Judy Batalion, The Last Woman of Warsaw
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[0:45]Judy Battalion is the author of the last woman of Warsaw.
[0:49]This is a totally booked live event that I recorded at the Whitby Hotel.
[0:53]I've had Judy on the podcast before, PS, she is a stand-up comic, and she also contributed
[1:00]to on being Jewish now, and we've done many events together around that book.
[1:05]Judy is funny, so smart, Canadian, and just pretty amazing.
[1:11]Judy is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, and
[1:16]her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.
[1:20]I loved her memoir White Walls about her mom.
[1:24]It's this subtitle is a memoir about motherhood, daughterhood, and the mess in between.
[1:30]And she also wrote The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters
[1:36]in Hitler's Ghettos.
[1:38]She's also the author of The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters
[1:43]in Hitler's Ghettos, which became a New York Times bestseller, got optioned, and is pretty
[1:48]awesome.
[1:49]Welcome to Totally Booked Live.
[1:51]I'm so excited to be here with my friend Judy Battalion, who is back on the podcast
[1:55]to talk about her debut novel, which at the time of this recording came out yesterday at
[2:00]the last woman of Warsaw.
[2:02]Congratulations.
[2:03]Thank you.
[2:04]I'm so excited to be back, Zibi.
[2:05]Oh, yay.
[2:06]I love talking to you.
[2:07]I love talking to you too.
[2:08]You can all clap on her book.
[2:09]Yeah, yeah.
[2:10]You don't say in your bio that you're a former stand-up comic.
[2:15]Well, you just have to feel that from me as I speak.
[2:20]Uh-oh.
[2:21]Like, I mean, travel.
[2:22]No, I don't put it in.
[2:23]I'll put it in.
[2:24]No, no, no.
[2:25]It's not like it's a funny book.
[2:26]I mean, it's a great book, but you don't pick it up and you're like, uh, you know,
[2:30]Warsaw, 1939.
[2:31]What a hoot.
[2:32]Yeah, you don't go for the humor, but you take some.
[2:35]Yeah.
[2:36]Okay.
[2:37]So Judy, tell everybody what the last woman of Warsaw is about.
[2:39]So the last woman of Warsaw, I mean, really in a nutshell, is a story of unlikely and powerful
[2:46]friendship between two very different young Jewish women, Fannie, who is a feisty fashion
[2:53]photographer and Zocha, who is an earnest, serious political activist.
[3:00]And it's set in a dazzling, sophisticated, fashionable Warsaw in 1938.
[3:09]Warsaw, by the way, is a huge character in the book.
[3:12]And I had hurt.
[3:13]I mean, obviously, we've all heard of Warsaw and pre-war Warsaw.
[3:17]But you talk about everything from how it got its name to the sights, the smells, the
[3:22]little Paris, little New York, what was it, little Paris?
[3:25]Paris of the North, Paris of the North.
[3:28]This was an incredibly sophisticated place.
[3:30]30% of Warsaw was made up of Jewish people who had lots of positions of authority and
[3:38]influence.
[3:39]And they thought they were kind of untouchable, honestly.
[3:43]They were like in the book, it says, you know, how could they come after us?
[3:47]We control so much of the city, you know, what would they do without us?
[3:51]I'd say huge minority, over 30% of Warsaw was Jewish, Jews made up a huge percentage
[3:57]of entertainers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, peddlers, traders, intellectuals.
[4:05]They lived there.
[4:06]Jews had lived in Poland continuously for over 1,000 years.
[4:12]And in that time period, Jews made up 30% of cities like Warsaw, but 10% of the population
[4:18]of the entire country.
[4:20]They were a huge minority.
[4:24]And with all the people living there, when all of the tides begin to turn, you show us
[4:31]what happens through the lens of two fictitious characters who were inspired by your grandparents.
[4:37]Can you talk a little bit, a little bit?
[4:40]They actually weren't in Svarbo, right?
[4:41]Okay, never nice.
[4:42]Let's back up.
[4:43]Okay, you were inspired.
[4:45]Okay, you have four of your, all four of your grandparents were in Warsaw in 1938.
[4:50]No.
[4:51]Okay.
[4:52]I did read, I promised you read this book.
[4:54]A lot was left out of my bio, obviously.
[4:57]Okay, so all four of my grandparents were born and raised in Poland.
[5:01]There you go.
[5:02]And spent their young adulthoods in Warsaw.
[5:06]My father's parents came to Canada before the 30s, but my mother's parents were there
[5:12]in 38.
