Cathleen Schine finds humor in the heartbreak of exile

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cathleen Schine sat lounging in her wonderful, sweet-smelling Los Angeles backyard, feeling miserably caught. She knew she needed to jot down about Jewish German exiles in Hollywood throughout World War II however feared {that a} strictly historic novel may grow to be “a pit of phony insertions of detail,” a quagmire-ridden quest for historic accuracy.

Make no mistake, Schine’s novels are all the time fine-tuned, fascinating and humorous. She’s been in comparison with Nora Ephron and Jane Austen. Her books embody Alice in Bed, a couple of suburban teenager with a mysterious illness (impressed by Schine’s personal unusual sickness as a younger girl), and extra just lately, The Grammarians, about an identical twin ladies obsessive about language and battling for custody of their household dictionary.

Thankfully, revelation struck and opened the artistic floodgates Schine wanted to pen her newest novel, Kϋnstlers in Paradise. Speaking by cellphone, she recollects, “I was sitting there with my notebook closed and the cap on my pen, staring at all this beautiful jasmine, unable to go anywhere or do anything. And I thought, ‘This is a kind of exile, too, because I’m sitting here in all this beauty, and all my friends are back in New York, locked in, terrified.’” Her buddies’ mother and father have been dying, and Schine’s personal mom, in her 90s, was additionally housebound, sick and, because it seems, nearing the finish of her life. “At that moment,” the creator says, “New York was a horrible, terrifying nightmare, and here I was in this beautiful garden, basically in paradise.” 

The consequence of Schine’s magical second is a multigenerational household drama about exile, guilt, ageing, storytelling and love, all instructed with a hefty serving to of humor. Ninety-three-year-old Mamie Kϋnstler has lived in Venice Beach, California, since emigrating as a woman from Vienna, Austria, in 1939 together with her mother and father and grandfather. After Mamie fractures her wrist, her grandson Julian, a wannabe screenwriter who can now not afford his hire in New York City, arrives to assist out. 

Then COVID-19 strikes, and Julian is lower than thrilled to seek out himself quarantined along with his grandmother, her housekeeper and a Saint Bernard named Prince Jan. Julian may not adore it, however readers completely will. Imagine, as an illustration: “Julian and his grandmother were stretched out in two chaise longues, side by side like an old couple by a Miami pool.” 

Eventually, nevertheless, Julian finds himself intrigued and even reworked by Mamie’s marvelous tales of Vienna and outdated Hollywood. Their time collectively reads like a love letter to not solely Los Angeles but in addition the relationship between grandparent and grandchild—a theme additional echoed in Mamie’s tender relationship together with her personal grandfather. 

Schine initially turned intrigued by these Hollywood exiles (many of whom known as themselves émigrés, she explains, “as if they weren’t ‘regular’ immigrants like the Russian Jews”) after studying a biography about composer and socialite Alma Mahler, and one other about actor, screenwriter and activist Salka Viertel. Schine even named Mamie after Viertel; each girls share the given title “Salomea.” Viertel seems in the novel, together with many different well-known figures, together with writers Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann; composer Arnold Schoenberg, who teaches Mamie to play tennis; and actor Greta Garbo, who’s a serious character.

“I just became obsessed with these people,” Schine admits. “I read a million memoirs of the period. And by a million, I mean a million.” She questioned what it will be wish to be a high-cultured one who instantly discovered themselves in LA in 1939, a time when the metropolis was culturally barren in comparability to, say, Vienna. “They came over here and had to exist in this beautiful place while their world was being completely destroyed, and that whole notion really captured my imagination,” Schine says.

“I read a million memoirs of the period. And by a million, I mean a million.”

Although Kϋnstlers in Paradise is way from autobiographical (Schine says her personal immigrant ancestors have been far much less “exalted” than these characters), she notes that “almost all of my older women characters are modeled to some extent on my mother, and also my grandmother,” each of whom had nice senses of humor. Like Schine’s mom did, Mamie dyes her hair “a much brighter red than nature could have provided,” though Schine notes that Mamie continues to be “really very much her own person.”

In distinction to Mamie’s swift improvement, Schine says, “It took a long time for Julian . . . to become a real character, not just a name that I kept putting in so that Mamie could say something. . . . I wanted him to be in some ways innocent and in some ways entitled. He hasn’t really done anything with his life yet, but on the other hand, he isn’t a complete narcissistic dumbbell. He’s just a kid. Getting that right was very difficult.” 

Like Julian, Schine was simply attending to know Los Angeles throughout the pandemic—although she’s lived there for over 10 years. COVID-19 put a cease to Schine’s month-to-month visits to New York City to see her mom, giving her extra time in LA “to walk around and get accustomed to the neighborhood and the way the light changes and the seasons, which exist, but they’re so different,” she says. “I was a real New York snob.” She had lived in New York for many years, elevating her two sons there with New Yorker movie critic David Denby. After their divorce, she moved to California together with her spouse, filmmaker Janet Meyers. “I realized that the part of New York that I had come to love the most was Central Park,” she says, “and I thought, ‘If New York for you is Central Park, then you could live in Los Angeles.’ I just got to the point where I wanted a quiet, peaceful place to live.”

Another trait that Schine shares with Julian is the incontrovertible fact that her personal profession emerged, let’s consider, slowly. She enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, hoping to grow to be a poet. “I’d never been to a place like that, where everyone was dressed in such a fabulous, interesting way and was so smart and charismatic. And I thought, ‘I am not letting these people read my poems. Are you kidding?’” She shortly transferred to Barnard College, modified her main to medieval research after which went to graduate college at the University of Chicago, solely to grow to be “a failed medievalist.” Next, she landed a job at The Village Voice with assist from her mom’s greatest pal, who later inspired Schine to remodel one of her articles right into a novel. 

During this time, Schine felt like “a depressed lump,” residing together with her mom and sleeping on prime of her mattress in order that when her mom walked in, “I could just sit up and the bed was made.” She ultimately started writing a novel secretly, “pretending like I was making a shoe,” which allowed her to keep away from the “baggage that it had to be the great American novel.”

Looking again, Schine acknowledges that her success was “a combination of great luck, connections and, I have to think, some talent. When that happens, and the luck is there, it’s amazing.” In distinction to writers who start with outlines, Schine experiences her personal writing course of like “being en plein air in a city, strolling through your book, observing things as you go.” She tends to construction a novel after most of it has been written; in the case of Kϋnstlers in Paradise, as a result of it’s full of Mamie’s tales, it ended up being “about stories and what they mean, and where they fit into your own life—and into the lives of the people you tell them to. And how stories change, and also change people.”

Schine has beforehand mentioned that she doesn’t need to write her personal life story, however in the present day she says, “You know what? I think I want to, actually.” However, as she begins to debate the style, she shortly backtracks. “It’s funny. I want to write a memoir, but I don’t really want it to be very personal,” she says. “Somehow writing about myself seems so self-indulgent without the protection of a novel to make it more interesting and, in some ways, more real for other people. On the other hand, I love reading memoirs. Go figure.”

Photo of Schine by Karen Tapia.