Reflections on my first published book’s tenth birthday

Today, 9 May 2024, makes ten years since the release of my first published book, And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away. Though this was far from the first book I’d ever written, I felt it was my strongest completed, publication-ready manuscript at the time, as well as one of the shortest ones. We always want to lead with our strongest efforts!

I’ve spoken so many times about how I wish I’d done so many things differently while writing this book, feelings I maintain to this day. Part of that comes from how I was so new to deliberately writing towards publication and querying (before I decided to go indie), and thus felt certain constrains compelling me to somewhat stifle the voice and style I naturally tend towards.

As I explained in “The Story Behind the Story”:

Starting in 2006, I began writing a lot of long short stories/pieces of backstory about my Shoah characters (both during and after the war), to be periodically inserted into my Atlantic City books set at the same time. Originally, they were intended as fairly short pieces serving as a sobering alternate trajectory to the fairly unburdened lives of these American teens who only think they have it difficult, until these characters ultimately linked up after the war. They soon grew so long and involved, they threatened to overwhelm the books they were intended for, and took the focus off the real main characters and their storylines. I realized I needed to spin all these interconnected characters off into their own series.

I started by expanding the story about Jakob (and, later, Rachel) into a full-length novel. Not only was it one of the fairly shorter ones, it was more straightforward due to its lack of an ensemble cast. It was easy to flesh out all the long passages summarizing events, and to fill in the many blanks. Because of Jakob’s age, it also seemed perfect to query as YA (albeit upper, mature YA). Hence, the fade to black in the wedding night scene, and my decision to make it into two books instead of one very long book like I usually do.

I initially intended it to be one book, but because I wanted to pursue traditional publication at the time, and was cognizant it had reached the upper acceptable wordcount limit for historical and upper YA, I felt it would be best if I created two volumes. The most perfect ending opened up, and I was able to turn the rest of the material in the originating story into a somewhat shorter volume about Jakob’s first year in America, and his and Rachel’s first real year as husband and wife. Each volume truly has its own focus, and the second one reads more like New Adult than Young Adult.

I’ve thought a few times about significantly expanding the first book, with more chapters and longer chapters, as a companion volume to the original. The new version would be more for the adult market, while the first one would remain the YA version. There are some books like that. However, that would take way too much time, and I’ve long since moved on from this story.

I still intend to go back to Jakob and Rachel at some point and write more books about them, but trying to retool a book I completed and published years ago seems like a big waste of time. The most important thing was acknowledging how being too much in my own head when I wrote it caused me to adopt a style and voice that’s not naturally mine. Besides the shorter than usual chapters, I had too many descriptions of body language and emotional reactions.

It’s always been hard for me to read back through this book, since much of it just doesn’t feel authentically mine. I wrote all 125,000 of those words, but I wrote them while trying to shape myself into someone I’m not and never will be.

I even briefly (VERY briefly) toyed with the idea of doing it in first-person, since I was seriously trying for traditional publication, and that POV is such a popular default in most current YA. If I’d gone through with that, it would’ve felt even more inauthentic to who I am! It’s extraordinarily rare that I’m genuinely called to writing an entire book in first-person.

The first published book is always a learning experience, and that was mine. Despite all my misgivings and reluctance to voluntarily revisit it, I’m still very proud of it.

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.

WeWriWa—A promise of hope in the coming year

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

Happy New Year! To mark the holiday, I’m sharing the middle of the three sections in the last chapter of Movements in the Symphony of 1939, “Farewell, Nineteen-Thirties!” In Part II of the book, we’re introduced to a subplot with a Polish family Cinni’s father has been trying to bring to America. Though most of them managed to escape before the borders closed, the five people left behind were sent to Stutthof in the early days of the occupation.

Hans, the one who wrote this letter, is a mysterious young Luftwaffe pilot who provided many of them with travel visas and got them onto trains permitted to leave Poland before the country officially surrendered. He has a secret crush on Emma.

In the bitter cold of Stutthof, Emma shuddered under the thin wool coat she’d come with. The cold season had already begun creeping up on Poland at the end of September, but it hadn’t been cold enough to merit fur. Emma, her aunt, and her three uncles had left their best clothes hanging in their closets and wardrobes back in Warsaw, along with their best boots, all their Judaica, their fine linens, the beautiful tableware they’d entertained with a lifetime ago, all their books, their family photographs, and all their other personal mementos. Emma wondered if they’d ever see their home again, if any of their dear ones had gotten out of Poland safely, and if the Robleńskis were still alive. Most of all, she wondered where Dawida was.

“There’s a package for the blonde,” one of the guards announced, throwing a lump at Emma. “Happy New Year.”

