Librarians are notorious for
enforcing silence, but school librarian Isabel Zinman is more likely to shatter
that silence with laughter.
“She’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and a lot of people will say the same. She’s always laughing,” said her daughter, Jen Elyse Feldy.
During her high school senior
talent show, the Student Council asked if Zinman would contribute her giggles to
their show. Her parents were on a business trip, but her older brother, Henry,
brought his friends to see her.
“It was your standard high school talent show and people were singing and dancing. I don’t remember if there were any rock bands, but I do remember at one pause, the clapping died down and all of a sudden you see Isabel come out from behind the curtain on the side of the stage with a sign, I think it said, ‘laugh,’ and she was almost out of control giggling. Everybody cracked up. Whoever thought of it, it was brilliant. It worked. Everybody just screamed with laughter,” said Henry.
For her exit, Zinman had someone drag her off stage with a hooked cane. Not only did her performance receive rave reviews from her brother’s friends, she was also acknowledged at a school assembly the next day.
“The principal called me up on stage and he said, ‘Before we start we’ve gotta have an encore,’” said Zinman.
Although she is fluent in laughter, Zinman’s native language is Spanish. She was born in Washington D.C., but since
her father was a diplomat, her family moved to Paris when Zinman was six months
old, and then moved to Spain a year later.
“My friends were Spanish [because] I went to a Spanish kindergarten, and I still have the accent and I can kind of pick [the language] up,” said Zinman.
In Spain, she learned to sew,
write in script and dance Flamenco.
“When we lived in Spain, I took Flamenco dancing lessons. For kindergarten, I went to ballet lessons as part of the curriculum for everybody, boys and girls. I got very interested in dance, so my teacher would come to the house and give me private Flamenco lessons. When we [moved to the United States], my mother looked for a good ballet school, so I continued,” said Zinman.
Nowadays, Zinman waltzes through
ballroom dance lessons with ease.
“She sent me a video [of her ballroom dance lessons]. She looks like she knows what she’s doing,” said Henry.
Aside from dancing, Zinman likes
art. She taught herself how to draw. Her medium of choice is colored pencils
and watercolor pencils. She creates zentangle patterns and has even constructed
a miniature doll house.
“Because we lived near Washington D.C., my mother and I would go to the Smithsonian [museum], and there was a beautiful doll house owned by a princess that was on exhibit there. It was a permanent exhibit, and that was my favorite thing to look at,” said Zinman.
She was so enamored with the doll house’s intricacy that one day, when she and her daughter visited an art store in Mineola, Zinman bought supplies to build her own doll house.
“I had [the doll house] in a room collecting dust for a long time and I decided to refurbish it. So about three years ago, I fixed the shingles, I repainted some things and it became alive again,” said Zinman.
While her daughter inspired Zinman’s artistic pursuits, Zinman has inspired her daughter’s comedic ones.
“I made a joke. I said, ‘I hope you don’t spend all your time and money on the doll house and then end up losing all the money in your real house.’ That’s actually the premise of a skit I’m making,” said Feldy.
Zinman was inspired by her
family, particularly in her efforts to learn Hebrew so she could become a Bat
Mitzvah.
“I don’t know how these 13-year-olds do it. I can read [Hebrew]. I don’t know exactly what I’m saying, but I can read it and I can follow the service, but they want us to chant it, with tropes [word inflections] and cantorial. Well, let me tell you I’m having a really hard time,” said Zinman.
Although she may be struggling to follow in her family’s footsteps when it comes to Hebrew, Zinman had no trouble taking up their love of reading.
“My father and mother are avid readers. My brother is an avid reader. My whole family. And we read purely for pleasure. I can remember my very first book. It was ‘Cinderella.’ It had the most beautiful pictures. I had to be about three or four [years old]. I can’t say that I read it, but I flipped the pages over and over again, because they were just so beautiful. And I can still remember what her gown looked like when the wand transformed her rags to this beautiful gown. I still remember what that looked like. It was just a gorgeous book,” said Zinman.
Zinman’s father also took her to a bookstore in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. where she was able to buy as many books as she wanted for five cents.
“When I was in my teenage years and I would get into bad moods, my mother would say to me, ‘Why don’t you go to your room, close the door and read a book?’ And it would always get me out of whatever fix I was in,” said Zinman.
After graduating high school,
Zinman attended Fairleigh Dickinson College in New Jersey. She majored in
drama, taught English, worked for Medicare and then went to the Palmer School
at LIU Post for her Masters degree in Library Science.
The person who interviewed Zinman
for her Masters degree asked if she liked books.
“I was just so [preoccupied with thoughts]. ‘Since I had a business background from Medicare, should I get my Masters in Library Science, education or get an MBA?’ So when the administrator said to me, ‘So, you like books?’ I said, ‘Oh my god, I forgot. You have to like books to be a librarian. I forgot all about that.’ I said, ‘Of course I like books.’ It didn’t even dawn on me. It was just so much a part of me that sometimes things that are a part of you are right in front of your nose, and you don’t know it. So you don’t really have to go too far to find what your passion is. It’s really inside of you, and people think they have to search and search and search and search, and sometimes, you just take it for granted,” said Zinman.
Although Zinman loved reading,
she was afraid to go to elementary school as a child.
“I can remember one morning trying to go to school and I couldn’t. I hid in the bushes. I got a phobia. [I had a] fear of leaving my mother. I couldn’t go to school,” said Zinman.
Her mother started attending
school with her and sitting in the back of the classroom until Zinman outgrew
her fear.
“For me to be a teacher in school, a place where I was so afraid of?” Zinman reflected. “Every once in a while when I think about how much I love coming to school and how much I was afraid of it...Words don’t describe the change,” said Zinman.
For Zinman, being a school librarian isn’t merely a job, but a way of life that gives her an identity and a purpose.
“She really likes the kids [she works with]. She would say she had such a good time with this person, or she made an impact with some student. Let’s say someone was suicidal or really depressed or had some issue. She was able to work with that student and help them out of some crazy situation with not having friends,” said Feldy.
In addition to supporting
students, Zinman is very persistent, and after she retires, she wants to be
remembered as someone who taught life-long learning skills and helped create a
society of independent learners.
“I’m definitely not perfect, and there’s a part of me that’s very insecure. But I love life, and you’re only here once. You have to make a footprint. Somebody once told me a long time ago that when you leave a room, you will be remembered. How you want to be remembered when you leave that room is how you should behave when you’re in that room. So how you want to be remembered when you’re no longer on Earth is how you should act on Earth, because you live on in other peoples’ memories, as long as somebody remembers you on Earth. [When] there is nobody to remember you, then that’s when you’re really gone. That made a huge impression on me,” said Zinman.
Then she smiled. “It’s important for me to act in a way which I will be remembered.”n
Danielle R.
Published May 2019