History or Fiction?
The book is historical fiction, based on the meager bones of fact that my husband was told about his late mother’s childhood. That is, early in the twentieth century, she and her younger sister were left alone after a pogrom in their village of Domachevo in Poland. Their aunt died shielding them from a Cossack’s gun. Some time later, in 1921, they were chosen from among the children in a Jewish orphanage by an unusual visitor - a South African philanthropist who was haunted by the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jewish orphans in Eastern Europe after the First World War. Isaac Ochberg obtained permission from the South African government under Jan Smuts (and support from the Jewish community) to bring exactly 200 of them to the safety of South Africa, and there they were placed in the Cape Town and Johannesburg Jewish orphanages. Most of them lived relatively happily in the institutions through their growing years. However, in a new and perhaps avoidable tragedy, the two sisters were adopted into two separate - and very different — families, and their emotional relationship became very complicated.
There was the bare skeleton of my story. As I researched and dreamed, the flesh of it was added almost unconsciously, scenes writing themselves in random order. The hardest chapter to write was the one about the pogrom. I had read about pogroms since I was a young girl but I dreaded writing that part and left it until last. The Night of the Burning is the pivotal chapter: before it, the story is told in alternating flashbacks; after that chapter, the story catches up with Devorah. But I couldn’t write it.
Finally I went to the Jewish Library in San Francisco and sat down to read detailed accounts of pogroms for hours, until I was nauseous and shaky. Then I came home and wrote it all at once. It was hard to read it each time I had to do some editing.
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