By Kyle Givens

Sometimes a book finds its way to you when you weren’t looking. My grandmother passed away six weeks before Also Here arrived on my doorstep. I didn’t intend to read straight through without stopping, but once I started whatever else I had to do felt less urgent.

I knew Brooke first as an editor before I knew her as a writer. There is no gap between those capacities. The same care and honesty that permeate her work with the writers she edits, suffuse her own writing. When her book came out, I sent her a note on how brilliant I thought it was, and then later when she asked if I would interview her, I accepted without hesitation. What follows is our correspondence on grandmothers, memory, legacy, and the limitations and contradictions in writing about family.

Kyle Givens: There’s the narrative of your grandmother and there’s your story with her and researching, but there’s also your interview transcripts with her, without attribution, which would have been unnecessary anyway because it’s clear when she’s speaking. Through the narrative I felt like I could understand her, but through the transcripts I could hear her. When did this structure begin to take shape for you?

Brooke Randel: From the start, I knew I wanted to incorporate Golda’s voice in Also Here because it’s one of my favorite parts of her—blunt, imperfect, charming, meaningful. I wanted the reader to hear her as I did, to hear what she was telling me and how. After my trip to Florida to interview her, the first thing I did was transcribe our interviews. Then, I started to play with how I could break them up and what pieces of narrative I could add in between to more fully tell the story.

You’ve worked on this book for years. How did the finished book differ from the book you set out to write?

Also Here took nine years to write, research and publish. In a lot of ways, it carries my initial vision, but with much more depth than I ever could’ve imagined. When I started, I thought I already knew my grandma and the story of how she survived the Holocaust. But what I learned through the process, again and again, was how little I knew, how much more nuance, detail and pain there was to excavate. How much loss. Part of what took me so much time was that I had to grow as a person, and then as a writer. I had to see where the book wanted to go and follow it there.

You write how there needed to be a distance, that being a grandchild provided that distance necessary to be able to receive the story from your grandmother, but also how the Shoah Foundation interviewer struggled because she didn’t know Golda. There’s a sense that you were far away from, but also close enough to her to tell her story.

It’s one of many contradictions that exists within the book, and within my relationship with my grandma. I felt close to her, but then something simple would happen, like a miscommunication at a hair salon, I’d realize how much I did not understand her, not at all. And that distance always frustrated me, but the deeper I went in my research and writing, I realized the value that distance can offer. Sometimes, and maybe even more often than that, the best view is not from the front row.

Also Here stands out for what’s left out as well. How does not visiting where your grandmother is from inform your narrative?

For me, there was never a plan to travel to Europe for the book. I always saw my grandma as my access point to the past, rather than any physical place or documentation. Her community was destroyed during World War II, so traveling to those areas would only reveal an outline to me, or a shadow, or a gulf. All of which she carried with her, that I felt in her presence anyway. Another, perhaps deeper, part of this stylistic choice comes from an impulse within me, one I inherited from my elders, that says to stay away. That those places are not for me. So, the type of reclamation I seek in the book is one of memory and story, not place. It may seem strange to talk about Florida in a memoir about the Holocaust, but it was much more present in our lives and I wanted the work to reflect that. We were navigating strip malls and casinos together, not concentration camps. Things could be funny and sad.

Food plays such a large role in this book. I especially loved the writing on creamish, a dessert that traces its creation through languages and history that was distinctively Golda’s. And there’s creamish, one of my favorite sections of the book. After going through the history and language and the distinctiveness of the dessert, – which you provide a recipe for – what comes out is that this could have only come through Golda’s history. And yet so much remains inscrutable. Between your experience of this growing up, and your writing about it, doing the history, how do you write into these gaps?

This was a question of mine throughout my writing. How do you write into a gap? Like wet concrete, hoping to fill it? Or maybe like sand, knowing you won’t? I did a lot of reading and research for this book and for the chapter about food, I did a lot of baking too. Once I went over to my grandma’s apartment to bake challah. I asked her how much flour to put in the bowl and she told me to dump the whole thing in. There was no way that was the recipe, she just wanted to use what she had. And she was a good enough baker to adjust based on other factors—how it looked, felt, smelled. The bread turned out beautifully. So how do you write into a gap? I think you try is all. You use what you have, you look for more, you acknowledge the gap, you acknowledge your limits, your pour yourself in and see what comes out.

You ask your grandmother what people can take away from her story and she replies, “They can only listen. What can you take away?” What do you hope people will take away from this story?

My grandma’s answer has come to inform my own. For one, I want to leave my writing open enough that readers can decide for themselves what to take. I think that’s part of the beauty of literature, that it’s ultimately a dialogue. The reason I hold my grandma’s words so closely is that they reveal where the power of storytelling comes from: the listener. It is a gift to listen to someone, to hear their story and hold a piece of it in your heart. Revelation can be as simple as that.

This is as much for you as an editor as a writer, what do you want to see in new writing, especially in non-fiction? What would you say to writers starting out in non-fiction?

I’ve been privileged to read a lot of non-fiction in the last few years, both for my own writing and in my role as prose editor for Chestnut Review. What I love about the genre is how expansive it can be, exploring a single moment or an entire movement, throwing the reader in the middle of a scene, experimenting with form, structure, order. There are many writers wrestling with non-fiction and testing what it can do. I’d encourage others to read widely and explore their own ideas with an open mind. There is no one way to tell the truth.

You’ve been quite prolific the last few years. What comes next?

This is a very generous question! Perhaps I look prolific from the outside, but I rarely feel that way. Maybe I should? I’m currently working on a new project and it’s in that early messy phase where making progress often feels like getting stuck in the mud. But I’m in there, churning.

Brooke Randel is a writer, editor and associate creative director in Chicago. She is the author of Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, she writes on issues of memory, trauma, family and history. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.

Kyle Givens is a writer from Arlington, TX, where he lives with his wife, three children, a dog, and a couple birds. He is a Prose Reader at The Chestnut Review, and is at work on a novel set in Depression era Texas.