What You Didn't Get to See Was This

I omitted a long scene that followed the fourth death sentence (though now I'd call it the third as I'm combining the two death penalty activities as one since, as Jacob noted, "At least.... they couldn't kill me twice.:

But here's what happens after he runs down into a cellar to hide. The rest of the scene takes place after he runs down the stairs to the wine cellar, after the first paragraph:

At the grinding of a heavy door above me, my eyes snapped open. I drew my revolver and held it poised to fire. Until I remembered that I had forgotten to reload it. At most I had one bullet in the chamber.

But it was only an old man whose slippered feet shambled down the stairs. I called out helpfully, “Don't be afraid.” At which he dropped his lamp and turned tail.

“There is something in the cellar!” he shouted.

A peevish wifely voice shouted back, demanding to know, in full detail, what he saw.

“Something alive.”

”Who alive, what alive?” she demanded. “A dog, a cat, a thief? What? Maybe a ghost?” she taunted. “Fool, what did you see?”

“I didn't see anything. It spoke to me. If you’re so curious, why not see for yourself.”

“A thief, then,” her voice decided. “Why are you just standing here? Run for the police.”

At this, I flung aside the door to reveal myself. Eight or ten pairs of female eyes gaped at me in terror and fascination. One woman reached out and touched me to assure herself that I was a creature of flesh and blood.

“Have no fear Fellow Jews,” I said. “I am neither a thief nor a ghost, but a human being like yourselves.”

“What are you doing in my cellar?” the most officious of the women wanted to know.

While I groped for an answer, the wine-merchant announced his verdict. For scaring an old man half to death, I should be handed over to the police.

I showed him my revolver in a perfectly sociable way, at which he retreated. Unfortunately, his wife was not so easily cowed.

“What are you doing here??”

“I lost my way. Here I am, a visitor from out of town. I heard shooting. I saw police grabbing people right and left. I was afraid that if they arrested me, my parents would never hear from me again” There was just enough truth in this to fill my eyes with honest tears.

“And why are you carrying a revolver?” my interrogator demanded.

“My mother warned me Warsaw was a dangerous place,” I answered somewhat truthfully.

With a sniff of contempt for a boy so unworldly as to be afraid of Warsaw, the woman dragged her husband back into the wine shop because customers were waiting.

The rest of my audience remained gathered around me, as though expecting further entertainment. Among them was a woman with a damp, unhealthy face that might once have been beautiful. She stared at me with what I chose to read as sympathy.

Addressing myself to her, I said, “Madame, you can see that I am only a harmless bystander running from the Cossacks. If they should find me here . . .“

I needed say no more. She said, “Come with me.” Ignoring the snickers of the other women, I followed her up four flights of crooked stairs. She admitted me to a one-room flat whose ceiling tilted as though the roof has fallen in.

“Here you will be safe.”

I looked at her in surprise. It wasn’t that I was unused to acts of generosity in unexpected places. But the very walls here oozed poverty, and the raw floor barely supported two crippled iron beds and an uncertain table, leaving a narrow alcove to serve as a kitchen. This consisted of a wood stove and two barrels, one for clean water and one for sewage, though at a glance I couldn t say which was which.

Seeing my interest in her kitchen, she said, “I have nothing for you to eat. I haven’t eaten, myself, since yesterday. Maybe later, when my daughter gets home.” She nodded toward a bright dress that clung to the wall like a large insect poised for escape.

The woman did not ask my name, and I didn’t ask hers. But, trying to be polite, I fumbled to open a conversation. “How many children do you have?”

A flare-up of shooting in the street blurred part of her response but I gathered that she had two daughters. One of them, it seemed, had turned out badly. But the younger one was a treasure whose earnings had been her mother's sole support.

My curiosity exhausted, I sat heavily on one of the beds and gave my attention to the pain in my thigh. A bloody scar had slashed my good trousers. Mindful of my manners, I tried to sit upright like a proper guest, but the weight of my head was more than my shoulders could carry. Before another dozen toothless words had tumbled from my mouth, daylight drained from the room like blood from a bullet hole.

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY OF TEH DEATH SENTENCE, GO TO PARTS I, II & III


TO BE CONTINUED

My Grandfather's Medal -- Can You Decipher It?

Sorry, everyone, for seeming to slacken on the blog. It's true that I haven't been able to post as frequently but that's because I've been busy trying to get the Advanced Readers Copies printed for the Jewish Book Council, and no matter how hard I try (pushy, but polite) I can't seem to make a certain printer in Tennessee move more quickly. I've already written to the Jewish Book Council and volunteered to send out my books at my own expense since I won't be able to get 100 copies to the New Jersey warehouse by the deadline (not that I didn't do Everything in my power to try),but I haven't gotten a response from them yet. Meanwhile, I keep trying to motivate the printer to act more quickly . . .

