Garden of Broken Statues author
Marianna Tax Choldin in conversation with Scott Shoger
Marianna Tax Choldin’s Garden of
Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia
covers a lot of
territory: geographically, from Hyde Park to Moscow to East Bangladesh;
ideologically, from Soviet “omni-censorship” to the less systemic
challenges to free speech we find in the States; and,
above all, interpersonally, as Choldin pays tribute to the people who
have shaped her life: her anthropologist Papa, her twin daughters that
temporarily waylaid her in her pursuit of the life of the mind, her
Russian
colleague and compatriot Katya.
Published in 2016 by Academic Studies Press, it's not strictly a
memoir, as she
says in the following interview. Nor is it strictly a study of Russian
censorship. And because it's such a wide-ranging book, it might be
recommended not only to those interested in Russia or censorship, but
also just about all readers of this journal: namely, librarians and
information professionals curious about the personal and professional
lives of those who have committed the better part of their lives to the
cause of international understanding. Choldin is, of course, the
founding director of the Mortenson Center for International Library
Programs, and those who know her solely in that capacity may be
fascinated by her work that predates the center's 1991 founding.
I've included the majority of our hour-long phone interview, conducted
in early December 2016, but have edited some of Choldin's remarks to
eliminate repetition and have edited the majority of my questions in
order to give context to her remarks, often by quoting directly from
key sections of her book.
Interview
Marianna Tax Choldin in March 2011. Photo by Kelly Ryan.World Libraries:
Choldin
distinguishes in her work between imperial and Soviet censorship,
noting that while
they shared in common certain aspects — “writers were not permitted to
criticize party leaders or the party itself, nor could they write
positively about religion or portray citizens of the Soviet Union as
‘non-European barbarians” — they differed in scope, such that Soviet
censorship “permeated everything and everybody,” constituting a sort of
“omnicensorship,” a term she introduced in a lecture at the 1990
lecture at the Library of Congress. [1] How does censorship in today’s
Russia compare to imperial or Soviet censorship?
Marianna Tax Choldin: It’s not as easy to answer as when you look back
on something that’s finished, that you can study to see how and where
it went. But no question about it: There is a new phase of censorship
that’s not like imperial censorship and not like "omnicensorship" or
Soviet censorship. It’s, of course, different partly because we have
new technologies that weren’t around in those earlier times: the
Internet, Twitter.
One thing that’s clearly being reimposed is state
control; that is, control from the highest elements of the government.
Unlike in Soviet times, no one is really bothering to say, "We don’t
have censorship." They’ve gotten control of all the national level
press and media,
and they’re simply changing things.
I don’t see at this moment an
elaborated system. Maybe we will. It’s certainly not
talked about very much, but it wasn’t talked about at all in Soviet
times. when there
perfectly clearly was a very pervasive, thorough-going kind of
censorship. In imperial times, as in other empires of the time, there
was also no question that there was censorship, and it was talked about
to some extent. It was something that was just part of government.
It’s been made clear to editors and whatever independent
owners there still are of media that there will be penalties if they
don’t start doing certain things or stop doing certain things. Many,
many journalists, unfortunately, have been killed, and that’s kind of a
deterrent for a lot of people. Various media and press outlets have
been declared, for example, foreign agents, and if you’re a foreign
agent that’s not good for your organization because you’re subject to
various penalties and so on.
I don’t know yet what’s happening, and I’m
not sure that my friends and colleagues in Russia know what’s happening
because different things are happening in different places. The period
of the ’90s were so wonderful in terms of openness and trying new
things. A lot of bad things were going on too, a lot of corruption, but
it was a time when you could experiment and try new things; it was a
window that opened. That’s not there anymore in the same way. That’s
discouraging to people who value freedom of expression
and access to information and all those things that had become so
important to me and are important to many of my friends and colleagues
in Russia. Those things are not in the ascendance right now. Russia is
going through a time of constraint and difficulty, and a lot of people
are quite worried about this. It’s a tough time.
World Libraries: One recent
discouraging development: Natalya Sharina, the director of the Library
of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow, has been under house arrest since
October 2015, having been accused of “inciting hatred or animosity
towards a social group by allegedly holding banned books in the
Library." [2] She has also been charged with misappropriating library
funds. Her treatment has been condemned by Amnesty International and
the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
(IFLA).
