By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson
MEVASSERET ZION, Israel — Writers have different ways of developing their ideas into a novel, and after my fourth novel was published, the editor of San Diego Jewish World asked if I would tell how I go about the process.
He suggested that I use my most recent novel, Chasing Dreams and Flies, a Tragicomedy of Life in France, as an example, and I was glad to have a chance to analyse what it is that makes me write and how and why I choose the topics that I write about.
I’ve been writing, on and off, for most of my life, in fact, from almost as soon as I could read. From an early age reading was my solace and my refuge, enabling me to escape from the strange and confusing world in which I was growing up. Many years later I wrote about my childhood experiences in my first novel, The Balancing Game; A Child Between Two Worlds, A Society Approaching War. Before embarking on writing that book I sat down and did my best to recollect scenes and incidents from my childhood. I found that I remembered a good many events, and had to winnow them down in order to make them into a readable narrative. I interspersed those childhood memories with recollections of my experience as a young woman living in Israel at the time of the Six-Day War. I used my memory but also went to the library to check out contemporary newspapers to help me gauge the atmosphere in Israel at the time. I had also kept a diary at the time, and that was also very helpful.
For my second book, Time Out of Joint, the Fate of a Family, I immersed myself in the documents and family correspondence that my father had brought out of Germany with him in 1938, after Kristallnacht. I used the information I gleaned to reconstruct and describe what happened to the members of my family in Germany between 1924 and 1942. My initial knowledge of German was not good enough to enable me to read material in that language, and so I made inquiries and was lucky enough to find an elderly lady who was a qualified German teacher. For about ten years we met on a weekly basis, conversed in German, and read and wrote texts in that language. By the time she died at the age of 92, I had already translated one of the books she had written in German about Jewish heroines throughout the ages.
My third novel, Levi Koenig, A Contemporary King Lear, describes the situation of an ailing elderly man, the interaction between his three daughters, and his relations with them. I had studied the play extensively at school and many aspects of it remained stuck in my memory. I myself am one of three sisters, and it fell to us to take care of our father after the death of our mother. Of course, the parallels with Shakespeare’s play are not complete, so that we do not have two evil sisters and one angelic one, rather I describe a situation in which each woman strives to balance all the various demands on her time and energy in the role of wife, mother, sister and daughter. There is also an element of tension that I have introduced involving a woman with whom their father may or may not have had an affair, but that of course is pure fiction.
My fourth book, which has just been published, is also based to some extent on personal experience. Like the principal characters in the book, I spend some time in rural France each year, though my husband and I do not regard it as our retirement home. I like to think that my knowledge of the French language and culture is better than that of my protagonists, and it is with a hint of superiority and humor that I describe their adventures and misadventures. The character of the hostile neighbor and the incidents for which he is responsible are entirely the product of my imagination, as is the denouement that ends the book. However, the prejudiced mindset of the main characters and the element of radical violence that emerges at the end are undoubtedly in evidence in Europe today.
All my books are available as ebooks and printed books on Amazon. I feel it might be going a bit far to claim that my last book is prophetic, but current events seem to be bearing out the views and events I describe and which were drawn from my imagination.
*
Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance writer based in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion. She may be contacted via dorothea.shefer@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)