Normally, I post my link compilations on Friday morning, before Shabbat. But this week, I made so many worthy discoveries after I prepared the Friday post that I am compelled to present a second batch. Let’s consider it the “Shavua Tov” edition!
A century ago, 146 workers – mostly immigrant women – died as flames engulfed the floors where they worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City. The ensuing public outcry against unsafe work conditions was covered in detail in the pages of the Jewish Daily Forward by poet Morris Rosenfeld.
Rosenfeld’s portrayal of the brutal effects of employee exploitation led to a trial of the factory’s owners, a greater push to unionize the garment trade and the establishment of new labor laws designed to protect workers.
But did these events eradicate sweatshops?
Lead to equality of opportunity for women?
Change attitudes toward immigrants?
End exploitation of the poor?The Forward is accepting original, unpublished English and Yiddish poems that address these questions or reflect upon the tragic fire’s meaning and legacy. A distinguished panel of judges will select a winning poem in each language to receive a $500 cash prize and to be published in the Forward.
There is a $15 entry fee for this contest (with the puzzling exception in the cases of entrants “who are legal residents of Colorado, Maryland, North Dakoa, and Vermont”). Submission deadline is 5 p.m. EST on February 14, 2011. More information and the complete rules can be found at The Forward’s contest website.
Shabbat shalom!
If you follow this blog, it’s likely not news to you that one of my most trusted resources for information on new Jewish books is Josh Lambert’s column on Tablet. But I found something especially newsworthy in this week’s column: a mention of William C. Donahue‘s Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films (Palgrave).
To explain why this discovery resonated so strongly, I must backtrack.
Almost eighteen years ago, when I was entering a Ph.D. program in Modern French history, I found myself in an intensive summer school class, trying to acquire sufficient skills to pass the German portion of my department’s language requirements. Yes, I was focusing on France, but the department required me, as a Europeanist, to demonstrate sufficient reading knowledge of both French and German.
Never mind that my paternal grandparents had been born and raised in Germany. Never mind that my father grew up speaking German at home–his grandmother, who joined the family in New York in 1946, never really learned to speak English. Never mind that, at times throughout my childhood, my father and his parents would switch to German when they wanted to communicate something they did not want my sister or me to understand. I hadn’t learned German. I hadn’t wanted to learn it. But that summer of 1993, I didn’t have a choice any longer. And William C. Donahue (Bill), then pursuing his own doctoral studies, was my instructor.
Bill was an excellent teacher (as was the other then-graduate student, Joe Metz, who worked with our group in additional drill sessions). And although, as his new book’s title suggests, his primary scholarly interests rested in German literature, Bill was very conscious of and sensitive to pedagogical issues—including the issue of how Nazism and the Holocaust were taught and represented in elementary German-language instruction.
Ultimately, Bill wrote (and won an award for) an article titled “‘We shall not speak of it’: Nazism and the Holocaust in the Elementary German Course.” I am proud that one of the appendices to this article comprises questions that I conveyed that summer from my classmates to my grandparents during a weekend visit, and my grandparents’ responses. (If you click the link above, you’ll see only the first page of the article. Bill mentions the interview there, but you’ll need full access via a participating library or publisher to see the article and interview in their entirety.)
One word that I learned that summer working with Bill and Joe appears more than once in what is the effective title story of my forthcoming collection, Quiet Americans. It’s a word that resonated strongly when I learned it, and, evidently, it stayed with me long past the time when most of the others that I’d learned that summer had, frankly, disappeared from my memory.
It’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
As the story’s narrator explains, “It’s a word that means, roughly, ‘coming to terms with the past.'”
Bill Donahue has helped me–and, I am sure, many others–with that process of coming to terms with the past. I look forward to reading his new book.
Oh, and by the way: Bill (and Joe) also helped me pass my department’s German exam that long-ago fall.
Many Israeli writers petition for peace and rail against the occupation. I have added my voice to that choir, particularly in May during the government’s lethally inept handling of the Turkish flotilla that tried to break the embargo on Gaza. Yet, as I look back at 2010 and the flotilla, I deeply believe that the greatest peril is from a ruthless and implacable foe: religious fanaticism. And the people on the ship that the Israeli naval commandos boarded, the Mavi Marmara, with their motive and capacity to manipulate world opinion, were acting cynically on its behalf. The death of nine people on the Mavi Marmara was a calamity. But activists on board stabbed and shot the soldiers who sought to steer the ship to a port from which nonmilitary cargo could be trucked to Gaza.
It is simple for an author to declare: “Peace. Peace now!” But it is a hollow demand.
From “Israel’s Present Tense,” by Ron Leshem (trans. Mitch Ginsburg), The New York Times, January 2, 2011