Why Holocaust historical fiction matters (and is necessary)

To mark Yom HaShoah 2024, I decided to discuss the importance of Holocaust historical fiction. I don’t understand people who get their knickers in a knot and rant about how it’s automatically offensive, grotesque, sensationalistic, and inaccurate. One of the hallmarks of hist-fic is putting fictional characters in real-life events and showing how they live through it. There’s no rule that hist-fic should only be about shiny, happy moments in history or that there are certain events that can only be in the realm of nonfiction.

Here’s an idea: If you’re so genuinely triggered or traumatised by books and films about the Shoah, 9/11, the Second Intifada, or other very tragic events you lived through, have generational trauma from, or just find generally upsetting, you can choose not to read or watch them. No one is forcing you to do that. But you don’t get to dictate what other people choose to write about.

We’re living in a time when more and more Holocaust survivors are leaving us every year. As of January 2024, there were only 245,000 left. The oldest known living survivor is 112, and the youngest, who were born during the war and survived in hiding or camps like Bergen-Belsen and Terezín, are almost 80. Most of the remaining survivors were children, not adults.

Hence, we won’t have infinite firsthand testimonies and memoirs forever. Eventually, any new books will have to be historical fiction or nonfiction. As long as a fictional story is told respectfully and strives for the utmost accuracy, I don’t see any problems.

It’s also important to combat Holocaust denial. If it’s this bad while we still have living survivors, just imagine how much more insidious it might be when the last first-person witness is gone.

I’ve written before about how to research this subgenre, and why accuracy matters so much. Here are some more things to keep in mind, and original angles to research:

1. So many people bleat about how all WWII/Shoah books are the same story over and over again, just with different names and details. Why not counter that by setting your book in a country rarely, if ever, covered in memoirs and hist-fic? E.g., Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Luxembourg, Serbia, Albania, Slovenia, the Channel Islands.

2. Though most people only think of the Shoah as happening in Europe, North African Jews in Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia also faced persecution and deportation to camps under Nazi and Italian occupation.

3. No two people experienced the Shoah in the same way. Your story doesn’t have to be set in a camp or ghetto to be a “real” Holocaust story. E.g., many children went to the U.K. on the Kindertransport, while other people escaped to neutral countries or open cities like Shanghai. Some people went into hiding or managed to live publicly under a pretended Gentile identity.

4. The camps people were shipped to weren’t random! It would make no sense for, e.g., someone in France to go to Janowska near Lviv, or for someone from Greece to go to Klooga in Estonia. You also need to know dates of founding and evacuation.

5. Very few children were allowed to live at death camps, unless they were being used for medical experiments, in the Czech and so-called Gypsy family camps of Auschwitz, arrived during a rare gas malfunction or after gassing stopped, or chosen for a rare position like a messenger boy or girl. Children who lied about their age also had to look it.

6. As Dara Horn proves in her brilliant, deliberately provocatively-titled essay collection People Love Dead Jews, too many Shoah stories are sugarcoated for a Gentile audience and given a warm, fuzzy moral about loving everyone and a generic lesson about man’s inhumanity to man. Holocaust education is such an embarrassing failure when people believe it arose out of nowhere instead of being the culmination of almost 2,000 years of European antisemitism, and thus a uniquely Jewish tragedy.

7. Unless you live in Poland and are subject to the ridiculous Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, you don’t need to use the goofy, totally nonintuitive, wordcount-bloating phrase “German Nazi-occupied Poland.” Normal people understand the name Poland as a geographical reference, not blame for running the camps. Even memoirs by Polish-born people themselves don’t use that silly term!

Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem

8. Widely read multiple sources while researching! I had to majorly retool my Hungarian characters’ stories because I assumed Isabella Leitner’s searing, haunting memoir was representative of all Hungarians’ experience. Through watching lots of USC Shoah Foundation interviews and doing more reading, I found out most people were registered for work in the main camp or transported to labor camps and factories instead of languishing in Lager C doing almost nothing for six months, before being sent to dig tank traps in the woods.

9. Any escapes (from a camp, ghetto, mass grave, etc.) need to be plausible. Read about real-life escapes and how they were successfully pulled off.

10. There were no escapes from gas chambers! A handful of people managed to survive because they were on the bottom, but they were sadly murdered upon being discovered. The only people who went in and walked out unharmed were there during RARE gas malfunctions.

