Helen Maryles Shankman's Blog
April 24, 2017
7 books about the Holocaust scholars say you should read
Honored to find They Were Like Family to Me included in this powerful list of books on this Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Recent releases provide valuable lessons ahead of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s national commemoration for victims of Hitler’s Jewish genocide
JTA — From Anne Frank’s diary to Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” books about the Holocaust remain some of the most powerful and well-known pieces of literature published in the past century. Books have the power to educate about the Shoah’s unimaginable horrors and bring to life the stories of its victims, as well as unearth hidden details about wartime crimes.
Ahead of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, JTA reached out to Jewish studies scholars across the country seeking their recommendations on recently published books dealing with the Holocaust. Their picks, all published in the past three years, include an investigation into the 1941 massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne (two scholars recommended the same book on that topic), a critical examination of theories trying to explain the Holocaust, and a look at how Adolf Hitler saw Islam as a religion that could be exploited for anti-Semitic purposes.
They Were Like Family to Me: Stories (Scribner, 2016) By Helen Maryles Shankman
Jeremy Dauber, director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, writes:
Writing literature about the Holocaust is many things, but it is never easy; and writing Holocaust literature in the vein of magic realism is more difficult yet. It risks taking the great horror of the 20th century and rendering it ungrounded, imaginative, even — God forbid — whimsically slight. But when a skillful writer pulls it off — David Grossman, for example, and now Shankman — the fantastic casts illuminating and terrible light on the dark shadows of the history of the war against the Jews. The stories in her collection are by no means factual in all respects. But they contain unmistakable truth.
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) By Anna Bikont
Joshua Zimmerman, professorial chair in Holocaust studies and East European Jewish history, and associate professor of history at Yeshiva University, writes:
This book, a winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, was written by a Polish journalist who discovered she was Jewish in her 30s and became deeply engaged in the topic of Polish-Jewish relations. After Jan T. Gross’ controversial book “Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland” (2000) proved that the local Poles — not the Germans — committed the massive pogrom in that town in July 1941, Bikont went to Jedwabne and its surroundings, interviewing eyewitnesses to the crime in the years 2000 to 2003, shedding new light on the character of the perpetrators, bystanders and the intricate way the crime was concealed for 50 years after the Holocaust. It is written in the form of a journal of the author’s travels and conversations with people.
Barbara Grossman, professor of drama at Tufts University and former US Holocaust Memorial Council board member, also recommended Bikont’s book. She writes:
I first read about the Jedwabne massacre in Gross’s book and still remember being riveted by the cover image of a barn engulfed in flames. Perhaps because my paternal grandfather was from Łomża, Poland — a city relatively near Jedwabne — I felt a particular connection to this atrocity, as well as gratitude to him for leaving the country years before the Holocaust. I directed Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s “Our Class,” a play loosely based on the events in Jedwabne, at Tufts in 2012, and remain fascinated by this story of greed, treachery and cruelty, a horrific crime in which as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women and children perished. Bikont’s magnificent work of investigative journalism details her meticulous reconstruction of the massacre and its subsequent decades-long coverup. It is a sobering and compelling account of anti-Semitism, denial and isolated acts of heroism.
The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015) By Lisa Moses Leff
Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, writes:
This award-winning book recounts the amazing story of Zosa Szajkowski, the scholar who rescued archives that might otherwise have been lost in the Holocaust. Szajkowski wrote numerous books and articles, but was also a known archive thief, caught red handed stealing valuable papers from the New York Public Library. Leff’s meticulous account reads like a thriller, yet conveys invaluable information concerning the fate of Jewish archives during and after the Shoah, and why removal of archives from their original home matters. Brandeis University and my late father, Bible scholar Nahum Sarna, play bit parts in this story. I remember Szajkowski, too; in fact, I took a class with him as a Brandeis undergraduate. He told lots of stories in class about his archival experiences during and after World War II, but it was only after reading Leff’s wonderful book that I understood “the rest of the story.”
Why? Explaining the Holocaust (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) By Peter Hayes
David Engel, professor of Holocaust studies and chair of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, writes:
I recommend this book for a lucid, well-crafted introduction to the history of the Holocaust. Unlike most works on the Holocaust written for a general audience, which tend to emphasize how the Holocaust was carried out and experienced, Hayes’ book concentrates, as its title suggests, on helping readers to understand why the Holocaust occurred when it did, where it did, in the manner it did and with the results it produced. It offers readers a window onto how historians go about finding answers to these questions, why some answers turn out to be more compelling than others and how new evidence can change understanding.
Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) Edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner
Omer Bartov, professor of European history and German studies at Brown University, writes:
This book comes out a quarter of a century after the publication of Saul Friedlander’s crucial edited volume, “Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution” (1992), which had challenged the conventional discourse on the mass murder of the Jews and critiqued its popular representation. The current volume attempts to grapple with the wider impact of Holocaust scholarship, fiction and representation in the intervening period. It includes fascinating essays on new modes of narrating the Shoah, the insights provided by the “spatial turn” on research and understanding of the event and the politics of exceptionality, especially the contextualization of the Holocaust within the larger framework of modern genocide. As such, it enables readers to understand both the ongoing presence of the Holocaust in our present culture and the different ways in which it has come to be understood in the early 21st century.
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Belknap Press, 2014) By David Motadel
Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, writes:
This is a major work of scholarship, examining the various ways the Nazis fostered a relationship with Muslims both before the war and especially during the war. Jeffrey Herf wrote a book a bit earlier, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” detailing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda sent, in Arabic translation, to North African Muslims, and Motadel expands the range of influence: that Hitler understood Islam as a warrior religion that could be exploited for propaganda efforts and to serve in both the Wehrmacht and the SS. The indoctrination of Muslims with Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda may well have had effects lasting long past the end of the war, a topic that deserves additional attention.
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past (The Experiment, 2015) By Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair
Michael Rothberg, professor of English and comparative literature and chair in Holocaust studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes:
Teege’s memoir, published in German in 2013 and translated into English in 2015, is a fascinating contribution to the discussion of the ongoing impact of the Holocaust over multiple generations. When she was in her late 30s, Teege discovered that her grandfather was a Nazi war criminal. And not just any Nazi: he was Amon Goeth, the commandant of Plaszów depicted in the film “Schindler’s List.” Because Teege is herself a black German woman — the daughter of a Nigerian father and a white German mother who was herself the daughter of Goeth’s mistress — her story takes on additional resonance. Intercut with contextualizing passages by Sellmair, a journalist, Teege’s memoir both confronts historical conundrums about race, reconciliation and responsibility for the past, and offers glimpses of very contemporary questions about the contours of German identity. Her earnest reckoning with family and national history can inspire us all to reflect on what it means to be implicated in histories of racial violence, even those we have not participated in directly.
Recent releases provide valuable lessons ahead of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s national commemoration for victims of Hitler’s Jewish genocide
JTA — From Anne Frank’s diary to Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” books about the Holocaust remain some of the most powerful and well-known pieces of literature published in the past century. Books have the power to educate about the Shoah’s unimaginable horrors and bring to life the stories of its victims, as well as unearth hidden details about wartime crimes.
Ahead of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, JTA reached out to Jewish studies scholars across the country seeking their recommendations on recently published books dealing with the Holocaust. Their picks, all published in the past three years, include an investigation into the 1941 massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne (two scholars recommended the same book on that topic), a critical examination of theories trying to explain the Holocaust, and a look at how Adolf Hitler saw Islam as a religion that could be exploited for anti-Semitic purposes.
They Were Like Family to Me: Stories (Scribner, 2016) By Helen Maryles Shankman
Jeremy Dauber, director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, writes:
Writing literature about the Holocaust is many things, but it is never easy; and writing Holocaust literature in the vein of magic realism is more difficult yet. It risks taking the great horror of the 20th century and rendering it ungrounded, imaginative, even — God forbid — whimsically slight. But when a skillful writer pulls it off — David Grossman, for example, and now Shankman — the fantastic casts illuminating and terrible light on the dark shadows of the history of the war against the Jews. The stories in her collection are by no means factual in all respects. But they contain unmistakable truth.
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) By Anna Bikont
Joshua Zimmerman, professorial chair in Holocaust studies and East European Jewish history, and associate professor of history at Yeshiva University, writes:
This book, a winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, was written by a Polish journalist who discovered she was Jewish in her 30s and became deeply engaged in the topic of Polish-Jewish relations. After Jan T. Gross’ controversial book “Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland” (2000) proved that the local Poles — not the Germans — committed the massive pogrom in that town in July 1941, Bikont went to Jedwabne and its surroundings, interviewing eyewitnesses to the crime in the years 2000 to 2003, shedding new light on the character of the perpetrators, bystanders and the intricate way the crime was concealed for 50 years after the Holocaust. It is written in the form of a journal of the author’s travels and conversations with people.
Barbara Grossman, professor of drama at Tufts University and former US Holocaust Memorial Council board member, also recommended Bikont’s book. She writes:
I first read about the Jedwabne massacre in Gross’s book and still remember being riveted by the cover image of a barn engulfed in flames. Perhaps because my paternal grandfather was from Łomża, Poland — a city relatively near Jedwabne — I felt a particular connection to this atrocity, as well as gratitude to him for leaving the country years before the Holocaust. I directed Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s “Our Class,” a play loosely based on the events in Jedwabne, at Tufts in 2012, and remain fascinated by this story of greed, treachery and cruelty, a horrific crime in which as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women and children perished. Bikont’s magnificent work of investigative journalism details her meticulous reconstruction of the massacre and its subsequent decades-long coverup. It is a sobering and compelling account of anti-Semitism, denial and isolated acts of heroism.
The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015) By Lisa Moses Leff
Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, writes:
This award-winning book recounts the amazing story of Zosa Szajkowski, the scholar who rescued archives that might otherwise have been lost in the Holocaust. Szajkowski wrote numerous books and articles, but was also a known archive thief, caught red handed stealing valuable papers from the New York Public Library. Leff’s meticulous account reads like a thriller, yet conveys invaluable information concerning the fate of Jewish archives during and after the Shoah, and why removal of archives from their original home matters. Brandeis University and my late father, Bible scholar Nahum Sarna, play bit parts in this story. I remember Szajkowski, too; in fact, I took a class with him as a Brandeis undergraduate. He told lots of stories in class about his archival experiences during and after World War II, but it was only after reading Leff’s wonderful book that I understood “the rest of the story.”
Why? Explaining the Holocaust (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) By Peter Hayes
David Engel, professor of Holocaust studies and chair of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, writes:
I recommend this book for a lucid, well-crafted introduction to the history of the Holocaust. Unlike most works on the Holocaust written for a general audience, which tend to emphasize how the Holocaust was carried out and experienced, Hayes’ book concentrates, as its title suggests, on helping readers to understand why the Holocaust occurred when it did, where it did, in the manner it did and with the results it produced. It offers readers a window onto how historians go about finding answers to these questions, why some answers turn out to be more compelling than others and how new evidence can change understanding.
Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) Edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner
Omer Bartov, professor of European history and German studies at Brown University, writes:
This book comes out a quarter of a century after the publication of Saul Friedlander’s crucial edited volume, “Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution” (1992), which had challenged the conventional discourse on the mass murder of the Jews and critiqued its popular representation. The current volume attempts to grapple with the wider impact of Holocaust scholarship, fiction and representation in the intervening period. It includes fascinating essays on new modes of narrating the Shoah, the insights provided by the “spatial turn” on research and understanding of the event and the politics of exceptionality, especially the contextualization of the Holocaust within the larger framework of modern genocide. As such, it enables readers to understand both the ongoing presence of the Holocaust in our present culture and the different ways in which it has come to be understood in the early 21st century.
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Belknap Press, 2014) By David Motadel
Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, writes:
This is a major work of scholarship, examining the various ways the Nazis fostered a relationship with Muslims both before the war and especially during the war. Jeffrey Herf wrote a book a bit earlier, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” detailing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda sent, in Arabic translation, to North African Muslims, and Motadel expands the range of influence: that Hitler understood Islam as a warrior religion that could be exploited for propaganda efforts and to serve in both the Wehrmacht and the SS. The indoctrination of Muslims with Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda may well have had effects lasting long past the end of the war, a topic that deserves additional attention.
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past (The Experiment, 2015) By Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair
Michael Rothberg, professor of English and comparative literature and chair in Holocaust studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes:
Teege’s memoir, published in German in 2013 and translated into English in 2015, is a fascinating contribution to the discussion of the ongoing impact of the Holocaust over multiple generations. When she was in her late 30s, Teege discovered that her grandfather was a Nazi war criminal. And not just any Nazi: he was Amon Goeth, the commandant of Plaszów depicted in the film “Schindler’s List.” Because Teege is herself a black German woman — the daughter of a Nigerian father and a white German mother who was herself the daughter of Goeth’s mistress — her story takes on additional resonance. Intercut with contextualizing passages by Sellmair, a journalist, Teege’s memoir both confronts historical conundrums about race, reconciliation and responsibility for the past, and offers glimpses of very contemporary questions about the contours of German identity. Her earnest reckoning with family and national history can inspire us all to reflect on what it means to be implicated in histories of racial violence, even those we have not participated in directly.
January 15, 2017
They Were Like Family To Me (originally In the Land of Armadillos) is a finalist for The Story Prize!
Ohmigod! My book, They Were Like Family to Me, originally published as In the Land of Armadillos, has been selected as a finalist for The Story Prize! HAPPY DANCE!!!
Great bouquets of thanks to all the readers who have loved and reviewed this book. So much author love!
To read the press release, click the link:
http://thestoryprize.org/announcements-1/
Great bouquets of thanks to all the readers who have loved and reviewed this book. So much author love!
To read the press release, click the link:
http://thestoryprize.org/announcements-1/
November 3, 2016
Ten Great World War ll Novels to Read This Fall
Originally published on the BookBub blog.
This is a guest post by Helen Maryles Shankman. Shankman’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light and the World War II story collection, They Were Like Family to Me. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
This is a personal and quirky list of great World War II novels. Some tell their stories with lyrical language, others with savage humor, but each one speaks in a distinct and compelling voice. Taken together, these books describe the war from many sides and many angles.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Liesel Meminger, a scrappy, disadvantaged little girl growing up in Nazi Germany, learns about the many faces of love while also learning how to read. A Jew in Germany learns that not all Germans want him dead. An ordinary man stands up against an evil regime. A woman with a sharp tongue can also be a loving mother and a hero. Take your pick of storylines in this astonishing book; they’re all beautifully written and realized. Zusak remembers exactly what if feels like to be a kid, playing soccer in the street until suppertime — and writes like the love child of Gunter Grass and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum
It is as if Gunter Grass reinvented language and storytelling to describe the landscape of World War II Germany. A precocious little boy, when faced with the growing horror that is National Socialism, decides not to grow up, and remains a mute three-year-old (except for drumming on his tin drum) for the duration of the war. This brilliant semi-autobiographical novel — part poem, part allegory, and part history — is a sharp inside look at the insanity of the Nazi years in Germany through the prism of magical realism. Even in translation, it is sheer poetry, with passages that make you catch your breath in wonder, in recognition, in horror, and in tears.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Chabon’s novel presents World War II through the eyes of two young Jewish men in New York City. Joe, an artist and magician, arrives from Nazi-occupied Prague (In a coffin! With a golem!), and moves in with his cousin Sammy in Brooklyn. Upon discovering that Joe is an artist, Sammy recruits him to create a superhero comic book. But what really consumes Joe is trying to get his family out of Europe. This novel — a story of art, writing, World War II, the Holocaust, love, family, prejudice, sexual identity, and comic books — won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The humor, the deceptively easygoing prose, the gorgeously real dialogue, the New York setting, and the heartbreak all made me want to jump out of my chair and applaud.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See
In the years leading up to World War II, Marie-Laure LeBlanc grows up blind but beloved in Paris, where her devoted father teaches her that even though she is blind, that doesn’t mean she is helpless. Werner Pfennig grows up a penniless orphan in a grim German mining town, doomed to spend his life in the mines that killed his father, until the Nazis notice he has a gift with radio circuits. The story moves back and forth in time, from the present, where Marie-Laure’s house is moments away from being bombed and Werner is trapped in the rubble of a hotel, to the past, where we watch as two children are molded into the people they become — one a resistance fighter, the other struggling to defeat his troubled conscience. And the prose — oh, the prose — it is precise, light, lush, humorous, luminous, gentle, and shattering.
The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart
The Last of the Just
Beginning with the massacre of the Jews of York in 1185, in every generation, a Levy is born to be a Lamed Vovnik, one of the legendary 36 righteous men who take the suffering of the entire world onto their shoulders. We follow the Levys through the next eight centuries of Jewish history, illuminating the history of anti-Semitism and the Jewish European experience, finally settling in Poland. The plot abounds with love stories and wry humor, with lovingly drawn settings, characters, and gently comical descriptions of Jewish village life. In the 20th century we meet little Ernie Levy, the Last of the Just, whose family moves to France just in time for the Holocaust. This is a book to treasure. The winner of the 1959 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest award, it is as wonderful in English as it was in the original French. I dissolve into tears every time I read the last page.
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
A masterpiece from the Soviet perspective of the war, Life and Fate weaves together plot lines that take place in Stalingrad, in prison camps, on battlefields, on airfields, in big cities and small towns, and in Treblinka. The cast of characters — Soviet pilots, scientists, political officers, lovers, Jews terrified of both the Nazis and the growing anti-Semitism in their own society, courageous old women, and frightened soldiers — are players in a uniquely tragic situation. They are fighting against Hitler, and in dread of Stalin. Grossman was a war correspondent for Red Star, the Soviet military paper, so the section that takes place in Stalingrad feels eerily real. That this book exists at all is a miracle: the manuscript was “arrested” by the KGB in 1960 and destroyed. Fortunately, a single copy was smuggled out of Russia in 1974.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Every Man Dies Alone
After the death in combat of their only son, Otto and Anna Quangel, an ordinary working class couple living in Berlin, begin a surreptitious campaign of rebellion. They drop postcards with treasonous messages written on them in the corridors of busy buildings. They urge their fellow citizens to slow down production, to think for themselves, to realize that their children are dying for nothing. The tapestry of interwoven stories shows how the Nazi machine persecuted even ordinary Germans. With the Quangels as its moral center, it brings together a pair of innocent lovers, some small-time grifters, a famous actor, a mail carrier, and a duty-bound detective who is doing his job in bringing criminals to justice, until he realizes that justice doesn’t exist anymore. Hans Fallada, a successful pre-war German novelist, wrote this powerful novel in 24 days in 1947.
