Helen Maryles Shankman's Blog, page 2
May 15, 2014
Blog Hop!
The great Jean Naggar, agent extraordinaire as well as author of Sipping From the Nile, the haunting and lyrical memoir of her enchanted childhood in Egypt, graciously tagged me to come along on this blog hop. Be sure to visit her blog at Jeannaggar.com!
What I am working on
In the autumn of 2008, my mother’s illness, in remission for so long, took a turn for the worse; in the middle of phone conversations, she would drift away, and I would be left talking to the ether. Within a couple of weeks, she stopped speaking altogether. For me and my family, it became a terrible kind of waiting game; was this the end? Or would some miracle intervene, some magic drug awake her from her endless dreaming, and bring her back to us, to the land of the living?
In this space of time—it was the days leading up to Halloween—I wrote my first short story. It was called The Partizans. In brief, two children grow up next door to each other in the village of Wlodawa, Poland, just before World War II. The boy runs away and joins the army, the girl stays behind with her family. The war begins. As the SS lead the Jews out to the forest to be executed—taking the girl and her family with them—a ghostly band of creatures, half-animal and half-human, descends upon the planned massacre and…well, I’ll let you read it for yourself.
Story after story came to me in this way. A thread of my mother’s life—my parents are both Holocaust survivors—would be woven into a plot. Characters—my grandfather the saddlemaker, and Selinger, the German chief of the Adampol labor camp—found a way to pop up in every story. There was always magic; I can’t seem to tell a story without magic. Soon, I began incorporating my father’s experiences as well.
Some of them were picked up by a variety of very fine journals and magazines; The Kenyon Review, JewishFiction.net, Cream City Review. Soon I had a series of linked stories that I call In the Land of Armadillos. And since my background is in art, I am tinkering with the idea of adding some illustrations. (You can tell me what you think.)
In my stories, the actions of a tailor’s wayward wife save the snobbish inhabitants of an underground bunker; the Messiah appears in a little boy’s bedroom to report that he is quitting; a particularly cold-blooded SS officer dedicates himself to rescuing the creator of his son’s favorite picture book; a young man shows up at a Jewish-owned grist mill in the middle of the night, claiming to be the Golem, ready to be put to work; a little girl is hidden with the biggest anti-Semite in the district and his talking dog, Fallada. Weaving in and out of these tales are the enigmatic and silver-tongued Willy Reinhart, German Commandant of the forced labor camp at Adampol Palace, and Soroka the saddlemaker, Reinhart’s favorite Jewish craftsman. To Reinhart, Soroka is that rarest thing of all in a totalitarian regime, a man who will tell him what he really thinks.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I wish I belonged to a genre! I seem to hopscotch around Horror, Jewish Fiction, Magical Realism, Paranormal Romance, and Literary Fiction. (I spent my entire childhood buried in Holocaust novels, superhero comic books and Stephen King. I guess there’s no real surprises here.)
Why do I write what I write?
It wasn’t a choice, it was an epiphany.
It could be related to my religious roots in midrashic tradition…or perhaps it’s because the Holocaust was so profoundly horrific, illogical, enormous and chaotic that I needed to exert some form of control over it. We say that World War II ended in 1945. But in truth, the Holocaust reached out its long arms to infect my childhood, and, I suspect, the childhood of many thousands of other survivors’ children. For me, writing about it, with all its facets of comedy, horror, and humanity, just seems necessary.
How does my writing process work?
I’m a slowpoke; I aspire to Graham Greene’s famous goal of 500 words a day.
With butterflies of excitement flitting in my belly, I sit down at the computer after the kids leave for school. First I attend to correspondence and social networks. When I’m all Tweeted and FB’d out, I switch to the computer that isn’t connected to the internet, situated in front of a window that overlooks my neighbors park-like property. There, between sentences, I watch the seasons go by and feel guilty about not exercising more often.
I begin each story with some kind of a rough outline. I write mindfully, editing as I go along. I borrow from my art background; I weigh each sentence, each scene, for color, texture, light and dark, composition. I always ask myself if it’s visual enough; if there’s too much tell and not enough show; is it alive; does it matter. I read each line out loud to hear the music and rhythm; and finally, I ask myself if whatever I just wrote is necessary to the story.
I stop when the first of my kids gets home. After an evening of dinner, homework, carpools, Little League, and kid-centered conversation, after the table is cleared, the laundry done, the kids in bed, I return to the non-internet computer and re-read what I wrote earlier in the day. Sometimes I am happy. Sometimes, I despair that I will ever write anything decent, ever again.
On to the tagging!
Watch this space for the terrific and talented authors I've tagged. I'll post them as I hear back from them!
EMILY KATE MOON, is the author and illustrator of JOONE. Her blog is http://www.emilykatemoon.com/
ELANA MARYLES SZTOKMAN is the award-winning author of Educating in the Divine Image: Gender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day Schools and The Men's Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World. Her blog is: http://www.jewfem.com
The multi-talented RENA BUNDER ROSSNER is the author of EATING THE BIBLE. She is a novelist as well as an agent at the Deborah Harris Agency. Her blog is http://www.renarossner.com/
What I am working on
In the autumn of 2008, my mother’s illness, in remission for so long, took a turn for the worse; in the middle of phone conversations, she would drift away, and I would be left talking to the ether. Within a couple of weeks, she stopped speaking altogether. For me and my family, it became a terrible kind of waiting game; was this the end? Or would some miracle intervene, some magic drug awake her from her endless dreaming, and bring her back to us, to the land of the living?
In this space of time—it was the days leading up to Halloween—I wrote my first short story. It was called The Partizans. In brief, two children grow up next door to each other in the village of Wlodawa, Poland, just before World War II. The boy runs away and joins the army, the girl stays behind with her family. The war begins. As the SS lead the Jews out to the forest to be executed—taking the girl and her family with them—a ghostly band of creatures, half-animal and half-human, descends upon the planned massacre and…well, I’ll let you read it for yourself.
Story after story came to me in this way. A thread of my mother’s life—my parents are both Holocaust survivors—would be woven into a plot. Characters—my grandfather the saddlemaker, and Selinger, the German chief of the Adampol labor camp—found a way to pop up in every story. There was always magic; I can’t seem to tell a story without magic. Soon, I began incorporating my father’s experiences as well.
Some of them were picked up by a variety of very fine journals and magazines; The Kenyon Review, JewishFiction.net, Cream City Review. Soon I had a series of linked stories that I call In the Land of Armadillos. And since my background is in art, I am tinkering with the idea of adding some illustrations. (You can tell me what you think.)
