reader

The Post in Which I Confess Again My Love of Sharpies & Probably Ruffle Some Feathers

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Today is Hoshana Rabba, the last day of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. In keeping with the more lenient final days of the holiday, my family has been trekking all over Southern California on outings. Today, I’m cooking, so between the challah baking and the vegetable roasting, I’d like to share a few thoughts with my readers.

A Writer’s Quandry

el pueblo de los angeles

The Avila Adobe, the oldest building at the Pueblo.

Yesterday, we visited El Pueblo de los Angeles, the original non-Indian settlement here in L.A. Last year, the Pueblo welcomed a new addition to its site on Olvera Street — an interpretive center for the América Tropical mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros that appears near the roof of what’s known as “the Italian Building.”

When the mural was unveiled in 1932, it immediately fell victim to controversy because of its anti-imperialist sensibilities. The most “offensive” images on the right half of the mural were quite literally whitewashed not long after it’s first exhibition, with the remainder of the mural being painted over four years later.

I was aghast as I listened to and read the details of the story. A white socialite pushed to remove an artist’s genuine expression of the Latino experience because it offended her political and social sensibilities.

Now, here’s the seemingly ironic part of the situation. I have a web page devoted to a “kosher reading list” and elsewhere have confessed to censoring my kids’ reading materials. My husband and I have effectively banned TV, Disney movies & Romeo and Juliet from our home because we don’t like their effects on children (see my comment in this link to the excellent post by Pop Chassid).

Yes, I am a self-described censor. Continue reading →

Play-by-play: The Weird Things that Happen When You Write Under Time Pressure

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clock

Tick-tock…Quick, that deadline’s approaching!

Foolish me.

So, as I mentioned last week, I committed to produce a story just three days after Passover was over. I did prewrite before the holiday, and even had started a first draft in longhand (I often do). It was this surprisingly dark piece, written in second-person. A concerned family member was talking to “you,” and “you” (it becomes clear) are suffering from a clinical depression.

When I picked these materials back up after Passover had wrapped up,  the first thing I thought was: ugh.

  1. The tone was too dark, especially for this particular venue (Ironically, the theme I was given was “Put some spring in your step!” Right.).
  2. The second-person thing effectively pulled you in–making the dark subject matter even more depressing.

I felt like hyperventilating. Was I back to square one? With only three days to go?

AHHH!

Continue reading →

Home decorating with bibliophiles: what your books say about you

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Yesterday’s L.A. Times had a wonderful article by book critic David Ulin about his book collecting habits. His home is packed floor to ceiling with shelves and shelves of books. Periodically, he arranges them in alphabetical order.

Ulin shares many reasons for his enormous book collection. Here’s his chief one:

They are part of my present, yes, but also part of my past, my history: three-dimensional memories.

Among their appeals is that they opened up a world view, which is what the most essential writing does. Yet equally important is their resonance as objects, carried with me, shelf to shelf, apartment to apartment, over decades, physical reminders of who I was and who I am and of my process of becoming, blurring the line between inside and out.

This led me to think about what the Klempner family book collection means about us.

  • World view – Klempner adults are cheapskates. We love borrowing from libraries more than buying books. We still have a lot of books, but not relative to the amount of reading that goes on around here. Most of the books we actually own are Jewish books, especially for adults–books of prayer, Torah, character-building, and so on. The secular adult books we own are mostly practical.
  • Life history – You can see what my husband learned in classes ten or fifteen years ago by checking which volumes of the Gemara we own. You can tell I studied anthropology in graduate school and that one of us reads French (speaking is another matter…). You can tell we’re both teachers, and that we’re the kind of parents that like to read a lot about how to parent. On the kids’ shelves, you can track all of my eldest child’s special interests since age 5.

What do your books say about you?

Lights to the Nations: Two Jewish thinkers release their books for the secular–even non-Jewish–audience

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Wow.

That’s pretty much all I could say. I read an amazing blog post by Ann Koffsky this morning (thanks Ann for sending me the link!) where she interviews the unforgettable writer Gila Manolson. The interview is chock full of advice to writers, advice to parents, and other neat stuff. But the biggest revelation to me is that Manolson has created a website to promote her upcoming book–her first book for a non-Jewish audience.

Manolson is not alone. Continue reading →

How to find a kosher book: Nifty bit in this week’s HaModia

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There’s an article this week about Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld in HaModia, and it mentions almost as an aside that he and his 12 year old daughter have started a website with books for Jewish kids.
I visited the site, and the coolest thing is that it is SEARCHABLE! You can look up selections by subject and by age of reader, as well as title and author. However, it does not contain all the books out there. I’m assuming it is a work in progress and I’m very impressed with what they’ve done so far. It would be a great resource, for example, for those looking to buy a gift for a particular child or looking to stock up for a school or classroom library.
The link is in the list to the right of this blog, as well, and will remain there indefinitely.
In other “HaModia” news…my all-time favorite serial (aside from the one co-written by yours truly…) wrapped up in that magazine last week. Hopefully, This is America! will soon appear in novel format in Jewish bookstores. I really hope so, as it will deservingly find more readers this way.

How to Provide Books to the Needy

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About thirty years ago, a linguistic anthropologist researched children’s literary experiences at home in three communities. In her famous article, “What No Bedtime Story Means,” Dr. S.B. Heath wrote about her findings. She reported that children who have books in their home and use them regularly have better literacy in school. Even if a child had books in the house, they had to be used…it was insufficient to have a beautiful book if it was treasured so much to the extent that it was left on the shelf as a display piece.

When I taught in So. L.A. nearly a decade ago, my students (mostly working class and Latino) often had no books of their own. Many didn’t visit the library unless on a school visit, although there was one in the neighborhood. Many parents, cash-strapped and not functionally literate themselves, chose to spend what little money they had on DVDs and video games. Others had a few books. These had often been received as gifts, and remained on the shelf so as not to be ruined (just as in Dr. Heath’s study). Alternatively, my students had books, but these were often t.v. tie-ins of questionable literary merit. And some of my students had parents who wanted to read, but were each working two jobs to make ends meet. These folks were simply too busy and too exhausted to read a bedtime story. Thus, my students often had very few literary experiences before they reached school.

Contrast this with the average Ashkenazy Jew in America: books cover the walls (content and language varies by religiosity); many books are so well used they have actually been “loved to death” and are in tatters; libraries are regularly visited; newborns are given copies of Baby Faces, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, and Blue Hat, Green Hat as gifts long before they can actually hold the books in their own tiny hands.

And people wonder why we are the people of the book?

In steps the wonderful organization, First Book. First Book has partnered with General Mills to distribute free books in Cheerios boxes at selected times of year. Plain Cheerios is a WIC friendly food, so putting them in that particular brand helps them reach their target audience, kids whose families may not be able to afford books, and who may not access public libraries. While these books are printed cheaply, they are high-quality literature. The authors have either won First Book’s annual writing competition for new writers or are established writers themselves…and the illustrations are fabulous.

Here’s a link to this wonderful organization. http://www.firstbook.org/