The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 157 - Galina Vromen

JOHN

Today, the Musical Innertube welcomes a great friend of the podcast, author Galina Vroman. Galena is a long-time international journalist, nonprofit executive, and author. She has had works on Selected Shorts on NPR and in journals including the Adirondack Review and Tikkun. We’re so excited to talk about her new novel, Hill Of Secrets. Welcome Galena Vroman.

GALINA

Thank you so much. What a pleasure to be here.

JOHN

You bet! Listen, Galena, let me situate your novel so our listeners can follow along. It takes place generally between 1943 and 45, mostly at or near Los Alamos. Its central figures are people, which include two couples, a young woman who is the daughter of one of the couples who come to be part of the atomic bomb project. But this is not about flashes and booms. Those don't happen here. We hear about them. But the blasts are off center stage. Instead, what we see is a drama, and sometimes a tragedy, about people trying to live somehow amid a culture of secret keeping.  People withhold what they know or prevaricate, avoid or lie to keep from telling the truth, either about the research or about their lives and relationships, and we see secrets and secret keeping tearing up the personal and social fabric. That seems so original to me, and I don't think many male authors would have written this kind of novel in that kind of setting. Can you talk about how that idea came to you?

GALINA

Well, it actually came to me in sort of two streams. One is that I've always been very, as far as I can remember myself, concerned about nuclear war and the use of nuclear weapons. So that was one thing that's always interested me. And the other thing is that really the whole. Issue of secrets. There's a tendency, I think, in the modern world, in today's world, to say, you know, you shouldn't hold back. You should reveal yourself. You should tell people the truth all the time, and I come from a European background. My parents are Europeans and they're very buttoned up in Europe. You don't hang your laundry out, you don't really tell people what's going on with you. And so, I became kind of fascinated with this issue of when is secret keeping a good thing and when is it a bad thing? When is it too much information? And so, the two things actually coalesced. And the other thing, the other aspect of that is very often, families have secrets that you kind of know about, but you don't really know what it is, you know, there's something that you're not quite sure what it is. And then I had a conversation with a college friend, and he's an American historian, and he was talking about a a paper that one of his students had written about the wives at Los Alamos and what they knew and what they didn't know. And I thought that was really fascinating. And so, I thought this whole theme of secrets and keeping secrets, to put it in the most secret place of the United States and have it where there's a huge, big secret going on and to juxtaposition, though, that big secret with the little secrets to raise the issue of secrecy would just work for me. And I also, you know, had lived in Israel for many years and a kibbutz is a place that has a lot of stuff going on. I mean, I was a journalist and one of the best stories I did was a series on modern kibbutz life, and one of the things about interviewing for it was you would ask people a question and you learned more from their silence in not answering it than from what they did say. So this whole issue of this kind of Peyton Place-y kind of thing, of the small community, and what goes on, you know, was also something that fit into my in my interest in in all of this.

DON

It's interesting too, because it's very timely with the Oppenheimer picture coming out a couple of years ago, that we have all that intrigue, but what you've done is you've taken your mind's eye the camera, if you will, that the book provides and just turned it around 180° so that now instead of seeing all of the stuff that's going on behind the closed doors to invent the atomic bomb, you're seeing what's happened to all of the other people outside who are involved in it, whether they like it or not, all the families that were dragged from wherever they were comfortable to Los Alamos, NM, which is by all accounts, not a very comfortable place to live. So that that was an interesting twist, to go away from the big secret. And you're right, to all the little secrets that were happening in the village itself.

GALINA

Well, I really lucked out that the Oppenheimer movie came out around the time that I finished the book. because for the for all the years that I've been working on it and people say, what's your book about? And I would say Los Alamos, and most people didn't know what I was talking about, and then the Oppenheimer movie came out, and there was all of a sudden a lot of interest in it. And that was really just a stroke of luck. Because I've been working on this for way, way, way longer - I mean probably with working on it before they even started working on the movie. So that was what really helped the fact that the book got sold.

