Larry Derfner's Blog
February 12, 2021
Review of my new memoir by Don Futterman on 'The Promised Podcast,' Feb. 11, 2021
Larry Derfner’s “Playing Till We Have to Go – A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” is a love letter to his father, to his childhood, to the black community and culture that nourished his soul, and to the entire multiethnic world of inner-city Los Angeles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This memoir is brisk, hilarious, moving and genuine.
A few things make “Playing Till We Have to Go” remarkable. First, Larry seems to have total recall. He remembers not just specific settings and incidents, but the shifting emotions he felt and the reactions of everyone involved. What astonishes is that these childhood years are not a blur. Larry documents the subtle passage of every stage of his transition from a runt to his hulking athletic prowess. In brief staccato dramas he marks out the shifting alliances and hierarchies of young children, with himself playing the fool or the villain as often as the hero. He can summon up his failures, his betrayals, his breakthroughs, his anxieties and also his bravado. This is a unique ability – to inhabit his 10-, 11-, or 12-year-old selves and to enliven the subtle variations. Age 10 is different from 11, which is distinct from 12 or 13. Anyone who has tried to recall childhood events that happened near each other in historical time knows how nearly impossible a feat this is. The reader feels that he or she has been granted directed access to Larry Derfner’s childhood. We can see later in the memoir how it continues to resonate in his psyche today.
A second extraordinary quality of this book is its directness. In this age of political correctness requiring seven levels of qualifications, and at a time when Jewish-black relations are fraught in America, Larry seems to have abandoned filters. He is blunt, uncensored and profoundly affectionate.
And third, unlike most accounts of American Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century, Derfner describes working-class urban Jewish life, not middle-class suburbia. Back before the Holocaust had a capital “H,” and before the term “survivors” had been universally adopted, Derfner’s parents, who had lost all of their own families, were distinguished from most of their refugee neighbors because the rest of them had been through the camps, but Larry’s parents had not. They were part of a tight-knit Jewish community of newcomers trying to rebuild their lives and families out of thin air in Los Angeles.
Derfner’s neighborhood was equal parts Jewish, African-American and Asian, with all three communities coexisting more or less fine in his telling. Larry spent many days in his father’s two liquor stores in the heart of black neighborhoods. There was integration in some areas of life, but school, home and work were separate turfs, and to some degree separate worlds. Larry straddled them all, paying the price occasionally when he tried to blur the boundaries, as when a customer’s apparent offer of friendship turned out to be a ploy to avoid paying his liquor bill.
Derfner’s father is the dominant figure in his life and in the book. He seems larger than life, an exuberant, compassionate, rough and ready man who built trust with his African-American customers, schmoozing and starring on his own stage. While never transgressing the accepted social boundaries, his father knew his clientele and cared deeply about them. Shoplifting, for example, was an occupational hazard, but when Larry’s father discovered a black employee stealing funds, rather than prosecute, he hoped he had used the money to advance himself in his own business.
In place of sepia-tinted nostalgia, Derfner offers the journalist’s eye for the telling detail, a commentator’s ability to succinctly create context and a memoirist’s willingness to expose his soul. And he slips from childhood avatar to cultural analyst with no apparent effort – in some cases, several times in the same page. Derfner is equally attentive to the sharp turn from the occasional hold-up to the more violent and dangerous robberies in his father’s stores as South L.A. started its descent into a gang-driven, drug-fueled enclave in which life became very cheap.
What comes through most powerfully is how much Larry laments to this day that his family, like most of the Jews, picked up stakes, moving up and out. Larry describes an encounter from his career as a journalist revisiting his old neighborhood, when black colleagues call him on his claim to identify as a local. Larry acknowledges that his family’s life in this community was transitory, unlike the experience of so many African-American residents, but Larry doesn’t miss it any the less.
I loved reading this book. It made me wish I had grown up in Larry Derfner’s universe.
A few things make “Playing Till We Have to Go” remarkable. First, Larry seems to have total recall. He remembers not just specific settings and incidents, but the shifting emotions he felt and the reactions of everyone involved. What astonishes is that these childhood years are not a blur. Larry documents the subtle passage of every stage of his transition from a runt to his hulking athletic prowess. In brief staccato dramas he marks out the shifting alliances and hierarchies of young children, with himself playing the fool or the villain as often as the hero. He can summon up his failures, his betrayals, his breakthroughs, his anxieties and also his bravado. This is a unique ability – to inhabit his 10-, 11-, or 12-year-old selves and to enliven the subtle variations. Age 10 is different from 11, which is distinct from 12 or 13. Anyone who has tried to recall childhood events that happened near each other in historical time knows how nearly impossible a feat this is. The reader feels that he or she has been granted directed access to Larry Derfner’s childhood. We can see later in the memoir how it continues to resonate in his psyche today.
A second extraordinary quality of this book is its directness. In this age of political correctness requiring seven levels of qualifications, and at a time when Jewish-black relations are fraught in America, Larry seems to have abandoned filters. He is blunt, uncensored and profoundly affectionate.
And third, unlike most accounts of American Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century, Derfner describes working-class urban Jewish life, not middle-class suburbia. Back before the Holocaust had a capital “H,” and before the term “survivors” had been universally adopted, Derfner’s parents, who had lost all of their own families, were distinguished from most of their refugee neighbors because the rest of them had been through the camps, but Larry’s parents had not. They were part of a tight-knit Jewish community of newcomers trying to rebuild their lives and families out of thin air in Los Angeles.
Derfner’s neighborhood was equal parts Jewish, African-American and Asian, with all three communities coexisting more or less fine in his telling. Larry spent many days in his father’s two liquor stores in the heart of black neighborhoods. There was integration in some areas of life, but school, home and work were separate turfs, and to some degree separate worlds. Larry straddled them all, paying the price occasionally when he tried to blur the boundaries, as when a customer’s apparent offer of friendship turned out to be a ploy to avoid paying his liquor bill.
Derfner’s father is the dominant figure in his life and in the book. He seems larger than life, an exuberant, compassionate, rough and ready man who built trust with his African-American customers, schmoozing and starring on his own stage. While never transgressing the accepted social boundaries, his father knew his clientele and cared deeply about them. Shoplifting, for example, was an occupational hazard, but when Larry’s father discovered a black employee stealing funds, rather than prosecute, he hoped he had used the money to advance himself in his own business.
In place of sepia-tinted nostalgia, Derfner offers the journalist’s eye for the telling detail, a commentator’s ability to succinctly create context and a memoirist’s willingness to expose his soul. And he slips from childhood avatar to cultural analyst with no apparent effort – in some cases, several times in the same page. Derfner is equally attentive to the sharp turn from the occasional hold-up to the more violent and dangerous robberies in his father’s stores as South L.A. started its descent into a gang-driven, drug-fueled enclave in which life became very cheap.
What comes through most powerfully is how much Larry laments to this day that his family, like most of the Jews, picked up stakes, moving up and out. Larry describes an encounter from his career as a journalist revisiting his old neighborhood, when black colleagues call him on his claim to identify as a local. Larry acknowledges that his family’s life in this community was transitory, unlike the experience of so many African-American residents, but Larry doesn’t miss it any the less.
I loved reading this book. It made me wish I had grown up in Larry Derfner’s universe.
December 25, 2020
Excerpt 3: 'Playing Till We Have to Go -- A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.'
From Chapter 1 (cont.)
Roy Mullins was scorned by my friends on the block. He was gentile, which put him at an unspoken distance, but there were plenty of gentiles who, at least on the surface, were not only one of us but held leadership status. They were good athletes, or funny, or combed their hair swept back, cursed exotically and knew things about the Hell’s Angels. Roy Mullins had none of those assets.
He was a tall, ungainly boy with messy, dirty blond hair whose clothes looked like his mother bought them at Thrifty, who couldn’t hold his own verbally in the “chop fights,” who didn’t get a lot of the jokes, and who, worst of all, spoke in a Midwestern drawl. All this branded him a poor, dumb hick. At first he was allowed to hang around with us, to play chase with everyone at night, but little by little he was deliberately left behind.
