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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

What are the unwritten rules of historical fiction, and when is it okay to break them?

March 24, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


Unwritten rules are made to be broken. However, there are certain things that one can’t do. If you are writing about Abraham Lincoln, he was born on a certain day and assassinated on another. He delivered his Gettysburg Address and either the sun was shining or it wasn’t. Those are facts. The history of the Civil War is more or less fixed. You can’t have him riding in a car or wearing pants with a modern zipper. He cannot smell of Brylcreem, which wasn’t created until 1928.

But historical fiction is in no way a text book. What was Lincoln thinking and feeling as he took the stage to deliver that famous address? How had his mother’s death affected him? His son Willie’s? Those require fictional leaps, even if you can access all his correspondence and personal diaries.

Many novelists — and filmmakers all the way up to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln — have attempted to see the man in full, generally reflecting their own times as much as his. We need heroes. We need to tear down the statues of heroes.

In the case of Lincoln, it has been noted that he was possibly homosexual or had physical relations with men. Gay was not a word at the time. C. A. Tripp’s thought-provoking nonfiction scholarly book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln makes a compelling and provocative case that Lincoln had intimate relations with men. it names names. It identifies his early entry to puberty as a possible explanation, if not cause. It cites his bawdy humor, with jokes so dirty they were often not recorded.

So, in that case, if we were to write historical fiction about those elements, or include them in a book about a character who encounters him in The White House, there would be room to speculate with fiction. Who was this man really? What were his dreams? His sorrows? His true affections? His feelings towards his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, the mother of his beloved children?

So, in this example, I hope to have explained that there are factual signposts and there are fictional leaps. As a writer of historical fiction, one has to make choices to move from one known event to the next. We are not biographers who must stick only to the facts as known. And, even those, are subject to the debate of historians themselves.

And this fluidity of the past is even more the case in fiction where the subject isn’t as well-documented as Lincoln, when writing stories of the underclass, people of color and women. We must be lions in giving voice to the voiceless, following the African proverb: “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”
If you like what you read, please follow me on Amazon.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: #amwriting, Abraham Lincoln, Bittersweet Brooklyn, historical fiction

What are some best practices that can help a writer succeed both artistically and professionally?

March 19, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


Writers fight a battle on at least three fronts: their personal artistic struggle, the challenge of creating good work, and the need to find a place in the market.

On a personal level, self-doubt can be the cancer of a writing practice. Look your doubt head on: you choose to be a writer. Make peace with the doubt monster as best you can. Find support: family, fellow writers, an editor who gets you, agents that support you. Create a supportive community. Block toxic naysayers.

Face your fears and write through them.

Writing is among the most accessible of arts — all you need is a pencil, paper and words. You don’t need a cast and crew. Writing, in the creation phase, is a very intimate art form, some would say lonely. I find it less lonely — because the words are the company I keep.

Whether writing fiction or criticism, practice is everything. Don’t stop. Find the rhythm that suits you — up all night, early morning brain. Coffee. Music. Cigarettes. You must write through those early days. You may be brilliant at school and, yet, when you write that first short story, or the fifth, it’s so much less than the books that you read, whether V. S. Naipaul or P. G. Wodehouse or Elena Ferrante. Continue, find your voice, find your format: short stories, poetry, novels, blog posts. For most writers, this requires great patience. To survive you must find joy in the process.

So: Write as if you were practicing for a marathon.

Finding a place in the market is the challenge most beyond your control. In some ways, it’s easier now with platforms like Quora, where you can write and connect without a gatekeeper. However, if you want to earn a living, as Dickens had to, then you must pursue a form for which there is a market.

While working a day job, I wrote hundreds of film reviews for a free Manhattan weekly before I kicked open the door at the New York Post. As a novelist, I wrote beyond rejection. I toasted the purchase of my first novel, Girl Empire, when it appeared to have publisher interest. It fell through. The book exists, I kid you not, on a floppy drive. My second novel, Playdate, got a prestigious publisher. I waited for the book’s publication to change my life. It didn’t. It wasn’t until The Last Woman Standing that I found a union of voice, subject, audience, agent and publisher.

By that time, I had learned my lesson. Keep writing. Keep finding subjects that fascinate. Change the world — as a creative individual, as a writer in the world, and as a professional — one sentence at a time.

So: Persistence.

To be a successful writer in the current environment, build confidence in your self, embark on the marathon that is a writing career, and be persistent. And, if you can, find joy in the creating.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Best Practices, historical fiction, Novel, novelist, Quora, Writing

What is essential for a person who has just started writing his first novel?