JOHN

You know, it's interesting, too, is what you just mentioned. A lot of people know that the United States was first to create an atomic bomb, and we are still the only country to have used that in anger, in a war. We used it to encourage Japan to surrender. And as you make so abundantly clear toward the end of your novel, there was a lot of time between the German surrender and the Japanese surrender, and in fact the bombs fell after many had capitulated. And there was a real sense in both cases, and certainly for a few days after even the second bomb dropped, there's a real sense of we don't really know what happens next. And I think that's really beautiful in your book how everyone's up in the air a lot. They're up in the air all the time anyway, because all the scientists go up to the mesa where all the good stuff's going on and. And their children and their husbands and wives have to sort of sit around and try to think of ways to have conversations without asking the wrong questions. And most people here don't know when you said Los Alamos, they didn't know what that meant.

GALINA

Some people thought it was Los Alamos, Texas, anyway, so.

JOHN

That's one Alamo, right? What is that, “willow tree” or something in Spanish? It's, you know, it's interesting, I think the movie does a pretty good evocation of life there. But it's interesting that that memory really isn't really strong, you know, among us today.

GALINA

I think part of it is actually, the whole Manhattan Project, the whole building of the bomb, actually took place in three places. Different parts of it were allocated in different parts of America. There was Oak Ridge, TN. There was a facility in Washington state, and then there was Los Alamos. So, there are three places where various parts of it were happening, but I think Los Alamos was really the most dramatic of them because that's where they really  did the test, and the truth of the matter is - and talking about what people didn't know - this isn't in the book, but it is true that the scientists had bet on what was going to be the power of the of the of the bombs when they tested it and they were off by like a hundredfold. They had no idea! First of all, the estimates among the scientists themselves had a huge range, and then they were off. They had no idea until they tested it.

DON

Also, there's an interesting evolution, I guess I want to say, from the scientists that are working on the bomb and their families back in Los Alamos, in the in the little village there. Those scientists who are working on the bomb come in very eager, and as the days go on, they get worse and worse, they get more troubled. They see what's happening, they see what they're doing, and it troubles them, and it makes them a little upset. On the other hand, some of the other characters in there, the wives and the and the others that that are interacting in the village, start to keep secrets, not the big secret, because they're never told anything. So just the little, you're right, the Peyton Place secrets that come up when any group of people is forced to live together, and they seem more comfortable by the end of the book in keeping those secrets. So, it's kind of those two groups and they kind of grow apart about how keeping secrets is making them feel.

GALINA

That's really true. I hadn't sort of thought about that, as going into different directions, but yes, that that is absolutely true.

JOHN

Well, thank you.

JOHN

 Don has his moments, let me just say, when he hits the nail on the head.

DON

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Please tip your waitress on the way out!

GALINA

That's one of the most fun things about discussing what you write with people, is what they see in it. I mean, you know, I've written short stories before where people told me all the symbolism in my stories, which was OK. No, I'll take it.

JOHN

Yeah.

GALINA

Things that that actually may subconsciously have been symbolism, but I didn't think about it when writing it so this is this is one example of that.

JOHN

You would have loved it last night after I finished the novel -Christi ate it up in a couple of days when it first got to the house - and I was finishing.

DON

Christi is John's wife, by the way.

JOHN

Yes, sorry I should have her on some time. That would be a great half hour and I'd leave the room.

DON

I wouldn’t even have to show up. You guys could just talk.

JOHN

And we were lying in bed last night just talking about your book. You would have loved to be there. We talked an awful lot about what the people in the novel radiate, in other words, not just themselves. They reach out into other areas. They move people for their own reasons, and we were talking a lot about this notion of honesty and how it is so prized in American Society. And I think the embodiment of that in your novel is Gerty, who is a young woman just coming into her own, who falls in love. Her parents don't like it. And toward the end of the novel, she's figured out just about everything. Not absolutely everything, but just about everything. And she's deciding she's going to confront some people in the future, so there'll be more bomb blasts beyond the novel. So, I'm wondering, you split your time between Europe and the United States, this notion that you should always be open about everything which is still, it's sort of an American value. I mean, does it seem to Europeans naive? Does it seem misled? What do you think?

GALINA

Well, I think the rest of the world tends to be shocked by you. Like, you know, you can get on a plane with an American - or at least you used to before everybody was using social, looking into their computers - and they would tell you the most amazing things about, you know, anything, from their relationship, to their rape, incest, divorces, anything. And then you'd get off the plane and they'd go pick up their suitcase and you'd go pick up yours and you were on your way, and you never saw them again. Let me put it this way, for non-America, that's totally shocking. I don't know, I think it's a way of creating a sense of intimacy, but it's kind of strange because I don't know what it really does ultimately. And I think Europeans are much, much more about requiring time to get to a point where you can tell people these things, and even then, a lot of people won't tell you everything. They will hint at things, you will know sort of in the in the way of kind of knowing but not knowing. And I don't know what's better. And I think it's not that there's one that is better and that one and that it's not. I think it's really situational. There are situations where, really, too much information is too much information. I don't know what, for example, children have to know about their parents’ past, if their past has been abusive, and I don't know what you need to know about your spouse, in certain cases, for the relationship to actually flourish. So, I think one of the questions that I do ask in the novel is, when are lies self-serving and when are they actually justified in terms of being more harmful to the person hearing the secret, not whether it's more harmful to the person telling the secret than not having that information, and I think that's something. And I think also in the background of this is the whole thing of this atom bomb, because it's a war, it's created in secrecy. I mean, America discovers that it has this incredible bomb, and it's never something that is discussed as part of social policy. It just kind of happens. If you think about the discussions that were had about civilian nuclear energy, and how fraught that discussion was. Do you want a plant? Do you not know what a plant uses for nuclear energy? And on the other hand, in this very, very extreme and important use of atomic energy, there's never been a public discussion about it.

JOHN

No, there never was. Never.

GALINA

There never was. There never will be because of the situation and how good or bad is that? And I think one of the things that certainly in the world that we live in today and with the dangers that live in the world today, the issue of the of the deliberation before the use of this weapon is one that I would say needs to be on the public, you know, in the public domain and not something that is exclusively decided behind closed doors.

JOHN

That's it's interesting because, just to return to Gertie for just a moment, she's the person from whom I wouldn't say the most is being kept, but the different kinds of secrets are being kept. Her parents, Kurt and his wife - Kurt, by the way, is one of the physicists I believe at work on the bomb - when he comes home, he can't tell anybody about the work he's doing. And of course, Gertie wants to know all about it. She's sort of heard about something called “The Gadget,” which is the nickname by which the atomic bomb is going through the camp. But her parents also have the fact that they have left war-torn Europe, leaving their family behind. And both of them are wracked, wondering about their fates, and one of them comes very close to madness with the legacy of not knowing what has happened. So, they don't want to inflict that on their child, which, by the way, is one of the prevarications or lies of omission you feel most sympathetic to in the novel. You don't want to tell your kids that all the worst stuff that that could ever happen to people is happening right now, just across the ocean. You don't really want to do that, so she really is, in a way, the center of all the secret keeping. And she still believes in goodness, she still believes in good things. She's thoroughly, in in some ways, for a kid who's an immigrant, she's thoroughly American.

GALINA

Well, first, I mean it is important to know that that her family, they're Jewish refugees from Germany. But I think that the whole thing that I'm really trying to posit here is the naive belief that ruth and not keeping secrets is always the best route, so she's the true believer in this in this thing, and that's why she is the young person, because she doesn't have effectively the sophistication to just to really say, well, sometimes you do want to keep things going and sometimes you don't. And so that's kind of why it's in her, and also I think the curiosity of a teenager. I mean, teenagers, they always think that everybody's trying to keep everything from them, and they really think that being adult is figuring out what everybody's keeping from them.

JOHN

They're not wrong. They're not wrong.

GALINA

So, it's kind of age appropriate as well. I don't think, I didn't posit her as being like the ultimate American versus her European background in that sense.

DON

Christine is actually the main character that you follow through the book, and she is one, if I go back to one of my original statements, that has secrets to keep, and is by the end of the novel much more comfortable in keeping those secrets than she was at the beginning, would you agree with that?

GALINA

Absolutely. And, actually, you know, I've been recently reading about the science of lying. And it's very interesting. Neurologically, the more we lie, the less we need to use our frontal cortex to do it. The more and more the more automatic we become at it.

DON

Sure. So, you're describing Donald Trump, is what you're doing.

GALINA

It's actually true. The more you lie, the more comfortable you become doing it, and the less mental part of your brain you need to use to manufacture the lie. You're good at it. So yeah, she does. She does become, she does take on bigger and bigger secrets.

JOHN

What are you hearing from your readers? Are you're hearing anything about their response to the characters in the book?

GALINA

Well, people do like the characters. By and large, I would say it's very gendered. It's very interesting. There are very few male readers. And they also give the most negative reviews. But the positive ones are really  drawn to the characters, and they are drawn to the geography of the place and the descriptions of daily life there. And you know, really, I think it gives a very vivid portrayal of what life was like there. And I did a lot of research. And they did have a very rich cultural life. There were pianists among them, and musicians among them, and Oppenheimer himself liked to act. He actually played in "Arsenic and Old Lace.” He was the dead body at the end. I didn't put that in the book. I figured nobody would believe it. It was, like, not credible in the novel.

DON
Stranger than truth!

GALINA

So, that was real. And I think that is the thing that people like, and they and I think the characters resonate with them. And I think the larger questions which I do get to, I touch on them at the end without delving deeply into them, because I think that sometimes to get people to think about serious questions, you don't have to hammer them over the head. And you know the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima is coming up next August. And I really think that it's a good time to sort of think about where we are with all this stuff. And I think that really, you know, hit them over the head hard kind of approach is not going to get people to talk as much as a kind of leave things in the air a little bit approach, which is the one that I took.

JOHN

We want to talk a little bit about some of the efforts you went to establish the time and place where this takes place. First of all, Maria Martinez is a maker of pots, an indigenous woman who lived near Los Alamos, and Christine befriends her and offers to become her – basically, a salesman of her work. Where did you come across Martinez's story? She's a real person, and her work is very highly valued today. And it does center this the novel so wonderfully. She's not a peripheral figure. She really is, in a sense, sort of the voice of the area in a different direction. And she's had some losses herself recently, her husband is has passed away. He died very young. And I was just wondering where you found out about her, because when I saw that pop up in the book I said, oh my goodness.

GALINA

I actually can't remember. I've always loved pottery. I've always been interested in pottery myself. And I don't remember where I first read about her, because I've been really - I started researching this book about 20 years ago. I ended up reading a couple of biographies of her and, though she's an interesting character and I made-up this whole thing about, you know, her having a relationship with Christine, the truth of the matter is that that's all made-up. But it turns out that the person who first promoted her was in fact a white woman about the age of Christine, who was the wife of the guy who started the Marriott Hotel chain. And she was interested in promoting that part of the country. And so, she had a sort of a commercial interest in promoting Maria Martinez, so that, I mean, this is one of those things where you know, and you don't know kind of thing. So, I sort of intuited this whole relationship. And then I discovered later that there actually was a very similar kind of relationship. But I honestly do not remember where I first read about her.

JOHN

She plays such an interesting role in Christine's life because Christine is most recently from New York City. And at first, at least, she ain’t like in the desert very much. She gets to love it, and I think Maria helps her to become centered. What I like is that you avoid all of the pitfalls of a non indigenous person writing about indigenous people. You don't impute to her any magical powers, but there's something about Maria that is centered in a way that Christine needs to find. She has to do it for herself.

GALINA

There's some video clips of Maria Martinez.  I got to see those, and I got to hear, to see her. She didn't really talk English very well, and so in most of the videos she does not like to speak a lot, she lets her family speak for her. But. But you do get the descriptions of how she looks, and how she's kind of very pithy in what she says, that really did come through in the video clips that I did see. And yeah, it was fun to discover, and I think really writing about the daily life gave me an opportunity to talk about the people that were not acknowledged as having been at Los Alamos, There were a lot of Spaniards and a lot of Native Americans who did the shit work, the grunt work of construction and of keeping the furnaces going in the in the ovens that were fueling the operations.

DON

There are some very evocative sections of the book there where you talk about the locals showing up for work. They don't live in Los Alamos, they live outside, but they're bused in, and they show up for work. And it's all as maids and gardeners and the usual sort of thing.

