Brooke Randel’s debut memoir Also Here is no ordinary personal history. Whereas most memoirs center on a single story – a focused, pivotal time in the author’s life – Randel’s remarkable debut contains multitudes, unfolding like a set of Matryoshka dolls. Or perhaps, more appropriately, the memoir reveals itself like dusty layers of a stalwart onion unearthed from the deep, cold ground. There is the sweet, tender, and often very funny story of Randel’s relationship with her idiosyncratic, multi-lingual yet illiterate grandmother, Golda Indig, set around a short visit to her south Florida condo. Inside that story lies Golda’s harrowing story of survival from Czechoslovakia to Romania to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the women’s labor camp, Christianstadt, from a DP camp in Germany to Canada and eventually, to the US. It’s a story stitched together from oral tidbits gathered over years and filled in with archival research.
As this search for her grandmother’s story becomes paramount, Also Here also becomes a moving meditation on craft, remembrance, and the limits and porousness of memoir. “We are built off our memories, what they hold and what they leak. How does one tell a leaky story? Is there any other kind?” asks Randel in her transporting tribute to Golda’s legacy.
With clear-eyed unsentimentality, Randel’s intimate account nonetheless leaves me longing for the untold stories of my own family. In a time when the last survivors are dying, Also Here gives voice to the voiceless through recorded testimony, making it a vital, intergenerational addition to the canon of Holocaust literature. I recently talked with Randel about her book.
Sara Lippmann
How and when did this project come about?
Brooke Randel
The idea was Golda’s and I’m still trying to understand the impetus, which remains a mystery to me. She was so evasive about the past for so many years. But I think she saw others write their stories and began to feel safe enough, and perhaps tired enough, to want to set down her silence. She took over a year to convince me to write about her, and I took nine years to interview, research, write/revise, write/revise, write/revise, and finally publish Also Here. Though the book is set over a half-week trip to Florida, we had conversations beyond that too, which helped me fill in (or complicate) details. What started as her idea soon became mine as I sunk myself into the memories and histories that I’d never had access to before.
Sara Lippmann
Your memoir straddles this in-between space: it is your grandmother’s story, but it is very much your story, too. There is a patchwork quality as you combine lived experience, memory, research, recordings, photos – even recipes! – with the substance of your own coming of age into independent adulthood. As you forge ahead, so too does Golda, in the various choices she made for survival – marriage, migration, etc. I love how the book’s movement reflects this dual ownership.
Brooke Randel
The structure mimics lived experience. So much of what I know about my grandma and her survival came to me in fragments and scraps. No one ever laid out the past in a simple, straightforward manner. Survival is not a place, but a pursuit, and Golda was still in it. I wanted to mimic some of that for the reader, for it to have this staccato nature, where you’re getting disparate pieces as I’m drawing the connections and context I so craved. The structure is representative of the gaps between us because while I wanted it all to make sense, Golda had sort of accepted that it cannot make sense. At the same time, it’s not a perfect mirror of the lived experience, which could be very frustrating, as I didn’t want the reader’s experience to be that way.
I also knew I wanted to include Golda’s voice—our interviews are woven throughout the book—but figuring out how to support those sections took a great deal of stitching and unstitching. I do some interpreting of her voice, but I also wanted to give it straight to the reader so you can hear how she processes without me as a filter. I wanted her voice to stand on its own. You could easily just read her parts, which she would be totally happy with, but I was invested in the scaffolding as well. I went through a lot of index cards, trying to find the right order for all these memories, stories and events. James McBride’s The Color of Water was a crucial source of inspiration for me.
Sara Lippmann
What was the most challenging aspect of this partnership? As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, did you ever feel tempted to recast this story with greater creative license as a novel?
Brooke Randel
I love fiction, but this story was always nonfiction. Memoir carries an element of oral history that’s particularly resonant for me. It’s someone saying this is what happened to me, not just this is what happens. The final stage of genocide is denial, so the book stands against that impulse of erasure. When I came across gaps in the narrative, rather than fill them, I wrote them into the book as one more part of the story.
Sara Lippmann
You encounter numerous obstacles: gaps wrought by trauma, memory loss, and language barriers. Some of this you fill in with historical records. (The chilling meticulousness of the Nazis always gets to me. How I know exactly what train my own relatives took, to which camp, on which date, etc.) But an incompleteness persists.
Brooke Randel
It’s tempting to be guided by what you know and dismiss what you don’t. But some of the gaps I faced were so central to the narrative that I couldn’t overlook them. I began to write about these leaks, how I approached my limitations or Golda’s or the (limitations of the) historical record, and how I maneuvered around, or through, or not. Sometimes a dead end was a dead end. From this experience, I discovered how seismic the impact had been. Just as violence had disrupted Golda’s life, so too had the destruction of documents, the absence of community, the isolation of statelessness and resettlement. These were the quieter, at times invisible, sides of survival, and it was only through leaving these gaps in the story did I realize how deep the ruptures ran.
Sara Lippmann
Is that what led you to weave other texts, like EJ Koh’s The Magical Language of Others, into the fabric?
Brooke Randel
I love reading memoir broadly, and I find I’m able to connect with people when they are talking about relationships because we all are dealing with relationships in different ways. EJ Koh is an author I love. Her themes of distance, isolation, connection, attempt at connection and failure: those are all present. The more widely I read the more I was able to see how, yeah, my book might be seen as a Holocaust book, but to me it’s a grandmother/granddaughter book at its heart. There’s so much to learn from other authors who are writing about relationships because those are universals beyond any particular historical moment or religion or ethnicity. Reading more broadly helped me make connections and understand my grandmother through other lenses. I also quote The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. There’s a beautiful line about surviving in that book (“There is surviving and then there is surviving the surviving”) which has absolutely nothing to do with surviving the Holocaust, but about surviving violence in your youth, which absolutely applied to my grandma’s experience. To be able to look wider and see how this type of experience in your fundamental youth can shape you was instrumental.
