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Karen Bermann, "The Art of Being a Stranger: A Family Memoir" (New Jewish Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, listeners. Welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Amber Nicol, the host of the channel. And today we are going to be talking with Karen Berman about their most recent publication, the Art of Being a A Family Memoir, which was just recently released by New Jewish Press, an imprint of University of Toronto Press. Karen is a professor emerita of architecture at Iowa State University, where she specialized in drawing and teaching in the Rome Study Abroad program. Prior to earning her BA in architecture from Cooper Union, she worked on sweat equity rehabilitation projects on New York City's Lower east side, in the building that first introduced solar and wind energy to the city. She has published and presented widely in academic settings on issues of identity, memory and place, and she lives between Rome and New York City. Welcome to the channel, Karen.
- [01:01]
B
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [01:04]
A
We are really excited to have you here. This is a unique text that really features short snippets accompanied by images. It's not quite a graphic memoir, but rather what I would like to call an artistic memoir. Can you please share with listeners why you chose this medium and how it shapes your telling of your family's story?
- [01:27]
B
Right, okay. How I chose this medium, well, the truth is I did not choose chose me. I've always worked this way. Since childhood, I've worked, A, in fragments, in what you call snippets, B, in between the visual and the textual. So even as a kid, I was writing one story and then in the next moment I was drawing another story. So it's happened by instinct. I didn't know this was going to be a book. I wrote some stories, I drew some stories. It was sort of a matter of making a collection. And as I said, instinctively, the right method or the right medium came first. So there were certain parts of the story. For example, when I write about abandoned buildings and burned buildings, they were very powerful images for me. And then I had to follow up with text and for other things vice versa. It's natural to me to do this. But also, as to your question of shaping the telling of my family's story in the context of memory, all of our memories, which is, I think, is always fragmentary, it seemed particularly appropriate to not sew all the pieces together, but to allow them to standalone and to sort of mix and match as they wanted to.
- [02:59]
A
And I think that really does a good job at getting at this fragmented nature of memory, as you just kind of mentioned the ways in which it comes in bits and pieces. And you leave a lot of that work to the reader. To try to make the differences or to make the connections right, which makes this such a unique text. The title's also really provoking. Why stranger?
- [03:22]
B
Well, first I have to say that I had a previous title that I loved and I still love. And that previous title is either I'll Kill Myself or I'll Eat the Cookies. Now, if you've read the book, you understand that this kind of signifies the kind of lunatic humor of the book. But of course, the publisher hated that title, so that was nixed. And then we found this much more sedate title, which I'm happy with because I love the word stranger, and I think it's a very rich word. My father experienced himself as a stranger, meaning both a foreigner and an outsider and an unknown person. And in fact, if you look up the etymology of the word stranger, you'll see that through various languages, starting with Latin, but passing through subsequent languages, its meaning has kind of swerved and swayed between being a foreigner, being an unknown person, being an outsider, and even at times, being a guest. So I thought all of these connotations were really appropriate for the way that my father experienced his own life and the art that he taught me growing up.
- [04:51]
A
I think that's a great segue to my next question, because it's really about your father. And a lot of my questions are about your father, as he's such a kind of stark personality in this. But it is, of course, a story of your entire family and the relationships within. But the text opens with an interaction between you and your father which ends with, that was in 1932, before the end of the World as I knew it. And this really sets the tone for your family memoir, indicating one of the most significant moments of generational rupture. Can you please share with readers why 1932 matters so much and what it meant for your father?
- [05:30]
B
Well, in those years in the 20s and 30s, in Europe, particularly in Germany and in Austria, you could say that every year mattered so much and was filled with epic events. 1932, in this case. I mean, my father was nine years old in 1932. So he was waking up to what was going on around him. Perhaps really the end of the world as he knew it began in 1929, as it did for so many people around the world, with the worldwide depression, in which his immediate family plunged into poverty. So any ideas that they had about being middle class Viennese people were undone in that year. But plus, I mean, even before the outbreak of the Second World War, before the Nazi occupation of Austria and So on. But there was also the Austrian Civil War, 1933, 1934, and Vienna, which was the capital, was a super hotspot. And I tell in the book of how my father snuck away from home to observe fighting in the streets between the Austrian army and the socialist city government at Karl Marxhof, very important work of architecture, socialist workers housing in 1934. And obviously then there was the rise of Nazism, in which there were epic events in all those years, culminating my father's departure in 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht.
- [07:10]
A
This longer family story, it is mostly focused on this relationship between you and your father, but there is also this longer Jewish family story, European story of one from poverty to Viennese promise and perhaps back and forth again. However, this was really not a clear cut transition and Vienna was hardly ideal, as you mentioned in some of these examples. Can you please share some of the complexities of this transition in everyday life in Vienna with listeners?
