Helen Maryles Shankman's Blog, page 3

New Short Story at Grift Magazine!

My short story, The German Officer's Rabbit, appears in the new issue of Grift Magazine, available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/john-kenyon/grift-2/paperback/product-21113829.html



Here are the first few hundred words. What do you think?

The German Officer’s Rabbit

The rabbit sat in a corner of the hutch, its small paws tucked under its round body. “How about this one?” he said.

The girl shook her head. “You don’t want that one.”

He straightened up, surprised. Around here, people didn’t often say no to him. “Why not?”

“You just don’t.”

Falkenrath squatted back down and observed the rabbit. Sitting in regal solitude in the wood and wire enclosure, it was the very picture of unconcerned serenity. Its long, thick fur was the warm brown of a hazelnut, shading to a soft gray on its nose and belly, and its face was flat and pushed in, like the ugly little dogs rich women carried around in their purses.

“What’s the matter with his ears?” Instead of standing up at attention, they fell down around its cheeks like a little girl’s pigtails.

“Nothing. She was born that way.”

Behind them, Rohlfe and his cook were concluding their business. The Gestapo chief’s chef had selected three meaty bucks, and was currently dispatching them with a crack of their short necks.

Falkenrath straightened up, turning his attention to Rohlfe. But Rohlfe wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at the rabbit girl. Or savoring the rabbit girl, to be perfectly accurate. Bundled up in warm clothes that rendered her shapeless, she was still something to see, with that milky skin, high Slavic cheekbones, eyes a man could get lost in.

“Why don’t you take one of those?” She pointed to another hutch in the row of cages, where five baby bunnies hurtled at high speeds around a brown-ticked doe.

Falkenrath tapped on the wire. One of the babies, a fat black and white furball, stood up on its hind legs to sniff thoughtfully at his fingers.

“What’s wrong with the brown one? Is she sick?”

“No.”

“Does she bite?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Take my word for it. You don’t want her.”

Rohlfe’s gaze turned cold. Falkenrath trusted the girl as he trusted her father, known to all as a good man and the best saddlemaker in the Wlodawa district, even if he was a Jew. If she said he didn’t want that rabbit, there must be a reason. But to Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Rohlfe, all tarted up in his dashing black overcoat and jackboots, this was a case of inexcusable insubordination. In the eyes of the Gestapo, Abel Falkenrath, Commandant of the Berlin Drainage Operation, was obeying commands from an inferior. It was a bad situation. It had to be defused.

“I’ll take the brown one,” he said.

More UNDERPAINTING Cover Tries!

This week is BEA--Book Expo America, the biggest book publishing event in the entire country.

Which means my agents are busy.

Which means I have another week to screw around with cover tries.

Some with alternate titles.

It is certainly possible that I have lost my mind. Still...which one makes you want to read my book?

The Making of an E-Book Cover

By the looks of my last post, it's been a while. In the short space of the past month, I cleaned the house for Passover, cooked ten feasts, (I'm not kidding. I counted. Ten.) turned the living room into a bedroom for my frail father, pushed him and his wheelchair through Six Flags, and hosted untold numbers of children who trooped through the house in search of Passover food that wasn't tasteless paste made entirely of matzah meal. Daffodils pushed their heads up through the New Jersey permafrost. Spring has sprung.

Also, I worked on my book cover.

And as I worked, I was thinking of the illustrations of the great and tragic Bruno Schulz. I was thinking of Diana Bryant, who was my teacher at Parsons, and her papercuts. I was thinking about Maurice Sendak, and his evocative, elegiac pen and ink drawings for the Little Bear books. And for some reason, the wonderful and eerie cover of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs.









The moment the holiday was over, matzah and matzah products cleared away, kids back to school, I spent an entire day painting. I mean, an entire day. Sat down after I got the kids on the bus, got up long after they went to sleep. Here is how my cover illustration turned out. (It's the sepia one.)



Bleary-eyed, I posted it on Facebook, sent it off to my agents, and toppled into bed.

The following morning, I glanced at Facebook, and basked in the gratifyingly rave reviews. After an appropriate amount of time basking, I drank a few gallons of coffee. Then I opened up an email from my agents.

They have played with it a bit in the office, toned down the color. They want me to try working with their version. Something about the silvery color, the play of light and dark suggests moonlight, works better than brown.

My first, knee-jerk response was, "Oh, no." As a classically-trained artist, I love my little underpainting, rendered in rich, classical browns. But then the designer in me clears her throat and speaks up.

Look, she whispers. This is undeniably haunting. Especially when reduced to the size it will be viewed on Amazon. And, the little designer continues whispering, this will be easier to run type across.



In my heart of hearts, the little painter knows that the little designer is right.

So, the very next thing I did was download my Free 30-Day Trial of Photoshop. (Thank you, nice sales people at Adobe!)

That was last Thursday.

It has been a long time since I used Photoshop in any professional way. In recent years, mostly I just used it to sharpen photos for my portrait paintings. Things sure have changed a lot. The learning curve is high. I realize just how long a word "Underpainting" really is. Should I break it into two lines? Should I do "Under" in regular type, and "painting" in bold? Hours go by. Days. Now I think it looks misspelled. I wonder if it's too late to change the title.

And then I find the "New Adjustment Layers" menu.

Oh, Photoshop. How I love you. Look at this cool stuff you can do with type! I can drop a shadow in from any angle, or make the letters look embossed, or chiseled, or shiny. I can make letters transparent. I can turn the whole thing blue. What day is this, anyway? When's the last time I washed my hair? Nothing matters. Nothing matters but precious, precious Photoshop...

And then I find the warp button.

Jackpot!



Now I have two versions I love, and I can't decide which I like better.

What do you think?

Underpainting Cover Art!

As I work on the cover, I'm photographing my progress. Partly to show everyone what I'm doing, and partly so that if I screw up, I can at least go back to where I was before I went wrong!

The top image is where I started. Here's some background: For Christmas, Tessa Moss is visiting her friend's cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. Left alone in the pet cemetery, Tessa stumbles and falls. The fog parts, and she sees Raphael Sinclair silhouetted under the trees.

So, I started with the image of Rafe under the trees.




Laura Biagi, one of the agents at JVNLA, noticed that there was no female presence in this sketch. And for me, I felt it was too generic.

So, for the next sketch, I added a face in the fog under the trees. It may be Sofia, his lost love, or it may be Tessa. I haven't decided yet.

I've also tucked elements from the story line into the illustration here.

At the top, I drew Sofia and Isaiah from the World War II section of the story. On the right, hidden among the branches, are two tiny hanged men, a pitchfork and a scythe, and a sketchbook with a drawing of the Eiffel Tower.

To the left of the drawing, you should see a little townhouse and an equally little gas lamp, as well as the ring that Rafe always wears around his neck.

Near the center, an angel with dark wings, a visual reminder of Rafe's past, and his nickname, The Angel of Healing.





Not bad for a couple of days work! On to the trees.

My novel, UNDERPAINTING, a tale of art, love, vampires and the Holocaust, is going to be published!

My novel, Underpainting, is going to be published, and I'm deep in the throes of painting the cover illustration. Here's the sketch--tell me what you think!

Finding A Righteous Gentile

The Jewish Standard is publishing a story about Dieter and me. Here are the first few paragraphs, and a link to the rest of the article.

When Teaneck author Helen Maryles Shankman dug into her family history, she hoped to unearth stories about her ancestors’ experiences during the Holocaust. But the award–winning author never anticipated that she would discover a Righteous Gentile.

Now Shankman is campaigning for an 82-year-old German to be conferred with the status of Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Shankman found the unlikely hero, Dieter Schlueter, because of her blog, where she chronicles the experience of researching her family’s history and their life during the Shoah in a Polish village called Wlodawa. Schlueter, who lives in Ludwigshafen, Germany, discovered her blog last June and sent her an email. Thus began their lively exchanges, as he told stories about what had happened years ago.

Schlueter, who spent his school vacations in the same town as Shankman’s family, remembered her relatives. He also told her that he had helped several Jewish families hide in the attic of his family’s home and he had delivered food to them, even as he strolled about town in a Hitler Youth uniform.

Here's the link to the rest of the story: http://www.jstandard.com/content/item...

Why I Wrote That

The Golem of Zukow started out, the way all stories do, as an idea.

The essence of the story never changed; a confused young man who shows up in a girl's room, stark naked, in the middle of the night. He thinks he's the Golem. He becomes a figure of amusement for the whole neighborhood. Later, he saves them all.

