Studio Ruthe

Ink, paper and friendship

I just got off the phone with raja who complained about the persimmons being left so long on the blog--I'm supposed to keep writing. Raja and I have been friends for thirty or forty years. We no longer see each other very often but we talk and read each other's blogs. Good way to keep in touch.

It's kind of a slow week. I've been exercising, riding buses, another form of exercise, because my car is in the shop for three days. I usually ride the bus, but it feels different when I have no choice. I've spent most of the last week working on making the Japan blog into a book. It's slow work; I'm adding more pictures and retrieving some of the information from the links. I have already created 42 pages and I'm only up to October 25. Like I said: it's slow work.

I'm still wrestling with the pictures. I love the printed page, but there are too many pictures to consider printing them all out. I have a few videos; one of these days I might even get them posted on the blog. I suppose what I really want is something like that new device Amazon came out with, but not quite that one. Something where I can put slides and videos into the printed page so I can touch the paper.

Amazing experience

Last night we went to a book signing. What's the big deal, you say. First, it is a very special book, written by Karen Williams and Khadra Mohammed. Read more about it here. Karen and Khadra are both very special women. Khadra runs the Pittsburgh Refugee Center. Karen is a writer who does no end of incredible things; read about her here. This is Karen reading to the children who came
to the event.

The older children were reading to
themselves.

But the astonishing thing about the event was the place where it was held.

About six blocks from where I live is a huge old warehouse. It looks almost deserted. Casablance Gallery has a mural painted on the truck entrance door to the building, and someone who repairs musical instruments, or teaches music, has something painted on another door. Neither place ever seems to be open, and the neighborhood appears to be iffy, at best. We walked down the street uncertain about whether we were in the right place. Steve spotted some balloons in front of an open door. Stepping inside was like walking into another world--a magical world.

Everything was clean and shiny, beautiful color on the walls, wonderful decorations to look at as you walked up the stairs. The huge loft space was organized by conversation groupings--sofas, chairs and decorative items inviting you to sit and be comfortable, but also be excited and examine all of the interesting objects decorating the group. None of these pictures does justice to what I saw. I wanted to live there, at least in a small part of the space. When it was time to leave I felt like we were breaking the spell; going back to the real world.

Book binding

I'm going to the Tai Chi class this morning then leaving for Kentucky. I've spent the last few days getting ready to bind a paper copy of my Charna Rieger book. I decided to print an image on fabric. Although you can buy pieces of various fabrics that have a stiff backing so you can put them through an ink-jet printer, I decided to make my own. I ironed freezer paper on the back of a piece of some kind of synthetic stuff (I have boxes of fabric from when I did a lot of sewing), but it didn't work. I tried again with some muslin, or it might have been an old sheet I had dyed beige, and I'm very happy with the result. I will glue or sew the picture on to another piece of fabric that will go over the cover board. When I finish I'll post a photo. For now, this is the design, printed on a light beige background.

Charna Rieger's Book is finished

I would like to add one more picture to the book, Charna with her first great-grandchild, Leon Schachter, but I can't find it. I'll keep looking for awhile, before I print and bind the book. Use Adobe Reader to look at the book. Keep in mind, it's a large file.
Download Charnabook.pdf

More about Grandma

I began working on my grandmother's book back in the late 80's. In 1989 I collected copies of correspondence about her nursery from several Chicago archives. Shortly after getting all of this stuff my neatly structured life crashed, I put the materials away and only returned to it now. I've been scanning all of these documents and reading them as I go along. My grandmother certainly generated a lot of controversy. (She did this within the family, also.) Family mythology simplified all of the reasons for the controversy, so it's interesting to see the point of view of all of the parties involved. Some of the factors: the larger schism between German Jews and Eastern European Jews; misogyny, this was a woman, leading women, raising huge amounts of money for her own cause; competition between groups working for the same causes (orphanages or infant group homes); prevailing scientific opinion that group homes for children were not a good thing. Most of the documents were written by men, powerful men who lined up on both sides of the controversy. The women just continued doing their thing. 

