Anna Olswanger's Blog - Posts Tagged "holocaust"

Early this year I posted a giveaway for Greenhorn, my short novel for middle grade readers, on Goodreads. In Greenhorn, a young Holocaust survivor comes to a Brooklyn yeshiva, where his obsessive attachment to a mysterious box arouses the curiosity and unkind attention of the other boys.

Greenhorn is based on a true story.

I received a message through Goodreads from a woman named Denise. She said she didn't enter many giveaways but mine caught her eye because her novel Rose's Will also contained a Holocaust story, a true one that the survivor allowed her to tell. She said she thought it was important to keep this atrocity present in the minds of future generations, and that she hoped to make it to the A-list. "It sounds like an awesome book."

I told Denise what I usually say to other people who write about the Holocaust, that I was glad she had preserved the Holocaust survivor's story, that these survivors would all be gone someday, and only their stories would be left as evidence of what they had been through. But then I told her about a negative review I received on Goodreads from someone who criticized an aspect of Greenhorn for not being historically accurate. I shared with Denise my response, that although the aspect of the story was not historically accurate, the character in the story believed it was, and I felt compelled to remain true to his story.

And then I told her not to worry about making it to the A-list. I would send her an electronic galley.

"Your character Aaron reminded me of my son when he was a child, always sticking up for the underdog," she wrote after she read the galley. "As for the soap thing, I thought that the rabbi placed enough doubt that a reader wouldn't necessarily conclude that it was true. I thought you did a good job leaving it ambiguous. Good story. Thanks for sharing."

I thanked her back. That was that.

But a few days later she wrote me again. She said that she had been looking around on my website, and found an interview about "Jewish story." She said she wasn't Jewish, and in fact was an atheist, but she said it wasn't until she read the interview that she realized what she had been looking for in her reading. "It's that moral depth and the thirst for analysis and meaning. It's the belief that we can all be better people if we choose to. And that's one of the central themes of Rose's Will. I think Cynthia Ozick would consider me a Jewish writer."

I knew what she meant about looking for meaning. I had written Greenhorn because I needed to understand the little boy's loneliness and why he was fixated on the box. I wanted to suggest to Denise that she write a blog about her message to me. But then I thought, maybe she had already written a blog, so I went to her website to look for a link, and there I saw on the home page, a blog entry. What Denise wrote was that she had just met with her oncologist, who told her that she had her greatest chance of survival with chemotherapy and possibly radiation. Denise had cancer. She had gone through a mastectomy and now needed more therapy. And she had drawn a little comic of her body on the page with a photograph of her face pasted in without hair. She'd had a rotten last few months. The surgery had been rough.

What could I say? Denise was fighting to stay alive, yet she had taken the time to contact me and have a back-and-forth conversation about a little book that was nothing in the scheme of her life. I told her I wished I could take her suffering away. And I thanked her again for reading Greenhorn and for making me feel that it had been important to her.

She wrote back one last time. "Thanks for the empathy. One can never get enough of it in my particular situation. I'm taking it one day at a time, as they say. And I should be thanking you for piquing my interest and distracting me from my current personal hell. Glad to have met you."

I was glad to have met her, too, glad to have distracted her from her current hell, if only for a few moments, glad that maybe I had found a piece of the meaning I had been looking for when I was writing Greenhorn.