The fall 2019 issue of NER features “The Black Virgin,” a strange and haunting story by Greta Knutson, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Christina Cook. We wanted to know a little more about the author behind this dark tale, and how it came to be translated now, more than thirty years after the author’s death. Here’s a brief Q&A between editor Carolyn Kuebler and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain.

CK: Your bio note for Greta Knutson says that she was born in Sweden but moved to Paris as a young woman, in 1920, and made connections with artists and writers, dadaists and surrealists. She’s described as a prolific painter and writer, though her writing wasn’t published until after she died of suicide in 1983. 

What first captivated you about Greta Knutson: her paintings, her biography, or her writing? 

A: All of the above.

Q: How did this translation project come to be?

A: I first came across Greta Knutson through her paintings and poems about twenty years ago, when as an undergraduate, I was researching French expatriate writers and artists from the twenties and thirties. The fact that Knutson was a multigenre and trilingual artist who led a low-key life spoke immediately to me.  

After my studies, I returned to France and worked as a musician and tutor.  By turns of coincidence, on my way to one of my students, I would often pass by Knutson’s and Tzara’s former residence in Montmartre, which was designed by Austrian-Czech Modernist architect Adolf Loos. This renewed my interest in the couple’s literary work, and triggered me to study them seriously.  

In 2005, I reread Knutson and started to study her work keenly. Most of my sources have been in French and Swedish. My colleague Christina Cook came on board soon after I decided to work on Knutson’s translations. Like Knutson, Cook has Swedish heritage, and she shares my interest in twentieth-century French poetry (she is a published poet and translates contemporary French poetry). This has been a passion project of many years for us.  

Until today, Greta Knutson remains little known not just in the Anglophone world: in France she, too, seems largely forgotten. Je ne sais pas pourquoi, I don’t know why.

Q: Do you know why her writing wasn’t published during her lifetime?

A: Possibly because Knutson was both a discreet and highly independent woman, brought up in a noble family . . . We do not have the impression that she needed to exist in the limelight as an artist, nor had the urge to make public her identity as a writer. In that sense, she seemed a true artist: her work came first, and it was the process of artmaking, and life above all, that might matter most to her. Of course, it is likely that she was overshadowed by the male writers and artists in her circle, including her ex-husband Tristan Tzara, her ex-lover René Char, and friends such as Albert Camus, André Breton, and Alberto Giacometti. Sexism isn’t something new.

To be precise, however, Greta Knutson’s literary writings, art criticism, and translations did appear during her lifetime in various journals and publications, including Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, Le Nouveau Commerce, Obliques, and Non-Lieu. A book in German of her writings—Knutson herself translated her texts, or rewrote some, into German—was published in 1980, even though her volume of collected texts in French was only published posthumously in 1985.

Q: Her paintings are said to reflect Surrealism and post-Cubist tendencies, but her writing—or this story at least—is very earthy, told from a child’s perspective. It’s almost like a tale from an earlier time, rather than a story by a wealthy, worldly expatriate in twentieth-century Paris. Do you know what year the story was written?

A: The story was possibly written in the seventies, when Greta Knutson was already in her seventies.

Q: The story takes place in the “karst.” This term wasn’t familiar to me, but apparently it’s a landscape characterized by eroded limestone, with lots of caves and underground funning water, such as you’d find in Kentucky, or the Kwangsi area of China, or the Causses of France. Do you know if this landscape figured into Knutson’s life? Why would she write about this area? 

A: For many years—during and after the Second World War—Knutson sojourned in southern France; she lived on a farm in Vaucluse in Provence, in the villages of Gordes and Maubec in Luberon, for instance. She had also stayed in Aix.

Q: How does “The Black Virgin” fit into her writing in general, including the poetry if you’re familiar with it, and why did you and Christina choose to translate this story in particular?

A: “The Black Virgin” is probably our favorite story of Greta Knutson. It is a dark tale—an early twentieth-century Bildungsroman where transgressions fueled by erotic drive, maternity, violence, and possession are set against the stifling social conventions and religious politics of a typical southern French village. The fact that it was told in the first person by a young girl, even though Knutson was already in her seventies when she wrote the story, heightens the covertness and tension of non-dit that stays immune to time, and the tragedy of circumstantial alienation that a reader isn’t quite prepared for until very late into the plotline.  

