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| Minka Pradelski, photo by Gabrielle Strijewski |
Minka Pradelski's first novel, Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman, has recently been published in the United States. She is a sociologist and documentary filmmaker who has studied the impact of the Holocaust on survivors--including her parents--and their children. She lives in Frankfurt, Germany.
Q: Why did you decide to write Here Comes
Mrs. Kugelman?
A: At the end of an interview I conducted with a
survivor in Mannheim for the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation, the survivor
asked me to not forget Będzin, his town, in which he was born and grew up. He
told me he had friends from Będzin, survivors like himself, who live in Israel and
whom he would love me to interview. His request affected me deeply, and I could
not get it out of my mind.
Months later, during a trip to Israel, I drove to
Jerusalem and interviewed one of his friends. After our first talk I was
fascinated by this little Polish town. On my flight back to Frankfurt I felt as
though I held something precious in my hand – raw diamonds that I absolutely
had to cut. I just didn’t know how. And that’s how Mrs. Kugelman emerged.
Q: What do you see as the importance of
telling stories, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust?
A: We have lost so terribly much in the Shoah.
With the long complicated silence of our parents we children of the second
generation are cut off from the stories of our own families. What did the
village look like, the city, the life of our parents and grandparents?
Here and there what we heard was never more than a small piece of the puzzle. I
felt compelled to revive this vanished world a little bit with the narrations
of Mrs. Kugelman.
Q: What is the significance of your character Tsippy’s
passion for ice?
A: Tsippy is a zany young woman. She lives
largely on frozen food because inside she is iced up and raw. It is not until
the stories of the rather brash Mrs. Kugelman warm her up that the ice crust
she lives in slowly begins to melt.
Q: What about Będzin in the book is real, and
what is fiction? How did you combine the two?
A: The historical facts, the actual locations,
are the pillars of the novel, around which the fictive stories and characters
are woven, but the melting together remains a little secret…
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At the moment I’m working on a new book. Its
focus is the time immediately after the collapse of the Nazi regime—the time
“after,” the next days and months, years. Most of those who survived were quite
young people. How did they reinvent their lives? What was romance like?
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I am very happy about the publication of Here
Comes Mrs. Kugelman in the U.S. When I was a little child we lived in New York
for a while. My parents were so proud to finally be allowed to travel to the
States. I remember vividly how my two sisters and I received checkered blouses
and little red handbags for the passage in the gigantic ship, so that we could
feel like Americans as soon as we arrived. And now “Mrs. Kugelman” has also
arrived in America!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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