Author's roots yield best-selling novel
Jenna Blum's novel Those Who Save Us tells the story of a Christian
woman who falls in love with a Jew and tries to help people captured by the Nazis.
Sidebar: Meet The Author
To see where award-winning novelist Jenna Blum is coming from when she talks about the Holocaust, just look at her Web site. Above a slowly appearing photograph of concentration camp train tracks is the query: "Who among us is not stained by the past?"
For Blum, author of Those Who Save Us, that view grew out of what she calls her "schizophrenic heritage." Born of a Jewish father and a German mother, she grew up in the United States with an acute sense of connection to the Holocaust, heightened by three trips to Germany with her mother.
Inspired by that connection, in 1994 she became an interviewer for Steven Spielberg's newly created Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. It was her job to elicit — as gently as possible — and record on video survivors' memories of what they endured.
Ten years later, in 2004, she published her novel about the Holocaust, to praise from the critics and growing public acclaim. This month, the book made it onto The New York Times paperback best-seller list.
Blum will discuss both her real-life encounters with survivors and her fictional take on the Holocaust when she speaks at the Jewish Community Center of Central New Jersey in Scotch Plains on Wednesday morning, Oct. 17, at 10:30. The event is open to the community.
Given her four years with the Shoah Foundation, one might have expected Blum to write her novel from a Jewish angle. Instead, she gave it an unexpected twist: She tells it from the perspective of a non-Jewish woman caught in the middle of the war's hideous dilemmas. Her goal, she has said, was to answer the question she posed to her mother and which haunted her: "If you had been my age during the war — an ordinary German woman — what would you have done?"
What she did gain from interviewing the survivors was the courage to also question ordinary Germans, and American war veterans.
"Whether they belong to perpetrator or victim, the guilt and shame, denial and complicity are still completely tangible," she wrote on her Web site. "It was in fictionalizing this spectrum of feeling for Those Who Save Us that I was able to explore how ordinary Germans could have permitted the Nazi regime — and the torturous consequences for all who lived through it."
The book took her three years of computer-bound obsession. Writing about her involvement with the subject, all that effort, she said, "was a lesson in humility and self-discovery. And it has always been, first and foremost, a labor of love."
In 2005, Hadassah Magazine published an excerpt from Those Who Save Us and, with Elie Wiesel serving as a judge, awarded Blum its Harold U. Ribalow Prize for excellence in Jewish-themed literature. Past winners of the prize include Joseph Epstein, Aharon Appelfeld, Louis Begley, Francine Prose, and Max Apple.
Success as a writer came early to Blum. She was 15 when her short story "Fifth Wheel" won third prize in Seventeen magazine's National Fiction Contest. The next year, she won first prize in the same competition with a story entitled "The Legacy of Frank Finklestein." She went on to publish short fiction and nonfiction in a number of leading publications, including Faultline, The Kenyon Review (which awarded her the Charles Monroe Coffin Prize for Short Fiction), The Bellingham Review, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and The Improper Bostonian.
Blum was living in Minnesota during the four years that she worked with the Shoah Foundation and set part of her book there. She now lives in Boston. She earned her BA from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1992, and her MA in 1997 from Boston University, where she taught creative and communications writing. She was the fiction editor for AGNI literary magazine for four years and now runs master novel workshops and writes a writers' advice column for The Grub Street Free Press.
In response to e-mailed questions from NJ Jewish News, Blum wrote this week: "I've always had a profound sense of connection to the Holocaust, despite not being related to survivors. My dad knew next to nothing about his side of the family — only that the Nazis had murdered two of his great-aunts at Babi Yar — and when history is lost, imagination steps in. I played the "How Would I Survive?" game from childhood to adulthood — until I had channeled much of my obsession into Those Who Save Us. Only when I was done writing the novel did the time period stop literally haunting me."
Asked how her Shoah Foundation experience affected her book, she said: "I used nothing from any of the testimonies that I was privileged to gather for the Shoah Foundation, for survivors' experiences are hallowed ground. But this blessed project helped inform the emotional atmosphere in which my characters dwell: denial, shame, guilt, and a fierce, enduring pride and hope."
As for her "schizophrenic heritage," she said: "At times I feel a little queasy as a half-and-half. Imagine going to a survivor's house to conduct an interview if you're part German! And imagine going to an all-German small town where nobody has ever seen a Jewish girl before.
"Mostly, though, I'm very grateful for my schizophrenic heritage," said Blum. "People are, as Anne Frank said, bundles of contradiction, and without both cultures resonating in me, I never would have been able to write Those Who Save Us."
Asked why she chose a non-Jewish protagonist for her book, she replied: "During my 1993 trip to Germany with my mother…, I asked my mother, 'What would you have done if you'd been here during the war?' My mother, as an 'Aryan,' would have been put in the same position as my heroine, Anna, forced to make terrible decisions to safeguard herself and her children.
"When I then began researching Anna's circumstances, I found very little information about average German women, which I thought odd given that women, from their ringside domestic seat, might have provided very interesting answers to how the Nazi regime came to power. I wanted to give voice to a German woman's perspective through Anna. I also felt it imperative, the only morally responsible option, to include Jewish survivors' voices as well."
Blum said almost all audiences ask her how much of the book is autobiographical. They also ask whether she's single. She said, "For the answers to all questions, please come hear me speak or visit my Web site and ask away! I love hearing what readers have to say."
Jenna Blum's novel is told from the perspective of a non-Jewish woman
caught in the middle of the war's hideous dilemmas. Photo by Lynne Wayne
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