Hi folks,
Just got notice that one of the writers
I coach on their novels just had the book I worked with her on come out. Michelle
Cohen Corasanti was nice enough to send me the essay her publisher—Garnet Publishing,
a UK publisher—asked her to write for their website and Michelle gave me
permission to post it here. In it, she relates her journey to publication and I
think the writers here will find it very interesting. I’m delighted to report
that I also helped her secure her agent. After playing a bit of a role in her
success, I was delighted she didn’t forget the “little people” like moi.
Without further ado, here’s what
Michelle had to say:
WHY DID I WRITE THE ALMOND
TREE?
I never wanted to be a writer. Well, you
might wonder, then why did I you write a novel? All I can say is that I
witnessed something, over twenty years ago, that affected me so deeply that
despite all my best efforts, I could no longer repress it. I remember the exact
moment it happened. I had just started reading Khaleed Hosseni’s book, The Kite
Runner. I was lying on a lounge chair, by the pool, at the Setai hotel, in
South Beach, sipping a cosmopolitan. I was on vacation with my husband and
twins. I didn’t have a care in the world until Amir, the protagonist, said that
the past can’t be buried, that it finds the means to claw its way out. And like Amir, my past found a way to call
me. And there I was face-to-face with my worst nightmares and my greatest
failures. One might say a defining moment. And I decided, that I wanted my
children to know, that I had seen injustice and I that I would try to do
something about it. And so I wrote the
story that had been inside of me for so long.
WHAT IS MY FAMILY BACKGROUND?
I grew up in a Jewish home in which
German cars were boycotted and Israeli bonds were plentiful. Other than the
blue-and-white tin Jewish National Fund sedakah box my family kept in the
kitchen and the money we would give to plant trees in Israel, all I knew was
that after the Holocaust, the Jews found a land without a people for a people
without a land.
I went to public school until third
grade and then attended the Hillel Yeshiva. There were two students in my sixth
grade graduating class. I returned to public school for seventh grade, stopped
wearing skirts with pants underneath and re-befriended my former best-friend
whom I had lost touch with during my yeshiva years. Her father had since died, her mother turned
into a raging alcoholic and her older brothers spent most of their time in
their bedrooms listening to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in a state I still
was too young to recognize. She lived without rules as she had no supervision.
Just what every teenage girl wants and what every parent doesn’t.
Being the oldest and the only daughter
in the family, my parents' strictness suffocated me. I decided I wanted to
study abroad in Paris in order to get distance from my
parental-choke-hold. My Zionist parents
rejected that idea and sent me to Israel to study Judaism and Hebrew with the
Rabbi’s perfectly well-behaved and obedient daughter Miriam. I was
sixteen-years-old and the year was 1982.
WHAT WAS MY INITIAL EXPERIENCE
IN ISRAEL LIKE?
Despite having come from Utica, New
York, the transition to the Ben Shemen Boarding School was effortless. I
soon had an Israeli boyfriend. When he told me he was a Kahanist, I had no idea
what he was talking about. “I believe in transfer,” he told me. “There are 21
Arab countries, the Palestinians must choose one of them. We don’t want them in
this country.” And who was I to question him? I thought Palestinian was a
synonym for Israeli. I had been taught, after all, that Israel was a land
without a people. I had never met a Palestinian.
As it turned out, my socializing helped
advance my Hebrew more than the flash cards Miriam was constantly reviewing in
our room. I had become a top student. Of course I decided to stay.
When I graduated from high school, I enrolled
in the preparatory program at the Rothberg International School to improve my
Hebrew in order to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My boyfriend was
unhappy. “There are too many Arabs in Jerusalem.” He was in the military by
then and would come to visit me with his loaded M-16, as required by law.
My parents, in an attempt to break-up my
relationship with the Kahanist, sent me to Paris for the summer to study
French. There I met a girl from Beverly Hills and we spent most of our nights
in exclusive clubs filled with rich, educated Lebanese men. Those were the first Arabs I had ever met. They
had quite a different version of Israel than the one I had learned. With my
eyes opened, I returned to Israel.
WHEN DID MY OPINION ABOUT
ISRAEL CHANGE?
I returned to Israel, dropped the
Kahanist, and enrolled in the Middle Eastern studies program at the Hebrew
University. I was the only American in my department. The rest of the students were
Israeli Jews and “Arab Israelis.” After my experience in Paris, I befriended
the latter, but they were nothing like the elite Lebanese I had met. They were
poor, second-class citizens and I had to hide my friendship with them out of
fear I might be failed-out—a very real fear, I might add.
At the start, I was the only one in the
department who didn’t know who Mohammad was. Come to find out, both the “Arab
Israelis” and I had no knowledge of the version of Islam and Middle Eastern
History that was being taught at my department. It was forbidden to write
Palestine because it never existed. Before 1948 there was the empty land of
Israel and afterwards there was Israel. It is true what they say that history
is written by the victors. I was quickly
learning another history from my “Arab-Israeli” friends. Plus, I witnessed
first-hand how they were treated.
When I told my parents, they refused to
believe me. My parents, who are liberal democrats, who were the first to
support Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the civil rights legislation that
followed his marches and were opposed to the Apartheid in South Africa ,didn’t
want to hear and refused to believe what I was saying. In fact, none of the American Jews I knew believed
or wanted to hear what I was saying. I had never witnessed such racism and
discrimination in my life. In fact, I was mystified to observe how the same
group of people could be vehemently opposed to oppression and racism of blacks
in the US and around the world, could support a similar form of discrimination
and oppression of Palestinians. It was then that I realized how I differed from
the other American Jews I knew. The lessons I learned from the Holocaust were
that we can never be bystanders to human suffering whether it be Jewish or
non-Jewish. The lessons the other Jews learned was the Berlin Wall. We can only
rely on ourselves. We must do whatever it takes so that we can have an as close
to an ethno-religiously pure Jewish country as we can in case it’s needed and
we will achieve that goal regardless of what we have to do to the non-Jewish
natives. I felt like I was pitted against the rest. At that time, I didn’t know
anyone else who took my position. I had never heard of Amira Hass or Ilan Pappe
at that point in my life.
The last year I was there, the intifada
broke out. Things went from horrible to unbearable. Something needed to be done
and I was determined to help bring it about.
WHAT WERE MY PLANS TO HELP
BRING ABOUT A JUST PEACE BETWEEN THE PALESTINIANS AND THE ISRAELIS?
I returned to the United States to
pursue my master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. I was
determined to devote myself to achieving a just peace in the Middle East and
defending the oppressed. I devoted my every breath to that goal. While at
Harvard, I won a Foreign Language & Area Studies fellowship to pursue
Arabic at Middlebury College’s summer total immersion program. As I had already
studied Arabic for four years, I entered at the advanced level.
When I finished the program, I went with
a classmate to Walden Pond and we were speaking in Modern Standard Arabic when
three Arabs approached us. One spoke to me in colloquial Palestinian. He, who
I’ll call Hasan, told me I spoke like Nagib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel
Laureate.
Hasan had completed his PhD in Chemical
Physics at the Hebrew University and was doing his post-doctorate with a Nobel
Prize winner at Harvard. We knew the same people, had lived in the same dorm
and had the same birthday. I learned his father had gone to prison when he was
young and wasn’t released until Hasan was in graduate school. Hasan’s father
had helped a refugee bury arms. Hasan, being the oldest son of nine children
with an illiterate mother, had to work to support his family from a very young
age. Due to circumstances, Hasan was only able to attend school on occasion.
But because he was brilliant in math and science, he didn’t need more. He
eventually won a scholarship to the university. There, the Israelis recognized
his genius and embraced him. He grew up in a mud brick one room house. They
didn’t get electricity until he left for college. I was going to make up for
everything he had suffered.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN THAT INSTEAD
OF MAKING HASSAN’S DREAMS COME TRUE, I BECAME HIS WORST NIGHTMARE?
I graduated from the master’s program at
Harvard and started law school (I was going to be an international human rights
lawyer) and my PhD at Harvard at the same time. The Middle Eastern studies
program had been easy for me, but law school was a different story. I should
have read Scott Turow’s One L before I started. I was studying twenty hours a
day. I never went out while Hasan tried to find a professorship. Since I spoke to him in Arabic, I hadn’t
realized that his English was practically non-existent and so I had to spend
many evenings translating and listening to his lectures in Chemical
Physics.
