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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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David Hays '56DRA David Hays is a world-class traveler. Well-known for his work as a set and lighting designer on Broadway and for the New York City Ballet, Hays embarked on a second career path when he helped establish the National Theater for the Deaf in 1967. After more than 25 years as its artistic director, he retired, built a small sailboat, and, with his son, sailing partner, and co-author, Dan, set off on a 17,000-mile transoceanic voyage (including a harrowing trip around Cape Horn) chronicled in the 1996 bestseller, My Old Man and the Sea. The latest travelogue by the “old man” is a tale of another kind of journey: one that covers fewer physical miles, perhaps, but is no less demanding. In 1996, the then-66-year-old Hays, who had been raised in a nonobservant Jewish household and hadn’t practiced the religion very much as an adult, decided to study for his bar mitzvah, the ceremony that marks the transition from childhood to adult status in the religious community. This event, which involves reading or chanting the Torah and other parts of the Sabbath service in Hebrew, traditionally occurs when a boy (and, in the more liberal brands of Judaism, a girl) reaches the age of 13, and while Hays could probably have opted for private lessons, he chose instead to join a class of pre-teens. “If nothing more will come from this enterprise than to sit with these kids, to learn again with young people, even if they are ahead of me and smarter to boot, why, that would be enough,” he writes. The result of his year with Rabbi Doug and the “Hormone Hurricanes” is a rich and delightful memoir in which the bar mitzvah “boy” comes to terms with the past. “I am aging without grace, a cranky man,” he says. “I was steering on a fast road and barely looked around at the passengers, and this failure to catch time and slow it is the most haunting failure in my memory.” This “journey of the spirit” may be a second chance. “Can I pick up, once again, that understanding of creation as a child understands it, even as I wear my barnacles and carry my lifetime baggage? Can we cut out those middle years and hear the bells again, in the quiet evening air?” The author is not, however, simply out to turn back the clock. “No elixir salesman could lure me back to the pain of youth,” he says. Besides, neither the ever-present ghost of his mother, nor his wife Leonora, whose masterful malapropisms enliven the narrative, would allow such delusions to take root. “You have to see it from both sides of the speculum,” Leonora tells him when he ponders the contradictions of life, learns Hebrew, and grapples with “the great mysteries”—the primary one of which is “Why am I in this classroom?” As he prepares, Hays looks back over his life and decides, “I’ve done enough big things . the trick is to choose your small battles carefully, and one at a time, and blaze away with humor.” It is a message that resonates deeply with the congregation at the ceremony. As Leonora recounts, “there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.”
Grenville
Goodwin and Neil Goodwin '62, ’65BArch “Imagine this,” writes Neil Goodwin, as he sets the scene of his account of a journey he made in search of a father he never knew. “Imagine that you live in Pinos Altos [a small town in northern Mexico] and that it is 1927. The Sierra Madre rises all around you. The mountains are said to be safe now, but it was not always so. Until 1886, when the Apache Geronimo finally surrendered, the mountains were places of fear. Now almost all the Apaches are gone.” But about 70 years ago, a few “wild” and completely unassimilated Indians remained to haunt the Sierra Madre and carry on a bloody, centuries-old war against Mexican settlers. One of the last acts in this gruesome play occurred in 1927, when a band of Apaches shot a Mexican woman and kidnapped her son. News that a group, led by the murdered woman’s husband, had been organized to hunt down the Indians and get back the boy reached a freshman at the University of Arizona, and promptly Grenville Goodwin decided to find and study these Indians before they were wiped out for good. “Grennie,” as he was known to his family and friends, would go on to write an important ethnographic study, Social Organization of the Western Apache, but while he was tracking the “phantoms” of the Sierra Madre, he also kept a journal, rich, said Neil, “with drama and the promise of adventure … Beginning in 1976, I began to follow in my father’s footsteps.” Over the next 23 years, Neil would return again and again to the Southwest, the diary as a guidebook, to compare notes (literally, Neil also kept a journal, the text of which becomes the book’s narrative), to try to finish work left undone, and to attempt to discover the spirit of the man who died in 1940, the same year Neil was born."I imagine my father talking directly to me,” writes Neil about their shared journey.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell '71PhD, Chace Family Professor of English In the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europeans began to visit Constantinople and other cities in the Turkish empire, western travelers brought back an array of exotic stories. Perhaps the strangest and most gripping tales of all dealt with the persistent rumor that there were rooms in the sultan’s palaces which were said to be filled with women who existed solely to provide pleasure for the ruler. The fact that no western male had actually been allowed inside a harem didn’t seem to matter. “Few could resist describing at length what they had not seen,” said Ruth Bernard Yeazell in her engaging and scholarly examination of the hold the seraglio came to have on the western mind. “And few could resist claiming to be more in the know than their predecessors.” These claims were expressed in the cantos of Byron, the operas of Mozart and Rossini, the writings of de Sade and Wollstonecraft, and the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, among others. But in almost all cases, the artists were exploring what Yeazell terms “harems of the mind”—a mythology, and a very instructive one. “I take for granted that all viewing is shaped by preconceptions,” says Yeazell. “As imaginative projections, such harems tell us more about the Europeans who created them than they do about the domestic reality of the East.” Through nuanced readings of the literature and the artwork for which the harem served as a focus, Yeazell shows how these preconceptions played out in the creative process, as well as how consumers reacted to the material. The author also demonstrates how the intrusion of 19th and 20th century realism, which “certified itself by the rejection of romance,” served to lift the proverbial veil and relegate the harems of the mind to genuine fiction.