[5:13]So it was also inspired by all the research you did for the light of days.
[5:18]Very good.
[5:19]So you found all these Yiddish manuscripts and you were able to find out a lot of different
[5:24]women's stories.
[5:25]And then you created these characters and also found photographs that inspired the book as
[5:31]well.
[5:32]How about you say, what inspired the book?
[5:35]As your son said, oh my gosh, my son, yeah, he called it, I'm just not good at this.
[5:40]Okay, so my last book was called The Light of Days, which I spoke on your podcast about
[5:45]too.
[5:46]The Light of Days was a narrative history, it was a true story of young Jewish women and
[5:52]teenage girls who fought the Nazis and who fought them from the ghettos in Poland.
[5:59]They were all the way from running underground schools and soup kitchens and secret printing
[6:04]presses through to young Jewish women who shot Gestapo men in the head, who blew up
[6:11]Nazi supply trains, who flung Molotov cocktails in ghetto uprisings.
[6:15]And many of them were career girls, they pretended to be Christian, they connected the
[6:19]ghettos, they transported weapons, money, information.
[6:24]That was my last book.
[6:25]These women were daring, audacious, brave and stylish and it didn't jive with my image
[6:36]of pre-war Poland.
[6:39]What kind of world had created Jewish women like this?
[6:43]I think my image of Warsaw, my preconceived image, I mean Warsaw, pre-war Warsaw, decay,
[6:51]grey, rubble, it has war in its name, you know, I mean it doesn't sound good and my image
[6:58]of pre-war jury or pre-holocaust Poland's jury really was Fiddler on the Roof.
[7:05]Really was, you know, I don't know, religious community, small town, sheddle, backwater,
[7:12]and as soon as I started to look into this question, what kind of world created women
[7:17]that were, you know, blowing up Nazi train, I realized that was totally wrong.
[7:22]And 1930s Warsaw was in fact a cultural hub, theater, cabaret, vaudeville, I mean there
[7:31]were 180 Jewish newspapers and magazines published in Warsaw at the time.
[7:39]I found, I did a lot, I love photographic research, so I really dug into photographic archives.
[7:45]I found photos of fashion shows being set up at the Warsaw boating club in fancy hotels.
[7:51]There was a fashion cafe dedicated to fashion with a runway in the back, I mean I wish we had
[7:58]that now, I mean this looks like it here, it's beautiful, you know, it was, oh, before
[8:03]Las Vegas, Warsaw was the capital of Nionth.
[8:08]Now this was, it's, it's comical almost because it was so far from my conception of what
[8:15]Warsaw was and what Poland was and it's that interest out how could I, how could I not
[8:20]know this, how could all four of my grandparents have lived here and I didn't know that
[8:26]this city was so exciting and dynamic and imaginative, that's what pushed me to write
[8:32]the book and the people living there at the time, I mean this may sound obvious but
[8:37]they didn't know they were living in pre-war, Warsaw, they were living in a post-war,
[8:43]Warsaw where things were feeling on the up and up and they were excited and they'd
[8:47]gotten over a lot and they were rebuilding and had all this power and excitement and creative
[8:54]energy so it didn't feel like we might imagine.
[8:58]Poland actually, I didn't know this, it was really a new country after World War I.
[9:03]It hadn't been its own country since the 1790s so suddenly you have, you have a new country,
[9:10]they're trying to create an identity, you have the Jewish community, a huge minority,
[9:16]that's also, you know, dealing with the influences of modernism and secularism and political
[9:21]movements, that's why you have so many publications, so much idea exchange, it's a really
[9:27]exciting and interesting time, now they weren't very badly affected by the Great Depression
[9:32]but 1938 in particular was seen as a bit of a bounce year, the economy was getting a bit
[9:39]better, antisemitism had been on the rise was actually a little better in 1938 so there was
[9:46]a positive feeling.
[9:48]And by showing us all this, you show us really what we've lost, right?
[9:54]You paint such a picture of this dynamic, a live city and we know what happens next,
[9:59]so the...
[10:00]whole time you're reading.
[10:00]And by the way, this is not a history book.
[10:03]This is a full-on fictional account of two women.
[10:07]It's about a woman who's engaged to someone
[10:10]but wants to be more independent.
[10:12]It's about a photography professor
[10:14]who suddenly disappears from campus
[10:16]and they're quest to find out what happened to her.
[10:19]It's about the man that they both kind of have a crush on.
