It’s hard to believe, but it’s one year since “The Tin Horse” was published – January 29, 2013! Year 1 has been an amazing ride. A few highlights …

* The launch party at Warwick’s Books in La Jolla was such a high! Walking from the car to the bookstore, I warned myself not to have expectations about how many people would be there … and it was mobbed. I was so moved by all of the friends who came to help me celebrate.

* In February, I spoke at the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles neighborhood where my novel is set. I was interviewed by Dr. George Sanchez, a USC professor who studies Boyle Heights’ multi-ethnic history. And, true to Boyle Heights’ diverse history, the talk had a wonderfully diverse standing-room-only audience.

* In August, I spoke to a Hadassah group in Madison, Wisconsin, and my mom was able to attend! (She’s in the yellow shirt in the foreground of the picture.)

* On a trip to Paris in November, I found the French version of the book, titled “Les Belles Promesses,” in a bookstore on the Left Bank.

I was touched by how perceptively reviewers engaged with the book. Here’s one of my favorite comments, from The Historical Novel Review: “’The Tin Horse’ offers that rare delight: a sophisticated, character-driven book with a suspenseful, hard-to-put-down plot. … The role of Elaine’s Romanian immigrant mother and the twists in her story will wham you with their humanity and depth. No clichés here.” And “The Tin Horse” was one of O Magazine’s books to pick up in March!

Along with  highs, the year has brought some big learning opportunities. I’ve lurched into the world of social media and discovered that not all online material can be dashed off as quickly as a Tweet. Pieces I wrote about my passions for Judaism and dance made me dig deeply to define why these things speak to my soul. And I made a video – you can’t see it, but my hands were pretty much glued to my sides to restrain my tendency to dance with them when I talk.

It’s been quite a journey. And it continues. Unlike the old days of book promotion, when you did a flurry of talks at the time a book first came out, many of my events are visits to book groups, where everyone has read the book. That has been a very special pleasure. During the years I was writing the book, “my readers” were a vague presence. Now they are real faces and voices, and I’m honored to hear how “The Tin Horse” resonated with them.

 

I just came across an online discussion on “The Editing Myth” in which many writers seem to believe that real editing is a thing of the past. That’s what I thought, too, until I worked with Kendra Harpster at Random House. Here’s my WSJ piece about our editing “marriage.”

Wall Street Journal – Jan. 26, 2013

When people talk about the classic age of editing, it brings to mind the kind of intimate connection that existed between Maxwell Perkins and the authors he discovered, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The great editors like Perkins, Robert Gottlieb, and Gordon Lish got their hands dirty with every detail of their authors’ work, and sometimes of the authors’ lives.

Legendary editor-author partnerships had a lot in common with marriage, both as a union of kindred souls and as a battleground. Take the association between Mr. Lish and the late short story writer Raymond Carver. Their on-the-page process is laid unusually bare in “‘Beginners,’ Edited,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2007 and shows the full text of one of Carver’s signature stories as he submitted it to Alfred A. Knopf, and as Mr. Lish edited it.

Initially, the edits are on the word and sentence level. Some seem capricious-a man named “Herb” becomes “Mel”-but you can see Mr. Lish shaping Carver’s spare style as he prunes the back-story and emotional cues: “Laura, my sweet, big Laura, said evenly” is cut to “Laura said.” As the story proceeds, the red pencil slashes. Mr. Lish deletes most of the latter half, including the final 1500 words, and adds the story’s ending.

For an author, the extent of the changes seems excruciating, and apparently Carver found it so. On the other hand, authors dream of having an editor who cares as passionately as Mr. Lish did about every word. And no one would pick Carver’s title for the story, “Beginners,” over Mr. Lish’s: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

His brand of editing no longer exists-or so I believed when my novel, “The Tin Horse,” sold to Random House in the fall of 2010. The novel tells the story of the search by the elderly Elaine for her vanished twin sister Barbara, and unveils secrets from their youth. Kendra Harpster, who would be my editor, assured me that she would be hands-on, and said she felt our partnership was bashert, a Yiddish word that means predestined. Still, my editing expectations stayed low.

