Carol Bergman

At the age of sixteen, as I was about to leave for college, my mother and stepfather gave me a lecture about swearing. I was the daughter of professionals, swearing was low-class, they said. Plus, I was a girl. What would the young men I met at mixers think of me?

Until then, my parents had never paid attention to my shits and fucks. I was still very young, had skipped two grades and I knew, even if they didn’t, that the swearing was bravado. I felt taller, older, safer, and more transgressive when I swore, ready to leave home with an arsenal of curses. I didn’t have a Teddy Bear, or a Snoopy, or any other transitional object to sneak under the pillow in my dorm room; swearing was it.

My parents weren’t native English speakers so I deluded myself that there was a chance they didn’t understand these delicious words. I don’t know if my mother ever swore in German or French, her two languages before arriving in America, and it was only years later, when I had acquired some French—merde merde merde—and taken a beginner’s class in German at NYU’s Deutsches Haus, that I figured out something about German I’d never realized: every imperative sounded like a swear word to me—achtung, achtung achtung. Oddly, my teacher was from Salzburg where the German is “soft,” similar to my parents’ cultivated, Viennese German. But that made no difference. The death camps surfaced in my over-active imagination and I couldn’t concentrate. And that is one reason I was there. I wanted to transcend my visceral hatred—and fear—of the German language, my parents’ mother tongue. No wonder they only ever talked to their children in English, I thought, as though the German language itself, its intrinsic, percussive evil-ness, had led to the Holocaust.

I remember the first day of class and the“why are you here?” interrogation. One person was an opera singer—lots of librettos in German—another was a business woman—lots of travel to Germany, another had a new German girlfriend, and so on. Then it was my turn: “How is that most of our English curse words derive from German words and not French words though English has also descended from French ?,” I asked. “Is there an explanation?” I had been working on etymologies for a textbook company and had tinkered with swear words in several languages. I knew I was right, I did not want to be challenged, I lied about why I had registered for the class. Luckily, I was not there to make friends.

At the break, I went out into the hallway and ate a peach to calm myself. There was the teacher right behind me, her hand on my shoulder, gently asking if I was okay. I was not okay. I wish I had been able to use WTF in that moment, but it hadn’t appeared yet in our swearing lexicon. And it’s really very tame, isn’t it, compared to What The Fuck with its implied, rhetorical question mark?  Read More 

My new passport arrived last week. It looks and feels different than my old passport, which I had to surrender to the State Department. A passport is not a souvenir, it does not belong to us personally, it belongs to the government. And it is now a traceable, electronic document; it has a chip. No wonder it feels different. We all do.

I had never studied the interior (visa) pages of my passport, never read the text from cover to cover, never appreciated its design, or the etchings and quotations. If I were stuck in an elevator with nothing else to read but my passport, there would be plenty to read until the fire department arrived to rescue me. And plenty to think about, too. What has happened to the so-called American dream? Does our Constitution still make sense? What about Lincoln’s words, quoted on the opening page: “And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Memorized in junior high, I can still easily imagine that great man reciting those incisive words. His words, and all the words in the passport, are not platitudes; they carry weight.

The first American passports were issued during the American Revolution to Benjamin Franklin and his aides as they embarked on their mission to France to raise money and military assistance for the Patriots. Ben Franklin had a printing press, he printed them. They were just a sheet of paper with a description—words only—of the bearer on one side; the description was in French, the diplomatic language. I don’t remember if any women traveled with Franklin—he established a new “family” in London, I recall—but American women were not allowed to carry their own passports until they/we “got” the vote in 1920. I cherish that piece of American history, and I cherish my new passport and what it implies and confers: citizenship and responsibility.  Read More 

I was on my way to meet a friend for an early dinner at “Sweetgreen,” a salad bar/restaurant/shop/assembly line? I am not sure what to call it. Shop, I’ll call it a shop. Suffice to say, it’s a vegetarian’s delight if one is vegetarian (one doesn’t have to be to enjoy Sweetgreen—there are various protein choices). I’d been there once, commented on being coerced into presenting my credit card—no cash accepted—and enjoyed the more than affordable meal. So this was my second visit and I was alert to more details. This time I saw the small sign at the counter explaining the“sustainability” of going cashless: no armored trucks, less chance of theft, more hygienic, etc. (It wasn’t that long, I looked up the “sustainability” reasons later.)

I was skeptical. How many New Yorkers would this decision exclude? A lot. In the USA, 7% of the adult population do not have credit cards. In Sweden, a cashless nation, 35,000 senior citizens who rely on cash, are excluded from the new app-driven economy. The government has a problem. They can’t wait for these seniors to die, they have to sustain them. Government and sustainability. Those words go together, they are sweet to me. So what regulations might be on the horizon? Hard to say.

