Peddler
Luria, Yaacov
PEDDLE SELLING IN THE JEWISH LITERARY MARKETPLACE YAACOV LURIA I'm not sure that I ever consciously set out to be a freelance "Jewish" writer, though I have been writing in my spare time on...
...Some years I sent a birthday card addressed to the story...
...Few writers who specialize in Jewish subject matter, even if they publish regularly, escape obscurity...
...Today Saul Bellow can fill his novels with Jewish intellectual types and pepper them with Yiddishisms and win a Nobel prize...
...If the three monkeys named Discretion, Trimmer and Play-It-Safe begin watching you, you may think you're writing as you please but only be pleasing the monkeys...
...Yankel drove a horse and buggy and stroked his beard over a scholarly volume...
...only goyim do it that way...
...I have no contract with anyone...
...That, at least, seems to me the premise on which editors of Jewish publications operate...
...Writing Jewish is a balancing act...
...And without a qualm did he read the Twenty-third Psalm, conceding that the words of a Jew could be sprinkled on you...
...As they bore you through the door, did someone say, 'Abe was a white Jew, one of the few...
...Give them publicity yet...
...They would have been put off, I think, by its shrill tone and sweeping denunciation of all the world...
...But if my work may only have an ephemeral existence between a printing plant and an incinerator, it has not encumbered me with the burdens of fame and fortune...
...Jewish writing crooked a skinny finger at me and I came...
...Marie Syrkin and Charles Reznikoff, husband and wife who edited The Jewish Frontier for a quarter of a century, managed to run an excellent magazine though they paid their writers pittances...
...Organization machers and politicians at large with historic speeches...
...Why do I go on writing Jewish...
...The values they transmitted to us were their own...
...Clearly the literary climate has changed a good deal since then...
...In Fifty-Five Stories from The New Yorker, published in 1949, only two stories, "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" by J. D. Salinger and "An Act of Faith" by Irwin Shaw, include either recognizably Jewish characters or concerns...
...You make me so happy...
...Possibly because Jewish periodicals have such skimpy staffs and limited page space, their editors seem especially high-handed and capricious...
...Naively, I sent out a poem called "For the Sabbath: With Love...
...If financial success is a measure of talent in our society, then Jewish freelancers must be eminently untalented...
...Of course, I am delighted when something of mine touches non-Jews or alienated Jews...
...On the other hand, I don't deserve my arthritis either...
...or animals under the open sky...
...Every editor has his own favorite sacred cows—and there are enough for everyone: Caterers, whose balanced trays help balance synagogue budgets...
...On the contrary, the editor, grown accustomed to the accents of veteran contributors, may be hankering for new voices...
...Mirabile dictu, Esquire printed Ozick's tirade unexpur-gated, insisting on calling it "All the World Wants the Jews Dead"—a most inflammatory title...
...Another instance of this species of ultra-sensitivity: The inscription "Abraham Cohen," startling on a tombstone in a churchyard in a village in the Adirondacks, led to a poem I called "One of a Kind...
...It almost seems that we are not tuned in to the same wavelength...
...It provoked, stimulated, enlightened, recalled memories, elicited confessions and obscene invective...
...Simple mentschlichkeit can make money seem meaningless...
...Blacks were in no mood, he said, to tolerate the inference that the predicament of immigrant Jews was in any way comparable to theirs...
...If a writer doesn't quickly become immunized to the recurrent sting of "Thank you but no," this isn't his game at all...
...But the reasons editors pinch their nostrils shut against manuscripts that are sheer masterpieces are legion—even a single phrase they find injudicious may suffice...
...A writer has the choice of resigning himself to indignities like ham-handed tampering with copy or not publishing...
...There was an undertone of anger in the editor's uncharacteristic curtness: "I don't see why we have to understand such people...
...Almost ready to give up, I placed it with the editor on the bottom of my list...
...I'm a peddler with a pack trying his luck on a street corner...
