Mom (18 page)

Mom talked about her great-grandfather, a physician in Vienna who went house to house caring for sick families during a typhoid epidemic in the nineteenth century. At the time visiting these quarantined homes was forbidden. One day he was caught coming out of a contaminated house and punished by having his hands chopped off and lye poured over his hands. He died soon after.

She told me about her grandfather, who owned a tiny, decidedly unsuccessful hardware store on 110th Street in Manhattan. He was, she said, a “pinpoint Talmudic scholar”—if you stuck a pin through this Jewish text and told him what word the pin hit on the first page, he could tell you precisely what word the pin would hit on each successive page. He would spend his days in his empty store, hunched over this great book he loved so dearly. Occasionally a customer would walk in and ask a question, only to be shushed: “I waited two hours for you, you can wait two minutes for me!” And then he’d finish whatever Talmud portion he was studying.

She talked about my birth: “I watched it in a mirror—it was very colorful. They put you in the little bassinette, and I leaned over and I said, ‘Hello, David, this is your mom!’ For months afterward, I would dream the colors of your birth that I saw in that mirror.” I asked her what lessons she’d learned in life: “I’ve learned that when things are really bad, they’re not going to stay that way. I’ve also learned that good breeds good—if you do good, more good will come of it. It’s like light—it attracts. That’s just the way it is.”

It’s been five years since that conversation. In that time, I’ve become a dad, and I’ve seen my mom evolve from a great mother to a terrific grandmother. It makes me happy to know that my son, my son’s children, and the generations to follow will one day get to know my mother, Jane Isay, through the StoryCorps interview we recorded that December day.

If there’s a single piece of advice I can offer six years into this work it’s this:
Don’t wait
. Take the time to show the people important to you that you love them by interviewing them about their lives. A few years ago, I had an appointment with my sports medicine doctor, who ran a practice with his dad. He told me that his father was retiring, I told him he needed to take his dad to a StoryCorps booth. He promised he would. It was my last appointment with him. Last week, a StoryCorps intern was riding the subway, reading our first book,
Listening Is an Act of Love,
when this doctor tapped her on the shoulder and told her he knew me. When the young woman told him she worked at StoryCorps, he said: “Just tell Dave this: I waited too long.”

Every day I hear from people who meant to record a beloved relative or friend but waited too long. I hope after reading
Mom
you’ll be inspired to honor someone important in your life by recording an interview—either at one of our StoryCorps facilities or by using your own recording equipment. (You can find all sorts of helpful resources at
www.storycorps.org
).

I also hope you’ll spread the word about our efforts. We want to encourage the entire nation to take the time to ask life’s important questions of a loved one—or even a stranger—and
really
listen to the answers. We hope to shower this country with more of the sorts of stories you’ve just read—authentic voices that remind us what’s truly important, that tell real American stories, and that show us all the possibilities life presents when lived to its fullest.

I hope you’ll join us as we work to weave StoryCorps into the fabric of American life and into the lives of all Americans. Onward!

—Dave Isay, October 2009

This book owes its existence to the remarkable curatorial eye, deft editing skills, and disciplined project management of Lizzie Jacobs, StoryCorps’s editor. Lizzie was assisted with diligence by Isaac Kestenbaum. Thanks also to this book’s readers, all of them mothers, who weighed in on numerous versions of the manuscript on tight deadlines: Kathrina Proscia; Eve Claxton; my wife, Jennifer Gonnerman; and my mom, Jane Isay. Gratitude to Darren Reidy, the Tape Transcription Center, Jennifer Kotter, Emma Tsui, and Jordan Sayle.

Thanks to Scott Moyers for his steadfast support and wise counsel. Thanks also to our remarkable, ever-vigilant agent, David Black, whose loyalty, attention, and heart never cease to amaze. At Penguin Press thanks to Lindsay Whalen, Liz Calamari, Tracy Locke, Stephen Morrison, and our editor and publisher, Ann Godoff, the best in the business.

Thanks to all of our supporters, with special thanks to our lead funders: Patricia DeStacy Harrison; Gara LaMarche; Larry Kaplen; Joe and Carol Reich for our Memory Loss Project; and Stan Shuman, Deborah Leff, and the StoryCorps Board. Thanks also to Peggy Bulger and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Thanks to the inimitable Ellen McDonnell, Ellen Weiss, Dana Davis Rehm, and everyone else at NPR who has a hand in our weekly broadcasts on
Morning Edition
.

Most of all, thanks to the entire tireless StoryCorps team—the most brilliant and committed group of people anyone could ever hope to work with.

Visit
www.storycorps.org
to

One hundred percent of the royalties from this book will be donated to StoryCorps, a not-for-profit organization.

Lead funding for StoryCorps comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Other major 2009 funders include: the Atlantic Philanthropies, anonymous, the Kaplen Foundation, Joe and Carol Reich, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and NPR.

Additional funders include the Ford Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Charina Endowment Fund, Bloomberg L.P., the Fetzer Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Open Society Institute, and the BayTree Fund.

Legal services are generously donated by Latham & Watkins and Holland & Knight.

For a complete and current list of all of our supporters, please visit our Web site:
www.storycorps.org
.

 

 

National Partners:

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. He is the author/editor of four books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including the first StoryCorps book,
Listening Is an Act of Love
, a
New York Times
bestseller.