Carol and I saw a movie the other night called “Waitress.” It’s a charming fairy-tale for adults about a Cinderella with a heaven-sent talent for making pies, who is trapped in a terrible marriage to a lout. The pretty waitress falls for her handsome OB-GYN, they have an affair, the baby gets born, the lout gets his comeuppance, and all (except the lout) live happily ever after.

But this isn’t a movie review. It’s about the lout.

The lout, whose name is Earl, appears unshaven and grubby-looking in every scene. He is said to work in a bank but I found it hard to imagine him in any bank job beside janitor. He mistreats the waitress heroine at every opportunity. He tells her again and again that she is his property. He won’t let her compete in a pie-making contest which — at the end of the movie, after she has de-louted herself — she of course wins. His sexual advances are cringingly clumsy, and indeed he only impregnates her because one night she gets drunk and careless. When he learns he is to be a father, he tells her how he hears some women get to loving their babies more than their husbands. He forces her to promise not to do that to him.

Earl never is redeemed, but there is a touching scene near the end where he falls to his knees in tears and clutches her pregnant belly, telling her how much he loves her. He looks helpless, pathetic and vulnerable. You believe him.

Now, I don’t treat my wife as property. Heavens. I’ve never raised a hand to her either. But I’ve certainly yelled at her from time to time. I noodge her sometimes just for the fun of it. I can be mean; at my worst I can be a bully.

Whenever Earl was on the screen, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I kept putting myself in his place. I kept thinking of all the bad things I’ve said and done to my long-suffering wife in the many years we’ve been together.

After the movie, I said some of this to her. I think she was a little surprised at the degree to which Earl had gotten under my skin. Carol, I said, thinking as much of his neediness as his abusiveness, there’s a little Earl in all us guys.

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Last week’s posting on immigration stirred up the expected fuss. Many said right on, some said wrong on. I expected people who live near the Mexican border to be the most negative, and some were:

– Rick Abeles in Santa Fe NM: “Illegal immigrants (let’s not make it sound nicer by saying undocumented workers) are a major problem here. Much of our crime is directly attributable to these folks. Granted, there are many hard working illegals and they are very important to our economy. Interestingly the strongest objectors to the illegals are the local Hispanics who have been here for generations. They feel, with some justification. that the Anglos came and took over their land and jobs and they have been oppressed from above, and now the illegals are taking their remaining jobs and oppressing them from below. This is not a perspective you would get in Chicago, New York or Washington DC.”

– Jack Foster in Santa Barbara CA: “You say: Around here at least immigrants work. Around here, they do too. But we’re not talking about [all] immigrants. We’re talking about illegal immigrants. And around here, illegal immigrants not only work hard and care for their families, but many also beg on the streets, send 58% of the money they make back to Mexico, overwhelm and exacerbate our educational system, and crowd emergency rooms to such a degree that two years ago I had to wait on a gurney for seven hours before a doctor could check my exploding gall bladder. And, around here, at least, I encounter homeless people almost every day with Spanish accents. … You disparage those who equate risking one’s life ‘to sneak across the Rio Grande,’ … with a crime like burglary, murder, or rape. I don’t equate it thus, but I do think it is a crime and should not be condoned … The illegal immigrants broke the law. To reward them for doing so is opening the door to anarchy.”

– Suzi Brozman in a similar vein (although in Atlanta, not along a border): “When my great grandparents trudged off their leaky boat, there was not government holding out wads of cash and promises of entitlements. They expected to work for everything they got. They didn’t go to hospitals expecting someone else’s tax money to pay their bills while many of those born here couldn’t afford to buy health insurance (a separate discussion). They didn’t expect food stamps or aid for dependent children or subsidized housing. They made their own way. And yes, they came legally, and the expected to obey the laws of their chosen country. Today’s illegal immigrants are breaking a law by their very presence. You can debate the wisdom or justice of that law, but the fact is that it does exist and what are we if not a nation of laws?”

Some focused on post-9/11 national security:

– Joel Whitaker in Rockville MD: “I’m opposed to open borders. In today’s world we need to know who’s here. I’m opposed to “guest workers.” I think we should assume that anyone who comes to work here will stay here. I agree with union leaders who say guest workers are simply a way to provide a pool of exploitable people who will work in substandard conditions for substandard wages. Give ‘em green cards. … I’m in favor of some sort of national ID card system, probably based on driver’s licenses. (You get your green card, go to MVA and get a license — which expires when your green card expires.) I’m in favor of local police detaining for ICE illegal immigrants, who are detected in the course of ordinary police activity, such as for-cause traffic stops. And I think the Feds should encourage this … by tieing Federal funding to passage of a statute requiring local police to hold and detain illegals for ICE.”

