We buried my mother a year ago today

How do you sum up a life? Normally with my mother, I think of a funny story. And maybe that’s not fair, though she was a character, wasn’t she? It’s not a fabrication on my part that when I told her I was going to have a baby, she said, “What? What? What? What? What?” (Yes, five whats. As I’ve said before, people born in Flatbush in 1938 are naturally enthusiastic). But this morning, a year since she’s left us, I’m thinking of the little gifts she came up with for Leo. Maybe all grandmothers do this but that first Christmas ornament she bought for him? It will live forever in the museum of my mind, if only there. A stately, white porcelain figure of Santa and his sack of toys, with Leo’s name etched in gold on the side. Her thinking? He needed a Christmas ornament right from the get-go, and she was right, of course. A nice one, too. Grandchild no. 8 but she’d lost none of her enthusiasm. I also think – veering off in a completely different direction, which she was known to do – of what she was like when she ritually watched the New York City marathon on TV, as I mentioned in a previous post. I remember when the first Kenyan won in the late 80s. That year, as she sat in her rocking chair smoking and watching while the runner began to overtake the lead pack, she edged forward as she shouted, “He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it!” I’ll never be able to completely ignore sports because of moments like that. The thrill of human achievement. The euphoria we can feel for someone we don’t even know. She wasn’t ever going to run a marathon, Pat, but she was going to enjoy that man’s victory, his perseverance, his dedication. Yet maybe it would be a better tribute to think of the ideas she endorsed because she knew how deep our longing could be. Specifically, my longing to go to liberal, activist, avant-garde Wesleyan, which would never have been her choice for a college, but she was happy for me, even though the atmosphere was a bit too bohemian for her tastes (“It’s very far-out”). This post hardly does her justice because I am leaving out the time she schooled me for suggesting we give a very old piece of clothing to a Goodwill donation, saying: “People who are poor like nice things, too.” The sting of regret faded, the lesson remained. I’m leaving out words like “discombobulated” and her instructions for a quick bath: “Get in, get out, get washed.” (Maybe not in that order). But nothing I can write can conjure up her spirit fully because she was truly alive – especially alive in raising four children in pre-modern times (which is to say, all the cooking, all the cleaning, nearly all the ferrying to activities, the Girl Scout leadering, the backyard shepherding, etc). Christmas? How she arranged it, with a thousand heartfelt, hand-selected gifts, it’s hard to imagine Heaven is as special as Christmas morning was at 236 Ohio Street. Her hobbies? Besides smoking, the New York Times crossword. Because she could fit that in between all of her other tasks. No matter how much I do for Leo, it will never approach what Pat did for us. Because she gave her whole self. I haven’t even touched on her conversational skills – she made chit-chatting seem like the reward you get for all of your hard work at day’s end (and good thing the kitchen phone’s cord could snake its way to the rocking chair in the living room). “Oh, he was a character,” she might say about someone we were discussing (take the compliment, buddy! You got Pat’s attention, and her good will). I scarcely know how to end this message because there are so many things I’m ignoring, except maybe I could ask a favor? If you're thinking of your mother right now, spend some time talking to her today – for me. Entertain her theories, put up with her smoking, probe her memories. I’ll live vicariously through you! But if that's not possible, maybe just read Marie Howe's poetry -- especially this line, "I am living. I remember you."

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The power of the Olympics (in my own backyard)

 

Long jump!

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Il paese dei miei antenati

Vado pazza per le parole, sia in inglese che in italiano. E una volta un mio amico fiorentino mi mandò una cartolina dall'Irlanda, e ci scrisse:

"Il paese dei tuo antenati è la fine del mondo."

Mi è rimasto impresso questo suo commento perché mi sembrava cosi gentile -- certamente mi aveva ascoltato con grande pazienza mentre gli parlavo, come americana, del paese di mio bisnonno -- ed anche perché Irlanda è davvero spettacolare. 

Quando ci sono tornata a giugno, spesso mi dicevo, "Il paese dei tuo antenati è la fine del mondo."

Le parole. A volte possono avere un peso sacro anche quando si tratta di frasi che non hanno niente a che fare con Dio o senza dimensione religiosa.

Grazie, Floriano! (la cartolina ce l'ho ancora).

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Literature I've Loved (after the NYT list)

I began compiling this list because whenever I teach, I'm always scouting out works I can include on the syllabus and I'm slated to teach a course this Fall. But I decided to complete it after the fanfare that resulted from The New York Times' list. Note, I don't make temporal distinctions. These are the works from all time that move me, which I suppose might be off-topic since the newspaper was specifically aiming to capture the best books of this century. I am not convinced -- or maybe I'm simply unsure -- the best books  I've read were published during the current century. I also approach my reading life in a way that's quite separate from the publishing industry's calendar. I have recommendations from friends, I have genres I follow (memoir, literature by Italian women authors), I have gaps to fill (Shakespeare! Toni Morrison!), and none of that necessarily coincides with the particular books that come out each year (the most notable often go on the TBRL file, no?). 

