‘Letter from a Stranger’ ties Barbara Taylor Bradford to the Jewish community

New York Times bestselling novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford is currently on demand by Jewish organizations, crisscrossing the country from Dallas to Chicago, Teaneck to South Florida as a guest at brunches, lunches, dinners and teas in the wake of her new book, “Letter from a Stranger.”

On Tuesday, April 24th, Bradford will discuss and sign copies of her book at the Luncheon and Book Review Series hosted by the Sabra chapter of AMIT of the Five Towns along with members of the Margolit Chapter of Forest Hills at noon at the Sephardic Temple, in Cedarhurst.

This, her 27th book, has a story within a story, with its core a memoir of a 14-year-old girl in Nazi Germany. Readers have emailed her, she said, noting that the seeming authentic and wrenching account has brought them to tears. It is this central story that has brought Jewish women’s organizations clamoring for her presence at their events and book clubs.

Bradford took time out of her busy schedule, currently writing her 28th book, to speak with the Jewish Star by phone from her home office in Manhattan. She described her inspirations for the book, her research methods and her views on anti-Semitism and Israel.

“We’ve got to be very careful what we reveal about the book,” she said coyly in her British accent. The first half of the book introduces the reader to an accomplished 32 year old woman who opens a letter that ultimately changes “many lives irrevocably,” said Bradford. This leads her on a quest to reconnect with a grandmother she believed was dead and to unravel a family secret.

Bradford is not Jewish but her husband, American film producer Robert Bradford is. Born in Germany, he lost his immediate family and was taken out by family during the war. Barbara Taylor was a child during World War II, began writing at age seven and was published at age 10. By age 16 she was working as a cub reporter in Yorkshire and at 20 headed for Fleet Street in London covering varied beats for the London Evening News, Today Magazine and others. After meeting and marrying her husband in 1963, they moved to the U.S. She covered interior design and lifestyles in a syndicated column in 183 newspapers across the U.S. and published her first novel, “A Woman of Substance,” one of the top ten bestselling books of all time, in 1979.

Asked if exposure to the war years in her childhood sparked her interest in the Holocaust for this book, she reflected that her strongest impression was during her formative years in Leeds with its significant Jewish community where she was unaware of anti-Semitism and was close with many of the Jewish families there. The tipping point though was on Fleet Street when some of her colleagues went to Israel to cover the Eichmann trial after his capture in 1960, noting that the aftermath of the war had more of an influence on her perceptions of the Holocaust. She pointed out that in her research for a previous book, “The Women in His Life,” she talked to many people who were taken out of Germany during the war and that many “can’t talk about it. It’s something so traumatic, to be without their family, to have their family taken by the Gestapo, or bombed, and to have to go on; they must cope by burying it very deep inside themselves. My husband couldn’t talk about it, he buried it so he could continue to live.” She said that she read about the Eichmann trial. Adolf Eichmann was behind the persecution and murder of millions of Jews during the Shoah, evaded the Nuremberg trials but was captured and brought to Israel, tried and executed for his crimes in 1962. “He was found guilty and executed as he should have,” she said.

The idea for this book, she said, germinated in 2009. “I was reading in the papers about women who disappear and are found dead or are never found. I wondered what a family must feel if their mother, grandmother or sister disappears into thin air, killed in an accident, lost their memory or run away. It’s a good jumping off point for a novel.” She was also aware of dictators, especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, who say that the Holocaust never happened. “I get inflamed by anger when I see denial of the Holocaust. I wanted to focus on the Holocaust and link it with missing women. I was interested in the trauma of a person going missing; many had gone missing in the Holocaust.” In that way she established the character of Gabrielle and the family in this book. She stressed that the creation of a novel starts with a “flash of inspiration and hard work, working out the drama and the plot line. I’m not a teacher, I’m an entertainer. Many of my books touched on serious subjects; this is one of those books.””

She said her story is “very dramatic and emotional. I believe a reader gets intrigued—what’s in the letter?’ She didn’t think that people would be “put off” by the Jewish core of the story. “It’s selling well,” she said. “They pick up a book by Barbara Taylor Bradford and get half way through, they care about the girl, her struggle to live. Readers get involved with the people I create in the book and if they don’t then I’ve failed. My books are mostly character driven. The Jewish part is absolutely necessary. It wouldn’t feel the same way if the character wasn’t Jewish. It’s integral to the story. You need to have the mystery, the dramatic intent to propel the book forward.”

Bradford thoroughly researches her books; she said that way she “knows it’s accurate” and she often gets plot ideas from the research. Typically, in all her books, her main character is a career-oriented woman of strong character. Bradford also typically vividly and colorfully describes the food the characters eat and their often opulent surroundings. “People like to read about food,” she explained. “I’m competing with TV and I want you to see the room, taste the food, see the garden. Yes, it’s almost like a character in the book.” She notes that she starts early in the morning writing “maybe because I worked on evening newspapers. I’m a morning person. I worked ten hours a day on this book. I’m a hard worker, I have a work ethic.”

She notes that she worries about England that they “don’t teach proper history.” She thinks positively about Israel. “I believe Israel is very important to America and the West,” she said. “Israel is a bulwark against what’s going on today. I’m a fan of (Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin) Netanyahu and am glad America is standing behind Israel. Israel has to be supported by the West, by America and the UK.”

“I don’t like anti-Semitism,” she stated. “People are taught, not born with it. The Holocaust did happen, people are forgetting things. I cried when I wrote the memoir because of what my husband and his family went through. It’s wrong. We have to remind people that six million were exterminated and it can happen again and it is happening in other countries. I chose to write about it because I feel very strongly about it. Such a systematic destruction of people.”

She recalled an incident when she was approached at a book signing by a woman who said she had difficulty getting into one of Bradford’s books but on a rainy day delved into it and came to the part where a child is taken out of Berlin with jewelry stitched into its clothing. “My husband was in shock,” the woman recounted. “I had never cried before and now I cried and cried. I had been taken out of Germany with my mother’s jewelry stitched into my clothing. You gave my emotions back to me.” This woman could not understand how Bradford was able to describe how Jews felt. Said Bradford, “The only difference is religion. We’re all human beings. I’ve never forgotten that, how she couldn’t understand how I could understand. I’ve got to be able to stand in someone else’s shoes to write any novel.”