Q: Can you tell us a little about her paintings? Did she have more success with them in her lifetime?

A: Greta Knutson’s first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1929. A retrospective of her paintings, drawings, and sculptures was just on view at the Norrköpings Konstmuseum in Norrköping, Sweden earlier this year, from March 23 to September 1. 

Q: I hope there are more Knutson translations on the horizon for you two and look forward to seeing what comes next!

---

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist who writes and translates in English, French, Chinese, and occasionally Spanish. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016). Her latest translation is Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019). She serves as the 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She lives in Paris.

Christina Cook is the author of A Strange Insomnia (Aldrich Press, 2016), Ricochet (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016), and Lake Effect (Finishing Line Press), for which she received the 2012 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems have been anthologized in Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets and Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. Her poems, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and more. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at Penn State University.

Ina Cariño, author of the poem “Bitter Melon” in NER 40.3, talks to Angela Narciso Torres about growing up in the Philippines, acquiring a taste for the bitter ampalaya, and for writing that draws from both her languages—welcoming us all into the conversation of her poetry.

Angela Narciso Torres: Growing up in the Philippines, ampalaya (bitter gourd) was the vegetable we children loved to hate because of its acrid flavor. But as I grew older, I acquired a taste for it, and even learned to prepare it for my family (which my children promptly resisted). So it seems to me a brilliant choice that you use ampalaya in this poem as a metaphor for awakening into one’s body and coming to terms with one’s personhood with all the accompanying angst and resistance one might expect. Can you talk about the origins of this poem and how you came to employ this vegetable as a central metaphor?

Ina Cariño: So, like you, I despised ampalaya when I was little. I grew up in the Philippines, and my grandmother liked to sauté it for dinner and add a bit of scrambled egg or tomato to the mix. She would always try to get me to eat a bit—sneak it in here and there, as if to get me “on her side” over my two older sisters (I was the youngest for a long time). But of course, it is an acquired taste.

I moved to the United States when I was ten, and still, for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to like the vegetable. In the last two years, my mom has started pickling ampalaya (she got the idea from my first-ever boss, the Okinawan owner of a sushi restaurant for which I have worked on and off since the age of sixteen, and who everyone lovingly calls “Machiko-san”).

The ampalaya is cut into half-moons, and submerged in heavily-salted water to get some of the bitterness out. Then you wash it, and pickle it with vinegar, sugar, peppercorns—garlic and chili if you like. I grew to like it in this form. It’s quite good with hot rice, as a side dish.

Anyway—all this to say that this poem is a mirror of that transformation. My taste buds have matured. But also, I’ve learned to move past the trappings of being assimilated into American culture. I’ve moved past the self-hatred towards my body as a queer woman who identifies as female only some of the time. And I’ve found that, despite being a small, small person—from culture shock, and from growing up as an immigrant in America—I want so badly to be seen, just like everyone else.

ANT: You use a lot of code-switching in this poem between English and Filipino. As a native speaker, I enjoyed encountering familiar words like “mantika,” “parsyak,” “dugo’t laman,” and the speaker’s final plea: “huwag mo akong kalimutan.” I noticed that you chose not to italicize the Filipino words or provide definitions, and admire your decision not to prioritize one language over another. How do you think it impacts the non-Filipino-speaking reader—and in the end, does it matter in the context of this poem?

IC: I’m going to use a word that one of my thesis committee members used to describe what I was doing in this poem (and what I do in a lot of my other poems): “non-exceptionalism.” This professor specializes in sociolinguistics, and was intrigued by how the poem worked and held together despite the inclusion of these words, and especially without the italicization signaling “foreign-ness” or being “other.”

