Welcome to the #NoContact Book Tour! While we all stay inside and stay safe, books have become even more important. But book events and conferences, alas, are canceled. To do my own small bit, I’m running interviews with authors whose tours must now be virtual. Today’s guest is Claudia Hagadus Long with a new novel that combines history, heritage, and adventure!

Welcome, Claudia. Please tell us about your book, Nine Tenths of the Law (Kasva Press 2020) 

“Two sisters, their mother, and a Nazi thief: combining the strands of history, mystery and the enduring power of buried memories.” 

Two sisters discover a menorah in the New York Jewish Studies Museum. They realize that it once belonged to their mother, Aurora. Aurora was fifteen when she walked out of the Warsaw Ghetto, orphaned and alone, after the Nazi foreman of the factory she’d been forced to work at eyed her for “special duties.” Decades later, her American daughters puzzle over the menorah that once belonged to her, and scheme to get it back. 

Their quest leads them deep into their own memories, their relationships with their mother, their stories and each other. It also leads them to a criminal art thief with Nazi parentage, and a confrontation between the vanished past and the very real present.

One day, over forty years ago, my mother and I went to the Jewish Museum in New York City,

and she showed me the menorah that’s at the center of Nine Tenths of the Law. “We had one

just like that,” she said to me. 

She was telling me, That was mine.

It’s with that memory of my own that the book starts. It’s tied together with my mother’s

stories, but it’s a book about sisters, really, a book of the survivors’ children. There’s a mystery,

there’s humor—what’s a Jewish book about tragedy without humor?—and there’s love.

What would you have been doing now to promote it? Where would you have been speaking? What bookstores would you have visited?

I had it all planned! Of course, I first would have had a launch party for family and friends at the Owl in Oakland (California) where I’ve launched some of my previous books. 

But they’re closed. Then I would have done readings at Books, Inc. Alameda (California), one of my all-time favorites,and Book Passage at the Ferry Building (San Francisco) where I had done readings previously. I was hoping to set something up at Flashlight Books in Walnut Creek as well. They’re pretty new here and I was excited to get to know them better. 

Oh, I had big plans. I’m still hoping that I’ll be able to get a program together with another author, the brilliant Stuart Roszister, who wrote The Mathematician’s Shiva, for one of our many venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, or at the very least, do something virtual with a few other writers. And I was going to submit for LitCrawl, the amazing street party of LitQuake, that takes place in the fall in the Mission District of San Francisco. 

Okay, I’m going to tear up now…

And, of course, I had plans to do a few events in New York, where the book takes place. You know, pre-pandemic New York: maybe Sarabeth’s restaurant, and maybe at the Jewish Museum across from Central Park (where I first saw the actual menorah!) My sister, who still lives in New York, was going to arrange a few events as well.

I haven’t given up hope. Maybe we’ll do all this next year!

Are you working on anything now? Is your process or routine different?

I’m still in the launch process for Nine Tenths, as the book has been out only a few weeks, so I’m very focused on this book. I’ve got some ideas for the future, though, and have done some outlines and character sketches, but nothing substantial yet. I may go back to my earlier era, Colonial Mexico (1690-1750) and may even pick up something with the Castillo family. (Josefina’s Sin, The Duel for Consuelo, and Chains of Silver, all available for your quarantine-escape reading pleasure!) or jump to the 1930’s in San Francisco for a bit of legal history. Or maybe the sisters in Nine Tenths, Zara and Lilly, will have another adventure together.

I do all my drafting during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month…November) so we’ll see where we are with this pandemic in the fall. 

Do you think your writing will be changed by this crisis?

Not really. At least I don’t think so. If anything I write takes place in the present I would have to have my characters behave in a manner consistent with reality, but human nature doesn’t change. I also truly believe that we will be together again.

Some things will change (we take our shoes off at the airport, right? Unthinkable before 2001) and we have no way of knowing how they will be different in advance. But we are, at the core, the same. Think of history: from 1914-1918 we had World War I, and the Spanish Flu pandemic for two years after that. Yet we embraced again. We had the Great Depression and World War II, and we made love, babies and art during those times. We had 9/11 and the real estate recession in 2008-2010 and our economy recovered and we found a reason to believe in the future. 

As humans, we are resilient. We will get through this world-wide crisis, and return to our old ways—good and bad—with amendments for the times. 

What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we’re free to be social again?

Seriously? See my grandchildren. Then I’m going to go out for coffee, sit in the sun with a friend and talk, and then walk down the street without feeling that I’m violating the social contract by leaving my house, go to a book store, leave with an arm-load of new books I picked off the shelves instead of being presented by an algorithm, and go to the Lafayette Reservoir, and read in public! 

Thanks so much, Claudia! I look forward to seeing you read in person!