Sunday June 15,
llam-8prn
at our
Bloomfield Hills &
Southfield Locations
,96tei/i citaice
• Ribs • Steak
Chicken
Hamburgers
& Hot Dogs
• Corn on the Cob
• Baked Potato
with ali the fixins
Look for Chef K .ith on the grill!
• Bloomfield Hills •
• Southfield •
Long Lake & Woodward
Northwestern at Inkster
(248) 647-3400
(248) 358 -1700
er Location: Taylor
week for breakfast, lunch or dinner
coffeebar & cafe,
Just North of Maple across from Meijers
6343 Haggarty Road
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
248.699.7400
telligent Chicken Vairits You!
For Dinner
After 3:00 pm
No Limit
6/13
2003
66
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AN'
Getting Published
With her first book in print, former Detroiter
realizes a longtime dream.
SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish .1\liws
R
osalee Mandell Jaeger did-
n't gain a pound doing
research for her first pub-
lished novel, and she very
well could have.
Love and Other Passions (Llumina
Press; $19.95) chronicles the fictional
lives of two women in the restaurant
business, and Jaeger took cooking
classes, dined out at gourmet estab-
lishments and interviewed touted
chefs to get the information needed
to authenticate the world of the char-
acters she created.
"I wanted my infor-
mation to be correct,"
says Jaeger, 68, who
moved from Detroit to
California and gives her
characters a similar
journey only with plen-
ty of detours to enhance
the plot. "I based the
book in Detroit because
I know Detroit."
Love and Other
Passions tells of Edith
Stern and Janet
Camerini, who- meet
and become close
friends while in teacher
training at Wayne State University.
Edith, a single mom, and Janet, a
Holocaust survivor, give up their
intended careers and learn about
cooking in Paris and Florence, where
they have unanticipated adventures
before returning to the United States.
The women, conflicted about fami-
ly and romantic relationships, offer
mutual support through their long-
standing friendship while going
through alternating experiences of
turmoil and success. In some ways,
the connections they make while sep-
arated keep their lives intertwined.
"I got the idea for the book when I
read an article about two women who
started a restaurant in Los Angeles,"
says Jaeger, who has been living on
the West Coast — currently in
Northridge, Calif. — since graduat-
ing from the University of Michigan.
"I got to thinking about how
women with different backgrounds
could go into business together, and I
came up with one character who
would be a Holocaust survivor from
Italy and a second character who
could have been someone I knew
growing up in Detroit.
"Although I created the two
women, I had no idea what was
going to happen to them. They took
on lives of their own, and I had to go
where they led me."
Jaeger needed no research for Paris
and Florence because she had traveled
to both cities and knew a family who
survived the Nazis in Italy. She did
visit a commune in Oregon and
interviewed someone from the exact
Idaho location referenced on her
pages.
The author, who
grew up in a duplex
on Pasadena, attend-
ed Durfee
Intermediate School,
Cass Technical High
School and Wayne
State University
before enrolling in
Ann Arbor.
An English major,
Jaeger submitted six
stories in competi-
tion for a Hopwood
Award and won first
place in the category
of Undergraduate Fiction in 1955.
The recognition motivated her to
continue writing, and the money
bought her a ticket to California, -
where she thought professional
opportunities would be more abun-
dant.
Jaeger's writing was sidelined for a
time after she met her husband,
Marty, now a retired attorney. She
went to the University of California
at Los Angeles to get her teaching
credentials, worked in a school for a
short time, raised three children and
managed her husband's office.
"I wrote seven books by working
on them in the morning and revising
them at night, but I couldn't get any
of them published," Jaeger says. "Self-
publishing wasn't an option in my
mind until two years ago, when I met
a man who had self-published.
"I decided to go with my best book
and spent time refining it. The pub-
lisher I chose is a woman who started