RachelBaranbaumVIOP

    9:35PM Apr 25, 2022

    Speakers:

    Sheryl Stahl

    Heidi Rabinowitz

    Susan Kusel

    Rachel Barenbaum

    Keywords:

    book

    molly

    anna

    chernobyl

    cosmic ray

    yulia

    write

    soviet union

    characters

    jewish

    felt

    raisa

    read

    happen

    comic book

    travel

    dies

    russian

    people

    meltdown

    I haven't checked the weather, but I know it is a perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at nice Jewish books. In this episode, I am happy to welcome Rachel Berenbaum to talk about her latest novel Atomic Anna. Hi, Rachel!

    Hi, Cheryl. Thanks so much for having me.

    I'm thrilled that you're here. I really enjoyed your first book A Bend in the stars, which featured a woman in the sciences who had romance and a great adventure. So I was really happy to see another book with a Jewish female protagonist, who was a mathematician slash nuclear physicist. But then you added time travel, and my favorite quote by Hillel, "if not now, when?" What more perfect quote, can there be for a novel like this? So I admit, this is turned into a fan girl, moment for me. But since my brain does get a little twisted with the time travel, would you like setting up the story?

    Yeah, thank you so much. That was such a great introduction. That was, that was my dream. So yes, the book is about three generations of Jewish women from one family. So we have grandmother, mother and daughter, it's Anna, Molly and Raisa and they work together, they come together in order to build a shot a time machine to stop Chernobyl, but actually, they're saving their family. And along the way, they realize that the Time Machine is a horrible weapon. And they ask big questions inspired by Pirke Avot you know, just because they can doesn't mean they should. If not me, then who? If not now, then when? Right? These are the big questions andPirke Avote is in front of the beginning of every section of the book, I have a little quote from there with these questions that hopefully inspire the reader to think about these morality and these questions of ethics as you're reading.

    So I wanted to start with Chernobyl, on a sadder note, since it has been in the news so much recently. And that one of Anna's goals is to prevent the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. And it just struck me since I've been hearing in the news, how many Russians have no knowledge about this. And during the invasion, they're just tractored through the area raising up all kinds of radioactive dust. And it's just such a horribly sad situation from so many different points. How did you decide to focus on Chernobyl?

    So Chernobyl is the disaster, the meltdown was the first massive news event that I remembered in my childhood, I was young. And you know, before that, I had heard accidents where, you know, you fall and you hurt your knee, or you, you know, smack your brother or your sister, right? These are accidents that you want to avoid. And yeah, then I hear about Chernobyl accident. And I realized how horrific it was. And the grown ups could actually destroy the world, with science with something that was intended to power, right, entire cities, cleaner, energy, all this kind of thing. And so just Chernobyl in itself that has always been sort of in the back of my mind. And then in 2016, all these essays started coming out to mark the anniversary with pictures from the Chernobyl from the nearby towns, the close city of Pripyat, which was right next door where the workers lived. It just looked like a ghost town. And it was so freaky, it really highlighted how scary it was the meltdown, how much destruction happened, how many people and animals died. And I just thought I have to write about this. And then I was reading about the cosmic ray station that the Soviets built on Mount Aragats in Armenia, was there in the Soviet Union. And it's real, that is absolutely real. I took that straight from this New York Times essay, it was a National Geographic, The Guardian, like all these essays came out about this amazing, amazing cosmic ray station. And I don't know, those two things, the cosmic ray station and Chernobyl just mash together in my head, and came out as Atomic Anna and time travel. And this this mission to stop the destruction.

    I knew a fair amount about Chernobyl, but I had no idea that the cosmic ray station was real. So that is fascinating. Yeah. So I'm not quite sure where to start. I've so many questions.

    Great. My favorite kind of interview.

    So one theme in your book seems to be about generational trauma. Would you like to talk about that?

