I could have taken the picture and nobody would have known the difference-nobody but parents ever saw these pictures. But suddenly the Christmas tree was wrong. I didn’t understand why I was so angry so abruptly, but I refused to cooperate.

"What do you mean, no?" asked Mr. Dennis.

"I’m not taking a picture in front of something I don’t celebrate. I’m Jewish." Mr. Dennis locked his jaw, but he wasn’t surprised. Though my second-grade teacher had not yet sent me to his office, I had visited Mr. Dennis in kindergarten and first grade because of "behavioral problems." These amounted to eye rolling and talking back-behavior I had seen my grandmother model. What neither my teachers nor Mr. Dennis ever realized was that there were patterns to my behavior.

I caused trouble when I felt threatened. And that almost always happened on holidays. For instance, in first grade, on Mother’s Day, the teacher had us sit in a circle and, one by one, recite a favorite thing about our mothers.Well, what was I supposed to say? My favorite thing about my mother is how she never calls or visits. No thank you. I was so scared someone would figure out I didn’t have a mother at home and laugh at me that I ran across to the art-supplies table and knocked it over. Pasta and rice and finger paints spilled all over the carpet. My teacher was so furious she sent me directly to Mr. Dennis. But Mr. Dennis didn’t ask me any questions, either. Instead he stared at the space just above my head and recited some jargon about the school’s high expectations. Because he was afraid of upsetting parents-they were potential donors, after all-he never bothered calling home to investigate. Now it was Christmas, and I was causing a scene all over again, but he still didn’t get it.

"Matthew. Just say ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ and smile," he said, not smiling. "You want to be a good boy so Santa comes and visits you, right?"

"I don’t care about your dumb Santa. I’m not Ho! Ho! Ho!-ing anything, and I already told you I’m not taking a picture in front of a tree I don’t celebrate!"

"Fine," he said, snatching the hat out of my hands. "Then you can’t be Student of the Month." I knew that he didn’t want to make a scene and that if I apologized, all would be forgotten. I’d get my picture taken, and he’d be on to the next child. But I was really angry now.

"I don’t want to be the dumb Student of the dumb Month!" I shouted. "It’s not like you need me. You have twenty other jerks right here!" I ran out of the room, and Mr. Dennis screamed after me, "Rothschild, you’ll never be Student of the Month again!"

I ran past the classrooms of my school and saw for the first time that each was decorated with Christmas propaganda. There were cardboard cutouts of Santa and those little dwarfs he carted around with him. Some classrooms had plastic dolls wearing sheets hanging around a barnyard. Christmas, Christmas, everywhere, but not a single present for me! When I finally returned to class, my teacher saw that I was crying. She quietly asked her teaching assistant to take over and pulled me aside.

"What’s the matter?" she asked.

"Mr. . . . Dennis . . . took. . . He took my hat. . . ." I sobbed.

After calming down, I told her what had happened. I asked her to call my grandmother; Iwanted to go home. I could have asked for my grandfather instead, but I was already scheming beneath my tears. I knew what would happen if my grandmother showed up, and I wanted revenge. "Oh, he did, did he?" I could hear my grandmother shouting through the receiver when my teacher called her. "I’ll drop-kick his Santa-loving ass from here to Macy’s."

When my grandmother showed up, I heard her long before I saw her.

"Where is he? Where’s that son of a bitch?" she was shouting. "I’m going to call the United Jewish Appeal. I’m calling the Associated Press! Does he know I’m on the board of Hadassah?"

She was not, but she knew that her bluff would be taken seriously, and she was quickly ushered into Mr. Dennis’s office. These were halls where children were encouraged to speak in a whisper, where "sucks" was a terrible word, and my grandmother’s intrusion was not welcome. My teachers blushed and closed the door.

The PA system beeped. It was my grandmother, paging me, calling me down to Mr. Dennis’s office. I could also hear Mr. Dennis in the background saying that it was his office, his intercom to use. Before the message ended, I heard my grandmother telling him to shut up.

"If you weren’t so stupid, I-"

The intercom went dead, and the class stared at me in a mixture of curiosity and awe. I shrugged my shoulders.

True, she wasn’t the type of grandmother who baked or knitted; she was the type who would bail you out of jail or take bartending jobs on the weekends for the free drinks-except she had married my grandfather and was relegated instead to a world of charity luncheons and teas. She lived for confrontations like these.

