Q&A with Jonathan B. Losos

 

 

Jonathan B. Losos is the author of the book The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa. His other books include Improbable Destinies. He is an evolutionary biologist at Washington University, and he lives in St. Louis.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Cat’s Meow?

 

A: I’ve always loved cats, but as my scientific career progressed, it never remotely occurred to me to study cats, for two reasons.

 

First, I wanted to go out into nature and study what animals do as they go about their day, and anyone who’s tried following a cat knows just how impossible that is. Lizards seemed like a better choice.

 

In addition, I was under the impression that there was no interesting research being done on domestic cats (both pets and unowned outdoor cats).

 

Then, about a dozen years ago, I learned that I was completely mistaken—many people were researching cats (again, domestic cats, not lions, tigers and ocelots) and using all the same cutting-edge approaches that I and my colleagues use to study lizards, eagles and elephants: GPS tracking, genome sequencing, etc.

 

Then I had what I humbly submit was a great idea: I’d teach a class for college freshmen called “The Science of Cats”—I’d lure them in on cats, and then teach them how we study nature, using cats as the vehicle.

 

The course was a great success and a lot of fun, and it occurred just as my book Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance and the Future of Evolution was published.

 

It wasn’t much of a leap to the idea of writing a book for the cat-interested public about where cats came from, why they do what they do, and what the future may hold—and how we know what we know.

 

Q: The writer David Quammen said of the book, “If you have ever lived with a feline long enough to reach an accommodation, you’ve probably asked yourself: Am I training the cat, or is the cat training me? That question is a gateway to the labyrinth of fascinating riddles explored by Jonathan Losos—himself a lifelong ailurophile as well as an eminent  evolutionary biologist—in this engaging and very smart book.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I love it! And coming from David Quammen—one of the world’s great writers about nature and science—I am extremely flattered.

 

As for who’s training who, Quammen is absolutely correct. I learned that lesson at a young age: whenever our cats scratched the living room furniture, my father would throw them out the door. It wasn’t long before they turned this to their advantage by making a token swipe at the couch with a single claw and promptly darting to the door, where my father would promptly show up to fulfill his role.

 

Like father, like son: I now find my daily schedule dictated by the whims of my feline overseers (as the old saying goes, “dogs have owners, cats have staff”).

 

But it is a little known fact that cats are eminently trainable—after all, they’re very food-motivated. You can even train them to use the toilet (though not, sadly, to flush afterwards). Check out the Savitsky Cats to see the incredible tricks they can learn.

 

Q: Has writing this book changed how you see your own cats?

 

A: Absolutely. There were so many things I learned.

 

For example, I always assumed that cats meow to each other, and the fact that they meow to us means that they’re including us in their social network, treating us as honorary cats.

 

But, in facts, cats rarely meow to each other (other than momcats and their kittens): they communicate using plenty of other sounds, but not meows. The fact that they meow to us is a trick they evolved during domestication.

 

Also, their meow has become shorter and higher-pitched compared to their ancestor, the North African wildcat, making it more pleasing to our ears.

 

They also evolved a type of purr, called the solicitation purr, that they use when they really want something (think the sound they make when they’re winding between your legs as you open a can of wet food in the kitchen). This purr shares acoustical properties with the cry of a human infant, a sound to which we are innately sensitive.

 

Another fun fact: unowned outdoor female cats often mate with multiple males, which means that kittens in a litter can have different fathers, which may explain why my Winston and Jane are so different in appearance and temperament.

 

Q: At the end of the book, you raise the concept of bringing back the saber-tooth tiger in a smaller housecat-sized form--has anyone taken you up on this idea?

 

A: Not that I’m aware of. But saber-toothedness evolved at least four times in mammals—once in cats, twice in species very closely related to cats, and once in marsupials in South America (producing a species that was a dead ringer for a cat), so evolving such a trait doesn’t seem that difficult.

 

All kinds of breeds of cats and dogs have been produced, so it strikes me as possible that this could be done if someone really wanted to (not that I’m suggesting it!).

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A topic I originally intended to tackle in The Cat’s Meow was the impact that cats have on the environment. It’s a highly controversial issue, pitting animal welfare advocates versus conservationists, and it’s a lot more complicated than most people realize.