    Yeah, I mean, I think in in my own family, I grew up with grandparents who are always asking me if I knew where the passports were, if I knew where the emergency money was, right, they always said Be ready to run. And yet my parents themselves and I, you know, We were born in America and lived a very safe life. And yet, in the back of my head, I always have this notion of have your passport ready, be ready to run. And so I don't know, you know what to call that, but to label that, but that is very much a part of my childhood and my life experience. And so that, you know, I sort of tried to echo that because my character Raisa, and Molly they hear from Anna, Molly hears from her adopted parents or adopted mother, Yulia, you know, sort of this fear, also. And I just pass that down to each generation, because it's something that is very real. And I think very many people experienced that.

    Yeah, and it just seemed that every, almost every character was the subject of this, that Anna had been traumatized by the circumstances around the death of her mother. And that made her feel unloved and unlovable. So she didn't feel that she could be a good mother. So she gives her child away to Yulia to raise. And then, as you said, you Leah, and her husband was laser, you know, were so traumatized by their life in the Soviet Union and so fearful in the United States, that they were afraid when Molly said that she wanted to be an artist or comic book artist, that she wouldn't be able to support herself. This wasn't something that she could, you know, use as a resource if she had to flee, that that wouldn't bring in the money that she would need to survive. Yeah, you know, and then, also, because they weren't willing to talk about their life in the Soviet Union, I think Molly felt really unmoored that she was raised almost her entire life in the United States spoke English at school. But she was living in this Russian enclave, but and spoke Russian, but didn't really have a connection to the actual Russia or Soviet Union. So I don't know if that was one thing that kind of led to her turning towards drugs, or, you know, some of the problems that she had in her life.

    Yeah, I mean, I think this notion of feeling trapped between two worlds is also very common for people, especially who speak a whole different language at home, eat different foods than what you might see in the American public schools, cafeterias, you know, to only speak English when you get to school is a very different experience, right for children to grow up there. And you know, sort of to blend in. And so it's easy to feel like an outsider. And I really wanted to capture that for Molly. And for her daughter, Raisa, I wanted them to both know what it felt like or, you know, to show what it felt like as this sort of, to be on the fringe there.

    Yeah, I definitely caught that in the reading. So to switch subjects slightly, I've heard and read about two major trends and time travel thought. One is the butterfly effect, where even a very small change in the past could have a massive impact on the future. And the other is more like a river, where you might throw in a rock, and it would change a little bit in a small place. But basically, time will just keep progressing along the same path. Where would you say your book false? Or what is your theory on this?

    Yeah, I mean, I guess what I tried to show is more of the butterfly effect that is very small changes can make have huge ripples throughout time in history, right? If you think about it by changing, even, you know, one moment, a chance meeting could be prevented, right? So if Anna jumps into a situation and she crosses a street, you know, ahead of somebody, then she might prevent somebody from bumping into somebody and falling in love and then starting a new family, right? There are all kinds of things that can happen, unintended consequences that you have no idea could possibly happen. And so this is what I really tried to touch on in the book is that a you know, what kind of time travel would be acceptable? So is there a way to justify it? So could you say, for example, we're going to stop Chernobyl and save all of these 1000s and 1000s of people from the, you know, hundreds of 1000s and all these animals and everything that's happened? Well, yes, that's a beautiful thing to say. And nobody would object to that. Except what about the doctors or scientists who met while they were cleaning up or working at the site and then fell in love and had families, all of that would be erased, right, or the people who left and came to America are moved to France or move to wherever they could write just other parts of the Soviet Union? In order to get away you're interfering with that entire trajectory? And so who should be able to do that? Who has the right to turn around and say I know what's best, and who can choose which lives to save and which not to save?

    And will she even still have her daughter Molly and will Molly have the granddaughter Raisa if they change that timeline?

    Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

    Yeah, I think that was fascinating. How did you map out? How did you keep track of the time travel and the different storylines?

