TW Interview by Lorraine Berry
For this Historical Novelist, Even the Wreckage Holds Beauty
Over the past thirteen years, I’ve corresponded by email with Richard Zimler, the award-winning author of The Warsaw Anagrams and The Seventh Gate, both released in the United States in 2012 by Overlook Press.
We’ve never met in person, but he has taught me a lot: how to craft a beautiful sentence about an awful experience; how to persevere when you are considered a second-class human being; how to find joy in a restricted life; how to tell a story. In this interview, conducted by email in March, he reminded me again of how important it is to write about those who can’t tell their own stories.
I first discovered Richard Zimler when I was in the process of deciding to drop out of my graduate program at Cornell. I’d been close to finishing doctoral studies in the cultural history of Franciscan Observant preaching and the persecution of Jews and women accused of witchcraft.
So, when I came across The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Zimler’s 1998 historical mystery, I was thrilled. The book recreates the historical context of sixteenth-century Lisbon and the increasingly intolerant attitude taken by the Church toward the Jews. It was intense, intellectual, and a ripping good read.
I posted a review on Amazon, which ended with my inviting Zimler to contact me if he’d like to discuss his work further. I didn’t expect him to get in touch, but he did, and thus began our long-distance friendship.
Over the years, we’ve discussed everything from his research for his latest novel to my frustration as a writer who has no trouble publishing essays but can’t find a literary agent for the memoir I’ve completed.
Many of Zimler’s novels have unusual settings, but when I read The Warsaw Anagrams, I knew I was in new territory: the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. Somehow, out of the chaos of the Nazi occupation, he crafted a murder mystery about children who slip out of the ghetto at night and sneak back food for their starving kinsmen. Only, in cruelty layered on cruelty, someone is killing and mutilating these children.
Okay, I know you’re thinking. You want me to read a novel set during a horrible time in history about horrible things being done to children. Yes. Yes, I do. Why? Because the writing is breathtaking, and you will get lost in the story. This remarkable author evokes the small details of life—the tiny things, like a torn seam—that still have to be contended with, even in a world gone mad.
When The Warsaw Anagrams came out, Zimler did something that I consider brave: He journeyed to Poland, despite the country’s lingering anti-Semitism and the fact that nearly every Jew in Poland was destroyed during the Holocaust—including most of his family. And yet, he wrote about moments of grace on that trip in a 2011 Jewish Chronicle article, “Welcome to Poland—It’s Where My Family Were Killed.”
He is now an American expatriate. Zimler and his partner live in northern Portugal, and the eight novels he has written in fifteen years have received heaps of attention and awards in Europe. His books have been translated into multiple languages. It’s a great shame that, despite his success elsewhere, Richard Zimler is virtually unknown in the United States.
TW: If I were asked to describe the genre in which you write, I’d call it something like “historical literary mysteries.” What do you call your work?
RZ: “Historical literary mysteries” sounds just about right to me, at least with regard to the majority of my novels. In my historical novels, I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of my prose and the poetry of my sentences, so I hope readers find them of literary value quite apart from their settings and themes. Having said that, I want to add that I don’t think at all about categories while I’m writing a novel. My goal is simply to write a great book.
After I’m finished and need to come up with a blurb for the back cover, I do think a bit about how literary critics, bookshop managers, and readers might characterize my novel. But I don’t spend much time on it. The labels are really a simplification device—a way of giving potential readers an idea of what the book might be like. Sometimes such labels are useful, but sometimes they’re very misleading. Would all those millions of people who loved The Bridges of Madison County really be likely to enjoy Home by Marilynne Robinson or Light in August by William Faulkner? I have serious doubts, though all three novels could easily be classified as “Rural American Fiction.”
One curious thing: In different countries, my books are labeled and marketed in very different ways. For instance, the novel of mine that has just come out in paperback, The Warsaw Anagrams, has been marketed in Italy as a mystery; in Portugal as a literary novel; and in Poland as Jewish historical fiction.
TW: One of the things I love about your work is that it’s not genre mystery. Rather, you construct these intricate historical puzzles. How do you come up with the ideas for your work?
