I’ve got my own two Ilana’s-Words-of-the-Year for 2026. They’re not completely new to the world in 2026, nor even new to me, but as recently as two years ago I’d never heard of them and I’ve thought about them more this year than ever before.

The words are Ashkenormative and Diasporism.

And they tell us something about emerging currents in Judaism—pointing to some possible forms and fissures of Judaism in the future.

Ashkenormative

I first heard the word “Ashkenormative” in early 2025 at a Jewish writers’ panel during the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). These were writers of Sephardic (Spanish) or Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) descent complaining that their communities have been overlooked in our focus on the experience of Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.

This was an “oh shit, that’s true!” moment for me. Name a Jewish food? I bet the first things that pop into your head are bagels, matzah balls, latkes, or other Eastern European dishes. Know any Jewish slang that’s become part of American English? You probably think of chutzpah, yenta, schlemiel or similar words from Yiddish, the mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews.

The most famous Jewish-American comedians—the Woody Allens and Mel Brookses—base their jokes on Yiddish-inflected mothers and bubbies. Fiddler on the Roof ‘s shtetl is assumed to be synonymous with Jewish roots, the Lower East Side of 1900 with the Jewish immigrant experience.

It’s true that Ashkenazi Jews make up the vast majority of the U.S. Jewish population— at least two-thirds, according to a 2020 Pew Research Survey, and perhaps as much as 90 percent if you count Jews who don’t specify their background. But they’re not the only kind of Jews, and in Israel they’re outnumbered by Mizrachi Jews. (A 2015 Pew survey estimated Israeli Jews as 45 percent Ashkenazi and 48 percent Mizrachi or Sephardic.)

Jews of non-Ashkenazi background are a growing minority here. Today we have well-established communities of Syrian Jews in New York and Iranian Jews in Los Angeles. Israeli emigrés often bring a Mizrachi or mixed Mizrachi-Ashkenazi heritage with them. And U.S.-born Jews by choice come from a myriad of cultures, ranging from Black Pentecostal churches to WASP suburbs.

Bits of Mizrachi culture have been seeping into American Jewish life for years, starting—as is often the case—with food. Every synagogue serves falafel these days; shakshouka is popular too, and my own Ashkenazi family has added a date-based Sephardic charoset to the traditional apple-based one at our Passover seder.

The lesson I take is not to generalize. “Ashkenormative” refers to the assumption there is one Jewish story and it began in the Eastern European shtetl. But there is not a single Jewish experience; we’re not just bagels and lox. The American Jewish future will be a lot more diverse than what we imagined twenty or thirty years ago.

I’ve read two novels in the past year that offer windows into very different strains of non-Ashkenazi Jewish life.

Kantika, by Elizabeth Graver, follows several generations of a Sephardic family from Istanbul to Barcelona and Havana and ultimately New York. The title means “song” in Ladino, the hybrid mother tongue of Mediterranean Jews like Yiddish was for Eastern European ones.

Sisters of Fortune, by Esther Chehebar, hones in on four sisters in a single Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn, and their trials and tribulations in a cringingly materialistic marriage market. Picture Pride and Prejudice with kibbe and mikvehs and Chanel handbags.

Have you read other novels about the non-Ashkenazi American Jewish experience? Let us know your recommendations!

Diasporism

Diasporism refers to the embrace of diaspora as an integral and positive part of Judaism—not just a temporary, lamentable “waiting room” until Jews return to the land of Israel.

It’s a rejoinder to the classic Zionist argument that Jews will never be truly safe, free, and self-realized while living as a minority in a country not their own. That argument isn’t new: from the time Herzl first launched his campaign for a Jewish state, there were other Jews who said “not for us, thanks.”

(Molly Crabapple’s recent nonfiction book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, tells the story of the Bund, the Eastern European Jewish socialist group that through the first half of the 20^th century opposed Zionism and insisted that Jews should stay and fight for equality in the Diaspora.)

What’s new today is how the Diasporist idea has revived.

It went largely dormant after the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. American Jews fell in love with the vibrant new state, especially after the David-versus-Goliath victory of the Six-Day War. Jewish identity became intertwined with Israel, with synagogues flying Israeli flags beside American ones, children learning Hatikvah and Israeli dances, and tens of thousands of teens touring Israel as a rite of passage.

But fifty years of West Bank military occupation and two decades of right-wing Netanyahu governments started to undermine that love affair. With the Gaza War—which started out as a justifiable response to Hamas terror but morphed into staggering civilian slaughter—even more American Jews questioned Israel’s moral trajectory. Young Jews sympathetic to Palestinian suffering started to define themselves as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, and even their less left-wing parents started to wonder if religious nationalism were driving Israel towards a cliff.

So some of the new interest in Diasporism is a response to disillusion with Israel—people groping for a new ideology to replace their Zionism. But the interest goes beyond simple backlash or reaction.

Some scholars and rabbis are now making a case that diaspora itself is a good thing—that Judaism grew into the ethical, human-centered culture that we know precisely from the experience of being a minority in other people’s countries.

Judaism in ancient Israel was a religion of kings, priests, and animal sacrifices. Judaism in diaspora became a religion of study and ethics. Instead of sacrifice, the early rabbis created prayer services. Instead of armies, we had books.

One of the foremost writers today on diaspora as an integral aspect of Judaism is Shaul Magid, a rabbi and Dartmouth professor. His book The Necessity of Exile is a key work on the topic, although it can be tough going if you’re not philosophically inclined. (An early Yom Kippur confession: I haven’t made it all the way through.)

Diasporism is one of my words-of-the-year not because I necessarily agree with it (or even fully understand it yet) but because it’s a new and provocative way of thinking about the place of Jews in the world. I don’t believe that American Jews will turn away entirely from Israel, but I do think there will be greater attention—particularly in the liberal wing of Judaism—to fostering an American Jewish identity that doesn’t depend on Israel.

Perhaps Jewish teens will learn to feel as proud of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Debbie Friedman as they do of the martyrs at Masada. Perhaps our local holy spaces—whether they’re synagogues or redwood groves—will become as celebrated as the Western Wall.

Perhaps new rituals and institutions that are unique to the U.S. diaspora will develop.

And so this is where my two words-of-the-year nestle up to each other, side by side. The American Jewish community of the future may be one that is less focused on Israel and more focused on its own creativity and history. I suspect it will also be one that recognizes and celebrates its wide diversity of Jewish cultures, not just the well-known Ashkenazi tropes of bagels and Yiddish and Fiddler on the Roof.

Writing memoir. Or, less coherently, writing memories.

This is something I’ve never tried before. Why do it? I’m no celebrity and have no seat-gripping story of childhood adversity or trauma transcended. But since dabbling in social history in college, I’ve loved first-person accounts of ordinary lives in the distant past. The memoirs of Glikl bas Judah Leib, a 17^th century Jewish woman from Hamburg, were a central inspiration for my historical novel—a window into how my main character might have viewed her world. I’ve treasured the rare written reminiscences of my own family, such as 1830s letters home to Germany by my immigrant great-great-great grandfather Julius Lehman or an unpublished memoir by my late uncle Ira Skutch.

I’ve long wanted to leave similar writings for a future Ilana—a message across time to the hypothetical children of my still-unmarried daughter, or the even more hypothetical children of those children.

And of course as a professional writer it also enters my mind: Is this something that might interest a broader audience?

Who’s the audience?

So here I am with a bunch of memories and several possible readerships:

• Those hypothetical descendants who might—might—someday be curious about “what was life like for great-great grandma?”

• Future historians studying the daily life of not-famous people in the 1960s and 70s.

• The general reading public???

• Myself. If nothing else, this might be a way to make sense of my own life.

At a self-styled “writing retreat” on Cape Cod with my daughter in July, I started messing around with writing about my childhood. It was a completely foreign process. When starting a novel I always have a premise in mind, even if the details aren’t yet clear, but here I had no plot, no theme, no idea what I would write about or where it would lead.

I groped for some structure to work within, rather than just “describe your life,” and gave myself a prompt: What world events do I remember from my 1960s childhood? It was shocking how little I remembered—the JFK assassination, yes, but not the civil rights movement. Not Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. Not the Six Day War or Vietnam War protests or the Kent State shootings. Not the Summer of Love or the first moon landing or the arrival of “women’s lib.” I felt like a sheltered, cossetted idiot: even as a child, how could these things not have seeped into and marked my world?

Memoir versus memories

I refined my prompt and chose a more fruitful question. And then I split what I was doing into two separate documents. One was a thematic essay that aspired to be of general interest, the other a rambling, stream-of-consciousness description of my childhood apartment, the view from our living room window, conflicts with my sister over our shared space, etc. It would interest only my family, and perhaps not even them.

I’d call the more thematic one an attempt at memoir, the more rambling one just memories. Raw material. Throw them all down on paper and see what’s worth pursuing.

Single and composite memories

I found myself puzzled by the process of memory. There are a handful of things that I remember as singular scenes or stories—anecdotes—like the JFK assassination or my grandmother’s death. These were mostly painful or disturbing incidents, and I suspect that by replaying them over and over I etched them into memory. But I have very few such “stories.” The vast majority of my memories are not specific incidents but composites—many afternoons at our 11^th floor living room window watching parades pass below on 86^th Street, many family outings to miniature golf where I would go into a dark funk after losing, and many, MANY suppers with my siblings at the glossy white table in the kitchen where we wore cotton bibs made from old diapers and ate frozen fish sticks, macaroni-hamburger casserole, sometimes fresh peas in their shells. Our orange tabby cat would get hold of the occasional raw pea and bat it around, finally catching it and chewing it and spitting out bits of green debris on the linoleum floor. Those bits of green are as detailed in my mind as if I were looking at them today, but they don’t connect to a specific evening: multiple peas, multiple chases and captures, multiple flecks of chewed-up pea, all melded into one memory.

As a writer, I’m not sure what to do with those composites, which take up most of the space in the self-storage locker of my memory. The novels I’ve written are driven by scenes: someone says something, does something, or a discrete action happens. While I include summaries of past events and characters’ composite memories—for instance, a character remembers sunny childhood days on a rock by the river—they are secondary.

A novel made up only of composite memories without specific scenes or actions would be tedious.

Or would it be Proust?

Enter Proust

I bought a copy of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s classic novel that incorporates many of his own childhood memories. Even if you haven’t read it, you may know about his famous description of how eating a simple madeleine cookie brought to life long-forgotten childhood people and places.

But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause…. And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray… my aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom….

And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it… and with the house the town, from morning to night, and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went on errands, the paths we took if the weather were fine.

(From the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way, published by Viking/Penguin in 2003)

Proust expounds in great detail on the faintest shades and most subtle repercussions of a memory: the bit about the madeleine that I just excerpted actually goes on for four full pages. (His novel In Search of Lost Time comes to seven volumes and 3,200 pages in total.) His writing is beautiful and nuanced but dense. Slow. It’s challenging to read. I’m sixty pages in and don’t know if I can soldier through even this first volume.

And I’m no Proust. Not remotely aspiring to Prousthood! My writing style is planted firmly and happily in the late 20^th century, direct and conversational and accessible. The lesson I take from him, so far, is to slow down and describe. Follow threads and ramble. Not everything needs to be a “scene.” There’s a place for that composite memory—if well told—of many green peas being chased by a beloved cat on many evenings.

Ready, set, experiment

So I’m messing around with memories that may or may not add up to a coherent narrative.

At first I felt daunted because I remembered too little—so few memories of world events, so few specific anecdotes even about my own life. Then, once I started writing, I felt daunted because I remembered too much. It was hard to get it all down on paper. Writing about my bedroom led to writing about the oompah bands whose music wafted up through the lone window on weekend nights, which led to the record player that sat under the window, which led to the first records I owned, 45s of commercial bubblegum pop like Sugar Sugar by The Archies, which led to my pre-teen crushes on Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy, which led to…..

It’s a mess. It’s an experiment, figuring things out as I go. Go where? I don’t know. But it’s a start.

Have you written memoir or personal reminiscences? Were there books or advice you found particularly useful? Things you’ve learned that you’d like to share? I encourage you to post them in the comments for other folks who are considering writing about their lives.

The most somber holiday in the Jewish calendar, it mourns the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in 587 BCE and 70 CE respectively, although over the centuries it also came to encompass the entire panoply of disasters that befell Jews.

Traditionally Jews fasted on Tisha b’ Av like on Yom Kippur—refraining from work, food, washing, sex, and acts of personal luxury like wearing leather shoes. They attended synagogue seated on low stools or the floor, chanting from the Book of Lamentations, which recounts the destruction of Jerusalem.

Orthodox Jews continue these traditional practices. But my parents were non-observant Jews and I never even heard of Tisha b’ Av until well into my adulthood. The Reform denomination of Judaism—to which my husband and I belong—downplays Tisha b’ Av since its 19^th century founders had no desire to rebuild the Temple and felt they had found a new Promised Land in America. While Tisha b’ Av is an official holiday in Israel, it’s not as strictly observed as some others: secular Israelis pay much more attention to Yom Kippur or to Yom Hashoah, the day commemorating the Holocaust.

Tisha b’ Av first captured my attention when doing research for my current novel, set in the Jewish communities of Europe in the 1600s. This was before the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) when everyone was what we now call Orthodox, so Tisha b ‘Av would have been universally observed—as normal a part of the Jewish calendar as Passover or Chanukah is today.

And Shabtai Tzvi turned it upside down.

Shabtai Tzvi and Tisha b’ Av

Tzvi, a rabbi from Izmir in the Ottoman Empire, declared himself the Messiah in the 1660s. He had prophets who testified that he was the chosen one and proselytizers who spread the word and hundreds of thousands of followers from Istanbul to Amsterdam.

Tzvi was remarkably transgressive. He claimed that with the arrival of the messianic era, a new Torah had replaced the old one. The old rules no longer applied. Tzvi spoke the forbidden name of God; he ate forbidden fats; he called women to read from the Torah.

He celebrated Tisha b’ Av as a festival, not a fast day.

Tzvi claimed it as his birthday (based on a rabbinic story, most likely meant metaphorically, that the Messiah was born on the day that the Temple was destroyed) and wrote to his followers:

“And ye shall make it a day of great banqueting and great rejoicing, with choice food and delicious drinks, and with many candles and lights, and with many melodies and songs, for it is the birthday of your king Shabtai Tzvi, highest among the kings of the earth. And concerning [the prohibition of work], observe it like a full holiday, with your best clothes and festival liturgy.”

