Author Archives: carlastockton

Follow Your Roots

Caroline Topperman’s book Your Roots Cast Your Shadow is a MUST READ.

In Your Roots Cast a Shadow, author Caroline Topperman takes her reader down into the chasms of her family history and proves that finding your roots can be both enlightening and liberating.

So many of us who are descended from damaged, displaced families find ourselves left with mere snippets of our forebears’ memories, carefully curated glimpses of what they deemed acceptable for future generations to know.  We wallow in guesswork and strive to build our sense of self from the shadows they cast. So much is left out that we find ourselves veritably blind, searching through a dark forest of innuendo that leads as much to speculation as to revelation.

Caroline Topperman has had considerably more success than some of us. Her remarkable parents and grandparents, who suffered through years of hardship that required travels to the far corners of the world, were less guarded. As they went, they scattered enough carefully chosen, indestructible truths behind them that Topperman was able to build a network of paths to meticulously follow.  At the end of the end of her multiple trails, she has found rich morsels of story, kernels of history that have provided the means with which she could build a memoir of one family’s struggle to assert their right to live happily ever and leave behind a meaningful legacy.

Topperman’s examination of her multi-rooted family tree, opens with glimpses of her maternal grandparents’  life in Lwow, Poland, just before WWII.  They were young, Jewish, intellectual, and proudly unwilling to put up with Nazi or Communist maltreatment. The odds they were up against are all too familiar, but  Topperman spins the tale with ever-expanding dramatic flair that is able to surprise, shock, and comfort even the most knowing among us. Both her grandparents found voices, became activists, and prevail. Of her maternal grandparents,  Topperman writes, “So many people are blinded by religion, and communism was my grandparents’ religion. . . . They weren’t part of a conspiracy to overthrow the western world; they were simply looking for a way to make the world a better place.”

Direr circumstances surrounded Topperman’s paternal grandparents, who fled from Warsaw to Kabul, Afghanistan, where her grandfather led the construction of Highway AH1 through the Kyber pass, where her grandmother taught gym in a local school, and where her father was born. Eventually, they returned to Poland by way of Uzbekistan, but their journeys were far from over.  By the time Topperman and her sister were born in Ontario, Canada, both her parents’ families had nearly traversed the world. 

Topperman’s story has many branches emanating from the roots she discloses here.  Without sycophancy or flattery, she honestly presents the stalwart men and pioneering feminists who were her predecessors, and she shares her own quest to find her place among them.  “Home,” she concludes in the title of her final chapter, “is where the compass lands.”  That may be true. But having read the book, I would add that home is where the compass lands. . . but first we must learn how to turn on the light.

Gratitude

Ah, Too Much of Nothing turns out to be a lot of SOMETHING!!

A brief introduction. . . .

It is exciting to see the response to my book release. I am humbled by the encouragement, the delight, the validation I am receiving from friends and acquaintances. At the same time, it is difficult to feel like I am constantly seeking the limelight. . . . But so much has gone into this book. Like child rearing, book writing takes a village. The people I shared the MFA experience with at Columbia — my cohorts Livia Lakomy, Elizabeth Walters, Sukriti, Lacy Warner, Mahad Zara, Andrew Lewis, Sean Quinn and a few others — took me seriously, convinced me that I had something to say worth reading. My friends Mari Alkus Bonomi, Bea Schwarz, Maryanne Aubin, Gail Gallagher, Peter MacIntyre and a few others stood patiently on the sidelines with streamers and megaphones yelling, “Go girl!” My first editor E.B. Bartles made mammoth suggestions and intelligent edits. Then Caroline Topperman, at Ash Mountain Press, did the next deep and deeply insightful edit, after which Andi Cumbo added her own kind of brilliance. . . . You get the picture. This is my first solo book, but I don’t plan to allow it to be the last, and every moment of this process encourages me to press onward.

Books and Books and Books

I have lived much of my life in and through books. I wandered into Alice’s Wonderland without a moment’s disbelief. I fell in love with Mercutio and imagined myself his unnamed lover. I signed impatiently when Torvald called Nora his squirrel and cried huge tears of relief when she left him. Books were never just reading material. Books took me to worlds and people, places and adventures that could carry me far from any pain that childhood or adolescence could conjure. Readers who delve into my own book Too Much of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Identity and Womanhood will find me navigating those venues, meeting those people, and bringing them with me to my reality to enrich my readers’ experiences. Dive into my magical rabbit hole and chortle with Samuel Beckett, tzikatch with Henrik Ibsen, laugh aloud with Lucas Hnath. . . . They — and so many more — have been such great companions. It’s a pleasure to share them now.

Books took me to worlds and people, places and adventures that could carry me far from any pain that childhood or adolescence could conjure.
Every book is its own kind of Yellow Brick Road

Adirondack Dreamin’

Aaron Marbone, a reporter for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise just interviewed me for a story that will run in tomorrow’s paper. A lovely young man, Aaron asked me what it was like living in Saranac Lake all those years ago.

Well, I told him, that trope about walking a mile to school uphill both ways was the truth for us then. I lived on Cliff Road in a house that is today a multi-unit condominium complex at the base of Mount Pisgah.

We walked down from the top of Cliff, by way of Catherine to Bloomingdale and then to Main, up Olive Street Hill and across the overpass to Petrova, which was our school through high school. Then, for much of the school year, we walked home in the dark, down Olive Street, back to Bloomingdale, Margaret to Catherine and back up the big hill home. In the winter we wore layers of clothes that weighted us down and in spring forded through rivers of snow-melted mud cascading down every hill and forming small lakes in every little valley. Glorious.

I never thought of the people of my town as family, but they were certainly part of a clan, a clan that protected me, tolerated my strangenesses, celebrated my talents. I won speech contests, appeared in class plays, played in the band, and sang in the glee club; I wrote a pageant for a Saranac Lake centennial celebration, commissioned by a group of adults who appreciated my writing. After a cataclysmic accident, as my mother lay pinned under her car, freezing in the wind at Donnelly Corner, passers-by stopped to shield her, to provide blankets and coats from their own backs, while the volunteer fire department worked tirelessly for hours to extricate her. Then, for two years, there was seldom a day when food was not delivered to our home.

My classmates never bullied me or made fun of me though I was the kind of kid who anywhere else would have suffered terribly. I was lonely but respected, and whenever I return for reunions, I am reminded of the enormous generosity of spirit they had then and still have today. My most vociferous cheerleaders, my strongest encouragers have been my classmates, people like Gail Gallagher, Peter MacIntyre, Maryanne Aubin, whom I have known since 4th grade when we moved to that little enclave in the Adirondacks.

So of course I will go “home” to have the first celebration of having written my first solo book. At NOON, on November 9, the Saranac Lake Public Library, where one can still find a copy of that pageant I wrote in 1965, will host my book launch. On the 13th I’ll be on a panel at the Adirondack Writing Center with a new friend Laurie Spigel to talk about writing and aging and making it through. . . . and getting by with a little help from our friends. Best of all, The Book Nook, in Saranac Lake is taking orders. I hope people support the independent bookseller and order there: https://www.saranaclake.com/shop/the-book-nook

Pub Date 2024!!

Hard to believe, I know. But here I am, age 77, and I have FINALLY achieved a solo publication. Writing was my avocation for so much of my life that it is hard to believe I have arrived to a place where it is my vocation!! I am not fond of promoting myself or touting my work, but having written the book, having put it out in the world, I am now in the business of being an author with a book to sell. I will be posting excerpts and insights here on my blog. So stay tuned!!