An e-publisher is courting me.  We had a long talk a few weeks ago during a week in which there was so much e-publishing buzz that I felt very cool and with-it in today’s world.  William Styron’s family was making news about the fact that his longtime publisher, Random House, didn’t have rights to e-publish.  E-publishing rights weren’t even thought of in Styron’s heyday. In December Media Bistro sponsored a New York City digital publishing summit in led by Jane Friedman, a publishing industry luminary formerly with Harper Collins, who’s made the leap to e-publishing (of old titles, such as Styron’s) in a start-up, Open Road Integrated Media.

But e-publishing is not a perfect answer and hardly a universally accepted concept.  Personally, my patronage of and concern for book stores (especially independents) notwithstanding,  I have to confess to the Kindle as a guilty pleasure.  We bought them in preparation for this fall’s Africa trip that didn’t happen; you’re not allowed much luggage on safari, and the long plane trips mandated lots of reading.  With six books downloaded, I’ve used the device, despite not going to Africa.  It’s fun and SO easy to read print adjusted to my eyesight and to carry around (downside is it’s one of the electronic devices flight attendants want you to turn off for take-off and about 20 minutes before landing).

But my potential market for Secrets of the Afikomen will mandate a physical product.  And, if a book succeeds through some form of self-publishing, there’s a chance a big name might pick it up later.  Not likely with e-publishing. Publishers aren’t going to let those rights slip away for long.

Good segue to self-publishing, which is what I’m really pondering here.  I’m beginning to explore this option and fighting to conquer the ego part of succumbing to it.  Is it for losers in the formal publishing world?  Is the caché of a “real” publishing deal still worth the struggle? The reality is that a newcomer, even with a book deal, is not likely to be showered with big publishing perks like a goodly advance, a book tour, or much marketing help.  There’s a lot I’d have to do myself either way, and I’m prepared for that (this web site is the beginning).  But distribution to book stores is a problem with self-publishing.  Here in San Francisco we hardly have room for that proverbial garage full of books to load into the car and schlep around the country.  Yet, I’ve seen at least one self-publishing “house” advertise its products in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section, which is a good sign of the potential for this route.

Lots to uncover and discover.  But this is the year.  Time to embrace the Chinese New Year Tiger and make it happen!

Blogging is amazing, to be sure, but it’s not the most worthwhile or even the most thrilling of my life’s experiences.  Certainly not. My work with the Monuments Men–now, that was work that made me proud.  One would say I was a Monuments Woman, although we women did not get the credit we deserved.  Yet another recurring theme in the story of my life.  Yet, living the life has made up for it.

I’d finished up at Cambridge in the late 1930s and gone up to London to study at the Courtauld Institute. Back then some called the Courtauld a finishing school for young women whose parents wanted them to acquire a basic knowledge of art–one requisite, or useful tool, toward the goal of becoming a proper wife.  I, of course, having read art history at Cambridge, scoffed at this and instead applied myself with great determination; I yearned to be a curator, you see.   The Warburg Library, Aby Warburg’s vast art trove, had shifted from Germany to London when the Nazis surfaced, and its relationship to the Courtauld lent more gravity to the courses and reputation.  And Anthony Blunt, then young and promising but not yet seasoned enough to be the Courtauld director, had begun to influence the direction of the institute, which was founded in 1932 with the grand gift of Sir Samuel Courtauld’s collection.  No doubt, you’ve heard of Blunt?  The gifted teacher and curator that I knew–it is hard to imagine him as a spy for the Russians all the time.

Anyway, I do go on…so sorry.  The war was coming, and we knew it, of course, for weeks ahead, that summer of 1939.  It was no secret that Hitler had already looted the great collections of every country where his legions had stomped their boots.  And a vicious air assault was expected. Everyone attached to a museum pitched in to evacuate the national treasures out of London to the countryside.  Like sending the children away, which was called Operation Pied Piper.  Fortunately, the paintings didn’t bawl as much as the children.  That work consigned me straight into the military as an attaché in the cultural section.  By 1943 we were actively preparing our own landing on the Continent to search out the troves stolen and hidden along the Nazi path of tyranny and destruction.  Within months after D-Day we art historians arrived in France, as well.

