A Guest Post by Alina Adams
The bulk of my upcoming historical fiction, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” takes place in the 1930s in, well, the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of the former Soviet Union, right on their border with China.
Historical fiction is most commonly defined as taking place 50 years prior to a book’s publication date. So, yes, that means that the first half of the 20th century is definitely now considered historical. (Heck, by that definition, the 1960s are now considered historical! A deep breath for those of us who were born then… or who remember it clearly.)
But there’s a bright side to that vaguely disconcerting fact. The bright side is that those of us doing research for our novels now have a wonderful resource right at our fingertips - the miracle known as YouTube!
When writing, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region,” I used traditional sources, too.
Particularly helpful were Masha Gessen’s book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, and Swarthmore College’s exhibit on Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: An Illustrated History, 1928–1996: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland.
Both were terrific general overviews, but when writing about my lead character, Regina’s, desperate flight from Moscow in the midst of Stalin’s Great Terror to what should have been the protective shelter of the JAR’s settlement of Birobidzhan, I craved specifics. What did the train station look like in the 1930s (an early scene is set there, where Regina meets Aaron, the man who will consume her life for the next half century)? What kind of housing were the new immigrants given (Regina is assigned to barracks with a trio of roommates, all of whom are expected to keep a close eye on one another and report any anti-Soviet activity)? How did they work the fields (Muscovite Regina is suddenly thrust into an agrarian world she’s only read about in books)? How did they dress? What did they eat? Where were their public meetings and samokritika sessions - opportunities for citizens to self-criticize by confessing their subversive deeds or thoughts and be thoroughly excoriated by their fellow commune members - held?
I wanted visuals, and I found them in the wonders of YouTube. After some intense Googling, I was rewarded with a documentary that combined footage from a film made in 1928 to entice Jewish immigration to Birobidzhan with new film shot in 2009. I also dug up random clips of what the train station looked like in the 1930s, and yet another modern documentary titled The Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia from 2019.
But my true treasure of a find was Seekers of Happiness, a 1936 Soviet film produced to convince the Jews of the USSR to move to Birobidzhan immediately.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t find it. My mother did.
My parents were born in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Growing up there, they’d vaguely heard that a mosquito-ridden stretch of swampland had been set aside prior to World War II as a place where Jews could supposedly go to escape the anti-Semitism of the USSR and build their own state, the first independent Jewish state in thousands of years - under the benevolent auspices of Communism. The reasons behind creating Birobidzhan were many, but a primary motivation was to counter the Zionist movement, which was illegal in the Soviet Union, and convince the Jews of the world that they were much better off relocating to the JAR, than dreaming of some impossible desert in the Middle East, where nobody wanted them, anyway.
In the 1950s, the JAR’s existence took on a more ominous denotation as, following Stalin’s accusation that Jewish doctors were attempting to poison Soviet officials - known as The Doctor’s Plot - rumors swept through the country that their Great Leader was planning on rounding up Jews in already prepared cattle cars and shipping them, en masse, to Bidobidzhan, where who knows what he had waiting for them.
Coming less than a decade after Adolph Hitler had done more or less the same thing, and in the middle of Stalin’s deportation of literally thousands of citizens to Siberia without so much as a trial or, sometimes, even a declared charge, the possibility didn’t sound at all unreasonable. (I covered the banishments to Siberia in my previous historical fiction, “The Nesting Dolls.”) Many Jews of my parents’ generation believe that the only reason this order wasn’t carried out was due to Stalin’s death in 1953.
It was because of the JAR’s prominence in the minds of Soviet Jews as the place to which they might at any moment be banished, that my mother remembered there’d been a propaganda movie extolling its virtues. The print had been restored and even re-released at select Jewish film festivals throughout the first decade of the 21st Century.
But I was doing my research from home - in the middle of a pandemic. Which meant YouTube to the rescue!
Thanks to modern technology, we were able to watch the entire film from our couch.
And what a film it was! A poor Jewish family returning from… somewhere (guesses range from America to Palestine), having been beaten down by life outside of the USSR. Naturally, they can’t return to wherever it was they left from originally. Not because of anti-Semitism. The Soviet Union vanquished the pogroms and other violent humiliations of Czarist times! If there was still anti-Semistim in the Soviet Union, would their government have so generously given the Jews a homeland of their own? Nonetheless, their neighbors wouldn’t be thrilled to see them again. For… no particular reason.
Have no fear, though! The family is soon given permission to immigrate to Birobidzhan, where, as long as they pull their weight within the collective, there are plenty of crops to harvest, plenty of fish to catch, plenty of chickens to breed, and so much joy that the grateful and happy workers literally go about their daily tasks singing patriotic songs.
Of course, one of the greedy Jews refuses to get with the program. He only came to Birobidzhan because he heard there was gold to be mined there, and he selfishly shirks his duties to go panning for it. Don’t worry, he gets his comeuppance - and how! (I won’t spoil an eighty-six year old movie for you in case you want to watch for yourselves… on YouTube!)
My parents and I laughed through most of Seekers of Happiness (at it, not with it), but it provided exactly what I’d been searching for. It demonstrated what the government wanted people to think the Jewish Autonomous Region was, versus the reality painstakingly researched and written by Gessen. It helped clarify for me why my heroine would be so fired up to make her way there - and the sorts of disappointments she would encounter.
The fictional film showed me what she would have been expecting. And the documentaries revealed what she would have actually found. (Octogenarian spoiler: The crops, fish, and chickens, not to mention the joyful, patriotic singing, weren’t nearly as plentiful as advertised.)
YouTube may not be much help to those researching time periods prior to the 1900s (though I suppose you could catch interviews with renowned experts on your particular period), but now that the 20th century is fair game for historical fiction writing, it’s a treasure trove of details that might not be available anywhere else!
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Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap-opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her historical fiction novel, “The Nesting Dolls,” was released in July 2020 from HarperCollins. Her upcoming book, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” is set for November 15, 2022 publication and available for pre-order now. Find her online at:
AlinaAdams.com
Alina Adams "My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region" coming November 2022! "The Nesting Dolls: A Russian-Jewish Family Saga" available now wherever books are sold!
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