Category Archives: personal

OK… All Right…

I have found, as I get older, that when I am alone, as happens in my life of contemplation, and I need to exert myself even slightly, I more and more often accompany the action with a reassuring “all right… OK…”    This involuntary self-encouragement is delivered in a slightly rough voice, but very softly.  It is as much a breath as a voice, really.    I don’t know where it comes from, except that such self-talk must go deep in the human experience.

It is unusual, in many lives, to have a gentle hand to guide us along.  Like many things we learn to do on our own, we sometimes provide our own gentle hand.   However otherwise gruff the voice is that encourages me to get up slowly after sitting for a long time, say, it is more than anything a gentle voice.   I don’t mind it at all.    I greatly prefer it to my outbursts.

I watched the last hour or so of the wonderful Princess Bride the other night.   It reminded me again, watching Peter Falk play a character years older than he was at the time, a kid’s grandfather, both gruff and extremely gentle, that Falk’s character was probably a main source of this voice.

The grandfather reads the end of the story, closes the book, says goodnight to his grandson and gets up to leave.   The boy asks his grandfather if he’ll come back and read it to him again the next day.    Falk turns at the door of the boy’s room,  bows his head slightly, like a vassal about to address his lord and says “as you wish.”

Why Do You Bother?

A voice started nagging me the other day, a familiar voice with famously bad breath.  “What the hell are you doing?” the voice said, with annoying, random inflection, the words arriving unpleasantly warm and fetid in my ear after wafting past my nostrils.

“You continue, day after day, to sit and write.  You seem to write about whatever comes into your head.   You write clearly enough, we’ll stipulate to that, but the larger question is ‘what the fuck’?   Seriously– what is your plan?”

A fair enough question, ass breath.

“More than fair, really.  If you are writing literally every day, taking the trouble to clearly set out all these things that are on your mind, document your long wrestling matches with anger, futility, depression, vexation with the ongoing triumph of incoherent narratives… why are you not spending as much time every day branding, marketing and selling your content?   Why are you not monetizing the skill you’ve been honing for decades?”

Nicely summarized, my inscrutable dilemma, there, toe cheese breath.    

“You can sit there asyntactically smarting me all you like, as you worry about the warranty for the nib of a very expensive fountain pen you love, the fairly new acoustic/electric guitar that is no longer electric, trying to overcome the frustrations of a smart phone that is smarting you daily, having failed to write down the robotically delivered authorization code for PT that the health insurance company robot read to you– foolishly assuming that same code had been sent to PT (it hadn’t, of course) and now you can’t make an appointment for tomorrow’s session since they are no longer picking up the phone, after you called Healthfirst back and were eventually connected to the third party who had the authorization number you need to continue rehabbing your sore knees…”  

I get it, sweat gland breath.  

“A blessing that you can’t smell your own breath, my decomposing friend. I’m just giving you a little friendly advice: you’re not a writer just because you write, even if you write clearly and convincingly, even if you do it every single day of your life. You are a writer if your writing is in print, paid for by somebody else, and with a check written to you for writing whatever the hell it is. Period.”  

Sure thing.

 

Shades of Anger and Avoiding Rage

Anger comes in varying shades.   Not every shade is dangerous, but unchecked anger always has the potential to explode into rage, which is the main thing to avoid.  Anger is a threatening emotion, difficult to sit with, and anger that is denied, pushed down, diverted toward people who don’t deserve it, is as corrosive as sulphuric acid.

Anger often starts as annoyance, escalates to feeling provoked.  Sufficient provocation gives rise to a righteous and difficult to control desire to strike back.   Depending on the situation, anger can easily turn to rage.   Recognizing the initial signs that you are becoming angry, and taking as many breaths as needed to avoid the easy cycle of anger,  is crucial to not flying into a rage.  Not flying into a rage may be the best we pitiful earthlings can do when we are provoked to anger.   Important work, friends, learning to not fly into a rage, even when sorely provoked.

I have been in this cycle of provocation and escalation countless times.  Over my childhood angry confrontations were a regular occurrence in the little house I grew up in.   I was a kid, and did the best I could in an insane situation where everyone was screaming at each other.   Much of the anger came straight out of my parents’ frustrations with their own lives.   Neither of them ever learned to control their anger very much, certainly not when it came to the two ungrateful children who presented such challenges to them.  In terms of dealing with their anger, both of my parents were essentially children.

I had a friendship for a while with a New York City criminal court judge.   He was a brilliant man, if also deeply troubled.  Sekhnet, who has a talent for hitting such nails on the head, said of him “Bill’s a child.   A brilliant child, but a child.”   The same could be said for my father, and to a great extent, my mother.   Both were highly intelligent, both had been raised by domineering mothers who frequently made irrevocable vetoes of their child’s deepest wishes.  

