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.