I am happy to welcome back Deborah Guttentag. Deborah’s new novel, LETTERBOX BY THE LAKE (Menucha Publishers, 2026), tells the story of two sisters living in 1960s London whose lives are shaped by their family’s harrowing experiences during and after after the war. The story introduces readers to the impact of trauma and difficult family dynamics. It’s a layered story that engages readers at every turn. I am delighted to learn more about the backstory of this novel.
Your new book, LETTERBOX BY THE LAKE, is the story of two sisters in London in the 1960s, whose lives are greatly impacted by their families’ experiences during the war. Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to write the story of Judith and Lottie?
My inspiration for the book was a visit to the Lake District together with my husband, about ten years ago where I saw an old letterbox cemented into a wall. As a child we spent a number of holidays in the Lake District. I remember that it often rained and then everything was rather grey and miserable and the lakes could look quite threatening but there were also visits where it was hot and beautiful. We often stayed in rugged cottages and we would go paddling at the edge of the lakes (I think Windermere was the one we mainly visited). I suppose it was an idyllic time but as a child you don’t realise that.
The idea for Judith and Lottie probably came from my own childhood, though I was one of five, with 2 sisters and 2 brothers. Perhaps there is some of Lottie in me. The community we grew up in during the 1960’s and 70’s in London, Golders Green was mostly made up of German Jews who had escaped Nazi Germany in the prewar years. Some of them had come on their own, leaving their parents behind, some came after the war. Some had been in concentration camps though I didn’t really know anything about these until the late 70’s and early 80’s. My own parents fled Germany just before the war. My father came on his own just before the outbreak of the war in 1939. He told us many, many years later that he had to travel on his own on a train full of SS men. My mother came with her parents and one of her brothers. They were able to get to England because my grandmother had a brother in Bradford, a wealthy textile dealer, who had come quite some years earlier from Switzerland and was comfortably anglicused.
Generally speaking, people didn’t talk about the war and their harrowing experiences. (My father and grandfather had been thrown into prison because they were Ostjuden (they originally came to Germany from Poland) where they heard the screams of people being beaten up. He saw a man on the street shot dead. But he never spoke of any of these things, or the fact that he never found out what had happened to his parents (we only found out in the last decade how they were murdered). In face my father was never able to sit shiva for his parents. He didn’t show us the few photographs he had of his parents or talk about his childhood. It must have been too hard for him.
My father was by nature a happy and contented man, and a very loving, kind father, also exceptionally intelligent, but I think I sensed something and always wanted to make that something better though I had no idea what it was.
I have in my possession a necklace that belonged to my mother’s mother, which had a picture of her husband (my other grandfather) in it. A photograph was taken of my grandmother wearing the necklace and looking very regal and this was hung up like a large portrait on the dining room wall. Another portrait hung on a different wall in the dining room of (I think) my grandfather’s mother wearing the necklace, her hair piled up, little pretty earrings. She was a very pretty woman. Interestingly that painting was not the original. It was a copy of the original which my uncle wanted so he paid to have it copied so that my mother could have it as well.
Judith and Lottie experience a lot of hardships when they are sent to live with a less than loving aunt and uncle. Although family secrets are eventually revealed and mysteries about their mother are resolved, there are still lingering questions and painful truths that remain. In other words, not everything is fixable. Why is this message so important?
It’s true that not everything is fixable. Many things are just out of our control. But what we can fix is our own attitude to things. In a humorous way I have tried to show this at the end of the novel when Lottie concludes that valuables aren’t truly worth anything. ‘Silly old jewel,’ she says, suggesting that she has learned that there are more important things in life than possessions. The book explores what people need in order to feel happy. The girls’ mother gains security by reuniting with her sister and her family. She also stops blaming herself for her sister’s apparent death. She herself is willing to forgo what rightfully belongs to her. She has found happiness in her family life.
Mrs Mendlesohn, however, having been in concentration camps, is driven by the idea of vengeance through exacting rights of possession for her friend Sarah. It is questionable whether she will ever find real contentment in the fae of the impossibility of seeing justice done on this earth. She comforts herself with the thought that in the next world the evil ones will receive retribution.
Your setting for the book is 1960’s London, but you weave in a lot of history about the war. It’s a difficult topic for a novel for young people. As a writer, how did you balance the truth of history while keeping your narrative age appropriate?
I had to be careful not to frighten young, sensitive readers. For instance, Judith and Lottie’s father has committed suicide before the opening of the book. Judith is not aware of it; only that her father has died. I know of two people now in their sixties and seventies whose fathers passed away in the same manner. Both men had endured the horrors of concentration camps, had then married and had children. Who knows? Perhaps their own children brought back to them what they had been, and the memory of the children from their families who were murdered. So I leave it to adults to read between the lines. Also, Mrs Mendlesohn alludes to this regarding her own husband: she ‘forces’ him to live. He is portrayed as living in a state of mental agony as a result of his experiences.
My publisher also made me alter the sentence in which we are told that Mrs Wertheimer had lost all her children in concentration camp. (she had ten) I had to keep one child alive. The publishers felt that it would be too much for our modern young readers.
The book references the work of the Quakers during the war. Can you tell me about their important actions during the Holocaust?
The Quakers, formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, are a historically Protestant Christian group founded in 17th-century England by George Fox. (wiki) During the war they were active in saving Jewish children from extermination. I know a lady now in her eighties who was saved by Quakers and brought to England as a girl.
What do you hope your readers take away from the book?
First and foremost I want my readers to enjoy the book as a good story, a page turner. I want them to feel for the main characters and understand what they are going through. I’d like them to believe in the situations I’ve created. I’d like them to see how Uncle Henry’s escape from his religious life did nothing to bring him happiness and how dishonesty and greed similarly do not achieve happiness. Openness, affection, sensitivity to others as well as tolerance for other people’s weaknesses (as Judith in relation to Uncle Henry) help a person grow in stature and confidence and ultimately make them happier.
Thank you, Deborah!
Deborah Guttentag B.A. Hons. (also known as Debbie) grew up in London, UK. She is married to Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag, a senior rabbinic leader in the UK. She is a qualified English teacher and runs drama classes for ladies and girls. She also writes and directs plays for the ladies and girls of the Manchester Jewish community. She is the author of Saving Soraya (Targum), In the Dark (Targum) and Letterbox by the Lake (Menucha) as well as short stories that have appeared in Mishpacha Junior, Family First, Ami and Horizons.