Carla Isicoff

Hannah sits contracted now in a permanent sitting position.  She has lost her ability to see due to the genetic curse of macular degeneration and her ability to talk from a series of strokes, but she can still play movies in her mind’s eye.   With the loss of other senses her hearing has become especially acute, so the movies are occasionally interrupted.  It’s her daughter, Evie, come to visit like a swirling dervish.  She has a love/hate relationship with the staff of this Jewish nursing home her son has so graciously provided for her.  And here Evie comes, shouting orders to staff as she makes her way to Hannah’s room.  Evie is the glue that holds the world together for Hannah.  Her son, on the other hand, may have the money to pay for this place, but his monthly visits are quick and brief.  His real reason for traveling to New Jersey from his home in Miami is to visit his girlfriend and daughter, his second family, that he keeps under wraps from his first family down in Florida.  Hannah knows all about it, she hears him on the phone to Susan, murmuring he’ll be there soon, how’s their daughter?, yata yata…..

Hannah prefers spending time watching her movies.  Snippets from the past that she is trying to assemble into a chronological, coherent full-length feature film.  Her very first scenes are not memories at all but stories her beloved mother, Blanche, told her of life in Grudna, Poland.  The story starts for Hannah on June 14^th, 1906 some 88 years ago.  She can picture the little collection of people at her father’s funeral, hear her sister, two brothers and her mother crying.  She was just a baby and had her own near-death experience at an early age. 

After her father’s death, her mother struggled to support the family collecting eggs produced by the farms in the little hamlet they lived in.  Blanche walked town to town with her cart bartering the eggs for meat, produce and other needed goods.  An old grandmother from the neighborhood took care of baby Hannah in exchange for food while her brothers and sister cared for the chickens, cooked, and tended the vegetable garden.  As Blanche arrived home after an exhausting week, the neighbors warned her as she approached her house that baby Hannah had taken sick and was dying.  They advised Blanche to start preparing for her funeral.  Blanche found Hannah bright red with a high fever and a rampant infection that was eating away at the skin of her throat and neck.  It was later discovered that the old woman’s eyesight had failed so poorly that when she would feed baby Hannah, she did not see the food running down the little one’s chin and neck.  The food, over the course of a week, started steadily decomposing and inflaming the skin of Hannah’s throat and neck.  By the time Blanche arrived home, late Friday afternoon the baby was burning up with infection.  Upon seeing the rotting skin of Hannah’s neck, Blanche cleaned it up the best she could, put a homemade brace around the baby’s head and neck and raced to the nearest doctor, two farm villages away.  The doctor cleaned the infected areas, applied poultices around Hannah’s neck and showed Blanche how to make and use them.  Blanche was determined to save her daughter and spent much of the next few weeks applying clean cloths around the infected areas several times a day.  The poultice was a simple mixture of several herbs crushed and tied in cloth then soaked in hot water and applied to the ravaged skin.  Within 2 weeks, baby Hannah was healing with no fever.  Blanche had not been able to get out on the road to sell eggs during that time, but the rest of the village brought food. 

It made Hannah sad to think that the poultices that cured her had no effect on her mother’s illness 15 years later.  But life was precarious with croup, rheumatic fever, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, typhoid fever, diphtheria tetanus, all playing a role in preventing on average one in four babies from surviving to their first birthday.  A simple abscessed tooth could cause systemic sepsis, overwhelming the heathiest.  One of her brother’s died of typhoid fever when she was just starting to walk.  Again listening to her mother’s stories in her mind’s eye, she could see the hamlet gathered with her family once again sobbing over a grave. 

