OUTRAGEOUS REALITY

I’ve been fascinated by epics since I was a little girl – captured by the imagery in the Odyssey and later in the vast tales of love and war that define us. In many cases these stories exist as fragments, or wisps of air blown through the mouths of bards. People spend centuries hunting for the stories behind improbable events and unlikely heroes.  

What a boring world it would be if everyone were perfect. People would stack up in our lives like a bunch of Lego bricks, with uniform strengths and clearly defined edges. Writers build stories, but stories are not made of interchangeable characters. We look into ourselves and at the people who have been closest to us, hoping for some greater understandings. From there we conjure up the scenarios. Personal flaws and foibles have the best chance of reaching readers’ minds and hearts, and of engaging readers in a character’s trajectory. Readers like the edges of life. If we think we can entertain or instruct others, we share our stories with an audience, and that’s when we take some risks.

In rare instances, we meet a person whose story needs to be shared.

Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy is based on true stories. My estranged father put a packet of notes into the mail, about 12 single-spaced pages. Dad was a spy and it was evident that he took pride in his work. Was this story even true? Authentic tales of espionage during WWII were something that he could not disclose. Spying is quiet work. Coupled with his story was my aunt’s account of her life during the war years.

For more than 50 years my father and his sister had raged against fortune and accused each other of lies and cheating. Their only agreement was this: Layers of secrets could not be revealed to their spouses or their children. There were reasons for the lies and for decisions that they were forced to make as young adults, Jews in a Europe gone topsy-turvy with persecution and war. After many extended visits to Holland as well as a foray through U.S. Army counte­r intelligence records, it was evident that both brother and sister were speaking their truths and that they were telling the same story. It was not a pretty one.

People rarely see themselves as characters. We go through a pretty intrusive process to dig away at their interior thoughts and desires. I decided that the accounts of my father and aunt needed to be a part of our larger universal story.  The experience of the Jews is larger than entire communities. My two Dutch teenagers came of age in a world that offered them existential questions, pain and loss. They were a part of a larger community of thousands of families; people who were forced to leave their homelands and live in exile. These stories of exile, emigration, and the rending of families need to be told. They come complete with the anger, complete with sores, with the scabs, and ultimately with the scabs picked open. Tragically, these stories reoccur on a daily basis, around the world.

These stories kept coming, and the book grew.

A final interview was absolute gold. I was reworking the end of the book and had a chance to spend an afternoon with someone who had been a member of the German army. After about an hour, his son picked up the bottle.

“Here, have some more wine.”

“Oh, I’m fine, I don’t need any more.”

Chris poured. “Yes, actually you do. Anti-Semitism is coming up next.”

So, we went for it. The old soldier talked, I recorded.

So, go ahead, face your people, and serve your story.