tv Book TV CSPAN September 1, 2013 7:00am-7:46am EDT
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we have a kitchen in la jolla and it was mitt's birthday that we celebrate a rather late. that was last spring. i do remember the first chance i had to actually get the family together and be off the trail for a day or two, the first thing i did was ready and took mitt's favorite dinner. >> the romney family table is the name of the book. ann romney, thank you for being on booktv. >> thanks so much. >> you are watching see them do with politics and public affairs. weekdays fiction live coverage of the u.s. senate. on weeknights watch key public policy events, and every week in the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedules at a website and join in the conversation on social media sites. >> now, more booktv. sonia taitz discusseser
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memoir, "the watchmaker's daughter," about growing up in newark city as the child of two holocaust survivors. this presentation was part of the 2013 "chicago tribune"'s printer's row lit fest. it's about 45 minutes. >> i'm very honored to be here tonight with this great audience and also with my colleague, sonia taitz has written a very haunting book called tintin. we'll tell you about both the washington -- "the watchmaker's daughter." you are the daughter. tell us about the watchmaker. what was it like to live within? >> i was born into a family of a heroic couple who had survived the holocaust and to seem to me more like victor's thing that comes. and so my father was a very charismatic man. i would say that physically you could combine yul brynner in the role of king in the king and i, and is also a good dancer, and
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particularly a good walter. and pablo picasso, a man who always looked older but never got old. he saved lives and the holocaust. you become a watchmaker because it was very unfortunate circumstances, but his life had a way of turning everything, and alchemical we're turning lead into gold. his father had been shot. my father was bigotry when his father was shot. his father had been a miller and his mother, my namesake, sonia, had to scribble to protect the three kids. when my father turned 13 he had to apprentice, find a trade, not stay in school. and teach us watchmaking and he really took to it and he became a master watchmaker. flip the calendar, years go by, and the russians came into this country of lithuania. he lost his job, his harley. the harley was an index of that. and after that the nazis came
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and lo and behold when asked each person what their profession was, he didn't say lawyer, which would have been useless to the regime, but a watchmaker. it's sort of crochet by the germans have or had a commission. >> for punctuality. and my father could fix any kind peace from the smallest rocket watch the big been. so that saved his life. you not only came a watchmaker in the dachau concentration camp that he was able to save other prisoners. people who are starving and week and couldn't stand confined as most of us couldn't, he would let them in and say i need an assistant and he would show them how to put -- cautioned them not to break anything. he had a workshop of a lot of watchmakers. so that was living with the hero, and my mother had saved her mother, ma and she had come to america and she was -- her
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color scheme was flowers and she played the piano. she had been at a conservatory about to graduate when the nazis came and so she played for us. i would lay under the delisting. my household was a very strange place of clocks ticking, pendulum swinging and hearing chopin, while living in different times and places. the past and present which was america and had nothing to do with any of that. >> when you grew up for the first over your she did not really know the story of your father's heroism of what he did in dachau. it's almost like a coincidence. tell us that he found out about it. >> i have to say i did know he was a hero, but a lot of people who come out of my experience, an american child born of immigrants, in particular war refugees and most particularly the holocaust, didn't get to hear, there was a feeling of silence because people were
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traumatized. no one was aware that in the kind of went on with their lives and i felt like a rogue leader wa the didn't get up in the morning and shave and get out and go to work. my parents did all that but they talked about it nonstop. although i did know about his heroism, i did know they have been intense. it was day one topic as i entered the mount sinai, you know, birth room. i'm sure i was told something about the holocaust. like it hurt more than in the holocaust, you know? my mother was in a twilight sleep. anyway, she always explained giving birth was painless and then i found up to the contrary that having babies in that era was painless. in any case i learned about my father's heroism at that time, the specific thing, but they both seemed very unbroken, very together. then they also linked it to things. they would link the fact they were in the holocaust to great things. i had tears but then i have joy.
