Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

Thelma Adams, Oscars, Playdate, Marie Claire, Movie Reviews, Interviews, New Releases, New York Film Critics, Celebrities, Personal Essays, Parenting, Commentary, Women, Women\'s Issues, Motherhood

MENUMENU
  • HOME
  • BOOKS
    • The Last Woman Standing
    • Playdate
    • Bittersweet Brooklyn
  • WRITINGS
  • MEDIA
  • EVENTS
  • BLOG
  • ABOUT
  • CONTACT

How Do You Find Inspiration for Writing?

April 3, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I find a lot of my inspiration for writing novels in the past. For my current book, Bittersweet Brooklyn, part of the inspiration came from a crime that occurred in October 1935. And that crime, the murder of “Pretty Amberg,” the aftermath pictured in the photograph above, somehow involved my Great Uncle Abraham Lorber.

His family called him Abie; his colleagues “Little Yiddle,” in part because he was all of five foot two inches. (A detail I unearthed in his draft records.)

Abie was a low-level guy in Murder, Inc., a predominantly Jewish hitman-for-hire service that peaked in the 1930s and flamed out in the 1940s in a blaze of betrayal and the sizzle of the electric chair at Sing Sing. It’s notable that, although I never met Uncle Abie, he lived to a ripe old age when so many of his compatriots didn’t.

I found information outside of family lore (“he was quick with a knife”) from Rich Cohen’s fascinating book Tough Jews. So, from the inspiration of a criminal in the past, I began plastering on facts in print. Abie was a footnote in Cohen’s book. In the discussion of Russian immigrant mobster Amberg (pictured below), Cohen notes that “He spent his nights at Yiddel Lorber’s, a hangout for Jewish gangsters near the on-ramp of the Wiliamsburg Bridge.”

Ping! Page 120, 121 and later 185. Three hits in the index at the back of the book. Like Josephine Sarah Marcus, who was a (relatively larger) footnote in the volumes on Wyatt Earp, became his constant companion and was the subject of my novel The Last Woman Standing, these small mentions, these icebergs, piqued my curiosity. And what I discovered was that Little Yiddel’s hangout on 128 Marcy Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn would become the Williamsburg Boys Club. Like John Gotti’s famous The Ravenite Social Club: John Gotti’s Bunker 247 Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy or Midnight Rose’s Candy Store on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia in East New York The Old Headquarters of Murder, Inc, these were centers of criminal activity with known street addresses.

While I now know more than the average bear about this rich vein of criminal lore, it was Abie’s little sister Thelma’s story I wanted to tell. She was my grandmother who died a year before I was born. She didn’t leave the trail of newspaper reports (stabbing, larceny, material witness, attempted assassination) or crime records that her older brother did. But, poring through the census data on Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History Records of Ancestry.com, I began to fill in the dots of her life in her brother’s shadow.

And, so, here is where the narrative pivots from its true-crime inspiration. I was curious about both the collateral damage of criminality in the family, and sculpting complex portraits of what must have been a very dysfunctional crew with roots in Drohobych, Galicia. I wanted to sing my grandmother’s story even if it was to a klezmer melody, a dance tune in a minor key with an antic clarinet where both light and dark conjoin.

People like my grandmother may live their entire lives outside of newsprint and book footnotes: I wanted to know who she was. Knowing Abie’s epic chutzpah and life force, I figured that quality may have run in the family. And, since I had been told I resembled her, I also wanted to know what it felt like to burn with intelligence, vitality and sexuality and be so limited by the time in ways to express it. I came of age in the time of women’s liberation, however flawed. What was it like to be a liberated woman before her time, a woman who, in some sense, ran with wolves.

The crime that October night in 1935 — the senseless burning of Pretty Amberg’s corpse after he’d been slit to pieces at Little Yiddel’s over bottle of vodka— was also a symbol for lives that shine bright and burn out. I wanted to understand that woman, my father’s mother, who I witnessed through the oversized character that was her son. He was a champion of the underdog — a union leader, a political activist, an involved and loving father. And it only seemed fitting to champion him by resurrecting his mother, my grandmother, in full. And, in so doing, restore a chunk of the wildness that also flowed in my veins, and a sense of how far I’ve come in our immigrant’s — and female — journey.

I find inspiration in history — and that’s only the beginning of a long and twisted journey into the understanding of the human condition that is fiction.

{This column originally appeared on Quora]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bittersweet Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Crime, family secrets, historical fiction, Kosher Nostra, Murder Inc., Women's Fiction

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

Book Review: Billy Bathgate

March 31, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Billy BathgateBilly Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read Billy Bathgate because it tells the story of a teenaged boy who comes of age under famed Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz, assassinated by gang rivals in 1935. My next novel, currently entitled “Kosher Nostra” starts that same week with a lesser known but equally critical murder of “Pretty” Amberg in the back of the Williamsburg Boys Club.

