B.A. Shapiro’s seventh novel, “The Muralist,” published last year and just released in paperback, has as its backdrop the most explosive events of the 20th century — the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust — and features major figures from the political and art worlds including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
But the central characters in the book, Alizée Benoit, an abstract expressionist painter of French-Jewish extraction who works for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, and her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, a Christie’s Auction House underling who in 2015 seeks to uncover the mystery surrounding Benoit’s disappearance 75 years earlier, are entirely the products of Shapiro’s imagination.
By melding world events with fiction in this book, Shapiro said she was able to immerse herself in many subjects she has been passionate about her entire life.
She will be speaking about “The Muralist” at Copperfield’s Books in Healdsburg on Nov. 4.
“I love doing research,” said the Boston-based Shapiro, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Tufts University and has taught at the college level, explaining the extensive background work required to set a novel in Depression-era New York just before World War II.
And, she added, “The Muralist” allowed her to once again focus on art, an all-consuming interest. (Shapiro’s last book, “The Art Forger,” was a critical hit that put her on the literary map, following “five novels that nobody read,” she said.)
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an artist,” she said, but it soon became apparent that her talents lay elsewhere. Still, Shapiro said, her first destination upon arrival in a new city is the local art museum.
The inspiration behind “The Muralist,” the writer said, was one of her uncles, a Holocaust survivor, who took 20 of his relatives, including Shapiro, on a tour of Poland with a Holocaust researcher to understand how the Shoah had touched their family. “This book is my homage to my uncle and his family,” Shapiro said.
In “The Muralist,” Alizée tries desperately to obtain American visas for her extended family in France and Germany, one of whom has been transported to Drancy, the French detention camp that was a way station for Jews being shipped to extermination camps. Other relatives were turned back from entry to Cuba and the United States on the ship the MS St. Louis. But the protagonist finds obstacles along every path she pursues.
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If readers get anything out of the book, other than pure entertainment, Shapiro said, it is that Hitler and his henchman weren’t the only culprits in the persecution of the Jews. They also included American anti-Semites such as longtime diplomat and career politician Breckinridge Long, who as Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state responsible for the issuance of visas blocked the immigration of Jews trying to flee the Nazis.
“Most Jews don’t know about him,” said Shapiro. “He flew right under the radar … I really wanted [to expose his misdeeds] in this book.”
Alizée and other characters in the book endeavor to call attention to Long’s anti-Semitism in a cultural and political climate in the United States that, while anti-Fascist, wasn’t particularly hospitable to the Jews. Even in New York, where much of the book is centered, it was not uncommon to find a “RESTRICTED sign in the front window, indicating that neither Negros [sic] nor Jews would be served” in restaurants, Shapiro writes.
Shapiro said that by touching on xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment, she has struck a chord with many contemporary readers. “I’ve gotten letters from Muslim refugees telling me that this is their story, too,” she said.
Nothing, she said, could make her prouder.
B.A. Shapiro will appear at 6 p.m. Nov. 4 at Copperfield’s Books, 106 Matheson St., Healdsburg.