11. It’s easier to stick fictional characters in camps with large populations. If a sub-camp had only a few dozen inmates, those people would be well-documented, and any fictional people would stand out in that small real group.

12. Above all, don’t forget how bonds of love flourished even in the most bestial of circumstances. So many people survived for one another, because of one another.

The Kennicott Bible (תנ”ך קניקוט)

The Kennicott Bible was created in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain in 1476, written by calligrapher Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by artist Joseph ibn Hayyim. Many scholars consider it the finest religious text of Medieval Galicia, one of the most beautiful Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, and the most gorgeous 15th century Sephardic manuscript.

Though there’s a historical debate about just how much Kumbaya harmony really existed between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, there was a large, prosperous Jewish community in A Coruña during the Late Middle Ages. Many people came to Galicia after a series of brutal pogroms in Castile and Aragon in 1391, and settled in A Coruña in particularly large numbers.

In 1451, the community was able to help with rescuing fellow Jews in the Kingdom of Murcia (in southeastern Spain) by paying a large ransom.

Tower of Hercules (Torre de Hércules), A Coruña, Copyright Alessio Damato, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

One source I found says the Bible was commissioned by Don Salomón de Braga for his son Isaac, though all other sources say Isaac himself (a silversmith) requested it. The colophon also states it was written for “admirable young Isaac, son of the late, honourable, and beloved Don Salomón de Braga (may his soul rest in peace in the Garden of Eden).” Scribe and illuminator worked in close collaboration, which was rather unusual.

Its creation took ten months, and Moses ibn Zabarah completed two folios each day, using Rashi Script (a kind of semi-cursive Hebrew). Joseph ibn Hayyim wrote his name, the location, and the date (Wednesday, 3 Av 5236 [24 July 1476]) at the end of the manuscript.

The commissioning of this Bible may have been inspired by the Cervera Bible, another gorgeous illuminated manuscript in Spain which was very possibly in A Coruña at that time. It was natural for Isaac to want his very own, this one with even more beautiful illustrations.

In addition to the Bible text itself, the contents also include Rabbi David Kimchi’s grammatical treatise Sefer Mikhlol, copied from the Cervera Bible. The cover was made of goatskin with geometric decorations, and it was protected in a wooden box. There are 922 pages, 238 of which are illuminated. Nine are carpet pages (i.e., full-page illustrations with intricate patterned designs).

Many of the illustrations have nothing to do with the actual text, such as bears playing bagpipes, dragons, grotesques, birds, zoomorphic figures and letters, cats attacking a castle defended by mice, mythological creatures. This was quite common during the Middle Ages

After Ferdinand and Isabella forced out all Jews and Muslims in 1492 (since God forbid the entire world not share the same religion), Isaac ordered a locking case for his precious Bible. He fled by sea in 1493, taking a fortune of 2,500,000 maravedís along with the Bible. After a stay in Portugal, he went to North Africa.

Eventually the Bible ended up in Gibraltar, where it resurfaced almost three centuries later, bought by Scottish merchant Patrick Chalmers.

In June 1770, Hebrew scholar Benjamin Kennicott, the librarian of Oxford’s Radcliffe Library, suggested to his colleagues they’d greatly benefit by acquiring a handwritten, illuminated Hebrew Bible. He then said he had just such a book for sale, given to him by General William Maule, First Earl of Panmure. Library trustees bought it on 5 April 1771.

In 1872, it went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford’s main research library, catalogued as the Kennicott Bible in honour of Benjamin Kennicott.

For a long time, the Kennicott Bible wasn’t seen as particularly important, since Jewish art wasn’t a thing most people cared about. All that changed in 1923, when art historian Rachel Wischnitzer published a book with one of the folios on the cover. Ever since, it’s been seen as the treasure it is, worthy of detailed study.

In November 2018, the Kennicott Bible finally returned to Galicia after 525 years, loaned to Santiago de Compostela’s Museo Centro Gaiás. A facsimile is also on display at the Academy of Fine Arts in A Coruña.

In May 2016, the manuscript was one of 100 items chosen for inclusion in Galicia Cen, a travelling exhibit showcasing Galicia’s history from prehistory to modern times.