We veered in and out of the boundaries of enemy lines until the war’s end the following spring.  Then we plunged in, especially in Germany and Austria, the last hold-outs of the Nazi regime.  Imagine the sight of an American G.I. carrying up an El Greco from an underground cave in the Alps?  Or a priceless Greek sculpture?  This was routine.  The Nazis, of course, were unfailingly systematic, what with their lists, so we could tell which cities and even which families items came from.  The tricky part, alas, was finding the people, if they didn’t make claims.  Were we to assume that they perished?  Sadly, yes, that was so often the case. Our procedure then was to return art to its country of origin, not that the Russians went along with that, of course.

Important and high-level as that work was, it didn’t matter when I returned to Britain.  Who was I to think that a Jewish woman who had served her country so nobly would qualify for a curator position?  My only option was teaching art history in a girls’ school.  In doing so, I became yet another cog in the process of imparting to young women that scintilla of culture that would make them proper society matrons.  My revenge: a few really latched onto it, told me I’d inspired them, and went on to open galleries and even land museum positions.  Times had changed, you see.

But the Monuments Woman work stayed with me.  We hadn’t solved all the mysteries or safely returned everything to rightful owners.  We’d disbanded only two years after the war’s end; there was only so long for art to remain a priority.  There were war criminals to be tried, displaced persons to be settled, countries to be rebuilt, the Cold War–and just plain cold, hunger, and austerity all over Europe, especially here in England.  It was easy to push empty-handed art owners away.

Yet, I knew survivors and their heirs would resurface looking for their treasures.  I hoarded as many documents as I could, kept my ear to the ground among collectors and curators I knew and remained in contact with my cohorts among the Monuments Men.  Once I retired from teaching, in 1984, I parlayed this into working as a consultant to people seeking looted art still missing.

Which is how Lily Kovner came to ring me up and make me a character in Secrets of the Afikomen.

The column I’m citing, timed during the baseball championship games leading to the World Series, focused on the the fancy new baseball stadiums in New York, including the Mets’ new home named for its corporate sponsor, Citigroup, of federal rescue funds fame.  Herbert makes the point that, even for many families not desperately hurt by recession and unemployment, a jaunt to these new palaces of sport is an expense worthy of considerable thought.  Between tickets and concessions, baseball has priced itself out of the ballpark.  Herbert, recalling his childhood when “even the scalpers’ tickets were affordable,”  regrets that today’s youngsters of modest means have no access to America’s pastime, and people sleep on the street while one magnificent, luxury box-lined field after another opens.

This commentary juxtaposed with the news of the book price wars made me think that, while the price of one pastime has skyrocketed, the price of another is up for grabs.  My first take: this devalues reading.  But a closer look at the wars that ensued in advance of this holiday shopping season revealed that the wars really centered on big name best sellers–the likes of Dan Brown and, G-d help me, Sarah Palin–that Wal-Mart and Target pegged as discountable “loss leader” they could sell in quantity as their shoppers rampaged through the stores toward the bigger-ticket items on their lists.

Independent booksellers professed to be nonplussed by this move; after all, they’ve been under relative siege for years (thanks to Amazon, B&N, Borders, et. al.), and the big-box stores were unlikely to cater to their more literary- and service-minded clientele. Here in San Francisco some local bookstores weren’t even stocking Going Rogue.  So, if they weren’t worried, why should I?  I just find it hard to view books–any books–as a loss leader commodities.

Pronunciation: \ˈzhän-rə, ˈzhäⁿ-; ˈzhäⁿr; ˈjän-rə\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, kind, gender — more at gender
Date: 1770

1 : a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content
2 : kind, sort
3 : painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday life, usually realistically

As the protagonist in Secrets of the Afikomen, I should be uniquely qualified to answer this question about the book my friend, Linda, has written. Ah, yes, we are friends–we’ve spent a lot of time together over the years as she’s worked to tell my story. Some in the book business strive to pinpoint a genre within fiction. Let’s go over some of the choices: mystery, thriller, literary, science fiction, romance, historical, women’s, spiritual. Then there are a couple that are new to me: chick lit and hen lit. And the “biz” categorizes uses the terms commercial and trade book, too. I understand commercial; trade fiction????

Where does Secrets of the Afikomen fit?

Like many people–Linda and me, to name two (OK, at least one of us is a real person)–it’s not a round peg in a round hole. The book transcends genres. It has elements of mystery, historical, women’s hen lit (sometimes called matron lit or granny lit, when referring to authors and female protagonists over a certain age), and I get a nice romance, too, though it’s not the bodice-ripping type. Linda and I admit we’re not literary here. But we’ll take commercial!

