Rudolph Girandola took 40 years to write his first book, ‘The Jade Chalice,’ an historical novel that takes place in the United States and China from 1935 to 1941, when the Red Guard took over China’s villages and infiltrated the system.
By: Mary Jasch
Rudolph Girandola is a man of faith and passion. He is a man who follows the path of his dreams and convictions. With vision, tenacity and courage, he is unafraid to face truth and challenge in his first book, The Jade Chalice (Publish America).
The book took Mr. Girandola 40 years to write while he delved into careers that could easily absorb the lives of six people. "I was a teacher, an educator, a reporter, and along the way I’ve written different things," says the Allentown author. "At 78, you don’t know what you made a living at."
Through his many careers and obligations to family, he kept the idea alive by reading pieces of the manuscript stashed away on slips of paper. "I have six children so I have a lot of passion," he says. "My poor wife lived with this for a very long time. I maintained my effort in this because I felt it was so good. I felt I was saying something very meaningful to people. Every time I saw a piece of it, I read it and thought, ‘I have to complete it because these people are alive!’ They became my friends; they’re part of my family. The passion never left me."
The Jade Chalice is an historical novel that takes place in the United States and China from 1935 to 1941, when the Red Guard took over China’s villages and infiltrated the system. The story revolves around an American who wants to be a priest and a young Chinese man who wants to be a leader in China’s communist movement. Both see the disparity of their systems and how problematic it is to agree 100 percent about their own philosophy.
The American, a Maryknoll missionary, goes to China. Mao Zedong purchases the missionaries and, through the Red Guard, extricates all foreigners. The young Chinese man, who rebels against his Catholic family, wants to be a hero of the system, admired and honored, and when the two meet, he is obliged to destroy the priest. "It was very difficult to put the emotions of these two people together," says Mr. Girandola. "The book follows them and shows how difficult it is to find heaven. I expose all of their weaknesses."
Mr. Girandola began writing The Jade Chalice in the mid-1950s while both studying at Fairfield (Conn.) University and training as an editorial assistant at Colliers magazine in New York City. "It’s been with me since 1956 when I was a really young guy," he says. "I was writing pieces then and doing a lot of research. All these pieces were put in folders. I wondered how I would put it all together. I had concepts of a character in America and concepts of a character in China. At that time in the ’50s, there was a hubbub about communism and Red China and the Red Guard. All of that formed in my mind as a book, developing characters in that kind of situation in both China and America."
Armed with a master’s degree and infant manuscript, Mr. Girandola chased his long-time dream of becoming a priest a vocation envisioned in high school seminary in his native Connecticut. Upon acceptance by the Bridgeport Diocese in 1954, he enlisted in Christ the King Seminary, but left two years shy of the priesthood.
"It was almost like a two-year retreat from the world," he says. "You’ll see some of this reflected in ‘The Jade Chalice’ the training, conflicts and joy of someone who is studying for the priesthood. It takes you into a world you’re not familiar with. I tried to show that there is a question about the selection of these candidates and also about their training and how they are isolated. You don’t get to truly know what type of individual will become a priest. What emerges is the human element of the individual, which is impossible to eradicate. When an individual is faced with passion, fraud or any kind of difficulty that violates the moral code, you wonder how that individual will react to that."
Shortly after, Mr. Girandola "met the girl of my dreams and had six children. I made sure everybody had their food, clothing and shelter." He taught high school and college for 26 years in New Jersey, and was executive director of the State Council on Vocational Education. Through it all, he published a chapbook, and wrote part-time for The Times of Trenton, reporting news and sports a topic he knew well from coaching college baseball.
Mr. Girandola needs but a few moments break between projects, for he is a driven man. So what’s next? "You get to a point in your life and say, ‘Should there be a next?’ I guess at 78 Ronald Reagan didn’t give up." He will choose just one of two current projects either a nonfiction book on meeting life’s challenges, which has four chapters already written, or a novel about communism and robotic engineering modeled after a popular politician.
"’The Jade Chalice’ has taken a lot out of me emotionally," says Mr. Girandola. "I’m going to be challenged by those who consider me critical of the church I love and it’s not that. I’m not looking to change anything. I’m looking to change something inside the individual’s soul and their own perspective of what God really is.
"I could never leave the old way behind me," he continues. "I’ve grown up in it so strongly that I would be afraid of damnation. I’ve seen over the years so many good people living in the world who don’t need Catholicism. My mission is to have people look for goodness and look for a relationship with each other that is touched by the spirit of God. I hope that ‘The Jade Chalice’ does that."