I remained friends with Roy, though. I was only eight or nine when I knew him, and I was a newcomer to L.A., innocent, uncoordinated, not exactly fat but anyway “husky,” and much younger than most of the kids I met. They accepted me because my parents were part of Rodeo Lane’s Polish Jewish mafia, and because I was smart, big for my age, good-hearted and harmless, but still I was only on the edge of the crowd.
On a Saturday or Sunday morning, all you had to do was go down into the street and you’d see kids you knew hanging around, trying to think of something to do, and you joined them. One morning I saw Roy and we started walking up the grassy mall, the centerpiece of the street, and saw a few boys from the gang in the courtyard in front of Robbie Frishman’s apartment. Just as we got there, one of the kids asked Robbie if they could sit around inside his house. Robbie, son of Leibel and Gita Frishman, was the golden-haired, preternaturally handsome son of the network’s first or second family, a princeling who was the object of everyone’s adoration, which made him modest and generous but also a little overwhelmed, a little unsure of how he was expected to conduct himself. He said we could come to his house, and we all turned to go.
“You’re not going to let Mullins come, are you?” one of the slicker kids asked Robbie.
We stopped, and no one said anything.
“Man, don’t let Mullins come, nobody wants him around. I can’t stand this kid,” said the mouthy boy, and he started walking toward Robbie’s apartment. He slowed to pick up Robbie, who now dutifully led the way, followed right behind by little Iago, then two or three other boys, then me, then Roy.
Robbie opened the door to his apartment and the other boys walked in. Roy and I were about to follow, but Robbie stood in the doorway and said to me, “You can come in, but not him.”
After a moment, I said, brokenly, “okay,” and Roy and I left. We didn’t feel like doing much after that, didn’t know what to say to each other, so Roy said he had to go home. After meandering around, I walked back to Robbie’s house and knocked on the door. He opened it and said, “What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
“Are you still playing with Mullins?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
Robbie shut the door.
Where did I get the guts to do that? I don’t know. Afterward, whenever I saw Roy, he was in the distance, on the other side of the mall, often by himself. At some point I heard he’d moved away. By then, the whole thing was long forgotten and I was back together with Robbie and the boys.
Roy Mullins was scorned by my friends on the block. He was gentile, which put him at an unspoken distance, but there were plenty of gentiles who, at least on the surface, were not only one of us but held leadership status. They were good athletes, or funny, or combed their hair swept back, cursed exotically and knew things about the Hell’s Angels. Roy Mullins had none of those assets.
He was a tall, ungainly boy with messy, dirty blond hair whose clothes looked like his mother bought them at Thrifty, who couldn’t hold his own verbally in the “chop fights,” who didn’t get a lot of the jokes, and who, worst of all, spoke in a Midwestern drawl. All this branded him a poor, dumb hick. At first he was allowed to hang around with us, to play chase with everyone at night, but little by little he was deliberately left behind.
I remained friends with Roy, though. I was only eight or nine when I knew him, and I was a newcomer to L.A., innocent, uncoordinated, not exactly fat but anyway “husky,” and much younger than most of the kids I met. They accepted me because my parents were part of Rodeo Lane’s Polish Jewish mafia, and because I was smart, big for my age, good-hearted and harmless, but still I was only on the edge of the crowd.
On a Saturday or Sunday morning, all you had to do was go down into the street and you’d see kids you knew hanging around, trying to think of something to do, and you joined them. One morning I saw Roy and we started walking up the grassy mall, the centerpiece of the street, and saw a few boys from the gang in the courtyard in front of Robbie Frishman’s apartment. Just as we got there, one of the kids asked Robbie if they could sit around inside his house. Robbie, son of Leibel and Gita Frishman, was the golden-haired, preternaturally handsome son of the network’s first or second family, a princeling who was the object of everyone’s adoration, which made him modest and generous but also a little overwhelmed, a little unsure of how he was expected to conduct himself. He said we could come to his house, and we all turned to go.
“You’re not going to let Mullins come, are you?” one of the slicker kids asked Robbie.
We stopped, and no one said anything.
“Man, don’t let Mullins come, nobody wants him around. I can’t stand this kid,” said the mouthy boy, and he started walking toward Robbie’s apartment. He slowed to pick up Robbie, who now dutifully led the way, followed right behind by little Iago, then two or three other boys, then me, then Roy.
Robbie opened the door to his apartment and the other boys walked in. Roy and I were about to follow, but Robbie stood in the doorway and said to me, “You can come in, but not him.”
After a moment, I said, brokenly, “okay,” and Roy and I left. We didn’t feel like doing much after that, didn’t know what to say to each other, so Roy said he had to go home. After meandering around, I walked back to Robbie’s house and knocked on the door. He opened it and said, “What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
“Are you still playing with Mullins?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
Robbie shut the door.
Where did I get the guts to do that? I don’t know. Afterward, whenever I saw Roy, he was in the distance, on the other side of the mall, often by himself. At some point I heard he’d moved away. By then, the whole thing was long forgotten and I was back together with Robbie and the boys.
December 23, 2020
Excerpt 2: 'Playing Till We Have to Go -- A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.'
From Chapter 1 (cont.)
The Birnbaums were the token American Jewish family in our crowd on Rodeo Lane, the street running through our two-story, vanilla-and-rainbow-sherbet apartment project in south L.A.’s lower-middle-class Crenshaw area. All the others in our circle, about 20 families, were Holocaust survivors, except for my parents, who were Holocaust escapees.
Because she was American, and maybe because she was the only one of the women who worked, they designated Jean Birnbaum, a tall, kind, somewhat harried woman, as perennial chairwoman of their charity, Women’s ORT, which built trade schools in Israel. When it was my mother’s turn (Sheindl, Sylvia to Americans) to host the monthly meeting, I’d lay in bed, unable to sleep because of the din from the living room, and the only words I could make out was “girls, girls!” – which was Jean calling them to order in an authoritative, nasal voice.
Other than the eastern Europeans (nearly all Poles), there were very few Jews in our neighborhood. In the early ‘60s, Jews in L.A. weren’t living in lower-middle-class apartment projects on the south side, paying $100 or so rent – except for our former Holocaust-refugee parents and the Birnbaums. And unlike Jean, the ex-refugee wives didn’t work; the husbands owned little stores of one kind or another, and the mothers stayed home with the kids. (America had some economy in the early ‘60s.)
When the crowd gathered in someone’s apartment for a noisy evening (without benefit of more than one drink per person), the men would sit at the dining room table and talk business while the women sat on the couches and talked about whatever they talked about – except Gita Frishman, an exceptionally strong-minded, ambitious woman who at some point would go sit at the table with the men. She influenced my father’s business decisions more than anyone else.
Jean’s husband, Morris, didn’t own a store; he was a salesman or office worker, in his 40s like the rest. I liked him; he had an easy, warm smile to go with his horn-rimmed glasses, and his American accent made him seem younger than the others, more like me. During that time he had a nervous breakdown, the first and worst “scandal” to happen in our neighborhood during the five years we lived there. Everybody knew about it – he had run down Rodeo Lane in his underwear – and it was spoken of only briefly, in muted voices.
After Morris was said to have recovered, my parents invited the Birnbaums to our place one evening. I remember the usual laughing and joking among the adults, then at some point Morris came over and sat down next to me on the couch, and began talking about the Pope. “You see how his hands are clasped? Positive and negative. He’s in balance.” I was 11 or 12, and I nodded attentively, out of politeness. Poor guy.
The Birnbaums were the token American Jewish family in our crowd on Rodeo Lane, the street running through our two-story, vanilla-and-rainbow-sherbet apartment project in south L.A.’s lower-middle-class Crenshaw area. All the others in our circle, about 20 families, were Holocaust survivors, except for my parents, who were Holocaust escapees.
