Author Glenn Frank, a lawyer who lives in Plymouth, has just had his first novel, “Abe Gilman’s Ending,” published. (LISA BUL/The Patriot Ledger)

Copyright 2007 The Patriot Ledger
Transmitted Tuesday, January 30, 2007

By SYDNEY SCHWARTZ
The Patriot Ledger

Glenn Frank was just 8 years old when he discovered an untapped world of storytellers at his great-grandmother’s nursing home in Rochester, N.Y. Their bodies were failing, but their memories were vibrant. He worried their insight and humor would vanish upon their deaths. Those days spent visiting the nursing home resonated with the young boy, even after his great-grandmother’s death. By age 11, he knew he would write a book about the stories he heard. It would show aging residents writing about what they know. The message: It is never too late to achieve greatness.

The Plymouth man ended up proving his own point. It took him 40 years, but Frank has finally finished his novel, ‘‘Abe Gilman’s Ending.’’

‘‘I was struck by the fact that there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of years of memories that were going to be lost,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s really what gave me the inspiration to think that maybe they should take out a project to write these things down.’’

Frank took a year off from college to start the book, but he

stopped writing to focus on college and then law school.

Seven or eight years later, he started working on it again. He had two children, a house in Lexington, his own law firm, and a big client - the Super 88 markets - so he had to write in the early hours of the morning.

Whenever he found time, he delved into the research, reading World War II histories and exploring Mattapan. His characters grew up in the once-Jewish enclave in the 1940s and spent their twilight years reminiscing in a nursing home.

‘‘When the kids were doing their homework, I was doing research,’’ he said. ‘‘I picked it up on and off. I had a lot of stops and starts.’’

Periodically, he sent the opus to publishing companies. They rejected it, but his disillusionment was only temporary.

‘‘I really had the whole outline of it in my head from the very beginning. I didn’t quite know all the details, obviously, but I knew the structure that I wanted to put together, and that never changed for me.’’

The novel centers around Abe Gilman, a 77-year-old widower who suffers a fall and is left wheelchair-bound in the Emunah nursing home in Mattapan.

The character feels hopeless, much as the author’s great-grandmother and some of her companions had. He hides in his room and dives into books, trapped in his own memories.

But he is revived when the other residents of the home start writing a book about the things they have seen and done.

The residents have vivid, interesting and sometimes horrifying stories to tell. They write about marrying the girl hit on the nose accidentally during a basketball game. They tell about a Polish writer killed for whisking Jews to safety from the Nazis, about a Jewish man killed by the Nazis after fighting for Germany during World War I, about a girl reading while she walked, and of joining the local synagogues to prevent another Holocaust against the Jews.

Frank’s chapters take the readers along with the residents as they conduct their research, weather tremendous frustration, develop their stories and write the book on the nursing home’s porch.

The characters outline the plot, debate the ending and scavenge the library for books - themes Frank himself dealt with as he struggled to finish the story for four decades.

Eventually, like Frank, the characters complete the work, telling a story of Germany during the wars, individual dreams and tensions, and postwar life through the eyes of two young American Jews.

Frank, whose family left Europe before World War I, said he came up with these themes while doing research on the book. He hadn’t thought much about the experience of Jews fighting for Germany until starting his research, but came to understand it as a cruel reality.

‘‘I did a lot of research on World War II and Jews fighting for Germany in World War I,’’ he said. ‘‘How horrible that must’ve been for the country to turn on them so viciously.’’

‘‘I was also intrigued by a lot of the research I did that showed that there were so many people who didn’t know what happened to their relatives in Europe during the Holocaust. Some never learned. There were records that the Nazis destroyed, and they were just never recovered. There were a lot of people here (who) couldn’t find out what happened and just never knew.’’

Frank chose Mattapan as the setting because he wanted a place where there had been several synagogues and a vital Jewish community, perhaps fearing a Holocaust at home. He considered Brooklyn but wanted it to be near Boston so he could do research in person.

‘‘I actually went and met a few people from Mattapan from the era and they walked me around, showed me the spots,’’ he said. ‘‘All the places in the book aren’t there any longer, but those were all real places.

‘‘That was kind of fun for me to see that, and then it was easier for me to put the characters in the spot.’’

Frank’s research taught him much about Jewish history, specifically the Jewish post-war experience. That was something he’d missed out on, having grown up in one of two Jewish families in his hometown near Rochester.

He was also always interested in how an entire society could turn on one group so quickly, and he wanted to chronicle what changed between the wars. This, he believes, is his contribution to history.

‘‘I wanted to make sure that I preserved that in a way,’’ he said. ‘‘ ... I’m not sure that has been discussed in enough detail.

‘‘I always felt like I had an obligation to give something back, for whatever reason ... I think I’ve met my obligation now because of the book.’’

Frank said he was drawn back to the book in 2002 when his father died, and again when his wife was diagnosed with cancer only weeks before the book was accepted for publication. Together, they overcame the illness as the book was edited.

Frank has also promised to donate some of the book’s proceeds to the Alzheimer’s Association and the Fran Delaney Fund, a fund named for a friend from Lexington who died from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2004.

Like Frank’s own story, ‘‘Abe Gilman’s Ending’’ sends a message of courage and rejuvenation.

He is already half done with the next novel, and he suspects it will come along a bit faster than the first did. It’s the story of a 13-year-old girl whose father is accused of murder in Pennsylvania’s dairy country.

He writes for three hours every morning. On nice days, he works on the porch, like the people of ‘‘Abe Gilman’s Ending.’’

‘‘If I could make a living doing this, this would be all I would ever do,’’ he said. ‘‘I was always compelled to do this, and life got in the way a number of times. Finally I decided I better finish before I regret that I didn’t.’’

Sydney Schwartz may be reached at sschwartz@ledger.com .