LIFE WITH BOOKS

Books are my abiding dilemma.

We are moving, again. For twenty-two years, I lived in a tiny bungalow on a hill in San Francisco. My walls were lined with bookshelves. Every inch was stuffed with books — mostly books I had read, some books I meant to read. Over the years, when the shelves threatened to burst their seams, I culled. Boxes and boxes of books left my house, destined for public library book sales. My criteria for keeping books were always a little fuzzy: books I might need someday for some research project; books I loved and might want to read again; books that were important in my life (like Das Kapital) that I knew I’d never want to read again but couldn’t part with.

All those categories make sense to me. There’s another one, though, that doesn’t: books I’d like my grandchildren to someday discover on my shelves.

What’s that about?!

I’m not a very directive grandmother. In fact, I’m told I’m way too permissive. Isn’t it grandmother’s privilege to enjoy but not control? I love creative grandmothering, which means they pretty much get away with whatever pleases them.

But when it comes to their worldviews, values of social justice and their responsibility toward making a better world, I have, not so much a desire for control, but longings. I want them to know me as a progressive activist. More, I want them to want to be like me in that way.

Grandchildren, of course, are the embodiment of the future. If I had no grandchildren, no children in fact, I’d still want to be valued most for my political self. Now, at the age of 75, I understand that while grandchildren may symbolize the future, they also hold a mirror to the past. Who I’ve been is reflected starkly in the middle of who I wish them to be and who I wish to be to them. I recognize these wishes as a measure of a life worth living.

We moved six months ago from our cozy bungalow into an expansive apartment in a newly-built part of town. Lots and lots of walls that could be built with bookshelves. But the place is a temporary roosting spot. We needed to lodge in a transitional home while the house was sold and we bought a condo or loft, a downsized (although not literally smaller, since our tiny cottage was about as small as we can tolerate) version of ourselves that is simpler, easier, more visually connected with sky and city. No point in unpacking all my books onto temporary shelves, not to mention building shelves onto walls that we would soon leave. So I culled one more time. I got rid of untold numbers of volumes — and boxed up thirty-some bankers’ boxes filled with books to store until we settled.

Now we’re buying the place where we expect to stay for the next set of years. It is here, I expect, we’ll sort out what old age means to us, how we are willing to occupy that station of life, what we need and want, accept and reject, can afford and must sacrifice. Soon we’ll have a place to unpack. But while the new condo is beautiful, while it has soaring windows and odd and wonderful spaces tempting us to creative uses, it doesn’t actually have a whole lot of space for books. Can I give them up?

Here’s the paradox: I don’t read books anymore. For many years now, I’ve read digitally. It suits me well. When I got my first Kindle reader, I came to know that my chronic neck ache was largely from reading books. I reveled in traveling with a way lighter suitcase. The fluidity of the Kindle allowed me to switch easily from the latest publication by a colleague to the mystery story that eased me into sleep. When I advanced from Kindle to mini-iPad, even more freedom allowed me to flow from the pre-publication manuscript I was reviewing for a friend to my own work in progress. Only very rarely do I come across something I need to read that isn’t digitally available. Books are a thing largely of the past.

Wait a minute! Materially they may be unnecessary, but emotionally! That’s a very different story. I feel like throwing a two-year-old fit. I don’t care how impractical they are, how passé, a relic of the past like all those photographs printed on actual paper. I want my books! And I want them on the walls, where I can see them, smell them, touch them — and where they are discoverable by generations to come.

The question is why? Am I clinging to an identity no longer true? Or relevant?

When I think in books rather than ideas, a small cascade of them stream through the moments of my life.

When I was four, I still could not speak intelligibly. Inside my mind, I talked just fine. But somehow what issued from my mouth was incomprehensible to anyone else. Kind people tried to decipher my meaning. Cruel people teased me. My sister, barely two years older than I, interpreted, giving to my garbled words the meaning she wished them to have.

I raged and wept and struggled to be heard. By the age of three, I was carrying around a piece of paper and a pencil. I’d thrust my precious tools in front of any adult I could find (my father’s medical office was in our home, his waiting room fertile territory for my project), and indicate they should write their names. Somehow, I communicated I needed them also to speak their names. I taught myself to read and write that way.

