PIEN HUANG, HOST:
In a new book of historical fiction, a woman looks back on her childhood in Holland upended by a brutal war. That war was World War II, and she grew up to be a grandmother, living a quiet life on the Jersey Shore, until a visit from her grandson brings up that past. The book is called "Our Narrow Hiding Places," and it's the latest novel by Kristopher Jansma. Jansma's real-life grandmother inspired the main character Mieke. She lived through a time known as the Hunger Winter.
KRISTOPHER JANSMA: During the final six months of the war, the Nazis blockaded food, cut off electricity, took away the coal and had already sort of confiscated much of the metal, rubber, blankets, clothes, even, from the people in Western Holland, in The Hague where she was growing up. And then they started blockading the food.
HUANG: Jansma says some 20,000 people died, and his grandmother has vivid memories.
JANSMA: Hearing these stories from my grandmother and - when I was as young as my kids, heard her telling us that, you know, had the war lasted another two weeks that she probably would have died, and of course, I wouldn't be there.
HUANG: Those memories inspired Jansma to write this novel. I asked him how he began that process.
JANSMA: I started by just taking down as much of the factual account as I could from her, which was all so rich and interesting that I wanted to try to keep as much of it to the truth as possible. And so I knew, you know, my instincts were kind of kicking in, and I realized at some point this was going to start to turn into a work of fiction. I was seeing interesting possibilities to go into sort of new directions with it. And then as I started to do more research, I got my hands on some other survivor accounts that actually she had found and collected. So once I started reading those and I saw some of the things that other people like her had gone through, I started to weave those elements in as well. So there's certain things that the character Mieke does in the novel that didn't actually happen to my grandmother but did happen to her neighbors, her friends, other family members.
HUANG: There is a grandson character in the book, a man named Will, whose visit to his grandmother Mieke prompts a lot of this remembering. I'm wondering, how did this character come to you?
JANSMA: Will is unlike me in many ways, although, of course, I think he's probably the closest character in the novel to me. Will is a doctor. He's married to a Japanese American woman named Teru, and the two of them are struggling to have a child. And he's dealing with sort of the downstream impacts, you know, two generations later of the traumas that his grandmother has experienced.
And all of this was, in my mind, a way to explore what happens when someone - you know, someone like Mieke, for instance, goes through all these things as a child, and the - you know, the traumas that she's experienced are passed along, both, you know, sort of in her DNA, but then also in these secrets that are kept from the family and the things that they're hiding from one another.
HUANG: Both Will and his grandmother Mieke have somewhat narrow views of what's happened, how it shapes who they are. You know, it's really about their lived experience. But the broader view in the story is actually taken by a voice that I found very surprising. Can you tell us about those narrators?
JANSMA: There are sections of the novel that are narrated by what I've called sort of a chorus of eels. They speak in the first person plural as kind of a collective. And they get to stand sort of outside of the shorter human timeline that Will and his grandmother - that Mieke are inhabiting. From the very beginning of the book, I had written sections that were - I wanted to include sort of folk tales and fairy tales that came from sort of Dutch culture hundreds of years ago, and they're able to tell stories then that relate to Dutch history, going back to when Holland was, you know, under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, or even further back to when it was part of the Roman Empire. I just - I really wanted the novel to be able to see a bigger piece of history than the human characters could see - science and research.
HUANG: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask you about the title, "Our Narrow Hiding Places." What does it refer to? And what does it mean to you?
JANSMA: So there's a literal connection in the novel. The eels, at one point, describe themselves as sort of inhabiting these narrow hiding places in the world. And so I had this idea of the eels being able to be almost anywhere, watching the human drama unfolding. And then it resonated with so many other things that were happening. The characters - at one point in the novel, Mieke's father and the other men in the building have to hide in the attic of their apartment building to avoid being sent off to a work camp by the Nazis that are occupying The Hague. And this is all - this is now based on a true experience that my grandmother had - the slip of paper that was tacked to the door of the apartment building demanding that all the men in the building come down the next day to report for the work camps. And her father and some of the other men in the building decided to defy that order and hide in the attic. And so they are also now kind of jammed into this narrow hiding place. And then just throughout the book, there are other characters who find themselves in similar situations...
HUANG: Yeah.
JANSMA: ...Physically. And then when it comes back to Will, I think he is also living in a world in which much has been hidden from him. People have tried to keep the truth from him about what happened to his father when he was young.
HUANG: The title is "Our Narrow Hiding Places," and we've talked about the different characters and what their hiding places are. But I'm wondering, is this something that you feel like you include yourself in...
JANSMA: (Laughter).
HUANG: ...As you're speaking to us from your own narrow hiding place in the closet (laughter)?
JANSMA: Yeah, yeah. When I started writing, I imagined that I was sort of coming in to face these intergenerational traumas - right? - the big buzzword a few years ago, in particular, when I first started writing this book. And I thought, that's what this is going to help me see. I'm going to figure out all these hidden things that happened a long time ago before I was even born that have, you know, shaped me and made me the way I am, and that'll help me understand why I am this way, right?
And in a weird way, a surprising way, what I found instead, or at least in addition to that, was a sense of - not trauma and, like, woundedness but actually resilience and an ability to survive that I had never really - you know, in my fairly nice, sheltered life in which I've never had to survive a war or extreme hunger and things like that that my grandmother did go through, never really understood myself to be capable of. But knowing that she - once I fully sort of saw what she'd been through, I was able to realize, you know, this has been passed on as well, right? We inherit - along with all those traumas, we inherit a hidden ability to survive, a hidden perseverance, a hidden resilience that is really powerful, and that's something that I hope that readers will see as they go through the novel with Will. I think that's what he comes to understand by the end of it.
HUANG: Kristopher Jansma's new novel is called "Our Narrow Hiding Places." It's out August 13. Kristopher, thank you.
JANSMA: Thank you so much. This is such a joy. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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