Q&A with Saul Golubcow

 

 

 

Saul Golubcow is the author of the new novel Were the Angels Wrong?, the latest in his Frank Wolf mystery series.  

 

Q: What inspired the plot of your new Frank Wolf mystery?

 

A: Writing Were the Angels Wrong?—in one form or another—was on my mind for decades. After completing my previous book, Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife?, I didn’t want to delay any longer. I set to work with an intensity beyond my previous work. On prior books, I spent two to four hours writing each day, but on this book, I often stretched to six to eight.  

 

As a child of survivors, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. On many evenings, when my parents believed I was tucked away in an upstairs bedroom, I crept downstairs and hid under the draped dining room table, listening to stories and reflections of my parents and other survivors who had gathered at our house after a long day’s work.

 

I made of them what a young child understands of such stories. Mostly, I focused on the heroics of the Partisans and pushed away the horrors tied to the death and destruction.

 

Those memories, those stories, stayed with me as I grew older, constantly prompting me to assess what I remembered. I listened to anger and expressions of torment, while at the same time hearing hope and determination.

 

Voices expressed bitterness and accusation—“They say he was a kapo” or “He ran away instead of fighting”—countered by “Who are we to judge anyone who lived through the slaughter?” Debates about “resistance” swirled around the table: “We accepted our fate like sheep” was countered by, “What could we have done? They had the guns.”

 

I heard sobbing—amazed that adults could cry so often and so openly. All of them had lost everything—whole families, homes, livelihoods—everything except their lives. Yet somehow, they also found rays of light by starting new families and speaking hopefully about the future.

 

So for quite a while I wanted to write a book featuring Holocaust survivors, based on what I heard them speak years ago—their pronouncements and their seeming contradictions—and what, over decades of reflection I made of those memories and subsequent deliberations.

 

Those familiar with my detective hero, Frank Wolf, know that he believes that we are created within the illuminated benevolence of God’s image—B’zelem Elokim in Hebrew—but as life begins, various forms of darkness, rising up from within or descending from without darken that essence of the divine and lead to destructive behavior, such as murder or other violent acts.

 

The darkness of the individuals who went through the Holocaust was never to be wholly eradicated from their lives. In Were the Angels Wrong?, a survivor is murdered and another is implicated in the death. Frank and Joel investigate.

 

How then would Frank, with his view of good and evil, with his grandson, Joel, solve a crime that emanated from the Holocaust’s blackness?

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: To begin, I may have given myself a Speak, Memory summons to bring forth what I recalled about the book’s two main locales, Brooklyn and Vineland (South Jersey) of 1976. But memories from nearly 50 years ago are suspect.

 

So I tried meticulously to verify hundreds of details related to landscape, cultural phenomena, and date-specific events of that time. I performed extensive online research with multiple checks and cross-checks since no single result should be taken as authoritative.

 

Because my memories of Vineland—particularly its Jewish Holocaust survivor poultry farmers—derive from early childhood to adolescence, I reviewed survivor biographies and newly published histories of the era.

 

I also pursued accuracy of buildings, streets, and businesses by consulting residents’ memories, newspaper stories, and historical society holdings.

 

What I found researching events in my narrative tied to the Holocaust didn’t so much surprise me as solidified my thoughts about Jewish resistance.

 

Many of us are used to an American version of heroism based on raw action, military prowess, and one-dimensional heroics that judges Jews in the Shoah as having insufficiently fought back, like “sheep going to the slaughter.”

 

But my research revealed that Jews did fight back and showed how difficult it was to do so, as demonstrated by the ill-fated October 7 (the irony of that day), 1944 Jewish Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz.

 

Jews also fought back in ghettos and in the countryside, with Jewish Partisans crying out in song, “Never say that you’re going the last way.”

 

My research also reaffirmed a long-held belief that Jewish behavior in the Shoah exemplified a different type of courage and heroism.

 

I’ve long thought of the courage of parents placing their children on Kinder Transports to safety, knowing that they probably wouldn’t see them again. The courage of parents telling their children to leave them by escaping through the sewers of Vilna for a chance at life. And the courage of children who, bonded by love and duty, refused to leave their families and attempt escape, thus forsaking life.