This is my reasoning for not italicizing Tagalog in my poems: in this century, a point at which there are tools such as the Internet available to many of us, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to expect that the reader does some of the legwork in attempting to understand the poem. This lends itself to my definition of art as not only communication, but also as conversation. Having been partially raised in the Philippines, I also don’t think of Tagalog as “other,” and this practice of italicizing foreign words is counterintuitive to my goal of getting rid of this “otherness” that a post-colonial past has made the norm.

There’s something beautiful to me about finding that a poem is a puzzle. Some poems you shoot back. On others, you dwell. The norm is what your lived experience is. And my poems, whether in English or otherwise, are my offering to a particular understanding of the world through writing.

ANT: Who are some of your favorite poets, Filipino (if any) or otherwise, who have influenced your writing?

IC: I’m going to sound a bit sentimental when I say this, but my mother, poet Luisa A. Igloria, is one of the biggest influences on my writing. I remember that she would write poems and stories for me and my sisters when I was little, and read them to us before bed. She encouraged me to read and write from an early age. I resisted specializing in English or writing in college for a long time—I thought I was being rebellious—but writing is my home, and it’s because of her.

Otherwise: Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath are some of my favorite poets. Galway Kinnell, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye. This is such a hard question to answer. The poetry faculty in my MFA program—Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Eduardo C. Corral—were hugely impactful as well. Currently reading a lot of contemporary poets. Lots of Asian American voices. Franny Choi, Khaty Xiong, Cathy Linh Che, Chen Chen, to name a few. I love Sam Roxas-Chua 姚—he combines his work with asemic writing and often does sonic elements. I could list so many more!

ANT: What new projects, poetry-related or not, are you currently working on?

IC: I’m trying to start a reading series for writers of color based in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I’m located. There’s a serious lack of platforms specifically for writers of color in this city. There are a few pockets here and there, and more in Durham nearby, which are little seedlings of something great. But I’m talking to a few people about how to go about this, and I would love to make it happen fairly soon.

Subscribe and support New England Review.

INA CARIÑO was born in Baguio City in the Philippines. Her poetry and prose appear in New England Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Fugue, Tupelo Quarterly, Nat. Brut, Raleigh Review, VIDA Review, and December Magazine, among other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State University in Raleigh and was a 2019 Kundiman fellow. Find out more at www.inacarino.com.

ANGELA NARCISO TORRES recently served on the editorial panel at NER. Her poetry collection Blood Orange won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears in Colorado Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Water~Stone Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed talks to NER about her short story “The Length in Six Strokes” (40.3)—and about Dhaka, screenwriting, and her new novel, set in 1940s Calcutta.

Carolyn Kuebler: In your story, Shalini’s editor asks her to review a book, saying, “It’s short and shitty and I’m curious what you think.” It’s a novel by another Dhaka writer who seems to have won the favor of the white publishing establishment—and who also happens to be young and attractive. Reza wants Shalini to be truthful about the book. There’s always a risk in writing a negative review of a book by someone in your own circles, but do you think there’s a particular risk for Shalini and for Reza?

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed: Because the burgeoning English lit scene in Dhaka is so small and dominated by the ruling class, who jealously guard their little piece of the pie, it could mean, as demonstrated somewhat cheekily in the story, social isolation for Shalini and even the loss of Reza’s job. The risk is particularly high for Reza because he is middle class, a self-made person, who taught himself English and is talented and instinctively worldly. He doesn’t have the buffer of inherited millions or connections in whatever government is in power at the moment. This is how it works in sharply class stratified places like Bangladesh. Reza is not, in fact, in Shalini and the author of the shitty novel’s circle. He is less protected. But Shalini could lose her circle and be isolated. It could upend whatever community she may have. But I think she realizes it’s not much of a community in the end. 

CK: Shalini likes to say that her book, which didn’t sell particularly well in the US, “killed in Dhaka.” It’s a joke for her. She and her editor Reza talk about Dhaka as if it’s a provincial, insular place, and yet it’s a major city—one of the most populous on the planet. Why do they feel this way about it? Is it a fair assessment on their part?

