Carol Bergman

The world has a lot of children--rich and poor-- every one of them wants to learn unless they are discouraged from learning. Joyce, a friend of mine, works with little ones in the Bronx as an ESL teacher. The school is "failing," and the powers that be are desperate to save it. Their solution is more jargon, more restraint on experienced teachers, more testing of the kids, more evaluation of the teachers, more day-to-day interruptions with memos and meetings.

Dear Reader, this is a polemical post today, please forgive me, but I am appalled by what Joyce has been telling me. She has asked for an alias, so she is Joyce for now. "Anyone will know it is me," she told me. She wants to keep working in the school. On top of all her other obligations, she doesn't need an encounter with the powers that be.

Joyce is devoted, well-trained and experienced. She uses her background as an actor and pastry chef in the classroom. She has an after-school cooking program and takes the kids on trips. She is bi-lingual and communicates easily with parents. She takes photographs, records stories, makes individualized books. When she runs into her students on the streets they are excited to see her and she is excited to see them. Why, then, hasn't she been able to teach in her classroom since April? Because of constant testing and evaluation.

The education and protection of children is a universal human right as codified in the UN's Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26 and elsewhere). Never before in my career as an educator have I questioned whether the United States is fulfilling this mandate. But I do now. Every term more and more students enter my workshops disabled by our failing educational system. Some can barely speak or write; they have no confidence and inadequate knowledge. When I begin to talk about reading to raise their knowledge base, they seem dumbfounded. Eventually they get it: they have been attending public, tax-funded schools but not getting an education. The Chinese and European students in my classes often know more, write better English and are more disciplined. This is more than embarrassing; it is shameful. All these skills can and should be taught in our schools.

When there is a war or a disaster, Unicef quickly sets up a full range of services for children in "child-friendly spaces," designed by a relief-worker friend, MacKay Wolff, and his team during his stint in Albania during the war in Kosovo. The brochure generated for this project reads, in part: "Children want and need to learn. Education of good quality is the most effective and efficient means societies have for organising learning opportunities which will assure that their children have the knowledge and skills they need to survive, develop and participate. Good education is, therefore, good for children."

Volunteers descend on the disaster zone for as long as the donations keep coming in and the schools flourish. There’s determination, a battlefield mentality. Perhaps that’s what we need in our collapsing urban school systems. That said, teachers like Joyce are already there on the front line doing their best with limited resources. Confused bureaucrats now monitor their every attempt at helping the children in their care.

Last Saturday, after a pleasant afternoon with my family at The New York Botanical Garden, and a leisurely meal at an upscale restaurant in the garden, we headed back to Manhattan from the Bronx. The GPS went haywire and we ended up driving down Webster Avenue, under the railroad tracks past Jerome Avenue. This is not a privileged neighborhood; it's the Third World. Joyce's school is not far from here, I thought. This is how the children she teaches have to live. They are as much at risk as the children in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Congo or Nepal.  Read More 

There was a newspaper every morning on the mat outside our apartment door. We were on the seventh floor and this was a marvel to me. How did it get there and so early? We were at the breakfast table by 6:30—all four of us—and my step-father had opened the door and picked up the paper before we were all assembled. Being the man of the house and the most interested in domestic politics and foreign affairs—at least that was my explanation until I went to college and learned better—he had prerogatives on the newspaper. That said, he shared its contents by reading various articles aloud and then asking his children questions.

My sister was always too young—even as she got older—so I had the opportunity and challenge to answer the questions to show-off and make my mother proud and my sister jealous. For this great effort I was rewarded with the arts section of the newspaper. Mostly, I looked at the movie ads and advertisements. But I drew the pages back as my stepfather did into a kind of scroll, right to left, and felt very grown up.

These days, I mostly read the newspaper digitally and I miss the smell of the paper, the newsprint on my hands, our small family at the breakfast table together before the frenzy of getting to school and work, and my stepfather’s lessons about all the world’s glories and woes.  Read More 

Ever since NYU Shanghai opened in 2012, I have had at least one or two Chinese students in my writing workshop. They are usually shy, or quiet, or scared, or in culture shock. They are expected to speak and to write with abandon, transparency and heart. Their English is still challenged, but this is not the biggest challenge. My classroom is an open classroom in an open society. For all our troubles here, we will not be put in jail for speaking or writing anything. Our inhibitions have a different origin: the constraints of the marketplace (difficult enough at times) or our own personal, psychological obstacles, all surmountable.

