Author Archives: ona

The Cave of the Jews

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10 May 2022

     Lower Tuscany. I’ve finished work on the second book in my Leah Contarini Mystery and am ready to send it to the press, happy to let them take over. 

 Today, for a break, I decided on research for the next book. S. and I drove the back roads of the thick forests on the border with Lazio, bumping over narrow dirt roads through the high hills. We were looking for the Grotto degli Ebrei, the “Cave of the Jews.”  This is the cave where our friend, Elena, and her family hid from the Germans during Germany’s occupation of Italy in World War II. Elena was 9 when, in November of 1943, she and her family, left their home and went west and north to the farm of gentile friends. Each month they moved to another farm, sometimes barely ahead of the Facists or the Germans, and finally ended in what came to be called the Cave of the Jews in the same forest where we drove today. 

     The forests of this area of Tuscany are like jungles: chestnut, oak, maple, hornbeams crowd each other, thick as grass, and the ground cover of tangled vines, thorny bushes, giant stands of Scotch Broom, overgrown wild roses, and wild raspberry bushes twist together in tight, impenetrable  knots. 

     Like some other local Jewish families fortunate enough to escape in time, Elena’s family was sustained by courageous peasants/farmers who put their lives on the line to protect Jewish families from the German soldiers combing the area to kill or round up Jews for the camps.  

     We stopped at a house deep in the hills and talked to a man who was eating lunch with his family. “The cave is difficult to find,” he explained. “I could take you, but I have to work on my tractor today. It’s hard to find.”

     So, today didn’t work out, but another day it might, and the story of that nine-year-old girl begins to take shape in my mind. 

On Travel

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I’m on the verge of a long trip and now that my luggage is nearly packed, I’ve been looking for books to read along the journey. After searching my shelves, I’ve decided that since I’m a traveler I’ll read about traveling, but from a different era.  

 I’ve settled on writings from Medieval times:  Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts, edited by Elkan Nathan Adler; and The Travels of Ibn Battutah, edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. The books aren’t entirely new to me; I’ve read a few pages of each one, and I ended up choosing them for the chance to continue exploring the Middle Ages of Africa and Asia.

Ibn Battutah said, “Travelling – first it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” I’m excited to see what story I’m about to enter with these intrepid authors, and I’m anticipating how their travels will change my own.

Another Thought on Asking Questions

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Last month I wrote a blog about the value of questions.  After I posted that blog I remembered a story on the same topic – a story I carry with me and think about every day.

There was a young married man who spent his day studying the holy books. As time passed, he became increasingly agitated. His reading led him to a question: What is the meaning of life? He couldn’t let go of the question. “What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life” he mumbled throughout the day. His wife became exasperated, “Go, ask the neighbors!” 

So the man went into the courtyard, calling out the question, stopping the passers-by. They brushed him off.  “What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life?”

The wife and the neighbors decided to take him to the rabbi in a neighboring town.

The rabbi invited the young man to sit in the chair across from him. “Now, young man, what’s wrong?”

“I have to know, Rabbi, What is the meaning of life?”

The rabbi stood, walked around his desk, raised his arm, and slapped the young man across the face.

Shocked, the young man jerked backward.

The rabbi said, “Why would you want to exchange a perfectly good question for an answer?

It is answers that divide us; it is the questions that bring us together.”

Questions/Answers

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My daughter-in-law gave me the present of an online, personal-interview program in which every Monday for one year I get a question about my life. The questions range from those about childhood, to food preferences, to sports, to religious outlook….The list goes on.

These Monday-questions are meant to be a record for posterity, but I’ve discovered that although ostensibly simple, they hide in their midst a fruitful complexity valuable in my work as a writer.

Why?

Because each question is the lynchpin of a moment or episode. Considering the answer to each question, I am tied to the question itself, compelled to search my memory and understanding within its confines, to pay attention to detail, and to search for whatever deeper meaning exists.

Coming up with answers to the questions is like swimming in a pool rather than in the ocean. I can swim lengthwise, crosswise, or diagonally, but whichever way I swim, there is a boundary. If I step from the pool, I’m no longer in it! If I step outside the question, I am no longer responding to it. Thus, each question compels me to focus. And, as I explore the area inside the boundary, the seemingly simplicity of the question becomes paradoxically complex, vast.

Example: Who did you date in high school?

I could, if I wanted, simply list names — but the question is more evocative than that.

My mind looks back at that young high school girl standing in front of the mirror combing her hair, heart pounding with anticipation. She worries about the pimple on her cheek and is more excited about being on a date and going somewhere than about the boy. I suddenly realize that girl never dated a classmate: she has known her classmates since kindergarten; they are too much like brothers to date. So who did I date? And then I wonder, Where did I go on dates? And I see my girl-self hating every moment of a particular amusement-park date; I see her embarrassed by the rides and the screaming. I see her wishing she were home.

Thus, at the same time I’m exploring that teenager’s life, I’m understanding, by answers, aspects of that girl’s character I never thought of before. Why did she hate amusement parks? What else didn’t she like? What struggles was she having? What was the usual date for teenagers in my town? Have I fabricated things about my younger life? Have I even lied about things? Or exaggerated events to make myself look better? Was that girl straightforward? A good student? What sort of date did she prefer? What were the boys like then?

The question snowballs, the pool expands. I swim into water I’ve never considered. My daughter-in-law’s gift leads me to vet not only aspects of my own life, it reminds me, in the long arc of a novel, to explore my characters’ lives from seemingly mundane details. It compels me to consider if I asking the right questions about my fictional characters. Could I dive deeper into their foibles, reflect on the ‘simpler’ facets of their lives ?

Thus, plunging into these Monday-questions becomes not only a gift to my family, it renews my attention to the details of my work, and — fictional or flesh – it is the details that make the design.

Reading the Cartographer

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It’s only two months until the launch of the first book in my new Tuscan mystery series. With the second book done, I’m deep into the third book and at the same time, trying to keep up with the necessities of production/marketing on the first book.

Maintaining this balance between marketing and writing fiction leaves me discombobulated. (One of my favorite words for being confused and disconcerted – still, knowing the definition of the word doesn’t change how I feel!)  

Anyway, by late afternoon, I’m knackered, and I find escape from both marketing and mystery by reading a motley array of books that seem unrelated to writing mysteries, but aren’t.     

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

A Mapmaker’s Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice by James Cowan

Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics by Martin Ewans

Reading these books and others, I’ve learned that there isn’t any book unrelated to my writing. Everything I read becomes entwined, one way or another, with my characters, with plot or landscape, with my understanding of human behavior.

Fra Mauro. I never thought to read about a Renaissance cartographer. I am writing a series of mysteries set in Venice, but I bought the Mauro book on a whim. How could Fra Mauro, enigmatic Renaissance monk and cartographer who stayed in his cell and reaped knowledge from visiting merchants and adventurers, contribute to a mystery set in modern Venice?  Reading the book, I discovered that Fra Mauro was not just recording information to make a physical map. As he says in his notebooks: “The things [the merchants and adventurers] had observed were phenomena only; what I attempted to inscribe onto my map was the transformation of their observations into that uncluttered grace we find in all living relationships.” How could a writer of any genre not appreciate the summons to fulfill the idea of finding the “uncluttered grace…in all living relationships?

Studying poetic forms in The Making of a Poem and trying to write a villanelle or a pantoum is a demanding exercise in the use of language and form. Using Strand and Boland’s book, I’ve turned creating different poetic forms into a weekly challenge and am gratified to find how effort instructs me in keeping my language tight, precise.

Afghanistan has been in the news recently and by coincidence, I lived in Afghanistan for a year and a half. When I inadvertently came across Ewans’ book I bought it, not sure when I would read it. But I am reading it, and through this scholar’s work am firmly reminded that personal experience never provides the full picture of a place or of a people. We travel, we live elsewhere for a while, we know some things first hand. But there is always more to learn, more to make one amazed, more understanding to destroy stereotypes, always new perspectives on culture, always some thunderbolt detail that makes you wonder how you missed such important wisdom.  

Victor Hugo said, “… to read is to light a fire, every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” 

For me, this is particularly true about serendipitous reading: I surprise myself with a study of rain, expand my understanding of what it means to be a woman by reading a book on the courageous, intelligent women of the Bible, and give myself a fruitful invite with a layman’s book on astrophysics (From which, too my surprise, I conceived a poem that was later published.)

I know that details can add up to knowledge but perhaps not to wisdom. Still, reading in myriad directions outside usual channels ignites my mind, hands me some new tools for awe, and nudges me toward understanding the lived-experience under the facts.

Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan

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The fall of Kabul and final takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

I’ve been watching the news day by day, remembering the good people and quick-witted students I knew when I lived and taught in Afghanistan years ago. I think of the young women, my bright-faced students, curious, eager for education, so ready to learn and to be a part of what was then, a country with possibilities for both women and men.

The young Afghan women of today, unlike the young women I taught and unlike the
women of the last 20 years, are now scrambling to find a way to safety, a way to escape being forced brides of Taliban fighters, a way to hide the fact that they are journalists or fashion designers, a way to protect the businesses they worked so hard to build. All Afghan women today see their freedom fading: freedom to simply walk in the street on an errand without a chadri or escort, freedom to study, freedom to have a say in who they marry, to express themselves openly… The list goes on.

I don’t have a Pollyanna memory of the year and a half I lived in Afghanistan. There
were terrible problems, terrible injustices (as in every country) but there was also social action, education for girls and boys, and the freedom to be citizens of the 20th century. And I haven’t forgotten that the Taliban takeover will be difficult and dangerous for many Afghan men as well, especially for any Afghan still in country who worked with the U.S. and its allies.

I’m thinking too of the U.S. and allied families that have experienced the death of their
children thousands of miles from home. All families: U.S., Allied, and Afghan, that have lost children have undergone one of the hardest losses possible — add to that the grief of those families whose children came home alive but mangled and broken, never the same.  Are they feeling their children died or were injured in vain? Will they eat bitterness the rest of their lives?

What a travesty of friendship on the part of the West this too hasty and ill-planned
withdrawal has been. Bitterness and grief floods the blood stream. Maybe we had to leave; but it’s the way we left and it’s our government’s naïveté about the Taliban (to put the decision in the best light).

Circumstances: memories of the Afghan women and men, those good people I once
knew, and my personal knowledge of losing a child juxtapose in the anguish of what humans can do to each other.

Joseph Campbell once said, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters
the flowering of humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that.”

It feels like we’re searching for those possibilities in a darkening room.

The People Who Write My Books

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Before I started writing books, I believed a person simply sat at their desk, wrote a book, sent it to a publisher, and the book was either accepted or rejected. 

Said and done. 

Now I know better, and I’m feeling particularly thankful to the people unknown and known who have had a hand in creating the books I’ve been writing

Unknown?  Yes. 

Like the 8-year-old water carrier I crossed paths with on a street in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, who supported a family of 7 by his work. He’s a boy I can’t forget, who I’ve transformed in my writing into an Italian boy with a different life but some of the same gutsy behavior.

Then there’s the Pashtun man who drove me to Kandahar and who, in the middle of deserted land, began yelling his anger at Americans. He becomes a violent character in another book, and I learned how to write a new kind of fear. 

Or my fellow travelers on top of a load of peanuts traveling south from Niger to Lagos, Nigeria. These strangers showed me ways to create joy in the midst of exhaustion, adding another aspect of behavior and personality to my fictional characters.

And there’s the woman in a Utah store dressed to the hilt but with the face of sad experience, who become a murder victim in my imagined story.

And the man standing on the cliff near Cascais, looking out over the ocean, as if he were remembering the days of Portugal’s reign of the seas. This man I never knew became for me a lesson in yearning, a fictional character recounting his history in the prologue of one of my books. 

Then there are the people I know or knew at one time:

There’s the woman I cared for when I worked as a nurse’s aide in a hospital, a woman deformed by rheumatoid arthritis, for whom every slight movement was excruciating. This woman, frozen in a fetal position, greeted her little five-year-old daughter with a smile as the little one bounced on the hospital bed to hug and kiss her. How do I understand this real woman’s courage and fortitude?  What is courage? Who of my characters are this courageous?  A fictional woman crippled, not physically but emotionally, finds her courage not in a hospital bed, but in one of her own worst challenges. 

There’s the lover I knew whose girlfriend left him. I can’t forget his sad eyes, the way pain settled on him. And I asked, “What particular way do my female characters hurt others?”  A lovely, but cruel woman is created in fiction. 

There’s the boy with a roomful of toys no one was allowed to touch, a boy who grew up to sell playground equipment, as if he refused to leave his childhood. What is the past of my new character? Is it this? What is my character holding onto? 

And there’s the fellow college student who drank himself to death in his 30s.  He becomes a character lost too soon to the people who love him, and this unravels a thread of loss throughout a fictional story. 

There are the parents who restrained their son so strictly he went crazy, and through my imagination my fictional character ends up a murderer driven by rage at his imprisonment. 

This is the mix and match way an author takes parts of strangers or people known, loved or disliked: a color of eyes here, a certain smile there, a tendency to cruel comments, or impetuous generosity; a characteristic of petty lies, a secret life below the community life.  I see physical and behavioral traits that as a writer I can then mix like puzzle pieces and put together to create a wholly new character who is real only in my imagination. The character is no one and yet many.

Thus the book is finished in draft form, but now come the readers — patient, generous friends who agree to read the book and care enough to give direct, truthful criticism. Why not move this chapter here? This character isn’t realistic enough, would he really fall in love so readily after a break up? Too graphic in this scene. Be more subtle. I love your description of the landscape. More action at the beginning….

These comments send the writer back to the computer, to rewrite, to improve. 

Done?  No.

Let’s suppose the book gets published.  

Now the editor at the publisher lends a hand. More comments, more suggestions. More changes. The editor has a good eye for literature, for plot, and an eye to the buyer as well, in other words, the editor is the friend that will help your book sell. 

Finished?  No. 

Now comes the copyeditor who catches the mistakes in what you thought was your perfect manuscript, the one you’ve checked and rechecked.  Spelling, punctuation, font, all of the details that keep the writing flowing smoothly. She’s the one who sends it off to the printer. 

And next is the marketing person who advertises both author and book to the public through magazines, online ads, podcasts, free copies to advance readers,… and teaches the author how to help with these aspects of selling the book.. 

And then the artist who creates your cover, startling and beautiful, so it catches the eye of the reader shopping in a bookstore or online. 

And then the readers who buy the book, and the reviewers who review it. People who let you know where you succeeded, where you failed, where you need improvement. These are the people who, along with the others, help you with your next book.  

Which brings me back to the beginning and the stories I want to tell. 

Most of the day, it may seem I sit alone at my computer, but actually, my office is crowded with people, telling me their stories, letting me borrow their noses, or their anger, or their gestures — all talking at once. They’re the community I walk into each day, disappearing into my own story.   

The Elm We Cut Down Came Back

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In late April, I wrote about our elm tree, a full-grown, broad-canopied tree, which before it became diseased had been a gathering place for family, friends, and a motley array of dogs, birds, deer, cats, squirrels, wild turkeys, and chickens.

Now it’s early June. The tree is gone; there’s a five-foot mountain of its wood chips under our spruce and a three-foot mound of fine-ground stump mulch by the back fence at the edge of the garden. The trunk and big limbs of the elm are jumbled in shoulder-high piles under the cherry and chestnut trees, and the tree cutter’s machinery left the yard brown and rutted. The little hillock where the wide trunk of the elm had met the ground, now spreads four, long, barren arms in the four directions, following what had been the tree’s major roots. This scattered wreckage of tree adds up to a devastated backyard, but I find it beautiful, and I feel protective, possessive of this static chaos.  

I grew up doing manual labor, farm work. After I left home, I exchanged that labor for writing and editing. This means the work of the tree is both old and new to me, and it’s given me a gift. Writer Chuck Palahniuk explains: “I’m not sure how it happens, but manual labor leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.”

Both the tree and I have been transformed: the tree to the useful forms of logs, chips, and mulch, and I to a woman returned to manual labor. I feel a protective sense. I want to take care of of the tree myself, to keep as much as I can of its transformed forms in our yard, or at least in our neighborhood.

Every day I shovel a few loads of the giant pile of wood chips/ mulch into the wheelbarrow and cart them to the parking strip as ground cover around the juniper bushes.  I’ve walked around the neighbors to offer wood and chips for the taking, I’ve planted drought-resistance flowers on the little hillock atop the stump and will soon plant native grasses there as well. I’ve loaded a big stump for a neighbor’s chopping block, and once the wood is cut, I’ll stack cords of it along the fence. Someday, when cold weather sets in and all my family is coming home, I’ll carry the wood to our fireplace and start a fire in anticipation of seeing people I love.

