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Lilith: Novelist Thelma Adams Brings Jewish Women to the Forefront of Crime Stories

August 19, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

>A Jewish woman married to Wyatt Earp? A Jewish woman cleaning up after a murder committed by her brother, a criminal with ties to the Jewish mafia? These are the kinds of stories that novelist Thelma Adams loves to tell. She talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how she finds her subjects and what they yield in her novels.

YZM: Last Woman Standing tells the story of a Jewish woman entangled with wild west legend Wyatt Earp. How did you first learn about Josie’s story and how much of it is true?
TA: I first tripped over Josie’s story when I saw on the internet that famed gunslinger Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Colima, California. What doesn’t fit in that picture? I wondered.
With a little research, I discovered that Earp was entangled with Josephine Sarah Marcus, a daughter of Jewish immigrants, for half a century. She wrote a memoir, I Married Wyatt Earp, which was heavily edited and possibly part of the campaign to whitewash her husband’s legacy—and her own. So, I used that book, and its voice, as a jumping-off point. I scoured the shelf-loads of literature about Wyatt where Josie appears as a footnote, to cobble together a story that placed Josie at the center of her own life. Her thoughts and emotions of that increasingly self-aware woman were largely a product of my imagination. Where would Josie have been and what would she have witnessed of the famed Gunfight at the OK Corral—the famous scene from so many movies including Tombstone? That’s pure fiction.

YZM: I love that you made Josie an innocent yet lusty woman; what inspired that part of her character?
TA: I’d like to say me at that age—would that be rude? I came of age in Berkeley in the 70s when free love was definitely still a thing. The goal was to be liberated in mind—and body. The west of Tombstone in the 1880s was also a frontier where accepted norms were thrown out the window, including sexual ones.
Also, I believe that lust is universal—and the desire for sex and intimacy, and the ability to enjoy it, is something that women are as capable of as men. One of the themes of my fiction so far is stories of liberated women before their time, women who enjoy sex, and how they collide with the social expectations around them. Female sexual pleasure isn’t a recent invention.

YZM: Were there other Jews in Tombstone, AZ at the time? Were they accepted or did they face discrimination?
TA: Yes. Ron W. Fischer’s book The Jewish Pioneers of Tombstone and Arizona Territory gives a relatively detailed account of the few dozen Jewish people in Tombstone. There was a Jewish cemetery in a corner of the mining town’s famed Boothill graveyard where the three victims of the Gunfight at the OK Corral—Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury and his brother Tom—have their last resting places.
Jews, mostly men, were merchants, bankers, miners, mine superintendents and gamblers, forming a local association. There was no rabbi and no temple, although these first developed 80 rugged miles away in Tucson, Arizona. In 1896, Tombstone elected its first Jewish mayor, A. H. Emanuel. Since the town was very new—keep in mind, it was a social free-for-all—there was no systemic anti-Semitism. In the epithet given to one Faro dealer—“the lucky Jew kid”—there’s modest evidence that discrimination existed but less so than in more settled, civilized settings in America like the San Francisco where Josie grew up. Jewish entrepreneurs exploited the economic opportunity provided by the Wild West. An excellent book on the subject in a larger context is Harriet Rochlin’s Pioneer Jews.

YZM: How about the historical accuracy of your other novel, Bittersweet Brooklyn, which deals with the mafia back in the East?
TA: There’s a lot of fact to Bittersweet Brooklyn, a novel that had the working title Kosher Nostra. I based it on my grandmother, the late Thelma Lorber Schwartz, and her infamous older brother Abraham “Little Yiddle” Lorber. While he became a relatively low-level fixer in the Jewish mob, Murder Inc., she’s the book’s focus. They were schleppers, the American-born children of immigrants who left Drohobych, Ukraine in the late 19th Century. Abie’s shameful stories, or the facts of his criminality, were not frequently shared by my father, Abie’s nephew. I don’t think he knew the full extent of his uncle’s crimes and associations.
Strangely, I knew even less about the other, quieter brother, Louis. I discovered that the man for whom my father Lawrence was named was a genuine war hero. In contrast to his older brother Abie, Louis channeled his violence into the military, enlisting in the Army in WW1. Through research, I discovered Louis to be a decorated soldier in the critical Second Battle of the Marne that turned the tide against the German offensive. He found a home and promotions in the military and remained a career soldier until his premature death from complications of appendicitis in the Philippines. He’s buried at the San Francisco Presidio.
A life in the military and one of serious crime leaves trails: in military, criminal and court records and newspapers. From these, census data, birth, death and marriage certificates, and an Ancestry.com addiction, I fleshed out their history and created a timeline. I researched the movie theaters and dance halls and street festivals of the era, walked the streets of Williamsburg, New York, and developed the story’s architecture. And then I dove in: all the dialogue, the emotions, the abuse that happens behind closed doors, the filial love and alliances, are fiction. So is the determination of who are the villains and heroes in this family conflict.

