2020 issue of Iris: Art + Lit
Write my life‘: A stranger’s plea inspired Alice Hoffman’s If you attend an author’s reading, you could walk away with a signed book, a brief connection with someone whose work you admire, possibly a tote bag. Or maybe the author will write a book inspired by your life. The writer in the last scenario is Alice Hoffman, who will open the 20th season of Talking After a reading at a Florida library, a well-dressed woman collared Hoffman, whose bestsellers include “Practical Magic” and “The Dovekeepers.” “The woman said she was a ‘hidden child,’ ” said Hoffman — meaning her Jewish parents saved “I didn’t even know what that was at the time, but she told me that her parents put her in a convent and if I didn’t tell her story, it would be lost. I said, ‘I don’t have the right to tell that story.’ But as time passed, I kept thinking about how I didn’t know about the ‘hidden children’ and that the next generation was even less likely to know about them. So maybe I should write “It” is Hoffman’s new novel “The World That We Knew,” which comes out Tuesday, and features one of her trademark elements — magic — in the form of a golem named Ava. (Read an As the Nazis grip Berlin, a woman realizes her daughter, Lea, must get out. So she asks her rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, to create a guardian for Lea, with the help of a spell and some special clay. The fates of Lea, Ettie and Ava intertwine as they escape to the French countryside, where “Very often, I go into a book not knowing anything. I have a question and I want to know the answer. So I went to France and visited these châteaus — homes for the children — and I met “One really amazing gentleman came to the country from Paris, and we went to the village She knew it would involve “love, loss and survivorship,” subjects she often writes about, and it would take the form of a folk tale about losing a child. Current events also informed the writing, particularly stories about people detained at the “I was writing about what hate does, the effects of the fear of people who are ‘other.’ I didn’t realize that so much of what was happening in France during World War II was anti-refugee, that it began not as a movement that was anti-Jewish but simply anti-refugee. So I found myself writing about how it’s really a choice, about how easy it can be to look in the other direction. These things happen slowly and then, all of a sudden, they have happened.” Hoffman is eager to discuss “The World That We Knew” at Talking Volumes and other stops on the book tour that begins Tuesday at Harvard. (She lives in Boston.) “I know the feeling that writers are — they’re a part of your life. I was afraid to meet Ray Bradbury, so I mostly had contact with him over the phone, but he was even better in real life,” said Hoffman, who is saluting the late “Fahrenheit 451” writer for the magazine Ploughshares, in honor of next year’s centennial of his birth. “I wish I had met him years and years earlier than I ‘You know what? I had to stop to cry a couple of times when I was writing.’ And I bet they were the same times.” ‘Maybe we’ll meet again’ “Maybe I needed her to pick me. Maybe I was just lucky.”