Living History, a guest post by by Gayle Forman

It wasn’t until my mother-in-law, Detta, was dying of cancer, doped up on morphine, that she told my teenage daughters a story about the time she set another woman’s dress on fire. As she remembered it, this woman had been flirting with Detta’s husband, so she took matters into her own hands. As my daughters gasped and laughed, scandalized and impressed, I could see the realization dawn: Grandma had been young once, full of envy and insecurity and maybe a little bit of bad-assery. She wasn’t always an old person who lived in an assisted-living facility, played bingo and ordered weird stuff on QVC. She’d been a complex woman full of strong feelings, someone like them!

She had been, and she still was. The idea that age bleaches all the color out of people is always pernicious, and in our culture, where young is shiny, and old is, well, less useful, particularly so. Which is such a shame. We lose out on so much.

When I was my daughters’ ages (16 and 19 now, 13 and 16 when Detta told them her dress-burning story) I wish I’d known more of the deep and complicated lives my grandparents had lived. Maybe then I would’ve asked my father’s father, himself the son of Russian immigrants, why he wanted to go to medical school—as I briefly did in my twenties before I found journalism—and how it felt to not go because my grandmother had become pregnant with would turn out to be the first of seven children. Did he often wonder about the road not taken? And what of my grandmother, who I only knew as a sort of friendly if down-trodden woman. How had having seven children—during the midst of the depression, no less—change her? What dreams were realized? What dreams deferred? Did she fantasize of running away from her seven like I once did from my mere two?

I wish I’d asked my German Jewish grandparents what life had been like in Berlin before 1933 when they were young and beautiful and wealthy. And how that changed after 1933 when Hitler came to power. How frightened had they been? How long had they pondered leaving before they finally made their escape in 1938, weeks before Kristallnacht? How did it feel to start life all over in a new country, to have children in this new country, to leave relatives behind, relatives who did not make it? How did that guilt and fear follow them across the Atlantic? 

But I did not. And to be honest, I did not even think to ask these questions until I became a novelist and began foraging in my own history, digging up the factual outlines of their lives but never the personal intimacies because they took those with them. This feels like an opportunity twice lost; first to see myself as part of a continuum, to recognize people are people are people no matter when and where they live. And second, to learn history from people who had literally lived through it. Because there is an immediacy to learning about the world as it was from a living, breathing person, who lived in that world.

Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to old folks now. Why, in my twenties, I began volunteering through an organization called Dorot, which paired me with Oly, an octogenarian who I visited every week for several years at her posh assisted living facility on New York’s Upper West Side. Why when Detta moved into a not-quite-as-posh-but-still-nice assisted-living facility in New Jersey, I went as often as I could, sipping the thimbles of wine the staff passed out during cocktail hour, playing trivia and bingo, though I never did learn to juggle several cards at once like the Bingo Pros of the Cranford Atria did. Or entertaining residents at an assisted-living facility in Seattle where my sister Tamar worked as a nurse while they were on lockdown—from a stomach flu, this being pre-Covid when lockdowns was still a novel idea.

There I became friends with residents like Sam, who at 96 had a sharper memory than I did, recounting incredible stories about fleeing Vienna for New York in the 1920s because of quotas restricting the number of Jews who could attend Austrian universities,  and returning to Europe during World War II as a propagandist for the military (he spoke perfect German and understood the psychology of the Germans, he told me). Days after Germany surrendered, Sam found himself in the German countryside, outnumbered by an armed Nazi platoon that did not yet know they’d lost the war.  Using his wits, his commanding German, and a riding crop, he cowed them into submission. 

Another resident, Minna, told me about the dances organized by the USO to help GIs catch up on the dating and marrying years they’d lost to the war. It was there she met her husband. 

Back in New York, yet, I met Harold, a nonagenarian who had reported the Nuremberg Trials, sitting in the same courtroom as Nazi war criminals like Joseph Goebbels. As we spoke, I kept thinking about the fact that I, the granddaughter of German Jews who’d barely escaped, was, in Kevin-Bacon parlance, four degrees of separation from Hitler. It was a mind-blowing moment; a realization of how close history really is.

Because novelists are thieves, versions of these stories have wound up in my work. Most recently in Not Nothing, a middle-grade novel about Alex, a 12-year-old boy who commits a hate crime and is court-ordered to volunteer at an assisted living facility where he meets Josey, a 107-year-old Polish Jew who survived Nazi ghettos, dragnets and concentration camps because of the bravery and love of a woman named Olka.