There are 44 writers in jail in China and many more under house arrest. China is the only country in the world that has incarcerated a Nobel Laureate: Liu Xiaobo. Liu was represented by an empty chair at the ceremony in Oslo in 2010. He is still in jail and his wife is under house arrest. Theirs is one of many stories of artists, writers and dissidents in China, a despotic communist state where one-man rule is as potent, brutal and feudal as it was under the emperors. With the economic boom and China’s influence and money on every continent, it is easy to forget this.

What happens to my students when they return to China? At an American PEN gathering this week, three Chinese dissidents (Murong Xuecun, Bao Pu and Xiaolu Guo) in town for demonstrations at the Book Expo, talked about the pervasive, endemic, government-driven censorship in China. And to a person, they were skeptical of the value of American authors getting published in China—a vast, tempting new marketplace—or of privileged Chinese students studying here who return to China with the cachet of an American diploma. Many are “seduced” by jobs in government or industry.

I feel protective of my Chinese students. I get to know them quickly despite their shyness. And I think it is cynical to believe that when they return they will necessarily be seduced. After all, writing is a strengthening, clarifying process. A personal transformation takes place that is both sustaining and lifelong. And so I am hopeful that exposure to a free-thinking environment will somehow take hold, and that the Chinese students who pass through our classes may, one day, be in the vanguard of democratic change in China. Or, if not them, then their children. And though all reference to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 has been expunged in mainland China, it will be found again, and published for all to read, and celebrate.

Recent history in other countries, including our own, provide the best example. American history textbooks never mentioned the genocide of the Native Americans until the 1960’s, or the brutalities of slavery, for that matter, two fault lines in our own past which have still not been reconciled or healed. And in Israel, it is only in the last decade that the Israelis have learned about the eracination of the Palestinian people during their fight for independence during the British mandate.

As for the publishing opportunities for foreign authors in China, it’s a hard call. “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories,” has been published twice in China, more recently using the “simple” alphabet. I signed a contract both times too casually. To get published in China, that is a good thing, I thought.Yes and no. PEN now recommends a series of actions before publication in China. I might have insisted on a translator to check on the deletions, excisions, and changes that were made, for example. The more writers that do this, the better. My agent might have done the same.

Is it better to have 90% of a book published in China—available in its entirety in Hong Kong and Taiwan or on the black market—or not to have it published there at all? Do we perpetuate censorship and the despotic regime by agreeing to publication? Or are we supporting the struggling publishers and editors who want to keep going and are always on the side of the writer and literature?

The answers to these questions test our moral conscience as they did before the fall of apartheid in South Africa. And that is a good for a writer.

A PDF of the American PEN “Censorship and Conscience Report” is available online:

http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/PEN_Censorship-and-Conscience_5-20-15.pdf  Read More 

When Princess Di was killed in a car crash in Paris and the paparazzi were gloating and falling over each other to get the most gruesome shot, what kind of journalism was this? Salacious, scandalous, tabloid journalism. And all of those reporters and photo-journalists—to their shame—were liable to a fine and imprisonment under French law which is grounded in the Napoleonic Code. Some refer to it as the “good samaritan law,” whereby anyone witnessing injury or distress is obliged to help. It is different in the United States; our law is based on English Common Law and there is no liability if we do not help, or moral obligation, or “duty to rescue.” Nonetheless, the discussion about rescue, engagement, and bearing testimony, is a constant among journalists. If we see a child starving in the desert and take a photograph for the newspaper we work for, are we obliged to help that child?

I will always remember those journalists on the day Princess Di was killed, I cannot forget them and what they did. She may or may not have survived her injuries; we will never know. But her death became a touchstone for many journalists who were repulsed by the paparazzi that day. I study my own motivations every time I interview and sit down to write. I try not to exploit for my own gain or fame, though temptations abound. I am not perfect. Every reporter gets an adrenalin rush on a big story.

I am thinking about all this today because of a front page story in the NY Times by Adam Nossiter, The West Africa Bureau Chief of the NY Times. He has been covering the Boko Haram atrocities in Nigeria for a while now, and has received death threats. He gets in close, takes risks. (Before Nigeria, he covered the Ebola outbreak.) And, yes, this is all very good for his career, and, yes, he will win prizes, but he is a reporter who cares. Perhaps, just perhaps, his courage will help the young girls who have been raped, impregnated and infected with HIV heal from their ordeal. I am sure he will not sleep well at night until he has done all he can to bring attention to this story.  Read More 

My daughter teases me about my texting. The texts are too long and I have turned off the auto-correct. “Write, correct, write, delete,” she says lovingly, and we both laugh. She does read them—I am her mom—but she is very busy and doesn’t have a lot of time and feels bad when she doesn’t have time to read them, which is really perfectly okay

Text has a purpose: fast, immediate communication, right? But I write tomes.

