THE BOOK OF LIFE - "Espionage! Secrets! Suspense!" Holocaust Books with Adam Gidwitz & Steve Sheinkin

12:34AM Jun 15, 2024

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Sheryl Stahl

Heidi Rabinowitz

Adam Gidwitz

Steve Sheinkin

Karen Jensen

Chris Baron

Keywords:

story

book

jewish

max

write

books

holocaust

spy

feel

kids

adam

rudy

podcast

read

steve

lies

love

talk

spies

escape

[COLD OPEN] I think the questions I really needed to ask, I asked, and the other ones are things that just get us deep into Nazism and stuff. I feel like we went there and we've come up out of that. So Steve, next time you and I have a beer, I'm just gonna hold your feet to the fire on and what Hitler really thought about stuff. But we'll do that some other time.

All right, that's something to look forward to.

Yeah, right?

Fires, Nazis.

Yay!

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz.

Before I tell you about today's interview, I want to let you know that The Book of Life podcast can now be heard on YouTube. Go to youtube.com/@BookOfLifePodcast to listen and subscribe.

Today, I've got two incredible authors, Steve Sheinkin and Adam Gidwitz, who joined me to talk about their most recent books, Impossible Escape and Max In the House of Spies. As many listeners know, I tend to avoid Holocaust books because I've kind of overdosed on them during a long career of working with Jewish children's literature. But both of these books are so good that I couldn't ignore them. Impossible Escape is young adult nonfiction, and Max In the House of Spies is middle grade historical fantasy fiction. They are very different books, but they also make a great pairing, as do Adam and Steve, who are friends in real life. We had a wide ranging conversation. This episode is a little longer than most, but so worth it. Be sure to check the show notes for links to more about Adam and Steve, for a transcript, and more at bookoflifepodcast.com.

Steve and Adam, welcome to The Book of Life.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

So a blurb for Max In the House of Spies by you, Adam, a blurb from author Alan Gratz says "Espionage! Secrets! Suspense!" which really could describe both books. So let's start by learning a little bit about both of them. Adam, why don't you go ahead and tell us about Max In the House of Spies. What is it about?

Sure. So Max is 11 years old. It is 1938 he is sent from Germany to England on the Kindertransport, when 10,000 Jewish children were taken into England, but their parents were not. But when he is on his way over, two creatures appear on his shoulders, a kobold, which is like a German goblin known for causing mischief, and a dybbuk from the Jewish tradition. It attaches itself to you and makes your life miserable, and lucky Max, he's got them both. When he gets there, he gets placed with a real historical family, the Montagues, who were a Jewish family who happened to be high up in British Intelligence. And Max desperately wants to get back to his parents, to Germany, and so he tries to get himself trained as a spy. Whether he'll succeed is the question of the book.

Okay, thank you. And Steve, tell us about the Impossible Escape. Who escaped from where and why was it so impossible?

The main figure in my story, which is a nonfiction book, is Rudolf Vrba, Rudy. He's 17. It's during World War II, and he knows Jews are being rounded up in his home country of Slovakia. He wants to fight the Nazis. His mother tells him this is impossible, and page one is him leaving home. Where the escape part comes from is that he gets swept up into the camps and winds up eventually in Auschwitz. This is his story of his survival in the camp for almost two years, but also his unending determination to get out, and how he did it.

These two Holocaust books are kind of polar opposites. We've got fiction and nonfiction, we've got fantasy and reality, but they both have strong, highly intelligent heroes who achieve nearly impossible things. So what drew each of you to your subject matter, and after so many books on other topics, why write a Holocaust book now?

I have been wanting to write a story about the Kindertransport for many, many, many years. When I was growing up, a very close family friend of ours was Michael Steinberg, who's a music critic. If you ever went to a symphony concert, often the concert notes were written by Michael. He was one of the children, one of the kind, as they called them, on the Kindertransport. He got out in 1938 at the age of 10. And so I've been aware of that story for a very long time. Always thought it would make an incredible novel if I could figure out how to tell it right. But I didn't have a good way in. And then I got really into reading the true spy stories of Ben McIntyre: Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, really incredible true stories about British Intelligence in World War II. And then the pandemic hit, and I was, like most of us, really disturbed by the atmosphere of lies that was swirling around us. It felt in that moment like I didn't know who was telling the truth, and I didn't know who was trying to tell the truth. Right? Were we supposed to wear masks or not? Was washing your hands important? Was being outside safer? Should we be injecting bleach into our veins? Right? Some people were clearly saying things that were intentionally false, and other people were saying things that were well intentioned. I started thinking about like, why? And why would people lie when they knew it was a lie, and why would people commit themselves to lies? Right? It wasn't that Trump told people to inject themselves with bleach. It was that some people did it, and those people should have been smart enough to know this is not something that we do. So what happens when a nation decides to commit itself to lies? How does that happen? I got out of the public library a book about Goebbels and his propaganda methods. And so then finally, I realized that if I took the Kindertransport that I'd always wanted to speak about, the spy stories that I'd fallen in love with, and this question that was plaguing me, how does a country commit itself to lies, that is the ingredients for what would hopefully be a really good book.

I didn't intend to necessarily write a Holocaust book, and certainly didn't know how the world would be when it came out, but it was the escape story. As a collector and lover of true stories, it's basically what I do for a living. I'm particularly drawn to spy stories and escape stories. That's initially what drew me. And of course, the story is much bigger and more complex than that and requires the historical context of World War II and the Holocaust and the Nazis. But it begins with a teenager facing impossible odds, trying to escape from this death camp and tell the world what he has seen at a time when there have been no eyewitness accounts of what's going on inside the walls of this camp. So that, in a nutshell, is what drew me to the story.

Steve, your story is told from two points of view. Why include the perspective of Rudy's future wife, Gerta?

This happens often with my books, another storyline or character just demands to be part of the story. I started with Rudy's story. He has a friend named Gerta who's a couple years younger. She's also a Jewish kid. She had a crush on him, but he didn't return it or even recognize it. I mean, he was 14, she was 12. They are separated, of course, by the war, and they connected again after all his efforts and escape and getting out of occupied Poland. He had made his way back to their home country. She had been in hiding in various places throughout the war. Then they had this reunion that she kind of expected to be a -- she even in her head described, I really expected it to be a Hollywood moment. We would fall into each other's arms. And even by the way she hugged him and felt his body tense, she knew that he wasn't the same person any more, and how could he be? They eventually married, but having those dual points of view, I think, helped me move this story along. It's mostly Rudy's story in terms of just strictly word count, but Gerta's story is fascinating. It's a different perspective than what you normally hear. It also served a practical purpose. For instance, she could listen to the radio that he couldn't, and so when I wanted to give a bit of a war update, that was a practical way of doing it. I could say "and she listened to the news," or she could even hear the BBC, and that was a way of getting in the war updates that I needed in order to keep the timeline moving toward the climactic action.

I love the book, Steve, and I really love that moment when they reconnect, when she looks in his face and his eyes and sees that he's not who she expected, and yet, knowing that they will get past that and that she will find some other way of understanding is so beautiful. But what I wanted to say, one other thing that I really appreciated about her part of the story is: I have heard an Auschwitz story. I've heard Anne Frank story. But there are all of these Jewish experiences and non-Jewish experiences around the war that we don't get to hear very often. Hearing, like, the Jewish communities that were hanging on there through the war, that hadn't yet been deported, was fascinating. So could you tell us a little bit more about, like, Gerta's sort of unique experience?

Yeah, thank you. Any Jewish teenager who made it to 1944 was going to have one hell of a story to tell. She was with her parents some of the time, some of the time on her own. She went back and forth between Slovakia and Hungary; their initial destination was to make it to Budapest and live as a Christian family under false identities, which worked for a while, but was never going to work for five years. And she ended up having incredibly close calls, being arrested herself near the end of the war. That was something that I didn't know. You can start a story, and a big part of it can be something you've never heard of.

Yeah, for the second volume of Max In the House of Spies, which is Max In the Land of Lies, and will come out in one year, it's already written and finished. In fact, I wrote the whole book as one big story, and then we needed to find a way to divide it in half, because it was like 135,000 words, and my editor was like, Barnes and Noble is never stocking that. So, you know, in 1940 Germany was winning, right? And so all of the things that Hitler had promised seemed to be coming true. And also the Holocaust hadn't begun yet, at least not in Germany. But Jews were still living, albeit in terrible conditions, in Berlin. And so these Jewish people walking around Berlin as the Germans are walking around feeling fat and fed and triumphant, like that moment seemed like one that we don't see very often, and I really wanted to depict the tension when Max does get back to the streets of Berlin, spoiler alert, he's got to be feeling: Man, maybe Hitler was right. He was lying, but maybe what he predicted was going to come true anyway.

Adam, at the end of your book, there's a section called "how much of this story is real?" So you wrote a fantasy. Why was it important to clarify which elements were real?

Well, mostly because so much of it was, and I needed to give credit to the real people. When Max goes to England, I said he's placed with this Jewish family, the Montagus. Doesn't sound like a Jewish name, I know; it's because their grandfather was Montagu Samuel. Their great grandfather, Montagu Samuel's parents swapped his name Samuel Montagu when he was a little kid so that he could avoid antisemitism in England. And the Montagus, Ewen being high up in British intelligence, his brother Ivor, being the founder of the English Table Tennis Association. I mean, that guy's got to get credit for that. That's important. Also the fact that maybe, just maybe, he was a Soviet spy, spying on his brother. I mean, that stuff is so cool that if you know it's real, to me, anyway, it's even cooler. And I think especially when you depict antisemitism, and I find this when I read of accounts of any kinds of racism, my question is often: Really? Were they really like that? Did they really say that? Did they really think that about you? Were you just imagining it? right? How much of that is real, and how much of those kinds of things did you just make up to make it a better story? So at one point, Max has to be interrogated by Tin Eye Roberts. He was a terrible person. He was the head interrogator at Camp 020, which is where people were interrogated by British secret services, and also was the place that inspired George Orwell to create Room 101. Because Tin Eye was the chief interrogator there, his interrogations are all matters of record, or at least, many of them are. And he was a bastard and he was so racist, antisemitic and racist, and it's all down there in the record. And was he playing it up for the sake of interrogation? I don't know. There's only so much that you can pretend. You know if you say it, you probably think it. So I didn't make that stuff up, and I want people to know that, no, I wasn't just doing that to make Max seem more like a victim or more heroic when he overcomes it. That's also real.

So Adam, you write a lot of fantasy, including your previous Jewish book, The Inquisitors Tale that we podcasted about together in 2017. You write about Grimm's fairy tales. I love your podcast Grim Grimmer Grimmest. You created the Unicorn Rescue Society series. You write Star Wars related books. And Max In the House of spies also has some fantasy elements, although it's, it's a lot more realistic than most of these other books. But I wanted to ask you to talk about the fantasy elements, the dybbuk and the kobold on Max's shoulders. Why do you have a dybbuk and a kobold on Max's shoulders? Why did you choose to tell a Holocaust story as a fantasy?

That's a great question. Betsy Bird, Fuse 8 blog you know, she wrote a really wonderful review of Max in the House of Spies. Her main criticism was: the kobold and the dybbuk could have come right out, I think is a direct quote, is what she says. And from a plot perspective in the first volume of the book, that may be true. In the second volume, they're required by the plot. But it is a dark time for a Jewish protagonist, and it was important for me both to have plenty of opportunities for humor, and they're essentially Statler and Waldorf sitting on his shoulders, heckling him the whole time. It's an opportunity for me to write an accent. I love writing them, I mean, one sounds like a High German professor and the other sounds like a vaudeville comedian. That was fun for me, but also, Max is fundamentally alone, separated from his parents in this country he's never been to, surrounded by a whole bunch of antisemites. I'm talking about England now. And he's got to figure out how to survive there. And I wanted him to have somebody to talk to, somebody to reflect his feelings off of so we could see him and his internality. I guess the other major influence for this book that I really should have mentioned is John le Carre novels. And in John le Carre novels, often the characters are doing things and you don't know why they're doing them, and then finally there's a reveal, and you're like, Oh, that was amazing. So there are a couple of times when Max is doing things and you're like, I don't know why he's doing that. And it was nice to have Stein and Berg, the kobold and the dybbuk, also being like, "Max, baby, what are you doing? Explain yourself." Just to help the kids understand what was going on. I have already had a bunch of kids and grownups come up to me and say that they were their favorite part of the novel, and so I feel very pleased that they're there. And if you don't like them, feel free to skip them. It's fine, whatever.

