Memoir, Straight Up

Last night after watching the film, “The Artist,” the beautiful many layered story of a silent film star tossed aside when talkies come in, I slept badly, dreaming of closed doors, a filthy outhouse. I awoke disgusted, climbed out of bed, walked downstairs in the dark and made myself a cup of coffee.

I’m a writer of a certain age, trying to bring a literary memoir to publication which in today’s publishing climate seems to have as much relevance as a silent film. Five years ago, my credits in literary magazines, Ploughshares, the New England Review, the fact that chapters from this book have been published, one winning a prestigious award, would have made an agent notice. Now, few agents answer my queries, and those few who do, send a polite, but form rejection.

The culture has gone visual, and ironically as movie and television screens have grown larger, the book has grown smaller becoming an image on a laptop, an iPad, an iPod. Is the book dead? I don’t think so, but I do think traditional publishing is not only in transition, but as Steve Almond said in a recent seminar I attended, “crumbling under the weight of its own inefficiency, and what’s suffering is anything literary.”

In my query letter to agents, here's the way I describe my book: Girl Wrapped In A Curtain is a scene driven 78,387 word literary memoir that explores the complexity of love between a father and daughter. That day, sitting at the table with eleven other writers, all of us trying to figure out how to publish our books, traditional, electronic, small press, do it yourself, I nearly laughed out loud. Literary, once a respected word, was now the kiss of death.

I don’t even want a big New York publishing house. I’d like a small press, but I still need an agent and agents keep their eyes on the big houses, going to smaller presses later. Agents and editors say what’s selling are celebrity memoirs and memoirs with a hook, which means sensational, ie abuse, addiction or mental illness. My book is my story of coming to love my difficult, mean, charming, manipulative, narcissistic father. He is my Rochester; I am his Jane, for Dad is ninety-one, half-paralyzed, bedridden, incontinent and demented with startling moments of clarity and dying when, finally, he lets me into his life. Is he conning me? He’s that kind of guy.

So, who’s my audience? All of us out there who will be, who are, who have cared for aging parents.

Back to “The Artist.” Leaving the movie theater with me, my husband said, incredulously, “That was a silent film.”

Yes, it was. A modern silent with the old embedded in the new. My book is memoir, straight up. I’m not claiming the artistry of “The Artist;” yet, like the silent film star in the movie, who needed to find his way back into film, I need to find my way into publishing my literary memoir. 

Sun and Sky

Early morning. Green grass. No snow. Outside, the ocean ripples. No white caps. Where I sit on my chaise in the early morning, I cannot see the sun. Yet, I know it is there, just out of view, because the horizon glows. “Too dark,” a friend had said, when I told her I was taking this northeast facing room for my study. I understood. I’m a person who loves light; yet, one of things I love about this room is anticipating the sun’s return as it travels north, its coming and going an essential rhythm of my life.

Now, the sun’s light illuminates a wooden bench I have placed at the edge of the lawn where ragged stone steps lead to a rocky beach, and although none of them is here, I can see each of my grandchildren, the three girls, the boy,hopping rocks, then stooping down to stare silently into a tide pool. 

This is the ebb and flow I need in my life, this silent coming and going of sun and light, cool and warmth. Upstairs, Dick, my husband, and the dogs sleep. What wonderful dogs, what perfect dogs to give me these moments of solitude to watch my invisible sun spread its light from bench to grass and now to the railing beside steps that lead to the deck outside my study. How quickly day asserts itself, blue sky, a swath of high white cloud.

And suddenly, I am remembering Margin Call, the movie Dick and I saw last evening, and I am struck by the lack of sun and sky. Wall Street exists in a world of machines, tall buildings with elevators, large rooms filled with computer screens, their unnatural light, their graphs and numbers, surreal, unreal. No where in that movie does sun light a bench or a railing. Men climb to a roof top where artificial light becomes their beauty, and the flickering lights are beautiful—but they obscure the sky, moon and stars. 

Shabbat in the New Year

After six days of creation, God rested. Silently, I ponder the words: God rested. Significant. Important. God knew enough to rest. Mostly, I don’t, so on one recent Saturday morning, visiting my son, my daughter-in-law and my grandson in their apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City, I was delighted to learn they were observing Shabbat by giving up electronics. This practice has a name, Technology Sabbath, a twenty four hour period once a week to turn off television sets, iPads, iPods and cell phones.

The daughter of an assimilated German Jewish father and a non practicing Jewish mother, I grew up without a formal Jewish education. I raised my three sons without Hebrew School. My own journey back to Judaism began when my sons were in their teens—too late for Bar Mitzvahs. My daughter-in-law, a convert to Judaism, loves the faith. She is our lucky, lovely gift. At nine my grandson attends Hebrew School, and I fully expect he will become a Bar Mitzvah. Committed to Judaism, but not Orthodox or Conservative in their observance, my family does not sweat the details of pushing buttons on Shabbat, elevator buttons, stove buttons. Nor do I.

On that Saturday morning I sat in the living room of my son’s and daughter-in-law’s apartment, thinking of Shabbat long ago, which I called Shabbos, then. I was six when I rode the bus from Madison to Morristown, New Jersey to spend the weekend with Mama and Papa, Orthodox Jews who observed Shabbos while my Mom and Dad worked in Dad’s store. Mama and Papa did not switch on lights or strike a match to ignite a burner on the stove. Papa did not smoke his pipe. Quiet descended inside the house while Papa sat in his blue easy chair, reading the Yiddish newspaper. Did Mama read, too? I don’t remember. I remember sitting in her lap, touching her curls and breathing in her soft, sweet lilac scent. I remember my small hand in Papa’s hand as we walked to Burnham Park where I stooped down at the edge of a pond and waited for a single brave duck to pluck a wad of bread from my palm. I wanted that touch of the duck’s beak, blunt and rough, but not sharp. Later, I would stand outside on the front porch watching for the first three stars to appear in the sky so I could announce the end of Shabbos. Even then, as a child, I felt the bitter sweetness of a moment that was both an ending and a beginning.

Giving up electronics on Shabbat is not simple. Work spilled into weekends. On that day, my son, a film maker and adjunct professor, was editing his latest film on two large monitors in his study. Always, he was plugged in, communicating with his actors, his production team, his students either on line or by cell phone. My daughter-in-law, an associate professor at a college in New Jersey, relied on electronics to collect and grade student papers, to plan meetings, to keep in touch with her colleagues. “Now,” my daughter-in-law said to me, “we have no choice. We go hiking every Saturday. We do things together as a family.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, scholar and theologian who among his many books wrote that wonderful slim volume, “The Sabbath,” called Shabbat “a palace in time.” To appreciate Shabbat we needed to turn away from space. In space we acquired things, laptops, iPods, iPads, iPhones. In time we connected with each other, with nature, with that mysterious force that some called God, that others like me refused to name because there was too much baggage associated with that particular naming.

On that Saturday, the four of us drove to New Jersey to pick up my granddaughter whose father, my oldest son, was away. We drove to Bear Mountain State Park, all five plus Jo-Jo, the dog, a white bichon with a trim hair cut. We hiked to a shelter, roasted hot dogs on sticks, not Kosher, along with tofu dogs. Kosher? We toasted our bread on forked sticks. We walked to caves where the children explored hidden narrow passages, calling back, laughing. Jo-Jo ran in circles up a bank and through leaves. My daughter-in-law, my son and I stood at the mouth of the cave listening to the children’s shouts, keeping track. Time swelled, and I wished this moment would last forever. It wouldn’t. But it would come again, and this was the glory of Shabbat.

Following a trail out of the park, I felt the mystery of water rushing in a stream and of the sun shining through bare branches at a slant and warming the cold air. I listened to my grandchildren chatter. I walked for awhile with my daughter-in-law, then with my son, my heart kvelling, that Yiddish word that means joy, but so much more than joy. We were a family: together.

Nearly three weeks have passed since that Shabbat. It is Thursday, December 29, and I am thinking of the new year. I don’t do well with Resolutions; yet, I feel the need to make one. Just one. In 2012, I will abstain from electronics on Shabbat. At home, I will rest, read and spend my day with my husband and my dogs, taking the joy of Shabbat into my heart.

I wish you all, a happy, healthy and joyous new year. And a good Shabbos.

Bloom, Romney and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I’m into religion. I’m not talking about, faith, revelation or ritual, I’m talking about the way religion plays out in that essential question: who am I? So when I read Harold Bloom’s piece in The Times early this month—“Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?—I was intrigued.

Bloom, a literary critic and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is one of our brilliant American minds, a man with whom I have not always agreed, but a man who’s argument I have always respected. I read carefully. In his opening sentence Bloom asks us to pay attention. Look, he says, but not in those words, look at what’s happening now right now. Pay attention to these candidates. What you see now foreshadows what you’ll see later—darker. Intensified.

Mitt Romney, if he gets the nomination, will be the first Mormon to secure a major party nomination. Bloom a scholar of American literature describes Romney’s church as “that very American Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints.” So what’s the big deal? I’ve heard news pundits deplore the fact that Romney’s religion may become a factor in the Presidential election. We should be beyond that, they say. I agree. We should, but we aren’t. Religion plays a huge part in American politics.

Full disclosure. I’m Jewish. I don’t go to synagogue. I’m ambivalent about God. I love the ritual of Sabbath candles, of Passover. I love the scholarship of my people. I love learning my people's history. I love my people. But not exclusively.

What strikes me is Bloom’s definition Mormonism as a particularly American religion. Bloom knows American literature. He knows the American character, that rugged individualism that we mythologize in our cowboy movies, our gangster movies, our literary heroes, Thoreau, sitting alone beside a pond or canoeing alone in the Maine wilderness, Emerson teaching us “Self-Reliance” and Willa Cather writing of Antonia in My Antonia and Thea Kronberg in The Song of the Lark, stories with huge western landscapes and independent thinking women.

Ah, yes, individual freedom, a fabulous idea, but when it runs amuck, that same idea produces mean-spirited, selfish individuals who refuse to see their responsibility to the whole—ie the rest of us. And this refusal, if I’m understanding Bloom, is what he calls: “American spiritualized greed.”

Americans, we worship money. I’ve often thought it strange that candidates who want to see this nation declared a Christian nation are so enslaved and enthralled by money that they allow themselves to be carried away from their own Christian values of helping the poor and the less fortunate among us, which translates to me as an unwillingness to make health care available to all and an unwillingness to make education affordable. Bloom says, “obsessed by a freedom we identity with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude.”

And this, I think, is the connection to Romney. The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints is an economic power house and I agree with Bloom when he says, “money is politics.” To take this argument a step further, Bloom says, “A Mormon presidency is not quite the same as an ostensibly Catholic or Protestant one, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints insists on a religious sanction for its moralistic platitudes.”

So this argument translates to values. What are Romney’s values as an individual? as a candidate for the Presidency? He’s a devout Mormon, and his faith tells him that the rest of us are infidels, a word which suggests faithlessness and disloyalty. As a devout Mormon, Romney keeps his Church’s secrets, aspects of his religion that cannot be revealed to the rest of us. I agree with Bloom, that this concealment “may be a legitimate question that merits pondering.” In other words, Bloom wants us to ask questions. To consider. When we asked John F, Kennedy how his religion would affect his decision making as President, he responded with his religion speech in which he pleaded for religious tolerance and reiterated his unconditional support for separation of church and state. We, the electorate, and the news media need to ask Romney that same question.

That said, another danger of a Romney candidacy and perhaps a Romney Presidency is the continuation of governance that has evolved into both a plutocracy and an oligarchy where money and power continue to be consolidated into the hands of the few, leaving the rest of us behind. How is this related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? It is the model of their organization.

Occupy Boston

His red curly hair sticks out from under his woolen cap. His teeth are yellowed, the spaces between them filled with plaque. Sitting on a stool outside a tent in Dewy Square, he talks about facilitating meetings. He wants to get inside of a corporate board room. He wants to be visible. This is what Occupy Boston is about, making the invisible visible, and as I walk the paths of Occupy Boston one Saturday in October, I am struck by two things. First, that this is a community, and second, that the folks camping here are mostly homeless.

Some say there is no organization. All I see is organization, at the entrance a sign welcoming me, another sign setting the rules: No alcohol, No drugs. There is a medical tent, a library tent, a food tent, a clothing tent, a tent where a volunteer uses bicycle parts to generate electricity to charge iPads and iPods. Volunteers haul bags of garbage to designated dumpsters. They pick up trash. Outside the food tent, they wash dishes. Mornings, they hold general assemblies. They schedule events. This is what Jeffersonian democracy looks like, people gathering to protest a government that does not respond, to our will. And they are not alone. Daily, others join them, teachers, engineers, students, my three friends and I who have traveled from York, Maine.

What do they want? What do I want? What do we want? Nothing less than to reform and reconstitute American democracy. This is a movement about choices. Do we want housing, schools, books and libraries or do we want drones, wars and death? Do we want to give away our jobs, give up Medicare and Medicaid or do we want to tax the rich and to tax corporations?

So how do we organize to have our voices heard? I stand in front of a stage at one end of Dewey Square, listening to an activist answer that question. He holds the mike close to his lips, speaks passionately about a sustained campaign across the country, where through our community organizations, we ask our local government to pass a resolution to cut pentagon spending and put that money into human services, including transportation and education. Fifty-nine percent of our Federal budget goes to the military, six percent to health and human services, another six percent to transportation, four percent to education. Those values are skewed.

Later that day, a crowd gathers to listen to Noam Chomsky, summarize what has happened, slowly and over time as fiscal policy such taxation, rules of corporate governance and deregulation made way for the banks to grow bigger and richer so that now corporate profits are reaching record levels. Unemployment, real unemployment is about the level of the Great Depression. More people are sliding down into poverty as the rich grow richer. Our schools are collapsing; our infrastructure is collapsing. Elections are bought, the outcome pretty much dependent on funding. This is not new, Chomsky says, but what is new is the extraordinary amount of money poured into campaigns. Also new is the buying of committee chairs in Congress. Chairs need to pay the Committees. And where does that money come from? The same people who fund the campaigns. These policies have set in motion a vicious cycle, that gets worse and worse. We need to break that cycle. This is what Occupy Boston, Occupy Wall Street, all of the occupying movements are about. Of course, the rich and the powerful, that one percent will try to dismiss the movement, ridicule the movement, scorn the movement. But we are the ninety-nine percent, and I plan to make my voice heard. How about you?

Auvillar, A Village in South-west France

I am searching for a path. I have markers, a conversation at dinner when John, a photographer said, “You take the road before the bridge. You’ll see some steps. Take the steps, then keep going up the hill.” Then, nodding to Robert, a craftsman who works with metal, seated at the end of table, John said, “When the two cooling towers of the nuclear plant line up, you’re at chez Robert. Then, you keep turning left.”

But there is a fork, two dirt roads, one marked by a caution sign, warning that the road is subject to flash flooding which I assume has something to do with those cooling towers that I try to ignore and the Garonne River which flows past. I choose the road without the sign. On my right fields with dried up corn, on a my left a fig tree. The tree is laden with purple figs ripe to the touch. I linger. But I see a house in the distance, and reluctantly, I walk, following a track made by vehicles. This farm land, land where people have planted gardens. Tomatoes grow in abundance, along with squash. There are trellises with grapes and another fig tree where I have reached a dead end. White figs this time. The fig is perfect, warmed by the sun with pale white flesh. I split it open then pop half into my mouth. No one can see me. I pick again, then follow the path back to the first fig tree. No resistance this time.

At the caution sign I follow a path to an athletic field, and there on the other side, I see the steps that John mentioned. At the top of the steps a main road and across the way, a narrow road that climbs. Undulating fields roll away from the road; They climb hillsides. Fields lie fallow; others are filled with blooming sunflowers. I am alone. Time meanders, and I meander along with it, stopping to look or to take a photograph. At the top of a hill dogs bark at my approach. There is a barn, a tractor, fields and across the road a farm house. Could this be where Robert lives? But the cooling towers don’t line up. “Bonjour Madame,” someone calls.

There on a terrace, I see two men. “Bonjour,” I call back.

“Bonjour.”

Climbing again and cresting another hill, I watch the cooling towers line up. I see a long drive. A distant house. Perhaps chez Robert. Is this his view from a terrace, two funnels spewing white smoke? John lives here for five months out of the year. He doesn’t notice the cooling towers. Although I try not to, I notice. Soon they disappear from view, and I realize I’ve been walking a long, long time with no sign of Auvillar, my destination. Should I continue on? Turn around? I want to meet another walker, to say, “Pardon. Est que je vais a Auvillar?” Am I going to Auvillar? Not great French, but the best I can do.

