Dreams We See

In Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy, the main character changes his identity.  The first step is to convert to Christianity and find a community.  I have no idea what my dad might have actually done about conversion because he never admitted his original background. It seems that he was reinventing himself into a man he would want to be. Night after night I experienced dreams telling me to find the answer.

During the first drafting process, I began research by hunting down a church that would have been in New York City in 1939 and found Fifth Avenue Presbyterian on Google. Figured that was as good as any, especially since Presbyterian would be close to Dutch Protestant. More than a year later, digging through papers on something else, I found out that dad actually had gone to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian. I stopped breathing on that tidbit of information. How in the world did I imagine that?

My husband Chet augmented the conversion scene and invented two reverends vying for the soul of the Jewish boy. One would be Presbyterian, the other Episcopalian. Chet suggested a setting of Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island in NYC for a place to end the chapter.

 Weeks later we flew to NYC to walk the terrain of the book and made it a point to spend a morning there. That Fifth Avenue church certainly was a good fit – no iconography in the windows, simple brass fixtures, similar to Dutch churches and synagogues. It also had a long history of welcoming outsiders.

Then Chet and I decided to try the walk to Welfare Island – now Roosevelt Island.

The tram landed near a little brownstone building. I turned to Chet. “If that is Episcopalian, I’m going to eat my shorts.” We walked around and around the little 1886 Chapel, over to the ruins of the mental hospital, and to what had been the soup kitchen. That was all real. When we returned to the church, a lady was going in with flowers. I asked her. “What is this called?” “Church of the Good Shepherd.” “What denomination?” “Oh, we’re just a small Episcopalian congregation.” Another series of nighttime dreams became real in the rainy morning.

Obviously a lot of the book came from places that are not me. Invented places became real. My job was to just wrap the words around the messages as carefully as I could.

See you soon!

So, that’s pretty much what I have done with the facts.  I’ve just blown them up.

originally published — January 14, 2018.