Books: "The Umbrella Maker's Son," By Tod Lending

 

The Umbrella Maker's Son

By Tod Lending

Harper Paperbacks/HarperCollins Publishers; paperback, 387 pages; $18.99; available today, Tuesday, February 11th

Tod Lending is an Academy Award-nominated and national Emmy-winning producer, director, writer, and cinematographer. His work has aired nationally on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and HBO; has been screened theatrically and received awards at national and international festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival; and has been televised in Europe and Asia. He is the founder and president of Nomadic Pictures, a documentary film production company based in Chicago. 

The Umbrella Maker's Son is Lending's debut novel, set against the distressing backdrop of World War II, that paints a vivid portrait of love, survival, and resilience in the face of tremendous adversity. 

Reuven is seventeen years old, and was born to a secure, middle-class Polish Jewish family, and he works alongside his father, an artisan businessman whose shop makes the finest handmade umbrellas in Poland. However, the family's peaceful life shatters when the Nazis invade their homeland, which ignited World War II.

Their businesses are confiscated, and they are evicted from their homes, by the Nazis. Their civil rights are also stripped away, which threatens the lives of the city's entire Jewish population, including Reuven and Zelda, the girl he loves.

After Reuven is separated from his family, he embarks on a perilous journey through the Polish countryside, determined to reach the Krakow ghetto where he hopes to reunite with Zelda.

Lending gives his story a real authenticity with his attention to detail, transporting readers to the heart of Krakow to capture the essence of a community torn apart by war. This is a work that stands out not only for its historical accuracy, but its deeply personal exploration of family dynamics amidst chaos.

The Inspiration behind my novel The Umbrella Maker's Son - By Tod Lending (Provided by HarperCollins):

I owe the title of this book, along with much of its inspiration, to my great-grandfather, Raphael Lending, an umbrella maker in Warsaw in the late 1800s, a time marked by virulent antisemitism. According to family lore, one day he came across a Police police officer beating a Jewish man in the street. Raphael intervened, hoping to stop the assault, but ended up stabbing the police officer with a dagger concealed in the stem of his umbrella. Fearing life imprisonment or execution, he immediately uprooted his family, abandoned his umbrella making business, and escaped to America. They arrived at Ellis Island on 24 December 1909. A version of this incident serves as a key turning point for the Berkovitz family in the novel.

Saul Dreier and Ruby Sosnowicz, both Holocaust survivors from Poland the subjects of a documentary film I made over the course of three years, were also invaluable sources of inspiration for this novel. Over the ten years of knowing them, they've given me an intimate emotional and psychological understanding of what it was like to live through the Holocaust and how their traumas affected them later in life. During filming we returned to Poland and walked the streets where they grew up - Saul in Krakow, Ruby in Warsaw. Their recollections offered deeper insights into what it was like to grow up in these places before and during the war - the sights, smells, and sounds of the neighborhoods, the rhythms of life, and how everything changed dramatically after the Germans invaded. I am greatly indebted to Saul and Ruby for sharing their lives and trusting me with their personal stories.

Another important source of research for this novel was The Krakow Diary, by nineteen-year-old Julius Feldman (1923-1943). Written over two months in the spring of 1943, Feldman risked his life to provide a detailed account of what happened to his family and city from the German invasion of Krakow on 1 September 1939, up to his last entry on 11 April 1943. At the time, he was a forced laborer interned at Plaszow. His diary ends abruptly, mid-sentence, and remained hidden until it was discovered inside the walls of a Plaszow barrack at the end of the war. Certain events and descriptions in The Umbrella Maker's Son are inspired by Feldman's account, including the evictions of Jews from their homes; the confiscations of their furs, jewelry, money, and other belongings; the ghetto's construction and brutal conditions; the forced labor they endured; the loss of their civil rightsl the mass deportations; and the atrocities at Plaszow. Historians believe Feldman perished in the camp. The slim diary he left behind remains, in my mind, a miraculous gift to the world.

The Krakow Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz was another essential historical source. Pankiewicz, a courageous Catholic pharmacist who risked his life running the only pharmacy in the Krakow Ghetto and saved many Jewish lives, inspired the creation of Mr. Malinowski in the novel. I am deeply grateful for Pankiewicz's acutely detailed, first-person account of the horrific events that unfolded under the German occupation, documenting the nightmarish conditions and events that occurred inside the ghetto.

Part II of the book, where Reuven Berkovitz, the main character, worksw on Stanislaw's farm, draws from my own experiences working on a farm at the age of 16 in the North Platte area of Nebraska. Elements of Stanislaw's character and the farm work are inspired by the time I spent working for Joe Hertje, a complex man who served as a father figure and mentor. Like Stanislaw, Joe was illiterate yet incredibly intelligent, possessing a deep knowledge of agriculture, mechanics and construction. His racist and antisemitic views - rooted in ignorance and fear rather than hatred - opened my eyes to the complexities of human nature at a young age. Working for Joe and understanding him so deeply provided essential life lessons and insights into human psychology that shaped this book.

I began writing The Umbrella Maker's Son in May 2019, during the pandemic, and completed it a year before 7 October 2o23. In certain ways the world has changed dramatically since then, but the book's core theme - how a young man during war copes with unimaginable loss, survives physically and mentally, and finds the strength to keep going - remains timeless and relevant. I hope readers will recognize Reuven's losses - of home and homeland, family, dignity, and even identity - as a universal human experience shared by Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Lebanese, and all those affected by war. Exploring how this deeply human experience shapes Reuven Berkovitz, and discovering the remarkable sources of his resilience, former the heart of this novel.