What was the Inspiration for the Novel The Serpent Bearer?

Jane Rosenthal

The inspiration for my novel The Serpent Bearer came from my own life, from the people I grew up around and the place of my childhood— the south, the Piedmont area of North Carolina, to be exact, right on the South Carolina border. That landscape—the red clay, the verdant green, rolling hills, the cotton and soybean fields, the haunting whistles of freight trains rolling past the longleaf pines at night—is as much a part of me as my eye color and height. I always wanted to locate a story in that place of childhood memory. In fact, a former literary agent once told me that I should “exploit my southern background,” and by that she meant write a story about some recently divorced woman who retreats to her beach house on the Outer Banks and falls for the hunky contactor who fixes her screen doors.

   There was just one problem.  My south, in spite of the shared landscape, was not the same south as those who owned beach homes and antebellum mansions. Why? Because I’m Jewish, and I grew up a Jewish child in the south in the time of Jim Crow. There were places White folks went, places that Black folks could go, and places Jews could go, places Jews could live. That was the way the world was back then—segregated. 

     I basically grew up in a ghetto, a community created by Jews who came south in the rag trade like my father, Jews who were lucky enough to escape Europe with the help of the Hebrew International Aid Society like my parents’ friends, and Jews who’d been there for generations like my father’s poker buddies, running small department stores, small hosiery mills, trucking companies, keeping a low profile, keeping to themselves. 

   I used to love hearing the grownups tell stories of what it was like—the south—when they first arrived in the thirties and forties, how there was a circuit riding rabbi, how they had to bring their Sabbath wine down from New York because the south was dry, and also, I’m guessing here, because the wine drinkers were mostly European with elevated tastes. I remember one family friend, a Polish refugee, laughing, saying “I am now bootlegger” as he and my father brought cases of wine into the house. The undercurrent of the joke was that he was the son of wealthy Warsaw diamond merchants, who were all dead, and he was the lucky one—a bootlegger.

     I still hear their voices, their laughter, and I wanted to capture that world, closed and intimate and always a bit precarious if I’m being honest. Could it be that Jews, segregated or not, were really safe anywhere, even in America?  

       I felt an urgency to write this novel because I may be one of the last of a generation that remembers who those people were and how they fought for a freer, better world than the one they experienced. They fought in Spain, and some never came back; they fought in Europe and the South Pacific; they fought for Civil Rights in this country, and until recently I thought they’d won. Between you and me, I’m going to bet, like my protagonist Solly would, that they still had the winning hand. They were people of great character and conviction. I wanted—no, I needed—to bring them and what they stood for, back to life. I didn’t want them ever to die.

     The only way I knew to do this was to write a book about them. However, to make a coherent story out of lives as complex and sprawling as the lives of my parents and the people in their world, a novel that would encompass all they had lived through in the twentieth century, well, that was a hugely daunting task, one that would take research and travel, all of which I did. 

    I studied the history of fascism in this country; I studied about radio transmission and code breaking, and about the relief work of the Mexican ambassador to France during World War 2, Gilberto Bosques, who rescued many Jews and brought them to Mexico. I travelled all over the Yucatan and Campeche on a special tour designed by the company Journey Mexico to help me with research. I stayed in places my characters would have stayed and walked in their footsteps. Writing this novel will always remain one of the highlights of my life.

    In spite of all that excitement, The Serpent Bearer had an inauspicious start. I usually begin a project with the voice of a character talking, guiding me into the story. But, this novel began simply with an image of a woman standing in front of my protagonist, Solly Meisner’s office door holding a basket of peaches. It was nighttime, she was a black woman taking a risk being where she was. Why? Who was she? What was the urgency? That was all I had to go on.

    Well, not all. I knew the title—The Serpent Bearer. The name comes from the Greek myth of Ophiuchus, a myth in which a shepherd witnesses a miracle: he watches a serpent heal another wounded serpent with a leaf. It’s a myth about bringing the dead back to life, exactly what I wanted to do. How I went from a blurry image of a woman with a basket of peaches, a title, and a question—what was she doing there?—tells you all you need to know about the magic of writing, how just a few snippets can take you on a magnificent journey, how following  breadcrumb after breadcrumb leads you into enchantment, and can for a while bring loved ones back, make them alive once again on the page.

      Some parts of this novel are absolutely true, and come from the stories I heard growing up; some of the novel comes from my early memories of the way the southern towns and landscapes looked in the fifties, and some of the tale I lived through. It was as if I put all my memories, all my research, all my travels, feelings, experiences into the blender of my heart and soul, pushed a button, and created this magic elixir. 

   Even though this magic potion is a spy thriller with danger always present, I knew I didn’t want to have the question—does the protagonist Solly Meisner survive—drive the narrative. I’m not giving anything away to tell you now, as I do in the second chapter, that you will know that he does. The question throughout the novel is how. How did he survive? How did any of the characters survive this frightening time?

    I needed to answer that question for myself, and I hoped I might answer it for my readers. How do we survive? What really matters? Writing The Serpent Bearer gave me an insight, an answer, and I hope that when you read this book, it will for you, as well.

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About the author: Jane Rosenthal studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. She worked for NPR and California Public Radio before teaching English in public high schools in Oakland, California. She grew up Jewish and southern in Charlotte, North Carolina, and now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, astrophysicist David Hollenbach.

The Serpent Bearer

Part World War II spy thriller, part romance, and part tale of buried family secrets, The Serpent Bearer is perfect for fans of Kelly Rimmer’s The German Wife and Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network.

A suspenseful tale stretching from Spain to Hollywood, from a small Jewish community in South Carolina to a crumbling hacienda in the Yucatan, The Serpent Bearer carries readers into the lives of a glamorous British aristocrat, a Jewish gambler, and a beautiful Hollywood screenwriter—all swept up by dangerous political currents during WWII.

Solly Meisner, a Spanish Civil War veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, has barely settled in after his return home when he discovers powerful Nazi sympathizers are working behind the scenes in his new hometown of Pennington, South Carolina. Determined to stop them, he signs on with the Coordinating Office of Information (COI), a newly formed US spy agency. His first assignment: travel to the Yucatan and infiltrate a group of German spies and collaborators—including Estelle, a beautiful British woman he fell in love with in Spain, and whom he fears may have betrayed him.

In the Yucatan Solly encounters a band of European exiles, not all of them who they claim to be. With his contacts dropping like flies, danger lurks at every turn. But with the Nazis only a few hundred miles from the US coast and making plans for an invasion, there is no time to lose, and no one Solly trusts to track them down and stop them but himself. If he fails, the world he once knew will be gone forever—and the people he loves with it.

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Category: On Writing