The difference is, I narrate my story of growing up Jewish and poor and violent in East New York and Williamsburg — the Wild West of Brooklyn — from the perspective of the little sister of a relatively minor mobster.

I have always appreciated Doctorow (loved Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate is a terrific and dark boy’s adventure based on true events. As a writer, I noticed that Billy, who is 15 at some points, often has insights or actions well beyond his years.

So, in my own writing, I always think of that when I am having difficulty writing about a character who, at that point on the page, is 3 or 7 or 13. POV is so important and sometimes Doctorow slips — but I still enjoyed the book greatly and would add it to my list of writing inspirations for my next book.

View all my reviews

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Billy Bathgate, biographical fiction, Brooklyn, E. L. Doctorow, Fiction, historical fiction, Jewish fiction, Kosher Nostra, Organized Crime, Writing tips

Disneyland Syndrome

April 5, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Playdate,Lance,SAHD,birthday party,Brooklyn,pony,Kensington Stables,Hover Parents

No ponies were harmed in the writing of this blog

We’ve all done it: thrown an overcompensating birthday party for our kids. Maybe it was the party we wanted as a kid, maybe we were trying to impress other parents and, sure, part of it was our desire to make our kids happier than a sugar rush. In my novel Playdate, the stay-at-home-dad (SAHD) Lance often speaks from my hard-won experience raising my own kids. In some ways, he’s the Zen parent I wanted to be, with an added dose of my husband’s common sense stirred in.

One of the key plot points is that Lance’s wife, Darlene, hooks the opening of her new diner on the special event of their daughter’s eleventh birthday, She throws her daughter Belle a big overcompensating party with a guest list larded with strangers, when all her daughter wanted in her heart-of-hearts was some chill time with her parents. And it comes as a surprise to Darlene that Belle is sulky about the event. Lance sets his wife straight. He tells her:

“Today’s party oozes with Disneyland syndrome. It’s like this: if you take Belle to Disneyland, and scream louder than she does on the Matterhorn and buy her every pizza-popcorn-pretzel she requests, every souvenir that will fall forgotten under the car seat by the time we reach home, she’ll remember that as her childhood.”

I think I made up the idea of Disneyland syndrome, but it’s a common mistake. I look back and laugh at my son’s fourth or fifth birthday. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essay, Playdate Tagged With: Birthday Parties, Brooklyn, Disneyland, Hover Mother, Novel, Parenting, Playdate, SAHD

Author-to-Author: Paula Bomer

March 21, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

Paula Bomer,Interview,Author-to-Author,Thelma Adams,Women's Literary Fiction,Parenting,Brooklyn,Babies,Motherhood,Infidelity

Bomer's debut story collection

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews with women writers. Here, we dance chick-to-chick with gutsy Brooklyn writer, mother, wife and homeowner Paula Bomer, 42. The acclaimed author doesn’t swaddle the truth when discussing her debut fiction collection Baby & Other Stories, praised as “raw and angry” by Publisher’s Weekly.

BEGINNINGS:

Thelma Adams: How old were you when you came out of the closet as a writer?

Paula Bomer: I started writing fiction in high school. After I graduated from college with a degree in psychology, I began writing fiction more regularly, knowing it was what I wanted to do. By 22, I began taking workshops. I applied to graduate writing programs at 24.

TA: What did you like to read as a kid?

PB: I read everything. As a young girl I read all the Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume books. I loved Madeline Lengle.

TA: And what did you read as a young adult?

PB: By the age of twelve, I had run out of children’s books and began reading things that went above my head. I read everything by Toni Morrison.  And with great delight and horror, I read Wifey by Judy Blume. How shocking that the Blume of my grade school years could write so explicitly about sex! It was a very exciting time, moving toward books for grown ups, even if I didn’t understand everything.

TA: What was the first dirty passage you read in a book?

PB: Well, that might have been Wifey. I loved Chaucer in high school. In college, I went through a stage of reading Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski: all sorts of dirty stuff but it was “literature,” too. Later, Philip Roth, Mary Gaitskill and Alicia Erian, to name a few, also showed me how writing explicitly about sexual matters doesn’t belittle the work.

TA: What did you wish when you were first starting out as a writer?

PB: I wished to be published and read and, quite frankly, to cause a certain amount of trouble, the trouble that Henry Miller caused, the trouble that Philip Roth caused with Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m over that, for the most part. I’m not ashamed of wanting to cause trouble – you can’t tell me Roth didn’t have the same childish desire – but it’s fine to be over it, too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Playdate Tagged With: Author-to-Author, Babies, Brooklyn, infidelity, Interview, Parenting, Paula Bomer, Playdate, Publisher's Weekly, short fiction, Women's Contmporary Fiction

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »
32-facebook32-twitter

Website design by Will Amato Studios