Finding Resiliance in 'Our Narrow Hiding Places'
An interview with Kristopher Jansma
I’m writing on the eve of TIFF 2024, and I’m still busy going out of my mind trying to schedule my time at the festival. My plan is to write daily dispatches for the newsletter as things kicks off tomorrow, but before that I had something else I really wanted to share with you all.
Several years ago now, I was introduced to the novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, by Kristopher Jansma. It was a whimsical story about an aspiring writer, the kind of thing I of course gravitated toward. His next novel was Why We Came to the City, about a group of friends living in New York, dealing the problems of life, including cancer. The story was drawn from Jansma’s own life, and the experience of his sister, who died from cancer. I was incredibly moved by the book at the time, and with my own experiences over the last couple of years being diagnosed with cancer, I’ve thought about it quite a lot.
I was happy then, to learn that Jansma had a new book out this summer, Our Narrow Hiding Places. This time, he was venturing into historical fiction, telling the story of the Hunger Winter, which took place in 1944 and 1945 during the Nazi occupation of Holland. It follows the story of a young girl, Mieke, named after Jansma’s grandmother, who surived the Hunger Winter as a child. Drawn largely from his grandmother’s own recollections, along with a lot of great research, the book offers a vivid picture of daily life in the depths of wartime, the mundane, the extraordinary and the horrific alike.
The book sets Mieke’s childhood story against a concurrent, contemporary story about her grandson, Will, who is facing struggles in his marriage, and reckoning with a streak of mental illness in his family, and perhaps in him, that may be descended from his grandparents’ experience in the war. More than mere framing narrative, Will’s story, expands the scope of the book, exploring ideas about inheritance, intergenerational trauma, and also resiliance.
Interwoven between the two narratives are tales of Dutch history and folklore, ostensibly written by a fictional concentration camp victim, but narrated by a collective of eels, whose mysterious, almost magical nature begins to intrude in ways on both narratives. Call it magical realism, or something else perhaps. It’s a choice that expands the story further, questioning reality itself and our place in it, the connections we have and the identities we form. It makes for a terrific, lively read, despite the darkness of the subject matter, and I was excited to sit down with Jansma over Zoom to talk all about it.
How did, how did this book come about?
So, actually, it started in in during covid, in early 2020, when all the lockdowns happened here. I was home with my kids and my family as everybody else was, and then my grandmother lives in New Jersey—she's about two hours, two-and-a-half hours from me, and there's no no other close family near her. My parents were a whole other long story, but my parents were stuck on a boat in the Caribbean for two years.
Oh my god.
So they were, you know, not going to be able to help much. I ended up kind of being the one to call her and check in with her every week and make sure she was doing okay, that she had food and all that stuff. So I would call her every Friday at night, and we would kind of chat and catch up on the week, and we talked about what was going on with with the pandemic. I was particularly concerned with my kids and what was this sort of scary, disruptive situation going to do to them? Because they weren't in school anymore, and my my daughter at the time was really young. She was basically in pre K and and my son was in first grade. I guess my daughter would have been even before pre K.
Prime development age.
Yeah, prime development. And also, they can't process what's going on, because their view of the world is so small. So anyway, I was talking with her a lot about that, and like, what are my kids going to remember from all this, and how scary is it going to be? I was sort of hoping, maybe it'll just all blow over soon and they won't remember anything. She sort of laughed, and she was like, “Well, I can tell you, when I was eight, you know, this crazy thing happened in my country where I was growing up, and I remember it all very vividly, and it was very scary.” Then we started talking more about that. Week by week, she would come back to it a lot, and she started telling me more and more of these stories. Over the years, she had told me some of the stuff, and I knew the basics of it, but now we finally kind of had the time to really sit down and talk to each other in depth about it, and for me to really start taking notes and write it all down.
I'd always sort of in the back of my mind thought, I should try to do this, you know, before it's too late. She was 83 at the time—she's 87 now—and so it just seemed like the right opportunity. And then as we talked about it more and more, the more I started thinking, Okay, there's actually a novel here that I could figure out how to write. I was a little worried at first, because I've never written historical fiction before, and for me it was such a departure from trying to write about the present day, or like the rough contemporary period. But then I think maybe it was also because I'd just written a book [that was so contemporary], then suddenly it felt like maybe it would be great to just get into a whole different time zone and start thinking about a different kind of storytelling.