 

Moreover, there are a lot of interesting twists—coyotes, for example, keep cats out of natural areas in most of North America—as well as a lot of fascinating research: what about the possibility of the Australian quoll (sometimes called the “marsupial cat”) as an alternative felinesque pet?

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Well, I could go on for hours about all the fascinating aspects of cats. I’ll leave you with one last story: it’s long been accepted that the cat was domesticated somewhere in the Middle East, possibly as recently as 3,500 years ago.

 

What is clear is that they didn’t start moving out to the rest of the world until after this point, spreading north to Europe, south into Sub-Saharan Africa and East to Asia, where they first showed up in China about 2,000 years ago.

 

Archaeologists were shocked, then, when skeletons of cats were discovered a decade ago in village sites in Central China dating to 5,500 years ago. How could this be? It seemed to turn our understanding of cat domestication on its head.

 

The answer was figured out a few years later. The skeletons were not of domestic cats, but of a different feline species, the Asian leopard cat (ASL).

 

On the one hand, that the ASL might have been domesticated wouldn’t be all that surprising: like the North African wildcat, they can be found today in the vicinity of villages, feasting on rats and other prey in agricultural areas. So, the stage would have been set for domestication to occur.

 

On the other hand, contrary to the NA wildcat, which can be very friendly, the ASL cannot be tamed—it has a very unpleasant temperament, leading the New Yorker to describe it as “a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat.” How domestication occurred—if it did—is a great question.

 

And there’s a kicker: one of the most popular breeds today—the gorgeous and affectionate Bengal—is the result of hybrid matings between ASLs and domestic cats, with the offspring crossed back to domestic cats for several generations.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Neil Mathison

 

 

 

Neil Mathison is the author of the new book Airstream Country: A Geologic Journey Across the American West. He also has written the book Volcano, an A to Z. He is a former naval officer, nuclear engineer, and businessman.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Airstream Country?

 

A: Place inspires my writing. Airstream Country is about the American West. When my wife Susan retired, when we bought our Airstream Bambi, one of our goals was to reconnect with the West, from its coast to its mountains; from its ice-shaped north to the layer-cake geology of its Colorado Plateau and the basin and range of its four major deserts.

 

We wanted to understand the bones of the West: how one region connects to another, how the West’s geology and geography came to be. To achieve this, we needed to drive its highways. Highways are the West’s sinews. Airstream Country is the story of that quest.

 

Q: The writer Adrienne Ross Scanlan said of the book, “From the Pacific Coast to the Southwest, up the Rockies and across the Cascades, Airstream Country is a journey of married joy and American history, of geologic time and the serendipity of an unplanned day, of letting each exploration reveal where the next journey needs to take us.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Adrienne’s words capture much of what we sought in our travels. We were traveling for nostalgia, serendipity, simplicity, and science.

 

Nostalgia because we grew up in the West and we wanted to visit places we’d visited before in addition to those we hadn’t.

 

Serendipity because we wanted to linger if we were inclined to linger or move on if we wished to move on without the schedules and obligations that had governed our pre-retirement travel.

 

Simplicity because simplicity makes travel lighter and therefore freer.

 

Science because we wanted to understand what we were seeing.

 

And, as Susan insists on pointing out, not always with “married joy,” but there was much joy, and companionship between two souls who love travel and who travel in the same manner.

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: My working title was “Bambi Diaries” I wanted the book to have the day-to-day sense of a diary; “Bambi” because it was the name Airstream assigned to our model Airstream trailer.

 

The staff at the University of New Mexico Press suggested that perhaps my working title would elicit Walt Disney’s Bambi rather than an Airstream journey, and that it conveyed nothing about the geological science, which was such an important element of the book.

 

The UNM Press team was right. The title we chose conveys what the book is about. “Airstream” because Airstreams have become as iconic for 21st century highway travel as the VW Bus was iconic for 1970s highway travel. “Geologic Journey” because geology is such an important element in the book and what makes the West so unique.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: Airstream Country is a travel book, a natural history book, a cultural exploration, and a personal memoir. The book is organized into 12 chapters based on 12 different highway routes.

 

Each route can be a template for readers who plan to travel the West, or some part of the West. But each route is also an account of the West’s extraordinary geography, of the planet’s evolution revealed in the West’s geology.

