Two things inspired my latest novel A Master Plan for Rescue. The first was the story of the St. Louis--the pleasure boat that left Hitler's Germany with 900 Jewish refugees in 1939. Despite the fact that every one of those passengers held a visa for Cuba, when they arrived in Havana harbor, they were refused permission to land.

For days, the St. Louis sailed up and down the coast of Florida--close enough that fishing boats carried out tourists to snap photos of them--while the refugees sent frantic cables to the American authorities asking for permission to land. But at last, word came back--America has enough Jews--and they were forced to head back toward Germany.

I knew I wanted to write about the St. Louis, to place a character on that ship.

My own son, Alex, was 12 when I started to write A Master Plan for Rescue. And I noticed how boys of that age stand equally in the worlds of childhood and adulthood. I wanted also to write from that imaginative place, to imagine how a boy that age would cope with losing the person who means the most to him in the world.

These inspirations provided the basis for my two main characters. Jack, the 12-year-old Irish boy, obsessed with the radio in WWII New York City. And Jakob, the young, broken-hearted Jewish man, who will eventually get on the St. Louis. Two characters who will meet, and out of their shared grief attempt an improbably rescue.

A Master Plan for Rescue

Janis Cooke Newman