I mean, I relate to that in that, my grandmother went through the Holocaust, and she has her stories all recorded and everything, but there was a certain point where I was like, I should get her to sit down and sort of tell me the stories, not to write it as fiction, but just to kind of write it down. The kind of the opportunities never really arose, and she went through some health issues that made it more difficult to do, especially at her age.
It was definitely that very much that. There was finally time to do it, and I started doing it, I got really excited about figuring out a way to kind of tell a version of her story.
Did you give a thought to just doing it straight, instead of as fiction?
There were a couple times where I thought about that, but I had a couple things hold me back on that. One was similar to you. My grandmother doesn't have any memory issues or anything that I know of, but she's still remembering back to when she was eight years old. I kept thinking, I wonder how to verify a lot of this stuff as fact. Obviously, I can verify the broad historical events and everything, but, you know, specific things about it. There's no one else in our family surviving from that time to even check things against and so I was a little worried about that. Then the bigger problem was just, especially that first year during COVID, it was very hard to find the research that I could do to back it up, even those bigger things.
I did a lot of research online. I emailed back and forth with these people at different institutions in Holland. Actually, those were largely closed for that whole year, and even most of the second year, into 2021, and what I really wanted to do right from the start was sort of go out there. I had seen these places, because when I was young, we we went and stayed in The Hague with my great grandmother—her mother—a couple of times. So I had pretty vivid memories of my own of what it all looked like, and I really wanted to go back there and see it all. It took two years before it was even possible to go out there. It wasn't until spring of 22 that I was able to actually book a ticket to go visit.
What did the process end up being like? You're writing fiction, but it's really striking, reading the book, the amount of detail that has to have come from research.
I got a lot of stuff from her in our conversations. After we were both vaccinated, I was able to drive down to actually see her again. She had a bunch of stuff that she had accumulated over the years that she was able to share with me. She had a she had a couple of books that had found over the years, and one was really helpful. It was sort of a little booklet with a bunch of different survivors’ accounts from World War, from the Hunger Winter specifically. And she had a couple of documentary things that she had found that she shared with me, like DVDs of news programs and things like that.
Through that, I was able to then weave in other things beyond what she remembered. There's certain things that happen in the novel that didn't happen to her specifically, but they're all things that are based on other things that I read about in that second book, other survivor accounts. They're all based on things that happened could have happened to her, and did happen to neighbors and friends and things like that.
Oone example is in the real history of it. My grandmother's family actually sent her and her brother away in—I think it would have to have been early 1944. They thought the Allies were going to be able to kind of break through Belgium, and that they'd be coming to liberate Holland, but that it would be very dangerous, particularly in the city, when that happened. There might be a lot of fighting and stuff. And so they sent my grandmother at age like seven or eight and my uncle at age like four or five, just to go live with this random family in rural Holland for a couple of months. Then in September, when Mad Tuesday happened, which is described in the novel, and they felt like the allies were actually about to liberate them, they went and got the kids back. In sort of a weird ironic twist, the kids ended up back in the family again right when the Hunger Winter phase began. That was one thing where I was like, I could have the characters do that and go somewhere else for a while, but it would feel disruptive to the story to have them all of a sudden change locations.
You have the sort-of-fictionalized, sort-of-real historical accounts, and then you've mixed in folklore element, including in your depiction of eels. I’m so curious how you landed on that.
So the folklore stuff I'd had in mind early on. I had written an essay for the Center for Fiction a few years ago that was all about magical realism. And I was, I was sort of interested in the science behind magical realism, and why, neurologically speaking, people lean towards magical thinking at certain times in our lives. One of the things I found was that, particularly during times of great uncertainty—in countries where there's famine, poverty, fascist governments, etc.—you see more inclination in culture towards magical belief. Gabriel García Márquez used to talk about magical realism, and he used to complain that he's not trying to be magical, he's just describing what life is really like in Colombia, that that's what people believe is real. So I had that in the back of my head.
I love that idea that, particularly for a young girl telling the story in that time, that it could be really interesting to weave in some sort of magical folklore elements and watch them go from a place of realism in the beginning of the novel, and then as things get more and more out of control, to have more of that magical stuff taking hold in her mind. By the time the novel ends and she's going through the actual Hunger Winter, she's full-on hallucinating. I wanted to play around with that kind of like uncertainty of, is it real? Is it magical? Is it is it delusional? Is it mental illness?
