Forestville author Barbara Baer spent her early years traveling the world, and then writing about the people and places she encountered.
All her main characters were based on people she actually knew. Now, in her latest novel, she has written about people who only exist in her imagination.
The book, Masha and Alejandro: Crossing Borders, is a story about a married couple—Masha from Ukraine and Alejandro from El Salvador—who move from Santa Rosa to the backwoods of Trinity County in search of a home they can afford. There, they encounter bigotry against immigrants, especially people of color like Alejandro and their son Tomas. It is also a love story about how two people with different temperaments and from very different backgrounds navigate the hills and valleys of marriage and family.
The idea came to Baer during conversations with a fellow tennis player who emigrated from Latin America and attempted to move to Josephine County in Oregon. His experience there, among the ultra-right-wing inhabitants, became the basis for Masha and Alejandro’s sojourn among similar people in rural California’s Trinity County. Baer’s tennis friend eventually moved to Bend, Oregon. It would be a spoiler to say what happens to Masha and Alejandro.
Although Baer was entering new territory writing about immigrants and the MAGA stalwarts of far northern California, she said she felt it was important to chronicle how immigrants are treated and how it is so difficult to afford to live here.
And she was on more familiar ground describing the Sonoma County locales, like the Jewish Free Clinic, where she volunteered for a year, and the Ludwig Avenue area in south Santa Rosa.
Her first novel, Grisha the Scrivener, is an entirely different story—literally. It is based on a man she met while living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1968. The man, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, made a huge impression on young Baer, and became a lifelong friend. He was an immigrant from Georgia and eventually lost his life in the civil war there.
A scrivener is a person who reads and writes letters and legal documents in places where many people are illiterate or incapable of writing well. The real Grisha was a poet who survived the former Soviet Union’s gulag by reading his poetry to the other inmates. Baer described him as “a little man, like Joel Grey’s character in Cabaret.”
“He was full of life, intense, alive. He danced around, lived every minute. He didn’t believe in anything, except maybe love, maybe sex,” she said. “I wrote it over a long period of time, but I had to get it out there.”
Baer ended up in Tashkent by marrying a French diplomat who was going there to teach at the university. Once they arrived, she also got a job there teaching English. It was difficult, she said, because there were no books, and she was not allowed to mimeograph the books she had brought with her. The Soviet regulations were designed to prevent anyone from creating literature against the government. So she hand-copied passages from Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway, using them as examples of the English language.
Before Tashkent, Baer had spent three years in India, teaching in a women’s college, studying Indian dance and taking care of an elderly Communist woman. She even ended up teaching Judaism classes to the students, who were primarily Christian and Hindu and eager to learn about other religions.
She said one of the things that drew her to India, a place where many young people were traveling during the 1960s, was the hope that she would be able to learn how to deal with her anger.
“I thought my anger would be resolved there, but it wasn’t,” she said with the wistfulness of long ago memory.
But what she did find there, to her delight, were Jewish communities. And each community was different. The Jews of Calcutta were very British, tall and fair, with British habits, like drinking lots of tea. The Cochin Jews, on the other hand, were more like the local Indian people. When she visited their homes, they graciously offered her food. They also had an interesting custom of jumping continuously when the Torah was presented and read in the synagogue.
“I was never happier to be Jewish,” she exclaimed.
While she was there, she started writing poetry, “because it was the only way to write about those awesome things.”
But it wasn’t until many years later that she wrote a novel about India, The Last Devadasi, referring to the women who performed the traditional dances of India.
After leaving Tashkent, and shedding the Frenchman who was her second husband, she traveled around Europe. For a time, she landed in London and joined a mime troupe headed by David Bowie. They performed his review, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, all over town. Baer had only good things to say about working with Bowie.
“He was a kind man,” she said. “And they paid us 100 pounds a night.”
While living in London, she also wrote about dance, which provided her with the opportunity to watch rehearsals at Covent Garden by Rudolph Nureyev and Natalia Makarova. When she followed them to Paris to see them perform Swan Lake, she witnessed the moment during the love duet when Nureyev failed to catch Makarova and she fell. That fall, which Baer says was Nureyev’s fault, became the core of another novel, The Ballet Lover.
In 1972, she returned to her birthplace, California, just in time for the Grape Boycott. Sleeping in the fields with the farm workers, she and her childhood friend, Glenna Matthews, wrote about the women on the picket line, winning a first prize for their series, “Women of the Boycott.”
She continued working as a freelancer for such publications as The Nation and The Progressive, until she founded the Forestville-based Floreant Press, published a couple of anthologies of local women’s short stories, and finally began writing and publishing her own books. But first she edited and published Dr. Gregory Levin’s Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist’s Exile from Eden, about his quest to collect and preserve the wild pomegranate trees that grew all over the eastern Soviet republics.
Another novel of hers is The Ice Palace Waltz, based on two generations of her own German Jewish family. For this book she collected a suitcase full of notes, journals, pictures and letters, to learn more about the generations that preceded her.
Baer is married to her longtime companion, Michael Morey, and has a son, Michael Leviton, who is the head of the journalism department at Diablo Valley College.
Barbara Baer’s ‘Masha and Alejandro: Crossing Borders’ is available at Books and Letters in Guerneville and Copperfield’s in Sebastopol.
