Q&A Washington Independent Review of Books

The author discusses Correspondence Course: The Bathsua Project, her multi-layered debut novel, with Harriet Dwinell. Washington Independent Review of Books, December 6, 2014.

The Year of Magical Thinking, the title of Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir written in response to her husband's death, well describes Rhoda Trooboff’s complex debut novel. Correspondence Course, The Bathsua Project follows a “magical year” that takes Dee Young, a retired English teacher, from paralyzing grief at the death of her husband, Dan, to acceptance of the past and hope for the future.
Dee does not undertake this journey alone. Clinging to the possibility of reaching Dan in cyberspace, she sends obsessive emails to their joint email account. At the same time, she embarks upon a secret correspondence with Bathsua Makin, a 17th-century schoolteacher and tutor to one of the daughters of King Charles I. This correspondence begins innocently, if supernaturally, enough. Soon, in a niche in the Library of Congress’ Main Reading Room, the two women begin exchanging notes that bring their lives to life.

Bathsua Makin isn’t a household name. How did you discover her?
I first learned about Bathsua in the 1980s, when I was preparing to teach British Literature at National Cathedral School for Girls. Who were the women who deserved to be in the English literary canon before Jane Austen and the Brontës? I wondered. So Correspondence Course started with a question. I soon found myself a 17th-century women’s literary history hobbyist. My first notes about Bathsua were dated 1985, when I read Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Bathsua lived during exciting, stressful times in English history — the Civil War, the regicide of Charles I (1649), the Plague Year of 1665, and the Great Fire of London (1666).
In 2001, I discovered Frances Teague’s excellent Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning, which carefully documents Bathsua’s accomplishments as a teacher, linguist, and educational theorist. Teague’s book also provides excellent contextual material and points out poignant archival documentation of her personal life. Dry stuff, perhaps, but suggestive of a rich, compelling emotional life. I could hear so many dramatic stories behind every fact I learned.

Given your fascination with 17th-century history, how did the coupling of Bathsua’s 17th-century story with Dee’s modern-day life come about?
Confluence. Fascinated as I was by this obscure historical figure, wondering what lay behind the recorded facts, and fretting about bringing to life an obscure and ordinary woman living in a time of enormous national upheaval, I found myself, like others, unhinged in the year after 9/11, our annus horribilis. Might I explore Bathsua’s life through the lens of a modern DC woman who also lived at a time of enormous national upheaval? Parallels — correspondences — between Bathsua’s life and Dee’s started presenting themselves.

Would you call Correspondence Course an epistolary novel?
Absolutely. The novel begins with emails — our substitute for handwritten letters. But I’m nostalgic about “real” letters — the long, discursive, handwritten kind! So I decided to have Dee exchange old-fashioned letters with Bathsua — and at the same time continue to email Dan. During the 10 years or so that it took me to write Correspondence Course, I observed that email was totally changing the nature of letter writing. So I knew that I had to use both the old epistolary form — letters — and the new one — emails — as well as their enclosures, attachments, and mailboxes. Perhaps Correspondence Course is an elegy to the lost art of letter writing.

When only a few facts are known about Bathsua’s life, how were you able fill your novel with vibrant scenes that bring her alive?
Both research and imagination were crucial — and interdependent. Real-life events helped me create an appropriate timeline and context for Bathsua’s life. I did a lot of library research on many topics — the precarious lives of newborns and their mothers in the 17th century; the way schools functioned; the last days of King Charles and his precocious daughter Elizabeth; the history of Bedlam Hospital, where Bathsua’s brilliant father spent his final days. I spent valuable time in London at the Museum of London and walking in the neighborhood where Bathsua spent her childhood. The office building at No. 30 Saint Mary Axe Street, now the second tallest building in London and known fondly as the Gherkin, rises beside Saint Andrew Undershaft, where Bathsua first taught in her father’s schoolroom. These are only a few examples. All this research led to thrilling imaginings.

When Dee asks Bathsua about her relationship with her sister, Bathsua doesn’t answer directly but invents five amazing fairy tales that hint at it. And when Dee explores her relationship with her own aging father, she doesn’t analyze it, but examines it in the course of teaching “King Lear” to her students. Can you talk about this process?
I learned that the night before King Charles was executed, he was visited by his daughter Princess Elizabeth. She had been Bathsua’s pupil — a precocious, talented teenager under house arrest when Bathsua taught her Greek, probably by having her study and translate classical tragedies like Sophocles’ play “Electra.” Elizabeth was eventually taken off to a damp, drafty castle on the Isle of Wight, where she died several months later. I found myself imagining the last tutoring session, the last time Bathsua and her star pupil saw each other. Those imaginings became “A Play in the Style of a Sophoclean Tragedy.” There was no historical record of that tutoring session, of course, but there is evidence that Princess Elizabeth was familiar with “Electra.” And after Elizabeth’s death, she was compared to that ancient doomed princess.
Similarly, I imagined both Dee’s and Bathsua’s elderly fathers growing more and more problematic — now we call the condition senile dementia — and I decided to tackle their last days fictionally. I don’t know why Bathsua’s father died in an asylum for the insane, but I tried to imagine how that might have come to pass in 1635. In the case of Dee’s father, as you said, I used the device of the literary parallel to Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Dee’s teaching the play as the key to unlock that sad time. In both cases, and throughout the novel, I sought fictional ways to explore huge crises in the personal lives of these two women.

