Today, my guest is Brooke Randall, whose new book, Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, is just out from Tortoise Books. Brooke is a writer, editor, and associate creative director whose work has appeared in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, and Smoke Long Quarterly, among others. She writes on issues of family, memory, trauma, and history. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to choose an opening scene for a memoir and so much more.
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Brooke: Thank you so much for having me.
Marion: Well, you’re more than welcome. I’ve so enjoyed reading through your work and congratulations on a fine memoir in which you are not only excavating your grandmother’s story of being put on a transport train in 1944, shaved, humiliated, disinfected, walked for six weeks to Bergen-Belsen. She survives, going home to a devastated town in Romania, leaves Europe, comes to the U.S., but you also explore the role of those who take delivery on the story of another. So, it’s a braided memoir and the braiding works from the first words, but those first words are essential.
You had a bond with your grandmother, your Bubbe, literally since your birth when you were born in the front seat of your parents’ car in your grandmother’s driveway and only your grandmother had the good sense to run inside and grab a table cloth in which to wrap you up.
What a bond, what a fine book set up, what an opener, what a remarkable place to write from and it all unfolds like that tablecloth in which she swaddled you. So, I wonder when in your writing you realized that the story of your own birth had to come first.
Brooke: That took me a long time to figure out what comes first because there were so many places I wanted to start the story and, you know, that’s not a moment I remember. That’s a moment that I’ve been told about throughout my life from different people, but in some ways that’s what made it the perfect place to start is because it’s all about the stories that were told and what we do with them, how we process them, as well as the stories maybe that we aren’t told or aren’t told for a long time or that we have to piece together ourselves.
So in that way, I was able to, you know, find it as a good opening, but certainly there are other places that I wanted to start as well in trying to figure out how I fit into this narrative.
Marion: I think so many memoir writers wrestle with this, you know, “Where do I start? Where do I start?” And we’re told, “Start with something dramatic, start with the inciting incident.” There’s so much advice. Did you try a bunch of other openers and then pop this one on?
And when you did, did it just feel right? Did you project it? Just give the writers listening some insight into this is what it is. It’s like, “Well, what’s the best bumper for this car? What’s the best prow of this ship?” Did you try other things and then say, “Ugh, no”?
Brooke: I absolutely tried other things and I absolutely said, “Ugh no,” like a ton. That was a huge part of the process. What I knew is that I didn’t want to start in the past in like the World War II times because my experience with my grandma was within my life and there was so much distance between the past.
So I knew I wanted to start with myself and with my grandma because my experiences with her were so different from the type of like traumatic story that she was telling me. We had this very close bond and the things we did together were like watch on TV and bake in the kitchen.
And it was nothing of this like deep rooted trauma. So I knew I wanted to start somewhere else than the Holocaust and work my way there. But then what moment exactly to begin with? I tried several different things. I started with some phone calls my grandma made to me in which she started bringing up the Holocaust, which really came out of nowhere.
But in the end, I really landed on what she did for me the day I was born and her presence because she was the first person to hold me after my birth went slightly awry and I was born in a car.
Marion: “Slightly awry” is a nice little understatement. It’s a great scene, but I’ve rarely seen an opening scene work so well all the way through the book. It literally does unfold like that tablecloth. And as you said, your grandmother started talking to you one day, but for decades she had avoided mentioning the war.
And then she presents you with this idea of writing about it. And in 2017, you published a piece on Medium that shows us the day you, your mother and grandmother toured the Illinois Holocaust Museum. As you describe the day, it is quote, “three generations coming together, reflecting on the most pivotal and painful year of our family’s collective history.”
And the museum was built in 2009 and it’s the largest of its kind in the Midwest. So I’ll put a link to it because I’d love people to go there. But things do not go quite as you envisioned as you take her there. And it doesn’t, they don’t go the way the reader envisions. We think, oh, this is when your grandmother’s going to start telling you all this stuff. And your grandmother instead, on her walker, virtually flies through the museum, barely stopping anywhere, waving off an offer of a tour. And then when confronted with a Nazi era rail car, the exact kind she was pushed onto with her family in 1944, she doesn’t even really slow down.
And always moving past and we get the point in the piece. But I know from being a writer, and I know so many writers would have come home from that experience saying, “Well, I took her to the museum. She didn’t even stop and look at the exhibits. I guess this isn’t going to work.”
You instead turned this into an essay. And I wanted you to explain to us how you pushed past what could have been viewed as failure, and into a place about writing about how we move on.