Kennicott Bible at the Bodleian Library
Kennicott Bible at Facsimile Editions, for the low price of just £7,950 ($10,117.29)! (Single leaves can be purchased for £55 [$70] or £65 [$82.70])
“The synagogue of the Old City of A Coruña, inside,” Xose Gago, La Voz de Galicia, 22 May 2021 (in Spanish)
“The Jews in A Coruña: the unknown history until their expulsion in 1492,” Paula Quintas, El Español, 23 May 2020 (in Spanish)

The Alba Bible (תנ”ך אלבה)

This year, my A to Z theme is Jewish history and culture, in response to the terrifying skyrocketing of antisemitism all over the world. There’s not much hope for people deeply-entrenched in hateful ideology and loony conspiracy theories, but I’d like to believe many regular people can be reached with education.

The Alba Bible was commissioned by Don Luis González de Guzmán on 5 April 1422. Though Don Luis wasn’t Jewish himself, he nevertheless felt a Castilian-language Bible might help interfaith relations after anti-Jewish riots in Madrid. This Bible, translated by Rabbi Moses Arrangel of Maqueda, Toledo, included commentary from Jewish scholars.

Rabbi Arrangel initially turned down the invitation, in a long, detailed letter of reply, but he eventually changed his mind. In June 1430, the work was submitted for editing and revising, and then given to Franciscans for illustrations. It was completed at 1,024 pages and 513 folios (with 334 beautifully illuminated) in 1433. Six of the illustrations are full-page.

The first 25 folios are the letters Rabbi Arrangel and Don Luis exchanged, alongside letters between other rabbis and Franciscans who created the artwork and helped with the project.

The Alba Bible contains commentary from scholars such as Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Shlomo ben Aderet (Rashba), Joseph Kimchi, Asher ben Yehiel, Ya’akov Ba’al HaTurim, and Nissim of Girona. Also included are commentaries from the Midrash and Talmud. On the Christian side of this interfaith collaboration, there are contributions from Vasco de Guzmán, the Archdeacon of Toledo Cathedral, and Dominican Friar Juan de Zamora.

In addition to translating the Bible from Hebrew to Medieval Castilian (i.e., Spanish), Rabbi Arrangel also included comments emphasising his great national pride at being a Spanish Jew and praising the kings for their virtues, nobility, and tolerance. Sadly, this tolerance ended in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella violently expelled all Jews and Muslims from Spain unless they converted under duress.

Though the Alba Bible was intended for Don Luis, it’s not mentioned in his will, his widow’s will, or the wills of any of their heirs, as would’ve been common practice for valuable books. According to historian Ladero Quesada, it was in the Segovia Fortress in 1474 as part of King Enrique IV’s treasure. By 1480, it had fallen into Queen Isabella’s hands, but wasn’t mentioned among her possessions by 1501.

The Alba Bible was eventually seized by the Inquisition. In the early 17th century, a Carmelite and Jesuit got permission to use it for research. Then, in 1624, Inquisitor General Andrés Pacheco gave it to Count–Duke Gaspar de Guzmán of Olivares so he and his descendants could read it and keep it in their library.

In 1922, scholar Antonio Paz y Melià published 300 illustrated copies. To mark the quincentenary of the 1492 expulsion, another 500 illustrated copies were published in 1992. One was gifted to King Juan Carlos (b. 5 January 1938, now King Emeritus).

The precious original manuscript is now safeguarded in the House of Alba’s Liria Palace in Madrid. Its current value is estimated at 2.5 million Euros ($2,721,050, or £2,134,034.68).

A contemporary multidisciplinary team is working on an authoritative edition including the original commentaries and illustrations, a glossary, modern linguistic commentary, detailed tracing of exegetical sources, and comparisons with similar Late Medieval works.

Though this is an interfaith collaboration, it only contains the Jewish Bible, Genesis through Chronicles. We call our Bible the Tanakh, an acronym of Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). The term Mikra, or Miqra, is also used. We don’t use the terms Old and New Testament to talk about the Bible, since that’s not our personal frame of reference.

The existence of this translation, and many others, totally debunks the urban legend that translating the Bible into vernacular languages was forbidden!

