Look and Listen

Biography

Spending her formative years in South Florida, the only child of New York expatriates with a penchant for the Bohemian lifestyle, Marcia Fine's best friend was a good book. At Florida State University, she majored in English, teaching high school for five years while working toward a Masters Degree in English Education with a Certificate of Concentration in Women's Studies. Marcia also taught freshman composition at Arizona State University.

During the Eighties, as a wife and mother, she opened a model and talent center, the Southwest's largest. As an agent and entrepreneur, she marketed and managed over three hundred people. After ten years Marcia sold her successful business to become a corporate trainer and motivational speaker for an international jewelry company, maintaining membership in the National Speaker's Association, 1980-2000.

In 2000 Marcia began to pursue her dream of writing, completing two satires about life and society in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is currently writing the third of her Jean Rubin social satires, entitled Stressed in Scottsdale. Her love of history has broadened the scope of her writing, Paper Children: An Immigrant's Legacy , is a well researched story based on family history. Her novel, The Blind Eye– a sweeping historical novel set in 15th century Portugal with a parallel story line in 20th century Florida–follows two young women searching for themselves, their religion and their identities.

Inspiration

For Blind Eye: I was curious about Sephardim, those Jews of Spanish, Portuguese and African descent, who survived the Spanish Inquisition, a reign of religious fervor that spread terror across the world and lasted for centuries. I wondered about these people, the Conversos, who were forced to "renounce" their Judaic beliefs and "convert" to Catholicism, but who secretly maintained their faith throughout cataclysmic events. This anti-Semitism eerily foreshadowed events in Europe under Hitler's Nazi Germany. My research and subsequent travel led to parallel narratives that have become The Blind Eye, a veiled reference to the Biblical prophet who foretold a wondrous future for Christians, but–to the long-suffering Jews–turned only a blind eye.

For Paper Children:I grew up listening to my grandmother's stories about Poland and her idyllic girlhood. Her story of the gypsies and their three predictions fascinated me. Before she passed away, she gave me a stack of family letters–written in faded ink on both sides of fragile blue onionskin stationery, with the Nazi eagle and swastika stamped on the envelopes–letters she called her "paper children." The letters, written in Polish, German, Yiddish and French were heart-wrenching. I was possessed and dreamt about my grandmother and the rest of my family. Even the translator couldn't sleep as she translated the last letters. We knew the fate of my family. I was compelled to write the story of the "paper children" and share my grandmother's legacy.