"Black Painting" by Stephanie Serpick (sserpick.com)

A local book club selected Motherland as this month’s featured work and invited me to participate in the group’s discussion today. Each reader found her own way of relating to the story.

One woman talked about how her mother was raised by adoptive parents who were alcoholics. (Her biological parents died when the girl was five.) “My mother didn’t really know how to be a mother and I was reminded of that challenge when I read your book.”

Another said that her son and daughter-in-law are considering a surrogate egg donor for fertility treatments, but the couple is concerned about the child’s confused identity. “Your book made me think about how each of us determines our own identity.”

A third book club member asked me whether I thought an experience she had constituted trauma. (Of course, that depends upon the individual and his or her support system.)

Another reader brought up a book she had just finished called Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire. It tells the story of a Cuban boy who was sent by his parents to America during the Cuban Revolution. “Your mother’s experiences reminded me of his story.”

I came away with the feeling I have when I go with a group of friends to an art museum and view an all-black painting. Each of us sees something different and what we see reflects who we are. Each viewer or reader brings his or her own experiences to the art.

“In this day and age when immigration is a hot button issue for so many people, it is important to remember the suffering from which people are trying to escape. Fern Schumer Chapman tells a story based on her mother’s journey to America during the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. .. a painful, but important book for a young person to read.”

From Mrs. Book-in-Hand reading blog:

“Need a good historical fiction book? This is one of the best that I have read in a long time…I think kids will find this book just as moving as the story of Anne Frank.”

http://hardinbookcafe.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-it-night-or-day-by-fern-shumer.html

From Kidslit:

“Chapman’s writing is beautiful. It captures the feeling of loss, the desperation of loneliness, and the small moments that help one survive…A gut-wrenchingly personal view of historical events, readers will feel connected to Edith and her plight very deeply. Appropriate for ages 9-12, this book would do well as a class read aloud for learning about World War II from a unique perspective. Get this into the hands of children who enjoy historical fiction…”

http://kidslit.menashalibrary.org/2010/07/13/is-it-night-or-day/

From Young Adult Reviewers of Southern California:

“An excellent coming of age story of a twelve years old Jewish girl leaving her hometown Stockstadt am Rhein, Germany and seeking a new life in America.”

http://yarsocalif.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-it-night-or-day.html

Author William Maxwell

Just as words can replace memories, (see previous blog) pictures can replace and distort memories, too. William Maxwell put it vividly in his book, So Long, See You Tomorrow:

“I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track if there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meant a moment, a scene, a fact, that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.”

Writer Dani Shapiro

Writing brings form to experience. It provides an order to life and, in the process, writing alters memory.

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section, writer Dani Shapiro states that readers “often think that writing a memoir must be cathartic. But, if anything, I found that it embeds the story more deeply in the writer. The story becomes frozen, in a way, by crafting of it. Memory is mutable and the relationship between the writer and the story at the particular moment the story is written becomes the story.”

Writer Annie Dillard

Writer Annie Dillard has made a similar point: “After you’ve written, you can no longer remember anything but the writing. My memories — those elusive patches of color and feeling — are gone; they’ve been replaced by the work.”

Rabbi David Wolpe wrote a blurb for my book, Motherland, stating that “How we remember determines who we are.” I would add that what we write determines what we remember…and who we are.

FSG, March 2010

You write in your Author’s Note that the book represents the experiences of your mother and other child emigres from Germany of that era. Just curious … was Aunt Mildred wholly your mother’s experience?

Edith’s story in “N or D” came directly from my mother’s experiences. I didn’t even change the names of her relatives. The book is a work of historical fiction because I assumed my mother’s voice. In addition, I grafted the stories of some of the other One Thousand Children into the work so that the reader would have a fuller experience. However, I didn’t make anything up. Much of the material in the book is based upon excerpts from letters and diaries from the One Thousand Children.

The stories of Aunt Mildred came directly from my mother, but many of the “children” had similar experiences. At the reunion of the One Thousand Children in 2004, I interviewed several immigrants who reported similar treatment in their new American “homes”. Since it was the Depression, some American families agreed to take in the children so that they could receive the small stipend; then, some families used these young immigrants as household help.

Author Tim O'Brien

In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien writes about the challenge of writing about his traumatic experiences in Vietnam:

“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words…and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening…The bad stuff never stops happening; it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”

Movie poster of "Get Low"

If I were teaching a writing class right now, I would require all my students to go see the new movie, Get Low, with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray and Lucas Black. Sure that’s an all-star cast, but that’s not the reason for my insistence.

For those who study narrative drive, this movie is masterful in its storytelling.

My writing guru, Sol Stein explains in his book, Stein on Writing, that readers (viewers) are like dogs on a trail; they have picked up a scent. It is the writer’s job to keep “the dogs” sniffing by dropping crumbs of information in the unfolding mystery.

Driving the Depression-era fable of Get Low is the question of why Duvall, who is known by the locals as eccentric and mean, became a hermit living alone in his isolated cabin in the Tennessee woods for forty years. Throughout the movie, we get glimpses of the early, defining experience that made him, but we have to wait for the last ten minutes of the film to learn the full story. (The director’s one misstep is the ending; he should have cut the last two minutes, which did not add power to the story.)

“Writers are troublemakers,” Stein writes. “A pyschotherapist tries to relieve stress, strain, and pressure. Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress, strain and pressure. The fact is that readers who hate those things in life love them in fiction.”

And that is the ‘Get Low’ on storytelling.

Here is the review of Is it Night or Day? by the Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA), the library magazine servicing those who serve young adults:

In 1938 Edith Westerfeld is twelve years old when her family puts her on a ship in Bremen,Germany that carries her to the Deutchland, an oceanliner that transports her to New York City. From there, all alone, she is put on a train to Chicago, Illinois where she lives with her father’s brother, his wife, and their teenage daughter. Edith is treated more like a servant than part of their family, but she strives to learn English, do all of the work demanded by her aunt, do well in school, and save money to send her parents in the hope that they will be able to join her. From having to start with first grade at school, to the anti-Semitic attitudes that abound even in America, Edith struggles in this new country but finds solace in walks to the shores of Lake Michigan, in baseball’s Hank Greenberg, and in the public library where she escapes into books. Shattered by a letter informing her of the deaths of her parents, she realizes she must carry on with life despite her losses. Author Chapman tells readers in an introductory note that this historical fiction work is based on an American rescue operation named “the One Thousand Children,” which her own mother was a part of, in order to give voice to another group of Holocaust victims. Edith’s story is compelling and interesting, shedding light on a young immigrant’s fears, confusion, and loss. This is a superb addition to any Holocaust or American History collection. Students will be moved by Edith’s story.