In the Jewish faith when a close relative dies, the family "sits shiva," for seven days, during which time visitors come with food and prayers and healing words. The comfort of not being alone in grief is profound.
Life goes on. So does writing. So does waiting to hear from four publishers considering my latest novel.

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

Sometimes I’m asked how long it takes to write a book.  I usually reply that there’s no good estimate.  When that doesn’t satisfy, I joke that it’s like a pregnancy, no less than eight months, no more than nine.  I don’t mention “Lilli,” the novel that took me 26 years to complete and still isn’t published. 

In 1990 a convention of Old China Hands, Jewish refugees from Hitler who had survived the Shanghai ghetto, was held in a hotel in Anaheim, California.  I lived nearby, so out of curiosity I attended one of the public events.  It was a raucous, joyously emotional gathering, lots of tears and laughter and reminiscences.  The personal stories were overwhelming.  I was hooked.  Over the following months I met and interviewed twelve survivors and taped their stories of escape from Europe and the life-altering drama of existence in the Shanghai ghetto.  Among the people I interviewed was a man in his late seventies who was living in a condo in Leisure World in Orange County; he had been a classical violinist in Europe and ended up leading a jazz band in Shanghai.   Another one was an insurance executive I interviewed in his office in Los Angeles; he had spent his youth in Shanghai and was curious as to why anyone would want to know anything about it.  Another was a woman in her sixties who agreed to meet me at a café in the Northridge Mall; she told me about a childhood in Shanghai that still caused her nightmares.  Another was an elderly woman and her daughter who met me for lunch in Marina del Rey and after a slow, awkward beginning, told me about their escape from Hitler and what their lives had been like in Shanghai.  There were more interviews.  Even a letter from a man in Australia.  I soon had a drawer full of interview tapes.    

I knew several things about the book before I started:  it would be a novel; it would hew close to the information I had gleaned from survivors; it would be about how people survive calamitous events and whether they survive honorably or by betraying others; it would be an adult novel that could also be read by teenage readers, for at the novel’s heart would be the young Lilli Chernofsky and her stunning metamorphosis  from sheltered seventeen-year-old to complex heroine. 

By 1997 the novel (then titled “Escape to Shanghai”) was finished.  I gave it to my agent.  She didn’t want to represent a book about Jews or the Holocaust or World War II.  I changed agents.  Several tried to find a publisher for the book, but with no success.

I contacted Spielberg’s Shoah Project and asked if they would like to add the taped interviews to their collection.  They said they only used interviews for the Shoah Project that they themselves conducted. 

I put the book and the tapes in a drawer.

It’s now 2016.  A few months ago I pulled “Escape to Shanghai” out of the drawer, did some revising and retitled it “Lilli.” I had fired my last agent, so I decided to personally contact a few editors I had had dealings with in the past:  one had made an offer on “Escape to Shanghai” several years ago, which I had refused because the publisher had only been in business a short time; two others had bought and published other novels of mine.  All three agreed to read “Lilli” and give me an answer as to publication.    

So I’ll wait for an answer, although it doesn’t matter what the editors’ responses are.  Somehow, some way, somewhere “Lilli” will be published.  It’s a startlingly valuable look at a people and time and place in Jewish history that’s been given scant attention up to now.  I made a promise to the survivors I met and interviewed that I would write a book about their experiences.  Despite the years that have passed, I don’t intend to renege on that promise. 

My review of the movie "The Handmaiden"

It’s 1930 in Japanese-occupied Korea.  Count Fujiwara (actually a small-time hustler from the Korean hinterlands) insinuates himself and his accomplice Sookee, a sometime prostitute and thief, into the household of a wealthy Japanese book collector and his niece Hideko.  The plan is for Count Fujiwara to court Hideko, marry her, grab her fortune, then commit her to an insane asylum.  Sookee’s job, as Hideko’s handmaiden, is to encourage Hideko to accept Count Fujiwara’s proposal.      

What the Count doesn't anticipate is that Sookee and Hideko will find their match in each other and fall in love.  Shifts in time, replayed scenes and voiceovers lead us through a labyrinth of withheld secrets and misdirection:  who seduced whom, who planned what, who’s weak, who’s strong, and the film moves from complicated con to the devouring love between Sookee and Hideko.  Their ravishingly beautiful, unashamedly explicit love scenes are as lushly seductive as the Japanese gardens on the uncle’s estate. 