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you having a really bad time, my love, and i with you over to paradise. those are typical psalms that david wrote to comfort a depressed teen. then these immature religious jewish day school so right away every holiday made since. the typical jokes, they tried to kill us, they didn't win, let's eat. so for me, passover was my father's store. it was almost like being a kennedy. my father is telling me things happening in the real world. he did tell me when i was very little about having a nazi make him not to -- matzo. >> when you which is you for the first time and you were there with your father and people started gathering. they recognized him and they would say he saved us. tell us about that. >> it's true. when i was 10 my brother was 13,
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my older brother, and for a present for him we went to israel. we were not rich. i remember going to seven stops and i thought it got dizzy athens and rome and paris. finally we arrived, and we went to jerusalem and we went into this park and my father was admiring the fact that there were so many trees and the country was green and saying how things could be born out of the dust and sand in the desert and the swan. i was like having jerusalem syndrome. i'm sure my eyes was because pipe leaks. people started to come out of all the trees in all the directions. they gathered around the fun and a group of them said, are you the one who saved his? and so thought my father was pretty great but i hadn't expected this. this was more than a hero worship in many ways and that's how he learned that he had saved allies. as i mentioned before, in dachau. so it was a very i guess every climatic moment for me every
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much homecoming to see that even if you in the worst circumstance, you could be standing on a beautiful palm tree in a place like jerusalem and feel nothing but admiration for courage that in the darkest time someone could be helping other people and that was, being a hero, doing something instead of sitting back and watching was one of the big legacies that my father gave me. >> but also at the same time, i think living with your father was not easy. there was a difficult and dark and violent side of that. please tell us. >> okay, so my father had a very, very bad temper. i guess his shakespearean flaw would be had a very bad temper and i think that's where the holocaust went into these periodic eruptions of rage. not an cause but it just t be so like my brother was in my neighborhood, which was washington heights, full of jewish day schools and refugees from europe, fairly observant
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and close-knit community. my brother was a maverick, and he didn't fit in very well and my father hadn't had a father, so my brother, sometimes age-appropriate sometimes fresh response to michael brother would learn from the tv, you don't understand anything, daddy, that kind of thing. my father would freak out. he had been pushed too many times in too many ways, and he didn't understand that. my brother would often enraging and that was an issue in the family that my father really didn't understand my brother and chose me as the honorary boy i guess, and the honorary olympic runner. here's the torch. you go and run. he definitely would lose his temper. i would be very worried about him and i did think about the song today how king saul was crazy to him needed david to write songs. i think i was the david always tried to console and comfort my father. and then turned he consoled and comforted me because he told me the world is really black and
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white. there's some very bad people in and we are not safe. there are so many other levels than the one you're looking at. everything is pretty safe except she never calls out my name. it's not kathy and peter, but just to sort of make the world safe, i think he gave me a lot of strength and in turn i gave him a lot of strength. it wasn't an easy relationship to be your father or mother's confidant and sort of tiny midget messiah. >> remember what happen when you came home from summer camp at one point and you said, dad, i learned something at summer camp. >> okay. i see where you're going with this. yes, that's pretty much how it became a writer. my fathers final attack on the. he almost never ever got angry at me. we were on the same page literally like a page about most things. i was good at school and he
quote
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loved the. he had not had his education. what did you learn today, and i would tell him. then i got very good grades and my father wanted me to go to law school so i was definitely running a very good race. i went to summer camp and that wasn't at all about academics are being a good group in my camp, it was a jewish camp, but it was about having boyfriends and having an id bracelet. i was 13 or 14, and i was coming into my own as a female and a ceiling very good about it. i had been very sort of feeling like i was very ethnic but suddenly barbara streisand was out and share with slapping her black hair and consider herself a gypsy and an indian and all these other things. it was very gray. one day my father was being overbearing, like, we just have to greet them at the door and say how was your day question was very old school european. i think i chattered and said, i realize now i'm growing up like you. i don't need to listen to you anymore.
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and of laughing because his arm didn't go like a windmill and then, but it was like that's all you needed to say to make a good comedy routine but he flipped out and he hit me. it sounds like yes, it's violence and that was because when you hit someone in anger, even in the old days when people did spank their kids, it depends on the mood and whether you're doing it because they've done something wrong and you want to teach them, or because you just really flipped out. i think he flipped out. that led to my becoming a writer, funny way that i disclose in the book, that i was so angry with them, i wanted to back. of course, i couldn't. you know, that's sort of thing in the bible you to kill for. so went to the bathroom and it took a piece of toilet paper, like churning up in the bathroom and then i ran and got a pen and wrote some notes about how much i hate daddy and someday i will write about him. then i flushed it down the toilet. said my words out to the fish in the atlantic ocean. but i think that was the first
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indicated that you get to rewrite the world and you could respond to it, and that you could reshape it and that you didn't have to take anything in life without having a conscious response to it, our reaction to it, and make it make sense or make it better, or even just event. >> tell us about the dynamics between your father and your mother. she's living with them, too, with this volcano of energy and anger, and how did he interrelate come and what did they find in each other? >> so, they met in a very weird way, which i will have to convention was romantic, because they didn't meet in lithuania. they both came from the same town and they didn't meet in a concentration camp at everybody loves their apartments and homes and got concentrated into this little village. they were both there. they didn't need. they didn't meet in concentration cams themselves because they were male-female.
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my father was with his father-in-lafathernot to be, did there and my mother was with sonia, my father's mother. they spent four years as displaced people in germany. they didn't meet. they come to america and everybody is desperate to get married and want to get married in america because the land we don't have to have a passport assess what's your religion, and everybody gives you a chance. my father felt, and i felt, too, that it's a unique country with tremendous, tremendous of democratic value and gifts that certainly the word true all over the world, and in some cases today. he came here and he wanted to marry, so did she. they're both getting on in years. my father was 40 when i was born. this is a mouthful but they went with the one in holocaust survivors ball. that sounds really hot, right? [laughter]
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but it was because my father was an incredible dancer and it wasn't just the waltz. it wasn't just shall we dance? it was the poker. i saw my parents dance and he never touched the floor. it was like watching a pair of prose. i vacated most of the work because he was a champion skater. he did all the work. i thought i really was good until he let go and i hit the ground. but they danced and then he fell in love with her beautiful green eyes, and she played the piano, and that was a huge thing for him because she was cultivated and he hadn't gone to school after 13. and she loved the way he danced, and he was very sexual i think she fell. she never used that word but i feel there was a charge between the. as a write in the book she was estrogen to his androgen. but at the same time they lived through a period, and so did i, where the relationship of male dominance over women was changing. and although all their lives she
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was sort of like the edith to his archie. she began to see us living a different life and i think there was stress because of that. and also the fact that my father so favored me over both of them, both she and my brother, were considered to be lesser than my father and me. he had chosen the in a very i think family destroying way, to some extent. we weren't destroyed, but come back to the bible. the main stores are all about indie. everybody hates joseph are having that beautiful code. my father put a man on at a very early age. there were times my mother with my been liberated and wanting to be a lawyer and all that stuff, she did recently and probably did feel envious and hurt. i knew that my parents had a really good life on some level because every time they went dancing they went right into the first scene. so that's complicated. >> tell us about the song and
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what it meant to them. >> i happened to love that pic i'm glad you mentioned it. it's a very small element in the book but that was their song. i thought about it a little bit. it's life in tink. that was their motto. i think innocents they didn't look at life in public classes. you do see life in bro's. -- rose. no matter how initial the love story there will be problems and that is a but in those is the human condition to face a life as it was and they could have as i say in the beginning of the book they didn't understand the america i was born into where everyone just seemed to be infantile and wanting to be happy and it was very neutral like the bland man in the gray flannel suit.
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everyone has a holding two car garage and smoke cigarettes. all their friends from the holocaust seem to gravitate to the servers and developed a taste for shrimp cocktail and lincoln continental's. my parents didn't want to nine because they wanted it to be significasignifica nt and meaningful. they wanted to get education and for us to understand. we suffer but if it has meaning we can do anything. they do want me to say that's over, i was mugged now i will go and have a party but it was more like interweaving their history with history of the world, the history of suffering with history of every individual who has, you know, who has problems. la vie en rose is like the time they dance. something kept them together. they could always be in that spot. the spot of rose. >> let's talk about your mother because she was quite an accomplished pianist who played insurance repertoires. but that was one of her many
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losses. not the greatest one-to-one for many losses because of the holocaust. that career, the artistic life. tell us about what she lost the what kind of a told you that take on her? >> my mother was raised in upper-middle-class way, which my father was from a poor family. i think he always admired the fact that she had a grand piano and get copies and she had maize, and -- shipmates commissions are gentle and soft spoken and should being raised to be a concert pianist and she was really, really talented. when she came to america, she really didn't seem that interested in that career at all. she really didn't seem to want to, but she did give lessons. but i think she would say periodically that daddy made for me from nothing because she was his help me. she ran i got things for them like he had his picture restore what they watch making practice and should always run to get the parts. she was always run but i think she liked to run the i never saw
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my mother sitting the i know she had a brain tumor because one day she took a nap and that was unique. she almost never sat, even when she had a new. she would run. she was in some sense in his shadow. and then when she would come to the piano, everybody would go silent. and even with a brain tumor at the end of her life, which is so serious, it was an operable and very fast-moving, she became sort of really quiet and really smiley and really sweet. i had the best talks with within the tissues no longer no longer in the us army and we would just sit on each other's laps basically. but she would go to the piano and she woul would play as was e ever, ever do. may be better. want i should comment on a few days to live, a neighbor knocked on the door and said, what radio station are you listening to? and so the piano was always there for her, as watches were for my father. and parallel to my mother, my father also died of cancer which seemed horrible because they
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have suffered and been imprisoned, he was in a coma and is hands were fixed fixing watches. she was still able to make the whole world resonate with not just beauty but in motion and death. >> do you think she greed for not having been able to become the pianist she might've been, or the artist she might've been to perform for other? >> i didn't see that but i think she would've loved, i think she took on america very strongly. she would've loved to have one of those houses in the suburbs and maybe she wouldn't have had the shrimp cocktail. she would have still enjoyed having time off. she thought she would enjoy having time off from being a lady of leisure. in actual fact i think is that are very well to of things to do all day because my brother and i left the house, she still wanted to bring, you know, she had nothing to do. when my father died she was completely at a loss. i didn't see her thinking, my
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career could've been, you know. i don't know why they put her in the conservatory other than it was something that every cultivated them would have a girl learned the pm and she happened to be really, really good at it. but she wasn't a real star personality. she wanted a nice life where people had nice things and you weren't scared or stressed, that kind of thing. >> you mentioned the favor that your father had torture, but also the onus of that, responsibility of that and i think it comes in when you're going to go to college and your father had requested of a pretty significant request he made a few. >> s. my father made a few, you know, he was a man of very few words. he spoke very slowly. his voice was really deep and he wrote asked for something. he would preface it by saying i don't like to ask for anything, but. in my blood would run cold. so yes, i was a very good student, and i have kids and a know how relevant it is that had
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to go to an ivy league school. it seems to be like the pressure that people are under, and i was a child of immigrants who hadn't gone to college, and i did really well all the way through high school and all of a sudden the principal says to my parents, i was well aware of is doing well and had good scores but i didn't know what that would translate into. the principal said to me, tell my father that i could get into yale and get a verbal guarantee that i would get in. and some of my father had one of his questions at the time, and he said, i don't how many years i have left, you're the apple of my eye and they don't want you to go away and i want you to stay in the city. so it ended up going to barnard college, a very good woman's college, part of columbia but that triggered a spring in me that the desire to go further. even my grandmother had me literally on a leash in the park when i was a little girl. i had those polyester suit dresses that were e.g. and to be really hot and all the other kids in the neighborhood, the other immigrant kids, primarily irish, or frolicking in the
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fountain. i was literally on a leash and she wasn't moving. this request for my father to stay as well, i definitely have a desire to not stay but i did for him when he asked me. why did i get? because i took care of my parents. they were my children and away. i was there parents. i was there to take her. i pitied them. i nurtured them. i felt so much of my father saying i have no family and i don't want you to go. i just wanted to do something that would help if it's an honor when someone someone asked you to do something like that. like someone says ill, stay by me. my father was unwell with cancer. i had three kids and i would stay with him and he would take why are you doing this for me? i said it's a great honor. you were always so busy, and i feel like this is such a great thing that you have time for me now and try to put it that way. it was true because my father was and i need you around, you make my life light up.
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so anyway i went to barnard and then i got into law school and he was twice as happy until that time i was at law school and i hated it and a lot of the people there, i was 21, they're young, i was sort of in over my head in terms of like the society. i was in the greater talking but. i really loved english literature and i love the art and literally big bucks all the time. some people have very big macs and they came from the midwest. that was very frightening. [laughter] so a lot of these people had ph.d's before because it was an unemployable degree so they then went to law school. that your fallback, i'll go to law school. i saw many of them traveled and i thought, now i will get away. i thought i would like to take a leave of absence. i checked with the dean and the surgical also, sure, go excavate in indonesia. all i want to do is go to oxford. of course, then had to talk my father into it. i sort of used his own -- he
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wanted me to be, when eyes are little one of our main stories besides the exodus and slaves being free, the story of queen esther. another example of a tried to kill us, it did work, let's see. the story is that in persia, there's a great threat to the jews, as there might be right now, and the king is an alcoholic idiot and he has banished his wife, because she doesn't want to dance naked for him. he holds a beauty contest for a new queen. so he chooses queen esther. he chooses asked her -- she wasn't queen yet because her uncle says you go in and it will be good to have a jewish queen. later when the king wants to destroy the entire jewish people, esther comes up to his chamber and says -- she comes in this room and she says, you know, the people you want to kill are my people. he goes, really? she says yes, i am here an just.
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say they just pick my father in some sense wanted to go to law school and do that, to the miss america, and second a state or some combination. so my asking to go to oxford, i put it this way that isn't of having what he called brass buttons or authority and status in the world, daddy, i have published a lot. due to accomplish something, you say i accomplished a lot. i'm in yale law school. frankly, i hate. and i would like to take a leave of absence and go to oxford. if i get in, can i go? why? oxford, that is even better than harvard or yale. so used to say that his omega was the highest certification. and i come in a wide away, suggested that if oxford, if harvard was all make it in oxford was the elite. he was very impressed when i sat on top of which i want to go back to europe. i want to go where you are thrown away and come back and be a student and make an impression
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and study and get a degree. so he was very kind to me in a sense, he let me go there but first he may be, there was another quest. it's like a fairytale. he said i will let you go and now i have another request of you. i want you to bow that wherever you wander and where the ago he will never forget who you are. i thought, that's not likely to happen since from the birthing room i was told, i was this incredibly -- it wasn't going to be that i would forget. i said, i vow. then it went to oxford and yes. >> tell us -- >> then all hell broke loose spent tell us what you learned at oxford about how jews were regarded in england. >> okay. so, my trip to oxford. i feel that every adventure, every great story begins with a
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journey, like a million things happen. my parents had their journey across the atlantic. you know, abraham is told leave the place you're used to and go to a new land. as i crossed the atlantic and i was going, as they sometimes say, to the heart of whiteness because it was very monolithically english at that time. england as far more mixed now, and it was english people in english culture speaking english in england with the church of england. so outsiders were treated like somewhat like outsiders, and being jewish was certainly thought to be a subject that i would be ashamed of. and so if i would say of someone else, do you think they're jewish? favorites that i wouldn't dream of asking. and i would think to myself, i'm asking is a descendent of abraham and moses and not if they have a communicable sexual disease. [laughter] so that was sort of, but my geithner counter was going off in us very excited because i've
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not experienced what my parents talk about. although i believed then and i read jewish history and was watching the world. it was exciting to feel that the world was really fraught with conflict and opposition. and so what happened was that i fell in love with an english guy, and so that would've been publicly the last thing my parents would've wanted, because my mother's day was, particularly, if you marry a gentile, he will drink in the chair and then he will call you a dirty jew. that didn't happen but my husband, this person's parents absolutely hated jews so that was like, amazing. his mother said clearly that she hated them, and that was, it was very open. it wasn't politically correct and i thought misguidedly that they would like me as soon as they got to know me, and that didn't happen. my charm failed miserably, and telling them how good i was in school. nothing worked and they seem to
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be saying to me that we are in england and even if you discovered a cure for every cancer and have aimed mortar board made of solid gold, we don't like you. we are english and we stay in england. we don't wander the world and sorting with her since. we don't do that. but there's a lot more to the story. much more to the story. >> didn't his mother say this incredible phrase in response to you and his courtship of you, or your courtship of them, better i need rest than a jewish? >> right. that's loaded in so many ways but the thing about college women like they would say -- you could know anyone appropriate everyone was a woman. i used to joke a baby was a baby woman. so yeah, that was, i have to say i got to jump ahead and say that this particular woman who said that is not my mother law and wrapped up a little presence for
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hanukkah for each of the three grandchildren is 24 and mailed them from england and they're all thoughtful. she did say that. i was told she was brought up that way in a small village in wales where she never met jews and do s so to in england becaue they were about, there were centuries where there were no jews in england. they were kicked out in the middle ages from york. and a lot of the literature has literature from jews, very negative on spiritual and a lot of prejudicial things my father experienced in eastern europe were sadly people will run after and tried to beat him up and say he drank christian blood and soil. i don't know what her particular images were, that she felt a to dread of me and of my family. and so yeah, and then in the end, and ended and, she met them. >> and she wasn't the only one who tried to stop his courtship. so did your mother. tell us about the. >> needless to say my parents
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believed in continuity of the heritage. one out of three jews died, and certain from their circumstances there were probably 5% remaining i got out. and they felt that it was their duty to transmit this, i guess this is tortured or this little candle to the next generation, like it again and the worst thing it would be happen is it would be snuffed out and forgotten. that's not just their lives but all the way back. so a long, poignant and resilient tradition, but easily snuffed out. and so both my parents felt that this would be a really bad thing. even when i met my parents in jerusalem again, and tried to make the argument, this is my greatest attempt of arguing, i said that meant i was in love with, the bullet i was in love with was one of the 36. there's this older jewish legend, and 36 people in work or not jewish action and to make the world so good.