...It has always struck me as inconsistent with our ethnic character that editors of Jewish publications should be suspicious of humor...
...This letter must have disturbed me considerably because I did something I have never done before or since: I went to speak to the editor personally...
...It is axiomatic, I think, that he who sells his labor cheaply invites contempt from those who buy it...
...Men and women sleeping together in a synagogue—this is a disgrace...
...The fee he sent me was more punishment than payment, a finger shaken to warn me that purveyors of contraband could expect no quarter from honest men...
...He has to compete with public relations people who turn out tons of publicity disguised as honest copy handed out gratis...
...Back came a letter from the lady with a snippet scissored from the retyped copy...
...She could sell none of the stories even though she professed to "love" them...
...For example, you may not offend rabbis...
...I don't think I have minded the miserable fees nearly as much as the indignities from editors...
...But sometimes during the rabbi's sermon people fall asleep...
...There have been instances when I have opted for the latter alternative...
...Indignities...
...You can take your choice...
...They treated both the writer and his copy with respect...
...He has to buck ghost writers for world-shakers...
...But if it's not easy to recognize—after all, how do you know if a joke is funny if it's never been told before?—they discreetly keep the door shut tight...
...All periodicals have taboos...
...He hinted darkly that blood would flow on the streets if my essay were printed...
...Groucho Marx's famous witticism—"I wouldn't belong to any club which let me in"—is applicable...
...Would you like to do a story for us...
...Jewish periodicals have naturally assumed a responsibility to protect the honor and public image of Jewry, but their ardor often is excessive...
...It tells of a husband who unexpectedly comes from the city to spend shabbos with his family in the country...
...Not that I would, heaven forbid, reject the goodies that fall into the laps of writers who make it...
...The problem is not that editors, by brandishing their shibboleths at writers, exercise a kind of intellectual censorship...
...So in this business—how many Jewish periodicals are there where you can peddle a problem manuscript?—it is rather easy to be stuck with a refrigerator in Eskimo country...
...Every writer chooses his audience...
...when I was a child on the lower East Side of Manhattan forty years ago, Jewish immigrant parents were experiencing distress about their children's education not too dissimilar from that of black parents today...
...I expect no voice on my phone to announce...
...Taking issue with the tyranny of editors is an act of lese majeste often tantamount to gradual literary suicide...
...During the New York City teacher's strike in the fall of 1968,1 wrote an article called "My Hebrew Schooling: Like It Was," in which I included these sentences...
...The rise of the bagel maybe...
...Speculating on the puzzle of the late Mr...
...A story about a martinet schoolteacher included the description, "He had the manner of a Grand Inquisitor...
...If acquaintances introduce me as "Yaacov, who writes for Magazine X," I counter with, "I have been published in X. I don't write for any magazine...
...Would an Orthodox woman like this one speak of "love" when referring to her "marital duties...
...They yearn to have sex, but may not because she hasn't been to the mikvah...
...One editor who turned it down was aghast at my chutzpah...
...When the New York Times had a poetry corner, it avoided, according to its editor, poems dealing with death or snakes...
...All available free and—especially during a tiifte of budget tightening, which is now and forever—utterly irresistible...
...In parting she offered what to her seemed good counsel: "Why is all your stuff so Jewish...
...Change a character's name from Moshe to Mark—and have him go to church instead of shul...
...The same editor was exercised over a piece I sent her about a summer rooming house in the Catskills that brightened my boyhood...
...the present administration in Israel...
...Finally the short story came back in the company of a letter: "We return the enclosed material with regret...
...Another editor whose magazine had a much larger circulation printed the piece without provoking a black insurrection...
...She had found one last surviving "corny and silly joke," a remark one of the old stalwarts of the congregation made after the rabbi introduced mixed seating: "Men and women sitting together I don't mind so much, especially if they are husband and wife...
