The first act in life occurs roughly from conception to age 30. The second act, 30-60. And the third, 60-death.

The 34 years that have been added to the human life span since the time of our great grandparents constitute a revolution in the field of human longevity. Naturally, if it’s a revolution, Jane wants to be there.

This group of older citizens worldwide, especially older women who live longest, could become an irrepressible, irresistible force for good. Much like the concept of Ubuntu described in my recent post, the life review process during the third act, if we actually conduct one, gives each of us the chance to find wholeness at last.

Instead of an arch that peaks in middle age and then declines, the best image for the human spirit in the third act, says Fonda, is a stairway. I like to think of it like a stairway to heaven. But we can only climb the stairway if we do the work of reviewing our lives, forgive ourselves and others, come back to our broken places and know them again for the first time. If we become whole, we don’t just seek our own salvation, we take risks so that younger people can climb the staircase also — and re-conceive their own lifespans. Instead of dreading decrepitude, they can envision themselves as evolving into wisdom figures.

No matter what you may think of the various stages of Jane Fonda’s own life, she seems to be walking her talk in this video. Without ever using the word memoir, she makes the case for a life review that builds peace in the world. To that I can only say, “Brava!”

What is your response to this idea?

Richard seems to be walking a parallel path in Appalachian Ohio to mine here in Brooklyn. When I found his blog Narrative a year or so ago, I reached for my shepherd’s crook and snagged it!

Richard has written about my post about the idea of Ubuntu and memoir on his blog. He also interviewed me. Part One of a two-part series asks me about my memoir’s working title, Rosy Cheeks and about how I structured my writing process over the last five years. While you are on Richard’s blog be sure to click on his favorite memoirs and read a few of his reviews. You’ll understand why I consider myself a learner in Richard’s classroom! And give him a little blogger love — leave a comment!

What other blogs do you love to read? Do you have any to recommend to me or to my readers?

Welcome to the new look for 100memoirs.com! The old site still exists and has migrated to the new location, shirleyshowalter.com. I have now met the original goal of reading 100 memoirs! I discovered over the last three years and 315 posts that readers love lists of top memoirs for their own reading selection. So you can find many good lists here.

As you may recall, I announced the good news of signing a book contract for my own childhood memoir. After my hair color transformed from auburn to grey, I invited readers to help me choose photos here. If you’ve been riding the waves of change with me through the past three years, thank you! Stay on board because the fun is just beginning.

If you are new to this site and this blog, welcome aboard.

From now on, my emphasis is shifting slightly from reviewing memoirs and musing about memoir as a genre (although I will still feature guest interviews, author interviews, etc. from time to time) to sharing some of my own struggles, questions, and triumphs as I complete a manuscript. I have now drafted six chapters out of fourteen.

I’m sticking to my schedule, but I’m also finding that writing is hard work. Mary Karr recently said writing (especially memoir writing) is like hoeing a long row in the hot sun. I know all about hoeing, since I grew up hoeing tobacco. I think Mary’s metaphor is absolutely perfect. If you are a writer also, or if you are a reader who dreams about writing, I hope you will come out in the hot sun with me.

That’s why I created the video (see right-hand column) to introduce an e-book on the subject my readers care about: How to Write a Memoir. I hope you have watched the video and have signed up to get the free book and the weekly Magical Memoir Moments. I had so much fun creating them while thinking about you.

With Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Fetzer Institute colleagues

One of my strongest beliefs is that we are all connected to each other, and that good things happen when we tell our stories. One of the great blessings of my life has been the opportunity to spend time with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Along with a group of leaders from The Fetzer Institute, I was able to sit around a circle with this remarkable man for several hours on several occasions over four years.

Archbishop Tutu has made the South African word ubuntu (Xhosa language) legendary worldwide. He explains it to students engaged in the Semester at Sea program in a short video here:

The words that inspire me most from this video seem at first blush to be antithetical to the idea of writing memoir: “There is no such thing as a solitary individual.” But when you add the rest of the Archbishop’s words, you see why memoir writing is much more than a single writer with a pen in her hand. It is a radical act: “I want you to be all you can be so that I can be all that I can be. I need you to be you so that I can be me.”

I invite you into a writing journey that will help lead you to be more you than you ever have been before. I feel myself becoming more me just by extending the invitation.

How shall we begin the next phase of this journey? What is your reaction to this idea?

