Q&A with Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is the author of the new novel Salt Houses. She also has written three poetry collections, including Hijra, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Guernica. She is a clinical psychologist, and she lives in Brooklyn.

Q: You've said that your novel started as a short story. At what point did you decide you would write a novel about your characters, the Yacoub family?

A: I don’t know that I ever actually made the active decision to write a novel. The very term terrified me and whenever I described what I was writing, I used the phrase “longer project.”

Rather, I think that I just became very curious about the other family members and was excited to try to give them each a chance to tell their story. I kept chasing that desire until, eventually, I had accidentally written a novel!

Q: You write from the viewpoints of many different members of the family. Were there particular characters you particularly enjoyed writing about?

A: I loved writing Linah’s chapter, because the perspective of a child is such a challenging thing to replicate. I also always enjoyed writing about Alia and Souad: their decades-long bickering was always enjoyable to witness (and create…).

Q: How did you choose the book's title, and what does it signify for you?

A: I initially had a different title and my agent told me I needed to change it. While I was initially reluctant, I am so grateful she encouraged me to branch out, because the current title is a million times better.

At the time, I just made a list of all the things that I mentioned a lot in the book, objects that I felt reoccurred throughout the chapters. “Houses” instantly grabbed me as an obvious choice, and then I brainstormed until I thought of “salt.”

Q: You've said that "one of the implications of a post-Trump America is that [immigrant] stories will become more urgent and necessary than ever before." Can you say more about that, and where you see Salt Houses fitting into that sense of urgency?

A: More and more, we’re seeing the attempt at negating, erasing or undermining the narratives of immigrants. I think books that challenge those norms, and portray immigrants in a non-dehumanizing, three-dimensional way are imperative in that process.

I hope that Salt Houses will be joining the tradition of literature that gives the reader an alternative perspective on the emotional costs of immigration and displacement.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I like to work on two projects at once, so I’m working on a new poetry manuscript and a new novel about a Lebanese family of expats that return to Beirut to sell their ancestral home. It’s tentatively titled The Arsonists’ City.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: This is still very surreal!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Michael Hogan

Michael Hogan is the author most recently of the book Abraham Lincoln and Mexico: A History of Courage, Intrigue, and Unlikely Friendships. His many other books include The Irish Soldiers of Mexico and Mexico: Sunlight & Shadows. He lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Abraham Lincoln and Mexico in your new book?

A: I was teaching an Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) class at the American School Foundation in Guadalajara, Mexico back in 2013. One weekend, my students went to see Lincoln, the movie directed by Stephen Spielberg. 

After they came back to class, I asked them how the movie dealt with Lincoln’s speech in Congress objecting to the Mexican War. I had told the students earlier in class about how it was a very courageous act. They told me that there was nothing at all about it in the movie. 

When I expressed my annoyance, one student by the name of Luciana Mendez, said, “Well, if anyone is going to tell the story about Lincoln and Mexico, maybe you should be the one to do it.” So, I took her advice and began my research.

Q:  How did you research the book, and was there anything that particularly surprised you in the course of your research?

A: I began the book with what I knew, which were the anti-war speeches Lincoln made in Congress as the Whig representative from Illinois. Every historian who wrote about these said that Lincoln was playing politics. 

But, I thought to myself, he was playing very badly if that was his game. Lincoln was shocked to discover that Polk had lied about his reasons for ordering the invasion. It took him a while to piece together the evidence of the “unjust and unconstitutional procedures” that Polk’s war message to Congress followed. 

But when he finally called the president out with his “spot resolutions,” it was clear that he had done his homework. It was a scathingly accurate and irrefutable critique. 

He was castigated in the press for his stand; his hand-picked replacement in Congress did not get elected, and Lincoln himself could not even get a job as postmaster. I then discovered other speeches he made, including a more risky one in which he actually accused the president of lying, and said that the war was unnecessary and unconstitutional.

When chastised by his law partner, William Herndon, for his obstinacy and ruining his prospects, Lincoln told him that he would do it again, and that it was the only honorable course to follow. 

So, matching up Herndon’s letters at the time with Lincoln’s responses gave me a clearer view. He was Honest Abe, not the wily politician, throughout the whole episode. I was surprised other historians had not pointed this out. 

