Traveling around promoting Jewish Cooking Boot Camp, my mom and I have been fortunate to meet many, many people who love to share their stories and recipes with us. And almost everyone has the same comment: "My mother/grandmother/aunt made a similar honey cake/matzo ball/brisket but shenever wrote down the recipe! It was 'a little of this, a little of that.'"

Hearing these stories only reinforced how rare and special it is that my mom and I were able to amass such a huge collection of traditional recipes. And the real reason we were able to do that was my grandmother, Edith.

Edith was far from a typical Jewish grandmother. She loved fashion and style almost as much as she loved cooking. She was the first person I knew to own MAC makeup in the late 1980s, brought back from a trip to New York City. She referred to her friends as"the dinosaurs." She once convinced a tailor to make my prom dress so short it would have made Paris and Lindsay blush. And I would often come home from work to find my roommate Zoë on the phone with her, discussing the previous night's episode of "Sex & The City."

She was a true individual and her style, her attitude, and even her cooking reflected that. People are always asking where the recipes came from and, truth be told, most came from Edith. They may have originated with her mother or grandmotheror even friends, but it was her tweaking and taste - and ultimately her writing things down - that gave us the basics for the book.

Edith and I at a family holiday in the early 90s.

Even more than in her recipes, I like to think her spirit lives on in the book as well. I wanted to create a book that would appeal to those who go to temple every week as well as those who have never seen the inside of a shul. And I wanted people to see that it's ok to do things your own way, in your own style, with your own spin and personality - much like my grandma. Holidays are about more than following rules. I always like to say I wrote the book not to tell people how to celebrate, but to give them the tools to do it on their own. And I think Edith would have loved that.

In honor of Edith (and my last post) I'm happy to share her signature cake. Try it - it'sreally simple, and absolutely amazing.

Edith's Orange Cake
Serves: 8-10
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Cooking Time: 25 minutes

(1) 18.25 oz. package orange cake mix
(1) 3.4 oz package instant vanilla pudding
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup orange juice

4 extra-large eggs

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

2. Grease a 10-inch Bundt pan using oil or cooking spray or Baker's Joy (I prefer Baker's Joy for baking)

3. Mix together all of the ingredients and beat for 2 minutes.

4. Pour the batter into the Bundt pan and bake at 350° for 50 to 60 minutes. Cake is done when golden and bounces back when touched.

5. When the cake is completely cool, pour the glaze over the top.

Orange Glaze

2 cups confectioner's sugar

3 1/2 tablespoons orange juice

Mix the confectioners' sugar with the orange juice, and pour the glaze over the cooled cake.

TIP: You can substitute milk for the orange juice to make an unflavored glaze.

Should we beoptimistic about the current discussions intended to create two sovereignstates in the area of Israel and Palestine? I'm not optimistic. I thinkthe conscience of the world is soothed by these meetings and accords andmemoranda and Camp David get-togethers, during which agreements are made thatwill not be kept, as mostpeople on both sides know. Settlements will continue to be built,terrorist acts will continue to occur, an occupied territory will remain occupied, an occupied people will continue tolose territory and such rights as they have, and then in the course of time the attention of the worldwill again be focused on the next conference or meeting in Madrid. Those of us who care and keep watchwill be hopeful and then again despondent and then again hopeful when attempts at a newagreement are made.

Isthere any reason to believe that something now under diplomatic discussion willchange this pattern? I don't thinkso.

Doesthis mean I am pessimistic and cynical about the possibilities of peace in theMiddle East? I'm not. However, Ido think we are looking for solutions in the wrong places, expecting oftreaties and agreements what can only be brought about by work on the ground,grassroots work, listening, mutual cooperation, and conversation. It's heartening to know that asthe peace treaties come and go work of this kind is taking place, right now, inIsrael/Palestine. I have devotedan entire chapter of my book, Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home, to a study ofthese efforts. The good news (and there is good news) is that these attempts at understanding between two embattledpeoples tend to spread.