YZM: Was the character you created actually based on someone named Thelma? What was it like writing about your namesake?
TA: Yes. I never met my paternal grandmother, Thelma. She died in 1958 and I was born in 1959. I got her name—nickname Thudma—which was common enough in her time but a source of continual ribbing as I was growing up in sunny Southern California. I was an outsider from day one, carrying that name, and from early days it launched me on an emotional quest to figure out who she was (and, by extension, who I was). I look like my grandmother, although we have only one remaining photograph of her as an older woman sitting at a bar with her girlfriends and my father. No pictures survive from her childhood. And, like the character of Thelma, I love to dance. My father taught me how to Lindy Hop and he was an avid and energetic dancer, which I believe he got from his mother.
With the knowledge of who my father was – a warm, vibrant, bigger-than-life Brooklyn refugee with a strong social justice bent and a tendency to harbor strays – I tried to imagine, by extension, who his mother was. What was that investigation like? Exhilarating and exhausting. I didn’t know her but I knew how the story ended and the loneliness of it. For me, channeling the emotion of her life wasn’t just about my grandmother – it was seeing all the women whose lives never hit the newspaper, who aren’t inked in the historical record. Their lives mattered, were rich and complicated, even if they never stabbed a rival or went to war. I wanted to honor my grandmother’s spark and even if a street will never be named after her.

YZM: In Bittersweet Brooklyn, Rebecca–who gives up her children–veers so far from stereotypical image of the Jewish mother that it’s painful to read. What were you trying to achieve by doing this?
TA: It is painful. And it was painful to write. Rebecca doesn’t represent all Jewish motherhood. It was a challenge to put myself in Rebecca’s shoes and peer out through her eyes – and see Thelma under the critical gaze that formed and cracked her. But I sat with a document in my hands in which the widowed Rebecca committed her two young sons to a Hebrew Orphanage where they lived for years. I read the form: “Father died two years ago. Mother supported them until now. Claims to be sickly. Has received assistance from Hebrew Charities.” She was at that point essentially a welfare widow.
My goal was to understand the economic and physical stress that impelled a mother to surrender her boys. I had to understand how she could live with that horrible choice. And I worked back from there. I knew nothing about Rebecca, and my father has long since passed, so no one could tell me much about her. And, yet, I have great empathy for her. She was born and raised in a village defined by Jewish rituals, surrounded by sisters and a large extended family – and given away in an arranged marriage and uprooted and dispatched across the sea to a gargantuan city. There was a place where middle sister Rebecca made sense, in her stubbornness and co-dependency, and that was the old country with her mother and sisters. Those values were her values. Not everyone came to America of their own volition, seeking a new identity and a new life. She couldn’t cope as an individual away from the community in which she made sense. Rebecca isn’t a stereotype, but I think she’s recognizable.

YZM: “What a ridiculous notion that all Jews would stick together, German and Hungarian, Russian and Rumanian, assimilated Americans who worked on Saturdays and wore pinstripes,” you write.
TA: There are scholars who have more nuanced opinions on this matter and many nonfiction books have been written on the subject. There are major class differences within the Jewish community—that was as true then as it is now. As the first generation Eastern European Jews flooded into the Lower East Side of New York, the tenements and the rampant tuberculosis, they were not welcomed with open arms into the uptown parlors of the established German Jewry, the bankers who had struggled to position themselves at the upper echelons of New York Society. These notions of uniform “communities”—the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBTQ community—are catchalls for complicated internal relationships based on class, gender and ability to assimilate (or not). When my children were stroller age, I would walk to Borough Park and its Orthodox community. While we might share a love for rugelach, and the best I’ve ever tasted I bought on Brooklyn’s 12th Avenue, it was clear that I was an outsider. I was an assimilated Jew in my shorts and sandals, and not a part of that tight-knit and tradition-bound community where women my age wore wigs and long sleeves and skirts and often had five or seven children not just two. For me, I felt both kinship and difference.

