Week 5
Class Ground Rules
Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.
READ (at least twice): Edith Pearlman – “Day of Awe,” (from Binocular Vision, pp. 13-24).
An old Jewish man meets his new adopted grandson during Yom Kippur in Central America.
Think About:
The narrative perspective.
The characters - Bob, Lex, Jaimie, and Janet -- and how they relate to each other.
The significance of the title.
“To me, a short story is a conversation between writer and reader,” Pearlman has said. “Since only the writer can speak, she must take care to respect the reader, to avoid telling him what to think, to say as little as possible and imply the rest with metaphor, ellipses, allusive dialogue, pauses.”—Edith Pearlman
Kol Nidre [English translation of song sung at the beginning of services on the eve of Yom Kippur]
All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations, and synonymous terms that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves, from the previous Day of Atonement until this Day of Atonement and from this Day of Atonement until the next Day of Atonement that will come for our benefit. Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.
Edith Pearlman Biography
Edith Pearlman was born in 1936 to a Ukrainian-born father, an ophthalmologist, and a Polish-American mother whose stack of bedside novels became her lending library. She and her younger sister grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Providence, R.I.
Pearlman studied literature at Radcliffe, but turned to computer programming to support herself after graduation in 1957. Pearlman noted, “It [coding] had much in common with writing fiction because of the various choices you had to make. Every word had a specific function and could not be misused or misplaced.” Such linguistic precision is one of her hallmarks. Read more...
Link to Week 5 class recording: brandeis.zoom.us/rec/play/dcOSYCz54qGr_Q2DVJSYAE0WhYjSBPXK2nEVxstE4h_FT-GtqR2p5vidNtc9Rc4d4N5gBOB59nQWnNlC.fM6cSkJtQwsND2j3