I wroteabout a village called the Oasis of Peace: Neve Shalom/Wahat-ha-Salam in orderto study the way it grew from a dream to a reality, hoping to learn how othersin the region could make their dreams of peace come true. In the Oasis of Peace, Jews and Arabswork and teach and study conflict resolution together. At first hearing, this effort must seemmuch less significant than the grand events (Oslo, Camp David, Madrid, Cairo)that enter headlines and call upon the attention of the world. On the other hand, while these summitsare regularly taking place and as regularly failing, the little village is growing; there are six hundred children in the villageschool and tens of thousands of teenagers have gone through the School for Peaceprogram. When I think of them Itend to imagine them as individual glowing sparks seeded out over the landamong their embattled people. These, and those like them, are the people who will find resolutions tothe conflict in the Middle-East.

Theearliest writers and dreamers about Zionism must have looked absurd to thepeople who surrounded them. Theywere poor and middle-class boys and girls living in Russia who gathered insmall circles to talk about building a homeland for Jews in Palestine.Dreamers, who knew how to work hard, they invite us to dream on the same scale they did-always rememberingthat a dream must first be planted on earth, in daily activity, in sustainedcommitment.

In1997, Amin Khalaf and Lee Gordon, Israelis of Arab and Jewish origin,established a non-profit organization called Hand in Hand. In 1998, they opened an elementaryschool where Arab and Jewish children study together. Since then, three more schools have been opened; over 800 students are presently enrolled in the four bi-lingualschools. Here, in thiscountry of bombs and attacks and shelling and dispossessions, 800 students now know how to speak each other's language. Their parents are alsoinvolved, actively working to create social change. Soon it is expected that an entire, countrywide network ofsuch schools will exist, educating children from kindergarten through thetwelfth grade, educating their parents too, and the neighbors of their parentsand probably anyone to whom the children or the parents happen to speak abouttheir lived experience of peaceful co-existence.

Someyears ago, I dreamed that I waslecturing about how we, the privileged in a society of growing poverty, aredamaged by our efforts to deny what is happening to our less privilegedneighbors. We do not understandhow to help them and therefore we close ourselves off to knowledge. In the dream I grasped in graphicdetail the way this self-insulation as making us shrink, impoverishing us,covering us in layers of stiff gauze, so that soon, I kept saying in my dream,we will have enclosed ourselves in an indifference so profound we can no longerbe said to be alive inside all those layers of denial. This was not a dream about Israel andPalestine; I dreamt it years before I wrote my book, but perhaps, working inthe subterranean way dreams do, it eventually instructed me to write the kindof book I wrote, in which I study our ability to ignore what ishappening to our neighbors.

As weare approach Yom Kippur and theDays of Awe, we ask ourselvesto think over the deeds of the previous year, to atone and repent, and to askforgiveness for transgression. Perhaps this year we will be able to bring particular regard to a prayerwe have repeated so often on Erev Yom Kippur we may no longer pay muchattention to it.

"May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who livein their midst, for all the people are at fault." As is customary, we will saythis prayer three times. The first time perhaps for what we have done to thePalestinians; the secondtime for what the Palestinians have done to us. The third time for the possibility that these two peopleswill be guided to forgive each other.

One of the biggest--and strangest--choices a writer has to make in the months preceding the publication a book is whether or not to read your reviews. If you're not a writer, this probably sounds insane. Why wouldn't you read the reviews? And I'll confess that before my own book was slated for release, I never gave the matter a moment's thought, despite having written more than my share of criticism. Then came the day, in early November, when my editor called and said, nervously, "I have some advance reviews. I don't know if you want to see them." Sweat immediately began to prick my underarms. "Are they good?" I asked. "Two are," she told me, hesitating. "The third, well, the person just didn't get it. It's snarky and mean." I was teased and bullied enough as a child to know that I couldn't stomach snarky and mean. I probably couldn't even stomach a misspelling of my admittedly complicated name. No, I told her, I didn't want to see them. Neither the good ones nor the bad ones. "I think that's wise," she said, and I smiled. I was wise! I was enlightened. I would maintain my faith in my own work-a novel on which I'd spent five years working, making ample sacrifices along the way-without a thought of the critics.