Then, I see her, the woman and her dog that John had spoken of at dinner, Madame D. and Texas, her dog lumbering behind. It’s a big dog, tri-colored, part collie, part setter and probably part Doberman with those colors, and although the dog is slow it’s a strange dog, and it’s slogging toward me. “Madame.” I call. Then again and louder. She turns, calls to the dog, then speaks to me in rapid French.

“Je ne parle pas Francis. Seul un peu,” I say. I don’t speak French. Only a little. “Est que le…” Is this the…. I point to the road. “Auvillar.

“Ah, oui.” She is a woman of a certain age, and her smile crinkles her face. She wears her gray hair cropped close. “You come with me,” she says.

And I do.

Madame D. tells me the story of how Texas got his name. One day a young couple, students, staying at the git or inn that Madame D. and her husband run, found a puppy. They were thrilled. But when it came time for them to return home. “Well,” Madame says, “what would they do with this….”

“Puppy,” I say.

“Pupeee,” she says. “Well, I do not know. My husband…” Her voice falls off and she gestures. “But he? She?” she asks looking at Texas.

“He,” I say.

“Is beautiful,” she says. “So we keep the dog. Then how to call him. They are from Texas, the young couple, so voila: Texas.”

“He is very kind dog,” Madame says. “Everyday I walk with him. They all know me.” She pauses. “And Texas.”

And everyone in my neighborhood in the town where I live on the coast of Maine knows me as the woman who walks with her two standard poodles. But not today. Today I am far from home, following a different path, down hidden steps that Madame D. says is her short cut before we step onto a road, Madame D. Texas and I, all strolling into Auvillar.

The Pledge

Reading In My Father’s Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer, stories the writer recalls of his father’s Beth Din or rabbinical court, an ancient Jewish institution, blending court of law, synagogue, house of worship and psychiatrist’s couch where Jews would come to settle disputes and get advice, I was struck by one particular story called “The Oath,” which seemed to me both warning and lesson.

In the first paragraph, Singer proclaims that his father would open each Beth Din proclaiming his opposition to the taking of oaths. I was sitting in my study, legs stretched on my chaise, looking out through the screen at my perennial garden, daylilies at their height of mass and color, pale yellow, tangerine, scarlet, heavy on their slender stalks, at purple coneflowers, petals thrown back, dome shaped cones like noses sniffing the sky. And beyond the garden a single lobster boat fished on the high tide. “No oaths,” I said silently.

For at that moment, John Boehner was negotiating with his recalcitrant representatives, all of whom had sworn an oath, not to God, not to our country, but to an organization called Americans for Tax Reform, controlled by a single man, Grover Norquist. And that oath? No tax increases under any circumstances. And I couldn’t help wishing that Singer’s father, that old rabbi long dead was the man leading the House of Representatives instead of John Boehner.

And why was the rabbi against oaths? Because we cannot trust our memories, and; therefore, we must not swear to what we believe is the truth. As we all know, truth is elusive. Take three people to the scene of an accident, and each will give a different version of what he or she has seen.

One day a woman and a group of men came to the rabbi’s Beth Din, the men accusing the woman of swindling. As the argument grew more and more heated, the woman cried and screamed her innocence. Suddenly, she opened the Ark, took hold of the Torah, that most sacred of scrolls, and swore she was telling the truth. All in the room were shocked into silence. Months later, the woman returned to confess to the rabbi that she had sworn falsely and that she wished to repent. I lifted my eyes from the page. The woman had fooled me, too. I’d thought she was innocent. She’d bullied me, bullied the rabbi, bullied the three men, and I said to myself: “Isn’t that what’s happening right this minute in Congress?”

In a recent article in the New York Times, Frank Bruni states that all but 6 of the 240 Republicans in the House, along with 2 Democrats have signed Norquist’s pledge. Bruni also says that Norquist uses the pledge like a hammer, vilifying pledge resisters during their primary campaigns. Let’s take Norquist out of the picture for a moment in order to concentrate on our 236 Representatives who took that pledge. They are no better than the woman in Singer’s Beth Din swearing falsely on what they cannot know. Their job is to legislate, that is to make or pass laws, yet, they have chosen to bully the opposition, leaving no room for negotiation. Compromise is intrinsic to a functioning government. If these 236 House members don’t understand this, they don’t belong in Congress. If only, like the woman in Singer’s story, they would confess. If only, they would repent. If only, they would govern.