Originally, I saw Shayna as a teenager living in an apartment building in the middle of town. But as I tapped the word "Wlodawa" into Google search, and images began to reveal the beauty of my mother's native land, I fell in love with the landscape. At the same time, I was reading Holocaust memoirs from partisans who fought in the Wlodawa district. Shayna evolved from a bemused teenager to a tough working girl, trying to keep her family's mill going.

As I began to write, the illness that would soon take my mother grew stronger, stealing her power of speech. While I learned more and more about World War II and Wlodawa, she withdrew further and further away from us. When she was alert, she was delighted with the nuggets of information I brought her from her former life in Poland; photographs of the town square, information about the Germans who had protected her. As she fell into unwaking, unending sleep, I found, to my sorrow, that there was no one left awaiting my discoveries.

Somewhere around the time that Shayna was driving her wagon into town to make a flour delivery to the baker, Mom passed away. Numbly, I made arrangements for the kids to be cared for while we flew to Chicago, numbly I walked through the airport, sat through the service, sat shiva in my childhood home. I was surrounded by rabbis, by aunts, uncles and cousins, by my siblings, by high school friends, by Mom's Wlodawa lantsmen.

At night, I wrote. After everyone else went to sleep, I booted up my parents' slow-moving Dell and typed ferociously into the small hours. I couldn't get the words onto the screen fast enough.

A few days later, I returned to New Jersey. Life was different. No more rambling conversations with Mom, though for a while, I kept on picking up the phone to call her. For a year, I was an avel, someone who is officially in mourning. No music. No parties. No new clothes. A constant, ineffable feeling that pervades everything you do, a sixth sense reminding you that something important is missing, forever.

Trouble comes in threes. My Mac's hard drive died, taking all my manuscripts and story ideas with it. Now I stole into my daughter's room to write, pounding away on her ancient PC, putting the pages on a flash drive and printing them out on my husband's computer. This story wanted, needed to be born.

Finally, I came to the last words. "Love is a kind of magic, too, isn't it?" I didn't know if my story was any good, but I had a feeling that it was. With a sense of embarrassment--look at me, I'm writing stories instead of folding laundry-- I submitted it to Narrative's Winter Story Contest. This was the first piece of writing I'd ever ever submitted, anywhere. When I received the congratulatory notification that The Golem of Zukow was one of five finalists, I was weak with astonishment.

My Golem would go on to be passed up by ten different literary journals. Carefully, I made my choices from Clifford Garstang's excellent Pushcart Prize rankings at Perpetual Folly. Along the way, I received some very thoughtful and very flattering rejection letters, but they were still rejection letters. Was my story too Jewish? Too long? Too long ago? Not universal enough?

I still have the email from Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky at The Kenyon Review. An acceptance letter is a beautiful thing to behold.

There's no moral to this story, not really. But here is my little checklist for getting started with submissions.

1. If you want to be a writer, learn to edit yourself.

2. Proofread, proofread, proofread.

3. Ask friends to read your story. (Facebook was made for this.) When they come back to you with suggestions, try not to be defensive. If three people are all unhappy with the same thing, change it.

4. Sign up for the Submissions Tracker at Duotrope Digest.

5. Write a good cover letter.

6. Read the submission guidelines at whatever journal you're submitting to. Read them again. Then do exactly what they say.

7. Research the best journals that best fit your story. Submit to them.

8. Be as professional as possible, even when you are hurt, angry, or disappointed. Especially if you are hurt, angry, or disappointed.

9. When rejections come in--and they will--read them to see if they have anything useful to say. Rejoice in the personal rejections that tell you how much they like your writing, and that you should submit to them again.

10. Write when you're happy. Write when you're sad. Write when you're bored. Write when you're worried. Write while you're waiting in the dentist's office. Write when you're waiting to talk to your kid's teacher. Write during wind storms. Write when it's raining. Write in the morning. Write at night. Write, write, write, write, write.

11. Inspiration is essential. But don't sit around waiting for it.

The Golem of Zukow

Whoo HOO! My short story, The Golem of Zukow, has just been published at The Kenyon Review! Here's the link: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online... Let me know what you think!

The Next Big Thing

My marvelous and dedicated agent, the great Jean Naggar, has included me in a blog network to which she was invited. Jean isn’t just a blockbuster agent, she is also a talented and lyrical writer. (Her book is Sipping From The Nile. It's a shimmeringly beautiful coming-of-age memoir, set in an Egypt that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.) After answering the same questions that she answered in her blog, I will tag four other writers who will do the same.

The 10 Interview Questions for "The Next Big Thing"

What is the working title of your book?

The title of my book is Underpainting. I have my agent, Jean Naggar, to thank for that--she'd drawn up a list of possibilities, and when she pronounced that one out loud in her lush British accent, we both kinda went, "oooh." Underpainting is a term from the world of art; it refers to the structural bones beneath the layers of oil and glaze in a finished painting, often done in shades of gray, or "dead color."

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It was a frosty January night, probably around two in the morning. I had just watched the killer second season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was still gasping. After years of being terrified of vampires, suddenly I understood. Vampires were the perfect metaphor for anyone living outside society's boundaries.

I'd always wanted to tell the Holocaust stories my mother shared with me, but I hadn't the slightest idea where to start. At the same time, I was already working on a different story, based on my years in the art world. Suddenly, I saw a way to marry them together, in a way that would make each of them more meaningful.

Raphael Sinclair, my vampire, appeared in my bedroom the very next night, sitting beside me as I typed away, whispering his sad story into my ear.

What genre does your book fall under?
Literary/commercial. My agent’s assistant, Laura Biagi, says that “Underpainting is a member of that magical hybrid that bridges both the literary and the commercial worlds.” Bless you, Laura.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I've spent way too much time on Pinterest creating pages dedicated to answering that very question. (Check it out here: http://pinterest.com/hmshankman/) Originally, I imagined Rafe, my vampire, as some kind of holy communion between Jude Law and Ralph Fiennes, though today I think Michael Fassbender or Tom Hiddleston would fill in nicely. Tessa, my art student, could be Scarlett Johansson, now that she’s discovered her inner Avenger, but she would need to wear Nicole Kidman’s Pre-Raphaelite red curls. Sofia, Rafe’s doomed love, makes me think of Rachel Weisz. And Anastasia, Rafe’s sometime mistress and the editor of the world’s foremost fashion magazine, might be Audrey Tatou.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Underpainting tells two intertwining stories of forbidden love, beginning with the powerful attraction between Raphael Sinclair, the mysterious founder of the American Academy of Classical Art, and Tessa Moss, a gifted art student. 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. Okay, that's two sentences. I cheated.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
As I mentioned before, I have the tremendous good fortune to be represented by Jean Naggar, of JVNLA.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I have four young children, and in my precious moments of spare time, I paint portraits. Between nursing a baby, changing diapers, wading through endless mounds of homework, driving a couple of million carpools, and painting other people’s kids, it took a little more than three years.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Interview With A Vampire, by Anne Rice, and The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Though in my secret heart of hearts, I often think of it as Buffy meets My Name is Asher Lev.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
For many years, when anyone said, "Tell me something about yourself," my answer was, "My parents are Holocaust survivors." Despite their unique and terrible upbringing, our house wasn't grim; we were always laughing, though the jokes could get pretty dark. I wanted to address that, but I also wanted to write about my own experiences, attending art school, working as an artist’s assistant in Tribeca, slaving away at Conde Nast.

I’ve loved writing since I was a little girl, but I wasn’t a writer when I began working on this book. But as I moved through the worlds of plot, sentence structure and story arc, I found I was using the same familiar rules of thumb that I use when I paint. I still depended on form, color, and composition, only now, composition was transformed into the pattern of storytelling. Color was the way I used all the senses, sights, sounds, smells. Texture became the nature of the writing itself; dialogue or narrative in this passage, exposition or summary? Does this adjective precisely convey the emotional shading? Is it balanced, or is it too dark in one area?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Artists are a little messed up. And by artist, I mean anyone who paints, writes, acts, sings. You see, you don’t become an artist because you like to paint. You become an artist because you will die if you don’t paint. Normal people do not abandon conventional jobs--jobs that come with a regular paycheck, by the way--to daub oily goo onto canvases, nor do they stay up all night to brood over a single paragraph until they get it just right. Normal people don't spend hours pretending that they are someone else. I wanted to celebrate those outsiders, people, who, in a curious way, are the most normal people I've ever known. Underpainting is a love poem written for them.