So, genre-wise, we’re a hybrid.

Does genre matter? Not to us. What matters is that people enjoy the read and that they get the chance to read Secrets of the Afikomen. Getting published would be a good way to accomplish this, of course. But these days there’s even not just one definition of getting published. More on that soon…

My story–the quest to find my Seder plate–was complicated enough. The vagaries of the book business these days serve up yet another mystery (but no romance).

Well, here goes: I’m nothing if not adaptable.  Warsaw.  London. New York.  Israel.  I’ve made my way for 96 years.  Pretty successful in business.  Personal life?  A few relatives, friends, a lot of acquaintances.  I stayed busy.  After I lost Elisabeth, no one could compare, so there was never a wife, no children.  But at least I had Lily; I could be like a father to her.  And a grandfather to her kids.  Such a blessing that’s been in my life.

So, that night, when Lily came over to the house and told me, who could believe it?  I was stunned.  All of a sudden, after so many years, the di Salamone Seder plate shows up in front of her eyes at an auction?  Then–poof–just like that, it’s gone again?

Such memories came back to me, memories of Elisabeth, Lily’s mother, my darling Elisabeth.  That Seder at her house in 1937, the night I brought the Seder plate.  What do they call it now?  A hostess gift?   That Jack, her obnoxious husband, thought it was for all of them, but, no, only for Elisabeth.  That jerk didn’t know what a prize he had in her.  A Seder plate?  I would have given her the world, if only…

What could I do?  One thing you learn when you’re 96 years old: you can’t look back–it’ll drive you meshuggah.  You don’t make it to 96 looking back.

Lily came to me a wreck.  She wanted me to help her.  What could I do?  I’m nobody in the collector world now, a has-been.

We sat down, we had some Chinese, I listened.  She wanted to go after the Seder plate.  I thought it was a bad idea, dangerous even. She doesn’t know  what it was like–those Nazis.  Of course, she saw them take away her father and the Seder plate. Granted, her parents and grandparents were killed in the Holocaust.  But she thinks that’s ancient history now, all wiped away.

Me, I’m not so sure.  One thing I could offer was to connect Lily to Simon Wiesenthal.  Now, there’s a guy totally wrapped up in the past, but doing something about it.  Personally, I don’t know how he can stand it: embroiling himself day after day in those files, following up on leads, hearing people’s stories.  I admire the guy. But I could never do it.

I’m not usually a paranoid type, but the whole Nazi connection–the art looting, this Bucholz name, Wiesenthal’s report that Bucholz vanished after the war–it scares me.  I don’t want Lily getting mixed up in this.  I couldn’t stand to lose her, too.  I warned her, “This isn’t child’s play like looking for the Afikomen,” I said.  So, what does she do?  She says, “Great, Uncle!  Afikomen.  That’ll be the code name for my search.”  A code name she has to have!

OK–so I can’t stop her.  She’s sixty years old.  I’m glad she met Simon Rieger.  Maybe he’ll go with her on this wild goose chase. At least maybe she’ll have a little romance out of this, if nothing else.  She’s too wonderful to sit home alone every night.  Young, vibrant, like her mother.  If I were 30 years younger…

There were many things I knew about Rena.  She was born in Shanghai to parents who had come there from Russia about the time my grandmother came to the US and for the same reason–to escape pogroms.  Her family, like most of the Russian community, lived in Shanghai’s French Concession, and she and her sister attended the French School, where she began to learn the seven languages she eventually spoke.  Their father was a writer, magazine editor, and active Zionist; the mother owned a children’s shop.  The family left China and went to Israel in 1949.  There Rena met and married Hannan, whose business led them to temporary homes in Korea, the Philippines, and Japan before retirement to the San Francisco Bay Area, where their daughters and their families had settled.

What I didn’t realize until Rena died was that the writing career that produced two memoirs, children’s books, a diary translation, and numerous articles and book reviews only began twenty years ago.  Which would have made Rena about 65 when she started publishing.  There’s hope for me!!!!

