I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish Books. Today I am excited to welcome Jennifer Rosner, her latest book, Once We Were Home has been named as an honor book by the Association of Jewish libraries Jewish fiction award. So welcome, Jennifer, and congratulations on your win.
Thank you so much. I'm honored.
So I don't generally read Holocaust fiction. But I'm really glad that I did with your book. It covers an area of the Holocaust in the aftermath that has not received a lot of attention. So would you please tell me about once we were home? Sure.
Once we were home weaves together the stories of four children who are moved under various circumstances from a place of home during World War Two, there's a there's a sibling pair, Oscar and Ana who are moved from their family to be harbored with a Polish farm couple during World War Two. And then after the war, an operative for the redemption of Jewish children, tries to retrieve them and get them on route to Palestine. And Roger is a boy who is harbored by the church for safety and when surviving Jewish relatives seek to reclaim him, the church actually takes him on the run, and is trying to keep him within Christianity. And then Renata is a child who was Germanized during the war, and and when the USRA tries to repatriate her, her mother actually takes her on the road to Oxford. So there are children who are being moved in war time. And their subsequent struggles with a sense of self and identity belonging place of home.
Yeah, a lot of people think, well, when the war ended, the war ended. But really, it took years, if not decades, or the rest of their life for many people to get settled. And, you know, as you say, build that identity,
that it's really interesting that there's this sort of long adjustment period. And a lot of the people who move children just figured they would settle with whatever situation you know, they ended up in, but in fact, they struggled quite a quite a lot, and many of them, and it's been interesting to learn about that.
The age of the children definitely influenced their experience. So the sibling pair, Oscar and Ana, Oscar was very young when he was brought to the Dubrovskys. And, you know, of course, he was sad and confused at first, but he pretty quickly adapted and grew to love his his foster parents. But Ana was older and had a lot more memories of her birth family. So it was harder for her to accept the situation.
Yeah, I purposely gave them different ages. And I wanted to explore the way in which the attachments differed the sense of loyalty to their first parents on a struggled with becoming comfortable with her foster family because she thought it was something of a betrayal, which I've read a lot about, also of her of her original parents. What memories they have, and the idea when someone came to reclaim them, Ana remembered her Jewish roots. So the idea of it was somewhat, it was enticing to kind of go back to something whereas Oscar didn't know anything about it. And just felt like he was being uprooted and taken from the only home he knew.
And Anna, sort of prematurely mature in this situation, because her birth parents told her, you know, take care of, of Oscar and keep an eye on him. And part of that was not doing a lot of things that little boys do. Peeing in the meadow, you know, stripping down and jumping in the river, because that would clearly show since he'd been circumcised that he was Jewish. So she felt very responsible for him and either couldn't or wouldn't hand that over to the Dubrovskys to manage because they were very invested in them in the community, not knowing these children were Jewish, and said that they were a niece and nephew who's whose mother was too ill to take care of them.
Yes, and I wanted to portray that kind of responsibility on the older children who weren't so old but had to age quite quickly and become responsive. for their younger siblings, and I mean, I think all children of war and you know, particularly here of the Holocaust, you know, they had to grow up so fast because they were hiding, and they had to be responsible to not let anything slip, they had to be careful what language they were speaking in, they had to be careful about what they said, they had to remember their fake names, they had a lot of responsibility.
They had to, with the siblings, go to church with the family, learn the prayers, you know, and really learn their whole backstory.
Exactly, keep up the whole story.
So let's move on to Roger. So he had been placed in a convent. And there was a very mixed group around him, that some of the nuns and priests knew that he that they were fostering him and that he would be eventually returned to family. Others were really strongly invested in keeping him and quote unquote, saving him as a Christian. Yeah,
Yeah, and I think it's really important to also think about the range of how the clergy did handle the rescuing of Jewish children, because there were many clergy who didn't have any intention of taking a Jewish child and making them Christian, they were just trying to harbor them through the war and hope that they would get back to their roots. And then there were some who saw an opportunity and wanted to bring them into the church. And so it did really vary. And I tried to, I try to represent the different kind of thrusts in that kind of situation. And so sister Bridgette is a person who really supported Roger trying to help him in whatever way she could to be expressive and stay sort of true to himself. But then you even see the complexity in a character like brother Jacques, who sees his aim at first as saving Roger and keeping him in the church, and then eventually coming to understand that perhaps that's not quite the right story for Roger, and this story of Roger, I mean, all of the characters in my novel are based on histories, factual histories, and the case of Roger is very loosely built on the case of the Finley brothers, the Finley brothers, Robert and Gerald Finley were these two boys who were harbored in the church, and then when surviving relatives came to reclaim him, the church took them on the run. And they also baptized him after the war after relatives sought to claim him. So once he was baptized, they really didn't want to give him back. And there's archival documents showing that, you know, the order to keep him within Christianity went very high up in the papacy. So this was actually built on a true case, as were Oscar, Anna, and Renata, so, you know, they're all fictionalized, but they're rooted in histories.