In my stories, the actions of a tailor’s wayward wife save the snobbish inhabitants of an underground bunker; the Messiah appears in a little boy’s bedroom to report that he is quitting; a particularly cold-blooded SS officer dedicates himself to rescuing the creator of his son’s favorite picture book; a young man shows up at a Jewish-owned grist mill in the middle of the night, claiming to be the Golem, ready to be put to work; a little girl is hidden with the biggest anti-Semite in the district and his talking dog, Fallada. Weaving in and out of these tales are the enigmatic and silver-tongued Willy Reinhart, German Commandant of the forced labor camp at Adampol Palace, and Soroka the saddlemaker, Reinhart’s favorite Jewish craftsman. To Reinhart, Soroka is that rarest thing of all in a totalitarian regime, a man who will tell him what he really thinks.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I wish I belonged to a genre! I seem to hopscotch around Horror, Jewish Fiction, Magical Realism, Paranormal Romance, and Literary Fiction. (I spent my entire childhood buried in Holocaust novels, superhero comic books and Stephen King. I guess there’s no real surprises here.)
Why do I write what I write?
It wasn’t a choice, it was an epiphany.
It could be related to my religious roots in midrashic tradition…or perhaps it’s because the Holocaust was so profoundly horrific, illogical, enormous and chaotic that I needed to exert some form of control over it. We say that World War II ended in 1945. But in truth, the Holocaust reached out its long arms to infect my childhood, and, I suspect, the childhood of many thousands of other survivors’ children. For me, writing about it, with all its facets of comedy, horror, and humanity, just seems necessary.
How does my writing process work?
I’m a slowpoke; I aspire to Graham Greene’s famous goal of 500 words a day.
With butterflies of excitement flitting in my belly, I sit down at the computer after the kids leave for school. First I attend to correspondence and social networks. When I’m all Tweeted and FB’d out, I switch to the computer that isn’t connected to the internet, situated in front of a window that overlooks my neighbors park-like property. There, between sentences, I watch the seasons go by and feel guilty about not exercising more often.
I begin each story with some kind of a rough outline. I write mindfully, editing as I go along. I borrow from my art background; I weigh each sentence, each scene, for color, texture, light and dark, composition. I always ask myself if it’s visual enough; if there’s too much tell and not enough show; is it alive; does it matter. I read each line out loud to hear the music and rhythm; and finally, I ask myself if whatever I just wrote is necessary to the story.
I stop when the first of my kids gets home. After an evening of dinner, homework, carpools, Little League, and kid-centered conversation, after the table is cleared, the laundry done, the kids in bed, I return to the non-internet computer and re-read what I wrote earlier in the day. Sometimes I am happy. Sometimes, I despair that I will ever write anything decent, ever again.
On to the tagging!
Watch this space for the terrific and talented authors I've tagged. I'll post them as I hear back from them!
EMILY KATE MOON, is the author and illustrator of JOONE. Her blog is http://www.emilykatemoon.com/
ELANA MARYLES SZTOKMAN is the award-winning author of Educating in the Divine Image: Gender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day Schools and The Men's Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World. Her blog is: http://www.jewfem.com
The multi-talented RENA BUNDER ROSSNER is the author of EATING THE BIBLE. She is a novelist as well as an agent at the Deborah Harris Agency. Her blog is http://www.renarossner.com/
February 9, 2014
And Then They Shot Him
This piece, my reflections on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, appears in The Jewish Standard this week.
A look at uncounted victims of the Holocaust by bullets
“Eastern Europe’s Killing Fields,” ran the subhead at the bottom of the New York Times. Underneath it, the caption read, “Many of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed by executioners’ bullets, historians have learned.”
It was Tuesday morning, the day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was also the second day back at school after the end of yeshiva break. Following a week of vacation where my children stayed up every night until the wee hours playing Minecraft and Assassins Creed, they were reluctantly rolling out of bed at daybreak and trudging out into record low temperatures, waiting at frozen street corners for their school buses.
After seeing everyone off, I spread the paper out on the dining room table and flipped to page A10. “Shedding Light on a Vast Toll of Jews Killed Away From Death Camps,” blared the headline. According to the Times article, the Holocaust generally is associated with concentration camps. Historians are now learning that a million and a half Jews were executed in forests and villages across Eastern Europe, in the Ukraine, in Belarus, and in parts of Russia.
For some unfathomable reason, the Times photo editor chose to illustrate the article with a picture of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
There’s a certain conversation you have when you tell people that your parents are Holocaust survivors. “Really?” they say respectfully. “What camp were they in?”
“They weren’t in a camp,” you explain. “They were hiding in the forests, running from place to place.”
This is followed by what my sister calls The Look. Then some kind of variation on this statement: “Oh, so they didn’t really suffer. They had it pretty good.”
That he “had it pretty good” would be news to my dad. Usually, his war stories end with the words, “And then they took him into the forest and shot him.”
Sometimes, the “him” in the story is his 15-year-old brother, Yehuda. When their bunker — a hole tunneled into the side of a hillock — was discovered by a passing hunter, my father, my grandfather, and another brother threw themselves into the latrine pit. Understanding that there was no room for him, Yehuda shoveled dirt over his father and brothers to hide them. Then he climbed out to face the SS.
Sometimes the “him” in the story is my great-uncle Aron. Aron had a gift. He built bunkers. And his bunkers weren’t just a hole in the floor, or a space hollowed out behind a false wall; Aron engineered bunkers that could hold 50 people. He secreted one under three feet of earth in a root cellar, so that suspicious soldiers armed with shovels couldn’t find it. Aron built bunkers with electricity stolen from Gestapo headquarters; Aron built a bunker with a real working toilet; Aron built a bunker with a shower he made from a car radiator.
Uncle Aron was hiding out in the Ukrainian forests when he was captured. The German soldiers barked, “Don’t move, or we’ll shoot!” Fearing that he might be tortured, that he might reveal the locations of the bunkers he’d constructed, Aron moved.
Sometimes, the “him” in the story is Aunt Devora, who lived in the city of Drohobych, just 11 miles away from my father’s hometown, Podbuzh. Dad remembers being sent to Drohobych one summer to stay with his aunt and her wealthy merchant husband. The family consensus was that my father was too thin. Aunt Devora was assigned the task of fattening him up.
“What happened to her, Dad?” I asked him, the first time I heard this story. “Where is she now?”
“What do you think?” he replied. “They took her into the forest and shot her.
“And her husband, and her children, too.” Before the war, there were around one hundred Szapiros living in the Galitzia/Drohobych area, Dad says, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Of this hundred, four survived.
The New York Times article cited Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest who became intrigued with the “Holocaust by bullets” after his grandfather was captured and held in Rava-Ruska, a camp for French prisoners of war in Ukraine. In the camp, his grandfather told him, life was hard. But, he hinted darkly, there were others for whom it was much worse. Though he refused to talk about it, eventually Father Desbois discovered that one of his grandfather’s jobs as a prisoner was filling in mass graves for Jews.
