The Better Part of Valor

This is the second part of my week-long blog for the Jewish Book Council

Haurowitz/Harris’ Goods and Sundries

June 16, 2010 · Leave a Comment

In her last post, Allison Amend wrote about Jews in odd places. She will be blogging all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Author Blog series.

My aunt, Jackie Cohen, put together a history of my relatives. In the only picture of my great grandfather Joe, he is standing proudly in his grocery store, apron wrapped around his prodigious middle, goods stacked to the rafters all around him. Like most people of his generation, he doesn’t smile (when did smiling in pictures start?).

It was this image I had in mind when I created Haurowitz/Harris’ Goods and Sundries in my novel, Stations West:

Moshe looks around the store. They have built rows of shelves and ordered glass cases. There are stacks of Indian blankets and pipes, hot water bottles and cloth. There are huge vats of pecans, hides of various provenances hanging from the walls, metal goods such as pots, pans, teakettles, and flour grinders. There are small bottles of tonics, large glass jars of spices, salt and pepper, and Mason jars for canning. There is wire for chicken coops and fishing line. There are chisels and lathes and knives and china, tin silverware, salt-back pork, chicory, and tobacco. There are old newspapers, and a part of the store that can be roped off with curtains when the photographer comes to town. A sign outside says HAUROWITZ SUNDRY in large gold-painted letters.

One small observation I was interested in exploring in my novel, was the idea that Jews cannot farm. Obviously, that is not particularly true, yet the stereotype stands. It is true that most Jewish immigrants in this country became salesmen and tradespeople, owning stores, or becoming tailors or importers. Why is that? I looked for an answer and could not find one. It’s not a function of education, for after the initial wave of German immigrants, most of the Jews that came to America were uneducated.

My characters initially try to farm but are stymied by the nature of the soil in Oklahoma (which gets quickly exhausted by cotton). A store seems like a logical extension of someone used to deferential behavior and used to providing a service. Is that why other Jews seemed to open stores rather than farm?

Allison Amend’s first novel, Stations West, is now available. Come back all week to read her posts for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Author Blog series.

I’ve been guest-blogging for the Jewish Book Council this week.

Jews in Odd Places

June 14, 2010 · 3 Comments

Allison Amend is the author of the novel Stations West. She will be blogging all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Author Blog series.

Since I’ve been touring with Stations West, there are invariably one or two people who approach me after each reading, telling me that their ancestors are from equally as improbable places: North Dakota, New Mexico, etc. What does this mean? That these are not such improbable places after all. Like other religions and ethnicities, we Jews settled everywhere, bringing our culture, tradition (and usually our peddling wagons or dry good stores) with us.

I’ve been a Jew in an unlikely place, too. I spent a year in high school living in Barcelona, Spain, which has not had a meaningful Jewish community since 1492 (though a small Sephardic community thrives still). I spent a weekend in a tiny town by the name of Olot in the Pyrenees. This was during the first Gulf War, and the U.S. Consulate recommended we not divulge our status as Americans, and warned us against telling strangers if we were Jewish. After a few days of avoiding the topic with my teenage hostess (“My family doesn’t really go to church that often,” “I guess Americans write down the family tree in the Bible,” “No, I didn’t get confirmed”.) I revealed that I was Jewish. My hostess, who, after half-jokingly (I think) asking if I had horns, thought it was the coolest thing about me, and proceeded to show me off to all her friends as a Jew. Her friends were equally as delighted by the revelation; they had always wondered what Jew would be like. Her little sister kept petting my hair and calling me “Pretty girl” in Catalan. It was an odd weekend.

More recently, I was a Jew in Lyons, France, where I taught high school. Coincidentally, I taught at the only school in the city that had no Saturday classes, and was therefore the Jewish school by default. One of my students, upon finding out I was Jewish, invited me over for Hanukkah dinner, where his Sephardic family was so different from my Ashkenazi one that I might as well have been dining on the moon. I remember thinking their tunes were all wrong.

They told me a story, which I fictionalized in my short story collection Things that Pass for Love, about their experiences during the Second World War (Lyons was in occupied France). The grandfather hid in the cabinet for the duration of the war. In 1996, the little girl’s Jewish day school was bombed, avoiding killing children only by accident. I realized, then, how lucky I was to be free of the fear of persecution that plagued them constantly.

I found out five years later that one of my best friends in France was the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, who lost his first family in the camps. She had never thought to mention it.

Allison Amend’s first novel, Stations West, is now available. Come back all week to read her posts for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Author Blog series.

Readers, he married her. And she looked beautiful. And he looked in love. What more could anyone wish for?

Hello, blog,

It’s been a while. But I am back, hopefully more frequently.

Was just thinking about how I’ve rented all these movies to see how to write a screenplay, but each time I watch, I keep forgetting to examine them with an eye toward deconstructing them and instead get caught up in the story. The same thing happens when I read novels to see how the author “did it.” I get involved in the plot and before I know it, I’ve read the book as a reader instead of an author.

Meet Allison Amend, author of “Stations West”

Book discussion, signing, and refreshments

Secaucus Public Library, New Jersey

Allison Amend, NYC

WHEN: Friday, April 30, 2010, 7 – 9 p.m.

WHERE: Secaucus Public Library

1379 Paterson Plank Road, Secaucus, NJ 07094

Directions:  www.secaucus.bccls.org, njtransit.com

HOSTED BY: The Turner Syndrome Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization

PO Box 726, Holmdel, NJ 07733

Tele: 800-594-4585

www.TurnerSyndromeFoundation.org

COST: Donations payable to TSF

Allison’s essay, “Alone on a Path Shared by Many”, recently published in the New York Times, (January 31, 2010), shares her intimately personal experience of living with Turner Syndrome, a condition that affects 1 in 2000 females.  “But for now, I miss the children I’ll never give birth to as intensely as I miss the characters in a book after the last page is turned.  I love them dearly, and yet they never existed.”

Praise for Stations West (LSU Press, 2010)

Oklahoma is a forgotten territory of “Indians, outlaws and immigrants” when its first Jewish settler, Boggy Haurowitz, arrives in 1859. Full of expectations, he finds the untamed landscape a formidable foe, its landscape rugged, its resources strained.

Four generations of Haurowitzes, intertwined with a family of Swedish immigrants, struggle against the Territory’s “insatiable appetite.” The challenges of creating a home amid betrayals, nature’s vagaries, and burgeoning statehood prove too great. Each generation in turn succumbs to the overwhelming lure of the transcontinental railroad, and each returns home to find the landscape of his youth, like himself, changed beyond recognition, his family utterly transformed.

Dramatic and lyrical, Allison Amend’s first novel, steeped in the history and lore of Oklahoma Territory, tells an unforgettable multi-generational—and very American—story of Jewish pioneers, their adopted family, and the challenges they face. Amid the founding of the West, Stations West’s generations struggle to forge and maintain their identities as Jews, as immigrants, and as Americans.

To advance order and contribute to TSF, go to www.onecause.com Click on Turner Syndrome Foundation.  Click on Amazon and they will donate a portion of your total sale to benefit TSF. Thank you!

Yes, it’s true, folks. Stations West, after 12 years of writing, editing, tearing out hair, despairing, and mailing, is finally on shelves. I’m so proud of my teenager!

Stations West

What do you call 8,000 authors in a room? AWP, of course. The conference you love to hate just ended. More news, with photos and gossip soon.

Well, it’s official. I’m moving to Florence, Italy for a few months. I got a call from someone I know who is the head of an international  school in Florence asking would I fill in for a departing middle school history teacher. I’ll be there from mid-Feb to July. Come and visit

I’m just tired a lot. I needed 20 hours of wires to tell me that?

Yup, I finally did it. After years of insomnia and daytime sleepiness I have finally booked myself into the sleep clinic, from where I write today (December 12, 2008. I’m a little slow on the postings).

The pulmonary and sleep specialist I consulted offer three theories for my sleep troubles:

I may be a hypersomniac. If the average need for human sleep is 8 hours, and people like Bill Clinton and Sarah Tombaugh only need 5, someone is getting 11 hours a night to balance them out.

I may have a sleep apnea. Though I do not snore (I insist that I breathe heavily), there might be an airway obstruction that prevents me from getting good quality sleep.

I may have mild narcolepsy.

As ridiculous as the last option sounds, narcolepsy is not like we learned in middle school science (remember the narcoleptic dogs?). It doesn’t cause you to fall over mid-sentence.

In any event, I arrived last night at around 9pm. I was shown to my room, where I watched television for a good hour. The room is something like a cross between a Howard Johnson and a hospital room. I’m told it’s raining outside now, but I have no window to back up that information. Inside there’s a television, a bed, a camera trained at the bed, and a bunch of electronic equipment.

Electrodes were placed on my face, head, chest and legs to measure brainwaves and limb movement, as well as any changes in heartbeat (indicating an apnea). Also, a pulse oxometer was placed on my finger. And finally, they put small nodes in my nostrils to measure breath and record sounds.

This was not terribly comfortable. The biggest problem was the fact that all these electrodes were attached to a box, so I was unable to roll over. They kept falling out in my sleep, and the technician came in several times to reattach the wires, finally replacing them.

He woke me at 6. I was not happy. Then I had to fill out a questionnaire—how much did I think I slept, how long did I think it took me to fall asleep, how many times did I wake up during the night?

I stayed awake for an hour and a half (I watched the Today Show) while the majority of the wires were removed. Then they turned out the lights with the command: “Go to sleep,” delivered via loudspeaker into the room.

So I did. I was rudely awakened 20 minutes later. Then I did some work. And napped again for 20 minutes. I didn’t think I’d fallen asleep, but apparently I did. Then I did it again. And again. Five times. I was napteased. I had the napping equivalent of blue balls.