It took me more than three years to finish
Shlepping the Exile
. I had a job as a researcher in pediatric neurosurgery to go to and a dissertation on the Middle English Pearl to try to avoid, and more than disappointed, I was positively crestfallen to discover that nobody in the exciting, high stakes worlds of commercial and small press publishing really cared. I sent queries, unagented and unsolicited, to various publishers, submitted selections to every literary magazine whose address I could find. The encouraging rejections usually included a Yiddish word or two—le-chaim at the end instead of yours truly, or “Mazl tov on a stunning achievement, but it’s not for us at this time.” The less friendly ones tended to come from editors who’d received my manuscript from one of their writers. To many of them, I was an anti-Semite; to a few others, a disgrace to my people—”Would you let your parents read this?” Virtually all of them saw the use of Yiddish as an anachronistic drawback. The only thing that might have interested them about my adult characters was their experiences during World War II: “You can clearly write,” one of them told me, “give us more Holocaust.” After letters like that, I was almost happy to have the manuscript called “pornography in dialect,” a put-down that didn’t really sting, though I’d have been even happier if the woman who’d handwritten it on the title page put “pornography mit a heksent” instead.
After two or three years of this, I was starting to get desperate. I forgot about publishing and took the book back to its origins, presenting self-contained excerpts in comedy clubs, storytelling venues, theatres, anywhere where I could get onto a stage. I’d done enough storytelling and stand-up that finding places to appear wasn’t much of a problem, especially because I only held a piece of paper in my hand if the event was called a reading. Otherwise, I gave performances of material from the book, selling photocopied, perfect-bound copies of the texts wherever sales were allowed.
They moved surprisingly briskly, even though they didn’t look like much, and proved beyond any doubt that the suspicions I’d been nursing for so long were true. Jews liked the stuff, gentiles liked the stuff; English-speaking Francophones really liked the stuff. Young people, old people, women and men. Everybody liked it except people who worked in publishing. I like to think of it as the dawn of a tradition.
Five years after I finished the book, I performed part of it at a party in honor of the great Chilean poet and artist, Ludwig Zeller, who was living in Toronto at the time. After I’d finished, his Canadian publisher came up to me and asked if I had any of it written down. “All of it,” I told him, and explained what I was up to. He told me to send him a copy; I did. Two years later, it came out. There was no line-editing, no copy-editing; aside from typos, it was the text as submitted, but it took two years to come out.
If he’d ever sent me any money, it might not be coming out again, corrected and plumped up, a good forty pages longer than it used to be. People ask me how you fit new stuff into the midst of material up to thirty years old. The answer deserves a book of its own.
The Visiting Scribes series was produced by the Jewish Book Council‘s blog, The Prosen People.
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