A Transcript of our Conversation with Evelyn "Evi" Torton Beck
with Hosts Elizabeth Bruce and Michael Oliver
If you would like to read a transcript of our conversation with Evelyn “Evi” Torton Beck, Ph.D., you’re in luck. Below is the opening with a link to the whole conversation here.
Evelyn Torton Beck holds Ph.D.s in both Comparative Literature and Clinical Psychology. She has pioneered numerous interdisciplinary courses on topics as diverse as Women in the Arts, Mothers and Daughters, Jewish Women in International Perspective, Women and the Holocaust, Death and Dying in Modern Literature, Lesbian Studies, Gender, Power and the Spectrum of Difference, and Feminist Perspectives on Psychology, among others.
As an author, Evi has focused on Franz Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, Frida Kahlo, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She has written on the impact of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia on identity development. She edited Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. She has lectured in Europe, Japan, and throughout the United States.
She has presented language-focused workshops at the National Association of Poetry Therapy and at The Power of Words Conference as well as workshops in Meditative Dance, Enhancing Joy in Your Life, Health and Healing, Stages of Women’s Lives from Child to Crone, and Creative Aging.
For more information about Evi Beck, click here and here.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I'm Elizabeth Bruce.
Michael: And I'm Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Our guest today is our esteemed colleague, Dr. Evelyn Torton Beck, who is a scholar, a teacher, a healer, a feminist, a child Holocaust survivor. She's a Sacred Circle dance leader and long-time advocate against antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other oppression. Welcome, Evi.
Michael: So, we'd like to start at the beginning, and that's quite literally like your childhood. All right, so what are some of your earliest memories of creativity, either as a witness or as a participant?
Evi: Well, actually, my parents in this sense were models for creativity. Long before the Nazis came to Vienna when we lived there, my parents would take me with them to the cafes in Vienna where people danced freely all afternoon and evening and I watched them dance and perhaps sometimes I got up and could dance with them. So that was one thing.
And then after we came to this [00:01:00] country, although my father was totally untaught, he had a fabulous singing voice. And after working at the factory all day, he would come home and sit at the piano and with two fingers, play opera music and sing the most beautiful opera arias and so I was—
Michael: Is that right?
Elizabeth: Wow.
Evi: Yeah, that was just a wonderful experience for me.
Michael: So obviously your parents were some of your earliest mentors, but did you have other mentors, people that sort of opened the doors of creativity for you?
Evi: Well, truthfully, I don't remember because I think the Nazis blotted out a lot of my early childhood. I went to a kindergarten—from which I was thrown out when the Nazis came to power—so I don't really remember early mentors before I came to the United States.
Michael: All right, and then and another question we like to ask our interviewees has to deal with how creativity has influenced their lives. And so what are some [00:02:00] of the aspects of your life that you would say creativity has had the greatest impact?
Evi: Well, I have to say that I think creativity has influenced everything I have ever done. Teaching requires incredible creativity. It's really, each class is an improvisation, whether it's academic or dance. It's also true for scholarship. So—painting requires creativity—so I'd be hard put to choose one area. I feel like creativity has been something that just has been part of everything I’ve ever done.
Michael: Sure. So, you're immersed in it, it sounds like.
Elizabeth: Well, speaking of this immersion, let's talk about how you understand creativity itself. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s books on creativity, which we've discussed, the, for example, Flow and Creativity, the focus is on acts that advance a particular field of endeavor, like engineering or chess or dance or scholarship. Conversely, in his book Human Motivation, the author Robert Franken [00:03:00] focuses on creativity in relationship to problem solving and communication. How do you, Evi, personally view creativity or the creative act?
Evi: To me, creativity is what flows through me. Whatever I'm trying to do or make something happen. I don't think of creativity as an act itself. I see it as a process that happens. I often have no idea where that flow comes from, and I can't force it and I can't make it happen. But it either comes or doesn't, but I can show up, I can ask for it, I can be ready, I can want it to happen. And that's how I view creativity.
Elizabeth: Wow. So that reminds me of, oh, was it Lillian Hellman or someone who said they have to just sit down at the page and wait for it to happen? Yeah.
Evi: Yeah.
Elizabeth: So, to—you mentioned a moment ago, your early childhood in Europe and in Austria, and I want to talk a little bit more about that, [00:04:00] this remarkable life you've had. On your Wikipedia page and in other writings you speak of your childhood and your family's experiences as Holocaust survivors. You were born in Vienna, as you said, the year Hitler came to power and were living there when the Nazis occupied Austria and imprisoned your father in concentration camps. He was released and after that, you and your brother and your parents fled to Italy and eventually to the USA on the last emigre boat allowed to leave for the US. Beloved family members were killed in the camps. It is impossible for most comfortable people today to fathom the terror and the horror your family and millions of others experienced.
Now, from my limited experience of you and your work as a scholar and a professor and an advocate and sacred dance leader, et cetera, my sense is that you have always been a healer, connecting others to paths of peace and [00:05:00] reconciliation. So, Evi, can you speak about how the deeply creative work of surviving, of rebuilding, of healing from horror and trauma, can you speak about that and how creativity has intertwined with your life's work as a healer across these many disciplines?
Evi: Wow. I really do think that everything I've ever done stems from this early trauma. I like that you speak of the creative work of surviving because without years of deep psychotherapy, which itself is a very creative process because the person who is getting this help from a professional needs to do most of the work. So, I think I would not have been able to access as much creativity as I have without that process. But then when I look at the different kinds of works that I have done, it's clear to me that I've used my creativity to actually be part of the healing process, the things that I researched, [00:06:00] like Jewish themes, lesbian themes, women's themes, painting, all of these themes were things that allowed me to heal. I used the scholarship and the writing and the teaching as part of the process of healing. It's a little hard to explain, but it really, I, I could only see this of course in retrospect, that I used my life's work in every way. In this part of my life I'm doing through the dance, the connection of mind, body, and spirit. That's something that I need now and I help others to heal by doing that. So I hope this makes sense to you.
Elizabeth: It sounds like you were speaking just a moment ago about your father's beautiful singing, and I'm wondering if other members of your family, when you finally got to the USA and you were hopefully no longer under a threat of persecution, were other family members able to use their creative powers and creative expertise to, to heal themselves ‘cause you were all traumatized?
Evi: [00:07:00] Well, unfortunately, we had a very, we only escaped the small nuclear family. My aunts and my grandmother and other family members all remained and were killed. So, the only other person left is my brother who in fact did use his creativity. He became an artist and a photographer and was in, in many ways he played the guitar, and he taught me the guitar. So, I think together, we definitely used each other's burgeoning creativity to heal. My mother herself went back to school, tried at least to do that because as a Austrian, as a Jewish, as a woman, she was not able to go to school past 16. So she, my parents were both extremely involved in the arts and creativity from a very lay person's perspective.
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This was a wonderful interview, so great to hear about Evi's lifelong involvement with creativity and her current teaching in the community!