Writing SUMMONS TO BERLIN by JOANNE INTRATOR

Writing helps me manage my life but it always wasn’t so.
I was born in NYC in 1946, to parents whose lives were wrecked by the Nazis. My father became morbidly ill when I was seven and two of my close relatives died around the same time. Money was very tight. I stepped into grownup shoes. Dread and catastrophic anxiety hovered.

Voracious reading saved me. My choices tended to the dark side, late at night when sleep eluded me. Books about murder and war calmed me. My precocious reading and curiosity made me an enthusiastic student until a problem made itself known as I progressed in school years. As more complex writing assignments were required, my thoughts, one by one sprung from my brain, buoyed with my unlimited enthusiasm, yet collapsed under the eyes of the imagined viewer. I could not write an acceptable paragraph. This did not hold me back in high school but almost immediately after starting college I was identified as needing an expository writing tutorial. What was going on? Was something interfering with the clarity needed to create a cogent argument in an essay?

The occasional verbs at the end of the sentence which were common in a German speaking household interfered but that did not fully explain it. Though I did not know the psychiatric term then, I had what psychiatrists call a thought disorder. Emotions bombarded my brain making it hard for me to think clearly when being judged.

Like many aspirational women of her time, my mother lived through me. Worse was her belittling of me, a parental style common in the German upbringing. I internalized this harsh voice which accompanied me during test taking and essay writing. Professors told me anxiety was interfering with performance. Therapy would have helped but that would have been a sign of weakness for my
German parents.

Fortunately, I kept diaries since the age of twelve that offered me solace and a place for my fantasies one of which was to become a doctor. Later, psychoanalysis helped as I untangled my emotions and put them into words that allowed some distance for clear thinking. I went back to school and took all the premedical courses I did not dare challenge myself with in college and began medical school at age thirty.
By the time I was forty I was psychiatrist a wife and mother. I wrote quite a bit in psychiatry that was published in professional journals. Collaborating with colleagues eased my angst.

My diaries became an important source for the book Summons to Berlin which will be published August 2023 by She Writes Press. My anxieties about writing worsened during the twenty years I worked on the book as
the book in part dealt with my family’s experience with the Nazis. What helped was hiring editors who worked carefully with me. Over time the writing became easier and I took chances showing it to several close friends. I have written fewer personal articles that did not present any emotional conflicts. My diaries, at least fifty in number now, continue to enable me to try out ideas, reflect and use the ideas as
a basis for future publishing and, of course, to view the trajectory of my life.

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