Each overbearing mother had broken up the most exciting  romance of each of their childrens’ lives.  My mother’s mother chased off her daughter’s first fiance, simply would not stand for this dashing young con-man becoming her son-in-law.  In my father’s case, it was a longterm relationship with a Christian woman, a young widow a couple of years older than my father.   There are photos of them together before World War Two in Connecticut and after the war in Syracuse.   My father never looked happier than in those couple of black and white photos.   It appears to have been some kind of love story.   In the end, the overbearing mother won, the lover was extirpated forever from my father’s life.  

There is the kind of anger that makes people lose their minds.  When angry, they feel they are simply fighting to stay alive.   Anything is fair to somebody in this hopped up state.   This is very common with anger– it convinces you of the rightness of whatever you do in that state.   Defend the homeland!!!  Death to the infidels!!!  Death before dishonor!!!  Take it out of their skulls!!!

I am thinking about anger today because yesterday, once again, I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with someone who called to tell me, essentially, that I had no right to my feelings.  No matter how much I may have been hurt and provoked, the caller told me, or how many times I may have been hurt in the exact same way, they love me, I am like family and the thought of me not in their lives is too painful for them to deal with.   All this was happening, I was told, because I was not looking at myself deeply enough, not finding a way to forgive a series of escalating provocations that were very aggravating, true, but completely, or at least largely, unintended.

It was an aggravating conversation with a person I like very much.  It was aggravating largely because the person had no idea, outside of endless, limitless forgiveness on my part, for what I should do going forward with a friend seemingly incapable of not provoking me in every encounter.  Aggravating because I’ve thought deeply about all these things, studied the situation over the course of the last few months, consulted friends whose opinions I respect.  

In the end, I had nothing, and nobody else could see any way forward, outside of the miracle of an old friend suddenly discovering how to be a mensch, something completely out of my hands.  I gave this old friend every opportunity not to keep attacking, but he was unable to refrain from being on defense and offense instead of seeking a way out of the toxic cycle that was killing our friendship.

A few times during the conversation yesterday I got angry.   Each time the person I was talking to squawked, hurt and mad that I was expressing anger at not being heard.   Each time I took a deep breath and quietly expressed the thing that couldn’t be heard when I expressed it with anger.  In the end little that I said seemed to have had much effect, but the exercise of not exploding in anger was a good workout.  A sad, mutually unsatisfying conversation ended calmly enough, with neither of us telling the other to fuck off.

No matter what else can be said about the difficulty, sometimes, of not exploding in rage, it is always a good idea.   It is hard work, Jack, very goddamned hard work. Especially if I keep denying your right to feel hurt by something I did to you, no matter how unfair I admit that thing was.   Keep bringing it up, I will keep shifting the blame back to you — you are unforgiving, you are heartless, rigid, you don’t see yourself, you exaggerate, you betray.  If you look deeply enough into yourself, I will say, you will see that you are wrong — it is possible, isn’t it, that you are wrong also? Love conquers all.    I will lay down the love card, the final card, the card only someone without love could deny.   I could not have really hurt you that badly because I LOVE YOU.

You respond that love is not words, no matter how beautiful, but actions, how we treat the person we love.  If I treat you harshly you have every right to expect a sincere apology from me, if I care about your feelings.  If I can’t give you an assurance that I understand the harm I’m doing, will do my best not to inflict more of it, there is no way forward.

I will insist, if I am that type of person, that you are no saint either.  You betrayed my confidence by writing on a blahg that you know a person who has a faulty memory.  I would never do that to you!   You have no idea how hurtful that public betrayal was to me.   I wouldn’t be surprised if you wore a wire on me when we talked the other day.   Are you wearing a fucking wire on me now, you fucking fuck!?   I’ll bet you are.

And away we go!

 

The climbing sorrow of death

Death waits, in no particular hurry most of the time, since every living soul must go with Death in the end.   Some beings get to live the full wink of an eye, eighty, ninety years.   Many delightful winks are far briefer.  It helps to think of the quality of a short life in these cases.  

A tiny colony of feral cats coexist in Sekhnet’s garden, along with a couple of large, gingery raccoons and the occasional giant possum, who come by after dark to finish off whatever food the cats leave over.   We get to witness the brutality of nature up close, its brutal cuteness and its seemingly random viciousness. 

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These two brothers, Whitefoot and Turtleback (foreground) were photographed hanging out in a flower pot on July 17, 2018.   They were three months old at the time.  I am lucky to have this photo, one of very few pictures I’ve shot in the last year or so that I’m still able to view on my phone. [1]   

Their mother, the beautiful Mama Kitten, had her first litter two or three years ago, at six months old.   Talk about babies giving birth to babies.   Six months old and Mama Kitten.  When they were big enough she dragged them from their hiding place and marched the adorable mice in front of Sekhnet.  

“You see,” she told her kittens, “soon, when I stop giving you milk, you will come to her, act cute, and do just what I’m doing now, see?”.  Mama Kitten would fix Sekhnet with a winsome look, make a quick cat move toward her and rub her head and her side along the human’s leg, using the tail to give a gentle caress as she makes her circle.

Sekhnet and I became familiar with the exquisitely gentle touch of a cat’s tail from my original cat Oinsketta, an affectionate cat who practiced the art delightfully.   The late A.W. Skaynes was also a master of the tail caress.   A few of these feral cats get pretty adept with their tails too, they’re generally the ones who like to be petted.  Mama Kitten did not let a human touch her until she was several months old.  She took to human affection cautiously, but she is now a very tactile cat who sometimes loves to have her sideburns scratched.  And she uses her head and her tail very tenderly.

We had many great photos of those adorable kittens interacting with mom, playing with each other, eating food off of spoons.   Suddenly it seemed Mama Kitten was in a hurry to wean her kittens and turn them over to Sekhnet for feeding.  We didn’t understand the urgency.  We soon realized she was pregnant again.  Chemicals coursing through her body telling her to protect her turf, make it safe for her offspring who were about to be born.

Mama Kitten had her most recent litter, four beautiful kittens, two male, two female, in April.  These four made the number of good-looking little cats Mama Kitten had given live birth to around twenty.   She has been pregnant or taking care of a litter continuously since before she was  six months old.   When she is about to give birth to the next brood she drives her young kittens out to fend for themselves.  Of course, they only know how to hunt by being cute to the humans who feed them, and there is only one other house on the block where feral cats are welcomed (see this here for that).

We once trapped three of her kittens who had lived to be five or six months old.  We took them to a vet and had them all neutered.   Each of them was dead within a very short time.   There was no connection to the minor surgery, they were all fine after they got back from the vet’s.   They simply disappeared, one after another, in the space of a couple of weeks.

Their lives tend to be short.  The oldest so far was probably Grey Guy, who lived almost two years.  There are hawks around that love a nice one or two pound kitten for lunch.   We assume the hawks get most of them.   A few have died from some kind of poisoning, we think they may have drank anti-freeze on a hot day.  All four of those kittens died within a few hot early summer days one awful summer before Mama Kitten was born.  A feral cat in this area that lives to be a year old is a survivor, an outlier.

It is a cruel thing to grow attached to these beautiful little creatures who have little hope of surviving more than a season or two.   We try not to give them names, remembering the fate of oddly cute Dobbie, or Cathead (a playful, affectionate kitten I would have made a pet, if it was up to me, and we’d had her spayed, too) since the attachment makes their disappearance more painful.

Still, it turns out that just for reference you need to call each one something.  Sekhnet takes care of that, keeping it simple.  Whitefoot advances on a white foot, both of his front feet are white.  Turtleback, mostly white but with nice markings, including a large beautifully painted section on his back that looks like a tortoise shell.    Here is a picture of Turtleback taken two days ago.   We were a little worried since we hadn’t seen the adventurous young male when his siblings were having dinner.  I later found him relaxing on their favorite box, and snapped this to send Sekhnet to reassure her that Turtleback was alive and well.

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Sekhnet has been furious at Mama Kitten since seeing how viciously she keeps attacking her almost year-old daughter, Paintjob (talk about a beautiful coat, that little cat was painted by a genius).   Mama drove that poor soul Paintjob out of the yard two or three litters ago and somehow the timid Paintjob is still alive and, until recently, managing to get fed by me or Sekhnet every second or third day.  

She eats fast, warily, wolfing her food and then stopping, tensing every muscle, marshaling all of her senses for threats.  Then she will eat another can of food, using the same procedures.   Paintjob is skinny but appears otherwise quite healthy.

Lately, even though she has lost her last pregnancy through some kind of natural miscarriage, Mama Kitten has been particularly vigilant and ruthless in violently chasing Paintjob off.

Sekhnet has seen this many times, how Mama Kitten discovers each secret place where Sekhnet has arranged with Paintjob to throw her a quick feed.   Paintjob was quite adept at making Sekhnet know where she’d be for a fast secret feed.  Mama keeps guard, watches Sekhnet like a hawk, peeks around every corner, pops out of nowhere and viciously attacks Paintjob who runs off at an amazing speed.   Their screams are heart-rending.  

I keep telling Sekhnet not to make such human judgments against Mama Kitten.  I point out that Mama is, and has always been, in pure survival mode, plus she’s crazed with chemicals produced by her constant pregnancies.  I point out that she’s  programmed to survive and is by far the longest lived feral cat to live season after season in Sekhnet’s garden in the back.   Sekhnet points out that Mama is a complete psycho bitch who savagely attacks her own daughter when there is plenty of food for everybody.

Yesterday as I fed the kittens, Mama Kitten came around to see what was on the menu.  She was not impressed with the first offering, which her kids all ate quite happily.   She tasted a bit of the tuna and found it not to her liking that day, though her kittens were quite pleased with that one too.   As everyone seemed interested in having a bit more dinner, I opened a third can, and this one Mama Kitten found to her liking.  I fed her some slime from the spoon, to test it before dividing it among her kittens, and this one she wanted.   She ate a bit.  

Then I saw, suddenly standing less than two feet away, an emaciated, haunted, desperate looking Paintjob, staring at the food, almost hypnotized.  I was aware that as soon as Mama saw her the savage attack would occur and that there was nothing I could do to get any food to Paintjob, or to stop what was about to happen.  A few seconds later Mama Kitten took off screaming in savage pursuit of a wailing Paintjob.  The kittens scattered in terror.

This scene was truly heartbreaking.  I understood why Sekhnet finds it so hard to forgive Mama Kitten for this seemingly heartless, irrational and murderous rage against her own kitten.  True they’re now both adult females, we get that, but, it’s hard to understand why it has to be this way.   Only a cruel god would design nature to feature this kind of nonchalant, horrible savagery.  

After I told Sekhnet this story of witnessing the vicious attack on Paintjob she became morose.  I had a text from her at 3:20 a.m. (we stay together half the week) and I called her right away.   She was tearful, couldn’t stop thinking about the doomed Paintjob.   “As she gets weaker and weaker from lack of food it will become impossible for her to escape her psycho mother,” she said, her voice cracking, and it planted an image in my mind I did not want to see either.

Sekhnet reported a bad night’s sleep.  She dreamed of Paintjob, lying on her side, her paws cut off, crying for food.  In the dream Sekhnet was unable to get any food to the helpless cat.  I tried to reassure her that she had not made the world, that nature was cruel, we’d seen it first hand over and over, the short, brutal lives these beautiful little animals live in the extremely limited, ruthlessly competitive wild in that part of Queens.  Then she got a call, there was a dead white kitten near the area where the backyard animals eat dinner.

It was one time when, being a man, all I could say is what a man should say at such a time.  I told Sekhnet I’d go to the house, carry away the body, that I would take care of it.  We arranged to go together.  There was a real-feel of 99 degrees in New York City again today.   We had images of the little cadaver getting ripe, covered with flies, possibly bloated.  

Halfway to the house, the sky got dark and a deluge fell from the sky in a massive electrical storm.  It rained as hard as I have ever seen rain fall, the traffic began to crawl along cautiously, and it continued to pour down in sheets for a long while.  The windshield wipers, on their fastest speed, had a hard time keeping the windshield clear.  There was flooding in places.

We killed some time, gassed up the car, sat in front of the house until the rain stopped.  I went to the back of the house.  It was Turtleback, on his side, feet stretched in a slightly grotesque final pose.  His timid little white-faced sister, who looks like him but without the turtleback, looked sad.  All of the kittens, and Mama Kitten, seemed determined to make sure I knew that their fellow was dead, was just lying there   Before I fed them dinner they all made sure I noticed the dead Turtleback lying there on his side, skinny and soaked.   Each one passed close to him as I went to get their food.

Sekhnet brought a sturdy box, just the right size, and handed me a shovel.  It took a moment, but it was an easy operation once I got the shovel positioned the right way.  He fit in the box perfectly.  “Watch his tail,” said Sekhnet and I tucked it into the box before I closed the flaps.  

I carried him a short distance, to a wooded place by the highway.  The area was filthy, littered with plastic bags and plastic take-out containers and probably much worse.  I did not venture far in the dark, placing his coffin behind the closest trees.  I got back and Sekhnet and I agreed that Turtleback himself was not there in that squalid place, just an empty vessel that had been, briefly, the beautiful little cat.

