Power Narratives: Amy Zalman at TEDxGeorgetown

Sharing a part of family history, Amy Zalman discusses the power of narratives.

In the spring of 1940,
Violeta Bardavid Zalman, my grandmother,

had two really big problems.

One was Adolph Hitler.

Hitler had invaded Poland in September, 1939

and nobody in Europe could be quite sure

where they were going next.

Violeta had actually already been expelled from Italy,

when foreign Jews were told by Mussolini

in 1938 that they had to leave.

So she had gone with her husband Harry
and their infant son

back to his native Bulgaria,

but she knew that if
the persecutions and explosions continued,

that they would have
a considerably more limited set of options.

The second problem, and arguably the larger one,
was Rebecca.

My grandmother was not
my grandfather's first choice in marriage.

Some years before their arranged meeting,

his older sister had put her youngest daughter

before him and told him to be her chaperone.

She was the 16-year-old and very leggy Rebecca,

so they immediately fell in love,

but when he went to his family to ask

if they could marry, nobody would really sanction

such a close tie between close realatives.

A few years later, my glamorous grandmother
was put in front of him,

and they married and moved to Milan to begin

their lives as newly weds far from Rebecca.

But when they returned a few years later

it was as refugees, with just a few hundred dollars,

so they were forced to go from house to house

of Harry's relatives, finally landing at Rebecca's,

where they lived in a spare room,

which was OK with my grandfather,

but was completely intolerable
and unaccetable for my grandmother.

So, she decided to take her case
to the American Consul.

In order to go to America you needed three things.

You needed a visa, you needed an affidavit

from somebody testifying to your good character,

and you needed a place in the quota system

that limited the number of people
who could go to the country.

They actually had already been told
that they could take the $250

which they had been allowed
to take with them from Italy,

and my grandfather could go by himself

to the United States and call for my grandmother

and their son when he had enough money,

but this, of course, would not solve
either of Violeta's problems.

So she dressed up, she put on those kinds of
silk stokings with seams at the back,

she put on her little suit, she put on high heels,
she put on lipstick,

she decided to speak French,
which she'd learned as a girl,

and she went down to the Consulate.

And she said the following:

"Monsieur the Consul, first of all,

you know we can't take money out of the country,

it's impossible, you're not allowed to take any,

no matter how much you have.

And secondly, really, my husband,
in America, all alone,

and me here with Hitler at our backs,

what is it going to be?

I tell you, we are not people who like to live

under the government's charge,
we're people who like to work.

And I swear, the first thing we'll do
when we go to America is

we'll start to work, and we'll pay taxes."

And she told me the story many times,
and it always ended the same way,

she cocked her head like this, and she'd say:

"You know what he said? He said OK."

And so my grandmother's story worked.

But why did it work?

It worked because of a powerful narrative,

we can name it the American Dream.

It also worked because of the power of narrative.

Those stories that are so big
that we live inside them.

They tell us who we are,
the meaning of what's happening around us,

where we came from,
and they give us some guidance

about where we are going in the future.

Those stories that are so big
that we don't so much tell them,

has become the conduits through which they tell us.

What we say, what we do,
what we plan for the future,

each of these is a step
in the continuation of the story,

and a little turning of the page

towards its future.

So the American dream has always been
one of those kinds of stories,

big, bigger than the country, even.

I mean, really, how did my grandmother,
who grew up in a village

in a country that would become Turkey

know of the American Dream?

She really had no claim to it, unless
it was the Rudolph Valentino movies

she saw as a teenager in Athens.

But she did know it. She knew it because
it was so elastic, so inclusive,

so universal in its promise that she,
like millions of other people,

imagined herself into it.

And without having a word of English,

or having ever stepped one foot into this country,

she persuaded a man that she'd never met

that she was an American.

As for the Consul who -
sort of a hardworking bureaucrat

who had to have my grandmother's
actual French translated,

by his secretary, he understood,

he understood when she spoke.

And it allowed them,
because they knew this same narrative

and they lived inside it,
to find a moment of common ground

and to solve a hard problem together.

We talk a lot still now about
the power of the American Dream,

but many of us know that it is not nearly

as powerful or as globally resonant as it once was.

There are lots of stories, lots of ways of thinking,

lots of codes, lots of symbols,
and they're all legitimate.

And stories actually change over time.

So what do you do when your stories start to dry up?

What do you do when the United States and China

are looking out at each other
across a very vast space

but into an inevitably shared future?

[You] can't figure out whether
they're going to write that future

as one as strategic partners
or strategic enemies.

What do you do when the European Union,

which was a shared dream, can't figure out

how to harmonize the voices of its rich countries

and its poor countries,
of Germany and Greece?

What should we do when that place that we call the West and that place that we call Islam

can't find a way to articulate their shared past,

so that they can go into
some kind of harmonious future?

And the past does exist.

My grandmother spoke of the medieval Spanish,

of the Jews of El Andaluz,

the crown jewel of the Islamic Empires,

and she grew up in the Ottoman Empire,

with Greek Orthodox neighbors on one side

and Armenian Christians on the other,

thinking about Parisian fashion
and American movies.

So, is that Islam or is that the West, or it's both?

So we need a new story.

But how do we get to that new story?

Well, we know that there are many voices
and many participants in making them.

But they're not exactly democratically
perfect examples of crowdsourcing, either.

Political power intervenes inevitably in
making the narratives that we share.

They suppress some voices and they elevate others.

And that is why it's so important that we have

not only responsible political leadership,

but one that understands the power
and the importance of narratives.

One that will help us forge a new one that has exactly

the same thing, three things,
that all successful societal narratives have.

All of them are legitimate.

They ring true, they have a sense of reality,

or people can recognize the reality in them.

They may not be the same reality, but they seem to be legitimate to them in some fashion.

They're participatory.
Everyone has a speaking part,

no matter how big or how small.

And they offer us choice,
because we're all modern people,

wherever we are from,
wherever we are right now.

And we don't really buy stories anymore

in which we are told the end and
what we're supposed to sort of leave out.

The other reason we need stories that
offer us a choice is because

when we have hard problems,
or we run into them,

which we inevitably will,
we need a way to make up

and create new solutions, and that means

that we have to start out with the opportunity

to meet on common groud, like my grandmother
and the American Consul did.

Thank you.

(Applause)