{"id":32556,"date":"2019-05-10T03:41:03","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T10:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=32556"},"modified":"2019-05-09T14:09:37","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T21:09:37","slug":"importance-of-womens-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/05\/10\/importance-of-womens-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Importance of women\u2019s stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cStories Around the Table\u201d meets a couple of times a year to present and critique their writing.\u00a0(photo from Karen Ludwig)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Today, at Karen Ludwig\u2019s home in New York, the actor, director and teacher regularly leads a group of women in story sharing.<\/p>\n

Ludwig, whose father is from Winnipeg but whose family origin is Russian, grew up in San Francisco. \u201cIt was a very antisemitic San Francisco town,\u201d said Ludwig of the time. \u201cAnd the German-Austrian Jews kind of ran the city, and they looked down on Russian Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a rabbi in my temple, Emmanuel, who used to say, \u2018Hear, o-Is-roy-ale,\u2019 and I never knew he was actually saying \u2018Israel.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother would speak in a whisper, \u2018Is she Jewish? Is he Jewish?\u2019 I never heard the word \u2018Jew\u2019 out loud until I came to New York. Then, someone asked, \u2018Are you Jewish?\u2019 And, I said, \u2018Hey, take it easy.\u2019 But, New York is a Jewish town.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ludwig\u2019s parents were amateur actors, acting in synagogue plays, and her family regularly went to see musicals and plays together in San Francisco. Ludwig knew that, when her parents were on stage, they had such a good time and she wanted to be up there with them.<\/p>\n

When she was 14, Ludwig subscribed to Theatre Arts Magazine<\/em>. The late Anne Bancroft was on one cover; she was in the play The Miracle Worker<\/em> and was making the sign of the letter \u201cL\u201d for love.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was something about that picture that was magnetic,\u201d Ludwig told the Independent<\/em>. \u201cI thought, that\u2019s what I want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
New York-based Karen Ludwig leads a writing group for women. (photo by Frankie Alduino)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cabaret was all the rage and Ludwig went to see a show with her then-boyfriend. She enjoyed it so much that she went to see it again on her own a couple more times and the lead performer, Kaye Ballard, noticed her.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe came out one time,\u201d said Ludwig, \u201cand saw me and said, \u2018What, do you sleep here, kid?\u2019 And, I was born. I thought, \u2018That\u2019s it. I\u2019ve been recognized.\u2019 And, I became a follower of hers, because … I loved anybody who made me laugh.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe met me for coffee a couple months later, very graciously. And, she said, \u2018If you\u2019re serious about being an actress, don\u2019t go to college. It won\u2019t do you any good. Go to New York while you\u2019re young and study.\u2019 And so, I did, [after] I went for one year of San Francisco state college. I played the lead in a play called The Wingless Victory<\/em>, by Maxwell Anderson, and I thought, well, this is easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ludwig went on to perform in other plays \u2013 some on Broadway and some off-Broadway. She even had the chance to work with Bancroft, and they became friends.<\/p>\n

This is what led Ludwig to start her women\u2019s group for actors who could write.<\/p>\n

While the group took a hiatus for several years, Ludwig restarted it two years ago. They meet every Wednesday and write about topics that are rarely discussed or written about by men.<\/p>\n

Ludwig said she developed her writing skills out of necessity. \u201cI did it because I was tired of waiting around for parts, because, as I got older, as a woman, parts became fewer and fewer. So, I decided to write my own show about my career \u2013 who I met, who I worked with and, then, another thread through it was my mother and my relationship with her. And the show was very successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ludwig won a one-night space rental in a competition at Joe\u2019s Pub at the Public Theatre and so performed her stand-up show on that one night. She described it as a wonderful but terrifying experience. Later, for almost two weeks, her show ran at another little studio in the city.<\/p>\n

One of the pieces of history that Ludwig shared in the show was her experience playing Ethel Rosenberg in the movie Citizen Cohn<\/em>. She was very involved in it, even raising money for the Rosenberg Foundation for Children, which \u201csupports children whose parents are incarcerated,\u201d said Ludwig. \u201cI did all kinds of research about how Ethel Rosenberg died, and how many volts of electricity she had to have to still her heart, and then I showed the clip of it in the show I did. I did quite a bit about Ethel Rosenberg and the two boys she left behind, and that she, in fact, was not guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her writing group, Ludwig prompts participants each week with a topic to help them focus their writing on different aspects of their lives. This brings about a variety of views on any given topic and the women push one another to dig more deeply than they would on their own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are things that happen in a room with just women that don\u2019t happen with men,\u201d said Ludwig. \u201cSo, I thought we would take advantage of that. I use prompts like…. \u2018My mother walked into my bedroom and said….\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Living in the Westbeth Artists Housing complex allows Ludwig to have a big table, so the group has dubbed their meetings, \u201cStories Around the Table.\u201d They present and critique their writing about twice a year and the subject matter ranges from family to politics to hair and beyond.<\/p>\n

Ludwig began her teaching career in Israel. \u201cI kept saying, \u2018This country isn\u2019t going to affect me that much,\u2019\u201d recalled Ludwig. \u201cI\u2019m a Reform Jew. What do I care really about Israel? But, from the moment we landed at the airport and they started singing, I began to weep, and weep and weep. And then, there\u2019s a clip of me going toward the Wailing Wall. Again, I\u2019m saying, \u2018This doesn\u2019t affect me. It has no meaning for me.\u2019 And, before you know it, I\u2019m davening. It was hard for me to leave Israel, because the actors were saying, \u2018You\u2019re a Jew. You should stay here and teach. This is your place to teach us what you know.\u2019 It was very hard to leave; I did love it there.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, Ludwig\u2019s Israel encounter parallels what she aims to get her writers to experience in their sessions \u2013 to discover a connection, to one another, to their past, to the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole idea is about sharing each other\u2019s feelings and thoughts about what\u2019s going on … so you don\u2019t feel so isolated,\u201d said Ludwig. \u201cThere isn\u2019t a goal exactly. It\u2019s just about the sense of feeling united, together … critiquing each other\u2019s work. And, if we don\u2019t understand something, we talk about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a certain kind of pressure that\u2019s off. There\u2019s a certain feeling of generosity. Really, how many feelings are universal? There\u2019s not that much that separates us, really, in terms of human experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cStories Around the Table\u201d meets a couple of times a year to present and critique their writing.\u00a0(photo from Karen Ludwig) Today, at Karen Ludwig\u2019s home in New York, the actor, director and teacher regularly leads a group of women in story sharing. Ludwig, whose father is from Winnipeg but whose family origin is Russian, grew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[8988,3021,7381],"class_list":["post-32556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-karen-ludwig","tag-women","tag-writing"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}