7 Questions with Julie Tulba, Author of The Dead Are Resting

 

Julie Tulba lives in the Pittsburgh area and currently works as an academic librarian. Besides history, travel is Julie's other great love in life, especially when there's a food tour (or two) involved; she's taken more than 20 in 13 countries around the world. Julie published her first book, The Tears of Yesteryear, in 2019, followed by The Dead Are Resting in 2021. Her passport is always at the ready for her next international adventure, while also brainstorming ideas for her next novel.

The author at Gallipoli

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

As a child I absolutely adored series like Dear America, Little House on the Prairie, and American Girl books. It was these wonderful books that instilled in me at a young age, my lifelong love and fascination with history. I also grew up in Philadelphia, colonial America’s foremost metropolis, thus further cementing this love affair.

 

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

I am an avid world traveler and every destination I have ever visited always includes a visit to at least one historical attraction, if not two or three…or four. In my opinion, nothing brings the past more alive than being, in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, right in “The Room Where it Happened.” I was inspired to write my second novel, The Dead Are Resting, after unexpectedly ending up in Berlin, Germany and visiting a truly unique museum there, the Topography of Terror. It is the only museum of its kind to focus on the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And what makes the museum even more chilling to visit is that it’s built on the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters of the Third Reich.

 

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

When I’m not writing historical fiction, I’m an academic librarian so being surrounded by books day in and day, looking up random historical factoids, complements my love of the past.

 

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

I fully subscribe to the adage, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” supposedly uttered by writer and philosopher George Santayana, because it is so very true. Look back through the annals of history and one will see how more often than not, history has indeed repeated itself. I also feel that studying and knowing about the past is of the utmost importance because it serves as a memorial to the past dead too—how can we remember our dead from wars and battle, if we don’t actually know the facts and dates of those same events?

 

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

While it’s hard to choose just one, I would have to say the first half of the 20^th century—so everything encompassing America’s immigration heyday, and of course both world wars. My great-grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to the United States in the 1910s and so I have always felt an immense personal connection to that period of American history—the story and history of the millions of immigrants who left behind everything they had ever known to come to a foreign land for the chance at a better life. I live in Pittsburgh, a city that thousands of European immigrants flocked to in the early 20^th century to work in the steel mills and so that past is still very much seen and felt. And the world wars, well, to me that’s still very much “recent history,” especially the Second World War and that aspects makes it all the more fascinating and incredible to me.

in Istanbul

 

6. What inspired you to write historical fiction?

Historical fiction has always been my favorite genre and so I wanted to fuse that love with my love for writing and being a creative storyteller through my words. I loved the idea of being able to help people acquire newfound knowledge on the past through my books.

 

7. Please tell us about your latest book?

The Dead Are Resting is a dual timeline novel set against the backdrops of Nazi Germany and modern-day Pittsburgh. However, it’s not just “another” World War II/Holocaust book because in my opinion, too often novels about the Holocaust focus just exclusively on the war years, but never the aftermath, never in the years and even decades following the liberation of the camps. The authors of those books tend to paint a rosier picture, as in “they were the lucky ones to have survived,” but now they can start anew. But as historical testimonies of survivors showed, it was never that easy/. And for some who survived, they remained dead on the inside for the rest of their lives, never able to come to terms with what had happened to them and the lives of their family members who were murdered by the Nazis. The Dead Are Resting shows THAT side, one rarely covered in historical fiction novels about the Holocaust. The book's cover which is a real-life photograph from World War II inspired the story behind it. 

 

My third historical novel, Red Clay Ashes, set during the Vietnam War, comes out later this year!