Father Desbois made it his life’s work to discover unmarked Jewish execution sites throughout Eastern Europe. Going from town to town in the Ukrainian countryside, he began by checking in with the local priest and telling him of his mission. Invariably, someone would come forward. Aged villagers who were children when the Jews of their town were killed and buried in a patch of wasteland behind the houses (or in a storage vault in the market square, or a nearby quarry, or a scarred clearing in the forest), yearned to unburden themselves of their memories, to confess to the priest what they had witnessed before their stories died with them.
On Google, I typed in the word “Drohobych” and clicked on “Images.”
Pictures popped up. Quaint onion-domed churches. Pretty nineteenth-century architecture. Wide city streets. Charming townhouses that could be in London, or Greenwich Village. Grand, ornate structures that clearly once were synagogues and have been re-purposed into something else.
I scrolled down. More pictures swam into view. German soldiers aiming their rifles at four men standing against a wall, their hands linked for courage. Nazi officers standing above a trench cut among the trees, a trench stacked high with bodies. In a clearing, a memorial shaped like a grave marker, commemorating the Jews of Drohobych, massacred and buried in the Bronica Forest. A wooded glade, featuring hillocks and dips covered in fallen leaves. Under these hillocks and dips in the forest, the caption clarifies, are unmarked mass graves.
My father’s stories came to life. I tried to imagine a 15-year-old boy named Yehuda standing among the trees with his hands up in the air. I tried to visualize my grandfather leading the remnant of his family through these woods in the dead of night, carving a hiding place into a mound of earth.
The true horror of this story is this: In 2014, an article about “Eastern Europe’s Killing Fields” is news because the scope of the killing still is unknown. The investigation continues, 69 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, because in hundreds of towns and villages where German soldiers rounded up the local Jewish population and shot them, there were no survivors.
The number we are all familiar with is six million.
In fact, we have no idea how many Jews were really murdered. And it’s likely we never will.
Helen Maryles Shankman’s short fiction has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and JewishFiction.net. Her debut novel, The Color of Light, is available on Amazon.
A look at uncounted victims of the Holocaust by bullets
“Eastern Europe’s Killing Fields,” ran the subhead at the bottom of the New York Times. Underneath it, the caption read, “Many of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed by executioners’ bullets, historians have learned.”
It was Tuesday morning, the day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was also the second day back at school after the end of yeshiva break. Following a week of vacation where my children stayed up every night until the wee hours playing Minecraft and Assassins Creed, they were reluctantly rolling out of bed at daybreak and trudging out into record low temperatures, waiting at frozen street corners for their school buses.
After seeing everyone off, I spread the paper out on the dining room table and flipped to page A10. “Shedding Light on a Vast Toll of Jews Killed Away From Death Camps,” blared the headline. According to the Times article, the Holocaust generally is associated with concentration camps. Historians are now learning that a million and a half Jews were executed in forests and villages across Eastern Europe, in the Ukraine, in Belarus, and in parts of Russia.
For some unfathomable reason, the Times photo editor chose to illustrate the article with a picture of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
There’s a certain conversation you have when you tell people that your parents are Holocaust survivors. “Really?” they say respectfully. “What camp were they in?”
“They weren’t in a camp,” you explain. “They were hiding in the forests, running from place to place.”
This is followed by what my sister calls The Look. Then some kind of variation on this statement: “Oh, so they didn’t really suffer. They had it pretty good.”
That he “had it pretty good” would be news to my dad. Usually, his war stories end with the words, “And then they took him into the forest and shot him.”
Sometimes, the “him” in the story is his 15-year-old brother, Yehuda. When their bunker — a hole tunneled into the side of a hillock — was discovered by a passing hunter, my father, my grandfather, and another brother threw themselves into the latrine pit. Understanding that there was no room for him, Yehuda shoveled dirt over his father and brothers to hide them. Then he climbed out to face the SS.
Sometimes the “him” in the story is my great-uncle Aron. Aron had a gift. He built bunkers. And his bunkers weren’t just a hole in the floor, or a space hollowed out behind a false wall; Aron engineered bunkers that could hold 50 people. He secreted one under three feet of earth in a root cellar, so that suspicious soldiers armed with shovels couldn’t find it. Aron built bunkers with electricity stolen from Gestapo headquarters; Aron built a bunker with a real working toilet; Aron built a bunker with a shower he made from a car radiator.
Uncle Aron was hiding out in the Ukrainian forests when he was captured. The German soldiers barked, “Don’t move, or we’ll shoot!” Fearing that he might be tortured, that he might reveal the locations of the bunkers he’d constructed, Aron moved.
Sometimes, the “him” in the story is Aunt Devora, who lived in the city of Drohobych, just 11 miles away from my father’s hometown, Podbuzh. Dad remembers being sent to Drohobych one summer to stay with his aunt and her wealthy merchant husband. The family consensus was that my father was too thin. Aunt Devora was assigned the task of fattening him up.
“What happened to her, Dad?” I asked him, the first time I heard this story. “Where is she now?”
“What do you think?” he replied. “They took her into the forest and shot her.
“And her husband, and her children, too.” Before the war, there were around one hundred Szapiros living in the Galitzia/Drohobych area, Dad says, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Of this hundred, four survived.
The New York Times article cited Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest who became intrigued with the “Holocaust by bullets” after his grandfather was captured and held in Rava-Ruska, a camp for French prisoners of war in Ukraine. In the camp, his grandfather told him, life was hard. But, he hinted darkly, there were others for whom it was much worse. Though he refused to talk about it, eventually Father Desbois discovered that one of his grandfather’s jobs as a prisoner was filling in mass graves for Jews.
Father Desbois made it his life’s work to discover unmarked Jewish execution sites throughout Eastern Europe. Going from town to town in the Ukrainian countryside, he began by checking in with the local priest and telling him of his mission. Invariably, someone would come forward. Aged villagers who were children when the Jews of their town were killed and buried in a patch of wasteland behind the houses (or in a storage vault in the market square, or a nearby quarry, or a scarred clearing in the forest), yearned to unburden themselves of their memories, to confess to the priest what they had witnessed before their stories died with them.
On Google, I typed in the word “Drohobych” and clicked on “Images.”
Pictures popped up. Quaint onion-domed churches. Pretty nineteenth-century architecture. Wide city streets. Charming townhouses that could be in London, or Greenwich Village. Grand, ornate structures that clearly once were synagogues and have been re-purposed into something else.
I scrolled down. More pictures swam into view. German soldiers aiming their rifles at four men standing against a wall, their hands linked for courage. Nazi officers standing above a trench cut among the trees, a trench stacked high with bodies. In a clearing, a memorial shaped like a grave marker, commemorating the Jews of Drohobych, massacred and buried in the Bronica Forest. A wooded glade, featuring hillocks and dips covered in fallen leaves. Under these hillocks and dips in the forest, the caption clarifies, are unmarked mass graves.
