My Daughter's Graduation Ceremony

The Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, Professor Boaz Shamir, spoke about what he had learned as a student, and about what he hoped the graduating students had learned. He mentioned five things: learning to think, learning to learn, learning about a field, developing (or beginning to develop) a world view, and knowing oneself better.
Since our daughter was living with us for two of the three years of her studies, we could see that on every front, she was achieving those five things, and it was a privilege and pleasure for us as parents to see her develop.
The Dean's words prompted me to look back at what I took away from my own undergraduate education. It seems to me that on the first four of the five counts, I did well at Princeton. But I don't think I knew myself much better at the end. I asked Judith whether she would say that her four years at Wellesley gave her self-knowledge, and she laughed.
We were both twenty-one when we graduated, and Hannah, our daughter, is twenty-five, because, like most Israelis, she served in the army for two years and also did a lot of travelling before beginning her studies. It isn't possible for twenty-one year olds to know themselves as well as twenty-five year olds, and it probably isn't possible for universities to attempt intentionally to provide students with self-knowledge. But it would probably be a good idea if beginning students were told that one of their major tasks in the coming years would be to increase their self-knowledge -- whether they're studying physics or finance.

The Case of Joshua Redman

I don't really mean to use such a gifted person as a "case."
He had a choice: to pursue a career in law or to give himself a chance to become a great musician.
Another African-American, in an earlier time, Paul Robeson, faced the same choice and, in fact, attended Columbia Law School. Then, confronted by blatant racism in the law office where he was working, he developed exploited his talent as a singer and actor.
But Joshua Redman reached maturity in a new era, with a lot less racism, and, with his intellectual gifts, he could well have been in line to be the second African-American president, after Barack Obama. It must have been a very difficult choice for Redman: Yale Law School and the road to political and economic power and a solid social position or the tenor saxophone and the risks of a career in music. I honor his courage for taking the risky path, and, having heard him play recently, I am grateful to him for making that choice.
I have read about other very talented young people who chose the piano over medical school or a career in mathematics over a career as a violinist. I also read about a man who was a successful ballet dancer until he reached his forties and then started college as a freshman. Of course a dancer, like an athlete, knows that his career will end with his youth, and, if he is prudent, he will plan for the future. But usually the options we are offered are mutually exclusive, which makes the choice among them agonizing. How can a person of twenty-two begin to imagine what his or her life will be like in another couple of decades?
At my age, my options are more restricted than they ever were, from one point of view. After all, how much can I do even if I am granted another twenty years of decent health? But they are also less restricted than before: I've esssentially done what was expected of a man from my background; there's no point in regretting what I might have achieved and failed to attain; what's done is done. There's less risk now in deciding to put all my chips on a number and letting the ball stop where it will.

Potting Progress

More than a year has gone by since I first sat at a potter's wheel with a lump of clay in front of me and tried to center it. By now I can center smallish balls of clay pretty consistently. At first, if I managed to create a vessel of any shape, I was pleased with it. In the past few months I've begun to make stricter demands of myself. I want the vessels to remain centered from start to finish. I want them to have thin walls, so they won't be too heavy. And of course I want them to look graceful.

I've also become more concerned with decoration and finish, less willing to accept whatever happens. Perhaps I've become less playful and spontaneous, and pottery isn't quite as much fun. But I still love the feel of the clay in my hands, the challenge of getting it centered and making it take the shape I want to give it, and it's still fun to get to the class and find a couple of newly fired pieces that I can take home.

Do I have a long term goal?
I'm not sure.
Is making a lot of bowls, cups, plates, and pitchers a long term goal?
For the moment I'm deeply involved in the process, not concerned with the outcome. And I have to remember that I'm doing it for fun!

As with music, the farther I progress, the more possibilities for progress become visible. It's like climbing a mountain: when you get to the top of a foothill, you see the peak that was hidden behind it.

Sometimes I let myself fantasize: I'm going to quit my paying work and devote myself to pottery. I'll open a studio with a store in the front and sell my own work and the work of other (better) ceramicists on commission. More realistically, I imagine buying a good electric kiln and a wheel of my own. But in fact, meanwhile, the two and a half hours a week I spend at pottery lessons is about all the time I can spare for that right now. I have set aside a space in a spare room where I can do some hand building, but in the past few weeks, I haven't even had time for that. I wouldn't take the step of equipping a studio unless I were sure I'd be using it almost every day. Maybe it wouldn't be fun anymore.

