Martha Rozett, a new addition to our schedule, will present When People Wrote Letters, a family history told through letters, photographs, clippings and pamphlets, excerpts from an unpublished autobiography and from a family history narrative, along with other saved objects.
The main characters are Betty and Edith Stedman, two eloquent and adventurous women whose relationship serves as the book’s central narrative. Their travels, and the travels of other family members, take the reader from 19th and early twentieth century New England, to Key West in the 1830s, to the Minnesota Territories in the 1860s, to France during World War I, to small towns in Texas and to China in the 1920s, to Spain in the early 1930s, and across America during World War II.
More.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
An Adventure in Letters-- Martha Rozett
Friday, March 30, 2012
Lelyveld-- Abandoned by Over-Achieving Parents
In his 2005 memoir, Omaha Blues, Joseph Lelyveld (who visits Tuesday) recalls his charismatic Reform Rabbi father and his ambitious actress-scholar mother who abandoned him to be raised by other people so they could pursue their divergent ambitions. His father travelled the country in the 1940s drumming up American support for the State of Israel. His mother gratefully abandoned the duties of a clerical wife to pursue graduate studies in Shakespearean scholarship (and an extramarital affair) at Columbia University.
At various times, the boy Joseph was turned over to a Seventh Day Adventist farm family, the Jensens, in Tekamah, Nebraska, and to his Brooklyn grandparents.
An excerpt of the book's first chapter appears on the Barnes and Noble website (you'll need to scroll down).
Picture: Lelyveld (middle) with the Jensen boys.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Will You Hide Me?
Anticipating a second Holocaust, Shalom Auslander, who visits on March 1st, asks fellow humorist Sarah Vowell whether she will shelter him and his family in her New York City apartment.
The video is part of a series of book trailers for Auslander's novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012). The trailers feature a number of Auslander's co-contributors to NPR's This American Life.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Two Jews Lost in a Holocaust Museum
Alexander Nazaryan of the Daily News gets a first-hand experience of the dark, angry humor of Shalom Auslander (who visits 3/1):
"We were somewhere near the Warsaw Ghetto when Shalom Auslander’s anger started to kick in. He was angry because he had wanted to see pictures of female Israeli soldiers, but there were none on display that day at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. He was angry because he had not been able to find cigarettes in Battery Park City before coming to meet me there on a cold Wednesday afternoon. He was angry because I kept waving my voice recorder in his face. I pointed out the dangers of misquotation. His small eyes glowed." More.