See No Evil: "The Night In Question"

Twenty years ago today our Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered.

A year earlier we returned to Israel after a long stay in the US. From distant Texas the summer of 1994 seemed like a wonderful time to be back in Israel. No one could have guessed that all that would end on October 4th 1995.

I recently took part in “the Narratives Project,” an initiative organized by The Parents Circle-Families Forum (PCFF). It brings together 15 Palestinians and 15 Israelis for several meetings in order to get to know each other and to promote understanding and peace.

The first meeting was for an intensive weekend in Beit Jala. In one of the organized activities we were asked to write down dates with special meaning and to stick the notes on  a rug at the center of the room. 

Please keep reading in the Times of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/see-no-evil-the-night-in-question/

"Not every death is the end of a well lived life"

At the hospital where my husband was being treated for cancer, Chemotherapy was administered in a communal room.There were several armchairs for patients, and some regular chairs for family members. The whole process took several hours, and we had to somehow pass the time. So, with everyone around,  it became an opportunity to talk, a kind of spontaneous support group.

One Friday we were only four in the room: my husband and I, another middle-aged man, like us, and a young woman. We started talking, and she told us about her life and her illness. It transpired that she recently had got married and had a small baby.

Suddenly the man, who sat with us, blurted, “ It is so unfair that you are sick, you are so young, and have a baby."

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/not-every-death-is-the-end-of-a-well-lived-life/

"One Radio Host": Ira Glass At Yale

I have to admit that I wanted to see “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host” because I am a fan of This American Life. I guess I wasn't the only one, the theater hall at Yale was packed and this was only a matinee, there is going to be a second show tonight.

I didn't know what to expect, but juxtaposing the two dancers,Monica Barnes and Anna Bass, whose voice is their body with Ira Glass, a radio host who normally is only a voice, sounded intriguing.

The show consisted mostly of old episodes from This American Life and recordings of Ira Glass’ interviews.The artists reexamined and revisited those stories with dance and narration.

For example the first act presented a story from the episode “Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time”( number 306 from  2006)  about the cast of Riverdance which  had been performing eight shows a week and suffered from boredom

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/one-radio-host-ira-glass-at-yale/

This American Life 

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/306/seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/88/transcript
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/93/valentines-day-98

The Remote Father

FEB.24.2013

 I got the idea for today’s post from a very unusual program of This American  Life. The topic of  the 1996 broadcast was Accidental Documentaries. It told the stories of old audio tapes from the late 1960s which were discovered accidentally in a  thrift store in Chicago. These tapes were audio letters between a family in Michigan and their son, who was in medical school in California, at the time. The tapes document the life of the family as its members:  the father, mother, and the younger sister, chose to share it with their son. 

The program's  producers got hold of the son who is a physician in California. This is Glass’ report: “We sent him uncut tapes of everything that was on the tape. And he heard them. And he said that it was fine with him for us to play the tapes on the radio. He said that the tapes captured the dynamics of his family perfectly. The drama of a lot of American families is the emotional distance of the father, the father staying away from the family orbit, the father not being around, the father holding himself apart. And Arthur Davis, Junior says that his father was like a lot of American dads in that way and was, in fact, pretty removed.”

I believe that the remote father is not only an American phenomenon. Growing up in Israel in the late 1950s I hardly have any childhood memories of my father. He was always away at work. My mother and my older brother were in charge of my upbringing. I got to know my father only as an adult.

 Arthur Davis Junior from the tapes tells a similar story: “He was reared in a divorced home. And there was a lot of bitterness. And so it was pretty tough for him to even consider getting married. And then when I was born, my mom said that he just broke into tears, thinking that he might have to deal with some of those issues as a parent. He never did really want to be a parent. And she really helped him through that a lot. It was very fascinating, Ira. After my mom died, my dad changed tremendously. And he came to live with me, and spent quite a bit of time with my sister and me, and was very connected with us and our children. So that all changed after Mom died.”

And in 1950s Britain,  in issues of Girl magazine we could see in pictures and in stories that the father is always away, either physically at work, or emotionally, uninvolved --withdrawn. Even when the father is at home he sits at the table.  the newspaper which he always reads separates him from the rest of his family .

I always feel that in the 1950s and the 1960s men had a much easier life at home than they do today: Fathers were spoilt by their family, which demanded nothing of them but gave them a lot of respect.

Some changes are good; my husband was an involved father and we raised our daughters together. And when I think of the close connection that they enjoyed, it seems to me that after all the 1950s fathers did not get the best deal.

This American Life  Accidental Documetaries transcript:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/14/transcript

Radio Show

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/14/accidental-documentaries

"What A Cute Accent, Where Are You From?"

When I asked my linguistic professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia how I could get rid of my Israeli accent, he wasn’t optimistic about my chances. I further inquired if a strong accent indicated a lack of musical talent. He answered that based on what he had read it was a matter of personal identity. There were some people, he called them the Chamaeleon type, who could speak with almost no trace of a foreign accent. In contrast,  I probably, subconsciously, didn’t want to get rid of my Israeli identity. This explanation was reassuring, it was a relief to understand that it hadn't been my fault. I am not sure if this is still a valid theory, but I am not going to look for conflicting evidence.