I believed there was a mystery to all this. Everybody but me understood all sorts of things, way beyond how to form words others could understand. People shared assumptions that took me by surprise. On the other hand, I had my own unshared assumptions, things that seemed so obvious to me, but not to others. Clearly, if you write with your right hand, you should write from right to left. Isn’t that logical? I knew others didn’t do it that way, but I wrote mirror image. I loved numbers — way simpler than words! But why couldn’t the world understand that five was a smaller number than four? I knew others counted one, two, three, four, five. But I insisted the proper order was one, two, three, five, four.

In short, I was a weird kid. Outwardly, I was rebellious and angry. But inwardly, I was simply trying to make sense of a world that just didn’t add up to me.

Those years from birth to four were war years. I understood that things were not right in the world. The adults put on a good show, but they couldn’t hide the emotional truth: fear and grief were ever-present. My people were Jewish; our family roots in Europe were only one generation away. A teenage cousin came from Austria to live with my aunt, half a block from our house. He spoke almost as unintelligibly as I. And he was way more disturbed than the adults I knew. I knew and didn’t know about the Holocaust, but I experienced it as a subtext to the emotional environment around me.

In my adult memory, my most beloved book of childhood was “Misunderstood Betsy”, the story of a city girl who comes to live with country cousins and is different from everyone around her. They all think one way, Betsy another. They understand things without words that elude Betsy. I identified.

When I Googled the title just now, I was thoroughly shocked to find that the title actually is “Understood Betsy”. How memory bends to reflect greater realities!

The next book that stands vividly in my memory is What We Must Know about Communism by Harry and Bonaro Overstreet. When I was ten, my family moved from New York to Fort Worth, Texas. Suddenly, civil rights became a defining principle in our lives. To be sure, I had encountered racism earlier in New York, and in a child’s way knew it for some version of what it was. We had a young black “maid”, a beloved bridge between the worlds of children and adults. She cared for us, and she also played with us as no other adults did. Conflicts arose between her and my father; I was militantly on her side. How could he!, I shried. How unfair!

That seed of a premature anti-racist blossomed into full-out activist in Texas. I started high school the year after Brown v Board of Education, in a school that remained segregated for another decade. I was outspoken, embattled, troubled. Meanwhile, I was learning about the Holocaust and decoding the emotional understandings of my first decade of life. I lay awake at night thinking, It can’t simply be that Germans are bad people. That would mean there’s nothing to be done. There can’t be nothing to do. There must be more going on when people do such bad things to each other. The urgent need to understand the twin “evils” of anti-Semitism and racism as something changeable occupied my ill-informed mind. I cast around for explanations and couldn’t find them.

By the time I was fifteen or so, I started cultivating a different way of thinking, a five-comes-before-four approach. By that I mean, I started looking through the looking glass, seeking the thing not said, the possibilities contained in intentional silences.

One of those unspeakable subjects was communism. In the fifties, to ask what communism actually meant was to be shut down with horrified suspicion. All you needed to know was that be a communist was about the worst thing you could be, even worse than being an integrationist. So maybe that’s what I was?

In school, we were required to watch a certain number of hours weekly of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, those cruel inquisitions rooting out subversives in American life. A television broadcast the hearings in the school library. I began to make connections: the same segregationists I so opposed were also those most vocal in their hatred of communists. But they never actually said what communism was. How was I to know whether I was one?

I went to the public library to find answers to my questions. But censorship was alive in the land; the library had been purified by that time. Anything that touched on communism was long gone. The only thing I could find was a pamphlet by the Overstreets, a precursor, I believe, to their later book. I read it avidly. Everything they said was wrong with the Soviet Union seemed to me to be essentially right: a collectivist society seeking to overcome class divisions, supporting emerging nations to free themselves from colonialism and resist new forms of subordination. I wasn’t ready to sign on, but it did sound appealing.

At sixteen, I was supported by the authorities of my high school — and by my very understanding parents — to graduate early. I left Fort Worth and enrolled at Brandeis University. “East”, my parents assured me, would be a whole different world. Integrated, no racism. I arrived on campus: where were the people of color? My first year, the entire student body was white. Moreover, almost everyone was Jewish. The next year, Angela Davis arrived on campus, brave Angela, the only black student to be found.

Nor was there much more to read about communism — way more anti-Soviet, democratic socialist literature promoted by faculty members like Irving Howe. Herbert Marcuse was still on campus, a big reason why I chose Brandeis. But he was no longer teaching, not accessible for the long, thoughtful discussions I had imagined.

I graduated four years later, disgruntled, disillusioned. I don’t remember a single book I read in college. I graduated hell-bent to leave America and immerse myself in a culture where I was genuinely the outsider, where I did not look like everyone else even while I thought like an alien from a distant planet. I wanted to regain an infant’s consciousness, to know that I knew nothing and to learn a different world from the outside in. I thought Burma was that world: Buddhist, communitarian, isolated from the world I knew. It was also closed by its post-colonial rulers to the western world. I started preparing myself to meet the challenge of access.

Along the way, I met Probhat Roy. An anti-colonialist fighter, he left India after the Nehru government came to power, drowning dreams of a revolutionary rebirth in a tide of elite dominance, Probhat was a genuine communist of a Trotskyist bent. Followers of Trotsky were a very different breed in New York and in Bengal, the part of India known for revolutionary fervor where Probhat lived. He was thirteen years older than I. I was mesmerized by his grasp of history, his deep dedication to making a just society, and, to be honest, his dashing good looks. My liberal, integrationist parents rushed to New York in a futile attempt to bring me to my senses. We married in self-defense.

The next four years in New York, while we saved money to fund our return to India, were formative for me. I remember sitting in a Manhattan walk-up with Probhat’s best friends, Paul and Pat Alexander. “What do you suppose has brought us all together”, Paul asked, “myself a truck driver from rural Oklahoma, Pat a theater person from London, Probhat a revolutionary from India?

“A common dream brought us together. A dream being imperfectly implemented in Russia but still alive.”

Probhat constructed a reading list for me. It started with Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. If you’ve never read it, you should — if only as great literature. I couldn’t put it down. I graduated to a rich array of Marxist literature. I actually read, word for word, Das Kapital — Book One and Book Two!

Meanwhile, we were living in a cheap apartment in a building dating from the 1830’s. We paid $75.22 a month in rent. I remember that number because when we left for India we passed our funky rent-control along, illegally, year after year to friends at that same rent.

The “supers” for the building (an institution of live-in superintendents who swept the sidewalk and managed garbage and other important matters) were an odd couple named Louise and Albert. He was tall; she was round. She talked endlessly, he sat in their backroom apartment, silent and forbidding behind piles and piles of old newspapers.

One day I came home from work juggling books and groceries. Louise was sweeping the sidewalk, as usual. The pile began to collapse; Trotsky fell to the ground. She picked it up and looked at the spine. “You’re reading Trotsky!” she exclaimed, looking at me with new recognition. We chatted. “Come here,” she commanded.

Half an hour later I climbed the stairs to our apartment with a great pile of books. At the top was Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Albert and Louise, it turned out, were not only Trotskyites but also Reichians, an untoward combination in those days. They hid their orgone collector in the courtyard behind the garbage cans.

Reich truly blew my mind. Here was the missing link, the thing I thought everyone knew but hid from me. How people lived, the families and relationships and social institutions they inhabited, formed their thoughts and actions. Marx revealed a lot about social arrangements, but Reich supplied the piece that linked history and lived experience. For the first time, I began to see possibilities for meaningful social change. If institutions like the family are political institutions, linked in complex ways with end results like the Holocaust, then there are ways to live revolution on a daily basis. The books I read, so important to me in writing my beliefs and identity, suddenly opened up a coherent world. To make sense of how good people do such terrible things was to bring abstract processes to a human level. If the world were coherent, then I too made sense.

Now, all these many decades later, I no longer read those books. I rarely even refer to them. They are part of my daily thought, especially imbedded in the form of therapy I practice. They are bedrock to my intellectual world but not evident.

Books, on the other hand, are very evident. They line the walls, making ideas material, presenting to grandchildren ideas, beliefs, values that lie importantly behind my being but are not commonly articulated. I’ve now read many, many books since Reich. We did make it to India; after many years, I returned to the U.S. with a child. I raised that child in a mini-version of the good society: a collective household created with friends. I practice a community-based form of counseling and mediation. I’ve earned a doctorate in sociology. I’ve written a bunch of books, taught classes, given talks. My scholarly work is all about understanding “the other”: white racism, police brutality, communal violence. Writing is informed by my practice, which gives me the great privilege of learning from so many people’s lives and struggles and transformations.

None of my accomplishments, though, seems to me to speak as loudly as the books on my shelves. My external appearance is of an aging Jewish woman, grey haired, grandmotherly. My internal world, misunderstood, I still believe, by the world, is of a revolutionary, raging against injustice — another black man killed by police, another stocker at Walmart not able to feed her children. I scream inwardly, and I also seek to understand rather than condemn. I try not to abandon the questions while waiting for someone to storm the walls.