The scholar Gershom Scholem, who wrote the definitive biography of Tzvi, reported that “The festival was celebrated with exuberant joy, much to the grief of the few steadfast souls who refused to follow the ‘new religion.’ ”

(I had fun writing that scene. 😊 )

Tisha b ‘Av was the climax of Tzvi’s messianic career. Barely a month later, he was taken as a prisoner before the Turkish Sultan and under duress converted to Islam. The movement around him fragmented; thousands were shocked and demoralized, while other thousands continued to believe.

There’s much more detail about all of this in my novel, which is still “under construction.” But let’s return to Tisha b ‘Av and how it fits into our modern era.

Masada or Yavne?

Andrés Spokoiny, president of the Jewish Funders Network, published a thought-provoking commentary this week on Tisha b’ Av in which he compares two historic responses to the destruction of the Second Temple – Masada, where the last remaining Jewish fighters committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, and Yavne, where a pragmatic rabbi negotiated with the Romans to let a tiny core of Jews continue to study and perpetuate their culture. Really, it’s worth a read.

In my youth, I would have been on “team Masada”: never surrender. Today I am perhaps on “team Yavne,” feeling that preserving life and culture is not cowardice. Spokoiny argues that it’s not a binary choice: some things are worth dying for, while others should be compromised.

Meanwhile, today Judaism is facing a new threat related to the lost Temple —extreme religious-nationalist efforts to rebuild it.

Modern-day zealots on the religious right

Within the religious right wing of Israel, there’s a growing movement to build a new Temple on the site of the old one in Jerusalem. That would require destroying the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam—a crime against culture and history, a stab in the heart of Muslims everywhere, a death blow to hopes for Israeli-Arab peace.

And for what? To revive a 2000-year-old priestly caste that conducted animal sacrifices! To re-eestablish a monarchy — a monarchy, in the 21^st century!—like that of King David!

To replace the state of Israel with an Orthodox Jewish theocracy that would stretch beyond the river and the sea, making past expulsions and discrimination against Palestinians look like a practice run.

When I lived in Jerusalem in 1984-5, the news story of the year was the arrest of a Jewish underground that was plotting to blow up the Temple Mount, with Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. The Hebrew word for underground—machteret—remains blazed into my mind even though I’ve forgotten the words for fork and spoon and bus ticket.

At the time, those extremists were seen as a crazy minority by Israeli society. Today their allies occupy cabinet positions in the Netanyahu government.

On June 28, the Israeli group Peace Now reported that right-wing activists had posted flags on the West Bank with images of a rebuilt Temple superimposed over the Israeli flag and a Biblical quote of “let them make me a sanctuary.”

“Anyone who still thinks this is just another flag is missing the bigger picture,” Peace Now said on their Facebook page. “The vision of the messianic right is to replace the State of Israel with the State of Judea. This is no longer a fringe extremist idea. It is the vision of the coalition leading Israel toward ruin.”

Israel will hold parliamentary elections on October 27^th, so there’s a possibility of a new government replacing the current right-wing coalition. But it will take more than an election—it will take a cultural shift—to return this horrific movement to the margins.

Seek justice, not a new Temple

Tisha b ‘Av mourns the destruction of the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago. But it’s one thing to mourn and remember. It’s another to fetishize the past.

Especially when fetishizing that past corrupts the ethical heart of Judaism—the holiness of all human life and the mandate to treat others as you would wish to be treated.

In rebuilding the Temple, the right-wing zealots would destroy Judaism more thoroughly than the Romans ever did.

Those early Reform leaders were right: Judaism does not need a new Temple. For this year’s Tisha b’ Av, let’s shift from mourning the past to defending the humanistic core of Judaism. This call is nothing new. It comes from prophet after prophet, Hosea and Amos and Samuel and, here, Isaiah 1:11:

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams... Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause."

Or here Micah 6:8, who sums it up well:

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

On Friday, August 7, I’ll take part in an hour-long online reading with five other writers of fantasy and science fiction from two continents, sponsored by Strong Women Strange Worlds. We’ll each read a favorite excerpt from our most recent novel.

As a preview—like those tiny tasting-spoons in ice cream parlors—I thought it would be fun to share the FIRST PARAGRAPH (below) of each of our books.

Like those spoons, give them a lick! Can you guess what each book might be about from its first paragraph? Does it draw you in and make you want to read more? As a reader, what do you look for in the first paragraph or first page of a book?

Science fiction and fantasy are very broad genres: if one flavor doesn’t appeal to you, maybe another will. You’re warmly invited to join us on August 7 to see if your guesses about these books are right. Maybe you’ll discover your next summer read!

The SWSW QuickReads runs from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Eastern time, or 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, August 7. Click here to register and reserve a spot. It’s free! (And there will be free giveaways of some of the books.)

And now for the six opening paragraphs, in order of our lovely faces on the poster:

(1)

“You didn’t have to come,” said Tempest.

It was dusk in the town where she lived, the town where Sargent used to live, years ago, but not anymore. Now, he was just a visitor, an interloper, a specter from the distant past, one who appeared now and then, poking his nose into her business, always smug, always superior, always… Sargent.

(From The Vampire Hunter Triumphant by Val St. Crowe, who lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia)

(2)

“I’m going to kill him,” Isa said just loud enough to be heard over the blend of casual conversations and the hip-swinging beat drifting through the bar. She set her tray on the bar top’s smooth surface and braced her palms on either side as she leaned in. “I’m fairly certain his body will fit in my trunk.”

(From Last Call by Jami Gray, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona)

(3)

Annie Maple had been back from the dead for a week before her brother Ben came to visit.

The first few days were a hospitalized blur, loopy from painkillers. Now she sat in her childhood bed at her parents’ house with the shades drawn, eyes closed, earbuds on, listening to Clair de Lune on looping replay. Before that, it had been Pachelbel’s Canon. Before that, Chopin nocturnes.

(From Shaken Free by Ilana DeBare, who lives in Oakland, California)

(4)

What wakes me?

The Cailleach stirs. Beneath her, the ground trembles, a low, urgent vibration, rolling upwards. Slowly, slowly, she comes to consciousness. Underground rivers move through her buried veins. The pulse of waves activates her dormant heartbeat. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Long fronds of brown grass dance above her, her hair moves with the breath of the sea. The Cailleach has slept for millennia beneath the crust of the landscape, folded into herself like a seed. Her body curled in a crouch, her bones seams of stone in the soil.

(From Queens of the Crone Age by Tracy Fahey, who lives in Sixmilebridge, County Clare, Ireland)

(5)

My name is Stacey M. Kells, and I exist. I think I’ve started narrating the events of my own life in my head to convince myself that I’m still real. I repeat the facts of my existence and comb over them, checking for consistency, probing my memories to make sure they’re still there. I lie on my bed in the back of the camper and mentally list out my strengths, weaknesses, and the key events of my back story like I’m making myself a character sheet.

(From The Legend Liminal by Ren Hutchings, who lives in London, United Kingdom)

(6)

Darkness spun around her, a black fog moving at tremendous speed. Patches of light broke through the whirling mist, and vague shapes shifted around her. Flashes of color sparked across her eyes, forcing her to squint and shrink from the intensity. Her body was frozen in place, but she still pivoted her head, twisting it back and forth to find her bearings. Her body’s core pulled toward something that wouldn’t let her break free. Though she couldn’t move, she felt fragile, like she would break into a million pieces and shatter into nothingness.

(From The Dreamer by Linda Patricia Cleary, who lives in El Cerrito, California)

Many thanks to the Strong Women Strange Worlds volunteers who put hours and hours into coordinating this reading series! I read with them for my first novel, Shaken Loose (of which Shaken Free is the sequel), and it was a blast. Please join us on August 7th: register here to get the Zoom link.

I pressed 2. And then something unusual happened.

“Hi Ilana. This is Charlotte. Hope your writing and birding adventures are going well. How’re you doing today?”

It was a friendly female voice, bubbly and youthful. I could almost hear her smiling. But my dentist’s receptionist is not named Charlotte.

This was artificial intelligence—a generation beyond the businesslike “press 1, press 2” digital voices that we’ve all heard for some years now.

The software spoke fluidly and casually. It introduced itself by name. Its voice rose and fell and took nanosecond pauses like a real young woman answering a phone. It was a computer, but it sounded human. And how did it know to ask me about writing and birdwatching?

I froze for a moment, my poor mortal brain trying to make sense of these conflicting inputs: real or not real? what was going on? how should I respond?

And then I got angry.

This was creepy. I know there are a lot of big philosophical or psychological terms I could use, but a simple one fits well: creepy.

I didn’t like that it sounded so human. I didn’t like that it was pretending to know me. I didn’t like that it was using personal information that I must have provided years ago on an intake questionnaire (Interests: writer, birdwatcher) to con me into mistaking a computer for a person.

Let me be clear here: I was not angry that the dentist was using a computerized voice to screen and direct calls. Companies have been doing that for years.

I was angry that the voice was so close to that of a living human.

No merge for the Waymo

Mulling this over later, I was reminded of another recent human/computer interaction—this one with a Waymo driverless car.

I was driving home from San Francisco on a street gridlocked with rush-hour commuters trying to squeeze onto the Bay Bridge on-ramp. We were all halted bumper to bumper, waiting for a light to change so we could creep forward. To my left, an alley held a line of cars trying to merge into our gridlocked street.

The front car was a Waymo—no driver, and I couldn’t see if there were passengers because of its tinted windows. If this had been a human-driven car, I would have made eye contact with the driver, felt a spurt of empathy with them, and waved for them to merge into the jammed street ahead of me. But it was a Waymo. There was no one to wave at, no one to empathize with; there might not even be a passenger. It was purely a machine, an object. And there was no way in Hell that I was going to let an object merge in front of me.

We respond differently to Things and People. That’s normal, that’s ethical, that’s even innate, with eons of evolution teaching us to treat humans differently than, say, rocks or walnuts.

My anger at AI-Charlotte came from the blurring of those boundaries. It was a Thing pretending to be a Human. Trying to get me to interact with it like a human. It felt deceptive. It felt… creepy.

Of course there are many huge societal issues raised by the blossoming of AI. Hundreds of millions of people losing their jobs; data centers devouring land, water, and energy; even greater mushrooming of propaganda and faked information; deterioration of human skills at analysis, writing, and basic thinking; and of course the sci-fi scenario of rogue AI deciding to eliminate all us pesky bearers of human intelligence.

I don’t feel qualified to add much to the debate over the macro issues. So I’ll keep to a small one: how we as individuals respond to these new non-human-but-humanlike actors.

What happens as the boundaries between Humans and Things become blurred?

Blurred boundaries

As AI-Charlottes and their counterparts become more common, I will no longer feel that momentary confusion over how to respond. Impatient, I’ll cut those friendly voices off mid-sentence so I can “press 1” or give a command. And then will I start cutting off friendly humans too—the human waitress who’s trying to explain the menu? My co-worker? My neighbor? Will I bark commands at them, will I abruptly walk away if they seem tedious, will I assume they have no feelings that matter?

As Things sound more Human, will we increasingly treat Humans as Things?

Conversely, will we turn to Things as substitutes for authentic human relationships?

Already there are plenty of news stories about people falling in love with AI chatbots, teens withdrawing into a private world of AI chats rather than messy real-world friendships, troubled adults talking to AI rather than a friend, family member, or counselor. There’s currently a lawsuit by the mother of a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide after months of an intense, sexual “relationship” with a chatbot imitating Danaerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

Some of this is timeless and inevitable: remember Girl of My Dreams, the pop song from 1979 by Bram Tchaikovsky, about a man in love with an inflatable doll he ordered in the mail? As long as humans have been around, people have treated others like objects. (See under: Slavery. Patriarchy. War. Industrial revolution….)

But the more realistic that AI simulations become, the more we dissolve the boundaries between Thing and Human.

I want those boundaries. I would rather have a stiff, impersonal digital voice answering the phone than AI-Charlotte’s fake familiarity. I want to know when a voice or image is human so I can treat them with their fully deserved humanity.

Because it’s a slippery slope.

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

Over the past year, I started occasionally using Claude.ai, the AI chatbot by Anthropic, in research for my novel. There will be a minor detail I need to find, such as what kind of pillows—feathers? straw? cotton?—would have been common in 17^th century German middle-class homes. I was comfortable with this because I’d done enough of my own research over the prior five years to know if the responses were plausible and the sources cited were reliable. And, just to be clear, I have never and will never use AI for writing or editing my work.

The point is: I ask AI-Claude questions and get answers.

And it remains very, very hard for me not to write “thank you” to AI-Claude after the software gives me those answers.

My parents raised me well. Together with my preschool teachers, they taught me: When someone does something helpful, you thank them. Today I might clarify that teaching to say: When a person does something helpful, you thank them.

Because I don’t thank my washing machine. I don’t thank the ice maker in our freezer. I don’t thank my car for starting up when I turn the key.

But AI-Claude… it doesn’t even have a voice like AI-Charlotte, it’s just text on a screen. It’s the digital version of a washing machine. But it has “communicated” with me, helped me, and I feel an impulse to thank it. Sometimes I even give in and type “thanks” into the ether.

Creepy.

I want those boundaries. And I feel manipulated when people try to blur them.

Sometimes you can know things on an intellectual level and only later does that knowledge hit you on an emotional level. Or you can think you’ve come to terms with something and then realize that you haven’t at all.

That’s me, with the knowledge that she will live her adult life 3,000 miles away from us.

For various reasons, including her partner’s family ties in Vermont, it’s clear she will not be coming back to California. On the bright side, it’s a lot easier to get to Boston from the Bay Area than to small-town Vermont, where they met while she was in grad school. We’re fortunate to have the financial resources to fly cross-country to see her.

And the situation has an element of turnabout-is-fair-play: I moved 3,000 miles away from my own parents when I left the East Coast for California after college. That makes me less self-righteous. But it doesn’t make me less sad.

Here’s what the future looks like through my blues-tinted glasses:

• Every visit with her will cost us close to $2000, if not more. (Airfare for two, plus accommodations in an expensive city. Expedia doesn’t even offer an option of searching for Boston hotel rooms for less than $320. Yikes.)

• We’ll see her maybe four times a year for intense and exhausting short visits, followed by long periods when we are absent from each other’s lives except for occasional phone calls.

• If she has children, we could sublet an apartment to stay for longer periods. But Boston feels foreign to me, even though I went to college there. Our community, our social connections, our activities—Sam’s musical groups, my gym, our synagogue, our volunteer activities, my vegetable garden, etc.—are all here in Oakland.