At one point, Dee talks about how easy it is to present real life as fiction. “Rearrange some details, add others, subtract something here and there, assign characters fictitious names, and poof.” Is this what you did? Are you concerned that people might see your novel as memoir? Does it matter?
I’ve been intrigued for years by texts that inhabit the blurry, porous, contested borders between fiction and memoir and between fiction and nonfiction. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried may have sparked this interest. Other novels I love do this, too. Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name and Laurent Binet’s HHhH, both of which I’ve reviewed [for the Independent], are two such novels. So, too, is Zola’s L’Oeuvre, about the early Impressionist painters living and working in Paris.
Writing teachers say, “Write about what you know.” This makes huge sense. And I think creativity is like the workings of recombinant DNA, or like playing with a bag of Legos: Artists, scientists, composers, writers disassemble what they’ve been given in life and recombine that raw material — a little bit of this moment, that gesture, this emotion, that fragment of memory or melody or event or place or person — dislodging bits and pieces from their original situations and transforming and combining them with other bits into a work that is wholly new. So I’m okay with friends noticing bits of my life in Correspondence Course…and perhaps a few bits of their own lives, too.

Ending a book that deals with the supernatural can pose problems for an author. Without needing a spoiler alert, can you talk about the way you wrestled with this issue?
I fussed over this for a long time. As I approached drafting the last chapter, I was considering three possible endings. I then put the manuscript away for about a year. I knew I had to end Correspondence Course somehow, whether it worked or not. (Writing teachers also say, “Don’t get it right; get it written!”) Finally, I chose the ending that seemed easiest to write, perhaps because it’s the most plausible. I’m pretty satisfied with this ending, but I can still imagine ending the novel differently.

What’s next?
Well, I’m a children’s book publisher here in DC (Tenley Circle Press). I’m thinking about a book for young readers about a spunky, smart girl who grows up to be someone like Bathsua Makin!

Harriet Dwinell, a frequent contributor to the Washington Independent Review of Books, has written for a number of local and national publications.

Q&A Washington Independent Review of Books

Review of Correspondence Course

Review by Roger Brunyate (Amazon Top500 reviewer)
of Correspondence Course: The Bathsua Project 

The Year of Magical Communication

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.

Format: Paperback

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.

Our newest book!

It is summer 2002 in DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and Dee Young is heartsick after her husband Dan’s death. Dee finds herself conducting two secret correspondences: one-way emails to Dan and two-way letters with Bathsua Reginald Makin (1600-1675), a Londoner who — like Dee — was a teacher, writer, wife, and mother. From Dee’s annus horribilis comes a celebration of the endurance of love, the evolution of grief, and the healing power of work.

Available from independent bookshops, big online booksellers, and Tenley Circle Press.

Review: Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch

Washington Independent Review of Books 

My Life in Middlemarch 

By Rebecca Mead

Crown Publishers

294 pages

9780307984760

Review published January 28, 2014

When asked her opinion of George Eliot’s newly published Middlemarch in 1873, Emily Dickinson famously replied, "What do I think of Glory?" Half a century later Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." In 2007 A.S. Byatt called Middlemarch “arguably the greatest English novel ever.”

In My Life in Middlemarch, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead agrees — and goes further, demonstrating how a passionate attachment to a great book helps us understand our own lives. Although this genre-bridging study of the novel, its author, and their lifelong impact on Mead will appeal particularly to Eliot and Middlemarch enthusiasts (including this reviewer), the work may well persuade other readers to join their ranks.

For a clear, elegant précis of My Life in Middlemarch, read Mead’s 2011 New Yorker essay, “Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot Teaches Us”. For the in-depth meditation on the novel, the author, and the power and pleasure of reading a great book again and again at all stages of life, read Mead’s book cover to cover.

Like Middlemarch, the book examines the complexities of love and marriage, of ambition and disappointment, of youthful idealism and mature sufferance. Unlike Middlemarch, however, it is under 300 pages (Middlemarch is more than twice as long); also unlike Eliot’s masterpiece its stream-of-consciousness structure allows Mead to roam freely and intuitively among the genres of memoir, biography, literary history and analysis. When we close My Life in Middlemarch we know a bit about Mead and a great deal about the life and work of Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans), her admirers and her intimate circle.

Mead has taken seriously E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, “Only connect.” My Life in Middlemarch convincingly links the novel’s panoramic plot, fully-drawn characters, and profoundly sympathetic themes on the one hand with events and people in the lives of Eliot and Mead herself on the other. Mead connects Eliot’s early passionate theological inquiries and brief attraction to the philosopher Herbert Spencer to the fictional Dorothea Brooke’s youthful idealism and disastrous first marriage to the icy, much older scholar Edward Casaubon. Mead also acknowledges parallels between the Eliot/Dorothea narratives and her own eager escape to Oxford from the provincial town of her English childhood, as well as her early romance with a senior American academic. Similarly, in her own fulfilling mid-life marriage, Mead sees shadows of Eliot’s long, loving, mid-life quasi-marriage to George Henry Lewes and the mature Dorothea-Ladislaw love story that blooms late in the novel. Mead also notes similarities between her love for her own three stepsons and Eliot’s maternal devotion to Lewes’s three grown sons.