But, first, a bit of a local flashback: The Amsterdam Avenue Sweetgreen shop I’m discussing here is on the flight path from two local public high schools—Laguardia and Martin Luther King—and a MacDonald’s on 71st and Broadway. It was just past 3 p.m. and the street corner was mobbed with kids—mostly black—socializing and munching on junkie food. Just steps away: an inexpensive healthy meal at Sweetgreen’s. Credit cards only.

So I began to think about this as I entered Sweetgreen. I arrived early to study the menu choices more carefully and to ponder the recent no-cash decision of its owners. Of Sweetgreen’s 64 locations throughout the US, only the shops in Massachusetts allow cash, and only because cashless is illegal there. The 1978 MA law states that no retailer “shall discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring the use of credit.” Federal law leaves the decision to the states.

Is this fair? Is it just? Aren’t we in the throes of a social justice discourse about the chasms between rich and poor in our country right now, at this very moment that I write?

Like most corporations, Sweetgreen has a mission statement, a website, and a PR department. They do philanthropic work in the city’s schools and they have a solid career advancement program for their employees. In other words, they seem to care about the “community,” a word that appears in their mission statement. But what, exactly, do they mean by “community?” Which community? And why not share their affordable, healthy, delicious offerings to everyone?

Here is my recent (May 25th) correspondence with Ben Famous, a PR at Sweetgreen. Please note that he did not want to have what might have been an off-the-record background conversation on the phone, he insisted on email. I wanted some answers so I didn’t push it:

ME: Hi Ben,
Could we have a short conversation on the phone?
I'm at my desk until about 2:30 today.

BEN:Hi Carol
I am tied up in meetings but can be responsive over email. How can I help?
Ben

ME: I'm interested in the decision to go cashless. Sweetgreen does terrific work in the schools and it would be logical to offer a cash alternative –like EZ Pass—for kids, for example, who've tasted your offerings and philosophy and would like to go to a store in their neighborhood but don't have a credit card. I saw a bunch of kids in front of the MacDonald's just steps away from your Amsterdam store the other day as I was headed to Sweetgreen to meet a friend, and that's what got me started on this. Just imagine if those kids would walk away from MacDonald's and into Sweetgreen, I thought to myself.

Going cashless is a global trend and some of the reasons make sense and some don't. So I was interested in how a socially conscious company like Sweetgreen is addressing this controversy.

BEN: Thanks for that note. I notice that your write for outlets - are you wanting to write a piece on the policy or are you asking as a customer for your general knowledge?

ME: I'm a free-lancer and an adjunct professor of writing at NYU. I follow my (personal) interests. I have no idea where this will lead. I may talk to other companies that have decided to go cashless. I may keep it small. I may put a posting on my blog. I am finding the subject challenging as even socially conscious companies such as yours are going cashless. There's fallout from this decision, consequences, nationally and internationally. I want to know how Sweetgreen is handling the controversy.

BEN: Sorry it took a bit for me to get back. As you know, Sweetgreen made the decision to go cashless in all of its locations this year, except those in Massachusetts, after a year long process of testing and careful consideration. At this time however we do not have any further comment on that decision beyond what has already been communicated. Please feel free to refer to statements and comments made in both the Fast Company & Business Insider pieces from our announcement which I've linked below. As we look to the future, and continue to evolve, we'd be happy to reach out with any updates or key learnings on cashless.

“Key learnings?” What does that mean? What has happened to the language wherein we speak to one another about important issues of the day? How would I be able to explain to those kids on the corner that they will never be able to enjoy a meal at Sweetgreen unless—or until—they qualify for a credit card.  Read More 

We went to have new passport photos taken at Ulloa’s, a local portrait studio between 181 & 182 on Broadway. There aren’t many of these left in Manhattan—we almost went to a drugstore instead—but we live in a mostly Dominican neighborhood and families from the DR are devoted to commemorating their family connections, accomplishments, status, and well-being. The walls of the studio are filled to the ceiling with framed, tinted portraits of important occasions—graduations, weddings, Communions—each one the touchstone of a complex, multi-generational family story. Hard copy is sent home, or carried in suitcases on annual visits.

The shop caters to their clientele with panache. The photographers are dressed in crisp shirts and ties out of respect for their customers and their craft. Compared to the insouciant, disheveled photo-journalists my husband and I have worked with over the years, this earnestness is a refreshing reminder of what it means to start a new life in another country: hard work.

