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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. When we heard Chilean author, Isabel Allende was in town and available for an interview, we immediately knew we had to get her into the studio. Over time, Allende's work has been translated into 35 languages. She sold more than 70 million books. Her latest novel, which was published in the spring, is called Wind Knows My Name, and follows three characters, Samuel, Leticia, and Anita, all of whom are facing life-threatening situations, the Holocaust, civil war in El Salvador, and border separation in current day.

The book is part history lesson, part human rights alarm, and Allende spoke to us about the inspiration and political message of the novel. Allende famously always starts writing something on January 8th, and I started by asking her when she started working on this book.

Isabel Allende: I started it last year, but I don't write a book every year. Sometimes the book takes more than a year, but I always wait until the next January 8th to begin something.

Alison Stewart: What do you remember writing on that day?

Isabel Allende: The day when I began this book?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Isabel Allende: I remember the Kindertransport which was the event that happened in 1938 when the Nazis were going to take over Germany, Austria, and Europe really. The Jewish families were already suffering the effect of this. England offered 10,000 visas for children as refugees. The Jewish families had the horrible choice of either keeping the kids with the risk of ending up in a concentration camp or sending them away to an unknown destiny. My protagonist, Samuel, is one of those children.

Alison Stewart: The book takes part-- The buildup to Kristallnacht, you describe how Samuel's family knew something was coming, but they weren't quite sure what it was and how quickly things changed.

Isabel Allende: In 24 hours everything changed.

Alison Stewart: What was it? Gosh, what was it about the transport program that made you think, "I can make this into a novel?"

Isabel Allende: I didn't think that at the time. I started thinking about children being separated from their families in 2018 when there was a government policy that Trump established to separate children from the families, to deter people from coming. I remembered again, the transport and other moments in history where children have been taken away from their parents. In times of slavery, children will be sold and nobody cared about what the parents felt or the child felt.

Indigenous children that were taken away from their families to be put in some horrible Christian boarding schools to civilize them and so many other instances. That event in 2018 and 2019 was so horrible, and we saw the pictures and the photographs and the videos of the children in cages, of mothers screaming, of the border patrol, which I'm sure were as devastated as everybody else pulling the babies out of their mother's arms. It's something that I needed to write about.

Alison Stewart: All three of your characters, and we'll talk about them each individually, leave their homes under these horrible circumstances. It's an experience you know, you were a political refugee in Venezuela for 13 years after the Chilean government was overthrown in a coup, a government run by a relative of yours, Salvador Allende. What do you understand about that experience that you wanted to make sure was communicated in this novel?

Isabel Allende: The novel is about the tragedy of displacement. It's very different to be a refugee, someone who seeks asylum from being a migrant. Usually, an immigrant is a young person who chooses to go to another place in search of a better life. A refugee is someone who's running away from something, usually doesn't have a choice where he or she goes, is received with hostility, and is always looking back, waiting for the moment when they can return to what they left behind.

I have had both experiences, being a refugee and being an immigrant and I can tell you how different it is. An immigrant looks to the future. A refugee is always stuck in the past. This book is of course, about that, but this book is mostly about the thousands and thousands of people who are trying to help. We hear only about the tragedy. We hear about the horrible things that happen and the horrible things that people do to each other, but we don't hear about the people who do good and who are--

In the case of the refugee crisis, most of the people who are working to alleviate it are women because there is no glory or fame, or money in this work. It's just compassion and heart, so women do it. That's what I'm interested in, those people.

Alison Stewart: My guess is, Isabel Allende, the name of the novel is The Wind Knows My Name. Let's talk about, learn about our three protagonists. Samuel, this boy who is orphaned by the Holocaust, he's sent on the Kindertransport, his mother makes this really difficult decision. From your research around the Kindersport and around Kristallnacht in this time, what was a detail that made it into the novel and that really helped shape this portion of the novel when we first get to know young Samuel?

Isabel Allende: To me, it's imagining the family, imagining one story, one person with a face, with a name. In this case, Samuel is a musical prodigy. If he would've had a normal life, he would've been an extraordinary composer or performer, but because his life is cut when he's almost six, he's cut away from everything, including music. He never develops fully all his talent. I try to imagine his life. There's a moment in the novel when he goes to the Holocaust Museum. He's already an adult, and he's looking among those--

I have been there many times, and he's looking for his past. He's looking for his family. Will he find his mom? Will he find his father among the thousands of pictures and names? Just imagining that was very hard.

Alison Stewart: The person, as a young man who shows him kindness, is a former military officer who thinks of him as a grandson and gives him a medal and tells him this medal will help you be brave.

Isabel Allende: Yes. It's an old Prussian colonel that did the First World War, and he sees the coming of the Nazis as something horrendous that is going to happen. He can imagine the horror, and he helps this Jewish family and falls in love with the kid. The colonel would sit in the hall of the building where they live to listen to the kid playing. When the Kristallnacht happens and these mobs come to destroy and kill and beat up these families, he shelters them.

This colonel gives him his medal that he won in the war, and he gives it to the kid and says, "This will give you courage. If you ask the medal to help you, it will always give you courage." The kid has the medal forever until 80 years later, he can give the medal to another child who is going through something similar to what he endured.

Alison Stewart: Let's bring Leticia into the conversation. She escapes the massacre, her village by fate. She happens to have been on the hospital and then when her father returns home, realizes what has happened and is not really able to speak of it for a long time. The massacre happened in El Salvador in 1981. The town was El Mozote. You write about this in a very straightforward and graphic way. Why did you decide to be so graphic in some of the details?

