 Welcome to the Arlington author salon for this chilly January evening. I hope you are all cozy wherever you are. And I want to remind you all that throughout this whole presentation you can add questions to the Q&A or to chat and we have a Q&A session at the end of salon. So I'm going to start with introducing myself. I'm Andrea Nicolai. I'm your emcee and I'm also the director of libraries for the town of Arlington. I wish you a happy winter. I thank you for beaming in with us this evening. Tonight's Arlington author salon theme is life, art, and family in history's shadow. We are so incredibly lucky to have three authors with us this evening, Helen Fremont, Elena Limberski, and Weyna Dairandel. The salon is a free reading series with a twist. Each author's presentation includes a sensory experience to complement their reading, whether it be music, photos, tasty treats, fabrics, even sculpture and smells, although zoom webinar has its limitations. The salon normally takes place at the kickstand cafe in Arlington center on a quarterly basis the first week of January, April, July and October with some exceptions excuse me to circumvent holidays. Our next salon will take place April 7th. A few notes as you settle in the salon is recorded and will later be viewable on Arlington Community Media's TV channel and on demand at ACMI.TV. We're so happy to have them as a partner. The list of attendees is not viewable during the program and it won't be viewable in this recording. Each author will have 15 minutes to read and will have a combined Q&A at the end of the program. And as I mentioned earlier, the chat and Q&A functions are enabled. You can enter a question for the authors at any point during the program and I'll pose the questions at the end during the Q&A period. I want to give a nod to our usual host Emily and the staff of the wonderful kickstand cafe, a home away from home for many writers and Arlingtonians. I also want to credit salon co-organizers Anjali Miradouva, Whitney Sherer and Amy Yellen. This program this evening is sponsored in part by a grant from the Arlington Cultural Council and the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture which is in turn supported by a state agency, the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The program usually takes place in the heart of the Arlington Cultural District which was designated in 2017 by the Mass Cultural Council. Books are for sale courtesy of the Book Rack, our local bookseller in Arlington, and that URL is book-rack.com. We'll share out that link during actually I think it might be shared out already but if it's not it will be soon. So our first author this evening is Helen Fremont. Helen Fremont's new memoir The Escape Artist was published in 2020 by Simon and Schuster and was selected as a New York Times editor's choice book. It was also chosen by People Magazine as a best new book in 2020. Her nationally bestselling first memoir After Long Silence was selected by the New York Times as a new and noteworthy book in 2000. Books of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including prize stories, the Oh Henry Awards, The New York Times, Plowshares, and the Harvard Review. I would like you to please welcome to the stage Helen Fremont. Thank you Andrea. Having a little technical problems here with pushing buttons but I really appreciate your introduction and I'm so grateful to you and Anjali and Amy, and everyone at the Robbins Library for hosting this event. And it's a real honor to be here with Yelena and Weina, who are terrific writers and you should get their books. In keeping with the show and tell format, I'm going to do a really a kind of a blitz through my family history. There are 49 slides. Many of the pictures here are not actually authentic Fremont family pictures. I might be able to tell the difference. Some I just pulled off the off the web but I just wanted to illustrate the story somehow. So, to start with, my sister and I were raised in upstate New York we were in a very nuclear family of just my mother, my father, and my older sister Laura and me this is not me and my sister anybody who knew us knew would know we would never be cut dead in these outfits but it does at least introduce us. My parents never never spoke about the past they we knew they were from Eastern Europe, we knew that they were soul survivors of their family they had survived World War two, and that everyone else was killed but we were never to ask about the past because it was just too painful. We were raised Roman Catholic, but found out in our 30s that in fact our parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. And we found that out in 1992, as you can see on the left, I'm a lawyer, and my sister Laura was a doctor at the time. And the way we found out was through these pages of testimony that were sent to us in a big packet by a rabbi at Yad Vashem the Holocaust Museum in Israel. And my sister had sent out an inquiry thinking, perhaps we would find out. Maybe there were some other family members that we didn't know about. And we were shocked to find that in fact we got pages like this which is written in Yiddish that this one is showing that my mother's mother was gassed at the extermination camp of Belgium in 1943. This is another page of testimony that shows that my mother's father was gassed at Belgium. And here's another one showing that my father's mother was also gassed at Belgium in the spring of 1943. And it turns out there were dozens and dozens of relatives that we didn't even know about we had aunts and uncles and cousins, and these pages of testimony described how they were either gassed or shot or starved in the ghettos and we were just overwhelmed with the amount of information that we received and we weren't sure what to do so we sat down and did a ton of research and in 1992 there was no internet. So we ended up reading a lot of history and writing to other survivors. Our parents were in their 70s and so there were an awful lot of survivors of their generation who are still alive. We went to their hometown in Levov which was now Ukraine, and we went to Israel and we did as much research as we could trying to find people who knew our parents and finally we sat down and talked with our parents and we got the story of how they had survived. So this is a map of Europe before World War II and you can see Germany in red in the middle and Poland is off to the east in blue and I put a little magenta star near Levov which is the city that my parents were from. Now this is the only photo I have of any of my family that predates the war. This is a medical school identification