Miriam bat ami biography of michael

Skip to main content. Miriam Bat-Ami Papers Collection. Identifier: CLRC Scope and Contents This collection contains typescripts, research, correspondence, clippings, photographs, proofs, video interviews, brochures and other material for three different titles as well as other various material relating to the author. Andersen Library reading room.

Additional Description. Abstract This collection contains production and research material for three different titles as well as various other material relating to the author. Collecting Area Details. Contact: SuiteElmer L. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Arts Culture magazines Bat-Ami, Miriam. Bat-Ami, Miriam gale. Learn more about miriam bat ami biography of michael styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia. Bat, Gray.

Bat Yam. Bat Shelomo. Bat Kol. Bat Industries Plc. He's mechanical; I'm not. He loves to cook; I don't. I write long books; he writes short poems. Nothing of mine rhymes; everything of his does. I love any kind of physical activity. He likes to walk if he's holding a camera. He takes beautiful black and white pictures of motion and stillness.

We both love movies and books and children. We didn't have children right away, though. First we moved to Santa Cruz near the redwoods and the ocean. It was a wonderful place to live if you don't need to eat. I kept looking for work and even got rejected as a mushroom sorter. That was disheartening. Ron washed windows, and we both scratched a lot—quite literally.

On one of my birthdays Ron got me a kitten—a wild kitten. We didn't know it then, but that kitten was fierce. You can't trust everybody giving away kitties. Ron also got me fleas. The kitty was full of them. When we left Santa Cruz, we also left behind the fleas. The kitty wandered off one day. In Los Angeles, where we moved, I found a job as a clerical accountant for a travel agency.

Ron worked on apartment repairs. When I got bored with adding up accounts for all the miriam bat ami biography of michael taking wonderful vacations, I started work at the Israel Investment and Export Authority. I stood at the desk near the door, meaning, if anything happened, I was the first to go. Besides translating letters from Hebrew, I also got to practice the Israeli version of "duck and cover.

Nothing beats being married by your dad unless it's the wonderful heart-shaped honeymoon suite somewhere in Wilkes Barre, PA. First, the mountains. They are beautiful. Then, the strange coal dumps left from the time when that region was famous for anthracite coal. When I was a kid, I got in the back seat of our car with my brothers and my sister, and Dad or Mom would drive us past the burning coal dumps outside Scranton.

One in particular was our favorite. It was nicknamed "Egg Mountain" because it stunk of sulphur. It also glowed green or yellow—I can't remember. We'd ride past Egg Mountain. We'd hastily roll up our windows after getting a good whiff of the rotten egg smell. Then we'd stare at the outer space like formation. Scranton also had these amazing sidewalks made of slate that were buckled and crooked so when you skated your knees got a great workout, and you felt like you were being tossed in a washing machine.

I think that was from all the old coal mines underneath the sidewalks. Legend has it that every so often a house would be swallowed up under the earth. Scranton provided us with a lot of legends including the one surrounding Bells Mansion, which was an old abandoned mansion near our house. In Dear Elijah I write a little about Scranton—but not enough.

I also tell the Bells Mansion story on Halloween to my college students. I turn off the lights and tell the whole truth and nothing but the. The author and husband Ron on their wedding day, One day I'm also going to write a story that will creep you out. I promise. Back to the wedding in Scranton, PA. It was a small wedding, but it was beautiful.

For our honeymoon we went to Vermont and Massachusetts, and I made my husband go horseback riding. Everybody who knows me—knows me well—has to ride a horse at least once. My younger son, Danny, even agreed to go to riding camp for a week. When his horse nearly rolled over on him, he called it quits for good. I keep trying to get him on a horse.

He won't have any part of it. After the honeymoon, I went back to work in L. There are some things in my life that I've done that I know you'd think are hard. It's hard getting a Ph. You have to go to school forever and ever. It's hard writing a novel. You might not think so, but, trust me, it is. You've got to draft and redraft. If you're writing something that takes place before you lived, you have to be historically accurate.

I did a lot of research for Two Suns in the Sky. It is not so hard to drive a car. A lot of people do it. However, I found learning to drive one of the hardest things in the world. It humbled me. It keeps me humble. When I wonder why somebody. Miriam and son Aaron "on one of our many fishing ventures," around It's a lesson in sheer endurance. It's the old Abe Lincoln story with a few twists.

Failed once. Failed twice. Failed three times. My husband tried teaching me. I nearly killed him. My best friend, Adrienne Goldstone, tried. Yes, Adrienne, you're in here, too. She gave up. When I lived in L. They hadn't met me yet when they made that promise. I failed two tests. The second was memorable. I was driving in downtown Los Angeles when the tester asked me to make a left turn.