Marianna Tax Choldin: It’s a shocking development, but it’s not alone.
Numerous organizations that do the kinds of things that libraries want
to do — museums and organizations that worry about the memory of people
who died in the Gulag and so on, history organizations — are having
similar problems. People are getting arrested, fined. People break in
wearing black ski masks over their faces, wielding guns, terrorizing
people. This is not the kind of thing that anybody who values open
societies likes to see happening.
In the case of the Ukrainian library,
it’s obviously tied to the situation with the war in Ukraine that the
government of Russia has been waging. It’s not terribly surprising to
make an example of this library that’s obviously not harmed anybody and
a librarian that’s not harmed anybody. You make an example of it and
you make others afraid. This is a known technique, and a lot of it, in
my view, comes back to the fact that the supreme leader of Russia is a
former, and maybe always, KGB officer. These are techniques that are
very well known and were practiced very widely. It’s not surprising
that activities that are sanctioned at the highest level of government
might go in this direction.
World Libraries: Choldin’s
description of censorship in the U.S. conjures a roiling seascape: “The
First Amendment arches over us, while below it, like a vast ocean, are
the whitecaps and tsunamis of challenges. They bubble up from the
bottom, disturbances created by every variety of civil-society group…I
have no name for our kind of ‘censorship.’ I tend to think of it as
‘from-the-bottom-up challenges,’ which isn’t very elegant. Our
government, like all governments, does attempt some censorship of a
traditional kind, mainly for military and national security issues….But
it’s the ‘bottom-up’ variety that surrounds us and characterizes
censorship in our daily lives.” [3] She came to her definition of
American
censorship after studying its Soviet and imperial Russian
manifestations.
Marianna Tax Choldin: I write about how I, myself, had to focus on
studying what our own situation is and what our own situation is
because that was a big part of my then being able to talk to Russian
audiences in a helpful way. Soon after the changes [following the fall
of the Soviet Union], when I started going around Russia with my friend
Katya and talking about these issues, the first question out of many
people’s mouths was, "Okay, what advice do you have for us based on
your system in the United States? You’re an America; you come from a
country," they said, "that doesn’t have censorship." And I started
thinking, "Wait a minute. Do we really not have any censorship?"
In the book, I explained what I learned from my vantage point from
knowing so much about Russian censorship but not so much about what we
do. I had to figure that out myself, and fortunately there are a lot of
people who do focus on the kinds of constraints that we have. And I
came up with my own answers to those questions that I got not only from
librarians in the former Soviet Union but in many other countries where
I’ve worked through the Mortenson Center.
Having had librarians
coming from all over the world to spend time with me, I’ve gotten a
better grasp on what I could say to them about our system and what
might or might not be useful to them. What you learn right away when
you study another country in depth is that if you put the same
attention on your own country, you will realize that there is a lot
going on that is not going to be applicable to any other country.
Cultures are different from one another; political systems are very
different from one another; histories are different. You’ve got to find
things, if there are any, that are going to be helpful to another
country in this area. And you’re going to have to reject a lot of what
you’ve learned about your own country. And that’s tricky.
25 years of the Mortenson Center
World Libraries: Founded in 1991 with
Choldin at the helm, the Mortensen Center for International Library
Programs remains steadfast in its mission “to strengthen international
ties among libraries and librarians worldwide for the promotion of
international education, understanding, and peace.” [4] The center
celebrated its 25th anniversary in October 2016 with a program
featuring Choldin.
Marianna Tax Choldin: We’re now on our third director, which is
wonderful. I’m very pleased to say that, under each of us, there’s been
growth and development, award grants from various foundations and
organizations, and reaching out to other partners in the world. It’s
all going exactly the way that Walter Mortenson, our donor, and I sat
down and talked about more than 25 years ago. It’s been rewarding to me
and the Mortenson family that this has all taken root so well and is
doing so well.
Twenty-five years is a flash, a moment, but it’s been a
period of great growth and development. Libraries from all over the
world have benefited enormously from it. We American librarians who
were involved in various phases of the center’s activities of the years
have gained so much from meeting and working with the partners in other
countries.
