A Conversation by Aaron Hamburger and Lauren Grodstein

The aim of the archivists was to deny the Nazis the last word on what had happened to the Jews of Warsaw. I spent hours in that room and when I left I said to my sister, “there are a thousand novels in there.” She suggested I try to write one of them, and this book is the result.

I’m sure I’m not the first to ask you this question, but it’s a particularly rough time for Jewish folks out there. I’ve been thinking about it constantly: What do you think Jewish writers can or should add to the discourse right now? Or should we hole away and concentrate on our work, leaving politics to the politicians?

AH I’d love to hear your answer, as I don’t know that I have a good one. My feeling is that each person’s response to this is necessarily individual, and all responses are valid. In Aharon Appelfeld memoir, The Story of a Life, he says, “Like evil spirits, people who know it all seem to be everywhere.” This is in a different context, but it seems an apt description of the atmosphere out there right now, not just on social media, but in our discourse. Amazingly, in the heat of the moment, in the fog of war, so many people seem to know exactly what all of us should do—if only we would listen to them! But which of these sure-minded people are the right ones and why? And why in the annals of human history has it always been the case that the sure-minded leaders with their purity tests and demands of unconditional loyalty are the ones who have led us down exactly the wrong roads? 

In a way, this is the philosophy of my main character Pearl in Hotel Cuba, who assiduously keeps her head down because she doesn’t trust politicians or big thinkers or powerful people. In her view, survival depends on the next meal, the next job, the next shelter. All she wants from political people or people in power is for them to leave her alone.

Which brings me back to your beautiful novel. One of the things that struck me about it was how it illuminated all these different responses of your characters to the impossible situation in which they were placed. It makes it clear how difficult and, in many cases, how random every choice was, the sense that human survival is as much a matter of luck as it is careful planning. Was that one of the themes you had in mind as you wrote the novel? I’d love to hear you talk more about this as well as why you decided to write about this subject in this current cultural moment.
LGActually, the thing that made it possible for me to write the novel was the pandemic. In no way—truly, truly—would I ever compare my comfortable pandemic circumstances to those of the prisoners of the ghetto. It’s just that for the first time in my life, mysterious death was lurking outside, and I was scared, and I was stuck inside with three other people and two dogs, and I really, really needed an escape. And, somehow, that tiny window of insight into fear, that tiny connection, was what I needed to pry open and imagine the fear, the confinement, all of it.

I think that if what had been happening in Israel and Gaza right now was happening when I wrote it, perhaps I wouldn’t have dared? The violence, the horror, the sadness—I don’t know if it would have allowed room for me to attempt fiction.

AH I keep coming back to Toni Morrison’s essay in The Nation, in response to the Iraq War and the 2004 election, in which she says, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job! … We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” So, I think art of all kinds, like fiction, is exactly what we need right now in this fraught moment.

When my editor bought Hotel Cuba, one of the first questions she asked me was if I was willing to change the facts of the true story that inspired it to make it a better novel. My answer was one-hundred-percent yes because that was what I had done all along. My family and I knew the basic outlines of my grandmother’s story—that she couldn’t get into America and went instead to Havana in the 1920s during Prohibition, attempted to smuggle into the U.S. illegally via Key West and was arrested, then deported—but I had to do research to flesh out the details. Ultimately, everything that was in my novel was based on something I uncovered during my research even if it didn’t happen exactly that way to my grandmother.

With your book, how much liberty did you take with the “facts” as you knew them? Given the subject matter, did you feel any pressure either way to stay true to the real stories undergirding this novel?

LG Maybe fifty percent liberty? I was writing a novel, not a historical text, but I wanted to remain true to the facts of the war as much as I could. I also had a tiny history professor sitting on my shoulder pointing out everything I was getting wrong, which made me double and triple check my facts (and yet I know I still got things wrong! To wit, when I was reading Hotel Cuba, I saw that Pearl heads to the port in Danzig! In my first draft I called the city Gdansk, which was of course its post-war name. I called my editor stat to make that change, so thank you for saving me from looking like a schmo.

AH All my work is tied to place and time, but Hotel Cuba was my first work of historical fiction, a story that went so very far back in time. I absolutely loved the process of research, trying to dig up the facts of the past as well as trying to recapture the spirit of the time period. Tell me about your foray into historical fiction. What kind of research did you do, and did you enjoy it? How did the process differ from writing your more contemporary novels?

LG I loved it. First of all, as we both know, there’s nothing like research to keep you from writing, so any time the drafting got hard I was able to escape into books (it’s a great way to feel like you’re working even if you’re not actually, um, writing!). The most amazing ones I read—that I recommend to anyone interested in this time period—were Samuel Kassow’s Who Will Write our History and Emanuel Ringelblum’s own journal, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. I also recommend Yehuda Bauer’s Rethinking the Holocaust for a broad, philosophical, and challenging look at the period.

