The Great Fire of Skala

I am in the final stages of writing a family memoir, The Memory Of All That. In my father's OSS personnel files, of all places, I have discovered information about his parents' origins that I never knew before. My grandfather Samuel Kaufman, a grocer, hailed from Rowno, Poland. My grandmother, Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman, hailed from Skala in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a town which has had a 20th century odyssey of its own without ever moving, as it was then (1887) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but over the century was part of Poland, then part of the USSR, until 1990, when Ukraine was made independent, and so today it is in Ukraine.

In reading about Skala, I learned that there was a huge exodus of the Jewish population as a consequence of "the Great Fire of Skala" in 1899. The Gottesfelds arrived in America in 1900. Given that my novel Triangle has at its heart the Triangle waist company factory fire of 1911, I regret not having awareness that for a number of immigrants, some of whom were no doubt present that terrible day in March of 1911, there was a bitter irony, fleeing one fire only to meet this historic fire in the land of opportunity.

The Asch Building

I learned shortly after Triangle was in page proofs that the site of the Asch Building had a significant history. I don't know why I didn't discover this earlier, but I know I would have woven it into the story in useful ways connected to the question of how a story is told and where the truth may lie in the different perspectives of an event. Among the row of houses that were torn down for the 1900-1901 construction of the lofted ten-story skyscraper, the top three floors of which were destined to occupied by the Triangle Waist Company, was 27 Washington Place, the house in which Henry James was born in 1843.

Naming a Character

Sidney Zion has died. I knew him because he was very close to a relative of mine.

For a variety of reasons, I borrowed his last name for the Ruth Zion character in Triangle.

Like Sidney Zion, Ruth Zion is relentless, dogged in her pursuit of material in support of her agenda. Like Sidney, she is obsessed with her issues. Unlike Sidney, she is overly literal and essentially humorless. I used his name for her because she is something of a ruthless zionist for her cause. Also because I liked the oddness and specificity of the name. I considered making the connection in the novel, which referenced various other real people, perhaps by naming him as a cousin of Ruth's. But the relative who was close to him was very agitated about the name being used at all, and she urged me to change it, which I didn't, so I opted to remain silent about the Sidney Zion connection.

L'Esprit D'Escalier

The French call it "l'esprit d'escalier," stairway wit. The witty thing you should have said that occurs to you only as you descend the stairs at the end of the evening. As a novelist, I find that I have staircase thoughts about each of my novels, even though it has been almost fifteen years since my first novel was published. I am always making discoveries of little details, finding a new insight about elements that would have been perfectly suited for some aspect of the story, always chancing upon something in a newspaper, in a conversation, on a train, in a novel. There is always one more small gesture that I would have appropriated for a character, if only I had found it when I was still writing that novel. (I don't mean that I have second thoughts now about what I did write.)

Do other writers have this experience, this sense that their novels could have been just a little more enriched by something that has only come to mind now, too late?

Two pieces of what I am going to call Staircase Writing to inaugurate this journal :

Today, driving to community recycling, I heard on the radio that the heart beats in 3/4 time. I wish I had known that when I was writing Triangle, because it is exactly the sort of knowledge possessed by George Botkin, the composer in the story whose music is inspired by forms found in nature.

Yesterday, flying back to the U.S. from Ireland, I read about a man who fell into a vat of boiling chocolate and died, in a processing plant in New Jersey, where the chocolate is processed for Hershey bars. If I had read this story a few months ago, when I was finishing my forthcoming novel True Confections, a novel about a chocolate factory in crisis, I am sure I would have found a way to work it into the story.