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NOLA: A Love Letter

This is a blog entry I forgot to publish, back from 2020.  Enjoy!

I may be a latecomer to New Orleans, but it seems I’m making up for lost time.

Before my son Sasha chose Tulane, I’d never visited the city. I knew NOLA purely through the novel The Awakening and a vague sense of its great jazz. I had standard images that flickered across my lids: the filigreed second floor balconies, Creole and Cajun culture, Mardi Gras, which I glimpsed through the beads and feathered masks I found in my late mother-in-law’s drawers.

Then came our research for our book, Sugar Changed the World.  Louisiana, New Orleans, is sugar. Louisiana was a slave state where the death rate exceeded the birth rate—because of sugar’s brutal conditions.  New Orleans is where Norbert Rilleux, a free man of color, invented a more efficient crystallization process for sugar, on the plantation that is now Audubon Park. One cannot walk the streets of NOLA, especially Uptown, without realizing the gouging imprint of sugar and slavery–each of the main arteries that cut down to the winding Mississippi, streets like Louisiana, or Jefferson—were the boundary lines for the narrow plantations that fronted the river.  At Tulane there was an old iron bell that the freshman touched for good luck—until it was revealed that this was the bell used to direct the slaves in the fields, and it was recently removed.  On one of my first evenings in NOLA, a neighbor at my Airbnb and a history aficionado, showed me his framed copy of the map that shows those plantations—thin, thin dominoes of land—and I was reminded of the narrow parcels of land that made up the plantations on the coastline of my father’s country, British Guiana.  As my dad used to say, “Booker [the sugar company/conglomerate] owned us.”  Sugar definitely owned a lot of folks in New Orleans, too.

To say that I have fallen in love with New Orleans is an understatement.  Every time I go to visit, I start with a long list in my head of all I want to explore, and I leave with an even longer list for the next trip.  I seem to tackle areas swath by swath, and always leave hungry for more.  We stayed in the French quarter the time we dropped Sasha off (which I’ll never do again, given its touristy, drunken crowds) but we did buy some cool clothes at Rubinstein’s on Canal Street, one of the last of the Jewish department stores, where a Morehouse graduate treated my husband very well in his search for some finer summer threads. I then read up on the Jewish peddler community and learned that inter-marriage was accepted—Jewish men marrying local women–and so the early Jewish community was Creole in nature.  Maybe as someone mixed race, mixed culture, that’s why this place is so irresistible to me—its DNA of mingling and blurring boundaries to make its own vibrant medley feels just right.

On this visit, every day after writing in the high-ceilinged Uptown apartment, I walked miles and miles.  The purpose of this trip, beyond seeing my son, whom I greatly miss, and doing a writing retreat, was to heal my back, which suffers during the cramped cold months of winter.  I am at heart a warm weather girl, and NOLA offers the perfect soul and muscle therapy.  I threaded through Uptown, the Garden District, the Irish Channel and Magazine Street, chatting with shop owners; I traipsed along St. Charles Avenue, listening to the metallic slide and clank of the street car; to Tulane, over and around in Freret (taking out my son’s roommates to a new hip taco place made out of a vintage gas station with picnic tables outside), around Audubon Park with its draping Spanish moss lit up in the sun like gray-green mantilla lace.  That it was the Covid era was something of a boon: safety, a light sense of enjoyment in the outside, but none of the grunge and crowds. Continue reading

Writing Crazy

“I don’t know if you’re really a writer.  I don’t know if you’re crazy enough.”

These were the words said to me by a mentor in graduate school.  I had honestly forgotten them, until an old friend from graduate school mailed me back the long letters I had written her during a period I think of as my apprenticeship as a writer, when we wrote each other fervently, and I, especially, set down the long (and sometimes self-dramatic) struggle to become a writer.

Not surprisingly, these words came from a male mentor.  I believe he looked on and at me with some affection—I have memories of him smiling, eyes twinkling, when I spoke in workshop; of driving with him around Providence, RI, where he was looking at a house he was thinking of buying, and, as he told me, “wasting his time so he avoided writing.”  I remember he often singled out my work, but wanted it to take a distinctly more avant-garde and dark direction.  I remember one such story that I considered finished, unto itself, and somehow, after workshop, I had persuaded myself to now tell the story from the point of view of the son, as an unborn child.  Another story, which again seemed finished, but for some odd details that needed fixing, was revised over and over again after his comments, until it became a muddle.  The first I published as a chapbook; the second story I let go.

The word “crazy” deserves some examining.  I do not know if my mentor held in his world view an idea that women writers needed to be ‘crazy’ to be good or true writers, or if he thought all writers needed to be ‘crazy.’  I do know that is a trope often dispensed on the female writer—yes, that neurotic, ungainly woman ill-suited for the regular world.  Her bleeding life is her art—the crazier she was, the more of an artist she must be.  But the notion of a ‘crazy’ woman author means that ambition and debilitation are always bound together.  One asserts and is made helpless at the same time—think Plath, Sexton, Zelda.  I was never interested in ‘crazy,’ honestly.  I was interested in hard, steady work, in finding how to steady myself as an artist, which wasn’t always easy.

When I was a child, I studied with a wonderful artist, a European who lived across the street in Parkway Village; he had a slightly haunted quality, having come through the war, and ran painting classes at the back of his framing store.  He seemed to think I had some talent, and he became like an artistic father to me—I relished those hours in the turpentine-smelling room, where he would lay out books of Impressionists and Fauve painters and we would try to copy and learn with oil paint.  After he and I took the long walk home, down Parsons Boulevard, pausing at the bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, the cars humming beneath us, to see a sky streaked and swollen with vibrant hues, no different than the Fauve paintings I had just been poring over.

In the early days, I painted instinctively, still a child, still unafraid, lavish in my sense of color and brush stroke.  I got into an art high school, but then suddenly retreated, afraid of being pigeon holed as solely a painter.

Then there was a break—my mentor’s wife passed away, he shut the store and took a teaching job to support his family, and then remarried and went to live elsewhere—not far away, in the neighborhood next to my elementary school.  I became a teenager, with a boyfriend, friends, diffuse in my likings.  I picked up painting again with him, this time in a room on the second floor.  But something was broken and lost—in our connection, and in me.  His stepdaughter, who was quite adorable, would come wandering into the room.  There were no spattered and dog eared art books splayed open to show me how to do it; no smell of turpentine.  My boyfriend was idling in his car across the street.  I worked on one painting—of a man in a chair—and the more I worked on it, the worse it got.  The palate became muddier and muddier.  I had lost my way.  Shortly after I stopped our lessons.  There was no point.

The same could be said of the fiction writing in graduate school—the revisions I was doing that muddled my original sight, my original sense of freedom.

I was trying to please.  And maybe, in some way, he was right—that pleasing side of myself was what he saw in the hothouse atmosphere of graduate school—I was the acolyte tipped forward, showing her eager and agreeable face, wanting praise, wanting attention, wanting to get it right, like a good student.  Surely not a good creed for becoming a writer.  One muddies–and muddles–one’s own sense of color and purpose.

And finally, he was being an a***hole. Continue reading

Freedom From Fear

Seventy-two hours that included pipe bombs, an assassination of two African Americans, and a synagogue massacre.  What country do we live in?

Strangely enough, I find myself thinking about Norman Rockwell–much the way people have been reflecting upon Mr. Rogers–who was from the very Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the Tree of Life Synagogue is located.

On a recent visit to the museum dedicated to Rockwell’s work, I was reminded of how, at twelve or thirteen, I became obsessed with Norman Rockwell.  There had been a retrospective of his work, perhaps at the Whitney, and my mother bought me the catalogue.  It was a slender book, but I would pore over those images, every detail, ever shoe lace and grimace and expression.  At the time I studied painting with an artist from Europe, a neighbor, who gave classes to teenagers and adults in the back of his framing store.  What we studied was utterly different—the Fauves, whose vivid and savage colors I imitated, those images of European seasides and women bathing on the banks of a river, the gesture toward brush stroke and shimmering intensity, not realism.

So what compelled me toward Rockwell? I had no real contact with small town America—I was a city girl, through and through.  I’d barely traveled in America, since my family used vacations to go to Canada, England and Europe.  I did not even know the suburbs very well, since my mother had a near allergy to them, and both my parents had a fear of communities that were unwelcoming or racially homogeneous. Continue reading

Maplewood Literary Award 2018

This was the brief talk I gave before my interview with Sarah Lester at the Maplewood Literary Award event on March 24th, 2018.  It’s adapted from an earlier blog on writing in 9/12.

I should like to tell a story.  It is a story of failure and motherhood.  It is a story of post- 9/11, what I call 9/12.  And it is ultimately a story of rebuilding one’s self, of home and community.  Because the career I’ve had for the last sixteen years is intricately connected to our decision to move to Maplewood.

We were living on the Upper West Side in an apartment.  My ‘office,’ such as it was, consisted of a corner of a room, next to a swinging door into the kitchen, walled off with a Japanese screen from my son’s nursery area.  My husband wrote on a thin little table in a corner of the bedroom.  Our books teemed everywhere.  There wasn’t much light in the apartment.  This was not sustainable.

But it was not sustainable for another reason.  I had, in all honesty, lost my way as a writer.  I had always been a fierce and disciplined writer, driven in some ways by guilt—the child of an immigrant, of hardworking teachers, I felt that if this was my job, I had to attack it like a job.  I led a pretty monastic life, keeping my expenses low, my apartments small to make this vocation work.

And I did continue to write after I became a mother—a few weeks after my son Sasha was born I was in Bed Stuy, reporting on teenagers with AIDs.  But just like the gray atmosphere of our apartment, there was a smudged quality to my vision, a sense of not being able to blend motherhood, the pressures and anxieties of making a living, and the act of writing.  Even I—quite stubborn—was having a hard time of it.  I felt like a graduate student peering into grown up lives, but somehow I could not figure out how to be and writer have that grown up life.

Worse, even after publishing two literary novels and a nonfiction book, I could not sell my third novel.  I pause on this for a moment because we so often focus on success of an author’s life.  But as every writer knows, particularly in the punishing environment of publishing, behind that gleaming surface, there is so much rejection and sense of failure and uncertainty and tossed out projects.  And often for no good reason, just bad luck or bad timing.  I was amazed to learn the other night at the Montclair Literary Festival that Tom Perrotta’s novel, “Election,” was actually sitting in a drawer, unpublished, when it was discovered for a movie.

For me, at this time, I had written a novel in a somber mood, in the wake of an ectopic pregnancy that had sent me into life-saving surgery.  I woke up a week later in bed, loopy on painkillers, with an image of an elderly Bengali woman, the wife of a photographer, walking the amber-lit streets of the UPW.  That novel, too quiet, too submerged, still waits in my drawer.  I tried a few other projects but nothing quite held.

Here is the other significant part of our move: 9/11.  Or rather, I should say, 9/12.  The day after.  The decades after.

They are connected. Continue reading

A Bucket, A Light, A Drop of Help — Puerto Rico Part 2

While it has been gratifying to have friends shower us for praise about our vacation-volunteering in Puerto Rico, it is also embarrassing.  What we are doing is a mere drop in an ocean of need, nothing compared to the river of help that so many others are offering.  And lest I give the wrong impression, Puerto Rico is full up with vacation pleasures: soaking up the sun; white wine in the evening on the patio while reading; jumping in the warm waves; playing volleyball on the beach.  Today I had a yoga session by the infinity pool with a lovely woman who gave me a bracelet and told me her story of Hurricane Maria (more later).  We are given far more than we give here.

On one evening we take an Uber to Old San Juan, to eat at a popular pizza place: up steep tiled stairs, dark wood tables with light green embroidered cloth under glass.  This is old-fashioned, colonial San Juan: simple food, sangria.  After we amble down the narrow streets, shocked at how quiet and deserted the town is; so many shops shuttered up, the upper floors completely dark.  We had visited Old San Juan when the children were young, and I remember anxiously driving our rental car in tight lanes of traffic, not sure where we would park.  Now the square with statues of the Three Kings is utterly empty.  Then the tourist shops blazed with light and dangling souvenirs; now the shop where we had once bought a wooden guitar for Sasha has already closed.  At one store filled with items from Bali, India, Mexico, the British owner tells me that one of the problems for store owners is the big hotels such as the Sheraton have been taken over by FEMA and companies.  “These guys don’t help businesses.  They come and eat and drink and then go back to their hotels and watch TV.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

We do, though, chance upon a delightful and lively place: Choco Bar, which sells famous Cortes chocolate.  Apparently Puerto Ricans eat chocolate with everything, and especially love to dip slices of cheese until they are gooey.  The walls are adorned with the history of cacao and chocolate in the New World, and as well, a video about a school the business created after Hurricane Maria, which emphasizes the arts and expression. Continue reading

We are Puerto Rico

December, 2017–San Juan, Puerto Rico

Corny as it sounds, as we’re touching down in Puerto Rico, there’s a rainbow arching over the land mass.  I can also see the vegetation has begun to spring back, though it’s hard not to notice the skeletal waste and bare branches.  San Juan itself looks stable but battered and worn.

We’re staying at La Concha—a mod late fifties hotel that makes me feel as if we’ve walked into the casino scenes in Cuba in Godfather II—marble floors, low space age furniture, elongated hexagonal lattices and orange slats over the balconies, a clamshell roof on the restaurant.  The elevator doesn’t work, so we all follow the work men to service area and go up, squeezed behind huge laundry trolleys.  I learn later that the hotel, which sits right on the ocean in Condado, survived the hurricane—they did not even board up the glass windows.  Wind crashed from the ocean and then swirled in circles around the wavy roofs.  Water sloshed down the low marble steps of the lobby but they managed to drag out the sodden rugs, and stayed open the whole time and FEMA workers and administrators are staying here through February.

That evening we walk on the beach, and see block after block of hotels and apartment houses, all stable, surviving, a few swaddled in scaffolding.  And yet most of the windows are dark—Puerto Ricans who have left, the apartments now abandoned.  Occasionally we see a generator hooked up on the street, but by and large the electricity is working in this part of San Juan.  Walgreens and CVS are glaring bright boxes down the block, freshly stocked.

That evening we head out for a meal at Café Tresbe, a hip outdoor place that serves tacos, empadillas, and tamarind-flavored barbecue wings, all out of a repurposed container.  The place is low-key, groovy, and we might be in Austin with the strung lights and music and murals.  Across the way is Sabrina’s, another restaurant with seafood and vegetarian fare. 

Later, when we return to our area, we walk over to the Condado Vanderbilt, an elegant turn-of-the-century hotel that’s been completely redone—a sunken bar area of velvet settees, dark wood, and sleek statues.  But it is utterly empty—the lounge area, the bar, where the staff wait expectantly; the restaurant and the terrace where the ocean pounds below.  Continue reading

9/12: The World We Have Woken To

9/11 is our day of marking, our day of mourning.  At dinner last night, our older son told us about his school’s annual assembly, how affected he was by the grim sequence of images—the smothering dust, the tiny figures plunging to their death.  Every year at his school the president of the student council gives a talk; this year they have come to the waning moments where soon none of those young people will have been alive on that day.  For them it recedes into memorialized history, not entirely lived and felt history.

And yet.  I have always felt that the significance of 9/11 is 9/12 and thereafter, the world we live in now and that our children have inherited.  Sasha was just over a year that bright blue sky day, and I will never forget leaving him with his father at home, biking down the West Side with phone chargers in my back pack, looping to the Red Cross where I’d hoped to donate blood.  Instead there was a momentary stop at the heliport where Pataki and Clinton were just then disembarking to be greeted by Guliani (yes, that kind of bipartisan resolve did exist) and we all cheered as they were whisked into cars, down to the site.  And then there was no need for chargers, no need for blood, just a police barricade, plumes of ashen smoke blotting that perfect sky.  That night, our son snuggled in our carry-on, we joined others at the Sailors and Fallen Soldiers Monument and sang and sang, almost wishing we could never leave each other, this fellowship, on such a painful and numbing day.

It is no secret that I did not want to leave the city.  It is the place of my birth, my blood connection, my charge and vibe.  I’m an urban girl through and through.  But somehow one year later we encamped to Maplewood, NJ, waking up stunned in an empty house on a quiet street on a hot August morning in 2002.  Our move was not connected to the event—we were not fleeing the city because of the attack.  But we did , in some way, need to rebuild, rethink, remold ourselves.  And I often think I experienced a rebirth as a writer then, one that was directly connected to 9/12.  I was now a writer in the world we have woken up to, the world our children are shaped by: war, terror, counter-terrorism, Islamophobia, fear, immigration panic, security.  Soon after a novel tore out of me, about the crackdown on undocumented immigrants—which became Ask Me No Questions.  At the end of the novel, the sisters’ fate remains unclear, as they are lofted out into that 9/12 world.  In real life, they would probably have become beneficiaries of DACA, which was just so cruelly torn away.

I had thought my story—of an undocumented family in the wake of 9/11—would become a kind of historical document.  Instead, in 2017, under this current administration and divisive mood, we are once again in the same crisis being lived afresh.  The world of 9/12 is not about linear progression.  It is about these same unresolved conflicts erupting again and again.  It is about the submerged re-emerging, with a vengeance.  That is how trauma works.  It is circular, often unresolved, getting worse before–and if–it gets better.  I cannot help but think, that with the attempt at the Muslim ban, the elimination of DACA, the events in Charlottesville, we are now in the descending plunge of the spiral.  When and how we circle up and out again, toward light and resolution—hard to say.  That may be too Pollyanna a vision.  9/12 is here to stay.

But there is one sweeter note to end on, for me, personally, as to what it’s been like to live in 9/12.  The community we so impetuously moved to a year after 9/11—Maplewood—has proved to be a nurturing bath for that newly re-formed writer self.  It is where I have raised my children; amidst the hub bub of family life, I carved out book after book, some out of the anguish and concern and puzzlement at the times we are living through.  Some are just the drive toward curiosity or shadow pockets of history or personal obsession.  Living in a house means there are that many more corners to stack up research books and novels.  I often think our house is one great heaving ship taking in more book cargo, while chucking out others to create better ballast, so we don’t capsize and drown in print.

And that is why, with great pleasure, I tell of receiving the 2018 Maplewood Literary Award, the brainchild of our remarkable library director, Sarah Lester, who also created the Maplewood Ideas Festival.  Fifteen years ago we decamped, we rebuilt, and re-envisioned.    Nearly every day I wake up to this street of porched houses, and children scattering toward school, commuters racing for the midtown direct train. From my desk, just beyond the trees, I glimpse the rooftop of novelist Pamela Erens‘ house, the 2017 award recipient.  It gives me quiet comfort to know she too is facing the page, so nearby.   And solace too for a community that so values art and words and expression, even in the face of our worst darkness.  This is my 9/12.   This is how we begin.

Henri Cartier-Bresson & India

2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the Magnum Photo Agency, founded by photography greats Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, William Vandervirt, and others right after World War II. Legend has it that Magnum was named after the magnum of champagne they drank to celebrate the agency, but with Capa one’s never sure. At the time, the photographers ‘divided’ up the world–Capa was somewhat ‘at large’ and Cartier-Bresson took Asia. The result is on display at the Rubin Museum in a rich show of his images of India at some truly key historic moments. Capa always told Cartier Bresson: “Stop calling yourself an artist. Say you’re a photojournalist.”

Surely these images reflect both: A fusion of exquisite sensitivity and composition, coupled with his keen sense of the historical moment: Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame.

 

DACA, Dreamers

April 26, 2017

Two items caught my attention today: an undocumented Rutgers student, a Dreamer, asked by ICE to interview at their office and report about how much young undocumented immigrants contribute to the NJ economy–$66 million and it is estimated that they could contribute another $27 million if they could get on with their lives, continue to study and work.

DACA Student at Rutgers Interviewed by ICE Officials.

Report: NJ young immigrants pay $66 million in taxes

I actually believe many people are squeamish about defending undocumented immigrants.  It makes them uncomfortable.  Aren’t they criminals? Didn’t they break the law? Many Americans, in fact, may be uneasy with Trump’s demonization of immigrants, but might have trouble openly marching on their behalf.  Might they secretly wonder: It is too much, isn’t it? Could some of what he says be true? Are they ruining our economy? Taking over our cities, our towns? Aren’t they a drag on our resources?