Two months later, I received my first editorial letter from Ms. Harpster. Its 18 single-spaced pages were filled with questions about characters and motivations: “In what other instances did Barbara push Elaine’s cautious nature? Where did that cautious nature lead her?” Ms. Harpster pushed me to refine dialogue and internal monologue around what she perceived as the book’s theme: “the unavoidably subjective ways (we) shape the narratives of our destinies.”

I sometimes fall in love with a phrase as language, even if it fudges the truth. I wasn’t allowed to get away with that. I’d had Elaine, my protagonist, say, “My life of duplicity began in earnest that night.” Harpster asked, “Is this a little hyperbolic?” I ended up changing it to “My season of duplicity.”

In what I think of as classic fashion, she and publisher/editor-in-chief Susan Kamil also gave me a two-year process of letting ideas develop and be refined. The editorial engagement never flagged. On perhaps her fourth time through, Ms. Harpster read the entire book aloud. On that read, she added a comment by Elaine that charmed me, “In those days I was an amateur at irony.”

Even more important was “thinking away from the page” about what might be missing. Ms. Harpster wanted me to expand the present-day story that now takes up about one-quarter of the book. She refrained from being too directive as to how I should do that. She planted the seed, and it led me to bring Elaine’s youngest sister, Harriet, into the present-day story in Chapter 4, rather than Chapter 17; now I could play the two sisters’ family narratives against each other.

And that, perhaps, is where editing skill becomes editing magic, and an author-editor relationship might even be bashert: when an editor is so attuned to an author that she knows when to jump in and when to exercise restraint.

Last weekend, I led two Jewish services, one on Friday night at my synagogue and the second on Saturday morning for my Renewal group. I led prayers – singing and playing guitar and drum – and shared a teaching about the Torah reading, the one where the Israelites are fleeing Egypt, the sea miraculously parts, and, after they cross the sea, they burst into song.

As the Talking Heads put it in “Once in a Lifetime” – and with the same tone of disbelief – how did I get here? How, after a very secular upbringing and literally decades of feeling disconnected from Judaism, did I end up leading prayers?

Although the term tikkun olam – repairing the world – wasn’t yet in vogue, the Judaism I experienced growing up in the 1950s and 60s was tikkun olam Judaism: committed to social justice and leading an ethical life. I was proud that the rabbi of our Reform synagogue in Milwaukee – Dudley Weinberg of Temple Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun – was prominent in the civil rights movement. A high point of my teens was a post-confirmation class with guest speakers including anti- war protestors, black activists, etc.; it led to a group of us petitioning for Black Studies at our very-white suburban high school. (To be honest, the speaker who made the most indelible impression on my 17-year-old self was a poet who advocated free love!)

I continued trying to repair the world when I went to college. I marched against the Viet Nam War. I wrote for progressive newspapers. I embraced the women’s movement. But when it came to Jewish practice, my parents – like Elaine in The Tin Horse – were of the generation that yearned to be American like their neighbors. We celebrated Hanukkah and Passover, and I did get sent to religious school, where I learned the Genesis and Exodus stories and got a heavy dose of Jewish Heroes, people who’d achieved in science or the arts or – less often but cooler – sports, who could give us some muscle-flexing Jewish pride.

But I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah, nor did either of my brothers have Bar Mitzvahs. Jewish rituals weren’t a significant part of my childhood. And, in my twenties and thirties, the same tikkun olam principles that drew me toward feminism pushed me away from the patriarchal Jewish narrative and traditions. Plus, my husband is a lapsed Catholic, and we don’t have kids, so we had no concern about providing a religious-ethical education. Once every few years, I’d feel a vague tug and try a synagogue … but there was always something that reminded me of why I felt alienated.

