By Patricia Grady Cox
I am a proponent of the idea that there are no “small stories.” Everyone’s life is interesting, with drama and tragedies and obstacles overcome. I’ve written five personal histories for customers and every one of them was fascinating: stories of World War II, stories of being left in an orphanage during The Great Depression, stories of running away from home as a young child. But sometimes you do hear a story that is beyond the pale, a story that needs to be written down.
I heard Helen Handler speak at a special emphasis program at my place of employment many years ago. Helen, a teenager at the time of World War II, survived Nazi concentration camps that destroyed all of her immediate family. Yet Helen went on to marry, have a son, own her own business, advocate for remembrance of the Holocaust, and now continues to speak about her experiences even into her eighties. I thought, “Somebody needs to write this woman’s life story.” Now someone has. The Risk of Sorrow by Valerie Foster takes a unique approach to writing a memoir. The subtitle of the book explains: Conversations with Holocaust Survivor, Helen Handler.
Cover of The Risk of Sorrow – Conversations with Holocaust survivor, Helen Handler
In my personal histories, I go to great lengths to make the memoir appear to be solely the work of my customer. My name doesn’t appear anywhere, and I try my best to maintain the voice of the subject. My goal is to be invisible. Ghost-written biographies follow the same approach.
But Valerie is very much a part of this book. I’ve never seen a life story presented in that style. Helen’s comments, sometimes several paragraphs or even pages long, are within quotation marks, and Valerie’s questions and reactions are included as a part of the book. So I contacted Valerie and asked why she chose this way to present Helen’s story.
Valerie and Helen have known each other for several years. Valerie, a high-school English teacher, had invited Helen to speak to her classes and, when Valerie retired, Helen asked her to write her story. Despite feeling that she had no idea what she was doing, Valerie jumped in.
Helen and Valerie’s first conversation when Helen visited Valerie’s class at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Ariz.
“The very first day we began this, I realized that Helen’s off-the-cuff speech is as eloquent, poignant, and stirring as when she speaks in public. And as I asked her questions, I felt they were as important as the answers. We just had such rich conversations.” Valerie is an admirer of Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth), and on her second visit with Helen had what she describes as an epiphany.
“I instantly envisioned the whole book. Two women tackling difficult subjects and ideas as one shares her testimony with the other,” Valerie says. Although the huge differences in their backgrounds would present an intriguing surround for the story, and Valerie felt that her questions were as important as Helen’s answers, she says, “I never wanted to distract the readers toward me. This is Helen’s story. I’m writing this for Helen. But having this secondary voice was, I felt, a way for the reader to relate. I always wanted to play the Everyman here; what would the average person ask a Holocaust survivor if they could? How would the average person feel about this? How might it change them?”
Valerie’s goal was to “bring the reader up close and intimate.” She wanted to invite readers who wouldn’t normally be aware of what happened under the Nazi regime. “I wanted it to be about post-Holocaust, too. There are many stories about survivors, but they’re usually relegated to the war itself.”
In telling Helen’s story, Valerie has achieved a very readable and compelling flow. I was curious as to how much she had managed the direction of the interviews and what her process had been that resulted in such a well-organized manuscript.
“Oh my gosh, this is the best question of all, and one I’ve been wanting to share with other writers, because it was a behemoth of a task!” Valerie says.
Any of us who has interviewed people for any writing project, or has written personal histories, can relate to Valerie’s eye-opening experience. “You see, Helen jumps all around when she talks. For example, she might mention the conditions of the barracks in Auschwitz during one chat with me, then refer back to that again 35 more times through the course of conversations! Each time she might add more, or clarify, or say it even better. I taped for 2 years. It was verbal spaghetti. My next step was to personally transcribe every taped conversation. Then I printed it all out. Saw the mess it was in. Color-coded with a highlighter to group topics together. Then I had to get a second computer from work and re-arrange everything. Then came the actual sit-down-and-write. That actually seemed like the easy part. Whew!”
Signing at the book’s debut, Chandler Center for Performing Arts, Chandler, Ariz.
And although Valerie says the arrangement of the transcribed interviews came from a logical progression, “through Holocaust and her life from there—then to the now,” and were not arranged for dramatic effect, the end result is very dramatic. The chapter entitled “Reunion,” which takes place toward the end of the book and very much in present time, actually illustrates Helen’s experience in a most profound and emotionally moving way, in a way that perhaps would have been less so if not so skillfully foreshadowed. This chapter, although most personal to Helen, was written almost entirely from Valerie’s point of view.
The Risk of Sorrow, of course, was not intended as a personal history project, nor is it a typical biography or memoir. Valerie has documented not only Helen’s life but her own reaction to it (and by proxy, our reaction).
Who is risking sorrow here? Surely not Helen Handler. She lives with sorrow every day of her life, ever since she stepped off that boxcar at Auschwitz and was told to step to the right while the rest of her family stepped to the left.
It was Valerie who took the risk and, by doing that, invites us to also risk feeling the sorrow, horror, and even guilt over this terrible time in human history. It was Valerie who was changed by this six-year experience. She says, “Spending all of this intimate time with Helen, and this subject, has not toughened me on the subject [of genocide], but made me even more sensitive. I cannot get through many a movie now when it deals with the Nazis, for example. I cried watching Woman in Gold recently and had to walk out of The Book Thief because I see my dear friend in each.”
Valerie and Helen
In her introductory speech when she and Helen make appearances, Valerie says, “It’s easy for us all to avoid running the risk of sorrow. But we need to keep taking those risks of listening and learning, because the payoff is immeasurable. The payoff is enlightenment and understanding.”
"I Remember When . . ." 