My father’s stories came to life. I tried to imagine a 15-year-old boy named Yehuda standing among the trees with his hands up in the air. I tried to visualize my grandfather leading the remnant of his family through these woods in the dead of night, carving a hiding place into a mound of earth.
The true horror of this story is this: In 2014, an article about “Eastern Europe’s Killing Fields” is news because the scope of the killing still is unknown. The investigation continues, 69 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, because in hundreds of towns and villages where German soldiers rounded up the local Jewish population and shot them, there were no survivors.
The number we are all familiar with is six million.
In fact, we have no idea how many Jews were really murdered. And it’s likely we never will.
Helen Maryles Shankman’s short fiction has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and JewishFiction.net. Her debut novel, The Color of Light, is available on Amazon.
January 13, 2014
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for The Color of Light includes an introduction and discussion questions for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
The Color of Light tells two intertwining stories of forbidden love, beginning with the powerful attraction between Raphael Sinclair, the mysterious British founder of the American Academy of Classical Art, and Tessa Moss, a gifted art student.
Rafe has everything; looks, money, beautiful women, a townhouse on Gramercy Park filled with priceless art, regular appearances in the society pages of major newspapers; but his real passion is the struggling Classical art school that he founded with his own fortune. On the wall of Tessa’s studio, he finds a sketch of a young woman covering the eyes of a small child, flames reflected in her eyes. The suitcase at her feet has the name Wizotsky printed on it. Sofia Wizotsky, the love of his life, was lost in the flames that engulfed European Jewry during the Holocaust.
Or was she? Tessa may be the key to discovering what really happened to Sofia that terrible night in 1943. And Rafe’s shadowy past may hold the answers to Tessa’s questions about her family’s catastrophic losses in World War II.
At the heart of the story are secrets and lies with their roots in a doomed love affair between two art students in Paris on the eve of World War II. One night, with his art school under siege, and her future as an artist in the balance, Rafe tells Tessa a tale of undying passion that consumes the talented daughter of a wealthy Jewish family and the playboy son of a knighted British aristocrat.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Is Tessa’s relationship with Lucian consistent with her character’s values? What does their affair offer her? Why do you think she stays with him, even though he cheats on her?
2. What is the significance of the painting of the Madonna and Child over Rafe’s fireplace?
3. Tessa’s grandfather refuses to talk about what happened during the war. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s healthy or unhealthy for Holocaust survivors to talk about their war experiences?
4. Rafe has been involved with thousands of women, whether he sleeps with them or drinks their blood. What is the source and significance of his promiscuity?
5. “The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What we do with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.” Do you think this statement is true for most artists, writers, dancers, actors?
6. Tessa’s family is still affected by secrets and horrors that took place fifty years earlier. Do you think the events of the Holocaust still shape family dynamics, and affect the children and grandchildren of survivors, seventy years after the end of World War II?
7. How does the tale of Sofia and Rafe and the circle of artists living in Paris intersect with the plot of the larger novel? In what ways does this magical tale of vampires connect with the brutality of the Holocaust and the ongoing life of the children of Holocaust survivors today?
8. Her small white hand glided over mine, alighting as gently as a butterfly. “We are just the same,” she said softly. How do Rafe’s recollections of his childhood compare to Sofia's childhood? What do you think they shared in common?
9. Do you think Rafe loves Tessa for herself? Or does he love her because she reminds him of Sofia?
10. How did Rafe and Yechezkel’s witnessing so much death up close impact them, respectively, as witness and survivor of the Holocaust? Why did both of them choose to keep details of this period of their life a secret from those closest to them for so long?
11. Do you think that keeping a terrible secret has any effect on the secret-keeper? Could you forgive someone who hides a terrible secret? Why do you think Rafe doesn’t tell Tessa what really happened in Auschwitz until he’s dying?
12. There are several icons that appear in the past and the present of the story—Sofia’s wedding ring, the drawing of the mother and child over Rafe’s fireplace, the paintings hanging in Rafe’s mansion, his sketchbook. What is their significance in the past, and what is their significance in the present-day part of the story?
13. How did you feel upon discovering that Rafe misled Tessa about what he really did in Auschwitz? Do his actions as a vampire make him irredeemable?To what extent is it possible to forgive someone who honestly repents of having committed evil acts?
14. “This is my Paris,” Tessa said, spreading her arms wide. “This is where I belong.” She smiled. “In New York, you can be anyone you want to be.” Tessa chooses to remain in New York rather than to go to Paris. How do you feel about her decision?
15. “What about children, Tessa?” Portia was almost shouting. Wiry blond hairs were springing free of her tightly wrapped bun. “A family? A normal life?”
“David was normal,” said Tessa.
Tessa and her art friends all come from backgrounds that could be described as difficult or unusual. David is “normal,” and yet, he’s the one who snaps under pressure the night before the Graduation Exhibition. How do you define normal?
December 19, 2013
The Voice Inside My Head
When I used to paint all day long, when all I did was dream of rich reds bleeding into cobalt blues beneath my brush, I had a patron saint painter who hovered above my canvas, with whom I was in constant conversation; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, impressionist painter of fin-de-siecle Paris nightclubs and bordellos, arguably the inventor of the modern poster, and lover of redheads.
“What do you think, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec?” I would ask with furrowed brow as I studied reproductions of his work, searching for that magical combination of hues that would make my painting sing. “What color do you suggest for this shadow?”
“Try Prussian Blue,” he would answer patiently in his French accent. “Use this stroke.”
Maybe he answered me, maybe I was just talking to myself. What is important is that it felt real. It wasn’t just about painting, either. In Loehmann’s, as I agonized over whether I should be spending money on a new dress or on yet another tube of paint, I swear I heard his voice. “Buy a pair of red shoes,” he said firmly. “Go dancing.”
But when I write, it’s Graham Greene.
My first encounter with GG was in his "entertainment" The Ministry of Fear. We’re in London, it’s World War II, and Arthur Rowe, the book’s main character, is lured out of his apartment and across the street by a church carnival. He goes in the hope of recapturing a little happiness.
Here’s the thing; sad, gentle Arthur Rowe is a murderer. He has just been released from jail for the mercy killing of his wife, who was suffering from an agonizing, incurable disease.
One of the attractions at the carnival is a prize cake, made with real eggs and butter, to be won by guessing its correct weight. In the dark of a fortune-teller’s booth, he is inexplicably given the right answer. But there’s been a mistake, he’s the wrong man. The intended winner wants it back; and he is suddenly caught up in a ring of enemy spies.
Halfway through the book, the plot takes an astonishing, unforeseeable turn. Bombed in the Blitz, Arthur loses his memory. He is quite happy now. His girl wonders if he isn’t better off this way, having forgotten the terrible crime he has committed. In the end, Arthur recovers his memory, recovers the microfilm, and gets the girl, and yet, the happy ending is a lie, predicated on lies.
It blew me away. I’d never read a book like this, so ambiguous in so many ways. It started out a thriller, and concluded as a journey into the pain and treachery of the human heart.
After that, I read every Graham Greene I could get my hands on, the novels, the short stories. Just when you think you know where he’s heading, he changes direction. He knows how it feels to be on the outside when everyone else seems to be on the inside. He knows what we are thinking in the darkest nights of our souls. He knows what it means to struggle with faith in a benevolent God. He knows. And that’s before I even get into the beauty of his writing. With Graham Greene, each word is inevitable, each sentence a faceted jewel of the English language. This is a writer gifted by God.
Late at night, bleary-eyed in front of my computer, I type, I read what I have written, I stop. What do you think, Mr. Greene? I ask.
And he answers me. Not quite there yet. Do it again.
“What do you think, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec?” I would ask with furrowed brow as I studied reproductions of his work, searching for that magical combination of hues that would make my painting sing. “What color do you suggest for this shadow?”
“Try Prussian Blue,” he would answer patiently in his French accent. “Use this stroke.”
Maybe he answered me, maybe I was just talking to myself. What is important is that it felt real. It wasn’t just about painting, either. In Loehmann’s, as I agonized over whether I should be spending money on a new dress or on yet another tube of paint, I swear I heard his voice. “Buy a pair of red shoes,” he said firmly. “Go dancing.”
But when I write, it’s Graham Greene.
My first encounter with GG was in his "entertainment" The Ministry of Fear. We’re in London, it’s World War II, and Arthur Rowe, the book’s main character, is lured out of his apartment and across the street by a church carnival. He goes in the hope of recapturing a little happiness.
Here’s the thing; sad, gentle Arthur Rowe is a murderer. He has just been released from jail for the mercy killing of his wife, who was suffering from an agonizing, incurable disease.
One of the attractions at the carnival is a prize cake, made with real eggs and butter, to be won by guessing its correct weight. In the dark of a fortune-teller’s booth, he is inexplicably given the right answer. But there’s been a mistake, he’s the wrong man. The intended winner wants it back; and he is suddenly caught up in a ring of enemy spies.
Halfway through the book, the plot takes an astonishing, unforeseeable turn. Bombed in the Blitz, Arthur loses his memory. He is quite happy now. His girl wonders if he isn’t better off this way, having forgotten the terrible crime he has committed. In the end, Arthur recovers his memory, recovers the microfilm, and gets the girl, and yet, the happy ending is a lie, predicated on lies.
It blew me away. I’d never read a book like this, so ambiguous in so many ways. It started out a thriller, and concluded as a journey into the pain and treachery of the human heart.
After that, I read every Graham Greene I could get my hands on, the novels, the short stories. Just when you think you know where he’s heading, he changes direction. He knows how it feels to be on the outside when everyone else seems to be on the inside. He knows what we are thinking in the darkest nights of our souls. He knows what it means to struggle with faith in a benevolent God. He knows. And that’s before I even get into the beauty of his writing. With Graham Greene, each word is inevitable, each sentence a faceted jewel of the English language. This is a writer gifted by God.
Late at night, bleary-eyed in front of my computer, I type, I read what I have written, I stop. What do you think, Mr. Greene? I ask.
And he answers me. Not quite there yet. Do it again.
November 5, 2013
My Guest Post at SHELF PLEASURE
Today, I am honored to be appearing on SHELF PLEASURE, Book recommendations for women who love reading and love books. You can find them at www.shelfpleasure.com
Read | November 4th, 2013
Read: Four Novels and One Kick-Ass TV Show by Helen Maryles Shankman
The Color of Light
Mostly, I blame it on Buffy.
One wintery January night a few years ago, I stayed up too late watching TV. I was bleary-eyed from cleaning up after three flu-stricken toddlers, but not yet ready to surrender the day. At two in the morning, I found myself staring numbly at a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I now know that it was the second half of the second season. Angel, Buffy’s dreamy and repentant vampire boyfriend, had turned evil. When he wasn’t busy killing her classmates, he was stalking her, just so that he could say mean things to her.
That’s when it dawned on me. The whole Buffy universe was a metaphor for high school. Some kids were smart, some kids were cool, some kids were damaged, and some kids were bullies. No one’s parents were around; they were out working, or maybe they were barely managing to hold their own lives together. All you could count on was your circle of friends, the books you could disappear into, and if you were lucky, a caring teacher.
Raphael Sinclair appeared the very next night, dressed smartly as always in his overcoat and gray fedora, whispering his sad story into my ear while I typed as quickly as I could to get it all down. My art school experiences, my years as an art assistant in downtown New York, my mother’s Holocaust stories–he tied them all together with his enigmatic, generation-spanning presence.
Angel wasn’t the first vampire I fell for. That honor goes to Louis, the haunted, grieving protagonist of Anne Rice’s strange and beautiful Interview With the Vampire. The lush settings, Louis’s mournful yearning, descriptions of vampiric encounters with women of every color and social class that resembled nothing so much as swinging 1970s sex…it really opened my eyes. But here’s the part that set my imagination on fire. Shortly after he becomes a vampire, Louis falls in love with a mortal girl. For a while, he pretends to be mortal too, helping her out with one thing and another, just as an excuse to be near her. But late at night, he lingers outside her window, watching, pining. The sheer longing with which he narrates this never-to-be-consummated passion held me transfixed. Years later, I heard Sting sing Moon Over Bourbon Street. Setting the story to music made the passage even more haunting. As I wrote, I listened to it over and over again.
Wuthering Heights doesn’t have any vampires, but it does have a ghost and a brooding antihero. There’s a blizzard going on, and Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, is stuck at his grim landlord’s grim home. Heathcliff, the fierce, taciturn master of the house, allows him to stay until morning. Someone shows him to a little-used room. In the middle of the night, Lockwood dreams. A branch is blowing against a window, driving him crazy, and he breaks the glass on the locked window to move the branch—only to feel his hand close on a girl’s wrist. “Let me in,” she sobs. “I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!” In horror, he struggles with the ghost, finally blocking her out with a stack of books. After recounting the story to the wakened household, he expects sympathy. To his astonishment, he witnesses a changed Heathcliff wrenching open the windows and bursting into tears. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! Oh! My heart’s darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!”
This is one of the most riveting passages in all of literature. I was thinking of Heathcliff when Rafe reflects, Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you’d haunt me.
