By Caitlin Kasunich
In many ways, Fort Greene writer Ghita Schwarz shared many similar experiences with other children in her neighborhood as she grew up on West 82nd Street in Manhattan. She had supportive, generous parents who put their kids first probably more than they should have, she said. From an early age, they always encouraged her to do well in school and incorporate arts into her curriculum. As she grew older, her parents never interfered with her professional goals or political opinions and constantly pushed her to choose her own path in life.
At the same time, Schwarz also knew that her family was quite different from those of other kids: her Jewish parents both came to the United States after growing up in the midst of World War II and experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. Schwarz’s mother, a small child at the beginning of the war, was born in Poland. After her family fled to Russia, they were deported to Siberia and then into the far east of the Soviet Union. Upon being repatriated to Poland, her mother’s family realized that they were not safe there and decided to go to a displaced persons camp in Germany before relocating to Israel in 1949. Her mother eventually came to the United States in 1959 on a scholarship to Juilliard in New York.
Schwarz’s father, on the other hand, was born in Germany but also grew up in Poland since the borders were changing in Europe at that time. After surviving concentration camps, he, too, resided near a displaced persons camp after the war had ended and eventually immigrated to the United States a few years later. While Schwarz’s mother’s family had survived the war, her father’s family had not been so lucky.
Throughout her childhood, Schwarz said that she remembers marveling over the many people in her family photo albums whom she had never met before.
“It does shape your consciousness a little bit,” said Schwarz. “Bad things happen in the world. Sometimes they’re stopped, and sometimes they’re not. Of course, if you grow up already knowing a lot about how political forces can shape your personal life, it shapes how you think of your career or what you want to study or what you want to write about.”
Schwarz, a Fort Greene native since 2000, was able to incorporate some of these memories into her first novel, entitled Displaced Persons, which was published by HarperCollins last August. The book, which is a work of historical fiction, tells the story of a group of Polish Jews who meet at a refugee camp during the liberation of Europe in May 1945. Unlike other books on the Holocaust that focus on the torments that people faced as they lived in the concentration camps, Schwarz instead decided to portray the ways in which these people tried to re-build their lives after the war had ended.
“I hadn’t really seen that part of history represented very much, at least in fiction,” said Schwarz, who attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and later studied law at Columbia University. “I liked the idea of not doing something directly about the wartime but about how people manage afterwards and how they manage in this atmosphere of really extreme grief.”
Maurice Samuels, one of Schwarz’s close friends who also attended Harvard and read several drafts of the book as Schwarz was writing it, said that the writer was always fascinated by the way in which society talks about the Holocaust and how that discussion has changed over time.
“That’s one of her main interests in the novel,” said Samuels, 42. “The novel takes place in several different time periods, and she’s interested in how people tell their stories differently and how people perceive those stories differently right after the war in the 1960s and then in the 1990s. That does follow something that I think was very personal for her.”
According to a book review in the San Francisco Chronicle that came out the same month that the novel was published, Displaced Persons also shows how the characters are able to “build lives largely incongruous with those they left behind,” as well as “endure the judgments of those who don’t understand their experiences.”
After the characters initially meet at the refugee camp, the book continues to chronicle their lives as they arrive in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. In this section of the book, Schwarz said that she wanted to show how people rarely discussed their memories and experiences of World War II publicly. The final part of the book takes place in the 1990s, when all of the characters have grown up. The end of the 20th century marked a period in history in which it became very popular to discuss Holocaust testimonies in the public realm, Schwarz said. At this point, the characters learn how to negotiate their experiences and express themselves to others.
Schwarz’s interest in the immigrant experience is present not only in her writing, but it is also incorporated into her career as a civil rights lawyer in Tribeca. She currently works with immigrants throughout New York City for a Latino organization called Latino Justice. She handles a myriad of cases each day involving anything from people who are suing the immigration service because of delays in the naturalization process to First Amendment issues that involve day laborers.
Most recently, Schwarz said, she has been working on a case where the immigration service came into people’s homes at 4 or 5 a.m. to try to find undocumented immigrants without warrants – “a very basic thing that Americans who were born here feel that they’re entitled to,” she said.
Samuels noted how Schwarz’s work as a writer and lawyer go hand-in-hand.
“The novel is very much about the struggle of immigrants, and that’s her job – to defend immigrants who have had really horrible things happen to them,” he said. “She’s very interested in both her legal work and in her writing and what it means to change cultures – what elements of your past you can hold onto in the present, the sort of day-to-day struggles that you have in between two cultures and trying to make it in this new world.”
Since the publication of Displaced Persons, Schwarz said that she has begun to work on her second book. Set in a fictional suburb of New York, the book continues to touch upon the immigrant experience – this time in the form of oral history.
“One of the things that is very interesting about the work that I do now is that I go to a lot of places where I represent, on occasion, undocumented immigrants or very low-income legal immigrants,” she said. “I go to a lot of places that are extremely wealthy, but there’s this whole population in those same areas like East Hampton or South Hampton that are very, very poor. They’re serving the more well-to-do people. I wanted to explore that dichotomy.”
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