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Former Detroiter Marge Piercy weaves together
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86 Detroit Jewish News
SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish News
1ff arge Piercy's Jewish
neighborhood was not
the Detroit area where
she grew up. For a
time, it was rooted in Cleveland,
where her grandmother lived. Later,
there was Chicago, where she was
active in synagogue. Years after, it
became Cape Cod, where she helped
found a chavura.
The Jewish neighborhood that
anchors her now was built from her
imagination. It's the home base of the
characters in her latest novel, Three
Women, the subject of her upcoming
speech at the sold-out Detroit Book
& Author Luncheon planned by The
Detroit News for Oct. 11 at Burton
Manor in Livonia.
"I decided to make
the characters Jewish
because it seemed rele-
vant," says Piercy, 63,
who celebrated her bat
mitzvah as an adult. "It
was part of how I con-
ceived them from the
beginning. I also write
about non-Jews, but
not in this book.
"I wanted one char-
acter to be a rabbinical
student. I know a lot
of women going into
the rabbinate, and I
know the kinds of
problems that they
often face. It's a situa-
tion that's fairly real to
,,
me.
The three women in Piercy's book
confront the generational problems
that are real to '90s women regardless
of religion. Suzanne, a 49-year-old
divorced lawyer, has to cope with a
daughter who comes home because
she is out of work and a once-inde-
pendent mother who moves in
because she needs care after a stroke.
"It's all about the relationship of
the three generations of women, and
it also considers the issue of whether
there's a right to die," explains Piercy,
who dedicates her book to all those
who are caught in the middle and
pulled all ways."
Piercy, who also fills this most
recent novel with explicit sexual rela-
tionships, shows another side of her
interests through poetry books.
"I don't enjoy repeating myself, so
every novel is different. But with the
poetry, it's an ongoing voice," says
Piercy, who recently launched
Leapfrog Press, a small, literary pub-
lishing company.
The prolific author also has
written historical fiction (City of
Darkness: City of Light), science fic-
tion (He, She, It) and erotic suspense
( The Longings of Women). Her ongo-
ing poetic voice expresses religious
ideas in a book released last March,
The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems
With a Jewish Theme, a collection of
old and new poems divided into
seven sections that move from chup-
pas to holidays.
Left: Piercy dedicates
her book to "all those
who are caught in
the middle and
pulled all ways."
Below: Marge
Piercy: "Writing was
what I wanted to do,
and I could see no
other thing equally
compelling. "
"Anti-
Semitism was
very blatant in
Detroit when
I was growing
up, says
Piercy, who
lived near
Livernois and
Tireman. "I
would walk through the neighbor-
hoods and hear Father Coughlin [on
the radio]. Covenants were written
into housing — no blacks or Jews.
"My neighborhood was fairly poor,
and the options I saw there were not
what I wanted. I lost my first friend
to a heroin overdose, and I did not
wish to go on the streets like my