But Dan Alemar, speaking from personal experience, countered: “Most immigrants come to a new country with the idea they will return to where they came from. They will come and earn enough money to last a lifetime. What usually happens though is that life intervenes. They meet a person who becomes husband or wife. They have children. The children may speak the language of the home country, but they are not socialized in the customs. They become Americans with a very different take on life. If their parents try to return to the home country the kids don’t want to go. It was never their experience and they are truly foreigners in the land their parents call home.

“In studies of immigrants, it was found that the person living away from their country returns a portion of their salary to the home country. It ends with the death of the recipient or the death of the individual. I remember my father (Puerto Rican) going home and buying a home for my grandmother. He also paid the mortgage for my grandmother for many years. He sent her money each week to make sure that she had enough to eat. Even though Puerto Ricans are American citizens, their behavior is the same as any other [immigrant] group. My father always dreamed of building a shack on the beach and living out his days there. He just got too comfortable and had a wife who said no way.”

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. My old high school buddy Bill Roth asked me to record a version of “Give me your tired your poor” for his radio program. It was to have been broadcast this afternoon on KRML-AM but, when I tuned in, Bill was reading something by Anne Morrow Lindbergh instead. I’ve attached the MP3 file for your listening pleasure, or you can go to www.krmlradio.com or tune in 1410 AM in the Monterey-Carmel CA area and hope to catch it. Even if you miss it, you’ll still hear some great jazz.

P.P.S. “To Love Mercy” just hit 107,966 on Amazon, the lowest (i.e. best) ranking in months. I don’t know what’s cooking but who cares? Help a starving author lower his Amazon ranking! Buy a book now at http://www.amazon.com/Love-Mercy-Frank-S-Joseph/dp/0974478539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8044709-7112717?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180475415&sr=8-1

On the base of the Statue of Liberty is inscribed “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus. I had to Google for the title of the poem, but I can still recite (and even sing) the words by heart:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

My grandfather Nathan Joseph and my grandmother Martha Salkin Joseph were among the tempest-tost who landed beside the golden door; as were my great-grandparents Sam Baum and Amalia Neuberger Baum, and Adolph Weber and Fannie Kahn Weber. I daresay, Gentle Reader, that most of you are similarly descended from immigrants, and so are most of the solons in Congress now debating the niceties of 900-mile fences along the Mexican border. (But not the Canadian border. Hmm.)

Before these guys take a chisel to Miss Liberty, shut down Ellis Island and run Lou Dobbs for President, they ought to consider a thing or two.

• Around here at least, immigrants work. I was in a Chipotle a few weeks ago and at 11:30 a.m. a flood of men streamed in wearing dirty work clothes and hard hats, every single one speaking Spanish. It seems like every guy (or gal) I see working construction, pulling weeds, running power mowers, caring for babies, etc. etc., speaks Spanish. But when’s the last time you encountered a homeless person with a Spanish accent?

• Around here at least, immigrants display family values. Sandra Perez — who came to this country illegally from Guatemala at age 20, and rose from taking care of the infants Alex Baldinger and Sam Joseph to becoming customer service manager of Key Communications Group Inc. and, now, administrator of a 1,500-soul Catholic church in Silver Spring (and an American citizen) — always sent Mom and Dad a handsome portion of a not excessively handsome salary. Gogi Sethi, who shared a house with us for several years while he was driving a D.C. cab, brought his Mom and Dad over from India to stay with us for three months. When you drive past those churches with the signs in English and Korean — and it’s not your friends who are attending regularly — don’t you wonder who is?

• Around here at least, it mostly isn’t immigrants who are committing the crimes. Think hard now: When was the last time someone with an accent stuck you up?

When Nate, Martha, Sam, Malchen, Adolph and Fannie stepped off the boat, there was no such thing in America as an “illegal” immigrant. Illegality was introduced in 1921 with the first immigrant quotas, and toughened in 1924 in response to a wave of post-WWI immigration from southern and eastern Europe. That deck was stacked; the quotas were based on the U.S. population makeup in the 1890 census, which had the effect of keeping out certain “undesirables” such as Italians. Some 200,000 Italians a year immigrated to the U.S. after 1890; but the 1924 quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000. (My forebears would have been screwed, blued and tattooed: Russia 2,248, Hungary 473, Lithuania 344, Latvia 144.)

