Two Articles on Ursula Hegi -- downloaded from Nexis
The Seattle Times
October 29, 1995, Sunday, Final Edition
HEADLINE: JUST ABOUT TIME FOR ANOTHER SOCIAL DISASTER
BYLINE: BY JERRY LARGE
It's probably nothing, but I've been thinking about the way calamitous
social disruptions sneak up on us while we're looking the other way.
Much of the world is getting its fair share, but here in the United
States we're overdue. Look at our history and you see that every generation
or so things get shaken up in a massive way. There was the Revolution, of
course, then the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the Civil War, WWI,
the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, Vietnam.
There has always been something big enough to stand some people's lives
on end and take the lives of other people. But not so much lately.
A recession and Desert Storm weren't it.
Downsizing and the rightward political movement aren't it, but they may
be among the precipitators of it, whatever it turns out to be.
I thought I saw a social upheaval coming the other day, but maybe it was
just because I had been thinking about that possibility and reading about a
prime example of the way disaster sneaks up on people.
There's a book called "Stones from the River," a novel about the
goings-on in a small German village. It traces the lives of the villagers
from WWI through the years just after WWII and shows how Nazism and its
extremes began in small ways, how ordinary people came to do things that
they would have sworn it was not possible for them to do.
Ursula Hegi wrote the book. Hegi, an English professor at Eastern
Washington University, was born the year after WWII ended, and she
immigrated to the United States when she was 18.
"One of the questions that was a catalyst for 'Stones from the River'
was how did it begin? We know how it ended, but how did it begin? It began
with many small acts of omission. It began with people looking the other
way when a neighbor was harassed, with people looking the other way when a
neighbor was beaten . . ."
And it accelerated, she said, to people looking the other way when a
neighbor was killed. "People would have never made that step from point
zero."
A person would not go from shopping in someone's store to killing them.
It moves in stages, from believing someone is bad, to listening to someone
else bad-mouth them, to remaining silent while someone else damages their
property, then their person. One small step at a time until you don't
remember things being different, don't recall the time when you would have
been appalled by what has become commonplace.
"I was born in 1946, and there was an absolute silence regarding the
Holocaust. None of the adults talked about the Holocaust, and when they
would talk they would say we all suffered a lot . . ."
We Americans are always trying to forget our history, too, the bad parts
of it anyway, saying it doesn't matter, it's the past and should be buried.
Hegi told me she writes about the Nazi period because she doesn't want to
think about it. Not thinking about it is the wrong thing to do. Vigilance
requires awareness.
The eerie feeling had started as I was driving along listening to the
radio reporter doing a story on liberal whites who were disgusted with the
Simpson verdict and the reaction of many blacks to that verdict.
The reporter was visiting the home of a Jewish family full of longtime
Democrats.
They were basically saying black people could go jump into the toilet.
One woman went so far as to say she'd nearly lost faith in God because of
the verdict and that she was so angry she was going to punish black people
by becoming a Republican. Damn! Was it that bad?
In another segment of the report, a commentator predicted that whites
would riot, but in their own way. Black riots happen in the streets and
trash mostly black neighborhoods.
White riots happen in Congress and in legislatures and in board rooms.
Using the power available in those places would, the expert predicted,
freeze black people out of many of the opportunities available today.
And then what?
Contemplating that with Hegi's book in the back of my mind, I was seized
with an image of my son having to hide away in a basement somewhere until
he could be spirited away to Mexico or Canada.
Nah. Genocide couldn't happen here, could it? Perhaps I should consult
with the Sioux about this feeling.
Los Angeles Times
March 20, 1996, Wednesday, Home Edition
HEADLINE: OUT OF SILENCE COME THE WRITER'S GREAT WORKS;
AUTHORS: GROWING UP IN POST-WAR GERMANY, URSULA HEGI WAS TOLD LITTLE OF THE
HOLOCAUST. IT IS THAT UNRELENTING SECRETIVENESS THAT INFUSES HER NOVELS.
BYLINE: DENNIS McLELLAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Interruptions can be a writer's bane, but the one that took Ursula Hegi
away from her latest novel, "Salt Dancers," turned out to be a welcome
intrusion.
A secondary character in her previous novel--German dwarf Trudi Montag--
began knocking about in Hegi's thoughts, demanding her own story.
So Hegi set "Salt Dancers" aside for more than two years and wrote
"Stones From the River," her acclaimed 1994 bestseller that deals with the
rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The story is told primarily from the
perspective of Montag, who understands "the agony of being different" and
is herself at risk of persecution.
Hegi, who is spending the winter quarter as a visiting writer at UC
Irvine, says she wrote "Stones From the River" with an "absolute sense of
urgency."
But the long-simmering "Salt Dancers" benefited from the wait.
"It took me longer than any of my other books, and I think I needed that
time of thinking about it and letting it sit," says the German-born author,
who is on the faculty at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Wash.