Brooklyn, New York

It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just closed the book A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. Outside Flatbush Ave. pulses with movement and light in the rain. The wet streets glisten and double the images of white headlights approaching, red taillights receding, and green traffic light swaying above.

The Express Lube carwash sign glows brightly, but the flag in front of it flutters wanly in the wind, its thin sodden fabric no longer furling, Under the large scarlet letters CAR WASH the burnt-out remains of another sign are faintly visible. But the last two letters burn brightly. OIL CHANGE has become merely GE.

High above the street looms a huge billboard with Adam Sandler’s face inviting us to his Christmas movie Jack and Jill. And above the billboard a huge blue logo accompanied by a single word in white letters: CHASE.

A woman heading this way onthe dark street fights the rain with a flimsy umbrella. From a distance she resembles a pteradactyl, giving the contemporary urban scene a touch of prehistoric mystery. Thousands of windows have a view of this same street, so perhaps I shouldn’t imagine that I am the only one watching this one woman in this particular place at this moment of time.

I think about the connections and differences between the life I’ve just read about and my own. Just five miles from the high-rise condo building on Myrtle Ave. where I am staring out the window, Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville still exists. His memoir, written in 1946 when he was still in his early ’30′s, already described a lost place, a place of immigrants yearning to breathe free, a place the author both loved and hated.

Alfred Kazin

I actually met Alfred Kazin in the 1980′s when he lectured at Goshen College and I was a professor there. He was at that time about 68 years old, only five years older than I am now. I thought he was ancient. The only one of his books I had read at that time was On Native Grounds. In graduate school it was considered an example of “old school” literary criticism.

Among New York Jewish intellectuals in the 1940′s-1960′s, where Kazin earned his literary and cultural street creds, his least honored work was his three-volume autobiography. Considered too personal to  ”count,” with his peers at the time they were written, the three books that begin with A Walker in the City (and also include Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew) may well become the most classic texts of his long and voluminous career. I now understand why A Walker in the City rates so well as a coming-of-age memoir even though it is basically a collection of essays rather than an integrated narrative. The secret lies in the layering of childhood and adulthood, the vivid sensory detail and the emotional intelligence of the narrating author.

How does a writer remember such vivid physical and emotional detail from childhood? Kazin is almost as gifted as Vladimir Nabakov in doing so. Here’s just one example. As he plays a game called Indian trail, “the greatest moment came when I could plunge into the darkness down the block for myself and hide behind the slabs in the monument works. I remember the air whistling around me as I ran, the panicky thud of my bones in my sneakers,and then the slabs rising in the light from the street lamps as I sped past the little candy story and crept under the fence.” Every child runs. Only a one in a million adults remembers running this way.

Flannery O’Conner once said, ”The fact is that anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

The drama of childhood is all about newness, ritual, feelings expressed and unexpressed, attachment and loneliness. The experience may well be small, the space limited, and the information scant, but a great writer makes the most of quotidian materials.

I am awed by this ability. Sometimes, reading the work of really great memoirists, I feel very small because they seem to be able to remember and evoke such profound detail. Then I read an article in The New York Times last week about talent and its correlation with working memory. After that one, I feel like that woman on the street struggling against the wind, her umbrella offering no shelter.

Anybody out there know what I am talking about? I suspect that part of the solution to this problem is to write and write and write. Sometimes the detail comes back that way, the perfect metaphor flashes with light. The sidewalks of memory glisten in the rain. One thing is sure. If I don’t write a lot, I’ll never remember beyond the broad, sunny, surface. If I want to get to the double image, I’ll need to sing, a lot, in the rain.

The contract was completed August 5. It’s taken me three months to tell my readers about it.

I was tempted to go incognito and then spring the surprise when the book was published. But the more I meditated on whether and how to share my good news, the more I recognized a core dilemma. I’ve found that if I wrestle with these dilemmas, opportunities arise.

The dilemma: Mennonites frown on excessive individualism and can pick up signs of pride from a mile away. Some might even say that “a single life Mennonite memoir” is an oxymoron. Pride will be a major theme in my book. As an imaginative, inquisitive, and exuberant child, I confronted the church’s teachings against pride in my youth even while absorbing and appreciating the church’s greatest gifts – community, simplicity, and peace.

