Ask the Author: Scott Russell Sanders
Answered Questions (2)
Scott Russell Sanders
What I would like to write about is less of a mystery, in the who-done-it sense, than a question. I want to know what happened to the family of my maternal grandfather, Samuel Isaac Solomon. He was born in 1886, in the village of Adeh, near the western shore of Lake Urmia, in what was then Persia and is now Iran. He traced his ancestry back to the ancient Assyrians, who had ruled over most of the Middle East from roughly 900 to 600 BCE, securing and maintaining power by brutal methods typical of empires. By the time of his birth, this once-powerful people had been reduced to scattered minorities, living as Christians in predominately Muslim countries, and suffering frequent attacks motivated by religious or ethnic hostility. In the Urmia region where Samuel grew up, Assyrian settlements were frequently pillaged, livestock stolen, houses burned, and people killed. This violence may have been the chief reason that his older brother, Joseph, immigrated to the United States in 1903, and Samuel followed two years later, at age 18. They shared an apartment in Yonkers, New York. The hope was that the brothers would establish a safe new home in America, and the rest of the family—their parents and eight younger siblings—would follow. However, by the time the brothers were securely established, World War I had broken out, and they never saw or heard from their family again. What happened to those ten Solomons left behind? In October 1914, Turkish troops and Kurdish tribesmen invaded and plundered the villages of Urmia, slaughtering men, women, and children. Historians estimate that by the end of the war in 1918, 300,000 Assyrians had been killed. Were my grandfather’s family among those murdered? He died without learning the answer, and so did his daughter, my mother. That is the question I could imagine writing about.
Scott Russell Sanders
And hello to you, Jay Mac, from the hill country of southern Indiana. I suspect you are a lifelong reader, as I am, and so you will understand when I say that I have many favorite writers, and the ones I turn to most frequently have changed over time. My earliest enthusiasm was for Mark Twain, whose work I still love. As a teenager, I read a lot of southern writers, such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Penn Warren. In college I became fascinated by the American Transcendentalists, especially Thoreau and Emerson, along with their contemporaries, Melville and Whitman, to all of whom I have returned to ever since. Because of my interest in ethics and social issues, I read works by James Baldwin and Thomas Merton, and I began developing an interest in Buddhism, which led me to Gary Snyder and Peter Matthiessen, and all of those writers still matter a great deal to me. During my four years in graduate school at Cambridge, I made up slightly for my ignorance of British literature by steeping myself in works by Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell. Back in the States, where I becamve a university teacher, I began adding what some people call "nature writers" and I call "Earth writers" to my shortlist of favorites: Wendell Berry, Annie, Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Wallace Stegner, Mary Oliver, Loren Eiseley, and Aldo Leopold. Because I'm an American writer, I am drawn primarily to writers from my own country; but I also admire the work of Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Thich Nhat Hanh, and--closer to your home ground--Robert Macfarlane, who has written memorably about Scotland, among many other places.
Thanks for your question. Best wishes--
Scott Russell Sanders
Thanks for your question. Best wishes--
Scott Russell Sanders
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