Because she was American, and maybe because she was the only one of the women who worked, they designated Jean Birnbaum, a tall, kind, somewhat harried woman, as perennial chairwoman of their charity, Women’s ORT, which built trade schools in Israel. When it was my mother’s turn (Sheindl, Sylvia to Americans) to host the monthly meeting, I’d lay in bed, unable to sleep because of the din from the living room, and the only words I could make out was “girls, girls!” – which was Jean calling them to order in an authoritative, nasal voice.
Other than the eastern Europeans (nearly all Poles), there were very few Jews in our neighborhood. In the early ‘60s, Jews in L.A. weren’t living in lower-middle-class apartment projects on the south side, paying $100 or so rent – except for our former Holocaust-refugee parents and the Birnbaums. And unlike Jean, the ex-refugee wives didn’t work; the husbands owned little stores of one kind or another, and the mothers stayed home with the kids. (America had some economy in the early ‘60s.)
When the crowd gathered in someone’s apartment for a noisy evening (without benefit of more than one drink per person), the men would sit at the dining room table and talk business while the women sat on the couches and talked about whatever they talked about – except Gita Frishman, an exceptionally strong-minded, ambitious woman who at some point would go sit at the table with the men. She influenced my father’s business decisions more than anyone else.
Jean’s husband, Morris, didn’t own a store; he was a salesman or office worker, in his 40s like the rest. I liked him; he had an easy, warm smile to go with his horn-rimmed glasses, and his American accent made him seem younger than the others, more like me. During that time he had a nervous breakdown, the first and worst “scandal” to happen in our neighborhood during the five years we lived there. Everybody knew about it – he had run down Rodeo Lane in his underwear – and it was spoken of only briefly, in muted voices.
After Morris was said to have recovered, my parents invited the Birnbaums to our place one evening. I remember the usual laughing and joking among the adults, then at some point Morris came over and sat down next to me on the couch, and began talking about the Pope. “You see how his hands are clasped? Positive and negative. He’s in balance.” I was 11 or 12, and I nodded attentively, out of politeness. Poor guy.
December 21, 2020
Excerpt 1: ‘Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.’
This memoir is basically a love story. A story of thwarted love.
Prologue
Five months after I finished writing this memoir, George Floyd was killed. Since then, white racism, black people, white people and race relations have become a primary preoccupation for America, and not just America. This book deals a whole lot with those issues, as they played out in the first half of the 1960s in my neighborhood in South Los Angeles, at school, at my father’s liquor store in the ghetto.
But, as you already might have guessed by my lower-case spelling of “black” and use of the word “ghetto,” I do not look back and write about that time from an orthodox, “Black Lives Matter” perspective. For one, the things I write about black people – and about white people, Asians and Jews, all of whom were part of that scene – are not necessarily the “right” things. What I did try to write were the true things, the things I really saw and heard, that I really thought and felt. My purpose here is not to show what a good person I am, not to convince anyone to vote for me, not to present a model for enlightened thought and behavior, but to tell the truth about an unusual corner of life, to record an unrecorded passage of history.
Black people are a major presence in this memoir, but they are not the protagonists. The protagonists are Jews – me, my family, my friends and their families. But in one way, I suppose the story does reflect the current, post-George-Floyd perspective: Black people play an absolutely crucial part in the lives of the white people in the settings I describe, in their mentality – above all, in mine. African-Americans still figure strongly in my thinking about politics, society, music, language, humor – and I’ve lived halfway across the world from America for the whole second half of my life.
Is this story “relevant”? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t try to make it so. It’s just a story I’ve wanted to tell in detail for decades because I think it’s a colorful one with distinctive personalities and plenty happening both on and beneath the surface; because it’s about a way of life that doesn’t and can’t exist anymore, if for no other reason than it’s peopled with Holocaust survivors and escapees in their 40s; because I wanted to capture that past life in words, to memorialize it as vividly as I could; and frankly because I wanted to relive those years in my mind, day after day after day. I stretched out the writing of this book – it took me nearly two years, which comes to a rate of about 500 words a week. There was definitely something masturbatory about the process. I freely admit that I am a nostalgia freak, and what I’ve written here is a memoir of my own Paradise Lost.
It’s basically a love story. A story of thwarted love.
% % % % %
From Chapter 1
My father padded into the liquor store carrying a case of 48 half-pints of cheap Ambassador scotch easily on his right shoulder. He was dressed for comfort as usual in a pale short-sleeve shirt, gabardine trousers and roomy orthopedic shoes. Two or three winos stood in the parking strip next to the entrance, drinking from “short dogs” of Gallo or Italian Swiss Colony wrapped in paper bags, and nodded to him as he went inside.
“Hey, Manny,” said the clerk behind the counter. (To Americans, Pop was Manny; to fellow East European Jews, Meilech.)
“Hiya, Don,” he said. “So I hear you won the pool.” He meant the pool among the clerks at his liquor store for each game of the 1963 World Series, with the money going to whoever picked the correct total score.
“Yeah. I won the pool down at the sheriff’s station, too.” Don was a sheriff’s deputy at a station further southeast, near Watts. He moonlighted at the store, Handy Liquor, which was well into the south L.A. ghetto but not as deep as Watts. Like all but a couple of the clerks my father hired over the years, Don was black.
My father whistled. “Two pools? You lucky so-and-so. What did you do,” he said to Don in his slightly Yiddish-accented baritone, “step in your own shit?” as he ferried the case of scotch into the storage room.
Don laughed, but he didn’t get it, of course. Neither did I, being a young American kid. When did stepping in your own shit bring you luck? Where did this expression come from, where did Pop hear this? It sounded like some old Polish legend about a fisherman who hadn’t caught a fish in weeks, and then one morning he accidentally steps in his own shit on the way to the lake and catches 19 trout or something. And now my earthy, Polish Jewish father, a 5’6” ball of strength, comfortable in his own skin wherever he goes, makes his daily entrance at the liquor store, whistling, and passes the saying on to Don, who went and spread it through Watts. Or at least I like to think he did.
Prologue
Five months after I finished writing this memoir, George Floyd was killed. Since then, white racism, black people, white people and race relations have become a primary preoccupation for America, and not just America. This book deals a whole lot with those issues, as they played out in the first half of the 1960s in my neighborhood in South Los Angeles, at school, at my father’s liquor store in the ghetto.
But, as you already might have guessed by my lower-case spelling of “black” and use of the word “ghetto,” I do not look back and write about that time from an orthodox, “Black Lives Matter” perspective. For one, the things I write about black people – and about white people, Asians and Jews, all of whom were part of that scene – are not necessarily the “right” things. What I did try to write were the true things, the things I really saw and heard, that I really thought and felt. My purpose here is not to show what a good person I am, not to convince anyone to vote for me, not to present a model for enlightened thought and behavior, but to tell the truth about an unusual corner of life, to record an unrecorded passage of history.
Black people are a major presence in this memoir, but they are not the protagonists. The protagonists are Jews – me, my family, my friends and their families. But in one way, I suppose the story does reflect the current, post-George-Floyd perspective: Black people play an absolutely crucial part in the lives of the white people in the settings I describe, in their mentality – above all, in mine. African-Americans still figure strongly in my thinking about politics, society, music, language, humor – and I’ve lived halfway across the world from America for the whole second half of my life.
Is this story “relevant”? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t try to make it so. It’s just a story I’ve wanted to tell in detail for decades because I think it’s a colorful one with distinctive personalities and plenty happening both on and beneath the surface; because it’s about a way of life that doesn’t and can’t exist anymore, if for no other reason than it’s peopled with Holocaust survivors and escapees in their 40s; because I wanted to capture that past life in words, to memorialize it as vividly as I could; and frankly because I wanted to relive those years in my mind, day after day after day. I stretched out the writing of this book – it took me nearly two years, which comes to a rate of about 500 words a week. There was definitely something masturbatory about the process. I freely admit that I am a nostalgia freak, and what I’ve written here is a memoir of my own Paradise Lost.
It’s basically a love story. A story of thwarted love.
