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The American Scholar
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A lively forum about literature, the arts and sciences, history, society, politics, and public affairs.
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Ho Ho Horror
Dec 27, 2024Tap to summarizeA few years ago, we ran a special winter episode on the Snow Maiden, an adored figure from Slavic folklore. Today, we travel to Austria for an encounter with the Krampus. Each December, this devil clad in sheepskin and goat horns wanders the Alpine valleys of Bavaria and Tyrol. The Krampus lurks in other parts of Austria, as well—and some of his cousins pop up even farther afield in Eastern Europe—but the specter of this dark Christmas legend is strongest in the mountains. You might have met some version of him in the 2015 Hollywood horror movie Krampus or the 2010 Finnish film Rare Exports. But the real story of the Krampus is better than the movies. Here to tell us about it is Al Ridenour, host of the dark folklore podcast Bone & Sickle and the author of the book The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas. Go beyond the episode: Al Ridenour’s The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas Listen to the Bone & Sickle podcast, co-hosted by Ridenour and Sarah Chavez Looking for more winter folktales? The Snow Maiden awaits. Rare Exports (2010) is our host’s favorite holiday horror flick Krampus (2015) is not entirely true to the myth, but we love it anyway And there’s always Santa slashers Krampusen from the Alt Gnigler Troupe, Salzburg (Photographs by Martin Zehentner): This episode features an arrangement of “Carol of the Bells” performed and recorded by myuu. Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook. Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”) Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. The post Ho Ho Horror appeared first on The American Scholar.
Transcribe →Kinship and Contradictions
Dec 13, 2024Tap to summarizeIdentity can be difficult enough to navigate without bureaucratic interference. For Native people, the question of identity is mired in more than a century of federal intrusion in the form of tribal rolls, blood quantum, and boarding schools—not to mention genocide. And yet, the number of people who identify as Native has increased by 85 percent in just 10 years—from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.7 million in 2020 according to the U.S. Census. But tribal enrollment, hovering at about two million, has not grown at the same rate. This phenomenon is just one of the things that Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz addresses in her new book, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America. Her own story of enrollment in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina opens the door to many more stories that reveal how Native life still reverberates with the consequences of 19th-century federal policy. Go beyond the episode: Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America For more on citizenship in the Creek nation, listen to our interview with Caleb Gayle on the complicated history of Black enrollment Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”) Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! The post Kinship and Contradictions appeared first on The American Scholar.
Transcribe →Magic Men
Dec 6, 2024Tap to summarizeFrom the day Laurie arrived at the small liberal arts college, a freshman from Evanston, Illinois, she’d been hearing about the Magic Men. This upstate New York school, with its sandstone buildings and glass-domed gymnasium, seemed dull so far: pale-skinned blondes wherever you looked, no different from the people Laurie had gone to high school with. Week two, things started to look up. In her drama class, Laurie had been paired with a junior named Helen, and after their improv skit got laughs even from the prof, Laurie hoped things might get a little more interesting. A week before leaving for school, Laurie had massaged a deep, shocking—just to her parents—purple into her long, sooty-blond hair. Yet Helen’s hair drew greater wows: magnificently bushy it was, and cauldron black. Helen was impressive to Laurie in other ways, too. She was big: big chest, big butt, big limbs, big personality. She