Terms like “hubba hubba” show up in their stories, along with descriptions of old-time Bay Area movie palaces and a bush- el full of anecdotes from days gone by.
After nearly a lifetime of living, many Bay Area seniors are returning to the classroom and bringing new life to their never-before-written-down stories.
It’s all thanks to social worker Rita Clancy and author-teacher Elaine Starkman, who have each developed programs and workshops to help seniors share their knowledge and experience through the written word.
Clancy, the coordinator of the Holocaust Survivor Program at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of the East Bay, started a memoir class in Albany for Holocaust survivors earlier this year.
“This group is a planted seed in its infancy at this point,” Clancy says of the program, which is called “Turning Memoir and Testimony Writing into Literature.” Volun-teers Julia Nemeth and Ora Young have helped Clancy run it so far.
The idea for the memoir workshops came from the members of Clancy’s successful Holocaust survivor program, Café Europa. After some people at a Café Europa meeting indicated that they were curious about writing memoirs, Clancy was inspired to start the class.
For the most part, Clancy’s students write not about the Holocaust, but about other important parts of their lives. For example, on Mother’s Day, students wrote and shared their stories about their mothers.
The class, held at JFCS’ Suse Moyal Center for Older Adult Services in Albany, is on a brief summer hiatus but is expected to resume in the fall, or to be held in conjunction with Café Europa. Ten or 12 people attended the last session, held in the spring.
“We can’t have it bigger than that,” Clancy says. “It just doesn’t work. What would be really ideal is if we could have more volunteers involved.”
Keeping the number low gives group members the opportunity to serve as a support system for their fellow survivors — and the group evolves into a community based on writing down and then reading personal stories.
The class serves as both a creative and emotional outlet for survivors.
“What is so beautiful about this group is that people who don’t necessarily attend therapeutic groups attend,” Clancy says. “Different survivors attend different groups, and this is something that is more creative.”
Watching the seniors develop as writers pleases Clancy, but her main fascination is watching each participant develop insight.
“The process can be very difficult because writing makes them dig deeper,” she says. “At first, people wouldn’t come back to the program because it was painful. Some stayed, and now they feel they’ve derived a lot of emotional support from the group.”
Clancy’s is not the only local writing group for seniors.
In 2001, Elaine Starkman developed a similar program, “Writing Your Wisdom,” in Contra Costa County. She has since been molding her students into memoir writers.
“Memoirs are not autobiographies, but are more colorful,” she says.
Starkman’s classes, also on break until the fall, are part of the Acalanes Adult Education Center, and her students are both Jewish and non-Jewish. All are between the ages of 50 and 90.
They show up to the classes with a common goal: to develop their memories into stories.
One of Starkman’s students, 90-year-old Byron Citron of Concord, has been attending her class for three years.
“I was approaching 90 years old, and I wanted to convey the stories of my father to my grandchildren and my three daughters,” explains the Beverly Hills-raised Citron, who described himself in one of his writings as “a 20th-century American grandson of a 19th-century immigrant Russian Jew.”
Starkman is a longtime teacher and author, as well as co-editor of the award-winning 1998 collection of short stories “Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories from Around the World.”
One tactic she employs in her teaching is providing her students a sense of the different styles of memoir writing, giving them more than 50 memoirs to read. She also gives her students a word or an idea to write about, and instructs them to play with language.
Students write their pieces at home and then bring them to the two-hour class for guidance from Starkman and classmates. Some of the questions Starkman asks: “Can they make it more colorful? Is it too cliché? How can they make it more interesting?”
The class has also become a support group, and many of the students have been attending for years.
“We meet on Tues-days for lunch,” Citron says. “It’s not just class. It’s friendship.”
“Turning Memoir and Testimony Writing into Literature” is slated to re-start in the fall in Albany. For more information, contact Rita Clancy at (510) 704-7480, ext. 257.
“Writing Your Wisdom”
is held on the old Del Valle High School campus in Walnut Creek. The next session begins Sept. 8. For more information, call (925) 280-3980, ext. 8001, or contact Elaine Starkman at [email protected].