The Border of Truth

Some thoughts on the novel and my father’s story:

Like so many children of survivors and refugees I grew up in the shadows of my parents different escapes from war. Shadowed landscapes are, I suppose by definition, intriguing and murky and it was often unclear what I was to see and what should remain in the dark. For a writer--such ambiguity is rich soil. My father left Europe on the Portuguese ship the Quanza and was among the 86 passengers retained on the ship in NY and then in Mexico to be sent back to Lisbon and then presumably to be repatriated into Nazi occupied Belgium. The ship, after refueling with coal in Virginia, was saved by the remarkable efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in outsmarting Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

My father became, as must be obvious, my first and deepest research source. It is a gift I would wish upon any child to have the chance to ask one's parent questions that otherwise would never occur to be asked. I'd ask, "What American movies would you have seen in Belgium in the late 1930s?" or "What was your school uniform?" and watch my father's face shift as memory bloomed inside of him. Had he recalled how those school socks itched even once before in the intervening seventy years? Had he said aloud the name of the beach side town where his family went on summer holiday in all those years, suddenly smiling at the amusement rides he loved as a boy and the cafe where his friends gathered with girls on August afternoons? While I took notes, I watched the smells and textures of my father's childhood return to him. "Here,"my father would say, drawing on the paper tablecloth of restaurant, "Here is the street where our family lived."

The Border of Truth is certainly not my father's story. As a writer I was keenly aware that a journey away from the bombed city of Brussels through France and Spain and Portugal was, like so many journeys, a natural for story-making. And as parents so generously do, my father gave to his daughter whatever she needed. I've invented, rearranged, compressed, shifted, imagined and then when it was done I worried. There's little he'd recognize, I'm certain.

This fall, I worked on the edited manuscript pages in a hospital room while my father recoveredfrom heart surgery. “Read to me from the book,” he asked through the breathing tube. "It's nothing like it was," I warned my father and he brushed at the air with his taped-up hand saying, "Please, don’t you think I understand literature?" The boy, the father, the daughter-- they are born of this novel and happily we live outside it. My father's story in the end is still his-- shadowed still in ways not even for his daughter to understand.

___________________________________________

L.A. TIMES / APRIL 1, 2007

By Susan Salter Reynolds

THE BORDER Of TRUTH

Counterpoint: 304 pp., $24.95

WHOSE story is this, anyway? Could it be Victoria Redel's? (A principal character's surname is Lejdel.) Could it belong to 17-year-old Itzak Lejdel, fleeing Europe in 1940, who is denied entry both to the U.S. and Mexico? Or the dapper Itzak in New York several decades later, his name changed to Richard Leader? Perhaps it's his daughter's story. At 41, Sara Leader, a professor translating the work of Walter Benjamin, loves her father but is frustrated by his refusal to reveal his background. Certainly it will one day be the story of the little girl, another refugee in many ways, whom Sara adopts, though she barely appears (waiting, curled up in our reading of this multilayered novel).

"The Border of Truth" is such a good novel that it could also be any American's story. It begins in 1940 with a letter from Itzak to Eleanor Roosevelt, who he believes can help him and his mother, passengers on the Quanza, obtain visas to disembark. Itzak invests this and subsequent letters with all his estimable talents as writer, charmer and child-citizen of the world. The novel alternates between his letters and Sara's thoughts as she wanders the streets of New York, much like Clarissa Dalloway preparing for her party. Sara visits her father's apartment; the New York Society Library, where she's pursuing research on Benjamin; and a furniture-repair shop run by a hippie named Ethan.

As if the war were not enough darkness to run from, Richard Leader has another secret, one he most wants to spare his daughter. Redel circles this life-changing moment, casts in its general direction, croons to it gently and reels it in, presenting it to Sara with a kindly reluctance. This from a writer who can be ferocious, unflinching, when it comes to the many kinds of pain that love causes. In her first novel, "Loverboy," she sank her teeth into the pure pain of filial love; in this one, she watches from a dispassionate distance as that pain spreads out through generations.