Walking into Mr. Dennis’s office, I saw that the color had drained from his face. My grandmother’s face was red, as if she had sucked the color out of Mr.Dennis’s. My grandfather sat chomping on a cigar. Since retiring, he often tagged along with my grandmother, entertained by a woman who could make attending the movies an adventure. Secretly, I know he envied my grandmother’s problem-solving style: a cross between physical violence and public humiliation. Unlike mygrandfather, she didn’t care what people thought, and that was her not-so-secret weapon.

"Mr. Dennis has something he would like to say to you, Matthew," announced my grandmother, sitting down.

Mr. Dennis withered under her gaze and turned to me. "I’m sorry that it seemed I wasn’t respecting your cultural beliefs. I never meant to insult your religion; I just thought you were fooling around."

"And?" said my grandmother.

"We should have had another scene for your picture."

"And?"

Mr. Dennis looked at her, his eyes pleading. "You can’t be serious."

She raised an eyebrow. "One phone call," she said. "That’s all it would take."

It was like watching a private conversation between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. My guns are bigger than your guns, she was saying. Mr. Dennis was just another oil painting in a suit to her, and he would be knocked from his pretentious pedestal.

My grandfather’s cigar sat poised on his lips.

"And . . ." Mr. Dennis sighed, lowering his voice. "There’s no Santa Claus."

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" said my grandfather, lighting up the cigar.

It was like hearing that there is no such thing as the Tooth Fairy or Thanksgiving.

"But I’ve seen him," I said. "On the street ringing his bell, asking for money."

"No, Matthew," said Mr.Dennis, "those are men in costume. Santa is pretend."

I had been wondering how Santa could be both black and white and still be the same man.

 "This will be our little secret," said Mr. Dennis. "Okay?"

"Okay," I said, wondering whom I would tell first. I thought of Chandler, a kid from my class who had bragged all about the great presents Santa was bringing him, and I imagined him crying over this news. A smile spread across my face.

"That’ll do," said my grandmother. "Come on, Howard, let’s take Matthew to lunch; it’s almost his feeding time."

"Do I get my hat back?" I asked.

Mr. Dennis reached into a drawer for the hat and set it on his  desk. I studied it, then looked at him.

"Well?" he asked.

"He wants you to put it on his head, moron," said my grandmother. "What, have you never seen a child before? Do they not grow them where you come from?"

Mr. Dennis turned red, and he attempted to secure the hat on my head.

As we were leaving, my grandfather said, "Why do we pay so much money for inadequate American education? This never would have happened in France."

"Yeah," said my grandmother,"it’s much better in France, where they’ve replaced study hall with lessons on how to blow perfect smoke rings with your unfiltered cigarette."

My grandfather started to say something, but my grandmother cut him off.

"Get in the car, Howard; I have a menorah to dig out of storage."

And although I expected it-we were right in the middle of December, after all-I did not hear him complain once that the car was white.

The post Why I Don’t Believe in Santa Claus, Part 3 appeared first on Jewcy.

My grandfather was a grand storyteller, but you could not count on him for accuracy. As far as he was concerned, it was the point of the story that mattered-that is, when he remembered the point he was trying to make. And when my grandmother, who hated cigars and had limited patience for my grandfather’s storytelling, was out of the house, he’d light up a good Cuban, settle into his favorite leather chair, and launch into a tale so contrived it would make the Brothers Grimm blush.

"When I was a little boy in Paris . . ." he would begin.

"I thought it was Vienna."

"Don’t interrupt, Matthew. Now. When I was a little boy in Vienna . . ."

My grandfather came to the United States sometime before World War II. He arrived from either France or Austria, wherever he felt like telling me at a given time. This was a man who knew five languages, and if he didn’t like what you had to say in English, he began speaking another language. Then he would shake his head, wide-eyed and innocent, pretending he couldn’t understand you. Rarely seen without a smile, my grandfather was always quick to tell a story-it was just the truth that gave him trouble.

Personally, I didn’t care that his stories weren’t always true. When he told a story, it was him and me, alone. My grandmother wasn’t invited. She would just make fun of us, anyway. Now that I was seven years old-almost eight, really-this was the only time it didn’t feel awkward to climb into his lap and play with his arm hair. I liked to make mountains by pulling on the hairs as I listened to him reinvent his childhood. My grandfather was a retired diplomat, and he often said, "World leaders could forget their differences, I’m sure, if they’d just listen to a few good stories." Presumably, the underlying moral of his tales would make them see the error of their ways while showing them how much they had in common. I didn’t know what a diplomat was, but if they got to tell stories and have their pictures taken with famous people, the way my grandfather did, this is what I wanted to do as well. They also got expensive gifts from people, and I loved presents.