Immigrants and children of immigrants run this small, bi-lingual business. Why not support them? Don’t we all have a story of migration somewhere in our family history? Shall I build a wall around my neighbors? Shall I shun them? These questions are in my mind these days. I cannot abide the hatred that has been unleashed since the recent election. So I sit at my desk today writing about yet another pleasant encounter with immigrants. Writing is my tool of resistance; I am delighted I found this photo shop.

Our photographer was dressed in black, his digital camera an appendage of his arm. I was dreading the results—digital photography is not kind to aging faces—but he did a commendable job of making both of us look good, or good enough for our passports. There was a short wait for the prints, time to ask questions. I was curious about the photos of “resting” babies on the walls as there were so many. These were babies who had fallen asleep during the photo shoot, our photographer explained. Parents usually decide to include them anyway as they are easy to photograph while asleep.

Healthy looking sleeping babies, not dead babies. I was relieved, as these images were reminiscent of dead Victorian infants dressed in bonnets and long gowns. In the earliest days of photography in the mid 1830’s, infant mortality was high, and families commissioned photographs of their short-lived children. The shiny copper Daguerreotypes felt more ethereal than oil paintings, a soul embedded in a photograph forever.  Read More 

I dreamt I was walking up a long stone staircase behind my mother and her small dog. She was wearing a taupe silk suit that matched her permed gray hair and the dog’s fur. Someone said, “She likes dogs.” I knew that was correct, but it wasn’t me that said it. I remained silent.

Slowly, I followed my mother up the stairs. She did not know I was there because I had not as yet been born.

I awoke with a sentence in my head: “We walk behind our mothers.” That sentence became the first sentence in an email letter I wrote to a friend about being both a daughter and a mother. And now it is here, in this blog post.

Why do I record my dreams? The unconscious mind surfaces in dream stories, a great gift to artists and writers if we can interpret and use the emotional information, sensation and epiphanies gleaned from them.

It was a therapist who first suggested I record my dreams. I would bring my journal to our sessions and read my dream stories aloud. The therapist would comment and I would reflect on her comments orally and then, later, in my journal. After a while, recording and interpreting my dreams became a habit and a writer’s ritual, one I look forward to every morning as I open my journal. If I can’t remember a dream, I often feel uneasy. Then, as I start to work, the dreams often come back to me.

Over the years, I’ve written fiction, nonfiction, poems and screen treatments out of my dreams. I get ideas as I am sleeping, in fact, and resolve knots in my life and my work. After a visit to MOMA to see “Women and Abstraction,” I couldn’t figure out why the exhibition felt so strange to me. I had a dream about it that night and there it was: these women painters had been appendages of men until just recently, their work hadn’t been taken seriously, it had been stored in the archives of the museum until just now rather than integrated into the “abstraction” galleries, and it was now “segregated” in a special exhibition. I woke up with all these thoughts in my head, closer to an essay than a dream, and I was fuming. Will I write a longer, more considered article on the subject? Possibly.  Read More 

I think I just wrote my first hashtag: #mentaldetoxspringrenewal. I sent it to my daughter. I wanted to show off. Now I am wondering why I resisted hashtags until this moment and why, suddenly, I wanted to write a hashtag. Are they contagious? And where on earth did the word hashtag came from and who was the first to use one? The answers to these questions are in a Wikipedia entry, and they are complicated. Suffice to say—in measured narrative prose—that hashtags have #takenofflikewildfire. Now is that a sentence or a real meta data hashtag? Neither, I’d say.

I vividly remember resisting –and eventually surrendering—to Facebook. Surrender finally came when I “found” my college room-mate and an old boyfriend. I wrote blog posts about my resistance and surrender and figured out a way to beat abbreviated posts: I only write full sentences, and more than one. Sometimes I post a photo and write a story—yes, a full story—to caption the photo. It’s good writing practice.
I now have three Facebook sites, use them to advertise my workshops, my publications and my publishing company, and friend people who I meet casually here and there. I even friended my bank manager recently. He was interesting. I write notes and blog posts and participate in a lot of political discourse these days. I follow, unfollow, de-friend and de-capitate only occasionally. Dear reader, please don’t do that to me.

Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and many other challenging books, loves hashtags and she loves tweeting. I heard her talk about it at a PEN conference maybe five years ago, but I still didn’t get it. By then I had a Twitter account but never used it except to watch, supinely, as my FB Carol Bergman: Writer posts fed into it. Once in a while I received a notice that someone was trying to contact me through Twitter, and only then did I pay attention. I still don't tweet but if you tweet me, I will twitter like a bird.