March 6, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The most essential element for a person who has just started writing his or her first novel is passion and commitment. This is a marathon not a sprint.

There are a number of ways to look at this question — let’s begin with subject matter. Do you know what you want to write about. Try — it’s hard! — to write what your book is about in one or two sentences making sure you compress the plot and emphasize the juice of the book. Here is an example from my novel that I crowd-sourced for the cover letter that went out with the galleys: “The first biographical novel about Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp’s wife, the gutsy Jewish beauty who captured the lawman’s heart in 1881, the year he fought the legendary Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

Who are your characters? Pause and write down as much as you know about the two to five main players. What do they look like, what is their personal history — what is their sign even. What do they like to eat? What aggravates them? Do they suffer from headaches? Prefer dogs or cats? Oldest child or middle? Ethnicity?

Begin the first chapter — does it have a unique voice? Will you tell it in first person or third, will your third person be omniscient or limited. Meanwhile, you can begin to outline. Not every novelist outlines their books. Some know the shape or the starting point. A picaresque, like my first novel or Don Quijote or Moll Flanders or The Diary of a Chambermaid, is a journey that meanders from adventure to adventure. I like to know at least three chapters ahead.

In the case of The Last Woman Standing, I wrote the first three chapters, knew where I wanted the entire book to land, and then talked out the progress of the chapters with a trusted editor. There were points where the map changed as I wrote but that was alright because I knew my destination: that my characters Josie Marcus and Wyatt Earp would reunite on her stoop in San Francisco (even though originally I had her sitting with her brother and she ended up there with her sister).

While I had an outline, one of the most ecstatic thing that happens to a writer who commits to a novel is the moments when the characters begin to act of their own free will. You have created them, you have put them in a situation — and then they begin to tell you how they behave in a way that’s true to their natures not yours. I call this hydroplaning because suddenly I feel that I am free from the road and flying — my fingers are still on my keyboard but they are channeling the fiction rather than forcing it. When you experience that as a novelist you’ll know you have arrived.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: historical fiction, history, Josephine Marcus, Novel, Romance, Tombstone, Western, Wyatt Earp

What Startling Fact Did I Learn Researching ‘Bittersweet Brooklyn?’

March 5, 2019 By Thelma 2 Comments

I looked for a criminal — and found a war hero. When I began to write Bittersweet Brooklyn, I knew I had a great uncle Abie “Little Yiddle” Lorber, the mobster who was “quick with a knife.” Through research I discovered his younger brother, Louis, was a hero at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918, the turning point of WW1 — and that’s what inspires this column originally published on Veterans Day.

In the novel, the family follows Louis’s progress overseas via Edwin L. “Jimmy” James, a “New York Times” reporter embedded with the Americans in France. He reported: “The story of how the American Soldier, who had never before played a role in this world war, stood against the most savage rush of the German foeman and held fast at one of the most vital points of the allied lines will make a glorious page in American history.”

Louis enlisted and became a private in the Thirty-Eighth Infantry led by Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander, These green troops joined the weary English and French battling the German offensive. And the miracle of that engagement was that they turned the tide with their bravery and routed the attacking Germans headed for Paris, putting them on the defensive. This Battle of the Marne is still seen as a key engagement in WW1.

Who was Louis, who fought so bravely that he received a Conspicuous Service Cross? He was a middle son of East European immigrants born in New York in 1896. According to his draft records, he was five foot four, grey-eyed and dark-haired and of medium build. He was working at the time at the Grand Theatre on the corner of Christie and Grand in Manhattan when he enlisted in December 1917.

As a boy alongside his notorious brother Abie, his mother institutionalized the pair at the NY Hebrew Orphan Asylum in 1905 at the age of nine. But, unlike Abie, when he was old enough to make a choice he enlisted. He found success in the Army. He was promoted from private to corporal. He never returned to civilian life and died far from Brooklyn in the Philippines married to a gentile woman he met while stationed at Camp Pike in Arkansas after the war.

My grandmother Thelma named her only son Lawrence after her beloved Louis. She loved to dance and one detail that I love was that he was in charge of the dances at Camp Pike.

May he rest in peace, this decorated foot soldier of the Second Battle of the Marne whose heroic story I disinterred unexpectedly on the road to Bittersweet Brooklyn.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: amily secrets, Brooklyn, historical fiction, secret history, WW1

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