 It was a little boy sitting on Welcome to Going Deeper. My name is Marcy Sklov, and today I'm sitting with Ani Tuzman, who wrote an amazing novel, which we're going to talk about, called The Trembl of Love. But that will come later. This is a two-part interview. So, welcome. Thank you, Marcy. Thank you for coming. I'm happy to be here with you. This is kind of a long time coming, sitting together like this. And the way I often start my interviews is by asking about what in your childhood, especially thinking about your spiritual life and growing up in that kind of a... I'm thinking about that context of your spiritual life. What happened, what parts of your... I mean, a lot happened, but what parts of your childhood informs the work that you do now and this amazing book? Yeah, it's a big question. It is a big question, and I'll try to respond to it as best I can. I grew up on a chicken farm, although I was born in New York shortly after my parents immigrated to the United States on the heels of the Holocaust. So, what year were you born? I was born in 48. My parents came at the end of 47, came over-pregnant with me. And so, I have to get into broader strokes so this could take a long time. But I grew up on a chicken farm. We moved there when I was very young. And so, one of the key influences on my life was the immersion in nature. Where I grew up turned out to be very anti-Semitic. We were outside of a refugee settlement where a lot of Jews had immigrated. But we couldn't afford to buy a farm there, so we were in a place where we were the only Jews. And I was the only Jew in my school. And there was ignorance. There was just a lack of understanding that turned into some intense experiences. So, two things were going on for me all the time. This complete awareness all the time of the shadow of the Holocaust and my parents' trauma, the word trauma, I don't even know if it existed. Certainly PTSD didn't exist. And my parents were traumatized. They'd lost everyone. And so, I could feel that and I could feel the yearning to make it easier for them to lift the pain, to be good enough to help them. And I never was, but I tried. And then simultaneously, so there was all this pain and chaos and tears and rage and there were the trees and the rain and even the sounds of the chickens. It was a chicken farm, I don't think I said. And there was this immense beauty and this sense of communion. So very early, as soon as I could write, as soon as I learned to write, I started, and as soon as I could really compose sentences, I started writing to this invisible companion. So that brings together, of course, a lot about my love of writing and my love of supporting others to write. But I wrote, I told all the secrets that I couldn't burden my parents with. In school, I was shamed and there was even violence and I couldn't tell them. I knew that I couldn't burden them with that somehow as young as I was. So there was, but I had a place to share that, to ask, even to be angry, which I didn't dare to do too much at the time, but I did a little bit as I got older in writing. And so there was both. There was the beauty and there was this unfathomable grief. And there was also, there was darkness because my parents believed they should tell us everything. So I heard a lot of things. I was really too young to hear. And then you had siblings come after you. They were younger, yeah. And then there was, as I said, there was that darkness and then there was incredible joy at the same time, most of which was related to my experiences in nature. Writing my bicycle and watching the light play on the stream. Yeah, I read somewhere when I was preparing for this about your experiences as a child of ecstasy. So that's pretty cool. A lot of kids may have that, but not even know that's what that is. I didn't know that word till later, but I found that word at some point. And I think I was in high school and I went, oh, that's what it was. Yeah. That's what that was at the same time that there were other feelings. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that's amazing. I don't, you know, I haven't studied children of Holocaust survivors, but I've known some. And the ones that seem most sane, most balanced, most able to walk through life in a healthy way, had something. You know, for you it was the chickens and the nature world. And writing. And writing. Writing, yeah. Yeah. So my next question, speaking of writing, is a little bit like a prompt, which is something that you do when you have groups, I think. And it's going to lead us into a conversation that we have had, I think, for at least 15 years. So that, I was thinking, how long has it been? But we originally had this conversation a very long time ago. Wow. So the question, the prompt is, is it really all right to be happy? Yeah. And where I'm going with this, as you probably know, this amazing dream that your father had. Can you talk about that a little? So my father, I've written about this, the longer story, because I'll try to condense it, is on my blog, Harvesting Love. Yeah. Finding, and this relates, the subtitle for the blog is finding love in unexpected and unexpected places. Yeah. Let's see, to condense the dream, I called my father and he had just had a dream. There's more context in the piece I wrote. I won't go into it all. He was actually very depressed. He was dealing with my mother's Alzheimer's and very despondent. And the night before, had actually done something to try to take his life. Wow. And I happened to call him and wake him at 11 in the morning, which is very unusual, but it's because he had been drinking and taking pills and he was really in a sad state. But he had a dream, his first dream of his mother ever, since he left her to save his life. In the dream, he was, as he told me, in heaven. And I'd never heard him use the word heaven. He said, Shemaim. And I think he told me that part in Yiddish. And he was, he saw all these women with candles, holding candles, and they were like they were the age of his mother. They were Eastern European. And he knew his mother was there somewhere and he became very desperate to find her and he asked them, has anyone seen Hanala? Has anyone seen Hanala? And finally he saw her. He was led to her and she was holding a candle that wasn't lit. And he said, Mama Shemaim, why isn't your candle lit? And she looked at him and said, Arala, you keep putting it out with your tears. And he told me this dream. And I tried to talk to him a little bit after that, but he didn't want to. And I shared this dream in a small group the next day. Yeah, when I was sitting there. When you were in that group and you came up to me afterwards and said something like your father, and I shared how painful it was that my father couldn't hear, couldn't, what in my perception, receive his own dream fully, the message from his mother. And you looked at me and said, that dream was for you. And many, many years later I wrote about that. And that message, because it was a huge question for me and life's struggle for me had been. And it's not that it never comes up but it's certainly transformed. Can I be happy? It was there when I was a little, little girl. Is it okay? Is it okay to be happy when not only my parents, I grew older, and now is it okay to be happy when they're starving children? Is it okay to be happy in the face of injustice? And now I understand, of course, that they're not. It's not either or. Right. And my own joy and my own gratitude and my own appreciation for life it strengthens me to face the rest. I also think it's not, not only is it not either or, but it's mandatory to be happy because not being happy, thinking that that is going to... Right. See, and that, it touched me partly also because my growing up, what I knew about the Holocaust as a young child, and I actually do have family that suffered and died in the Holocaust but at the time I didn't know it. But we were taught that the only way to respect the people who had died was to keep their memory alive in the context of the Holocaust. So it was intentionally like a rule. You had to be sad. Yes. You had to see them as victims and oppressed. And I think that is a huge reason why Jews haven't really recovered from this horrific thing. And I'm not saying all Jews are, but just generally it speaks to, in my mind, an explanation about Israel and all the fear around that. So yeah, it was, in my mind it was a dream for your father. It was a dream for you. And it was a dream for me. And that post actually that I shared it. And then recently I rewrote it and shared it on a social media and I was amazed at how many people it spoke to who wrote to me, one man wrote to me that he cried for two hours after reading it because it opened something up in him in relation to this very question. The notion is that our tears, our sadness, our lament is what keeps the flame from continuing. Amen. Yeah. So I hope it's close by, can you read the poem that you wrote about your father and the chicken soup? Yes. That would be so sweet to hear it just now when we have him in our hearts and in our minds. So this is called In There With Those Girls and I actually wrote it on the, my father's 70th birthday. A family decided to make a celebration in his honor. He loved being the center of attention and I wrote this and read it. In There With Those Girls, the chickens didn't give anyone their eggs the way they gave them to my daddy like they loved him. The way he learned their language, ladies, he'd call softly in English and Yiddish as soon as he came through the door, he's just me, take it easy, he would say. One long word he stroked them with, take it easy. If I came in the coop with him, they would cackle like crazy like they weren't going to calm down no matter how nice he asked them. So I would go out and just listen, listen to my daddy sing song, those mean white birds with his tss tss tss and the ketzala and bubola he usually reserved for my mother. He'd roll up his sleeves all the time making his sweet sounds and looking them right in the eyes sliding his hairy arm under their plump bodies his fingers stretched in the straw for one of their warm eggs. They would never peck at him or balk once in a while one of them talked back and my daddy would answer straight off promising, I won't hurt you Shayna Medela, you don't need to worry. He never ran out of sounds. He'd have whole conversations while he filled the wire baskets with eggs that cooled quickly. In Uncle Menasha's kitchen in the Bronx my daddy said he hated the stink of the coops, the dust, having to worry about the price of eggs dropping. He knew the big farms, the ones that did it all by machine would sooner or later drive the small farmers out. The handwriting was on the wall. He would have said if he knew English idioms he complained instead, it's a stink in a business, that's all there is to it. But in there with those girls he was someone who threw the clock away moving among them like he was dancing, like he was making love as if he'd been born on a chicken farm, clucking to them all the way, soft clucks, staccatos, whispering that they were so good, so beautiful, such dedicated mothers. Wow, that's so great. And you read it so beautifully. I thought it would be a fun, those sounds are fun. It's fun to read, yeah. And I really, I could see them and feel them again. Yeah, oh yeah. So tell us a little bit about the writing workshops that you lead and are you still doing the ones for children? Yeah and that's, I don't know if that's how we first met or later but in any case I started doing them, doing writing groups for children shortly after coming to the valley were my first ones actually when I was pregnant with my daughter and then brought her, we used to do a lot of them in nature and go right in nature and continued so that what started in around 1980 or 81 and I was part of Amherst Writers and Artists, started the youth division and the first children's workshops that Amherst Writers and Artists offered before they even were Amherst Writers and Artists and then became, did it on my own and began to call it Dance of the Letters after a profound experience that I had in India actually and just had these wonderful experiences supporting children and then teenagers to find and free their voices and not do it in any right way just I would offer writing sparks and then now I'm not working, and across the river and now I'm working with women or working, playing, writing, engaging, holding beautiful sacred space with women over, started over 50, over 60, over 70 and they're quite wonderful, quite wonderful. Yeah, yeah. I didn't actually remember your connection to Amherst Writers and Artists so Lena, my daughter who was in your groups, she took the training and she actually led groups, writing groups for the women and their children at the Safe Passage Shelter when she was in high school. Wonderful. Yeah, that is an amazing format I think is the word I want. The format of how to open up people for hearing their own voices and the kids the kids would write something in Spanish because that's their first language and they would get so excited they'd say, oh well maybe I can try writing in English and then it became like a literacy issue a push for literacy as well as the other stuff. Yeah, so many ways to open a person. And just to make a quick connection it took me years to realize that in doing the writing groups in a certain sense I was you could say making amends to the young one that I was because when I was in school I was silenced and having a voice was a very frightening thing and having a different voice my first language was in English and all of that and then some of that continued into college when I was told I wrote about feelings I was a poet and the editors of the magazine told me it was right before the women's movement and they basically said you write like a girl and they said I should write more intellectually and there was a theme of my voice not being okay or it even being dangerous to have a voice and certainly to be different I mean I was different in every conceivable way including my voice so I didn't even consciously realize until years later that these containers I co-created with the others there were what I didn't have as a young person so that was a realization Hearing it it sounds so frustrating to me because just had you come with your whole baggage all your story being exactly the same but maybe 20 years later you would have been easy peasy in terms of all the feminist stuff and acceptance for being an immigrant and old all of it it's kind of interesting all that we go through as it is forms of art so yeah I do think that sometimes yeah so we're coming to a close in part one and we're going to talk mostly about tremble of love in part two but I wanted to just kind of ask you about your spiritual practice a little bit not to get too personal because it can be a very private thing I understand that very well but there is a quality that you have the way that you're in touch with yourself and it's not that typical for people who don't have that kind of inner life and I wonder if you would talk about that a little I think it's so interesting because this will probably tie together your first question with how did my childhood and then my spiritual life now so that the heart of my spiritual practice my spiritual life is and spiritual is a funny word I think everything is spiritual but meditation and nature experiencing nature so being in the presence of nature and meditating and I had it was in the 70s early 70s and I like many was I didn't know the term even but I was the seeker and I was going to in a week I remember I went to a Sufi event I went to Hasidic I don't know if