Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: Past to Present: The Echos of War Panel

Festival Art

As mentioned in my earlier posts on the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the 2-day festival ranks as one of my premier Los Angeles events of each year. I just love it.

My fifth panel discussion was titled "Past to Present: The Echos of War." There were three panelists.

The following short biographies were taken from the LA Times Festival of Books website:

Rita Gabis is an award-winning poet and prose writer. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant for nonfiction as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives and teaches in New York City. Her latest book is “A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet.”

Dawn MacKeen is an award-winning investigative journalist who spent nearly a decade researching and writing her grandfather’s story. Previously she was a staff writer at Salon, Newsday and SmartMoney. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, the L.A. Times and elsewhere. Her book is “The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in the U.S. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative and the Chicago Tribune. He teaches English and American Studies at USC. His books include “The Sympathizer,” winner of an Andrew Carnegie Medal, the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a finalist for the 2015 L.A. Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, among other honors, and “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.”

The following are my notes from the panel discussion. There are potential misinterpretations to what I heard so take that into consideration.

Gabis. She comes from a blended family: Jewish and Lithuanian Catholic. She grew up understanding that her grandfather was a hero for saving his family during WWII. She later learned that her grandfather was a high ranking SS officer. He was the chief SS officer for an entire region where 95% of Jews were exterminated. How did her grandfather go from killing 8,000 Jews to becoming a tile inspector in America? How does one make that transition? 

She doesn't think everyone can do what her grandfather did in Lithuania, but what if there is a lack of resources such as water: will you share with your neighbor? 

MacKeen. Her grandfather survived the Armenian genocide. Her grandfather had to walk across a desert and drink his own urine. Her book is based on his journals. The books follows how he is pushed from Turkey to eastern Syria. She traces his journey. She wanted to tell the story of the Armenian genocide. What happened to 1.5 million Armenians? She did so via looking through the lens of one person. 

She wants to advocate about the genocide. Armenians just want to heal. 

Nguyen. He came to America as a four year old via Vietnam. Even at that age, he was still imprinted with the war. He was given to a family in Pennsylvania. 

In his fiction book, he attempts to tell the Vietnam war story from another perspective. What American culture looks like from outside America? His novel is critical of communist, south Vietnamese, and Americans. It is about how one requires empathy for those beyond your own community. 

Going to war is done for patriotic reasons so we never want to talk about the inhuman issues that take place in war such as rape. 

He did grow up reading about the Vietnam war so he didn't do a lot of additional research for the book. he did look into a detail timeline of the fall of Saigon.