Search Results for: Education

From the Sidelines: A Reading List on the Need for Female Coaches

Arizona Cardinals training camp coach Dr. Jen Welter poses for photographers after being introduced, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, at the teams' training facility in Tempe, Ariz. Welter is believed to be the first female to hold a coaching position of any kind in the NFL and will be member of the Cardinals coaching staff throughout training camp and the preseason, working with inside linebackers. AP Photo/Matt York

After playing one season for the Dallas Cowboys and one for the New England Patriots, I huddled up for a third season with the rest of my flag football team wearing a uniform that simply read “NFL Flag.” The uniforms were relics of a world far from mine. I lived in Indonesia at the time; what I knew of football came from my dad wearing his Packers shirt around the house after work, where he discovered the scores of games played twelve hours and nine-thousand miles away from our dial-up computer.

As little as I knew about the NFL, my participation in flag football was never a question. I loved sports so much that I joined soccer, baseball, basketball, the swim team, and a running club where we ran at least five kilometers every Tuesday night. Because our school was so small, each team was co-ed. Athletes were known for their skills rather than separated by gender, which is a quality of those early years that I still treasure. Looking back, perhaps I idealized athletics, believing that sport could erase the expectations of gender placed upon me in other ways. On the field, I imagined myself not as a girl, but as a twirling blur of muscle and breath.

This illusion was punctured in a huddle during my third year of flag football. My coach that year was a man with a reputation for calling his sons “sissies” if they showed any sign of exhaustion on the field. He glanced around the gleaming faces of our team, signaling off starting positions. When he got to me and another girl, the only other on the team, he said “bench” to us both. I stood on the sidelines, cheering my team toward a touchdown, and waiting for the signal to tag in. There was an unspoken rule within our league that teams should be fair to both boys and girls by giving them equal playing time, and my coach gave a chance to the other girl, who was older, but quickly took her out again when he thought someone else could do better. When his son showed up to half-time sweaty and lagging, I thought I might have my chance, but he told him to “man up” and sent him back in. As the game stretched on and the lowering sun colored the sky a dusky blue, I remained sidelined. When I got home that night, I wept. I knew I was fast, knew I could hold my own — as I had for three years — against anyone in the league, and knew I cared enough about my teammates to run fake routes without a chance at the ball. But none of that was enough. To that coach, I was a girl. Someone who could watch the game, but not participate.

I won’t say that after that moment I began to negotiate gender and sport, but something in me shifted. I quit playing flag football after that season. Wondering if I would always be categorized as a “girl,” I pushed myself to the absolute brink of what was possible in every other sport I played, ensuring, for example, that when I crossed the finish line of the mile first, before all the boys, that I was acknowledged for my prowess and not my gender.

I competed in multiple sports for almost all of middle school and high school, and then went on to run for a Division I team. When I look back now, I’m amazed to realize I can count two female coaches across a lifetime, plus a handful of female assistant coaches. I’m not the only one to experience this inequality. The 2017 College Sport Racial & Gender Report Card, which assigns grades to sports based on a comprehensive evaluation of gender and race, notes that white men “dominated the head coaching ranks on men’s teams holding 86.5 percent, 87.8 percent, and 91.6 percent of all head coaching positions in Divisions I, II, and III, respectively.”

I’m not insinuating here that female coaches are superior to male coaches or vice versa, but I’m wondering where these discrepancies come from. Are the factors that lead to highly disproportionate numbers of white male coaches somehow related all the way back to childhood athletics, during which young female athletes are told that they belong on the bench? Or are there other factors at play? Female coaches are earning positions in sports previously coached only by men — Jen Welter became the NFL’s first female coach in 2015, and, in 2016, the Arizona Coyotes hired Dawn Braid as the first female coach in the NHL — but the fact that these titles are newsworthy indicates that we have a lot of work to do to diversify coaching staff not only by gender, but also by race.

1. College Athletics’ War on Women Coaches (Pat Griffin, March 8, 2015, Huffpost)

In 2015, Shannon Miller, who coached women’s ice hockey at the University of Minnesota Duluth, was notified by the university that her contract would not be renewed at the end of the season because of concerns that she was being paid too much for her work.

“Placed in the context of a disturbing trend in the diminishing number of women coaches and the treatment of the women in athletics over the last several years, this decision has more far reaching consequences for college women’s athletics.”