So I don't remember hearing about situations like Renata's, can you talk about that?
It's fascinating. There was a huge project that was begun by Himmler to Germanized children who could pass the kind of tests of caliper and I charts and hair color and stuff and bring these children that they you know, they are they were born outside of Germany, but they might be able to be Germanized. So they were taken. Some there's a lot of arguments about how many children but it looks like it could be in the hundreds of 1000s of children. And they were taken from various settings from Parks, from from schools, from their parents, you know, they were taken and put into these germination kind of centers where they would do measurements, and if the end and try to see if they could be you know, educated, re educated to become German, and older children were put into centers and younger children were put into childless German couples homes. And a lot of the time the couples didn't understand that those children weren't just children who needed adoption from within Germany. They they thought they were just adopting a child and it turned out they were someone else's child that they had been taken and put into their home. And yeah, and then for the children who didn't pass the Germanization testing, many of the older children were either put into labor camps or they were put into a particular concentration camp, and maybe only some of the very youngest children were returned.
It's mind boggling. And it's also so I don't want to say fascinating that sounds too positive. But bizarre that the Nazis would not accept assimilated Jewish families who were totally assimilated. nonpracticing Jews, you know, looked like the other Germans around them, but they would accept these random children.
Yeah, and I should say most of the children they accepted, you know, we're from Poland and other nearby countries, most of them weren't Jewish children. I don't know of Jewish children, but I think maybe some, but mostly not. And, okay. But But I think the idea was that the birth rate in Germany was very low, the soldier, the men were at war, they were trying to bolster the population. But what's really bizarre to me is that for a people who was, you know, for a group that were so focused on racial purity, the idea that you could grab children from any random place, Slavic children, who they are to narrowly looked down on. But if they pass these certain kinds of tests, they could be kind of, you know, educated and put in, it was very interesting and very strange.
I want to go back to the siblings, when the organization, I'm sorry, don't remember the name, the Jewish organization,
[in Hebrew] while there were many organizations who were seeking to get these children back into Judaism, but there was sort of this umbrella group called cord anoxia, they were trying to organize the different players and work together to try to reclaim as many Jewish children as possible. So
it was definitely not a smooth journey from once they found and got the children to finding family or to relocating them to Israel.
No, and here's the thing, most of those children didn't have parents, like the parents had perished. They were hidden with these, you know, Christian couples or families. So they weren't going to be going home, you know, they weren't going back to family, they were going to Judaism. And that's where for me the kind of moral blurriness of it came in, because you're taking a child who has had so many ruptures, they lost their first family, they were placed in a second home, to try to be, you know, rescued during the war. And now the war ends, and they're taken again, to be returned to their to Judaism. But that might mean a Jewish orphanage, or it might mean a kibbutz, but it doesn't mean you're going home. And it was really complicated. Because the people who are doing this work were mostly Holocaust survivors, they have lost everyone, you know, in their families and their villages, and to think of leaving Jewish children behind was very painful. And after such annihilation, they were trying to rebuild the collective, and it felt like a moral imperative to do so. I think it also felt scary to leave them in Polish settings, in particular, because anti semitism was so rampant, just after the war, even as much as during and so I think they felt a kind of personal responsibility, if they knew there were Jewish children hiding, they should get them back and get them out of there. Because even if the family was loving, and accepting, there were neighbors that were villagers, there were other people, and it felt very dangerous. And I should say, thirdly, that something that was pressing on the operatives was a kind of sense of honoring the last wishes of the parents who perished. So you know, the parents put their children in this Christian setting, not so that they would be raised Christian, but that so that they could just be on hold and safe until they could come back and raise them Jewish. And so the idea here is that the operatives would get this children back and raise them Jewish, and it would be a way of honoring the parents who perished. So all these factors were in their minds. But for me, the idea of taking a child out of a home that they might love, you know, their parents and feel connected and feel, you know, safe to move them for the sake of, you know, their Judaism was complex and kind of morally blurry to me. Whereas, you know, some of the operative sort of saving, but there was actually some disagreement about, you know, even what you call this type of, of missions, so sometimes, you know, they would say rescue, but then others would say, No, the Christian family is harboring them were the rescuers. And so they'd say, Well, we're redeeming them, or we're reclaiming them or we're retrieving them and some said we're ransoming them because they were offering money. So there was definitely like, even within the conversation, you could feel the moral texture there.