But when I finished this stage of my research, I only had half a book. The second half was Lincoln and Mexico during the presidency and his legacy to Mexico after his death. There was virtually nothing at all written about this. So, that involved more research, this time in Mexico City.

Q: Can you say more about Lincoln’s attitude toward Mexico, both before and during his presidency?

A: Before he was president, Lincoln knew little about Mexico. After he became president in 1861, he was visited by Matías Romero, the Mexican Ambassador, at the Lincoln family home in Springfield. In Washington, D.C., Romero became close friends over time with Lincoln as well as with Mary Todd whom he accompanied on her many shopping trips. 

Lincoln was particularly impressed by the new president of Mexico, Benito Juárez, since he was attempting to help the Mexican peasants and limit the power of the conservative landowners and the Church. My discovery of Romero journals and letters in Mexico City was a big help with this stage of the research.

In 1863, when the French invaded Mexico and imposed Maximilian as emperor, Lincoln refused to recognize the new regime. He continued to treat Romero as if he were the legitimate ambassador and deal with him. This enabled Romero to raise millions from U.S. bankers to support the liberal cause, and through Generals Grant and Sheridan obtain arms for the liberal army that would overthrow the French four years later.

Q: Given the focus today on U.S.-Mexico relations, how would you compare the two periods and what do you hope readers take away from your book?

A: The 1840s was a time of imperialistic designs in which the U.S. expanded its territory from “sea to shining sea.” There were some critics of this policy of “Manifest Destiny” including Henry David Thoreau, John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln himself. 

We acquired Texas and the southwest states as a result but the country was torn apart by a civil war which to some extent was result of the war with Mexico and new slave states. It was a low point in the history of America.

The 1860s was the time of the Civil War itself and, although Lincoln was busy with domestic affairs, he maintained good relations with Mexico and tried to make amends for what had gone on before. Grant followed this tradition. He too was a good friend of Mexico, and made sure that its leaders were able to obtain U.S. surplus armament to defeat the French.

Harry Truman reminded everyone of the great debt we owe to the Mexicans when he visited Mexico in 1947, the 100th anniversary of the War with Mexico, and laid a wreath at the monument of the Niños Heroes, the teenage cadets, of that conflict who died resisting the American invasion of their capital.

I think all of these presidents—Adams, Lincoln, Grant and Truman—would be appalled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric and the negative comments one reads and hears today coming out of Washington, D.C. 

Truman considered Mexico the singular most important friend and trading partner of the United States. He said, “Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together. We shall not fail each other.”

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I actually have two projects. One is creating a set of lesson plans for middle school and high school students to go along with the book Abraham Lincoln and Mexico, which we believe will be an excellent supplement to APUSH and other U.S. History classes both in the U.S. and in American and international schools abroad. 

The book contains 137 pages of primary sources in the Appendix which will be useful to students to evaluate first hand. This will be a useful corrective since many textbooks today continue to ignore or spin the truth about reasons for the U.S. illegal invasion and unconstitutional war against Mexico, and how the military conquest of nearly half of Mexico at that time was the largest land grab in modern history. 

It’s time to set the record straight, and help students understand the common bonds between the two nations.

The second is project is a book I am planning about the American Legion of Honor, which was a group of ex-Union soldiers who joined the Mexicans after the Civil War to help expel the French. Almost nothing is written about this unique band of warriors, which included many black troopers or Buffalo Soldiers, several of whom had received the Congressional Medal of Honor in the earlier conflict.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I have written more than 20 books, but Abraham Lincoln and Mexico has assumed a life of its own in social media, in the press, most recently as a critically-acclaimed three-act play, and possibly as a mini-series down the road. 

Much of the credit for this is due to Mikel Miller of EgretBooks.com who is an excellent editor and co-founder of the Lincoln and Mexico Project that has as its goal the improvement of Mexico-U.S. relations by, among other things, revealing the histories of both counties based on archival documents, and the repercussions of U.S. policies both past and present. 

He has met with ambassadors and consul generals in the U.S. and abroad. He has reached out to university librarians, historians, history teachers, and authors, and has worked with me to promote the play Abraham Lincoln and Mexico: The Untold Story, which has been performed in two different venues in Mexico. You can learn more about the Lincoln and Mexico Project by following the blog.