Pat Griffin summarizes a list of troubling action taken toward female coaches from 2007 to 2015 and argues that “the public rationale offered by athletic administrators for their decisions in each of these cases masks a deeper and more fundamental problem in college athletics: misogyny, sexism, and homophobia.”

2. An Open Letter About Female Coaches (Pau Gasol, May 11, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

Pau Gasol of the San Antonio Spurs, in an open letter, not only successfully dismantles others’ arguments as to why Becky Hammon should not be head coach of an NBA team, but also urges the NBA — and fans of the NBA — to advocate and work toward a more inclusive league as a whole.

“Let’s recognize that one protest does not mean we have solved the problem of racial inequality in this country. One parade doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can for the LGBTQ movement. And one coaching interview doesn’t mean we have solved the issue of gender diversity in our workplace.”

(Related: read Sidelined by Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate.)

3. American Running Needs More Female Coaches (Erin Strout, September 14, 2018, Outside)

By examining the sport of running as a focal point in this piece, Erin Strout illuminates the reasons why women are less likely to become coaches, interviews women in coaching positions to understand their challenges, and wonders about the future of women’s coaching and how more women in coaching positions could impact sport.

“Whether at the professional or collegiate level, Hogshead-Makar says that adding more female influence within the sport is crucial—not only to advance gender equity but also to provide a safer environment where athletes can thrive.”

(Related: read Reem Abulleil’s Why aren’t there more female coaches on tour? published by the Women’s Tennis Association.)

4. Where Are The Women? (Rachel Stark, Winter, 2017 NCAA Champion Magazine)

“In 1972, women coached more than 90 percent of collegiate women’s teams. Today, they coach fewer than half.”

In this 2017 piece for NCAA Champion Magazine, Rachel Stark investigates the effect that female coaches’ visible representation has on younger athletes who play sports, and also provides a number of resources such as “How to Support Young Coaches on the Rise,” “How to Strengthen Your Contacts,” and “How to Deepen the Candidate Pool” as a way to encourage more women to apply for coaching positions, and to open the conversation about gender, race, representation, and coaching within college sports.

(Related: read Number of Women Coaching in College Has Plummeted in Title IX Era by Jeré Longman published in The New York Times.)

5. The Field Where Men Still Call the Shots (Linda Flanagan, July 28, 2018, The Atlantic)

In this deeply researched essay, Linda Flanagan argues that a dearth of female role models in sport can negatively impact female athletes in several ways, such as leadership styles, lack of participation in sport, and an inability to visualize themselves as future coaches.

“According to a 2009 study by the sociologists Michael Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, men typically coach, and women typically serve as “team moms”…In the researchers’ view, this imbalance stems from “institutional gender regimes” that divide the work between men and women based on traditional roles.”

6. The Rise of Women Coaching Men (Michael LoRé, April 26, 2018, culture trip)

When Natalie Randolph tells a man at the bar that she’s a former football player, he barrages her with questions.

“Wait, you played football? Did you wear pads? A helmet? Was it the Lingerie Football League? And you coached? So then, what’s a spread offense? Do you know the 3-technique?”

This instance, as Michael LoRé reports, is representative of the kind of frustrating and discriminatory reaction Randolph encounters frequently when she talks about her experiences as a woman of color who is both a football player and female coach of a male football team. And her story is not an anomaly. LoRé, using Randolph’s experiences as a thru-line throughout the piece, discusses the current state of coaching and weaves in stories from other female coaches.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

Decolonizing Knowledge: Stefan Bradley on the Fight for Civil Rights in the Ivy League

Yale cheer leaders Greg Parker (L) and Bill Brown give the Black Power salute during the National Anthem starting the Yale-Dartmouth football game in the Yale Bowl. November 2, 1968. Bettman / Getty

Jonny Auping | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,155 words)

Being steeped in tradition, by nature, requires a resistance to change; and, as Stefan Bradley points out in the introduction to his new book Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, seven of the eight Ivy League schools — often referred to as the “Ancient Eight” — existed before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, making them perhaps “more American than the nation itself with respect to culture and history.” Attending an Ivy League school is and always has been a marker of status in this country, one boasted by many U.S. Presidents, judges, and world leaders. Racial equality was not something that came naturally to these institutions; it had to be fought for. Upending the Ivory Tower documents the struggles of early black Ivy League students as well as the demonstrations and building occupations students in the 1960s took part in to hold these elite universities accountable for their prejudice.

Dr. Bradley is currently chair of the African American Studies program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (and years ago he was also a professor of mine at Saint Louis University). In 2012, he published Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the 1960s, a book about how, as some white student activists worked to radicalize and restructure the university, black students, joining with local activists in Harlem, sought to stop the university from paving over a public park to build a private gymnasium. The perspective of outsiders allowed them to see beyond internal campus politics; to recognize the university as a force in the world which sometimes must be opposed, not just reorganized. Upending the Ivory Tower covers similar ground but has an expanded scope, covering the postwar period through 1975 and all eight Ivies, adding a new layer of nuance to our understanding of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and recounting the stories of young people who had everything to lose but were righteous in their demands for what they had yet to gain. Read more…

The Humanities Marketplace As a Circle of Hell

Ian Nicholson/PA Wire/Press Association via AP Images

After earning two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree, Athena Lathos, a self-described “Friendly Neighborhood Millennial,” still struggles to find adequate work, even in academia. Like many of us writer types, she had to work retail while applying to numerous other jobs that never contacted her back.

On her blog Bertha Mason’s Attic, Lathos shares her travails as a humanities major in the job market, as she tries to imagine that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t another dumpster fire. It isn’t as if she doesn’t recognize the pitfalls of her academic pursuits. It’s just that our capitalistic culture rewards too few people for them. The beauty is that her blog post makes her abilities evident: her wit, intellect, narration mixed with analysis, the engaging narrative voice, self-awareness, and deprecation so essential to compelling, insightful personal nonfiction. Please, someone help this talented, passionate writer and scholar find a job deserving of her.

Before I finished graduate school, I met with a career counselor at OSU and explained that I might like to pursue a career where I could remain part of university life, i.e. as a low-level administrator. For jobs even at that tier, she told me I would likely need another MA in “Higher Education Administration.” Really? Another MA? That I would have to pay in full for? To use the same programs and software that I had already been using as an instructor at OSU? Okay.

I heard her, but I also ended up applying to a lot of entry-level admin jobs, most of which amounted to working as a receptionist. I didn’t get any interviews.

After a summer of job searching, and increasingly desperate for cash, I began working retail at a local bookstore, thinking that I could continue looking for a position while I earned minimum wage. I ended up there for a year. Every few months, I was given tasks that increased in complexity and responsibility – everything from daily bookkeeping to making bank deposits for the store – while being told it wasn’t likely I would ever get a raise beyond a cashier’s minimum wage. At the store, nearly all of us had a college education or more, but we were treated like high schoolers with little to no intelligence. For example, one member of upper management referred to us as “the blind leading the blind.” Another, when I gave my two weeks notice, assumed it was because I was starting college as a freshman in the fall, expressing utter shock after she learned that I was 24 with an MA degree. In addition to those comments, there was the daily drudgery of being condescended to and degraded by everyone’s favorite I-must-speak-to-the-manager-immediately shoppers, who a) routinely berate you for store policies you have no control over and b) treat you like a thoughtless robot.

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You Can’t Escape Everything in the Ivory Tower

Photo by J.B. Hill via Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)

At Tin House, Jaclyn Gilbert explores the emotional legacy her father heaped on her, and how she coped as so many of us do: by turning the pain inward, and writing it on her own body. For her father, Jaclyn is an extension of his failed marriage and a debt to be managed rather than a daughter to be loved — something which she long understood instinctively, and her father found ways to drive home explicitly.

An hour later, when I opened the attachment, I found a copy of my parents’ original divorce agreement from the nineties.  I was eighteen by then, of legal age to change the terms my mother had negotiated when I was six.  If I signed, he would no longer have to contribute toward my or my sister’s college tuitions.

The pain and shock I felt in that moment is still hard to explain.  It wasn’t as simple as the question of money, of refinancing my education.  If it were, I would have signed in a heartbeat.

It was the fact of what I represented to him.  Debt, the object of a war he’d lost to my mother and was still searching to recover through me, his eldest daughter.  It was his plotting over the years—as if every time he’d asked me to ignore his absences during visits, his neglect when he wasted afternoons calling his bookies, his insults—he’d been preparing me for this larger acquiescence.  And yet to voice my anger would be to become my mother incarnate, a barrier to his complete financial freedom.  Signing this document not only meant choosing his story over my mother’s, but it meant doing so at my own expense, denying my autonomy.  The conditionality of his love blurred the document on my computer screen. My body seemed to be spinning into tiny pieces, no longer centered, no longer believing in myself as someone individual, separate, or whole.

