My lit agent told me, \u201cIf you don\u2019t want to change the narrator\u2019s sex, don\u2019t. I can sell it as is.\u201d<\/p>\n
OK, I\u2019ll leave it as is.<\/em><\/p>\n My agent shopped the manuscript around. Evocative<\/em> — as praise — showed up a lot \u2013 two years of evocatives<\/em>. In the end, nothing. I probably should have rewritten the book.<\/p>\n I did<\/em>. I sent the revised version back to HarperCollins, but the editor was gone. Editors jump around a lot. Susan Orlean had about 10 editors on her first book.<\/p>\n I switched to non-fiction, like Orlean. I wrote Bodegas and Bagels<\/em>, a trade paperback about the Americanization of the bagel. It came out in 2017 and didn’t go anywhere.<\/p>\n I wrote My Main Man<\/em>, Maimonides <\/em>(2021).<\/em>\u00a0The Jewish Review of Books<\/em> gave it five dreidels. Didn’t go anywhere, either.<\/p>\n Now I’m working on an e-book about the end of the world. The main character is a Jewish Studies prof who subsists solely on baba ganoush during the famine. I\u2019ll self-publish. Annoying, I know . . . everybody is self-publishing and clogging the Quality Lit pipeline.<\/p>\n This morning I wrote a poem, “I Smoke my Own Lox.” I’ll paste it below.<\/p>\n No, I\u2019ll spare you. I’ll put it in my book and make you to buy it.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 7 pm this Sunday (June 28), Alma Theater, Cain Park, Cleveland Heights.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve written several unpublished novels. My best was about a married couple with a kid who died from SIDS. An editor at HarperCollins liked it. She wrote, \u201cBut we need you to change it to a female narrator.\u201d OK, done. My lit agent told me, \u201cIf you don\u2019t want to change the narrator\u2019s sex, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34478"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34496,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34478\/revisions\/34496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/bert-stratton-unpublished-final-jpg-300x168.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n