An Interview with Author Germaine Shames
What inspired you to write You, Fascinating You?
The short answer is Margit Wolf. As the book’s tagline says, “Behind every great love song is an unforgettable woman.”
I met Wolf’s son, Cesare Frustaci, at the home of mutual friends, Hungarian émigrés, in the winter of 1990. As we got to know each other, details of his childhood began to emerge—the malnutrition he suffered during World War II, the “shoes” he fashioned for himself from horses’ feedbags, the corpses alongside which he would awaken each morning… He seemed to be describing the perils of an orphaned waif abandoned to his fate, yet he was the son of Pasquale Frustaci (aka the “Italian Cole Porter”), a composer and conductor whose star, while the war cast Europe into darkness, had never shone brighter. How then, from the age of seven, did Cesi end up alone on the streets of Budapest and the battlefront of provincial Hungary in the middle of the worst carnage the world has known?
The answer arrived in my mailbox a dozen years later: a videotaped oral history Cesi contributed to Yale University. It told the story of a Jewish Hungarian ballerina who marries an Italian maestro in fascist Italy and bears him a son—a ballerina who inspires an international anthem to longing only to fade from history without a trace. I sat riveted, as if hearing the libretto of a ballet or an opera, but this was memory—the memory of a hungry boy searching for his mother.
Determined to give this forgotten ballerina her moment in the spotlight, I joined Cesi in his search.
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You refer to You, Fascinating You as a cross between The Red Shoes and Europa, Europa. How so?
Like the former it centers on an impossible love between a ballerina and a composer, and like the latter its consequences leave a seven-year old boy alone on the streets of Europe during the most desperate months of the Second World War.
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Have you a background in ballet?
As a child I dreamed of becoming a ballerina. Like Margit Wolf, I began ballet training at the age of four—and there any comparison ends. I was hopeless! My love of classical dance, however, has endured.
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Is You, Fascinating You another Holocaust book?
YFY tells the hidden story behind a timeless love song. Ironically, while the eponymous song enjoyed peak popularity throughout Europe, the woman who inspired it fought for her life in a series of concentration camps. The book, however, spans several decades and does not deal directly with the horrors of surviving Auschwitz or Ravensbruck (which, I believe, are best described in works written by survivors themselves).
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Is You, Fascinating You a love story?
YFY begins as a backstage romance between a Jewish ballerina and an Italian composer during Mussolini’s fascist regime and ends as an epic triumph of the human spirit for a mother and her son. Margit’s actions demonstrate the lengths to which a woman will go to protect and honor those she loves. As she says, “People who love do the impossible all the time.”
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But I’ve never heard of Margit Wolf. Why does her story matter?
There have been innumerable artists—dancers, actors, authors, musicians, and playwrights—whose careers were blighted by persecution and oeuvres cut short by war. Imagine for a moment all the songs that will never be composed, ballets never performed, books never written… History has yet to reckon the loss of these great talents. I dedicate You, Fascinating You to their memory.
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Wolf’s story unfolds amid a complex welter of world events little known to contemporary audiences. How did you research You, Fascinating You?
By the time I took on this project, Cesare had already spent years assembling his mother’s papers and filling in the blanks with research of his own. I invested an additional five years poring through archives, corresponding with scholars, visiting the story’s many settings, and interviewing people who had known Margit and Pasquale.
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Your last published novel, Between Two Deserts, written when you were a correspondent in the Middle East, explored the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Is You, Fascinating You an expansion of this theme or a departure?
Both. Extraordinary events engender extraordinary drama and will always play a part in my fiction. In recent years, however, two developments have had a major impact on my work. First, I returned to college to study film and have completed three feature screenplays. It is no coincidence that editors and critics have called You, Fascinating You “cinematic.” Second, in recent years I have surrendered to my passion for the arts. Nearly all of my protagonists are now artists of one sort or another—in my next novel visual artists, and next screenplay composers.
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Who are you hoping to reach with You, Fascinating You?
For the past several years Cesare has been sharing Margit’s story at schools, community centers, churches and synagogues—and receiving the same enthusiastic response from all these diverse groups. I would like to think I have written a book that reaches across barriers of religion, generation and politics to touch the hearts of readers everywhere.
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