The Magical Power of Objects. How a Glass Bird Inspired a Brilliant Novel...

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (0:00)

And I was thinking about throwing them out, and then I said, no, I need to keep them. I wasn't sure where that instinct came from, but I put them in my curio. And it took me the writing of this book to figure out why I really kept them.

Charles Levin (0:23)

Oh, Charlie had a story, a tale to be told. Welcome back to The Munn Avenue Muse, where we love to talk with authors about the stories behind their books and the creative journey that brings those stories to life. Today I'm joined by Annette Libeskind Berkovitz, author of The Great Conjunction, a brand new book from Munn Avenue Press, beautifully written and set against the backdrop of pandemic era New York. Annette has written six books over the last 20 years, and as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she brings a deeply personal perspective to the novel's exploration of memory, survival, and the meaning we attach to things we leave behind.

Blending richly drawn characters with touches of magical realism, The Great Conjunction is both deeply human and wonderfully imaginative. Annette, welcome to the Munn Avenue Muse.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (1:26)

Thank you, Charlie, for having me. Happy to be here.

Charles Levin (1:29)

I'm so delighted to have you here. Oh, first, you know, I never asked you the question, but your accent, where does that come from?

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (1:38)

Oh, my goodness.

I even stumped a professor at City College many decades ago. He said, you have an accent, but I can't figure it out. Well, it's a blend, probably, of all the places in which I've lived, which encompasses three continents. So let's leave it at that, because the whole story would take too long.

Charles Levin (1:59)

All right, but we'll let the listeners guess a little bit, too, and your name might be a bit of a clue as well.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (2:07)

Well, Charlie, if listeners want to know more about it, it's all written in one of my other books, Aftermath, Coming of Age on Three Continents.

Charles Levin (2:18)

Oh, okay, great. And Annette, as we said, has written six books. Today we're going to talk mainly about The Great Conjunction, the newest one.

What inspired you to write this book? What was the kernel that sparked a huge amount of work and research to bring this to light?

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (2:38)

Charlie, I think that it's almost never a single event.

I suppose it could be, but my mind is always very focused on memory. Memory, if you had to define my family by a single characteristic, it's concerned with memory. It probably comes from my father, who was passionate about carrying forward the story of what happened during the Holocaust. Several dozen of our families were murdered, family members rather, and he told the story over and over again. Not everyone is like that. A lot of survivors don't talk about it. My mother was one of them. Her story was very hard for me to know because she didn't want to talk about it. But my father did. And so that my brother and I are the only two children in the family, and we're both very interested in thinking about memory and what's important to remember. As a matter of fact, my brother is an architect, a very well-known architect, and he's been called the architect of memory.

And I have found, I think about it a lot, but as I stopped to think about all of my books, I hadn't quite realized how all of them have memory as a very important component. So that's one part. The other part is that I, like everybody else during the pandemic, was sitting in my living room, and that was my environment, okay, maybe another room of the house. Basically, we were confined to our homes, and I became hyper-focused on my immediate environment. One of the things in my immediate environment that's very noticeable is my curio cabinet.

I started thinking about how and why I collected some of the items that were in there, and that kind of the glass birds, which are very much magical realism component of my story, I in fact have in my curio cabinet, and they were the spark that set it all off. Why did I keep them? Even though they are broken, and I don't like broken things in my curio cabinet. But I realized-

Charles Levin (5:08)

Tell us why.

Annette Libeskind Berkovits (5:09)

Yeah, it was a sad story, but it's an interesting component of the spark that propelled me to write this book.

As my father lay dying, I was in Washington. I happened to be receiving an award from the National Science Foundation. It was a Black Die event. I had to be there. So I left my son to care for my father while I was away, but he called out during the night. He was very ill. And my son jumped out of bed, knocked over the nightstand. And the two sets of birds that I had sitting on them, they were very delicate Murano glassbirds. One set was a pair of doves, and the other set was a pair of purple martens. And the mate of each bird broke.