It includes links to external references, including a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times that states: “The United States owes Mexico and itself an honest reconsideration of its first imperial war, not only in its schools and universities but also in its museums and books.”

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

May 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
May 2, 1903: Benjamin Spock born.

Q&A with Richard Michelson

Richard Michelson is the author of the new children's picture book The Language of Angels: A Story About the Reinvention of Hebrew. His many other books include Fascinating and More Money Than God. He is the owner of R. Michelson Galleries, hosts Northampton Poetry Radio, and was poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he lives. 

Q: Why did you decide to write a children's book about the reinvention of the Hebrew language?

A: Because it is an amazing story!!  No one had spoken Hebrew as a daily language since the time of the Maccabees—over 2,000 years ago. Imagine having to make up words for every new development in 2,000 years—ice cream, bicycles, libraries, etc.

And even the Jews living in Jerusalem when Eliezer Ben Yehuda arrived were totally against the idea. Hebrew had come to be viewed as a “holy language,” and folks were aghast at the fact that you would use Hebrew to ask where the bathroom was, or to tell someone to take out the garbage.

Even more outlandishly, Eliezer wanted his son, Ben-Zion, to be the first native Hebrew speaker since Biblical times, so he wouldn’t allow him to hear any language but Hebrew. 

Which meant that Ben-Zion had no friends. He wasn’t even allowed to hear the sounds animals make. His father would cover his ears when dogs barked or cats meowed. Yet within Eliezer’s lifetime, he saw his dream come true. What a difference one person can make!

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?

A: I knew nothing about the subject when I started – Ben-Yehuda to me was the name of a street in Israel -- so almost everything about the story was a surprise. But mostly I was amazed at the impact this one man had on an entire language. Ben-Yehuda lived to see 55 schools open with all instruction in Hebrew…

For research I relied heavily on Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s grandson, a Florida-based rabbi also named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who also has a strong interest in the Hebrew language and who has written about both the language and his grandfather’s life. There were numerous other sources which I cite in my bibliography.

Q: What do you think the book says about the importance of words and of language?

A: Most children think of language as “God-given,” or immutable, and why shouldn’t they? We teach them “the rules” in school, and grade them on their vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. But languages are more like living, breathing, ever-changing organisms.

So although on one level the book is about “the reemergence of Hebrew,” it is mostly about my love of words in and of themselves, and how much fun it is to play with language. That is something I hope to share with all children and those of you who once were children yourselves.

Q: What do you think Karla Gudeon's illustrations add to the story?

A: I was thrilled to be able to work with my friend Karla on this book….I will admit that I do not speak Hebrew, and Karla does, so I relied on her greatly.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I always try to have a number of projects going: so am writing a follow-up to my 2015 adult poetry collection, More Money than God (University of Pittsburgh Press), plus I am working on an alternative Haggadah (with the artist Michel Kuch), and I am finishing the libretto for an opera on the life of Edvard Munch (with composer Steven Schoenberg), and I have a couple of new children’s books in progress.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: You can visit me at www.RichardMichelson.com. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Richard Michelson, please click here.

Q&A with Julia L. Mickenberg

Julia L. Mickenberg is the author of the new book American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream. She also has written Learning from the Left and co-edited Tales for Little Rebels. She is associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for American Girls in Red Russia?

A: It’s a bit of a long story, but as a child of the Cold War, I had been interested in the Soviet Union for some time, and even toyed with becoming a Russian Studies major in college… but back then I gave up studying Russian after two years because it was so much harder than French, which had come quite easily to me.

Fast forward to writing my dissertation in American Studies, and the book that followed it, on children’s literature and radical politics.

Reading radical and also progressive and liberal periodicals in the course of doing that research, I encountered a great deal of material portraying the Soviet Union in a positive light, and repeated emphasis on resources and programs focused on women and children. 

This despite the fact that much of the scholarship dealing with the U.S. left says little about the “new Russia’s” significance for a broad cross-section of radicals, progressives and liberals. It was as if scholars were afraid to consider this issue.

I became generally interested in the way in which perceptions of the Soviet Union influenced Americans’ ideas about their own society and their relation to it, and thought of writing something about U.S. education and the Soviet Union as a way of continuing my research on childhood.  

