{"id":38284,"date":"2022-02-11T01:44:17","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T09:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=38284"},"modified":"2022-02-10T15:49:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T23:49:07","slug":"novel-informed-by-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2022\/02\/11\/novel-informed-by-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Novel informed by life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alina Adams, author of The Nesting Dolls, spoke at a recent Zoom webinar organized by the Jewish Community Centre of Victoria. (photo from alinaadams.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

New York City-based writer Alina Adams, author of the 2020 novel The Nesting Dolls<\/em> \u2013 about three generations of Russian-Jewish women \u2013 spoke at a Jan. 27 Zoom webinar organized by the Jewish Community Centre of Victoria.<\/p>\n

Adams began with her personal story. Born in the port city of Odessa, she spent the first seven years of her life in a communal apartment: a dwelling, including kitchen and bathroom, that was shared by two families.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I mention in The Nesting Dolls<\/em>, these relationships were not always positive. My parents were lucky in that they got along well with the people they were assigned to share with,\u201d said Adams.<\/p>\n

In 1976, her parents decided to emigrate. Two years earlier, the United States had passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked U.S. trade with the free movement of Jews and other groups in the Communist bloc.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like to say we were traded for wheat,\u201d Adams quipped.<\/p>\n

To those leaving the USSR, she said, \u201cit was like stepping off the edge of the earth. You didn\u2019t know where you were going, you didn\u2019t know what life would be like when you were there, and you certainly knew you couldn\u2019t come back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family\u2019s first stop was Vienna. From there, they took a bus to Rome, where they stayed for four months before traveling on to North America in January 1977, first to New York and then to San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Adams recounted some of the reactions upon coming to America in the 1970s as a young child: for example, the surprise of watching a television screen in full colour. It was television, namely soap operas, that Adams later credited for helping her learn English.<\/p>\n

The young immigrant started out in a Jewish day school, where the differences in various customs \u2013 her life in the new versus the old world \u2013 became very apparent. Parents in North America, she recalled, did not send their kids to school in the same dress every day; they used Band-Aids instead of green antiseptic to treat cuts; and, if their child had the sniffles, they did not place the child\u2019s feet in hot water and then into socks filled with dried mustard.<\/p>\n

Over time, Adams and her family got the hang of life in America. She graduated high school and college. All along, she knew she wanted to be a writer.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents claim my first words were \u2018pencil\u2019 and \u2018paper,\u2019\u201d said Adams. \u201cAnd what\u2019s the advice all writers get? Write about what you know. Well, what did I know? I knew about being a Soviet immigrant. I knew about living a culture that wasn\u2019t mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Publishers, at first, were not interested in those themes. Nonetheless, an editor at Avon Publishing did like her writing and contacted Adams, asking if she would write a Regency romance. This would become The Fictitious Marquis<\/em>, a unique book in the Regency romance genre in that Jews are central characters.<\/p>\n

Adams now has more than a dozen titles to her credit, including mysteries, books on figure skating (non-fiction) and other romances.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>About four years ago, Adams\u2019 literary agent told her that editors were becoming interested in Russia, and this led Adams to write The Nesting Dolls<\/em>. The novel begins in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and ends in 21st-century, pre-pandemic Brighton Beach, in New York City. It focuses on the lives of three generations of Russian Jewish women in one family; the periods parallel those of Adams\u2019 grandmother, mother and herself.<\/p>\n

For Adams, it is the everyday events that are the most fascinating part of writing historical fiction. \u201cAnyone can look up which date Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, but it is the small details which make historical fiction compelling,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

As an example, she pointed to a personal account she used in the novel. According to her mother, Adams did not want to be breastfed. This caused her mother to go to a doctor and ask him to write up a prescription for yogurt. \u201cThese are the little things, in this case how difficult it was to get regular foodstuffs in the Soviet Union, that bring a situation to life and show the reader what an era was like,\u201d said Adams.<\/p>\n

The novel was scheduled to be released in 2019 but was delayed to 2020, which, for Adams, turned out to be a blessing for the story\u2019s timeline, in that she wasn\u2019t finishing it during the pandemic. The last section of the book takes place in pre-pandemic Brooklyn in summer. \u201cThe things my characters do in the summer of 2019, they could not have done in the summer of 2020,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Adams lives in New York with her husband and their three children. She has written about her interracial, interfaith and intercultural family for\u00a0Interfaith Family Magazine<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0the Forward<\/em>,\u00a0and has written columns and articles for dozens of publications.<\/p>\n

Sam Margolis<\/strong> has written for the <\/em>Globe and Mail, the <\/em>National Post, UPI and MSNBC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alina Adams, author of The Nesting Dolls, spoke at a recent Zoom webinar organized by the Jewish Community Centre of Victoria. (photo from alinaadams.com) New York City-based writer Alina Adams, author of the 2020 novel The Nesting Dolls \u2013 about three generations of Russian-Jewish women \u2013 spoke at a Jan. 27 Zoom webinar organized by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38285,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[21244,356,4526,21245,3592,3034,21246,7381],"class_list":["post-38284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-alina-adams","tag-immigration","tag-memoir","tag-romance-novels","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-victoria-jcc","tag-writing"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}