I first heard Judith Krummeck before I met her. I’d been scrolling through radio stations – years ago – on my way home from work when her voice came through on 91.5, soft yet self-assured. Perhaps she’d been expounding on the historical nuances behind a classical piece of music; I’m not sure. What intrigued me enough then to form a concrete memory about it, was how Krummeck spoke with a passion for music so genuine it was almost palpable through my car’s busted stereo. I’d never been much for overtures or concertos, but I kept listening to Krummeck’s retelling of how they came to be.

I’ve since put a face to her voice. And I’ve learned that she is, in fact, a passionate storyteller and I suspect that’s because she’s an avid story-learner. It’s as if it comes naturally for her to ask, “How come this piece of writing exists?” and “Why was this artwork created in the first place?” 

Krummeck’s debut novel, The Deceived Ones is, by its simplest definition, a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But, more than that, it’s a novel full of answers to questions only Krummeck knew to ask of The Bard. It is an excavation of the familiar characters’ inner lives, complicated motives, and insatiable drives backlit by present-day issues: war, immigration, gender, sexuality, the pandemic…

It is the story of Vira, a Ukrainian refugee displaced by the Russian invasion, with little more to her name than her beloved viola da gamba when she arrives in Baltimore. After being physically attacked, she takes to passing as her twin, Sevastyan, until he is able to join her. Meanwhile, Orson, a stalled composer, is agonizing over the inexplicable withdrawal of his muse Isabella from a performance he’d written. He chances upon Vira one day, now passing as “Sevastyan,” who gives him the inspirational jolt he’s long needed to finish his work. 

Indeed, the plot of The Deceived Ones is straight from Shakespeare’s radio station, but again, it’s Krummeck’s voice and passion for storytelling that comes through, making it a tale all her own. I sat down with her to get the story behind The Deceived Ones…

Your novel is marketed and referred to as an “homage” to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” but really, the book is more an homage to Shakespeare himself. At least that’s how I looked at it. Was that your intention? 

It’s lovely that you say that. I think a lot goes on subconsciously, because a friend of mine picked up on the name “Viola” in the original Shakespeare play, and she said, “Oh, how clever of you to have [the protagonist, Vira] playing the viola da gamba. It’s a play on the name!” And that was absolutely not my conscious intention. It wasn’t. So, I wondered if it’s the same as your reading [the book] as an homage to Shakespeare because I didn’t consciously think it that–I felt as if I was very closely attached to the play itself. But it also seemed important to pull in lots of threads, and I think, in the context of Shakespeare, maybe the way that his life and his work come through is that I kind of gave myself permission to do a take on that, using him as a source, because he had used sources so much. And anyone familiar with his literature would know that. But I was very interested in delving into the specific sources he used and I actually used those a lot. 

The title of the book itself is based on Shakespeare’s sources, right? I can’t say it…

I can’t say it well myself. I think it’s “Gl’ingannati” (“The Deceived Ones”). But yes, I think I wanted to make the book not just the play, but the elements of what went into the play for [Shakespeare]. Also, the other themes that I could bleed out from his original concept. So if it comes across as broader, that’s fantastic, because that’s exactly what I was hoping to do. 

You mention the themes of the book and parsing those out. How was the process of bringing “Twelfth Night”’s themes into a contemporary world–amid COVID, the war in Ukraine? 

I think a wonderful thing about Shakespeare is you can pretty much take any play–even the historical plays–and you can pretty much do what you want to. And I think that’s one of the reasons he has survived, you know, because any production of Shakespeare can attach to any contemporary issue in our lives. “Twelfth Night” is one of my favorites–yes, it’s a comedy, by definition–but there are lots of dark elements in it. So, that was what really attracted me to it–it’s not all “light and fluff” like “Comedy of Errors”; there are other elements to it. And they were themes I thought were apposite–two themes in particular: one being that the whole play hinges on the fact that Viola dresses up as a man, and we know why [Shakespeare] did that–all the parts were played by men during his time, so he uses that device a lot. But today around the conversations of gender and sexuality, that seemed to be something that I could play with a lot. And I didn’t want to make it just that [Vira] is the one who dresses up, but that the Orson character is a bit confused about his attraction to her as well.

And the other theme? 

The other theme was immigration because, although not that much is made of it in the play, the twins come from somewhere else and they’ve got to find their place, and they’ve got to rely on other people, and they’re not familiar with their surroundings; they can’t call on their network. And that is so the journey of an immigrant. The only reason I started writing was because the process of immigration, for me, was so shattering; I had to write about this. And so there has been, invariably, up until now, this theme, this thread, of immigration that runs through all my writing. And I wanted to play with that again, not just that it was the twins. I wanted to look at different aspects of that. Two of the singers–you know, the loud bass and the sort of namby-pamby countertenor–they come from other countries, and no big deal is made of it. But they’re not Americans. The Olivia character–Isabella–she’s not only of mixed race, but of mixed heritage, in terms of where her parents came from. Then there’s the whole story of Mía living in the shadows all that time; and Antonio, who’s an undocumented immigrant… I just wanted to look at it from all those different aspects. 