___________________________________________

NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 10 2007

By CARA BUCKLEY

Published: July 8, 2007

As the Statue of Liberty lurched into sight, Malvina Parnes felt a knot rise in her throat.

The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot photographed Malvina Parnes and Annette Lackmann with their mother, Rose, peering out a porthole of a ship of refugees that anchored for coal in Virginia in 1940.

Enlarge This Image

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

From left, Annette Lackmann, her sister, Malvina Parnes, Elza Weinman and Irving Redel, all refugees who fled Europe during World War II and eventually found safe haven in the United States.

It was Aug. 19, 1940, and she was 11, her skinny legs rooted to the heaving deck of the Quanza, a Portuguese cargo ship that 317 passengers had chartered to flee war-torn Europe.

Malvina was desperate to feel safe. She had been seasick every day of the 13-day voyage, and spent the nights wrapped in a blanket on the open deck, unable to bear the fetid, windowless bunker where her mother, her 3-year-old sister, Annette, and her aunt slept.

But New York offered no sanctuary. While 196 passengers, including 66 American citizens, got off, the other 121 passengers, nearly all of them Jews seeking political asylum, including Malvina and her family, were denied entry. Eighty-six of the 121 passengers were later turned away in Mexico, too, and to their horror, the captain was preparing to go back across the Atlantic. It was only when the Quanza anchored for coal in Virginia on Sept. 11 and a State Department official finally granted them visas, atEleanor Roosevelt’s behest, that the refugees were able to disembark.

Until recently, the plight of the refugees aboard the Quanza was all but subsumed by history and faded memories. Their story had a happy ending, unlike that of Jewish refugees from Germany aboard the S.S. St. Louis, who were denied entry to Cuba and the United States in 1939 and were forced to Europe, where most died in the Holocaust.

Once in the United States, the Quanza’s refugees scattered wide, though many ended up in New York. But even though they made the life-saving voyage together, few kept in contact.

“We were going on with our lives,” said Nina Miness, 84, another refugee. But then Victoria Redel, a writer whose father, Irving Redel, was aboard the Quanza, wrote a novel, “The Border of Truth,” based on the ship’s crossing and its passengers. During Ms. Redel’s research, she dug into her father’s past, and he found himself remembering things that he had forgotten decades ago. To celebrate the publication of the book this spring, Ms. Redel contacted as many of the ship’s surviving passengers that she could and brought them together.

Five of them met recently for lunch in the airy Park Avenue apartment of Mr. Redel, 84. They began chattering immediately, kindling memories, each a poignant vignette of a refugee’s past.

Bright spots on the voyage broke through the solemnity of the departure. Mrs. Miness viewed the trip as a grand adventure, and Mr. Redel, who was 17 at the time, brimmed with a sense of youthful invincibility.

“All we ate was sardines, sardines, sardines,” said Elza Weinman, 81, who was 14 at the time. “And then everyone got seasick.”

Mrs. Weinman’s mother wore the same corset every day, because she had sewn diamonds into it for safekeeping. Mrs. Parnes’s fetching young aunt sneaked into lifeboats at night with equally fetching young men. When the ship reached New York, Mrs. Miness’s lovely, vain mother begged to be taken to Ellis Island, because she had heard that there was a salon there and was desperate to have her hair coiffed.

There were luminaries aboard, too, to the delight of other passengers. They strained to catch sight of people like the French movie star Marcel Dalio and his glamorous wife, Madeleine LeBeau, who would later appear in “Casablanca.”

Irving Redel’s family members were not luminaries. They fled their home in Brussels in early May as the Germans advanced, first hitching a ride toward France, where thousands of refugees clogged the roads in cars, wagons, baby strollers and overflowing wheelbarrows.

Malvina Parnes’s family fled Antwerp after her aunt charmed two young men into driving them part of the way. The family sought shelter where they could, spending one night in a farmhouse. While Malvina was standing by its front window, a bomb dropped feet from the glass but did not explode, a memory that haunts her still.

People scrambled to get visas, including phony ones, for anywhere outside Europe. In Toulouse, the Redels got visas to China and Morocco. Mrs. Miness’s family got visas for Mexico. Mrs. Weinman’s family had visas for Venezuela. The Quanza’s captain also made many of the passengers buy return tickets, because he doubted their visas would gain them entry anywhere.

