After a year's hiatus, I have decided to get back on the horse. I had a little bit of a burn-out with my writing (and, to be honest, life in general) shortly after the post before this one and have done very little writing, except what I needed to do for school, since then. Now, I'm living in Israel (temporarily, alas, but here nonetheless), and my perspectives on a lot of things have changed; I think for the better, but no one ever really knows what's better in the moment, do they?
However, since the change in scenery has helped me get back into a mindset that makes me want to write again, I can say with certainty that I am doing better in at least one way now.
I've got a few projects in mind: I want to get back to the novel I started two years ago (it's dystopian, my favorite genre, but very difficult to write well, so don't expect to see much of that anytime soon); I feel some poetry is begging to be laid onto paper from my experiences last semester in DC and this semester in Israel; and, most of all, I want to work on a collection of short stories I've been conceptualizing for a while now but never had a chance to bring to fruition. The working title of the collection is "Inventory," with a tagline that will go something like, "Lost Objects of the Shoah." For those unfamiliar with the term, "Shoah" is the Hebrew word for what we call in English the Holocaust. There's a significant debate in the scholarly community around the nomenclature of that event/series of events; "Holocaust" has linguistic roots that connote "sacrifice," religious sacrifice in particular, and many scholars, and non-scholars as well, have problems with calling the extermination of 6 million European Jews and 3 million other Europeans a human "sacrifice"--after all, they ask, to what end? The word "sacrifice" implicates giving something up to achieve something better, and saying that the Shoah created something better creates a lot of problems--emotionally, intellectually, historically. The word "Shoah" has a literal translation of "catastrophe," thereby calling the event The Catastrophe--no religious connotation, no implication that there was a higher purpose to it all, just the single most horrific, most widespread mass slaughter in human history.
I have had an intellectual and emotional investment in the Shoah for many years; I am the descendant of survivors (and some non-survivors), I have written several pieces--creative and non-fiction, both public and private--about my family's history, and I have researched that time period from a cultural (as in, not the war and the military tactics involved in it, but the lives of the people affected by it) standpoint for many years. I am taking a course now on the artistic representations of the Shoah, which has re-piqued my interest in the topic and inspired me to get back to the "Inventory" project. It started out with one story which I had published in a small publication in Atlanta when I was 15 put out by the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust; it tells the story of a child's shoe lost on the side of the road as she is marched to the trains in an
Aktion in Germany. I also started, but never finished, a story about a pair of silver Sabbath candlesticks of thus-far undetermined fate. Shimon Attie's artistic piece, "Brick by Brick," offered significant inspiration for the rest of the project. I have a list of just under 2 dozen other items with unique stories (fictional, but based on historical occurrences or possibilities), with more ideas to come I'm sure. I might post some of these, or at least sections of them, for feedback as I get them written over, I hope, the next few months. It might be a hard experience; I have an idea of calling my grandmother up and asking her if she can help me by offering tidbits of stories of items that were important in her life in Germany which she lost, or recovered, as a result of the war. That will be difficult for both of us, I'm sure. But I'm also certain that it will, in the end, be a good experience for me, and I think the collection might even serve as an eye-opening piece for others as well if it ever does reach full fruition and publication.
To make a long story short, I'm back in the writing game. "Words Not Lost" wasn't lost forever. It was merely taking a meandering walk through the woods that some would call lost, but I call a temporary exploration of new territory. I've certainly explored new territory in my life since last year. I'm about to go on vacation to Cairo for the first week of my spring break, then to Haifa for Passover seder; I hope to gain inspiration and do some writing in that time, but I'll be on full force when I get back to Tel Aviv a week from Sunday and writing as much as I can in the week following. I hope to have something written, however rough and unedited, before classes start up again after Pesach. Wish me luck. :)
~ RaeAn