But now, listen to those howls against “amnesty” — as if risking your life to sneak across the Rio Grande, or sail here on a leaky boat, just to escape poverty and hopelessness and persecution at home, and hope for a job planting petunias, were a “crime” like burglary, murder, rape or, er, using your public corporation for a personal piggy-bank.

Immigration built this country; our earlier open-immigration policies made us who we are today, and all of us benefit from immigration that occurred generations ago. But while those immigrants of yore were streaming in, they did indeed trigger the same kinds of social strains that immigrants are triggering today — different looks, dress, worship and languages (and, let it be noted, politics; some of those immigrants of my forebears’ generations were political agitators, trade unionists, Socialists and Reds, not our kind of people dontcha know).

And yes, today’s economy doesn’t offer the wealth of low-paid factory jobs and needle-trade piecework that greeted our forebears. (But we do have a lot of buildings that need building and petunias that need planting, not to mention babies that need taking care of.)

So OK, immigration is a hard pill to swallow. But I know I’m personally better off because Nate, Martha, Sam, Malchen, Adolph and Fannie got in; and I also know the country is better off because of the accomplishments of these particular individuals and their descendants. I’ll bet most of you could tell a similar story. I’ll bet our Representatives and Senators could too. Maybe even Lou Dobbs could.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Gore-Obama? Edwards-Obama? Giuliani-Obama for God’s sake? Should I even be asking these questions? Well, should I?

Last time I reported on enlisting members of my writing group to help me brainstorm the plot of my current novel, working title To Walk Humbly. I scheduled three sessions, but one was all it took.

Linda Morefield, bless her soul, played sounding board for an hour or so, after which I drove to the Two Amys, ordered a pizza, and wrote out a yellow-pad draft of the storyline of the entire novel. Next day I wrote two more longhand pages of close-in plotting for the chapter at hand, then wrote two-thirds of that actual chapter. I finished writing said chapter the following day.

The story in To Walk Humbly spans from September 1952, when my character Steve starts high school, to September 1955, the lynching and funeral of Emmett Till. That’s far more complex than the story in my first novel To Love Mercy, which took place over 5 1/2 days. Although I now can see the “skeleton” of the new novel, I still don’t know what precisely occurs at each step along the way. So each day before I write actual fiction, I write a “plot journal” in which I figure out what is about to happen and who will do what to whom.

Every writer hears the advice to write every day without fail. It’s advice I’ve ignored in the past, to my great regret, but I’m trying to adhere to it now. Doing so has required me to stop going to the gym first thing, a habit that took years to form and one I relinquish with great regret. But I want badly to get this novel written, and I believe that won’t happen unless I stick my butt in the chair and keep it there.

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After I ate the pizza, I went on the radio. Kathy Troutman, proprietor of The Resume Place and herself author of the Ben Franklin Award-winning Ten Steps to a Federal Job, had invited me on short notice to appear on her Federal News Radio show to talk about my late-in-life literary career. (Kathy is a pal from my Federal Personnel Guide days.) The interview with Kathy and Amy Morris went great, and you can hear it at http://federalnewsradio.com/emedia/76762.wma. It runs less than 10 minutes.

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Next afternoon I visited Borders at White Flint Mall on a rumor, spread by David Stewart of my writing group, that there were copies of To Love Mercy on their “Hot Fiction” table. When I got to Borders, there was no “Hot Fiction” table, but there were three by God copies of To Love Mercy on the shelves.

I found a bookseller and asked if she’d like me to autograph them: She said sure. I asked, How about a signing too? She said, Let me call a manager over. Five minutes later, the manager had pretty much bought in. He and I are to talk this coming week and set a date and time, but I’m thinking: Hmm, that was easy.

