Thursday, April 16, 2009

Promised Land

Going to the Westwood Public Library is another of those “favorite things” (as Julie Andrews trilled) I love to do when I am back home in the bosom of Cincinnati. It is the library of my childhood—in fact, the library was built in 1938, the same year my mother was born, so it is sort of a womb, well, of sorts—well, that is just strange, I suppose. Anyway, this 1930s art deco gem is just a few steps from my elementary school, and I have been going there since I could walk, or maybe read. As a child I made a beeline for the biography section, reading a certain Abraham Lincoln biography dozens of times as a child, until I moved on to my junior high obsession with Gone With The Wind.

Anyway, I visited the library this week to get a few books just in case the jet lag wreaked havoc with my sleeping patterns and I could devour a few books before sunrise. I picked out a book called, The Movie That Changed My Life, interviewing famous people about, can you guess what? And I got an art book by the inimitable Sister Wendy on Impressionist art, a book of letters by comedian Don Rickles, and a book called Promised Land by Jay Parini.

Well, as the sleep patterns go—I tend to wake up around 4:30 am as I adjust being stateside. So the first three books went pretty quickly. The movie answers were pretty lame, Sister Wendy was on autopilot, and Don Rickles was uncharacteristically toothless and dull. But that Parini book really killed time waiting for sunrise.

The subtitle of the book is, “Thirteen Books that Changed America,” and as I saw it in the library I groused that someone had beaten me to the book I should have written. You see, when I used to teach AP United States History, one of the ways I prepared my students for the final cumulative exam was a lecture on the “Fifteen Books that Changed America.” This Parini louse beat me to publication, and even made it a little easier on himself with just 13!

Anyway—got the book, and as I paged through it, I just loved his writing. The concept is a good one (even if he purloined the idea from my teaching files of 1996-2000!) trying to explore what books throughout our history would help us understand the climate of America from the earliest days down to the present day. It is not a “greatest books” lecture, but rather, a search for books that played a role in shaping our nation’s idea of itself, kind of providing the intellectual and emotional contours of our United States; I guess you might say he wanted to have books explain our “psyche.”

The list of books is surprisingly similar to mine, okay—enough—I didn’t write my own book! The books range from William Bradford’s 17th century Of Plymouth Plantation and covers predictable territory in the 19th century, and then he includes Dr. Spock’s book, Dale Carnegie’s self-help book, and concludes with The Feminine Mystique. But there is a book I did not know at all, an early 20th century immigrant’s tale called, The Promised Land, a 1912 book by an author named Mary Antin (never heard of her! Good to learn!). Parini quotes the first sentence of the book: “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.”


Not only is the Antin book new to me, but I enjoy reading about this Russian Jewish immigrant’s secular “rebirth,” and I appreciate Parini’s enjoyment of the metaphor of the Promised Land.

Now that I live near the spot where Moses looked into the actual Promised Land of the Hebrews, the concept captures my attention all the more. As I live and work in Jordan, I think of my hometown Cincinnati now even more as a Promised Land, indeed that Westwood Public Library often seemed to be the Promised Land to my childhood doppelganger. And then my second home, New York City also acts as a Promised Land to me as well.

But I love working over that phrase that Antin uses to open her book, that notion of how we are “made over,” with all the potential of rebirth, even resurrection. I toss aside the other books and dive into this exploration of the books that chart the adventure that is the history of the United States of America.

The more I read the book, the more I see parallels to the young history of KA.

Throughout the book Parini speaks of the United States as an “adventure,” and an “experiment.” He says, “its Founders were, for the most part…a band of sensible, well-educated people who valued rational thought and weighed carefully the elements that constitute a successful organization.” That is certainly a parallel to the conception and execution of KA. Many of the books Parini chose deal, in some way, with a quasi-biblical epic idea of a promised land, often visualized and hyped as a dream of independence. He writes of this American Dream as “not so much a physical place but as John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, a ‘paradise within thee, happier far.’ By its very nature, this land lies just out of reach, and the note of yearning can be heard again and again in these works.”

Hey, that sounds like the same heady talk that propelled KA into being—going from a pipe dream to a concrete reality, to a fragile young seedling, with very real olive trees transplanted from the veritable Promised Land of the Bible.

How funny that back in the bosom of Cincinnati I am reminded of the vision that built this school in Jordan, and how that vision informs many of the hopes of our young academy. Just as Emerson and Thoreau’s words provided Americans a visionary laser whose beam never faded, our school, our own contemporary “Promised Land” project, tries to locate the “better angels of our Nature,” as Abraham Lincoln urged.

So in these pre-dawn hours I am enjoying this exploration of Parini’s book, musing about my own visions of a Promised Land. The immigrant tale, The Promised Land probably irked some people—it sounds as if it wore its confidence and bravado on its young 20th century sleeve—the kind of arrogance that does make people outside the USA bristle at us. But the book sounds exciting about these immigrants coming here, remaking themselves, reaching, and maybe overreaching.

What do we make of overreaching? Is it bad? Or is it just like youth in general, when we grapple with worries and doubts and the anxious seeking of authority figures. There probably is a declaration of independence involved, and hopefully a coming-to-terms with humility.

I guess any exciting adventure, worthwhile project, or risky experiment follows those same intellectual and emotional contours. The history of the United States certainly has followed those grooves, and now it seems so does the young history of KA, and also my own involvement in this current of events.

Hmmmm….some interesting thoughts as I await dawn in Cincinnati, waiting for my father to wake up and for us to go out to breakfast. As I watch him work the room as the Mayor of the Imperial Diner, he seems to have found his Promised Land.

In a few hours I will go out to lunch with my divine Aunt Dot—our times together are about as swell as Moses must have felt as he stood on the precipice of Mt. Nebo considering the land of Milk and Honey. She has been working hard on our family’s history, going back into these times that Parini has charted about the American promise. Aunt Dot has been navigating these 19th and 20th century waters on a microcosmic scale, seeing how the Evans and Griley families plumbed the depths of the Promised Land in America—recent immigrants from Wales, and Germany, respectively. I will have lunch with Aunt Dot and Jim on the terrace of the Cincinnati Art Museum today, catching either up on our own adventures, projects and experiments of the last few months. I wonder what our sure-to-be-marvelous discussion will yield!

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