Well, I got up and did it and only stumbled once. And did a good enough job that someone (Austin? DC?) later came up to me and said, “There you are, we’ve been saying we had to find the bubbly-blonde.”

I’ve never been called a bubbly-blonde before. LOVED it.

So then after all that pitching, we were ushered into a basement dining hall where they served us beige food and gave us absolutely no alcohol. Nothing. I have never wanted a drink so badly in my life. Especially as we writers kept being urged to circulate, and the pressure was keen to meet & greet & impress, over and over again.

And yet: I got to speak with some lovely women, all of whom were there because they loved books and loved their communities and wanted to bring Jewish writers to Jewish readers– a noble cause, to my mind, and one I am of course hankering to help out with.

And: there were NY black & white cookies. Albeit the mini-kind.

And: I met Palm Beach, who loved, loved, loved Sima and hopes, she told me, to team up with Miami and Ft. Lauderdale to bring me over.  Which sounded pretty amazing to me, especially since more than one rep had told me that coming from Victoria I was a bit hard to budget for, flight-wise.

(Damn that Canadian border. The flight from Victoria to Seattle takes less than 1/2 hr but bumps up the ticket price by at least $200. Grr.)

Anyway, fingers crossed that someone will find me worthy of breaking the bank.

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1. Snowy night, early flight

I spoke at my mother’s Hadassah Chapter: Park Slope, Brooklyn.

There was cake, there was coffee, there was hummus & salad & quinoa. And there were thirty-odd Jewish women in their 40s and 50s and 60s, each of them (well, almost) holding a copy of Sima.

It hadn’t occurred to me until I was walking over to the meeting: they had the potential to be my best or worst audience.

After all: my novel is about Brooklyn Jewish women. Yes, they don’t have to be Jewish. But: they are, unapologetically so. I recently read Nathan Englander rail against the “Jewish Fiction” label. I see his point, but reject it entirely. Sima is Jewish Fiction.

And yet: this was my first  exclusively –and assertively –Jewish audience.

Would they recognize themselves and the landscape they know in Sima? Or would they tell me I’d gotten it all wrong? Or would they make nice small-talk for my mother’s sake, while clearly hating every last word I’d written?

Well: they seemed to like it. I got lots of kisses and hugs and significant hand-holds. More than that, I got to sit back and listen as they took the talk from me and carried it forward: women raising their hands, women interrupting, women leaning forward impatiently to respond to someone’s point about my book.

Is there a greater thrill for an author than hearing her work intelligently engaged with? Than listening, and in listening knowing: this story matters to someone?

And then too: how I’ve missed interruptions! Honest, at a midwifery intensive that preceded this trip I kept chastising myself for interrupting. I’m terrible sometimes, and I do try to be better. But to listen to these women talk, and to recognize the flow of the conversations I’d been raised on –well, it was validating.  I’ve learned to say ‘please’and ‘thank you’ (I swear I wasn’t taught as a child) and to keep quiet sometimes and wait my turn others, but it doesn’t always come easy to me, and sitting there and listening I understood why, and loved it.

One of the funniest moments came when I told them how so many Canadian readers had responded to me: understandably intrigued by the “exotic” setting and full of questions about it. (“What’s with the wigs?”)

The laughed out loud to think of Boro Park as exotic. “Really? They think that?!”

On the flip-side, I’m used to Americans giving me a blank look when I say I’m from Victoria. But these women all seemed to have been there, on some cruise or another. “The Butchart Gardens,” one after another told me, “I couldn’t believe how gorgeous!”

All in all, a fabulous evening. They even gave me a framed certificate for speaking at their group. “Oh yeah,” my father said, when he saw it, “Hadassah loves giving out certificates.”

Luckily, I love taking them.  Thank you, Hadassah of Park Slope, Brooklyn!!!!

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Cool, no?

Am thick in midwifery-exam studying right now. Yes: thick in it. Which is why I am blogging, obviously, instead of reviewing, say, all the many ways in which Cytomeglovirus will screw your unborn child.

Don’t ask.

In celebration of the end of the semester/preparation for finals, I have begun watching Grey’s Anatomy. Yes, I am nothing if not 5 years behind a trend. Apparently I’ll have to wait until Season Two for the OB/GYN /Pediatric Surgeon (why don’t we have one of those in Victoria?!), but all the same I feel like I have somewhat more insight into all the many absurdities of television medicine than I would have without my student-midwife training. So that means I’ve come a long way in my learning, right?

Best of all was the lung surgery scene. “Is that…?!” says the shocked intern, as they show a shot of something black and malicious lurking behind a pink lung. I was able to immediately tell Jordan it was a left-behind surgical towel.  Then I had to verify a few times that he wouldn’t have known that without my telling him. Which he assured me he wouldn’t.  Which illustrates that I am now well-acquainted with the particular look of blood-saturated guaze. Well done.

