I came to the University of Michigan Library this summer as a Michigan Library Scholar with my identity grounding me in my project.. I'm a Public Policy major at the Ford School with a minor in writing through the Sweetland Center, and most of my coursework is focused on law and policy. But this project put me in a very unfamiliar spot; the archive of Victor Perera. Perera was a Sephardic-American writer whose life and work in some ways paralleled, and in some ways diverged greatly from, my own. More than anything, however, my ethnicity, as an Ashkenazi Jew drew me to apply. In addition to the stated goals of the project, I wanted to understand a Jewish identity that wasn't the one I grew up with.
Victor Perera (1934–2003) was an award-winning journalist, essayist, and academic whose papers came to the U-M Library in 2002, shortly before his death. Chief among them is an unfinished manuscript, Of Whales and Men: Patagonian Encounters, which Perera never completed due to a stroke. Under the mentorship of Gabriel Mordoch, my main mission was to help move this 125-page manuscript toward a publishable state. The learning objectives were focused on more than simply copy-editing, however. In addition to preparing the manuscript, some of our goals were to get comfortable with archival material, understand what it takes to prepare a manuscript for publication, and soak up the history, geography, and culture of the Patagonia region and environmental writing that Perera spent his life documenting all while going through the publishing process.
My primary contribution was retyping Perera's manuscript from the archival copy, eventually transitioning into carefully copy-editing the manuscript to ensure its publication readiness. While this may sound mechanical, and perhaps not even worthwhile—it certainly was not. Every page required close reading, while making decisions about formatting and being conscious of preserving Perera's voice. Furthermore, we often made sure to cross-reference with the surrounding materials in the collection to catch context that otherwise might have been missed.
Looking through the entirety of the materials in the Victor Perera Papers became my favorite part of this project. The Victor Perera Papers are enormous, and include various correspondences, drafts, photographs and notes spanning decades of a prolific writing career. At times, it became very challenging for me to even stay focused on the manuscript, because everything else in the collection kept pulling my attention. I'd go looking in a box in search of pictures from Perera’s time in South America, and then an hour later I'd still be reading through letters that had nothing to do with the manuscript at all. When I first stepped into the special collections room, this phenomenon felt like a distraction from the actual job I was there to do. Over time, though, I came to see it differently. That expansiveness was the archive doing its intended job. It gave me much more than I had asked for, and it then rewarded me for searching. It was this learning process that helped me let myself explore while still bringing myself back to the manuscript. It not only gave me archival research skills, but also helped me learn that learning isn’t linear and doesn’t follow a straight path.
Technically, I came away from this project with real skills in archival handling and research methods, such as how to move through a large, sometimes over-indexed personal collection, how to verify details against primary sources, and how to work carefully with materials that are delicate and absolutely cannot be replaced if they are damaged. Those are skills I wouldn’t have developed in my coursework, and they turned out to be more transferable than I expected.
I'd also worried going in that close transcription work might feel tedious for a job that is focused on research. It ended up feeling like a very natural fit. Being able to build an accurate record from primary-source material, which involves reading closely, verifying claims, documenting where information comes from, truly is not so different from the kind of mindset needed to excel at the kind of legal research I hope to do in my career in law. This summer gave me the skills to adapt to that mindset, and the patience it takes.
Beyond the technical side, working inside Perera's writing all summer gave me a bit of a window into his Sephardic history and identity that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Reading his reflections on culture, memory, and place alongside my own Ashkenazi background sharpened how I think about my own identity, as well as helping me learn about Perera’s.
An unpublished manuscript by a writer as significant as Victor Perera wouldn’t get the chance to actually be published without the work done to prepare the manuscript. That's what this project was, at its core: making sure Perera's final, unfinished book has a path forward toward publication, as opposed to sitting idle in a box. Every correction and annotation I made is a small piece of that larger effort to preserve his literary legacy, for anyone who might one day pick up Of Whales and Men and encounter Perera's writing for the first time.
I came into this internship expecting to learn about archives. I didn't necessarily expect to leave with a clearer sense of both how research and the publishing process connect to the kind of legal and policy work I want to do after graduation. This summer certainly reminded me that the work of getting small details correct, and giving someone else's story the care it deserves, is work worth doing.