Q
& A with Author
Mary Glickman
Media Connect, the book PR firm that I work for, is promoting the author of a new book, Marching to Zion, Mary Glickman, for her
publisher, Open Road. The novel is a fascinating look at interracial
dating a century ago in America. Below is a candid interview with the
award-winning author:
1.
What is your newest novel, Marching to Zion, about? Marching to Zion is the tragic love story of a beautiful, damaged Jewish refugee
from a Ukranian pogrom and a charismatic African American man, a self-made,
debonair son of the Mississippi, during the first decades of the 20th
century. We watch these lovers experience mind-bending passion, betrayal, and
redemption. They also suffer racism, the kind that’s vicious, brutal, and
anonymous.
2.
How would you describe your writing style? It’s pretty unique! I don’t use quotation marks, the
narrator sometimes jumps around in time and point of view. Some of my idioms
violate all kinds of rules of grammar. You see, I wanted the text to sound like
an oral narrative, as if someone were telling you a story while you sat in
front of the fireplace, or on the back porch. Stories from the back porch are a
very Southern phenomenon, so this kind of voice helped me ground the plot in
its setting. To help me keep it real, I imagined the voice of Morgan Freeman
telling me the story while I wrote. Now that man’s voice is gorgeous. I have to
say that little trick has worked for me!
3.
Each of your novels explore race relations. Why does this
topic fascinate you? Listen, I write about the South and
you can’t write about the South and not write about race. I don’t think you can
write about America and not write
about race. Racism is America’s Original Sin. Our history is entangled so
deeply in issues about race, there’s no getting away from it. Even today, with
an African American president in his second term, daily, casual acts of racism
persist. And I don’t just mean white-black racism, I mean black-white racism,
anti-semitism, anti-whatever-else-you’ve-got. Look at the history of Native
Americans in this country, of Asian immigrants. We think of racism as a
black/white issue, but that’s only because it’s the most obvious example in our
national narrative. It abounds.
4.
Why do you say that, that "America's original sin is
racism"? Let’s face it. Racism is a sin
that’s been embedded in our society from the very beginning. From colonial
times until the industrial revolution, our economy was dependent on slave
labor. Racism persisted not just in the South, but in all the states, in all regions.
Even after Emancipation, we didn’t learn our lesson! Jim Crow Laws kept blacks
in invisible chains in the South for a hundred years after the Civil War. When African American’s tried to escape those
laws during the first half of the 20th century, they found
themselves trapped in a struggle against Northern racism, which had all the
earmarks of Southern racism except for the “Colored Only” signs. Now that’s
just the tip of the iceberg as to how racism has shaped and molded the United
States. We’re not talking the economic, psychological, social and cultural
effects, which have been enormous. It’s something we’ve made great strides in
over the 20th century, but the job ain’t done!
5.
As a New England Jew who first lived in the South 25 years
ago, what have you noticed to be a difference in attitudes on race between the
two regions? Look. I lived through the Boston
busing riots in the ‘70s. The racism of the North is no secret to me! All those years I was jumping back and forth
between the North and South, I noticed a curious difference in race relations
between the regions. In the New South, I saw a kind of warmth and relaxation in
daily encounters between blacks and whites that I didn’t see up North, where I
noticed a lot of racial anxiety. I thought this might be because in the South,
the races always lived in close proximity; they shared the same culture, the
same food, the same music, so they’re comfortable in each other’s presence. .
.In the North, ethnic groups were ghettoized and ghettoization makes people
more strongly identify only with their own. It encourages people to see
everyone else as “other” as “not one of us”. Much of the nation has a Hollywood
South in their minds and don’t see the New South’s complexity and growth. I
wanted to address that.
6.
How about in terms of religion? From the get-go, Jews were accepted as white by the dominant
culture in the South and this led to a far greater degree of early assimilation
than in the ghettoized North. Of course, Jews were scapegoated from now and
again during times of trouble, but for the most part, they were a valuable, integrated
part of the South. Then came the Civil
Rights Era. During that time, up to 60% of the white Freedom Riders, 70% of the
Civil Rights attorneys, and 65% of the volunteers during Freedom Summer were
Northern Jews. They came South, did what they did, and went back North, leaving
Southern Jews vulnerable to a fresh outbreak of anti-semitism as
segregationists lumped all Jews together as enemies of the system. Whether that
was true or not, synagogues were bombed, businesses destroyed, lived
maimed.
