Hill of Secrets is Galina Vromen’s first novel, set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the Manhattan Project that led to the development of the first two atomic bombs. Nevertheless, says Vromen, “the book is not really about the development of atomic weapons. It’s about relationships and secrecy and how those get amplified in a place that is also itself secret. Los Alamos is, in a way, a metaphor – a place that echoes what is going on with the people there.”

The plot of Hill of Secrets unfolds downstream of the historical events portrayed in the hugely popular 2023 film Oppenheimer, which focused on the life and work of the enigmatic physicist tapped as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. The story is told through the points of view of four characters: Christine Sharp, the wife of a chemist who suspended her own ambitions – first, the pursuit of a science degree, and then a position as an art dealer in New York – to support her husband’s career; Sarah and Gertie Koppel, the wife and teenaged daughter of Kurt, another scientist, who have all escaped Germany while family members who could not leave face an uncertain fate; and Jimmy Campbell, a young corporal with scientific skills involved in a budding romance with Gertie.

All find themselves in the makeshift desert town of Los Alamos – in the middle of nowhere but also the epicenter of scientific inquiry and military ambition that will change the arc of human history. In Vromen’s novel, the human element is brought to the fore. “The book is more about the dilemmas of the people who are the unsung heroes of the families that just had to endure and deal with the situation,” says the author.

The magnitude of the project, conducted behind a veil of secrecy, overhangs the personal entanglements of these characters. Vromen said she became interested in the dramatic possibilities of the scenario after a friend of hers, a teacher at her alma mater of Hampshire College in Amherst, introduced her to a student who had “done a really good paper on wives of scientists at Los Alamos and what they knew and what they didn't know during the war. I asked him what he concluded. His conclusion was that they knew and didn't know. It was like they knew, but without knowing the specifics. They sensed what was going on. I thought that that was an amazing analogy for a lot of what happens in families. I thought that it would be intriguing to do something around that topic of secrecy, which I find really interesting, but to put it in Los Alamos. The novel is about what it was like to deal with the issue of secrecy in families in the most secret place in the United States in the 20th century.”

Vromen adds that her interest was further whetted by her own experiences in her teens and twenties “reading about what was going on in the Middle East concerning Iran and Israel and their nuclear capabilities and all that.” Ultimately, however, the essence of the book is “the issue of secrets. It really fascinates me because I think that our attitude towards divulging things has changed in my lifetime from a time when people refer to cancer as ‘the Big C’ and people who were gay were in the closet. So much of that has changed, but it, to my mind, has gone to the other extreme, where sometimes there's just too much information. I'm fascinated by the current belief that letting it all out is always a good thing. I think I wanted to challenge that.”

Los Alamos proved to be a rich backdrop for the story to unfold. “It was such a mixture of the elite of America in terms of the best of the best of physics departments around the country,” says Vromen. “There were a lot of refugees there, Jewish refugees from Europe. There were the military folks, the engineering detachment, and the WACs, the Women's Army Corps. They were all there, the elite scientists and the people who did the grunt work. I wanted to give a taste of the variety of types of people that were there. It was natural for me to have one the families be a Jewish refugee family.”

Vromen had a distinguished career as a journalist for Reuters, after which she went to work for the Harold Grinspoon Foundation. She started as the foundation’s director of special projects, and after her son graduated from high school in 2008, she decided she wanted to move back to Israel, where she had previously lived. She stayed with the Grinspoon Foundation to bring PJ Library to Israel, working with the Ministry of Education to introduce books through the classroom that students would be able to take home. She also led a parallel program that provided books in Israeli Arab schoolchildren in Arabic.

Those impressive accomplishments didn’t leave her much time to work on her novel, which she says has been germinating for the better part of 20 years. When she retired, she worked to finish Hill of Secrets, wrapping up at around the same time the movie Oppenheimer was released. “I thought, ‘is this going to help or is this going to harm” the books potential, she says. “When I saw the movie, I relaxed because the book really does not cover the same things, it compliments them. Oppenheimer did not focus on what the domestic or what women were up to. It began providing a little bit of romance about Oppenheimer himself, but it really did not get into what daily life was really like there. I provided a side that really is not in the movie.” Vromen says she visited Los Alamos, now a historic site, and her evocations of the vast New Mexico desert convey a palpable feeling of how remote and lonely a place it was.

“But at the same time,” says Vromen, “I stopped having to explain what Los Alamos was, because until then, when I would say I was writing a book about Los Alamos, most people thought I was talking about someplace in Texas. The Oppenheimer movie raised an interest and consciousness about that period. I wanted people to think about the issues of dropping the bomb, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn't provide a lot of answers to the moral issues and also do it in a user-friendly way. I think the book provides a gateway to a discussion. And I think as the 80th anniversary of the bombing comes up in the next year, I think there will be a lot of reevaluation of the why and wherefores of that whole action. And I think this contributes to that discussion in a quiet way.”

Jewish Books

Galina also offered some ideas about books by Jewish authors: “I recently enjoyed The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (2014), a well written, light, fun read about a colorful character who starts a successful ice cream business. Another good fiction read is Adam Unrehearsed by Don Futterman (2023), a touching and funny coming of age story of a New York City teen in the 1970s that is very insightful on relations between Blacks and Jews.