Interview Q & A with Pleasantville Community Synagogue leadership and 5th – 7th grade teachers, students, and parents:
Q: What gave you the idea to write this book?
A: I never forgot my mother’s memory of crocheting around diamonds and making them into buttons she sewed onto sweaters that refugees wore on the boats to America. I was sure there was a good story in there. But what really motivated me was my unruly class of fifth through seventh graders at another synagogue. I couldn’t interest them in anything, even Israeli football or playing Maccabean Revolt war games. Finally, I asked, “Since you have to be here, what DO you want to learn about?” The overwhelming answer: The Holocaust. I couldn’t find the right book for them. Many books on the subject for young people are memoirs written by adult survivors looking back on their childhood in concentration camps. My mother was never in a camp, yet she had vivid memories of that time in her life.
Your protagonists, Anni and Rosie Blum, escape from the Nazis by traveling from Vienna to England disguised as holiday travelers. They’re going to live with cousins they’ve never met in a country where they don’t speak the language. Anni is only 12 and Rosie is 7. Many Jewish children came to England that way and lived with total strangers. What can you tell us about that time in history?
In Nazi-occupied countries, each step in victimization tricked the Jews into thinking that “it couldn’t get any worse.” By the time people like my grandparents realized it could and would get much worse, it was too late. The borders were closed and Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were sent to camps. I tried to write from the point of view of a twelve-year-old experiencing that horrific time firsthand, in the moment: the park closed to her, her name changed to ‘Sarah,’ her beloved Papa taken away. England, safer than Austria, was willing to take in refugee children, but it wasn’t a land of princesses in castles, either. The first thing the girls encounter there is their cousin painting out the street signs so German planes flying overhead won’t spot the village.
The design of the book is very beautiful.
How did you develop it?
Thank you! I still treasure books I was given as a child, classics like Swiss Family Robinson and Heidi, written and designed to be enjoyed by readers of all ages — with cloth bindings, gold stamping, endpapers, and beautiful color illustrations. My goal was to create a work in that classic style, using typefaces designed in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. I made many mockups before I could say, ‘Ah-ha, this is it.’
The book is fiction, but I built it on a time line of actual world events.
The blue squares in the chart above are months before chapter one, when the events that haunt Anni’s memories happened, and are written as flashbacks. The months in yellow are in England. The flashbacks fade away as she and Rosie get comfortable in their new environment, become more fluent in English, feel like members of the family, make friends. The months in pink are in the U.S.A.
In Chapter 8, “All Who Are Hungry,” when Anni and Rosie read their Passover essay, they learn that they can reach people and change minds with words. Chapter 11, when Anni overcomes her fears and successfully interrogates the Nazi pilot who bailed out over their village, is a real turning point. During the “American Knitting Table” scene at the book’s end the girls learn that rationing and blackout regulations are coming to the U.S. They are old hands.
How did you work with the book’s illustrator, Caterina Baldi?
Totally online. We’ve never met. I discovered her on Reedsy.com, a platform that connects authors with illustrators and editors, and was captivated by her work. For each chapter, I sent her a description of what I considered the key scene, plus a folder of ‘scrap’ pictures of clothing, furniture, wallpaper, sewing supplies, flowers in season in England, warplanes, and so forth. She made rough sketches, which we discussed. Gradually, detail was added. I was the art director, set and costume coordinator, and weatherperson. She turned ideas and scraps into compelling paintings.
Without giving away too much, tell us how knitting helps the girls save other refugees.
Anni presents her idea with conviction. Uncle Benjamin sees its potential as a way to help the refugees he wants to save arrive in America with enough money to begin a new life. The girls efficiently use their talents to get things done in ways that involve and charm other people. Perfection isn’t a goal any more. A few dropped stitches don’t matter. And the book has a positive ending in New York that also involves knitting and immigrants.
Not all of Anni and Rosie’s relatives make it out of Austria. Was that hard to write about?
Yes. I struggled with how to show the girls’ relationship with their grandmas and how to write the scene where they learn of their deaths. My own grandmother made it out of Austria, but her sister and mother didn’t. The rest of her life was one of sadness, anger, and perhaps guilt. Why did some people survive when so many others didn’t? That was always in my mind. My goal was to craft a book that envisions positive futures for immigrants from many countries. And write a story that brings on both laughter and tears.