Q&A with Jill Morningstar

  

 

 

 

Jill Morningstar is the author of the novel Eva Schmidt. She serves on the Lung Cancer Research Foundation Board of Trustees, and she lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Eva Schmidt, and how did you create your character Eva?

 

A: Eva Schmidt was inspired by the extraordinary historical figure Bertha Pappenheim, a leader of the German Jewish women’s rights movement in the first third of the 20th century. She was a brilliant, accomplished passionate woman with a highly complicated past.

 

Because I wanted to write fiction, and I preferred to write about the Weimar and early Nazi periods, I decided to create Eva Schmidt, an illegitimate orphan raised by Bertha Pappenheim.  

 

My goal for Eva was to mirror Bertha’s complexity. She is an intelligent, brave and imperfect protagonist. When we meet her in 1933, she works as a dive bar fortune teller in Berlin. Because of the shames of her past and the rise of Nazism, her Jewishness becomes her most closely guarded secret.

 

I began thinking the novel would focus on Eva’s relationship with Thad Cartwright, an American intelligence officer, but when I discovered the true story of Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, I knew she would be someone to whom Eva would have to become attached.

 

Only through navigating the gray spaces between Eva and Bertha, Thad and Magda, can Eva finally confront her past and save herself.

 

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

 

A: The good news about writing about the Nazi era is the tremendous amount of literature available. I researched mainly by reading nonfiction.

 

The books that were most important to the process were: The Enigma of Anna O, by Melinda Given Guttmann, Magda Goebbels by Anja Klabunde, The “Jewish Threat,” by Joseph W. Bendersky, and The Jewish Response to German Culture, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg. 

 

To better understand the culture of the time, I read novels and commentaries from Hans Fallada, Walter Benjamin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth and Siegfried Kracauer, among others.

 

I was most surprised to learn the bizarre history and hypocrisy of Magda Goebbels. Her past relationships with Jewish people and her experience as a refugee shocked me given what we know about her actions after becoming a Nazi and marrying Joseph Goebbels.

 

She joined Eva Schmidt after I had started writing because she was too interesting to leave out. As drafts were done and redone, she emerged as one of the most significant characters.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “thrilling tale of shame and redemption.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think the description was wonderful. Despite Eva’s many gifts, Eva’s life was limited in many ways by her feelings of shame. Eva’s first words in the novel are: “My story was told in three words, a quick whisper falling from a maid’s yellowed lips. Bastard. A Jew.” These three words haunt Eva throughout the novel.

 

Frau Pappenheim demands Bildung! Sittlichkeit – Education! Respectability! from her orphans. It was a mold that left Eva “misshapen and bruised.” Eva excels at everything her “spiritual mother” asks of her. She says that Frau Pappenheim’s praise “could hold me for hours. It made me better than I was. But better than I was wasn’t enough. My truth cropped up like crab grass, ugly nubs she couldn’t polish over. I was an illegitimate orphan living among Ostjuden girls.”  

 

The Eastern girls were victims of the pogroms. As Eva says, “Their hundreds of words telling of dead mothers and shattered glass made our teachers cry . . . At night, when . . .I heard the Eastern girl’s tears, I wanted their reason to cry. My sadness came only from my shame, so I never cried.”

 

When Eva moves to Berlin, her shame as a Jew grows. Frau Pappenheim admonishes her, “Jews carry an unenviable burden of proof, and you, as an orphan, all the more so.” After burning her identity papers and becoming enmeshed among the Nazi elite, Eva fears her past is inescapable.

 

She sees an Ostjuden hawker by the side of the road and thinks, “How much happier I would have been living outside the ever-looming shadows of these wailing, waiting people. I didn’t know if I could escape them. I didn’t know if I wanted to. Despite my lies, my past would not go away. It was asymptotic. No matter how much I slashed it, halved it and beat it down, it would never reach zero.”