• Looking faaarrrr ahead (too far! stop it, Ilana!), if I am someday widowed and ailing and want to be near my daughter, I’ll have to completely give up my life in Oakland and move to that foreign city of Boston.

I’ve known all this for a while, intellectually. But on this trip it became more real, more intractable. The happy novelty of having her in Boston rather than Vermont wore off and what was left was the distance. Three thousand miles, a full day on a plane, thousands of dollars of costs, the intense spurt of togetherness and then goodbye.

From 24/7 to three times a year

It remains shocking to me that we spend 18 years intensively focused on these small persons—nursing them! feeding them! clothing them and playing with them and driving them around! sleeping in the room next to theirs every night!—and then suddenly they are gone.

They’re independent, which is good. Building their own lives with friends or partners. I’m grateful she isn’t still sleeping in her childhood bed. But still, even after a decade with an empty nest, it’s a stark change. And the 3,000-mile distance makes it even more stark. I wish she were being independent across town, where she could pop by to borrow a casserole dish or join us for Shabbat dinner.

It’s also shocking to me that my parents never suggested that I return to the East Coast. Or maybe they suggested it and I don’t remember it? I made the initial decision to move to California right after college—not wanting to live in New York, lured by the California mystique and friends who had moved there. After that, there were logical reasons to stay, such as low in-state tuition for journalism school and jobs at California newspapers. But I never looked at the other side of the ledger, the cost of those benefits. No one warned me—or if they warned me, it didn’t register—that my child would grow up with only a distant connection to her grandparents. That I would not be a hands-on part of my parents’ lives as they aged.

That we would all see each other twice a year, maybe three times, for holiday gatherings or short beach vacations or family weddings or medical crises. When everyone would be excited and hectic and overbooked and exhausted.

That we wouldn’t have spur-of-the-moment cups of coffee together. That we wouldn’t routinely drop our daughter off for a “weekend at grandma and grandpa’s.” That we wouldn’t stop by to chat, or deliver leftover cake, or help clean out closets.

And now that cycle is repeating.

Mobile versus rooted

As a young person I took family for granted—the backdrop to my individual, exciting, all-consuming life. I treated family as roots that didn’t need cultivation, that could be ignored.

Is this yet another schism in our hyper-divided country? We have urban and rural, college and no-college, rich and poor, left and right: somewhere in that mix we also have the geographically mobile and the geographically rooted. In my little slice of the upper-middle-class Bay Area, almost everyone seems to have come from somewhere else. In Rhode Island, where my sister lives, almost everyone still gets together with family for Sunday dinner.

Technology and wealth have been a blessing in broadening our options. People with enough money today can hop on a plane and relocate to any city in the world. We can stay in touch by phone and text and Zoom and social media. We can shop in the same chain stores and buy the same products, creating an illusion that we haven’t really left.

Yet 3,000 miles is 3,000 miles. Planes go no faster now than they did forty years ago. Even Elon Musk can’t make Boston a 20-minute drive from Oakland.

And so some things are lost with these blessings. I guess that’s what I’m feeling. Even in the best circumstances—with love, with money for planes and hotels, with rational decision-making and reasonable compromises—things are lost when you live far away.

So our wonderful visit to Boston has left me sad.

Join me for a book event this Thursday in Oakland!

If you’re in the Bay Area, I’d love for you to join me on Thursday, June 4th at 7 pm at Clio’s Books in Oakland for what will be an offbeat and stimulating literary evening.

The program is titled “Alive / Not Alive” and addresses the challenges/opportunites of writing about characters in the grey area between living and not living.

I’ll be in conversation with Lauren C. Johnson, whose newly-released novel The West Facade takes place in medieval Paris during the Black Plague. It’s about statues on the facade of Notre Dame that become sentient one night each month—and one particular statue, St. Genevieve, who yearns to become human permanently.

My two recent novels, Shaken Loose and Shaken Free, focus on a Bay Area college dropout who finds herself in an unjust, unraveling Christian Hell with a chance at returning to life.

Together Lauren and I will talk about creating these alive/not-alive characters, the research and world-building that went into our novels, writing stories based on Christian mythologies as non-believers, and more.

Tickets to the evening cost $10, to benefit the bookstore. Details, directions. and tickets at this link. I hope you can join us!

Well, definitely not anymore.

In April my husband Sam and I joined a weeklong Jewish heritage tour of the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are nowhere near the Mediterranean and instead (duh) border the Baltic Sea, which also laps up against Sweden, Finland, Poland and a bit of Germany. That’s the north of Europe! In fact, this was probably the furthest north on the globe that I’d ever born.

I joined the tour, organized by our synagogue, out of intellectual curiosity and a strong interest in Jewish history. Sam’s paternal grandfather immigrated from Lithuania as a very young child around 1880, so he had a distant genealogical reason to go. What I hadn’t expected was that some of the other people on our tour had much more direct connections—parents who fled the Baltic states before or during the Holocaust, and relatives who were killed there. Hearing their stories and experiencing the places through their eyes gave the trip a much deeper resonance for me than a simple history tour.

There were two phrases that our guides used that summed up the essence of the trip and that will probably stick with all of us for the rest of our lives:

1. The Presence of Absence / The Absence of Presence

2. The Holocaust of Bullets

The Presence of Absence and the Absence of Presence

Our first full day was spent on a walking tour of the old Jewish section of Vilnius (formerly Vilna) led by a wonderful Lithuanian Jewish guide who was born shortly after World War II. There was almost nothing to see. There were plaques: an empty lot was where the main synagogue used to stand, a sign marking the onetime home of the famous 18th century rabbi, the Vilna Gaon, and so on. Along one street, a couple of storefronts had their facades scraped and cleaned so that traces of Yiddish letters were visible. The modest amount of historical markage and discovery was done in the years after Lithuania gained independence from the Soveit Union (1991), since the Soviets stifled any acknowledgment that Jews were particularly singled out and victimized by the Nazis.

Our guide told us stories as we walked—of accomplished Jewish artists and doctors who used to live in Vilnius, of Theodor Herzl’s brief but celebrated visit to Vilnius in 1903, of the ghetto walls erected by the Nazis and the Jewish figurehead they put in charge of selecting people for slaughter (who was eventually slaughtered too). Of the Jewish youth groups that attempted armed resistance in the ghetto.

But it was plaques and stories, nothing more. An entire community had vanished.

At its peak in 1914, the Jewish population of Vilnius numbered 98,700 — more than one out of every three people in the city. There were 60,000 in 1939 before the Nazis arrived. By 1944 there were 800 left.

And thus the “presence of absence.” Walking through Vilnius and the other Baltic cities, we were viewing the vacuum where a civilization once existed.

Our walk through Vilnius’ old Jewish quarter reminded me of other cities I’ve visited where the past was not visible. For the historical novel I’m currently writing, set in the 17th century, Sam and I did research trips to Hamburg and Istanbul. Neither of those cities have any intact neighborhoods left from the 1600s, so like in Vilnius I had to reconstruct the scene in my imagination as we walked around. But in both those cities, the absence of the past felt less sinister. Hamburg was broadly decimated in bombing during World War II—part of the vast military damage to both sides—and Istanbul was repeatedly razed by fires that devoured its wooden homes. Vilnius was different, the deliberate destruction and erasure of one single community—its people, its institutions, its existence.

Our history books tell us that the Allies won World War II and the Nazis lost. We celebrate that! We watch Hollywood movies about it! We feel proud of our parents or grandparents who contributed to that victory! And on a geopolitical level it’s true that “our side” won. But walking around Vilnius, it was hard not to feel that on a narrower level the Nazis won. At least when it came to their goal of creating judenfrei (Jew-free) cities and countries.

The Holocaust of Bullets

Before this trip, if you asked me what first popped into my mind when someone said “Holocaust,” I would have answered something about concentration camps. Place names like Auschwitz, Terezin, Mathausen, Dachau. Words like “gas chamber” and “crematoria.” And it’s true that the camps were responsible for the murder of the vast majority of Europe’s Jews.

But in the Baltics, the Nazis and their local collaborators slaughtered three countries’ worth of Jewish people before the construction of a single death camp.

In the Baltics they killed Jews the old-fashioned way—shooting them.

Sometimes they shot them in their homes or burned them in their synagogues, but more often they were rounded up and sent to killing sites in nearby forests. Tens of thousands were shot and buried in pits.

This started in June 1941, within days (hours?) of the Germans capturing the Baltics. By early 1942’s Wannsee conference, when Nazi leadership unveiled their “final solution” of extermination camps, they could boast that Estonia was already judenfrei.

We visited several of those killing sites in Lithuania and Latvia. The Ponar forest was a popular vacation spot about ten miles outside Vilnius, with a train line to the city. Think Catskills or maybe Sonoma County; Jewish youth groups used to go on camping trips there. Then during the Nazi occupation about 70,000 Jews were transported to this lovely spot, shot, and buried in large pits originally intended for oil storage. (Others killed there included Lithuanian intelligentsia and communists, Russian prisoners of war, and Romani people.) Later when the Germans wanted to hide their atrocities, they used a brigade of 80 Jewish prisoners to dig up the corpses and burn them.

Today these sites are memorials. Ponar is a forest of pine and birch, silent except for birdsong and wind, nature disrupted only by pits and memorial plaques. We said kaddish and left stones that our rabbi had brought, thoughtfully engraved with the name of our synagogue.

The Baltics had no gas chambers. no crematoria, no Mengele-style “experiments”—just guns and men willing to shoot them.

Thus the “Holocaust of Bullets.”

And other stuff

What I’ve just described covered about eight hours (two places) out of a seven-day tour. Obviously we experienced a lot more than that, and perhaps a third of it was unrelated to Judaism or the Holocaust—a walking tour of Art Nouveau buildings in Latvia, a hike through a peat bog in Estonia, a visually fascinating stop at a Lithuanian hillside covered with crosses of all sizes and shapes that were placed there from both religious faith and Lithuanian nationalism. (I’ll include some photos at the end of this post.)

And we had some great meals, including one—not part of the tour—at a fantastic Vilnius restaurant called Amandus where the chef/owner spent about 45 minutes chatting with us. (If you’re ever in Vilnius, go there!)

The result of all this was a chronic, low-grade emotional whiplash. To go from slaughter pits in a forest to a Michelin-quality dinner? Even now, at home, it’s hard to hold it all together in my brain.

Fresh sprouts?

Along with the destroyed Jewish past, we did get glimpses of Jewish revival, particularly in Tallinn where there is an active Jewish community center, a lovely new synagogue building, and a public school with a Jewish-themed curriculum. That was heartening.

But numerically the region’s Jewish population today is a speck of dust compared to what it was before the Holocaust. Before World War II, Lithuania had 250,000 Jewish residents, Latvia an estimated 100,000, and Estonia 4,500. Today Lithuania has about 6,000, Latvia 10,000, and Estonia 3,000. Many of those are relative newcomers—children and grandchildren of displaced eastern European Jews who ended up in the Baltics after the war, or Jews from Russia who moved to the Baltics during the Soviet years.

The losses to Baltic Jewry weren’t just from Nazi slaughter. In the following decades of Soviet rule, Jewish culture was stifled. Today’s Jews—those who want to engage with Judaism—are trying to relearn and reinvent their grandparents’ traditions and knowledge after a gap of fifty years.

Takeaways

I came away from the trip with an appreciation for these countries that I couldn’t have placed on a map before. They’re trying very hard to integrate themselves into the democratic West after 50 years as Soviet satellites—a process with its own internal tensions. (Older generations grew up learning Russian and for many that’s still their primary tongue, while younger generations speak their national language and turn away from all things Russian.) We saw Ukrainian flags everywhere: the Baltics are acutely aware that if Putin conquers Ukraine, they are likely next.

I also came away with a humbled sense of the scope of the Holocaust and how far it extended beyond the well-known death camps and big-city ghettos. What we commonly think of as the Holocaust is the tip of an iceberg. Every shtetl (village) in eastern Europe had its own story—villages whose names most of us will never know, their stories lost in the deluge of tragedies.

We stopped briefly in the rural Lithuanian village of Žiežmariai (between Kaunas and Vilnius), which has one of the last remaining wooden synagogues in eastern Europe. At the end of the 19th century, Žiežmariai had three synagogues. Before World War II, it had a Hebrew-language primary school, amateur Yiddish theatre troupe, community library, and Maccabi sports club.

Here is what Yad Vashem documented about the fate of Žiežmariai’s Jews:

On August 29, 1941, the remaining Jews of Žiežmariai, mainly women and children, were expelled from their houses. They were driven to pits in the Triliskiu Hills, about 1.5 kilometers from the east end of the town, via Žasliai, and shot.

Karl Jaeger commanded the operation, and reported afterward on the number of Jews murdered in Žiežmariai and Rumsiskis: 784 people (20 men, 567 women, 197 children).

Today only the one synagogue that we visited remains. It survived as a warehouse during Soviet times until it was renovated in the 2010s as a historical site and community exhibition center.

Žiežmariai—not a name we know or (at least in my case) can even pronounce. But multiply it by thousands, all over Europe. The underwater part of the Holocaust iceberg that’s difficult to see and truly comprehend.

“Never again” for us — or for anyone?

In today’s moment of increasing Holocaust denial—along with the passing of the generation that lived through those years—it feels important to document and share the history we were glimpsing. People need to see, empathize, and resolve that such discrimination and destruction will never happen again.

But any discussion of the Holocaust these days must also raise the question of whether “never again” applies just to Jews or to everyone.

The Netanyahu government and Israeli right wing seem to interpret “never again” as a mandate to forsake morality when it comes to defending Jews, a carte blanche to destroy entire communities that are perceived as (or merely neighbors of) the enemy. No, I am not using the “g word” or accusing them of the kind of wholesale extermination plans that the Nazis created. But the scale of civilian death in Gaza and now with lesser numbers in Lebanon is morally unjustifiable.

On our walking tour of Vilnius—with our guide pointing out where this Jewish school used to be, and that Jewish theatre used to be—I couldn’t help thinking about former Palestinian villages and neighborhoods that no longer exist. I imagined a similar walking tour in the lovely West Jerusalem neighborhood where I briefly lived in the early 80s. A Palestinian guide could easily point out, “this was the house where my parents lived in the 1930s, and down the street was my grandparents’ house, and this stone building on the corner was the little store where they bought groceries.”

Or Gaza, where even the buildings are no longer standing. “This empty lot used to be a school. This pile of rubble used to be an apartment building.”

