Man who wants to show the world what he could do and thats what pearl harbor was about. For the last three hours weve been talking about the 75th anniversary of the attack on pearl harbor, here the authors we have been talking to, steve to me, and Craig Nelson Pearl harbor is the name of the book. Thank you all for being with us on book tv. For more about the attack on pearl harbor watch our companion network, cspan three. All weekend, every weekend, cspan three features American History for this weekend to mark the 75th anniversary of the pearl harbor attack you can watch several programs about the historic day. Starting on cspan three, watch a live viewer within toll, author of pacific crucible, were at sea in the pacific, 1941 to make 1942. We take a look at the pacific war from the japanese attack on pearl harbor on december 7, 1941 to the u. S. Victory over pearl harbor on december 7, 1941 to the u. S. Victory over the Japanese Imperial navy at the battle of midway in june 1942. Thats on American History tv right now and cspan three. Note on [inaudible]. 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. Thank you all for coming with our sponsors as you know by now if you have been here today, we think the knight foundation, areata construction, the Bachelor Foundation and the group foundation, give big thanks to Miami Dade College for all they do, all the wonderful volunteers who help all the staff, who juggle so any places and we are thankful to all of them and to the friends who sustain us and enjoy programs the year but if you are not a friend please consider joining me. We will be happy to have you as part of the group. If you were here earlier in the day you have met clydette de groot. She and her husband, charles, are longtime supporters of the book fair. They chair the clydette de Groot Foundation and this is the foundation i have just thanked for their help at the book fair which focuses on innovation and culture with a particular interest in the visual and literary arts. They partnered with the Miami Book Fair to create a prize. The Miami Book Fair clydette de groot price to be awarded to an author with an unpublished novella. Please give a grateful, welcome to clydette de groot who will introduce our authors in conversation. Good afternoon. My pleasure to introduce susan faludi who will be in conversation with deidre donahue. Deidre donahue is the contributing editor of reporters for usa today. Please welcome deidre donahue. [applause] susan faludi is a prizewinning journalist who has written for the wall street journal, the new yorker, the New York Times and harbors among others. Susan faludi came to the attention of many of us in the 1990s with her book back last, an undeclared war against american women which argues for the existence of a media driven backlash against feminist advances of the 1970s. Back lash receives an award for nonfiction. Her other books include stiff, the betrayal of the american man, and terror dream, with and misogyny in an insecure america. Susan faludis latest book that she will talk about today is her memoir. In in the darkroom, she shares the journey of her extraordinary confrontation with the enigma 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] all righty. Susan, give us the background of this extraordinary book. Im a book reviewer and i read 5 books a week, this is the best book i have read in 2016 and possibly beyond. [applause] you can go on. Didnt mean to interrupt you. Can you hear me . Your question, how did it go today . Began for me much earlier for my father, in 2004. I was sitting at home, boxing up notes on my last book on masculinity when i checked my email and had this email, the subject line was changes. From my father. It said dear susan, i have some interesting news for you. I have decided that i have had enough impersonating a macho aggressive man and have never been inside. The interesting news which was illustrated with a series of attached selfys was my father without telling anyone had a month earlier flown to thailand for surgery. And also, my father was, at the time, 76 years old. Also, this was the journalism goddess gave me quite the story. And also my father and i had not much contact. We have barely spoken in more than a quartercentury. And that was in large part because my father said when i was growing up that my father was a nacho aggressive man. Also autocratic and domineering, bullying and ultimately violent to my mother and to the family. All of which fueled my early feminism. That is the long backdrop to how i began to embark on this project. What i think is so extraordinary about your book is it is not just about gender issues and gender identity. It is also about religious identity, national identity. If you could take us back to hungary and your fathers background as a hungarian. My father was identity zealot, she was channeling the whole last centurys marquee struggles over identity. It culminated with gender identity, but national, political, racial and religious so the story, the early story of my father is she was born kaman friedman, only child, only son of a wealthy family, wealthy parents, my grandparents in budapest and my father lived a very coddled, pampered existence with a series of nannies, tutors and governances, not very loved by his parents who spend most of their time making a social scene and going to the opera, didnt have much time for their child. That whole privileged life was swept away in world war ii. My father was about 13 throughout my fathers teenage years. My father, 13 to 17, my father wound up a kind of urchin on the streets. As a christian with false identity papers and stolen at one point my father used that armbands to pose as a hungarian officer so that he could