Beth Benedix is the author of the new book Ghost Writer: A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story. It focuses on the life of Joe Koenig, a Holocaust survivor, and Benedix's efforts to tell his story. Her other books include Subverting Scriptures, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications. She is a professor at DePauw University, and is the founder of the nonprofits arts organization The Castle. She lives in Greencastle, Indiana.
Q:
Your book is subtitled "A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story." Why
did you decide to take this approach to your book, and how long did it take to
write it?
A:
Thank you so much for asking this question! It took about nine years to write,
and it went through a number of different iterations.
Somehow
I always knew that the story I most wanted—felt I needed—to tell was the story
of the process of trying to tell this story, which sounds terribly convoluted
when I say it this way. But the truth is that the earlier iterations fell flat
because I attempted to mute my sense that it had to be this way.
The
questions that I obsess over—the ethical questions concerning how to tell
someone else’s story, what it means to choose one method over another, what it
means to impose a narrative arc, how to draw out the universal implications of
an insular set of memories—are essentially questions of process, and, so, it
seemed natural to me to bring these questions out into the open.
My
biggest inspirations in memoir--Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius) and David Harris-Gershon (What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist
Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?)—are painstakingly, playfully, process-driven, and
the authenticity of this approach came as a revelation to me the first time I
read their books.
There’s
a vulnerability to this approach that feels necessary to me, a tentative
quality that conveys the reality of what it feels like to just not know how
best to communicate the weight of Joe’s story.
I
gesture to Paul Celan at the close of the book, and this gesture captures my
full sense that a story like this, a story of encounter—raw, real,
unscripted—is always “en route.”
Q:
Throughout the book, you discuss both Joe Koenig and your father. What do you
see as the connection between then?
A:
Yes, this connection becomes a central motif, even as it surprised me to make
the connection. In the book, I try to make clear that, in so many ways, Joe and
my father couldn’t be farther from one another.
There’s
a conversation we have, for instance, where I tell Joe in no uncertain terms my
sense of the chasm between them: I tell him that, where he is a true survivor,
my father—who died when I was 20—squandered his life.
And
yet… my relationship with Joe, the time I spent with him poring over his story
and learning who he is and what makes him tick… somehow this all brought my
father back to me in the most vivid way.
Somehow
the relationship we developed—his sense of humor, his brute honesty, the way he
challenged me to face my fears, the way he knew how to master the world around
him—all of this brought my dad back. And
I started to process Joe’s story through the residual ache of losing my
father.
In
an act of what I can only call grace, Joe told me once that we are “the same”
because we both lost our fathers too soon. The weight and generosity of that
statement loomed somehow over the book for me; I wanted to understand what it
meant that Joe could have said this, when our experiences seemed so far apart
to me, when his losses were so profound and mine seemed so prosaic.
So
I think the connection is mainly that he validated my sense of loss.
Q:
What do you hope readers take away from Joe's story and your approach to
telling it?
A:
Oh, this is hard, because I most want readers to have their own authentic
encounters with the book and I’m so interested to see where those moments of
encounter might happen for them.
I
guess I would like readers to come away primarily with a sense that they really
know Joe. I want readers to see him as a flesh and blood man with a history and
a family and a wicked sense of humor, a man who refuses to be labeled and
defined by his experience in the Holocaust.
It
was so important to me to introduce Joe in this way to readers, because it’s in
this kind of meeting that his story becomes most meaningful. Joe’s memories are
of unfathomable loss, and I feel an obligation to share these memories, both
for his family’s sake and for the sake of recording and collecting his
testimony.
Alongside
of that sense of obligation is another: the obligation to show that stories of
memory take on lives of their own for the people who listen to them. It has to
be a shared act, this kind of story-telling, this kind of testimony, it has to
be about the attempt to make a connection—even if the attempt feels clunky or
flawed or incomplete.
Q:
What impact did writing the book have on you?
A:
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it’s pretty fair to say that writing this
book has changed my life. I live in a perpetual state of gratitude that Joe
came into my life, a perpetual kind of wonder at the workings of the universe.
Knowing
Joe has changed the way I’ve thought about… well… everything, from writing to
teaching to being a mom. Everything feels more applied now, more hands-on, more
in-the-thick-of-it. There’s a clarity
that wasn’t there before, a sense of what really matters.
In
the book, I talk about the Jewish concept of beshert—fate. Allergic as I am to any form of
institutionalized religion, this concept—that there are others with whom we are
fated to cross paths—resonates with me in a way that I always sort of sensed
but was never quite able to articulate until writing this book.
The
magic simplicity of the not-so-chance encounter… I’ve come to honor this as
something that can only be felt intuitively and viscerally, and to acknowledge
the power of connection when it happens.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
Right now I’m working on marketing this book! It’s been such a long road, and
I’m really looking forward to the conversations that I’m hoping this book will
facilitate.
I’m
waiting for the next writing project to announce itself to me. In the meantime,
I’m keeping busy being a mom, teaching, directing a nonprofit organization and gigging with my
band.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
This question makes me anxious! I feel like I should have a perfectly witty
response. The only thing that comes to mind, strangely, is a line from Rush’s
song “Free Will”: “If you choose not to
decide, you still have made a choice.”
Oh,
and a quote from the newly released movie adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time,
which I just saw with my kids, a line from Rumi: “the wound is the place where
light enters you.” So beautiful.
Thank
you so much for the opportunity to talk about Ghost Writer, Deborah!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
