Q&A with Brooke Randel

 

Photo by Kelsey Kovalcik

 

 

Brooke Randel is the author of the new memoir Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Also an editor and associate creative director, she lives in Chicago.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Also Here, and how would you describe your relationship with your grandmother?

 

A: My grandma Golda and I always had a loving relationship, but we never really understood one another. We were too different. She was restless, stubborn and generous, a refugee and Holocaust survivor who didn’t like to look back.

 

She was also someone who couldn’t read or write, so when she did want to share her wartime experiences, how she survived three Nazi concentration camps, she suggested I write about it. Over phone call after phone call, she kept bringing up the idea.

 

I was startled every time, so used to her not wanting to talk about the past. There was so much silence in my family about what had happened—the violence, the death, the displacement, the grief. I felt like I didn’t know anything. I felt like maybe I should.

 

All that to say my grandma very directly inspired me to write Also Here, but the book it turned into, a portrayal of our relationship, a look at food and starvation, storytelling and illiteracy, silence and remembrance, was beyond what she imagined. It became something much bigger than either one of us expected.

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

 

A: The title comes from my grandma’s words. After being separated from her sister at Auschwitz, she found a way to escape the line for the gas chambers and smuggle herself back to her sister’s work group. As she told it to me, her sister was crying, assuming she’d lost Golda forever. Golda snuck up to her side and pinched her arm, saying, “I am also here.”

 

I’ve never forgotten those words. I am also here. It’s not literally what she said to her sister—she did not yet know English—but how she relayed it to me, her translation of the moment.

 

The phrase, structured so particularly, got me thinking about my grandma’s presence in my life, her here-ness despite everything, as well as the also-ness of existence, the overlap of all our lives.

 

Togetherness can be both extraordinary and confounding, and for me, the title holds that complexity and hope.

 

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

 

A: I spent years doing research for Also Here, recording family interviews, conducting archival searches, and reading testimonies of other survivors from similar areas and camps.

 

So much surprised me. Here are three details that seared themselves into my brain:

 

From 1933 to 1945, there were more than 44,000 camps, ghettos and sites of persecution across Europe. That number is still staggering to me.

 

Through Bernice Lerner’s All the Horrors of War, I discovered another survivor who was from the same town as Golda, and saw the same three camps.

 

She also ended up in the United States and amazingly, I was able to connect the two women over the phone. They shared memories of streets they used to walk down in their hometown and faces they once knew well. It was the first time I saw my grandma experience something akin to nostalgia.

 

The meeting where the Nazis formalized their plan for genocide, known as the Wannsee Conference, took 85 minutes.

 

Q: The writer and filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki said of the book, “Also Here bears witness to the Holocaust and the third generation’s efforts to understand it in remarkably important ways.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m quite humbled by Elizabeth Rynecki’s words. The third generation, or the grandchildren of survivors, have a distinct (and by no means uniform) perspective on the Holocaust because we knew the survivors as elders in our lives.

 

So much of my reckoning of the past is an attempt to connect two starkly different versions of the same person: the frail 13-year-old who lost her family and home, and the tireless octogenarian who liked to play gin rummy, wear bright red lipstick, and watch Baywatch with me and my brother.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m still writing about memories, how they’re passed down, remembered, buried and shared. My latest project is about fairy tales and the suburbs.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: This memoir took nine years for me to write, and many more for my grandma to live, so I’d love for you to check it out. Buy Also Here at Bookshop or find it at other retailers. You can also learn more at my website, brookerandel.com (and peep some cute pics of me and Golda).

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb