Author Archives: oinsketta

Holiday

“So, are you saying his father literally machine gunned people into a mass grave?” she asked, brow bent.  

“Well, that was the weight of the old man’s painful confession the night before he died,” he said, already up on his toes, dancing in that half mad way of his.  

“So you’ve taken poetic license to his confession and transformed it to guilt over machine-gunning families into a mass grave?” she said.  

“Philosophical license,” he said, one finger in the air, head cocked like an old school pedant.

“You’ve taken license with the facts again,” she said.  “I thought you’d taken a vow not to write fiction.”  

“It’s not fiction.  What the man did to his own children, at the moment when they most needed a human response, was inhuman.   Instead of empathy he fought them, denied them, dismissed their feelings as stupid. He beat them down when they tried to express grief when they learned of the slaughter of their entire family when the family tree had all but one limb hacked off, was uprooted, the ground burned and sown with salt.   On this blackened dirt the bones of his aunts and uncles skittered on windy days.”  

“According to him these things may have happened, but they were the kind of trifles a mature person doesn’t waste time crying about. His children came to him grieving over a trauma to make a child vomit and he snarled adamantly that they were insane to grieve.”  

“So in your mind browbeating his children was the same as machine gunning the entire family into a ditch and feeling justified as he did it,” she said.  

“Yes, but it wasn’t just the browbeating.  The browbeating fit the pattern– take a trauma, deny it, tell anyone who may be traumatized they have no right to feel that way but that they are insane, and cowardly, in fact, to have any feelings at all about it.”  

“A very damaged individual,” she said, “but not necessarily a machine gunner of families into mass graves. You want to be careful before you go there.”  

“Nancy,” he said, “a person who is damaged this way, if he still has a soul, dies with terrible regrets.  He deeply regretted that he had lived his life in a black and white world.   The black and white world is a zero sum game where many atrocities are permitted.   After all, it cannot be black when it is white, nor white if it is black, right is right and wrong is wrong.  In fact, he told his son with sorrow, hours before he died, ‘I think of how much richer my life would have been if I’d seen life in all its gradations and colors…’  In a black and white world it sometimes becomes necessary to murder another person, even thousands of people at once.  In a nuanced and just world it is never OK to murder thousands of people at once.”

Nancy looked at him.  

“Ask God, if you believe in God, and you’ll get the same answer: there may come a time when a killer must be stopped from killing and deadly force becomes necessary to prevent an atrocity.  No God worth praying to would ever assure you– unless you see the world as black and white– that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to destroy an entire city in the name of some greater good.  There is no godly answer to the murdered souls of the dead children, old people, invalids, babies, workers in that city.  You want to say you are justified in war to slaughter an entire population?  God does not smile upon you, if you do.”  

“I thought you stopped drinking,” she said.  

“Nancy,” he said, “be serious.  I’m trying to get you to understand why I chose the metaphorical machine gun as the instrument of his towering, seething, white-hot rage, rather than a much harder to fully describe verbal whip he actually used. Brutally using words to cause pain is one way of being furious and self-righteous, but how much better is actually physically machine gunning a perceived enemy, on the lip of a mass grave he would later insist meant nothing.”  

“He insisted the mass grave meant nothing?”

“He waved his hand, Nancy,” and he waved his hand, “and he said ‘those people were mere abstractions, nobody ever knew them.  You have no right to claim to be effected by the loss of those people you never even met,’ and he smirked as he said it.  And it was true that I’d never met them, they were all killed more than a decade before I was born, almost exactly 13 years, actually.  The year of my birth would have been bar and bat mitzvah year for the infants who went into that ditch along with the dozen great aunts and great uncles wiped out by Ukrainains as Nazis gave instructions.   My grandmother Yetta knew them very well.  They were her six brothers and sisters, and their families, and her parents, if they were still around in 1943, and all the children and extended family, and also the same for my grandfather Sam’s six brothers and sisters.”  

“Wait a second,” she said, “so this guy you were referring to in the third person was actually you?”  

“No need to be so literal about it,” he said.  “Fact is, on his deathbed an old man expressed regrets, and whipped himself over having been such a cruel bastard during his life, stubborn, judgmental, enraged, unfair. This is the profile of the guy, who, finding himself behind the gun, turns and fires it, wiping out anyone who might stand against him.”  

“Which is only logical, after all,” she said.  

“It’s logical,” he said, “but not everybody sees the world as an implacable enemy worthy of death.  Not everybody is capable of actually swinging that big gun around, training it on the terrified faces, and, rejecting all of the many reasons not to, heeds only the imperative to pull the trigger.  And if they are capable of it, it will bother them on their deathbed when they have only their vanishing, irremediable lives to consider, and they’ll be filled, sometimes, with terrible, almost unbearable regret.”

“I see what you mean,” Nancy said.

 

 

 

The possibility that most of them are sadists

On his deathbed he expressed tormented regrets, spoke for the first time of things he’d found impossible to talk about, tried to make his peace.  “I must have been insane to believe I was doing something good when I machine gunned those people into that ditch.  I pray that God will forgive me, for that one, at least,” he said.

“You did the best you could,” his son said, “God will understand.”  He gave the old man some water.  “Besides, since when do you believe in God?”  

“It’s not God so much I believe in now, but justice.  It seems impossible that there is no reckoning for the bad things we do here.”

“It is our pain that makes us do the bad things we do here,” said the son.  

“Pain also brings forth the best of some people,” the dying man observed sadly.  

The son nodded, heard the rest of the old man’s unspeakable confession.  He listened with special attention to the detailed apology for the years of truly regrettable cruelty to his own family.  Knowing that death was about the dying man’s needs and not his own, he mildly told him he would have done better if he could, closed the old man’s eyes after the dying man breathed his last.

At the time he thought of this belated conversation as a blessing to both of them.  Years later he realized the blessing had probably been much greater for the old man, being forgiven and let off the hook as he opened up, for the first and last time, to express his regrets for the pain he’d caused.  He’d given the man an easier death.  “Why was I so mild, letting the old killer off the hook?” he sometimes wondered.

Eventually the son looked at patterns in his own life, questioning his largely unnoticed attempts to be mild above all else.   Mildness is easily mistaken for passivity, which is widely hated in a competitive society where people are judged largely on their ambition and accomplishments in the marketplace.  He wondered if he’d been unconsciously attracted to people like his father, collected as his friends a group of unrepentant sadists who would possibly be filled with regret on their deathbeds, but not a moment sooner.   Had he surrounded himself with smiling but angry friends who were the least equipped of anyone to understand his desire to be mild, the first to point out what a pussy he was when he got in a tight spot and resisted lashing out, as any self-respecting person would?

“It’s an oversimplification to call us sadists,” said the dead man from his grave.  “Do you think we derive pleasure from defending ourselves and our righteousness at all costs?  It’s a reflex to protect ourselves, first and foremost.  It’s not about sadistically taking it out on our victims, for our pleasure.  We feel they would have done it to us if we didn’t strike first, so we hit them hard to keep them off balance.  It’s paranoia, maybe, but not necessarily sadism.  The entire pleasure, if any, is in not being victimized again.  Plus, we are completely overwhelmed by our own demons, it’s not about others, it’s about us.”  

The son was sick of hearing the dead man’s opinions, but they had to be considered nonetheless.  “On the Asperger’s spectrum is probably a better way to think of some of them.  A chap who calls to report on and get solace about his problems but seldom inquires about his friend’s troubles.  ‘Ah, but your troubles are well known!’ he’ll exclaim, full of bonhomie, then back to his recitation, the reason he called.”  

“I have to talk to you, at least you listen,” one tells him, “nobody else lets me talk. Do you have any idea how painful it is not be be listened to?”  

“I never worry about you,” says another, truthfully, but oddly nonetheless.  

There was one with a great sense of humor, an unappreciated person of great talent with an even greater need to be right, who decided the best course, when he was trying to be funny, was to look at him with a slightly disgusted expression and slowly shake her head.  Why laugh at his attempts to make her feel better when it was so much easier, and so much more satisfying, to make him feel like an asshole?  Nobody ever gave her anything.

He was able, without rancor, to shed the most destructive of these old friends when the time came to cut the ties.  No need to curse or express disappointment, it was a rational act of delayed self-preservation.  If a friend acts consistently hurtfully, is unrepentant and ignores requests not to behave that way, it is time to take your leave.   Wish them well and head for the door. Few will wrap their arms around your legs as you go, experience teaches that their pride always prevents this.

As a result of being more selective in his friendships, there were days when the only voices he heard were his own, often asking himself out loud who the hell he was talking to, and the dead father’s voice.  It was a heck of way to take a vacation, but better than fighting, he reasoned.

He could see the old man as a strong young man, setting up his machine gun, hear him cursing the people he was about to shoot, and going about his business feeling quite justified.  “These people were scum, they’d have done the same to me in a second, if they could have,” he said, acrid smoke hanging in the air, his accomplices shoveling soil into the ditch.

Vacation

I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest.  Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal.  And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces.   We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad.   “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.  

I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes.  I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts.  Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback.   I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now.  Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.

I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission.  It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part.  The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur.   The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated.  During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often.  I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily.  One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out.  Woken from  a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.

The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal.  We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged.  Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often.  It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.

The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all.   She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free.  I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood.  It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess.   I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as  I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.

The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children.  Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup.  She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too.  My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going.  She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity.  I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities.  Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything. 

I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting.  I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal.  This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake.  I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one.  The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.

Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman.  I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.

Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo.  And not a moment too soon.

Seven Miles from home, New York City Style

We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here.  The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.

Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night?   This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.

We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us.  As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent.  “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him.  At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll.  The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.

By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile.  Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile.  A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour.  We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively.  But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure).  We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30.  It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.  

Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.

 

 

My father’s take

As a boy, when I first learned of the Nazi period, and saw black and white filmed documentation of the worst of their handiwork, I vomited.  An appropriate response for a nine year-old that seems as appropriate now, almost fifty years later.  Some nightmares followed and then, the reality that Nazis come to power from time to time and lead mobs to do unspeakable things, and that many enraged sociopathic types scattered through daily life are glad to do their personal versions of these things with whatever power they can amass, became the background of my life. The continuing news from all over the world, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, El Salvador, East Timor, Syria and too many other places to list, keeps the reality alive and sickeningly well.

Hitler is supposed to have reassured his colleagues, some time before the meeting in that villa in swanky Berlin suburb Wannsee where the Nazi brain-trust secretly worked out the best way to go about the “Final Solution” — a plan that sounded like a possible public relations nightmare to some of them — “Don’t worry, gentlemen.   After all, who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”   An excellent question, Mr. Hitler.  What about them?   He was speaking twenty-five years after the massacre of an estimated million Armenian souls, by the Ottoman Turks.  

It is now a hundred years later and the story of the genocide against the Armenians (the word ‘genocide’ was coined, in 1943, to describe what was done to the Armenians) comes as a surprise to most people who hear of it.   I myself knew very little about it, beyond the death marches, mass starvation, concentration camps and the fact that German officers witnessed, sometimes in horror, the brutal deportations carried out by their allies, the Turks, during World War One.  Then ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau wrote of the sickening slaughter, and how it was smiled on by Ottoman officials, in terrible detail.   The ongoing massacre was apparently regularly written about in the NY Times and widely deplored.  But the world was too busy strafing and gassing each other, and cheering the carnage or dying of typhus, to notice as trainloads of Armenians, packed in cattle cars, were taken to concentration camps where they could be gathered to die more efficiently.  

Today genocide is so common we use the shorthand “Ethnic Cleansing”, a phrase almost as innocuous sounding as “collateral damage”, the shorthand for that unfortunate externality of war, the murder of non-combatants like babies, five year-olds and senior citizens.  In recent years revisionist “scholars” have been claiming the Nazis didn’t really kill people in death camps and surely one day there will be those who deny these other sickening atrocities ever really happened.  Like the state-sanctioned mass killing of the Armenians, though it clearly happened, it’s very controversial now, to some.   Tutsis mass murdered by Hutus? What?

I saw my father cry twice.  Once was at the seder table where he was overcome while dedicating a cup of wine to those slaughtered by the Nazis.  His face turned almost purple as he struggled not to cry, and he wept suddenly and violently before quickly pulling himself together.  My little sister and I watched helplessly as this etched itself indelibly in both our souls. 

“Those people were abstractions, for Christ’s sake, you can’t claim that we were personally effected by Hitler, we never knew any of those people, their letters just stopped coming one day, that’s all, it didn’t effect our family,” my father insisted dismissively (and ridiculously) years later when I brought up the murder of our entire extended family, on both sides.  He had been a twenty-one year-old Jewish kid stationed in Germany immediately after the war, a war that had wiped out his mother’s entire town and his father’s as well.  Of his feelings about being there he said little, though my sister can also tell you the name of the little dog they adopted on the air base, Schickelgruber, and what happened to the poor mutt when it got under the moving wheels of some heavy vehicle, maybe a plane.

I have always been given to brooding, and thinking too much, it must be admitted.  “Think less– do more!” is a mantra I would do well to get in my heart, like today when I am writing this instead of researching and writing things much more practical and badly needed.  Still, reading yesterday, for the first time, what actually happened to my grandmother’s large family, and my grandfather’s, and seeing the names of family members in survivor accounts, chills me too much and I cannot do otherwise. 

Marched to a prepared ravine on the northern end of town, after two years of random killing and death by starvation, ordered to undress (but for some reason to leave their underwear on) and lie face down, they were shot and covered with dirt by local haters who were paid in the clothing of the murdered to make a devilish layer cake of fresh corpses and earth.  Then another terrified group was ordered to undress, lie on top of the previous thinly covered layer of dead bodies, be shot, another layer of dirt, more bodies, repeat as necessary until, by the time I was born, all that would be left of the local Jews was a canyon full of loose bones on the outskirts of Vishnevets.  Among them the scattered bones of every member of Sam and Yetta’s families who were still alive in August of 1943.

Abstractions.

Map of My Grandparents’ little town

Vishnevets

It may be too small to see here, and the half image is oddly distorted and cropped (click on it to see entire map), but on the key provided with this hand-drawn map of Vishnevets you can see, along with the post office, synagogue, cemetery and hekdesh (poor house) a large blot on the northern end, top left center of map, marked in Hebrew “brothers’ graves”, where the victims of the most recent slaughter in that town were buried together in a pit. The English words printed on the map there, “mass graves”, need no translation.  The mass grave was necessitated by “Nazi brutality and cruelty”, (enthusiastically carried out by local Ukrainians), in (August) 1943, according to the monument at Mt. Hebron cemetery in Queens, NY, erected by the Wishnevitz Brothers Benevolent Society and the Wishnevitz Ladies Auxiliary. 

Other information about the unlucky town is summarized in this on-line excerpt from the book of memory:

In 1500 the town was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible. In 1653 the Jews were killed by the Tartars. By 1765 there were 475 Jews in the Old City and 163 in the suburbs. In 1847 there were 3,000 in Wishnowitz.

I could not stop myself from reading the gut-wrenching survivor accounts, determined to get a clear picture of exactly how my grandparents’ families were murdered.  It chilled me to read their names mentioned in one survivor account:

March 16, 1943

On that date, which was a Tuesday, the order was given to set up a ghetto. The buildings to be included in the ghetto were marked. According to the order, the ghetto had to be constructed in three days. The Jews were assigned to build the ghetto with their own hands and with materials they had to supply.