One of the reasons I’m interested in your process is that my grandparents emigrated from the same place around the same time (let’s face it, Aaron, we’re almost certainly cousins). How did you do your research? What surprised you? And could you maybe talk about that amazing photograph of your grandmother?

AHI completely agree with you about the joy of research. It’s an amazing feeling to know that if you’re looking for an answer, it might already be out there, and you just have to find it. At first, the idea of doing research was overwhelming, but then I heard historical novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez say when she writes, she starts by doing a draft to figure out what she needs to figure out. This helped to narrow down the field of what I needed to look up.

I loved doing a deep dive into the books about my subject, and then digging through their bibliographies to find more sources. Also, I tracked down the authors and interviewed them to ask more questions, which was amazingly gracious of them and helpful. One author, Arlo Haskell, who wrote a book about the Jews of Key West and directs the Key West Literary Seminars, graciously invited me to come down to Key West, where I got to interview the local historian and visit some key sites that played a role in the book. My tour guide in Havana was an amazing source of little vignettes that informed my sense of the place past and present.

I visited the National Archives in DC and went through primary sources there. I looked at advertising from the period, which told me a lot about the zeitgeist, listened to music, studied the fashions—a lot! I now know terms like “Peter Pan collar” which I never would have imagined I would need or know. And I was very lucky that we have these recordings of my grandparents telling their stories, which I listened to over and over. My grandmother told us very little, but she gave me the broad outlines, which I then worked to fill in with sensory details to breathe life into the individual scenes. It helped to hear her voice and get a sense of how she thought about things, what she valued.

As for that picture you mention, it was the spark that got all this going. In 2017, I came across this photo of my grandmother in 1922 Key West wearing full male drag. My grandmother was a typical Yiddish bubbie, not the type to go to drag shows, more likely to bake cookies or sing me lullabies as a kid in her thick Eastern European accent. I was so curious to find out why she was dressed that way. I never did find the definitive real-life answer–and maybe life is better with a little mystery in it. However, I did come up with a few theories, and one of them is in the novel.

In terms of what surprised me, and maybe it shouldn’t have, it’s that the people of the past were far more like we are than we might imagine. As the photo shows, the idea of gender bending that seems oh, so au courant was in fact alive and well one hundred years ago. In fact, androgyny was a thing in fashion of the 1920s and sexual experimentation and pushing the envelope of sexual and gender boundaries was a hallmark of the period. A good reminder for these people who think we ought to turn back the clock in America to what they think was a time that accords with their conservative values. Maybe not so much.

As I think about these commonalities of the human experience, I’d like to ask how you feel about this question that I get asked all the time, “How do you write about a female character when you’re a man?” (I imagine you get asked the reverse.) I feel like the answer is, “I’m a writer. It’s my job to imagine lives that aren’t my own. I can’t just populate my books with characters who are clones of me.” And yet it almost seems like this is what some people expect us to do? You’re an experienced and esteemed teacher of writing. What do you think of these issues?

LG That is exactly the answer I give. What would it mean if I couldn’t imagine the voice or personality of someone of an opposite gender? Isn’t my entire job to try to inhabit someone who isn’t me?

I suppose I have a sort of old-fashioned take on all this. Generally speaking, I believe the writer should try whatever he or she or they can try in fiction, whatever he or she can envision, and let the reader decide if it works. The imagination is transcendent—or at least it should be—and therefore a writer should be able to unleash that imagination to create whatever kind of protagonist or character speaks to her. I understand arguments about cultural appropriation, of course, and I would never support a writer taking on a character of another race or gender for political reasons or out of creative laziness. I would also never support a writer doing a bad job of envisioning someone else! But I think it’s okay to imagine freely, and to try to envision, to understand, and to attempt to embody as many people as you can. That’s not just where good writing comes from—it’s where empathy comes from too.

AH I can’t think of a better note to end on than empathy. Thanks for this conversation, Lauren! Best of luck with the new book, not that you’re going to need it based on the rapturous reception (deservedly so) it’s been getting.

LG Thank you and may 2024 be a good year for books, for writers, and for you.

Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and the New York Times-bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and The Washington Post. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.

Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection The View from Stalin's Head--which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rome Prize and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award--and two novels, Faith for Beginners, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and Nirvana Is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards. His writing has appeared in the New York Times; Washington Post; O, The Oprah Magazine; Tablet; The Forward; and numerous other publications. He lives in Washington, DC.