What compels people to deliberately place themselves in harm’s way? Or attempt dangerous feats, endure extreme psychological and physical conditions? And joyfully repeat the experience. An “unlikely candidate“ to imperil her life, Mimi Zieman, had a clear path to medical school but also thoughts to make dancing her career. Willfully rejecting her parents’ repeated mantra to pursue medicine Zieman dumped their “list of shoulds” and chose an unimaginable alternative. Tap Dancing on Everest is author Mimi Zieman’s gleeful memoir, a journey towards reaching the top of the world.
Born in 1962, even at the age of six, Mimi Zieman knew she did not want to live in the shadow of her parents’ insecurities. Displaced from Europe during the Nazi onslaught, their escape to Mandated Palestine certainly saved their lives. However, being new immigrants in America was no picnic. The Ziemans moved into a shabby tenement, ironically called Versailles. They shared their cramped space with their matriarch nicknamed Amama. A former choreographer for the Berlin Opera, Amama was fired from her job during the Nazi regime. She escaped to America in 1933 and inspired her granddaughter, Mimi, to take dancing lessons.
Zieman loved the freedom in her dance classes, the rhythm of tap, the pulse of jazz way more than her strict Orthodox religious education that she was compelled to complete. Encouraged by her dancing instructor and her grandmother, Zieman hoped to make dance her career. But her mother inhibited her dreams, warning she can never make a living dancing often shouting, “you’ll starve---you have a perfectly good brain, use it.” In 1980, at eighteen, Zieman took the prescribed road of ‘shoulds'. She applied and was accepted into McGill University Medical School in Canada .
In the summer, Zieman registered at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. Though she never gave up dancing, the courses at RMBL not only captured her interest but Zieman determined she would follow an adventurous career, ”like Jane Goodall”; she loved the outdoors. Her biology classes at RMBL took her into the mountains. Climbing and hiking the Rockies replaced her feelings of self-doubt. The dizzying heights were exhilarating though she saw others suffer from altitude sickness, nausea, headaches, and other physical injuries. A third year medical student she helped where she could. Resolute to follow her passion Zieman booked a trip to the Himalayas, first to Nepal, backpacking alone in Asia on mountains topping 26,000 feet (Annapurna) then to Tibet on a trekking expedition where she would combine her skills in dance, medicine and share a Passover Seder with her team.
A truly breathtaking adventure of a bold (feminist) medical student who demanded a “boundless life” and discovered it on “terra incognita”.
