September 26, 2024
Meghan O'Toole
Lois Baer Barr releases novel based on family history
The Tailor's Daughter is a new novel by Associate Professor of Spanish, Emerita, Lois Baer Barr inspired by the lives of her mother’s Eastern European Jewish family living over their tailor shop in Louisville, Kentucky.
The novel begins in 1920 and ends with the outbreak of World War II.
“It’s really about immigrants making their way together,” Barr said. “It’s about how families from different communities can work together. It’s fiction, but it’s based on my mother’s stories and research I did on the places and people in the novel.”
The novel, published by Water’s Edge Press, started as a collection of short stories. Barr’s writing group encouraged her to turn the collection into a novel.
“Fiction in some ways gives you much more freedom,” Barr said in an interview on The Deerfield Public Library Podcast when asked about using her family history in a work of fiction. “It can’t always follow the way it happened in reality. Fiction has to have its own truth.”
Barr, who taught at Lake Forest from 1995 to 2016, will be giving a book talk and public interview with Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Latinx Studies Gizella Meneses at 2 p.m. on October 6 at Secret World Books in Highland Park. Attendance is free.
Barr is also the author of Biopoesis, which won Poetica’s 2013 chapbook award. Her chapbook of flash fiction, Lope de Vega’s Daughter, was published in 2019 by Red Bird Press. Tracks: Poems on the ‘L’ follows Barr’s experience writing at a studio in Edgewater and volunteering as a Reading Buddy for Open Books from 2016-2020. It placed fourth in Finishing Press’s New Voices contest and was published there in 2022. Barr’s work also includes The Patriarchal Tradition in the Latin American Jewish Novel published by Arizona State University in 1995.