Around the time I was asked if I wanted to join the blog tour for Love & Treasure, I was attempting to decide if I wanted to watch the motion picture Monument Men as previously I have found that war-time dramas can be a bit too much for my heart to handle. I thoroughly loved Tea with Mussolini and Life is Beautiful, although Saving Private Ryan pushed me past my edge. In recent years, I have appreciated the BBC tv series Foyle’s War, eagerly awaiting the next seasons to come through my local library who purchases them on seasonal dvd! It is such a blessing to be able to watch an historically enriched series, set during the war, and is full of characters who draw empathy into their characters as they give us a piece of what that particular portion of British life and history were during those turbulent times. Likewise, I have always been struck with curiosity about what became of the family heirlooms and personal effects which were stolen and taken away from them by the regime. It was such a darkened part of history, but there are moments of strength inside of the darkness as well. There was something stitched inside the premise of this story that spoke to me, and it was a story I wanted to read most surely!
I wanted to interview the author herself to see what inspired her to take on the subject matter and to get to know a bit more about her as a woman behind the pen, so to speak! I do hope you enjoy my questions and will be intrigued to visit with me again, as I share my thoughts and observations as I read the novel this week!
A bit of a note on why I included the quote by Ms. Oates: I’ve been attempting to read through The Accursed since I first discovered it through the library last year. Time sweeps me away, I fear, but the manner in which Ms. Oates composes her thoughts and paints the portraits of her stories has staid with me! I felt compelled to share her thoughts on behalf of this story, even though I typically do not post well-known quotations of reviews for the books I blog about myself.
Book Synopsis:
A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War.
In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life.
A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past.
Praise on behalf of the novel:
“Love and Treasure is something of a treasure trove of a novel. Its beautifully integrated parts fit inside one another like the talismanic pendant/ locket at the heart of several love stories. Where the opening chapters evoke the nightmare of Europe in the aftermath of World War II with the hallucinatory vividness of Anselm Kiefer’s disturbing canvases, the concluding chapters, set decades before, in a more seemingly innocent time in the early 20th century, are a bittersweet evocation, in miniature, of thwarted personal destinies that yet yield to something like cultural triumph. Ayelet Waldman is not afraid to create characters for whom we feel an urgency of emotion, and she does not resolve what is unresolvable in this ambitious, absorbing and poignantly moving work of fiction.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
Author Biography:
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the newly released Love and Treasure (Knopf, January 2014), Red Hook Road and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was made into a film starring Natalie Portman. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on “All Things Considered” and “The California Report.”
For more information please visit Ayelet’s website . Her missives also appear on Facebook and Twitter.
Her books are published throughout the world, in countries as disparate as England and Thailand, the Netherlands and China, Russia and Israel, Korea and Italy.
Your novel “Love and Treasure” encompasses such a gutting time in our historical past and touches on such a unique sliver of World War II history. How did the early conception of the story alight in your heart and how did it affect you on a personal level going through the research straight through until you wrote the last chapter?
Waldman responds: I have always been interested in literature of the Holocaust. That period looms in the imagination of American Jews, so many of whom feel that our survival was a matter of chance – immigration at the right moment. I have read in my my life probably hundreds of books, both fiction and non, about the Holocaust, many of which were the worst kind of Holocaust kitsch. You know, the story of the one good German. But the books that are good, books like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz or Primo Levi’s memoirs, changed how I looked at my life and my world.
Writing this novel was emotionally difficult. I remember at one point my husband said to me, after a dinner party, “Sweetie, I love you, but not every conversation has to be a conversation about Treblinka.” I had to learn how to compartmentalize.
Did you find it difficult at all to shift between the time settings of the book? As you go both forward and backward in the narrative in order to best tell the story as it evolves?
Waldman responds: Not at all. This was one of the delights of writing this book. Obviously it required a tremendous amount of research, and also a tremendous amount of focus to keep the sections distinct in tone, but challenges like that are what make writing fun.
What do you feel is the hardest part about writing convicting historical fiction whose heart of story is rooted in a remembered part of our combined past?
Waldman responds: Not allowing your research to overwhelm the story. It’s so tempting to cram every single thing you’ve read or learned into the novel, because you spent so much time and effort on your research. But then the story takes second place to the research, and that’s neither interesting nor emotionally satisfying to the reader.
What do you think has led for this section of history to become re-examined both in fiction and in motion picture!? (i.e. Monument Men)
Waldman responds: I’ll tell you this much, from now on I’m going to insist that George Clooney make a movie tangentially related to all my forthcoming novels.
I suppose it’s because the last survivors are now nearing the ends of their lives and people want to capture their stories before it’s too late.
What has led you to soak into the historical fiction genre to such a passionate level and know that it is a niche you want to explore further!?
Waldman responds: It’s a challenge to write about a different time and place, and challenges are what make writing exciting.
You revealed settings for your second historical novel in a previous interview, what attracted you to the different time and locales you were referencing? (French Riviera before WWI; Hollywood 1940s & 1950s; and New England in the 1960s) You picked specific places and decades, which lent me to believe you had a particular attachment to those choices?
Waldman responds: My character in this one has a particular attachment. They are the times and places his life will lead him. But I don’t want to say more, because it’s tempting fate to discuss a work before it’s been fully realized.
Outside of the 20th Century, is there a moment in the folds of the historical past you might be curious to explore?
