“Human nature can be broken down into love, hate, ambition, and disappointment,” Samuel G. Freedman pointed out to a class of students that he visited at Baruch College. It can be assumed that someone with extensive experience and vast knowledge of human life and our behavior can make such an argument, and in Freedman’s case, such an assumption would be correct. He is a columnist for Saturday’s New York Times, for which he is constantly interviewing people. He is also a professor at the prestigious Columbia University. However, it is probably his latest book, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life, that gives Freedman the most credentials as a respectable writer.
As Freedman spoke of his late mother, the subject of his most recent book, it was clear that he took her close to heart. He said that although he has always despised the genre of memoire writing, this book was like an “act of penance” for him. He wanted to make up the debt of not being a great or caring son to his mother for the short nineteen years that he spent with her. In order to complete this rather personally fulfilling project, Freedman conducted four years of research. He interviewed his mother’s relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. “No rules apply for history or memoires,” he said, however, “One must not sanitize the topic.” After reading Who She Was, I realized that such advice must be heeded.
In addition to giving very helpful advice on writing a memoire/ biography, such as how to interview people you do not know, using photographs as tools, and retrieving old documents, Freedman gave some guidance for living a fulfilling life, something he claims he did not know when he was a young adult. He respects his mother because she had to put bread on the table when she was younger, something he was not responsible for. In other words, do not take things for granted. What he learned while writing Who She Was was that you should be careful about denying your kids what their hearts desire. Most importantly, the reason why he felt the need to write this book is to not spend your life hating a parent. It is not worth the stress and the very likely guilt that you will feel later on in life.
Clearly, Samuel G. Freedman is more than just a brilliant journalist, professor, and author. He is a man who has reached a point in his life in which he can reflect on his past mistakes, learn from them, and share them with others. “Not only famous lives are extraordinary or worth writing about. Any life can be dramatic,” he said. He can be a considered a philanthropist, one who through his writing and teaching wants to expose the good and bad of human kind, one person at a time.

Author of the well-respected book, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life, Samuel Freedman discussed the process behind his research and the makings of his mother’s biography during one of my classes. Freedman was very honest when responding to questions asked of him, and was open with information concerning his personal life. As a student, I was amazed at his ability to uncover information about an obscure past. As a reader, I was amazed at his ability to articulate details that might have otherwise been overshadowed.

Freedman is a professor at Columbia University, an author of many award winning books, and a popular columnist for the New York Times – quite the résumé. Who She Was was one of his most recent works, and it’s essentially a biography of his mother’s life, a life that he did not get to know very well. After his mother passed away, Freedman journeyed to discover the history that gave birth to his mother’s character, a journey that took him to a foreign country, and called for the revisiting of old friends. I applaud Freedman for the effort and the time he put forth in his venture, which produced a book that captured the essence of his mother very well. His method of researching was something he tried to convey to us that day, and I was very much influenced by his work in producing a Who She Was piece of my own.

Freedman uses many sources to build his mother’s past: old photographs, immigration records, interviews. Freedman was very attentive to the details of old photographs he had, and was able to piece together subtle information. For example, he deduced that it was Rosh Hashanah in a series of photographs because of the date and the clothing worn by the people in them. Also, with only past records and documents in hand, he created the environment that his mother grew up in – Samuel Freedman is a man who knows how to extract information from a variety of sources.

Freedman’s tribute to his mother is both moving and revealing. Many people can relate to his mother’s story one way or another, as an immigrant or as a parent, and many others can appreciate the story of a mother tied to her childhood fantasies while trying to make something of her life.

Ben and Frances Richey

Awhile back, I attended a reading hosted by the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence program, featuring Frances Richey. She introduced herself as a yoga teacher and poet, a nice coupling of professions. When she revealed that she worked in the corporate world for two decades, I was taken back. When she revealed that she wrote a book of poems for her son on duty at Iraq, and after reading a selection, I almost doubled over – in front of me that night was a mother with a passionate heart, and a poet who definitely knew how to write.

Richey had first started to write poetry when she began volunteering at a hospital in New York City. At the time, she was a single mother raising a son, Ben. She gave us a highlight of their lives together – their differing political viewpoints, their differing social viewpoints, all the way up to when he graduated from the military academy West Point, and was sent on duty to Iraq. His absence introduced a void in her life that Richey decided to fill with yoga teaching and poetry. Her latest collection, The Warrior, is dedicated to her son, and is filled with pages of powerful stories all pertaining to her experiences with Ben and on occasion, her family.

Richey has won several prestigious awards for her poetry, and much of her work has been showcased in popular publications. She composed poetry for her experiences as a hospital volunteer, something she shared with the audience that night as well. A highlight that I would like to touch upon, is how mother and child eventually learned to overcome all of their differences – it was a very heartwarming ending to the story. Her son is still serving, having done two tours of Iraq already, and Richey continues to write and hope for his safety.

Francine Prose

When a writer like Francine Prose comes along, you might just ask yourself, “What the heck did I learn in school?” In her recently released title, “Reading Like A Writer”, Prose probes the mind to re-teach the art of writing and reading – Prose and prose go quite well together.