wore spaghetti-strap leotard tops that revealed her booming cleavage. An impressive history of cutting—self-harming, as the counselors liked to call it—ran up and down the inside of her left arm. Laurie had heard about cutting. Who hadn’t? No one she knew would have been brave enough. Helen’s tidy line of cuts frightened Laurie. Yet she found herself wondering if they had been Helen’s way of keeping some sort of score. It was Helen who revealed some specifics about the Magic Men, though what she said was all over the place. Helen didn’t filter the stories. She didn’t try to make them add up. The Magic Men lived in a stone house off campus that was a fraternity. No, it wasn’t a fraternity, but it had been one, until the Magic Men got kicked out of the chapter. Twelve guys lived there. Not so—there were six. No—there was only one, a sort of Erlking who ruled from under the mountain. Females were only allowed in the stone house between midnight and six in the morning. Females were never allowed in the stone house by rule, but it was always full of them. The Magic Men made a potion that changed you. “It’s magic,” Helen said. “It makes your virginity disappear.” (Laurie was not a virgin, not really.) The stone house was haunted. The basement. Helen said it again more ominously: the basement. There were parties all the time. All the first-year girls wanted to go to the parties. They were all afraid to go and none did. A very tall Black man who called himself Satan stood at the door and denied entrance to all but the most beautiful. Those who entered were forced—forced—to drink potion. By the end of week three, Laurie had become half obsessed with the Magic Men. One day after drama class, she and Helen were walking across the groomed lawn of the main quad when Helen pointed over toward the bell tower. “That’s one,” she said. “That’s one of them there.” The guy Helen’s finger aimed at had his foot on the step of the picturesque chapel, as if he were giving a lecture on the history of the stained-glass windows that flanked the front door. He was small with a bushy beard—Laurie flashed on the Seven Dwarfs. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. But he wasn’t that small. Laurie recognized him. The bushy-bearded guy was in her American lit class. He had made a point about Hawthorne that morning that Laurie didn’t really get. “You could totally crush him,” Laurie said to Helen. In her cowboy boots, Helen was 5’10” to Laurie’s 5’6” in flats. “Of course I could,” Helen said. She had her books in a sack on her back, and the straps pulled her T-shirt so tight across her chest that Laurie could see the lace pattern of her bra through the fabric. Helen’s skin was translucent white and so smooth, it seemed unlikely she’d ever had a blemish. Though with the arm-cuttings, she’d made a few of her own. The sun came out of a cloud and reddened Helen’s cheeks. “Have you ever used your karate on anyone?” Laurie asked. Helen laughed. “Not lately. I told you. And if I’m late for Spanish. Again—” “Okay, go, go.” Laurie watched Helen jog around other students, her body—the word actually fit—majestic. Helen worked out and had a brown belt in Taekwondo. She’d grown up in Lake Placid, an hour from the college. Apparently, she’d had a choice between training for the Olympic luge and going to school. Laurie hadn’t remembered what luge was exactly, and Helen had explained that it was basically tobogganing for maniacs. That was a Tuesday. On Thursday, after class, Laurie went up to the Magic Man. “Nick,” she said: she had learned that was his name. He did not respond. “Nick!” He looked at her, and it was as though he was looking at nothing else, thinking of nothing else. He had, for some reason, taken off his shoes during class, and he was standing there in blue-and-white striped socks. Without his shoes, he was almost ridiculously short—heigh-ho, heigh-ho—an inch shorter than Laurie. “Aren’t you Nick?” “My mother calls me that,” he said. “My last name’s Dadinski. Everybody calls me Daddy—except my mom.” “They call him Big Daddy.” Another guy had materialized beside Nick. This guy was tall and lanky, Aryan-looking. It appeared he’d been born in a swimming pool. “Big Daddy?” Laurie gave her best skeptical look. “There’s a Little Daddy at the house,” said Nick. “Bet you can guess what he