READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION
Upon landing at Ellis Island in 1907, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz discover their son Reuven is missing. The child is never found, and decades later, Esther becomes convinced that the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh is her lost boy. Esther’s manic obsession spirals out of control, leaving far—reaching effects on the entire Lipshitz lineage for decades to come. In present-day New York City, we meet T Cooper—the last living Lipshitz—who struggles to make sense of all that came before him, and the legacy he might leave behind as well.
PRAISE
“It’s refreshing to read a novel that makes a veritable game of its storylines. The book is further enhanced by Cooper’s considerable descriptive powers, which bring to life such varied tableaus as a Russian pogrom, a Lower East Side gang fight and a Lindbergh rally in Oklahoma City. It is the story of Esther that resonates long after the book has been closed.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“T Cooper travels an enormous distance in this new novel, from Russian pogrom to middle–class tract living in Texas. This is a fresh, funky, astutely observed and frankly different version of the immigrant story, making the most of lost and found identity in the mix of modern America.”

—Amy Bloom

“A glorious identity–bending, multigenerational epic….Cooper’s storytelling skills are phenomenal. She effortlessly shifts perspectives, [and] throughout, her experiments are divine: They serve to make this peculiar family feel real.”

—Time Out New York

“Cooper has an affinity for creative liberties, even in anything–goes 21st–century fiction, liberties of a stunning sort. This is not another generic everyday family saga, not when it starts in the Russian pogroms, jogs past Charles Lindbergh and closes with a guy who impersonates rapper Eminem at bar mitzvahs.”

—Seattle Post–Intelligencer

“Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes is a brave novel of poignancy, reverberations and ingenuity.”

—David Mitchell

“The Lipshitz story is brilliant, and the post–modern coda…offers up a surprising conclusion.”

—Texas Monthly

T Cooper is the author of the novel Some of the Parts (2002), and editor of the short story collectionFictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (2006). T’s writing has appeared inThe New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, and Out, among several other publications and anthologies. T holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and lives in New York City. Visit the author’s website at www.t–cooper.com. If your book club, class, or library reading program would like to discuss Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, T Cooper is often available to speak with groups in person, via conference call, or online. For more information, please e–mail: bookclubs@t–cooper.com.

I wanted to tell the story of an immigrant family starting a life in America—but with a twist. What if it all goes awry, literally the moment the family steps off the gangplank onto Ellis Island, as it did with my family when they immigrated here? (My grandmother’s brother was lost and never found or heard from again.) I also wanted to play with the universal question of, “Where did I come from?” and have a modern–day character trying to answer that simple, yet equally impossible query. I wanted to posit whether one even can tell the “true” story of a family or history. What gets passed down, why, and how does it get altered from the original event?

You chose two wildly different narrative voices through which to tell this story.

Yes, I did. For me the first part of the book does not exist without the second, and the second does not exist without the first. The narrative choice I made was about bringing history into the present, acknowledging that to some extent, we are versions of our histories: no matter how far you run, no matter how seemingly distant you appear from your heritage, there it is, and there you are. The character T Cooper is totally estranged from his family, his only seeming connection to his heritage is that he performs as Eminem at rich kids’ bar and bat mitzvahs. And yet, he’s drawn back into his family history, drawn into attempting to tell the story and figure out why he is the way he is: angry, anxious, and afraid that everything will be taken away—even when life appears otherwise so stable.

As for the structural shift, it was very much intended as a physical, textual, and emotional reminder of the radical shift inherent in immigration: that utter disorientation of stepping off a ship onto a foreign land after months of grueling travel, years of oppression or poverty or whatever, and then immediately setting about absorbing into the fabric of a country that is not one’s own.

How do the notions of fiction and nonfiction play into your writing?

The blurry line between fact and fiction fascinates me, as do the gray areas between binaries such as American/un–American, immigrant/native, male/female, Jewish/Gentile, black/white, etc. I try to explore the places and identities that exist somewhere between these (and other) extremes in my work.

