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****Ruth Weinstein’s BACK TO THE LAND: ALLIANCE COLONY TO THE OZARKS IN FOUR GENERATIONS is #006 in the never-ending series called THE MAGNIFICATION OF ONE MEMORY IN MEMOIR. All THE MAGNIFICATION OF ONE MEMORY IN MEMOIR links are at the end of this piece.
Name of memoir? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? BACK TO THE LAND: ALLIANCE COLONY TO THE OZARKS IN FOUR GENERATIONS. My first choice for a title was even longer, something like FROM THE SHTETLS OF KIEV TO THE ARKANSAS OZARKS IN FOUR GNERATIONS: A SUMMER KID’S LOVE LETTER TO THE ALLIANCE COLONY. My cousin Bob, also a writer, urged a shorter title while I might have foolishly gone on for another sentence to convey the whole breadth of the book in the title.
Has this been published? If yes, what publisher and what publication date? The book was published by the South Jersey Culture & History Center Regional Press for the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey in February 2020. Very unfortunate timing—launching right at the beginning of the pandemic!
What is the description of this memoir? BACK TO THE LAND is a hybrid genre with memoir at its core. It is part history—both of Jewish immigration to the United States and my mother’s family history. The peak period of Jewish immigration to the United States occurred from about 1880 to 1920, when Jews of the Russian Empire, also known as the Pale of Settlement, fled Czarist pogroms in huge numbers.
Early in that wave of emigration, my mother’s paternal and maternal grandparents left what was really Ukraine and settled in rural Southern New Jersey. My grandfather’s parents came in 1882 and, along with forty-two other Russian-Jewish immigrant families, established The Alliance Colony (http://alliancecolony.com/),
which has ever since been known as America’s first successful Jewish agricultural community. My grandmother came as a teenager with her parents around the turn of the century. My grandfather was born in 1883 and became an all-American country boy.
I call the book a memoir because after summarizing the historical background, I connect the dots for the reader to see how I hearkened back to my mother’s family’s rural roots, when in 1976, my husband and I moved, as hippie back-to-the-landers, to the Arkansas Ozarks, where we have lived ever since on the same forty-acre piece of land. My summers in that community. from my birth in 1941 to 1959. imprinted me with an indelible ink and “wrote” countless memories that helped to shape who I have become.
which has ever since been known as America’s first successful Jewish agricultural community. My grandmother came as a teenager with her parents around the turn of the century. My grandfather was born in 1883 and became an all-American country boy.
I call the book a memoir because after summarizing the historical background, I connect the dots for the reader to see how I hearkened back to my mother’s family’s rural roots, when in 1976, my husband and I moved, as hippie back-to-the-landers, to the Arkansas Ozarks, where we have lived ever since on the same forty-acre piece of land. My summers in that community. from my birth in 1941 to 1959. imprinted me with an indelible ink and “wrote” countless memories that helped to shape who I have become.
What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? I consider the summer of 2012 the formal beginning of this memoir though in one way or another I have been writing parts of it nearly my entire life (elementary school compositions on “how I spent my summer vacation,” poems over the years, an attempt at an autobiographical novel in the 1980s—I still have this and cannot bring myself to use the handwritten pages as fire starters).
I completed the first draft, I believe, in early in 2019 and sent it to my editor, Thomas Kinsella, professor of literature, the Samuel and Elizabeth Levin Director of the Alliance Heritage Center, and the Director of the South Jersey Culture & History Center Regional Press at Stockton University. We—Tom, his student interns, the graphic arts designer there, and I—had an edited, formatted first edition of it, complete with photographs later that same year.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. In the summers and early autumns of 2018 and 2019, I wrote at the table on our screened-in porch where large white oak trees and a bamboo grove shelter the house and porch from the western sun and where a breeze usually blows. I can gaze out at our kitchen garden in a forest clearing. Birds sing from pre-dawn until past dusk. My laptop stays on the table until shared mealtime when I move it. If I am having breakfast alone, I leave it in place and maybe write a bit. Mostly I manage to write in the evenings and often into the summer nights listening to the whippoorwills, while sipping on a cool drink.
As summer winds on and the weather becomes unpleasantly hot, the air becomes drought-dusty and my gardening chores are a little less demanding, sometimes in the late afternoon, I get time to do yoga on the porch and go back and forth between my yoga mat and the laptop. Somehow, if I fully submit to the power of yoga to quiet my mind and relax my body, a particular phrase, sentence or even more developed idea will pop into my head. As I am writing the answer to this question—in July of 2020, it is 8 p.m., and I am hearing the most amazing birdsongs and calls as the birds settle in their nests—on branches and the interwoven bamboo branch perches—and twitter themselves to sleep.
As summer winds on and the weather becomes unpleasantly hot, the air becomes drought-dusty and my gardening chores are a little less demanding, sometimes in the late afternoon, I get time to do yoga on the porch and go back and forth between my yoga mat and the laptop. Somehow, if I fully submit to the power of yoga to quiet my mind and relax my body, a particular phrase, sentence or even more developed idea will pop into my head. As I am writing the answer to this question—in July of 2020, it is 8 p.m., and I am hearing the most amazing birdsongs and calls as the birds settle in their nests—on branches and the interwoven bamboo branch perches—and twitter themselves to sleep.
