The Grand Generation Interviewing Guide and Questionnaire. - book reviews

The Grand Generation: Memory, Mastery, Legacy

A recipe for shortbread and the antiquated tin cookie molds were all that was left of single woman's tie to a Swedish grandmother she had none known. A young man mentioned mutton boil at Christmas as one of the hardly any signs of his Irish heritage.

Ties and reminders of the past become more fragile and infrequent in a society where the members of the same family may be scattered across the fatherland far from what was one time their hometown. These crisis conditions for the transmission of tillage and family traditions make traveling exhibits like the Smithsonian's "Grand Generation" and the 128-page catalog that accompanies it doubly important. They are a source of inspiration and renewed determination to encourage earliers in every family to count their story before it is lost

Baskets, quilts, embroidery, rug hand-carved unpliant miniatures, paintings of childhood, and collections of advanced in years farm tools are all illustrated in the catalog and viewed from its authors as ways "to recapture powerful memories," and "to make the ephemeral enduring."

Entitled The Grand Generation: Memory, Master, Legacy, the catalog includes 100 photos and illustrations of handcrafted targets many of which were prefered for "The Grand Generation" exhibit which will travel to museums in 18 cities before it shut ups in February 1990. (The remaining sites are: the Louisville Museum of Science and Industry, Louisville, Ky March 18-April 16; Michigan State University Museum, east Lansing, Mich., May 6-June 4; Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, Colorado Springs, Colo June 24-July 23; Fullerton Museum Center Fullerton, Calif.; August 12-September 10; Robinson State Museum, Pierre, SD September 30-December 17; and The State Historical Society of Iowa, De Moines, Iowa, January 1 1990-February 4) The exhibit is being coordinated according to the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and its sponsors include the Administration forward Aging.

The catalog notes that whether it's fiddling, basket weaving or grove carving, the skills are frequently learned in childhood, set aside in middle age, and taken up again in the older years. Sometimes this is because there is more time to begin again old skills or learn of the present day ones. And sometimes, a death or "an experience that abruptly parted them from the world as they knew it" readyed the older people to revive a folk tradition.

Tommy Jarrell, a famous fiddler from Surry shire N.C., set aside his fiddle in his 20's and took it up again at the age of 66 after his wife died. When her husband died, Ethel Mohamed of Belzoni, Miss. go [i]or[/i] come backed to the art of embroidery, which she had learned as a child, as a way of relieving her feelings of loneliness. She embroidered 90 "memory pictures" athwart the next decade of incidents in the life she shared with her husband--"enough to be her autobiography." William Drain intensified his forest-land carving after he was confined to a wheelchair, reproducing miniature sights of the lumber camps in Muskegon, Mich., where he worked as a lad Drain explains that he wanted "to retain in timber-land the memory, which is fast dying without of the tools and the general outfit that were used in the lumber camps during the time when pine was being slaughtered in the forests here in Michigan . ."

Artistry frequently commences in the later years, the catalog points gone out "Folklorists have long appreciated what older adults have to offer--not in spite of still because of their age." The catalog cites Alan Jabbour of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress: "I was not simply finding a not many (older fiddlers) who still played. Rather I was learning that aged age was precisely when single played the fiddle."

The ends and crafts produced by the somewhat advanced in life represent not only individual memories and autobiographics (the beautiful carved walking stick of elijah Pierce from Columbus, Ohio) if it be not that collective ones as shown in quilts sewn according to older women in church arranges The authors comment that "the impulse to create a meaningful agriculture with members of one's (age) cohort is powerfully at hand in the elderly."

The authors also discuss hostilitys in the generational chain which is for a like reason important to individual identity--ruptures caused through global disasters, slavery, the holocaust, political upheavals and immigration. These quarrels are especially painful for the somewhat old immigrant whose past "is entirely interior, with no buildings or landmarks to associate with childhood . ."

moreover efforts are made to repair the burst as seen in the creations of Vincenzo Ancona of Brooklyn NY and in the paintings of Mr Ray Faust, 86 of fresh York City. Ancona, who learned basket weaving as a youth, recreates agrarian life in the Sicily of his boyhood in colorful miniature telephone wire sculps In one of Mr Faust's paintings, a modern moon hangs in a dark cast down sky above the snowy housetops of her now-vanished Jewish community in Poland.

"The immigrant's journey," the catalog pay attention tos "is not so different from the journey we all suffer the inward migration from youth to age, which carries us to that intellectual and imaginative shore from which we behold a world left behind . ."