Doreen's story (part I)

I made a Xerox copy of Doreen Spitzer’s manuscript. I went up to visit her in Princeton on May 21, 2001, when I was still actively pursuing Belle’s story. She was kind enough to talk with me then at some length. I suspect she has since died (like so many people I should have pursued conversations with, but that’s another story). I can barely read my notes, my handwriting is sloppy and telegraphic. I suppose I thought I’d remember the context, but now, seven years later, I remember nothing. All I can excavate from my scrawling is that she first went to the American School in the fall of 1936 (probably after graduating from Bryn Mawr that spring), returned in the summer of ’37 and stayed for almost three years.

Her manuscript was typed on onion skin paper, so thin I laid each sheet individually, and gingerly, on the glass face of the copy machine. I didn’t want to take the chance that a page might become stuck in the machine’s feeding mechanism. Getting stuck would irreparably damage the paper, and I couldn’t afford to lose a single word. As I copied it I was transported back to the time of typewriters, onion skin paper, and carbon copies, to a time when my father brought me to his office one Saturday and showed me an enormous machine that made negative copies (the paper came out black, the printing white). I remember begging my mother to be allowed to play with the carbon paper and then had to refigure out which way it went every time. The typewriter made it even more confusing. Doreen’s manuscript was a carbon copy on paper the thickness of an old, old woman’s translucent skin. Its text a glorious recounting of her years in Egypt and Greece. The open-mouthed marveling of an American woman in her early twenties is palpable as she immerses herself in the new cultures she is discovering. On the very first page:

We went through miles of crowded streets until we came up a lovely broad avenue between two huge, magnificent mosques, with another at the top of the street. On our right was the Sultan Hassan Mosque, which still has embedded in its walls the cannon balls that Napoleon fired into it. It is perfectly plain inside, and the effect of light and shadow from the machicolated walls is incredibly impressive and dignified. The chains from which elaborate lanterns used to hang made thin perpendicular shadows against the walls. The lanterns themselves are in the Arabic museum. We shuffled along ant-like in the canvas slippers they fastened on to our shoes when we entered. We felt very small and unimportant in the vastness of the mosque and much impressed with a religion that can achieve such a masterpiece of architecture. It has all the dignity and religious quality of Chartres or the English cathedrals, plus a sort of rich simplicity – if you see what that can be – more awe-inspiring than any I have seen elsewhere.