Barbara Scheiber is the author of the new novel in stories We'll Go to Coney Island. She also is the co-author of Unlocking Potential: College and Other Choices for Learning Disabled People, and the author of Fulfilling Dreams: A Handbook for Parents of People with Williams Syndrome. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Antietam Review and Oasis Journal. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
Q: In a recent piece about your book in The Washington Post, you describe
how you came across the Walker Evans photo that is now on the cover of the
book, and realized that it was a picture of your father and his mistress (later
your stepmother). Why did you decide to begin your book with a trip to Coney
Island, and include a reference to it in the title?
A: Seeing the photo taken by Walker Evans of a couple at Coney
Island was truly a stunning moment for me. I had already written most of the
stories in my book, and the photo felt like a message from the past, telling me
the truth of what I had suspected as a child, and confirming my effort to
create a novel out of those suspicions and truths.
I recognized the couple immediately – my father, an aspiring
young lawyer when the picture was taken, and his secretary, who six years later
became his second wife. Though they both have their backs to the camera, there
is no question about their identities – or their relationship. Her flowing,
seductive posture, his firm arm around her waist sparkle with romance.
The date on the photo is 1926, when I was six years
old. It brought back the many times, as a young child, I had been to my
father’s office, sitting at a desk and drawing pictures on typing paper, and
gradually absorbing the realization that my father and his secretary had a
romantic relationship.
I came to know it, and at the same time understood that it
was something I wasn’t supposed to know. I hid my awareness from everyone,
including my mother, and tried to pretend that it wasn’t true.
That sense of secrecy pervaded my childhood. When I saw
Walker Evans’s photograph, it was a revelation of patterns that dominated much
of my life, and inspired my book. My father had many gifts – one of them
was the dream he gave to those who loved him – a dangerous dream of joy,
fun, excitement. It was a dream that held a hidden side – the fear of
loss.
All of these themes, and more, seem to be embodied in the
couple that caught Walker Evans’s eye that day so long ago. By using his
now-famous photo in the cover, and describing that day in the book’s opening
chapter, I hoped to catch some of the spark that created these stories.
Q: Why did you decide to use multiple perspectives and
varied time periods, ranging over most of the 20th century, to tell the
story?
A: I wanted this to be a story of a family – not focused
only on one central character. And I wanted to show how actions and
decisions by a single family member can affect others in many different ways –
often having an impact on future generations.
Two principal characters – Aaron and his first wife, Minna –
are from immigrant families living on the Lower East Side of New York during
the early years of the 20th century. Minna herself has arrived in this
country at age 10, and struggles to speak English without an accent.
I felt it was important to tell the story of these earlier
years, when Minna and Aaron first meet, to give readers a sense of the enormous
challenges they both faced and strove to overcome throughout their lives. Scars
and remnants of the past, along with their remarkable inner strengths always
remain with them – and become part of their future and the futures of their
children.
It was fascinating and challenging for me to draw the scenes
of Aaron and Minna’s younger lives. I had no family stories to draw on –
neither my father nor my mother ever talked about this period. All I knew was
that they had been extremely poor, that my mother had to go to work in a
sweatshop at age 13, though she loved school and hated to leave it, and that my
father always loved to read and was self-educated.
The characters of Aaron and Minna as young people are
totally imagined. I looked at hundreds of photos taken on the Lower East Side
during that period, read diary entries at the Library of Congress of immigrants
who came to America, read news stories and fiction of that period.
I also had the pleasure of interviewing one old family
friend who related a treasured memory – her search and discovery, during a
childhood trip from deep in the city to Van Cortland Park, for a beautiful
flower that blooms in early spring – the arbutus, and I incorporated the story
in the book. It seemed to hold so much of the hope and resolve that
motivated that generation.
Q: Do you identify with some of the characters more than the
others?
A: When I am writing from a particular point of view, I find
myself identifying with that character, with their motivations, weaknesses,
conflicts.
Of all them, Minna and Rachel are clearly the ones I
identify with most strongly. “Sycamore Farm,” which describes how Rachel
stumbles on a love letter from her father to his secretary, is close to a true
story. Her yearning to bring her father home, to somehow – through a magical
power -- create a stable and loving family, are vivid reflections of my own
needs at that time in my young life.
Much of Rachel’s later story is fiction. But throughout, I
felt keenly related to all her experiences, especially her efforts during a
crisis in her adulthood, to assert her own sense of right and wrong, to protect
her daughter from a disastrous decision, and to save her own marriage.
Though Minna’s life was very different from mine, I wrote
about her with a powerful sense of her longings and struggles, her courage, her
determination to pursue her dreams in the face of inevitable disappointment and
-- too often -- failure.
Q: Over how long a time frame did you write the stories that
make up your “novel in stories,” and how did you decide on the order in which
to place them?
A: I did not originally think of my stories as part of a
novel. I began writing fiction, with much excitement, soon after I retired, and
two of the stories – “The Eclipse of 1925” and “Sycamore Farm” – were among the
first I wrote at that time. Both of them were published in Whetstone, a
literary magazine, which encouraged me to go on.
Most of the other stories came later, and as they emerged I
saw them not as a collection of stories but as a unit, each one related to the
whole despite the differences in time and points of view. The book was
written (and rewritten) over a period of about 25 years. I wrote two other
books during that time (both non-fiction) and had the joy and support of other
writers who gave me invaluable feedback.
In the book as it now stands, chapters of the story “Minna”
alternate with stories about the family’s life later in the century. Originally,
I wrote “Minna” as a novella, and it wasn’t until recently that I saw the
possibility of including it as an integral part of the book. For me, this
format brought the entire book together in a way I hadn’t conceived of before,
and gave it new meaning for me and, I hope, for readers as well.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At 92, it would be truly ambitious to start another
novel, but I’m hoping and looking forward to working on shorter pieces – poems
and personal essays, possibly exploring old age -- its mysteries and
surprises.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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