    Very carefully, very carefully. That was very difficult. I grew up in Excel, you know, I used to be in finance. And so I use Excel spreadsheets. And they're very, very detailed, very careful. And talk about the butterfly effect, right? Changing one small thing, even moving it by a day or two days or a month changes everything in the book. So each chapter, for example, or each section starts with a header that says so many days or years until Molly dies at Mount Aragats. And, you know, so if I change one date, that has to go throughout the entire book, and I have to really, you know, trace that and make sure it all works out. And you know, that we're in the right time period. And if I say something like Mali jumps three months, or you know, three years, I have to make sure that tracks to the right time going forward. So it's very complicated.

    And I was struck to that you did say "before she dies," even though the goal is that she doesn't die. So "until she presumably dies" until she's set if time continues, along the same path.

    I mean, right, right from the beginning, in the very first scene, Anna is holding an amplifier that she hopes will increase the power output at at Chernobyl at the power plant. And so she's holding that at during the meltdown. And this huge power surge turns that amplifier into the time machine. So that's how she builds it, you know, this from the very first few pages of the book, not a spoiler, and then she gets to the mountain, and she finds a dying woman, she's bleeding out, you know, on the floor, in this compound, and Anna realizes this is her daughter, Molly, you know, that she hasn't seen in years and years. And so you know, from the beginning that Molly is going to die in that scene. And so that's why I felt comfortable saying, you know, until Molly dies, and then leaving that hanging, is that, does that mean, no matter what's going to happen, she's going to die anyway, is that actually going to happen? So you have to read the books. But it seems like that's been a very helpful way for readers to track where we are as we jump around in time.

    Yes, definitely. I found it helpful. So without giving away how it ends, I'll just comment that I thought the ending was beautiful. That it seems like you set up that there would be two probable endings, but then you did something else entirely. That still fit the whole work. So, so well done you.

    Thank you. Thank you.

    So sometimes, when people do kind of a surprise ending, it's like, Well, where did that come from? But it totally made sense.

    Thank you. So the second to last scene is the scene in which Anna goes back and revisits her mother the night that her mother dies. And that is actually the very first scene that I wrote for the entire book. So I was sort of writing towards that the entire time.

    It was beautiful. Okay. Yeah. So recently, there's been an uptick in the number of Jewish fantasy books. You know, I've seen a handful come out every year for the past few years, but there's still very few science fiction. So why do you think that is? And what drew you to the more sciency side?

    So I have no idea why they're more science fiction. I wish I did. But my book is really about family and love and there's time travel in it. And so people tend to think it's science fiction in that sense, but it's really about the emotions and that's what interests me right? So often compared to like, Addy LaRue or Outlander books, right where it's about Okay, you're time traveling, but really, we want to know what happens to the characters. Are they in love? Are they not? Are they going to save one another? And that's what interests me in writing is the love the right bit for family for mother daughter, grandmother. Right, that bond and can you repair that bond? Even if you've made some terrible awful mistakes? Can you still go forward in love and, you know, towards towards a better life?

    Yeah, that was one thing that you did in your book, too. This was also about creating family since Julia and Anna had been dear friends for a long time. And gave, Yulia, so I'm losing track of the names, and agave, Yulia Molly to raise and so they had already been a family, but it just sort of reconfigured that instead of Anna Molly, along with Yulia and Lazar. It was Yulia and Lazar with Molly.

    Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, Anna, Yulia was Anna's first love, and she loved her dearly, and so anyone was going to take Molly it was going to be Yulia. And so that was that was very clear. So I know the names are hard. It's very typical Russian novel in that sense. And so in the finished copy of the book, I have a beautiful family tree that hopefully helps me, you know, to move through these names, because it's very typical, like Dostoevsky. And if you read old Russian books, they have like the cast of characters set out in the beginning. And I thought about doing that. But instead, we went to the family tree idea. And I think hopefully, that's helpful.