Sara Lippmann
Rebecca Makkai has a wonderful lecture on “the ear of the story” – the intended reader, and how this decision informs tone, language, word choice, etc. For all its specificity, your memoir speaks to anyone who’s ever tried to tell a family story, who may be grappling with the burden of that particular inheritance. It’s like you’re saying anyone can enter here. How much did you consider the “ear” as you were writing?
Brooke Randel
I both know and love this lecture, and considered the concept of “ear” quite a bit while writing. It can change so much about a story. For me, I wanted the book to find a readership beyond traditional Holocaust and WWII readers. Though I did a lot of Holocaust-era research, I ended up cutting a lot too because I wanted the historical details to be in service of the larger narrative, rather than become the narrative itself. I see Also Here as a relationship story first. Making the story accessible for a broader readership, creating an engaging, contemporary entry point to this otherwise harrowing history, was an early aim of mine.
Sara Lippmann
What is one of the biggest lessons Golda taught you?
Brooke Randel
Much of what I learned was by observing and making meaning as opposed to her telling. One thing I learned through observation was embracing contradiction. Nothing could be boiled down simply. At times I viewed her as a loud outgoing person and other times I realized she could be really quiet and withdrawn and kept things close to the chest, so I learned to let two sides be true. I also learned to go with the flow in the kitchen. Once I went over to her place to make her challah recipe and she was like, “open the flour and pour the whole thing in the bowl.” Like of course there was no set recipe. So I learned to use my hands, to improvise, to watch and observe and go with what you have.
Sara Lippmann
That reminds me of my German grandmother whose barely decipherable recipes in faded pencil amounted to little more than – “add butter, a little milk” – which taught me to trust instinct over measurement. And then what you said about holding two conflicting truths feels essential to humanity, to literature, to the essence of what character is about. Contradiction is what draws us. Being able to hold two truths.
Brooke Randel
I think part of it is not being so precious with the past that you have to preserve it exactly as it is. Sometimes, all you can get is a sense of it, and you can shape it a bit as you need it, and that is something I definitely got from my grandma. To follow your own intuition and senses and not to assume that as it’s given to you is as it is or as it should be forever.
Sara Lippmann
Have you ever traveled back to Golda’s hometown with her?
Brooke Randel
I’ve never visited Golda’s hometown or any of the camps she was in during the war. For me, spending time with the past always meant spending time with her. I wanted a personal experience, not a visceral one, so I traveled to south Florida for the book, where she had a one-bedroom condo, extra-large sofa and active social life. Maybe I’ll go to Sighet, Romania one day, but my impulse has always been for safety and distance. I get it from her.
Sara Lippmann
Despite her amazing proficiency in six languages, Golda is not a reader. In one of the most poignant memories in the book, young Brooke, armed with phonics, takes it upon herself to try to teach Bubbe to read, and is disappointed when the experiment fails.
Brooke Randel
We were both doing the best with what we had. I was so eager to help, but clearly in over my head. I was a third grader who’d been reading for two years; what did I know about teaching an illiterate adult? I didn’t understand trauma, war, displacement—and never thought to consider those things either. She enjoyed my company enough to overlook these faults and trudge through my lessons. I wish I could’ve empathized a bit more as a child, but I came around as an adult. Illiteracy is full of shame, no matter how brilliant or resilient a person may be. Golda was remarkably resourceful, and always found ways to get what she needed. Usually the secret was kindness. So many people liked her and were willing to help. She tried to master literacy, but never got where she wanted to go. But wow, did she try. I think she was marvelous in that regard.
Sara Lippmann
Did she ever offer any “feedback” on chapters? How is Golda doing?
Brooke Randel
Golda died two years ago. I so wish she could’ve held the book in her hands; she would’ve loved it. I know because I printed an early version of the manuscript at FedEx and she was so taken by this bound and floppy stack of papers. It meant so much to her. Since she couldn’t read, I read the manuscript aloud to her chapter by chapter and wrote about it for The Nasiona. Her favorite sections were the transcriptions of her own words (fair). I think we’re all trying to be seen or heard in one way or another. The book was beyond what she envisioned in terms of its honesty and breadth, but she never asked for changes.
Sara Lippmann
I’m so sorry, Brooke. I recently read a French book on grief (as one does) called Living With Our Dead, which I found gorgeous and nourishing, and keep returning to, particularly around the division of life and death, and the place of memory inside all of it. The author, Delphine Horvilleur, writes, “The role of a storyteller is to stand by the gate to ensure it stays open.” Did you ever feel called by a sense of obligation? We live in a time of AI, of Holocaust deniers, of revisionist manipulation and erasure of history. Did this factor into the exigency of the project?
Brooke Randel
I didn’t start with this sense of obligation and awareness, but I certainly met it while I wrote. Resisting ideas of supremacy requires active, collective effort, especially in a world where algorithms push and promote the most incendiary messages. I see real-world community and connection as a way to counteract division, and art can be a powerful tool in this. Writing Also Here helped me connect with my grandma, so I can only hope it will be helpful for others. We all need connection, and more of it.
NONFICTION
Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust
By Brooke Randel
Tortoise Books
Published December 10, 2024
