Scrolling through all the Facebook pictures of fresh faced children headed back to school today, I had three thoughts:
- I miss that excitement. In my mind, September has always been the true “new year”, unlike that middle of the winter day most of us call New Year’s.
- Yay! It is finally a warm sunny day after a summer when such days were rare, and I don’t have to go to school! I am sitting in the sunshine (laptop in a bankers’ box for screen visibility) as I type.
- Without thinking of it as “back to school” my instincts must have kicked in, because I just signed up for another round of Spanish classes.
To be honest, I’ve taken three writing courses this summer as well, so point 3 is a bit of a cheat! Nevertheless, with the start of the new school year, I will also start this new blog. If you enjoyed following Tema’s Travels, you can still read about the sabbatical year travels at temastravels.com. But going forward I will be blogging here, at temafrank.com. (And if you are more interested in my business and customer experience blogging, you can still find it at https://frankreactions.com/blog/.)
Do New Things
This coming year will be about doing new things, not just travelling to new places. (Though there will be plenty of that too.) One of those new things is finally trying to learn to write compelling fiction and creative nonfiction. I know I can write business books well, but writing in a more creative way is a whole other skill set.
I tried to write fiction during my first year of married life, when we had moved to the Netherlands and they’d stamped in my passport that I was only allowed to be there as long as I was with my husband and he still had his job. I was not legally allowed to work there. This was a bit of a shock for someone who’d been a career women for over a decade already.
What I discovered was that there was a whole craft to writing creatively that I had never learned. And this was pre-Web, so I couldn’t access courses and books online to teach myself. I wrote a few character sketches, tried a few stories, but wasn’t at all satisfied with the results.
When we got back to Canada I wrote my first book, Canada’s Best Employers for Women, which had many stories in it, several of which sounded far-fetched, but, sadly, weren’t fictional. Stories like that of a female senior executive who talked about how pleased she was that her male colleagues no longer held meetings in strip clubs. (Yep, and this was in the mid 1990s! #metoo)
Then I just got too busy with life, business, kids, parents and trying to earn a living to spend much time on creative writing. But now that I’ve declared myself retired, I am finally tackling a book that I’ve yearned to write for years.
My Upcoming Book
It will be based on the early life of my grandfather, Boruch Idelzik (later known as Ben Adelson) who was born in Belarus in 1892 and lived the excitement and turmoil of the Russian revolutionary period.
His father died when he was only four years old and his mother had to struggle to earn enough money to raise her three boys alone. Always eager to learn, Boruch had wowed the villagers by being able to recite the Mourners Kaddish at his father’s funeral, after which he was taken under the local rabbi’s wing to learn more. He also insisted on learning Russian from a boarder his mother had taken in to earn some money.
At age 12 he was sent to the city of Minsk, a solid day’s carriage ride away from his home town of Igumen, to study at a yeshiva. The children had to sleep on the same benches where they studied, and they were expected to arrange a “rotation” among local Jewish families, so that they would have a place to go each day of the week to be fed. He was shy, and so he went hungry a lot.
After a few weeks he ran away and managed to get himself apprenticed to a tinsmith. (One of the challenges of writing a book like this is that it is almost impossible to get documentary evidence of what exactly he did, when, where and how. So I suspect the book will have to be fiction “based on the life of” rather than my original plan of it being a work of historical nonfiction.)
The chronology of the following years is not fully clear yet, but it included:
- Fleeing Russia in 1913 to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army.
- Landing at Ellis Island in New York and making his way up to Montreal, where he stayed for three years.
- Going back to New York, where he was involved in a socialist revolutionary group, and may have met Trotsky.
- Fleeing New York to avoid being drafted into the American army in WWI. He figured that the war was all about capitalist imperialist struggles for money and power; not a cause worth fighting for in his opinion. However, if he was going to have to fight, he and some of his revolutionary friends decided they would return to Russia to join the Bolshevik revolution — a cause he believed in.
- I don’t know what happened during that period back in Russia, but I do know that he ended up travelling between Vladivostok and Yokohama, Japan, selling clothes to try to earn a living.
- Stowing away on a ship from Yokahama after the city was destroyed by a earthquake, tsunami, and fire.
- A brief stint in an an immigration “prison” in Vancouver.
- Somehow making his way back to Montreal, where, in 1924 he finally settled down, married, and started leading a seemingly quiet, respectable life. (Still a rebel though, his children were sent to a socialist camp, for years he and his wife were vegetarian, and despite suffering from Meniere’s Syndrome which was supposed to have led to an early death, he lived to be 100.)
