The Texicans

Part 2

1988, April, San Antonio. I telephone Frances Kallison from the hotel. I want to know if I can arrange an interview with her.

She cuts me off. “No arrangin’ necessary, darlin’, I’m comin’over to the Menger this afternoon and get you and your husband and show you around. Stay right there. Don’t go away.”

“We can’t go far,” I said. “My husband threw his back out a few hours after we got here and can’t get out of bed.”

“I’ll take care of it, darlin’, don’t you worry.”

About an hour later she shows up with a doctor, her good friend and personal physician, Milt Jacobs. The doctor, a homely man in his late fifties, has a stammer and an ingratiating personality. He gets to work examining Marv while Frances sort of supervises him. Frances is 79, is wearing white gloves like the ones women wore in the fifties, a pale yellow suit, and has her dark brown hair swept into a severe bun on top of her head. She was warmer on the telephone. In person she’s icy, resists easy banter, doesn’t seem to be listening, eyes wander, but she hears everything, answers everything, expounds and pontificates, is opinionated and confident to the max. I decide that the warmth I heard on the phone was the Texas accent. No one is cold over the phone who says “darlin’” and talks with a twang.

Doc Jacobs gives Marv a bottle of pain pills and tells him to stay in bed.

Frances takes me for “a little sightseein’” around San Antonio.

She drives like a maniac. She cuts people off, runs red lights, seems to forget she’s behind the wheel of a car. I comfort myself with the thought that her driving hasn’t killed anyone yet, and today probably won’t be the exception.

She talks while she drives. She has plenty to say and it’s all interesting. She’s part of Texas society, a university graduate who wrote her master’s thesis on the history of Jews in Texas, is an authority on everything Texan, is active in Texas political life – a founder of the temple, a patron of the arts, a benefactor of the public library – comes from a well known ranching family, rode horses till she hit sixty, she and her husband owned the largest western outfitting store in San Antonio – Kallison’s Farm and Ranch Store – her husband broadcast the Old Tradin’ Post show from the store, which was next to the “Big Red Court House,” and farmers all over Texas listened to the show and especially to Perry Kallison’s singing turtles and their weather forecasts, and now Perry’s housebound with Parkinson’s and tended by a full-time nurse. In between all this she recites a recipe for black beans and garlic, tells me about her daughter’s wedding – she was married at home and had a reception at the Menger Hotel – and remarks that the heat in April is starting already and asks me if I can feel the sweat tang.

“Sweat tang?” I ask her.

“When it’s hot and humid the sweat stays unevaporated on the skin and you steam, darlin’,” she says. “That’s sweat tang.”

I finally manage to get in a few words about the novel I‘m planning to write about present-day Texas, and that I’m mainly interested in the sanctuary movement.

She takes both hands off the wheel and waves them at me.

“Oh, that,” she says.

I hope everyone loves The Rose Variations as much as I do. I also hope you join the book club to discuss it! Besides being beautifully-written, the book really captures a moment in time when “Time magazine’s Man of the Year was the American Woman, though no one woman in particular.” Rose embodies the independent woman of the 1970s and ’80s who wants to be focused on her career—in this case, music—and also find love, but isn’t sure how these two things are supposed to fit together. She’s a flawed character who makes lots of mistakes, but she’s also completely believable and sympathetic. It’s great fun getting to know her.

This month we’re trying a social networking experiment: the Twitter/Facebook bookclub. Anyone who has a Twitter or Facebook account can join, and the first five people to email soho AT sohopress DOT com will receive a free copy.

Facebook users can discuss on the Soho Press Facebook page under “Discussions,” and Twitter users should tag tweets SPBC for Soho Press Book Club.

February’s selection is THE ROSE VARIATIONS by noted playwright and poet Marisha Chamberlain. Already an IndieNext selection and Midwest Booksellers Association pick for February, THE ROSE VARIATIONS has received high praise from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, and MORE Magazine.

If you have any suggestions or comments about the book club, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Evan Fallenberg’s LIGHT FELL has been named a 2008 National Jewish Book Award Finalist in the fiction category as well as the winner of the 2009 Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gitting Literature Award from the American Library Association.

When published in hardcover, LIGHT FELL received high praise from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, Forward: The Jewish Daily, Jewish Book World, The Advocate, Haaretz, EDGE Publications, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and many more. The Rocky Mountain News recently named LIGHT FELL one of its “Great Debut” picks for 2008.

You can learn more about Evan Fallenberg by visiting his website here.

The holidays are over, I’m working on a new novel, this is my first blog, and I’ve been thinking about how devious the writer’s mind is.  When I began to write THE TEXICANS I thought it was going to be about present-day Texas, that it would involve the lingering effects of the Vietnam War on a family in a small town in the Texas Hill Country, and that the oldest son’s post traumatic stress disorder would be complicated by the youngest son’s involvement in the sanctuary movement.  I always like to know what direction I’m heading in when I get in a car. 

So my husband and I went to San Antonio.  It was April, Fiesta time, the thermometer climbing, streets jammed with revelers, colored buntings flying.  We stayed at the old Menger Hotel because I wanted atmosphere and because Teddy Roosevelt and some of his Rough Riders had stayed there and because all the other hotels were full. 

I had lists of people to call:  professors at the University of Texas, people involved in the sanctuary movement, therapists at the Vietnam Veterans Clinic, and a woman named Frances Kallison. 

Frances took over my life and the book took a U-turn.

Oops!  Talk to you later.  My husband is reminding me that we’d better leave now if we want to get to the movie in time.