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and my father said, sweetie, first to give some consideration and said i really don't think so. [laughter] another i've been married for a decade i can say yes. he's not one of the 36 for sure. [laughter] but, you know, who is? both sets of parents made us break up and we were broken up, and i married to someone else who fit the bill, a rebound romance, a law student who became a lawyer, and his father was a professional, and although my parents, they didn't get what they wanted because it was like a big piece of ham in the fridge and they offered to my father and he said why dvd is? the other guy says why don't you taste the? a taste agree. even though they were jewish that wasn't quite the -- the familiar feelings my father wanted. i was about to make the wrong guy. i have a lot of misgivings biggest every single day on thing about the boy in england i love. i'm getting older and older and
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if you like this was the one and i'm sure, and get on about walking out with someone. i pretty much like a lot but it don't think i should be marrying him, and they went to nevada and said said let's call it all. he said always go forward, not backwards. that might've been how we survive. it doesn't work if you're in a speeding car rushing towards the cliff and it does work if you're a lemming i think. and then i sent out an sos letter to paul and i think i'm getting married in what you think, something like that. i learned later my mother had torn up those letters. because when i finally did get back together with paul, i separated from my husband and i left my wonderful law job with a beautiful desk and flowers on it, and went back to england because paul said that he would marry me and things were different now. and he said by the way, why didn't you answer my letters? so at the wedding day, my mother apologized. she said i tore them up, i'm sorry. i cost you so much time.
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but i think everything happens for a reason. i guess we were both much more mature. we were like in her early '20s. now we're more at an appropriate age, and although this are hard to get the jewish divorce. from the first husband, i decided i would do in very religious way, so that there is no question that we were divorce. if i had children there's no question i was married to the new father. they stood up on, like a court when you get a jewish divorce and they stood up, sat, there were three rabbis, like the smith brothers like one more. one hi, one low, one sideways. and it was humiliating because i had to be given a bill of divorce and in the old-fashioned way. at some .1 of them said to me, so, do you to have children? i said no. he said, thank god. i went through a lot but i think, i guess as a writer it's all for the mill. so that's what happened. >> let me ask you something more
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difficult. two subjects, shame and guilt. you say when your parents came to one of your college graduation, i think it was law school, how ashamed you are about how they looked, how they looked unlike everyone else, the of the people spared. and, of course, how guilty you felt about that, a shame they felt when people came to your apartment and saw what it was like. tell us about those things and about how you do with that. >> okay. i just want to also come back a minute ago we talked about the wedding and all four pairs by them are madly in love with each other, it was the most beautiful scene, very tiny wedding. and on his deathbed my father said thank you for bring these people into my life. and so my fears and machines and all that vanished away. yeah, i felt, i felt when i was a tenured that my parents were so different it was ridiculous. i now know that's a teenage thing as well because my children also think of that of
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me. cool, wonderful me. it's like mommy, don't talk. said, don't talk. stated. we see some and a department store, i have to hide behind a rack. i know it's a common thing for children. [laughter] my children, and if i'm friendly like, you are talking too much. i probably am. but anyway, what with my parents, my parents would come to visiting day. i became very sassy until my dad i was grown-up because i had an id bracelet from some cute guy. you know, i've got the look and i've got my long hair and it's a straight as it always has to be. and i'm doing my thing. and here comes a mom. she's wearing socks and sandals and she's got a bag -- everybody is getting snickers and m&ms and my mother says, i brought you some hard boiled eggs and some raisins. [laughter] and eggs are in their peel. if you should open one, they're not that hard. it's very sad. very, very said.
