Thanks to Carve Magazine and Sejal Patel for this wonderful interview in the Summer 2018 “One to Watch” feature. We discuss my research for “When It’s Over”, some of the themes in the novel, and the lives of refugees then and now.
Excerpts:
Q: Did writing the book make you feel like you had arrived at some answers about who you are, or did the process leave you with many more questions?
A: Writing the novel involved re-living what my mother had suffered, in a far more intense, emotional way than she ever shared with me. She was usually very reserved and held her emotions in check. I think this was typical of many in her generation. This was how she coped with her grief, but probably, too, she didn’t want to “burden” me with her pain. I had already become aware in my young adulthood of how this had made it difficult for me to express emotions, and I felt critical of my parents for that aspect of my upbringing. But writing the novel made me appreciate what she had lived through, at such a young age herself, and how deep her pain must have been. It also made me reflect on how I must be carrying that legacy within me, the inter-generational legacy of trauma that Elizabeth Rosner and others have described. I think my experience, my “personal inheritance”, is probably different from someone raised with two parents as Holocaust survivors. My father was English, and after her marriage to him, my mother assimilated into an upper-middle class English lifestyle as a typical 1950’s housewife, and her past was not often mentioned. So I feel as if I am still trying to make sense of the impact on me. It’s interesting that now the novel has been published, I have English cousins writing to me that they are amazed to learn the details of my mother’s background. It’s as if the topic was off-limits for all those years they knew her; with good English politeness, they never wanted to “pry”.
Q: You take a hard look at the life of a refugee here. A refugee is a person who has been forced to leave his or her country. It seems to me that there is a dual displacement here – the displacement that comes with fleeing a homeland and then the displacement of coming to a place where a person feels they may not belong. Can you tell us how you thought about this when you were constructing your characters?
A: I read about the internment of “enemy aliens” and thought about what it must have been like for these refugees, fleeing for their lives, leaving family behind, and then facing xenophobia. Britain was a very homogenous society back then, and was of course under great threat. So we know hostility toward outsiders increases in situations such as these. And individuals are going to respond in different ways. So in my novel, the character of Lotti for example, she never feels accepted in Britain and yearns to return home to Prague as soon as the war is over. But Lena is much more ready to embrace life in her adopted country. I also thought a lot about how cut off they were from their families left behind, with no communication. It’s difficult for us to understand this in today’s world. When I watched Ai Weiwei’s extraordinary documentary “Human Flow”, I was struck by the fact that today’s refugees are certainly in dire straits, and may have nothing to their name—but they all carry smart phones; they can talk to their relatives back in Syria or Afghanistan or wherever. In WWII there was no way to communicate with people in Nazi-occupied territory, no way to find out what was happening. So I wanted to try to portray that in my characters. But I also wanted to include lighter touches, some of the small, humorous misunderstandings and confusions that any immigrant faces, such as being flummoxed by the currency or the food. And I have a scene, based on a true anecdote, where a small-minded bureaucrat can’t understand the Slav convention of adding -ova to a woman’s last name; Lena’s is Kulkova, while her father is Kulka.
You can read the full interview here: