Q&A with Sarah Wildman

Sarah Wildman, photo by Kate Warren

Sarah Wildman is the author of Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Slate. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Q: Why did you decide to write this family memoir?

A: Paper Love isn't actually a family memoir - in fact, I tend to call it an "unfamily" memoir as it's about the life my grandfather didn't choose, the family he didn't have. 

It's a search story, a love story, an investigation into family myth and memory. I found a folded note - of the kind we all used to pass in the pre-texting era - in each quadrant was a “selfie” of the 1930s, a photograph of a girl, and under each was a caption - she wanted my grandfather to write to her. It was dated 1939.

I showed it to my grandmother and she said, "That was your grandfather's true love." It was such a remarkable statement, and offered without commentary. I wanted to see if I could find this woman. Had she survived? What did she mean to the story of my grandfather? What did she mean to me? 

In many ways I have always seen myself - as so many of us do - as an accidental American, here on these shores because of the apocalypse of the 20th century and the (often daring!) choices my grandfather made as the Nazis took over Vienna, Austria, where my family lived then. That history has been a part of my consciousness forever, since I learned my name.  

I owe my life to my grandfather's escape. There was, for me, something profound in knowing that, both as a child and today.

Filling out the details of his story, writing through the holes he left in his narrative, was really about understanding who I am, and how to explain who we are to my children. 

For all of us I think there is a need to understand these major shifts of history at the moment where memory is becoming history. We are losing the generation that knew the war - our grandparents, and, for some, parents. 

The questions of xenophobia and racism though, that were at the heart of the Nazi effort to not just exterminate but to erase an entire people, are still with us. 

I think we must look at these stories so as to understand that these were stories of individuals, and not just nations; of families, and not just an ethnic or religious group.

When we connect the stories of the personal, the individual, we can relate to history not as distant, but as near to us, and learn from it, as well as remember it.

Q: How did you research the book, and what surprised you most in the course of your research?

A: The research was really multi-layered - it began when I discovered a box of letters in my parents' basement in a file box mislabeled "Patient Correspondence, A-G." 

The letters were not from patients but from my grandfather's entire exploded Viennese world. Dozens upon dozens were from a woman named Valerie - Valy - Scheftel. She was his girlfriend at the University of Vienna Medical School, and she had remained behind when he fled in 1938. 

What had happened to her? Where did she go? And why didn't she go with him? These questions came up for me immediately.

Her letters offer a lot of information - the places she wrote from, the many places she lived, and where she worked - but they were also censored so to fully understand what was happening, I needed to match up her letters with the restrictions Jews were under in the Reich, and to find the material the state had kept on her.  

The search for her took me to Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Israel, the UK, and this country. I went to archives, and I walked the streets she walked, sought out the buildings she worked and lived in - I wanted to 'see' her world as much as possible. 

I spent years and years going through archival material, matching up official Gestapo documents with the letters that I found, in Austria and in Germany and in the Czech Republic, and in this country. I did hundreds of hours of interviews with survivors, Holocaust historians, and third generation on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I read and read and read - books on letter writers, books on specific geographies, books on the way Jews lived under the Reich in Berlin, Vienna, the Czech Republic, elsewhere. 

The biggest surprise was that in the archives of the International Tracing Service - the last unopened major Holocaust archive in Germany - someone else had come looking for Valy before me. 

Finding that person took me years, but when I did, it opened up a whole new world of material, and allowed me to discover the full story of the woman my grandfather left behind. 

Q: How did your impression of your grandfather change as you learned more about his life?

A: For one it expanded my picture of his pre-war world, enormously. This became so much more than my grandfather, and really about the way we all live - who are the people around us?

I had never really considered what his world had looked like, before he fled. This book opened that up for me, completely. 

Who were the people he went to school with? What happened to them? It was an incredibly modern world. It was an extraordinary situation, but it felt very relatable. What happens when everyone you've ever known has scattered, or dies?  

My grandfather was always the hero of my family - larger than life, the man who could do no wrong, the man who had no wrong answers.  Everything was "herrlich" - wonderful. 

What I discovered in the archives, and through these letters, was that he had nothing under control when he arrived on these shores. That he was terribly poor. That he nearly failed. 

Knowing all this meant I suddenly had a chance to know him as a man - as a flawed person, like the rest of us. If anything it only made me love him more.

Q: How was "Paper Love" selected as the book's title?

A: Paper love is a bit of a play on words - it is about the love affair I discovered on paper, the mysteries afforded by paper, the paper trail of the letters sent by a woman desperately in love with my grandfather, and desperate to escape the Nazis, and the love of paper itself, the way in which this path has led me through thousands of pieces of paper. 

Q: What has the reaction been to the book? 

A: I've been really humbled by the response to the book: I've received dozens of letters from readers who see themselves, and their family's stories, in the search - which is something I very much hoped might happen.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I work on stories on the intersection of culture and politics, history and memory - stories that speak to identity, and who we are now, and how we got here. 

I like to see how history plays a role in current debates - immigration, religion, culture wars and I'm always looking for quiet, unexpected stories that stay with you.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I think the story of this book was as much about my own family as about an effort to understand the Nazi effort to erase one woman as well as exterminate a people. 

My hope was by telling, as fully as I could, the story of one small group of people, I could do something to un-erase them from history.

It's not a word! I know! but it was really that - to take this one, normal, incredibly intelligent woman, to let her really be heard, to allow her to have a bit of a voice in history, to show you how incredibly important she became to me.

I also think we should not rest on the idea that this happened long ago, or to another people (if you are not Jewish, of course). Valy was marginalized, demonized, and reviled for her religious identity. 

Imagining how bewildering and horrifying she would have found the experience is not hard. I believe it is important to consider: how does society continue marginalize, to reject, to select out?

Today - knowing as I do now the debates in the U.S. State Department in the 1940s over whether and when and if to take in refugees - it is hard not to relate to the moment we are in right now. 

For many years we have discussed "what did people know? and when did they know it?" Did Roosevelt know of the destruction of the Jews? of the clamoring of refugees? 

Today with horrifying images of young children dying at sea and piled up in Keleti station in Budapest and desperate to arrive in Europe - we know what is happening. Our twitter feeds, our Facebook pages, our newspapers are filled with images of desperate families. 

For me this resonates strongly with the refugee crisis that took place 70 years ago. The difference is, in part, that no one will ever say we did not know of the horror that is the Syrian conflict; no one will ever say we did not know about the refugees.  Now we are all tasked with finding a solution to this humanitarian crisis. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous version of this Q&A, please click here. Sarah Wildman will be participating in the Temple Sinai Authors' Roundtable in Washington, D.C., on February 27, 2016.

Q&A with Lester K. Spence

Lester K. Spence is the author of the new book Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. He also has written Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics. He is an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and Salon, and he is based in the Baltimore, Maryland, area.

Q: You describe the “neoliberal turn” as “the gradual embrace of the idea that society…works best when it works according to the principles of the market.” How does this concept affect black politics in particular?

A: If you think about black politics as a problem-solving enterprise, the idea that society is best governed by the market shapes what actors within black politics think, and shapes what the solutions should be.

If, for example, kids in schools aren’t performing well, black kids aren’t performing as well as their white counterparts, the [approach] becomes to generate market-based solutions to deal with it, instead of a solution [more focused on] the school system.

Q: Let’s look specifically at President Obama’s role—you write that he “has done much to aid and abet the neoliberal turn.” What are some examples?

A: If you look at what’s up to now his signature issue designed to deal with people of color, the My Brother’s Keeper project, what it does is acknowledge that young men of color face challenges, a range of contemporary challenges—unemployment issues, an achievement gap in schools.

What he proposes is a set of public-private partnerships that seek to make young men better fits for the market as it is, as opposed to dealing with the structural factors that generate the problems they’re facing.

One argument could be, If they’re viewing the solution in market-based terms, then what’s the problem? The problem is that the solutions rarely work, and often make the problems even worse.

In the case of My Brother’s Keeper, the public-private partnerships that seek to make the boys better workers actually generate more inequality than what we had before.

Q: So what do you see as a better approach?

A: In general, if you look at the levels of inequality from 1929 to now, they dipped from 1929-1960, in large part because of political processes—politics took more control over the economy.

If we injected the federal government more in the schools than [under] the current relationship…if we had more taxes at the federal-government level to increase resources to the schools…probably we’d have better educational outcomes.

Instead of a market-based approach, what we need are more political outcomes. The state has the most important role.

Q: Looking at the presidential candidates, whose platform would you support?

A: Bernie Sanders. There are big challenges—the challenge is that Congress is not changing, so it’s not that Sanders would be able to implement through Congress any of the ideas he’s proposing.

Let’s take free public [college] education, that in and of itself. As students are coming out of school with debt, [his plan] makes college an option for large swaths of the population it’s not really an option for now.

That dynamic would unleash innovation. All these folks who are now educated and weren’t educated before, who knows what that would do? You can significantly expand the middle class and that would significantly expand the number of taxpayers and the ability of government to give the public the resources we need.

It’s the type of thing that theoretically he could do. In reality, he’d be significantly hamstrung. [But] he could forcefully make the case for progressive government.

Q: What role do you see the Black Lives Matter movement playing as far as attitudes toward the neoliberal turn are concerned?

A: A significant part of the neoliberal turn is when industry moved out of cities. These moves started as early as the ‘50s, and by the early ‘70s [the industries] were really gone. In the Rust Belt, it became possible to discuss cities like Baltimore, Gary, Detroit, as post-industrial.

But there were a large number of people in these cities who were put there to labor in industrial cities, and now are unemployed. What happens is the prison-industrial complex—folks are placed under its direct [control], or cities spend money on policing.

The Black Lives Matter movement is a response to the heavy use of policing in the wake of industrial flight. What they’re doing is responding to the consequences of the neoliberal turn, policing.

That’s something very valuable, because now we’re having conversations about the police, the police budget, how they should function. We haven’t had those conversations since I’ve been an adult—you may have to go back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

The challenge is the types of violence visited upon the black population. There’s a lot more that black folks are having to deal with. Freddie Gray, the neighborhood he lived in, Sandtown-Winchester, is pretty much toxic. His family [filed] a lawsuit because the house they lived in was filled with lead and they were afflicted with lead poisoning.

[The Black Lives Matter movement is] dealing with incidents of anti-black police violence, which is important, but the economic violence in general, they haven’t quite wrestled with.

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

A: I talk about the hustle at the beginning of the book—the hustle was synonymous with a con—if somebody was hustling you, they were conning you. It was an illegal activity.

That term, the way we use the language now, has been transformed. Hustle now refers to constant work—hustling and grinding.

A lot of people use it as descriptive, but make it normative—that’s what we’re supposed to do. If you’re not hustling, you’re sitting on your ass and you get what you deserve.

I wanted to critique that. As Jay-Z and some other rappers talk about, “Can’t Knock the Hustle”—we should be knocking the hustle!

Q: Are you working on another book?

A: I’ve been working on a public health project, [looking at] public health through the lens of HIV and AIDS in Baltimore. And I’m collecting data for a project on policing in Baltimore back to 1965 or so, [and the impact of] the neoliberal turn…

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: When I talk about [the neoliberal turn] in black politics, what I try to do is hone in on some ways black political officials operate—mayors of [mostly] black cities, how the president has operated, how we see the rhetoric in the black church.

I try to cover as many areas as possible within black politics. [The impact of the neoliberal turn] exists in all these places we haven’t thought about, and shapes the degree to which we have black politics that can cover everybody.

The other thing I drive home—it’s not just a critical book. I use four cases to show how people are organizing against it, to make a claim for political organizing as a solution out of the neoliberal turn.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Tim Grobaty

Tim Grobaty is the author of the new book I'm Dyin' Here: A Life in the Paper. A longtime columnist for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, he also has written the books Growing Up in Long Beach, Long Beach Chronicles, and Location Filming in Long Beach. He lives in Long Beach, California. Q: How did you come up with your new book’s title, and what does it signify for you? A: The title was the easiest part. I was sitting with publishers Wendy [Thomas Russell] and Jen [Volland] and they said, “We need a title.” I didn’t have one, but I said, “I’m Dyin’ Here.” We laughed and then it suddenly made sense on a couple of levels: I’m dyin’ here because print is dying, and, because I’ve been at the paper for 40 years (in May), I’m apparently going to be carried out of the newspaper business feet-first. Q: You describe your career over the years at the Press-Telegram. How has the paper changed, and what does that say about the journalism business overall? A: The paper has undergone incredible change, from employing almost 700 people in a four-story building and serving more than 20 cities to a staff of about six reporters and one editor serving Long Beach and a couple of adjacent towns. Journalism, as a trade, is doing OK, but print/newspaper is close to dead in all but a few cities in the U.S. (worldwide, it’s doing pretty good). It truly is a race between us, at 61, and the print version of the Press-Telegram, for which will be the first to go. Q: How do you come up with ideas for your columns, and what are a couple of your favorite columns that you’ve written over the years? A: I very rarely have an idea for a column when I come into the office in the morning. I fiddle around with colleagues and cruise the Internet and email and phone messages until I find something. This week I wrote on Tuesday about local golf courses turning to FootGolf (you kick a soccer ball until you get it in the hole) to get more customers during slow times; on Wednesday I wrote about obfuscation by city officials through their Orwellian public statements; and on Thursday about my idea of running for city council using Trump tactics. You learn to see things differently as a daily columnist; that is, with virtually every event, no matter how trivial, is looked at as “Can this be turned into a column?” It can, more often than not. I’ve written more than 5,000 columns, but things still happen that I haven’t written about. There’s probably about 800 left, then I will have written about everything. Q: What do you see looking ahead for print journalism? A: You can see the end from here. Q: What are you working on now? A: Promoting the book which, to me, is way more daunting than writing it, though this one, of the four books I’ve written, was a lot more difficult than the other three, and the one I’ve blown the most deadlines on. Q: Anything else we should know? A: I’m pretty proud to be with a Long Beach publishing house [Brown Paper Press]. My other books were published by the History Press in South Carolina. It’s great to have friends as editors and publishers, though they’re harder to argue with. And it’s cool being part of the Long Beach literary scene, which is huge and I’d hate to start mentioning people because I’ll accidentally leave out the best, but it certainly includes my two publishers and my fellow Brown Paper Press author Alan Rifkin. Right now I’m reading a great memoir, Nazis & Nudists, by a longtime Long Beach writer and Los Angeles Times reporter, David Haldane.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Alan Rifkin

Alan Rifkin is the author of the new book Burdens by Water: An Unintended Memoir. He also wrote the story collection Signal Hill and co-wrote the memoir Wounds to Bind with Jerry Burgan. A former contributing editor to Details and LA Weekly, his work also has appeared in a variety of publications, including Premiere and The San Francisco Bay Guardian. He is based in Los Angeles.

Q: How was Burdens by Water’s title chosen, and what does water signify for you, especially as someone from California?

A: I have the publishers, who are also my editors, to thank for lifting that title from one of the essays in the book, “Pool Man.” It refers to the almost contiguous background of pools in Los Angeles, and the desire to lay down our burdens by water.

I think it does run through as a motif through a lot of the episodes in the book—following the pool man, bodysurfing in Santa Monica, the whole fountain of youth mythology that surrounds L.A.—there’s a real tense juxtaposition of the life-giving aspect of water with the nearness of the desert, dust, death.

At times you see those properties converge in a way that makes living in L.A. so spiritually compelling…to a lot of people.

