Paul B. Cohen is the author of the novel Tales of Freedom. A playwright and theater critic, he is based in the UK.
Q: You based your novel Tales of Freedom
on a film script you'd written. How did you come up with the idea for the
story, and why did you decide to turn it into a novel?
A: I had long been fascinated – as have
other writers – by the creation of golems in Jewish tradition. Alice Hoffman,
for example, has just released an acclaimed new novel that involves a
protective golem.
I first learned about golems – humanoid
creators created by masters of Kabbalah (Jewish mystical knowledge) – from the
story of the most famous: the Golem of Prague. When I started writing in
earnest, a long time ago (!), I wanted to use the legend but bring it into
modern times somehow.
Although the Holocaust – I prefer the term
“Shoah,” meaning calamity, rather than the connotations of sacrifice with the
word Holocaust – is rightly memorialised in numerous books and films, I feel
that the reality of Jewish (and non-Jewish) resistance is less celebrated and
far less known than it should be.
Tales of Freedom started off as a screenplay
– I’d moved to Los Angeles from England to study at the University of Southern
California in a graduate writing program, and since I was studying with an
Oscar screenplay winner, the late Frank Tarloff, it made sense to write the
story as a film script. It actually won a university-wide award when I was
still at USC.
About a decade later, I decided I could
more fully explore its themes as a novel.
Q: What kind of research on the World War
II period did you need to do to write the script and then the book, and did you
learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: When writing the script, I was
thousands of miles away, so I relied on books and then the Internet. I returned
from LA after almost 10 years to live back in my native England, and felt I
really needed to visit Prague for myself, so went with my brother.
I found the city, and particularly the
Jewish quarter, smaller than I had expected, and this helped me work out the
permutations and logistics for the climax in Prague near the end of the book. I
guess its size was surprising!
Q: What do you hope readers take away from
the novel?
A: That anyone who resisted the Nazis and
their allies, in any way, whether Jewish, non-Jewish or of any religious group,
or none, were heroic for doing anything. And resistance didn’t just have to
mean fighting: it was any act that helped the occupied push back against their
occupiers.
Q: Which authors do you particularly
admire?
A: A lot – being a writer means being a
reader.
To name a few: Isabel Allende, Ken
Follett, Marcel Proust, Chaim Potok, James A. Michener, Charlotte Bronte, Ian
McEwan, Alice Hoffman, and to single out two: R. F. Delderfield, a somewhat
neglected British writer who was a fabulous storyteller, and Alain-Fournier,
whose great 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes inspired me to write my still
unpublished English set homage, The Wildest Beauty.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a number of short stories in
print, and was a winner of the Moment Magazine–Karma Foundation annual short
fiction awards. The judge the year I won was none other than Alice Hoffman! I’m
proud of my tale, “Lecha Dodi,” which is also steeped in mysticism.
“Lecha Dodi” is one of a number of stories
in a collection I’ve just put together called The House on Honeysuckle Street.
I have also recently completed a new novel,
Somebody Else’s Life, about a famous artist, his biographer, and what it means
to live another person’s life.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Tales of Freedom is available on
Amazon, and I’d love any feedback from readers – and thank you, Deborah, for
these questions!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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