Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer
Three brief updates from my desk.
1. Nothing to report this week about my own kidlit work, but I was thrilled to see two picture–books by members of my critique group spotlighted in a big Publishers Weekly Fall 2021 preview piece. And I was also inspired by a virtual launch event for Sigal Samuel’s new release.
2. Reminder, for those of you with copies of Birthright: “The Book of Vashti” is perfect reading (or re-reading!) this Purim week.
3. This week, the class I’m teaching on Holocaust Literature is reading Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (trans. Stuart Woolf). And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this line, uttered by Levi, quoted in a short film that I’ve assigned my students: “My life has been marked by two fundamental facts: first, my detention at Auschwitz; and second, that I have written about my detention at Auschwitz.”
I’ve read Levi’s The Periodic Table, but I cannot bring myself to read his (or Wiesel’s) accounts of his time in the concentration camps. I know I should, but I’m not made of the right stuff.
Understandable. That’s been my feeling about *visiting* the camps.
I feel that if they can bear telling the story it is my responsibility to read/hear it.
A valid point, Nina.