RZ: The ideas usually have to do with something that I know very little about but that fascinates me. For instance, a few years back, I grew very interested in the Nazi sterilization and murder of disabled people, precisely because I knew so little about it. Who exactly did the Nazis sterilize? How many disabled people did they end up killing? Did they set up concentration camps for them? So I started ordering books about it.
The more I read, the more the Nazi war on disabled people began to seem like an important crime against humanity that I wanted more people to know about. After all, how many of us actually know what happened to tens of thousands of deaf and blind people in Hitler’s Germany? It seemed to me that they—and the others who were sterilized and murdered—deserved a novel. I love to write about topics that other people would prefer to forget about—or whitewash. I suppose it’s the subversive side of my personality. So the war against disabled people seemed perfect for me.
The plot of The Seventh Gate came directly out of my historical research, as it always does. I never decide what a book is going to be about before I do months of reading about the time and place I’ve chosen. The puzzles you mention grow directly out of the research as well.
To give you an example, my narrator in The Seventh Gate is an intelligent, artistic, and sexually adventurous 14-year-old from a Christian family, coming of age in Nazi Germany. Her name is Sophie. Now, one of the things I learned while researching Hitler’s rise to power was that tens of thousands of Communist Party members switched over to the Nazi Party—to National Socialism—just after Hitler was elected, in 1933. They did that in order to save their jobs, protect their families, and further their careers. Sophie’s father switches sides like this. And it leaves her upset and disoriented, because she’s always believed in her father’s ideals for creating a more just and equitable world. She’s forced to keep her opinions to herself in front of him and her mother, of course—to wear a mask. It angers her.
Partially because of that, she decides to help a Jewish neighbor and his friends who have formed a secret resistance group. So, from that point on, Sophie leads a double life. A bit later, when the Nazis begin to sterilize all those they consider “unhealthy” to the German race—individuals who are disfigured, epileptic, congenitally blind and deaf—she begins to fear for the safety of her younger brother Hansi, a reclusive boy who lives in his own universe and who—in this era before autism was diagnosed—has been labeled “feebleminded.”
Another example: My original idea for The Warsaw Anagrams was to write about the day-to-day life in the Warsaw ghetto, in part because I knew almost nothing about it. Did the kids there have schools? Did adults have jobs? Could Christians help their Jewish friends by bringing them food? Part of why I wanted answers was because all of my relatives in Poland—the brothers and sisters of my grandparents, for example—would have been interned in ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz before being transported to the death camps. The more I read about the Warsaw ghetto, the more it seemed like a “Jewish island” cut off from the rest of the city and the world. That image fascinated me. It still does. To be confined to an island in the middle of a European capital of one million people seemed to me a unique—and terrible—experience worth writing about.
I decided that I wanted to explore the life of an elderly Jewish psychiatrist—trained in Vienna, of course—who survives a Nazi labor camp and returns home to Warsaw. I was—and am—interested in how we find the courage to go on with our lives after suffering great traumas. While writing the very first page of the book, the novel changed, however. I was writing from the point of view of Erik Cohen, the elderly Jewish psychiatrist, who is walking back home, and I wrote: I’m a dead man. I meant it metaphorically—that he’d lost his wife and all his friends. He had no more reason to go on with his life. But as soon as I wrote those words, a revelation came to me: Erik was indeed dead! He was what we call in Jewish tradition an ibbur—a ghost who remains in this world to fulfill a duty or obligation that he failed to fulfill in life. But what was that duty? Why was he still stuck in our world?
After Erik returns to Warsaw, he discovers one visionary man—Heniek—who can see and hear him. So Erik tells the story of his year of life in the ghetto to Heniek in hope of figuring out what important deed or act he still needs to do.
TW: Have you always liked puzzles? Are you a puzzle-doer outside of your writing life?
RZ: It might sound odd, but I don’t! The puzzles come directly out of my research and, when I start writing, out of my characters’ behavior. They are a natural consequence of the small mysteries and secrets that the characters keep to themselves—and that we all have. My books have always been character driven, I think. I follow where my narrators lead me, and their journeys are almost never straight and easy. Whose journey is?
TW: Several of your books comprised mysteries involving Sephardic Jewish communities. What drew you to the Sephardim?