% % % % %
From Chapter 1
My father padded into the liquor store carrying a case of 48 half-pints of cheap Ambassador scotch easily on his right shoulder. He was dressed for comfort as usual in a pale short-sleeve shirt, gabardine trousers and roomy orthopedic shoes. Two or three winos stood in the parking strip next to the entrance, drinking from “short dogs” of Gallo or Italian Swiss Colony wrapped in paper bags, and nodded to him as he went inside.
“Hey, Manny,” said the clerk behind the counter. (To Americans, Pop was Manny; to fellow East European Jews, Meilech.)
“Hiya, Don,” he said. “So I hear you won the pool.” He meant the pool among the clerks at his liquor store for each game of the 1963 World Series, with the money going to whoever picked the correct total score.
“Yeah. I won the pool down at the sheriff’s station, too.” Don was a sheriff’s deputy at a station further southeast, near Watts. He moonlighted at the store, Handy Liquor, which was well into the south L.A. ghetto but not as deep as Watts. Like all but a couple of the clerks my father hired over the years, Don was black.
My father whistled. “Two pools? You lucky so-and-so. What did you do,” he said to Don in his slightly Yiddish-accented baritone, “step in your own shit?” as he ferried the case of scotch into the storage room.
Don laughed, but he didn’t get it, of course. Neither did I, being a young American kid. When did stepping in your own shit bring you luck? Where did this expression come from, where did Pop hear this? It sounded like some old Polish legend about a fisherman who hadn’t caught a fish in weeks, and then one morning he accidentally steps in his own shit on the way to the lake and catches 19 trout or something. And now my earthy, Polish Jewish father, a 5’6” ball of strength, comfortable in his own skin wherever he goes, makes his daily entrance at the liquor store, whistling, and passes the saying on to Don, who went and spread it through Watts. Or at least I like to think he did.
December 14, 2020
December 9, 2020
How I wrote two memoirs in the last four years -- after 23 years of false starts. Final episode
The new memoir, “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.,” was such a pleasure to write that I took my sweet time. Getting there, though, involved a whole lot of failure.
When we left off in Part 4, I’d finished my first memoir, “No Country for Jewish Liberals,” which was tied to a very popular topic, Israel. Now I was wondering how to get the reader interested in a second memoir that wasn’t tied to anything beyond my childhood in early-’60s Los Angeles.
I’d wanted to write this new memoir ever since I started thinking seriously about writing a book, nearly 30 years ago. The first half of the 1960s, when we lived in a lower-middle-class apartment project and my father ran a liquor store in the ghetto, was vivid, eventful, new and magical like no other time in my life except my arrival in Israel, and the people I’d lived it with and was still friends with said they felt the same way. Plus, that period for me was set mainly on a little street in South L.A. where “our crowd” included about 20 families of Holocaust survivors, and in a district, Crenshaw, that was integrated — among blacks, whites and Asians — to an extent that was completely anomalous for that era in America. So on paper there were elements for a story that would be about more than just my little childhood.
But what was that story? What was the “narrative arc,” and what was the point? Unlike everything I’d written before, this was a story I wanted to tell, yet had nothing to say about it. It was a set of twinkling images in my mind, filled with great characters, little adventures, some danger, laughter, tears, and I wanted to capture it all in words, to recreate it — but I had nothing to say about this passage in my life except that it was interesting, it was great, I missed it, which was to say nothing.
And so I had to invent a narrative arc and a point. Which I did: The book does tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it does make a point, or points. Accomplishing the first goal was relatively easy — the story is chronological, starting in the middle, then moving backward, then moving forward, similar to “No Country.” Figuring out the point, the meaning, of the story involved thinking about myself, my parents, my friends, money, class, race, America, modern Jewish history and other issues. It meant judging myself, judging the people I loved, judging Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, and it meant being prepared to render a guilty or innocent verdict, case by case.
So it turned out that once I began to think deeply about my material, I found that I did indeed something to say about it — lots, in fact.
And I made all my points about my story, I felt, as always, that I had to make one final, overarching point about it, which I finally came to at the end of the Prologue, the last part of the book I wrote:
It’s basically a love story. A story of thwarted love.
“Playing” has been out for a month, and so far the reactions from readers have been everything I could have asked for; we’ll see how well it does. Myself, I’m happy with the book. Like “No Country,” it’s the memoir I had vaguely in mind all those years. This is the pair of books I’d always wanted to write — and I have no others in mind. I’ll probably try to write some more essays, but my book-writing days, my long gallops, may be over. It’s sad. But I’m so grateful for having had those two rides.
When we left off in Part 4, I’d finished my first memoir, “No Country for Jewish Liberals,” which was tied to a very popular topic, Israel. Now I was wondering how to get the reader interested in a second memoir that wasn’t tied to anything beyond my childhood in early-’60s Los Angeles.
I’d wanted to write this new memoir ever since I started thinking seriously about writing a book, nearly 30 years ago. The first half of the 1960s, when we lived in a lower-middle-class apartment project and my father ran a liquor store in the ghetto, was vivid, eventful, new and magical like no other time in my life except my arrival in Israel, and the people I’d lived it with and was still friends with said they felt the same way. Plus, that period for me was set mainly on a little street in South L.A. where “our crowd” included about 20 families of Holocaust survivors, and in a district, Crenshaw, that was integrated — among blacks, whites and Asians — to an extent that was completely anomalous for that era in America. So on paper there were elements for a story that would be about more than just my little childhood.
But what was that story? What was the “narrative arc,” and what was the point? Unlike everything I’d written before, this was a story I wanted to tell, yet had nothing to say about it. It was a set of twinkling images in my mind, filled with great characters, little adventures, some danger, laughter, tears, and I wanted to capture it all in words, to recreate it — but I had nothing to say about this passage in my life except that it was interesting, it was great, I missed it, which was to say nothing.
And so I had to invent a narrative arc and a point. Which I did: The book does tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it does make a point, or points. Accomplishing the first goal was relatively easy — the story is chronological, starting in the middle, then moving backward, then moving forward, similar to “No Country.” Figuring out the point, the meaning, of the story involved thinking about myself, my parents, my friends, money, class, race, America, modern Jewish history and other issues. It meant judging myself, judging the people I loved, judging Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, and it meant being prepared to render a guilty or innocent verdict, case by case.
So it turned out that once I began to think deeply about my material, I found that I did indeed something to say about it — lots, in fact.
And I made all my points about my story, I felt, as always, that I had to make one final, overarching point about it, which I finally came to at the end of the Prologue, the last part of the book I wrote:
It’s basically a love story. A story of thwarted love.
“Playing” has been out for a month, and so far the reactions from readers have been everything I could have asked for; we’ll see how well it does. Myself, I’m happy with the book. Like “No Country,” it’s the memoir I had vaguely in mind all those years. This is the pair of books I’d always wanted to write — and I have no others in mind. I’ll probably try to write some more essays, but my book-writing days, my long gallops, may be over. It’s sad. But I’m so grateful for having had those two rides.
December 3, 2020
How I wrote two memoirs in the last four years -- after 23 years of false starts. Part 4
The new memoir, “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.,” was such a pleasure to write that I took my sweet time. Getting there, though, involved a whole lot of failure.
When we left off in Part 3, I’d finally, for the first time since starting to try writing a memoir set in Israel, finished the first chapter.
From the outset of the writing, I made a couple of basic decisions: First, that I didn’t want to write a book for people who didn’t know the ABCs about Israel, I didn’t want to have to write, “Israel is a sliver of land about the size of Wales with a hot, dry climate …” I didn’t want to say anything obvious. The audience I had in mind were my Facebook friends, who have a very high level of knowledge about Israel, and I would not mention any fact or state any opinion that they would consider banal.
Second, this was not to be a book about my life, but about the development of my outlook on Israel — so only the experiences that had influenced that development would merit inclusion in the book. I actually ended up leaving out the single most dramatic thing that’s ever happened to me in Israel — that time in 1994 when I almost got lynched in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jericho — because it didn’t change my thinking about Palestinians or the occupation. Personally, it was a hell of an experience, but politically it said nothing new to me, so it didn’t go into the book. (I’m still not sure, though, if that was the right decision.)