YZM: “The landlady didn’t know Rebecca’s father or her mother, her grandfathers, the great Torah scholar who had been her father-in-law. How could she know Rebecca without knowing her family?” This statement seems to describe the immigrant’s condition perfectly.
TA: I think that’s the key to understanding Rebecca and her inability to function in the new world. All her signposts were gone. Her sense of who she is in the world has been pulled up at the roots. And that is why this is not only a book about Jewish and Italian immigrants in the early 20th Century. It’s also about the immigrant experience and the poverty that so often comes with being a stranger in a strange land. So that when we look at the children sleeping on cement floors with tinfoil blankets on this side of the Mexican border, consider their parents and grandparents, their first memories, the food they ate, the music they heard, their disconnect from all the factors that formed their young identities. And consider, too, how much kindness and generosity is needed at just that disruptive moment to help them mature into healthy adults. And how it is withheld. The cycle continues.

YZM: It seems like you’re drawn to the stories of Jewish women in atypical settings like the Wild West and a criminal underworld. Is this true and if so, what drew you to such subjects?
TA: Yes. That is true. I’m drawn to the stories of Jewish women in atypical settings because they fascinate me. Who was Josephine Sarah Marcus, why did she move to Tombstone and what did she really find there? I wanted to see that familiar Hollywood legend from her eyes filtered through my imagination. I enjoy busting stereotypes because when I look at the Jewish women surrounding me, I see so many different and fantastic females who I turn to again and again in my life for support, laughter and guidance. I see unique, generous and often adventurous individuals.
I’m a Jewish woman who has had many opportunities: a stable home, good medical care, college and grad school, international travel. And those opportunities shaped who I am and my place in the world. With historical fiction, I want to sing out the many different stories of our shared experience as Jewish women, some pretty and some not so much. The Last Woman Standing was also a reaction to seeing legendary tales where the Jewish women involved were airbrushed out. For example, in the Western classic Tombstone, more energy was spent on getting the spurs and silver waistcoat buttons historically accurate than in creating women characters that were true to their individual and often adventurous experiences – Josie in particular. These women were the backdrop for a man’s story. I wanted, and still want, to put Jewish women at the center of their own stories.

*

This interview first appeared in Lilith: Independent, Jewish and Frankly Feminist

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: author interview, Bittersweet Brooklyn, Crime, Jewish fiction, Kitty Zeldis, Kosher Nostra, Lilith Magazine, the last woman standing, Westerns, Wyatt Earp

How the Berlin Film Festival Sent a Message to Cannes, Venice on Film Parity

May 17, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The future of film is female: a photo snapped in February at the Berlinale’s climax, when the Juliette Binoche-led international jury met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, may be the most important film photo of 2019 — or even the decade. The image is a signpost of where we want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. And that it’s attainable.

As Americans become mired on how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of #MeToo and Trump, on the way to 50/50 in 2020, the Berlinale jury showed what the future could look like with a female jury president — and a female government leader. Embrace the change — the Berlinale showed us how (and stepped ahead of rivals Cannes and Venice in so doing).

“The picture clearly captures a life-highlight moment for all of us who were there [hopefully the chancellor as well],” says Rajendra Roy, Berlin jury member and MoMA’s chief curator of film. “[But] the real significance lies in what was discussed in the nearly 90-minute meeting that followed. Mrs. Merkel had serious, and extremely poignant, questions about the state of the industry, the rise of streaming platforms [one in particular, but she wanted to understand the differences between them] and the cultural importance of the theatrical experience,” Roy says.

“To be totally honest, we were more star-struck than she was [or let on] and we came away feeling like we had engaged in a conversation that would lead to concrete regulatory and financial measures.”

Jury member and Los Angeles Times (and former Variety) film critic Justin Chang says: “It meant a great deal that Chancellor Merkel took the time to sit down with us and discuss everything from the film industry to climate change; in doing so, she asserted the importance of the arts in public life and the value that artists bring to the conversation.”