...Professor Nahum Glatzer of Boston University is fond of quoting a colleague who, on receiving a coveted honor, remarked, "I don't deserve this...
...I think not...
...I still don't know if I was sad or happy...
...With every new manuscript a freelancer is back at the starting line...
...And the "outstretched coat" on the grass...
...I've been admiring your work, my boy...
...God's blessing to all of you...
...my words are for sale to anyone who thinks they have value...
...After her ball point had ripped through my manuscript, it looked like a cabbage head shredded for the kraut barrel...
...The fact that I ultimately sell just about everything I write, no matter how perverse or irreverent, is sufficient evidence that editorial bias and taste are hardly monolithic...
...Judged by the avalanche of mail it set off, this was the most successful article in Esquire's history...
...Jewish periodicals have taboos sui generis...
...Several years ago I sent a query about a story in depth on a young woman whom I watched grow from a sunny-faced toddler to a fervent Jew for Jesus...
...I write when and if I please, have no literary reputation to uphold and am not devastated if a piece goes unpublished...
...This isn't at all a matter of vocabulary or content but the way I see and feel...
...In my first published piece, about an old man I knew in my childhood, I wrote, "Sinai Laib made wine good enough to sell...
...I do know, however, that subsequently I sold the story to another magazine that printed it immediately...
...I love its unpredictability...
...This was editorially transformed to, "Sinai Laib's wine was not ordinary...
...A rather parochial theme, I thought, yet Thought, a magazine published by the Socialist Party of India, reprinted it...
...The editor, an instinctive feminist well ahead of her time, wrote in her rejection note...
...I'll admit that the piece was irreverent and, come to think of it, harder on congregants and synagogue officials than rabbis...
...The mere mention of certain subjects can cause massive systolic-diastolic upheavals in some editors...
...The editor, possibly even a history major at college, changed it to "good inquisitor...
...on good terms with his Jewishness and gets a special charge from this kind of writing because it reaches him internally...
...If it's too Jewish for their taste, they throw it back for "flag-wav-ing...
...This is Edward Klein of The Sunday Times Magazine...
...Writing Jewish has been an emotional luxury in which I have not indulged without paying a price, materially and otherwise...
...And it is good for a writer's growth to move beyond whatever he has found too comfortable...
...To me it has a wrong ring...
...Manuscripts that didn't appeal to them they rejected gently, firmly and promptly...
...They edited—if at all—with a light and reluctant pencil...
...It's just that early on I made a choice that has limited my chances...
...And their checks— even if they were hardly worth the trouble of cashing—at least came on time...
...Rather, the danger is subtle, unconscious self-censorship...
...In any case, I couldn't swallow the medicine...
...A freelance writer very soon has to suppress an urge to picket editors' offices with a sign crying "Unfair...
...Another genius altered "She had gone too far with the teaching of her lesson" to "She had gone too far with her teaching the lesson," which is as far as one can go in using language with total non-meaning...
...They maintained standards and a strongly Zionist point of view, yet they were open to variety and the mildly offbeat...
...Recklessly, I persevered...
...In another instance I managed to hit two vulnerable areas at once— rabbis and humor...
...The teachers at the public elementary schools I attended were almost exclusively Gentile...
...And yet the unexpressed slogan "Jewish is beautiful" was certainly implicit in their thoughts...
...began one editor...
...Still I have gotten more satisfaction when my material has clearly and openly had Jewish substance...
...and though you had died, did you swell with pride...
...People, after all, read their newspapers at breakfast...
...Anyway, I never chose to write Jewish...
...The fall of the bialy...
...They find a way: The brook they hear babbling in the night becomes their mikvah, and they sanctify the sabbath by making love at the brookside...
...These lines alarmed at least one editor who professed to be moved by the poem as a whole...
...Earlier I have alluded to editors' fear of offending non-Jews, whom they fantasize as lying in wait and ready to pounce on even the most trivial example of tactlessness...
