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| 2019/10/07 12:33:15瀏覽1048｜回應0｜推薦5 | |
Writer: Susan is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom. Faludi was born in 1959 in New York, and grew up in Yorktown Heights, ew York. Mother was a homemaker and journalist, and father was a photographer who had emigrated from Hungary, was Jewish, and a survivor of the Holocaust; furthermore, eventually came out as a transgender woman and later died in 2015. Susan Faludi has dual US-Hungarian citizenship. Faludis maternal grandfather was also Jewish. Susan graduated from Harvard University and became a journalist, writing for The New York Times, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She is married to fellow author Russ Rymer. She was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Stockholm University in Sweden. (R.3) Story: In the Darkroom is a memoir by Susan Faludi that was first published in 2016. The memoir centers on the life of Faludis father, who came out as transgender and underwent sex reassignment surgery at the age of 76. It won the 2016 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. (R.2)
Susan in 2004. Falludy received an email with the subject "Some Changes," sent by Steven. Faludi - a father who had barely spoken to her for twenty-five years. "Dear Susan, I have an interesting news to tell you. I decided, I am fed up with a big man who has never been inside, and who is brave enough to fight." Seventy-six-year-old Stephen The daughter declared her transgender to be a woman: "Stephanie entered the real world!" During Susans growth, her father has always played the role of a cruel tyrant, burning her early feminist thinking. Why is this violent man transgender? When she gradually took the reason behind her fathers degeneration, she found that she had transcended the issue of gender identity and was noisy with her father as a Jewish survivor of Hungary during World War II, experiencing complex identity of the country, race, politics, religion, etc. The problem - walked into a dark historical maze without warning.
Highlights vs self- reflection: 1.p.241: My father was granted an exception. 2.p.451:My father’s mind seemed to me like the limestone beneath Castle Hill 3.p.282: And then as a teenager, he’d witnessed his man-about-town”cultured”father reduced to a fearful fugitive, unable to save his family when that liquid brew of distorted identities calcified into racial genocide. Surely the experience would have taken a toll. Golden Sentence: 1.p.385:Identity is what society accepts for you. You have to behave in a way that people accept, otherwise you have enemies. That’s what I do and I have no problems. 2.p.259: Everybody turning over the leaves of this book should realize the significance of the fact that also above the will of the power which thought itself to be the strongest there is a higher jurisdiction, preventing the innocent from being entirely exterminated. But he should also realize the heavy burden pressing down upon each single person who is figuring in this book: the dreadful memories of the past, the frightful dreariness of the present, and the unsolved problems of the future. For we all who remained are now standing here in the world, plundered, humiliated in our human dignity, with souls harassed to death, and alone. Conclusion: 1. More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as "convicted homosexuals".Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order. leading scholar Rüdiger Lautmann believes that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%.Nazi Germany thought of German gay men as against the plan of creating a "master race" and sought to force them into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would not change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the "Extermination Through Work" campaign. (R.4) 2. Susans father came out as transgender and underwent sex reassignment surgery at the age of 76. To be himself is a life-long struggle. It’s bigger challenge than to face the mass murder. 3. Susan’s father is also a tricky speculator who never admit that he was Jewish and keep him survives from the Nazi holocaust. He saved his parents and he announced that he left no debt from his parents any more. He was so violent that he accused his wife had affair to make him to take attact to his love rival. He told Susan that he created her so he can destroy her, too, Why he wanna take sex reassignment surgery, is to take the advantage to play female role and to be a taker than a giver. He changed his religion from Judaism to televangelism. After 25, Susan and her father without see each other, Susan’s father just gave her a ring and told her about her sex surgery. Susan went to Hungary to find out the reason, her father was so reluctant to tell her. Susan tried all the clues to weave the true story from her point of view. It seems to me that he has no close intimacy to others. He maybe a good photographer in the darkroom, but in the real life, all his life is to change himself than to admit himself. Wonder if it’s the karma as Jewish to face the self disturbance after WWII ? I so agree with what Susan learned from his father that life is nothing to do with gender, but deep lesson about life and death.
Discussion Questions by Clive Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and her most recent book was called one of the top ten books by the New York Times Review of Books two years ago. I recall many meetings where members complained about how novels sometimes seem unrealistic, and the hard-to-swallow coincidences used in order to neatly tie up any loose strands of the story. “In the Darkroom” sounds like and reads like a novel, a very bad novel. It does. However, sometimes, reality delivers up not just a remarkable story, but a remarkable story containing a set of parallel images that seem too absurdly perfect to be credible. If we read this stuff in a work of fiction, we would all complain around the table at Cubit Café, about how “unrealistic” it was, and how “far-fetched” it is. This book isn’t fiction...it’s a memoir of sorts written by an award winning writer, and this book gave Faludi her third Pulitzer nomination. Here’s what happened to Faludi, the author of “Backlash” and one of the most influential feminist journalists of her generation. In the summer of 2004, she received an email from her 76-year-old father. This in itself is important, because father and daughter had barely spoken in a quarter of a century. Faludi’s mother had filed for divorce from her father when Susan was 16. Her father responded to the filing of divorce with what Faludi describes as “a season of escalating violence.” One night, in violation of a restraining order, he broke down the door of their suburban home and stormed in with a baseball bat, attacking the man his wife had just begun dating. He stabbed his rival multiple times with a Swiss Army knife, spattering the house with blood and putting the other man in the hospital. Later, he managed to convince a judge that he was the wronged party (because he felt she was still HIS wife). Susan Faludi witnessed the evening and believed that not only was her father a danger, but he was manipulative and a force of terror to be kept at a distance. She spend the remaining years estranged from him and speaking to him only a handful of times. Some decades later, Faludi’s father moved back to his homeland of Hungary from New York. Faludi knew of this, but not firsthand. She cared little where her father lived because he wasn’t a prescence in her life. She had witnessed her father’s behavior and she was genuinely fearful of him. However, an email arrived in Susan Faludi’s inbox in 2004, that changed their relationship. “I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside,” it read. Susan’s father had recently returned from a trip to Thailand, after receiving sex reassignment surgery. The email was short on words but rich in photographs of Susan’s transformed parent. No longer was he Stefan Faludi, but now he was Stefánie Faludi. Months later, Susan flew to Budapest and began a long, tortured collaboration with her father that finally resulted in “In the Darkroom.” Faludi describes the process as “a game of cat and mouse, a game the mouse generally won.” Stefánie wanted Susan to tell her story, but she wanted it told her way. Susan Faludi was no pushover, but she met had met her match. Her father was a bully… both as a man and as a woman and prone to anger and violent outbursts. Susan Faludi tries with much frustration, to get her father to talk about her experiences as a once-rich Jewish boy reduced to living on the streets of Budapest during World War II. This avenue gets shut down with a dismissive wave of Stefánie’s hand. Susan drags Stefánie to the Hungarian Jewish Museum, where her ultra-patriotic father glances at a display of hateful anti-Semitic Hungarian propaganda and sniffs, “This is of no interest.” Her father tells her what she needs to know and what to write about. Her father has no interest in his daughter creating the narrative. Her father has no interest in telling/showing Susan anything about the past, or helping her discover the man who once used to be her father. During the war, as family legend had it, Stefánie (then István Friedman) freed his parents from a perilous situation by wearing a stolen armband and posing as a member of the Hungarian fascist party. Living by his wits and working for the resistance, he regularly escaped a vicious Nazi puppet organization, that was among the most eager collaborators of the Holocaust. Because of the native fascist party in Hungary, Hungarian Jews were the last to be shipped to the concentration camps but made up the largest deportation operation in the history of the Holocaust. Between May 15 and July 9 over 437,000 people were transported to Auschwitz. After that more than 10,000 more a month. Faludi’s father dressed as a mechanic and carried fake identity papers, but his most persuasive mask was an internal one. “No one sees me as a Jew,” Stefánie boasted to her daughter of her ability to carry off a performance, “because I don’t see me as a Jew.” Emigrating to America, István changed his name to Steven Faludi, married Susan’s mother, and assumed the highly conventional role of a midcentury American husband, father, and breadwinner. In the years before digital photography, he worked as one of the most famous photographic retouchers, a darkroom wizard who perfected glamorous images for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, He was, Susan writes, “particularly skilled at ‘dodging’. This is making dark areas look light, and ‘masking,’ concealing unwanted parts of the picture.”