That liminal space between becoming smaller for the sake of others and celebrating too wildly at my own party has taken me a lifetime to find. Sometimes I fail utterly. Sadly, I’ve had to learn how to celebrate outside my faith community. But what I really long for is a celebration larger than self — a way to bring the self fully present and alive inside the community and at the same time enlarge the space of the community itself. Could this happen? Could it happen through memoir — not only my own, but others?

Let me tell you a little story:

The best-selling book by a Mennonite author for many years was the Mennonite Community Cookbook first published in 1950. The author was Mary Emma Showalter, my husband’s aunt. Here’s how she described the idea for her cookbook:

Among the cookbooks on the pantry shelf at home there has always been the little hand-written notebook of recipes. As a child I learned that this blue notebook, which contained a collection of my mother’s favorite recipes, was her favorite cookbook. Not only were all the pages of this notebook filled with recipes, but inserted between the pages were loose sheets of paper on which were written other favorites. These were copied by friends and relatives whom Mother had visited at some time and whose specialty she had admired. Since a cookbook of the favorite recipes of Mennonite families had never been published, I began to sense that the handwritten recipe books were responsible. I asked to see them wherever I went and was astonished to learn how many of them had been destroyed in recent years. The daughters of today were guilty of pushing them aside in favor of the new, just as I had done one day. This collection is a compilation of over 1,100 recipes, chosen from more than 5,000 recipes sent in. They come to you from most of the Mennonite communities in the United States and Canada.

Anna Mary Herr Hess' (my maternal grandmother) kitchen notebook

My mother still has such a notebook  from her mother. I estimate that Grandma Hess, who died in 1951, created this notebook soon after her marriage in 1918. Soon the notebook will be one hundred years old.

Aunt Mary Emma, as the Virginia-based cookbook author was called by my husband and his siblings and cousins, collected recipes by asking for them in church publications. I don’t think my Grandmother Hess responded from her farm in Pennsylvania, but at least she kept her own notebook instead of throwing it away. I still make a few of the recipes, my favorite being steamed cherry pudding. But the collection of other notebook entries in the Mennonite Community Cookbook was the most important book in almost every Mennonite kitchen (and many others as well) for generations.

And, what’s also true, is that most Mennonites have other treasures in their homes, like those recipe notebooks, that they have not valued highly enough. They come in the form of letters, diaries, photos, and heirlooms of close and distant ancestors. Many of them are already lost. But it’s not too late to claim a great heritage.

Today it is almost impossible to reach all Mennonites through a single outlet or publication. We live in too many places and speak too many languages for any one publication to reach us all. Churches borrow from many different sources. The Mennonite magazine and Mennonite Weekly Review reach many, but certainly not all, Mennonite homes in the United States. Facebook, Twitter, and blogs reach some others.

I would love for storytelling and story writing to become as Mennonite as shoofly pie. And I would love for the whole world to join in the great Mennonite story-telling enterprise as if it were a hymn sing. And for Mennonites to sing in the hymnals of others.

What if:

• Stories were as important as recipes.
• Mennonites would begin to share their stories. Not in a single master narrative but in truthful tales of real emotions and remembered events, practices, and people.
• Some of those stories were sold as books and their authors toured the country, not only speaking about their own stories, but holding workshops on storytelling and story writing in churches, schools, libraries, and homes.
• Sunday school classes and small groups would read Mennonite memoirs together and then write or tell their own stories to each other.
• The stories that aren’t published are collected Story Corps fashion on a blog or made available as podcasts.
• Historical Societies around the country sponsor annual storytelling and story writing events.

I don’t exactly know how all of this would look, but I do know that it greatly inspires me to tell my story if I know others are both helping in the process and thinking of their own stories and how to share them.

And so, dear reader, I am sharing my memoir writing timetable with you and giving you the keys to holding me accountable. I’d like to create in some fashion a Mennonite Community Memoir! And you don’t have to be Mennonite to come to the table.

Timetable

• Draft intro, chapter one and chapter two are finished. Very rough!
• Chapter three deadline is Nov. 2. Yikes!
• Chapter four: Dec. 1
• Chapter five: Jan. 1
• Chapter six: Feb. 1
• Chapter seven: March 1.
• Chapter eight: April 1.
• Chapter nine: May 1.
• Chapter ten: June 1.
• Chapter eleven: August 1 (to allow time for moving from Brooklyn to VA and for two international trips)
• Chapter twelve: Sept. 1
• Chapter thirteen: Oct. 1
• Chapter fourteen and epilogue: Nov. 1.
• Revisions, photos, index, permissions, etc.: Nov. 15, 2012–Feb. 15, 2013
• Estimated publication date: Fall 2013

Does this timetable give you heart palpitations? Probably not. But I can feel a few coming on.

