Be inspired at book festival

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Finding our way in life is not easy, to say the least. Some of us may appear to have it all figured out, but none of us does. Two very different real-life accounts in this year’s Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival describe people overcoming potentially devastating adversity, and achieving a success that has nothing to do with money, power or prestige.

Among the many author talks and workshops at the book festival, which opens Nov. 23, is A Courageous Journey: A Father’s “Oddly Normal” Memoir of Parenting a Teen. Presented with the Jewish Family Service Agency and the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver youth outreach program, it features John Schwartz, a national correspondent for the New York Times. His memoir Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality (Gotham Books, 2012) begins:

“‘You have to come home,’ Jeanne said on the phone. Her voice was urgent, shaking. ‘Joe has taken a lot of pills.’

“Jeanne, my wife, had stepped into the house that late-spring afternoon to find our son Joseph stumbling around the bathroom in a daze. The room was scattered with pill bottles and bubble packs.

“Joseph, then 13, is our youngest child, the last one still at home.

“He had tried to take his own life.”

The memoir then candidly relates not only what happened after that day in 2009, but what led up to it.

“Writing the book was an enormously helpful experience for all of us,” Schwartz told the Independent. “So many things had happened over the years – our realization that we were raising a son who was likely to be gay, coming to understand Joseph’s unhappiness, his problems in school and dealing with his troubles with other students and the teachers, his suicide attempt and our efforts to help him become happier with himself – we had been through them but they were still an emotional jumble. The process of writing our story did help us to get a better understanding of what had happened. The research I did ... helped me to understand the tremendous stress that a gay kid may be under at home and at school even with supportive parents.

“Sam and Elizabeth were supportive, but distant,” he continued, referring to his older children. “I mean that literally: they had gone off to college by the time Joe came out, and when he tried to hurt himself. (Elizabeth, when we told her that Joe is gay, only said, “So that’s why he was always stealing my jewelry!”) And so, while they both knew the book was coming, and while I sent them the manuscript so that they could make comments and suggestions, and they love Joe, I can’t say they were close to many of the events in the book.”

Given his profession, Schwartz said that, while writing the book brought up a lot of feelings, the process was familiar. “The unexpected difficulty came when I was recording the audiobook,” he shared. “We had to stop recording in several places because I was overwhelmed with emotion at some of the saddest parts of the book and the happiest ones. So I’d choke up, we’d stop, and then we’d go back to it. Saying it aloud meant reliving everything in a way that was very different from writing everything down.”

In Oddly Normal, Schwartz explains why he decided to write everything down:

“All the time Jeanne and I were struggling with the schools and with doctors and with our own confusion, we wondered where we could find the information that could really help us. We looked in those racks of brochures about dealing with eating disorders and depression and everything else; where was the brochure for us? It wasn’t there.

“So we wrote it.”

He warns: Oddly Normal is not a step-by-step guide, but “we hope that reading our story sets you on your way to writing your own guide – one that works for you.”

Oddly Normal includes a partial listing of “organizations dedicated to making sure that kids who might be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender grow up happy and safe.” Considering their personal experience and the research he conducted for the memoir, Schwartz said, “The best advice we got was the best advice I ever read, which is the best advice ever given on raising a child. Benjamin Spock opened his amazing book, Baby and Child Care, with the line way back in 1945: ‘Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.’

“Besides that, of course, there are resources, resources, resources. Parents should find PFLAG [Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] online, and find their local chapter and connect with other parents and families. Gay friends proved a wonderful resource to Jeanne and me when I just wanted to know what they would have wanted their parents to have said or done. The most important thing is to love and support your child any way you can.”

Of the support he and his wife received, there is mention in Oddly Normal of conversations with Rabbi Mark Kaiserman, then the rabbi of the synagogue the Schwartzes attended.

“The counsel of Rabbi Kaiserman was very important to us, but we are not a deeply observant family,” said Schwartz of those conversations and the role that Judaism played in helping him cope during this period. “Jeanne was raised a Catholic, and is no longer religious, though she agreed that we would raise the kids in the Jewish tradition. Elizabeth and Sam have had their bat and bar mitzvahs; Joseph has not, and takes after his mother. He’s more of a skeptic than I am, and can give detailed arguments defending his beliefs (or lack of them). As for me, I take great comfort in Judaism, am a weekly participant in a Torah study group with my congregation and am a too-infrequent presence at services. I think the message of thoughtful living, acceptance and humility that modern Judaism teaches us has shaped my own thinking and guided me through much of what we have been through.”

About the reception of his memoir by Jewish audiences, Schwartz said, “Everybody wants to know how Joe is doing now, and occasionally there are questions about homosexuality in the Jewish tradition. Leviticus opens up a very rich conversation for us about observance and the 613 laws and commandments. On the JCC tour, the centres have generally worked to bring in parent groups, local LGBT organizations and more, so the crowds are mixed and the question and answer sessions are lively.”

Schwartz’s presentation at the JCCGV, which is on Sunday, Nov. 24, 5 p.m., will be followed by a 6 p.m. discussion in the centre’s Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. JCCGV youth outreach coordinator Stephanie Rabin, JFSA director of counseling Alan Stamp and JFSA child, youth and family counselor Nava Rozen will provide information on what programs the community has to support youth.

