Barr, Lois Baer. The Tailor’s Daughter. Water’s Edge Press, 2023, 338 pp., $20 pb.
I first met Lois years ago when I ran a Jewish Writer’s Workshop at the Highlights Foundation in the Pennsylvania Poconos. We’ve stayed in touch ever since and I was delighted when she let me know about her new book. I offered an interview.
Writing the Past (WTP): What inspired you to write this novel?
Lois Baer Barr (LBB): My mother’s stories were part of the background noise of my youth. I absorbed them but didn’t pay enough attention. As I became aware of Mom’s gifts and mortality, her tales about growing up over her father’s tailor shop became urgent and irresistible. She remembered in detail the family of the pastor of the German Lutheran church who lived next door, his fine children and the beautiful stone church. In my mother’s eyes the tiny backyard her family shared with all the tenants of the building was Edenic with its apple tree, grape arbor, and room to put up a Sukkah every year. Her memories of the Great Depression and the Great Flood of the Ohio River of 1937 were compelling. Finally, I have photos of my parents in uniform. Dad was in the Army and Mom was training to be an Army nurse. Who were those fresh eyed youngsters, so in love and full of hope?
WTP: What was your writing process?
LBB: Some writers outline the plot of the novel point by point. I did not. In the beginning I wrote a couple of stories. First came “War Stories” relating my great-grandmother’s reluctance to tell stories about the Old Country. Realizing that her grandmother was jealous of the time my mother spent listening to an upstairs neighbor’s stories about the Old South, Mom manipulated her alterbubby into telling her a story about the shtetl. My great grandmother’s memory of a pogrom gave my mother nightmares for a long time. I had to reinvent the tragic events because Mom had blocked it out. That story won a Pushcart nomination, and I was off to the races, but not sure where I was running.
As the inventory of work grew, I envisioned a book of connected stories. Sadly, agents, small independent publishers, my critique group, and even my husband rejected that idea and wanted a novel. They could see an arc that I could not. I was in love with all the characters who populated that world of the Great Depression and the Great Flood of the Ohio River in 1937. Each character had a story that I wanted to tell.
After seven years, I found I had to slow down, to stick to one point of view per chapter, and cut any stories that didn’t move the plot forward.
WTP: Did you encounter any surprises, and if so, what were they?
LBB: After the second story was published at Jewish Literary Journal, I got an email from the granddaughter of the Lutheran minister of the church next door to the tailor shop. She had Googled her grandfather and one result was my story.
WTP: Now looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
LBB: Not really.
WTP: How did you conduct research for this book?
LBB: Oral history was a big part. Besides Mom’s memories, I leaned on my mother’s best friend. She is still alive and kicking and, although she didn’t know my mother when they were young, they were born a couple of months apart, so her stories about the 1937 Flood, the Depression, and about the early years of World War II were invaluable.
Online newspapers archives were an important source of information about my mother’s family and about Jewish life in that era. Also Louisville has two great historians of its community, Herman Landau and Carol Ely.
I steeped myself in the history of the time and read FDR’s “Fireside Chats” as well as Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper columns.
WTP: The title suggests the book is about Bess, Solomon the tailor’s daughter. Yet you include other point-of-view characters. Please tell us how and why you made that decision.
LBB: To me Bess’s story is entwined with the stories of others. Her father’s thwarted musical career. The young Black girl who cooked and cleaned for her family when they could finally afford the couple of dollars a week that she earned. Grandma Dodge who lived upstairs and filled my mother’s head with stories about dashing Civil War soldiers and graceful Southern belles. Before there was Gone with the Wind, there was Grandma Dodge.
Like my mother, I have always had my ears open for the stories of others, and like her I grew up hearing a myriad of accents and languages: Yiddish, the Mississippi inflected Ebonics of so many Blacks in Louisville, the high southern of landed gentry, and the drawl of Appalachians, who flocked to Louisville for work.
WTP: How did you go about finding a publisher?
LBB: Like a rookie. I attended conferences where I could meet with agents. I wrote letters to agents. I humbled myself by asking relatives to share their literary contacts. None of that worked.
I focused on small publishers and got a nibble from a press in Philadelphia that liked the sample pages I had submitted but didn’t ultimately take the book. Then I stumbled on Water’s Edge Press. I ordered a novel from them and found what I had never been able to provide in my pitches, a comparable novel. Dawn Hogue’s A Hollow Bone had so many similarities. I sent her a pitch and the opening chapters. After a few days I received an email back with the subject, “Hooked.” Then I sent the whole manuscript and after about a month, she said she was interested, but she felt that the work ended at the wrong point. The arc was incomplete, and she wanted me to take the story up to World War II when Bess was a young adult and joined the Army Nurses Corps.
WTP: What challenges did writing this novel present?
LBB: The editor and publisher at Water’s Edge finally convinced me that Bess was my fictional character and not my mother. I had a lot of trouble letting really bad things happen to her which meant that the conflicts in the novel were muted.
I had to give up tangential stories that I really loved writing. As I have ADHD, I need to remember to wear blinders and not meander down every path that presents itself.
WTP: Satisfactions?
LBB: This will sound superficial, but the cover thrills me every time I look at it.
The reaction of my readers, so far, has been gratifying. When you make a dinner, you want your guests to say, “Yum.”
WTP: You’re also a poet. How does that affect your prose?
LBB: I regard my writing as exploration, and I am willing to take risks. I hope that there is an echo of the poetry I write in the novel. At this point I’ve read it and revised it so many times that I don’t hear it. Perhaps my hobby of painting also affects my work. I notice details that others might miss.
WTP: What authors inspire you?
LBB: My tastes are eclectic. I taught Spanish and Latinx literature for half my life, so writers like Julio Cortázar, Isabel Allende, and Sandra Cisneros are favorites. My dissertation was about a 19th century realist Benito Pérez Galdós, and I do love a fat juicy novel full of details about the time and place. Anzia Yezierska and Kadia Molodowsky amaze me. I turn frequently to the work of contemporary poets Ilya Kaminsky and Dorianne Laux. And the Kentuckian Wendell Berry always inspires me. I have annotated one of his books with my own poetic responses. Finally, my bookshelves are full of the work of Irish novelists: Roddy Doyle, Maive Binchy, Claire Keegan, and Colm Tóibín.
WTP: What’s next for you?
LBB: More poetry and short stories. I love working with my writing groups and performing stories at a local theatre. The collaborative process always generates work. I hope that if I find myself writing another novel, I have the strength and focus to finish it.
For more about this Pushcart-nominated writer and poet, Lois Baer Barr, please visit her website.
The Whole Megillah 