User talk:LarryLopez

Your mother
Please accept my sympathy for the death of your mother. Parkwells (talk) 14:13, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.

Not sure how to respond to your talk page on the article, so I hope you don't mind if I post some thoughts here instead. Hope you see them.

Frist of all, apologies for the delay in getting back to you (and also for the clunkiness - I need to spend some time figuring out how to communicate on wikipedia). As a former AP reporter, I have no problem with the need for authentication and verification - I'm just not sure quite how to do it.

I think the review you are talking about is of Jack Hitt's book, Bunch of Amateurs. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but his book and the years-old Lingua Franca (?) piece on which the Lopez chapter is based is rife with simple factual errors. You have cited it correctly. But it is factually wrong.

For example, the chapter's opening paragraph, on page 249, says inter al. that Lopez was 17 in when the Germans invaded in 1940, had a yellow Citroen car, and was about to take a job a few doors down from the house of internationally famous songwriter Jacques Brel. The actual facts are these: she was 19, not 17, and took trams to and from school because she did not drive, much less own a car. As for Brel, he was born in 1929, so he would have been all of 11 at the time the Germans invaded. He did not begin to write and perform songs until 1952, 12 years after the war broke out, and he was already married by then, so I doubt he was living at his childhood home in Schaerbeck. (For that matter, I'm not sure the about-to-get-a-job part is exactly right, either.

There are other clear errors in his chapter. Two examples: The conversation with her brother Gilbert did not take place after the bombs fell: it was at least a year earlier. Indeed, it couldn't have been after the invasion since Gilbert was in the Army, fighting the Germans, not out taking long walks with his sister. And it was her brother Etienne, not Gilbert, who later sent word about funds in America.

I realize that my saying this doesn't help you find a published source. I do have original material, like her birth certificate and long taped interviews she gave (including one at the Yale Holocaust Studies program), but I'm not sure how I would get them to you. If you want to ensure I'm really her son, you are certainly welcome to contact someone at the Franklin Papers. I'd suggest Ellen Cohn or Kate Ohno - their names are on the FP's website at http://www.yale.edu/franklinpapers/editorialstaff.html and their contact info is in the Yale directory at http://www.yale.edu/search/find_people.html. Ask them what email they use to contact me and then shoot me an email if you want.

I'm glad you find my mother's life intriguing. There's a lot more to her: some brilliant lectures on French women from Joah of Arc to Simone de Beauvoir, for example, and the cholera-plagued ship on which she made it to America. She's also been a subject, e.g. in Josh Kornbluth's brilliant "Franklin Unplugged" performances. You'll find some of it in a quick bio the family put up at claudeannelopez.com, but there's a lot more that could be said. LarryLopez (talk) 09:02, 1 January 2013 (UTC)