Authors Elizabeth Pschoor, Chitra B. Divakaruni and Colene Sawyer-Schaepfer spoke before a recent AAUW fundraising luncheon in Saratoga.
February is the month of love. Three Bay Area authors who have written books on the themes of love and marriage spoke at the American Association of University Women's Los Gatos-Saratoga Branch education fundraiser recently at the Saratoga Country Club.
Elizabeth Pschoor talked about her book, A Privileged Marriage. Her story begins in Hitler's Germany duringWorld War II, when her Jewish heritage and her marriage to a non-Jew strongly influenced her life. Pschoor was compelled to write her history 40 years later after her 9-year-old grandson was given a school assignment on immigration. Before then, she had never been asked about the time she spent in Germany. She is a romantic at heart, and the book includes love letters to and from her husband, her parents' love letters, and letters from her parents to her. She translated more than 1,000 letters from German into English. Pschoor says the book is for her grandchildren. What a great legacy! This 83-year-old-woman survived the Holocaust and, in the process of looking back, learned a lot about her own inner strength.
Colene Sawyer-Schaepfer, a member of the Saratoga-Los Gatos AAUW Branch, is a marriage and family therapist. She wrote Fishing by Moonlight: The Art of Choosing Intimate Partners. After two divorces she was intent on getting it right and worked on this book for eight years. She said she learned a lot through self-discovery, books, case studies and clients' experiences. She met her future husband, Fred, along the way. Her friends dubbed him "her guinea pig." She says she definitely got it right this time and thinks others can, too. Her book is written in reader-friendly terms. Fred and Colene are currently giving marriage and relationship workshops based on the book. When asked about the book's title, Colene says it's symbolic and conjures up images of the mystery and magic of moonlight. The first part of the book addresses why we make the choices we do, and the second part tells how to make relationships better.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wrote the bestseller Arranged Marriage and has a new novel coming out in March called Mistress of Spices. One of her short stories appears in this month's Good Housekeeping magazine.
Divakaruni teaches writing at Foothill College and lives in Sunnyvale. Her interest in writing stories about Indian women came after she moved to the United States from India at the age of 19 to continue her studies. It was then that she realized how different the two cultures were. Arranged marriages are common in India. She says the concept is foreign to the Western way of thinking, but she points out that arranged marriages were popular in America over 150 years ago and in Europe.
AAUW member Natalie Wilds commented that perhaps an arranged marriage isn't such a bad idea, considering how prevalent divorce is today.
The author dressed in native garb to read part of a short story rich in description from Arranged Marriage while Indian music played in the background. Her stories are fiction, arising from her imagination and material from her work with MAITRI, a South Asian women's service organization she helped found in l991.
Other News: Jocelyn Soto, owner of Perfect Tan in Quito Village, says there was some excitement in her shop a few weeks ago when KNBR reporter Tom Spencer asked to use the phone to call in a broadcast report. He was returning late because of heavy traffic from the AT&T golf tournament at Pebble Beach and couldn't find a pay phone to call in his story. Soto let him use her phone.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 19, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.