 

Eva’s push and pull with her past takes her through a treacherous maze. She faces seemingly impossible choices and dead ends. Her answers aren’t right or wrong, heroic or evil. She makes mistakes, but over time, she does her best when there is no best to be had.

 

I hope readers will offer Eva the redemption she seeks. I hope they will see the strength in the love she learns to give to the people in her small universe. I hope they return that love even when, as Frau Pappenheim says, “you need to look through dark to see it.”

 

Q: Especially at a time of increasing antisemitism, what do you hope readers take away from the novel?

 

A: The things from the early Nazi era that glaringly echo for me are the lies. Hate is born of lies, and today’s antisemitism is no exception. Eva says of the new Hitler regime, “Justice was gone, truth was erased. Basic language had new meaning. Words like ‘instinct, fanatic and death were exalted, while ‘truth,’ ‘reason,’ and ‘intellect’ were weak, venal, the odious domain of a subhuman race.”

 

While we are not where Germany was in 1933, we are living through a painful, ugly time. I have never felt this level of antisemitism before, and it is coming from all directions. People ascribe to us the lies we thought would not come back, at least here. I don’t know what to do about it, but somehow we have to return to the truth. 

 

I hope people take with them Eva’s reaction to a letter she receives from Frau Pappenheim. Bertha Pappenheim actually wrote these words in response to the growing anti-semitism in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover. In the novel, she shares them with Eva: 

 

“Thunderous rage fills me! I will preserve it, it shall burn in me—as long as what rightfully arouses it exists. I will not become lenient. I hope that I may retain the strength to cry out in passionate anger, again and again, to condemn every injustice!”

 

Eva reacts:

 

“Her pride was a blunt object, beating me over the head. I read the letter again and again, searching for a place into which I could fit. I scrounged for a hint of something that was meant for me, not for the person I should have been, not for the person I’d left so far behind. There was nothing. I took out a sheet of paper and scrawled her a note. I miss you. I’m doing my best. It’s not close to enough.”

 

I am grateful for every person who cries out in passionate anger and condemns every injustice, especially as lies and the hatred they cause grow more powerful and more vicious. But we also can find inspiration and truth in those who find their own way to try, even when it is not close to enough.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am writing a novel about love, religion and murder on Key West in the 1920s.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Jill Morningstar will be participating in the Temple Sinai (D.C.) Authors Roundtable on March 15, 2026. 

Q&A with C. Evan Stewart

  

 

 

C. Evan Stewart is the author of the new book William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter (November 1860-April 1861). Seward (1801-1872) was Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state. Stewart's other books include Myron Taylor: The Man Nobody Knew. He is also an attorney and a visiting professor at Cornell University. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write William Henry Seward’s Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter?

 

A: Seward has been a hero of mine since I was an undergraduate at Cornell many years ago. Since then, I have comprehensively studied his life.

 

This particular story I thought was/is important to tell because “mainstream” historians have written of this era from Lincoln’s perspective and thus the “real” history of the Secession Winter—a critical period in our country’s past—has been little understood (or misunderstood). 

 

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

 

A: I reviewed all the correspondence of the critical players of this period (Lincoln, Seward, Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglass, Charles Sumner, Thurlow Weed, etc.), as well as ALL the works of every historian who has written on this period (a fact borne out by the endnotes).

 

Q: The author Edward L. Ayers said of the book, “Stewart offers a stimulating discussion of Seward’s attempt to avoid war--and then to win the war when it could not be avoided, reminding us of history's rich moral complexity.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I was very pleased that Professor Ayers—one of our greatest Civil War historians extant—reviewed the book. While I like this quote, I like the one the followed it even more!

 

Q: What do you see as Seward’s legacy today?