If any group of people in the world ought to be working
together, it’s librarians. There’s so much we can do for each other and
can give to each other: in educating, and helping to educate, everyone
from small children up to scholars of advanced age; in helping each
other find materials; and, I suppose, most fundamentally, in building
tolerance and understanding, which is exactly what Walter Mortenson
wanted to be done with his modest funds. He always said, "My funds are
very modest. I can’t buy any library all the books it needs. But with
your help, we can invest in people. We can invest in librarians. And
the projects that they will do will spread throughout the world to
build tolerance and, eventually, peace." Walter was a pacifist. I think
he’s right.
Of
course, it seems like a drop in the bucket, but that’s how all good
things are. There’s plenty of trouble and ill will out there, but as
long as there’s also some cooperation, tolerance and people working
together to make things happen, it makes you feel better! I think that
the center is just in the early stages, really, after 25 years. Who
knows where things will lead? What a new director 50 years from now
will come up with? It’s kind of wonderful to think about. I still feel
very, very strongly that we did a good thing by getting that whole
operation going and that it needs to continue. And each director comes
with a different background, different experiences and so on. That only
makes you stronger too.
There are probably a number of reasons [the center has been
successful], but one thing that I held to very firmly, and I think my
colleagues that proceeded me are following this same path, is that, in
order for any kind of good activity and change and learning to be
successful, you have to make it sustainable. And the only way to make
it sustainable is to get good people in other parts of the world who
know their own situation, who know their languages, their culture,
their history, the problems that they’re dealing with in their county;
all of the things that make it possible to do something useful and
lasting in your country. They’re the ones that have to really carry it
on.
We can help, "we" meaning a small group of people in the middle of
Illinois. We can make it happen by finding them; helping them to find
us; getting together and figuring out, mostly from them, what they
need; and then helping them to accomplish that. We at the center were
always very, very strong on partnerships with sustainable partners,
with institutions or individuals connected with a university, library
or an institution, who could lead us so that we could support them with
the kind of training or technical help or whatever it is that they
might need that we might be able to help them do.
That’s how it’s going
to go forward. It’s not going to go forward by a bunch of Americans, or
people from any other country, going into some country and saying,
‘Here’s what we think you ought to do. We’ll give you some help but
only if you do this our way.’ There’s been plenty of that, and there
have been many well-meaning people who, without realizing it, have
fallen back on that approach. I think that, not only does that very
often fail, but it probably should fail much of the time.
I think the
sensitivity to the expertise of people elsewhere and the ability to
work with people in a humble sort of way, in a modest sort of way, are
really key. I think the center has been really good at doing that. And
when you don’t do it and you make a mistake…We all make mistakes;
sometimes you suggest something and it turns out not to be a good idea
for that group. Okay, you have to say, "Well, that didn’t work. What
did we do wrong?" I think the center’s done remarkably few wrongs in
that way. That’s why it succeeds; that’s why it gains the trust of
funding organizations, of governments; and that’s how it should go
forward.
World Libraries: In Garden of
Broken Statues, Choldin connects her
work with the Mortenson Center with her interest in action
anthropology, a field of thought developed by her father, Sol Tax:
“[W]hen I founded the Mortenson Center for International Library
Programs and worked with librarians and their communities in Russia and
around the world, I was influenced by his Current Anthropology activities and by ‘action anthropology,’
the field he is credited with founding, in which the scholar helps a
community to achieve its own goals and studies that community at the
same time.” [5] Would action anthropology serve others well as they go
about their studies and lives?
Marianna Tax Choldin: I think so. It would be good for many people to
understand a little more of the work that people in other fields have
done in this area. Action anthropology has lessons and techniques,
really, for a lot of us as we go out in the world and deal with other
cultures. I was very fortunate, and, you know, to some extent, my own
accomplishments, whether with the center or as a scholar, have been
built on the kinds of lessons that I learned at my father’s side and in
the community I grew up in, an educated community that was built on a
lot of tolerance. I think that helps.
So we should always remember the
people who came before us on whose shoulders we stand. I think that’s a
useful lesson: Find someone who can help you understand a little more
broadly where you’re going, what some of the dangers might be and what
some of the strengths of the people that you’re going to work with will
be.
I think listening is a very important skill, especially when you’re
going outside your own comfort zone. Most of us think of librarians’
work as being more straightforward. You just find some information that
somebody needs, or a book someone should read or wants to read. But
everything we do deals with much more complex human relationships than
we realize at first.
I’d suggest listening carefully to what people
tell us and recognizing our own inadequacies without losing the
confidence that we can do something. It’s about seeing yourself as an
open book and not someone who’s telling other people how to go about
something. Having the ability to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes
is important too, and the best way to do that is just to get out there
and see how other people are living and what their issues. Those are
skills that are going to help most of us deal better with all kinds of
issues: If we can be quiet and listen, and also offer our advice in a
modest sort of way — ask a lot of questions rather than handing out the
truth about things.
Growing up lucky
World Libraries: The second chapter
of Garden of Broken Statues,
“My American Planet,” opens: “North America is my home planet and
Chicago my anchor city, but Hyde Park is the South Side neighborhood
where I was born in 1942 and grew up and was the epicenter of my first
twenty years. In Hyde Park we lived five minutes walk’ from the
University of Chicago campus, where Papa taught anthropology…” [6]Could
her life story, which found her balancing life and work, procreation
and scholarship, provide a sort of model or inspiration for others,
particularly in the way it assures readers that they need not follow a
set schedule or model in meeting their goals?
Marianna Tax Choldin: I was very lucky, partly because the things that
I wanted to do were common to the community that I grew up in. I didn’t
have to break down all kinds of barriers. That was luck. People
jokingly say sometimes that the most important decision you make is who
your parents are. You can see that it’s a lot easier to accomplish some
kinds of things when you have advantages that will make it more
possible for you.
When your parents are supporting the kinds of things
you want to do; when your teachers in school, your professors in
college and everybody else you have to deal with say, "Yeah, that’s
good, go ahead and do that" — not everybody has that. It’s not always
necessary. There are people who accomplish enormous and marvelous
things in complete contradiction to what anybody else around them did
or does. That’s incredibly admirable, and it’s not that my way is the
only way.
It’s just that it is possible in a setting like mine to take
advantage of a lot of things and make things happen, and it’s also
possible to let it all go and give up. Part of it is just realizing
that even if you don’t think you’ve got the strength to do certain
things, you might have it, you might have it after all and it’s worth
trying. Traditionally, women have had a harder time breaking through
some barriers than men have, although men have problems too. I think
some women might see some helpful points in my story. Maybe it will
encourage some people to make some progress where they thought they
couldn’t.
World Libraries: Another chapter,
“Bangladesh and Babies,” has little to do with Russian censorship, but
everything to do with the shape of her the rest of her life: from
creating a family to going a different route with her graduate studies.
“Looking back, I can see that my year with the babies, like my time in
East Pakistan, was not just a diversion. Those three years were
important for my development as a Russian scholar, a library activist,
and a caring human being. It was good for me to be jolted out of my
trip on autopilot to a PhD; good to be immersed in a very different
culture and language; good to be humanized by parenthood (Papa’s
concept); good to grow up a little, to be anchored by other people, and
not to think only of myself.” [7] I put it to Choldin that, if she was
lucky in some respects, she certainly didn’t have an easy time of it
when she had her first kids. To put it briefly, while she ended up
having her twins close to home in Hyde Park, with her parents ready to
help, her first few months of labor were spent far from a modern
hospital in a small town in then-East Pakistan, where she had recently
moved with her husband.
Marianna Tax Choldin: Those stories don’t always have happy endings.
When you’re very young, you don’t think of the dangers you’re stepping
into blithely when you go off to the other end of the world. It can end
happily, but it’s also possible to accomplish some things a lot more
easily than I did.
It’s interesting, I mentioned to a number of people
that I had a bit of a struggle, first with the memoir group I worked
with and then with editors, who said, "You know, that chapter on
Bangladesh and babies is just not going to fit it. It’s too different
from the rest of the story." And I kept saying, "You know, I really
feel strongly that it belongs there, and I don’t know how I’m going to
change your mind about this. I have to do it; I can’t just leave out
that chapter of my life because it did have something to do with who I
became and what I did later."
I just kept going back to the table and
writing some more and figuring out what I really wanted to say here
that connected that experience with the rest of my book, the rest of my
memoir on censorship and Russia. Finally, with the last round of that,
I had a wonderful editor who was helping me to tell my story as best I
could, and I came back to her with the final draft with my heart in my
hands. I was really worried about what she was going to say. And she
said, "You’ve done it. You’ve convinced me that that chapter belongs
there."
