Henye Meyer - a chat about genre, process, and the infinite spiral of research
Hey! Welcome to another issue of Frum Books, home of everything related to frum publishing. This week I talked to Henye Meyer, author of beloved historical fiction such as This is America, Adrenaline Rush, and the recent Who is Like Your People. My conversation with Henye reminded me of why I love history so much. Henye brings the humor and depth to the parts of history we’ve always thought was boring.
How did you get into writing?
Well, that's not so simple. I've always been writing ever since I was a kid. Odds and ends, nothing particularly good. The drive was there, the training wasn't. I had no background in writing. I started with mostly factual and opinion. I even sold to the Jewish Observer. I was really pleased with that piece.
I wrote the first book because I wasn't satisfied with the quality that was available for kids. It was stupid. It was simplistic and the characterization was lousy. It was like you had a row of paper cutouts and you'd have a different label on them for every chapter to tell you who they were. The plots were goofy, they all had the same tropes, the same trite things, and they weren't even true. You know, pirate captains, falling in love with this beautiful Jewish child and therefore doing anything for him. And in my opinion, if a pirate captain fell in love with the beautiful Jewish child, he figured he could get a better price. And so that was what I put in.
Did you always like history? When did you decide that historical fiction would be your focus?
I'm not a history fan. I pull out what I need, use it, and then it's gone. I hated history in school. It was badly taught, nothing but church, wars, and dates. And it was all European, no mention of China, India, Mexico, South America, nothing. So I was a little cynical about it. You know, there's more to the world than European history. And European history is by definition, as far as I was concerned, boring.
I did read a lot of historical stuff for kids; that was probably the majority of what there was. History, some adventure, I suppose, but mostly historical. I got into historical fiction from the influence of Rosemary Sutcliff; she wrote the most wonderful historical fiction for Young Adults. I wrote to her and she wrote back and gave me tips. She was wonderful to me. When I published The Exiles of Crocodile Island, we had just moved back to England, and I treated myself to a visit to her. She was very open. We kept up the correspondence off and on. So historical fiction wasn't so much my focus as the natural outgrowth of everything I'd been reading.
Very little of Jewish historical fiction ventures before the 20th century. Why did you choose the time periods you’ve written about?
For one thing, I avoid all Holocaust material. I can't read it. I read some early accounts when I was a child. They were unvarnished and unexpurgated, and I can't touch it now. I won't go anywhere near it. World War One is nearly as bad because of the death rate, and the conditions were just so dreadful. So world wars were out. Which means it's going to be a lot older. I think the periods were interesting. But of course, starting out in 1493 [for The Exiles of Crocodile Island] immediately set me on the path of destruction of going way back.
One of the reasons that I chose the First Crusade era for A Stranger to My Brothers rather than the Third was that the Third's been done to death. Everybody writes about Richard the Lionheart and how he was wonderful. Richard the Lionheart was a terrible king. He was never home, spent all the money the taxes drew in for him, and was a wastrel. And then he got himself captured to make it worse. So I wasn't going to do the Third Crusade under any circumstances. I chose the First and it was a really good decision; there is so much available from that period.
When I was researching my very first book, Crocodile Island, I came across Professor Goitein's Mediterranean Society, an analysis of Mediterranean society during the centuries covered by the finds of the documents in the Cairo Genizah. While I was going through one of the volumes, I came across the mention of Ovadya. I wrote to Professor Goitein and said, is there anything more on him? And he said, This is something that I'm about to publish, and he sent me a copy of it. So I had a jumping-off point.
Oh, I loved Ovadia. At the back of the book, I have the link to the website, you've got to read what's left of his autobiography. His personality leaps off the page. He's such a person, he's a Renaissance man, long before the Renaissance. He's musical. He's a linguist. He's idealistic. He's interested in religion. He's got the superstitions of the age. He's naive in the beginning and not so naive by the end. He's still known and honored in his birthplace because he wrote Jewish melodies using monastic music notation called neumes, which look very much like trop notation, and he left to two or three pages of these. I think it's one of the earliest examples of neumes. So because he's famous for that, he's an honored son, even though he converted.
One thing that your books have in common is a rich sense of history, not just showing the individual character’s circumstances but the whole time period. How do you do that?
Research, very heavy research, I have to admit. I'll chew at it and chew at it until I've got what I need until everything has been reduced to mush. I always go back to original sources if I can, you learn so much more. You're never going to get an accurate, unbiased picture of history, but you are going to see it through the eyes of the people who lived then and see their opinions and take on it. And I want to get into the mindset.
