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07/06/2016 09:30 AMJess Maghan and Sam Lindberg, the authors of Forty Sons and Daughters: Finding Father Within, will talk about their book at Essex Meadows on Friday, July 22. It shares the stories of 40 people who wrote both about their own fathers’ lives and what they have taken from those lives as they played out their own stories. It originally came out in 2009 when it was called Forty Fathers, but the name has been changed in the reissue to Forty Sons and Daughters. The current volume came at the urging of Ruth Crocker of Elm Grove Press who was so taken with the book that she pushed for its republication. “She [Crocker] called it an inspired book; she said it kept haunting her and she wanted to do it, “ Maghan said.
The book was, in fact, inspired by Maghan’s relationship with his own father, a Washington. D.C. policeman. “I never really knew my own father. He was a decent man, but it was like their was plastic wrapped around him,” Maghan said. He himself is a retired police officer, a professor of criminal justice, and was at one time Director of Training for the New York City Police Department. “Ever since I was in grade school I have asked people about their fathers,” he recalled.
That, in fact, is how the book started. Maghan asked people to write reminisces of their fathers. (This reporter was one of them.) “I asked all kinds of people; sometimes people I knew, sometimes other I had just met, sometimes people I just ran across, “ Maghan said. Some wrote as much as 30 pages, even knowing that Maghan would edit their essay down to two 350-word segments. And some didn’t want to write at all. Maghan remembered the refusal of one person who referred to his father as a “S.O.B” and said he had never even visited his grave. Still, several months later, that man called Maghan to ask if he still wanted him to write his reminisces. And in the end, he did, but it was not one of the essays that Maghan chose to include in the book.
The stories that do appear are fascinating. Ruth Hill lived in a home with two men, unsure of which one was actually her father. The late Eliane Koeves, who died in February of this year at the age of 102 never knew her father. She was born in 1913. He was killed in the first big battle of World War I in l914. But his influence was always there. “Pap grounded my being,” she wrote.
As he looks back on his father who had to leave school in the 7th grade to help support his family, Jerry Kelly, who graduated from college and had a successful career as a banker and part-time teacher at Middlesex Community College, thanks his father for his emphasis on education. Reflecting on his own fatherhood, Kelly, who encouraged his children’s intellectual exploration, worries that he did not spend enough time “creating moments in the quiet of our home to discuss religious thoughts and beliefs.”
Cookie Siegelstein remembers religion differently. Her Hungarian immigrant father was concentration camp survivor who immigrated to this country at the end of World War II. She described how she felt she and her siblings were brought into the world as an affirmation of life after the destruction of the generation before them. Her father remained a bitter man who never made peace with the disastrous memories that haunted him. He committed suicide in 2000. But his legacy lives in the music Siegelstein, a professional violinist, has devoted her own career to: Klezmer, the music of the Jews of Eastern Europe. And her Klezmer group is called Veretski Pass, after the mountain pass in the Carpathian Mountains where her parents grew up.
Maghan noted for many of those who contributed to the book, writing essays about father helped close the circle on relationships, whether harmonious or fraught with pain. “It was a release; it doesn’t change things but it can calm memories,” he said.
Photographer Sam Lindberg had the opportunity to read each essay before he taking pictures of the subjects. That insight helped him to capture character with the camera. “I had a real advantage reading those pieces.” And he captured it in a way that, though only a decade ago, belongs to another world of photography. Sam used what he describes as a very old Olympus camera. “So old you can’t even get replacement parts for it,” he added. And he used film, high-speed black and white film that produces sharp contrast that adds drama to his photographs. What is even more interesting than the film he used is the fact that Lindberg is not a professional photographer. He spent much of his career, however, in the printing business. “I was a fine arts printer and it was great to step on the other side of the lens,” he said.
For both Maghan 81, and Lindberg, 84, having their book come out again is a particularly proud moment. “At 84, it’s great. It expands us mentally as well as spiritually,” Lindberg said.
Forty Sons and Daughters Finding Father Within
Elm Grove Press
Jess Maghan and Sam Lindberg
Talking About Forty Sons and Daughters
Essex Meadows, 30 Bokum Road, Essex,
Friday, July 22 at 1:15 pm
Free and Open to the public
For reservations, call Susan Carpenter: 860-767-7210, x-5156