Ruth Katz

home phone (best): 718-834-6863
home address: 270 Jay Street Apt. 7F / Brooklyn NY 11201
email: katzenchan@yahoo.com

I'd be hard-pressed to write it again, my bio of five years ago. At the moment, I would not have the energy – or the self-assurance. These past few years have changed everything (or else are more of the same, on steroids), as if to support the philosophizing of my first paragraph: fate, free will, luck, Buddhism. Who could have predicted? I said five years ago that I regretted the state of the world, but now that's revealed to be a blatant understatement. Words I bandied about five years ago, such as “travel” and “understanding,” have become loaded. Is it just me, or has everyone noticed how ridiculously busy we've become since the pandemic began and our social structure and politics took an even more sinister turn? Nowadays instead of writing, I find myself continually digging out, continually getting ready to write (I do still read). And a new wrinkle in my philosophy: at a certain point, our lives all go on autopilot: stuff just keeps happening, for better or for worse.

As for different choices I could/should, in hindsight, have made: Physics instead of Religion; a home with a garden instead of a NYC apartment; and not relying on travel as a safety valve. We did manage an excellent swan song, thank goodness, a family trip back to China in late 2017. For our daughter, Marina, launching a career in theater has been particularly trying these past two+ years, although progress has been made. Her first two years postcollege were filled with excitement and promise; then . . . Zoom! (Shout out to Maia Danziger for brilliant participation in one of Marina's online plays! Many thanks!)

So . . . with that introduction and those unsettling qualifications, I feel the very best I can do for 2022 is re-offer my still-hopeful bio of 2017, gently edited:

The encyclopedic Indian epic Mahabharata – about which I wrote my dissertation – suggests that as regards fate and free will, it's actually both together that determine our destinies. Add, as a third factor, the sheer luck of the draw, and there, as I see it, we have it all. That's as far as I'll go with my philosophizing, except to add that my single certainty is that there's more to this than meets the eye. Enough to say that my life thus far has meandered in directions inconceivable to me in high school, all efforts at control notwithstanding. Looking at photos in Annals, I see how much the same yet how different this person was from who I am today – a bit of Buddhism to add to the mix.

Nourished and encouraged at Hunter, almost uniformly my experience, I bounded into college with every intention of becoming a creative writer or possibly a journalist. My literary role model, still my favorite novel, was Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, which we read in Miss Monkmeyer's class. But in college I came up against the meagerness of my experience: nothing worth writing (I thought). So I more or less skipped the early creative writer stage, which more or less scuttled that recurrent dream. Marvelous college professors led me into a Religion major, nothing I might have imagined earlier, but for which I was prepared by the love of folklore, mythology and literature with which I'd been raised. Balkan folk dance in college brought me, unforeseeably, to Eastern Europe. And thence I dived directly into grad school, where I figured out to my surprise that India was the richest laboratory of world religions – and thus the trajectory of my future studies, some further travels, insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding (the world! the universe!) and unexamined academic career was established. Mostly in a straight line, I completed my doctorate and became a professor. Now a shock: I went right from Boston (which I adored) to my professorship, and lucky to get it, in Tallahassee! I adjusted.

At home, at Hunter (of course) and even in college and grad school, the burden of being female seemed only peripheral. How was I so ill-informed? Indeed, I ignored far too much of the world around me – the '60s, the '70s – while immersed in my studies. It's odd that I finally wandered into feminism only when required, as the token woman in my department, to teach Women and Religion. After not many years I had defined the scaffolding of History of Religions as hunter-gatherer → agriculturalist → Indo-European/Semitic → monotheist. I was developing a lively interest in the Goddess, despite having written my dissertation on that most masculine of figures, the Mahabharata hero Arjuna.

“Fertility religions” notwithstanding, I was by now behind schedule on that aspect of my life plan. My intention had been to conceive, like my favorite prof, while writing my dissertation, resulting in one biological child, while the second would be adopted internationally. But it was unconscionably hard to find a partner in grad school and even harder in Tallahassee – and OMG, I was at this moment trapped in Tallahassee, despite my lovely book . . . based on my dissertation! Having a child on my own, I conjectured, would wreak havoc on my career. Meanwhile, I traveled to Romania for my “Shiva and the Devil” (later “Krishna and St. George”) project and eventually married a Romanian there (oh, the international liaisons!), but that was short-lived. On sabbatical, in NYC, I met my future husband at thirty-nine, decided at last to quit Tallahassee and tenure, and then encountered . . . infertility! – which showed me just how tone-deaf I'd been when blithely expounding on fertility religions irrespective of my audience. After inevitable distress, our joyful solution was to undertake the international-adoption half of my plan (China) – after which, unanticipatedly, I never returned to academia. Fascination with our daughter, playing continual information catch-up, travel, caring for elderly parents, a fairly simple apartment renovation that nonetheless came to be referred to as the “twenty-year plan” – a little this, a little that, and life rushed by. Insofar as I continued to write, I never got around to further publishing.

Oh, “'I skip forty years,' said the Baker in tears . . .” (from Lewis Carroll's “The Hunting of the Snark”)! Our daughter, Marina, is now about to graduate from college. [Remember, all this was written five years ago.] Do I have the youngest child in our class? – she has kept my husband and me young at heart. As to personality and talents, she's very different – more wonderful – than anyone my own genes might have produced. Yet she's my daughter indeed: her major is playwriting and she hopes to work in some capacity of theater. Like me, she's rather a perfectionist.

I don't want her to put aside her ambitions at a certain juncture, as I did. For it's the abandonment of my career that I regret the most (that and the state of the world), feeling I could and should have made several different choices, and would have if it were only a matter of free will! At this stage of life, I've stepped up my writing and – again a shock! – exquisite material has fallen into my lap: a huge unpublished trove, mostly of poetry, by my mother, a woman of obsessions, who managed to persevere in her art by quitting her job some months before the birth of her only child (me), then surreptitiously relegating child care and homemaking to the back burner (resulting in my sense, growing up, of unsupervised freedom), when not promptly molding them into her subject matter. Thus began our family lineage of aspiring female authors, who have focused as often on process as on product. And now I can work with my mother's legacy, and I see that I must. So . . . rebooting my career, I'm writing a book about my amazing (to me, at least) discoveries in my parents' apartment after their deaths, of which my mother's poetry is only, in fact, the tip of the iceberg.