Rosemary Sutcliff told me the Iceberg Principle. Only 10% of the iceberg shows, but you have to have the other 90% to hold it up. So all that research, you don't have to put it in.
Do you start with the research or the plot?
I start with a message more than anything else. The plot kind of, I had to know where I was going, and I did know what the ending was going to be. But there were so many things in between that suggested themselves from the research. And I did fall in love with Constantinople. That was how you got the travelogue.
Who Is Like Your People has the travelogue as well. Just reading the book takes you through different cultures, getting to see more than just one tiny slice of history.
Because there was so much more to it! You can't just have this one little narrow band, because everything was woven together, there was so much interaction. Those two books, Who Is Like Your People and A Stranger to my Brothers are really twinned. A Stranger to my Brothers is like a prequel to Who Is Like Your People.
How do you manage the balance between historical accuracy versus the freedom to adapt based on what's needed for the plot?
If there's no information at all, I have a lot more freedom, but I don't want it. I like to have enough to enable me to make an educated guess if I don't have an answer.
Who Is Like Your People was hard, I had to work everything in from Ovadia’s autobiography. He was very specific about things. I had to find meaning for the dreams, because he believed in them. I had to convey that mindset, and then find the meaning.
And then there were things he didn't say anything about that make you wonder. Because he had a good relationship with Rabbi Boruch of Aleppo, and as it turns out, his correspondence with Rabbi Boruch continued over the years. But he hardly mentioned Reb Yitzchok, who was the Rosh Yeshiva. So it was omission as well as specific mentions that I was working from.
This is America was easier in a way, because the history is very well known and I had wonderful sources. Did you know that Edison made movies of a bridge dedication, a ride on the El (Elevated Railway), and a walk down the Lower East Side with a policeman swinging his billy, and the pushcart men pushing their pushcarts out of the way? It was really interesting. And then, of course, the Triangle fire fell into my lap as well. It's useful to have all that so I could use them as part of the plot if I needed to. You know that song "Oif’n Pripitchik?" What's a pripitchik? Nobody knows what a pripitchik is. It is a hearth of a raised built-in masonry Ukrainian oven. It took me months to learn that. But it mattered, I needed to know it.
How do you keep yourself from spiraling into the research to the point where you never get to the writing?
Oh, it's endless. I say enough is enough. I finally pull back and I say, that's it. If you don't know, nobody else is going to know, make an educated guess and quit. Cut your losses. Or you'll never get anything written.
Moving towards the publishing side, you self-published A Stranger to my Brothers, is that right?
Yes and no. I originally went through what billed itself as co-publishing. It wasn't. They did the work (got me a good editor, organized cover and interior design, and so on). I paid. I was very unhappy with the result. They published it under a title I didn't like, they gave a bad cover that was just completely wrong for the period, and the blurb was all lies. It turned out that although they had a distribution network, they had no money for advertising, so it didn't sell.
So when they went out of business, I held the copyright. I went back to the original cover artist and asked him to set it up for e-publishing. I did it with CreateSpace. It was already all done for me. It was already proofread several times. I had a fantastic editor who's ex-Random House. She has a really disciplined mind, and she taught me writing at the same time, saying, “You can't put that in and then do nothing with it. You made a big deal of that sword, it's got to have a function in your story. “
Did you find that you had more or less creative freedom in your plot because it wasn't published through the most traditional source?
No, because I've never really conformed to anybody. You tell me what to do, I'll quit the job. B”H I've had fantastic editors who let me have that freedom. That's why Menucha, where I ended up, is such a good fit for me. Hamodia is also a very good fit. There are things where they'll say, No, we can't have this in a serial. When it comes out as a book, you can put it back in. Like Ovadya, I would have had that as a serial, but I couldn't because the whole first section is all churchy, too much Christian stuff. I didn't figure magazine readers would put up with that. In a book, people can read it and then go straight into the rest of the book, whereas in a serial, you're stuck in this week after week after week, church, monks, priests. People don't want to be bombarded with goyishkeit. They want to get Jewish content right away.
You've written so many different genres and styles. Which of these styles do you think best represents your work?
That really is hard, because I have a lot of aspects poorly integrated. I love Adrenaline Rush, simply because it's fun. It's tongue in cheek, it's light-hearted, it's self-deprecating humor. It's very Bondish in a way. I really enjoyed writing it. And don't forget I had all those terrible Jewish thrillers to make fun of. As the note in the beginning, which nobody reads, says, it doesn't have the Mossad, it doesn't have a Nazi villian, it doesn't have an Arab villain. But it has MI6, MI5, FBI, CIA, you know, we've got enough villains. I don't usually use villains, but for fun, I will.