I was able find an old book of Dutch folklore. And I started reading that, and I started pulling things out of there that I thought I could weave into the story. There's little like in-between sections that had always been there, but originally they were just written straight out as little folktales, and then during the editing process, in the final couple months of writing, my the editor at Ecco had me make a fairly big change to the contemporary section of the book with Will, and I had to cut a lot of stuff out. I think I was a little sort of grumpy about that, and so as I was doing that, I was looking for something else to throw back in that would excite me a little bit.
I was reading this book called The Book of Eels at the time, which is a nonfiction book. Something about it kind of just gelled with the voice that I was already working with in the novel. There were already eels in the novel that Mieke was going to catch with her uncle, but by weaving them in as a kind of narrator, I realized that I could kind of pull back out a little bit. I really wanted to show a bigger slice of history, and put these events into a bigger context. And one of the things I'd learned about eels at that time was that they have these, mysteriously long lifespans. There’s that legend about the eel that gets stuck in the well.
That’s a real story, about the eel that lived over 150 years.
Yeah, that’s a real story, which they mentioned in The Book of Eels as well. That clicked with me. And I was like, okay, if the eels are telling the story, then they could be able to, collectively, take us back to the Napoleonic age. They could talk about what Holland was like during the Roman Empire? And even in these sort of pre-Roman, pagan times, when, according to the folklore, the fairies lived amongst the people.
There’s also the modern section of the book, following Will’s story, which brings in questions about the intergenerational effects of what his grandmother went through. The book explores even as a genetic thing, what’s passed down through traumatized DNA. But there's the great bit near the end of the book where you sort of suggest it's enough that the stories are told and the stories on their own like perpetuate these traumas and other intergeneration things.
It's something I think about a lot. I'm a storyteller, so I my inclination is always to think about the stories that I've heard about my childhood, or about my parents’ lives, and the stories that we passed down from one generation to the next. How do those get inside our heads, and give us a context for ourselves? You grew up knowing that you are the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, carrying that with you and probably wondered, What bearing does any of that have on this or that decision that I'm making? I kind of had something similar with this, where I was wondering, the more I looked into it, the more I was thinking, How did this affect the way my grandmother raised my father? How does that affect the way my father raised me? And on and on.
But then, as I was digging into it, I had started reading about the the relatively newer science of epigenetics, where they've now started to look at it from a genetic point of view and see that traumatic events like this damage the DNA of the victims. And then that damage can be forwarded on generationally into the future. Then, as I was digging into the Hunger Winter, I found out that actually the Hunger Winter itself is is sort of like a focal point of researchers in epigenetics, because it's the relatively rare moment where there was this sudden onset of a famine in an otherwise very healthy, First World population. They were able to kind of rule out a lot of the other types of things that would muddy the data I guess, so there's a number of these studies that actually have been done specifically on survivors in the Hunger Winter and seeing the effects on the people that survived, but then also on their children and their children's children.
There's so myths surrounding the covalence of artistic ability, and temperament, and mental illness. You read these stories and poems and things like that by these great artists who've struggled with mental health, or have committed suicide and things like that. It was just something that, like, my whole life I've been worried about, I guess, in a lot of ways. Do these things come hand in hand together? And I think writing the book helped me figure a lot of that stuff out. I tried to kind of put a little bit of that through Will in the novel.
I was also curious about the character of Will’s wife, Teru. They’re going through marital difficulties, and she’s actually going through her own process of coming to terms with intergenerational traumas, with her family having gone through WWII in Japan. We don’t get a lot of her character, and you don’t get too detailed about their marriage, but we still get a strong sense of it.
This was one of the things that changed in the final rewrite of the book. My original idea for the novel had been sort of two equal parts, the Hunger Winter and World War II stuff, and then a while story that would have taken place in 2020, during COVID. Originally Will and Teru were living together in Brooklyn, they had two kids already, and they were in the process of breaking up when the pandemic started, and so now they were sort of stuck together and not sure if this was going to be another chance for them to work things out, or if it was just going to make it all worse. I never really liked the way it all came together. Ultimately, when I brought it to the publisher, she said, “You know, I love all the Holland stuff. The World War II stuff is really interesting. I can't get anybody to buy a book about COVID right now.” I was already feeling a little iffy about it anyway, and so I took all that out and started over with Will and Teru.
