Category Archives: immigrants

We’re Still Here: Happy New Year of the Trees

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Today is my favorite Jewish holiday,  Tu B’shevat, The New Year of the Trees.

Why do I like this holiday so much? It doesn’t have a back story about war and destruction or about celebrating a so-called “victory” after taking sides. It’s simply about celebrating trees. And I have a thing for trees.

Nine years ago on Tu B’shevat, my friends and I gathered to have a 100th birthday party for the tree in my front yard, which we know was planted in 1916 when our house was moved several hundred feet by horse and winch from where it previously stood. It’s definitely an elder now and we watch it every year with loving care. We’re glad it’s still standing.

And five years ago, on Tu B’shevat, I was at the Brownsville/Matamoros border, leading writing workshops for women and teenagers who were stuck waiting in Mexico for a months or years to be called for a tiny number of daily asylum appointments. As a prompt for the workshop, we read a book called Somos Como las Nubes, (We Are Like the Clouds), a collection poems by young people about their journey north and their hopes and dreams of a better life.

These children (and the adults that accompanied them) may have thought they were like the clouds. But they were also like trees. Rooted in an unshakable hope. Then and now, I am amazed at their steadfastness and resilience, especially as I think back on the stories they told me of the violence they faced. I continue to be haunted by the pictures on their phones they showed me of loved ones covered in blood.

Friends, these are the stories of many of the people who are being rooted out, separated from their families, shackled and put on planes, or sent to places like Guantanamo Bay.

It breaks my heart. And while it doesn’t minimize the impact of the wrongs being done, I take small solace that trees are still standing.

In fact, when I start feeling anxious and fearful about the end of democracy, I think of the trees all over the world who have lived through wars, genocide, dictatorships…

How do they do it, and what lessons can I learn from them?

It’s only been in the past few years that I read that trees communicate with each other through a complex underground network of fungi to warn each other against insect attacks and other dangers. Somehow, I don’t think they discriminate about which trees to warn and which not to warn, which to welcome, and which to keep out.

Trees, like humans, need community. And tonight, I will celebrate Tu B’shevat tonight in community, where we’ll eat different kinds of tree products (fruit and nuts) and talk about the cycles of life and the seasons. But mostly what I’ll celebrate is that trees are still here–and we’re still here, which I’ve learned has become a theme song on many people’s “getting through dark times” playlists. As a total luddite when it comes to pop culture, I’m not even sure which I’m Still Here song is getting all the play. But here’s a rap I found that I like by Lathan Warlick; and here’s a Holly Near favorite with the slightly altered title of We’re Still Here.

Let’s keep on being here–warning each other against danger, and taking care of each other.

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Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

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The day I arrived in New York to help deal with my father’s medical emergency, they were repairing the sewer pipe under my parents’ house.

The onslaught of noise was deafening as workers cut through an entire square of concrete then lowered themselves into the cavernous maze of underground pipes to search for the blockage. It took them two days to find the troubled spot, which had already plagued my parents for a week: no showers, no laundry, minimal dishwashing, and a directive to flush the toilet only when absolutely necessary. And after all that noise and digging, the blockage turned out to be not in the area where they’d dug at all. They found the problem in the sad little brick-enclosed square of dirt my parents call the “front yard”–under a rosebush that had already been reduced to small rootball and a few aspiring fronds.

The next day, when my father was officially referred to hospice and people rained all that “death is a passage” stuff on us, I thought about that sewer pipe–also a passage. And I also thought about the Dylan Thomas villanelle and its repeating haunting lines: Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It isn’t that I want my father to fight against the reality of his dying. I feel grateful that he is not–and has never been–an angry or vengeful person. Even in his compromised state, while depressed about what is happening, he continues to exude kindness and express love and gratitude to those around him.

But I feel like raging. Not at the inevitability of my father’s death, but at the sadness of seeing him so frail and unable to do things for himself–the “dying” of my image of my 90+ year-old parents as timeless icons of longevity.

And I feel myself raging against the barely flickering “light” of my country. Yet this rage feels like a fruitless kick-the-floor-and-flail-my-arms temper tantrum. Pundits tell us to keep breathing and find joy. The sun is brilliant on the half-inch of freshly fallen snow today. But where is the balance between digging and doing what we can and totally abandoning ship, closing our doors and taking out whatever might constitute our modern-day “opium pipe” to lose ourselves in a stupor of disempowerment and apathy.