Right now there are ongoing land incursion and violent attacks by right-wing Jewish settlers in the West Bank aimed at forcing Palestinians to leave their homes and villages. They’re not herding people into forests for slaughterlike Ponar, but they’re destroying communities through terror and displacement. If they are permitted to continue, someday one will be able to lead “presence of absence” tours there too.

For me, “never again for the Jews” is not enough. It needs to be “never again for anyone.”

Okay, I promised some “fun” photos that are purely touristic! And I (almost) always keep my promises. Here you go.

Unless indicated otherwise, all photos by Ilana DeBare.

My quest, grail, obsession, nemesis.

Almost the first thing I thought upon release from the hospital after my December bike crash—besides reveling in the bliss of a hot shower—was that I needed to bake cookies for the emergency department staff at Wilma Chan Highland Hospital.

Not right away. Even in my slightly blurred Oxycodone state, I knew that was impossible. But once I was feeling better, I would bake cookies. It seemed like the appropriate way to thank them.

The care they’d provided felt so personal that the thank-you needed to be personal, not just a box of See’s chocolates or a Trader Joe orchid. I suspect that most of their patients don’t send thank-yous —big-city ERs treat a lot of people living on the edge, financially and emotionally—so I felt especially motivated to express my gratitude.

I kept those cookies in mind as I started to heal, step by slow step. First I stopped taking the Oxycodone. I undertook short walks on my block with a hiking pole, after which I would retreat to bed. Then I walked around the whole block with my pole before retreating to bed. I had short visits from friends and then longer visits from friends….

A dozen cookies wouldn’t be sufficient: there should be enough for the nurses and physician assistants and janitors as well as the doctors.

I walked to Rockridge BART and rested on a bench in the sun like an Old Person. I stopped taking my other prescription pain med. I took deep breaths without my ribs hurting. I bent at my waist without feeling my torso was made of a thousand grinding pieces of Lego. I stopped taking extra strength acetaminophen three times a day….

There would have to be several kinds of cookies, something for everyone. Brownies for chocoholics, ginger cookies for those who like a little zing, my mom’s “moon” cookies with powdered sugar for those who want simple.

A month passed, five weeks passed. I felt well enough to travel with Sam to visit friends in Palm Springs although I had to (had to! what a sacrifice!) lie down by the pool every afternoon. I put away the hiking poles. I started doing physical therapy for the pain in my neck and shoulder. I could lie on my injured side for a minute or two. I could sleep on my injured side for an hour or two….

So I was making all this improvement but I COULD NOT bake those cookies.

Just thinking about it exhausted me. Hauling all the ingredients out of the cabinet. Mixing and pouring and placing on baking trays. Washing all the bowls. Then doing it again. Then doing it again. And doing it all in a short enough time that the first batch of cookies would still be fresh by the time the third batch was done.

I’m not a natural baker. Unlike our friend Jane, I don’t bake to relieve stress. Unlike Sam, I don’t watch every single episode of The Great British Baking Show and then Zoom with baker friends to analyze it. But I wanted to make those cookies.

Six weeks passed. I bought fresh ginger to make the ginger cookies. The ginger sat in the fridge and went bad. I bought more ginger.

It was daunting. My energy level was good for about one Big Thing per day and cookies were never that thing. Walks, working on my novel, meetings at our synagogue, going to theatre… but I couldn’t rouse myself to bake.

Last week, seven weeks after the accident, I felt ready to go back to my gym. I went to my usual Pilates/barre class and managed to do about 75 percent of the exercises. I went to my spin class and cycled for 45 minutes, though at a very mellow pace.

It was time to spear the white whale.

I decided to stage the baking. Make brownies during the week and freeze them. Mix the ginger cookie batter on Saturday and refrigerate it. Mix and bake the moon cookies on Sunday, bake the ginger batter on Monday morning, and deliver it all on Monday afternoon.

There was, of course, a catch. I had started wearing a splint on my right hand because of pain from the accident that had only become apparent after my ribs stopped hurting. I’m right-handed but currently can’t grip with that hand. I wasn’t sure I could shape cookies. I definitely couldn’t grate ginger.

But this weekend was my opportunity. Not much planned—not going anywhere—not watching the Super Bowl—

So I baked!

The brownies were easy, not too much hand-mixing. The moon cookies were manageable when I briefly removed the splint to shape them. The ginger grating was a problem but I asked Sam for help. He chopped it all up in our mini food processor, which was not optimal since it doesn’t remove the fibers but good enough for the circumstances.

This morning I finished everything, boxed the cookies up in pretty white cardboard boxes, and wrote a note to the ER staff. After lunch Sam drove me to Highland and waited at the curb while I dropped them off.

Done! Unlike Ahab, I got my whale and returned safely to port.

Now, looking at this project in retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t ask friends for help. Certainly some people would have been tickled to contribute their favorite cookies. But there I was, Ahab alone on the open sea, determined to kill the beast myself with my minimal whaling crew of Sam and a Kitchen-Aid.

What was that all about? Certainly I have a strong—probably too strong— individualist streak. I’d rather do something myself than deal with a team or committee. I’m uncomfortable asking for help and already felt indebted to the many friends who’d made dinners for us.

But it was more than individualism. There was also my desire to provide a personal thank-you—one created by me, not by See’s Candy Co. or Trader Joe or my friends. There was perhaps an unconscious impulse to live up to one nurse’s description of me in my hospital chart as “kind.”

And, too, there was an urge for closure.

Since December, piles of plastic containers had been sitting in our living room near the front door, waiting to be returned to the friends who brought us dinners. They nagged at me—a reminder that this was a house of illness, that I’d suffered injuries and was not yet healed. Finally about ten days ago I packed the containers into my car and drove around dropping them off. It gave me a sense of closure: our living room was now a living room again, not a food drop-off site for someone who could barely get out of bed.

The cookies do the same thing. They conclude my emergency room experience. They say “I had an accident, I healed, I’m done with that.”

Of course that’s not true. I still have the splint on my hand, my neck and shoulders still hurt, and my ribs still ache if I do a big walk. And a “big walk” is still less than an average stroll, pre-accident.

But that’s all relatively minor stuff that will get better with time. Meanwhile, I am eager to be done with this crash and its aftermath. So maybe the cookies are a magical talisman: if I act as if this episode is over, it will be over.

Maybe the cookies are magical thinking.

But really, those folks working in the Highland ER are the ones doing magic—true magic. They deserve a special kind of thanks.

And there is something special about homemade cookies.

Especially my mom’s moon cookies.

Nancy DeBare’s Moon Cookies

These are some of the easiest cookies in the world to make, even if you’re someone who feels “I can’t bake.” They’re a version of Viennese Crescents without the nuts. No fancy ingredients or fancy techniques but they are delicious. My mom Nancy made them at family gatherings, and then my late cousin Amy Solomon Levey made them, and my sister Deb is known for them throughout the great state of Rhode Island.

Ingredients

• ½ pound (two sticks) of butter at room temperature

• 2 cups of flour

• ¼ cup of sugar

• Vanilla (1 teaspoon or more)

• About 2 cups of powdered) confectioner’s sugar for coating, in a bowl or rimmed dish

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Cream the butter. Add the flour to the butter. Add sugar. Add vanilla. Mix well, scraping down the sides of the mixing bowl if needed. It will become a kind of pliable dough like soft Play-doh.

Roll into balls, shape the balls into crescents, and place on an ungreased baking tray. To prevent breakage, keep them small and not too skinny.

Bake 35 minutes or slightly less if your oven runs hot. Cool for a minute and roll them in the powdered sugar. Place on rack to fully cool.

Notes:

Recipe makes about 36 cookies, which can fit on two sheets.

I use salted butter since the recipe doesn’t specify and that is probably what my mom used back in the 1960s.

That in itself is a small miracle of modern medicine. No guesswork about my tests or drugs or diagnoses, even if I was in too much of a daze at the time to remember much. But within the forty-two separate Triage Notes, Progress Notes, Consults, and Care Plans, one sentence struck me. It was a line written by a nurse after my first night there:

Pt is an extremely kind and cooperative patient eagerly using her incentive spirometer at bedside every hour while awake.

The “incentive spirometer” is a plastic device that I was told to inhale from—keeping little colored balls in the air, like a toddler toy—as a way to ensure I didn’t get pneumonia while my collapsed lung drained and recovered.

The spirometer wasn’t what struck me.

It was the adjective “kind.”

Until that moment, I had never imagined anyone describing me as “kind,” let alone “extremely kind.” It’s not a word I would have used to describe myself.

Here are some words I would have used: Smart. Organized. Verbal. Creative. Funny.

I might also have said empathetic or compassionate but, to me, those qualities are different from kind. They’re more abstract. They’re ways of thinking or feeling rather than behaviors.

Empathy: I’ve always been good at imagining other people’s lives: after all, that’s the entry ticket for being a fiction writer. And I’ve always felt compassion for underdogs, even if—especially if?—they’re as far away as Ukraine or Gaza.

But those things are different from kindness. Kindness to me consists of little actions that require attention and time—noticing when a co-worker feels bad and offering then a shoulder, befriending the awkward new kid in school, making thank-you cookies for the dentist’s staff. For much of my life those haven’t been my strong suit. I was too caught up in work or writing or you-name-it. Or I was more comfortable critiquing systemic injustice than making in-person overtures to a nearby human.

Coincidental to my thinking about kindness, it turns out that George Saunders is publishing a new novel, Vigil, this month. Saunders is one of my favorite writers: if I were a Pharoah, I’d want his Lincoln in the Bardo entombed with me in my pyramid. (Along with a half dozen Satsuma mandarin oranges.) Aside from acclaim as a writer and a teacher of writing, Saunders is known for a 2013 commencement address he delivered about… kindness.

It’s funny, humble, of course wonderfully written, and wise.

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” he said. “Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

There’s more. It’s only 11 minutes and it’s free on YouTube. Watch it or read it. (And then read this 2026 New York Times interview with him, where he revisits those decade-old remarks.)

Resting at home after my hospital stay, I wondered what led that nurse to describe me as kind. I hadn’t leapt up from my hospital bed like Super-Patient to donate blood, hadn’t borrowed the trash cart and gone around emptying everyone’s waste baskets. What I had done was hold several conversations with her overnight, where I asked about her family and sympathized with some of their challenges.

And here’s the weird thing: Her description of me as “kind” made me think of myself as kind. It made me want to be someone that people described as kind.

Puzzling about this, I composed a question for my Facebook friends:

When you are gone, which positive word do you hope people will say about you?

1. Boy, was s/he smart.

2. Boy, was s/he kind.

3. Boy, was s/he creative.

4. Boy, was s/he loyal.

5. Boy, was s/he successful.

6. Boy, was s/he idealistic.

7. Boy, was s/he hard-working.

8. Boy, was s/he strong.

9. Boy, was s/he gorgeous.

10. Boy, was s/he funny.

11. Boy, was s/he _________. (Fill in the blank but only with one word, so you can’t say “good at playing the ukulele.”)

Of the folks who responded, about one-third said “kind.” A couple more used words that were related to kind such as “loving” or “good.”

I realized that forty years ago, I would have wanted to be remembered as “smart.” I would have wanted to be remembered as (breaking my own one-word rule) “a great writer.”

Today I would want to be remembered as kind.

I suspect this is a getting-older thing. In George Saunders’ commencement speech, he theorized that most people get kinder as they age:

“We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be…. Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving.”

So it makes sense that, along with being kinder, we might come to value kindness more, both in ourselves and others.

The importance of kindness is especially apparent in our current political era where this narcissistic, power-obsessed president seems to know nothing other than being unkind. Our headlines blare one instance after another of his mean-spiritedness, from ridiculing people with disabilities and calling women reporters “pigs,” to blaming Rob and Michele Reiner for their own deaths, and this week vilifying Renee Good after her murder by a federal ICE agent.

We need more kindness in our world. It isn’t all we need—of course we need civil rights and checks on the presidency and universal health care and so many other things—but kindness is something each of us can accomplish while working toward those other goals.

Perhaps I am a little more kind than I was forty years ago, both for the reasons Saunders suggested and because, retired, I have more time and attention for others. But the nurse’s memo made me want to be intentional about it.

She saw me that way, and it made me want to be that way.

Is there a lesson we can draw from this, with other adults but especially with our children?

If we tell them they are kind—if we treat them as kind people—will they believe us? And then live their lives that way?

Last week I felt outside of time in the emergency department of our county trauma center.

Very different experiences!

The retreat, organized by my friend Susanne Pari, was wonderful. Five days with nothing to do but wake up, sit by a big glass window, write, and in the evening eat a delicious dinner together and talk about writing. Time vanished, the news cycle vanished, and the outside world dissolved in a dreamlike way that was perfect for writing.

Then I came home and crashed my bike on a routine ride on Sunday, December 14th. Four broken ribs, a mild concussion, and a collapsed lung. Spent three days in the emergency department of Wilma Chan Highland Hospital, one day in a regular hospital room there, and then came home to recuperate in my own lovely bed.

Once again time vanished, but now it was lost in the windowless 24/7 urgency of an emergency room.

Here’s the full story. Let’s go back to the beginning.

The crash

I don’t remember the actual crash. No cars were involved. I remember riding down Joaquin Miller Road, a long and steep hill, with Sam out of sight ahead of me because he goes fast down hills and I go slow, using my brakes a lot. The next thing I remember is sitting on the ground, my bike sprawled behind me, and being aware that I’d had an accident. A group of passing cyclists called out to see if I needed help. “I’m fine,” I said and waved them on. (Duh! Concussion talking!)

I left a voicemail on Sam’s phone saying I’d had an accident and would come downhill to find him. I considered whether to ride down to him but decided to walk my bike. (Good thing: it turns out the brake cable was snapped and the derailleur was mangled.) I started walking down, he rode up to find me, we met, and I told him that my side really hurt. He says I kept repeating myself and didn’t know what day it was.

A good Samaritan in a pickup truck offered to take my bike and drive me to the Kaiser Permanente Oakland ER while Sam rode home and got his car to meet me there. Kaiser did an initial set of scans and x-rays and sent me by ambulance to Highland, the county trauma center.

I was anxious about being transferred to Highland, our local public hospital. I’d never been there and pictured a 19^th century Dickensian bedlam. But the Kaiser ER doc told me she’d done her residency there, many of the area’s emergency doctors train there, and they have the best trauma care around, which reassured me.