But in the meantime, my mother found her father's medal from the war, cleaned it up and sent it to me, which I've scanned and post below in the hopes that someone who read Cyrillic can tell me what it means.

                                                                                                                                                   

FRONT








BACK



                  CLOSE-UP

Not in So Many Words

Yesteday, I had my 'interview' with the Jewish Book Council for whom I gave a version of the two-minute presentation that I plan to give in May at their Meet the Author event. My two minutes clocked in at close to three, but that's only because I had been rehearsing and cutting it since that morning, where it first clocked in at nine minutes.

It turns out that there's not a lot you can say in two minutes to people who haven't read the book. My jokes got deleted ("save them for your road presentations"); not even all the highlights.


I guess you can't always trust information online that a two-minute speech equals about 250-300 words. I didn't count mine I as I spoke, but I had had around 300 to start with, and not that many of them are left. I want to make a good impression and get invited to as many cities as possible, but it's going to be difficult to stand out in that little time when the audience will probably hear from, my guess is, 30 people each day. I guess that's what the reception afterward is for; that's when to really go into sales mode.

Alphabet Soup

Every once in a while I like to entertain you with the 'Process' of Self-Publishing. Today's entry is about all the codes one needs to buy:

Now that the writing is “done,” and while I wait for the book to be laid out, it’s time to tackle some of the other aspects of getting a book published. And this is where you come upon a veritable alphabet soup of abbreviations and codes: DBA, ISBN, BISAC, LCCN, etc. And the licenses, and so on.

The first step was coming up with a Fictitious Business Name; I discussed, earlier, how I arrived at the name, “Crosswalk Press.” But first I had to make sure that no one else in San Diego County (and I looked further afield than that) was using that name, whether for a publishing business or not. And fortunately - - oddly - - the name doesn’t appear to be in use anywhere in the U.S. So I filed for a Fictitious Business Name ($30), but hadn’t realized that by using my home address on the form, that meant that I would have to publish my home address in every book printed (and I hope there will be a lot of them). So, back I go to the County Recorder ($30) with a P.O. Box that I had obtained the day before ($32). Then I needed to advertise that I would be Doing Business As (DBA) Crosswalk Press. That has to run in a paper (circulation doesn’t matter, but there is a specific list to choose from) for four consecutive weeks. I think it’s sort of a “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” ie., no one can challenge it after that period of time has passed. But, with trying to do everything, each of which is on its own critical path, I’ve had to do certain things in parallel before the business name is assuredly mine.

And this is where the other codes come in: ISBN (International Standard Book Identifier; it’s unique to each edition of every book published anywhere in the world. It’s the 13-digit number that appears above the bar code); it takes a week to get this, and once you finally have it, you can get an EAN (European Article Number: basically it’s the bar code, above which the ISBN number is printed) (10 ISBNs + 1 EAN: $300) , SAN (Standard Address Number—assigns a specific number to each address in the publishing business; it’s supposed to make electronic transactions easier) ($50). This doesn’t appear on the book.

Only once you have these codes can you apply for the next series of codes: PCN (Preassigned Controlled Number, like LCCN—Library of Congress number; this helps in cataloguing the book.) This also requires an application and approximately a one week wait. Then one needs a CIP (Cataloguing in Publication) number: bibliographic information on a book that hasn’t yet been published. Publishers of fewer than 3 books, though I don’t know over what period of time, are not eligible, but can get P-CIP  numbers – Publishers Cataloguing in Publication) Self-publishers are only eligible for PCIP numbers ($50). You have to get this from someone who knows how the cataloging system works. For this you need the Copyright page out of your book – that page with really small type and a lot of numbers near the beginning of the book that no one reads? It’s important for this. But I also have to have my final cover, so I’m waiting on that before I can apply for the PCIP.

But, wait: There’s more! BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Classification) number. This identifies the subject heading under which your book should be catalogued, and the author gets to/has to make that determination. So, based on my exhaustive search of the database, I’m identifying my Subject Heading as: Biography, Historical; and History, Jewish. (I can’t choose more than two here, but under a PCIP application I can choose as many as I want, and there I’ve chosen a bunch, including: History, Military; History, Russia; History, Poland; War, Russo-Japanese; Anti-Semitism; Russian Revolution, Events Leading to; and Czar Nicholas (Nicolai) II. The BISAC is also one of those rare, free codes. All that money for digits no one understands or even looks at, but it’s part of the process.