To be sure, many of these works I've read and/or re-read this century. But does that matter? Let's put the issue aside and move onto the actual list, which isn't exhaustive, more like 'some ideas' for what to read. A list like this could really go on and on but I'm going to call time right now. And I've probably missed all kinds of books that I loved. Oh well!

Fiction

The Dubliners, James Joyce

Drown, Junot Diaz (which I preferred to 'Oscar Wao,' which made the Times' list)

The Divine Comedy, Dante (definitely not this century, ha ha!)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Il Giorno della Civetta, Leonardo Sciascia

To Each His Own (A Ciascuno Il Suo), Leonardo Sciascia

Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini)

Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones (His book, "The Known World," is on the NYT list but I haven't read it yet!) (almost this century!)

Country Girls, Edna O'Brien (May she rest in peace!)

A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr 

A Meal in Winter, Hubert Mingarelli

Gli Indifferenti, Alberto Moravia

The Bishop's Bedroom, Piero Chiara (in a stellar translation by Jill Foulston)

Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Patrick Modiano (actually this century)

Suspended Sentences (ibid)

A Scrap of Time, Ida Fink (see below)

Charming Billy, Alice McDermott

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver 

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (this century)

If You Kept A Record of Sins, Andrea Bajani (ditto) (and translated gloriously by Elizabeth Harris)

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (thanks to my friend, Jenny, for reminding me of this incredible book! So this entry is an addition to the original list, judges)

Essays/Memoir
"Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin

"Journey into Night" by David Sedaris

"Black Men and Public Space" Brent Staples

"Going it Alone" by Rahawa Haile

"Winter in Abruzzo" by Natalia Ginzburg

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan 

"The Namesake" by Mason Stokes

"Brownsville Kitchen" by Alfred Kazin

“No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston 

"We Should All Be Feminists" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nonfiction (book-length)

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

If This is a Man, Primo Levi

Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

Wanderlust. Rebecca Solnit (it's about WALKING! Walking!)

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

Family Lexicon ("Lessico Famigliare")

"Trial by Fire," by David Grann (in The New Yorker)

The Letters of Nancy Mitford

Aran Islands, Synge (definitely not this century, ha ha!)

Here in Our Auschwitz, Tadeusz Borowski 

Individual short stories

"The Haircut" by Ring Lardner

"Making Love" by Antonya Nelson

"Casta Diva" by Francesca Scotti

"Autumn Lessons" by F. Marzia Esposito (read my translation of it here!)

"Cortez Island" by Alice Munro

"Your Husband is Cheating on Us"

"The Dead," Joyce, just in case you can only read one story from Dubliners

"A Hand Reached Down..." David Gates

"The Key Game" by Ida Fink (click on link but it's devastating)

“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” by Amy Hempel

Poetry
"Now" by Denis Johnson
"Aubade" by Philip Larkin

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

"The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy (a poem I learned by heart as a girl -- yes I can still recite it. It's short!)

"Dulce et decorum est," Wilfred Owen

"The House," Warsan Shire

"The Second Coming," by Yeats

"When I think of Tamir Rice While Driving," Reginald Dwayne Betts

"Digging," by Seamus Heaney

"The Symbol," "To Be Born By Chance" and "Maybe," by Edith Bruck

Graphic novel

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

In Italian, not available in translation

Viaggi e altri viaggi, Antonio Tabucchi (English translation forthcoming)

Andremo in Città by Edith Bruck, not yet available in translation BUT SOON! SOON!

Due Stanze Vuote, ibid ^^^

Passaggio in ombra (note the English translation could be available! Read an excerpt here)

(Yes, forgive me, I've included links to some of my translations because as a part-time translator, I only translate what moves me)

Tell me the literature you've loved. Don't worry about which century had the luck of seeing it published.

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Gente di Dublino (What I read before leaving for Ireland)

Italian literature is never far from my mind, even the last few months when I immersed myself in Irish literature as I prepared for my first trip to Ireland in more than a decade. 

It's perhaps because when I read Italian literature, I attempt to fill in the vast gaps in my education, seeing as I attended school in America, and not Italy. So many Italian classics I didn't encounter in high school!

As such, I've avoided reading American or British classics in Italian. Why bother?

But a year or so ago, I stumbled over the opening lines of The Great Gatsby in Italian. By which, I mean, the first lines of IL GRANDE GATSBY. (I wrote about it here). 

