When Worlds Collide
By Donald Maass | February 7, 2018 |
Have you ever felt out of place? I’m sure. We all have. Meeting the new in-laws. An interfaith church service. Asking the price of a necklace at Tiffany’s. The ER. CIA headquarters in Langley. Strange environments where people are different.
One summer day commuting to work on my bike, I stopped at Sander’s Bakery on Lee Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of South Williamsburg. A bakery is a bakery, right? Well, no. Sander’s is in the heart of Brooklyn’s vast Chasidishe, ultra-orthodox Jewish community. The shop was filled with men in long sideburns wearing black coats, Tzizit vests and beaver hats. Women wore wigs, calf length skirts and sturdy shoes. All spoke Yiddish. The shelves were brimming with challah, strudel, rugelach, kippelech, sufganiyot, Napoleon cake and cookies.
In my jeans, black tee and bike helmet, I stood out. Customers avoided my eyes. I am goyim. A non-Jew. An outsider, suspicious, not unwelcome but not welcome either. Cyclists have been attacked in South Williamsburg. To some, I would be less than human. Some, I knew, might believe that I literally lack a soul.
But hey, why should that stop me? I was there for cinnamon rugelach. The gentleman behind the counter accepted my money and spoke kindly. I bothered no one and left quickly. The rugelach was delicious. No one was hostile. The stereotypes of Hasidim are stereotypes. (Gay bashers, child molesters, women oppressors, bad drivers? Please.) The Hasidic world is not my world, it’s just their world and so what? They are entitled to live according to their faith. And, hey, they have cinnamon rugelach.
In that trivial anecdote, note a couple of things. The different place: South Williamsburg. The different cultures: beaver hats versus my bike helmet. The resolution: They are different but we find something in common in yummy cinnamon rugelach.
Most of all, though, note the source of tension. Goyim. Outsider. Cyclists have been attacked in South Williamsburg. Those feelings came not from anyone inside Sander’s Bakery. They came from me. When worlds collide, visual differences create contrast, true, but what creates conflict is the apprehension inside of a POV character.
When worlds collide, it is mostly inside.
In a way, all stories are about a collision between two worlds. Some stories literally smash two cultures together. Shogun. The Poisonwood Bible. The Narnia Chronicles. Others are built around class conflict. The Great Gatsby. Poldark. Never Let Me Go. Others are built around generational conflicts or family clashes. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Middlesex. Pachinko. In others, a stranger rides into town or there is an encounter with “others”. Shane. The Joy Luck Club. The Left Hand of Darkness. Conflict can be poured into the very foundation of a novel.
However, put together any two people and you necessarily have clashing contexts, assumptions and needs. Everyone has a back story. Everyone is searching. Everyone is yearning. Everyone is journeying. We are worlds unto ourselves. When those worlds meet there is a collision. We feel different. We feel dislocated. We feel afraid. We feel “other”.
Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, whose father is a union organizer in 1930’s New York City. As the novel opens, Anna goes with her father to the grand seaside home of Dexter Styles, a gangster and club owner, for whom her father will become a “bagman”, passing out bribes. Their arrival introduces Anna to a different world.
The door pull was answered by Mrs. Styles, who had a movie star’s sculpted eyebrows and a long mouth painted glossy red. Accustomed to judging her own mother prettier than every woman she encountered, Anna was disarmed by the evident glamour of Mrs. Styles.
“I was hoping to meet Mrs. Kerrigan,” Mrs. Styles said in a husky voice, holding Ann’s father’s hand in both of hers. To which he replied that his younger daughter had taken sick that morning, and his wife had stayed home to nurse her.
There was no sign of Mr. Styles.
Politely but (she hoped) without visible awe, Anna accepted a glass of lemonade from a sliver tray carried by a Negro maid in a pale blue uniform. In the high polish of the entrance hall’s wood floor, she caught the reflection of her own red dress, sewn by her mother. Beyond the windows of an adjacent front room, the sea tingled under a thin winter sun.
