The Latest from Rome... The Heat is On!

The heat has come on in our building (the law here says you can't have it on until November 15) and none too soon. The past few days we've been showing up at dinner in our sweaters and jackets.

During the day, though, the weather is pleasant, sunny and cool, with no rain. Last weekend, I met my friend Marco who said this last gasp of summer often happens right around November 11, a saint's festival which is popularly known as the day of the henpecked husbands.

Here at the Academy, we're getting ready for Thanksgiving--I am head of the pumpkin pie committee--and Christmas. Every year, the Fellows are expected to put on a show in Italian for the Italian staff, a performance that climaxes with the appearance of Santa Claus, bearing gifts for the children. I'm sidestepping the show by volunteering for the Christmas tree committee, because every Christmas tree needs a good Jew to help make it look beautiful. Actually, I've heard a story that Christmas trees were popularized during the 19th Century by Jews in Germany who wanted to blend in with their Gentile neighbors but couldn't bring themselves to put up a creche in their windows.

My major news is that I've joined a gym called "La Fitness," tucked into one of the dense alleys of Trastevere. Gyms here seem a bit different than those in the States, in that with your membership you get access to a trainer who will lead you around and tell you what to do. My trainer is Realdo, a short, highly muscular man with a craggy face and a shaved head. There's a picture of him in a spangled bikini (and nothing else) as he flexes his muscles and accepts a trophy for natural bodybuilding. Realdo (who teaches in a warm-up suit, not a spangled bikini) explains to me in a slow clear voice exactly how to position myself in front of the weight machines, how to pull the weight, how to breathe. As a result, I've now learned how to say "weight," "three sets of ten reps," and "biceps" in Italian.

My language skills have been improving rapidly. Last week I went to see the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan dubbed into Italian (all movies are dubbed here), and I understood just about all of it. Then again, it wasn't a terribly complex or interesting movie. Jodie spent most of it running up and down the aisles of the airplane, screaming, "Dove mia figlia!" (Where's my daughter!) Now that I think of it, most American movies these days could probably benefit from being dubbed into Italian.

There are times, however, when my Italian completely fails me, usually when it's someone giving me directions over the phone. For example, last weekend Marco was trying to invite me to do something and I had no idea where he wanted to take me. I got so confused I couldn't even understand where he wanted to meet beforehand. Finally, he said, "Meet me at Termini train station, track number 7. That way there'll be no confusion."

So I went, and then followed him to a highway, where we waited about twenty minutes and then a car picked us up (driven by Marco's roommate Ludovica). Off we drove to a neighborhood called "Centocelli" which means 100 jails in English. There we drove in circles, asking directions from passersby who couldn't help us, until we parked illegally beside an abandoned military fortress that had been taken over by a commune of anarchist squatters. By then it was dark, and a light fog had settled over the fortress grounds, which were lit with torches, like an outdoor carnival. After paying three and a half Euros each, we passed through a graffiti-painted tunnel into an underground network of brick and stone catacombs. Inside there were art exhibitions, a cinema, a theater, a display of common household products that were bad for the environment, political action stands, and a market selling organic wine, cheese, olive oil, and other foods. Each stallkeeper offered free tasting and explanations of how his or her wine, soap, cheese, salami had been made without any additives or chemicals.

The crowd was a mix of young people, many of them with dredlocks, a smattering of piercings, leather jackets, and dogs. "Today if you want to be in the punk style, it's necessary to have a dog," Marco explained.

After sampling some putrid cheese, some very flavorful wine and cheese, and a chewy tasteless cake sweetened with organic fruit sugar, I came home with a bottle of organic apple juice and a pot of organic red currant jam. I drank some of the juice last night, but I have yet to use the jam, though it looks pretty in my refrigerator.

Memoir of a Book Tour

What does it take to sell a book? Random House, my publisher, and I were willing to bet that a two-week, six-city tour of bookstores and synagogues across the country just might do the trick. And so in the middle of October, I made my way to the airport in Rome and flew to the United States.

Before publishing my first book, I used to dream of traveling at my publisher's expense to various cities in order to show off my work to appreciative audiences, newspaper and magazine reporters, and radio talk shows. In reality, a book tour may include a little of that dream. If your name is Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison, a book tour will include a great deal of that dream. For the rest of us, a book tour is a kind of marathon that can range from moments of exhiliration to deep depression. You pray that people will actually show up, that they've read your good reviews and not your bad ones, that they'll have the right sense of humor, the right politics, or simply that they've seen your author photo and think you're cute.

The biggest trouble with readings is that generally people don't like being read to. Or at least grown-ups don't. So it's important for a writer starting out that his friends and family mobilize the troops.

And mobilize they did. Everywhere I went, I was flattered and honored to see people I loved in the audience, particularly in my hometown of Detroit, where the local Borders brought out extra chairs to accommodate the overflow. Yet, it doesn't necessarily follow that because someone is your friend or family member or family member's friend that he or she is your target audience. In fact, quite a few people I met at readings told me they never read books. And so I read my novel about Jews visiting Israel to Christians who've never left the continent, about a middle-aged housewife with her troubled gay son to older men with no children or young straight career women, or impressionable middle schoolers who'd been promised extra credit by my nephew's English teacher for showing up. The best part of it was that many of these people actually had a good time.

What is the point of a book tour? I'm convinced it's more than the event itself. It's an opportunity to turn the publication of the book, which is really no more than opening a box and putting copies on shelves, into a happening worth marking by local bookstores, media, and readers. Your book gets placed in a prominent position in the store a week beforehand. Your reading gets listed in local newspapers. You sometimes do interviews. You shake hands with booksellers and audience members, several of whom (to my great delight) had read my first book and had eagerly been awaiting my new one.

Then there are the unforeseen wonderful small moments you never expected. I heard from friends of mine I hadn't heard from in years, including two men who came out to me for the first time. In Atlanta, I met a gay man who'd just escaped to the big city from the small town where he'd felt trapped for years and was enjoying his new life of freedom. In Washington, I was met at the airport by a "media escort," which is a person who makes a living by picking up authors in town for book signings and taking them around the city for the day. My media escort turned out to be a smart, insightful social worker with whom I shared a thoughtful conversation about religion and the role of faith in progressive politics. In L.A., I was adopted for the weekend by the synagogue Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I was treated like a rock star.

And then in Chicago, I had a moment that reminded me what this whole business is really about. My eight-year old nephew Nick had just purchased the latest Berenstein Bears book--he owns the entire series--and I asked him if I could read it to him before he went to sleep. Nick very graciously said yes. "Do you have a bear you like to cuddle with when you're being read to?" I said. He did, and with his stuffed animal safely tucked into the crook of his arm, he lay in bed with a completely absorbed expression on his round face as I opened the book to page one and began to tell a story.