The Unplanned Writer by D.Z. Stone

by D.Z. Stone

Growing up, becoming a writer was not something I ever dreamed about. Indeed, I wasn’t even aware I could write. My first inkling came in college when I’d get papers back with professors often scrawling something like ‘Well Written!’ on top. 

Still writing wasn’t something I considered as a career. Writing was hard for me, sometimes painful, so how could I possibly live my life this way, always tortured until I figured out just the right way to say something? What if the words never came?  This was no way to live.

Better to stick to my original plan and become a lawyer—especially since my father had already told all his bar customers that I was going to be a lawyer since I saw an episode of Judd for the Defense when I was 12 and blurted out that was something I’d like to do. 

It would be hard not to live up to this lawyer expectation as my family lived in the apartment over my father’s bar and it was not unusual for a customer to see me in the bar kitchen or out on the sidewalk and say, “Hey there’s the lawyer!” 

Actually, a customer recognizing me for being this or that was something I lived with since elementary school. My father, who quit high school to join the service during WW2 and was often (affectionately) called, “You dumb Polack!” had, for example, been bragging about my academic prowess since a school janitor told the entire bar that I was the smartest kid in the entire school system. 

This of course translated into my father telling his customers that I was the smartest kid in the entire world. After that, my father and his customers—who bet on everything from how many snowflakes would hit a parking meter in a minute to what South American country exported the most beef, decided if the answer to one of their bets wasn’t in the World Almanac my father kept behind the bar, they would ask me and everyone would go with what I said. 

Let me tell you it was a lot of pressure being the arbiter of such matters; I could only hope that I knew what I was talking about. The last thing I wanted was not to live up to my father’s expectation. So it was not easy when I decided that I didn’t want to go to law school.

The idea that maybe I didn’t really want to become a lawyer first came from my college advisor at William and Mary (who was honest enough to let me know that his wife of many years went to law school and after she passed the bar, left him, so he wasn’t crazy about lawyers in general). But this same professor said he heard I could write so maybe for my senior year I should take a writing course as an elective. I took playwriting and to my surprise I not only loved it but also got a lot of ‘Well Written’s’ and ‘A’s.’ 

So I thought that’s it, I’ll be a playwright. However, after graduation, a fire that destroyed my father’s bar and the family apartment upstairs put a dent in my plans. Instead I moved to Ithaca, NY, where my boyfriend was in graduate school. Looking for a job I saw an advertisement for a traffic manager at a radio station. I had no idea what a traffic manager did but it sounded better than making bagels or pumping gas.

I walked into WVBR-FM, a student-run station that was independent of Cornell University, and saw a young Peter Schacknow do the news. I met the station’s Personnel Director, Keith Olbermann and General Manager David Goldsmith. I still wasn’t sure what a traffic manager did. David assured me I could do it and said were I to take the job I could go also go through the station’s training program and if I got air clearance, go on the radio. Okay, I said, I’d give it a try.

It wasn’t on-air that I found my niche even though I got to do the news and thanks to General Manager Dan Geller, I hosted a talk show. Then thanks to Community Affairs Director Laurie Freeman and News Director Yoji Shimizu I started writing a daily feature called ’90 seconds’. These short opinion pieces could be funny or serious (or both) and about whatever topic I wanted. I’d write one on my lunch hour and then Laurie or someone else would voice, always giving me the writing credit.

Atley Nesbitt, editor of the Grapevine Magazine (Ithaca’s alternative newspaper) and a member of the radio station’s board of directors, came in and said he heard my 90 Seconds. “Kid,” he said, “You can really write. How’d you like to interview the rock stars that come to Cornell and Ithaca?” 

Boy, would I. Thanks to Atley I had my first clips and thought maybe I could write for a living. 

Certainly being a lawyer would have been more lucrative. Writing for a living has often been painful both emotionally and economically. However, when I read a review or comment saying my recently published book, No Past Tense: Love and Survival in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell; Oct 2019), is beautifully written, the writing life has been worth it. 

—

D.Z. Stone, author of No Past Tense: Love and Survival in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell; Oct. 2019), is a journalist with academic training in cultural anthropology. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and Newsday. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, she holds a Masters from Columbia University. She resides outside of New York City.

NO PAST TENSE, D.Z. Stone

“Kati and Willi Salcers’ resilience in the face of terror demonstrates how nothing can stop us from living our lives. They are the definition of inspiration.” —Tony Robbins NY Times #1 Best Selling Author, Philanthropist, and the World’s #1 Life and Business Strategist.

No Past Tense is the highly acclaimed biography of Kati and Willi Salcer, two Czech Jews who as teenagers survived concentration camps only to face their greatest challenge: living after.

Based on more than 100 hours of interviews and covering their entire lives, No Past Tense weaves in the first person ‘real time’ voices of the Salcers as if they are watching a documentary about themselves. This unique narrative structure provides a distinctive ‘whole life’ view of the Holocaust that grabs the reader and won’t let go.

The book begins with their childhoods in Czechoslovakia, education in Budapest, and 16- year-old Kati falling in love with the handsome 19-year-old Willi when they are forced into the same Jewish ghetto. They are together only one week before Willi is taken. Returning to their respective villages after the War, they discover most Jews are gone and villagers do not want them back. Willi chases the squatters from his family’s mansion while Kati moves into a shed on her family’s property, refusing to leave until they return what is hers—and in standing up to her village, wins Willi’s heart.

They live as smugglers in post-war Europe until immigrating illegally to Palestine in 1946, where Willi builds tanks for the Haganah, the Jewish underground army. Willi becomes a head of industry in Israel but in 1960, saying he does not want the children to know war, convinces Kati to move to America. Once there, with a few bad investments, Willi loses all their money and for the first time Kati suffers panic attacks. But Willi rebuilds his fortune, while Kati rediscovers her courage, and starts living again.

“Once I began reading, I could not put this book down, and details of the Salcers’ journeys will stay with me for a long time. NO PAST TENSE deserves a place on the bookshelf with classic Holocaust memoirs.” —Amy Gottlieb Author, The Beautiful Possible

“Stone shows how they responded to the Holocaust not by looking back but by spiraling forward.” —Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Author, Professor and Former Project Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Paperback

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing