12. Daring

 Daring

Is daring a feeling? Can I be daring without being aware of feeling daring? I have done things in the past that, looking back, were daring, but at the time seemed the only thing I could do. Dropping out of Antioch College in a city I’d only been in for a few weeks for my co-op job period, for instance. At the time, I felt unsure of everything in my life, and I knew that when I returned to school, I was expected to make a “five-year plan,” essentially choose my major and make sure all the courses I’d need would be available on the schedule I’d be on campus and not off on my co-op jobs. But I had no idea what that major would be. I’d taken courses in English, history, philosophy, and none of them had awakened any desire to continue those fields. When on my current co-op job I’d met a woman my age who was looking for a roommate after being kicked out of her college, I jumped at the chance to just stay here in Washington, D.C., and try to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t think I was being daring, and my parents thought I was being foolish.

            Many years later, did I do another daring thing when I asked not to be evaluated for tenure at New York University’s journalism department? It’s true I might well have been rejected—I hadn’t published much. But I had a book proposal that a university press had expressed some interest in. Instead, I was attending meetings in 1990 about organizing a meeting for women activists in the newly non-Communist countries of eastern Europe. The next spring, when I should have been working on “unpacking” the thoughts from my recent master’s thesis for the book I would need for tenure, I was headed for a weeklong gathering in Dubrovnik, just a few weeks before war broke out in Yugoslavia. It seemed to me that 1990 and 1991 were a world-historical moment, and how could I miss being part of that moment? The 75 women in Dubrovnik founded the Network of East-West Women, and I worked for NEWW for some years, helping to get create its online presence in the early days of the internet as a mass medium. But when I left for that meeting in  Yugoslavia, I had no idea what would happen in the future, only that I might continue teaching at NYU as an adjunct. Daring? I guess so.

SOL March 2: My Life in 50 Objects, #14

In 1991, I was one of several co-founders of the Network of East-West Women, an organization to support women activists in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, where women were rapidly disappearing from public life in what were still, in many cases, patriarchal cultures. A few years later we supported a workshop on women in the region initially based at NYU and now at the City University of New York, where (mostly women) scholars, activists, journalists met monthly to hear reports or analyses of what was happening in the various countries concerning women, feminism, and gender. About 20 years ago one of our speakers was Nurgul Djanaeva, founder of the Forum of Women’s NGOs in Kyrgyzstan. She gave me this little ceramic as a representation of Kyrgyz women.

NEWW still exists, headquartered now in Poland and working with the European Women’s Lobby, among other groups.

SOLSC March 9: International Connections

            In 1991, I was among 75 women who met in Dubrovnik,  Yugoslavia (which at that moment still existed), and founded the Network of East-West Women<https://neww.org.pl/opening-the-electronic-curtain-by-sonia-jaffe-robbins/>. NEWW was created to support women activists, writers and artists, and academics in the newly noncommunist countries of Eastern Europe, and over the years, NEWW connected women’s centers to the then new mass medium called the internet.

            I worked for NEWW for its first few years and got to know some amazing activist women in such countries as Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Croatia. Today I met with one of them, who I hadn’t seen or spoken with for years. Lenka Simerska, from Prague, was NEWW’s first social/economic Fellow in the early 2000s, interning at WEDO, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and taking a course in labor studies at Rutgers. Currently, she works in the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, presently heading the program to reduce the gender pay gap in her country. And this week she was in New York at the United Nations for meetings of the Commission on the Status of Women.

            It was really great to see Lenka and catch up with her work, her family, and life in the Czech Republic, sometimes now called Czechia, though she said that is not official. There’s been some talk about changing the name to Bohemia — a one-word name for a country is supposed to be preferable? — which refers to the largest historical region of the Czech Republic. But that ignores other regions, like Moravia and parts of Silesia. Czechia is also now host to many Ukrainian refugees, and cutbacks in energy that comes from Russia is causing many Czechs to be softening their support for Ukraine. 

            I wanted to add a photo here of the two of us, but for some reason the internet hasn't yet passed it from my phone to my laptop. Maybe someone knows whether it might be in my iCloud account and how I might find it? 

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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 9 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

  

 

SOLSC 21: All My Jobs

Last summer, I was having lunch with some friends, and they started listing all the jobs they’d had, which was not many. When I thought about all my jobs, there were so many I had to sit down and make a list.

            It started with the jobs I had while a student at Antioch College, which had an innovative at the time program of cooperative work-study, alternating time on campus with jobs anywhere in the U.S. or sometimes even abroad. Then I dropped out of college, went back to Antioch, got married and dropped out again. And then a series of grownup jobs that turned into the career of copy editor, a job I hadn’t ever heard of when I set off for college. Here’s the list.

1. Saks-34th Street, sales clerk

2. National Institutes of Health, normal control

3. Public Health Service, statistical clerk

4. private lawyers representing clients at the FCC, typist

5. 3 psychoanalysts, secretary

6. United World Federalists, secretary

7. New York Times, copy”girl”

8. Bantam Books, secretary

9. various typing temp jobs

10. Bobbs-Merrill, secretary to associate editor

11. various freelance copyediting jobs over three years

12. Village Voice, freelance, staff copy editor, copy chief, deputy managing editor

13. New York University Journalism Dept., full-time tenure track, but failed to get tenure; yet continued as an adjunct for many years

14. Network of East-West Women, an organization I helped start that supports women activists in the post-communist countries of eastern Europe

15. World Business, a short-lived publication of KPMG, the transnational accounting organization

16. various freelance copyediting jobs, over two years

17. Publishers Weekly, freelance, staff copy editor, managing editor

            Is that impressive? I don't know. I just don't know what it's like to work at one place for my whole life. There's variety here, but also a commonality. And I’ve started a series of essays describing each of these jobs, just to get down my memories and to see if there’s any pattern or lessons to be passed on. For example, there's my trajectory at the Village Voice and at Publishers Weekly.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 21 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

SOLSC Day 17: Mammogramming

I had my annual mammogram today. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but in New York almost every mammogram technician is from eastern Europe. I always ask where east Europeans are from, since, back in 1991, I co-founded a nonprofit, the Network of East-West Women, supporting women activists in the post-communist countries, and still co-moderate a workshop on their issues.

            Today’s tech was a late-middle-aged woman with short dark hair. When I asked where she was from, she answered by asking me to guess. Hmm, I thought, is she Russian? Polish? Serbian? Croatian? Not Bulgarian, I thought. “Russia?” I guessed. Yes, she replied. I said I’d traveled in eastern Europe, but wasn’t good at distinguishing accents. She said their languages were all Slavic, so they mostly sounded the same. I said, not really, Czech sounded quite different from Polish.

           Then there were several minutes of her positioning me into the machine, adjusting my body and arms, and letting the machine squash my breast. There’s one position, with my shoulder down and head turned back, that always feels like a frozen dance move.

            When I asked where in Russia she was from (maybe I’d met someone from there?), she confessed that actually she was from Tajikistan, near Afghanistan, in what they called Middle Asia, but she’d stopped saying that when most Americans had never heard of Tajikistan. (My workshop has had a couple of speakers from Tajikistan.) I asked if she spoke Tajik. She said, the Tajik speak Farsi, but it’s written in Cyrillic. She still speaks it, but not so well, and her children, born here, don’t speak it at all and aren’t  interested in Tajikistan.

            One hundred years ago, there were massive numbers of immigrants into the United States — including all my grandparents. It feels like we’ve having another wave now, and I welcome them.