I devoured his stories voraciously. I thought that if I learned to tell stories the way my grandfather did, I might be as successful as he was. But despite all his success, I knew there was one leader his stories failed to work on: my grandmother.

"Listen here, snail eater," she’d say, materializing out of nowhere, shiny silver hair falling down to her chin, and pointing a well manicured finger at my grandfather. "Maybe they’re hot on having cigar butts litter the floors of Paris, but I don’t want that shit in my house. Take it to the curb."

My grandfather would mumble about how it was really his house and everyone else was just a guest-after almost fifty years of marriage, my grandfather was still trying to assert his dominance over his castle, but he never did get it quite right. So, indignantly, he finished his story-cigar defiantly lit-from a bench in Central Park, across the street from our nineteen-room apartment. "Your house indeed," my grandmother would say, slamming the door behind us.

My grandfather paid the rent, but we all knew who wore the pants in my family.

***

My grandfather was raised in a genteel, aristocratic Europe, where people politely disagreed over a friendly glass of absinthe. But my grandmother was born and raised in New York City, where every waking minute is a potential street fight. These two opposing figures stepped in to raise me after my own parents-who wished to remain children themselves-abandoned me when I was still a baby.

My father disappeared altogether, never to be heard from again. And my mother, seeing her own parents’ offer to raise me as an opportunity to reinvent herself as a party girl, hopped on a plane and flew to Europe without a backward glance. She called exactly four times a year-on birthdays and my grandparents’ wedding anniversary-and did not visit New York again until I was ten years old.

My grandparents and I lived in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, the only Jews in our building. Jewish delicatessens and bakeries may punctuate every other block of New York City, but thirty years after my grandparents settled on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile-that glorious stretch of asphalt from 82nd Street to 105th-theirs was still the only Jewish name in the most exclusive building in the most exclusive neighborhood in one of the most exclusive cities in the world. "She threatened to tear someone’s balls off, and they let her in," I heard people say behind my stylish, petite grandmother’s back. But like so many half-truths, this, I learned, was an urban legend. The whole truth was far more typical of Old-Moneyed New York in the 1950s.

Old Money never allowed anti-Semitism to become advertised policy-it was just an unspoken rule. Review boards famously barred Greenbergs and Friedmans from inhabiting the same space as Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Yet they compromised for my grandparents. Much later I would wonder what my grandparents compromised, in turn, to live within such gilded bigotry. 

In order to live in this historic building, my grandparents must have jumped through some hoops, offered to play by someone else’s rules, the most prominent of which was keep the Jewish thing quiet.

For my grandfather this was no great compromise-he left religion when the world allowed Hitler to wipe out most of European Jewry. But my grandmother was a woman who thrived on being contrary. That’s how I know it was my grandfather who pushed for his family to suck it up and live in that building. If his own family had lived among princes in Europe, why should they not live among them in America, too? My grandmother, the daughter of an affluent merchant, couldn’t have cared less about living among those who sneered at her family’s "new money," who blocked them from membership in every prestigious social club in New York City. But for my grandfather she agreed to live in a hotbed of Waspy prejudice. It was her way of telling him, "I love you."

When she made any kind of concession, however, she’d never let anyone forget it.

"Oh, no," my grandfather told our driver once, "this is the wrong car." It was late November-well after Labor Day-and we were on our way to dinner. The driver had pulled up in the white Rolls-Royce.

My grandmother, buttoning her coat, snorted. "Howard, shut the hell up. Just get in the car," she said, grabbing my hand.

"What will people think when they see us in the white?" he asked. My grandfather was always battling to earn some neighbor’s respect, reassuring people they’d made the right decision letting these Jews in when they had rejected so many others. He had just as much, if not more, money than his neighbors did. He had finer clothes, better cars-he had everything they did, but still he was afraid of being seen as an outsider. He had massaged Old Money until it begrudgingly paid him attention, and he was determined not to make them regret it-but his wife often refused to cooperate.

"What do you expect him to do? Take the car back to the garage while Matthew and I just stand here?"

My grandfather was silent.

"It’s bad enough that I have to live around a bunch of oil paintings in suits," she continued. I was seven years old when I realized she was referring to our neighbors, not actual paintings. "Now I have to freeze when there’s a perfectly good heated car, just because it’s after Labor Day."

I felt sorry for my grandfather, whose refined taste was obviously lost on my grandmother. She didn’t understand the benefit of appearances. If she had her way, we would have sat at home eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of the bag instead of going to a fancy restaurant. She took off with great strides, dragging me toward the waiting car. "Oil paintings do not run our life!"

My grandfather knew she would leave him behind, so he huffed under his breath in French and got into the white car. And once we were on our way, she put her hand in his, and he squeezed it because-though he’d never admit it-he loved his wife even more than he loved his reputation. 

Reprinted from Dumbfounded by Matt Rothschild.  Copyright © 2008 Matt Rothschild.  Published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc. 

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The first setback was that I couldn’t stop writing. I’d be sitting at my laptop hacking away and then I’d remember another funny anecdote that just had to be made into a story. The number of essays grew and I mined my memory for more. I read everything I could about the craft of memoir. I set deadlines that I did not meet. The end grew farther and farther away.

Even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about writing. A year before I found an agent I tried to quit writing. I was full of confidence in my writing in college, but when I tried submitting essays from my book, they were rejected. Some rejections had encouraging notes from editors; most did not. I doubted myself and decided to concentrate on other things, like my job or a relationship. I put the latest draft of the book in a drawer and left it there for nine months. Still I could not stop seeing my life in print. I would go to work and something funny would happen, and I’d think "that’s a story."

But later that year I got a phone message from an editor asking for permission to print a story I had submitted. The message was full of static, and I could not make out the magazine title the first time I listened. I did hear his name was Dan Lynch from a magazine that had New York in the title, which meant only one thing to me: The New Yorker. Flushed with excitement, I dropped the phone and high-fived the air in elation before remembering I didn’t submit anything to The New Yorker. I picked the phone back up and concentrated on Mr. Lynch’s voice. As it happens it was not The New Yorker calling. It was a small magazine called New York Stories, which I had in fact submitted something to. Still, this was big news. I was finally going to be a published author! That single publication was all it took to renew my interest in writing.

I dug out my defunct manuscript and reread it with a red pen. It was not a pretty sight and I decided to rewrite the whole thing. Six more months went by writing and rewriting. People who knew I’d been writing wanted to know when the book was going to be published, and I did not have an answer for them. I couldn’t even decide whether I was writing a memoir or a novel. Everything was true, but what would happen when my estranged family heard I was writing a book?

I took a step back from the laptop again and reevaluated my intentions. If I wanted to write a memoir, displaying my dysfunctional family for the entire world, then I needed to understand why. Sure I wanted to be published, but I didn’t know that writing nonfiction was any more likely to get me published than writing fiction. Besides, there had to be some good reason why I had been writing true stories from my past all along. I just needed to figure out what it was. So I decided to fly back home to New York from where I’d been living in Florida for an investigative trip.

Because New York is home to me, I viewed it with a mixture of longing and apprehension. Longing because it’s home, the site of my happiest childhood memories -and it was a very happy childhood – and apprehension because due to the unraveling of my family in my adult life I can’t return home. That was what I was writing about. So this particular trip wasn’t a fun-filled time of dinners and reunions. It was me trying to figure out how things went so wrong and how I would write about it. I ended up wandering the city where I once lived and replaying my childhood. Here’s FAO Schwarz where I was almost arrested for shoplifting the Barbies I couldn’t bring myself to ask for. Here’s Central Park where I roamed endlessly and where I once learned that my entire life had been a carefully orchestrated lie.

Most of my book takes place in one of the prestigious apartment building’s on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile – that glorious stretch of Fifth Avenue from 82^nd Street to 105^th – but I hadn’t been home since my mother threw me out of the house when I was eighteen. Our apartment building sits across from the Met and I sat down on the steps outside the museum. I could see the same doorman I knew when I lived there, and I wondered if he’d remember me. I am on a list of names not to admit inside.

I looked up at what I thought was my old room’s window and saw a figure looking out at Central Park. Who would be in my room now? Did they see me? It was then, sitting on the outside and trying to look in, that I realized why I started writing my memoir to begin with, and why it had to stay a memoir. It wasn’t because I was mad, or greedy enough to write one of those tell-all books. I wrote because I was confused, and I thought that through writing I could finally get some answers to my questions. I was trying to write my way to closure, trying to find my way back home.

