No News is Good News

Dische's novel began as a biography
Tuesday, August 14, 2007

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

"I don't like facts," said Irene Dische in a phone interview. "I have the greatest respect for journalism. I don't do it very well, because my mind just slips over into fiction so easily." [photo left, courtesy of kiel.de]

Perhaps it's just as well. Dische, a best-selling novelist in Europe, is releasing a new book set partly in Fort Lee -- a book that started as fact and became fiction. "The Empress of Weehawken" tells the story of her grandmother, an anti-Semitic German who married a Jew and fled to New Jersey months before World War II began.

Of course, there are many books claiming to be "based on a true story." Dische's novel differs in that it uses real names -- and she herself appears as a troubled girl. The book began, she explains, as an autobiography and evolved into a fictional account.

Dische says her imagination was fueled by visits to her old family home in Fort Lee, currently occupied by brother Charles and his family. She tells us more about her inspiration and her family in an interview.

Q. How did you end up writing this family story?

I had a very wild childhood between the ages of 15 and 19 ... and my children were always pestering me to tell them about it, and I didn't want to give them a bad example. So I was always telling them I would tell them about it later, "when you're over the age of danger."

So I was going to write an autobiography of that time in my life, and I kept lying. I kept making things up and making myself out to be a nicer person. I decided that I needed to ask somebody who knew me very well, and who was very critical, to be fair. So I thought of asking my grandmother, because she was always very critical.

She had already passed away, but I had her internalized. I sort of let her write it. Of course, most of the book is about her, because she was very interested in herself and her daughter. But I very much had the sense I was ghostwriting it for the lady who's referred to as the Empress of Weehawken.

Q. Can this book be called a novel?

It is a novel in the sense that in every novel, some things are true, and some things are not. In this case, it was going to be my autobiography, but if you read through to the end, the narrator admits that she makes up a lot of stuff to keep herself amused.

Most everything is based on fact where her life was concerned. Of course, I wasn't there during the Nazi time, so I did have to improvise a bit. But she was a great storyteller and a storyteller who loved detail. So I think a great deal of it is simply true.
Q. How was your grandmother able to bring letters, newspaper clippings and even furniture to America as an immigrant?

She could bring anything she wanted because she was privileged. ... As a Jew she wouldn't have been allowed to take anything. But as a Christian, as an Aryan woman, she was allowed to take everything.

I think that she wasn't going to leave the Germans a thing. And when she got to New Jersey, she suddenly went from being a wealthy woman in Germany to being a woman of modest means, and she made do with it. She simply put the stuff in the attic.

Q. And it was all still there when you looked?

After she was long dead, I bought a house in upstate New York. I took the furniture out of that attic, and I practically furnished a whole 4,500-square-foot house.

Q. "The Empress of Weehawken," titled "Granny's True Confessions" in German, sold 500,000 copies in Germany alone and went on to do well in Italy, among other countries. Why do you think it did so well?

I think it sold because the narrator interested the Germans. ... She's really a bigmouth. She says things that everyone says but you're not allowed to say. But at the same time, she's very contradictory: She talks like a Nazi but is very heroic in helping the Jews.

There were many, many people who came to me and said that they felt that this person was their grandmother, that they just liked her so much. I was very glad, because I had a lot of problems with my grandmother, and in the course of writing this book I became close to her. I was very happy that -- she was thrown out of Germany, originally -- she ended up being very popular in Germany.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com

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