Enchanted Prose

Bravo performance by a virtuoso drama critic’s daughter who played the role of selfless Daddy’s Girl (Manhattan and Connecticut, 1970 – 2018): “Since Daddy left, it seems anything is possible,” writes Priscilla Gilman, who “wished and wished on stars when it came to her father”: brilliant and troubled Richard Gilman, famed dramatic and literary arts “philosopher-critic”; Yale Drama School professor for thirty years; and author of seven books.

“I lost my father for the first time when I was ten years old. In the months and years that followed, I lost him over and over, many times and in many different ways. This book is my attempt to find him,” she explains about the complex man she adored more than anyone else in her world.

Honoring and protecting his legacy while staying true to his conviction that without truth there’s no art a delicate balance she pulls off in grand style, though it took her six years after her father’s death in 2006 to begin a performance of a lifetime. You can’t help but be bowled over by her unwavering devotion to him.

How to navigate treacherous waters when “loyalty is at stake”? Not just to her father, but to her mother: Lynn Nesbit, powerhouse literary agent co-founding Janklow & Nesbit Associates, with a client list a mile long – Joan Didion, Anne Rice, Michael Korda, Michael Crichton, Tom Wolfe, John Le Carre, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (See the full list.)

The sense you get is the drama “enthusiast” for “authenticity” would be melodramatically applauding the authenticity of this exquisitely composed memoir. Well-balancing the “joy and tears” of her profound attachment to a “living, wounded soul” with a “hunger for a larger life.”

Richard Gilman comes through as larger-than-life. Priscilla as selflessness beyond measure – no matter the sacrifices she made to perform the role she’d “been assigned at a very young age”: calmer-in-chief, happy warrior, peacekeeper.

“Without my father, would anyone truly know who I was?” is an interesting question, given the dutiful role she played even when anguished and not being truthful. Ironic for a man who believed the “highest forms of love demands rigorous honesty.” Professionally, yes, but not when it came to his needy, emotional roller-coaster self.

You might assume the commonality between a mother and father’s passion for literature were ingredients for a thriving marriage, yet they divorced when the author was ten. Not then, or afterwards, pretty. The repercussions of a family falling apart are palpable. Excruciatingly devastating for those who couldn’t bear it. Richard Gilman cries, sobs, pleads whereas Lynn Nesbit is a picture of strength, with a “lets-get-on-with-it” attitude.” She seems to have kept the family together until she couldn’t, which the author never forgets.

Richard Gilman could play child as equally well as scholar. A “passionate believer” who “believed in childhood,” he could be so much fun. An avid sports fan too, so the author became one nestled beside him. Nesbit was mostly out-of-the-picture working. Closest with Claire, the author’s slightly younger sister, a “girly girl.” Carrie, the nanny, is credited as a “beacon of stability for us all.”

Nesbit felt Priscilla was “obsessive” about her dad. Her reply implies, how could I not be? “He “made me the thinker, writer, parent, human that I am”? Performing with “preternatural sensitivity,” grace, self-control, and selflessness for her Daddy throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood may have suited her well but it seems mother knows best about the consequences she’d pay. Literature, if nothing else, teaches that.

A stark contrast is shown between a nurturer of the careers of writers yet not seen during their marriage. A “fierce advocate of authors” philosophically pitted against a man renowned as a “ruthless arbiter of their worth.” 

Of Claire, the author’s best friend, she says, “Other than my father, there was no one I loved more.” You wince wondering how Nesbit reacted to those words. Like the “cool realist” she’s attributed to here? You’ll appreciate the author’s appreciation of her mother, but that comes much later.

The Critic’s Daughter is a candid assessment of enmeshment between a without-boundaries father-daughter bond. Almost fused together, raising questions on when the line is crossed by a parent too dependent on a child? The child on the parent?

