Finalist for the 2017 Story Prize Honorable Mention in the 2017 ALA Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish Literature
“An absolutely dazzling triumph…A singularly inventive collection” (Jewish Book Council) of linked stories set in a German-occupied town in Poland during World War II, where tales of myth and folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion.
1942. With the Nazi Party at the height of its monstrous power, Hitler’s SS fires up the new crematorium at Auschwitz and the occupying army empties Poland’s towns and cities of their Jewish citizens. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival depends on unthinkable choices, Poland has become a moral quagmire, a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.
“Filled with rich attention to the details of flora and fauna and insightful descriptions of the nuances of rural and small-town life” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Helen Maryles Shankman shows us the people of Wlodawa, a remote Polish town at a crossroads: we meet an SS officer dedicated to rescuing the creator of his son’s favorite picture book; a Messiah who announces that he is quitting; a Jewish girl who is hidden by an outspoken anti-Semite—and his talking dog. And walking among these tales are the enigmatic Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the forced labor camp who has grand schemes to protect “his” Jews, and Soroka, the Jewish saddlemaker and his family, struggling to survive.
“Moving and unsettling...Like Joyce’s Dubliners, this book circles the same streets and encounters the same people as it depicts the horrors of Germany’s invasion of Poland through the microcosm of one village....A deeply humane demonstration of wringing art from catastrophe” (Kirkus Reviews), They Were Like Family to Me (originally called In the Land of Armadillos) is a testament to the persistence of humanity in the most inhuman conditions.
Helen Maryles Shankman’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s Story Contest and earned an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers competition. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gargoyle, Cream City Review, 2 Bridges Review, Grift, Jewishfiction.net, and other publications. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light and the story collection They Were Like Family to Me. She lives in New Jersey, with her husband and four children.
Interviews
Words like Brushstrokes
The booksellers who sit on our Discover Great New Writers selection committee can't stop talking about Helen Maryles Shankman's debut, In the Land of Armadillos. Set in Poland in 1942 at the height of the Nazis' power, this haunting collection of linked short stories that reads like a novel blends folklore and history into a single unforgettable voice. Delusions and denial, hope and atonement coexist in these finely wrought narratives full of clever reveals. Shankman has a fine arts background, and her paintings have been displayed in numerous exhibitions in and around New York City, and we asked her to tell us about how she employs such different media to tell stories. — Miwa Messer, Director, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
There are times I want to tell a story with a brush and a tube of paint. There are times I want to paint a palace with my words.
Plain, unadorned sentences function like the background in a painting, moving the story forward, framing, but not detracting from, the main action. Or they provide contrast to long, compound sentences heavy with lazily unfurling syllables and clauses.
Used another way, the stripped down sentence becomes a splash of bright color, riveting the reader's attention with starkness and simplicity, like the yellow trousers on the doomed man in Goya's The Third of May, 1808.
I work as an artist. But when I write, I still depend on the building blocks of art: color, texture, and composition. Color is description, the way sights and sounds and smells breathe life into a list of words. Texture is the nature of the writing itself; should I use dialogue or narrative in this passage? Exposition or summary? I think about where the highlights will go, and what I can hide in the shadows. I compose the narrative arc of the plot, and the path my characters will travel.
When I paint, my gaze roves restlessly over the surface of the canvas, checking the work in progress against my original sketches, scanning my reference photos for accuracy and detail. When I paint, my eyes are wide open.
But to write, I must close my eyes. Back I travel, through the inky black waters of memory, dredging up places and events and passions, trying to recall the way the air smelled of rain and electricity that day, or cigarettes and orange peels. Behind my eyelids I flicker through a slide show of remembered settings, or rekindle the sensation of a particular moment. Only with my eyes shut can I shuffle through emotions like they're a pack of cards, deciding which one to play.
Painting is how I escape my demons. Writing means facing them down.
Originally, I planned to be an illustrator, to tell stories with the pictures I made. But eventually, I found that pictures weren't enough. I needed words. Big words, small words, fancy words, dirty words, lyrical words, foreign words, words I could taste and words I could see, words that syncopated with music and rhythm, words that twirled off my tongue and ran through my fingers and fastened themselves to the page. It seemed as though I'd been running along the ground for years, flapping my wings the whole time. The day I began to write was the day I learned to fly.
Ask any of our booksellers what they love most about their jobs, and you’ll hear a chorus of voices say, “Recommending books we love to other readers.” Our booksellers read deep into specific categories or widely across genres; they never stop talking about the books that broke their minds wide open, the stories they can’t […]