card from my father from 1936 when he was 21 years old. And this was also the year that he met my mother and she was a high school senior and he crashed the party at her high school. This is my mom. I don't have any pictures of her from before the war. This was taken 10 years later in 1946. Anyway, they fell in love and they were going to be married. They were just waiting for my father to graduate from medical school. But before he could, the war broke out. And in September of 1939, the Russians took over Levov because we'll go back to our maps. Here on the left again before the war, you have the little star showing where my parents were from and the Germans and Russians divided Poland between themselves. And basically Russia was given the eastern part and you can see that Levov now is under Russian occupation. So what happened under the Russians is that as soon as my father graduated medical school, he was arrested as a socially dangerous element, and he was sent to Siberia as a slave labor in the gulag. And basically no one ever heard from people who went off to Siberia that was the end of them they either starve to death or froze to death and in fact, my mother and her family never heard anything further from him for six years. A year later, the Germans broke their agreement with their Russian, the Russians and invaded Russia and took over the city of Levov. And this was in June of 1941. So again, there was Levov sitting in under Russian occupation and then to the right you see what Levov Germany had just exploded and invaded north, south, east and west, and they pushed the Russians out and now Levov was under German occupation. And under the Germans, my mother and her parents and families were all forced into the ghetto and they were forced to wear the Jewish star. Because they had an armband so they were required to identify as Jews, and my mother was managed to support her parents by pretending to be a Polish Catholic, and she had a real gift for language was fluent in several languages, including Italian, because her older sister had earlier married an Italian will get to her later, but my mother got a job pretending to be a Polish Catholic girl and worked for an Italian officer stationed in Levov in the area and section of town. And the Italians were allied with the Germans, so she was able to, at the end of her workday, smuggle food from the area section of town, back into the ghetto put on her her Jewish armband, and at night she was able to keep her parents alive with the food that she brought, and she was able to keep that up for about a year and a half until October of 1942, when the Germans liquidated the ghetto, and my mother ended up having to escape she cut her short. She got false papers, and she dressed up as an Italian soldier and marched out of Poland dressed as an Italian soldier with the Italian army. But she was arrested at the border. She was imprisoned and in a concentration camp. And it was about nine months later that she was released in July of 1943 and she went to live with her older sister Zosia, who had married an Italian and this is actually I think the building that they lived in at that time in Rome. This is my aunt Zosia, and she was seven years older than my mother, and here is Uncle Julio. He was the Italian count he's actually the only authentic Catholic in our family. He was a lawyer and he was really into heraldry this was not his daily outfit, but it was very proud of being a knight of the Order of Malta. And this is his you know he really got into the little metals and the tape and everything in the feather cap and so here he is posing as his as a knight in the Order of Malta. And now we have a picture a few pictures from after the war in 1946. This is my aunt with my three year old cousin, her son, ostensibly, Renzo. All this time for the last six years my father has been in forced labor camps in Siberia, and no one has heard anything of him and assumed he was dead, but he was not dead. He managed to escape in the summer of 46. So it was about a year after the war was already over. And he ended up jumping on a train he was up above the Arctic Circle he was in sort of the, the upper right hand corner of this picture in the red zone and he ended up jumping trains and hanging on and getting to the border with Europe and then he walked up all the way to Rome as a fugitive from justice. And in 1946, he found my mother in Rome, and he and my mother married 10 years to the day since they first met. So this is in fact my father and my mother and again, little Renzo, who you can see is really pissed off that my father is now in the picture. They took them another four years before they were able to put together enough documents to apply for citizen or not yet citizenship but just to emigrate to the United States and they came over to New York by boat, and my sister and I were born in the country. So now I have a few pictures of just family pictures of me. This is a picture of me when I was 16. And I'm with my uncle Julio we're in Montagatini, which was his favorite spa town in Tuscany, he always went for a month in Tuscany and just finished youth hostling all over Europe so I'm wearing my rather unfashionable hiking boots and cut off shorts and my uncle of course is wearing his, his little ballet slippers and he looks, he was just a delightful guy. Here I am a few years later, I am on the crew team at Balzy College and I'm the second from the left in this picture, and another picture of me on the left with Renzo, Renzo's daughter in 1993 and this was taken in Italy. And this, we are not sure who this is I just thought I would throw it in to see if people were still awake. And I decided that I needed to write the story, once we had discovered all of these secrets and how our parents survived and the fact that we were Jewish. And as writers know, you know, you need to have a whole bunch of muses and accessories to get yourself inspired to write and you have to have your panic button and so this was mine. And writing, when you begin, it's really very exciting you're, you know, like discovering all sorts of varied secrets but with time, it can also be really exhausting and it took me six years to write this book. And, and I must say that they were not always easy, you know, it wasn't always easy to get this down but finally, in 1999, I was able to publish the, my first memoir after long silence which really got down the details of my parent story as I understood it then. And I thought that I was done. But as it turned out as a result of that books publication, even though my sister and I had done so much research and thought we had