Women who fall from the sky. Obese, absent-minded Hebrew tutors. Feverish Jewish mothers who bargain with sulphurous-smelling creatures perched on the bedpost.
All those bizarre characters inhabit Palo Alto author Stella Zamvil’s equally eclectically titled book of short stories, “My Father Hunts Zulus, My Mother Puts up Pickles.”
While Zamvil has neither fallen from the sky nor dickered with the devil, a number of the New York Jews who populate the pages of her latest book hearken back to her childhood. The 75-year-old was born and raised in Brooklyn, attending Brooklyn College.
She is the daughter of a housepainter — the profession held, not coincidentally, by the father of the storyteller in her book’s title tale.
The Zulus referred to in the story are actually the Zulusenskys: A sign-maker had only made it as far as “Fabrics by Zulus…” before heading home and promising to finish the job the next day. When the man died of a heart attack, storeowner Boris Zulusensky took it as a sign from God and left it at that. Thirty-five years later, Boris still won’t change the sign, but he grudgingly consents to hire the storyteller’s father to revamp his store.
As for pickles, the storyteller’s mother is fanatically devoted to fermenting her own dills.
“My uncle and father were housepainters for a while. So I had a little bit of experience with that at home, how they handled things,” recalled Zamvil. “But the rest is fabrication, assumption. But I do have a friend who makes pickles just that way.”
Zamvil moved to Palo Alto in the 1940s to marry her husband, Louis, who had been drafted into the Army and assigned to the West Coast. They still live there, and are founding members of both Reform Congregation Beth Am and Conservative Congregation Kol Emeth.
In addition to her own writing, Zamvil has spent much of her life helping others express themselves as well.
She has worked with students of all ages, from elementary school pupils to seniors. The author has taught off-campus courses for Foothill Junior College for the past 10 years and just completed teaching a creative writing class at West Valley Community College.
“I try not to be overly critical of their work. I just want them to feel free to write,” she said. “I’ve had the most luck with the in-class write. I just put the paper in front of them, begin the sentence and say take it from there.
“You get the most amazing results. I started them with the sentence ‘On Thursday, I walked into the garden.’ One man saw a Martian. The different things people came up with are lovely. Just start with a sentence from everyday life.”
Zamvil’s everyday approach has worked well for her. Most of her stories are only a few pages, no more than 10, and portray slice-of-life incidents: Two old buddies discuss a real estate deal gone wrong over baked apples in a New York delicatessen. An elderly Jewish man walks to the corner store to pick up the Yiddish daily. A young college grad falls asleep on an El Al flight to Israel and dreams of hoisting a Pulitzer on one arm and Miss Israel on the other.
Of course, she also touches on slices of more harrowing lives: A young medical student hangs himself and visits Maimonides in the afterlife, a housecat offers writing advice and a son mails a lion named Mickey home to his mother.
Sound like a movie? Zamvil sure hopes so.
“I’d always love to see any of these stories filmed,” she said with a laugh. “I’d love if someone like Steven Spielberg showed interest in these. He does such a good job getting things like these on film.”
As nice as that would be, Zamvil is concentrating on her writing. She hopes to put the finishing touches on a novel she’s been writing off and on for several years about a pair of friends who escape Russia’s pogroms to pre-state Israel and America.
Zamvil acknowledges her Jewish background has strongly influenced her work, but beyond that, she doesn’t scrutinize what makes her tick.
“I never analyze that sort of thing. I was told years ago by a writer that if you try to find out why you write, you will not write,” she said. “So I never explore that.”