I am aware that nature is cruel, even as it can be so generous.  That severe thunderstorm struck me as a gratuitous, a mocking touch for a gentle God to interpose in the path of two people heading somewhere to try to do a decent thing.   I had several thoughts about God as that rain pissed down, as we killed an hour in the car before I could go back and lay whichever poor devil had died so young to his or her rest.  

Afterwards we hung around a bit hoping Paintjob would show up for a feed while I was there to distract Mama in the back, but no sign of her anywhere.  It is hard to shake the thought that yesterday’s desperate move by Paintjob may have been her final one on this earth.   I got back home and began writing this, my attempt to, as they say, process all these thoughts and feelings.  Then a notification beep, a WhatsApp from Sekhnet.  

Sekhnet, among her many talents, apparently also has the power the make me sob in loud, honking notes, my nose drowning in snot, alone in my apartment.   My emotions all night had betrayed nothing but manly resolve, stoically placing the tiny cadaver in its carboard coffin, stilly carrying the dead kitten to his eternal resting place, manfully reassuring Sekhnet at every turn.   I don’t know what my neighbors must have been thinking to hear me weeping that way, it is rare to hear a grown man sobbing, especially a grown man prone to angrily cursing.

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[1]  Naturally, of course, the format has been randomly dicked with, it is not displaying full frame as I shot it, it’s messed up.   I never inserted those moronic blocks of black at the top and the bottom.   I am not even sure how to edit those out with the programs and apps I have.  

Background:   I took dozens of photos of these beautiful cats.  Yesterday my phone spontaneously deleted  over 2,400 photographs.   The girl at the T-Mobile store said there is no way T-Mobile can recover the photos and that they were probably deleted because I accidentally hit something.  I told her I had hit “restart” after several days of being unable to move or delete photos.   When the phone restarted, 3,000 photos were wiped out.  She was a pretty girl, and friendly enough, but there was something about her reply “you must have accidentally hit something that deleted the photos:  that made me want to ask her to come around the counter to take a nice, quick knee to the stomach.

“A Samsung problem,” she told me.   She showed me how to find the randomly saved photos in something called Google photos that I never signed up for.   Apparently Google randomly collects images from your phone, to show you how they provide this great cloud backup for all your data.   If you pay them, they will save everything.  If you take their free version, which you might not ever know you even are using, they will choose what to save and what to delete, probably by some brilliantly calibrated algorithm.

This was the only photo  remaining of perhaps 100 shots of these great looking feral kittens and their beautiful mother.

 

Noticing Small Things

They call this mindfulness these days.   Awareness of your mind, your body, your surroundings, other living beings, their presence, your presence, your interactions with the world.   We live in an age where “reality” itself is presented to us, constantly, in small, exciting boxes.   These boxes arrive continuously, with alert beeps if you set your phone to give you notifications.   You look at the phone and through a filter you instantly see a selected slice of life.  

Your life is clearly not this selected thing you are looking at, but the irresistible device  is designed to make you feel that it is very important.  Breaking news, crucial, need to know, this just in, ten things that will make your jaw drop, five amazing secrets nobody will ever tell you, the seven, yea, eight best cures for distraction,  the most erotic nude photo of the most beautiful person ever photographed, very tasteful.  Click here.

All very compelling, but not your life.  In most cases it is only the thinnest, most superficial slice of your life.  In many cases it has nothing whatsoever to do with you as an individual and everything to do with you as part of a discrete/discreet [1] demographic.    

I had some drama with my smartphone the last few days, it wasn’t letting me move, copy or delete photos.  I take hundreds of photos, very happy now to finally have an excellent camera on my phone.  I had more than 2,000 photos in the folder marked Camera.   There have long been two folders marked Camera.  The first has about 80 photos in it, the last one taken on July 4, 2017.   All the photos since have been saved in a second folder, also marked Camera, which was created autonomously by the smartphone on July 5th.

Frustrated at being unable to delete or sort photos the last few days, I finally restarted the phone.  The phone reset.  When it came back on-line there was one folder marked Camera.  It had 80 pictures in it, all taken before July 5, 2017.   Almost every photo and video I’ve taken since is, inexplicably and without warning of any kind, no longer on the phone.

I think of this and consider it in the context of a glance I had at my face in a magnified mirror just now.  I see the results of the original “plastic surgery” I had to close and cover the incisions from removing  the basal cells on the right side of my nose a decade ago,  a kidney shaped piece of shiny beef jerky, with jagged outlines.   It is my own fault, I had shit insurance.   The upper East Side surgeon wasn’t going to bust her ass for what they were paying her.  My mother actually put up $500 for some cosmetic follow up, but that was clearly money down the toilet.

