The other night I had a school dream different from the usual anxiety-laden ones – you know, naked to class, forgot to prepare the lesson. It was unusual not just because of its content but because I actually remembered it on waking. My dream memories are more like snapshots than videos, so you have to imagine the context and actions that surrounded the picture.
I am in my classroom with my student teacher. It must be the end of the school year; there’s a sense of things wrapping up. I’m holding the student teacher by the shoulders (she’s not really a student teacher. I recognize her. She’s Laura G. whom I once hired to teach math at my charter school) as I proclaim passionately, “Take it. It’s all yours.” It’s not clear if I’m referring to my classroom and job or, more narrowly, to the classroom library which I’ve lovingly amassed over many years of scouring rummage sales and used book store shelves, mostly with my own money.
My fascination with dreams is as much about identifying the waking world elements that have formed the spine of the dream as I am with the far murkier and more questionable task of parsing its “meaning.” In this case, there are two elements that I think invaded my sleeping thoughts. First, one of my FB friends posted a letter from Alex Pretti’s last nursing students. It was the kind of tribute to his caring and loving way of being in the world, both as teacher and friend that every mentor dreams of. He, she said, would live on in the way she approached every aspect of her nursing life.
Second was the heartbreaking story in the previous day’s NY Times about the award winning Ohio teacher who was fired on the basis of a parental complaint about some of the titles in her classroom library. When she left, she packed up her whole library and deposited it in a storage locker, presumably in the hope that it would find a new classroom home when the displaced teacher was rehired. That never happened.
It’s pretty easy to see how these two experiences contributed to the shape of the dream, but what did it mean? The likely interpretation suggests that this is some kind of valedictory to a life I loved as a classroom teacher, a handing off, not just of my material possessions, but of my way of being as a teacher. There are other possibilities, including some that cast the dream in a sexual light, but they seem further from the mark than my first shot.
In fact, when I left that classroom in Houston for what I thought was a year’s leave, but which proved to be forever, I handed the proverbial keys to Christa, a young and enormously talented writer to whom I was connected through a Writers in the Schools program I had helped to start. I knew she would use the books well, possibly even better than I had. Christa is still teaching 30 years later, though not in that classroom and school. I hope she took some of the library with her. I visited with her on a trip to Houston last year and am awed by the variety of innovative projects that were in the works at her current school. I would like to take some small credit for all this, like what Alex Pretti’s nurse attributed to him, but I can’t claim more influence on her than that precious library.
It’s rare that I finish two 500+ page books in such a short span of time, so, to celebrate, I want to follow up my notes about Demon Copperhead with a very different kind of book which was recommended to me by my dear friend and fellow book lover Adrienne Lieberman. It’s called All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner. The title is the translation of a line from Goethe by Mildred Harnack, the protagonist of this deeply researched account of not just her life, but of an entire network of underground resistance groups in Nazi Germany.
I had heard of The White Rose, a group that has been memorialized in literature and in film, but I had no idea that there a number of other interconnected anti-Nazi circles whose members had penetrated the highest level of the Nazi bureacucracy. Initially, their mission was to inform the German public of the dangers of Hitler’s plans and the need to resist them. Later, some of the participants became spies for the Soviet government; they saw Russia as the most likely route to defeating Hitler.
Mildred Harnack was an American woman who arrived in Germany in the early 30s to teach and to complete her doctoral research on American literature. She married a German economist, Arvid Harnack, and together they built a network of like-minded opponents who managed to continue operating undercover until deep into the war. I don’t think it will spoil the book for you to know that they are eventually undone by a foolish error not of their own making. Someone responsible for encrypting messages fails to use key members’ code names which leads to the arrest and execution of almost the entire resistance network.
The book jacket refers to this work as narrative non-fiction. This means that although there is a deep well of research and documentation from which the story is drawn, there are touches of color that help to bind the story together. They’re details that no one could actually know but which I’m ready to grant a pass to because the author has delved so deeply into these characters’ lives that she has license to imagine what can’t be fully documented. Altogether it makes for a very readable and informative work.
I first found the book’s title heavy and a bit abstract, but now that I’ve finished the book, I find “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days” painfully prescient.