“The only thing I can do is write; I have no other skills” – Francine Prose in a nutshell. At a young age, the would-be writer was fascinated with reading and with words in general. Not a single book at her local library was forgiven. She confessed during a recitation that she was never successful with any job, albeit those concerned with the processing of words. Prose worked for many magazine companies growing up, all the while punching out award recipient titles. Prose writes many children’s books as well as many literary articles.

Words to her are like paints to Da Vinci, really. Many of her titles feature stories painted with words. She detests a lack of detail and eloquence in writing, making a point of it in “Reading Like A Writer” even. As such, it is very possible to place one of her books in a VHS player, just like the cassette, to watch a visual presentation.

Francine Prose currently lives in New York City, and resides as the president of PEN American Center. She occasionally takes trips out into her country house. Despite having two children, Prose continues to write magnificent titles. She writes whenever, wherever, however.

The man in action

From the Big Apple emerges one Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer whose work is generally associated with photo journalism. He is a photographer who has evolved through the ages so to speak – from black and white to color, from manual to auto focus. After studying at the International Center of Photography, Mermelstein has moved on to work for wideknown companies like the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Life Magazine. He also took pictures for advertising purposes for companies like Hewlett Packard, and electronics giant Samsung.

He was a guest speaker at one of my classes the other day, and during the course of a hour and fifteen minutes, he showed us his amazing work – you don’t get to see a man fitting a book the size of an encyclopedia in his mouth everyday. What’s unbelievable about his photos is that none of them are manipulated by a computer. Mermelstein said that he enjoyed taking pictures as they were; he wanted to capture the “soulfulness of pictures.” Perhaps he meant when a photo underwent computer manipulation, it lost some of its realism, some of this intricate quality that gave it life. He manipulated photos in the sense that he employed certain techniques that allowed him to change the depth of field in a photo, or the perception of an object. He is able to change the sharpness of a picture, highlighting the object of interest in the foreground, and dimming everything else – a favorite as seen in many of his samples.

When asked how he approached pedestrians about taking their pictures, he told us that the least interaction was the best interaction – you come and you go. A point of interest he revealed was the increasing paranoia parents had of letting their childrens’ photographs be taken. Mermelstein had his share of encounters that resulted in the film from his camera being ripped out. Although a big man, Mermelstein told us explicitly that he was a pacifist at heart, and did not do anything that could endanger anyone.

Taking photograph after photograph might seem tedious to some, but that is how Mermelstein likes it. “I would shoot anything and everything, then pull from it.” From an entire roll of film, this photographer might use five photos for publication purposes.

How do we find the truth of the past? Visiting the class to share his experience of writing a memoir of his mother, Samuel Freedman was the author of Who She Was. What separated Freedman apart from other guests Professor Bernstein had invited before was the sharpness in his language. He could quickly convert his thoughts into proper language that I began to write down everything he mentioned because they were all clear and useful for my Who She Was project.

With a brief introduction, Freedman shared about why he chose to write a memoir of his mother and, subsequently, learned from it. Freedman knew the struggle of his mother, as someone battling her own health, but he wanted to explore his mother’s past to understand why she had became the person she was and what she had expected herself to be. Though his mother went to college, she eventually had to give up her “ambition to have a profession” to support her family. This piece of information helped Freedman to realize the tremendous disappointment of her mother of “not making those goals.” I think this was what he meant by “universal doesn’t mean writing universal. If you do it right, people will connect to the story.” Though the story he unveiled was his mother’s, people could still connect to the importance of family and financial burden of ordinary people.

According to Freedman, there could never be truth in writing memoir. Different family members had their own view of his mother’s life. What I found unexpected was how the different events we had gone to connected with each other in some shape or form. The director of Waltz with Bashir also commented that memories were not always the truth, but the truth was we wanted to remember.

What I got out of the meeting with Freedman was that through memoir I might discover something that I never expected. In Freedman’s case, he began to realize his misconception of the role his father played in the family and how he struggled from his mother’s suffering. For my own Who She Was memoir, I might just follow his advice to let “the subject choose me.”

Once we make a decision, it’s often too late to change. For Frances Richey, however, she was able to repair her relationship with her son, Ben. I chanced to meet her at the Macaulay Honors event, hosted on the Veterans Day. Though I did not know much about her background, prior to the event, her poems reflected her internal struggle with her son. In a divided family with separate views on politics, Richey struggled to compromise with Ben. After He was deployed to serve at Iraq, Richey began to realize how selfish she was. In her published book, The Warrior, Richey attempted to reconstruct her fractured relationship with her son.

Though I could not recognize her appearance in the basement, I could sense her misery and her disconnection to his son from her subdued voice. She was one of the first few people, I have encountered in life, who was optimistic about her future yet regretful of what she had done. After she recited few of her poems, what gripped my attention was her style of poetry. It was one of those that didn’t rhyme. “The way you did when you were twelve and I was afraid to open the door I’d forgotten to lock. You went in ahead of me.” In her poem “To My Son In Iraq” Richey expressed the bravery of his son to fight the war and how she lacked the confidence. For most of her poems, thought they mainly were addressed to her concerns for Ben, the theme was universal. For families, with someone serving the country, they put their views aside and supported the soldiers.