I’m forever grateful to Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde, who was able to channel her rage into a calm and quiet plea for mercy, focusing the whole time she spoke, toward whatever light might be left that’s still shining on who we could be–individually and collectively. And I’m wondering if that’s the kind of light that flashes before our eyes as we near the end of our lives in addition to reliving all of our life’s significant moments. I’m wondering what my father, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is thinking as he sits hooked up to his oxygen machine with the New York Times spread on his lap, trying to stay awake long enough to get through more than a paragraph and make sense of all that’s happening around him.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

While we all have to accept death, as hard as it is, we mustn’t go gentle into this dark time, or accept the numerous attacks on our Constitution as the legitimate prerogative of a new leader. I feel grateful for the many in our community who are joining together and channeling their quiet rage into action. Death may be a lonely endeavor, but raging can be a community enterprise. I’m grateful to the many who are standing up to support immigrants, transgender people, the environment, and the many other important issues that are under attack.

In fact, what keeps me finding joy is knowing I have community–both to support me during this difficult personal time and to work together on keeping the light shining.

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Submission Milestones for 2024

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Each year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve included an end-of-year submission stats post, just to shed some light on the nitty-gritty of this murky game. Here’s what happened for me in 2024.

POETRY:

20 Journals/Anthologies accepted 34 poems. I also got 91 poetry rejections.

Of the 34 poems accepted, 7 were taken on the very first go-round; 8 poems were previously rejected 1-3 times; 7 poems were rejected 4-7 times; 4 were rejected 9-12 times; 3 were rejected 15-20 times, and 1 had been previously rejected 31 times! (The other 4 poems were previously published, so I didn’t track that stat.) This surprised me, as usually my poems circulate more before someone picks them up. I’m wondering if I might be getting better at selecting poems I send out and matching them to journals.

Another thing of note is that of the 20 journals that accepted my work, 8 of them had previously published something of mine in the past, so I may have been more of a known quantity. But this is a great point for anyone playing the submission game. Establishing relationships with journals and editors who like your work can be extremely gratifying and also help soften the rejections from some of the more competitive journals on your reach list. And as long as the journals you’re published in put out a good quality product, who cares that they’re not the creme de la creme in the journal world. Your work is still getting read and appreciated!

FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION:

My fiction stats are a bit more depressing. I offered stories and essays to 23 journals, and only 1 got accepted: an op-ed in my local newspaper.

Some analysis on this:

–Stories and essays are often harder to publish because they take up more room in a publication. (5-10 pages vs. a 1-2 page poem).

–Most of my better stories were already published in my collection, IMMIGRANTS, so I’ve been only circulating a few newer ones. Before the book was published I did manage to publish around half of the stories it contained in various places, but it was slow going.

–I still tend to feel overall more confident in my fiction, and therefore I submitted  to a greater number of “reach journals.”

AWARDS:

I’m personally very mixed on the “awards/contest” game for books because it seems like mostly a way of collecting a lot of exorbitant entry fees just to say your book won an award, but my publisher and I did submit to a couple of the more known ones. I was pleased to get a finalist designation (first runner up short-story and all category short-list) for the Eric Hoffer Awards, and a finalist designation in the short story category for the Independent Authors Network.

I also received two Pushcart Prize and two Best-of-the-Net nominations from various journal editors.

And I did not win a few other notable things, like an IPPY Award.

LARGER PROJECTS:

It was a thrill to have my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, which drew heavily on my witnessing trips to the border and the children’s detention center in Homestead, FL, come out in early 2024. With the upcoming administration’s about to take over and put their extreme deportation plans in gear, this book feels even more relevant right now, and I’m continuing to look for ways to publicize it.

I did not spend a lot of time circulating my music memoir or any of my novels. But I did receive three rejections (aka non-responses) from agents, and one non-response from a small press where I sent one of my older kid-lit novels.) So this might be an area ripe for New Year’s resolutions in 2025.

Nevertheless, I easily crossed the 100-rejection threshold (91 poetry rejections, 22 fiction/CNF rejections, and 4 agent/small press rejections) for a grand total of 117!

Onward to 2025!