As for hashtags, I don’t think I will surrender until I can figure out a way to use them that satisfies me as a writer. I don’t want my narrative brain to atrophy and I don’t want my students to communicate with me or each other in sound bytes or 140 characters. When and if you have the pleasure of walking into my classroom, this is what you will hear from me on the first day: We’re writers. It’s our mandate to preserve our language and participate, fully, in its evolution.  Read More 

I was walking down Columbus Avenue when I saw Charlie’s books neatly piled on a table. Charlie is a fixture in this upper west side Manhattan neighborhood, more so now that the Barnes & Noble a couple of blocks down has become a Century 21. I miss that Barnes & Noble. It was on a clear cut between my debark from the C train to my gym at 63rd.

I had just been in a café reading my students’ interview assignments. I’d sent them out into the city to meet a stranger and get their story. Everyone has a story, see what you can find out, I said. Don’t talk about yourself. This isn’t about you, it’s about someone else.

Any community is a treasure trove of interesting people. Writers don’t have to go far to exercise their curiosity and heightened sensitivities. The other day, getting my car oil changed and inspected at an upstate mechanic near my daughter and son-in-law’s house, I met a fourth-generation farmer who just had his fourth great grand-child. He’d voted for Trump and I wanted to know why. What is it about his life that sent him down that electoral path? His truck was ready before my car, but at least I got some of the story, not enough to write anything just yet, but enough to spur me to find out more. I wrote about the conversation in my journal and mentally filed it away, to be continued.

Now there was Charlie on the street, a man and his books I’d passed a hundred times, maybe more, on my way to the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble, but never stopped. I figured those neatly piled books of his were dirty—god knows where they’d come from, maybe loaded with bed bugs, I thought, and I've had enough of those, thank you. I would have passed by again, but my phone vibrated and I stopped to pick it up right in front Charlie and his books. I clicked off the call and started looking through the books. When there are books in front of me, especially in such close proximity, I look. The first that caught my eye was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” one of my favorites. I have a hardback copy, too big to carry around, and I’ve been wanting to reread it for a while. And because I can’t seem to read literary fiction on my Kindle anymore, I’ve been buying more paperbacks.

Charlie was right there behind my shoulder. I could smell his cigar and see the smoke. So I asked him to pull out the book. It was pristine. Never cracked.


“How much?”
“Three dollars.”
“Take five,” I said.

Then he stood next to me as I flipped through it again. Lo (or LOL), it wasn’t completely pristine, I’d missed an inscription:

"Dear Yasmina,

May you have many nights of reading yourself to sleep, and may we always share among many other things this love of good books.

With nothing but love,
R"

“Well, I guess that relationship is over,” I said. “How did this book get here? “
“No idea,” Charlie said.
“Yasmina gave away a book with a very intimate inscription. Or maybe she died. Was this an estate sale book?”

My imagination was already clicking over. If Yasmina had died—Yasmina are you out there reading this blog post?—why did her loved ones give away this inscribed book? How callous, I decided.

Charlie took the fifth. No comment. Time for me to ask him a question or two.

“So where do you get your books?”
“All over.”
“And what did you do before you sold books here?”
“I read.”
“And how long have you been selling books here?”
“Twenty years.”
“And are you still reading?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got any Graham Greene?”
“Let me have a look.”


As he was searching, it was as though he was stepping into his books, possessing them. He belonged to them, they belonged to him, he belonged to this street, this neighborhood, this city. “No Graham Greene,” he said. Then he offered his hand. “Charlie,” he said. “My name is Charlie.”  Read More 

I went to see “Oslo,” by J.T. Rogers when it was still in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater. The advance press was intense. Rave Reviews. I was disappointed—an understatement—perhaps one of the few that evening who was not applauding or sighing with relief at the promise of “hope” in the Middle East. We need more than hope or sentimental plays right now to set the world straight. And so I was doubly surprised when some of my internationally astute Facebook friends praised this play. Perhaps we are all so down-in-the-dumps these days that any glimmer of “hope” is welcome, even in a play that doesn’t work as a play.

Forgive me, dear Reader, but “Oslo” is not a theatrical experience, it is a soapbox experience about back-channel meetings early in 1993 while the First Intifada was still raging. The meetings culminated in a handshake on the White House Lawn between Arafat and Rabin, President Clinton presiding. Rabin was assassinated two years later. Much has been written about all of this, most notably in an article in The New Yorker by Connie Bruck which is informative without distortion or polemics:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/14/the-wounds-of-peace

The end of the “ handshake,” as the rapprochement came to be known, led eventually to the Second Intifada and to the upsurge of violence and despair today. This is the unexpressed undertow in the play. So why was the audience laughing?

