Archive for the ‘The Shawl’ Category

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From the Desk of Paulette

Friday, August 21st, 2009

August 21, 2009
Washington, DC

Inspired by veteran Big Read organizer (and Caldwell Public Library Director) Karen Kleppe Lembo’s July 31 article in The Recorder, here’s the library’s Big Read by the numbers . . .

 253: Number of Big Read activities offered by Caldwell Public Library in Caldwell, New Jersey, as part of their Big Read of Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

$8,000: Amount of Caldwell Public Library’s Big Read grant

18: Number of organizational partners (not including schools, libraries, or museums) for The Big Read

2: Number of sponsors that donated matching grant funds for the library’s program (Rotary Club of the Caldwells and Kiwanis Club of Caldwell/West Essex

>$20,000: Amount of in-kind donations received for the library’s Big Read

1,000: Number of copies of The Shawl in circulation throughout Caldwell during The Big Read

33: Number of official book discussions around The Shawl

400: Number of Big Readers who were able to meet Cynthia Ozick during her visit to Caldwell

16: Number of schools—nursery school through college—that partcipated in Caldwell’s Big Read

1,000: Number of teens that attended teen-friendly panel discussons and participated in a collaborative art exhibit

15,500: # of crayons collected for The Crayon Project at 12 collection bins created by Boy Scout Troop 6. Created by Teh Fair Lawn Jewish Center, the project is a Fair Lawn community rpoject that is collecting one crayon for each child lost during the holocaust. Some of the crayons will be used by local artist Herb Stern to create a permanent memorial to the lsot children, while the rest of the crayons will be donated to underserved schools.

countless: Inspired by Rosa’s shawl, number of squares that have been knit, crocheted, and/or tied by Caldwell crafters to create blankets that are being donated to local domestic violence shelters, halfway homes, and Native American reservations

3: Number of Big Read grants received by Caldwell Public Library to date (You can count on—pun gleefully intended!—Caldwell’s Big Read of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to arrive in early 2010)

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Posted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Shawl | 1 Comment »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

theshawlbookcoverweb

Photo by Alan Zale courtesty of  Caldwell Public Library’s (New Jersey) Big Read of The Shawl

For the month of July, I set myself the challenge of writing a poem a day. While I didn’t manage to write each and every day, I did manage to at least start quite a few poems. There’s the old saying that writing is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. But there were a couple of times during my writing vigil when my pen seemed to be functioning on 100 percent inspiration, a feeling Cynthia Ozick describes rather fluently in this excerpt from an NEA interview in which she talks about beginning The Shawl.

We read now and again that a person sits down to write and there’s a sense that some mystical hand is guiding you and you’re not writing out of youself. I think reasonably, if you’re a rational person, you can’t accept that. But I did have the sense—I did this one time in my life—that I was extraordinarly fluent, and I’m never fluent. I wrote those five pages as if I heard a voice.

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Posted in The Shawl, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

FROM PAULETTE’S DESK

Monday, June 1st, 2009

June 1, 2009
Washington, DC

From Mark Sarvas’s literary blog, The Elegant Variation, here are a couple of Big Read-related items of interest . . .

Tin House has just published The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Last week The Elegant Variation serialized Susan Bell’s essay from the collection, “”Revisioning The Great Gatsby.” Here’s part one to get you started.

Sarvas also had a rave review (written for Barnes and Noble) of Cynthia Ozick’s new short fiction collection, Dictation: A Quartet. Here’s a quick byte from the review: “[I]n all four tales Ozick focuses her abiding intelligence on the limits of understanding and the fungible relationship between words and truth…” Read the entire review.

 

Posted in The Great Gatsby, The Shawl | No Comments »

FROM PAULETTE’S DESK

Friday, April 17th, 2009

April 17, 2009
Washington, DC

Happy Birthday Cynthia Ozick! As a New Yorker, I can’t resist celebrating the happy occasion by sharing this quote by Anita Brookner, from a 1999 review in The Spectator. Though The Shawl takes place in Warsaw and Miami, I think the quote speaks to Ozick’s deft evocations of the surroundings in which her characters plod, pant, carry on so that the cities themselves become characters.

“She is as authentic a voice of New York as was Edith Wharton before her, but Ozick’s New York is an affair of battered suburbs, of cavernous municipal buildings, of ancient Hebrew teachers living above Cuban grocery stores, of public libraries, wily lovers and miraculous if inconvenient apparitions.”

