Blueprints: Falvey Library

Contents:  November 2002
 

• Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

• Joe Lucia, Librarian Poet

• Know what you want? "Borrow Direct" might be able to help

• Falvey's "new" Rare Book Room is now open every weekday

• IMS Graphic artist featured in Moore College of Art's "Cards of Art" project

• Also contributing to this issue...

by Susan Markley

Falvey Library's Distinguished Lecture Series recently presented a rare glimpse of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a young girl who survived the concentration camps.  Ruth Kluger, Ph.D., introduced the audience to a child's view of a life full of fear and death, but also a life of survival and hope as she read excerpts from her memoir, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered  (Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001).

Joseph Lucia, University librarian, introduces Ruth Kluger.

In the Vienna of 1938, Kluger was a 7-year-old girl from a well-educated, upper middle-class Jewish family. While most of Austria celebrated their annexation by Nazi Germany, the Jewish population realized all too quickly that their way of life was ending. Although anti-Semitic restrictions were imposed on the Jewish population and daily humiliations increased, Kluger was still innocent enough to believe that the Jewish children in her school were really considered "special."  They were excused from practicing the Nazi salute in class and were allowed to work on any arts and crafts projects they chose rather than cutting out Nazi symbols like the rest of the class.
 

By 1940, Kluger and her family fully realized the extent of the Nazi menace, but it was too late. Her father had already fled the city, leaving behind his wife and children who were soon caught up in a final roundup of Jews. Kluger and her mother began an odyssey through a succession of concentration camps.

While her mother, in total desperation, considered suicide for them both by flinging themselves against the electrified barbwire, Kluger, in her youthful optimism, wanted only to live and to grow up to be a woman. She never doubted that the Allies would eventually win the war.
 

In February 1945, as Russian troops advanced, Kluger and her mother were evacuated from their camp. While participating in one of the final death marches of the war, they managed to escape. Posing as German refugees with false identity papers wangled from a Protestant minister, mother and daughter managed to survive and find  work in a Bavarian town. As the war came to an end and the Allied troops approached, Kluger remembers unbelievable happiness and relief, in stark contrast to the German townspeople who were filled with dread and sorrow.

While the euphoria of joy during the summer of 1945 produced some of her happiest childhood memories, the following years of adjustment to living in America were some of her most difficult as she reflected on her past experiences. Her sense of well-being was often overshadowed by anger at her father for abandoning the family in Vienna, guilt over the death of her brother in the camps, a troubled relationship with an admittedly difficult mother, and the usual growing pains associated with emerging womanhood.

Responding to questions from the audience, Kluger admitted that some experiences from the camps produced positive results, such as a renewed sense of her Jewish identity. In her book, she wrote that Theresienstadt, where she and her mother were first imprisoned, was "where I became a Jew."

Her book notes that the teenage socialists and Zionist leaders of the children's barracks changed her from an "outcast" into a "social animal." She also wrote that "the camps were a unique experience for each of us, but they also constituted a group experience."  When asked why she refuses to return to visit the camps, she answered that turning the camps into museums only makes these places "more manageable, monolithic experiences where there are no individuals, only victims."
 

As the first speaker for the Distinguished Lecture Series this semester, Ruth Kluger proved to be an excellent choice as she brought to the audience a stark but moving story that showed the resilience of the human spirit under the worst of conditions.
 

by Teresa Bowden

On October 16 the VQI Enhancement Team of Falvey Library invited the new University librarian, Joe Lucia, to a brown bag lunch to speak to the library staff -- not on work issues, but to talk about his experiences as a poet who has been published in a variety of publications. The event was extremely well attended, and the staff appreciated the opportunity to see another side of their new director.

Joe began with an introduction providing a background to his work, where he included Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson among his formative influences. He also noted the tension in his writing between narrative, confessional poems and more experimental verse, making it difficult to place him in the "landscape of contemporary American poetry."

Joe then read several of his poems from his current manuscript, allowing the audience to feel the emotions behind his writing. His offerings ranged from narratives of personal events or moments to grappling with questions about life and the world around us. Two themes that emerged were fatherhood and the artistry of the spoken language. Here is a sample of his work: 

Moving About at 4 a.m.

For Maria

           We feel the crests and troughs of his sleep,

            the small waves that ease us.

            We ride them to the deep hour when he stirs

            and his cry enters our dreams, changing them.

            I wake quickly and walk naked

            down the unlit hall to his room.

            It's hard, at first, to be roused this way

            but slowly this rising becomes another

            gift of night, like the stars and the cool

            shimmer of moon through the windows.

            He grows alert and greets me with a shout

            I understand but, like him, have no words for.

            I lift his eight-month body and he smiles,

            teaching me the joy of these hours

            that break old habits, that reveal

            a world where the restless face their needs.

            You come down the hall to the bathroom

            and I hear your feet on the cold tile

            as I diaper him.  He is warm and strong

            under my hands, and morning hungry

            though it's three hours to dawn.

            You're back in bed before I carry him

            through the dark.  His quick, curious hands

            swim in the cool air to his mother's sweet flesh.

            He's heavy in our sheets as he sucks

            at your breast and slips away again

            to a place where vowel sounds and slow rhythms

            speak to us of the hope we have been given,

            this pure, feeding body to which we must answer
 

            with all of our lives.