Charna's Book

I haven't entirely finished Charna's book, but I've decided to post what I've done. You should be able to open this in Adobe Reader. Warning: it's a large file.

The book is finished, for now, and can be found at the February 8, 2007 post.

Unfortunately, I have a little more translating that needs to be done. I have to start from scratch with this, and I don't think I will be able to do it. So I'm looking for someone with a good knowledge of Yiddish. Eventually, all of the blank pages will be filled.

Another Busy Week

I am overwhelmed with reading for my Japanese Art History classes. It's a good thing I don't have to work for a grade in these classes. Besides the assigned reading I've been reading some papers for a couple of my  classmates and Eli sent the novel he's been writing. Of course, that took first place. While he was here over the holidays we spent some time discussing his plot and characters, so I was very pleased to finally get to read it. I'm very impressed; he did a great job.

My software arrived on Wednesday so I've also been working on my grandma book. I'm actually not finished with the text, but I felt like I had to see it laid out before I could go further. That's been very satisfying. I decided to have an 11 x 8.5 inch page, landscape. The text of Grandma's autobiography is 5" on the inside of each page. Notes, photos and additional material cover 3.5" on the outside of each page, with wide margins all around. All of the text is entered. Now I'm working on the pictures and other material.

Book update

I've been working on both my tunnel book and the book about my grandmother. I have most of the text prepared for Grandma's book and am waiting for some new software to work out the layout. I have it visualized, but sometimes there is a great distance between idea and implementation--which is where I am with the tunnel book. I have a clear idea in mind, but playing with the pictures I want to use, I'm not sure it will work.  I think I have a long way to go.

For those of you who have asked what a tunnel book is, look here. Another, simpler book is here. The book maker has taken a reproduction of that very famous picture, Sunday on La Grande Jatte, cut out the figures, pasted them back in descending order to create perspective and repainted the background. It is easy because they have taken a two dimensional image of a three dimensional view and made it into a quasi-three dimensional view. In trying to analyze my problem, I think because my subject is a tunnel, it is too long and I have too many pictures from too many angles.

Three Books

Eli is writing a novel, and I am having a wonderful time discussing with him the various aspects of novel writing, such as character development, how to maintain suspense, etc. At the same time, I am thinking about my books, which will tell a story but in a much more indirect way. In both the tunnel book and grandma's book the visual, or layout aspects, are most important. I haven't done anything about the tunnel book, but I've made some decisions about it. I have pictures of the tunnel in summer and in winter. the summer pictures look from the river to the street; winter pictures do the opposite. There is a pedestrian bridge in the middle. Unlike many tunnel books I would like this to be viewable from both ends. So now I need pictures of the buildings across the river and the buildings across the street. These pictures will be on the inside covers. I still have to figure out how to bind the books so the covers can open fully, the accordion part of the tunnel stretches, but the whole thing remains intact and stable. Almost as complicated as writing a novel.

Grandma's book will be a compilation of everything she wrote with memoirs of my father and my aunt along side, other published material I will scan in, and my comments added. In addition to the physical book I intend to publish this as a DVD. All of this can be easily put together with hyperlinks, but the layout of the actual book is remains a problem.

Grandma

I've spent most of the week working on Grandma's book. I have material from my father and my Aunt Flo, but the core of the book will be Grandma's own writing, her autobiography, written in Yiddish, and published in 1944 as a fund raiser for the nursery she founded in Chicago in 1917. At my request my father translated the book, but he had some issues with his mother and did a lot of editorializing. I painfully reworked the translation, with help from a fluent Yiddish speaker who knew Grandma. When I started working on this new book I decided I liked my father's translation better. He probably comes closer to my grandmother's voice. My effort was too cleaned up. So I am comparing the two documents, line by line, to retain his voice and omit the gratuitous comments. It's been a huge job.