Ellen Shapiro is the author of the middle grade novel The Secret Buttons.
Q: A recollection of your mother’s was an inspiration for The Secret Buttons — can you tell us about that?
A: My mother, Elizabeth Nussbaum Shapiro, was born in Budapest. She grew up in Vienna, Austria, briefly attended medical school in Moscow, immigrated to England in 1940 and to the U.S. in 1943.
She spoke Hungarian, German, Russian, and English, could do the Sunday crossword puzzle in minutes, and was always knitting 10 projects at once.
She became a PTA president, and — when white residents were fleeing — stayed put and opened a knitting shop that she described as “a workshop in human relations” in the racially torn city of Inglewood, adjacent to South-Central Los Angeles. She was an inspiration to many.
When I was about 10 years old, she told me the one sentence that inspired the book: “When I was in England during the blackouts and the Blitz, I crocheted around diamonds and turned them into buttons for sweaters that refugees wore on the boats to America.”
She warned me not to repeat it to anyone — especially strangers — but I always knew there was a story in there. After she died, in 2007,when I mentioned it to a few people, they were astonished and curious. Your mom did that? Really? Why? How? For how many people? For just a few, or was it a widespread smuggling operation?
I wondered about all that myself and could kick myself for not insisting that she divulge the details. Honestly, though, she would have denied the whole thing or changed the subject.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Since I knew nothing about what actually happened — diamond-crocheting-smuggling-wise — I worked backwards and forwards to research and write a story that would have realistic, relatable characters and would keep readers hooked on every page. A big challenge, no?
I was a graphic designer, studio owner, longtime copywriter, author of magazine articles and nonfiction books about the design field, but a novice at novel writing. I needed and got lots of good advice from beta readers and developmental editors.
I began by reading everything I could about the time period, not just “Jewish books” and “Holocaust books.” Because I wanted The Secret Buttons to be for older children and young teens, I read middle-grade books with main characters who lived in extraordinary, dangerous circumstances.
One of my favorites is Red Scarf Girl, Ji-Lin Liang’s memoir of being a talented schoolgirl during the time of purging the “Four Olds” — such as one’s grandfather, a landlord — by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Another is Hero on a Bicycle by Shirley Hughes, a novel about a brave boy who wants to join the resistance, like his father, during the Nazi occupation of Florence, Italy.
I also love Coolies, a gorgeous picture book about immigrant brothers from China who protect each other during the treacherous building of the railroad that connected the West Coast to the Midwest.
I visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, twice. First to soak in the whole experience, then to spend time in the library researching archival materials and photographs.
The Museum’s exhibition and book State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda were important parts of my research, demonstrating how the Nazis developed what we now call a comprehensive branding program that incorporated symbols, color scheme, typography, illustration, and the use of posters to transform Germany into a one-party, racially-motivated state that incited hatred and intimidated those who did not fit into the program or comply with it.
Mom’s one sentence morphed into the book’s centerpiece, Chapter 10, “The Brilliant Idea.” To write it, I had to research how this scene could take place: While everyone is huddled around “the wireless” listening to Churchill’s description of the great air battle taking place, my main character, Anni Blum, age 13, soothes herself by taking out her knitting, an almost-finished “Tyrolean sweater” for which she’s going to make crocheted buttons.
As Aunt Vivian reminisces about wearing diamond solitaire earrings to parties in honor of the Duchess of Kent, Anni realizes she can crochet around diamonds and securely hide them inside buttons, a way to help Uncle Benjamin get the relatives and friends he wants to save to America with enough money to start new lives.
Thus, I had to research why immigrants needed to hide diamonds in the first place. Why not just wear them on their fingers? To keep them from being stolen, of course. But the real reason was that British law prevented any money or valuables from leaving the U.K. during wartime. It was all needed for the war effort.
And how did money belonging to Central and Eastern European Jews even get to England? Before a certain date, those who saw the writing on the wall could wire it to relatives to deposit in the Bank of England.
With those problems solved, I interviewed everyone I could who’d lived through World War II, including an older gardening friend who came from Germany on an American troop ship.
She told me that the “beds” were hammocks hanging by chains bolted to the ceiling that made an awful racket when the ship went through rough waters. Those kinds of details were storytelling gold.
Austria-born graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister related his hilarious memories of learning English as a German-speaker, which I incorporated into Chapter 4, “English Lessons.”
What most surprised me? Learning about the meticulously organized program the Nazi regime undertook to identify and separate the Jewish population in Vienna, where people of different religions and backgrounds lived in large apartment buildings.