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An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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The Wrong Pair

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lisa W. Rosenberg | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,844 words)

 

Dr. Alvarez furrowed his brow, crouching to view my right breast head-on, inscribing something on it with a dark blue marker — a map for his scalpel.

“You’ll notice a real laterality here,” he said, glancing up at one of his two male assistants, presumably residents. “Not so much on the left.”

“Yeah,” The younger physician concurred. “Wow.”

I bit my lip, amused. I was too giddy to be mortified. Nothing in life prepares you for a situation where three guys in white coats marvel at the nuances of, and the contrast between, your breasts. I sat, compliant, tolerant. My greatest wish was coming true. On the other side of this day would be relief from my aching middle back, from carrying around twin entities that had never felt like mine, and which had contributed to a struggle with body image that lasted through my mid-40s.

When Dr. Alvarez finished marking me up, he asked if I had any more questions before they wheeled me in for anesthesia. He had explained everything already: what kinds of I incisions would be made for minimal scarring, what the healing process would be like, how long before I’d be able to run.

“How small can we go?” I said, though we’d been over this as well.

“A C-cup,” he said. “Any smaller would compromise the integrity of the breast.”

Integrity and my breasts had never belonged in the same sentence as far as I was concerned. I felt no guilt about my choice, no reservations. A woman I’d met at physical therapy a few weeks before, who had overheard me talking about the upcoming surgery, had clicked her tongue at me.

“God don’t mess up,” she’d said.

But he did in my case, I’d wanted to tell her. I pictured a boob conveyor belt where God’s helpers — whoever they might be — awarded specially-selected, custom-designed boobs for every female in the queue. I imagined a woman in line before me: broad, tall and brash, with frosted, feathered, Barbara Mandrell hair, pausing to fix her slingback heel. Then me, pushed forward, forced to take the double E knockers that God had designed for her, instead of the nice, delicate A cups intended for my slight frame.

“A B-cup might be nice.” I told Dr. Alvarez.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

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The House on Mayo Road

Dougal Waters / Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Dur e Aziz Amna | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,986 words)

The spring I turned 12, I moved to an all-girls school, and my family moved from a tiny two-bedroom in the outskirts of Pindi to a huge house in the heart of the city, 30 minutes from Pakistan’s capital. I remember walking into the vast emptiness of the new house, my shoes leaving imprints on the dusty floor. It was a January afternoon in 2004, and the sun came in through windows we would later find to be full of cracks. The garden sprouted weeds. My two brothers and I ran upstairs, knowing our parents would take the downstairs bedroom by the front door. There were two rooms on the second floor, both with their own bathroom. I told my mother, “Ammi, I’m the eldest, I want the bigger one.” She glared at me and said, “We’ll see.”

As we moved in over the next few months, I understood why Ammi had been in a foul mood. For me and my brothers, the house meant lots of space. It sat a stone’s throw away from GT Road, the historic highway that once ran from Kabul to Chittagong. It had a garden in the front and a yard in the back, large enough for us to set up a badminton net. For Ammi, the move brought months of scrubbing, washing, organizing. “Don’t think they ever cleaned this place, the old bastards,” she said under her breath as she threw a pail of water onto the grimy marble floor, the air alive with the smell of wet dust.

Built in the 1960s and given to senior employees in Pakistan’s civil service, the house was meant for officers who would hire an entourage of help to sweep the cavernous rooms, take cobwebs off the high ceilings, clean the furry grit that collected on the fans, and water the wild jasmine that bloomed every March, turning the living room fragrant. The lady of the house, the begum, often stayed at home to supervise and entertain. My mother had gotten her first teaching job months after I was born, charming the nearby school principal by telling him that Anna Karenina was her favorite book. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” she told me years later. “I never finished the book, but that was its first line.” I turned the sentence over in my head, a bit miffed by Tolstoy. I felt like we were happy in our own way.

In the years to come, Ammi continued teaching English at a school nearby. She would come home later than us most days, then take a nap during which we tiptoed around the house, knowing that even the slightest sound might disturb her. Once, when we went to wake her up, she made us lie down next to her and asked, “Do you wish you had one of those mothers who stayed at home all day and took care of you?” We gave emphatic nos, because we thought Ammi was quite all right.

