Hey, here’s a link to an audio file of an interview I did with Rachael Hanel (a myspace buddy!) of the KMSU “Weekly Reader” radio show on April 3, 2008.

I talked about my book, Opa Nobody, and about research and family. And I noticed that as I talked to Rachael and heard her lovely Minnesooota accent I began to sound very Midwestern myself.

See if you can pick up on those vowels, ya know?

From a great review by Valerie Weaver-Zercher in The Christian Century Magazine (May 6, 2008): “Rather than setting documents, histories and photographs in opposition to family lore, however, Huber plumbs family stories for the truths they hold, even if they ultimately prove not to be factual. ‘Remembering is an act of the imagination,’ poet W. S. Di Piero has written, and it is precisely Huber’s play with the imaginative possibilities in the gaps between historical fact and family memory that makes her project so poetic and moving. “

I felt blessed indeed to learn on Sunday (March 23) that I’d received this review of Opa Nobody in the Los Angeles Times:

Revolutions, notoriously, devour their children: Once-beloved radicals are beheaded at the guillotine. But for the actual children of revolutionaries and activists, this idea holds a whole other dimension of meaning. For them, politics extracts a personal cost. Deep down, they suspect they come second to the cause.

For Sonya Huber, daughter of a German immigrant and author of the memoir “Opa Nobody,” this conflict gnaws at her family. Her grandfather Heina’s commitment to socialist and antifascist politics in prewar and Nazi Germany demanded sacrifices from his wife and children, even as he fought on behalf of the proletariat. For his efforts, he earned the title of the family “nobody.

Growing up, Huber heard about her grandfather’s activism, but she never knew the full story. When her own commitment to leftist politics led to emotional and physical collapse, she sought inspiration in his example. She wanted to know, “Why try to change the world?” She listened to family stories, and when those ran dry she crossed the Atlantic to search through German historical archives. In every chapter, she weaves stories of her activist life with richly imagined scenes of her grandfather, reconstructing his life from anecdotes and documentary evidence.

Huber also confronts links to Nazism in her own bloodline — in the person of a great uncle who joined the Waffen-SS. Although she has no evidence that he took part in war crimes, she imag- ines him participating in atrocities nonetheless. It would be too easy, Huber writes, not to do so, to acquit him simply because the paper trail ends. His SS status, in other words, makes him complicit, regardless of what he did or did not do. At the same time, Huber frames his decision to join the SS as fraught with nuance — perhaps as a survival strategy. And yet, she admits, such a “survival strategy” is her own invention, an expression of her hopes as opposed to the “truth.”

Huber is always careful to explain where research ends and imagination begins. Amid recent scandals about fraudulent memoirs, her honesty is profound in what it implies about storytelling and genre. Read as the saga of her quest to balance activism and motherhood, “Opa Nobody” is a memoir; read as a biography of her grandfather, it becomes speculative nonfiction. At times, it feels like a historical account. Her own label of “nonfiction novel” suits it well, but it is more than that. By connecting with history on such a personal level, she reveals how ordinary citizens can get swept up into movements of all kinds; allegiance is never as simple as a membership card.

Most radically of all for a progressive activist, Huber embraces the past. Instead of tossing it all out in search of something new, she ties a firm knot between then and now.
Karrie Higgins is a writer based in Portland, Ore.

About 70 folks (I think) came to hear me read and talk about Opa Nobody, which was sooooo wonderful. Yay to the Book and Cranny in Statesboro for all the help, and to Eric Nelson & his posse for the beautiful food, and to my son for drawing on my face while I was trying to sign books.

In other good news, Booklist says of Opa Nobody: “[T]houghtful discourse on political activism and the toll exacted from those dedicated to unpopular causes.”

I got this random piece of paper in an envelope yesterday and it turned out to be my first review. from Kirkus Reviews, dated 1/15/08. Okay….they’re not my mom, so they found stuff that I totally agree with: “the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing.” And also “The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication.” (well, I’d call that fiction and a mixed-genre thing while trying for honesty, but these are quibbles.) Here comes the good part:
“Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read. Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.”

I walked around the house kind of dazed, and then a half an hour later I said to Donny, “Wait, I think this is a good review.” It is a good review. Bumpy is okay–hell, they could have said hellishly incomprehensible and galling for even existing. “worthwhile,” “unique,” “imaginative…” aww, and they don’t even know me So I’m relieved and glad for such a strange book to be liked.

Wow, this is amazing. Just got the book jacket illustration today. Makes it seem somehow real!

My forthcoming book is “Opa Nobody,” and the story traces the life of my German grandfather, as I try to get him to explain how I should live my life. I never knew him, but I tried to reconstruct him in order to ask him about the struggles of trying to change the world while being a part of a family. The book alternates between pieces of memoir and pieces of fictionalized scenes from my grandfather’s life, based on research. It’s due out, at least right now, in Spring 2008 from University of Nebraska Press. I’m going to start keeping track of the process.