found everybody who might have known our parents. And as it turned out, there were a ton of relatives, some who had come before the war, some who had survived, and we didn't even know that they were here in America. So this reunion is from 2000, and it's only the East Coast branch of my mother's family that got together. It's not complicated this is in fact my own dog Roshi after he got into the briar patch and it's a good metaphor for what I felt like after writing the book because I got into trouble with my family. And we had a very enmeshed family and it was really, really warm and fuzzy to be in my family. We loved each other a lot. But if you tried to turn around or do anything on your own, it really caused complications and that's what my book did. And my, this is sort of representative this is these are not my parents as you might have guessed but this is what my family response to after long silence was my mother was horrified, and did not speak to me for the next couple of years. My father was actually pleased that the book came out he had written his own memoir, he wanted his story told, but he unfortunately was suffering from Parkinson's and so he ended up dying in 2001. That's what broke my mother silent she finally invited me home for my father's funeral, and we had a very emotional reunion, but six weeks later, I found out that I was disowned and declared dead by my family, and I hadn't seen that coming. So, what I realized is that it wasn't enough to just tell the story of what happened, and that there was a deeper story that I had left out of the first book and that is the effects that the secrets can have on on family dynamics, and the transmission of trauma from one generation to another. And so I realized that I'd only scratched the surface and I felt that I needed to dig deeper and write more about it and that took just a quick 20 years later. And finally came out with the second memoir, which in fact uncovered more secrets that helped me understand what had happened to my family and it tells into the relationships of the sisters and my mother's relationship with her older sister, my relationship with my sister, and basically the effect of intergenerational trauma. So that's it in a nutshell, and thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here, my goodness. The pig on the raft. I mean, that's, that's memorable. Nothing to do with your book, but very memorable. All right. Our next author this evening. Our next author this evening is Elena Limbersky, excuse me Elena Limbersky. She grew up in Leningrad, St. Petersburg specifically, Soviet Russia and moved to the US in 1987. After earning a bachelor's from the University of Michigan and a master's from MIT. She worked as an architect in Boston and continued writing and publishing her new memoir, like a drop of ink in a downpour memories of Soviet Russia co authored with her mother Galina is her first book length work of creative nonfiction. She lives in Arlington and can be spotted tossing tennis balls at Minotomy Rocks Park. Please join me in welcoming Elena Limbersky. Thank you. Thank you, Andrea. So I think I will begin, if I may, by reading an excerpt from my memoir. The piece that I originally wanted to read. When I started reading it, I realized I will not be able to read through it. Even 40 years after everything that had happened. So instead, I will read a piece from a chapter that's called the rain and the frost. And then I will show some slides. The rain sets in in about mid September. The Leningrad rain is not impulsive or passionate like a Shostakovich symphony. It's not brush. No, it's depressing. Hello and persistent lingering drizzle that penetrates clothes and lungs. The dull grayness comes with it. The worn out pastels of Ruchov apartment buildings turn drab. Rhodes black and heavy clouds that look like beef broth congealed overhead. My neighbors put on gray garments so that the splatters will blend in. In gray rain coats, hats and shells gray whiteness. My heart turns gray. Rain sips into my boots from the top and from the bottom through cracks in the souls. Wet socks, runny nose, sidewalks are littered with soggy cigarette stubs. I have to watch my step. Water sips below doorways into our foyer. Now and then the drizzle brings in the tender scent from the Gulf of Finland. But more often it is the stinks, the stink of the overflowing storm drains. Puddles form at the side of the road. Cards drive through them too fast. Blasts of water and mud shoot up like flicks of black ostrich fence. Pedestrian slip away, the burlesque of Leningrad's rain, the contest of the biggest mess. And then there are brief moments when the sun comes out and veins of blue sky breaks through the clouds. Puddles sparkle in Lapis lazuli and pearl. My white apartment building stands tall as a lighthouse in our pallid neighborhood. In those moments I feel that everything will always turn out well and my heart dreams will gratitude. So I wanted to write this memoir since I was 11 years old when three men from Soviet police came to my house. And I were about to, the two of us lived together and we were about to emigrate. The borders were closed in Russia, and it was almost impossible to get out. The exception was made for Russian for Soviet Jews. And the small amount of small number of us were able to get special permission, special exit visa. My mother was successful and we had our visa. She had a couple weeks before she had given up her Soviet citizenship and we have given away most of our things and getting ready to leave. But I came home on that day from school, and I saw my mother standing in a hallway. And the three men were moving from room to room and tapping my mattress and pillows with metal detectors, turning our things upside down. And when they left, they took away our exit visa. And there was an investigation against my mother. Everybody told her that she will be acquitted because the charges were trivial. And she received the prison sentence. And I, the memoir I wanted to, so I remember feeling incredible rage that I was not able to protect my mother. And all I could do is to remember everything and hoping that one day I will write it down. But then years passed, and we were finally able to leave. As we were leaving, as our airplane was taking off from Leningrad, my mother and I made a promise to each other that we will never speak about our past again. We wanted to start, this was our new life and we did not want to bring this past into our future. And so when I met people in the, we moved to an arbor, Michigan. And so when people asked what it was like to grow up in Russia, I had, I had