Mead apparently has read and reread everything in and about Middlemarch and by and about Eliot.  As a result, Mead seems to channel the wise, sympathetic, middle-aged Victorian voice that intones sentences such as this, beloved of Eliot-Middlemarch enthusiasts: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

Readers unfamiliar with Middlemarch, seekers of great-books-style plot summaries and Wikipedia-style literary biographies might be disappointed by My Life in Middlemarch. So might be readers eager for yet another tell-all mid-life celebrity memoir. However, this contemplative, restrained work of biography, reporting, literary criticism, and memoir will delight those of us who favor old-school reportage buoyed by old-fashioned research methods: careful primary- and secondary-source reading, persistent archival study, pursuit of unlikely tangents, closely observed site visits, and attentive face-to-face interviews.

Mead’s thoughtful, tenderly erudite love song to a book and author will please those of us who delight in reassurances that great works of fiction, well-read, help us understand our own lives. Probably best appreciated after at least a first reading of Eliot’s classic, My Life in Middlemarch will inspire many of us to read Middlemarch again. And again. And again. It will, I hope, introduce more readers to this novel, this glory, one of the few English novels for grownups, arguably the greatest English novel ever.

Rhoda Trooboff, a longtime literature and writing teacher at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., is a publisher of children's books at Tenley Circle Press, Ltd.

Review: Hannah Kent's Burial Rites

October 4, 2013. Washington Independent Review of Books.www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/burial-rites:

Burial Rites

By Hannah Kent

Little, Brown and Company

320 pp.

978031624319

Published September 10, 2013

Reviewed by Rhoda Trooboff

Iceland is famous for its wild natural beauty: volcanic mountains, glaciers, cascading waterfalls and boiling geysers beneath a surreally massive sky of rushing clouds by day and trembling aurora borealis by night. In her haunting first novel, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent stunningly captures this setting and recreates the life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir (1795-1830), the last woman executed in Iceland for a capital crime.

The historical record is familiar to Icelanders: On a spring night in 1828, house servant Agnes woke neighbors with word that Natan Ketilsson’s Illugastir farmhouse was ablaze with Natan and his friend Pétur Jónsson trapped inside. When the fire was extinguished, it was discovered that the two men had been stabbed to death. Agnes was arrested along with two others, the farmhand Fridrik Sigurdsson and his teenaged girlfriend Sigrídur Godmundsdóttir. Sigrídur was sentenced to life imprisonment. Agnes and Fridrik received death sentences and were assigned to forced labor with local farm households pending their executions. On January 12, 1830, they were beheaded on a small hill in Vatnsdalshólar in the Húnavatn district. Their executioner, appointed by District Commissioner Björn Blöndal, was Natan’s brother, Gudmundur Ketilsson. The National Museum of Iceland preserved the execution block and axe, and a memorial stone marks the execution site.

Close observation and research by Kent, an Australian in her late twenties, are evident throughout the novel. Primary source documents accompany what Kent calls “fictional likelihoods,” which were based on her year spent in Iceland as a high school exchange student, her subsequent visits there and, most important, her rich empathetic imagination.            

Among these “fictional likelihoods” are vivid portrayals of the real participants. In Kent’s hands Agnes, an orphaned servant, becomes a reminder of Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield; Natan, an herbalist/farmer, becomes a shaman and Agnes’s on-again-off-again lover; and Rósa Gudmundsdóttir, one of Iceland’s most famous poets, becomes another of Natan’s lovers. In the novel, District Commissioner Blöndal takes responsibility for all bureaucratic elements of the trial, the forced labor assignment, and the execution; Thorvardur “Tóti” Jónsson, the young clergyman assigned to be Agnes’s confessor, elicits her backstory and moral/psychological musings. The real Fridrik, Sigrídur, and the farm family that housed Agnes until her execution are all brought to life as well.

Besides containing convincing character development, Burial Rites also depicts Iceland’s starkly beautiful, sparsely-peopled landscape. The novel’s treatment of character and setting is structurally significant as well. Against the backdrop of the open natural landscape, Kent situates many of the novel’s scenes in badstofas — traditional communal sleeping rooms — where the ever-present supporting characters establish an atmosphere of oppressive, judgmental social cohesion. Emerging from this stifling communal life are the few individuals — principally Reverend Tóti, the farm wife Margrét and, of course, Agnes herself — who ambiguate societal norms and pit individual moral dilemmas against ethical standards.

Given her large cast, Kent has wisely chosen to simplify some characters and complicate others. Assigned appropriately monochromatic treatments are the greedy, immoral Fridrik; the officiously bureaucratic Blöndal; the enigmatic Rósa; and the scheming Sigrídur. More multidimensional are the manipulative, amoral Natan; the spiritually and sexually anxious Reverend Tóti; the conflicted Margrét; and Margrét’s squabbling daughters Steina and Lauga. These characters help the reader understand and sympathize with Agnes and her decision to kill Natan.

Kent deftly knits the story arc from multiple points of view, interior monologues, dialogue-rich scenes, confessions, flashbacks and official documents. Shifting the narrative focus among various characters ultimately presents a fully rounded portrait of Agnes herself, with the most lyrical writing — prose poems, in fact — coming in her interior monologues. Ultimately the reader emerges from the novel with a powerful sense of Agnes’s full humanity — her capacity for suffering and wisdom, for vulnerability and strength, for violence and love.

Readers may find early 19th-century Iceland’s rugged way of life utterly unfamiliar and its place names and patronymic naming patterns maddeningly mind-boggling. Even though Australia is about as far away from Iceland as it’s possible to be, Kent is fully at home in this world and this novel and invites her reader to be, too. It is no hyperbole to put Burial Rites in the same company as Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Ingmar Bergman’s “Virgin Spring” and Akira Kurasawa’s “Rashomon.”

Poets W.H. Auden and Louis McNeice traveled together in the 1930’s to Iceland. Like many who have visited the island before and since, they were moved deeply by what they saw and wrote about it. I think they would have admired Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites. Perhaps the last lines of Auden’s “Journey to Iceland” are an apt tribute to this brilliant first novel:

Tears fall in all the rivers. Again the driver

Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

Upon his deadly journey; again the writer

Runs howling to his art.

Review: Monica Wesolowska's Holding Silvan: A Brief Life

Holding Silvan: A Brief Life

Monica Wesolowska

Hawthorne Books 

202 pages, paperback

Midway through her breathtaking memoir, Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, Monica Wesolowska recounts an incident from her childhood: On an ordinary weeknight after her mother had left for choir practice her father began serving dessert, “cutting and distributing as equally as he could to four kids. He passed the first piece to me. I watched him cut the next. It was a good-looking piece, too, and as I would relate it to myself later, I thought, I will be polite and pass this down to Katya. Abruptly, my father changed the position of his knife. ‘For holding out for a bigger piece than your sister,’ he said, ‘you get half.’ I howled at the injustice. . . . [M]y father wanted me to accept that, even if the next piece was smaller, my life was fine. He wanted me to be grateful for whatever I got. . . . For being good, for caring about others, for suffering enough myself on behalf of those others, I thought I deserved at least the same as everybody else.” 

In clear and transcendent prose, Wesolowska urges gratitude for life’s gifts even in the direst of circumstances. After a long labor she delivers her firstborn, a beautiful, full-term, seemingly healthy baby boy. Her joy is palpable, even as she admits that he is limp and silent and the neonatologists whisk him off “for observation.” Soon, however, Wesolowska and her husband discover what the medical team fears: during labor and delivery the brain of Baby Boy Wesolowska -- Silvan Jerome Fisher -- has suffered a catastrophic insult -- oxygen deprivation -- that leaves him with irreversible brain damage. 

Holding Silvan begins with an epigraph by Václav Havel: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The doctors at first “keep holding out hope like little bits of candy,” but soon they name Silvan’s condition: severe hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. Wesolowska and her husband must decide what is in Silvan’s best interest. “Where’s the line? When’s enough?” Wesolowska asks. “How long can his life be artificially sustained?” 

The narrative arc of Holding Silvan dips into Wesolowska’s past -- including lessons from her Catholic upbringing and reflections on the deaths of family and friends -- and  moves forward to her current children, but it centers on the weeks of Silvan’s life. Doctors and nurses as well as Wesolowska’s husband, family members, clergy, and friends are honestly and sympathetically drawn. The memoir unflinchingly addresses the profound themes of the “good death” and the moral and ethical choices facing patients, their caregivers, clergy, and medical professionals in the age of modern medicine. Wesolowska’s honest, elegant prose places Holding Silvan firmly in the company of Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. 

Above all else Holding Silvan is a stunning meditation on love. “All [Silvan has] known in life is love,” Wesolowska writes:

“Since he came into the world through love, since he’s been surrounded by it, I’d like him to leave knowing nothing else but love. . . . We love him as a newborn, his loamy-scented head, the soft heft of his thighs, the tiny thump of the heart in his chest -- and we love the dark-haired man with the cleft chin whom we are still in the habit of imagining he will become.”

“I bend forward to kiss his forehead, then his nose, then the space by his ear that is free of medical tape. And then I cannot stop. I kiss the front of his neck below the breathing tube, those warm wrinkles, and the side of his neck, so smooth, so smooth, and his shoulder, and creases at the edge of his armpit and across his naked sternum and down towards his belly button, all the while making smacking noises, eating him up. When I raise my head I am renewed. . . . The mother and grandmother at the next crib stare in surprise. ‘That was quite a kiss,’ the grandmother says. ‘Well, once I started I couldn’t stop,’ I say. My time is limited. This is a mother’s love distilled.”

“A Reasonable Proposal” Editorial 17 January 2013. The Garrett County, Maryland REPUBLICAN Newspaper:

While President Obama's proposed gun legislation is clearly facing an uphill battle with Congress, not to mention the National Rifle Association, the three major components of his package seem reasonable, and do not appear to be a serious challenge to, or outright snubbing of, the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The three pieces of Obama's proposal are: the introduction of criminal background checks on all gun sales, the renewal of the ban on military assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines and armor-piercing ammunition.

So what is the big deal about background checks? These are done routinely for various reasons, such as employment or when applying to work in almost any capacity with children. One of the NRA's claims is that not enough is being done to identify and treat mentally ill persons who end up with weapons, which is probably a fact. Would not such a background check help immensely with that identification, in addition to determining whether or not the individual has a criminal background?