it was Zalman or Shlomo Kawah or whomever Sufi, Hasidic there was a Holy Order in Boston this very progressive Christian church and the Vedanta Temple I just to me was and I love Vedanta had all the symbols and all that it's all one and it felt that way to me there was no conflict it was delicious to find and to be meditating and also to hear people talk about God and all these names and then I met a teacher and experienced and that was Swami Muktananda, Baba Muktananda and I I'll just say one story I was at an event I had been brought by other people and my mind was screaming and then I saw people bowing and my mind was just I don't do this, I don't do this and I heard him say if you think you're bowing down to this 80 year old body think again you're bowing to your own self and I thought how did he know I was thinking that and also I just I had come with others I couldn't leave but I thought it reminded me the Hare Krishna is on the street and what am I doing here and then right after coming up to him and because of time I won't go into the whole story I I sat down shortly after I did bow, I just found myself bowing sat up, went and sat down and had the most profound experience later I looked up the word for an upside down waterfall it was a geyser of joy and my head went back and I thought I know this feeling I know this it was like I came home and in that experience I was back to that pure joy of the child without any layers so here we connect a lot of the dots and I just kept going and I learned what meditation could be and that has and to keep on coming home that way and to see that in others which I'd also glimpsed as a child in the very people that were that were there was a girl that was a bully we didn't have the word then and one day as she was cursing at me and throwing things at me I had tried to ask if she wanted to play I saw this little light in her heart I had no words for this no concepts I saw little flame and I knew it was her goodness and her kindness and her and that all the rest was she was afraid that same day I'd seen her mother curse at her and throw things at her and I went home and tried to tell my parents and it didn't go well probably but I remembered and then later I was reminded and reminded of how to remember when I would forget how to find my way back to that knowing wow that's amazing if we could all like the world isn't just such a tough place you know if we could all see that little flame instead of reacting to the negative behavior oh gosh yeah if there's time there's a little passage I was inspired to pull out not now I was going to say in our next section because it's from Tremble of Love and it deals with what we're talking about so if there's time I could do you want to just say it and that will be our closing for this part say the little passage is probably two or three minutes so maybe that's too long we could try it just through it though okay read a little fast this scene takes place I'll just say in a remote village in the Carpathian Mountains and Yisraal or the Baal Shem Tov is in this will be speaking to his daughter whom he calls Levov in Zabia in addition to cultivating the land Yisraal had been cultivating a spiritual practice that had yielded rich fruit the practice of Dvekut remembrance of his closeness to God his father had been the first to teach him this when he was on his deathbed Rebelliazer had instructed him to remember assuring him that he would not be alone to remember was to focus on the energy at the root of all life and to feel one with that energy Yisraal the practice of Dvekut was not merely a mental activity although it started with directing his mind to remember was to feel the Shekhinah the sacred presence close not only during meditation prayer and study but in his daily life as husband father farmer and healer Yisraal practiced remembering he turned his attention to feeling and in this way to knowing the unknowable force called God and by many other names remembrance was at once a path to awakening and the practice of remaining awake after hearing him speak about the practice of Dvekut to their Sabbath guests Dahlia with her usual intent curiosity approached her father wanting to understand more when I worry and become afraid am I forgetting that God is with me she asked if you do forget Lavovi it is very easy to find one's way back you can just remember but what should I remember it is not such hard work Yisraal reassured her smoothing her brow and touching his daughter's cheek tenderly perhaps it will help to imagine it this way imagine a river with many times the current of the Cheramos a river of love that you may not see but can sense flowing through every being and instant of life you can draw power from this stream of blessing at any time all that is required is to pause and remember it's always there Dahlia relaxed remembrance is a gentle moment to moment practice Lavovi when we have forgotten a hint is that we feel less joy when we remember there is deep joy and even relief the relief one feels finding one's way home after being lost he paused we are here together to help each other remember wow yeah it does absolutely I'm going to say goodbye for now thank you for joining us we will come back in part two thank you