looks like.” The house. The stone house. They were talking about it. “Can I come?” asked Laurie. Daddy gave a gentle mock leer. “Can you come?” Nick asked. “There are a lot of sketchy answers to a question like that.” “Can I? “If you can,” Daddy said, “you can.” “How will I get in?” Daddy put two fingers to his lips and tenderly kissed them. He reached forward and touched Laurie in the middle of the forehead. “That should do it,” he said. “If Satan can’t see it at the door right away, tell him to use the magic light.” “Tonight?” “Any night.” Daddy slid into a pair of shoes with broken backs and went off with the nautical Aryan. Laurie texted Helen to tell her they’d been invited to the stone house. “When?” Helen asked, which Laurie thought was weird. “Tonight! As soon as possible,” Laurie answered. Thursday night, Helen and Laurie had tryouts for a play. Friday night, Helen texted that she didn’t feel up to the stone house. Laurie was let down, but she used the time to write her first anthropology paper. When Saturday night came, Laurie wasn’t taking chances. She showed up at the off-campus house that Helen shared with two carpenters, grads of the college who, Helen had told Laurie, rented rooms to female undergraduates so they’d have a steady stream of girls to date. Helen had apparently dated both, even though the semester had barely begun. “Nice guys,” she’d said. “No, really they are,” she added, as though Laurie had given Helen a skeptical look. If Laurie had given Helen a skeptical look, she hadn’t meant to. Laurie had a 16-year-old brother who was a sweetheart, everyone said, but only a sister would know if it was really true and, as it happened, it was. It had never occurred to Laurie to doubt that most guys were nice guys. Laurie was beginning to understand that there were tons of girls, girls like Helen, who assumed otherwise. Unfamiliar electronic music floated from the upstairs bedroom of Helen’s house. The front door was unlocked, and Laurie bounded up the stairs. Inside, the wide-open windows in Helen’s room invited a cool October wind to swirl. The walls were decorated with severe pencil drawings of ordinary objects—bowls of fruit, vases, candlesticks—sketched, presumably by Helen, on huge sheets of paper that flapped noisily in the cross-breeze. “Hi there,” Laurie said. “Look at this?” Helen answered and pivoted her computer toward Laurie as though she’d been expecting her. What Helen showed Laurie on the computer was bizarre. “Play it again,” Laurie said. She needed time to take it in. It appeared that Helen had filmed herself shaving her face, as if shaving a beard of foam from a female face were the most seductive act imaginable. The strange, awful part was that after each stroke of the razor, Helen opened her mouth wide and licked it as though the razor head was a delicious lollipop. “Oh my god,” Laurie said. “How did you not totally cut yourself? Let me see inside your mouth.” Helen giggled and opened her mouth for Laurie to inspect. Everything looked fine inside. “There wasn’t actually a blade in the razor, you idiot—it just looks as though there is. It’s the point. What’s happening onscreen is determined by our expectations. Besides,” she added, “no sharp-sharps allowed in proximity to you know who.” “It’s the electronic background music—it’s so creepy. Are you sure you’re okay?” “Of course I am. Do you like the video? I just posted it, and it’s getting tons of attention. It’s probably going in my portfolio for grad school.” Laurie wasn’t sure whether she liked Helen’s video, but she decided that discussing Helen’s portfolio right now might keep them from getting to the stone house. She said she thought the shaving video was dope. “Dope? I’m not going with you to the stone house if you use words like that,” Helen said, but she said it mildly. Laurie blushed pink. It was the second time Helen had schooled Laurie on a word she wasn’t to use. The word bitch had been the first. According to Helen, sorority girls at the college called each other bitch, like, all the time. Hearing certain kinds of white girls copycat an insult because they thought it was cool made Helen want to turn them upside down in pairs, hold them by the ankles, and hit their heads together. Laurie didn’t doubt that Helen could pull this off if she wanted to. “What are you going...
