West Kildonan author launches YA novel

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This article was published 26/11/2021 (1419 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first draft of West Kildonan resident Harriet Zaidman’s latest young adult novel was complete before the pandemic, yet includes a deadly virus, vaccines and the conspiracy theories that bubbled out of these things.

If humankind weren’t so prone to repeating itself, one might almost think Zaidman clairvoyant. 

The novel, entitled Second Chances, is the story of a teenage hockey star in Winnipeg who is stricken with polio during the epidemic of the 1950s. He meets and becomes enamoured with another patient, a young girl whose family is being pressured to leave Rooster Town, which was a Métis settlement on the southwestern fringes of Winnipeg that existed from 1901 to the late 1950s.

“And he’s immediately ridiculed for it by a kid who had learned racism from his parents,” Zaidman said.

All too familiar themes of viral panic, confusion and racism thread through the novel, but in the end it is a young adult novel, Zaidman said.

“So you have to have something positive come out of it,” she said. “Everybody gets a second chance in some way to move forward. And for some people, it’s harder. For some people, it’s easier, and for some people it’s different. But there’s always a second chance.”

A huge amount of research goes into crafting a historical novel (if it’s any good, that is). For Zaidman, this meant amongst other things interviewing numerous polio survivors, including Paul Alexander, a man in Dallas, Texas, who has breathed on an iron lung since 1952.

“They talked to me not only about their polio experience, but how post-polio syndrome has affected them because their lives were changed. After a number of years, the nerve endings that regrew — the body regenerates nerves — they started to fail,” Zaidman said.

The former teacher-librarian submerged herself in memoirs of survivors; biographies of Dr. Jonas Salk, who is credited with developing the polio vaccine; and other writings about Winnipeg, the polio epidemic and Rooster Town.

There’s particular importance in exploring the history of our own city, Zaidman said. 

“I think it’s essential that we address the issues that are in our history. We should learn all history, but when it comes to our own, we have to examine that,” she said. “We have to acknowledge that we were given a wrong narrative. We were fed a different set of stories, and the true story is the human story. And the human story is that Indigenous, First Nations and Métis people were deprived of their land and their rights.”

In fact, Zaidman said she’d never even heard of Rooster Town until reading an article in the Winnipeg Free Press in 2016, despite the town having been only a few kilometres to the south. And she’s likely not alone in this.

Rooster Town ended with the City of Winnipeg offering $75 to those who moved and threatening to evict the rest, before bulldozing and burning existing houses in favour of suburban development.

Zaidman launched her book on Nov. 20 at McNally Robinson. She has one other young adult novel, called City on Strike, set during the general strike of 1919, and three picture books.