In honor of Sukkot, which begins on Saturday, the 3rd of October and will continue for 7 days until Friday, the 9th of October, here's an excerpt from an interview in the current Forward with Park Slope author Jonathan Safran Foer and his brother, Josh Foer about a sukkah they built last year.
How did you decide where to build the sukkah?
J.F.: Our original design idea was a floating sukkah. It was going to have curtain walls and be suspended from above by cables.
JSF: Directly from God’s beard.
J.F.:
Directly from Jonathan’s magnolia tree. I had four pieces of steel
specially fabricated for the project. But that idea got nixed by a
rabbi. You can’t build a sukkah under a tree, you know.
JSF: No. That’s not it. We decided the tree couldn’t support the weight.
J.F.: Right.