More with Henye Meyer - walking in the footsteps of history
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I always go back to original sources if I can, you learn so much more…
I was thrilled when I chose the part of Yorkshire that I did to start the story in and found so much extra information. It turned out that that particular area was a real hotbed of paganism. People came from miles around to bury their dead there. It's usually the local vicar, the local minister, who's the historian of that area. We found him and he was extremely helpful. By the time it came out he died. I keep finding this, my most helpful people die before the thing comes out. So I can't really thank them properly.
Part of the research came out of the biography of Alexius the First, the emperor of Constantinople. It was written by his daughter, Anna, and it's brilliant. It gives you such a picture of his personality, what he looked like, how he behaved, the politics. He was a master diplomat, and he manipulated all these peasant nobles coming to him. You know, these Westerners who had no culture, no refinement, no decency. When somebody showed up with manners, it was like, wow, this guy is human. But the rest of them were practically animals. The Crusaders were just trash.
I wrote the first book because I wasn't satisfied with the quality that was available for kids. … In my opinion, if a pirate captain fell in love with the beautiful Jewish child, he figured he could get a better price…
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s translation of the Me’am Loez had just come out a couple of years before. He was going through the makkos, and when he got to tzefardeah he mentioned the opinion that it had included crocodiles and referred you to a footnote at the back, which expatiated on this and gave you most of what Abarbanel said, about the children being sent there. And then he didn't tell you anything more! I was going crazy, what happened to them? You can't just tell me this and then not finish the story. So that was the germ of the whole thing.
When I wasn't working, I thought, well, I can't do worse than the garbage that's out there already. So I did it. I did a tremendous amount of research. I had to go into New York to consult the Portuguese court records which are still in existence. And I found somebody who spoke Portuguese, which was even better, and she translated what I needed. At the time, Rabbi Goldwurm a"h was working for Artscroll and davened in the same minyan as my husband. Rabbi Goldwurm knew what I was working on, so whenever he came across a reference, he used to send it home with my husband. The only problem was they were all in medieval Hebrew, which is very difficult, and my Hebrew is pretty dodgy at best. So I always had to call him up and ask him to translate anyway, so he might just as well have hung on to the sefer and told my husband to tell me to call him. But it took me a full year.
How do you think living in England, a country with such a long history, makes you relate differently to “older” history?
Americans think old is 1800's - here, old is Roman times, maybe! But we've got stuff here from even earlier. We've got Stonehenge to begin with, and all sorts of stone huts up in Scotland. There's a Roman road half an hour's drive away from Manchester, you can walk up it, it goes up a hill to nowhere. Roman villas all over the place. They're not obviously standing but their foundations are there, beautiful mosaic floors. You can see the hypocaust, that's the central heating system under the floor. I love it. From the Regency period, there are all these beautiful stately homes, built when people had vast sums of money, and they spent them on their own properties. Money then was in land, in property, because your crops and your rents were what fueled your income. So there are ancient remains all over.
It's easy from here to get to the settings of my books. I like to walk the area because I like to know the terrain. Is there a hill here? I went to Istanbul for two and a half days. From a map of Istanbul, you can't tell it's built on seven hills like Rome, you can't tell where they are. So I did find a topographical map in some book from 1880 in the library. And then that was pretty much all I had. I don't like cities, but I fell in love with Istanbul. I love it. It's just spilling out all over the place, it's fascinating.
Seeing the sunrise over the Bosporus, that was unforgettable. I had already put it in the book, and I needed to check to see that I described it accurately. I was staying at this little teeny hotel in Istanbul, like just a few rooms, and there was a wonderful hotel owner. He didn't have a view, but he knew that the YMCA a few doors up had a roof restaurant. He arranged with the owner that I could go there at dawn, go up to the roof restaurant and watch the sunrise over the Bosporus. That was terrific, to see what I had described actually happening!
You recall there was the chain across the Golden Horn [in A Stranger to My Brothers]. They opened the chain at dawn, and the boats that were sitting out in the sea slowly one by one came through the opening. When I was standing on the YMCA roof just before dawn, there were a number of ships parked out in the distance there, in the Sea of Marmara. And as dawn broke, they slowly started to move into the Golden Horn, just as I’d described.
In the days before my book, when the Varangians had been serving the Emperor for some time, the Empire was practically broke, and he hadn't been paying them. They were demanding their money, and he didn't have it. They said we're leaving, but he had the chain pulled across the Golden Horn so the Varangian ships couldn’t get out. Aha, but what they did was they left the naval harbor just inside the chain. Ships out of there, took them back up to the head of the Golden Horn. They got all the Vikings sitting there rowing like mad, getting a terrific head of steam. They row like crazy up to the chain. The chains are going to rip out the bottom of the boats, but they get up the chain, everybody drops the oars, runs to the back of the ship, ship tilts up, everybody runs to the front of the ship, tilts it down, and they get over the chain. The whole Viking fleet is out.