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Finally, finishing a busy week, I spoke yesterday at the CityLit Festival in Baltimore, on a panel with two really impressive authors — Kwame Alexander, author of Crush, perhaps the first and only collection of young-adult poems ever written, and John Green, author of An Abundance of Katherines, his second young-adult novel. I’ve known Kwame off and on for six or seven years, but yesterday was the first time I’d been exposed to his poetry. I am here to tell you it is delightful, capturing the essence of teen love in all its messiness. As for Green, he read a passage about the “19 Katherines” who’d dumped his protagonist — starting at age 8. It simply cracked me up. It was an honor and a pleasure to be on this panel with these guys. But …

… there were only about seven people in the audience and half of them were librarians. (CityLit took place inside the glorious Enoch Pratt Free Library just north of downtown Baltimore.) The rest of the day, I sat behind a table flogging books and no one came by; the joint was, like, empty. I sold precisely two books, and one of those was to my fellow panelist John Green. (Kwame has already read To Love Mercy so I couldn’t even sell him a copy.) Let’s see, gross revenues $29.90 for books, less gas, less parking, less lunch, less 85 miles’ wear and tear on the car, less the $20 I spent on other people’s books, less the $10 for a great T-shirt, leaves, um … forget it. If you’re thinking of writing novels for money, find some other way than this to do it.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Call to all in the Chicago area … I’m trying to set up another visit in fall. If you attended Hyde Park High in the middle ’50s, I want to talk to you; if you know someone else who did, please put me in touch with that person. If you know a library, bookstore, book club, church or synagogue where I might sign or speak (or both), please get in touch. Your help, as always, is gratefully appreciated.

I’m great at beginnings and pretty good at endings. It’s the middles that give me problems.

This is a pretty serious issue if you’re a novelist.

Heretofore, I’ve just made it up as I went along. By incredible good luck, this technique worked in the writing of To Love Mercy, my first novel. But I’ve written some 200 pages of a second novel the same way and I view this project as a hopeless mess. Somewhere around P. 100, I lost my way. I’m stumped as to how to save this work-in-progress.

Hopefully I’m on to bigger and better things. I’ve written three chapters (plus two half-chapters) of To Walk Humbly, the second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy.” This time I’ve vowed to figure things out ahead of time. But I’m not doing very well at it. The hardest thing, for me at least, is to stare at a screen and make stuff up.

I was bemoaning this issue to Patrick Grace, my publisher, and he volunteered to brainstorm it with me. The moment he suggested it, I knew he was onto something. Brainstorming is how my mind works. As uncreative as I am when locked in a room by myself, I’m just the opposite when engaged face-to-face with another person.

Patrick is in Huntington WV, a five- or six-hour drive from where I live. But members of the Holey Roaders, my stellar writing group, are nearby. Gingerly, I contacted three who I feel are (a) in tune with what I’m trying to write and (b) available during the day on weekdays. I vowed to return the favor — or any other favor for that matter. I promised lunch, dinner, whatever. That wasn’t necessary. All three immediately saw the potential of the idea, not only for helping give me a jump-start but also to jump-start their own creativity.

This feels a little like cheating — “Playing tennis with the net down,” as Robert Frost immortally said about non-rhymed poetry. I’ve never heard of other writers doing it (I’d be interested if any of you have an experience to share along these lines).

But writers are expedient people. For example, one celebrated author (name escapes me) recently wrote about dictating his novels into the computer using Dragon Naturally Speaking. (I use Dragon myself, for note-taking while reading microfilm, though I haven’t tried it for creating.)

If he can dictate, I can brainstorm. Whatever works, right?

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Fruits of the Obscure Yiddish Word Challenge:

Sid Goldstein: “The pages of To Love Mercy were the first place I ever saw the word shocher in written form. I had heard it within the Jewish community in Alabama in the 1964-65 time frame. The way I heard it pronounced, I thought the word might have been spelled ’shucka’ or ’shucha.’ I was led to believe it meant ‘colored;’ at least, it was used the same way. I did not hear the term ‘black’ applied to African-Americans until around 1968, with the following exception:

“On the Birmingham police beat, it came to my attention that criminal pedigrees were organized into four categories: white males, black males, white females, and black females. (Don’t ask me about ‘other,’ because I don’t remember that coming up.) I recall that the terms ‘black male’ and ‘black female’ were jarring to me at the time, because, as I say,
African-Americans (then known to themselves and others as Negroes) did not start calling themselves ‘black’ until several years later.

“[On another topic], there may be a gender issue in your latest message. Although I am neither a Yiddish nor Hebrew scholar, it is my understanding that aleva sholom means: ‘May he rest in peace.’ In remembering a grandmother, as opposed to a grandfather, one would, I think, say: Ahava sholom.”

Beth Rubin: “I remember ricious (for anti-Semitic). Haven’t heard it since I left home in the ’60s.

