Writing It Real contributor Janice Eidus’ newest novel, The War of the Rosens, is the story of 10-year-old Emma Rosen, a thoughtful girl who is writing poetry amidst the anger, confusion and angst of her leftist and atheist father Leo, her subservient socialist mother Annette and lovelorn older sister May. Amidst May’s hateful ripping up of Emma’s poems, Annette’s emotional withdrawal and Leo’s exhortations about “Truth With A Capital T,” Emma attempts to find her own answers to the nature of good and evil, the existence of God, the meaning of religion, and her place in her family.

In an interview with Carol Schmidt of The Author’s Sala of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Janice Eidus remarked:

Despite writing and publishing fiction and nonfiction all my adult life, it has been extremely difficult for me to write about my Jewish identity and roots.

I grew up in an emotionally and physically tumultuous Jewish family in the Bronx. Not until my husband and I began to raise our own daughter, who is adopted from Guatemala, was I able to begin to explore my Jewish identity in my writing.

The War of the Rosens portrays the world in which I was raised, the world that shaped who I am and led to my becoming the deeply loving mother of this particular child at this particular time in my life. The War of the Rosens, rooted so deeply in truth, explores my Jewish identity, which has proven — for better and worse — to be hard earned, unconventional, and sometimes controversial.

Most of us find it difficult to dig into the most fundamental occurrences of our early years, especially if our parents are still alive and if siblings see things differently than we do. Still, such stories contain imagines and dialog that show how our early life created our personal obsessions as writers and our idiosyncratic windows onto the world. It is worthwhile to write these stories, and we can draw lessons from the way Janice Eidus put her experience into her novel.

When Leo buys Emma a coveted diary at the five-and-dime, Emma is appalled by his words to the salesclerk:

 “We Rosen’s believe,” he says loudly, waiting for his change, returning once more to the foremost and central subject on his mind, exclusively in the worth of human beings, not in a supernatural God…”

“You’ll never need any spiritual crutches,” he dramatically declares, handing Emma the book, his thin nostrils flaring and his bright blue eyes lit up.

Emma is embarrassed as she sees the young woman’s eyebrows “rise toward her scalp” and wonders why her father needs so much attention, even from strangers. She thinks, “He is a child,” and as soon as she thinks it, she feels guilty. She begins to mull over his frequently stated words: “The Rosens may not be good Jews, but they’re good people.” And she asks herself, “…if the Rosens are good people, why aren’t they happy?”

Why is her father so enraged all the time, her sister so cruel, her mother so mournful and sad, riddled with crippling headaches and nausea that leave her flat on her back for days at time? Isn’t it possible that God–who doesn’t exit, of course–well, maybe He does exist, and then if He does–isn’t it possible that He’s punishing the Rosen’s for not being good Jews?

In another scene, Leo insists on taking Emma and May with him to the beach on the Jewish holy day Rosh Hashanah. He is dead set on flaunting his lack of being observant before all the neighbors. After the girls have eaten sandwiches on the blanket he spread out for them, and he has taken a bracing swim in the ocean, it is time to drive back home:

Leo accelerates so fast that both girls gasp, and he crosses lanes, cutting off the Number 12 bus, which in the summer is packed sardine can-tight with beachgoers but today is nearly empty. With a wild screech, he steers across the busy intersection of Pelham Parkway and White Plains Road…

Leo parks the car on the far side of the Projects, and Emma immediately understands that he has done this deliberately, so that they’ll have to walk past all five of the other buildings, in order to reach their own. This has been the real reason for the entire excursion, this parading around in their bathing suits on Rosh Hashanah. By now, the Project benches will have filled up with Jews, home from synagogue, chatting and sharing news of God, or whatever it is that religious Jews discuss on the High Holy Days. This must be what her mother meant when she’d said to Emma’s father, “You don’t have to rub everyone’s faces in your beliefs.”

Like two little ducklings, May and Emma trail behind their father, the three of them in their bathing suits. Their rubber flip-flops slap the sidewalk in drum-like rhythm. Emma’s toes and fingers are freezing, and, beside her, May also shivers, although she won’t meet Emma’s eye to commiserate.

Of course, Leo doesn’t appear to be cold at all, and it’s crystal clear to Emma how proud he is of the figure he cuts as he walks through the Projects, his back straight, head high, a strong man who can withstand cold water and cool weather, a muscular man with his two obedient and unquestioning daughters in tow.

