Risk-taking is often associated with youth — adolescents testing parental limits, toned athletes pushing themselves to the max, perhaps even adults in their prime scaling professional or recreational heights at the peril of failing and losing everything.
But risk-taking in our older years? That’s another story.
Victoria Zackheim of San Francisco has done just that. The Dogpatch resident has reinvented her career several times over. At 67, she indulges in creative risk-taking on a regular basis.
“I’m starting to lecture friends about the ‘call of the wild,’ ” she joked. “I began to realize when I hit 60 that I have nothing to lose by taking risks. If I try something and it doesn’t work, well, it just doesn’t work — and that’s OK.”
Zackheim encourages others to do the same. “It’s easy to get stuck as a senior, but when you follow your flights of fancy in your creative life, you keep your mind stimulated, you keep the juices flowing,” she said. “Then you get up each morning to see what happens next in this very short and wonderful life we live.”
Zackheim grew up in South Central Los Angeles, an area with few Jewish families where she was bullied because, in her words, “It was not OK to be Jewish.” Perhaps surviving that explains her mettle.
Zackheim writes books, film scripts, television documentaries and plays, and teaches personal essay writing for UCLA Extension.
Her latest book, “Exit Laughing,” published earlier this year, puts a light twist on a serious topic: death. Subtitled “How Humor Takes the Sting Out of Death,” the anthology includes essays by 24 writers who share stories about finding humor in the face of death. Zackheim edited the book, which includes her own essay about her mother.
“Exit Laughing” is Zackheim’s fifth anthology. Other books she has edited also take on topics of interest to older adults, such as “For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance”; and “The Face in the Mirror: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age.”
Zackheim’s first screenplay, about a prison breakout in Belfast in 1972, has been optioned by Identity Films. She developed and wrote “Tracing Thalidomide: The Story of Frances Kelsey,” a documentary film.
Zackheim first moved to San Francisco as a newlywed in 1966 after graduating from UCLA with a degree in speech and English. She earned a degree in speech pathology and worked in that field for several years. After she and her husband divorced in 1984, as a single mother of two Zackheim switched gears and carved out a career as a freelance writer, turning out marketing materials for several large companies in Silicon Valley.
When her younger child left for college, Zackheim moved to Paris to study French for three months. “I loved it so much that I stayed for almost five years,” she said. While in Paris, she began working on a novel.
She returned to San Francisco late in 1994, “when my kids were young adults, marrying and starting families,” she said. “I wanted to be part of that.” Zackheim now has four grandchildren, with a fifth due any day.
After many rewrites, she completed the novel she started in Paris — “The Bone Weaver” — published in 2001. Zackheim describes the book as “a blend of history and fiction created around three generations of women and their struggles to survive pogroms, illness and the violence of shtetl life in 19th-century Eastern Europe.”
More recently, she wrote the narration for the documentary “Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps” for On the Road Productions. The film currently is airing on PBS stations around the country.
“Writing about the Holocaust is always fraught with emotions,” said Zackheim, who lost 37 family members in Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto. “In a sense, I was able to memorialize them in ‘The Bone Weaver,’ by telling their story as the ‘back story’ of my novel.
“Whenever I write about the Holocaust, I’m mindful of the responsibility we all have to keep the stories — and the people who lived those stories — alive.”
Publication of “The Bone Weaver” put Zackheim in touch with people in the local writing community. “That’s when I began to think of myself as a writer,” she recalled. “How we define ourselves is so important in the sense of who we become. Functioning as if I were a writer allowed me to truly become one.” She is a 2010 San Francisco library laureate.
What’s next for Zackheim? She will work on a play with Ellie Mednick, artistic director of Marin Theatre Company. “We have a one-year option on ‘Entangled: A Chronicle of Late Love,’ a memoir by Don Asher and Lois Goodwill,” Zackheim said. At 69, Goodwill, a local clinical psychologist married for more than two decades, fell in love with a 70-year-old man she met at her son’s wedding. After the affair ended badly, Goodwill and her husband wrote the book.
“I don’t know if the play will work out,” Zackheim said, “but I am willing to take the risk.”
“Exit Laughing: How Humor Takes the Sting Out of Death” by Victoria Zackheim (304 pages, North Atlantic Books, $18.95)