That’s why I need you now more than ever.

I will keep you updated via this blog and a new website now in production. Soon I’ll have a FB page where I will be able to ask questions as I write. For example, if you are Mennonite, what do you remember about preparatory services for communion? Did you have to be able to say, in the company of witnesses, that you are at “peace with God and your fellow man” before you were ready to “partake of the cup”? What did/do you think of such a practice?

If you aren’t Mennonite, what would you like to know about Mennonite life?

Of course, as I write, I will continue taking care of grandson Owen until we leave Brooklyn at the end of May. I consider him an inspiration rather than a drain on my creativity, and his presence in my life is part of my memoir story that I will try to describe in the epilogue.

I would love to hear from many of you in the comments section and to build a larger community through the subscription list (right hand side) to this blog. Please respond to anything in this post that gives you pause, brings up a memory, or an idea. How can I be of service to you?

Now a final story:

When I became the 14^th president of Goshen College, the chapel committee invited me to sing a call-and-response hymn, “Lead Me, Guide Me” by Doris Atkers. Somehow I managed to sing the solo part, buoyed up by the voices of the community, and there followed eight years in which God and that community gave me the strength I needed for the many tasks as president. Now I feel like I am standing alone at the mike again, but I know you will be there and that if you are, great things will happen. Lead me, guide me, again.

I am weak and I need thy strength and pow’r

to help me over my weakest hour.

Help me through the darkness thy face to see.

Lead me, O Lord, lead me.

Recently an interview with Sedaris appeared on his page that reminded me of something I am struggling with as I write memoir.

Dialogue.

Remember picking books from the library when you knew nothing about them and you were craving a really good read? One that took you out of your time, place, maybe even out of your own body for a little while? Did you do what I did in elementary school–look for the white space on the page?

White space= dialogue. Dialogue equals speed of reading and engagement with character.

The interview shared on facebook comes from this story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sedaris can sell out a house, not only here in America, but in Europe also. He’s compared to Bruce Springsteen in the article. He himself seems bemused by his success.

Here’s the paragraph that jumped out at me:

Q. Do you think that the performing – that constant reading out loud – has affected the way that you write?

A. Yes, definitely. If you’re reading something in front of an audience, you need to have dialogue in your story and it has to clip along in a way that if it’s just on a page, it doesn’t have to. People can just say, “Oh, that’s nice that he put that word in front of that one. Oh, I always liked that word. Look! That word has seven syllables in it.” But when you’re reading a story in front of an audience it has to move along.

Memoirists treat dialogue in many different ways. Right now I am reading Miriam Toews’ memoir about her father called Swing Low: A Life (recently reviewed in The New York Times.) So I thought I would observe the way the author handles dialogue in this unusual memoir–a daughter writes a narrative pieced together from fragments of information about her bi-polar father’s life.

Since the main character — Mel Toews — is notoriously silent unless he is in school or in church, the dialogue is mostly internal. So the lack of quotation marks makes sense. In general, it makes sense not to use quotation marks in memoir, I think. It takes some of the burden off memory when the reader does not see punctuation as a promise of fundamentalist truth.

However, I also picked up a copy of Toew’s novel, A Complicated Kindness, and I note the absence of quote marks there also. Yet there are more white spaces in the novel because the main character, a teenage girl, is voluble compared to the terse Mel Toews. Toews skillfully uses dialogue, both internal and external, to establish character and bring the reader close in as an observer.

Dear reader, what are your own preferences? Dialogue, description, or philosophic musings? If you are a writer, do you employ the same mix you yourself prefer as a reader? Do you like or dislike quotation marks?

If you don’t have time to read the book, read this essay by Colson Whitehead: “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It,” the best short piece about Brooklyn I’ve ever read. It’s real subject is writing, not place.

Inspired by learning about my new environment, I have tried to open my eyes and my heart to the very land above which I am perched as I write these words–in this high-rise condo building. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be talking about land when you are sitting twelve stories above it!

