Two fiction examples are enclosed:

  1. Queen of the Owls, by Barbara Linn Probst (Chapter Summaries)

CHAPTER ONE

Elizabeth signs up for a Tai Chi class and is immediately struck by Richard. He’s not classically handsome, yet something about him magnetizes her. They’re brought together when the instructor, Mr. Wu, drops from a sudden heart attack (surprise event = inciting incident). She feels a powerful adrenaline rush from the shared crisis. Afterward, she walks home slowly, reluctantly [first time she does this]Elizabeth returns to her apartment, where her husband Ben is engrossed in a television documentary, as usual; clearly, he’s not especially interested in her as a woman. She retreats to work on her dissertation about O’Keeffe. As she examines O’Keeffe’s paintings, she feels a new wordless longing.

CHAPTER TWO:

At her apartment, Elizabeth gets her children ready for the babysitter because she has a meeting with her thesis adviser. Despite his skepticism, she convinces him to give her a chance to prove why and how Hawaii was O’Keeffe’s place of necessary transition. After leaving his office, Elizabeth reflects on the photos O’Keeffe posed for. She encounters people doing Tai Chi on the campus lawn and learns that the class will continue in Mr. Wu’s absence, but demurs on the invitation to join them. Then she goes to the botanical garden and plucks the reproductive center of the hibiscus flower, putting it in her pocket.

CHAPTER THREE:

Her sister Andrea, along with Andrea’s husband Michael and their daughter, are joining Elizabeth, Ben, and the children for pizza at her apartment. While they wait for the others to return, Andrea makes a coy reference to “keeping the home fires stoked” by looking good. Elizabeth confesses that her marriage has always been tepid. Andrea says she can help, and then drops a careless hint that Michael may have been straying, though Elizabeth can’t believe it’s true. Her resentment wells up as she recalls The Nutcracker and mermaid play via flashback, and how her role as “bookworm” was set. Then, over dinner, Andrea starts a lighthearted game about each person’s favorite body part. Elizabeth is offended when Ben quips that her favorite body part is her brain.

After Andrea and Michael leave the apartment, Ben tells Elizabeth she’s taking everything too seriously, he was just joking. But it doesn’t feel funny. There’s a sadness, a missed connection.

CHAPTER FOUR:

After the Tai Chi class, led by Richard in Mr. Wu’s absence, Elizabeth returns to the dojo because she’s forgotten her headband. Richard is locking up, so they ride he elevator together to the ground floor , and he invites her to have a cup of coffee. Again, there’s that magnetism. In the café, he tells her about his photography while she tells him that she’s studying O’Keeffe. She’s aware that they’re flirting, liking and fearing what she feels in his presence. He tells her that she can buy the coffee “next time.”

Elizabeth meets with Harold at his office to talk about her budding ideas about what O’Keeffe was after. He cautions her to stick to scholarship and not projective fantasies. She reminds herself that he’s grooming her for a spot at the elite table.

CHAPTER FIVE:

Elizabeth is teaching her Feminist Art class, where Naomi, an assertive student, challenges her with the question of how far she would use her own body to make a statement, if people knew it was her/her body, being revealed.

After class, Lucy (the sitter) calls and puts a distraught Katie on the phone who needs her mommy. Elizabeth promises to come at once, even though she’d planned to go to the library [role conflict]. At Lucy’s house, she meets Phoebe. They connect, until Phoebe makes a comment indicating that she and her husband have a lively sex life. Elizabeth is both attracted and repelled. She wants to know how Phoebe and her husband have created the thing she and Ben lack, yet her shame and sense of inadequacy prevail. She makes an excuse and flees.

CHAPTER SIX:

Back at the apartment, after the children are asleep, Elizabeth returns to her study of O’Keeffe’s Hawaii paintings. Impulsively, she opens her blouse in front of the mirror and pretends to pose as O’Keeffe did, rehearsing/ foreshadowing what will take place later. But Katie calls for her, interrupting.

When Ben returns from squash, she feels the distance between them and remembers via flashback how she’d convinced him to be with her. To her surprise, he gives her the negligee “to make you feel sexier.” She’s hurt but touched that, like her, he wants to try. They do “try,” but it feels artificial. When she attempts something other than their usual way of making love, he’s not really interested. Their consummation is routine. Afterward, she feels alone.

