Salem State professor turns the page

MARBLEHEAD – Dr. Ellen Golub, who has taught journalism at Salem State University for 26 years, enjoyed her first official day of retirement on Tuesday, spending her morning at her favorite writing spot, Panera Bread, and afternoon at the beach.”I was surprised I even had feelings about it,” said Golub. “I thought the summer break would just seem to continue on. But it feels great.””It really gives meaning to the cliche ?the first day of the rest of your life,'” she said.Her long-awaited day-well-spent comes after years of hard work and dedication to the many different hats she has worn: a writer, a teacher, a mother (and now grandmother), a student and a woman passionate about religion.Her retirement will give her more time to spend with family, including her four children and four grandchildren, and more time to write novels, she said.Golub recently published her first work of fiction, “PsychoSemitic,” with Gaon Books on Aug. 14. She had been working on and off on the story for about 10 years, she said.”It started as a short story and then I put it aside and later came back to it,” Golub said. “Now I expect I’ll be writing a lot more with a lot more frequency. I expect to finish writing another book in a year.””PsychoSemitic” is fan fiction, which takes a character from another novelist and brings it to another story.”There were a couple of characters I was very interested in as a kid,” Golub said.Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a popular Jewish writer who worked under the pen name Sholem Aleichem, wrote about characters Sheyne Sheyndel and Menachem Mendel in his shtetl stories from the 1890s.”They were always saying mean things to each other in nice words,” she said. “It was actually funny but I thought it was sad. Then one day it occurred to me that I could fix their lives.”I fixed their marriage,” she said. “I put them in an American setting and had them ponder the issues of science and religion,” she said.She introduced them to modern American things like Prozac, she said.The story is filled with humor but also the conflict that arises with these characters who have been dropped in a more modern-day American setting.”I’m a humorist, and I really enjoy it,” Golub said.The opportunity to play with words and create the story was a lot of fun for her, she said.”It’s unlike the journalist in me that couldn’t make stuff up,” she said. “It was the opposite of what I was used to, but it was just fun. I was constantly fact-checking and now it’s my time to just play.”Golub has been passionate about Jewish literature since she was first introduced to it at a young age, she said.She was born in Lynn, where she lived in a multi-family home surrounded by grandparents, aunts and uncles until she was 6 years old and moved to Marblehead. She was taught Hebrew at a young age and could recite the Torah by age 3.”We lived near a goldfish pond,” she said. “I have very fond memories of Lynn.”Her first-grade teacher introduced her to the possibility of becoming a writer and told her parents that she was a gifted and talented child.”I always wanted to be a writer and I didn’t really know what that meant,” Golub said. “I was 6 years old and it hit me that that’s what I wanted to be.””Ms. Rose Claffey was my first-grade teacher,” Golub said. “She was a wonderful teacher. It was with her that I first discovered that you could write this stuff. I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I could barely write, I knew the alphabet and maybe a few words. But I quickly became a reader.”Golub went on to study English at Salem State. She then got her master’s degree in English at Northeastern University.”I wasn’t ready to commit to a Ph.D.,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it was what I wanted. I liked it so much I decided to go for it.”She then went to The State University of New York in Buffalo because she knew there were a few professors there whom she wanted to learn from. She studied literature and psychoanalysis.While she taught at the University of Pen