Mrs. Style’s daughter, Tabatha, was only eight—three years younger than Anna. Still, Anna allowed the littler girl to tow her by the hand to a downstairs “nursery,” a room dedicated purely to playing, filled with a shocking array of toys. A quick survey discovered a Flossie Flirt doll, several large teddy bears, and a rocking horse. There was a “Nurse” in the nursery, a freckled, raspy-voiced woman whose woolen dress strained like an overstacked bookshelf to repress her massive bust. Anna guessed from the broad lay of her face and the merry switch of her eyes that Nurse was Irish, and felt a keen sense of being seen through. She resolved to keep her distance.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles concerns an aristocratic Russian count and dilettante poet named Alexander Rostov, who in the wake of the Revolution is sentenced to house arrest in his residence, the Metropole Hotel. Rostov at first adjusts to his confinement by attempting to maintain his daily routines. One midday he repairs to the basement establishment of the Metropole’s peerless barber, Yaroslav Yaroslavl, for his weekly trim. A heavyset man is also waiting, but Yaroslavl seats Rostov first. The heavyset man insists, “I was next.” Rostov tries to defuse the situation.
“Yaroslav meant no offense, my good man. It just so happens that I have a standing appointment at twelve o’clock on Tuesdays.
The fellow now turned his glare upon the Count.
“A standing appointment,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
Then he rose so abruptly that he knocked his bench back into the wall. At full height, he was nor more than five foot six. His fists, which jutted from the cuffs of his backset, were as red as his ears. When he advanced a step, Yaroslav backed against the edge of the counter. The fellow took another toward the barber and wrested one of the scissors from his hand. Then, with the deftness of a much slighter man, he turned, took the Count by the collar, and severed the right wing of his moustaches with a single snip. Tightening his hold, he pulled the Count forward until they were nose to nose.
“You’ll have your appointment soon enough,” he said.
…
When he had first seen him sitting on the bench in his rumpled jacket, the Count had summed him up in an instant as some hardworking sort who, having stumbled upon the barbershop, had decided to treat himself to a cut. But for all the Count knew, this fellow could have been one of the new residents of the second floor. Having come of age in an ironworks, he could have joined a union in 1912, led a strike in 1916, captained a Red battalion in 1918, and now found himself in command of an entire industry.
“He was perfectly right,” the Count said to Yaroslav.
The Diviners by Libba Bray is a Jazz Age YA horror novel in which budding young flapper Evie O’Neil is sent by her distraught parents from stuffy Zenith, Ohio to New York City to reside (until a scandal cools off) with her Uncle Will, who owns a museum of the occult and macabre. Liberated, so she imagines, Evie rushes to meet a friend, the plain-but-game Mabel, so together they can plan wild Manhattan adventures. At their apartment building, the Bennington, Evie is introduced to two dowager sisters, Lillian and Adelaide Proctor, whose dour aura clashes with Evie’s effervescent spirit:
“Welcome to the Bennington. It’s a grand old place. Once upon a time, it was considered one of the very best addresses in the city,” Miss Lillian continued.
“It’s swell. Um, lovely. A lovely place.”
“Yes. Sometimes you might hear odd sounds in the night. But you mustn’t be frightened. The city has its ghosts, you see.”
“All the best places do,” Evie said with mock-seriousness.
Mabel choked on her Coca-Cola, but Miss Lillian did not take note. “In the seventeen hundreds, this patch of hand was home to those suffering from the fever. Those poor, tragic souls moaning in their tents, jaundiced and bleeding, their vomitus the color of black night!”
Evie pushed her sandwich away. “How hideously fascinating. I was just saying to Mabel—Miss Rose—that we don’t talk enough about black vomit.”
Dislocated. Out of place. Out of time. Stranger in a strange land. Every protagonist is, in a way, confronted with what is unaccustomed, odd and fearful. All heroes feel lost, out of their depth, unable at first to fathom the new environment in which they find themselves. That is as true whether they are close to home or far away. It’s true, always, because dislocation is felt inside.
To capture the dislocation inherent in a collision of worlds, one need only resolve to get it on the page:
- Where and when does your protagonist find his or her world in collision with another? Whose? Detail the differences visually. What details cause your protagonist to feel inferior, out of place, uneasy or apprehensive?
- Of what is your protagonist envious? What does your protagonist dislike? Who in this new world judges or rejects your protagonist? Whom does your protagonist wish to know better, or hope to avoid at all costs?
- How does your protagonist know that he or she stands out? What about him or her was previously considered normal, but is now glaringly out of place? Who notices that—or pretends not to?
- How does your protagonist adjust, apologize, defer, cover, or debase himself or herself in this new environment? What about himself or herself will have to change?
- In what way is your protagonist determined not to change? Having been challenged, in what way is he or she resolved to resist?
When stars collide in outer space, they send off gravitational waves and gamma rays. The collision also creates heavy elements such a gold, platinum and lead, which are flung across the universe. (The gold in your wedding band was formed by colliding stars.) A collision between the worlds of two characters is similar. Its waves ripple through the story—and through your protagonist. The collision has force, and it in turn forces change.
The collision of stars—and worlds—also creates light.
What two worlds collide in your story? How do we see the differences? How does your protagonist experience dislocation?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
In my novel, the MC gets a scholarship to an elite college, having grown up as craftsman’s son. He definitely feels out of place for many reasons, one of which is clothing. Before going off, his parents bought the finest clothes he’s ever worn and it still not enough. However, this attracts Mervin, who is the opposite of the MC. Every generation of his family has gone to the college. Mervin seeks out my MC because he needs help with classes. One of the major arcs of the book is how the two of them influence and change each other.
Wonderful! What is the title?
Lines of Excellence
But it isn’t published (yet)
Don – Another topic right up my cobblestone alley. I think what you’re describing here is a big part of my original attraction to epic fantasy. Remember all of the ways the hobbits felt out of place once they were out of the Shire, and into the world of men and elves? And it’s certainly not just a physical thing, though in I’m sure Tolkien’s creation of them as being small and childlike was symbolic. They’re common but gentle folk, often finding themselves interacting in the worlds of “fair folk” (highborns) or warriors.
I think my initial attraction to writing from the perspective of the Goths was not just that there was little they wrote about themselves, but how the Romans spoke of them—or how they basically maligned all of the Germanic tribes. They didn’t go down in history as barbarians for nothing. To Romans the Goths were impulsive, hot-tempered, lazy, lustful, and prone to drunkenness. They were also physically larger, and often described as physically beautiful. In fact, during the height of the empire’s interaction with Germanics, blonde hair dyes and wigs became all the rage in imperial cities.
Even as my research unearthed this feeling of otherness, fear and loathing coupled with attraction, I was instinctively excited by the storytelling possibilities. In my original trilogy, I even have a young highborn Roman woman (the daughter of an imperial courtier) fall in love with a Gothic federati officer (Vahldan’s second son, Armesus). It was great fun putting each of them in the other’s world over the course of the story.
I’m right in the thick of the early days after the Gothic and imperial worlds collide, so your timing is perfect (as usual). Thanks for reminding me of my early enthusiasm and my current good fortune.
Imperial Romans going in for blond hair dye and wearing wigs?
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” n’est pas? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
But seriously, history is replete with clashing civilizations and cultures, refugees and dislocation. Rich material. Thanks, Vaughn.
Hi, Don:
One thing I always ask in such encounters: what about my character is suddenly, unwittingly revealed? What remains secret?
Also, though my character might feel out of place, he’s also unsettled the people who call this place home ground. What is it about the character that rattles those who presumably should be comfortable? How do they reveal that? (Or do they fight to keep that undisclosed?)
Great topic. As always. Thanks.
Terrific bonus questions, thanks David!
Liked this piece! It’s relevant to my writing now. Thank you. I clicked to share the article on FB. But the link wouldn’t work. Don’t know why. I’ve subscribed to Writer Unboxed for a long time.
I often feel a sense of dislocation when dealing with technology. Why are computers–which are supposed to make things simpler–so complicated? And don’t get me started on WordPress. Augh.
Hi Don,
I love such “slice of craft” posts for the way they apply laser focus to a specific aspect of a manuscript. I have a class differential in my WIP that gets flipped when my middle-class protagonist (oh how she’d hate that I used the word “class,” even though she feels it) wipes out her own business’s reserves to help a lower-class friend through a failed attempt at private drug rehab.
The protagonist is now caught in her friend’s poverty-stricken town due to an ice storm that has rendered her credit card useless. In one scene she must beg for dog food at a small grocer’s, and is only successful due to her association with the friend’s family—not the eight generations of her family who have summered at the nearby lake. The scene has great tension but I stopped short of exploring her envy. Gotta go jot notes—thank you!
Begging for dog food. Wow, that is definitely forcing a character out of her element. Great!
