June 27, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

Today we publish the second half of Samantha Shapiro’s letter from Jerusalem. In yesterday’s letter from the editor I wrote about Emily White, Samantha’s editor at Open Letters, to whom Samantha’s letter is addressed. For today’s editor’s letter, I asked Emily to write a bit about Samantha. Here’s what she sent me:

Dear Paul,

I first met Samantha sometime in the summer of 97, I think. I had been editing The Stranger for three years or so, during which time the paper had grown exponentially, competing head to head with the more established local paper the Seattle Weekly. I had finally reshaped the staff I had inherited to a point where we were putting out the kind of paper I wanted: a paper where you didn’t know what you would find when you turned the page: it could be something deadly serious, or obscure and experimental, or scatological humor, or hard news.

One of my ongoing problems at the Stranger was finding women writers. It amazed me week after week how, even when I did find talented women, they very often wanted to write small, polite pieces about books or poetry, and if they took the plunge into longer features, in the editing and revision process they tended to give up all together. This was not something I found among male writers, who came through, met deadlines, took criticism well. One of my favorite male writers once turned something in and told me point blank, “This is genius.” I never encountered anything resembling this cocky confidence among women writers. I chalk this up to further proof that the female virtues of selflessness and modesty are alive and well, insidious as ever.

Anyway, one day Samantha’s resume crosses my desk. I hone in on it right away because I see she was one of the high school guest editors at Sassy, that wonderful now-defunct girls magazine. When I meet her in person, she is 22. She is the youngest staffer at the Stranger and all of us suddenly feel positively arthritic. She is the Kid. She burns with energy, and will tackle any story, writing in prose so clean and focussed she makes the rest of us feel positively retarded. She’s fearless as a reporter, and brimming with empathy. Every time she writes she seems to make a crack in the world.

During the year and a half or so when I worked closely with her, Sam became more and more obsessed with her Jewish roots. I have known one other New York Jew who moved temporarily to Seattle, the writer Adam Heimlich, and both he and Sam described to me the way Seattle’s white, west coast, vaguely gloomy rootlessness made them feel, as Adam said, “Like a TOTAL Jew.” Eventually Sam joined a really serious hardcore synagogue and had to take three busses to get there for services. She didn’t want any chickenshit religious services. She was hardcore.

Sometimes she and I talk about this spiritual feeling, this feeling of a lost world, and I tell her about how I don’t know anything about my roots, I think there really are not any roots at all. She tells me about how she feels like she is part of a hidden story. Something going way way back. That is what her incredible letter is about. Sometimes when she tells me about this way, way ancient story, I worry, like maybe she will disappear into it.

I eventually had to leave the Stranger to write a book called Fast Girls (more on this later). It was hard to leave and I still feel nostalgic for the culture we built in those days. Shortly after I resigned Samantha was awarded a fellowship to study in Israel by the synagogue elders who had come to love her just as I had, and she left town. The day before she left she came over to my house and we listened to Stevie Nicks singLandslide ten times in a row. For a while I didn’t hear from her, but she resurfaced bit by bit on email, and people say, Have you heard from Samantha? And I say yeah, there is a lot happening a lot. Rumor had it she saw God.

Whatever she is seeing, I hope she continues to write it down.

yours

emily

Yours truly,

Paul Tough