Tom
Perrotta '83 In one of the more enduring images of the H-Y-P axis of the Ivy League, every student is brilliant, accomplished, and, as befits the scions of upper-crust parents, completely sure of which direction to take in life. This picture might have been at least partially true in the halcyon days recounted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it’s hardly an accurate depiction of today’s Yale, where nearly half the undergraduates receive some form of financial aid and references to the delights of cognac, cigars, and billiards are more likely to prompt derision than envy. Novelist Tom Perrotta’s modern Yale—the College in the early 1980s—takes its cue from Bruce Springsteen rather than Jay Gatsby, and in this funny and bittersweet account of protagonist Danny’s spring semester in his junior year, the writer deftly moves a cast of well-drawn characters between gritty north Jersey, where Danny’s father drives a lunch truck, and New Haven. Danny has a hard-hat sensibility, and when he goes home, he finds it easy to fill in for his dad on “Dante’s Roach Coach.” He also has no trouble washing dishes in a residential college dining hall where Nick, the cook, “made me wonder if I was a fool for thinking I had some kind of God-given right to satisfying work and personal happiness, for believing that what separated me from him was anything more that a few points on a standardized test and a little bit of luck that was bound to run out long before I reached the finish line.” Fool or not, Danny sees Yale as a ticket to a different kind of life, but as he wrestles with issues of social class, upward mobility, and his place in the college universe, his luck starts heading south. A girlfriend from home turns up pregnant, his current love interest at Yale is sleeping with a professor, he can’t get through Middlemarch, and when the Jersey mob tries to muscle him out of the lunch route business while his father recuperates from hemorrhoid surgery, Danny responds to the leader of the “Lunch Monsters” by asking him if he had a dentist. When the muscleman doesn’t answer, Danny replies, “Make an appointment. tell him you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of . teeth.” What follows are twists and turns that would, like Perrotta’s previous novel-turned-hit-film Election, translate well to the screen. And there is even an ending—filled with the Whiffenpoofs, grain alcohol, and a hot townie with overly protective brothers—that screams out “Sequel!” The novelist has created people to care about, to wonder how Danny and his friends will get through their senior year and beyond.
Brief Reviews Christine Andreae ’67MAT Ten years ago, the author began volunteering to provide care to dying patients at a local hospice. In a touching account of her work, Andreae learned to see terminal illness as an “everyday” reality and help people live as much as possible.
T. Berry Brazelton, MD, and Stanley I. Greenspan '66MD A leading pediatrician and child psychiatrist identify the most important and basic needs of children and set out a program to ensure these needs are met.
David Manuel '58 Brother Bartholomew was blessing the animals when his pager went off. The body of a woman had washed ashore in Cape Cod, $10 million in diamonds she had with her was gone, and the local police chief needed help from an unlikely gumshoe.
Bruce Ross-Larson '66 Whether creating content for the Web, writing an interoffice memo, or developing a great novel, the goal is to craft prose that is clear, accurate, and memorable. Ross-Larson, a veteran teacher and editor, offers sound basic training for authors.
Sherwin Nuland '55MD Best known as the creator of the Mona Lisa, da Vinci was also an architect, engineer, philosopher, and scientist. Nuland, a surgeon and a premier writer on medicine and history, examines Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity.
Harlow Giles Unger '53 The most recognizable signature on the Declaration of Independence belonged to the least likely man to take part in a rebellion. Journalist Unger reveals Hancock’s revolutionary transformation.
More Books by Yale Authors Marc Ian Barasch '71 Sarah E. Chinn '89 Charles Harrington '81 David S. Goldstein '70 Marie Gottschalk '98PhD David Katz, Associate Clinical Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health Christopher Krentz '89, Editor Ralph Lopez '82 Bruce L. McClennan, Professor and Chairman, Diagnostic Radiology, and Howard W. Pollack, Editors Leah Price '98PhD Mark Salzman '82 Susan M. Schultz '80 Lyde Cullen Sizer '84 W. Royal Stokes '65PhD G. Edward White '67PhD Bob Woodward '65
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