Contemporary Authors

• For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors ( essays) University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2018

• From Publisher -

  Laura works as a translator of Russian, French, and Spanish to English. For many years, she served as the interpreter for Russian-speaking authors at the PEN World Voices Festival and as a PEN prison writing mentor. Her work has been listed as “notable” in five of the last seven editions of Best American Essays.

• CLMP - https://www.clmp.org/blog-post/from-lwc-to-publication-laura-esther-wolfson-on-her-journey/

  From LWC to Publication: Laura Esther Wolfson on Her Journey
  Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018
  View all blog posts →

  A 2007 graduate of the New School MFA program, I believe I hold the record for attending the CLMP Literary Writers Conference more times than anyone. I’ve missed only one or two iterations since graduating all those years ago. Each year I watch for the program and think, “I can’t believe I’m still an emerging writer!” and each year when the schedule is published I see that there are more things to learn, more panels to benefit from, more writers, agents, editors and publicists with invaluable inside knowledge to share. And I register again.
  I don’t know the precise definition of ‘emerging writer.’ I probably still fall into that category. This year, however, will see my literary debut; For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, which has been described variously as a memoir, an essay collection, a booklength essay and a collection of autobiographical stories, won the 2017 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and will be published by the University of Iowa Press on June 1, 2018. Written over the course of nearly 15 years, it consists of a voice-driven series of sections that focus on my lifelong obsessions with language (I am a translator of Russian and French), literature, cultural difference and translation, as well as chronic illness, marriage and divorce.
  During my first years as a conference attendee, I pitched the novel that had been my MFA thesis. Many agents who sat opposite me for those eight minutes during agent speed dating kindly agreed to look at it. Their gentle comments helped me to recognize when it was time to set that project aside and move on. When I told one of the conference organizers the following year please to remove me from the agent speed dating schedule because I had nothing to pitch, he urged me to present something, anything, so as not to miss the valuable opportunity to practice talking about my work. Thus did the idea of For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors come into being, thanks to a fellow New School MFA graduate staffing the conference table whose name I never learned.
  During the time that For Single Mothers was taking shape, the Literary Writers Conference was crucial to my understanding of the publishing industry and how books reach their readerships.l learned about literary magazines—the rich array that exist, especially the more recent ones, their role in nurturing literary talent, how to support them, and how (and how not) to submit to them–from listening to such luminaries as Brigid Hughes of A Public Space, Rob Spillman of Tin House, and editors of numerous other magazines, such as Guernica, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Killens Review and Hudson Review, to name just a few. During that time, 11 of the 13 sections of For Single Mothers came out in literary magazines, my submissions guided by what I had learned from those sessions.
  The case study presentations, always featuring works of literary nonfiction, including essay collections, kept my spirits from flagging during the years that my book was coming together, reminding me that there are niches and readers for genres that get less attention than the novel. I particularly remember asking one agent on a panel whether it was worthwhile to work in a genre that I had been told again and again was not marketable. “If that is your strength, that is what you should do,” she replied, without hesitation. I took heart and kept going.
  The opening lines clinics enabled me to see if my sentences could draw in key literary gatekeepers such as agents Renee Zuckerbrot and Erin Harris, and to observe and learn from the work of my fellow emerging writers. The legendary Jonathan Galassi, head of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, who spoke along with Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, on the panel “The Writer and His Team,” stands for me as the lodestar of uncompromising literary standards and dedication to the arc of a writer’s career rather than to individual books. At that same panel, I was moved to hear Michael Cunningham speak about his difficult path, which included years and years when he had not a single story accepted for publication. Seeing him banter with his agent of many years, also on that panel, demonstrated vividly the rapport that an author and agent can and should have. I was reminded of all the varied paths a writer’s trajectory can take when another attendee, an emerging writer in her sixties, confided to me afterward that decades earlier she and Cunningham had been classmates at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
  The CLMP conference put writing colonies and residencies on my radar. “You should be applying to a few of these every year,” CLMP director Jeffrey Lependorf said one year while moderating a panel along with the director of the Millay Colony and representatives of other artists’ colonies. I began to apply that year and then followed his advice to contact colonies that had turned me down to ask how my application had done during the judging process. I learned from one place that my application had been deemed “slightly below average.” After a break to overcome my discouragement, I continued applying for years, recently gaining admission at long last to the colony that given me that disheartening response. (I had to decline their invitation owing to a scheduling conflict.) I am writing this guest blog from the MacDowell Colony, where I am continuing work on my second book, tentatively entitled Super-Pricey, Royal Blue French Lace Bra.