RZ: I grew up in a secular Ashkenazi family. My parents were born in New York, and their parents emigrated to the States from Poland around 1905. I knew nothing about Sephardic history or culture when I started coming to Portugal in the 1980s. Ten years later, I moved here, to the city of Porto, and by then I’d discovered that Portugal had a thriving Jewish community before the Great Conversion of 1497, when King Manuel I forced virtually all the Jews to convert. It’s hard to estimate how many Jews ended up as so-called New Christians, but probably between 50,000 and 100,000.
So what first drew me to Sephardic history was simply curiosity. When did Jews first reach Iberia? How are their customs and religious practices different from those of the Ashkenazim? Where did Spanish Jews go when they were expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492? Where do the descendants of Jews converted in Portugal in 1497 currently live?
I started researching Sephardic history seriously in order to write my first novel, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, which is about a Portuguese-Jewish family, the Zarcos, that survives the so-called Lisbon Massacre of 1506. In April of that year, about 2,000 New Christians—converted Jews—were killed in a pogrom. Their bodies were burnt in two huge pyres in Lisbon’s main square, the Rossio. Very few people in Portugal were aware of this pogrom before I wrote my novel, so The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon has had a huge impact here. Sixteen years after first being published, it still continues to sell well.
Discovering Sephardic history changed my life. I realized that there was a large diaspora of Jews from Portugal and Spain, stretching from the Caribbean all the way to Turkey and India. So far, I’ve written four novels about different branches and generations of the Zarco family: The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Hunting Midnight, Guardian of the Dawn, and The Seventh Gate. Starting on this project made me realize, too, that I love writing about people whose voices have been systematically silenced.
TW: Your most recent works are about Jewish communities during the Nazi era. What made you decide to shift your attention to the twentieth century?
RZ: Having written three novels about different generations of the Zarco family, I thought, what if I wrote about a branch of the family living in Germany during the Nazi period? That struck me as a big challenge, and I knew it would give me a chance to explore an aspect of the Holocaust that I mentioned earlier and that we don’t usually discuss: the Nazi war on disabled people. So I put those two purposes together, and the result was The Seventh Gate, a novel I’m very proud of, in part because I have so much admiration for the main characters, Sophie and Isaac. I also love the relationship between Sophie and her autistic younger brother, Hansi.
One nice thing that happened after I wrote it is that a Swedish publisher decided to publish it because she has an autistic son. She thinks everyone should read the book because she is so committed to helping autistic people become independent, useful members of society.
TW: You’re a native New Yorker now living in Portugal. What made you decide to move to Portugal?
RZ: Back in the late 1980s, one of my two older brothers got ill with AIDS. His name was Jerry. He was very unlucky and had become infected with HIV quite early on, probably around 1981. He was living in New York, so I had to fly in from San Francisco—I was living in Berkeley at the time—fairly frequently in order to help him. Spending so much time fighting to get him decent medical care in a variety of hospitals was exhausting. I worked very hard for many months—along with our parents and his close friends—to try to save his life. I spent a lot of time talking with researchers and doctors, trying to obtain experimental drugs for him and get him admitted into medical trials. After a couple of bad opportunistic infections, he died on May 6, 1989.
My brother’s death devastated me. He had a dynamic—and often difficult—personality, and I simply couldn’t imagine a world in which he wasn’t around. Also, the death of a young person has psychological repercussions that are very different from those that affect us after the death of someone who is 70 or 80 years old. His death was much more disturbing to me than the death of my parents, many years later. And its effects were more long lasting. He died when he was 35.
In my experience, when someone you love dies so young, you start to question the justice of the world. You feel disoriented—as if you can no longer get your bearings. In my case, I also became constantly aware of my own mortality. I found it hard to go on with my life. Of course, I did everything we all do to survive—I went to work, made supper, went on vacations. But I was often depressed—and terrified of dying young, like my brother.
Complicating things was the devastating extent of the AIDS epidemic in the Bay Area. It was impossible to go to dinner with friends or have a meeting at work without someone discussing a friend or family member who was ill. It was as if the Bay Area were slowly losing all its forward motion and enthusiasm. My partner, Alex, sometimes says it was like the movie A Clockwork Orange, where the first half is all shot in glorious, vibrant colors and the second half is gray. Well, San Francisco faded to gray during the “viral eclipse” (as I call the AIDS epidemic in one of my novels). So Alex suggested we start over somewhere else. Porto, Portugal, was a natural choice, because he had received an invitation to become a professor at one of the medical schools there several years earlier. We ended up moving in August of 1990.