And I’ve had a lot of comments on that chapter, partly because
it’s so different, of course, from anything that other people have
experienced, but I think I must have somehow managed to make the
connection because no one said to me, ‘Gee, that chapter didn’t fit in
with the rest of your book.’ Somehow, I managed to fit it in there, so
I’m pleased about that.
Broken statues, excised books
World Libraries: Choldin says she
found the metaphor that anchors her book in 1997, when she happened
upon a Moscow park filled with discarded Soviet-era statues. “Our world
is full of broken sculpture gardens; every country has some,” she
writes in the book’s final chapter. “Unlike the brilliant museums I
described earlier, the ones that tell their brutal their brutal stories
honestly, these unfinished gardens pulse not only with horror and
sorrow but also with urgency, with the need to take down barriers, to
see the past and the present with clarity, to show connections. They
make me understand how very important it is for open democratic
societies to give their citizens and the world’s citizens access to all
of the country’s past, the shameful as well as the noble.” [8] But did
Choldin know back then that she could build a book around this morbidly
alluring park?
Marianna Tax Choldin: I knew that it was very important, really central
to me, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to work it out on paper.
I knew the garden
in Moscow was central, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to tie in
other stories that spoke to me. I wasn’t sure how I was going to put
them down and how they were going to related to each other, what the
actual metaphor would be. I knew I was going to relate to monuments,
things that were broken as a metaphor for societies that were broken.
It just came together kind of bit by bit. The final form of it didn’t
really come together until I had been writing for quite a time. It came
from deep inside, but it wasn’t clear to me until quite long into the
process what form it would take.
My husband took the pictures of the
garden, and we had no idea at the time we took those pictures where
they were going to end up or what significance they were going to have.
I just knew that in all these places that I was that were horrifying,
broken places — filled with broken lives, broken statues — that I
needed pictures, that someday I was going to need to use them for
something. They’re not always very good pictures but they tell the
story.
This kind of image speaks to people. It’s supposed to. An
effective monument speaks to you. We’ve all experienced that with a
monument somewhere. The question is how to make it speak for you, to
give the message that you want to give. All of us who work with any
kind of images, we learn that that’s what we have to get on top of:
pictures, statues, sayings, slogans, all kinds of things like that.
World Libraries: From a spooky park
to the spooky stacks: Choldin writes compellingly of the life of the
scholar, and the pleasures and perils that one can find in the stacks.
Here’s a taste: “I’m about to enter the stacks of the University of
Illinois Library in Urbana…It’s winter break 1976, and I’m going to
search for two nineteenth-century German books…[that were] permitted
for circulation in Russia only, with the excision of certain
passages…If find my first Brockhaus volume, check the censors’ catalog
for my instructions, and open the volume to the right page. I gasp!
What is that in the left column, where my excised passage should be?
What happened to the print, and why is the paper so thin?…I’m not a
horror movie sort of person, but I can’t help thinking that I’m not
alone on the tenth level: a ghostly imperial Russian censor is stalking
me, laughing silently." [9]
Marianna Tax Choldin: I think the point to be made is that, in whatever
kind of research you’re working on — and I doubt that it matters what
subject you’re working on: it could be chemistry experiments or
philosophy or a piece of music — you should always be alert to the
possibility of coming across a needle in the haystack. You don’t know
what’s going to jump out at you from someplace as you’re working on
something. If you do know, it’s probably not that interesting a topic
and you should look for a different one. You just simply don’t know
what you might find around the next corner or turning the page. It may
be a certain chord in a piece by a composer, a certain chemical that
shows up in a compound.
We’ve read about scientists who had incredible
epiphanies when there’s been a certain reaction. The same thing happens
with humanists or social scientists, certainly to librarians. You don’t
know what you’re looking for but you keep looking. It’s a wonderful
process and it makes your life much more interesting as you go along.
It’s a rich kind of exploration. I’m all in favor of people doing
scholarship in the hope of turning up something unexpected.