In defending her best-friend, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, my sixteen-year-old protagonist collides head-on with the ignorance and prejudice that has always been part of her little NJ town, but that she hadn’t noticed until kids started using slurs and slinging hate. It gave me an opportunity to explore some of that deep-seated yuck that you don’t notice until something shakes the bottle and the sediment rises. I love your bakery story. I was there, feeling the tension and smelling the smells. You made me hungry, both to write and to eat pastry! Thank you, Don.
The bakeries of Lee Avenue are marvelous, but be prepared to feel out of place. Doesn’t stop me, but I do feel “other” in that neighborhood. It’s worth it for rugelach and authentic bagels, of course.
Prejudice in small towns–really? Ha. Kidding. Seriously, small towns in my observation are today as multi-cultural as big cities. I wonder how that’s playing out in terms of prejudice? Perhaps the greatest bias is found in wealthy enclaves? (See Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.)
And New Jersey…small state, but one with as many distinct communities and cultures as Great Britain. So different than most people’s homogenized “which exit?” impression of the place. Fertile territory for story. Go for it.
Forgot to mention that the story takes place in the late 70’s. The town that the one in my story is based on is now very multi-cultural, which makes for good eating…
Your post is a journey into other worlds, a stranger in a strange land. My MC finds herself having to leave her home, the Chicago neighborhood she has always lived in, because of some fear her spouse has about “changes.” But the change is within him, and the move leads to the kidnapping of their child–both then thrust into a frightening dwelling place, the country of loss. But reading this, I realize I need to have my MC examine not only her husband’s words, but his face, search it for some unknown change, as living with him is now like being with a stranger. Thanks, Don and yes, I’m still working on the same book. Looking forward to your next class at WFWA, hoping to query soon.
Spouse as sudden stranger? Oh yes. Love the way you’re looking at a so-familiar face.
Good Morning Gandalf…I mean Don
This post couldn’t have come at a better time for me. Reading over my latest draft, I realized that all the seeds of tension I planted never turned into anything fruitful, so I’m starting over fresh. Doing some research, I found a formula for comedic setups that I think could translate over into dramatic ones because it deals with world views.
(Reasonable Reality and Set of Expectations + Unusual Behavior and/or Point of View)
X
Raised Emotional Stakes + Ending Which Subverts Established Pattern
=
Comedy (And I Hope Dramatic) Bliss
Good grief, James, Gandalf DIES! Well, he comes back from the dead, but still. Not sure I’m comfortable with that compliment.
Comedy is indeed founded on the subversion of what we expect. Set up…substitution…laughter. Great comedy makes us uneasy, zings us with uncomfortable truth.
So, wait, maybe in a way I am Gandalf? Great. Looking forward to returning from the dead. And to your next manuscript. Write on.
Great post, Don. As usual, you made me think of my WIP.
No Apology For Being is about a young woman who falls in love with her dead step sister while on a sponsored bakery tour across the U.S., meeting many different people. It takes a hard look at society’s boxes and how we discover our place, our identity.
Your post has given me lots to think about, thank you.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT (Gift of Travel)
Wow, wait…what? “Falls in love with her dead step sister”? Okay. Hooked me. Hurry up and finish! (Or take your time. You know what I mean.)
I have decided to take the risk and write this, since my resolution for 2018 is to step up my efforts to no longer let things go by. It’s not easy. (And I live in a blue town in a blue State!)
I have listened to you speak and have read your works, so I think I have a sense of your perspective on things, and respect so much of what you have to say. I hope readers know they aren’t supposed to take you literally in the opening story. When you wrote the following, it stopped me cold:
The stereotypes of Hasidim are stereotypes. (Gay bashers, child molesters, women oppressors, bad drivers? Please.) The Hasidic world is not my world, it’s just their world and so what? They are entitled to live according to their faith. And, hey, they have cinnamon rugelach.
I am assuming you are not really implying that these very real values are worth ignoring for good rugelach. I certainly respect religious differences (I work with refugees) and practice tolerance, but I’m hoping you were being cavalier to make a point. But some things are just intolerable and shouldn’t be merely accepted because of traditions. (Note: there are colliding worlds WITHIN this group as young people try to leave.)
Obviously when a writer is describing colliding worlds the writer should not rely on stereotypes. But in an attempt to refute stereotypes, the writer should also research facts and tread carefully.
Much respect- aobc
Hasidim in our city have been seen, by some, through a lens of stereotype. News media have fed that to some degree, IMHO, witness coverage of the Crown Heights riots in the 1990’s, or the child abuse scandals a few years ago.