The Emergency Department

They were fantastic! I can‘t say enough good things about the Highland emergency staff—doctors, nurses, even the fellow who empties the trash. My memories of arriving and intake are blurry but I was treated promptly, expertly, with good pain management. People unfailingly treated me like a human being. Both at Kaiser and Highland, most staff said something like, “I’m really sorry this happened to you.” That’s just a little thing but it makes you feel connected and seen on a human level, not just as a pile of injuries or test results.

They inserted a tube in my chest to drain blood, fluid, and air out of my lung so it could gradually expand to its proper configuration. I needed to stay in the hospital while they monitored my brain (two small bleeding areas that resolved themselves) and while the lung drained. For the ribs, the only treatment was time, rest, and pain relief.

I was super-fortunate to be given a bed in a room that even had its own bathroom, although I was hooked up to enough tubes and wires that I couldn’t get to the toilet without a nurse unplugging me. Like many hospitals, there were not enough beds available so patients were backlogged, with many lying on gurneys in the corridor of the ER outside my room. I myself was approved to move to the ICU or the regular hospital about 36 hours before I was actually moved — but stayed in the ER since no ICU or hospital beds were open.

In retrospect my case was probably pretty routine and simple for them, although it felt dire to me. As a trauma center, they get car crashes, gunshots, and knife wounds along with less dramatic emergencies, and many patients come in with multiple issues including mental health problems or drug/alcohol addictions.

My bed was directly opposite the nursing station so I had a good viewing and listening post for what was going on: I felt like an indoor cat looking out the living room window at the world going by. One evening a nurse remarked to another nurse that “it’s a stabby night.” Two hours later, they were talking about whether the burritos they were ordering came with guacamole. That’s life in the ER.

At another point I listened to a nurse pleading on the phone with the daughter of a demented elderly patient who’d been admitted after a fall: the patient was well enough to be sent home but none of her children were answering their phones or willing to take her. More life in the ER.

Then there was the guy ranting loudly and angrily while he roamed the corridor, holding his crotch with his pants coming down. He’d been brought in by police but wasn’t under arrest and it turned out all he really wanted was a sandwich.

Given such cases, I was an easy one! A couple of the nurses said how thrilled they were by my “compliance”: I did the breathing exercises they assigned me, I stayed in bed, I took my meds! This in turn thrilled the straight-A-student part of me that likes pleasing authority figures. The bar was low, but I felt good about being an ER over-achiever.

After about a day I wanted to get at least a little exercise. I got the nurse to disconnect my chest tube from the electric pump, although it still siphoned blood through the plastic tubing into a transparent case. I started walking circles in the corridor, moving sooooo slowly and gingerly so as not to jiggle my ribs, wearing my hospital gown and carrying the box of blood in my hand like a purse. I felt like some kind of Victorian figure—the captain’s widow walking circles on the roof at midnight, or the ghost of a murder victim pacing circles carrying her own skull.

One unexpected highlight of my time in the ER: it turns out that one of Becca’s best friends from elementary school is now an emergency department resident at Highland! She wasn’t on duty when I was there but came in to the ER to visit me. I hadn’t seen her since she was probably 11 years old… and now here she was, part of this crack team of life-saving medical professionals.

Eventually Highland found a bed for me in the hospital wing. A private room with a flat-screen TV and two recliner chairs, it could have been a country club! It actually felt a bit lonely after the activity of the ER. I spent just one night there; then my chest tube was removed and I was released for home.

Happily home

It was wonderful to come home but I will sum it up in two words:

HOT SHOWER.

My first in four days.

I’ve now been home about a week and a half. Sam has been an amazing caregiver, which is no surprise if you know him. Friends have been tremendously supportive, bringing meals and snacks and pillows and other helpful stuff. (You know who you are: thank you!)

I also experienced the good side of social media while I was in the ER. I’d posted about my accident on Facebook and a zillion people wrote encouraging comments and get-well wishes. I know how harmful and destructive social media can be, but this is an instance where it glowed. All those well-wishes were both a comfort and a welcome distraction when I was stuck in a hospital bed.

All told, I’m immensely grateful that my injuries weren’t worse. Thank goodness I always wear a helmet! And I had no cuts or lacerations, no spinal damage, no damage to my arms or legs or face….

It’s weird. There are parts of my aging body that I normally worry about — arthritic knees, aching feet, some minor heart issues. But for once, they’re behaving in stellar fashion. In fact, my leg and core strength have helped compensate for my damaged torso. It’s painful to bend from the waist but I can easily bend at the knees; my core muscles help stabilize me when moving so the ribs don’t hurt as much. All those annoying Pilates classes and exercise sessions are paying off.

Still, this hurts. Here’s how my left side felt when I first came home: as if, instead of a mass of smoothly moving muscle and flesh, my torso was made up of individual Lego pieces. Picture the tiniest Lego pieces, those little single-unit ones. Every move of my torso involved multiple Lego pieces, and each one hurt when it moved even the slightest bit—even little moves such as shifting position in bed by a quarter-inch

It made sleeping a challenge, since it was hard to find a position that didn’t hurt. For the first few nights at home I dreaded the approach of bedtime. But that’s been improving. The pain is moderating, and I’m also learning how to sleep and move. I’m walking less gingerly and more normally now.

The latest challenge is exhaustion. I’m able to take slow fifteen-minute walks around my neighborhood but afterwards I’m wiped out. Sam drove me to Kaiser for a follow-up CT scan last Wednesday and when we got home I had to go back to bed… at 11 a.m.! I’m spending A LOT of time in bed, listening to a Philippa Gregory audiobook about the wives of Henry VIII. (Then falling asleep while I listen, and discovering when I wake up that the woman I thought was queen no longer has her head.) This is not the Ilana I know! But I’m guessing this will gradually improve too….

It’s a good sign that I have the energy to write this blog post (even if it took me three days). Maybe tomorrow or the day after I’ll get back to working on my novel.

And what I learned

Some of my takeaways:

• WEAR A HELMET!!! Make your kids wear helmets! Make your friends wear helmets! Make your enemies wear helmets!

• Emergency room staff are heroes. And ER technology is miraculous, from the suction pump that cleaned out my chest cavity to the CT scanning machines that repeatedly showed the inside of my head.

• As a society, though, we’re undermining both the tireless work of our medical staff and the billions spent on health tech by refusing to provide adequate preventive care and support services for the poor and vulnerable. The Republican-led slashing of Obamacare subsidies will cause people with limited funds to drop their insurance, flooding ERs with health crises that could have been prevented by routine care. And Trump’s budget slashes a lot of the health services relied on by our most vulnerable neighbors. Highland Hospital, for instance, will close its ENTIRE OUTPATIENT MENTAL HEALTH PROGRAM in 2026 because of federal budget cuts. Poor people who have relied on these programs for mental health care for years will suddenly be without service… and will end up in the ER, on the streets, or worse.

• We need a national system that provides affordable health care for all, including treatment for mental illness and substance abuse. Tax the rich to pay for it; I am hardly an Elon Musk but will happily pay higher taxes to get universal health care. Even Mitt Romney wrote a New York Times op-ed last week calling for higher taxes on the rich to preserve Medicare and Social Security.

A modest proposal: Every elected official should be required to spend 48 hours in the trauma ward of their local hospital. (Preferably without broken ribs, but hey, by any means necessary.)

Meanwhile, happy new year to all. Appreciate your body (limbs that move! lungs that breathe!) and take care of it. Be kind to your friends and neighbors. Resist tyranny and mean-spiritedness in whatever way feels right to you.

Here’s to a 2026 of good health, good spirits, good writing, less violence, and midterm elections that reassert the basic human values of compassion, inclusion, justice, and sticking up for the underdog.

May we each experience timeless moments that come from beauty and joy, not from emergency rooms.

Bonus: Bookable Space Podcast

If you’d like to hear me read a few excerpts from Shaken Loose and Shaken Free and talk about writing those books, check out the Bookable Space podcast, produced by novelist Yvonne Battle-Felton in the U.K. It’s about a half hour long and was posted about two weeks ago. (It might seem like a miracle that I could be doing a podcast while drugged up in the ER, but in the fact this was recorded over the summer.)

Like much of Genesis, this week’s portion is all about family—brothers who are rivals and parents who each favor a different son. The family focus is timely, since this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving, when many of us will be gathering with our extended families. If we’re not gathering with them, we may be missing them. Or we may be avoiding them with relief or angst. In any event, it’s likely we’ll be thinking about them.

Parshat Toldot opens by declaring, “This is the line of Isaac, son of Abraham,” and it would seem that these chapters should be where Isaac gets center stage, the spotlight, like Abraham before him and Jacob after him.

But in fact Isaac does not get very much attention here. The bulk of this parsha is about bridging the generation of Abraham with that of Jacob – an explanation of why and how God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah was passed on to the descendants of their grandson Jacob and not the descendants of Esau. Even the haftarah associated with the parshah—a section from the prophet Malachi—refers to Jacob and Esau, while not once mentioning Isaac.

In many Near Eastern cultures during Biblical times, the oldest son would have been the one to inherit all or most of a father’s wealth. So the Torah sets out to explain why in this case, the younger grandson was the inheritor of Abraham and Sarah’s covenant and destiny.

There are three ways in which Jacob’s claim is explained or justified.

First is the word of God, directly. Isaac’s wife Rebecca asks why the twins in her womb are pressing against her and God responds, “two nations shall branch off from each other from your womb, one people shall prevail over the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Secondly, Esau sells Jacob his birthright for a bowl of red lentil stew. And thirdly, Jacob later tricks Isaac in old age into giving him the blessing intended for Esau.

You could look at the birthright sale and the blessing trick as actions taken to fulfill the word of God. Or you could look at them as stories invented to drive home the point that Jacob was the rightful inheritor, and that his descendants — the Israelites — rightly deserve to be God’s chosen people.

When I’d read this story in the past, I was always confused about the difference between a birthright and a blessing. In both cases, Esau was supposed to be the beneficiary but Jacob managed to turn things upside down and come out the winner. The two anecdotes seemed repetitive. If you have the birthright already, I thought, why do you need the blessing too? Aren’t they more or less the same thing?

So this time I looked it up and no, they’re not the same thing.

Birthright was a legal status governing inheritance rights and other practical matters. In ancient Israelite society and some of the surrounding cultures, the firstborn son typically received a double portion of the father’s estate compared to other sons. So if there were three sons, the estate would be divided into four parts, with the firstborn getting two parts and the others one each.

This wasn’t as unfair as it sounds. The firstborn son was also responsible for family welfare—supporting the widowed mother, providing dowries for his sisters. So there was fairness in his receiving a double portion.

These birthright practices have actually been documented archeologically in other Near Eastern cultures of the time, in stone tablets called the Nuzi tablets from a civilization called the Hurrians or Horites in what is today Iraq. Working in the early 20^th century, archeologists found about 4,000 inscriptions of administrative records. Some of these records are very similar to what we read in Genesis. For instance, here is a Hurrite selling his birthright around the 15^th century BCE:

“On the day they divide the grove... Tupkitilla (father) shall give it to Kurpazah (son) as his inheritance share. And Kurpazah had taken three sheep to (his brother) in exchange for his inheritance share.”

Meanwhile, Isaac’s blessing was more of a spiritual benefit. It didn’t involve land or flocks, but a prophetic prediction of God’s future favor and future prosperity:

“God give you of heaven’s dew, of earth’s bounty, abundant grain and new wine,” Isaac told the boy he thinks is Esau but is actually Jacob. “Let peoples serve you, nations bow down to you. Be a ruler to your brothers and let your mother’s sons bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed, and those who bless you be blessed.”

The ancient Hebrews apparently viewed a father’s blessing as irrevocable—maybe not every father, but certainly one like Isaac who was of God’s chosen line. Thus Isaac “began to shudder – a shudder exceedingly great” when he realized he had unintentionally blessed Jacob instead of Esau. He knew it could not be edited or undone. When Esau asks to be blessed also, Isaac responds “Look, I have appointed him your master – come now, what am I supposed to do, my son?”

He goes on to deliver a blessing to Esau but it is not the kind of unambiguously positive destiny that we today think of when we say the word “blessing:”

“Your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth and the dew of heaven above. Yet by your sword you shall live, and you shall serve your brother. But when you grow restive, you shall break his yoke from your neck.”

In modern terms, we could think of birthright as a traditional financial will that determines who gets a parent’s property, and blessing as more of an ethical will that expresses the parent’s hopes and wishes for their child. But in this particular case it’s more than an ethical will, because coming from Isaac, it is not just a hope but a divinely-inspired prophecy.

The parshah got me thinking about the things we leave our children, here in our modern, secular world. Most of us have written legal wills that determine who gets the house, the savings accounts, the investments, the heirloom jewelry. But we also leave our children legacies that are less defined and tangible.

These legacies, like Jacob’s different blessings for his two sons, are not always positive.

One child grows up feeling confident and capable, while their sibling feels they can never do anything right.

One child constantly hears from the time she’s a toddler, “she’s so pretty, she could be a model” while another hears, “he’s so smart, he should be a doctor.”

One child grows up in poverty being told, “The system is rigged against us, but if you’re smart and work hard, you can find a way up.”

Another child in the house next door, equally poor, grows up being told, “The system is rigged against us, so don’t even bother trying.”

Many of us come from families—happy families, high-functioning families—where nevertheless we knew without ever being told who was mom’s favorite. Who was dad’s favorite. Who was the klutz, or the brainy one, or the one who couldn’t carry a tune, or the one expected to be the peacemaker. Or, heaven forbid, the unwanted one. And then we carry that knowledge within us, shaping us, sometimes for our whole lives.

Think for one moment now about the legacy your parents gave you, for good or for ill.

First consider what they left you as a birthright—the physical stuff—maybe their house, old photo albums, money or jewelry or (I hope not) debts?

Then consider what they left you—intentionally or unintentionally—as a blessing. This is what’s more interesting to me. What was the message or prophecy that you took away from being raised by them?

Perhaps this question of parental blessings could be a conversation starter at your Thanksgiving gathering. Could you ask your relatives or friends about their parental “blessings” — what intangible legacy, good or painful, they took away from the people who raised them? What messages about their capabilities and their future did they receive?

I’d like to end with a lighter thought, especially for those of us who find big family get-togethers difficult, so difficult that maybe we avoid them altogether. Yes, our gatherings may be fraught with political tensions these days over Israel or Trump or any number of topics. But it could be worse….

