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Writing It Real contributor Janice Eidus' newest
novel, The War of the Rosens, is the story of
10-year-old Emma Rosen, a thoughtful girl who is writing poetry amidst the anger,
confusion and angst of her leftist and atheist father Leo, her subservient
socialist mother Annette and lovelorn older sister May. Amidst May's hateful
ripping up of Emma's poems, Annette's emotional withdrawal and Leo's
exhortations about "Truth With A Capital T," Emma attempts to find
her own answers to the nature of good and evil, the existence of God, the
meaning of religion, and her place in her family.
In an interview with Carol Schmidt of The
Author's Sala of San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico, Janice Eidus remarked:
Despite writing and publishing
fiction and nonfiction all my adult life, it has been extremely difficult for
me to write about my Jewish identity and roots.
I grew up in an emotionally and physically tumultuous Jewish family in the
Bronx. Not until my husband and I began to raise our own daughter, who is
adopted from Guatemala, was I able to begin to explore my Jewish identity in my
writing.
The War of the Rosens portrays the world in which I was raised, the
world that shaped who I am and led to my becoming the deeply loving mother of
this particular child at this particular time in my life. The War of the
Rosens, rooted so deeply in truth, explores my Jewish identity, which has
proven -- for better and worse -- to be hard earned, unconventional, and
sometimes controversial.
Most of us find it difficult to dig into the most
fundamental occurrences of our early years, especially if our parents are still
alive and if siblings see things differently than we do. Still, such stories
contain imagines and dialog that show how our early life created our personal
obsessions as writers and our idiosyncratic windows onto the world. It is
worthwhile to write these stories, and we can draw lessons from the way Janice
Eidus put her experience into her novel.
When Leo buys Emma a coveted diary at the five-and-dime, Emma is appalled by
his words to the salesclerk:
"We Rosen's believe,"
he says loudly, waiting for his change, returning once more to the foremost and
central subject on his mind, exclusively in the worth of human beings, not in a
supernatural God…"
"You'll never need any spiritual crutches," he dramatically declares,
handing Emma the book, his thin nostrils flaring and his bright blue eyes lit
up.
Emma is embarrassed as she sees the young woman's eyebrows
"rise toward her scalp" and wonders why her father needs so much
attention, even from strangers. She thinks, "He is a child," and as
soon as she thinks it, she feels guilty. She begins to mull over his frequently
stated words: "The Rosens may not be good Jews, but they're good
people." And she asks herself, "…if the Rosens are good people, why
aren't they happy?"
Why is her father so enraged
all the time, her sister so cruel, her mother so mournful and sad, riddled with
crippling headaches and nausea that leave her flat on her back for days at
time? Isn't it possible that God--who doesn't exit, of course--well, maybe He
does exist, and then if He does--isn't it possible that He's punishing the
Rosen's for not being good Jews?
In another scene, Leo insists on taking Emma and May with
him to the beach on the Jewish holy day Rosh Hashanah. He is dead set on
flaunting his lack of being observant before all the neighbors. After the girls
have eaten sandwiches on the blanket he spread out for them, and he has taken a
bracing swim in the ocean, it is time to drive back home:
Leo accelerates so fast that
both girls gasp, and he crosses lanes, cutting off the Number 12 bus, which in
the summer is packed sardine can-tight with beachgoers but today is nearly
empty. With a wild screech, he steers across the busy intersection of Pelham
Parkway and White Plains Road…
Leo parks the car on the far side of the Projects, and Emma immediately
understands that he has done this deliberately, so that they'll have to walk
past all five of the other buildings, in order to reach their own. This has
been the real reason for the entire excursion, this parading around in their
bathing suits on Rosh Hashanah. By now, the Project benches will have filled up
with Jews, home from synagogue, chatting and sharing news of God, or whatever
it is that religious Jews discuss on the High Holy Days. This must be what her
mother meant when she'd said to Emma's father, "You don't have to rub
everyone's faces in your beliefs."
Like two little ducklings, May and Emma trail behind their father, the three of
them in their bathing suits. Their rubber flip-flops slap the sidewalk in
drum-like rhythm. Emma's toes and fingers are freezing, and, beside her, May
also shivers, although she won't meet Emma's eye to commiserate.
Of course, Leo doesn't appear to be cold at all, and it's crystal clear to Emma
how proud he is of the figure he cuts as he walks through the Projects, his
back straight, head high, a strong man who can withstand cold water and cool
weather, a muscular man with his two obedient and unquestioning daughters in
tow.