I also found an anchor for my writing, a clear image of what I was writing to whom and why. I visualized one of my sister Suzie’s friends, a woman I’d met, an American Jew of about 60 who loved Israel and had traditional views about it, but who was curious and eager to learn. We’re sitting in the kitchen of Suzie’s former house and she asks me, “You left America to go live in Israel — how did you become so critical of it, so angry at it?” That was the question I would answer, and the answer would stand not just for me, but for a large number of Jews in Israel.
After so many failed attempts, I naturally was spooked in a number of ways about writing the book. I worried that I didn’t have enough good anecdotal material, that I didn’t have enough good quotes, that my characters and scenes were too fleeting and shallow. These and other fears had brought me up short many times: A problem would arise in the writing — my memory was too spotty, the story wasn’t eventful or interesting enough, I don’t know enough about the issue, etc. etc. — and I’d conclude that my memoir had landed in the ditch, again, and I had to make a new plan.
But this time I discovered something — problems in writing a book can be solved, they don’t have to be fatal. If an anecdote to illustrate a point doesn’t come immediately to mind, think harder, or think of something you can use as a substitute. If there’s too much “I” in the story, or too much explanation, fix it, change it, use something else. Once I got around two or three of these ditches, I gained the confidence that future obstacles could be overcome too.
But I didn’t know if what I was writing was any good or not — which was something I always knew when writing an op-ed or feature story. This sort of writing I was doing now — book length, braiding different strands of narrative — was brand new for me, and I couldn’t stand outside the manuscript and judge it. An old worry I’d had was that by trying to combine the political and the personal, I would fail and end up writing two halves of two books instead of one complete book, or even three thirds of three books. I was afraid it wouldn’t hang together.
So I asked a few people whose opinions I respected to read the first chapter or two — and they liked it. They had criticisms, but the main thing was that they did not find it boring. Or pointless, or aimless. They found it entirely readable! This was the most important thing for me to know, because I had enough confidence in my writing to believe that if the book was readable — if it was not the sort of thing you throw out and start over, like I did with any number of op-eds and features before getting them right — then it would be a good book. And if one person could say he liked it, others would too.
I kept moving forward, breaking the topics in my outline into subtopics and sub-subtopics, jotting down the things I wanted to say about each one before writing, just like I had with op-eds and features. I set myself a goal of writing 500 words a day, five days a week, and pretty much kept to it. The night that I could see the end approaching for the third chapter — which, as I wrote earlier, was the point at which I’d know I could finish the book — I work up very early, unable to sleep, went to the computer and bashed out the final 1,500 words of Chapter Three.
I knew a publisher, Helena Cobban of the small, left-wing Just World Books, and she was interested in publishing it. “What sold me was your working title,” she said of “No Country for Jewish Liberals.” I sent her chapters as I finished them, and ended up finishing the book, which ran 90,000 words, in 9-1/2 months — only two weeks longer than I’d planned at the very start.
It only sold about 600 copies, which was a big disappointment, but it got about a dozen reviews, all but one of them good, and great reactions from readers, not to mention from my family and friends. The pleasure and sense of accomplishment I got from writing it was everything I’d imagined. And the book was everything I’d hoped for — the one I’d had vaguely in mind all those years. It was as good a memoir set in Israel as I was capable of writing.
Afterwards, I wrote some memoiristic essays from my earlier life in America, and they weren’t bad, so I figured I was ready to write that other memoir I’d tried and failed to do so many times: the one about my childhood with Holocaust survivors, blacks, Asians and working-class whites in Los Angeles in the early ’60s, the most magical time of my life, the period I’d covered briefly in Chapter Two of “No Country.”
On one hand, it would be easier now that I had my first memoir under my belt. On the other hand, it would be harder: Masses of people are interested in Israel, so you’ve got a head-start in writing a memoir, especially a heavily political one, that’s set there. How do you get readers interested in a book-length memoir about a time in your life and the life of a community that’s set on Rodeo Lane, a little, unknown street in L.A.? To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
When we left off in Part 3, I’d finally, for the first time since starting to try writing a memoir set in Israel, finished the first chapter.
From the outset of the writing, I made a couple of basic decisions: First, that I didn’t want to write a book for people who didn’t know the ABCs about Israel, I didn’t want to have to write, “Israel is a sliver of land about the size of Wales with a hot, dry climate …” I didn’t want to say anything obvious. The audience I had in mind were my Facebook friends, who have a very high level of knowledge about Israel, and I would not mention any fact or state any opinion that they would consider banal.
Second, this was not to be a book about my life, but about the development of my outlook on Israel — so only the experiences that had influenced that development would merit inclusion in the book. I actually ended up leaving out the single most dramatic thing that’s ever happened to me in Israel — that time in 1994 when I almost got lynched in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jericho — because it didn’t change my thinking about Palestinians or the occupation. Personally, it was a hell of an experience, but politically it said nothing new to me, so it didn’t go into the book. (I’m still not sure, though, if that was the right decision.)
I also found an anchor for my writing, a clear image of what I was writing to whom and why. I visualized one of my sister Suzie’s friends, a woman I’d met, an American Jew of about 60 who loved Israel and had traditional views about it, but who was curious and eager to learn. We’re sitting in the kitchen of Suzie’s former house and she asks me, “You left America to go live in Israel — how did you become so critical of it, so angry at it?” That was the question I would answer, and the answer would stand not just for me, but for a large number of Jews in Israel.
After so many failed attempts, I naturally was spooked in a number of ways about writing the book. I worried that I didn’t have enough good anecdotal material, that I didn’t have enough good quotes, that my characters and scenes were too fleeting and shallow. These and other fears had brought me up short many times: A problem would arise in the writing — my memory was too spotty, the story wasn’t eventful or interesting enough, I don’t know enough about the issue, etc. etc. — and I’d conclude that my memoir had landed in the ditch, again, and I had to make a new plan.
But this time I discovered something — problems in writing a book can be solved, they don’t have to be fatal. If an anecdote to illustrate a point doesn’t come immediately to mind, think harder, or think of something you can use as a substitute. If there’s too much “I” in the story, or too much explanation, fix it, change it, use something else. Once I got around two or three of these ditches, I gained the confidence that future obstacles could be overcome too.
But I didn’t know if what I was writing was any good or not — which was something I always knew when writing an op-ed or feature story. This sort of writing I was doing now — book length, braiding different strands of narrative — was brand new for me, and I couldn’t stand outside the manuscript and judge it. An old worry I’d had was that by trying to combine the political and the personal, I would fail and end up writing two halves of two books instead of one complete book, or even three thirds of three books. I was afraid it wouldn’t hang together.
So I asked a few people whose opinions I respected to read the first chapter or two — and they liked it. They had criticisms, but the main thing was that they did not find it boring. Or pointless, or aimless. They found it entirely readable! This was the most important thing for me to know, because I had enough confidence in my writing to believe that if the book was readable — if it was not the sort of thing you throw out and start over, like I did with any number of op-eds and features before getting them right — then it would be a good book. And if one person could say he liked it, others would too.
I kept moving forward, breaking the topics in my outline into subtopics and sub-subtopics, jotting down the things I wanted to say about each one before writing, just like I had with op-eds and features. I set myself a goal of writing 500 words a day, five days a week, and pretty much kept to it. The night that I could see the end approaching for the third chapter — which, as I wrote earlier, was the point at which I’d know I could finish the book — I work up very early, unable to sleep, went to the computer and bashed out the final 1,500 words of Chapter Three.
I knew a publisher, Helena Cobban of the small, left-wing Just World Books, and she was interested in publishing it. “What sold me was your working title,” she said of “No Country for Jewish Liberals.” I sent her chapters as I finished them, and ended up finishing the book, which ran 90,000 words, in 9-1/2 months — only two weeks longer than I’d planned at the very start.
