Reading Lucille Kolkin in the archives

You have just read “Reading Lucy” (Brooklyn Was Mine 2008), an essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan. As great as it would be to return to the Brooklyn Historical Society to examine the Kolkin collection that Egan writes about, we can save time and examine some materials online.

A good place to start is the finding aid for the Kolkin collection at BHS. We can also examine two letters available online. We can see a photograph of Lucille Kolkin and three other women she worked with at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as a photo Kolkin took at work. We can also listen to an interview with Lucille Kolkin, since BHS has digitized some of their oral histories.

Please link us to any additional materials you find on Lucille Kolkin or related subjects.

As you consider “Reading Lucy” and these additional materials, consider why they exist, and why they exist where we find them. What do they tell us about the materials? What do that tell us about preservation? How do they help us relate to Kolkin, or to Egan?

Reading Lucy by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan’s essay, “Reading Lucy” from the collection Brooklyn Was Mine conveys Egan’s relationship to Lucy Kolkin and how it develops throughout letters written by Lucy to her husband. At the begging of the essay Egan talks about two month friendship she had with Lucy Kolkin until Lucy decided to move to California. Later on in the essay we understand that by that she meant that she spent two months reading Lucys letters to her husband that joined the navy on 1944. This relationship developed because Egan was doing research on a novel  she was writing about which was about a woman who worked in Navy Yard during World War II and she came up with Lucy who also worked at the navy yard for almost two years. To help her research  she decided to read the lecture notes lucy had when she took shipfitting school. While she examine the notes she noticed lucy did to-do lists just the way she did so it intrigued her to know more about this woman. Therefore, she decided to go to BHS to read the letters BHS had archived from her when she used to write to her husband. Jennifer Egan spend 2 months reading this letters and she got so into lucys life that she felt she was there a with lucy back in 1944.  Even if she didn’t get the chance to meet Lucy it was like if she already knew her by the emotion lucy put in those letters to her husband. At the beginning when she said she got to know lucy until she moved to California she meant that that was the last time she got to read lucys letters because lucy went to live to California to be with her husband, so obviously the letters stop at that point. Egan learned Lucy did have kids and grandchildren but that sadly she died. After that Egan decided to read some letters that Alfred Kolkin send to Lucy and she was happy and satisfied knowing that Alfred had the same amazing personality Lucy had.

Read Lucy

In Jennifer Egan’s essay Reading Lucy, she was very passionate about reading Lucy Kolkin’s life and her letters to here husband. Egan made a seft-to-self connections with Lucy because she considered Lucy and herself as “Brooklynites”. Lucy’s letters telling her husband Alfred about different stuff happening in her everyday life fulfilled Egan’s interest in learning about battleships and working in a Brooklyn Navy Yard. From reading Egan’s essay I learned that Lucy was a very passionate women who was wildly in love with her husband which would be conveyed in her various letters to him while he was stationed in different areas throughout his duties in World War II. Egan’s relationship with Lucy began when she started reading her letters starting from April to September 1944. Lucy letters began with her lecture notes from navy yard shipfiiting school, she wrote down and defined different acronyms. Continuing her research which initially was suppose to be on working in Brooklyn navy yards, Egan fell deep into the letter of this extraordinary women. Egan tells use about one letter where Lucy’s pink lipstick from kissing the paper was still visible even a sixty-two years. We would go on to learn that Lucy was a 3/c ( third class ) shipfitter soon to be 2/c. Lucy had time where she would tell Alfred humorous stories about her day and times when she had spent time with her girlfriends. She complained about sore feet and mentioned her covering of shifts and the processes she had to go through. She told Alfred about her dream of a having a baby and starting a family. Lucy and Alfred did have their problems when it came to being able to see each other but they worked it out eventually. Egan tells us she Google searched Lucy only to find out she did at seventy-eight and her husband out lived her. Jennifer Egan’s connection with Lucy turned out to be more than just a research on navy yard’s but an amazing experience.