A True Story
Elyce Wakerman’s novel, A Tale of Two Citizens, is her version of her father’s immigrant story. Lying about his marital status to enter the US prior to World War II, her father spent years trying to bring his wife and son into the country while fighting his own deportation. Elyce had an envelope of documents, but little else to go on as she wrote the novel. In a recent book talk, she described the research she had to undertake. The historical details needed to be accurate, she said, or the reader wouldn’t trust her.
In addition to adhering to the historical facts, Elyce described the necessity of adhering to the character’s own truth. When she was about to write that “Malka put the matzo meal pancakes on paper towels to absorb the fat,” she stopped to wonder if they had paper towels in 1932. They did, but she realized that this character would have been too frugal to waste paper towels on absorbing fat. She would have used a brown paper bag. What would have been factually accurate would not have been true.
The Friday after Elyce’s talk, as I lit the Sabbath candles in my grandmother’s silver candlesticks, I told my daughter how much I wanted to write my grandmother’s story, but that I didn’t have anything but the candlesticks themselves. No documents, no surviving family who might know anything about her life before I was born. I said the story would be a complete fiction, but my daughter said that would not make it any less true. We argued about the distinction between truth and fiction, and then I came across this quote from Hemingway in an introduction to the Hemingway Library Edition of A Farewell to Arms:
A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make an absolute truth.
Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn to novels. They tell the truth of human experience.