If you’re not querying or have never queried, you might ask what is a dead manuscript? If you are or have, you know. Dead manuscripts are manuscripts that never found a home or never found an ending or never found a plot or never found a voice. While Stephen King advises writers to “kill their darlings”, he’s been at this a lot longer than me and is wildly successful. I can’t quite afford to kill them so I instead lock them away (kind of like in Misery). I cut sections from manuscripts or say goodbye to whole manuscripts all the time. I don’t kill them or murder them or obliterate them, I file them. I might need that plot one day or that character description or that award winning first line.

Even when they are filed away, I dream about them from time to time. And the ones that I loved the most, I’ve decided to paint. Will they ever be read to anyone besides my cat? Perhaps not, but she agrees they’re too precious to go. And while they might not ever have a cover or contract, I will now be able to revisit them, my turtles and tortoises, ants and gladiators, pigs and astronauts, in full color, whenever I wish.

Volumes and volumes of Jewish folktales line my shelves. I imagine my great-grandparents, who I never knew, chanting them in foreign tongues. In my imagination, they add details, constructed from memory, that make me believe their stories are true, but also that they were somehow created just for me.

I, however, was raised on a singular folktale. 

In the beginning, there was a beautiful angel who rose from the waters in flowing robes with a magnificent crown. She held an eternal light that reached to the clouds. 

But in order to see her the people first had to shed their shtetl skins. So they cast them away into the river, like sins. 

The angel then devoured names, story, syntax, and syllables until all that remained was the language that they did not yet know. 

They crawled onto the shore, skinless, wobbly legged, and wordless. They tried on names and customs, settling on ones that never seemed to fit. 

Then as they gazed upwards towards the heavens, she appeared before them. They promised her that this was the story they would tell their children and their children’s children.

My father’s parents saw this angel with their own eyes or so he told me, but they were buried before I was old enough to ask questions. My mother’s parents saw her too and talked about her often. 

My grandmother was Persian, but she barely remembered that. She only recalled that she didn’t know the Yiddish that sometimes slipped out of my grandfather’s mouth when he was angry. 

“Really, tell me what language you spoke before.” I pleaded. 

“None.”

“Where were you born?”

“Ellis Island,” they would reply.

I protested until I was finally forced to accept this to be true. 

“Fine, but then tell me, where were your parents born?”

“Ellis Island, too.” 

And I grew to understand that it wasn’t a lie because, to them, it was the beginning of everything and this was the story that would save them and their children and their children’s children. 

“You really want the whole story?” asked my grandfather born Yitzhak later named Issac then Isadore then Edward and finally just plain Ed. 

“Long, long ago the Jewish people were chased from the Promised Land. But we’re the lucky ones. We found our way to a new promised land on a distant shore,” he said. 

So it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in anything. They, of course, believed in the angel and they believed in a promised land. They lauded the public school system and its ability to teach English while continuing to insist that they knew no other language before. They believed that in America anything was possible even for Jews so long as long as we waved our flags and made ourselves look and sound like ‘real Americans’. They believed that this is what would keep them safe. 

It was a bargain that they happily accepted long ago. Mostly. They hedged their bets. 

They kept a version of Passover from the Holy book, the Maxwell House Haggadah, and they also still gave us Hebrew names. These names were separate from who we were, souvenirs from a forgotten world. 

Esther, my name, both Jewish and Persian, felt akin to the name Elana that my Spanish teacher assigned to me in the seventh grade. Because what’s a name detached from meaning or story? 

My name, Erica though that came from a daytime soap opera and you don’t get more American than that. I knew my origin story.  

But then my cousin became ill. From the whispers around me, I knew that it was unlikely that he would survive. And because we were a family sewn together by secrets, it only accidentally slipped out that my father and uncle had gone to synagogue to have my cousin’s name changed. 

“Change the name, the true name, the Hebrew name, of the gravely ill and the Angel of Death can perhaps be deceived. When the Angel comes to collect their soul, the person by that name will be but a memory. Then the Angel of Death may be fooled into failing to reap his reward.”

“Old World mishegas. Meaningless,” my father said later.

And even though it didn’t work and my cousin passed away, I knew my father was wrong. 

It wasn’t meaningless. It was proof that worlds of stories were once written for me. And even though they believed that the angel in the New York Harbor demanded that they throw them overboard, they were already imprinted on their souls and maybe faintly on mine too. 