Transcribe →Aging Out
Dec 5, 2024Tap to summarizeGolden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel; Basic Books, 368 pp., $32 Americans used to train for aging and mortality. Mary Moody Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts, practiced death for decades, wearing her burial shroud by day, then climbing into a coffin-shaped bed. Her nephew Ralph Waldo opened tombs to watch decay conquer the bodies he loved: his young first wife, his five-year-old son. In family plots everywhere, gravestones cautioned: As I am now, so you must be. Contemporary America segregates debility and death, and it’s costing us, body and soul, writes Duke University historian James Chappel. We all go into the dark, but too many of us suffer dreadfully in the process. The arc of modernity, Chappel contends, can be read as a struggle between insecurity and security—as material reality, as subjective state. We crave security for ourselves but not necessarily for others, and as we age, these tensions ratchet. Golden Years, a pellucid, unsparing account of the ends of life, anatomizes why a particular vision of old age was constructed in the 20th century, why it fell apart 40 years ago, and what may come next. Chappel believes that the system is worth repairing, if only for its utopian heart: the argument that we all deserve a life of dignity and public support once we become old or disabled. If not for Social Security, nearly 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty. Every part of the aging process is shaped by history, he warns, and as we decide how to handle a hot gray future, “it might help to understand a good deal more about the gray past.” Histories of pension legislation rarely thrill, but Chappel is excellent on the radical, doomed attempts, in the 1880s and after, to repair lives damaged by war and chattel slavery. The long discourse on old-age support was sophisticated, the politics deadlocked. Social Security offered a moderate New Deal compromise, the least worst solution. “Beginning with the 1935 passage of the Social Security Act,” Chappel writes, “Americans were sold an idea of old age.” Yet millions were sidelined from the start, Black people especially, since agricultural and domestic workers were ineligible. Social Security was designed for the industrial working class, firmly aimed at white men with few needs and plenty of family (meaning female) help, and framed as a way to keep younger relatives off the hook. The model, always, was a three-legged stool: government stipend, private savings, employer pensions. Dignified old age was an agreeable byproduct. Yet once checks flowed, recipients grew restless. Chappel writes, They wanted full participation in the life of the nation. They would need health, and they would need things to do: senior centers, golf courses, and more. And they didn’t want to be called “the aged” anymore either. That term was stigmatizing by design. They wanted a name that would signal their desire to belong to the American experiment in the fullest sense. The aged were no more. Now they were senior citizens. And from the ’40s to the ’70s, they ruled. Old-age security, next to military might, became public policy’s central preoccupation, capped by the 1965 passage of Medicare and Medicaid. As free-market government and employers briskly offloaded responsibility, the IRA and the 401(k) appeared, and retirement was marketed, aggressively, as a genuine stage of life. Now the term of art is “older people,” a designation so baggy, it’s meaningless: Over 65? Over 55? Over 50? And the answer to “who speaks for the old?” is, increasingly, no one. Even the vaunted AARP, Chappel tartly notes, is more interested in selling private sector products than pressuring government. The idea of independent old age is fully accepted—hospice, senior clubs, senior transport, a bubble of protection—but in practice, retirement age is rising and the policy effort backsliding, even as other countries enjoy coherent frameworks of care. Some victories persist. Elder poverty has plummeted. Elder health is vastly improved. Older Americans are the only ones with guaranteed access to a functioning welfare state. But there is no workaround for the merciless math of aging. A spike in people over 80, many of them frail, plus the pandemic plus inflation equals a genuine crisis of care, as Social Security’s traditional recipients scramble back to the workplace, and those who never had access to full security despair: the disabled, the divorced, the widowed, the immigrants, the queer. Chappel’s tone throughout is mild and rational, but his findings are disturbing in the extreme, and by the close of the book, his disgust is barely contained. This is at heart a book about care, he writes, and the wrongheaded questions we ask about age and aging. “This is also a book about family—about what it means, and what it could mean, and the ways that families have been asked to do too much.” It is beyond time, he says, to fight fire with fire. Golden Years is most compelling when it walks right up to the line between scholarly distance and social justice and offers, if not solutions, then goals: much higher pay for home health aides; safe, regulated nonprofit nursing facilities; decent senior housing; better pensions all around. His examples of programs that do work are a welcome revelation. The long-running On Lok program in the San Francisco Bay Area offers a coordinated suite of health care and social services to allow independent aging in the community. Third Act, a climate-activism organization, engages people over 60 based on their experience and sense of responsibility; they see all too clearly the tie between climate shift and economic precarity. As organizer Bill McKibben says, older citizens “may have a deeper sense almost of anyone of how much change has come.” Under the ordered surface of Golden Years, another book pulses with artesian force: personal, impassioned, twisty. A memoir, maybe. Chappell, a parent and professor living in the South, has described himself elsewhere as a white moderate. “There is a lot of your dad in this book,” he tells his daughter on the very last page. Would there were even more. In the meantime, he reminds us to watch the clock. Live to 80 and that’s nearly 4,200 weeks, a span absurdly brief and with no guarantees, none at all, if our nation fails to reinvent, yet again, old age. The post Aging Out appeared first on The American Scholar.
Transcribe →My Cousin Manya
Nov 9, 2024Tap to summarizeMy cousin Manya, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, passed away on June 10, 2024, a day before the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, and two months before what would have been her 100th birthday. I hadn’t even known of her existence until 2004, when Manya wrote me a letter care of The New York Times. She had read an article I’d published there about the emergency quintuple bypass surgery that had saved my life. “This is a long shot,” Manya’s letter began, “but I can lose nothing, maybe gain a lot.” She wrote that she had spent three years in Auschwitz, had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen, had lost her mother and father and eight siblings (four sisters, four brothers) to the camps, and had come to America in 1947. When she was a young girl, at the time of her father’s sister Sarah’s wedding, she heard her grandfather speak of a sister in the United States who had married a man with an unusual name—Neugeboren —and she “had always wanted to search into this matter, since there is not a soul left on my father’s side of the family.” She had never forgotten the name, she wrote. She added that her “grandfather’s name was Mendel Gerlich, and he came from Rimanov.” Would I please respond, “regardless of whether there is a connection or not.” My grandmother’s family name was Gerlich, and she and my grandfather came from Rimanov, a shtetl in what is now Poland, near the present Ukraine border and not far from Kyiv. I telephoned Manya, and we talked for a long time. Manya lived in Ellenville, New York, a town in the Catskills about two hours north of New York City, where she had made her home for more than 50 years. Her husband, Herman Eisner, also a survivor of the death camps, had been the rabbi at Congregation Ezrath Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Ellenville, from 1949 until his retirement in 1988. He had died in 1995. By chance, Manya said, she was coming to New York City the next day to see an opthalmologist who was treating her for macular degeneration. We met in the doctor’s waiting room. “Neugeboren?” she asked when she emerged from the doctor’s office and saw me. We embraced, after which she asked me to return to the doctor’s office with her so he could meet me—she had told him the story of how she’d found me, just as, in the days, weeks, and years to come, she would tell the story to others. Then we went to a coffee shop. The evening before, after I talked with Manya and telephoned my children and several cousins to tell them about her, I’d gone through folders that contained information about the Neugeborens and Gerlichs, and I’d brought some of the information with me—a page from my “baby book” in which my mother had written my grandmother’s name (“Bela née Gerlich Neugeboren”); a page from the 1910 U.S. Census that listed the names of my grandparents and their children, and provided data about them. Both Neugeboren and Gerlich are rare names. Any Neugeboren I’ve ever met has come from Rimanov or a village near Rimanov, and for Manya the same was true of the name Gerlich. In the coffee shop, we talked, and we laughed, and we sat there astonished—“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Manya kept saying as we tried to comprehend our story’s obvious and wonderful conclusion: her grandfather and my great aunt had been brother and sister. “Then we are cousins!” Manya said, and after I told her that she had lots of cousins now, she talked of the family she’d lost and, holding my hand, recited the names of her mother and father, and of each of her eight brothers and sisters. My father, like Manya, was one of nine children, and I had grown up with 22 first cousins on his side of the family (and with more than a dozen cousins on my mother’s side). A month or so after Manya and I met, I held a gathering in my Upper West Side apartment to which I invited as many Neugeboren cousins as I could locate, and on that afternoon, Manya kept saying what she would say each time she told the story of how we met: “It’s a miracle! After all the years … it’s a miracle …” Manya and I got together whenever she came to New York for a medical appointment, and we talked by phone regularly. When she and her friend Sherry Solomon came to see a play about the Holocaust, the three of us went together, and Manya and Sherry stayed over in my apartment. The play was based on a book by Primo Levi—Manya had called me as soon as she heard about it on NPR—and we talked about Levi, whom we both admired, as a writer and a man, much more so than Elie Wiesel, a writer Manya considered “too much the showman” to be trusted. On another visit, when I had lunch with Manya and her granddaughters, Rachel and Ilana, I presented her with an advance copy of a new book of mine: News From The New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile, a collection of short stories whose dedication page read, “For my cousin Manya Gerlich Eisner.” I visited Manya several times in Ellenville, in the house located across the street from Congregation Ezrath Israel. The synagogue was situated on a small knoll the town had named Rabbi Herman and Manya Eisner Square. In earlier years, Ellenville had been a vibrant town with a substantial Jewish population—home to The Nevele, one of the largest borscht-circuit hotels, and a hotel some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had stayed in while on vacation. By the time I first visited Ellenville in 2005, however, the hotel had fallen on hard times (it closed in 2009), many of the town’s stores had closed, and most of the young Jewish families had moved away. Manya’s friendship with Sherry Solomon had spanned more than 60 years. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” Manya’s granddaughter Rachel wrote me, “and yet that is exactly what they were: they spoke every single day … walked together and supported one another through all that life is.” Sherry had been a high school English teacher, a college instructor, a secondary school principal, and had earned two doctorates, and when, one afternoon Manya accompanied Sherry to the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz, where Sherry was registering for several classes, Sherry urged Manya to register for a course. When she arrived in the United States, Manya spoke no English and had only an eighth-grade education, but she signed up for a course that day, and subsequently took one or two courses a semester until, in 1979, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree, with honors. When Sherry’s health began to decline, she moved to Florida with her husband, and after he died, she moved to California, where she lived with family, and then, her memory failing, in a nursing home. In 2009, not long after Sherry left Ellenville, Manya asked if I could visit her for a weekend and help her go through documents, correspondence, paintings, and photos because she’d decided it was time to leave Ellenville. Sherry was gone, the synagogue often did not have a minyan on the Sabbath, and her eyesight was failing in a way that made ordinary chores increasingly difficult. Manya loved to read, and the good news, she reported—Manya was forever finding good news in situations that made others despair—was that she had discovered books on tape. She had recently finished listening to Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was now about to listen to the third of six short novels by Anton Chekhov. We talked about our great love for these two writers: James, who’d been born in New York City but had spent much of his early life in upstate New York, not far from Ellenville, and Chekhov, who’d been born in Taganrog, Russia, but who’d spent some of the happiest years of his short life in Odessa, where my mother’s family had come from. We talked, too, about a recently published novel of mine, 1940, which was, in part, about Hitler’s childhood doctor, Eduard Bloch, a Jewish man who had been able to emigrate from Linz, Austria, to the United States—due to Hitler’s intervention. While we went through items Manya had gathered, including photos of her and her husband with Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and other notable politicians, Manya talked about how much she missed Sherry, about the vanishing of Ellenville’s Jewish community, and about her plans to relocate, probably to New Jersey, where relatives on her mother’s side of the family lived. In 2010, Manya moved into a three-room apartment at The Lakewood Courtyard, an Orthodox Jewish assisted-living facility in Lakewood, New Jersey, where Rachel and I would visit with her until shortly before her 99th birthday. Then, unable to care for herself, Manya moved into a Lakewood nursing home, The Leisure Chateau. In Ellenville, New York City, and Lakewood—on walks, in her homes, and on the phone—Manya and I talked endlessly and easily. She always asked first about my children and grandchildren, and when I’d report that they were all well, she’d always say a quick “Thank God” before asking for details. She talked with me about her only child, Moshe, who was living in Florida, and was, like my son Eli, an artist and illustrator. She talked about Moshe’s family—his wife and their three children—and about her two granddaughters and her hope that each of them would meet and marry “a nice young Jewish man.” And she talked about her childhood in Czechoslovakia, and about her years in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen. In one of the courses Manya took at SUNY–New Paltz, a man gave a lecture on the Holocaust in which he talked about Holocaust deniers, at which point, Manya told me, she stood up and said, “I was there and I will talk about my experience whenever you need me.” And so she began talking about her time in the camps to schoolchildren, and also to interviewers from the USC Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg, and the Holocaust Memo...
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