Hampshire College Alum Galina Vromen 72F Publishes Debut Novel in Her 70s

For Galina Vromen 72F, writing has always been central to her career. She spent more than 20 years as an international journalist, working with Reuters News Agency in Israel, England, the Netherlands, France, and Mexico. Later, she led national literacy initiatives in Israel, directing two programs that distributed more than 20 million books to children and earned recognition from the Library of Congress.

Now, at age 70, Vromen has taken on a new challenge: fiction. Hill of Secrets, set in Los Alamos during WWII, follows the lives of the women and children living in secrecy while their families built the world’s first atomic bomb.

Released in October, the book became a #1 Amazon Kindle new release and has earned praise from The Washington Post, Booklist, and the Historical Novel Society.

We spoke with Vromen about her Hampshire experience, career, and new book.

What drew you to Hampshire?

I fell in love with Hampshire the minute I visited the campus and applied early decision. I felt I had landed in an intellectual Disney World, where I could study whatever I wanted, to my heart’s content, guided by professors. I loved that the focus was on learning and not on testing, and on an interdisciplinary approach, which was very innovative at the time.

I went to public high school in New York, where teachers focused almost exclusively on preparing us all year for the state’s Regents exams — to the point where my personal essay to get into Hampshire was entitled “How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.” Hampshire was so different, a place that focused on learning and assumed that success — personal and/or professional — would emerge from the process.

What did you study? Did that evolve during your time at the College?

I studied anthropology and mass media, which was what I planned to do from the beginning, but of course my thinking about both of these subject areas evolved. I went into Hampshire wanting to be an international journalist, which is indeed what I became.

But I also got very caught up in learning and teaching about the Holocaust. Hampshire was debatably the first college in the United States to teach a course on the Holocaust, and it happened through a student initiative. The course was initially student-taught, under the guidance of the late professor Leonard B. Glick. I was in the first cohort  and I later administered the course in its second year, along with Aaron Berman 71F and Fred Landes 72F. The students in that second year included Aaron Lansky 73F, who went on to create the Yiddish Book Center.

Did your Hampshire experience influence the work you’re doing now? If so, how?

Certainly. While at Hampshire, I won a Women and Career Options Fellowship from the Carnegie Foundation, which was offered to undergraduates who wanted to try out their prospective careers before graduating. Through that fellowship, I spent a semester as a reporter in Mexico. The journalism courses I took at Hampshire stood me in good stead there, as well as later with the Associated Press and Reuters.

Having an anthropological perspective has also been very helpful, as I’ve lived in many different places since Hampshire — France, the Netherlands, England, and Israel — including being, with my husband, the only Jews in an Arab town. It has also been helpful in running a book program for children in Israel’s extremely diverse society, which includes religious and nonreligious Jews, as well as religious and non-religious Arabs, who themselves are religiously diverse (Muslim, Druze, and Christian), and creating books for children that speak to the uniqueness of each culture while fostering common universal humanistic values.

Can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to tackle your novel at this stage in your life?

I’ve wanted to write a novel as far back as I can remember. I started thinking about a book on the nature of family secrets and set in WWII Los Alamos — arguably the most secret place in 20th-century America — about 20 years ago and spent some 12 years writing it. I finally had the time and bandwidth to seriously devote myself to it when I retired. 

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

First, I hope it will prompt them to think in a nuanced way about some of their values. My main character, Christine, does several things in the book that, on the face of it, are considered morally bad, but I hope readers will question this, including the value of keeping or divulging secrets. Second, I hope readers will have an increased awareness of the factors that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to recognize the huge human toll of the use of nuclear weapons in the past, and to be as vigilant as civilians can be about their future use.

Any advice for students considering Hampshire?

Hampshire works well for students who have self-discipline. It hones that self-discipline into a way of life. I’ve always appreciated Hampshire for teaching me how to plan the steps I need to take to reach whatever goal I set for myself, how to evaluate myself along the way, and how to articulate the process to others — all extremely useful life skills.