The basis of each of my novels is a family story. Some I heard from my grandmother, and others I discovered while researching my family tree. Recently I attended Ancestor Seekers, a wonderful week-long event at the Family Search Library in Salt Lake City. There I spent five full days looking for documentation of names and dates, and nuggets that could be stories.
I’d been considering my husband’s grandmother for my next book. That’s her in the photos above: as a young mother, just before her trip to Germany, after Germany, and later as a grandmother. She was a Russian Jew living in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. I know she went to Germany in 1939 with her husband and young son, and that she was arrested by the Nazis, who made her an interpreter. I actually knew very little about her young life in Brooklyn or her first marriage. I had discovered an article where her first husband begged for her to return after leaving with their two daughters. Family legend says the two daughters were put into an orphanage. On this research trip, we actually found the document from the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum showing the girls’ admittance to the orphanage and their dismissal years later.
As with most discoveries, this document raised questions. We don’t recognize the name of the person who surrendered the girls. Had their father reclaimed them then died? Did their mother give them up, unable to afford to raise them? It was the Depression, and it was not unusual for mothers to put their children in an orphanage if they couldn’t afford to raise them. The girls were admitted in October of 1930. Grandma had remarried her second husband and given birth to a son in April of that year. Did she have the girls with her and give them up to focus on raising her son? How horrible to be put in that position.
That’s when the thunderbolt of inspiration struck. We may never know exactly who dropped off the girls, or if their mother even knew they were there. The pain of giving up children, though, is the seed of a story. Her childhood in a Russian Jewish tenement, an abusive first marriage, giving up her girls, and a second family have the makings for a good novel. I’ll have to do a second novel about her time in Germany!
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