It only sold about 600 copies, which was a big disappointment, but it got about a dozen reviews, all but one of them good, and great reactions from readers, not to mention from my family and friends. The pleasure and sense of accomplishment I got from writing it was everything I’d imagined. And the book was everything I’d hoped for — the one I’d had vaguely in mind all those years. It was as good a memoir set in Israel as I was capable of writing.
Afterwards, I wrote some memoiristic essays from my earlier life in America, and they weren’t bad, so I figured I was ready to write that other memoir I’d tried and failed to do so many times: the one about my childhood with Holocaust survivors, blacks, Asians and working-class whites in Los Angeles in the early ’60s, the most magical time of my life, the period I’d covered briefly in Chapter Two of “No Country.”
On one hand, it would be easier now that I had my first memoir under my belt. On the other hand, it would be harder: Masses of people are interested in Israel, so you’ve got a head-start in writing a memoir, especially a heavily political one, that’s set there. How do you get readers interested in a book-length memoir about a time in your life and the life of a community that’s set on Rodeo Lane, a little, unknown street in L.A.? To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
November 30, 2020
How I wrote two memoirs in the last four years -- after 23 years of false starts. Part 3
The new memoir, “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.,” was such a pleasure to write that I took my sweet time. Getting there, though, involved a whole lot of failure.
When we left off in Part 2, it was the start of 2015 and I was about to take a last stab at writing a memoir set in Israel by combining the three threads I’d tried to develop separately, and unsuccessfully, into a memoir — the story of my experiences, the story of my reportage, and the story of my changing political ideas.
I took all my millions of notes and started to arrange them in chapters, chronologically — knowing that this wasn’t the final outline, but a place to start. And I knew I needed to start the story in the present, so my first chapter would begin with Modi’in, the new city where I’d been living with my wife and two children since 1997. It had been built as Israel’s “city of the future,” the symbol of the Rabin government’s vision of Israel at peace: a modern, happy, “normal” country. Eighteen years later, when I started writing the book, Rabin’s vision was shattered but Modi’in, and Israel in general, was modern, happy, normal, secure — and utterly complacent, politically anaesthetized. Plus, of course, Modi’in was where I lived, so it would be a perfect opening for a story that was political and personal, and whose take on Israel was mainly critical, often harshly so, but in many ways appreciative, too.
My notes on the opening Modi’in section were a long list of every item — be it experience, reportage or opinion — that I thought might be relevant and interesting: examples of quality of life; the West Bank a kilometer away; absence of crime; high army motivation among youth; the “Modi’in Salutes the Army” banners during the 2006 war in Lebanon; the collection box at the neighborhood grocery store for the family of a local boy killed in the 2014 Gaza war; my original, naive hope that Modi’in would be like the workers’ cooperative project in the Bronx where we used to visit my Aunt Rose in the ’50s; and on and on. I wanted to show Modi’in’s evolution over the past 20 years as a microcosm of Israel’s — changing from a vision of Jewish-Arab peace into Pleasant Valley Sunday. I wrote the opening paragraph:
It’s kind of embarrassing to remember the dreams I had for Modi’in, the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) where my pregnant wife, Philippa, and I bought an apartment off the blueprints in 1995. And when I think of the dreams the Rabin government of the time had for it, I can hardly believe they, or the rest of us, were really living in Israel, seeing how this country has long since stopped dreaming.
From there, I wrote about Modi’in and me — how it began with my writing stories about the government’s audacious plans for the city, and why my wife and I decided to move there from Tel Aviv, and soon I realized that I needed … a nut graf! What is this book about? What is my point? — the reader’s running out of patience. So I decided not to screw around, but to make the book’s very first sentence the nut graf, and I wrote at the top:
This is a political and personal story about Israel, about how over the years it went one way and I went the other.
Simple, direct — it did the job. Then I saw I needed another sentence to transition to the opening about Modi’in, so I moved a few details up from my original first paragraph and wrote this:
I’m going to start where I live, literally — in the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) of Modi’in, which is truly a showcase Israeli community.
Then I picked up with my previous opening paragraph, and I was off. I wrote about Modi’in, Israel and myself mainly in the present, treating the first chapter as an Introduction. In the second chapter I wanted to go back to the beginning, to talk about my parents, my upbringing in New York and Los Angeles, the shaping and changing of my political views, my “Jewish identity,” such as it was — the whole preamble to my moving to Israel, where the rest of the memoir would be set. I titled the first chapter “Introduction: City of the Future,” and ended it:
Israel, which has given my family and me
a great life, has turned into what I would call a morally failed state. It didn’t used to be that, not by any means, but that’s what it’s become.
How did it get to this point? How did my opinions about it get to this point? To try to explain, first, where I’m coming from, I’ll answer that hoariest of conversation-starters among new immigrants: Why did you move to Israel?
After 23 years, I’d finally written my first whole chapter. For some reason, I’d got it into my head that if I finished the first chapter, I had a 20% chance of finishing the book; if I finished the first two chapters, I had a 50% chance; and if I finished the first three chapters, it was a virtual certainty I’d go all the way. Which meant, as far as I was concerned, that I now had a 20% chance of becoming an author. To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
When we left off in Part 2, it was the start of 2015 and I was about to take a last stab at writing a memoir set in Israel by combining the three threads I’d tried to develop separately, and unsuccessfully, into a memoir — the story of my experiences, the story of my reportage, and the story of my changing political ideas.
I took all my millions of notes and started to arrange them in chapters, chronologically — knowing that this wasn’t the final outline, but a place to start. And I knew I needed to start the story in the present, so my first chapter would begin with Modi’in, the new city where I’d been living with my wife and two children since 1997. It had been built as Israel’s “city of the future,” the symbol of the Rabin government’s vision of Israel at peace: a modern, happy, “normal” country. Eighteen years later, when I started writing the book, Rabin’s vision was shattered but Modi’in, and Israel in general, was modern, happy, normal, secure — and utterly complacent, politically anaesthetized. Plus, of course, Modi’in was where I lived, so it would be a perfect opening for a story that was political and personal, and whose take on Israel was mainly critical, often harshly so, but in many ways appreciative, too.
My notes on the opening Modi’in section were a long list of every item — be it experience, reportage or opinion — that I thought might be relevant and interesting: examples of quality of life; the West Bank a kilometer away; absence of crime; high army motivation among youth; the “Modi’in Salutes the Army” banners during the 2006 war in Lebanon; the collection box at the neighborhood grocery store for the family of a local boy killed in the 2014 Gaza war; my original, naive hope that Modi’in would be like the workers’ cooperative project in the Bronx where we used to visit my Aunt Rose in the ’50s; and on and on. I wanted to show Modi’in’s evolution over the past 20 years as a microcosm of Israel’s — changing from a vision of Jewish-Arab peace into Pleasant Valley Sunday. I wrote the opening paragraph:
It’s kind of embarrassing to remember the dreams I had for Modi’in, the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) where my pregnant wife, Philippa, and I bought an apartment off the blueprints in 1995. And when I think of the dreams the Rabin government of the time had for it, I can hardly believe they, or the rest of us, were really living in Israel, seeing how this country has long since stopped dreaming.
From there, I wrote about Modi’in and me — how it began with my writing stories about the government’s audacious plans for the city, and why my wife and I decided to move there from Tel Aviv, and soon I realized that I needed … a nut graf! What is this book about? What is my point? — the reader’s running out of patience. So I decided not to screw around, but to make the book’s very first sentence the nut graf, and I wrote at the top:
This is a political and personal story about Israel, about how over the years it went one way and I went the other.
Simple, direct — it did the job. Then I saw I needed another sentence to transition to the opening about Modi’in, so I moved a few details up from my original first paragraph and wrote this:
I’m going to start where I live, literally — in the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) of Modi’in, which is truly a showcase Israeli community.
Then I picked up with my previous opening paragraph, and I was off. I wrote about Modi’in, Israel and myself mainly in the present, treating the first chapter as an Introduction. In the second chapter I wanted to go back to the beginning, to talk about my parents, my upbringing in New York and Los Angeles, the shaping and changing of my political views, my “Jewish identity,” such as it was — the whole preamble to my moving to Israel, where the rest of the memoir would be set. I titled the first chapter “Introduction: City of the Future,” and ended it:
Israel, which has given my family and me
a great life, has turned into what I would call a morally failed state. It didn’t used to be that, not by any means, but that’s what it’s become.