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

February 17, 2009
Washington, DC

Big Read author Cynthia Ozick has more than a dozen books to her credit including a short story collection, collections of essays, and novels. In this excerpt from the Reader’s Guide for The Shawl, Ozick talks about becoming a writer and the difference between working on fiction and on critical essays.

NEA: Did you always want to be a writer?

OZICK: Always. It was a destiny that I never had any alternative, or wished for any alternative. I simply knew it, always. But I never even thought of myself as a writer until I had published a certain basic body of work because it seemed to me that it was hubris. Who would take me seriously? So if someone asked, “What do you do?”, it took me a long time before I could say, “I’m a writer.”

NEA: What is the difference for you between writing fiction and writing criticism?

OZICK: If you’re going to write an essay, let’s say, about Henry James, you have a subject, and you know something. If you’re going to write fiction, you have nothing. You begin in chaos. You may have a smell, a scene, a word, an idea, an emotion. It seems to me that ideas and emotions are inseparable. Emotions may not always be ideas, but ideas are always emotions. In fiction you can come up with something that you never knew you knew.

Want to learn more about Cynthia Ozick and The Shawl? Go to The Big Read Web site to check out the Big Reads underway by Caldwell Public Library (Caldwell, New Jersey) and Gadsen Cultural Arts Foundation (Gadsen, Alabama) this February.

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Writing is Power

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

April 16, 2008
Washington, DC

“Writing is power.” If I were a school teacher for a day, that’s the first thing I’d tell my students. “Don’t be afraid of a blank page of paper,” I’d declare. “With paper and a pen, you can create an entire universe. You might even change our world.” But would students believe me?

I got the chance to find out last week in Waukee, Iowa, when talking with middle and high school students. Seventh graders studying poetry at Waukee’s Middle School laughed at me when I claimed to be able to “control the space/time continuum.” That is, until I wrote two sentences on the board.

Dan went to bed at nine o’clock.

The next morning, he ate oatmeal for breakfast.

It’s a simplistic example but, between those two sentences we jump forward in time at least nine hours.

“Authors,” I told the students, “make time-travelers of us all.” Great writing can take us from the sublime garden of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Peonies,” to Ray Bradbury’s futuristic world of Fahrenheit 451, to Edith Wharton’s old New York in The Age of Innocence. What do these works of art have in common? They each began with a blank sheet of paper.

Cynthia Ozick transports us ahead three decades between the opening short story of The Shawl, which takes place during the Holocaust , and the book’s second section, set in the 1970s. As readers we accept this without reservation. The author has grasped us with her capable hand. We follow her without hesitation.

Waukee High School English teacher Ann Hanigan’s honors tenth graders stunned me with their insightful comments about the similarity between Rosa Lublin’s personality before the horrors of the Holocaust changed her life forever and that of her niece, Stella, thirty years later — after the pair had settled in the United States. They saw how each woman cared for the other, finding strength when the other was weak. In their eyes, The Shawl is as much a love story between these two women as it is “Holocaust fiction.”

I wish Cynthia Ozick could have been a fly on the wall of that classroom! The night before, she had graciously appeared at the Waukee Public Library via an internet conference, answering questions for more than an hour and a half. Charming and witty, Ozick immediately put everyone in the room at ease despite the book’s somber subject matter. The Big Read participants adored her.

The Waukee community benefited from the hard work of four fabulous women. Assistant Library Director Devon Murphy-Peterson and Rebecca Johnson, the President of the Waukee Library Board of Trustees, applied for The Big Read grant and plotted every aspect of programming. They recruited Ann Hanigan, the phenomenal high school English teacher, to encourage local middle and high school students to get involved. Jane Olson of the Waukee Area Arts Council added a wealth of knowledge about how to get local residents to attend events. “People come out to support their kids,” she told me. “Getting young people involved is so important.”

Perhaps nothing illustrates Waukee’s commitment to reaching young people better than The Big Read’s final event, a party at the library celebrating six weeks of reading and discussing The Shawl. Middle and high school students read their winning essays about the importance of literature in their lives. The Attic Door Theatre Company, a troop of teenage girls, performed a choral stage adaptation of the novel. Waukee High School culinary students baked truly tasty treats. Julie Kaufman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines surprised everyone by presenting the Waukee High School with funding for two teachers to travel to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

During all of these festivities the music of Eastern Europe was performed with zest by a local klezmer band, the Java Jews. Small children (and some not-so-small adults) were dancing the polka between the stacks. By the end of the evening, I was so moved that I could barely speak. Literature came alive that night — changing, transporting, and empowering us all.

