What gave you the idea to write “Two Supplicants in the Queen City?”
For the last few years, I’ve immersed myself in a big family-biography project/memoir focused on the first American-born generation on my father’s side. Wading through the extensive archival holdings at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, as well as continuing to sift material in my own and other family members’ collections, I’ve been seeking ways to write my way into this mass of material and make sense of it — and especially to excavate the voices of the women of that generation.
I originally conceived of the whole project as centering on my great-grandmother, Natalie Reichert Sprung. She wrote a family memoir (in the form of letters to her unborn first grandchild, my aunt Isabelle) in 1944-45, and I initially imagined this self-published work — which has circulated among the family for generations — serving as the key text. But I set the memoir aside as I was reading the correspondence among the siblings in the archives. Then when I came back and re-read it, the story of this excursion to Cincinnati immediately captured my attention — in part, because I too spent time in that city at significant junctures in my life. The framing of the essay presented itself to me early in the process.
You went to Cincinnati to conduct research; Natalie went because she was invited by her brother. In what way were you both “supplicants?”
Merriam-Webster tells me that a supplicant is “one who makes a humble entreaty.” In retrospect, it’s a bit hyperbolic — or at least, ironic — for me to use the term. For one thing, “humble” is not a word I’d use to describe my great-grandmother’s stories about her family. We descendants of the five American-born Reichert siblings have always wondered, “Where did this family’s oversize sense of ambition — its sense of its own significance — come from?” And further: “How did the siblings reckon with those dreams in their later decades, by which time reality had clipped or thwarted their early ambitions?” Those two questions are fueling the larger project of which this essay is a part.
But my use of this word, “supplicants,” is also sincere. I imagine both of us — me and my great-grandmother — posing questions to the universe, with the very act of embarking on these journeys to Cincinnati and back: Who am I? Who or what can I really be?
Based on knowledge of your great grandmother and her writings, you made use of “perhapsing,” when you imagine Natalie’s first encounter with her future husband, and again when you imagine a suitor reading poetry to her. What do you like about this technique, and what does it do for your essay?
I attended my first creative nonfiction workshop a few years ago, to which I brought a different essay based on this family material. One of the key lessons I learned from Sonja Livingston at this workshop, and which I encountered in my favorite works of creative nonfiction, thereafter, is that you can imagine your way into the past — if you make it clear to your reader that you are constructing an imaginary scene. As with fiction, it’s crucial to imbue that world with realness, within the world-building parameters that the writer sets out. Till recently, fiction was my primary mode of creative writing, so using tools native to fiction in my nonfiction work has felt both alluring and complex.
When Natalie wrote her 1945 memoir, you felt that she referenced her father’s letters as “evidence of this abandoned excursion.” Although she was circumspect in her writing, do you think she hoped a future reader might sympathize with her situation?
The first thing to note is that she hoped for future readers, period. She says at the outset of the memoir that, when young, she hoped to write the Great American Novel, and she acknowledges that this dream will not be fulfilled (she was fifty at the time). It’s a poignant and startling admission and I somehow completely missed it (!) till a recent re-reading.
Second: I think she hoped that future readers would sympathize with her situation. But also, I think she tries to show that the entreaties from her father to leave Cincinnati and return to New York came from a place of love. I don’t think she was hoping that future readers would feel sorry for her or blame her father for the turn of events but rather gaze wistfully with her toward a road not traveled. I think, if asked, this is the rationale she would have offered for sharing her father’s letters.
And yet: I can take the evidence she has set out — and she did set out this evidence — and tease further meaning out of it. She might not have liked the resentment I express in the essay; to me, her father’s efforts come across as nakedly manipulative. But on the other hand: maybe she would have been relieved to hear it named in this way, all these years later.
In her memoir, Natalie could have lamented her decision to leave Cincinnati and return home. Do you think her nuanced style was more effective?
In fact, one of the perennial frustrations of this project comes from my wish that my great-grandmother told a more unvarnished telling of her family’s story. I want Natalie to signal that she felt controlled by her father — to show some anger! But it’s not there on the level of plain text.
As I work with her memoir, I’ve begun to understand her writing as an exercise in both self-aggrandizement and self-censorship deflection of truth at the juncture of propriety and vanity. I must consider Natalie’s artifice as a storyteller as part of the story I need to tell about her and the family.
What other authors do you admire who are also driven by “writing” and “family?”
I just read Janet Malcom’s Still Pictures for the first time and was entranced and challenged and inspired by her project of excavating self and family, and her deep engagement with photographs as points of entry to this work. Annie Ernaux’s The Years is another recent favorite, and a model for writing the stories of our ancestors while locating ourselves — as historical actors and as writers — within this “we.”
What other writing projects are you planning?
I have several different projects underway. I’m working on a Jewish-feminist-horror novella. I’m also always writing and revising short stories. And I’m going to keep chipping away at this big, messy, family-biography-slash-memoir, one essay at a time.