Perhaps you remember when a parent or sibling, public or
religious schoolteacher or relative acted in public in a way that made you
cringe. Usually, such moments are born of the adult making "inside"
business public, of communicating points of view that seem obsessive even to a
child observer. And usually, the child is powerless against being used by
adults to appear a certain way, to help them make a statement about how life
ought to be. How often we had to soldier our way through the experiences or
deny that there were battles we wished to fight.
Plagued by spiritual and emotional questions, the two sisters have different
ways of searching for answers. Emma starts secretly visiting the statue of the
Virgin Mary at a nearby church. When she asks life questions in the presence of
the stature, she hears answers:
"Don't worry now about
how to be a good Jew. One day you'll understand. And then, you will be what you
wish to be."
May's response to her parents' vehement atheism is a great
love for the Old Testament, which is forbidden in the house. From the
time she found a copy under a park bench, she was enthralled with the language
of Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus. She believes her
Grandmother Thelma, who her father loudly denigrated, was right about the value
of Jewish law and a belief in God. She imagines marrying Marvin and keeping a
Jewish household. May and Emma's mother Annette's response to Leo's maniacally
anti-religious lectures is to suffer terrible days-long migraines.
You might be inspired to make a list of moments when adults made you more than
merely uncomfortable and you questioned what your life would be about. After
you have remembered such a moment you might want to write about, write down
questions you wished you'd addressed to someone about your inner turmoil. Write
down answers you would have liked to have gotten. Who could have given you this
answer if you had asked--perhaps someone in a dream, a beloved teacher, another
relative or friend's parent, a camp counselor, or community leader? The fact
that Emma goes to a religious icon of a different faith might inspire you to think
about how beings far from our background often have the answer we are looking
for when escaping our own background seems important. Try writing a letter from
your child self to the being or spirit that could have provided an answer. You
can explain what you hope to get from thinking about the situation now. As you
write the letter, describe symptoms, rituals, and the denial mechanisms you
used to submerge your anxiety.
Janice Eidus writes this book with a convincing sense of time and place that
you'll want to emulate. On every page, the reader feels a part of Emma's
environment and concerns. In a recent review of The War of the Rosens, J.
Stefan-Cole describes it this way:
The journey back to the Gun
Hill Projects reflects a time that now seems innocent. Uniformly bland brick
buildings are alive with an ethnic mix, sixties songs fill the background, and
chance meetings at the elevator serve as a telegraph system; in the projects
people are not strangers. And there are the candies Leo sells, names called out
like mantras running through the book: Good ‘n Plenty, Raisinettes,
Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Pez, Chunkies…manna
to the neighborhood kids.
As you are writing about a setting in which you were a pawn
of an adult, don't reveal the manipulative situation too quickly. Write about
what you wore, what you were doing (sitting on a beach blanket eating
sandwiches with your disapproving sister as your father went for a swim in Emma's
case), what the environment you were in looked like (the bus Leo cuts off was
not crowded in contrast the way it was in the summer months). Remember the
weather at that time (too chilly to be in a bathing suit), the sounds around
you (Emma's family's flip-flops sound like drums), any food involved (the girls
had eaten sticky peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while they waited for their
father to finish his swim). Remember how you got where you were and what the
vehicle was like or the pavement beneath your feet (Leo's car has
bullet-riddled windows).
Once you have described the place your scene begins (for instance, in The
War of the Rosens, Leo is strutting in his bathing suit with his girls in
theirs before dressed up observant Jews), write about becoming aware of the
manipulation, the moment you fully felt it. Write about how you felt in the
situation--what you thought, what you remember, what you made of things.
Describe the image that the manipulative person is trying to get across, the
one you are powerless to change at the moment. When you are finished writing
this letter, you may have written material for a personal essay or the start of
a story or novel.
Near Eidus' novel's end, Emma exclaims, "I am not bad!" stealing
words back from her father to use as a platform for standing up for herself. In
her life, Janice has become a parent and reports, "Creating a multiracial
family has deepened my identity as a Jew. This life transformation has led to a
major breakthrough in my writing, as well as in my creative and emotional life.
The War of the Rosens is the book I was always meant to write."
Although The War of the Rosens is a dark tale of a family suffering from
both disillusionment and idealism, it is also a tale of how writing, Emma knows
she will "blossom and thrive," that her life has in it "a
thousand lines of poetry" that "have taken root in her heart."
Whether you are well published or just beginning, writing from dark childhood
experience is a way to discover what was going on and how you can undo any
remaining chains. . . .
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