images (8)I’ve often wondered why these sections got the cut, (my memoir had to be pared down to below 100,000 words) and what prompted me to include them in the first place in my memoir Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces. (SheWritesPress, 2016) As I retyped them from the copyedited version for today’s blog post, the following insights came to me:

  • Could it be that I wanted my reader to understand my mother’s family history in terms of escaping the Nazis?
  • Could it be that I wanted the reader to under the dynamics of my family history?

Now rereading these words, I would have to say “Yes” to both these questions. I couldn’t edit any content out during the kickstarting phase, but I tried to understand where I was going with certain scenes.

My editor made suggestions for clarity, but the point of this scene and section was to show how I was able to deal with Shawna, a very bossy Australian who was ten years older than me on my aunt’s kibbutz in Israel  where we were both working as volunteers. I was trying to forge the understanding between her bossy nature and that of a sabra, a prickly pear fruit word to describe an Israeli born and this piece of information to let the reader know where I’m coming from as an American-Israeli trying to figure out how this prickly pear culture fits in with my own life.

So after reading these sections, would you be enticed to read the memoir?

images (9)At Grandmother’s apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, I once thought soups were big buckets of tears because mother would tear up and cry as she cut onions. Grandma would throw methodologically, every onion into that pot as if it were no big deal. “So what’s the story?” she would ask during a random conversation, but Mom was so busy wiping her eyes on her sleeve, that by the time she was finished, Grandma was already dressing the chicken.

“Why are you crying?” I’d ask.

“That’s what happens,” she said. “They make you cry.”

Of course, none of this made sense as the plate of fried onions she served over fluffy white rice never made me cry.

 

yiddish-advice-on-going-gluten-freeJust as the steam from the boiled onions crowded along the two long fluorescent tubes as they tried to find a way out of her small Queens apartment, my grandmother would sniffle, grunt, and mutter a few words in Yiddish after slicing and boiling the onions. Years later, I wondered if grandmother’s tears were really about leaving her family, her Polish roots when she found out she had to leave Poland. She was forced to leave because of Hitler; she fled to Spain, and later to Panama, and ultimately, to the Bronx.  But grandmother never talked to me about these things. Maybe she didn’t want to make me cry.

Many years later, both my grandparents’ families were wiped out by the Nazis and that my grandparents were lucky and smart enough to escape Spain with my mother, a baby at the time, along with their other daughter, my aunt, who was seven at the time.

Had I known this information, I might have been in a better position to fend for myself against bossy people like Shawna who now made herself head of the volunteers.

 

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