Elias Sassoon

Tales of Modern Judea: Short Stories Elias Sassoon

Here are stories written so long ago that I cannot remember writing them. I was fresh from a sojourn through graduate school and adventures in a foreign country. My mind was filled with the thoughts of greatness; I would become famous and leave the dust of a childhood growing up in Flushing, Queens, New York behind. I would conquer the world! In other words, I was living in a world from which there was only one direction to go and that was down. Then, I came back from Canada and my historical studies in the great North, back as a writer of fiction filled with dreams. Returning, I was forced into the same apartment in which I had grown up in Flushing with my parents; my father, an angry, out-of-work factory worker, was still the asshole; still roared and drank and punched and ridiculed at dreams. While listening to my father?s curses and my parents constant fighting, I wrote, locked away in a little room, pounding keys of an old Olivetti typewriter. Soon, I finished a novella and a story collection, and found places to send them. Weeks passed. I imagined Madison Avenue publishers pouring through my pages and congratulating themselves on finding the next genius. I walked around Flushing with these thoughts until my first manuscript was returned with a form rejection. I was crushed, embarrassed, and angry. But, what did they know! Many more rejections followed but without causing self-doubt. Manuscripts streamed to big and small publishers across the United States and Canada, always followed by rejection. Eventually, I got out of my parent?s apartment, and found jobs as a writer in corporate America. The stories in this collection originate from those early days. You can feel the anguish, the anger, and isolation. Mostly however, there is that vision, the vision of youth.