Metro
A Women's Lore
U-M symposium and archives honor feminist Jewish writer Marge Piercy.
SHARON LUCKERMAN
Staff Writer
is
arge Piercy, one of contemporary literature's
foremost social-conscious writers, credits
growing up in Detroit, first in the Jewish
Dexter-Davison neighborhood and then on the West
Side, with deepening her political and social aware-
ness.
She also recognizes her mother and grandmother
who instilled in her a strong Jewish identity and sense
of feminism. Both shaped her writing, which includes
15 novels, 16 books of poetry and a memoir.
Piercy was in Ann Arbor on Oct. 21-22 when her
alma mater, the University of Michigan (1957), hon-
ored her life and work with the symposium "Jewish
Women Writing Feminism." The event drew local and
international professors to discuss Piercy's work and
influences.
The university also presented "Marge Piercy Writer,
Feminist, Activist," an exhibition of her work at the
Special Collection Library, where Piercy's work is
archived in the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library.
"My mother and especially my grandmother gave
me my religious education, my strong Jewish identity
and a sense of my female side of Judaism," Piercy said
in a phone interview prior to the symposium. The
women in her family, she added, were strong and great
storytellers.
"The stories they told were shtetl stories and a lot of
women's lore," she said. "A lot of it was superstition,
but a lot was useful information, too."
Not all were easy stories. She mentioned her grand-
father, a union organizer, who lived in a Lithuanian
shtetl and was murdered there while organizing bakery
workers.
Her working class roots in Europe and Detroit, she
said, also are an important influence.
"The city of Detroit was a great place to grow up
for a writer," said Piercy, who is both outspoken and
warm with the variety of people who approached her
about her work. "Everything was in the open: race,
class attitudes. Everything was very naked and visible.
Not like growing up in the suburbs."
Piercy's Literary Gifts
Piercy graduated from Mackenzie High School on
Detroit's West Side and, with a scholarship to U-M,
she became the first person in her family to go to col-
lege.
Some of her earliest writings at U-M, for which she
won four prestigious Hopwood Awards, now are part
of her U-M archives, along with manuscripts of her
better-known novels. Her works include Going Down
Fast (1969), Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Gone
to Soldiers (1987), He, She and It (1993), The Moon
is Always Female (1980) and The Art of Blessing the
Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1998).
11/12
2004
22
Her work is translated into 12
languages, said Kathryn Beam, U-
M curator of the exhibit and
archivist of Piercy's work, which
consists of 55 linear feet of manu-
scripts, drafts, photographs, corre-
spondence, audiotapes and videos of
interviews, and at least 700 periodi-
cals that include Piercy's writing.
More than 200 fans — young,
old, students, workers — filled U-
M's Rackham Amphitheater to hear
Marge Piercy
Piercy read Oct. 21.
"I just wanted to meet Marge
Piercy and put a face to this writer I
enjoy so much," said Jeannie Weiner of West
Bloomfield. Weiner first read Piercy's novel Gone to
Soldiers in a book group and passed it on to her hus-
band, who also loved it.
"It's one of those sagas and generational books that
takes place in Detroit and Europe," she said. "It's a
very moving emotional story about World War II.
Piercy's not just for women; she's universal."
Anca Vlasopolos, professor of English and director
of the Comparative Literature program at Wayne
State University in Detroit, said, "Piercy opened up
literary forms to the literary experiences of women in
the '60s and '70s during the second wave of femi-
nism. She identifies and looks upon the Jewish expe-
rience as an outsider experience, which squares with
her feminism and resonates with her sense of speak-
ing for the oppressed.
"Her poetry is far more direct and less involuted
than Sylvia Platt (a well-known poet of the same era);
but Piercy has the same intensity about the female
experience, and it's from a less tortured perspective."
Symposium keynote speaker Susan Weidman
Schneider, founding editor of Lilith, the independent
Jewish women's magazine, said Piercy has helped
women to see the importance of being mindful of
everyday life.
"Piercy has wonderful radar for the everyday details
in our lives, a kind of compassionate attentiveness,"
said Weidman in a phone interview before her talk.
"You see how the personal is the political."
Piercy On Judaism
Piercy said two things enrich her writing.
One was moving to Wellfleet on Cape Cod after
living in Ann Arbor, Chicago and Boston.
In Wellfleet, Piercy says she was in contact with
the Earth, changing seasons and the tides. "Being
rooted added to my poetry and writing," she said.
She and her husband, writer Ira Wood, also founded
Leapfrog Press there, which publishes fiction, non-
fiction and poetry.
Research also enriched her work. She talked about
flying to Prague, after teaching herself enough of the
language to get past the "gate-
keepers" at the library, to do
research on the Golem stories for
her novel He, She and It.
Other kinds of research
enriched her life.
"When my mother died, since
my brother had converted to
Catholicism, I said Kaddish for a
year," Piercy said. Afterward, she
was so annoyed that she didn't
understand what she had been
saying that she began to study
Hebrew.
By the time Piercy had a bat
mitzvah at age 50, her involvement in Judaism was
considerable.
She and her husband ran a chavurah (Jewish fel-
lowship group) on the Outer Cape for 10 years,
which now is run by others.
"There was no Jewish presence on the Outer Cape
and a lot of mixed families here," she said. The near-
est synagogue was in Hyannis, an hour away. So she
and her husband first had a Purim party and over
80 people came. "We got 400 people for the High
Holiday services and 200 attended a seder my hu's-
band conducted."
This year, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion awarded Piercy an honorary doctorate
for her contribution to religious and secular Jewish
culture.
She served as poetry editor for magazines such as
Tikkun and Lilith. She also received numerous hon-
ors and awards including recognition by the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and the
Arthur C. Clark Award in 1993, Great Britain's
prestigious award for science fiction for He, She and
It.
She contributed to writing a Reconstuctionist sid-
dur and recently agreed to write a book about
Passover for Schocken Books (a division of Random
House).
But for some, the best testament to Piercy's life
and work is her effect on young students and how
she brings literature alive for them. After she visited
three of U-M professor Larry Goldstein's writing
classes last month, he wrote thanking archivist Beam
for Piercy's visit.
"This kind of personal appearance is so important
for showing students that poetry is not just some-
thing on a page, but a living expression of the
human voice and personality," he said.
❑
`Marge Piercy Writer, Feminist, Activist" is on
exhibit through Nov. 27. For hours at the Special
Collections Library exhibit, call: (734) 764-9377.