Some pieces were written as part of my participation in a writer’s group led by Ruth Lehrer, writer, neighbor, and friend. I am grateful to members of this group, past and present, for their constructive criticism in the biweekly sessions. I also want to thank Michael Greene, my Great Neck therapist, chosen for me by my wife as she researched the internet on her deathbed. He helped with formatting and much more, including emotional support. Important additional support was provided by, among others, Rabbi Sidney and Ruth Solomon, Jacqueline and Aron Weinbach, Jackie Friedland, Raizie Lutwak, Susan Cutter, Naomi Joy Greshman, Lynn Silverman May, and Fernando Giordano.
1
Self-Publishing
I’ve wanted to write my autobiography for as long as I can remember and completed the first of a number of attempts while I was still in high school.
Was there anything so extraordinary about my life that I felt the need, even as a child, to tell my story? Not really. But if you stop and think about it, you too may come to feel that we all have a story to tell, something unique and worth the effort to recount and preserve.
Was it Socrates who said that the unexamined life was not worth living? What better way to perform that examination to take stock and make sense out of the experiences that comprise our days on this earth?
“It is only in the narrative mode,” the renowned psychologist Jerome Bruner tells us, “that one can construct an identity… Facts never exist out of context.”
My own life began in New York City in 1937, but its setting soon shifted to a small town Northeastern Pennsylvania. My parents, Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria, moved our family to a predominantly white, Protestant, middle-American setting where they established a small factory and worked hard to succeed and raise their two children well. This meeting of cultures generated many contradictions, some of which still puzzle me today, but I was privileged to have the benefits of both worlds and to find my own, very personal, path through life. Ultimately, I came back to New York to work and finally to marry in my fifties. I don’t know that there is anything particularly instructive about my story, but it’s been a life—my life—and writing it has made it more vivid and meaningful to me.
How many of us have lives distinctive enough to interest Oxford University Press, Random House, or Simon & Schuster? It must be a truly extraordinary story, often authored by a well-known personality possessing mass appeal, in order to merit such attention. I can envision a pile of rejection letters all stating your book is “not commercially viable.”
What are we to do with all the stories we want to share? The self-publishing phenomenon can speak to this need. Increasingly today, writers are turning to self-publishing rather than struggle through years of daunting frustration trying to interest a trade publisher.
I produced three books over the years, all works of scholarship, the first two with contract in hand before beginning the project. One was a monograph on the expatriate African-American author, Richard Wright, part of a series on modern writers. A second was a library reference work done with Coauthor Edward Margolies on African-American fiction, 1853–1976. The third, a thoroughly documented study of the early show business personality, Jimmy Durante, reached an enthusiastic publisher that specialized in this kind of material, but not before I spun my wheels in frustration sending the manuscript to inappropriate and uninterested companies.
Retired after years of teaching at Medgar Evers College, a branch of the City University of New York, I’ve had the time to write about some of the most meaningful experiences in my life so far, good and bad, happy and sad. This would be not so much a full autobiography but a selective memoir, skipping over less interesting aspects of my life. The memoir would also skip over elements too personal to be shared in public, more properly good material for a novel that stretches and embroiders the truth creatively for dramatic storytelling effect.
I decided not to waste my time looking for a trade publisher. After investigating a number of self-publishing options, I chose CreateSpace, an affiliate of Amazon.com, and while their service has not been perfect, it has been adequate and affordable. They provided traditional print and eBook formats, a Library of Congress ISBN number, a copyright in my name, and an Amazon.com listing, plus other services if I was willing to pay for them. On paper, royalties sounded hefty in comparison with those paid by trade publishers, and it can be an exciting experience to be part of the creative process of designing your book, but publicity is the missing ingredient (and so no royalties to speak of). Still, the author got to tell his story for his still-living friends, family, and those few others who might find an interesting time capsule that recalls much that once was and is no more.
My memoir was entitled Zero to Seventy-Five in 30 Snapshots. It was actually fun writing and rewriting the thirty segments or snapshots with coincidentally thirty photographs. After the book appeared, I belatedly caught a few factual errors and still fewer misspellings despite careful proofreading. The second printing corrected such errors as misstating the publication for which my boyhood friend, Art Cooper, served as editor before taking over GQ magazine. It was Family Weekly, not Family Circle. My wonderful landlady in Delaware was from Ireland, not Scotland. Still, I missed naming the correct show business book that beat out mine on Jimmy Durante for an award; it was about Tommy Dorsey, not Jimmy Dorsey. These missteps notwithstanding those friends and others who took the time to give feedback thought the book was well-written, candid, and even courageous in what it revealed.
Now I enjoy being part of a writing group whose leader stresses brevity and the subjects all related to personal experience, no fiction. My second collection of essays—again self-published, much shorter than the first—is entitled Drowning Naked in Paradise & Other Essays. After the title piece, the others are in no special order. Several aim for a touch of humor. The reader can pick any one without missing any connecting link.
2
Early Interest in Writing
When I was in high school, the local chapter of Hadassah, the Jewish women’s group, ran a contest. The topic for a poem was to be any biblical story. I chose Moses. My brilliant friend, Hans, when told what first prize was, a big box of Barton’s chocolates, asked if he could cowrite the poem for half the chocolates if the poem won.
Rhyming was fun. “Moses” won first prize. We split the candy, my giving Hans his choice of which pieces he wanted from the box. I guess this was really cheating, the first and only time I took credit for work not entirely my own.
A year or two later, I wrote an essay on the topic, “I Speak for Democracy.” The American Legion awarded first, second, and third place prizes. First prize was a check. A girl won that. The second-place winner was given the choice of two ten-inch LPs, a recording of Ray Anthony’s big band or vocals by Nat King Cole. He chose Ray Anthony. The principal then called me to the stage and joked that I had no choice but to accept the Nat King Cole LP. That’s what I would have chosen anyway. The students in the auditorium laughed. That was okay with me; I loved making people laugh.
My twelfth-grade teacher was in her last year before retiring. Harriet Kline was the most inspiring of teachers. She taught an awareness of the multiple styles of excellent writers through the centuries of British and American literature. What I remember most were the essays of Elizabethan author, Sir Francis Bacon, and the opening passage of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities. Doing what Mrs. Kline called “aping,” another writer’s style, I wrote an essay, “On Scouting,” in Bacon’s style. I got an A-plus. What I most admired in Dickens’ style was his parallel structure:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period,