Think about the families in Genesis. And imagine a Thanksgiving table with all of them seated together, since these complicated, flawed people are all a single mishpachah.

We’d have a single table with both Jacob and Esau, and Abraham and Isaac, and Lot and his wife and daughters, and Sarah and Hagar, and Joseph and all his brothers, and Rachel and Leah and Laban.

Jacob brings red lentil stew as a side dish and Esau throws it in his face. Someone asks Lot’s wife to pass the salt and she storms out of the house without looking back. Isaac has an episode of PTSD when Abraham comes in from the Weber grill with a roasted lamb. Joseph has a little too much hard cider and starts telling his brothers about a dream where they are all turkeys and he is a hatchet, and they don’t take it too well. Sarah leaves Hagar with all the dishes to wash since she is the maidservant, after all. Then Laban goes to watch a football game on the big-screen TV and discovers that Rachel has hidden all his idols behind the console, and all She’ol breaks loose.

Shabbat shalom, and may your Thanksgiving be calmer than this and in fact a chag sameach.

Also the perfect time to start thinking about books to give (or request) as holiday presents!

I’ll share a handful of the books I’ve enjoyed in 2025. There’s not really a common denominator, just books I read for the first time and found memorable. As is typical for me, they’re all fiction. So I’m adding some non-fiction favorites of my husband Sam, whose reading choices invariably make me think, “Wow, that sounds super interesting! But, um, 600 pages, can you just summarize it for me?”

Endling, by Maria Reva

Doubleday, 2025

This novel starts out fascinating enough. It centers on three young women who work in the “bridal tourism” industry of Ukraine, where unmarried U.S. men pay agencies to bring them to Ukraine to meet potential wives at parties and other staged events. As you can imagine, the industry is rife with sexist assumptions and has faced a series of feminist protests. But these three women have complicated backgrounds, including reasons for taking this job that have absolutely nothing to do with wanting a ticket to a dream life in America. (Such as: getting cash to run a jerry-rigged lab in an RV aimed at protecting endangered snails!) One of the women hatches a plot that seems certain to end badly, when….

RUSSIA INVADES.

And now the fourth wall of the novel breaks down. Suddenly it shifts into first person, with the narrator writing about how she is unable to finish her draft of this novel because she is so wracked with worry about her family facing Russian missiles in Ukraine.

I’ll stop summarizing here. I’ll just say that the characters are wonderful, the story is both dramatic and absurd, and the invasion of the invasion into the narrative is wonderful. Along with exploring the politics of bridal tourism, it questions the use of writing fiction at a time when war is destroying lives and communities. And it brings home the terrible human toll of Putin’s aggression. Gifted to me by my childhood friend Vivian, it was by far the most memorable book I read this year. I strongly recommend it!

The Grand Paloma Resort, by Cleyvis Natera

Ballantine Books, 2025

After I heard Cleyvis Natera speak at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in the spring, I immediately pre-ordered this novel. It’s a story of people behind the scenes at one of those glitzy tropical resorts you either love or avoid—the managers, bartenders, babysitters, and cleaners who create a mirage of effortless paradise for their uber-entitled customers.

Think HBO’s White Lotus. But about “the help,” not the guests.

The main character is a Dominican woman who is working her butt off as the only “local” in management at the resort—torn between trying to rise out of poverty, shelter her younger sister, and also remain loyal to her community. The younger sister is rebellious and, shall we say, lacking in judgment. Then there’s the handsome hotel employee who supplements his wages with illicit gigolo services… the bar owner raising twin daughters on her own since their wealthy father lives in Europe with his “real” family… and (of course) a giant hurricane arriving to throw everything into crisis.

A few more, in brief:

Some Final Beauty (University of Nevada Press, 2025) by Lisa Alvarez is a collection of short stories set in Latinx communities of southern California. Nuanced characters and everyday events illuminate people’s pasts and decisions, including those of activists seeking to better their communities. It’s nice to have a short story volume on hand to dip into when you want a quick, self-contained read before bed.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). I didn’t love Normal People, Rooney’s breakout novel, since I got impatient with the characters, who seemed pointlessly self-destructive. Intermezzo felt like it had more heart, the story of two differently-troubled brothers struggling to find human connection in the wake of their father’s death.

The First Mrs. Rothschild by Sarah Aharoni (Amazon Crossing, 2019). This one is a few years old, but I’ve been vacuuming up Jewish historical fiction set before the 20th century as part of working on my own 17th century novel. This novel isn’t stylistically innovative or plot-focused: it basically just imagines a lifetime of journal writings by Gutle, a young woman who marries the founder of the Rothschild financial dynasty. Through the eyes of a traditional Jewish wife, we see the constricted world of the Frankfort ghetto, the arrival of Napoleon with promises and disappointments for German Jews, the gradual crumbling of ghetto restrictions, and how the Rothschilds made their fortune. Translated from Hebrew, this is a worthwhile read if you’re interested in Jewish history.

And now for Sam’s non-fiction picks:

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Viking, 2025)

“The theology of sex is fascinating and very bound up in early Christianity’s need to differentiate itself from the Jews,” said Sam. “It goes back to Paul, who really couldn’t stand his body. The Puritan strain of thinking in American Christianity, and the idea that sex is sinful even when you do it to reproduce: Christianity is the only religion that’s come up with that idea.”

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War, by Lyndal Roper (Basic Books, 2025).

“I didn’t know there’d been a German peasants’ revolt in the late 1500s, and the relation between the revolt and Luther’s teachings,” Sam said. “Luther of course hated the peasants and sided with the nobles, even though the peasants were his most devoted followers.”

The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization, by Roland Ennis (Scribner, 2021)

Remember Cod: The Fish That Changed the World — the book that launched a thousand other histories of obscure yet influential objects? This one’s about wood.

“Unlike other books about single things, wood really is an important through-line material, up through today,” Sam said. “It’s interesting how archeologists try to figure out how ancient cultures used wood, even though wood isn’t left behind like iron or stone.”

Having touted all these other books, let’s throw mine in the mix—my fantasy romp through Hell, Shaken Loose, which came out in 2023 and its sequel Shaken Free, which came out this year. No more sequels, complete at two!

Honestly, the Hell of my books is a great escape — I hope even an inspiring one — from the Hell of our political landscape these days. Characters connect with each other across vast cultural differences, grapple with injustice, and become their better selves. Buy the pair as a gift for a friend, or a gift for yourself. In these darkening days, you deserve it.

Happy reading!

Well, that opening paragraph was what we in the news business would call BURYING THE LEDE.

Because my news today is that… I just finished writing the final chapter of the first draft of my historical novel!

I now have a manuscript that goes from start to finish or, as the expression goes, soup to nuts. Let’s have a few celebratory fireworks: 🎆🎉🥂

I started writing this draft last summer, about one year ago. But the research, thinking, and plotting began way before that—although dating the precise genesis can be as challenging as an archeological dig. Writing a novel is not like applying for a job where you have an offer letter with an official start date.

I’ve got early notes about my main character on my computer from February 2021—four and a half years ago. My Amazon account shows that I bought Gershom Scholem’s definitive, 1072-page biography of 17^th century false messiah Sabbatai Sevi in October 2019, so I was already starting to research six years ago.

It’s been a long process. It’s fine to celebrate.

But you’ll note I said “a few” celebratory fireworks, not a whole Fourth of July extravaganza! Because a first draft is a milepost along the way, not the end of a journey.

Comparing novel-writing with sculpture, I view the first draft as the equivalent of hauling a giant block of marble out of the mountains—probably by ox cart, bumping along, with wooden wheels that occasionally fall off or get stuck in rutted roads. The first draft gets the marble out of the quarry and into the studio. Then subsequent drafts are like sculpting that faceless block into a piece of art.

You need to haul the marble in order to create art. But without those later drafts, it’s nothing more than a big chunk of rock.

As I moved through my first draft, I already started to see things that need to be fixed in the next draft. Early sections where there’s too much backstory layered on top of more backstory. Characters who seemed minor when I first introduced them but later became more important and now need to be fleshed out. Gaps in my research that need to be filled in….

So the next step is to go back in—especially to the start of the book, which I barely remember at this point—and fix the problems that I know about. Then re-read the entire manuscript and look for additional problems as well as opportunities to go deeper, to bring out themes, to embellish or detour from the main narrative.

Once I’ve gone as far as I can go on my own, I’ll bring in other readers—my writing group, friends with good critical eyes, maybe a freelance developmental editor. That in turn will lead to more rounds of revision. At some point, the revisions will get narrower and more like honing, tightening, and polishing.

Then I’ll have to find an agent. And a publisher. Both those stages may involve more revision.

Friends sometimes say, “I can’t wait to read your book!” and I always feel like I’m disappointing them when I respond, “Thanks, but it probably won’t be out for years.” It would be lovely if the time between finishing a first draft and publication were six months, but for me, at least, it isn’t. There’s a lot of work and time still to go.

So I’m saving the Fourth of July-scale barrage of fireworks for later.

But it does feel good to know I have an entire story laid out on paper. That it’s roughly the right length for a typical novel. That I didn’t write 80 pages and run out of ideas, which is always a fear when I start out. That I didn’t get bored with the whole premise halfway through or intimidate myself into giving up. A stranger could read the manuscript right now and, even with its many gaps and flaws, find a comprehensible story.

A story that goes from beginning to end—or, as the expression goes, from soup to nuts.

And it was still wonderful.

Huh?

Let’s step back a minute, especially for those of you who aren’t familiar with the publishing world.

Publication day is a big deal for writers, both emotionally and from a business point of view. Emotionally: it’s the culmination of years of solitary, dogged work. Finally your “baby” enters the world! From a business point of view, the couple of months right before and after publication are when publishers make their biggest marketing push and books get the most media coverage. It’s much harder to get attention for a book that’s been out for a year than one that came out a week ago.

My small publisher doesn’t do much marketing—no publisher-arranged multi-city book tour for me—so for both Shaken Loose and Shaken Free I set up my own local launch events.

Happily, I had support from two Bay Area bookstores with a lot of experience in author events—Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco and A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland. And with both books, I decided to have some creative fun with the launch events—to go beyond the typical format of reading a short section, doing a Q&A with another writer, and serving forgettable wine and sad crackers.

Devil’s food cupcakes and afterlife selfies

Since Shaken Free is set partially in Hell and Heaven, I bought afterlife-themed refreshments—Velvet Devil red wine, Angels Ink white wine, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and Flame Grapes, and I recruited baker friends (Yay Becky! Yay Jane!) to make angel food cake and devil’s food mini-cupcakes.

I also created an Afterlife Selfie Station with a photo backdrop of Hell and Heaven and appropriate costume props (devil horns, angel halo etc.)

I found a fun and offbeat venue for the East Bay event—Faction Brewing, a craft brewery in an old naval airplane hangar in Alameda, with gorgeous views across the bay to San Francisco. (And a food truck on site. And great beer on tap.)

I sent out email invitations and created promotional memes. I talked to the bookstores back in April about quantities of books to order. I made list after list of things I needed to bring to each event, so I wouldn’t forget bookmarks or autograph-signing pens or those marginally edible Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

And then the books didn’t come.

The black box of distribution

It wasn’t the bookstores’ fault. They ordered far in advance. It’s not clear, and may never be clear, whose fault it was. The part of the publishing process between publisher and bookstore is a black box to me and to many writers. There are big distributors like Ingram who store and ship books for publishers. My publisher uses a print-on-demand business model, so somewhere in there are also third-party printers (I think various printers according to region of purchase?) who are contracted by someone (not sure who?) to actually print the books. Maybe someone reading this understands the process better than I do. If so, enlighten us in the comments!

But in any case, somewhere in that black box there were delays. Significant delays. My publisher shrugged and said it was beyond their control. Green Apple Books was told by their distribution contact that the books wouldn’t arrive in time for their event on Wednesday. Great Good Place was told that UPS would deliver them on Thursday, the day of the event.

And then UPS said, sorry, they wouldn’t be delivered on Thursday after all but on Friday.

So here I was on publication day, with two big events scheduled and invitations sent and cakes baked and no books coming.

I could have freaked out. But I’m proud to say that I remained calm. I knew attendees would understand: we’ve all lived through Covid and two Trump elections and we know that sh-t happens. And a #booklaunchwithoutbooks is a relatively small mess-up compared to those other events.

Plus, it turned out I had about a dozen author’s copies on hand that I’d ordered before publication to give to reviewers and people I wanted to thank for helping with my research. I could bring those to the event, and attendees could at least see actual books—she’s not lying! she really wrote a book!—and a few people could buy them, and the bookstores could take orders from everyone else.

So on with the shows!

It’s all about connecting

I had a wonderful time. I love reading my writing to a live audience—getting immediate feedback, seeing smiles or hearing laughter, sensing when something I’ve written connects the way I hoped. I also love talking about my books once they’re finished. While I’m writing them? No way: I’m fearful that talking about works in process will flatten them for me, will snuff the spark of creating. I also understand my books better after they’re done, revised, and finalized. I’m delighted to talk about themes or process or roadblocks or character arcs… afterwards.

And the people. At the East Bay event—much larger, since that’s where I’ve lived for 30+ years—there were people from every corner of my life. My neighbors, folks from my synagogue, birding friends, newspaper colleagues, family members, my gym instructors and my hair cutter, book groups who’d read and discussed Shaken Loose, someone from my new-moms group back in 1994… It was like a wedding or a giant landmark birthday gathering.

I think they had a good time too. I do read to a crowd well. My Q&A partners—Audrey Ferber and Monica Wesolowska, both from my writing group—asked smart questions that made for an engaging conversation. The cakes were GREAT. (Yay Jane! Yay Becky!) And people had fun with the selfies, as I think you can see from the photos.

And book sales?

We sold the meager inventory of copies that I brought. The stores took orders. And on Friday—the morning after the East Bay event—of course—UPS delivered cartons of books to Great Good Place.

I went in to GGP that afternoon, signed books, and hand-delivered them to neighbors who’d placed orders. Other folks will pick them up at the store. I’m sure we sold less than if we had a full stock on hand. But honestly, I don’t mind. These were the kind of evenings that are a life highlight. Maybe I’d feel differently about live events—exhausted, bored, jaded?—if this were a big publisher-sponsored book tour with non-stop talks in multiple unfamiliar cities. But I doubt it. I did a lot of speaking gigs for my girls’ school book back in 2004 and enjoyed them all.

During the Shaken Free launch events I felt proud and appreciated, even loved. Most of the attendees had read Shaken Loose, the first book in this duology, and I felt people’s enthusiasm not just for me, but for the book.