Emma pulled off the thick outer layer of paper and found several slices of bread, smoked meat, some kind of crackers, a few cooked potatoes, and sliced raw carrots. Before September, she would’ve laughed at the thought of this feeding five people for more than one pathetic meal, but now it was a veritable holiday feast. At the bottom of the package, she found a handwritten note.

The ten lines end here. A few more follow to finish the scene.

Dear Emma, Zofia, Aleksander, Borys, and Paweł,

Happy New Year. I can’t promise anything certain, let alone so far in advance, but you must believe I’m coming to get you, not all at once, but as fast as I can. I haven’t forgotten you, nor the necessity of rescuing you from the terrible things I see coming. Never lose hope. By next year at this time, you’ll be in freedom again, maybe in your own home, and with as many of your former possessions as possible. Please believe I’m your friend and have your best interests at heart. Your redemption and rescue can’t come overnight, but they will happen. Hope never dies, even when it seems impossible.

Your unlikely friend,

Hans

WeWriWa—Precious protection

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

I’ve gone back to my hiatused WIP The Strongest Branches of Uprooted Trees, which follows a group of young Shoah survivors during the early postwar years. Part II tells the story of what happened to some of them while they were separated.

Ráhel and Dániel Kovacs, eight and four years old, escaped from a death train under cover of night and found shelter in a nearby convent. They’ve been put in a hidden room upstairs, and a doctor performed a tracheostomy on Dániel, who has diphtheria.

After being assigned the Polish names Liwia and Fryderyk, the Polish forms of their middle names, a nun asked where they got the rosary and scapular they arrived with.

“A very nice lady gave them to us before we got off the train. She taught me four Catholic prayers, and taught my brother a very easy prayer for little children. Her parents converted before she was born, but the Germans thought she was still Jewish.”

“Oh, good, you already know some prayers. Some of the other people we’ve hidden didn’t know anything. What’s your dolly’s name?”

“Ambrózia. My sister bought her in a big store in Budapest. She came from France.”

Dr. Kaczka smiled.

The ten lines end here. A few more follow to finish the scene (and chapter).

“Well, let’s hope she’s your ambrosia and confers the same kind of protection on you as it did on the Greek deities. No one can live forever, but living a long life is good enough.”

After Dr. Kaczka and the nuns had gone, Ráhel leaned over and whispered the Sh’ma and its first paragraph in Dániel’s ear, just as Mirjam had commanded. She also added the last paragraph, and then repeated it in Hungarian, adding the concluding line of the Our Father afterwards.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Take to heart these words with which I charge you this day. Teach them to your children. Recite them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Bind them as a sign upon your hand, and let them serve as a symbol before your eyes; inscribe them upon the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Thus you shall remember to observe all my commandments and to be holy to your God. I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the Lord your God. And deliver us from evil. Amen.”

WeWriWa—New names

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

I’ve gone back to my hiatused WIP The Strongest Branches of Uprooted Trees, which follows a group of young Shoah survivors during the early postwar years. Part II tells the story of what happened to some of them while they were separated.

Ráhel and Dániel Kovacs, eight and four years old, have escaped from a death train under cover of night and taken shelter in a nearby convent. They’ve been put in a hidden room upstairs, and a doctor performed a tracheostomy on Dániel, who has diphtheria.

Now they’re asked about their names, and Ráhel provides their middle names like her older sister Mirjam told her to do.

The nun who’d answered the door touched Ráhel’s hand and addressed her in Esperanto. “What are you and the boy named?”

“My name is Lívia, and my brother’s name is Frigyes.”

“Freed-yesh? Is there another form of that name? You’ll both need Polish names when our orphanage school starts in the autumn.”

Ráhel thought for a few minutes about her history lessons in school. She knew Dániel’s middle name was in honor of a famous emperor from a long time ago.

“Frederick!” she said excitedly. “My brother’s English name is Frederick!”

The ten lines end here. A few more follow to finish the scene.

“I should’ve guessed that. The Polish name is Fryderyk. Your name will be Liwia. We’ll call you Liwunia, and your brother Fredzio. If you have Jewish names, please don’t tell us. It’s best if we don’t know.”

“Do you feel sick too?” Dr. Kaczka asked.

“No, I had torokgyík last year.” Ráhel took a drink from the new glass of water on the nightstand. “Thank you very much for being nice to us. My mother and sister will give you money after the war.”

“We don’t need money for doing the right thing,” a very young nun said. “For now, the most important thing is to get some rest. We’ll take very good care of you, teach you Polish, and protect you from the Germans. Where did you get that scapular and rosary from?”