You could probably turn things up doing any kind of research, as long
as you’re alert and educate yourself as to what’s going on in a certain
setting so that you’ll be aware the moment something shows up that’s
not so typical or that may lead you down another path. Serendipity is a
wonderful thing and that’s something that librarians are very much
aware of, how you can be looking at two books on a shelf or titles in
an online catalog, and say, "What a minute. Why are these two things
next to each other? What does that tell me?" There are just a lot of
ways you can be amazed by something that your curious mind will find. I
suppose having a curious mind is a real advantage.
World Libraries: The censor Choldin
described following her in the stacks eventually caught up with her —
and, in a sense, became a part of her: “[W]ith the help of my internal
censor, I sat in my study and really began to think like a censor.
Simultaneously, I thought like someone who had been censored…I found
myself understanding the censor’s role. “Aha! That sentence certainly
has to go!’ I would find myself exclaiming. Why? Because it’s
disrespectful toward Russian royalty, or questions the tsar’s power, or
ridicules religion, or portrays Russians as what I’ve come to call
‘non-European barbarians.’” [10]Does she still think like a censor
from
time to time?
Marianna Tax Choldin: Yeah, you don’t lose it once you’ve got it. Now I
think about what I’m going to see next. I’ve noticed it, of course,
when I see the censorship of other countries, when I’ve read something
about how the Chinese government censors things. I don’t need to know
everything that a scholar of Chinese censorship would know to say,
"Uh-huh, this sounds familiar." Being close to one system will make you
sensitive to other systems. They’ll all have their own peculiarities
and special features so it won’t be the same, but it will be perhaps
similar or suggestive of something. Whenever I hear or read about
control of expression in different settings, or when I look at Russia
now and wonder what’s going on that’s new or different or what sort of
cues are there, I’m tuned into that; I’m afraid I’m stuck with it
forever.
It’s such an unpleasant subject, such a sad and tragic subject in many
ways. But then, being an optimist and a generally sunny person, I say,
look, the more you understand this, the more, maybe, it can be helpful
to other people having to get out of a similar situation. Certainly,
there must be some other, more pleasant subject one can take up. But
people in my field [Russian history] end up with a lot of miserable
subjects. It’s a history that’s full of sad and miserable and tragic
things, as well as some of the most brilliant works of art and science.
Nothing is perfect and anything we undertake in any part of any culture
is going to have beauty and some extreme ugliness.
World Libraries: What is it about
Banned Books Week — and perhaps other events or media related to
censorship — that attracts such interest?
Marianna Tax Choldin: It’s think part of it is just shock and
indignation. But the people who lived with this or live with it still
today — though you have to have gotten out of it to be able to think
about it — for them, it’s not just something that shocks you in a
casual, amusing sort of way. It was something that really ruined your
life in some important ways for many years, or if not ruined it at
least made it extremely difficult.
I think Americans are, again, very
privileged, as are others who live in open societies, that we look at
some of the kinds of banning that has gone on even in our own country
and say, "This is so ridiculous and silly that it makes me laugh,"
because some of it does! It’s absurd and you laugh. But you always have
to remember is that there are people out there, even in our country,
who are not laughing. The perpetrators are not laughing
because they believe that whatever they’re dealing with really should
be censored: It’s really dangerous; it’s really bad; it’s really wrong.
It’s not a bad idea to look at those lists which I
used to look at very carefully, the lists that would appear in the
Intellectual Freedom Newsletter, back in the days when, on the front
page, there was a list of the most frequently banned books in school
and public libraries. There was Mark Twain,
Huckleberry Finn every time, alongside several others that recurred
every time. It’s
important to take Banned Books Week seriously and to have other lists
that show the kind of tolerance and
openness and diversity that is healthy to have. Studying censorship is
appealing in a variety of ways, but probably when we are taking it very
lightly, we ought to draw back a little bit and think about what its
deeper meaning is.
A memoir for the masses
World Libraries: Can you talk about
how you came to write the book?
Marianna Tax Choldin: It’d hard to answer that because it just sort of
came naturally. When I set out to write this book, I had in mind not a
scholarly book as such. I’ve done that, and it’s not that I’ve moved
beyond scholarship in any way. But I felt a great desire to let people
who otherwise wouldn’t know much about Russia, or certainly Russian
censorship, get a glimpse into what I’ve learn over these many years.
