Interview with humor writer Jerry Klinger

My fun author guest today is Jerry Klinger, to chat about his humorous book, Boynton Beach Chronicles – Tails of Norman.

Bio:

Jerry Klinger and his wife Judy are happily transplanted retired Floridians from Washington, D.C. He is the founder of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation and the To Save A Life Foundation, two American public charities.

Jerry has written over 100 articles about the American Jewish experience, ranging from the Jerusalem Post, the Prairie Connection to the San Diego Jewish World. He is frequently interviewed on T.V. and radio. But it is in Boynton Beach his alter-ego has found expression.

“Boynton Beach, where every corner has a Bagel Den and somebody kvetching. It is funny, simply a very funny place,” he says.

Welcome, Jerry. Please tell us about your current release

The Boynton Beach Chronicles is a compilation of stories written over a number of years. Like with any story, there is a kernel of truth, an element that comes from real life experience and observation. If we back away from the seriousness, the stress, the overwhelming pushing of media, political, and social concerns, and look at the life about us without filters, there is humor everywhere. Our over serious sincerity is actually funny. Laughing at ourselves makes the living part fun.

It confounds my kids who never realized there was a funny bone in my body…the forest and the trees stuff of being too close. The kids are sure they have been raised by strangers, not by their mother and me. Or, they think I have gone off the deep end and need to be checking out Shady Pines, asap. Now that they are adults, it is extra fun confusing them. The grandchildren love the word games. Grin, Grin.

What inspired you to write this book?

I have been writing about American Jewish history, more serious stuff, for years. The articles frequently went along with the over 100 American Jewish historical markers and projects I have completed in 39 states and in five countries. More than 7,000,000 people annually see and benefit from one of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation efforts.

My wife said I created JASHP because I needed something to do when I retired. She knew I was really bad at golf.

People ask me to write a book after seeing, participating in, reading an article I wrote, or hearing me speak somewhere.

I might someday. I tell them. There could easily be a few volumes for the dusty stacks of University bookshelves about JASHP’s wide ranging projects.

Writing a book about my Jewish American historical projects always struck me as work. Not that work is bad, it isn’t. But, I have been writing Jewish humor for years, mostly under a pseudonym for pure fun, part of a secret personal life. It is an escape from the tensions of work.

Moving from telling about the real world to telling stories from my imaginary world that reflected the real world is fun. I can make mistakes on time, date, place, and because it was fiction, it is still accurate. It is my fiction and fun to share.

The serious and the fun stories continued to build. About a year ago, I was in San Diego with Don Harrison, the editor of the San Diego Jewish World. We were site developing for future Jewish Historical projects that my Society would underwrite.

The subject came up of writing a book about the projects. I felt reluctant, anticipating all the work. I asked Don about doing a book using my humor stories on American Jewish retired life in Boynton Beach, Fl., instead. I never associated having fun and laughing, and then chucking again and again about Florida Jewish retired life, as work.

So what inspired me to write the book? I wanted to have fun and share fun and laughs with others who could use a laughing escape even while seeing some reflection of their own lives.

Many years ago, when I was a junior in Mr. Puglisi’s homeroom class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., he kept life quotes on the walls for us to be read. He was trying to get us to think about what we wanted for our lives ahead.

He never asked us to read them. They were just there for us to read, absorb, or not, on our own.

One of those wall quotes stayed with me. I have no idea whose quote it was.

“If you don’t want to be forgotten when you die, do something worth writing about or write something worth reading about.”

It is a bit of a negative perspective. I dreamed that my life had meaning, only what?

Over the years, I have written much and done lots of things. Few of us have one dimensional lives.

My wife, Judy, shares, perhaps tolerates my split humor/serious personality. We are getting to the years when we plan for the Journey’s End. Judy and I both agreed, we absolutely, without question, totally refuse to have our name written on a stone, dates and the text loving parent and grandparent. We wanted to stick out. We wanted to give people a smile about who these people might have been when visitors come to that somber place and read our stone.

Our agree upon text will have our names and dates.

Our texts will read:

On my side:

He did more than some and less than others.

On hers it will read:

She put up with more than some and less than others.

What we want to leave with folks as they drive by and read the stone is a smile, a chuckle, and a wonder…who were they? They had and even now have a sense of humor.

The Boynton Beach Chronicles, Tails of Norman, is a smile that people can own, reread and enjoy for many, many years.

