Through photographs and essays, Author Ilan Stavans explores Jewish immigration to America, Jewish individual and collective memory, and mental illness. In the late 19th Century, a poor Yiddish speaking immigrant from Russia was institutionalized at Willard, the famous psychiatric hospital in Upstate New York, from which he never came out. Charles F. spoke Yiddish with his doctors, he talked to ghosts in Yiddish, etc. Like thousands of other patients, he arrived at Willard, abandoned by his family, with only a few items in three suitcases. The suitcases were taken away from him by the staff and stored in an attic. They stayed there after he died in 1950. When Willard closed in the late 1990s, after almost 125 uninterrupted years, someone remembered the suitcases. Instead of having them destroyed, they were shipped to a museum storage house. Activists and others found out about them and the suitcases became very famous. Articles were published in multiple publications, starting with The New York Times. In fact, those suitcases have become a battling cry for mental health patient's rights.
Internationally-renowned, award-winning essayist and translator Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His many books, translated into twenty languages, include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days: The Making of a New American Language, Quixote: THe Novel and the World, and The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America. He has translated Borges and Neruda into English, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish, Isaac Bashevis singer from the Yiddish, Yehuda Halevia and Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew, and Cervantes, Shakespeare, and The Little Prince into Spanglish. He edited the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories as well as The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, The Schocken Book of Sephardic Stories, Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, and How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish. His work has been adapted into film, theater, TV, and radio.
In partnership with William James College.