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New Life for an Old "Gang" |
The
Warren Adler E-Sheet 42
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Greetings
From Publishing Central
The Sunset Gang never sets.
 A
few years back I wrote fifteen stories
based on my parents' experiences in a
retirement community in Florida. (Century
Village.) Nine stories were published by
Viking and later all fifteen were
published by Homestead Press, under the
title
Never Too Late for Love. Linda
Lavin, the actress, produced a trilogy
based on three of the original stories on
PBS to ecstatic reviews. One of the
trilogy stories "Yiddish" was adapted to a
musical called, what else, "The Sunset
Gang." I wrote the book and lyrics and the
great composer L. Russell Brown
wrote the music.
Read more about it.
The original stories still resonate to the
reading public. Currently both books are
available as either e-books, trade
paperback or hardcover. Four of the
stories are available as digital audio and
can be ordered individually at
fictionwise.com and at
paperbackdigital.com. |
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Reflections on The Sunset Gang
 Like
birth, aging flattens all differences.
My parents moved to Florida in 1971.
Considering their origins in the ghettos of
Europe at the turn of the century, it seemed
an ironic ending to a life of struggle and
incessant migration, from the shtetle across
the ocean through the constantly changing
Jewish ghettos - now called neighborhoods - of
Brooklyn.
Settling in Florida did not break the pattern
of their "ghettoness," which had taken on new
textures and tones, but remained the
overriding condition of their mentality.
Florida developers, many of them sons of
like-minded parents, plugged into this
mind-set by creating new ghetto forms: huge
condo-complexes. Thanks to the efficiency of
mass production, retirement homes were finally
within the reach of lower middle-class Jews,
all survivors of the great American adventure
that had taken them through the devastating
Depression and the first and second world
wars.
This was the generation that survived and
sacrificed for the kinder, the children, who
visited them now in their big cars, designer
clothes and fancy jewels, and regaled them
with tales of their latest purchases of master
paintings and vacation villas in the South of
France and whose yearly income was more money
than their parents and grandparents and
generations beyond had made in their combined
lifetimes.
They were mostly retired teachers, bookkeepers
(like my father), small shop owners and
government workers. This was the generation to
whom compassion and grappling, loudly, with
deep moral questions was still obligatory and
fashionable, to whom liberalism was a way of
life, who voted straight Democratic, whose
idea of leisure activities was canasta, Mah
Jongg, gin rummy and pinochle. Golf and
country clubs were for Gentiles - or fancy
German Jews, sons of an earlier migration.
But these condo/ghettos had the patina of
Gentile mores, the big "country club"
clubhouse, the golf course, tennis courts,
man-made lakes and streams, manicured lawns
and barrack-like buildings disguised as fancy
complexes with old English names like
Sheffield, Chatsworth and Fieldcrest. My
parents' pleasant one-bedroom condo in West
Palm Beach cost them $13,900 in 1971. Theirs
was a corner apartment - an inside one was
cheaper.
Not that all the owners of these condos were
Jewish. Many were Italians, whose own ghetto
sensibilities melded quite easily with their
Jewish neighbors, especially if they were from
New York.
To my mother, Florida, in the early years of
their sojourn, was Nirvana. She reveled in it.
My father, used to his subway commute, coffee
shop bagel-and-breakfast, New York Times,
and the bustle of the city beat, merely
tolerated it.
Visiting them periodically, I discovered that
these people had created a hybrid culture
patched together out of their own rich
experience. They would, of course, deny to
themselves the richness of it, their view
distorted by the economic struggle and pain of
displacement. The whole idea of tropical
Florida for this generation of northern
survivors was a fantastic irony and the humor
of it could provoke both a wryness and a
belly-laugh. Troops of fat-butted "athletes"
roaming the streets on tricycles, pennants
waving from chrome masts; card rooms
stretching beyond even the most far-sighted
vision; lines waiting for the restaurants'
"early bird" special; men, once at home
hanging around the corner candy store, now
finding a substitute in the laundry room while
the wash spun; the incessant petty gossip and
eternal battles of the matriarchy, that breed
of tough Jewish hausfrau who rules the
roost with an iron hand.
The children of these mock country clubbers
would come to bask in the loving pride of
their forebears, exhibiting themselves in the
spotlight of their parents' loving admiration.
