Along The Seam
Episode 1 (unedited): Lois Lowry
INTRO
Hey Everyone. This is Rachael Cerrotti and you are listening to Along The Seam. As I get ready to release the second season of this show, I want to share an unedited version of my conversation with author Lois Lowry. She was the first episode of my first season. She indulged me in talking about The Giver which to this day remains one of the most important books in my life. And, also about Number The Stars – a book that tells the story about the rescue of the Danish Jews during the Holocaust; it was the only book I ever read in school where I felt like my own family history was represented.
Our conversation lasted about an hour and a half, but the published episode was edited down to about 40 minutes. In the two years since that conversation, other topics that we talked about have become increasingly personal to me and I write about that in my newsletter. You can find a link to that in the show notes or by searching Along The Seam in the Substack app.
Lois has authored more than 50 books in her distinguished career and is the writer I can thank for giving me my first memory of loving memory. I hope you enjoy this unedited conversation with Lois Lowry. It was recorded at her home on March 4, 2022 here in the great state of Maine.
CONVERSATION
Rachael: I have not used this recorder in a while. Can I just have you tell me about how your day is just to check some sound?
Lois: How’s my day gone so far? Uh, I stayed up too late last night watching a documentary film called The Tinder Swindler. Have you seen it?
Rachael: No, I haven't seen it. How was it? I heard it's good.
Lois: it's about a guy from Israel who swindled vulnerable women out of many hundreds of thousands of dollars by purporting to be a billionaire who was courting them on Tinder.
Rachael: All right. Another reason I should be scared of being on dating apps again. [laughter] All right, I'm going to put this here just so I can keep track. Okay. I am just going to ask for you to introduce yourself.
Lois: Hi there. I'm Lois Lowry. Nice to be with you, Rachael. My new friend.
Rachael: We are in your home in Maine, which is very close to where I live. And I think we could go as far as to call ourselves neighbors. And I'm so grateful you have invited me here for this conversation.
Lois: Happy to have you with me, and your dog.
Rachael: Who we might hear in the background barking. So to start off with a very bold statement which I've already said to you before, is that your books have changed my life, and I’ll probably mention that a few times over today. And every other time we see each other in the future. And you've written nearly 50 books throughout your life and there are three that I'm going to weave in and out of as we talk today. Two are your beloved young adult novels: The Giver and Number the Stars —- both which were written before I even knew how to read. And then a memoir you wrote called Looking Back which beautifully takes quotes and passages from your novels and explores how they may have influenced – they may have been influenced by your own life. So before we dig into the stories that you have gifted us, I want to start with your story. You were born in 1937 in Honolulu, Hawaii, and you were the second daughter of your family and would soon become the middle child when your younger brother was born. And so I'm curious, what is a memory of yours or one that you have inherited from your family that has shaped who you are today?
Lois: Gosh a single memory that shapes who you are? Ah, that's very tough. I wish you'd given me more time to prepare. I seem to be somebody who has a lot of memories. My psychiatrist husband finds it very impressive that I remember so much from my early days. I want to add that I'm not lying on a couch with him taking notes when we go through that process. But because I have so many memories, it's hard to single out one that – but I do remember, okay, I'll choose this one. I remember when my baby brother was born. I was five soon to be six, and was being displaced as the baby of the family. But my father was overseas. This was during World War Two. And so what I remember – although I don't remember the mechanics of it because as such a small child, I wouldn't have paid attention to that. I remember my mother sending a telegram to my father, who was somewhere in the Pacific. I didn't even know what that meant – in the Pacific. It was a phrase that told me, Where is daddy? In the Pacific. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that mother was sending him – magically – sending him the news –in those days, they didn't know it would be a boy in advance — telling him that he had a son and telling him the name of my new baby brother, whom I wasn't quite sure yet that I really liked very much. That's a kind of an encapsulated memory of a family situation at a particular time, wartime. I had an older sister. And she, of course, was in school and I was not yet. And so during those months, weeks preceding the birth of the baby, my mother would take – it makes me think what a wonderful mother she was to a small child – She took me, I want to say, every day, but I'm sure it wasn't. We would walk together in the small college town where we lived to downtown about three blocks away to Bowman's department store and I would be allowed to choose one item of baby clothing. And then we would walk home carrying the little sweater or the little nightgown or whatever. And so I felt as if I was part of the preparation for this change in my family.
Rachael: And your family- so I know you were in Hawaii, but your family moved to the mainland of the United States prior to Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And I'm curious how that event reverberated in your family and what that was like at that time.
Lois: Well, my father was a career army officer. That's why we were in Hawaii when I was born. Uh, I don't know- and this is an example of why you should ask your parents questions when they're still alive- because there are these things that I don't know. I do not know exactly when we left Honolulu. I've written a book based on a photograph of me playing on the beach and in the background on the horizon, which is the name of the book, is the outline of the Battleship Arizona which sunk at Pearl Harbor. So this was probably, I mean, clearly it was before Pearl Harbor, but when we left there, I don't know. But when we did, we went to New York. We were living in New York when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And that is an event I remember. I would have been four years old and what I remember is this, and again, I wish I could check these memories. We know from history that it was Sunday, December 7th, 1941. The time difference would have been such that it was late in the day in New York. But I remember my father was outside getting into our car which was parked in front of our house in Brooklyn, New York. My mother heard something on the radio that clearly shocked her. I remember that feeling of being aware that something terrible was affecting my mother. And she ran from the house and called to my father telling him about what the something was, which was something I didn't understand. What I remember, and what I wish I could corroborate now, is that she had heard on the radio – she called to him and said, they say you have to put your uniform on. It was a Sunday, so he was in civilian clothes. And I'm guessing that on the radio it had probably said people in the military should, what? Be in uniform? I just don't know what that little bit of history was about. But I do remember the emotions surrounding that moment as I watched my mother telling my father terrible news and saying, you have to put on your uniform.
Rachael: And this book that you recently – you recently published this book, right?
Lois: Yeah. In 2020
Rachael: And it's called On the Horizon. And I have to admit that I have not read it yet. What made you decide to take that material from this part of your childhood and write it as nonfiction? Because most of your books that you're most well-known for are all fiction.
Lois: And two of my books are autobiographical written as fiction. A Summer to Die, which was my first book, grapples with the death of my older sister when we were both young and Autumn Street – my favorite of all my books - is also autobiographical, but in both cases I've turned myself into a fictional narrator. They're both written in the first person. This last one was dealing, of course, with history. It was something that had haunted me for a long time and I didn't know what to do with it in terms of being a writer. What happened was that my father had been an amateur photographer, not his profession, but he was a good one and he had good equipment. And so we had lots of home movies dating back to the 1930s. And when I was a child, in those days, growing up when there was no television, what did you do in the evening? Sometimes we would talk daddy into setting up the projector and once again we would watch ourselves on the screen in these home movies. So I had seen many, many times that few moments of me playing on the beach. I had never before noticed the Arizona in the background. I wouldn't have known what it was. Then, when my father was aging and I visited, I discovered that those old reels of film were in his garage in tin containers. I say tin, I don't know what the metal is, but in metal cylinders. And when you opened them, [a] terrible smell came out. The film was deteriorating. So I took them with me back to Boston and I had them transferred to videotape. I don't know what year it was, but I had just bought a VCR. I mean, who has a VCR anymore? But at this time, that was new technology. And so I got these videotapes of what they could save from the deteriorating film. And before I sent them to my father, I had some friends over and I made them watch the films of Baby Lois. And one of them was a man who was a lawyer in Boston. But that was a second career for him. He had been a Annapolis graduate, a long time naval officer. And when he saw the scene in Honolulu, me playing on the beach, and then it goes on to the next scene which I recall as my sister and me watering the flowers with a big watering can in our mother's garden in Honolulu. John said, wait a minute, stop it and pause and go back and show the scene on the beach again which I did. Took me a while to figure out how to pause my new machine. Rewind. And then there I am again, playing on the beach. And John said, look in the background, look on the horizon. And it was he who pointed out, that's the Arizona.