I think they're very important. I love them. I love the book. But of course, there are different perspectives. I had someone just at a school this week tell me she didn't think Gerta's story was necessary in my book. I love the similarities between our books, which seem to be so different. And one of them is, yes, we're trying to get at really dark times in history that kids probably don't know very much if anything about, but it's got to be done through story to be effective. And my background in textbook writing, I'm very well aware of how poorly that works when you just present things as names and dates, facts to remember until the test, at which time you just forget. So yeah, having humor where possible, having story, is super important in both of our books. And I think otherwise, the stories would be both too dark and, quite frankly, not very compelling to read.

Could I ask the question about your, like, rules? I guess, my rule for the historical fiction fantasy that I write, both Inquisitors Tale and this book, is: it can't happen if it couldn't have happened. And my only two exceptions are Max being sent to Germany as a 12 year old spy, and Stein and Berg, because, well, I mean, it could have happened, but we don't have any evidence of that. And I put that right up front in the author's note, that these are the two things that are fantasy. But otherwise, if it could have happened and we don't have a record of it, then it could be in the book. But Steve, you have a very different standard. And you know, I was struck. I think in the prologue of the book you have a beautiful description of like, warm lights in the cafe windows or something like that. How do you get details like that, and how do you get it within your rules?

Yeah, that is so important. And throughout my career, I've been really careful, and I think gotten better at source notes, they've gotten longer anyway, for each book. I've yet to meet a middle school kid who reads them, but maybe one day, one day I will, but they're in there for that very reason. How do I know these things? How do you know? It's always from primary sources, that's the only reliable source there can be. And I'll stack the deck, honestly, in my favor. If those sources don't exist, I'm not going to tell that story. So Rudy did thousands of pages worth of interviews and hours and hours of oral histories, as well as writing his own memoir. And that's priceless stuff. And I'll pore through pages and pages and files for hours just to look for one little detail. Like as he's escaping, he gets in a cab, which is kind of a darkly funny way to escape the Nazis, to get in a cab. He just wanted to get over the first border, which would have been Hungary. Well, what happened in the cab? Well, he describes that. It's beautiful, it's priceless. He didn't have enough money. The cab driver's mustache was tobacco stained. The seat kind of crinkled as he lay down to get out of sight. It began to snow, which he saw through lights of this town along the border, knowing now that it's time to get out and trek into the woods. So all of that stuff I collect like a miner and hold on to it, because I want all those elements. I'm not kidding when I say I'm jealous of novelists sometimes, who can invent them, although, of course, that's a gift and a skill too. But the most important part of my research for me, again, we're coming back to story, is to collect the elements that allow me to tell my books as stories, and I want those characters, plot twists, high tension, high stakes, leading to climactic moments, and so all of that stuff, if you're lucky, is in the sources.

Steve, at the conclusion of your book, you specifically choose not to tell us the takeaway. And you say so, you explain that you're not going to do that. So talk about why you made that decision.

I wrestled with that at first. I thought, well, I guess I have to have some sort of summation, though I don't usually do that in my books. But I just felt like, all right. Sometimes you do have to jump in and after this big, complicated story, what do you say? I went back to the sources, as always. Let me just see what would Rudy say, because maybe he could get me out of this jam. I'll just quote him. He had a whole career as a chemist and scientist, very successful, long career, lived all over the world, but he also did a lot of Holocaust education, a lot of talks, and particularly found it meaningful to talk in schools. So I said, let me find out about what he would say about that. It was a little difficult because we don't have recordings of those talks, although I found articles, clippings. But the best note I got was from someone who knew him, someone at a university in Canada where he had worked. He was also a Holocaust survivor. And I said, All right, so solve this problem for me. Basically, what did Rudy say? What was his takeaway? He got, he tells you the story of his life, his escape and its incredible impact. And what did he say at the end? Literally, what did he say at the end? And the guy actually sounded a little bit annoyed. He said: he didn't do that. He didn't do your work for you, everything is in the story, and you should know what to do. That's what he would say if someone asked for the takeaway: you've heard the story, you know what to do. I was really moved by that. I thought it was really powerful. We talk all the time about not writing down to kids. Adam, you're a master at this too, of writing up. We both, I know, have this goal of respecting the reader's intelligence, and I think it's a really powerful tool to get this story, but I don't think we need to tell readers how to use it.

That ending is so powerful, the way you wrote it is beautiful. I had a similar insight when I was trying to compose this book. One of the major questions of the book is, if we have to choose between what we love and the truth, what do we choose? And one of the reasons I was thinking about that so much is going back to the research and reading I was doing when the pandemic began. And this is going to sound awful, but it's a Jewish podcast, so I can talk about it here and know where I'm standing and coming from. Goebbels was trying to make an argument for a national community. He talked about the national community all the time, and the idea of the national community was a community not divided in any way, not by ideology, not by race, not by religion: one community where everyone came together and worked together to make a good society. And that sounds kind of nice if, you know, you don't have to kill people in order to get there or eliminate them in other ways. I read a really incredible book called An Account Rendered by Melita Maschmann. She was in the Hitler Youth equivalent for young women, and she ultimately was getting people out of their homes in Poland, resettling Jews and also Polish people. She had a whip and she had a German Shepherd, and she talks about why she was doing what she was doing. This is actually, it's written as a letter to a Jewish friend of hers who disappeared during the war, that she never found again. She tried to talk about why she did this. She really believed in the national community. She was convinced by Goebbels and Hitler's rhetoric that we should have this society where there is no division between us, and only much later did she realize the horrible costs of that. Melita truly loved Germany. She loved it, and she had to make a choice. She knew the truth about Jewish people because one of her best friends was a Jew as a teenager. So she had to choose between the truth on the one hand and her country on the other hand, at least as she saw it, and she chose her country. And it's easy for me to say she chose wrong, but I know that there are many situations, including right now, today, in many ways where I often let my emotions cloud my moral judgment. And the reason I feel like this is really related to what Steve was talking about, is my editor once told me that my best books are the ones where I ask a question that I do not know the answer to. And so in this book, I'm trying to ask a question that I don't know the answer to, and I have it in the beginning of the book, a sort of paraphrase of Albert Camus, "between the truth and my mother, I choose my mother." I don't know which I would choose between the truth and my mother, but that's, that's the book that I wanted to write, the question I wanted to write. So it's so amazing that Steve, also the end of yours, we both get to this place where it's like, there isn't an easy takeaway, and maybe that's because of the subject matter, right? It is too big and too complex to have some neat and packaged takeaway, so just read the story.

And because I would argue that curiosity is so powerful that it is a great, and maybe the best, maybe the only antidote to prejudice, to hatred, which is always based in lies. And I think kids today are, frankly, smarter than we were in middle school, in high school, I know they're more evolved in terms of how they think about each other, how they don't divide each other as much as we did. Don't use a lot of the same derogatory terms. They're just smarter, and that is, in a world where it's so easy to get discouraged day after day, I think it's the most encouraging thing I see.

Well, it's really interesting you say that, because I was going to ask you: in later life, Rudy believed that "the mentality and danger of the Holocaust are still with us." It's something you talked about towards the end of the book. So as students of history, this question is for both of you, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think he's right?

Unfortunately, "yes" is the short answer, because it does come down to that instinct, whatever it is that Adam was just talking about, how easy it is to divide ourselves into groups and judge others, rank others, especially if we benefit from that, there's something very human about that. It's not even political. It's way beyond or before politics, that is definitely still with us. I do think, like I said, young people are getting slowly better at handling that. I think it's a form of evolution. Of course, it will take a very long time. But is it still with us? I suppose the short answer has to be yes.

I completely agree. Steve said, to me, you have an incredible quote. Page 216, of your book. You're rubbing off on me, I got to cite you here. "Rudy was sure he'd done the right thing. The only way to fight big lies, he argued, was with aggressive doses of the truth." And I read that, and like, put a lot of stars all around it, because in the second volume, Max in the Land of Lies, Max has a very similar question that he faces. He sees that part of the problem is that these people have bought these big lies. And in fact, there's a climactic scene when he realizes that himself has started believing his own lies. And what Max realizes he has to figure out to do is, he has to find an antidote to big lies. This is all spoilers, I apologize, everyone. And what he realizes is the antidote to big lies is small truths. And so when a kid who may not believe in the Holocaust, right, who has swallowed some of the big lies that are still floating around today reads Impossible Escape, the humanity of those characters, the details of the story are a better antidote to the big lies that they've swallowed than anything else, I think.

That's beautiful. I love that.

Yes. Thank you.

For each of you, as a Jewish writer, did you connect to this most recent of your books in a different way than you do to most of the other books you write which are not Jewish stories?

Yes, short answer, definitely, yes,

Yeah, definitely. And that made the research more intense. I thought a lot about: what did I know at this age? Being a young adult, what would I have wanted to know? What would have inspired me to know more? Yeah, you could tell I'm having a hard time even describing that. The research felt more emotional. I went to Poland and Slovakia too, and that felt very powerful. I wouldn't be here if my ancestors had been there at that time. They got out a couple decades before, but they were from that exact area, so yeah, it all had a personal feel that was unlike anything I'd done, and maybe that's the reason I hadn't approached or attempted the story until now. Haven't thought about that until you just asked.

I got a chance to think about it while you were answering, so I have the advantage here. But feel free to jump back in, Steve, if you're like, wait. And also, as you were talking about it, I was thinking about specifically one passage. One of my favorite characters in the book is Lord Victor Rothschild. Lord Rothschild was the richest person in the world, probably. He also happened to be obsessed with explosives and spy toys, and he made explosive devices for the British clandestine services, which is just the coolest thing ever. Max gets to have dinner with him one night, and they have this conversation that echoes a conversation that I've been having in my head about my Jewishness a lot recently. They talk about living on the borderline, and Rothschild's such a good example of it. He's the richest man in the world, and certainly the conspiracy theorists think that he controls the world and pulls all the strings, even though, as he says very clearly in the book and is true from history records, he doesn't. Absolutely, he could get a private interview with Winston Churchill, and Winston Churchill would smile and nod and then sort of pat him on the head and send him on his way. But everyone thinks, Okay, you're the most powerful man in England, and yet he could be walking down the street and any plumber from Manchester could shout, "You're not an Englishman at all. You're a Yid. Get out of my country!" right? And so Jews are often in this place where we are in positions of power, and then suddenly we're completely powerless, that amazing balancing act that we all feel. I am incredibly privileged. My family had money. I have money. I live in Brooklyn Heights. I live in the city with three times more Jews than any other place on the planet. I feel perfectly safe, and yet, suddenly something happens. And it could be a million different things. It could be people marching with torches in Charlottesville saying "Jews will not replace us." It could be an offhand comment from a friend on a text thread and I'm like, "Oh, wait, you don't think of me as like you at all." So that that was very personal for me, an opportunity to explore that in the book.

Thank you both for opening up about that. We've talked about the research that you each had to do. So was there anything that you discovered in your research that was really interesting but didn't make it into your book?

That always happens. I don't know, Adam, if it's true for you. I talked to Holocaust educators and said, All right, at what age do you introduce the gas chambers, for instance, things like that. And I got responses, about eighth grade, but I wanted the book to be accessible and appropriate to that age. And so how to describe what was happening in Birkenau, and we have eyewitness accounts that are far too graphic that you would put in an adult book, but not in a book that would be categorized even YA.

I was so glad, Steve, that you did that. In fact, that there was a moment when you explained literally how the showers worked, or the gas chambers worked with the pellets. And I realized when I was reading that passage that I hadn't known, that I had never thought through the mechanics of, wait, well, how did the poison get in there? Now I know, so I appreciate, I really appreciated you putting those kinds of details in there, because there's stuff that you think you know. And in fact, gaping hole. If some kid had asked me, I would have no clue.

And kids would ask that. And that was Rudy as a teenager, he knew that he didn't see everything. He collected, again, risking his life, collected this information of, well, what does happen in the gas chambers? How does that work? If he had ever seen the inside of one, he would never made his report. So he talked to people who were forced to work there, and a few of those people did survive the war, and left accounts behind. Some of them who didn't survive, left accounts buried in the soil in the camps that have been found in the decades since. And it was very important that he commit that to this prodigious memory that he had, all those details, and include those in the account that he gave when he finally did escape and make it back to Slovakia, the account that eventually made it through Europe to the United States. You can see articles printed in the summer of 1940 in the New York Times. They're not quoting Rudy. They never heard his name, but they got the information directly from him, and so those details were vitally important. I mean, just going back to the question is, how do you handle that? And I'm sure you must have dealt with this too, because you want your books to be accessible to even younger. I ended up writing a scene in the gas chamber that was just completely cut. It was just too, it was too much. But sometimes the only way I find those lines is by writing it, finding the story, by cutting it back to what needs to be there.

Adam, did you have anything that you found in your research that didn't end up in the book, but that you want to share with us?

What's funny is, I can't always remember what made it into the book. You spend so much time cutting, right? There's like, you write so much, and then you have to cut, and then I put things back in, so there's, I mean, there are multiple scenes, many, many scenes where I just, I can't remember, you know, if that detail got in or not. In the second volume, Max in the Land of Lies, one of the Nazis who is sort of both on the tail of Max, but maybe also befriending him, is Gustav Adolph Scheel, an SD officer, the Sicherheitsdienst, if I'm saying that correctly, which was the spies of the SS. He was a real guy. When he was in college, there was a Jewish professor, Julius Gumbel, a math professor who was openly anti-Hitler, and Scheel and Gumbel had this, like, war between them. While Scheel was a student, Gumbel escaped right before things got too dark, and when Scheel became part of the SS, he was put in charge of one of the Einsatzgruppen, the death squads, and went into France, one of the only death squads that went west. My theory, anyways, that he was looking for Gumbel because Gumbel was in France, but he never got Gumbel. Gumbel got to New York. I don't think that story is made into the book, but honestly, now I can't remember. Probably was one of those ones where my editor was like, what does this have to do with the plot? And I'm like, it's so good! So yeah.

Well, speaking of not being able to remember what you put into your book or not, this is making me think of Author-Fan Face-Off, which is a project of yours, Steve. And you both have a lot of extracurricular projects. I also mentioned Adam's podcast, Grimm Grimmer Grimmest. So can you each tell us about your various book related projects?

Author-Fan Face-Off, which we did have Adam as a guest on naturally, this was very much a pandemic baby. One fan, one author. They go head to head on trivia questions from one of the author's books. And yes, there is a beautiful thing that happens, which is that the kids, the majority of the time I would say, know the books better than the authors. They've read them more recently. They don't have in their head stuff they may or may not have put in. They just read the story, often five times in the last week, the way kids can devour books that they love. And so that was just a really fun project that we've continued to do, although slowed down. It's a way to stay connected with writers I love, and books I love, and and the kids who come on the show clearly, just remind us all the time that joy you get from a great book.

And they're smart. I mean, I had a great time with my with my opponent.

Very smart. Yeah.

So my major other project is the podcast Grimm Grimmer Grimmest. We're not recording new episodes now, but I hope we will again soon. Pinna, the company I recorded with, went through ownership shift.

And just for people who haven't heard that podcast, can you tell us what the premise is of Grimm Grimmer Grimmest?

Sure! I'd love to. I tell real Grimm fairy tales, live, to kids. If you've read my book A Tale Dark and Grimm, you know I like telling the real dark Grimm fairy tales, the scary ones, the funny ones. The reason I wrote that book in the first place is because I was telling them live to children at the school I taught at. And so I always felt like, as great as the books are, you were missing half the magic when you were reading the book, because half of the magic was what the kids were saying. And so I was approached by a podcasting company, and they were like, Do you have any ideas? And I was like, I've always wanted somebody to hear what the kids say. It's the best part. And so we figured out a way to do it, and it is the best part. You hear them laugh. You hear them scream. I love making children scream. It's adorable. And you also get to hear them heckle me, which is not my favorite part, but usually the kid's favorite part. In one of the early podcasts, the main character meets a blue dwarf, and this girl goes, she interrupts me, and she goes, You mean a smurf? And I'm like, No, it's not not a smurf. It's a blue dwarf. And she goes, I'm pretty sure that's a smurf. And I was like, it's not a smurf! And then for the rest of the episode, every time the blue dwarf comes up, the kids go, It's a smurf! And I'm like, It's not a smurf! So anyway, if you enjoy hearing children drive me bananas, you would enjoy the podcast.

I do enjoy the podcast.

Thank you.

It's awesome. You guys are friends in real life, and I know that you're fans of each other's work. You've asked each other a lot of really interesting questions, but I want to open it wide up now and ask what other questions you might have for each other?

Yeah, I got one for Adam. Max's adventures are so exciting as a reader, but I wonder, Adam, would you have made a good spy? I mean, would you, would you want to be Max?

Well, you know, you have to think about that, right? Yeah, when you're doing one of these, and I want to bounce that back to you about Rudy. When I was a kid, I would lie in bed at night and imagine, I mean, constantly, what I would have done if I were in the Holocaust. And I have no lack of imagination, but for some reason, every time I thought it through, I always came to the conclusion, no, I would have died. They would have got me. I had all sorts of other fantasies, I constantly fantasized about becoming an NBA superstar, which was clearly was never in the cards for me. And yet, the one fantasy that I couldn't even entertain was having actually escaped and survived the Holocaust, and likewise, I think being a spy, as I think about the things Max has to do, I would immediately just appeal to someone's humanity and be like, I'm gonna tell you everything. I'm gonna tell you the truth. Please be nice. Which, of course, would not work. So, yeah, I couldn't, could you? Could you have done any of the things Rudy did?

Oh, Rudy, I was gonna, I was thinking of Max. But well, my mother, the most loving woman you'd ever meet, but she could always zoom in on what you could improve. Let's, let's put it that way. I have three siblings. She had her lines for each of us, and damn if they weren't just spot on. And what she would tell me, it's embarrassing to say, but her biggest line for me was, "Don't be sneaky."

Really?!

And at the time, I thought, Well, why not? It allows you to get away with stuff. But her point was that it was a very despicable trait, but the fact that you're surprised by that...

I'm shocked!

...indicates to me maybe I would be a good spy, because I'm naturally sneaky, and people don't suspect me of being that way.

I love this, Steve, we have to put this into practice. We gotta see, like low stakes spy situation, see how sneaky you can be, because...

I think so.

...because I've never suspected it. You do appear to be a very mild mannered, kind and forthright person. I mean literally, your whole job is only telling the truth, right?

Yeah, it's a good cover.

It's a great cover.

And it's really true. You know, of course, James Bond is the most famous spy, the last person you would want to have be your spy, the guy who walks in the room and everybody looks at.

Right.

The great suit, the watch. He's super confident.

But what's funny is, so in Max in the House of Spies, there's this character, Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley, or "lef-tenant", as he would have pronounced it. And he was a spy master, and ultimately, probably a spy himself. The last known photo we have of him was 1955: he was in the Arabian Desert, dressed as a Bedouin, quote, unquote, studying wasps, which is some cover for something. But this man was nearly seven feet tall and had waxed mustaches and little round glasses, and he couldn't have fit in anywhere, and yet, somehow he was a spy. So maybe it's, maybe it's, it's all about how you carry it, I guess. I don't know.

Yeah, there's hope for all of us, I suppose.

But it's funny that you write nonfiction, because many of the great spies in history have been fiction writers, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Ian Fleming.

I love those kinds of stories, and I love reading the real life experiences that these guys have had. And in fact, if you read about 1940 Bletchley Park attempts to break the enigma code, Ian Fleming, who was an intelligence officer at the time, came up with the most outrageous, far fetched plot that they unfortunately didn't quite pull off or even attempt. They got pretty far in it, and then something went wrong. But yeah, it all began in this real life experience. I find that really fascinating.

The beginning of the war, Ian Fleming submitted a list of 50 outrageous spy plots, and one of them became Operation Mincemeat, which did work and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, probably.

Yeah, he came up with stuff they really did use, and that's true of these other guys as well. I don't have that experience. Unfortunately, I was not hired to be a spy as a young man, I should have been, but...

I mean, you wouldn't tell us if you had.

Yeah, or maybe I was.

Exactly, this is still a great cover, Steve.

That's true!

That's what I would say, yeah, when I was writing textbooks, supposedly.

Did you, either of you have any other questions for each other?

When I meet other authors, children's book authors, I love asking them how old they are, not biologically, but spiritually. And I think you even say in your author's note, you're 10. And I slowly over time, developed a theory that everyone who does this has a really specific answer to that question. And I've asked other people, and Katie DiCamillo will say, I'm 9, 10. I asked Dav Pilkey, he said, I'm in second grade, can't you tell?

He really is!

Yeah, and I guess I'm a little more like the 12, 13 range. And I'm just really curious, if you think about that, you obviously do, because you put it in there, and why is that?

I mean, I wasn't all that happy at that age. Honestly, I was like a class clown, and didn't have, like, any close friends, you know, I was much happier when I was 17 or 18 years old, you know, junior and senior in high school, and I'm much happier now. So why 10? I don't know. You know, it was before all that gross kissing stuff started, you know, that's, that stuff really kind of ruined everything, you know. And so there were times that were the most glorious in my life, I suppose, when you're just like running around playing football at recess, and you come in sweaty, and you don't care that you're sweaty, and then you fall off your chair laughing at something. I mean, I used to teach fifth grade, and it was that golden time when they had learned so much and they had become really good at their skills, and puberty hadn't set in yet for most of them. And so it's like that perfect, that perfect moment. It's kind of like the apex child in some ways. So maybe that's why I think of myself as that age. Why do you think of yourself as 13, 14, did something happen, Steve?

I would say more 12, 13, yeah, I don't know. It's so funny. When I do school visits, I show a picture of me and my brother, and we're wearing suits. It was the day of my Bar Mitzvah, and I actually was 12. My dad was like, well, that rule, we can come up with an exception. Because we were going on a trip and so I got to do my Bar Mitzvah, like, a week before my birthday. And I had a big fro, it looks great. And I was just, I was so happy to be done. I hadn't messed up, which was my main goal in life. Yeah, I mean, there's a blossoming of curiosity at that age. My father died that same year, and of course, of course, that's part of it. I don't think it's all of it, but that's why I kind of ask about the positive and negative elements to it. I don't expect to solve this question, but I do, since Heidi gave us the chance to ask, I do like to ask it of authors I admire.

Okay, so Steve, you've asked a couple of questions. Adam, did you have any other questions that you really wanted to ask?

No, I think the questions I really needed to ask, I asked in the middle of, and the other ones are things that are kind of like, just get us deep into Nazism and stuff. I feel like we went there and we've come up out of that. So Steve, next time you and I have a beer, I'm just gonna hold your feet to the fire on Hitler and what he really thought about stuff. But we'll do that some other time.

All right, that's something to look forward to.

Yeah, right?

Fires. Nazis.

Yay! All right, well, then let's move onward and upward. It's tikkun olam time. So what action would each of you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

I feel like these days, we are all operating at very high levels of emotion, for obvious reasons. There has been a lot of strong opinion stating in the world, and there has also been a fair amount of silencing going on in the world. I had a very powerful experience recently where I was speaking at a school, and what they standard do after a school speaker is they invite the affinity group that that speaker would be a part of, to come and meet with the speaker. So I got to meet with the Jewish affinity group. I said, you know, I'm happy to talk about anything. And this girl raised her hand in the front row, and she told me that her mother had worked in Gaza for a few years. And I was like, wow. And I was also curious as to why she was establishing her bona fides, like, was she about to express to me her opinion? And then she said, Can you explain what's happening there?

Wow.

And I was shocked. She was a middle schooler. She was a seventh grader. And then I tried to do a kind and fair and empathic explanation of what was happening. And then another kid raised his hand and said, Can you explain what's happening on college campuses? And it was just like these kids felt like they desperately needed someone to just, in a calm, fair-ish way, as fair as you know, I know how to make it, tell them what was happening. And I think the act of tikkun olam that I would call on people to do is to do your best possible job listening. And then when someone is ready to listen, do your best possible job of kindly and empathically explaining your view of things. I think we need a lot more of that right now. I think it would heal the world a little bit.

Thank you. That's a really amazing suggestion.

Yes, thank you, Adam. I will add the word "curiosity." How powerful it can be to find out a story, maybe especially if it's a story about someone who you think or thought was different from you. That would be my suggestion, to find someone who may seem or you think is part of some other group in some way, in some category, and just be curious, open minded, as you said, Adam, too. Listen. Listen to their story. And I think we don't need to tell anyone what to do with that. I think it's so powerful that that alone will do something very valuable for the world.

Amen.

Beautiful. Thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you, Heidi.

Is there an interview question that you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Steve, here's the question that I would want to be asked. I'll ask it to you. How are you so good at writing books?

How much time do you have?

All right baby, let me hear your answer. How are you so good?

I can't tell to what extent you want a serious answer. I think my secret is that I'm not very good at it naturally, and that I really have to work very hard to make it clear to myself. But I love puzzles. I love putting stories together. I'm surrounded by index cards of different colors, and to me, it's a puzzle that I get to decide what it looks like, and that is the one part that I am good at, and everything else is just hard work.

So, Adam, can you answer your own question, why are you so good at what you do?

Oh, I just, I just want somebody to feel that way about me. I don't have a good answer for it, for it, but I guess I think one of the things that's important, it is very, very important in my writing process that at least once, if not twice, I read the entire book aloud, full voice, not under my breath, full voice, because it's important that my ears hear the language and judge it based on that. We have all been hearing English or whatever our native language is, since even before we were born. So we are much better judges of language when we hear it rather than when we just read it. And I do think I have a pretty good ear. My mother was a professional musician, and my father loved music and was also a really excellent extemporaneous public speaker. And so from both of them, I got a really good ear and so that I make myself read the book out loud so I can hear it, I think helps make my book sound good with rhythm and pacing and hopefully humor. That's why I'm so great! As, as, as Nietzsche once said, I think in one of, in Ecce Homo, chapter titles of Ecce Homo, I think it is, Nietzsche's book. "Why I am so great" is chapter one. Chapter two is "why I'm a destiny," and chapter three is "why I write such great books," which, I mean, gosh, I wish I had his confidence.

Awesome. All right, that was good. I'm glad you came up with that. What are each of you working on next?

Max in the Land of Lies comes out a year from now. I'm very excited for you all to read that, I think a lot of the big questions get a lot deeper in that book. If you like the first one, I hope you will spend time with the second one, because it's where I really get to sink into the toughest questions. And then I have the graphic novel coming out after that, which is adaptations of the Grimm fairy tale podcast. And I'm currently writing a book about my great grandfather, Papa Jake, who was the first Gidwitz to come to this country. He was a peddler of pots and pans, and he peddled in the Mississippi Delta. Eventually established a credit store for black sharecroppers. And the interaction between Papa Jake as a Jewish immigrant and the black sharecroppers, and what happens is an amazing story that I got from his memoir, and so I'm trying to figure out how to put that into a novel.

Cool!

Wow, that is very cool. I too, have a couple graphic novels that I've written that are being illustrated. It takes a very long time. It's incredibly intense. My very first books that I ever did were my own graphic novels called The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey and I drew those. They're nice, they're good, but at this point, when I write these more ambitious historical sagas, it's nice to get a professional artist to do those books. So those are in the works, and the next thing that's coming out for me will be a real change of pace. It's a novel. It's historical fiction that I'm doing with a friend and very well known young adult novelist Ruta Sepetys. She is known for taking on little known bits of history for young adults, and has a great ability in that world. And I, of course, do what I think of as mainly middle grade nonfiction. And we thought, let's meet in the middle let's do a middle grade novel and write it together. And we picked, this is very Max adjacent, it's a code breaking story of World War II set in Bletchley Park in 1940, the summer of the Battle of Britain. And we are a brother and sister, which allowed us, I think, to more smoothly approach the co-writing, alternating chapters. And we use, very much to me, an uncomfortable process of just kind of making it up as we went along. And I don't approve of doing that, although I get it now, I sort of get it. I see why you can do that. In nonfiction, of course, you can't invent your way out of a jam. And that's called The Bletchley Riddle. It'll be out in October of this year.

I am very excited for that.

Awesome. Is that the first fiction? Well, no, Rabbi Harvey was the first fiction.

Since Rabbi Harvey. Yeah.

Is Rabbi Harvey widely available? Can I get that?

Widely! Oh, it's, you practically can't turn around without seeing copies of Rabbi Harvey! There are three books in that series. He's a sheriff in the Wild West, but he doesn't use a gun of any kind, just wit and wisdom to solve crimes.

He's got a scroll in each holster?

Not literally, but in his head. He's got 3000 years of Jewish wisdom.

I gotta read those. That sounds fantastic.

Is there anything else that either of you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you.

I would be curious to hear: Adam, I don't actually know where you grew up, but was it in New York City?

No, I grew up in Baltimore.

Okay. Did you face incidents of antisemitism as a kid? Was that something that was part of your experience?

Not in direct experience, because the school I went to had been founded as a Jewish school, though it wasn't anymore, and I went to a Jewish summer camp. So I was around a lot of Jewish kids, but I certainly experienced it the way that we all do when we just encounter the way people talk in the world. I was on a summer program, and there was a kid from Louisiana, and he said, like, Oh my god, that guy totally Jewed you. And I was like, what? And I never, had never heard that phrase before and only after, I was like, Dude, that's really offensive. And then I was like, Oh, wait, gyp is probably the same thing, because we used to say I gypped you all the time. And I was like, Oh man, I should probably stop that. And then when I read, I am rather empathic. No matter who the speaker is, I am empathizing with their position. I want to understand it. I think it is one of the things that makes me a decent writer. It's important that I am empathic with every viewpoint in my book, even the ones that are horrendous. And so when I read about the Nazis, when I read about the KKK, when I read about people who hated me, you know, when I read Autobiography of Malcolm X and about Elijah Muhammad's views about Jewish people and white people, it hurts, and yet I'm thinking about it and trying to understand it as if there's really good reasons for them to hate me. And so, yeah, I mean, I wasn't targeted in any real way. But I think even when you're not, you live with it. How about you?

When you said reading experience? My mind went to reading books that I loved as a kid, and then rereading them more recently and realizing the antisemitism that was in them that I simply did not see. So blocking it out, the opposite of what you're saying. A book like Mutiny on the Bounty. I loved this sea adventure, nothing to do with religion. And yet, there's one person who's identified as "the Jew." And of course, he is the greedy, acquisitive guy who sells rotten cheeses to the crew, you know, because he can make a buck doing it. And no one else is identified by their religion, but this guy is "the Jew." Agatha Christie does this in her books.

I used to love her books.

And you go back and read them, it's like, wow, I just didn't, I just didn't see it. I wonder what I was doing mentally there. And I, too, grew up in a I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and lots of Jewish kids in my school, for whatever reason, the cross country team was the bastion of white nationalism. So the kids would make fun of me for being Jewish, but they didn't know why. It wasn't frightening. They weren't threatening to beat me up. Of course, it made me feel bad, but I also knew that they didn't know what they were doing. I somehow sensed that this was fundamentally different from how it must have been in Europe before World War II, where it was, it was just ingrained in the DNA of the culture.

And yet, there are so many instances in those stories, including in Impossible Escape when Gerta's friend starts saying some really horrendous things. Yeah, "you Jews need to learn how to work hard" or something. Something just just so inanely stupid. And Gerta is surprised.

Yeah.

Right? I think that, like, antisemitism, when it comes up in your face, almost no matter the circumstance, almost, is still shocking. You know, there's an incredible story from Into the Arms of Strangers, which is the first person accounts of the Kindertransport, incredible book, and I think it should be like number one on the reading list for middle grade readers if they're trying to learn about the Holocaust. Number two, obviously, Max in the House of Spies. And then when they get a little bit older, Impossible Escape, obviously. But Into the Arms of Strangers. There's this story, and I have it in Max in the House of Spies, I retell it, where people are being attacked in the streets, windows get smashed. This is during Kristallnacht, and a mother calls up the police and says, Help us. Help us. And the police ask her name, and it's a Jewish name, and they laugh and they hang up. And the idea that you would call the police and they would laugh at you. Nothing more horrifying. But also the idea that even in the middle of Kristallnacht, people expect to be treated like humans, and every time we're not, it shocks us and it hurts us. What more vivid example could there be?

Wow.

And Heidi, where did you grow up?

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a very Jewish neighborhood. It's the Main Line, but I did actually experience the most visceral incident of antisemitism that I ever have. At that time, when I was in high school, I had a best friend, part of a friend group of nerds. We were all fans of Doctor Who and Star Trek, and we would go to conventions, and so this was my best friend. We would do cosplay and role playing and have sleepovers all the time. But her family were German immigrants, and her parents had, I believe, been in the Hitler Youth because they had to be, and they had absorbed a lot of that. So at some point, we were at a sleepover with a bunch of other kids, and we said, Let's do a blood sisters ritual. We'll prick our fingers and we'll swear allegiance and whatever. And she wouldn't do it. And another friend jokingly said, Oh, is it because Heidi's Jewish? And it turned out that that was why, because her parents had instilled in her this antipathy towards the blood of a Jewish person, touching her blood. And I mean, really, it's not healthy. You shouldn't be mixing your blood anyway. But you know, we were kids, and we didn't...

For listeners at home!

We were like 13, so you know, what did we know? But I was mortally wounded by that, because she was supposed to be my best friend. It was like a breakup, because, you know, you're really close with your your besties in high school. That was basically the end of that friendship. And it was really painful.

That's brutal. I'm so sorry that happened.

Yeah, so and it was so unexpected.

Well, as they say, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Yes, exactly! All right. Well, Adam Gidwitz and Steve Sheinkin, thank you so much for talking with me.

Thank you, Heidi. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you so much, Heidi.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi. This is Karen Jensen, creator/administrator of Teen Librarian Toolbox.

Hey. This is Chris Baron, member of the Facebook group For the Love of Middle Grade. We'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast.

I'd like to dedicate my episodes to teen librarians everywhere who are trying to figure out how to serve middle grade readers and young teens.

I'd like to dedicate this episode to my community and communities everywhere of friends and family, Jewish and non Jewish, who make the time to gather around tables for Passover and Shabbat and beyond.

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through Bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifePodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!

[MUSIC, PROMO] Often we just want to connect with all the people around us and fix any problems we see. In The Hebrew Teacher, a collection of three novellas, people attempt to do this in very different situations. But sometimes other people see a problem from a different perspective, or the problem is not what it seems, and to connect with someone else, they need to want to connect back with you. Join me for a conversation with Maya Arad about navigating life, jobs, and family. Find the podcast at JewishLibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.