A Writer's Statement

This is the statement that I prepared for a reading sponsored by IAWE, the Israeli Association of Writers in English, which was held in Tel Aviv in February.

Why We Must Keep Writing

Despite the Inadequacy of Language and Our Skill in Using It

During the past few years, I’ve been increasingly aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience.

Let me illustrate by evoking two scenes from my recent life.

On a Friday night a few weeks ago, a friend of mine from college, an extremely austere and quiet professor of Chinese who has been dividing his time between Princeton and the Hebrew University for the past fifteen years or more, brought another classmate of ours, as effusive and ebullient as the professor is withdrawn, to our home. Though we had been friends in college, I hadn’t seen this other man since we graduated in 1966. I knew that he was born in 1943 on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where his mother was hiding, and that he and his parents survived and got to New York in the early 1950s. I also recalled that they had scratched out a living selling brassieres on the Lower East Side. That much I remembered about my friend – but I knew next to nothing about what had happened to him since then.

For about an hour and a half, with frenetic energy, which came in part from the excitement of seeing an old friend after so many years, he spoke to us about his life. It was like a private stand-up performance – and I realize that I don’t possess the literary skills to convey the scene, which was hilarious, with deep tragic dimensions, and heightened by the coincidence that at that Sabbath meal we happened to have volunteered to host two Christian visitors from Michigan, kind, intelligent people – but absolutely bland compared to the brilliant, entertaining, energetic man who had dropped in on us! If they were hoping for exposure to authentic Jewish people, they sure got some.

Then last Shabbat, my wife and I participated in the Bat-Mitzvah celebration of my second cousin’s husband’s grand-daughter – the kind of tenuous family connection that somehow can matter here in Israel. During a small luncheon for family and close friends, I noted the huge variety of people assembled there: from a demented retired Conservative rabbi to a Korean convert to Judaism, and I realized how much literary skill it would take just to convey everyone’s background – forget about a plot!

My third lesson in the inadequacy of language is painful. Quite a few of you know me personally, so you know that I suffered a tragic loss last year, when my twenty-eight year old son Asher fell to his death while hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. During the past year, almost all of the personal writing that I’ve done has been connected with this loss. I kept a blog about it to share my feelings and experiences with our friends. But of course the words came nowhere close to expressing what I was feeling – and still feel.

I had number of reasons for writing about our loss in the public form of a blog. It was a way to make my writing available to family and friends without imposing on them by sending them individual emails, for example, which they may have felt required to read. With the blog, if they didn’t want to read, they didn’t have to. And if a stranger somehow stumbled on the blog and benefited by sharing my feelings, that would please me, though I have no idea how many strangers actually logged onto it and read it. I wasn’t even tempted to put a guest counting widget on the blog, because I didn’t want to get caught up in wondering whether or not I had an audience, or in feeling disappointed if I wasn’t reaching more than a handful of readers. If my wife and children read it, and some other people close to me, that was enough. Nevertheless, it was important for me to make it at least semi-public, and that’s a point I’ll return to.

I managed to attain a degree of self-revelation in the blog, and it has had some unexpected and heartwarming personal consequences. For example, a few weeks ago a Hebrew author whom I admire and once interviewed for the Jerusalem Post found me on the Internet and got in touch with me by email. She was looking for a translator and wanted to know if I was still in that business. She’s been abroad for the past ten years, so we’ve been out of contact.

I decided to tell her about what had happened in our family by referring her to my blog. (I don’t do that with everybody I am in contact with: it depends on how personal I feel about them.) This writer is a clinical psychologist, and, as she told me in an intense correspondence, she also lost a child – her first one, a son who died of an illness when he was six. She encouraged me to write – not the blog, but fiction. Writing should be my way of coping with grief. With the blog, that has been the case – but as to writing fiction ... I don’t know. I’m not ready yet.

I began by saying that life has made be acutely aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience – but I should add that life has made me equally aware of the marvelous ability of language to stimulate the imagination and thus enlarge our experience. And that is why we should keep on writing, even if we’re not as successful at it as we could wish.

I engage in two main expressive activities aside from writing: music and ceramics. I have been an active amateur musician for many years, and I’ve kept up with that almost obsessively during this year of bereavement. By contrast, pottery is new for me. Last spring, spontaneously, without brooding about it or planning it, I looked for ceramics classes on the Web, found one within walking distance of my house, enrolled, and have been happily messing about with clay ever since. For my psychological health, I knew it would be useful to do something new, something not laden with memories of my son (although he was a very talented artist), and something non-verbal – as music is non-verbal. And I was right.

