Q&A with Diane Botnick

 

Photo by Erin Wik Photography

 

 

Diane Botnick is the author of the new novel Becoming Sarah. She lives in Cold Spring, New York. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Becoming Sarah, and how did you create your character Sarah Vogel?

 

A: It was a filmed interview of a survivor talking about being liberated from the camps at war’s end and put on a boat filled with refugees bound for Palestine. He didn’t know how old he was (about 6, he figured), his own name, who his parents were, or where he was from. It was chilling. 

 

I didn’t know what I had to add to the oeuvre or, with no survivors in my own family, if I even had a right to, but I wanted to write a novel about someone like him, a different kind of survivor. And in fact, judging by the various survivors I’ve known, there are only different kinds. Just like people, there are no survivors like any others.

 

Having always been drawn to books that reveal a character’s tragic flaw, I took that as my charge. But unable to pin the sum of my life to one central event, tragic or otherwise, I began to wonder why my protagonist should have to?

 

And as she took shape on the page, I remembered that writing fiction, like living a life, involves so many choices. If her origin story and physical appearance felt like givens, her future lived only in my imagination. The identity she was forced to invent for herself? That was up to me.

 

So the Sarah Vogel my readers will get to meet is unsentimental, tough, hardworking though not opposed to shortcuts, and like a terrier will lock on to whatever she can that might smooth her way forward . . . even if that means telling a few lies along the way. She is a survivor but one no better or worse than any one of us.

 

Because of that, one of my readers described Becoming Sarah as a subversive Holocaust novel. That excited me.

 

Q: The writer Amy Friedman said of the book, “Becoming Sarah opens with a gut punch crafted so beautifully, if feels almost divine.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Not to pat myself on the back, but I’ve now read through my book, I don’t know, a hundred times, and I still feel that gut punch. I paid great attention to the prose throughout the piece, but the opening, in particular, carries me along like a piece of music, and I feel so honored that at least one reader has also felt the rhythm and flow of its melody. I hope other readers will, too.

 

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

 

A: I feel like I’ve been researching this book my whole life, obsessed with Holocaust literature since I was a kid. Anne Frank, Leon Uris, and later, Elie Wiesel, Sophie’s Choice, Levi, even In Paradise, Peter Matthiessen’s novel about a retreat held in modern-day Auschwitz, so many chapters of history books, and of course, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., a great source of inspiration as well as information.

 

But in foraging around for this book, I learned that while most of those murdered upon entering Auschwitz were women, those of them not sent directly to the “showers” actually fared better than men—women being predisposed to recreating family-like groups, bonding, helping each other, sharing their meager resources, hugging each other to stay warm.

 

The men reportedly hugged only themselves, seeing both inmates and guards as opponents, like gladiators battling for survival. I tried to capture that duality—the survival of the fittest versus united we stand, divided we fall.

 

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

 

A: I hope when my reader finishes Becoming Sarah she feels the triumph of the human spirit. I hope Sarah will stay with her. I hope the book shows her what the world looks like through the eyes of an “other,” uncomfortable in her own skin, having nowhere to fit in, feeling like everyone’s speaking a foreign language even when they’re not.

 

I want the reader to struggle with the concept of identity, asking herself who she might have been if it had been up to her and her alone.

 

And I’d like her to ask herself why some survive and others fail to thrive. Does surviving mean you were any stronger, more resilient, or simply luckier than others? Does succumbing mean you were weaker or less-determined? What kind of survivor would you be? I’d ask my reader if I had the chance.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have two projects in my drawer awaiting my attention. One is a novel with a gothic feel set in 1970s New York. It’s about a young woman with extraordinary powers who falls into the hands of an ambitious gallerist and becomes part of his plan to build a new art empire in the heart of the city. It needs at least one more draft.

 

The other is a collection of short pieces that I hope will grow into a novel that tracks the evolution of a woman’s thought, experience, and memory over the course of her life. Its four parts, each a bundle of 20 to 25 years, hold stories of friendship, death, love . . . all the big topics.

 

I’m still not sure what form it will take, but mining my own history for memories has felt less like writing and more like digging up broken tiles to polish and mortar into a luminous mosaic or cutting up old dresses to be sewn into one of those patchwork quilts that gets passed down.

 

Preserving the integrity of each memory, freeing them from hindsight, crafting them to feel like they’re rooted in their timeframe of origin, is a conceit I hope readers will find refreshing.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Not to know, but to think about . . . The current climate of anxiety seems inescapable. I’ve never directly experienced antisemitism, but it is once again a fraught time to be a Jew. A fraught time to follow or to ascribe to any particular brand of spirituality.

 

I hear people refer to religious groups as cults, the followers brain-washed. And I don’t disagree, but effective brain-washing (the kind I had) is hard to undo.

 

I think in part because it offers so much: communality, traditions that manage to bring families together when nothing else can, moral constructs that when they work keep the peace and instill order, the wonder of spirituality ... the inherent goodness of doing unto others.

 

I believe it’s entirely possible to be a good person without religion. Sadly, the question seems to have become, can one be a good person with religion? I’m hoping so.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb