Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert has decided not to publish her February 2024 novel. She says it’s because the book is set in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, and due to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the subject and setting could prove upsetting to her present-day readers.
I was born in Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My July 2020 historical fiction, The Nesting Dolls, is set in Odessa of the 1930s and the 1970s. My November 2022 follow up, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region, takes place in Russia in the 1930s and in a German prisoner of war camp in the 1940s with a sympathetic view of Soviet prisoners and what the Nazis put them through. (Because the USSR was not a signatory to the Geneva convention, Soviet prisoners were treated much more harshly than the Americans they were imprisoned alongside with. There is a reason there are no Russians engaging in wacky hijinks in Hogan’s Heroes.)
I am not pulling either of my novels. Because writing about Russia in the past does not mean you support their actions in the present. It could, of course. I am sure there are currently books being written in Russian and other sympathetic languages (Belorussian? Korean? Chinese? Arabic? Farsi?) which cheer, lionize, and justify invading Ukraine.
But merely setting your story in a past, present, or future war-torn location does not mean you are endorsing what happened there.
In my case, it means the exact opposite. Both The Nesting Dolls and My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region go to great lengths to describe the murderous excesses of Josef Stalin’s 1922-1953 Communist reign. His purges, his show trials, his middle of the night arrests of hundreds of thousands of people, the torture, the forced confessions, the exiling to Siberia of not just political prisoners, but their families, the elderly, children…. As well as the parallel of Stalin’s Great Terror to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Just because My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region is compassionate toward the suffering Soviet soldiers and what they endured in German POW camps where they were starved, denied medical attention, and worked to death does not and never will mean it is offering aid and comfort to Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
I have not read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book. Almost no one has. That has not stopped some, however, from spamming her Goodreads page with negative reviews of a book hardly anyone has read.
All I know about it is that it takes place in the USSR, which, to be clear, is a different country from today’s Russia and that it focuses on a family who, in defiance of Stalin and his endless bloodbaths, abandons their city life to hide in the woods for decades. Does this sound like a story that is condoning a tyrannical government’s actions or one that is urging its citizens to rebel against it?
Elizabeth Gilbert is free to do what she likes, which is more than can be said for the citizens of Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, or Iran, all countries which actually do support Putin’s actions.
But I am free to do what I like as well. So are all of my fellow writers, historical fiction and otherwise. We can set our stories where we like, when we like, and yes, we can even take controversial positions on historical and present-day events.
Ultimately, it is up to readers to decide who they will and will not support. And I would not have it any other way.
Amazon Links:
My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region
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Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her latest historical fiction, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region, chronicles a little known aspect of Soviet and Jewish history. Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1977. Visit her website at www.AlinaAdams.com.