[34] You can’t make this stuff up! Or rather, you can, but no one would believe it. During Susan’s childhood, Steven Faludi forcefully asserted his “male prerogative,”[7] forbidding his wife to work and devoting his weekends to projects in his basement workshop. Susan writes that although she never suspected her father of feeling uncomfortable as a man, she sensed he was not entirely there, or that parts of him were hidden: “I sometimes regarded him as a spy, intent on blending into our domestic circle, prepared to do whatever it took to evade detection. For all his aggressive domination, he remained somehow invisible.” Later, once Susan begins visiting Stefánie more regularly in Hungary, her father is more willing to talk about herself, but again, only within limits. Like Steven, Stefánie lectures endlessly about topics Susan regards as superficial—opera, mountaineering, “her favorite resource and beauty websites….” His old profession of master of manipulating photography is reduced to retouched photos of herself in pinup outfits. Her father’s only other two obsessions, are a pair Budapest buildings owned by her family before the war but taken by the Hungarian fascists/Nazis. This was property she’d tried to reclaim for 20 years without success. Most of “In the Darkroom”, and the best of it, consists of the epic battles between Susan and Stefánie—an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On Susan’s first visit, Stefánie doesn’t want to leave her house, perched on a hill overlooking a lost Friedman family mansion. Susan begs to be taken on a tour of the places her father lived in and knew as a boy, prompting Stefánie to say, “It doesn’t pay to live in the past,” and then lose her temper with a terrifying fury when Susan persists to ask the same question. Instead Stefánie keeps trying to show Susan things she doesn’t want to see, and talk about things she doesn’t want to talk about. As Stefánie grows more confident about being a woman, we learn, with horror about what her idea of what a women is. For Susan, it remains scary, outdated and strange. “Men have to help me,” she tells Susan. “It’s one of the great advantages to being a woman. You write about the disadvantages of being a woman, but I’ve only found advantages!” Susan Faludi doesn’t appear to have trouble adjusting to the news about Stefánie’s gender. Her real struggle is what she views as a backward idea of what a woman is, according to her father. “Change your clothes all you want,” Susan thinks to herself during one battle, “you’re still the same person.” What most interests Susan Faludi is the larger puzzle of her father’s identity. Who does he thinks he is, and what he thinks being Jewish, Hungarian, a father and a woman is. Before her father’s death, Susan never truly figures out who he was. We can wonder if her father ever figured it out either. Discussion Questions 1. Is identity something you choose? Faludis father came out as transgender and underwent sex reassignment surgery at the age of 76. To be himself is a life-long struggle. It’s bigger challenge than to face the mass murder. 2. Is it really possible to change your identity or leave it behind? Think about all the changes people experience in their lives. People go from single to married to divorced. People go from wife to mother, husband to father. Buddhist to Christian. Wife to widow. Healthy to sick. But do these changes in life change your identity? They may change how others view us, but does it change how we view ourselves? p.434:Mel: I had my previous life as a male, I had my life as Melanie, and now I have my life as neither male nor female or both female and male. I gave up a lot to be who I am. No matter how we change, we need to accept ourselves. p.235: All forms of modern Jewish identity became saddled with some kind of psychic disturbance. It’s kind of national trauma. It’s hard to get rid of it, and more harder to face it. I wonder it’s the reason why Susan’s father wanna get away from himself. p.385: Identity is what society accepts for you, You have to behave in a way that people accept, otherwise you have enemies. That’s what I do –and I have no problems. To follow the outside’s rule is his father’s identity rule. 3. What effect do you think the early years of Susan’s father’s life had? Impersonating fascists to save his life and even others? Do you think he lived a life hidden behind masks? p.263: After the war, his father would be one of the first members of another moviemaking group, the youth film club to turn movies from Nazi to anti-Nazi films. And he didn’t let the company know that his was Jewish. Her father never wear mask cos deep in his mind he never accept he was Jewish, he try totally self-deny is a way to accept himself. 4. Does this journey resolve the huge difference between a violent father of her childhood, and the “woman” she has never known? p.283: I am accepted better now as a woman than I ever was as a man. No one sees me as a Jew, because I don’t see me as a Jew. p. 463: while her father passed away, he saved a pair of pearl earrings for her. p. 461:Now , it seemed important to honor her inscrutability. Sometimes it’s hard to understand ourselves, furthermore, the others. Just accept who he is. No matter you understand or not. 5. Susan Faludi described her father as “violent” and a “despot” and she also admits, she never knew him and she felt unsafe around him as a teenage girl. Why do you think she gives him a second chance to get to know him as a woman, especially since they had not communicated for 25 years. p.451: my fathers mind seemed to me like the limestone beneath Castle Hill p.284: I created you and I can destroy you. After 25 years’ mirror, Susan will know better where she was, no matter right or wron. 6. Faludi’s says of her father, “becoming a woman had only added a barricade, another false front to hide behind.” Wasn’t her father essentially a man confused or at least a man who had lived with so many masks his whole life, that being a woman didn’t seem so strange? p. 463: All the years she was alive, she’d sought to settle the question of who she was. Jew or Christian? Hungarian or American? Woman or man? So many oppositions. But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought: there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death. Either you are living or you are not. Everything else is molten, malleable.
7. What did you think of this journey? Do you think Susan Faludi was brave to write about her father the way she did? It’s more difficult to reach parents soul, it’s a big history.
Discussion Report I want to thank all the participants for today’s meeting. It was a really challenging and interesting discussion about a book that was both difficult and harrowing. It was an extraordinary story of an extraordinarily complex person. Many readers did not expect the rich content here about the Hungarian portion of the Holocaust and about the little tales of ordinary people facing real evil. Late in life, journalist Susan Faludi’s father had sex reassignment surgery on the cheap in Bangkok. For 25 years they had been estranged. In 2004, the author got an email from her father announcing the news with a series of demands on how she should communicate and understand her father. They “reconciled” but like we readers, father and daughter got much more than they bargained for. His penchant throughout his life for “faking things”—passes, letters of introduction, photos, certificates etc.—should not be minimized. Who was this person? Even his own daughter never seemed to know. We had a fascinating conversation about topics we haven’t covered really in the past few years. Emma really offered some interesting insights as did Lydia and Jo. It was a difficult book but also a powerful book. This book holds up next to classics of parental biography like The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff. It is an astonishing book, not just because of the topic but also because of Susan Faludi’s astonishing voice and her determination to share a narrative that didn’t cover up the unpleasant or bend to the wishes of her father. The book tells many tales seamlessly and brilliantly and was an amazing catalyst for conversation today.
Related Reading: 1.the Darkroom review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/navigating-identities-past-and-present-in-susan-faludis-in-the-darkroom/ 2.Book Review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Darkroom 3.Susan Faludi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Faludi 4.Homosexuals in Nazi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany 5. In the darkroom review: https://www.tcsb.com.tw/SalePage/Index/4985803 Thanks for Clives penetrating lead in the Oct. meeting, our ladies would actively attend so long as he presented in the discussion, we are so grateful to him that we can widen our knowledge from him while he especially recommend some different themes among books. Thanks, Clive. As the year is approaching to the end, we need your recommendations of books for the coming year, please recommend eagerly, our deadline for recommendations is on Nov. 7, 2019, then we would have a vote after we complete the sorted book list. Please also note , you will need to pay your annual fee for our 2020 Kaohsiung International Womans Club NT$1500 plus our book clubs fund, NT$500 in our November meeting. We will appreciate Lydia for her kindness to offer us her first floor library in their building. we can arrive at 12:30 noon after your meal. November 4, Activity: Book: Small Fry Author: Lisa Jobs Leader: Faye Wang Time: 12:30 noon, Nov. 4, 2019 Place: Lydias comfortable condo We look forward to seeing you soon. |
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