Transcripts For CSPAN2 In The Darkroom 20161120

Community policing. How to we Bring Community sport engage them in a common effort, so thats important right now because one, unlike europe the good news is we do not have a sort of eight generational radicalization problem. We have cases and radicalized individuals, but we are not dealing with 3000, 4000, 5000 people going to the mask is to get trained and then returning to france or germany. Our geography helps us in that regard, so theres emphasis on working with arab and muslim communities because its the mom, the mother, the exwife, the father who know something terribly wrong with their son or daughter and must feel comfortable coming to either the fbi or Government Official to expose their concerns correct there is a second piece to it, which is that active access people had to weaponry that can killing a lot of people and thats why we have to get very serious about whether terrorism watch list and purchasing of guns or having more stringent gun laws, so those are two ways in which we can do it and thats why people like me are very very passionate and critical of some of the things that you are hearing coming out of this transition and some of the people who support the president elect about, you know, about islamic communities or muslim communities and arab communities. I will tell you as someone whos been in counterterrorism for very long time one of the things that makes our nation safer than most, we have our vulnerabilities, we dont have radicalized immigration immigrant population, you know, the mexicans in la, the cubans in florida, the irish in boston and the muslims in dearborn, all feel a common identity with United States that if we do things that will isolate those communities, not only is it the right wrong thing to do, but i think in the long term it will make us less safe. Host security mom an unclassified guide to proctecting our homeland and your home is the name of the book and Juliette Kayyem is the author. Book tv live coverage of the miami book festival continues and we go back to the book tv room and we will hear from susan faludi talking about her most recent book, in the darkroom. Lets get started. Welcome to everyone. Please turn off your cell phones if you have not already or if you have turned them back on to do business between sessions. Thank you for coming. Our sponsors as you know by now, we think the knight foundation. We thank zero hl construction, the bash the foundation and that degroot foundation and we get big thanks to Miamidade College for all that they do, all of these wonderful volunteers who help, all of the staff who juggle summary plates and we are thankful to all of them. Also, to the friends who sustain us through their donations and enjoy program struck the year. If you are not a friend, please consider joining. We would be happy to have you. If you were here earlier in the day you have already met claudette degroot. She and her husband charles are longtime supporters of the book fair. They chair that degroot foundation and this is a foundation i have just thanked for their help with the book fair. It focuses on innovation, education and culture with a interest in the visual and literary arts. They partnered with the Miami Book Fair to create the miami group Miami Book Fair. Please give a very grateful welcome to claudette degroot who will introduce our author in conversation. Thank you. [applause]. Good afternoon. Its my pleasure this afternoon to introduce susan faludi who will be in conversation with deidra donahue. Deidra is a contributing editor for aarp med magazine and previously a book reviewer and publishing reporter for usa today, so lets please welcome deidra. [applause]. Susan faludi is a prizewinning journalist who has written for the wall street journal, the new yorker, the New York Times and harper among others. Susan faludi came to the attention of many of us in the early 1990s with her book backlash, an undeclared war against american women. Argued for the existence of a media driven backlash against the feminist advances in the 1970s. Backlash received a National Book critics circle award for nonfiction. Her other books include scif to, the betrayal of the american man and terror dream, myth and misogyny in an insecure america. Susan faludis latest book, the one she will talk about today is her memoir. In in the darkroom shares the journey of her extraordinary confrontation with the big thing met of her father and subsequent inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. Please welcome susan faludi. [applause]. Susan, give us the background of this extraordinary book. I am a book reviewer and i read about five bucks a week and this is the best book i have read in 2016 and possibly beyond the. [applause]. You can go on. [laughter] can you all hear me . Is this working . Oh, your question, how did this begin. Well, it began, for me anyway, began earlier for my father began in 2004, when i was sitting at home. Actually, i was boxing up notes on my last book on masculinity when i checked my email and i had to this email that the subject line was changes. It was from my father and it is said dear susan, i have some interesting news for you. I have decided that i have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man, that i have never been inside. The interesting news, which was illustrated with a series of a attached selfies was that my father, without telling anyone, had a month earlier flown to thailand, to get sex reassignment surgery. Also, my father was at the time 76 years old. Also, this was the journalism goddess gave me quite a story. Also, my father and i had not really had much contact. We had barely spoken for more than a quartercentury and that was in large part because of my father said when i was growing up, my father was a macho aggressive man. Also, domineering, bullying and ultimately violence violent to my mother in the family, all of which fueled my early feminism. Thats the long backdrop to how i began to embark on this project. What i think is so extraordinary about your book is that its not just about your gender issues and gender identity. Its also about religious identity. Its about national identity. If you could take us back to hungry, and your fathers background as a hungarian. My father was kind of an identity relic. She was channeling the whole last centurys kind of marquis struggles over identity. I mean, it culminated with a gender identity, but also national, political, racial and religious. So, the story the early story of my