My skin is scarred, so the ugly one on my nose sort of blends in.  My hair is gone, eyebrows scraggly.  My teeth are crooked, uneven, brownish.  My eyes are strained, pinkish in the whites, and they do not track exactly.  I rarely look at my face closely in the mirror, and that’s better, since my general impression of myself is of a decent looking man.   Do not look too close, you will see the enlarged pores, the tiny veins in the eyeballs, the unhealthy-looking little tags growing on your skin.

Still, it gave me perspective.   I am a unique and beautiful creature, I realize and remind myself at times like this.  It is not my skin, or even my bones, that make me this way.  It is how I try to be with the creatures around me.   I rarely clench my hands these days, they’re open.  Soft to the touch.  I do not often offend with my touch.  

I don’t even mind taking a metaphorical punch, if there’s a chance for something better on the other side.   I won’t take more than one, usually, but I extend that courtesy.   It is a better world if we do extend each other the courtesy.  Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hillel’s Golden Rule, Ahimsa and all.  Good enough for these deepest of thinkers, who am I to say no?

I will go to the T-Mobile store tomorrow and try to recover those deleted photos, though I have no reason to be optimistic.  It would be a great bummer if they are gone forever, yes, but no less a blow than seeing that jagged piece of beef jerky over my right nostril, extending across half the lower nose, and half again as tall.  A ragged dry lake bed on a bumpy, pitted topographical map in a place where the most lovely faces have a smooth expanse of skin.  Think of any beautiful face.

That is what I see, actually, when I think of my face, when I think of faces I love.   There is nothing to compare to those faces, in my world.

 

[1] discrete:  individually separate and distinct.   Discreet:  careful and circumspect in one’s speech or actions, especially in order to avoid causing offense or to gain an advantage.  also, intentionally unobtrusive. 

The Process

Humans are not strictly rational beings.  Human Nature 101, people will kill, march to certain death, commit unimaginable atrocities, for seemingly insane causes, or for no rationale they can articulate.   In America millions of us routinely vote against our interests, in nakedly profit-driven elections now decided by the unlimited “speech” of legally created “persons” who exist only in the minds of unappealable activist judges.     We vote for imperfect candidates who serve these interests,  in the states where we’re still allowed to vote, our ability to vote less a given now than a few years ago, when the Supreme Court deemed the Voting Rights Act unnecessary in our colorblind, post-racist, er, post-racial democracy.   Yeah, we all know, n-words can’t take an f-wording joke, particularly about American history.  I’m not laughing either, and I’m technically a white man.

As fucked up as human beings so often are, there is a quality called integrity that many of us admire.   The dictionary defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”   The synonyms include — honesty, probity, rectitude, honor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, virtue, decency, fairness, scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness.

It’s plain to see that the definition of integrity will vary based on your beliefs about the nature of decency, fairness, morality.    There are often arguments, in democracy, about what is moral, honorable,  right.   These debates, in our smash-mouth culture, are often conducted by adamant partisans (many of dubious intellect) on a maddeningly reductionist level: abortion is always murder, a sin despised by God; abortion is a mother’s difficult decision and her absolute right to choose, at any time and for any reason, even the day before birth.  

“You got a glass of water, Elie?    Even for a blahg that virtually nobody reads, this post is a little bit dry, no?   A tad academic, might we dare suggest?  A wee bit pedantic, preacher?” says a pile of bones, interrupting.  “Seriously, Elie, don’t mind me, I’m just here wearing the coxcomb, so to speak, to break the spell.”

Fuck me.

“Let’s get down to it, man.  You’re thinking hard about something that is stuck like a jagged fiber between your molars.   Play it out, motherfucker, work the damned dental floss.  This piece is called ‘Process’, explain the process.  Show us, don’t perfessor us.”

Fair enough.  There is little enough we control in our lives.  I’ve been in two discussions recently with people who doubt there is such a thing as “free will”.  Let us suppose that free will is like the “free market”, a tiny speck of truth in the ocean of bullshit it claims is all fact, all freedom.  There is little enough we have control of here in a world of chaos often run by the most ruthless psychopaths among us.    We have our reputations, which are built on the goodwill of people who… never mind.  

On the most elemental level, in our personal lives, all we really have is how we act in the world, how we are with the people we encounter.   Each of us almost without exception have hurtful things we do, morally neutral things, and helpful things.  If we are great, we also have the healing things that we do. There is no greater work, I think, than calming a distraught kid, listening with empathy, helping someone recover from trauma.   There is plenty of trauma in our troubled world.