If I’m suspicious of language and glad to spend time in non-verbal activities, that’s because I’ve always been excessively verbal. Silence troubles me. My working hours consist mainly in translating Hebrew to English and occasionally editing English, so words are always reverberating in my head, and I’m constantly involved in the technicalities of writing. It’s also a craft I’ve come to know a good deal about, so I’d like to move toward a conclusion by being bluntly honest with this group about our writing.

I think it’s safe to say that no one in this room, no contributor to ARC, is ever going to be recognized as a major writer, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone by saying that. It’s even safer to say that none of us is going to get rich and/or famous by writing. If we go on writing, it’s because the activity of writing is important to us, not because what we write is important to a large outside audience, waiting breathlessly for our next magnum opus.

However, though we don’t have a large outside audience, we do have a small inside community, and our writing lives and matters in that community – essentially the people in this room and the people outside it whose lives we touch.

There are many bad reasons for writing, mainly connected with excessive egotism. But there are also a lot of good reasons for it, even if one can’t approach the level of the writers one admires (here I speak for myself). After all, I’m not terribly surprised or upset that I can’t play tenor saxophone as well as a professional who started off with more talent than I have and has devoted his or her whole life to music. I don’t expect ever to be more than a decent amateur player, but I do appreciate great musicians because I know how hard it is to play at their level. As for my pottery, I’m not aiming to exhibit in the next biennale or to sell my work in the lovely shops in Nahalat Shiv’a. But my friends seem to be pleased when I bring a misshapen little bowl as a house present when I come for dinner. So, I also don’t kick myself for not being as successful (both in terms of gaining recognition and in terms of mastery of the art) a writer as Bellow, Updike, Nabokov, or Borges – or some of the people I have translated, like Appelfeld and Agnon. Trying makes me appreciate their greatness and their devotion to the art.

Aware that I am not a great or important literary artist, I still want to share my words, to get them out into the world, because publishing gives our work reality, just as playing music for an audience makes it count in a way that it doesn’t have when you’re only playing by yourself in your room. The imaginative depth I spoke of before can exist in isolation, but it’s stronger when it’s shared. Our task as Israeli writers in English is to create a public space for our writing, a public space tolerant of our shortcomings, patient with our limitations, and appreciative of what we do achieve. We should all be grateful to one another for providing enough of a public to make our writing live.

Technique and Creativity

I see it in all three of the areas of creativity in which I'm active: writing, music, and now pottery (from poetry to pottery).

Without technique, one's creativity is limited.
True, children are endlessly creative and boldly imaginative, but the limits of what a child can do are evident.

However: the effort to acquire technique often stifles creativity.
The young writer becomes aware of the need to write correctly and stifles her imagination.
The young musician strives to control her instrument and stifles her expressivity.
The young potter concentrates so hard on producing centered, symmetrical, and light pieces that she loses the drive for originality and spontaneity.

For the mature artist, technique and creativity feed into one another. One enhances one's technique in order to create things that were beyond one, and one's enhanced technique spurs one's imagination for further creativity.

When I took up music again after more or less giving up on it while I was in college, I studied for two or three years with Stephen Horenstein, a brilliant composer and virtuoso saxophone player - who became and has remained a good friend. At the time, Steve said that if someone were just playing his instrument without being creative at it, there was no point to it. That was the first time I'd heard that from a music teacher. Up till then the challenge had been to play the notes correctly.
I wasn't ready for Steve's message then and, while I kept on playing saxophone, never really extended myself creatively at it.
About fifteen years down the line I acquired a musical guru of sorts: Arnie Lawrence. Perhaps because I was ready for it, I let Arnie push me hard in the creative direction.

Have I become a creative musician? A creative person?
These are the wrong questions.
I am more creative than I was and more appreciative of creativity when I encounter it.
That's already a lot.

Getting into Pottery

I am ordinarily slow to come to decisions, but the decision to start taking pottery lessons was quick and virtually instinctive.
When I was a child of ten or so, my mother enrolled me in a pottery class at Greenwich House, near our home in Greenwich Village, New York City. I was too young to walk to Greenwich House on my own, because I would have had to cross Sixth Avenue by myself, so she took me there. We walked downtown along Washington Square West, where we lived, then to the west on Fourth Street, probably a ten minute walk. It would have taken too much of her time for my mother to leave me, go home, and then come back to get me, so she enrolled in an adult class.
I enjoyed pottery, but after a year or two, all the other boys in the class dropped out, and, I being too young to see the advantage of being alone with a room full of girls, dropped out, too. Meanwhile, my mother remained an avid amateur ceramicist throughout most of the following years.
The idea of taking up the craft as an adult never occurred to me until a few months ago.
I looked up pottery classes on the Internet and spotted one that seemed appropriate from every point of view - it was within walking distance from my house in Jerusalem, the price was not too high, and the hours were extremely flexible. I called up the teacher right away, arranged to go to see her setup, and within a day or two I was sitting at one of her wheels, struggling to center a rapidly turning lump of clay.
Hadas, my teacher is a tall, thin young woman, and her studio is in two front rooms of a small rented apartment in an extremely expensive neighborhood. She has four wheels, a kiln in a shed outside her door, and the clay, firing, and glazes are included in the price of the class. The downside of the flexibility she offers us in scheduling our sessions is that she constantly has to juggle us from one slot to another. Because my time is pretty much in my own control, I have attended classes on various days, at various hours, and so met many of her students. They are mainly women, but now I don't mind that.
Hadas' teaching method is low key and unintrusive. She lets us work on our own and waits for us to ask her how to do things. That suits me perfectly.
I think I would have been happy as a potter. If I'd stuck at it as an adolescent, I'm sure I would have gotten more and more deeply involved in it, maybe gone on into it. But who knows? There were so many external pressures on me at the time, pressure to excel academically, pressure to get into a fine university and qualify for some prestigious kind of work, that I wasn't ever in touch with what I wanted. I can't imagine that I would have considered going to art school and majoring in ceramics in the face of all that pressure, for I had completely internalized the values it came from. I thought that art school was for people who weren't good at other, more important things.
Now, however, as I approach my mid-sixties, having done all the things I was supposed to do, more or less -- received a BA from a prestigious university, earned a doctorate at another prestigious university, worked for decades as a translator (in other words, I put my intellectual gifts to some kind of use), raised a family, and so on -- I feel as if pottery is the artistic medium I have been searching for all my life.
I always wanted to be some kind of artist, but never got it together to become one. Since I'm very verbal, I thought I ought to be a writer, that if I had an artistic medium, it would be words. Indeed, I have had some modest success as a writer and translator, but I never felt delight in what I wrote. I also have some visual skills, and I was seriously involved in photography for a few years, but there, too, I didn't find that I was taking pictures that anyone else couldn't have taken. When I was doing photography, it was more a way of running away from my disaffection with graduate work than involvement in the thing itself.
I am also a serious amateur musician. I play saxophone and clarinet and even went back to university to study musicology half time for three years. I love hearing and playing music, but I'll never be seriously good at it. Not that I mind. I'm not ambitious as a musician. I'm glad to have opportunities to play, and I enjoy it. It's refreshing to do something without being ambitious about it. Perhaps ambition is what took the pleasure out of writing for me - but let's not go into that for the moment.

Smashing all my Pots

As I may have mentioned, a supremely generous woman has been allowing me to use her pottery studio a few times a week for the past three months or so, and I produced thirty or forty vessels on her wheel. I was planning to ask her to fire them. Then I was planning to bring them to the studio where I take lessons to glaze them and fire them again.
When I asked Hadas, my teacher, whether that would be possible, she told me that I had made an irreparable error: I mixed different kinds of clay that have to be fired at different temperatures. So she can't fire them for me.
It is true that if I had my own kiln and my own glazes, I could have glazed and fired them all at a low temperature, but I'm far from there. So the only thing I could do was smash them all and soak them in water to reclaim the clay - which remains clay that I won't be able to glaze, though I can fire it.
Early this morning I went down to the studio and broke up almost all the vessels I had thrown over the past three months. I put them in a tub of water to turn them back into raw clay, which I've decided to use for projects that don't need glazing. Maybe I'll make a bunch of flower pots, for example, and some sculptures. This morning I started in that direction. But I'm prepared to smash all that in a month or two.
Oddly enough, I have absolutely no regrets about any of the pots that I destroyed. My standards have been going up as my skill has increased, and I didn't see much point in firing and glazing a bunch of heavy, lopsided, clumsy pieces.
Many teachers of pottery impose stringent discipline on beginners, making them smash every pot that isn't centered. Hadas, the teacher I've been going to, is more laissez faire, and she's right. Sometimes clumsy pots have a charm of their own. Why discourage people when they're doing pottery for the fun of it?