The Atlantic crossing was not easy. A hurricane hit. The windowless bunks were stifling. Mr. Redel’s mother developed pleurisy. A New York Times article noting the Quanza’s arrival described the bulk of the passengers as “lowly refugees."

Malvina’s father, who had been admitted to the United States months ahead of his family, met the ship in New York. He was allowed on board only once, and came bearing food, clothes and kisses. Malvina, her mother, aunt and sister were not allowed off the ship, and Malvina paced its length, playing an imaginary piano to chase her jitters away.

Mr. Redel at age 16 in Brussels.

Sailors hoisted her screaming little sister overboard in a chair fastened to a pulley, so her father could kiss her goodbye before she was hoisted back and the ship steamed away.

The Quanza headed to Vera Cruz, Mexico, where 35 passengers, including Nina Miness’s family, were admitted. But the authorities rejected the visas of other passengers, including the families of Mr. Redel, Mrs. Weinman and Mrs. Parnes, 78. As the ship steamed around the Caribbean, Mrs. Weinman’s father wired different governments, begging to be let ashore. No one answered his call.

Preparing to return to Europe, the Quanza stopped for coal in Virginia, where at least one despairing passenger threw himself overboard. (He swam to shore and was returned to the ship.) A lawyer, J. L. Morewitz, managed to keep the ship in dock until Mrs. Roosevelt stealthily instructed a State Department official, against the wishes of the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, to arrange for everyone onboard to get visas. The refugees raced ashore and scattered.

Mr. Redel’s family ended up in Brooklyn. He went on to found a commodities trading business on Wall Street and raise his family in Westchester before moving to Park Avenue. Mrs. Miness lived blocks away. Mrs. Weinman lived on the Upper West Side, and so did Mrs. Parnes. While a few met up roughly 10 years ago, when the Morewitz family arranged a reunion, no one stayed in touch, despite their proximity.

Now, in their twilight years, the last of the survivors say it is gratifying to find each other again. The rekindled memories brought pain, they said, but solace, too.

“Many of the things that happened to people is a matter of luck, of us being in the right place at the right time,” Mr. Redel said. “It’s a story of desperation and hope.”


				victoria redel *The Border of Truth*



	Home \| Interviews \| Books \| Loverboy \| The Border of Truth \| Events/news \| Articles






		Some thoughts on the novel and my father’s story: Like so many children of survivors and refugees I grew up in the shadows of my parents different escapes from war. Shadowed landscapes are, I suppose by definition, intriguing and murky and it was often unclear what I was to see and what should remain in the dark. For a writer--such ambiguity is rich soil. My father left Europe on the Portuguese ship the Quanza and was among the 86 passengers retained on the ship in NY and then in Mexico to be sent back to Lisbon and then presumably to be repatriated into Nazi occupied Belgium. The ship, after refueling with coal in Virginia, was saved by the remarkable efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in outsmarting Secretary of State Cordell Hull. My father became, as must be obvious, my first and deepest research source. It is a gift I would wish upon any child to have the chance to ask one's parent questions that otherwise would never occur to be asked. I'd ask, "What American movies would you have seen in Belgium in the late 1930s?" or "What was your school uniform?" and watch my father's face shift as memory bloomed inside of him. Had he recalled how those school socks itched even once before in the intervening seventy years? Had he said aloud the name of the beach side town where his family went on summer holiday in all those years, suddenly smiling at the amusement rides he loved as a boy and the cafe where his friends gathered with girls on August afternoons? While I took notes, I watched the smells and textures of my father's childhood return to him. "Here,"my father would say, drawing on the paper tablecloth of restaurant, "Here is the street where our family lived." The Border of Truth is certainly not my father's story. As a writer I was keenly aware that a journey away from the bombed city of Brussels through France and Spain and Portugal was, like so many journeys, a natural for story-making. And as parents so generously do, my father gave to his daughter whatever she needed. I've invented, rearranged, compressed, shifted, imagined and then when it was done I worried. There's little he'd recognize, I'm certain. This fall, I worked on the edited manuscript pages in a hospital room while my father recoveredfrom heart surgery. “Read to me from the book,” he asked through the breathing tube. "It's nothing like it was," I warned my father and he brushed at the air with his taped-up hand saying, "Please, don’t you think I understand literature?" The boy, the father, the daughter-- they are born of this novel and happily we live outside it. My father's story in the end is still his-- shadowed still in ways not even for his daughter to understand. ___________________________________________ L.A. TIMES / APRIL 1, 2007 By Susan Salter Reynolds THE BORDER Of TRUTH Counterpoint: 304 pp., $24.95 WHOSE story is this, anyway? Could it be Victoria Redel's? (A principal character's surname is Lejdel.) Could it belong to 17-year-old Itzak Lejdel, fleeing Europe in 1940, who is denied entry both to the U.S. and Mexico? Or the dapper Itzak in New York several decades later, his name changed to Richard Leader? Perhaps it's his daughter's story. At 41, Sara Leader, a professor translating the work of Walter Benjamin, loves her father but is frustrated by his refusal to reveal his background. Certainly it will one day be the story of the little girl, another refugee in many ways, whom Sara adopts, though she barely appears (waiting, curled up in our reading of this multilayered novel). "The Border of Truth" is such a good novel that it could also be any American's story. It begins in 1940 with a letter from Itzak to Eleanor Roosevelt, who he believes can help him and his mother, passengers on the Quanza, obtain visas to disembark. Itzak invests this and subsequent letters with all his estimable talents as writer, charmer and child-citizen of the world. The novel alternates between his letters and Sara's thoughts as she wanders the streets of New York, much like Clarissa Dalloway preparing for her party. Sara visits her father's apartment; the New York Society Library, where she's pursuing research on Benjamin; and a furniture-repair shop run by a hippie named Ethan. As if the war were not enough darkness to run from, Richard Leader has another secret, one he most wants to spare his daughter. Redel circles this life-changing moment, casts in its general direction, croons to it gently and reels it in, presenting it to Sara with a kindly reluctance. This from a writer who can be ferocious, unflinching, when it comes to the many kinds of pain that love causes. In her first novel, "Loverboy," she sank her teeth into the pure pain of filial love; in this one, she watches from a dispassionate distance as that pain spreads out through generations. ___________________________________________ NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 10 2007 By CARA BUCKLEY Published: July 8, 2007 As the Statue of Liberty lurched into sight, Malvina Parnes felt a knot rise in her throat. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot photographed Malvina Parnes and Annette Lackmann with their mother, Rose, peering out a porthole of a ship of refugees that anchored for coal in Virginia in 1940. Enlarge This Image Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times From left, Annette Lackmann, her sister, Malvina Parnes, Elza Weinman and Irving Redel, all refugees who fled Europe during World War II and eventually found safe haven in the United States. It was Aug. 19, 1940, and she was 11, her skinny legs rooted to the heaving deck of the Quanza, a Portuguese cargo ship that 317 passengers had chartered to flee war-torn Europe. Malvina was desperate to feel safe. She had been seasick every day of the 13-day voyage, and spent the nights wrapped in a blanket on the open deck, unable to bear the fetid, windowless bunker where her mother, her 3-year-old sister, Annette, and her aunt slept. But New York offered no sanctuary. While 196 passengers, including 66 American