Gail Benick

Author of Memory's Shadow

Meet Me in St. Louis

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When I began to write Memory’s Shadow, my second novel, I knew the story had to be set in St. Louis. As the old adage goes: ‘Write what you know.’ Although I have not lived in Missouri for decades, St. Louis is my birthplace and the site of my fondest childhood memories. Among my favorites, I have always counted visits to the Jefferson Memorial in Forest Park where I absorbed the glorified history of the Lewis and Clark expedition opening up the American west; regular outings to the zoo and the art museum, local institutions dating back to the St. Louis World’s Fair; day trips down the muddy Mississippi River on the excursion steamboat, the SS Admiral; attendance at Cardinals baseball games at the old Busch stadium and the Veiled Prophet parade. Without hesitation, I felt sufficiently tethered to the history and culture of St. Louis to write a novel in which the city is not only the setting, but also a character in the story.

Yet, few of these glossy memories grace the pages of Memory’s Shadow. Like many novelists, I wrote the book on a hunch, an unsettling sense that something was amiss in those curated scenes of St. Louis life. As I waited for the publication of Memory’s Shadow my gut instinct was put to the test. Flipping through the newspaper one night, I saw a review of a new study on my hometown. “Book explores the violent history of St. Louis and America itself,” the subhead stated. I promptly joined the long wait list at the library for Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. In the interim, the library offered a sample chapter. That’s all it took. I needed to own this book rather than borrow it—and own the troubled history meticulously described in it. Herein, I suspected, were the bedtime stories which eluded me while growing up there.

Curious readers often ask me the standard question put to novelists: How autobiographical is your work? Are Memory’s Shadow and my debut novel, The Girl Who Was Born That Way, true stories? The short answer is that most fiction reflects the author’s perceptions of the world and draws on the writer’s deep memory. Reading Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America illustrated for me the myriad ways in which fact mingles with intuition to create fiction.

The-Broken-Heart-of-America-Book-Cover

Here’s an example. Early in Memory’s Shadow three sisters visit the St. Louis zoo. Toni, the most politically astute of the three, rails against the outing. She loathes the very idea of a zoo, sensing something sinister in caging animals and dressing monkeys in frilly clothes to perform circus stunts on a stage for besotted audiences. But the history of the zoo, as described in Johnson’s book, is much more disturbing than that. During the vaunted 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, there were “living exhibitions” of indigenous peoples gathered from North America and around the globe, showcasing their exotic food, clothing, architecture, and religious rites so that fairgoers could gawk at them in their “natural habitat.” The organizers of the World’s Fair devised this human zoo with the express purpose of demonstrating white, Western superiority.

Memory’s Shadow also aligns with Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America in the importance bestowed on the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Indeed, the implosion of one of the thirty-three buildings in the residential complex is an inciting incident in my novel. The demolition heightened conflict between the sisters and foreshadowed the violence that will tear apart their family.

For Johnson, the political decision to destroy Pruitt-Igoe, home almost exclusively to African Americans, was another spectacularly violent episode in the city’s long history of Black removal and structural racism. The St. Louis Police Department castigated Pruitt-Igoe as a cesspool of humanity, a living nightmare, a combat zone, and Fort Apache. They used police dogs whenever they entered the housing project, giving the city’s police force the dubious distinction of being among America’s first to deploy canine units in crime detection.

I didn’t have the benefit of Johnson’s searing analysis when I wrote Memory’s Shadow. Perhaps I didn’t need it. What I had were the tools of a novelist’s trade—slumbering nightmares, shadows lurking from the past, and a broken heart.

Memory’s Shadow is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Gender and Leadership

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Until recently, modern western democracies have excluded women from political leadership and disparaged their ability to lead, as if there is something contradictory in being female and a leader. Women who do achieve positions of leadership face misogynist media messaging and persistent gender stereotyping. In her stunning novel, Petra, the Vancouver author Shaena Lambert uncovers the complex reality of one woman, Petra Kelly, who broke through those barriers and co-founded the Green Party of Germany. In 1983, Kelly was part of the first slate of Green candidates elected to the West German legislature.

German born and American raised, Petra rose to prominence as a charismatic young activist inspiring hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to protest the placement of nuclear missiles on West German soil. She was the Greta Thunberg of her day. Here’s how Lambert described Petra when she met her at a peace rally: “Leaning forward at the microphone, sweeping her boyish blond-brown hair from her eyes, she wove together a passionate vision of ecology, feminism, love for the planet, rights for First Nations, equity for the poorest nations, and always, the need for freedom for Tibet. I was shaken by how deeply she saw connections between issues, and how brilliantly she shook out the blanket that held all of them.”

Petra Kelly was the epitome of a transformational leader. She had the ability to connect with the hopes and dreams of people and make them real. She inspired a belief in a new ecofeminist vision, then mobilize people around it. Four decades later, more women are entering democratic politics. Research shows that, in general, these women are not clones of male politicians, nor was Petra Kelly. They tend to be more participative than men in their approach to leadership. They advocate for compassionate policies promoting the interests of women, minorities, children, and the poor. And finally, they are rising to the top of the political hierarchy. As Kamala Harris said in her inauguration speech when she was elected as vice-president of the United States, “I may be the first woman to hold this office. But I won’t be the last.”

