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May 16th, 2012
Guest Author Interview with Linda Frank
Please join me in welcoming Linda Frank, a resident of San Francisco, avid reader and author of After the Auction.
1. What inspired you to write your first book? My novel, After the Auction, originated from a story my mother told me about a man she met during World War II. Someone like him is a character in the book, but the plot evolved from the mysterious silences I got when trying to research him for a nonfiction article or biography.
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March 31st, 2012
 There are two things I don’t understand about the US Postal Service. First, why it’s the workers, not the customers, who’ve gone “postal” and shot up the stations. Secondly, why is it going bankrupt when it has me?
Since my son, Jonathan, moved to Beijing almost 13 years ago, I’ve shipped countless care packages, many of which have contained homemade bakery. Would I consider letting the anytime banana bread or the Rosh Hashanah honey cake or Passover brownies get stale with regular airmail service taking ten days to two weeks? Or store-bought Chanukah cookies or Purim hamentashen? (Full disclosure: my maternal grandmother’s dough rolling gene that produced gorgeous pies and strudel was recessive in both my mother and me.)
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Tags: Beijing, chocolate-covered matzah, Jewish Popo, Passover, Sephardic recipes
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February 29th, 2012
First, let me express my condolences on the Oscars. I know you put your heart and soul into all your projects, and “The Descendants” and “The Ides of March” certainly reflected your talent and hard work.
That said, I want to tell you how excited I am about your forthcoming movie project involving the Monuments Men, the art historians and curators whose work in the wake of Nazi art looting tried to bring a just resolution to that segment of Hitler’s war crimes. Despite their efforts and the documentation furnished through German efficiency, this endeavor didn’t totally fix the problems or end the claims and injustice. It’s remarkable to me that today, nearly 67 years after the end of World War II, heirs and other descendants of victims are still fighting battles to reclaim stolen property. There are a few actual survivors who remember the actual occurrences, but fewer and fewer. There’s even a regular online newsletter called looted art.com
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Tags: After the Auction novel and movie, George Clooney Monuments Men film, Meryl Streep, Nazi art looting, Robert Edsel, sex after 60
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December 29th, 2011
Readers may wonder why I blog on travel and not just my writing. From the beginning I titled the blog “Travels and Travail,” relating to the authorship experience. While travel is hardly travail, it certainly augments and complements the writing and broadens the writer’s outlook (and body look). Blogging is writing, too, which is a good thing, since this is the most writing I’ve done in the past couple of weeks.
After our non-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving in Glasgow Ei and I flew to southern Spain. The 2+ hour flight that departed at 8 am from Glasgow was packed with Scottish vacationers, many sporting flip flops and shorts and drinking beer for breakfast. We flew Easy-Jet, a European no-frills carrier. Nice folks, no rowdiness, just a little noisy. With Glasgow’s climate, who could blame them for starting their holiday from the moment of take-off?
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Tags: "Three Days in May" play, Jewish travel, Maimonides, Spain
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December 8th, 2011
Your support is very important to me. However, through tech world mysteries and (my website guru tells me) some mergers and acquisitions, I cannot retrieve the list of who you are. I am working on a new list service to remedy this problem and keep you informed about speaking appearances and other book news, as well as blog posts. Soon there will be a new sign-up mechanism on my site, but you can assure your spot right away by contacting me directly.
THEREFORE, I WOULD REALLY APPRECIATE IT IF, WHEN YOU GET THE EMAIL MESSAGE ABOUT THIS POST, YOU WOULD EMAIL ME THAT YOU ARE A SUBSCRIBER. MY PREFERRED EMAIL ADDRESS: linda@lindafrankbooks.com
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November 12th, 2011
Yes, traveling (a Midwest swing bookended by a Little Rock meeting and book talk and a St. Louis wedding and book talk, with stops in Louisville and beautiful Lexington, KY; Indianapolis; alma mater town Ann Arbor; Milwaukee homeland; Lincoln’s Springfield). Hardly the dizzying foreign destinations of the Today Show host’s annual odyssey this week.
But, more significantly, I’ve been AWOL from writing.
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September 13th, 2011
“A 60 year old female protagonist is an automatic problem with most mainstream publishers who prefer much younger characters.”
This is part of the email response I got yesterday morning from a New York literary agent, who shall remain nameless. I read it on my IPhone, while my husband and I were driving back to San Francisco from a quick weekend trip to Los Angeles. The thumbs-on-phone approach wouldn’t work for my reply, and I wouldn’t have time to write back on my computer until later in the evening. But I had plenty of time to think about it the challenge it presented. Those “fighting words” were a clarion call to action!
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Tags: 60 year old women, a band of wives, agents, AJC Asia-Pacific Institute, Baby Boomer readers, Diane Keaton, Friends of the SF Commission on the Status of Women, Helen Mirren, HIPPY USA, Jennifer Seibel Newsom, Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Miss Representation, NCJW, publishers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
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August 20th, 2011
You’ve heard of the Tiger Mom? The Panda Dad? Well, meet the Jewish Popo!
Popo is the Chinese word that in Mandarin means the mother-in-law on the husband’s side. I’ve also seen it defined as old woman (ahem!) and grandmother (someday soon, I hope). When I’ve asked my son in Beijing, Jonathan, why there’s a special name for the mother-in-law or grandma from the husband’s side, he said it’s because of the traditional dominance of that side in Chinese marriage customs: the bride would go over to her husband’s family. I’ve also seen a chart of family relationship names, and it seems that all sides have specific words for them.
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August 4th, 2011
 Xiaoming, a new Chinese friend searching for her Jewish roots. It’s no secret to blog-readers and everyone I know that I have a family tie to China in my daughter-in-law Li Xuebai, aka Amy Li Ansfield. And readers of my first novel, AFTER THE AUCTION, might recall that Lily, my “main woman,” discovered a Chinese cousin, Ruth, in Israel, while searching for the Seder plate looted by the Nazis. And I’ve already hinted that Ruth and China figure prominently in the next novel. Working title: The Lost Torah of Shanghai.
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