Deborah Batterman's Blog

What began as a way to escape family noise came to an end when I found my true voice as a writer.

Tucked away on the very top shelf of my closet is a lidded box, gray cardboard trimmed with metal, and  filled with with diaries. There’s the leather and hand-made paper one (Il Papiro, Firenze),  the cloth-covered one with a musical staff on the cover, the abstract black-and-white vinyl one, echoes of Keith Haring.

Each diary has its own beginning and end; one begins Sat., July 6, 1991, “three weeks in our new home,” and ends Fri., May 14, 1993, the day my daughter loses a front tooth.  Days earlier we celebrated Mother’s Day, the first without my mother, who had died a month earlier. “Here is the sum total,” I write. “I am my mother’s daughter . . . and my daughter’s mother.”  Unlike other diaries I abandoned, empty pages left blank, for the sake of a fresh beginning, this one is its own slice of time, filled up cover to cover.

I keep these hidden away for a simple reason:

I don’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.

But every so often they tug at me, come, take a peek, treat yourself to a memory refresh.

Tumult is a word that I would swear was Yiddish until I learned that technically it isn’t. It has Latin roots, tumultus, which means uproar or commotion and there is indeed a Yiddish word, tuml, which means a noise or racket.  It’s all about cadence and cultural appropriation. Come over to the apartment I grew up in on almost any night of the week, listen to my noisy Jewish relatives sitting around the kitchen table and you understand the tumult at the roots of my becoming a writer.  I listened. I grasped the way family stories get rehashed, daily dramas at the heart of them. . . .

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These days find me craving Jane Austen.

Reading a Jane Austen novel at any given time is its own kind of joy.  In an instant I’m pulled into a world, if not a kind of writing, I discovered as a teenager.  But it’s during dark times that I seem to need her most.

Back in September 2001, when it felt as if the world was crumbling beneath my feet, Jane Austen called out it me. No one I knew personally was among those who died in the Twin Towers attack, but that was little comfort for my distressed soul. 

I hadn’t read a novel of hers in years but whatever spell she had cast when I first read Pride and Prejudice clearly had a lingering effect. Even without a fuller understanding of narrative tone in a novel, a diligent reader does not forget a first line like this—

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

The same thing happened during  early COVID days, when lockdown and utter fear of the unknown had me longing for any semblance of sense and sensibility.

Now, with so much strife in the world and political polarization that feeds on a web of poisonous lies, Jane Austen again brings me solace, if not escape. 

To read the work of any author at fifteen is not the same as reading it at seventy-five. Fifteen gives a taste,  even if you can’t fully articulate what it is you like about a novel. Seventy-five makes reading more of a repast as you pick things apart —how the plot moves without feeling contrived, how the characters play their parts, the distinctive qualities of an author’s voice. If you’re a writer, you come to see  the author in a different light.

 Northanger Abbey, Austen’s first novel, was written when she was in her twenties although not published until after her death. Reading it for the first time as a writer myself, and with immersion in her other books over the years, I found myself marveling at how Austen takes her characteristic charm and cleverness to another level. . ..

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A time when nostalgia becomes a season all its own.

Late August in the Northeast.   Crisp mornings, cooler than usual, the light noticeably shifting in its dance with time.   Summer is barely over and school busses are on the road, drivers mapping their routes.

It’s that combination of  sound and sight—the screech of brakes, the faces I picture peering through the small windows of the bus’s bright Crayola yellow body— that gets to me all the time. I see my daughter with a small group of children gathering at the end of our cul de sac. In elementary school days, parents (and dogs) would be waiting with them.  When middle school and high school rolled around, they were on their own.

Come September, nostalgia, with her gossamer strands of aching and longing, becomes a bittersweet presence filling the air. If spring signals fresh, new beginnings, autumn whispers the beginning of the end. The vibrant green of leaves starts to fade before they treat us to the full glory their yellow red orange green palette and then fall from trees.  A touch of cold air reminds us that winter is on its way.  

Imprinted in my own early back-to-school memories is no school bus waiting on a corner. Just the walk from the Brooklyn housing project of my childhood to P.S. 251 a few safe blocks away. It had the feel of a parade, friends meeting up along the way.  Middle school and high school meant a ride on city buses. 

Routines and rituals bring shape to our lives . . . .

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Why the lynching of Leo Frank a century ago still haunts us.

A couple of weeks ago, waiting to board our plane at LAX, my husband is approached by two bearded Orthodox Jewish men, a father and son. “Are you Jewish?” asks the son. In the traditional black coats and hats, full-bearded and smiling, they believe they’ve stumbled on a landsman (loosely defined as a fellow Jew).

My husband, gracious and good-spirited, tells them, yes, he is indeed a Jew. At which point they try to coax him into a midday prayer ritual. He shakes his head, thanks but no thanks. They’re persistent but also know when it’s time to let it go. The Chabad sect of Judaism works hard at bringing less observant Jews back into the fold.

Years back, a single woman living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a Jewish man, also of the Orthodox persuasion, approaches me on the street, asks for directions. A simple request, a helpful answer, and I’m handed a $20 bill by this stranger.

I can’t take this, I tell him. You helped me, he insists. This is just a way of saying thank you. And there is no way I can get him to change his mind. Not a huge amount of money but enough to make me think about how I would spend it. A few days later, I would find myself at a street fair. An etching caught my eye. It cost $20.

Memory compresses time. That brief encounter would evolve into a correspondence that spanned 1978–1984. He is a rabbi, I learn, living in Belgium. His letters, intermittent, fill me in on his activities aiding Jewish families in need. He loves visiting Israel, runs a school there. He sends presents, promises to give me the information I want about Beruria, a female Talmudic sage.

A friend thinks he wants to marry me. No way. On a scale of observance compared to his, I’m practically a shiksa (i.e., a gentile). Nothing in his letters suggest he wants to pull me into a more observant life as a Jew. I take his use of the word ‘love’ in his sign-off in a spiritual, not personal, context.

Within that same time frame I would come across an article about a Jewish man named Leo Frank, convicted for the rape and murder of a white teenager, Mary Phagan, who worked at the pencil factory he managed in Atlanta. This was 1913, and the perception of Leo Frank — a Northerner, an industrialist, and Jew — made him something of an alien in a Southern milieu resistant to change. Unfamiliarity only managed to breed contempt for a man of the Jewish faith. . . .

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The mixed blessing of solitude.

I spend a lot of time alone — taking walks by myself, meditating and doing yoga, writing and reading, listening to music.

My husband spends most of his day in his home office.

Our paths cross in the kitchen, a snack for me/a drink for him. A drink for me/a snack for him. We talk about what’s for lunch, and what’s for dinner. Snippets of today’s news (ugh), movie suggestions for a night out. Chitchat that becomes a kind of interlude between all the things I do in solitude.

When I head out for a walk, there’s almost always some inner chatter in my head — a sentence I’m struggling with in an essay or story, something I plan to do later in the day, someone I intended to call and exactly what it was I wanted to say — I can’t believe it’s a month since you’ve been back from your trip. I want to hear all about.

Okay, so the moment passed, I got diverted for any number of reasons, inconsequential or otherwise. Intention counts for something, doesn’t it? I can still make that call and explain — I meant to call, really I did. Maybe I should at least send a text when I get home. . . .

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Just don’t say I’m elderly

I know it’s silly. It’s just a word. But it hit me like a shock of cold water when a doctor described me as elderly in a message summarizing a recent visit with him.

Patient is a healthy-appearing elderly woman, he wrote as a prelude to the specifics of why I was there and a deeper assessment of the mild arthritic changes in my bruised, thankfully not broken wrist. As joints go, its complex anatomy makes the wrist more susceptible to injury. Not only for seniors like me.

I’m 75 and I take to the sound of ‘senior’ much better than I take to the sound and implications of ‘elderly.’