• Michigan Quarterly Review - http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2018/06/language-place-and-the-remarkable-in-between-an-interview-with-laura-esther-wolfson/

  Language, Place, and the Remarkable In-between: An Interview with Laura Esther Wolfson

  by Sarah Sala
  Jun 27, 2018
  in Interviews

  I first met Laura Esther Wolfson in 2016 while co-producing AMP Lit Fest in New York City. Struck by her attention to the nuance of foreign and familiar languages, not to mention her resilience as a so-called “emerging writer” despite her work being widely published and anthologized for decades, it was my distinct pleasure to interview her at her Upper West Side apartment early one Sunday morning.
  Her debut essay collection is For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors (University Of Iowa Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Iowa Prize in Nonfiction. Whether exploring the delicate work of examining self and the world post-divorce, the tightrope walk between language and place, the onset of chronic illness, or the deep longing for children, Wolfson’s collection spans the width of the human heart and the heights of intellect. For Single Mothers is a book that commands attention.
  Wolfson is currently at work on her second book, Super-Pricey Royal Blue French Lace Bra. Her prose has been honored with the 2017 Notting Hill Essay Prize, published in leading literary venues on both sides of the Atlantic, and cited in Best American Essays. She served for many years as the interpreter for Russian-speaking authors at the PEN World Voices Festival and as a PEN Prison & Justice Writing Mentor. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony (2018) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2017). Wolfson holds an MFA from the New School and lives in New York City.

  How did you choose the title For Single Mothers Working As Train Conductors?
  It’s offbeat and curiosity-inducing for the potential reader. My then-husband, Aleksandr, said that if we had a child, we would have to put him or her in 24-hour daycare. I had never heard of such an institution and was baffled by the concept. Why would anyone plan to have a child and then choose not to raise it? Years later, I asked a Russian friend if there were 24-hour daycare centers in her home country. She told me, after some thought, that there were. They were for single mothers working as train conductors who went on long trips for work and had no immediate family to take care of their children while they were away. I put the title piece first because it introduces many of the themes returned to later: marriage, longing for a child, Russia and its recent history, my work as a Russian linguist.
  You’ve said that if you could write one good essay per year then you’d be happy. For Single Mothers won the 2017 Iowa Prize for Nonfiction and it’s your debut collection — what was the journey like to get here?
  I wrote this book over the course of fourteen years and it has thirteen essays in it. There were a few others that didn’t go in. I didn’t write this as a book — all of the pieces were standalone. When I revised it last year after it was accepted, a large part of the revising process was weaving the things more tightly together. It astonishes me that some of the pre-publication reviews have said that it’s a book-length essay or a memoir because to me it’s obviously a collection.
  How did you sustain your writing practice all that time?
  I wrote and I wrote really slowly on the weekends while working full-time and my second husband really encouraged me. He didn’t speak English when we met — he’s French-Canadian. We’re not married anymore. Even before he understood English I would read my work to him and he would comment on the rhythm and the speed. He thought writing was really important as a pursuit.
  Did you finish any other books before For Single Mothers?
  I also wrote a failed novel during this time about my grandfather. It was rejected by about eighty literary agents — many of whom expressed interest and requested to see more, but ultimately didn’t want to represent it. I was getting quite anxious about the fact that I didn’t have a book and I was well past forty. Someone said to me that I should start putting the essays together and shopping them around. First, I went the literary agent route — that didn’t work, so then I just started sending it to competitions. The most important thing is that I didn’t conceive of it as a book for a long, long time and I didn’t feel that I was writing a book.
  Very often I find that an author’s first manuscript isn’t published initially — it’s shelved or the timing isn’t right until years later. It’s encouraging to see that you didn’t just sit down and write this manuscript one day — it was a fourteen-year journey. How many books have you written total?
  There are three others — one I wrote in my 20s, one in my 30s, and one in my 40s. I started For Single Mothers in my 30s and went through to my 50s. The one in my 30s is a series of vignettes and might have been a precursor to this book. I think some of the material in there is related. There’s a lot about language. Sometimes I’ll go through my papers and I’ll find that I wrote the same sentence many years ago.