Where did your interest in Charles Lindbergh begin?

I’ve always been interested in aviation and periods of history where massive leaps in industry and engineering have occurred. Lindbergh’s story and 1927 flight in particular have always intrigued me. When I read A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize winning Lindbergh biography in 1999, it dawned on me how much Lindbergh’s story encapsulates the story of the 20th century in America: his catapulting to fame and glory, the media’s obsession with personal details of his family life, the loss of his son, and finally, the crash–and–burn downfall and self–imposed exile to Europe. It hit me while reading that book: why not tell the story of this Jewish immigrant family against the backdrop of the Lindberghs’?

He was one of the first true “sons” of America with whom the world fell in love—those sparkling blue eyes and blond hair, and handsome, chiseled face depicted in photographs and moving images that were flooding people’s consciousness in a way previously unheard–of. I think Lindbergh became almost a blank screen of quintessential, iconic American–ness upon which people projected their hopes and dreams and desires. They saw what they wanted to see in themselves, and that’s why it was such a blow when he started being such an outspoken isolationist before WWII—not to mention an admirer of the Nazi party.

What about Eminem? What draws you to him?

In some ways, Eminem is a modern manifestation of Charles Lindbergh—a blond–haired, blue eyed, middle–American success story. Only of course with Eminem, he is acutely aware of the stereotype and mines it. Eminem has made an entire career of weaving fiction from the facts of his life, going back and forth between fact and fiction, and employing different personas to bridge the gaps between them. Beyond my being a fan of Eminem’s skills as a lyricist and rapper, his self–conscious performance of the “angry blonde” (with a soft–center) fit intrinsically into the historical story I was telling—but brought some of the themes I was working with into the 21st century.

Hip–hop artists often create exaggerated personas for themselves, weaving tales about versions of themselves who have more money, more sex, more women, and participate in more violence and criminal activity than they really do. In “Slim Shady,” Eminem has created an extreme persona for himself so that he can rap about stuff he never could as his real self, Marshall Mathers. Hip–hop culture has essentially given Eminem a “pass” to be part of what is predominantly a black musical tradition, and he takes this acceptance seriously. But Eminem also knows that he is as popular as he is not only because black hip–hop culture has accepted him, but also because he is white and looks more similar to the suburban white kids hanging out in the malls of middle America and driving sales of his records. Like Eminem, the T Cooper character also creates a persona for himself, passing as something he’s not—while he’s simultaneously drawn into the story of his family members who were also trying to pass and assimilate into a culture that was not their own.

What resources did you find most helpful while researching this novel, or what might be interesting further reading?

A number of books were helpful in my research. For a fascinating look at the 20th century through one man’s life, I do recommend A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh (Berkeley, 1999). I also really relied upon both Lindbergh’s and his wife’s writings, including War Within and Without; Diaries and Letters, 1939–1944 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), and We by Charles Lindbergh (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927). For turn–of–the–century tenement life in Manhattan, I immersed myself in Jacob Riis’s classic How the Other Half Lives (Penguin Books, 1997 edition; but originally published in 1890). I also recommend Ellis Island Interviews by Peter Morton Coan (Facts on File, 1997), and the beautifulEllis Island: Gateway to the American Dream by Pamela Reeves (Dorset Press, 1991). For a thorough survey of the Galveston Movement and Jewish life in Texas, I relied upon Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West by Harriet and Fred Rochlin (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) and Galveston: Ellis Island of the West by Bernard Marinbac (SUNY Albany Press, 1983).Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom by Edward H. Judge (NYU Press, 1992) was invaluable to my understanding of pogroms and Jewish life in tsarist Russia; and if you haven’t gotten enough of the Real Slim Shady, tryWhatever You Say I Am: the Life and Times of Eminem by Anthony Bozza (Crown, 2003). For a more complete list, a full biography appears at the end of my novel.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on my third novel, set in an entirely different era and place—neither of which I’m going to disclose at this point, in the event somebody decides to hold me to it.