nothing. And it wasn't that I was keeping a secret. It's just that, that past was, had no relevance to this new life. And I met many people from all over the world in first in an arbor and in Cambridge. People from Middle East, from Europe, from Germany, from, from Asia. And I always ask them about their childhoods and the places where they grew up, and their stories, their places became my stories and my roots. And that was enough. And so I didn't tell, I didn't tell about this to my husband until five years into our marriage. And I didn't tell anything to my children. As they were growing up and reaching the age I was when the three men came to our home. I was watching with shock and horror. And they were quite fun to Russia. They never visited. And their reference to Russia was the school of Russian math and the cartoons and sweets we brought from the Russian store. And so I had to tell them how it was. But it was impossible for me to talk about it. So I started to write down my memories. And then my mother gave me the recordings. We recorded her memories and put our narratives together. And what surprised me. The story that was that came out that wrote itself on the pages was not full of rage. It had all the sweet memories, tender, tender sweet memories of the place I grew up. And they were incredibly well preserved, like little ice mummies that were coming out from the melting snow. So the book is made of three parts. Yes, and so as I was struggling as I was writing and struggling to go to those more difficult years when my mother was away and I was alone. I kept going to the earlier memories as a safe place. So the book is made of three parts. The first part is told in the voice of a young girl, me growing up in Leningrad in the 70s. And I tell about our neighborhood and playing in the backyard. I also talk about my school lessons. And it was like to grow up Jewish in the Jewish family in the country with state endorsed antisemitism. The secrets my family had to keep. And my first memories of my grandfather's paintings. Including his three paintings of by the year. My grandmother never told me what by the year was. And she never spoke about Holocaust. The second part is my mother's. And she talks about her growing up in post war Russia. She had a lot of jobs, including a temporary job she took in the hair salon after she began to apply for immigration. When she worked, when she went to work for this hair salon, a job that was innocent. She thought she saw a vast unbound corruption theft. The scale she never could imagine were possible. She was not participating in it. But the fact that she knew about it and knew the people who were involved in this basically landed her in prison. So she talks also about her experience in prison and the labor camp. And the third part is back to me as another lesson after she came back. And we had to find a way to leave and a place to leave and rebuild our life. She continued to apply for immigration. And got refused year after year with the same explanation, not in the interest of the state. And at that time, we had no hope of ever getting out. And in the 80s, if you lived in the Soviet Union, you could not have imagined the possibility that just in few years, the Soviet Union would cease to exist. And my book will be released in next week on January 18, but this is a review copy. I want to show a couple more slides. So this is the cover of my book. It was designed by Whitney Sharer. When Whitney sent me the first several options of the possible covers that we could use. They were absolutely stunningly beautiful. And my first thought was how would we ever choose just one. And we chose this image of Leningrad courtyard because it expressed the spirit of life in Russia. Reach for the sky when nothing else is within reach. You will find this courtyard in the center in the old part of Leningrad where my mother grew up after World War II. From the street, the building facade would look like this for the small slide. But if you sidestep, if you step in the alley and keep walking, you will find these courtyards. They turn out really small. And some of them are quite narrow. From the window, if your window looks in the back, you might see a brick wall. And then you have to look up to see the light. This image is Kristy, the prison where my mother was taken after her trial. The name Kristy means the crosses because the buildings are built in a form of a cross. It was a very old prison. The windows of the cell were covered with metal louvers that were turned up and you could only see narrow strips of light. When prisoners were taken on their walk, they were brought to another small cell that had no roof. There were just tall, brick blind walls and the prisoners had to walk in a single file without talking to each other. But then you could look up and you would see the square of the sky. I want to thank everybody at Arlington Salon, Angela, Whitney, Andrea and everyone who created this wonderful opportunity for us to share our work. It's an honor to present with Helen and Vena. I just finished reading both of your books and they're just exquisite. So thank you for everyone for joining us online. Thank you so much, Elena. Thank you for joining us. And I am glad that you were patient with yourself about the images because they were amazing to see. And I think I speak for the rest of the audience when I say that. Our next and final author of this evening is Wayna Direndel. She is the award-winning author of three novels, The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Moon in the Palace and The Empress of the Bright Moon, a historical duology about Wu Zichen, China's only female emperor. The Last Rose of Shanghai was named the best historical fiction of 2021 by Wild China and was selected as the most anticipated book of 2021 by Bustle. She is the winner of the RWA Rida Award, the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction Semi-Finalist, and the RT Book Reviewer's Choice Best First Historical Nominee. The Empress of Bright Moon series has been translated into seven languages and sold worldwide. Please welcome to our virtual stage, Wayna Direndel. Well, thank you so much for having me here. I'm really excited to be here. And I have some slides I would like to show everybody. Before I start my talk, I would really like to thank everybody for making this happen for me. Thank you so much to Angel Lee for inviting me. This is incredible. I'm new to Boston and I haven't had a chance to meet the writers in this community. This is a perfect opportunity for me. And it's so wonderful to see all the people are coming to listen to us. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you so much to Arlington authors along. And thank you to Andrea and to Whitney for helping out make this happen. Now I'm going to go to the next slide. So I've written and published three novels so far. The first two novels are called The Moon in the Palace and The Empress of Bright Moon. They are called a duology. I know many of you are familiar with this word, but in case you don't, it's a series of two books. So when I started to have this idea of writing the book featuring the first Chinese emperor, female emperor, I pitched to the publisher as three books as a trilogy. They declined the third one. So now we have the duology, The Moon in the Palace and The Empress of Bright Moon. And this duology described the journey of a 13 year old girl who was summoned to serve the emperor in the palace and describe the journey of her rise from a low ranking concubine to the ruler of the country. So I published these novels in 2016 at once. They came out back to back. It was a very interesting marketing strategy for me. I wanted to add, it took me about 10 years to write The Moon in the Palace. I know in the life of a writer, a few years is like nothing and sometimes a few months went by, years go by and nothing happened. 10 years though is a long time. And I received 82 rejection letters from agents. I just want to fill this out there in case there are some aspiring writers who are in the stage of acquiring agents. Don't give up, keep writing, keep querying, somebody out there is going to offer a representation to you and you are going to get published. You are going to fulfill your writer's dream. Just don't give up. So now I'm going to talk about the last rooms of Shanghai. It was published last year in December, the last month of the year. Again, it was not something I have in control just to let you know, but I did have some saying in the design of the cover, which was very nice for the publisher to consider my suggestion. When they sent me the concept, the cover was not like that and the dress was blue, so I asked them to use my wedding dress, which is exactly the same wedding dress that I have. And they took my suggestion and used the color and the tone. Okay, so. Now, why did I decide to write a historical novel, The Last Rose of Shanghai. There are a few reasons. I would say maybe four reasons. And I'm going to get to them. The first one is, as you can see, I'm Chinese, I'm a Chinese American. I was born and raised in China. I grew up in China I was educated today I went to school there. I also spent five years in Shanghai, and I worked, and I studied in the college there, and during my years in Shanghai, I learned some history. I learned during World War Two, Shanghai was a haven for Jewish refugees. There were about 18,000 Jews who were prosecuted in Nazi Germany and they had nowhere to go, because they couldn't find entry visas to the country, but they managed to find entry visas to China, to Shanghai specifically. So they fled to Shanghai and they survived the war because they lived in Shanghai. And I also learned that after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over the entire Shanghai, I'm sorry, Japanese took over the entire Shanghai. And they arrested many foreigners in Shanghai. They included Americans, British, the Dutch. They, because they consider them as alien enemies, and they arrested all of them in Shanghai and put them in five interment camps in Shanghai. So this part of history, I don't think it's very well known, but some people are familiar with that. If you have read Empire of the Sun, the author actually was a victim of that, and this entire family was sent to an interment camp in Shanghai. So he wrote about that. This part of history, again, I said many people in China actually were not familiar with that either. Again, there's another rumor I heard in Shanghai when I was working in Shanghai. I often passed a brick building, a red brick building in Shanghai. And it was, I said it was a church, Moses Church, and I didn't give any indication. I didn't even think twice of it. But now I know I actually was not church, it was a synagogue. But in Chinese church and synagogue, they are the same thing. The rumor said many Jewish people, Jewish refugees, lived in a specific area called Shanghai ghetto, Shanghai Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, and after Pearl Harbor because all those wealthy American Jews and British Jews were sent to interment camps. The Jews were left on their own, and they were living in an absolutely horrible condition. They had no food, they could not communicate with the local Shanghai needs, they could not find a job, and the living condition was absolutely horrible. During that time, the local people said many Shanghai people actually saw lots of bread into the alleys to feed those Jewish refugees. Now, you know, I thought it was very impressive. I still remember the rumor, but I have to say that when I was researching I could not verify if that was true or not, it was just a rumor. So, the second reason I wanted to write that is, I married an American guy, and he's actually Jewish, but when I married him, I did not know he was Jewish. See, for me, if you are not Chinese, then everybody is a foreigner. That's the concept that Chinese people have in China. If you're not Chinese, then you are foreigner. It doesn't matter what kind of religion you're living. So when we got married, my husband broke a glass, and I did not know what that meant at all, and I was just happy that I got married, I married the man I love. However, because I am going to get into the personal story here, because I chose to marry an American, it was not a very happy moment for my family, especially my parents. My mom was very upset. My dad, so a huge fit. He refused to talk to me many months. And when we got married, nobody from my side of family showed up. And it was a very small wedding, and I was wearing my traditional Chinese dress. My husband's family side, they were very smart, they checked me out before the marriage and make sure I was acceptable. But this kind of family and personal experience has, and that's something to me. So I know two cultures, when they are united, it's not always a happy moment for everyone. So the third reason that I wanted to write The Last Rose of Shanghai is, I started to write this novel in 2018. That was two years after published the Ruin the Palace and the Empress of Red Moon. But I felt like I was a legitimate historical writer, and I knew many writers who actually published historical novels, but they were all, most of them were all set