Before I wrote, I read (even though my first-grade teacher deemed me not Not So Smart).

I loved the Weekly Reader and my mother subscribed me to a children’s book-of-the-month club. My father was a voracious reader. Each Saturday we went to the library or Hefros Stationery and Books. We had four newspapers delivered (New York Times, Herald Tribune, Newsday and the Long Island Press – but not the Daily News because as my mother said, “It’s for wrapping fish, only Republicans read it”). She had custom-made bookshelves designed for the unused fourth bedroom and in a moment of high pretention in our otherwise middle-to-low end lifestyle, it was renamed “the library.”

My tastes then, as now, are all over the map: fiction, history, current events. One of my first book fair purchases was about space exploration and the galaxies. This was 1961, and John Glenn was everyone’s hero. I found it interesting until the last page: ‘How the Earth Could End,’ that described – and illustrated – a meteor crashing into the earth.

My parents never restricted my reading material. When my father found me with his copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask), he didn’t take it away. In fact it was the closest we ever came to the birds and the bees discussion. Decades later I’m still a book packrat. Whenever we moved I culled the collection, but it inevitably grew bigger by the next move. And instead of one room referred to as the library, every room in our apartment has books – which was handy in writing STJ as it is littered with literary references. A few samples follow:

From Classics & Religion:

Aeschylus wrote, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Does that mean we have to believe?  I don’t know but it will always move me in times of darkness. And the simple words of Rabbi Nachman, “The entire world is a narrow bridge; the essential thing is not to fear at all,” always gives me courage.

From Dead Men & Women:*

War and Peace (which I spent the summer of 2016 reading) is magnificent, though in STJ it only appears as a device to build up biceps. (It is over 1,000 pages).

Though there’s no direct reference to Hemingway (who was a nasty piece of work), I did read A Movable Feast. That influenced me to spend too much time and money in overpriced cafés on the Left Bank and wonder where Sartre and de Beauvoir may have held court as I sipped my café crème.

In 1630 John Winthrop, the Governor General of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, coined the phrase, “the city on the hill.” It came to be a metaphor for what a community and its people could be – if only (part of his “if only” meant strict observance in many ways). As an urban geek, there is a certain resonance in that phrase that I can’t help but admire.

The genre of writing about Jews behaving badly is as old as the Bible itself when Jacob deceived his brother Esau. This tradition has been carried on through the ages by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Bruce Jay Friedman and many others.

It may have peaked with Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (a book I read much too young). The established Jewish community labled him as a self-hating Jew, but I don’t think that’s the case. Roth exposed the warts in the increasingly comfortable lives of American Jewry. Decades later his Plot Against America revised opinions about him, and the prescient quality of that novel should give us all cause for concern.

*All aren’t men or dead, but most are.

The War:

That was the word used in my family to describe Europe between 1939-1945. As a youngster I knew that my father served in it, and there were vague references to members of my grandfather’s family who were “lost” in it. As I got older I learned much more, about my father’s involvement and the loss of family.

I don’t think there was definitive moment when I learned about the Holocaust, though when I was nine I read an article in Look magazine that was excerpted from a memoir. In it, the author wrote that as a nine-year-old boy in Warsaw, he had been out all day and when he arrived home learned that his entire family had been rounded up. He lit candles and said Yizkor for them. But as he was about to leave his house in hopes of escaping he turned back. He lit one more candle and said Yizkor for himself, believing he would not survive and there would be no one left to pray for him. From then on I was obsessed and read whatever I could about that terrible period – history, memoirs and fiction.

When I asked my father about the war he told funny stories such as how he drank Russian vodka so strong that his hair stood up and marched away. Only much later in life did he speak about entering the Nordhausen death camp, the stench of death and the murder of aunts, uncles and cousins by the Einsatzgruppen.

Though STJ is not an historical novel by any means, the specter of the Holocaust is there. No doubt a cell memory in the deep recesses of DNA.

Junk:

Despite any literary intellectual pretensions inferred by what you’ve read thus far, I enjoy a good junk read too. Any novel taking place in New York City draws my interest; food and real estate porn usually get my attention; and I’m not above a scandalous piece on evil people getting their comeuppance.

I suspect I’ll get blowback to suggesting that Exodus is junky as it is a pretty good read. The book and film serve a purpose (there’s also the music – see the Discography tab), but like The Sound of Music it glosses over a lot. Though the scene where Paul Newman, cast as the dashing heroic Jew, Ari Ben Canaan, is disguised as a gentile and told by a British officer that he can always “spot a Jew by their eyes” – as he is looking into Newman’s baby blues – is a favorite of mine. 

Figments of My Imagination:

When I was young, Rizzoli’s was located in an impressive space on Fifth Avenue. The third floor was devoted to art books published by Taschen – and they certainly would have published Great Hotels of the World. Though they were better known for dressing up soft, medium, and sometimes hard porn as art books.  Titles such as The Young Girls of Southern France, Hot Evenings on Cold Steppes: A Siberian Fantasy and Sardinian Oil Wrestling Though the Ages were not uncommon, all at premium prices.

I’ve never written the Dad & Lad (or in my case Lass) Guide to Restaurants that Serve Large Portions of Not so Great Food at Cheap Prices, but I wish I did.