Joanna Biggar's Blog

Ten days ago my last public “event” was to be in conversation in a local bookstore with fellow author and friend, Antoinette Constable, about her new Y.A. novel, Natalie: In the Shadow of the Swastika. It is based on true experiences—her own—as a young Jewish girl living in Paris during the Nazi occupation. It is a beautiful rendering of a young child’s personal transformation,from ages eight to thirteen, and the parallel story of her growing understanding of what horrors are occurring around her.

But in addition to being a gripping personal story and a grim history lesson, it is also a story about persistent and grueling deprivation. That aspect of it really struck me as the lights in the bookstore—and everywhere–went dark, and we all turned our attention to self-isolating and new ways of survival in the age of the Covid-19 coronavirus.

It occurred to me that much of the book and a lot of the thoughts of young Natalie concern food: the lack of it; memories of it; dreams of it; and for a brief period during a visit to her critically ill father in Switzerland, the delicious reality of it. Fresh baked bread, butter, jams and hams, cakes, and thick cream and cheeses from Normandy. These are the things that occupy the fantasies of a hungry girl, who later in real life will become a caterer and marvelous chef.

But there are other things that preoccupy her too: the lack of heat, and having to survive for season after season in a cold house; the Germans who terrify her in the streets, sometimes knock on the door in search of her Jewish mother, and bomb the house next door to bits; the constant fear that her mother will simply not return home one day, and she and her sisters will be on their own.

Of course, millions of children across the world have experienced such terrors, and continue to. Millions in our own country live with inexcusable deprivation all the time in our land of abundance, even before an event like the Covid-19 coronavirus swept through our land and the entire world. But many millions of others of us are lucky, blessed, and have warm and safe houses to shelter in and access to food, services and medical care.

For us, this represents an upheaval of our daily lives and expectations, but to date not real deprivation in the sense that others have known and know it. Realistically, we do not and will not likely face starvation, cold, and constant terror. That is what I remind myself when I cannot find an item I’m accustomed to on a strangely empty shelf, or when my professional and personal calendar is suddenly bare.

That is what I want my grandchildren to know when they read this book that I am sending them. And what I want them to take away from it is not only how lucky they are, but how they as well as we adults need to be thinking of ways to alleviate the pain of those around us who are not.