I love my characters in Shaken Free, and I love the story. I’m so happy to have it out in the world and to see it in the hands of readers.

To go from a wild idea inside my head to words on a computer screen and then a printed book and finally a story—images, characters, emotions—that is embedded in other people’s heads is an absolute miracle.

That—more than sales numbers—is what writing and publishing and launch events are about for me.

P.S. Green Apple Books recorded my launch event on video: you can watch it on their YouTube channel. And if you’d like to order Shaken Free or Shaken Loose, they’re available on on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org or from your local indie bookseller.

Planning for the launch feels jarring. I’m creating cute social media memes to promote a fantasy story set in Hell, while the world around me feels more Hell-like every day:

The Republicans pass a budget that will yank health care away from over 10 million poor Americans while giving tax breaks to billionaires. Trump bans Harvard from enrolling foreign students. Cryptocurrency promoters get red-carpet treatment at the White House while the president of South Africa is taunted and humiliated….

And these are just headlines from a single day last week.

Why would anyone want to read a book set in Hell under these circumstances?

I myself crave cozy books and movies—stories where the protagonists are well-intentioned, where nobody is slaughtered, where there is humor and nuance. (I just watched The Residence on Netflix and loved the quirkily brilliant, bird-watching detective. I’m currently reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, futuirstic science fiction about a gentle tea-serving monk who uses they-them pronouns and an equally gentle robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap.)

But people do seem drawn to dystopic stories. The modern classics that broke open the literary-fiction gates to dystopic science fiction were The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, and Station Eleven—stories of patriarchal dictatorship, nuclear wasteland, and post-plague anarchy. Now we have shelf after shelf of novels about climate disaster, planetary destruction, near-future civil wars.

What emotional needs do these stories fill in our increasingly dystopic era?

Perhaps they make us feel that our own situation isn’t so bad. “Abortion is banned in a quarter of the states, but at least women aren’t enslaved for breeding like in The Handmaid’s Tale.” We get a frisson of pleasurable fear imagining terrible things — like fear on a roller coaster — because we know those terrible things aren’t happening to us.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing it if feeds complacency—a feeling that things are okay in America because, for instance, we aren’t handmaids. Yet.

On the other hand, maybe dystopic stories show us how to resist. There’s usually a heroine or hero struggling against the forces of chaos and repression. They may be leading a political resistance (Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games) or modeling internal fortitude—survival through love or art or faith. (The Road, Station Eleven.)

One thing I take away from dystopic books—especially the post-apocalyptic ones—is appreciation of routine experiences that I normally take for granted. A warm bed, my bowl of Kashi cereal at breakfast, a pair of well-worn sneakers. The scene in The Road where the boy is enthralled by the taste of Coke — the first time he’s ever encountered a soda — is carved in my memory.

In writing Shaken Loose, one of my goals was to evoke that sense of marvel and gratitude. Before her immersion in Hell, my protagonist Annie despises her job, her apartment, and even herself. Then in Hell—a world without sun, grass, water, food, human touch— she finds herself yearning for mundane earthly things like sleeping bags on cold camping trips, brightly colored M&Ms, her neighborhood laundromat.

“And laundromats! Clean clothing, warm from the dryer. Holding a warm sock to your cheek. The crisp scent of bleach in the air, a tattered copy of People magazine amid the lint clumps on the window ledge, the neon letters of ‘lavanderia’ backward and bright against the dark night.

“Your basic street-corner laundromat.

“Every damn minute here you thought of something else from home, something you had taken for granted and now longed for like it was golden treasure.”

I had this gratitude-for-daily-life theme in mind pretty much from the time I started writing Shaken Loose, the first book in the duology. But another upside to dystopia only revealed itself to me as I was halfway through the sequel.

My characters changed.

I’m not talking about Annie, whose arc of personal growth I mapped out and sweated over and refined, and refined, and refined. I’m thinking of my secondary characters, and in particular the 4^th century Hun horseman Trua.

I didn’t start out with any particular plans for him, other than as a foil for Annie—an enemy who turns into an ally and ultimately a love interest. But in the crucible of Hell, Trua changed. At the start he was a product of his tribal society, valuing loyalty to family and clan above all. If you were part of his clan, he’d sacrifice his life for you. If not, you didn’t matter. When he was alive, he’d killed outsiders without a moment of doubt or regret.

By the end of Shaken Free, though, he has become a different person. At one point he speaks up to challenge the injustice of Hell and Heaven.

“It’s like a tribe.”

Trua’s voice rose harshly from beside Annie and she pivoted in surprise. Trua, critical of tribes?

“A tribe made up of Christians,” he growled. “Members of the tribe are admitted to Heaven. They get protection and light and… happiness. They get everything. Tribe members win and outsiders lose. Outsiders don’t matter. Their suffering doesn’t matter. I used to think like that too. I admit it. But I was wrong. There are no tribes. There are only human beings.”

I hadn’t planned for him to speak up like that, but when I wrote those words, I loved him for for it. I’ve thought of his speech numerous times since then, when confronted with real-world scapegoating of immigrants, attacks on Gaza civilians, every violation of the “other.”

So my story of an unjust and torturous Hell is also a story of people changing, for the better. It’s a story of hope.

During the first Trump administration, I was still in the middle of writing these books. They were a refuge for me, a soothing, temporary escape from news headlines. I’ve recounted that many times as a joke: “Hell was better than Trumpworld.” It wasn’t really that the Hell of Shaken Loose was less brutal than our world. In fact, it was far worse. But as a writer I had control there, which I certainly don’t have in our country of 340 million people. And my characters grew. They changed. They learned.

They reached out to each other and formed connections across cultural and religious canyons.

In this worst-of-all-worlds, they became better versions of themselves. So ultimately, I view Shaken Loose and Shaken Free as stories of hope.

And so we circle back to my discomfort in promoting a fantasy novel during this time of real-world darkness. Maybe I need to take myself more seriously. To remind myself that Shaken Free isn’t just an escapist romp through a fictional afterlife. Yes, it has humorous and adventurous parts. Yes, it romps. But it also raises questions about God and justice that are relevant to our world’s tragedies.

Even more saliently, it offers a vision of transformation and hope amidst dystopia.

And that is something we all need more of these days, isn’t it?

Shaken Free will be published by Hypatia Press on June 3, 2025. If you’re in the Bay Area, please join me at my launch events on Wednesday June 4 in San Francisco or Thursday, June 5 in the East Bay. If you can’t make it to an event, you can order Shaken Free and Shaken Loose from your local independent bookstore. Of course they’re also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.com. Let me know what you think! And if you enjoy Shaken Free, it would be really helpful if you can leave a short review on Amazon or goodreads.

Right now, we have a chance to do something more than wring our hands.

We can vote.

The World Zionist Congress—yes, the same organization set up by Theodor Herzl in 1897—is holding elections this month that are open to Jews throughout the Diaspora. The winning slate of candidates will control about $5 billion in quasi-governmental spending over the next five years, through bodies such as the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund.

This election will determine whether those billions go to expand West Bank settlements or help economically-struggling communities inside Israel. It will determine whether money goes to Orthodox social service agencies or organizations that respect the rights of women, GLBTQ people, and non-Orthodox Jews.

The election also sends a strong message to the Israeli government about what Diaspora Jews want and value.

When the Israeli government is hurtling rightward, our WZC votes can't stop that but they can be a kind of counter-balance, at least limiting some of the damage.

Who should I vote for?

If you’re one of my non-Jewish readers, it’s fine to stop reading now. Or keep going if you want! Maybe this is an interesting window for you into the Jewish world and its politics.

If you’re Jewish: please vote. You do not have to belong to a synagogue or any Jewish organizations. You simply have to consider yourself Jewish, be over 18 years of age, agree with the WZC’s basic tenets, and pay a $5 fee to cover the election cost.

There are 21 slates running in this year’s election, representing various ideological movements within Judaism. There are Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform slates, left-wing and right wing-slates, and even a slate focused on Israeli emigrés.

In 2020, the most recent election, the top vote-getting slates were:

• Vote Reform (Reform Judaism)— 39 seats

• Orthodox Israel Coalition - Mizrachi (Orthodox Judaism) — 27 seats

• Eretz Hakodesh (another Orthodox slate) — 25 seats

• Mercaz USA (Conservative Judaism) — 18 seats

• Zionist Organization of America Coalition (right-wing Zionists) — 13 seats

• American Forum for Israel (right wing, pro-settlements in the West Bank) — 10

• Hatikvah slate (progressive/left wing Zionists) — 10 seats

You can find platforms and delegate lists for each slate on the WZC election web site. The two that I support are the Reform slate and Hatikvah, the progressive, peace-oriented slate. I personally know and admire delegates on both of those slates, and in fact the Reform and Hatikvah slates will work together on most issues as part of a liberal bloc. So that choice is a toss-up for me. If you belong to a Reform or Conservative congregation, you may want to vote with your denomination; if you are a secular Jew primarily concerned with Israeli-Palestinian peace, you may want to vote Hatikvah.

VOTE HERE

Here are a couple of points from the Hatikvah platform. You can view the full platform for more:

• Hatikvah calls for an immediate negotiated end to the war in Gaza. We maintain that military action, however justified, serves no purpose without a diplomatic goal at its end. We remain steadfast in our long-term objective of a diplomatic pathway ensuring freedom, security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

• Hatikvah fiercely opposes the policy of permanent occupation and annexation of the West Bank. Without a diplomatic pathway ensuring freedom, security, and sovereignty for both Israelis and Palestinians, we will continue to perpetuate the cycle of violence for generations to come.

• Hatikvah affirms that Gaza reconstruction plans are essential to the foundational roadmap that propels forward the peace process and self-determination for those living within the region.

And tell me why, again?

As Jews, Israel often claims to speak and act in our name. Its actions reflect on us, whether we like it or not. We can’t vote for the Knesset but we can vote in the WZC election.

A strong majority of American Jews — probably including you, if you’re reading this blog — support a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that provides rights to both peoples. (A 2024 pre-election poll by J Street found that 68 percent of U.S. Jewish voters support a two-state solution, and 74 percent support such a solution if it also involves recognition of Israel by the Arab world.)

Yet many liberal Jews are unaffiliated with synagogues or other Jewish organizations. They don’t have organized channels for expressing their views. By contrast, Orthodox Jews—and right-wing supporters of Netanyahu and settlement expansion—are very organized.

The WZC election results will turn on a relatively small number of votes. In 2020, the total number of votes cast was only about 123,000. That’s fewer than the number of people who voted for county supervisor in my district in Oakland.

In other words… your vote will make a difference!

If you tell five friends, those five votes will make a difference!

Thanks for listening, and thanks even more if you decide to vote. The election runs from now through May 4th. We’re living in a moment of dire decisions in both the U.S. and Israel, and every action we take—whether a vote, a letter, a protest march, a conversation—is significant.

But I started writing both of the Hell books long before Trump rode down that escalator into presidential infamy. I’ve invested years of my life and my heart in them. Finally, finally, we’re close to the publication date for Shaken Free—June 3rd, three months from now. Maybe these books can serve as a rejuvenating break from our stressful (dare I say Hellish?) political moment.

So… let’s launch!

What to expect?

Shaken Free picks up where Shaken Loose ended. My protagonist Annie has magically escaped from Hell back to life, pregnant with the baby she rescued from the marsh of Limbo. Her beloved companion Trua remains alone in Hell. A devil civil war is raging. The systems governing Hell are breaking down, and it is still a very bleak, very unjust place….

So the main characters from Shaken Loose are back with old and new challenges. (Like, um, how do you re-adjust to earthly life after visiting Hell—especially when your friends and family are sure you’re delusional?)

Plus there are new characters I really love. Kezia is a devout Christian widow with multiple losses of her own. The devil Ardat used to be a dazzling but arrogant harpist in Heaven and now yearns for music in the wasteland of Hell. Plus there’s Ben—Annie’s brilliant, atheist older brother whose achievements always overshadowed hers, and who finally makes his in-person debut in Shaken Free.

Lots of question to be answered: Will Annie and Trua meet again? Will Trua and the hapless revolutionary Haisheng succeed in overthrowing Hell? Will Annie ever stand up to Ben? Will Satan ever pay attention to the lovestruck girl-devil Baphomet? Where is God in all this? Where is justice?

Some good news: this sequel is the end of the series. No more cliff hangers!

You’re warmly invited to pre-order Shaken Free through your local indie bookstore or online through Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

Why pre-order?

From a writer’s perspective, heavy pre-orders can generate buzz among booksellers and motivate a publisher to invest more money in marketing. But that’s more relevant for authors with tens of thousands of followers than for folks like me. In my case, the main advantage of pre-ordering is to lock in some sales: pre-ordering ensures that people will buy the book even if they happen to be away on vacation or having a baby or taking a social media break around the time of publication.

And for you, the reader? Pre-ordering is like sending yourself a little surprise gift. Order it now, forget about it, and then one sunny day in June you’ll find an unexpected package at your front door! (Or you’ll get a friendly call from your local bookstore saying, “Guess what, your book is here!)

It’s not a bouquet of flowers at the doorstep, but it will last longer than flowers. And maybe it will come on a day when you really need a boost because of all the bad stuff out there in the world.

The best way to pre-order?

People often ask, “What’s the best way to buy your book—online, or a bookstore, or what?” Here’s my answer from a personal financial point of view: It’s up to you. I get the same amount of royalties regardless of where you buy the book. (I do get less money if you buy a digital Kindle version, but Kindle is fine if that’s your preferred way to read!)

Thinking more broadly, though, I encourage you to order it from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.org, which partners with indie bookstores. Bookstores are a vital part of our democracy, they foster neighborhood feeling and foot traffic, they’re a way to obtain books that are banned by narrow-minded school boards, they support local authors, they allow you to stumble on your next unexpected great read… enough already, you know all of this.

And for those of you in the Bay Area, here’s another option: Wait until publication week, come to one of my launch events, and buy a copy there! I’ll be able to sign it for you, sales will be handled by Green Apple Books in San Francisco and A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, and these will be really fun evenings.

More on the launch events later. But mark the dates in your calendar:

• Tuesday, June 3 at 7 p.m. Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco.

• Thursday, June 5 at 7 p.m. Faction Brewing in Alameda.

Thanks in advance for supporting Shaken Free, local bookstores, and reading generally! Once we’re closer to launch date, I’ll have other things you can do to help, like posting reviews online or sharing Shaken Free on your social media.