in Europe. And they describe people in Europe, their plight, and their difficulties, their sufferings. And it's absolutely great. However, I felt there were not a lot of people who actually knew what happened in China during World War II, because Japan was a member of ASICS. Japan was worked together with Nazi Germany, and they committed horrible crimes in China. And I wanted people here to hear that it happened, and how Chinese people suffered. And the most beautiful thing is, among all the suffering, Jewish refugees, they went to China, and they survived. And they actually formed some kind of friendship with Chinese people there. I think this is very exciting for me, and this is the story I want to tell. Many of my Jewish relatives have no idea about this part of history. They did not know that many Jewish people actually fled to Shanghai and survived, and how they interacted with the local people in Shanghai. So when I told them, I was writing this book, and they were very surprised as well. So, the last reason that I wanted to write The Last Rose of Shanghai was, in 2018, a friend told me that I would be a good candidate to write this kind of story, because my daughter was becoming an embodiment by the next year. So I was like, oh yes, this is perfect. I can write this novel. So this would be something I can do to honor my Jewish family's heritage. And I also want my novels to be a bridge, a bridge of understanding for people here. So people in this country and outside this country will understand that World War II was devastating, and it happened. And many people in this world suffered, and many stories are still out there. And if you are open, you can hear those stories. And I want my story to be a bridge where you can get a better sense of the world, of Chinese people, of Chinese culture. Okay, I'm going to move to the next slide. So in The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Last Rose of Shanghai is a story, is a love story, and it's a love story between a wealthy Chinese woman and a penniless German Jewish refugee. And I decided to tell, to characterize my main characters, wealthy Chinese nightclubs, because I'm interested in writing strong and flawed female characters. And I wanted to describe Chinese women in an empathetic light that will reveal the strength and the weaknesses. And I also wanted to make sure that people will understand that there were many brilliant Chinese women out there. And this character was based on the first Chinese female entrepreneur in China. She was a historical figure. She lived in 1930s. During that time, many American women were not allowed to take a job, but she owned a nightclub. Her name was called Ai Sheng. So I took her first name, but didn't use her last name. So for my main character, male character, German Jew, her name, his name is called Ernest Reisman. And the reason I named him Ernest was because I read a very moving memoir by a Jewish refugee, it's called Shanghai Refuge. And it was very moved, very touched by the book. I decided to name my main character after the author. He has ever, he has passed away by now, but his book was very helpful for me to understand German Jews mindset. So, yeah, that's how I decided to name the book after him. So I think I only have a few minutes left. So I'm going to go walk through this slides very fast. Then I will read a few paragraphs from the last Rose of Shanghai. Okay, so next one is in the last Rose of Shanghai, you will see some historical figures, but one main one is called a survey to say soon. He was a wealthy playboy, he was called the wealthiest man in Asia, and he was very helpful to Jewish refugees in Shanghai. He was also the owner of the peace hotel. Currently it's called a firm on peace hotel in Shanghai. If you go to Shanghai, you visit the bond area, you will not miss the building. And another two historical figures is called Shaoxian Mei, he was a poet, he was a prominent poet in Shanghai. And he had an affair with an American journalist called Emily Khan for five years. So, these two historical figures were also featured in the book. And the fourth historical figure I want to mention is a Laura McGillis, and she was a social worker. She was sent to Shanghai in 1940 to help 8,000 Jewish refugees, because they were living in absolutely horrible living conditions. And she was instrumental in improving the condition for the refugees, but after Pearl Harbor she was also arrested and sent to the internment camp in Shanghai. She was released about a year later, but many people were actually confined in the camps until the end of World War Two. So jazz, you know jazz in Shanghai was featured prominently, because it was very popular in China in that time. And this is my book here. So now, I think I have a few minutes, I'm going to just read a few paragraphs here. So this is in the middle of the book. So before this, Ernest's parents were stuck in Germany. And the thing happened with them was, they are a family of four, but they were only able to receive two exoduses. So the parents told Ernest to take the sister with him. So they could leave Germany and go to Shanghai. And this is a few years after that. Often Ernest thought of his parents. So one day he visited a synagogue, the Osho Rachel, built by the great uncle of sources soon. He didn't know what he wished to see, entering the majestic entryway with rusticated pillars. And passing scores of white robe to your Shiva students who had arrived from Europe with forged passports last year. Ernest set by a round window near the Ark that held the Torah. In front of him were empty chairs, tables and candles. Solitary, like something left behind. The chairs from the students could enjoy unfamiliar with what they were praying. Then he sneezed. Embarrassed, he stood up and left. He visited the synagogue again a few days later. The sanctuary was walled, windows sealed by tarp paper and dim. Yet he felt relaxed this time. In the air, aged by the plumes of pale daylight running through the door, he could hear the beats of wind, small flies, the rush of the greens, and the faint prayer like a distant voice. The place felt vast, endless, full of unfathomable colds, like a great, pensive mind. His hand on the chair in front of him. Its armrest was damp from incest and rain, and smoothed by many hands before him, and it would be smoothed again by many after him. If this was what his parents felt when they came to Temple, to feel the togetherness, to feel the pulse of life, to become part of tradition that bounded generations past in generations to come. He was not a religious man, but he was still a Jew. He prayed for