Based on a single scene Hegi wrote in the early '80s but didn't begin
writing in earnest until 1989, "Salt Dancers" (Simon & Schuster, 1995) is
the story of architect Julia Ives.
When Julia is 9, her mother suddenly vanishes from her and her brother's
lives, and her alcoholic father turns his physical and psychological abuse
on her. Julia's first marriage ends after she refuses to have children. Now
41 and single by choice, she discovers that she's pregnant by her current
lover. Overwhelmed by an unexpected yearning for motherhood, she feels
compelled to confront her painful past. She returns to her father's home in
Spokane, which she left at 18 vowing never to return.
Explains Julia: "I was afraid I'd mess up my child's life if I didn't
sort out before the birth why things had gone so terribly wrong with my
family."
Hegi, who has taught creative writing and contemporary literature at
Eastern Washington University since 1984, was invited to be a visiting
writer at UCI after giving a reading of "Stones From the River" at the
university in 1994.
She drove down from Washington in January, settling into a beachfront
duplex in Newport Beach. Seated in a wood-framed easy chair facing a
picture window only steps from the beach, Hegi says she's on the phone
every day to architect Gordon Gagliano, her partner of eight years. She
misses Gagliano but not the weather back home. "This is ideal, living at
the beach and teaching. I go out there in the morning and do my tai chi
and go for long walks."
As Hegi discusses her writing, one word repeatedly surfaces: "silence."
It's a theme that not only has infused three of Hegi's novels but also her
own life growing up in postwar Germany, where silence about the Holocaust
was pervasive among the older generation that fought the war.
In "Salt Dancers," it is the "destructive silence" between a child and a
physically abusive parent.
The novel, Hegi says, grew out of a scene she wrote 12 years ago:
"Julia as a child is sitting on a windowsill when her father comes into
her room offering her some chocolate. She can smell that he's drunk, and
she refuses the chocolate. He says, 'Don't you love me anymore?' She can't
answer because she doesn't feel that love at the moment, and he says, 'Say
you love me.' She won't, and he beats her until she says it. And for her,
that's a real turning point, of course, in her relationship with her
father."
Once she had written that scene, Hegi says, "the rest of the material
started to gather itself around, sort of attaching onto that scene. But
the book took me a long time to write."
Hegi says she has never written a book with such a sense of urgency as
"Stones From the River."
"It was very exciting and scary at times," she says.
One night, she recalls, "Gordon and I were driving from Portland to
Spokane, and it was dark, and he was playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
on the stereo, and I had one idea about Trudi Montag. I started writing
in the dark on a yellow lined pad, and I filled most of it. We could feel
her presence in the car with us."
Hegi has been writing almost as long as she has been reading.
By age 6 she had decided to become a writer. "It seemed at the time to
be the only thing that could possibly be more exciting than reading," she
says. She wrote stories and poems, always feeling odd because she didn't
know anyone else who wrote. She still has some of the "terrible, gloomy
teenage poetry" she wrote at 14 and 15 and the "half of a novel" she wrote
on lined note paper at 16.
In 1965, at 18, Hegi came to the United States, doing translations and
accounting for a German company in Fort Lee, N.J.
"I would have gone anywhere," she says. "I wanted to get away from
Germany. I think part of it ad to do with being 18, thinking you can start
a new life somewhere else wherever and whenever you decided."
The other part of it, she says, "was the very oppressive, authoritarian
society that I grew up in--very strict, very Catholic. My mother died when
I was 13, and I think if she had lived, my family situation would have
been very, very different. But as a result, it just was not very close,
and I really wanted to get away."
Married at 21, she returned to school at 27 after her sons were born.
She earned an undergraduate degree in English and a graduate degree in
creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she taught in
the English department for five years before being hired to teach in the
graduate writing program at Eastern Washington.
It wasn't until "Floating in My Mother's Palm," her 1991 novel about a
girl growing up in postwar Germany that Hegi first tapped her homeland in
her writing.
"It took me a long time to start looking at Germany," she says.
Hegi, who became an American citizen after her first son was born, says
that after arriving in the United States, she was "very uncomfortable with
the fact that I came from Germany."
Born in 1946, she grew up in Germany during "a time when no one talked
about the Holocaust, where there was an absolute silence" about it. But
once in America, she began learning about the Holocaust, realizing that
Americans her age knew much more about it than she did.
First with "Floating in My Mother's Palm" and much more so with "Stones
From the River," Hegi "broke through that silence and started writing
about what had happened in Germany through the perspectives of characters."
From those novels has grown her first book of nonfiction, due next year.
Tentatively titled "Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America," it
consists of interviews with German-born Americans of her generation.
"What I've done with my writing is to look at it very, very closely.
And much of it has been very painful. But, on the other hand, I think in
looking at something and looking at it very closely is a very important
step."