...Curious, I questioned an Indian student about it...
...Because sometimes I get a letter of acceptance that is a warm embrace...
...After the shabbos meal he and his wife walk together in the darkness...
...Mr___is no longer editor of__The new name of the magazine is_, and I am its editor...
...In my letter I expressed my belief that it was important for Jews to understand what swirling currents of needs, conflicts, and frustrations tore young people like her from our fold...
...This is what happened (I believe) when I began sending out a satiric short story—a kind of fantasy, as I labelled it—about an ecumenical rabbi who gets carried away by his own rhetoric and has a nervous breakdown before finding satori in the Esalen Institute...
...Are you indiscriminately accusing non-Jews of being anti-Semitic...
...PEDDLE SELLING IN THE JEWISH LITERARY MARKETPLACE YAACOV LURIA I'm not sure that I ever consciously set out to be a freelance "Jewish" writer, though I have been writing in my spare time on Jewish things for three decades...
...Every year thereafter for seven years, I sent a letter asking after the manuscript's health...
...The editor pleaded for patience and compassion and made more promises...
...And how humiliating it is to have to match wits with editors—more usually their assistants—who argue that the honor of simply being printed by them is already a rich reward...
...It doesn't make sense to provide them with ammunition against us...
...Everything I have written, even an essay on the tragic essence of Death of a Salesman and Rosen-krantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, has been in some way informed by my Jewish commitment...
...There are surprises though, however infrequent...
...A few years ago Cynthia Ozick, an accomplished writer of fiction but hardly a household name, wrote a long and emotional outcry against the universal persistence of anti-Semitism...
...The editor who at last accepted it was only willing to print it after she had excised every vestige of humor she could find...
...Even Daniel Fuchs and Jerome Weidman are represented by stories that would have been perfectly comprehensible to the lady from Dubuque...
...Other years I reported on changes in my hair color—it actually went from dark brown to mouse grey during those years...
...And he knows that it takes an heroic editor to prefer the well-crafted writing of an unknown to a piece of hazrei by a famous name...
...even saying this can be construed as offensive and portend trouble for me...
...My ideal reader is someone who is Yaacov Luria's work has previously appeared in September and November 1977 issues of moment...
...Twenty years ago, when I was still a young enough dog to learn tricks that could propel me upward from a dog's life, I brought a batch of published stories to a literary agent with access to TV producers...
...The owners of this kochalein, an elderly couple named Yankel and Shana, conformed to a shtetl tradition: Shana was an ayshis hayil, the manager and doer of major tasks...
...Did you run a store...
...That the public schools had any responsibility for supporting the self-esteem of Jewish children never occurred to immigrants who were grateful to be free of pogroms...
...If one doesn't get enough Jewish content or feeling into a piece, editors (who can fault them...
...I have had my fill of stories which portray Jewish women as beasts of burden slaving for men who are too delicate to do anything but study Talmud...
...he told me that the Hindu mourning custom has some similarity to shivah...
...This is a useful perception which has armored me against disappointment...
...The fact that he has been published in a magazine 25 times gives him no advantage with its editor...
...If there is one area of universal timidity, it shows up in an almost total avoidance of anything having to do with sex...
...it's just about where the Saturday Evening Post was forty years ago...
...Thirty years ago Jewish writers, with the exception of a few unregenerate militants like Meyer Levin, were masters of camouflage...
...Ethnic dimensions may enhance rather than diminish...
...Sometimes a piece that seems so rooted in a specific soil that it cannot survive transplanting surprises me...
...When I mentioned "indignities" earlier, I was not referring to the affront of a rejection slip...
...Worse still is the injudicious cutting that many editors do, often lopping off the limbs of a manuscript and even damaging its heart...
...Several years ago I wrote a sketch I called "The Northeast African Candidate," a spoof on the comic aspects of congregations sitting in judgment on rabbis as they try out for pulpits...