SZA: Dhaka is an ancient, vibrant place. It used to be center of the muslin industry. The British Raj effectively destroyed the industry by co-opting it and moving it elsewhere for nefarious, colonial purposes. It’s one of the main hubs of the region of Bengal, a region where some of the greatest literary and artistic figures, such as India’s first Nobel laureate, Rabrindranath Tagore and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray come from. The poet Nazrul Islam is from Dhaka, which falls in East Bengal and Kolkata; where Tagore and Ray are from falls in West Bengal. Dhaka is teeming with artists, painters, writers, dancers, singers. The world within Dhaka I am describing in the story is not that Dhaka. It’s the minuscule elitist ecosystem that is so small it sometimes consumes itself. And that microcosm is provincial in a way because it is so insular. It is not greater Dhaka or Bengal. That is why I needed to include the bit about the terrorist attack, to draw the distinction between the bubble land of the American Club and Gulshan and the rest of the city, and thus the nation itself. I think Reza and Shalini are aware it’s a bubble and are weary of it. They are both intelligent and restless and have a certain integrity. They find the social structure suffocating. That is what informs their attitudes. 

CK: According to what I read on Wikipedia, you were born in Dhaka and left there when you were three weeks old during the Bangladesh Liberation War. First of all, is Wikipedia correct? And next, what is your relationship to the city now?

SZA: Yes, Wiki is correct! I left when I was around three weeks old and landed up in Chester, Connecticut. I have a complex relationship with Dhaka. It’s not an easy city. It’s stultifying at times. The traffic is the fourth level of Dante’s Inferno. If I had supernatural powers, I would send my enemies (chiefly certain book critics) to sit in Dhaka traffic for a day. But I also love it, because I hear Bengali everywhere and I have close childhood friends and my parents live there and the food is fantastic. I also know artists and writers there who are deeply talented and committed to their craft. And Bangladeshis are happy go lucky by nature. Curious and friendly. I could only live there if I was working full time and had a specific goal or purpose. I am going there in December for the launch of my new novel, and people seem excited and welcoming. Incidentally, I think I am killing there because my novel sold out within hours. It makes me happy. 

CK: I’m glad to hear it—life imitates fiction! That novel, Dust Under Her Feet, is your second book of fiction, after the story collection The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai, and it’s set in 1940s Calcutta. Was there a particular event in history that led you to write about this time and place? 

SZA: Yes, my mother describing watching the horrendous communal violence in Calcutta right before Partition in 1947. She was very small, about seven, and she lived in the Muslim section of town and watched a Muslim mob fall on a Hindu boy, killing him. Elsewhere Hindus were attacking Muslims. People who had been neighbors and even friends murderously turned on one another. I also grew up watching the old black-and-white movies from Hollywood’s golden age, like Casablanca and The Lady Eve and Bringing up Baby and I loved them deeply. Those were the first stories that made me want to write. That time was so specific. Especially politically. There was no ambiguity or confusion about who the bad guys were, unlike now, when geopolitical agendas are terribly opaque. But no-one looked like me in those films. I was American but Bengali too and wanted to find an intersection. Dust Under Her Feet is that center bit of my personal Venn diagram. It’s my love letter to Hollywood and Bengal, both epicenters of great storytelling. 

CK: How did you go about doing the research?

SZA: I had the privilege of traveling to Kolkata and drinking in the atmosphere. I walked down the where street I set some of the story and tried to imagine what my protagonist, Yasmine, saw in 1942 when she did the same. It was magical. And I read so many books about the China Burma India theater of World War II. As a result, I firmly agree with the assertion that that was the greatest generation to come out of the United States. 

CK: In addition to writing short stories and novels, you also write for television and theater, which are much more collaborative genres. Which came first for you, and how do these different projects complement or compete with each other?

SZA: Short fiction came first and then a play, Raisins Not Virgins, which will be produced again—a revised version as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door Season 2020. Raisins was produced while I was still writing and sporadically publishing short stories. Eventually I started writing feature scripts and then landed a TV job in a room, which is a very collaborative experience and different from being a solitary writer. Ultimately, story is story and the rules for a good story are the same. Because of my TV gig, I learned to write a first draft faster—of anything I was working on, and I have become a champion outliner! I have also learned to look at bigger pictures of plot and narration. I work simultaneously on things. Right now, I am working on my second novel, revising my play, and writing a feature script. 

