Photography by Timothy Tai
Susan Margolis Balk inhabits contradictions. She’s taught literary journalism at Columbia University and creative writing to ex-cons; worked as a literary editor at Playboy; written for Rolling Stone but also for Vogue. She turned photographs by her late husband, who escaped Vienna when the Nazis invaded, into a slim, powerful book called Vienna’s Conscience. And when she overheard someone at a signing say complacently, “Those damned Viennese,” she founded New Conscience to fight all the hatreds that still burn. Now called HateBrakers, the nonprofit tackles everything from Midwestern bullying to ethnic genocide. Ferguson kicked it into high gear.
You read poetry at Oxford University. How’d you sink to journalism?
I didn’t like the life of a poet. It was too private a world.
So you wrote a book about privacy’s opposite, Fame, back in 1977, when people were “struggling to be famous the way earlier Americans struggled to be saved.”
Something was happening, and nobody had quite pinpointed it. I wanted to understand the power famous people have over us. We’ve always allowed them to hold our hopes and wishes. [She waits a beat.] Also it was an excuse to go to the Academy Awards.
How did you define fame?
There were three different versions. In New York, it was doing something first, before it caught on, and with a certain amount of success. In D.C., it was power, or access to power, or the appearance of access to power. And in L.A., it was all about image. This is so dated, it probably isn’t even useful, but back then, in D.C., the dinner party was much more of a vehicle than it is now. During the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and a couple of his aides cancelled their dinner party. The second night, his cabinet cancelled. The third night, everybody cancelled, so it would seem like they were in the inner circle. But today’s fame is different, with social media and these ridiculous reality shows. It’s much less than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes. There’s this combination of awe and contempt.
Why do we still worship celebrity?
Maybe because we don’t have royalty, or religion. They are kind of our saints. They tell us how to live our lives.
In the same year, you married your first husband—how did you meet?
In an art gallery in Greenwich Village. He was tall, he had a tie on, he had a car, and he had an accent. The day Hitler and his army marched into Vienna, Ricki was in a movie theater trying to look inconspicuous. A teenager, 6-foot-4, all elbows and knees. He said he heard the music as they marched down the street and his foot tapped, because it was his music, too. We used to ask each other, “How can hate take over an entire continent?”
Vienna’s Conscience is about the after-effects of hatred. Isn’t that rather a switch from fame?
Not at all. Fame looks like power and feels like power—and so does hate.
Is hate an aberration?
No, it’s normal. HateBrakers is the struggle not to be defined by it. We look at the continuum from bullying to genocide. We believe that if people see how others have moved from acts of hate—whether they were victims, perpetrators, or witnesses—to acts of moral courage, it will make a difference.
That’s why you called your educational program Meet a Hero, Be a Hero.
My favorite part of our content is the video interviews. People from three different genocides—Rwanda, Bosnia, and Nazi—and the similarities are astonishing. The triumph of not being defined or limited by that! Confronted by evil, most either people run or fight or do nothing. We want the cumulative effect to be that if God forbid someone encounters an act of hate, they will think, “Oh, I could do this.”
Why did Ferguson become an international buzzword?
The media so oversimplified it. There’s a young woman who’s involved with HateBrakers—she always wanted to be a journalist. During the protests, she was interviewed by CNN and other networks, and she was so excited. Then she saw what appeared on television. All the ideas were edited out.
What have you realized in listening to people about Ferguson?
Just why leaving Michael Brown’s body in the street was so hurtful. There’s a visceral connection to lynching, when bodies were left hanging from trees to teach people a lesson.
You focus on the consequences of hate, but what is its root?
If I were younger, I’d get a doctorate in neuroscience, because it’s right here [she taps her skull] in the amygdala.
Any practical solutions?
Let’s just not demonize each other—or ourselves. Like white privilege—in some cases, it’s like getting mad at the fish because he doesn’t know what water is. I have lots of friends who are really struggling with their white privilege. I also have friends who…aren’t.
I heard you caught some flak for calling your nonprofit HateBrakers?
Some people say, “You shouldn’t use the word ‘hate.’ Well guess what? It’s what we’re using. It’s an element we all have, and it’s a taboo—we don’t talk about it unless we are professional haters, and then we call the other people the haters.
For four decades, you’ve been flying out to San Francisco to teach literature and creative writing at Delancey Street, where people who’ve hit bottom with addiction, homelessness, or prison sentences learn job skills and earn college degrees. What’s that like?
I’ve taught in some cute places, fancy places. Nobody has ever said to me at Columbia, “What’s a metaphor again?” They are so not inhibited. The woman who started Delancey is my oldest, dearest friend. As she said, “They have a whole different universe of bullshit. It’s not the literary bullshit.”
It’s interesting that your organization doesn’t emphasize forgiveness.
I think forgiveness is very, very private. It’s something we can aim for and maybe never achieve. But we can behave as if. That’s the thing I’ve learned from Delancey Street. When people come in there after having done terrible, terrible things, they are told to behave as if they are decent human beings.
What’s your ultimate goal?
I’d like “hit the brakes” to become part of our language, spoken the minute somebody starts demonizing somebody. So it’s said as easily as “hold your horses” or “get a room.” I’d like kids in our program to start interviewing each other, because that’s a special kind of listening. And how about a St. Louis guide to HateBrakers? We have one in Vienna. Instead of saying, “Here’s where Hitler bombed,” it shows where the acts of heroism took place.
You’ve worked with the fire of activism, the softness of literary metaphor, the shiny new online world of “deep content,” and the hard-core finances of running a nonprofit. What does it take to pull off such varying roles?
Whatever success I’ve had has been based on intuition!
You moved to St. Louis a decade ago to marry Ken Balk. What’s your verdict?
I actually love it here. When I first came, people said, “Oh, be very careful, it’s a closed town. Well, maybe if I was, like, a Veiled Prophet wannabe or something…”
The third annual HateBraker Hero Awards are May 11. Details at hatebrakers.org.