Though Richey repaired her relationship with her son after he came back from war, I felt that she had given up part of who she was. In my perspective, she accepted defeat. Richey noted that she never argued about their difference in political view after he was home. This was one aspect that continued to puzzle me. I had come to the conclusion that her defeat was what essential all mothers would do. They sacrificed themselves for the children.

When he walked into the room, Jeff Mermelstien exuded an air of nervousness.  He kept his head down and said little as he surveyed the small class and edged his tall body toward the back.  The few things he said were calm and bored sounding as he first opened his mouth to introduce himself and to ask for help setting up.  It was as though he had the distinct impression that we as a class were going to verbally attack him and his art at the first possible opening.  He set up his slides and steeled himself for a blank and humorless hour and a half.  He obviously did not realize the kind of class he was dealing with. Not only did we find his pictures intriguing and occasionally hilarious, which the back row greatly appreciated, he was interesting as well.  The uncomfortably dubbed “street photographer” showed us old pictures, ones from his book Sidewalk and others he remained connected to over the years.  He told back-stories and explained inspirations. As he flipped through slide after slide, his opening statement of “being seduced by color” made more and more sense.  Neon red and old ladies outfits and all the different browns and grays found swimming in his photos clearly showed this passion.
As the slides slid on, his nervousness ebbed away and he began to laugh with us and crack jokes.  He appreciated our side comments and initial reactions.  Then, as the last of his doubts faded away and he remembered that teenagers are people too, he allowed himself to become part of the class for the last few minutes.

At an instant, when Sam Freedman visited our classroom, one could tell he was dedicated and humble. Barely late at all, he was apologetic of running a bit behind, despite countless valid excuses. What a busy man! I believe a lot of his energy and drive contribute to his successes as a writer, teacher, and human being. When he began speaking about his novel, one could tell he was kind, despite what could be considered mean about his nature towards his mother in “Who She Was.” He spoke as an author should, with words full of color. One thing that struck me as odd was the repetition of the word obscure to describe his mother. It is such an honest word, but I would have used it to negatively describe someone whose character I find to be slightly off, yet he used the word without remorse, as if it was in full of meaning, but dead in the way I am used to.

Sam Freedman’s search for honest facts enthralled me and made me wonder what drove this man to such integrity. I am glad he has seemed to make atonement with his mother by writing the novel. He seems like a good man who has had regrets, but he is changed forever because of it. He was extremely helpful in giving us advice for our own papers. His research methods are so involved, which further show his dedication to make amends with his mother. Another thing the Freedman taught me was that it is much easier to make amends with a family member while they are still living!

When I walked out of the elevator of the seventh floor of the William and Anita Newman Library Building, I saw posters and flyers telling all that Francine Prose was amongst us.  To be honest, at first I didn’t truly understand the magnitude of having such an accomplished writer at Baruch willing to talk to Macaulay Honors Students about her life’s work.  I soon realized this was a privilege not just a mandatory part of my Arts in New York City course.  Professor Roslyn Bernstein and the rest of the esteemed Baruch College staff had nothing but praises regarding Francine Prose and the novels she wrote, including the book my fellow classmates and I recently read, Reading Like a Writer.

The night began with a few people stepping up to the podium telling the audience about Francine Prose and her successful career.  The respect for her was evident from the first words out of their mouths.  One thing I learned from the experience with Francine Prose was that “Hansel and Gretel” holds a completely different meaning than it used to.  From my childhood, I remember the old tale about a witch wanting to eat two children.  It is safe to say that Francine Prose put a truly original spin on this narration enticing listeners from the beginning of the story.  Her version of “Hansel of Gretel” was a rendition of a true story that left the audience asking themselves different questions.  It was amazing to witness and listen to how a somewhat boring event was transformed into an interesting, enticing piece of literature.

Following Prose’s narration of her version of “Hansel and Gretel” was a question and answer session.  All throughout the reading of the short story I racked my brain trying to think of the perfect question to ask, but my attempts were unsuccessful.  As the question and answer session ended, I was shocked to see almost everyone in the cramped room, flock to Francine Prose whether it was to sneak in another question or just get her signature.  I said to myself, “I may never get another chance to meet another highly accomplished writer.”  I didn’t hesitate in knowing that I should also get up and encounter this talented writer.  As she handed the book back to me with her signature on the first page, she was answering another student’s question.  I overheard her saying was that she remembered what it was like to be in college reading countless books that bored her to death.  I laughed to myself for this is how I have always felt since the beginning of high school.  I was comforted to discover that she is a very down to earth person, being able to relate to an ordinary college student like myself.  It was astonishing to learn that such a renowned writer and celebrity like Francine Prose, was just another person trying to make a living, one novel at a time.