On Thursday, Nov. 13 at 7p.m. Sarah Wildman will be at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, to discuss her new book Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind.
One day when author Sarah Wildman was in her early 20s she was visiting her sick grandmother. They were sitting in her late grandfather Karl’s study when Wildman came across an old album in his cabinets. It contained tiny black and white photographs of a dark-haired and handsome young woman Wildman didn’t recognize. In some photos the woman was alone and in others she posed with Wildman’s grandfather. They were signed on the back “Your Valy.” When Wildman asked her American-born grandmother the identity of the mystery woman, her grandmother simply replied, “She was your grandfather’s true love.”
Years after her grandmother’s death, Wildman would make another surprising discovery among her grandfather’s personal effects: a file of old letters addressed to Karl in America, where he and other family members had fled in 1938. The file included letters from Valy herself. The letters were “powerful, difficult, they begged, they pleaded, they cried. They were desperate appeals for my grandfather’s help.” Wildman wondered what had happened, why her grandfather had left Nazi-occupied Vienna without Valy. Was she indeed his true love or was the relationship of the fleeting nature so typical of the young? She decided to find out.
I interviewed Wildman by phone to ask her about the research behind her powerful family memoir and what she discovered about herself and the experience of ordinary people left behind in Nazi-occupied areas as the Holocaust loomed.
Brookline Hub: Tell me about the impetus behind writing Paper Love. When you decided to start your research looking for your grandfather’s “lost” love, Valerie Scheftel, or Valy, were you concerned that you were opening a Pandora’s box?
Sarah Wildman: The idea was percolating for a long time, but the research began in the summer of 2008, so it’s been six years. I had started by writing the Holocaust stories of regular people, stories that were overlooked when looking at the big picture of history.
My series on Slate (from which this book originated) ran in 2009, but though I continued my research on my own I wasn’t certain it was going to be a book until 2012. That’s when the writing of the manuscript began. I was learning things right up until the last minute. I discovered an essential piece of evidence—a work card belonging to one of the people in the book—just as the book was going to press!
I had grown up with the somewhat childish idea that my grandfather and his family had all escaped Vienna unharmed. A child’s world is naturally narrow and small, and as a kid I wanted to believe that they had all escaped. Then as an adult I had the opportunity to better understand what my grandfather had lost.
Often when we think of the Holocaust and what led up to it we think of the Jews being forced to wear the yellow star, of Kristallnacht and then of the concentration camps. We don’t think about what happened between those two big events. Before the Final Solution even began, the Nazis were trying to erase people, literally render them unmemorable. How do you give these people a voice again? Where do I begin? I wanted to tell the stories of regular people and Valy’s seemed a good place to start.
I dove into the research without thinking I was opening a Pandora’s box. As I went along I worried a little more—maybe not everyone in my family would be thrilled that I was writing about this. But at that point it would have been hard to back out. I did feel that I had enough distance as Karl’s granddaughter to write his story without radically changing what I thought of him personally. As a parent I know I’m imperfect and that my parents and grandparents are imperfect. You have to consider what their life was like then—what was the context in which they made their decisions?
The mystery of my grandfather’s lost love, Valy, is enmeshed in the time it was happening. She, like everyone else around her, was yearning for freedom and normalcy. The mystery is was she in love with him? as she says or does he represent freedom to her? They had danced around the idea of marriage, but in 1938 when they were 26 they weren’t quite ready to commit, which in itself was quite a modern thing to say!
Brookline Hub: Did any of your relatives object to your writing about your grandfather’s past?
Sarah Wildman: I suspect my (late) grandmother didn’t want this story told. Why else would she have destroyed all my grandfather’s letters except the ones that were between the two of them? It surprised me that she did that. When she told me that story, I was sure she knew my interest in history. In fact, at the time I was finishing up an internship in oral history at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Of course, like us, grandparents can (and often want) to curate their reputation for their grandchildren.
BH: What did you discover about yourself through the research and writing of this book? What did you learn about the experience of those who lived before, during and after the Holocaust that you didn’t know or fully understand before?
SW: The period I researched, between 1938-1943, was about the destruction of normal human life as we think of it. What I didn’t fully understand before writing Paper Love was the tiny destructions of normalcy that were happening every day in the lives of the Jewish people. First they couldn’t buy new clothes or shoes, then they couldn’t resole their old shoes. Then they couldn’t buy meat, eggs and milk. Soon they had nothing left. It was the idea of the chipping away at people’s normal, day-to-day lives, and what they lived with well before the idea of extermination even entered the picture. Even as these restrictions were happening, Jews didn’t think they would be murdered. But things just got worse and worse.
It made me wonder what would have happened to me if I lived in Germany or Austria at that time. Who would I have been if I had lived through that?
Brookline Hub: So much of your journey in the book involves paper, particularly old letters. Today, with the temporary, cursory nature of our communications with each other—email and texting, etc—we no longer have the same paper trail. You’re a mom: do you think your children will know more or less about their family history than you did when they grow up?
SW: I think it’s sad that we’ve lost the art of letter writing. We lead such documented lives now, yet we’ve lost all those beautiful letters and postcards. The communication we have now is more disposable in some ways.
For instance my best friend recently got married. At her rehearsal dinner I read an email that she had written to me when she first met her now-wife and that I had saved from an old Hotmail account. She was surprised and delighted. She told me she couldn’t believe I still had it!
I’ve kept all my old letters from when I was a kid, but email and the cloud are not as permanent as we may think. In the future we may have completely different email accounts or Gmail might decide to do away with its archives or something. It’s not the same thing as finding a stack of old letters in your grandfather’s files!
BH: Why do you think the generations before ours held their private lives so close while people today practically advertise their private lives on social media and blogs? What do you think has caused this shift in transparency?
SW: We’re still curating our lives on social media. Not many people I know post negative things about their lives. Most of the time it’s things like anniversary posts, “I want to give a shout-out to the most amazing person—I love him/her more everyday!” It’s a joke among my friends that we all look so happy on Facebook. Meanwhile I had a tough morning this morning, and I still posted something light and cheerful on Facebook that I would be in Brookline on Thursday doing the event at the Booksmith!
BH: What are some of your favorite reads? What are you reading now or what are you excited about reading next?
SW: I just read Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film by Glenn Kurtz. It comes out Nov. 18. I loved the novel Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman and I’m so excited to read the memoirThere Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond by Meline Toumani. I was at the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences at the same time as Meline—we both had a fellowship there—and we are thrilled our books came out the same week!
One of my all-time favorite novels is Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, about an investigation into a single incident in the Spanish Civil War. Cercas is one of my literary heroes.
BH: What do you have planned for the Brookline Booksmith event?
SW: I’ll read a bit from the introduction—I won’t give too much away, but I want to give a sense of Valy’s voice. I’ll discuss the process of researching the book, about following leads, and the periods of discovery along the way.
Paper Love is really a love story and a search for identity. I think it will appeal to readers who are curious about history, and not just Jewish history—human history.
—By Jennifer Campaniolo
