New novel explores the immigrant experience in rural northern California
Longtime West County resident Barbara Baer caps her writing career with the release of her latest—and last?—book at Occidental Center for the Arts this Sunday
Forestville resident and writer Barbara Baer has lived an unusually interesting life. The author of five novels, she was born in Southern California in 1939, then moved north to attend public high school and Stanford University. She and her husband, writer Michael Morey, moved to Forestville in 1980, where they still reside — but not before Baer lived numerous other adventures.
Her travels began when she moved to New York City’s East Village in the early ’60s, during a lull between both her Stanford degrees … and the Beatnik and hippie movements. “I went to the New School and got turned on, but didn’t really drop out,” she said during a recent phone conversation.
In subsequent years she also lived in Washington D.C., India, Soviet-era Uzbekistan, Vienna, London and Ohio. During those years she married her first husband, a French diplomat; had a son; studied dance; and worked as a teacher, a translator and a freelance journalist. She even joined a mime troupe in England in the early 1970s, where she performed in David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tour.
“I did that for quite a while and earned a lot more money than I did translating or teaching,” she said.
After settling in Forestville, Baer co-founded Floreant Press in 1995 and ran it until she published its “bestseller,” Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist’s Exile From Eden by Dr. Gregory Levin, in 2006.
Following that book’s success, she began writing books herself, and in 2009 Ghost Road Press published her first of five novels, Grisha the Scrivener, the story of, according to the Amazon description, “an exiled Georgian journalist who keeps his head down under oppressive Soviet dominion while maintaining his own identity.”
Baer drew on her travel adventures for her first three novels. Regarding her 2018 novel The Last Devadasi: A Novel (Open Books), she said, “It’s really very much about this caste of matriarchal women who were dancers and sacred prostitutes in the temples in South India, particularly South India and Madras. I knew a lot about [them] because I lived in Madras, and I studied with this great dancer who was the last of her caste, which was banned by the ’60s.”
Baer gained access to historical letters, pictures and documents to educate herself while writing her fourth novel, The Ice Palace Waltz (Open Books, 2020), a multi-generational family saga about the Jewish American experience set against the tumult of early 20th century America.
But for her newest novel, Baer took a new approach.
“I usually follow the dictum that you should write about what you know,” Baer said. “But with this one, Masha and Alejandro Crossing Borders, there’s so much that I attempted that I really have no authority on. It’s certainly the first book I wrote that I didn’t know a lot about.”
The story involves Alejandro from El Salvador and Masha from Ukraine, two young immigrants who move to Trinity County. A hostile local militia group pays them unfriendly house calls, while MAGA supporters and anti-vaxxers make their working conditions less than desirable. In the end, the common act of everyone working together on the fire line to save their community from catastrophe brings with it the possibility of peace.
“It’s a book with complex matters in it,” Baer said. “It was a hard book to write. It’s hard to get the voices right.”
She based the fictional Alejandro on a real-life Mexican man she met at a local tennis club. He and his family had moved to Josephine County, Oregon, along the California border, not knowing they were moving to a lawless, pro-MAGA community with its own militia and deep anti-immigrant sentiments. Each time Baer encountered him at the tennis club, he told her new stories.
“This really happened, and he’s a wonderful guy,” Baer said. “He’s a short, dark man, and he had a terrible time. He ended up having to own guns because he was mugged and broken into several times and vandalized.”
The novel, she says, “isn’t about the issue of immigration. It’s more what happens when the immigrants are here and try to assimilate.”
Baer, who began writing the novel during the pandemic and finished it earlier this year, says it’s probably her last. But while this may be her last book launch at Occidental Center for the Arts (OCA), it won’t be her first. In fact, she’s done book readings for all of her previous books at OCA.
“Suze Cohan, she works so hard to have these launches, because there’s very few places where bookstores and others will devote the evening to you,” she said. “And so the OCA is a great spot for local writers.”
Join Barbara Baer for her Masha and Alejandro Crossing Borders book launch at Occidental Center for the Arts this Sunday, Oct. 13, from 4 pm to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free; all donations will be graciously received. The talk and readings will be followed by a Q&A, book sales and signing. Refreshments will be available. occidentalcenterforthearts.org
In addition, Barbara and her son, Michael Levitin, will both read from their latest books — his being the newly released paperback edition of Generation Occupy — at Books & Letters, 14045 Armstrong Woods Rd. in Guerneville on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m. Wine and treats. No charge.