A chosen exile, By Jennifer Steil

It feels appropriate to suddenly find myself and my 10-year-old daughter exiled from our home in Uzbekistan while launching a novel about exile—although our situation is far more fortunate than that of my characters. They flee the Nazis in Vienna to find refuge in Bolivia, the only country that will let them in, and have to rebuild their entire lives.

We’re only fleeing the same thing everyone in the world is fleeing, and only temporarily. We have not been singled out for persecution and annihilation. We still have each other.

It was not our choice to leave Tashkent, where my husband is the British ambassador, two months ago. Nor was it our choice to come to London, where we have no home. The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office evacuated us, concerned that if we became ill we wouldn’t have adequate healthcare in Uzbekistan.

Still, we are lucky. A fellow author—aware that we were about to land in London with nowhere to go—made miracles happen. I write this at the dining table of the kind strangers who offered us their rental flat in Belsize Park, with just two days notice and absolutely no written contract. It is spacious, with worn wood floors, a record player, a library, 479 board games, and a chandelier in the bathroom. I’ve never lived in a London flat this fancy. Our landlady gives us plants and leaves butter and eggs outside our door.

My husband remains in Uzbekistan, where he is continuing to run the British Embassy. Uzbek airspace is closed and we don’t know when we will see him again. 

Like everyone everywhere, we continue to walk towards the unknown, unable to predict or plan our lives. 

I’ve spent a fair amount of time grumbling over the years about not having enough leisure time. Or any. First, I was paying off monstrous amounts of student debt while earning below minimum wage working as an actor, barista, and temp. Then I was in graduate school while teaching, acting, and temping. After that I worked as a journalist while trying to maintain a career in theatre and launch a career as a fiction writer. 

In 2006, I left the US to take a job as editor in chief of a newspaper in Yemen, where I worked more than 80 hours a week until my boss told me that if I didn’t slow down he’d be sending me home in a body bag. That experience inspired my first book, which I began writing while running the paper and finished editing while nursing my newborn daughter. 

Now, scrambling to keep up with doctoral work, mentor other writers, put together a temporary home, launch a new novel, and manage my daughter’s online schooling, I have all the excuses I need to take a break from work. 

Go easy on yourself, friends on social media are telling me. Don’t feel you have to be productive right now. 

But I do. I do have to be productive right now—not because I need to write a masterpiece and not only because I have deadlines and a need to support my family—but because if I don’t, I will lose my mind. 

When I am idle, my thoughts lurch towards darkness. Pessimism is my natural state. I make every effort to fight this, but only work helps. It’s a bonus that when you are writing to save your life, you don’t worry about who will read your words and what they will think. It frees you from that. You write in order to keep breathing.

At rest, I remember that my husband and I still haven’t written our wills, that I may not see him again, that both our upstairs and downstairs neighbors here have had covid-19, that all the traffic on our street consists of ambulances, and it’s probably just a matter of time for us. I fixate on the articles about the dangers to children. I dwell on the thousands of miles between us and everyone we have ever loved. 

I’m a human being, not a human doing, a more zenlike friend used to say, tired of being cornered at parties and grilled about what she did for a living. And while this may be true for more enlightened people, those comfortable staring into the abyss, it’s not for me. I am a human doing. When I am unable to write, there is no I at all. 

Since 2006, I’ve spent four years in Yemen, four months in Jordan, two years in London, four years in Bolivia, three years in London again, and eight months in Uzbekistan. We live in a permanent state of exile from the countries of our births. Now, even when I return to the United States it feels like a foreign land to me. 

Yet at the same time, I am at home everywhere, even in hotel rooms or friends’ guestrooms. I chose this life, this exile. It suits me. The lives I live in countries around the globe inspire all of my books. Friends and experiences in other cultures and countries constantly challenge my assumptions and points of view. I have the privilege of exploring new languages and perspectives.

I’ve made my home in movement, in novelty, in work, in the community of other writers, in my husband and daughter, and in all the places in between. 

It’s the best home I can imagine. 

—

Jennifer Steil’s new novel Exile Music (Viking) was inspired by the Jewish community of La Paz, Bolivia, where she lived for four years. Many of these Jews or their ancestors fled Europe in the 1930s to find sanctuary from the Nazis in Bolivia, one of only three countries still granting visas to Jews by 1938. Although her current home is in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Jennifer and her 10-year-old daughter were recently evacuated to London, England. Much of her work thus far concerns people living far from home, either by choice or necessity, and explores themes of displacement, identity, and home. Although born in the United States, Jennifer has not lived in the country since 2006, when she left to take a job as a newspaper editor in Yemen.

Jennifer’s previous books include The Ambassador’s Wife, winner of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and the 2016 Phillip McMath Post Publication book award, and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a critically acclaimed memoir about her tenure as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a.

Her stories and articles have appeared in the New Orleans Review, Saranac Review, World Policy Journal, The Week, Time, Life, Peauxdunque Review, The Washington Times, Vogue UK, Die Welt, New York Post, The Rumpus, and France 24.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/jfsteil7

Find out more about her on her website https://www.jennifersteil.net/

EXILE MUSIC

Based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, Exile Music is the captivating story of a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia

As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. Her father plays the viola in the Philharmonic, her mother is a well-regarded opera singer, her beloved and charismatic older brother holds the neighborhood in his thrall, and most of her eccentric and wonderful extended family live nearby. Only vaguely aware of Hitler’s rise or how her Jewish heritage will define her family’s identity, Orly spends her days immersed in play with her best friend and upstairs neighbor, Anneliese. Together they dream up vivid and elaborate worlds, where they can escape the growing tensions around them.

But in 1938, Orly’s peaceful life is shattered when the Germans arrive. Her older brother flees Vienna first, and soon Orly, her father, and her mother procure refugee visas for La Paz, a city high up in the Bolivian Andes. Even as the number of Jewish refugees in the small community grows, her family is haunted by the music that can no longer be their livelihood, and by the family and friends they left behind. While Orly and her father find their footing in the mountains, Orly’s mother grows even more distant, harboring a secret that could put their family at risk again. Years pass, the war ends, and Orly must decide: Is the love and adventure she has found in La Paz what defines home, or is the pull of her past in Europe–and the piece of her heart she left with Anneliese–too strong to ignore?

“In a sea of Holocaust literature, ‘Exile Music’ stands out as wholly original and engaging.” —Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle

“A beautiful coming-of-age tale… Moving, evocative, and well-researched, this is sure to linger inreaders’ minds long after the last page has been turned.” —Booklist (starred) 

“Steil expertly weaves historical details into this immersive narrative, complete with a focus on the impact of music in the characters’ lives. Steil’s evocative look at a lesser-explored corner of WWII is well worth picking up.”—Publishers Weekly

BUY THE BOOK HERE 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing