WRITINGISM -- IS IT AN ADDICTION?

The interesting thing about being a writer is how close it is to drug addiction.  Did I just say that?  Forget it.  I didn't mean it. Look what I've started.  I see that look in your eye.  You're thinking I need a stint in writers' rehab.  It was a slip of the id.  I've read too many Anne Tyler novels and it's addled my brain.  

Millions of books have been written by perfectly normal people.  Were they all addicts? Of course not.  I don't know what came over me when you asked me why I write and I gave you that silly, unfounded analogy to drug addiction.  Of course, it isn't an addiction.  

Do I look like a falling down, spaced-out junkie? My hands don't shake when blank paper and a pen or pencil get too close.  Being in a room with a computer doesn't make my heart race.  I don't get the sweats when my Amazon ranking goes below a hundred thousand.  And believe me, I don't care how many books I sell or if anyone ever reads anything I've written.  It's the act of writing that intrigues me. Period.  End of sentence.

So you won't let me take back what I said about writing being close to a drug addiction?  Well, I don't need your permission.  I take it back.  Writing is a noble calling, one that I humbly and modestly and self-deprecatingly engage in occasionally, and that's all it is.  No addiction about it.  

What did you just ask me?  Are you talking about whether I have to, need to, must write every day and if I don't I have to be hospitalized?  Of course not.  And the rumor that I tried to spike Don DeLillo's drink when he and I were clients of the same literary agent is patently, absurdly false.  And it wasn't cyanide.  Where would I get cyanide?  And as far as comparing myself to other writers, I hardly ever read a book that I haven't written.  And I don't pay attention to who got the latest literary award.  Oh, I might glance at the list if I have nothing better to do.  I certainly don't look at Amazon rankings for anyone's books but my own.  As for feeling a little sick in the morning when I have to wait too long for my computer to boot up, the doctor says I should eat breakfast, that writing all day on an empty stomach aggravates my ulcer.  Know what I think?  I think there's something about the smell of computer paper in the morning that makes my ulcer act up.  I wonder if there's a nonallergenic computer paper available.

You really believed what I said about excessive writing being similar to drug addiction?  You're still stuck on that?  Well, ignore what I said at the beginning of this post.  It's not true.  Not even fuckingly, remotely, crazily true.  I just needed something to say when you asked me about what it was like to be a writer, and now you think you know something about me just because I was trying to be clever.  Haven't you ever tried to be clever and it backfired?  How about a joke?  Do you know when someone is trying to make a joke?  You don't?  And shut up about your Aunt Marilyn and her addiction to her typewriter.  I'm nothing like your Aunt Marilyn.  

So I write a few books here and there.  Maybe I don't eat or sleep or socialize, but it's a small price to pay for the elusive words that I manage to capture and put on paper every day, and if you persist in calling me a victim of writingism, as if it were a disease, go ahead, but that isn't me.  And, smarty pants, where did you find the made-up, idiotic word writingism, anyway?  I looked in the dictionary.  There's no such word.  

You're saying my writing is a compulsion and compulsion is part of addiction?  I don't buy it.  Isn't compulsion when you get carried away by an impulse and act on it even when you know that doing so will be harmful to you?  I don't see a trace of compulsion in me or in my writing.  Okay, okay, so I like to write more than I like to do anything else.  Is it a crime that I feel better when I'm writing than when I don't?  

You just asked if I read reviews.  No, I don't.  Not all of them, anyway.   Positive ones, of course.  Negative ones make my ulcer squeal.   

 And now that you have a slim, itty, bitty snippet of personal information about me, you think you know everything.  Well, you don't.  You don't know that I can certainly live a contented life without writing another thing as long as I live.  You don't know that I could be perfectly happy without putting one, single solitary word on paper.  You don't know that I could quit writing entirely if I wanted to, if I felt like it, if I really, truly tried.  And quit staring at me with that pitying look on your face.  I have a perfectly contented, happy life.  And I don't care if you believe me or not.  

Did you just say you think I need an intervention?  Ho, ho, ho, that's a laugh.  You're the one who needs an intervention to suck all the crazy ideas you have about writers and the writing life sucked out of your brain.

You want to give me your Aunt Marilyn's psychiatrist's phone number?  Are you serious?  Haven't you been listening to a word I've said?  I've written a whole post on what a writer is and you still don't understand one thing about it.  Where do you think all those burning shards of wisdom we writers put between covers come from?  How would you know anything about the stomachache I get when I stare at a blank page or the feeling of euphoria that comes over me when I print out a chapter of my new book.  How would you know about the all-night writing binge, or about waking up at four in the morning with an idea so gorgeously inventive and clever you nearly break a leg running up the stairs to your writing cubby to memorialize it, or the feverish waking dreams of words and sentences and paragraphs that turn you momentarily deaf and blind to the world around you?  

You're sorry?  You beg my forgiveness?  Well, that's better.  Want some advice?  Until you become a writer and can experience what I experience, and know what I know, keep your cockamamy ideas and your interventions and your Aunt Marilyns to yourself.  I'm a writer.  I write.  And if I suffer from writingism, I can handle it on my own.  

Ruminations on the Life of an Elderly Aunt

Aunt Amy was my father's younger sister.  She was sophisticated and aloof, and, although slightly pinched-face, was good-looking in her elegant jewelry and designer clothes.  We were never close.  She was from the rich side of the family.  I was from the working-class side.  She lived in Encino, I lived in Huntington Beach.  We rarely saw each other.

 She called me after the 1975 earthquake.  She was in her sixties then.  

"I'm homeless," she said.  "My apartment was squashed and I might have to live in my car."

"Come here," I said.

"I'm fine," she said and hung up.

She called me a few years later.  Twenty, to be exact.  

"I fell and broke my wrist, but I can still play the piano," she said and hung up.

  Her only daughter had died by then and she had no grandchildren.  She was obviously reaching out to me.

I invited her to a 4th of July party at my house.
  

She didn't show.    

I called her that night to ask what had happened.     

"I got lost," she said.  "I had to keep stopping to ask directions, so I turned around and went home."

"I think it would be good if you moved closer to me," I said.  "I have a friend who lives in Leisure World in Irvine.  You can buy your own apartment, and you'll be only fifteen minutes away from me." 

She surprised me by taking my advice.

I helped her move into a large condo in Leisure World.  It had a bucolic view of the Irvine hills.  There was a nurse on duty in the building and breakfast and lunch were available in the dining room.  I took her shopping once a week, and Duke and I had dinner with her several times a month.

She had been an avid bridge player.  I arranged for her to join a bridge club.

"No one will play with her," the organizer of the club told me.  "She can't remember the cards.  She insults the other players."

She wanted a computer.  "Everyone has a computer," she said.  "A person is left out if they don't have a computer."

Duke got her one, and showed her how to use it.  She couldn't remember what he told her.  There were endless calls to Duke complaining that the computer was broken, it was no good, it didn't work.

She couldn't hear the telephone ring.  Duke bought her an answering machine.  She couldn't remember how to play back her phone messages.

I called a registry and hired a caregiver to be with her during the day.  No one lasted more than a week. As each one departed, she would curse them and try to bar the door.

She lived in her condo in Leisure World for thirteen years.  She didn't lose reality all at once.  It happened a bit at a time.  It was like the sun going down.  Inexorable.  Unstoppable.

I found a board and care home for her near where I live.  I would take her for a walk in the afternoon, and afterward she would sit in a chair and sleep until dinnertime.  She lost her contankerousness.  She turned sweet.  She let me kiss her.  She smiled at me.  She said she was going to vote for Obama.

We had a small party for her on her hundredth birthday.  She didn't recognize anyone, but she seemed happy.  She held the greeting card from President Obama in her hand until it was frosting-spotted and creased.

She died six months later.  She went peacefully.  No arguments.  No curses.  No deathbed scenes.  She just left.  

 I had always thought someone else would end up with Aunt Amy's care.  Her daughter probably, or my mother.  But they were both gone.  I could say my connection to this difficult, enraging, and sometimes endearing woman was a fated, better-late-than-never, gentle twining of two hearts.  Maybe it was, but it was also a valuable pull-the-mask-away peek into a future that awaits us all.   

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

Sometimes I’m asked how long it takes to write a book.  I usually reply that there’s no good estimate.  When that doesn’t satisfy, I joke that it’s like a pregnancy, no less than eight months, no more than nine.  I don’t mention “Lilli Chernofsky", the novel that took me 26 years to complete.   

In 1990 a convention of Old China Hands, Jewish refugees from Hitler who had survived the Shanghai ghetto, was held in a hotel in Anaheim, California.  I lived nearby, so out of curiosity I attended one of the public events.  It was a raucous, joyously emotional gathering, lots of tears and laughter and reminiscences.  The personal stories were overwhelming.  I was hooked.  Over the following months I met and interviewed twelve survivors and taped their stories of escape from Europe and the life-altering drama of existence in the Shanghai ghetto.  Among the people I interviewed was a man in his late seventies who was living in a condo in Leisure World in Orange County; he had been a classical violinist in Europe and ended up leading a jazz band in Shanghai.   Another one was an insurance executive I interviewed in his office in Los Angeles; he had spent his youth in Shanghai and was curious as to why anyone would want to know anything about it.  Another was a woman in her sixties who agreed to meet me at a café in the Northridge Mall; she told me about a childhood in Shanghai that still caused her nightmares.  Another was an elderly woman and her daughter who met me for lunch in Marina del Rey and after a slow, awkward beginning, told me about their escape from Hitler and what their lives had been like in Shanghai.  There were more interviews.  Even a letter from a man in Australia.  I soon had a drawer full of interview tapes.    

I knew several things about the book before I started:  it would be a novel; it would hew close to the information I had gleaned from survivors; it would be about how people survive calamitous events and whether they survive honorably or by betraying others; it would be an adult novel that could also be read by teenage readers, for at the novel’s heart would be the young Lilli Chernofsky and her stunning metamorphosis  from sheltered seventeen-year-old to complex heroine. 

By 1997 the novel (then titled “Escape to Shanghai”) was finished.  I gave it to my agent.  She didn’t want to represent a book about Jews or the Holocaust or World War II.  I changed agents.  Several tried to find a publisher for the book, but with no success.

I contacted Spielberg’s Shoah Project and asked if they would like to add the taped interviews to their collection.  They said they only used interviews for the Shoah Project that they themselves conducted. 

Being a fiction writer means being philosophical about the fate of one's work.  Although attachment might not diminish, reality must be served.  So I put the books and tapes in the drawer and began writing a book about Texas.  

In 2006 "The Texicans" was published by Soho Press.  After that there were a few false starts on other books, but always in the back of my mind was the unpublished novel about the Shanghai Jews.  It nagged at me that I had made a promise to the survivors I interviewed that I would write a book based on their experiences and when the going got rocky I had given up.  So I pulled the manuscript out of the drawer. and began to revise.  

I don't know what changed.  My fortunes, possibly.  The zeitgeist, maybe.  But in 2016 I sold "Lilli Chernofsky" to Brick Mantel Books.  It was published in January of 2018 and will be featured on the Jewish Book Council's list of recommended books.  

So writers everywhere:  Open the drawer, dust off the bedraggled manuscript, look at it with a gimlet eye, make revisions -- slash-and-burn revisions, if necessary -- and then humbly, proudly and determinedly take it to market.  

A Second Life for an Old Friend: posted on Red Room

In 1988 I wrote a novel about Mexico, Maximilian's Garden. My agent sold it to a publisher and shortly thereafter the acquiring editor left to go back to her old job as a journalist. The book, abandoned by its shepherd, became that most dreaded of objects, an orphan, passed from editor to editor in the publishing house until, like a game of musical chairs, it landed on some unwitting editor who already had plans for retirement. The book was published in 1990 - sort of - fell into a coma and died.

I thought about that novel often after that, wondered what I could have done to prevent its untimely death. Had no idea. None at all.

Let's back up a bit. If left to my own devices I'd still be writing books the way I wrote Maximilian's Garden, with ballpoint pen on yellow legal pad.

Now that that's out of the way, I can explain what happened to Maximilian's Garden.

"Check out this Lanier computer, honey," my husband said when the first monster home computers came out in the late eighties. "It's revolutionary, memorizes what you've written and prints it out."

He brought one home. I whimpered and whined. I told him I had my own way of doing things and what was I supposed to do with the thing, anyway.

Point of information: I've always been resistant to anything that involves understanding patent applications.

"Lanier offers classes in how to operate their machine," he said.

He's so reasonable.

I took a class. The Lanier wasn't revolutionary. Each page had a discrete, inviolable number of lines. Try to exceed them - such as when you edit and rewrite - and the maneuvering required to do so was so onerous it made my eyes cross.

I threw out the Lanier, the pen and legal pad and began using an electric typewriter, which had its own set of problems. But never mind.

The Lanier gave way to the personal computer. PC Magazine began arriving in the mail at our house.

"Look at this, honey," my husband said. "A personal computer is just the thing for you. You'll save time. You can rewrite to your heart's content."

A computer promptly arrived in my office. Bit by bit, arguing and complaining, I learned how to write on it. I had to admit, it did save time, and I could rewrite and rewrite and rewrite without destroying a single tree.

Then something called the internet turned up. A gimmick, I thought to myself. Who needs to e-mail someone when you can pick up a telephone?

Of course, in no time my husband had us hooked up to cyberspace.

"Look at this, honey, something called e-books," he said. "They put books on the internet."

I liked reading books with words on paper. My husband loves gadgets. He began reading e-books.

It wasn't until 2009 that I discovered that one of my books, The End of Marriage had been put on Amazon Kindle in 2002 by its publisher, who was one of the first to reserve electronic rights in book contracts. I had signed away electronic rights when I signed the book contract. Everyone did. No one thought there would ever be an advantage to owning electronic rights.

But I owned the electronic rights to Maximilian's Garden. It was a book about Mexico. Mexico was in the news.

I reread it. It was like meeting an old friend and picking up the conversation where you left off 20 years before. But 20 years ago I was still a baby writer; I didn't have the skills I have now. I decided to rewrite it, first page to last. I renamed it Children of Guerrero in honor of Gonzalo Guerrero, the first Spaniard to set foot on the Yucatan peninsula, the father of the mestizo.

So now Children of Guerrero is on the internet, an e-book that can orbit the world in a cometary flash of light. The business of delivering books to their readers is being reinvented as I write this. Who knows what magical discovery is on the horizon? All I know is that writers have been unshackled, their options expanded. Worthy books, long out of print, can be brought back and given second lives. With the internet nothing is lost. Books can't be orphaned or killed. They float through cyberspace, an unimpeded ghostly chorus of the reborn.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER'S MISTRESS, Part 2

Esther, more diminutive than I remembered from the night before, is at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, waving away smooth gusts of smoke with nicotaine-stained fingers. She stands up and gives me a kiss.

“Did you sleep well?” she asks.

“Yes,” I lie.

I wore two sweaters and a blazer to bed and was so cold that I imagined icicles forming on the ceiling above the bed.

“Do you like eggs? How about an egg and a piece of toast? Do you like jam? Deborah, do we have jam? No jam. I can give you a little piece of toast with butter. Deborah, do we have butter? No butter. Maybe there is still that honey I put in the back of the cupboard. I’ll go look.

“Eggs are fine,” I tell her.

There is no honey. Deborah and her mother are now chattering back and forth in Yiddish. I understand most of what they’re saying. It’s about why there’s no butter or jam or honey. Deborah’s tone is snippily impatient, Esther’s is forbearing, sweetly indulgent. Old memories of mine – erased, I thought, by the distance of years – dart out of hiding. Images bombard me of a stifling apartment, Holocaust survivors staying for days or weeks, four people to a bed, people eating and talking at all hours. The doctor comes because I can’t stop vomiting. He says, My, my, she’s a very high-strung child, and takes everyone’s blood pressure before he leaves.

Esther fries an egg for me on the ruined stove. As she turns off the burner, the knob breaks and falls to the floor.

“We’ll hurry and write this book before the house comes down on our heads,” Esther says, and laughs a hoarse cigarette-limned laugh.

She wants to know about me. I tell her about my children, about my husband. I tell her about California and that we live a mile from the beach.

“The beach is deserted this time of year,” I tell her, “but this is the best time to walk along the strand and not get run over by a bicycle.”

She listens bright-eyed. I had imagined she would be a withered relic of the death camps, a human time capsule, buried in a house in Flushing and forgotten, but she bursts with life. I envision her as she must have been in pre-war Europe, a vividly present, sassy girl with a personality as unlocked as her daughter’s is shut tight.

A teenage boy, lank and dark-eyed, comes into the kitchen.

“My son the yeshiva student,” Deborah says.

He doesn’t look at me while Deborah tells him who I am and why I’m here. He’s bent at the waist, leaning forward as though about to pray, the yarmulke bobby-pinned to his brown curls pouting blank-faced at me from atop his bent head. When Deborah has finished talking, he raises up, grabs his books and is gone out the front door. I hear boys’ voices, loud at first, then fainter, then too thin to hear.

“Have you ever heard of Rabbi Schneerson?” Deborah asks me.

“I’ve read about him,” I tell her.

“Then you know he’s wisest rabbi in the world. He’s predicted the coming of the messiah. Soon. The meshiach will be here soon.”

Esther asks me if I’m religious. I tell her I’m not. It doesn’t seem to bother her. She prays at the sink before she sits down and eats a piece of dry toast.

I have the definite impression that both mother and daughter have decided they can trust me to be compliant, to listen to what they have to say, to write the book exactly the way they want it, and to get them enough money for plane tickets to Israel.

Before we go into the living room to get started, Deborah says offhandedly, “I tried to write the book myself, but gave up. I’ll give you what I’ve written. If you can use it, fine. If not, not.”

Copyright Nina Vida 2009

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER'S MISTRESS, Part 1

A few weeks before Thanksgiving I got a telephone call from a producer who had optioned one of my screenplays. He wanted to know if I knew much about the writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer. I told him I knew that Singer was a Polish Jew who wrote in Yiddish, that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978, and that his novel,”The Slave” was one of my favorite books.

The producer asked me if I’d be interested in writing a book about Singer’s 30-year relationship with his mistress (I’ll call her Esther), that the woman’s daughter (I’ll call her Deborah) was looking for a writer.

“Esther is a Holocaust survivor,” he said, “and Deborah told me she’d be more comfortable confiding in a Jew. I told her you were Jewish, and that cinched it.”

“Sounds intriguing, but I write fiction.”

“From what the daughter told me this is more fantastic than any fiction a writer could dream up. Singer was eighteen years older than Esther. She was the only one in her family to survive the Holocaust. She married another survivor she met in a Displaced Persons camp in Europe and divorced him when she came to the States. She had Deborah then and was destitute. Singer offered her a job as his translator. She had been a poet in Poland, spoke seven languages, and when you hear what Deborah has to say about her mother’s affair with Singer, you’ll realize that she was the inspiration for the character of Masha in the movie of Singer’s book, ‘Enemies: A Love Story.’

“Is this a vengeance book, a woman scorned?”

“She says no, that Esther doesn’t want to hurt him or his wife, that she’s agonized over it for the past few years and now that he’s dead she’s decided it’s time to tell the story. Mother and daughter are broke. They need the money. If you agree to do it, Deborah wants you to go to New York and stay with them for as long as you need.” He laughed. “From what the daughter said, it seems that Singer was something of a sexual athlete.”

“Is the mother willing to go into all of that?”

“No holds barred. The straight scoop. Diaries and photographs and letters. Full cooperation. And Deborah contends that Singer got many of the ideas and material for his work from Esther, that she was victimized twice, first by the Nazis and then by Singer.”

I had made my first solo trip from California to New York ten years before to meet the editor of my first book. At that time I was such an inexperienced traveler, that my husband, worried something would happen to me en route, had me call him when I got off the plane, when I got to the hotel, and when I got to my room. It was as if I were a kindergartener on my first day of school, except that he didn’t pack a snack or tie my shoes.

This second solo trip had my agent worrying about me. Is this woman’s story for real? Who are these people? But go, please go, it’s irresistible.

I was on a plane to New York the next day.

Deborah picked me up at the airport, a tall woman in her forties, with even features and a mane of auburn hair. She was dressed for cold weather, a stylish scarf wrapped around her neck (I was dressed for California and didn’t own a scarf). She insisted on carrying my bag, told me she had gone to the wrong gate, “what the hell was wrong with the airport putting the wrong gate up on the board?” gave me a hug and said she was happy I had agreed to do this.

She had parked her battered Chevrolet in the airport lot.

“My mother is on welfare and food stamps,” she said as she drove through the rain swept streets. “This is a desperate move on our part. We have no money. What my mother and I have to say about Singer has never been said before. It will be a shock to everyone, but a good shock, a shock worth money. He ruined my mother’s life and mine as well. I want to go to Israel to live, get out of New York, take my mother away. We can forget everything in Israel. I get a few days of substitute teaching, but it’s not enough. My husband and I are separated. My daughter lives with him, so you’ll have her bedroom. The house isn’t much. As a matter of fact, it’s falling apart. I don’t have the money to fix anything. Wear socks and a sweater to bed. The heat isn’t working. It gets cold at night.”

I wasn’t prepared for cold weather. I was sorry I hadn’t brought the coat I bought the year before that I had never worn because it never gets cold enough in California for a coat. I also wasn’t prepared for the extravagance of hope that Deborah had placed in me. I felt overrun, outtalked, although I did manage to say that my agent wanted to meet her and her mother, and that nothing was settled yet, that I’d have to see how much story there was, and then there was the contract to be agreed to, and, well, let’s just see what happens.

