Alison Pick – She Reads Novels

Something slightly different today: a guest post from author Alison Pick! You may remember that I recently posted my review of Alison’s new novel, Far to Go. Alison is visiting She Reads Novels today as part of her UK blog tour and here she tells us what inspired her to write Far to Go.

Growing up, there was a secret in my family. We went to Church, and celebrated Christmas, but we weren’t really Christians. We were hiding something. I didn’t know what.

I got older. There were clues. My great-grandparents had died in Europe. It had something to do with a camp, and with my grandmother’s pearls that she’d smuggled into Canada in a jar of cold cream.

I understood the truth in stages. My great grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. Why? Because they were Jewish. Which meant their children, my grandparents, were Jewish too. Which meant, of course, that my father was the same.

I both knew this, and did not know it.

The reason for my psychic ambivalence was a moratorium on discussion. My grandmother forbid any and all questions about her parents, their deaths, or their backgrounds. In retrospect this makes perfect sense. Granny was a young woman when she arrived in Canada. Although culturally Jewish, she’d never practiced. Her own parents, who she had been very close to, were supposed to meet her in Canada, but they never made it out of Europe. It was out of a horrific lifelong grief that our family’s silence was sewn.

When my grandmother passed away in the year 2000 I was bereft. I wrote poems about her life following the Holocaust. Although she probably wouldn’t have liked the poems, they were my tribute to her.

Still, they weren’t enough. I grew as a writer, and the desire to write something bigger to honour my history grew too. Finally, in 2007, I began work on the novel that would become FAR TO GO. Paradoxically, I knew that the book would not tell my grandparents story in a literal sense. I wanted to write a gripping novel, one that would keep the reader turning the pages, and I didn’t want the constraint of “what really happened” to get in my way.

In other words, I wanted to forsake their particular story to tell one that was more universal.

Well, it’s done. FAR TO GO sold in five countries, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and has been optioned for film. More importantly, it has given me incredible pleasure to write something for the family I never knew, and for my grandmother, who I did know and who I miss terribly. I’m not sure what she would have thought. Secrets die hard, especially ones like hers. I have a hunch, though, that she would have been proud.

As Jews around the world say on the anniversary of a loved one’s death: May her memory be for a blessing.

Thanks for visiting us today, Alison!

See what Alison said yesterday at Catherine, Caffeinated and don’t forget to visit Get On With It tomorrow to hear more from her!

For a full list of tour stops please see the blog tour button in my sidebar.

Far to Go is the moving story of a secular Jewish family, the Bauers, living in the former Czechoslovakia during the build up to the Second World War. Marta is nanny to the Bauers’ beloved little boy, Pepik, and at the beginning of the book, she is quite happy with her position – she gets along with both Pavel, a rich factory owner, and his wife, Anneliese (although Anneliese’s insensitivity annoys her at times) and she loves taking care of Pepik. But in 1938, when the Germans take control of the Sudetenland – the border region of Czechoslovakia where the family live – they find their peaceful existence is under threat. It doesn’t matter to the Nazis that the Bauers don’t consider themselves to be particularly religious – anyone with even a trace of Jewish ancestry is in serious danger. In an attempt to keep six-year-old Pepik safe the Bauers consider sending him to safety on the Kindertransport – but can they go through with it, knowing that they might never see their little boy again?

Far to Go is the first novel I’ve read that covers the lead up to World War II from the Czechoslovakian perspective, so a lot of the historical information was new to me. But instead of confusing the reader with a lot of names, dates and politics, Pick has chosen to concentrate on the lives of an ordinary Czechoslovakian family – a family who at first don’t realise how much danger they are in. Through Marta’s eyes we see how each member of the family tries to cope with the challenging times they are facing and the difficult decisions they are forced to make.

This is also the first time I’ve read about the Kindertransport (a scheme to help Jewish children escape from Czechoslovakia and other occupied countries by train, where they were then placed with foster families in Britain). I had tears in my eyes at the images of children being forcibly removed from their parents’ arms and pushed onto the trains, where they stood looking out of the windows as their families disappeared into the distance. Pick’s writing perfectly evoked the fear and confusion these poor children must have felt.

Although most of the book is written in the third person and focuses on Marta and the Bauers in the late 1930s, there are some sections which are set in the present day and from the viewpoint of an unnamed narrator who is carrying out research into the Holocaust and the survivors of the Kindertransport. At first I was slightly confused and wasn’t sure exactly who or what I was reading about, but eventually everything became clear and I could appreciate the clever structure of the book.

Far to Go is a beautiful, heartbreaking novel and one I would recommend to anyone interested in learning more about such an important period of Czech history.

I received a copy of this book from Headline for review.