By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Maryann Macdonald has written a children’s book that is also suitable for adults, titled Odette’s Secrets and in a recent e-mail interview she spoke about how she found the “story” in 2006 in Paris and how the book came to be now in 2013 America.
To say the least, her book, written from the point of view of a Jewish child living in France during the war, is an unusual story about the Holocaust, told in verse about a young girl’s shifting views of herself as she has to hide and change her identity be safe in the face of the political events around her. Macdonald, a Michigan native, is based in New York City and busy promoting her book in interviews and lectures.
The story behind the book, recently reviewed on San Diego Jewish World, is that a Jewish woman, Odette Meyers, who had been one of those Jewish children in wartime France, wrote a memoir in 1997 titled “Doors to Madame Marie” that was published by the University of Washington press. Her book enjoyed a modest success in English, but it later went out of print, with Ms. Meyers
passing away in 2002.
Macdonald, the author of over 20 children’s books and now in her 60s, told me she found the original memoir by Meyers by complete chance one day in 2006 while in Paris. While not Jewish herself, Macdonald was captivated by the book.
“I began to read about life in Paris during the war, especially about the life of French Jews,” she told me. “Some 11,400 Jewish children were deported. Most died in concentration camps in eastern Europe. But more children survived in France than in any other European country, around 84 percent. I began to wonder: How did this happen?”
The answer was this: “Most were hidden in homes, convents and monasteries and at farms and schools all over the country. To stay successfully hidden, children had to reinvent themselves, to deny their families and their identity and ‘become’ French Catholic children. How in the world were they able to do this? And what was it like for them to readjust to reality after the war?”
“I became fascinated by Odette’s story,” Macdonald recalled. “I pored over the photographs of her and her family and friends, read and reread her adventures, especially the passages where she described what it was like to switch selves, not once but twice, both in the remote countryside of the Vendee where she hid and then back in Paris again after the war.”
When asked what in her own background growing in the Detroit area had motivated to tackle this kind of a children’s book, Macdonald told San Diego Jewish World in an email: “I had grown up in an immigrant neighborhood near Detroit just after the war. I grew up on World War II stories, including some involving the Holocaust. But I had never before heard the story of how children saved themselves from death through their own courage and ingenuity. This was the story I wanted to tell.”
To take Meyer’s memoir and use the story there as her own free verse novel for children, Macdonald had to ask Meyer’s son, Daniel, if she could have permission to write such a book.
“I found Daniel’s number in the Paris telephone directory,” Macdonald told me. “I dialed the number and left a message, explaining who I was and what I hoped to do. Then I waited. A few days later, Daniel called me back and invited me to lunch at his apartment. He listened to my request and made his decision almost immediately. His mother, he said, had often talked in schools and libraries to children about her wartime experience. He was sure she would want her story to live on. As her literary executor, he gave me permission to use the facts of her life as the basis of a book for children.”
Macdonald says she wrote and rewrote Odette’s story many times before she was satisfied with it.
“At first, I attempted to write it as a straight biography,” she said. “This version seemed too dry. Then, with Daniel’s permission, I tried writing it in first person, in free verse, imagining insofar as I was able, the childhood voice of the Odette, the poet-to-be. I imagined details, such as the name Odette’s beloved doll might have had, and the actual words that might have made up conversations to which Odette and her mother had alluded in their writings. Now the book became a work of fiction rather than nonfiction, but I hoped this might make it more accessible to today’s children.”
The publisher says the book is aimed for readers in the 10-14 age bracket, but it has also been recommended for 9-15 year-olds, it’s also been it described as a young adult (YA) book, Macdonald said, adding: “Many adults have also told me they loved reading the book. So I guess it’s a story for all age groups.”
In terms of Holocaust education programs, Macdonald said that parents, teachers and librarians have told her that kids really seem to engage with Odette’s story, noting: “The best review of all came from Odette’s sister, born after the war. She was dubious at first, she told me, when she heard about my project from Daniel. She was understandably afraid that the book would ‘dumb down’ her family’s complex story. But, she said, she read it in one sitting and found it just right, and that it captured her sister’s voice and spirit.”
Although classified as fiction, ”Odette’s Secrets” cannot be so easily pigeonholed, the San Diego Jewish World’s editor Donald H. Harrison wrote in a book review here in early April, noting: “These weren’t Odette’s real words, so Macdonald’s work cannot be called history or biography. Yet the words were based on fact, so it really can’t be classified with those books that are spun strictly from the imagination. We could call it ‘historical fiction’ but that somehow would mask the freshness of Macdonald’s free verse. I would classify this work as simply remarkable.”
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World and an inveterate Internet surfer. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com