“Like this excruciating fucking post, for example.   What the fuck, really, Elie, can you make your goddamned point while some of them are still alive?” said the pile of bones.  

Your friend Eichmann cited Kant’s Categorical Imperative during his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem.   Hannah Arendt gave the otherwise dull defendant a gold star for stating it more or less correctly: to act in such a way that your actions could be universally practiced and the world would be better for it.  Kant’s imperative is related to Hillel’s famous formulation of the Golden Rule:  what is hateful to you, do not unto another.   Now all this is quaint stuff in our modern world, our commodified, monetized world where the exact worth of an individual;s life can be reckoned down to the nickel by calculating their “net worth.”   

“Elie, I’m fucking begging you,” said the skeleton.  

No good deed goes unpunished.  The sassy devil of this cliche is in the waggish details.  Say you take the high road with an old friend, somebody who we will stipulate can be difficult, prone to tirelessly trying to prove himself right, no matter how many contortions are involved, a man in deep trouble, at any rate.   He is unaware of the effect his actions have on those around him, seems to have little insight into how provocative he can be, is locked in a constant zero-sum war for survival.   In this war he has shown that he will do whatever he has to do to survive, even things most of us would shrink from.  That is what people often do in war.

“So why take the notoriously thankless high road?  Why not just take your leave of him if he’s such a toxic person?”

I don’t have a good explanation, except that I am trying to redeem a friendship we once had, for the sake of learning a better way than just shoving these types off the back of my yacht and leaving them bobbing in my wake. 

“Nothing better than a good shove and bobbing in the wake job, it seems to me, if the person has been loudly demanding it for some time.”

Well, I wont say no to that.   But here’s the point I’ve been stumbling toward about my process.    First I have to try to understand as much about the thing as I can, try to see the thing from as many sides as I can, extend the benefit of the doubt if a friend is involved.  I do that by thinking and then writing here.   I arrange things until they make sense.   I arrive at conclusions that help shape my actions.   In writing I see clearly…

“Unless you’re as deluded as your, eh, friend…”

… for example, that this chap has rage he is unaware of, pent up, waiting for an occasion to let some of it out.   He appears to be largely unaware of this rage or its unconscious seepage.  He is nervous, so that things that might not rile a less nervous person really drive him nuts.  He reacts pungently.  I have to map all these things out, to get a handle on how to best approach the problem.

“While exacerbating the problem by writing about it here where your angry, nervous, distracted friend can stumble on it and stoke his righteous anger at being once again betrayed.   A laudable process, I have to say.”   

Well, sure, he  would know the anonymous allusion to, say, a person who keeps forgetting key agreements and so on, are about him.   On the bright side, he’s too busy most of the time to read anything that’s not somehow related to his overwhelming professional life, so his stumbling on anything on my blahg is unlikely.   In any case, I always write with an eye toward preserving the anonymity of the people I mention in my “work” here.

“Your ‘work’,” said the skeleton, silently opening his jaws in a pantomimed guffaw, “I love that.  Thanks for tickling me with those quotation marks.”  

Shut up.  Here is my point.  Someone can make you mad, give a meaningless apology that is dragged out of them (“implied apology” asshole, I’m already covered, you merciless dick), and then continue aggravating you in the very manner he’s already apologized for.   That’s a person that needs to be extirpated from your world, no question.  Is it better or worse if the motherfucker has no idea of their neurotic habit of making others angry?  An irrelevant question, really.    

My point: I wrestle with the right way to approach all this and then, after a hellishly combative several hour long attempt at reconciliation during which I manfully avoided physically assaulting my decisively unrepentant old friend, I get an email congratulating me on the test showing a trend toward remission of my kidney disease (which I’d bcc’d to everyone on the list) and saying he’s looking forward to our next get together.

“Your fault, Elie, why on earth did you bcc him the health news?”

Point taken, bone breath.  I suppose in an ill-considered attempt to preserve relationships with his wife and kids.   Eichmann again: Hannah Arendt notes that the three German-Jewish judges who decided the war criminal’s fate were unfailingly humane and respectful to Eichmann.   Unaccustomed to this treatment, Eichmann took their attitude as sympathy and was cruelly disappointed when these men, who had treated him so decently, suddenly condemned him to death.  Arendt watched the face of the man in the glass booth and saw this reaction for herself.   He couldn’t believe it, they’d been so respectful, even kind, and now they were fucking hanging him?  

“Look, if you’re comparing an old friend to Eichmann, I’d say the poor devil is already off the back of your yacht and bobbing, utterly betrayed, in the wake.”  