A big part of that was also rebalancing the two halves. So it was originally maybe like a 400 page novel, about 200 pages on Holland and 200 on Will in COVID. There was really no way, even with all the drama of COVID, to have that feel equal to the importance of the war and what was happening in Holland. At the same time, I didn't want it to be just kind of like a loose frame narrative around it. I really wanted the two parts to connect through that intergenerational trauma. So I ended up compromising and finding a way to make Will’s story about half of the overall length of the World War II stuff. It literally took some architecture like that, where I was looking at, like, Okay, I just had a 20 page section in Holland, so the next section in New Jersey can be 10 pages.
Oh, interesting.
I was sort of targeting towards something where, roughly, you always spend about twice as much time in the Holland sections as with with Will in the present day. I wanted to keep the focus on what was happening in Holland. And really the central question for me for Will and Teru was, are they going to stay together now that the truth about his past, that he's been sort of hiding from her, is coming out? And then, more broadly, do they see a future for themselves as parents? In Will's case, I think there's a fear of, If we have children, then I may pass all this on to another generation, and taking that responsibility on. I wanted to kind of keep the focus pretty narrowly on just that aspect of their relationship.
There's a sort of rhyming between the past and present storylines, and there's certain connections. One chapter will kind of set off some ideas that are dealt with a little bit in another, but very subtly, and there's sections of the book where the the chapters don't feel that connected, which I think is also nice. It doesn't feel schematic that way. I’m curious how you approached creating those connections.
I didn't want to be—what you just said, schematic, I think is a great word for it. I didn't want it to parallel in such a direct way, where it's like, something happens to, you know, Mieke in 1944 and then we see the exact same thing happening again to Will in the next chapter in 2017. I think it would have just been a little too clever and a little too cute. And I also don't think it's how this stuff tends to happen in the real world. You know, I like what you said there about it sort of rhyming. A friend of mine said that. When we were talking about this book, he said, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. That is a nice way to think about it.
I had a pretty clear sense of the progression of things in World War II and how those those elements were going to keep on getting kind of dramatically worse. And I realized along the way that it didn't need to match up perfectly to what's happening in 2017 as long as the situation with Will is sort of progressively deepening as well, as the story goes along. Which was tricky because Teru is off camera the whole time. She leaves after that first scene. So I needed a way to keep the situation with Will and Teru getting more complicated, even as the rest of the novel continued. But as long as it was able to kind of keep on developing, it seemed like they worked well together.
Going back to the research. Was it fun to go diving into research?
I found that I really love the research. It's something that know about myself and then forget. When I get into the research part of it, I will often really dread it, and I'll avoid it for weeks and weeks. I just want to sit down and, you know, write and for it to be pure imagination. Sitting with a book in the library or going to see something in real life feels like such a way to slow that all down. And it feels like it's going to be tedious. Then, as soon as I do it, I realized immediately, This is so great. I should have done this a long time ago. Because there's so many great little details that are out there, and it feels like, as you're researching, they're just sitting there waiting to be used. The minute I see them, I can see it in the book.
One example would in the museum in Holland. When I finally got there, in one of the display cases in the resistance Museum, they had the actual homemade device that that they had used at the time to basically boost the signal on the radio.
That kite thing that you describe!
Yeah, it's wild! I had a scene already in there where they're listening to the radio, because I had read about that in one of the other books, but all of a sudden I was sitting there, looking at it. It's just four pieces of wood and some wire. There was a printout that somebody was passing around, basically teaching you how to make it yourself out of home supplies. Immediately, I was like, Oh, I've done that when I was growing up! When we were in the early days of the internet, I remember making a WiFi signal booster out of a Pringles can so that we could steal WiFi from the neighbour's house. So all of a sudden, it feels very real and like personal, based on just this little thing that I couldn't have seen until I got there. And it's not just like what it looks like, but it's actually realizing, like, oh yeah, these guys would have sat around with scrap wood and copper wire, and follow these instructions in order to do this little, like hack. Little things like that, and all of a sudden I could see the whole scene where they're making it.
Those details make it feel like you've got a window into into an actual past that people lived in and did things in. I got that feeling reading your book, where there's like details, like names of stories and all kinds of things that almost nobody will know about or get the references, but it doesn't matter, because it fills out the world and the characters.
I had a little bit of a theater background. I was a terrible actor, but I loved being behind-the-scenes and doing the tech stuff. I was always involved in sort of getting the sets and things put together. I think about it that exact way, where it's like, the audience can't really see the accuracy of this prop or whatever, and sometimes you just have to throw something together, but it might affect the way the actor does the role or it’s going to have even this totally imperceptible impact on how the scene goes.