I was dead wrong. I made a left turn from the right hand lane and nearly killed a few people. He was too white to say anything. I was thirty then. I'd have to wait five more years before I actually learned how to drive. It's embarrassing when you fail twice at schools that guarantee you're going to succeed. I'd get in a car and see an accident about to happen—an accident involving me—and sure enough what I'd see in my mind translated to what almost happened, several times.

I stopped trying. Besides, all that private instruction was expensive, and I wasn't earning all that much back then. I wrote segments of plays. Let me explain. My acting group was an improvisational group. The actors created lines like the Second City people do using a subject focus: it was always a Jewish subject. I recorded a lot of the lines and transcribed them and helped shape them into a script.

While I was no Shakespeare, it was wonderful seeing how a company of my peers could make words come alive. That is the beauty of theater: your words are transformed on stage and become part of a world that actors and actresses bring to life. Before the creation of the playscript SurvivorsI watched Holocaust films and interviewed Holocaust survivors.

Most of the troupe members were children of survivors, and so they had a special connection to the topic. Sometime during the improvisational work done by a group of really talented people, including the cellist and composer Peter Mann and the director Armand Volkas, I created "The Train Poem," a long prose poem chorally said by the troupe on its way to a concentration camp.

Since SurvivorsI've never had the nerve to write a Holocaust text that actually takes place in a camp—although I think in some ways doing this piece began preparing me for the writing of Two Suns in the Sky so many years later. I'll never forget, though, survivors actually coming up to me and talking about how my poem crystallized their feelings.

I felt awed and humbled and embarrassed somehow that I, who never experienced what they had, had the gall to write about it. Aside from doing writing work for the New Artef Players, doing some freelance writing, finishing my M. Sadly, it has never been produced although I've entertained kids with monologues from the play. Goldfish, a few of the several characters in my play.

People just don't line up to offer you jobs when you've got an M. That way I'd be able to teach college. I liked teaching. I liked reading novels. I liked discussing books. I didn't exactly love grading papers, but I didn't hate it. I loved the idea of being my own boss, too—making up my own syllabi, teaching what I loved to others who, hopefully, would love these things, too.

I was also tired of jobs that numbed my brain and most especially tired of taking orders from bosses: I was doing a lot of that. The thing is—I was smarter than the jobs I was doing, and it's no good to work at things that bore you. Let me tell you, there are a whole lot of jobs.

Miriam bat ami biography of michael

Sometimes, you've got to take those jobs while you're working your way to a job that you want to do. I've had my years of doing that. Off and on I was a Kelly Girl doing temp secretarial work. That wasn't bad because I'd go from place to place, and seeing new offices and meeting new people can be real interesting. But most of the things I did as a temp were dull.

I remember being a receptionist at a place where the phones barely rang. That killed me because I was told to look interested just in case somebody opened the door. Imagine what it's like to keep an interested look on your face when your insides are turning into dried prunes. I cut and pasted typed sheets at a real estate agency.

Nobody would do that now because we have computers to do it for us. That wasn't too bad but I think I was going nuts from all the glue I had to use. For awhile I worked full time as a legal secretary in a law firm. All I remember are pages of interrogatories that I had to type and the lines that my boss asked me to memorize. Just say that I'm busy.

I don't know about the golfing. Then there were jobs that I couldn't do very well because I'm not super quick. Even before we moved to L. The boss always gave me the slow table in the back. I figure that you know why. And then there was the minimum wage letter-opening job in downtown L. I sat at a long table with a lot of other workers and quickly opened envelopes: check on one side, envelope on the other—or something like that.

I must have zapped out a few times and spent too long studying the designs on the checks because I was fired for not being fast enough. One job that I had lasted several months. I worked as "traffic" in the miriam bat ami biography of michael section of a clothing business in downtown L. That means I put together the art and the text for their advertising pamphlets.

All I remember for that was how I racked my brain to come up with new ad come-ons for shoes. Slip into fall. Spring into spring. A spring in my brain was coming loose. I wasn't serious. I've never been the least bit suicidal. I love life too much. Still, I was frustrated and angry, and I knew I'd continue to be that way unless I was doing what I liked.

I was writing. I loved that. But writing while you're answering phones—or not answering because they're not ringing—isn't all that good. I had finished my master's in English, and I applied for the Ph. I was thirty years old. Thirty felt old or old enough. Old enough to stop wandering around. Old enough to start earning a decent income. Old enough to be tired by.

The author and family with brother Louis's family. My husband and I lived in Pittsburgh for five years. We lived on the bottom floor of a wonderful house off the Negley bus route. Notice that I say bus route. I still wasn't driving so I took the bus from Pitt to my house. The people who owned our place lived next to us, and, though I didn't realize it then, provided me with a framework for my second novel.