Q: Your book’s subtitle is “An Unintended Memoir.” Over how long a period did you write these essays, and at what point did you decide to collect them as a book?

A: I hope this isn’t too long a story, but it was circuitous….How the pieces began to come together into a book—last summer, the summer before, I was on hiatus from a complicated relationship, and was trying to ground myself spiritually, and try to get back in touch with what matters and what doesn’t.

I was reading the Bhagavad Gita, and one of the first reactions I had was a sense of shame, how far egotistically I [had come] from a sense of purity and goodness.

I had the impulse to look back at a piece I had written about monks…I was trying to find anything I’d written that I could feel proud of, that honored the people I was writing about, and honored the sense of the divine that I was looking for.

That piece stands up. It led me to see what other pieces embodied a spiritual quest, and led me to the dolphin story and the pool man story. I found an almost interwoven journey between stories…

Q: Did you write more stories after that point, or did you pull together stories that you already had written?

A: They were all originally written on assignment for various magazines. The most recent was “E Luxo So,” which came out of the same period. It involved a lot of taking stock, and revisiting the mostly Jewish neighborhood where my mom’s best years and the best years of the San Fernando Valley came to an end…it embodied issues of aging, the California dream, and what we’re left with.

I arranged them and wrote new material for many of the essays in order to keep an autobiographical thread running through the whole thing—references to my childhood in the Valley, what I grew up reading, worshipping, what I was looking for in this relationship and that relationship, what I was looking for in rooting for Elgin Baylor of the Los Angeles Lakers…

Q: So how did you decide on the order in which the essays appeared in the book?

A: They are loosely but not completely chronological...the earliest ones come first, by and large. I chose [“Wave Theory”] as the prologue. I arranged the book the way I would arrange a magazine feature: [to] draw people in by way of a self-contained anecdote.

Then, about midway through the book, I write about becoming an evangelical Christian, marrying a woman who takes every word of the Bible literally, immersing myself in the culture, holding our marriage up to the example of our then-pastor and his wife.

There was a lot of combustibility in the changes happening in the middle of my life, some funny, some tragic. From the middle of the book on, I see the stories as more reflective about my own life and some of my dreamier attempts to find wholeness, and making mistakes.

I ended with the earliest piece I ever wrote, because it seemed to shine for me as all about simplicity when I wrote it. It felt like a poignant contrast after everything else had gone down.

Q: What do you hope a reader would take away from the book?

A: I want them to be very tolerant of it! In my fantasy, I would love it if they just felt it was lovely, that it rang true, and that they found sadness in the humor and vice versa—and that it evoked something meaningful and timely about the time and place I lived through.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A few things. I’m working on a magazine piece that I’m terribly behind on.

The next book I’m sort of underway on is some kind of co-written memoir with my adult son who has battled mental illness. It’s juxtaposing my young adulthood with his attempt to have one 40 years later. The centerpiece is the summer he spent on the run from hospitalization.

I’m also teaching students at Cal State Long Beach [and trying to create] a venue for student voices, particularly first-generation immigrant voices…they’re amazingly talented and have important stories to tell.

Q: Would that be in the form of a magazine?

A: I’m not really there yet, but I’m thinking of an anthology.

Q: Anything else we should know about Burdens by Water?

A: A development in our time that the book is a product of is the changes in print journalism. I got to write those stories because of a time when magazines could send us anywhere, pay your expenses, let you write reflective stories about what you experienced.

In the past decade, venues for this [type of writing] have shrunk to two or three. We get so much instant analysis about anything—Donald Trump says something scary, there’s a school shooting—there are pieces on the Internet that look like long-form journalism but are not thought through, and are glib….

This book is a swan song to a certain paradisical time in California, and also to what magazine writing used to be like…but I don’t want the book to [seem as if it’s] just about getting old and dying!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Feb. 23

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Feb. 23, 1868: W.E.B. Du Bois born.

Q&A with Sara Taylor

Sara Taylor is the author of the novel The Shore, which takes place around the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Fog Horn and The Blue Route. She grew up in Virginia and now is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this book, and for the family you write about?

