Six years after the publication of my memoir, I’ve completed a novel. It wasn’t supposed to take this long, but writing has been tucked around the edges of work and everything else life has thrown me over the past few years. I was finally mobilized by a wonderful and meticulous editor, Robert Braile, former book editor for the Boston Globe, who has inspired me to finish this manuscript. I’ve also dusted off a group of linked novels I’ve been working on for five years, and I’m now about 150 pages into that sprawling project. Writing can be tedious, frustrating, and challenging, but also joyful, engrossing, and wonder-making.
The completed novel, Triptych, is the story of three siblings during the Holocaust. It begins in the nineteen thirties in Vienna, and ends in 1942, the year when the gas chambers were built, but when the tide was also just beginning to turn for the Allies. The three stories, each told in first person, try to recreate what it was like to be a young person in the middle of these cataclysmic events, living in hope and without the knowledge of where things would end up. The three are scattered, one to Palestine, one to England, then Canada, and then the United States, and one to Germany and then a site of mass extermination in Belarus. Triptych started as a young adult novel, but because the themes of despair and diaspora run throughout, I feel it will appeal to a wider audience.
Unlike writing, the business of writing involves moving away from my desk to promote my work and myself. It involves quite a bit of effort and means facing what feels like endless rejection and disappointment. Keeping up with this website is a fulltime job. Once a book has been out for a few years, you can no longer get readings. The release of a deluxe paperback edition of My City of Dreams offered hope for a new start, but that release was delayed, first by a fire in the paper plant, then by a cyberattack at the press, and then by multiple flaws in the galleys. Then, my publishers wanted to delay the release until I found a publisher for the novel. Thankfully, TidePool will be getting My City to the printer shortly. They also listed the book with a distributer for independent publishers, Pathway Book Service. Bookstores worldwide will now be able to stock the book when I start my readings again.
About finding that elusive agent—I’ve followed multiple leads without opening any doors. I’ve been advised to send query letters to the agents mentioned in the acknowledgements of books I like. Does that work? So far, I haven’t received responses to cold queries. Most agents and editors state prominently on their websites that they don’t accept them.
So, I am looking for introductions and trying to remain hopeful that this new book will find a home with a major publisher. Or that a call from Stephen Spielberg, Natalie Portman, or Jesse Eisenberg is right around the corner.
Meanwhile, I keep writing.