Books: A Family Affair

I feel myself growing more and more passionate about books, about publishing books, about writing books myself, and about helping others craft powerful and moving narratives. No doubt it’s a function of age, trying to cram more significance into fewer days. But I’ve come to realize that I’ve always been surrounded by writers and their books, and surely that’s left an imprint. Adolescent summers with my grandmother on Boston’s North Shore put me in a bedroom walled by books. This remains an indelible memory. Upon arrival my habit was always, year after year, to peruse the shelves, finger the spines, study the titles, see which piqued my interest compared to the previous summer. Perhaps I was indexing my intellectual growth in some way. The order of the books never changed on the shelf, however, unless I did it myself, a private time capsule for next year. The centerpiece of that collection, a complete run of Harvard’s fabled set of classics, “The Five Foot Shelf of Books,” now sits on my shelf. Even now I often lose myself in daydreams staring at my own bookshelves. Entering the home of a new acquaintance, I always make a direct run to the bookshelves, if there are any.

It is the writers with whom I have always been surrounded, however, who have left the biggest mark.

Writing has been a family affair. Start with the twins, David Levy and Charles Lee. Charles, who changed his last name early in his career to avoid the complications of antisemitism, was my maternal grandfather. Two minutes older than his brother, my great uncle David, and thus his mother’s favorite, Charles started out in the newspaper business, became a book review editor for Boston and Philadelphia papers, then took a PhD in American literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He eventually became an associate dean at Penn, a well-known radio and TV personality and charming man-about-town in Philadelphia. Along the way he produced a number of books including his published dissertation, The Hidden Public, which was an early investigation of the Book of the Month Club as an avatar of middle-class literary tastes. He produced several short story anthologies, at least one work of fiction (the novelization of the Ginger Rogers vehicle, Weekend at the Waldorf), and other miscellaneous pieces. It was as a poet and composer of light verse, however, which probably carries his greatest significance, at least for me. Every year at Christmas he produced much-coveted chapbooks for friends and family, most of which were later collected in published hardback form. “Come to Philadelphia,” went one of his lyrics, “and I will ring the bellferya.” Light stuff, but well rendered and offered with love.
 
I still recall my favorite of his in this vein, a tribute to the 1980 World Series winning Philadelphia Phillies:

From Tinker to Evers to Chance,
The line was F. P. A.’s.
But lifting a later lance,
I honor the double plays,
The catches, the pivots, the throws,
From Bowa, to Trillo, to Rose.

​He left a legacy of hundreds like these: light verse, witty doggerel, a few sonnets. Some, like “The Wrestlers,” had real literary merit. I taught that one to my son during Covid-induced homeschooling. Grandpa also wrote a  piece in anguish over losing his daughter, my mother, to cancer in 1977. “The Hunters,” it was called. I did not teach that one.
 
His younger-twin-by-a-minute, David, earned much the greater national reputation, though not quite as a writer. David started his career during the New Deal in the US Treasury. He moved from there to the advertising firm Young & Rubicam, working on accounts in the fledgling television industry. Part of his portfolio was to vet performers on behalf of advertisers lest unsavory political (i.e., communist) ties mar the production’s reputation. David sidled easily into television proper from Y&R, becoming head of programming for NBC in the late 1950s. He was responsible for bringing Bonanza to the air. Let go under mysterious circumstances in the early 1960s, David formed his own production company. His most enduring legacy was the conception that a popular one-panel cartoon that regularly featured in The New Yorker could be fashioned into a popular sitcom. Thus The Addams Family was born. Later in his career he published a few potboiling novels about the television industry; I have vague recollections of his paperbacks prominently displayed in my childhood home.
 
David’s son, Lance, my cousin, has certainly eclipsed his father in his writing career. Lance is an exceptional poet, playwright, and novelist (check him out here: Lance Lee Author.) He’s also written several highly regarded books on screen- and stage-writing craft. My favorite of Lance’s works is his memoir, Family Matters (LWL Books; 2022), an account of his relationship with his father and the latter’s mercurial career. David, the much-despised younger twin, could never quite shake a latent animosity that he carried with him his whole life, exacerbated by a mother (my great-grandmother, Lilly Levy) whose epic acidity and turgid self-consideration is a wonder to behold on the page. True story: Lilly accompanied David on his honeymoon, and tried to break up the marriage in favor of another shipmate whom Lilly favored over her brand new daughter-in-law. Lance needs to turn her into a screen character.
 
The family tradition remains unbroken. Rivaling Lance for reach, mastery of genre, and mounting literary reputation is my kid sister, Rachel Louise Snyder (check her out at www.globalgrit.com.) Rachel cut her journalistic teeth in the harried world of free-lancing, collecting bylines in the Chicago Tribune, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and other ladies’ periodicals. She reported major stories for American Heritage and The New Republic before her big break, a publishing contract with Norton for her first book, Fugitive Denim. A deeply reported account of the global textile industry, Rachel’s book is ostensibly a biography of your blue jeans, taking readers from the cotton fields of Azerbaijan, to the factories of Cambodia, to the design boutiques in Milan, to the retail shelves in San Francisco.
 
For most writers that would be accomplishment enough. Rachel’s next book was a novel, What We’ve Lost is Nothing, in which she mines our suburban upbringing, and the dark prejudices and paranoia that often lay undisturbed therein, for a truly innovative and gripping narrative tale. Still, though, only prelude.
 
Rachel returned to the world of non-fiction for her third book, the celebrated and highly acclaimed No Visible Bruises, an expose into the troubling world of domestic violence. Stoically focused, Rachel probes the phenomenon from multiple perspectives: Why do violent men commit violence? Why do women stay in violent situations? And what sorts of policing and intervention efforts might stem the national epidemic? One of the key insights in the book is to show in detail why so many women find it so difficult to remove themselves from dangerous environments. The book found a spot in numerous top ten lists and was a finalist for prestigious Kirkus and National Book Critics Circle awards. No Visible Bruises has rightly fomented a national conversation around the topic.
 
But there’s more. Rachel’s most recent publication is a memoir, Women We’ve Buried, Women We’ve Burned. This is a deeply personal, and highly affective account of our shared upbringing, and her more turbulent teenage years. She recounts the loss of our mother, the subsequent ideological loss of our father to charismatic religion, and her ensuing search for meaning and acceptance in a tumultuous world. She also notes the inspiration that “Papa Chuck” had on her decision to become a writer. I’ve read this book twice, partly because it reminded me of many shared experiences I had forgotten, partly because I had to learn that a boy’s experience and a girl’s experience of putatively shared circumstances are seldom the same.
 
The skill that Lance and Rachel show in poetry, fiction, drama, how-to, non-fiction, and memoir is staggering. I know of no other writer of any reputation with such a breadth of mastery over so many genres.
 
It doesn’t stop there. My ex-wife, Dr. Saskia Coenen Snyder, is professor of modern Jewish history at the University of South Carolina. I was along for the ride for her first two books, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which examined patterns of assimilation and segregation in European Jewish communities through the lens of synagogue architecture, and A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting, which traces the involvement of Jewish communities in London, South Africa, Amsterdam, and New York as each comprised a circuit in the global diamond industry.
 
My own efforts pale in comparison to these illustrious writers in my family. But they are a source of constant inspiration. Looking back, I am sure this is one reason I went into a literary academic field. It was a guarantee of being surrounded by excellent writers and effective storytellers. All my friends are writers, and they’ve all produced books of which I am enormously impressed . . . and sometimes even a little jealous.  
 
So let’s see what I can do with Daisy Lampkin now . . .
 
—David J. Snyder