A shure fun Bavel, a shure fun Poyln: Jeannelle Ferreira's A Verse from Babylon

Jeannelle M. Ferreira carries the sea with her. She carries also a consciousness of story and history that most first-time novelists—and even experienced writers—might envy. Her first novel, A Verse from Babylon (Prime Books, June 2005), is an extraordinary snapshot that never was of the lives of five people who indelibly were: Raissa Gellerman (who was Ferreira's great-aunt), her lover Violeta Stern, the songwriter and partisan Hirsh Glik, and the married couple Fayge and Beniek Gellerman, all of whom lived—and most of whom died—in the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1943. If Warsaw is the heart of Judaism, Vilna is the muscled right arm, the refined hand, the lively fingers . . . Working from published songs, plays, and poetry, the archives of the Holocaust Museum, and her great-aunt's private papers, Ferreira has created a Holocaust novel that is not about the Holocaust: it is about artists, lovers, friends, and defiance; about theatre when you're starving and songs when you might die; it is about the lives that go out, and the words that remain. Spare, poetic, and unsentimental, A Verse from Babylon is a rare introduction and illumination of this vanished world.

The following interview with Jeannelle Ferreira was conducted over e-mail yesterday. All technical weirdness is the fault of the interviewer, who has never done this before.

How do you view A Verse from Babylon in terms of historical fiction? How much is history, how much is story, how much does (and should) the distinction matter?

I'd say about 30% is history and 60% is storytelling. I had an incredibly rich set of primary sources, but it's still never enough. World-building has to happen even when there's an established historical location for all your action, and people seldom actually put what they were really feeling or thinking into the journals they bury for posterity. Even the plays and songs, it was hard to get a precise human feeling from them, because they're coming from a very specific and constricted place. I think the line between fact and fiction needs to be as blurry as possible, however. If you can believe all of it absolutely happened that way and you're observing these people through nothing more than a thick pane of glass, then I've done what I wanted to do. I particularly admire writers who can do that, for me; Mary Gentle is one. I wanted to write that kind of historical hyperfidelity that she has, the verisimilitude that makes you say of course it happened like that.

Which character most attracted you initially? Is this the same character that wound up fascinating you the most? Who were you surprised by, as you researched and wrote them?

Raissa was my reason for writing the novel. She just was this voice that wouldn't quit. By the time I was done, however, the person I wished I'd known more about is Violeta. She kept a diary, probably an extensive and objective one, but it's gone. She wrote pieces for the Geto-Yedies, but pseudonymously. She's really hard to pin down. And she was the odd one out, a polyglot foreigner in a time when most people only ever took the train to the next town over, a lesbian and an educated woman when most girls got married right after finishing an eighth-grade curriculum, if that. She came to Vilna from outside, and made herself at ease among these people who had status and money even though she was not of their class and certainly not someone they'd approve of associating with their daughter. And she wrote poetry and plays and I just, I long to know what was in her mind. Raissa never got the opportunity to develop her craft and her personality much. Would she have been like Violeta, or someone astronomically and completely different? What did they find to love in each other?

This can be anything from research to putting words down on paper to figuring out what on earth came next: what was the hardest part of the novel, for you?

The hardest part was keeping myself from internal censure as I wrote. I wanted a realistic, honest book, and it's difficult to do that in some situations. There's a cultural bias against setting a novel during the Holocaust and portraying characters who are not saintly, who say fuck and have sex and make poor choices and die deaths for stupid little reasons, the way everybody lives and dies.

Talk about the interplay of character and gay. (I couldn't resist.)

The gay's just there. It would have had to be fairly quiet, to be historically in tune; but I wanted it still expressed, this fact that even in not-very-enlightened places and times, and under horrible duress, people are still going to be gay, or bisexual, because it's woven into who they are. You can't control who you love, even if it's liable to get you shot. As far as character and gay, I think the gay is secondary to the character. Raissa's defining characteristic isn't her lesbianism, or her cross-dressing; it's that she's a foolhardily brave little snit who is always, always going to open her mouth.

If you were to include a CD with every copy of A Verse from Babylon, what would be on it?

Maybe Prime will release a CD with the second printing of the book. It would have to have the songs that were current in Vilna at the time (let us pause and dig out our Folkways records): Friling, Shtiler, Zog Nit Keynmol, Yisrolik . . . also the comedy songs from the revues, Mues, Hob Ikh eyn Karachter. I'd also need it to have some Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, such as The Ballad of the [Nazi] Soldier's Wife, and some nice subversive swing and Gershwin. Because Vilna had a swing band and a jazz ensemble during the occupation. And the most awful possible rendition of Tum Balalaika by a chorus of people we haven't fed for two days, and Chopin's Nocturne in C minor.

If you were to cast a film or stage version of A Verse from Babylon, who would be in it?

Private citizens, mostly! I have someone in mind as a very good Hirsh, so apt for the part that he informed the character as I wrote him. Emmy Rossum as Fayge, because the age and appearance are about right and she has a demonstrably good singing voice, and you will be busy doing . . . whatever you do out there in ancient Babylonissyria. [Interviewer's note: Mostly Greece. I only own a time-share in Nineveh.] Christian Bale as Beniek. Liam Neeson as Herr Doktor Professor Kruk. And I'd really, really like my fiancee to take the part of Raissa. I don't know who'd play Violeta. I think Kate Winslet would be fantastic. As for Kittel, the villain, I have no idea. Got any good villains?

How do you think Raissa, Violeta, Hirsh and all the rest would react to the idea that there's a novel about them?

I think Raissa would laugh in a socially inapropos manner, Violeta would shrug and smile, Hirsh would lose his glasses and have to go and find them on the floor and thus be spared scrutiny, and Fayge would quickly calculate what share of the sales could be used for protection money.

And how do you think people are going to react to sex in a novel about the Holocaust?

I hope they react by thinking about why it's there. One scene is meant to be erotic and the other is meant to be profoundly disturbing, and I think both of those things are good things, in their places in the book.

I also hope they react with "Huh, so people didn't stop having sex. Makes a lot of sense when you think about it." Because these were still people.

On that line of thought, do you want to talk about the scenes between Raissa and Violeta and between Beniek and Fayge?

Well, they're very deliberately different encounters. Both couples have an age and status gap, but how—and whether—they're able to surmount that is different. I didn't set out to have them contrast each other, though. I think Raissa and Violeta have a sort of comfortable connection in the narrative and in their dialogue that Fayge and Beniek obviously don't, but I didn't mean that as commentary on healthy relationships in gay versus straight couples, either. I don't think I meant it; maybe it's all subtext. But these are the only four people in the novel who are shown making those connections, no matter how well they make them.

. . . What else am I supposed to ask you?

Why it took me seven or eight years to get from seed to story to novel. Because damn, I was inflicting this in its gestatory form upon helpless people in college.

Last question, I promise. Do you think you will ever write about these people again?

I have written other, earlier little vignette parts of their stories. I don't know if it would make a fuller, longer work or stand alone. So anything's possible.

Thank you for interviewing me.

Thank you for writing a novel I could interview you about!