In today’s Jerusalem Post, I’m interviewed about the current violence in Gaza and Palestinian politics. As their columnist writes, I’m trying to give an understanding of why the Palestinians do what they do that you won’t find in newspapers or tv reports. I explain some of that in the Post story, and for the rest of it of course you have to read my novel A Grave in Gaza. Here’s the link to the article:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1231167303018&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

I’ve noticed that in readers’ forums the question often comes up: What do Palestinians think of my sleuth Omar Yussef? Generally people are curious about that, but there’s also the subtext: if Omar is so critical of other Palestinians, surely ordinary Palestinians wouldn’t like him (that is, they’d prefer him to blame Israel for everything bad that happens to them).

Far from it. I receive many emails at my website from Palestinians, including those living elsewhere in the Arab world and Europe. They commend my books for showing the reality of life for Palestinians, rather than displaying them as stereotypical terrorists or victims, as they typically appear in Western and Arab media.

Hanan Ashrawi, the former peace negotiator and a leading figure in the Palestinian parliament, went on German tv and was asked about my book. She said that, “unfortunately Rees’s novel represents the reality for Palestinians.” (She was talking about the first book at that time, The Collaborator of Bethlehem.) So I have parliamentary approval.

The Palestinians who are the basis for my characters have in some cases read the book. The man on whom I based Khamis Zeydan, the police chief, said he could tell me things he wouldn’t tell another Palestinian, because he’d fear that his comments would get to people who might threaten him for them. So he says he can express his feelings about Palestinian life only through me.

The first book in the series has also been published in Hebrew and had a very good response in Israel, with lots of features about it in Israeli newspapers. I believe it gave Israelis a way to look over the wall they’ve built between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and see what life is like over there. That’s one of my aims — to humanise Palestinians, who’re often seen as so very different from us in their aspirations and behavior. In fact, they’re not so strange at all, and I hope readers will appreciate my characters on a very human level.

The third in my series of Palestinian detective novels, The Samaritan’s Secret, which Soho publishes on Feb. 1, has terrific write-ups in all three major pre-publication reviews. Here they are:

Booklist: Rees makes it three for three with his latest Omar Yussef mystery. This time the Bethlehem history teacher is in strife-torn Nablus to attend the wedding of a family friend. Nablus is home to the small Samaritan community, which follows its ancient traditions in the midst of the ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Yussef, ever the historian, jumps at the chance to visit the Samaritan synagogue and learn more about their beliefs, but he is quickly engulfed in a murder investigation. One of the Samaritans, a young man who worked for Arafat (“the old president”) and controlled millions of the leader’s under-the-table money, has been murdered, and the funds are missing. Yussef throws himself into the daunting task of following the money and thus stopping the World Bank from cutting off aid to Palestine. As in The Collaborator of Bethlehem (2007) and A Grave in Gaza (2008), Rees not only offers a perceptive look at complex international political issues but also help us to understand those issues in the context of everyday lives—of Palestinians attempting to dodge bullets coming in all directions (from Israelis but also from rival factions within their own country) and carry on with the business of falling in love, marrying, raising children. Constantly at risk from all manner of idealists with guns, Yussef soldiers on, his concern for individual human lives standing in stark contrast to the world around him. Bill Ott

Kirkus Reviews: Layers of secrets and a tradition of distrust.

Visiting the Palestinian city of Nablus to see his grandchildren and attend the wedding of a friend, Lt. Sami Jaffari of the National Police, Omar Yussef (A Grave in Gaza, 2008, etc.) gets drawn by inches into an unusual murder. Sami spots him on the street, pulls up in a Nablus police car and drives him to a Samaritan synagogue, where the priceless Abisha Scroll has been stolen. When Samaritan priest Jibril Ben-Tabia reports that the Scroll has been safely returned, Sami and Omar Yussef prepare to deconstruct this obvious lie, but murder thickens the plot. The victim, a Samaritan named Ishaq who worked for the Palestinian Authority, was beaten, tortured and thrown down a hill. The cool reaction of Ishaq’s widow Roween to his death piques Omar Yussef’s interest. His discovery that the dead man was homosexual is the first piece of a complex puzzle set in a town a world apart from Bethlehem, where Omar Yussef works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The local turmoil clashes strangely with the festivity of the upcoming wedding and, despite some distance from his son, Omar Yussef’s joy over his grandchildren. Rees probes the racial and political crosscurrents of volatile Nablus from Omar Yussef’s perspective as a Palestinian Christian who no longer drinks alcohol or believes in God.

The depth and heart in Omar Yussef’s third case makes it a tearjerker as well as a page-turner.

Publishers Weekly: Absorbing, Vividly Captures Essence of Palestine
No crime, whether a theft or murder, is an isolated event in Palestine; it’s an intersection of religious, cultural and political issues, as shown in Rees’s absorbing third Omar Yussef mystery (after 2008’s A Grave in Gaza). Omar Yussef, a 57-year-old history teacher, becomes immersed in finding who killed Ishaq, a member of the tiny, ancient Samaritan community on the outskirts of Nablus. While his fellow Samaritans didn’t respect Ishaq, he controlled millions of dollars of government money through his job at the Palestinian Authority—money that’s now missing. Unless the funds can be found, the World Bank will cut off all financial aid to Palestine. If the quiet Yussef stretches believability as a sleuth, Rees excels in capturing the essence of Palestine, from the claustrophobic casbah with its myriad scents to the harsh beauty of the countryside. Rees vividly illustrates daily Palestinian life, where violence is a constant threat and religious attitudes permeate each decision.