GALINA

They really did, the folks at Los Alamos, really the scientists, had actually a very good relationship with the locals. They had, like, even cultural evenings where the Native Americans came and danced, and then they had parties together, actually, and there were pictures of, you know, Edward Teller hanging around with Maria Martinez.

JOHN

Oh my God.

GALINA

So it's like it, it was, you know, they were friendly, they were really friendly.

DON

Have you spent a lot of time in Los Alamos in order to pick up the flavor of that?

GALINA

I spent a week.

DON

1. OK, but at least you've been there.

GALINA

I've been there.

DON

At least you're not talking out of turn. It was an interesting part of the novel for me to have these two German Jewish immigrants, and they were as scared of the US government guards, if you will, as they were for what was happening in Nazi Germany. In other words, it was very, very tough for the woman at some point in the novel to discern that she wasn't being followed by government G men. And it was just very ironic that the government secrecy was along the same lines, as, you know, the kind of “follow you home to your doorstep and listen and listen and eavesdrop” that the Nazis were doing.

GALINA

Well, there is definitely the irony that, you know, here was this community that's raison d'être was to create a bomb to assure the continuation of democracy in the world, the right to a free world, and their lives were incredibly unfree. It was a military base. All their letters were censored. They had some point – actually, I didn’t get this into the novel - but they at some point had some kind of local council. There was one point, for example, when there was - this is historically true, but, again, I didn’t put it in the book - there was a dog with rabies, and the army wanted to have everybody get rid of their dogs.

DON

Wow.

GALINA

Kill all the dogs at Los Alamos? There was, like an uprising, people saying just, no!  That's a chapter that got kicked out. Something had to go. But it really it really was very restrictive. They had to fine scientists who left papers out and didn't put them in a safe at night, you could get fined for that kind of stuff.  It was a very closed and strict and this whole thing of having to show your passes and renew your passes and all that stuff. And then they the different kinds. I didn't go into this a lot in the book, but you had a different kind of pass depending on where you were allowed to go on the base.

JOHN

 I wanted to compliment you on your choice of period music. Pop music, especially the selection of “Powder Your Face With Sunshine.” Now it's a little bit out of time by two or three years. It's actually late 40s, early 50s when it was a hit. Still, it does have something to do with this story, because the lyrics were written by a man who was recovering from very serious injuries during World War Two. And he sat down, and he was broke, and so in his hospital bed, he wrote these lyrics, and then he gave it to Guy Lombardo, of all people, to write the music. And I said to myself, I have to ask Gelena where she got some of these songs. I'm, you know, I'm a song maven, so, you know, I'm going to know.

GALINA

That kind of embarrassed me because that's the only song that is historically - to my horror, when I actually put it on my website - oops, it was two years later than what I have in my book. But, wow, only a song maven like you would, like, pick up on that song.

JOHN

Exactly. I'm sorry, I ruined the party.

GALINA

But anyway, I think the truth of the matter is, it's all on Google. I mean, you just look up songs of the 40s. And the unfortunate thing was because of copyright on music and stuff like that, I couldn't put the lyrics in the book. The original manuscript had a lot of the lyrics in the songs. Each of them was chosen with a very specific reason because of what's happening in this situation or in that scene relates to the song. They're very, very specifically chosen for that. And unless you're really into the music, you won’t know that. Which is why I put the songs on my website. That gets lost because I couldn't, for the reason of getting copyright, I couldn't put the lyrics in the book.

JOHN

I like the way that you did that, because the songs often, although they're in the background - or people are dancing in one room to it, while a big conversation is happening in the foreground - the songs thematically guide you in some ways, if you know if you know what they're about. And I just, I just love that.

GALINA

Right.

JOHN

I thought it was brilliant.

GALINA

The one that really shocked me - when I listened to it and I just said I have to use this one – is, “I'd rather have a paper doll girl than a real-life woman,” and it's like you can't get more misogynist, you know, like, it's the symbol of the times. We swear we can't even imagine the song playing today. And so, really I was trying to give, you know, the sense of really what it was like,  what the sentiments were about. About the war and about gender stuff at the time. And yeah, I really, you know, I do hope that people if they use the book for book clubs and things like that, will actually listen to the songs because I think there is a reason for each one that we've done very deliberately.

