I’ve called this blog Chanukah and Christmas because the festivals are approaching, both of them. Perhaps as a reaction to Candlesticks and its endless focus on both religions, I have relished being free-thinking, and secular in the weeks since it ended.
So much happening, I think. I feel the need to do an end of year reckoning.
My reckonings seem bland and harmless compared to the reckonings the rest of the world needs to be making. Against the background of multi-millionaire dominated world football, the world is a threatening place, with economic and social issues to the fore here, and every kind of conflict flickering or burning in so many other places in the world. We donate more to foodbanks at the present time than ever before. People need foodbanks. People need so much more than foodbanks. This is horrible.
My sisters and friends in Israel are devastated at the outcome of the recent elections there. No-one I know (or would want to know) has a good word to say about the Jewish supremacist parties that seem to be claiming their place in government. Haaretz, which we read online, is despairing. Or maybe I choose to read only the despairing articles.
I`ve shared some of Paper in the Cracks with someone skilled in editing. I am submitting it here and there, and still finding words and phrases that need changing.
I wrote a poem which I submitted to a competition, and a 500 word monologue which I submitted somewhere else.
I`m returning to the two plays I embarked on after Candlesticks, but also am busy reading and making notes on a novel I have been asked to review.
I`m preparing a presentation I hope to deliver at this year`s Limmud conference. ‘What exactly is a Jewish Story.’ I will use “Tell it Not, 17 Stories by Deborah Freeman,” as a starting point, and perhaps a finishing point, but hope to include anecdotes and ideas between. Thinking hard, anyway.
Then there is the next novel. Paper in the Cracks ends in Jerusalem in July 1967, a month after the end of the Six Day War. I was there, and kept a diary. Post M E I still have a less than perfect relationship with my stamina. It can behave erratically, and desert me, so all I can do is sit around patiently till it comes back. If I had 100% stamina, or was ten years younger, I would definitely set out to write the sequel. 50 years later kind of thing. Or to be more accurate – almost 60 years later.
If you want to order the stories, google Tell it Not, 17 Stories by Deborah Freeman…
