Annette Gendler's Blog, page 9

The Chore of Writing Book Reviews: Is Having to Read a Book Worth it?

I just clicked the Send button to submit my last book review. Until now I told myself that this would be my last. I don’t want to have to read a book anymore.

Mind you, as a writer I am unlikely to not have to read a book now and then.

I teach writing, and so I have to read books for my class. Often I have to read the books of writer friends. All of these might be good, enriching even, but they are not necessarily my choice. Maybe, with giving up book reviews, I can at least decrease the n...

The Best Thing ever for a Writer: When a Reader Shares Passages She Loved from your Book with You

Jumping Over Shadows in Karlsruhe (photo by Barbara Jester)

As a writer, there is nothing I like more than connecting with a reader. So I was thrilled when Ellen Amarnek tagged me in the following post:

She had photographed a passage she particularly liked from my article “A Day on a Bench in Paris” in the Bella Grace Issue 19. Then she took the trouble to look me up and created this Instagram post to connect with me. That, in and of itself, is already amazing.

She went to that extra troubl...

Sharing the Best Photos of our Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip to Petra, Jordan this past January (Part 3: Petra)

When you arrive in Petra, you have a fairly long walk from the visitor center to the actual archaeological site. Along the way, however, you can already see multiple cave entrances, typical for this landscape that the ancient Nabataeans made good use of.Souvenir shops abound. Solar panels provide power.We were surprised that references to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade weren’t all over the place, but then we did happen upon these jolly knights at the entrance to the Siq, the narrow Cresc...

Sharing the Best Photos of our Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip to Petra, Jordan this Past January (Part 2: Amman)

If our first stop in Jordan, Jerash, was windswept and chilly, it was downright cold at the Amman Citadel.

The Amman Citadel has been a site of fortresses dating back to ancient times, perched on the highest of the many steep hills that make up modern-day Amman.

The weather on that late afternoon was also decidedly odd, the sky enveloped in a shroud of smog and gloomy clouds.

We entered Amman driving through what our tour guide Rania told us was a Palestinian refugee camp. It struck me as...

Sharing the Best Photos of our Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip to Petra, Jordan this Past January (Part 1: Jerash)

This past January I was fortunate enough to be able to cross one of the places I always wanted to see off my bucket list: Petra, Jordan.

Mind you, this didn’t come easy, and it wasn’t my first attempt. In December 2006, my mother-in-law and I booked a day trip to Petra from Eilat, Israel, only to be turned back at the border. Why? It had snowed in Petra! This happens rarely but alas, it did right when we wanted to visit.

Being snowed out of Petra was again a possibility when I planned this y...

My Grandmother’s Original Recipe for Hazelnut Torte Which Happens to Be Kosher for Passover

Every Passover, I bake my German grandmother’s signature Hazelnut Torte. In my family, it wouldn’t be Passover without it. I included the recipe in Jumping Over Shadows because it is such an amazing amalgam of my heritage and my adopted Jewish tradition. And yet, it occurred to me this morning, as I opened the little spiral-bound notebook of recipes she left us, I never shared an image of the original recipe.

So here it is–if you can read German, you might just make it out.

When I first lear...

6 Years of Morning Pages: Why I’ve Stuck with Them and Recommend Them to Everyone

Writing Morning Pages is still the practice I most recommend to anyone who wants to bring writing into their life, and to anyone who wants to live a more deliberate life.

April 8 was my 6-year Morning Pages anniversary! I just recommended Morning Pages again, this time to a friend of my husband who was visiting us this week, and who wants to write but is scared to do so. I gave her Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, which was my entry into the practice of writing Morning Pages. In fact, it...

What Happened When Hitler Visited My Grandparents’ Hometown

Hitler himself visited Reichenberg on Friday, December 2, 1938. His visit was geared to rally the populace for the supplementary elections to the Reichstag, to be held the following Sunday, December 4, when the Sudetendeutschen would vote on who would represent this newly acquired territory in Berlin. Read on…

Thus begins a chapter I ended up cutting from Jumping Over Shadows. 

To celebrate that the book now has 100 reviews on Amazon, I am sharing this chapter as a little gift to my readers....

How I Got into the Purim Custom of Giving Mishloach Manot

Purim is coming up — this year it begins on the evening of March 20 — and I’ve been busy planning what to put in my Mishloach Manot, the small gifts of food Jews exchange on Purim. I wasn’t always into this custom, but let’s just say I’ve really come around. Read on in my new article on Kveller:

Why Jews Need This Silly Purim Tradition

I have, however, always been into baking Hamantashen, the traditional cookies for Purim.

If you’d like my recipe for poppy-seed-chocolate-filled Hamantashen,...

On Keeping More Than One Notebook

A writer should always keep a notebook. And I do! But what if you keep more than one? What if one notebook simply isn’t enough to sort your thoughts, ideas, projects? Simple: then you keep multiple concurrent notebooks.

The Purse Notebook

It used to be that I had only one notebook, which I always carried in my purse. It was small, so it would fit and not weigh too much. Everything went in there: grocery lists, to-do lists, quotes, brainstorms for an essay. This is where I wrote down people’s...