DON

And the relationship between Christine and her husband - her husband is one of the guys working on the bomb - actually is very, very realistic. I don't want to say that that there's any kind of caricature in there. I know you want to make a division between men and women and living at that time and what everybody believed and what they thought the role of the man and the woman is. But it's very flexible, really, between the two of them, they both, actually, deep down, want what's best for the other one. And so, the man, although they do have fights and disagreements, the man doesn't come off as a total misogynist bore. He’s still there for her. And I thought that was an interesting play in their relationship.

GALINA

I tried really hard with him, because people kept telling me, he's such a horrible guy. I'll make him nicer. I kept trying to make him nicer so that so that, I mean, it's another thing is that, you know, I think in the book you want to have characters that even if they like, do terrible things or they're really kind of horrible person, you do want your reader to, bottom line, see their humanity. So I think that was really very important to me to try and beef him up and make him an okay guy after all.

JOHN

I think I think to their credit, both Kurt and Thomas, although they sort of discount their wives very seriously in the beginning of the story, come to, I think, a fuller recognition of them in their own ways. I'm not going to say that Thomas is ever going to change. He's always going to be a guy who's super smart and knows it. And so, it can be a real pain to live with a person like that. But I think he does appreciate her at the end more than he did, even if he fights against it. And of course, Kurt comes to a very different understanding of his wife as the as it goes on, so that if they started as mysoginists or as people who see women as zeros, or null set, they don't at the end.

GALINA

Thomas to his credit initially is attracted to Christine because she's not a typical woman who wants to be a housewife. I think that's actually that, in his case it kind of goes in reverse, which I think also may have been characteristic of that time. And you know you know you college guys wanted to marry a woman who had a college education. But they didn't necessarily want her to make use of it once they got married.

JOHN

They wanted her to forget that as soon as they tied the knot, you know.

GALINA

Well, it harmed their status in the family if she worked. And  my own family, my mother insisted on working and my father would say like, what do you need this for? Like, why are you doing this? And if she was, like. angry or something happened at work, or she was annoyed and he said, well, you know just give.  I think it was very, you know, I think that was very common at the time, and he is actually at least initially, very pleased that she is serious about her career.

DON

Oppenheimer was something of a party animal, wasn't he?

GALINA

He was! I think my big disappointment about Oppenheimer in the film was that he comes off kind of cold in the movie and he was anything but. I mean, any descriptions, and  if you see some of the documentary stuff on him, he was a very charming man. Women really liked him. There's a description of his assistant, Dorothy Mckibbens, when she first met him and she was just, like, mesmerized by him. And so, I wanted to make him much more sociable. I mean, I wanted to depict him the way he really was, which he was a very sociable guy. And he really was very well known for his martinis and for, you know, organizing parties and things like that. So yeah, he charmed these people to come. He really had great human skills. I mean, after all, to keep these scientists together, everybody with egos larger than a house and to keep them together and to keep them working together, he was both brilliant and very, very accessible in some way.

DON

And they all liked working for him.

GALINA

They did. They really did. Even the ones he disagreed with a lot, like Edward Teller.

JOHN

I've always thought of you as one of our most interesting friends, Galena, because you do split your time between Israel and here and, speaking for yourself, do you find it jarring to go from one culture to the other with such regularity, especially at a time like this? They're real different places.

GALINA

I don't think jarring. I mean, I think people who have lived in different places have a kind of bifocal view of the world. You see things, you're never completely integrated in any one place and you always have a kind of a double vision going on. The funny thing is I sort of feel I can pass in both places. So, it's kind of a little bit of a fraud in each one of them, but it also gives me an out as a little bit of an outsider perspective wherever I am, and I think that that is enriching, actually. I mean, let me let me put it this way. As I have grown older, I have become more comfortable with that. And I tend to also befriend people who have similar double vision, that have also very often lived somewhere else and so see things from more than one perspective.

JOHN

Galina Vromen, thank you for being our guest today on the Musical Innertube. The novel is called Hill of Secrets. Go out, get, read, enjoy it. Gets the Musical Innertube stamp of approval! And we hope to have you back when you complete your next novel in 2037.

GALINA

Thank you. Thank you. If I'm still, you know, functional at that point, I'll be happy to come back. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. Take care.