God, it's really tough writing in this environment, especially historical fiction. Bari, you know my first book, What the Night Sings, which asked questions about how Germany got to where it did. No, America isn't comparable to 1930's Germany in many ways. But leaving aside the total exceptionalism of the Holocaust, the way a society get…
God, it's really tough writing in this environment, especially historical fiction. Bari, you know my first book, What the Night Sings, which asked questions about how Germany got to where it did. No, America isn't comparable to 1930's Germany in many ways. But leaving aside the total exceptionalism of the Holocaust, the way a society gets to any level of demise—whether genocide, civil war, or the kind of impending social collapse we see in the US right now—it does always start with how we treat our neighbors. I point to Jan T. Gross' book, "Fear", about the conditions in Poland which allowed Jewish communities to be emptied in broad daylight while neighbors looked out of their apartment windows. Gina's point, while clumsy (look, she's an actress, not a researcher), gets at a core truth: when we lose sight of neighborly respect, we can find ourselves doing and saying things we could never have imagined. And that, truly, is where we find ourselves, right here, right now. How it goes from here is predictable but not inevitable. We can choose to gather and rehumanize each other, and that's what folks like you and I are aiming at. Grateful for your voice.
God, it's really tough writing in this environment, especially historical fiction. Bari, you know my first book, What the Night Sings, which asked questions about how Germany got to where it did. No, America isn't comparable to 1930's Germany in many ways. But leaving aside the total exceptionalism of the Holocaust, the way a society gets to any level of demise—whether genocide, civil war, or the kind of impending social collapse we see in the US right now—it does always start with how we treat our neighbors. I point to Jan T. Gross' book, "Fear", about the conditions in Poland which allowed Jewish communities to be emptied in broad daylight while neighbors looked out of their apartment windows. Gina's point, while clumsy (look, she's an actress, not a researcher), gets at a core truth: when we lose sight of neighborly respect, we can find ourselves doing and saying things we could never have imagined. And that, truly, is where we find ourselves, right here, right now. How it goes from here is predictable but not inevitable. We can choose to gather and rehumanize each other, and that's what folks like you and I are aiming at. Grateful for your voice.