Month #5
I WRITE TO YOU FROM DEEP INSIDE THE DAYS OF AWE. This is the 10-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur designated by observant Jews for serious reflection – about transgressions of the past year, repentance, and aspirations for the year ahead – knowing, and this is key, that G-d is watching and deciding upon our very worthiness to go on living, and if we do, what kind of life we will have.
“On Rosh Hashanah it is written,
On Yom Kippur it is sealed.”
When I first heard those words, proclaimed by a large and bearded Rabbi addressing a group of four-year-olds among whom I was one, I shuddered. Our behavior, and very thoughts, he told us, would determine whether we would live or die – and Reader, it was scary. Could it be why I decided to become a writer?! Books and writing are central to this whole religious arrangement, so why not try to master that which sounded so intimidating?
Is this why I write books, so that I can have a say?
According to the Jewish Virtual Library:
“One of the ongoing themes of the Days of Awe is the concept that has “books” that he writes our names in, writing down who will live and who will die, who will have a good life and who will have a bad life, for the next year. … This concept of writing in books is the source of the common greeting during this time:”May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”
It is not uncommon for writers to assert that writing is akin to playing G-d. I frequently attempted to tantalize my Creative Writing students with this promise. “Will the character fall in love? Fall off a mountain? Persuade or not persuade her child to come home for Rosh Hashanah dinner? It’s all up to you. You, the writer, shape events, motivation, outcome.”
A SIMILARLY COMPELLING REASON FOR WRITING, related to playing G-d, is to fill in the gaps, the things that you don’t know, or, as the author Rebecca Solnit suggests in her excellent book, The Faraway Nearby, to create connections, provide context. In my previous post, I mentioned the letters and documents that are interwoven in my novel, A Tale of Two Citizens, (whose upcoming “birth” is the driving theme of this blog). Several of these came from the many aged sheets of paper and photographs in an envelope in my mother’s dresser drawer that I found after her death, a legal-sized envelope marked “Hy’s Past,” written in my mother’s hand. Spilling from the envelope were steerage tickets, letters, government documents, photographs – and from these, I spun a tale. I took things that didn’t quite have a context – beyond knowing that my father had once touched them – and, as Solnit would describe it, I “sutured” them together to form coherence and pattern. Story. I played G-d with my father’s life (which ended when I was three), and wrote a novel.
This was one of the photographs inside that envelope:
Coming upon a photograph like this, wouldn’t you want to know who these people were? What they had to do with your father? And if you couldn’t know, for sure, and you were given to dreaming up stories, wouldn’t you want to sew together the loose pages and pictures with scraps of information mentioned in passing at family dinners: things you had heard, but never thought to absorb? Things that belonged to some distant long-ago life until you realized that that life was part of your own? As a writer, I had no choice but to shape a story for my father. Perhaps, as my father’s daughter, I had no choice but to be a writer.
THE WORK OF WRITING THE BOOK - ABOUT THE HIGH-STAKES DRAMA FACED BY AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IN 1930s AMERICA - COMPLETE THESE MANY YEARS AFTER THE STORY BEGAN TO TAKE SHAPE, it is now time to count the months until the novel is delivered to the public. That date, the official publication date, is February 3, 2015. A Tuesday.
Now, here’s something you probably didn’t know: All official publication dates fall on a Tuesday.
And talk about things tying together, I found this headline when I was looking for information about that fact:
Tuesday: The Holy Day of Publishing
Trying to find why this is so is like looking for reason in the Bible. Explanations for Tuesday as Publication Day run from the convenience of shipping and stocking following the weekend, to timing delivery in conjunction with the tabulations sent from bookstores to the New York Times bestseller lists. No one seems to know how “Super Tuesdays” started, but persist they do; check any pub date and you will find that it falls on a Tuesday. And that goes for the release dates of CDs and DVDs, as well. Tuesdays, we hardly knew ye!
SO HERE IT IS, FOUR MONTHS UNTIL PUBLICATION. With those unifying and all-encompassing forces of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years coming up, the time should go quickly, except of course for January, which always drags like nobody’s business. BoaB reader, Beryl Elon, cheerfully observes that when it comes to this blog, “The months are flying by – much faster than the months when I was pregnant.” I know the feeling, because it seems every time I turn around I’m back here at my computer, writing up this blog. And I’ll be darned if various pre-publication happenings aren’t still following pretty closely with the months of pregnancy.
According to the website, Enfamil.com, this is the month when the mother may start feeling butterflies in her stomach. (That sure rings true to me, although I could say it for each of the previous months as well.) “If you’ve been dying to feel your baby’s kicks, you may be rewarded this month. As his movements become smoother and more coordinated, you might feel some fluttering, called quickening.”
Webmd enumerates more detailed activity of month #5:
Fat begins to form [check], helping your baby’s heat production and metabolism. The lungs are beginning to exhale amniotic fluid, and the circulatory and urinary systems are working. Hair on head, eyebrows and eyelashes is filling in…. reflexes are kicking in. [The fetus] can yawn, stretch and make facial expressions, even frown. Taste buds are beginning to develop and can distinguish sweet from bitter tastes. The baby will suck if its lips are stroked and it can swallow, and even get the hiccups. The retinas have become sensitive to light, so if a bright light is shined on your abdomen, baby will probably move to shield its eyes…. Skin is developing and transparent, appearing red because blood vessels are visible through it. A creamy white protective coating, called vernix, begins to develop. Mother might feel dizzy, faint, lightheaded; Take care not to get overtired since rapid growth can compound the burden on your heart.
I’ll make note of that, webmd, try to stay on an even keel even as Advanced Reader’s Copies are due to be sent out any minute; the new book cover still, as of this writing, hasn’t shown up on Amazon, GoodReads, etc., and G-d is busy deciding what kind of a year it’s going to be.
“May we all be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”
Writing hand, please don’t fail me now!
~
Note: To see the book cover, you can visit Yucca Publishing’s Facebook page or webpage – and be sure to check here next month when, according to webmd, the mother [author] is definitely “starting to show”!
