Straight from the Source: Laurie Schneider on Writing Historical Fiction
What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?
Every story has been different for me. Sometimes it’s a line…which then leads to a character. Sometimes an image. Sometimes a character. Gittel was a little different; it was inspired by a place–a small Jewish agricultural colony near Arpin, Wisconsin, where my great grandfather once lived in the early 1920s.
Once I had the place in mind, I read as much as I could on this movement that brought recent Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire to isolated and far-flung settlements in rural America. Most of the scholarly material on the Jewish colonies focused on the goals of the movement – to get Jewish immigrants out of overcrowded tenements in cities and to speed assimilation—and the reasons they failed. And most of the colonies failed spectacularly.
One of the challenges of writing Gittel was knowing that I was writing about a community that was destined to vanish within the lifetime of most of my characters…and making readers (besides myself!) care.
I visited Arpin before writing and that gave me the emotional connection I needed to start my story. When it came to characters it felt natural to base some of them on family members. Honestly, though, most of my decisions while writing are unconscious. I try to keep my monkey mind out of the process; it gets in the way, and my favorite part of writing is being surprised.
How do you conduct your research? Do you have a specific system for collecting data?
I wish I had a system! I’m hopelessly haphazard, hopping down rabbit holes wherever they appear, scribbling notes on scraps of paper, on my notes app on my phone, on sticky notes, in notebooks, in Word docs, and–my favorite–emails that I send to myself! All of it gets incorporated into longer documents that live in a folder on my computer.
What kinds of sources do you use? The more specifics here, the better!
Photos, scholarly books, visits to museums and archives, oral histories, visits to sites when feasible and affordable. My primary sources for Gittel were oral histories, old family stories, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, Wisconsin public libraries, scholarly books, newspapers, and popular magazines of the day. My favorite sources were old Sears catalogs and newspaper and magazine advertisements. Ads are great for details about clothes, appliances, tools, furniture, medicines. I don’t know how people can write historical fiction set before Sears! I’m a huge fan of Karen Cushman who can bring any era to life!
What’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?
Once I’ve immersed myself in enough background material and cultural information and the writing flows, I feel like a time traveler, an embedded journalist in another world. It feels like a real gift to be able to do this. And by gift, I don’t mean a talent, but a gift from the universe. I often find writing excruciating, but when my editorial brain turns off and I enter the flow it can be exhilarating…until reality hits when I go back to revise.
What are some obstacles writing historical fiction brings?
Permissions. Oy vey, permissions. Yes, there’s a lot of great material that’s in the public domain, but sometimes things you assume you can use are in a gray area or you can’t reach the person or entity who needs to grant permission. When that happens, I’ve discovered it’s easier to rewrite or reinvent. In Gittel I was surprised by the rules regarding the use of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Fortunately, the earliest edition of her work is in the public domain, though scholars of Dickinson consider it bowdlerized by the acquaintances who edited it.
What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve learned while researching?
After writing Gittel there were some details I wanted to double check and I sprang for a subscription to Newspapers.com. I discovered a long article in my home-town newspaper, circa 1921, detailing the difficulties my great grandmother had in reaching the United States. My great grandfather had left her and their three children behind in Ukraine intending to send for them as soon as possible – but WWI and the Bolshevik revolution intervened and it ended up taking seven years. The article included harrowing details and descriptions of the pogroms she survived, including being beaten by soldiers and having her house burned down. By the time she made it to Milwaukee and stepped off the train to be reunited with her husband, she was terrified to see people bustling and running at the train station, sure it was another pogrom.
My great grandmother was in her eighties when I was a little girl and she spoke with a thick accent I could barely understand. As far as I know she never spoke about her life in Ukraine and my mom always regretted not having asked her more. The article filled in a lot. It breaks my heart to think of her carrying that burden alone, but I’m glad I finally know.
Now that Gittel has been released, I feel I have a responsibility to talk about the weight of living with and carrying stories like this, just like Gittel and the Borenstein family in my book carry the memory of the Easter pogrom in Kishinev.
How closely does Gittel adhere to your family’s history in central Wisconsin? What was it like writing about your family?
Right off the bat, I altered the time frame of my great grandfather’s story by setting Gittel in 1911. He didn’t actually live in the Arpin colony until the late teens and early 1920s when there were only a few Jewish families left in town. While I definitely wanted to address the issues that threatened the survival of the community, I didn’t want that to be the focus of Gittel’s story.
Overall, the book is more inspired by my family history than based on it, but there are definitely a few characters in Gittel who bear more than a passing resemblance to some of my family members. There aren’t many of us left who remember my great grandparents and grandparents, and this was my way of keeping their memory alive. It was a joy for me to spend time with them, even if only in a fictional world.
As a child I knew nothing of the challenges they faced. I understand more now and am awed by how much they achieved in one generation. My mother and her parents came to the United States from Romania in 1922 when my mother was two years old and her mother, my grandma, was eighteen. She and my grandfather had three more children, ran a successful small business, and managed to send all four of their children to college! That’s one of the reasons I wanted to emphasize the importance of public education in Gittel. It’s so critical and, sadly, inexplicably, under attack in our country now.
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Laurie Schneider grew up in central Wisconsin not far from where Gittel is set and was raised on a steady diet of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carol Ryrie Brink, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, E.L. Konigsburg, and Beverly Cleary. She works in acquisitions at the Dulaney-Browne Library at Oklahoma City University and moonlights at Barnes & Noble. When not working or haunting the local coffee shops, she enjoys street and wildlife photography. To learn more about Gittel and for downloadable lesson plans, visit www.laurieschneider.com.