rescue my grandparents from a socalled protected house to whose residents were about to be killed. There was a certain point in fall of 1944 when the arrow cross which had come into power by then, socalled officers who were really like teenage sons that dragged jews out of protected houses by the swedish, the wallenberg story, would be dragged out and taken to the danube and shot. My father dressed up as arrow cross, really all my father had with this armband, rifle without bullets that he picked up somewhere and marched in and said he was taking these dirty jews, mister and mrs. Friedman out of his house to be dealt with immediately. They believed him. My father all his life was a great trickster among other qualities. Host talk about his career in brazil. He had a remarkable covering up, your career has been in uncovering. Guest yes. One of the dramas between my father and me with a contest. My fathers specialty is not just photography but altering images. After a rather extraordinary sort of perennial elation from hungary to denmark where my father had set up and export import filmmaking distribution business my father went on to brazil where he took photographs of amazonian outback for the government, wpa style photographs kind of love but ultimately my fathers career after arriving in new york was working literally in the dark room altering images in the days before photoshop. His main client was condoleezza nass, making perfect copies so you couldnt tell the difference between the original and a copy and all kinds of photographic techniques that have wonderful metaphorical masking and dodging. That is 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. The journalists who like to dig up things and find out the real history, pushing into my fathers past whereas my father would say no, we dont need to talk about that. Im a different person now. That was always the struggle between as i referred to my father, the artful dodger and me, the reporter who wants to get to the bottom of it. Host how extraordinary and strange that your father, a hungarian jew, returned to hungary and can you talk about that and your own trip to see him, what was that about the change there are a lot of mysteries, nothing but mysteries which one of them may be in a funny way the most difficult. Much harder for me to understand than the gender transformation was my my father would go back to hungary. This was a remarkable to many hungarian jewish expats i talked to. That is the big question. Why go back . Some background, hungary, quote, protected its jews. For the first few years of the war, or at least didnt deport them and the spring of 1944 the germans occupied, with very little resistance from the hungarian government or military, they didnt have that much choice in the matter, but where they did have choice was how much to participate in the deportation of the jews, because the ss showed up. The 200 s officials and that did the drivers and the cooks and the secretaries so they could not have deported Hungarys Jews without the avid complicity of the hungarian government, hungarian military and all the Civil Service institutions. As it turns out hungarians were very eager to get rid of the jews and within six weeks had pretty much cleansed the countryside of jews. One in three jews who died in auschwitz where hungarian. The same line about the hungarian graveyard, the field in poland. Host in the first eight days, 30,000 hungarian jews were denounced as 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 woman and return to hungary and your visit to hungary and what you observed. My father went back to hungary in 1990 a year after the fall of communism and that is my father was still a he then, would go back and either when i asked my father why, he said 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 somerville or in the buddha hills so my father moved back, my father wanted to buy the buddha Hills Property back. It wasnt for sale. So he bought another very large house just about half a block away overlooking the villa where my father spent his childhood. That was one aspect. That was 1990 and it wasnt until 2004 thatmy father had gender reassignment surgery so when i arrived in the fall of 2004 and began to explore all this with my father, she was very adamant that we didnt need to get into all that history. That to me was rich and juicy and no way i was going to understand my father without understanding where my father came from. It was a long struggle to get to that point and it was only in the last years of my fathers life that she became much more open to exploring her childhood, the Family History and especially her experience of being a jew during the holocaust. And we began finally, had to really struggle to get my father out of the house because my father love to sit and show pictures on her computer all the time and i say look at the synagogue where you went as a child and my father would say i have a picture of that on the computer, we dont need to leave. In the past couple 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. Host it is not just about religious identity or national identity. A lot of your book seems to be about the identity of family. On a positive note it seems you have connected with relatives you had never met. If you could talk a little bit about that. Another mystery about my father is my father was very adamant about family being important. A big reason why my father and i barely spoke, my father was very angry i had taken my mothers side in their divorce. My father was very violent, naturally i took my mothers side. In spite of all this talk about family, my father had cut herself off from her side of the family, from her grandparents, 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 and in hungarian from israel, my father would toss the letters aside. My mother endeded up writing back in english. Than those letters just stopped coming. The rest of the family, the extended family, part of this farflung diaspora after the war, lived in switzerland and basil and some lived in australia and some lived in israel, some in new york, my father had no contact with any of them. When they tried to establish the connection, my father wouldnt speak to them. So when i began to work on this project with my father i didnt even know if it would be a book at this point but just be a way to get to know my father i began to go see these relatives and it of unexpected glorious gift was they were so welcoming and so warm and jumped into the project with me and gave me letters and photographs and most importantly their own stories and memories. But beyond all that, just said now they said to me, you have a family. You are part of our family and this morning i got an email from my second cousin in tel aviv expressing yet again, writing since november 8th about the election. This whole side, this kinship i have been able to reclaim. Host your father was aggressively christian in celebration of the biggest christmas tree, the largest little drummer boy display, the emphasis he had on assuming almost violent new identities and discarding them. If you want to talk about the time you werent raised with any knowledge of your being jewish. Guest i knew i was jewish. We lived in a very catholic neighborhood where somehow, bully boys in the neighborhood, they seem to figure it out within a week. All the Christmas Lights on our house didnt convince anybody of anything but violence is the right word. There was there were these masks my father put on and they did violence to my father ultimately, denial of who my father really was and when i started visiting my father again and i would bring up i thought a little information, i was suddenly an authority on the experience of hungarian jews and tried out statistics all of which my father already knew about what happened during world war ii and my father would wave it aside and didnt want to get into it. It doesnt matter. At the same time, once, after the end of communism, which kind of put a lid on religious expression, when that did came off all the antisemitism which never really went away and reestablished itself very quickly and in the years i was visiting there was the ascendancy of very right Wing Movement that culminated in 2010 with election of rightwing government and a florescence of antisemitism and my father was on the receiving end of that. Still, my father just wanted to say no. I belong here, everything is fine. In the last two to three years of my fathers life, all the rage about the loss and trauma of those years came back and culminated in this day we went to the Hungarian National museum, which is this massive celebration to fantastical gingerbread. We were slogging through century after century of how great hungary is and finally we went to the basement to use the restroom and in the seller there was very little it said survivors, this was on the anniversary, the 16thth anniversary of the holocaust. And we will recognize the holocaust, should they do very likely, one of the ways to recognize the holocaust was have a few exhibits, this is one of the exhibits stuck in the seller. We walk in and a Photo Exhibit of a photographer from israel, there are photographs of hungarian jews who survived, this isnt even a product of hungary, my father started translating for me the signage. The museum guard said you are talking too loud. You can buy that information in the gift shop. My father just lost it, addressing the hungarian if you did this, you look upon this, these were your neighbors, your countrymen. You destroyed them, look upon this. I didnt know where this came from, so deep inside my father, and he walked out, and well, well, it is understandable, and argued back and forth, we did a lot of arguing and my father said if they had a little book, thank you for putting jews in the seller. Which is gallows humor. I just want to say one thing and i have to say you reference to Richard Everett on project, very tormented relationship, i really felt you showed her father and an amazingly honest way, incredibly sympathetic, cant recommend the book highly enough. Sound like a monster until you read the book. Thank you. [applause] lets show what you would like to know now. Who has questions . We let them go some more. Why dont you read . Lets do a little reading. We have one question. Lets take the one question and have a little reading and you have another 10 minutes. Go ahead with your question. Eager to read your book and having not read it i am curious, at that age, what was it like for you, your father, to identify and go through gender reassignment . What was it like for me . The funny thing for me, not really funny but makes complete sense, or makes sense to me anyway, accepting my father as a woman was the easiest part of the journey. Much harder was dealing with all of the ways my father had not changed. All the ghosts hunting our past. That said, my father went from being the hypermasculine rock climber, horseback rider, marathon bike rider, my father tried it on when i was a child to this at least at the beginning hyperfeminine, when i first came over my father was eager to give you the guided tour of her Marilyn Monroe wardrobe, frills and feathered blowups and stilettos and wigs and all this stuff and my father gave me quite a lecture, so wonderful being a woman, you as a feminist talk about the disadvantages, i find only advantages, men take care of you, men kiss your hand, they open the door for you, everything is