Remembering Professor Gerald Shapiro

Today is very bittersweet for me. I was fully of tears of joy earlier today, unable to sleep, being so happy that Gilad Shalit is back with his family after five years and four months in the arms of evil. But I just found out some news that has me almost in a different kind of tears, tears of sadness.

Once upon a time, back in 2006, before Gilad Shalit had even a hinkling that his life was in danger, I was sitting in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Spring semester classroom of Gerald Shapiro, an English professor, taking his Jewish-American Fiction course. It was my last class at UNL, and I was so eager to immerse myself in the life and times of Jews in America writing about their lives. The syllabus was amazing -- Maus I and II, works by Cynthia Ozick, Tova Mirvis, Saul Bellow, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others. I loved every minute of that class, especially because we got to watch movies along with reading some amazing texts that enlightened me on the American-Jewish experience. At that time, during that semester, I was closing up my learning for my Reform conversion, and just before the semester closed, I became a Jew under Reform auspices.

In response to my final paper -- and this is probably why I remember Professor Shapiro so much, why I feel like his impact on me was so great -- he wrote,

"Jewishness, Jewish culture, is a matter of putting pen to paper – you’ve got that down, too. You have what my mother would have called a Yiddishe kupf – a Jewish head. You see the subtleties, the nuances in things. You see the humor that’s enveloped in tragedy, and the tears hidden inside the laughter."

I even blogged about it back in January. This man touched my life, and I don't know that he knew that. And that makes me so sad. He believed in me, as a writer, as a Jew. He believed in me.

I graduated, I moved on, and then, in November 2006 I decided to email Professor Shapiro, who had had such an amazing impact on my Jewishness and my literary interests. We sent a few emails back and forth about suggestions for reading for me based on what I did and didn't like in class -- and he remembered me, "fondly," he said and suggested some things I might enjoy. "Gerry," he signed his emails. At the end of one, he said,

"It's very, very good to hear from you and I hope you'll keep me posted as to your comings and goings."

And I never emailed him again. I feel bad about that. I followed the suggestions he made for me and wound my way around the world of American-Jewish fiction on my own, but now I'm wondering what else he would have suggested for me.

But now, he's gone. Unexpectedly. At the age of 61.

He'd been diagnosed with Hodgkins in his 20s, and I never saw or heard him speak about it when I was in his class or through our emails. He mentioned a back surgery once, but that he was doing well, but that was years ago. I feel horrible for not keeping in touch, but it reminds me how fleeting relationships are, even those with mentors and people we respect to guide us.

If you a chance, pick up a copy of Bad Jews and Other Stories, and let me know what you think.

A Yiddishe Kupf -- A Jewish Head

In the eternal struggle, at the age of 27, to know who I am, who I was, how I got here, and -- I hope -- where I'm going, I've been digging through an old LiveJournal, old poems, things that smatter my hard drive from years gone by, things I'd probably attempted to forget for one reason or another.

This is something I wrote on April 25, 2006, as part of a final paper for my Jewish-American Fictions course, which was one of my favorite courses of my undergraduate career. It was, also, the last class I attended as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I wanted to create some poetry for the class, even though the course was on fiction, prose, not poetry. I am also trying to track down a sort of heart-wrenching poem I have about the Shoah and being a convert.

So, until then, here you are: A little piece of me, right around the time of my conversion to Judaism under Reform auspices.

Jewish-American fiction puts pen to paper, making an image of who 

we are and where we've been. It's Tova Mirvis making my heart bleed 

at the makings of a family figuring out when everything started changing 

and Jonathan Safran Foer making "small prayers to G-d" out of 

memory and religiosity. Jewish-American fiction places faces and makes 

a mosaic out of the grab bag of the things that mean "Jewish." Turning 

tradition into struggle, love and survival into the trappings of figuring out 

what modernity means to the tradition of remembering. Jewish-American 

fiction is a window to the outside world, as Jews and nonJews, and characters 

kept inside story forms make it possible to peek outside and see what we do to 

be Orthodox, Reform, lapsed, born again, a believer or dreamer, secular, 

sane, insane, in love and out of love, living, dying and surviving. 


But above all else, when we are bound to a book below lamplight,
 

it’s easiest to say that Jewish-American fiction is the definition of humanity.

I ended the paper with the following, If anything, [Bernard] Malamud is using Jews as the example: Humanity at its core is Jewish. It is survival, perseverance and remembering so as not to repeat. By saying “all men are Jews,” Malamud creates a most-powerful metaphor, and an example, for all religions, races and nations. He simply is saying “here is the beginning, here is who you are, don’t forget it."

In response to my final paper (which is much longer than these two excerpts), my professor gave me one of the greatest compliments I've probably ever received from someone, and this was just as I was converting the first time around! He said, "Jewishness, Jewish culture, is a matter of putting pen to paper – you’ve got that down, too. You have what my mother would have called a Yiddishe kupf – a Jewish head. You see the subtleties, the nuances in things. You see the humor that’s enveloped in tragedy, and the tears hidden inside the laughter." Here's one Jew who knew.

A sampling of some of the amazing things we read that semester, which I definitely need to revisit are:

• "Lady of the Lake" by Bernard Malamud
• Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• The Outside World by Tova Mirvis
• "Electricity" by ... I can't remember. This bums me out greatly.
• "When You're Excused, You're Excused" by Bruce Jay Friedman
• The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman
• The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

And, if you know what's good for you, you'll purchase Bad Jews and Other Stories by Gerald Shapiro. Would I lead you astray?