    I did a little sketch of that at the beginning of my notes for this interview. Because unfortunately, since I got the advanced readers copy, it just said, the tree will go here. Yeah, actually including it.

    Right? Family Tree to come. Right.

    So you mentioned that the cosmic rays are real, what are they?

    The cosmic ray station, I know it's looking for a hard rain, sort of looking out in the universe station, where you went out, sort of looking for what's coming down, what sort of information we can gather from what's coming through the inventory, you know, the, the atmosphere and what's out there and just sort of a place to stare there also, all kinds of fun conspiracy theories about what the cosmic ray station is. And if you look at it, it's totally sketchy looking. Can't believe it's happening. But yeah, so that's, it's just, you know, it's like a scientific base.

    So you said that was real was Anna based on any historical person, or people put together a conglomerate of people?

    So Anna is based on a number of different people that I put together. I mean, she's really this fantastic character, and that don't know that any one person could invent and do as much as she did, right. I mean, she created the first nuclear bomb for the Soviet Union, and then designed and oversaw Chernobyl, built a time machine, right, I gave her this huge life larger than life. So she's really based on a bunch of different people that I put together. And I made all into this one woman, because I love to write really strong women at the helm of bucks. And so that's Anna,

    Would you tell me about the role of the comic book or graphic novel that Molly was writing throughout this?

    Yeah. So I love to talk about the comic books in there, the middle generation, Molly really sees the world. She's an artist. And so she sees the world as a contrast of light and dark and colors, as opposed to numbers that her daughter sees the world through, right and, or the science lens. And so she escapes into her drawing and her artwork, and she discovers comics and starts drawing these comic books and becomes she's a brilliant comic artist, although she doesn't have much of a career because she falls to drugs and other things. But these comic books ultimately become the way that she communicates to her daughter and to her mother, right, and that she keeps track of their progress and what they're doing, and they become the connector throughout the novel. So I've actually had this amazing project. I've connected with some real life comic book artists who have been drawing these characters that I imagined and I talked about in the book. And so the comic book is called Atomic Anna, which is where the title for the book comes from. And so these comic book artists have been drawing the imagined cover for Molly's comic book and the imagined characters. So atomic Anna, mighty Minerva, and rocket Raisa, and it's been such a fun project and such a fun way to connect with a lot of readers, but also with my characters themselves, because they can see themselves in these characters and pass messages along. And sometimes it's easier to say something in a picture than in words. So that it's a real it's a very big part of the book.

    And I think it would make an awesome graphic novel turning that the whole book into a graphic novel.

    Thank you.

    It was also, you mentioned that it was a way for Molly to connect with her mother and her daughter, but it was also a way for Anna to communicate with Raisa.

    Yes.

    So since she knew that she was reading her mother's books that she snuck things in.

    Exactly, yes.

    The value of photograph also was an important thread throughout.

    Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of us have these old family photographs, and we don't really know the story behind them. Sometimes we don't even know who's in them, right. We just know, this is a family photograph, who was it? Where were they what day you don't really know. And you can sort of imagine around it. And so you see my characters and in particular looking at this photograph, you know, sort of imagining the family she could have had or that grew without her and what could have happened? So yes, photographs, pictures. I think they play a very big part in our lives.

    Okay, so Yes, wonderful family pictures. So it sounds like you did a lot of research for this project. What in your research surprised you?

    I mean, I think just learning about the cosmic ray station was surprising thing. Other than that, I think learning about the book also opens in the scene where Molly and her adopted parents are building a bomb shelter in their basement. And, you know, I didn't realize that the specifications for the shelter were published in Life Magazine. And you know, in sort of how the all of America was told how to prepare for, you know, all out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and it's eerily resonant today. And so that has really surprised me, because obviously, I didn't know this was going to happen right, three years ago, as I'm writing this, but learning about that seeing it today, and that that fear that preparation for sort of the end of the world, that was very much the the feeling of the time when the book opens, seems to be a little bit of the feeling today as well.