 

The book answers questions of what I call Big-Picture Geology. Why is a mountain range here and not elsewhere? What do the layers in the Colorado Plateau tell us about the ancient history of the continent? Why is Yellowstone one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes?

 

Each chapter explores not only the route’s geology, but its ecology, national parks and forests, literary, cinematic, and historical aspects, as well as the sociology of Baby Boomers, ten-thousands of whom are retiring each day, and who are creating a recreational vehicle culture.

 

Because Susan and I are native Westerners the book also offers insights into the West’s past as well as its present. What has changed? What has remained the same? What still inspires us? What has been lost?

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A collection of essays, many already published, about places that have been important to my life: Hawaii, the Grand Canyon. the San Juan Islands. the Salish Sea. I’m also working on a series of linked stories set in British Columbia’s Inside Passage, several of these already published.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: We launched the book at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle on March 12, 2025. The book is shipping and may be ordered through most bookstores and online retailers. I will be attending AWP in Los Angeles in late March.

 

Readings are being scheduled and will be posted on my website, www.neilmathison.net , which also includes chapter excerpts from Airstream Country, as well as selections from my previous book, Volcano, an A to Z, and many of my published essays and short stories.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Grace Feuerverger

 

 

 

Grace Feuerverger is the author of the new memoir Winter Light: A Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors. Her other books include Oasis of Dreams. She is professor emerita of education and ethnography at the University of Toronto, and she lives in Berkeley and in Toronto.

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir, and how was the book’s title chosen?

 

A: Actually, Deborah, this is a much more interesting question than you may think because I never, ever intended to write this memoir.

 

Winter Light was not supposed to have been written – let alone published. I have broken all the rules that dominated my bleak family life when I was growing up. But I feel as if I was compelled by some mysterious force to write my story in order to add a somewhat different piece to the mosaic of Holocaust literature.

 

Because, you see, it wasn’t the language and culture of my people that saved me; it was the language and culture of strangers. At the core of my story stands a little girl struggling to find a path toward the Life force and to escape from the demons of despair that permeated her home. My memoir is about a sequence of serendipitous “rescues”—an emotional rags-to-riches story.

 

I’d also like to emphasize that my book Winter Light is unusual in that most Holocaust memoirs that have so far been published are, for the most part, from families who had enjoyed some measure of social and professional opportunities before the war.

 

Those stories depict survivors as heroically determined to rebuild their lives after the war despite their devastating losses, and they encouraged their children to live as fully as possible in their new society.

 

My memoir stands in stark contrast to these, in that my parents had never known anything other than blinding poverty, visceral antisemitism, lack of any educational opportunities before the war. So they had no role models they could fall back on after the war.

 

About the title:  When I was a child, I was mesmerized by a shimmering light that seemed to call to me on winter mornings through the “Jack Frost” designs on our kitchen window.

 

It was simply magnificent to see the sun glowing against the bright-blue sky and on the freshly fallen snow on those bitter cold winter days in Montréal. The crystalline designs on the windowpane were like a roadmap pointing me toward new horizons. I really mean it.

 

In my mind I thought I heard a whisper: “You belong in this light, you will find your place in it; just follow the light.” So it made sense that this should be my title because that winter light uplifted me and offered me a path forward toward a life worth living.

 

Q: How would you describe your relationship with your parents?

 

A: My parents arrived in Montréal in 1948 – penniless, emotionally broken, carrying with them all the ghosts of their murdered relatives. I was born several years later.

 

With an emotionally unstable mother and a father consumed by sorrow and inner rage, I was always searching for shelter. And I knew from the start that my home was the last place on earth I would find it.

 

Neither of my parents were able to encourage my own ambitions as I was growing up. And yet I was a child really eager to be out there in the world. But at every turn I had to battle those “demons” hissing their frightening, grim messages.

 

How dare you? was the mantra that reverberated in my home. I felt like a traitor. And sometimes—in the dead of night—I still do.   

 

When a very wise and compassionate therapist, one of my serendipitous rescues, explained all this to me years later, I felt as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted off my shoulders. Suddenly I could begin to see my parents more clearly and to realize that it hadn’t been my fault — which is what all children coming from places of trauma feel.

