Al Filreis

Auschwitz: Once you're in the room, you can't get out

Daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, Debbie Fischer, asks her father, as he lies dying, to tell her the real story of his time at the death camp. He has refused to tell her much all these years, always giving a blandly positive response to life in the camp. Here is the audio recording of her testimony about his testimony.

Bob Gibson per Roger Angell

Roger Angell offers commentary here and there throughout Ken Burns’ nine-part (or nine-“inning”) documentary Baseball. In what is perhaps my favorite of his appearances in this film, he talks about Bob Gibson. Here is an mp3 recording of it. Angell was a Writers House Fellow in 2005, and I had the pleasure of interviewing him (mp3).

He enjoyed his time with the students and the other people of the Writers House community, as he said so, generously, a few days later. Eric Karlan has written a nice summary of that interview. “Angell concluded his several-day stay in Philadelphia,” Eric writes, “with an excerpt from a piece on the 1975 World Series, the infamous Game 6 when Carlton Fisk willed the ball fair for the game-winning home run. As he does so well, the longtime New Yorker writer provides a fresh, provoking perspective on an event. He leaves the Writers House thinking about ‘caring.’ Despite being a fanatic, Angell recognizes the triviality of baseball in the grand scheme of life. And that is why, as he imagines people across New England giddy and elated at the Red Sox victory, he reminds all of us not only of how odd it is that we dream through sports teams, but how it has seemingly ceased to matter to everyone what they care about — ‘as long as the feeling is saved.’” You can hear other Angell clips (on the early Mets, on NYC as the capital of baseball in the 1950s, on Bobby Thompson’s homer, on Willie Mays, on the Red Sox 6th game victory in 1975, and on Babe Ruth’s final weekend) by going to the 2005 Writers House Fellows reading list. Listen to Angell read from his essay about the 1975 World Series.

Pound was punk to Gizzi

“I LOVE, I mean LOVE that PennSound has put up all the Pound material,” wrote Peter Gizzi to us not long after the Ezra Pound recordings were added to PennSound.

A poet starting with X

My modern American poetry site is set up alphabetically. I’ve never had a link under “x.” The spoken word poet (“I have been involved in what is now called spoken word since 1982”) Emily XYZ wrote to me suggesting that I correct this omission, and so I have.

On recorded poetry: A discussion with Steve Evans

Does the ubiquity of recordings of poets reading their own poems change the way we teach modern and contemporary poetics? On April 23, 2007, I had a good conversation with Steven Evans about this in my office at the Writers House. Here is a slightly edited recording of that conversation: this link takes you directly to a downloadable mp3 file. Steve’s Lipstick of Noise site is subtitled “listening and linking to poetry audio files.” I visit the site at least twice weekly.

On Primo Levi's 'Gold'

At an event we called “7 Up on Gold” — featuring seven people speaking for seven minutes each about gold, the color or the element — I chose to speak about the chapter entitled “Gold” in Primo Levi’s brilliant book, The Periodic Table. I’ve taught the book a number of times in my course on the Holocaust.

My podcasts

I happily host two podcast series. One is PennSound podcasts, which features recordings from that vast archive of poetry recordings. The other series, Kelly Writers House podcasts, presents excerpts from various sorts of programs, events, seminars and discussions at the Writers House. Please listen and let me know what you think.

The very first news article about the Writers House (1995)


My former student Randi Feigenbaum was a big-wig at Penn’s student-run daily newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, at the time the Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk was just forming. It was in those weeks and months known as one of the “pilot” projects of the “Twenty-first-century Project for the Undergraduate Experience” at Penn. Randi’s news piece was published in the December 7, 1995, issue of the DP. It gives a pretty good sense of what we were trying to get started there. To this day, Randi is a big supporter of the Writers House.

Is 'Filreis' Portuguese?

The hazy geneaology of a Sephardic family

In 2003 I corresponded with the cultural director of a Portuguese foundation. He responded to the possibility that my family’s name is indeed Portuguese. I’m not sure what the origin of this family assumption is — perhaps it’s been passed down to my father’s older brother through his father or his brother who passed through western Europe on the way to Brooklyn twice in the 1910s and ’20s (once before WWI and once again after). Western Europe — France, we assume — where one of these Filreises made contact with French or Spanish/French Filreises and learned of the ancestral connection to Iberian peninsula. We put that “news" together with the clear sense that the families were part of a Sephardic community in Warsaw and have assumed that they were part of the exilic migration away from Spain to northeast Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is very difficult to track this, but since Jewish families typically bred very closely within the Jewish community, there is probably a way of following the lineage. I haven’t figured out how yet. I suppose first would be to find out definitely where the members of the Warsaw family were killed during the Holocaust; I’m 99% sure it was at Treblinka, the killing camp that destroyed Warsaw’s Jews in 1942 and ’43.

'I am the very model of a member of the faculty…'

I maintain a deep and eleborate website about the culture of the 1950s, with an emphasis on the Cold War and literary politics. Recently I posted to that site a verse parody written in November 1949 by an anonymous member of the faculty of one of the California colleges. It’s based on Gilbert and Sullivan and was given the title “Ode to Hysteria: University Division.” Of course it’s a response to the anticommunist loyalty oaths of that moment: here’s that poem.

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