However, when the weather turns cold, I write at the dining table in our open-floor plan main room, warmed by the wood stove. If it’s very cold, I might carry the laptop to the sleeping loft, which is now our guest “room,” and write there.
When I write prose, it’s strictly on my laptop although I do write phrases or notes as they occur to me on scraps of paper or in notebooks. This somewhat depends upon how close I am to my laptop or what is most convenient at the moment. I’ve already discussed location and times when I can find moments or hours for writing.
My other writing habits also vary with the seasons. In cold weather, if I can tune in classical music on the radio, I will listen to it as I write and maybe sip some red wine or hot herbal tea. If I can’t get the classical station to come in clearly, I sometimes turn on the public television CREATE channel and pay subliminal attention to the cooking shows—a sort of non-caloric, comfort-food-binge, which helps me to keep track of time for purposes of medication and feeding our sourdough starter or other domestic chores that require a schedule. My husband works four days a week with two overnights and gets home late at night the other two nights, so this is the quietest time for me to write.
My other writing habits also vary with the seasons. In cold weather, if I can tune in classical music on the radio, I will listen to it as I write and maybe sip some red wine or hot herbal tea. If I can’t get the classical station to come in clearly, I sometimes turn on the public television CREATE channel and pay subliminal attention to the cooking shows—a sort of non-caloric, comfort-food-binge, which helps me to keep track of time for purposes of medication and feeding our sourdough starter or other domestic chores that require a schedule. My husband works four days a week with two overnights and gets home late at night the other two nights, so this is the quietest time for me to write.
The span of human emotions captured in the picture and encapsulated in my memoir is vast: all the wonderful emotions of joy, love, security, curiosity, exploration, and happiness are wrapped up in the photo and book. You will also find anxiety, fear, pain, sorrow, loss, confusion, teenage sexual desire and awkwardness—all the universal emotions packaged in long passages of what my readers consider good writing. Even the difficult parts, however, were a delight to write, in a sense.
In the end, I chose a memory that is almost a cliché—or very universal—only the reader can judge that. The most emotional memory for me to write about was the disillusionment of young love which transpired via several incidents. I could have written about several aspects of my life during those years that left me with visceral, emotional memories. There is a two-page piece about my first kiss, which was so horribly embarrassing and humiliating at the time, but also after only a few years, funny. In my old age I see it as a stand-alone short story as hilarious as any contemporary teen rom com. It was fun to compose, but events with a different boy the next two summers can still make my heart ache more than sixty years after they occurred. I write about my awkward relationship—if it can even be called that with “The Boy”—in the context of coming of age in that little close-knit community that remains a special time and place to many, many people who spent significant parts of their lives there. I chronicle my history with “The Boy” throughout seventeen pages, from page 166 to page 183. So many events are braided tightly together, and many evoke excitement, nervousness, bewilderment over the powerful attraction he exerted over me, but the events that contributed to my disillusionment appear in pages 180 to 183.
The process of writing about it has also allowed me to finally develop a very mature sense of tenderness towards both that boy, with his Svengali ways, and poor teenaged me as the mesmerized, helpless Trilby. The raw and painful emotions that I felt when the particular interactions in which his unkind nature took place can still hit me in the pit of my stomach, tighten my chest, and bring tears to my eyes if I am in a fragile emotional state. I still think of him in the summertime when most of our “relationship” took place. In the interests of brevity, I will set the scenes and then quote short sections, but I describe this series of events in the passages between the last paragraph on the bottom of page 180 to the middle of the second of page 183.
(pp 80-81)
In the physical education class, a mixed volleyball game was in process, and both he (“The Boy”) and his girlfriend, whom my cousin had introduced me to in one their common classes, were playing. She was friendly and nice. He greeted me but minus the warmth of our summer greetings at the beach. I was not a good volleyball player and was a little worried about getting hit in the face with the ball and having my eyeglasses broken, which had happened during a gym class game at my own high school. BAM! Suddenly the ball he served hit me in the chest, knocking the wind out of me. I faked a quick, slick recovery, but the emotional pain, more than the physical sensation, was sharp, deep and cruel.
By my seventeenth summer, he came to the beach less frequently because he had a part-time job. His girlfriend was never at the beach, and I don’t remember her at parties. We danced together still but not as we had the previous summer. He was not at parties as frequently, and it seemed that the parties at Hirsch’s Hotel were also a less regular treat. I got other rides back to Pop’s after night-time events and stuck around the house more, reading my way through my English class’ summer reading list and extra books. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which fascinated me with its vivid descriptions of intrigue-ridden Renaissance Italy, was one I particularly remember from that time. The attitude of ambiguous belligerence the boy had developed toward me was not a constant, but it flared now and then and because there had never really developed a relationship with definable qualities between us, I could not ask him what was wrong. I got a glimmer of an idea at the beach one day that summer.
(pp 81-82)
From the center of the beach where the mass of kids congregated, I saw him talking to two girls who had spread their beach blanket off to the side. They were not known to anyone, but as I peered at them from my vantage point, I recognized them. They were friends from my high school in Philadelphia; we were classmates together in algebra class. So it was completely natural for me to walk over and say hi to them. The Boy, as I approached their blanket, asked what I was doing, why I was following him. His response angered me, and I told him not to flatter himself, that I had come over to greet my friends from school. I did not know that Joan and Bonnie had connections with Norma and was happy to see them, eager to introduce them, and to make plans for that night that would include them. … I still liked The Boy and felt the same powerful attraction, and given the chance, I probably would have been ready for more physical intimacy that summer, but suddenly there was a side of him that I did not like.
It was not that easy to shed my attachment to this powerful crush I had on him, and the feelings persisted for another year even though he gave me little enough upon which to pin my hopes. I sent him anonymous, sarcastic Valentine cards to vent my emotions. The last time I saw him in Norma was the summer of 1959 at the pavilion at the beach. I had graduated from high school in January of 1959 and had a job as a file clerk in a center-city insurance company until September when I matriculated at Temple University’s Teachers College. He graduated in June of 1959. … Nothing was the same. I was there with a cousin from Philadelphia to attend our Levin Cousins’ Club picnic. The Boy seemed pleased to see me. We talked for a while, danced there one last time, and then my cousin and I left.
I would never again spend time there in the same way that I had. Everything I knew and loved and identified as the framework of my life was coming to an end. My childhood summers in a twentieth-century, post-war, Jewish Acadia were over. A world of adult responsibilities awaited me. My summer romance had budded, bloomed, and withered but never bore fruit, leaving me no better prepared for the sexual revolution of the next decade than I had been for my teen years. Within a couple more years, my grandfather’s failing health and the need to sell his property to finance his last years cut me off forever from what I viewed as my personal, ancestral homeland. An amorphous, frightening world of multiple unknowns loomed ahead. I returned there in the 1960s for a couple of Levin Cousins Club picnics and my grandfather’s funeral in 1966. My father was buried in 1970, my mother in 1979. The unveiling of their headstones within the years of their respective deaths necessitated additional trips to the Alliance Cemetery where they are buried. In the 1990s returning from the New Jersey shore to their home in Maryland, my brother and sister-in-law and I made a side trip there to visit our family’s graves, drive past Pop’s place, and see the river. Until my pilgrimage in August of 2018, I did not return. By writing this memoir, I am actively engaging in laying most of my ghosts to rest.
Other works you have published? A couple of my poems have been published but thus far no other books.
I, however, sell the book through my email address stillinthegarden20@gmail.com through which you can order copies of the book and pay via PayPal or credit or debit cards. The book is $17 per copy. Shipping is $4 per book. You can decide whether to get free Amazon Prime shipping and make Jeff Bezos richer or to support an independent writer and receive a signed copy. If you choose to order through my email address, make sure you include your name and address and the name(s) of the person(s) to whom you want me to inscribe the book. Thank you for your consideration of purchasing directly from me.
As a textile artist she has worked since the mid-1970s in various media: hand weaving, quilting, clothing design, and painted floor cloths. She was a recipient of an Arkansas Arts Council Traditional Artisan Teaching Grant in the 1980s. As a writer and historian in the mid-1990s, Ruth received an Arkansas Humanities Council grant to research and write a first draft monograph on the theme of cultures in contact about the in-migration of the back-to-the land movement in several Ozark counties. Recent academic publications still quote from this work.
The most important aspect of Ruth’s life since the early 1970s, however, has been organic gardening. She sees this as a matrix for every other creative endeavor in her life. She and her husband have lived on forty acres of Ozark woodland since 1976. Although they now expend their energy strictly on gardening, in the past they also raised dairy goats and chickens and plowed their garden with a burro. Thanks to a community of younger friends and neighbors who value Ruth and her husband as caring, supportive elders, she is confident that they will be able to live out their days on the land where they have transplanted themselves and grown deep roots.
Contact link for you?
Although I am attempting to develop a website, that is on the rear burner. For now, you can reach me (Ruth Weinstein) at stillinthegarden20@gmail.com
THE MAGNIFICATION OF ONE MEMORY IN MEMOIR links
001
03 18 2020
“Two Minus One”
by Kathryn Taylor
002
03 19 2020
“HeartSnark”
by Terry Kroenung
003
06 14 2020
“Good Cop, Bad Daughter – Memoirs of an Unlikely Police Officer”
by Karen Lynch
004
07 26 2020
“Dirty Shirt: a boundary waters memoir”
by Jim Landwehr
005
08 12 2020
“Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption”
by Ralph Savarese
006
09 05 2020
“Back to the Land: Alliance Colony to the Ozarks in Four Generations”
by Ruth Weinstein
007
05 20 2021 "Twice A Daughter: A Search For Identity, Family, and Belonging
by Julie Ryan McGue
by Julie Ryan McGue
#008 The Magnification of One Memory In Memoir: Vivian Conan’s “Losing the Atmosphere, A Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood”
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