By Minyi Jiang
In her upcoming novel Atomic Anna, author Rachel Barenbaum poses the question: What would happen if a woman was in charge of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union in 1986?
“Atomic Anna follows three generations of women – grandmother, mother, and daughter – as they build a time machine to stop the Chernobyl disaster and save their family,” Barenbaum said at a recent virtual luncheon hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies. “That’s the one-liner elevator pitch for the book. But really, it’s about love, it’s about family, it’s about relationships between mother and daughter, and it’s about regret.”
The book starts with main character Anna Berkova’s first time travel on April 26, 1986, the day the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down.
“She is one of the Soviet Union’s top scientists. She lands on a mountaintop in what is present-day Armenia’s Mount Aragats, and she finds her estranged daughter Molly is dying,” Barenbaum said. “She is confronted with the question: can she go back? If she can go back in time, if she can re-engineer and figure out what brought her forward, should she save Molly, or should she stop Chernobyl?”
Should you save the one or the many – thousands or maybe millions of people. “This is a very Jewish philosophical dilemma, something we hear about talking a lot throughout history in many of our texts,” Barenbaum said.
Barenbaum is a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. She studied philosophy and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where she later received her MBA degree. She worked as a hedge fund manager before becoming a best-selling novelist in 2019 when she published her first work of Jewish historical fiction, A Bend in the Stars, a love story of two scientists set in Russia on the eve of the World War I.
Barenbaum recalled watching the news on television with her two great aunts, who come from Russia, when Chernobyl melted down. “They were saying, ‘They need to run, get out of Chernobyl, get out of Chernobyl.’ And then, one aunt leaned over, and she said to her sister, ‘You know, if a woman had been in charge, that never would have happened,’” the author said.
“So, I have these women in my head, and I’m thinking, ‘What if a woman had been in charge at Chernobyl? What if that woman had been Anna Berkova?” she said. “I created this whole character who’s in charge of Chernobyl, of the Soviet facility, and I built the world up from there.”
“That’s how we get to Atomic Anna,” she said.
UCSB Taubman Endowed Symposia director, Richard Hecht, left, and novelist Rachel Barenbaum, right, at a recent Taubman virtual event discussing Barenbaum’s upcoming novel, Atomic Anna.
Having this idea in mind, Barenbaum found many photos and videos of Pripyat, the closest city to the power plant, after the explosion. In her virtual talk, she showed a picture that she found in 2016 where a stopped clock above a swimming pool grabbed her attention. “It just stuck with me that the time stopped in Pripyat at Chernobyl, and so many horrific things came after that, that I just had to dig in further to the story,” she said.
“I do a lot of science reading because I love it. I love these big questions, and I think you can't stop progress, you can't stop technology…” she said. “So if we can’t stop it, and it’s there, what are we going to do with it? How do we use it responsibly and how far should we take it?”
These are the big questions, Barenbaum said.
Atomic Anna, published by Grand Central Publishing, will come out on March 7th.
Rachel Barenbaum, author of the new novel Atomic Anna, shared her inspirations and research process into the novel at a recent UCSB Taubman symposium virtual event. Headline photo of Chernobyl by Gerhard Reus.
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.