  Laura Esther Wolfson
  How many languages do you speak? I know this is a layered question because one could be fluent or intermediate — one could read in a language, but not hold a conversation in it.
  It’s really good that you recognize that because how can you say you know a language? It’s infinite. I speak Russian and French fluently and I speak Spanish and Yiddish badly. Plus, of course, English. In my job as a translator at the United Nations I learned Spanish because I was expected to translate documents from Spanish — and they were always vetted afterward by people who knew Spanish really well. I don’t usually tell people that I translate from Spanish because I can’t hold a fluent conversation and they would expect me to.
  You write about translating or interpreting state banquets at the Kremlin, mafia trials, forgotten literary masterpieces, KGB files, and so much more. What’s one job that stands out to you?
  I interpreted for Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was First Lady on a trip to Moscow. She was incredibly tactful, diplomatic, and kind to everybody she met — including me. She spent her days with the wives of the prime minister and the president of Russia who were lifelong political wives. She didn’t flaunt her credentials whatsoever. She ooh’d and aah’d over photographs of their grandchildren. Then there was a banquet at the Kremlin where she was seated next to Yeltsin. The waiters brought out a dish and Yeltsin said, “This is really delicious.” She said, “Oh, what is it?” I was sitting in between them. He said, “it’s lips.” I broke out of my interpreter mode and I said, lips?! He said, “Yes, elk lips,” but in Russian they use the same word for moose and elk. I said moose lips — it turns out that moose are indigenous to North America, so it was probably elk lip soup. He kind of stood over her and made sure she ate it. She was protesting all along the way saying, “oh, I worked in Alaska and I saw moose. They were such nice animals.”
  Do you think translating literature is inherently a political act?
  I think it depends on what you translate. I suppose it is inherently political, not only because it lifts things from oblivion, but also because it brings cultures closer together. Since Trump was elected a lot of people talk about the inherent subversiveness of reading and writing, which I get on an intellectual level, but some part of me thinks we’re just trying to justify doing what we were doing before — not to do more.
  What’s one book you found gratifying to translate?
  I was very proud to translate the book called Stalin’s Secret Pogrom which was about the killing of the majority of Yiddish authors in the Soviet Union. It was a very little known incident and probably the only literary genocide of its kind. I thought it was very important. Although, if I were a German translator and someone had come to me and said, “We’d like you to translate Mien Kampf,” I would have said yes because people need to know what Hitler was saying and thinking.
  I read recently that the Anti-Defamation League released findings from a massive global poll stating only fifty-four percent of people surveyed have ever heard of the Holocaust, and thirty-two percent believe the event was greatly exaggerated or a myth. Why did you choose to write about WWII so strikingly in your book?
  Those numbers are appalling. I didn’t really plan to write about the Holocaust. I went to Lithuania to study Yiddish because I had been studying it already in New York and I was writing a novel about my grandfather. I wasn’t aware how thoroughly the Germans had occupied the Baltic States — Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia — until I went there that time. I didn’t know they had killed ninety percent of the Jews there and that if my grandparents had not left in the early twentieth century, they would have been caught up in that and I would never have been born.