CK: Are you tempted at all to make a film script from any of your own fiction? 

SZA: Yes, I plan to adapt Dust Under Her Feet into a screenplay. That is always a possibility for me, if the story lends itself to scripting. 

CK: What feeds you as a writer? Any specific books, music, or film—people, places, or things?

SZA: Politics, human nature. I listen to Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, and those of their ilk a lot when I am writing. Women, with strong, distinct voices where one can hear the longing in them. Also, the vulnerability. I need to be near trees and water. I have started taking long walks in the woods with my goofy dog Percy to help ground me. I have also learned to avoid people and energies that are not expansive or generous. I need rocks and flowers and shells around me. I have stones I collected from Alaska to Malaga. I am of Muslim descent but have statues of Buddha from Sri Lanka to Bali and Japan and China, where I lived for a couple of years, all over my house. I try to show up for my friends and family as much as possible while guarding my time and space. I love to socialize and spend time with people I love. Maintaining boundaries feeds my creativity. 

CK: Thanks for taking the time to give us some background on your work, Sharbari. And best of luck with whatever comes next!

Subscribe and support New England Review.

SHARBARI ZOHRA AHMED is the author of two books: the novel Dust Under Her Feet (Amazon India/Westland Publishing, 2019) and a short story collection, The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories (Daily Star Books, 2013). She was on the writing team for season one of the ABC TV Series Quantico, and her play Raisins Not Virgins will be produced as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door 2020 season. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and Artist in Residence in the Film and Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University.

Alisa Koyrakh, author of the essay “Tomorrow We Travel,” talks to nonfiction editor Elizabeth Kadetsky about history, reverie, and the role of research in lyric nonfiction.

Elizabeth Kadetsky: “Tomorrow We Travel” brings readers on a desultory, emotional journey through physical spaces scarred by the traumatic history of the Holocaust. There is a nonlinear, intuitive quality to the structure, creating an almost dreamlike, dissociated landscape for the reader. We move through the traumatized lands of Eastern Europe, Russia, Austria, and Germany alongside you and experience the almost surreal juxtaposition of the everyday with that of living history. Often, the transitions from the past to the present are jarring: “I go shopping,” you write, after visiting a former synagogue that is now a museum for Jewish history. You so effectively create a structure that mimics the effects of trauma for the reader. Was this conscious on your part, or did you arrive at the form intuitively?  

Alisa Koyrakh: To be honest, I didn’t know I was writing about trauma. I certainly didn’t plan to. As I mention in the essay, I was in Prague to work on my novel. I thought by going alone to a foreign country, I would retreat into my own inner world. I thought it would be safe and quiet in that world. Instead, the exact opposite happened. I felt careened into the physical world. But writing this essay wasn’t quite intuitive, it was more like a compulsion. The very early sections of the essay came from several Facebook posts—I almost never post to Facebook or social media platforms and so it was strange that I was suddenly sharing my thoughts and experiences in that way. I thought the loneliness had gotten to me. I had moments of respite, of course, when I was with Kate or my cousin or when Colin visited. But mostly I was alone. I thought I was losing my mind.

During that time, I was reading Maggie Nelson’s books about her aunt who was murdered at a young age; so my break from dealing with my own painful inheritance was to read about Maggie’s. I’d read about the horrible violence one man did to her family and then switch to researching exactly how cyanide pills worked. It was a very dark time for me, and yet I somehow reveled in it. I can’t explain. The original essay is much longer than the published version. When I came home and gained a little distance and renewed a life with Colin, I was able to reread and shape and think critically about what would give the words a proper arc. I had to ask very pointed questions and find a way to give myself and my readers a sense of closure within the essay. But yes, for most of the experience of writing this, there was no thinking involved, not in the usual sense. My “thoughts” were the ways in which I circled the synagogue in that shopping center or stared at paintings in Vienna. I suppose when you’re experiencing trauma, you don’t really know what’s going on. I did the everyday things, bought eggs and picked out nail polish colors, but I was saturated with the history of these places. I didn’t know how to ignore the history, even though at times I really wanted to.     

