Today’s book reading for Two Faces jointly co-authored by my friend Nina Wolpe and me was organized by University of Oregon librarian David de Lorenzo. David was one of a dozen individuals we asked to read the advance reader copy of the book and provide us with their impressions. David gave us an excellent blurb which we used in the “In Praise of” section in the first pages of our book.

Today’s reading was held in the library of the Special Collections Department. The crowd of some fifty audience members was made up of mostly undergraduate students from the university. After some preliminary comments I read a segment from the book and opened for questions. After a bit of a slow start, I fielded questions about life in the internment camp, my experiences as a child in camp, and in general what life behind barbed wire was like.

At one point in an effort to obtain a reading of my audience I asked three questions: 1) a show of hands if they had learned about the evacuation and internment in elementary or high school – Three quarters of the audience raised their hands. 2) A show of hands if they had taken a university class about the internment camps – 50% of the audience raised their hands. And 3) a show of hands if they personally knew someone who was an evacuation and internment camp survivor, and more than half of my audience raised their hands.

I was more than pleasantly surprised with these numbers! In all the talks I’ve given to adult audiences about my family’s experiences during the war I have never seen these kinds of percentages – The most I’ve seen have been a smattering of people who learned about it somewhere in elementary or high school, maybe in a college level class, but never this high a showing in any of my audiences. And among adults in my audiences very few personally knew former internees.

Today’s reading was the most pleasing presentation I have ever given – So far…