It happens to be my favorite novel of all time. And I realized how tickled I would be to see how the Italians render it (tickled and maybe also edified, since I do some literary translation, myself).

And why stop there?

So when Il Nostro Inviato went to Italy a few months ago for work, rather than ask for the latest releases from my favorite Italian women writers (my standard order), I asked for Gente di Dublino.

Or what I've been calling "Dubliners" since I read it for the first time at St. Anthony's High School on Long Island.

I made a beeline for the masterpiece of James Joyce's collection, "The Dead," or in Italian, "I morti."

Here are the indelible final lines from that seminal story (slightly condensed):

(From "I morti" -- "The Dead")

"Cadeva la neve in ogni parte della scura pianura centrale ... E cadeva anche su ogni punto del solitario cimitero sulla collina in cui giaceva il corpo di Michael Furey.

"...pian piano l'anima gli svaní lenta mentre udiva la neva cadere stancamente su tutto l'universo e stancamente cadere, come la discesa della loro fine ultima, su tutti i vivi e tutti i morti."

I can remember my teacher, Brother Jeffrey, pointing out the repetition in the lines: "falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling," and they delight in Italian, too.

I've been binge-reading Irish literature for months -- ever since booking our trip to Ireland shortly before St. Patrick's Day.

And I've spent my reading hours re-visiting Synge and other works by Joyce, as well as tackling several Brendan Behan works and a short play by Samuel Beckett.

But there's really nothing like those final lines of "The Dead" or "I morti." It's the same, really, in the end. Be it "The descent of their last end" or "La discesa della loro fine ultima," I am equally enthralled.

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Jeanne reads poems by Edith Bruck in translation

These are poems from Versi Vissuti, which combines three of Edith's poetry collections. I read them for the translation reading series, Translators Aloud, which is a YouTube channel that bills itself The Voice of Translated Literature.

Enjoy!

An Oscar-winning film, seen on a whim, changed my life

I don’t pay much attention to the Oscars ceremony, which will air on Sunday. Most years, I don’t see a single movie that’s been nominated. “Barbie?” Haven’t seen it. “Oppenheimer”? Nope. I’m a middle-aged mother with an 11-year-old son so I see few movies expressly for adults.

But once upon a time, an Oscar nod was reason enough for me to go to the movies. Ten days before leaving for college at Wesleyan University, I saw what is now considered a modern Italian classic: “Cinema Paradiso.” It won the 1989 Oscar for best foreign film. And it changed my life.

The main character is a famous movie director named Totò who, in the years after World War II, returns to the tiny Sicilian town where he grew up. The film begins in the present day, in an apartment in Rome, but an unexpected phone call sends the director back to Sicily – and the movie back in time.

In the director’s boyhood village, life revolves around the parish church and the lone movie theater. That’s where the whole town convenes in the years before television. Alfredo, the projectionist, is seen repeatedly shooing away Totò – back when he’s an adorable but incorrigible boy who is infatuated with movies and always grabbing strips of film that fall on the floor. Alfredo eventually relents and agrees to teach him his profession. In the course of the film, Totò transforms from a tiny tot who uses a stepstool to reach the projector into a teen using his first movie camera to capture frames of a pretty girl he likes.

Before I saw the film, I knew no Italian, and had no plans to study it. But when I arrived at college a short while later, I enrolled in Italian 101 and signed up for a hybrid literature-study abroad program – all because I fell in love with the sounds I’d heard in the film. Eighteen months later, I left to study in Italy, and after college, I went back to live in Tuscany as an ex-pat. Since returning to the States, I’ve written this blog as an ode to small Italian pleasures. The film is one of many reasons a part of me will forever remain in Italy.

The movie does what all good fiction does: it makes you wish you lived in the world evoked by the story, in this case, Italian small-town life. I felt as though I had gone on vacation, to another country and another time. 

It also reminds me of the necessity of pursuing something that’s not inherently useful or handy. Knowing Italian won’t really get you out of a jam. Even traveling the world, you’ll find Italian will help you in only a handful of place outside of one solitary country (Italy). But studying Italian has been the great passion of my life; it’s allowed me to step inside the mind of another culture and revel in small moments, such as eavesdropping on a conversation between a barista and a regular at café in Rome or dining in a remote countryside restaurant where not a single other person speaks your native language. Fluency, after all, is a form of immersion not unlike diving into a pool or hiking the Appalachian Trail.

I saw the film at a now-defunct arthouse cinema in Manhattan. Last year, I watched it with my students at a small college in Hartford where I was teaching Italian. I sat in the back of our darkened classroom, and took notes, my eyes brimming with tears of nostalgia. In one scene, Totò is at home in his kitchen pretending to be a cowboy, mimicking shoot-outs from westerns he’s watched at the theater. A lighthearted moment balanced with the knowledge that his father has gone off to war and never returns. In the space created by that absence, Totò’s friendship with Alfredo, who is childless, looms far larger than the token love story in the movie. 

The film is about more than a boy who grows up to be a director; it’s about how longing and loss shape our lives, as well as the power of community. Totò leaves his provincial hometown on Alfredo’s advice, without ever looking back, and becomes successful in the big city. But the cost to both men is considerable. On his return, he sees what’s happened to the village – and his one-time mentor, Alfredo – since then. As the director revisits landmarks of his youth, he realizes he’s abandoned the people who loved him the most.

Watching the film at 18, I absorbed a culture completely foreign to my suburban New York upbringing. It drove me to master Italian so I could understand bits of dialogue that escaped me on the first viewing and it introduced me to what would become my adopted country. Since then, its language and customs have infiltrated every corner of my life. That 11-year-old son I mentioned? His name is Leonardo, and one afternoon in Italy not too long ago, a Florentine friend of mine insisted on teaching him to curse in Italian. I am raising him in a house where Italian words cover every surface, from book covers to the posters on the living room wall, and boxes of pasta in the pantry. 

So go to the movies. See a film you know nothing about. It might change your life. And one day, when he’s a little older, I’ll watch “Cinema Paradiso” with Leonardo – in the hopes that he, too, falls in love. With the movie or movie-making or Italian. As long as he knows the beauty of falling in love with something powerful enough to change your life.

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Women Holocaust survivors: A Reading List

To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27), below you'll find all the books I have read or want to read by or about women who survived the Holocaust. Note, this list is NOT exhaustive!  Mainly Italian authors, for starters. But a good primer on works involving a group of survivors that has often been marginalized, as I wrote in an article for the American Scholar last year. 

Available in translation

Who Loves You Like This, Edith Bruck (Paul Dry Books; Thomas Kelso, translator)

Lost Bread, Edith Bruck (Ibid., Gabriella Romani and David Yanoff, translators)

Letter to My Mother, Edith Bruck (Brenda Webster and Gabriella Romani, translators)

There's a Place on Earth, Giuliana Tedeschi, (Tim Parks, translator)

Sentenced to Live, A Survivor's Memoir, Cecilie Klein

Ravensbrück, The Women's Camp of Death, Denise Dufournier

Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz 

Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo (French resistance fighter)

A Scrap of Time, Ida Fink (a collection of stories that includes "The Key Game" -- devastating)

Distant Fathers, Marina Jarre (click to read my reviews of both Jarre titles)

Return to Latvia, Marina Jarre (both Jarre books were translated by Ann Goldstein)

*Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (I cited this book in the article I published in the American Scholar about women Holocaust survivors)

Not available in English translation

L'esile filo della memoria, Lidia Beccaria Rolfi (This book begins a few days before the writer was liberated from the concentration camp called Ravensbruck, which is fascinating because it deals with the saga of afterward. As if the saga of before -- the camps -- weren't enough.)

Come una rana d'inverno: Conversazioni con tre donne sopravvissute ad Auschwitz, Daniela Padoan (interviews with three women who survived the Holocaust) 

Il silenzio dei vivi, Elisa Springer

Andremo in città, Edith Bruck (Note, I'm translating this, thanks to an NEA grant)

Due Stanze Vuote, Edith Bruck (" ")

Transit, Edith Bruck

Signora Auschwitz, Edith Bruck

Scolpitelo nel vostro cuore, Liliana Segre

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My Tiny Love Story in The New York Times

I've written a tiny love story for The New York Times and I think I'd like to compose one for everyone I've ever loved!

But I started with my first best friend, and it's a pretty good place to start.

World, this is my sister, Denise!

Coming to my rescue -- not for the first time.

The words came to me one day while I was taking a walk. That's so often how writing works, and in this case, since it's only 100 words, the few lines that might surface while out and about suffice!

We've had a two-year period of losses, but as monumental as those events were, little moments and gestures can often be decisive. Little moments that act like life boats.

To read the entry properly, click here.

Ryan Holiday: These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life

I don't agree with all of them, but I do find this list (link below) of 'reading rules' intriguing, and I agree with the author (Ryan Holiday) that any aim at reading well, widely and frequently can benefit from a strategy.

The rules I agree with:

–"Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I’ve read at the Grammy’s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I’ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get."

–"In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core."

–"Don’t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved—that we never step in the same river twice. The books don’t change, but you do."

Read more here:

https://ryanholiday.net/these-38-reading-rules-changed-my-life/