Which brings us to Dracula. Oh, yes, I read Dracula. Bram Stoker’s book is as notable for its retrograde turn-of-the-century anti-feminism as for the introduction of one of our greatest monsters. Lucy Westenra is a naughty girl–she’s interested in boys, unlike prim Mina Harker, who fatuously announces that men are smarter and kinder than women. Bram Stoker punishes Lucy for her weakness; he has Dracula turn the poor girl into a nymphomaniac, roaming the countryside, kidnapping children and drinking their blood. Thank you, Bram Stoker, for your sexual anxiety! You opened my eyes to what that fin-de-siècle fear of vampires was really all about—fear of women’s liberation, but mostly, of female sexuality.
Finally, I come to Atonement. The language is precise and beautiful, the list of quirks and details describing each character absolutely essential to the drama that is to come. Every event quietly noted in the first third of the story has its echo later in the novel, like the closing of a parenthesis. Thirteen-year-old Briony likes to write and act in plays she puts on for her family. Later, in the defense of a lie—or is it a misunderstanding? –she will prove to be such a convincing actress that she sends an innocent man to jail. It is only at the end of the book that the reader discovers her last lie—and it is shattering. Atonement was my introduction to the device of The Unreliable Narrator. Thank you, Ian McEwan.
These influences shaped the novel I didn’t know I was going to write. When I wrote a vampire book that takes place at a school, with strong female characters and a cast of funny friends, I was thinking of Buffy. But when I wrote a book where the protagonist never recovers from the loss of his lover, I was thinking of Wuthering Heights. When I wrote a book with a strong sense of place, with tactile, sensuous descriptions of objects and settings, with a man who buries his grief in sex, I was thinking of Dracula and Interview With a Vampire. When I wrote a book where a character tells you his story—but not all of it—I was thinking of Atonement.
Sometimes, it pays to stay up late and watch old reruns.
Read | November 4th, 2013
Read: Four Novels and One Kick-Ass TV Show by Helen Maryles Shankman
The Color of Light
Mostly, I blame it on Buffy.
One wintery January night a few years ago, I stayed up too late watching TV. I was bleary-eyed from cleaning up after three flu-stricken toddlers, but not yet ready to surrender the day. At two in the morning, I found myself staring numbly at a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I now know that it was the second half of the second season. Angel, Buffy’s dreamy and repentant vampire boyfriend, had turned evil. When he wasn’t busy killing her classmates, he was stalking her, just so that he could say mean things to her.
That’s when it dawned on me. The whole Buffy universe was a metaphor for high school. Some kids were smart, some kids were cool, some kids were damaged, and some kids were bullies. No one’s parents were around; they were out working, or maybe they were barely managing to hold their own lives together. All you could count on was your circle of friends, the books you could disappear into, and if you were lucky, a caring teacher.
Raphael Sinclair appeared the very next night, dressed smartly as always in his overcoat and gray fedora, whispering his sad story into my ear while I typed as quickly as I could to get it all down. My art school experiences, my years as an art assistant in downtown New York, my mother’s Holocaust stories–he tied them all together with his enigmatic, generation-spanning presence.
Angel wasn’t the first vampire I fell for. That honor goes to Louis, the haunted, grieving protagonist of Anne Rice’s strange and beautiful Interview With the Vampire. The lush settings, Louis’s mournful yearning, descriptions of vampiric encounters with women of every color and social class that resembled nothing so much as swinging 1970s sex…it really opened my eyes. But here’s the part that set my imagination on fire. Shortly after he becomes a vampire, Louis falls in love with a mortal girl. For a while, he pretends to be mortal too, helping her out with one thing and another, just as an excuse to be near her. But late at night, he lingers outside her window, watching, pining. The sheer longing with which he narrates this never-to-be-consummated passion held me transfixed. Years later, I heard Sting sing Moon Over Bourbon Street. Setting the story to music made the passage even more haunting. As I wrote, I listened to it over and over again.
Wuthering Heights doesn’t have any vampires, but it does have a ghost and a brooding antihero. There’s a blizzard going on, and Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, is stuck at his grim landlord’s grim home. Heathcliff, the fierce, taciturn master of the house, allows him to stay until morning. Someone shows him to a little-used room. In the middle of the night, Lockwood dreams. A branch is blowing against a window, driving him crazy, and he breaks the glass on the locked window to move the branch—only to feel his hand close on a girl’s wrist. “Let me in,” she sobs. “I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!” In horror, he struggles with the ghost, finally blocking her out with a stack of books. After recounting the story to the wakened household, he expects sympathy. To his astonishment, he witnesses a changed Heathcliff wrenching open the windows and bursting into tears. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! Oh! My heart’s darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!”
This is one of the most riveting passages in all of literature. I was thinking of Heathcliff when Rafe reflects, Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you’d haunt me.
Which brings us to Dracula. Oh, yes, I read Dracula. Bram Stoker’s book is as notable for its retrograde turn-of-the-century anti-feminism as for the introduction of one of our greatest monsters. Lucy Westenra is a naughty girl–she’s interested in boys, unlike prim Mina Harker, who fatuously announces that men are smarter and kinder than women. Bram Stoker punishes Lucy for her weakness; he has Dracula turn the poor girl into a nymphomaniac, roaming the countryside, kidnapping children and drinking their blood. Thank you, Bram Stoker, for your sexual anxiety! You opened my eyes to what that fin-de-siècle fear of vampires was really all about—fear of women’s liberation, but mostly, of female sexuality.
Finally, I come to Atonement. The language is precise and beautiful, the list of quirks and details describing each character absolutely essential to the drama that is to come. Every event quietly noted in the first third of the story has its echo later in the novel, like the closing of a parenthesis. Thirteen-year-old Briony likes to write and act in plays she puts on for her family. Later, in the defense of a lie—or is it a misunderstanding? –she will prove to be such a convincing actress that she sends an innocent man to jail. It is only at the end of the book that the reader discovers her last lie—and it is shattering. Atonement was my introduction to the device of The Unreliable Narrator. Thank you, Ian McEwan.
These influences shaped the novel I didn’t know I was going to write. When I wrote a vampire book that takes place at a school, with strong female characters and a cast of funny friends, I was thinking of Buffy. But when I wrote a book where the protagonist never recovers from the loss of his lover, I was thinking of Wuthering Heights. When I wrote a book with a strong sense of place, with tactile, sensuous descriptions of objects and settings, with a man who buries his grief in sex, I was thinking of Dracula and Interview With a Vampire. When I wrote a book where a character tells you his story—but not all of it—I was thinking of Atonement.
Sometimes, it pays to stay up late and watch old reruns.
October 28, 2013
Joss Whedon is my Hero
A funny--and surprisingly moving--speech from Joss Whedon, about why he writes such strong female characters.
http://bit.ly/HmpuTi
http://bit.ly/HmpuTi
October 16, 2013
My Halloween Holocaust story.
