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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. I'm C.P. leslie, the host of New Books and Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Sandra Friels about her debut novel, Annika Yan's in the New World. This novel is timely in two ways. The first and more obvious connection is with the approaching 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which will be celebrated with great fanfare, no doubt this summer. But 2026 also marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city we now know as New York. And it's there, in early 17th century Fort Amsterdam, that Anneke begins her journey. Arrival 1630 New Amsterdam when the Eendracht dropped anchor off the tip of Manhattan Island. Annika should have been relieved that their long voyage was nearly over, but but instead she stood by the railing of the ship, tightly gripping Roelof's hand, accustomed to the flat, grey horizon of the Dutch polders. She found the spring sunlight sparkling off the pristine waters of the harbour unnerving, and the dense forest that covered the hills rising in the distance filled her with dread. How will we ever live here? She asked. There are no people, no buildings, nothing but wild animals and savages. And now, to answer her question, please join me in welcoming Sandra Friels. Hi Sandra, thanks for agreeing to talk with me today.
- [01:24]
B
Well, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
- [01:27]
A
Before we talk about your novel, please say a bit about your background and how you got started writing fiction.
- [01:32]
B
I can. I am originally from Evansville, Indiana, but I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. I took an undergraduate degree in Russian at Indiana University and then I went to stanford for a PhD in Russian language and Literature. And I was very lucky after I graduated to find employment at Portland State university in Portland, Oregon, and I spent the next 30 some odd years there teaching Russian language and literature. But I retired in 2014 and retirement is full of surprises. I became interested in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which is roughly equivalent to today's New York. And quite to my own surprise, I ended up writing a novel about it.
- [02:24]
A
What inspired you to tell this particular story?
- [02:28]
B
The short answer to that is genealogy. I believe that Anneke Jans is my 11G grandmother, but we all have thousands of 11G grandparents, and that's not a reason to write novels about them. The real reason is that during the pandemic I discovered the records of the colony of New Netherlands. The Dutch were meticulous record keepers, and despite damage by fire and water and human neglect. Many of these records still survive, and to my great good fortune, they have been translated and made available online by the New Netherland Institute. And as I said, I discovered them during the pandemic. I couldn't hang out with living people, so I read those records as though they were gossip columns. And I came away from it feeling that I had a pretty good sense of what the community was like. Not just the individual biography, but how the people interacted, what they believed, how they felt. And I wanted to tell that story.
- [03:44]
A
That's such a gift. I mean, I wish we had that from Muscovite history. It's everything burned down every 30, 40 years, and there's so few records. I mean, it's great for fiction because you can make up a lot of stuff and nobody can catch you, but it's not great for research. So how much information is available about Annika herself?
- [04:07]
B
We know the basic outline of her life. We know the dates of her marriage, the names of the men she married, the names of her children. We find traces of her running through the council records that I was talking about. There are traces of her in the church records. There's some evidence that she owned property, but that's really about all we know. Everything else in the novel is invented. It's fiction.
- [04:37]
A
How did you approach the task of turning her story into a novel in that case?
- [04:42]
B
I started imagining conversations between her and her neighbors and decided I really needed to write some of them down. I was struck by what it felt like to have 210 children, and in an age of high infant mortality, what it would have been like to inevitably lose one or more of them. I was curious about what it felt like to live in a rigidly hierarchical society. This is early modern, where people at least nominally believed that their lot in life was foreordained. How would that affect your perceptions and your behavior? And then, of course, I was immensely curious about what it felt like to get on a flimsy wooden sailing vessel and sail away forever to a very strange destination where you didn't know the language, you didn't know the culture, you didn't know the rules, you didn't even know if there were any rules, and you had to completely reinvent yourself. The historical Annika might have been much nicer or much nastier than the one I invented, but I like to think that I've at least come up with a version of Annika that really might have been. So that was my approach.
- [06:10]
A
I found her very credible, I have to say, very Likable as well under despite all of the stresses and strains that she goes through. The Dutch West India Company, known as the wic, plays a major role in the novel. Could you talk a little bit about the company itself before we get to your characters?