That contemporary novelette that I had running in the Inyan recently, Designer Garden, it's funny because people read it. It was only a novelette, but they did like it because in my real novels you have at least one central character with inner problems, questions, difficulties. And in this one, nobody was really tormented. It was just a very quiet, pleasant, light read to sit down with a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. There were a lot of people who wanted that. They didn't want tortured characters. They wanted something to make him feel good on Shabbos afternoon. So we obviously have two different streams of readers.
Is there a style or a genre that you haven't done yet that you'd like to try?
I don't think so. I've fiddled around with various things. I've done the kids' books, and I'm working on a third.
There is a story behind those. A gentleman here in town approached me. He wanted to start a children's magazine and he needed a serial for it. When he described what he had in mind, it turned out to be what he remembered of an old Enid Blyton book. Now Enid Blyton was the quintessential children's author, she wrote about 1,000 books; they're all the same, they're all dreadful. So I said I don't think I can do it. My husband said, Oh, come on. He's a nice guy, do it.
I ran into problems because she always has a dog. Can't have a dog. She has boys and girls together constantly. She has parents who probably would be locked up by the Child Protection people for negligence because the kids have incredible freedom. And the kids are always associating with the most hopelessly awful people, criminals and Gypsies, and vagabonds. How was I going to get around this? And secret passages, everything has to have a secret passage. I'm not going to have a secret passage no matter what I do.
I wrote this dreadful thing (the magazine never appeared and I sold it to Menucha), and it was quite popular. So I wrote them a second one, and that one is slowly in the process of working its way through the system. But the trouble was, they had billed it not as a book, but as the first of a series, The Accidental Adventure series. One is not a series, two is not a series, three is a series. So I'm writing a third one, when that's done I'm finished with that series.
What do you think is the main difference between an adult novel, a young adult novel and a child novel?
Up to a point, themes, I can't explore complicated themes in a child's novel. Although I'm trying. In the one I'm working on, I don't know if I can get away with it, but I'd like to do the Kotzker Rebbe's “If I am I”. Try putting that in a children's novel! I have to think of ways to convey this. The main thrust of it is overspending on simchos. So how am I going to present this to children? Children have no control of it. So I am taking a just pre-Bar Mitzvah class, the Rebbi is presenting this idea to them. This is a problem in our community, what can you do about it?
For readers who enjoy your books, what would you recommend they read next?
Etka Gitel Schwartz is certainly more than a cut above the average, well researched, well written, and well worth reading. She's the one I always refer people to.
There are other good ones. There are people whose English is up to my standard, but the writing is a little bit pedestrian. So then you've got an extra problem. You want English that's well handled, polished, graceful prose. I do have particular standards, this is what I grew up with. Superior, superb English.
You are starting to work on a Regency Era novel, and you're not sure if people will be receptive to that period. Can you elaborate on that?
It's not the period, but the style, because I'm writing it in period style. I feel it gives a much better feel for the period, to get a better sense of what the period was like, the attitudes. A bit more formal, some contractions, and slightly different wording, like, "I own that would be a lovely idea” rather than "I admit". A slightly uncomfortable style to the modern ear. So we're experimenting. Hamodia is going to print a short story of that style in the Pesach supplement iy”H, and we'll see how people react to that.
Do you have that novel planned out, do you know where you want to go with it?
I know what I want to do, I'm not sure how I'm going to do it, I realized that I'm going to have part of it in a form that I really don't like, which is an epistolary novel. That's in letters. There was no proper Jewish education in London or England at that time, so the boy is being sent away to the continent, and he does not want to go. He doesn't have any particular goal in mind, he doesn't know what he wants to do with himself. He has the same laissez-faire attitude his father has, and his grandfather had. His grandfather realizes now the mistakes he made, his father hasn't yet and the boy is going to have to come to the realization that he's been poorly served by his father. His grandfather is taking over because he sees that this neglect is making this boy prey to following the footsteps of so many of that time who left Yiddishkeit altogether.
I've been doing crazy research, I'm trying to get going on it.
You’ve reached the end of the interview - but there’s more! Writing historical fiction is not a desk job, at least in Henye Meyer’s world. For the history or travel-loving amongst us, read about some of Henye’s fascinating “research” adventures as she gets up close with the settings of her books. (Can’t access? Hit reply to let me know and I’ll send you a pdf copy.
There are frum book nerds in all corners of the world - if you know one of them, please send this to them!