“This is a book that begins with a suicide attempt,” said Schwartz, “but it’s really about happiness and finding your place in the world. I hope that many people come to hear our family’s story. The book-signing line after the talks tends to take a very long time, because many of the people who have come want to share their stories with me as well. Everybody has been through so much – I just wrote our story down.”

Entrepreneur Ilana Edelstein is one of those people who seemed to have it all figured out. Her own business thriving, she met the love of her life, Martin Crowley, and gave it all up. Together, they (and others) built the Patrón tequila empire, enjoying every moment of the at-times bumpy ride to the top. Then, her relationship with Crowley soured and he betrayed her love, trust and dozen-plus years of work. She had to start over, from scratch. Once again running her own business, Edelstein is also now the author of The Patrón Way: From Fantasy to Fortune – Lessons on Taking Any Business from Idea to Iconic Brand (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013), a book that may soon see its way to the silver (or TV) screen.

Edelstein will speak at the book festival’s closing event on Thursday, Nov. 28, 8 p.m., at the JCCGV. The evening will be emceed by comedian Marion Grodin, who will entertain with a performance that includes anecdotes from her book Standing Up – A Memoir of a Funny (Not Always) Life (Centre Street, 2013). She has survived breast cancer, divorce and addiction, and her memoir is described as an integration of her “life experiences and unstoppable ability to make everything funny in a way that is both entertaining and helpful. She hopes that her book will send a message to those who feel they are misfits and to those locked in addiction: there is a way out – and life can be very good when you kick the habit.”

Edelstein’s The Patrón Way is also both entertaining and helpful. Not only does she provide an example of a life well lived, values strongly upheld and the benefits of tenacity, but the book’s epilogue summarizes the main business-related points of each of the book’s three sections. These are useful because The Patrón Way is an intense mix of the personal and the professional, and having the latter separated out offers clear advice for the aspiring entrepreneur.

From starting out with nothing but an idea, to creating the brand, finding partners, managing the finances, dealing with the competition, fighting the legal battles, etc., running and growing a business seems exhausting, yet Edelstein’s love for this way of life is clear.

“Everything about being in business for myself appeals to me,” she told the Independent, “especially because of all the different aspects involved to build and run a successful company. I love the fact that I get to indulge my creative side, my business sense, interacting with people, all the avenues involved, not forgetting, of course, the thrill of making it happen! Besides, I’m not sure if I’m employable?

“You will notice though, that my business endeavors are never in the retail arena. I am only interested in building a business where I can go out and get it, as opposed to having to wait for it to come to me.”

Originally from South Africa, Edelstein’s family was in retail, her father had a concession store for miners, she said, while her mother, a Holocaust survivor, had her own ladies clothing store. When her parents both died when she was 18, Edelstein writes in The Patrón Way, she took over her mother’s store “with the help of Len, my brother-in-law, and my older sister, Sharon.” In her twenties, she was married and divorced, closed the store, worked for Len in his clothing manufacturing business, then for a record label in Johannesburg. When her sister and her family decided to move to the United States, Edelstein writes, “I was devastated, although I understood why they wanted to leave. There didn’t seem to be much of a future in South Africa under apartheid.” Eventually, after a couple of years traveling the world, Edelstein reached the same conclusion and headed to the United States as well. She initially found work with Hollywood publicist Norman Winter, then with her brother-in-law in his office supply company before starting her own business, IE Financial Services.

In addition to her parents having demonstrated “a hard-working business ethic and surviving,” Edelstein said about being a member of the Second Generation, “The home I was brought up in was very Jewish, not in the religious term, we only went to shul on the High Holidays, but in the traditional term – and being a child of a Holocaust survivor and German Jewish father who escaped Germany just prior to the war, there is a bond and attachment to Jews and Jewishkite that is indescribable and indestructible. I truly believe that in our DNA is a memory from our ancestors, and that is where my strength and ability to survive came from: my amazing mother, because not only did she survive Auschwitz, she did so with grace and a spark for life like no other. I never witnessed hatred or bitterness in her, just a remarkable instinct to survive and live life to its fullest.”

And that instinct proved invaluable for Edelstein when her partnership with Crowley dissolved, and she lost her battle in court for compensation for her contribution to Patrón. (Crowley died in 2003.)

“Of course, I would love to still be involved in the company in some way,” she shared with the Independent, “but, regardless of that, Patrón will always be my baby, that will never change. It is still such a thrill being in an establishment and hearing a stranger order Patrón by name.

“I certainly grieved and went through a very dark period, complete with anger, bitterness, hatred and experiencing my dignity being completely stripped away. But I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t have an option, I could either drown in my misery and let that experience cripple me for life, or I could pick myself up and start again with a clean slate. The choice was pretty obvious, though it did take time, it didn’t happen over night. It took me 10 years before being able to write this book!”

Of the future, she said, “I’ve been approached by several brands to consult on their business and product, I’m doing speaking engagements for diverse audiences, including women’s groups, business conferences and groups, etc., and am loving this newfound career, and we are also doing a movie of the book. But, rest assured, the door remains wide open, as are my eyes, mind and heart to welcome whatever the universe has to offer!”

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