What I didn't bargain for was the fact that these days, in the age of the Interweb, everyone is a critic. A week or two later, my editor called again, ecstatic. The novel had been chosen for one of Barnes and Noble's book clubs, something called "First Look," in which readers receive galleys of new novels a few months before they come out, then discuss the books in an online message board. "This is really, really great," she told me. "Simon and Schuster, as a company, has only had one other book chosen for it." The catch: The author participates in the discussion for nearly a month, answering reader's questions. In my case, I'd be logging on in January, when my as-yet-unborn baby would be about a month old. "That sounds really fun," I told her. And, in a way, it did. Sort of.

January came quickly and found us ensconced in our studio, which had no phone line, which meant we had no DSL. Luckily, we were able to piggyback on a neighboring school with an incredibly powerful, inexplicably-not-password-protected wi fi signal. A week or two before I was due to start answering readers' questions, Evan excitedly told me that readers were already posting. A few days later, he was a little less excited. "My advice for you," he said, "is to not take any of this personally. Some of these people are clearly cranks. And some just aren't used to reading literary fiction." "But some are smart," I said. "Right?" "Yes," he admitted. "Some are smart."

Continue reading...

I've noticed a pattern in my posts this week: I've been making lists. Lists indicate a tendency toward organization, which I fail to exhibit elsewhere in my life. So in honor of my newfound organizational skills and of the upcoming Jewish holiday Saint Valentine's Day, I offer my Jewcy readers yet another list:

My Top Ten Favorite Things About Valentine's Day

1.     Scripture Candy, the company that makes conversation candy hearts that say "God loves you." (This is the same company that makes Happy Birthday Jesus Pops.)

2.     People who say "Valentine's Day is just a Hallmark holiday," as if they came up with that idea themselves.

3.     The fact that no one knows who Saint Valentine was. (No one knows who Saint Patrick was, either. This stops no one from celebrating them with gusto.)

4.     The theory that Saint Valentine was actually a bunch of martyred saints, and our subsequent national decision to commemorate the martyred saints with expensive prix fixe menus.

5.     Men who propose to their girlfriends on February 14. These are the same men who lost their virginity on prom night.

6.     That it's the one day of the year when scary stalker types can call themselves "secret admirers." Cute.

7.     Frank Gusenberg, victim of the 1929 Valentine's Day Massacre, whose last words were, "I'm not gonna talk. Nobody shot me." Bad ass.

8.     The High Court of Love, established on Valentine's Day in 1400 in Paris. Women selected the judges based on their poetry readings.

9.     Valentine's Day 2007, when Hugo Chavez said he missed Condoleezza Rice.

10.    Folding red construction paper in half and cutting out half a heart, so when you open it, you have a whole heart, creased down the center.

Happy Valentine's Day, readers. May your stalkers become your admirers, and may you find meaning and truth in your candy.

Diana Spechler, author of Who By Fire, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

A friend asked the other day if I had ever been angry enough to want to kill someone. The answer brought back an experience that I hereby share with you.

The Grand Lobby of the Krasnapolsky hotel in Amsterdam was both large and ornate. The clientele sipping cocktails and champagne that particular noon exuded an air of gentility. At 34 years of age, I was the youngest by far. The mood was jarred by the entrance of a bald heavyset man of military bearing, his voice commanding instant attention. On each arm was a heavily made-up young blonde, obviously being paid for her favors. They were seated not far from my table. His fingers snapped for service after which I heard, in guttural German-accented English, "Hitler didn't kill enough of them! If I had been in power..." I stormed out before he completed his sentence.

