BRUCE J. BERGER turned to writing after a 40-year career as a trial attorney, earning his MFA in Creative Writing from American University in Washington, DC, where he now teaches. His first novel, The Flight of the Veil, won a Bronze Award in General Fiction from Illumination Christian Book Awards, and his second novel, The Music Stalker, was a Finalist (Suspense) in the Next Gen Indie Book Awards contest. Including To See God, the three novels are now grouped by the publisher as the Forgiveness and Faith novel series. Bruce J. Berger has also published more than 50 stories and poems in a wide variety of literary journals. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Laurie, and their dog, Whiskey, and down the street from his grandson Cole and granddaughter Neely, to whom he has dedicated To See God.
Denise: What inspired a 40-year trial attorney to earn his MFA in Creative Writing and become a teacher and novelist? What does your curriculum focus on?
Bruce: I knew that I wanted to have a second career, meaning a career that was not as a lawyer. After 40 years, I’d accomplished as much as I was going to accomplish as a lawyer, but I wanted to continue to work and contribute to society as opposed to sitting around and doing nothing useful. As I had always written creatively, even during my years as a lawyer, I realized that writing would be the central focus of Career #2. As I began my MFA program, I soon realized that I also wanted to continue in an academic environment for the long term, and so teaching became the natural outgrowth of that desire. So, as an adjunct faculty member in the Literature Department of American University in Washington, D.C., I usually teach College Writing, a required course for all students at the school, and I occasionally teach the basic undergraduate course in Creative Writing. Regardless of which writing course I teach, I focus very much on writing clearly and keeping the audience in mind.
Denise: How do you have time to write when you have to read and grade your students’ assignments?
Bruce: It’s difficult to get very much writing done during the semester, although I might be able to do a chapter or two every week, and my chapters are usually very short, maybe 500-1,000 words. Thus, most of my creative writing occurs during the summer or between the fall and spring semesters. When I teach, 90% of my time is devoted to teaching, which includes formulating and revising lesson plans and meeting with students as well as reading and grading their work.
Denise: How many novels have you written and who published them?
Bruce: I have published three novels with Black Rose Writing: The Flight of the Veil, The Music Stalker, and To See God. I have written another novel about the same characters, Displaced, which I have never submitted for publication. I might someday, but that would require an extensive rewrite, and, frankly, I’d rather work on new material right now.
Denise: Your latest novel is To See God. I understand it explores questions about faith, trust, and healing among people separated by Life experience, culture, race, and religion. Separated in what way?
Bruce: The first separation in these three linked novels was a literal separation occasioned by the Holocaust in Greece. An older brother, Nicky, is sent away from his family living in Salonica, to hide with a priest in Athens. His young sister, Kal, is sent away later to hide with other Christians in Kavala. This is a separation that lasts 47 years, and the reunion of these siblings – both of whom had no idea that the other was alive – is the central theme of The Flight of the Veil.
But separation exists as well in a spiritual sense, as one sibling, Nicky, has become an atheist, and the other sibling, Kal, has become a Greek Orthodox nun known as Sister Theodora. Nicky’s family in America includes his daughter, who has turned to Orthodox Judaism, her son, Jackie, being raised as an Orthodox Jew, and Nicky’s girlfriend, Helen, also a very observant Jew.
And separation in the sense of culture refers to the very different life experiences of the main characters, i.e. the experience of a monastic who prays constantly to Christ; of a successful psychiatrist practicing in Brooklyn; of a piano prodigy whose meteoric career is cut short by mental illness; of a wife and mother who has been a rape victim and suffers from schizophrenia, and so on.
Denise: Tell us about Nicky and Kal and the challenges in their lives.
