Leslie Lacin

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Oxford, I have always been interested in Russian literature, history and politics. And the Holocaust. Even before I converted to Judaism after graduate school I had visited the Concentration Camps and war memorials of Eastern Europe. So perhaps it was natural to want to write a novel about a little known chapter in WWII history centered in the North Caucasus.

My first novel, You With Your Waiting, takes place in the Soviet Union in 1941-42. Though familiar with the Soviet Union, I hadn’t been back to to the region since the early nineties during the tumultuous transition from Communism and the splintering of the old USSR into many countries— Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan among them. I travelled to all three over a period of ten years to gather the stories of elderly Holocaust survivors and to experience the places where their lives unfolded.

From New York to Tel Aviv, Rostov-on-Don to Moscow and Baku to Tbilisi, I was exhilarated to be back, a kind of strange homecoming to the places I knew in a former life. I climbed mountains, took pictures, got lost, talked late into the night making friends (and sometimes enemies), bought dried fruit and sheepskins in Caucasian markets, bribed traffic police and drove miles and miles, visiting monuments to the dead, while I chased the last of the living from the WWII era. The survivors, witnesses to the tumult of both the 20th and 21st centuries, were gracious, hospitable and bossy. They made fun of my rusty Russian and wanted to know if I knew Barbara Streisand (I don’t). They always fed me while they shared medals and stamp albums and front line letters from long lost fathers.

At the end of every journey, no matter how I loved the world and the people who welcomed me into their lives, no matter how much I felt I belonged, I returned home, changed, exhausted, and often overwhelmed by the stories I’d heard. The constants in my life—my family, the familiar streets, the weather and the noise, though comforting, often appeared alien. I was conscious of a self modified—of knowing too much to bear.

I think about the people who shared themselves and how they have become a part of my own story, their burdens somehow my own. We live together, intertwined, between the past, the present and the future because in the middle of the night, to distinguish one from the other, feels impossible.

You, With Your Waiting is about loss and longing, about the human capacity to recreate home over and over again in small ways—lighting coal fires, playing music under the trees, lying in the moonlight. It is about love and separation, resilience and sorrow. Writing the novel reaffirmed something profound about the meaning of return in my life. Always a nomad, I carry home with me like a snail’s shell while at the same time cherishing the comfortable chair in my study and the rows of books on my shelves. But I understand now that familiarity and novelty, loss and recovery are unwittingly integrated into what we end up calling home. For the vagabond and the stay at home mom, the survivor and the writer of novels, home isn’t a constant. It expands and contracts depending on what we bring into it and how we share it with others.