Later in the day, I was back in the lobby, this time to meet a fellow guest who had invited me to dinner. I had arrived early and unfortunately, seated diagonally across from me was the same man. He had two different girls now in tow, still holding court. He was obviously drunk. His rants became more anti-Semitic, obnoxious, and aggressive. Others in the lobby, most with eyes fastened on the floor, were clearly disturbed, but neither they nor management took steps to quiet him down.

My date had just arrived and counseled me to ignore him. I was having none of it. I walked over and, as politely as a I could under the circumstances, stood directly in front of him and said, "Excuse me, sir. Could you please lower your voice? I am trying to have a conversation with a friend but your voice is so loud I have trouble hearing what he has to say." With that, the ugly, by this time unkempt, fat pig jumped to attention, looked down at me with a repulsive expression on his face and said, "Are you a Jew? How dare you talk to me that way! Of course you are Jewish. Look at your nose!" And then, with seemingly no forethought, he spat at me. That disgusting, revolting, horrible son-of-a-bitch Nazi actually spat at me! His spittle landed on my left shoulder. I WANTED TO KILL HIM! The son-of-a-bitch bastard! Everything moved so quickly after that. Next I knew, my date was behind me grabbing my right arm which I had pulled back, ready to strike in an attack position. Me, who abhorred violence. Had there been a butcher knife on the table, I would have stabbed him on the spot!

I remember three things about that evening:

1. His screaming "Jew Bitch" repeatedly in German and English as two managers finally led him away.
2. The other guests politely applauding me once he was out of sight. "And why didn't any of you speak up?" I asked.
3. Looking in the mirror on my way out and seeing the reflection of a person I hardly recognized. A person who, for the first time in her life, had wanted to kill another human being, who was almost ready to kill another human being. I remember thinking "what has become of me?"

Tania Grossinger, author of Growing Up at Grossinger's, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

---

Want a free, autographed copy of Growing Up at Grossinger's?  Participate in this week's giveaway contest! Send an email to contests@jewcy.com and at the end of the week we'll choose five winners. Good luck!

Want to know more about Tania?  E-mail her or visit her web site! 

Since my debut novel hit the shelves in September, I've given about thirty public readings. I gave one yesterday, and I'm giving another one tonight (New Yorkers, I'd love to see you there...details at the bottom of this post). Readings can be the best part of publishing a book-fun and social and gratifying. But they can also be the worst. Sometimes, no one comes to them. And reading to a crowd of zero or three or even eight reminds me of the recurring dream I used to have where I was riding a Ferris Wheel, knowing that soon my ride would end and everyone would know the truth: that I was naked.

At one reading, in California, my audience consisted of a smattering of relatives, a counselor from my summer camp (hadn't seen him since), and some guy who had recently added me on Facebook and commented under one of my photos that he liked my green eyes. Which was flattering. I mean, who doesn't want her eyes admired by strangers? But it was also creepy because there he was in the flesh, the stranger who liked my eyes and probably hadn't read my book. And I felt terribly self-conscious because what if, in person, my eyes were less beautiful than he'd anticipated? I didn't want to disappoint my first and only fan.

At that reading, I fantasized throughout about being struck by lightning. I didn't want to die. I just wanted to go to the hospital. Something to put an end to the nightmare. I considered faking a seizure.

My book tour has been punctuated by appearances from ex-boyfriends and ex-friends. Once or twice, I've noticed children running around as I read (several times) the words "fuck" and "fucking." On a few occasions, someone has approached me with open arms, ready for a hug, and I've been unable to match a face with a name. But out of all the awkward moments, nothing has made me feel more awkward than the awkward questions asked during the inevitably awkward Q&A. There are a few questions that pop up repeatedly, and I cringe every time. Someone once told me I need a better game face. Well. Yes. I think I need a better game face. But in the mean time, I'll just share my discomfort with you. So here they are, the top three book tour questions that make me feel like I'm naked on a Ferris Wheel:

1.     How did you research sex addiction?

2.     How much of yourself did you put into your characters?

3.     How much of the book is autobiographical?

And here are the answers I've never given:

1.     How do you think?

2.     They're all me. They're all my many personalities.

3.     It's totally true. I call it fiction, but who are we kidding?

Anyway, if you can restrain yourselves from asking these questions, or even if you can't, come on out tonight. I'll be reading with the very talented novelist Karan Mahajan, as part of the Beatrice.com reading series.

The details:
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 7:00 p.m.
17 East 47th St., New York, NY

Diana Spechler, author of Who By Fire, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Since my book came out I've been doing a lot more interviews about bagels than I ever thought possible. One common theme among interviewers and callers (to radio phone-ins) is a lament for the bagels of 'the good old days' - the 'concrete doughnuts,' the 'jaw breakers' of legend.

Of course it's true that the mass production of bagels has resulted in a product which is very different from what you could get in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The holy grail of 'long shelf life' means that preservatives keep the bagels chewable for much longer. The downside is that the crust of such a bagel is to the crust of a Brooklyn bagel of yore what a net curtain is to a velvet curtain. 'Feh!' as my three year old (who learned this Yiddish all-purpose diss from her 91 year old grandmother) would say.  And then of course there are the complaints of bagels being too big and too billowy. Mimi Sheraton said it best when she wrote in 1981:

...Not even in my most pessimistic moments did I imagine it would come to this. What used to be a fairly small, dense, gray, cool and chewy delight that gave jaw muscles a Sunday morning workout had become snowy white, soft, puffy and huge

But there is a flip side to this. And that is with the proliferation of bagels or the 'bagelization' of America, more people are getting to know bagels and therefore more people are wanting better bagels. Sales of frozen bagels, for example, are down year on year for the past seven years. What's exciting for this bagel maven is the resurgence of the hand rolled bagel.

Does hand rolling really make a difference? I can't prove it scientifically but the idea of shaping the dough with  human skin and muscle rather than cold steel would seem to give it a little something extra. Certainly to my mind the best bagels in New York these days are the ones made by a friend of mine, David Teyf, whose grandfather was a famous matzah baker in Minsk. David didn't go into baking to begin with, but, having become fed up with what he felt were inferior bagels, he became converted to the idea of re-invigorating the hand rolled product. Today he's supplying hand rolled bagels to Manhattan food landmarks like the 2nd Avenue Deli and Russ and Daughters.  

Enjoy!

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is her parting post. Want more? Buy her book!

I'm grateful to the bagel for introducing me to American and particularly Jewish American labor history.

One British review of my book berated me for ‘devoting an inordinately lengthy section to the history of the New York bakery unions' struggles' but those struggles led to real change for people's lives (and also arguably resulted in more hygienic bread!).    

The conditions in the cellar bakeries of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 19^th Century into the 20^th were grim. Here's one account from the New York Press in 1894:

Trays of pretzel biscuit (that is, bagels) more or less fresh from the oven, stood upon the barrels... the wooden floor was rotten and bent under the weight of a person in every part... and wet, so wet that if a man stepped on that portion the splash of the water underneath could plainly (be heard)... the shop was thorougly infested with a great vareity of insect life... real genuine cockroaches, about an inch long, were seen springing at a lively rate in the direction of the half moulded dough.   

It took until 1909 - with the support of the whole community on the Lower East Side - to establish a lasting bakers' union and set minimum wages. But it would be a turning point for the entire Jewish labor movement in New York. This was the beginning of a period during which Jewish unionists would play a leading role in the wider American movement, most famously in the garment industry.

One of demands acceded to by the bakery bosses in the 1909 strike was a system which was pioneered by the Jewish unions in the US - a system by which employed workers gave up one night a week to unemployed workers. One of the union leaders described it this way:

The Jewish locals demand from their steady men to support the loafing men, not with money but with work... [We] take the list of loafing men and the list of steady men and [determine] just how much the steady men must give up of their time to enable the loafing men to get enough work to cover their immediate expenses and a little above.

