The DREAD of SEPTEMBER 1ST

Growing up in Israel, September 1^st was the first day of the school year. No matter what else would suggest bumping the beginning of our toil either forward or pushing it back, the schedule was as firm as it was non-negotiable.

Unless it fell on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Oh, how we hoped it would. One year, when September began on Saturday, we rejoiced as if we had won the lottery. Our summer vacation got an extra day of freedom.

 

There was something sad that enveloped the last day of summer vacation. The whiff of changes to come loomed large, and when I reflect on that predictable feeling, which came like clockwork on August the 31^st, I realize I was always anxious and unhappy about change. Each new school year meant a new teacher, a new room (Israel didn’t have a “homeroom” system for elementary schools back then) and possibly a few new classmates to get used to.

 

It wasn’t the return to school, which I mostly liked. It was the return of the daily homework assignments, which I mostly disliked. When I reflect on my distain for homework, I realize very few assignments were stimulating or interesting. The few that were interesting made me happy. But most were a drudge and the word boring is too kind for the almost mindless regurgitation imposed. How can one not feel sad that many months of these daily backpacks laden with heavy cement were about to be placed on our backs, and for so-o-o many months until summer vacation begins again?

The last day of August bore the color of cement.

 

You know how you might dread something, like getting a shot or swallowing fish oil pills, and the dread grows inside your belly until it swells too large to be contained and floods your whole being? That about describes what August 31^st was like.

 

But, like the shot or smelly pill, once done it amazes how needless the dread should have been.

 

September 1^st, by the end of the school day, all was well and you are assured it will continue to be, rolling from week to week until the great summer vacation comes again.

 

So many years later, I still feel both August 31^st and September 1^st every year they come around.

I say to the me-of-then and to school children in Israel, it will be all right.

My very first September 1^st: still joyous with my best friend the first day of first grade, before we knew a thing about the vat of daily homework we were about to be dunked into.

The words behind us spell “Hello First Grade”

HOW TO BECOME KNOWN AS THE DORMOUSE

 

Some years ago, our family were on our way home after a beautiful winter hike. We had climbed mountains to view the ocean and passed countless cows grazing on our way down. The cold air outside had chilled us to the bone, and now the heater in the family car warmed us.

 

The drive was long, and night had fallen. My husband was driving, and I was in the passenger seat, while our two children sat in the back. The conversation was lively, but at a certain point our daughter dozed off in her car seat. It was more than her then-three-year-old body could manage to remain awake. Her older brother and her parents continued to speak, noting her soft sleeping breaths.

 

At some point, even we had rested our conversation, when out of her slumber our daughter’s sleepy voice interrupted the silence.

“Would you pet a cat that had no tail?” she said.

It was a non sequitur to beat all non sequiturs.

“The Dormouse has spoken,” my husband said.

 

 The Dormouse is a character in "A Mad Tea-Party", Chapter VII [1] from the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The Dormouse sat between the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. They were using him as a cushion while he slept when Alice arrives at the start of the chapter. The Dormouse is always falling asleep during the scene, waking up every so often, to insert some unrelated comment and doze off again.

 

After that day, our daughter began to call herself Dormouse, and she and her brother developed this alternate identity further, making up stories that bore little resemblance to Alice’s tea party associate or to nature’s dormice. Our resident dormouse kept this alter ego for some years before it, too, dissipated into the family lore of yore.  

 

But so many years later, I woke up thinking about the question posted long ago in the dark car.

 
“Would you pet a cat that had no tail?” never got an answer back when.

Today, it seems to me the question deserved a reply. The way I understand it, it has a deep meaning. It’s another way of asking, “could you love and care for someone who isn’t perfect?”

 

Dear Dormouse, it was a perfect question perfectly asked. We got sidetracked but your question deserved an answer.

My belated answer is YES, ten times yes. I’d pet a cat that had no tail. Would you?

The WHY of Writing

 

“To write is to fight forgetting.”

Annie Ernaux, Nobel laureate in literature 2022

 

 

Much is made of the impetus to write. Annie Ernaux is primarily a memoirist, and so the quotation above seems a perfect fit for her motivation. Fiction writing appears to be more about organizing one’s thoughts, ideas, and ideals. After all, what is there to forget when it comes to tales of the imagination?

 

I maintain that fiction is about truth, our truth, and by writing our truth down, carved of words-sentences-paragraphs-chapters-novels, we writers are fighting the human propensity to forget.

 

Fiction/fantasy is the cloak. The body is our truth as we make an attempt to chisel and give shape to it so it may be incorporated into the communal memory.

