Monday, April 8th is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. In honor of this important day, I'd like to share a new book by my friend, Anna Olswanger. Greenhorn is based on the true story. In the book, Daniel is a young boy who lost his family and begins a new life in a yeshiva. His only possession is a tin box he refuses to open and in the other boys wonder what he is hiding. As the story unfolds, young readers will learn about the heartache of Daniel's loss. Greenhorn is also a story of friendship. love, and loyalty. The illustrations by Miriam Nerlove are tender and warm, a perfect pairing for the heartfelt story of a young boy and his friends. Books like Greenhorn will keep alive the memories of so many who were lost. I'm so pleased to have the opportunity to interview both Anna and Miriam.
Greenhorn is inspired by true events. Anna, tell me
how you learned about the story that inspired you.
I heard the
real story of Greenhorn thirty years
ago on a tour bus in Israel. The rabbi of my synagogue stood in the front of
our bus as we approached Jerusalem and told us the story: When he was in the
sixth grade, the school principal came into the classroom to announce that the
yeshiva would take in fifty boys. He introduced "Daniel," a young boy
who had no possessions, except for a small, tin box that he never let out of
his sight. The class later discovered that inside the box was a piece of soap.
Daniel believed that the soap, manufactured by the Nazis, was made from the
body fat of Jews murdered in the death camps. And he believed that maybe, just
maybe, that piece of soap contained his parents' remains. He said he didn't
have anything else from his parents, not even a photograph.
Miriam, what were you initial thoughts when you read
Greenhorn?
I was very
interested and taken by the story of Greenhorn,
on many different levels. Learning about the Holocaust has been an interest of
mine for years, and the sensitive portrayal of the narrator (Anna's rabbi) and
Daniel, as well as the setting of the story in New York yeshiva in the 1940s,
all appealed to me. The devastating emotional effects of the Holocaust on the
young survivor, Daniel, spoke to me, as did the complex range of emotions and
reactions of the yeshiva boys he came to live with. Issues of bullying as well
as tremendous kindness are presented in a real and touching way, and I was very
moved by the book.
The Holocaust is a difficult subject for any age.
Anna, were you concerned about bringing this topic to young readers?
I had originally
self-published Greenhorn as a
miniature book for Judaica collectors. I didn't think of it as a story for
children. A few months after I sent the miniature book to the publisher of my
first book as a holiday gift, she called to say she wanted to publish it as an
illustrated book for children.
“Why?” I asked her.
She said it was a provocative little book (this is the publisher who took the
“N” word out of Huckleberry Finn, so
she’s no stranger to being provocative), and the book’s image of a tin box and
its contents haunted her. She said Greenhorn was a brave work, and she liked
the way it brought the Holocaust home and gave it a human face. She later wrote me:
"I could not
not publish Greenhorn. My son Julien,
still my best reader of middle-school and YA fiction, was emotional in
confirming it was a book for NewSouth."
Miriam, did you need to do a lot of
research to make sure the illustrations were authentic?
I
did. Much of the setting was familiar to me, and one that I love—I lived in
Manhattan and then Brooklyn years ago, and so the feel of what the buildings and
atmosphere were like was familiar to me, but I had to make sure it was the
1940s! My daughters attended a Jewish day school, and my husband is a former
cantor, and so even though it's a very different environment from what I was
involved in, the yeshiva felt familiar to me as well. Having said that, there
was much I still needed to look up to make sure the illustrations were
authentic. Also, huge thanks need to be made to Suzanne (Greenhorn's publisher), the staff at NewSouth books, and to Anna,
whose help proved invaluable. An author and illustrator are usually kept apart,
but I'm grateful we were able to do things differently, and that I was able to
benefit from Anna's knowledge and care for what she had so beautifully written.
Anna, how much research was required for Greenhorn? Can you share a bit about
your research process?
I wanted
to write only the story I heard. I didn't want to add backstory or previous
history for the character I named Daniel. Rabbi Rafael Grossman, the basis of
the "Aaron" character who told me the real story in the 1980s on that
tour bus in Israel, didn't remember every detail forty years later, and
certainly not seventy years later when the story was about to be published and
I was revising it one last time, so I had to fictionalize parts of what he told
me. Because I was concerned about the ethics of creating fiction based on the
Holocaust, and because I wanted to honor what the real Daniel went through, I
focused entirely on the events I heard, and refrained from inventing anything
from the time of the Holocaust itself when Daniel may have been in a
concentration camp.
I did,
however, change one event from the actual story. When I researched the history
of soap made from human fat, what I found was that the Nazis probably did not
mass produce the soap. There is some evidence that they experimented with
making soap from human fat in one factory in the Stutthof concentration camp
near Danzig/Gdansk, and that is what I referred to in the book. In the story I
heard, Daniel kept a bar of soap with the letters RIF on it. Many Jews, during
and after the war, believed this was soap made from Jewish fat, as did the real
Daniel and the other boys at the yeshiva, including Rabbi Grossman. But from
from what I read, the letters RIF, which many thought stood for
Reichs-Juden-Fett (“State Jewish Fat”), in fact stood for Reichsstelle für
industrielle Fettversorgung (“National Center for Industrial Fat
Provisioning”), the German government agency responsible for wartime production
of soap. I revised the story so that Daniel’s bar of soap was from the factory
near Gdansk. I felt it was important to make this change and not refer to the
unfounded story about the RIF soap.
Miriam, can you tell me a bit about the techniques
you used for the illustrations?
I used pencil
and watercolor for the illustrations. There is a softness to watercolor that I
love, and I was hoping it would be a good fit for Greenhorn.
What is your creative process like?
When I am
illustrating someone else's story, I admit to an initial panic. What if I fail
the author's vision of how the book should look? And so I read and reread
Anna's story, letting it soak in as much as possible. With the publisher,
Suzanne's, suggestions in mind, I mapped out the illustrations I planned on
doing, as this is important for the pacing of the visuals in the book. Then I
went, literally, to the drawing board and began the sketches. I like to draw
directly on the watercolor paper, and when I start painting—that is when the
real joy of illustrating hits me.
Anna, what were your thoughts when you first saw
Miriam Nerlove's illustrations?
One of the
advantages of being published by a small, independent press like NewSouth is
that the author can be involved. I offered to help Suzanne scour websites for
art samples. When I saw samples of Miriam work, I instinctively knew that the
softness of her watercolors were what Greenhorn
needed. Their softness would balance the intensity of the text.
When we
launched the book at Bank Street Books in New York, Rebecca Migdal, the events
director there, wrote this in the bookstore's newsletter: "Miriam
Nerlove's delicate watercolor illustrations evoke the vulnerability and
sweetness of childhood, even as the text exposes the cruelty of which human
beings are capable."
I thought
that was the perfect endorsement of Miriam's art.
Thank you, Anna and Miriam!
Thank you, Anna and Miriam!
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