Leo Tol­stoy wrote in Anna Karen­i­na, ​“All hap­py fam­i­lies are alike. Each unhap­py fam­i­ly is unhap­py in its own way.”

Well, accord­ing to some, all Sovi­et Jew­ish immi­grant fam­i­lies are alike, too. As are all inter­ra­cial families.

When my first his­tor­i­cal fic­tion nov­el, The Nest­ing Dolls—which fea­tures the daugh­ter of Sovi­et Jew­ish refugees dat­ing an African Amer­i­can man—came out in 2020, I was advised that I didn’t under­stand how immi­grant fam­i­lies worked. No Sovi­et Jew­ish fam­i­ly would ever accept such a pair­ing, I was told. They would cer­tain­ly nev­er accept it as calm­ly as the char­ac­ters in The Nest­ing Dolls did.

So, fun­ny sto­ry: I am a Sovi­et Jew­ish immi­grant. My hus­band is African Amer­i­can. My par­ents are … chill.

I was also advised that I didn’t under­stand African Amer­i­can culture. 

I was told that my African Amer­i­can char­ac­ters were too eru­dite, that the fact that they had inter­ests and could dis­cuss top­ics out­side of mere­ly being African Amer­i­can — rang­ing from com­ic books to Shake­speare plays to com­put­er pro­gram­ming — didn’t feel real­is­tic. I was accused of fail­ing to rep­re­sent the authen­tic Black experience. 

A smarter writer than I might have backed down in the face of such crit­i­cism. I dou­bled down instead.

In my forth­com­ing work of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, Go On Pre­tend­ing, I don’t just fea­ture a New York Jew­ish soap opera writer (my past gigs include work­ing for As the World Turns, Guid­ing Light, All My Chil­dren, and One Life To Live), but also her love inter­est, an African Amer­i­can actor, Shake­speare schol­ar, and grad­u­ate of Colum­bia University. 

Being a writer, I was oblig­ed to make their lives dif­fi­cult. My hus­band and I got mar­ried in 1999. Rose and Jonas get engaged in 1956. Though inter­ra­cial mar­riage was always legal in the state of NY, this was over a decade before Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia made it the law of the land. Rose is also Jonas’s boss: he is an actor on the radio soap opera that she writes. This becomes an even big­ger prob­lem when the show is set to tran­si­tion to tele­vi­sion, since he is voic­ing a pre­sum­ably white character. 

But the prob­lems Rose and Jonas face all come from the out­side, not the inside, and they are pro­fes­sion­al in nature. Jonas is fired. Rose can’t find a pro­duc­er for her Marx­ist retelling of Oth­el­lo. Their per­son­al rela­tion­ship, how­ev­er, is steady. Even the dif­fer­ent reli­gions of their par­ents aren’t a prob­lem, as both Rose and Jonas are atheists.

My hus­band didn’t con­vert, but we do have a Jew­ish home. Our sons had a bris. Our daugh­ter went to Jew­ish Day School. My old­est son was a Bronf­man Youth fel­low and my daugh­ter a Mac­cabi ath­lete. We cel­e­brate all the Jew­ish hol­i­days. My hus­band did his time tak­ing the kids to Tot Shab­bat. He even fasts on Yom Kip­pur and avoids bread over Passover in solidarity. 

While we talk about pol­i­tics and cur­rent events, many of which have a racial and reli­gious com­po­nent, we also talk about oth­er things. My hus­band loves com­ic books and sci­ence fic­tion and soap operas. Being Black is just one of many parts of his life. Race and reli­gion and cul­ture con­tribute to who Rose and Jonas are, but they don’t define them.

I’m sor­ry if some read­ers find that inauthentic.

No, wait. I’m not sorry. 

I don’t care.

Inter­ra­cial romance was only a part of The Nest­ing Dolls. But it is the heart and soul of Go On Pre­tend­ing.

Did I base Rose and Jonas on my hus­band and me? Of course. How can any­one write a love sto­ry with­out ref­er­enc­ing what they believe love is? (For those curi­ous, I don’t need flow­ers or cards or dra­mat­ic procla­ma­tions. I find a clean bath­room much more romantic.) 

I may have based aspects of Rose and Jonas on my hus­band and I, but liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time peri­od obvi­ous­ly affect­ed the choic­es they make, which are based on the options avail­able to them. Believ­ing they’ll have a bet­ter life there both as an inter­ra­cial cou­ple and as artists, Rose makes the rad­i­cal deci­sion to defect to the Sovi­et Union. (Def­i­nite­ly not a choice I’d ever make, but then Rose also goes to fight in the Span­ish Civ­il War.) The con­se­quences of Rose’s act echo down to her daugh­ter, Emma, and even to her grand­daugh­ter, Lib­by, who spend their lives look­ing for a place to belong, flirt­ing with every­thing from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism to anarchy.

Rose and Jonas were inspired by my hus­band and I but, like all ful­ly real­ized fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, they quick­ly took on a life of their own. 

Yes, Rose is a Jew­ish woman descend­ed from Russ­ian immi­grants. Yes, Jonas is an African Amer­i­can man. But if they don’t hap­pen to fit the box­es some have decid­ed such char­ac­ters and rela­tion­ships must, then well, frankly, I’m glad.

I want­ed to write some­thing orig­i­nal. Some­thing fresh and excit­ing and com­pelling. I’ll know I’ve suc­ceed­ed if read­ers think Rose and Jonas are like no char­ac­ters they’ve ever met before.