Revise and Conquer

Eva Etzioni-Halevy is professor emeritus of political sociology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. A child Holocaust survivor, she spent World War II in Italy, partly in an Italian concentration camp and partly in hiding. She moved to what was then Palestine in 1945.

She lived most of her life in Israel, but spent lengthy stretches of time in the United States and Australia before returning to Israel in 1989, to seek her roots there, and returned to the religious orientation she had previously abandoned.
Eva lives in Tel Aviv with her husband; she has three grown children.






By Eva Etzioni-Halevy

When I began writing novels about women in the Bible some five years ago, all the chips were stacked against me.

I was 69 years old (yes, that makes me 74 now). I had no previous experience whatsoever in fiction writing. I wrote in a language, English, which is not my native tongue. I began writing for English-speaking, particularly American, readers, even though I lived—and still live—in a country (Israel) that is at a distance of thousands of miles from those readers.

On top of everything else, I was a complete outsider to the American fiction publishing scene. I had no knowledge of what was going on in it, and no connections with anyone who did.

It seemed hopeless. Some people who truly had my welfare at heart, advised me to give up, rather than investing an enormous amount of time and effort in an endeavor that could lead to nothing but dismal disappointment.

Today, I have published three biblical novels with one of the world's largest and most reputable publishers: Plume/Penguin. The first two novels: THE SONG OF HANNAH (2005) and THE GARDEN OF RUTH (2007) had six printings each and are still going strong. The Third one, THE TRIUMPH OF DEBORAH (2008), although published only slightly over a month ago, has had its second printing already, as well as incredible reviews.

How did I get from one to the other?

One important explanation lies in the fact that the American publishing market proved to be truly open to outsiders and open-minded, as well as populated by some wonderfully supportive people. Secondly, I made the fortunate decision to base my work on The Old Testament of the Bible, which Christians and Jews share. So members (particularly women) of both faiths found an interest in my novels. Thirdly, the novels, although meticulously faithful to the scripture, make for light, entertaining, reading, and hence are attractive also to people who feel no special connection to the Bible.

Beyond all this, however, there seems to be one overriding factor: tenacity and the willingness to revise my work countless times, until it reached the quality that made it publishable. I kept changing, revising, improving, polishing, my material an uncountable number of times, and then did the whole all over again.

Moreover, the reason I was able to be so tenacious is, that I chose a topic that was burning inside me, bursting to come out. A topic—biblical women—for which my love was so strong, that I felt compelled to invest years in it, despite the realization that the chances of eventual publication were exceedingly poor. My affinity to the heroines of my novels was so overpowering, that I could not give up writing about them even when all seemed nearly hopeless.

My compulsion to write and publish novels about these women was so overwhelming, that I was even willing to accept other people's candid and not necessarily flattering criticism of my work. This was an ego-battering experience, which initially led me to despair, but eventually produced even further improvements.

Using other people's comments as guidelines for revisions was difficult particularly because not all were constructive, and not all were feasible. I had to sift through the responses, to adopt the useful ones and discard the rest. I used them to help me become an exacting critic of my own work, but I also had to become a critic of my critics, and to find the right balance between the two.

There is a well-worn New-York City anecdote about the man who asked a passer-by: "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" and obtained the reply: "Practice, practice, practice."

If an aspiring writer were to ask me a similar question about how to reach publication, my answer would be: "Revise, revise, revise."

Most importantly, I would add, "And may the Lord be with you."

(To learn more about The Triumph of Deborah, click on the book cover.)