City of Thieves by David Benioff
City of Thieves
A World War II bromance set in the Soviet Union, City of Thieves is written by David Benioff, co-creator of the wildly popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Kolya, a handsome, charming Russian soldier, and Lev, the impoverished adolescent son of an executed Jewish poet, are thrown into the same jail cell for minor crimes. A KGB colonel gives them a chance at redemption, but it is an impossible mission: they must return with a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake, or face execution. This odd couple sets off through starving, besieged Leningrad and the surrounding countryside, meeting partisans, Nazis, and cannibals, and talking a great deal about how to seduce a girl. By turns, City of Thieves is hilarious, devastating, profoundly moving, and utterly contemporary.
Dark Star by Alan Furst
Dark Star
Andre Szara is a respected Russian journalist working for Pravda and occasionally doing a little favor for the State when he is recruited to be deputy director of a Paris spy network. A survivor of pogroms, the Russian Pale, and Stalin’s purges, he is wry and witty, dashing and romantic, cynical and softhearted. With the effortless grace of Furst’s language, his amazing grasp of history, and an astounding vocabulary of period detail, he conjures it all to quivering life. When you read this book, you will know how it feels to be hunted by the NKVD, what it is like to be a Jew in Berlin on Kristallnacht, how to react if a Gestapo officer leans over to look at you, and of course, how to run an agent. I love all of Alan Furst’s literary, elegant World War II thrillers, but this one is my favorite.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day
Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, finds he needs to add someone to his staff. Precisely, he wants to add a certain Miss Kenton, who worked there as housekeeper 20 years earlier. As Stevens journeys through the quaint little English towns that lie between Darlington House and Miss Kenton, his memories take him back to World War II, when he worked for Lord Darlington, arranging dinners and secret conferences with politicians and diplomats. The twist? Darlington is a German sympathizer, trying to make peace with a people he feels were given a bad deal at Versailles. It is during casually recounted dialogue with other characters that you find out the real events of the story, and the tragic consequences that follow — a raw and stunning example of the unreliable narrator.
What World War II novels do you recommend? Share in the comments!
This is a guest post by Helen Maryles Shankman. Shankman’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light and the World War II story collection, They Were Like Family to Me. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
This is a personal and quirky list of great World War II novels. Some tell their stories with lyrical language, others with savage humor, but each one speaks in a distinct and compelling voice. Taken together, these books describe the war from many sides and many angles.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Book Thief
Liesel Meminger, a scrappy, disadvantaged little girl growing up in Nazi Germany, learns about the many faces of love while also learning how to read. A Jew in Germany learns that not all Germans want him dead. An ordinary man stands up against an evil regime. A woman with a sharp tongue can also be a loving mother and a hero. Take your pick of storylines in this astonishing book; they’re all beautifully written and realized. Zusak remembers exactly what if feels like to be a kid, playing soccer in the street until suppertime — and writes like the love child of Gunter Grass and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum
It is as if Gunter Grass reinvented language and storytelling to describe the landscape of World War II Germany. A precocious little boy, when faced with the growing horror that is National Socialism, decides not to grow up, and remains a mute three-year-old (except for drumming on his tin drum) for the duration of the war. This brilliant semi-autobiographical novel — part poem, part allegory, and part history — is a sharp inside look at the insanity of the Nazi years in Germany through the prism of magical realism. Even in translation, it is sheer poetry, with passages that make you catch your breath in wonder, in recognition, in horror, and in tears.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Chabon’s novel presents World War II through the eyes of two young Jewish men in New York City. Joe, an artist and magician, arrives from Nazi-occupied Prague (In a coffin! With a golem!), and moves in with his cousin Sammy in Brooklyn. Upon discovering that Joe is an artist, Sammy recruits him to create a superhero comic book. But what really consumes Joe is trying to get his family out of Europe. This novel — a story of art, writing, World War II, the Holocaust, love, family, prejudice, sexual identity, and comic books — won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The humor, the deceptively easygoing prose, the gorgeously real dialogue, the New York setting, and the heartbreak all made me want to jump out of my chair and applaud.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See
In the years leading up to World War II, Marie-Laure LeBlanc grows up blind but beloved in Paris, where her devoted father teaches her that even though she is blind, that doesn’t mean she is helpless. Werner Pfennig grows up a penniless orphan in a grim German mining town, doomed to spend his life in the mines that killed his father, until the Nazis notice he has a gift with radio circuits. The story moves back and forth in time, from the present, where Marie-Laure’s house is moments away from being bombed and Werner is trapped in the rubble of a hotel, to the past, where we watch as two children are molded into the people they become — one a resistance fighter, the other struggling to defeat his troubled conscience. And the prose — oh, the prose — it is precise, light, lush, humorous, luminous, gentle, and shattering.
The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart
The Last of the Just
Beginning with the massacre of the Jews of York in 1185, in every generation, a Levy is born to be a Lamed Vovnik, one of the legendary 36 righteous men who take the suffering of the entire world onto their shoulders. We follow the Levys through the next eight centuries of Jewish history, illuminating the history of anti-Semitism and the Jewish European experience, finally settling in Poland. The plot abounds with love stories and wry humor, with lovingly drawn settings, characters, and gently comical descriptions of Jewish village life. In the 20th century we meet little Ernie Levy, the Last of the Just, whose family moves to France just in time for the Holocaust. This is a book to treasure. The winner of the 1959 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest award, it is as wonderful in English as it was in the original French. I dissolve into tears every time I read the last page.
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
A masterpiece from the Soviet perspective of the war, Life and Fate weaves together plot lines that take place in Stalingrad, in prison camps, on battlefields, on airfields, in big cities and small towns, and in Treblinka. The cast of characters — Soviet pilots, scientists, political officers, lovers, Jews terrified of both the Nazis and the growing anti-Semitism in their own society, courageous old women, and frightened soldiers — are players in a uniquely tragic situation. They are fighting against Hitler, and in dread of Stalin. Grossman was a war correspondent for Red Star, the Soviet military paper, so the section that takes place in Stalingrad feels eerily real. That this book exists at all is a miracle: the manuscript was “arrested” by the KGB in 1960 and destroyed. Fortunately, a single copy was smuggled out of Russia in 1974.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Every Man Dies Alone
After the death in combat of their only son, Otto and Anna Quangel, an ordinary working class couple living in Berlin, begin a surreptitious campaign of rebellion. They drop postcards with treasonous messages written on them in the corridors of busy buildings. They urge their fellow citizens to slow down production, to think for themselves, to realize that their children are dying for nothing. The tapestry of interwoven stories shows how the Nazi machine persecuted even ordinary Germans. With the Quangels as its moral center, it brings together a pair of innocent lovers, some small-time grifters, a famous actor, a mail carrier, and a duty-bound detective who is doing his job in bringing criminals to justice, until he realizes that justice doesn’t exist anymore. Hans Fallada, a successful pre-war German novelist, wrote this powerful novel in 24 days in 1947.
City of Thieves by David Benioff
City of Thieves
A World War II bromance set in the Soviet Union, City of Thieves is written by David Benioff, co-creator of the wildly popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Kolya, a handsome, charming Russian soldier, and Lev, the impoverished adolescent son of an executed Jewish poet, are thrown into the same jail cell for minor crimes. A KGB colonel gives them a chance at redemption, but it is an impossible mission: they must return with a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake, or face execution. This odd couple sets off through starving, besieged Leningrad and the surrounding countryside, meeting partisans, Nazis, and cannibals, and talking a great deal about how to seduce a girl. By turns, City of Thieves is hilarious, devastating, profoundly moving, and utterly contemporary.
Dark Star by Alan Furst
Dark Star
Andre Szara is a respected Russian journalist working for Pravda and occasionally doing a little favor for the State when he is recruited to be deputy director of a Paris spy network. A survivor of pogroms, the Russian Pale, and Stalin’s purges, he is wry and witty, dashing and romantic, cynical and softhearted. With the effortless grace of Furst’s language, his amazing grasp of history, and an astounding vocabulary of period detail, he conjures it all to quivering life. When you read this book, you will know how it feels to be hunted by the NKVD, what it is like to be a Jew in Berlin on Kristallnacht, how to react if a Gestapo officer leans over to look at you, and of course, how to run an agent. I love all of Alan Furst’s literary, elegant World War II thrillers, but this one is my favorite.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day
Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, finds he needs to add someone to his staff. Precisely, he wants to add a certain Miss Kenton, who worked there as housekeeper 20 years earlier. As Stevens journeys through the quaint little English towns that lie between Darlington House and Miss Kenton, his memories take him back to World War II, when he worked for Lord Darlington, arranging dinners and secret conferences with politicians and diplomats. The twist? Darlington is a German sympathizer, trying to make peace with a people he feels were given a bad deal at Versailles. It is during casually recounted dialogue with other characters that you find out the real events of the story, and the tragic consequences that follow — a raw and stunning example of the unreliable narrator.
What World War II novels do you recommend? Share in the comments!
July 27, 2016
Discussion Questions for "They Were Like Family To Me"
Is your book club reading They Were Like Family to Me? Then this is for you! Here are some great discussion questions to get it rolling, courtesy of Scribner.
They Were Like Family to Me: Stories
1. The first passage of the book is a love letter that a man writes to his wife. It is followed by an entry in his diary, where he philosophizes about his former job in the Einsatzgruppen, shooting women and children. What did it feel like when you first realized that a Nazi officer was writing the love letter?
2. Knowing that Max is a former member of the Einsatzgruppen, “a cold-blooded killing machine,” how does that complicate our feelings about him when he begins to care for Toby? How does it complicate our ideas of good and evil, of villains and the righteous?
3. The first story, “In the Land of Armadillos,” contains short summaries of Toby Rey’s books. Max, his protector and admirer, doesn’t understand that Toby’s illustrated fables are thinly veiled metaphors. What do you think Toby’s story about Bianca the blue cockatoo and Aramis the armadillo means to say? What about the story Toby summarizes for Max, “The Thief of Yesterday and Tomorrow?”
4. Some of the stories feature characters typically despised for their acts in World War 2; Nazi officers, and Poles who collaborated with the enemy. Readers expect German characters to be evil, and Polish characters to turn their backs on their Jewish neighbors. In which stories are our expectations challenged?
5. Discuss how the eight stories are linked. Which characters appear in more than one story? Can you name them—and in which other stories you find them? Which event—or events—is shown from different points of view?
6. The overwhelming majority of people in Poland refused to help Jews during World War II. Why do you think that is?
7. At one point in the title story, “They Were Like Family to Me,” Stefan, who is now an old man, calmly describes a murder he committed during the war, while working for a German killing squad. Erich reacts in horror, and Stefan lashes out at him. “What else could I do?” he said roughly. “You couldn’t just say no. I had to think about myself, my father’s position. What would you have done?” What do you think you might do under the same circumstances? Do you think people today would act differently?
8. Though many of the events in the stories are based on events related by the author’s parents, the stories feature elements of magical realism—sometimes less, as in “They Were Like Family to Me,” and “The Golem of Zukow,” and sometimes more, as in “The Partizans” and “The Messiah.” Translated into art, magical realism would be the paintings of Marc Chagall. Some other Jewish writers working in this genre are Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Meir Shalev and David Grossman. Do you enjoy magical realism in literature? Do you think magical realism is appropriate when writing about the Holocaust?
9. Shankman wrote that she was uncomfortable humanizing Max, who has participated in some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. She explains, “Once we label someone a monster, we let him off the hook for the evil he commits. After all, monsters have no control over themselves. But if they’re human—if they have wives, children, jobs, hobbies, indigestion, ordinary workplace gripes—then they are just like us.” In some of the stories, Shankman explores humanity in people whose actions brand them as evil. How does that make you feel when you read their stories?
10. Pavel Walczak, in “The Jew Hater,” is the biggest anti-Semite in the district. He has given the Nazis the names of neighbors who are hiding Jews, and tells them where to find Jews hiding in the forest. Yet he risks his life for Reina, the little Jewish girl left with him by partizans. Do you think Pavel deserves to be redeemed? Is it possible to forgive someone who has committed such terrible crimes if they change their ways?
11. Knowing that Pavel is “The Jew Hater,” how does the title of the story complicate our ideas of good and bad, of villains and the righteous?
12. At the beginning of the story, “The Golem of Zukow,” Shayna doesn't believe rumors about German atrocities, and doesn’t believe in her brother Hersh’s ghost stories, folktales and fables, either. Do you think she feels the same way by the end of the story? Was Yossel really a Golem? And what does this tell us about the power of stories?
13. The protagonist of “A Decent Man,” Commandant Willy Reinhart, is seen by the Jews as “A good German” and by his fellow Germans as a “Jew lover.” Time and again, he smooth-talks Nazi officers into leaving his Jewish workers alone, even as Jews are swiftly being eradicated from neighboring towns. At the same time, he’s enjoying all the privileges and riches that come with being a German in Nazi-occupied Poland. How do you see Willy Reinhart? Is he a hero or a murderer? A failed Schindler, or a selfish, greedy opportunist?
14. Hersh Mirsky, from “The Golem of Zukow,” tells Commandant Willy Reinhart a folk tale about a midwife who delivers a demon’s baby: “One night, a midwife was called to deliver a demon’s baby. An incredible coincidence, the demon’s wife turned out to be a stray tabby cat the midwife had been feeding. Though the demon’s cave sparkled with gold and jewels, the cat advised the frightened woman not to accept any food or presents no matter how hard she was pressed. Taking the cat’s advice, she was led safely home. Upon waking the next morning, she found piles of treasure heaped in every corner.” How does this tale resonate in “A Decent Man?”
15. Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the Adampol forced labor camp, and Haskel Soroka, his saddlemaker, are friends. Do you think it would have been possible for a German and a Jew to be friends in wartime Poland?
16. Early in “A Decent Man,” Reinhart witnesses a mass shooting. This is the first of many turning points in the arc of his story. Can you think of some other turning points?
17. Soroka the Saddlemaker is forced to make a choice no parent should have to make. When seven-year-old Reina is lost in the forest, he realizes that the family cannot go back to search for her, and that they must continue on to find a place to hide. Can you think of some other characters in the book who are forced to make difficult choices?
18. There are many acts of resistance throughout the stories, from small to monumental, by characters who are German, Polish and Jewish. Can you name some of them? What do you think the author wants us to take away from this?
19. Max and Hackendahl and Toby in “In the Land of Armadillos,” Pavel and Hahnemeier and Marina in “The Jew Hater,” the old man and the priest in “They Were Like Family to Me,” Shua from “The Messiah,” Zev Heller in “The Partizans,” Yossel in “The Golem of Zukow.” Discuss what happened to these characters in the past, and how it affects their actions in the present.
20. In “1987,” the story which serves as an epilogue, Julia, who is American, winces every time Lukas, who is German, attempts to make conversation. “She cringed. It didn’t matter that he was disconcertingly handsome, with green eyes fringed just now with long damp black lashes, or that he was pleasingly proportioned and dressed entirely in bohemian black. Every time he opened his mouth, he sounded like a Nazi.” Do you think this is a common reaction? Have you ever met anyone from Germany?
21. Ninety percent of Polish Jewry was murdered during World War 2. At the same time, there were more Righteous Gentiles in Poland than in any other country, by a wide margin. Why do you think that courage, compassion and responsibility were more present in Poland than in any other German-occupied country?
22. In “They Were Like Family to Me,” the priest tells Erich that he is searching for sites where massacres were committed because it is the only way he can think of to atone for his father. The children of Nazis divide into two groups; those who defend their fathers and say they were innocent, and those who despise their fathers’ memory and experience crushing guilt. Often, Holocaust survivors didn’t tell their children about their war experiences. German soldiers who worked in concentration camps or in the Einsatzgruppen didn’t tell their families what they did during the war, either. It’s as if both sides wanted to forget, to just move on. What do you think? Is it important for victims and perpetrators to remember and discuss their experiences? Why?
23. How does Poland figure as a character in the story? What elements of the Polish countryside, and of Polish folklore, appear throughout the book?
24. Shankman has said that she was concerned that people were experiencing “Holocaust overload,” that readers might feel that they already know everything there is to know about the subject. “As an author, that’s where my challenge lay. I needed to make people feel it, for the first time, all over again.” Do you think she was successful?
To anyone using these questions, I would love to hear what you think! Please post them as part of your review on Amazon, or here on GR.
They Were Like Family to Me: Stories
1. The first passage of the book is a love letter that a man writes to his wife. It is followed by an entry in his diary, where he philosophizes about his former job in the Einsatzgruppen, shooting women and children. What did it feel like when you first realized that a Nazi officer was writing the love letter?
2. Knowing that Max is a former member of the Einsatzgruppen, “a cold-blooded killing machine,” how does that complicate our feelings about him when he begins to care for Toby? How does it complicate our ideas of good and evil, of villains and the righteous?
3. The first story, “In the Land of Armadillos,” contains short summaries of Toby Rey’s books. Max, his protector and admirer, doesn’t understand that Toby’s illustrated fables are thinly veiled metaphors. What do you think Toby’s story about Bianca the blue cockatoo and Aramis the armadillo means to say? What about the story Toby summarizes for Max, “The Thief of Yesterday and Tomorrow?”
4. Some of the stories feature characters typically despised for their acts in World War 2; Nazi officers, and Poles who collaborated with the enemy. Readers expect German characters to be evil, and Polish characters to turn their backs on their Jewish neighbors. In which stories are our expectations challenged?
5. Discuss how the eight stories are linked. Which characters appear in more than one story? Can you name them—and in which other stories you find them? Which event—or events—is shown from different points of view?
6. The overwhelming majority of people in Poland refused to help Jews during World War II. Why do you think that is?
7. At one point in the title story, “They Were Like Family to Me,” Stefan, who is now an old man, calmly describes a murder he committed during the war, while working for a German killing squad. Erich reacts in horror, and Stefan lashes out at him. “What else could I do?” he said roughly. “You couldn’t just say no. I had to think about myself, my father’s position. What would you have done?” What do you think you might do under the same circumstances? Do you think people today would act differently?
8. Though many of the events in the stories are based on events related by the author’s parents, the stories feature elements of magical realism—sometimes less, as in “They Were Like Family to Me,” and “The Golem of Zukow,” and sometimes more, as in “The Partizans” and “The Messiah.” Translated into art, magical realism would be the paintings of Marc Chagall. Some other Jewish writers working in this genre are Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Meir Shalev and David Grossman. Do you enjoy magical realism in literature? Do you think magical realism is appropriate when writing about the Holocaust?
9. Shankman wrote that she was uncomfortable humanizing Max, who has participated in some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. She explains, “Once we label someone a monster, we let him off the hook for the evil he commits. After all, monsters have no control over themselves. But if they’re human—if they have wives, children, jobs, hobbies, indigestion, ordinary workplace gripes—then they are just like us.” In some of the stories, Shankman explores humanity in people whose actions brand them as evil. How does that make you feel when you read their stories?
10. Pavel Walczak, in “The Jew Hater,” is the biggest anti-Semite in the district. He has given the Nazis the names of neighbors who are hiding Jews, and tells them where to find Jews hiding in the forest. Yet he risks his life for Reina, the little Jewish girl left with him by partizans. Do you think Pavel deserves to be redeemed? Is it possible to forgive someone who has committed such terrible crimes if they change their ways?
11. Knowing that Pavel is “The Jew Hater,” how does the title of the story complicate our ideas of good and bad, of villains and the righteous?
12. At the beginning of the story, “The Golem of Zukow,” Shayna doesn't believe rumors about German atrocities, and doesn’t believe in her brother Hersh’s ghost stories, folktales and fables, either. Do you think she feels the same way by the end of the story? Was Yossel really a Golem? And what does this tell us about the power of stories?
13. The protagonist of “A Decent Man,” Commandant Willy Reinhart, is seen by the Jews as “A good German” and by his fellow Germans as a “Jew lover.” Time and again, he smooth-talks Nazi officers into leaving his Jewish workers alone, even as Jews are swiftly being eradicated from neighboring towns. At the same time, he’s enjoying all the privileges and riches that come with being a German in Nazi-occupied Poland. How do you see Willy Reinhart? Is he a hero or a murderer? A failed Schindler, or a selfish, greedy opportunist?
14. Hersh Mirsky, from “The Golem of Zukow,” tells Commandant Willy Reinhart a folk tale about a midwife who delivers a demon’s baby: “One night, a midwife was called to deliver a demon’s baby. An incredible coincidence, the demon’s wife turned out to be a stray tabby cat the midwife had been feeding. Though the demon’s cave sparkled with gold and jewels, the cat advised the frightened woman not to accept any food or presents no matter how hard she was pressed. Taking the cat’s advice, she was led safely home. Upon waking the next morning, she found piles of treasure heaped in every corner.” How does this tale resonate in “A Decent Man?”
15. Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the Adampol forced labor camp, and Haskel Soroka, his saddlemaker, are friends. Do you think it would have been possible for a German and a Jew to be friends in wartime Poland?
16. Early in “A Decent Man,” Reinhart witnesses a mass shooting. This is the first of many turning points in the arc of his story. Can you think of some other turning points?
17. Soroka the Saddlemaker is forced to make a choice no parent should have to make. When seven-year-old Reina is lost in the forest, he realizes that the family cannot go back to search for her, and that they must continue on to find a place to hide. Can you think of some other characters in the book who are forced to make difficult choices?
18. There are many acts of resistance throughout the stories, from small to monumental, by characters who are German, Polish and Jewish. Can you name some of them? What do you think the author wants us to take away from this?
19. Max and Hackendahl and Toby in “In the Land of Armadillos,” Pavel and Hahnemeier and Marina in “The Jew Hater,” the old man and the priest in “They Were Like Family to Me,” Shua from “The Messiah,” Zev Heller in “The Partizans,” Yossel in “The Golem of Zukow.” Discuss what happened to these characters in the past, and how it affects their actions in the present.
20. In “1987,” the story which serves as an epilogue, Julia, who is American, winces every time Lukas, who is German, attempts to make conversation. “She cringed. It didn’t matter that he was disconcertingly handsome, with green eyes fringed just now with long damp black lashes, or that he was pleasingly proportioned and dressed entirely in bohemian black. Every time he opened his mouth, he sounded like a Nazi.” Do you think this is a common reaction? Have you ever met anyone from Germany?
21. Ninety percent of Polish Jewry was murdered during World War 2. At the same time, there were more Righteous Gentiles in Poland than in any other country, by a wide margin. Why do you think that courage, compassion and responsibility were more present in Poland than in any other German-occupied country?
22. In “They Were Like Family to Me,” the priest tells Erich that he is searching for sites where massacres were committed because it is the only way he can think of to atone for his father. The children of Nazis divide into two groups; those who defend their fathers and say they were innocent, and those who despise their fathers’ memory and experience crushing guilt. Often, Holocaust survivors didn’t tell their children about their war experiences. German soldiers who worked in concentration camps or in the Einsatzgruppen didn’t tell their families what they did during the war, either. It’s as if both sides wanted to forget, to just move on. What do you think? Is it important for victims and perpetrators to remember and discuss their experiences? Why?
23. How does Poland figure as a character in the story? What elements of the Polish countryside, and of Polish folklore, appear throughout the book?
24. Shankman has said that she was concerned that people were experiencing “Holocaust overload,” that readers might feel that they already know everything there is to know about the subject. “As an author, that’s where my challenge lay. I needed to make people feel it, for the first time, all over again.” Do you think she was successful?
To anyone using these questions, I would love to hear what you think! Please post them as part of your review on Amazon, or here on GR.
March 30, 2016
"In the Land of Armadillos" is available as an audiobook!
Hey, all--the audiobook for my book, In the Land of Armadillos, is out today, and the paperback is scheduled for October! The hardcover has a 4.61 rating after 94 ratings and reviews.
*A Spring 2016 Discover Great New Writers selection at Barnes & Noble*
A radiant debut collection of linked stories from a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, set in a German-occupied town in Poland, where tales of myth and folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion.
In the Land of Armadillos
*A Spring 2016 Discover Great New Writers selection at Barnes & Noble*
A radiant debut collection of linked stories from a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, set in a German-occupied town in Poland, where tales of myth and folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion.
In the Land of Armadillos
February 21, 2016
When a Picture Speaks a Thousand Words
This originally appeared on February 4, 2016, on Visiting Scribe at The Prosen People.
Early in 2012, some guy named Ben emailed me an invitation to join the beta version of his new site, Pinterest. He called it “a social catalogue.” In his email, he effused that he “couldn’t wait for me to join the community.”
What did that even mean? I sat on the invitation for a week. After poking around on various author sites, I discovered that Pinterest was a sort of online bulletin board, where you could “pin” pictures that you found while scouting the internet. I responded “yes” to Ben’s invitation, because I can always use one more way to waste time on the internet.
For another week, I did nothing. Sure, the “board” was nicely designed, and it was fun seeing my name in big letters up on the top. But the blank board sat there for weeks, staring at me in an accusatory way, before I pinned my first photo.
A character in my novel was wearing an evening gown. It was 1939, she was absolutely fabulous, and she happened to be a vampire. Of course, I’d been using Google for research, and though it was doubtlessly a miraculous tool, in order to refer to my inspiration photos I had to bookmark webpages or drag photos into document files—a time-consuming process taking up time storage on my desktop.
What the heck, I thought, let’s try this, and opened up Pinterest. In the search box, I typed the words Womens Fashion, 1930s. I typed Fashion Designers. I typed Ballgowns. I added Black.
And, oh, reader! The riches that unfurled before my eyes!
Dresses by Balenciaga, by Chanel, by Lanvin, by Schiaparelli, by Vionnet! Luscious confectionary creations in silk and velvet and jet beads, in lace and organza and satin and netting! To save it, all I had to do was click the red “Pin It” button on each photo, and presto, it appeared on my own personal online bulletin board. Overnight, Pinterest became my go-to program, as essential as Microsoft Word.
This was a pivotal moment in my writing. The ability to call up a trove of curated research photos, available on my phone, computer, or laptop, bestowed on me the power to bring realistic detail to my writing whether I was sitting at my desk in New Jersey, staying at a rustic campsite in Maryland, or visiting my parents in Chicago.
In the title story of In the Land of Armadillos, inspired by events in the life of Bruno Schulz, Sturmbannfuhrer Max Haas, formerly of the Einsatzgruppen, takes it upon himself to protect the Jewish creator of his son’s favorite picture book. But Toby, the artist, doesn’t want to be protected: Toby wishes he was dead. To his own infinite astonishment, Max finds himself trying to restore the artist’s will to live.
I knew exactly what Max would look like: average, ordinary, everyman. But when I began to describe his SS uniform, I was stumped. Shiny black boots, I thought. A red swastika armband. After that, I was lost.
I opened up Pinterest and typed Nazi uniforms.
Still photos from Schindler’s List came up; the terror-inspiring, Hugo Boss-designed tunics of the Third Reich. But so did something else, infinitely stranger: jaunty, sporty fashion illustrations from a 1937 Nazi Party handbook. Here were the infamous SS officer uniforms I sought, with belts and braid and silver lightning pips and skull badges on the caps; but also gym uniforms, security guard uniforms, the League for German Girls uniforms, uniforms for sailors and hikers and children and waiters, all briskly sketched on attractive German citizens, striding smartly through imaginary fields, or standing about looking valiant and visionary. These weren’t the brutal, baby-killing Nazis of our collective postwar memory. These drawings were the way the Nazis saw themselves: healthy, wholesome, resolute, capable.