Rachael: And can I ask, what is the Arizona —
Lois: Yes
Rachael: for those of us who might not know what the Arizona is.
Lois: People who are young don't know what the Arizona is. People my age all recognize that name. And in fact, the people sitting in my living room that night, all of them, when John said, “that's the Arizona.” A freeze all went around the room. A hush. The Arizona was a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor. It carried 1200 young men. They all died. That's exaggeration. A few survived. But those who died are still there in that ship which is now the memorial to Pearl Harbor. And if you go there, you take a boat - tourists take a boat out to that memorial, which is built on top of that ship. You can look down. It's just below the water. And there are still to this day, little bubbles coming up which is the oil being released from wherever the oil was contained in that ship. Many of the few survivors who went on to live to a great age, some of them asked to be returned to the ship after their death. And so every now and then, I'm not sure if there are any left now, there will be a ceremony.Divers will take an urn of ashes out. They play taps and they take the urn down to the ship and enter the survivors with their shipmates. So now I've forgotten what question I was answering. But, oh, okay, so I looked at that when I became aware of that connection of the child playing happily on the beach and behind her, unknown to her, a tragedy is unfolding and I tried to put together in my mind what connection is there between that child and those young men. Couldn't figure it out for a long time. And then eventually I put together this book. I did research on the young men who died and I selected a few of them and wrote about them individually. The book is divided into three sections. The second section takes place in August 1945 and I started with a story of a little boy, a real boy. Koichi say was his name, about to turn eight years old that morning when he saw the light in the sky and felt the earth shake. And he was seeing the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima which was 50 miles from his home. So the second section again takes individuals, survivors or victims, people who were there that day. And the third section tries to connect all of them together because, of course, that's what the world consists of, people with connections to each other. And finding those connections, I think, is our task.
Rachael: And we're going to talk about some of the connections that you and I have found with each other in a little bit. But, you got ahead of my next question, which is about your father being a very gifted photographer. And he always had a darkroom in your home, right?
Lois: We traveled often, but we moved often. And it is not true that he had a darkroom in every home. But he would have liked to. He was a very gifted photographer, but he was a dentist by profession.
Rachael: So the intention to have a darkroom in every home which as a photographer myself, is a wonderful dream to have. At that time photography was not for the everyday person which I think for my generation of millennials and anyone who comes after me probably finds pretty hard to imagine. So your family was documenting your every day in a way that perhaps other families weren't. And you just gave us an incredibly beautiful answer to how you think those pictures and those tangible memories influenced your writing and also your relationship with your siblings. And so I noticed that in your memoir, Looking Back, it was really beautiful the way that you structured the book where you had a photograph and then you had a quote from one of your books - previous books. And then kind of a very brief page or two page synopsis of how your writing has perhaps been influenced by one of your childhood or one of your life memories. And I'm wondering why you chose to structure it with those three elements coming together to tell us a story.
Lois: You know, I don't remember what year Looking Back was published. It's been published twice. I see, you have the second version here. I think it was ten years after the first was published when the publisher came to me and asked me to update it with ten more years of memories and photographs and so I did. I don't remember when I began the book except to describe that as I've moved from house to house, I have always moved boxes of photographs and some of them were ones that came from my father because when he was gone, then all of those came to me. Actually, I was very angry at my mother once, who was a very good mom, and I loved her. But at some point, she had a lot of 8x10 photographs that my father had developed and printed in his darkroom and they were of my sister and me. And my sister had died, but my sister left children. And so my mother meticulously cut the photographs in half so she could send the half with the sister to my sister's children and gave the half of me to me.
Rachael: That feels like a tragedy.
Lois: I mean even as I retell it, I can feel being stabbed in the heart. Partly because I don't think my mother was aware of this, but I was. My father framed photographs beautifully, so the composition was always perfect. And the instant you take a pair of scissors, that's destroyed. Of course with Photoshop, I could put them back together if I could get those other fragments from wherever they ended up. So there were all those photographs including the ones that mercifully my mother had not destroyed, and they would come with me. And then I would add to them the ones that I took. And I ended up with many more photographs than any human needs. So at some point I began to sort them out and save those that were important. And I think it was then — I can picture me doing this on my dining room table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so I can sort of date it to that time. That's when I began to see, looking at the photographs, connections to things I had later written. I didn't, while writing those books or those passages, I didn't specifically recall the photographs. It was only looking at the photographs that I made the connection. And so then I began to put it together with the purpose and to see how it would all fit together which eventually I was able to do.
Rachael: So in my world, the two books of yours that are most well known are The Giver and Number The Stars. And you know, when I told friends, particularly of my generation, that you and I had become friends and that you agreed to sit and talk with me about your work and your life, it was like everybody was just immediately transported back to their childhood when they read these books. And you've really laid the groundwork for so much of our literary experience and our understanding of stories. And I want to start with The Giver because when I think about the work that I do and why I've been drawn to intergenerational storytelling, this book puts it all into place for me. And I've heard you say in the past that books can serve as a rehearsal for life, particularly for young people. And, I had no idea at the time, when I was first reading this as an elementary school student, that both my professional world and my personal world would come to revolve around listening to and documenting the memories of older generations. But now, looking back, it feels very obvious, uh, why this story meant so much to me. And I know for a fact that I am just one of countless people who write to you and come to you with some exclamation about the impact of your work. And I would love it if you could share some of the reactions to your work that have been most meaningful for you and perhaps in some way have changed the way that you've thought about your own stories that you have written.
Lois: Well, gosh, I've forgotten what year The Giver was published, probably 1994 and I'm not quick at math.
Rachael: That is correct. It was 1994 and I was five years old.
Lois: Okay. So how many years ago was that?
Rachael: Um, about–
Lois: 26, 27,
Rachael: Something like that.