To make sure the order would be carried out in full, two hostages were taken: Yakov Markhbeyn and the writer of these lines. Any diversion from the details of the order would jeopardize their lives.

The ghetto encircled a narrow part of the town and the length of one long street. It extended from Alter Layter’s house to Beni Mazur’s house and from the road leading to Lanovits to the entrance to the Old City.

The gruesome details of the massacre, which I learned for the first time a moment ago here:

At night we could talk, and we asked the two young men from Vyshgorodok to tell us what had happened. And the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me what they had seen with their own eyes-how Vishnevets Jewry had been destroyed-and here is their story.

All the people were brought to a ravine behind the Old City on the road leading to Zbarazh. The ravine served as a readymade grave, with a capacity that met the Nazis’ needs. The ravine had been prepared by Ukrainian farmers. They stood with their tools, clearing the surface of the ravine. They leveled it, removed small mounds, scraped the stones from the sides, and dug the walls. They covered the bottom with the stones and soil they had removed from the walls in order to create a kind of crushed-soil foundation for the victims.

Once the foundation had been prepared, the first group of Jews was led to their burial place.

Two policemen ordered them to take their clothes off and remain in their underwear. They undressed, piled up their clothes on the side, and were then ordered to lie down in a row in the ravine, face down.

When they were all lying face down, the policemen ran over them with their submachine guns in their hands, shooting bullets into the heads of the people who were lying down.

Afterward, they inspected. They walked from person to person and with a handgun killed those who didn’t die immediately, using the gun butt or a bullet shot into the center of the skull.

When they were done with one group, they brought the second, and so on.

The Ukrainians walked over the bodies inside the ravine with horrifying skill. They lifted the bodies that were not level and laid them straight. The Germans sat on the walls of the ravine and supervised the work. They gave the orders, and the Ukrainians executed them.

The farmers took over after the Ukrainian policemen were done inspecting and leveling the layer after the last round of shooting. They covered the layer of bodies with soil in order to place another layer on top. They used shovels to do this. They covered it with a thin layer of soil, and the area was ready for another row of bodies. The clothes piled up on the side were given as a gift to the farmers in exchange for their work. Immediately, they collected the victims’ clothes and loaded them onto their carts, and while the others were busy with their work of killing and taking care of the bodies, they set off to sell their booty.

That was what the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me, and it is the utmost truth, because while they told us their story, they were very detailed and corrected each other so as not to distort what their eyes had seen.

========

It was with another shuddering thought of ruthless fate that I recalled that Beni Mazur’s house was likely the same place where my grandfather Sam grew up, and narrowly escaped death by typhus during the epidemic after World War One.  If my grandfather had not escaped death from typhus (which killed at least one other family member and caused the deafness of one of his parents, and which he referred to as a “very bad item”)… you know the rest.

From A Heck of A Book of Fate, Brownie

It’s a book about the invisible hand of fate, extending its fickle finger here, tickling a cooing baby there. 

In 1921, or possibly 1923, Yetta Marchbein, Yetta “Marrowbone” (her father was a butcher), about 20 years old and full of ambition and idealism (the Bolsheviks billeted in her home during the Revolution had been gentlemen and also inspired her), crossed the Atlantic Ocean from some European port, having made her way there, alone, far under the deck, terrified for life by the rats who walked the partitions there between the bunks.  She, alone, of her large family in a muddy little shtetl in the Ukraine called Vishnevitz, would be alive twenty years later.   The rest disappeared without a trace into the nightmare that was Hitler’s fondest dream. In the U.S. she’d take the Americanized name of her cousins, Miller, and two years later, long before the slaughter of her family and town, marry her strong, frightened fiance Sam Mazur, also from Vishnevitz, who followed her to the U.S. on a ship that embarked from Bremen during the presidency of Warren G. Harding.  The Mazur family, Sam’s six brothers and sisters, father, mother, extended family, was murdered along with the Marchbeins and the rest of the Jewish town of Vishnevitz.  There is a monument in the cemetery in Queens, behind the gates of the Vishnevitz Benevolent Society, where Sam and Yetta are buried, commemorating the slaughter there.

