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Tag : Sadie in Love
June 1, 2018 by Rochelle Distelheim
A Quiet Revolution (Part 4 of “Sadie in Love”)
All this week, in the grand tradition of Victorian periodicals, Lilith will be serializing an excerpt of Sadie in Love, the debut novel from 96-year-old former magazine editor Rochelle Distelheim. Look out for new installments every day this week.
Sadie in Love: Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Thanks God, the following week was quiet, a good time to think up final plans for her first organizing march, only one week to go. How many marching ladies to make a good showing for the watchers? Free soda pop, popcorn, to keep the audience in the park for speakers at the end. Get a permit for using the streets. Would the city send policemen for just-in-case accidents?
Mrs. Pomerantz called fighting to vote a quiet revolution. Easy to say, hard to do. So far, no one was smart enough to make a revolution to explode up the old way of doing things without someone, lots of someones, getting bumped up.
Sadie made a list: Print up banners, papers for handing out, people should know why women were being cheated, don’t blame George Washington. Find drums or trombones or some noisy marching music, find chairs for speeches at the end. Balloons. Confetti. Clean cloths, bandages, aspirin.
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May 31, 2018 by Rochelle Distelheim
The Dance King of Riga (Part 3 of “Sadie in Love”)
All this week, in the grand tradition of Victorian periodicals, Lilith will be serializing an excerpt of Sadie in Love, the debut novel from 96-year-old former magazine editor Rochelle Distelheim. Look out for new installments every day this week.
Sadie in Love: Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
She looked good – a pity Herschl wasn’t here to see her – thanks to Klein’s Emporium, Mitzi’s make-up tricks, and not-so-reliable electric light bulbs strung around the hall.
Her new earrings whooshed a satisfying sound against the lace collar of her silk taffeta shirtwaist. Her corset was also new, bought the day her mirror told her she’d lost three pounds, maybe more. Mitzi, helping her get dressed, had pulled hard at the corset strings until Sadie hollered, “Enough!”
“You’re sure ample, Hon, but interesting.” Sadie asked what ample meant, and Mitzi made a circle of thumb and forefinger.
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May 30, 2018 by Rochelle Distelheim
Sadie Schuster’s Magic Love Knots (Part 2 of “Sadie in Love”)
All this week, in the grand tradition of Victorian periodicals, Lilith will be serializing an excerpt of Sadie in Love, the debut novel from 96-year-old former magazine editor Rochelle Distelheim. Look out for new installments every day this week.
Sadie in Love: Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Sadie Schuster sold love knots, hope wrapped in a schmattah, fifty cents. A lot of money in 1913, but hope never came cheap, especially when it came from Sadie Schuster. “You think this business makes me rich?” she asked her customers. “I do it to make people happy. The material alone costs me forty cents.”
She learned her magic tricks in Poland, where she and Fivel lived before coming to New York, two greenhorns, just married, and talked about love knots as though there really was magic in this world, and only she, of all the Jews in New York who came from Minsk, from Riga and Lublin, Budapest and Warsaw, knew how to put them together.
It was a secret, she said, passed from mother to daughter. Her own daughter, Yivvy, who ran a second-hand shop, and worked the cash register nights at the Second Street Cafeteria, didn’t believe in love or magic. Take it or leave it, Sadie Schuster was the only love knot person in New York City.
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May 29, 2018 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
What It’s Like to Publish Your Debut Novel… at Age 90
All this week, in the grand tradition of Victorian periodicals, Lilith will be serializing an excerpt of Sadie in Love, the debut novel from 90-year-old former magazine editor Rochelle Distelheim. Look out for new installments every day this week.
Sadie in Love: Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Sadie Schuster—fortyish, plumpish, a suffragist, and recently widowed—spends more time now talking to her late husband, Fivel, than she did when he was alive. Sadie keeps Fivel informed of her daily activities—especially her pursuit of a husband—because “An empty bed is a cold place for a hot-blooded woman.” A lover of ballroom dancing, the moving pictures, and night-school English words, Sadie’s true talent lies in the magic love-knots she artfully crafts for lonely, unwitting, immigrants willing to purchase hope wrapped in a schmattah for fifty cents.
Selling love-knots while seeking love, Sadie consults with her magic spirits to woo Herschel—the muscled ice peddler who reads poetry and pines for his newly departed wife. Her daughter, Yivvy, sells secondhand, possibly “pinched” tchotchkes in her antique shop and plans to marry the Irish cop on the beat. Enter Ike Tabatnik, the “Dance King of Riga, Latvia,” just off the boat and ready to take on America—and Sadie’s heartstrings. Comedy and chaos follow.
A stunning confession, following the wedding of one of her love-knot clients—which begins with one groom and ends with another—pushes Sadie to make a surprising choice. She then throws herself at the mercy of her magic spirits, asking them to do quickly for her what they have been doing for her customers—before it’s too late. Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to Rochelle Distelheim about what it feels like to have her debut novel published when she’s in her nineties.
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