If William Wordsworth’s words are true – that “the child is father to the man” – we need look no deeper than into the trying years of the Great Depression to understand the person whom Jacqueline Park became.
Although she modestly attributes her success to “a series of fortunate accidents,” there is no doubt that strength of character, the embrace of hard work, curiosity of mind, and commitment to causes and to family, have also played a role in the near nonagenarian’s many achievements.
Park is an acclaimed novelist, currently working on the third installment of a three-part literary saga that began with The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi, a remarkable 15th-century Italian Jewish woman, and continues with newly published The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi, about the travails of Grazia’s son in the court of the Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Great.
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi, published in 1997, became an acclaimed, international bestseller. But Park, then 72, was not finished writing. “I came from television,” she said, “where the motto is: Always leave room for a sequel.”
Park picked up the novelist’s pen in her seventh decade. To that point she had led a very active, creative life in the world of documentary and commercial filmmaking, teaching, homemaking and parenthood.
I recently met with Park at her home in downtown Toronto where she shared some fascinating highlights of her wondrous, personal saga.
Born Jacqueline Rosen in Winnipeg in 1925, she grew up during the harsh years of the Depression. Park has very clear recollections of that uncertain time which left deep scars, she explained. Like an invisible hand shaping the clay of the soul, it formed the characters of an entire generation of young people.
Her professional career began early. While writing for The Manitoban, the student newspaper of the University of Manitoba, she interviewed John Grierson, the founder of Canada’s National Film Board, who was visiting from Ottawa.
Impressed with his young interviewer, Grierson invited Park to Ottawa to work for the nascent Film Board in support of Canada’s war efforts. Though still a teenager, she jumped at the chance.
Due to a shortage of manpower, Park performed a wide variety of tasks and learned many facets of filmmaking. Those various skills would provide a pathway to filmmaking-related work throughout her adult life.
After a short stay in Chicago, Park enrolled in graduate school at the University of Toronto. In Toronto she met, fell in love and eloped with Gurston Rosenfeld. Like many young Jewish idealists of the 1940s, the couple wanted to improve the world. So Jacqueline and Gurston moved to Grimsby, Ont. and joined a hechalutz (pioneering) group doing hachsharah (training) in preparation for life on a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine, now Israel. But the young couple never made it to Israel. They moved back to Toronto. Then, after their two daughters were born, they went their separate ways.
In 1960, accepting an offer from the Rockefeller Foundation to work on a series of educational films, Park took her two children and moved to New York. Among other opportunities there, she did some freelance television writing for the CBC. And she married Ben Park, an executive with NBC. “It was a very heady time,” Park reminisced of her life in New York.
The Tisch School for the Arts at New York University then hired her to teach dramatic writing and she rose in the faculty’s ranks to become chair of the dramatic writing department. She is now professor emerita, after retiring some eight years ago.
While still teaching, in 1990, Park found the courage – as she described it – to try her hand at writing a novel. She “lacked the confidence to start,” but once she did, she quickly developed her literary momentum.
The genesis for The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi was an exchange of original correspondence from Renaissance Italy that Park found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Park discovered letters between Isabella Gonzaga d’Este and a young Jewish woman, Pacienza Pontremoli. Countess d’Este urged Pacienza to convert to Christianity. The young woman refused. Park explained that she “could not relate to the women of the Renaissance in general. But I could relate to the situation and plight of the Jewish women of the Renaissance.” The courageous Pacienza became the model for the fictitious Grazia dei Rossi.
The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi, reviewed in these pages recently, appeared 17 years after her first book. Life and circumstances, however, had intervened to slow down the pace of Park’s writing. She developed macular degeneration, severely impairing her vision. A writing assistant helps her now. Together, they are working on the third installment of the Grazia dei Rossi saga.
Park is determined to finish the trilogy. “I believe we are at the dawning of a new era because of all the scientific discoveries in medicine. People are living and functioning longer.”
Given her track record, there is no reason to doubt that she will.
See Review here: https://thecjn.ca/books-and-authors/grazia-dei-rossi-sequel-rich-atmosphere