I've uploaded my short story, THE PARTIZANS, to GoodReads, written three years ago in the weeks leading up to Halloween. (I think of it as my Halloween Holocaust story.) Here are the first paragraphs, followed by a link to the rest of the story.
THE PARTIZANS
For generations, Lufts and Hellers had been next-door neighbors on Wirka Street, a polite name for a string of ramshackle wooden cottages at the southern end of town. Here, where civilization sputtered out before giving way to the deep primeval forests, Zosha and Zev’s parents were just the latest in a long line of Hellers and Lufts that stretched from the present back to the early 1700’s, two hundred years of eking out a hardscrabble existence, shoulder to shoulder, from the compacted soil behind the run-down houses that sat on the ever-shifting border between Poland and the Ukraine.
They knew each other in all the ways that brothers and sisters know one another. At the same time every morning, they set off to school, attired in sibling hand-me-downs; Zev’s oversized pants cinched tight around his six-year-old waist, Zosha’s blond pigtails in disarray because there was no one home to braid them. Often they would meet on the same errands, to the butcher, the baker, the tobacconist, the newspaper kiosk, dodging the press of older customers in the shopping streets that led up to the medieval marketplace. On holidays, she would peek between the railings of the women’s gallery to find him at the end of a line of his brothers on the main floor of the grand synagogue, usually in the process of being cuffed by his father for restlessness and lack of piety. Until Zev turned thirteen, Zosha was the taller and stronger one, and she took advantage of that fact, secretly tying the laces of his shoes together under a chair, or grabbing his cap and sailing it in a long arc across the muddy cobblestoned street.
After classes were through for the day, Zosha and the other girls usually lingered near the sports fields to watch the boys play soccer. Damp with sweat, his sharp knees bruised and dirty under his short pants, Zev would come to an abrupt stop whenever the soldiers of the local regiment marched by, rigid and splendid in their green uniforms, leather boots polished to a high, gaudy shine.
She came to know the features of his face as well as she knew her own. The straight brown hair that fell around his ears, the gray eyes that she thought resembled the surface of a calm ocean. The round cheeks that lengthened and hollowed as he grew, the tea-with-milk color of his skin. The way his full pink lips smiled when he teased her. As they entered the long corridors of adolescence, he grew taller than she did, and she noticed that too, the width of his shoulders, the strength in his hands.
It was about this time that the fights began to come with alarming regularity. There were no secrets on Wirka Street; the windows were open, walls were thin. Voices were raised, harsh words flew, the kind that can never be taken back. Sometimes she heard things break, or the blows of flesh on flesh, followed by the sounds someone makes when they are running up stairs, failing in their efforts not to cry.
It was on those nights that she would find him hiding out in the shed that housed the animals, his forehead pressed against the smooth gray flank of Fallada, the horse. While the dog slept in a corner, and a few skinny brown chickens scratched for bugs in the straw, Zev would allow her to slip her hand into his, and she would tell him marvelous tales of a make-believe world called Yenensvelt, where clouds were spun from colored sugar and waterfalls ran with milk. Hip to hip on a mound of fragrant green hay, they would remain undetected for half an hour or so, safe in the close warmth of the animal shed. In her role as Queen, Zosha banished adults from the land of Yenensvelt, where all children were happy and free.
In the year that she turned fifteen, he disappeared. It was the end of May, at the height of a glorious spring. During that gray hour in which it is no longer night but not yet morning, she was awakened by the stealthy squeal of the Heller’s front door opening and closing.
Zosha rolled out of the bed she shared with her younger brother and went to the window. A man in an old brown jacket and a soft cap was standing on the porch of her neighbor’s house, his face hidden in shadow.
She had lived alongside him for too long not to recognize the nape of his neck, the loping gait of his step. But everything else was different; he had shed the traditional knickers and the long black coat of his forefathers, the beard and payes of the pious. Without them, he was changed, unfamiliar.
At the squeak of the floorboards under her feet, he froze. This hour of the day, it was still cold enough so that she could see his breath, a ghostly mist against the shadows on the porch. Finally, satisfied that no one was coming after him, he hefted the burlap sack he carried higher onto his shoulder and set off down the street.
She was afraid to call out to him, afraid she might jeopardize his escape; so instead, she watched him walk away. When he was no more than a small dot on the brightening horizon, she thought she might have seen him turn around and seek out the window where she stood.
His parents wept and moaned, they tore their clothes in mourning. Little by little, she overheard details, late at night, when her parents thought she was sleeping. Zev Heller had abandoned his heritage, his religion. He was sleeping with Polish girls, he’d been baptized in the Orthodox Church. It was even rumored that he was eating pork.
In their religion, this was a sin that required mourning, a fate comparable in gravity to death. But Zosha remembered the hurtful words, the sound of blows on a child’s flesh and thought, I hope he is happy.
***
First they blew up the train station.
The day after that, the Germans bombed the bridge that led over the river to the next village, barring escape.
Zosha watched as the Deutschen marshaled prisoners in Polish infantry uniforms past her house and down Wirka Street, vanishing into the scrim of trees around the forest. Two days later, hunters found the dead scattered through the marshy underbrush like fallen timber, the leaf litter under their boots saturated with blood.
The angry little man shook his fist and made threats; the nations of the world hurled words, retreated behind their borders and did nothing. Watching the silvery bellies of enemy planes fly in tight formation overhead, Zosha felt a tightening in her heart, a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach, and just like that, she knew. This was the beginning of the end of the world.
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
THE PARTIZANS
For generations, Lufts and Hellers had been next-door neighbors on Wirka Street, a polite name for a string of ramshackle wooden cottages at the southern end of town. Here, where civilization sputtered out before giving way to the deep primeval forests, Zosha and Zev’s parents were just the latest in a long line of Hellers and Lufts that stretched from the present back to the early 1700’s, two hundred years of eking out a hardscrabble existence, shoulder to shoulder, from the compacted soil behind the run-down houses that sat on the ever-shifting border between Poland and the Ukraine.
They knew each other in all the ways that brothers and sisters know one another. At the same time every morning, they set off to school, attired in sibling hand-me-downs; Zev’s oversized pants cinched tight around his six-year-old waist, Zosha’s blond pigtails in disarray because there was no one home to braid them. Often they would meet on the same errands, to the butcher, the baker, the tobacconist, the newspaper kiosk, dodging the press of older customers in the shopping streets that led up to the medieval marketplace. On holidays, she would peek between the railings of the women’s gallery to find him at the end of a line of his brothers on the main floor of the grand synagogue, usually in the process of being cuffed by his father for restlessness and lack of piety. Until Zev turned thirteen, Zosha was the taller and stronger one, and she took advantage of that fact, secretly tying the laces of his shoes together under a chair, or grabbing his cap and sailing it in a long arc across the muddy cobblestoned street.