Brooke: Yeah, I really entered that experience with this expectation that it was going to have some weight. So this was significant. It was meaningful in some way. I remember clearing my afternoon afterwards, after the museum visit, just in case it was really emotional and I would like needed time to decompress.
And it ended up being the least emotional thing I’ve ever experienced. I mean, she was practically sprinting and you know, you don’t often see octogenarians sprint. So I was so surprised by the experience. And it was because it didn’t meet my expectations that I was really able to write into it because it helped me like really understand the fact that like, this is not a place she wants to dwell. This is not a space that’s really designed to educate her. She is aware of what happened. And these are memories that she is trying to run from. She doesn’t want to hold on to them, but they’re with her no matter what she does. And really, like getting to experience that and have that visceral experience, helped me understand better what it was like for her because I wanted to hear about these details, but I wasn’t considering how difficult it was for her to sit with it.
Marion: Yes. And we get all of that feeling and more in that piece. It so represents so many people who have not stopped and talked about the Holocaust or other genocides, but from whom their children and their children’s children continue to live in the shadows of the horror.
And I’ve heard before about the reluctance to tell personal tales of the Holocaust. I’ve edited perhaps a dozen books that are written by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. So I know this silence is very real, but you know better. So please, for those listening, give us some idea, some context of what you know now about this reluctance to tell.
Brooke: I think it’s important to understand its context. The silence starts from immediately after the war. No one wants to hear the story. It is too soon. It’s too close. There’s no one interested. And the pressure is really on survivors to move forward and figure out what they’re going to do next.
Because for most survivors, they lost statehood. They don’t have a place to go home to. They’re displaced and they’re essentially refugees. In my grandma’s case, she’s also an orphan. And so at 14, after liberation, she has to figure out what she’s going to do next.
There are no elders in her life at this point. So it’s really a moment of like living, putting your head down, surviving, trying to figure out what you’re going to do. And even as you make progress forward, in 1950, my grandma did emigrate to Canada.
And 13 years later, she did come to the United States. But still there’s such a focus of like putting things together, paying bills, feeding mouths, like just surviving. There’s no space for processing. There’s no one to really like hear your story. And my grandma was in communities of other survivors. So on some level, they all knew and could not bear to hear another story, another tale, because they had experienced something traumatic themselves. So it was kind of from this need to be silent that she learned silence. And then she really wanted her children and her grandchildren to have different experiences than her. And so, she felt in a way by not telling them about what happened to her, that they could go forth and have different lives.
And so, in some ways, she protected them from the truth. But of course, that created a big distance and a big silence, in which we all on some level knew that something happened. We had a general sense of what it was. We didn’t know any of the specifics. And we didn’t know how they had really impacted her.
Marion: Yeah. And you say that your grandmother started talking to you. And at the time of the piece that you wrote in Medium, she’d been talking to you about maybe for about two years, and you had begun writing it down. And here’s your quote, “She leans on me to explain what she cannot. She doesn’t mind that I also can’t explain.” This is a lovely set of sentences about bearing witness about being the scribe. And many writers want to do just this. So talk to me here for a minute about the responsibility in this role that you had.
Brooke: Yeah, it is a responsibility. And I think on some level, you’re always pushing for knowledge and insight. And you’re researching to get at the truth. But at the same time, you’re grappling with the fact that there are some truths you can’t fully know, or some places where you can’t make full sense.
And so, trying to find the balance, you know, while striving for truth, accepting that some details are lost, that some realities are destroyed, and that, you know, you have to gather and put it together as best you can, but that it will never be fully complete.
Marion: Yeah, you have this great phrase that I am absolutely going to share with everybody about a “leaky story.” You say that you write in the book that “in every attempt at remembrance, there’s forgetting.” And you write that “we are built off our memories, what they hold and what they leak. And how does one tell a leaky story? There are no other kinds.” Well, leaky story is my new favorite phrase. But I’d like you to just go a little bit deeper with that so that people, I think that the frustration, at least the writers that I speak to every day, have leaky stories, and they don’t know how quite to handle that reality.
Brooke: Yeah, so my process started with talking with my grandma, we sat down, my plan was to interview her. And we spoke for several days. And what I found was that when I asked her new questions or tried to probe deeper on things, she would repeat what she had already told me.
And it was like, she was telling me what she had to say, and she didn’t have any more to give me. And so her memory had held on to some details so crisply. And there were other things she just couldn’t connect or couldn’t quite remember, or sometimes she’d remember them in other places, and I’d have to put them back into the timeline as I was piecing it together.
