Category: The New York Times

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Small Connections

One of my little favorite New York Times features is Metropolitan Diary, a column of little stories of the city that appears on Monday. Over the years I’ve been in it a couple of times and am even in the book of collected columns.

In today’s Metropolitan Diary a contributor named Mimi Alperin, wrote that, in the ’70s, her son would travel to and from school on the Fifth Avenue bus. During his daily trips he made friends with two of the route’s bus drivers. Alperin related how her son insisted on inviting one of the drivers to his bar mitzvah. And she told how, just recently, the other driver saw her husband and asked about the son, who is now an adult with his own children.

The story involved two things I like to think about. One is what’s now called “free range children.” Back when I and my children grew up they were just called “children.” But now that the world feels dangerous to us, we are reluctant to let children do the things we took for granted, like taking a bus or walking around the neighborhood alone.

It’s astounding how we no longer notice the absence of children. Not little children who appropriately cling to a parent’s hand when they’re walking down the street. But children who are old enough to begin, one small supervised step at a time, learning how to navigate in the world on their own. There’s a street near my house where, from time to time I have glimpsed a boy, maybe about 10 or 12, walking. Just walking. By himself! A free-range child! I am always happy to see him and I applaud the courage of the parent who has gone against fears of danger and criticism to allow him this freedom.

I also live near a college attended by some of the world’s smartest kids who seem not to know how to cross a street safely. I always think they could have benefitted from a little dose of free-range activity when they were younger.

The second thing I loved about Alperin’s story was the way it acknowledged the relationships we have with all the people in our lives with whom we share an almost unseen connection. We don’t know their names and we hardly do more than nod or smile to each other. The person bringing our mail. The supermarket cashier we like to go to even if her line is a little longer. The gas station attendant who knows right away that we want regular and we’ll be paying cash. It’s these almost unseen interactions that make a neighborhood, that help make us who we are. If we move or if they retire we won’t say goodbye. We might not even notice the absence for a while. But these faces we recognize make our daily lives recognizable to ourselves.

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What’s a book review for?

I’m often baffled by book reviews. Especially the ones in the New York Times on Sunday, which sometimes seem to have a backstory between reviewer and author that we, the reading public, are not privileged to know. This week’s Times has a page one review of Philip Roth’s latest by Leah Hager Cohen that, for me, is exactly what a book review should be.

Cohen starts off admitting that, in the past, she has been less than charmed by Roth’s body of work. I’m right there. She freely admits, too, being a little surprised to have been the one The Times called on for this review.

And then she writes the sentences that I have longed to see in a review: “Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-everything, does he keep bothering to write?…I don’t think it’s a bad question.My mistake was in asking it rhetorically.”

And she goes on to uncover with great care and an open mind, exactly what she thinks Roth is trying to accomplish in novel after novel and now in this latest, “Nemesis.” Yes, she makes me want to run out and buy the book, but that’s only part of the point. She also makes me grateful to be a reader on the verge of opening a book I can look at in a new way. She makes me, as a writer, hope for readers who come to my work with respect and in a spirit of open inquiry.

I have written–well, maybe ranted–before about why some book reviews are written when they seem to be about showcasing the reviewer’s own oh so clever and perceptive writing. In this one, Cohen herself was very visible, but in the best possible way. She was offering herself as our intelligent guide to a book we, apparently, must read. Isn’t that what a review is for?

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Reading the Sunday papers

Some days the news gives you news in unintended ways. In today’s New York Times I read the obituary of a poet named Abraham Sutzkever, whose beautiful, haunting, and heart-breaking work I discovered only recently. He wrote in Yiddish about the Holocaust and the lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

Here is one of his poems, translated by Jacqueline Osherow:

Written on a slat of a railway car:

If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life’s own path until it’s gone
somewhere in a fog and can’t be seen —

If someone should find these pearls
let him know how — cool, aloof — they lit up
the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart
of the Paris dancing girl, Marie.

Now, dragged through unknown Poland —
I’m throwing my pearls through the grate.

If they’re found by a young man —
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they’re found by a girl —
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they’re found by an old man —
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.

From Epitaphs 1943-44

When I turned from the Times’ news section to “News of the Week in Review,” I saw its lead story about political anger. It was illustrated with some of the most disturbing photographs I’ve seen in a long time. The front page photo is from a Tea Party rally. Pictured front and center are three women not far off my age cohort. One holds a sign that reads, “Gun Control is being able to hit your target.” The jump has a photo, too, this one from the 1964 presidential campaign. A woman identified as a Barry Goldwater supporter holds a “USA Love It or Leave It” poster. Her face is so contorted with anger that she looks more animal than human. (For some reason, the editors have selected women’s faces here. Food for thought. No comment.)

Left me thinking about hate in its various historical moments and incarnations and what it does to us.

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Nan Robertson, thank you

Nan Robertson died last week. Maybe I missed it, but I saw only a hint of the outpouring of tributes I expected, especially from women journalists.

She was one of the trailblazers, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was known as a generous mentor to countless women in journalism. Certainly she was an inspiration for many more.

Nan was 83 when she died and had made her career, mostly at The New York Times. She started there in 1955, in an era when “women’s news” was a beat. She wrote hundreds of articles on fashion, shopping, and decorating before moving, in 1963, to the paper’s Washington bureau. There her assignment, as she described it, was covering, “the first lady, her children, and their dogs.”

She wrote candidly about her own life, her struggles with alcoholism and depression and, most famously, her horrific experience with toxic shock syndrome, which ultimately led to the amputation of eight fingertips.

Her 1992 book, “The Girls in the Balcony” told the story of the federal class-action suit successfully brought against The New York Times by 550 women employees alleging discrimination in pay, assignments, and chance for advancement. The “balcony” in the book’s title was the less-than-second-class area at the National Press Club in Washington where women journalists could look down at the auditorium from which they were barred. Women were not allowed in the auditorium even on business until 1955 and were denied membership in the Press Club until 1971.

It is shocking to realize how relatively recent those days in the balcony were. But in 2009 around the world, in new media and old, women journalists are writing substantive news stories. And their voices are being clearly heard in the public discussion of how information is gathered and shared. Thank you, Nan.