I
think a lot of people, particularly in America, haven’t thought a lot
about censorship. It’s so much less a part of our lives than it is in
countries with very different political situations. Hearing about or
reading about censorship in countries that are very different from our
own might make one turn — as it did me, really — to considering what
kinds of restraints or constraints we have on freedom of expression in
our country.
There was material that I hoped would be interesting to a
general audience that you don’t usually aim for or reach with scholarly
material. There are things here that scholars have enjoyed too. But I
thought reaching a broader audience of librarians, of course, but also
of just people would be worthwhile and a challenge and kind of fun to
do. And it has been all of that!
I started out close to home. In order to write the book — and I wasn’t
sure what else might come out of it — I put together a small group of
friends. We refer to each other as the memoir group because as it turns
out, three other friends, really four, were working on some kind of
memoir themselves. I didn’t know how mine would turn out. I called it a
memoir and it is partly a memoir, of course, but it’s not only a
memoir.
These
were people who had nothing to do in their scholarly work or life
activities with Russia or the Soviet Union. They knew no more than the
bare minimum that educated people tend to know from reading the
newspaper, seeing movies, reading Russian literature. That had no depth
of knowledge, but they were all writers; good, heavy readers; good
listeners. So they were extremely helpful in getting me to really make
clear what I was talking about.
When you’re an academic, you tend to
take a lot of things for granted that people will know. And when you’ve
been in a field for many years, most of the people you’ve talked to do
know this stuff and you don’t need to explain it. But when you’re
writing for a general audience, you really have to be aware of what
they are not likely to know or understand. My husband, who is an
academic but, again, has nothing to do in his work with Russia, was
also a terrific reader in this way. He could point out, ‘Well, yeah,
but that’s not clear. What do you mean by that?’ And then you’d have to
go back and fill that out.
I had some very good feedback, even as I was
working on the book, from the memoir group and from Harvey, my husband.
Since the book was finished, I’ve had several friends or
people I knew read it and find it spoke to them very clearly. They
weren’t having trouble understanding. They wanted to talk about some of
things I was writing about. Of course, some of these are people who
knew me well but didn’t really know that part of my life as well.
I
think I’ve had enough feedback to tell me that all is not lost on the
general reader. I’m going to be, in the next few months, talking to
more general readers in a couple of bookstore appearances and a couple
of reformed Jewish temples in the neighborhood. I’ll get more feedback,
I think, and that’s good. It’s too late to fix this book, but it’s good
for me to know if there are things that, for some reason, I didn’t
explain clearly.
World Libraries: Anything else you'd
like to say about Garden of Broken Statues?
Marianna Tax Choldin: I hope that librarians reading the book will get
some sense of what my
own library experience was. It was a little unusual but there’s a lot
in there that I think was common to everyone who was working as a
librarian. I think, too, something that I would like to leave librarian
readers with is the idea that there are so many ways to be a librarian,
and so many different ways to use the kind of education and training
that you can get in being a librarian. Mine was not in the slightest
typical: first a Russian scholar, then, sort of by accident, a
librarian. But I was able to put things together in ways that were
helpful for a lot of people who were in my field.
I’ve always told
people that librarianship is a field that can be put to great value in
combination with anything in any other fields. If you have strengths —
subject strengths or other interests — find a way to put them together
with librarianship and you’ve got something special, something extra.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a need for right down the line,
right down the center, good librarians and information people who will
help work toward all kinds of different aims for all kinds of different
kinds of people. There is, of course, but there’s also that stretching
it, that going out to the margins and coming up with something that
hasn’t been thought of very much, and you might add really special
added value to the job you’re doing. It’s a big wonderful field out
there.
About the Interviewee
Marianna Tax Choldin is a Russian scholar and librarian who studies
censorship in imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet
Russia. Fluent in Russian, she has made more than 50 trips to Russia
since 1960 and has traveled widely in the region, meeting with
colleagues, curating exhibitions, and lecturing about censorship.
Endnotes
[1] Marianna Tax Choldin, Garden of
Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia (Brighton, MA:
Academic Studies Press, 2016), 88. ↵
[2] "IFLA-FAIFE statement on the continuing detention
of the Director
of the Library of Ukrainian Literature," IFLA-FAIFE, May 20, 2016,
http://www.ifla.org/node/10488. ↵