father is that she was born, only child, only son of a wealthy parents, my grandparents in budapest. My father lived a very, you know, kind of coddled pampered existence with a series of nannies, tutors and governesses, not very loved by his parents who spend most of their time out, you know, making the social scene and going to the opera and really didnt have very much time for their child. So, that whole privileged life was swept away in world war ii, which was when my father was about 13, throughout my fathers teenage years. My father from like 13 to 17. My father wound up a kind of richmond on the streets of budapest, passing as a christian with false identity papers and a stolen armband. At one point my father would actually use that armband to pose as an hungarian nazi officer so that he could rescue my grandparents from a socalled protected house whose residents were about to be killed. There was a certain point in the fall of 1944, when the arrow cross, which had come into power by then, these socalled officers. They were really like teenage thugs that would drag jews out of the protected houses, houses protected by the swedish. This was the kind of wallenberg story. They would be dragged out stake in taken and shot. So, my father dressed up as an arrow cross dressed up, really on my father had was this armband and a rifle without bullets that he picked up somewhere and he marched in and said he was taking, you know, these dirty jews, mr. And mrs. Friedman out of this house to be dealt with immediately and they believed him because my father all of his life was a great trickster among other qualities. Could you talk a bit about the i mean, his career in brazil. You really did have a remarkable covering up and your career has been in uncovering. Yes, one of the dramas between my father in me was this contest over, you know, heres my father who is specialty that is not just photography, but altering images. After a rather extraordinary sort of granulation from hungary to denmark where my father had to set up an export import filmmaking distribution business , my father went on to brazil where he took photographs of the amazonian outback for the government, sort of more wpa style photographs. The kind i kind of love, but ultimately my fathers career after arriving in new york, was working literally in the darkroom altering images in the days before photoshop. He did a lot of that. His main clients was making perfect prints from making perfect copy so you could not tell the difference between the original and the copy and all kinds of photographic techniques that have wonderful metaphorical residents of masking and dodging so, thats how my father made a living. When my father and i got back together after this email and my father invited me to write her story and wanted me to investigate her on one level, but on another level was always trying to maneuver, to present the picture that she wanted the way she wanted to be seen. Of course, i the journalists that likes to dig up things and find out the real history was always, you know, sort of pushing into my fathers past whereas my father would say no, no, no, we dont need to talk about that. Im a completely different person now, so that was always the struggle between the sort of as i refer to my father the artful dodger in me the, you know, the reporter who wants to get to the bottom of it. But, how extraordinary and strange that your father, hungarian jew returned to hungry. Could you talk about that and your own trip to see him. What was that about . As you can tell there are a lot of mysteries with my father. Nothing but mysteries. One of them, maybe in a funny way the most difficult, i mean, much harder for me to understand than the gender transformation was why my father would go back to hungry and this was remarkable to many hungarian jewish ex paths that i talked to. They would say thats the big question, you know, like a back there . Some background, hungry protected quote unquote protected its jews for the first few years of the war or at least did not deport them and then in the spring of 1944 the germans occupied with very little resistance from the hungarian government or military, they did not have that much choice in the matter, but where they did have some choice was how much to participate in the deportation of the jews. That ff led by eichmann at the time showed up and there were only about 200 officials are not included the drivers and, you know, the cooks in the secretaries, so they really could not have deported Hungarys Jews without the avid complicity of the hungarian government, hungarian military and all of the Civil Service institutions. As it turned out the hungarians were very eager to get rid of the jews and within six weeks had pretty much cleansed the countryside of the jews, one in three jews who died in ashworths were hungarian. Same famous line about the biggest hungarian graveyard is the field and poland. You had that i guess, in the first eight days 30,000 hungarian jews were denounced compared to 350 in the first years in holland. If you could talk a little bit about how you were affected by your fathers decision to become a one and also to return to hungry and your visits to hungry and what you observed. Well, my father went back to hungary in 1990. It was a year after the fall of communism and thats why i mean, my father was still he then and he would go back and, you know, when i asked my father why he said well, this is my home, like it or not. My father was also obsessed with reclaiming the family property. My grandfather owned some very lovely apartment buildings and the family also had a summer villa in the buda hills, so my father when my father moved back he actually wanted to buy the buda Hills Property back. It wasnt for sale, so he bought another very large house just about a half block away overlooking the villa where my father spent his childhood. So, that was one aspect of it, so that was in 1990 and it was not until 2004, that my father had gender reassignment surgery. So, when i arrived in the fall of 2004, and began to explore all of this with my father, she was very adamant that we did not really need to get into all that history. Of course, that to me was rich and juicy and there was no way i was going to understand my father without understanding where my father came from. So, it was a long struggle to get to that point. It was really only in the last years of my fathers life that she became much more open to exploring her childhood, the Family History and most especially her