Leah and his parents, with faces, smiles, voices, and friends, would forever stand in the altar of his memories. For Miriam, whom he had disappointed, but would always protect. Who he loved and would always love, and for Mr. Shled, the people working in his bakery, and the refugees in Shanghai, who were his new family, for whom security and comfort had remained elusive. He wished them the light of peace, the eternal joys, and the unbroken spirit, years to come. Okay, that's it. Thank you so much, Weina. And now we will bring Helen and Elena back on stage, so to speak, and have our Q&A. I want to start by just thanking you again and giving you a round of applause for our whole audience. It was a wonderful evening of readings, and I want to remind folks in the viewing audience that our next salon is April 7th. So getting to questions. One of the questions that came up right away during actually Helen's reading was to the idea of your parents somehow finding each other again. How did they find each other again? How did your father know to go to Rome? It was a really complicated story that he had a music teacher that had managed to save a postcard that my mother had sent at the end of the war and trying to find out what had happened to him. And this was a Ukrainian music teacher of his, and she held on to it, and he managed to get, because of the way the borders changed, even though she had been part or in his hometown. His hometown was now behind Iron Curtain, so when he was jumping trains, he hadn't yet had to cross the border into Europe, and he stopped in and found her because she hadn't been killed. He had been hiding his own mother until his mother was taken away. And she brought out this postcard from a year and a half before that she held on to, excuse me, and it had the address in Rome, and he didn't know whether my mother was still there. So, but he had that goal in mind. And when he did finally get across the border, he telegrammed, and she responded back. And she said, Okay, I'll wait for you. Do you want me to come there or shall I come to you and he said wait, I'll come to you. And it took him many months to, because he had no papers, he was a fugitive, but he ended up, I think he got help with the Jewish organization, the underground, helped him cross over and he walked across Europe and ended up hiking across the Alps and found her so he knew that that was his goal. Amazing. This next question is for Elena. Did you write in English, or did you write in Russian and translate to English and how did your fluency in Russian influence your choice of words. Okay. Thank you for this question. I actually it's very interesting that I, when I write in English directly it's very different from writing in Russian. And it's not even the matter of words and the limitation of English as a second language. It's almost how you view yourself. You really truly view yourself differently, depending on the language you're speaking. So I had to write in Russian for it to be authentic. And then it was, and when I was saying about writing for 10 years, it took me 10 years to read this book. And was rewriting it. And so, so I wrote pieces in Russian and then I was translating and then towards the end I was writing directly in English just little pieces and connecting it. And yeah, that was the process. Thank you. So interesting. This question is for wayna from Carolyn. Has there been healing between you and your husband's family, your family and your husband's family. Um, I would say my, my husband's family has been gracious my in laws have been very gracious since the very beginning but not everyone else, obviously. Um, but I think they grow to accept me, everybody. If we're going to, we're going to have 20 years of wedding anniversary at one point you have to just accept right. If not, that's too bad. Um, for my, for my own family, my parents. It was a different thing, I guess my dad is very, very kind of very stubborn. It took him almost five years to finally reconcile. And then he started really like to speak to my husband but my husband Mark doesn't speak Chinese, my husband, my dad doesn't speak English. So when they stand together, the best thing they can do is say, Hello, me how that's it. And for one, once we had, we had a kids, my family, completely different to be started to be very involved and we talked to my parents and my kids and I think that's completely fine now. Yeah. Thank you. And actually, there was another audience question for Helen on this same topic of, you know, thawing has has have people thawed in in your direction. But, you know, not really what they've done is they've died. And so, I mean my parents died, my cousin died, even his daughter died. So, it's really there are very few left of us in the in that nuclear family we just sort of, you know, it didn't blow over we blew up. There's so many other family members that I didn't know I had. So, in many ways, it's, it's also I think, you know, to some extent, it's illusory that we had this incredibly loving and close relationship with my family. But, but when pushing it depended on a lot of false fronts, and it if I want if I could no longer live within that constraint, then, as we know said I think the, it's so be it, you know at a certain point you have to just some things can't be fixed. Thank you. So we have another question from Robert for Elena. What was the process like writing the book with your mother was it hard for her to go back those memories and how did you know how does she feel about the book being published now. Thank you for this question. Yes. Yes. Well, so my mom is quite amazing. We are very connected. I think to each other I think in some ways we are as close as Helen's mother and her sister. It's a very, very close connection and I told her so I was writing for a while without telling her because I really wanted this to be my project and not her project, my writing. When I finally told her that I wanted to do this memoir. Her first reaction is why, why, why, you know, go back and, and just, you know, face all this difficult while while why do you live all this difficult life. But I think also she was very happy. Because, because she never received justice. And some, some political prisoners some prisoners who were accused of criminal crimes, but who really incarcerated for political reasons in Russia, many of them received. Thank you for getting the word. Their, their prison sentences are overturned, right, so they are announced to be innocent. And it never happened for my mother because we left, and we were not living there. So, so I think part of her was grateful and happy to be