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Last update - 14:36 10/07/2008 Questions & Answers A conversation with Joanna Hershon By David B. Green Tags: author interview  American author of 'The German Bride' a novel set among Jewish immigrants to the frontier town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the years following the Civil War If you've seen Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," this past winter's acclaimed film about an oil prospector (played by Daniel Day Lewis) in the American West at the turn of the 20th century, who slowly and ruthlessly turns himself into a leading player in the business, you may recall how effectively it evokes the texture of life at a time when the U.S. was young and still held out the promise of land and opportunity for those willing to keep pushing toward the Pacific Ocean. "The German Bride" (Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $25), Joanna Hershon's new novel, which takes place four decades earlier in a still-untamed New Mexico, is similarly effective, in allowing, in this case, the reader to feel enveloped by the world of the past being described. It gratefully lacks the fake "authenticity" of some historical novels, whose authors have done extensive research -- and feel the need to share every piece of it with the reader. The "German Bride" is Eva Frank, the 18-year-old daughter of a prosperous and cultivated Jewish family in 1860s Berlin. After Eva gets seriously involved with a non-Jewish artist who has painted her and her sister Henriette's portraits, and Henriette subsequently dies in childbirth, a tragedy for which she feels partly responsible, Eva takes advantage of an opportunity to start over in the New World. That opportunity comes in the form of Abraham Shein, a German Jew who has joined his brother in Santa Fe, where the latter owns a dry-goods emporium. During a home visit to Berlin, Abraham meets Eva, and barely has to court her before she agrees to marry him and move to New Mexico. The novel follows the couple's crossing to North America, and their harrowing journey across the continent. Not surprisingly, Abraham turns out to be an unreliable husband, and despite a real attraction between the couple, he squanders his wife's trust (and his brother's, too), and gambles himself into serious debt. Hershon, 36, is the author of two earlier novels with contemporary settings. In "The German Bride" she evokes an earlier era with great authority, and although she says that was her intention, she also claims that she was careful not to be "hemmed in by history." Hershon lives in Brooklyn, New York; Haaretz spoke with her by phone from Liguria, Italy, where she was vacationing with her painter husband and their twin boys in late June. Advertisement * * * Q: What in the world made you think of setting a novel among German-Jewish pioneers in the Old West? A: It started years ago, in 2003, at a barbecue, when a friend said to me, in a really offhand manner: "My ancestors were Jewish cowboys." The strange thing was, he didn't know anything else about them. He wasn't really connected to being Jewish. I perked up when I heard that. He did tell me that his great-great grandmother was a famous ghost in Santa Fe, and that it's likely that she killed herself. It was such a gothic tale, I thought it had all the elements of a great story. I started doing research on my friend's family, and at the same time, I tried to get as much knowledge about the period as I could. That led me to books and to family histories, and I did research for years. There was so little available on any women, and so I began thinking: Why would these women agree to come halfway across the world, except for love? They came from fairly prosperous families, and this was actually a good time to be a Jew in Germany. That's the way the book formed itself, around this question: Why would a comfortable well-off Jewish woman pick up and move, not to New York, but to the American frontier? Q: Weren't there women who kept diaries, even if they remained unpublished? A: I found some diaries, and in one case even a published memoir of a Jewish woman, although in different circumstances, in the Midwest, in a much more harrowing situation. I also found a memoir written by one of the nuns at the monastery in Santa Fe [characters who play a role in the book]. And a bit written by the woman on whom I based the character of Beatrice [another German-Jewish woman married to a Santa Fe merchant, who befriends Eva]. That is, Beatrice is based very loosely on a real woman who did some writing. It took me a relatively long time to come up with the actual story. Eva is not exactly a predictable frontierswoman. We all hear about the adventurous types, but I'm sure that many of the women who came were not so game. Q: Eva is your book's heroine, and Abraham, her husband, is not a good guy. But he's also far from being a monster, and has just enough self-awareness to know that he's not behaving well. Am I wrong in thinking that they even loved one another? A: I really enjoyed writing that character. I still, when I do readings, like to read the scene when Abraham and Eva meet. The moment when she sees that he can offer her an opportunity to get out of her own sad situation, and she is drawn into his bravado and ridiculous confidence. I really worked at him, and I really enjoyed the struggle. I wanted to make theirs a nuanced relationship and marriage. I believe that relationships are not black and black, not just love, or not just hateful. She's completely dependent on him, not just in a modern euphemistic sense of the word, but truly she had no recourse. And that's powerful. And I tried also to infuse their relationship with a sexual chemistry that they have from the beginning, which plays into her own guilt and her own sense of her self. But in terms of, did she love him, I think she grew to love him with a fierce dependency and admiration. She saw the way he was a leader and got them to Santa Fe with their lives. Q: I don't know if the book is authentic, but it certainly felt that way. How did you do that? A: I immersed myself in the material, certainly, but that sense of authenticity can come from very subtle things, like a line from a cookbook, or a bit of memoir or diary. It could be a turn of phrase, or a way of looking at landscapes. I did a lot of research at the Leo Baeck Institute [for the Study of German-Speaking Jewry, in New York]. There were tiny precious things, like a little girl's diary from Germany. That was the culture my character came from. I did a lot of research about Germany at the time. Eventually, I think the authenticity comes in layers. I'm trying to be faithful, but at the same time, I am also creating my own characters and my own world. At one public reading, I read from the part of the book when Eva is crossing the ocean and she visits the ship's steerage. I was asked by an audience member how frequently that would have happened. Probably not very often, but I think that it's possible. And sometimes it would come down to the simple question: Was it possible? A big turning point came when I was writing about the affair Eva has at the beginning of the book with the painter, in Berlin. That was obviously a very important part of the plot. I asked a scholar at the Leo Baeck Institute, who is as much of an authority as anyone, if it was possible [an affair between a Jewish girl and a gentile man]. He said, absolutely. And he backed it up with all these sources. Absolutely possible historically. I ended up running a lot of things by him. But I also think it's important to go with your intuition, and not be so hemmed in with the limitations of history. Ultimately, I didn't let it cramp my style, or weigh me down. Q: In the book, you mention Amos Elon's "The Pity of It All" as a source you relied on. A: I enjoyed that book so much. So influential. In a way, he does in his non-fiction book what I was sort of saying about writing a novel. He said something in his notes about not being a sociologist, that he didn't feel he had to write about average people. And in 19th-century Germany, there were such extraordinary people. After the 1848 revolution, there were these extraordinary Jews, with their salons, and assimilation was such a complicated and barbed subject, and I thought he addressed it beautifully. These people were so German, so fascinating to me. I guess I knew it, but I was still surprised by the depth of feeling, the fierce loyalty to their country and to German Kultur. Q: I kept thinking about what ultimately happened to the Jews who returned in that extraordinary society, especially toward the end of the book, when Eva has to decide whether or not to return to Germany. Did you feel a desire to protect her? A: It's a haunting and interesting piece of knowledge to have. In fact, a lot of these German immigrants went back. They succeeded spectacularly in America, but went back to Germany, and they or their families were, I presume, killed several generations later. I was thinking about that the whole time I wrote. I wanted Eva to stay in America for a host of reasons, not insignificantly for this. Haaretz Books, July 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   By the numbers A study shows Jewish Israeli men live almost four years longer than Israeli Arabs. Local threat The Shin Bet arrests two Bedouin, accused of supplying information to al-Qaida.

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