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Alumni Books NONFICTION Casting Lots: Creating a Family in a Beautiful, Broken World Susan Silverman (CAS’85) Da Capo Press EADING SILVERMAN’S Casting Lots is like spending time in the R company of a wise, funny, and generous friend. Although the sub- text is a call to international adoption (there are tens of millions of orphans in the world, Silverman, whose resource website is JustAdopt.net, tells us), the book is on many levels a love story. An ordained rabbi, a human rights activist, and an adoption advocate, Silverman takes us through a childhood in a family so blended that her parents’ divorce was not a loss, but ultimately a wind- fall in the form of stepparents (and a half sibling) who feel devotion to their children, biological or not, and relaxed aff ection for one another. It’s a portrait FICTION AND POETRY intimate to historical, including “Texas of a sometimes achingly honest mar- Tower Massacre,” which ponders the riage where dinner table discussion can Fire Tongue psyche of the 25-year-old man who take on the weightiness of a Talmudic Zvi A. Sesling (COM’66) shot dead 14 people at the University argument. It’s about an extended fam- Červená Barva Press of Texas in 1966: ily of loquacious, HEN A POETRY COLLEC- cheek-pinching Crush the people like cockroaches on sidewalks tion’s most comforting verse bullets in place of feet, hands steady rifle kvellers who cannot W is titled “The World Is End- do you—feel close to God or Satan in the tower get enough hugs, up there pulling the trigger again and again ing,” you know you’re in for some pretty kisses, or laughs. dark reading. Death not only pervades A widely published poet who has Silverman has these verses, it is the scaff olding they taught at Emerson College as well as always wanted and cling to. It is the fuel for irony, bitter- Boston University, Sesling has created planned to be a ness, faith, and redemption, and in in Fire Tongue an aff ecting landscape mother, and for as these poems, all that thrives in life does of loss, fear, and decay. Some of the long as she can re- so with the sad insistence of a barnacle poems, such as “Hotel Terminus,” read member, that plan on a dying reef. like a warning and could have been included adoption. In her husband, No one is penned by a mischievous Death itself. Yosef Abramowitz (CAS’86), she fi nds spared: cars mow The shorter poems deliver swift stabs to a thoughtful, devout, and optimistic down blameless the gut, such as this, from “Hours Gray partner whose progressive brand of children, a hydro- and Ill”: Judaism fuels his commitment to the gen bomb rains Sadness pervades notion of tikkun olam—healing the on a city. In the black night, stars hide world. “I want to adopt from abroad,” poem “Last Will,” from illness of dark Silverman declares to Abramowitz. the grieving rela- By embracing something so fun- “And I don’t mean from a lady.” At the tives, likened to damentally and universally human— time, they have two young biological vultures, lean in death and fear of death—Sesling’s daughters. Ethiopia, writes Silverman, close to hear a dying man’s last words: poems whisper in the reader’s ear that seems a perfect choice—Abramowitz “Screw you all!” One poem is titled, although there is no escape, he or she is had been active in bringing Ethiopian simply, “Death.” not alone, and that for all its inevitabil- Jews to Israel. Divided into four sections, “Fire ity, death is oblivion, and we are right It was agreed the child would be a Tongue,” “City,” “Sorrow Road,” and to be, to varying degrees, obsessed boy. “Girls come from mommy’s tummy “War Zones,” the poems range from with it.—SUSAN SELIGSON and boys come from Ethiopia,” evolves 60 BOSTONIA Summer 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY BARBARA OTT 55-61_Bostonia_SU16.indd 60 6/1/16 12:59 PM into a family mantra. And so the family fi refi ghters in one day. Their deaths In Other Words is altogether diff er- grows, as Susan returns home from an marked the single greatest loss of ent: a slim memoir that at its heart is a Addis Ababa orphanage cradling the fi refi ghters nationwide since 9/11, love story. And like any love story, this infant Adar, and years later returns and the largest death toll of profession- one is full of passion, longing, and at to adopt three-year-old Zamir. The al wildland fi refi ghters in more than times, exasperation. But Lahiri’s aff air boys join daughters Aliza, Hallel, a century. is with the Italian language. and Ashira. She took an eight-month leave from “It was love at fi