I say this not because I believe these ideas, but because I believe we must bring out of hiding these shadow thoughts in ourselves.  And the only way to do so is to bring the cold, clear nuggets of facts, such as the ones above.  To hear these stories.  These are young people whom we have already invested in; young people who are already contributed; and who have so much more to offer.  Are we willing to lose that gorgeous hope and possibility?  Because of we shut ourselves to what they can be, we shut down what we can be as a nation.  I believe we are more capacious than this; that our republic, so different than others, has room and room again.  Let us not give into the shadows and fears; let us find a way.

 

On Re-reading Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”

April 13th, 2017:

Last night I taught Baldwin (which the students loved) and the last lines kept resonating as I drove home: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are:in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.”

And yet I must confess, that the phrase ‘without rancor’–which is so hard to do–might be also substituted ‘without grief.’ For even as I gained so much strength from Baldwin, I found myself suddenly crying at the latest headline regarding the withholding of Federal funds from Planned Parenthood. The outright cruelty of this move undid me. I was subsumed in grief–for the women whose lives will be affected, poor women, sick women, confused women, determined women. It was a stab to my gut, my own body, a shock.

I only hope in daylight I can muster up the two opposing ideas that Baldwin conjures up for us, his complex light through the tunnel, to see our way into the future.  But right now, my heart heavy, and it requires so much strength to rally forth.

Normality Elusive In Fraught Times–Muslim Teenagers after Orlando

An article in the NY Times today about how the Orlando killings are again snatching away a sense of normality for Muslim teens during Ramadan, a time that should be reflective and celebratory.

Last year, during Ramadan, I spent a lot of time wandering the streets of Queens and Brooklyn for my new novel Watched.  And what I was so struck by–and what is lost in these polarizing times where Islam is equated with frightening headlines–is the way in which Islam, observance, is part of the fabric of life, a rhythm for one’s days.  I watched families hurry to pick up last groceries, stroll and linger on streets before and after prayers,  crowd around tables under the pale wash of florescent restaurant light for the Iftar, the evening meal.  Little children cupped in father’s arms; a man and his wife, their robes blazing white in the dark, rushed off a bus, across a busy avenue.  By one tiny mosque, where the women prayed, jammed next to one another in a narrow basement, prayers voiced in through speakers, little children set off tiny bang-snaps outside, annoying the adults who also forgave them.  It was such a New York, a Brooklyn scene: how many children have been doing that for generations on borough pavements?

Take a look at the beautiful slide show that captures some of this.

Kara Walker & The Real Sugar Links

On Kara Walker’s A Subtlety is a marvelous, yet maddening installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory.  Here’s why:

When I stepped inside the vast Domino Sugar Factory for the opening of Kara Walker’s installation, A Subtlety, I nearly wept.  For over a century, the iconic Domino Sugar Factory, which shut its doors a decade ago, has loomed on the Brooklyn waterfront, an enigmatic, forgotten carapace.  Now, with Walker’s sculpture, it is not just the doors of the factory that have reopened–we have also flung open our shared history of sugar.  It is a history I know well, for my own family traveled from northern India as indentured workers to work the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  My great-grandfather gave away his share of land in Uttar Pradesh to his two older brothers and set off to seek a new life in British Guiana, which rivaled Jamaica and Cuba as one of the largest sugar producers in the world. Continue reading

Lisa Jalowetz Aronson: The Door Opens

Lisa with Peter Lindenfeld at a show of Lore Lindenfeld’s work

I first met my future mother-in-law in 1996, when my boyfriend at the time, Marc Aronson, brought me to Westchester, where he was giving a talk on Edith Wharton to his mother’s book reading group, which was reading House of Mirth.  Marc and I had met many times over the years–I an all-in-black aspiring novelist, he an editor at Henry Holt–mostly at the home of Shashi and Minu Tharoor.  On one fateful occasion, we sat perched on a sofa and were soon immersed in  a conversation about Edith Wharton and Henry James.  Marc had recently finished his dissertation on William Crary Brownell, who edited both authors.  (I am a James fan; he a Wharton, and we still have not resolved the issue) At the time, I think Marc was surprised that he was talking to someone who not only knew all the works, but even cared!

What followed was a very Jamesian or Whartonesque courtship–take your pick–a long date at the Metropolitan Museum, where we both had wandered as children and now shared our favorite rooms, literary readings, strolls and high and low meals talking books in our beloved New York City; proffered and refused gifts and many, many conversations, heady and otherwise.  Over the course of that time, he mentioned his parents a few times–once at an Israeli restaurant in the East Village he said something about his parents ‘working in the theater.’  Then one evening, standing at the bar at Gramercy Tavern, after an event at the National Arts Club, he began to explain his fascination with Brownell, how he was drawn to figures who are on the borderline or cusp of cultural change, since of course, that was who his father, the set designer Boris Aronson, was.  At that moment, I thought to myself, “I will never be bored with this man.  I will always want to hear what he has to say,” and simply put–fell in love.

Shortly thereafter we rented a car and made our way up to Westchester, where I met his elegant, snowy-haired mother and her fellow book group.  Marc gave his talk and then we followed Lisa back to her home, across the river, in Nyack.  At the time, Lisa was about 75 years old, and she drove like a speed demon, swerving around the winding roads.  As we stepped up to the door, he paused, and said with a sigh, “Welcome to my family.  Welcome to the avant-garde.”

The door swung open. Continue reading

We’re Ready for Immigration Reform: A Novelist’s Perspective

A new Op-Ed in the Huffington Post:

With the bipartisan proposal on immigration just announced, and President Obama’s speech on reform delivered recently, we’re all braced for the polarizing winds of anger to rage.

But that’s not what I’ve found. For several years, I have been talking about illegal immigrants, all over the country. Every time I finish my talk, I wait for a blast of hostility.

It never comes.

More …

When Do You Write: Guest Post at Anjali Enjeti’s Website

Nowadays I write when the saws aren’t whining downstairs or one of my boys isn’t tumbling into my study, complaining about his odious brother.  Seriously, right now—living through a kitchen renovation during the summer, my prime writing time—has been a huge challenge.  It’s discombobulated my otherwise pretty disciplined rhythm, which I established in graduate school years ago.  At that time, I felt so guilty about leaving a ‘real’ job, and living on the tiny scholarship, I felt I had to be at it, every morning.  I lived in a tiny studio, worked at the kitchen table and listened to the family next door in a gorgeous Victorian back down their driveway every morning, going off to the ‘real world’.  I remember feeling terribly deprived, sure I would never have such a life, and yet pure, Spartan.

More …

Mrs. Dalloway Then and Now

This appeared in the Patch:

When I was in college, I took a course taught by an erudite British poet and critic, Jon Stallworthy, who came to class in nubby wool sweaters, and assigned us to write an essay on “Why Mrs. Dalloway is a masterpiece.”

Moxie sophomore that I was, I decided to write a paper on why Mrs. Dalloway was not a masterpiece, and headed straight to the Graduate Library, where I spent hours digging up old reviews in English newspapers, panning Woolf’s novel, and building up my sure-fire case that the novel was ‘second rate’—not on the order of To the Lighthouse, certainly.  I was sure my professor would be impressed by my extraordinary, rebellious performance. Continue reading

Remembering David Foster Wallace (briefly)

This was a piece I wrote for our local Patch in anticipation of an event with biographer D.T. Max:

In 1989, when I was still a novice writer, I spent the summer at Yaddo, the beautiful writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs.  It’s a fairly intimidating and luxurious atmosphere (butterballs served at dinner!) for any new writer still trying to get a handle on a first novel. One feels both anointed and yet hollow, inadequate.

It was there I met—among many other writers—David Foster Wallace.  Already, there was a bit of star aura around David—he was clearly brilliant, and his difficult, opaque and challenging first collection, The Broom of the System, had been published.  Downstairs in the main room of Yaddo’s Victorian house was the mail table—and it was hard not notice the big packages that came for David—from publishers, from Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown.  Wallace was starting to hum with a true career while many of us were simply in the shadows, figuring out who we were as writers or artists.

 

David was a funny mix of Midwestern earnest, well-brought up, polite, and yet sharply arrogant.  He kept his cards to his chest, though one could still see the whirring, ambitious calculations within.  Evenings, some of us would sit around the screened-in porch for long winding conversations about the state of contemporary fiction, and he would dominate, posing quizzical questions, conducting the conversation as if he were the professor.  (Flustering a few of the more insecure young writers)  I could clearly detect that he was a professor’s son, used to the analytic seminar, even in his slacker trademark bandana around his long hair.  Indeed David was not teaching creative writing as many of us were—he was headed for Harvard to study philosophy.

Over the course of the month, a small group of us hung around quite a bit, shooting pool in town, or joining him as he smoked a lot of pot in his attic room.  I once made the mistake of playing tennis with him—he was a ranked state player in high school—and embarrassing myself not just with the ball, but with some of the intellectual volleys, so shy was I at the time.

Lobbing the ball across the net, he asked me what I thought was the next frontier in fiction.  Since I was actually trying to wean myself of the intellectual pyrotechnics of experimental fiction, I mumbled something about ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ fiction and then felt completely tongue-tied and embarrassed.  Somehow, I managed to say, “You know it’s mostly about writing a story that really hits you.”

He paused on the court.  Something had clicked.  He said quietly, “Yes, there is that.  It’s hard to deliver that emotional knockout that gets you right here—“ He pointed to his chest.  “That is rare.”

David would go on to write Infinite Jest, a book that was a huge achievement; as much a literary opus as it was a massive cultural event.  He also battled with severe and profound depression.  Shortly after he left Yaddo, I’d heard from mutual acquaintances that he’d had a severe crack up, dropped out of Harvard, and was in an institution.  All that pot smoking masked his constant internal struggles with “the black hole with teeth.”

Over the next decades, Wallace moved toward the luminosity of the truly gifted and brilliant, the public.  A cultish fascination grew around his maximalist work.  Though I was not one of those who dared crack open the over a thousand-page-tome, David’s journalism and essays, which appeared on the pages of Harper’s, were among my favorite—funny, erudite, slangy, relaxed, genre-breaking cultural commentary, where his penchant for the extended, hilarious footnote became a genre unto itself.

To my surprise, many, many years later, the author DT Max contacted me in his research for the biography of Wallace, which began with a New Yorker article he wrote about the last days of Wallace’s life before he committed suicide in 2008.  I was surprised, as I was no more than a speck in the huge number of famous figures and dear friends who populated David’s life.  But it speaks to DT’s scrupulous sense of fine research that he reached out to everyone.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a kind book, for it takes up, with compassion and insight, the twin struggles of Wallace, the ambitious literary author and Wallace the person, battling severe depression.

 

Continue reading

What I’m Reading

A few days ago I finished D.T. Max’s Every Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.   The book is both eminently readable, a kind of psychological thriller of one brilliant author’s mind, his ouvre, and ultimate self-destruction.  At the same time, I found myself queasily putting it down for rest stops–perhaps because I knew David very slightly, from Yaddo, and thus his ghost brushed past on the page; perhaps because this was the first time I had read a biography of someone who is a contemporary.  The effect is oddly dizzying, even nauseating (is it nauseated? Wallace was a hard-ass on grammar and nausea was one of his pet peeves).  It’s like being in a Tilt-a-Whirl of one’s own times, lurching a bit too close to one’s cultural moments, veering away as we watch his particular struggles and demise.  In the end, the book is also terribly sad and moving.

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Throughout the summer I’ve been slowly making my way through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in preparation for our project on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and the Spanish Civil War.  I’ve never been a great reader of Hemingway–he was most certainly the obligatory guy author for me back in high school, and I’ve never been a fan of minimalism.  Its language constraints irritate me; the dialogue at times seems peevishly forced.  Prior to beginning the novel, I read the two biographies of Martha Gelhorn–the second, which was unauthorized, provides a rather damning portrait of Hemingway the mean and vindictive ex-husband, so I was hardly inclined toward him as an author. Continue reading

First Stop: Barcelona

On August 5th, 2012, Marc, myself and our two boys, Sasha and Rafi flew to Barcelona—exactly 76 years after Capa and Taro when arrived to begin their photo-journey into the Spanish Civil War. Within a few months, Capa would become a world-famous war journalist. Both would reinvent modern photojournalism as we know it today. And in less than a year, the daring Taro would be dead.

We spent nearly three weeks in Spain, tracking, as best we could, some of the key sites and in some cases, visiting some of the exact locales where they shot photographs. Our last research day was in Brunete, where Taro was sideswiped by a swerving tank, and ultimately died in a hospital 30 kilometers away.

In this blog, I’ll be filling you in on our travels, our journey into the story of Capa, Taro, and Chim as we developed this book. Enjoy!

*****

Barcelona, August, 2012: This is the Barcelona I remember from 1983-84 when I backpacked through–and it isn’t. Still the same frilly-edged art nouveau buildings rising off the grand avenues; still the winding streets in the old quarter; and still good Serrano ham and manchego cheese to be found at all hours.

Yet there is a difference. Gone are the old women washing on the balconies, the clamoring parakeets and teeming plants; gone are the old men and women on Las Ramblas benches, the smokey-eyed gypsy children; the seedy, red light district, the dark mouths of nightclubs, where you walked downstairs and were never quite sure what you would find; gone is the morning wake up when we stayed in the old quarter—a bakery where fat-armed women shoved aluminum trays of quivering flan; the men in their slightly ill-made suits and hair wet down; the shoes thicker, sturdier; so much less polish and high-strung tourist sheen as I had encountered in Florence and Sienna. I could feel, in this city, the sense of the peasant, of the rustic.

At that time—28 years ago—my friend and I were at the edge of their lives, observing. Now it is throngs of tourists driving down Las Ramblas who are the center of the action; now they are flanked by shiny stores, tapas places that seem like remakes of the dark wood dives I drank in and ate before. When we reach Placa de la Catalyuna, I feel as if I’m in Times Square. We’ve stopped off at the official FC Barcelona store, where Sasha understands that I am not spending 100 dollars on a Messie shirt.

But we are here for history, and so we oblige, with Alan Warren, our chipper and cheerful guide who is obsessed with Spanish Civil history, knows it down to his bones, and leads tours throughout the region recreating Orwell’s steps, battles, particular regiments.

He has arrived at our large, atmospheric (and slightly odd) Eixample flat in his floppy khaki hat, his folder of images and notes, and marches us past the elegant art nouveau buildings, shows us the Hotel Majestic, which at the time was taken over by the Republican forces, and where long tables of food were served for free. Now it is swathed in scaffolding; I peek through the revolving doors to see the lobby is completely renovated—sleek marble, barely adorned—and intimidatingly pricey in look.

Another doorway is where deserters from the Nationalist side straggled in, along with recruits from abroad. This is the international surge that brought Capa and Taro to Spain in the early days, along with George Orwell, who would immortalize his time in the classic Homage to Catalonia:

“When the fighting broke out on the 18 July it is probable that every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy standing up to Fascism.”

Most certainly this is what Capa and Taro felt, back in Paris. Both were refugees from Hungary and Germany respectively; both were Jews who had begun to see the iron hand of anti-Semitism start to choke the political life of their countries. Indeed Capa had already had his run-ins for political activism, as did Taro, which is how they wound up in Paris, mingling among the many artists and emigres who had flocked to the city at this time.

Capa and Taro were also opportunists—in the best sense of the word. They sensed a chance, an opportunity, to make their mark through the growing field of photo journalism. They had met when Taro worked for Maria Eisner, who ran a photo agency, Alliance Photo. Taro helped to groom the scruffy Hungarian so he might better sell his work. Then she too took up the camera. It was only a matter of time before they felt the siren call to Barcelona, to Spain, where already, international volunteers were pouring in to fight Franco.

The Barcelona they would have encountered would have been similar to the city George Orwell described:

“… when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.”

“The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town were crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.”

“There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

Certainly, Taro’s photographs during this time capture the revolutionary fervor, the joyous and ordinary ways that residents had taken up arms and were remaking their very city, their society. Taro shot children happily scampering on sandbagged walls, donning anarchist caps like any children playing made-up war games.

She followed Republican militiawomen training on the beach near the city—one of her most iconic a silhouetted woman, crouched, aiming her pistol—a symbol of equality promised women during this halcyon period, a time, as Orwell noted, when people did not address anyone as “Senor or Dona” or even use the formal “Usted.”

My favorites of Taro’s during this period are those of people laughing, relaxing in the August sunshine (Catalonia is indeed hot during those months). In one, a man and a woman lean back in two wicker chairs, heads tilted to one another, exchanging laughter; he casually holds a rifle between them. There’s an easy grace to the photo, men and women as comfortable compadres, as Taro and Capa were themselves.

In August 1936, when Taro and Capa and Orwell arrived in Spain, to join what they saw as the greatest struggle of their generation, they did not yet detect its dangerous and self-destructive undertow, nor did anyone anticipate the terrible destruction that would be unleashed with ariel bombing. (Indeed Barcelona was used as a testing ground for this new technology and the brutal air raids gave way to something called the “Barcelona Effect”—the more a civilian population was bombed, the more they in fact resisted) We pause at the reconstructed Coliseum, which now has a stark black steel memorial in front to memorialize those killed in the dreadful pounding that pummeled these grand streets.

“There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

Yet if anything characterizes the Spanish Civil War, it was the deadly factionalism that would eventually splinter the Left, particularly as the Soviets played a deadly game of suppressing the Anarchists and undermining their hold on the local population.

Less than a year after that optimistic period that Capa and Taro recorded visually, a stand-off between the Communists and Anarchists was taking place: “The word flew round the town that the workers’ buildings were being attacked, armed Anarchists appeared on the streets, work ceased, and fighting broke out immediately.”

Today, we stand in the thronging Placa de Cataluyna to see the Telefonica Building, the tallest building at the time of the Spanish Civil War, a blank modern building that juts up over the teeming plaza.

We press onward, past the fountain where everyone descends after a Barcelona soccer team game (No, we tell the kids, you cannot drink the water), and stand just opposite Café Moka, where Civil Guards were holed up inside. Across the way was the Poliorama, where the P.O.U.M. (the party Orwell fought with and more or less came to support) patrolled on the roof domes.

“I used to sit on the roof marveling at the folly of it all,” Orwell writes. “From the little windows in the observatory you could see for miles around—vista after vista of tall slender buildings, glass domes and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea—the first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.”

The Eyes of The World: Work-in-Progress

Ongoing updates about our work-in-progress, “The Eyes of the World: A Story of a Man, a Woman, & a Camera”, to be published by Henry Holt for Younger Readers in 2014:

Last summer, while sitting at lunch at the Vermont MFA program, chatting with many veteran children’s book authors such as Walter Dean Myers, Leda Schubert, I was suddenly thunderstruck with inspiration: I knew what my next young adult nonfiction book would be–the story of photographer Robert Capa, the less-known Gerda Taro, and their friend Chim, as they set off to photograph the Spanish Civil War and create modern photojournalism–and war journalism–as we know it today.  Nothing like the company of other authors, bubbling with their own ideas, to set one going.

Indeed, given that this is very much a story of a man and a woman collaborating–as equals, as compadres, as artists–it seemed the perfect next book for Marc and I to write.  We had been casting about for a new idea and had touched on the idea of collaboration–various duets in history that have joined forces to create something they could not do on their own.

The story of Capa and Taro had caught my eye a few years ago when I went to an exhibition at the International Center for Photography–“This is War!”–a huge retrospective of Capa’s work.  I’d always been fascinated with the Magnum photographers, and fell in love with those images from the Spanish Civil War–the molded, strong faces staring up at a sky strafed with war planes; children playing see saw amidst rubbled buildings.  At that exhibition, I became acquainted with Taro’s work, which also shared a smaller exhibition space.  I learned that in fact she and Capa were an artistic team–Capa & Taro–and they had gone off together, as lovers, as friends, as co-conspirators in the aim of telling the world about the Republican cause.  Like so many of their generation, they believed that the Spanish Civil War was the war to stake a claim–that if it was not won–Europe would surely fall to fascism.  (And of course they were right in this regard)  Armed with their new, lightweight Leicas and Rolloflexes, they set off, arriving in Barcelona on August 5th, 1936.  Sadly, Taro would not live more than a year, as she was killed during the Battle of Brunete in July, 1937.  This is one of the reasons her work is not as well known–she died very young, just as she was emerging as a daring and canny photojournalist in her own right. Continue reading

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