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Clara’s Heart

A Novel by Joseph Olshan

A young writer trying to finish his first novel has the whole world before him.  And this wider world is certainly a contrast to the finite world within his fiction.  When I was in my twenties and finishing my first novel, Clara’s Heart, I had no idea how the book would fare; I was, after many attempts, just trying to get the book right.  I had a larger-than-life character who seemed to know what she wanted and whose Jamaican patois became poetry whenever she spoke.  What Clara said was often as surprising to me as the writer as it became to the many readers who got to know her after the book was published.  Clara may have come from a different world and from a different culture, and yet she is probably my greatest fictional creation.  She somehow lives more vividly on the page than all the other characters I’ve created whose worlds are arguably much closer to my own.

And that was the magic that blessed me when I was writing Clara’s Heart. That was the inspiration that came from an almost mystical place.

When the book was finally published and sold to many foreign countries, I was surprised that my little story about a housekeeper who takes care of a young man whose parents are divorcing, could be related to by readers living in other languages and other cultures.  But then my Finnish publisher said something interesting to me. “Think of all the people who are hired to take care of children all over the world and who grow close to these children only to lose them when the children grow up. This is a story that anyone anywhere can relate to.”

Hollywood seemed to agree because a film, starring Whoopie Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris was made of Clara’s Heart.

My New Orleans

A Memoir by Peter Wolf

My New Orleans with cafe au lait and beignets - wonderful!Written by a sixth generation New Orleanian, My New Orleans Gone Away, A Memoir of Loss and Renewal, takes you to a New Orleans you cannot see, a New Orleans you cannot find by yourself, a New Orleans you will never forget, and if you already love the city, a New Orleans you will understand in a new way.

You will understand what really happened to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, the worst natural disaster in the history of America, in a way you have never imagined. Not the news story, but the real story.

You will be guided to the best restaurant in America, Mosca’s, ten miles out of town in the nearby swamp. And you’ll meet Johnny Mosca, find out what to order and why, and become aware of the generally unrecognized connection of the founding of this creole-Italian roadhouse emporium of culinary delight to the mafia underworld that once had such a strong hold on the city.

You will come to understand Mardi Gras as so much more than a street celebration with brightly decorated floats whose krewe riders throw beads and trinkets to the imploring massed curbside throng. You will find out that this is the manifest and disguised tip of an old entrenched social hierarchy that has long dominated the power centers of New Orleans, and how racial and social discrimination lurk behind the gaiety.

Most of all you will get to read an intimate, coming of age story of a shy boy from the south who ventures to Exeter, to Yale, to Paris and to New York who eventually becomes a noted urban policy expert, architectural historian and writer. My New Orleans is a portrait of a generation as well as a portrait of America in the mid-twentieth century.

A New York Times bestseller: A “charming” memoir of growing up Jewish among New Orleans high society—and finding a place in the bigger world (Winston Groom, The Wall Street Journal).

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle and Audible

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One of These Things First (excerpt #2)

“I stepped back and considered myself in the mirror.
No strapping high school freshman here. I was pale and
pudgy, and I had tortured my mess of wavy strawberry
blond hair into a perfect inch-high pompadour, hardened
in place with thick white hair cream, like plaster of Paris.
I had meticulously doctored an inflamed whitehead under
my bottom lip with Clearasil, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed
when they found me. I was also spiffed up for the occasion,
new clothes, slacks and sweater in shades of forest green,
the big retail color of the season.

I moved closer to my reflection until my breath condensed
on the glass and I tasted it with my tongue, one
lick, two licks, cold and salty, and I concentrated deeply
into the eyes of the boy in the mirror and tried to will
another boy out of me, like the spirits that stepped out of
dead bodies in the movies, only this boy would tell me if I
could grow up . . .”

One of These Things First (excerpt #1)

 

One brilliantly cold afternoon in March of 1962, three months past my fifteenth birthday, I set out on a course of action that would shake my world from its wobbly orbit and spin it off on an unanticipated new trajectory. I managed to escape the hawk-eyed scrutiny of the three saleswomen in whose care I had been left, and slipped behind the brocaded curtain of a fitting room in the back of my grandparents’ ladies’ clothing store.

The small room was warm and close, the air thick with the cloyingly sweet smell of stale perfume and hairspray. Although only a curtain separated me from the rest of the world, I felt sealed away and safe. Of course, I wouldn’t be safe for long because they would soon realize I was missing and come look for me. The saleswomen didn’t like me in those fitting rooms. The saleswomen didn’t like anything I did. Lily Williams said it wasn’t normal for me to go into a fitting room where women got undressed, although one would think it was the most normal thing in the world for a teenage boy to be curious about a place where women were naked. But I guess maybe not those women, who were mostly overweight and middle-aged, with huge pale breasts like kneaded dough, sometimes with nipples stretched as big around as a saucer.

Those were the kind of women who came from all over the five boroughs of New York City to this Mecca of corsetry, to be fitted from the comprehensive stock of sturdy brassieres, girdles, and long-line undergarments, elaborately constructed of elastic and satin, given shape by metal stays covered by pink plush to prevent chafing. Crucial alterations were attended to while-you-wait with the unparalleled expertise of Katherine, my grandfather’s chatelaine and sergeant at arms, or by my grandmother, at a black 1955 Singer sewing machine.

Live in Italy for Two Years and Write in Italian

The word on Jhumpa Lahiri was that she’d moved to Italy and now, after a few years of immersing herself in the language, was going to write in Italian. Had I heard this news about one of my fellow, white American, middle-class novelists, I would have shrugged and said, “Knock yourself out.” [Read more…]

What It’s like to be a half-caste German Jew in Occupied Austria

thekaminskycure

There are lots of things I notice this Christmas that I’ve never noticed before. When my mother takes me shopping, for instance, which is only between the hours of three and five, there are certain village stores she will go into and certain stores she won’t. And the stores she will not enter are usually the smarter ones, the fish shop and the cooperative, for instance, which are near the best inns like Franzi Wimmer’s and have glossy portraits of the Führer prominently on show inside, while the shops she does enter are the cheaper ones, even the dirtier ones, like the baker whose bread is often stale and the dairy where the milk is often sour. They have pictures of the Führer on their walls too, of course, but smaller ones and not so often dusted. Some of them even have little specks of fly-shit on his face.

I’m puzzled by my mother’s shopping choices. I take it that as we are from Berlin, we must be a cut above the rest, so we should be going to the best shops, not the worst. And why do we go only in the late afternoon? I know that other people like Jägerlein go at any time of the day. My mother doesn’t explain these anomalies, and I sense I’m not supposed to know the real reason, although I’m still convinced it has to do with our being proper Germans, while the villagers are not. Nobody tells me where I’ve gone wrong. Nobody explains that my mother is a vicious and degenerate Jewess, that the best shops won’t serve her, that in any case she’s allowed to shop only between the hours of three and five so that decent Aryans shoppers can arrange to avoid the disgusting sight of her altogether.

My parents have always been bickering and crying (I think that’s normal—what else do I know?), but they never openly mention this source of their troubles. Imagine, I can’t recall ever being called a half-Jew yet, let alone a Yid, and perhaps I never have been. I don’t even know what a Yid or half-Jew is. Sara does, of course; she knows all right. And so do the others. But not me. Why should I? I’m never allowed out to play with the village children, so they aren’t going to tell me. And neither Jägerlein nor my mother is going to either. As for my brother and sisters—they’re certainly not going to tell me what it’s like to be called a half-Jew or a dirty Yid. Like rape victims, they never tell because they feel they’re guilty.