I looked at the stage, I looked around at my fellow theater- goers. The actors were bored with the pedestrian script, I decided, and they were grandstanding to amuse themselves, stay awake, and remember their lines during a very long and wordy play. As for the audience, they seemed relieved to be feeling something.

Though based on historical research, the play is imbalanced. The most important characters were not the Palestinian and Israeli delegates, but the Norwegian couple who persuaded them to attend the talks –Mona Juul, then an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and her husband, Terje Rod-Larsen, who was director of the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences. This couple deserve a medal for what they accomplished in Oslo: they kept the talks secret, and defied the expectations of the meddling Americans, among others. But they are oddly absent in the play except as foils.

What if this play had been told from diplomat Mona Juul’s point of view? Or even her husband’s? Or both of them? Now that would have been an interesting play. This one isn’t.  Read More 

She died at 99 holding a book. Not literally so, but metaphorically speaking, she was a free-thinking person of the book and interested in all books, all people, all of life, everywhere. She was difficult, opinionated, even prejudiced occasionally, but she usually returned to knowledge and tolerance. She was an enlightened, educated, emancipated, complicated woman.

She was fully conscious to the end, thinking about and verbalizing her experience. She lay in her hospice bed, her family around her, observing her own death, talking about it to us and to herself in an inward reflection. “I’m dying,” she said. She instructed the nurses to give her more morphine, or less. We played her music, put buds in her ears, read poetry to her. She wanted to wait for one of her grand-children to arrive from Wyoming, she said, clearly. As a physician, she understood the power and solace of morphine, how it could be used to control one’s last breath, or delay it. She consulted my sister and her husband, also both physicians, but this was pro forma. She didn’t really need them. She knew what she wanted, she was in control, she had come to the end of a long and eventful life, she was regnant upon her hospice bed.

Her father, my Czech grandfather, was a traveling salesman who traveled from Vienna to Yugoslavia to sell high-end leather gloves. My mother adored him—she was an only child—and dreaded his departures. The promise of a gift upon his return soothed her. It was always a leather-bound book, inevitably a classic. By age 10, my mother had her own library and become an avid reader. In America, in my childhood home, there were bookshelves in every room, the library organized by subject and author. My stepfather had his own shelves, his own interests: dictionaries, history, Goethe and Heine in German. My mother never read a word of German once she was on American soil. She spoke English, she spoke French and that was enough once she’d disembarked. It was odd and troubling, at times, how she’d rejected her mother tongue.

Often, I’d want to borrow a book and if I took it off the shelf and held it in my hand, she’d become agitated. Books were her totems. The library held life together, it was a commentary on the past and present, perhaps even the future. If it was disturbed, I thought, this held-together world might collapse as it had in Europe when the war began, and all was left behind, so many loved ones murdered. So I was careful, I always asked, I always returned books to their proper place on the shelf and rarely took one away. Which probably explains why my mother constantly bought me books and insisted that I read them right away so we could have a discussion about them. Many were duplicates of the books on her own shelves, and though this may seem profligate, it was not profligate; it was necessary.  Read More 

I first met Hakim Constantine in Sakura Park near Columbia University in Manhattan. He was a gardener for the Riverside Park Conservancy; I was a volunteer. Once a week, until Hurricane Sandy hit and the cherry trees toppled closing the park for months, we raked and weeded and talked. It was always just the two of us so we talked a lot. Hakim had just lost his grandfather and his college education had been interrupted. I was struggling with some life changes also. Our age difference evaporated with the fresh air and physical work; we mentored and supported each other, sharing family stories, and philosophical musings. I encouraged Hakim to get back to school to finish his degree. His dream was to mentor young people, perhaps become a teacher or a counsellor. Soon after we parted ways, he started Empire State College. He had a lot of credits and I knew it wouldn’t take him long to get his degree. He was already smart, but with each course, each book he read, every paper he wrote, he became smarter and smarter. His mind clicked over so rapidly that before very long, while he was studying and working full time at Prospect Park, he had started Simeon’s House. Still young, he has arrived at his life’s work.

I cannot tell you, dear reader, how proud I am of Hakim. He was profiled in The Amsterdam News this week, my pride amplified. The trajectory of Hakim’s education and achievement is a reminder of what we all are working for: public, fully-funded education for our children, no matter background or economic circumstances, and the end to white flight into private schools, charter schools and elite city schools—Hunter, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science—that, still, after all these years— discriminate against our underprivileged children. The educational system may still be at Ground Zero, utterly misguided in its test-based curriculum, but men and women like Hakim press on despite their challenges and compromised opportunities. That gives me hope.


http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/mar/16/hakim-constantine-working-toward-better-future/?page=2

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