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Jud ith Zukerman Amsterdam Days |
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AUTHOR INTERVIEW Robin Willard Tell me about your first trip to Amsterdam. My future mother-in-law wrote my fiance's name on a raffle ticket. He was the winner! The prize was a trip to Europe for two, eight countries, hotels, and $500 spending money in 1960 which went a long way. The flight was on KLM and began and ended in Amsterdam. You then went to Amsterdam to live for the first time in 1994-95. How had it changed since the first time you'd visited? I wish I had the eyes and understanding that I do now. I remember a sea of bicycles, not cars. I remember the Rembrandt House and the old buildings in the heart of the former Jewish area. When I went back to Amsterdam to live in 1994, those buildings had been destroyed. Some places the Jews lived in were empty during the end of the war. People gutted those buildings looking for what they could use for fuel for that last long, cold winter of the war. Spring 1995 was 50 years after the war and the Dutch Jews were hoping to put the war behind them and move forward. Oudezijds Kolk, the small street I lived on, had been the last street in the Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis. We were not to nail anything into the walls or door of our apartment but I got permission and hammered an Ethiopian mezuzah to my doorpost. I pounded hard, hammering those nails in for all the Jews who had been deported and murdered. You took several short trips to Amsterdam after living there. What took you back? As I wrote in one poem not in the book, Once I Called Amsterdam Home, I missed favorite places and people. After living there in 1999-2000 and returning, I knew ten days would seem such a short time. I set myself the goal of collecting 100 images. I didn't quite make my goal but I had 75 images which were in my journal and have shown up in poems in Amsterdam Days. Did you miss the Midwest? The first winter I longed for a Wisconsin forest. One of my favorite places is The Clearing in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin. I found my Amsterdam clearing in Van Gogh's painting entitled, "Undergrowth." How did you learn Dutch? I had one tutor in the U.S. each time before going overseas and the second year I studied at the University of Amsterdam and took an intensive course for four weeks in August. As a poet who knows Hebrew, Italian, some Spanish and Yiddish in a passive way, I know the joy of reading poems in the language in which they were written. I was having trouble hearing the beauty of the Dutch language. I decided to read Dutch poetry and sing Dutch songs to help give me a feeling for the music of the language. I chose the poetry of Judith Hertzberg, an award-wining poet, though I didn't know it at first when I chose her work. I read and liked her poems. I also chose to study at a neighborhood house in a Dutch class for women instinctively knowing that some women from more sheltered cultures would choose a women's class. That was one of my rich experiences in the Netherlands. We were Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Jew ranging in age from the 20's to the 60's. We came from many countries. We used to say, "The whole world was in our class." We women shared from our deepest places in our only common language, Dutch. That community of women was my anchor in the Netherlands. I also sang with old Amsterdammers. We sang old songs and occasionally I was surprised when they sang a Jewish song or a song about a Jew ish family from before the war. Once we sang a song in English and the conductor turned to me and asked me to translate. My Dutch wasn't as good then but fortunately it was an easy song to translate. Tell me about your development as an author. I remember making up and telling stories when I was 11, 12 and 13. I would baby sit and make up stories and put the children I was taking care of in the story. If I were taking care of a shy child, I would give the central character the same name but make them brave and courageous. I didn't write the stories down. Sometimes my sister wanted me to repeat a favorite and I would be hard pressed to remember how I made the fantasy of the story work. I grew up in a three-generation household until I was ten and oral storytelling was a part of my life as well as devouring books. It was a household where books were treasured and we never wrote in books at that time. If a book dropped, not only a book with God's name in it, which is part of Jewish tradition, but if any book dropped we would pick it up and kiss it. That's how I remember it. When my daughter was very young, I was telling her a story. She had to go to the toilet. She said, "Mom, put a marker in your mouth." I have a deep, Jewish background from my family and from receiving my Master's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Calliope, a children's magazine for 10 to 15 year olds was doing a special series on religion. I saw the guidelines for the issue featuring Judaism at a Highlight for Children Writers' Conference. I was uniquely qualified. I wrote a query letter proposing several possible topics. They were interested but asked me to write a feature length article on Life Ceremonies that I did. The magazine Cobblestone was doing a series on different groups living in America. I wrote an article on the Polish Museum of America. I pretended I was a child