When I met Hasan I didn’t realize that
getting an academic position would be harder than achieving peace in the Middle
East, with up to a thousand top candidates applying for the seven or eight
positions that opened up each year. I told him it was fine for his mentor, a
Nobel Prize winner, to take risks, but he was at the start of his career.
Little did I know that he was at the forefront of nanotechnology. With the
pressure from my studies and his job search I crumbled.
I decided to do an internship my last
semester in law school with my father’s law firm in my hometown. There, I met
my husband who had recently returned home from Los Angeles and never looked
back. I had wanted to save the Palestinians and in the end I only saved myself.
HOW DID I FIND MY WAY TO BE
GOOD AGAIN?
The Kite Runner forced me to deal with
my past, but it also gave me a way to be good again. I realized that when I read the passage about
how history and religion weren’t easy to overcome and in the end Amir was a
Pashtun and Hasan a Hazara— I knew I was finally ready to tell the story that
had been inside me for twenty years. I would show how such obstacles between
Israelis and Palestinians could be transcended for I had seen it with my own
eyes.
For five years, while my friends
shopped, I slaved over this novel because I had found a different way to
achieve my dream. While a human rights lawyer can save a few, a writer can
reach into the hearts of many and affect them forever. Even if I make a ripple,
I will have succeeded.
This story is fiction and the characters
are straight from my imagination, but it has a sound and accurate base in
reality.
May the battles
we fight be for the advancement of the human race.
HOW DOES A NON-WRITER WRITE A
STORY?
Well, I told myself, if a medical doctor
could write The Kite Runner, then surely you could write a novel as well. After
all, weren’t lawyers trained to write? I knew I had the seed for a story, but
that was all. I decided that I would completely fictionalized the story. I chose
to write about a boy that was born in 1948 and grew up under Israeli military rule
which had similar laws to the ones used in the occupied territories today.
In my first draft, I wrote about how the
Palestinian boy, Ichmad, helped a refugee bury arms and his father insisted on
paying the price. His only request was that Ichmad forget about politics and
make something out of his life. I then wrote about how an Israeli professor
recognized Ichmad’s ability and together they achieved something great. And, of
course, Ichmad falls for the perfect Jewish American human rights activist on
the planet.
I wrote it in essay form. No dialogue.
No hooks. No cliff hangers. No rise and fall of tension. Completely flat
characters. I knew I needed help. I rarely ever read fiction and had no idea
how to turn this into a story. I began to take courses at Writers’ Digest
online. Two years and twenty-one courses
later, my novel was still in rough shape.
WHY WOULD A JEWISH AMERICAN
WOMAN CHOSE TO WRITE IN THE VOICE OF A PALESTINIAN MUSLIM MALE?
I began to write my story in first
person in the voice of Ichmad because it felt natural. Yes, I know that it is
somewhat strange that a Jewish American woman felt most comfortable writing in
the voice of a Palestinian Muslim. Believe it or not, out of all the characters
I created, I felt he was the easiest for me to be. I think that’s because I saw
the situation through the experiences and eyes of mainly Palestinian Muslim males.
I felt their pain. Ironically, my Hasan rarely ever talked about his past.
Almost all the stories I heard were from men that went to school with me or
events I witnessed myself. I didn’t meet Hasan and then become interested in
the Palestinian plight. Quite the contrary, I was deeply affected by the
situation when I met him and had already seen too much not to have my own
opinions.
Surprisingly, the most difficult
character for me to write was Nora, the Jewish American human rights activist.
Maybe that was because I had never met any. Maybe it was because I had failed
so completely at that task, abandoning the cause before I even started. When I
initially wrote the story, Nora was a much bigger part of it. I think,
subconsciously and with the help of hindsight, I tried to make her into
everything I wished I could have been. No one who read the earliest drafts of
my book (No joke I think there were over 500) liked her. She had no flaws.
Readers like characters with flaws. I found it virtually impossible to get into
her head. I eventually had to limit her role and then kill her off.
HOW DID I CHOOSE THE
BEGINNING?
When I initially wrote the novel, I
began with Ichmad on a bus to visit his father in prison. Ichmad had already helped
the refugee bury arms and he was on his way to confess his crime to his father.