able to share her story. And when we were recording her, her, her, her story, we actually had to be in separate, you know, she was in her house and I was in my house and they did it over the phone. Because I think just just being together and having this all come out that we had shared was just be just would be impossible. So, you know, we could leave our own emotions in the privacy of our home and pretend to be strong for each other and then we edited together and we are very different writers and more visual. She likes everything to be short and to the point. And so she would give me this gorgeous paragraphs. And then as we were editing she would say okay just take this one out take this word out take the sentence out and by the end with nothing left of her beautiful sentence. So we did this for a, I think for a year and then I finally, finally. Yeah, so so her part is her voice but with some of my editorial sessions. But you know it's been a wonderful shared experience. I was going to ask how you could do that I mean did it ever. I mean you said yourself that you were hoping to write. You know, you're finally carving out your own voice. And that's what I was. I'm such a bad collaborator. With my own mother because it's just like it would be possible. I don't know. Did you have any is that you don't have to tell me. Well, I have to I have to tell you Helen because I was reading last night. I was reading last night your part where you're writing about, you know, picking, choosing colleges and and trying to and in the end really trying to please your mother and everything you do and say. And I have to say, you know, you all this years, everything I do I feel like I'm doing to please my mother. And actually, there was a question from the audience, an audience member about how you got to Wellesley. Who me how I got to her Helen yes. Oh, I dropped out of high school and it was when I just looked at two colleges because my mother was saying, you know you you go to college for an education you don't go for a husband. But so stick to women's colleges and then it was basically my sister was going to one women's college and I thought, I mean they're going to go to hers or I'll go to Wellesley and I think my mother lot just for whatever reason, she fell in love with the campus and I wanted to give her Wellesley so I went I wasn't unhappy with that. That was what we do for our mothers. What about you, do you feel like your parents influenced your writing at all. Okay, so my mom actually had passed away. A few years ago, but my dad is always a character and I've been fighting against him since I can't remember. He always told me way now, go get a job. Don't be a writer. It's a terrible thing you cannot support yourself. You'll get a job, be a doctor. So they'll be perfect job for Chinese girl right. But I didn't want to be teacher I did not want to be a doctor I didn't want to do any of those. So, and then he said, marry somebody who's a teacher. Well, I was like, well, I don't know what to do but I just married in the person that he expected the least in America. He was not happy with that. Yeah, I had this kind of rebellious street, I guess. Sorry, we have we have time for one more question and I think it's a question that many people in the audience will be interested in the answer to what are the next projects that you are each working on and we'll start with Elena. Well, I think the obvious with me right. Yeah, for me the obvious is to finish my Russian version of this book. And, and then I have stories that were that ended up on the cutting floor on an editing floor that I would like to make a book of stories. I have a few ideas I actually inspired by Whitney Whitney shares biographical novel of Lee Miller, the book she wrote in the day of light, the days of light, that the beautiful story about the American photographer and the model. And just riveting story and I'm inspired by biographical fiction and Venus work and I want to find some stronger antagonist from maybe Soviet history and write a novel. Thank you. Weina, would you like to go next. Okay, so my next novel is called the angels of Vienna, a set in Vienna, Austria, between 1938 after the Anschluss to 1940 after the years where the war started. She features a Chinese American, not really. She's like half Chinese half Irish, but she lives. She's a Bostonian, because I love Boston so far. I moved here last year and I love everything about this state and this city and the culture and the history so I made my character a Bostonian, and she's, she's a wife of diplomat. And they will be released in February. Excellent. Thank you. So, I, I'm so blown away. Your, your plans and your knowledge both of you, what you're doing, I never know what I'm doing, and until it's too late. And I think I after the first memoir I was so relieved you done with them or I want to go back to fiction. And I found myself writing more memoir and after this one I thought that's thank God I can go back to fiction I spent a year just writing stories and it was just so much fun and now I'm working on something that God helped me look like memoir and I know I shouldn't but that's where it seems to be going There's actually a little bit that I have it when you get really, really old. There's lots and lots of parts of your life that that you have yet to mine so I don't know what will happen. I'll find out I actually am inspired if I had any sense I would do some research and write historical novel because it's, it's really challenging. Yes, but Helen your, your memoir reads like novel, and you, it was absolutely stunning for me to read the escape artist. I just couldn't put it down. The pose was impeccable and you had excellent sense of hooking the readers from very beginning and you know when to release it go into the background. This is exactly historical. Oh, thank you because I feel the same about your book. So we can have, you know, a mutual fan club, but it really is. It's such an honor for me to be with both of you and I'm so grateful to you Andrea and I'm jelly. And to all of you at Arlington father salon for putting these together. It's putting us together and putting these salons together so thank you. Oh, well it is a pleasure. It really is. I want to thank our audience. I also wanted to remind you again that our next salon is April 7 and you can sign up for notices about future salons through the salon web page or through the library's monthly newsletter. Thank you again Helen Fremont Elena Limbersky and wayna del direndel I spent just a fantastic evening with you and I wish you all luck in your future writing endeavors. We'll see you soon.