  When I was there, for about a month, there was so much discussion of the Holocaust in the classes and the fieldtrips that we took because the Jewish community had disappeared. We visited villages where there was one Jewish person left who had either been out of town when the Germans came or somebody had hidden them in their attic — so it just happened because of all the stuff that I was hearing. Then the woman that I met, who I call Faina in the book, told me her story.
  Reading about Faina in “The Book of Disaster,” it felt like fate compelled you to tell her family’s Holocaust story. So many fascinating figures and their histories are woven throughout this collection that I began to wonder if it’s because you were an interpreter that the voices around you infused your own experience.
  Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never thought about that. It’s true as an interpreter you get used to listening and repeating what other people say. I think that when you write personal narratives, if you just concentrate on yourself it’s very limiting. Of course lives overlap, so if you write about yourself, you’re going to end up writing about other people. Faina, in particular, clearly wanted her story to be told.
  In “The Bagels in the Snowflake,” bread serves as a mystical connection to Judaism. What’s your relationship to Judaism now?
  I started getting interested in Judaism when I was twenty-seven. I was reading about Passover, which we never celebrated when I was growing up. It said the youngest person at the Seder gets asked the four questions about the meaning of Passover. The reason that the rabbis decided to organize the ceremony that way is because the youngest person is going to pass it down the furthest to the next generation.
  That stopped me cold because it was in the generation before mine that it was lost — it was continued down for millennia and then it stopped in my parents or my grandparents’ generation. My mother was the youngest of thirty first cousins and she had to do the Seder for years. She was very shy and she hated it. She hated having the attention on her and she vowed that she would never put another child through that. So I started reading voraciously.
  I’ve never become a really observant Jew. I think you really have to know the Hebrew texts and it’s very hard to take that up when you’re an adult without devoting yourself to it full-time. If you don’t get the original texts, everything else — that’s like the hearth around which all the rest of Judaism is gathered. So I don’t really feel like doing Jewish cookery or being proud that a lot of Hollywood moguls were Jews — that’s not Judaism to me.
  It makes sense that your connection, your touchstone, to Judaism is language.
  I think the notion of a secular Jew is paradoxical. I think it’s really just a euphemism for someone who’s assimilating and in a couple of generations their kids are going to be celebrating Christmas and will barely know that they had any Jewish ancestors. But that’s how I was raised and there’s only a certain extent to which I can overcome it.
  The year after you were diagnosed with the lung disease Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), you entered the New School MFA program. Did you feel compelled to write about LAM to let other writers know this is just another part of your life?
  I just had my second book rejected by a literary agent because she said she didn’t like medical topics — it’s about many other things as well. It’s such a big part of life. I write about everything and that’s just one of the threads. I got into a Lyft the other night — I was going to participate in a reading downtown and the driver asked me about the oxygen machine. Then he said, “Are you going home now or are you going to the doctor?” And I said, “I’m a writer. I’m going to give a reading of my work. I do go other places.” He said, “Oh. We just want you to get better.” I tweeted about it.
  When I read your work it’s deceptively spare. You put in an enormous amount of hard work so that it reads effortlessly — a noun or an adjective shivers like a struck bell in a sentence. Who are your influences or who do you love to read?
