Local author writes a memoir through ‘rosary colored glasses’

It was 1950. Janet Rossi, not quite 6 years old, was sitting inside the imposing white church whose timbers bore the weight of religion when something the priest said during his sermon caused her to slip her hand inside the comfort of her mother’s. “If you know the one true faith and turn away from it,” he said, “you will not go to Heaven.”

Rossi was used to sitting on the pew, as close as she could to the mother she found beautiful, appreciating a quiet moment with the typically busy matriarch. Parishioners found her a well-behaved churchgoer. She found herself unsettled.

Janet Rossi Tezak grew up in an Italian Catholic household in Miami, Florida during the 1950s and ‘60s. Last year, she decided to write about it. In a time when her city wrestled with the divide between being Jewish or Catholic, married or divorced, Cuban or American, Black or white, she struggled to understand the attitudes of her church, family, and society.

Although social issues remain which she may never understand, the author, 76, found she does have perspective and a story to tell, through her own “Rosary Colored Glasses.”

Tezak, who has written and published other works, is used to having a story wandering around in her mind, writing and rewriting memories asking to be put into words. Finally, she turned her attention to the story of her childhood, choosing to recreate the era from her point of view as a child, while exploring her shifts in attitude and understanding as she matured.

Tezak considered calling the book “Rose-Colored Glasses,” until she realized that an unrealistically optimistic view of ideas and events wouldn’t tell the whole story. When a classmate in a writing course at OLLI — the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CSU Monterey Bay — suggested she shift to “Rosary Colored Glasses,” Tezak knew she had a point.

“The book is fairly light,” she said. “It is very real but without getting into serious depth of the issues. But it’s also a keen reflection of the era and, in particular, my community. To do that, I had to sit myself down, return to that era, and remember, so I could bring it to life.”

One of the key questions Tezak asked herself in wandering through her childhood, its influences and impact, was how honest she could allow herself to be.

“Writing the ‘raw’ sometimes holds me up,” she said, “but it also takes courage to write it as it was. The whole idea of writing a reflection is challenging. It’s easier to write what happened than how I feel about it. That’s when some writers turn to fiction. Sometimes just changing names gives me enough distance to be honest.”

Tezak looked back on her growing-up era with a sense of nostalgia. She let it speak for itself by describing the moments and events, which illustrated the beliefs, the traditions, and the mentalities of the place and time.

“It is my hope,” she said, “that my stories will take readers back into their own versions of their growing-up years.”

Striking out slowly

Tezak didn’t venture too far from home when she went off to college at Florida State in Tallahassee. Yet when her father decided to move the family to California, he enrolled his daughter at UC Berkeley, a mind-blowing experience for a fairly sheltered young woman who arrived during the “free speech” movement.

Tezak found her place when she transferred to Modesto Junior College and then Stanislaus State in Turlock, before getting her teaching credential at Sacramento State. After achieving her master’s degree from San Francisco State, she began teaching middle school in the Alum Rock School District in San Jose, followed by a year, teaching in Gilroy.

“Gilroy was known as the ‘whispering school district,’ where we were never to raise our voice or force children to listen,” she said. “I loved teaching middle school, the years when a teacher has to be most real. You can’t fool seventh and eighth graders.”

Tezak was on holiday while endeavoring to learn Italian in Florence, when she went on to Paris, where she ultimately spent a year, sleeping on a broken cot in an apartment below Montmartre. Without knowing a word of French, she got a teaching job at a private school, where she taught history and geography in English. Ultimately, she began studying French.

Back in California, she had begun teaching in the English department at Monterey Peninsula College, when she felt inspired to write, “Do I Dare.” Published in 2006, the book is a collection of stories all driven by moments of daring and what became of them.

In 2018, Tezak published her second book, “Lost and Found,” about one defining moment in her life, when suddenly everything changed, and she had no way of knowing how much it would affect her wellbeing, her life as she knew and loved it, for how long, and if she could accept and accommodate the changes. Her health and her life resumed, but she was forever changed.

“At a recent meeting of the Central Coast Writers, of which I’ve been a member for 10, maybe 15 years,” she said, “I sat down next to McKenzie Moss, a retired naval officer who, at 91, is writing a spy novel. It inspires me, sitting next to people, particularly him, who are thinking and talking about writing and how that influences the way they look at life.”

Today, the author and her husband, Rich Tezak, live in Monterey, where they raised three children. She is still Catholic and still likes going to church. Yet she does so, accompanied by her own heart and mind, without the weight of her parents’ perspectives.

Published by Andrew Benzie Books (2020), “Rosary Colored Glasses” is available via Amazon.