Record Stories. Make History this Thanksgiving.

Record Stories. Make History.

As we gather for the holidays, we make plans for family, friends, and fun. I can’t remember a family gathering that didn’t feature family stories new and old. This year is great opportunity to capture the stories of your family and local community.  You can use The Great Thanksgiving Listen as a guide.

The 2016 StoryCorps initiative, The Great Thanksgiving Listen is an effort to create an oral history of contemporary America.  To participate in The Great Thanksgiving Listen, you simply engage and interview elders the holiday seasons this year.   The Great Thanksgiving Listen has all the tools and tips to help you preserve the stories you hear. You can use tools you already have to participate. The StoryCorps website has advice for planning your interview. 

Ready to start planning your interview? Use this advice.

Select:

·       Person to Interview

·       Place to record interview

·       Device and application to record interview

·       Questions

Test:

·       Device and application to record interview 

Invite:

·       Person to Interview

Remember:

·       Include an introduction of yourself and subject in the interview

·       Share your recording with others who will enjoy the story

Looking for inspiration? Check out the recordings shared at StoryCorps in the 2015 Great Thanksgiving Listen.

Author Spotlight: Elie Wiesel

By Jeff Burns

Recently, the world mourned the passing of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel.  At age 16, Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp.  His Romanian family perished in the Holocaust.  Wiesel survived and dedicated his life to educating the world about the Holocaust and to being a champion for the oppressed around the world.  He wrote 57 books over the course of his 87 years. Here are a few of my favorites, and I hope to re-read some of these soon.

Many of us are familiar with his first work, Night, published in 1960.  It is commonly read in high schools, and, if everyone had to read one book about the Holocaust, it would have to be this one.  Night is Wiesel’s memoir of his “life” in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Only about 120 pages, it is one of the heaviest books you will ever read. Many people do not know, however, that Night is the first work of a trilogy, and the other two books are just as powerful.  Dawn is the story of a young Holocaust survivor and Jewish guerilla fighting for independence in British Palestine.  Day centers on the death of a Holocaust survivor in New York City.  All three books poignantly explore life, death, guilt,  brutality, inhumanity, and humanity.

Wiesel’s two-volume memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full, takes the reader from his childhood memories of his Romanian village through his career as spokesman for humanity.

The Gates of the Forest tells the story of a Jewish teenager who is the lone survivor of his family, wandering through caves, forests, and villages, seeking some sort of order or explanation. The Town Behind the Wall follows a Holocaust survivor as he returns to his home village in Hungary, now behind the Iron Curtain. As he finds himself imprisoned as a spy, he grapples with the bystander question:  what did the people of his village do as the Germans deported their Jewish neighbors to death camps? The Trial of God is a play, set in a Ukranian village in 1649 following a pogrom in which almost all of the Jewish residents had been murdered or driven from their homes.  A traveling group of actors arrives at an inn, and the Jewish innkeeper demands that they put God on trial for abandoning humanity.

Has God abandoned humanity?  How can God allow things like the Holocaust to happen?  How can human beings so cruel and brutal?  How can human beings stand by as brutality happens? How does humanity – and individual humans – survive such experiences?  How can such things be prevented?  These are all the questions that Wiesel addressed in his writing, and we would be hard pressed to find a better “spokesman for humanity.”

Moving Into Modernity: Three Books About the Early 20th Century

By Jeff Burns

The late 19^th century and early 20^th century were a tumultuous time of great changes in American history. Around the turn of the century, America’s demographics were rapidly changing and transforming the country.  Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooded into the cities of the Northeast, and, for the first time, the urban population surpassed the rural population.  Industrialization changed how people worked and how people lived.  New inventions and forms of entertainment changed the way things were done enabled Americans to enjoy something new, leisure, and activities like movies, Vaudeville Theater, amusement parks, and spectator sports not only provided enjoyment, but also fostered the assimilation of the new immigrants into the American melting pot. Progressives took note of the many problems, from sanitation to childhood mortality and everything in between, and sought to improve conditions. By the 1920s, a conservative backlash arose as traditionalists tried to slow the rapid pace of change, and the country experienced the first Red Scare, a new surge of nativism, immigration quotas, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and a pronounced clash between modernism and fundamentalism.

The story of this time in New York City is captured and told beautifully at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The Lower East Side has been the home of successive generations of immigrants, and each generation made its mark, and continues to make its mark.  In the late 1800s, the area was full of tenements, where families crowded into 350 square feet apartments, usually with no running water.  Today, the area is one of the most desirable areas of New York City, and those same apartments rent for thousands of dollars per month. The museum gift shop has a huge selection of great books related to the history of the neighborhood. Here are a few titles that I enjoyed reading.

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families In One New York Tenement, by Jane Ziegelman, is an excellent introduction to the area and history of immigration in New York City.   The author creates a vivid picture by telling the stories of five families who lived in the same building between 1863 and 1935: German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish (both Orthodox and Reform).  Using food to tell the story is fun and unique.  Even more fun is the fact that the book contains forty recipes that the reader can try.

Paula Uruburu wrote American Eve, the story of one of the most infamous scandals and murders in American history, perhaps the first “crime of the century.” Teenager Evelyn Nesbitt gained the notice of photographers and artists in New York City, and she quickly became America’s first “It girl.” Her pictures were published and displayed in galleries, she appeared on stage in Broadway shows, and her movements were reported daily in the press.  Part of her fame was derived from the fact that she became the mistress of Stanford White, one of the most famous, richest, and accomplished men in the city.  She also incurred the attention of another millionaire.  A murder ensues, followed by a lurid trial.  It’s a page-turner.

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz is a fast read, a history of flappers, the young women who scandalized older generations by bobbing their hair, raising their dress hems, and smoking, cursing, drinking, driving, and carrying on in public in ways that “ladies” had never dared to carry on in the past.