The seed for Not Nothing was not just the history I’d learned about my grandparents and directly from Olka, Sam, Minna, Harold and more. It was seeing a reprise of this history play out in front of my eyes, in my country, as white nationalism and bigotry reared their ugly heads again. It was a history I immediately recognized not as an echo of the past, but a continuation of it. Because when history feels personal and alive and not covered in dust and blankets, It becomes impossible not to see the then bleeding into the now, not to recognize a repetition of past mistakes we vowed we’d never make again.

For my own children, the 1980s—the era in which my last “historical” novel Frankie & Bug was set— feels like ancient history. The 1940s? Please, we may as well be talking about the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius for how relevant it seems to them. But of course, it’s hugely and directly relevant. So many of the issues my kids and their peers care about—from climate catastrophe to civil rights to LGBTQ+ rights—have direct corollaries in a history that many older Americans (or not even so older) lived through. 

I wish we utilized more ways to show young people this, to bring history out from the dusty marble, and I applaud the many innovative educators who work to connect the the dots between history and today’s lived experience, like the industrious social studies teacher at one of my daughter’s former schools who taught history backwards, starting with Black Lives Matter, moving back to the Civil Rights Movement, and on to Jim Crow before ending at Reconstruction. Suddenly Reconstruction was not just something that happened after an ancient war but was directly related and felt to our current moment. Brilliant!

One thing I noticed while visiting the assisted-living facilities was a pervasive thirst of residents to be seen, to be talked to, to share their stories, to be valued. Not to mention the loneliness that seemed to mirror what my adolescent daughters were going through in their own life dramas (and hey, sometimes, me as well). 

It’s both a cliche and wrong to assume that the elderly are wise just by dint of being old. I suspect that at 80, Detta—who died in 2021; her memory is a blessing—might’ve gone just as rogue on someone she suspected of trying to steal her man. But what all elderly people do have is experience, having notched so many years on this planet, and this gives them a unique perspective. For Alex, getting to know Josey and Minna and the rest is life changing. It has been for me, too. I wonder how many people’s lives—those newer to this world, and those more seasoned—could be enriched.

What if we encourage children to have more direct and more authentic connections to the past via those who have lived it? What if we provided avenues and opportunities for young people to seek out their grandparents or other elders in their lives and in their communities as part of a living history curriculum? What if we invited the young to ask the old about the big things and the small things in their lives? For the young to tell the old about the big things and small things in their lives? Would they, like Alex, learn about a history they might be heretofore ignorant of? Would they begin to see themselves as part of a continuum?  Would they understand the deep through-line of humanity: a desire to love and be loved, to feel like they matter, like they belong somewhere, basic needs that connect us across cultures, across generations. Maybe. Or maybe they’d just get some scandalous stories about grandmothers behaving badly. In the scheme of things, this is not nothing.

Meet the author

Award-winning author and journalist Gayle Forman (she/her/hers) has written several bestselling novels, including those in the Just One Day series, Where She Went, and the #1 New York Times bestseller If I Stay, which has been translated into more than forty languages and was adapted into a major motion picture. Her first middle grade novel, Frankie & Bug, was a New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

Book’s purchase link here.

About Not Nothing

“The book we all need at the time we all need it.” —Katherine Applegate, Newbery Award–winning author of The One and Only Ivan

In this middle grade novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Gayle Forman, a boy who has been assigned to spend his summer volunteering at a senior living facility learns unexpected lessons that change the trajectory of his life.

To say Alex has had it rough is an understatement. His father’s gone, his mother is struggling with mental health issues, and he’s now living with an aunt and uncle who are less than excited to have him. Almost everyone treats him as though he doesn’t matter at all, like he’s nothing.

So when a kid at school actually tells him he’s nothing, Alex snaps, and gets violent. Fortunately, his social worker pulls some strings and gets him a job at a nursing home for the summer rather than being sent to juvie. There, he meets Josey, the 107-year-old Holocaust survivor who stopped bothering to talk years ago, and Maya-Jade, the granddaughter of one of the residents with an overblown sense of importance.

Unlike Alex, Maya-Jade believes that people care about what she thinks, and that she can make a difference. And when Alex and Josey form an unlikely bond, with Josey confiding in him, Alex starts to believe he can make a difference—a good difference—in the world. If he can truly feel he matters, Alex may be able to finally rise to the occasion of his own life.

ISBN-13: 9781665943277
Publisher: Aladdin
Publication date: 08/27/2024
Age Range: 10 – 18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post