While I was in Israel this win­ter, I taught a mas­ter­class to alum­ni from the Bar-Ilan MA Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram. The class was titled: Trans­form­ing Fam­i­ly Sto­ries Into Fic­tion and the stu­dents were tal­ent­ed, sen­si­tive, and engaged. I chose the top­ic because while writ­ing my debut nov­el, The Anato­my of Exile, I dis­cov­ered that my nat­ur­al ten­den­cy was to dip into my fam­i­ly his­to­ry and mem­o­ries. It’s what I did then, and what I con­tin­ued to do in my sec­ond nov­el, The World Between. 

In The Anato­my of Exile, I used aspects of my father’s Mizrahi past to cre­ate char­ac­ters (Sal­im and Hadas). In The World Between, I used ele­ments of my mother’s sto­ry. She was born in Siberia to Pol­ish par­ents after their forced depor­ta­tion by the Sovi­ets at the start of World War II. My grand­fa­ther was draft­ed into the Sovi­et army, leav­ing my grand­moth­er alone with two chil­dren, my moth­er, an infant, and her six-year-old broth­er; how­ev­er, only my moth­er was placed in a children’s home, which I was told allowed my grand­moth­er to work. My grand­moth­er, who labored as a laun­dress wash­ing Sovi­et uni­forms and bed­sheets, vis­it­ed her once a week. There are days when I can­not fath­om how my moth­er sur­vived the lone­li­ness and depri­va­tion in the children’s home. There were too many chil­dren to feed and too lit­tle food. She, like the oth­ers, was rarely held and most­ly ignored, until my grandmother’s week­ly vis­it. I won­dered how my grand­moth­er sur­vived the war on her own, how she endured the gru­el­ing work, the lack of food and med­i­cine, and the bru­tal cold. I wrote The World Between to bet­ter under­stand them and the cir­cum­stances that shaped them. My aim isn’t fac­tu­al truth, but the emo­tion­al truth I try to get at in fiction.

How­ev­er, grow­ing up this was the sto­ry I was told: My moth­er was born in a gulag.

After my father died, I went through a box of fam­i­ly papers and came across a school doc­u­ment that list­ed my mother’s place of birth as Orsk, a city on the Siber­ian bor­der. Was the fam­i­ly in Siberia or on the out­skirts of Siberia? Did my grand­moth­er vis­it once a week or more often? What is the truth? And does it mat­ter when, over time, mem­o­ry becomes dis­tort­ed? As is so often the case, there is no one left to ask. I wish I had made sure I had the whole sto­ry and not just rem­nants of it when I had the chance. The sor­ry truth is that this his­to­ry is now buried with those who knew it best. It belongs in that lim­i­nal space between mem­o­ry and imag­i­na­tion, the nicht ahin, nicht aher, the nei­ther here nor there. This is the world my nar­ra­tor inhab­its in The World Between.

I was twen­ty-five years old when my moth­er died of scle­ro­der­ma, an autoim­mune dis­ease that over­pro­duces col­la­gen, caus­ing the con­nec­tive tis­sue to hard­en, tight­en, and scar, mum­mi­fy­ing the skin. She was forty-three. I can bare­ly catch my breath when I think about how young she was, how she could oth­er­wise have begun a new life with her chil­dren almost grown. She could have ful­filled her desire to com­plete her edu­ca­tion. She had nev­er fin­ished high school. She nev­er had the chance. My grand­moth­er need­ed help pay­ing the bills. 

I write to cap­ture missed chances and reclaim lost causes.

I wish I could hear her voice. She had a beau­ti­ful, oper­at­ic voice but was poor and with­out the resources it would take to train it, espe­cial­ly in 1950s Israel. She mar­ried at sev­en­teen in the hopes of gain­ing inde­pen­dence, only to find that mar­riage, too, cur­tailed her free­dom. Chil­dren rarely see their par­ents as enti­ties out­side of them­selves, so it was only after she died that I real­ized her ado­les­cence was tak­en from her. 

In The World Between the nar­ra­tor is a for­mer Yid­dish stage actress. I cre­at­ed her out of my expe­ri­ences as an actor. The nar­ra­tor is me, but she is also my moth­er, and like my moth­er, the nar­ra­tor spent time in a children’s home in a Siber­ian gulag. But the lay­ers of imag­i­na­tion and mem­o­ry don’t stop there. My moth­er is embed­ded in the tod­dlers the nar­ra­tor can­not bear to com­fort for fear of becom­ing too attached to chil­dren who might not sur­vive the war.

In her book, Sur­vivor Cafe: The Lega­cy of Trau­ma and the Labyrinth of Mem­o­ry, Eliz­a­beth Ros­ner cre­ates, ​“The Alpha­bet of Inad­e­quate Lan­guage.” It begins, ​“A is for Auschwitz, B is for Buchen­wald, Bergen-Belsen, beat­ing.” It’s bril­liant and sear­ing because it names places of loss and rea­sons of loss, while acknowl­edg­ing that there is no ade­quate lan­guage to describe the atroc­i­ties of war on the mind and body. Nor the trau­ma we inher­it from those who expe­ri­enced it first­hand. When I stud­ied act­ing, I learned that mem­o­ry resides in the body. In a scene study class that I took with the late Nola Chilton at Tel-Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty, we were asked to imag­ine our­selves as chil­dren in a Dis­placed Per­sons camp. An Ital­ian woman in the class kept shout­ing, facista, facista, in a shrill voice, while some of the Israeli stu­dents lay on the ground in fetal posi­tion, try­ing to make them­selves as small as pos­si­ble. This was in 1977. Four years ear­li­er these stu­dents had lived through the Yom Kip­pur War.

When the nar­ra­tor in The World Between finds her­self in the Sis­ters of the St. Joseph of the Appari­tion Hos­pice, she’s remind­ed of the gulag. Her aide in the sana­to­ri­um is a Geor­gian woman who wears her hair in a crown of braids like the Queen of Razor­blades, the matron in the orphan­age who once a week shaved the children’s lice-rid­den heads. This was one of the few details my moth­er gave me about her life in Siberia. It was a gift that remained with me all of these years to use when I need­ed it. It’s these small details that seep into a sto­ry that lend it authen­tic­i­ty and anchor it in the world between mem­o­ry and imagination.