The photograph, with its female majority, men of color and LGBTQ inclusion, reflects cultural creators, curators and journalists engaged in an ongoing dialogue that’s coming to fruition.

“Despite the conservative backlash, there’s been a sea change in who gets to choose and who gets to tell their stories,” says Beth Barrett, Seattle Intl. film festival’s artistic director.

The photo validates and advances an inclusive worldview. “To see that engagement between the jury and Merkel, who is the leader of the free world … she’s not a super artistic chancellor and yet she appreciates the role of arts and culture in the world and how it betters the country and its communities,” Barrett says.

“Having Juliette Binoche as the jury chair, she’s able to lead the discussions in a way that is collaboratively combative. There’s no antagonism and yet at the same time each one of these people is going to have their opinions heard, respected and discussed. That’s huge when talking about the history of women and men of color in groups.”

These historically marginalized voices are assuming leadership roles and showing how the game can be changed, one jury at a time, one festival at a time. “To be on that Berlinale jury, on that level of international A-level festival, is a statement about how you are perceived within the industry. It’s also a responsibility: you’re able to take on that role of being able to choose: to push someone forward or push forward the status quo,” she adds.

Liliana Rodriguez, artistic director of the Palm Springs Intl. Film Festival, responded to the photograph with its composition of women at the forefront, and a sense both playful and serious that these empowered artists are forward-looking and seizing the moment: “I’m reassured and hopeful that we as a society are moving in a direction where women and people of color casually occupy these spaces that have historically been occupied by white men. I’m hopeful one day these will be the norm. For now, this feels revolutionary.

“Despite the nightly news real change is possible,” Rodriguez says, “It just takes time.”

Chang concludes, “While it would be amusing to compare the responsibilities of running a film festival jury and leading the free world, I don’t think the symbolic importance of a meeting between two brilliantly accomplished women — Chancellor Merkel and Juliette Binoche, our jury president — was lost on any of us. Maybe it was a happy coincidence; maybe it was an astonishing snapshot of what progress can look like.

“Certainly it was a reminder that the Berlinale has done as much as any major film festival to advance the cause of gender parity, as evidenced by the fact that seven of the 16 films in our competition pool were directed by women. I’m reminded that so much of the discourse on movies, especially on movies being made outside the confines of the Hollywood studios, begins at film festivals, and so it’s natural that inclusion must begin there as well — among filmmakers, decision-makers and journalists.”

As evidenced by this single photograph, the strides made by the Berlinale offer a signpost of where many in the industry want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. Not only is it attainable, it sends a message to Cannes and Venice: this is the bold collaborative future of film.

[[this article first appeared in Variety]]

Filed Under: Movies & TV, Uncategorized

Movie Review: ‘The Chaperone’

April 18, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


For Downton Abbey fans, The Chaperone represents a respectable reunion on this side of the pond among 1920s middle-class Yanks. Downton creator Julian Fellowes, 69, adapted the script from Laura Moriarty’s bestseller for director Michael Engler, who will helm the upcoming Downton Abbey movie. The drama tracks schoolgirl Louise Brooks’ first trip from parochial Kansas City to wild Manhattan, seeking fame as a dancer and, ultimately, finding it as a silent movie star. But, while the perky Haley Lu Richardson, 24, twirls through the pretty period drama, bobs her hair and tipples despite the era’s Prohibition, it’s Downton’s Cora Crawley, Elizabeth McGovern, 57, who gets the star treatment. She gives one of her best performances as the repressed, corseted and unhappily married chaperone, Norma.

This is a rare season of movies struggling to depict the belated self-acceptance of ordinary over-50 mothers — from Mary Kay Place’s Diane to Julianne Moore’s Gloria Bell. Add Norma to that category, as a New York-born, Midwestern-raised orphan who did all the right things: loved her adopted rural parents, married the first man who asked and moved from their farmstead to his bedstead without ever posing that central American question: What am I going to be when I grow up?

Norma assumes the path of least resistance as a wife, a mother and a neighbor who tries to keep on the right side of the community’s virulent gossip mill. Having let others make her life choices for so long, through the birth and maturation of two stalwart sons, when her nest becomes empty and she’s betrayed by her lawyer husband (an empathetic Campbell Scott, 57), she’s unmoored.