Lois: Something like that. At any rate, many, many years, and almost immediately the letters started to come. The emails came later. 1994-95 predated the big email days. And so letters started to come and they still do, but now, of course, they take the form of emails. But what surprised me at the outset because I'd written many books before then and I'd always gotten letters from readers. What surprised me was that these letters came of course from kids, but more often in the beginning from adults. And I don't know how the book made that transition into the hands of adults. I wasn't involved in the marketing, but it has always been marketed I believe, as a book for what they call young adults. Some of the ones that come to my mind are a letter from a Qantas pilot in Australia, a letter from a – and this guy, I did go to see — a, I started to say Tibetan monk, but that's not correct. He was a, uh, a monk. Trappist. That's the word I want. A Trappist monk in a monastery. And he said - he described to me in his letter that Trappist – I'm not Catholic, I don't know anything about orders – the Trappist order is a silent order. And so the monks are silent all day long except for specified periods when they can speak. But they are read aloud to at dinner and the books they are read aloud from are divided into two types. And one, I've forgotten what they call the one, but the other is sacred reading. And he said they had decided to designate The Giver as sacred and it had been read aloud to his order at meal time. And then he had contacted me. I went to his monastery at his invitation and spent a couple of nights at a guesthouse just off the grounds. And at his invitation, and because I was being polite, not because I wanted to, and I got up in the middle of the night because every night at I don't know, like 2:00 a.m. they have a service. So I had to get up and put my clothes on and walk across the road to the chapel and they came in in their robes singing. It was quite moving and majestic, but I sure wouldn't want to do it every night. Anyrate, when I was there I was allowed to eat my meals with one monk at a time for a designated period and for that period the monk could speak to me and I was told I could ask them any questions I wanted and so I did. Anyrate, I won't bore you with a lot of description.
Rachael: Well I imagine that those conversations were quite powerful for you. I mean, what a perspective.
Lois: Well, you know, it's interesting. I came away sort of bemused by the whole experience. I realized early on that it wasn't in every case that they were so moved and affected by the book. It was that they wanted a good meal and a time to be able to talk. Apparently, their food was not that great. Some of them confided in me. The ones that got to eat with me had a good meal. That's kind of embarrassing. Anyrate, I was talking about the mail I got. And so that was just one example. I also got letters from people who hated me. There was one person who said Jesus would be ashamed of you for writing this book. So it evoked a lot of very strong opinions from all sorts of people and that has continued to be true. Before we began this, I told you a little bit about a man who wrote me recently about The Giver. He was a retired fireman. He has no children. I didn't think to ask him how he encountered the book, but it had meant a lot to him over the past 25 years. He described reading and rereading it. I've gotten letters from prisoners who have been within the walls of penitentiaries, been part of reading groups who have read the book. Now, all of that goes along with the countless letters of kids who are assigned to read at school. Some of whom write to me and say, ‘I hated this book, it was so boring.’ But those are few. Kids seem to be very affected by the book in the same ways, perhaps at a different level, as their adult colleagues, as it were. So I don't know what else I can tell you about that, except that I did not sit down to write this book with the intention of putting into it things that would profoundly affect people. And I haven't mentioned the geography around the world. During the pandemic, I have zoomed with classrooms around the world. When schools were closed here in the States, every teacher in the United States emailed me to ask if I would zoom with their classrooms and I just couldn't physically do it. But I decided to do only the ones in other countries. And that has given me a glimpse into the amazing way a book can affect kids from many different cultures. Just recently, I did one with Doha in Qatar. I know I mispronounced that country, but I've done it with Katmandu. I have an invitation that I just replied to this morning from Turkey. It's not the first from Turkey. Did one in Romania. One amazingly in Tehran. Who would have guessed that kids in a school in Iran would be reading this book? And I have not done a zoom, but I have had a letter not long ago from a man, an adult in Russia, who said his little boy is still too young, but he looks forward to reading this book with his child when the child's a little older. So, there was no way that I could have planned for that to happen. It just happened. And it's been, uh, fortuitous and mysterious and quite wonderful.
Rachael: I wasn't actually going to ask you this, but you know as you're listing all of these countries and these places that have taken to your work, your work is also known for being banned. What is it about the content of The Giver that makes people feel like it is inappropriate for children?
Lois: Let me say at the outset that The Giver has never to my knowledge been challenged or banned in another country. It's only here. And it's not only in the South and Texas where we might expect it. It's been in various places around the country. Those who challenge it – what happens often is a parent will come to a school and say, I don't want my child reading this book that you've assigned. Fortunately, the rules tend to be that before an official complaint is brought, the person bringing the complaint has to sign a thing saying they have read the book because often in the early days, what happened is that a passage would be taken out of context and maybe murmured about from one person to another and then they would all rise up and ask to have the book removed. Often the passage was, well, there were two. One is where the boy is assigned a task. In the book, 12-year-old children are given volunteer jobs. They're assigned various jobs, which they do throughout their growing years. And in the book, the 12 year old boy is at his current volunteer job which is working in a nursing home. It's called the “House of the Old” and in the scene he is bathing an old woman. She's in a tub, the steam is rising. I think it describes him with the sponge washing her back and they have a conversation. And I found it a very tender scene. There's no sexual context to it at all, but just the idea of a 12-year-old boy being with a naked woman was enough to make some parents rise up in horror. It’s interesting that kids don't react that way at all. Another scene that they have objected to is the scene in which it is revealed to the boy that part of his father's job is to euthanize infants. And of course, that's horrific for him to come to that realization and to see on videotape his father doing that with no apparent distress or remorse. It's a glimpse into what his society has become, which is dispassionate and without emotion or human feelings. But people have taken that to mean or have objected to the book with the objection that it promotes euthanasia, which if you read it in context, of course it does not. So I think – I've tried to figure this out over many years and the only thing I come to in my mind is the thing they're really uncomfortable with, but they don't realize it and so they choose these out of context moments is the fact that a boy comes to realize in the book the hypocrisy of his parents' generation and he sets out to disobey the rules that have made the society what it is. People are made uncomfortable by a child failing to submit to the rules of the parents’ generation.
Rachael: I'm going to ask you to read a piece of the book for me. And you just gave a bit of background of what the book is, but just for any listeners who might not be familiar with The Giver or maybe it's been a couple decades since you've read it, just a bit of background here – So The Giver tells the story of a boy named Jonas, who is on the cusp of teenagehood, who lives in a “perfect world” which could also be described as a dystopian community where everyone in their community is assigned a role so they don't choose their jobs or their own life path, but rather are assigned a life path, so-to-speak. And Jonas is given a once in a generation role as the receiver of memory which means that he is given the privileged responsibility of holding all of the memories of the community. And so he's the only one who can see color and he's the only one who knows the feeling of snow. And he's the one to hold the memories of war or falling in love or feeling of attachment and loss. So he really carries the duality of life and what it means to be human for everybody else. And so I kind of threw a dart at some of my favorite passages for which one I was going to ask you to read. And currently, Lois, you're holding my childhood copy of this book which you can tell has had a couple of decades of use by its cover. So, elementary school me can't believe that I'm sitting here in my 30s talking to you as you hold this. So I'm going to ask for you to start on Page 77, starting with “the man sighed.”