Soon after we’d moved in, the house splintered into two worlds. There was the world downstairs: that of morning parathas, Quran lessons, and structured TV hours (one hour a day, from 8 to 9 p.m.). Here, we came dressed in our ironed school uniforms: a maroon tunic for me, white shirts and maroon ties for my brothers. Here, we acted like the good kids our parents knew us to be. After guests left from dinner parties, my parents sometimes said, “Did you see their kids? So ill-mannered.” We, on the other hand, sat in a tight three-headed row in the drawing room, speaking when spoken to, taking no more than two kebabs even when offered.

At 9, we were sent to bed, the staircase a portal to the other world. Despite my initial desire to bag rooms, we had all taken to sleeping in the bedroom my brothers shared, its walls a freshly painted blue. My room was sea green, my favorite color, but we were conscientious kids, and my parents said it was wasteful to keep two fans going. For several hours each night, we sprawled around on the bed, sometimes talking but often not. The room always had dozens of library books lying around. In a childhood shaped by discipline, books were one thing we were allowed to be obsessive and unruly about. The librarian at my mother’s school always let us check out 50 books at a time. “Jamila’s kids, such readers,” she’d marvel to her colleagues.
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We Could Fell a Redwood Forest With This Anger

Photo by Richard Sunderland via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

As increasing numbers of Americans walk around brimming with rage, increasing number of Americans need an outlet so the anger doesn’t turn inward. Organizing and activism is productive and takes the edge off, but sometimes, the boiling cauldron of wrath overflows. Megan Stielstra found an unexpected but in retrospect eminently understandable outlet: axe-throwing. She writes about it with great eloquence and clarity for The Believer.

Competitive axe-throwing goes back to lumberjacks in the late 1800s, but its contemporary indoor equivalent was started by a guy in a Viking metal band. He threw parties in his backyard in Toronto with axes and booze, and people showed up via word of mouth until they had an informal league. Scoring was added—each ring around the bullseye holds a different points value—and in 2011 they moved into their first warehouse. Now there are dozens of axe-throwing centers in Canada and across the United States.

Of the two in Chicago, one is twenty minutes west of our apartment. I learned this in September on the day Betsy DeVos rescinded sexual assault protections on college campuses. I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction for twenty years and long ago lost count of the young women and queer and gender nonconforming people who put their hearts on pages and hand those pages to me saying please, please, please don’t tell because they don’t trust the systems that are supposed to protect them. I choke on that word: protection. We shouldn’t need protection. We should be able to walk into the classroom or dorm or boardroom or bar or park or grocery store or anywhere without needing a bodyguard or a wing person or a knife in our goddamn pocket and while the protections under the Department of Education weren’t perfect, they were something, a start, a way of saying we see you and you matter and we’re trying.

My husband found me crying in the bathroom and asked how he could help.

Vote. Donate. Teach our son to dismantle the white cis hetero patriarchy.

“I would like to throw axes,” I said.

We got a babysitter.

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Paks 1918: A Pogrom and a Prelude

Getty Images / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Longreads

Howard Lovy | Longreads | November 2018 | 17 minutes (4,186 words)

 

On the banks of the Danube, there is a place where the great river takes two sharp 45-degree turns, making it difficult for ships to pass unseen. For centuries, this feature made the city, nestled within, a fortification against foreign attack. But from an enemy inside the city’s own boundaries, there was no natural protection. And for a 9-year-old boy, hiding as his neighbors ransacked his grandparents’ home, a wine barrel was the only shelter. There he hid, silent, while around him echoed the muffled, angry, anguished sounds of a pogrom.

The year was 1918 and the place on the Danube was the Hungarian city of Paks, where the local townspeople, having endured defeat in the Great War, were venting their rage on the usual cause of all their woes — their Jewish neighbors. The boy in the barrel was Jóska Lovy. Decades, lifetimes later in America, he will be known as Grandpa Joe and the beloved patriarch of an exponentially expanding family of Lovys — of doctors and engineers, of entrepreneurs and soldiers and writers — scattered across their adopted nation.

But, for now, that future was only as thick as the wood surrounding Jóska and his brother Andor, whose grandparents Jacob and Deborah Grun believed to be safe inside these barrels. They knew the casks would not be destroyed by the mob. The goyim would still need them for the coming grape harvest even if they succeeded in slitting the throat of every Jew in Paks.

Jóska cowered inside the wine barrel, surrounded by near total darkness, yet his senses were assaulted with contradictions. First, was the scent of old oak mixed with the sweet memory of Pesach. The residual smell of wine soaked into the oak barrel in which he hid helped him recall the laughter of family at Passover, the taste of holiday chocolates, the mild intoxication of his grape juice spiked with a touch of the sweet alcohol. Last year was the first seder in which he was allowed to pour a drop of wine into his cup, and he savored the knowledge that, if he drank enough of it, he would grow giddy with drunkenness, the way he heard his adults long after he was supposed to have been asleep.

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Home Again, Home Again: A Reading List

Getty Images

“Home, I began to feel, was the half-formed beliefs you fashioned in the middle of all you didn’t and couldn’t understand, a tent on a wide, empty plain.”

-Pico Iyer

Nine or 10 months after I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, my parents packed up all of our belongings in a Mazda 323, and drove us away from my natal home. My parents took the Alcan highway through Canada, and then made their way down to Texas, where we lived for a couple of years before moving again. There are photos from that initial journey. In some, I am lolling on a viewing platform in Yellowstone National Park, and in others, I’m bundled up in a snowsuit, unnamed mountains behind me. My parents tell me I remained watchful in the backseat, my eyes trained on the scenery as it flushed from snowy white to green.

After Texas, we maintained a peripatetic existence, moving to Louisiana, then back to Alaska again. Though I learned early on in my life that we didn’t live anywhere long enough to change the walls from sellable beige, the idea of home didn’t concern me until my first-grade year, when my parents suggested we move to a small seaport city on the edge of Borneo, the second-largest island in Indonesia. We spent six years in Indonesia, only moving once from Borneo to Java. It was the longest I lived anywhere. Not knowing as an elementary schooler the layers of privilege that complicated my presence there, I allowed myself to feel as though I had found a home. I learned to pull nectar from the pink flowers outside my front door, speak Bahasa Indonesia, and scooter past the monitor lizards on my way to school. America — the country people often reminded me I was from — became the other end of infrequent long-distance phone calls, during which I’d listen to the crackling, faraway voices of people I loved. When we returned to the States once a year, well-meaning family and friends would always say, welcome home or I’m so glad you’re back. I felt, in those moments, as though there were two of me, both versions shimmering and illusory. I didn’t fully belong in Indonesia, but I also couldn’t understand how I fit into the landscape of technicolor grocery-store aisles and the dazzling suburban asphalt streets of a country that others called mine.

My family found out we were moving from Indonesia while on summer leave in the U.S., so I never got the chance to return or say goodbye. My memories from the formative years I spent there are buried somewhere deep within me — for years, I have felt too homesick to let myself remember. It is only in certain moments — the voice of a woman speaking Bahasa Indonesia rising from a crowded venue in Oregon, the echo of an adzan from a mosque — that I allow my memories from those days to unfurl like lush rainforest leaves, broad and green and glossy, beading with dew and bursting with song.

I move every two to four years now, and I am always filled with anticipation, hoping for a place that will hold me. I feel rootless, capable of fitting in anywhere, but not truly belonging. Most of the time I carry these thoughts quietly within myself, but I have found comfort in the way others voice complications with the idea of home. How much of who we are stems from the places that bear us? What does it mean to long for a home that doesn’t exist in the way it once did? What memories rise to the surface when you return to a long-forgotten place? What does it mean to be unable to return?

1. Reading ‘The Odyssey’ Far From Home (Azareen Van der Vliet, March 10, 2018, Electric Lit)

When Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi moves to South Bend, Indiana, she feels unmoored.

“Given the disorienting cartography of my life, there isn’t a singular home for me to return to. I am from nowhere; or, perhaps, I am from a constellation of places which habits and social codes violently contradict one another, leaving me empty handed.”

Van der Vliet Oloomi reads The Odyssey in Indiana, which helps her better understand her own nostalgia for an intangible place. Her encounter with the tale serves as an example of the power that literature, like place, has in offering an intersection between reality and possibility, solace and hope.

2. Baby Boy Born Birthplace Blues (John Jeremiah Sullivan, December 6, 2016, Oxford American)

When John Jeremiah Sullivan was young, a local paper in his hometown of New Albany, Indiana, ran an article about a boy who discovered a passageway that had once been part of the Underground Railroad. By researching old newspaper clippings reporting on runaway slaves, instances of racial violence, and the origins of blues music, Sullivan unravels myth to reveal truths about the complex and rich history of the place he “was raised in and where occurred the events that most shaped and damaged me as a human being.”

3. A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home (Jamila Osman, January 9, 2017, Catapult)

While watching salmon return to the site of their birth to lay thousands of eggs of their own, Jamila Osman feels a pang of jealousy at the certainty of the fish, their ability to find their way back to a point of origin. In this lyrical, haunting essay, Osman chronicles her parents’ journey from Somalia to Canada to Portland, Oregon, and reckons with grief after the death of her sister, the shortcomings of maps, and how her own identity has been shaped significantly by loss and place.

“A country is impossible to contain; a people are impossible to boil to the silt of parchment. A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”

4. Enduring Exile (Alia Malek, October 15, 2013, Guernica)

When Anto’s neighbors warn him that he’s no longer safe in northwestern Syria, he heeds their warning, quickly shuttering the windows of his restaurant and inn, and selling what possessions he could. Alia Malek not only tells the story of Anto’s displacement in this harrowing journalistic essay, but also writes about the devastating effects of the Armenian Genocide and the way Anto’s family’s relationship to the idea of home was permanently altered as a result.

“He was curious to visit Armenia, even if it wasn’t really Armenia, and he wasn’t really from this Armenia.”

5. Fountain Girls (Samantha Tucker, Fall/Winter, 2016 Ecotone)

“There are Fountain girls who try to leave, but cannot outrun their hometown legacy; there are Fountain girls who never even stumble upon the chance to try.”

By deftly weaving together her own personal narrative about her upbringing in Fountain, Colorado and the death of her brother Ronnie, with the death of a “Fountain girl” named Tara, Tucker illuminates how a place can hold you in its grasp, even after you’ve physically left it behind.

“Where, in our reach for something better—an enlistment, an education, a steady job, a family, the dream—where do we, instead, cycle back, or discover our beginnings have inevitably been our end?”

6. Looking for Home in the Palestinian Diaspora (Marcello Di Cintio, September 24, 2018 Hazlitt)

Over 70 years have passed since Palestinians were first displaced by the Palestine War in the late 1940s, and many of the refugees living in UNRWA-administered camps have not been able to return to their ancestral homes. After Palestinian author Mona Abu Sharekh guides Marcello Di Cintio through Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Di Cintio begins to wonder “about the descendants of refugees who live far from the villages their grandparents lost — not just across a fence, but across an ocean.” Di Cintio meets with several Palestinian poets in Brooklyn in order to bear witness how both literature and heritage inform their conceptions of home.

“‘My father infected in us a nostalgia for Palestine,’ Hala said. Though she’d never seen Palestine, she came to love the place because of her father’s love.”

7. A Woman’s Choice — Sexual Favours or Lose her Home (Jessica Lussenhop, January 11, 2018, BBC News)

Broke and homeless, newly released from prison, Khristen Sellers was offered an abandoned trailer under the condition that she’d clean it herself. She did, but when the inspector came by, he “asked her if she ‘gives head’” and implied that “his signature on the inspection was the only thing standing between her and a place to live. Sellers is not the only one to experience this kind of harassment.

“In a post-Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo world, most people are well aware sexual harassment occurs in the workplace. But across the US, women are subjected to it in a far more intimate setting – their homes.”

In this piece, Jessica Lussenhop chronicles the experiences of sexual harassment that many women tenants have experienced, the flaws in the system that allow for such egregious incidents, and related legislation.

8. Home by (Chris Jones, Jaunary 29, 2007 Esquire)

After the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated before re-entry in February, 2003, Donald Pettit, Captain Kenneth Bowersox, and Nikolai Budarin were left stranded in space. Through interviews with the crew, and research about the surrounding circumstances, Chris Jones, in this moving piece of longform journalism, writes about what it means to be suspended far from Earth’s comforts and minutiae, not knowing when — or how — you’ll be able to return.

“And sometimes you’re no longer a month away from home–you’re suddenly much farther, although you’re not really sure how far, because the miles are meaningless.”

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and illness.