A visit from an adult child meant that a call
would go out to the neighbors to come see "my
Solly, or my Herman or my Milly or my Molly"
and a bragging contest would ensue, complete
with photographic evidence.
A visit was only good for a few hours or an
overnight or two, but it was enough to salve
one's sense of duty and to rediscover the
mysterious joys of connection. After a few
hours, the sentiment and the incessant rhythm
of the Florida lifestyle would weary the
visitor whose frantic life of success and
acquisition was planets away.
Out of these visits to my parents came the
first incarnation of
The Sunset Gang.
The collection of nine short stories was
published with much moral support and
emotional commitment from Viking, perhaps my
compensation for a rather modest advance. It
received many ecstatic reviews.
The reviewer from the New York Times,
however, was troubled by the fact that, since
the theme of the stories was "aging," the
spectre of death was nowhere to be seen. He
had missed the point entirely; the "aging" are
not obsessed with death, but with life, which
these stories abundantly celebrate.
Indeed, the limp sales of
The Sunset Gang
and the lack of any paperback or foreign
deluge were attributed to the fact that no one
really gave a fig about older people,
especially a bunch of old Jews. In 1976, the
youth culture was still ascendant and the
portrait of old Jews dripped with the clichés
of saccharine sentiment that the fiction mills
had created.
Nevertheless,
The Sunset Gang
took on a new life. It continued to thrive
through libraries and senior citizen groups, a
number of which dramatized one story or
another or reprinted them in their various
publications.
Often people of all ages would come to me and
respectfully - even reverently - ask if I was
the Warren Adler who wrote
The Sunset Gang.
Naturally, I was flattered, also bemused by
the book's staying power and apparent
attraction for younger readers.
Almost a dozen years after its publication,
the perceptive and remarkably talented Linda
Lavin was casting around for a project for her
own production company, Big Deal Productions.
She approached my agent for the rights to
The Sunset Gang,
the book having struck an emotional chord in
her, since her own father was currently living
a similar lifestyle in Florida. But it took
her additional years of persistence and
persuasion to convince Lindsay Law of American
Playhouse to produce the trilogy that aired on
PBS.
For years I have been baffled by the amazing
survival of
The Sunset Gang.
Only recently has it begun to dawn on me that
something is embedded in these stories that I
should have recognized from an incident that
occurred back in 1976, a month after the
book's publication.
I was sitting at home - then Chevy Chase,
Maryland. A murderous snowstorm had totally
paralyzed the Washington area; my driveway was
covered with drifts of seemingly impenetrable
snow.
A man called and asked me to autograph a copy
of the book. I told him I would be delighted
and suggested we get together when the snow
cleared.
"No," he said. "You must do it today."
"You'll never make it my house," I protested.
"Yes, I will," he insisted.
Two hours later, there he was, trudging up the
driveway. I signed the book and fixed him a
cup of hot coffee.
"Why does it mean so much to have braved this
weather for a signature?" I asked.
"My mother," he explained, "lives in a nursing
home in Jacksonville, Florida. The stories in
that book have given her great happiness and
made her life a bit more tolerable. She wanted
to, in some way, touch the author. To meet
this wish is the greatest thing I can do for
her."
I was greatly moved. Isn't this the true
reward of the writer?
But what puzzled me was my own narrow
assumption that the ethnicity of the stories
had so limited the book's appeal that the only
people who might be taken with it would have
to be Jews of that era and experience. This
man was not Jewish, yet his mother had related
to these stories on her own terms.
It is only now, years later, as the aging
process begins to work its way into greater
personal awareness, that I have begun to
understand the universality of the theme. Like
birth, aging flattens all differences. There
is nothing exclusively ethnic or exclusively
anything in the process. It is
nondiscriminatory and nonjudgmental. It is the
last lap of the human journey, the way of all
flesh.
It is also, in its own way, more of a triumph
than a tragedy.
 Barnes-Storming!
Warren Adler's latest mystery novel,
Death of a Washington Madame, is now
available in paperback at
Barnes & Noble. And, of course, for
eBook fans, this newest Fiona FitzGerald
mystery and the entire series is
available in Adobe, Microsoft Reader, Palm,
and MobiPocket formats - check out
Warren's website for daily specials from
our online vendor partners.
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Until next time, happy reading.
Warren
Adler
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