On 9/11, I was living in a loft in lower Manhattan and I saw the towers fall. It was natural, I suppose, that as a writer I look to see which cataclysmic events had scarred New York as deeply. There was that Triangle Shirt Factory fire. There were a few tenement fires, some epidemics. And then I came across the largely forgotten Slocum disaster. Why, I asked myself, was the Triangle Shirt Factory fire so infamous, when fewer than 150 people died, and yet no one seemed to even know the General Slocum, when more than a thousand burned to death or drowned?

Then, it dawned upon me. The Slocum disaster had happened only a few years before the Great War. And when World War I arrived and so many Americans perished, no one cared about the Germans any longer. Now, they were the Hun, or the Boche. Somehow sub-human. Unworthy of remembrance.

When I decided to tell the story of the General Slocum tragedy as a YA novel, it was inevitable that the narrative should revolve around xenophobia and antisemitism, misogyny and prejudice of all kinds. In writing fiction, particularly historical fiction, one tries to create a narrative that speaks a truth transcending one specific life or set of lives, but rather one that represents all lifelines from that time, a bridge connecting the reader to the thoughts and feelings of the people living in that age. It also grants us an opportunity to relearn the truth that—despite vast differences in years—humans are driven by motivations which transcend time.

Kiss Me, I’m Dead is a story about love, about a love so strong that it conquers time and death in the face of prejudice, misogyny, antisemitism, and the mindset of the mob. It may be set in 1904, but these themes are very much eternal, indeed too omnipresent in our culture today. And yet the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy is more than that. It’s also the anniversary of New York’s greatest act of misremembering, the intentional collective sublimation of an idea, and the vanishing of a people.

In today’s culture, where we can create digital personae of ourselves on Tik Tok and Instagram that bear little resemblance to our true selves (just look at our politicians), at a time when AI makes it increasingly easy to manufacture alternate realities, indeed when VR permits us to actually immerse ourselves within these artificial worlds, the need for memory, to keep a foothold in truth, is more important than ever. To forget the past, Santayana warned us, means we are doomed to repeat it. To forget the holocaust, slavery, the Armenian and Rwandan Tutsi genocides, and all the other countless genocides before is to forget the current conflagrations in Gaza and the Sudan and the DRC, the wars of colonial occupation in West Papua and the Western Sahara.

One hundred and twenty years ago, New York experienced the greatest single loss of life in its history. That’s not fake news. No matter how hard we tried to ignore the event a few years later, it did happen. Indeed, our collective misremembering may be a truth as great as the loss of life itself. If the sinking of the Slocum teaches us anything at all, I hope it teaches us the power and essential nature of memory. Our most sacred trust, and our greatest obligation to future generations is to remember. Unflinchingly. Warts and all.

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J.G. Sandom is an international best-selling author of a dozen novels including Kiss Me, I’m Dead. Originally released in hardcover by Penguin/Dutton under the title The Unresolved and pen name T.K. Welsh, the novel is being re-released by Cornucopia Press in both English and German under the title Kiss Me, I’m Dead in time for the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy.

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