lovely, that was not my experience and frankly not my fathers experience. My father was very handy, very capable of building things, skill that electronics and did not, there were no men in my fathers life after the surgery or before who took care of my father. So that was a period that lasted a while. Ultimately my father let go of that caricature 1960s persona. My father had to go to that extreme to smash the other carapace of macho man to be able to free herself from this other cage, other trap of gender mold she put around herself and become who she was which was someone who was only partly defined by gender as we all are, pictures of identity, the idea that it is one thing, identity stands alone, you can purchase offtheshelf. In our consumer era we redefine identity and there was so much more competition than that. Only take a couple more . It took a little encouragement. Im midway through the book and loving it. So sometimes i wonder if theres a third gender at least so that if so, which i do experience we wouldnt have to mutilate and alter the body and i would love to hear, i am interested in what you speak about. I love the line about how you do it wasnt a woman because a woman would put a book on a hook. What would a woman to . I adore being a woman but i dont fit into most of the forms. You got so much work on misogyny and identity and gender. I would love to hear your inner process of what is this thing called gender . The pocketbook story, if you havent read the book, when i first arrived my father was waiting and to rest in a fairly sedate way, the red dress, pearl earrings, and a pocketbook which hung on the luggage cart is my first lesson was not something about my father but something about myself. I think of myself as little miss feminist and my reaction you are a woman. Excuse me . When did you become such an essentialist . My father and i in a funny way we sort of met in the middle because as my father got older, as i was saying earlier more comfortable with who she was, and 80 something is not going to be wearing high heels anyway, wearing the same thing, sneakers and a good jacket. My father was able to let down the question of gender and not present one way or another. In the beginning when i came to visit my father and said what does this mean, what does it mean for you to be a woman . My father would say i am more accepting now. I didnt fit the role and now as a woman people accept me which distressed me. Should it all be how other people see you . What i think underlying that for my father was the desire to somehow breakthrough extreme almost pathological terror of exposing herself, being in connection with anyone. For my father, ultimately this is just their is no there is no one smoking gun to turn it around endlessly but a huge factor for my father was wanting to feel close to people, wanting to show herself. She was so much in hiding all the time. One of the reasons in the darkroom, had enough of it. Did somebody, wanted to open the door, wanted to be seen for who she really was. And out of becoming a woman, you raised an important question, had to have surgery, maybe not. My father never regretted the surgery. And we did bring a measure of peace. We did have time for two more questions. This winter i have a couple questions i heard you mention and a strange name to change it to. Secondly i was reading the New York Times book review on your book, i was curious why was he such was he a photographer . We are having trouble understanding with the mike be change the photographer. Many reasons. Yes. My father because strange, was it because i agree with you. Altering images all the time, where did that come from . My father was a big set of german culture. Almost all of it had to do with my father identifying with the period when hungry was part of the austrohungarian empire. There was a good reason for that identification. A lot of people in my extended hungarian jewish family yearned for those days. The second half of the 19th century from 1867 when the jews were emancipated in what was then the austrohungarian empire until the end of world war i was a period of incredible freedom and acceptance for jews, particularly bourgeois jews. Because the country desperately needed to modernize, industrialize, and unlike germany there wasnt a burger class and the hungarian jews stepped into that and were extraordinarily overrepresented in every field from industry to banking to law, medicine and in particular the arts, theater, literature, music, painting. My father had a great romance about that period and connected german culture to that. There was a period when german more of a language than hungarian. It was pasted on, became an official language late in the game so that was part of it. German was also my fathers mother tongue, first language my father learned from a german nanny which was common among wealthy jews in budapest. You had a question about susan faludi. And gary and name, after the war in 1946 my father said lets get rid of this german name. My father picked susan faludi. My father was a big film fan and so many films, hungarian films were processed at covearch and phil ludy you would not want a boring name. It is a really good hungarian name. It means of the village, to be a hungarian is to be of the earth person. This was part of my fathers ongoing, another one of the mysteries, my father remained a passionate hungarian patriot, voted to the right to government which may be another inkling of why my father could tolerate a love of where it works and block out the political implications of that. We better close things, thank you so much, both of you. How wonderful. [applause] you can pick up the books in the book station over here, susan faludis book and she wl