 

A: Hopefully (if my book reaches a broad enough audience), Seward’s importance in (a) putting the nation over partisan politics at the most dangerous time in our history (with a plan that was working, until Lincoln changed his mind and sent ships to resupply Fort Sumter), (b) creating an architectural plan for our country’s expansion to the Pacific and thereafter to Asia (e.g., buying Alaska, Midway, the Guano Islands, etc.), and (c) helping to win the Civil War in so many ways (e.g., ensuring England and France did not recognize the Confederacy—if they had, the South would have won the war), will be understood and appreciated—for the first time.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am just finishing up a book on the four campaigns Lyndon Johnson ran in 1960—a story never told before; and I am just starting a book on George Patton—again, a story never told before: how he struggled during his entire career to achieve his military destiny while clashing with the bureaucracy of the U.S. Army (a collective biography of Patton-Eisenhower; Patton-Bradley; Patton-Marshall; Patton-Pershing, etc.).

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Lots more to share on Seward, but hopefully the foregoing is a good start.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

March 9

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 9, 1947: Keri Hulme born.

Q&A with Miriam Chernick

  

Photo by Leah Huebner

 



Miriam Chernick is the author of the middle grade novel The Zuzu Secret. She also has written the book A Kid's Guide to Washington, D.C. She lives in Maryland.



Q: What inspired you to write The Zuzu Secret, and how did you create your characters Josie and Abe?  

 

A: Two events inspired The Zuzu Secret.  

 

In March of 2020, my brother (born with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare disease) was designated high-risk for catching Covid, so during the lockdown, I brought him to live with me and my family. During his 15-month stay, we spent many hours talking and reminiscing.  

 

When my brother’s distinctive voice started playing in my head like an earworm, I began to write our conversations down. This journaling inspired the sibling characters—Josie and Abe—and their respective interests—animals and baseball.  

 

Also in 2020, an email popped up on my neighborhood listserv. “Did you lose a lizard?” Attached was a picture of a bearded dragon out on the street. I recognized this as an instance of the horrible practice of “dumping,” where owners abandon their no-longer-wanted pets outside.  

 

Though I was able to rehome this lizard, what happened stayed with me, so I had Josie—whom I’d drawn as an animal lover—rescue a bearded dragon not unlike the one found on my neighbor’s street. That became one of the main plotlines of the story.  

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between the siblings?  

 

A: Josie’s and Abe’s sibling relationship is typical in that sometimes they have fun together and sometimes they fight.  

 

But because of Abe’s disability, Josie is and will always be Abe’s caregiver—which is unusual. Josie’s “parentification” creates an imbalance between the siblings and leads to a number of problems I highlight in the story.

Q: How much did your own family’s experience factor into the writing of this novel?  

 

A: I could not have written this book if not for my experience growing up in a family with someone with PWS. I drew from my own memories and those of my three sisters. For example, my oldest sister was much more of a caregiver to our brother than I was. In that regard, she was most like Josie.  

 

I also drew from the relationships that my children have developed with their uncle. We were all together during Covid, so as I drafted the novel, I was able to consider their perspectives, too.  

 

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

 

A: Over the year it took to write The Zuzu Secret, I came up with lots of different titles. Some had Josie’s and Abe’s names in them, others had Zuzu’s name. But I did not like any of them.  

 

Then, when I told my editor, Karen Boss, that I was underwhelmed by the options, she said, “What about The Zuzu Secret?” It was perfect! And this is a great example of the invaluable relationship between an author and their editor. Book publishing is truly a team effort.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?  

 

A: I’m working on another contemporary middle grade story (for kids ages 8-12). It’s a family story, a school story and an animal story (of course!).  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?  

 

A: Since The Zuzu Secret launch, I’ve been getting feedback from kids saying they like learning about lizards and Orioles baseball, and more broadly, about the challenges faced by a family with someone with a rare and awful disease. This story is making readers outside the disabled community feel empathy.  

 

At the same time, kids born with Prader-Willi Syndrome or a similar disease, and their siblings, feel seen. Their own lives are reflected in the story of Abe and his family.  

 

That kids both outside and within the PWS community are reading—and finishing—The Zuzu Secret is heartwarming. What more could I ask for?


Miriam Chernick and her brother, Daniel, at an Orioles game last summer.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Miriam Chernick will be appearing at the Temple Sinai (D.C.) Authors Roundtable on March 15, 2026.

