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| Victoria Zackheim signs her books |
Zackheim, a 2010 San Francisco Library Laureate who teaches Personal Essay through UCLA Extension, spoke about turning life events into fiction. She talked to a rapt audience of 25 about the process of researching her family history and writing her novel, an endeavor which took 16 years.
While in college, a publisher asked Zackheim to write a book about her deceased father, a Jewish educator from Compton who worked in the Black community of Los Angeles. By the time she had interviewed countless friends and family members about their memories of him, a new publisher was no longer interested in the project.
Years later she unearthed her records, typed up on parchment paper, typos and all. Intrigued by one woman's story in Israel--the only survivor of the Holocaust of 38 relatives on her father's side--Zackheim asked her grandmother for more information. "Why would you want to know about that?" was the typical response to a family history entrenched in the pain of genocide.
"What they're holding back is who we are--a major part of our psyche, our emotional ballast," Zackheim said about the importance of family stories. "Who we are is a tapestry of everyone who came before us."
