Jewish Book Fair

Novel Approaches

From30-year-old Amy Sohn to 80-year-old Walter Zacharius,

Explicit Lit

Like her previous books, Amy Sohn's latest novel spares few details about her protagonist's sex life.

JULIE WIENER

Special to the Jewish News

W

hen Amy Sohn attended
her Reform youth group
reunion a few years ago,
she says she got a lot of "strange
sideways glances" and was "definitely
considered the most scandalous
alum.
That's not surprising considering
the 30-year-old Sohn has built her
literary career as something of a
Jewish bad girl. Her first novel, the
explicit yet witty Run Catch Kiss, was
about a young Jewish college grad
who chronicles her sexual exploits
for an alternative Manhattan
newsweekly. It came after three years
writing — what else? — an autobio-
graphical sex column for the New

York Press.
Sohn's latest novel, My Old Man
(Simon & Schuster: $23), is just as

raunchy. In it, rabbinical student-
turned-bartender Rachel Block
plunges into an affair with a cranky,
misogynistic, gentile filmmaker who
is twice her age at the same time
that, to Rachel's horror, her shleppy
father experiences his own May-
December romance.
If you expect your Jewish Book
Fair fare to contain only clean lan-
guage and wholesome, family-friend-
ly scenes, you'd best stay far away
from My Old Man, which spares few
details in Rachel's S&M-leaning
amorous life. A savvy and wry narra-
tor, Rachel expounds on everything
from her promiscuous neighbor's
wide array of vibrators to female
ejaculation.
While it is hardly going to end up
on the reading lists of yeshiva day
schools, Sohn's writing does come
from a distinctly Jewish perspective.
Yiddishisms are sprinkled through-

out, and there are oodles of refer-
ences to Jewish holidays and culture,
including Rachel's family's habit of
referring disparagingly to gentiles as
"NJ" (shorthand for "Not Jewish").
Rachel's sex-toy collecting neighbor,
Liz, attends Israel and JCC fund-
raisers and playfully refers to Rachel
as "Racheleh."
Meeting for coffee in Cobble Hill,
Brooklyn (Sohn's and her character's
stomping ground), the author is sexy
yet classy in a tight, low-cut ribbed
teal sweater, with her long, brown,
curly hair pulled back.
She says that once she decided to
make her protagonist a rabbinical
student, she began thinking a lot
about the idea of suffering and the
biblical story of Job.
"I was interested in the idea of
somebody who leads a religious life
but hasn't suffered personally, and I
wanted Rachel to undergo a trans-

Amy Sohn:
"Still
searching.

formation that might mean coming
away from more conventional ideas
about religion to a more human
experience of life through her suffer-
ing," she said.

After 60 Years, A Novel

Publisher Walter Zacharius' first attempt at fiction is a wartime romance inspired by his Army years.

SANDEE BRAWARSKY

Special to the Jewish News

I

n writing his first novel, Songbird
(Atria Books; $24), Walter
Zacharius has come to realize that
being an author is far more difficult
than being a publisher. The 80-year-old
founder, chairman and CEO of
Kensington Publishing has just pub-
lished a book that he began in the
1980s, inspired by the life of a young
Jewish woman he met in Brussels while
he was serving in the U.S. Army during
World War II.
This interviewer sat down with
Zacharius in the Manhattan office of
Kensington, one of few remaining inde-
pendent publishers in New York, two
days before the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Paris. On Aug. 25, 1944,
Zacharius, a young soldier who had
been assigned to Paris, was hugged and
kissed by people crowding the streets to
celebrate. "In retrospect," the former
member of a combat signal unit says, "it
was one of most exciting days of my
life."

10/29
2004

82

Although he's wanted to write a novel
since he was a kid (the other side of his
dream was to become a publisher), he
began this book on a dare. Once, while
attending the annual Frankfurt Book
Fair, he told a story that had stayed with
him since his wartime years to his busi-
ness partner, who then encouraged him
to write it as a novel.
He began doing historical research,
interviewing survivors to try to fill in the
gaps and wrote 800 pages. After his
partner died at an early age, he put the
project aside for a decade. About three
years ago, at the urging of his wife, he
picked it up again and pared it down to
the book he really wanted to write.
A historical romance, Songbird is told
through the voice of Mia. When the
novel opens in 1939, she is a 17-year-
old vacationing with her family at a
resort called Krzemieniec, "the Polish
Athens."
Affectionately called "Songbird" by
her father, Mia is a beautiful singer and
pianist who studied in Paris — and
music is an underlying theme of the
book. When the family learns of

Germany's invasion of Poland, they flee
to their home in Lodz, their lives of safe-
ty, culture and freedom forever altered.
Her father, a doctor, is able to protect
the family for a bit, but they are forced
into the Lodz ghetto and then to
Treblinka, although Mia manages to
escape from the cattle cars en route.
The story, which unfolds cinematical-
ly, is Mia's journey through the war
years, fighting with the Resistance (her
code name is "Songbird"). It is also a
love story, following her from Poland to
Switzerland, New York, England, Paris
— she's there when the city is liberated
— and to a kibbutz in Israel.
During the war, Zacharius was intro-
duced to the real Mia by an Army
colonel; he tried to help her get out of
Europe when she was trapped, but says
that he really couldn't do much. "Then
she disappeared from my life."
Many years later, he heard that she
was living in Israel. Still, he can conjure
up her face. He once had a photo but
destroyed it. "That was the past," he
muses.
He explains that he enlisted in the

Walter
Zacharius:
"I grew up
in a hurry."

U.S. Army soon after Pearl Harbor and
as a 19-yearlold traveled across France,
Belgium, Holland and Germany, mostly
with British and Canadian forces.
"I grew up in a hurry," he admits.
"I've tried to show how the war swept
people out of their comfortable world
and threw them into a frightening new
one, where they had to do things, both