The Surgeon
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

I was still a kid
interning at State
he reminisces late in the meal—
It was a young red-headed woman
looked like my sister
when the lines went flat
I fell apart
shook
like a car with a broken axle
Went to the head surgeon
a fatherly man
Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard
before you know this business
and you just did row one, plot one.


Alicia Suskin Ostriker, "The Surgeon" from The Book of Seventy. © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted by permission. (buy now).

On this date in 1947, the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine. Palestine had been under British control since 1917. Zionist Jews from Europe and Russia were migrating in ever-greater numbers, with the intention of forming their own country, and hostility between the Jews and the native Palestinians was also growing. Britain supported the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, but they also recognized the rights of the Arab Palestinians. Support for the Zionists grew during World War II, especially after people learned of the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1947, Britain decided it wanted out of Palestine and asked the newly formed United Nations to make recommendations for a plan that would ensure the rights of both sides.

The U.N. drafted a plan, also known as Resolution 181, that divided the region into three Jewish sections — more than half of the territory — and four Arab sections; the city of Jerusalem was internationally administered. The plan also guaranteed religious rights and minority rights, and made provision for free access to any holy sites. The two states would share a monetary system and all services, and have equal access to water and utilities. When British forces withdrew in August 1948, a five-country Commission would be put in place to occupy the formerly British regions, establish borders, and help the two states set up their governments.

The Jewish Agency in Palestine approved of the plan because it reflected international recognition of their cause, but they felt it didn’t give them enough territory. The United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 in favor of the partition plan. Britain was one of 10 nations that abstained from voting. The six Arab delegates walked out in protest.

Six months later, on May 14, 1948, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion formally announced the formation of the State of Israel. The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

Today is the birthday of British novelist, scholar, and poet C.S. Lewis (books by this author), best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, seven volumes of stories about young children who find entry to another world through an old wardrobe. They meet a magisterial lion named Aslan who asks for their help in battling evil. Aslan says, “I never tell anyone any story except his own.”

Lewis was born Clive Staples Lewis in Belfast, Ireland (1898). His mother died when he was young and he spent much of his time at boarding school, where his headmaster wielded a cane and admonished students to “Think!” Lewis and his brother created a special world called “Boxen,” where animals talked and had exciting adventures. Lewis once said, “I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.”

Before becoming a scholar of classics at Oxford University, Lewis served as an infantryman in World War I. He was wounded in the back, he said, “oddly enough by a British shell.” He became lifelong friends with writer J.R.R. Tolkien, and they met weekly at Oxford for tea and literary discussion with other writers for 16 years. They called themselves “The Inklings.”

It’s the birthday of the writer Madeleine L’Engle (books by this author), born in 1918 in New York City. She was an only child. Her parents always had a house full of artists and writers and musicians, and she said, “Their lives were very full and they didn’t really have time for a child. So I turned to writing to amuse myself.” She wrote her first story at age five. She was shy and clumsy, and some of her teachers thought she was stupid. Her parents sent her to a fancy boarding school in the French Alps, and she hated it. She went to a series of boarding schools, then to college, and then worked in the theater, where she met her husband, an actor. When they had a daughter, they decided to raise her away from New York City, so they bought an old farmhouse in Connecticut. And since there was nowhere to be an actor in rural Connecticut, the family needed some more money, so they bought an old general store and managed it.

The family went on a 10-week cross-country camping trip, and Madeleine L’Engle was reading about quantum physics, and she said: “We drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit. Mrs Who. Mrs Which.” From there the idea for a story unfolded, about a girl who travels with her brother, a high school classmate, and Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which, through space and time to find their father, a physicist researching the space-time continuum, who has been imprisoned on another planet by an evil being called “IT.” It didn’t take her long to write the book, but the manuscript got rejected by 26 publishers, because no one understood what kind of book it was. L’Engle wanted it to be a children’s book, but publishers thought it seemed too dark and difficult. Even L’Engle’s agent finally gave up on her. Then L’Engle threw a tea party for her mother, and one of the guests was friends with John Farrar of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, and arranged for L’Engle to meet with Farrar. He liked L’Engle, and he liked her manuscript, and even though FSG had never published a children’s book before, they started with Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time (1962), which went on to win many awards and sell 8 million copies.

It’s the birthday of novelist Louisa May Alcott (books by this author), born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832). Her family friends included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and she was sometimes tutored by them, but mostly she was self-taught or taught by her father. Her father, Bronson, was often involved in idealistic projects. He ran several failed experimental schools, and when Louisa was 10 years old, her father founded an intentional community where everyone ate a vegan diet, no one used animal labor or wore cotton (because of slavery), and all property was communal. Like most of Bronson’s projects, the community was a failure. The Alcotts never had enough money, so as a teenager, Louisa Alcott went to work as a seamstress and governess.

When the Civil War broke out, she enlisted as a nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. She had always been the nurse in the family, and she never got sick. Six weeks later, she contracted typhoid pneumonia and almost died. She never fully recovered. She said, “I was never ill before this time and never well afterward.” Her six weeks as a nurse gave her plenty of material for her writing, and in 1863, she published Hospital Sketches. She wrote later: “The Sketches never made much money, but showed me ‘my style,’ and taking the hint, I went where glory waited me.”

It was a while before Alcott took that hint and wrote more about her own life. For several years, she focused on the writing she loved: lurid, sensational potboilers, which she called “blood and thunder” stories. They had titles like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” and A Long Fatal Love Chase, and they featured revenge, opium addiction, sex, and cross-dressing.
She was not happy when her publisher asked her to write a book for girls. She wrote in her journal: “Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” Two months later, she wrote in her journal that she had sent off the manuscript. Little Women (1868). It was an immediate hit and her publisher demanded sequels. Alcott made enough money that, for the first time, her whole family could live comfortably.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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