If this reeks of denial, just hear me out.

As a writer, I’m well attuned to the nuances of language. Word choices factor into the perception of ourselves and others. And perception goes beyond vanity, which may play at least some part in my reaction. Not to mention the reactions of friends when I shared the story: expressions of surprise, maybe even a chuckle, pretty much sum it up.

Even I started to think of it in amusing terms despite my own equating of elderly with fragility. . .

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A few weeks before giving birth to a baby girl, my daughter calls for a consult on the protocol of baby naming, Jewish-style.

The Jewish tradition is to name a child for someone no longer living. My daughter does not tell me any of the names she and her husband are contemplating. All she wants to know is how literal they have to be when naming their daughter after someone.

I tease her, suggesting this is a question worthy of Talmud scholars.

It’s only after the baby is born that I have a fuller sense of her question. Judaism is a mixed bag of observance in terms of how strictly rituals are followed. That applies to everything from life events (the birth of a child, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, weddings) to holiday practices.

Rituals may get diluted as generations pass, but when it comes to baby naming, we honor the dead by giving the baby a Hebrew name and an English one. Case in point: My daughter was named after my grandmother, Ida, an English name that just didn’t resonate. Once I learned her Hebrew name, Chaya Sara, my daughter’s was a no brainer: she would be Sara.

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Finding my way back to the music I loved when I learned to play piano

I’m sitting at my office desk, scrolling through emails, fingers in a kind of dance — Delete Delete Delete. Pause — when a beckoning sound, rich and melodious, filters in from the living room. My piano is being tuned, and the technician, nearly finished with doing his magic, is testing his handiwork.

I follow the sound to the alcove where the piano, a Baldwin baby grand, is nestled. Finished with the fine-tuning, the technician is putting the music shelf back in place. Later, when I will sit down to play something from the sheet music and books that stand on that shelf, I get only a hint of the warm, rich sound that floats through my house like ghost music when someone else is playing.

Before he leaves, we talk about musicians and pieces of music we have a special appreciation for. I admit that I don’t play as much as I would like to. Frustration at mastering a piece gets in my way. He reminds me that there are music books with the simpler (not simplified or edited) pieces that composers wrote.

Beginner’s mind goes far beyond Zen meditation . . .

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Variations on a theme sparked by wildfires

My daughter lives in Los Angeles. She is seven months pregnant.

When fire flared up in the Hollywood Hills, she and her husband took the precautionary measure of leaving West Hollywood at least for the night. Too close for comfort, they reasoned, even if not an evacuation zone.

The Sunset fire was contained pretty quickly and they were back home the next morning.

I live 3,000 miles away, an hour north of New York City in the home my daughter grew up in.

Home can be a haunting word, especially in the wake of witnessing the apocalyptic destruction of the wildfires that decimated Los Angeles.

Before Dorothy can find her way back from the dream journey a tornado has thrust upon her, she has to say the magic words — there’s no place like home. With a click of her ruby red slippers, she makes a trope of what it means to be someplace that connotes comfort and love.

At the other end of the rainbow Thomas Wolfe conjures a trope of a different color with his sprawling novel, You can’t go home again. . . .

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Or Is it?

Back in 2013 Diana Nyad accomplished something no other long-distance runner had even tried. She swam from Cuba to the U.S, without a shark cage. It was her fifth attempt to negotiate the 110 miles with its manifest risk of sharks and deadly jellyfish.   She was 64 years old.  

Annette Bening’s portrayal of Nyad in the 2023 movie is a tour de force  in capturing her determination and willingness to put herself through the kind of challenge not available to most mortals.

And yet, for all the inspiration her mythic accomplishment offers up, there was an aspect I found sobering, even dispiriting, at witnessing what she was a willing to endure. At the end of the movie, there’s a clip of the real Nyad on the Ellen DeGeneres show in which she says, with all the pride of a woman who pushed herself to the brink of her power and beyond: “It just shows that anything is possible.” . . .

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