Phone just rang: live-time coverage here to announce that the Thrifty’s Food Supermarket in Broadmead Village has matzoh meal in stock. (Yes: they called me. How’s that for customer service? “I heard you’re interested in our Manishewitz Products,” the customer rep said. Indeed.)

Study pause again then, to get all I need to make matzoh balls with Eva this afternoon. Just like my mom did with me, when I was a kid.  Don’t even ask for the recipe: it’s perfect, but I’ll never share it.

Okay: write an amazon review and it’s yours.

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Okay? Okay.

But who’s kidding who: I haven’t written in a bit because I simply don’t have much book news. I gave an embarrasingly long interview to an Australian ex-pat who has made it his business to interview every Jewish author around. I’m not sure what possessed me to go on, and on, and on, though I suspect his accent was to blame. At any rate, he’s posted not just the transcript but also the audio. I will never ever listen to it myself, but it’s nice that it’s out there for Jewish author posterity –in excellent company.

This coming Friday I have an interview with Jewish Week.  A bit of a coup for me–it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that my mother has been salivating over the idea of a Jewish Week review ever since the publishing contract got signed. When none came, she simply called them herself. She got the name & email of the book reviewer and passed it on to me; I sent an email explaining the situation re: my mother and my novel. Right away I got a response, and now an interview. Score one for the home team.

In other news: my midwifery placement ends this week, I’ve got a final on Tuesday, I have no idea where my summer placements will be (the idea is to work with obstetricians, nurses, and family physicians, but UBC has been mum on the details), and I have now committed to go to NYC the last weekend of May for Jewish Book Network auditions, which means I will parade around showing how Jewish and appealing I am while representatives from Jewish Book Fairs all across North America watch, deciding whether I am worth bringing to their venue. Which begs the question: if I am chosen, how will I get the time off? (And if I’m not?!)

All the usual craziness. But the real big good news: Tillie is toilet-trained! One month shy of 2, and totally brilliant. And with two kids in underwear, nothing can stop me. 

(Not even being out of Cheerios mid-week–even this trial I can face. So off to the supermarket I go–)

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Hearing this, I was not only amused—I was also a little proud. Sometimes it’s obvious what our children understand. (For instance: when, after seeing Bambi, I overheard Eva playing with toy animals. A small giraffe called out a high-pitched, “Mama! Mama! Where are you Mama?!” A larger alligator responded in a deep-voice, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Oops.)

Other times it’s less clear. Eva knows we don’t celebrate Christmas, because we don’t hang up Christmas lights much as she would like us to. (We do, however, have a brilliant little pair of joke-glasses that, when worn, turn Christmas lights into tiny Star of Davids.) We also sometimes, but not always, celebrate Shabbat, and even attend synagogue once a month. Or at least: we mean to attend synagogue once a month.

When I was a child we almost never went to synagogue. But then: growing up in Brooklyn, at least half the kids I knew were Jewish. At a certain point I would have understood that Jews were a small minority, but that never colored my daily experience. When at age 20 I decided to spend a year studying in Scotland, one of my justifications was that I needed to get away from so many Jews. Familiarity breeds contempt, and that sort of thing.

But we’re raising Eva, and her younger sister Tillie, in Victoria, British Columbia. Victoria is a small city on the Southern tip of Vancouver Island. People describe it as beautiful, charming, breath-taking. All that is true. My mother calls it “the Land of the Goyim,” which is also true. If I take my girls to the playground this time of year, I can guarantee that all the mommy-talk will center on Christmas plans. And while we have wonderful friends here and have fallen in love with the area, boarding a plane to New York City from Toronto last year I surprised myself by thinking, as I looked up the aisle, wow, people on this plane look like me.

I hadn’t even known I was missing that.

Recently I received a wonderful note from Vanessa Hart, the actress who is voicing the audio-book. She wanted to know how to pronounce the Hebrew & Yiddish words in the novel. If you’d asked me I probably would have said there was only a handful of Jewish-isms in the novel, but Vanessa sent me a long list. So there I was on the phone, trying to teach her the guttural “ch” –no, not H, Ch, from the back of your throat, catch some mucus with it—laughing as she repeated after me in a hopelessly non-Semitic accent.

Will my daughters know these words? What will not-being-Christmasans mean to them? Jordan and I talk about it sometimes, and like all parenting/family decisions we’ve adopted an inevitably ad-hoc approach, improvising as we go along. Saturdays were a sacred family day, until my student-midwife clinical placement began. In just a few years Eva and Tillie will have their own Saturday activities, which we will or won’t resist. We make it up. We bend and flex. We take evening walks to look at our neighbors’ Christmas lights, sometimes squinting through the Star of David glasses, sometimes removing them to better enjoy the cool & colored light.

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