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November 11th, 2019
In anticipation of the current issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, we spoke with poet and novelist Ellen Galford about her writing, as well as topics in Jewish studies more broadly. Galford composed three original poems for issue 37, volume 3, a special issue titled “Narrative Spaces at the Margins of British Jewish Culture(s).”
You can access Shofar through your institutional log-in via Project Muse or JSTOR, visit the Shofar website, or follow Shofar on Twitter @ShofarJournal.
Q: You’ve written fiction and poetry on Jewish themes and topics in the past, and for this special issue of Shofar you’ve written three poems: “The Museum of Margins,” “Mixed Marriage,” and “Curator.” Do you find that one form (poetry or prose) lends itself especially well to exploring certain aspects of Jewish identity or history?
Ellen Galford: There’s an old saying that God’s real reason for creating humankind was to satisfy His/Her/Their (??) voracious appetite for stories. When an image or a theme starts jabbing me between the shoulder blades, I don’t ask it whether it would like to be a poem or a piece of prose when it grows up. Either way, it’s going to be a story that I hope will keep a reader, divine or human, entertained.
Prose has prevailed throughout most of my writing life—screeds of bespoke nonfiction texts for the day job, fiction for the sake of love and politics and taking my imagination wherever it wanted to go. But it was only after novels about lesbian bad girls in Jacobean London, folklore and feminism in the twentieth-century Outer Hebrides, and a satirical slap at the Thatcher government that I came out of the closet as a Jewish writer with novel number four. And at that point prose—with its leisurely story arcs and ample room for any number of digressions—opened the door into the surreal, heretical Jewish world inside my head.
After I stepped across that particular threshold, I came out of the closet as a writer of poetry, too. For years I’d felt uneasy about showing my poems to anyone (apart from a few very personal pieces with specific readers in mind). But maybe it’s because I’ve travelled far enough along in my own personal timeline to acquire a bit of chutzpah and just go for it. Sometimes writing poetry feels like wrestling with an angel (or a pack of noisy demons) all night long. Call it some kind of cockamamie optimism, but I don’t think there is any theme or topic, Jewish or otherwise, that a poem can’t tackle. Making it good enough is another story.
Q: You were originally born in New Jersey but spent much of your life in Scotland. Do your American origins shape your experience in Scotland? Additionally, does your Jewish identity inform the ways you understand national identity, the ways you might personally locate yourself within national or global communities or as a writer?
Galford: I’ve lived in Scotland for a very long time. When I left the US, Nixon was still president. I am what’s sometimes defined as “Scottish by formation.” Politically I view the world through a leftish, internationalist Scottish lens, appalled by Brexit and hoping that we’ll get our independence while I’m still around to see it. But any time I start up a conversation with a stranger, the first question will be “Where’s that accent from?” As soon as I open my mouth, it becomes clear that my origins lie much closer to the banks of the River Hudson than to those of the River Clyde. And although I tend to look at whatever is happening in America as “foreign news,” I know that culturally I am also very much a product of my New York/New Jersey upbringing. Middle-aged taxi-drivers are particularly impressed when I tell them that the TV mafia saga The Sopranos was based on the suburb where I grew up.
Many years ago I did a reading at a feminist bookshop in Massachusetts to mark the US publication of The Dyke and the Dybbuk. The shop manager confessed that “We can’t decide where to put you. The lesbian shelf? The historical fiction shelf? The fantasy shelf? American feminist fiction or European?” I suggested very tentatively that if she ordered a few extra copies she could put them in all the right places.
Like everybody else I know, I belong to several different tribes, some of them Jewish (you can be 98.6 percent secular and still want to learn Talmud). We’ve all made journeys, some of them generations-long, to reach the places where we feel at home, changing and maybe even reinventing ourselves in the process. This certainly informs my thinking not only about national identity but about the ways people define themselves over time in terms of religion, gender, sexuality, political perspective, and so forth. And I can’t understand how any Jew with even the vaguest sense of history can collude with the builders of walls.
Q: Many scholars in the upcoming special issue discuss the ways historians, sociologists, and artists have in the past often limited their explorations of British Jewishness to England. Do you think Jewishness is experienced differently in Scotland than it is in England? How would you describe the relationship between Scottish identity and Jewishness?
Galford: Scotland is a small country (5 million people) with a tiny population of Jews. The Jewish spectrum runs from traditional Orthodox through progressive Liberal to those who wouldn’t put their foot into any shul at all. Most of us live in Glasgow or Edinburgh but we also turn up in remote Highland glens, out on the islands and in tiny fishing villages along the Fife coast. We don’t all know each other.