So I bring my children to the Statue of Liberty. 

“Your great-grandparents were born here,” I tell them as I gaze up at Lady Liberty. “Floating around us are all the stories of you and of me.” 

I look back and whisper to my ancestors and pray that the angel’s mouth will open and their lost tales will spill out. Perhaps next time. 

Until then I borrow folktales and origin stories: Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Talmudic, Tanakhic. I collect them. I rewrite them. And I continue to hope that one day I will find the story that will make me remember. 

*Published in the Jewish Literary Journal, September 2025 

This was meant to be a big week for me.

On the day the bodies of Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Ori, Almog, and Alex were found (1/9), just days after their execution, my article, Feeding Our Folktales to the Sea, was published in the Jewish Literary Journal.

Today (2/9), on the day of the funerals, my interview about On a Chariot of Fire will be published in Paper Brigade Daily (PB Daily).

And tomorrow (3/9), during shiva, On a Chariot of Fire is released.

In one week (10/9), when aninut ends for the families, Mixed-Up Mooncakes is out.

What really matters is that we all allow ourselves to feel this tremendous loss and that we never forget. We are mourning for people we never met, but got to know through their families.

There are families grieving. Our nation is grieving. We are grieving. They were part of all of us.

Words are not enough.

I recently sent revisions of my middle grade novel back to my agent. While waiting is associated with the initial query process, in finding an agent, it’s actually a part of the entire publishing process. Agented writers wait to hear from their agents on revisions and then they wait to hear from publishers. So here I am waiting though now I’m waiting for publishing news and for hostage news too.

Waiting for news

The manuscript I just sent back to my agent is a very different one from the one I started revising last summer. How could it not be? I’m very different.

My manuscript, historical fiction with magical realism, begins September 1945 and ends in October 1946. I wanted to write a hero’s journey with a twelve-year-old girl (Frayda) as the hero, but I initially planned on glossing over Frayda’s personal trauma and the Jewish community’s collective trauma. That was setting and not the story that I wanted to tell. I didn’t want the focus on Frayda and her incredible journey and her wants and desires to be shifted to focus on the trauma of history. Perhaps that was naive or misguided. She’s a product of the history she lived.

October 7 forced me to reexamine my manuscript just as it forced me to reexamine my relationships and my worldview.

In my new draft, I lean into my character’s trauma and directly spell out the antisemitism responsible for it. The characters now comment on the state of the world in 1945 in language that speaks directly to the situation today.

It’s as if they tried to warn us. It’s as if history is pounding on the door of today.

As writers, we can write about a past that we can only imagine or we can imagine an entirely new world, but the truths remain the same. We can only see history through the lens we know.

Now that I’m supposedly on my way to a career in this, I’ve had to think about what my benchmarks are. There was a time, in 2020, when my goal was to see my name on print on a front cover. It seemed theoretically attainable, but impossible at the same time. And then in 2022 it happened with the publication of Alone Together on Dan Street.

On Twitter, I started to see announcements of awards. Was that my new benchmark? What do awards measure? Shiny stickers are great, but they’re also not something within a writer’s control. I’m tremendously proud of my awards, but there’s no formula to replicate what I did to be awarded one (see my post on awards). I can only continue to improve my craft and grow.

So, what is a worthwhile benchmark? Being selected by PJ Library? A certain number of published books? Earning out? A starred review?

I got my first starred review just last week from Kirkus for Mixed-Up Mooncakes, along with co-author and friend Christin Matula and illustrator Tracy Subisak, and I was over the moon (excuse the cliche and mixed metaphor). But stars are like awards, there isn’t anything that I can do to get one.

My new benchmark, the thing that I’m striving for, is getting a publishing contract for a novel (middle grade). This is the goal I started with. I just printed my MG manuscript out for about the 6th time and I’m on a holiday. I’ve already sent my agent two very messy drafts. I’m not clear what the standard is. Did I send it too early? What stage of development is the correct one to send?

I had a new kidlit friend tell me that I’m doing well and I should just stick with picture books. Maybe that’s sound advice, but I know that I’m not done with novels yet. It’s what started my dream and I have to at least see this one through. I already know the dedication that I’ll include. I wrote the dedication after just one draft.

The truth is benchmarks will always move. What’s important is not to lose sight of real goal to write for that child that needs your next book. That’s reason enough to keep on writing.