Perhaps you remember when a parent or sibling, public or religious schoolteacher or relative acted in public in a way that made you cringe. Usually, such moments are born of the adult making “inside” business public, of communicating points of view that seem obsessive even to a child observer. And usually, the child is powerless against being used by adults to appear a certain way, to help them make a statement about how life ought to be. How often we had to soldier our way through the experiences or deny that there were battles we wished to fight.

Plagued by spiritual and emotional questions, the two sisters have different ways of searching for answers. Emma starts secretly visiting the statue of the Virgin Mary at a nearby church. When she asks life questions in the presence of the stature, she hears answers:

“Don’t worry now about how to be a good Jew. One day you’ll understand. And then, you will be what you wish to be.”

May’s response to her parents’ vehement atheism is a great love for the Old Testament, which is forbidden in the house. From the time she found a copy under a park bench, she was enthralled with the language of Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus. She believes her Grandmother Thelma, who her father loudly denigrated, was right about the value of Jewish law and a belief in God. She imagines marrying Marvin and keeping a Jewish household. May and Emma’s mother Annette’s response to Leo’s maniacally anti-religious lectures is to suffer terrible days-long migraines.

You might be inspired to make a list of moments when adults made you more than merely uncomfortable and you questioned what your life would be about. After you have remembered such a moment you might want to write about, write down questions you wished you’d addressed to someone about your inner turmoil. Write down answers you would have liked to have gotten. Who could have given you this answer if you had asked–perhaps someone in a dream, a beloved teacher, another relative or friend’s parent, a camp counselor, or community leader? The fact that Emma goes to a religious icon of a different faith might inspire you to think about how beings far from our background often have the answer we are looking for when escaping our own background seems important. Try writing a letter from your child self to the being or spirit that could have provided an answer. You can explain what you hope to get from thinking about the situation now. As you write the letter, describe symptoms, rituals, and the denial mechanisms you used to submerge your anxiety.

Janice Eidus writes this book with a convincing sense of time and place that you’ll want to emulate. On every page, the reader feels a part of Emma’s environment and concerns. In a recent review of The War of the Rosens, J. Stefan-Cole describes it this way:

The journey back to the Gun Hill Projects reflects a time that now seems innocent. Uniformly bland brick buildings are alive with an ethnic mix, sixties songs fill the background, and chance meetings at the elevator serve as a telegraph system; in the projects people are not strangers. And there are the candies Leo sells, names called out like mantras running through the book: Good ‘n Plenty, Raisinettes, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Pez, Chunkies…manna to the neighborhood kids.

As you are writing about a setting in which you were a pawn of an adult, don’t reveal the manipulative situation too quickly. Write about what you wore, what you were doing (sitting on a beach blanket eating sandwiches with your disapproving sister as your father went for a swim in Emma’s case), what the environment you were in looked like (the bus Leo cuts off was not crowded in contrast the way it was in the summer months). Remember the weather at that time (too chilly to be in a bathing suit), the sounds around you (Emma’s family’s flip-flops sound like drums), any food involved (the girls had eaten sticky peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while they waited for their father to finish his swim). Remember how you got where you were and what the vehicle was like or the pavement beneath your feet (Leo’s car has bullet-riddled windows).

Once you have described the place your scene begins (for instance, in The War of the Rosens, Leo is strutting in his bathing suit with his girls in theirs before dressed up observant Jews), write about becoming aware of the manipulation, the moment you fully felt it. Write about how you felt in the situation–what you thought, what you remember, what you made of things. Describe the image that the manipulative person is trying to get across, the one you are powerless to change at the moment. When you are finished writing this letter, you may have written material for a personal essay or the start of a story or novel.

Near Eidus’ novel’s end, Emma exclaims, “I am not bad!” stealing words back from her father to use as a platform for standing up for herself. In her life, Janice has become a parent and reports, “Creating a multiracial family has deepened my identity as a Jew. This life transformation has led to a major breakthrough in my writing, as well as in my creative and emotional life. The War of the Rosens is the book I was always meant to write.”

Although The War of the Rosens is a dark tale of a family suffering from both disillusionment and idealism, it is also a tale of how writing, Emma knows she will “blossom and thrive,” that her life has in it “a thousand lines of poetry” that “have taken root in her heart.” Whether you are well published or just beginning, writing from dark childhood experience is a way to discover what was going on and how you can undo any remaining chains.