Interview

Jennifer Rosner discusses The Yellow Bird Sings and the hidden children of the Holocaust.

The Yellow Bird Sings builds on similar themes as If a Tree Falls, your memoir about raising your two daughters who are deaf, and your family's history of deafness. How much of your personal experience influenced this story?

The works are connected in many ways. Both are about longing for connection amid silence. During a book talk for If a Tree Falls, I met a hidden child. [According to the ADL, hidden children are the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, who eluded the Nazis by hiding in convents, orphanages and other places.] A woman was in the audience, and we connected. I was talking about the deafness in my family, how I wanted so desperately for my daughters to talk and for me to hear them, and how, in my ancestry, I'd discovered deaf great-aunts who tied strings to their wrists at night--an innovation--so that they'd know if their babies cried. I was focused so much on the mother-daughter relationship, on hearing and silence in our lives, yet here was a woman who hid with her mother amid a very different, brutal and dangerous kind of silence. It was powerful and resonant, and led me into the terrain of my novel.

As part of your writing process, you interviewed many other hidden children.

I did. The woman at my book ...