Isabel Allende: Because people cannot understand why people leave their places of origin. Why do we have today millions of Ukrainian refugees that we didn't have a year or so ago? Because something has happened in their country that forces people out. In the case of Leticia, she was a child with her family in a small village in El Mozote. There were several villages there. The military, which by the way had been trained by the CIA, goes to El Mozote to terrorize the population with the idea of stopping the population from helping the guerrillas, which is a fantasy because it's not happening in reality. There are no guerrillas there.

They're just farmers and poor people who live off the land. They go there and they kill more than 800 people in the most horrible way. They burn people alive. They chop them in pieces with machetes. They kill all the children. With the blood of the children, they write graffiti on the walls with total impunity protected by the government, protected by the military. There's no accountability for this.

Alison Stewart: Leticia has nowhere to go. Her father comes back, he's dazed, he's traumatized. What does she hope for her life after this?

Isabel Allende: She hopes to make a life somewhere else, but she carries the loss. The father doesn't even speak anymore. He barely survives because he needs to help Leticia. He has to care for his only remaining child. He tries to make a life in the United States as an immigrant, and it's very hard. He has menial work. He doesn't speak English. He doesn't have legal documents. It's very hard for him. Leticia is the second generation. She makes it in the States.

Alison Stewart: We bring in Anita, a nearly blind, very smart seven-year-old girl, separated from her mother in 2019 at the border as part of the Trump administration's policy where every migrant, including asylum seekers attempting to cross the border, were detained and criminally prosecuted. What went into your decision to have Anita have near blindness?

Isabel Allende: Because it's a case that I saw through my foundation. I have a foundation and we work with organizations and programs at the border. One of the cases was a little girl called Juliana that came with a mother and a little brother called Juan, and they were separated at the border. The girl was blind. They were separated for more than eight months, that they couldn't find the mother in the bureaucracy. When finally they were reunited, they were all deported.

Alison Stewart: You have a few characters in the book who raise questions or who are just completely ignorant. One character is completely ignorant about what's going on. He hears at his background in the news. Neither of them are bad people. They're not evil people. Why was that important to you and how did you balance creating these characters who were multidimensional, not just mustache-twirling, bad guys [laughter] but who were ignorant or had some feelings that might not be the ones that you share?

Isabel Allende: Because most people are like that. We are overwhelmed with news and information. We cannot process everything. Unless we know one case and we know one story, we can't connect to the tragedy that's going on, or we can't connect to the war or to famine or to anything because it's too much. I totally understand that because I feel that way about many issues. I am very concerned about everything that happens to women, but I'm not concerned, for example, about things that happen to other people who are not within the little niche that I work with.

I understand that and that's the way the world works. It is in the book, of course.

Alison Stewart: These three protagonists, they intersect at some point. When you're working on a piece like this, do you work in a linear fashion? Do you write by timeline or do you know, "I know these people are going to intersect, now I'll work backwards."

Isabel Allende: I don't know anything, Alison. I have no idea. I just start a book and things happen and sometimes I find myself in a dead alley that I can't get out and say, "Well, how did I get here?" Then I have to go in another direction. I know writers that have a script, that have everything written before that they have a map. I can't work like that. For me, everything happens in the womb. It's organic, and the characters start to grow and do things that are unexpected.

Alison Stewart: I love you threw your hands up in the air [unintelligible 00:15:28], radio. I don't know where they come [unintelligible 00:15:30]

Isabel Allende: I have no idea what's going to happen.

Alison Stewart: One of the themes that runs through the book is though these people, and you touched on this earlier, experience, such difficulty. There are these acts of kindness. People who go out of their way to help them. We mentioned the military gentleman. There are people who have pro bono lawyers are involved. People who give people jobs say, "Okay, show up and I'll try to help you out." As you were writing this book, how did you balance the truth of the horror and the difficulty with the moments of hope?

Isabel Allende: That was easy because I see the hope and I see the help all the time. I work with that. Selena, for example, was based on two women that are social workers, and they're friends and they even look like her.

Alison Stewart: She's trying to help get Anita. She trying to help find Anita's mother and trying to find their home.

Isabel Allende: They represented Anita. It's easy because I see them all the time.

Alison Stewart: How do you name your characters, Isabel?

Isabel Allende: When I wrote the House of the Spirits among the many thesis that were written about the book, one of the thesis was about the names in the book. I didn't know, but every name means something that has to do with a character. Then I realized that names mean something, so I bought a book, a dictionary of names. For a long time, I would name my characters according to the dictionary. I thought, "Well if this character is just a jerk, let's find a name that represents the jerk." Well, now I don't do that.

This time, I chose names from the people that I know, that Leticia and Selena, they're names from the community of people that I know that are helping. Samuel, I made it up.

Alison Stewart: At this point in your career, Isabel, what inspires you to keep writing?

Isabel Allende: I love the process. People say, "Well, you are 80. Why don't you retire?" I'm retired of everything I don't like, of toxic people, of cocktail parties, of signing books, of book tours. I'm retired of all of that, and I am totally involved with the writing that I love, with my dogs and my husband.

Alison Stewart: That was Chilean author, Isabel Allende, whose new novel is called Wind Knows My Name. That's All Of It for today's show, dedicated to Icons. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. Meet us back here next time.

 

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