The second piece will likely be the toughest to enact, since it is viewed by pro-gun folks as an attempt to "take away our guns!" But as noted over and over, assault-style weapons are unnecessary in nearly every circumstance – certainly for hunting purposes. And if the Second Amendment affords us the right to own assault weapons, then should it not follow that private citizens should be permitted to own bazookas and mortars?

For similar reasons, the third piece seems reasonable. Having the capability of rapidly firing 100 shots or more with a gun is unnecessary, and there is no question that armor-piercing bullets are "needed" only to kill persons wearing bullet-proof protection – usually law enforcement officials.

The claim by some gun enthusiasts is that they feel they must be armed in the event of an attempted government take over. [Chuckle.] If the government would ever make that decision, no private arsenal of any kind or size would be enough to stop tanks, flame throwers, drone missiles, etc.

Using the most recent figures available, among 75 nations the United States ranks 10th in the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 population. Among those ranked ahead of us are the highly unstable, Third World nations of Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, and Swaziland.

For the purposes of comparison, it is striking that the number of murders by firearms (not counting suicides) in the U.S. in 2009 was 9,146, while the number for Great Britain, where there is fairly rigid gun control, was 648. Since Britain's population is 1/5 that of U.S., this is equivalent to 48 times fewer murders than in the U.S.

It is only fair to point out that the rate of gun murder in the U.S. is at its lowest point since at least 1981. The high point was in 1993. However, non-fatal gun injuries from assaults increased last year for the third straight year, and that rate is the highest since 2008.

Regardless of the falling rate of gun murders, when innocent children are among those being slaughtered, the president and Congress absolutely must act to change things.

The Words & Grammar of the Second Amendment -- Take 2

Does the Second Amendment really give Americans an absolute right to automatic weapons? 

Surely we can all agree that the Framers of the Constitution used language carefully. And that the Framers never imagined the right to bear arms as empowering sociopathic individuals to use assault weapons because of the urgings of their private, horrific demons.

Let’s look beyond the 14 last words of the Amendment –  “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” We’ve heard those 14 words a lot lately.

What about the Amendment’s first 13 words? “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”

First look at the key terms:

·      Regulated: operating under laws and rules.


·      Militia: armed citizens acting together under the control of law or constituted authority.

·      Security: safety.

·      Free State: a political body governed by the will of its people.

Clear enough: These opening words emphasize rules and laws, constituted authority, defense of the American nation from external threats, and safety. They speak of collective behavior, not individual behavior. They say nothing about hunting, protection from home invaders, vigilantism, or even sportsmanship. 

Now consider the grammar of these 13 words. They constitute an absolute. The Framers studied grammar in school, so they understood this old-fashioned form. They knew that starting a sentence with an absolute emphasizes it. They also knew that an absolute answers the question When, why and under what conditions is the main clause true?

Maybe the Amendment would be clearer if it were expressed as a Q and A:

·      Question: When and under what conditions should “the right of the people to keep and bear arms . . . not be infringed”?

·      Answer: If or when “a well regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free state.”

·      Question: Why should “the right of the people to keep and bear arms . . . not be infringed”?

·      Answer: Because “a well regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free state.”

In other words: If or when America’s safety needs defending, then Americans bearing arms must be organized, trained, and regulated.

This close reading of the Second Amendment persuades me that the Framers envisioned the right to bear arms as a means to insure America’s defense by a citizen army. I believe that the Framers did not mean to empower anyone to go armed anywhere, anytime, with little or no regulation. Nor did they intend us to place arms and live ammunition in our schools, theaters, places of worship, and elsewhere that Americans gather for peaceful purposes. 

To me this is absolutely clear.

Review: Ramona Ausubel's NO ONE IS HERE EXCEPT ALL OF US

February 6, 2012. Washington Independent Review of Books. Review by Rhoda Trooboff.

The daring ― or bravado ― of Ramona Ausubel’s debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, should come as no surprise to fans of her first bursts onto the mainstream literary scene last spring. Setting her goals high, this 30-something author of the heart-wrenching short story “Atria” (in The New Yorker) and the serio-comic riff “The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following” (in the Paris Review) seems to thrive on daunting, high-risk writing challenges.

The novel begins in 1939-40 in Zalischik, a Jewish village along northern Romania’s Dniester River, so remote in the Carpathian Mountains that the villagers decide to isolate themselves from the encroaching war and retreat into a world of imagination, reinventing their tiny shtetl along patterns set down in the Hebrew Bible. This undertaking is inspired by Lena, the young adolescent narrator of much of the novel, and the enigmatic Stranger, who, washed up on Zalischik’s riverbank by an upstream bomb blast, becomes a kind of angel and shaman, and the inventor and recorder of communal prayers and rituals.

In the first half of the novel, thanks to Ausubel’s deft metaphorical style, scenes of shtetl life have the surreal authenticity of dreams; they’re reminiscent of Marc Chagall paintings and of “Fiddler on the Roof” and its source material, Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman and Other Tales. Zalischik’s muddy roads (it is always raining in this novel), small houses and barns are vividly ― and often eccentrically ― realized. The villagers follow instructions of their “Committee for the Appreciation and Construction of the Night Sky Out of Broken China on the Ceiling of the Barn Which Is Also the House of God”; they smash crockery and use the shards to adorn their makeshift synagogue. Zalischik’s butcher, baker and healer and their wives and children, as well as the banker, the jeweler, the Stranger, Lena’s parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and neighbors all come fully and distinctly to life.

Ausubel beguiles her readers into feeling deeply for each idiosyncratic individual. In the timeless world of the shtetl there is surprisingly enormous vitality. Each action has stunning tenderness and depth: Crazy Aunt Kayla and bumbling Uncle Hersh, childless and lonely, convince Lena’s parents to hand over first their elder daughter, Regina, and then Lena to raise as their own; pimply young Igor, whom Lena marries midway through the novel, is a narcoleptic whose “true calling was to sleep off the pressures of existence, the unknowable meaning of life, like a hangover he was trying to lose.”

If this weren’t stunning enough, Ausubel also recontextualizes familiar Biblical tropes into the opening shtetl scenes. The almost-continuous rain is likened to tohu va-vohu, the formlessness and void of the beginning verses of Genesis, then to the rains in the Noah story. Waterlogged Zalischik evokes the reed basket in which the infant Moses drifted down the Nile, and then the Nineveh-bound ship from which Jonah plunged into the belly of the whale. The poetically striking connections between the Hebrew Bible and the world of this novel serve as learned, stylish embellishments that this reader hopes signal Ausubel’s principal goals for future novels: reflection on ageless spiritual questions raised particularly aptly via subtle allusions to the great literary canon.

Unfortunately, after seven chapters of such breathtaking and innovative craftsmanship, Ausubel veers suddenly toward a more conventional, frenetically plot-driven narrative. Drawing from episodes in her great-grandmother’s life ― a harrowing between-the-wars escape with her children from Romania to America ― the author refashions family stories into a Holocaust escape saga. Lena, now in her late teens and the mother of two young sons, witnesses the arrival of Axis forces in Zelischik and her husband Igor’s capture. With her children she makes a run for the forest. A grueling trek, miraculously survived, takes her to the Black Sea port of Odessa, onto a ship and eventually to a new life in post-war America.

Ausubel was perhaps unsatisfied with the telling of just one Holocaust saga and unwilling to let go of all the villagers so painstakingly created before Lena’s hurried departure from Zelischik. In disjointed jumps from place to place and character to character, and with clanking switches between first- and third-person narration, the author combines Lena’s escape tale with accounts of the massacre at Zalischik, Lena’s son Solomon’s new life on a farm in Poland, Regina’s life in Russia and Igor’s in sun-drenched Italy. These ungainly leaps are understandable, given the author’s ― and reader’s ― attachment to the characters drawn so lovingly at the opening of the novel. One passage near the end seems gratuitous, however: the story of Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s wedding night, its chapter framed as Lena’s post-war dream aboard her America-bound ship.

The prologue and epilogue to No One Is Here Except All of Us insist that story-telling ― remembered, reported and invented ― is truth-telling, and that its impulse is bred in the bones and hearts of families with painful histories. In her afterword, Ausubel asserts, moreover, that with this novel she assumes the huge, and noble, responsibility of honoring and preserving the stories of respected ancestors whose voices would otherwise be lost.

By converting her family’s early 20th-century story into a Holocaust narrative, Ausubel has situated No One Is Here Except All of Us in the company of such august Holocaust-survivor memoirs as Elie Wiesel’s The Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The ReAwakening and recently, Thomas Buergenthal’s A Lucky Child.What an enormous ― one could say heroic ― undertaking in a first novel. One can only wonder what challenges Ramona Ausubel will take on next.

Review: Alice Hoffman's THE DOVEKEEPERS

The Dovekeepers: A Novel

• Alice Hoffman
• Scribner
• 512 pp.

Reviewed by Rhoda Trooboff in Washington Independent Review of Books

The Dovekeepers has it all –– convincing characters, compelling plot, breathtaking setting, plus age-old themes swirling in a maelstrom of religion, sex, and war. It helps that novelist Alice Hoffman has great historical material to work with.

In 73CE, high above the Judean desert and the Dead Sea, Masada, the besieged mountain fortress occupied by the last remnant of resistance against Roman occupation of the Holy Land, was finally breached. Soldiers commanded by Lucius Flavius Silva entered the compound and found 900 dead Jewish Zealots –– warriors, women, and children –– all self-slain, having preferred death to slavery under imperial rule. So ended the uprising that saw Jerusalem’s fall and the Second Temple’s sacking in 70CE.

According to Hoffman’s principal source, Josephus’ first-century The Jewish War, two women and five children survived the mass suicide and told the Romans the Masada story. Otherwise the heroic –– or fanatic –– massacre would have been lost to history.

Inspired by visiting Masada since its 1960s excavation and restoration by Israeli archaeologist/general Yigael Yadin, Hoffman examined artifacts in Masada’s Yadin Museum, studied Josephus’ account, and researched ancient near-Eastern wildlife and daily life, traditions of magic and herbal medicine, and religious texts and practices. No visitor to Masada can miss its importance to modern Israel or its place in the geopolitics of the modern Middle East: After completing basic training, Israeli soldiers climb the ancient Snake Path by night and at a torchlight ceremony are sworn into the IDF by declaring: “Masada shall not fall again.”

To these materials Hoffman has applied her formidable sympathetic imagination to recreate the drama between the years 70CE and 73CE, recounted by four strong women. Her narrators explore the female condition in the male realm of holy war. Yael, an assassin’s daughter and sister of a lieutenant of ancient Masada’s charismatic leader, Eleazar Ben-Ya’ir, takes the reader from Jerusalem in flames through her adolescent sexual awakening and a harrowing desert trek ending at Masada. Continuing the story, Revka teaches the pregnant Yael the work of Masada’s dovecotes, which supply food for the Sicarii, the violent extremist Zealot splinter group encamped at the mountain fortress built a century earlier by Herod the Great. The third narrator, Aziza, a girl raised (improbably) as a boy warrior, works by day in the dovecotes and by night joins Sicarii raids against the Romans in the desert below. The fourth narrator, also a dovekeeper, is Shirah, a Jewess trained by Egyptian priestesses to be a faith healer and reader of omens. Her backstory connects Ben-Ya’ir to the other dovekeepers. Before her death in the mass suicide, Shirah helps Yael, Revkah, and the five children escape via the site’s system of subterranean cisterns.

The story line examines how women –– ancient and modern –– manage to live with, and love, men engaged in religion-inspired asymmetrical warfare. Such women do the messy work of daily life beside their men who, gripped by ideological –– even fanatical –– ardor, pursue apocalyptic ends. Hoffman moves effortlessly among action, setting, and details of daily life in ancient Judea, but always returns to religious reverie, the burdens of womanhood, and the horror of war. Thus The Dovekeepers is deeply spiritual and unabashedly feminist. About holy war it is provocatively ambivalent.

The four women are the novel’s protagonists. So is Masada itself: Perched between sky and desert, the aerie is elemental, awe-inspiring. “They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land, and that God can be found there by those with open eyes,” Hoffman writes. Masada evokes both “the light and compassion of the Almighty” and “the other side, the dark realm, the evil side of the world, that terrible region which could be found at the left hand of God and fed on human sin.” “Is it not beautiful?” Aziza asks a warrior companion. “Is it not terrible?” he replies. They plunge into torrid lovemaking.

Hoffman’s women collect doves’ eggs and shovel dove dung, cook stews and concoct potions, make love, deliver babies, tend the sick and wounded, nurture children, make Masada’s gardens bloom, wield weapons alongside male warriors, and bury the dead, all while scanning the sky for rain and portents and the desert for progress of the Roman siege. The women observe the rites of post-biblical Judaism and contemplate the Angel of Death and the World-to-Come. They worship the Hebrew God, Adonai, and venerate Ashtoreth, “the female aspect of God, … the bride to Adonai’s groom, … the Queen of Heaven.”

Letting out every rhetorical stop, Hoffman pulls off a grim, gripping treatment of first-century holy war that resonates for our own time. Masada inspired the IDF’s service oath; Hoffman’s reworking of Ben-Ya’ir’s 73CE suicide exhortation (“The time has come for us to prove our faith. … Our freedom is our winding sheet, more glorious than any other. … Let our story bear witness that we perished out of choice, … to choose death rather than slavery.”) sounds eerily like contemporary jihadists’ fanatical death pledges.

The author of 28 prior works of fiction (including Practical Magic, Fortune’s Daughter, and Here on Earth), Hoffman uses high-wattage, sometimes prolix language that is both beautiful and histrionic. Despite its tightly constrained time and place, The Dovekeepers is epic in scope, reminiscent on the one hand of Vergil’s sublime Aeneid and on the other of the more sensational The Red Tent (Anita Diamant), Last Days of Pompeii (Edward Bulwer-Lytton) and Ben-Hur (Lew Wallace). Like an epic on steroids, The Dovekeeperscontains at least three descents into the Underworld, oft-repeated omens, incantations, and heroic epithets, plus more than one deus ex machina.

Scholars may quarrel with the accuracy of Hoffman’s treatment of geography, history, religious practice, and other details. Nevertheless, book groups will have a field day with The Dovekeepers, historical fiction at its best and a stunning conversation starter on the fraught topics of war, sex, and religion.

InTERdependence Day 2011

We celebrate the Fourth of July as Independence Day. But one of the great things about this country is our recognition of our INTERDEPENDENCE. This morning in under an hour I had three demonstrations of this great national trait, which deserves celebration alongside our ancestors’ courageous battle for political liberty:

• Stacey this morning was in the community garden mucking out the compost pile and tidying the surrounding path so that the rest of us will have better produce and a pleasanter experience making it happen.

• Susan alerted our synagogue’s listserve that Mollie needs drivers to get her to medical appointments every morning this week and next. By the time I replied to sign up there was only one slot left.

• Sig and Carolyn posted more helpful information on TOUGH CONVERSATIONS, an on-line blog and clearinghouse devoted to mediation, conflict resolution, and good communication.

Review: SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman

Reviewed by Rhoda Trooboff

Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman’s intimate and elegiac tribute to his late wife, Aura Estrada, initially reads like the latest entry in a long list of tragic love stories starting with Orpheus and Eurydice. That alone would suffice to make this a compelling read. But Mr. Goldman goes further. Like Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) and John Bayley (Elegy for Iris), Mr. Goldman mercilessly immerses the reader in mourning’s abyss. He extols his young wife’s beauty and brilliance and entrusts to his reader a meticulous, unflinching study of survivor’s guilt. But the real accomplishment of Say Her Name is its proof that art can restore the dead to life. On a Mexican beach where Ms. Estrada lay paralyzed, her back broken in a July 2007 bodysurfing accident, Mr. Goldman administered mouth-to-mouth respiration, breathing for her again and again to no avail. Say Her Name, however, sustains Aura Estrada for the ages.

Numerous settings are fully realized, giving a memoir-like truthfulness to the action unfolding in New York and Mexico City. There are scenes of Paris, where Ms. Estrada had set the novel she was writing before her death; of the beach at Mezunte in Oaxaca, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast; at hospitals in Pochulta, Huatulco and, finally, Pedregal, near Mexico City, where she died.

The novel blends in elements of memoir, inviting the reader to puzzle over distinctions between the fictional Aura and Francisco and the real Ms. Estrada and Mr. Goldman. The novel’s fictional truths begin in real-life truths: the love affair and marriage of Mr. Goldman (author of previous novels The Divine Husband, The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman, and of the nonfiction The Art of Political Murder) and the vivacious Ms. Estrada, the precocious only child of a doting mother; Ms. Estrada’s stellar doctoral work in Latin American literary studies at Columbia; her authorship of numerous stories and essays on Latin American fiction; her work on her own novel. The tragedy that took Ms. Estrada’s life at the beach at Mazunte 26 days before their second wedding anniversary is also true, as are Mr. Goldman’s ensuing efforts to both examine his culpability and immortalize her.

Central to this novel is the making and blurring of distinctions. Whose mourning is deeper, the mother’s or the husband’s? Which legacy is truer, ashes or written words? After Aura’s death, Francisco fights a bitter war with his mother-in-law, Juanita, who keeps Aura’s ashes. Francisco, however, keeps Aura’s diaries, laptop and handwritten notes, from which, Pygmalion-like, he reconstructs a fully rounded, wise, soulful, funny Aura, satisfying his longing to know what it was like to be her.

Assembling an altar to Aura in their Brooklyn apartment, Francisco turns insignificant remnants of her life into talismans — a tube of shampoo left behind in their Mazunte hotel room, for example. Totally bereft, he would daily “open a drawer and hold a pile of her clothes to my nose, frustrated that they smelled more of the drawer’s wood than of Aura, and sometimes I emptied out a drawer on the bed and lay facedown in her clothes.” Every scene, replete with such vivid imagery, is redolent with love.

Nonfiction elements — short, elegant essays on the literature of bereavement, ocean-wave science, jargon-free literary analysis — help Mr. Goldman blur other distinctions. In a brilliant, opening explication of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl,” the reader is made to peer through murky aquarium glass in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes at a pinkly beautiful, broad-smiling, nearly extinct Mexican reptile with funny ears. Suddenly, mid-sentence, Cortázar’s third-person narrator becomes the “I” of the axolotl. The passage haunts the rest of the novel: Like Cortázar’s narrator, Francisco wills himself into Aura’s mind, lovingly and repeatedly mentioning her wide smile and pretty ears. Later, Francisco finds in Aura’s laptop her notes from a disappointing seminar on literary theorist Henri Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” Francisco reads what had frustrated Aura, then responds: “The essay seemed to me like a dazzling web woven by an insane genius spider. I read to the part where Foucault cites Saint Jerome’s contention that even an author’s name has no credibility as an individual trademark, because different individuals could have the same name, or someone could write under someone else’s name, and so on.”

Such literary riffs serve the novel’s goal of dissolving boundaries among characters, real and fictional. Similarly, stunning hallucinatory passages reminiscent of magic realism dissolve boundaries between reality and imagination, the living and the dead.

Francisco strives to relive Aura’s memories. He revives her playful imagination, lively good humor and sensuous, passionate intellect; he keeps her mind and voice alive, fulfilling her promise of literary greatness. His dreams evoke her physical presence. Francisco seems to become Aura.

The novel is non-sequential and repetitive. We know the end from the start; details and images reappear, piecemeal, throughout. This, of course, is how the mind works, offering memory’s crumbs in no apparent order, again and again. In a final chapter, however, Francisco recounts in orderly sequence all the horrifying events at Mezunte, in the ambulances, at the hospitals. His retelling is both a reliving and a confession that provide neither relief nor absolution.

Thanks to Mr. Goldman’s transparent and never lofty prose, the reader inhabits Francisco’s head, his memory, his crotch, his bed. If any criticism could be leveled at this novel, it is its relentless embarrassment of the reader, who becomes a voyeur, peering through the veil of another human being’s inscrutability. (Camus’s L’Étranger comes to mind.) Perhaps Ms. Estrada might not have wanted others to read her notes. The reader squirms at witnessing Francisco’s shabby efforts to suppress his misery in the years after Aura’s death.

Some readers might regard the novel’s relentlessness as hyperbolic. Reading Say Her Name is total immersion in a deep-grieving, tortured soul, belying Shakespeare’s words in “Richard II”: “My grief lies all within, and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” Near the end Francisco asks, “Could a shadowy facsimile of Aura’s soul or self be grafted onto mine? Was it maybe already there and would they see it?” This reader’s resounding answer: Yes.

Rhoda Trooboff, a longtime literature and writing teacher at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., is a publisher of children’s books at Tenley Circle Press, Ltd.

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