"Is Being Published The Only Thing Worse Than Not Being Published?"

That was what a novelist friend warned me was the case during the two years I struggled to find a publisher for my first collection of short stories. I’d been publishing fiction steadily through the 1980s and thought that was a glide path to a book contract, but the path was much rockier than I expected.

I was so disheartened that I groused more than once to my husband about quitting. Then, one evening an editor at St. Martin’s Press phoned me, said he loved the book, and offered me a contract. When I got off the phone, my spouse smiled and said, “Did you tell him you were giving up writing as a career?” I laughed and we went to the kitchen to open a bottle of champagne.

The book eventually won a prize and put me on the literary map, but I started to understand what my novelist friend was talking about when the copyedited manuscript of my collection, now titled Dancing on Tisha B’Av, arrived.

Many of my characters were Holocaust survivors and non-native speakers of English, so I was faithful to how they might be mentally translating from other languages. That meant their syntax and even grammar might not be correct or standard. The copy editor completely missed what I was doing and made suggestion after suggestion about “normalizing” their grammar and diction.

That was only the beginning. When a story referenced the Temple in Jerusalem, the copy editor asked me “What was it’s name?” I was tempted to respond Temple WTF but I restrained myself.

Then the copy editor—who I was beginning to picture as Inspector Clouseau—objected to one character wearing a blue polo shirt. Why? Because he thought “polo” should be capitalized because it was a Ralph Lauren brand. I wrote a long note explaining that this style of shirt was popularized by polo players long before Lauren was born.

And so it went, with ridiculous, inane, or myopic notes from the copy editor on page after page. STET was a new word for me, but I applied it liberally and with great gusto.

Little did I know that there would be worse copy editors ahead, always balanced however, by dozens of terrific editors of anthologies, magazines, and books. Editors who have uniformly made my work stronger, clearer, more memorable even when it was being mauled by copy editors who seemed very poorly educated.

So my friend was right, but then again, my friend was wrong.

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing fiction and essays about Holocaust survivors and their children, the so-called Second Generation. He is the author of The German Money, Writing a Jewish life and two dozen other books in genres ranging from memoir to mystery to psychology.

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