  W. G. Sebald’s not terribly well-known, but those who do know him regard him as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. It’s ironic because I can’t read his work in the original — which gives me a rest, actually. I love Proust. Rebecca West, who wrote Black Lamb Grey Falcon, which is a travelogue written about Yugoslavia in the 30s — very stylish. The Russians: Isaac Babel, Tolstoy. I love Doris Lessing, who’s often just kind of straight realistic fiction, but The Golden Notebook is very innovative. I love James Baldwin’s little known book, No Name in the Street.
  What is it about these authors or their style that draws you in?
  I love the first-person voice and I look back over my reading from when I was young and Little House on the Prairie — [Laura Ingalls Wilder] writes in the third-person, but it’s autobiographical. When I realized at eight- or nine-years-old that she was talking about her own life, I was disappointed that she wasn’t using the first-person. I also asked my mother, why doesn’t she write about people going to the bathroom? Didn’t they go to the bathroom back then? She wrote about everything else! My mother said, well she doesn’t write about every time they take a breath, does she?
  In “Losing the Nobel,” you describe the decision to turn down translation work in order to prioritize writing your own books. You’ve also joked that you’re forging a new genre by writing about projects you didn’t translate. Do you feel the need to choose between the two?
  Many writers don’t need to choose between their own work and translation — they do both. Perhaps because translation has been my day job for decades it feels like a means of procrastinating my own writing. Of course, when I learned that Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize, I regretted turning down the opportunity to translate her books, but I still knew deep down, and not even that deep down, that it wasn’t the right project for me.
  I think that piece is more about the difficulty of writing in obscurity for so long, which made me think I even longed for some other kind of recognition that would, for me, have been a poor substitute. “Losing the Nobel” won the Notting Hill Essay Prize and then became part of the book that won the Iowa Prize. Turning down the translation opportunity not only gave me more time and strength to write, but also led to some unexpected recognition as a writer.
  Do you have a new project in the works?
  The second book I’m writing about is even more personal. It’s called Super Pricy Royal Blue French Lace Bra. I’m struggling with writing about sex and — the first piece in “For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors,” I was really embarrassed to write that part about giving the diaphragm to my sister-in-law. I included it because it was bizarre and a little bit disgusting. For over twenty years I was thinking I have to use that in my writing somewhere. So, in this second book I’m actually writing about … the sex act! Oh, my god! It would be okay, except it’s me engaging in the sex act. I actually digress and say this was really hard for me to write about because there was no overlap when I was growing up about sex and language. It was never talked about.
  Did it give you pause to publish essays about your personal life?
  I’d like to say that while my writing is autobiographical, I don’t feel beholden to the facts because I’m using the materials of my life to create a story. The purpose is not to tell people this is what happened, and I don’t want people to read my work to find out about my life. I want people to read these essays as works of literature, stories. It feels more real to be working with actual materials, but there are points where I embroidered a little bit and I don’t even always remember where those points are and the thing that I’ve written becomes more real than what happened. So I’m not going to get berated by Oprah — like James Frey with A Million Little Pieces — because I’m very upfront about the fact that it’s not my purpose.
  As I’ve said, a lot of different genre designations have been attached to my work and my feeling is the more the merrier. I’m delighted every time someone comes up with a different genre designation. I envy you poets because they don’t ask you whether it’s fact or fiction. The only way I can write is to use my own life.