I can imagine the land first of all before European settlement. Wooded, grassy, swampy, planted in maize. The various branches of the Canarsie Indian tribe left few signs of themselves as they were pushed by settlers east into Long Island or west into what is now New Jersey. I learned a smattering of facts about these first dwellers in the land by reading broken land: Poems of Brooklyn, edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell, and I look forward to hearing the editors of this book speak in person next Saturday at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

With only ten months to live in Brooklyn (and three of them already behind me), I feel the hot breath of time on my neck, and I realize how little one can learn about a place as complex and rich as Brooklyn in so short a span. However, I am nothing if not adventurous, and when it comes to the combination of literature, history, and place, I’m all in. (My children still roll their eyes at the thought of all the author places I dragged them to over the years. They express no regret at not being able to join me in my current visits and flights of imagination.)

Brooklyn today is a living literary reality. Not only is it filled with authors, bloggers, agents, publishers, and readers (thriving independent bookstores being one of the signs), but under this current hip scene, lie layers of literary history as deep as the bones in the Martyr’s Monument just a few blocks from here on the pinnacle of Ft. Greene Park.

In fact, if you had been a city mouse in 1937, and trotted into the park at this entrance across from Washington Park and Willoughby, you might have bumped into Richard Wright as he entered here:

Brownstones on Washington Park St. across from Ft. Greene Park

All of the buildings around the park would have stories to tell. Some of them housed writers who would become very famous. The Hughes book, Literary Brooklyn, contains several maps of multiple places where a dozen or more well-known authors lived from the time of Whitman to the mid twentieth century.

While Wright sat on a bench near the Martyr Monument (there’s a small sign indicating which bench now in the park), he could have been writing what would become Native Son in longhand while poet Marianne Moore was playing tennis in the courts just a few hundred feet away. That thought delights me.

But the granddaddy of all inspirations in Brooklyn has to be Walt Whitman. The Hughes book starts with an excellent chapter on Whitman, and the Kasdorf/Tyrell anthology begins with Whitman also.

A Ft. Greene Park ranger today pointed to the place where Walt supposedly sat as he composed Leaves of Grass–and looked across the East River to Manhattan. The ferry offered the poet a jumping off point for a great poem, the one we know as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “Sun-down Poem.” This poem has come alive for me in a way it never could as I read it as a college student in Virginia or even a professor in Texas and Indiana, even though I loved it then also.

The hill in the park 108 feet above sea level--Whitman's hill.

What changes when one begins to know a place might be described as empathic imagination. Sometimes that imagination is all on the part of the reader — who, for example, visits the places where great works were written and where great poets bestrode the world like a colossus. There the reader senses one truth–the poet was like me. Whitman knows this and he catalogs all the ways it is true: “I too saw the reflection of the summer-sky in the water, . . .I too . . . I too . . . .”

But Whitman is the prince of empathic imagination–from the writer’s perspective. “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” He has seen me, little country girl Shirley Hershey come to the big city at last as a grandma. And he has seen this vast city of Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, blacks, browns, whites, Buddhists, Hindus, protestors, magnates, people from all parts of the earth and all stages of life living together, striving: “The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun -set.”

Whitman’s power as a poet derives from using the reality of the present moment — the December sea gulls high in the air, for example — not as the only reality but as a connecting hub to both past and future. He can see what others see but recognizes that the sensory perceptions of the present moment are not enough — he must break through the boundaries of time: “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.”

As I write my memoir, casting my eyes to the past, I have no desire to go back. What I am learning from the ghosts of Whitman, Wright, and Moore and all others who lived just blocks away from this present location, is to think of the centuries ahead and of the others who will come to all the places so dear to me now. And once again I think of Wordsworth: “they will love what we have loved/and we will teach them how.”

Today, I sat on a bench across from an amazing piece of public art on the Fulton Mall called “Before I Die” which I first photographed three days ago. I watched as a young father pushing a stroller, picked up a piece of chalk and finished the sentence “Before I die–I want to hold my son’s child.” Whitman knew that about him and about his son and about his son and his daughter and her daughter after him.

I know most of my readers are not Brooklynites, but I hope you have found a connection to the ideas of this post. I’ve been thinking of you before you were born . Do you think beyond the present time as you write? Do you visit writer’s places? How has a particular place inspired you?

Lithgow, who lives in New York, has made the rounds of the talk shows and could sell the book just with his charming personality.

The reason I want to read it, however, is that I already admire two things about the man which make the life one I want to know more about:

1. His love of language and literature has deep roots and great nurture. He knows Shakespeare and the great poets in his bones.