The memoir is both a primer on the role of playfulness and the devastation of divorce. Saturated with adoring love, the book is also a beautiful testament to the emotional power of literature and the performance arts. Priscilla Gilman loves performing and singing, but directed by both parents to pursue an academic life. Achieving notably as an English literature professor at Yale and Vassar, where she was tenured. (Surprisingly, her father wasn’t; at Yale; no doctoral degree). After he died, she gave academia up. The last part of the memoir explains why the courageous change of heart. Brave having received an elite education all her life, she’d attended one of the most prestigious all-girls private schools in the country, the Brearley School, founded in 1884. The alumnae list another Who’s Who. My favorite, Caroline Kennedy.

Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Central Park and Museum Mile was a privileged life, with the burdens and sacrifices offstage. In one of the eye-popping statements, a precious excerpt from the author’s diary, is a list titled, “Things Not to Do When I’m w/Daddy.” First up is “Don’t Cry.” Followed by “Don’t Complain,” “Don’t Be Difficult,” “Don’t Tell Him Anything But Good News,” “Don’t Mention Mommy,” and “Don’t Expect Him to Be the Daddy of Old.” Penned in middle school, it’s stunning and sad that this young girl could be so mature and perceptive of the role she had to play, shaping who she became. How did she manage all that, in light of all that happened?

Claire was the troublemaker constantly aggravating her father as a child; Priscilla, the “easy one,” the “good girl.” The only one of his three children – Nicky, loving son and artist from his first marriage – Richard Gilman knew would unconditionally always give him what he needed. (He loved them all.) Vividly, we see a “little girl who was enraptured by her father’s magical abilities, recognized his vulnerability and addictive tendencies, and feared his inevitable demise.”

Happiness and despair, trust and betrayal, halcyon and tumultuous, are intertwined. As if you can’t have glorious without paying the price.

Richard Gilman’s books include Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity; The Making of Modern Drama; and his hot-button memoir Faith, Sex, Mystery (this review by Mary Gordon cited), which exposed his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and his loss of faith, along with his struggles reconciling an existential “romantic soul” with his lust for sexual transgressions, erotic tendencies, gender experimentation.

Considering how much this family read, including to each other, quotes from great literature and poetry are richly infused. Relishing is the roster of writers like Bernard Malamud (Uncle Bern), Toni Morrison (Aunt Toni), Ann Beattie (Aunt Ann), Susan Sontag, and a slew of other writers, playwrights, and students who frequented the Gilman Manhattan home and countryside retreat in Connecticut.

Opening with a Shakespearean quote, “All the World’s a Stage,” befits the man who felt “great plays can be as revelatory of human existence as novels and poems.” Daddy’s Girl turns in a stellar performance like being judged on a stage getting a standing ovation.

Lorraine

Nurture vs. Genetics and other mysteries of life (Manhattan & Long Island, NY and Cambridge, MA; 1950s to 1968): Like a three-act play, Margot unfolds theatrically.

Probing many issues, asking many thought-provoking “What If” and existential questions about the meaning of life, Margot, historical fiction, can’t be pigeonholed.

Shaped around Margot’s unsettling coming-of-age story – a searing search for identity and belonging, battling achingly low self-esteem amidst the changing social and cultural forces of the fifties and sixties, along with an early, belittled fascination with science – Margot is a psychologist’s feast. Raised in a loveless, emotionally abusive family of Old Money white privilege and prejudice, her sad and lonely trajectory swings submissively, feverishly, passive-aggressively.

Margot presents as many things too. Can she ever recover from the relentless “fault-finding” of her cold-as-a-fish mother Peggy, the emotional abandonment believing she’s the one always wrong?

The moody cover sets a disquieting tone. Told in three parts: “Beginnings” (Part I/Act I), her choke-hold, formative childhood and adolescent years; “Intermediate” (Part II/Act II), her breaking-out college years – the burning core of the novel; and the haunting ending, “Advancing” (Part II, Act III), the mood is “doomy-boomy.”

