The Baroness of Books
Shreya of The Baroness of Books
Hi readers! Literary and historical fiction fans will enjoy this Q&A with author Florence Reiss Kraut on her novel How to Make a Life! My review will be out later this week/month, so I'll share the cover and description below as well. Thank you to Smith Publicity for partnering with me on this post and sharing a copy of How to Make a Life.
Question: How did the idea for How to Make a Life take shape?
Florence Reiss Kraut: I have always wanted to write a novel about a big ethnic – in my case Jewish – family like my own, but not my own. Over my career when I was mostly writing short stories, a family began to take shape and the same characters began to emerge at different stages of their lives. All of a sudden, I was linking the short stories and building four generations of a family. I worked on that concept over 6 years, writing and re-writing until I actually had a novel, How to Make a Life.
Q: Why was writing about a large, diverse family important to you?
FRK: A large, diverse family describes the one I was born into. I had 27 first cousins and 20 aunts and uncles. That was 11 families, including mine, all of whom lived in NYC where I was born, raised and educated. We visited each other on weekends and holidays, and entire summers were spent together in bungalow colonies. Some of my cousins were as close as brothers and sisters. No matter where family members moved, who they married, how they lived, we somehow all kept our connections to one another. I wanted to celebrate that kind of family bond that can span generations.
Q: The book tackles some mental health topics as well. Why was that important for you to include?
FRK: I spent my professional life as a clinical social worker, working with many people and families who lived with and suffered from mental illness. In such a large family, like the one in which I grew up, we also had members who experienced mental illness. I wanted to show how this illness affects not only the ones who suffer from the disease, but also the ones who love them, live with them and try to help them.
Q: Do you have a favorite character in the book and why?
FRK: I feel like choosing one character as a favorite is a little like choosing a favorite child. Impossible. I like all the characters, some because of their strengths, some because of their weaknesses. I feel empathy for all of them. That said, I do have more chapters from Jenny’s point of view because she is the one who always works to keep the family together, the one to whom family members turn for help. I guess all families have one or two people like that.
Q: How did your faith inform the novel?
FRK: I grew up in this large rowdy and very Jewish family. My grandparents who were immigrants at the turn of the century—although they did not come from Ukraine or flee pogroms—were Orthodox Jews. Their 11 surviving children mostly remained in the faith. At least they all married within it and, when I was growing up, our religious practices were part of my everyday life, from celebrating holidays to the Sabbath with Jewish foods, books, culture, and humor. I think that our family was very much like the families of other immigrant ethnicities. In my generation, the religious connections got looser. Some of my cousins inter-married with other religions and races, some stopped practicing any form of religion, and some moved to Israel so they could live a more integrated Jewish life. My background makes me intensely Jewish, totally connected to Jewish history and culture, and very proud of it. But I am not a religious person.
When Ida and her daughter Bessie flee a catastrophic program in Ukraine for America in 1905, they believe their emigration will ensure that their children and grandchildren will be safe from harm. But choices and decisions made by one generation have ripple effects on those who come later—and in the decades that follow, family secrets, betrayals, and mistakes made in the name of love threaten the survival of the family.
A sweeping saga that follows three generations from the tenements of Brooklyn through WWII, from Woodstock to India, and from Spain to Israel, How to Make a Life is the story of a family who must learn to accept each other’s differences—or risk cutting ties with the very people who anchor their place in the world.
A native New Yorker, Florence Reiss Kraut was raised and educated in four of the five boroughs of New York City. With a BA in English and a Masters in Social Work she worked for over thirty years as a clinician, a family therapist and eventually CEO of a family service agency before retiring to write and travel. Her own close family of 26 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins and listening to stories around the kitchen table, coffee klatches and family parties inspired her to write her fictional, multi-generational family drama, How to Make a Life.
She has published stories for children and teens, romance stories for national magazines, literary stories, and personal essays for the Westchester section of the New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as The Evening Street Press and SNReview.