Nov. 5, 1857: Journalist Ida Tarbell born.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Q&A with author Lev Golinkin
Lev Golinkin is the author of the new memoir A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, which focuses on his childhood as a refugee from the Soviet Union who eventually arrives in the United States. He lives in New Jersey.
Q: You write about how your professor encouraged you to “go
back” and examine your past. How did that eventual exploration of your
background change your feelings about yourself?
A: Learning about the struggle for the freedom of Soviet
Jews was incredible. I discovered this
immense network of individuals stretched across continents, all of whom had
dedicated so much to the struggle against the Soviet Union in the name of
complete strangers. It helped me feel worthy. I was also able to read about the
rich history of the Jewish people, which made me proud to be a Jew.
More than anything, going back and understanding my past was
key. The more I allowed my past to be suppressed and unknown, the more control
it had over me. By engaging my past I was able to regain that control.
Q: As you recreated your family’s experiences in and
departure from the Soviet Union, was more of your description based on your
actual memories, or on research and interviews?
A: That’s a great question. Most of the emotional scenes,
both good (walking in the park with my father, playing with my friend Oleg, receiving
a jacket in Vienna) and bad (crossing the Soviet border, being frozen with
terror when the druzhinniki swept through the yard) I remember very well.
They were moments that impact you and stay in your mind, for
better or worse, and were easy to recall because I’ve been carrying them in my
head most of my life.
Where the research came in is in placing the story within
the wider historical and social context. There are many things I remembered but
didn’t understand.
I vividly recall my father illegally purchasing matzah but
didn’t know why it was illegal, or how the Soviets had eradicated Jewish culture.
I remembered my family being terrified of pogrom rumors, but didn’t know why
Gorbachev’s reforms had led to an increase in anti-Semitism.
And, of course, there were factors my family didn’t know,
such as what the human rights workers who helped us were facing. That required research as well.
Q: How much of your family’s immigrant experience was
specific to the fact that you were from Kharkov, Ukraine, and how much could be
seen as universal?
A: I strove to describe the particulars, but believe it’s
applicable to many people and scenarios. The exotic elements – life in Soviet
Ukraine, escape as refugees, meeting a baron, living in the Alps – give flavor
to the narrative, but on the basic level it’s a story of family, being trapped,
trying to escape, and searching for self-understanding. These are things you
don’t have to be an immigrant or ex-refugee to relate to.
At the same time, I do hope that it helps American readers
understand some of the more foreign things, like the Eastern European Cold War
mindset and history (which is certainly relevant given today’s crisis in
Ukraine) as well as what it’s like to be an immigrant in America.
Q: How have your family members reacted to the memoir?
A: My sister asked me to change her name – she’s a private
person and I can certainly respect that. My parents were instrumental in
fleshing out details and helping me place life in Soviet Ukraine in context
(see my answer to question 2).
In the process, I not only received invaluable info for the
book but also got a glimpse of what they were going through when I was a child.
And, since I kept many of my own emotions hidden from my parents, reading this
book helped them learn more about me in return.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I’m focused on this book’s promotion and
publicity. The whole experience has been
one hell of a learning curve – from figuring out how to interview people, to
getting an agent, to working with an editor – and there is still lots to
learn.
Afterward, I have a couple ideas for the next book as well as
some magazine articles. Tracking down and interviewing people who had helped my
family (and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews) was one of my favorite
parts of the process and I’d love to do more traveling and interviewing.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I feel that what makes this story unique is that it’s
written by someone who’s been on both ends of the soup kitchen. This is a book for
anyone who’s dropped off a coat or a can of food at a charity drive and
wondered, “Did I make a difference?”
Also, my last name can be anagrammed as “Lion King” or, if
you prefer, “Loin King.”
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Lev Golinkin will be participating in the Lessans Family Annual Book Festival at the JCC of Greater Washington, which runs from Nov. 6-16, 2014.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Q&A with author Lucretia Bingham
Lucretia Bingham is the author of the new novel The Talcott House, a modern retelling of the classic Daphne DuMaurier novel Rebecca. She has written for a variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair. She lives along the Long Island Sound.
Q:
Why did you decide to write a modern version of the classic novel Rebecca?
A: Because I found myself actually living out a version of that classic story! When I first moved into my new husband’s grand old shingle style mansion, there was a resident housekeeper who, like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, attempted to sabotage my position in his heart and in the house.
Like the young wife of Rebecca, Ophelia, the heroine of The Talcott House, has her doubts. Can’t all of us relate to having doubts about the truth of our loves? Haven’t all of us often wondered if our new love still pines after his ex?
Q: How closely did you decide to follow the plot of the original novel?
A: As a writer, the old “what ifs?” began to invade my mind and waking dreams and my true story began to morph into a fictional tale of its own. What if the housekeeper were not just manipulative and unpleasant but truly evil?
In real life, my wonderful stepdaughters, almost grown-up, had been privy to the housekeeper’s poisonous assessment of me, but what if the children in this new made up story were younger and more impressionable?
Q: Was the house in your book based on an actual place—maybe your actual house--and why did you pick Connecticut as the setting?
A: Gothic novels must have gothic houses! Their brooding character set the stage for the classic struggle between good and evil. And since I live in a grand old shingle style house in Connecticut, which is already purported to be haunted, it was easy to make the actual Talcott House the central setting of the book.
When the winter winds howl and the whole house shakes and doors slam of their own volition, it isn’t hard to imagine ghouls stalking its halls.
Is it haunted, people ask? One guest said an invisible hand pushed her down the staircase. Others say they hear strange tinkling piano music emanating from the heating pipes. And, in the past, there have even been a rash of mysterious fires.
But I personally believe that all of us can be equally haunted by lost loves and thwarted desires, and that twisted dreams can indeed be as fearful as ghosts. And in that case, yes, The Talcott House has seen its share of haunts.
A: When I set out to write this book, I thought back to great novelists of the past. When I was 13, Dracula, by Bram Stoker, kept me sleepless for months. Dickens enthralled me by ending chapters with cliffhangers. And I loved the wild passion of Wuthering Heights, which made me breathless.
So, just as those writers and books did, I wanted to make my readers’ hearts skip a beat, both when the lovers touched and when they were endangered. I love reading a book I can’t put down because I must know what happens next.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: As to what lies ahead, another favorite writer of mine was H. Rider Haggard, who wrote wonderful suspense adventure novels, which my mother once read out loud to me.
His works inspired the sequel to The Talcott House, entitled She, the same name as my favorite Haggard novel. With the same group of characters as The Talcott House, She is a story of white slavery, child kidnappings, romance and adventure set in the souks, deserts and Kasbahs of Morocco. Keith Publications, LLC has it on their slate of novels soon to be published.
I am also in the process of writing the final chapters of a novel entitled The Four Absolutes, about a young girl’s coming of age within the confines of a religious cult, a subject close to my heart since my father was indeed a member of cult during my childhood years.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Visit my web site TheTalcotthouse.com for more information on everything, and its Facebook page, The Talcott House, which posts events and pictures regarding the house, its environs and its life as a novel.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Q&A with author Rhonda K. Garelick
Rhonda K. Garelick is the author of the new biography Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History. Her other books include Electric Salome and Rising Star. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the CUNY Graduate Center, and she lives in New York City.
Q: Why did you decide to write about Coco Chanel, and what surprised you most in the course of your research?
A: Deborah, the book began as a study of Chanel's work as a costume designer for dance, drama, and cinema. I am a scholar and critic of performance and had realized that no one had studied the vast range of Chanel's work in this field.
She had a 30-year career doing costumes--and they were very interesting. Her collaborators for stage work had included Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Visconti, Alain Resnais, Jean Renoir, Balanchine, Nijinsky, and so on.
But as I was working on that project, it dawned on me that Chanel was indeed a costumer--but not just of performers-- of the entire world.
I realized that the women of the industrialized world were all still walking around essentially costumed by Coco Chanel--in our trousers, jersey separates, neutral colors, flat-heeled shoes, eyeglasses, short hair, skirt suits, costume jewelry, shoulder bag purses, chain link belts, T-shirts, etc.
Her influence is so vast and deep that most of us no longer even recognize it. She is like the air we breathe, all around us but invisible. I decided that no other woman of the 20th century had had even close to as much influence as this woman, so I expanded the project's scope into a full biography.
A: Chanel's work captivated in several ways. First, when she invented her look, women were accustomed to dressing in vast layers of stiff, corseted materials, in dresses that reached the floor, with elaborate hats and veils pinned to their heads.
Chanel helped abolish the corset, and created sleek, movable, breathable, athletic clothes--separates, tubular skirts, jackets with pockets (like men's clothes, this was new!), hats that fit firmly on the head, and more. So on the simplest, physical level, the clothes felt wonderful, freeing, and light.
But on a deeper level, these clothes jibed with the new century, with women's increasing view of themselves as “doers” not just 'be-ers." With the advent of World War I, women were flooding into the workplace, doing jobs that men had done before, and there was a concomitant loosening of some of the strict decorum around “being a lady” of a certain class.
Chanel's clothes, but also her persona, her free-spirited, athletic, glamorous lifestyle, seemed to emblematize this new world of potential feminine freedoms.
Chanel knew how to work the publicity machine, and by her early 30s, she was known as a woman who lived with a lover, a woman who rode horses, played tennis, traveled, and ran her own highly successful business. She was beautiful and seemed ahead of her time. The clothes seemed to convey this fantasy of a life to whomever they touched.
A: There are many theories about this! Some say it was simply that 5 was Chanel's favorite number. Others say that her perfumer, Ernest Beaux, had gone through four previous iterations of the scent with her, and this one, the fifth, was her favorite.
My theory is that 5 was indeed her favorite number but that there was a reason for this: Chanel lost her mother at the age of 12, and her father abandoned the family immediately thereafter. She was raised in a convent orphanage, separated from her two brothers. Her two sisters both committed suicide young. The original family had five children, and it was torn apart.
I think Chanel used the number 5 throughout her life (not just for perfume, her runways shows were always held on the 5th of the month, etc.) as a tribute to her original family--the one she lost tragically and early.
Q: In the book, you describe Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. What were some of the factors leading her into this partnership?
A: Well, this is a complicated story. Chanel may or may not have worked for the Germans as early as World War I. Her police file in Paris suggests this.
By World War II, she had several reasons for this affiliation. First, there was her nephew (or possibly her son!), Andre Palasse, who was taken prisoner by the Germans.
By all accounts, Chanel was desperate to get him released, and for this reason she approached the Nazis and may have agreed to cooperate with them in exchange for Andre's release. He was in fact released, and Chanel did take part in an abortive spy mission for the Nazis, in which she attempted to broker a separate peace with Germany.
But to me, the romances are less important than Chanel's penchant for the glamour and fantasy of fascism and the Nazis. I think her childhood poverty and ostracism and many other tragedies in her life led her to wish to identify with whatever group seemed the most powerful.
During the Occupation, that group was the Nazis and Chanel fell in easily with their elitism and their elegance (in dress, in manners, I am speaking of the highest-level SS officers). What's more, her own politics were, by then, hard-right, nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. She'd hungered all her life for just the kind of inherent superiority promised by fascist ideology.
After the War, she managed to slip out of sight for over a decade, going into self-imposed exile in Switzerland, while other collaborators suffered harsh consequences. When she returned to her career in the early 1950s, she managed to re-invent herself all over again.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am planning a new book on the subject of "admiration"--how it functions, its uses and abuses. I suspect that we, in America, have lost somehow our capacity to admire and have replaced it with something we find more comfortable and less threatening--adulation, celebrity worship, etc.
The book asks what compels people to follow or emulate a leader, in sports, popular culture, politics, religion, and yes, fashion. And I want to figure out how admiration has given way, in my opinion, to something less productive, and whether we can fix this. It draws heavily on my two-decade career as a professor, too.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, as I said, I am also a professor, of comparative literature and performing arts. I am a visiting professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
I have a theater and dance background myself and have also worked for years as a corporate consultant in media, fashion, and journalism, so I have a kind of dual view of topics like fashion and popular culture.
I am married and live in NYC, which is my hometown.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Saturday, November 1, 2014
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