Maybe I love to write because I can’t stop thinking most of the time. Writing is my respite from thinking and yet it’s the only way I can think straight. I don’t know how to make sense of that. 

EK: You powerfully juxtapose reverie and reality throughout. At times, the reverie is so rich that it becomes almost another form of reality, for instance when you shift from a description of your pleasant apartment in Prague to an imagined scene among imagined former tenants there. “Maybe an elderly couple lived here before World War II,” you write. Later, that imagined couple becomes just “the husband and wife.” Still later, it is as if you have inhabited the consciousness of Magda Goebbels when you imagine giving cyanide to “your” six (imagined) children. This technique stretches the language of nonfiction. Imagination is real, and yet somehow, nonfiction too often sticks to hard and fast reality. How did you come to this technique?

AK: When I began my research, I worried a lot about how a sane person could come to murder their own children. I thought the only way I could understand it was to do it. So I did it. I also felt sorry for the Goebbels girls, which in turn stirred up my Jewish guilt. How dare I spare any sympathy for the families of Nazis? To work through those feelings, I had to put myself in the bunker and see if these children did deserve my attention. It is difficult for me to claim this as a technique because it’s actually the way I tend to live my life and make decisions. If I’m not sure that I want to meet friends for a drink, I’ll take turns picturing the different evenings I could have. If I’m not sure that I want some chocolate cake, I imagine myself eating it in order to decide. I’ll even mimic taking a bite. Colin laughs whenever I do it. I conjure scenarios for myself all the time. They are part of my ordinary reality, so they have to be part of any nonfiction I produce. So to say that the building I live in is somehow more real than the mind I spend my time in just doesn’t make sense to me. We all live in our fantasies and our physical world and move between them all day long. So they’re both forms of truth. Imagining how the young artist Stepan felt in Terezin admittedly reveals more about me than it does about him; as long as that distinction is clear, I think anything goes.  

EK: Late in the essay you mention Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, a YA novel published in 1988 in which a twelve-year-old Jewish girl drinks too much wine at a Passover seder, then opens the door for the Prophet Elijah and steps into an alternate world in which the Holocaust is about to happen; then, she becomes trapped there. I found your reference to be so satisfying, particularly because of the way you as the author are continually inhabiting individual experiences from the Holocaust—just as Hannah does, if more supernaturally, in The Devil’s Arithmetic. You mention that, later in your life, you were less interested in YA depictions of the Holocaust because they “removed the events from reality.” I would be curious to hear more about your sense of the range of possibilities for depicting “unspeakable” horror—your take on the notion that certain things are “indescribable.” What is the role of un-literal representation, and do you see your work as a part of a conversation about where the bounds lie, or what, even, they are? 

AK: Some of the people closest to me have alternately referred to the piece as both an essay and a story. I don’t really bristle at either of those classifications, mostly because I would have a hard time classifying it myself, if I ever wanted to. But that does mean that I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as nonfiction. More interestingly, I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as fiction. Most importantly, I have to ask myself if I think this debate matters. I’ll maybe save that for later.

At the age of twelve, I was reading fantasy novels with concentration camps and Holocaust fiction with magical cities. I was also reading many nonfiction accounts of the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite all this reading, nothing prepared me for standing inside the crematorium at Terezin. So I think it has nothing to do with the fact that some books were fiction and others weren’t. Given the sheer unbelievability of very real events in our immediate past, un-literal representation is often the only foot we have to stand on. Oscar Wilde almost certainly didn’t mean it when he said, “The only real people are the people who never existed,” but his point is clear. We need our minds to create realities because most often reality is too surreal. There’s some comfort that in the realm of literature all genre can quickly become part of the same structure, the same imaginative world. 

Facts, data are so easy to manipulate too, right? Even with a balance sheet, you can tell any story you want. So for me, the distinction is not between fiction and nonfiction, instead it’s only the following: there are people who tell stories for personal gain and greed and there are people who tell stories to connect with others and understand human nature. I judge great literature, whether we call it fiction or nonfiction, by how well it does the latter.