[10:22]It's about coming of age story
[10:25]and all of the things that you look for in fiction.
[10:28]This is just the background.
[10:30]But I learned so much personally from reading it
[10:33]that my whole conception of the place has changed
[10:36]and not that I needed to feel more devastated by the Holocaust.
[10:40]But, you know, thank you for that.
[10:42]You're welcome.
[10:44]My job is done.
[10:47]All right, so Fannie is from a very wealthy family
[10:51]or so she has historically, she's inherited,
[10:55]her mother is very concerned with how everything looks,
[10:58]who she's going to marry, what she wears,
[11:01]what she can major in, kind of a typical controlling Jewish mom.
[11:05]I would just say, you know.
[11:07]And into this, we have Fannie who gets out there
[11:10]and tries to find a way to get this independence
[11:14]that she wants, particularly because she's obsessed
[11:16]with photography.
[11:17]Which at that point, a lot of women don't do it.
[11:19]We have our photographer in back, gently photography.
[11:22]And now we don't even think about it.
[11:24]It's like, oh, okay, taking pictures.
[11:26]This was like revolutionary.
[11:27]Well, this is the beginning of a kind of camera
[11:29]called the Leica Camera.
[11:31]The Leica Camera is portable.
[11:33]So you don't need, I don't think of old photography,
[11:36]like the towers and the flashes and the equipment.
[11:39]No, suddenly you can hold a camera and walk around town.
[11:43]You can take the camera and lie on the ground
[11:46]and take a picture looking, this is new.
[11:48]This is a new way of seeing the world.
[11:50]And anyone who has the means can buy a Leica.
[11:54]And so Fannie comes from a wealthy background.
[11:57]She, her mother bought her this camera on a trip to Paris.
[12:00]And she becomes fascinated by pictures.
[12:05]She loves fashion.
[12:07]She hangs out at the fashion cafe.
[12:09]And she starts to take a lot of close-ups of clothes.
[12:14]That's how she begins her artistic exploration.
[12:18]People are like, you're taking pictures of Shmada.
[12:21]What are you doing?
[12:22]Like, why are you doing this?
[12:24]But she looks at a tiny little fringe
[12:26]and does a big close-up.
[12:28]And one of the challenges from her professor
[12:31]is how do you make the familiar something totally new?
[12:35]Which is kind of what you're doing with this book.
[12:37]Thank you.
[12:38]Like how I tied that all together?
[12:39]I actually love that.
[12:41]I bet my son couldn't do that.
[12:42]I have to get over this.
[12:48]Oh, my gosh.
[12:49]OK, and then we also have Zocha.
[12:51]And Zocha is really suffering from PTSD, honestly.
[12:55]And we don't find out until the middle of the book.
[12:57]Why?
[12:57]Or what exactly happened?
[12:58]And when we do, it's really devastating.
[13:00]As you might imagine, she keeps having to go out for air
[13:02]and getting flashbacks.
[13:05]And yet she has come in and is a warrior, right?
[13:08]She wants to immigrate to British Palestine at the time.
[13:12]She wants to help as part of the burgeoning youth movement.
[13:16]Talk a little bit about her.
[13:18]So Zocha is, she comes from a small town.
[13:21]She comes from a religious family.
[13:23]And she's experienced, I don't want to give away too much,
[13:27]but a episode of violence and anti-Semitic violence.
[13:32]And this is really affected her.
[13:35]And she ends up joining the youth movements, which is something
[13:39]I also wrote a lot about in my in the light of days.
[13:42]100,000 young Polish Jews became members of these youth movements.
[13:46]They were like the scouts, but even more.
[13:49]They were spiritual, romantic, intellectual, meeting groups.
[13:56]The last name, and that's how I call it,
[13:58]used to be the name of your movement.
[14:00]She calls herself Zocha drawer.
[14:02]Drawer means freedom.
[14:04]And that was the name of this youth movement.
[14:06]This movement was homeland movement.
[14:09]It believed in creating a Jewish homeland,
[14:11]back then in British Palestine.
[14:14]And it was socialist.
[14:17]It was collaborative.
[14:19]It was really focused on cooperation,
[14:23]on taking responsibility for community,
[14:25]for the less advantaged.
[14:27]A lot of charity work was done in the movements.
[14:31]And it was also egalitarian.
[14:34]Women were leaders in these movements.
[14:37]And Zocha was becoming a leader in draw in freedom
[14:42]in this movement.
[14:42]And that's what brings her to Warsaw.