Sam and Yetta Mazur were my mother’s parents.  They had one child, a girl they named Helen, who, as soon as she was able, changed her name to Evelyn.  Evelyn grew up on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, a once thriving street with one end at the stylish Grand Concourse.  Eastburn Avenue, at some point in my mother’s childhood, was cut in half, literally, and its neighborhood destroyed by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  In that apartment house, where the Mazurs lived on the first floor, a family named Stamper also lived.  Yetta and Dinch Stamper (who called each other “Mazur” and “Stamper”) became lifelong friends.  There is a great photo of the Mazurs and the Stampers, probably from before they had children, relaxing on the grass somewhere, in front of dense trees, dressed in the style for going out on Sunday in the early 1920s.

Dinch Stamper had been born Dinch (Diana) Gleiberman in a town in Belarus called Truvovich, a Jewish hamlet about 300 km. north of Vishnevets.  The Jews of Truvovich met the same terrible fate as their landsmen in Vishnevets, wiped away with barely a trace, Truvovich now erased from the map.  Dinch had come over by ship years earlier with a cousin named Chava Gleiberman, youngest sister of my father’s Uncle Aren.   Aren had arrived here a decade earlier from Canada after fleeing involuntary service in the Czar’s army and the Russo-Japanese War.  Chava, a good-looking, deeply religious red-headed Jewish girl, had her hopes for a happy marriage dashed when Aren’s wife broke up a romance with a Jewish postman in Peekskill who’d fallen for Chava.  When Chava’s indentured servitude to Aren and his wife ended a marriage was arranged hastily with a man named Harry Widem, a man my father described on his deathbed as “an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world.”  What my father probably didn’t know about were the routine beatings, with club-like boards, that young Harry had received daily from his step-mother in the mud-floored farmhouse in Connecticut where he was raised.   What I didn’t learn until recently was that Harry spoke English with no accent, unlike Yetta and Sam whose Yiddish accents and inflections spiced my childhood.  I never met Harry and Chava, both died before I was born.  I am named after my father’s father Harry (Eliyahu in Hebrew) and my sister after Chava.  What is now well-known is how much Chava despised her husband, and that she whipped her oldest son, Israel, without mercy, from the time he could stand.

The hand of fate, gentle reader, spared these two couples, Sam and Yetta and Chava and Harry, my grandparents, while the rest of both of their large families (several of Harry’s siblings and half-siblings in the US survived to produce families, as did Chava’s brother Aren, who has dozens of descendants here and in Israel) disappeared into the night and fog the world remembers hazily as World War Two.  The good war America fought against unequivocal Evil.  

My parents met, of course, in that apartment building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx where my father, and his younger brother Paul, would visit their cousin Dinch and her family.   During these visits my future father spied my future mother, the beautiful, dark-haired, popular and completely haughty, Evelyn Mazur.   She had an active social life, many boyfriends, and considered the shy, skinny guy from Peekskill a laughable hayseed, and besides, he was clearly poor as a church mouse.  In time she would agree to go out with him (to get the insistent Yetta off her back) and would watch, amazed, as he transformed himself from hick to urbane, witty, increasingly sophisticated boyfriend, fiance and later husband.  They would build a middle class life together, she’d come to think of him as the most secure and brilliant man she’d ever known and he would (when not making her cry) give her all the credit for transforming his life into one worth living and striving to improve.

If Yetta, Chava and Sam had not left Europe before the slaughter of everyone they knew (Chava lost her brothers Yuddle and Volbear and her sister Chaski as well as the rest of her family in Truvovich), had not Harry (who came to the US as an infant) survived the passage and a childhood of blows to the head with whatever wooden truncheons came to hand, Evelyn and Israel would not have been born.  If they had not come to be, and meet, and procreate, neither would I have.   If the bleeding my mother endured one frightening day late in her time pregnant with me had been worse, if this, then that. 