She wasn’t kidding about the house. It was a wounded relic of a 1950’s brick faux-Tudor in a housing tract in Flushing, its walls gouged and scarred, the kitchen a half-remodeled ruin of missing appliances and broken cabinets. Bales of twine-wrapped newspapers moated the dining room table, the uneven rampart of old news planted beneath the windows as though to protect against invasion. In the living room frayed drapes cloistered the scatter of furniture and a reek of tobacco and gribbines floated up out of worn upholstery as from the windings of talliths in some ancient talmudic study hall.

There was no sign of Esther.

“Where is your mother?” I asked.

“She reads most of the night and then sleeps on and off all day. She knows you’re coming. She should be up soon.”

My bedroom was upstairs, a cell-like narrow room, the only sign of Deborah’s absent daughter a few abandoned stuffed animals on the single bed. The door had no doorknob, merely a reamed-out hole stuffed with toilet paper. I was startled to find myself in this strange house, this strange room, and overwhelmed that Deborah expected me to produce a book that would rescue her and her mother from the final teeter into the abyss.

There was a phone in the hall. I called my husband..

“I haven’t seen the mother yet.”

“Say the word and I’ll get you a flight home tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll let you know.”

When I went downstairs Esther was there, standing in the door to the kitchen. A diminutive woman in a cotton house dress, a wild ruff of gray hair partially tamed by a plastic head band, her long-ago beauty reviviscent in the barely lined face and crushed-ice blue eyes.

She took both of my hands in hers and cocked her head mischievously.

“Don’t worry about anything,” she said. “I will be the worm to catch the fish.”


Copyright Nina Vida 2009

The Age of Reason

1946 was my freshman year at Adolph Leuzinger High School in Lawndale, California. It was one year after the end of World War II, and the high school was bulging with returning servicemen – not to get their high school diplomas, but to begin college on our campus. There was no provision yet for all the veterans who wanted to take advantage of the GI Bill, and the crush of veterans eager to leave war behind and move forward in their lives was so intense that the school district was willing to split the high school in two: days for high schoolers, afternoons and evenings for veterans.

Everyone in school had a story about war to tell; mine was about Uncle Morrie, a bombardier lost on a bombing flight somewhere over the Pacific, neither plane, nor crew, nor Uncle Morrie ever found. I remember Uncle Morrie as thin, his eyes the same cherry brown as my mother’s. We saw him off at Union Station in Los Angeles, handsome in his uniform, kissing my mother goodbye, patting me on the head, smiling at everyone. Lost over the Pacific. Disappeared as cleanly as if he had never gotten on that train in Union Station and headed to meet that airplane, that crew, that death.

Concentration camps, Nuremburg trials, Holocaust newsreels, lost relatives in Poland, atom bombs, radiation sickness were for adults to ponder. Teenagers aren’t good at tragedy. We were sunk in the business of sock hops and who was going to win the talent show. We felt a little crowded by the veterans, many of whom showed up early for their classes and jammed the halls, and there were pairings between students and veterans, the inevitable result of off-kilter fraternization, but for the most part we were getting back to normal.

The school was built on Japanese farm land. When people wanted to disparage where we lived, they’d say we lived out in the bean fields, although there had been no bean fields since 1942 when the Japanese were interned. I don’t remember paying much attention to where all those Japanese farmers went, except for hearing references to places like “Manzanar” and “Tule Lake” on the radio. I’d like to think I thought about where they had gone, had even examined the rightness or wrongness of their going, but I didn’t. No one I knew did. All during the war we were exposed to news stories and photographs depicting all Japanese as grinning, barbarous, murderous sneaks with protruding teeth and bottle-thick eyeglasses.

I’d also like to think that that image was erased when the first Japanese boy showed up in one of my classes in mid-1946. His teeth didn’t protrude and he didn’t wear glasses and he showed no fear. He raised his hand in class and twirled his pencil with the nonchalance of the innately brave. No one knew what to do, what to say, he was so alien, so out of place, so associated with everything bad we had ever read or heard about the Japanese. I remember thinking that maybe one of his relatives had shot Uncle Morrie’s airplane out of the sky. I was embarrassed for him, wondered how he could come to class every day knowing that everyone was thinking that he shouldn’t be there.

No Japanese farmers returned to the bean fields until years later, and no other Japanese student returned to school except this one. Propaganda images faded, the war receded, but he stayed, came to class, made friends, won us over. The stubborn courage of his presence was for us the real end of the war.

Copyright Nina Vida 2009