- [06:28]
B
I can. The company was a very much for profit organization that had a monopoly on developing Dutch commercial interests in the entire Atlantic world, which included West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and the North American colony of New Netherland. The director answered to an administrative board in the Dutch Republic, but distances were very great and communication very uncertain. So the director of the colony, no matter who he was, had almost unlimited authority over the lives of the colonists. Very important.
- [07:15]
A
And what brings Anneke herself and her husband Roloff to Fort Amsterdam? Where has she been before now?
- [07:22]
B
The company, the Dutch West India Company, understood that if it was going to hold on to its North American territory, it needed to cede it with people. So it came up with various schemes for attracting settlers to this unknown land. The first ship came over in 1624. One of the ways to entice people to come was to cede different portions of territory to semi private patroons. They were called patroon ships. And the most successful of these was Rensselaerswijk, in the territory that's generally the vicinity of today's Albany, New York. The patroon was responsible for bringing over a certain number of colonists and ceding them on farmsteads. And Anneke's husband Roloff signed one of these contracts to come and work in Rensslerswick for a period of four years. They arrived in 1630. They came from Norwegian territories, so they had already immigrated once from Norway to Amsterdam before taking this huge plunge and agreeing to emigrate now from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam.
- [08:54]
A
And how would you describe Anneke herself as a personality, a character?
- [08:58]
B
Well, we know she was a survivor. I have depicted her as being very cautious and wary in her new surroundings. She has to be on guard at all times. She's hardworking, she's patient, she's pragmatic. But at the same time she's also compassionate and very protective, especially of her family. And I think she has a great sense of humor. I like her.
- [09:29]
A
Yeah, I liked her too. What does she find? What does New Amsterdam look like to her when she first arrives?
- [09:37]
B
When she first arrives, it's a very raw, very masculine emerging community. It's a frontier settlement. But what's striking is that in this small developing settlement there's this wild mixture of peoples and languages and religious beliefs all Coming together, and not intentionally, but accidentally creating something quite new. When she arrives, there are American Indians of different tribes and different dialects interacting with Europeans of many, many different nationalities and religious denominations. And even at this very, very early period, there are already enslaved Africans there who have probably been taken from Portuguese prize ships. So it's this wild mixture of people, and as Anneke immediately notices, almost no old people or children and very few women. It is very much a society of brash young men at that time.
- [10:49]
A
Introduce this place to her husband, who was not a brash young man. This is her first husband, Roloff. How has he made his living and what convinces him to emigrate?
- [10:59]
B
He was a seaman, a Norwegian seaman, originally in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. And I have to imagine that he gave up the sea to become a farmer because of the very attractive conditions of the Rensselsweich contract. The patroon would pay the passage of Roloff and his family to the New World. They would give him everything he needed to establish a farmstead. And if the farmstead succeeded, they would share all of the profits with him. And all he needed to do was figure out how to make it work. So in a way, he was a brash young man. I think Anneke agreed to it for a different reason. I think she was tired of living as a widow while her husband was at sea for years and years, and she saw this as an opportunity for them to live together as a family.
- [12:03]
A
This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com, own the dream. Yeah, that's a good point that you raise. I mean, we tend to forget that, as you know, I think we all know that in the 17th century, they don't have cables and phones and certainly not cell phones or texting or anything like that. But we tend to forget that people just, you know, if you were a sailor, you just went off for two years and. And nobody knew what had happened to you, Right?
- [12:54]
B
Absolutely right. And. And the women managed the business during that time while the man was a wise. So they had quite a. They had, in addition to home responsibilities, they had commercial responsibilities. As well.
- [13:08]
A
And they were treated seriously as their husband's agents, I guess. I mean, it is the 17th century, so they weren't considered full human beings, but still, Right?
- [13:18]
B
That is correct.
- [13:19]
A
You've given us a good picture of Fort Amsterdam at the time, but Rensselswijk is different. What did they find out there?
