This May, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, UCI alumna and award-winning author Elana K. Arnold (’96 comparative literature) offers a reflection on her most recent work, The Blood Years (Balzer + Bray), which earned the Sydney Taylor Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award, and was named a best book of the year by the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, SLJ, ALA Booklist, the Horn Book, and more.

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“Though I have published in many categories, The Blood Years is my first foray into historical fiction. And, it’s more than that: it’s what I’ve made of the stories my grandmother shared with me about being a Jewish teenager in Czernowitz, Romania during WWII and the Holocaust. I built upon and deepened the story my grandmother shared with me by doing years of in-depth research into the complex and unique history of her particular region, other survivors’ narratives, creative work produced by those survivors, scholarly works about the events that transpired in and around Czernowitz, Romania, and much, much more.

I always knew that both of my grandparents had survived the Holocaust—my grandfather, in Poland, and my grandmother, in Romania. They met and married after the war. I learned about concentration camps in school, and when I asked my Nana if she’d been imprisoned, she said, “Not exactly.” What I didn’t understand for many years was that the experience of Jews—and Roma and disabled and queer people—in Romania was different from the stories made popular in American literature, media, and history books. There were no concentrations camps in Romania… but that absolutely didn’t mean that there was no Holocaust. It wasn’t until after I published my first novel that Nana filled in some of the gaps in the war stories I’d heard. Hearing what she finally shared, I understood why. When I was young, she’d edited out the worst of things to spare me from them. Though she’d shared stories about her family life—going to the countryside for a summer, where she was chased by geese; her mean-as-a-snake-but-incredible older sister Astrid; their attendance at a ballet academy, and the relationships made there—near the end of her life, she trusted me with much more of it— the complex relationships between her mother and her father; her sister and her lover; herself and a man who both provided for and abused her; what happened to her beloved grandfather. But I’ll bet, knowing her, even then she held back some of her most painful remembrances as an act of love. And she hoped that someday I could use her experiences in a book. “Just name the character Frederieke,” she told me. “I’ve always liked that name.”

Crafting this novel went beyond simply sharing my Nana’s stories. Indeed, the research was long and complex. Among other avenues, I explored the extensive survivor reflections and testimonies collected by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; I read every memoir I could find, written by a survivor from her region of what is now Ukraine; I read the poetry of Paul Celan and the prose of Aharon Appelfeld, both prolific writers from Czernowitz who lived through the same time period as my grandmother. I read doctoral dissertations about the Jews of Eastern Europe as well as the Roma of this region; I read historical tomes that went into great detail, as well as newspaper articles published during the war years, both here in the United States and in Eastern Europe. 

Most fortunately, I was able to connect with a still-living survivor, Ruth Glasberg Gold, who was just a few years younger than my grandmother. She recounts her life in Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir. After reading her memoir (and her marvelous cookbook), I reached out to her; she agreed to act as a reader for my manuscript, and helped me correct many of the mistakes I had made.

Further afield, I read a marriage manual of the time, entitled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique; a collection of nightmares German Jews were having in the 1930s, entitled The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation 1933-1939. I connected with a listserv of Jewish Czernowitz residents and their descendants, who helped me locate some of my family’s documents. I studied the treatment of tuberculosis; the tenants of teaching ballet; I learned more deeply about Jewish rituals and holidays.  

The Blood Years is the story of my Nana’s teenage years in Czernowitz, Romania before and during World War II. It’s a love story about sisters. It’s about ballet, and bears, and the ways our families can fail us. It’s a book about the great and terrible things people do in the name of love. And it’s my attempt to do with my Nana’s gift of stories what I try to do with all my work—to transform pain into art, to embrace ambiguity, and to find beauty even in the ugliest of moments.”

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Elana K. Arnold is the award-winning author of many books for children and teens, including the Printz Honor winner Damsel, the National Book Award finalist What Girls Are Made Of, and the Global Read Aloud selection A Boy Called Bat. Her latest work, The Blood Years, earned the Sydney Taylor Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award, among other honors. Arnold is a member of the faculty at Hamline University’s MFA in writing for children and young adults program. She earned her bachelor’s in comparative literature at UCI and her master’s in English and creative writing at UC Davis. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of animals. You can find her online at elanakarnold.com.

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