    Was there a large Jewish community in Philadelphia at the time? I'm sorry, a large Russian Jewish community. I know that Yulia ended up there, because they had one connection there. But was there a large? Yeah, yeah.

    Yeah. So there still is, there's still a big one out there. And my family does a lot of shopping in Russian markets in that area. And we're up there, especially when I was growing up, we spent a lot of time out there.

    Are there any interesting tidbits that you found that did not make it into the book?

    I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages that I wrote that are not in the book. So that's always the hard part of you know what to cut out, I get some writers are very precious, and in their sentences, and they write beautiful prose every day. And I am not that kind of writer, I will generate a lot of pages, a lot of words. And a lot of it's terrible. But that's sort of my process and how I work through getting to the good stuff. So there's a lot of stuff that I cut out that didn't make it to the final, you know, and moving characters, oh, instead of doing this in the, you know, in the back of their store, let's move this to the school, or let's move this to a diner or whatever. So I will try characters in different situations in different places, until I find one that actually works for me for the book. And so it's a lot of experimenting to get to this final book, right, these final pages,

    I remember being given the advice by a writing teacher at one point that, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly. So just just put it all out there. And then as you said, trim it down, and ya know, figure out what, what's the good stuff?

    Yeah, I mean, it's much easier to make a terrible sentence into a good sentence, right? Or to just cut it rather than to look at the blank page, and just worry yourself forever. What's going to be on there? Where are they going, you know, a lot easier to have something to work with.

    So do you have any projects in the works that you would like to talk about? I mean, it's only I mean, it's been two days since the book is officially out.

    Yeah, I know. It's been overwhelming. So deep into my next book, which will be about the World Trade Center. 9/11. I was down there when that happened. So it's not going to be memoir. It's going to be fiction. But I think it's time to write about that. So stay tuned. And hopefully, I can come back and tell you about that. It'll be a while.

    Right? Yeah. Is there anything you would like to answer that? I haven't thought to ask.

    You've asked great questions. So no, I mean, I'm just so excited that you love the book so much. It's just a thrill to talk to someone who's such a careful reader, you read the books so carefully, and I just, I can't thank you enough for that. Well,

    You'll have to check back with me in 10 years or so. But I suspect this is going to be on one of my all time favorite book list. I mean, the list changes a lot that.

    Thank you.

    So if someone were to use your book as a call for tikkun olam for repairing the world, what would it be since time travel is not an option for us to come back? repair things are done.

    I mean, I think that the concept of tikun olam is very much in these pages and that the three generations are repairing their relationship with one another, right? And they're gaining the courage, the ability to look back on their mistakes that they made, you know, with one another to go back and say sorry, but even more the courage to go forward and say not only am I sorry, but I want to try again, I want to keep going forward with you. And so that's the kind of repair that I think a lot of us me I can speak for myself like that I want to be able to do every day to say to someone I made this mistake. Let's keep going forward that you can always look for the future, right, a better future to recognize your wrongs in the past and to do better. That's all we can do is try to do better. Right? Try to learn from the past and try to do better.

    Yep, absolutely. All right, great. Well, those are all the questions I had But I really loved your book love speaking with you. And I wish you all the best. Thank you!

    This is amazing. It was such a fun interview. And I like I said, I just appreciate that you read the book this carefully and that you love to tell them again. So thank you. Thank you for reading and for this time today,

    My pleasure!

    If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore, or at your local library. Thanks to Die Yan Kee for use of their 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 libraries.org/nice Jewish books. I would like to thank AJL and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.

    This is Susan Kussel co chair with Heidi Rabinowitz of the holiday highlights committee for the Association of Jewish libraries. I'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast. Heidi and I would like to dedicate this episode of the holiday highlights committee. Amy Lillian Harper, Robin Friedman, and Sylvia Schaeffer.

    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 in April 2022. To hear my conversation with Susan cosell at Book of Life podcast.com