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So when she overhears that local girl Brooks won’t be allowed to attend a New York dance academy without proper accompaniment, she jumps at the chance. As someone who’s never leapt before, she surprises herself by leaving her husband behind, and looking ahead to carve her own identity in a search for her birth mother while Brooks attends class.

That trip to Manhattan, and Norma’s proximity to the rebellious Brooks, becomes a catalyst for seismic personal change. She both waits to exhale (ultimately dropping her corset) and gets her groove, if not back, then for the first time.

McGovern, who also produced, drove this passion project. Aware of how few complicated roles exist for mature women, and empowered by Downton’s popularity, she’s made an exquisite if slight movie where it’s history’s forgotten character, not the ingénue, that makes headlines, who carries the narrative and wins the day. McGovern is lovely as a fading, self-effacing beauty who always serves herself last. Yet, it’s in the moments when she snaps — at her feckless husband, or the spoiled Brooks — that she reveals the ever-present tension that exists in a woman whose politeness has eased her way in society but has also numbed her to her essential desires. Norma’s slow rise to self-empowerment is every bit as radical as that of Brooks — and hugely satisfying for audiences hungering to see real women, not superheroes, carrying the plot.

[[This review first appeared on AARP.com]]

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV

Elizabeth McGovern: icon, kickass actress, producer, singer and lover of life

April 12, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I loved talking to you too, @thelmadams https://t.co/kqBMJS7cwc

— Elizabeth McGovern (@ElizabethMcGov) April 12, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Movie Review: ‘Diane’

April 5, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mary Kay Place, 71, gets the role of a lifetime in Diane, the engine of New York Film Festival director Kent Jones’ character-driven, Martin Scorsese-produced study of a woman who has become a supporting player in her own existence. It’s a bold choice in contemporary American films, to put a postmenopausal woman on the verge of a polite nervous breakdown at a downbeat drama’s center. Because Place, best known as the single businesswoman desperate to conceive in The Big Chill, has such a warm and genuine touch, Diane’s story is one of late-day awakening rather than one long stretch of kvetch.

The script meanders through a series of modestly dramatic events as Diane drives her battered sedan from one errand to the next through frigid, rural wooded Massachusetts. The roughest comes when she visits her only son, Brian (Jake Lacy). She totes his laundry to his chilly crash pad. When he shambles out of the bedroom, he’s equally unkempt and resents his mother’s “helpful” intrusion.

Brian’s an addict, and she scans him with her gimlet eye, trying to assess if he’s using again or just tired. It’s so hard to be a mother helpless to heal her once-beautiful child. It’s clear, through script and direction, that this is a dance they’ve been doing for ages, long after Brian should have taken control of his own life. “Take a shower and get cleaned up,” she nags in frustration. The ruts in their relationship — the hopes and disappointments of a mother who has seen her beloved son relapse, and who sees before her both the boy and the cracked man he has become — are heartbreakingly rendered.

Add another wrinkle to Diane’s face.

[Click here to see my AARP interview: ‘Mary Kay Place Gets Her First Lead Role’]

The do-gooder continues on her circuit: delivering casseroles to neighbors experiencing rough times, heading to the soup kitchen to ladle stew for the less fortunate, and visiting her terminally ill cousin Donna (the incandescent Deirdre O’Connell, 67) at the hospital. The pair radiate a long, comfortable kinship that transcends blood.

Diane and Donna have spent their lives sitting across from each other, playing cards, kibitzing and advising — and avoiding addressing a personal betrayal perpetrated by Diane that continues to gnaw at her. Diane is good — warm, caring, community-spirited. But she’s not as good as she might have been if she hadn’t made one big mistake she has regretted all of her life.

Watching Donna wane, along with their close-knit family’s elders, Diane belatedly realizes that all the consoling of others will not heal what’s cracked within her. Diane gets trashed at a bar for locals. She boogies down and, seemingly, rekindles the spark that she has lost, the joy in the moment. It has been a long time since she has loved herself, if she ever did, and there’s a glimmer of hope. There’s still time for Diane to star in the movie of her life.

[This review originally appear on AARP]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: aarp, Aging, best actress, Diane, Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese, Movie, movie reviews, Tribeca Film Festival

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