- [13:26]
B
Well, it's further to the north. It's very much isolated. And Roloff, with two farm boys who traveled in their party, has contracted to develop a working farmstead on undeveloped land. Annika suffers from the isolation. She has yet another child with no female assistance. Roloff's lack of experience in farming leads to mishaps. Their first house burns down. But what's interesting to me is they almost certainly are in contact with their Mohican neighbors. And there's quite a bit of intercultural influence and I would say friendship that develops between them and their neighbors.
- [14:13]
A
Yes, I found that a very interesting element of the story because we are so accustomed to thinking of the relationship between the Native Americans and the colonists as being almost hostile from the beginning. But it's. And we do see that develop over the course of the book as more and more colonists arrive. So it's kind of a stage. But, yeah, it's a very interesting element of the story. So Annika leaves behind a mother and sister when she travels to the New World. And that's important in part for the reason that you just mentioned that she's alone on this farm giving birth and her mother is a midwife. What brings them to join her in the New World?
- [15:00]
B
We don't know exactly when her mother and sister arrive, but they appear very, very early in the historical record. And her mother, Trine Jonas, as you said, was the first midwife on Manhattan, the first European midwife on Manhattan. I have depicted Trine as the matriarch of the family, always on the lookout for opportunities to advance the interests of her two daughters, Annika and her younger sister, Marichen Marichin, I've imagined as livelier, more outgoing, more of a risk taker than Anneke, but just as determined a survivor as her older sister is.
- [15:54]
A
Yes, and that's quite common in families where you have two daughters. The younger one is often more outgoing and a little less responsible, perhaps, but you know, the two.
- [16:06]
B
Yeah, big sister will always fix it, no matter what. Yeah.
- [16:09]
A
Do talk a little bit more about her mother, though. Her mother's a fascinating character, I think.
- [16:15]
B
Trina is a midwife and not sentimental about it. This is her job. She saves children. She loses children sometimes she loses the mother. She travels wherever she is needed and her job is to bring these babies into the world and to give them a start if she can. It's an important. It's an important position in this kind of rudimentary colony. She is one of the first of the medical figures who appears in the records. One of the second is the barber surgeon who sets the broken bones. And then there's a physician who studied at the university and knows about internal ailments. But transposition is absolutely key to the. The success of the colony. If you don't have healthy babies, you can't have a growing population at all.
- [17:18]
A
But she's also a social mover. She pushes Anneke to marry Roloff and then she pushes her to marry her second husband.
- [17:28]
B
Yes, she is, as I said, very much the matriarch in my imagination, in the novel, she is the one who pushes for the immigration. This is your chance. It's success, children. You must take it. And when Roelof dies in the historical record, we see both men and women remarrying as quickly as possible. Life was just too difficult to get through without a partner. And when Roloff dies, Anneke knows that she must remarry. But it is Tryin who pushes her to marry someone of consequence, someone of position, someone who will further her place in the colony. So, yes, Trine is very much the one who pushes both of her daughters to social and financial success.
- [18:25]
A
Yes, I think that's true, actually, throughout early modern Europe and probably earlier and even into the 19th century, because there was such a sharp division of labor between men and women, you really couldn't. I mean, apart from the fact that you're, you know, out in some completely semi populated space, even if you weren't, you would still need someone who could do the things that you can't do because of who you were born to.
- [18:53]
B
Yes, yeah. The men remarried just as quickly as the women. Everyone needed a partner.
- [19:00]
A
So this is the 17th century. So it's not too surprising that everyone thinks that Anneke's main job in life is to produce kids. And as you've noted, she's very successful at that. How does she herself feel about her lot in life?
- [19:16]
B
She has 10 children and she buries three of them. One as an infant, one as a teenager, and one as a young adult. And as a woman of her time and of her religious upbringing, she cannot question the will of God in giving her children or in taking them away. It takes a toll. However, women from about 15 to 45 were constantly pregnant or nursing, it takes a toll. But at the same time, she cherishes the children she has and grieves for the ones she loses just as much as any modern woman, just as much as you or I would do.
- [20:05]
A
So I'm not going to ask more about Roloff because I'd like readers to discover what happens to him. But it's in the book blurb that she does marry again. So we do know that. Tell us something about her second husband, his place in the colony, and what their marriage means for her. He's quite different character from Roloff.