How did it get to this point? How did my opinions about it get to this point? To try to explain, first, where I’m coming from, I’ll answer that hoariest of conversation-starters among new immigrants: Why did you move to Israel?
After 23 years, I’d finally written my first whole chapter. For some reason, I’d got it into my head that if I finished the first chapter, I had a 20% chance of finishing the book; if I finished the first two chapters, I had a 50% chance; and if I finished the first three chapters, it was a virtual certainty I’d go all the way. Which meant, as far as I was concerned, that I now had a 20% chance of becoming an author. To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
November 26, 2020
How I wrote two memoirs in the last four years -- after 23 years of false starts. Part 2
The new memoir, “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.,” was such a pleasure to write that I took my sweet time. Getting there, though, involved a whole lot of failure.
When we left off in Part 1, I’d started trying to write a memoir set in Israel, and immediately gotten stuck. I’d write a couple of good “close-up” paragraphs, then a big-picture “nut graf,” just like in a newspaper feature, but not know where to go from there.
I couldn’t see the road ahead in what I was writing — it was so much longer a road than I’d ever gone. In a feature of a few thousand words, I knew that if I had enough interesting reportage and a reasonably interesting point, I could see my way through to the end — and even if I didn’t know exactly how it ended, that would come. I had the story — beginning, middle and, more or less, end — in my mind before I started writing.
With an op-ed, I knew that if I had a fresh, solid argument and enough examples to back it up, I was in business. Just like with a feature, I had the op-ed roughly in my head before I started writing.
But I couldn’t see to the end of a full-length memoir, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. After the first few paragraphs it became vague, shapeless; the simple structure of a feature story couldn’t support it at all. Over and over, my memoir died an awfully premature death.
I got some advice that I’d sort of intuited — that you have to break the book up into chapters, then you just have to wrap your head around one chapter at a time. So I tried that. I broke my story into chapters, or at least sections: The first one was about growing up in L.A. and the development of my political ideas, the second was about coming to Israel and the further development of my political ideas, then going into the army and dealing with the intifada and more political development, and finally living through the Gulf War and the crystallization of my worldview. Then the ending, which I would work out like always.
But there was a problem here: The whole book would be about me. From start to finish — I did this, I thought that, then I did something else and thought something else, on and on. I realized this wouldn’t work. Maybe Justin Bieber could get away with a memoir like that, but not me. From me, it would be airless, claustrophobic, unreadable.
Then I figured that instead of writing about my experiences, maybe I should focus strictly on my political ideas and write basically a much-extended op-ed, breaking it up into different subjects — the occupation, Israeli nationalism, the image of the Holocaust, etc. But op-eds are necessarily timely, and usually go stale after a few days. How could I take a history of opinions I’d had about events in the years past and make a book out of them? It would read: This happened and my opinion of it was this, then that happened and my opinion of it was that, then another thing happened… . Again, unreadable, obviously.
Then I thought that maybe I should write a book based on my reportage, my feature stories over the years. And maybe I’d narrow it down to one subject that I’d written lots of stories about and that hadn’t gotten that much attention, say Israeli poverty. But I faced the same problem I did with a book of political ideas — the features I’d written, like the op-eds, were tied to transitory events of the past, and those features were now stale. So no book there, either.
I was stumped. As the years piled up, I kept trying to write the book, but less and less frequently. I became an expert on what didn’t work, on how not to write a book, and could spot the fatal flaws in my ideas earlier and earlier. I felt like I was trying to crack a safe by means of one random combination at a time. And in the early 2010s, about 20 years after I started out to write a memoir, I decided I had to stop. This was not good for me. This was self-torture. I wanted to write a memoir so bad, like nothing else, and I couldn’t do it, yet over and over and over, for 20 whole years, I’d rubbed my nose in my own failure. Enough.
Louis Armstrong once said, “If there’s something you want, and you can’t get it, to hell with it.” I would take his advice. I have a nephew in the U.S., Joel Derfner, an author who has written a painful, funny, unforgettable memoir, “Swish: A Quest,” about his coming of age as a gay man, with a Foreword by Elton John, and whenever I’d see Joel, one of the things we’d talk about was my “progress” on my memoir. Then when I saw him sometime in the early 2010s, he brought up the subject, and I told him thanks, but I really didn’t want to talk about it anymore, didn’t want to keep bringing it up anymore: “I feel like that guy in Greek mythology who gets his liver eaten by birds, then it grows back and the birds come and eat it again every morning.”
So I was learning to live with loss. I’d go on writing features and op-eds. But then at the beginning of 2015, some months after Israel had bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age and the world had pretty much yawned, the doubts I’d long had over whether my topical features and op-eds, or those of any liberal critic of Israel, were worth a damn became magnified in my mind. I really wanted to start writing something else. What? Maybe I’ll give this goddamn memoir one more try, one more random combination. Last time.
So what do I have for a story? Well, I’ve got one about my experiences, another one about my ideas, and a third one about my reportage. Screw it — maybe if I throw them all together, something will come out of it. I haven’t tried that before, and anyway there’s nothing to lose.
I didn’t know it then, but I was on the verge of successfully reinventing the wheel, and this particular wheel is called the “braided narrative.” To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
When we left off in Part 1, I’d started trying to write a memoir set in Israel, and immediately gotten stuck. I’d write a couple of good “close-up” paragraphs, then a big-picture “nut graf,” just like in a newspaper feature, but not know where to go from there.
I couldn’t see the road ahead in what I was writing — it was so much longer a road than I’d ever gone. In a feature of a few thousand words, I knew that if I had enough interesting reportage and a reasonably interesting point, I could see my way through to the end — and even if I didn’t know exactly how it ended, that would come. I had the story — beginning, middle and, more or less, end — in my mind before I started writing.
With an op-ed, I knew that if I had a fresh, solid argument and enough examples to back it up, I was in business. Just like with a feature, I had the op-ed roughly in my head before I started writing.
But I couldn’t see to the end of a full-length memoir, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. After the first few paragraphs it became vague, shapeless; the simple structure of a feature story couldn’t support it at all. Over and over, my memoir died an awfully premature death.
I got some advice that I’d sort of intuited — that you have to break the book up into chapters, then you just have to wrap your head around one chapter at a time. So I tried that. I broke my story into chapters, or at least sections: The first one was about growing up in L.A. and the development of my political ideas, the second was about coming to Israel and the further development of my political ideas, then going into the army and dealing with the intifada and more political development, and finally living through the Gulf War and the crystallization of my worldview. Then the ending, which I would work out like always.
But there was a problem here: The whole book would be about me. From start to finish — I did this, I thought that, then I did something else and thought something else, on and on. I realized this wouldn’t work. Maybe Justin Bieber could get away with a memoir like that, but not me. From me, it would be airless, claustrophobic, unreadable.
Then I figured that instead of writing about my experiences, maybe I should focus strictly on my political ideas and write basically a much-extended op-ed, breaking it up into different subjects — the occupation, Israeli nationalism, the image of the Holocaust, etc. But op-eds are necessarily timely, and usually go stale after a few days. How could I take a history of opinions I’d had about events in the years past and make a book out of them? It would read: This happened and my opinion of it was this, then that happened and my opinion of it was that, then another thing happened… . Again, unreadable, obviously.
Then I thought that maybe I should write a book based on my reportage, my feature stories over the years. And maybe I’d narrow it down to one subject that I’d written lots of stories about and that hadn’t gotten that much attention, say Israeli poverty. But I faced the same problem I did with a book of political ideas — the features I’d written, like the op-eds, were tied to transitory events of the past, and those features were now stale. So no book there, either.
