A Rupture Between a Daughter and a Father Resonates for Decades

Dean Emerita of the School of the Arts Carol Becker has written a new book, George’s Daughter,  which is both memoir and essay. Becker, still a professor at SoA, tells the tale of her beloved, but domineering and racist father in post-World War II Brooklyn. The family lived in Crown Heights, which, at the time, was where survivors from concentration camps settled and built new lives. In the following years, racial and religious discrimination again came to the fore, and Becker found herself increasingly at odds with her out-of-touch father. When he disapproved of her new romantic partner, a rupture threatened to ruin the family forever.

Becker discusses the book with Columbia News, along with what she’s been teaching since stepping down as dean, and books that are currently occupying her.

How did this book come about?

When I was a child, my mother used to say, “Someday you will write about your father.” She probably assumed this because I was always writing something, and because my father made me laugh. We were very close, and she could tell that I enjoyed his uniqueness. So writing a book about him, or one in which he is a featured player, was always in my consciousness. But I am certain that the story I tell in George’s Daughter is not the one she imagined or hoped I would write.

This narrative is full of love for him, but it reveals the pain he caused us all because of his fears and inability to hold trust in me and the choices I was making. The book is also about both my parents and grandparents, which is necessary to create the context for the story about the rupture with my father that has haunted me for decades. After I wrote my first memoir, Losing Helen, about my mother’s last months of life, I realized that that book was the first of a trilogy. George’s Daughter is the second part, a companion to the first, although they are not necessarily sequential.

Did you ever manage to reconcile with your father? 

There’s no simple answer to that question. I’d rather people read the book and decide for themselves what reconciliation means in this context.

How did the backdrop of Crown Heights contribute to your relationship with your father?

The Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that I grew up in was a very different neighborhood than Crown Heights today. There were no young single people, no artists, good restaurants, or galleries. The area could not have been less fashionable. Rather, it was an extraordinarily culturally rich, working-class environment, with a diverse population of Blacks, Italians, and Lubavitcher, Orthodox, and secular Jews. There was a great deal of tension between these groups. The neighborhood was, as they say, “in transition,” and later would experience “white flight.” During the 1990s, those tensions exploded into actual riots.    

My father watched the New York City he had known change. But he didn’t fully understand why that change was occurring or what it meant, although it affected his world as an auctioneer and small businessman directly. We never talked about sociopolitical issues when I was a child. But growing up as I did, in such a layered and complex neighborhood in proximity to the Brooklyn Museum and the Grand Army Plaza Library, was a great gift. It created the backdrop for all I wanted to become, and eventually became. I grew up embracing diversity of all kinds. My father never could.

How is it, in your post-dean period, to be teaching again? What are you teaching now?

I am loving teaching. When I was Dean of School of the Arts, I always felt pulled in too many directions to maintain the concentration needed to teach each week. I could make studio visits and offer critiques, but I could not commit to a regular teaching schedule, and I missed it very much. But now I can.

To think deeply with students and to learn from them, especially at this time, is a great comfort to me. It is also a challenge to anticipate what they will need intellectually as they go out into the world as creative people. Last semester, I taught a course called Art and Artists in Society: Theory and Practice. This semester, I am teaching a continuation of that course—Art and Artists in Society: The Subversive Imagination. It is a seminar with students from multiple programs, schools, and disciplines. The conversations are intense and unexpected. The students enjoy engaging with each other across disciplines, and I truly enjoy them.

What are you working on?

I am writing another book, part three of the trilogy, which is tentatively titled, A Time of Radical Imagining in California, 1968–1978: A Decade of Activism and Transformation. This book is partly memoir, partly sociology, partly history, and partly imaginings about a profoundly formative historical time for me and others in my generation.

While studying for my PhD in English and American literature at the University of California, San Diego, I was also protesting the Vietnam War, working to build the women’s movement, and to help organize the United Farm Workers’ grape and lettuce boycott. At that time, many in my generation really did believe we could change the world. It was thrilling to be engaged in such projects while living rustically on 1,000 acres of wild, undeveloped California land. I find it very helpful to focus on that time now, when the possibility for true equity and justice for humans, the land, and all species seems so impossibly remote in this country.

Which books would people be surprised to see on your shelf?

People who know me well would not be surprised to see these books, but others might be. I have an extensive library of diverse Buddhist texts and writing about Buddhism. I have been studying Buddhism formally and informally for some time. My library in my house in Chicago holds most of this collection, but there are quite a few in my New York apartment as well. Reading these books and practicing meditation is how I keep my balance in this world.

What books have you read recently that you would recommend and why?

Because I am working on this new book about California, I have been reading a great deal about the development of the physical U.S. landscape. American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow is not a new book—it was published in 2013—but it is a unique narrative of the settling and building of this country, told through the history of its relationship to its forests. There were many species that were useful to the British shipbuilding industry, but perhaps most significant was the white pine. These trees were taller than any in Europe, and were easily made into masts for ships. There was an untapped resource of unspoiled forests in North America, waiting to be exploited. Imagine what it felt like for Europeans to see the immensity of trees in forests that had never been logged. Rutkow’s book changed my understanding of what motivated the settlement of America—and the book is rich with so much more.

What’s next on your reading list?

I am finishing Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence. It is a poetic, aphoristic history of his long-standing relationship to a monastic community and retreat center near Big Sur and proximate to wildfires. Given the recent catastrophic California events, this book could not be more timely. But Iyer’s writing is always calming to the spirit. It is necessary reading, especially now as we attempt to manage unprecedented levels of calamity.

What are your hopes for George’s Daughter?

Although this book reflects my great love for my father, it is also the story of a cataclysmic break that destroyed my small family for some time. I hope others who have had or are having similar experiences in their families—provoked by differences in perceptions of the world—will identify with the emotions in the book, and find hope in its outcomes. It is always a bit terrifying to put out something so personal, but also liberating, especially if it can be useful to others who are navigating such uncharted terrain.

Carol Becker will discuss George’s Daughter with Gideon Lester, artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard College. The event will take place at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at Lenfest Center for the Arts.