Rena’s first book on life in Shanghai, Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai, introduced me to this unique chapter in both Jewish and Chinese history.  As many of you know, this interest I’m now putting to work as chair of an exhibit called “Jews in Modern China,” which will run from February 24-May 16, 2010 at the Presidio Officers’ Club Exhibition Hall here in San Francisco. (This program is part of the Shanghai Celebration. For more information on this year-long San Francisco Bay Area-wide collaboration and its associated exhibitions, films, performances, lectures, and other events, please visit www.shanghaicelebration.com, a site still under construction. The cornerstone of the Celebration is the Asian Art Museum’s presentation of Shanghai, a major exhibition examining the visual culture of one of China’s most cosmopolitan cities, scheduled for February 12-September 5, 2010.)  We’re planning a “Remembering Rena” event during the exhibit.

But I digress.

After reading Rena’s book, I wrote her a fan letter.  She called and invited me to lunch. Imagine!  A total stranger!  But that was Rena; I’ve learned that I was hardly the first such guest, or the last.  The menu reflected her life: Japanese noodle soup, a savory Russian cheese pastry, and Israeli salad!

At some point Rena, knowing that I wrote, gave me a beautiful book, The Jewish Writer, a photographic essay collection by Jill Krementz.  In it are many of the usual “old guard” suspects–Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer–and a few of the younger stars, such as Allegra Goodman and Jonathan Rosen.  And then there are a few that don’t immediately come to mind: James McBride (remember The Color of Water?  The mother was Jewish.) and one Tillie Olsen (née Lerner), whom I must confess I’d not heard of before.  One of her short stories is called “I Stand Here Ironing.”  Certainly not something I’d ever write, unless I get into the fantasy genre!

I took the book off the shelves after Rena’s funeral, remembering when she gave it to me, and began to ponder whether the Jewish writer is just a writer who’s Jewish or a writer on Jewish subjects? Does being Jewish influence writing, even if the subject matter is not overtly Jewish?  Of course.  Just as the milieu, culture, heritage, and experiences of any writer influences his or her work.

But what’s a Jewish book?

A friend who got my web site launch email sent it on to someone else (and copied me on the chain) prefacing her message with “this is a Jewish book.”  Is Secrets of the Afikomen a Jewish book?  I have to say that bothered me a bit.  Not that I’m skittish about my identity or about writing on subject matter related to the Jewish experience.  Another friend, after reading the first chapter of a long-gone draft, told me that she thought I should change the looted art work in my book to a painting, rather than a Seder plate.  Both of these friends are Jewish.  What was their point?  Is this a book with a limited market because of its title or subject matter?

It’s true that the focal point is a treasured Jewish ritual item, but so what?  It’s also a great story about a woman of a certain age (ahem!), the intricacies of life and relationships in unique circumstances, and an important niche in Holocaust history that surfaces in the news even sixty-plus years later.  And, remember, there’s a nice romance thrown in.

I have to think that Exodus, The Red Tent, all of Daniel Silva’s books, Goodbye Columbus, Marjorie Morningstar, The Chosen…I could go on and on… Have these books only been read by Jews?  And let’s not get started on Dan Brown’s best-sellers.  I dare say there are plenty of Jews who’ve read those “Christian” books.

What do you think?  What’s the market for Secrets of the Afkomen?  Feel free to post a comment on this blog.

I don’t have my friend Rena to ask anymore.  Certainly she would have had an opinion.

Like everyone else at the auction, I was shocked by her outburst.  These auctions are sedate and refined.  Maybe not so fancy and formal as Sotheby’s or Christie’s–but low-key and dignified.  What shocked me most was how disgracefully everyone treated her, the people in the audience and the ones running the auction.  Sure, she interrupted the proceedings, but her charge was serious, at least serious enough for the Mosaica woman to withdraw the Seder plate and end the auction.  I couldn’t believe that no one talked to Lily or bothered to even ask about what she said; they just got up and left.  Totally shunned her on the way out. Without a glance her way.  Close to one hundred people.

I couldn’t let it go.  Or let her go.

I worked among looted art, as a private assigned to the Monuments Men, during my Army service right after World War II.  I knew there could be a scintilla of truth in what Lily said.  And I’m a Judaica collector–old manuscripts and books; do you think that between my Army experience and my years in the marketplace I’d never run into issues of questionable (a euphemism) provenance?  The aftermath of the Nazi years opened a Pandora’s box of art provenance problems. The work of the Monuments Men who sorted and tried to return art to its rightful pre-war owners could only go so far.   Let’s face it: a lot of those owners were in no position to claim their lost property.  Some of the art simply went back to countries of origin, including the U.S.S.R. and its affiliates, which plopped the Iron Curtain over it until recently. Plenty slipped through the cracks of pilfering or more outright crime.

