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Crossing Borders
Volume 7, Number 1 - Fall 2008
P & S Visionary Honored
with PACF Service Prize
talking with Sarah Hirschman
It began in the courtyard of a public housing project in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass. Sarah Hirschman approached the women sitting on the project’s stoops with copies of “Siesta del Martes” by Gabriel García Márquez in her hand.
Within weeks, the women were meeting regularly, discussing stories in Spanish (Hirschman’s fourth language, after Russian, French and English), raising the sparks from which Gente y Cuentos/People & Stories was born.
Thirty-six years later, the program reaches 1,000 participants a year in 35 locations that include shelters, GED classes, drug-recovery programs, senior centers, prisons and libraries in states from California to Georgia.
And while Hirschman is no longer an active coordinator, she remains on the board and helps to evaluate stories in Spanish and French for the program’s bibliography. Her vision, her spirit and her decades-long dedication were honored in May, when she received the Bud Vivian Award for Community Service from the Princeton Area Community Foundation.
Hirschman’s nominators described her as a “citizen of the world…who developed a way to invite those with basic literacy skills to enjoy and benefit from the same artistic works usually studied in college classrooms…She has found ways to bring people together in discussions driven by complex stories that don’t offer easy answers, but encourage people to explore values and talk about difficult questions.”
Hirschman didn’t envision the program’s eventual reach when she ventured into that Cambridge barrio in 1972, short stories in hand. “I was just interested to see whether I could involve people who had never read before, or who had not had familiarity with books, to see how they would react to serious literature.”
Their reaction was enthusiastic, she recalled, providing confirmation of theories Hirschman had gleaned from study with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
“On the one hand, there is ‘high culture’ and, on the other, people who for one reason or another haven’t had access to it. How can we bring it together? People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos started with that as the basic idea,” she said. “Literature has a way of awakening things in people so that they can begin to discover new worlds and can begin to see how these new worlds relate to their own experience.”
The method, the training and the funding all came later, developed incrementally by Hirschman, People & Stories executive director Patricia Andres, board members and dozens of coordinators.
But Hirschman remains the keeper of People & Stories’ flame. “I am absolutely opposed to trying to match stories to what we think is the interest of people,” she says. “When I worked in Argentina, in a very poor barrio, one woman said, ‘What I want for my barrio more than anything is just one performance by a ballet dancer.’ No one choosing stories could have guessed that’s what would interest this woman.”
Hirschman spent recent weeks exploring her own literary passions, re-reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (“I always like to read something in Russian in the summer to keep my language afloat.”) Meanwhile, the award has brought a flurry of notoriety, both for Hirschman and People & Stories.
“When I began, I didn’t think about any program, any strategic plan, any end-result. I was just interested in the process. I am glad that the award has put the program on the map for a lot of people.”