Waldman responds: Sure. But I don’t really know what yet. I do know that writing (and reading!) historical fiction is such a delight that I’ll definitely be returning to the genre.
Do you travel to destinations that are reminiscent of locales or scenes that are inside your novel(s)? Or is most of your research condensed to what you can draw out of materials outside of travelling? I think it works both ways personally, as not everyone can travel to each country or city where their novel is set.
Waldman responds: Oh absolutely. I love to travel. It’s one of my greatest pleasures. Being able to travel both enriches the novel and is one of the reasons for doing it. I set this book in Hungary because I wanted to go to Hungary!
What were your early influences and wanderings in literature!? Which authors spoke to you as far as a style of story-telling endeared itself to you ahead of creating your own stories? Are there any titles you could share which are still brought forward to mind in fond affection?
Waldman responds: I was a voracious reader as a child. In addition to novels and memoirs about the Holocaust (The Diary of Anne Frank, The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier) my favorites included Harriet the Spy and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. All I did as a kid was read, gulping down books as many as one or two a day.
What was the impetus which gravitated you into writing? And, when did this occur? Who was your best cheerleader?
Waldman responds: I wanted to stop being a lawyer, and I’d always loved to read. My husband is a novelist, and I sort of thought, “Well, how hard can it really be?” Ha! He is no doubt my greatest cheerleader. He believed in me when no one else did.
What are your favourite tools to use whilst writing? And, where do you write to gain the most inspiration?
Waldman responds: I write anywhere. In my studio, in an office, at my kitchen table. I don’t believe in being too precious about it. I’m a terrible procrastinator and if I allow myself only to work in particular situations I won’t ever get anything done.
That being said, I love going to the MacDowell Colony. I get more done in that solitude than anywhere else on earth.
I write on a MacBook air using Scrivener. When I’m done, I put the document in Pages.
Outside the realm of writing and creating art, what enriches your spirit the most? Where do you find your serenity?
Waldman responds: I’m sort of a serenity-free zone. I’m always moving, always fretting. But I love my husband and kids. And my dog. If anything gives me serenity in life, it’s Mabel. She asks for nothing beyond a bowl of food and an occasional walk, and is always thrilled to see me.
Author Connections:
Converse via Twitter: #LoveandTreasureBlogTour
This Author Interview is courtesy of:
Similar to blog tours, when I feature a showcase for an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog.
Tuesday, May 27
Review at Kinx’s Book Nook
Thursday, May 29
Review at Mari Reads
Review at A Bibliotaph’s Reviews
Friday, May 30
Review at She Reads Novels
Review at Dianne Ascroft’s Blog
Monday, June 2
Review at Flashlight Commentary
Thursday, June 5
Review at Oh, For the Hook of a Book
Friday, June 6
Interview at Oh, For the Hook of a Book
Monday, June 9
Review at Closed the Cover
Tuesday, June 10
Interview at Closed the Cover
Wednesday, June 11
Review at A Bookish Girl
Review at Peeking Between the Pages
Friday, June 13
Review at Ageless Pages Reviews
Monday, June 16
Review at So Many Books, So Little Time
Guest Post at Historical Fiction Connection
Wednesday, June 18
Spotlight at Let Them Read Books
Thursday, June 19
Review at Book Nerd
Friday, June 20
Spotlight at Curling Up with a Good Book
Monday, June 23
Review at 100 Pages a Day
Tuesday, June 24
Review & Giveaway at Luxury Reading
Wednesday, June 25
Review at Lit Nerd
Thursday, June 26
Review at The Little Reader Library
Friday, June 27
Review at Man of la Book
Monday, June 30
Review at A Bookish Affair
Review at Just One More Chapter
Interview at Layered Pages
Tuesday, July 1
Interview at Jorie Loves a Story
Wednesday, July 2
Review at From L.A. to LA
Thursday, July 3
Review at Jorie Loves a Story
Review at Seaside Book Corner
Review at CelticLady’s Reviews
as I am happily honoured to be a blog tour hostess for:
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I am quite eager to share with you my ruminations on reading “Love & Treasure”!
{SOURCES: Book cover for “Love & Treasure”, Author Biography, Book Synopsis, and the quoted praise by Joyce Carol Oates were provided by HFVBT – Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours and used with permission. Author Interview badge provided by Parajunkee to give book bloggers definition on their blogs. Post dividers badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. In conjunction with reading the novel for review on behalf of HFVBTs, I wanted to interview Ms. Waldman get to know the writer behind the novel, as it is such a captivating slice of WWII history. My questions were sent to the author and received a reply through HFVBTs for which I am thankful.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2014.
Loved the interview!
wonderful interview — I love that Ms. Waldman name checked “The Mixed Up Files…” as it is a childhood fav of mine, too.
Hallo Audra,
I *loved!* “The Mixed-Up Files,..” myself and that was why I was over the moon in joyfulness in discovering “The Sixty-Eight Rooms” by Marianne Malone! Have you read this one!? It turnt into a series since I first read it through my local library, and I am always attempting to get back into it! Let me know if you read it one day and feel the same, as if it were almost a sequel without being as such officially? I just loved how Ms. Malone penned her story & kept the appeal of the first book intact for me! I’ll need to read the series & blog about it as I do! Cheers!
Ayelet, I loved reading about the fact that your husband is a novelist, too, and his support of you :) How wonderful, and what a career you’ve built!
Thanks for the interview, Jorie, and thanks for sharing, Ayelet :)