Q&A with Jane Rosenthal

 

Photo by Gabriella Marks

 

 

Jane Rosenthal is the author of the new novel The Serpent Bearer. She also has written the novel Del Rio. She lives in New Mexico.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Serpent Bearer, and how did you create your character Solly Meisner?

 

A: The inspiration for my novel The Serpent Bearer came from my own life, from the people I grew up around and the place of my childhood--- the south, the Piedmont area of North Carolina, to be exact, right on the South Carolina border.

 

That landscape--- the red clay, the verdant green, rolling hills, the cotton and soybean fields, the haunting whistles of freight trains rolling through the longleaf pines at night---is as much a part of me as my eye color and height.

 

I always wanted to locate a story in that place of childhood memory. In fact, a former literary agent once told me that I should “exploit my southern background,” and by that she meant write a story about some recently divorced woman who retreats to her beach house on the Outer Banks and falls for the hunky contactor who fixes her screen doors.

 

There was just one problem. My South, in spite of the shared landscape, was not the same south as those who owned beach homes and antebellum mansions.

 

Why? Because I’m Jewish, and I grew up in the south in the time of Jim Crow. There were places White folks went, places that Black folks could go, and places Jews could go, places Jews could live. That was the way the world was back then---segregated.

     

I basically grew up in a ghetto, a community created by Jews who came south in the rag trade like my father, Jews who were lucky enough to escape Europe with the help of the Hebrew International Aid Society like my parents’ friends, and Jews who’d been there for generations like my father’s poker buddies, running small department stores, small hosiery mills, trucking companies, keeping a low profile, keeping to themselves.

   

I used to love hearing the grownups tell stories of what the South was like when they first arrived in the ‘30s and ‘40s, how there was a circuit riding rabbi, how they had to bring their Sabbath wine down from New York because the South was dry, and also, I’m guessing here, because the wine drinkers were mostly European with elevated tastes.

 

I remember one family friend, a Polish refugee, laughing, saying “I am now bootlegger” as he and my father brought cases of wine into the house. The undercurrent of the joke was that he was the son of wealthy Warsaw diamond merchants, who were all dead, and he was the lucky one--- a bootlegger.

    

I still hear their voices, their laughter, and I wanted to capture that world, closed and intimate and always a bit precarious if I’m being honest. Could it be that Jews, segregated or not, were really safe anywhere, even in America? 

       

I felt an urgency to write this novel because I may be one of the last of a generation that remembers who those people were and how they fought for a freer, better world than the one they experienced.

 

They fought in Spain, and some never came back; they fought in Europe and the South Pacific; they fought for Civil Rights in this country, and until recently I thought they’d won.

 

Between you and me, I’m going to bet, like my protagonist Solly would, that they still had the winning hand. They were people of great character and conviction. I wanted--no, I needed--to bring them and what they stood for, back to life. I didn’t want them ever to die.

 

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

 

A: To make a coherent story out of lives as complex and sprawling as the lives of my parents and the people in their world, to write a novel that would encompass all they had lived through in the 20th century, well, that was a hugely daunting task, one that would take research and travel, all of which I did.

    

I studied the history of fascism in the ‘30s and ‘40s and support for Nazis in this country, especially in the South during that time; I learned about radio transmission and code breaking, and about the relief work of the Mexican ambassador to France during World War II, Gilberto Bosques, who rescued many Jews and brought them to Mexico.

 

I travelled all over the Yucatan and Campeche on a special tour designed by the company Journey Mexico to help me with research. I stayed in places my characters would have stayed and walked in their footsteps. Writing this novel will always remain one of the highlights of my life.

   

The work of Ambassador Gilberto Bosques was a wonderful surprise. I knew that many Jews who were prevented from entering the United States because of the quotas went to Mexico.

 

What I did not know was that Ambassador Bosques bought two large houses in the south of France where he sheltered Jews and other refugees before securing safe passage to Mexico for thousands of them, all with the permission of Mexico’s president at the time, Lazaro Cardenas. Bosques is known as the Mexican Schindler.

 

Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I had absolutely no idea where I was going with this novel or how it would end. Frankly, The Serpent Bearer had an inauspicious start. I usually begin a project with the voice of a character talking, guiding me into the story.

 

But this novel began simply with an image of a woman standing in front of my protagonist Solly Meisner’s office door holding a basket of peaches. It was nighttime, 1941, Jim Crow South, and she was a Black woman taking a risk being where she was. Why? Who was she? What was the urgency? That was all I had to go on.

 

Some parts of this novel are absolutely true and come from the stories I heard growing up; some of the novel comes from my early memories of the way the Southern towns and landscapes looked in the ‘50s, and some of the tale I lived through.

 

It was as if I put all my memories, all my research, all my travels, feelings, experiences into the blender of my heart and soul, pushed a button, and created this magic elixir.

      

Even though this magic potion became a spy thriller with danger always present, I knew from the very beginning of the first drafts that I didn’t want to have the question--does the protagonist Solly Meisner survive--drive the narrative.

 

I’m not giving anything away to tell you now, as I do in the second chapter, that he does. The question throughout the novel is how. How did he survive? How did any of the characters survive this frightening time?

 

I needed to answer that question for myself, and I hoped I might answer it for my readers. How do we survive? What really matters? Writing The Serpent Bearer gave me an insight, an answer, and I hope that when you read this book, it will for you, as well.

 

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

    

A: When I began this novel, I didn’t have much to go on, but I did know the title--The Serpent Bearer. The name comes from the Greek myth of Ophiuchus, a myth in which a shepherd witnesses a miracle: he watches a serpent heal another wounded serpent with a leaf. It’s a myth about bringing the dead back to life, exactly what I wanted to do.

 

How I went from a blurry image of a woman with a basket of peaches, a title, and a question--what was she doing there?--tells you all you need to know about the magic of writing, how just a few snippets can take you on a magnificent journey, how following them leads you into enchantment, and can for a while bring loved ones back, make them alive once again on the page.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

    

A: A Cold War spy novel set partly in the fictional town of Pennington, South Carolina, I created in The Serpent Bearer.

 

The plot revolves around the secrets of a mysterious group of bohemians who landed there after Black Mountain College was shuttered in the mid-‘50s and the consequences of those secrets on members of the group and others.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just one more thing. I published my first novel in my 70s, the second novel in my mid-70s, and I’m working on another one, which I hope to publish in my late 70s. It is never too late to do what you love!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb