![]() and I sit at the kitchen table and we talk, we're talking about school. When I come home and cook my college-age daughter dinner. "I have the ability not to be consumed by a cause," says the mother of two grown daughters. She easily explains why she hasn't burned out after more than a quarter century of manning the battlements. The countries and the situations change, giving her, she says, a whole new batch of sometimes nightmarish images, but the words remain appropriate to our time. It's a song she sings every time she performs. How many years can some people exist, before they're allowed to be free. "How many times must the cannon balls fly, before they're forever banned. Travers' audiences these days are still primarily the children of the '60s, who remember with nostalgia and deep emotion the gentle lyrics of Where Have all the Flowers Gone, If I Had a Hammer, Leaving on a Jet Plane and, most of all, Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind: And in September, a book on the trio, as yet untitled, is scheduled for publication. Last year, a host of stars paid tribute to the trio at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington, D.C., for 25 years of "public service for racial, social and economic justice."Įarlier this year, the group's first new album in nine years was released, No Easy Walk to Freedom. Travers, who got back together with Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow in 1978 after a seven-year break, performs about 55 concerts a year with the trio and about 40 on her own. It becomes an ever-widening circle, a circle that makes life worth living." "If they were Jewish," she chided, "you'd be screaming."Ĭaring, she told her audience, "begets caring begets caring. Travers began her program by reminding her audience that there are "political refugees from all over the world being turned away" at America's borders. "Needless to say, you can't get out of the Soviet Union and you don't have freedom of religion."īut to Travers, the plight of Soviet Jews is part of a larger picture of human rights abuse around the globe. And the Soviet Union is a signatory to both of those agreements. "The fundamental abuses in the Soviet Union," Travers said in an interview prior to her lecture, "are abuses of freedom of religion and freedom to emigrate, which are both, according to the United Nations charter and Helsinki Accords, fundamental human rights. Joining three others, including a rabbi, she journeyed to the Soviet Union to meet with refusenik Jews, those who have been stymied in their attempts to emigrate.
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