When I meet Leora Skolkin-Smith and Caroline Leavitt (far right) for lunch last week, they’re in a celebratory mood: Leavitt has recently turned in the manuscript for a new novel to her agent, but more pertinently to this conversation, she’s just a few days away from completing a screenplay adaptation of Skolkin-Smith’s Edges, the story of a teenage girl’s coming of age in Jerusalem before hostilities erupted between the Israelis and Palestinians in 1967. “I write the pages and then send them to Leora,” Leavitt said of the process. “She makes her notes, I go over the pages again, and then we send them to Jorge Gurvich.” Gurvich, an Argintinean filmmaker, is already slated to direct the film if production gets underway; other producers are working on permission to shoot on location in Israel, and there’s talk of an Academy Award-nominated actress considering the starring role.
As the production comes closer and closer to becoming a reality, perhaps nobody is more (pleasantly) surprised than Skolkin-Smith herself. “I wrote the book for about three people,” she says modestly of Edges, one of the first books published under Grace Paley‘s Glad Day Books imprint. “I knew the audience would be slim.” But watching Tovah Feldshuh record the audiobook version a few months back changed her mind. “Watching Tovah transform into the mother from the novel in the booth, I’d never seen anything like that,” she recalls. “And I knew this had to be a movie.” Now Skolkin-Smith hopes the story film remind viewers (and readers) that Jews and Muslims once lived together peacefully in the Middle East; the novel is based loosely on her own family, which lived in Jerusalem long before the formal creation of Israel. The current escalated tensions in Israel may make the story especially relevant, but Leavitt emphasizes that the intimate emotional relationships make the story stand out. “Still, I think this film is going to be controversial,” she says, “and I think that in itself will be a good story.”