Swapping academic journals for a debut novel

When David Rosenbaum retired from academia, it was clear that he still wanted to, and needed to, write. 

“The bottom line is that I enjoy writing, and when I retired from academia I still wanted to write,” the author told The AJN. His golf game wasn’t up to scratch, he hates fishing, and there is only so long he can play with his grandchildren before they have had enough. “The last thing I wanted to do was drive my wife crazy.”

His first thought was an autobiography. After working with a book coach, he realised he was not a recognisable name and wondered who would read it. Fiction, he decided, would let his imagination “run wild while keeping reality as its foundation”. The result is his debut novel, The Remaking of Myles.

The book grows out of themes Rosenbaum has thought about for years, including the impact of intergenerational trauma on younger people, and the disconnect felt by those who come from other cultures and must come to grips with life in a new country.

He knows that second experience first-hand. 

His parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who became “forced nomads”, moving from Poland to Germany, France, Sweden and Italy, then to the United States, and finally to Australia. His older brother and sister were born in Germany, while he and his younger sister were born in the US.

Rosenbaum arrived in Australia in 1964, aged eight. He spent his childhood being taunted for being Jewish, especially in Brisbane, before the family moved to Melbourne.

“I never felt settled,” he recalled. “And I came to see that the Australians I grew up amongst in the 1960s had no idea what immigrants went through, what challenges they faced, or how those challenges shaped them as they grew up. It wasn’t just the kids at school. Their parents didn’t understand either, and that made it worse.” 

With his story taking shape though, Rosenbaum realised that moving from academic writing to fiction meant unlearning old habits. 

“In academic writing you are the expert,” Rosenbaum explained. “You state your premise, present your research, support your conclusions, and spend the whole article telling the reader, leaving nothing to their imagination. Fiction is the opposite.”

He likens it to taking the reader to a front door. The journey has to be interesting, and the reader has to be convinced they need to see what is on the other side, but they must open the door themselves. For the first few months, he often caught himself telling too much. 

“I had to stop seeing myself as an expert and become simply a storyteller,” he said. 

Myles is not Rosenbaum, though the two definitely share something. 

“There is some of me in Myles, but he is not me,” Rosenbaum clarified. “He carries my doubts about belonging, but his life takes a different path.”

The book was inspired in part by Rosenbaum’s mother, who survived the Holocaust and died in 2006 aged 87. 

“Her strength and tenacity were something else,” he said. He also points to the accounts of many survivors, with Eddie Jaku, author of The Happiest Man on Earth, standing out. His two children and two grandchildren played a part too. “I want their future to be different from my past, and that can only happen if the world changes,” he said. 

As Rosenbaum explained, the Holocaust is always present in the novel. It is, after all, the reason for the story. But the author only brought it front and centre when it sharpened Myles’s own dilemma. As a child of survivors, Rosenbaum explained, he was able to become the bridge between history and the fictional character. 

“History is usually written from a factual base, where emotion gives way to the cold reality of the time,” Rosenbaum said. “Of course, with a subject like the Holocaust, it is impossible not to be moved by the facts. But fiction puts emotion at the forefront, even when it has factual foundations. Myles’s life is all about his emotional response to the realities he faces.”

At the heart of the book is a question about how much of our identity comes from our own choices and how much from the stories we inherit. 

For Myles, a turning point comes when his mother’s past is revealed to him. “That one scene shows Myles how she moved on,” Rosenbaum said. “Her life was not dictated by what she went through; she determined her own future.”

When it came to the writing process, Rosenbaum had an idea in mind about the overview of Myles’s journey and a detailed character arc, but new ideas kept emerging as he wrote. The larger story took shape near the end of the first draft, when the manuscript was heading well past 135,000 words. Restructuring let him create a second novel, the sequel he is now writing, which keeps the characters of the first book “with some very explosive developments”. 

A prequel, which Rosenbaum said is also possible, would take Myles’s parents back to the Holocaust and then follow Myles as a child.

As for readers of the book, Rosenbaum’s message is simple. Life is “what you make of it, not what it makes of you”. 

When his mother died, he said, there was no list of achievements he could point to in the usual sense.

“Her greatest achievement was surviving, when millions did not.” 

Writing the novel was his way of recognising that she mattered.

The Remaking of Myles can be purchased online.