Photo by Jo Rosen Photography
Galina Vromen is the author of the new novel Hill of Secrets. She lives in Israel and in Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write Hill of Secrets, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: I’ve always been intrigued by the issue of secretiveness. We live in a society where we are encouraged to be open and led to believe that keeping secrets is a bad thing.
And I wanted to open up that question and explore it. When are secrets bad? When are they good? Who do they serve? And posing those issues in the context of probably the biggest secret of the 20th century – World War II Los Alamos -- seemed the perfect backdrop for such a novel.
From there, I started to think about the types of people who came to Los Alamos: refugees from Europe, the best-of-the-best of American-born scientists from elite schools and elite echelons of U.S. society, conscripted soldiers of various backgrounds, and the people from the surrounding area who did most of the menial labor.
Q: What did you see as the right blend of fiction and history as you wrote the novel?
A: History had to inform the novel but not take it over. Too often I found myself writing scenes because I wanted to get in some interesting fact that I had learned about and I had to force myself to cut those parts out if they didn’t really serve the plot.
For example, one of the most prominent scientists there, Edward Teller, did a weekly story hour for children on the local radio station. I wrote about this, but cut it out, because it slowed down the scene.
Or the fact that mail delivery was terribly slow because, if you came originally from Princeton, New Jersey, friends and relatives would continue sending your mail there, and it would be forwarded to Los Alamos. And when you wrote back, the letter would go to Princeton, New Jersey, and carry a postmark from there, before going on to the person you wrote to.
So the slow mail is in there, but the explanation was one that I couldn’t slow down the narrative to fully explain. There were dozens of facts like that which had to go.
On the other hand, I was scared stiff about getting anything wrong regarding the science of the bomb, so I kept the science to a minimum, and included just what was absolutely necessary for the plot. And since most of my characters don’t know about the bomb, I didn’t have to become an expert in nuclear physics to write the book!
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Actually, I had a different title for the book, which the publisher didn’t like, and I didn’t much like the suggestions of the publisher.
In the end, it was my husband who proposed a title we could all agree to, and I think it is one which truly captures what the book is about – secrets both on the big scale of the bomb, and secrets which ordinary people keep from each other, and even from themselves, sometimes for noble and often for not-so-noble reasons.
At the start of the book, I quote the French writer Andre Malraux, who said, “Man is not what he thinks he is. He is what he hides.” And that is what Hill of Secrets tries to unpack. So I think the title really works.
Q: Can you say more about how you researched the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I read an enormous amount about Los Alamos over more than 15 years, visited Los Alamos for a few days, and also listened to a lot of oral histories online from a site called Voices of the Manhattan Project, which was set up as a joint effort by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF) and the Los Alamos Historical Society (LAHS).
There were some 600,000 people involved in the whole Manhattan Project in numerous locations – about 6,000 of them lived at Los Alamos itself – in other words about 10 percent. So, I focused on the accounts from Los Alamos, particularly from people who were children there during 1943-1945, or were young mothers raising children then, or maids.
I think the scale of the secret of Los Alamos surprised me. That there could be a whole town of 6,000 people that no one was supposed to know about is quite remarkable.
Also, I didn’t know at first that the people who lived there were really stuck there, not allowed to go away on vacation, not allowed to visit with relatives for the holidays, and without any idea of how long they would be there.
Another surprise was much more personal. When I told my father, a chemist, about the plot of Hill of Secrets, he told me that he had been invited in the 1950s to work on a nuclear weapons project – and had turned down the offer. This was news to me – and my mother.
So here I was writing a book about secrets in families and a secret nuclear project only to discover that for more than 50 years, my father had kept to himself his near encounter with just such a project!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am dithering between two projects, not sure which one to commit to. Both are more contemporary, one based in the Caribbean and the United States, the other based in the Middle East.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I think Hill of Secrets makes a great book club book because it raises a lot of issues for discussion, from the politics and ethics of the use of the atom bomb, to secrecy in relations, and other ethical questions which I don’t want to elucidate to avoid spoiling the plot for readers.
I have a section on my website – www.galinavromen.com – with some book club questions to get people started, as well as recipes and songs from the book, which I put there to potentially enrich a book club meeting. I am happy to meet with book clubs that read the book by Zoom or even in person, when feasible.
I did my best to get the historical facts right – with a lot of help from some amazingly meticulous editors and fact checkers. I’m always open to learning if I got anything wrong but I hope that the book will make people palpably feel what it was like to live in that time and in a place that was extraordinary in terms of the impact it has on our lives to this very day.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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