experience being a jew during the holocaust. We began finally, i had to really struggle to get my father out of the house because my father liked to sit and show pictures on her computer all the time and i would say lets go look at the synagogue where you went as a child and my father would say i have a picture that i my computer we dont need to leave, but in the last couple of years before my fathers death and maybe because of her awareness of heightened awareness of mortality, that she became not only willing, but actually suggested that we start exploring places of her past and we wound up going to that synagogue. Is not just about religious identity or Even National identity. A lot of the book seems to be about the identity of family and i positive know it seems as if you have connected with relatives you had never met. If you could talk a bit about that. You know, another mystery about my father is that my father was very well very adamant about family being important and a big reason why my father and i barely spoke with my father was very angry that i had taken my mothers side in their divorce. My father was very violent, so naturally it to my mothers side. But, in spite of all this talk about family my father had cut herself off from her side of the family, from her grandparents im sorry, her parents, my grandparents who i had never met who were living in israel who when i was a child they would write to my father in hungarian from israel. My father would just toss the letters aside. My mother ended up writing back in english and then those letters just stopped coming. The rest of the family, that extended family who, you know, part of this after the war some of them lived in switzerland and some lived in australia, some lived in israel, seven new york. My father had no contact with any of them. I mean, when they tried to establish a connection, my father wouldnt seek to them. So, when i began to work on this project with my father and i did not even know if it was going to be a book at this point or just a way to get my note get to know my father. I began to go see these relatives and of the sort of unexpected glorious gift was that they were so welcoming and so warm and had jumped into the project with me and gave me letters, photographs and, of course, most importantly their own stories and memories. Beyond all of that, just said no they said often to me, now you have a family. You are part of our family and i actually just this morning got an email from my second cousin in tel aviv. We have been writing since november 8. Writing about the election, so there is this whole side of, this old kinship that i have been able to reclaim through writing this book. Because one of the things about the book is how your father was sort of aggressively christian and his celebration of the biggest christmas tree, the largest little drummer boy display, the emphasis that he had on assuming what was sort of a almost a violent new identity and then discarding them. Was that strange to you that if you want to talk about, you know, the fact that you were not raised really with any knowledge of you being jewish. I knew i was jewish. We lived in a very catholic neighborhood where somehow there were these kind of bully boys in the neighborhood and they seemed to figure it out within a week. So, all of the Christmas Lights on our house is not really convince anyone of anything. I mean, i think violence is the right word. There was a kind of i mean there were these masks that my father put on and they did violence to my father, ultimately, because it was a denial of who my father really was. When i started visiting my father again and i would bring up, you know, i thought it was a little information, that it was suddenly an authority on the experience of hungarian jews and would trot out these statistics and all of which my father already knew about what happened during world war ii and my father would just kind of wave it aside and did not want to get into it. Said it doesnt matter. Yet, at the same time there was this after the end of communism, which kind of put a lid on all sort of religious expression and when that lady came off all of the antisemitism, which was had never really went away and reestablished itself a quickly. And then, in the years that i was 15, and there was the very rightwing movement that culminated in 2010, with the election of rightwing government and there was just a fluorescence of antisemitism and my father was on the receiving end of some of that. Still, my father just wanted to say no, i belong here and everything is fine. Then, in the last, really the last two to three years my fathers life, this other all of the rage about loss and the trauma of those years came back and it kind of culminated in this day that we went to the Hungarian National museum, which is this massive celebration to kind of fantastical kind of gingerbread identity. So, we were going through century after century of how great hungry is an wrong raw hungry and then finally we went down to the basement to use the restroom and then in the seller there was this very little exhibits and it said survivors. I should say this was also the anniversary of what would it have been, 60th anniversary of the holocaust and the hungarian government had said oh, yes, we will recognize the holocaust, which they rarely should they do only very lightly, but one of the ways they said they would recognize the holocaust is that they would have a few exhibits. So, this was one of the exhibits stuck in the seller. We walk in and its a Photo Exhibit of a photographer from israel and there are photographs of hungarian jews who survived and went to israel, so this isnt even a product of hungry and my father started translating for me the signage and a museum guard came over and said basically youre talking too loud and you can buy that information in the gift shop, you know, pipe down, basically. My father just lost it and it was as if she were addressing, you know the country. I see we have one question. Lets take that one question and have a little reading. You have been another 10 minute spearhead go ahead with your question. Okay, i am eager to read your boat. Having not read a comment im curious at that age what it was like for you, for your father to identify gender wise as a female for the gender reassignment. What was it like for me . The funny thing is not really funny, actually makes complete sense i suppose or makes sense to me that started accepting my father as a woman was the easiest part of the journey. Much harder