When I arrived, I was totally exhausted. In addition to my brother’s death, my father had recently passed away after a yearlong depression. Happily, when we got to Portugal, the people we worked with—and our few friends—weren’t talking all the time about AIDS. So I wasn’t constantly reminded of what had happened to my brother. Metaphorically speaking, I was able to finally wave goodbye to him—though without forgetting him, of course.
TW: What’s a typical working day like for you? To what do you attribute your being a prolific writer?
RZ: I usually wake up around 7 a.m. and eat breakfast with my partner. Once I’m alone, I go upstairs to my work area and begin working. I start a page or two before I leave off each day, so that I can work myself back into the rhythm and structure of the book, and—above all—get back inside the head of my narrator. I try to always focus on both the quality of my sentences—their rhythm, in particular—and on moving the story forward. And I rewrite constantly. If something isn’t working, I keep at it for as long as I have to until I get it just the way I want it. If I need to do more research while I’m writing, to add a historical detail, for instance, then I consult the books in my library or do a search on the Internet.
I stop for lunch around noon and usually make myself a sandwich. While I’m eating, I watch a bit of television—maybe an NBA basketball game or an episode of CSI. Then I go outside and walk around my neighborhood. We live near the sea in the city of Porto, so I often walk along the ocean. We have a kind of boardwalk in Porto, with cafes and restaurants. On a sunny day, with the ocean sparkling, it’s gorgeous. When I get back home, I make myself a cup of tea and go back to work. I usually quit around 6 p.m. When I was younger, I could go on a bit longer, and always wanted to work over the weekends, but now that I’m 56 years old, I don’t have the stamina. I’ve come to realize that pushing myself too hard only hurts the quality of my writing.
If I’m prolific, it’s because I work very hard at what I do. It usually takes me anywhere between a year and three years to write a novel, working at least six to eight hours a day. Of course, I take off time for vacations and promotions, and to work in our garden, but 90% of my life is Alex and my books. After I finish a novel, I usually take three to four months off and then start another. I’m totally spent after I finish a book. I take naps, bake cakes, watch TV, garden, listen to CDs, and play my guitar. The whole process can be very exhausting, but I’m also very lucky; I love what I do and can earn a living at it. And I get the most generous and wonderful comments from readers all over the world.
A Zimler Primary
Richard Zimler’s website- “Welcome to Poland—It’s Where My Family Were Killed” by Richard Zimler, Jewish Chronicle, December 22, 2011.
- The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler (Corsair, 2011; first published in the United States by Overlook Press, 2012).
- The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler (Arcadia Books, 1998; first published in the United States by Overlook Press, 2000).
- Hunting Midnight by Richard Zimler (Delacorte Press, 2003).
- Guardian of the Dawn by Richard Zimler (Constable, 2005; Penguin, Reprint Ed. edition, 2008).
- The Seventh Gate by Richard Zimler (Constable, 2007; first published in the United States by Overlook Press, 2012).
“One minute, a man can think of nothing but leaving behind seminal works that will be read in London and Vienna for decades, the next he is waiting outside a soot-covered grammar school for his nephew, examining a ripped seam on one of his two pairs of trousers and wondering if he still knows how to use a needle and thread. Now that Adam and I were friends again, he'd tell me about his day as we walked home from school. He's start in a cautious monotone, testing my interest, but each of my questions would encourage him to pick up his rhythm, so that his account would soon be zooming downhill at top speed. Sometimes he'd launch himself across a bridge of thought where I didn't know how to follow. His words would whizz past me like honeybees. To have a buzzing little nephew telling me stories that I didn't have to understand or interpret was to be in a state of grace.
—The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler
Art Information
- Photo of Richard Zimler at the Grand Canyon, courtesy of Richard Zimler; used by permission
- Portrait of Richard Zimler © Eva Carasol; courtesy of Richard Zimler; used by permission