2. He had a happy childhood.

I first encountered the man behind the actor by watching this fantastic interview on Bill Moyers Journal:

As I write my third chapter of my own childhood memoir, Mr. Lithgow has given me an idea. Stay tuned. . . 

Barbara Ann Hess, photo attached to her 1941-43 Diary

Anne Frank. Read about her here: http://www.annefrank.org/

 Thank you, readers, for letting me know you’d like to see side-by-side journal entries of the two girls pictured on the left.

Today I want to be three people: (1) an American Studies scholar who functions as a detective, reading the diaries of these girls with perspicacity, illuminating both character and culture, (2) a memoirist drafting chapter two of her manuscript and, (3) a grandma who wants to be there when her grandson wakes up from his nap.

Naturally, being Grandma wins the race, but let’s see if I can give you a taste of  the scholar, albeit an imperfect one.

Having spent the morning reviewing the overlapping sections of the two diaries, I can report that there are six days in which the two girls begin their diaries in the same way–day of the week, date, year. Anne sat in a cramped Secret Annex in Amsterdam, and Barbara Ann found a nook in her spacious, open farmhouse on the Fruitville Pike near Lancaster, PA.

One could write a dissertation on two primary sources as vivid as these. There are gender, race, religion, cultural, and class issues to dissect. One is written in a voice that will be iconic and forever young. The other voice belongs to the girl who would become my mother, an 84-year-old woman who looks back on these passionate declarations of her teenage self with a mixture of bemusement, admiration, and disbelief.

Each girl wrote 40 or more entries during the overlap period, usually once or twice a week. Anne’s were usually longer. I have selected Saturday, February 27, 1943, as the day for comparison. Imagine you are watching a movie with a split screen, one in Amsterdam, the other in Pennsylvania. And you are listening to the pure, clear voices of two young girls. First, Anne:

Dearest Kitty, [an imagined name she uses for her diary]

     Pim [Father] is expecting the invasion any day now. Churchill has had pneumonia, but is gradually getting better. Gandhi, the champion of Indian freedom, is on one of his umpteenth hunger strikes.

     Mrs. van D. [one of the eight people hiding in the annex] claims she’s fatalistic. But who’s the most afraid when the guns go off? None other than Petronella van Daan.

     Jan brought along the episcopal letter that the bishops addressed to their parishioners. It was beautiful and inspiring. “People of the Netherlands, stand up and take action. Each of us must choose our own wepons to fight for the freedom of our country, our people and our religion! Give your help and support. Act now!” That is what they’re preaching from the pulpit. Will it do any good? It’s definitely too late to help our fellow Jews.

     Guess what’s happened to us now? The owner of the building sold it without informing Mr. Kugler and Mr. Kleiman. One morning the new landlord arrived with an architect to the look the place over. Thank goodness Mr. Kleiman was in the offic. He showed the gentlemen all there was to see, with the exception of the Secret Annex. He claimed he’d left the key at home and the new owner asked no further questions. If only he doesn’t come back demanding to see the Annex. In that case, we’ll be in big trouble!

     Father emptied a card file for Margot and me and filled it with index cards that are blank on one side. ‘This is to become our reading file, in which Margot and I are supposed to note down the books we’ve read, the author and the date. I’ve learned two new words: “brothel” and “coquette.” I’ve bought a separate notebook for new words.

     There’s a new division of butter and margarine. Each person is to get their portion on their own plate. The distribution is very unfair. The van Daans, who always make breakfast for everyone, give themselves one and a half times more than they do us. My parents are much too afraid of an argument to say anything, which is a shame, because I think people like that should always be given a taste of their own medicine.

Yours,

Anne

From Barbara Ann Hess:

February 27, 1943 (Saturday)

This is my sixteenth birthday and the closing entry in my diary. This day has been a red letter day for me. I received 7 cards through the mail from Ethyl Rote, Marty Rote, Esther Landis, John and Mrs. Rote, Ella and Martin Lefever, Florence Lefever, Irene Brenneman.

Bob and Anna sent me some pictures of the wedding and also a dozen name cards plus one of their own. It was certainly very nice of them and I appreciate it a lot. John Henry and Betty came and brought me a card too.