What rekindled a sense of connection was a Bat Mitzvah … on my husband’s side of the family. Right, that’s my lapsed-Catholic husband, Jack Cassidy. Jack’s sister also has a Jewish spouse, and in the early 90s, their daughter Rachel had a Bat Mitzvah. Their synagogue in Seattle, Eitz Or, had one of the first women rabbis, Vicki Hollander, and there was a moment during the Bat Mitzvah when the four people standing on the bimah (podium) were Rabbi Vicki, Rachel, and Rachel’s grandmother and aunt on her dad’s side. All women! For the first time in years, I was in a synagogue … and I felt at home.

Shortly after that, I started to plan a new novel in my mystery series. My brother David lives in Tel Aviv (he teaches statistics at Tel Aviv University), and I decided to give my sleuth, a San Diego radio reporter, a mystery to solve in Israel. I could visit David and write it off! Figuring out where in Israel to set the story, I had the thought, “Isn’t some branch of Judaism associated with the town of Safed? And it’s in the Galilee, it looks pretty.” I had no idea that Safed was a centuries-old center for Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. I wasn’t even aware that Judaism had mystics. (This was before Madonna and other celebrities became devotees of the Kabbalah Center.) But, as research for the book (“Death in a City of Mystics”), I started to read and study. And I was captivated.

Two books spoke to me deeply: Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s “God was in this Place & I, i did not know” and Judith Plaskow’s “Standing Again at Sinai.” Kushner’s book is a multi-faceted take on Jacob’s dream of a ladder with angels going up and down, and it made me aware that Jewish texts are rich with psychological resonance and open to a multiplicity of interpretations. Reading “Standing Again at Sinai,” a classic of Jewish feminism, I found that during the years when I’d stayed away, there were women who so valued their connection to Judaism that they were insisting on carving out a larger place for us. (It’s a struggle that continues – do you know about the amazing Women of the Wall in Jerusalem?)

I learned about Kabbalah from a great set of tapes (now on CD) by Rabbi David A. Cooper, to which I listened in the car. I was driving through the hills east of La Jolla when I heard the teaching that every blade of grass has an angel whispering to it, “Grow! Grow!” Now, any time I’m on that stretch of I-5, I still hear it: “Grow!” Not that I really believe that. But neither do I disbelieve it. I think what touched me was that the religion I’d experienced as dry and intellectual also had room for this poetic flight of imagination.

Jack and I went synagogue-shopping and found a Reconstructionist congregation, Dor Hadash, and also a Jewish Renewal group, Shir Ha Yam. I’ve linked to sites that explain Reconstructionism and Renewal far better than I could. But briefly, both are progressive, with women in leadership roles. At Dor Hadash, I’ve enjoyed being part of a  welcoming, intellectually stimulating community, jamming with a wonderful music group … and getting the opportunity to have my Bat Mitzvah when I was 49! In Renewal, I love the Jubu (Jewish-Buddhist) practices of chanting and meditation and. And, at Renewal retreats, I’ve explored creative ways to dive into texts – I’ve done bibliodrama with Peter Pitzele and Arthur Strimling, and practiced Storahtelling with Caryn Aviv.

In both communities, I’ve discovered that Jewish music speaks to my heart, especially music by contemporary women composers: Rabbi Shefa Gold’s chants, Cantor Linda Hirschhorn’s multi-part a capella songs, Debbie Friedman’s soulful tunes. And – back to, how did I get here? – I’ve found that my love for music, plus the ability to carry a tune and play guitar a little, has led to my being a lay service leader.

I have also become a trop geek. Trop are the melodies used to chant sacred texts, and there are different trops depending on the text. For my Bat Mitzvah, I learned Torah and Haftarah trop. I’ve since acquired a bit of Song of Songs (the melody does sound like a love song). Using the Torah trop for the High Holy Days, I’ve learned to chant the Akeda, the story of the binding and near-sacrifice of Abraham’s son, Isaac, and I’ve grappled with that wrenching story … and that gets me into the new novel I’m writing, in which one character is studying to be a cantor and will chant the Akeda for the first time.