Sounds of silence echo in generations
For a long time, while Oakland author Hilary Zaid was writing her debut novel, the book went without a name or even a working title. Then, during her research, she eventually came upon a traditional Yiddish lullaby, “Paper Is White.”
“As soon as I saw the lyrics of that song (‘Paper is white and ink is black. / My heart is drawn to you, my sweet life.’), I just knew that was the title,” Zaid says. “Because it was very clear to me from the outset, that this story was about silences.”
“Paper Is White” would indeed become the title of her affecting novel that deals in what she might call the presence of an absence. Its tale is cocooned in various relationships to silence: how it might be integral to survival, how we suffer at the hands of it, how it alters our lives and the lives of the generations that follow.
The protagonist Ellen Margolis specifically works in unearthing silences: As an oral historian at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory San Francisco in 1997, she records the testimonies of the remaining Holocaust survivors, most of whom have kept mum this part of their lives. For many, cutting ties with the past is a necessary act in assimilation or in simply moving on in the world.
“It’s the experience of a lot of immigrant families and Jewish families embedded in our 20th century experience — what it means to be an American and what you have to give up or lose or bury to be an American,” Zaid says.
In her own upbringing, Zaid, who received her doctorate in English at UC Berkeley and writes lovingly of the Bay Area, experienced a level of this restraint. “My father is the youngest of four brothers, and until I was a teenager, I didn’t know I had three uncles,” she says. “Those kind of things happen and they seem extraordinary, and yet so many families are threaded through with things like that.”
In “Paper Is White,” this intergenerational act of silence eventually becomes entangled with Ellen’s own personal life. As she prepares to marry her partner Francine in the late ’90s — when same-sex marriage has yet to be recognized by the state and homophobia demands levels of silence — the ghosts of her own past, namely the loss of her grandmother, compel her toward a secretive relationship with a Holocaust survivor, Anya Kamenets, who is full of unspoken history.
Zaid subverts our literary preconceptions of these two seemingly disparate narratives, the legacy of the Holocaust and queer relationships, ultimately threading them instead into a slow-burning treatise on the power of love — how it survives or contorts amid loss and the things that are left unsaid and unknown.
“Our impulse in historical fiction is to get inside the people in the past and then we really know,” Zaid says. “But for me, I feel like the challenge is to address not being able to know. Because we don’t always get to know. People die and they take stories with them, and that leaves you with something in your hand. But it’s not their story. It’s the absence of their story, but the absence is a presence that we struggle with.”