Fake news trolls Nazis in ‘The Ventriloquists’
Oakland author captures obscure chapter in WWII history
Fake news ascends to its finest hour in Oakland author E.R. Ramzipoor’s debut novel “The Ventriloquists” (Park Row Books, $26.99, 544 pages). Her fact-based fiction is sourced in the skeletal bits that history has actually recorded about a group of Belgian resistance fighters who hornswoggled their German oppressors in World War II by writing, printing and distributing, partly on the Nazis’ dime, a satirical newspaper that savaged Hitler and his hordes. This underground sleight-of-literary-hand, amazingly, was accomplished in just 18 days, and most of the accomplices were severely punished for their stunt. Ramzipoor, a 26-year-old
graduate of UC Berkeley, stumbled upon a sentence about it in a U.S. War Office document while researching a seminar paper. The topic became her senior thesis, but she had to turn to her imagination to flesh it out as a novel. We’ve peppered her with questions. Q Do you think people will have a hard time accepting the book’s premises? A Absolutely, and in fact, they have, from Day One! One of the funny things I ran into when I was trying to get an agent is that people would read it, and then they would say, “I really like this book, but I think you should edit out some of the more far-fetched plot points.” And I had to say, I’m sorry, but these things actually happened. And it’s so extraordinary to think that these ordinary people could pull off such an amazing feat. There’s one part of the book that received a lot of pushback, even though it’s actually true, where these ragtag architects of this scheme were able to convince the Royal Air Force to bomb Belgium — and that actually happened. Q How much did you have to go on before you had to start making things up? A Not a whole lot, to be honest. The story, first of all, unfolded in secret, and second of all, took place in 18 days. So there isn’t a lot of primary source material documenting this because they didn’t have time to stop and make notes about what they were doing. So I found other mentions of the story in books about World War II and about the Belgian resistance. I was able to piece together information about, oh, this person must have participated and this must have happened. But it was really kind of this strange process where I was taking these bits and pieces from other puzzles that I couldn’t necessarily see and trying to create my own story out of that. I also had a couple of copies of the newspaper itself, which is amazing. I just found them on eBay, relatively cheap, because nobody had heard about the story yet, and I was able to translate parts of it (from French) myself using Google Translate online and having a friend of mine help out. Q How did you settle on “The Ventriloquists” as the title? A The title became pretty clear from the start, because I knew that I wanted to tell a story about people who were finding their voices, who were bringing voice back to the people of Belgium, and then of course, I have a character who is, in fact, a “literary ventriloquist,” who can write in the style of anyone, from Winston Churchill to his own mother. Q What was your biggest challenge in filling the few facts out into a full-blown narrative? A Making the story hang together coherently. I wanted to try to balance between giving the reader enough historical detail that the story had texture and they came to appreciate the real-life history but not so much detail that it bombarded them with unnecessary information. So I settled upon this idea of having these rotating points of view to help guide the reader through all of these bits and pieces in a way that grounded them within the perspectives of these various characters. Q Who is your favorite character? A I have two favorite characters. My favorite character to write is probably Lada Tarcovich, who is this funky, queer prostitute who cares very much for the women she employs. She’s this very practical foil to our very flighty, imaginative main character, Marc Aubrion. But I am very proud of David Spiegelman as a character, the literary ventriloquist. He is kind of the soul of the novel, very fascinating, and a challenge to write, especially to capture this idea that he is working for the Nazis — he is pressed into service for them — and yet his heart is with the resistance, and he really wants to make a difference. Q Your character Marc Aubrion remarks that for ordinary Belgians, subjugation has become “the routine.” Do you think that has resonance today? A Yes! I’m really glad you asked that question, actually, because I wrote a lot of the early drafts of this book before the 2016 election. But I did end up rewriting a lot of it afterward. And obviously, there aren’t direct parallels to Nazism, we don’t have Nazi boots in the streets. But I tapped into the feeling of despair — the routine feeling of despair that I felt and that a lot of people I think felt after the 2016 election. I remember the day after we learned the results, I went for a walk, and I was living in Berkeley at the time, and there were people out and about and I could almost feel how despondent they were, just in the way their footsteps were falling — people were holding themselves differently — and that’s when that phrase popped into the book. Q Your main antagonist, the Nazi August Wolff, is something a bit less than an all-out villain. Why is that? A I wanted to be really careful not to make him this one-dimensional character and lean on the tropes of Nazism. So I wanted to give him these layers and nuances, but I also didn’t want to write a sympathetic Nazi, because I’m not sure there is such a thing as that! So I wanted to create a character who was waffling back and forth between the very real and attractive pull of “well, this is what everyone else is doing, this is the ideology, this is my path to promotion and fame and fortune,” but also, he doesn’t feel good about this; he knows his moral center is decaying with each book that he burns. Q What do you want your readers to take away from their encounter with this book? A The traditional World War II story that I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen typically feature men with guns on the battlefield. And the only time we really see LGBT people or disabled people or children or women is when they’re suffering. And obviously, that was very much the situation at the time — they did suffer at the hands of oppressors. But I wanted to tell a WWII story that was fun and actionpacked in which people we traditionally consider to be oppressed get to be the heroes and get to be the masters of their own story.