And, I have to admit that it wasn’t just the collector in me who stopped to talk to Lily.  Here was a very attractive woman with a problem. Jumping up and screaming foul at the auction might not have been her finest moment, but my gut told me she wasn’t a nut case.  Of course, my approach–the clapping and show stopping remark–was far from my smoothest come-on, given the circumstances.  But when I backed off and apologized, she seemed receptive and forgiving.

I hope so.

My husband, Eli, and I recently spent a week in the Berkshire Mountain area of western Massachusetts.  It’s a bounty of glorious nature and culture: Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Jacob’s Pillow Dance Center; the fabulous Clark Art Institute; the Norman Rockwell Museum and others; theatre festivals.  We were busy and enjoyed it all.

The Berkshires are also home to such literary greats as Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton,…and Dr. Seuss!  But Sholem Aleichem? Glückel of Hamelin, Who knew?

No less revered by their readers in their time and locales were some of the great Yiddish writers, and, remarkably, their legacies are also preserved in the land of their American Lit peers.  The National Yiddish Book Center (http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/) sits on a lushly wooded site on the campus of Hampshire College, just outside Amherst, MA.  The center’s 37,000 square foot building architecturally resembles a shtetel synagogue.

The 1.5 million books were rescued by center founder, Aaron Lansky, a MacArthur Genius Award Fellow, who in 1980 started an effort to preserve Yiddish literature and books by advertising for and, along with volunteers, personally collecting truckloads. The ongoing vibrancy of the center lies in its efforts to revive and preserve not just the books themselves but the richness of the language and the writing and other culture it produced. Toward this end goes Steven Spielberg’s funding to digitize the physically deteriorating tomes, more of which still pour in every week.

*Eastern European village, where Yiddish speaking and reading Jews lived.
**Mother tongue.

I’ve used this as my (latest) working title, because my protagonist, Lily, gives her quest for the looted Seder plate a code name.  Lily is no Nancy Drew, VI Warshawski, or Aimée Leduc; she’s not a private investigator (either pro or amateur) or policewoman, just an ordinary Manhattan person who instigates a search over three continents when the missing object is something stolen from her family, Arguably, as a journalist she’s armed with skills applicable to this search.  And no shrinking violet is our Lily.  In fact, “Uncle,” Nachman Tanski, thinks codenaming it is way too cavalier for the seriousness of tracking old Nazis.  “This is not child’s play, like hunting for the Afikomen,” he says.

Secrets of the Afikomen is my fifth working title since I started to write the book.  In order they’ve been The Collector, Treasures & Values, Herbs Bitter & Sweet, and Return.  Here’s how I’ve traversed this part of the journey, and why:

The Collector: I was thinking Daniel Silva.  Most of his titles: The with Some Oblique Soubriquet: The Assassin, The Messenger, The Defector.  But I meant The Collector to refer to the Nachman Tanski character; in my early iterations of the book, he was a more influential player.  Besides, The Collector has been done and done in books and movies (including a new one, I think, but I still remember the Terrence Stamp/Samantha Eggar version).  However, The Collector lives! It’s still my computer file name for everything related to the book.

Treasures & Values harks to Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons thinking.  I’ve never read it and haven’t seen the movie (I only resorted to “reading” The Da Vinci Code on CD while recovering from a detached retina).  Dismissed early by prospective agent pitches.

Herbs Bitter & Sweet: Lily’s looking for a Seder plate.  Bitter herbs (maror) play a big role in the Seder ritual: usually, we use horseradish to depict the bitterness of life for the Hebrews under Pharoah, plus a bitter green vegetable and salt water to guarantee that we don’t forget that we were slaves.  Sweet—Lily’s story is not all bitter.  One agent thought this sounded like a book about organic food.  (Now I’m thinking it’s a potential title for a new Passover cookbook?)

Return: I love Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Saturday.  There is plenty of RETURN symbolism in the story, including the name of character Eliezer Ben Shuvah (Ben Shuvah in Hebrew meaning “son of return.”)  Pooh-poohed by another agent, who actually thought Herbs Bitter & Sweet wasn’t so bad.  (And you were wondering why this has been such a “trip”?)  Also, my developmental editor, Alan Rinzler, (www.alanrinzler.com) nixed it, too, and helped me select Secrets of the Afikomen from a list of possibilities.

If a book deal is in my future, it will be named whatever the publisher wants.