Yeah, and even later in life, Oscar wanted to continue that relationship with the Dobrowskys he considered them his parents and, you know, started writing letters to them and eventually visited them. And Ana was very reluctant to do that. She was like, nope, those weren't my parents. they're done with that not going to think about them.
Yeah, and again, it sort of represents the range of how people dealt with all these different kinds of circumstances that were very tough in wartime, and how they emotionally managed, going forward. And that's the same, you know, same with not just the relationships to people, but even to their faiths. So, you know, you might ensconce yourself in Judaism after all that, or you might hold on to Christianity after that, or, you know, there were so many different ways, children who were emerging from the situation, we're coping with the situation
Oscar and Anna ended up eventually on a kibbutz. Oscar left somewhat early, but Anna settles down. And in many ways, she was philosophically very in tune with the kibbutz and a egalitarianism. And, you know, everyone, everyone being equal and no shared property until she married and had a child. And then it was very difficult for her to only see her kid during appointed hours during the week, because they were in the baby house. And, you know, she could take workshift there, but basically, she could not see her child as much as she wanted. And it seems like that would be very much influenced by the fact that she had been taken from her parents and then taken from her foster parents, and, you know, she wanted to have be able to provide a close childhood that she didn't have.
Yes, I think that the feeling that in her mind, her first her parents, her mother, in particular, left her with the other, you know, with the dobrowskis and then she was taken from the dobrowski is and brought, you know, on this, on this journey, etc. It was as if, you know, she hadn't been held on to, and she wanted to hold on to her child. And, and I think it pressed very hard, that kind of very strict communal aspect of the kibbutz, especially at that early stage of, of kibbutz development. Nowadays, I think it's different, I think children can sleep with their parents, you know, in their in their house on a kibbutz. But it early on, you know, the children were parented by whoever was on duty in the child room,
I'd like to ask you about the title. And it seems that once we were home could be understood in two ways, or at least two ways. It could be that we used to be home, and we're not anymore. Or it could be the beginning of a new phrase or phase. Once we were home, we were able to dot dot dot start a new life, we were able to reconnect with Judaism. What were your thoughts on the title?
Well, I purposely chose it for the ambiguity, because I feel like every child will have who has experienced this kind of rupture, will have a different take on the nature of home as the and maybe it changes over the course of their life as well. And so I really wanted it to be unclear. And that's why I love that word, once in our language. And the only complication is as it gets translated into foreign languages, that there may not be that dual meaning but I really feel it's important.
So it sounded like you did quite a bit of research. So I was wondering how you found these sort of case studies to base your characters on?
Yeah, well, this novel began when I met a woman who actually worked as what they called an operative for the redemption of Jewish children. So you know, this holocaust Holocaust survivor who I met who she had been in a Siberian labor camp during the war, she returned to her native Poland afterwards and learned that just something like 3% of Jewish children had survived and they were in, you know, Christian settings with assumed identities and names, etc. And she ended up joining a mission to try to reclaim those children and she described her work and how they went about it that she said they would go into taverns. They would try to buy drinks, they would loosen lips, and see if you know any children arrived during war time. So she was in there in 1946. You know, asking if any children arrived in wartime and if a child arrived in 42, right around when ghettos were being liquidated, there's a good chance that the parents had, you know, desperately found, you know, a housing situation for their child. And so even if someone said, my nephew and niece are here with me during the war, there's a chance that that was a Jewish child in hiding and So they would go with money and try to, you know, offer money to get the children back. And, you know, a lot of these families were incredibly poor, they were stretching as far as they could to have, you know, feed this extra mouth. And even when they very much loved this child, sometimes they would take the money and give the child other times they didn't want to, and this woman, you know, said that they wanted those children and they were going to try to get them no matter how it went. And, you know, even if it meant at dusk, kind of throwing them over your shoulder and running. So, you know, it was they were desperate to get them and they felt it was their moral imperative to do so. So she described that, and I really couldn't stop thinking about that. It batted around in my head for a long time. And, and that was, you know, the beginning of fleshing out the Oscar and Anna storyline of children in a setting like that and being moved and what that must feel like and you know, what the child must struggle with on on many, many levels.