Her most horrifying memory from her childhood was being buried alive in a potato gulley.  There were several waves of Russian pograms against Jews in Poland.  As Czarist troops stormed through the tiny villiages of Poland, if they didn’t simply line up Jews for execution, the would round up the Jewish children.  Any boys 13 years old or older would be used as decoys and human shields for Russian soldiers on the front lines.  The girls of at least 13 years old or older would be taken and used to do the soldiers cleaning, cooking, sewing, farming, or in the worst case, would become the soldiers sex slaves.  The good religious Christians of Hannah’s village, who sympathized with the Jews and their plight, would assist in harboring Jewish children by hiding them in the haylofts, floorboards, mattresses and garbage bins of their farms.  Children were often smuggled out during the night and placed on cattle boats by means of bribes such as a piece of jewelry or a few coins, and then eventually onto vessels leaving for America.  This was a treacherous 385 mile journey through Russia occupied territory to the north to reach the port at Gdansk and the Baltic Sea.   For families that did not have the means to smuggle their children out, the potato gullies that stored the potato harvest were used on short notice to hide children or protect them from the daily bombings and raids by Russian and then German troops.  The children were literally buried alive and the parents would lie over the gulleys during bombardments.  Russian authorities were told the troughs were needed to cultivate potato crops when they swept through villages.  In Grudna, at least, the strategy worked to save Hannah and her siblings. 

Hannah’s sister, Shara and brother Ely were smuggled to America when they were in their early teens, the minute Blanche had enough money for bribes and passage.  Hannah was too young and there was only enough smuggling for her two older siblings.  Within a few years, Hannah’s mother became progressively debilitated by what, Hannah decided much later, was most likely cancer.  Hannah earned enough money sewing, knitting and baking and selling eggs to provide the two of them with basic necessities.  As there were no doctors, medicines, treatments or a basic understanding of what was wrong with Blanche, Hannah sought the advice of the village “wise women” who practiced folk medicine.  Their best advice was to go to the swamps, a few miles away, and collect fresh seaweed to create packs to apply daily to the festering sores on her mother’s body.  So, on top of having to do an abundance of chores and work to support her and her mother, Hannah set out daily to the swamps with the help of a friend to collect fresh seaweed.  Hannah would attach a rope around her waist and wade out into the swamp while her friend held the other end on high ground.  To collect the large amounts of seaweed needed, Hannah sometimes had to swim to the deepest parts of the swamp.  Several times the rope gave way, and her friend would have to run back to the village for help, while Anna struggled to keep from drowning in the swamp’s quicksand.  She would do anything for her mother.

On her deathbed, Blanche sewed a pouch into a secret waistband on Hannah’s best dress.  In it she placed 3 gold coins (rubles) and an amulet that Hannah was to find later, when she needed it most.  Blanche had hoped that these coins would enable her daughter, when the opportunity arose, to start a new life in America. 

Story Statement: Women Who Settle, Women Who Don’t: Resiliance versus Resignation

In a series of women’s stories, all connected in one way or another, women live with the consequences of their decisions with resilience and joy or resignation and disappointment or maybe something in between.  The reader decides which and why.

Hook/Logline

Hanna’s Story: With her family dead or scattered, on her arrival to New York City from war-torn Poland in the early 1900’s, Anna is determined to keep her family intact despite an arranged marriage to an abusive husband.

Rachel’s Story: Against the strong urging of her parents not to, Rhoda marries a narcissist equally as self-absorbed as she is.  Unable to out run his demons, her husband is completely unable to meet her expectations and her parent’s “I told you so” haunts her.

Jeanne’s Story:  After being told by everyone in her life (parents, 5 siblings, teachers, peers) that she is the “black sheep” of the family, Joan struggles with her addictions and self-esteem trying to find some aspect of her life her family can take pride in.  She can’t look in the mirror without deep sadness and prefers to involve herself in everyone else’s lives.

Celia’s Story:  Being raised in a strict Irish Catholic family, Agnes breaks off an engagement and enters the convent as a compromise she knows will make her family happy and, as an emerging knowledge of her own sexual orientation, will prevent her from entering a marriage that would be a misery.

