Susan Lynn Meyer

Children’s Books and Baltimore History: Lesléa Newman’s Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed

While I was thinking about what I learned about Baltimore history from reading Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, I happened to come across another book that taught me more about Baltimore: Lesléa Newman’s adorable picture book, Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed, with charming, lively illustrations by Amy June Bates (Candlewick 2015).ketzelcatwhocomposed

 

If you have a young child who loves cats, lives in Baltimore, plays the piano, or loves true stories, you must rush out and get a copy of this book! And if you are a teacher looking for appealing non-fiction to add to your classroom library, this book is certain to be very popular.

 

Moshe, a composer, who has learned to listen “outside himself and listen . . . inside himself” and turn those sounds into music, hears the mew of a kitten one day while out for a walk. He adopts Ketzel and brings her home. One day, while Moshe is struggling with a piece of music, Ketzel walks across the piano keyboard—and the rest is music history!

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Moshe Cotel and Ketzel

It is Baltimore history too. And, like The Hired Girl, it also intersects with the story of Jews in Baltimore. Moshe Cotel, the composer on whom the story is based, was born in Baltimore in 1943 and taught music composition at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater!) from 1972 to 2000. He then became a rabbi.

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The Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore

 

And—what are the odds on this?—it turns out I get to mention my favorite George Eliot novel again in this blog post!

 

Cotel composed an opera titled Deronda inspired by George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda! (This novel is less well-known than Middlemarch, but I feel it deserves just as much attention. It’s about an adopted Englishman who discovers that his birth mother is Jewish.)

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Hugh Dancy as Daniel Deronda in the BBC adaptation

And the ten-year-old girl who first performed Moshe Cotel’s “Piece for Piano: Four Paws,” in 1998, Shruti Kumar, a piano student at the Peabody, was then also a student at Friends School (see my post on The Hired Girl) and connected with the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. So was I, and so were some of my siblings, years ago, when it was just beginning, under the leadership of Professor Julian Stanley, then in the Johns Hopkins Psychology Department.

Small world!

Posted on 02/14/2016 07:33 pm | 4 Comments

Moments of Literary Joy: Shana Burg’s Laugh With the Moon

This week’s moment of literary joy (well, really there are two today!) comes from Shana Burg’s Laugh With the Moon (Delacorte 2012), a middle-grade novel about an American adolescent, Clare.

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Clare has recently lost her mother and is taken, unwillingly, to live in Malawi by her physician father. Clare overcomes her initial strong resistance through a friendship with Memory, a Malawian girl, and her younger brother, Innocent, and through evolving relationships with her other Malawian classmates. In this powerful, moving novel, Clare’s initial, painful isolation gradually gives way to a sense of commonality in human suffering, community, connectedness, and hard-earned joy (laughing with the moon). It’s a beautiful book.

 

Here are two moments I especially loved.

 

This sentence, on p. 23, in Clare’s voice:

 

“One boy sits on a branch, his bare foot dipping into the sky like it’s a lake.”

 

So nice. That sentence conveys the boy’s comfort in the world, and the continuity between water and air. It makes me of Thoreau’s “time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” There’s something beautifully light and confident and free about that boy in the tree.

 

And then there’s this striking image, as Memory talks about her sense of connectedness with the people she has lost:

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“Each night I watch the moon. The moon is our light in the dark. In this moonlight is the light of my family” (p. 220).

 

Ah. Yes. That passage really hit home for me. Reading it, I realized that there’s a similar passage in my new novel, Skating with the Statue of Liberty. In a moment of unbearable grief, Gustave sees the moon rising over Brooklyn and feels inexplicably comforted. My sister helped me at a very difficult time by telling me about how she felt when she saw a rising moon.  Remembering this helped me figure out how to end this chapter in which Gustave is suffering terribly.

What is it about the moon and grief?  Has anyone else reading this felt comforted by the moon?

 

Posted on 02/08/2016 03:37 am | 2 Comments

Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, Jews, and Baltimore Schools

I’ve just been reading Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl (Candlewick 2015) with great pleasure. It has a compelling plot, it gives us a glimpse into Jewish life in turn-of-the-century Baltimore, and Joan is such a terrific character—an utterly believable, impulsive, romantic, imperfect, likable fourteen-year girl.  And how often can a character be found reading my favorite George Eliot novel, Daniel Deronda, in any book—let alone in a children’s book?

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Enoch Pratt Free Library in Joan’s day

I grew up in Baltimore, and reading this novel set off a series of questions in my mind about the city in the early twentieth century.  I  paid close attention to the place references in the novel, such as Enoch Pratt Free Library, where Joan teaches little Oskar to read.  (That’s where my family used to go on weekends for storytime!)

So when the novel ends with Joan attending an innovative new school located on a street with a name it seemed to me that nobody could possibly make up—Auchentoroly Terrace—I just had to go to my computer to see if Laura Amy Schlitz’s writing mind works in the same way mine does. Could this unnamed school just possibly be the Park School where Schlitz is a librarian and teacher?

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The Park School at Auchentoroly Terrace in 1912

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a strong hunch it was—and BINGO! That was the first address of the Park School when it opened in 1912!  In Joan Skraggs, Schlitz has imagined one of the earliest students at the school.

But that connection with the Park School made me worry about an earlier passage in the novel–about an unnamed Quaker school. When I was a child, I was for a while a scholarship student at Friends School in Baltimore. It was a very progressive school, and I received an excellent education there.  I remain deeply appreciative of that scholarship.  I look back on those years, until Friends could no longer afford to fund the scholarships for me and my many siblings, as among the happiest of my long educational career.

When I was at Friends School, there were a lot of other Jews. Although it was a Quaker school, I remember only one Quaker in my grade.  When our kindergarten class put on a Christmas pageant, the girl originally chosen to play Mary pulled out because her parents thought it wasn’t appropriate for their Jewish daughter. I got put into the role next. We weren’t Christians either, but I guess that didn’t bother my parents.  So I played Mary, holding a flashlight wrapped up in a blanket to represent the baby Jesus! I remember my father—or was it my older brother David?—making jokes about turning it on to create a halo! Jews had a definite presence at Friends in my childhood.

But in The Hired Girl, a Quaker school in Baltimore has educated the older two Rosenbach brothers but has refused to accept Mimi, the third child as a student, because they have too many Jews. They’ll only take her if the parents pay an extra fee of $10,000 to the school!

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Friends School, Baltimore in the 1899 building

Well, how many Quaker schools are there in Baltimore? Could Schlitz possibly be basing this on something that happened at Friends School in the early twentieth century, I worried? Could that have been MY SCHOOL? This seemed very much at odds with the Friends School I knew in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Friends School, Baltimore, 1925 on

 

I’m afraid it looks as this moment in the novel was at least to some extent based on Friends School history. A bit more internet sleuthing reveals that Friends School had a high proportion of Jews in 1899, when it opened, due to its proximity to the Jewish neighborhood of Eutaw Place, where Joan finds her live-in position with the Rosenbach family.  But by World War I, Jewish enrollment had sharply declined.

It isn’t clear from what I’ve come across in a quick search that there was a Jewish quota exactly, or that extra pay was demanded from Jews—but the headmaster at the time was pleased when the number of Jews dropped off.

Jews at Friends School pre-World War I

Is there more to the story? Maybe I’ll email Laura Amy Schlitz to see if this is based on a more particular incident at Friends School. Stay tuned.

 

Posted on 02/04/2016 11:55 pm | 12 Comments

Welcome to my blog

I’ll be posting here about the books I’m reading and writing and the history behind them.

If I have some exciting news about my writerly life, I may put that up sometimes too.

On Fridays, I’ll post writing prompts for fiction writers and memoir writers.  Most will be good for teachers to use also.

Welcome to my corner of the universe!

Posted on 02/01/2016 06:05 pm | Leave a comment
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