S.D. Jewish World authors: Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

Editor’s Note: San Diego Jewish World is fortunate to have among its contributors the authors of many books. To acquaint you with them, and their literary output, we will from time to time offer articles by the authors telling about their works.  This article is by Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, a second-generation Holocaust survivor who made aliyah to Israel from the United Kingdom. For convenience sake, we include Amazon icons, which may be clicked by anyone seeking to purchase the books cited by the author.

By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

Dorothea Shefer-Vanson
Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

MEVASSERET ZION, Israel — I have always written, though for most of my life I did not regard myself as a writer. Writing just came easily to me, whether at school (where I was awarded several prizes for English), at university (lots of essays to write) or in my professional life (when I wrote articles of various kinds for journals). And of course I always wrote letters, to my parents, friends, and relatives, and was usually told that they were much appreciated. Today, in addition to my books, I write a monthly ‘Column from Israel’ for the AJR Journal (Association of Jewish Refugees) in England, and my weekly blog, ‘From Dorothea’s Desktop,’ which also appears on the San Diego Jewish World and Jerusalem Post websites.

It was about thirty years ago, when my husband was spending a sabbatical year at the University of Nebraska, that I found myself at a loose end, cut off from my sources of free-lance employment as a translator/editor/writer (those were pre-internet days) that I registered for a course in Creative Writing offered at the local Community College. Our teacher, Katherine Kidwell, sent us to buy the course book. Story and Structure by L. Perrine, and worked through the chapters. When the course ended she kept a select few on and encouraged us to continue writing.

 

In that framework I wrote my first book, on an enormous typewriter I had found discarded in the street (computers were just beginning to catch on), typed on flimsy paper. That novel now sits in my computer and I intend one day to get down to rereading, editing and rewriting it. I have been writing on and off ever since, and now have some five or six novels in my computer in various stages of completion.

 

After failing to find a publisher or agent, I decided to go with one of the many firms that offer to publish your book for a fee,  and that is how I published The Balancing Game, A Child Between Two Worlds,  A Society Approaching War. The novel comprises two separate strands, one describing the experiences of a child growing up in a poor neighborhood of post-war London. The girl, the daughter of refugees from Hitler’s Germany, is haunted by her parents’ ‘otherness’ – they are orthodox Jews, they speak with a foreign accent – and creates a world of her own, playing with her non-Jewish neighbor and her two younger sisters.

 

The second strand of the book describes the experiences of a young woman nearing the end of her first pregnancy and living in Jerusalem in the period leading up to and during the Six Day War of June 1967. It describes the general atmosphere and physical surroundings of the time, as well as the process of giving birth just after the ‘liberation’ of the city by the IDF and the general sense of euphoria that ensued.

 

Eventually the two strands combine, providing an explanation for the child’s malaise and the erratic behavior of the young woman. I think that writing this book was therapeutic for me, helping to rid me of all kinds of ghosts that had been haunting me since early childhood, and most significantly the well-known psychological phenomenon of ‘Maternal Deprivation.’

 

Of course, the experiences of the alienated child and the bewildered young woman are my own, and the act of setting them down on paper (or rather on the computer screen) helped to exorcise the ghosts of my past.

 

The Balancing Game, A Child Between Two Worlds, A Society Approaching War was not the first book I have written but it was the first book that I felt was ready to be published and had some intrinsic merit. Now I’m not so sure, but it is out there and exists in its own right. I was not happy with the American firm that published it, and it is no longer associated with them, so is readily available from Amazon as an ebook and from me personally as a paperback (just email me at: dorotheashefer@gmail.com).

 

My second book, also a novel, Time Out of Joint, the Fate of a Family, is based on and inspired by the documents, family correspondence, and photo albums that my late father brought out of Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. The family – parents, two teenage children, and the young boy, the ‘afterthought’ who eventually became my father – experienced the rise of the Nazis, and each of its members eventually ended up in a different country and met a different fate.

 

In order to be able to access the material I resolved to learn German, and have been doing so for the last fifteen years. I resolved that the voices of those individuals should not be allowed to sink into the mists of oblivion and endeavored to imagine myself into the mind and life of each one of them – the bourgeois, orthodox parents, the ‘successful’ son who, like Icarus, flew too high and crashed, the rebellious daughter who abandons religion, Germany, and all the values of her parents, and the young boy who remains at home, adheres to the religion of his ancestors, and eventually reaches England, where he marries the sweetheart he met in Hamburg.

I undertook a fair amount of historical research in order to provide the wider context of those times, starting with the Stavisky affair in France in 1934, the Spanish Civil War, the rise and fall of the first socialist French President, Leon Blum, the conflict between the French communists and socialists, the tobacco growing and processing industry in Kentucky, the ritual of the Hevra Kadisha, the life of the inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the commercial structure of Shanghai, the experience of riding the Trans-Siberian Express, various aspects of music, which played a prominent role in the family’s life, the experience of living in a village in the South of France during the German occupation, and the organization of the Kindertransport operation that brought 10,000 Jewish children from Europe to Britain just before WWII.

Writing that book was also a cathartic experience for me, as I felt that through writing it I was reliving the experiences of my relatives, most of whom I was never able to meet, and I was giving them a voice. I have been told that it is a better book than The Balancing Game, but both books are my beloved children. Time Out of Joint, the Fate of a Family is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and an ebook.

My third novel, which will be published in another couple of months, also on Amazon, is entitled ‘Levi Koenig, a Contemporary King Lear.’ It describes the life and times of an ailing elderly man and his three daughters, the relations between them and of each one vis-à-vis her own family. It takes place in contemporary Israel and mirrors my own situation several years ago, but I have allowed my imagination to run wild and added a great many ‘what ifs’.

However, just to be on the safe side, I asked each of my sisters to read and approve the manuscript before I published it, and they have both given it their blessing in its current form. Together with my son, who is a designer, I am now working on preparing the cover for it, which – as with the other two books – will be based on a painting of mine.

And what about the book after that? I hear you cry. It exists in draft form, and I’ll get to work on that once ‘Levi Koenig’ is out. And after that? Those children are still in the computer-womb, but if I live long enough they, too, shall see the light of day.

*
Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is a freelance writer who resides in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, Israel.  You may comment to dorothea.shefer@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website, per the instructions below.

 

__________________________________________________________________
Care to comment?  We require the following information on any letter for publication: 1) Your full name 2) Your city and state (or country) of residence. Letters lacking such information will be automatically deleted.   San Diego Jewish World is intended as a forum for the entire Jewish community, whatever your political leanings. Letters may be posted below provided they are responsive to the article that prompted them, and civil in their tone.  Ad hominem attacks against any religion, country, gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability will not be considered for publication. There is a limit of one letter per writer on any given day.
__________________________________________________________________