As promised, the main points of the speech I made at the book launch of The Meleke Stone:
“As a writer I have to deal with many questions. The most common is How do you write a novel? My answer: write about what you know. That way it comes over as more realistic. As I started to write The Meleke Stone, therefore, my thoughts flew back to when we used to attend a synagogue in Toulouse. One day after the service, a male congregant came over and asked me why I wrote in the name of Olga Swan. Wanting to impress him I said that the name was an anagram of my late brother (A. Olswang): my way of remembering him. But there was a pause before the man asked me how long I’d lived in France. I was puzzled but told him. He then said Don’t you yet know that the name Olga here means a lady of ill repute, a streetwalker! I was shocked. Maybe I should have called myself EL James instead. I already have 50 shades of grey in my hair! Back home in Birmingham, there were more questions. How did I choose my current book cover? Local bookshops seem to stock a plethora of wartime novels, all featuring scenes of rubble plus a young, attractive girl wearing - for some strange reason - a red, expensive coat, looking far too clean for the surroundings and make-up that’s far too modern for the era depicted. I’m pretty sure they didn’t have liquid eyeliner in the war. So I didn’t want such an unrealistic image on my cover. Then I thought Well, my story’s about Israel so maybe I should use an image of Jerusalem, but the cover ended up looking like a glossy travel brochure. So, in the end, I thought ‘less is more’ so I chose an image of a wall of meleke stone representing Herod’s Temple, with two ancient keys with Roman heads. The subheading pointed the way to the storyline: Survival is the eternal key. I didn’t want to write an academic non-fiction book because I wanted to interest the ordinary reader - so it had to be a novel. My challenge was to counter antisemitism by writing an enthralling story but wrapped around the real, true historical facts about the Jewish people and the land of Israel. I’d like to now read a few pages from the start of the novel. A bomb has just exploded in a Toulouse synagogue and Moshe, a Holocaust survivor, is on his way there unaware of what’s going to happen….
Before this lady of ill-repute bows out, thank you everyone and (turning to my good friend Graham Stone) ‘Graham, perhaps you should call your future granddaughter Anna Meleke - then she will be A MELEKE STONE!
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