Hi, I’m Marc Aronson, I’m an author of nonfiction books for middle grade and high school, and I teach at Rutgers in the School of Library and Information Science, and I have a doctorate in American History.
When I was growing up, I was always interested in history, I think partially because both of my parents were immigrants. My father came here in 1922, and my mother came in ‘39, just barely, barely escaping from Hitler. And so if your parents are immigrants, you know there’s another story that’s different from the story that’s all around you. You know there’s a past that’s different from the present, but in some way connects to the present.
So I was always interested in figuring out those connections, linking those dots. I’m also an only child, and I think a very great author once said that only children are spies. And you’re spies because you’re in the world of adults, and you’re always sort of half-overhearing things you’re not supposed to hear. But then you have to try to make sense of them, you have to try to make sense of the clues. And I think in some way history to me always meant figuring out those clues, connecting those dots, connecting me to some world beyond me, the world of adults, the world of my parents’ past, the world of Europe, the world of other times and places.
That always felt like a treasure to me, to make that connection. So I initially hoped to be an archaeologist. I was very, very influenced by a book called Gods, Graves and Scholars, by C. W. Ceram, which was an adult book about the great archaeologists, Schliemann discovering Troy, Sir Arthur Evans discovering the palace of Knossos in Crete. And that always seemed wonderful to me, it’s what I wanted to do.
But there were maybe two issues. One was the issue that it sort of seemed like everything had already been found. All the good stuff was already known, I can’t find Troy, it’s been found! And so it was a little bit discouraging on that front. And then the other issue was that at my Bar Mitzvah, when I turned 13 and the rabbi was going to talk about my interest in archaeology, happened to be the week John Kennedy was assassinated. And so in a certain way, history interrupted my interested in the deeper past.
When I was an undergraduate, and actually when I returned years later to graduate school, I thought I would study medieval history. And I think that was because my grandfather was a rabbi, as were many, many, many, many, many, many prior parents and men. And so I was always very interested in how a religious world, a defined religious world meets the modern. Because that’s what happened in my family, my father was an artist who left that world, defined religious world.
And so medieval history seemed like that same story, where you had a Europe defined by religion that started to break out in the Renaissance and started to move out of that. So I was always interested in those borderlines. But I think I was also interested in another borderline, and that’s the borderline between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It’s the same thing. It’s leaving a closed-in community of shared beliefs and moving out into a wider world and a time of challenging beliefs and ideas.