Photo by Peter Blankman
For Anne Blankman, it all started during a ninth-grade sleepover with a group of friends that included a new classmate, Victoria, who had recently emigrated from Ukraine. Like many teenagers, the girls were complaining about their parents. Victoria got quiet before she piped up in broken English, “You guys don’t know how lucky you are. … I had to live without my parents for a whole year.” Then her story tumbled out. A Chernobyl disaster survivor, she had been sent as a young child to Uzbekistan to escape the effects of the nuclear accident before eventually moving to a small town in upstate New York.
That story — and friendship — stuck with Richmond author Blankman for two decades, and it eventually became her newest book, “The Blackbird Girls,” out this month. A story of camaraderie and loss amidst physical and verbal abuse set in the USSR during the late 1980s, the novel centers around a young Jewish girl, her grandmother and a non-Jewish girl in the community. Although it’s geared for middle grade readers, the story transcends audiences. During graduate school, Blankman discovered that she “[adored] writing for younger people — they’re much more adventurous readers than adults,” she says.
As part of the research for the book, which included more than 400 pages of historical notes and primary resources, Blankman interviewed Victoria and her grandparents about their experiences living in the former Soviet Union. She explains that she researches extensively for all her books. “It will be a long time before I can write that first sentence,” she says, laughing. “Before I start writing, I need to know what is historically possible for my story to occur.”
Blankman’s first two books, “Prisoner of Night and Fog” (2014) and “Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke” (2015), are set in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. “The Blackbird Girls” strikes a similar chord with the hypermasculine world of the Soviet regime; Blankman considers the setting itself as a character, which is evident in her richly constructed worlds.
Blankman, who is Jewish, admits that “The Blackbird Girls” is her most personal story, written at a time when she was particularly vulnerable. While drafting the book, Blankman’s husband, Michael Cizenski, then in his 30s, was diagnosed with cancer. While writing the manuscript and working full time as a children’s librarian, Blankman cared for Cizenski, who is now cancer free, and her young daughter, Kristen, now 11.
In each of her books, she weaves together themes of religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, empathy and kindness. Through personal relationships, her characters evolve over time from bigotry to tolerance to love. Blankman explains that themes of intolerance are timeless, and she was made especially aware of the continued threat during the editing of “The Blackbird Girls” in the fall of 2018, when there was a mass shooting in a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“It’s even more important that we read stories about tolerance and kindness and about overcoming prejudice,” she says. “I truly believe that stories have such healing power and that stories do have the power to change someone’s mind.”
Anne Blankman will sign copies of her book, “The Blackbird Girls,” on Saturday, March 14, at 2 p.m. at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.
