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Hashtag CNF Episode 1—Author Susan Kushner Resnick
284 Plays12 years ago
Susan Kushner Resnick is the author of "Goodbye Wifes and Daughters," which won a gold medal for nonfiction from the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards. Her first book, "Sleepless Days: One Woman’s Journey Through Postpartum Depression," was the first PPD memoir by an American author. In her latest book, "You Saved Me Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish," Susan writes of the chance encounter she had with Aron Lieb, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and the blossoming love and friendship that came from that meeting.
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Transcript
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to hashtag CNF, a podcast about reading and writing with authors in the genre of creative nonfiction. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
Meet Susan Kushner Resnick
00:00:18
Speaker
Susan Kushner Resnick is the author of Goodbye Whites and Daughters, which won a gold medal for non-fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her first book, Sleepless Days, One Woman's Journey Through Postpartum Depression, was the first PPD memoir by an American author. In her latest book, You Save Me Too,
Who is Aaron Lieb?
00:00:36
Speaker
What a Holocaust survivor taught me about living, dying, fighting, loving, and swearing in Yiddish, Susan writes of the chance encounter she had with Erin Lieb, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and the blossoming love and friendship that came from that meeting. It is my great pleasure to welcome Susan Kushner-Resnick to hashtag CNF.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yes, you're very welcome. It's really an honor that we can kick off this podcast in style. So what did Aaron teach you about living, dying, fighting, loving, and swearing in Yiddish?
00:01:16
Speaker
he was a little too irritable and cranky for that but he taught me things by forcing me to go through situations that taught me how to live for example I had to fight all these battles for him and I got to learn about good people and bad people and so he kind of launched me on a journey but one of the most concrete things I learned which sounds basic is that
00:01:44
Speaker
When you spend that much time with someone who survived the Holocaust and hear their story, you kind of get perspective on your life to the point where now whenever I'm having a bad day and start whining in my head, I just say to myself, you know what? Babies aren't dying. It doesn't matter. And I think that that's a really important lesson and I'm glad that I internalized.
What Makes a Soulmate?
00:02:06
Speaker
And talk about what it means to be a soulmate. Until I read your book, I had always associated the term with marriage partners and so forth. Thank you, Hollywood. But you sketch a totally different interpretation of soulmates, so expand on that.
00:02:22
Speaker
Well, I was always amazed at how similar we were. And we had nothing in common on the surface. You know, different generations, different education. You know, he was super poor. I was middle class, Polish, American. Everything that could be different was different. But inside, we were so similar with Erie. You know, we would understand each other.
00:02:44
Speaker
think the same things and like the same things and I felt like wow this is kind of really my other half you know I feel like this guy is
00:02:54
Speaker
whatever a soulmate is, he's the thing. And I realized at the same time, oh, it isn't supposed to be a romantic partner necessarily. It's, you know, whoever you connect with. Right, and also given that you just randomly met him, and he just, he kind of bumped into your son, right? And when he was, you know, when your son was very little, and that also goes to this greater thing that maybe you guys were meant to meet each other.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, and he always used to say that, that, you know, God brought us together and things like that. Yeah, it was very strange and as I write in the book, it's like we were continuing a conversation the first time we talked.
00:03:33
Speaker
He just walked up to me, I was holding my son, he asked about him, and I don't even remember us really introducing each other. We just started talking and kept talking. Describe your approach to writing the book.
Why Write a Love Letter Book?
00:03:45
Speaker
I chose to interpret it as a love letter in a lot of ways, as you use the second person to speak directly to Aaron, and we as the readers are eavesdropping. So how did you come to that decision?
00:03:55
Speaker
Well, I came to that decision actually while I was driving to his deathbed, which is how I start the story. And I realized that if he indeed was dying that day, which he did, I wouldn't be able to talk to him anymore. And that just made me so sad. I mean, I wanted to tell him about that day. So I decided, oh, this is how I can tell the story, as if I'm telling it to him.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then I had to figure out how to bring in all the history, but I figured, you know, he was 91. Well, he could have forgotten a lot of what he had told me. So I told it as if I was reminding him of things and catching him up on what he didn't know about me.
Narrative Challenges
00:04:35
Speaker
What was the challenge in braiding Aaron's history, your history, and that day, January 9, 2011, that proves to be the anchor through which the story adheres? Well, you know, I was really inspired by Nick Flynn's book, Another Bullshit Night in Sub-City, because he tells a story, and it's linear in a way, but it jumps back and forth in time during that line. And so that's what I did. I kept the story moving to a certain point.