• Laura Esther Wolfson website - http://lauraestherwolfson.com/

  Laura’s debut essay collection, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, was awarded the 2017 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction and published by the University of Iowa Press in 2018. She is currently working on her second book, entitled Super-Pricey Royal Blue French Lace Bra.
  Her writing has been honored with the 2017 Notting Hill Essay Prize,
  published in leading literary venues on both sides of the Atlantic, and cited in The Best American Essays. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony (2018) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2017). She holds an MFA from the New School and lives in New York City.
  She served for many years as the interpreter for Russian-speaking authors at the PEN World Voices Festival and as a PEN prison writing mentor. She has had a long career as an interpreter and translator, working from Russian, French and Spanish to English.
  She translated Stalin’s Secret Pogrom (Yale University Press, 2001), on the events leading up to the Night of the Murdered Poets. The book went on to win the National Jewish Book Award for Eastern European history.

  Follow her on Twitter at @EstherLaura.
  Read here about her experiences learning Russian and working as a Russian linguist: Laura Esther Wolfson.

Wolfson, Laura Esther: FOR SINGLE MOTHERS WORKING AS TRAIN CONDUCTORS

Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wolfson, Laura Esther FOR SINGLE MOTHERS WORKING AS TRAIN CONDUCTORS Univ. of Iowa (Adult Nonfiction) $19.95 6, 1 ISBN: 978-1-60938-581-1
A translator's command of language belatedly finds her translating her own life.
Wolfson describes herself as working "in a difficult-to-name genre containing generous helpings of the lived, the observed and the overheard...[and a] blurring of distinctions that had long struck me as artificial and unnecessary." In a volume that is more cohesive than a typical essay collection, the pieces flow together like memoir, though an elliptical one, in which the author is "omitting a lot, almost everything, in fact." Yet her writing attests to a remarkable life, one rendered with a remarkable verbal facility. She long supported herself as a translator, primarily of Russian, a language she was inspired to learn in order to read Anna Karenina. She eventually did, but her deeper connection to the language resulted from her marriage to a Russian man, whom she divorced because he resisted having children even more than she wanted them. The book's odd title comes from her husband's insistence that if they were to have a child, they would need "twenty-four-hour day care." Well after she had divorced him and married again, she learned that this was actually an option in Russia, "for single mothers working as train conductors," and thus away from home for days on end. Wolfson subsequently spent years immersing herself in the study of Yiddish as a way of coming to terms with her own identity within a family of mostly nonobservant Jews. Then she suffered a collapsed lung, caused by a disease she couldn't pronounce. It was degenerative and usually fatal, making her pregnancy too great of a risk in her second marriage (which also collapsed). Where essayists often strain to find topics to muse about, this evocatively detailed and richly experienced writing reflects a life with no dearth of material. But as she tells an aspiring writer, "what's important about a book is not so much what happens in it, but how the writer tells it." Wolfson unquestionably tells it well.
An impressive literary debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wolfson, Laura Esther: FOR SINGLE MOTHERS WORKING AS TRAIN CONDUCTORS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375098/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6da433d. Accessed 28 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375098

For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors

Publishers Weekly. 265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors
Laura Esther Wolfson. Univ. of Iowa, $19.95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-60938-581-1
Wolfson debuts with an enjoyable collection that serves as both exploration of and experiment in language, as well as a globe-trotting memoir. The experiences she relates include the all-too-relatable one of working mundane jobs that fall far beneath expectations, the comical interactions one has communicating in a foreign language, and the difficulties of living with a serious illness. Discussing multilingual relationships, she describes the pleasure she takes in being able to "engage publicly in secret exchanges of all kinds," as she does with her Russian-speaking first husband in the New York City subway. Wolfson's prose is beautiful and evocative of her travels; of Montmartre she writes: "Scraps of time and history become trapped in the interstices of the alleys and buildings, and slowly they yield up their fragrance." Her reflections upon personal topics, including her divorce and her battle with a degenerative lung disease, articulate how people cope with unforeseen struggles and strike a balance of provoking thought but not overwhelming readers. Fans of the essay form, travel-writing, or memoir, as well as general audiences, will be equally pleased. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555648/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8c25d56a. Accessed 28 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555648

• Word Gathering
  http://www.wordgathering.com/issue46/reviews/wolfson.html
  Word count: 1629

  Book Review: For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors (Laura Esther Wolfson)
  Reviewed by Anne Kaier
  Last summer, sitting in a spacious reading room in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I overheard a librarian talking to an impatient male customer. In that friendly but brisk way of librarians, she told him, "I'll get it for you in two minutes' time." She didn't say "in two minutes," as an American would. That slight difference shocked me out of my sense of being at ease in Britain. I've spent a lot of time in Oxford, lived there once for two years. Normally, after even a few weeks in England, my mind becomes used to the lingo. It even slides into my head and into my speech. But this morning, the slight difference in the ordinary phrase tore at the seamless mesh of language that normally surrounds me in the UK. That's not the right phrase, I thought. Then I realized that for the British speaker, it was the right phrase, but I am not British; I am an American and say it differently.

  I thought of this incident when reading Laura Esther Wolfson's collection of essays, which won the Iowa Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. She writes with great insight about her career as a translator and interpreter of Russian into English—a much more complicated dance than my simple steps from American English to British and back again. But Wolfson's great theme is displacement, a sense of not quite fitting into the places or with the people she loves—and often leaves.