A number of years ago, I attended an impactful talk at SCBWI’s Summer Conference by Deborah Helligman on writing history. Her book Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers, a non-fiction, had recently been published.  She explained that even when writing a compelling narrative, the facts are the facts. She explained that, in non-fiction, characters can’t lean against a lamppost if there wasn’t a lamppost in the historical record. She stressed that dialogue for the characters must be limited to what they actually said. There are no assumptions or possibilities. There are facts.  She ended her talk by telling the historical fiction writers in the room (paraphrase), that we’re lucky because we get to make everything up. She was being facetious. We’re bound by fact too, but with a very different set of rules.

That being said, I’ve read historical fiction novels that do just that. They make everything up. They sometimes write entertaining and compelling novels. They’re, in my opinion, writing fiction in a historical setting.

This isn’t how I approach historical fiction. I’m the chair of a historical society after all. I make plenty of things up, but I have a series of unwritten rules that I follow.

1. I won’t change history
2. I won’t create dialogue for a real person unless it’s something that they actually said (part of the historical record)
3. I won’t change the behavior of a real person even if it only serves to deepen the narrative and has no effect on the outcome
4. I stick to dates and won’t manipulate time
5. Because this is still fiction, I give my self permission to write anything that is at all plausible
6. My characters meet real people, but won’t interact with them in any direct way

Of course for every rule, there are exceptions. I think there’s a bit more room to play in picture books. And every project is different irrespective of the age of the reader. Sometimes facts are simply not knowable. If I were to write a novel set in biblical times, for example, I would likely need to reexamine my list. Also, I incorporated magical realism into my WIP (set in 1945) so when it comes to plausibility, I’ve strayed a bit, but not where history is concerned.

In my most recent picture book, Saliman and the Memory Stone, I fictionalized a true story. I needed a main character of a certain age, a journey that was more straight forward, and I also needed to soften the harsh realities. I made every effort to be certain that the story was still plausible by consulting with a team of subject matter experts. For more information on my research process, see my blog post: Researching Saliman’s World.

For my current work in progress (WIP), a middle grade novel set in 1945, I needed a rabbi to interact with the main character. The community is real and it’s a well established fact who the rabbi was. I wouldn’t attribute dialogue or action to him that wasn’t based on the historical record. This was problematic for my plot. What to do? I created a second rabbi (Rabbi Yosef) for the community that could act the way I needed him to act and say the things that I wanted him to say. I acknowledge the real rabbi and write him into historical scenes that he was actually part of. For example, I mention that he was to give a speech at the opening of the new synagogue and the children were assembled below the bima to sing. This was all real. My fictional character dramatically bursting into the scene was not. Could someone have made a dramatic entrance? It was plausible so that was good enough for me.

Keeping the historical in historical fiction is important to me. These aren’t the rules. They’re my rules. Create your own set of standards and have fun getting lost in a world where fact and fiction mingle.

Maybe its obvious, but I wasn’t sure what to make of all the Shhhh – Secrets in Kidlit Posts and the vague post messages that said things like “good news” or “signed something today”. Eventually I figured this out. There’s a [long] period of time in which you have an offer from a publisher, but it can’t be made public. You can tell your partner, your cat, and your kids because none of them are listening. They’re tired of hearing about books things, but there are people that might care. The industry standard seems to be that everything is secret until the deal appears in PublishersWeekly (a trade publication).

What I hadn’t appreciated is that fact that these PublishersWeekly announcements (those cool ones with headshots) can take forever to come. There are many reasons for this. For picture books, if you are an author only (as opposed to an author-illustrator), the deal won’t be announced until an illustrator signs the contract. Often, author manuscript edits are fairly far along before an illustrator discussion begins and then various factors can cause further delays that can include the publisher’s calendar and potential illustrator’s availability. Then the illustrator has to go through the offer and contract process now too. The wait can be very long.

I can give an example. Shhhh. I signed a contract for a picture book in May 2023. YAY! The announcement still isn’t out as of now (June 2024).

This manuscript was actually originally sent to the publisher in Spring 2021. They asked for an R&R (Revise and Resubmit). Don’t know what that is – neither did I.

So what is an R&R? It’s a request from a publisher or agent for you to rework your manuscript. Typically there will be comments that will suggest another direction or angle for the story. It’s a good thing. First of all, it’s not a rejection. It’s a statement of serious interest, but not enough to make an offer. It’s an opportunity. Even if it ultimately is a no, you have had the benefit of free expert advice that will make the manuscript stronger for your next round of  queries. In this case, the R&R (2 years later) was successful. It became an offer. I should also point out that the R&R came just as I was signing with my agent which is partly why I forgot about it.

Back to the waiting game. Offer in hand, I was obviously excited.

Then I waited for a contract. Then I waited for the first round of edits and the second. Then I waited for an illustrator. Now over one year after signing a contract and 3 years after my initial submission, it’s still a secret.

So, I have news…

You will have to wait.

In the case of Saliman, the lightbulb moment was hearing a friend and tour guide, Ayala, casually refer to ‘that time’ her great-grandparents walked from Yemen to Jerusalem in 1881. I had to hear more! I had to know all the details about her family’s journey and this journey in general. I knew about Operation Magic Carpet (1949-1950 airlift and sea rescue of 45,000 Yemenite Jews), but an 1881 walk from Yemen was news to me.

Step 1: I asked Ayala for all the details of her family story.

Step 2: (began minutes later) I searched online for hours and days for more information on this particular historical event.

Step 3: I researched Yemen, Jewish Yemen, Jewish Yemenite culture, Jewish Yemenite dress, Jewish Yemenite culture, Semite Aliyah, the 1st Aliyah, Operation Magic Carpet, Jews of Arab Lands… Some sites that I used were: the Israel Consulate page on Jews of Arab Lands, The Jewish Virtual Library, and the National Library of Israel blog (The Librarians). The Librarians is one of my favorite blogs!

Step 4 (visual and sound): I looked for videos for a better understanding of the people. I wish that I had kept track of all the incredible videos that I watched. I spent days and days doing this. It was here that I learned how they cooked, dressed, sang, and danced. Though my book was going to be historical this still gave me invaluable insight into the culture. The films replayed in my mind as I added details into the story like the mother’s singing voice, the poetry, the dancing, and the sound of their silver jewelry. Some that I really appreciated include (this is only a few of dozens): The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – Yemen Music of the Yemenite Jews, Yemenite Women Dance, Yemenite Jewish Wedding Celebration.

I also watched many, many other films on Yemen and Sana’a generally to get a feel for the landscape and architecture.

I continued my internet research and collected dozens of images. I knew these could help my future illustrator, but I also needed these to help fill in the world and story that I was telling.

A Yemenite family walking through the desert to a reception camp set up by the American Joint Distribution Committee near Aden (image from the Israel Embassies website: Jews of Arab Lands)

Step 5: Since I have limited access to libraries with the materials that I need, I had to buy books to help my research. Many books I only found a sentence or two that was relevant to the specific time period. My two main printed sources were The Jews of the Yemen, 1800-1914, By Yehuda Nini, Routledge, 1991 and The Land of Sheba: Tales of the Jews of Yemen, Schocken, 1947. Unfortunately, I didn’t use any archival materials this time. 

I also read academic articles. These included:

Yemenite Dances and Their Influence on the New Israeli Folk Dances Author, Gurit Kadman, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 4 (1952), pp. 27-30;Operation Magic Carpet: Constructing the Myth of the Magical Immigration of Yemenite Jews to Israel, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Israel Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3; and  The Literature of the Jews in Yemen, A. Neubauer, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jul., 1891), pp. 604-622.

I then read far too many articles on demons and folk beliefs. This was not helpful for this project, but very interesting.

Step 6: Repeat steps 2-4, but not ad infinitum. Rabbit holes are useful, but there will be a point when even I can see that I’m wasting time.

Step 7: I consulted with people with a similar background. It was difficult to find other families that had made the 1881 journey, but I have many friends who do come from Yemenite Jewish backgrounds. I spoke with their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers, and anyone else willing to speak to me. I asked about character names, language, dress, customs, and food.

Step 8: Consult experts. This step was crucial in fact finding and also these same experts will later be able to help fact check as they did in this case. From Asian Jewish Life, I developed a wonderful working relationship with experts of Far East Jewry. Yemen was new to me. I asked everyone that I knew. One leading expert, from a top US university, was introduced to me at a cocktail party in New York. Another I found from a community member in synagogue and one from X Twitter. This meant that I had to talk about my book non-stop!

Step 9: Repeat steps 1-8. Every detail is important. Every fact is essential.

The trick again is to know when to stop the research process. For me it was when the fully fleshed out manuscript ‘appeared’ on the page. During the revision process with my editor, I had to refer back to the research several times.

All of this – months of this – was what enabled me to write Saliman and the Memory Stone. The incredible illustrations by Yinon Ptahia are what brought this all to life!

There are no shortcuts.

More on Yinon and working with illustrators in a later post!

I’ve always had a million excuses not to write, but I now at least have a couple of valid ones. This war has made it impossible to sleep, nearly impossible to function. To get on track, I knew I needed help. I needed an outlet. It was time to turn/ return to writing.

I first decided that I needed to give myself permission to be ‘selfish’ which as the mother of five (and cat mom to a geriatric cat and a new kitten), just means doing something for myself. Even ‘working’ seems like a selfish act to me when there are so many others with needs turning to me.

I booked Highlights Foundation’s Jewish Symposium: An In-Community Gathering for Jewish Writers and Illustrators. A Highlights Jewish retreat is what initially gave me the spark that I needed to officially launch into a career as a Jewish kidlit author.

But I knew that I couldn’t wait until May. Faced with an existential threat, I needed a way to write myself out of my state of permanent anxiety and despair. In the mornings, after school drop-off, I try to walk and I’m successful with this most days. It’s my time to think and listen to podcasts. I was listening to Book Friends Forever and Laurel Snyder was the guest. She was talking about being in a slump and what she has done to work her way out of it. She mentioned a book (and a course) called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

I only had $13.99 to lose and thanks to my Kindle, it would be in my hands as soon as I returned home from my walk up Victoria Peak.

I’m only just beginning Week 2 of the process. Why I didn’t know about this before?

I’ll write more on that in a separate post because it turns out that I did. The Artist’s Way – A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity is exactly what I needed now. It’s a twelve week program designed to help creatives find their way out of a block and back to their creative self.

Now I’m finding my way, the artist’s way and I’m excited to see where it takes me. I have 11 weeks to go, but I’m already opening up to the possibilities.

What’s the value of Jewish narratives at a time when it feels like no one is listening?

Since 7 October it feels like, as Jewish creatives, we’re all screaming into a void or, at best, an echo chamber.

The last picture book manuscript I sent to my agent was about a turtle that celebrates Shabbat – sort of. There’s an ongoing war, there are 136 hostages (some no longer living), terror attacks against Jews have been plotted all over the world, antisemitism is rampant – and I’m writing about a turtle?

It’s hard to navigate the upside down world that we’re living in.

I stepped away from kidlit temporarily to focus on my family and fighting antisemitism because that’s what felt right at the time. I wrote letters to the editor of the local paper. I posted on social media. I went to Rome to meet the pope (and think I also found a picture book idea or two while I was there) and helped raise the issue of antisemitism and the hostages while I was there.

I felt guilty about taking small pleasures like creative writing in a world where there’s so much pain and suffering. Writing anything outside of opinion pieces and petitions felt trivial.

After finally hugging my children in Israel, I recently submitted my first manuscript to my agent in months. It’s been in my head for a long time, but getting it down onto ‘paper’ was a struggle.

And now I guess I’m back to trying to put more Jewish stories out into the world. I’m writing about turtles and rabbis and trumpets and children and wolves. Writing these stories is now an act of resistance. Maybe no one will read them and maybe only Jewish children will, but I’m going to keep on writing. There are discouraging articles about the future of publishing for Jewish authors. What I said in relation to awards and reviews is applicable here. I can’t control the reaction to my work once it’s out in the world. I can only continue to produce art that I’m proud of and that matters to me.

So, I’m logging new story ideas with Storystorm. I’m going back to my critique group for the first time in months. I’m picking up my middle grade manuscript and starting to work on revising it again. I even picked up etegami again.

I think back to a conversation with my mother from many years ago. For context, I grew up in a household with the rule, common among many other Jewish families, that anything German was banned. My mother loved Chanel perfume. When I told her that Coco Chanel was a Nazi collaborator, she responded, “I don’t want to hear it. Haven’t they taken enough from us already? This is my pleasure. I’m not letting it go.”

I have stories to tell. October 7 can’t take that from me so I spray myself with my mother’s Chanel perfume and begin to type away. I’m writing those Jewish stories. There’s a child out there waiting for that very story that I have in my heart. They matter. Our stories matter.

This is my pleasure. This is my passion. This is my mission. I’m not letting it go.