Q: The writer Nora Gold said of the book, “Winter Light is a frank, intelligent, and well-written memoir that charts the inner journey of a daughter of Holocaust survivors and her struggle to find a path forward for herself, from the darkness she inherited into the light of a meaningful, love-filled life.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Nora’s description fits very well. It makes it clear that she thinks it’s truly a worthwhile experience to read my book. I appreciate it very much.

 

All the endorsements on the back cover (and inside) offer interesting thoughts about Winter Light. Adam Hochschild’s blurb is one of my favorites as well. It’s hard to choose because they are all so heartfelt. The Kirkus Review on the front cover expresses it very lyrically.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Writing Winter Light has helped me better understand my parents’ suffering and how and why it affected me so deeply. My relationship with my mother was difficult and unsatisfying. She never understood me at all.

 

Perhaps she just couldn’t accept my longing to be out there in the world, given how deprived and shattered her own family life had been. It’s a loss that I will carry with me forever.

 

But, through the writing of this memoir I now realize how much I am my father’s daughter. He would take me to the local public library when I was very young and show me the children’s section (all those wonderful fairy tales that beckoned to me!) and then he would bring me over to the adult section and tell me that when I’m older I will be able to read those books.

 

He was an avid reader (especially of history and political science), an intellectual and a terrific political analyst, a self-taught man who could have been a professor, or a writer or a politician.

 

Unfortunately he was denied a proper education, as I’ve already mentioned, and just soldiered on with a job as a bookkeeper in order to make a living to keep the family afloat.

 

This kind of job gave him no satisfaction. He escaped into his reading as often as he could. I could sense that he carried a lot of sadness about this for the rest of his life – on top of the endless sorrow about the murder of his family members.

 

After having written this memoir I feel as if I have been living out my father’s dream in my professional life as a professor, researcher, and writer. It is a bittersweet feeling.

 

Of course there are other children of Holocaust survivors who lived in emotionally and socially deprived circumstances as I did, but I don’t think they have written about it. Not yet. Not published.

 

So I hope that my memoir will lend voice to their experiences and to speak for all children coming from places of trauma – be it abuse, poverty, war, isolation, and other oppressions.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am beginning to work on a very different kind of book: a book of historical fiction. I won’t say more because I don’t want to jinx it, but my mind is already deeply immersed in it. I will say that it is also about World War II, but from a very different perspective.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Well, I would like people to know that I have also written academic books, and the one I’d most like to mention is Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel (2001), which is as relevant today as when it was published. It’s an ethnographic study which I conducted over a nine-year period.

 

Oasis of Dreams is filled with narrative portraits of some remarkable educators who are working together on an everyday journey toward reconciliation and peaceful coexistence – which they continue to do up until the present moment.

 

In fact, it was in the process of interviewing these villagers filled with their trauma and pain and hope that I began to share my own story with them. This opened the door to my going a step further and discussing my life as a child of Holocaust survivors with my graduate students at the University of Toronto. They began to encourage me to write down my story.

 

It was as if they gave me permission to begin to write Winter Light, bit by bit over a good many years. I owe them so much.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Boris Fishman

 

 

 

Boris Fishman is the author of the new novel The Unwanted. His other books include the novel A Replacement Life. He teaches at the University of Austin.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Unwanted, and how did you create your characters Susanna, George, and Dina?

 

A: The immediate inspiration is unrelated to what it became. I have a dear friend, Dina Nayeri, a novelist. We went through the same refugee camps in Italy, though we didn’t know each other there.

Dina told me she was going back to Italy to look at the hotel where she was put up. I remembered the hotels, with people from all over the world thrown together—who falls in love with whom. It was such an unusual life circumstance. Such a melting pot—people who were never meant to live next to each other.

 

The phrase “the waiting palace” floated into my mind. These were modest Italian hotels that the government took over and filled with refugees. The term “palace” is ironic. We were waiting for the authorities to decide our fates. We were from humble lives—these were palaces to us.

 

The more I looked at it, it wanted to become something else—the story of a family that has to flee because, in trying to stay safe, they crossed the wrong people. In A Replacement Life, I was also interested in stories of people who were forced to act unethically because of circumstances in their lives. The shifting lines of morality are interesting to me. 

 

So, the story wanted to start earlier, before they got to the “waiting palace.” And I was interested in exploring the story as a child’s perceptions. Dina, my friend, shares my consciousness in many ways. It was a way of exploring my own 8-year-old consciousness, but I have a terrible memory. I ventriloquized the experience through Dina. She has been very gracious.