Yesterday afternoon I rode over to Esther Groff’s and left my bike there and got the Manheim bus and went into town. It was snowing fast. Mother and I went to Adler’s and bought me a blue plaid coat suit, 3 dickeys, white, egg-shell and brown and a blue straw hat with a black veil for my birthday and Easter present. It just fits me and its beautiful!! I didn’t think we’d get it until Tuesday because it had to be shortened. But Christian and Dotty went into town this morning and went in and it was done. Was I surprised when they brought it in!

This morning Christ and Dot cornered me and pulled my ears. That was fun.

////

John Henry is in 1-A (meaning that he has to go very soon unless we can get him deferred.) If he has to go Betty will come here. It certainly is awful. Betty pregnant – and she cries and cries and cries (because of Johnny) and she’s all alone except for us. Lloyd hasn’t been classified yet.

//

It used to be not so very long ago that when you were my age you looked forward to fun, dates, popularity etc.  You made plans for your future. It certainly has changed. The youth of today have only a very clouded future ahead to look forward to. The future is definitely – BLACK! with no silver lining. And I am one of that number. I am one of the youthful American citizens. But as youth has always been and probably always shall, we are still hopeful. We still dream and think and hope. Although it is a very dark outlook at present who knows how soon the clouds may be lifted away. – (the end.)

So there you have it. One day in the life of two girls during wartime. Neither entry is totally indicative of the whole of the journals. The exclamatory ending of Barbara Ann’s February 27th entry derives, I’m guessing, from the need to say something final as she squeezes out the last of her stenographer’s notebook space.

Overall, both girls write about boys and dreams and a little about their bodies. Both write about the war. Anne naturally lives on war news. Barbara Ann has more luxury of choosing when, where, and how to think about war. Yet she does view it as a dark cloud ruining her youth and stealing the lives of the innocent. Both young writers are capable of poetic passages of description and philosophic musings not illustrated on this particular day.

What did YOU notice as you read the two entries. Since little Owen will soon be awake, I have to depend on you to be the scholars!

Anne Frank, writing, from this website: http://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-franks-history/a-diary-as-a-best-friend/at-last-seriously-taken-as-a-writer/

Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank, (1929-1945) the young Jewish girl who kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from her thirteenth birthday (June 12, 1942) until August 4, 1944, shortly after her 15th birthday, when she and her family were betrayed, discovered, and sent to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of a typhus epidemic that spread through Bergen-Belsen.  The camp was liberated April 12, 1945. If she had lived until her 16th birthday, she might still be living today. The Anne Frank Museum, created at the Frank family’s war-time hiding  location in Amsterdam, has an award-winning website in which you can visit the annex where Anne lived and learn much more about her life and times.

My own mother, Barbara Ann Hess Hershey Becker, was born February 27, 1927, on a farm near Lancaster, PA. She is living today! She too kept a diary during WWII. Though she was two years older than Anne Frank, her teenage diary overlaps with Anne’s because it was begun when Mother was “14 years, 3 months, 13 days” old. It ends on her sixteenth birthday, the birthday Anne never reached.

As I read the two journals, Anne’s and Barbara Ann’s, together, several amazing coincidences jump out at me. First, both diarists begin their journals on the same day–June 12–just one year apart. Anne starts her diary in 1942 Barbara Ann in 1941.

Between June 12, 1942 (when Anne begins) and Feb. 27, 1943 (when Barbara Ann’s diary ends) there are 47 entries in Anne’s diary. Some of these entries are written on the same day!

But two significant differences stand out (in addition to the slight difference in age). One is obvious–Anne is a Jew living during the Holocaust. Mother is living safely in the arms of her Mennonite family in America, but she nevertheless experiences fear about the war.

Another is less obvious. Anne hopes to reach the rest of the world with her journal. Barbara Ann warns any potential readers that her diary is her “personal property and private journal” (see warning on the cover below).

Anne Frank, sometime in 1944, hears an underground broadcast from London saying that letters and diaries will be collected and possibly published after the war. She goes back, amends her private journal and begins new entries with the intent of contributing them to the cause described on the radio. She therefore finds in her diary more than ordinary teenage solace for angst; she is also trying on the vocation of writer. Writing keeps her spirit alive.

Today it’s time for my weekly call to my mother. Her voice will seem even more precious to me after studying these two journals.

If she gives me permission to quote from her “personal property and private journal,” would you like to read some excerpts here? Would you like to see them side-by-side with Anne’s?