Good morning, Alana Ka. How are you doing today. Hello, it's
wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing
well. Oh my god. I'll tell you what. This book is coming
out at the right time, and I mean this in the most positive way.
There's so much change in the world right now, and a book like
this The Blood Years is going to share with readers the importance of writing down
your family history. I hope this book will be embraced by younger readers,
you know, teenagers and grown up for life alike. I think this really
is a book for really anyone who's interested in learning more about this time in
history. So I'm so jealous of you writing about your grandmother's teenage life.
I mean, because I mean, I don't know that much about my own
grandparents. Yeah, I am lucky. My grandmother, Frida was a natural
storyteller, and I was a very inquisitive kid, and whenever she was a
brilliant grown up. Whenever I asked a question, she would answer it honestly
and wait for me to ask a follow up. And in that way,
she's sort of gently shared with me and Anoy's story of family and of tragedy
that she gave to me sort of in degrees as I was ready to hear.
It was that the inspiration behind getting the opportunity to speak with survivors of
the occupation. It was so important to me to do a lot of research
because I'm a novelist, so this is not just my grandmother's story. It's
my grandmother's story made into a novel for which I had to weave in a
lot of other experiences, and so I didn't. But I didn't want to
make stuff up about the Holocaust. There's enough terrible, real stuff that happened
that it felt vitally important to me to honor the real stories of survivors and
people who didn't survive. So I did an enormous amount of research, listening
to testimonials through the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, reaching out to survivors that
are still alive. I worked with a woman named Ruth Glassberg Gold who's a
survivor of Front of Its Romania and also the author of a memoir called Rooth's
Journey, who read a draft of this book. Can help me with my
veracity. I read memoirs, I read fiction written by the get my hands
on it. Was very important to me to tell Dorey Wright the wife's family
has the roots in Romania. So that's maybe that's the reason why I'm so
attracted to this, because I really do want to know her roots as well
as my own roots. And I think that's the kind of generation that we're
evolving into. It's not just about MEMI me, it's about Okay, how
did we we we get here? Oh, I hope you're right. That
is a very good point. It's really interesting about the city that my grandmother
is from. Turn of It's Romania, it's now Ukraine. This town changed
hands several times during this book, and one of the periods of this book
is when the Russians came in and took over turn of It's Romania. And
as I was writing this book, Russia took over Trinity, Ukraine, the
town that you know. It's this very all full cycle moment. There's a
character in my book who says everything is cyclical, and for me, that
was a cycle moment, like in live action watching the city be taken over
again by Russia. See, now it reaches beyond family and it goes into
community because now you're telling the history of Ukraine. Which which is in you
know, just in turmoil right now? Exactly. Yeah. It is so
interesting and kind of terrifying how true it is that cycles repeat themselves. And
as a younger person, it's something you hear, but well, that can't
really be true, you know. And then as you get older and you
live long enough to see the cycles occur, and as you become more educated
and so you're able to reach farther back into history than your own lived experience,
and you can start to see these cycles as they're happening. One of
the things that's taking place in the real world is something that your grandparents had
to deal with, and that is letting go of everything to seek a better
tomorrow. I just can't imagine that, but yet you bring truth to those
pages. Absolutely. And my grandparents came here. In fact, my father
was born in Europe, so I was the first generation to be born here.
And they came here, like so many wonderful Americans, with nothing,
with no language, no no English, with no connections, and they built
a life that you know, last night I had the book launch for this
party, and my three siblings and our five children were all there in the
room with me, and it was absolutely. And my grandmother is no longer
alive, my father is no longer alive. There's no one above me and
my chain. But here was me and my siblings and my children. It
really gave me chills to see what they had built, which they couldn't have
known. You know, when my grandmother was living the experiences that inspired the
blood years, she didn't even know she was going to be alive tomorrow,
let alone alive to come to this wonderful country and create this family that I
get to be a part of. You know, we need books like this
in the way of the things that's happening to this nation as people are coming
into this country as well, because we need to learn that we all came
into this country. My grandparents came from Germany. They brought with them a
bead that was so important to my grands In fact, it was so important
that he gave it to me as a young child. And I don't know
where the bed is now because I moved away from Montana. But the fact
of the matter is it was so important to him to bring that to America.
I love that detail us exactly the sort of detail that would go into
my book if it had been part of my family history. I so want
to know the story behind that bed. Yeah. We are a country of
immigrants, and that is I think one of the things that makes us such
a strong country, and it makes me so proud. Whenever I get to
meet anybody, I always ask about their family and where they're from. I
find it to be so fascinating the sort of mosaic that makes up for our
country based on people from all over, from one author to another author.
And now as a podcaster whose words have been banned as well, what do
you go through? Because I go through a morning period and I also go
through a very hurtful period when when something that I have done is banned or
taken away. How do you deal with that? Yeah? Yeah, Panama
has listened to me for you know a year now. As one of the
most challenged and banded authors in the United States, many of my books have
been removed from schools and libraries across the country. I think it's such a
loss for young readers. Many of my books are for readers, as you
know. I have picture books that have been removed from collections, middle school
books, young adult novels. I think it's really scary as someone whose family
came from a time and a place that I talk about in the blood years
where things were taken away, you know, the right to be a professor.
You know, my Jewish family, they couldn't teach in the university,
they weren't allowed to own a business. They know their books were taken from
them. You know. I think when we start taking away opportunities to learn
about one another, when we start banning voices and silencing things, and is
never a good indication of the sort of a general greater picture of what's happening
in a space and to the people who live in it. So I am
horrified by the very actual small percentage of people with very loud voices who want
to limit children's access to curated collections that have been put together by educated educators
and librarians. I think it's horrible. And I'll tell you it was just
a couple of weeks ago that the President said that a broken democracy doesn't find
itself at the end of a barrel. It's in the silence. And so
it's like the silence. We can't be silent. We're creative. People don't
silence us from saying something. Yeah, it is scary and it becomes when
one feels afraid to share their creative work for fear of what will happen to
it and how one will be seen for saying and writing the things I've had
people write to me, and you know, say terrible things to me.
It's tempting to sort of be quiet and get small, but it's that's the
exact moment where it's important to be louder and speak up. And so I'm
really grateful that my books have years is being published. So many of us
grew up reading the book about Anne Frank And it makes me wonder, since
you bring up the subject of a safe home and how it's really not a
safe place, sometimes I have to ask, in these modern day times,
would you open your home to be a safe home for somebody who you need
to hide? Wow, that's a heavy question. For the last thirty seconds,
I think we have an obligation to Yeah, we are living in a
home. The home is the United States. And are we even bigger than
do we have an attic or do we have a space where we could hide
an individuals? So what are we doing to protect the environment of people who
are endangered right now in our own communities, and I think our voice is
what helps to create that safe space. If we speak up when we see
things happening that aren't okay, if we vote by going to our local school
board elections, by going to our city council meetings and paying attention to what's
happening, we are creating a home that is faith and if we don't,
we're allowing the people who don't want it to be safe to make the decisions,
which is something that again, yeah, in my book, is something
my characters experienced. Wow, you got to come back to this show anytime
in the future. The door is always going to be open for you.
Alana, Kay, thank you so much. I so appreciate your having me,
and please, I do hope your listeners will find a copy of The
Blood Years and you know, and I'm very hopeful that this book will have
a wide readership. So thank you for helping me. You'd be brilliant today.
Okay, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day out there.