- [07:43]
B
Sure. Just to pick up from our last conversation, our last question. Yes, Vienna was in chaos because there was civil war in Vienna in the 1930s, so there were battles in the streets, so there was stress and fear in their lives even before they understood what was going on with, with National Socialism and the Jews. In addition, it was the goal of many people who came from what my father referred to as the Eastern lands, which, meaning the eastern part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. It was the goal of many of those people to come to Vienna, which was the Mecca, right? To become Viennese, losing your local accent or dialect, your kind of bumpkin, bumpkin hood, becoming sophisticated and acculturated and Viennese. Now, this was not actually possible for people like my grandfather, who came with his brothers from the eastern lands, because he was, number one, extremely uneducated, I think not fully literate. And number two, he was an orthodox Jew, a religious Jew, and thus lived in a kind of religious bubble. They were not acculturated, they were not assimilated. So there's a kind of a contradiction here which possibly I never understood fully, or possibly it really just was a contradiction. They did not go to concerts and lectures and waltzes and skating rinks and participate in the cultural and intellectual life of the time. And from when, 1939 on, from when the Depression came, everything really fell apart and they reverted to the poverty that my grandfather had grown up with and.
- [09:44]
A
Attempted to escape after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Your father lands in Mandate Palestine and he ends up participating in British colonial projects there. And this is, I think, a Very interesting part of your text and imagery is trying to make sense of how he understands his role in this. So how did he understand his role in colonization?
- [10:11]
B
You know, this is something I've always thought about a lot. And obviously, since October 7, 2023. Sorry, I have thought about it a lot. A lot, a lot. And it remains probably. I mean, my father was an extremely contradictory person, loaded with contradiction and of not even having a problem with it. I mean, all those contradictions just sort of sat there and piled up side by side and. Yes, but this is probably the most confusing and contradictory for me, part of the story. And I wish I knew more, and I also wish I had written more about it.
- [10:57]
A
But.
- [10:58]
B
Okay, so my father was a refugee boy, really. I mean, the circumstances of his departure are significant here. He was saved by a charity organization which shipped Austrian and Jewish children, alone, without their parents, just the kids, to British Palestine. It was something like the British, the famous Kindertransport to England. And when my father arrived in Palestine alone, he was deemed old enough to work, and he was put to work as an agricultural laborer. Now, he felt very much that he was a person without agency. And of course, first of all, all children are without agency. All children and young people are without agency. But in his case, this was extra true. He had. He had been put on a train and found himself in another country. And it was extra true in the colonial context in which he was a subject, a colonial subject in which the Brits hired, or maybe they didn't hire, maybe they just required such young men to carry out the dirty work of the construction of the new nation of Israel. In his case. In my father's case, he worked with a bunch of other young men. Their job was to go into the desert and evict Bedouins from their land with guns and with an official decree. What I understand, he felt guilty. He was sorry. He believed it was wrong. My father, by this time, was a convinced young socialist. And he saw the contradictions and he saw the symmetry and the irony in Jews who had just fled Europe evicting Bedouin from their land. He was angry, but as I say in the book, he was also aware of his own lack of agency. And he also felt a certain hopelessness and desperation about having no choices of his own and being, in what he called, in his slightly macaronic English, a dog or eat the dog world. And when I corrected him, I said, dad, it's a. It's a dog eat dog world. He said, I mean, you do not want to Be the dog that gets eaten. So, in short, as a progressive person and an angry and hopeless and helpless person, he was mired in conflict and contradiction.
- [13:42]
A
So your father made his way to New York. What was his first job there? Why does this matter? And how did this and his experiences in Vienna and Palestine set the tone for the rest of his life in New York?
- [13:57]
B
My father's first job in New York. Well, my father had really no skills and no English, but he had driven and repaired tractors in Palestine. So he looked for a job as a handyman. And then he rose through the ranks to become what he called a big shot in the world of building maintenance in New York. And building maintenance became a kind of metaphor for his obsession with foreseeing and forestalling disaster. He was keenly attuned to the fractures and failures in building infrastructures, as he was keenly attuned to the fractures and failures and everything else. So he knew before anyone else that a fire escape was beginning to pull away from the wall, or an elevator was in danger of dropping through its shaft. My father always said, I'm a good maintenance man because I know it's not a matter of if, but of when. I think that sums it up.
- [15:02]
A
And then towards the end of the text, you grapple with your father's death. Would you mind sharing with readers about your father's death, how he died? And I think this will be a good transition into a conversation about your relationship with him.
- [15:20]
B
Sure. Well, I suppose I would have to say he committed suicide. I mean, he did commit suicide. He committed suicide. Which led me to the first title of the book, either I'll Kill Myself or I'll Eat the Cookies. This was a sort of comic, menacing threat he made to me often in his last years. So I would say, so what are you going to do today, Dad? I don't know. Either I'll kill myself or I'll eat some cookies. But I prefer to say, you know, yes, he committed suicide. He ended his life. He took himself out. He thought it was time for his life to end. And once I got over the shock of it, now, you could say, why was I so shocked? Because he talked about it constantly. But, you know, he talked in such. His language was so extreme always that it was. Had we taken him seriously, we would have been going crazy every day. So we had to live with these threats and lunacies. But once I got over the shock of it, it made a lot of sense to me. I mean, he was very old. He was falling apart physically. He was just Beginning to fall apart mentally. And I think that that kind of loss of control was not for him. Now, I wish he had chosen a more pacific way to do it. I'm not going to give away. Give away the details here. I wish he had chosen a more pacific way to do it, but, you know, he was not a pacific person. So, you know, it made a certain sort of, I don't know, poetic sense that, you know, his death was fairly violent. It was a sort of, you know, live by the sewer, die by the sewer to kind of death. Also, you know, just pragmatically, it's not so easy to find a good way to kill yourself. It's actually really hard. Did I answer the question?