EK: Your mother is a winning character throughout your essay, offering wisdom and humor. At one point, you express, with irony, frustration at your mother’s “trying to live vicariously through me.” Of course, so much of the essay is about transposing one’s own experience into the lives of others, and using that transposition as a vehicle toward empathy and achieving a deep understanding of history. I was wondering what factors led you to choose to include your mother, who figures in only a small portion of the narrative. Did you think of her as a figure who could offer dramatic irony, and did you see her role in the narrative as fulfilling other textual functions as well?

AK: I’m so glad you say she’s a winning character. I worried a lot about my portrayal of her and what she would think after reading it. My mother is the person I love and respect the most and understand the least, and unfortunately for her that means I’ll be writing about her for a long time. I imagine I’ll be able to understand her better if I get to have children. In that sense, I’m very curious how raising children could affect my writing. After reading the essay, my mother’s friend told her that it was a love letter to her. I think there’s a good argument to be made for that. It’s just amazing how technically small a mother’s current role in your life can be and yet how she can still loom over everything. Loom of course has a negative connotation, which I don’t mean to imply at all. In this essay she keeps me grounded. She puts me in my place. If she’s a device she’s there to remind the reader not to take the narrator too seriously. And you’re right to point out the irony—transposition is such a big part of this essay, and there I am accusing my mother of trying to do that. That’s another way I think my mother, as a device keeps, me in my place. 

EK: I loved your use of research. At times there was a feel of an existential mystery. If only we could find out exactly what happened to the man who lived on your street in Prague and was born in 1895! Were Ottla Kafka and Stepan Pollak on the same transport to Auschwitz? In the same gas chamber? This fascination with the particular detail is juxtaposed against the flatness and misinformation that you encounter at so many of the Holocaust museums and memorials in the region. And yet the particular details, in the end, lead down vague pathways toward confounding unknowns. What thoughts do you have about the role of archival research for the lyric essayist? 

AK: I am at once a lover of words, of the sounds they make when they’re put in the right order, and someone deeply concerned with the ways that words are used to lie or misinform. I like to speak clearly. In my religious days, when I attended seminary, we did an activity there: we were asked to write down our top twenty values, then winnow the list to the top ten, then the top three, then to one. The last value I had left was “Beauty.” I could not cross out that word, I just couldn’t. I remember being frightened of myself in that moment. How could I choose Beauty over Truth, over God, over Family? Was I confessing in that moment that I cared for lyricism over truth? Maybe, but I think that’s because to me beauty is more “real” than truth. In that moment, I think some part of me realized I wouldn’t be religious forever. Today it seems like no one believes truth exists anymore. Truth never really existed, not in the way that I think people wish it did. 

The truth is, I miss Stepan so much even though I’ve never met him. I worry about how Franz would have handled Ottla’s death, even though he died before the war began. I worry for Karel, the man from my street, though I know next to nothing about him. I love Gonda deeply and have often imagined him holding his baby son inside the gas chamber. I worry about the husband and wife I made up, who I imagined living in my apartment, even though they never existed. Sometimes, I just choose to think that they did.

But the question was about the role of research in lyric essays. I never thought about either of those labels in direct reference to this work. I researched what I wanted to know and wrote what I needed to understand. Of course many beautiful essays have been written without any research. But I think that archival research does have the effect of grounding the lyric essay, making it somehow more immediate. Perhaps an obsession with facts combined with a love for the sound of language leads to a kaleidoscope form that is more reflective of everyday life. Our minds are both filled with our own individual music and the pressing clatter of outside information.

Subscribe and support New England Review.

ALISA KOYRAKH received her MFA in fiction from NYU and studied Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She lives in Chapel Hill where she is finishing her first novel. Her essay in NER is “Tomorrow We Travel.”

ELIZABETH KADETSKY, nonfiction editor at NER, is author of the forthcoming lyric memoir The Memory Eaters (U Mass Press, 2020), the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella Books, 2015), the story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014), and the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004).