citizens, got off, the other 121 passengers, nearly all of them Jews seeking political asylum, including Malvina and her family, were denied entry. Eighty-six of the 121 passengers were later turned away in Mexico, too, and to their horror, the captain was preparing to go back across the Atlantic. It was only when the Quanza anchored for coal in Virginia on Sept. 11 and a State Department official finally granted them visas, atEleanor Roosevelt’s behest, that the refugees were able to disembark. Until recently, the plight of the refugees aboard the Quanza was all but subsumed by history and faded memories. Their story had a happy ending, unlike that of Jewish refugees from Germany aboard the S.S. St. Louis, who were denied entry to Cuba and the United States in 1939 and were forced to Europe, where most died in the Holocaust. Once in the United States, the Quanza’s refugees scattered wide, though many ended up in New York. But even though they made the life-saving voyage together, few kept in contact. “We were going on with our lives,” said Nina Miness, 84, another refugee. But then Victoria Redel, a writer whose father, Irving Redel, was aboard the Quanza, wrote a novel, “The Border of Truth,” based on the ship’s crossing and its passengers. During Ms. Redel’s research, she dug into her father’s past, and he found himself remembering things that he had forgotten decades ago. To celebrate the publication of the book this spring, Ms. Redel contacted as many of the ship’s surviving passengers that she could and brought them together. Five of them met recently for lunch in the airy Park Avenue apartment of Mr. Redel, 84. They began chattering immediately, kindling memories, each a poignant vignette of a refugee’s past. Bright spots on the voyage broke through the solemnity of the departure. Mrs. Miness viewed the trip as a grand adventure, and Mr. Redel, who was 17 at the time, brimmed with a sense of youthful invincibility. “All we ate was sardines, sardines, sardines,” said Elza Weinman, 81, who was 14 at the time. “And then everyone got seasick.” Mrs. Weinman’s mother wore the same corset every day, because she had sewn diamonds into it for safekeeping. Mrs. Parnes’s fetching young aunt sneaked into lifeboats at night with equally fetching young men. When the ship reached New York, Mrs. Miness’s lovely, vain mother begged to be taken to Ellis Island, because she had heard that there was a salon there and was desperate to have her hair coiffed. There were luminaries aboard, too, to the delight of other passengers. They strained to catch sight of people like the French movie star Marcel Dalio and his glamorous wife, Madeleine LeBeau, who would later appear in “Casablanca.” Irving Redel’s family members were not luminaries. They fled their home in Brussels in early May as the Germans advanced, first hitching a ride toward France, where thousands of refugees clogged the roads in cars, wagons, baby strollers and overflowing wheelbarrows. Malvina Parnes’s family fled Antwerp after her aunt charmed two young men into driving them part of the way. The family sought shelter where they could, spending one night in a farmhouse. While Malvina was standing by its front window, a bomb dropped feet from the glass but did not explode, a memory that haunts her still. People scrambled to get visas, including phony ones, for anywhere outside Europe. In Toulouse, the Redels got visas to China and Morocco. Mrs. Miness’s family got visas for Mexico. Mrs. Weinman’s family had visas for Venezuela. The Quanza’s captain also made many of the passengers buy return tickets, because he doubted their visas would gain them entry anywhere. The Atlantic crossing was not easy. A hurricane hit. The windowless bunks were stifling. Mr. Redel’s mother developed pleurisy. A New York Times article noting the Quanza’s arrival described the bulk of the passengers as “lowly refugees." Malvina’s father, who had been admitted to the United States months ahead of his family, met the ship in New York. He was allowed on board only once, and came bearing food, clothes and kisses. Malvina, her mother, aunt and sister were not allowed off the ship, and Malvina paced its length, playing an imaginary piano to chase her jitters away. Mr. Redel at age 16 in Brussels. Sailors hoisted her screaming little sister overboard in a chair fastened to a pulley, so her father could kiss her goodbye before she was hoisted back and the ship steamed away. The Quanza headed to Vera Cruz, Mexico, where 35 passengers, including Nina Miness’s family, were admitted. But the authorities rejected the visas of other passengers, including the families of Mr. Redel, Mrs. Weinman and Mrs. Parnes, 78. As the ship steamed around the Caribbean, Mrs. Weinman’s father wired different governments, begging to be let ashore. No one answered his call. Preparing to return to Europe, the Quanza stopped for coal in Virginia, where at least one despairing passenger threw himself overboard. (He swam to shore and was returned to the ship.) A lawyer, J. L. Morewitz, managed to keep the ship in dock until Mrs. Roosevelt stealthily instructed a State Department official, against the wishes of the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, to arrange for everyone onboard to get visas. The refugees raced ashore and scattered. Mr. Redel’s family ended up in Brooklyn. He went on to found a commodities trading business on Wall Street and raise his family in Westchester before moving to Park Avenue. Mrs. Miness lived blocks away. Mrs. Weinman lived on the Upper West Side, and so did Mrs. Parnes. While a few met up roughly 10 years ago, when the Morewitz family arranged a reunion, no one stayed in touch, despite their proximity. Now, in their twilight years, the last of the survivors say it is gratifying to find each other again. The rekindled memories brought pain, they said, but solace, too. “Many of the things that happened to people is a matter of luck, of us being in the right place at the right time,” Mr. Redel said. “It’s a story of desperation and hope.”


