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Paradise Found
Be a princess in the kitchen, learn the secrets of a TV star,
hear the truth about the Supreme Court justices and spend the evening
with the man who assured you that despite your troubles, the sun will
come out tomorrow ... Welcome to the 2008 Jewish Book Fair!
Elizabeth Applebaum
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Special to the Jewish News
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o cherubs with dainty wings, no endless tables with
fruit and sumptuous cheeses. No blue mountains
surrounding misty lakes where lilies float on sweet
water. No rainbows.
Paradise, said author Jorge Luis Borges, is like a library, with
row after row of books.
Welcome to paradise.
The Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit's
57th annual Jewish Book Fair, chaired by Gail Fisher and Amy
Hammer, will be held Nov. 5-16.
"This year's Book Fair features a vast array of subjects and
includes authors from all over the world;' says the event's
director, Heidi Budaj. "Each author's story is fascinating and
unique. We will feature literary journeys to war zones, to the
Israeli army, to Kurdish Iraq, to an affluent world that no longer
exists on the Upper West Side of New York, to flights of imagina-
tion that take us to new worlds and journeys that will have us
look at ourselves and our values in a new light:'
Among this year's guests is Oprah favorite and leading
novelist Chris Bohjalian, whose Skeletons at the Feast was
inspired by an actual diary. It tells the story of German refu-
gees who flee westward from the Russians while, in a parallel
story, Jewish prisoners are forced west in a march from a Nazi
death camp.
The diary belonged to a friend of Bohjalian's, who asked
him to take a look.
"Usually when someone asks a novelist to read the 'family
diary: the writer's reaction is a sort of desperate, anything-
but-that fear," Bohjalian said. "Most family diaries are about as
interesting as toast because most diarists aren't Anne Frank.
But this was a very good friend who had made the request
— our daughters had been buddies since birth — and so I
said sure:'
In 1998 Bohjalian was handed a book, "about 175 typed
pages, all single space."
It told this story:
"In January 1945, the diarist decided to take her daughters
and walk west, hoping to stay ahead of the Soviet army and
somehow reach the British and American lines. The section
that chronicled the journey wasn't very long — maybe eight
or nine pages — but it was riveting. The trek was always gru-
eling and often terrifying," Bohjalian said.
He was fascinated "because the person writing the entries
had been my friend's grandmother; that 16-year-old girl who
was nearly raped by Russian soldiers was his mother; the chil-
dren trudging west in the cold and the ice and subsisting in
April and May on dandelions were his aunts.
"Nevertheless, it didn't cross my mind in 1998 that there
Xi I I might be a novel somewhere in those pages. After all, at the
time I was focused on novels about the cultural margins that
were set in the present — books such as Midwives and Before
Oprah Book Club (for Midwives) author Chris Bohjalian based
his latest novel, Skeletons at the Feast, on a family diary
given to him by a friend.
You Know Kindness and The Buffalo Soldier.
may also have lacked the confidence to tackle material of
such profound historical importance as the Holocaust and the
average person's complicity. I wasn't old enough or gray enough."
When at last he did begin the book, the writing itself was
invigorating, said Bohjalian (now in his late 40s and of partially
Armenian descent) "because I was so passionate about the mate-
rial. But sometimes the research left me a little staggered. I would
find myself emotionally drained and moved to the point of tears by
the stories that survivors would tell me. I would be sitting in a res-
taurant or a living room or at a kitchen table; and I would be listen-
ing, and suddenly I would feel the color draining from my face.
"And yet it wasn't simply the unspeakable cruelties these indi-
viduals had endured and all they had lost. It was also the seem-
ing normalcy of their lives now — how they had raised their
children and had their careers and built their families. It was
poignant and powerful and inspirational."
In addition to writing, Chris Bohjalian is an avid gardener,
bicycle rider and fan of the New York Mets. He will be the fea-
tured speaker for Book Fair's Hadassah Luncheon on Tuesday,
Nov. 11.
For a list including this and other Book Fair Special Events, see
page B14. ❑
Elizabeth Applebaum is a marketing specialist at the Jewish Community
Center of Metropolitan Detroit.
The Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit's
57th annual Jewish Book Fair runs Nov. 5-16. See the
following stories in the A&E section for more in-depth
author and event information. All events are open to the
public and free unless otherwise noted and will be held
at both the JCC in West Bloomfield (WB) and in Oak Park
(OP). To view the complete brochure, visit www.jccdet.org .
For more information, call (248) 661-1000 (WB) or
(248) 967-4030 (OP).
Staff photo by Angie Baan
October 30 • 2008
B13