Some Reflections on Book Tour

Written from A Greek Summer

Somewhere

Dear Monsters,

I have spent the last three months away from home, more or less. The first two and a half I was in motion, doing a series of twenty seven book events that filled my heart, filled up venues, and smashed every expectation of what a book like HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY could achieve in the world. #4 of the New York Times bestseller list, my loves. That’s cause of you.

Nearly every day that I was not speaking before an audiance, I was doing an interview, which is to say staring into the camera’s unblinking eye and trying to convey my book’s essense in sentances snappy enough to be clipped for social media.

I planned to write about the tour. I thought I would do dispatches from the road. I imagined myself posted up at airport bars, banging out incisive essays or at least funny memories from Philly or Portland or Paris. I wanted this to be me. I always fantasize that I can become the sort of writer with fast reflexes, conjure words on command to meet the needs of any moment— the way I can grab a sketchbook at a party and draw draw draw, no internal questions asked. But I’m not.

I just have a different relationship with prose.

And that’s why you didn’t get your tour diary.

Mea culpa. Sorry about that.

Hasan Piker, thank you for telling people to buy my book

In this wrapup, I’m not even trying for completeness.

Here’s a list of places I went: Princeton, DC, Cornell, Chicago, Clark Unvierstiy, San Fransisco, LA, Portland, New Orleans, Phladelphia, Providence, Boston, London, Paris. I also could list interviews and events done, like a good careerbot laying out her resume, but it feels dull.

I’d rather share memories.

• Like the memory of walking through rain-blessed New Orleans with Clayton Cubitt, photographer legend and son of the city, and stopping to notice how flowers forced their way through the concrete sidewalks

  

  photo by Clayton Cubitt

• The cute Jewish girls in keffiyahs, l’chaim intifada shirts and miniskirts who dragged their well-coiffed moms to my signings, and cringed when their moms demanded to know what I thought about Hamas

• The old Jewish dykes who came to my events, who have been at the frontlines of every protest of the last five decades, who passed me handwritten notes with tears in their eyes

• The grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of Henryk Erlich and Sophia Dubnova, who sat front row in San Fransisco and Boston, who are union bosses and scientists and fighters for tomorrow. Dor tsu dor

• The teamster in San Fransisco, an old school fan of mine, who brought me a bottle of Oban 14 single malt scotch. Bless you.

  

• Filling rooms in Paris, despite the fact that my book has not sold a French translation, and that French customs would not permit more than a dozen copies to enter the country. Introducting myself with the terrible French I learned as a fourteen year old trying to escape my present into a bohemia that I could only conceive of as existing elsewhere. Thank you TSEDEK, my comrades. Then finding the Bundist memorial in Cimitaire de Bagneux.

• The old guy who came to my event at Cornell, looking exactly like Larry David in a beret, and shouted “What about the Mufti?”, stormed out after I answered, then stomped back in to wait on line to argue with me more. Never change, my man.

  

  The Jewish Voices for Peace book club in New York. They made signs of my book’s subjects!

• The young people from JVP branches, new Bundist branches, and DSA branches around the country, who filled my events with such utter passion.

• My best friend for life, Max Fractal, filling the stage of the New York Public Library with their flaming hair as they performed a classic love song to a girl who shoots fascists.

• My gratitutde. I owe everyone so much and I can’t list you all so I’m sorry. But know that all of you who hosted fed listened to me promoted my work shot photos shot video drove me to their airport and sat on stages with me, the victory of this book is yours. HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY owes everything to the community, and nothing to the corporate machine.
  

  

  Chanel. My readers are the most beautiful

  
  A final thought:
  

  This tour helped me get over my last vestiges of fear.
  
  When I came out with HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY I knew I would be attacked. And I expected it would be the sort of attack that would hurt me, professionally or psychologically or something. This was not the case.
  
  Zionists were angry of course (as were anti-Jewish racists. I don’t want erase you darlings). My social media is barely useable due to Zionists gloating about the murder of their Jewish political opponents in the Holocaust. Hundreds of people organized themselves via facebook groups to try to get my events shut down, writing emails and calling muckety mucks at venues where I was due to speak (the venues rightly ignored them). Some people even dug up decades-old nudes to discredit me (sorry losers, I looked, and continue to look, fabulous). I even got denounciations in the right wing press.
  
  None of it mattered.

  
  It didn’t hurt me. Not personally or professionally. It was just idiots, jerking off into the void.
  
  Compare this to what my Palestinian friends go through, just by virtue of being Palestinian in public, let alone speaking about the genocide of thier people. They don’t let it silence them. Why should I shut up? I think about one friend in particular: about her ferocious courage, her rigor, her commitment to pleasure, her contempt for the whinging monsters who tried to wreck her. I don’t fear anyone but god, she told me once. She helped me be brave.

  
  I'll close with fragment of a poem by Rexroth, that I came across through the incomperable Margaret Killjoy.

  
  Life was good for us. It is
  Good to be brave — nothing is
  Better. Food tastes better. Wine
  Is more brilliant. Girls are more
  Beautiful. The sky is bluer
  For the brave — for the brave and
  Happy comrades and for the
  Lonely brave retreating warriors.
  You had a good life.

  It’s good to be brave.

---

I’ll be back in New York on Wednsday. Not that the road is done with me.

If you can’t get enough of hearing me talk, go become a Jewish Currents member.

If I’m out of touch for a bit, know I’m still around. Kisses,

M