00:05:03
Speaker
forward, but I would go back and jump around because it was really hard to keep in that I'm talking to right now and bring the history into it. Setting up that structure was the hardest thing to do. Once I did that, I've been taking notes on this story for 14 years and just plugging them in with the easy part.
Lessons in Perseverance
00:05:23
Speaker
And how much did you learn about human perseverance in your research? Oh, God, a lot. I mean, I just learned that you don't always choose to
00:05:31
Speaker
to push through, but you gotta do it and you just, you know, there's no way to decide who's gonna live and who's gonna die and you have to keep working. And what was it about Aaron that kept him alive through the camps and even once he emigrated and found life to keep screwing him as he aged? Yeah. Well, you know, the answer to that is I don't know because I kept asking him. And so there are different theories in the book. Sometimes he would say it was Locke. Sometimes he would say it was God. Sometimes he would say
00:06:01
Speaker
it's because he was so poor when he was young that he was used to being hungry. There were all these weird circumstances that happened. He missed being selected for the gas chamber by one day because of a potato shipment. So all these strange things would happen. Who knows why some people survive and why some people, you know, great people die young. There's really, I have no answer for
Comparing Survival Stories
00:06:26
Speaker
that.
00:06:26
Speaker
In reading his survivor's tale, I kind of thought of another World War II era tale in Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken with Louis Zamperini and how on earth he survived his POW camp and also being stranded at sea for 40 some odd days. It's pretty remarkable how some people have the fortitude of mind to be able to
00:06:52
Speaker
I know to ignore their surroundings in some cases and just keep their eyes on some distant future that might not exactly exist. Yeah, I mean, in his case, I think it was more deliberate than in Aaron's. I think Aaron was just kind of getting through the days, which I think a lot of survivors were. I mean, they were so hungry and thirsty, they couldn't think in a rational way anymore. Sometimes I think that in this kind of romantic, but that
00:07:20
Speaker
These people survived so they can teach off the lesson about life. And maybe Aaron couldn't die until he had taught me and other people around him what they needed to know. And there was no shortage of books about the Holocaust, so was there any hesitation on your point to add to that collection, or did you feel any pressure contributing to that pantheon of books about such a horrific and iconic event of the 20th century?
Why Write About the Holocaust?
00:07:50
Speaker
for this kind of story years ago and it involved Aaron and his girlfriend who was a refugee from the Soviet Union and I thought that that would be an interesting story and it got completely rejected by everyone because they said nobody wants to read about the Holocaust.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I would tell Aaron that because he knew I was writing about him and he would say, so how's the book coming? So at this time when I realized it was more of a story about how he had changed me and not just a Holocaust story, then I felt better about trying to sell it. And indeed I don't have that much about his story.
00:08:29
Speaker
I have some kind of an outline, but it's not primarily about that.
Balancing Personal and Family Ties
00:08:35
Speaker
And I just finished reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. And here's this family that brings in a dependent person, needs a lot of attention. And in some ways, I felt a similar presence of Aaron in your life for your family. Talk about striking the balance between your family and what was essentially an adopted family member in his advanced years that would require a lot of care and time.
00:08:59
Speaker
Well, strangely, it didn't affect my family that much. Most of the time when I was with him, it was while my kids were at school, my husband was at work, you know, I'm a freelance writer, I can do that whenever I want or, you know, not do it as long as I'm procrastinating. So it didn't affect them that much. People ask me that all the time. They just kind of saw it as my project, you know, this is the thing I do once a week during the day or these are the
00:09:27
Speaker
Mom's on the phone yelling at someone again about Aaron. I think they just saw it as part of what our family did. And you said that this book in a lot of ways was a conversation with him.
A Conversation Beyond Life
00:09:41
Speaker
And do you still find yourself talking with him and speaking with him?
00:09:47
Speaker
Uh, once in a while, but I think that writing the book kind of got it out of my system. I do wear a bracelet all the time with his Holocaust number, his tattoo engraved on it. So I always feel like he's kind of with me. The name of the book again is You Save Me Too, What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, Swearing, and Yiddish. The book is published by Skirt. Thank you, Susan Kushner-Resnick. Thanks, it's an honor to be the first one.