rst sight,” Lahiri Silverman has been bar gain ing the Times to write her fi rst book, The writes, recalling her fi rst trip to Italy in with God since childhood, when as a Fire Line. The story reads as if Santos 1994 while she was working on a PhD toddler, before the birth of her sisters, tagged along with the Granite Moun- in renaissance studies at BU. “My rela- she found herself in the sad, confus- tain Hotshots in the fi eld, but in fact, tionship with Italy is as auditory as it is ing vacuum left by a brother she never met them. She visual….What I hear in the shops, in the killed in a freak accident at relied heavily on inter- restaurants, arouses an instantaneous, six months old. By Silver- views with their families intense, paradoxical reaction. It’s as if man’s account, the tragedy’s and friends to fl esh out her Italian were already inside me.” potentially devastating psy- characters. She interviewed Over the next 18 years, Lahiri studied chic fallout—lifelong guilt, scientists and climate ex- the language as she raised her family blame, rage—didn’t materi- perts as well. Wildfi res, she and built a literary career. But after alize. Instead, the virtues of writes, are becoming more completing The Lowland, in 2013, she forgiveness, resilience, and prevalent because of climate felt that she had come to the end of a gratitude triumphed. But the change and increased urban certain creative phase in her writing fl ip side of such profound development. She spent part life. In Other Words begins with her and terrifying love is fear of loss, of 2014 training at the Arizona Wildlife decision to move with her husband and and she has wrestled with anxiety her and Incident Management Academy to two children from Brooklyn, N.Y., to entire life. learn how to fi ght fi res. Rome, so she could read and write full- The book concludes with the family’s Santos dives deep into who these time in Italian. emigration from the United States to a men were, sharing intimate details In some of the memoir’s most moving kibbutz in Israel’s Negev Desert. There, about their quirks, families, and bonds passages, Lahiri chronicles her compli- they found simplicity, community, and with their comrades. The wildfi re cated relationship with language. She the progressive, pluralistic values they that killed the men grew fast. Santos spoke only Bengali until she was four, hold so dear. Casting Lots, a reference stresses that the men stuck together when her family moved to Rhode Island to the Old Testament’s mention of a until the end, describing how their from India (by way of kind of throw of the dice to determine bodies were found in a tight formation, England). Her fi rst en- God’s will, is subtitled Creating a Fam- huddled under portable aluminum counter with English, ily in a Beautiful, Broken World. But fi re shelters that begin to disintegrate she writes, “was harsh it is not until her author’s note at the at 500 degrees. The fi re clocked in at and unpleasant.” She end that Silverman lays out the case 2,000 degrees, as hot as lava from a describes how hard it for international adoption as a way of volcano, she writes, and the shelters was to trust teachers making that world, ever so slightly, couldn’t stand up. and make friends, “be- more beautiful and less broken. She de- The Granite Mountain Hotshots, cause I had to express bunks the common arguments against writes Santos, “had chosen to live myself in a language international adoption. But an even on a razor’s edge, helped one another that I didn’t speak, that more powerful argument resides in the elect and survive constructive risk, I barely knew....I was ashamed of speak- montage of Silverman-Abramowitz and rewarded one another with ing Bengali and at the same time, I was family snapshots that appears in the well-founded guardianship and ashamed of being ashamed.” As she book. Guided by their own instincts and devotion.” —AMY LASKOWSKI notes, “Writing in Italian off ers a fl ight beliefs and fueled by their love for one from that confl ict.” another and the planet, they made a In Other Words Lahiri wrote the book in Italian; the family. And it was good. —SS Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97) English version is presented in a dual- Alfred A. Knopf language format, with her Italian text The Fire Line: The Story of the Gran- HUMPA LAHIRI WAS JUST 32 appearing on the left page and the ite Mountain Hotshots and One of the when she won the 2000 Pulitzer English translation, by Ann Goldstein, Deadliest Days in American Firefi ghting J Prize for her fi rst book, the short on the right.