Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Judy Batalion
When I heard Judy Batalion’s new book, The Light of Days, described as “Inglourious Basterds”– if the “basterds” were teenage Jewish girls who hid grenades in their underwear to kill Nazis,” my first thought was “I need to read that book. “ My second thought was, I need to talk to the author for Women’s History Month. I’m so glad I did.
Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Forward, Vogue, and many other publications. Judy has a BA in the History of Science from Harvard, and a PhD in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, and has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. Born in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish, she now lives in New York with her husband and three children.
Take it away, Judy:
We are seeing more and more books about female spies and members of the resistance in World War II, both fiction and non-fiction. Do you think there is a reason that we are drawn to these stories now?
That’s a great question, and I have two answers. First, some backstory: I found the primary Yiddish source material for this book in the spring of 2007, just after I submitted my dissertation in feminist art history. I knew that the stories I’d found – testimonies about Jewish women who tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with contraband, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flung Molotov cocktails, and bombed German supply trains – were incredible, and yet, at the time, I also knew that they would not be “commercially viable.” As I’d learned from my Ph.D. work, women’s history just wasn’t in vogue. I was granted translation funds from an academic institution and, for many years, planned to release my research in an academic sphere. It was only after the first Women’s March, after Trump took office in 2017, that I pitched this idea to my literary agent, who immediately saw this story as one well-suited for a trade publication. Around that time, a new type of feminism was developing alongside a popular fascination in lost women’s histories. All to say, one reason is the social zeitgeist.
My second answer has to do with the subjects of these stories (and many of the fictional accounts published now are based on real people). Many of these WW2 female survivors stayed silent about their war tales for most of their lives. Sometimes they weren’t believed; other times, they were blamed for fighting instead of helping their families; frequently they were accused of sleeping their way to safety. Many women suffered terrible survivor’s guilt. Mostly, many women wanted to suppress their memories to raise “normal children” and create a healthy, happy new generation. Despite this, the second generation often felt ashamed of their outsider, refugee parents. It took until my generation, the 3Gs, to feel pride in this legacy, to ask our “grandmothers” about their lives. The WW2 survivors finally started talking, aware that they needed to tell their stories before they died. I think we’re now seeing books published based on these late-in-life conversations and ruminations.
The Light of Days tells the story of a group of fascinating women. Do you have a favorite among them?
You can’t have a favorite child! I was drawn to each woman for a different reason, mostly because they were so unlike me. These women were daring, cunning, passionate, and willing to take risks against-all-odds. Having said all that, when I went to have my headshot photographed for the book, I was having trouble posing. Before The Light of Days, most of my published work was humorous, and my photos always showed me smiling; I had perfected the cheeky glance, looking up at the camera above my glasses frames. For this shoot, however, I had to project something serious. I did not know how. The excellent photographer pushed me to think about my subject material, to focus intensely on one woman whose story I wanted – needed – to tell. I immediately thought of Frumka Plotnicka. Known as “di mama,” (the mother, in Yiddish) for her ability to listen, counsel and comfort, she returned to Nazi-occupied Poland on her own accord. She established soup kitchens and cultural programs to help ghettoized Jews; she slipped in and out of ghettos and traveled across the country bringing Jewish communities information, hope and supplies; she strategized uprisings and negotiated with Poles and Nazis; she was offered papers to leave the country for The Hague but would not go. But alongside her colossal strength and bravado, Frumka also had trouble making friends; she was intense and awkward and broke down a few times during the war – all that I could certainly relate to. Frumka died, age 29, while shooting at Nazis, clutching a revolver. If I didn’t tell her incredible story, who would? I feel close to her, in an ethereal, writerly way.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
A real research challenge for me in this project was names. I struggled with my characters’ names, a struggle that was amplified because they were women. The women in my story, like most Polish Jews, had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, as well as nicknames. Some had a wartime alias or several. Sometimes, they used other fake identities for emigration papers; it was usually easier to leave Europe if a woman was faux married. Then many changed their names to suit the languages of the countries where they ended up. (For instance, Vladka Meed began as Feigele Peltel. Vladka was her Polish undercover name; she married a Miedzyrzecka, which was changed to Meed when they moved to New York.) Further, I searched for these Slavic and Hebraic words in English search engines, based on combinations of Latin letters. For example, I found my protagonist Renia Kukielka under Renia, Renya, Rania, Regina, Rivka, Renata, Renee, Irena, and Irene; Kukielka has infinite Anglo spellings, as does its Yiddish “Kukelkohn.” Then Renia had various false wartime document names—Wanda Widuchowska, Gluck, Neuman. Plus, the married name added a layer that often complicates women’s traceability: “Renia Kukielka Herscovitch” (or possibly Herskovitch or Herzcovitz) has endless permutations. The story of Renia Kukielka could easily have slipped through, been lost forever.