I got up and crossed Fifth Avenue, half-expecting someone to come out of my old building and tell me to leave. When they did not, I took out my camera and snapped a picture of the building’s awning. I took a picture of the American flag outside the building. I walked back across the street and got a picture of my old room’s window. I was like the paparazzi of my own past. I must have been taking pictures for an hour before the camera’s battery gave out, and I felt a gust of summer wind. It was time to move on, to go back home and finish the book.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post.

The post The Shelf-Life of a Memoir appeared first on Jewcy.

I’ve heard all about his theory before, but Tyson has a notoriously bad memory, and recently as we were driving over to Tampa, he repeated his theory about the Power of Three (or POT as I call it), and attempted to apply it to whether or not he should move. I have to admit that I wasn’t paying close attention during the conversation. It’s not that I don’t find him interesting–he is sometimes–but I was distracted, and when he brought up POT, I found myself linking what I thought were simple coincidences together. I present the coincidences here for your consideration. If you have time, would you take a look and then tell me what the universe wants me to do. 

Seemingly Random Instance Number One:

I had just finished reading aloud three sections from Dumbfounded for a bookstore audience. There were maybe forty people in the audience, and I remember thinking that seemed like a lot for a town where I had no connection. Maybe this is why I allowed myself to relax and have some fun. When I do these readings I generally read the same three sections, short excerpts from different chapters, so the audience gets a good flavor for the book. I’ve rehearsed and timed them; it takes about twenty minutes. Then there’s time for questions. 

The last section I read from is a chapter called "Jude the Obscure", and it’s the first really pivotal chapter in my book. It’s the chapter where I learn, conclusively, that my life up until that point had been a lie. A well-orchestrated lie told for my protection, but a lie nonetheless. It’s also the first non-funny chapter, and the first chapter where the reader gets formally introduced to my mother Jude. So I finish reading the chapter and it’s time for questions.

I’m expecting some questions about my mother, especially since this last bit I read was about her. People always ask about her. I’ve come to rely on it. But something strange happens this time, which is why it’s lodged itself in my mind. A man raises his hand and I call on him. 

"What about your father?" he asks. 

"My mother?" I say, thinking I must have misheard him. I said nothing about my father in the reading.

"No, your father. Where is he?"

How the hell do I know? That’s what I want to say, but I don’t. Instead I explain that my father checked out before I was born. I never had to ask about him, because somehow I got the impression that he had slipped into the world of unmentionables.

"So you’ve never tried to contact him?" the man asks.

"No," I say, "it must sound strange, but I never really thought of that as an option. I guess if I were young today it would have been easier, what with the Internet, but I never really thought about trying. Somehow that seems disrespectful to my grandparents. They were the ones who raised me when both my biological parents developed Peter Pan syndrome."

The man didn’t seem completely satisfied with my answer, and I have to admit that I wouldn’t have been either. What I didn’t tell him was that if I’d kept on reading from "Jude the Obscure" I would have come to the part where my mother tells her friend that my biological father didn’t know I existed. I have spent some time thinking about this twist in my story, but I know my mother is prone to exaggeration to garner sympathy and I’m not sure she wasn’t lying. Certainly she never said this to me, but I also never asked her about my father.

So maybe it was the shock of the man’s question that night–I swear in a dozen other readings before nobody had asked about my father- but for the first time I began thinking about my father.

Oddly Coincidental Instance Number Two:

I’m driving down the road a few days after that reading from Incident Number One and my friend Rebecca calls me. Her book club had read my book, and she wanted me to know that it was a hit. She says that the ladies (it’s a girls only affair) were disappointed that I didn’t attend because they had lots of questions. Instead they directed their questions at Rebecca, and she did her best to answer them. I asked what kind of questions

"Oh, things like What happened after the book ended to make you want to teach? Whether you and your mother patched things up. But then something came up that I didn’t know how to answer…They wanted to know about your father."

Again with this? It’s not like I claim to be the product of Immaculate Conception in Dumbfounded. It says very clearly "my father left, never to be heard from again." It’s no mystery. But I asked her to explain the line of questioning.

"I guess it wasn’t a question. It was more that some people wondered if things would have been different if your father had been around. And they couldn’t understand how you could brush him off in a few sentences." 

At first I was insulted. Didn’t he brush me off? And for as much as I know, he’s never written a book, so I’m not even a footnote in his story! But I was also insulted for my grandparents. Like, really insulted. For someone to insinuate that a totally absent entity could do a better job than my grandparents, who willingly gave up their Golden Years to chase around the little shit that was me, is beyond comprehension. Then I realized that’s probably not what the book club meant, and that it was a reasonable enough question. I also thought back to that twist in my story where my mother says my father never knew. I wondered if he did know, or if he was out there somewhere completely unaware.

The seed of doubt.

Okay, Seriously? Instance Number Three:

So I haven’t told anybody about this yet.

Maybe three days after that conversation with Rebecca, I got an email from a woman who had read about my book in the Washington Post. Something about the name sounded familiar and she went out and got the book and read it, and then she put somepieces together. She went to my website, found my email address, and wrote, "I know you don’t know me, but I think I might know you. I think we’re related."

Can you guess how? Well, continues the email, she remembers her mother telling her that before her father left their family, he became involved with some wealthy young woman. She goes on to write that her mother has passed away, and she can’t verify the name, but she believes the woman’s name was the same as mine and various other components of my story made sense to her as well. Small things, like my red hair. My first hair color was red; my father is Irish. Hers is, too. She has attached some pictures of the man in question. 

The pictures don’t really tell me much of anything. Everyone who has seen me recognizes that I look like my mother’s family. As my friend Michael commented a few days ago, every year I look more and more like a portrait of my ancestors. That or a Jewish mountain man, but only when I wake up.

Of course beyond the photos she’s been nice enough to include the name of her deadbeat father (for after he left her mother, he basically disappeared) and it is, in fact, the same as mine. I email her back and suddenly we’re conversing about a whole family I never knew I had. There’s a cousin who impersonates FDR for a living, uncles, aunts, and would I like to meet them? One uncle even thinks he knows where my father is…

So in the car last week with Tyson, his reference to the Power of Three got me thinking. I never tried to find my father before. What would have been the point? What good would it have done? But now I’m wondering, maybe it’s time. What do you think?

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post The Power of Three appeared first on Jewcy.

I started cooking – I mean actual cooking, not just making cereal – earlier this year when I adopted my dog, Baron. I used to write exclusively at Starbucks, but I always had this fantasy of working at home with a loving dog, a clean study to work in, and a home that perpetually smelled like roasted chicken or chocolate chip cookies. Well, now I’ve got the dog, the study is still a work in progress, and on most days my house does, indeed, smell like heaven.

But cooking is more than just a manifestation of my idealized self. I never thought about it until recently, but I cook my way through writing complications. Given the kind of work that I do, you wouldn’t think that I’d have writing complications. What’s so complicated about repeating your own life experiences? That’s like asking what’s so complicated about running. All you do is put one foot in front of the other and move, yet somehow most of us find ways to talk ourselves out of it. The same can often be said for me and writing.

In order to make a memoir interesting, a writer has to re-experience all of the events he or she writes about. That’s the only way it works, otherwise the bones of the story are there but it’s missing flesh and blood. While writing Dumbfounded, I tried to pretend my childhood happened to someone else, but I couldn’t get inside that guy’s head. Finally I told myself, "Look, if this is going to work you have to back in time and be that seven or ten year old you."

That was far easier said than done, and often cooking became a refuge when things got too heavy. I peeled apples for the crock pot apple cobbler through re-experiencing my mother saying she never meant to have me, sautéed onions and garlic for a casserole through humiliating myself in front of my entire fifth grade class with my a capella rendition of a Judy Garland ballad, and beat chicken cutlets flat for schnitzel through losing my grandparents. Eventually, when the food was ready, and I calmed down, I would go back to that messy study and channel the little boy with the big hair. Sometimes I’d bring ten year old me a plate of food, that always made him feel better.

Needless to say, the more I write the more I need to cook, and now look where it’s gotten me. I’ve got 26 croissants to make chocolate croissant pudding, and tomatoes to make-what the hell am I supposed to be doing with these tomatoes again? And let me tell you what else! I have been making these large, elaborate dinners-for me and Baron! Roasted chicken (remind me to tell you how I figured out what a "giblet" was), rack of lamb, beef rib roast,and that’s just in the oven. I can make the slow cooker sing out in joy from cobblers, stews, and Korean barbeque dishes. I’m like the closet gourmet. I have a very large table and everything just waiting. Do you need to bring anything? No, I’ve got it under control, but if you’d like to bring your newly purchased copy of Dumbfounded, I’ll sign it for you after dinner.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Cooking Up a Memoir appeared first on Jewcy.

Item Number One: Everyone sees something different in the book and the author’s intentions or opinions regarding said work are completely irrelevant. Moreover, they’re a nuisance.

I would be lying if I told you that this hasn’t worked in my favor. For instance, a journalist writing for The Forward drew a comparison between a story my grandfather tells me in Dumbfounded and what happened to me later in the book. In the story, a boy throws his name down a well and can’t ever get it back. But, argues Beth Schwartzapfel, "Unlike the boy from Chelm, whose name would likely have faded into obscurity whether or not it was lost down a hole, little Matthew was an heir to New York’s branch of the Rothschild clan, the international banking and finance dynasty: His name was no small thing to lose." I don’t have to tell you that I didn’t include my grandfather’s folktale in order to craft a metaphor, but I will most certainly take credit for it.

Of course there are the opinions you may not like as much. Recently Modern Tonic, a pop culture website, compared my book to a scene out of Gossip Girl,  "He lived in a 19-roomapartment on Fifth Avenue, where he had a driver and a housekeeper. He attended posh prep schools while his mother gallivanted around Europe collecting husbands." It’s an apt comparison, and it was meant as a compliment, but I kept wondering what my grandmother would have said. She hated the whole pack that became the inspiration for shows like Gossip Girl, and she made it her mission to save me from being eaten by a sea of Paris wannabees. Once again, it wasn’t my intention for anyone to draw that comparison, but I’m no fool: I know it sells books. Sorry, Grandma, but I’m taking credit for this, too.

Item Number Two: You have to know how to talk about the book.

I don’t think I realized this initially, but Dumbfounded is a tricky book to discuss. One reason is because it’s about so many things (identity, class and race, religion, rejection, sexuality, care for the elderly, etc.) that it’s hard to home in on one issue in particular. But I did realize that because of my name and subject matter I would have to work double-time to ensure that people didn’t get the wrong idea and think my memoir was a "Poor little rich boy" story, a "Oh, I’m so sad and so rich. Boo hoo hoo. Pity me and all my woes that I brought upon myself because I’m so rich and so sad!" It happened anyway, and every time I see that kind of reference in a review or an article, I think, "You totally missed the point of the book."

But what was the point? Do books like mine even have points?

"What’s your book about?" people would ask.

"Uh… me?" I answered the first few times. Now as anyone with an ounce of common sense could predict, this answer wasn’t usually enough.

"So I guess you’ve had an interesting life?" they ventured. 

I’d shrug. "I guess." It wasn’t until experiencing Item Number Three that I learned how to answer this question.

Item Number Three: The author is responsible for selling the book.

On the publishing side, I have a wonderful publicist who has gotten me fantastic media coverage and gigs like this one at Jewcy. She’s arranged lots of interviews with newspapers and magazines and radio, etc., and she coordinates my book signings. So when I go to bookstores to do readings, generally people have heard of the book and show up to listen. But that’s where my publicist’s job ends and mine begins: I’m the only one who can sell this book. (It’s a job I take very seriously, as I like to eat, and the more books I sell, the more I get to eat.) A mediocre reading or poor body language can eliminate any potential buyers in the audience. The author needs to schmooze it up with the crowd, shake some hands, tell some jokes, smile until his face cracks, and then smile even harder.

And when it becomes obvious that your introducer hasn’t read the book, nor does she seem inclined to even read aloud from the dust jacket (I once had a woman who spoke for roughly five minutes about the specific shade of blue on my book’s cover but nothing else), it’s up to the author to bring the audience back with the stump speech. This is where having mastered Item Number Two from above comes in handy. I suggest rehearsing as I did.  "Dumbfounded is the true story of what happens after my strikingly beautiful but emotionally unavailable mother abandons me at three days old to her Jewish parents, a couple I’ve seen best described as ‘Fiddler on the Roof meets Auntie Mame.’"

Now for the most important thing I learned… drum roll…

Item Number Four: Put your pride away because it’s got no place in the publishing industry! (Besides, if you really cared about your pride then you shouldn’t have written a memoir.)

As a new writer, selling a book can be especially difficult. You have no built-in audience, or even folks who think they heard your name mentioned once at a bar, or on that clever website Stuff White People Like. So when someone requests an interview or an appearance, even if the signing is in the middle of Kansas, take it. JetBlue or Southwest your little tuchas out there, and tell them how much you love Kansas. Open with, "Have I mentioned how much I love living under the imminent threat of tornadoes? It’s so great to meet other folks who feel the same way!"

The only time my pride reared its ugly head was during my very first radio interview, when I was  asked, "So what did your grandparents think about the book?" I don’t mean to spoil Dumbfounded’s plot here, but both of my grandparents have passed away, and their deaths are discussed in great detail in the book. My grandfather dies maybe halfway through? My grandmother dies at the end. This gives you an indication of how far this interviewer had read. Because I am the person who I am, and because nobody told me I had to abandon my pride, I had to goad the man. "Oh they loved it," I said. "They thought it was the funniest thing they’ve ever read. They were rolling in their caskets." He didn’t think that was terribly funny, and I must admit that I had to work very hard not to preface all answers to remaining questions with, "Well anyone who’s read the book might think…"

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post What I Didn’t Learn in Author School appeared first on Jewcy.

Just a moment ago, it occurred to me that I was naked and standing in front of an open door. Now, besides my nine-year-old boxer, I live alone, and while for some living alone might seem an obvious invitation to turn one’s home into a satellite nudist colony, I am not one of these people. Let me tell you, the way that I was raised was not conducive to casual nakedness. In fact, my grandparents (who stepped in to raise me after my own parents refused) were so modest that I would have been more comfortable growing up in Victorian England than in New York’s Upper East Side of the 1980s. So the realization that not only was I naked, but that I was advertising myself like someone looking for trade, surprised me.

This is what happened. Earlier this morning, I went for a run with my dog and came home sweaty. I was in the process of taking off my clothes and piling myself into the shower when I got a text message from a friend suggesting I might want to read an article in the newspaper. Curious, I picked it up and quickly became so engrossed that I forgot what I was supposed to be doing (showering), and I forgot what my body was doing (walking), until I looked up through the open patio door and saw my neighbor waving at me. Fortunately, the newspaper concealed just enough to make the situation only moderately embarrassing. She’s kind of a lush anyway, so there’s a fair chance if she got an early start today she won’t remember any of this.

I don’t tell you any of this to introduce my new alter ego, Nudie Rothschild, nor do I begin my blogging stint on Jewcy with something embarrassing in order to make myself more endearing, though, admittedly, that’s something I would do. No, I wanted to tell you about my sojourn into nudity to illustrate why I write. It’s very simple. I write because I can still get so lost in the power of words that I completely forget myself. As a writer, it’s my dream to do that for someone else. I want someone lost in the forest of my words with only my voice as a guide.

In truth, I didn’t set out to be a writer. Sometimes you hear writers talk about teething on pencils instead of ice cubes, and writing before they were talking. That wasn’t me. For me writing was a necessity; it was the only way that I could win praise. By the time I was in high school, I had already been expelled from five different schools (think Holden Caulfieldwith a pronounced Jewfro and an additional seventy-five pounds), and it was obvious that my hard-assed teachers saw me as the vehicle to finally drive them over the edge. So imagine everyone’s surprise when the Fifth Avenue Delinquent (one of my more colorful nicknames) began earning As on papers. Actually, I can credit writing for finally giving me the impetus to turn myself around in school. I remember one particular teacher holding a paper of mine and saying,"Matt, you’re very intelligent, but nobody will ever care if you’re always going to act like a prick." From that point on, any assignment I could do in writing, I wrote.

Still, it wasn’t until I was in college living in San Francisco that I realized my future lay in writing. A friend had come out to visit, and in his haste to make his returning flight, he left a copy of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day in m ycar. I hadn’t read the book, but I had heard of Sedaris. People told me I should read him because we had a similar sense of humor.

Later that night I began reading and quickly lost myself. That was the first time I could remember something like that happening. Sure I had enjoyed books before, but not like this. If a book can do this for me, I thought, this is what I want to do for someone else. Looking back, finding that book was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had been in college for too long racking up majors and degrees, but nothing affected me like the temptation to reach people through writing. It was after reading Me Talk Pretty One Day and then [an earlier Sedaris book] Naked that the seed for my book Dumbfounded began germinating in the back of my mind.

Having already spilled the beans about why I write, I’ll tell you I have a lot to accomplish this week. In five posts I have to introduce you to me, and hopefully persuade you to give my book a chance. And with so many fantastic books vying for readers right now, that’s going to be a task. But if there’s one thing you need to know about me from the start, it’s that I love a challenge, and-as you can see from the naked anecdote above-I have no shame when it comes to writing.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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