And your character, Ava, who was the one trying to reclaim the children went through a lot of different phases in her life about when she was looking back about the work that she did. And sometimes wondered if maybe it wasn't the best choice. Yeah,
Yeah, and so it's interesting, because the operative that I met, did not have much retrospective, regret or, or concern, she felt she had saved the children saved Judaism, she, you know, she, she felt it was pretty clear to her. But I read the testimonies of other operatives who followed many of the children they moved, and they recognize that there was some psychic damage caused by that last that next rupture, you know, that they were ensconced in this other family, and that taking them out caused a lot of, of anxiety or, or, or just a lot of difficulty. And, and so they wondered child by child like maybe overarching ly, it was the right thing to do. But maybe there were particular cases in which they should have left the child there. Or, you know, they just wondered, was it the right thing?
We didn't talk much about Renata, who, as you said, was probably a polish or Slavic baby who is placed with a German family. And her mother, absolutely refused to speak about her past about family. She was always very secretive with Renata and Renata, ironically, or maybe because of that, became an archaeologist. So someone who was really intent on digging up secrets and examining the past.
Exactly, so she's examining everyone's past except her own because she doesn't really have a lot of access to it. And, and in the novel, you know, you start seeing that what has happened to Renata is a lot of stuff she doesn't remember. And so in fact, her storyline is to some extent narrated by her little matryoshka doll, who she's holding in her hand at the time, the Nazi soldiers take her, and she has with her through her journey. And because there are things she can't remember, but I want the reader to know, there are little interstitial chapters where the Michalska doll narrates and so you understand what has happened to Renata, even though she doesn't know. And ultimately, when her mom dies, and there's going to be, you know, a box, a lot of boxes to go through, she will probably she will learn. But I thought it was really interesting to build a character who doesn't know a lot about her past. So the other kids, you know, they grow up, sort of in front of you knowing what's happening to them, whereas Renata's past is obscured to her. And there really are a lot of people who don't know what happened in the early days. So I had watched a documentary about germinization. And I had seen this sibling pair, who only learned that they were German, in their, like, late 70s, early 80s, they had thought they were German their whole lives, but in fact, they had been moved as very young children as part of germination. And
it was, so they only learned they were German. I'm
so sorry. They only learned that they were actually not German. You know, quite late in the in the game, and the brother was very eager to kind of go back to his village, I believe it was Poland. And, you know, ask neighbors, see if anyone remembered his family, you know, try to find out as much as he could about his roots. And his sister just refused. And she was like, No, I'm German. I'm not going you know, she just didn't want to engage with that sort of new identity or new information about her identity. And I just thought it was interesting that you know, a lot of Children of War, especially very young ones who are moved around You may be missing pieces of the story, and may or may not ever learn them. I mean, these days we have DNA testing, and we have other methods for learning things. But, you know, this is relatively new. And you know, there are plenty of people whose histories just remained a mystery.
So was there anything in your research that surprised you?
I mean, honestly, everything surprised me, I was very surprised to know that there was this mission to try to get children who were, you know, hit, still hiding in Christian settings and get them back to Judaism. I didn't know about that mission at all. And I had been pretty steeped in Holocaust history, because I had written a previous novel that Yellowbird sings. But when I met this woman, I learned of this whole kind of side of it of after the war, and the attempt to reclaim the children for Judaism. And then honestly, I started opening things up. And I learned about the Finley brothers and saw that this was happening also by the church, that they were trying to keep children in the church. And then, you know, learning about germination was also kind of an eye opening thing. And I think the takeaway for me was that we do this we move children around, it happens under so many different circumstances. I mean, especially in wartime, but you see it now with Russian soldiers taking Ukrainian children. But you can also go back to Argentina, and Yemen and Chile. And there's all these cases, I mean, cases of children being moved. And for some, you know, ideological reasons, which I'm not going to pass judgment on. But for some adult conception of where a child belongs, a child has moved from possibly a place of love and moved into another place may or may not be a place of love. But it was just, to me really interesting to think about and to realize, and it wasn't just one group of people, it is all of us, because when you look at the history, it's just a rampant thing. And it's very disturbing. And in fact, you know, I could have chosen to just write the Oscar and Anna's story, but but I didn't want to do that, because it's not only Jews who went back and reclaim children, right. It's, it was happening kind of in this, you know, on many levels, and you know, sort of on under different conditions. And I guess it's really important to me to say that I don't draw equivalencies at all between the cases like a Jews after the Holocaust, trying to reclaim Jewish children is not at all like Nazis, taking children from Polish families and you know, trying to Germanized them like they're not the same in any way. However, the commonality here is the children themselves and the struggles they face because my four children, however different their circumstances were, are all struggling with their sense of self and how to connect to others. And what is home and Where do I belong?
Do you have any projects in the works that you would like to mention?
I am working on a new novel. It's at the very beginning. It's about a young girl who wakes up after having a illness and a high fever and she can't hear. It's really about a journey she takes sort of through through the Deaf capital D and lowercase d deaf worlds of you know, and trying to explore the kind of fractiousness in in those worlds and looking at that as a possible microcosm into like the larger fractiousness of our of our situation today. And as you know, my daughter's are both deaf. And I've kind of over my the course of my writing life have kind of been dealing with deafness in different ways on the page as well as in our life, and decided I really wanted to explore this in a way that showed all sides of the debates in a way that wasn't biased and really kind of, I don't know, like, let the hearing world into the mindsets, because they all have some validity, and they're all a bit crazy in certain ways. And like everything, you know, there's a range and a big array, and I think, I hope it'll be interesting.
It sounds wonderful. And you did include a deaf character in this book as well. So a kid grew into young man who is Oscar's best friend was deaf and they talked about learning sign language and learning how to communicate with him.
Yes, he's in there and he's one of my favorites.
My last question is always if you would like to take a minute to promote some call to action for tikun olam for repairing the world. What would it be?
Yeah, our world is in need of repair on so many levels. And I was thinking thing that may be the best call is that if you're not acting to act, and if you're acting a little act more, because we need, you know, we just need everyone engaged. And, you know, in our family, we're working right now on voter protection so that, you know, as the election comes forward, that people's votes will be that people won't be disenfranchised in voting. That's just one aspect of so many issues. But I think given that, you know, the book I've written about children in wartime, you know, fighting for peace, in whatever way we can get it is really, so primary. And I hope that people will do everything they can to try to promote peace.
Yeah, as we're recording this, the war in Gaza has been going on for five months now. And you definitely need more, more peace in that area, and for those children and other hostages to be redeemed and reclaimed and sent home. Exactly. So if someone would like to contact you, what is the best way?
My website has a contact email, that you can just go right on the site and get in my website is, is WWW dot, Jennifer dash rozner.com had to add that dash between the two R's. And, yeah, that's probably the best way because you can also see if I'm having an event nearby, or if you would like to ask you, you know, asked me to join in your book club or all kinds of things there.
Wonderful. Well, Jennifer Rosner, thank you so much for speaking to me about Once we were home.
Thank you so much for having me.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite origins brick or online bookstore, or at your local library. Thanks to de Yan ki for use of his fraleigh which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries. And you can find more about it at WWW dot Jewish Library's dot org slash nice Jewish books. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz. Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi, everyone, I'm Martin Lemelman, the author and illustrator of the miracle seed. I'm thrilled to be able to join Heidi and the upcoming book of life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to two amazing Israeli women. Dr. Sarah Salone of Hadassah Hospital, and Dr. Elaine Solloway of the iRobot Institute. They created a miracle in my book. For more than 1000 years, the Judean date palm was extinct. Working with Ancient Seeds discovered on the fortress of Masada. They brought this special tree back to life.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlit. Join me to hear my conversation with Martin lemon about the miracle seed at BookofLifepodcast.com