Cutting a diseased tree is a seemingly unimportant moment, but I’ve discovered this loss unfolds and enters every part of my life, like any felt loss would. This tree, once alive, thriving, and a great joy, has in its altered state, altered me. It has adjusted my sight, literally and figuratively. I can now see across the river valley; can now enjoy the giant elm of our neighbor, as if that elm I never noticed before had stepped in to offer itself for our loss. The figurative part of this new sight is that the jumbled piles of tree trunk, big limbs, and the mountain of chips and mulch have given me some of the gifts of insight that accompany labor, gifts that dovetail with my work as a writer.  

Shovel-full by shovel-full, log by log as I work, think, and take stock, I revisit hot summers baling hay; sweaty, itchy days scooping oats; the parched throat one feels after hours of cutting volunteer corn out of bean fields. In memory or in the present, I let my mind wander over my most recent book; hone in on spots in the book I want to expand; imagine new characters I want to create; and sometimes, am visited by little epiphanies.

Writer Chang-rae Lee, author of On Such a Full Sea, says: “…maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks… when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?”

The elm was the center of decades of stories while it was alive, stories of humans, birds, cats, dogs, wild turkeys, stories of wind and rain, snow and sun so hot trees’ leaves curled. Some of those stories became my own when I moved onto the tree’s land. Now the elm has been shattered, but it’s come back. I’m telling its stories, and thanks to the freedom labor gives me, am rejuvenated in making more of my own.

The Elm

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I sat down to work this morning, as usual, but I got derailed, when for the last time, I looked out the window at our elm. Today everything will change. The tree cutters have come.

We have a big elm in our back yard. A full-grown, wide canopied tree, it’s provided shade for the house, cover for our kids at play, cool comfort for a summer afternoon’s reading, shelter from the high sun for outdoor meals with friends and family. Over a decade ago, my brother climbed high into the elm to anchor the parachutes, shade for the hundreds of guests at our oldest son’s Bar Mitzvah celebration.

The limb of the elm is where we hung the bird bath and feeder for the thousands of chickadees, lazuli buntings, flickers, red polls, and magpies that come to us. Deer have gathered at midnight and early morning to tap that bird feeder with their noses and eat the seed that trickles to the grass.

I’ve laughed watching a squirrel hurtle itself toward the spruce from the higher branches of this elm, but miss, and fall twenty feet to the ground, shake its head and dash away, embarrassed. One winter afternoon, I came home early to see sixteen deer gathered under the tree. Two of them got into a fight. They reared on their hind legs, striking out with their hard little fore-hooves and making a strange squealing sound.

Another winter day, in the yard by the tree, I watched my 8-year-old son approach a pregnant deer, carefully, slowly pulling the pockets of his jeans inside out. When he came in, I asked, “What were you saying to them?” He answered, “I told them I didn’t have any weapons, that they didn’t need to be afraid.” Another day, a Sunday in May, thirteen wild turkeys squatted like boulders on our elm’s high limbs and stayed with us the whole day.  

For many late-spring weeks after our son died, it was this tree that shaded me while I lay in the grass, trying to refute a truth I could not admit was true. 

This elm is the one that stood near the pergola my sons and husband built to surprise me.  Our weekly Torah study met under this tree, and grandchildren have played under this tree. Before he emigrated, my son fashioned a heart in the grass under this tree, a heart we’ve never cut in the years since. Neighbor dogs have zoomed through our yard, circled the elm, and chased each other out again. A black and white cat has crouched in the grass under the elm, sprung to catch a bird, and then let it go.

An accumulation of moments over time ties our lives to a place, to things. By the waving of its branches, by the generous way this tree welcomed others, shared its limbs and shade, and made its windfull sound at night, this elm has graced my chaotic, joyous, maniacal, grief-stricken, and peaceful life. It made a camaraderie among species in a way that made me more whole.

But today the tree cutters have come and the loss is difficult. Each thick limb that falls to the ground shakes the earth with a heavy thud, a punch in the stomach. The sound of a buzz saw cuts air, so unlike the sound of the soft night wind through the limbs of the elm that brings us sleep.