Finding the (not-so-fine) line between history and fiction: A Guest Post by Merav Fima

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that it would be interesting to imagine a meeting between the four great female English novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. She argues that the only thing they had in common is that not one of them bore a child. I, too, thought it would be fascinating to imagine just such a conversation between the great female writers and artists—all of them migrants—of Israel’s founding generation, familiar as I am, twice a migrant myself, with the hardships associated with maintaining one’s creative practice in a foreign land.

In my recently released collection of short fiction, Late Blossoms, the meetings are fictional and purely imagined, blending fact and fiction. The six stories in the central part of the book take place at the Jerusalem residence of painter Anna Ticho in the mid-twentieth century. While it is known that the Tichos regularly hosted many intellectuals and artists in their home, there is no record that my other real-life protagonists (other than the poet and painter Else Lasker-Schüler) were ever present at the Tichos’ salon, and the Swedish poet Nelly Sachs never even visited Israel.

However, in my stories these women meet regularly to share their creative work and discuss the challenges of writing and painting in a new and unfamiliar environment, language, and culture. I have taken poetic license in constructing these encounters, in order to explore their most profound emotions and experiences as women and as migrant artists, in the face of discrimination by the patriarchal literary and artistic establishments of their time.

Although the stories are based on years of research into the lives and works of these historical figures, I often just used one or two facts as the foundation of the story, while constructing a complex fictional situation around those few facts. For instance, the first story I wrote, focusing on Anna Ticho’s artistic block and how she learns to appreciate even the desolation of Jerusalem as a source of painterly inspiration while shifting her identity from hostess and nurse to artist in her own right, came to me after sitting with friends at the Ticho House café and reading about the history and architecture of the house on the back of the menu. That’s when my imagination kicked in as I started picturing Anna as she moved through the historic house and developing her character as an aspiring artist within that setting.

Another of the early stories, Degeneration, was initially inspired by a painting by Kees van Dongen portraying an anonymous woman reclining on a sofa, which I saw at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Intrigued by her pose and anguished facial expression, I first conceptualised the story as an imagined piece, speculating on the the situation that had led to her apparent despair. When, some years later, I learned in an art history class about the poetry and paintings of Else Lasker-Schüler, a German-Jewish Expressionist who was persecuted by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate artist’, I started imagining the protagonist as Else and infused the existing story with details from my research about her life and colourful artworks.

Still, as a lover of history, I was bothered by the question of how to reconcile my desire for historical accuracy with my other desire for poetic license, for letting my imagination loose.

To minimise the tension, I took several steps to try and reduce the reader’s expectation for historical accuracy, while hopefully maintaining their suspension of disbelief. Originally, each of the stories had the name of the historical figure and the exact date when the story takes place written in bold right beneath the title. I decided to remove the date markers from each of the individual stories and, instead, listed the general range (1925–1967) at the beginning of the section. I then moved the artist’s name from the title of the story and added it in smaller, plain font after an epigraph – a quote from their poetry or diary – to suggest that the story is inspired by their work, rather than telling a biographical story.

I also changed the names of some of the secondary characters to invented names, so that there’s no confusion with other historical figures. For instance, in the story Degeneration, the Nazi officer appoints a new Artistic Leader. I had initially used a name that, as it turned out, belonged to a known philosopher, who was himself persecuted by the Nazis, and so I changed it to a made-up name. Likewise, in Rings of Smoke, the poet Leah Goldberg is ridiculed by a younger male poet, who claims to be forging the path of Hebrew poetry. I had originally used the name of a well-known poet, and so I changed it to a fictional name.

Following the feedback I received from some of my early readers, I also changed the name of the gallery where Anna Ticho’s painting is exhibited in Paris from the Louvre to Galerie des Quatre Chemins, where she actually held an exhibition of her works.

These are just a few examples of the amendments I made while already in the second round of editing with the publisher, in order to simultaneously enhance the historical accuracy of the stories, while acknowledging their fictionality.

Although, in these stories, it may at times be difficult to distinguish between historical fact and invention, I feel that this is the beauty of fiction. While it may be helpful to conduct extensive research in order to ground the fictional story in factual details that are recognisable to the reader, each writer should feel free to take poetic license in order to give full expression to their imagination, thus infusing the literary work with their own unique touch.

Merav Fima is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of the forthcoming novel The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree (Running Wild Press, 2026) and of the short story collection Late Blossoms (Vine Leaves Press, October 2025). She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Monash University and her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals worldwide, including: Meanjin Quarterly, Parchment, Poetica Magazine and The Australian Book Review.