But of course stereotypes are just that. The same ugly characterizations of Hasidim have been leveled at many groups and are no more valid when they are.
Now, you are right in that in my post I exaggerate for effect. Do customers at Sander’s Bakery actually look at me and see someone less than human? I doubt it. However, might I imagine that they do? Certainly. That’s my point. A sense of dislocation–being out of place–comes from inside a character.
In warm weather I cycle to work through South Williamsburg pretty much every day. While there definitely is traffic congestion, I have never felt threatened or unsafe or unwelcome in a bakery. If anything, I must ignore the mouth-watering waft of cinnamon and cycle on, reminding myself about calories.
No harm meant here, but if the discomfort of feeling oneself in a different world comes through that’s good and something to recommend for the pages of one’s fiction. That’s all.
Thanks, Don, for a post which prodded me into taking a deeper look at things, from a slightly different perspective.
My protagonist finds her world in collision with the world of someone who takes her back to who she was at 15, in the flush of first love. What makes her feel inferior and out of place is that she is 32, and during those years in between she became a different person in order to deal with the pain of losing that first love.
The person she is now can’t really go back, even though the feelings she felt at 15 arise again, because she can’t forget the choices she made in between, choices that were made on the assumption that the 15-year-old was gone forever.
At the same time, in this new world the people most familiar to her, on whom she relies, have also become strange and out of place. She feels judged, exposed, and all of it makes her uneasy.
While I knew all of that, what I hadn’t explored in depth was what it feels like to have the crazy feelings of being in love at 15, with the awareness of who you are and what you have done at the age of 32. The feelings of disorientation, self-betrayal, and grief go even deeper than I’ve yet put on the page. Some work ahead of me.
Thanks.
You have me thinking about my world at 15. Definitely not my world of today! If I were to meet my 15-year-old self, it would be a shocking dislocation–as much for 15-year-old me as for much-older me.
I hadn’t though about one’s own self being more than one world, but of course that’s true. Great comment, thanks.
Love the first Wednesdays of the month. And here you are, right on time, albeit a little later than the east coast, here on Vancouver Island.
Collisions can be positive even when beset with serious challenges. In my work-in-progress, an eccentric artist, a retired woman, lives all her working life in a big city, struggling, feeling alienated and at cross purposes with the seaside life she’s dreamed of. Her ideal world is living out her last years, quietly secluded in a cottage by the sea.
When she gets her wish and arrives at her dream home, she lands in a new world that’s both perfection and weird. The sea unleashes long-suppressed high school memories in supernatural flashbacks and flash-forward events that mirror as Alzheimer’s. Who is real? Who are the hallucinations? Who, if any, are her allies?
Rather than succumb to dementia in the ward of an institution, the woman agrees to change places with a teenage girl in a famous painting who offers solace and the practicalities of homecare.
After a stalker leaves three encrypted messages in sandcastles on her beach, the woman hits the sand running.
The girl in the painting has to fulfill a promise made three-hundred-years in the past and the woman has to remember the incident that connected them when they were both sixteen.
I look forward to our next meeting on March 7th
Love the sound of that story!
Good morning, Don. This is a timely post, and world’s colliding have been on my mind a lot. I recently reread Taylor Caldwell’s, “Captain and the Kings”. It’s the story of Joseph Armagh, a young Irish immigrant, and his mother died hours earlier. Here’s a passage that I think very quickly points out what you are talking about here.
“Foot by foot the Irish Queen moved to the docks and the long sheds upon them, and Joseph strained fiercely to see the faces of the lonely crowds gathered on the wooden wharf. Was his father among them? There were many there, including women, and they were weeping, for they already knew that the steerage passengers would not be permitted to land. Some forlorn hands waved in greeting. A man was raising a flag on a staff nearby and for the first time in his life Joseph saw the stars and stripes whipping wetly in the cold wind of winter and unfurling heavily to the new and hopeless day.
“So, and that is the brave flag,” said a man at another porthole, and the other men joined him to gaze at the forbidden land. One laughed derisively, then burst into a fit of coughing.
“They don’t want the likes of us.”
It’s an older novel, but feels fitting for today and the immigration battles being waged, the rich vs. poor.