Lois: “The man sighed, seeming to put his thoughts in order. Then he spoke again, “Simply stated,” he said, “although it's not really simple at all, my job is to transmit to you all the memories I have within me. Memories of the past.” “Sir,” Jonas said tentatively, “I would be very interested to hear the story of your life, and to listen to your memories. “I apologize for interrupting,” he added quickly. The man waved his hand impatiently. “No apologies in this room. We haven't time.”“Well,” Jonas went on, uncomfortably aware that he might be interrupting again. “I'm really interested, I don't mean that I'm not. But I don't exactly understand why it's so important. I could do some adult job in the community, and in my recreation time I could come and listen to the stories from your childhood. I'd like that. Actually,” he added, “I've done that already, in the House of the Old. The old like to tell about their childhoods, and it's always fun to listen.” The man shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I'm not being clear. It's not my past, not my childhood that I must transmit to you.” He leaned back, resting his head against the back of the upholstered chair. “It’s the memories of the whole world,” he said with a sigh. “Before you, before me, before the previous Receiver, and generations before him.” Jonas frowned. “The whole world?” he asked. “I don't understand. Do you mean not just us? Not just the community? Do you mean Elsewhere, too?” He tried in his mind, to grasp the concept. “I'm sorry, sir. I don't understand exactly. Maybe I'm not smart enough. I don't know what you mean when you say ‘the whole world’ or ‘generations before him.’ I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” “There's much more. There's all that goes beyond – all that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It's how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.”
Rachael: Thank you so much. I want to pull out one of those sentences. The quote “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now,” I find this statement a bit haunting. I also find it very calming and I'm wondering if there is a piece of you that feels like life would be easier this way without the visceral and so often like the physical anxiety that comes with holding the past inside oneself?
Lois: When I read that passage right now and it won't surprise you to know that I haven't read it in a very long time, but I do – I had remembered they sounded familiar those lines when I read them. “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” I mean, that's what we have fallen victim to in this world today. And it's one of the things, one of the ways in which we account for all the problems we have. People's tendency to care, not only to think there's only us, but to care about only us, care about only now. And it's why we are not dealing with environmental issues because we think it's only now and it's why we have trouble with immigration issues because we think it's only us. I went on to deal with these same issues, same problems in the books that follow The Giver. And it's interesting to realize more and more. And often people remind me that some of the problems I wrote about 10 years ago, 20 years ago are now at the forefront. And teachers, for example, are hauling out these old books that they used 15 years ago and the one third book and the giver quartet called Messenger deals with the community that is divided because half of the people in the community want to build a wall around so nobody else can come in. I mean, how contemporary is that?
Rachael: I have to admit that I've not read any of the other books in the quartet and I also have not seen the movie. And I think part of it is just total preservation of what the story means to me.
Lois: Well, I will confess to you that my favorite of the four books is the fourth one, which tries to bring all the people from the first three books together, including the boy Jonas. The giver is no longer around, but the baby is the main character in the fourth book, and he's now 14 years old. And another thing that the books have done, beginning with this one, this boy is described as having a special, almost magical quality. And in the book, it's called ‘seeing beyond.’ It's not exactly clear what that is, except that as he experiences his training with the giver and becoming the giver himself, he is able to see beyond the world of ‘only now, only us.’ And then, as I wrote three more books, each with a main character who is an adolescent, I gave each of them a quality. And the second book, uh, the girl - and incidentally, that book, which was written before 2001, describes the collapse of the two tall buildings. It's a very spooky feeling to realize that I wrote that before it happened. But, she has a quality that enables her not to see, but in her hands, because she's very creative, she's able to create a picture of the future. Okay, the third book has a boy who has a gift, a quality that enables him to heal. And the fourth book, Gabriel, the baby in the first book — and I looked specifically for a quality that would be the quintessential quality that we should all aspire to — he realizes that when he's young and he calls it veering, that he's able to veer V E E R and it's painful and exhausting. But he does it again and again and it increases in his capacity and he's able to move into another person's consciousness and experience what they're experiencing. And in the end of that very long, 400-some-pages fourth book, he uses that quality to put the world back together. And what he's experiencing, though it's not named in the book, is empathy - the ability to feel what other people are feeling. And of course, that's what we do every night when we sit watching the TV and see people suffering in other places. Those of us who have the capacity to feel that suffering and to to try to do something about it. We're the ones who are feeling so frustrated that we don't have more power than we than we do.
Rachael: I'm gonna go off my own script here and jump way ahead to something I was going to ask you a bit later on, which is the role of choice in your characters. Because there's the idea of, okay, we can have this empathy, but then what action is attached to it? What do you actually do with the empathy? And it seems like from the characters I know of your book, there's a lot of personal choice that exists in their realm that they're working through of how to deal with the emotions that they have and then what to do with them.
Lois: You know, that's what every - I shouldn't say every because I haven't read every book in the world. But, that's what fiction consists of, creating a character and then walking them through a journey that they make during which they have to make choices. Often I've heard, and this is jumping ahead as well to a different book, But I often hear from kids who have read Number The Stars in school, usually fifth grade. They're abouts – 10 years old – the age of the main character. The young girl on the cover – and the book is set in Denmark. And so the main character, Annemarie, is a Christian Danish girl, and her best friend, Ellen, is a Jewish Danish girl. Kids ask me why the blond girl is on the cover as opposed to the other girl and I explain to them that the main character of a book is the one who makes choices. And in this circumstance set in Denmark during 1943, the Jews weren't the ones who were able to make choices. It was the Christians who made the choices to save the Jews that the story's about. But every book is about characters who make choices, and I’ve never been a teacher, but I one time had a fantasy of being a college professor in an English course and I thought I had come up with the perfect exam question, assuming every kid in this literature class has had to read a particular classic book. And so that I couldn't look at the next guy's paper and, you know, cheat and see what somebody else's writing, they would each have to find a moment in the book when the main character makes a choice and describe why the character makes that choice and then talk about how the book would have been different if the character had made a different choice. And I think that's an interesting thing to contemplate. But then I realized that a clever student taking that exam, having read Virginia Woolf, would say, Mrs. Dalloway decided not to have a party that night. And, so the book would be different. So it isn't a great exam question. But it is true that life and literature following - emulating life is is just a series of choices.
Rachael: And we're going to come back to, um, Number The Stars because, as you know, that's very personal for my life. But going back to The Giver, because I just want to stay with this idea of memories for a while. As I was re-reading this book for you know the umpteenth time prior to seeing you today, I was trying to imagine like, what would it feel like to be rid of memories? And part of this transmission of memory that Jonas and The Giver go through means that every time Jonas receives a memory, The Giver no longer has it for himself. And I think that there is some parcel of reality in that. Particularly I do a lot of work with communities who have gone through trauma and I've learned that while recounting difficult memories does have the possibility to retraumatize ourselves. It also does have the possibility of releasing us from some of what haunts us. And I'm wondering what was in your mind as you were making that decision that The Giver would no longer have the memories once Jonas held them.
Lois: I don't think I go through a conscious decision making process because I tend to write very intuitively. And so I can only look back and speculate why I wrote a particular thing. As you were talking and putting the question together something came to my mind, which was after a child of mine died in an accident some years ago. And of course, everybody I knew wrote me compassionate and moving letters of sympathy, the one that has stuck in my mind and that I think about still often came from a friend who was an actor and who had often performed Shakespeare, and he sent me a quotation from Macbeth. And I can't remember the name of the character who says this, but I know that he says it to Mcduff after Mcduff has been told that his wife and children have been killed and he's incoherent with grief. And this other character says to him, “Give Sorrow Words.” And that three word phrase has stuck with me. I think it's so important to give words to grief. And as you describe and in the case of The Giver, whether putting it out there takes it away from him, that would be somehow diminishing the sorrow, I suppose. But putting it out there also – I can't think of the right words. I'm supposed to be a person who uses words, but unless I have a computer in front of me and I'm typing them out, they don't always come easily to me. But it spreads it somehow. I don't want to say it diminishes it because one can't diminish one's grief, but it alleviates it by diluting – that's the word I wanted - it dilutes it somehow to give sorrow words.
