It’s a tale about the author, yet not about the author.
“This story owned me in ways nothing I had written before ever had,” said award-winning author and social science researcher Paula Dáil of her latest novel.
“Red Anemones,” a work of historical fiction, was released Oct. 17. At its center is Natalie, a young woman who unravels the secrets of her family history to find her Jewish identity; the novel parallels Dáil’s own life experience while bringing complex social issues to the forefront.
For Dáil, writing has always been intertwined with a desire to enact social change. Dáil’s first publication — at 7 years old — was a letter to the editor of The San Diego Tribune urging the newspaper to purchase shoes for migrant children in California’s Central Valley.
Dáil went on to become widely published in the social sciences, efforts she describes as having “always been oriented toward the public good,” with a focus on poverty, homelessness and potential solutions from a public policy standpoint.
“I never considered writing historical fiction until the issue of women’s reproductive rights reemerged in the national political conversation,” Dáil said.
After interviewing an elderly Catholic nun active in the fight for women’s reproductive rights, Dáil intended to write her biography, she said. When the pandemic hit, the project was stalled and Dáil’s subject died shortly after. Still wanting to tell the woman’s story, Dáil used fiction to fill in the blanks and published Fearless, her first historical fiction novel, in 2022.
“With fiction, you have a lot more freedom,” Dáil said. “I began to realize that in many ways, fiction was a better way to convey the social messages I was interested in conveying.”
Although also confronting crucial social issues, “Red Anemones” developed differently. “One rainy Sunday afternoon in the second year of the COVID-19 crisis, I decided to search my maternal grandmother’s name on a genealogy site, and one thing led to another.”
Dáil’s research would end with a discovery of her Jewish identity, something she termed “a long-sought homecoming.” Her grandmother, Bertha, soon “took up rent-free residence” in Dáil’s head, refusing to leave until Dáil wrote her story. It would be writing a piece of her own story too.
“I was about [the protagonist’s] age when I first discovered solid reasons to wonder whether my mother was a Jew,” Dáil said. Only years later, through Bertha, was that suspicion confirmed.
Natalie’s character arc in “Red Anemones” begins from a similar discovery but develops in its own way. Dáil considers her role to be the “instrument” through which characters can reveal themselves, striving only for all of them to be “interesting enough to have dinner with.”
Still, it took Dáil plenty of research to unearth the story, reading “as much history as [she] could get [her] hands on,” as well as attending course lectures and webinars. “I just dug in.”
“Red Anemones” seeks to offer readers an emotionally powerful narrative as well as a deeper understanding of the Jewish immigrant experience in early 20th century America. Dáil hopes that her readership “will hear the same message: that we are all human beings who are more alike than different, and all have an obligation to make the world we live in better.”
Red anemones, the national flower of Israel, bloom each year in a dry, arid climate.
To Dáil, the flowers capture much of the novel’s key themes: “The resilience to survive and keep blooming every year, and the hope that they will proliferate and never be extinguished… this is the Jewish people’s story across millennia.”
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Paula Dáil is an emerita research professor of social welfare and public policy and an award-winning writer of both non-fiction and fiction. She lives in southwest Wisconsin, belongs to Central Synagogue in New York City and currently blogs for the Times of Israel.
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