...Was the story so bad that the editor couldn't bring himself to print it...
...Excerpts of books soon to be published by the Jewish Publication Society and reprints of classic stories by Sholem Alelchem and I. L. Peretz...
...I have encountered editors with utterly unholy compulsions...
...An editor's letter of rejection epitomizes an attitude: "What should I say...
...To my disgrace—the piece had already made more voyages than Columbus—I finally connived with her butchery and even retyped the manuscript for the printer, against whom I had no grievance...
...Perhaps...
...There wasn't even a demonstration...
...Having set down my collected grievances against editors—I have been saving them for years—I still conclude that freelancing in the Jewish market is exasperating, but stimulating and challenging as well...
...But even he has had, at times, to abandon Jewish ambience, as in Henderson the Rain King, perhaps to assure the world of his universality...
...Or a letter from a reader, a lady in Brooklyn commenting on die story of my daughter's move to a windswept, remote hilltop in rural West Virginia: "I did not realize how involved I became in your beautifully related story of Toby and David until the last two paragraphs when the tears came coursing down my cheeks, under my chin—and plopped into my cottage cheese and wheat germ breakfast...
...Editors remain the last of the absolute despots—parliaments, cabinets, prime ministers, prosecutors, judges and juries all concentrated into single bodies...
...We share something intimately, we savor the closeness that occasionally emerges when a play takes off in a small off-Broadway theater...
...Eighteen years ago an editor accepted a short story with the promise that it would appear "in an early issue...
...Her advice sounded to me like a prescription for phoniness...
...How can I nebbech compete with the Israeli ambassador's latest retort to the UN or Abba Eban's eloquent dissertation at the recent Israel Labor confab...
...It may be a matter of taste...
...It remains as the most beautiful memory of my mother—and father...
...Did someone with a flair say a prayer while they lowered you there...
...The Jewish freelancer has extra-heavy duffel to lug: Rabbis bearing sermonic texts...
...The Jewish press hasn't yet caught up with the Jewish Bible...
...The trick is to become as famous as Singer first...
...Take a lesson from Paddy Chayevsky...
...It had taken me years to bring myself to write of something so intimate...
...In retrospect I salute the lady's sentiments although I think she was guilty of a fallacy—intimating that a writer who reports a given situation necessarily inherently advocates it...
...Jewish mothers, Golda Meir and Senator Scoop Jackson...
...I worried that it was becoming jaundiced in a desk drawer...
...find it too general—"not for us," as they say...
...The quick, brusque rejections that came tumbling into my letter box suggested that the subject of the piece (not its quality, which I thought no worse than my average) had poked a lancet into a sensitive area...
...Jewish periodicals, even those subsidized by large national organizations, pay writers a fraction of the going rate at commercial publications...
...Today, The New Yorker editors fasten their eager talons on third-rate Chassidic tales by I. B. Singer precisely because they are exotic and elusive...
...Cohen's resting place, I wrote, in part: "Did you mind being one of a kind...
...So even though I have landed stories in The New Yorker and Harper's and even though I dislike the parochial less-than-best sound of "Jewish writer," I continue to write from my experience as an American Jew and "move easy in harness" with the limitations of the Jewish press...
...It was the kind of piece that would trigger anxiety in editors of a Jewish magazine...
...The Galitzyaner influence in the careers of Mayors Beame and Koch...
...Or both perhaps...
...The northeast African candidate was Moses himself, who didn't get the job he was after and complained about it later to God...
...If it comes clad in the familiar apparel of Sholem Aleichem, or even Art Buchwald or Ephraim Kishon, they will invite it in...
...Nothing is as blinding to editors as reputation...
...Commentary once published a story of mine called "The Snuff Box," which was about children quarreling with one another over sitting shivah for their father...
...I could not have been older than sixteen when my mother (God knows how or why she brought herself to speak so openly one evening) confided the incident to me...
Vol. 3 • May 1978 • No. 6