 

Fiction is often, nay— usually, bolder, and thus more honest. Ernaux is exceptionally honest, but in my experience only fiction allows a complete unveiling.

 

This is my mini-attempt to record and reveal my personal driving force. As the number of my years grows, I am fighting forgetting with increasing ferocity.

AUGUST MEMOIRE

 

I grew up in Israel before every home had air conditioning, and the month of August was a challenge even for the august and robust among us.

 

Memory #1: the heat so suffocating, my best friend and I lay splayed on cool tile floors and as soon as the tile underneath warmed from our boiling bodies, we crawled to the next not-yet warmed tiles.

 

Memory #2: Getting yelled at for sticking my face in the refrigerator and keeping its door open. I wanted to step inside and stay there.

 

Memory #3: Volunteering to go to the supermarket for the daily grocery shopping only to open its freezer case and pretend to be undecided as to which ice-cream I was about to put in my grocery basket. Getting yelled at there also, only this time it was the store manager.

 

Memory #4: Mothers setting a large washbasin with cold water on the front porch. My best friend and I dunking ourselves in. This stopped as we got older and our cold bathing began to draw a small crowd of onlookers.

 

Is it any wonder I chose to live on the Northern California coast, where, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “the coldest winter is the summer”?

 

As the earth heats, I wish y’all working air-conditioners and robust ice-dispensing fridges.

PURIM, LONG AGO---

 

Purim is celebrated today all over the Jewish world. This holiday of dressing in costumes, reading the scroll of Esther, and drinking to oblivion (by religious commandment to drink to a state where one can’t tell the difference between a Haman, the arch villain, and a Mordechai, the righteous hero) is a hoot.

 

I only celebrated it as a child, and drinking was not part of our allotment, thank you very much. But costumes certainly were.

 

I had the great fortune to have a best friend whose mother was a genius seamstress. Thus, in grades 2-4 I got to pair with my friend as her mother made us into Mini and Mickey (the Disney mice) and into a she and he sailors. In fifth grade I wore a costume my mother had bought for me while we were briefly in the Netherlands. I was a Dutch girl, and I only remember how uncomfortable the wooden shoes were. I didn’t dance that Purim.

 

In sixth grade, I was on my own. My mother said I was old enough to make my own costume, and for some reason, I agreed. I had to think fast, because the party and the yearly competition for best costume were only a day away, and my original idea for dressing as my favorite magazine failed miserably in my attempted execution.

 

I had never won first prize, and I wasn’t thinking of any prize. I just didn’t want to be that kid, the one who showed up wearing plastic glasses and calling it “a costume.”

 

We had a song we sang back then. To the American melody of She’ll be Coming ’round the Mountain we sang the Hebrew words, “Madman in Pajamas.” Trust me, it works. That ditty never made any sense. But less than a day before the Great Purim Costume Party & Competition, it suddenly made sense to me.

 

And so, I was. I was a Madman (mad person?) in Pajamas. I danced and sang the song and waved an old flashlight my mother had inherited, and wada-ye-know, I won first prize.

Which goes to show that life can be senseless. It also shows that spontaneity and desperation are underrated, and should be given more respect.

MEMOIRES

 

Memoirists have a special challenge: tell a good story, driven by themes which must not overwhelm the plot.

My late father was urged to write a memoire/autobiography, because his life’s story encompassed the momentous events of Jewish history of the 20^th century. He survived the Holocaust (ghetto and concentration camp) to go to what was then Palestine, and fight to establish the Jewish state of Israel. He was critically wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. He was part of a group that established a kibbutz. He went on the represent Israel in cultural aspects in France and Argentina.

 

Even one of these chapters would have made a poignant book. He was an academic historian, and wrote beautifully, having had poems published. He was the one to tell his story, right?

 

But he refused to write his memoires. He told me that people who write their life story inevitably lie, embellish, or seek justification.

“Fiction allows the writer to tell much deeper truths,” my father told me.

 

When I first wrote the story that would evolve into a published novel for middle grades, it was half biographical. By the time it took its final form, the details were more fiction than fact, and I submitted it as such. I was told by one editor who wanted to take it to acquisitions that it would be more likely to be acquired as a memoire. I, like my father, turned that down. The story had left the honest facts of my life’s story long before, in order (as my father would have put it) to tell the deeper truth and tell it as a better, tighter story.

One blurb I got referred to The Voice of Thunder as “fictionalized biography.” Fair enough.

 

Memoirists have the advantage that when submitting their story, they present it as true, and it is easier to sell it that way. But keeping it true while making it tight and compelling is a hard hill to climb.

See this post about the special challenges of seeking to traditionally  publish memoires.