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Holding the Stories of Others

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In 2014, I visited the Galilee, and stayed with one of three Jewish families in the Druze village of Peki’in. They were an older couple, Holocaust survivors from the Netherlands, and they lived right next door to the carob tree that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Jewish mystical book, the Kabbalah, supposedly subsisted on for 13 years when he fled the Romans and had to hide out in a cave.

In addition to visiting the tree, we visited a “national park” nearby, which was mostly filled with scrubby desert flora. But in the middle of the area sat an old stone church, and in front of the church sat an old man wearing a keffiyeh. Our host asked the man why he was there and the man told us his story. He had been 11 years old in 1948 when the Israeli soldiers came into his village. They told his mother she had to leave–for just a couple of weeks, they said. They needed to do some work and then it would be fine to return. They could leave most of their things–no need to take the donkey.

When they returned, the entire village had been razed. Only the church was left standing. Later the government turned the area into a national park, ironically charging admission for this man to enter his own village, where he sat day after day on a one-person vigil to commemorate what had happened to his home.

Later that night, our host told his story. He’d been a “hidden child,” sheltered by a Christian family during the war. But the trauma of being left by his parents (who ended up killed in the death camps) had never fully subsided.

Last night I went to hear a reading and talk from the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who, in response to a question about the value of writing poems at times of such death and devastation, said that as poets we need to hang on to the stories–and we have a responsibility to tell them.

Mosab Abu Toha’s work does just that. He portrays Gaza through the lens of the people that live there. I think this is one of the reasons that poet Audre Lorde said, Poetry is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, the quote that begins Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise.

When I went to the border in early 2020, I heard many stories from people that kept me awake at night, and kept me crying for days and weeks after I returned. I wrote poems about some of these stories; and I also wrote poems about the man in front of the Church in the Galilee and our Holocaust survivor host in Peki’in. But I continue to worry that capturing these stories in poems is not enough. For weeks, months, and even now, all of us on the border trip have continued to feel the weight of these stories. How can we keep ourselves healthy and lean into joy without discounting or ignoring the moral imperative for action that these stories should lead us to?

And how do we untangle the knots when stories contradict each other? How can we move into a space that rejects the idea of right and wrong, a space that has no sides?

My friend and compañera on the border trip carried this sign everywhere she went.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

May it be so. B’aruch Ha’Shem. Inshallah.

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Why I Write About Immigrants

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When I was a child in New York City, I was one of the few kids who wasn’t an immigrant or a child of immigrants. I remember being awed when I’d visit my friends in their homes and listen to them speaking animatedly in another language–Spanish, or Chinese, or Greek–before switching back to me and talking in just as fluent English. I felt envious and ripped off that my family couldn’t speak any other languages.

In elementary school, nearly every year our teacher would give us a homework assignment to describe the country we, or our parents, or grandparents had come from, and then present that to the class so everyone could learn about it. “You come from many different countries,” my parents would tell me, as they ticked off the different areas on the map that my great grandparents (and sometimes great-great grandparents) had lived before sailing to Ellis Island: Lithuania, Germany, Holland, Russia, the Ukraine, Poland…

This was an odd assignment for me because I felt no connection to any of these places. We had no legacy of language. My parents didn’t know Yiddish. Even my grandparents–all of whom were born here–knew very little. I felt so American, so boring, and sad that I had absolutely nothing for “Show and Tell”

But the point isn’t to complain about my experience as much to reflect back on an instance when being an immigrant was celebrated. And I did not go to a “lefty commie school.” This was a regular public school in New York City where we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning, and learned about how “great” America was. And part of what made it “great,” we learned, was immigrants. New York was a “melting pot.”

I currently prefer the term salad bowl, a metaphor that allows us to acknowledge everyone’s individual culture rather than envisioning us all melting into some unidentifiable assimilated conglomeration. However, neither image does the kind of harm as the recent outrageous lies about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the overall vilification of immigrants put out by MAGA Republicans–who are calling for a large-scale deportation of not only undocumented residents, but also those who have obtained a legal path to be in this country.

Had this been carried out when I was a kid, it would have included nearly everyone in my class.

When I wrote my collection of short stories, I wanted to emphasize how immigrants are everywhere, just as they were everywhere in my childhood. Some of my stories are overtly political, drawing on my experiences as an activist, but most of them aren’t. They’re simply tapestries woven with real people–some of whom simply weren’t born in the U.S. I write about humans in situations with issues. That’s what’s always grabbed me in fiction–the ways we struggle to love the world, each other, and ourselves.