A smile is more fun than a scowl.

What exciting story are you working on next?

There are funny stories that strike me daily. By lunch, followed with by nap time, unless I write down the idea, I forget the idea and have to wait till the morning for a new one to pop into my balding humor head.

This morning, an email from one of my daughters-in-laws complaining there has not been a roll of toilet paper on the shelves of her local grocery store for seven weeks got me going.

My sense of humor kicked in to the dilemma. She has three children, ages ten to five. What can she do to teach them personal hygiene if there is no T.P.? What do people do if there is no T.P.?

I wondered, being in Florida, we could use Palm fronds. I wondered, what do you do if you live in Arizona, use carefully de-thorned cactus pads? What do you use in Alaska, recently caught Salmon?

Anyway, the humorous possibilities of the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020 kept me chucking and writing away.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I have never considered myself a writer. I like to think of myself as a storyteller. Story telling can be serious. When I taught history at the University, my lectures were stories. I think they kept student’s attention better that way.

Humor storytelling makes people’s lives more fun. It makes my life more fun.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?

No, I don’t write full time. I spend much of my time on my historical and charitable efforts. Winston Churchill said, “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”

I give a lot, money and time, through my historical and charitable focuses. I think the best way to give is to leave people feeling a bit better about life than when I first passed by.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

Instantly seeing the foibles of life and reflecting them through a Jewish cultural perspective.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I thought I wanted to teach history. Can’t make a living teaching history. I went into the financial world. Retired now, I can teach all the history I want without having to worry about making a living.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?

Probably, but it is getting close to nap time.

Links:

Amazon | Jewish American Society | To Save a Life organization

 Thanks for the chuckles today, Jerry! Wishing you many more happy tails. :)

Interview with author Claudette Sutton

Author Claudette Sutton is here today to chat about her new historical biography, Farewell, Aleppo: My Father, My People, and Their Long Journey Home.

Bio:

Claudette Sutton is an award-winning author and journalist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and son.

Welcome, Claudette. Please tell us about your current release.

My family had roots in the Jewish community of Aleppo, Syria, for perhaps 2,000 years. Growing up in the 1920s and 30s, my father went to school in Aleppo with other Jews, Christians and Muslims, who lived side by side as they had for centuries. Yet my grandfather, a Jewish textile merchant who did business with Arabs in Syria and neighboring countries, saw the signs of rising anti-Semitism and recognized the need to get his family out. Faced with the unfeasibility of relocating his large family at once, he came up with the plan of “exporting his sons” – sending his eldest son, my father, to Shanghai in 1941 to work for an uncle, in hopes of finding a stepping-stone to the United States. When Japanese forces seized Shanghai in December 1941, just a day after bombing Pearl Harbor, my father found himself alone in an occupied country, across the world from his family, until the war ended and he could come at last to the United States. Today, when the horrors of seemingly endless civil war in Syria fill the news, “Farewell, Aleppo” reminds us of a timeless than a century ago when Aleppo was a center of diversity, scholarship and tolerance. Written with a journalist’s eye and a daughter’s love, it is a poignant and hopeful narrative interlacing one family’s story with universal questions of identity, family, culture, and what it means to be home.

What inspired you to write this book?

The inspiration came from a seemingly simple request from my father. Friends had been asking him about his childhood in Syria and years in Shanghai during World War II before coming to America, and he wanted my help putting the story on paper to share with them. I immediately said yes, anticipating a short project for friends and family, but as I learned about my father’s experiences, and Syria’s amazing and nearly forgotten Jewish history, I knew I had to keep going. Many hundreds of hours of interviews, research, writing and rewriting later, I had a book, Farewell, Aleppo. That invitation to get inside my father’s experience was one of the greatest gifts of my life.

What exciting story are you working on next?

I am in the early stages of a book about my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was born in Aleppo, Syria and came to New York with his family in 1902 when he was 8 years old, part of the first wave of Syrian Jews to America. My grandmother was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1918, and after the death of her mother she was bounced between relatives in Haiti, New York City, and Manchester, England. She was a 15-year-old girl in a boarding school in Paris when a 30-year-old American businessman, a distant cousin, stopped to check in on her when he was traveling through Europe on a business trip. For Grandpa, it was love at first sight. For Grandma, “I didn’t know from love!” They were married over sixty years. Their story is one of individual fortitude, family ties, intercontinental journeys – and one of my favorite love stories.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Oh my! I still have a tendency to look at other people as “real writers,” while I’m someone who spends a lot of time writing. But I spend a lot of time writing, some of it gets finished, and some of what I finish gets published. So I guess I’m a writer.

Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?

I don’t write full time. For over 20 years I’ve been the editor and publisher of “Tumbleweeds,” a quarterly newspaper for families in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I created back when my son was 5. I write an essay in every issue, and these have won several state and national awards, but much of my workday goes into soliciting articles, selling ads, other aspects of running a business. I have time to write between busy seasons, so my big challenge is in shifting my creative energy when my schedule shifts. One way I do this is to keep a little writing going even though my busy season, so I have some writing momentum when my time frees up. And I try to be vigilant about protecting my mornings for writing and writing-related reading, for things that keep my writing brain engaged.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I have serious side-interest in botany. When I need to clear my head from writing, or need to build up some writing momentum, I’ll often read about and study wildflowers. Right now I’m reading “The Triumph of Seeds,” by Thor Hansen, and “Gathering Moss,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, to learn about how seed plants reproduce, and how spore plants do it. I find it can be very valuable to think about something (seemingly) totally unrelated to what I’m writing about – although when I think about it, I’m still learning about families, just plant families. Same issues, just played out differently.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Other than a few years in junior high when I wanted to be a scientist, I pretty much always wanted to be a writer. What I loved about the idea of being a scientist was the thought of spending my days quietly making observations and taking notes – which in many ways is just what I do as a writer.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?

Good writing shows us that there’s always more to someone’s story than first meets the eye. A good book builds understanding, compassion and empathy, stretching the heart as well as the mind. That’s the kind of writing I try to do.

Links:

Website | Amazon | YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Google+

Thanks for being here today!

Interview with journalist/writer Greta Beigel

Today's guest is non-fiction writer/journalist Greta Beigel. Her book Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life--A Memoir of Music & Survival is the topic of conversation, but there's a lot of other fun stuff, too.

Read on!

Bio:

American journalist Greta Beigel worked for many years as an arts reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of three Jewish-themed books: The humorous/satirical Mewsings: My Life as a Jewish Cat (also in audio); the short story, “A Jew from Riga,” about her efforts to learn more about her Dad’s mysterious past, and Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life, a memoir (paperback and e-book) about growing up an Orthodox Jew and a gifted pianist in South Africa during the apartheid era. Beigel now lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

Welcome, Greta.  Please tell us about your current release. 

"Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life," recently released in paperback, tells the courageous true story of the author who grew up in Johannesburg as a gifted piano prodigy, only to be exploited by her superambitious mother desperate to be accepted by a scornful Jewish society. Subtitled "A Memoir of Music & Survival," the book also takes a hard look at everyday living in apartheid-South Africa, where prejudice dominated all. The memoir soon migrates to Southern California where our protagonist morphs from music performer to music scribe, becoming a staff writer specializing in classical music coverage for the Los Angeles Times. Sadly, once in America, three chapters call forth the details of sibling sexual molestation--a subject so taboo, yet one that begs for further public discourse. The last chapter of "Kvetch" hops around the world, as the author gets her story down, and seeks a type of spiritual transformation. 

What inspired you to write this book?

All my books to date have been personal, autobiographical, even my favorite, Mewsings: My Life as Jewish Cat, a humorous, albeit learned take on Jewish life from one feline’s perspective, but in reality reflections on Judaism from my alter ego. My desire to pen “Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life,” evolved over decades. The need was propulsive, with no way out. I felt compelled to get a certain event, a certain image, a certain dialogue down on paper. I usually write in cafes, or coffee shops or restaurants, away from my normal milieu, and carry a notebook and jot thoughts or chapters down in shorthand, a skill that I learned in Johannesburg in my 20s that sustained my early years as a newspaper reporter, interviewing celebs in Los Angeles. 

Excerpt from Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life

Apartheid

Copyright©2014, Greta Beigel. All Rights Reserved

Under cover of darkness a secondary terror rages forth: the abuses of apartheid. Often my mom wakens me, beckoning me to the window. Fingers to lips, we watch members of the Afrikaner police force as they conduct raids and make arrests and throw African men into the backs of waiting vans, as though they’re nothing more than sacks of mealies to be stacked up one against the other for transport.

For what? These men apparently are guilty of walking around without the requisite "pass books" documenting their existence. They can be stopped and picked off the streets at any time and in any place, and if failing to show reference books, detained. Whites for the most part merely look on, or cluck-cluck or perhaps even deem it all a good idea. I often hear shouting from upstairs as a husband or lover or friend of a servant employed by someone in the building is cornered and carted off by yet another zealous copper.

History note: In 1947, the Nationalist Party comes to power. This Afrikaner govt. soon begins its diatribes against Indians, “Coloreds” and Africans. The Dutch Reform Church sanctifies this apartheid, or apartness. Now the church makes damn sure that everything shuts down on Sundays and that cinemas and shops and places to eat remain closed. They make sure there’s bugger-all for all of us to do. Except go to church, I suppose. Sex ranks next on the agenda, and the passage of the Immorality Act mandates sex between whites and non-whites illegal.

Mornings, Johannesburg streets are jammed with giant green Putco buses packed to capacity with non-white workers streaming into the city to work as domestics or gardeners. Evenings, the train station in Hillbrow remains chaotic with workers rushing along non-white platforms to catch trains alarmingly stacked to the rafters as they head back to Alexandra or Soweto townships with their shanties and smokestacks and no water or electricity and marauding tsotsis.

By contrast, whites-only platforms stand clean and orderly and calm. At virtually all public facilities, separate entrances exist for blankes and nie-blankes. Signs are posted in front of banks and at government buildings and outside post offices. Ironically, the nie-blankes are there for the most part to buy stamps for the blankes, and yet they have to resort to their separate entrances and stand in separate lines to make these purchases. Beaches are marked separate, and park benches painted blankes-only. Restaurants, cinemas, theaters and concert halls remain the sole purview of us Caucasians.......

What exciting story are you working on next?

The conclusion of Kvetch refers to my longing to return to live in Hawaii, a place of great beauty and pineapples, coconut and palm trees. But also enormous social and economic complexities. Now that I’m back in Honolulu, I’m toying with writing about the islands in either a blog or a column, covering the joys and setbacks. Also plan to get back into journalism, and write about classical music, both online and in print. And perhaps start on that book about a certain pet sitter.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

From a young age, I became fascinated with the inner workings of newspapers. Perhaps this resulted from my mother's pushing, for after every musical triumph she'd schlep me to the various newsrooms for interviews and photographs, and I became fascinated with the editorial process. Daily, I'd compare arts stories between the morning and evening papers, and was not above calling editors to point out lapses in coverage. I also loved entering writing contests. So albeit I was a terrific pianist, methinks I was always destined to be a music writer and later an author. I've always loved seeing my name in print.

Are you a fulltime writer? If not, what else do you do, and how find time to write?

Yes, I write most of the time. I also need to concentrate on getting the word out about my books. Social media takes time and we all must engage. It's an ever-evolving process. These days I'm focusing on making appearances at book clubs.

What would you say is your fun writing quirk?

As mentioned, I like to write in cafes, anyway away from home. I also do good works traveling on buses, in fact public transportation is a great way to get through the slog of research and underlining, etc. For many years, I've preferred to use computers at libraries--I have many cards from many cities--to laboring at home alone, and also enjoy sitting amongst students at university labs and libraries. The staffers are so helpful with technical stuff. Journalism, far more rigid, is easier in many ways. I do much research, interview subjects, transcribe my notes (moaning all the time), and then prepare an outline of the story to follow. It’s a far easier world of writing, albeit much more disciplined. Once the story is published, my job is over. But birthing a book, remains a lifetime commitment. 

As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

Growing up a lonely child in South Africa, I became obsessed with British author Enid Blyton who wrote wonderful mystery series for children. I resolved by age 10 that I, too, would write a book one day. This pronouncement continued over the years and in many countries and I would insist that I’d tell my story of growing up a gifted child pianist with a cruel mother and an absentee father. Even when I worked as a music journalist for the Times, I’d tell everybody that one day I’d write my story and be published. I always KNEW. But did not know when.

Buy links:

Paperback | Kindle

Social: Facebook 

Thanks, Greta!

Readers, if you'd like to chat with Greta in person, she's going to be a guest at The Writer's Chatroom on Sunday, December 7, 2014 from 7-9PM EST. Feel free to join us!