  Many of the essays circle around her two marriages, first to a young Russian she met when she was living and working in Russia near the end of the Cold War.They ultimately moved to the States where they spoke Russian—not English—together. But their ways of communicating, linguistically and emotionally, ultimately got out of synch. Her second marriage also foundered and in a searching essay she considers the nature of divorce in her family. Most of her relatives have had long, steady marriages. In a striking metaphor which is typical of her writing, she speaks of herself as feeling tiny in an old growth forest of solid marriages. Then she brings in memories of her father's first wife, Kate, whom he divorced before her parents got together. Normally, Kate is seen from her father's point of view as a mistake he got over, but Wolfson finds herself looking at this story from the woman's perspective. Kate remarried several times and the writer sees this as a victory of hope and bravery over experience. In resurrecting Kate, Wolfson finds a way to weave herself back into her family.

  Some of the most memorable essays tell about Wolfson's search for ways to fit into the Jewish culture she knew very little about as the child of unobservant parents. As an adult, Wolfson, an accomplished linguist, tried to learn Yiddish, even participating in a Yiddish language course in Lithuania, her ancestral homeland. However, her conversational Yiddish is not good—again making her feel how difficult it is for her to become part of that which she loves.

  "But despite my years of classes and my love for the language, for the way the very sound of it renders me instantly whole, for a time, while making me recognize just how fractured I am and helping me forgive myself for that because, given the dislocations of Jewish history, what could be more natural than to be fractured?—despite all of that my conversational Yiddish remains lousy."

  This is elegant writing, piercing, insightful. Wolfson is willing to grapple with the contradictions of her experience.

  Her most sustained reflections on her rare lung condition come in an essay called "Climbing Montmartre." In Paris, she was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis or LAM for short. She jokes that she can't remember how to spell it, not surprisingly. It's a degenerative disease. In a vivid scene in her French doctor's office, Wolfson takes us into the moment when she finds out what is wrong with her and what her future may be.

  "I was sitting across from my surgeon. Call her Chantal Bonmot. She looked to be just a few years my senior…with creamy, freckled skin, dark blue eyeliner, and glossy dark blond hair held back with a black velvet headband." The doctor ticks off the diagnosis and symptoms, shortness of breath and collapsed lungs, with typical French sangfroid. Wolfson is trying to write all this down, assimilate it, the way you do in doctors' offices. She asks, "Is that all?"

  'Oh, and perhaps you'll need une greffe de poumons.'

  An unfamiliar word reminded me we were speaking French.
  'Greffe? What is that?'

  'It means you'll have to get a new pair of lungs,' she said. I admired her ease in defining the word. I've spent enough time learning languages to know that most people are hopeless at explaining difficult words to foreigners.

  'Une greffe de poumons? ' I mastered my new word immediately, right down to the gender.

  'Oh really,' she said, 'it's no big deal. It wouldn't be for another fifteen or twenty years. And many women with this condition don't live long enough to need one.'
  'Twenty years!' My exclamation overlapped with her last words, nearly erasing them. 'Mais ca passe vite!' (That goes by quickly!)"