Q&A with Anjali Enjeti

  

Photo by Nicole Buchanan

 

Anjali Enjeti is the author of the new book Ballot. Her other books include Southbound. She is a former attorney, organizer, and journalist, and she's based near Atlanta. 

 

Q: You’ve described Ballot as “an ode to the act of voting, but also a warning.” Can you say more about that?

 

A: Voting has always felt like a calling to me. I have treasured the right to vote ever since casting my first ballot at age 19 and have voted in every single election since.

 

Beginning in 2017, I started getting out the vote for Democratic candidates in Georgia, co-founded an organization for South Asian Democratic voters, and became a Fulton County poll worker in 2020.

 

Ever since the US elected Barack Obama, our first Black president, an avalanche of voting restrictions has passed in Republican-led states. The Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which unleashed nearly unlimited corporate donations to campaigns. Then in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

 

Things deteriorated even further after Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss, when he and his loyalists pressured elected officials in the battleground states he lost to enact even harsher voter suppression laws and policies. Our right to vote is slipping through our fingers and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.

 

Q: The writer Alexander Chee said of the book, “Anjali Enjeti has written a moving and brilliant autobiography of her vote that intersects with the history of the right to vote, speaking all the while to the subtext of the times: that bound up in our vote is our lives, and what we mean to each other, our future and our past, our possibilities.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It was such an honor to receive this kind of endorsement from one of my favorite writers. Alexander Chee captures the spirit and the intention of the book perfectly. Ballot isn’t just about the act of voting, and the barriers to voting. It’s about who we are as individuals, and as members of society, and how we can build a better future, together.

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead for the 2026 midterms and people’s right to vote freely?

 

A: Our right to vote is precious and it’s in serious jeopardy right now. We’ve got to start figuring out how to get our people to the polls well in advance of the primary and midterm elections.

 

Much of this work is simply informing voters whether laws and policies have changed since the last time they voted. Has the date of requesting absentee ballots shifted? Does the state require a different form of voter identification? Has the location of voters’ polling places changed? What are the early voting dates?

 

Arming voters with the information they need to cast their ballots is half the battle. And given the degree of voter intimidation coming from the current administration, we need to offer voters as much support in casting their ballots as possible.

 

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

 

A: I wrote Ballot primarily in 2024, during one of the most unprecedented (and catastrophic) presidential election years in US history. I was so glued to the news I could hardly tear myself away to write it. Watching three presidential candidates platform such inhumane policies on everything from Palestine to immigration, was truly dispiriting.

 

I have been a devoted Democratic voter for my entire life—the party has moved so far to the right it’s unrecognizable. There were days that I could not bring myself to open up the draft of my book. I wanted to quit.

 

What ultimately kept me going to the finish line is the exact same thing I hope readers will take away from reading Ballot—it doesn’t have to be this way. We must hold our candidates and elected officials to higher standards. We must demand more of them. We must nurture better candidates.

 

Things seem incredibly dismal and frightening right now. But we do have members of Congress like Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Delia Ramirez, Rashida Tlaib, and former Representative Cori Bush (who will hopefully be re-elected to Congress later this year). There are amazing human beings serving at state and local levels, too. We’ve got to throw our support behind them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Ballot was my third book published in 4.5 years, so writing-wise, I’m looking forward to taking things a little more slowly. I’m neither a fast writer nor do I have a fountain of creative ideas spilling out of me! But I do have a few ideas for projects swirling around in my head, so I’ll take some time to see which project is calling out to me the loudest.

 

In the meantime, I’m focused on upcoming elections, specifically, pouring my energy and resources behind truly progressive candidates that will challenge both Republicans and Establishment Democrats whose loyalty lies most with billionaires, corporations, and donors.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I don’t hold back in Ballot. This is a book on voting and voting rights from a decidedly progressive point of view. One of the reasons why we’re living under fascist rule today is because both parties in our two-party system have failed us completely.

