The 100-year-old suicide of an overlooked female scientist inspired American writer Judith Claire Mitchell’s blackly comic and critically acclaimed second novel, A Reunion Of Ghosts.
Described as “a 400-page suicide note” by the 63-year-old author, the book published by Harper Collins late last month has been receiving rave reviews for the flair, irreverence and tenderness with which it describes issues from feminism at the turn of the 20th century to the patriotism of German Jews eventually targeted in a World War II Nazi pogrom.
“The book was in a way the biography of the 20th century. Pretty much everything that goes wrong in the 20th century happens to the people in the book,” says Mitchell on the telephone from her home in Madison, where she lives with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich. She is a professor of English and director of the master of fine arts programme in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
A Reunion Of Ghosts comes 10 years after her well-received first novel, The Last Day Of The War. Like her debut, it is anchored by events of World War I.
It describes a family whose members consistently choose early exits from the world, starting from German-Jewish Iris Lenz in the early 20th century, who killed herself in protest against her husband’s development of poison gas as a weapon used in World War I.
Writing this fatal family history are three Jewish-American sisters who decide to kill themselves on New Year’s Eve 1999, rather than see one of their number waste away from cancer.
“As someone said, the real tragedy is that the sisters give up a rent-controlled apartment in New York,” says Mitchell, echoing the dry humour that has endeared the book to reviewers from Rebecca Abrams for the Financial Times to Mark Kamine for The New York Times.
Iris Lenz is Mitchell’s homage to real-life scientist Clara Haber, who killed herself in 1915 and whose husband Fritz Haber gave his name to the industrial process for manufacturing ammonia.
The Haber Process is used to make fertilisers and revolutionised the farming industry, so few also remember that Fritz Haber, a German Jew, developed the lethal chlorine gas that was the precursor to the poisons that killed thousands of his compatriots in concentration camps during World War II.
Even fewer know that Clara Haber was a chemist in her own right, the first woman to get a doctorate from the University of Breslau at a time when the masculine scientific community was closing ranks against aspiring female students.
“What made me so sad about the real person was that she fought so hard for her degree and her education. They set up harder tests and she passed these tests,” says Mitchell, who first heard about Clara Haber while watching a TV documentary in 1998.
Though she did get in touch with a descendant of the Habers early on in the writing process, she decided not to research the family but keep her story fictional. Still, her depiction of Iris, the fictionalised Clara, rings true – key to her husband’s research, never acknowledged and deeply frustrated at being overlooked.
Brooklyn-born Mitchell knows how hard it is for a woman to find her own identity outside the domestic sphere. Her 90-year-old mother is a housewife – her father had an electronic parts business – and is a typical Jewish mother who lives for her children.
“She’s a very bright, smart person who loved to read, but stayed home with the kids. That played a part in my feminism because there came a time when the children left home and she had nothing,” says Mitchell.
Thanks to her mother, Mitchell knows she was writing as early as age four.
“She has poems I wrote when I was four years old, it’s embarrassing,” she says. “I was just always writing, that was how I wanted to express myself. I’d be happy writing a grocery list, I just love writing.”
She wrote for her high school magazine, but her first piece, a story about two teenagers “who went off and had sex on a beach” was printed without adult oversight, upset teachers and parents and led to every copy of the magazine being trashed instead of circulated.
“I came back to school and found teachers running around, picking up copies of the magazine and taking them to the office so they could be trashed. That was my introduction to writing, I was censored,” she says, laughing.
She did her bachelor of arts degree in English from Barnard College and worked for many years as a paralegal before following her heart and heading to the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Out of that came her first novel, The Last Day Of The War, about an American teenager who follows a crush all the way to Europe and gets caught up in larger events.
The Last Day Of The War was also loosely inspired by real life. A friend had an aunt who volunteered with the YWCA in Europe during World War I and offered Mitchell her aunt’s letters.
“You could tell she was trying to be serious, but you knew she’d just gone over to meet guys, that’s where the guys were. And then gradually you could see her become very sober, she was growing up.”
Mitchell may not be done writing about World War I.
“That war is fascinating to me as a bridge between eras. People went into World War I in the Victorian era of long dresses and they came back and it was the Roaring 20s. Women had been to work. Everything had changed.”
Asked what she is working on now, she points out with a laugh that she is “a very slow writer”.
Her office table at home is full of make-up. When she writes, she heads to a cafe to be surrounded by bustle and hubbub.
“I like having voices around me, but not talking to me,” she says. “I don’t mind the hum of people. Otherwise, I’ll feel I’m here all alone, sitting here making up stories which grown-ups don’t do.”
TaraShea Nesbit, author of 