So I guess that’s my “show-and-tell”–only 50 years late. Hoping we can get a little of that immigrant love back. All of us belong in the salad.

 

Lies, lies, lies

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taylorandayumi, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

When my partner, Shel, and I were first dating forty-plus years ago, we were enamored with a string of inexpensive and delicious Indian restaurants that spanned the entire block of East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village in Manhattan.

One day Shel noticed that the printing for all the restaurant menus was exactly the same. “Have you ever been around the corner on East 5th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A?” I asked him. When he told me he hadn’t, I said, “There’s a whole string of print shops there that print the menus for the Indian restaurants.”

“Oh, that’s odd,” he said. And I burst out laughing, amazed that he believed my jokey little lie.

True confession: I have “a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies.” It’s one of the innate qualities John Gardner writes about in On Becoming a Novelist that I value in myself as a fiction writer. My mind is always trying to churn up believable story lines. That’s why I love coming up with pretexts when planning surprise parties for other people, even though, as an introvert, I hate surprise parties when the surprise is on me.

My lies have generally been harmless, safely ensconced in their fictional blankets, or quickly revealed as untruths, once I’ve made the joke or unveiled the surprise. But I also need to own up to the “white lies” I’ve told–or might tell –n situations when full honesty might be more hurtful to the person I’m talking to, and, yes, to the lies I told as a teenager in order to do things my parents would have never let me do. While I’m not necessarily proud of having told those falsehoods, I do admit that I enjoyed making up the details, even then.

And some lies–like the recent story about immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets, are NOT harmless, even as most of us might laugh at such incredulity, I can’t help but think of the propaganda Hitler and the Nazis disseminated about Jews, way before the Holocaust started. In writings, films, newspaper articles, political cartoons, Jews were consistently portrayed as subhuman creatures. As early as 1919, Hitler said, “the ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”  At that time, when Jews in Germany were largely secular and assimilated into German society, it might have been easy to brush off that comment as the ravings of a racist–but look what happened!

Trump has made deporting undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his platform. And in the debate last night, he kept hammering the falsehood that all these immigrants were criminals, when in fact, the number of crimes committed by immigrants in this country is far lower than the number of crimes committed by native born Americans. Then he drove in more nails by repeating the crazy message about immigrants eating cats. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but it’s also a way of subtle brainwashing, depicting these people as so different from ourselves that we can no longer feel empathy for them or connect human-to-human.

Unfortunately, there will be people who believe Trump’s lies. And there may not be not be anyone around who can own up to the falsehood and quickly reorient them to the truth. As a Jew, an immigrant justice activist, and a writer, this has led me to contemplate my own love of lies. Have they all been harmless? Have I lied “ethically” and is there such a thing as “lying ethically?” Have I told the truth, even during the times I twisted or exaggerated “facts” to put the frosting on a good story? I’ve always felt, like author Madeleine L’Engle, that truth and fact are not always the same thing, something Shel and I disagree on, since he’s always correcting my stories with more accurate numerical and geographical detail–which I find highly annoying.

When we debriefed the Indian restaurant/print shop story, I told Shel I was surprised he could be so gullible. In response, he said, “I had no reason why I shouldn’t trust you.” It was a sobering moment. As writers, we do ask for our readers’ trust. There’s a truth nestled inside whatever fiction we might spew that we want our audience to believe and resonate with. That means we have a responsibility not to tell lies that have the potential to harm, no matter how innocuous or ridiculous they might appear on the surface, or how much we might enjoy telling them.

 

 

Tuning In/Tuning Out

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I have always claimed, only half in jest, that tuning out was my superpower.

Too much nagging or irrelevant banter by members of my family or in social situations. No problem. I nod my head and hopefully make the appropriate noises while the rest of my brain lounges in some woodsy retreat cabin of my imagination.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “tuning out” this week as I recover from a minor concussion.  For several days, my poor brain just refused to tune out anything, making it impossible to look out a bright window, or be in a space with too many clashing colors or in front of a screen with its array of flashing videos and words, words, words against the bright. blue light.

And whenever I tried to do too many of these things, my brain went haywire, and I had to spend the next hour in a dark room with the shades drawn. If only I could have had one of those float tanks!

But now that I’m–thankfully–about 80% recovered, and preparing for my book launch of Here in Sanctuary–Whirling this Sunday, I’m also thinking about tuning in.

When I went to the border in 2020 I was determined not to fall into the distant malaise I often feel when the news becomes too overwhelming. While I know that there’s just so much sorrow one can handle, I knew that my role was to tune in as much as possible–so I could feel the joy of the teenager bounding across the bridge waving his white paper. I made it! he exclaimed. I got asylum! 

He was reportedly the only person in weeks that people had heard about who  received a positive outcome form the infamous tent courts. And as witnesses gathered around to offer him a place to stay for the night and assistance to get to his brother in Florida, he told us the key to his “success.” I told them the gangs had killed my entire family. Other than my brother, I have no one.

How to fathom the depths of that?

How to comfort the woman in the writing workshop sobbing over the picture she drew of her missing child, or the beefy young father folding into his arms in tears as he recounted his kidnapping together with his seven-year-old daughter. She told me she was hungry, and I had no food to give her. I couldn’t take care of her.

Don’t Look Away! the sign read on the American side of the border, where witnesses stood every day, reminding us of our responsibility not to tune out.

As a writer, I’ve tried to take that responsibility seriously, attempting as best as I can to capture the joy, the sorrow, and the emotional complexity of salient moments, both in my work as an immigrant justice activist and every other aspect of my life. It’s a way of extending the witnessing work I did on the border, and letting others live that experience, or any other experience I feel compelled to share, with as close a lens as possible.

Yet at the same time, I recognize that to be effective in whatever we feel compelled to do, we need to take time to take care of ourselves, allowing our brains to rest in the dark room, or the land of the imagination, or whatever other equivalent a person might have in order to take a deep breath, regroup, and press on.

Hope to see some of you on Sunday! I’ll be reading poems that hold the joy as well as the sorrow.

 

 

Silver Linings in a Snowstorm

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Yesterday I was supposed to have my book launch reading for Immigrants at the Odyssey Bookshop, but the weather gods had other ideas. The forecast was for snow, sleet, and/or freezing rain starting in the late afternoon and continuing all the way into this morning. While accumulations were not expected to be significant, the roads were expected to be slippery.

While I’m an admitted snowphobe when it comes to driving, I knew I’d likely be able to make it to the bookstore, which is only 5 minutes away from my house. But I also knew that others who were planning to come were driving much longer distances. I didn’t want to ask people to risk their safety. And I didn’t want to risk a low turnout. Even though I’d already bought the snacks and the ingredients for brownie-making, I decided it would be best to postpone.

I don’t know if it’s from being born under the sign of Gemini, but communication has always been huge value for me. My pet peeve is when people don’t return my calls or texts, and it infuriates me when I’m not communicated information I need. So, even though the bookstore was willing to post on social media and notify the people who’d actually signed up to attend the event, I wanted to make sure that people who were thinking about coming, or might have been planning to come and not signed up, didn’t make an unnecessary drive through the slush or ice only to find out the event had been cancelled.

This meant a whole lot of texting, emailing, FB messaging, social media posts, etc. And it meant I ended up connecting with people I hadn’t spoken to directly, which felt really lovely. While my core identity is introvert, I definitely have an extroverted side, and all that communication gave me a surge of energy that kept me going and focused on the task. I was so touched by how many people answered my messages in a warm and personal way who thanked me for making a call on the side of safety. And I was surprised by the number of  people who said they had planned to come, or that they couldn’t have come tonight but they could come on the new date. It felt like such an overwhelming bubble of support from my community, this big universal love…

Between all this, I was also using that surge of energy to attend to political issues involving real immigrants, working with my immigration justice affinity group on a short emergency mailing to drive calls to Congress against the potential Senate deal that would trade away current protections and due process for people at the border seeking asylum and expand deportation of people who are already here, all in exchange for more military weapons for the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. You can read more about that here.

So, I guess there are silver linings in a snowstorm–including the beautiful scenery when I woke up on Wednesday morning.

And, I was told by one friend that the new date February 7, has much better numerology–#8, a number which supposedly resonates with self-confidence, inner strength, and inner wisdom, among other things. I don’t know very much about numerology, but I’ll take it.

Hope to see some of you local people at the Odyssey Bookshop on February 7.