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my fathers when a straw hat which he wore every day in the summer. and at some point he sleeps on my bunk bed, asleep and snoring with the huge paper over his face. so that's really cool. [laughter] my kids had no idea what i had to do with. even if i were will with religious people, so few people came from the holocaust but my parents didn't know the rules and on the sabbath day went to a sabbath day went on i was sitting with the rabbi's daughter, my mother turned on the light and turn us was use electricity. she said you are not? you could never hit or do this because she would say, why are you -- [laughter] and the pinnacle, law school, there i am graduated from law school, gothic. it was after i came to oxford. it was exactly like oxford and everybody's parents seem to be, that dads are all 6'1" with silver beautiful here. the moms all had a velvet headband, and here comes my parents and my father has
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patrick my mother has become of course. but this times it's a banana that is five days old and brown. [laughter] and i can't be was an accident. this is where she got revenge on me for being such a smart aleck, being my dad's favorite. and she said, do you want banana? we are standing in line, the whole cap and gown, and i write about this in the book. the shriver's, one of the kennedy kids, the shriver is in my class and reference. i see his parents and the exactly like what i just described. maria who is not yet a journalist, i am praying -- the banana is intended oil. the tinfoil has been reused so it's got 1000 creases. it's like catching the sun in so many ways. [laughter] i was -- the horrible thing for me is my kids when they're mean to me and say hide, hide behind the coats, they don't feel guilty because my husband and i are like strong modern parents. i would feel bad that i was
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ashamed of my poor parents and i would feel sad that kids wouldn't come to my house because we were in the wrong neighborhood. but also be relieved. it was a very big conflict got a painful thing. they couldn't learn. i couldn't dress them. they were adults, you know, or they would answer the phone and that have accents. it was hard. it was hard for me. >> two more things i want to ask you. what is it about, you devote a lot of thought and pages in this book to the deaths of each of your parents. really a lot of time, why do you do that? why is that so looming so large day in the context of your story? >> yet. i'm always thinking -- i just want to say, a lot of immigrants will know what it's like to feel ashamed of the plastic yellowing plastic on the furniture and plastic flowers. okay, but about their deaths.
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i wrote the book many years after my parents passed away, and i was going to write this kind of book although my mother used to say to me, she was everybody has a story. i have a story, and she wrote her story and it's in the book of how she survived and she said, tell my story. and i agree to that has a story. everyone after watching has a story that can be written about and the vivid and amazing. you don't have to have gone through these dramatic things to have a story. there are little dramas everywhere, and i waited, so that has to wait it was almost like i could go on living. i have been so much in the world and i felt that i failed them. each of them died of cancer and i was a rogue like trying to give him the surgery that was impossible. if someone to get to get mood -- get my from pluto i would've tried to i remember playing tapes or my father, these new age things that digital to fulfill yourself? is your cancer because of something you didn't do? he said do i have to listen to this? after they died, many years
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later, i started to write the book and i feel that only in terms of an mri think one shouldn't be writing a diary, a journal, a mommy dearest the really see the characters of people as fully fledged, rounded people with good and bad. i want to see them as real people, not all roses and pink and sort of sentimental, and not as villains but some blend. i hope i did it because i saw this story has been a story. it happens to be nicer but it has the drama of a novel in fact i'm born into world. america and there's. they say don't go and they take the journey. and i meet the person the least wanted me to be with, and he converted and we are all families are happy. and then, at my father's death he says thank you for bringing g these people into my life. and i feel that i deliver to them, i know that now, that he delivered a certain sense of peace. my father, even though he was in
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a coma he was able to have a last moment with my brother where they sort of forgive each other and tell each other they love each other. my mother and i had that moment as well. so yeah, i think that death is really, really important because i also think that people think they can keep their lives saved and in some silly way we're not going to get sick or die. it's part of life and as with the holocaust or any challenge, it's how you deal with this. they were lucky to be surrounded by love. >> please help me thank sonia taitz. [applause] >> there are several types of bowling that the left loves to engage in their favor is where racial bowling. it's their favorite thing. the reason for that is the last philosophy is based almost solely and completely at this point on the idea that they stand up for victimize groups. everything they do is to stand up on behalf of some victimized minority. blacks, jews, gays, women, if
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you're a minority they are standing up for you. what that means is that if we oppose their policies, by necessity the logic is we hate blacks, gays, jews and women and that is sort of the philosophy a dried-up. >> the editor at breitbart.com ben shapiro is today's in depth a guest and he will take your calls and comments for three hours live starting at noon eastern and looking ahead, so bright leader congressman john lewis will be october's guest. >> now on booktv, lord send a examines the past, current, and future state of the american middle class. the author reports that a strong mile
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