“You’re playing God,” my husband says, after he asks me what’s going to happen to the characters in my new novel. And maybe because I am feeling a little fuzzy this morning, those three words startle me.
Who, me? I am just a writer, writing a story. If I’m lucky, I might have three or four dozen readers for the novel I am composing. I write not because it makes me rich or famous, but because I need to write the way other people need to breathe. Or to paint. Or to dance. Or to throw wet clay pots on a wheel.
It makes me feel good to lay thoughts and images on paper. Writing swells my heart with joy.
For the last six months I have been writing the story of my great-great-grandmother on my father’s side. That progenitor was unfortunate enough to get pregnant out of wedlock, a word we don’t hear much these days. But in Filomena Scrivano’s time and place, 1870, southern Italy, that unwed condition was a crime and the punishment was absolutely severe: you were denied your baby. And worse, that baby was sent to a depraved foundling home where most infants died before their first birthdays!
I don’t think I ever consciously decided to tell Filomena’s story. It more or less arose in my heart after a long period in which I had been thinking and writing about my ancestors.
Curiously, the book took off shortly after my daughter Lindsay had her first baby last November. I turned 70 that same month; my great grandfather, the so-called “illegitimate” ancestor, died at age 70. Like me, he was born in November. For whatever reason, I started to feel connected to this Old world Italian man who had been given the name Pasquale Orzo by municipal officials.
It is my firm belief that he was given his last name – Orzo being a type of small macaroni – in order to guarantee that he would be humiliated throughout his life. Indeed, when my first cousin Donna traveled to the little town of Paola, in the province of Calabria, back in 2012 in search of our great grandfather’s birth record, the foolish women working in the municipal office laughed at the name on the record, all the while refusing to let my cousin see it.
Fast forward. I am sitting here, having written more than 300 pages of the novel about Pasquale’s mother, Filomena, and I am stuck in the scene where she meets the woman who will raise her son. Who is the woman? Why does she do it?
I’ve begun to feel a strange mix of emotions. Gratitude that I’ve been able to write so much, but a kind of deep fear as I try to imagine the agony that Filomena experienced when she had to yield up her flesh and blood to a stranger.
Are words possible for that loss?
Perhaps the inspiration for writing this story pours out of the observation I made of my daughter, whose love for her new baby, a cherubian infant named Monte, is off the charts. I’ve never seen Lindsay as smitten as she is these days. All I know is that Filomena came roaring to life shortly after Monte arrived on the scene. The love between Monte and his Mama brought a smile to my face and occasionally, tears to my eyes.
And quite unexpectedly, I began to try to feel into my great-great-grandmother’s agony when she had to turn over her son to municipal officials, whose decisions were directly dictated by the Catholic Church.
In researching our great-great-grandfather’s life, my cousin unearthed an astonishing book by Brown University historian David Kertzer, called “Sacrificed for Honor, Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control;” Kertzer reveals that hundreds of thousands of babies were taken from their unwed mothers during the 19th century in Italy and other Catholic countries, and most of those babies died.
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Back to my husband saying that I am playing God. I suppose I do create entire worlds when I write a novel. I love doing that. But I hardly think of myself as God!
This afternoon, I told my husband I thought it was quite ironic he would say that I am playing God, because he has said so often to me through the years that he doesn’t believe in a God “with long grey hair, sitting up on a cloud somewhere” meting out punishments and rewards.
His reply to me today: when you are writing a novel, you are doing what people like to THINK God does. “You are saying who lives and who dies.”
It is at that moment that I realize that all this comes in the week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the beginning of the 10-day period in which Jews are told over and over again that they can mitigate God’s “severe decree” through “repentance, prayer, and charity.”
The choice that Jews face is simple and clear: change your behavior for the good and be rewarded, or persist in your evil ways and be punished:
“Three books are opened in heaven on Rosh Hashanah, one for the completely wicked, one for the completely righteous and one for those in between. The completely righteous are immediately inscribed in the book of life. The completely wicked are immediately inscribed in the book of death. The fate of those in between is suspended until Yom Kippur. If they do well, they are inscribed in the book of life. If not, in the book of death” (Rosh Hashanah 16b).
All this is well and good. But how does one explain the mighty disasters that befall humankind each and every day, mega-tragic events like the Maui fires, the earthquake in Morocco, the floods in Libya. Or the Holocaust? Millions die. We often ask why and the answer is, well, these things happen.
Does anyone really believe that cataclysmic events come about because people are acting in wicked ways? Actually, the Fundamentalists of many religions apparently do subscribe to that belief. Which is sad. And scary.
Better to think about the choice for the Days of Repentance this way: choose good in life, choose to live with love toward all others and gratitude for your blessings. Pursue justice for all peoples. Living that kind of life better ensures happiness for everyone.
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But that still leaves me stuck writing my chapter about my “bis bis nonna,” my great- great-grandmother, who I have come to call Fi. In my telling, she is a powerful young woman who lives up to her last name, Scrivano, which means “scribe” in Italian. My gal Fi discovers herself, and her loving partner, as a writer, and it is this writing that might ultimately save her sanity.
I cannot say for sure because the book isn’t finished.
And as for my playing God, I don’t really subscribe to that idea. Well not exactly.
Last week, in my writing group with my good buddies Nancy and Peggy, Nancy, a wonderful poet, asked Peg and me (both of us long-time fiction writers) how we decide what is going to happen in our novels. Neither of us had a precise explanation. Both of us suggested that we work with a kind of vague idea that we mull over in our heads. Then we sit down to write, and in so doing, discover the particulars that emerge on paper.
In my case, I also rely heavily on my journal and morning meditation. Over and over again, I write down a question about a character or a scene that I am trying to develop, and then I ask for Divine inspiration. More often than not, I get my answer in the form of a vision, that is, I see something about the character or the scene that leads me to better understand what it is I am writing.
This morning I asked for inspiration about the woman Giovanna who I believe is going to end up raising the infant that my great-great-grandmother will deliver.
Almost immediately I saw the woman had a white kerchief tied on her curly head of hair; the kerchief was a cotton towel folded into a triangle. (Is there some significance to that triangular image? I’m not sure yet.) Also, Giovanna looked to be especially short, and quite plump.
And that’s all I got.
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I started writing the scene, and it was going slowly. I had no inspiration. No energy.
So I stopped.
And I started writing this piece about my husband saying that I am playing God. All of a sudden, when this piece was about half written, I switched files, without thinking much about it, and I was writing the scene that had been giving me trouble. I was writing in earnest and didn’t stop until it was finished.
Later, my husband and I went for a long walk, during which I was telling him about the scene. I told him that I was thinking of changing the name of the Giovanna character. I was toying with Generosa, which means ‘generous,’ and Adelina, which means ‘noble.’
“Oh, so what will God decide?” he teased. I turned to him.
“I’m not God,” I said. “I am the creator. Of this story.”
And then it hit me. Oftentimes in services we refer to God as the Supreme Creator. This name reminds me that God is a Force unlike any other. One that created the infinitely large universe, all the galaxies, billions of stars, our solar system, the Earth, the mountains, the oceans, the plants, the fish, the birds, and
on the sixth day the land animals and humans.
God constantly “creates” choices for us, each and every moment of the day. Our choices matter. A lot. Especially now that we’ve got so many crises pressing -- environmental, political and otherwise.
Calling God the Supreme Creator doesn’t solve the conundrum about why bad things happen to innocent people. I’m not sure what the answer to that is.
But I like that name, Creator. For God.
And for me. Author will do.