102 minutes of real-life drama in a fight to survive

102 Minutes is one of the best, most important books I’ve read in 2023. As shocking as this is to admit, I deliberately avoided as much news about 9/11 as possible in the immediate wake of the event, and so genuinely didn’t know too much about it until very recently. I strongly suspect that was a trauma denial response based on my emotional detachment defense mechanism, and the intense physical reactions I’ve had while researching it recently were delayed secondary trauma responses. Not everyone processes and reacts to traumatic events in the same way, just like not everyone responds to grief in the same way.

Thus, reading 102 Minutes was part of my extremely belated education in possibly THE most historically significant event of my lifetime, and my atonement for avoiding the news and not understanding the giant magnitude of what actually happened.

102 Minutes is far more than just an account of the 102 minutes that transpired between the first plane striking and the second collapse. It also goes into great detail about shocking flaws in the Twin Towers’ design, decades before the attacks, that made escape impossible for people at and above the impact zones, and an uncertain challenge for many other people who had access to stairs. Another subject prominently featured is the failure of communication between the police and firefighters, and even firefighters themselves in the same companies.

The authors rightly point out what hopefully everyone knows, that the sole responsibility for what happened lies with the terrorists. The people who designed and built the buildings in the 1960s and 1970s never dreamt anyone would deliberately fly planes into them and that those towers would have to withstand such high temperatures from fire and the resulting weakening of their support systems.

HOWEVER, a lot of terrible decisions severely compromising the safety of those inside were made, based on the desire to squeeze as much capitalist profit out of those buildings as possible over protecting the human lives of the people working there.

Thanks to unbridled capitalist greed, the city fire code, in place since 1938, was rewritten in 1968 to eliminate fire stairs and six regular stairwells for skyscrapers. More stairs take up more floor space, and that wouldn’t be very good for maximising business! Having that many stairwells also seemed a hopelessly dated relic of the past.

Not only that, the three sets of stairs that were put into the WTC were clustered close together instead of by each tower’s four corners. When the planes struck, the stairs at and above the impact zones were destroyed or made inaccessible, trapping everyone there. The only exception was in the South Tower, where fourteen people at or above the impact found one working stairwell and escaped down it.

The 1968 fire code also reduced the amount of time columns of tall buildings had to hold up under fire to three hours, and the floors, to two hours. Greedy real estate moguls thought it was terrible that the 1938 code forced buildings to be heavier and sturdier. Thus, skyscrapers became cheaper to build. Open concepts also provided more floor space for as much business as possible.

The powers that be couldn’t conceive of the necessity for a total evacuation of any of these buildings being constructed under the new code. Such buildings were believed to be fire-safe, and residents were expected to stay in place until firefighters arrived or sprinklers put out the fire. If there were an unavoidable fire threatening their lives, they should “just” move to a safer floor.

Maybe this is just my lifelong pyrophobia talking, but the normal human instinct is to hightail it out of there at the first sign of fire, not nonchalantly wait around for firefighters!

The architect and structural engineer refused to vouch for the floors’ so-called ability to stand up to fire for two hours. No fireproofing tests were ever done on the floors. No records exist of tests on the lightweight structural steel built into the trusses either, nor of the half-inch fireproofing materials sprayed on the façades.

The Port Authority was so worried about all this, they refused to permit natural gas lines. Windows on the World had to cook everything with electricity. The Port Authority also sued the manufacturer of one of the supposed fireproofing products since it contained asbestos, and parts of it had fallen off the steel and left it exposed. In some places, the fireproofing appeared to not have been applied at all.

The Port Authority won $66 million in this lawsuit.

Communication between the NYPD, Port Authority, and FDNY was shockingly poor, even without the technical outages caused by the plane crashes. Many firefighters never received the order to evacuate the North Tower after the South Tower collapsed, and lots of exhausted, overheated firefighters were taking a break on the 19th floor, completely unaware of the danger they faced, near the end.

Some firefighters began taking off their heavy coats and equipment of their own accord, without hearing another order to do just that so they could evacuate quicker, while many others kept everything on and slowed their progress down the stairs. Though there was no possible way a fire that high up could be extinguished, many firefighters nevertheless lugged heavy hoses and their gear up all those stairs. The ones bringing all possible equipment along had a load of 86.5 pounds.

Many firefighters carried outdated analogue Motorola Saber radios, some as old as 15 years old. New and improved radios introduced earlier in 2001 were withdrawn because of complaints, though no one ever determined if the problem were a technical glitch or lack of training. Other new radios were sitting unused in fire chiefs’ cars and on police chiefs’ shelves.

Helicopter cops were forbidden to attempt rooftop rescues, since when they did that after the 1993 bombing, the FDNY accused them of grandstanding and showing them up on their rescue mission. However, rooftop rescue was impossible anyway, since all the doors to those stairs were locked to try to prevent suicides, vandals, exhibitionists, and daredevils. Both the Port Authority and FDNY believed keeping the doors locked even in an emergency would reinforce the importance of sheltering in place and evacuating down.

The conditions were also far too dangerous to risk it, and only two people at a time can be lifted onto a helicopter because of the 600-pound weight limit.

But despite all those shocking, fundamental failures that only came to real, serious attention after the fact (just like with the sinking of Titanic, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and the fire on the steamship General Slocum in 1904), almost everyone below the impact zones in both towers managed to make it to safety.

Had the planes crashed even an hour or two later, the death toll would’ve been so much higher. Many people in the South Tower evacuated after the North Tower was struck, including people at or above the impact (though sadly, many people obeyed orders to return to their offices and lost their lives). The official workday began at nine, so lots of employees hadn’t come in yet. Windows on the World and the observation deck also didn’t open to visitors until nine, so the only non-employees in the towers were in the mall on the concourse level, and they had a rather quick escape.

Through the pages of 102 Minutes, we get to know so many people and their stories of heroism, such as:

Polish-born window-washer Jan Demczur, who used a squeegee and squeegee handle to cut an escape hatch in an elevator. He and the five other guys with him then had to break the tiles in a bathroom, and they found one of the few working elevators to take them down to the 44th floor sky lobby.

Best friends Abe Zelmanowitz and Ed Beyea on the 27th floor of the North Tower. Ed was a quadriplegic who used a heavy wheelchair, and he couldn’t be carried in an evacuation chair.

Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, Mak Hanna, and Frank Varriano, who went from floor to floor near the North Tower impact zone to break open blocked doors and clear passageways.

Roko Camaj, a window-washer who had keys to the South Tower roof but was unable to open the electric doors on the 105th floor.

Battalion Chief Orio Palmer, whose athleticism enabled him to reach the 78th floor of the South Tower by the time of collapse.

Port Authority cop Will Jimeno, who was buried under rubble from both collapses and was pulled out alive.

And many others who lived or died based on the most minute turns of Fate that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time or the right place at the right time.

The literary Stasi strikes yet again!

Another day, another author obediently giving in to the raving cancel culture mob instead of showing a damn spine and standing up for her creative vision. These creepy, scripted-sounding apologies only embolden the mob to seek more blood and find new targets to bully. “I will do better. I am listening. I am learning. I see you, and I looooovvvveeeee you! Thank you for stopping the beatings, Big Brother! What a productive struggle session!”

And just like many other books which have been cancelled in the last few years, this one too was the victim of mass negative Goodreads reviews when it wasn’t even published yet. They just saw it’s set in Russia and went on the warpath.

Please explain how the HELL a story about an anti-Stalin family in the 20th century (based on the Lykovs) is an any way, shape, or form related to Tsar Vladimir’s genocidal war against the Ukrainian people. This isn’t a pro-Putin or pro-war story set in the modern era, and Ms. Gilbert didn’t plan to donate proceeds to Putin or the Russian military!

I cannot begin to imagine what the Ukrainian people have gone through since Tsar Vladimir launched his illegal war against their country. However, I do understand the centuries of bad blood between the two peoples and how Ukraine has spent much of her history under foreign occupation, with her native language and culture repressed. I also realise many of the people attacking this book are speaking from a place of deep trauma, and trauma responses by definition aren’t rational.

The Ukrainians saying they want to cancel everything even tangentially related to Russia, calling all of Russian culture stolen from neighbouring peoples, and just making general anti-Russian comments remind me of Shoah survivors who refuse(d) to buy German cars, travel to Germany, listen to German music, watch German films, or deliberately be around German-speakers. While it’s not fair to judge an entire people by the actions of evil seeds, that is a very understandable trauma response.