During one of the writing courses I took, another student asked why should he
sympathize with Ichmad? He was helping bury weapons to kill Jews. I began to
re-evaluate the beginning. I definitely didn’t want to start out with a
Palestinian doing what Palestinians are believed to do. I wanted to start with
an innocent boy and show why he’d help the refugee.
I signed up for Les Edgerton’s class,
Hooked, how to write the first five pages. All we focused on in the book was
the first five pages. I explained to Les the situation and decided to rewrite the
beginning of my novel. Seven-year-old Ichmad discovers his little sister is not
in her room. She had run outside into the devil’s field and was blown up by an
Israeli planted land mine. I got that
idea from my excellent Jewish editor Pamela Lane (more on her later). Les was
harsher than any other teacher was with my work. He ripped it apart. When the
course was over, I immediately tried to hire him to edit my book. I wasn’t
looking for someone to pat me on the back. I had a crucial message to get out. Unbeknownst
to me, Les was an ardent supporter of Israel. Notice I stressed the was. I will
let his blurb tell his side of the story. I’d like to add that Les was an
amazing editor and he really helped this book become a reality.
WHAT DID LES EDGERTON, MY
EDITOR, HAVE TO SAY ABOUT MY BOOK?
Blurb for
Michelle Cohen’s
The Almond Tree
from Les Edgerton
Many months ago, Michelle
Cohen-Corasanti enrolled in one of my Writer’s Digest creative writing courses
on story beginnings. The novel she worked on in class was The Almond Tree. It
was clear immediately that this was a writer of uncommon talent and promise.
The problem—for me—was her subject material. She was writing what seemed to be
a pro-Palestinian book. All my life, I’ve been pro-Israeli. A political stand derived
from my upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian home, where we were taught from
an early age that the Jewish people were God’s “chosen people,” and Israel, a
God-favored state. I was taught (and firmly believed) that as long as the U.S.
was an ally of Israel, that we were also a nation under the grace of God. A
pro-Palestinian novel simply went against all of my core beliefs. But, I
consider myself a professional and I also fervently believe in freedom of
expression. So, while I disagreed with the theme of her novel, she was never
aware of my personal beliefs which I never revealed and I simply worked with
her in addressing her craft. And then… she asked if she could hire me after
class to coach her on her final rewrite. Now, I had a moral quandary. Could I,
in good conscience, help someone in a work that was fundamentally opposed to
everything I believe in? I asked several Jewish friends for their advice. I got
differing views. Some said, I shouldn’t lend my name and whatever editing expertise
I had to the project if I disagreed with the politics. That wasn’t censorship,
they argued, and I agreed. Others said that this was a professional matter and
that my personal politics and beliefs shouldn’t be the deciding factors. After
much soul-searching, I agreed with the latter. At no time during the process
did Michelle know of my beliefs. I pride myself that I’ve never revealed to any
of my students or writing clients my personal and political views nor let those
views influence the way I worked with them. The few who’ve learned of them have
always been surprised, assuming I shared their own views. I’m proud of the fact
that I’ve remained neutral when working with writers.
We began to work together. At no time
during this process was Michelle aware of how I felt about Palestinians and
Israel. My only guide was to always treat her material in a professional way
and only look at it with the goal of helping her make it the best novel she was
capable of writing. It was only when she had finished, that I revealed my personal
feelings about Israel and Palestine to her. And that her novel had changed my
mind…What’s important about this lengthy preamble to what I have to say about
Michelle Cohen and her novel, The Almond Tree, is that this novel—the intensely
gripping story of a Palestinian boy and his family and their suffering under
Israeli occupation—convinced me with surety that my beliefs about this conflict
were severely flawed and had been formed from a one-sided awareness. Her truly beautiful
novel showed clearly that there are always two sides to a question, something I’d
forgotten. In other words, Michelle wrote a novel which changed my mind about
something important. That is the mark of a great work of art.
It was easy to see Michelle has
talent—what convinced me that this will be a book that will achieve substantial
sales and be nominated for prestigious awards—was that the story she created converted
me from what I had assumed to be a committed and unyielding position to one in
which I now see the Palestinian people as belonging to the community of mankind
every bit as much as any other group, including the Israelis.
Some will be tempted to compare The
Almond Tree to The Kite Runner, but to do so unfairly places the two books in some
sort of presumed ranking. Both of these books are brilliant and powerful accounts
and deserve to stand tall on their own merits, irrespective of the other.