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

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The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain:  An Oblique Look at the Holocaust in Switzerland

When Rose Tremain, the celebrated British novelist, wrote The Gustav Sonata, she wanted to explore the issue of neutrality during one of the most turbulent periods in European history — the era of World War II. Where better to set a novel about neutrality than in Switzerland which has the oldest policy of armed neutrality in global affairs? The Swiss have not participated in a foreign war since the Treaty of Paris established the country’s neutrality in 1815. But, would Switzerland, bordering on Nazi Germany, be able to remain neutral when confronted with a possible German invasion? How would neutral Switzerland respond to refugees fleeing the Nazis?

Published in 2016, The Gustav Sonata considers Swiss neutrality from various angles. In an interview, Tremain stated that she was interested in examining neutrality not only as it unfolded in Switzerland, but “to create a person who is striving for a kind of a neutrality” and therefore refuses to engage with passionate feelings. To that end, she develops the character of Gustav Perle, a Swiss child growing up at the time of World War II. He adores his mother, but she is an angry, hostile widow who is incapable of returning her son’s love. Instead, his mother advises him to be like Switzerland and master himself.  Early in the novel, Tremain describes Gustav:

He never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he always forced it down because this was how his mother had told him to behave in the world. He had to master himself. The world was alive with wrongdoing, she said…In this way, Gustav would be prepared for the uncertainties to come because even in Switzerland where the war hadn’t trespassed, nobody yet knew how the future would unfold. So you see, she said, you have to be like Switzerland. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous and stay separate and strong. Then you will have the right kind of life.”

Gustav’s self-mastery is put to the test in his lifelong friendship with Anton Zwiebel, a talented Jewish pianist suffering from stage fright, which sabotages his career as a performing artist. As the story progresses, the intense friendship between the boys comes to define Gustav’s adulthood and exposes the pitfalls of remaining neutral. Gustav must ultimately choose between a bland existence of taking care of others or acknowledging his own needs and passions.

If Gustav learns self-mastery from his mother, the life of his father, Erich Perle, might have taught him the opposite tendency. Erich Perle served as the assistant chief of police in a small Swiss town in the 1930s. Following the Anschluss in 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Switzerland closed its border to those entering the country without proper entry permits, particularly Jews from Germany and Austria who had a “J” stamped on their passports. As the number of Jewish refugees trying to enter Switzerland at the Austrian border increased and put pressure on local police officers to enforce restrictions against Jewish refugees, Erich Perle faced a moral dilemma. He could follow government instructions to send back Jewish refugees to face their likely death or breach the explicit orders of his government.

In the novel, Erich Perle chooses to assist Jewish refugees escaping Nazis persecution by stamping the refugees’ passports with a false date so that it would look as if they had entered Switzerland before the border had been closed to them.Erich Perle is unwilling to remain neutral. Instead, he risks his life, and by extension the wellbeing of his wife and son, Gustav. Swiss authorities discover Perle’s illegal activity and strip him of his position. Humiliated and dishonoured, Erich Perle dies of a heart attack before the end of the war.

Tremain based the fictional character of Erich Perle loosely on the historical figure, Paul Grueninger, who served as a Swiss police officer at the outset of World War II. Motivated by altruism, he disregarded official instructions and allowed desperate Jewish refugees to enter Switzerland by falsifying their arrival dates and treating their entry into Switzerland as legal. But, unlike the fictional Erich Perle, Grueninger took his altruistic stance several steps further. He impeded government efforts to trace illegal Jewish refugees and paid with his own money to buy winter clothes for needy refugees who had been forced to leave all their belongings behind.

When Swiss authorities discovered Grueninger’s actions, he was dismissed from the police force, his benefits were suspended, and he was brought to trial on charges of illegally permitting the entry of 3,600 Jews into Switzerland by falsifying their registration papers. In1941, the court found him guilty of breach of duty. He was deprived of his right to a pension, thrown out of his state-sponsored apartment, convicted of forgery and forced to pay the trial costs. Ostracized and forgotten, Grueninger lived for the rest of his life in difficult circumstances. In 1971, a year before his death, Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Paul Grueninger.

Neither Paul Grueninger nor the fictionalized father figure in The Gustav Sonata remain neutral when confronted with a humanitarian refugee crisis. But why did Tremain alter the facts and remove Erich Perle from the novel so early in the plot of The Gustav Sonata? The answer lies in the author’s oblique approach to the Holocaust, which provides the context for The Gustav Sonata, but not the main subject matter. Indeed, Tremain takes great care to keep the Holocaust off stage in this novel. She depicts the Holocaust in a muffled whisper rather than in a thundering roar. Most importantly, she makes the decision to tell a story about the Holocaust in Switzerland from the perspective of a Swiss family rather than a Jewish family. By killing off the Swiss father who is the character most impacted by the Holocaust, Tremain ensures that the events of World War II will not overshadow the hero’s journey at the core of this novel. That journey focuses on Gustav’s transformation from an emotionally closed, passive child to a fully realized adult with the ability to make active decisions about his life. He is capable of human agency, no longer needing to hide behind the shadow of neutrality.