My Facebook status posts are long also and I use the “note” function which is terrific. I post the blog on my website into a Facebook note—excuse me FB, for short—and then share it to my personal timeline. My daughter, who is brilliant at all of this, organized my FB page to feed into my Twitter.

But this is the thing: I’m a writer. I don’t abbreviate, or I find it difficult to abbreviate. “Where r u,” for example. I want everyone to read what I have written and I want to read what everyone has written. But I understand that time is limited and that not everyone will admire and respond to my beautiful long narrative sentences.

When I was in graduate school, I learned that whatever medium we choose to use is up to us; how we use it is up to us, and every one of them is a tool, nothing more. Whatever medium I choose, so far as I am concerned, is the perfect opportunity to write a decent sentence and to practice writing decent sentences.

Kindly join me in this endeavor, “like” my Carol Bergman Writer Facebook page, and feel free to write long comments if you have the time. I promise to read them and to reply when I have the time.  Read More 

I went to the United Nations yesterday to meet Sueichi Kido from Nagasaki. He is one of twenty survivors of the atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki who traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibit in the UN lobby, discussions at the UN about the world’s nuclear arsenal, and a commemorative concert at Ethical Culture School.

The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha, a Japanese word that literally translates to "explosion-affected people." Hibakusha and their children have been stigmatized in Japan and it is only recently that the government has recognized their medical complaints as a consequence of the blasts.

The Americans—President Truman and his advisers—who unleashed this weapon of mass destruction, censored the press after the blasts and suppressed the stories of the military witnesses and survivors. Even General MacArthur doubted the wisdom of dropping the bombs, and feared it. He argued that the saturation bombing of Tokyo-- 200,000 killed--just prior to the nuclear blasts, would end the war just as quickly.

A small man with a cherubic face once badly burned, Mr. Kido is devoting his retirement years to telling his story. “There aren’t many of us left. We are getting old, we are sick,” he says. Five-years-old at the time of the blast and living within the 2km epicenter, his mother carried him away from the wind and flames in search of shelter. Flesh was melting off their bodies, they were thirsty. There was no water, no shelter, no medical facility. The city had been incinerated.

Needless to say, there was no question of a normal childhood for Mr. Kido after this holocaust. He didn’t stop trembling until he was ten-years-old, or laugh, or play. PTSD doesn’t describe the implosion in his body and his soul.

"A uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki on August 9. Little Boy exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison."
– Source, Wikipedia.

The curator of the exhibit, Erico Narita, had invited me to the exhibit. She showed me around and translated. She is in her 30’s and grew up in northern Japan near Hakkaido, a blissful, peaceful, innocent, post-war childhood. Contemporary Japanese history is not taught in the schools so she knew very little about Hiroshima and Nagasaki until she began her research. Therefore, the stories of the survivors in this 70th anniversary year serve a double purpose, at home and abroad.

Knowing that people don’t read a lot these days, Ms. Narita created a balanced narrative with photographs and graphics. And though the pictures are muted black and white, be warned that they are hard to look at.

When there is no knowledge, there is no discussion, Mr. Kido explains. He is a retired Japanese history professor and no friend of Emperor worship or the current Prime Minister. And so his story is also well-balanced; he is not a victim. There are fault lines in every nation, we said to one another as Erico translated. Then we bowed gently, shook hands, and said good-bye.

“Nucelar-Free World; Cries from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” a multi-media exhibition, will be in the Main Gallery of the United Nations until May 31st. There are lines to get in and airport-strength security. Bring ID. Mr. Kido, the Assistant Secretary General of Hidankyo, the Japan Conference of the A and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization, and the last of the visitors, will be in the gallery until May 10. Read More 

I managed to get away for a few days after the end of term and I am still away as I write this. It's chilly, the fire was on when I arrived at my daughter and son-in-law's house in upstate New York, but the sun was out.

