On November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old German-Polish Jewish boy living as a refugee in France walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot dead a Nazi consular official. The boy, Herschel Grynszpan, had recently learned that his family had been rounded up with thousands of others and deported to the Polish border. Two days later, the Nazis instigated Kristallnacht — the first nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany — which the Nazis claimed was a spontaneous response to Grynszpan’s act.

In his novel Everyone Has Their Reasons, writer Joseph Matthews imagines the years of Grynszpan’s life leading up to, and following, the assassination through the teenager’s refugee existence in late 1930s Paris. In an interview on the California-based progressive radio show Against the Grain, radical journalist Sasha Lilley spoke with Joseph Matthews about his book, the life of Herschel Grynszpan, and what it meant to be a refugee in 1930s France.