Carol Bergman

I had been in the hospital visiting a friend, standing by the elevator waiting to leave, when two nurses rolled an incubator into the hallway.

Even a baby has a story. She had been taken downstairs for x-rays and was wrapped up inside the incubator, a little hat on her head, a striped blanket covering her and oxygen pumping through a tube into her nose. Such a small little baby. The two nurses had stethoscopes around their necks, one on each side of the incubator, like angels guarding the baby. A priest was standing next to them, and when the elevator arrived, everyone gave way for the procession: two nurses, the baby inside the incubator, the priest. “This baby gets right of way,” I said. Where were her parents? How could they have let their baby out of their sight? Why did she need an x-ray? I began to cry, just a soft, whispering cry. Then everyone in the elevator fell silent, and as it began to move, the priest raised his finger and pressed it against the glass near the baby’s head. He said a blessing. “This baby needs to be blessed,” the priest said. So we all blessed the baby.

Premature babies died until the incubator was invented; it was an adaptation of the chicken hatchery. And then came hucksterism, a freak show of “live babies" at World Fairs and Coney Island’s Dreamland, circa 1903. It was Dr. Martin Couney’s idea. Don’t people like an unusual story that pulls at their heartstrings, he asked? Entrance fee: 10 cents. Outside carnival barkers (including a very young Cary Grant) drew people into the exhibit. The sign over the entryway said, "All the World Loves a Baby." Ain’t it so, dear readers? Who can resist a story with a baby in it? Not I.

Back in 1903, desperate parents volunteered their babies willingly and who can fault them? If they hadn’t, they would have died. Dr. Couney never charged them any money.

Those who survived were called “Couney graduates.” I met one many years ago in Seattle and interviewed her. “Just imagine spending the first few weeks of your life in an incubator at Coney Island?” she said. Did she remember? Not really. But it sure made a good story.

The incubator exhibit at Coney Island closed down in 1941. Now, of course, incubators are commonplace in the developed world as are the survival rates of premature babies.  Read More 

Lest we ever forget the empathetic, imaginative genius of The Bard, we have another reminder in an up-and-coming digitalized archive at The British Museum Library. It’s a play, circa 1600 that was never produced. (The original playwright is unknown,) . The authorities were afraid it would incite riots. Why? Because the main character—Sir Thomas More—makes an impassioned plea for the humane treatment of French Hugenot refugees seeking asylum in London. Sound familiar?

Shakespeare was brought in as a script doctor, as were others, but scholars agree that his contribution is the most moving and well-written. Indeed, he fixed the script; many speeches have a distinctive Shakespearean signature.

For those who have not read “Wolf Hall,” or seen the adaptation on PBS, Sir Thomas More was Henry VIII’s councilor and lord chancellor. And by many accounts, including Hilary Mantel’s, he was not a particularly sympathetic figure. Shakespeare re-interprets Sir Thomas More, deepening his character in the rewrite of the script.

“At its heart it is really about empathy,” says the library’s curator, Zoe Wilcox, in an article in The Guardian on March 15, 2016. More is calling on the crowds to empathise with the immigrants or strangers as they are called in the text. He is asking them to imagine what it would be like if they went to Europe, if they went to Spain or Portugal, they would then be strangers. He is pleading with them against what he calls their ‘mountainous inhumanity’ ” :

“You’ll put down strangers,/ Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,/ And lead the majesty of law in lyam/ To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the King/ As he is clement if th’offender mourn,/ Should so much come too short of your great trespass/ As but to banish you: whither would you go?/What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers.”

We would do well to remember that these are not Sir Thomas More’s words, they are Shakespeare’s.  Read More 

Letters. Once upon a time my mailbox was chock-a-block with letters, not junk but letters. Envelopes with stamps, handwritten missives on all kinds of stationary, typed missives, laser printed missives, photographs. Now, every morning when I open my email I’m excited if personal messages await me. We live transnational lives, friends and relatives and colleagues everywhere. But only a few use the convenience of email to send long narrative “letters,” if we can still call them that. Certainly, writers send long narrative emails more than most. Not only does it keep our professional and personal relationships alive, it keeps our writing muscles supple.

After a decade of working in London, I’d made many friends and I was sad to leave. My friend, Norma, suggested that we correspond regularly. About once-a-month we exchanged huge envelopes filled with: news clippings, a written letter or tape, programs of plays, press releases (we are both journalists), gallery brochures and photographs. Now we do the same on email which is much cheaper, faster and environmentally correct though, somehow, not nearly as much fun. The arrival of these packages made me smile. I’d have days of browsing and reading ahead of me, the joy of hearing Norma’s voice telling stories on tape (she’s an actor as well as a journalist) and the sensation, illusory though it was, that I was still in London, if only for an hour or so a month. Skype, phone, Facetime, all wonderful and immediate, but not the same. And this is true of every technological advance: we gain and we lose.

So here’s a gain story:

My friend William moved to Singapore when he finished his PhD and couldn’t get a job in the U.S. He married and now has a baby. Settled, more or less, into a very interesting life abroad. He teaches, he writes hard-boiled novels, reviews books, travels. We had both taught ESL at a Japanese school in New York and although we are a generation apart became fast friends. Then he left. What to do? Stay in touch, of course. Recently, after he moved from Singapore to Jakarta, our email correspondence accelerated and deepened. A few days ago he attached some photos of his wife, his new baby girl, and a link to a blog post sketch of him made by a well known Indonesian graphic artist, Sheila Rooswitha. They were in a noodle cafe discussing a graphic novel adaptation of one of William’s Malaya trilogy, “Singapore Black” (Monsoon Books), when William’s phone went off. There’d just been a terror attack south of where they were sitting and he was trying to get some information. Sheila started to sketch him. The sketch was so vivid that I was right there with them.

Then there is my cousin, Cameron, a musician (French horn), who led a peripatetic life in the orchestra of “Phantom of the Opera” for many years—stayed in touch with everyone—and is now living in the woods of northern California with his husband, James. Cameron collects old typewriters and is an avid correspondent. To my shame, I discouraged him from writing me very long letters and I am sorry, truly, Cameron. Somehow the electronic revolution addled my brain. It made me impatient and dismissive of thick beautiful envelopes arriving in my snail mail box. So I’m contrite and repentant and by way of apology will post the link to your blog here so that others might enjoy it:

http://cameronkopf.blogspot.com/

All best,
Carol Bergman  Read More 

I went to my favorite fancy café to have a cup of cappuccino and a pastry. The bill was nearly $10. This may not seem like a lot of money to most people and it didn’t seem like a lot of money to me in that moment. I had just paid and was gathering my belongings when a young man sat down at the end of the communal table. There was something about his face that stopped me and I did not want to leave. I was feeling a familiar pain deep inside my body I call “my refugee pain.” Somehow I knew, I knew instinctively as I always do, that this man was a refugee or an asylee. My parents were refugees and I grew up witnessing this pain and feeling it. Writing eases the sensation and is therefore of some use to me and others, I feel. I am writing about it now.

I took off my coat and sat down again. The young man did not take off his grey wool coat or his green knitted cap. I was relieved to note that these clothes were clean. He was wearing large glasses that were slipping down his nose, shiny with sweat.

He sat for a while and looked around, bewildered. He was black. He was African. All the other visible employees in the café were white. One of the waiters put a menu in front of him. He picked it up in a desultory way and then looked around the capacious room. Conversation was buzzing. It was lunchtime. Finally, I said to him, “The service is not great here. You’ll have to call someone over.”

I don’t know why I said this. Maybe just to open a conversation. Because I knew that this young man was not there to drink cappuccino.

“I’m here to see the chef,” he said. Behind the hutch where the waiters collect the food were two men in toques. Both were black.

Then the manager came over. She was from Finland, tall and lean and blonde, studying to be a fashion designer. I bring my students here, sit for hours and read their manuscripts, and I know all the hired help. I was sure the well-dressed beautiful manager from Finland was on a student visa. She bent over the young man instead of sitting down next to him and asked a few questions. And though he didn’t have a CV, he’d been recommended by one of the chefs so she gave him an application and left him to fill it out. She’d been kind or kind enough, I thought.

The young man was from Congo, he told me when I asked. I could not imagine what he’d had to leave behind or who had been killed—friends, an extended family, maybe even a wife and children. He had escaped. He was safe. Was this enough?

I watched as he began to fill out the form. He stopped to think. Congo is a Francophone country; maybe he was having trouble with the English questions. Should I do more? Help him fill it out? His pen ran out of ink and he flicked it with his wrist. He put it down and I offered him mine. It was the least I could do. He needed a job. I doubted this would be his lucky day.  Read More 

It’s my birthday week so I thought I’d write a post by way of celebration. It’s not a big birthday. No parties, please. I’m not a party person; I like small gatherings. So I didn’t enjoy my birthday party two years ago overmuch. (Is that a word?) Okay, guess the number because I won’t tell. My daughter and husband planned it, I drew up the guest list, but even so, I objected. They refused to hear objections and in the end I surrendered to their loving efforts. There were many highlights: friends and family and a scrumptious M&M cake. I allowed myself to indulge.

It took place in a favorite restaurant. There were balloons, good food, cheerful buzzy conversation, a cash bar. We had the whole back room. Nice. But as soon as I walked in the door—I was already writing about it in my head. “It was as if everything I saw had already been written,” wrote Gabriel Garcia Marquez who was both a journalist and a novelist. Always observing. Always narrating a story.

In other words, even when we are not physically writing, writers are writing. Life’s happenings spin differently and take on odd configurations.

My mother died—healthy and full of ideas—at the age of 99. To the end, she knew what was happening and talked about it. She was a physician so could organize her medical care—how much morphine to drip into her veins, for example, so that her last breath would postpone until one of her grandchildren arrived from Wisconsin. Maybe I get my slightly detached appreciation of life from her. Did she enjoy her birthdays? Yes and no. Certainly the accumulating years were experienced as a gift. Most of her family--our family-- had been killed in a genocide; she was a survivor. And so every day was precious, not just her birthday. But she didn’t like the focus to be on her; she was shy. Maybe this explains my resistance to celebrating my birthday this week. Or maybe I’m watching it unfold into a story.  Read More 

The women characters on “The Affair” all have pouty lips. What a soap opera! That being the case, why am I watching this program other than to relax and laugh?

A writer friend recommended it. I wonder about his motivation. Is it really so well written or is he hooked on the sex scenes? All that time lapse structure from different points of view is impressive, my friend says. Remember “Rashomon,” the 1950 Kurosawa film? There’s a murder involving four people. They all have different stories. Orson Welles used a similar device in “Citizen Kane.” Both films are classics; we watch them over and over again with equal pleasure. And we always notice something new. I can’t say the same of “The Affair,” and though I managed to keep watching until the end of Season 2, I don’t plan on ever watching it again.

Mostly I was fascinated by the predictable/ constant sex scenes, the underbites, overbites and deep red lipstick, and the two main actors, Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, who are both British. It was fascinating to observe their impersonations of hot, shallow, irresponsible, foolish Americans as they feigned regionless American accents. Actors always do their best so I cannot fault them. And Dominic is a hunk.

In journalism we also have something called the “Rashomon effect,” which is much more serious than the POV gimmick in “The Affair.” When we go out to interview people, we must be mindful of subjective interpretations and corroborate every assertion and every accounting and recounting of an event. We gather varying points of view and present, interpret and assess as fairly and accurately as we can. Unless, of course, we are creating factoids for the tabloid press. In that case, we’d still be writing soap operas.  Read More 

I arrived early at The Algonquin for a rendezvous with a writer friend and was directed to one of my favorite locations in the southwest corner of the lobby. The high-backed chair with green leather upholstery is my favorite and comfortable for my back. I’m a regular and know the best seats in the house—both for comfort and line of sight. Who else is here? Just a touristy theater crowd or someone important? Sooner rather than later, a waiter appears. I am greeted warmly and place my order—a pot of hot tea.

On this particular evening, I logged into the Wi-Fi, checked my email and unloaded “Middlemarch” from my backpack. Whew! I wouldn’t be taking it home with me. Either I’d pass it along to my friend or hand it to one of the waiters or managers. It seems that everyone is a reader here. Years ago, when I had a book club that met in the back near the famous Round Table, I left a book with Doomy, who has now finished his education and been promoted from lobby maître d’ to restaurant manager. These days, if Doomy is around when I arrive, I am greeted with warm hugs and a few moments of interesting conversation. He’s doing well and I am proud of him.

Now George, an “associate”—aka a waiter—arrives with my pot of tea and notices “Middlemarch” on the table. He says he’s read it but prefers the Russians. George is college-educated and reads all the time. Just because he’s a waiter, I say to myself, not knowing how to finish that sentence. Here we are, in The Algonquin lobby, talking about “Middlemarch.” I’m thrilled.

When the hotel was sold a few years back—it’s now managed but not owned by Marriott—they kept on all their wonderful employees—no one got fired or lost their benefits. Some have been at The Algonquin for decades. They are landmarked, just like the building, and its long, literary history.  Read More 

My husband asked me to read a book he had published for a client. It was a short book but the subject didn’t interest me. No matter. He valued my professional input and I said okay. I cannot say no to my husband, nor should I, not to mention that this was a client’s book. My husband is a screenwriter, among other things, and is getting into producing, as he describes it. Now he was thinking of producing the story he had just published as a movie. But he wanted to know: would this story make a good movie? It’s about a boy who gets lost in the woods, discovers a den of wolves (do they live in dens?) and is led home by a very talkative wolf who has a profound philosophy of life based on Greek mythology.

It wasn’t my cup of tea; I can never get into this kind of fantasy. But my husband can, and our daughter likes it, too, and so do many other people; it’s a viable popular genre.

I tried reading the book in my office, on the kitchen table and in the living room. I never got past page 10 before I needed a cookie, miso soup, some crunchy celery, a handful of walnuts, or a sandwich. Not necessarily in that order.

Then one day, the deadline for my answer looming, I went downtown for a swim, and instead of taking the speedy subway home, I took a bus. I had taken the book with me and I thought, maybe I’ll be able to finish this book on the bus.

Long bus rides, bless them. I remember when I first arrived in London and had some time to get to know the city before my job started. Every day, I hopped on a bus—a different line each time—and took it to the end of the line. London is a vast, complex, wonderful city. That’s how I got to know it. I took small orange WH Smith notebooks with me and jotted down all my thoughts and observations. Everything interested me in this new landscape. And now I was on a New York City bus headed uptown and there was something about it’s lumbering stop-start movement that eased my mind. Also, I was trapped—no kitchen. I got into the book and finished it. Then, I took out my phone and sent my husband an email: I finished the book on a long bus ride home. In answer to your question—would it make a good movie—I’d have to say: I have no idea. I enjoyed the bus ride, though. The gritty urban landscape was the perfect antidote to the den of talkative wolves.  Read More 

I met a composer from Berlin at the Pain-Quotidien café near Lincoln Center. We were sitting at the communal table and began to chat. I was editing a manuscript and he asked if I was a writer. I heard his German accent and asked what he was doing in New York. Our conversation continued for at least 30 minutes: politics (our election, Merkel, the refugees), support for artists (or lack thereof) in our respective countries and cafés. We are both grateful for Pain-Quotidien however slight a resemblance it bears to a European café. When he is in New York on business, it’s the closest he can find to his regular Berlin café. He took out his phone and showed me a photo of his favorite café in Berlin. Most people would show a picture of a loved one so this was amusing. He missed his café.


The café of my dreams is in Paris, London, Prague or Berlin, I told him, and it’s an outdoor/indoor café with cheerful canopies and friendly waiters who know me well because I am a regular. I have a special table in a corner with a vantage of the street, the perfect seat, which I have earned after many years of being a regular. I arrive around 3 p.m., order my coffee and strudel, take out my notebook and write by hand or read until a friend arrives. I never know who that will be, no arrangements have been made, they are not necessary. It’s a given that this is where we spend a couple of hours of every day away from the rigor and solitude of our writers’ desks. It’s verboten for any of us to talk on our mobile phones or bring our laptops. We are here to converse with one another.

Converse, what a quaint notion. Am I dreaming? I suppose I am. In truth, I reside in a city which has no café culture whatsoever though the bar culture is very strrong. Can a culture be strong? Can it obliterate all other cultures? And so I am wondering what can be done about this, if anything. And then I wake up from my dream in a café in my neighborhood, far away from Lincoln Center, where everyone is plugged-in and wired-in and a man wearing a headset is sitting next to me. There are odd very large paintings of rhinos and elephants on the wall—a special exhibition—and he is looking at them, so I say, “Do you like the paintings?” and he seems shocked, even annoyed that I have broken his insular reverie. “Oh I wasn’t really looking,” he says, and he turns back to his laptop and increases the volume on his headset.

Once upon a time my husband and I planned to open a writers’ cafe in New York, not just for writers, of course. Even in the planning stages I knew it was a bad idea: exorbitant rents withoout commercial rent control and so much time spent in administration we’d have no time to write. But after ten years abroad, it was a dream, a dream of bringing a European artist’s avant garde aesthetic to the city of my birth and to revitalize a café culture in Greenwich Village where writers used to hang out—when they had time and didn’t have to work money jobs to pay the rent.

“Midnight in Paris,” that nostalgic Woody Allen film, caught my mood exactly.  Read More 

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
--George Eliot, "Middlemarch"

Upon my word, I have finished “Middlemarch,” finally. This is a long book, 794 pages in my Barnes & Noble edition. I did not only read the hard copy—that I kept on my kitchen table. I also downloaded it onto my Kindle app and read it on my iPhone and iPad... sync sync sync. What would Mary Ann Evans, née George Eliot, have said? I think she would have been pleased. Writing in the 1870’s about the 1830’s, a time of rapid technological change in Victorian England, she would have been fascinated by the internet, for example, or by women politicians.

I read “Middlemarch” exclusively over the winter break holidays. I let the New Yorkers pile up and did not open another book. This is very unusual for me as I am always reading at least two books at the same time: a fiction and nonfiction book. “Middlemarch” is both a character-driven story and a book of ideas, all intertwined and satisfying. Yes, it is polemical at times, but not overly so. Yes, it is flawed, but what novel isn’t?

And I love all the characters, imperfect and troubled as they all are. Ardent Dorothea and sweet observant Celia, her sister, and their kind Uncle, and all the misguided, struggling men, a plethora of those: Lydgate and Ladislaw and Sir James Chettam and deadly dull Casaubon. Into this male-created universe George Eliot, drops corseted, clever, uneducated—or undereducated—women who ask questions and defy convention and expectation, as Eliot did herself. She lived with her partner, Henry Lewes, for more than twenty years—unmarried. She was a free-thinker and a successful author in her own lifetime.

Yes, it was time for me to read “Middlemarch.” I will, undoubtedly, read it again, but I am moving onto “Daniel Deronda,” Eliot’s second master—or should we say mistress—work. I will keep you posted on my progress, dear reader.

Why “Silas Marner” was on the curriculum in my high school, I shall never understand. What –American—adolescent could ever fathom Eliot’s complex sentences? Her thoughts ascend into the stratosphere and back down to earth in loops and swirls. I had to read many of them more than once. And that was both a challenge and a welcome antidote to our sound-byte culture.

As writers we are the custodians of literature and language; it is the foundation of what and how we write today. What is past is not past, nor is it arcane, however difficult to read and interpret.  Read More