- [17:27]
A
Of course. Of course. Yeah. I was. I was just thinking about the. I was just thinking about the transition and kind of thinking about it for a moment. So of all the pros in the text, page 134 actually stands out to me the most, and I think it will serve as a good transition. To my next question. Would you mind reading it for listeners today?
- [17:48]
B
Yes, sure. Okay. My father said, I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, my dear child, but let it never be said of me that I was not honest with my children, that I gave them pie in the sky, that I told them, like these innocent Americans who don't know anything about the world, who don't know history, not even their own, that they have control over their lives, that happiness is waiting for them, that they can become anything they want to become. Whoever told you life was fair, whoever told you you deserve, you make the best of what you got. No one can ever say I sugarcoated things for my children. I tell my children the truth, even when it is brutal. I tell my children the truth because it is brutal. I tell my children the truth. It doesn't matter how good you are or how smart you are or what you want or how hard you try. History is a tidal wave and it will wash you away.
- [18:58]
A
How did your father's approach to parenting and his experiences really shape your relationship with him and your own experiences and your own sense of self? And I know this is a very big question.
- [19:12]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's a big question. And as you point out here, it's really not just a memoir about my father's life, but it's a memoir in two voices that are entangled. And it's a memoir about our relationship and our family dynamic. First, I want to say the Art of Being a Stranger does not tell the story of a Happy family that gets disrupted by the coming of the Nazis. The patriarchal authoritarianism that we associate with Nazism pervaded pretty much all of Austrian and German culture, especially, and including, including, and especially, excuse me, the power structure of the family, the power of the father, capital F, and really brutal principles of child rearing. The spirit of the child needed to be broken. This was discipline and socialization. And, you know, I have never heard anybody talking about this in the context of, of German and Austrian Jewish culture. Jewish families were not exempt from all this. Even as Jews suffered from the practices of Nazism, some of the same principles and practices were instilled in them. And these destructive traditions were enacted in our family in the new country. So a lot of the story is about my need to escape from my father, to escape both from his attempts to protect me, which amounted to smothering me and entrapping me, but also from his brutality. I needed to resist. I needed to resist this. I also needed to resist because my father didn't believe in hope, as you can see from the page that I just read. And he thought I would suffer in my life if I were hopeful. So he wanted also to break the hopefulness that I think is natural to children. I had to build something else for myself. But this something else was not going to be a happy American life. I mean, it had to be some kind of negotiation with all that darkness. There was no escaping it. This negotiation with darkness most clearly embodied itself in the question of our common love of buildings, which is something we shared, something I inherited from him, that fascination, those stories. But for him, as a building maintenance man, he was looking at looking into the apocalypse, the inevitable apocalypse, and doing his best for it, to prevent it. For me, as first, someone who got involved in community based housing rehabilitation in New York in the 1970s, it was about care and it was about love. It was about protection. It was about care and it was about love. I've also written academic articles and spoken in my academic life on the theme of architecture as an act of care, building and taking care of buildings as an act of care. We protect and care for our buildings, and in turn they protect and care for us. It's a reciprocal relationship. So how this shared concern held us together and how we differed in our approaches to it, it was something central to our relationship that bound us, even in the bad times, that bound us. And that's central to the book.
- [22:59]
A
So we've actually taken up quite a bit of your time today. I want to wrap up our interview with my traditional New Books Network closing question. And that is what are you up to now?
- [23:12]
B
Well, I'm working on things that have nothing to do with the art of being a stranger. And it's really a pleasure to be working at a smaller and much more intimate and less meaningful or less significant scale. During the pandemic, living in a courtyard in Rome, really locked down in this courtyard. Courtyard is filled with pebbles, thousands of them. I started looking at them closely and I started drawing them and I started to think about their history vis a vis our history, how their history over millions of years makes our history and all the stories we've just been talking about into an instant. Also thinking about how these solid little objects are actually in continuous flow, in continuous change and transformation. So I also started writing about them. And this is, I guess, something that this work has in common with the book is that it's a work of both image and text, image and text, paired images and text. So I started writing about them, about stones and the passage of time. And then of course, since I'm in Rome, I'm surrounded by falling apart and worn down stone everywhere, including statuary, including buildings. And so the topic has kind of expanded to that, to the question of, I don't know, monumentality, geology and the passage of time. It sounds very noble and grand, but it's pretty vague at this point. I mean, the short answer is I'm drawing pictures about of stones and I'm writing about stones.
- [24:57]
A
Well, I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing that in some form in the future. Listeners, if this interview piqued your interest, please pick up a copy of Karen Berman's the Art of Being a Stranger directly from the press or you can order it from your local bookstore. To understand this text part exhibit, you must see it.
- [25:29]
C
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