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Cracked Open

Friday, March 21st, 2008

March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick. Photo
© Nancy Crampton

  

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Posted in Bless Me, Ultima, Fahrenheit 451, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Grapes of Wrath, The Shawl, To Kill A Mockingbird | Comments Off

The Big Read in the Crosshairs, and Set to Music

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA

When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.

Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.

I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:

Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon - - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”

Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”

And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…

Posted in Bless Me, Ultima, General, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Maltese Falcon, The Shawl | Comments Off

Elegy for the Elegiac

Friday, February 15th, 2008

February 15, 2008
Washington, DC

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

Posted in General, My Antonia, The Age of Innocence, The Grapes of Wrath, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl | Comments Off

A Farewell to Arms: Kansas City’s Natural Selection

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

December 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Sometimes, even if the picture won’t win any prizes, the subjects are the story. Snapped here are Big Read partners Jane Wood and Henry Fortunato, flanking a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jane presumably brings the same dynamism to chairing the English department at Park University that she’s brought to co-organizing a Big Read, while bemused, voluble Henry directs public affairs at the nearby Kansas City Public Library. Darwin, meanwhile, helped start World War I, if you believe a text panel accompanying this display inside Kansas City’s new National World War I Museum (one of Jane and Henry’s Big Read partners). But more about that later.

It was my privilege to fly into Kansas City two weekends ago for the finale of their salute to A Farewell to Arms. What I saw there capped a series of fine recent Reads, each superlative in its own way. Attleboro, Mass., whose Fahrenheit 451 Read I posted about not long ago, drummed up some of the strongest school participation I’ve seen yet. Rochester, N.Y. — not surprisingly, in light of its Kodak history and consequent movie madness — programmed an ambitious film series around The Maltese Falcon, and created a readable, handy, stylish Big Read calendar that could serve as a model for Big Read cities everywhere. And in White Plains, a SUNY Purchase English professor hosted an absolutely exemplary book discussion, putting aside academic jargon to engage a score of townspeople whose demographics rivaled Pauline Kael’s proverbial World War II movie bomber crew for diversity.

Back in Missouri, the celebration of A Farewell to Arms combined sturdy versions of these three Big Read components with a positively unprecedented amount of workplace participation. At least five local corporations distributed books to their employees and invited an especially industrious KCPL librarian to lead office discussions. Kansas City Star arts columnist and book critic Steve Paul, who had already keynoted KC’s kickoff event with a talk about Hemingway’s year as a cub reporter at his newspaper, moderated a reputedly overflow office book group at the international headquarters of Hallmark. (If you see a spate of Hemingwayesque greetings cards in the coming months, feel free to blame the Big Read.) All these so-called “Corporation Big Reads” must’ve gone over well, because every last company involved is already clamoring to know which book — Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, in particular, came up — they want to do next year.

On the Origin of Species, as a work of British nonfiction, won’t be appearing on the Big Read list anytime soon. But its prominent placement in the WWI Museum raises the question of its alleged role in the runup to the war that wounded Hemingway and so many others. It’s an interesting hypothesis, casting a gentle naturalist’s case for the theory of natural selection as the trigger for what became, in its time, probably the bloodiest war in human history. All the combatant countries had considered themselves “naturally selected” for greatness, of course, and assumed that in a war of all against all, they’d surely come out on top. None of them was right.

Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war.” So, did Darwin really help make an even bigger one? Me, I’d hang more of the blame on the British political economist Herbert Spencer. He’s the one who perverted “natural selection” into “survival of the fittest” — a phrase Darwin never used.

But there’s another dimension to all this. Kansas has played host to some of the most contested litigation in recent years over the teaching of evolution. By placing Darwin in one of the very first display cases at the World War I Museum, our docent noted that curators were implicitly defending a book often under attack elsewhere in their state.

Then again, they were also blaming a five-year bloodbath on that same treatise. Books are dicey things, and mean different things to different people. To Kansas City, A Farewell to Arms has meant the chance to come together around a single book in their schools, their libraries, their spectacular new museum and, most originally, around the office water cooler. Only light, not blood, was shed. Arguments broke out in book groups all across town, but no gunplay. To my knowledge, no book discussion has ever ended in violence.

Might make a good novel, though. Watch this space.

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