The Other Shore

Maristella Panizza Lorch

Description

The Other Shore is the closing volume of Maristella Lorch’s trilogy Beyond Gibraltar, the story of generations of strong women covering more than a century, including two World Wars, the Cold War, and the explosion of terrorism. Interweaving memory and history, the personal and the global, The Other Shore, that begins with the death of Lorch’s second husband and the flashback to their torrid love affair on the Columbia campus in the early 50’s, focuses on the space of the imagination and the drive to build a family, not only a genetic one but an intellectual and creative one that defies time and geography. 

PART I—A LOVE STORY

1. Our Ending,


2. Our Beginning,


3. Caught in a Net,


4. Lavinium Lavinio Lavinia,


5. The Blessings born of Courage.

PART II—SETTING OUR ROOTS ON AMERICAN SOIL

1. First Steps Forward,


2.  A House in the Wilderness, 


3. The Rite Of Christmas,


4.  Bridging Language and Culture.

PART III—SPREADING OUT INTO THE WORLD

1. The Early Stages,


2. Donatella’s Marriage: to Settle Down or to Wander?,


3. Memories in Flight,


4. Beautiful Africa.

PART IV—LETTERS TO THE FAMILY

1. Musings on the Winter Solstice,


2. Beautiful Barbuda—my Little Africa and its African Roots.

PART V—A CHRISTMAS TREE IN AFRICA 1994

1. Settling in In the Camp, 


2. The Meaning of Christmas.

 

 

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Relations familiales
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Estrella de Barnard
• Universidad de Columbia
• Loss
• Psychology
• Columbia University
• Shore
• Grief
• Family
• Barnard
• Université Columbia
• Death

Informations

• Publié par: CALEC
• Date de parution: 24 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781947626256
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Bilingual Revolution Series
A Program of The Center for the Advancement of Languages, Education, and Communities (CALEC)
Our Books in English
The Gift of Languages: Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Language Education by Fabrice Jaumont and Kathleen Stein-Smith
Two Centuries of French Education in New York: The Role of Schools in Cultural Diplomacy by Jane Flatau Ross
The Clarks of Willsborough Point: The Long Trek North by Darcey Hale
The Bilingual Revolution: The Future of Education is in Two Languages by Fabrice Jaumont
Our Books in Translation
Die bilinguale Revolution: Die Zukunft der Bildung liegt in zwei Sprachen by Fabrice Jaumont
La revolución bilingüe: El futuro de la educación está en dos idiomas by Fabrice Jaumont
ДВУЯЗЫЧНАЯ РЕВОЛЮЦИЯ: БУДУЩЕЕ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ НА ДВУХ ЯЗЫКАХ by Фабрис Жомон
La Révolution bilingue: Le futur de l'éducation s'écrit en deux langues by Fabrice Jaumont
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Other volumes of the trilogy
Mamma in her Village (2019, first published in 2005);
Beyond Gibraltar (2019, first published in 2013).
Other Publications
Critical edition of Lorenzo Valla’s d e Voluptate (1431-44);
On Pleasure ( translation of Lorenzo Valla's de Voluptate);
A Defense of Life: Lorenzo Valla's Theory of Pleasure;
Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature (with Ernesto Grassi);
Edition of Ziliolo Zilioli’s Michaelida (1431).

Copyright © 2019 by Maristella de Panizza Lorch and CALEC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
TBR Books is a program of the Center for the Advancement of Languages, Education, and Communities. We publish researchers and practitioners who seek to engage diverse communities on topics related to education, languages, cultural history, and social initiatives.
TBR Books
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Brooklyn, New York
www.tbr-books.org | [e-mail]
Front Cover Illustration © Greg Rosenke
Cover Design © Eunjoo Feaster
ISBN 978-1-947626-24-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-947626-25-6 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944291
CONTENTS
PRAISES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I—A LOVE STORY
O UR E NDING
O UR B EGINNING
C AUGHT IN A N ET
D ISINTEGRATION OF D REAMS
L AVINIUM L AVINIO L AVINIA
T HE B LESSINGS BORN OF C OURAGE
PART II—SETTING OUR ROOTS ON AMERICAN SOIL
F IRST S TEPS F ORWARD
A H OUSE IN THE W ILDERNESS
T HE R ITE O F C HRISTMAS
B RIDGING L ANGUAGE AND C ULTURE
PART III—SPREADING OUT INTO THE WORLD
T HE E ARLY S TAGES
D ONATELLA ’ S M ARRIAGE : TO S ETTLE D OWN OR TO W ANDER ?
M EMORIES IN F LIGHT
B EAUTIFUL A FRICA
PART IV—LETTERS TO THE FAMILY
M USINGS ON THE W INTER S OLSTICE
B EAUTIFUL B ARBUDA — MY L ITTLE A FRICA AND ITS A FRICAN R OOTS
PART V—A CHRISTMAS TREE IN AFRICA 1994
S ETTLING IN
I N THE C AMP
T HE M EANING OF C HRISTMAS
EPILOGUE
PRAISES
Maristella de Panizza Lorch’s The Other Shore is at one level a love story, chronicling the romance and marriage of two European intellectuals who fled the perils of the old world for an academic sanctuary across the Atlantic. But it is also a lyrical celebration of three distinct cultures—European, American, and African—and of the tight-knit family whose curiosity and peripatetic lives spanned all of them. In narrating her century-long journey, Lorch takes her readers from Nazi-occupied Rome to Columbia University, from a wooded retreat in the Catskill Mountains to a bush camp in the heart of Kenya’s Masai Mara. Describing her three daughters’ growth into ambitious, independent women, and the courageous struggle of her soul mate of nearly forty years against a fatal illness, she creates a magical tableau of life, literature, and the love that binds a family. What comes through most by the end of this beautiful story is her declaration in a letter to a granddaughter who stands on the cusp of adulthood: “To exist,” she proclaims, “means to realize the best of oneself without fear of limits.”
—Joshua Hammer, author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and the upcoming The Falcon Thief )
***
There have been a fair number of autobiographical narratives of the great intellectual migration by scientists, artists, humanists and others escaping the horrors of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s and ‘40s. But none are quite like this enormously interesting, gripping, and powerful trilogy, Beyond Gibraltar, by Maristella Lorch. Her journey from her native town near the border of Italy and Austria, to studies in Rome, to her capture by the Nazis, her escape beyond Gibraltar to New York and the United States, make for a riveting life story. This totally engaging woman is nothing short of a Shavian life force. Initially living in virtual poverty in New York, this accomplished woman found a job at Barnard College and Columbia University and spent the rest of her academic life challenging the orthodoxies of university culture.
Her sheer energy, her unflappable determination, and her powerful intellect made her a revered teacher, a notable Dante scholar, and an academic entrepreneur—who would befriend leaders of the Italian government, the leading directors of cinema and theater in the years after the War, as well as distinguished scholars in her field. The story is one of courage and intellectual and physical vitality. The stage is the world, but a world that returns always to Columbia and her passion for beauty.
What makes this final book in the trilogy so moving is that it is also a love story, a story of passion told in epistolary form, a tale of confronting and violating prevailing customs and norms about a “woman’s place,” a story of personal emancipation, and, perhaps more than anything else, a story of the love of and strength gained from family life. This is a book that should be read by all who are interested in how the intellectual migration helped shape modern America—one based on the pictures drawn by a remarkable woman nearing 100 years of age who experienced a wildly changing world.
—Jonathan R. Cole, John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University, Provost and Dean of Faculties (1989-2003), Columbia University
***
“Is there a way into the past to revive it not as memories but as a means to live more fully my present?” As we learn in the pages that follow, the event that prompts that initial question is the death of Ray Lorch, the brilliant mathematician with a passion for music who has been the author’s beloved husband for almost forty years. “I still want to live—Ray tells his wife—but I am forced to live at another level from before and I have no control of it.” When she desperately asks how she could help him, he responds, “You can only help me with your love….”
The Other Shore, the third volume that, after Mamma and Her Village and Beyond Gibraltar, completes Maristella de Panizza Lorch’s trilogy, is a book about a geographical but also emotional and psychological journey. Maristella and Ray’s eventual union led to the creation of a whole “new world” filled with projects, accomplishments (professional and personal), interests, books, adventures and friends. At the center of that microcosm, the love for their children raised between Riverside Drive in New York and the home nested in the Catskills where, as an ideal Ithaca, the family would always return. “Love”, writes the author, “exists in what it creates.” One of the most compelling gifts that one receives from this marvelous book is the idea that time is not just a meaningless succession of moments but a circular reality similar to the rings that mark the inner part of a growing tree: every line is enriched by its link and connection to the other. Ultimately, this highly poetic book is a celebration of the rooting power of memory and, with it, the belief that, more than any other force, Love is the true energy that, as Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy , “moves the sun and the other stars.”
—Ingrid Rossellini, Ph.D., author of Know Thyself: Western Identity from Classical Greece to the Renaissance
***
In the final book of her trilogy, Medieval and Renaissance scholar Maristella Lorch has written a love story dedicated to her late husband, Edgar Raymond Lorch, the Swiss-American mathematician who, like her, also taught at Columbia University. But more than that, The Other Shore is the memoir of a woman who emigrates from Europe to America after World War II and persists in finding her place at a great American university of the ‘50s—a pioneering role model for women as she raises three daughters during a life filled with work, travel, and world figures.
Maristella sheds light on the internecine workings of a great American university, describing how she and the love of her life “dangerously sailed through two divorces, risking…at least my career at Barnard/Columbia.” Throughout the book, Ray is the wise, enduring lone male surrounded by five interesting daughters—shades of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women . When one of their two own daughters, a journalist, takes off to Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Africa, Ray reassures a worried Maristella: “That girl is made for open spaces.”
Along the way, Maristella reflects on her near-century of living, meeting characters like the Afghan mujahed commander Abdul Haq, who has dinner at her Riverside, NY, home; Italy’s three-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, who supports her successful efforts to build Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America on Amsterdam Avenue; and Polish opposition leader Lech Walesa. She takes the reader to Eastern Europe, on the cusp of the end of the Cold War; to the Italy of her birth and childhood; and to the land of the Masai of East Africa.
Maristella likens the journeys of her children and grandchildren across the modern-day world to the wandering knights of Medieval times, and she follows them wherever she can, even while looki