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Beth Benedix honored for holocaust survivor book
The shared connection between two people — a DePauw University professor and a Holocaust survivor who both lost their fathers when they were young — leads to a compelling story on creating a new conversation for Holocaust survivors and their stories.
Beth D. Benedix, a DePauw University professor of world literature, religious studies and community engagement, was recently selected as a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for her book, “Ghost Writer: A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story.” This book took more than nine years to write and went through many versions and revisions before it got to the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil.
The Next Generation Indie Book Award has more than 70 categories for authors and publishers to send in their work to the judges that have already been published or will be published by 2020. Being a winner or even a finalist comes with many advantages including local recognition.
When asked how she felt about being one of the finalists for the book award, Benedix said it was “really nice.”
“When you’re writing, you’re in this sort of echo chamber and you have no idea how things are going to come across (to the reader),” Benedix said, “and I had this amazing agent and it was a chance to see how other people might hear it. That was the first time that I was really like ‘OK, maybe this could be out in the world.’”
How this all started was a colleague from DePauw approached her about working with a Holocaust survivor and from there Benedix met with the family members of Holocaust survivor Joe Koenig and then drove up to Chicago to meet Koenig.
“My specialty is modern existential and Jewish literature, so this was right up my ally,” Benedix says. This was new writing for her as she had written academic pieces on Jewish writers and poets before and it was “compelling and intriguing” from the start.
According to a statement on her publisher’s website, Benedix takes inspiration and influence for writing from Jewish writers and poets.
“My biggest inspirations in memoir — Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) and David Harris-Gershon (“What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?”) — are painstakingly, playfully, process-driven, and the authenticity of this approach came as a revelation to me the first time I read their books,” Benedix said.
Another major influence is Franz Kafka, Benedix having a poster of him above her desk.
Always thinking about the meaning of life, Benedix found that the majority of her inspirations were written “under the shadow of the Holocaust” and living in a world that the Holocaust occurred in.
“After receiving a couple of drafts from his (Koenig’s) son where he worked with two women prior, I felt he jumped off the page just in seeing his story was all about. And I felt immediately connected to him before I met him,” Benedix said.
She really wanted to work on this project the moment she met Joe Koenig and her next major obstacle was how to go about telling this story.
“There are so many Holocaust memoirs out there that aren’t being read so to me the challenge was to come up with a way to tell a story that would reach a general audience as opposed to a niche group,” Benedix said.
She knew it had to be done in a way that was “sort of unconventional. I really wanted people to read this story.”
Starting out, she began the process of writing scenes and expository writing, which she had little to no previous experience doing, but she also began asking questions that every author asks themselves when writing a story, poem, study, etc.: How do we reach a general audience? What’s the arch? How we create literature out of a human story? How do you build pieces of fragments and then connect the gaps? This led to the connection between Benedix and Joe Koenig.
Benedix’s process started out with her writing a book about her dad who was an “unsuccessful career criminal” and passed away when she was only 20. It wasn’t going anywhere so she shelved it when she was working with Koenig and working on his story. When she was recording conversations between her and Koenig, Benedix knew “the real story that people really wanted to hear beyond his (Koenig’s) story of survival and it had a story within of a larger story.
“It had to be about he and I interacting in his telling me of the story.” Benedix said.
At a certain point in these conversations, her dad was coming back up where Koenig said to Benedix “Oh, you lost your dad? You were such a baby. We both lost our dads too soon. We’re the same.”
This led Benedix to a critical juncture in her work.
“It occurred to me that part of the story that I was really trying to tell is how my story kept creeping into his story and what that meant,” Benedix said.
And so it became part of the process of trying to negotiate ‘What does that mean?’ and whether it was proper to put her father’s story into Joe’s story.
This led her to trying to figure out the sentence structure and wording that could be written poetically enough to reach a general audience 60 years after Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.
“Now, we need a new genre because it’s a new conversation of ‘What do we do now?’ with the second and third generation grappling with how humans could have done this to each other,” Benedix said.
What drove this story, though, was her passion to have these stories read and heard by people and readers.
“Fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are alive and it’s so important to get these stories out there, but in a way that people really care about them,” Benedix said. “It was something I was hoping for, not receiving an award, but to start a conversation. It’s an opportunity to reach more people and to have these conversations.”
Benedix feels it’s her duty as a person who did not experience this to “really listen and be as open and empathetic as I can possibly be to hear what Joe was telling me,” and to “not co-opt his story and avoid the genre of 'self-published family memoirs.’" She stated it was important to “really bring up the questions and issues on the Holocaust that need to be asked now, and to not only memorialize the Holocaust, but for anyone who goes through trauma and is trying to share that story with a wider audience so that people can have a sense of what that person went through, even though they will not know exactly what they went through at the end of the day. To hear someone’s story and say ‘Oh, here’s where I can resonate with.’”
Her students’, past and present, reactions have been mixed with many of her former students reaching out to her, but she also works with her students on projects that they are passionate about and nailing down their inner dialogue using the strategies that she used in her book which could be used for any type of story.
“If we don’t know why you’re telling the story that you’re telling, then the story you’re telling us is very much nothing,” Benedix said. “We need to know why you’re telling us these stories. We have to listen and we have to listen now to what is being said.”
When Koenig and Benedix crossed paths in this project, she knew it had to be him.
“It’s all about connections and it had to be Joe, for me, based on the specific fact that I met this particular person who would become family to me,” she said.
Benedix said a connection could have happened with another person. However, she and Koenig connected to the point that she felt they were practically family. This led to the specificity of being open to people and their lives to further build on that connection.
The next book Benedix is working on is about her philosophy on teaching, where it comes from and what it means in having conversations in generating meaning on a person’s “Why?”
“Ghost Writer: A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story” is available at Eli’s and Conspire on the square, Amazon, the publisher’s website or at www.bethbenedix.com.