So, there’s just this sense of like acceptance that, of course, none of us remember anything perfectly. And when you have trauma, you’re more likely to remember some things incredibly well, and just completely blur over other details. So it was a matter of, you know, taking what I could from her, taking what I could from research, from other accounts, from museums and historians, and then accepting what was lost and what I would never quite know, and trying to, you know, reckon with that, as well.
Marion: Yes, and you make a good point about research, and I want to talk about that in a minute. I think we also have to reckon with the fact of who we’re interviewing. And one of the things that you touched on in the Medium piece is also displayed beautifully in the book, this idea of rushing.
As you write of your frustration, when you write that you think your interviews are, quote, “intimate conversations,” and she thinks they are foot races, and she rushes when you need and want more detail. You get lost. So give us some advice to the writers listening on how to just be in the presence of the story of another.
Sometimes we just have to sit when things are being thrown at us that we literally don’t understand, can’t contextualize, are being repeated. So let’s combine this with a research question, like does research then make some of it make more sense? Does it clarify the dates and times?
I mean, is it you listen and you get this big sort of goulash of story, and then research allows you to pull it apart and make it make sort of strings of sense? Just talk to me about sitting still when it’s getting really goulashy, and then pulling it apart later.
Brooke: Yeah, “goulash” is a perfect word for it. I think it connects well to the idea of a leaky story too. You can really start to smell it. Yeah, I think writers have a tendency to really try to narratize. So as they’re getting information, they’re starting to put pieces together and build an arc.
And when it comes to researching, listening, interview, interviewing people, you really just want to listen and trust that you’ll be able to make connections later and absorb it and be present with the person, which is so difficult because oftentimes you’re just trying to be like, “Do I understand this?” and start to connect the dots.
But really all you want to do is gather the dots. And that took a lot for me. It made it easier that my grandma wouldn’t slow down for me to ask a question anyways. So I was forced into the position of listener and I got better at it with time. But I think when you’re doing an interview, you want to just have a little bit of faith that you’re going to come back to this. You’re going to process it when you write, you’ll process it when you research, and you’ll start to build that narrative, but it doesn’t need to be in the moment. What you need in that moment is really to listen to that person because that connection you have will ultimately shape where your interview will go and the type of information you’ll get.
Marion: So let’s talk specifically about that research. Where did you go? And what I know about some of the resources, of course, but you had both a global story and a very personal tale. And that can be anything from going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., back to the Holocaust Museum in your area to going to her photo albums.
So can you just give us a sense of the span of research that you took on?
Brooke: Yeah. On the one hand, the highest quality research I had was really talking to relatives. So my grandma was my primary source, but she wasn’t the only one. And I was able to get really great stories I just never would have gotten anywhere else. But those stories did come with these gaps that I had to like check against the historical record.
So I worked with a lot of museums. There are a lot of concentration camps that have become museums and they have the records. Many records were destroyed, but I was able to find what was not destroyed. Part of that search happened through the International Tracing Service in which they were able to run my grandma’s name as well as her sister’s name, to pull records to help actually source, you know, where they were and when.
And so all of those kind of like international research elements were incredibly helpful, but it was a real blend of looking for records and documents, as well as personal accounts, and using those two together to help shape the story.
Marion: I think memoir writers think they won’t have to do any research. And of course, that’s just not true. Even if you’re writing specifically a tale from your very own self. You got to check the names and the dates and the facts. But here, I think it’s beautiful the way we can’t look away because of the accuracy that you provide here amid this remarkable desire on her part to be heard.
It’s very, very touching and I work with memoir writers all day long and many of whom want to write someone else’s tale. And almost always, these writers are confronted by their own fear of stirring things up or causing pain when they ask about the past.
And I think you can reassure them. I think you’re uniquely qualified to reassure them. Your evolution in this tale is as much a part of this story and the heart-stopping part of it, it must be said, when after she has made phone call after phone call to you over the years asking you to write her tale, it took you a long time to see you write, quote, “That what she was asking for was more than a record of what happened. She wanted to be heard. She wanted to be seen, for someone to sit still and listen to know her and her pain. My questions had not hurt her, they’d lightened her step.” I wept when I read that. I want you to explain how you came to understand “lightening her step.”
Brooke: It took me such a long time to really understand. I think I’m too literal a person sometimes. And it wasn’t something she was able to express directly. So that was really only a revelation I was able to make through observation, because I started to realize that as I asked her questions, I’d be scared of, you know, what my questions might open up for her, her reaction to them. But I would, you know, visit her and I would write down her answers in my notebook and she would watch and she watched me as I wrote. And I could tell like, it really mattered that I was recording what she was saying. I was putting it on paper and that she felt like she had a place to put these thoughts and feelings.