Provocative, Margot will surely elicit varying reactions and thoughts. Not, though, when it comes to the originality of the prose. Wendell Steavenson’s writing holds us hostage evoking what Margot’s family did to her. Playing with snappy combinations of words, she intentionally overuses hyphenated words, creating drama, zippy pacing, laser-like focus. Words are also repeated without punctuation for emphasis – “studied studied studied” (Margot’s head always in books, her “favorite people”), and “ran ran ran all the way home home home without looking back.” Cynical, the rapid-fire dialogue reeks of sarcasm.

No warm and fuzzy happiness. At best satisfaction and acceptance. So why would a novel screaming disenchantment fit so well with Enchanted Prose? The best explanation I’ve uncovered so far comes from an article adopted from a new book, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something by Susan Griffin in which she says: “If the sound of your words is true, your reader will be riveted if not enchanted.” 

The What Ifs begin before you open the book. What If author Wendell Steavenson had a different career? Would she have written a gentler, happier story? Steavenson, a war correspondent, has witnessed the senselessness and trauma of conflict in some of the most dangerous hotspots around the globe. Having written three notable nonfiction books set in revolutionary times in Iraq, Egypt, and Georgia (post-Soviet), expect those presumably life-purpose perspectives in Margot, her second novel. (Paris Metro, her first).

The What Ifs kick off on page one, when eight-year-old Margot falls from a “rope ladder” dangling from her treehouse. Instead of her small-minded mother appreciating that her wonderfully curious and intelligent only child can find solace and joy in the natural world, Margot fears she’ll be “mad at me for gallivanting.” Soon her mother’s “brittle-voice” will repeat her mantra that Margot will never be “good-enough.” When that’s pounded into your head, what does that do to a young girl’s sense-of-self?

What If her hiding-in-the-library nursing apple-brandy father Harrison gave her any attention? Absent are any real mother-daughter or father-daughter relationships.

What If her wealthy family wasn’t in the 1% and thought only money equaled happiness? They own two homes: one on the richest avenue in the world, Park in Manhattan, and the more vivid setting, the “big house,” an estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island. (Teddy Roosevelt summered here; today Sagamore Hill National Historic Site). Would they treat her any differently if she was growing up today? 

Two different types of revolutions in the “hippy-dippy” sixties take center stage: the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement. Sharpened by Margot’s choice to attend the all-women’s experimental and rigorous college Radcliffe, before it merged under Harvard. Heightened by her captivation with Molecular Biochemistry after Watson and Crick made their discovery of DNA. Margot is gripped by the possibilities of cellular life on this planet after America landed a man on the Moon.

Margot herself is an experiment. Desperate to liberate herself from the shallow, prescribed world her repugnant mother turned into a “head-game.” Magnified by an edgy time when women were liberating themselves sexually, Margot turns into a “head-game” for readers.

“What are we going to do about Margot?” is a refrain. Bright, socially awkward girls who shoot up to six feet tall are not marriage material as far as uppity Peggy is concerned. Marriage is all that matters when money rules the world. The family’s history is also marked by antisemitism involving Margot’s Aunt Sarah, her mother’s long-lost sister. A mystery that unravels bit-by-bit. It’s not beautiful, but it fits beautifully with what it says about Margot’s family’s intolerance. The loss of Sarah, who might have filled the emotional vacuum, emphasizes Margot’s yearning for “tenderness” yet rarely finding it.

Margot is “weary-wary” up against pernicious limitations then disorienting freedoms. Socially, her young life was filled with too many unlikable characters forced on her, setting in motion others who’ll hurt her. Two exceptions: one who rescues Margot’s wild, perhaps only girlfriend Maddy/Mad, and the standout Sandy Full, aka Sandyful. Full of sensitivity, kindness, allure. Margot met him when he’d graduated from West Point and she was about fifteen. He’s in and out of her life as he’s Stevenson’s eyewitness to war. Doing his patriotic duty for the US Army as the Vietnam War rages, he profoundly knows what sacrifice, loss, and physical pain mean. Perceptive to Margot’s emotional pain, he tells her “the trick is to look at the world with your own eyes.” Can she? 

Margot is in and out of her own life too. Thrusting her into the radical, groundbreaking mission at Radcliffe – a “messy experience” in general, and specifically in a highly unusual genetics class where Margot’s male classmate calls her the “Princess of the Chromosomes” – sets up a perfect storm. Far from being treated as a princess, she’s torn between studying studying studying and inserting herself into a foggy milieu of partying, drinking, sexual promiscuity, pot smoking. Margot muddles through – unsecure, confused, distressed, burdened by her trademark shame, yet sometimes she’s excited and hopeful. Push-and-pull. Heady times.

The “Pill” is seen as a powerful trigger in freeing women sexually. Steavenson strikes at the hot button struggles in the current abortion rights ban and women’s freedom decades later.

To highlight how women don’t get their due, Rosalind Franklin’s name pops up. She worked with Watson and Crick, instrumental to their genetics discovery, but never got the credit. Her story may be famous in science circles, but most of us never heard of her. An article in The Guardian poses whether sexism was the reason this British chemist was left behind? An example of how thoughtful Steavenson was in crafting Margot’s story. 

Margot, then, is often pictured with her head looking down into a microscope. Or, a centrifuge or an oscilloscope, studying the “protophase metaphase anaphase telophase” stages of mitosis. “The division of a cell is a beautiful and mysterious process,” thinks Margot who sees “something romantic about laboratories at night.” Even romantically she thinks scientifically: “Is it chemistry or electricity that quickens a heartbeat?”

Sandy offers what may be the novel’s most hopeful message: “Everything causes a scar, visible and invisible” . . . we can never erase our pain but we can honor it and we can learn to redirect it.” Again, can she?

Lorraine

Chasing the rare to inform all of us (Australia, southeastern and eastern coasts; spanning centuries to present-day): Imagine having “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and no capacity to run” as a roaring fire heads your way “lighting up the horizon with a livid orange glow.” You live in a unique part of the world where bushfires are a way of life. In your world you’re rare. In the spiritual world, you’re a symbol of relaxation and peace. Yours are called “million dollar babies.” You’re simply “unlike anything else we know of.” Who are you?

If you hadn’t seen the cover and title of Danielle Clode’s newest book, would you guess you’re from a species around for some 37 million years yet only abundantly studied over the last twenty or so years?

Koalas are iconic symbols of Australia. Surprisingly, very little is known about them. Danielle Clode, an Australian zoologist/biologist, wants to change that. “It amazes me a creature this iconic and distinctive to Australia is so mysterious.” Her husband says, “Maybe there’s not much to know.” Her reply, Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future,” vividly shows “there is just a lot more to koala than meets the eye.”

In dedicating this unusual, beautifully told story, Clode confirms what the reader delightfully discovers: there’s something in this book everyone can enjoy and learn from. When Clode lays out a “perfect world” and fears of an “apocalyptic wasteland,” she’s not just speaking about koalas. “Quite literally,” she says, she’s standing up “to protect life as we know it.”

Koalas are a “singular creature: idiosyncratic and inimitable.”

Singular might be one way to describe the author too. How often does someone spend their childhood education sailing around a continent, then attending college and winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she earned a doctorate in zoology? One might assume her curiosity to “tell the story of the koala” was instilled early on – seeing, experiencing a stunning and wild landscape of enormous, unique biodiversity. A word that encompasses all forms of life in a geographic region.

Clode, an award-winning, mostly nonfiction writer, did it the “hard way” to craft this captivating and quite accessible book combining creative and academic writing, which she teaches at Flinders University in Adelaide. The school states its commitment to the “Traditional Owners of Country” (numbering close to a million Aboriginal peoples), reflecting Clode’s respectful acknowledgements before and during – not after – Koala’s fascinating story unfolds. 

Creating this book involved researching, visiting, interpreting, and integrating numerous fields of knowledge: “Botany, ecology, Indigenous knowledge, evolution, paleontology, anatomy, conservation biology, history, toxicology, psychology, veterinary and nutritional science, and animal behavior.”

Thanks to two American Presidents – Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover – koalas became popular and were saved back in the early 20^th century. Teddy, the reason they’re called bears when they’re not. Hoover banned importing them for their soft and thick fur, leading Australia to bar exporting them so the killing stopped. Hoover provides an interesting example of the value of travel, appreciating koalas from his time gold mining in Western Australia. 

This two-minute National Geographic video highlights some of the koala characteristics you’ll read about:

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/koalas-101

Two pages of compelling novelistic prose preface each of the book’s six parts – Into the Woods, From Fossils to Bones, Life in the Forest, A Life in Reflection, Everything Changes, and Future Tense. For instance, the opening sentence begins with: “A cool breeze ruffled the koala’s fur, causing her to stir in her sleep.” Sleep as in twenty hours a day, which has given them a bad rap that they’re dumb. 

A few questions Clode explores argues why they’re smarter than we might think:

• Why do koalas only eat specific types of leaves from one species of tree: Eucalypts? A designation referring to “800 or 900” types of gum trees.
• Why do they choose only a handful of these species, such as river red gum, manna gum, swamp gum?
• How do they know which leaves they can eat? Especially when the leaves of these trees are toxic for other creatures? (Note: a eucalyptus plant is toxic to dogs and cats.) Key is how specialized their teeth and digestive system are to their survival.

Between sleeping and eating, koalas are “an almost entirely arboreal animal.” Why it’s highly unlikely to spot them in the wild. Perched high up in these trees, they find safety away from predators on the ground. When they do climb down its nightfall, when most people aren’t searching for them.

We learn that two-thirds of Australia’s mammals are marsupials, more than anywhere else in the world. Like the kangaroo, koalas have outside pouches for carrying and nurturing their babies called joeys – the difference between marsupials versus mammals. But their “remarkable” and complex digestive system puts them in a class of their own. So you’re not likely to see koalas in a zoo elsewhere in the world. Feeding them their select types of gum tree leaves, fresh, makes them the most expensive animal to care for and thrive outside their native forests. The San Diego Zoo is a leading exception. If you have time, you can watch them on the zoo’s live cam:

Many frown upon anthropomorphizing animals, but Clode’s discussion on how the joeys cling to their mothers and how their sense of touch is critical to survival is relatable and heartwarming. Koala fingerprints are unique like ours too. And like us, the tips of their fingers have a purpose: to make them more sensitive when they touch things. Are fingertips “as important to koala evolution as it has been to our own”? the author asks.

Wanting to understand “what’s it like to sit at the top of a tree – to see the world from a koala’s perspective –” Clode makes us wish we too could climb trees. She posits they’re able to spend so much time on their “rump” because they don’t have tails and the skin on their behinds is “extremely tough” with “particularly thick” fur. A “comfortable cushion.”

In dedicating her book to all people who care deeply about the environment and wildlife, climate change a thread and threat throughout, Clode shows herself to be a wonderfully observant nature writer, a dogged researcher (includes twenty pages of detailed resources), historian of evolution, and a passionate activist. It helps that we see koalas as “cute and cuddly,” though their claws act like razors.

Startling is an estimate that only 60,000 koalas remain, which led last year to their joining the growing list of Endangered Species. Ten years ago, koalas were classified as “vulnerable.” Despite Australia’s vastness, koalas are concentrated in only two regions in the country. Perhaps the continent’s size and species diversity is why they have the poorest record of preventing the extinction of mammalian species? Among the reasons Clode attributes to their dwindling population include agriculture and the timber industries; highly contagious “retroviruses” likened to HIV; and climate change, horrifically seen in increasingly catastrophic bushfires.

Danielle Clode lives in bushfire country. She wants us to care. About the fate of koalas, and what their story is telling us. About their need to “climb to freedom” – and ours.

Lorraine

How everyday objects can mean so much (Northeast Poland, Odessa Ukraine, Lower East Side of Manhattan, Brooklyn’s East New York, & Deerfield Park, Florida; 1920s – 2015): If “our lives are a dance with history,” then Objects of Love and Regret leaps off its 300 evocative pages.

One of America’s “leading public historians” Richard Rabinowitz has taken an unusual perspective on “survivors and strivers” in his stirring, multifaceted memoir. Doing what he does professionally, curating American museum exhibitions, he uses ordinary objects to tell extraordinarily meaningful stories on the complex forces and psychological consequences of history, trauma, economics, cultural values, and societal norms that profoundly shaped his family over the 20^th century.

This is, and is not solely, a Jewish immigrant story. It’s a book that has something that resonates for everyone. Surprising in scope, memories, and takeaways.

Rabinowitz’s search to better understand what his East European Jewish parents went through coming to America in the late 1920s is especially focused on the “singularity” of his mother Sarah. Having survived Soviet “pograms” that killed “nearly a hundred thousand Jews” in Poland and Ukraine, the book is both a heartbreaking, terrifying story of anti-Semitism from a 100 years ago that alarms us today as bigotry towards Jews is surging. It’s also a Jewish immigrant story seeking “freedom and independence,” enduring tremendous poverty and hardships that more broadly applies to all immigrants when they come to America to escape persecution. Which is why Rabinowitz has the greatest admiration for Sarah as the “bedrock” for his family who nurtured a “House of Hugs.” 

The objects that trigger and organize the chapters mean these dances are “touchstones of love,” not just “loss [that] leaves us with lifelong regrets.” One of the biggest takeaways, beautiful and poignant in light of the pandemic, is the concept of “Enoughness.” Sarah embraced it in everything she did. It’s a Count Your Blessings attitude. Gratitude for the things we have. Clichéd, but when you feel and see how life-affirming this positive mindset can be it causes you to reflect. 

Calling himself a “microhistorian,” Rabinowitz shows himself to be a mensch: “a generous and thoughtful adult.” One of many Yiddish words that pepper the narrative that add richness to the prose. A literary dance. There’s something about Yiddish words that deepen the meaning of English ones, particularly when the author translates most of them. Which speaks to how much Rabinowitz wants us to take in the deepness and power of emotions.

As Rabinowitz digs into the emotional meaning of the stories behind the objects, he acts like a psychotherapist. In fact, four psychologists were consulted and acknowledged. 

Arriving in America from a Polish ghetto or shtetl – a Yiddish word that refers to a village and a ghetto, in this case Wysokie–Mazowieckie, to live in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City was a different type of ghettoization. Is it any wonder then that one of Rabinowitz’s human rights exhibitions was designing the Tenement Museum in Lower Manhattan? Today, an emotionally affecting reminder of life primarily for early Jewish immigrants (Italians and others too) in the US.

Is it any surprise that there was no room in Rabinowitz’s house for racism? Or, that he also designed museum exhibitions like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio?

Sarah was a balabusta. A “highly competent homemaker” who “ritualized” cooking to the point of it becoming “holy.” Her “lifelong distrust of rabbis, born of a close familiarity with the domestic lives of the religious authorities in the shtetl,” symbolic of how impoverished, discriminated, and segregated people preached to by people of privilege felt, she devoutly practiced a form of secular religion preserving her cultural heritage through cooking, with her mother Shenka nearly literally tied to her apron’s strings. The kitchen and comforting meals the center of the life they made makes this also a moving generational story of motherhood. A joined-at-the-hip dance about the meaning of Home. 

So when Rabinowitz discovered in 2015 a faded, green-painted bottle opener Sarah bought for Shenka from a pushcart peddler on the Lower East Side for twenty cents, haggling from 25c, in 1934, the simple tool that could easily have been tossed away made him realize this wasn’t “really about kitchen work” but “about the bond” between mother-and-daughter. “What had produced this closeness?” Rabinowitz explores.

Particularly poignant when contrasted against Rabinowitz’s father David, who went from one job to another and cycles of unemployment, worsened since he saw his life’s purpose as providing for his family. For decades, he suffered from a low sense-of-self.

Sarah is the “Empress of Empathy,” steadfast in weathering an intricate dance of economies spanning years of lows, some highs, and everything in-between. Good times came when David worked for the war effort as an electrician, and then a jeweler in the Diamond District of Manhattan.

Examples of some of the objects’ storytelling: “Papa Doesn’t Know from Ice Cream” is about “one of the first battlefields for the clash of old and new cultures” when Sarah eats her first ice cream cone costing 3 cents at twelve, newly arrived in America in 1928. “Isaac Guss Finds an Artillery Shell” is about Rabinowitz’s maternal great grandfather who perished during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920, which even the historian “knew nothing about.” A cigar box tells the story of tenement life. How you could have so little and yet stored inside this cardboard box you saved small things as if you had a lot.

A cobalt-blue bottle of perfume romantically named Evening in Paris depicts a very different side of Rabinowitz’s father. “Dave Splurges” when he has so little money is about a twenty-year-old in love, who despite being poor, did so elegantly; his nineteen-year-old bride always attentive to how she dressed. No matter how poor they “did not feel themselves excluded from the better things in life.” A dance of pride.

By 1948, the family saved up enough money ($13,000) to buy a two-story rowhouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York near Jamaica Bay. Under 1,000 square feet, it represented the “American dream.” Though they still lived a fairly insular life, shared with Italian immigrants, really knowing your neighbors who looked out for each other meant you didn’t feel isolated anymore. The once ubiquitous aluminum folding “beach chair” isn’t about beaches but about grabbing a chair and parking yourself on the sidewalk in front of your home chatting with a dozen other families. Tight-knit neighborhoods, when mothers stayed at home and your neighbors’ children were in and out of each other’s houses, shows us what was lost.

Many other objects summon nostalgic and sad dances. Like the creamy Charlotte Russe New Yorkers loved versus the mailman’s whistle alerting a loved one died during the war.

Objects of Love and Regret is and isn’t just A Brooklyn Story or a New York story. It’s America’s story too, transforming over the last century. Transforming today, right before our eyes. Sending a timeless message: Remember what you have, and what you’ve lost.

Lorraine

Meet the Mother of French Modern Art (Paris, late 1800s to 1941): How could such a highly influential modern art dealer from the early 20^th century, of mostly undiscovered French avant-garde artists called les Jeunes, be unknown to us? As in Berthe Weill was the first to enthusiastically discover, promote, fight for, and exhibit Picasso and Matisse, leaving her mark on art history.

As in advancing an extraordinary list of other French artists like Marc Chagall, Toulouse Lautrec, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and artists from other countries such as Diego Riviera (Mexico) and Amedeo Modigliani (Italy).

As in a Who’s Who of something like 500 “novel” artists we’re told, listed in a stunning, twenty+ page Glossary of Names of emerging artists representing and furthering revolutionary art movements that bucked conventionalism: Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pointillism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Realism, Synchronism, and Futurism. (For characteristics of these new modernist styles, see: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/glossary/, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/synchromism/, and https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/futurism.) Fauvists, Cubists, and Surrealists are the most frequent, described in this informative video:

Could it be that Berthe Weill, fittingly called by the artists Mother Weill, was a woman in the male-dominated art world? She opened her first gallery in the “starving artists” Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1902 – the first one to do that in the Belle Époque era. Could it also be that Weill was Jewish, notably when half of France was conflicted about the innocence or guilt of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus? The Dreyfus Affair exposed the ugly consequences of anti-Semitism resounding today. French President Emmanuel Macron showed how damaging this period was in France’s history by opening the Maison Zola-Musée Dreyfus in October 2021, in Medan, a village near Paris.

Certainly there’s been plenty of time for us to have heard about this trailblazer – gutsy, persevering, colorful, witty, sarcastic, and fascinating – since she wrote her memoir Pow! Right in the Eye! in 1933!

Note the two exclamation points in the title. A tip-off that her writings in these journal-type notebooks are unusually excessively punctuated. A no, no in the creative writing teaching world (use sparingly, if at all). Then again, Weill marched to her own rare beat. Weill, nobody’s fool, asked Paul Redoux, a French artist and journalist to write the preface, in which he explains that what makes her prose so special is that it’s not weighed down by “literary verbiage.” Instead, it’s an “extraordinary” original source document from both an “artistic and psychological” perspective:

“Artistic, in what it told about so many artists’ beginnings and their initial struggles, everything that crowded the French painting scene over twenty-five years.”

“Psychological, in what those sentences – and it would be sacrilege to change a word of them – said about a courageous, tenacious, visionary, and enthusiastic soul” . . . wonderfully expressed in disjointed, punchy sentences that weren’t so much as written as spoken, they were so natural and alive.”

Punchy is spot on! This is a punchy memoir in every way.

Which makes it not an easy one to translate, refreshingly says translator William Rodarmor, winner of the 2021 Albertine Prize awarded by the French embassy for French literature translations, who:

“Found tackling Weill’s memoir to be a mix of pleasure and terror. The pleasure was in learning intimate details about an array of twentieth-century artists from a lively, sharp-eyed observer. The terror was in wrestling with Weill’s rapid-fire prose, idiosyncratic style, and cryptic references while being haunted by the fear of getting something wrong.”

If it weren’t for the collaboration between Manhattan gallerists Julie Saul, who led this effort along with Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Gallery, we probably would still not know what Berthe Weill meant to the modern art world. The complete vision for this project to be realized in 2024 when the Gallery is set to open the exhibition, Berthe Weill: Indomitable Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde. Saul sadly passed away in February 2022, even before this book was released. Poignant news that punches us too as you appreciate the task of pulling the book together. 

Saul and Gumpert made the smart decision to relocate Reboux’s “Preface: First a Few Words” after we’ve read the slim diary-like memoir. In doing so, he confirms what we’ve been feeling all along: that this “itty-bitty woman” (under five foot) with oversized eyeglasses had the “strength and faith” of a “husky giant.” A remarkable force of determination, risk-taking, and fervent devotion to the cause of nurturing what Weill astutely eyed as great art. Her quest was never about becoming rich. Which you might assume she became, but she didn’t. Continually, she mocks herself for her bad business sense, and chronically struggles financially to keep her gallery running, having to move five times due to expenses, problems with landlords, and so on.

Outspoken about the “comings-and-goings” of a dizzying collection of diverse artists – painters, illustrators, watercolorists, sculptors, printmakers, decorators, collagists, engravers – plus collectors, other art dealers, art critics, writers, poets, and playwrights she crossed paths with, but she doesn’t say much about her family or personal life.

What stands out is that her father was a “ragpicker,” and how much she treasured her frequent travels with friends, many artists themselves. She never married. One artist friend Weill was quite close with was Émilie Charmy. Interestingly, she too is being newly rediscovered. Charmy seems best known for her self-portraits. She’s associated with the Fauvists, especially its leading figure Henri Matisse. Known as “King of the Wild Beasts,” the name attached to this new dazzling color style of painting.

Weill intended to end her memoir at her twenty-fifth anniversary as a gallerist, but decided to add an “Appendix” that takes us to her thirtieth year in business. She closed her gallery in 1941, marking forty years. She died in 1951.

Translator Rodarmor wrote most of the detailed “Notes” that come afterwards. Chapter-by-chapter over twenty single-spaced pages, he takes great pains to fill in the blanks of this “heroic slayer of the dragon of banality.” Which is why you might not want to skip them as you’ll find you’ll want more enlightenment about someone who was “always interested in everything new.” Someone who gravitated to youth and “everything that makes life bearable.”

This is a charming, lovingly produced book that makes it clear that despite the “aesthetic revolution of eye-catching splendor” that defied the ordinary, the fickleness of art, “too subject to the whims of speculation,” took years to make a dent in. Even with the enormous up-hill challenges Weill went through to showcase women artists, it’s impossible not be floored by how many were still “stricken from the history of art.”

Weill writes about how “beauty and good sense triumphed together.” But you have to wonder if or when that would have happened if it weren’t for one striving woman who never stopped believing.

Lorraine