Children's Fiction

2009, The Monkey Painters: a children’s story for four- to eight-year-olds, to be illustrated.

2008, This Way and That Way, a children’s book for ages 1-5, to be illustrated.

2007, Up and Down Days, a children’s book for ages 1-5, to be illustrated.

Articles on Culture

• Coming! Growing Up on the Lower East Side in the Twenties; fictionalized oral history

• June, 1995: “Using Oral Histories to Elicit Reflective Writings: The Experience of Being an Immigrant Adolescent in the Urban U.S., MultiCultural Review, Vol. 4, 2, http://www.petrolinas.biz/MCR2001-03/toc1995.htm

• March, 1977: “Shoplifting in New England: Any number can play," The New Englander, Vol. 23, 11, p. 40.

Academic Writing

1995: “Emotional Lives of Refugee and Immigrant Mothers in the Urban U.S.: Strategies for Acculturation,” in Selected Papers on Refugee Issues IV, Ann M. Rynearson and James Phillips, Editors, CORI (Committee on Refugees and Immigrants) Publications of the American Anthropological Association; Part II: Starting Life in a New Land: Communities and Individuals;
http://www.aaanet.org/gad/coripub.htm#3

Poetry

• Best Poem: http://bestpoem.wordpress.com/2009/01/

A Poetry Journal
Barbara Trachtenberg January 31, 2009
Early May

The dogwood blossoms seem best when I’m alone.
The white one’s brown, mottled kisses
like smudged lipstick on each petal.

I love the blossoms’ four prone petals
thrown back shallow cups of sun
iridescent in the gathering afternoon storm.

Their dancers’ arms interrupt each other,
children, calling, “Me, me! Oh, see my spring.”

Cut now in a glass pitcher
they’re as vulnerable in their perfect beauty
as our most private moments together.

• Boston City Hall Poetry Exhibit

"Raymond and Thelma in Boston"

Barbara Trachtenberg

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking. Walt Whitman

We are seventeen and twenty-five
as your hand pulls me with you away
from Boston, your feet planted, mine barely
defined, as though unsure of my step
in the coming night
of this chill June day in Boston
the sky pushing blue,
some fire forcing us on.

“Thelma, here are the chickens of my grandparents’ farm.
and there the tomatoes and a prairie dog.
We ate squirrels, you know.”
“Not koshered,” I say.
“Not in Boston,” you say.
“A mockingbird, Thelma!” your head bobbing,
your hand still grabbing at mine, “Let’s find it.”

Could we have met in Missouri?
In the 30s or 40s? Talked to each other?
A Yiddle in Middle America, my great-grandfather
a Russian, peddling rags to that Scottish farmer
Of the Methodist persuasion?
They lived like cousins, in city and country,
depended on each other somehow
in a time Civil, in a state in the middle
of middle America, later come to Boston.

In this other June night warmed by
quilts and our bodies, we remember them
lying near each other in their cemeteries now,
lying, like us, in the beds of
recycled cloth and earth we come from,
meeting each other in our bedtime talk
in Boston, as we recall
seventeen and twenty-five,
the farms, the rags.

Reviews

Theatre

November, 2004: Theater Review of Permanent Collection, in ArtsEditor, “Permanent Collection at the New Repertory Theatre”
http://www.artseditor.com/html/opinions/1104_permanent.shtml

Books

Winter, 1991: Book review of Hopeful Openings: A Study of Five Women's Development Organizations in Latin American and the Caribbean, by Yudelman, Sally; (The women in international development (WID) movement)
www.anthrosource.net/doi/ pdfplus/10.1525/jlat.1991.3.2.72 OR http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jlca.1991.3.2.72?cookieSet=1&journalCode=jlca.3 (Latin American Anthropology Review)

Short Stories

I am completing a series of linked short stories that comprise a collection that present varied facets of the character of Julia as she responds to and interacts with the stories of other characters. As a teacher, researcher and mother, Julia finds her personal life spinning an internal thread through her work and connection with young people, immigrant women and elderly people. 

"The Right Documents"

Each week, after taping immigrant Central American mothers, Julia, an ethnographer, wrote fieldnotes in her car by the overhead light, the neighbors probably wondering. Having achieved a motherhood she had never been able to garner for herself, the women and their lives stayed with Julia in the years ahead. This story captures her conversations with the women, represented by one character—an immigrant mother in an imaginary relationship with Julia. The story brings to light an ethnographic process of reaching deeper into oneself by reaching out to those who so generously share their lives with the anthropologist.

A fifteen-minute segment of this story was read at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (Sfaa) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, March, 2009. This reading can be heard on iTunes between the 16:40 and 30:00 mark on the link below:

http://sfaapodcasts.net/2009/04/30/without-footnotes-writing-creative-ethnography/