I was stumped. As the years piled up, I kept trying to write the book, but less and less frequently. I became an expert on what didn’t work, on how not to write a book, and could spot the fatal flaws in my ideas earlier and earlier. I felt like I was trying to crack a safe by means of one random combination at a time. And in the early 2010s, about 20 years after I started out to write a memoir, I decided I had to stop. This was not good for me. This was self-torture. I wanted to write a memoir so bad, like nothing else, and I couldn’t do it, yet over and over and over, for 20 whole years, I’d rubbed my nose in my own failure. Enough.
Louis Armstrong once said, “If there’s something you want, and you can’t get it, to hell with it.” I would take his advice. I have a nephew in the U.S., Joel Derfner, an author who has written a painful, funny, unforgettable memoir, “Swish: A Quest,” about his coming of age as a gay man, with a Foreword by Elton John, and whenever I’d see Joel, one of the things we’d talk about was my “progress” on my memoir. Then when I saw him sometime in the early 2010s, he brought up the subject, and I told him thanks, but I really didn’t want to talk about it anymore, didn’t want to keep bringing it up anymore: “I feel like that guy in Greek mythology who gets his liver eaten by birds, then it grows back and the birds come and eat it again every morning.”
So I was learning to live with loss. I’d go on writing features and op-eds. But then at the beginning of 2015, some months after Israel had bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age and the world had pretty much yawned, the doubts I’d long had over whether my topical features and op-eds, or those of any liberal critic of Israel, were worth a damn became magnified in my mind. I really wanted to start writing something else. What? Maybe I’ll give this goddamn memoir one more try, one more random combination. Last time.
So what do I have for a story? Well, I’ve got one about my experiences, another one about my ideas, and a third one about my reportage. Screw it — maybe if I throw them all together, something will come out of it. I haven’t tried that before, and anyway there’s nothing to lose.
I didn’t know it then, but I was on the verge of successfully reinventing the wheel, and this particular wheel is called the “braided narrative.” To be continued.
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
November 24, 2020
How I wrote two memoirs in four years -- after 23 years of false starts. Part 1
The new memoir, “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.,” was such a pleasure to write that I took my sweet time. Getting there, though, involved a whole lot of failure.
I always had some talent for writing, and once my ability to write poetry dried up in my teens, then later when I realized I did not have the imagination for fiction, I turned to journalism, which is how I’ve earned my living for the last 40 years. I did mainly “creative” journalism, too — newspaper weekend features and op-eds. But like probably every professional writer, plus maybe a billion or more other people, I always wanted to write a book. Given that I couldn’t write poetry or fiction, it seemed like the closest thing, the best thing, I might do was a memoir.
Right away I thought of two possibilities: One was about growing up rough and tumble in early-’60s Los Angeles, which is the subject of my new memoir. But that was a smaller, more obscure, more personal story — first I wanted to tackle the big one, the story of what brought me from America to Israel, and what I found here. A personal story, but mainly a political one. At that point it became a matter of waiting for something conclusive to happen to me, some climax, an ending that would tie my story together, after which I could begin writing it. That something came in 1991: the Gulf War.
I was living in Tel Aviv and my wife Philippa and I sat in our gas masks hearing and feeling the Scuds fall. I’d endured a war, I’d served in the Israeli army, had thousands of stones thrown at me in the West Bank and Gaza, I was no longer a sheltered West L.A. liberal, I was older and wiser, and now I had a tale to tell. I started making notes, outlining and writing the following year, when I was 40. And for the next 23 years, I made dozens upon dozens of starts on the memoir, along with several intermittent attempts at the one about my L.A. childhood, and never once got even close to finishing the first chapter. (My last, successful attempt at the Israel memoir began when I was 63, I set a goal of finishing it in nine months, finished it in 9 -1/2, and “No Country for Jewish Liberals” came out in 2017.)
The reason I wanted to write a book was mainly because it seemed like the greatest feeling a writer could have — to say what you want to say, as fully as you like, to take detours and even to get briefly lost but to know that you were headed to a glorious destination. I loved writing op-eds (about 800 words) and sometimes liked writing features (about 3,000 words), but these were relatively short and simple, a straight line from point A to point B. They were entirely logical, with little if any room for tangents, for indecisiveness — for writing more closely to how you actually think. I usually found newspaper feature writing, where you’re supposed to be “objective,” very constricting and lacking in candor. Writing op-eds was much better — I had total freedom at The Jerusalem Post and wherever else I wrote opinion pieces — but again, it had to be tightly logical, circumscribed. I wanted freedom to stretch out, to take my time, to weave in and out, to go on a long gallop, and that could only be done in a book.
Usually, my first couple of paragraphs would be good. Then came the time for what journalists call the “nut graf” — the paragraph where you tell the point of your story — and then I knew I was in trouble. Fine, I know how to start a story with a dramatic scene from the Gulf War or my army service or landing in Israel or whatever — and then, for the nut graf, saying something like, “This is a story about loss of innocence …” It was the basic structure of a feature story, and I knew how to do that. But it was absolutely useless, in fact deadly, for writing a memoir. (To be continued.)
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
I always had some talent for writing, and once my ability to write poetry dried up in my teens, then later when I realized I did not have the imagination for fiction, I turned to journalism, which is how I’ve earned my living for the last 40 years. I did mainly “creative” journalism, too — newspaper weekend features and op-eds. But like probably every professional writer, plus maybe a billion or more other people, I always wanted to write a book. Given that I couldn’t write poetry or fiction, it seemed like the closest thing, the best thing, I might do was a memoir.
Right away I thought of two possibilities: One was about growing up rough and tumble in early-’60s Los Angeles, which is the subject of my new memoir. But that was a smaller, more obscure, more personal story — first I wanted to tackle the big one, the story of what brought me from America to Israel, and what I found here. A personal story, but mainly a political one. At that point it became a matter of waiting for something conclusive to happen to me, some climax, an ending that would tie my story together, after which I could begin writing it. That something came in 1991: the Gulf War.
I was living in Tel Aviv and my wife Philippa and I sat in our gas masks hearing and feeling the Scuds fall. I’d endured a war, I’d served in the Israeli army, had thousands of stones thrown at me in the West Bank and Gaza, I was no longer a sheltered West L.A. liberal, I was older and wiser, and now I had a tale to tell. I started making notes, outlining and writing the following year, when I was 40. And for the next 23 years, I made dozens upon dozens of starts on the memoir, along with several intermittent attempts at the one about my L.A. childhood, and never once got even close to finishing the first chapter. (My last, successful attempt at the Israel memoir began when I was 63, I set a goal of finishing it in nine months, finished it in 9 -1/2, and “No Country for Jewish Liberals” came out in 2017.)
The reason I wanted to write a book was mainly because it seemed like the greatest feeling a writer could have — to say what you want to say, as fully as you like, to take detours and even to get briefly lost but to know that you were headed to a glorious destination. I loved writing op-eds (about 800 words) and sometimes liked writing features (about 3,000 words), but these were relatively short and simple, a straight line from point A to point B. They were entirely logical, with little if any room for tangents, for indecisiveness — for writing more closely to how you actually think. I usually found newspaper feature writing, where you’re supposed to be “objective,” very constricting and lacking in candor. Writing op-eds was much better — I had total freedom at The Jerusalem Post and wherever else I wrote opinion pieces — but again, it had to be tightly logical, circumscribed. I wanted freedom to stretch out, to take my time, to weave in and out, to go on a long gallop, and that could only be done in a book.
Usually, my first couple of paragraphs would be good. Then came the time for what journalists call the “nut graf” — the paragraph where you tell the point of your story — and then I knew I was in trouble. Fine, I know how to start a story with a dramatic scene from the Gulf War or my army service or landing in Israel or whatever — and then, for the nut graf, saying something like, “This is a story about loss of innocence …” It was the basic structure of a feature story, and I knew how to do that. But it was absolutely useless, in fact deadly, for writing a memoir. (To be continued.)
“Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (published November 2020) available at Amazon — $2.99 Kindle, $8.99 paperback.
“No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) available at Amazon — $9.99 Kindle, used hardback from $2.12, new from $8.01.