Madeline’s Story:  As a cubby, shy young woman, Judy finally finds the man of her dreams, but turns her back on every sign her new husband is gay, willing to ignore and deny what she sees to be true to save face with her hypercritical and demanding mother.

 

Second Assignment: Protagonist Profile

As each woman’s story has its own antagonist and protagonist, I will use Hannah’s story as an example.  Hannah’s protagonist is her husband, Joseph.  Abandoned by his mother at 8 years old, he survived by sheer wit and determination and by 15 was able to secure passage to New York City.  Despite his incredible work ethic and drive to make a good life for himself, he was a bitter man who harbored great anger and resentment over his mother’s abandonment.  He harbored a great distrust of women, all women, especially his wife and daughter.  His sons were put on Earth to work with him and were pulled out of school by 6^th grade to do so against Hannah’s protests.  He inherited the narcissistic gene from his mother, which confused and baffled Hannah.  She had never experienced anyone with the complete self-absorption and lack of empathy exhibited by her husband.

 

 

Assignment Three:  Working Titles

In no particular order:

And She Lived Happily Ever After?

Resignation, Resilience and Revenge

Women Who Settle, Women Who Don't: resignation versus resilience

 

Assignment 4: Selecting Genres and Finding Two Comparables

Genre: Womens Fiction, Historical Fiction, Feminism, LBGTQ+

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus

In this book, the main character is an anomaly for her time, a chemist in a man’s domain.  Set in the 1950’s, the mainstream jobs for women were clear cut: teacher, nurse, secretary, but NOT chemist!  The main character, Elizabeth Zott, fights with grit and determination to bring her feminist views to the public via her cooking show that combines chemistry with art of cooking.  There is tension in the sexist encounters with her male peers, humor (her dog narrates come of the action) and an antagonist you clearly want to cheer on.

Compared to my stories:

My women’s stories are set in time frames starting in the early 1900’s to present day.  Although the context within which each woman struggles is different, struggles remain.  Some of my women are much like Elizabeth Zott – bright, determined and up against cultures and mores that attempt to block their way.  Some of my women’s struggles are completely self-induced.  Some of my antagonists the reader will want to cheer on and some will be more difficult to cheer on.  They’re complicated women with sound motives that may seem nefarious to some.

A Manual for Cleaning Women, Collected Stories by Lucia Berlin, Foreward by Lydia Davis, Edited by Stephen Emerson

This gritty collection of Berlin’s stories, published posthumously, tell tales of hard-living women.  Many of them are semi-autobiographical, as Berlin suffered from alcoholism and fought that demon all her life.  Her clear, unvarnished prose is the clear asset in her stories with just enough humor and wit to keep the reader from descending into a black hole.  Kirkus Reviews states “…she might have had a higher profile if her subject matter had been less gloomy.”  Advice - I’ll take it!

Compared to my stories:

The women in my stories are mostly blue-color women, only one being college-educated.  There are struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, an inability to live an authentic life because of religious beliefs and homophobia and a woman’s most ineffective coping mechanism: denial.  I want to keep the prose clean and necessary to advance the story, but vary the voice to allow an omnipresent 3^rd person to inject humor, wit and outrageousness into what might otherwise be a depressing tale.

 

Fifth Assignment: Hook line/Logline for each woman's story (originally drafted in first assignment and edited here)

Hannah’s Story: With her family dead or scattered, on her arrival to New York City from war-torn Poland in the early 1900’s, Hannah is determined to keep her family intact despite an arranged marriage to a narcissistic, abusive husband.

Core wound: Loss of family

Conflict: Husband is uncaring and abusive to Hannah and her children

Rachel’s Story: Against the strong urging of her parents not to, Rachel marries a narcissist equally as self-absorbed as she is.  Unable to out run his demons, her husband is completely unable to meet her expectations and her parent’s “I told you so” haunts her.

Core wound: Her beloved parent’s rejection of the man she chooses to marry

Conflict:  As much as Rachel tries to show her parents she made the right choice in a husband, he continues to sabotage her efforts and prove them right.

Jeanne’s Story:  After being told by everyone in her life (parents, 5 siblings, teachers, peers) that she is the “black sheep” of the family, Jeanne struggles with her addictions and self-esteem trying to find some aspect of her life her family can take pride in.  She can’t look in the mirror without deep sadness and prefers to involve herself in everyone else’s lives because hers is too painful to examine.

Core wound: Lack of self-esteem from a childhood of being told she’s the “bad girl” in the family

Conflict: Despite her best efforts, her “bad girl” reputation follows her into her marriage driven by the “magical thinking” her addictions inspire which contribute to a continuing downhill spiral of her self-esteem.

Celia’s Story:  Being raised in a strict Irish Catholic family, Celia breaks off an engagement and enters the convent as a compromise she knows will make her family happy.  This prevents her from entering a marriage that would be a misery as she comes to grips with an emerging knowledge of her sexual orientation, but she exchanged on misery for another.

Core wound: Inability to live an authentic life within her family’s values and beliefs

Conflict: Celia escapes a scam marriage to find herself miserable in the Dominican religious community

Madeline’s Story:  As a cubby, shy, young woman, Madeline finally finds the man of her dreams, but turns her back on every sign her new husband is gay, willing to ignore and deny what she sees to be true and confronted by their son with the truth.  Her denial allows her to save face with her hypercritical and demanding mother.

Core wound: Madeline is the only child of a widowed, demanding, hypercritical mother whom she can never please.

Conflict:  She married a gay man, she can’t let her mother know!

Sixth Assignment: Conditions for Protagonist’s Inner Conflict

Hannah’s brother and sister are smuggled out of Poland in their early teens.  On her deathbed, Hannah’s mother gives her the last of the money she’s been able to save and helps Hannah arrange passage to New York.  Hannah’s dreams for her future are to marry a good man and raise a family in peace and prosperity, far from the difficult struggles of her childhood.  Hannah is in an arranged marriage through a Jewish matchmaker within 3 years of her arrival in the United States.  She is 19 and he is 29 years old.  She has 4 children between 1926 and 1934.  The first child is a girl, Evelyn. The second child, a boy, died within 17 days of “whooping cough”.  A son is finally born in 1929 – a relief to Hannah as Joseph wanted a son.  As she tries desperately to create and maintain a happy home for her family, Joseph decides the oldest boy must quit school and work with him.  Hannah wants her children to be educated and have opportunities she never had.  Joseph sees nothing in his children beyond helpers.  He is a difficult man who has no problem beating the boys and Hannah, if he thought they needed it.    That son turned into a major disappointment to Joseph, he was sickly with asthma and weak, not much of a helper, but as Sam turned 10 years old, it was time for him to quit school and come to work with Joseph.  She is devastated, this is not what she wants for her children, but there is no arguing with Joseph. 

Secondary Conflict

Hannah slowly learns that Joseph and his 3 siblings had been abandoned by their mother, immediately after his father died, when Joseph was 8 years old.  His mother took all the money the family had and left Minsk, Poland for New York.  His siblings, within a year, earned enough money to make their way to the United States leaving Joseph to his own devices. Joseph stowed away in box cars traveling from town to town doing odd jobs until, at the age of 15, he had enough money to come to the United States.  By the time he married Hannah, his mother tracked him down.  She had him come with his horse and cart and move her to a tenement flat close to him and Hannah.  Joseph’s mother carried the most dominant narcissistic gene and manipulated everyone in her sphere to meet her needs.  Joseph was no exception.  He soon expected Hannah to provide meals and help care for his mother, who had no source of income besides the men she married, having 4 or 5 husbands during her lifetime.  Hannah is confused as she doesn’t understand how her husband could have anything but contempt for this woman.  She complies with Joseph’s commands to assist her wicked mother-in-law in an attempt to please her husband.