The Joys of Reading Aloud

In October I always commemorate Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day with a post that refers in some way to the events of the 1490s that I wove into my Jewish historical adventure/ mystery series the Mendoza Family Saga, which has now been running for almost fifteen years with more stories to come. The key historical events, about which I wrote in the first short story, “The Green Cross,” and the first novel, Voyage of Strangers (2014), were the persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest to the Caribbean, and the genocide of the Taino people.

This year I had the great pleasure of reading aloud in their entirety both Voyage of Strangers and its sequel, Journey of Strangers (2015). My first-person protagonist is young Jewish sailor Diego Mendoza, who sails with Columbus on the Santa Maria in 1492 in “The Green Cross,” which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2010. In Voyage, Diego and his sister Rachel travel through Spain at risk of capture by the Inquisition to join Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. They befriend the local Taino, come to admire their culture with its guiding principle of generosity, and watch in helpless horror as the Christian Spaniards destroy both culture and people. Journey of Strangers follows Diego and Rachel and their friend Hutia, a lone Taino survivor, across war-torn Europe to Istanbul, where the Mendozas have settled in the Jewish community that the Ottoman Sultan has welcomed. Journey also tells the story of Joanna, one of two thousand Jewish children kidnapped by the King of Portugal in 1493 and shipped off to slavery on the pestilential Isle of Crocodiles, São Tomé.

My audience of one was a transplanted Jewish New Yorker who lives in Austin, where she’s active in the local Jewish community through her synagogue. She also does volunteer work for the Minaret Foundation, a Muslim organization that is “making Texas better through multifaith and civic engagement.” She was already a friend when she started losing her vision to rapidly progressing macular degeneration, and I had the bright idea of offering to read to her via Zoom. Our weekly reading sessions have become a high point of the week for both of us.

The theme of cultural relativism pitted against absolutism and intolerance is certainly relevant today. The parallel between fifteenth and twenty-first century anti-Semitism in Europe (and America in the twenty-first) and the contrast between the fifteenth century relationship between Jews and Muslims and that relationship in our own time provide food for thought. When my listener laughed and cried as the story unfolded, I'd say, “That’s exactly what I hoped you’d do. You’re the perfect reader!” She'd say, “Laugh and cry and learn.” Her appreciation made me glad I spent all that time crawling through the stacks of the Columbia University Library to retrieve an unpublished doctoral thesis to get details on the Enderun School that shaped the Ottoman viziers and janissaries and followed the trail from a professor at Brandeis University (my alma mater) to a professor in Tel Aviv to a footnote to find out about the Jewish women called kiras who served as purveyors and personal shoppers to the Sultan’s harem.

In fact, as I reread my own writing aloud, word by word, more than ten years after I wrote it, I could hardly believe I did all that research—into history, into several different cultures and religions, into a dozen languages. I’m still in love with my characters. That’s no surprise, since character is my strong point as a writer. I too cry at certain passages, including but not limited to the parts that made me cry as I wrote them. Not unexpected either. It’s the storytelling, the suspense I somehow manage to sustain for chapter after chapter, that amazes me. That’s the part I was never good at. But as I read my work aloud to someone who is always astonished and excited at each twist and turn of the plot, always wants more when we end a chapter or it’s time to end the session, I realized that with these two novels, by gum, I did it. Not a single chapter sags. If it did, reading it aloud, I would notice and admit it. I wanted more at the end of every chapter too. This experience blew my mind.

Neither of us wanted this exhilarating shared experience to end. So once we finished Journey of Strangers, along with the Afterword explaining what parts of it are historical and the multilingual Glossary, we went on to the rest of the Mendoza Family Saga: short stories, most of them mysteries involving Rachel, still working as a kira to the harem when Suleiman the Magnificent becomes Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1520, that first appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine. The previously published stories can be found in the e-book Rachel in the Harem, along with a novelette about Rachel’s daughter among the Knights of Rhodes that first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a two-timeline story from Jewish Noir II, a time travel story, and the very first Mendoza story, which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2010. But only my two favorite Texans—my audience in Austin and a certain editor of impeccable taste—know what happens in two stories yet to appear.

Three Pines

 

This may be a commonplace, but I’ve been thinking about what makes TV adaptions of mystery series work, and while casting is clearly the biggest piece, there are a whole lot of other pre- and post-production decisions in play.

Looking back at the success of Magnum or Rockford, you point to Tom Selleck and Jim Garner, and they deserve all the credit they get – but their shows were successful both commercially and critically, the key being consistency, and that’s due to sharp writing and committed exec producers, Don Bellisario and Stephen Cannell.  You see a similar dynamic in Longmire or Justified, and for my money, the two best shows currently airing, Bosch and Shetland.

Michael Connelly has two series running, with one in the pipe, and Ann Cleeves has three.  This is no accident.  The books give good weight.  Connelly also gets exec producer credit on Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer, and his sensibility looms large.  The other thing you notice, though, is the depth of the cast, in both shows, and the feel.  Bosch is very L.A., the heat, the culture, the streets; Shetland is very much the outer reaches, the damp, the insular, and the cold sea.  They’re lived-in landscapes.

Three Pines is adapted from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels, and so far, Amazon has aired two episodes.  The runtime is about an hour and forty minutes, which allows for development, and breathing room.  The pace is measured, and there’s a very strong sense of place.  It’s shot in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and it shows.  You need a warm coat.

Pursuant to the remarks above, the first reason to watch is the lead, Alfred Molina, as Gamache.  Molina goes back to Prick Up Your Ears, with Gary Oldman, and would you believe Enchanted April, not to mention voice work on Rick and Morty and Robot Chicken, as well as Doc Ock in Spider-Man?  One of my personal favorites is Close to the Enemy, from 2016.  Okay, he’s not Quebecois, or even Canadian, but he convinces me, and a large number of the rest of the cast is Canadian, and/or Indigenous.  (Tantoo Cardinal!)  All the same, Molina is the one to watch.  Gamache is grounded.  He doesn’t have a drinking problem, and he’s not grieving for a lost love.  He’s a still point in a turning world, and Molina gives him enormous gravity.  He seems to experience other people, to absorb their pain or folly or hope, and see it whole.  His empathy makes him, of course, a terrific investigator, but it makes him deeply human, as well. 

As for the Indigenous presence, there’s a thread of sorrow, never far from the surface.  The back story of Native children taken from their parents and their homes, denied their language and history, pushed to assimilate into a white, Christian culture, subject to physical and emotional abuse.  A survival narrative.

Three Pines works within the conventions, the community of eccentrics, and rash outsiders, hidden currents, shared secrets, and the rest, but touches on them lightly, for the most part. The sorrows, however, remain.