They, being Mr. Leo, had come from Italy, and they had a wonderful garden behind their back yard. Every summer they grew tomatoes and cucumbers, and they had a fig tree that they buried every winter to save it from snow. They unburied the fig every spring. That way Italy seemed right in their back yard. Our second summer living next to the Leos, I asked Mrs.

Leo to teach me the art of growing vegetables. Up until that point, I didn't know a thing about vegetable gardens. I knew about miriam bat ami biography of michael people's gardens. There were the Poplans who let me pick prickly cucumbers from their garden and Andy, the farmer, who sold corn that we bought and sometimes picked from his stalks.

And then there were the radishes. For an eighth-grade project I grew radishes in our back yard—I grew two of them. That's it. Things would change. Under the tutelage of the Leos, Ron and I grew Roma tomatoes, the ones you use in spaghetti sauce. We had lots of tomatoes. Nobody can ruin a tomato—nobody except a tomato bug. Last year I had several of those.

They're about the most disgusting bug around: huge and green, they camouflage themselves on tomato stalks and eat tomatoes like there is no tomorrow. We also grew cabbage until the summer of the cabbage bugs. And peppers. You can't ruin a jalapeno pepper, either. And cucumbers. They're easy. Believe me. I loved gardening. Over the years I've grown cucumbers and summer squash and zucchini—too.

I've never been very successful with melons, perhaps because I've always lived in cold climates where the growing season is short. My son, Danny, grew the biggest sunflower ever. He was entering kindergarten when he grew it, and that became the subject of a story that I wrote for Cricket magazine called "The Practicing Sunflower. Leo, combined with my husband, became Mr.

Pettinato in my second novel When the Frost Is Gone. The name itself came from the real Pettinato family who lived across the street from us in Scranton. Everybody, I think, needs to have some sort of a garden. Everybody needs to plant something, be it vegetable or flower or tree. It is important for us to see that we are all part of a bigger world, and sometimes that world needs us to be its caretakers.

A world without trees or plants is a soulless place. Right now, as I write, I look out to a barren tree in my yard. Barren is the wrong word although there are only a few dry leaves hanging from its branches. Buds are there. They don't come out in spring the way I once thought. They're on the tree all winter long as if saying to us, "Spring will come.

There will be green again and new life. Its black and white face flashes before me. You never know when something will happen that stays inside of you and becomes part of a novel. Writers store ideas like squirrels store nuts—out of instinct as much as out of habit; and, out of instinct as much as out of habit, we bring up these things that make a difference to us.

My learning to grow a garden from the Leos found its way into a creation of mine. Of course, there were other things I learned to love at Pitt: Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century Russian writers and writing better stories. My best critic was Sir Angus Wilson, a visiting professor from England who was knighted for his excellent works of fiction.

Perhaps I thought of him as my best critic because he was the first instructor I had who was willing to take adolescent literature seriously. He didn't say, "Miriam, you aren't writing for adults and therefore aren't writing anything of significance. Some people don't realize how hard it is to write for children or teens. They don't see the craft.

Good writing is good writing, and Sir Angus looked at my manuscript in those terms. To be frank, at the time I wasn't writing for teens per se. I was writing for myself and a somewhat generic audience, but what came out was teen fiction, and that is what naturally does come out of me. I learned that at Pitt, too, although it took some time to truly realize the implications.

Sir Angus also taught me that good teachers, really good teachers, don't need to spend any time telling you that they're good. Their ego—or lack of it—doesn't get in the way of their work. I say this feeling my own limitations: I'm a better comic than a teacher, a better writer than a professor, but I've touched some people: I've made some people think.

A great teacher makes you see the world in a different way—so does a great writer. There is so much in this world to experience and learn from: I wish people were like cats and had nine lives—nine long lives. I might get tired and restless but never really bored. I can't understand boredom. In Pittsburgh I also combined writing with acting. My husband teased me because some critic in the Pittsburgh paper liked me—a lot.

He used to come to all my plays—even the very bad ones—and there miriam bat ami biography of michael some horrible ones. Acting allows you to do things you'd never do in real life—be people you could never be. It's like writing except you're doing all the words. In one play I wore a wonderful costume. My name was Lady Dainty Fidget not Miriam Bat-Ami, and I had a white wig and long gloves and petticoats under my very heavy dress, and I had to learn to flick my wrist fast so that my fan opened all at once.

In I finished all course work for the Ph. Non-tenure track means that you aren't permanent. Mostly people who have master's degrees or never finished the Ph. Interviewing for that job was so thrilling. I had held a lot of jobs before, but none of them were meaningful to me. There was something professional about being a college instructor. I could say it and feel proud of myself inside.

That's what everybody has to do—find that job that makes them proud, whatever that job is. I was going to teach college composition. These are the pictures that come to mind: me at the Holiday Inn awaiting my interview. Me, swimming back and forth in the pool and thinking about this job—this wonderful job that I might or might not get.