And so I started to see like, “Well, my questions aren’t hurting her.” She’s actually in her own way, kind of opening the door for me and asking me to care. And so we were able to build this rapport where I could ask these questions. I would never ask too many at once because I knew there still was some weight to them. But she was open. She never said no to any of my questions. She might say that she didn’t know about something, but she always gave me an answer. And so I started to see through the asking that I wasn’t pushing her, but actually like helping her open up.
Marion: I think one of the things that’s really interesting and compelling and really can be very confusing for someone in your role is the emotional response you have to the content right there in the spot. When you’re a home alone writing, if you break down, if it’s just such an extraordinary thing to be writing a scene of your grandmother and her family being put on a train, of your grandmother being shaved, of your grandmother being handed the one dress, the gray dress, that that’s all she’s going to be given. That’s one thing. You’re home alone.
But as you’re sitting there taking in the details, do you think that the kind of emotional response you have is important in this process? In other words, did you cry together? Was it helpful? Did you just maintain a fairly stoic sense? I think again, people are very afraid that their own responses are going to bottle up the story or lead it in a different direction. So could you just give us a little bit of the emotional content of this exchange?
Brooke: Yeah, I think one’s emotional reaction is part of the story. Whether you include it as a writer or not, that’s up to you. But for me, it was important because I was an entry point in a lot of ways for the reader as well, not knowing the story and then learning it in depth.
When I sat with her, she did not cry, but I did. I got very glossy eyed. I was right on the edge. And for a while, she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking straight ahead and talking. Near the end of one of our interviews, she turned and she looked at me and she could see I was quite glassy eyed.
And she said, “It bothered you, what I went through?” And it’s such a simple question, but of course, of course, it bothers me deeply. And it sort of surprised her. She didn’t know that I would be emotional about it. And so I think for her to see the emotion in me, it maybe helped in some ways because she wasn’t having any emotion on her side. It was something she had become numb to. If she was to feel emotion, it would be such a big, overwhelming emotion. And so one of the ways that really she survived was to kind of numb out at times. And so to be able to like see me and understand that what she went through was horrific, and that it was emotional, I think in some ways was like reaffirming for her.
So in that point, it’s like my emotions part of the story because she’s having her own revelations in seeing how her words affect me, even while maybe in that moment, she’s not able to really feel them herself.
Marion: And you write beautifully about what you call the quote, “small, unassuming details” and how they are actually monumental. And I agree. It’s in the small stuff that the big stuff is illuminated. And I wonder what this process of intimate inquiry with your grandmother about her past, your family story has done for you as a writer of other stories.
So as we wrap this up, I hope you’ll be able to talk with us about how it’s changed the lens through which you view life and the stories you intend to write in the future.
Brooke: Yeah, I’m so much more curious than I was when I started because I’ve seen the way like one small nugget can lead to another, and just how much of a world can live within a single detail. And I’ve really learned that from listening to her and how she tells her stories, seeing what details stay with her.
For example, she really talked a lot about the coffee at the concentration camps. If she hadn’t mentioned it, I never would have written about it, but it was a big part of her experience because there were all these rumors going around about what the coffee was doing to their bodies, how it was changing the women prisoners. But there’s been a lot of research into this. And actually the coffee did not impact their bodies. It was the experience of malnutrition and starvation that was impacting their bodies. And the coffee was just really bad coffee. It just tasted horrible.
But the experience that she had was one of like hearing all of these rumors, being concerned, noticing her body changing from the starvation, just kind of weakening over time. And so for her, it was very fear inducing drinking this coffee. I never thought so deeply about it. And so, just observing one detail, researching it, digging into it helped open up my sense of the experience at large. And that’s kind of one of the things I took away as a writer. I say in the book that my grandma accidentally made me a better writer.
And it’s totally true because from investigating these small details and pulling these stories out and understanding them through personal experiences, not just my own, but others really helped me see the kind of power of narrative and understanding a larger experience through it.
Marion: Well, it’s a gift you give to all of us. And it certainly feels like you were changed, that she was changed, and we are absolutely changed by reading it. Thank you so much, Brooke. It’s a beautiful book, and I wish you all the best with it.
Brooke: Thank you so much.
Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Brooke Randel. See more on her at brooke randel dot com. The book is Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, just out from Tortoise Books. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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