This morning I was up with the light, wrote in my journal, listened to music as I read the awful news from Nepal, called an editor in London, took out the compost, let the chickens out (there is one rooster), forgot to collect the eggs, fed the dog, walked with the dog down a quiet country road, had a yogurt and strawberry breakfast (the strawberries frozen from fresh picking last summer), made a phone call or two, checked my e-mail, had a Facetime conversation with my husband in the city (partially a business call about our small, family-owned publishing business), and though this all seems busy, it did not feel busy, nor is it late, just mid-day right now. Life here is just as productive as in the city, more so probably, because there is less distraction. I move through the day slowly; it is very quiet.

I wish I could be here all the time, but I cannot. Even the drive over the mountain above the tree line revives me. I drive in all weathers and experience--viscerally--the change of season.

I feel blessed to be able to come up here to refuel and let my mind drift. I'm working on another collection of short pieces as they occur to me. This will be called either "Nomads Two," or "Nomads Redux." I have about forty already, not all of them usable, but it seems to be a format that works for me, a distillation that enables me to improve the precision of my writing and keep the writing muscle supple, especially during term time when I am so immersed in my students' work.

But the late spring and summer is for my own work, usually fiction. I want to start another novel. I've already done some research, taken notes, visualized characters. Like the flora at this time of year, my ideas are slowly budding.  Read More 

They tried to understand what had happened. It had happened fast, they’d been drinking—what else does one do at a bar (while socializing of course)—and talking about the descriptions of various wines on the chalk board. Someone had a good handwriting they noticed; it looked like calligraphy. Different colored chalks plus a drawing of a wine glass. Pretty damn good.

There were three of them, all men, hanging out after work. Where else was there to go? They had nothing much to talk about except their work and the descriptions of the wine and where they were going on their next vacation and their electronic devices. All three cell phones were on the bar, silenced, but lighting up now and again and demanding their attention—a tweet or a text.

A couple slid in next to them, a man and a woman, the woman much younger than the man and pretty, the man balding and overweight. The three friends began to whisper and giggle like a bunch of schoolgirls. And the balding man noticed and said, “Hey, what are you looking at?” The way he slurred his words, it was obvious he’d had a head start at another bar somewhere. But this didn’t stop the three friends from hooting and howling and making lewd remarks to the woman. “That your daughter?” one of them asked.

Within seconds, fists were flying and the older balding guy was on the floor. Not suprisingly, everyone had a different story to tell the cops depending on whose side they were on—the three young guys or the balding older guy and his pretty young date—and where they were sitting at the bar. The bartender had a story, so did the manager. Who could tell the story straight? Who knew what had really happened?

I watched it all unfold, as a reporter. And I thought to myself that it was up to me to get the story straight—to interview everyone, gather all the details, and write it from a reporter’s point of view, like a detective. I wasn’t part of the action, I wasn’t at the bar; I was at a table. I had an obligation. Small story and I am writing it here. My observations, my point of view.

I’d just come from a screening—a story about two sisters, concert musicians, who lived together like a married couple all their lives. Their symbiosis was eccentric and troubling, but never discussed. How did they become this way? There was very little narration—the reporter was mostly absent—cinema verité.

Diane Arbus intruded on her subjects in a similar way. Her photos are compelling, but they are also freak shows.  Read More 

Art restitution was still on my mind. I’d published “Egon Schiele, My Father and Me” in The Jewish Forward on February 11th about the restitution of one of my father’s Schiele paintings. The response had been interesting. Some readers were concerned that any Jewish misdeeds would once again and forever stir anti-Semitism. Some tried to disprove it—it never happened. How could Jews—Holocaust survivors no less—deliberately, or unwittingly, buy and sell looted art?

The doubters/deniers offered me documents. Would I like to see them to prove innocence of malfeasance? Others congratulated me on the brave article I had written. Though I do not consider myself brave, I do know that—thanks to my parents, their education, their early lives in a cultured pre-Nazi Vienna—my moral compass is strong. I stand by what I wrote in the article.

And now we have the film, “Woman in Gold,” with Helen Mirren playing Maria Altman, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of the painting by Gustav Klimt hanging in the Neue Galerie in New York. This gorgeous, valuable painting was restituted after many years of legal action by E. Randol (Randy) Schoenberg against Austria, and then bought by Ronald Lauder for his gallery. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, has bought other restituted paintings, a great gift to the families after so many years of heartache and struggle.

I am what the Germans call a “zweiter,” a Second Generation. According to Helen Epstein in her seminal work, “Children of the Holocaust,” it is my generation that does the “emotion-work,” which often means that we pay attention to issues as they arise and feel obligated to speak out about them. Our parents—the survivors—were too busy escaping and then surviving—beginning again, trying to be happy, and raising their children as best they could despite the distortions of their agonizing trauma. There have been other genocides in history—many are still going on today—and I worry that we are becoming numb to them. As a writer and a child of the Jewish Holocaust, I feel that it is my mandate to remain alert to these new atrocities and, more immediately at home, to discrimination and the protection of American freedoms. Indeed, I am very pleased to be an American.

In a line at the end of “Woman in Gold,” Altman says that she had thought the restitution of the painting would make her feel better; it didn’t. And why not? Because she had left her parents behind.

I had already been crying, but this scene took me over the edge. In my efforts to understand my mother’s pain, I had always fixated on her mother—my grandmother, Nanette, who was killed in Auschwitz—and had written about her often in memoir and fiction. I had imagined my mother’s farewell scene with her parents before her escape with my father and his siblings. The exactitude of the script startled me, as did Mirren’s performance which so perfectly embodied the elegant, dignified, undefeated hauteur of the Viennese refugees I had grown up with. The film is a tribute to them and I loved it.  Read More 

1. “My Life in Middlemarch” by Rebecca Mead. Mead is a reporter for The New Yorker, born in England in a small provincial town much like Middlemarch, and she came to my rescue as I was trying to read the novel for the umpteenth time, and failing abysmally. Perhaps if I read Mead’s book, I thought to myself, I might enter this challenging novel at last and inform my niece that I have done so. She belongs to a “classics” book club and is well ahead of me with that list.

Mead’s book is part memoir, part literary analysis, part bio of George Eliot. It’s well written and interesting, but whether I’ll finally be able to read “Middlemarch” itself, I do not know right now. Or, perhaps, I could cheat and say I have read “Middlemarch” because I have learned so much about it from Rebecca Mead. Not likely.

2. “The Bostonians,” by Henry James. Having failed with “Middlemarch,” I turned to another 19th century tome with greater success. This surprised me; I have never been able to read Henry James even though my husband was named after him by his journalist father. (We call my Henry James Jim for short. The 19th century Henry would not have approved.) Well, this is not exactly accurate. I did read “Portrait of a Lady” in college. I can’t remember a word. So how did it happen that I should attempt another Henry James? Well, I was upstate at my daughter’s house where I keep a small library of books and needed something to read slowly—slow reading I call it—before going to sleep (the e-books are too speedy at bedtime) and there was “The Bostonians” on the shelf. Fortunately I wasn’t too tired to get the cadence of James’ long sentences that first night and, before long, I was swept up in the story of New England suffragettes and, more importantly, sequestered homosexuality. Henry James was gay. This I learned from studying Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent. And the book is loaded with allusions, attractions, rapture, commitment, jealousy—all woman to woman for safety sake. Please forgive me, dear reader, but I see Henry James and his struggles in his protagonists Olive and Verena. What an odd couple!

3. “A Son at the Front” by Edith Wharton. Published in 1922 and dedicated to two friends she lost in WW I, Wharton describes in scintillating descriptive detail what it was like in Paris during the war. She had been living in Paris, was already a successful author, and became a war correspondent for two magazines, traveled to the front, and was active in relief efforts for wounded soldiers and their families.

This is a reread for me as Wharton’s stories and sentences never disappoint me. I didn’t start reading her work until about ten years ago and I go back to them time and again for inspiration, psychological insight and entertainment. I had wanted to read this one last year—the 100th anniversary of the beginning of WW I—but was too busy with other things.

We are still a nation at war and probably will be for some time. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan, their families, all of us. This book resonates.

4. “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill. Such an interesting writer—half Turkish, half Irish, raised in Holland. This is his first novel gifted to me by a friend just yesterday. I started reading it on my long train ride home and was riveted from the first paragraph. It’s a 30-something story and I am no longer 30-something (no one is for very long) and so I find some of it boring and predictable and I am not that interested in cricket, I am interested in this writer and how he is making this story. I don’t know if I’ll finish it or not, but I’m pleased to have been introduced to him. His new book is called “Dog,” set in Dubai (now that is interesting), and he’s also written a memoir, “Blood-Dark Track,” which is definitely on my list because I am so interested in O’Neill as a writer.

That’s it for today dear reader. Would you add your current reading escapades here, please, not just titles, but annotations—how you found your way to the book and why it resonates, or doesn’t? Many thanks.  Read More