7.
The Civil Rights Movement was not all that long ago, yet it
seems the newer generation doesn't realize the role Jews played in helping
blacks gain new freedoms. Why is that? Don’t
get me started on the failures of American education! I don’t know the whys of
it, but travelling with my books around the country has taught me that people
seem to know about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and very little about Jim
Crowe and the near nationwide race riots of 1917. They know about the Holocaust
and the establishment of the State of Israel, but they know little to nothing
of European pogroms, of the forced displacement of Jews from country to country
over thousands of years. One of the reasons I write my books is to provide
people context out of the history that’s been forgotten, context for the larger
events, like the March on Washington or the Holocaust. In terms of the Civil
Rights Era, there naturally came a point at which the Black Power movement developed
and its emphasis was on ethnic independence and self-determination so a rift
occurred between Jewish activists and Black Power groups. That rift has
deepened over the decades. My books also seek to remind people how closely our
cultural narratives mirror each other – slavery, exile, discrimination – and
maybe, hopefully heal that rift a little.
8.
Your new book focuses on a tragic love story involving an
interracial couple in the shadows of the 1917 race riots. What was going on in
the country around that time that would impact their fate? Tons! The race riots came about because of World War I.
There was an industrial expansion in order to supply the war just as labor
unions were striking for workers’ rights. Factory recruiters went South to put
African Americans on trains North as strikebreakers, telling them how much
freedom there was, how much money they could make. What they found was
something different: crowded tenements, de facto segregation, black man’s wages
for white man’s work. Anyway, tensions
between striking workers and strike-breaking blacks fueled the race riots that first puts our lovers in danger in Marching to Zion. They move to Memphis for
a fresh start. That’s when they first acknowledge their feelings for each
other, but their union is highly dangerous, It’s illegal for one thing. It
represents certain death for one or both of them. How the lovers react, how they suffer through
betrayal and separation and reunion and redemption forms the meat of the novel.
9.
If even 50 years ago a black man and a white woman dating
each other was viewed as taboo, have we come a long way now that a majority of polled
Americans say they accept gay marriage? Yes!
And the distance is clear! Until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v
Virginia that bans against interracial marriage violated the 14th
Amendment, such marriages were illegal in fifteen
states. During the years Marching to Zion takes
place, interracial marriage was an invitation to a lynching. Today, interracial
marriage across racial lines is common. 14% of all marriages are interracial.
It is common also among my
contemporaries at least to have mixed race grandchildren running around. Seems
to me that’s the only way we’ll ever completely get over racial bias or any kind of bias in America – to blend
families.
10.
Your book is about race and culture and history, but it is
also about love. Can the power of
love exceed all other concerns? Marching to Zion
is a love story but it’s also a tragedy. I wouldn’t say love conquers all. But I would
say love is what - even under the worst circumstances - makes life worth living,
it gives you strength and hope. And for the characters in my book, for the
readers who pick it up, I think the power of love will shine through and
uplift.
11.
Are you surprised that your writing career first got started
at the age of 61 and now, three books later, you have received critical acclaim
and literary recognition? Surprise
isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but it comes close. Maybe gratified, grateful,
thrilled are better. Cynthia Ozick once said that being published for the first
time at the age of 38 is a little death. For me being published for the first
time at 61, was a resurrection! I was writing novels from my 20s on. My first book, Home in the Morning, sold well and landed a film option. And my
next novel, One More River, was a
National Jewish Book Award Finalist. I have to say, I think I was more excited
about the finalist award than the film option. Is that my age showing?
12.
What type of research goes into the creation of your novels?
All kinds. My Southern sensibility
comes from a twenty-five year love affair with the South. You really have to live in the South to
comprehend it. I’ve read many of the seminal texts on Southern Jews and the
Civil Rights Era also. One of the most vital resources I’ve found is the Oral
Archives of the Jewish Heritage
Collection at the College of Charleston. They recorded on tape and text
interviews with Southern Jews over most of the 20th century. I don’t like to over-research, though. I like
to give enough detail to convey an atmosphere, a zeitgeist, of the era without
bogging the story down. I believe all
great stories are character driven, and so I strive to create characters that
live and breathe and get under your skin and into your heart. I think of my
novels as novels about people against an historical backdrop, not historical
novels in the conventional sense.
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Brian
Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and
not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter.
You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when
discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©
2013
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