Rachael: Bringing together The Giver and grief. Um, society members in this book are “released” when they get too old to be a functional part of society or, as you were mentioning earlier, are euthanized as babies if they're perhaps not needed. And so it strikes me that there's no concept of death in this world. And well, first let me ask, is that true? That there is no concept of death? Would you put it that way?
Lois: Uh, I think that's true. The people, the general populace, doesn't understand what death is. People are there and then they're released to someplace else, and they don't even think about what that consists of. And yet there is a moment I'm now remembering, having not read it a long time. There is a moment when the boy sees his friends and is troubled by the fact that his friends are mindlessly playing a game of war and shooting imaginary guns and falling down as if they've been shot. So they do have some kind of residual awareness of destruction, but there's no connection to them between that and grief of any sort or loss, I don't think.
Rachael: Yeah, it comes off as a very - it's a very stoic space.
Lois: Yeah, yeah
Rachael: So when I first wrote to you and I'm let's be very honest here, I totally fangirl to you through your website, you were gracious enough to not only respond to me, you spent some time with my work and quickly, you found my portrait series about young widowhood. And so I was widowed when I was 27-years-old. My husband was 28 at the time and died from a heart attack during our first year of marriage. And you told me that you lost your son when he was and he was in the military and died in a plane crash and he too had left a widow behind as well as a child and perhaps even more unusual that both spouses, mine and your son's spouse were European. And I remember reading this and I immediately closed my computer because, you know, here is Lois Lowry, you know, childhood hero of mine coming into this very intimate space of mine that I don't share with a lot of people. And, so I'd love to spend some time and talk about your son, Grey, and talk about the relationship that you've had with his wife and with your granddaughter since that day, which I know was quite a long time ago now.
Lois: Yeah. And I will correct one thing you said. Grey was 37 when he died. It's very hard for me to go in my mind to how old he would be today, because, of course. And I know you must experience this as well. Uh, to me, he'll always be 37. I just the other day, I got an email from a Lufthansa. No, I'm sorry. I'm going to get the word wrong and I'm going to mispronounce it - Luftwaffe pilot. That's the German Air Force. Lufthansa is the airline. He's with the Air Force. And I don't know how he happened on this or contacted me. Well, I do know he contacted me through my website - emailed me. And he said, ma'am, he said, I knew your son. My son, incidentally died in Germany where he was stationed, and he said I have a photograph of him and I would like to send it to you. So, I mean, this is years later. I don't know why that happened. But of course, I wrote back and he did send me the photograph. But anyrate, he was 37 at that time and will always be to me. His wife was younger and I believe possibly ten years younger, which would have meant she was 27, the age that you were.
Rachael: You've said in the past that while you were deeply saddened by his loss, your life has been enhanced by the memories of his childhood.
Lois: Yes
Rachael: So, I’d love to hear some of the memories of his childhood.
Lois: It's funny that you mention that, that you're here today because what's the date today? Is it March 4th?
Rachael: Yes
Lois: Yesterday was March 3rd and that was my son's birthday. And I got an email this morning from a friend who was vacationing in Key West and she knew nothing of the particularness of this date to me. But she said, we're down here in Key West and it's very warm, blah, blah, blah. And I wrote back and I said yesterday, but in 1959, my son was born in Key West. Now, I'm saying this today on March 4th in Maine, and I'm looking out the window at snow. And, I haven't been outside today, but it's probably very cold there. But I wrote back to her and told her that on March 5th, two days after his birth in Key West, I took my two day old baby home from the hospital wearing nothing but a diaper because it was so hot in Key West at that time. We were there because his father was a naval officer who was stationed there. So my son grew up in many different places and he was a neat kid. I'm just remembering so many different times. I have a photograph hanging out here in the hall, which I'll show you, of him with his horse when he was 13-years-old. He announced when he was 12 and we lived here in Falmouth, Maine in an old farmhouse with 20 acres of land. He announced that he wanted a horse. He had a friend who had a horse and that had inspired him to feel the need of a horse. And so we kind of put him off by saying we would get him a horse if he would fence a pasture. Our land was not fenced. And he would have to go out in the woods and cut down the trees himself and chop them into fence posts, and then he would have to dig the holes for the fence post. We figured that would be a task that would mean we would never have to get him a horse, but he was a very determined kid. And he went out at the beginning of the summer and did that. He took our riding lawn mower out in the woods and he chopped down trees and he dragged them back by the mower and he cut them into fence posts and we got him - we did get him a post hole digger, but it wasn't a power one. There are such things. He had to do it by hand, and that meant he had to dig a hole deep enough to plant a fence post. And Maine has very rocky soil and we would watch him out there and he would get half a hole dug and then he would hit a rock, immobile rock. And it was the first time I ever heard him swear. He would say shit. So the fence ended up kind of zigzagged as he found places where he could put holes. So eventually, by the end of the summer, he had fenced an area large enough to pasture a horse. And so we got him a horse. And guess what? He was allergic to horses. his eyes puffed up and his nose ran and he sneezed and he willed himself to get over that. My doctor husband would say he desensitized himself, but that's what he did. He spent time – suffering time – with that horse until he got over that allergy. And he had the horse for some years until he got old enough to have a car. And he was a teenager and a girlfriend. And the horse, uh, he advertised in the paper that he would give a horse to the right home. That was a mistake because so many people appeared at our house. And then he had to choose between these, you know, picture 13 year old girls weeping and saying, choose me, choose me. You know, he interviewed these kids and he chose one. And, they came with a horse trailer, took the horse away. And a couple weeks later, they called us and they said their daughter was scared of the horse and she was having trouble. So bless his heart, he was a 16-17 year old kid with a Volkswagen bug. And every afternoon after school for several weeks, he drove 20 miles to their house to give riding lessons to the girl with his horse. That was my son, very determined and he was that way all his life. And, he majored in economics, I think, in college, but didn't really know what he wanted to do. But he was a spectacular athlete. And he decided he wanted to fly. And so he applied for the Air Force pilot training program and he was a senior in college at the time. And he passed all the aptitude tests and, you know, intellectual tests. All he had left was the physical and that was scheduled for a particular day. And he was going to have no problem with the physical except shortly before that day, he went out skiing and he broke his shoulder skiing. And he couldn't change the date of that physical. If he didn't pass that physical, he was going to miss the beginning of his Air Force training. So he didn't tell him he had a broken shoulder. He took off the sling and the thing that was buckled around his chest and he went in and pretended he was fine. And he did all the exercises required, including push ups with a broken shoulder and passed the test. Became a pilot. I went to Texas for his ceremony to pin on his pilot wings. And I remember thinking, he'd been 12 years old when I pinned on his Eagle Scout badge. And so He had a very happy and successful career as a pilot and he was killed because of a maintenance error on the plane which caused his plane to crash. In the meantime, he had married. He and his wife, Margaret, had been married five years before they had a child. And my granddaughter – my only granddaughter – was just under two years old when he was killed. He died [at] the end of May. It was Memorial Day weekend. And I don't remember what day Mother's Day was that year, but he was in Germany and he called me on Mother's Day and he told me that that morning, his little girl, 20 months