James Romberger on Prof. Perl

[Anonymous]

#622

Professor Perl’s is the most effective yet of the essays we have read for this class. She utilizes poetry as a tool to accessing personal history, rather than as an end to itself. The necessary brevity of poetic forms enable the author to delve most efficiently into the issues at hand. I’ve used what I consider to be a similar cross-medium approach, which involves making maps and diagrams, implementing my predominant visual strengths to access memory. Hers is clearly an even more fruitful way in, using her strengths. It creates an interesting affect for me as a reader, because I don’t retain much memory of the specific poetry that she wrote, but her overall storytelling skills are impressive, and they are what I find memorable.
The idea of her being forced by her family to consider herself as marred somehow by the shape of a facial feature that occurs naturally, of her nose being disparaged and rejected by her father, mother and sister as if it is not only an obstacle, an obvious visual signpost that marks the family to be more likely to suffer anti-semitism, but also the fact that the family as a whole (with the exception of her) had bought into the programmed idea that the female member’s noses were less than beautiful. The father— well, did he also get a nosejob? No? Then the “aesthetics” are gendered. And her mother and sister rather cruelly excluded her; they bonded together over their surgeries, leaving her to the side, ostacized from her closest relatives and forever “flawed” by not participating in their painful and absurd embracing of conformity.
Jewish identity is again a negative factor when the Professor’s husband decides abruptly to become fundamentalist. Not mentioned are the sexist ways in which women figure into the hasidic lifestyle, which I imagine she would then have been expected to adhere to. But again, by asserting her preferences, she becomes excluded and it then becomes clear that this was but the first indication that her husband was drawing away from her—- his erupting behavioral changes are part of a midlife crisis that will again ostracize her from her nearest and dearest. I felt so bad for her, but then I also must admire her resiliance.

[Sondra Perl]

#623

Thanks for your response, James. Those incidents from the past were hard at the time but no longer pierce me in the way they once did. In fact, having written about them and lived beyond them, I can return to them now and share this writing with some affection for all the people involved.

[Author]

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