								Time Out New York / Issue 603: April 19–25, 2007 Missives in action A cache of secret letters forms the core of a new novel about the Holocaust. By Sarah Weinman Victoria Redel’s second novel, The Border of Truth, might not feature corpses, tough-talking PIs or other familiar crime-fiction tropes, but its appetite for mystery-solving lends it the momentum and feel of a detective story. In the book, a woman investigates how her ancestors fared during the Holocaust, but her tight-lipped father constantly derails her attempts to understand the past. “Having any kind of family history means having secrets,” Redel says over coffee at a café on the Upper West Side. “Think of a story you might have been told as a child by a relative, uncle so-and-so. Ten years later, the story gets embellished or edited for any number of reasons.” In The Border of Truth, the character with a story to tell is Richard Leader (born Itzak Lejdel), the octogenarian father of a fortysomething English professor named Sara. Sara’s decision to adopt a child leads her to reconsider conspicuous lacunae in her family history, but Richard has little desire to answer her persistent questions about his adolescence during World War II—especially his experiences as a Jewish refugee trying to flee Europe aboard the ship Quanza. “Itzak is a first-generation American, and like many immigrants and refugees his age who survived traumatic experiences during the war, he believes that the past should be left behind and not discussed,” explains Redel, 48, who has written a previous novel, Loverboy (2001), and several collections of short fiction and poetry. Sara, on the other hand, follows a path similar to the one documented in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, sifting through the fragmented and fading pieces of Itzak’s early life to answer lingering questions about her family’s existence. Sara’s understanding of what actually happened to her father comes late in the book, when she discovers what the reader has already been privy to: a cache of letters Itzak wrote while aboard the Quanza. Addressed to Eleanor Roosevelt, these notes describe the teenager’s trials and tribulations—the boat had to return to Nazi-occupied Brussels after being denied American port—with bursts of bold enthusiasm. But the subsequent horrors he experiences in France and Holland clearly transform him from a jubilant kid into a reticent man. Redel carefully draws contrasts between the youthful Itzak and the reluctant Richard, making the novel resonate in haunting ways. “I wanted him to be quieter as an old man, someone made cautious by loss,” Redel says. At first, the author intended Itzak to be the primary narrator, and devoted only about 30 pages to Sara. “But I realized,” she says, “with Itzak so unwilling to reveal himself, that Sara’s perspective mattered just as much.” Later drafts developed Sara’s character further, fleshing out her stellar academic career, spotty romantic history and increasing desire to be a mother. The evolving book also nails Sara’s headstrong inquisitiveness, which might have its roots in Redel’s early reading. “As a kid I was a big fan of Nancy Drew,” the author says. “Give me a strong heroine and I’m happy.” A teacher in the M.F.A. program at Sarah Lawrence College, Redel drew on her own family biography for research. Like Itzak, Redel’s father was on the Quanza, and his recall of certain details—such as the presence of 1930s French actors Marcel Dalio and Madeleine LeBeau—were incorporated into the novel verbatim. But Redel never fully realized how much Itzak’s fading past resembled her father’s until the novel was almost finished. “My father was hospitalized as I was working on the edits,” the novelist recalls. “It struck me that he was part of a generation about to die, and once they do, so would their stories.” According to Redel, writing the book gave her, like her heroine, a fuller sense of history. But the novelist never pushes for the total exposure of Richard’s past. She remains fascinated by the secrets at her novel’s core. “I’m of the belief that there isn’t one truth,” Redel states. “Writing is all about remaking the truth of an event into mythology.” That’s what novelists—and families—do. The Border of Truth (Counterpoint, $24.95) is out now.