My question to Pamela: Since you are so wonderfully steeped in women’s history, I would love to hear what you recommend as a great and surprising women’s history book or even TV show right now?
Women’s history month is a rough time around here (and by around here, I mean in my head). I end up with a whole bunch of books I want to read, added to the pile of books I already wanted to read and no time to do more than dip in here and there. That said, two very different books have grabbed me by the imagination and are keeping me reading:
The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Lived by Danielle Dreilinger—I was a hostile reluctant home economics student when I was forced to take the class in eighth grade. (And I still think that the class as I experienced it was caught in a timewarp.) The revelation that home economics was a feminist project in its roots is an eye-opener. (Just so you know, the book won’t be released until May. Sorry)
The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage and Justice by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon.—I loved Lemmon’s earlier books so I was eager to read this one, and she doesn’t disappoint. Beginning with the statement “I told myself that I had given up war,” Lemmon is sucked into the story of an all-female Kurdish militia unit fighting against Isis, and to make women’s equality a reality in the process. She sucked me in, too.
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The Light of Days will be released on April 6, but you can pre-order it now wherever you buy your books.
Want to know more about Judy Batalion and The Light of Days?
Check out her website: https://www.judybatalion.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @JudyBatalion
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Follow her on Instagram: JudyBatalion
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Come back tomorrow for a whole bunch of questions and an answer with Julia Charles, talking about Jessie Redmon Fauset and the New Negro Renaissance.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and , well, women photojournalists. (You can tell where my mind’s been lately.) If that sounds like your fistful of daffodils, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b .(When you subscribe, you’ll get a link for a very cool downloadable timeline of the Roman emperors and the women who fought against them or supported them, which I created with the people behind The Exploress podcast.)
Asta Nielsen, International Film Sensation
Here’s the deal about “women’s history”: once you’re sensitive to the subject you stumble across references to notable women all the time.*
Take the case of Asta Nielsen:
I first met her in this sentence: “Asta Nielsen, newly arrived in Berlin from Denmark, described her horror when a skeletal horse collapsed in the street.”** For all I knew, Asta Nielsen was just a stray Danish tourist in Berlin, but I am a responsible researcher so I did a quick Google search, just in case. And, poof, once again I was down a research rabbit hole with no immediate link to my book.
Asta Nielsen is often described as the first international film star. Known as “Die Asta” and “the Silent Muse,” she was an international superstar of the silent movies. (In World War I, soldiers on both sides of the trenches carried her picture into battle.)
Nielsen was a working actress with an career that was going nowhere when film director Peter Urban Gad convinced her to work with him on a film. The project, an erotic melodrama titled Afgrunden (The Abyss), released in 1910.
Nielsen used her success to negotiate contract terms with the growing German film industry that gave her a financial interest in her films and considerable artistic and economic control over both her films and her public persona. (Unlike most of her Hollywood contemporaries.) Nielsen spent the next 25 years in Germany, where she made 70 films, including one co-starring Greta Garbo, Die freudlose Gasse (the Joyless Street or The Street of Sorrow). ( Garbo’s assessment of Nielsen: “In terms of expression and versatility, I am nothing compared to her.”) In 1932, Nielson performed in her only sound film, Impossible Love. It was her last film, with the exception of two documentaries that she appeared in decades later.
