Lizzie Skurnick Books is the publisher of ISABEL’S WAR by Lila
Perl, which has been named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book for teen readers. Since
Lila died before the publication of her book, the following interview takes
place with her publisher, Lizzie Skurnick.
Copied
from Amazon About ISABEL’S WAR and author Lila Perl:
In a stunning new novel completed just before her death
in 2013, award-winning author Lila Perl introduces us to Isabel Brandt, a
French-phrase-dropping twelve-year-old New Yorker who's more interested in boys
and bobbing her nose than the distant war across the Pacific—the one her
parents keep reminding her to care more about. Things change when Helga, the
beautiful niece of her parent's best friends, comes to live with Isabel and her
family. Helga is everything Isabel's not—cool, blonde, and vaguely aloof. She's
also a German war refugee, with a past that gives a growing Isabel something
more important to think about than boys and her own looks. Set in the Bronx
during World War II, Isabel's War is
a beautiful evocation of New York in the 1940s and of a girl's growing
awareness of the world around her.
Lila
Perl, the daughter of Russian immigrants
fleeing anti-Semitism, published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction
for young readers during her long and distinguished career. In addition to the
beloved Fat Glenda series, Perl twice received American Library Association
Notable awards for nonfiction and was a recipient of the Sydney Taylor Award
for Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust
Story. She died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. Isabel's War and its completed sequel, Lilli's Quest, were her final works.
Lila Perl was a bit of a legend, having written over sixty books for young readers. What was it like to work with her?
Lila was, simply, a delight. When I first called her to ask if
we could republish the “Fat Glenda” series--one of my absolute favorites as a
teen--we wound up having an hour-long conversation about what it was like to be
an author who wrote tens of books while also raising young children. (I was
about to have a baby, and I wanted advice!)
What struck me most during that conversation was her absolutely
modesty, both about her impressive output and how she lived as a young writer.
(In a garden apartment in Queens, writing while her children napped.) To me,
she is, as you put it, a legend--but talking to her, I learned that authors of
her era had a very different experience from the teen authors of today. YA was
actually booming in the 70s and 80s, but publishing didn’t have the enormous
marketing apparatus it does today, and the authors weren’t on blogs and Twitter
and email. They went to see their editors directly with each book, sitting in a
waiting room, and heard from their readers by actual mail, or met them at schools
and libraries and book fair visits. Most remarkably, I could tell that Lila had
no idea what an enormous fan base she still had. (And has.)
I asked her to write an essay about it, which she (typically)
turned in the next day. It’s about her early years as a writer, rejection, and
her own Peyton Place:
But the most impressive thing, of course, is that Lila was dying
of cancer at the time we worked on ISABEL’S WAR and LILLI’S QUEST. She never
told me. She finished ISABEL, then wrote LILLI’S QUEST, when I told her we
needed to know what happened next. We were actually planning a trilogy, the
third book about both the girls at Smith, and you can see hints of the next
story in LILLI’S QUEST.
I think the fact that she knew she was dying and turned in two
books before her death says the most about her as a writer.
What inspired Lila to write ISABEL'S WAR?
From her own background as the child of parents who barely
escaped the Holocaust, I think Lila was interested both in the Holocaust from
the point of view of an American girl, as she was, as well as Lilli, a survivor
herself. The characters were a way to tell a unique story only very few people
know: the story of the war both here and in Germany. Most books about the
Holocaust are (unsurprisingly) miserable and terrifying, if brilliant. What’s
remarkable about ISABEL’S WAR is that we get to know Lilli and Isabel as people
as well, and the book is actually quite funny.
The mission of Lizzie Surnick Books is to “reissue the
very best in young adult literature from the classics of the 1930s and 1940s to
the social novels of the 1970s and 1980s,” yet ISABEL’S WAR is a new release.
What about this particular book brought it to your attention and persuaded you
to deviate from your stated mission?
I knew very well that the publishing industry changed during
Lila’s lifetime, and I suspected that she might have a novel or two in the
drawer from when the 80s YA world went out of fashion. She did: the unfinished
ISABEL’S WAR, a book her agent had not been able to sell.