I talk about that a lot with my students. So many of them have been taught this super minimalist, like Hemingway style that I've never really I appreciated. I know it's not easy to do, but it doesn't get me as excited. Because I love that sort of excess of detail that shows you the author is layering in things that aren't really necessary sometimes, just because that's the way that is what reality is. I think James Wood talks about it in one of the books I use in my class, he talks about like the nature of reality is like an excess of detail. Every writer's job is to choose certain things to emphasize. When you want to give the impact of this being like a real room that they've just walked into, you want to include not just like the table and the chair that he's about to sit in, but all the other things that you can in order to make it feel like a real room. When you walk into a real room, you don't just see the table and the chair, you see everything.
How did the actual experience of going to Holland affect the book?
By the time I got to Holland, there was a pretty big chunk of the book already written. When I got out there, and I started really looking into the museums and going and walking around in the areas where the events were happening, there was so much of that kind of excess detail that we talked about that started to find its way in. I was able to then go back and take some of those scenes and bring them more fully to life. One surprise was when I went out there, my original plan was to go out there by myself and just sort of poke around for a week. I bought my tickets, and I told my grandmother that I was going, and she called me a few days later and said that she had bought her own ticket and she was going to go herself. At the time, she was 85 and still worried about getting COVID, so I was stunned that she actually wanted to take the trip, but she did. She flew out, she stayed with a friend of hers in The Hague for the week, and I was able to meet her in The Hague and then walk around a little bit. We went to the building where she grew up that she'd been telling me about, and even standing there in front of it, she started remembering things that she had not told me about yet. That was really very moving. I think it makde it so was able to make it feel real to myself.
There’s a bit in the book where Teru is walking in the place where her grandfather has said he was standing when the bomb was dropped on Japan, and she describes to Will the feeling of being at home in this place that wasn’t actually where she ever lived. That seems to be a pretty universal feeling for children or grandchildren of immigrants.
Yeah, places that you maybe have never been to, but you've heard about. I'd visited that area in The Hague a few times as a kid, so I do have, like, a weirdly nostalgic, homie feeling for it. You know, for me, a big part of it was that I've never really felt all that connected with myself as a Dutch person. That cultural thing just never really existed for me. And Will talks about this a little bit in the book. I was able to kind of get that in there. Growing up, it wasn't like being Dutch meant anything in particular to people. The Austin Powers joke [“I only hate two things in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s backgrounds. And the Dutch.”] was the very first time in real life that I remember that coming up, andeven as Will observes, it’s only funny because there aren't other stereotypes.
It’s so random.
Yeah, it just feels random. And so I was seeking that a little bit, I think, in writing this. I wanted to find a way to actually understand what it means that we are Dutch, and what that heritage is about. We don't have, like, a great cuisine, you don't go to a Dutch restaurant or anything. I was really struggling to figure out, what does it mean to me to be a Dutch American?
I sympathize, having my own complicated relationship to being Jewish and my family coming from Israel, and I found that exploration in the book really moving.
My wife is Jewish. I converted to Judaism, actually, in the middle of writing this book. We had already, together, been sort of attending synagogue and things like that for 10 years. That was, I think, a little bit of where that was coming from. I could always see how important it was. Even the times when she she wasn't interested in something, like there was something there to be uninterested in, you know? When members of her family are non-practicing, it's like there's a thing that they're supposed to practice, in theory, but they're not, they're choosing not to, and that means something to them. I thought about that a lot as that was going on, how different it is to have that in your life already.
The book is about a lot of different things, including intergenerational trauma, but I liked how you also reframed that a bit. That it’s not necessarily just the trauma that’s being passed on, that there’s a lot more.
I think I originally kind of thought it was going to be a book about trauma. And then I realized, Mieke’s story is traumatic, but it's also this pretty crazy survival story. And then realizing that that was the more meaningful thing to me by the end of writing the book, coming to an appreciation of how much resilience my family has had. I felt like that was an interesting part of the intergenerational trauma discussion I hadn't heard a lot about yet. You can look back on it and find things to blame for various problems that we have now, which is also helpful sometimes. Linking back to it and explaining it, but then also realizing that, just by definition, if we're here, then it's because we somehow survived those traumas, or our relatives survived those somehow. And maybe that was just luck, you know, maybe, but maybe it was something else that we've also inherited.