There’s humor in Shaken Free, deep human connections, and less violence than in the first book. Yes, it’s still Hell but there are inspirational moments and even a scene or two that (maybe) will make you cry—in a good way. In fact, it could be a welcome momentary respite from our current world.

It’s sad when a story set in Hell is more upbeat than the real world, but that’s pretty much the situation we’re facing these days.

Pre-order now!

It translates as “in the middle of the thing,” and it refers to opening a novel or movie in the middle of the story rather than at its chronological beginning. The classic example is The Odyssey, which begins not with Odysseus’ departure from vanquished Troy but with his stranding on Calypso’s island, partway through his journey home.

That’s how in medias res applies to the structure of a narrative work.

But as a writer, in medias res can also apply to the process of creating my first draft—right now I’m in the middle of the thing.

Middles of novels are notorious swamps. Writers often come up with a kick-ass beginning and an eye-popping ending… while the hundred pages in between sag or meander or limp along without enough structure or momentum.

That’s not the problem I‘m facing right now with my 17th century historical novel. Once I’ve completed this draft, I’ll have a sense of how the middle of the book is working. So it’s possible you may read another blog post in six months about my saggy, draggy middle. (Just to be clear: this is not the kind of saggy middle one deals with through Spanx.)

For now, here are some of the things I’m noticing about being in medias res:

Potholes

This is my first historical novel, and the writing process feels like driving down a street with potholes.

Writing that’s going well feels like driving on a freeway—you’ve got momentum, speeding along, feeling the wind in your hair. (Did I mention it’s like driving a convertible on a freeway?) The words stream out. You stay up till 2 a.m. because you don’t want to stop.

With this novel, I start to increase speed and then, thwack! I hit a hole in my historical knowledge. Something that I would know intuitively—wouldn’t even have to think about—if I were writing about my own era, but I don’t know at all for the 1660s. It can be a small detail like, “Did a character of this particular social class use a fork?” Or it can be something big and essential to the plot like “Would a woman of that era have gone into such-and-such a place?”

My convertible slams to a halt. If it’s a small, self-contained detail, I highlight it and make a note to find the answer later, once I’m done with this draft. If it’s an important plot point, I stop writing and dive back down the rabbit hole of research—my notes, the books on my shelf, the web, or if necessary the U.C. Berkeley library, which eats up the better part of a morning.

Either way, it's stop-and-start, bumpy. Harder to build up that momentum that feels so good and productive. I feel nostalgic for writing contemporary fiction where OF COURSE I know that my character uses a fork except in Japanese restaurants where she uses chopsticks, or scifi-fantasy where I can decide that my characters don’t need cutlery at all because they DON’T HAVE MOUTHS.

Long journeys

This novel takes my main character on a journey from Hamburg south over the Alps and then across the Mediterranean to Istanbul. She’s been traveling for months. I’ve been writing for even longer: I started this draft last July.

I feel almost as tired as she does. When I think about events that take place in the early chapters, they feel as distant as my own college days—a long, long time ago! It’s almost as if someone else wrote those chapters. “Oh yeah… I remember that… mostly.”

I’m ready to be finished with this draft and eager for the next stage of revising it—seeing what works and what is missing, trying out structural changes, going deeper in some places and cutting in others, and so on. But I’m not there yet. I still have that last third or quarter to write. Onward!

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

By now, I know my main character a lot better than when I started writing. Yes, I had sketched her biography before starting to write—where she grew up, her role in her family and so on. But with each event that I’ve written, I’ve gotten to know her better—how she responds, how she makes sense of the event afterwards.

By now when some plot twist happens, I can immediately see how she relates it to previous events: it reminds her of such-and-such, or she responds based on something she experienced earlier in the book. It’s as if she and I experienced those earlier events together. They feel more real and organic than my imagined notes about her childhood. I suspect readers will feel that way too: readers will have lived through the books’ early events with her, and the same “memories” will pop into their heads. Her responses will feel “real” and not like an arbitrary or contrived decision by the writer.

The ending—aaughh!

I’m far enough along that I feel perched on a mountaintop, looking into the Promised Land of the ending. I know roughly what needs to happen by the end. But aaughh! There is so much that needs to fit in to this final quarter or third, and it’s all a jumble!

What comes to mind is going on a trip with my necklaces and bracelets all stashed in one little jewelry pouch. I unpack and it’s impossibly tangled, necklace knotted within necklace. I can’t even find a loose end to unravel them. One big mess of tangles.

The other morning I was stewing about all this and realized, I don’t even have a climax. No big, defining choice or action that resolves everything. Just all these tangled little pieces of the plot. That was a discouraging thought. Then, by the evening, the climax made itself known. Not with a bolt of lightning, but at some point during the day I realized what it was.

It made complete sense. It had been there all along. I just hadn’t seen it—perhaps because I didn’t know my character well enough until now. Or perhaps because, until recently, I hadn’t yet written the earlier scenes that would make this the obvious climax.

Wanted: an audience (maybe)

Recently I’ve felt a tiny urge to read a section out loud to friends. I did this back in September at a writing retreat hosted by my talented friend Susanne Pari and it was wonderful. Invigorating! Encouraging!

To be sure, reading from a work in progress is not always a good idea. Some writers would rather be roasted over charcoal briquets than share something that isn’t their best, polished work. I understand that. Or if the audience response isn’t what you hoped, it can send you into a funk that freezes your writing process. And I guess it could be awkward if you read a chapter today, and then two months later decide to change it dramatically: the heroine doesn’t make her way across the alligator-filled ravine into her lover’s arms. Instead she falls in and DIES!

But I always enjoy reading out loud—the connection to listeners and the chance to feel their response to funny bits or emotional bits—and the writing retreat last fall was no exception. I was happy with the chapter I’d written (who knows if I will still like it when I get to the revision stage!) and my small audience was enthusiastic and it boosted my spirits.

I’d like to do that again for an encouraging boost in this long, long process.

Or maybe it’s better to keep my fingers on the keyboard, my eyes on the computer screen, and finish this draft first….

Pushing forward through medias res, the middle of the thing.

They were all fake — scams, phishing, efforts to steal my personal data or money. I knew that. But still, I had to think about each one. There was a minute of confusion and anxiety — “Wait, what is this? Am I in trouble?” — and then another couple of minutes logging into my real PayPal or FasTrak account to make sure no one had hacked it and made unauthorized transactions.

Those were just short disruptions in my routine. But they broke up my concentration, my writing flow, my peace of mind. They created an underlying sense that creepy people were out to get me. And the problem is that it’s not just one phony email or text: it’s a stream, a swarm, what feels like a hundred small, sharp darts flying through the air at me every day.

And then there’s the daily (hourly?) news about this terrible presidency.

Last fall we suffered the stress of the election, then Trump’s victory and the constant pundit speculation on this or that policy he might unleash. Now he’s in office and the outlandish, dangerous, cruel, self-serving, vindictive policies are popping out faster than an I Love Lucy assembly line. Outside the U.S. too: it feels like one terrible, out-of-control thing is happening every minute.

I’m not temperamentally an anxious person. But unnerving things are happening on so many levels, from tiny (scam emails) to national (Trump) and even to existential (things I don’t understand like AI and bitcoin, and things I understand too well like climate change). Meanwhile, underneath all this static are the usual human stresses like unemployed grown children.

How does one cope?

Some of my friends have stopped watching or reading the news. They don’t even want to talk about it. A few mention leaving the country—mostly just speculating, I think, though I’m not entirely sure. Neither of those are paths I want to take.

I’m far from an expert in any of this—not in politics, not in strategies for resisting tyranny, not in mental health, not even in managing the spam in my own inbox. I’m in search of answers as much as anyone is. With that disclaimer, some thoughts about coping through this time of anxiety:

• Don’t flee. If you have the resources to consider moving out of the country, you have the resources to help fight the darkness. You’ve got education, a critical mind, some free time, maybe some money. The people who are going to be most hurt by the Trump regime don’t have any of that: they’re working two or three jobs to pay the rent, perhaps not fluent in English, perhaps afraid of being deported or physically attacked. They need us—you—to be present and fight.

• Control your information flow. Don’t stop following the news, but be selective. Give yourself a sense of control. For me, that means not watching TV news, which is so immersive, repetitive, and often shallow that it feels like you’re drowning in the flood from a burst dam. With newspapers or other written media, I feel more in control. I can read three paragraphs and then stop; I can skip certain stories entirely; I can look for upbeat stories to offset the dark ones. Your solution may be different—maybe limiting your news consumption to 20 minutes after dinner?—but figure out a strategy that gives you a feeling of control.

• Music. Springsteen’s No Surrender showed up on my workout playlist the other day and it wiped away my despair. Weave Me the Sunshine—on my mind because of the recent death of Peter Yarrow—is more mellow but equally encouraging. Remember the role that music played in strengthening the brave, frightened activists of the civil rights movement. What music makes you feel optimistic, energized, empowered? (You’re invited to share it in the comments section!)

• Focus on the important stuff, not the side shows. There’s enough repulsive rhetoric coming out of Trump’s camp that we could spend 24 hours of the day spinning in fury. Don’t. To me, Elon Musk’s Nazi-like salute was far less important than government actions like immigration sweeps or muzzling the CDC in the midst of avian flu. Don’t exhaust yourself in outrage over words and stunts intended to provoke us: focus on the real damage to people and institutions, even if it’s less easily reduced to a meme or a sound bite.

• Get involved in something. Find one corner of our world where you can make a positive difference, whether it’s joining an “action alert” mailing list for a particular issue or tutoring a kid in your nearby elementary school. Action is a great antidote to worry and despair.

• Be patient. Trump begged voters for the ropes of power; now let him hang himself. Already the man who campaigned on ending inflation is presiding over $8 cartons of eggs. With time, his policies will hit people’s pocketbooks, health, and government services. He can try to blame Biden for everything but that will get stale. And at that point, the 2026 midterm elections will be drawing closer.

I know: none of this is “stop the presses” news. And these suggestions go hand in hand with other common mental-health strategies such as spending time with friends, getting out into nature, and doing stuff like gardening or exercise or art that make you feel good. You’re probably trying all these strategies already.

Maybe the real point of this post was to share some songs that make me feel empowered and optimistic. (And hear about yours!)

Or maybe writing it is a way to restore my own sense of control. Writing always does that for me.

In any case, off we go into the digital ether with this post! It will show up in my own email inbox, as well as yours if you already subscribe.

And with this one email, at least, I will know it is not a scam.

It’s still three years away from 70.

I’m not someone who takes getting old(er) with calm Zenlike graciousness. Of course I’ve heard and echoed ad nauseum the half-joking response that “it’s better than the alternative.” But I don’t like how even my most optimistic self has to admit that there are now more years behind me than ahead of me – that each birthday brings me closer to the end of the railroad line, or closing time at the tiki bar, or (pick your own Grim Reaper metaphor).

Age numbers have always felt misaligned to me, usually about a decade higher than the way I psychologically feel. When I was 40, I felt 30. When I was 55, I felt 45. Maybe it takes ten years for my age to sink in, and by then it’s out of date. Or maybe the images I associate with age numbers haven’t caught up with modern longevity and health improvements.

During the 2018 elections, I remember going door-to-door to get out the vote for Democrats. The GOTV operations weren’t fully digital then, and we had a paper printout that listed all the target households on a street, the name of the voter, their gender, and their age. At one point I glanced at the sheet and saw the next house was a 63-year-old woman and I thought to myself, “old lady,” and pictured a sweet but doddering grandma with lace doilies on her furniture. Then I realized that I was 61 and we were essentially the same age – both baby boomers, raised on rock and roll, more likely Ikea furniture and flat-screen TVs than lace doilies.

That mental mismatch continues. If you say “67 years old” to me, the image that reflexively pops into my mind is grey hair up in a bun, wrinkled face, sagging body parts, dragging feet, an apron.

Basically Golda Meir without being prime minister of a country.

And that is NOT what I feel like!

Yesterday, my birthday morning, I biked up Tunnel Road, a lovely low-traffic ride near my house that involves 1,500 feet of elevation gain in about six miles. The sequel to my Shaken Loose fantasy novel set in Hell will be released in June and I’m in the middle of a rough draft of a completely different historical novel. Last year I helped start a group at my synagogue promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace and justice. On vacation in Mexico City three weeks ago, Sam and I walked between six and eight miles each day.

I’m not doddering, not decrepit, not that stereotypical “old lady” whose image is embedded in my brain.

And yet.

My doctor recently started me on a statin for arterial plaque. And my feet are giving me problems. They hurt when I wake up in the morning, they hurt if I walk a lot (I was limping by the end of our eight-mile day in Mexico City), they hurt if I don’t wear custom orthotics or if I unexpectedly flex them a certain way. For a long time I thought it was plantar fasciitis, but the podiatrist told me last month that it’s arthritis. It’s just my body parts wearing out. Certainly this is a minor issue compared to friends dealing with heart problems, knee replacements, diabetes etc. but I don’t like it. I worry that it’s the first step into a health doom loop: feet hurt -> walk and hike less -> put on weight -> less heart and lung fitness, and there we go, next thing you know it’s closing time at the tiki bar.

But I signed up for a new Pilates class this week in addition to biking/spinning.

Take that, doom loop!

In truth, I don’t get caught up in angst over this very often, just at certain key moments like birthdays. I know that it’s best not to think about age numbers. Do what you want to do, stay active, don’t let the numbers dictate what is expected of you. Certainly our new (terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad) president hasn’t paid attention to age numbers. Taking a more positive example, our late president Jimmy Carter didn’t let age stereotypes define him. Heck, he was in hospice for nearly two years!

Here are my main goals for the coming year: Finish the first draft of my historical novel. Launch Shaken Free, the sequel to my Hell novel that will be published on June 3^rd. Keep up my workouts and physical activity. Stay engaged with what’s happening in the world and resist whatever evil stuff comes out of the new (terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad) administration.

Last week, my Uncle Bobby sent me a poem for my birthday. He’s always been a very good wordsmith, and over the decades wrote several books and had numerous letters to the editor printed in the S.F. Chronicle. He’s my last living uncle or aunt. Here’s what he wrote:

We look at the calendar, knowing quite well
That this Birthday greeting is NOT straight from hell!
For "hell" was a very first start, we all know,
And taking Step Two will certainly glow
Into something much happier, which surely will prove 
She's one great new author, now hitting her groove!

I was so tickled to get this.

My uncle Bob Skutch is, by the way, 99 and a half.