But I became interested specifically in women through my discovery of Ruth Epperson Kennell’s Siberian adventures, the subject of chapter three. She got me thinking of the Soviet Union’s particular appeal to American women, which I say more about below, especially as I realized that this topic was significant and also had almost nothing written about it.

Q: What were some of the most common reasons that these women chose to move to Russia?

A: As I discuss in an early chapter of the book, a fair number of women came as relief workers, or “child savers,” during the famine of 1921-1923. Many were shocked by reports of starvation and disease, but they were especially concerned because the famine threatened all that might be.

As Helen Keller noted, “I feel more than ‘sympathy’ with the destitute children of Russia… I love them because round them clings the sanctity of the ideals and aspirations, the incredible courage and sacrifice of a people who uphold the hope of humanity…”

Before the revolution there was already a tradition among American feminists of admiring female Russian revolutionaries, whose “tenderness” made them so appalled by injustice that they felt compelled to take up arms.

Later, after the Bolshevik victory, U.S. women were attracted to the fact that women gained the vote right after the revolution, that abortion became free and legal and divorce was simplified, and that a range of measures were put into place to put women on par with men.

Although there were never enough of them and their quality varied, public dining halls, laundries, and other facilities were all supposed to eliminate what Lenin referred to as “household drudgery” and allow women to join the workforce and the public sphere as equal players. Generous maternity policies and factory crèches were supposed to allow women to be mothers and workers.

And all of these measures were thought to facilitate a new ideal of comradely love, wherein economic incentives were removed from marital relations.

Beyond these specifically gendered things, the Soviet Union was the site of the most dramatic events on the world’s stage in the 1920s and 1930s.

It had world-renowned theatre, artistic and literary experiments, music, film and exciting innovations in education, architecture, you name it. Theatre professionals came to train with the most innovative directors of the time. Dancers came so that they might have the experience of embodying the revolutionary ethos in their own movements.

During the Great Depression, when work in the United States was scarce, there were plenty of jobs in the Soviet Union. Jewish women wished to visit a country in which anti-Semitism had been eliminated (in theory). African-American women wanted to visit a country in which racism had been eliminated (in theory).

Finally, there was something forbidden about Soviet Russia, whose very existence was a kind of challenge to the United States and all that it stood for. The discomforts one endured to be part of building a new society were part of the attraction, as was the whiff of danger.

In actuality, the discomforts that foreigners experienced were nothing compared to those that the Russian people themselves endured because of the material shortages. And the whiff of danger became very real for some people, especially by the late 1930s, as all foreigners were suddenly suspect.

Q: Did most of the women you researched aspire to live permanently in Russia, or just stay there temporarily?

A: Most of the women I studied at did not see themselves moving permanently to Russia. In fact, the original title of my book was “The New Woman Tries on Red: Russia in the American Feminist Imagination.” I very much saw most of them “trying on” or trying out the “Soviet experiment.”

Women who actually stayed on in the Soviet Union almost inevitably lost the sense of idealism that had brought them there, especially if they gave up American citizenship and the privileges that came with it.

Q: How did you research this book, and what surprised you most in the course of your research?

A: I spent more than 10 years working on this book, although I did a number of other things during that time as well.

In addition to reading related relevant scholarship and published magazine and news articles from the time I was looking at, the bulk of my research involved looking at intimate sources (diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, notebooks, etc.) in archives, and reading those against public expressions.

I was interested in the gap between what people thought privately and what they professed to a wider audience. So I looked at the personal papers of a wide variety of women who had spent time in Russia or the Soviet Union: Ruth Epperson Kennell (at the University of Oregon); Anna Louise Strong (at the University of Washington); Pauline Koner (at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts); Dorothy West (at the Schlesinger Library); Louise Thompson Patterson (at Emory University); Anna Strunsky Walling (at Yale); Emma Goldman (in several different archives); Margaret Bourke White (at Syracuse University); Milly Bennett (Hoover Library); Jessie Lloyd O’Connor (Smith College); Lillian Hellman (here at UT).

I also looked at institutional records: the American Friends Service Committee (at the Friends Library in Philadelphia) and their British partners (at the Friends Library in London); CPUSA collections (at NYU); the Comintern’s papers (some on microfilm at NYU and some in Moscow); records of VOKS (the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, also in Moscow); Intourist (the Soviet travel bureau, also in Moscow); the Socialist Revolutionaries (Amsterdam); settlement houses; the National Woman’s Party (Library of Congress).

I acquired FBI files. I interviewed the children of several people: the son Mignon Verne/Mary Garland, who had spent a year in Moscow with the Isadora Duncan dance school; the daughter of Louise Thompson Patterson, who led a group of African Americans to Moscow to perform in a film about U.S. race relations; the daughter of Seema Allan, who worked as a journalist for the Moscow News, the first English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union.

I guess that’s kind of an overwhelming list, and it’s not anywhere near complete. My biggest surprise in the course of working on this book was that I actually enjoyed studying Russian, and so kept at it longer than I might have, despite how much trouble I had actually learning it.

I started sitting in on Russian language classes just after I got tenure at UT, and I loved getting to be a student instead of a teacher, and taking classes just to learn, without having to be graded.

After four years as a not-very-good student I was able to achieve my goal of being able to work in Russian archives, but a good measure of my skills, especially as a speaker (I did slightly better as a reader), was that in the Comintern archives I heard one librarian say to another about me, “Boy, her Russian is really bad.” Proudly, I answered back, in Russian, “Not that bad.”

In terms of the research itself one thing that surprised me was that my ambivalent feelings about the Soviet Union remain, even after so many years of researching it. There truly was a lot to be excited about, but there was paranoia, repression, and violence, as well as deprivation, regimentation, mismanagement, pettiness, greed, and corruption, on all sides, from the very beginning.

In a way it makes sense that the best book about the Great Terror is a work of fiction, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The facts are themselves too hard to fathom. It was surprising sometimes to find that people could find ways to reconcile these things.

One of the people I most enjoyed researching was Milly Bennett, who made funny, cynical, and occasionally wise comments in her letters to friends while writing punchy and often poetic journalistic pieces, like the 1932 exposé of “American Girls in Red Russia,” which was written for a syndicated magazine, and from which the book takes its title.

It was she who wrote in a letter to a friend, “The thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right. . . . And then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say . . . ‘facts are not important.’”

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I’m chairing the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and directing the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (just for a year, allowing my friend Mary Neuburger to go on a research leave), making it hard to do sustained research.

However, I’m working on several smaller projects and thinking about a few larger ones. I’m doing an edition of Madeleine Z. Doty’s writings on the Bolshevik Revolution, which was in the midst of happening when she arrived in Russia as part of a trip around the world to document women’s experiences on the home front during World War I.

She wound up staying for several months in Russia and writing one of the most vivid accounts of the revolution, but right now it’s buried in a book that discusses several other countries as well, including China, Sweden, Germany, and England. I’m writing an introduction and annotating/footnoting the text.

I’m also doing research for what will probably be an article—but could conceivably be a book—on Ruth Epperson Kennell’s professional and personal relationship with Theodore Dreiser.

Kennell comes up throughout American Girls in Red Russia, but I don’t say much about the four months she spent as Dreiser’s private secretary, or the fact that their relationship continued for the rest of his life. And years after his death Kennell published a book about Dreiser’s experiences in Russia, based primarily on the diary she kept for him.

I’m interested not just in how she served him but also how he aided her career and helped her efforts to promote the Soviet Union to a younger generation in the 1960s.

I’m also writing an article on women, the Russian revolution, and the first Red Scare that will most likely focus on Doty, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pastor Stokes, all of whom had intensely personal relationships to the Russian Revolution and all of whom strongly felt the effects of the 1919 Red Scare.

I’ve got two future book projects in mind, one dealing with the writer and activist Eve Merriam, and the other dealing with Second-Wave feminism.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Peter Szabo

Peter Szabo is the author of the new book Finding Maria: A Young Man's Search for His Grandmother, and Himself. He also has written a volume of poetry, Death and Life, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Bioscience and Maryland Historical Magazine. He lives in New York City.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book about your grandmother?

A: I don’t know at what point I decided to write a book. The work just kind of came out as I was in the later parts of the experiences covered in the book and in the process of trying to make sense of them, and putting some of the history together. 

Looking back on it now, it was all part of a process of memory formation, the process of turning my grandmother into a memory in the course of working through the experience.

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: In conversation with my editor, David Groff, we arrived at "Finding Maria." There is a kind of finding that goes on in this book on a range of levels, from finding her place in history, to finding more who she was on a range of levels, to, ultimately, finding her within myself in internalizing some of her incredible strengths, and her memory.

Q: Given the book’s subtitle, what do you think you learned from the time you spent with your grandmother when you were a young man, and how has it affected you since? 

A: I think that I learned a lot about life. Through her example and her personality, she taught me that life is both tragic and beautiful, and that that’s OK. The process of maturing is really developing a capacity to experience the tragic, to not run from it, and also to cherish beauty.  Maturity involves holding them both comfortably, tragedy and beauty.

I learned a lot about the complexity of human beings, and about frailty, and strength. We develop to the extent we acquire over time a capacity to take in not only the good but the not-so-good about people, and find a way to love them more richly. I think my grandmother taught me a lot about that, and my aunt and my father did as well. 

I think the time with her helped me understand more about life’s complexity. For example, I know that I was headed toward marriage, but I think there was something reinforcing around that that came from my grandmother, about life choices and taking risks.

And I think holding on to passions and following passion and belief. And at the same time, it’s a part of life that you do what you have to do. So I think in my work life I have been able to follow passion, at the same time that it’s work. And I’ve been able to make time for writing. 

So, her example of persistence and hopefulness, her delight with beauty, and also her comfort with tragedy, taught me a lot.

Q: How much did you know about your family history as you were growing up, and what particularly surprised you as you found out more from your grandmother?

A: Growing up, if there was any history that was offered, it was about The Escape. The story of my grandmother and my father and my aunt escaping from Hungary was told. My father told it. I don’t remember whether my grandmother told it or whether she was just there when he did. 

So what was particularly surprising was the Holocaust and World War II story. I don’t remember if I knew my father was raised as a Catholic, I feel as if that was kind of out there. But I think understanding in more vivid detail his going to the Jesuit boarding school and parading around in the Papal uniform. 

And his own story about wartime experience and confusion around his religion, the ease with which he was able to pose as a Christian when they were in hiding, and his eventual return to Judaism. 

I would say also, the questions around her survival, and her bravery in getting the false papers, and finding the hiding places and surviving the bombings. 

And the magnitude of the loss across the family – sitting there with her on that bench in Central Park, in my early 30s, and having my grandmother tell me that 60 friends and family were lost in the Holocaust, that was probably the most striking thing I learned through the whole process of discovery. And it transformed the way that I think about myself and my family.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: (Laughter) What I am working on now is trying to get the word out about this book! But I have also started doing some research on my grandfather. This would be my mother’s father, my Brooklyn-born grandfather. 

He was the son of an observant Jew, grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn in the early 1900s, fought in World War I, earned a Purple Heart, played professional basketball in its early years in the late teens and 1920s, and had a thriving plumbing business as Brownsville and Flatbush were built out, until the Great Depression hit. 

I’ve started exploring some of the history around that period, and I’m considering doing something related to his early life or related to the early years of basketball.  I haven’t zeroed in on the next step there yet.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I hope that people are inspired by this book to go out and get the story from the older people around them. It might be your parents. If you are young enough, it might be your grandparents. Everyone has got a story, and it doesn’t have to be about surviving the Holocaust in Budapest and escaping Communism to come to America. 

The point is really about forming bonds with your family, with your own history, and learning about the people near you, who they are, learning about the choices they made, how they lived their life, learning to love them. 

On a simple level, you are helping them, reducing their isolation, increasing their connections to the world. But it goes far beyond this.  The rewards of building a more extensive friendship with an older person in your life are many.

I think in the process of doing that you also grow and you forge a much fuller identity. I know “identity” has become kind of a charged word these days, but I think that’s a shame.

We are all stronger with a deeper and richer sense of our identity. To look in the mirror, to walk around each day, to interact with our loved ones with a stronger sense of self gives life more meaning, and makes the world a better place, I like to think. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

May 1

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
May 1, 1923: Joseph Heller born.