Any lessons there for today's recession?

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

Bagels make people smile. I can't think of another bread that has so many jokes made about it - some of them, according to the bagel bakers I talked with, unrepeatable in print or polite company.

In the 1950s Milton Berle and Molly Goldberg used bagels as props. Even a young Woody Allen in 1963 got in on the act with a routine that taboo subjects are vital to society, so much so that in a place (like the Faroe Islands alledgedly) where sex is casual, sleazy natives peddle food porn instead. When a Faroe woman is asked whether she'd like cream cheese on her bagel she replies: "I don't do that kind of thing."

The New Jersey artist who in the 1990s figured out a way to preserve genuine bagels and genuine locks (as versus lochs) on canvas had to be counting on the sense of humour of his potential buyers in an upscale Miami gallery - otherwise why hang these arrangements on your wall?

So what is it about the bagel that's so funny?

Some say it's the word itself - 'beigel' or 'bagel,' it's chunky and chewy just like the experience of eating it.

For others it's the ring shape with no beginning and no end that has a special hold on our human imagination with its intimations of eternity.   And then there's the bagel hole - inpsiring or terrifying, depending on how you deal with the concept of infinity (for one London poet of the 1930s, the ring of dough represented life - when you finished off your bagel the hole you were left with symbolised death). The hole is the subject of many tales, the best of which has to be the one about the Fools of Chelm - a staple group of simpletons in Jewish folklore. Finding Chelm's bagels lacking, a delegation of the town's sages decided they must act and find out why the neighbouring town's bagels are tastier, crunchier and chewier. 

"It's simple," says the neighbouring town's bagel baker when they ask him, "it's the hole that makes the bagel."

"Please," say the delegation from Chelm, "can we have some of your holes so as to improve our bagels?"

"Of course," answers the baker and hands over a dozen or so holes which the sages place very carefully in their pockets.

Wending their way home in high spirits, they stop paying attention to the path. Suddenly all of them - to a sage - fall over the crest of a hill and roll down, the bagel holes falling out of their pockets as they gathered speed. Desperately they search the fields for these special holes but to no avail. Crestfallen they return to Chelm empty handed, unable to change the sorry state of the town's bagels.

What I find endearing about the shape of bagels is that while they may aspire to be the perfect halo, they are by their plump, lumpy nature imperfect and a bit cheeky.   

In the 1960s El Al introduced a booklet - El Al Looks into the Bagel - to explain bagel history and etiquette to those passengers (there were quite a few it turned out) who had never eaten one before. The booklet was a hit and was reprinted at least four times. In fact, such was the scale of interest generated that El Al created a Bagel Research Center in its New York office - or did it? No one I spoke with in the course of my research (including the airline's unofficial historian) knew anything about it. Was this a further bagel joke? Or is there a great archive of bagel jokes out there? Anyone with more information?

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

My father passed away around Father's Day a year before Assisted Loving was published.  I'm sorry he wasn't around to enjoy its success and all the nice reviews.  But as I travel around the country talking about him and telling the twin stories of our desperate dating derbies, I find he remains with me, a gift I never expected.  And apparently, he reminds lots of people of their own parents.  I thought he was the most peculiar and iconoclastic of fathers.  But apparently, he's Everydad.  No, it isn't every dad who wears a ski parka around the house instead of a bathrobe or soaks raisins in orange juice to pour over his cornflakes.  No, it isn't every dad who in the 1970s, would ask a neurotic college bound son (me) if he was gay, then tell him it was fine by him.  And of course, it isn't every dad who would forget about the veal chop from dinner left rotting in his tennis bag or decide to schedule hip replacement surgery on Yom Kippur.  But what is universal about him, I guess, is his total lack of pretense and unchecked enthusiasm for life.  And I guess what's universal about our story is how hard I had to struggle to learn to accept his embrace.  