  This scene is emblematic of Wolfson's strengths. I loved her clear understanding of how we so often react in a stressful moment—she's aware of the French woman's facility with language and concentrates on that, as we so often concentrate on what must, in retrospect, be seen as a side issue when we are in this kind of highly stressful and worrying situation. I also admired the sharp characterization of the French doctor, down to the ironic pseudonym, Bonmot, meaning"good word." Hardly the physician's strength when she so casually intimates that Wolfson has only twenty years to live. Yet I wanted a great deal more here. What did Wolfson feel in this scene? For heaven's sake, she's just learned she may have only twenty years to live. She's still a relatively young woman. Of course, the sudden outburst of "That goes by quickly" gives us a clue. She's shocked, outraged. But surely in retrospect, thinking about this encounter, she had more and more varied responses to her lung condition and her prognosis. What did she think when she got home? What did she go through, emotionally, before she determined to handle her situation in a combination of acceptance and denial—spiked, perhaps, with motivating anger? Again, metaphor—linked to action—gives us a clue. She titles the essay "Climbing Montmartre." I'm not surprised that climbing, even in the face of difficulty, is her response. She scales the steep hill, even when she is short of breath, just as she did when she was younger and healthier. But I wanted to be with her right after that French doctor told her what might be in store for her. Why did she decide to go on laboring up the highest hill in town? What emotions led her to it? What combination of anger, fear, and determination to continue to enjoy what she loved spurred her on? I wanted her to give me a scene showing the drama of her inward thoughts and feelings. Spell it out for me. Instead she offers us a vivid description of the shops, cabarets, and history of Montmartre—full of intriguing bits of information about Picasso and Eric Satie. She follows the tour with this reflection: "If only I could take some of those wisps of time that linger in the alleys and crevices of Montmartre and tack them on to the end of my life." It's a poignant remark, typically elusive. But it's not what I want to know.
  It's important to realize that her book is a collection of linked essays, not a single, tightly woven memoir. The individual essays can be read apart from each other. However, they work more powerfully together, read one after the other, from the beginning to the end of the book. That way you get a more immediate impression of the way Wolfson circles and revisits moments in her life—her marriages, her divorces, the different stages of her career as interpreter and translator, her lung condition. The collection's fractured chronology works to underscore her displacement theme. The reader, too, feels displaced—surely a conscious technique in a writer this skilled. The collection is held together by Wolfson's voice—probing, funny, intelligent, distinctly her own. Yet despite two readings of the essays, in the end, I had only a slippery sense of who she was—as if she could not look directly in the mirror and tell us what she sees there. It's as if her sense of dislocation extends to being somewhat a stranger to herself—and aren't we all?
  Title: For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors
  Editor: Laura Esther Wolfson
  Publisher: University of Iowa Press
  Publication Date: 2018

  Anne Kaier's essays have appeared in the New York Times, 1966journal, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. "Maple Lane" was mentioned on the list of Notables in the 2014 edition of Best American Essays. Her memoir, Home with Henry, is out from PS Books. Her poetry appears in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disabiilty. She was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Fall 2017. More at www.annekaier.com.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/for-single-mothers-working-as-train-conductors/
  Word count: 359

  For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors
  Laura Esther Wolfson
  University of Iowa Press (Jun 1, 2018)
  Softcover $19.95 (144pp)
  978-1-60938-581-1
  Laura Wolfson worked, traveled, and eventually married in the Soviet Union toward the end of the Cold War. Despite being fluent in Russian, she struggled to understand her Russian spouse’s insistence that having children would require twenty-four-hour childcare. Eventually, this statement is revealed as a reference to the childcare provided by the Soviet state for single mothers working as train conductors. But her spouse’s mother wasn’t one. After their childless marriage and divorce, his statement lingers, a translation without a context and the first of many instances in Wolfson’s For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors where her desire for language to be at the root of everything and the limitations of that same vehicle are revealed.
  Wielding a diarist’s tone of complete, poignant honesty, there’s an undeniable gravitas in Wolfson’s story. She makes a formidable offering of her life, traversing two marriages, sickness and health, multiple countries, several languages, and a career in translation. Her foreign language skills give her access to experiences that are and aren’t her own, and the results of this arrangement play out in interesting ways across the memoir.
  The memoir’s chronology is organically rough and balances time’s forward march with retrospective meaning-making, but Wolfson’s greatest skill is as a stylist. Throughout, her prose is a constant delight; melancholic, it dances between Proustian perambulations and stark, terse phrases with ease. The transit between these polarities is circuitous and unhurried, with remarkable turns of phrase scattered high and low.
  At one point, Wolfson surmises, “Writing arises from loss; it aims to fashion something to fill the charred void that is one of the late phases of suffering, to erect on a parched plot of pain an edifice of meaning, or of beauty.” A disconnect among connections, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors fashions beauty from all the singular losses of Wolfson’s many parts.
  Reviewed by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
  July/August 2018