Poets Follies Reading Series Presents Ralph Freedman and Mariela Griffor

March 19, 2009 at 7pm.
Ewald Branch Library in Grosse Pointe Park
15175 East Jefferson

Open to the general public.

Ralph Freedman, who grew up in Germany, emigrated at nineteen to England and ultimately the United States. He served in the US Army during World War II, in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, afterwards graduating from the University of Washington and earning a doctorate at Yale. He taught 12 years at the University of Iowa, 22 at Princeton and for two post-retirement years at Emory University. He wrote and published a novel (Divided, 1948), criticism (The Lyrical Novel, 1953), biographies of Hermann Hesse (1978), Rainer Maria Rilke (1996), and many essays. His works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. A Chinese version is in press. He loves hiking, travel and good talk. He is reading from his novel Rue the Day.

Rue the Day: Jacob Becher, a young American intelligence officer, meets Francesca Mancini, a member of the Italian Resistance on a battlefield in Italy where they are nearly killed by enemy artillery fire. The exploding shell spares them but creates a bond that leads to marriage after the war. During an investigation by a "McCarthyism" committee at the University of Washington where they both teach, he betrays his wife. Francesca flees; their marriage ends, but Jacob spends the next 50 years tormented by guilt and his unabated love for her. Terri, his daughter by a second marriage, is determined to uncover the secret of her father's unacknowledged anguish, and embarks on a prolonged search that takes her back in time.


Mariela Griffor was born in the city of Concepcion in southern Chile. She attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden in 1985. She and her American husband returned to the United States in 1998 with their two daughters. They live in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. She is co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press. Mariela is the author of Exiliana (Luna Publications) and House (Mayapple Press). She will be reading from her newest work of translations, an anthology on contemporary Latin-American writers which is compiled by Poetry International and will be published by San Diego State University Press in 2009.

The Poets Follies Reading series is a free admission event.