After retiring from a long career as a law professor, Amy Cohen was able to pursue her dream of writing a novel. She began with genealogy and family history research a few years before retiring, and through that learned a number of facts and stories about her ancestors. Her latest novel is The Women Before Us. Let’s hear the story of the story from Amy …
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People often ask, “Why write novels instead of non-fiction books about your family history?”
I write a weekly genealogy blog, Brotmanblog, based on my family history research, and it reports the facts: who was born where, who married who, how many children did they have, what did they do for a living, and when did they die. But very early on in my genealogy research, I realized that the bare facts did not reveal who the people really were: what were their fears and dreams, what did they feel about their families and their lives, and what kind of people were they? For the most part, that was left to speculation.
And often in my blog posts I would engage in speculation. Did the couples who married even know each other? Did they love each other? Were they happy even if they didn’t start out loving each other?
How did that woman feel giving birth to a baby almost every two years for twenty years? Did she want that large a family? And what about all the babies and children who died? Did the parents grieve the way I would, or with so many children and such a high mortality rate, was it easier for them?
And what made my ancestors and their relatives decide to leave their homes and come to America? Was it economic opportunity? Religious freedom? Fear of oppression and violence? When they got here, were they disappointed? Homesick? Elated?
But I had no answers to many of these questions, nor could I find answers since all the people I write about are deceased, and few if any living people knew them well enough to answer those questions. To explore more deeply who these people were, I had to use my imagination. In addition, the entire journey into my family history had been inspired by my children and grandchildren. I knew that showing them thousands of documents or even just a simple family tree would not spark much interest or help them understand their roots. I wanted to find a way to tell the stories of our ancestors in a way that would be memorable and accessible.
And thus, I wrote my first family history novel. Pacific Street is the story of my immigrant grandfather who escaped persecution as a teenager in Romania and came to New York all alone without his parents or siblings. It is also the story of my grandmother, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York, the child of poor Jewish immigrants. Although I’d known my grandmother until she died when I was 23, I’d never once asked her about her life. My grandfather died when I was four. My mother also seemed to know so little about her parents’ lives. To tell their story, I had to imagine it.
I used the skeletal facts of their lives, and then I researched what life was like in Romania for a Jewish boy in the late 19th century and what life was like for immigrants in New York City in the early 20th century. I researched how Jews escaped from Romania and imagined my grandfather as part of the Fusgeyer movement of young people who walked out of Romania. I visited the Lower East Side and the Tenement Museum there to see and feel what a tenement apartment was like. And then I created two characters, Gussie and Izzy, and placed them in those settings and imagined their feelings, their fears, their dreams, their grief, and their joy.
That was my first family history novel. I’ve now written three more. Santa Fe Love Song is the story of my pioneer great-great-grandfather who traveled the Santa Fe Trail in the 1860s and with his brother started a successful dry goods store in Sante Fe. That book led me to research the Santa Fe Trail and what it was like back in those days to travel across America by train and stagecoach to get to the west. A trip to Santa Fe added visual images to help me place my ancestor in that environment.
My third novel, Simon’s Secret, begins in Germany where my relative Simon faced criminal charges and prison. I was fortunate to be able to obtain a copy of the German court’s opinion to give authenticity to his case. Simon then left Germany for America to start over again, and my research took me to western Pennsylvania in the mid-19th century during and after the Civil War.
Now with my newest novel, The Women Before Us, I explored a pattern I saw frequently in my family history: women moving far from their families to follow their husbands, husbands they often barely knew before their marriage. This book spans from Germany in the 1840s to Philadelphia in the 1940s and covers four generations of my paternal female ancestors. From my three-times great-grandmothers who followed their husbands from Germany to America to my great-great-grandmothers and great-grandmothers and my paternal grandmother who all followed their husbands across the continent—from Philadelphia to Santa Fe, from western Pennsylvania to Denver, from Santa Fe back to Philadelphia, and from Denver to Philadelphia. Each one of them traveled more than a thousand miles away from their parents and their homes to follow and be with the man they married. I created stories about what that must have been like for these young women.
My books are not about famous people or big historical events, but I place all my books in their historical context and paint a picture of the social and economic conditions of their times. The focus is on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in those times and places, people seeking to find meaning and joy in lives that were often very challenging and so different in many ways from our own, but also in so many ways just like our own.
Many thanks for sharing your story, Amy. How exciting to turn family history into relatable fiction for others to enjoy. Best wishes for success with The Women Before Us!
The Women Before Us by Amy B. Cohen
Throughout history, women have married and moved to wherever their husbands lived or worked, leaving behind their own families and friends. Then they raise their own daughters and watch them move away from them. In this work of historical fiction, Amy Cohen looks back at the line of women who have followed this pattern, focusing in particular on Edna, a young woman who falls head over heels with a charming and handsome young man who lives across the country in Philadelphia, far from her family in Denver. Will she marry him? And will she be happy? Read this new family history novel by Cohen, the fourth in her series, to learn more about Edna and the other women before her.
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