Bruce: They both suffer from extraordinary guilt. Nicky, for example, suffers from the trauma of having fought with the partisans during World War II and the deaths of innocent people that his fighting brought about. He suffers as well from guilt for having abandoned his family when his parents sent him away to hide from the Nazis. Kal – who has become Sister Theodora – is similarly challenged by the trauma of her having left her home to hide, by the deaths of those who tried to save her, by the unexpected reunion with her brother and by the reawakening of her memories of growing up in a Jewish household. Nicky is further challenged by his marriage to a woman who suffers from schizophrenia (his former patient, Adel) and by being the father of a child prodigy, a role for which he is particularly ill-prepared.
Denise: Were they characters in your Covo family saga (book 2) The Flight of the Veil?
Bruce: Nicky and Kal (Sister Theodora) are characters in The Flight of the Veil and To See God. Kal is not a character in The Music Stalker because, at the time of the actions in that novel, no one is aware that Kal is still alive.
Denise: How can Kayla live a normal life suffering from schizophrenia and keep her son, Jackie? The odds seem against her. How old is Jackie and can he honestly handle his mother’s mental illness?
Bruce: The fact is that patients who suffer from schizophrenia can lead nearly normal lives if they stay on medications that have been helpful for them. A trait of the disease, however, is that patients often stop taking medication, and that’s when the real problems develop. In The Flight of the Veil, the reader learns that Kayla has attacked her son in an episode of paranoia occasioned by her failure to continue with her medications. The ramifications of this event are examined in To See God and, indeed, become the substance of a custody action brought by Jackie’s father, August. The odds may very well be against Kayla, who obviously needs the support of her community: her family, her psychiatrist, her rabbi, and her other friends.
Jackie goes from six to seven years old in the course of To See God. How does he handle things? With some difficulty, but, again, he is supported by his loving family: his mother Kayla, his uncle Max, his grandfather Nicky, and Nicky’s girlfriend, Helen. But it will take very tense moments in Family Court and beyond for things to sort themselves out.
Denise: Who is part of her support system? How does helping her only lead to further issues?
Bruce: Kayla has, for years, lived with her divorced brother, Max. He helps her raise Jackie, but Jackie at times longs for a real father, not an uncle. And Kayla is supported very much by her father and Helen, but their efforts to help her with Jackie – and to relieve some of the trauma that Jackie feels – put them, e.g., into a confrontation with the New Orleans police and with Jackie’s father.
Denise: Then there’s Aunt Kal. What makes her believe that Jackie is a special child?
Bruce: Kal – otherwise known as Sister Theodora – has what she feels is a Divine mission, i.e., a mission given to her in a dream in which she sees Jackie as the Second Coming of Jesus. So, it’s more than that she thinks Jackie is a special child; she believes that Jackie is God, come back to earth in the form of a human being, preparing to announce the post-messianic world to the faithful. She believes she’s been instructed by God to visit Jackie and assist in his Divine mission. When in your heart you believe that God has spoken to you and given you – and only you – a purpose in this world, it’s hard to do otherwise than to try to fulfill that purpose.
Denise: This is not your average novel. How did you come up with this storyline? Is there an underlying message that you are trying to share with your readers?
Bruce: I agree that this is not an average novel. I would go further, in all humility, to posit that there’s never been a novel quite like this. So, how does the storyline emerge? I had a need to see what would happen to these characters I love following the conclusion of The Flight of the Veil. That novel ends with Sister Theodora telling the abbess of her monastery that she longs “to see God.” I had to find out what that longing meant, in her life and in the lives of the people she loves and interacts with.
If there’s one underlying message in all three novels, it’s that the bonds of family are the strongest bonds we know, that they propel us, as human beings, into extraordinary actions, and that ultimately they define what it means to be human.
Denise: Is this the final volume of the saga or can we expect a new book in the near future?
Bruce: I don’t think there will be a new book in the near future, but perhaps within a couple of years there might be a fourth book. And that book might be entitled Forgiveness. I’ve started work on such a book and perhaps I’m about one-fourth of the way through a first draft. Teaching comes first, however. I feel I can do more immediate good in the world as a teacher than as a writer of a fourth novel.