A: It began with “Target Practice.” I’d tried since I moved there as a teenager to write stories about the Eastern Shore.

It’s the kind of strange, half-wild, frozen-in-time place that makes you understand how people have believed in magic for so long, and I’d wanted to capture it on paper so that I could take it with me when I left, but the stories I wrote never worked as stories because I was coming at them with the landscape in the foreground.

Then I found myself alone in a tiny house on the edge of the marsh, with no Internet connection and an immovable deadline. I couldn’t write anything that would require outside research, so I began a story about two sisters alone in a tiny house on the edge of the marsh.

And when it was finished I realized that, even though I hadn’t been thinking about it, the landscape was there in the way that I’d wanted it to be when I’d first tried to write about the Shore.

From there it was a matter of asking the right questions: Who was Chloe’s mother? Who owned the land where they lived? What happened to the rest of their family? Every question I answered led to three or four more, until the stories began to connect back to each other.

Q: Each chapter tells a different story, over hundreds of years. How did you decide on the order in which the stories are told? Did you stick to an outline, or change things as you went along?

A: I don’t think I’ve ever managed to stick to an outline in my life, though I did from the beginning have an idea of the limits of the book.

The stories were written mostly out of order: I started with “Target Practice,” “Skirt,” and “Tears of the Gods,” and used them as fixed points in the family’s timeline, then filled in the spaces between them.

When I thought that everything was down on paper I played with the order – there are diagrams stashed away somewhere. The final order was hit upon because it controlled when the reader learned things about the characters at the time that I wanted them to.

Q: The stories range from the 19th century to the 22nd century. Why did you decide to include two chapters that take place in the future?

A: It’s probably too simple to say “because it felt right,” but it is what felt right. Without the stretch into the future, the book would end with “Missing Pieces,” and while it would be wonderfully symmetrical to begin and end with Chloe, it would make the book as a whole be too much about her. Also, I think it would leave too much unanswered.

Q: The book is set on several islands off the Virginia coast. Can you say more about the importance of setting to you, and do you feel this story could have been told in a different location?

A: The setting, I think, is the core of the book, and while it might have worked in a different location – Knockemstiff and Crimes in Southern Indiana are two books off the top of my head that also take place in rural environments with recurrent characters – it would have been very different.

A lot of the stories are based on the history and geography of the Shore itself, and the fact that it is physically removed from the rest of the country adds to the inescapability of the place.

Q: Some of the chapters are told in first person, others in second or third person. How did you decide on which viewpoint to use for each chapter?

A: Mostly through trial and error. With some stories I felt it was essential to have the limited viewpoint of a specific character – “Skirt,” for instance – while in other places it was more important to have some distance between the reader and the character.

Q: What are you working on now? Do you think you'll return to this family again in your future work?  

A: At the moment I have a novel going through the furnace of final edits.

The Lauras is about a woman who abruptly abandons her life to travel across the United States settling business left unfinished when she was a teenager in foster care and a young adult on the run; it’s narrated by Alex, her only child with the man she leaves behind, who is dragged along unwillingly at first.

It should be published in early 2017 in the U.S., and August 2016 in the UK.

I’d like to return both to the shore and to the family some day. Since finishing I’ve run across several little bits of history from that part of the country that are fairly begging to be made into fiction, and there were a few chapters that didn’t make it into the final draft that I don’t want to give up on entirely. And I’m still wondering what happened to Renee.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Since the chapters that were cut, either for length or because the characters weren’t close enough to Chloe’s family, can all stand alone as independent stories, I haven’t thrown them away, and occasionally I pitch them to literary magazines.

NASA has a facility just off Chincoteague, and a chapter about the rockets launched from there in the 1960s, called “Flight,” is published in the current issue of The Fiddlehead.  

The rest I’m hoping to eventually find homes for, but if that doesn’t happen I might break down and write another book about the Shore. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Feb. 22

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Feb. 22, 1892: Edna St. Vincent Millay born.