This is a clever movie, but filmmaker Park Chan-wook has his eye on something that goes beyond cleverness.  Themes of dominance and subjugation run throughout the movie, from Japan’s boot on Korea’s neck to the control that Count Fujiwara and the uncle exert over Sookee and Hideko, to the pornographic readings Hideko is forced to perform for the uncle’s and his friends’ titillation.  Park has given us not only a mind-teasing puzzle box to unravel, but a  brilliantly filmed opera of female vengeance.  

What I'm reading

I’m reading “The Diary of Mary Berg:  Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto.”  Mary Berg’s mother was born in America, which saved her and her immediate family from eventual annihilation by the Nazis.  In 1944 they arrived in the United States on the SS Gripsholm in exchange for a shipload of German prisoners.  With Mary Berg was a diary she had begun in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 when she was fifteen years old.  It was written in an abbreviated Polish that filled twelve notebooks.  It's a startlingly candid memoir of the Holocaust and the only one written by someone who survived the Warsaw Ghetto.  It was first published in 1945 and has since been reprinted with a new translation and forward.  

                The Holocaust.  That’s what it’s called.  Even now.  Even after Cambodia.  Even after Rwanda.  The Holocaust.  The template for genocide. 

                I was nine years old when I overheard my Aunt Ida say she was glad her parents weren’t alive. 

                “Why would Aunt Ida say that?” I asked my mother.

                “Because of Hitler,” my mother replied.  “If her parents hadn’t died in 1930, Hitler would be murdering them now.” 

                One day shortly after that I came home from school to find a man and a little boy talking to my mother in the living room.  I understood a little Yiddish, but not enough, and when I tried to talk to the little boy in English, he didn’t understand me. 

                “This is your uncle and cousin visiting Aunt Ida from Mexico,” my mother said to me.  “They’re the only ones in Aunt Ida’s family who escaped Hitler.”

                My mother peeled a banana for the little boy and he held it like it was an ear of corn and ate it end to end. 

                 My husband and I have a library of Holocaust and Holocaust-related books.  I read mostly about families who went through the Holocaust, my husband reads mostly its history.   My obsession with the Holocaust began with Aunt Ida’s remark; my husband’s began with his father Charlie's story.  Charlie's family came to the U.S. looking for the promised "streets paved with gold," and after a year of disappointments returned to Hungary, leaving seven-year-old Charlie in the care of a Jewish grocer and his wife.  Charlie converted to Judaism and married my husband's Jewish mother and the whole history would have remained a secret if my husband hadn't discovered a photograph of Charlie's brother in the uniform of the pro-Hitler Hungarian Army. What Charlie's story taught my husband and me was that as much as we try to erase the past, we can't.  We carry ourselves with us everywhere we go.  We leave letters and diaries and photographs.

                

Reading Fiction

I was once an avid reader of fiction.   I gobbled novels.  Ate them.  Lived and breathed them.  So as not to drown,in books, I became selective.  I  relied on critics  to tell me what was worth my time and money.  But sometime in the eighties something strange happened.  I'd buy one of the critically touted books and before I had finished the first chapter I'd feel my mind wandering.  I'd start flipping pages.  At about chapter three I'd put the book down and never pick it up again.  I lowered my reading standards.  I began to read novels that weren't literary enough for major review, but they didn't hold my interest; ingenious plotting couldn't atone for the lack of elegant prose.  Unread novels, like discarded boxes of cereal, began to pile up on all the tables in my house.  

If I had to point to one thing that killed my fiction-reading addiction, it might be the new American novel, a creature that was born and bred in the word swamp of  writing workshops, where the institutionalized writing of fiction has created a model that sucks out originality and depth and quirkiness.  Now, I love beautiful writing.  I love metaphors.  I love adjectives.  In my mind a well-crafted sentence is a thing of beauty.  But beauty that keeps looking in the mirror is a bore, and piled-on metaphors and untethered adjectives and endlessly repetitious writing is a cheat.  (Reviewers do their part in measuring the quality of a novel by listing and quoting its brilliant metaphors .)    

 Why can't we have elegant writing and narrative surprise and mind-blowingness in the same book?  Why can't we have fiction that doesn't tell us the same thing over and over and over merely to fill out the pages but instead knocks us over the head with delight?   

Wait.  What is that noise I'm hearing?  Is there dissension in the writing-program business? Did someone just say that they can always tell a book that has been workshopped?  Is there a new model on the horizon?