Upon seeing these drawings, something clicked inside my head. Max is a monster, a cold-hearted mass murderer, but the key to his character is that he doesn’t know it. He sees himself as a soldier and a family man--one who is assigned some unpleasant duties in the course of defending the world against the Communist threat.
The fashion illustrations breathed the same delusional air. And with that, the story caught fire.
Helen Maryles Shankman’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
Early in 2012, some guy named Ben emailed me an invitation to join the beta version of his new site, Pinterest. He called it “a social catalogue.” In his email, he effused that he “couldn’t wait for me to join the community.”
What did that even mean? I sat on the invitation for a week. After poking around on various author sites, I discovered that Pinterest was a sort of online bulletin board, where you could “pin” pictures that you found while scouting the internet. I responded “yes” to Ben’s invitation, because I can always use one more way to waste time on the internet.
For another week, I did nothing. Sure, the “board” was nicely designed, and it was fun seeing my name in big letters up on the top. But the blank board sat there for weeks, staring at me in an accusatory way, before I pinned my first photo.
A character in my novel was wearing an evening gown. It was 1939, she was absolutely fabulous, and she happened to be a vampire. Of course, I’d been using Google for research, and though it was doubtlessly a miraculous tool, in order to refer to my inspiration photos I had to bookmark webpages or drag photos into document files—a time-consuming process taking up time storage on my desktop.
What the heck, I thought, let’s try this, and opened up Pinterest. In the search box, I typed the words Womens Fashion, 1930s. I typed Fashion Designers. I typed Ballgowns. I added Black.
And, oh, reader! The riches that unfurled before my eyes!
Dresses by Balenciaga, by Chanel, by Lanvin, by Schiaparelli, by Vionnet! Luscious confectionary creations in silk and velvet and jet beads, in lace and organza and satin and netting! To save it, all I had to do was click the red “Pin It” button on each photo, and presto, it appeared on my own personal online bulletin board. Overnight, Pinterest became my go-to program, as essential as Microsoft Word.
This was a pivotal moment in my writing. The ability to call up a trove of curated research photos, available on my phone, computer, or laptop, bestowed on me the power to bring realistic detail to my writing whether I was sitting at my desk in New Jersey, staying at a rustic campsite in Maryland, or visiting my parents in Chicago.
In the title story of In the Land of Armadillos, inspired by events in the life of Bruno Schulz, Sturmbannfuhrer Max Haas, formerly of the Einsatzgruppen, takes it upon himself to protect the Jewish creator of his son’s favorite picture book. But Toby, the artist, doesn’t want to be protected: Toby wishes he was dead. To his own infinite astonishment, Max finds himself trying to restore the artist’s will to live.
I knew exactly what Max would look like: average, ordinary, everyman. But when I began to describe his SS uniform, I was stumped. Shiny black boots, I thought. A red swastika armband. After that, I was lost.
I opened up Pinterest and typed Nazi uniforms.
Still photos from Schindler’s List came up; the terror-inspiring, Hugo Boss-designed tunics of the Third Reich. But so did something else, infinitely stranger: jaunty, sporty fashion illustrations from a 1937 Nazi Party handbook. Here were the infamous SS officer uniforms I sought, with belts and braid and silver lightning pips and skull badges on the caps; but also gym uniforms, security guard uniforms, the League for German Girls uniforms, uniforms for sailors and hikers and children and waiters, all briskly sketched on attractive German citizens, striding smartly through imaginary fields, or standing about looking valiant and visionary. These weren’t the brutal, baby-killing Nazis of our collective postwar memory. These drawings were the way the Nazis saw themselves: healthy, wholesome, resolute, capable.
Upon seeing these drawings, something clicked inside my head. Max is a monster, a cold-hearted mass murderer, but the key to his character is that he doesn’t know it. He sees himself as a soldier and a family man--one who is assigned some unpleasant duties in the course of defending the world against the Communist threat.
The fashion illustrations breathed the same delusional air. And with that, the story caught fire.
Helen Maryles Shankman’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
February 12, 2016
Words Like Brustrokes (From the Barnes and Noble Review)
The booksellers who sit on our Discover Great New Writers selection committee can’t stop talking about Helen Maryles Shankman’s debut, In the Land of Armadillos. Set in Poland in 1942 at the height of the Nazis’ power, this haunting collection of linked short stories that reads like a novel blends folklore and history into a single unforgettable voice. Delusions and denial, hope and atonement co-exist in these finely-wrought narratives full of clever reveals. Shankman has a fine arts background, and her paintings have been displayed in numerous exhibitions in and around New York City, and we asked her to tell us about how she employs such different media to tell stories. — Miwa Messer
There are times I want to tell a story with a brush and a tube of paint. There are times I want to paint a palace with my words.
Plain, unadorned sentences function like the background in a painting, moving the story forward, framing, but not detracting from, the main action. Or they provide contrast to long, compound sentences heavy with lazily unfurling syllables and clauses.
Used another way, the stripped down sentence becomes a splash of bright color, riveting the reader’s attention with starkness and simplicity, like the yellow trousers on the doomed man in Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808.”
I work as an artist. But when I write, I still depend on the building blocks of art: color, texture, and composition. Color is description, the way sights and sounds and smells breathe life into a list of words. Texture is the nature of the writing itself; should I use dialogue or narrative in this passage? Exposition or summary? I think about where the highlights will go, and what I can hide in the shadows. I compose the narrative arc of the plot, and the path my characters will travel.
When I paint, my gaze roves restlessly over the surface of the canvas, checking the work in progress against my original sketches, scanning my reference photos for accuracy and detail. When I paint, my eyes are wide open.
But to write, I must close my eyes. Back I travel, through the inky black waters of memory, dredging up places and events and passions, trying to recall the way the air smelled of rain and electricity that day, or cigarettes and orange peels. Behind my eyelids I flicker through a slide show of remembered settings, or rekindle the sensation of a particular moment. Only with my eyes shut can I shuffle through emotions like they’re a pack of cards, deciding which one to play.
Painting is how I escape my demons. Writing means facing them down.
Originally, I planned to be an illustrator, to tell stories with the pictures I made. But eventually, I found that pictures weren’t enough. I needed words. Big words, small words, fancy words, dirty words, lyrical words, foreign words, words I could taste and words I could see, words that syncopated with music and rhythm, words that twirled off my tongue and ran through my fingers and fastened themselves to the page. It seemed as though I’d been running along the ground for years, flapping my wings the whole time. The day I began to write was the day I learned to fly.
There are times I want to tell a story with a brush and a tube of paint. There are times I want to paint a palace with my words.
Plain, unadorned sentences function like the background in a painting, moving the story forward, framing, but not detracting from, the main action. Or they provide contrast to long, compound sentences heavy with lazily unfurling syllables and clauses.
Used another way, the stripped down sentence becomes a splash of bright color, riveting the reader’s attention with starkness and simplicity, like the yellow trousers on the doomed man in Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808.”
I work as an artist. But when I write, I still depend on the building blocks of art: color, texture, and composition. Color is description, the way sights and sounds and smells breathe life into a list of words. Texture is the nature of the writing itself; should I use dialogue or narrative in this passage? Exposition or summary? I think about where the highlights will go, and what I can hide in the shadows. I compose the narrative arc of the plot, and the path my characters will travel.
When I paint, my gaze roves restlessly over the surface of the canvas, checking the work in progress against my original sketches, scanning my reference photos for accuracy and detail. When I paint, my eyes are wide open.
But to write, I must close my eyes. Back I travel, through the inky black waters of memory, dredging up places and events and passions, trying to recall the way the air smelled of rain and electricity that day, or cigarettes and orange peels. Behind my eyelids I flicker through a slide show of remembered settings, or rekindle the sensation of a particular moment. Only with my eyes shut can I shuffle through emotions like they’re a pack of cards, deciding which one to play.
Painting is how I escape my demons. Writing means facing them down.
Originally, I planned to be an illustrator, to tell stories with the pictures I made. But eventually, I found that pictures weren’t enough. I needed words. Big words, small words, fancy words, dirty words, lyrical words, foreign words, words I could taste and words I could see, words that syncopated with music and rhythm, words that twirled off my tongue and ran through my fingers and fastened themselves to the page. It seemed as though I’d been running along the ground for years, flapping my wings the whole time. The day I began to write was the day I learned to fly.
February 7, 2016
Trivializing the Holocaust
The story materialized in my head a few days before Halloween. A gang of creatures, half-human, half-animal, attack a party of SS men executing a group of Jews. I imagined a young Jewish girl stumbling over tree roots as German soldiers herded her toward a clearing in the Polish woods. I visualized a wolf standing upright, a lean, doglike head, tip-tilted gray eyes, muscular legs encased in the trousers of a Polish military uniform.
The story thumped home with a sense of rightness. Yes, this is good. Yes, this works. All the usual signs were there; the hair raising on the back of my neck, the butterflies flitting in my stomach.
But on its heels, this: Am I trivializing the Holocaust?
My parents are Polish Holocaust survivors. Growing up, I heard the stories of their survival again and again. How my mother hid as a shepherd girl with a Polish farmer. How a Polish neighbor boy who used to play at my father’s house discovered his bunker and betrayed it to the Nazis. How my grandfather made saddles, and how the German he worked for sent a wagon to bring Zaydie and his children to his castle the day before a terrible Aktzia consumed the town.
There are so many books dedicated to Holocaust literature that readers experience a kind of overload. Yes, it was tragic, they say. Yes, millions were murdered. They’ve read Anne Frank. They’ve read Night. They’ve read Maus. They know. They know.
That’s where the challenge lay. What was different about my stories? How was I going to make World War II new again?
The facts of the catastrophe—the obsessive focus on enslavement and extermination of a peaceful civilian population, nightmarish death factories, unthinkable atrocities committed by a cultured European nation—are so impossible, so bizarre, so far-fetched, that they might as well be science fiction. I’ve been to Auschwitz and Majdanek; I’ve walked through those warehouses full of shoes and eyeglasses and hair; I’ve descended into the gas chamber and out again, and even I can’t grasp that it really happened.
My mother’s stories of the Poles and Germans who risked their lives to save her family were just as unbelievable, the men and women bigger than life, transcending reality like characters in a fairy tale. An SS man who hid Jews in his castle, with the power to enchant his superiors; a woman who cooked such lovely breakfasts that they lured away the soldiers searching her barn; timid Torah scholars and Jewish school boys, transformed by the deep and ancient Polish forests into mighty resistance fighters. Throughout my childhood, these people loomed as large as giants. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
What made me turn to myth and magic to recount my parents’ stories? Was it the desire to control the uncontrollable? The need to believe, in a time when God’s face was hidden, that there was some guiding force behind the horror?
Art removes us to a safe distance from actual horrors, allowing us to see what we already know in a new way. Fairy tales entertain children, but they also warn them of danger. In a fable that my fictional author, Toby Rey, composes for his German protector in the title story In the Land of Armadillos, he ends his allegory of a village complicit in a secret crime with this line:
“From that day forward, wherever the townspeople went, they were accompanied by the songs of birds. It filled their lives with beautiful music, but it also reminded them of what they were capable of. Remember, the songs warned them, and do not forget.”
The story thumped home with a sense of rightness. Yes, this is good. Yes, this works. All the usual signs were there; the hair raising on the back of my neck, the butterflies flitting in my stomach.
But on its heels, this: Am I trivializing the Holocaust?
My parents are Polish Holocaust survivors. Growing up, I heard the stories of their survival again and again. How my mother hid as a shepherd girl with a Polish farmer. How a Polish neighbor boy who used to play at my father’s house discovered his bunker and betrayed it to the Nazis. How my grandfather made saddles, and how the German he worked for sent a wagon to bring Zaydie and his children to his castle the day before a terrible Aktzia consumed the town.
There are so many books dedicated to Holocaust literature that readers experience a kind of overload. Yes, it was tragic, they say. Yes, millions were murdered. They’ve read Anne Frank. They’ve read Night. They’ve read Maus. They know. They know.
That’s where the challenge lay. What was different about my stories? How was I going to make World War II new again?
The facts of the catastrophe—the obsessive focus on enslavement and extermination of a peaceful civilian population, nightmarish death factories, unthinkable atrocities committed by a cultured European nation—are so impossible, so bizarre, so far-fetched, that they might as well be science fiction. I’ve been to Auschwitz and Majdanek; I’ve walked through those warehouses full of shoes and eyeglasses and hair; I’ve descended into the gas chamber and out again, and even I can’t grasp that it really happened.
My mother’s stories of the Poles and Germans who risked their lives to save her family were just as unbelievable, the men and women bigger than life, transcending reality like characters in a fairy tale. An SS man who hid Jews in his castle, with the power to enchant his superiors; a woman who cooked such lovely breakfasts that they lured away the soldiers searching her barn; timid Torah scholars and Jewish school boys, transformed by the deep and ancient Polish forests into mighty resistance fighters. Throughout my childhood, these people loomed as large as giants. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
What made me turn to myth and magic to recount my parents’ stories? Was it the desire to control the uncontrollable? The need to believe, in a time when God’s face was hidden, that there was some guiding force behind the horror?
Art removes us to a safe distance from actual horrors, allowing us to see what we already know in a new way. Fairy tales entertain children, but they also warn them of danger. In a fable that my fictional author, Toby Rey, composes for his German protector in the title story In the Land of Armadillos, he ends his allegory of a village complicit in a secret crime with this line:
“From that day forward, wherever the townspeople went, they were accompanied by the songs of birds. It filled their lives with beautiful music, but it also reminded them of what they were capable of. Remember, the songs warned them, and do not forget.”
January 31, 2016
Fun with Dick and Jane
If my mother is to be believed, I spontaneously began reading at three and a half. I use the word spontaneous purposefully; in the way “spontaneous combustion” comes from nowhere, so did this magical ability to read, and it set my imagination on fire.
In my immigrant family, this was pretty much a miracle. For the most part, my parents’ educations were suspended in 1939, their childhoods cancelled by the great planet-spanning conflagration that was World War II. My mother’s English was limited, and my father worked until late, often coming home after we were asleep. I pronounced the word “Wednesday” as “VED-niz-day” until I was in kindergarten.
Enter Dick and Jane. The characters in Fun With Dick and Jane were my introduction to American life. The cheery 1950s artwork looms large in my psyche, the boys all well-groomed, with crisp, nicely-pressed shirts tucked into their crisp, nicely-pressed pants, the girls in frocks with white lace collars, their hair, helmets of perfect golden waves.
Oh, how I admired Jane’s poofy dresses and ankle socks. See Jane’s parents sitting on the grass and smiling as the kids turn somersaults! See Father juggle! See Dick and Father throw a football around! See Dick and Jane visit the State Fair and ride the cotton-candy-colored ponies around the carousel! Everyone smiled a lot. They had a smart cocker spaniel named Spot, and a fluffy orange kitten called Puff. Best of all, their grandparents lived on a FARM! My immigrant grandparents lived in an apartment. (See Helen turn green with envy.)
Dick and Jane clashed wildly with my American experience. Where were the mother and father who spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want their children to understand? Where were the grandparents with beards and babushkas, the plastic covers on the couches, the cutting sarcasm, the adults shouting at each other in thick accents or foreign languages across plates of gefilte fish?
I pored over those illustrations, seeking clues to the way real Americans lived. I began trying to mold my parents into the correct pattern.
Me: Can I have a dog?
Them: No. What you need is friends. Go out and make some friends.
Me: Look at this picture, Dick and Jane’s family are camping out in the forest.
Them: We spent enough time in forests during The War.
And that was pretty much that. I didn’t understand what my Holocaust survivor parents found important, and they couldn’t fathom why their American-born daughter cared about such silly things. I turned to books for the life my parents couldn’t give me.
In the year that I was seven, Mom’s hip younger sister came to visit us, and stayed for six months. In that span of time, she bought paperback novels. When she returned to Montreal, she left them in the bookcase.
Yes, reader, I was too young, and yes, I read them anyway. Some of them I understood completely, some only a bit. (Slaughterhouse Five, I’m looking at you.) Reviewing the list, I can see that they shaped the way I still think today, and by extension, the way I write. I must have read To Kill A Mockingbird a hundred times, captivated by its descriptions of a free range childhood and its uncompromising sense of decency and social justice. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest educated me about Rebelling Against The System; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John LeCarre, taught me about bad guys who are actually good, and good guys who are actually bad, and the duplicitous nature of governments; and Dune and The Hobbit taught me that it was okay to make up stories that take place long ago and far away, or at some time in the distant future, and that these stories can actually be about real things going on right here and right now. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, taught me that under the hood, America was not all Dick and Jane.
As I grew older, the truth slowly began to reveal itself. No one’s lives were like Dick and Jane’s, even those that, on the outside, seem golden and blessed. Dick and Jane were a dangerous fiction. Everyone has their peckel, their secret burden of woe.
Eventually, I discovered that the children of Holocaust survivors had a great deal in common, and that I could find comfort and healing in talking with them. Eventually, I discovered that my experiences as the child of Holocaust survivors were strikingly similar to the experiences of children of other immigrants. Eventually, I discovered that even the descendants of pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower don’t have Dick-and-Jane lives. Life has a way of cracking us open. It is the cracks that make us who we are, and it is the cracks that bring us all together.
In my immigrant family, this was pretty much a miracle. For the most part, my parents’ educations were suspended in 1939, their childhoods cancelled by the great planet-spanning conflagration that was World War II. My mother’s English was limited, and my father worked until late, often coming home after we were asleep. I pronounced the word “Wednesday” as “VED-niz-day” until I was in kindergarten.
Enter Dick and Jane. The characters in Fun With Dick and Jane were my introduction to American life. The cheery 1950s artwork looms large in my psyche, the boys all well-groomed, with crisp, nicely-pressed shirts tucked into their crisp, nicely-pressed pants, the girls in frocks with white lace collars, their hair, helmets of perfect golden waves.
Oh, how I admired Jane’s poofy dresses and ankle socks. See Jane’s parents sitting on the grass and smiling as the kids turn somersaults! See Father juggle! See Dick and Father throw a football around! See Dick and Jane visit the State Fair and ride the cotton-candy-colored ponies around the carousel! Everyone smiled a lot. They had a smart cocker spaniel named Spot, and a fluffy orange kitten called Puff. Best of all, their grandparents lived on a FARM! My immigrant grandparents lived in an apartment. (See Helen turn green with envy.)
Dick and Jane clashed wildly with my American experience. Where were the mother and father who spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want their children to understand? Where were the grandparents with beards and babushkas, the plastic covers on the couches, the cutting sarcasm, the adults shouting at each other in thick accents or foreign languages across plates of gefilte fish?
I pored over those illustrations, seeking clues to the way real Americans lived. I began trying to mold my parents into the correct pattern.
Me: Can I have a dog?
Them: No. What you need is friends. Go out and make some friends.
Me: Look at this picture, Dick and Jane’s family are camping out in the forest.
Them: We spent enough time in forests during The War.
And that was pretty much that. I didn’t understand what my Holocaust survivor parents found important, and they couldn’t fathom why their American-born daughter cared about such silly things. I turned to books for the life my parents couldn’t give me.
In the year that I was seven, Mom’s hip younger sister came to visit us, and stayed for six months. In that span of time, she bought paperback novels. When she returned to Montreal, she left them in the bookcase.
Yes, reader, I was too young, and yes, I read them anyway. Some of them I understood completely, some only a bit. (Slaughterhouse Five, I’m looking at you.) Reviewing the list, I can see that they shaped the way I still think today, and by extension, the way I write. I must have read To Kill A Mockingbird a hundred times, captivated by its descriptions of a free range childhood and its uncompromising sense of decency and social justice. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest educated me about Rebelling Against The System; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John LeCarre, taught me about bad guys who are actually good, and good guys who are actually bad, and the duplicitous nature of governments; and Dune and The Hobbit taught me that it was okay to make up stories that take place long ago and far away, or at some time in the distant future, and that these stories can actually be about real things going on right here and right now. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, taught me that under the hood, America was not all Dick and Jane.
As I grew older, the truth slowly began to reveal itself. No one’s lives were like Dick and Jane’s, even those that, on the outside, seem golden and blessed. Dick and Jane were a dangerous fiction. Everyone has their peckel, their secret burden of woe.
Eventually, I discovered that the children of Holocaust survivors had a great deal in common, and that I could find comfort and healing in talking with them. Eventually, I discovered that my experiences as the child of Holocaust survivors were strikingly similar to the experiences of children of other immigrants. Eventually, I discovered that even the descendants of pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower don’t have Dick-and-Jane lives. Life has a way of cracking us open. It is the cracks that make us who we are, and it is the cracks that bring us all together.
June 16, 2014
Mom's Guide To Life
To my endless surprise, two of my children are graduating this spring, one from eighth grade, one from high school.
How did this happen? In my heart, we’re still looking at houses, choosing what town to move to, a babysitter, a grammar school.
The high-schooler was my first. With her arrival, I, a girl who never played with dolls, who never babysat, a girl whose only concerns were art, movies, and books, had to learn how to change a diaper, how to push little limbs into stretchies, how to finagle a stroller bearing a sleeping infant down the subway steps or up a set of brownstone stairs, how to care for a helpless little human being day and night. As she slept, I watched her, marveling as traces of relatives’ features and expressions flitted across her face, then departed.
Overnight, I shed all semblance of self-consciousness or dignity. There were spontaneous parades around the dining room while we clanged on pots and pans to the tune of “When the Saints Come Marching In”; I sprawled on Brooklyn sidewalks while she traced my outline with colored chalk; to comfort her, I sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” aloud on trains and airplanes, heedless of how many strangers were listening. She taught me how to play.
As for my graduating eighth grader — he was my constant companion for our early years in New Jersey. With my first two, there were daily trips to the playground in Park Slope as we walked the ten blocks home from nursery school. But Number 3 was born right before our big move. He accompanied me on countless trips to hardware stores, furniture stores, paint supply stores, and gardening centers, good-naturedly approaching each chore like it was an adventure. I spent the early shock-filled hours of 9/11 curled up on his bedroom floor, watching the twin towers fall as he built his own towers with wooden blocks. With him at my side, I learned how to drive, painted the house, watched a hundred of my older children’s baseball and soccer games from the distance of the playground.
To me, all that happened just yesterday. But my curly-haired toddlers are taller than I am now, with their own interests and friends and skills and tastes and opinions and slang, moving further out into the world and away from me. In this short span of adult time, I’ve stayed pretty much the same, while they have grown to undreamt-of heights, acquired wings.
What do I have that I can give them? What advice? What wisdom? How do I teach them to be aware of danger while simultaneously encouraging them to embrace experience? How do I pass over my system of faith and beliefs while also training them to see a thing from all sides, to ask good questions?
This Mother’s Day fell a day after the anniversary of my mom’s birthday. As we always do for her birthday and yahrtzeit, we met at a restaurant in the city, my brothers, my sister, and me, to share good food and memories. We remembered Mom’s deeds, her words, her sense of humor, all shaped by a hard life, and complicated by the disasters and disruption of the Holocaust.
We remembered her gleeful smile, her boundless good spirits, her childlike wonder. And then it came to me. I knew what I would tell my new graduates.
Mom’s Guide to Life
1. A difficult start in life shouldn’t keep you from having a good life. You are the master of your own fate.
2. Be a good listener.
3. Learn how to cook at least one thing, anything, very well.
4. Don’t mix a shirt that has one kind of pattern with pants that have a different kind of pattern. This is best left to experts.
5. Stand up for your rights.
6. Help people who would never tell you that they need help.
7. Look at all the sides in a story before you make any judgments.
8. Bite back those first words that rise to your lips when you’re angry. Think of another way to say it.
9. Read, read, read. Then read some more.
10. If you want kids to play your game, you might have to play their game first.
11. You will not need this one for a few years, but I’m telling you anyway: Give your children independence in order for them to grow. Whether you like it or not.
12. Learn how to tell a good story.
13. Treat all people with respect.
14. Be a good friend.
15. Happiness is about being happy with what you already have.
16. Remember only the good things.
This article was first published in The Jewish Standard.
How did this happen? In my heart, we’re still looking at houses, choosing what town to move to, a babysitter, a grammar school.
The high-schooler was my first. With her arrival, I, a girl who never played with dolls, who never babysat, a girl whose only concerns were art, movies, and books, had to learn how to change a diaper, how to push little limbs into stretchies, how to finagle a stroller bearing a sleeping infant down the subway steps or up a set of brownstone stairs, how to care for a helpless little human being day and night. As she slept, I watched her, marveling as traces of relatives’ features and expressions flitted across her face, then departed.
Overnight, I shed all semblance of self-consciousness or dignity. There were spontaneous parades around the dining room while we clanged on pots and pans to the tune of “When the Saints Come Marching In”; I sprawled on Brooklyn sidewalks while she traced my outline with colored chalk; to comfort her, I sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” aloud on trains and airplanes, heedless of how many strangers were listening. She taught me how to play.
As for my graduating eighth grader — he was my constant companion for our early years in New Jersey. With my first two, there were daily trips to the playground in Park Slope as we walked the ten blocks home from nursery school. But Number 3 was born right before our big move. He accompanied me on countless trips to hardware stores, furniture stores, paint supply stores, and gardening centers, good-naturedly approaching each chore like it was an adventure. I spent the early shock-filled hours of 9/11 curled up on his bedroom floor, watching the twin towers fall as he built his own towers with wooden blocks. With him at my side, I learned how to drive, painted the house, watched a hundred of my older children’s baseball and soccer games from the distance of the playground.
To me, all that happened just yesterday. But my curly-haired toddlers are taller than I am now, with their own interests and friends and skills and tastes and opinions and slang, moving further out into the world and away from me. In this short span of adult time, I’ve stayed pretty much the same, while they have grown to undreamt-of heights, acquired wings.
What do I have that I can give them? What advice? What wisdom? How do I teach them to be aware of danger while simultaneously encouraging them to embrace experience? How do I pass over my system of faith and beliefs while also training them to see a thing from all sides, to ask good questions?
This Mother’s Day fell a day after the anniversary of my mom’s birthday. As we always do for her birthday and yahrtzeit, we met at a restaurant in the city, my brothers, my sister, and me, to share good food and memories. We remembered Mom’s deeds, her words, her sense of humor, all shaped by a hard life, and complicated by the disasters and disruption of the Holocaust.
We remembered her gleeful smile, her boundless good spirits, her childlike wonder. And then it came to me. I knew what I would tell my new graduates.
Mom’s Guide to Life
1. A difficult start in life shouldn’t keep you from having a good life. You are the master of your own fate.
2. Be a good listener.
3. Learn how to cook at least one thing, anything, very well.
4. Don’t mix a shirt that has one kind of pattern with pants that have a different kind of pattern. This is best left to experts.
5. Stand up for your rights.
6. Help people who would never tell you that they need help.
7. Look at all the sides in a story before you make any judgments.
8. Bite back those first words that rise to your lips when you’re angry. Think of another way to say it.
9. Read, read, read. Then read some more.
10. If you want kids to play your game, you might have to play their game first.
11. You will not need this one for a few years, but I’m telling you anyway: Give your children independence in order for them to grow. Whether you like it or not.
12. Learn how to tell a good story.
13. Treat all people with respect.
14. Be a good friend.
15. Happiness is about being happy with what you already have.
16. Remember only the good things.
This article was first published in The Jewish Standard.