When the Nazis came into power in 1933, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Nielsen her own studio. She refused, but continued to perform in German theaters until 1937, when she returned to Denmark. When the Nazis occupied Denmark in 1940, they offered her another chance to make films. She refused again.
In Denmark, she continued to perform on stage, became an acclaimed collage artist, and began a literary career at the age of 65.
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn all acknowledged her influence on their work. Not a bad legacy by any standard.
*This should surprise no one.
**In Belinda J. Davis’s Home Fires Burning: Food Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin, in case you want to know. An excellent book, though a bit too academic for me to review it here on the Margins.
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Come back Monday for a three questions and an answer with Judy Batalion about Jewish women who fought against the Nazis in the resistance .
How the Titanic Launched* One Woman’s Journalism Career
In April 1912 , a 30-year old seamstress/businesswoman from Louisiana, Missouri named May Birkhead was sailing to Europe on the Carpathia. Her holiday was postponed when the ship halted to pick up survivors from the Titanic.
Birkhead put her seamstress skills to good use, creating clothing for the shipwreck victims from towels and other materials available on board ship. But that would be her last job as a dressmaker.
Several years previously, Birkhead had become friends with Eric Hawkins, a New York Herald reporter who came to Louisiana Missouri to photograph Democratic Senator Champ Clark.. When word reached New York that the Carpathia had picked up survivors, Hawkins remembered that Birkhead was on board. He contacted her over the ship’s radio and asked her for an eyewitness account. She not only got interviews with survivors, she got negatives from Carpathia passengers who took photographs of the disaster and the rescue.**
Birkhead met Hawkins on the dock when the Carpathia arrived back in New York, giving the New York Herald a enormous scoop on the biggest news of the day.
The Herald’s publisher, James Gordon Bennet, was so impressed with her work that he offered her a job.
Birkhead started work as soon as she reached Paris. For twenty-nine years, she reported on fashion and society from Paris, first was a correspondent for the New York Herald and later for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and then the New York Times. During World War I, she stayed in France and once again proved herself to be a reporter who could handle more than the “woman’s page.” Although she was not an official war correspondent, she wrote feature stories about war news and later reported on the Versailles peace conference.
She left Paris on July 16, 1940—a month after the Nazis took Paris. Birkhead drove out of France toward Lisbon through Nazi-occupied territories with several friends. They quickly discovered that Germain officers refused to allow people who were leaving the country to buy gasoline. They spent five days in Poitiers, trying to get enough gasoline to reach Bordeaux. While in Poitiers, two of the party were arrested by the Nazis on suspicion of spying. The charges were proved to be false and the army officers agreed to give them gasoline as a “form of damages.”
When they reached Lisbon, they discovered that 22,000 people had arrived ahead of them, trying to get passage out of Europe.
Interviewed by the New York Times on her arrival, she told the reporter that the Nazis were stripping the city of all valuables, including food. She reported that before she left the city where she had wined and dined for almost thirty years, she had lived for five days on condensed milk, cocoa, and cereal, the only food left in her cupboards. The interview ended with the optimistic statement that Birkhead had renewed the lease on her apartment before she left and would be “going back after the Germans are thrown out.”
Birkhead did not make it back to her beloved Paris. She died on October 28, 1941. In her obituary, the New York Times said “She probably knew and was known by more cosmopolites and social personages of the two continents than any other reporter in Europe or America.” (On the other hand, the Times also described her as being “a young girl bound for a carefree holiday abroad” on the Carpathia, when in fact she was a 30-year-old woman who had financed her own first-class ticket with her successful dressmaking business.)
* Sorry I couldn’t resist.
**Rubbernecking on a grand scale.
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Come back tomorrow for more juicy Women’s History Month content.