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Thursday’s Post-Publication Post: September, My Grandmas, and Me

by Erika Dreifus on
15

PRACTICING WRITING IS GOING ON A BRIEF HIATUS. DETAILS LATER IN THIS POST.

As most of you know by now, my debut short-story collection, Quiet Americans, is inspired largely by the histories and experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. In real life, as in the subset of linked stories within the book, these two met and married in New York, raised a son, and eventually became loving and involved grandparents to two little girls.

All four of my grandparents are often on my mind and always in my heart. Throughout the process of writing, publishing, and promoting Quiet Americans I have been thinking, quite obviously, particularly of my father’s parents, Ruth and Sam Dreifus. But in the past several weeks, I’ve been thinking of them—and my maternal grandparents, especially my Grandma Rose—even more often and intensely.

Part of that is because August is a big family month for us. Among our celebrations are the birthdays of both of my sister’s children, who are named for my father’s parents. All of us in my family are keenly aware of how much joy it would have brought my grandparents to have had the chance to meet these children.

Then, a couple of weekends ago, all nine of my maternal grandparents’ great-grandchildren were together in New Jersey. My maternal grandparents didn’t have the happiest of marriages, so seeing this very tangible, positive result of it is always a little bittersweet but also, somehow, uplifting.

Every August also brings my parents’ wedding anniversary (a milestone this year!). And, as usual, my parents have been reminiscing about their wedding and everyone who was there. On this, I’ll just add that one of the things that makes my parents’ marriage so noteworthy (at least, in my observations), is the degree to which my mom and dad were each welcomed into their “in-law” family. Now that I’m older and wiser, I am deeply grateful for how well everyone got along, and how much all of that warmth enriched my own childhood and growing-up.

Now that it’s September, I have even more reason to be thinking of my grandparents, especially my two grandmothers.

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The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • This was my latest #StorySunday contribution, but if you didn’t catch it then, read it now: “8:46,” a 9/11 story by Philip Graham.
  • On a related note: D.G. Myers has posted an extensive annotated list of 9/11 novels.
  • Fabulous piece by poet Philip Schultz in Sunday’s New York Times: “Words Failed Me, Then Saved Me.” If you’re a writer who has struggled with a learning disability, or you’ve ever loved anyone who has battled a learning disability, you simply must read this.
  • Smart suggestions from Midge Raymond on “Facebook for Authors.”
  • Monday marked not only Labor Day, but also the 39th anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Read my thoughts–and an excerpt from my story, “Homecomings,” on my “other” blog, My Machberet.
  • I always enjoy David Abrams’s “Front Porch” posts and David’s take on upcoming books. Here’s the latest one.
  • Gorgeous blog post from Susan Woodring (“The Habitual Writer”) on “When the Copyedits Arrive.”
  • The latest issue of The Short Review has gone live. This month I’m even more enthusiastic about it than usual. Guess why.

    • Words of the Week: Adam Kirsch

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair.

    Just one sentence from Adam Kirsch’s superb Tablet review-essay, the general subject of which is “the American Jewish response to Sept. 11” and “the anti-Semitism, trauma, and mourning that still linger after the attacks .”

    Quotation of the Week: Barbara Kingsolver

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    For a story to make the cut I asked a lot from it – asked of it, in fact, what I ask of myself when I sit down to write, and that is to get straight down to it and carve something hugely important into a small enough amulet to fit inside a reader’s most sacred psychic pocket. I don’t care what it’s about, as long as it’s not trivial. I once heard a writer declare from a lectern: “I write about the mysteries of the human heart, which is the only thing a fiction writer has any business addressing.” And I thought to myself, Excuse me? I had recently begun thinking of myself as a fiction writer and was laboring under the illusion that I could address any mystery that piqued me, including but not limited to the human heart, human risk factors, human rights….The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write and read.

    –Barbara Kingsolver

    Source: Kingsolver’s introduction to Best American Short Stories 2001, ed. Katrina Kenison, Barbara Kingsolver (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. xvii-xix.

    September 5: An Anniversary and an Excerpt

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    The terrorist attack on and subsequent massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics began in the early morning hours of September 5, 1972.

    Although I was too young at the time to be aware of what had happened, I learned later about the episode. The 1992 anniversary brought extensive commemorative coverage, which I followed intensely. About a decade later, I researched the events still more extensively and incorporated them in my story, “Homecomings,” in which a woman who left Nazi Germany as a young adult returns to Europe for the first time in September 1972. The story won the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Contest for short fiction on Jewish themes, and, in a revised form, appears in my collection, Quiet Americans.

    Here is a brief excerpt from “Homecomings.”

    May the memories of all the victims be for blessing.

    They switched the television on. The screen showed athletes, winning more medals. Sunbathing by the pond. Playing ping-pong.

    But there were bulletins. About something else. Something beyond comprehension.

    Black September, the group was called. At least one Israeli athlete was dead. No one knew exactly how many were captive in Building 31, in that sunshiny Olympic Village.

    Between the competitions—“How can the Games go on like that?”—she and Daniel and Simone kept asking each other, when they could speak at all, and when they weren’t mesmerized by the images of trucks marked with the all-too-familiar “POLIZEI” that suddenly seemed to fill Munich’s streets—they absorbed the interviews.

    Including the one with the Israeli prime minister. More than anything else, more than appearing angry or vindictive or even fearful, Mrs. Meir looked deeply dejected. Grieving. But that old determination showed in her not-altogether downcast eyes when she refused to negotiate with the terrorists.

    “If we should give in,” she said, her voice steady and sure, no Israeli would be safe. Ever. Anywhere. What had happened to the Israeli team during the night, she declared, what was currently underway, was nothing except “blackmail—of the worst kind.”

    Simone sighed. “She’s right.”