[14:45]Well, it's so interesting reading the book now
[14:47]and the context of everything going on.
[14:49]I know you contributed to I'm being Jewish now the book.
[14:51]I know you have your own thoughts and feelings about the times
[14:54]we're living in now.
[14:55]Why bring out a book like this?
[14:56]What are we, how does this reflect on our current state
[15:00]of the world, if you will?
[15:01]So first I'm going to answer that by saying
[15:03]that this book was really drafted in 2021,
[15:08]before October 7th.
[15:11]And one of the main plot points in the book
[15:14]is rising antisemitism in the university campuses
[15:18]in Poland.
[15:19]This is based on my historical research.
[15:22]And that was something that I found interesting.
[15:24]I found troubling.
[15:26]And I made that a major part of the story.
[15:30]This was before our current climate.
[15:33]So sometimes I look at the book and I almost feel like,
[15:36]it's almost as if I took what's going on
[15:38]and put it in 1930s Warsaw.
[15:41]And that's not the case.
[15:43]I did historical research.
[15:45]I was writing about the time.
[15:46]And then in the real world, I began to see things repeat
[15:50]themselves.
[15:51]And that was very troubling and very difficult.
[15:54]But what I hope to bring here and to this book
[15:57]and to my readers is, well, first of all,
[16:00]a big part of this was to mourn this lost world.
[16:05]I always have one is to say kadish for this lost world
[16:09]of Jewish imagination.
[16:12]And I wanted to share it and give it its moment.
[16:17]And to show us that they are, they, you know,
[16:21]they were not primitive and backwater.
[16:24]They were sophisticated just like us.
[16:27]And yes, it's important to know and understand
[16:30]that what happened to their world can happen to ours.
[16:35]And what I've hoped to bring through all my writing
[16:37]in this period is hope and awareness and knowledge.
[16:42]And inspiration by characters who are rebels,
[16:46]who are audacious, and who are fighters.
[16:49]Amazing.
[16:50]And you yourself are an audacious fighter.
[16:54]I have to say, I'm going to go with it.
[16:56]Come on.
[16:58]How do you audition as fighter?
[17:01]You are audacious.
[17:01]Well, even just for writing the book
[17:03]and all of the research that you've done
[17:05]and all the people that you've introduced us to.
[17:07]And you have your own personal life.
[17:09]You've written a memoir yourself about your relationship
[17:12]with your mother.
[17:13]You recently lost your mother.
[17:14]I'm so sorry.
[17:16]Share a little bit about that.
[17:18]And the context of you becoming a writer
[17:20]with your own story to tell them.
[17:22]So my first book was a memoir.
[17:24]Oh, I haven't talked about this in a long time.
[17:26]We're going all the way back.
[17:27]Oh, boy.
[17:27]I'm not a, I'm not greased up for this.
[17:29]Okay.
[17:30]My, I mean, it's your life.
[17:31]You know, you don't have to talk about it as a book.
[17:33]Oh, my life.
[17:34]Oh.
[17:35]Hi.
[17:37]All right.
[17:38]It's way harder.
[17:39]My first book was a memoir about,
[17:43]I also, you know, it's about my family
[17:45]or Holocaust survivors on my mother's side.
[17:47]And both my grandmother and my mother
[17:49]were pathological compulsive hoarders.
[17:54]And I grew up in this environment.
[17:57]And many people attribute that to trauma,
[18:00]especially early life trauma and refugees and nomadism
[18:05]in early life and hanging on to things.
[18:08]And I grew up, I became a complete minimal,
[18:10]I call myself a militant minimalist.
[18:13]Less is too much was my mantra.
[18:17]And I ran away from my family.
[18:20]I ran away from the Holocaust for a long time.
[18:25]But like most things, the more you run,
[18:27]the more they slap you in the face.
[18:30]And then of course came back
[18:31]to writing two books about three books
[18:33]about the Holocaust, but also I became a mother myself.
[18:36]And that's kind of my first book, White Walls,
[18:38]is about when I became a mother.
[18:39]And suddenly, my white sofas were not so white anymore
[18:44]and there was yogurt on everything.
[18:47]And I mean like crumbs everywhere and towels
[18:50]and breast, bottle, warmers.
[18:53]And I mean like equipment and snow,
[18:56]and I don't know what babies come with.
[18:58]It was just so much stuff that I had to buy.
[19:02]And I didn't like that.
[19:03]I didn't like that mess.
[19:04]I had a lot of trouble inviting mess back into my home
[19:11]and into my heart.
[19:13]And so that book was about trying to come to terms
[19:16]with the mess and with my relationship
[19:19]with my late mother.
[19:21]Can you share a little more about your family's
[19:24]Holocaust history, just to really lighten the mood again?
[19:27]Yeah.
[19:28]Oh, comedian, there we go.
[19:31]So my grandparent, so my father's side were also left pollen,
[19:38]a lot because of antisemitism,
[19:39]but that was before the war.
[19:41]My mother's parents were living in Warsaw in 39
[19:46]and they escaped by fleeing east instead of going west.
[19:52]My grandfather had a brother in eastern Poland
[19:55]and they went to stay with, and there was Russians
[19:58]and Germans were fighting.
[20:00]in that region, and they shot at my grandfather and his brother, and they killed his brother.
[20:06]And my grandfather, the bullet grazed his neck in his whole life. He had a scar on his neck.
[20:12]And obviously they were newly traumatized, and they just ended up going more east. They crossed
[20:18]the border to Russia. That's the time. And they were part of this movement of movement.
[20:24]They're part of the, I mean, the Russians sent these refugees to Google ads in Siberia
[20:30]to war camps. And my grandparents spent most of the war in Siberia, in labor camps, in forced labor,
[20:37]which they never talked about. And then they were coming back to Poland towards the end of the
[20:43]war, and my mother was born in 1945. On their, on their route, I say, she was born in Kyrgyzstan.
[20:50]it's like way out. I looked at a map where I was like, wait, how's that the route? I don't know.
[20:56]But they were there. And my mother actually, she died. We've been going through her things.
[21:00]We found her Russian passport. She was born on their way back to Poland to see if anyone was alive.
[21:09]And where they? So my grandmother had three younger sisters, an older sister, and three brothers,
[21:16]who is a large family, and her younger sisters and parents were murdered. But her older
[21:22]sister and brothers had all managed to escape. I actually have family in every continent
[21:28]in the world because of that. And your family settled in Canada, your Canadian? Yes. Yes,
[21:33]eventually. Eventually. What do you do with all of this heaviness? Because I know humor is one way.
[21:39]Obviously, we joke about your joking, but it's true. Humor is one way. But how do you, how do you
[21:45]handle all the past trauma and the family and the community, all of it? I write books about it.
[21:55]I have to make sense of it. Humor is a big part of it. I mean, how could I not? How could I not be
[22:03]funny with a background like that? But I'm always trying to make sense of it. I'm always trying
[22:10]to understand. And also, I've been telling you, I know my grandpa, I don't know anything about my
[22:14]grandpa. You know, I grew up with my grandparents. And I know so little about them. And there's
[22:20]something missing. There's something missing for me. My lineage feels decapitated in some way. And
[22:26]I think that's what drives me to research these women. I know so much about these other women. I
[22:31]think I'm driven to this period because I need to understand really where I come from. Amazing.
[22:40]And meanwhile, you just like whip out a novel, which is not said. Yeah, just riffed it out two weeks
[22:44]tops. So you wrote most of it several years ago. And what happened? I did the first draft in 2021,
[22:53]then you put it in a drawer or what happened? That draft was, yeah, that draft was long.
[23:02]It was like 12 seasons of television in one draft. There were some rookie mistakes,
[23:08]let's just say. And then I gave it to some people to read. And there was a lot of comments
[23:15]that I didn't really know what to do with because it was very rough. And I did put it away for some
[23:22]time. Yeah. And then, you know, I ended up, I couldn't leave it. And the subject came up. People
[23:30]I could tell people were interested. Did you know Warsaw was a capital of meons before Vegas?
[23:36]Oh, I have to write this. I have to write it because people don't know. So then I came back to
[23:44]it. And I think I wrote, I think 11 complete rewrites of this. It was so hard. It was really hard.
[23:53]It was really hard. Well, you alternated perspectives. You showed us entire worlds. You did the best
[24:02]job of historical fiction where we don't realize, like, I know how much you have must have had to
[24:07]learn to put it in and make it so casual. But it doesn't feel like you're just inserting it to be
[24:13]like, yeah, did you know we like to use this fabric? And, you know, and that's hard. And getting the
[24:19]pacing down is hard. There are like doing a first novel like this is a huge, huge accomplishment.
[24:27]So you should feel really, really proud of yourself.
[24:35]Judy, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Congratulations. For clubs here.
[24:43]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books.
[24:49]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[24:55]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.