For this month’s interview, I bring to you Andrea Alban, author of
ANYA’S WAR (Feiwel & Friends), a young adult novel. ANYA’S WAR is about a
Russian Jewish family that relocates to China during World War II. In the
beginning of the story, Anya, 14, finds an abandoned Chinese baby girl in an
alley. She brings the baby home and names her Kisa. Once, I attended an author talk
given by Andrea where she shared that her Jewish father and his family came to
Shanghai, China shortly before War War II began. Her father, 8, found an abandoned Chinese baby girl and brought her home. Because his
family feared the child may have cholera, Andrea’s father had to hand the baby
over to local authorities. But what happens to the baby Anya finds in ANYA’S
WAR?
The paperback version of ANYA’S WAR is being released TODAY.
Andrea very generously offered to give away a copy of her book. So if you leave
a comment here between now and April 3, I will announce a winner on Monday,
April 4.
Being a San Francisco native, I must ask: Which part of San Francisco did you grow up in?
I spent
my first nine years in Lakeside Village a few blocks away from SFSU (where I
would eventually get my BA in Creative Writing).
My father moved the
family to St. Francis Wood in 1969 where I am again living in my childhood home
with three generations of women. (My Mom, Donna, and my 17 year old daughter,
Lily…four generations if you count our Golden Retriever puppy, Lola.)
What childhood memory do
you have associated with that area?
I was famous amongst the
SFSU college students for greeting them as they walked back to their cars after
class. I stood at the base of the driveway in a lemon yellow dress, white bobby
socks, and black patent leather Mary-Janes.™ I also have such fond memories of
the stacks of books my Mom brought home from the Merced Branch Library. I was a
voracious reader. This habit set me up as a reader who writes.
What was something
extremely valuable that you learned from your Creative Writing program at San
Francisco State University?
How to write scenes
without “filtering" which emphasizes a character's observation of
external action rather than directly presenting
the thing seen. The key to eliminate filtering is to search the manuscript for
words such as see, saw, watch, observe, notice, hear, and feel. Delete them,
and what remains is the character’s immediate experience, and robust writing.
Did you conduct most of the research for the novel, especially
about the way of life for the Jews in China’s Frenchtown, based on family
interviews? How else did you conduct your research?
Yes, I spent over a
decade researching while raising my two children. I pored over family documents (correspondence and photo albums), conducted
oral histories of my family members and their friends, and was admitted into
the reference stacks of the Judah Magnes Museum. I also read every memoir
written by Shanghai Jews and consulted with Tess Johnston, a local historian, author and storyteller living in
Shanghai who is an expert in the history of the Western presence in Shanghai.
What made ANYA’S
WAR a particularly unique book was that the story intermingled three
backgrounds to create an extremely rich setting. What aspects of the Jewish
religion and the Russian and Chinese cultures did you make an effort to bring
out in the story?
My father and aunt spoke
four languages fluently—Russian, French, English and Mandarin—by the time they
sailed from Shanghai to attend college in America. (My father at UCLA; my aunt
at Juilliard) Throw in a little Yiddish, and the superstitions, proverbs,
artifacts, food, rituals, and mysticism of Jewish, Russian, and Chinese
cultures, and you have the rich soup I was brought up on. I wove these elements
and symbols into the characterizations and the story world I created for ANYA’S
WAR.
What challenges,
if any, did you have composing a work of fiction with threads from true stories
in your family?
To the contrary, I was
not challenged. I was called to write this story from early childhood. I
listened to my father’s exotic stories of his childhood in the French Quarter
of Shanghai and began weaving a plot. I love research. It was a seamless and
joyous process for me. My Aunt Lily had documented family life in albums full
of captioned photos. She kept a carbon copy of every important letter she wrote
and saved those she received. This treasure trove provided the flavor and voice
of a long ago era.
Would
ANYA’S WAR, in its paperback form, be translated into different languages to be
sold internationally? If so, which countries?
I hope so. Translation
rights are handled by a special department at Macmillan. My dream is that the
first translation will be in Mandarin.
What
books/authors did you enjoy reading when you were younger?
My favorite books were:
Now We Are Six and Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by
Betty Smith; every book written by Beverly Cleary; The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Charlotte’s Web by
E.B. White; The Secret Garden and The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson
Burnett; The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig; The Oz books by L. Frank Baum;
Diary of Anne Frank; and The Phantom Tollhouse by Norton Juster. I can actually
visualize where these books were shelved in my school library. Reading was my
delight and my escape. I was known for checking out five books at a time each
week, lying on my bed all weekend reading while munching on Red Delicious
apples. I tossed the apple cores under my bed. My father asked me to break the
“littering” habit after discovering a dozen brown, shriveled cores providing a
feast for a long line of ants.
Congratulations
again on the re-release of ANYA’S WAR. What other projects are you currently
working on?
Thank you! I am thrilled
that my publisher, Feiwel & Friends, deems ANYA’S WAR an ‘evergreen” title
for their backlist. The book is finding its way onto many middle school, high
school, and university bibliographies around the country.
My next projects are: a
picture book entitled PONYDOG: A tale of a dog and his boy. And a novel in verse set
in 1968 San Francisco about a sixteen year old girl who sues her fractured
family for emancipation, amid a backdrop of university student riots, Women’s
Lib bra-burning, and Martin Luther King’s assassination.