 

But no matter what, we must still absolutely vote. Our vote is our voice in our government. Black Americans died for the right to vote. We must never forget this, and must never take our right to vote for granted. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Anjali Enjeti. 

March 8

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 8, 1928: Lore Segal born.

Q&A with David King Dunaway

  

 

 

David King Dunaway is the author of the new book A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See. His other books include How Can I Keep from Singing?. He is a professor of English at the Universities of New Mexico and São Paulo, Brazil, and he lives in Los Ranchos, New Mexico. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write A Four-Eyed World?

 

A: I’m extremely near-sighted, someone who couldn’t cross the street without glasses. So after writing biographies of Pete Seeger and Aldous Huxley, and Southwestern writers including Barbara Kingsolver, I decided it was time to see if I could apply those techniques to a device, the one many of us keep closest, either on our nose or in our pocket, the first thing touched in the morning and the last at night, eye glasses.

 

This meant looking into everything a biographer would: the history of eyeglasses and how they developed; experiences with that device, good and bad; its reception, positive and negative; its past and its future.

 

Q: How have people’s perceptions of glasses changed over the centuries?

 

A: People’s perceptions of glasses have evolved since they were invented nearly 750 years ago.

 

In the beginning, glasses were viewed by the medieval church as the work of the Devil. We should accept whatever eyes God gave us, the Church said. Trying to correct them was defying God’s will. So pretty much as soon as someone invented a way to hang lenses on a face, someone else denounced the idea.

 

Later, eye doctors themselves resisted prescribing them: “It’s obviously better to have two eyes than four.” So, it was peddlers who sold glasses, depending on the age of the buyer.

 

But most relevant today is the resistance to wearing glasses among women and girls.

 

They were told it made them unattractive and might drive away suitors. That it revealed their aging. That it marred their facial looks, especially if the lenses were thick. As humorist Dorothy Parker wrote, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

 

Earlier, a newspaper commented that for women, wearing glasses was “a bit like brandishing your wooden leg in public.” Even today, women (and men) are likely to tear them off for selfies.

 

Is this over? Until three years ago in Japan, women would be fired for wearing glasses to work: “they don’t go well with a Kimono,” one executive said. Most importantly, the slights wearers have born could ultimately be internalized and change the way people view themselves.

 

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

 

A: I researched from the general to the specific, from encyclopedia articles and overviews to detailed historical documents. I have a foot-thick file on the history and development of eyeglasses; and another, of similar length, on what research shows about how people rate those wearing glasses, and how wearers view their own pairs.

 

What surprised me was the seriousness and persistence of glasses-shaming. Teenagers have killed themselves after too much teasing and bullying—including as recently as 2024 in Indiana.

 

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

 

A: The major impact of writing this book was the experience I undertook alongside it—putting aside my glasses for a week to understand a bit of how people managed before glasses, and to test what wearing glasses means by seeing on my own, without them.

 

I had the expected results: accidents small and large, injuries, and isolation (both visual and personal). This was a major challenge leading to injuries and embarrassments but ultimately worthwhile, as I discovered how important lenses were to me and to the world.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: With a colleague at the University of New Mexico, I have just finished the first oral history of arguably the world’s most famous road, Route 66. This is bouncing around from my agent, Peter Rubie at Fineprint Literary in NYC.

 

I have also just finished the longest radio documentary on Route 66, to be released this summer on public radio nationally: Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story (Route66.unm.edu).

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I hope to persuade people to take a second look at their glasses and consider how wearing them may have shaped their world, giving them opportunities but also challenges. I want to share with people how the best pairs are made, why glasses cost so much, and what to look for.

 

Glasses are a much bigger part of our lives than many of us realize, for we tend to overlook them.

 

I also see wearers as part of a community which goes beyond not losing them and keeping them clean. To me, we are “glassers,” a name much better than “Four-Eyes.” Tell us your own stories of wearing them at https://www.facebook.com/weareglassers/ and find the book at afoureyedworld.com.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb