Sandra Freels is the author of the new novel Anneke Jans in the New World. She was the longtime head of the Russian program at Portland State University, and she lives in Portland, Oregon.
Q: You write that your character Anneke was based on a historical figure--how did you learn about her and at what point did you decide to write this novel?
A: I came upon Anneke through genealogy; I believe she is my 11G grandmother. Her name at one time was fairly well known—until recently there was even an "Anneke Jans" restaurant in Kittery, Maine—not because of anything she did in her lifetime but because of litigation surrounding her estate and a subsequent scam aimed at her descendants.
There are numerous biographical sketches of her online, some of them authoritative and some quite fanciful, but none of them gave me a sense of Anneke as a living woman with joys and sorrows and 10 children to feed. I kept thinking about what her life must have been like until it became so real to me that I needed to write it down.
Q: What did you see as the right blend of fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: Anneke Jans is a work of imagination. I have tried to be faithful to historical events and to the basic facts of Anneke's life, but everything else—personalities, relationships, motivations, reactions—is invented.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: The biggest surprise is that detailed records of the council sessions of New Amsterdam still exist and are available online in English translation. Reading those records is like eavesdropping on people who lived 400 years ago.
I was also surprised to learn that the population of New Netherland was so diverse. People of many different nations came together there and created a vibrant society unlike anything the world had ever seen before.
I started by sifting through online records for references to Anneke, her family, and her friends, and then I read every book on New Netherland I could get my hands on. I pored over art books and even cookbooks, hoping to get a sense of what life was like in a 17th-century Dutch village.
I'm bound to have made mistakes, but I hope I have told Anneke's story as it really might have happened.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Above all, I hope that readers perceive Anneke as a real person and that they identify with her as she makes her way through an unknown world. I hope they come to love her as much as I do.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a stand-alone sequel to Anneke Jans, a fictional biography of Anneke's daughter Sara Roelofs, which I hope in time will become the middle volume of a New Netherland trilogy.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Readers can contact me at www.sandrafreels.com. I'm always happy to meet with book clubs, both in person and virtually, and have posted discussion questions there that they might enjoy using.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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