As reported in Eichmann’s Jews by Doron Rabinovici, the Nazis grouped all Jewish organizations (just like the JCCs, synagogues, and schools we have now) into one Kultustemeinde, one cultural community, then assigned the members jobs, such as providing membership lists, while offering reassurances that if they did so, “things will be better.”
This helped me develop the character of Papa, who didn’t realize things were not going to get better until it was too late.
Another surprising fact was how, after Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, mail between Allies (England) and Axis countries (Austria), then part of Germany, which had been blocked, could be delivered using a go-between in a neutral country like Spain or Switzerland.
That knowledge gave me lots of inspiration for Chapter 6, “The Postal Code,” during which my main characters’ relationship with their snotty cousin Ronald, the stamp collector, develops into friendship.
In the course of designing the book — 12 of its 16 chapters are set in rural England — I did tons of visual research online, researching and choosing “scrap” to upload to illustrator Caterina Baldi, who’s always lived and worked in Italy: pictures of British cars, bicycles, kitchens, wallpaper, radios, lamps used during blackouts, even the shape of “bangers,” English sausages, so she could paint them, instead of Italian sausages, in the butcher shop window. And, most importantly, the clothing and hairstyles.
Luckily, a good friend is a teacher in London, and she read the manuscript for accuracy, proper use of British slang, and stuff such the wrong tall red mailbox was in the painting that opens Chapter 6, “The Postal Code.”
She informed me that (really!) when a new English monarch is crowned, his or her name is inscribed on post office boxes. The King of England in 1939 was George VI, who became monarch after his brother Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson.
Caterina changed the inscription from “George VI” to “Edward VIII.” Though it’s a small detail, it would have been worse than “dodgy” to readers in the U.K.
Q: What do you think Caterina Baldi’s illustrations add to the story?
A: Her illustrations give a sense of place that would take way too many words to describe. On two levels.
The double-page paintings that open each chapter set the stage for what will happen on the coming pages. They depict the surroundings, the time of year and day, the relationships of the characters, even the flowers in bloom.
Caterina’s 75 or so spot illustrations drew fill in the blanks: Nazi boots, gas masks, chamber pots, ration books, wooden button molds. Instead of describing those things in detail, I focus on the characters and dialogue, what they are thinking, doing, saying.
I’d tried out various illustration styles on my own, such as using historical photographs, maps, and newspaper clippings as background collages, and having an illustrator draw the characters and place them in the setting. Too complicated, too abstract.
When I saw Caterina’s paintings, with their European architecture and street scenes, their realistic, non-cartoon-y characters, beautiful color schemes and lighting, I knew she was the artist I wanted to work with.
As the book’s designer, I had in mind the books my parents gave me when I was a child: cloth binding, gold-stamped spine, endpapers, full-color illustrations on fine paper stock.
That’s the hardcover edition, but there’s also a much less expensive paperback and an eBook. I used Caterina’s illustrations in each edition, reducing the sizes for the eBook and changing them to black-and-white for the paperback.
Q: Especially given the current rise in antisemitism, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers will take away a solid sense what others experienced in a not-so-long-ago time in history.
And that they will heed to warning signs when a government begins characterizing immigrants from certain countries as “murderers and rapists” or closing the doors to immigrants from countries where most people have dark skin.
I hope that young readers will warmly welcome classmates who are new to America, who might not look like them, and are struggling with English — and will treat them with empathy and try to help them fit in.
I also hope they will get their grandparents and other elders to divulge as much information as possible about their backgrounds and experiences, especially their immigration stories.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on an interactive website, SecretButtons.com, where readers will be able to post their comments, stories, and artwork, and maybe even connect with each other (meeting with a programmer today about the possibilities).
And I’m enthusiastically pitching a picture book about descendants of immigrants who make a new kind of hybrid, multicultural music.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Hmm, you should know that I’m the grandma of two Chinese-Jewish-American kids who live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and that I’ve followed my son and family from San Francisco to Singapore, to Bali, Indonesia, to Thailand, spending weeks with them in each place — and that someday I might write a children’s book about that.
Besides writing, I’m passionate about cooking, gardening, and playing percussion.
I invite everyone to visit my website, visualanguage.net, where there’s lots about me and my learning materials and books including The Secret Buttons. I have quite a few radio interviews scheduled and I invite readers to listen in live or to the podcasts.
And I would love to visit synagogues, libraries, schools, community groups, and book clubs (via Zoom if not local to the NYC Metro area) and connect with readers on Goodreads, Instagram (@ellen.m.shapiro), and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/writedesigner).
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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