Anna Olswanger

Anna Olswanger lives in the Metro New York area where she heads Olswanger Literary, a boutique literary agency she founded in 2014. Her clients' books have won the Newbery Honor, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and been on The New York Times Bestseller list. Anna is the author of SHLEMIEL CROOKS, a Sydney Taylor Honor Book and PJ Library Book; GREENHORN, adapted to film and named an Audience Award Winner for Best Short Film Drama at the 2015 Memphis Jewish Film Festival; and A VISIT TO MOSCOW, a 2023 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Nominee.

A Visit to Moscow is based on the true story of Rabbi Rafael Grossman’s secret journey into the heart of the Soviet Union. What drew you personally to this story, and how did you approach adapting such a harrowing yet hopeful historical moment for readers today?
Rabbi Rafael Grossman and I began collaborating on writing projects in the early 1980s. One of our first projects was a Holocaust novel with a character based on his cousin, a leader of the Jewish resistance in the Bialystok ghetto. As we planned out the storyline, Rabbi Grossman told me about an incident during a trip he made in 1965 to the Soviet Union, where he met a young boy whose parents were Holocaust survivors. The boy had never been outside the room he was born in. We included the incident in the book and got about a hundred pages in before the rabbi had to focus on other obligations.

We never finished the novel, and then in 2018 Rabbi Grossman died.

I hadn’t thought about the manuscript for years until his daughter sent me a box of the writings he and I had once worked on. There, in the box, were the hundred pages of the novel. I was intrigued and dug out the notes from my own files. As I read through them, I realized that along the way I had lost the thread of what had really happened and what we had come up with for the storyline. I didn’t know if I was reading fact or fiction in my notes.

But what was clear to me was the message of the rabbi’s story: Each of us can make this world a better place, even if only for a few people.

I knew I wanted to get the story published, but because I couldn’t separate out the facts, it wasn’t possible to publish it as nonfiction. My editor suggested that I write it as historical fiction, and that is how we went forward with A Visit to Moscow—“Adapted by Anna Olswanger from a story told by Rabbi Rafael Grossman.”

The book captures both the political tension of the 1960s and the spiritual endurance of the Jewish people. How did you balance historical accuracy with emotional storytelling in bringing that atmosphere to life?
Developing the book as historical fiction was one way of achieving the balance, but I also added what I hoped was an element of timelessness by imagining the adult Zev in the opening and ending. The view of the world as an extraordinary place sustained Zev as a young boy, whether in the one room in Moscow where he could only peek out the window or later, when his family was able to leave the Soviet Union and go to Israel, in the openness of the land and cities of Israel. I think for him, being alive on this earth was like being in heaven.

In the opening, I imagined the adult Zev, who has just died, looking down at the area in Lebanon where he had stepped on a land mine. He sees the lush landscape—a river, haze, the ruins of a rampart. He thinks he’s looking down from heaven. And then everything starts to disappear. He can’t remember his name or who he was. He hears a voice and follows it. He sees a man (later we realize it is the fictional version of Rabbi Grossman) at his Shabbat table with his family. The man is about to tell his family the story of his meeting a young boy named Zev during a visit to Moscow in 1965. At the end, the adult Zev remembers all the events in the book, realizes he has died, and remembers he has been alive. I wrote, “He remembers being alive was like being in heaven” as a way to capture the timelessness of his story.

You collaborated with illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg, herself a former Soviet Jew. How did her visual interpretation shape or deepen the narrative you originally envisioned?
I feel that Yevgenia had a clear vision of the atmosphere of the story because of her own experience in the Soviet Union. In an interview just after the book came out, she said that finding the right light to set the visual mood, which she did by combining luminosity and fog, was the most satisfying part of this project for her.. She included several textless panels throughout the book to alter the pace, and noted that while the main events of the novel happened in the summer, her winter panel of snowy Moscow showed the passage of time without words.

In that same interview, Yevgenia talked about the challenge of keeping the composition dynamic because there isn't much physicality in the story. The scenes are mostly limited to two to three people. However, there is internal action throughout the text, and Yevgenia said she was able to both slow down and speed up the narrative through her images and vision of the atmosphere of the story.

Much of your work—from Shlemiel Crooks to Greenhorn and now A Visit to Moscow—connects the Jewish experience across generations. What continues to draw you back to these stories of faith, resilience, and identity?
I think that what all three books have in common, and what draws me to them, is the element of hiddenness. In Shlemiel Crooks, there is a talking horse that no one hears but who saves Reb Elias’ shipment of Passover wine from robbers. In Greenhorn there is the little box with its secret contents that the young Holocaust survivor won’t let out of his sight. And in A Visit to Moscow, there is the hidden child Zev. I asked Rabbi Grossman what Zev was like, and he told me that he never played, but he loved to imagine things. “What are shuls like in America?” he asked Rabbi Grossman. “What’s a Torah like? What do children do?” Rabbi Grossman said Zev showed no resentment at having never been outside his parents’ apartment. Rabbi Grossman thought it was because of the incredible love his parents showed him. He told me that it didn’t make what they did right, but it did make for an emotionally healthy child, one who had been hidden from the influence of the communist government.

The book has been recognized by the Eisner Awards and praised for its haunting simplicity. What conversations do you hope A Visit to Moscow will spark among readers—especially those unfamiliar with the “spiritual Holocaust” faced by Soviet Jews?
I hope that the book will raise discussions about the risks that Jews have taken throughout history to preserve their religious ideals. I would like readers to consider the ideals that would be important enough for them to take risks for. 

I would also like them to think about the meaning of the line, “He remembers being alive was like being in heaven,” and how they might conceive of this world, with all its pain and imperfections, as being like heaven.

And, I would like them to consider the epigraph of A Visit to Moscow, “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world” and ask themselves if they could imagine a time when they could apply that epigraph to their own life.

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Purchase the book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Visit-Moscow-Anna-Olswanger/dp/1513141953/