BY ANAT ROSENBERG
Ronald H. Balson has been a Chicago trial attorney for 47 years, and during that time, his work has led him into courtrooms across the country and to numerous cities around the world. One case, a complex telecommunications-related lawsuit, brought Balson to Poland more than a decade ago and unwittingly launched his literary career as a best-selling author of historical fiction.
“Going to Poland and getting involved in that case was just happenstance,” said Balson, who appeared at an AMIT Chicago event in the spring and recently spoke with AMIT magazine. “When you go to Poland, you’re walking on a battlefield, you’re walking in a country that ceased to be during World War II. You go there now, there are monuments and memorials everywhere.”
As a Jew and a former college history major, the experience of walking through Poland’s streets inspired Balson to want to write a story about an ordinary family living in an ordinary town in Poland during the war. That germ of an idea eventually turned into his first novel, the best-selling “Once We Were Brothers,” which is about two boys—one Jewish, one not—who grow up together and meet again decades later when one accuses the other of having been a Nazi. (That book also introduces two of Balson’s recurring characters, the attorney Catherine Lockhart and investigator Liam Taggart.)
Balson’s legal knowledge and experience have served him well in writing, as he has weaved legal plotlines into his books and used his research skills to delve into different eras in history, which his novels recount in rich detail.
Balson finished the manuscript, and then came the hard part: finding an agent, pitching it to publishers, and facing rejection after rejection. “It was certainly a lesson in naiveté,” he said. Finally, in 2011, he self-published the book and began selling copies out of his house. Sales were slow at first, but over time they took off—even without any marketing or promotion— and the book eventually sold 100,000 copies before getting picked up and published by St. Martin’s Press in 2013. Five years later, Balson is set to publish his fifth book, “The Girl from Berlin,” in October.
“Word of mouth is a very powerful thing,” said Balson. “Books are essentially sold by one person telling another, ‘Hey, I just read a really good book.’”
Balson’s travels—in this case, to Israel, where his son served in the IDF—also inspired his second novel, “Saving Sophie,” a thriller that jumps from Chicago to Hawaii to Israel and centers around a father’s attempt to save his kidnapped daughter and thwart a potential terrorist attack in Hebron.
While he was in the middle of working on “Saving Sophie,” Balson met an elderly, Polish-born Auschwitz survivor named Fay Scharf Waldman who was living in a Chicago suburb, and who read “Once We Were Brothers” and told the author that she felt she was reading about her own family. Balson invited her to lunch, where Waldman shared her experiences during the Holocaust, which served as the creative stimulus for Balson’s third book, “Karolina’s Twins.”
Waldman was a “strong, remarkable, determined, brilliant, and beautiful woman,” said Balson, adding that she was going to help him write the book, but passed away before work on the novel began.
In his fictionalized account of Waldman’s story, an elderly Holocaust survivor named Lena Woodward enlists the help of lawyer-investigator team Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart to help her fulfill her friend Karolina’s final wish—to find out if her twins survived the war.
Balson has said that he cannot write Holocaust-related novels back to back because his characters and their experiences are real to him, and he is “living with them” as he writes. That may explain why his fourth book focuses on his character Liam Taggart who returns home to Northern Ireland for his uncle’s funeral. As the thriller unfolds, Taggart confronts the mysterious circumstances of his uncle’s death as well as his own memories and family history.
To research his book and the conflict in Northern Ireland, Balson traveled there, just as he spent time in Hebron while working on “Saving Sophie” and Poland for his other books. “My books wouldn’t be as authentic if I wasn’t there, and didn’t engage historians,” he said. Just as Poland is home to monuments and memorials, Northern Ireland is also steeped in history and tensions that are still lurking beneath the surface, Balson added. “Going there and sitting in bars and restaurants and talking to people is what makes the book realistic.”
In addition to history and the search for justice, Balson also counts music as a passion (his grandmother was a pianist and piano teacher and helped inspire his love of classical music)—one that plays a role in his forthcoming book, “The Girl from Berlin.”
The book returns to the Holocaust, this time exploring what impact the war had on Jewish artists and musicians. Its protagonist is Ada Baumgarten, a violin prodigy who flees Germany and settles in Italy with her mother, also a violinist. She may be connected to a modern-day property dispute in Tuscany that Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart work to help resolve.
Like Balson’s other novels, the story moves between past and present, in this case World War II-era Germany and present-day Tuscany—and, also like Balson’s previous novels, this one was inspired by travel, this time a visit to Tuscany several years ago. While there, Balson discovered that some local wineries are owned by German companies, prompting him to delve into the subject of property that the Germans confiscated during the war and the Terezin Declaration from 2009. That agreement was signed by 47 countries vowing to establish a restitution process for looted property and assets.
Property disputes are also among the types of cases Balson has had experience with as a civil litigator, but now, he said, he gets to pick and choose which cases he will take on. “I do between 40 and 50 speaking engagements per year, and at this point, I do more writing than legal work,” he said. His fans will surely be happy to hear that.