Merely setting a book in Russia is not an act of aggression or anti-Ukrainianism. The story has nothing to do with current events. I am truly sorry if your trauma has made you instinctively recoil from anything Russian, but that doesn’t give you the right to dictate how the entire world behaves. We can’t pretend Russia doesn’t exist or that 100% of Russians are terrible people. It’s also impossible to ignore its long, rich history of literature, music, dance, art.

It’s too bad Ms. Gilbert didn’t take her own advice and stand up to the mob trying to cancel her. Many times, when you refuse to roll over and cry uncle, people eventually lose interest and move on to another attempted target, and they forget about you with enough time.

What country in the history of the world has never had a ruler who did anything wrong? Are all books set in countries with less than perfect reputations next on the chopping block for cancellation? We need to separate countries from the individuals and régimes governing them.

Even when public perception is that most people support a totalitarian dictator and a militaristic war of aggression, we have to think of what caused that, and the consequences for speaking out. People steeped in that kind of culture from birth don’t know anything else, and if they do question or oppose certain things, they’re terrified to voice such thoughts aloud. Acts of resistance are necessarily limited, such as Japanese young men during WWII who failed their military qualification tests on purpose.

Here’s a novel idea: If you’re so legitimately triggered by trauma over a book set in Russia, you can simply not read it. Everyone is entitled to their own personal boundaries in books, so long as they don’t impose them on others. E.g., a very religious person might immediately DNF a book when s/he finds a sex scene, or a Shoah survivor might not want to read any books with that setting. But you have no right to make that decision for everyone else based on what you’re uncomfortable with.

I have been a passionate Russophile since December ’92, around the time I turned thirteen. That’s currently 70% of my life. No one will ever shame or bully me out of such an integral aspect of who I am and always will be. Neither will anyone ever convince me to withdraw my existing Russian historicals from the market and trash the ones in progress or waiting to be written.

My cast of characters also includes Ukrainians, people with partial Ukrainian ancestry, Russians who lived in Ukraine for many years with the greatest love and respect for their host country, and Ukrainophiles. Some of them are Holodomor survivors. And when the antagonistic camp counsellors in Dark Forest say offensive, insulting, false things about both Ukrainians and Belarusians, they’re always immediately shut down and corrected.

I do believe many writers choose Russia as a setting because it feels exotic, they love Russian fairytales and folklore, and/or they’re obsessed with the last Imperial Family, not because they give a damn about Russian history and culture. It always shows in how superficial and inaccurate their stories are. However, my reaction to such books is to simply not read them. I’d never argue for them to be banned or yanked from publication.

Instead of having a “reckoning” (how I hate that word!) with everything ever created by a Russian, we need to stand up against perpetually online slacktivist keyboard warriors who think it’s okay to leave hundreds of 1-star reviews for a book that hasn’t been published yet and isn’t even available in ARCs. You don’t get to dictate what the entire world can and can’t read based on your own personal feelings, political views, and religious beliefs.

Many of these censors also don’t understand how people can care about multiple important issues at the same time, and that two things can be true at once. I support the Ukrainian people’s fight for freedom and am horrified by what Tsar Vladimir has done to their beautiful country. At the same time, I oppose the cancellation of any book that dares to be set in Russian and have sympathetic Russian characters. That won’t help with healing and building bridges after this war finally ends and Ukraine regains her rightful sovereignty among the world nations.

“Eat, Pray, Get Cancelled,” Kathleen Stock, UnHerd, 13 June 2023
“‘Eat, pray, pander’: Mixed reactions after Elizabeth Gilbert pulls Russia-set novel,” Edward Helmore, The Guardian, 13 June 2023
“Eat, Pray, Pander,” Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 12 June 2023
“‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Author Pulls New Book Set in Russia,” Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, The New York Times, 12 June 2023
“Eat, Pray, Cringe,” Katha Pollitt, The Nation, 14 June 2023
“Elizabeth Gilbert is pulling a novel set in Russia from publication. That’s unsettling,” Francine Prose, The Guardian, 15 June 2023
“Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation sets a dangerous precedent,” Leigh Stein, UnHerd, 13 June 2023
“Eat, Pray, Cringe: Elizabeth Gilbert Cancels Herself,” Kat Rosenfeld, The Free Press, 15 June 2023