Certain word choices had impact – the ‘lonely crowds’, the star and stripes juxtaposed to the ‘new and hopeless day’, the ‘brave flag’ and ‘forbidden land’. And the question – ‘would his father be there?’ It’s a passage maybe overwritten by today’s standards, yet in less than half a page, it got to me.
Thanks, Don. Hope your day is a good one.
Thanks for this exercise! I always look forward to your posts.
In my story, a young woman is trying to keep a grip on reality while faced with unexplainable paranormal activity. The two worlds collide in a nuclear way at work which is the inciting incident. Then her sensitivity continues in France where she must keep up a front of normalcy around her controlling sister. She wants to live in that normal world but senses imminent danger. The question becomes, how far will she go to risk her relationships and reputation, but ultimately, their lives?
And how does being out of her element (in France) change her, and change what she must do?
Even though the protagonist is younger than her sister, a role reversal takes place in France as she discovers her sensitivity isn’t a quirk but a strength. This gives her the confidence to defy her sister and slip out at night to search for the Gothic estate’s darkest secrets in order to protect them both.
Your questions always set my mind whirring, Don. These two are especially helpful to me right now: “What about him or her was previously considered normal, but is now glaringly out of place? Who notices that—or pretends not to?”
I hadn’t previously thought about this aspect of my MC’s deliberate jump from a comfortable middle-class life to a one of poverty. Your questions are giving me lots of new ideas for how to show her dislocation/relocation in her new world. Thanks!
Go for it.
Don, cinnamon rugelach, yes. Challah too. (Gluten, my dearest friend.) Tasty post too. The novel I’m about to self-pub has a three-headed protagonist: one is an uptight businesswoman who is tossed together with a homeless panhandler through unsettling circumstances.
She’s deeply ill at ease, he’s deeply skeptical. Their shared rugelach turns out to be Charlotte Bronte. (You have to be there.) A deeper, disturbing bond regarding bad parenting comes later. The other protagonist’s head is in the clouds, trying to mediate between these two.
Oh, I loved A Gentleman in Moscow. Great storytelling and an admirable style.
You have two characters (three?) who certainly are going to feel dislocated in each other’s worlds. Charlotte Bronte, however, is their common ground? Fun!
In my just-published novel Restoration Day, the two worlds are the prim and proper sheltered world in which the heroine has been raised, and the harsher reality outside her magic bubble.
The heroine is the locus of conflict, both externally and within her own mind, as she tries to figure out what out of everything she’s been raised to think and be is true, and what is false.
While running for her life, of course, because you can’t operate out of a false set of assumptions without running your head into some trouble.
I have loved worlds colliding -in the early 90s, I worked in Boston and a Japanese friend was sharing another one of her insights about Americans. That morning she thought American men were so cute that they wore little hats to hide their bald spots. After the hysterical laughter subsided, we explained that they were Jews and the hats were part of their religion. She was fascinated and we quickly realized we couldn’t answer her more probing questions. An Israeli couple couldn’t answer as the wife couldn’t stop laughing and the husband was insulted. I joked about calling Jewish Information (preGoogle, we used the Boston phonebook) To our amazement there actually was a number listed. We called it and an older man answered. He listened to our story and invited us to tea, since he was also located in Chinatown. We took off our lab coats and immediately left for our adventure. (note: people who work in research labs will go anywhere for free food and a respite from the mind numbing boredom) As it turned out, he was a rabbi who headed the Rabbinical Court for New England. He had a lovely trimmed and full white beard -my Japanese friend immediately asked him if he was Santa Claus. After he stopped laughing, he poured us tea and offered cookies. After an hour, my friend was satisfied and a little disappointed. And me? A lapsed Catholic –he invited me to his synagogue but asked that I not use my name Christine, since he had many survivors. I showed up and for three years I was Chaya. Since then, my ears are more attuned to the subtle attitudes of people who simply do not understand. I recently went to a book signing for Jewish Noir and the smiles wavered or disappeared when my name tag was read, it made me sad but I understood. In my WIP, a convert moves to the rural South with her husband, a secular Jew -she is the religious one and worlds collide gently.
For those of us who do not yet understand: what is the issue around the name Christine?
Don,
I love all your posts. I print them out (because I’m from an era when pen, paper, and typewriters were the only choice.) I’ve said this before here, but I always know the post is from you in the first paragraph or two. That’s when I pay better attention. I know I’m going to learn something or reinforce something. Thanks for the lessons!