Based on a true story, Even in Darkness highlights the intimate experience of Kläre’s reinvention as she faces the destruction of life as she knew it, and traces her path beyond survival to wisdom, meaning, and—most unexpectedly—love.
1. What inspired you to write Even in Darkness?
Even in Darkness is based on the life of my great
aunt, who alone among her siblings did not escape Germany during the Holocaust.
Her story of survival—the courage and strength she had to remake herself and
her life in the face of unspeakable loss—has been an inspiration to me
throughout my adult life. Hers is a beautiful story and having come to know it
in depth I wanted to share it and create a legacy for her.
2. You researched the book thoroughly. Did you know from the beginning how
extensive your research would become?
Yes and no. I’ve known since one of the visits I made to my
great aunt in Germany many years ago, that I wanted to write her story, so I
started interviewing her (she was already over 90 years old) and the priest,
who is the other main character in this story. I also interviewed my parents
and grandparents. I already knew a lot about my grandfather and great aunt’s
family from Sunday nights around the dinner table. Then my aunt died, and the
priest sent me all her personal papers, including over 50 letters that her son
had written to her during and after the war from Palestine, where he had been
sent at the age of 12. Those letters deepened and changed what I understood
about all their lives in a way I couldn’t have predicted.
3. What was one of your favorite stories that your grandfather told you
about his life in Germany?
My favorite story is one that’s actually in Even in Darkness and describes how, when
all hope appeared to be lost for getting a visa to leave Germany, my
grandfather chose to try one last time at the bidding of my 12-year-old mother
who pestered him that she wanted to go to the U.S. to join her best friend who
had already emigrated. My grandfather didn’t want to frighten my mother by
telling her that he’d tried repeatedly to see the American consul and been
denied an appointment. My mother begged him to go that day; it was her
birthday. When he said he might not be able to get in, she told him to tell the
diplomat it was his daughter’s birthday. My grandfather stayed all day in line
at the consulate, and as he was about to be turned away yet again, he pleaded
that it was his daughter’s birthday and he just felt it was a lucky day. The
official let him in, and an hour later he had the necessary visa. That was in
May of 1938, and they were finally able to leave in October, just a few weeks
before Kristallnacht.
4. Where did you begin your research and where did it lead you?
5. How did you feel reading letters written by your ancestors? What did you
learn from these letters?
This was one of the most thrilling and challenging aspects
of writing Even in Darkness. To
translate these sixty-five-year-old letters and hear the voice of my mother’s
cousin as a 19-year-old pioneer in Palestine with his description of his escape
from Germany and the early years of his life half a world away was both
fascinating and did more than anything else to make that time and his character
live for me. The exhaustion, desperation and heartache of his parents, having
just survived years of persecution under the Nazis, and then three years in a
concentration camp and displaced person camp, can be heard in his youthful
assurances that one day it would be safe for his mother to visit, brushing off the
dangers he faced, and his exuberance for all that he was training to accomplish
on the kibbutz he and other young pioneers were starting.
6. What kinds of considerations were there in incorporating real letters
into your novel?
The biggest challenge was to capture the voice, the history
and the language of the letters and still work within the story structure of
the novel. It was the most poignant and concrete example of the constant
balance I had to maintain as I was writing Even
in Darkness between what really happened to the people on whom the book is
based, and what worked for purposes of writing a good novel.
7. What was the most surprising part about your research? Did you uncover
any family secrets?
There were some surprises. Through interviews with cousins
in Europe I learned a different perspective about other members of my
grandfather’s family, whom I knew only though his stories. I learned about my
mother’s cousins who were hidden in a convent by nuns. I learned about the
personal decisions about faith and influence in the Catholic Church at that
time that had enormous impact on my family. I learned that another great aunt
was a beautiful singer and evaded arrest by singing for a German officer. And I
learned that what people had to do to maintain their safety and their sanity
during the dangerous years of the 1930s in Germany resulted in boundary
crossing behaviors that were both courageous and painful.
8. What was the hardest part about writing fiction around events and people
that really happened and really existed?
As I’ve said elsewhere, Even
in Darkness is not just my first novel. It is a story of my heart and
the finest tribute I can craft to two remarkable people and to other Holocaust
survivors everywhere. To separate my personal attachment to the real
people and events behind the book enough to insure a tight, compelling novel
was a really interesting challenge for me as a writer. I also felt very sensitive
to and responsible for the privacy and the legacy of other family members. Finally, this is not your typical Holocaust
survival story, and the very things that make it unusual might be painful to people
who would have a hard time with some of the decisions my characters made.
9. How did your research expand your understanding of living life as a
Jewish woman in the twentieth century in Germany?
I got to ask my great aunt the hard questions about what it
was like to watch her whole family leave, and then have to send her children
out of the country. I got to hear her nieces tell me how hard their mother
begged my aunt to leave, and I got to feel the agony of her decision not to
leave without her husband who was ill and had refused to believe the Nazi
menace was serious until it was too late, and her mother who was too old to get
a visa and refused to go as well. As a mother of three sons, right around the
ages of the children Klare sent out, I read the letters she received from her sons
and ached for what it meant, for what she lost. I grew to understand that she
had to take charge of their lives and save them as best she could; a role that
her traditional upbringing couldn’t have prepared her to take on.
10. Why did you decide to write a novel rather than a biography or memoir?
The simple answer is, there were too many missing pieces in
the story. I didn’t know all the facts, but felt I understood from the point of
view of the characters. It was a way to use all the compelling reality of the
family story with the immediacy that fiction allows us to maintain. In the
first year that I worked on the book, I participated in a wonderful workshop
with the author Elizabeth Kostova. I had recently come back from a
research/interview trip to Germany with much new information. We worked the
story out both ways: as a memoir and as a novel. In the end, I realized I
wanted to write a novel, this novel.
11. Were there any unexpected obstacles you encountered when you began
writing Even in Darkness?
I thought I could work full time, finish raising three boys,
do volunteer work and write a novel. I had no idea how much I would love the
research and the writing, and how much I wanted to devote ALL my time to it!
12. What advice would you give to authors conducting research for their
book?
Do as much as you can; use your network to help you, invest
in it. The work you do to inform yourself will exponentially inform your story.
13. Who’s a character from a book you wish you could meet?
Bernhardt Steinmann, the publisher that courts Klare in Even in Darkness!
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