I began working on my grandmother’s book back in the late 80’s. In 1989 I collected copies of correspondence about her nursery from several Chicago archives. Shortly after getting all of this stuff my neatly structured life crashed, I put the materials away and only returned to it now. I’ve been scanning all of these documents and reading them as I go along. My grandmother certainly generated a lot of controversy. (She did this within the family, also.) Family mythology simplified all of the reasons for the controversy, so it’s interesting to see the point of view of all of the parties involved. Some of the factors: the larger schism between German Jews and Eastern European Jews; misogyny, this was a woman, leading women, raising huge amounts of money for her own cause; competition between groups working for the same causes (orphanages or infant group homes); prevailing scientific opinion that group homes for children were not a good thing. Most of the documents were written by men, powerful men who lined up on both sides of the controversy. The women just continued doing their thing. 

I haven’t entirely finished Charna’s book, but I’ve decided to post what I’ve done. You should be able to open this in Adobe Reader. Warning: it’s a large file.

The book is finished, for now, and can be found at the February 8, 2007 post.

Unfortunately, I have a little more translating that needs to be done. I have to start from scratch with this, and I don’t think I will be able to do it. So I’m looking for someone with a good knowledge of Yiddish. Eventually, all of the blank pages will be filled.

I’ve been working on both my tunnel book and the book about my grandmother. I have most of the text prepared for Grandma’s book and am waiting for some new software to work out the layout. I have it visualized, but sometimes there is a great distance between idea and implementation–which is where I am with the tunnel book. I have a clear idea in mind, but playing with the pictures I want to use, I’m not sure it will work.  I think I have a long way to go.

For those of you who have asked what a tunnel book is, look here. Another, simpler book is here. The book maker has taken a reproduction of that very famous picture, Sunday on La Grande Jatte, cut out the figures, pasted them back in descending order to create perspective and repainted the background. It is easy because they have taken a two dimensional image of a three dimensional view and made it into a quasi-three dimensional view. In trying to analyze my problem, I think because my subject is a tunnel, it is too long and I have too many pictures from too many angles.

Eli is writing a novel, and I am having a wonderful time discussing with him the various aspects of novel writing, such as character development, how to maintain suspense, etc. At the same time, I am thinking about my books, which will tell a story but in a much more indirect way. In both the tunnel book and grandma’s book the visual, or layout aspects, are most important. I haven’t done anything about the tunnel book, but I’ve made some decisions about it. I have pictures of the tunnel in summer and in winter. the summer pictures look from the river to the street; winter pictures do the opposite.
There is a pedestrian bridge in the middle. Unlike many tunnel books I would like this to be viewable from both ends. So now I need pictures of the buildings across the river and the buildings across the street. These pictures will be on the inside covers. I still have to figure out how to bind the books so the covers can open fully, the accordion part of the tunnel stretches, but the whole thing remains intact and stable. Almost as complicated as writing a novel.

Grandma’s book will be a compilation of everything she wrote with memoirs of my father and my aunt along side, other published material I will scan in, and my comments added. In addition to the physical book I intend to publish this as a DVD. All of this can be easily put together with hyperlinks, but the layout of the actual book is remains a problem.

I’ve spent most of the week working on Grandma’s book. I have material from my father and my Aunt Flo, but the core of the book will be Grandma’s own writing, her autobiography, written in Yiddish, and published in 1944 as a fund raiser for the nursery she founded in Chicago in 1917. At my request my father translated the book, but he had some issues with his mother and did a lot of editorializing. I painfully reworked the translation, with help from a fluent Yiddish speaker who knew Grandma. When I started working on this new book I decided I liked my father’s translation better. He probably comes closer to my grandmother’s voice. My effort was too cleaned up. So I am comparing the two documents, line by line, to retain his voice and omit the gratuitous comments. It’s been a huge job.

Occasionally I find myself reading large print books, usually because that’s the copy that is still on the shelf. Recently I took two of them from the library. I find I can read them much faster than ordinary books because I’m not backtracking to figure out which letters I read wrong. Half the time I feel like I am half reading and half making it up. Today I found another virtue of large print books: I can read them while I exercise, whether I am on the bicycle or the treadmill. And I don’t need reading glasses, although I admit to doing a little "intuiting" without the glasses.

I am committed to exercising three times a week. I don’t love it, just the opposite. I think it’s the one thing I can do to stay healthy. I can’t seem to diet or lose weight, even though I think I am eating less and less all the time. At least with exercise I am in control. But it’s boring. I watch TV and that’s boring. In Jersey I listened to public radio. Here they mostly play jazz, which I like, but it doesn’t keep me absorbed. The books are great. I can keep moving and not think about it. Now if they only had more large print books that I wanted to read.