Ichmad’s story is a big-hearted story of
a small Palestinian boy who learns to survive in a brutal environment and
doesn’t simply endure, but emerges from the fire with the wisdom gleaned from
the example of a father who has taught him that all men have value, even their enemies.
A tale of innocence moving through a vicious world, compassion learned against
an environment of daily horrors, and wisdom forged through a boy’s journey
through a life we would never wish upon our own children. Michelle Cohen’s The
Almond Tree is one of those rarest of books—a fiction that rings with
authenticity and integrity to reveal the wonder of what it really is to be
human.
If ever peace is to become a reality
between Israel and Palestine, it will be because of the influence of books such
as this. I am proud to have been allowed by Michelle Cohen to have played a very
tiny role in the development of this novel. This is a book that I think will
endure and resonate forever in the souls of all who read it. I know it will in
mine. Some books have the power to change us profoundly; this is one of those
books.
Les Edgerton
Author of The Death of Tarpons, Monday’s
Meal, Hooked and others.
WAS LES YOUR ONLY EDITOR WITH
POSSIBLY PRECONCIEVED VIEWS ON THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN SITUATION?
Through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I was assigned the successful novelist Marcy Dermansky
to be my writing coach. I was leery when
I found out that Marcy was Jewish. All the Jews I knew had the Berlin Wall
mentality. I knew my novel was pro-peace, but I wasn’t sure she’d see it that
way. My novel was about a Palestinian
and an Israel who are able to rise above race and religion, find a common
ground and achieve what others only dream of. My message was clear, we need to
work together to advance humanity. I
knew that in my story, the Israelis gave Ichmad a scholarship, put aside their
differences and embraced him, but I didn’t sugar-coat Ichmad’s suffering.
Reality is reality after all.
Marcy was editing my novel during the
time of either the war or the siege on Gaza (the novel writing did last years
after all and between the classes and the editors, it all seems to have blurred
together). She suggested I incorporate Gaza into my novel. I was skeptical. Unlike
the rest of the material, I’d never been
to Gaza. I immersed myself in relentless research about Gaza which probably wasn’t
the best thing for me. I was horrified at my findings, but Marcy helped me give
shape to my ideas. When I finally finished
the final draft of my novel, a couple years later, I sent it to Marcy to read
and she had the following to say:
Prepare
yourself: The Almond Tree may very well move you to tears. Michelle Corsanti's
profound and finely crafted debut novel tells the story of one man, Ichmad
Hamid, from his humble beginnings as a scared and helpless child in an occupied
village through to his inspirational rise to power and influence. His intimate
tale of love and loss and awareness shines a greater understanding of the
personal toll of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
-- Marcy Dermansky,
author of Bad Marie
After Marcy, the talented Pamela Lane,
another Jewish editor, helped take my novel to the next level and along the
way, she told me that I changed the way she viewed the conflict. She could now
see both sides. She even wrote letters of protest against the Israeli attack on
the Gaza flotilla.
WHY ARE SOME REVIEWERS
DESCRIBING YOUR NOVEL AS THE STORY ABOUT TWO BROTHERS?
My intention was to write a book about
an Israel and a Palestinian who rise above religion, race and politics and
together achieve greatness. Somewhere along the way, the story began to take on
a life of its own and all I could do was to go with it. Nora’s role shrunk and
Abbas’ grew. For whatever reason, I was able to get into his head and become
him. Abbas began as Ichmad’s younger brother who an Israeli cripples. When I
decided to add Gaza, I need to find a way to get Ichmad to Gaza. And so angry
Abbas goes underground only to emerge in Gaza as a Hamas leader.
Nathan Stock, an advisor on Palestine at
the Carter Center, really helped me with all the details about Gaza. He
suggested that I make Abbas more charismatic. And so I did. Abbas became the
angry brother filled with hatred while Ichmad’s ability to forgive allows him
to succeed. In the end, both brothers reach a common ground. And somehow, along
the way, the focus of my book, for some readers, became less on Professor
Sharon and Ichmad and more about two brothers.
Michelle
And there you
have it. It’s a remarkable novel and I think it’s going to win some prestigious
literary prizes and acclaim. You can order your copy from Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008XM0AZM
Blue skies,
Les
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