Me thinking about Springfield, Missouri, and how different it was from any other place where I'd lived. The Midwest. The Bible Belt with a small church on every other corner. The actual buckle of the Bible Belt as I later learned. I'd have a few students who went to revival meetings and spoke in tongues; a few who'd want to save me from perdition being that I hadn't let Christ into my life; and quite a few more who were first-generation college students and proud to be in school.

I didn't even know how to pronounce it right. Not Missouree with a hard e ending but Missouri with an open Southern ending: eh—Missoureh. There were creatures great and small that I met in Missouri. The small ones were the pests: the tics and jiggers. I had the most awful first encounter with jiggers. The first summer, uninitiated in the small creatures of Missouri, I went berry picking without protecting myself from jiggers.

Sulpha powder rubbed around those parts of you that are squeezed by elastic such as your ankles and waist is a great help. Somehow jiggers love to burrow themselves around those areas. I was happily picking raspberries, singing while I filled my pail. The sky was a beautiful deep blue, a Missouri blue, and I didn't have a trouble in the world.

The jiggers were humming, too. I was perfect bait. I went home with a whole load of them inside me, and I itched and scratched as they burrowed out and attacked other areas. Jiggers are mean, disgusting creatures with no business living on this earth—although, I suspect, they must have some useful purpose. Tics are no more fun. I learned that you don't pull them out of you because part of them can be left behind.

You need tweezers or a hot match since they are supposed to light out the minute heat gets on them: I never tried the match trick—not enough nerve. There are fleas abundant in Missouri, too, and our first house had a ton of them. You take a dog with fleas and make that dog depart. Well, the fleas get mad. They just hang around in the rug waiting for some good flesh which happened to be mine.

My husband and I lived in that first Missouri house the whole of one week. I think it boils down to this: all of God's creatures love the sun and the blue sky, and there was loads of that in Missouri. Something inside of me was loving Missouri, too. Unbeknownst to me, when I accepted the five year job, I was pregnant with Aaron, my first child. I wanted to be pregnant—badly—but a year earlier I had a miscarriage.

I was afraid that I'd never have children. I stopped hoping. It was like me and getting a license, but so much bigger. Other women could have children—not me. I was thoroughly surprised when I learned that I was pregnant. If I had known, I don't know if I'd have made that move to Missouri, but I didn't know, and we were all set to leave. Ron and I packed up our belongings.

All in all, we had moved so much by that time: from Boston where we met, to Santa Cruz, to Los Angeles, to Pittsburgh. And there were moves within cities. I think, at one point, we counted at least fifteen moves in ten years. In Pittsburgh we actually lived in the same place for four years. We wanted to beat that record. It's hard moving so much.

We'd have at least five years—as long as I did well—in Springfield. I was looking forward to staying in one place. I was looking forward to having one job and not scrambling around from job to job. I was looking forward to being something other than a poor graduate student. I was really looking forward to having a child. We didn't tell anyone at first.

It was awkward to have just been hired and announce that I was pregnant, although it all worked out. I can't think of a better place to be pregnant in than in Missouri. I'd get on buses—note I'm still not driving—and people would stand up and give me their seat. My department accepted it and worked out a way by which I could take a few weeks leave in late March.

By the time leave would be over, I'd be on summer break. Even my composition students got into it. I still have a baby blanket one student made for me. She didn't know if I'd have a boy or girl so the blanket was alternately pink and blue. And everyone in my department went to the circumcision ceremony. That, in itself, is a story. My son, Aaron Rubens, arrived on April 3,shortly after midnight.

My husband tells me there was a full moon: I wasn't watching. Eight days later we all gathered for an official Orthodox circumcision. My parents couldn't come: it was Passover and too difficult for them to travel with all the dietary restrictions, but my father made arrangements for the proper Orthodox ceremony. He hired a mohel or official circumcisor from St.

Louis to travel to Springfield. Had I known the full ramifications of an Orthodox circumcision, I would not have invited nearly everyone I knew including my gynecologist who had never witnessed the sight before, but I was totally unprepared. So was my son who, thankfully, remembers nothing of the occasion. There is something to say for tradition and our mohel fully enjoyed the audience.

All I can say is for him it was the performance of a lifetime. When I was thirty-five, I had my first child, Aaron. I was a college instructor, a wife, a mother, and there is nothing in the world like being a parent. My life had become our life—my husband's and mine—and then it became ours: Aaron, me, and my husband. Nothing beats parenthood.

I had everything I wanted—or nearly everything. My second child, Danny, hadn't been born yet. When he was born in November ofhe made life complete. My husband, me, Aaron, and Danny. The immediate family. All that was missing was the writing and the riding. All that was missing were the books. And the horse.