dealing with all of the ways my father had not changed and all of the ghosts that were hunting our past. That said, my father went from being this sort of hyper masculine rock climber, horseback rider, marathon bicycle rider, you name it. My father tried it on when i was a child tuesday is at least at the beginning this hyper feminine persona did when i first came over, my very eager to give me the kind of guided tour of her maryland monroe woodrow. Theres all these frills and feathered relatives and stilettos and waves and all this stuff. My father gave me quite the lecture on how its wonderful being a woman. He is a feminist, all you talk about are the disadvantages. Men take care of you. Men kiss your hand. Everything is lovely. Needless to say it was not my experience. Frankly it was not my fathers six periods. My father was very handy, very capable of building things, very skilled at elect john x. There were no men in my fathers life after the surgery or before we take care of my father. So that was a period that lasted for a while. Ultimately, my father kind of like go of that character 1950s persona. In some ways, i think my father had to go to that extreme to kind of smashed the other terror faith of macho man. To be able to free herself from the southern cage. The feathered gender malt she had put around herself and only then could she kind of become who she was, which is someone whos only partly defined by gender as we all are. I think one of the great dangers of identity is the idea that it is just one thing, that identities are kind of a standalone entity you can purchase out the shelf. In our consumer area we can redefine identity that way. My father is a much more complicated and so much more interesting than not. Should we take a couple more as they are lining up . It took a little encouragement. A midway through the book. I havent finished it. Sometimes i wonder if theres a gender at least and if that is experiencing not, we wouldnt have to mutilate and alter the body and i would love to hear and theyre interested in what you speak about. I love the line about the pocket book about how you know it wasnt a woman because the woman wouldnt put a pocket book on the hook. And yet, what do women do . You know, i adore being a woman, but i dont fit into most of the forms. Youve done so much work on misogyny and identity and gender. I would love to hear your inner process of what is this thing called gender . Great question. A pocket book story. For those of you havent read the book, when i first came, when i first arrived in the past my father was awaiting and she was stressed concert is a fairly sedate way red dress and pearl earrings. My father leftparen what hearings. And she had this white pocket book wished she had hung on the luggage cart. You know, my first lesson was not something about my father, but something about myself. I think of myself as the Little Feminist and my first reaction was no woman would hang her pocket book fair. And then i had to say, excuse me, when did you become such an essential list . You know, my father and my enough anyway we sort of met in the middle because as my father got bolder and more comfortable with who she was, and you know, not using high heels anyway, so after a while we were kind of wearing the same things my father was able to let down the whole question of gender and not be so obsessed with presenting one way or the other. In the beginning when i came over, my father and i would say what does this mean . What does it mean for you to be a woman . My father would say well, and much more accepted now. I didnt fit the role as a man. And now is a woman, people accept me, which distressed me because shouldnt all be about what other people how other people see you. What i think underlying data from my father was the desire to somehow break through an extreme, almost pathological terror of exposing herself, ive been in connection with anyone. For my father ultimately and this is of course my theory and there is no final. There is no one smoking gun with my father and i could turn it around endlessly. It is a huge factor for my father wanted to feel close to people, wanting to show herself. She was so much in hiding all the time. This is what i call the book, amman other reasons come in the darkroom and it had enough of it. My father really wanted to throw open the door and wanted to be seen for who she really was. That was part of her inviting me back in to tell her story. But it is also ultimately what she wanted out of becoming a woman. You raise an important question, did she have to have surgery in order to do that . You know, maybe not. I dont know. I do know that my father never regretted the surgery and this change did bring her measure of peace. I think we have time for maybe two more questions. [inaudible] i have a couple of questions. [inaudible] i just dont know the origin of that. Secondly, i was reading a near times book review on your book and i was curious why youre such a fan [inaudible] why what . [inaudible] a photographer for the regime. That its just so strange because he was was he altering images all the time or where did that come from . Well coming up, my father is a big fan of german culture. Almost all of it has to do with my father identifying with it. When hungary was hardly austrohungarian. My father had a good reason for that identification. I think a lot of people in my extended hungarian jewish family for those days. The second half of the 19th century sorted from 1867 when the were emancipated in what was then the austrohungarian empire until the end of world war i ways. Having credible freedom and except in for, particularly not all jews because a country desperately needed to modernize, urbanized, industrialized and unlike germany there wasnt, you know, a burger class in the hungarian jews stepped into that breach and were extraordinarily overrepresented in every field from industry to banking, to locke, madison and in particular the iris, and jeter, literature, and music, painting. My father had a great romance about that. And somehow connected german culture to that as well. When it was more of the language in hungarian. Was pasted on and became an official language very late in the game. So that was part of it. It was my fathers mother tongue. From the german nanny, which was common among wealthy in budapest at the time. About flutie. The hungarian name, in 1946, my grandfather said lets get rid of this german name and my father picked it because first of all my father was sent to film fan in so many films