Fade in on a well-appointed kitchen on the outskirts of Albany, where Peter Golden is pouring seltzer. “The obligatory tour of the author’s lair. That’s part of the gig, right?” he asks wryly, ushering me up a carpeted staircase. To the left is a large book-lined study with a counter-sized desk. “That’s the nonfiction room,” Golden says. To the right, two steps lead to a smaller room, also lined with books. “And that’s the novel room.”
Golden has spent ample time on both sides of the hall, producing two novels, Wherever There Is Light (Atria Books, 2015) and Comeback Love (Atria, 2012), O Powerful Western Star: American Jews, Russian Jews, and the Last Battle of the Cold War (Gefen Publishing, 2012), and two acclaimed biographies.
Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “a keenly detailed historical romance,” the just-released Wherever There Is Light is the sprawling saga of unlikely lovers Julian Rose, a German-born Jew who made a fortune in Prohibition-era Newark, and Kendall Wakefield, a headstrong, gorgeous African American photographer. The novel room’s bookshelves bulge with hundreds of titles on France, World War II and the Holocaust, women photographers, art history, the Negro Press, and other topics infusing the novel’s epic sweep.
There are also hints of an equally ambitious novel-in-progress, including a print of Wayne McAllister’s iconic 1949 Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. Fascinated by postwar futurist architecture, Golden launches into a free-associative riff about the “grand illusion” of Baby Boom prosperity, the infantilization of women after WWII, the nascent Civil Rights movement, the Eichmann Trial revelations, and JFK. “History’s got all these threads,” he observes; in his fast-moving mind, they interweave fluidly, and there’s a story wherever you look.
Heading downstairs, he says, “You missed the Nixon letters,” pointing out several framed letters from the former president on the wall. Nixon was an interviewee for Quiet Diplomat (Cornwall Books, 1992), Golden’s biography of political insider Max Fisher. He’s also interviewed former presidents Ford, Reagan, and G. H. W. Bush, four Secretaries of State, and three Israeli prime ministers; his website boasts a photo of him with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Even at home, he’s dressed for a stroll on the Riviera: blue blazer over a striped French navy pullover, khaki pants, Topsiders worn without socks. The home he shares with his wife Annis, chair of SUNY Albany’s Communication Department, is impeccably neat, with rolling expanses of carpet. Golden sprawls on an overstuffed chaise, next to a plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies which prove irresistible to Layla, one of two well-loved cats; the second, Rocky Raccoon, dozes in a corner.
It’s hard to get a short answer from Peter Golden. Ask him about one of his books, and Spinoza or Nietzsche may make a sudden appearance. Or James Baldwin, or Alexander Hamilton, or WWII photographer and model Lee Miller, one of Golden’s inspirations for Kendall.
Or Jewish gangster Longy Zwillman, who not only appears in Wherever There Is Light (alongside other historical figures), but who’s father once had a pushcart on the same Newark street as Golden’s great-grandfather. “You have to understand, in the absence of a social service network, you had gangsters,” Golden says. “They made sure hungry people got fed.”
They also offered protection. When Golden’s grandfather, a wholesale fishmonger, got threatened by New York mobsters at the Fulton Fish Market, Zwillman’s name calmed the waters. “When he went back the next day, they said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me who your friends were?'” Golden says, adding, “Julian is a fictional character sort of based on Zwillman.”
Julian had other roots too. Years ago, Golden spotted two guys on the Garden State Parkway, cursing out bad drivers. These became prototypes for Julian and his hothead Irish friend Eddie. “Every time I went back to Jersey, I’d think about them. They were just make-believe people I wanted to use in a book.”
He also imagined a privileged woman of color as Julian’s love interest. “I wanted to look at race backwards,” Golden says, noting that America’s first female self-made millionaire was hair tonic entrepreneur Sarah Breedlove. “I wanted Julian to be from an impoverished background, a gangster, violent—any of the stereotypes associated with African Americans today.” Kendall, by contrast, is “from enormous wealth, with department stores being opened early for her.”
The issue was how they would ever meet. Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb’s book From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Universities provided an answer. In 1939, after the Nazis expelled hundreds of Jewish scholars from German universities, many were hired by black Southern colleges whose leaders saw parallels between white supremacist lynchings and Hitler’s ideology.
Julian’s émigré father teaches at the college run by Kendall’s imperious mother, Garland. Fate throws the lovers together and tears them apart repeatedly, in Jim Crow Florida, in an artsy Greenwich Village where landlords still veto black tenants, and in a vividly rendered postwar Paris:
“Electricity was rationed, so the great monuments weren’t lit. Still, he could see sparks of moonlight on the Seine, and the towers and spires of Notre-Dame etched in black against the stars, and the comforting flicker of candles in the apartment houses on one side of the Rue Guynemer with the locked gates of the Luxembourg Gardens on the other, and down a deserted stretch of the Boulevard Montparnasse, the light in the windows of Le Select, an all-night cafe and a haven for les vagabondes nocturnes.”
Both Julian and Kendall are haunted by wartime experiences, which Golden leaks out slowly. “Writers are always asking questions that readers want answered. It’s the treasure hunt mentality: I want to find the prize,” he explains. Was he anxious about writing characters of different races and genders? His answer is swift and unambiguous. “Not for a moment. That’s the moral aspect of being a novelist. The more different people you can become, the more compassionate you can become.”
Nevertheless, he puts these words into Garland’s mouth: “White people don’t have a clue what it is to be a colored. Not one damn clue.” Here as elsewhere, he uses period-accurate language, including such mouth-friendly slang as “The band was cookin’. And Eddie and me got boiled as owls.” Golden also writes juicy sex scenes and unapologetically romantic plot twists. His turf is the intersection of love story and history.
Does he approach novels and nonfiction differently? “Narrative is narrative. The only difference is you’ve got to look things up when you’re doing nonfiction,” says Golden. “When you pick up a history book, for every sentence you read, the person who wrote it has probably read five or six books. What informs nonfiction is a lifetime of work.”
An early illness may have nudged him toward literature. Home sick for a week, Golden binge-read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. His sister wrote a Nancy Drew-inspired book at age 12, and read him selections aloud.
At college, he devoured Hemingway and Fitzgerald while majoring in philosophy. “I was interested in the history of ideas and how they change,” Golden says. In 1973, during Christmas break, he saw James Earl Jones in “The Iceman Cometh” and came out determined to write. “I went back to Albany and read everything in the library that had Eugene O’Neill’s name on it.” But he decided playwriting was “not pragmatic—I wanted to make a living as a writer.”
After a brief stint as an aide on a psych ward, he started writing for magazines, worked as an advertising copywriter, and created five interactive novels for a joint project by IBM and Bantam Books. He spent two years in Silicon Valley, moving back east when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Back in Albany, he wrote for Capital Region magazine, eventually becoming its Managing Editor. When a former professor recommended him to write a biography of Max Fisher, “I thought, ‘Who the hell is Max Fisher?'” Golden reports. He soon found out. One of the world’s richest men, the octogenarian practiced private diplomacy on an international scale. “Max was the reason I got to interview all those people,” Golden says of the heads of state on his resume.
Between all these travels, Golden wrote an early version of Comeback Love. At 850 pages, the manuscript didn’t sell. He set aside the ’60s-themed love story for a decade, then revised extensively. When it still didn’t land a publisher, he brought it to Susan Novotny, owner of Albany’s The Book House and Troy’s Market Block Books, who was launching an imprint called Staff Picks Books. That small-press edition caught the attention of sales rep John Muse, who recommended it to his employers at Simon & Schuster; agent Susan Golomb sold it at auction.
Both Comeback Love and Wherever There Is Light have attracted Hollywood interest, and Golden is hard at work on another historical novel, about a deejay who broadcasts rock ‘n’ roll into the Soviet Union and winds up in a Cold War intrigue.
Does the compulsive researcher enjoy any non-literary activities? Golden pauses to think, then offers traveling, taking photos, and (reluctantly) exercise. He leans forward. “I want to be able to stay up later. I won a contest in ninth grade for a short story about a machine you stepped into, got your sleep, and stepped out of a minute later. I still have that fantasy.”
Peter Golden will appear 11/7 at 5pm for a book launch event at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany.
This article appears in November 2015.
