It's Good to Be Ruthful

On Monday we were most fortunate to have Ruth Halikman Franklin ’91 spend the day here at Park. For those of you unfamiliar with Ruth, she is an accomplished writer and reviewer and currently is on the editorial board at The New Republic. Her new book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, focuses on whether there is a special obligation for Holocaust literature to be truthful.

She was the speaker at the Upper School assembly--- a daunting challenge for many guests. You have to be intellectually engaging while simultaneously keeping the attention of 300 adolescents. Ruth excelled on both scores, and I would say her presentation was one the most impressive I’ve ever seen in this forum.

The topic has some innate emotional triggers often making it difficult to discuss, and I imagine this only heightened Ruth’s challenge in crafting her remarks. I cannot begin to do justice to her thesis, and its support. In all seriousness, I’m hoping if this blog entry gets to her, she’ll share some of her argument with this audience. One of the most impressive features of the presentation was the construction of her argument. You had to pay close attention. Each premise logically rested on the preceding one and together they built a very sound analysis of what we came to understand, is a murky debate.

We all know that we live in a world of sound bites and video postings that typically last 30 seconds. It was so refreshing to bask in a thoughtful and educative presentation. The 30-40 minutes she spoke were a well-orchestrated journey for the listener to be provoked to re-think assumptions, and ultimately to assess the validity of a most cogent thesis.

Does it help that this compelling speaker was a Park graduate? Yes, and how. Ruth deserves all of the credit, but I’m guessing that she had some pretty good mentors along the way, and probably many of them were at the ‘ole Park School.

To see some of Ruth’s work at The New Republic go to:
http://www.tnr.com/search/apachesolr_search/ruth%20franklin

or for more information about her book go to:

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Jewish/?view=usa&ci=9780195313963