A Conversation with Fern Schumer Chapman

Fern Schumer Chapman is a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. She lives with her husband and three children in a suburb of Chicago.

To download the WBEZ interview with Fern Schumer Chapman, please go to http://www.wbez.org/services/848_rajuly00.htm#000713.

When did you become aware that your life -- and that of your mother and grandparents -- was a viable subject matter for a book, and why was this the right time to write it? Was the trip to Germany taken with a book in mind, and if so, how did this goal affect the trip?

I always knew this was a story that ought to be told, but I waited until I was ready emotionally, and as a writer. I went on the first trip with the hope of finding whatever was left in Germany of my family. On my second trip, accompanied by my husband and children as well as my mother, I began to realize that I should write a book. With three generations together in my mother's little town, I saw the larger story.

How did your training as a journalist affect your writing of this memoir? What were the advantages and disadvantages of writing Motherland as autobiographical narrative, versus a journalistic piece that is more "distanced"?

Good storytelling is good storytelling in any medium. Every writer uses the same elements: good quotes became dialogue; a magazine's narrative drive becomes the book's story arc. I didn't see how I could write the book journalistically. I have no emotional distance from this experience, and I could not introduce distance without corrupting the story.

How do you place your work within the genre of Holocaust literature?

I wrote the book as a personal story without considering it as Holocaust literature. Clearly, it fits into a genre of second-generation voices. This is a new kind of nonfiction that examines historical forces though intensely personal experience, using the techniques of fiction to tell a factual story; in other words, a literature of ordinary perspective on extraordinary times. Even when a story is not one's personal experience, its telling can illuminate something in one's own truths. While I was writing Motherland, an Irish Catholic friend often laughed with me about how you don't have to be Jewish to identify with my story. "This book," my friend would say, " is for everyone who ever had a mother!" So often, readers who know little of the holocaust experience discover that my world looks a lot like theirs.

What do you hope will be accomplished through publication of a seemingly private history? What would you wish for readers to take away from this story?

First, I hoped to discover and comprehend enough of a family history to offer to my children. Second, I wanted to show how a cataclysmic event such as World War II reaches beyond its participants and continues to shape future generations. I want readers to see how the past defines the present.

Much is made in the book about the relationship between generations: mother and daughter, grandparents, a family legacy. How was writing this book and telling the story of your family affected your children and your mother? How can you offer children a life "free of the war" without erasing their awareness of history?

The lesson I hope my children have taken is that we need to be aware of the forces that shape us and our reaction to them. We must be able to discuss these things. I'm happy and grateful to say that, since the publication of the book, my mother is much more comfortable with her past. The reactions of readers to the book have shown my mother and me that we are not alone in our experience. I can't offer my children a life free of war and prejudice, but I can help them understand its ravages and its lingering effects.

You refer to the Germans as Fatherland-less, homeless, as contrasted with the Motherland, a seemingly warm and universal place. How would you define this concept of the Motherland, and what place does it hold within the book?

"Motherland," for me, has many meanings, and I'm touched and thrilled when readers suggest their own. For me, "motherland" is of course one's homeland. It is also an emotional terrain where identity takes root, as well as a foundation upon which we build our selves. And it is the place in our hearts that springs into being when we become mothers.

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