“Anecdote: My ‘aristocratic’ grandmother on my dad’s side didn’t readily admit to being Jewish. Her husband Is (Isadore, my grandfather) had a marvelous sense of humor and loved to tease her. In the 1930s (as the story goes), they were first in line for a table at Ruby Foo’s in New York. A diner walked up to my grandfather, dressed in a tux, and asked, ‘How long for a table?’ My grandfather turned to my grandmother, and in a voice loud enough for Brooklyn to hear, said, ‘See, you always tell me I’m too Jewish, and this man took me for a Chinaman.’

“I use Yiddish frequently in my writing. Ain’t nothin’ like it to spice up dialogue.”

Colette Seymann: “My grandfather referred to my daughter as the knuble pronounced ‘k-nuble’ … because she had such a round head as a baby. A few years ago, I heard someone use the word knadle which means a round dumpling, like a matza ball. After looking up knuble, I found the word to mean a head of garlic. My grandfather is no longer around to ask the question, but even if he was I don’t think I would out of respect.”

Gary Goodman: “Shocharim is something I heard spoken by only one person in my life (my uncle). I’m about 99.99% certain that you didn’t hear a comment from me about your usage of its singular in To Love Mercy. But, having grown up just a few years behind you, I can truly relate to what you wrote in your book reference to the ’s’ word (or words) from your zayde. Good Luck at City Lit!!”

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. And speaking of the CityLit street festival, it’s NEXT SATURDAY (May 12) inside and outside of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Cathedral and Mulberry Streets, Baltimore. I’ll be signing books all day, and I’m on a panel of young-adult writers from 1-3. CityLit features literary stars including Connie Briscoe (”Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50″), Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher (”Supreme Discomfort,” the new Clarence Thomas biography), Jabari Asim (”The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why”). Please come if you can. Check out the full program at www.citylitproject.org/index.php?q=node/167

When Nate, the grandfather in my novel To Love Mercy, uses the terms shocher and shvartze to refer to African-Americans, the grandson Steve thinks to himself:

Sometimes Grandpa talks those words, I don’t know them, but they’re bad words or maybe not bad but you’ve got to say them in Yiddish not English. I don’t know if that makes them bad. But it might.

I heard Grandpa say one of them before. Not the other. I never heard the other. They probably both mean the same. I think I know what the one means. Shvartze.

Negroes?

He says Yeah Negroes except he says it like knee-grows. What do they teach you in school anyway?

This passage accurately reflects my own reaction when my grandfather, Nathan Joseph (the model for the character “Nate”) used the word shocher. I never heard anyone else utter this word except him. Nevertheless, I used it in my novel. I mean, it’s my novel, right?

Following publication, though, two intrepid correspondents (one was Rick Abeles, who’s married to my cousin Kathy Koretz, and the other I don’t remember — might have been Gary Goodman) cleared things up. They said shocher is Hebrew, not Yiddish, and it means “black.”

This morning Wife Carol and I were having breakfast chit-chat and for some reason the word ricious popped into my mind. This is a word my mother Marjorie-Lee and her mother (my grandmother) Leona Weber Baum, aleva sholom, used as an adjective to mean “anti-semitic.” They pronounced it “RISH-us.” My great-aunts The Weber Gals — Hattie, Carrie and Jo — all used it too. But I never heard anyone else use it.

I always thought it was spelled “ricious” but actually I have no idea. I always assumed it was Yiddish too but actually I have no idea. It doesn’t sound like Yiddish. Wife Carol (who was born into the Russian Orthodox faith) said it sounds to her like black slang.

(Black slang is another fascinating topic. Late in To Love Mercy, the character Sass uses the word dicty, meaning stuck-up. The word hincty means approximately the same thing. I had lots of fun Googling around for definitions and derivations before settling on dicty, which was the word lodged in my own personal memory bank.)

So … are you ready for the Obscure Yiddish Word Challenge*?

Send me your nominations, along with definitions and anecdotes as best you remember them from those long-ago family dinners. I’ll share what’s shareable next time.

*Oh, and … black slang would be cool too.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. There’s a great street celebration in Baltimore Saturday, May 12, and I’m part of it. The CityLit Festival features literary stars like Connie Briscoe (Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50), Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher (Supreme Discomfort, the new Clarence Thomas biography), Jabari Asim (The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why) … and li’l old me. I’m on a panel, “Peers, Sneers, and Cheers: Young Adult Writers,” from 1-3. I’ll also be at a table signing copies of To Love Mercy throughout the day. It’s 10-5 Saturday, May 12, in front of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Cathedral and Mulberry Streets. Check out the full program at www.citylitproject.org/index.php?q=node/167