Motherland

Once, when I was eight years old, my mother raised a subject she had never discussed before – her hometown. “I’m from Stockstadt am Rhein.” “Where?” The town’s name was foreign, but the way she said it, with a thick German accent, revealed a part of her I never knew existed. She went to the shelf, dragged the oversized, heavy Rand McNally Atlas of the World to the kitchen table ...

For authors, publishing a book is a little like dropping a fishing line into a pond. We never know who will take our bait. When I wrote Motherland, I imagined telling the story to a good friend whom I have known for decades. I wished she could have come with me on my trips to Germany. Instead, I tried to give her the experience through the book. I couldn’t have ...

In 1938, when my mother fled Stockstadt am Rhein -- the small German town her family had helped settle in 1721 -- it had 2,000 people and two Jewish families totaling eight people. That means the Jewish population in Stockstadt was about one half of one percent, a statistic that mirrored Germany at large. In 1939, 350,000 Jews lived in a country of 50,000,000 people. By 1945, the German Jewish ...

Dr. Robert Sapolsky and friend I stumbled upon Professor Robert Sapolsky’s lecture series at a local library. His presentations gave me an amazing understanding of stress. Dr. Sapolsky, a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at Stanford University, spends each summer in Kenya studying a population of wild baboons, trying to identify the relationship between an animal’s personality, environment and stress levels. What Dr. Sapolsky has discovered is that low-ranking baboons ...

I’m often asked why I titled my upcoming book, Is It Night or Day? Warning: what follows is a bit of a spoiler. An explanation of the title appears on page 205 of the book. For those who don’t want to wait, read on. The cover of my new book, "Is It Night or Day?" My new book is about child immigration. Throughout history, many families have made the painful ...

Each day, ideas fly through my mind like birds gliding across the vast blue sky. They flicker in my consciousness, capturing my attention for only a moment. “Hmmmm,” I say to myself, or “Interesting.” Then they pass. I haven't ever taken the time to record or catalog my birds. But now, I have entered the world of blogging. Here, in this unique medium, small, significant thoughts or fleeting observations are ...

While listening to the radio yesterday, I heard an interview with a man who was telling the story of how his father had been murdered. I was struck by the way in which the man remembered the incident, which happened when he was 9 years old: “It was dark. They were kids. He was killed.” Then, he would take a breath, collect himself, try again. “It was a gang. He ...

A friend who read Motherland three times wrote to tell me that he had made new discoveries on his most recent reading. He said he looked at the book through the “specially-ground lens” of his own personal experiences. On this reading, he identified “the vividness with which she (Edith) carried, late into her life, the feeling of desertion she had when her parents sent her to safety, even though - ...

If it is true, as the Iowa Writers' Workshop website claims, that "writing cannot be taught but...writers can be encouraged," how can the university expect students to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for an MFA in writing? That's a lot of money for encouragement!

I've been thinking about this question since I occasionally teach one-day writing workshops at colleges in the area. I came upon an interesting sentence at the Iowa Workshop website. "We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged." I certainly encourage the writers who attend my classes, but I also believe students can ...