Julie Tulba has found that her master's degree in library science has helped her to do research for her historical novels.

Julie Tulba's latest novel moves through time, just as its author moved through the world.

“The Dead Are Resting” is the second novel for the part-time reference librarian at Butler County Community College.

She started writing the historical fiction novel in March 2020 after she returned from trips to England and Southeast Asia in 2019 before COVID-19 restrictions made travel in 2020 very difficult.

“It's mind-boggling to think I could use my passport and travel to the other side of the earth,” she said. “There were no constraints.”

She began globe-trotting after leaving her job as a technical services librarian at the Butler Public Library. She spent a month touring France, Germany and the Netherlands and another month visiting Singapore, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Tulba traveled alone without more than a smattering of French to get her by in both hemispheres.

“I'm more of a Spanish speaker. My French is at the elementary level at best,” said Tulba, who graduated as a Spanish major from Chatham University in 2003.

“I had spent a semester overseas in Spain, another in Costa Rica and one in South Korea, where my Spanish also did not come in handy,” she said.

Idea for bookIt was on her visit to Germany that Tulba got the germ of the idea that became “The Dead Are Resting” at a museum.“There's a museum called 'The Typography of Terror' in Berlin,” Tulba said. “It's built on the site of Gestapo headquarters.“I started 'The Dead Are Resting' in March 2020 and finished it in December 2020, and then there were multiple rounds of edits,” she said. “It was written on a computer. I'd like to be very old school and use a typewriter, but I don't have the patience.”Some days, she would write for five hours or more. Other days, she would work for about an hour. Whatever the output, she said, she tried to write 1,000 words, or a couple of pages, a day. Tulba said she didn't have an outline or a plan to follow as she wrote. She had an idea of the book in her head and just wrote from that.“The Dead Are Resting” is set on dual timelines. In the present, it's the story of Becky growing up in Pittsburgh, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. The only survivor in his family, Becky's father had always refused to talk about the past, having spent his entire life internalizing his pain, rather than coming to terms with it.The novel's second locale is Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s during Hitler's rise to power.“The Germans were suffering long before the world got involved and started fighting each other,” Tulba said.

The two timelines begin to intertwine when Becky takes a trip to Germany to learn about the homeland of half her ancestry. Then she comes across a photograph in a German museum.Tulba said the title of the novel comes from her father, who was quoting Ecclesiastes 38:23: “When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest, and be comforted for him, when his spirit is departed from him.”She said that quote refers to the theme of her novel, with survivors keeping the past in the past, eager to move on from horrendous events.“People are trying to move past it. Their attitude is, 'Stop bringing up the ghosts,'” she said. But the past is not so easily laid to rest.Everybody knows Hitler and the Nazis killed the Jews, she said. But not everybody realizes what came before or after. In post-War Germany, there were guilt and nightmares on the part of those who lived through the event and show trials of ex-Nazis.But the survivors of the camps, much like the members of “The Greatest Generation,” are dying off every day. Their memories must be kept alive.

The past played a big part in Tulba's first novel, “Tears of Yesteryear,” about immigrants in Homestead. She said a lot of that novel was based in her great-grandmother's life. She came to the United States when she was 17, an ethnic Ukrainian.“I've always wanted to write historical fiction,” Tulba said. “It's always been my favorite genre.“I've had to do a lot of research for each of these novels,” she said, adding getting a master's degree in library science from the University of Pittsburgh definitely helped.Her travels have given her the inspiration for her third novel, she said. A visit to Saigon on her Asian trip in 2019 has given her the idea for a story about women during the Vietnam War. And Tulba is planning to take trips to Japan and Greece next year.For now, “The Dead Are Resting” is available in print or on Kindle from Amazon.com.