old, was learning to speak English and German simultaneously because her mother was German. Her father was American. And he told me that that morning he’d gone into his child's bedroom to get her out of her crib, and she stood up and grinned at him and she sang, “I love you. You love me. We're a happy family.” And he said his heart just melted and he just wanted to tell me that on Mother's Day, because he said, you must have felt that way about me once. And I said, I still do. And that was, you know, a couple of weeks before he died. I remember that I went over there – well I went over there immediately at his death and for his funeral, but I went back a couple of months later so his child was now close to two years old. Someone had sent Margaret, my daughter-in-law, my German daughter-in-law, a video. Grey, my son, had been in the states on some Air Force business. He had stopped in to see these friends and they had taken a video of him playing with their children and their dog and they had sent it to Margaret after his death. And she said she had not been able to work up the courage, if that's the right word, to watch it until I was there and I could watch it with her. So, we put it into the - again we're back at the VCR days - we watched and this little girl was playing on the floor, not yet two years old, and she looked up and she watched with us and she became very angry. We could see her – just her little shoulders stiffening and I think maybe she even stamped her foot and she began to speak in German angrily to her mother. I don't speak German. And her mother had to translate for me, but I think I maybe could understand just from the tone. She was saying, “Where's my papa? Why doesn't he come home?” And, to her credit, now see I'm going to get choked up telling you this. Her mother, my daughter-in-law, instead of turning off the video and distracting the child with other toys, she took her on her lap and said, That's you know, that's your papa. And she explained to her why he couldn't come back and the child was too young to understand death, but she did understand – I could tell the finality of it and the sorrow of it. And as I say, I give credit to my daughter-in-law for that honesty that she showed and has always shown. Now my granddaughter has now grown, uh, does not remember her father. She was too little, but like all of us, including myself. You think you remember things because they've been told to you so often. So she has often said to me, No, I don't really remember him, but you've told me so often the stories that I see them in my head as if I remember them. And I think that's true of my own memories as well. When I describe playing on the beach or whatever I describe from my early childhood years, I think I'm starting to remember the memory of them. I don't know if that's the right way to say it, so I no longer know what's a real memory and what is a memory of a story of a memory. And I don't think it matters much really in the long run. It's hard for me to imagine having too much memory. I so love having memories.
Rachael: What was particularly remarkable to me when we started speaking about this, this space that we share with young widowhood, with loss is that you're still so close with, with his wife and I have a very close relationship with my mother-in-law. And – oh my gosh, look, a fox.
Lois: Oh yeah. He goes by here every afternoon and it’s a big, healthy fox. Could you see how good he looked?
Rachael: Yeah, I thought it was my dog for a minute. I haven't heard from her in a while. Sorry, listener. - the beauty of living in Maine. Um, people ask why we live here. It's cold, but there's foxes outside. Umm it's so interesting, actually, when you start talking about death and the loss of loved ones, so many of the widows that I've spoken to have said like sometimes seeing an animal is completely reminds them so –
Lois: I'll tell you, you know, I hesitate to tell the story. It almost sounds hokey, but I did not see this myself. But at my son's funeral in Germany, I later was told, ‘did you notice that moment during the funeral when everybody sort of murmured?’ And I hadn't really. I don't know. I was sitting up front with my daughter in law, and I didn't see that. But whoever told me about this said it was because a yellow butterfly had flown into the church and was flying around the people and they began to murmur. And I'm sorry I didn't see it, but of course now every time I see a yellow butterfly I think of it. And in fact, that Christmas after his death, I found a person who sells – I kind of cringe to say this – mounted butterflies, but I bought yellow butterflies and gave them to my children.
Rachael: Well, that brings up a lot for me – after my husband passed, umm, my parents live just outside the Boston area in the woods and we saw a wolf which were very unusual to see. You see a lot of like coywolves or coyotes, but this was like a beautiful Disney-like wolf. And still, to this day, I mean, it's been almost six years. You know, wolves are this symbol of my husband. I have a tattoo of a wolf. But my in-laws, who live in Poland, when they went back to Poland, there was a butterfly in their apartment, which you know they hadn't been home in like two weeks because they'd been in Boston with me. And so my mother-in-law…
Lois: At the time of his death?
Rachael: Yeah. When they came back. So my mother in law actually has a tattoo of a butterfly. So every time we see a butterfly, we think of him. And it was her first tattoo. And then she got his final words inscribed by the butterfly, which was, ‘it was good to dream sometimes’ because in the few minutes before my husband passed, he had sent my father and I an email that had a link to a beautiful gentleman's farm in Maine. We were living in Boston at the time. That was like, obviously outside of our budget because we had zero dollars because he was working as a farmer and I was a photographer. And the the subject of the email was ‘it's good to dream sometimes.’ So we've just put a lot of emphasis on butterflies and wolves.
Lois: I’m gonna give you one more animal. I had forgotten about this or, you know, I had forgotten it was tucked away there someplace. I have a younger son. And he told me this is now some days after his brother's death. But he said he had had a nightmare. And in the nightmare, he was observing his brother's crash and death. And he said he woke up. It was very early morning just shaking and distraught and just to calm down. He said – this was in Falmouth, Maine, where we are now – he got in his car and drove and he drove across the bridge that goes across the Presumpscot River. I'm pointing over that way because there are several bridges and it’s that bridge up there. And he said as he was driving across the river, he suddenly saw an eagle low down in the sky and the eagle came toward the car, he said. Came up to the windshield of the car and swooped across and flew away again. Now my son flew a particular plane in the Air Force. I don't know if it was the plane or the squadron which was called the Eagle. So my other son, Ben, took that as meaning. I mean, we'd look for it wherever we can find it. And we're just, you know, lucky to find it now and then.
Rachael: Absolutely, I love symbolism. And, you know, before my husband passed, I think I would have had a hard time wrapping my head around it But once somebody you love dies and you have that experience where, all the things that you think you understand, you realize you don't understand anything so the idea that like that person you loved is now, you know, in front of you in some beautiful shape and form is just so, it's comforting.
Lois: Do you ever dream of him? Because my daughter-in-law has described dream. I had one dream about my son. I don't remember how long after his death – not terribly long. But in the dream he was standing there. He was wearing a leather jacket that he had. He had bought it in Denmark. I remember the softness of the leather. And people were waiting in line to talk to him. It was like a reception line. And I was waiting my turn and when I got up to him, I hugged him and I could feel and smell that leather jacket. Oh, people were saying goodbye to him, that was it. I said to him, Remember that the original meaning of goodbye was God be with you. And he started to laugh and he said, Mom, I know that. So I don't know what that was about. Margaret, my daughter-in-law, said she has dreamed of him standing in a meadow. And she said it's hard to describe, but the meadow, the grass in the meadow is so green that it's greener than any green you can imagine. She's never seen anything like it, and there he is standing and laughing. So, you know, I'd like to think that somewhere there's a meadow. I don't really think that. I'm a bit of an an agnostic. I don't believe in heaven persay. I do believe in some greater than us universe. And he's out there somewhere, but I think probably more in molecules than in a meadow, but anyrate, I like that we have those memories come that way in dreams.
Rachael: I like it too, and I dream of Sergiusz and not as often as I would like to these days. But I always text his mom right away and it's like because she's in Europe, she's ahead of me. So if it's my middle of the night and she's already awake. And you know, it's like, you get this bonus time with them. It's like a new memory, even though it didn't quite happen.
Lois: Yeah, yeah.
Rachael: Well, shifting gears, which is always awkward when you're talking about people you've loved who’ve you lost. But I want to keep us in Europe. Your son was living in Europe. My husband was from Europe, so let's take your work to Europe and back to the time of your childhood which is World War Two. So as you know, I've spent well over a decade entrenched in my grandmother's wartime history and part of her story is that she was a Holocaust survivor and saved during the rescue of the Danish Jews during World War Two. So for context, for listeners who don't know about this history, just a very quick overview which is that in 1943 while World War Two and the Holocaust were raging, Denmark would come to save 95% of their Jewish population. And in not much more than three weeks, a spontaneous grassroots rescue mission that, very importantly, began by a Nazi officer illegally ferried roughly around 7,500 people from Nazi-occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden. And it's an exceptional story of upstanding during one of humanity's darkest periods. So, Lois, your book Number The Stars, another classic, tells this story through the plight of a young girl named Ellen. Ellen is Danish. She is Jewish. And she’s sheltered by a friend named Annemarie and then goes on to be rescued by boat across the Baltic Sea. And as you mentioned earlier, the book itself is actually through the perspective of Annemarie and not Ellen. So I have to tell you that I teach my grandmother's story in the classroom a lot, and this book is the greatest gift to me as an educator because it doesn't matter if I'm talking to elementary school kids or middle school or high school or college or their teachers or their parents. If I say, do you know the book Number The Stars, immediately hands go up. Everyone gets enthusiastic. They're like, Yes, I love that book, and I go, OK, great. So now you have some context for what the story of my grandmother is and what I'm about to tell you. So, jumping right in, where did your interest in this topic, in this country's role in this rescue come from?
Lois: Well, I had a very dear friend named Annelise who was Danish. I met her in this country. She had come to this country with an American husband. I'm just chuckling because Danish people are often very funny. They have a sense of humor, I find. I mean, I'm generalizing. I don't know that many Danish people, but Annelise was very funny. And, she met her husband, Bob, when he was stationed in the army in Europe and married him there and came to this country with him, but she said that she thought he was a locksmith and she thought that because he told her he had gone to Yale. Okay, now as you know or don't know, Yale is the brand name of most padlocks. And so she — I don't know if she really thought he was a locksmith. He was actually a lawyer. But anyrate, she married Bob from Yale and came to this country, and our kids grew up together. She had a son the same age as my son, Grey. They were great friends and a daughter, Kiersten, the same age as my daughter, Kristen. And they were great friends. Her son was named Torben. Still is. He's a grown man now. I remember her telling me a story of Torben as a small child in a supermarket cart, riding, two-years-old, with his last legs dangling, and he would have been a very cute child. I didn't know him as a toddler, but he had curly hair and was a handsome boy. And, she said a woman swooped down on us at the supermarket and said “oh aren’t you cute. What's your name?” And her very shy son, said Torben. And the woman was gushing about him, and Torben said ‘it means God of thunder.’ Anyrate, I used that name in Number The Stars as the name of the cat in the book - God of Thunder. Um, but anyrate, she told me the story of - Well, wait, I'll back up a bit. Sometime later, after our kids were grown, Annelise and I took a trip together and we went to Bermuda together for a week and stayed in a little bed & breakfast. And so we had a lot of time to talk and we talked about our families. And I don't think we had known this about each other before, but I mentioned to her that I had had an older sister who had died young. And she said she had as well. Now my sister had died of cancer. Annelise said her sister had been newly married, expecting a baby and had died in childbirth. And I was so astonished by that. Because I had been to Denmark. And as it happened, my husband had had a back injury when we were in Denmark. He was taken to a hospital where he got excellent treatment for no charge, I might add. And I said, But Denmark has wonderful medical care. How could your sister die in childbirth? And she said it was during the Nazi occupation and then she began to tell me about that period of time which I had probably known about because I had studied history in high school and college. But, I had not retained many details. And so she described to me the rescue of the Danish Jews. And it struck me immediately that that was an important story to tell to kids. For one thing, it has all the elements that make a story appealing to kids. It has suspense and danger. And, boys like it because it has soldiers and guns and girls like it because it has friendship. It just has all the elements that go together. And it is a true story. Of course, I had to get the details correct. I was in this country at the time and so was Annelise.So I did a lot of the research at a library in Boston and then I went to Denmark with names of people who had been alive at that time. They no longer would be now. And I spent an evening, for example, with a woman who had been part of the Danish underground. So as far as I know, I got the details correct. A number of people have told me that I should have included the fact that the King of Denmark wore a yellow star in sympathy with the Jews and I am able, although, I think, often they don't believe me, to correct that misapprehension that Danish Jews were never asked to wear yellow stars. Photographs of the king often show him in a kind of military uniform, with stuff on his chest, medals and ribbons and things. And so perhaps those have been confused with a star. But that story is not true. It doesn't need to be because they didn't need to have any fake bravery. They had enough real bravery of their own.
Rachael: This book has become such a classic piece of understanding the Jewish experience during World War two. Because, I mean, still to this day, only a handful of states even require genocide education in the school systems and Number The Stars is often the book that used to tell stories of the Holocaust. It's, you know, Number The Stars, Anne Frank’s Diary, maybe Elie Wiesel’s Night. And it's such a beautiful story. I'm wondering that being that this is not your personal background and it's not your experience. It’s not your family's stories, how does it feel to have created one of the primary pieces of literature that give context to this very complicated period?
Lois: Well, I'm not sure how to answer that. It's such a wonderful story — such a wonderful, true story that I'm only the purveyor of it, the person who put it out there. The story is on its own. It didn't need me. I just happened to be the one to be the conduit for it. But I'm moved all the time by letters I get about the book from - have you seen recently the teacher who has published in Facebook? I've got to show you after this if you haven't seen it. A teacher in Kansas, I believe, who just gives a description of a way of teaching this that is so profoundly moving. But I did hear from a teacher. This is years ago in Tennessee. She taught fourth grade. And she began the school year under difficult circumstances because their school building was being reconstructed and they were all housed in a big warehouse of some sort with partitions separating the classes and none of their usual supplies. But she found a map to tack on the wall and she began reading this book a chapter a day to the kids because she knew from experience that it captured their interest. And, she said very shortly into it, she oversaw and overheard a couple of kids going to the map and saying, oh, look how little Denmark is, look how big Germany is. And she realized that she was able to convey history through this story. So she decided to incorporate other elements of teaching and in particular, she mentioned, English. You know, study of language. And she asked the kids to look for examples of figurative language in the book. I'm probably going to forget details of this. And one by one, the kids looked through and chose passages that they read and, uh, one child, there's a place – will I wreck your recorder if I take the book out and look for it?
