A week ago, Lee Hall published a post I wrote on his blog, Lee’s Hall of Information. In case you missed it, here’s what I wrote:
My debut short story collection The Nansen Factor, Refugee Stories, was published this spring. Most of the stories did not appear in prestigious lit mags. Not for a want of trying. “Hanky-Panky” was rejected over 50 times. “The Courage It Takes,” merely 47. The typical reason for rejection was that the story was “not the right fit for our pages at this time.” Often editors suggested resubmission. This disappointing response could not faze me although it did, at times, feel like a bucket of ice cubes being dumped on my head. I had labored over my stories for almost 20 years. Many had been workshopped at GrubStreet’s Masters Short Fiction classes. I believed in them. The feeling I experienced in sending them out into the world had come to resemble the way I felt sending my children off to elementary school each fall.
My father was a refugee. I knew Dad’s story of escape from Bolshevik Russia well from having edited his memoir, Émigré, 95 Years in the Life of a Russian Count. After working jobs as varied as waiter in a TB sanitarium and gold miner in Colorado, pallbearer at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in San Francisco, dog walker and screenwriter in Hollywood, he made his way in the Federal government without the benefit of a college education and retired to Cape Cod in 1970. Not all refugees from Russia were as fortunate. Dad sent money every Christmas to a cousin who found herself in Brazil without a means of support. From the faces of the older Russian women I met throughout my life, I understood what such an uprooting does to the soul and set out to document the scars in my writing.
Refugees from the first Russian émigré wave went all over the world. A vibrant Russian community existed in Harbin, China, but the largest portion chose France, where the men drove taxis and the women found work in the budding fashion industry. The supermodels of the 1920s and 30s were often Russian beauties. England and Germany also welcomed Russians, as did Canada and the United States. The protagonist in my story “Time of the Pale Green Light” emigrated to Paris but lived in Shanghai from 1937 to 1949. Her story was inspired by the journey undertaken by another of my father’s first cousins.
I cut the longest story—20,000 words—and discovered my manuscript would be too short for publication, which sent me back to the keyboard to write two flash pieces for the beginning. The first story takes readers across Saint-Petersburg on the eve of revolution with fifteen-year-old Volodia, who realizes by the end of the day that his life will be forever changed. To illustrate how Volodia fared, a new flash follows him to Odessa, where he picnics with a schoolmate who shares gossip about the Cheka, the fearsome secret police organization, precursor to the KGB. I also brought Volodia back into the book as an adult, visiting his mother at Maison Russe, a nursing home created by and for Russian immigrants. Still in need of 2000 words, I pilfered a chapter from a work in progress. The protagonist’s dad announces his plan to seek his fortune in the United States. His daughter tells him she has only just adjusted to life in France and refuses to follow.
Laura van den Berg’s weeklong seminar on short story collection construction made me realize I needed to find a way of uniting the stories. My characters either had lived through the Bolshevik Revolution or were descended from White Russian refugees who had relocated after revolution. The theme became obvious: dislocation and its consequences.
Today, many psychologists believe in transgenerational grief, a type of PTSD that is passed to future generations through genetic changes to a person’s DNA following trauma. This fact confirmed my intention to include the descendants of Russian refugees in the mix.
My final task would be zeroing in on a title. I had read about the Nansen passport but had never seen one in a museum. My father left Europe on February 14, 1923, after being added to the quota by the American vice-consul in Denmark. He traveled with papers the vice-consul provided. The previous summer, Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen created a passport for stateless persons. It served many Russian and Armenian refugees from 1922 to 1938. So, in my stories, I added a few details to indicate my characters traveled with a Nansen passport. 450,000 Nansen passports were issued.
We held the book launch on June 18 at Belmont Books, near Boston. A member of the audience stood up during the Q&A and commented on her attendance. “My grandparents, immigrants from Armenia, traveled to the United States using Nansen passports, which I now treasure,” she said. How cool is that?
