Goodreads asked Brett Ashley Kaplan:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Brett Ashley Kaplan While entirely fictional, Vandervelde Downs was sparked by a memory: it’s 1979 and I am at a Vietnamese Refugee Center in the Midlands, in provincial England, with my grandmother, a Swiss Quaker who moved to England when she fell in love with my grandfather, thus scandalizing her somewhat snobby Swiss family (he was the son of a market gardener, she was on a teacher training program and firmly expected to return to Switzerland). I grew up between the very Jewish world of the Upper West Side, New York City, and the very not-Jewish world of small town England (my father is Jewish, my mother isn’t, and because she worked in the summers, I lived with my grandmother in the tiny town of Stone for three months a year). In 1979 Omi and I are at the Refugee Center to “help.” I don’t exactly know what that means, and I have no idea where Vietnam even is. But we’ve made little knitted hats and we give them out.
I wanted to see what would happen if/when multiple strands of refugeeism and migration come together with different aspects of looted art.

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