 

  1. Odessa, Odessa, by Barbara Artson (Part Summaries)

Part One: In the Beginning

In a shtetl on the outskirts of Odessa, Henya, a woman who no longer bleeds, broods about the unlikely possibility of being pregnant.  At forty-two and with six older children and her husband living in cramped quarters, she worries about where she would put this child.  She worries about the shortage of food and water and wood and coal that comes with the hostile winters in the Pale of the Settlement.  Mostly, she worries about when the Cossacks will make another unwelcome visit.  The child is born, a little girl, who, when the Cossacks noisily break into their home, Henya realizes is deaf, as the infant remains peacefully asleep, hidden beneath a pile of dirty laundry.

Henya’s husband, Rabbi Mendel Kolopsky, descends from a family of rabbis and cantors.  He inherits the rabbinic mantle, in place of his older brother, Shimshon, who, because he repudiated God, is declared dead by his rabbi father, who then sits shiva for him.  Shimshon, both hurt and furious, abandons the family to join a secular socialist labor movement in Vilna.  He will reappear in the latter part of the novel as Samson Ketar of Israel, when, following his death, his grandson finds his grandfather’s chronicle, which renders his journey from his exodus from Odessa to its conclusion on a kibbutz in Israel.  His grandson reads of his grandfather’s feats of bravery, his reputation as one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund movement, and the demons that afflict him due to the traumas he endured.

Mendel and the older children move to New York, leaving Henya, with their four younger offspring, to make arrangements to join them. In 1914, Henya, Avram, Disha, Leib, little Marya, now five, and Henya’s new shipboard friend, Bessie, arrive at New York Harbor after a harrowing passage in the putrid bowels of the Lusitania, only to confront yet another challenge after they climb the steep stairs leading to the inner sanctum of the Great Hall of Ellis Island. They pass the several distressing medical examiners’ tests, avoiding the dreaded chalk marks inscribed on their backs that would send them back to Odessa, and, finally locate their family, who await them at the “kissing post.” Mendel, Levi, Shmuel, and Faigel and her husband, Yosef, now transformed into “real” Americans: Stewart, Leon, Faye, and Joe.  Henya, shorn of her sheytl, shyly embraces her husband.

Part Two: The New World

It is 1934. As her husband naps, Henya, now sixty-seven, awaits the arrival of Disha (now Dora), her husband, Saul, and their two small daughters.  In her reverie Henya reflects on their early years in America, their cramped apartment in Brighton Beach, Mendel’s humiliation at his futile attempt to make a living selling rags from a pushcart.  She recalls her second attempt to register Marya at school, and her rage at being told by the principal, Mr. Harold Steen, formerly Herschel Bernstein, that her child was retarded, to take her home and teach her to make beds so she can be a maid.

She thinks of how her other children succeeded in living the American dream, especially Faye, whose husband now owns a small factory, and how Dora, at sixteen, quit school to work on the assembly line in Joe’s factory, stitching elastic to the waistbands of ladies’ bloomers.  After breaking up with Freddy, a ne’er-do-well shoe salesman, Dora was introduced to her chum Sadie’s nephew Saul.

She was drawn to his boyish good looks, his reliability, strength, and the sense that he will protect her, no matter what.  Unlike Freddy, Saul is an honest man of few words. Saul is attracted to Dora’s beauty and vivacity, so unlike his sensible, down-to-earth family.  In 1939, the year of Germany’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, Saul moves Dora and his daughters to a six-room suburban tract home in an anti-Semitic working-class neighborhood in New Jersey.

Furtively, Saul attempts to enlist but because his work as the production manager of a laundry is designated “essential” to the war effort, he is rejected.  His humiliation and depression worsens when in March 1945, his younger brother, Seymour, is killed by a Japanese kamikaze attack off the remote and formerly unheard of island of Okinawa.

Fourteen years after Saul’s death from throat cancer, we find Dora, now an eighty-six-year-old woman, sitting in a rocking chair—which she bought with savings from her weekly food allowance—awakening to her own smothered screams from her recurring nightmare of Cossacks breaking into her home. The acrid odor of scorched eggs invades her nostrils.   After cleaning the stove, she sits down to reflect on what she considers the best years of her life.  She looks at the silver-framed photograph of their daughters that Saul captured with his new Brownie camera on a car trip to Florida.  She is reminded of the signs they encountered as they crossed the Florida border: NO COLORED OR JEWS.