When I had it in my hands, I knew we had to know the rest of
the story. In some ways, it is a
reissue--just one the publishing industry missed on the first go-round.
When will LILLI’S QUEST (sequel to ISABEL’s WAR) be
released?
In the Fall of 2015. We can’t wait!
Can you give us a sneak peek at LILLI’S QUEST?
But of course!
ONE
Lilli wakes up to the sickly yellowish light
of a November morning. They are still living in that high-ceilinged,
ground-floor flat on Heinrichstrasse. The sun never pierces the tall, narrow
windows and to Lilli, who hates the darkness, all of the rooms feel like the
insides of brown-paper bags. It is 1938 and Lilli is eleven years old.
She and her younger sister Helga, who is ten,
share a bed, very high and with tall, knobby bedposts that are carved with
elaborate scrolls. The bed once belonged to Oma and Opa, their grandparents.
Lilli’s youngest sister Elspeth, now five, is still sleeping in her old baby
cot, which is positioned crosswise at the foot of the family heirloom.
Today begins like an ordinary day. The girls
of the Frankfurter family wake up, shiver as they wash themselves at the
kitchen sink, and dress in their itchy woolen jumpers, thick black stockings,
and sturdy oxfords.
They help Mutti prepare the family breakfast
of hot milk, bread, and very small rations of jam, which is running short, as
are many so-called luxury goods in Germany in 1938. The country, under its Nazi
dictator, Adolf Hitler, is arming not only for war in Europe but to take over
the entire world. And Hitler’s armies need to be equipped with the best of
everything.
But war shortages aren’t something that Lilli
is thinking about right now. She’s more concerned with thoroughly removing the
despised skin that has formed on her mug of boiled milk. Mutti gazes at her
frowning. “Always the same,” she mutters in a tired voice. “You are throwing
away nourishment, my child. It’s hard enough to get milk these days, hard
enough to keep body and soul together.”
Lilli can’t help noticing that Mutti, who was
once so pretty, with her flaxen hair and flirtatious smile, has become faded
and that there is a faint new crease in her forehead. Papa, who has also come
to the breakfast table, is dressed in his usual going-to-the-office suit. But
in truth he won’t be going anywhere. Many months ago Papa was dismissed from
his job as a chief scientist at a chemical plant near the town where the
Frankfurters live.
When Papa arrived home in the middle of a
workday, the astonished girls asked why. “You should already know the answer,”
Papa told them not unkindly. “Why have all of you been forbidden to attend
school with German children. Why did the Jewish school then burn down?”
Lilli flashed a bitter smile. “Of course, I
know. They hate us, the Jews. What will you do now, Papa?”
There was no answer. Every day Papa dressed
for the office. Sometimes he left the apartment and tried to find a job among
his Jewish friends. Money had been saved but it was running low and the
Frankfurters had to borrow small sums from Mutti’s family, the Bayers, who were
not Jewish.
Papa responds to Mutti’s criticism of Lilli.
“Let the child indulge herself, Martina. Who knows what’s coming?”
Papa is so handsome in Lilli’s opinion – his
high cheekbones, the curl of his lips, his dark hair and amber-brown eyes, the
richness in his deep voice.
Mutti has caught something in Papa’s words.
“You mean…? Do you think there will be trouble today, Josef?”
Lilli’s eyes and those of her sister Helga
flash to the six-pointed yellow star with the word Jude, for Jew, which is sewn
onto the sleeve of Papa’s suit. If he goes into the streets searching for work,
everyone will know that he belongs to the race that Hitler has sworn to wipe
out. Already Jews in Germany have been stripped of their rights as citizens.
They’ve been mocked, attacked, beaten, and even arrested. From her parents’
conversation, Lilli senses that something truly evil may be coming.
Yet, the day goes by quietly enough. The
older girls do their lessons with Papa instructing. Elspeth practices her
alphabet and her reading, urged on by Mutti, and then goes off to play with her
dolls. Papa reads the evening newspaper, which has been delivered to him by a
kindly neighbor, Mr. Doppler, who is a so-called “pure” German and need not
fear being questioned or even arrested by one of Hitler’s special police.
Darkness descends and the girls go off to
bed.
