By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
Scott Nadelson’s newest book is a poignant connection to both his Jewish identity and the part of the world he calls home. 
“Trust Me,” set to be published in September by Forest Avenue Press in Portland, is Nadelson’s second novel. It depicts a divorced father from New Jersey living in a cabin in the Cascade mountains of Oregon he bought to try and save his marriage. The book is written as a series of interlocking vignettes of the weekends he has custody of his daughter. 
Powell’s Books said, “By turns comic and heartbreaking, ‘Trust Me’ is a study of the uneasy bond between a hapless father and his precocious daughter, of their love for a complex and changing landscape, of the necessity and precariousness of the relationships and places we cherish most.”
Nadelson said that the father is inspired, in some ways, by facets of his own life. 
“He definitely shares a lot of autobiographical facts with me in terms of where he’s from and his age and personality-wise,” Nadelson said. “He’s a lot more impulsive than I am and a bit more of a mess.”
In addition to his own time in the Cascades with his family, Nadelson explained “the other big influence was a novel that I read and loved, called ‘The Summer Book’ by Toby Johnson, a Finnish writer. I just loved the structure of it and the sort of magic of this way in which he explores it.”
The format suits Nadelson, who said that writing short stories plays to his literary strengths. A Professor of English and the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University in Salem, Nadelson has published six collections of short stories in addition to his two novels, a memoir and a trove of individual stories and essays in publications all over the country. That’s not to say the process was easy – particularly as he began the work without knowing quite how it would end. 
“It took me about eight years to write the thing, and I didn’t know how it was all going to come together. I just tried to focus for a while on just writing these small moments and letting them accumulate,” he said. “It didn’t actually come together until after the fires of 2020; then, suddenly, I knew where the book was going to end.”
Nadelson’s Judaism has always been infused into his fiction, beginning with his first book, a story collection titled “Saving Stanley” that leaned heavily on his experience growing up in a not-particularly-Jewish part of New Jersey. 
“I write a lot about the secular American Jewish experience. It’s a metaphorical state of being; having sort of one foot in the dominant culture and one foot out of the dominant culture and the sort of consciousness of also being separate,” he said. “That’s something that it has infused all of my work.”
This particularly comes home in a scene in “Trust Me,” where father and daughter are selecting a Christmas Tree for the mountain cabin – the child hasn’t been raised Jewish and her mother always practiced Christmas traditions, including the tree. Nadelson recalled that during Christmastime in his New Jersey hometown, his was the only house around without lights.
“That was what her family always did, but he’s never really been that comfortable with it and sort of thinks about his own childhood, which was my childhood,” Nadelson said of his character’s tree-buying adventure. “He’s navigating trying to give his daughter the experiences she wants and carrying a lot of discomfort around what he has chosen to run away from and feeling like he’s done something wrong.”
Nadelson explained while he’s worked previously as a journalist – including as calendar editor for The Jewish Review - fiction is where he’s truly hit his stride.
“I actually came to writing through music first. I discovered language that really meant something to me through song,” he said. “I first thought maybe I wanted to be a rock star, but I had no musical talent whatsoever. I stumbled across poetry late in my high school years and thought I wanted to write poetry.”
Life had other ideas – when Nadelson attempted to sign up for a poetry class at the University of North Carolina, it was full, and he ended up in a fiction-writing class instead. 
“It just really took off from there,” he said. “I found the thing that I love to do.”
Powell’s Books is holding a release-day event for “Trust Me” Wednesday, Sept. 4 at 7 pm at their Downtown location on West Burnside Street in Portland. Signed copies of “Trust Me” are available for preorder through Powell’s at powells.com/book/trust-me-9781942436638/1-1.