In the middle of this memory, Dora experiences a razor-sharp pain in her chest, and drops the picture of Roberta and Hanna as shards of flying glass surround her.  She dies without fanfare, mouthing the words, “Just like Mama.”

Following Dora’s funeral, Roberta and Hannah, while cleaning Dora’s apartment, find a picture of a very young man neither sister can identify, someone with an uncanny resemblance to their grandfather Mendel. On the back of the picture, faded with time, the name Shimshon is scribbled in Yiddish, and Samson in English.

Part Three: Back to the Beginning

Finding the mystery photograph breathes life into her immigration lawyer Roberta’s obsession with her family’s genealogy, first prompted when she viewed Alex Haley’s Roots on television.  The several clues she pursues leads to dead ends, until she receives a mysterious letter from an Israeli stranger claiming to be her cousin, if indeed she is related to Rabbi Mendel Kolopsky. He tells her of a trunk he inherited from an elderly cousin that contained a journal written by his grandfather, Shimshon Ketar, who he believes is Mendel’s older brother, Samson.  He informs her that although it was written in Yiddish, he has had it translated to Hebrew—the language of Israel—and that he is now translating it into English.

Roberta immediately calls her sister and they make plans to travel to Israel.  On the flight the sisters converse about old times, their childhood, their parents, politics, and their trepidation about meeting their relatives.  Their newfound cousin, Reuben, picks them up at the hotel the morning after their arrival and whisks them off to his home, where he and his wife, Rivka, are hosting a gathering of his children and grandchildren in their honor.

The sisters tour Israel from Safed in the North to the hilltop fortress of Masada and Caesarea in the East, to Be’er Sheva in South.  They swim in the Dead Sea. Reuben changes the subject when they ask about the journal, but he reluctantly agrees to take Roberta to the Shu’fat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, accompanied by his Palestinian friend Da’oud as a guide. Under the guise of having to pack, Hannah refuses to join this adventure, but is really furious with Roberta for breaking her promise not to get into Palestinian/Israeli politics.

Roberta is distraught to learn that there are over seven million Palestinian refugees worldwide, and one million living in camps in Gaza and over two million in the West Bank.  She is outraged to see the unpaved roads of the camp, the lack of sidewalks, the waste that is scattered everywhere, the dilapidated, narrow alleyways and falling-apart two-story buildings and rock-strewn streets. Da’oud tells her that the camp is run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency under the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Municipality and jokingly refers to it as “Chicago,” because, he explains, of the organized crime and drug trafficking.  Roberta stifles what would be a defensive response.

On the ride back to her hotel, Roberta thinks about Palestinian terrorism and their despotic leaders; she thinks about the aborted peace efforts, and then her mind turns to the Jewish ghettos in Europe, the Settlement of the Pale, for example, that she read about as she pursued her family’s history, and wonders how this differs from that:  groups of people isolated in ghettos because of their religion, of blacks living in their ghettoes because of the color of their skin, and of so many others because of their political affiliation or ethnicity or sexual identity.

The following evening Roberta and Hannah entertain Reuben and Rivka, their thank-you gift. Reuben and Rivka reciprocate the evening before the sisters are to return home.  After a typical Israeli dinner, Reuben with starched ceremony retrieves a package containing great Uncle Shimshon’s journal.  He warns them not to touch it for fear of it disintegrating, but tells them he has a translation for each of them. The evening ends when the children arrive to say farewell; the sisters leave, each carrying a manila envelope with their own copy of the journal.

At Ben Gurion Airport, they pass through security and board the plane that will take them back to the United States.  Once installed in their side-by-side aisle seats, they simultaneously open the manila envelopes. They wave away the steward’s offering of a beverage prior to takeoff and begin to read “Shimshon’s Chronicle,” written October 21, 1961. It begins: “To those who might be interested in one very old man’s journey from Odessa to Israel—and foreign places in between—I write this account from memory,” and ends twenty-eight pages later.

A postscript written by Samson’s great-grandson informs the reader of his grandfather’s death begins “January 14, 1962. I am Yaa’kov, Meir’s son.  My beloved great-grandfather died this morning at 10:31 AM” and ends “I, Yaa’kov, have nothing more to say, except: Chuzak ve’ematz, Grandfather Shimshon Samson Ketar.”