SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
One of America's great poets has written a memoir that's haunting, engrossing and often a hoot. Let's ask Edward Hirsch to read one of his bits from "My Childhood In Pieces."
EDWARD HIRSCH: (Reading) I once met a man who made me scream. He carried a little black box of instruments and mumbled mumbo jumbo over my body. It was the mohel who circumcised me.
SIMON: (Laughter) Edward Hirsch is also a MacArthur Genius, whose day job is president of the Guggenheim Foundation. He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
HIRSCH: My great pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: And why this approach to a memoir?
HIRSCH: I guess I started by trying to capture the people around me that I remembered so well - first, my parents and all my uncles and aunts and my grandparents. And they were very funny, quick, bit harsh. And I started writing down - just remembering things they'd said. The first thing I wrote was something my mom said to me when I was 8 years old. And I said, you know, you really shouldn't make fun of me. You're my mother. And she said, don't be so sure, kid.
SIMON: (Laughter).
HIRSCH: So this way of - this sort of way of comment - you know, the way they were just opened it up. I just started writing that way, too.
SIMON: You had a colorful childhood.
HIRSCH: (Laughter)
SIMON: A tinge of organized crime, tinge of show business. Your parents separated when you were two. You were too young to really know what was going on. But I'm struck by another line you write, where you say all their lives they carried the heat of first love plus the rage of early betrayal.
HIRSCH: My parents started going together in seventh grade, and they went together all through high school. They got married when they're - my mom was 21. My father was about to turn 21. Then they had me. And then they had my sister, Lenie, and things started to fall apart. But they were so young. They didn't really have a full consciousness. So that's sort of what I tried to capture, the first love and the great love that they had, and then the betrayal that broke apart, that they carried the rest of their lives.
SIMON: You grew up in neighborhoods - first in Chicago, then Skokie, Illinois. What was it like in the 1950s?
HIRSCH: You know, I didn't really understand - you know, when you move as a child, you just move where your parents are moving. And I didn't really understand that my family was following kind of Jewish migration patterns in Chicago, and they're moving further north. And then in 1960 - '59 or '60, we moved to Skokie, which was a new suburb. I didn't really understand that a lot of the suburbs did not welcome Jewish people, and Skokie had made a plan for new developments of single-family houses. And they had advertised in a lot of gritty Jewish neighborhoods, saying, Jews are welcome here. And so we moved, and it was - I looked it up. There were - 58% of the population was Jewish, around 7,500 Holocaust survivors. So you did see people walking down the street carrying bialys with numbers on their arms.
SIMON: I want to ask you about a song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LITTLE BOXES")
MALVINA REYNOLDS: (Singing) Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same.
SIMON: You began to take a personal dislike to this song because of what - the life you knew in Skokie, didn't you?
HIRSCH: Yes, I did. I mean, everyone around me liked the song. I liked it, too. It was catchy. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. And the reason I liked it less is because it suggests that everyone - we lived in tract housing, and the houses all looked alike. And so the suggestion in the song is that everyone's living cookie-cutter lives, that the houses are alike, and the people are alike, and the lives that they're living are alike. And I happen to know that the people in our neighborhood were a lot of weirdos trying to fit in. The people weren't actually living cookie-cutter lives. It could seem that way, but it wasn't actually the case. And that the actual experience that people were having of their lives was much stranger, darker and more interesting than that song would lead you to believe.
SIMON: Can I get you to read a bit called - I almost call it a poem - "Back Alley Antisemitism."
HIRSCH: (Reading) Back alley antisemitism. The insult flew over my head. Why would someone call me a kite?
SIMON: (Laughter) I laughed. I'm laughing now. Is that OK?
HIRSCH: Yeah. I thought it was funny, too.
SIMON: We should explain that's kite, K-I-T-E - probably not the word the guy meant.
HIRSCH: Yeah, it was a tremendous nasty thing for someone to say in the back alley to me, but I didn't really understand.
SIMON: Yeah. There's a heart-stopping section when your grandfather Oscar dies. You go into the basement of your family house and find a poem called "Spellbound." What do you think it set off in you?
HIRSCH: After my grandfather died, it was the first death I'd ever experienced, and I was heartbroken. And there was a library downstairs. It didn't have many books in it, but it had an anthology. In those days, the anthologies didn't always have the name of the poet. And I read this poem called "Spellbound," and I felt as if my grandfather was trying to reach me. It was if - I just took it as if my grandfather was speaking to me, and I found tremendous comfort in it, that I was just fastened to the floor, standing there reading this, that my grandfather was somehow contacting me. Then when I got into high school, I opened an anthology and saw this poem called "Spellbound." I go, there's grandpa's poem. Hold it a second. It was written by Emily Bronte. And it put me under a spell all over again. But now I didn't know who was trying to reach me, my grandfather or Emily Bronte.
SIMON: Is there something we should take from that? I ask one of America's most distinguished poets.
HIRSCH: I guess what I would say - thank you for saying that. I guess what I would say is that poems reach you. I was sort of wrong about the author, but I was right about the feeling.
SIMON: Yeah.
HIRSCH: And when I read the Bronte poem when I was older, it didn't change my interpretation of it. But it did make a difference that it wasn't actually my grandfather who had written it.
SIMON: Yeah.
HIRSCH: So poems are meant for readers, and they register in you, and that one registered in me deeply.
SIMON: You write, this book is dedicated to my sister Lenie. We lived through everything together. We share a sense of humor and a history. She has vetted my stories, but also remembers our childhood as traumatic. I prefer to recall it otherwise. Her way was more expensive. (Laughter) I'm laughing again. But do we too often call an experience traumatic when maybe, if we just called it interesting, we can make use of it?
HIRSCH: You know, I think everyone takes their own childhoods differently. And I guess what I'd say is that acknowledgment is - I think it's funny, but it's also meant to be a tell. And that I'm treating what happened to us in a different way by spinning it this way.
SIMON: Yeah.
HIRSCH: But she spins it a different way based on what happened, and they're both equally valuable.
SIMON: How are you and Lenie doing?
HIRSCH: We're doing great. Sometimes I would - when I was writing this or thinking of things here, I'd call my wife, Laurie (ph), and I'd say, what do you think of this? And she'd say, call your sister, Eileen (ph). She'll think that's funny.
SIMON: (Laughter).
HIRSCH: And then I, like, call Lenie, and she'd burst out laughing. So, you know, the jokes are not for everyone. But, you know, we went through everything together, so we literally have the same sense of humor.
SIMON: Well, that makes a family, doesn't it?
HIRSCH: It makes a family, exactly.
SIMON: Edward Hirsch's new memoir, "My Childhood In Pieces." Thank you so much for being with us.
HIRSCH: My great joy, thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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