The hand of fate, gentle reader, including its fickle, tickling finger.   More details to follow, perhaps, if fate and the spirits will it.

 

At the Picnic

“So what are you saying?” he asked me, understandably at a loss.

“When I say certain gears aren’t working in my head, I’m not trying to say I’m seriously impaired.  I mean, I can have a conversation, can take care of a lot of things, I have talents, feel responsible to people I love and even people I don’t know, I’m strong, I can be counted on in a pinch and all that, but I am impaired, clearly,”  I could see this was not making things clearer for him.   I felt bad, he is a likable man.

“I’m like 90%,” I said.  “I can do most everything I need to do, but I’m not 100% effective, if you know what I’m saying.”

“So, you’re like 10% off?” he said.

“Yeah, something like that.  I mean, not to say it’s not a problem for me, it’s clearly a problem.  But also, yeah, I’d say about 10%, maybe, things I can’t get myself to do.”

“Can’t get yourself to do or can’t do?” he asked, making a distinction that left it my turn to be confused.

“No, to be clear,” I said, “sometimes ten percent, which seems like a small percentage, takes on a disproportionate importance, like when the top 10% in a society own 90% of everything, things like that.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, looking around with a sudden determination to refill his waning red plastic cup of wine.

Clever Marketing is the Key to Success

Sekhnet came up to urge me to join every social media site linking businesses that I can find.  I am isolated and it is an increasing problem, especially for someone trying to run a shop and attract customers.   She showed me the social networking entry for an accomplished man we know, an angel investor on a site where these entrepreneurs mingle looking for opportunities.  She showed me how clearly he laid out his interests, qualifications and expertise.  She urged me to do the same, to advance my stalled not-for-profit business.   I agreed that she was right about the usefulness of joining more sites where I might meet like-minded people, then read her part of the email I’d spent the past hour writing.

I’d been led to pet one of my favorite peeves by my friend’s emailed, on target, comment:

(“You spend way too much time petting your peeves,” Sekhnet observed.)
 
I’ve grown more and more bitter over the fact that nothing succeeds on its own merits–that whatever makes it in our world, does so because someone has packaged and sold it cleverly.  Which helps to explain why we end up, in the culture, in our food, in our politics, with so much rancid shit.
 
Well said and I share the bitterness, though I try (mostly without success) not to let it stop me. A sociologist who wrote in the 1930s (Harold Lasswell, I think) whose work I read decades ago while researching Hitler’s rise to power and how ruthlessly Herr H. used the mass media to influence public opinion and promote his famously rancid ideas, concluded that “the religion of the United States is advertising”.  He proclaimed this self-evident truth before TV, in the infancy of radio, when the mass media was being cranked out and printed on pages that were disseminated by child hawkers on street corners.  He described how American industry sent Polish immigrants back to Poland to unfurl giant painted banners of American streets literally paved with gold and lie to the workers they fronted steerage tickets for to bring to work in factories.   Greek Americans went to Greece, Italians to Italy, wherever they were recruiting they sent native recruiters to lie in the mother tongue.   Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was run by an ad man named George Creel who whipped up patriotic fervor for a war being fought by the rest of the world in muddy trenches along the lines of the worst of the Civil War, except made even more hellish by the addition of machine guns, poison gas and airplanes.   There were parades in the streets and long lines at the recruiters because of Creel’s genius in whipping up support for WIlson’s senseless (except to those who made a killing) War to End War, War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, War for Fuck You We’ll Kill You Under the Espionage Act For Trying to Use the First Amendment in Time of War to Aid Our Enemies, You Fucking Traitor!
 
