Family letters from Nazi era deepen Fox novel
more than 25 years, her greatgrandmother’s words have resounded in Lauren Fox’s head.
Writing from Nazi Germany to her daughter Ilse, who had fled the country, Frieda exhorts her to write back: Don’t be lax about writing, because this is all that we have left of you.
As German Jews experiencing increasing persecution from 1938 to 1941, Frieda and her husband tried every avenue to leave the country but met only dead ends. I have no strength left, she writes to Ilse.
And in a sentence that suggests the burden that history will place on survivors, Frieda tells Ilse, I know you’re doing everything you can, do more.
In her early 20s, Fox found the letters in a wooden box in her parents’ basement. She has warm memories of her grandparents: “always feeding me, kissing my head, praising my every accomplishment.” But as a girl, she had been afraid to ask what Germany had been like — for those who left, and those who were left behind.
Fox — who has published three prior smart and witty novels, including “Days of Awe” — kept trying to find the right vehicle for writing about Frieda’s letters and her family history.
They were composed in an old-fashioned German script that was hard to read. A professor at the University of Minnesota, where Fox studied creative writing, worked with her for a year to translate them.
She used them in a memoir she wrote for her M.F.A., but she didn’t feel memoir was her best form. She wove a few
Lauren Fox of Shorewood sits with copies of letters her Jewish great-grandmother wrote from Germany to her daughter who left to escape the Holocaust. Fox incorporates parts of the letters in her new novel “Send for Me.” lines from them into a Modern Love essay she wrote for the New York Times in 2006, but those brief excerpts only hint at the texture and poignance found in the clutch of some 75 letters.
But now the Shorewood writer has fused her vocation and her legacy in a memorable way. Her historical novel “Send for Me” (Knopf) builds on those letters to portray four generations of women in a family ruptured by the Nazi regime. Fox will launch her novel Feb. 2 with a Zoom event sponsored by Boswell Books.
“I’ve been sitting with them for such a long time,” Fox said in a recent interview. “They were just always sort of in my mind and in my heart and just kind of waiting for the right moment.”
Letters Lauren Fox’s Jewish great-grandmother wrote from Germany to her daughter were in an old-fashioned German script, and Fox worked with a professor for a year to translate them.
Two things made now the right moment. When she saw the Trump administration separating immigrant families at the U.S. border, she knew how relevant a story about forced family separation would be. Also, from a literary point of view, she realized she could be true to the letters but still write the story as fiction.
Moving forward and backward in time, “Send for Me” traces the arc of Klara, in 1930s Germany; her daughter Annelise, who escapes the Nazis by immigrating to Milwaukee; granddaughter Ruthie, whom Annelise brought over as a child; and great-granddaughter Clare, who discovers the letters while making decisions about her future.
Fox made one rule for herself: She would not change a word in her greatgrandmother’s letters. She uses judicious selections from them, sometimes as brief as a single sentence between chapters: In spite of everything, I would not wish that you were here. She credits her husband, Andrew Kincaid, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate professor of English, with helping her see the aphoristic and paradoxical eleFor
Online event
Lauren Fox will speak with fellow novelist J. Courtney Sullivan during a live Zoom event at 7 p.m. Feb. 2, presented by Boswell Books. Admission is free. Register via boswellbooks.com/upcoming-events. ments of the letters.
Before starting “Send for Me,” Fox wasn’t confident that she could write a historical novel. But she found the research satisfying.
“It really opened up a lot of avenues of inquiry and exploration and imagination for me,” she said.
Fox offers an occasional telling detail, such as the brand name of a German toothpaste in the ‘30s. But in general she wears the research lightly. (Hunger warning: Klara and her husband run a bakery, and nearly every variety of tasty
is mentioned.)
Clare, the novel’s generational counterpart to Fox, wonders if she might have taken on some of her grandparents’ sadness, “a grain of something that embedded itself inside her … her own gorgeous, secret sorrow, nacreous and pearled.”
Fox has talked with her mother about the recent rise in open anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, imagining the response of her grandparents: “They would be so disappointed and so distraught.”
While “Send for Me” shows the harsh way formerly friendly neighbors treated Klara and Annelise after the Nazis rose to power, it is not a catalog of horrors. Her book “is about the person who left, you know, and what it means to leave your family,” Fox said.
Describing the one who leaves, Fox writes, “Annelise is bird-walking across a wire: unbelievable good fortune on one side, unfathomable heartbreak on the other.”
Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins @jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.