Staff rarely see their administrators wearing the other "hats" of their lives, so this was a unique and wonderful opportunity for everyone to get to know Joe on a new level. The library staff greatly appreciated his willingness to share his gift with us.

Teresa Bowden is a reference librarian  and a co-leader of the Falvey VQI Enhancement Team. 

By Merrill Stein

Join 340,000 students, faculty, and staff members, at some 35 private and public college and university libraries, in using a consortial direct borrowing service, also known as remote circulation. A benefit of Falvey Memorial Library's membership in the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium (PALCI), the service dubbed "Borrow Direct"  allows patrons to initiate their own online requests to obtain books from participating Pennsylvania institutions, including the Tri-Colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr), the University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Lehigh University and Temple University.  Additional institutions are added periodically. 

PALCI makes the online catalogs of these institutions accessible by a _common interface so that all appear as one online catalog instead of many.  The borrow direct service is available for borrowing books not currently owned by the Falvey Memorial Library and for borrowing books currently checked out or otherwise unavailable at Falvey.  Member institutions may restrict the length of loan or types of books that can be lent.  The service is currently not available for requesting journals or photocopies of journal articles.

To date, nearly 90,000 PALCI requests have been transacted with a 92% fill rate.  The average date of publication in these requests was 1969 with the median date of publication being 1995. Out-of-print books accounted for 28% of system requests while 18% of the requests were for books published outside the United States.

The service may be accessed when searching VUCat  by clicking the "Borrow Direct" tab at the top of the screen, or see the description in the "How Do I..." section of the Library homepage. Once connected to the PALCI site, patrons enter the 16-digit number on the front of their Villanova WildCard, locate a desired item, enter their e-mail address and submit the request. The PALCI system will choose the best lender from the list of available libraries and update patrons via e-mail about the status of their request. The status of a request can be checked online at anytime by visiting the same address used to enter the request. Books received through this service are charged out from and returned to the Falvey Memorial Library circulation desk.

Traditional interlibrary loan services are still available in the library or online through the Request Forms link at the bottom of the Llibrary home page. Feel free to use both loan services to meet your research needs.

(Information for this article was obtained from the PALCI web site at www.Lehigh.EDU/~inpalci/ and from "Special Report: Interlibrary Loan," Library Systems, vol. 22, no. 10, p. 6.) 

Merrill Stein is head of the Access Services department.

by Bente Polites

Falvey Library is pleased to announce that the renovated Special Collections Room on the second floor of the library is now open to the Villanova community and general research public on a limited basis during the semester. In an attempt to accommodate class schedules, Special Collections will generally be open Monday, Thursday and Friday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Students, faculty and staff members are invited to visit and see the renovated Special Collections Room, and we hope that you will find the new surroundings conducive to your research.

Most recently, users of Special Collections studied illustrations from 19th cent. world exhibitions, illustrations of Jack. B. Yeats, incunabula editions of Saint Augustine, information about Irish participation in the American Civil War, American Gift Books, Irish-American history and early Irish manuscripts.

Tom Wirth, a graduate student in the history department, does research in Special Collections.

Thanks to the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kolmer, a remodeling of the Rare Book Room in 2000 included the installation of a separate heating and air conditioning system,  new carpeting and shelving. The room was also equipped with attractive lighting fixtures and four reader's chairs from the furniture maker Thos. Moser.

Previously, Falvey Library's collection of rare books was stored on the fifth floor of Old Falvey where they were subject to huge fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity. These conditions contribute significantly to the breakdown of materials and resulted in brittle paper, warped covers on books and flaking ink, not to mention mold growth and insect activity.

After the renovation was completed, the move of the 10,000 volume collection was planned and executed with the assistance of many library staff members. We are happy to know that these valuable books now are stored in much improved conditions that will assure their availability to the Villanova community and to visiting scholars for many years to come.

A celestial globe made by the Venetian cartographer and Franciscan friar Vincenzo Coronelli in 1696.

With these improved environmental conditions and added security measures, we were also able to exhibit two rare globes that belong to Villanova University's art collection. The two globes, a terrestrial and a celestial globe, were made by the Venetian cartographer and Franciscan friar Vincenzo Coronelli in 1696. A librarian will be available to provide assistance in using Special Collections material during the new  hours and the Special Collections resources are searchable in VUCat. Computer-network connections are also available in the room. For more information and selected finding aids, see the Special Collections homepage: http://www.library.villanova.edu/services/depts/speccoll/scgenifo.htm

For additional times and information or to make an appointment, please call 610-519-5182 or inquire at the Reference Desk.

Bente Polites is Special Collections / reference librarian.
 

Donna Blaszkowski from Instructional Media Services' Graphics has had her design accepted for the Moore College of Art Alumnae Project 2002:  "Cards of Art." This year's effort involved the creation of four unique decks of regulation playing cards with art submitted by Moore alumna.

Donna's design, "The King of Spades," features a paint and ink underwater scene with King Neptune and fish representing the required symbols to identify the card. Hers was one of 6 selected for color publication in the recent MOOREnews (Issue XIII).    Proceeds of the Cards of Art project benefited the new Moore "Art Shop" grand opening on their Philadelphia campus in October. The participants were recognized and honored for their work.

     

Also contributing to this issue of Blueprints: Bernadette Dierkes, Laura Hutelmyer, Jacqueline Mirabile, Judy Olsen and Sue Ottignon; photography by Lorraine Williams, Bernadette Dierkes and Laura Hutelmyer.