The rulers of our society have always ruled by selling lies to people raised from infancy on advertising jingles and tag lines.  By the time kids are ten they’ve done their Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quota of commercials on TV, they are masters of being marketed to.  Presidential debates and elections?  Decided by image, body language, sound bites.  A few years ago promising presidential candidate Howard Dean lost his political future by cackling euphorically into a microphone at a rally.  Might have had good reason to be euphoric at that moment, he was leading in all the polls, but they played the 3 second clip of a cackling madman 24/7 until he was toast.  It’s despicable what greed and cynical marketing have done to the world and it explains much of the misery, disease and early death.   Capitalism is a cancer and the only cure, it would appear, is the total destruction of life on earth, which they are well on their way to accomplishing. God bless ’em.  But in this context, in our competitive free market society, there is only one way to successfully sell an idea– the old fascist way, the single-minded way Mr. Hitler had such brutal insight into, to put the most distasteful possible gloss on the gentle and perfectly neutral art of persuasion.  Trying to do it without retching, not always easy for the squeamish.
 
Sekhnet told me I should clean it up, lose the ending, and send it to the Nation as a letter or note, that people would be interested in the little history I’d presented, that I write these great things and never send them anywhere to find an audience for them.
 
“Did you ever read the Nation?” I asked her.  She hadn’t for a long time, but knew their politics and thought their readers would appreciate a letter to the editor containing this well presented information.

I appreciate her feelings, I really do, and her desire to help.  Motivated by love, and my best interests, and an understandable desire to see me step forward in the sticky muck.   She agreed that it wouldn’t do to send it in without cleverly packaging it, somehow, and relating it smartly to some current hot topic, the hook.   The irony was not lost on me, though I took the way of the world and said nothing about it.

Then her native optimism and desire to help rose up again– the stories of a Big Lie are so common that I won’t have long to wait until the next news cyclone generated by one, and I can send it in then!  

Meantime, I do the online equivalent of printing it out, rolling it up and sticking it where the sun don’t shine.

What We Should Say Instead

A book I read recently about making a good pitch, saying it right the first time, pointed out that the hardest question a person usually gets during an interview is the one inevitable open-ended question seemingly too simple to prepare for:  tell me about yourself.

The author suggests we prepare well for this question, practice a short, rich answer tailored to advancing the subject at hand.  If it’s a job interview the answer should convince the interviewer that everything in your life has led up to this perfect-for-me job.   If promoting a book, it is the short, crisp background story that will make the reader know why you wrote it and make them want to rush out and get the book.

Yesterday a woman at a nonprofit I hope to work with asked the famous, and obvious, open-ended question: how did you come to this?  Tell me about yourself.

What I said, without a script:

I’ve always drawn and I play music.  I was a teacher years ago.  I practiced law for a while, until, when my mother got gravely ill, I decided I should do something I really love, which is when I began developing this program.  It took me about a year to work out how to do animation in a way that kids could do everything, I invented the animation stand and perfected the program.   We’ve been working with public school kids for about a year and a half.

This answer led to the question of what kind of law I practiced, how contentious the NYC Housing Court is and the woman’s “at least you represented tenants.”  Followed by my self-deprecating remark that landlords’ lawyers wear better suits than tenants’ lawyers and some other off topic banter that advanced nothing, other than the idea that I may be a dilettante, and/or someone having a midlife crisis, and that, naturally, as a lawyer, I had incorporated as a nonprofit.

Clear lesson learned:  work on the short, punchy script for next time that advances why someone should care about what I so deeply care about.   It needs to include how much I enjoy creative play, visual, musical and otherwise; how long it’s bothered me that public school kids don’t get much chance to show their creativity and competence in this age of metrics and teaching to the test.  That creativity is not a luxury, it’s a huge part of learning and a vital part of life.  That being listened to is a rare gift easily given, and sorely needed by children in particular.  Work in how much I love to draw, and play guitar, and collaborate, and how every time I work with children in the animation workshop, the buzzing intersection of so many creative avenues, I feel energized and delighted by their creativity. 

And, note to myself, don’t ever again mention to strangers that instead of a smartphone with GPS I have my dead mother’s once state of the art Motorola Razr.  Why would anyone but a nattering madman mention such a detail?  Note how much better in every way this answer is:  “Do you have a smartphone?”  Answer: “No.”