As promised, here is my list of writers. Next week, they will answer The Next Big Thing questions on their own blogs.

Jean Naggar http://www.jeannaggar.com/blog.htm?tag=Egypt

Iza Trapani http://izatrapani.com/wp/

Elana Sztokman http://www.jewfem.com/easyblog1/blogger/listings/elana

Renee Miller http://reneeamiller.blogspot.com/

Ballad of the Holocaust

Meet Dieter Schlüter. Dieter is the boy in the picture, the stepson of Bernhard Falkenberg, declared Righteous Among the Nations in 1969. In 1942, Dieter was twelve years old, the privileged child of a prominent German working on a massive civil engineering project around the town of Wlodawa, Poland. My uncle Philip was twelve too, but he was a Jew, trying desperately to hide from the Nazis during a vicious Aktzia. The child of a resister, Dieter resisted too, letting Philip hide in the stable behind his family's home.

Under the Nazis, it was Falkenberg's job to drain 900 square kilometers of Wlodawa swamp so that the Poles could grow more crops to feed Germany. Falkenberg saved his Jewish workers, time and time again. He pulled them from lines when they were selected in Aktzias, gave them extra food rations, signed on an additional twelve hundred workers just so that he could give them working papers, hid them in his stable and attic, and gave aid to Partisans. Details of his heroism can be read here, at http://shraga-elam.blogspot.com/2010/09/sory-of-communist-schindler.html

Dieter saw it all. Though he was in boarding school during the school year, Dieter went to Wlodawa to spend his summer vacations with his mother and stepfather, just like any other schoolboy, just in time to witness the Holocaust. Asking no questions, he helped out around the house by bringing food up to thirty people hidden in the attic. My favorite part of this story is how he donned his Hitler Youth uniform and went biking jauntily across the ghetto, his luggage rack carrying a basket of food for his little Jewish girlfriend Lydia, the daughter of his father's office worker. As a Reich German, Dieter says, no one would stop him.

In 1942, Falkenberg was arrested and sent to Mauthausen, where he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Tragically, Dieter's mother was arrested on the same day, and sent to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin Alexanderplatz. There, she was beaten and tortured so severely that she was never the same. Dieter, too young to arrest, was sent back to a school in Berlin.



By 1945, children and old men were fighting Hitler's war. Dieter was assiged to an SS unit consisting of a few turncoat Russians, a few Estonians, and a troop of 14-year-old schoolboys. The last days of the war stranded him in Czechoslovakia, where his battle became the struggle to stay ahead of the Russian Army long enough to surrender himself to the Americans.

After the war, this non-Jew continued to suffer from the consequences of anti-Semitism. In 1949, he was refused admission to the school he wanted to attend, even though he was among the top five students in his class. Anti-Semitic teachers had learned of his parents' resistance work. They blocked his academic work and promotion, and later, denied him admission to the state exam.

In 1950, he happened to be at a demonstration in front of the Theatre am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, where hundreds of Jews were protesting the appearance of anti-Semitic actor Werner Krauss. The protesters were arrested and taken away on trucks. When the Jews didn't get on the trucks fast enough, the police beat them with batons. Dieter was fired from his job when he intervened to stop the beating.

Dieter is still consumed by the war. He published a book, Shoah and Fascism, What Have You Done? and wrote a screenplay called Last Stop, Sobibor. He has been trying to tell his family's story for seventy years. I hope I can help him.

I end this post with a poem Dieter wrote in 1955.



Ballad of the Holocaust
by Dieter Schlüter

Afterglow

The walls nauseate.
You are only shit.
The street draws its path,
and draws it suddenly back.
That window in the courtyard
is totally blind.
Petra is stupid,
writes a child.


A ghost grins behind the glass
toward two dry lakes.
The Oracle hurls a vase at the wall,
and a painting with delicate contours appears on it.
You bring, with one word,
The frost to coo.
It is the most beautiful place
to lose your soul.

Symphony and children's cries
Choke the air;
they cry in chorus;
Paralysis is the key.
My wife laughs, like a reed pipe sounding from an open grave:
I lend you my ear,
sadistic mouth.

A monster urges us
to hurry along.
Grandma has hung herself...
ways of passing the time.
My leg is pinned
beneath the wheel.
A flower limps
towards my tomb.