Posted in: Arts, Film & Culture
Published on Mar 04, 2020 by Phyllis Chesler
Published by New English Review
Hannah’s War on the Upper East Side
The soft rain did not stop the
glamorous Book Club women from crowding into my very charming neighborhood
bookshop—The Corner Bookstore. We were there to hear Jan Eliasberg, the movie
and television director (NCIS: LOS ANGELES, MIAMI VICE, BLUE BLOODS), read from
Hannah’s War, her first novel.
Eliasberg did a brief reading and
then engaged in a spirited QNA with her Little, Brown editor, Judy Clain (Julie
and Julia, I Am Malala). Eliasberg told us how and why she started
researching this book . One day, in the New York Public Library, she suddenly
wondered how the New York Times had handled America’s dropping of the
The the H-bomb on Hiroshima. The coverage included a rather strange phrase,
namely, that a “non-Aryan woman” had worked on the science behind the bomb. Who
was this unnamed woman?
Eliasberg was hooked.
Hannah’s War is a fictionalized tale based on the life
and work of Lise Meitner, the Austrian Jew and genius-level theoretical and
nuclear physicist—the woman who discovered nuclear fission, who was never
properly credited in her time, and who has been all but forgotten in ours.
Now, here, that “non-Aryan” woman
scientist is resurrected, reimagined into being. Meitner is yet another
Rosalind Franklin or Rita Levi-Montalcini—all supremely talented Jewish women
scientists who were barely given salaries, or proper equipment, or the room in
which to work. For a time, during World War Two, Turin-born Montalcini-Levi had
to work at home in her bedroom.
In Berlin, before the War,
Meitner had to work in a former carpenter’s closet in the basement and use a
bathroom down the street in a restaurant. British-born Rosalind Franklin died
before she was forty and her work was the basis for Crick and Watson’s
discovery of the double helix and for which they, not she, received a Nobel
Prize. Only Levi-Montalcini received that award for her discoveries in cell
biology.
I am happily in the midst of
reading the book. From what Eliasberg said, I gather that she’s placed
Hannah/Lise in Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project—something entirely
fictional. But this is a novel, and novelists have the right to turn mere
reality right on its’s head, to imagine... anything.
First Novel, Jan.
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