Heaven forbid I should speak for everybody, but I think I’d be safe in saying that Jewish Scotland is in no way a smaller, rainier version of Jewish London or Jewish Manchester. In Scotland you’d have to be very determined indeed to live in what one might call a separatist Jewish environment, devoid of friends, partners, colleagues, or neighbors from outside the tribe. And Scotland, as we are forever reminding the rest of the world, isn’t England. Our educational systems, legal systems, historical perspectives, and social attitudes differ in many ways. One current sore point is that the Scottish electorate voted by a substantial majority to remain in the European Union, and there is a widespread feeling that we are being dragged out against our will by our southern neighbours.
I’m trying hard to avoid sloppy generalizations here, but I do think that the reasons for this include a much more positive attitude to immigration. This is partly because it is widely understood that Scotland needs more people—demographically and economically—to flourish. But there is also an underlying internationalism. Scots, like Jews, have experienced all manner of displacements and diasporas, forced and voluntary alike. You’d be hard-pressed to find a native-born Scot without family connections in Canada, Australia, the United States, or elsewhere. Like Jews, Scots of all breeds and creeds have long memories, and know what it feels like to look over your shoulder and see the place you came from disappearing from sight.
Q: In two of the poems you’ve written for this special issue, “The Museum of Margins” and “Curator,” you reference the museum space, a library, “draughty corridors,” and “tattered photos.” These poems revolve around the past, including not simply spaces to preserve history (museum, library) but also memories. How would you describe the relationship between place, memory, and the act of writing in your work?
Galford: The one word answer to this question would be: Inseparable. But to make a short story a wee bit longer, I’d say that I’m an inveterate time-traveller. I’m obsessed with places and the sense of place, random objects and the mysteries behind them. If they had an Olympic event in Urban Flâneuring, I’d be a good bet for a gold medal. Yet even though I try hard to stay in the here and now, I find myself drifting across timelines. Sometimes this involves leaping across space as well as time, wandering through my own memories, personal or inherited. And living in Edinburgh, with a medieval castle and a long-dead volcano at its heart, means that any ordinary morning dog walk can take me through many centuries of local history and into deep geological time.
I think these tendencies are probably hard-wired into every Jewish writer’s DNA. They definitely run in the family. My father was a history teacher and my mother a librarian. Both were inveterate sentimentalists and the curators (not always willingly) of a massive horde of family photographs, battered kitchen utensils with a tale attached to every dent and scratch, a cellar and attic crammed with files and boxes of ephemera bearing the fingerprints of at least four generations.
Q: You mentioned that you’ve recently been studying Yiddish and experimenting with Yiddish poetry. What motivated you to learn Yiddish? Is your experience significantly different when writing in Yiddish rather than English?
Galford: It’s only in the past dozen years or so that I’ve begun studying Yiddish in any formal way, but its words and cadences have provided the background music to my life since the day I was born. My maternal grandmother, who lived with us throughout my childhood, was the first American-born child of a large (and talkative) family that emigrated from Riga to New Jersey in the mid-1880s. She and her nine siblings grew up speaking English as their first language but shifted easily into the mameloshn when any passing child drifted into earshot of a juicy conversation. The next two generations followed the old familiar pattern: My mother used a few Yiddish phrases; I knew only a random collection of Yiddish words.
I joined a Yiddish class to reclaim that inheritance and learn the language properly but it’s the literature that keeps me going. I had no particular intention to write poetry in Yiddish (doing it in English seems challenging enough) but sometimes Yiddish words and phrases slip on to the page. The finished poems are, of necessity, short and simple. I’m not the whizz-bang linguist I was in my youth. Despite the best efforts of our wonderful teacher, my grasp of grammar and retention of vocabulary still have a long way to go. It’s probably an act of sheer hubris/chutzpah to try writing Yiddish poetry at all.
Q: Your novel The Dyke and the Dybbuk was the winner of a Lambda Award for Gay and Lesbian Literature, and you’ve written about and been involved with LGBTQ communities in the past. What would you say are the key intersections between LGBTQ identity and Jewish identity? (For you personally or for the communities more broadly).
Galford: I grew up in the pre-Stonewall era of Compulsory Heterosexuality—a time of toxic stereotypes, parents cutting ties with their “deviant” offspring or sending them to shrinks for a “cure.” It took many of us, me included, a longer time than it might now, and quite a few wrong turnings, before we found our ways into who we are. Today’s Jewish and queer communities would have been beyond our wildest imaginings: out and proud gay and lesbian rabbis (indeed, any female rabbis at all), discreet support groups for those in flight from fundamentalist communities (Jewish or otherwise), the etiquette around preferred pronouns.
For all the positive developments, we’ve not quite reached the Promised Land. We can’t even agree what that Promised Land should be or who should have the right to be there. A long history of vicious persecutions, whether at the hands of anti-Semites or homophobes or fascist dictatorships, doesn’t automatically make us all lovely souls. In the particular communities I inhabit—the LGBTQ and the Jewish worlds as well as that turbulent political sphere called “the Left”—there are still those with more appetite for widening schisms than for finding common ground. Case in point: It can sometimes feel more problematical to come out as Jewish than it once felt to come out as a lesbian. This gives me an uncomfortable and very personal sense of déjà vu. But nobody reading this needs me to tell them that we’re living in dangerous times.
Filed under: UncategorizedAugust 19th, 2019
In preparation for his forthcoming title Teaching in the Now: John Dewey on the Educational Present, we briefly talked to author Jeff Frank about the book, what motivated him to write it, and the reason for advocating for John Dewey’s work in the modern educational landscape.
Q: Could you briefly explain your book, for those who are not familiar?
Jeff Frank: I wrote this book out of appreciation for John Dewey’s thinking on how to create a meaningful educational present for students. Too often, we treat the present as mere preparation to do something rewarding or interesting in the future. When we do this, we lose student interest and engagement. Dewey argues that the best preparation for a meaningful future is learning to live meaningfully in the present.
Q: What prompted you to write Teaching in the Now, and what do you hope to accomplish with the book?
Frank: I wrote this book for two main reasons. First, I worry that we don’t do enough to value the present moment. Schooling can be tremendously interesting, but it loses its interest when we defer meaningful work to the future. Second, I wrote this book for students new to Dewey’s work in the hopes of showing them why they should take him seriously. Though his work may initially appear difficult, I wrote this book in the hopes that it might make it easier to stick with Dewey.
Q: What is it that motivates you to advocate for Dewey’s work in such a purposeful way?
Frank: A major motivation for this project is a sense of hope. John Dewey believed that each one of us harbor deep potential, and he also believed that activating that potential was one way to ensure the future of a strong democracy in the United States. My belief, one I share with Dewey, is that we need to do everything we can to make each moment in the classroom as engaging and rewarding as possible for students. Doing this is not only good for students, it is also good for our democracy. By helping students realize their potential in the present moment, we are helping to bring about a better future. My book is meant to aid teachers as they create these types of experiences for their students.
Q: You mention some treating the present as “mere preparation to do something rewarding or interesting in the future”. How do you feel this mentality come about? How have you seen it manifest?
Frank: In many ways, this is the key point. Dewey believes in the importance of thinking about how we acquire habits and what these habits make possible or foreclose. When it comes to “mere preparation,” Dewey might think about the habit many of us get into where we think things like: Once I have X job I will be happy, or Once I have X amount of money I will be happy, or Once I have tenure, or my own classroom I will begin doing the things I truly want to do. For Dewey, we should begin living the life we aspire to, as much as possible, in the present moment. For a teacher, this means trying to create the most engaging environment for students we can, in the present moment, not deferring until ideal conditions are met.
This brings up a related point. Someone may wonder: But aren’t there just some things we just have to learn? To this, I have two responses. First, I coached three sports in addition to teaching high school English, and there are indeed things one must learn before doing more advanced work. For example, if you don’t know how to spin correctly in the discus circle, there is no way to throw as effectively as possible. But there are ways to make the learning how to spin more or less engaging. The same holds true in the classroom Robert Frost, an excellent teacher himself, noted that explaining a joke doesn’t make it funny. The same is true with a poem. Spending time explaining why a poem is interesting in preparation for helping a student enjoy a poem is often counterproductive. A teacher should look for poems that are appropriately challenging and that they think students will actually find interesting, thereby giving students the most meaningful experience of learning in the present.
My second point is this. When we are learning how to do things outside of a school setting, how do we learn best? How do we prepare to cook or ski or develop a passion for music or movies? While some people may spend hours reading about skiing or testing skis out off of the slopes, more often than not we try things out. This experimenting allows us to see what we need to learn in order to improve, and this leads us to develop a passion for figuring things out so that we can make progress. Or to ask another question, when you want to share your passion with a friend, how do you do it? Do you make them do a lot of preparatory work, or do you try to use your pedagogical creativity so that the first experience your friend has with what you are passionate about makes them want to learn more and engage more deeply with that passion? Dewey would argue that we can approach teaching this way, seeing the goal of teaching as creating the type of present that makes students want to learn more. Far from leaving students unprepared, these are the experiences that instill habits of thinking and acting that make students more able to engage more deeply with their learning in the future.
Q: How would you explain the importance of your book, and your field as a whole, to a lay audience?
Frank: This book is important because it helps teachers and future teachers think about how to create an engaging and educative present for their students. It also makes Dewey’s work more accessible. Anyone who teaches Dewey’s Experience and Education or anyone reading Dewey’s educational philosophy for the first time will—I hope—find something of interest in my book.
Get 30% off your own copy of Teaching in the Now by ordering it from our website with the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: Uncategorized