I love the way you parsed out the book–the way you structured it with each chapter attached to a character. Was there a particular story, or particular character, that you really harmonized with? 

What was interesting is that there is not a clear parallel in the book to my story. In the early drafts, there was more of one. Because, originally, I had the twins come from Dubrovnik in Croatia, because Dubrovnik is believed to be the “Illyria” of Shakespeare’s play. So, I thought that would be quite cool. And then the twins wished to come to America to study further, which was an aspirational wish similar to what I’d had. So that was quite close. But, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it occurred to me that that kind of upped the ante of the story a lot, that the twins didn’t come by choice, but came because they had no option. This also added an element of the darkness I mentioned–they were refugees. I never was a refugee. So, the traumatic elements of immigration in the book are not my experience. What is my experience is the sense of “dislocation.” At one point, I talk about Sevastyan going into a grocery store and having to read every label in order to find what was similar to back home. And for me, the first time I did a grocery shop, it took me honestly an entire afternoon because I just couldn’t start. The size of the store amazed me, and also just finding the “equivalents” [to food I’m familiar with].

What was the research process like for you? 

That was intense. It was multi-layered–the research. One tends to think that perhaps for fiction there isn’t as much research. For historical fiction, fair enough, but for contemporary fiction, you’d think maybe there wouldn’t be that much. But there was a lot. In terms of my musical knowledge, I think I definitely know the most about the Romantic Era, and then the next most about the Classical Era. Renaissance is not my era of expertise, so that needed a lot of research. Also, the viola da gamba is an arcane instrument now. So, that needed a lot of research–how you play it. I had not known, for instance, that it was not part of the string family like a violin or a cello, but part of the lute family; it’s structured like that in terms of frets and multiple strings. 

And the parts about Ukraine? 

Yes, I did ask someone who grew up in the Soviet Union and who speaks Ukrainian, I spent the manuscript. And he went through to make it certain corrections. I think for English speakers, it always comes down to the “gender [of a language]” because we don’t have gendered language. So he needed to make some corrections along those lines; he also was the one who translated my English back into Ukrainian for me in the book. I don’t know how you write, if you do all your research up front–

*Shakes head no emphatically*

–Ok, so I find that as I need to know something, then I will delve into it. Then, if the writing has to stop for a while, then the writing has to stop. So, when I needed to know, say, about a supermarket in Lviv, then I would go and look into that. 

And how did you go about writing in the voice of the different characters? 

You know, all of them have something of me in them in some way. Or, if not me directly, then someone that I know. The Orson character is a lot like my brother. I made him look like him. And my brother, he was almost edging towards bipolar, so there was a lot of duality about him. There was sexual duality about him, there was personality duality about him. Through that all, he was the person that I was just intensely close to, and he had an astounding ability to be empathic. So, I think even if one is not writing in a memoiristic way, one is still bringing in your knowledge, your personality, and your experiences–especially your experiences with people you’ve been close to–into the process. Of course we can only write what we know, right? Even though I’m not directly in the book, I’m in the book. When my brother died, I couldn’t drop everything to see him. I was still in grad school. And my brother went quite suddenly into hospice. And when I got to him, it was a day too late; he’d already died. And I was able to sort of write through that haunting experience through the character of Isabella, whose own brother had just died.

Speaking of Isabella, she first comes off (to me) as cold. But that changes over the course of the book. What was writing the evolutionary process of the characters like? 

I was quite helped by Shakespeare in that, because he takes care of the arc. And we know that his character Olivia (Isabella) is in mourning, but he doesn’t go into that very much. So, the reason I wanted to write it from multiple points of view is, I suppose, again, an homage to the play. You know, when you go to a play, you are experiencing “the whole” as a collection of speeches from the actors on the stage. Your focus is on that actor when they’re speaking, and then that moves the narrative forward. That was why I chose to do it that way. It was also important that each character would have, within the overall arc, their own arc… And the greatest arc, I think, was probably Isabella’s, because she goes from not only grieving, but absolutely berating herself and punishing herself for not being there for her brother. So, for her to kind of come alive, go down the wrong route and be in a place of vulnerability, dumping emotions on the wrong person, and then finding some kind of peace at the end–I think that was what made Isabella’s arc the biggest. 

And what are you working on now? 

I’m working on a piece of historical fiction now. Once again, there’s a thread of immigration in it, and again there is a strong musical component. And I’m experimenting with first-person voice (other than memoir, obviously!) for the first time. I’m writing an account of one of the first named female composers in America. She lived and composed at the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania during the mid-1700s, and some of her work is collected in the Ephrata Codex that is housed at the Library of Congress. I’ve had some trouble trying to find her voice, but I think I’m edging closer to it now.

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