After classes were through for the day, Zosha and the other girls usually lingered near the sports fields to watch the boys play soccer. Damp with sweat, his sharp knees bruised and dirty under his short pants, Zev would come to an abrupt stop whenever the soldiers of the local regiment marched by, rigid and splendid in their green uniforms, leather boots polished to a high, gaudy shine.
She came to know the features of his face as well as she knew her own. The straight brown hair that fell around his ears, the gray eyes that she thought resembled the surface of a calm ocean. The round cheeks that lengthened and hollowed as he grew, the tea-with-milk color of his skin. The way his full pink lips smiled when he teased her. As they entered the long corridors of adolescence, he grew taller than she did, and she noticed that too, the width of his shoulders, the strength in his hands.
It was about this time that the fights began to come with alarming regularity. There were no secrets on Wirka Street; the windows were open, walls were thin. Voices were raised, harsh words flew, the kind that can never be taken back. Sometimes she heard things break, or the blows of flesh on flesh, followed by the sounds someone makes when they are running up stairs, failing in their efforts not to cry.
It was on those nights that she would find him hiding out in the shed that housed the animals, his forehead pressed against the smooth gray flank of Fallada, the horse. While the dog slept in a corner, and a few skinny brown chickens scratched for bugs in the straw, Zev would allow her to slip her hand into his, and she would tell him marvelous tales of a make-believe world called Yenensvelt, where clouds were spun from colored sugar and waterfalls ran with milk. Hip to hip on a mound of fragrant green hay, they would remain undetected for half an hour or so, safe in the close warmth of the animal shed. In her role as Queen, Zosha banished adults from the land of Yenensvelt, where all children were happy and free.
In the year that she turned fifteen, he disappeared. It was the end of May, at the height of a glorious spring. During that gray hour in which it is no longer night but not yet morning, she was awakened by the stealthy squeal of the Heller’s front door opening and closing.
Zosha rolled out of the bed she shared with her younger brother and went to the window. A man in an old brown jacket and a soft cap was standing on the porch of her neighbor’s house, his face hidden in shadow.
She had lived alongside him for too long not to recognize the nape of his neck, the loping gait of his step. But everything else was different; he had shed the traditional knickers and the long black coat of his forefathers, the beard and payes of the pious. Without them, he was changed, unfamiliar.
At the squeak of the floorboards under her feet, he froze. This hour of the day, it was still cold enough so that she could see his breath, a ghostly mist against the shadows on the porch. Finally, satisfied that no one was coming after him, he hefted the burlap sack he carried higher onto his shoulder and set off down the street.
She was afraid to call out to him, afraid she might jeopardize his escape; so instead, she watched him walk away. When he was no more than a small dot on the brightening horizon, she thought she might have seen him turn around and seek out the window where she stood.
His parents wept and moaned, they tore their clothes in mourning. Little by little, she overheard details, late at night, when her parents thought she was sleeping. Zev Heller had abandoned his heritage, his religion. He was sleeping with Polish girls, he’d been baptized in the Orthodox Church. It was even rumored that he was eating pork.
In their religion, this was a sin that required mourning, a fate comparable in gravity to death. But Zosha remembered the hurtful words, the sound of blows on a child’s flesh and thought, I hope he is happy.
***
First they blew up the train station.
The day after that, the Germans bombed the bridge that led over the river to the next village, barring escape.
Zosha watched as the Deutschen marshaled prisoners in Polish infantry uniforms past her house and down Wirka Street, vanishing into the scrim of trees around the forest. Two days later, hunters found the dead scattered through the marshy underbrush like fallen timber, the leaf litter under their boots saturated with blood.
The angry little man shook his fist and made threats; the nations of the world hurled words, retreated behind their borders and did nothing. Watching the silvery bellies of enemy planes fly in tight formation overhead, Zosha felt a tightening in her heart, a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach, and just like that, she knew. This was the beginning of the end of the world.
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
September 17, 2013
The Author's Prayer
Dear Lord,
Let me not lose my sanity as my book goes out to be reviewed.
Nor allow me to devour all the cookies, sour sticks and chocolate in the house.
Keep me from spending countless wasted hours checking on my book stats at Goodreads or Amazon,
Nor let me fall into the sinkhole of Googling myself.
Instead, fill me with the inspiration to do some laundry, take a shower once in a while, maybe serve the kids something that is neither chicken nugget nor pizza.
Let all who read about Rafe and Tessa fall in love with them.
Save me from those readers who might give it one star,
And shield me from other readers who abandon it halfway through.
Mostly, protect me from myself, Lord, and prevent me from sending my agent frantic emails at two in the morning.
Shower me with the gift of the bloggers' praise,
And help me to respond to all situations with humor and grace.
Allow me to honor You with my words,
And not lose any friends, nor make new enemies, in the process.
Now let us say, Amen.
September 11, 2013
COLOR OF LIGHT Goodreads Giveaway!
There's a Goodreads giveaway going on for three copies of my book, The Color of Light! Go sign up!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...The Color of Light
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...The Color of Light
September 3, 2013
"The Color of Light" Blog Tour Stops Announced!
Well, this is an incredible thrill! Here are the stops on my upcoming blog tour:
Monday, November 4th: Must Read Faster
.
Wednesday, November 6th: Books Without Any Pictures
.
Thursday, November 7th: Bookish Whimsy
.
Monday, November 11th: Svetlana’s Reads and Views
.
Tuesday, November 12th: Ageless Pages
.
Wednesday, November 13th: Conceptual Reception
.
Thursday, November 14th: Great Imaginations
.
Friday, November 15th: Book-alicious Mama
.
Monday, November 18th: From the TBR Pile
.
Tuesday, November 19th: A Fantastical Librarian
.
Thursday, November 21st: A Chick Who Reads
.
Monday, November 25th: Sara’s Organized Chaos
.
Wednesday, November 27th: My Bookshelf
I’m hoping for one from Man of La Book as well. Stay tuned!
Monday, November 4th: Must Read Faster
.
Wednesday, November 6th: Books Without Any Pictures
.
Thursday, November 7th: Bookish Whimsy
.
Monday, November 11th: Svetlana’s Reads and Views
.
Tuesday, November 12th: Ageless Pages
.
Wednesday, November 13th: Conceptual Reception
.
Thursday, November 14th: Great Imaginations
.
Friday, November 15th: Book-alicious Mama
.
Monday, November 18th: From the TBR Pile
.
Tuesday, November 19th: A Fantastical Librarian
.
Thursday, November 21st: A Chick Who Reads
.
Monday, November 25th: Sara’s Organized Chaos
.
Wednesday, November 27th: My Bookshelf
I’m hoping for one from Man of La Book as well. Stay tuned!
