Greenbaum, Beth Aviv 1951-

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Greenbaum, Beth Aviv 1951-

PERSONAL: Born June 23, 1951, in Detroit, MI; father's name, I. William; mother's name, Marjie (a homemaker); married Joseph Aviv, August 28, 1977 (divorced March 7, 1987); married Eli Greenbaum (a writer), March 6, 1994; children: (first marriage) Sari, Rachel. Education: University of Michigan, B.A. (cum laude), 1973; Harvard University, M.Ed., 1975; attended Wayne State University, 1985, 1986. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—928 Chesterfield, Birmingham, MI 48009. Agent—Emilie Jacobson, Curtis Brown Ltd., 10 Astor Pl., New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: High school English teacher in Englewood, NJ, 1975-77, and Scarsdale, NY, 1977-79; Marygrove College, Detroit, MI, lecturer in English, 1979-82; Seaholm High School, Birmingham, MI, English teacher, 1985-; Groves High School, Birmingham, English teacher, 1985-. Ragdale Foundation for the Arts, resident in writing, 2004; conference chair; judge for student writing awards.

WRITINGS:

Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust, Heinemann Publishers (Portsmouth, NH), 2001.

Work represented in anthologies, including Voices: On Writing Fiction, DWW Press (Detroit, MI), 1987; Century of Voices: Detroit Women Writers Anthology, 1900-2000, Book Crafters (Chelsea, MI), 1999; Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2001; and Charity, Red Rock Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2002. Contributor of short stories and reviews to periodicals, including Monthly Detroit, University of Windsor Review, and Transition.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Teaching the Bible in Public School; two novels, Borders (young adult) and Tamar.

SIDELIGHTS: Beth Aviv Greenbaum told CA: "What is my primary motivation for writing? This is a hard question. I suppose I write to think. I write to discover and to know, to figure out what it is I really feel. I feel stagnant, unhappy, when I'm not writing. I need to write to feel I know the world around me better—to understand what I think. I've always felt writing is an exploration as well as record of how the world looks from my vantage at any given moment.

"My work is particularly influenced by current events: by whatever I'm reading at the moment; my personal situation—marriage, divorce, raising children; whatever obsesses me or makes me feel passion. Yesterday I was reading a Thomas Friedman piece in the New York Times. The first few lines of his article about suicide bombings in Jerusalem triggered an opening line for me, and I spent the next couple of hours writing a piece I'd been struggling to begin. It often works that way. I read or hear something, and it triggers a flow of words and sentences.

"My writing process varies. The sudden, inspired piece may be a poem or an essay triggered by something I read or see or experience. For the longer work—the book that plods along chapter by chapter—I need a stretch of time when I'm not obligated to get to my day job (teaching). Then I can get up in the morning, read the newspaper, and have my coffee—then work for three or four hours to get down the basic outline of a chapter, flesh it out, research detail, and get it to come alive. It takes me about a week to finish a chapter. Sometimes I need to work by hand—script is more personal. I do this for poems, for beginnings of books. Then, the flood of ideas comes more quickly on the computer. Primarily, mornings are for creating, afternoons for editing (and napping).

"I wrote Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust because I'd been assigned to teach a full-semester course on Holocaust literature, and I felt the prospect was too painful. So to distance myself, I wanted to observe the process of teaching and dealing with the literature and my students. Originally I proposed to write the book with a colleague, as an anthology with questions; however, the editor wanted more of an essay about the process of teaching and working with the material. It was an inspired work, written in part because I was so agitated about the general state of 'using' the Holocaust to teach tolerance—which is, of course, part of the subject, but not the goal for me. I wanted the Holocaust to be studied for the sake of knowing what humans do—as survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. I wanted to see how these experiences could be rendered into art. And I wanted to understand better my former mother-in-law, whom I loved and who had been there.

"I have written stories and essays about my life—my experiences forged into art (if I can be so presumptuous as to use that word). There is a drive to put them down, that in the act of putting down words the chaos of emotion and experience get some definition."