Angels on the Clothesline: A memoirby Ani Tuzman

Hatfield author Ani Tuzman, who was raised by Holocaust survivors, writes in the introduction to her memoir, “Angels on the Clothesline,” that the idea for her newest book came to her unexpectedly when she was researching her parents’ stories for a possible novel.

She was struck by a vision of herself as a little girl, crying in her bed — and her book morphed into a memoir of her childhood, as witnessed by her older self but written from a young girl’s standpoint, as she recalls how she slowly came to understand her parents’ trauma and her own inherited pain and grief.

“Angels on the Clothesline” is told in a long series of vignettes, written as prose poems. Using that format, Tuzman recalls growing up on a threadbare farm somewhere in the Northeast, perhaps upstate New York. (The family occasionally goes to New York City, where her parents first arrived as refugees after WWII.)

It’s a household where the horror of the recent past hangs heavily, with Tuzman’s mother trying to keep her emotions at bay but sometimes exploding in rage at her, while her father might silently read a Yiddish newspaper and suddenly pound the kitchen table in response to bad news.

The young Ani recalls feeling out of place in elementary school, where she’s the only Jewish student in her class and she listens to the other children talking about Thanksgiving. “Their grandmothers and grandfathers will / be there, you hear them say. Your grandparents / are dead. Killed by Hitler.”

There’s worse. Some of those same classmates say “PU the Jew” to her, and others bully her on the playground. A sadistic teacher, Mrs. Cadave, who calls her “little Jew,” forces her to eat leavened bread in the classroom during Passover; Ani’s convinced ingesting the bread will cause her family’s death.

But Tuzman also sketches brighter, more joyful moments, such as how she came to love to read and then write. She offers glimpses of what she calls “light and love,” including the vignette with the memoir’s title, when she recalls the happiness she experienced while hanging up the family’s laundry.

“Now is when you start to see the angels … They’re made of light. / Tiny sparkling tightrope walkers appearing and disappearing … You hope they will never hide from you. / You tell them in your mind that you are happy to see them.”

In an afterword, Tuzman, an educator and writing instructor, notes that she once thought she’d want to “rewrite the script” of her life if given the chance. But as it turned out, she notes, her experiences “opened and formed my heart … (and) seeded a passionate commitment to cherish, honor, and protect children, which has inspired my life’s work.”

“This is my story,” she adds, “but aspects of it belong to children and adults all over the world who have been shamed, feared, or punished for being different, for being other.”

Civil War Monuments and MemoryEdited by Jon Tracey and Chris MackowksiSavas Beatie Publishing

Civil War monuments have been flashpoints of debate for some time, especially since 2017, when a white nationalist protest against plans to remove a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia led to the death of a counter-protester and several other injuries.

“Civil War Monuments and Memory,” a collection of essays and articles by historians and other Civil War buffs, examines these issues, such as how monuments can, as publishing notes put it, “embody the very real tension between history and the way we remember that history — what we today call ‘memory.’”

Among the contributors is Hatfield writer Rob Wilson, a former educator and a consultant with the Springfield Armory Museum. Wilson writes about a subject that’s likely little known in Massachusetts: how two memorials honoring men who had served with the Confederacy ended up in the Commonwealth.

One was a small stone monument erected in Georges Island State Park, in Boston Harbor, that honored 13 Confederate prisoners who died in nearby Fort Warren, a military outpost converted to a prison during the Civil War; over 1,000 rebel soldiers and others were interned there.

The monument to the deceased prisoners was put up in 1963 as part of the war’s centennial and in a spirit of reconciliation. But in 2017, media attention that landed on the monument led to calls for its removal; it first was covered up, then moved to the state archives, Wilson notes.

A second small Confederate memorial, in Oak Bluffs on Cape Cod, prompted a more sustained debate. A collection of plaques with Confederate names was added in 1891 to a statue of a Union soldier at the request of a former rebel combatant, Charles Strahan, who had moved to Oak Bluffs after the war.

He offered the monument as a symbol of reconciliation, Wilson notes, as the former Rebel soldier had by then welcomed the abolition of slavery and celebrated the country’s reunion, which won him acceptance in town.

There were objections before 2017 from some to the monument, notably from people who saw it as an affront to African Americans. But the objections picked up steam in 2017, even as some defended the memorial as a sign of Southern repentance for slavery and the war, and not as a glorification of the Confederacy or the Jim Crow South.

But, Wilson writes, debate intensified after 2017 in what one Cape Cod newspaper called a “Civil war over Confederate plaques,” and the memorials were moved to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum as part of a display called “The Chasm is Not Closed.”

In other book news: The WriteAngles Writers Conference, an annual get-together that took place at Mount Holyoke College for over 30 years, hit a roadblock during the pandemic and has not been staged for the last few years.

Now, Straw Dog Writers Guild has taken over organization of the forum and plans to bring it back in April 2024, this time at the Northampton Center for the Arts.

First staged in 1987, the conference had originally been sponsored by the local chapter of the National Writers Union; it then operated independently and was run by a committee of volunteers, who hosted guest speakers, writers, publishers, book agents and others in the trade.

The April 6 reboot will feature Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of the acclaimed novel “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” as the keynote speaker.

In addition to being a forum for a “diverse array of writers,” organizers say next spring’s WriteAngles Conference will pay tribute to Jeffers by giving her the Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award. The other finalists for the prize, which recognizes work centered on social justice, are Carmen Maria Machado, Shanta Lee, and Cameron Awkward-Rich.

More information on the event can be found at writeanglesconference.com.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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