Touring with this book, I get to hear from readers around the country.  They email me at AssistedLoving.com too.  These days, there are many befuddled boomer kids with  parents on the prowl for new love.  One senior mother wanted her son to score her some Viagra so she could give it to the man she was dating.  Another, after her husband died, took up with a man she loved as a teenager in Europe.  Several middle aged children told me about lists left behind by dying mothers or fathers with names of potential new spouses. (Considerate or controlling?  Who knows?)  One woman had a father who, after seven days of mourning her mother, declared, "I can't live this way anymore!  I need a new wife!"  Then there was the bemused middle aged son in Saint Paul who told me that when his mother died, his father, after 50 years of marriage, decided he was gay.  He was eighty, and went online and met someone nice who was twenty years his junior.  Men! 

Bob Morris with his father.What's a good son to do but laugh?

And what was I to do but laugh when, after cleaning out my father's junk strewn sedan to sell after his death, I reached into his glove compartment to give the new owner of the car the title, and found a recently purchased Trojan that would not expire for years.

"My father," I said, "was always a very hopeful man."

I'm hoping that readers of this book won't only get a new view of their parents, but a new view of themselves too.  That's why I wrote Assisted Loving.  It's about never giving up on the idea of love, whether for a parent or in the quest for a significant other. 

Love is a decision.  I learned that from my father. 

But only when I was ready to hear it. 

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy the book!

Stephanie Klein, author of Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. She opened with an explanation of her book's title (and middle school nickname). Then she went on a rant about Japs (as in Jewish American prince/princess), followed by a post about publicizing her life story. She even gave us some insight about why, despite their reputation, Jewish girls do swallow. Finally, she told us about her deal to make a sitcom out of her last memoir. Need some more moose? Buy Stephanie's book!

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Chang & Eng about the famous "Siamese" twins.

This month, in London, an 18-year-old named Laura Williams gave birth to her daughters Faith and Hope - two attached sisters; Hope died on Tuesday night after an operation to seperate them. (Hope's lungs ended up being too small; she couldn't breathe after the separation.)

It's terrible, it's unimaginably sad, and I thought it had nothing to do with me.

But last Friday, I got a call from a BBC show called Five Live. They wanted me to go on the air to talk about the intricacies of seperation, the psychic toll conjoined twinship can have, etc.

The producer called me and said: "I want to get one thing straight before we interview you. Are you an expert on conjoined twins?"

"No," I said. "I just wrote a novel about some guys from Siam."

The sound of him scratching his chin 5,000 miles away crinkled through my cell headset.

"Right," he said. "Can we have you on, anyway?"

Now, I have what my grandfather called a Yiddisha Kup - a Jewish brain. In other words, I don't like to turn down a buinsess opportunity. The BBC! My new book, More Than It Hurts You, is set to come out in England and Europe in February! But this is a little girl's death we're talking about. And I'm not an expert: just a fiction writer.

The original "Siamese" Twins: Chang and Eng Bunker"I have to tell you I'm a little uncomfortable about this,"  I said.  

"Well," he said. "You've been on with us before."

This was true. Ever since I wrote Chang & Eng, whenever some set of conjoined twins, somewhere, has made the news, I get a phone call. And so I was on BBC's Five Live once before; it had been the most surreal thing. I'd been on my phone in New York; the interviewer was calling from London, and - sitting in Texas - they had one member of a set of adult conjoined twins on, too. (The other sister refused to participate.) The host had badgered the twin who had agreed to talk, making fun of her because she and her sister had chosen not to try to separate ("Why don't you want to try? Aren't you miserable living like that?").  I ended up defending the sister (Lori Schappell) from the interviwer.* After the show, Lori told me she gives my book out to friends, which seemed like the best review I ever got.

Anyway, getting back to this week.

I decided to do the interview, as long as I wouldn't have to talk about the morality or the science of separation. "I'll go on if I can talk about Chang & Eng, but i don't want to profit off the tragedy of this family."

"Sure, sure," the BBC said. (And it has a very stuffy bristish accent, the BBC.)

Schappel twins Lori and George"So," the interviewer said, first thing. "What do you think of the moral decision by the mother to seperate those girls?"

I muttered something about sadness, about the impossibility of putting oneself in another's shoes. They seemed okay with it, and I hung up, feeling pretty bad about myself.

I find it amazing that I get to be an expert, just because I wrote a novel. It's like interviewing George Lucas about the physics of warp speed travel. Oh, well. Like my grandfather would have said, maybe I made a few sales.

*Their story is very interesting. The Schappel twins (I think they're Jewish) were born attached at the head. Lori works part-time in a hospital laundry; her sister George is a country singer; she won the L.A. Music Award for Best New Country Artist in 1997. She has performed in Germany and Japan, as well as all over the U.S. They live about as separate lives as possible. I am not making this up.

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

When I was an undercover agent for the Kansas Attorney General, we had meetings with the DEA and FBI about the need to make more drug arrests. Why? To make the streets safer? To help get people off drugs? No--to insure higher caseloads so we had more money coming in from the feds. It was all about Power and Money.

Just like with gambling. Why has the government allowed so many casinos? Our government wants the tax dollars. Same with the lottery--basically a legalized "numbers racket." Yet if you have a poker game at home or as the local bartender you take sports bets, it's a felony and you can go to prison. The difference? In the activities they allow, the government gets the vig (the percentage a bookie takes). Same with alcohol. The government once tried to ban booze. It didn't work. So now the government taxes it, takes a cut of the revenues, and punishes any negative behavior (drunk driving, etc.) that may result.

Why not do the same with drugs (and prostitution too)? Tax the product, make the distribution safer, and punish any negative behavior. Also, legal drugs that are safer than heroin, etc., exist today. One element in legalizing alcohol was that it would take dangerous moonshine off the street. There are legal drugs that can take deadly drugs off the street. The government just needs to make those safer drugs more widely available.

The new White House should convene a commission on revamping our entire approach to the drug problem and I'd love to be on it. (BTW, I'm on the board of directors of Renaissance West, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic). If we don't take a new approach, the drug problem is only going to get worse. Eighty percent of the people in prison are there because of drugs or drug-related crime. I know--I was one of them. Solve the drug problem and you solve our crime problem. It can be done.

Craig Glazer, author of The King Of Sting: The Amazing True Story of a Modern American Outlaw, spent the last week guest-blogging on Jewcy. Want more? Get his book!

When I was incarcerated at Boron aka Watergate Camp, only a couple hours from L.A., there were a few inmates connected to Hollywood. One of them was Seth Jaffe, an actor who had guest starred on TV series like "Cagney & Lacey" and "Remington Steele." He was also a very funny writer. So the warden allowed us to put on a comedy show in front of the 700 inmates. One of our skits went like this…

You all saw the landing on the moon, July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to walk on the moon, right? Actually, I, Craig Glazer, was the first man on the moon. Here's how it happened… The lunar module had just touched down when Houston called us: "This is Mission Control, we have a problem. The lunar surface where you have landed may be unstable, too dangerous for you to step down on." We were crushed. All of our work was for nothing! But then Mission Control called again and only spoke to Neil and Buzz: "We have an idea. Send the Jewish kid down first." I go down the stairs onto the surface of the moon. I check things out and everything seems safe. That's when Neil lowers a camera to me and I film him jumping onto the surface.

Don't believe me? Think about it. How the hell do you think they got that film of him coming down the stairs? The cameraman! That was me--the first Jew on the moon!

Even the goyem laughed--and considering this was federal prison that was almost everyone.

Craig Glazer, author of The King Of Sting: The Amazing True Story of a Modern American Outlaw, is guest blogging on Jewcy.  Tomorrow he'll publish his parting post.  Stay tuned.