I was reminded of the on-going difficulties with my foreign accent when I heard an episode of This American Life number 203:”Recordings for Someone” from Jan 11, 2002

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/203/recordings-for-someone?act=2

In the second segment of this program a student who stutters makes a recording for someone with whom he talks on the phone whenever he orders pizza. In that message he explains how anxious he becomes when he encounters impatience and intolerance on the phone, and as a result his stattering becomes more severe.   

Similarly, I cannot recall a phone conversation during which I wasn’t asked “I beg your pardon?” But still  talking on the phone had always been easier than the initial face to face interaction. Since on the phone people only heard my voice they still were able to concentrate on what I had to say.

In the small towns where we used to live there weren’t that many  foreigners, and  since I fit the Caucasian square on official forms, people just didn’t expect me to speak with a foreign accent. It usually threw them off and then came the question: “I beg your pardon?”  Normally once I had repeated the sentence, the next comment was: ”what a cute accent, where are you from?”

I never thought of my accent as "cute," it was who I was. In the US it was also the conspicuous sign of my foreignness, which otherwise could have gone unnoticed. It went with me everywhere: to the grocery store, to the gas station, to my girl's school, to work etc. Some people used to talk to me in a slow loud voice as though my accent made me hard of hearing.

Others were suspicious of foreigners, or strangers as the sociologist Georg Simmel calls them. He defines "‘stranger’ as a person who comes today and stays tomorrow, whose position in a group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it which do not and cannot stem from the group itself."

Simmel's mention of the stranger's position in the group, and the issue of belonging were key factors in our decision to go back to Israel after 14 years in the US.

When I heard the student whose stutter worsened whenever he sensed antagonism, I realized, that stuttering and foreign accent are more similar than I had ever thought. I was lucky to be able to find a place where I am understood, sadly he does not have such a safe haven.  

Lack of accessibility comes in all colors, shapes, and sounds, often it is just a polite substitute to the word discrimination. We still have a long way to go until everyone is let in.

Can Great Literature Save Lives?

As we were reading the passage about lighting the fireplace at Mary Lennox's room, my young friend asked: "How did they start the fire in The Secret Garden? Do you know if they had matches?" I wasn’t sure, we had to look it up, but that question led to a more general discussion about inventions.

This is only one example of the many issues that we cover (and discover). Reading aloud is a great opportunity for instruction and delight: we think of and develop ideas, discuss our opinions and share personal stories.

In the last couple of years I have been reading books with a young friend whose eleventh birthday will be coming soon. She doesn’t like to read, but she loves to get to know the characters in our books, and to explore the motives behind their actions.

Recently we read Sunday's Child by the German author Gudrun Mebs. This book is a variation on the genre of the boarding school novel. But Sunday's Child is told from the point of view of an eight year old girl who lives in an orphanage, she is the protagonist and the narrator.

Every Sunday many children are taken out for the day by families, and this girl (who remains nameless) is longing to have a family as well. At one point in the story a single woman, a writer of children books, becomes her Sunday mother.

 When they first meet the girls notes how different that woman, Ola, is from the other Sunday mothers. But when Ola takes off her glasses and the girl looks into her brown eyes, she suddenly realizes that Ola's eyes are just like the buttons eyes of her beloved stuffed bunny.

I asked my friend what was the purpose of this comparison? She answered that comparing the strange woman to the bunny made it easier for the girl to connect to Ola and to love her. I was speechless.

Telling the story in the first person and from the point of view of the young child,  allowed me to introduce my young friend  to the concepts of the unreliable narrator and the implicit author. It was easy to look for instances when the girl’s perception and understanding of reality were different from what actually had taken place, and to remember similar examples from our own experience. 

Personally I am convinced that literature offers the best preparation for life. In other words, it supplies the essential life skills.* Literature enriches the repertoire of responses and provides tools to analyze the world. Since literature is made of examples—stories with characters and situations, it is a much better guide for the young and the perplexed than philosophy for example. Moreover, literature is a great training for recognizing nuances and  understanding subtexts.

This morning while I was skating I listened to the episode Act V in This American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/218/act-v

The entire program was devoted to a theater production of Hamlet Act V by inmates in a high- security facility in Missouri. It seems that Shakespeare’s lines penetrated the shields of the toughest prisoners and brought about change. Thus, the actors/prisoners were able to connect to the characters in the play from the depth of their own experiences. 

This program reminded me of another important quality of literature. For years I believed that, unlike medicine for example, literature could not save lives. But recently I had a change of heart.

My father in-law, an old fashioned family doctor, believed that a cup of tea and three days off work were the best cure for most complaints. In a way, reading good literature with my young friend is that type of medicine. But I feel that experiences like the Hamlet production at the Missouri prison, could literally save lives.

And in case you wonder, in 1911 when The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was published, matches were used to light a fire.

*In the home page of Unicef, life skills are those  that enable individuals to deal effectively 

 the demands and challenges of everyday life. They are loosely grouped into three  broad categories of skills: cognitive skills for analyzing and using information, personal skills for developing personal agency and managing oneself, and inter-personal skills for communicating and interacting effectively with others."