As a girl, I read compulsively. Unlike the kids in the neighbourhood who had a short walk to the catchment schools, I took buses halfway across the city — technically across city boundaries, in fact — to get to my Jewish school.
There were no smartphones in those days, no podcasts or Wordle, only books books books to keep me entertained.
I read everything by VC Andrews, Stephen King, Sidney Sheldon, John Saul, Mary Higgins Clark, Cynthia Freeman, and, with some shame, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele.
Every morning a boy a year my senior boarded the bus, gestured at me sitting there, a thick paperback clutched in my hands, and declared sarcastically (and now that I think about it, rather misogynistically), “Look at the dumb broad!” I didn’t care. Books were my joy.
I lived a few doors down from a public library and weekly emerged from its doors with a delightfully precarious tower of books—sometimes to the dismay of the librarian.
I still remember her calling up my mother when I went to check out Judy Blume’s scandalous Wifey and hearing my mother’s voice booming through the telephone receiver telling her off for trying to shut down a precocious reader!
There were many consequences of my obsessive habit: my parents took me to get my hearing checked, though it turned out I was just too absorbed by my reading. I caught up on the latest television mini-series only when it was based on a novel I loved.
Karen-Skinazi
Karen Skinazi (Photo: Karen Skinazi)
My brain processed all life around me as though it were a book. When someone spoke, a voiceover in my head added, “she said”, “he asked,” “he declared sarcastically”. And next thing I knew, I wanted to write my own books.
But writing, I was told, is like acting: everyone dreams of doing it, yet only a rare few make a career of it. What to do with my desire to write came to me in the mystical city of Sefad, which I visited on my year abroad. I was 19.
At a Shabbat dinner, my host asked what I was going to do with my English degree, and I replied, to my own surprise, that I was going to be a professor. That was it, then: after that dinner, I started looking into postgraduate programmes, taking my university assessments more seriously, planning for an academic life.
A life in which writing was core to a career that also came (in the best of circumstances) with a steady paycheque.
Remember what Joan Didion said in her essay Pacific Distances? “At 19,” she wrote, “I had wanted to write.
At 40 I still wanted to write.” It doesn’t go away, that urge. Confronted with the patriarchy, Didion spent decades questioning whether or not she could write (but she could!).
It wasn’t the patriarchy that was holding me back—except that the patriarchy always holds women back. (Let me tell you about the time a male professor told me I had too many kids to have a successful career…) It was more mundane things.
My job demanded writing, of course, but academic writing couldn’t be more different from fiction; my time teaching and running a university programme have meant I’ve barely even had time for that; and I’ve also been busy raising three boys.
And I must be honest: and as a literary critic by trade I can tell you this fact plainly, I love to write, but I’m no Joan Didion.
It’s been 30 years since that Shabbat dinner set my life on a particular trajectory, and you would think I might have got over my youthful yearning. I did not.
So, during the pandemic, when I spotted the advert for the inaugural Emerging Writers Programme, a joint project of Jewish Book Week and the Genesis Foundation, I knew I wanted to apply.
It seemed silly, of course. I wasn’t a young, “emerging” anything! I couldn’t have “potential”—a word reserved for someone who just graduated from Oxford and, a day later, secured a star literary agent. I was banned from all those “20 under 40” lists.
I was middle-aged, and I already had a career and a family, not to mention a 130-year-old house needing lots of attention.
But I’d been writing. Without my regular commute, in the spare moments between Zoom meetings and homeschooling, I had been sketching out a giant, multi-narrative saga, with four female protagonists who lived over the course of the 20th century: the Yiddish-theatre actress turned Bollywood star; the Chasidic girl in rural Hungary who has to flee during the Revolution; the dreamer and would-be architect in jazz-era Cairo; the young Polish woman who becomes the only survivor in her family.
Rosie, Margit, Fortunée, and Fanya. So, when asked in the Emerging Writers application for a writing sample, I had one. It was the start of Fortunée’s story, when Fortunée’s abandoned mother, the Bitter Agunah, decided to pack up their life in Beirut and relocate to Cairo — a city that, in 1908, promised to be a good place for women, and for Jews.
I never thought I would win a place on the programme. I never thought I would get Tracy Chevalier — a brilliant, successful author (one of those unicorns who has fully made a career of her writing), and a master at historical fiction—as my mentor.
I never thought I would participate in seminars with the likes of Elif Shafak and Cathy Rentzenbrink and Sophie Herxheimer and AD Miller and other contemporary luminaries. At almost 50 (yikes), I thought my chance to pursue a youthful dream was long past.
I was wrong. In fact, to my great surprise, I was not even the oldest person on the programme; I would say I was smack in the middle.
What a change from the usual connotation of “emerging”: for the people at Jewish Book Week and the Genesis Foundation, apparently writers can emerge (re-emerge, be unsubmerged, surge) at any age.
I still may never procure a literary agent or publish my novel (a much-slimmed down version of the original plan, thank you, Tracy), or go on to write others (though I hope I will! Rosie, the shund actress, is still waiting in the wings).
But I have, on this very laptop on which I type, a complete draft of a novel, which I’ve called Ness — miracle. Not only because it’s the name of a character in the book.
The Genesis Emerging Writers share their experiences at Jewish Book Week at 11am on March 5