visiting this Chicago museum and asked the tour guides what the children liked? I explored Polish restaurants in the area and where to do genealogical research. The photos I took were not only used for my article but for other articles in the magazine. There were articles for which I was given the go ahead but then for lack of space in the issue or a change in editors, they were cancelled. One I'll never forget was on Dutch castles. The castles are closed in winter so in October 1994 when I first came to live in the Netherlands, I was rushing to do research, visit castles and take photos. It was Fall Vacation and some school children and their parents were visiting Slot Loevestein. The castle is surrounded by a moat and has a huge, tall tower that had been used to hoist food into the castle. The guide was hoisting the children up as they used to hoist food up. I am afraid of heights but decided if I were writing a children's article, I had to get into the spirit. The guide hoisted me way up in the tower. The editor who gave the go ahead was on maternity leave and the new editor didn't use the story. My research in Dutch for the article improved my Dutch reading. The Midwest has excellent opportunities for continuing education in writing. Did you take advantage of any of them? I went to the Clearing in Ellison Bay and took a weeklong writing workshop with Norbert Blei in 1987. During that week, I reconnected with the storytelling part of myself. The trip going home should take about four and one half hours. As I was heading home, I kept pulling over to the side of the road to write. A female police officer pulled me over. She wanted to know if I was all right. It took me seven hours to get home. I've learned from workshops through University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, International Women's Writers' Guild, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the feedback of writing partners and other writers in writers groups as well as workshops at Iowa Summer Writing Festival. In the summer of 2004, I had the wonderful nurturing writer's experience of a four week writer's residency at Nor croft in Listen, Minnesota. When did you start writing poetry? Although I wrote some poetry when I went back to writing in 1987, I concentrated on writing stories. I respond a lot to the climate around me. When I lived in Amsterdam, poetry was the way I wanted to express myself. I believe it was because there were so many layers to my experiences. I would write to a favorite painting for half an hour. The music in Amsterdam nurtured me. Even when my Dutch became more fluent, I still was the "other," which I benefited from as a writer. From 1999-2000 in Amsterdam, I would light a candle each morning and write. A Swedish architect designed the apartment we lived in. I looked out the big window and could see trams, canals and parents riding their children to school on their bikes. Once I even saw a big bike carrying a bathtub. Your poem "Dutch Jewry: A Sacred Remnant" took you seven years to write. Tell me about that. Each word in a poem represents many layers of meaning. I was feeling the pain of Amsterdam's Jewish past and each person's story stayed with me. I had to try many ways to dip into the pain. Then I needed to answer the question of whether each segment was its own poem or did it belong to something larger. There was also the question of whether I should only show the dark side or include the positive many Dutch Jews were reaching for. Aside from your poetry what do you think is the biggest gift you have given the Dutch? I learned my Judaism with beauty and joy from my father. Dutch Jews, because of the war's pain, didn't have that joy. I shared that. When I first lived there, I shared our family traditions and had a Seder plate with the symbolic foods but also with flowers. Passover is a spring holiday, Hag Aviv. The Dutch love flowers so adding flowers to the Seder plate and giving everyone a spring flower to wear is in keeping with Dutch culture. Also, one Dutch woman wrote me after reading my book saying it helped her to see immigrants through my eyes. This has been a turbulent time in the Netherlands. What is the symbolism of your necklace. . . a turtle and a dream catcher with the blue stone? I went to a gathering of the International Women's Writers Guild at which Emily Hanlon said, "the creative process is often slow, like a turtle." Her son made this turtle. At the gathering, another workshop leader was an 80-year-old Choctaw Medicine woman. . . She had such dark, sparkling eyes. Except for a few moments when she would stand, she was in a wheelchair. Her helper made the dream catcher. It symbolizes my writing going to incredible heights. All my work in one place is strengthened by my work in another place. In Yiddish, the word is bashert but there is nothing to describe it in English. Perhaps, the closest words are predestined or synchronicity. What are you working on now? I'm deep into another book of poems, most of them new, some reworked. I'm also working on a four-year memoir project, two stories and a children's book. You have such passion for both Amsterdam and writing. If you could either write for the rest of your life and not visit Amsterdam or visit Amsterdam and not write, which would you choose? I would choose writing. Writing can always take me back to Amsterdam, to worlds, I've created, to people and times in my life. . . writing can take me anywhere. |