 

From a factual perspective, I did learn something that surprised me—only at Auschwitz were prisoners tattooed with numbers. For those who read my book, they will see this fact plays a role in the plot.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Frank and Joel?

 

A: I would describe their relationship as loving, with expected generational tensions. Joel has always lived under the same roof with his grandfather. Joel’s father passes away when Joel is 14.

 

In his quiet, unobtrusive manner, Frank assumes a parental role, while at the same time, allowing his daughter, Molly (Malkeh), to assume primary authority. Joel respects his grandfather’s wisdom and accepts that he has a lot to learn.

 

All of my Frank Wolf Mystery stories are written in the first-person voice, with Joel as the narrator. I did so not so much to set up Joel as a foil to the wiser Frank (like Watson to Holmes or Hastings to Poirot) but to create a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age narrative in which Joel learns a good deal from his grandfather, and from others including his wife, Aliya, and his mother.

 

If a reader follows from my first Frank Wolf story, The Cost of Living, to Were the Angels Wrong?, I hope the reader will see a maturation process as law-school-student Joel goes from impetuous and reactive to a large firm lawyer who is less impetuous and more restrained.

 

His character is offset by the steadiness and experience-based sagacity of his grandfather—but of course, there are innate temperamental differences, as there are with any two people.

 

Joel often recalls how his grandfather treated him when he was younger—with patience and understanding—which is still the way they relate in the present.

 

A few readers have suggested that the relationship is “too nice,” and that there should be some episodes of family members screaming at each other. I’ve thought about it, and my answer always is, “It won’t happen,” not with this family.

 

Yes, Joel will pout and be resentful, and Frank will express regret for errors in judgment that hurt Joel. But there will be no screaming. I believe this family dynamic is entirely realistic.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: We may remember Mark Antony’s words in Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." 

 

I tried to make Were the Angels Wrong? a whodunit page turner while at the same time asking the reader to consider if the “evil” done was on the horrific scale of the Holocaust, what terrible repercussions come down to subsequent generations?

 

How does a detective such as Frank Wolf seek justice for a murder that takes place in the present when the seeds of the crime were planted during the Holocaust?

 

I want the reader to think about how, in general, we bring light to our broken world that has resulted from a preceding darkness.

 

Q: What are you working on now?  

 

A: I’m now working on my next Frank Wolf Mystery, in which a doctor is murdered, not in one moment of violent death, but through an agonized dying resulting from the substitution of fake pills for life-sustaining medication.

 

In The Cost of Living and Other Mysteries, I explore how unplanned, horrific crimes arise from a brief convergence of perpetrator and victim in time.

 

In Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife?, I examine complicity in crime. In Were the Angels Wrong?, I look at how the darkness of past events finds its way into the future to an evil act. Now I’m trying to craft a mystery centered on a theme of family dysfunction and professional jealousy.

 

I’m not giving much away when I acknowledge that the “inspiration” for the book is the biblical story of David and Jonathan. I have been drawn to that narrative and wonder how might it occur in a 1970s setting?

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I would like to explain the title of my book. Were the Angels Wrong? draws on a millennia-old commentary on the creation story in the book of Genesis. When the angels learn that God has decided to give humans dominion over the earth, they are flabbergasted and angry.

 

At the book’s end, Frank Wolf describes the angels’ reactions as, “they shouted that such frail, confused, and selfish creatures were both not worthy of receiving such a gift and incapable of maintaining such a treasure.”

 

Obviously, God disagreed and carried out the decision. Frank understands the angels’ outrage, but, as much as people have betrayed the trust put in them, “It is our duty,” Frank strongly maintains, “to strive every day to prove the angels wrong.”

 

That’s what he, along with his grandson, Joel, does in all of my Frank Wolf mysteries. Like my previous books, Were the Angels Wrong? is constructed in the classic detective manner with crimes to be solved taking place in the Jewish communities of New York City in the 1970s.

 

In this novel, Frank strives mightily to challenge the angels, for the origin of the crime emanates from the Holocaust, one of humankind’s greatest evils.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Saul Golubcow.