Rachael: Not at all. You're always welcome to look through your own book, especially when it's my copy of it. [laughter].
Lois: Uh, The children have gone up the coast to the uncle's house, to a place on the ocean from which they don't realize this, but this is the place from which they'll be taken to Sweden. And they look — the Christian child, his uncle's farmhouse it is, takes her friend to the sea, the water. And - I'm not going to find it in time - but at any rate, the child reading this passage chose it because it describes the water as looking ruffled by wind. And the child said that's like ruffles on my shirt, on my blouse sleeves. So it's figurative language, which was what the teacher was trying to convey. And I chuckled reading that because I remembered writing that passage. And I had originally put pleated by wind, and I pictured a pleated skirt with the raised, uh, ridges. And I realized children of this age wouldn't know what pleats were. And so I changed it to ruffles. But then she said another little boy who was a slow learner, raised his hand, and she was curious what he would choose. And– I'm not going to find it in time - but it's a passage where the child, okay, it's again, they've gone to the coast. They're looking at the ocean. And the Jewish child, who has never been out of Copenhagen before, says, oh, it's beautiful. And and her friend, whose uncle's farm it is, said she looked around and she had never thought about it before, but now hearing her friend say this, she saw it with fresh eyes and it was beautiful. Okay, this little boy said - And so he read this passage - and the teacher said, oh, yes, thank you Jimmy. That's right. It's beautiful that the author was writing about how beautiful it was. He said, no, no, no. He said, it's that she saw it with fresh eyes. He said, eyes aren't fresh like milk or eggs. But he was seeing it with new a new way of looking. And then he went on to describe something that I should have told you sooner. Because earlier, she said, in the teaching of this book, a child had said, my grandmother called and she asked what I'm reading, and I told her about this book and she wants to come and speak to our class about World War Two. And the teacher said she inwardly groaned because this child's grandmother was a college professor, and the last thing her fourth graders wanted was a lecture on World War two. But she said, oh of course, David, your grandmother could come. On the appointed day, the grandmother came with her daughter, David's mother and David, bringing the grandmother very proudly and the grandmother was introduced and she goes to the front of the class and she says with a slight accent, I was a Jewish child. I was born in Germany. And she said the kids just were riveted as she told about her escaping Germany during World War Two, escaping the Holocaust. And as she was talking, they heard a sound. The kids all turned around, and David's mother in the back of the room was crying. And she said, My mother never told me this before. I'd never heard my mother's story before. So now, I should have told this first because now the little boy who said she saw it was fresh eyes. He said it was like David was seeing his grandmother with fresh eyes. So doesn’t that - it's just the power of children's imagination and innocence and. And the power of a story and a true story. It just all goes together to make something wonderful.
Rachael: It does. And the fact that one story gives permission for another story to be told. And I found that a lot, particularly in the world of family history and personal storytelling, where, you know, we're all sitting here in a room, not thinking that we have anything in common because maybe outwardly we, you know, look like totally different people living in different parts of the world. But then when you start to get to the inner essence, I mean, one person just sharing an inner feeling like suddenly it gives everyone else permission. You know, it's even just like seeing the fox earlier where it's like suddenly, well, if you hadn't, you know, shared one piece then I share one, and then now suddenly you're like, oh –
Lois: Yeah, I gave you my butterfly. I got your wolf in return.
Rachael: Yeah, exactly. And it's beautiful.
Lois: I’ve got one more little bit of that particular teacher’s story because now it's all coming back to me what she told me. At the end of teaching this book, on the day she read the final chapter, she went and bought a necklace with a Star of David. She was not Jewish, but she found such a necklace, wore it without saying anything to the kids, and they recognized it instantly as the necklace on the book cover. And so she took it off. And as she read the last chapter, she gave it to one child and they passed it around the class. And she said as she was reading, she saw each child press the Star of David into the palm of their hand, the way it describes in the book that the child in the book, being questioned by the Nazi soldiers is hiding the necklace in her fist, and realizes later she's imprinted the Star of David on her palm, and she saw these kids do the same thing. That was years ago, she told me that story. So those kids would now be, I don't know. Say they're in their 20s or even 30s. Every one of them will remember the day. The imprint of the Star of David on their hand. That's my guess. My hope.
Rachael: Lois, you've been so generous with your time. I have one last question for you. We're recording this episode on a Friday afternoon. It's March 4th, 2022. We are just outside of Portland, Maine and although the sun is shining, it's particularly cold outside. Even though I know you said you haven't been outside yet today. And on this day and at this time, what is something that's happening right now, whether it's perhaps in your personal world or maybe in the larger community or culturally that you think will become a memory that outlives you.
Lois: Memory that outlives me. Oh, that's a hard one. You know, this is such a tough time that we're living in. And, I've not talked to my German family this week. But I've been thinking about them, so close to what's happening in Europe, and I guess that's the memory I'm going to take away from this week. My fears for the people who are suffering and not so much for myself, but for the generations of children who are growing up in this time and having to face what's happening in this world and wondering if there will ever be an end to it. That's a kind of depressing note to end on. I'd like to find some optimism in all of this, and perhaps it's out there, but I'm not seeing it yet today.
Rachael: Well, thank you. I'll say it again. Your books have changed my life, and I thank you for that and I thank you for The Giver, which has taught me the power of listening and having a reverence and respect for the memories of those who came before me. And for Number The Stars, which really is the only book as a child that I remember reading in school that my family history was reflected in. And I'll say before, and I'll keep saying it, you're amazing. And I love the strange way that life is full of unexpected relationships and friendships, and I'm just so grateful that we have built one of those.
Lois: Thank you. Me too.
Rachael: So now I'm wondering, can you give me a tour of your bookshelves?
Lois: You know, the bookshelves behind me are all books by me. When I downsized and gave away so many hundreds of books, I couldn't bring myself to give away my own. But I don't know what to do with them. So there they all sit. Not very exciting to look at.
Rachael: Well, for a superfan like me, so- [laughter]
Lois: In the other room are the bookcases. What I did keep was memoirs and collected letters, and it breaks my heart that there will not be any more volumes of collected letters because those are books that I have loved over the years. And of course, now, and I include myself. I don't write letters anymore. I write emails that people delete, and I receive emails that I delete and they're all gone.
OUTRO
A forever thank you to Lois Lowry who gifted me her time, her presence and her trust in being my very first guest on this show. At the start of this conversation we spoke about her recently published book On The Horizon: Memories of WWII which tells the story of the USS Arizona. The name of that ship was new to me at that time, but in the years since, it has become a history that feels deeply personal. I wrote about that for my newsletter and you can find the link in the show notes or by searching Along The Seam in the Substack App.
The start of season 2 of this show will be coming soon. Take a listen to our first season of episodes and learn more about the show and our guests at alongtheseam.com.
I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Thank you for joining the conversation.