In Italy, I went to where Giuvan was born. There's nothing left at the castle now but the foundation. They have an apartment block built on top of it. I went across the lane from the remains of the castle, there was somebody's garden fence. Then I heard people's voices inside, so I knocked on the gate and explained what I was doing there. I wanted to see the view, so they took me into their dining room, threw open the shutters, and I took pictures to my heart's content. They called up a niece who was coming to visit the next day and said bring all that material you have. There had been a conference on Ovadia in the nearest large town. So she brought reams of material. They called the local family, everybody piled into cars, it was a family expedition. We went to the family houses and saw where they used to wash the clothes in the river in the summer, and they took me all over. They even took me into the basement of the castle, which they now use to store the wine barrels. I will never forget it.
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…
[In Stranger to My Brothers,] I was taking a tinok shenishba. I felt that people weren't handling Ba'alei Teshuva properly. They were idealizing them, they weren't thinking about how Ba'alei Teshuva thought. They were attributing motives to them that didn't exist. So I was taking somebody who was the extreme, somebody who was a difficult, antisocial person who didn't want to become frum at all, who had zero connection to his background. And he was very much a product of the society he grew up in. Then, how do you deal with that?
[In Who Is Like Your People], Ovadya starts out being what I think of as a professional Ger. You know, these Geirim who go around speaking, all right, maybe it's the only way they can make a living, nebach. But to bare your soul before people, and you've got an audience of leeches sitting there with their little fangs out and they're sucking your blood, which you're spilling in front of them, and they think it's inspiring, but it's not. Inspiration means it leads to something. You go out to do something because of it. But they don't. They sit there, they listen, oh, isn't that beautiful? Then they go home. Nothing comes of the experience. So, okay, so somebody made money out of them. People don't appreciate that they're going to have problems fitting in. They will have problems fitting in, it's inevitable, coming from a different culture, different mindset.
I was also trying to convey other messages through his eyes. Because for an outsider to come into a society like ours, there are a lot of things that aren't so simple and aren't necessarily good. And one of them, for instance, is hypocrisy. It was like a shooting gallery. I was having a terrific time. You know, I don't like this, have him object. People with protektziah, who get positions they're not suited for because they're related to somebody. People with wealth who get treated differently from somebody who's poor. And there may be reasons behind it, and I found them, but the injustice exists. How do you deal with it? Why does it exist? Why does the community accept it?
[For the upcoming Regency Era Novel I've been doing crazy research, I'm trying to get going on it…
How long does it take by boat from London to Holland? And where in Holland? I came across one thing that had all the coaching inns in London, from that date, and pictures of them as well. Locations, pictures, and where the coaches went to, say the West Country.
I found a story where somebody had just married a girl in London. They were moving to Falmouth, and they were going to take Russell's Wagon. I didn't know if it was a type of wagon, or if it was someone specific. Well, I found out that Russell's was the company all over the southwest of England. And they advertised like crazy, they even printed postcards with pictures of their wagons on it. And you know how people think Conestoga wagons are the original covered wagon? Forget it! They were making them in England years before, great huge hoops covered with canvas. They put the luggage in the back, the cargo in the middle, and the passengers at the front on straw or hay. So this was only for poor people. And this couple were so appalled that they rode the whole way on horseback behind the wagon, to get to Falmouth. It was a dreadful journey, apparently, but better than going in the wagon.
I'm not using it but I did use it in the short story, because a woman in the short story came from Falmouth. But my people [in the in-progress novel] aren't bothered with Falmouth, they're much more settled in the London area and southeast.
I knew that 1816 is known as the year without a summer. This is because in late 1815, an Indonesian volcano erupted, a huge eruption. When this happens, immense amounts of ash are spewed into the atmosphere. They sit up there and don't fall down. So they're carried around the world by the prevailing winds. You get terrific sunsets, but there's so much ash that the clouds of it get in the way of the sun, which lowers the temperature all over the world. The summer of 1816 was so cold, places in the northern hemisphere were getting snow in June. The crops died. There was a famine in Northern Europe. And prices went sky high. The price of bread had gone very high anyway, because of the Napoleonic Wars. I'm not making a big deal of it in the story, but it means that you can't sit out in the sun because it's raining all the time, or it's snowing.
There are frum book nerds in all corners of the world - if you know one of them, please send this to them!