INTERVIEW: Caroline Topperman, Author of Your Roots Cast a Shadow

Interviewed by Michèle Dawson Haber

Growing up in Toronto in a secular immigrant family, Caroline Topperman’s roots were both ever-present and inscrutable. Her Polish-born parents taught her their language and regaled her with stories, but it took moving to Poland for Caroline to fully identify with her family’s past.

When she and her husband sell their home and move to Warsaw, Caroline finds herself living in a neighborhood where nearly every corner she passes is one where her ancestors walked. The experience moves her to take a deep dive into family documents and mementos to better understand her parents’ and grandparents’ histories in a historical and cultural context. The result is Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family’s Search Across History for Belonging (HCI Books; December 2024), a compelling and vividly told hybrid memoir of cultural translation, identity, and belonging.

Tracing her family’s migration through pre-WWII Poland, Afghanistan, Soviet Russia, and beyond, Caroline explores how a family’s identity is shaped by global events both in real time and into the future. From the rigid, anti-Semitic milieu of the Polish Communist Party, to a road construction site in Kabul, to the bustling all-male markets of Baghdad, to the quiet streets of Stockholm, Your Roots Cast a Shadow navigates the murky waters of history, investigating the relationship between migration, politics, identity, and home from the perspectives of three generations.

Caroline and I had a great time talking about these deeply resonant and illuminating themes, as well as her newest adventure in hybrid publishing. What follows is a necessarily condensed version of our wide-ranging conversation.

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Michele Dawson Haber: Congratulations, Caroline, on the release of Your Roots Cast a Shadow. I’d love to hear about the genesis of this book. What set you out on this quest to uncover your family’s history and when did you know that you would document their stories in the memoir form?

Caroline Topperman: The book idea came in 1995 right after my mom passed away. I had just started film school. My dad and I would walk and talk, and I recorded our conversations. I started to write a screenplay based on these conversations, but I’m a little embarrassed to admit at the time, I was more interested in my mother’s side of the family than my father’s. And so, I kind of left the screenplay. It didn’t go anywhere. The summer after my mom died, my father took us to Poland. There I saw more family, learned more things, and the information grew. It was in 2015, after I had moved to Poland, that I started writing. But it was not this book at all.

At the time, I was writing a fashion and lifestyle blog, and it was doing really well. Other bloggers were coming out with books that had anecdotes and tips—this was a thing then, and so I originally wrote it in that format, incorporating some of my family stories. The feedback from agents was that they were more interested in my family stories. I realized at the time that they were right, so I started rewriting it.

Then about seven years ago, we were moving my dad into a retirement home and I was helping him clean out his storage locker, and I found all these papers, letters, and an unpublished book written by my grandfather. And I sort of sat on that and thought about it until I finally decided this needs to be in a book. I went to the Kingston Writers Festival in 2019, and met Susan Scott, who was the creative nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly. I tracked her down later with a knapsack filled with these documents, put everything in front of her, and said, “What do I need to do for you to help me with this?” Well, she didn’t run screaming, which was to my benefit. It took us about two years of going back and forth, working and writing.

MDH: The memoir alternates between the present of the book, which is you and your husband, Pawel, living in Poland, with stories of your grandparents and parents written from their perspectives. There are so many choices to be made when we set out to tell the stories of others based on documents and interviews.

In writing your family members’ stories from their points of view, complete with internal thoughts and justification for the decisions they made, you had to have relied quite a bit on invention. Was this way of telling the stories one you landed on right from the start, or did it emerge in the process?

CT: It emerged. The first version of this book had 42 very short chapters, and I was constantly moving them around. Even in the final version, we were literally copying and pasting chapters into a new order until the last minute. It was tough to figure out, because it’s two sets of grandparents and my parents and me, so there’s a lot. I was lucky because I think my grandfather knew that one day there would be this book, because a lot of the letters had internal thoughts. I didn’t have to do a lot of guessing. Also, my grandmother did an interview with my uncle at some point before she passed away, and I had that too. So, I didn’t have to invent things, which was great.

MDH: This family memoir touches on so many big questions, such as the role of history—personal, national and cultural—in the shaping of one’s identity, whether trauma is passed down through generations, and whether humanity has learned anything from the past. There are many ways we could talk about the overarching message you hope to convey with your story, but I suspect that a lot is represented in the title. Can you talk a bit about how the title came to be?

CT: I get this question a lot, because the title really works. I have to give credit to my husband; it was his suggestion that I take the title of one of the chapters from the first version of the book and pull it out as a working title. And the funniest thing is, everybody across the board asked me, “are you sure you want that title?” And then they would sit for a moment with it and say, “oh no, it cannot be anything but that.” My publisher loved it too, and they added the subtitle. I was trying to get across the idea that you can’t ever really get away from your roots. I was born in Sweden to political refugees, and it didn’t matter that their country didn’t want them, and it didn’t matter that they didn’t necessarily want their country—they couldn’t get away from their past. It followed them everywhere. And it’s the same thing for me.

I felt it keenly when we landed in Poland and I found out that the place we’d rented was around the corner from where my family lived after the war, where my dad lived a little bit later when they came back after the war, where my mother went to school, and near the place on the corner where my parents, my grandparents and half the family were married. When I walked to my ballet classes, I would pass all these places. I had to acknowledge them and understand they’re part of me. I think for a lot of us living in North America, we tend to forget our roots. We tend not to know our stories.

MDH: In the process of researching and writing this book, you discover unflattering things about your grandparents, your paternal grandfather who chose loyalty to the Communist Party over his own family, your maternal grandfather who was a womanizer, and your grandmother, who could be gobsmackingly selfish. Did you have any internal talks with yourself about the pros and cons of writing a story that both honors and exposes your family members?

CT: I didn’t really know my paternal grandparents. So, to me, they were just names. My maternal grandparents were the best grandparents you could have. Yes, they were shitty parents; I knew a lot about these things before I wrote the book, so it really didn’t come as a surprise. My mother died in 1995, and my grandmother basically moved in with us just before. She was not great to be around, you could see how she really wanted everything to be about her. But it was a part of life. I chose to put it in because they were human, and whatever lasting trauma they had, which I can’t even imagine, was part of who they were. I decided I’d rather talk about these things openly. It made it easier that they were all deceased.

MDH: There’s one family member that you clearly don’t care for: your uncle, KT. Is he aware of the content of your book? Did he try to intervene in any way?

CT: My uncle lives in Poland, and I don’t know if he knows I wrote this book. I didn’t tell him. If I did, he would probably want to be the central figure. But he’s got a Wikipedia page with a big lie on it, and he’s also published his own book. So, I thought, if he’s putting it out there in public, I can put out my truth. I did have some hesitation about using the book my grandfather wrote, but then I realized I inherited that book, so that’s fair and square too.

MDH: Much of the memoir circles around questions of identity. Ultimately, the reader concludes that this memoir, despite the big cast of characters, is about you. I’m fascinated with the idea that knowing one’s family history leads to greater self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Would you agree?

CT: Yes. It has changed who I am one hundred percent. The changes came from expected places (writing the book) and from realizations about different members of my family after diving into their histories. When we moved to Poland a new government came in, and they were basically owned by the Catholic Church. They started going back to traditional family values, and I began going to protests every week. I remember one protest clearly: I was standing outside the national TV station in Warsaw because the government was clamping down on the information that the station was allowed to broadcast, and they were about to take it over. I remember standing there and getting this gut feeling that my grandfather, my mother’s father, would be proud that I was there. Proud that I was standing there just like when he was so much against all of the same things (he had an underground press). And so yes, it solidified what I wanted to fight for.

The writing of this book also cleared up a lot of things. My mother and my uncle found out on the schoolyard that they were Jewish. When she was a teenager, my mom was dragged into an abandoned building by two boys and almost killed because she was wearing a Star of David. I can’t even imagine that. My grandparents had to walk past public signs that read, “Jews go back to Palestine!” I grew up in a very Jewish area North of Toronto, but we didn’t participate in religious life. My cousins had bar and bat mitzvahs, but my mom’s approach was, we’re just not going to do that, but this is where you come from. It was so deep in our bones who we were as people.

My dad, although he was Catholic, probably knew more about Judaism than anybody else, because he learned it specifically for my mom. He was always very comfortable with who he was. He brought the world into our home. He could transcend all these things: where he came from, where he was, and who he was married to.

All of this—my parents’ and my grandparents’ histories—came together for me. It solidified who I am and who I hope I can be. It funneled me into this spot where I am now. It’s why I work with girls at an underground school in Afghanistan teaching them writing, so that I can help them find their voices. It is why I unfollowed a whole lot of people after the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th. And, the craziest thing of all, it’s why I joined a humanist Jewish congregation that is secular in its practice. (Half my family must be rolling in their graves!)

MDH: Your voice is distinctive, it’s inquisitive, it’s casual and it’s friendly. At many points you address the readers directly, breaking the fourth wall. Were these purposeful style decisions?

CT: Yes, because I can’t write in a literary way. I tried for a long time, and it was never who I was. I have a degree in screenwriting, which is a very direct, very clear style. I also spent years working on a blog where I was always addressing the readers. But also, while I was writing, I realized there are history books that are phenomenal, but those are books where the author is far away from the reader. I felt a certain urgency as I was writing this book as it was when Russia invaded Ukraine, and I thought, what we need are books that speak to as wide an audience as possible. I want somebody who may not pick up a history book to be able to read my book and relate to it and not feel like they were having history rammed down their throat.

MDH: I understand that you’ve recently launched a hybrid publishing business. What do you offer that distinguishes you from other hybrid publishers, and what types of books are you looking for?

CT: Yes, it’s actually very exciting. The way it started out was I was getting book coaching clients and clients who wanted developmental editing, and my friend Andi Cumbo was also doing editing as well as helping people format and get their books published. She’s incredible at self-publishing, she’s a huge self-publisher and knows that market really well—so well that she was picked up by an agent. She’s one of those rare birds. I thought, why not join forces and pool our strengths? So, we formed Mountain Ash Press two years ago. It’s a very new hybrid press, and yes, people are paying for some services. We do a royalty split in favor of the author; the author gets 80%. Also, it’s a short royalty split—two years—so it’s not that they’re attached to us for the rest of their lives. We’re looking for books that would have a hard time finding a home with a traditional press. We are specifically looking for books that have a message and that, in their small way, seek to change the world.

MDH: Caroline, it has been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. Thank you and best of luck to you.