Roxanne Veletzos
From Deborah Kalb's Q&A with Roxanne Veletzos, author of The Girl They Left Behind:
Q: Your novel is based on your own family history. What did you see as the right balance between the fictional and the historical as you wrote the book?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I must admit this did not come easily. Much of Romania’s history at the time was complex and volatile, and challenging at times to balance against the intensely personal stories of two families and the daughter they share.
In the end, I had to be careful not to encumber the plot, but rather to thread historical developments with a delicate hand, in a way that supported the characters’ experiences.
Q: How much did you know about your family's history as you were growing up?
A: I was 11 or 12 when I first found out that my mother was adopted—although it wasn’t until a few years later when our family moved to California that the full details of her adoption became known to me.
I remember my mother tearfully revealing one day, that as a toddler, she had been abandoned on the steps of an apartment building in late January of 1941, just as the nation’s capital had erupted into a wave of violence against the Jewish population, which later became known as the Bucharest Pogrom.
Unfortunately...[read on]
