The Wizardry of Jewish Women

Chapter 2

Satalyte Publishing first released this work in Australia in 2016. Thanks to Stephen Ormsby, Marieke Ormsby and the rest of the team for all their work and support.

The second edition was through the amazing people from Book View Café. Special thanks to Judith Tarr, Vonda N. McIntyre, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Chaz Brenchley, Deborah Ross and Marissa Doyle.

This novel was written very companionably over quite a long period of time. My family helped ensure the background was realistic, talking and walking me through things ranging from floor layouts for various houses to the cemeteries in Ballarat. My cousin Anna and my mother Sonya were especially wonderful, with my stepfather Les, my sister Suzie and her daughters Miriam and Johanna giving a hand. Eliya Cohen helped me understand pre-teen girls, and Fiona Formiatti gave me much-needed moral support. Domestic violence expert Anne Morris checked my draft to make sure that I was not seriously off about the subject (luckily for me) I knew least about, and Jewish Studies expert Jennifer Dowling made sure I didn’t lead readers too far astray on the magic side. Tamara Mazzei was always there for me as a friend.

When I faltered, some new friends appeared. The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild did their share of reading. Of them Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Donna Maree Hanson, Trevor Stafford and Stu Barrow deserve special thanks for this novel. Jen Mason advised on some critical subjects and made a vast difference to my plot choices.

Elizabeth Chadwick and Wendy Zollo gave me tons of email support — especially with swapping word counts and maintaining sanity. Milena Benini checked the near-final draft, when I had married the strands together, and offered some wonderful insights into what could be done better. Several of my students donated their experiences of the Canberra bushfires to enrich Belinda’s journey through them.

Special thanks to Emma Pallett, Spinster, whose scrapbook I own. She inspired the scrapbook in the novel and I used her poem (in her handwriting, though I don’t know if she was the author) and some of her jokes. Despite the poem, she’s not Ada, nor anything like Ada.

You need to know two more things.

First, most of the external events in the book actually happened (despite my warped time-lines), even though the characters in the book are entirely fictitious. We all still live with the legacies of fire and hate.

Second, readers often come to me and say, “You are this character.” I’m not. I’m especially not Rhonda. A couple of Judith’s life experiences, however, are drawn from mine. None of my beta-readers and friends have successfully guessed which unless they were actually involved in those experiences. Consider the whole novel fiction, therefore. Because it is. If I were all the characters that readers tell me I am, I would need psychiatric help.