 

Q: Is your characters’ country based on an actual place, or was it imaginary?

 

A: It’s a stand-in for whatever country you want. The names are generic. I did mean for this to be anywhere. The point is that the country doesn’t matter. The people with power who choose to abuse the people without, even - and now especially - in this country, usually do it in the same exact way. Also, I didn’t want the story to be overdefined by a particular conflict. 

 

Q: Given that immigration and refugee policy is a focus right now, what do you hope readers take away from the novel?

 

A: I would love it if anybody who conveniently comforts themselves thinking they are greater than these people – I mean immigrants, legal or illegal – spent these 300 pages with them. I would love for this imaginary reader to remember that every ancestor of every one of us in America was an illegal immigrant. Every one of them fled for reasons very much like the ones these contemporary migrants have.

 

That’s the value of writing a novel—you make your testimonial. I’m fortunate to have a publisher who believes in me. Some of my relatives think 99 percent of migrants are criminals, whereas 1 percent are. A novel can represent that truth whereas nonfiction, by sometimes merely providing information, struggles to create empathy. It’s easier to create that with fiction. 

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Credit goes to my agent, Henry Dunow. It has such an elemental quality. I like slightly more elliptical titles, but it’s hard to deny that it’s elemental, and it’s true, these people are unwanted. It all comes back to dignity and respect.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m teaching, in Austin, Texas. I teach at the University of Austin, which was founded as a free speech university in reaction to the liberal orthodoxy in most college campuses. It felt like a fresh approach. It’s healthy to be surrounded by people with different views than you. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know about the novel?

 

A: I wrote it to move fast, to be full of plot, which was less true of books two and three. A Replacement Life, my first novel, also had a chugging plot. Then, as now, I was trying to write the smartest book for the broadest audience. 

 

It was very meaningful for me to write a book with no Russians or Jews in it—not because I don’t care for those communities, but because I have said everything I want to say on that and want to move beyond it. The Unwanted is not from another universe thematically, just a broader canvas.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Boris Fishman.

March 28

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 28, 1936: Mario Vargas Llosa born.

Q&A with Brittany Rogers

 

Photo by Lunar Haus, Brittany Greeson & Stephanie Hill

 

Brittany Rogers is the author of the new poetry collection Good Dress. She is also an educator, a visual artist, and the editor in chief of Muzzle Magazine. She lives in Detroit.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems collected in Good Dress?

 

A: I began writing the earliest iterations of Good Dress in 2016! Over time, it became a full-length collection titled “What Runs In The Blood,” and in early 2021, it began to transform into what became Good Dress. 

 

Q: How was the collection’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I chose from a list of words or phrases that stuck out to me throughout the book.

 

I ended up choosing “Good Dress” because it encompassed several themes from the collection: good, as in purity; good, as in fancy; good as in expensive; dress, being both literal and figurative. I want people to hear the title and think about adornment, extravagance, and what it means to be “good.” 

 

Q: The Detroit Public Library features prominently throughout the book--why did you choose to include it?

 

A: I chose it as both a landmark and a symbol. The Detroit Public Library is a very tangible part of my childhood and early adulthood. It is where I passed many hours during a very transient time in life. It is where I got the first inklings that I was queer.

 

It is also a symbol for history, archival, and neglect when looked at in context with the history and politics of the city. 

 

Q: The poet Khadijah Queen said of the book, “Rogers’ electric debut enfolds us in what we didn’t know we needed to understand about how we can move in the world, to dance and roller skate and cry, to imagine ourselves adorned passionately with life.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I was so humbled to receive her blurb, and I am grateful for such a generous description; my hope is that people who read my book feel more possible and more audacious, so I am glad someone else sees that same sentiment in my work. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Right now I am working on a multi-genre project  which explores the interior thoughts and outward indulgences of Black femmes to challenge the politics of beautification, labor, and indulgence. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Iris Mitlin Lav

 

 

 

Iris Mitlin Lav is the author of the new novel Gitel's Freedom. She also has written the novel A Wife in Bangkok. She worked for many years in the field of policy analysis and management, and she lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

 

Q: In your Author’s Note, you write about Gitel’s Freedom: “This book is based on my family’s experience, but it is fiction.” What did you see as the right balance between history and fiction as you wrote the book?

 

A: I was careful to accurately represent the historical background in the book, both the historical events that affected the characters from 1907 through 1968, and the places where the action took place.

 

I am a fan of there being a lot of dialogue in a novel to give a first-hand feel for the characters. Since about half of the novel takes place before I was born, the interactions and conversations between characters had to be completely fictional, based on my conception of the nature of the characters.

 

Some of the stories about the characters, such as Shmuel’s repeated health problems, are close to the truth of what happened. Other stories, such as Rayzel figuring out who stole the geese, are complete fiction.

 

In short, fiction filled in the parts of the novel where actual happenings were not known to me or where talking about actual events did not fit well into the novel.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I used a variety of materials to research historical events, most of which is detailed in the appendix to the book entitled “Resources.” The sources included books about life in Belorussia, in South Bend, Indiana, and in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, events during the Great Depression and others. I also found articles available on the Internet useful.

 

For family issues I relied on a relative who had done genealogical research, the recollections of an older cousin, and some letters I had saved from relatives who are no longer with us. I also used Census information, old phone books, and statistics from the Department of Labor.  

 

I was especially surprised by the timeline of what happened during the Great Depression. My parents often told the story of how they lost their business when their bank closed and didn’t reopen, which led to the loss of their business’ working capital as well as their personal savings – which in turn set the stage for many of their subsequent problems in life.

 

When I researched the timeline during the Depression, I was surprised to learn how clear the warnings were of what was likely to happen. There was a period during which they could have acted to save their business if they had heeded the warnings.

 

In the novel, Gitel is portrayed as understanding the warnings, with Shmuel refusing to act. Whether that was what actually happened I do not know.

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Gitel and her husband, Shmuel?

 

A: When Gitel first met Shmuel, he was speaking about political issues at the left-wing Jewish organization Workmen’s Circle in Chicago. She had never met a man like him in her town of South Bend, and she immediately began to fall in love with him – more on an intellectual level than a physical one. And Shmuel, charmed by her interest in him and his ideas, began to fall in love with her.

 

After they were married, there was some strain between them caused by Gitel’s dislike of sex with Shmuel and desire to avoid it when possible. Gitel also chaffed at some of Shmuel’s traditional ideas about the role of a wife.

 

Despite all that, they seemed to love each other and dutifully take care of each other through their lives.  But in the years between Shmuel’s stroke and his death, Gitel resented having to be his caretaker.  

 

Q: The author Bruce J. Berger said of the book, “Gitel’s Freedom immerses the reader in the complex lives of Jewish immigrant families, providing a thought-provoking and detailed examination of what it means to start anew in America, the joys that might be nearby, and the costs that sometimes must be paid.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think it is a good description for the characters in Gitel’s Freedom for both the first- and second-generation immigrants.

 

Yankel, Gitel’s father, escaped the Tsar’s army, was able to establish a profitable business in South Bend, and could freely worship as he chose. For him, his decision to immigrate did bring joy, especially as his six children grew up and became comfortable in the country.

 

For Yankel’s wife Rayzel, the costs of her loss of culture and the status she had in Borisov, and her isolation due to her inability to speak English, clearly outweighed any small bits of joy she might have found.

 

For Gitel, who very much wanted to be a normal American girl, her mother Rayzel’s immigrant ideas of the proper behavior of a Jewish girl held her back – especially in the refusal to let Gitel go to college. It was a cost Gitel paid that was a major hindrance to her subsequent life.

 

In the next generation, being born in America gave Ilana the freedom to choose her own path in life.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Right now I am working on the release of Gitel’s Freedom and activities to publicize it.

 

I have some ideas for possible future projects, including turning some outtakes from the book into short stories. I also have some thoughts about writing a nonfiction book related to my previous work life. I’ll have to see what develops when I am less busy with this book.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’d like to give a shout out to my publisher, She Writes Press, and its head, Brooke Warner. They have been incredibly supportive as I wrote both of my books, A Wife in Bangkok and Gitel’s Freedom.

 

When I started writing fiction after a long career in public policy, I had a lot to learn. I would recommend She Writes Press to anyone who is starting to write fiction without an explicit background in how to do it, as well as to other women writers.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb