Notes from October and November's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Although different in genre, style, and tone, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a memoir of his search for information about six family members who perished during the Holocaust, and Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, a biography of Antonina Zabinski and her family, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II who helped to shelter over 300 refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto, share an abiding interest in the particulars of the lives they discuss. Mendelsohn notes that at one point during the many interviews he and his family conducted with survivors, his brother Matt exclaimed, "A lot of people want to know how they died, but not how they lived!" In our discussions of these two works, we continually returned to the amazing fact of how the people described managed not only to live, but also to do so with hope, dignity, ingenuity, and courage.

Most members of our discussion groups seemed to enjoy the experience of reading The Zookeeper's Wife more than that of reading The Lost, perhaps because Ackerman shapes a more coherent and uplifting "story of what happened," as Mendelsohn would say. Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to tell a coherent story of what happened to his grandfather's brother, wife, and daughters, "[a] story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that, like my grandfather's stories, began with all the time in the world, and then speeded up as the lineaments became clear, the characters and personalities and plot, and ended with something memorable, a punch line or a tragedy that you'd always remember," but in the end, he was unable to do so. He did, however, meet many survivors who were willing, in spite of the pain of their personal memories, to share how they had lived and how those they knew and loved had died. He suggests that "How to be the storyteller . . . [is] the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away." Reading these books together perhaps gives us a more complete sense of the enormity of the Holocaust than reading either book alone, the reality that there were, of course, so many heroic and uplifting or tragic and sad stories, but that most of them are lost forever along with the original tellers, making each story that we do have that much more precious.

Not Fiction Book Discussion at West Ashley Branch

We are excited to announce that the Not Fiction Book Discussion will travel to the West Ashley Branch of Charleston County Public Library! Our first discussion there will be of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, this Thursday, November 20, at 11:00 a.m. Please see the previous post for a brief description of Ackerman's biography of Antonina Zabinski and her family, who were zookeepers of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II. We look forward to having more discussions at West Ashley in the future, and we hope you will join us to share your ideas about the books there, at Main Library, or here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us Tuesday, November 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Main Library for a discussion of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, a biography of Antonina Zabinski. Antonina and her husband Jan were zookeepers of the Warsaw Zoo in Poland in the 1930s and 40s. Horrified by the Nazi regime's racist beliefs about both people and animals and supporting the Polish Underground resistance movement, the Zabinskis sheltered over 300 refugees from the Nazis in the remnants of the zoo left after German bombing and Nazi hunting parties. Although the Holocaust is a dark subject, Ackerman's story shimmers with a deep appreciation for the natural world, warm admiration for the Zabinskis, and humorous affection for the animals and humans who lived at the zoo. Ackerman's prose captures the feeling of Antonina's own writing, and one gets the feeling that Ackerman is channeling Antonina's personality as well. Her story provides many topics for discussion, including the perennial question of why some people insist on seeing the difference between themselves and others while other people embrace difference and will even risk their own well-being for the sake of others. We hope you will help us while away the anxious hours leading up to the election results on Election Day!

October is National Reading Group Month

The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) is sponsoring its second National Reading Group Month in October 2008 to promote reading groups and to celebrate the joy of shared reading. For more information, visit the Women's National Book Association Inc. website.
Read, share, enjoy!

October Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us for a discussion of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn on Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library in downtown Charleston. As a boy in the 1960s, Mendelsohn could cause elderly relatives to cry simply by entering a room. He comes to understand that his family is haunted by the deaths of six relatives who disappeared during the Holocaust, who were "killed by the Nazis," and that he resembles one of them, his grandfather's brother. While still a child, Mendelsohn became the official historian of his family, and as an adult, he obsessively searches for answers to the mystery of the disappearance of the six, traveling to many countries and continents, conducting interviews with those last few remaining people who witnessed the events of the Holocaust and might have known his family. His narrative combines memoir, travelogue, genealogical research, and Biblical and Torah commentary to create a rich meditation on family, loss, and the relationship between memory and truth. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award and chosen as a notable book by many book reviews, The Lost is an important addition to Holocaust literature. According to Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun, "More than just an act of familial piety, this kind of recuperation is one of the distinctive ethical acts of our time."

Notes from September's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Many of us attending the September 2 discussion of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir The Fun Home had never read a graphic narrative before. We admitted that we assumed the graphics would merely reiterate the text. Needless to say, we were surprised and gratified by Bechdel's book. We discovered that her graphics are an essential part of her narrative, a "text" to be read just as carefully as her words. Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal, "It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?" We enjoyed sharing and decoding some of our favorite panels. One of my favorites is on the first page, where we see Bruce Bechdel has been reading Anna Karenina. It was with great delight that I recalled the first line of that novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This panel taught me how to read the book and introduced its subject in a delightful and compact way.

Several critics feel that Bechdel's use of literary and pop culture allusions is too heavy-handed, rather unnecessary to telling her story, and ultimately weakens the story. We disagreed with these critics. We found the allusions to be an integral part of her story, another opportunity for the reader to decode Bechdel's tone and purpose. Bechdel self-consciously refers to the tone of her memoir, in large part created by her use of allusion, as "my cool aesthetic distance." This "cool aesthetic distance" serves both to indicate the pain her relationship with her father has caused her and, at the same time, to show her great debt to him. Her purpose in writing the book, we decided, is to reconcile the pain with the debt and to acknowledge the identity she shares with her father beyond genetics, familial obligation, or sexuality. Bechdel told The Village Voice that " . . . the book is an expansion of my childhood diary, in that it's this perseveration on detail. You know? In some ways I felt like it was almost a penance to trace everything out in such detail." And she told The Advocate, "I realized eventually that what the book was really about was not his suicide or our shared homosexuality or the books we read. It was about my creative apprenticeship to my father; it was about becoming an artist."

We will continue our discussion of family secrets and identity October 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. We hope you will join us at the Main Library or here on the blog.

September Not Fiction Book Discussion

We will continue our consideration of identity with tomorrow's discussion at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library of The Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Bechdel has created a new genre with her book, the graphic memoir, in which she describes her ironically charged relationship with her father, Bruce Bechdel. Alison Bechdel learned that her father was gay shortly after coming out as a lesbian to her family. A short time later, Bruce Bechdel was killed in an accident that Alison suggests might have been suicide. Bechdel circles around both the painful and touching moments of their life together, keeping emotion at just the right distance with controlled and elaborate literary allusion. Would Bechdel have had this utterly original perspective on her search for her sexual identity without her complicated love/hate, recognition/denial relationship with her father? We hope you will join our conversation, either in person or here on the blog, of this groundbreaking work that was acclaimed a best book of the year by more than twenty review journals.