- [20:24]
B
He's very different. Her second husband is a lightning rod for controversy. He was born plain old Everett Bogart and raised in an orphanage. So again, an inauspicious beginning. But in this age of religious fervor. As a teenager, he experienced religious visions, and he was sent to university to prepare for the ministry. By the time we meet him, because he has attended university, he has Latinized his name. He now is Everardus Bogardus, and he is the only minister of the only church on Manhattan. He is second in importance on the colony only to the director of the colony. When Annika marries him, she joins the elites of the colony. She catapults from being farmer's wife to being preacher's wife. But her new husband is in conflict with the director of the colony. And so even though she has moved into not a financially more secure, but a socially more prestigious position, she fears that the feud between her husband and the director will almost certainly lead to catastrophe.
- [22:01]
A
Are there any other characters or instances that you'd like listeners to hear about whom I haven't mentioned?
- [22:08]
B
I would like to go back to the Mohican siblings. They meet early on. All of the European names in the book come from the historical record. They were all real people, although the characters in my book are all invented. But the only two completely fictional characters in the book are the two Mohican siblings, Walanya and Kitpul. And they are important to me. We don't have historical records showing Anneke and her family interacting with their Mohican neighbors, but they must have done. Walania and Annika, despite their differences, develop a friendship of sorts. And they share their cultures as much as they can with each other. They are separated very early on by Anneke's moving back to New Amsterdam. And yet the memory of this friendship remains with Anneke throughout the novel. She's kind of a golden ideal of what might have been. So these two characters are very dear to me. And they're important to me in their place in the book.
- [23:24]
A
Yes, I enjoyed reading about them very much, and I'm glad you included them, because otherwise it would have been a much less nuanced story, I think. What would you like people to take away from Annika Jans in the New World?
- [23:39]
B
Most of all, I would like them to take away an increased awareness of the sheer complexity of early colonial society. I would like them to like Anneke, of course, and to sympathize with her joys and her sorrows. But I'd also like them to reflect a bit on the role of an immigrant such as Annika, and developing this vibrant, multilingual, polycultural society we now call our own.
- [24:15]
A
As we speak. This novel has just come out. Are you planning to write another?
- [24:19]
B
I am, thank you for asking. I am working on a fictional biography of Annika's oldest daughter, Sarah, who at age 15, married the colony's first barber surgeon and then went on to become an interpreter. I think she is endlessly fascinating and I am really eager to introduce her to you.
- [24:44]
A
Oh, good. I look forward to meeting her. She's a very interesting character in this book, too. Can you say just a little bit about her as we meet her here?
- [24:53]
B
I can. She married the colony's first barber surgeon. She had 10 children and lost two of them in her lifetime. She married three times, three very different kinds of men. And this is part of what I was talking about, about the need to have a partner no matter what your social status is. But what is fascinating to me about her is that during one of the major conflicts with the Indian population, which is not depicted in Annika, eons that came later, Sarah was happy to serve as interpreter for the lead negotiator of the Hackensack Indians. We assume that she learned her language from that childhood experience with the younger sibling Kitbu, I've tried to depict in her mother's novel. But she was a full fledged interpreter and a very important person in the colony, despite being a wife and a mother.
- [26:07]
A
And that friendship between her and Kippel is an important element in this novel as well. They're quite close.
- [26:14]
B
Yes, they are.
- [26:15]
A
Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Sandra. I've really enjoyed talking with you.
- [26:19]
B
Pleasure. I've enjoyed talking to you. Really happy to meet you.
- [26:23]
A
And thank you for listening to our podcast once again. I am Sapie Leslie, the host of New Books in Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And today I've been talking with Sandra Friels about Annika Yan's in the New World. Find out more about her@sandra friels.com like us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok EW books network. You can find out more about me and my books@cplesdie.com, where I blog about the interviews and in general discuss history, historical fiction and the rapidly changing publishing industry. Goodbye until my next conversation about historical fiction on the New Books Network.