My friend would never do what Eichmann did.  I take your point, but let me finish.   I am stuck musing over this, and because I cannot clear my mind of it, it floats up in conversation.  I made the mistake of bringing it up yesterday.   I myself don’t know a productive thing to say about this festering idiocy that remains so clearly oppressive to me.  I’ve done everything I know how to try to make this person understand the peril our long friendship is in,  I’ve been more patient [1] than I ever thought myself capable of being, in the face of mind-numbing obliviousness, denial and attack from my desperate old pal.  

“Yer a fucking saint, Elie, no question now.  Join a religion pronto, my boy, so you can be canonized.”  

Good idea.  Anyway, there is nothing anyone can say about this situation.  I’ve got nothing.

“Outside of the last few thousand words of postmortem.”  

Yeah, and I’m hoping this last bit of coughing will hack up whatever’s left of it.   The point is, this process has made me see all the issues very clearly, anyway.  If someone is unaware of their anger, and it causes them to provoke others, who then become angry, and they are bitter about the angry friend’s demand that they apologize for something they don’t even know they’ve done, no matter how clearly the facts point to it, and then they argue instead of being at all contrite… well, there you have it.  So there’s not much that can be said.  My experiment failed.  Case closed.  But still you feel compelled to rattle on about it.  What is a friend supposed to say at this point?

“You’re empowering him to bother you,” a friend says, in an attempt to be helpful.   The attempt was well-meant.   The effect of the comment is to blame you for being unable to put the hideous conundrum out of your head.  

“We’re back to free will now, Bozo.  If you have free will, your friend is right.  You’re giving this irredeemable neurotic the power to continue endlessly fucking with your mind.  Be done with the slimy little bastard.  Trust me, the clueless, enraged little fuck will look much, much better bobbing hopelessly in the wake of your yacht.”       

 

[1]  The Hebrew word for patience is more profound than our English word.   In Hebrew they say “sovlahnoot” which means the ability to endure suffering.  The Hebrew word for patience comes from the root “sevel” which means suffer.  It takes no patience to endure something that does not make us suffer, true patience involves enduring something that is difficult to endure.   

 

 

Fair and unfair

Fairness is what everyone wants, like liberty, freedom and love.  Fairness feels right.  Unfairness sticks in the old craw.    We live in the midst of vast, rising, institutionalized unfairness, a small group of extremely powerful people making unappealable decisions the rest of us suffer from.   Even here in our great democracy, small groups of special interests (e.g., those who insist that the estates of billionaires should not be taxed a penny when they die) get an unfair amount of say in the policies we all must live by.

In the personal sphere, the only place where we can exercise true autonomy (to the extent any of us do), unfairness can sometimes be avoided.   You can simply subtract toxic people from your life, it’s done all the time.   Addition by subtraction. Of course, personal things are not always so simple.   Take the example of a friend who insists on his love, who insists on the right to be your friend, no matter what, and seeks to bind you to an agreement to this effect.

A friend who consistently treats you unfairly, in the manner of my beleaguered brother-in-law telling me to keep secret that he was taking advantage of me, may sometimes make a rule for you, draw a line in the sand.   For example: you may not discuss how I treat you with other people.  There is nothing to say that we must abide by unfair, one-sided obligations imposed by others.

In the case of my brother-in-law, he told me to keep our “confidence” about his inability to keep his promise to quickly repay the loan I’d made to him, in the context of him revealing how much money he owed several other people, including my father.  He owed me my entire life savings, which I’d offered him in a loan when he was in a tight spot.  Then he couldn’t pay me back as we’d agreed, since paying my father’s loan (which I knew nothing about) had priority over mine.   I’d had no idea he’d taken money from my father and many other people, no idea he’d been untruthful when he convinced me to loan him the money.  Now I found myself in a bind and he was insisting I needed to suck it up, dummy up, shut the fuck up.    I told him I’d talk to my father, arrange to get paid back first.   This upset my brother-in-law, and he threatened me, and called me a pussy who had to run to his father.   He tried to make me promise to keep this between us.  This was unfair.  Fuck him, I was under no obligation to participate in my own fucking for somebody else’s sake.  

I spoke to my father who told me, with characteristic directness, that it was my problem, that he insisted on continuing to get paid back first and that I shouldn’t have been so generous with my life savings.  Also unfair, sure, but no more unfair than my brother-in-law trying to force me to keep a secret for the sake of helping him to conceal his shameful practices. 

Now, decades later,  I find myself up against another game with evolving rules that are not fair.   “I know you are an open kind of person, not given to arguable untruth or subterfuge, and that you seek advice from people close to you, that you tend to write about your vexations, so it may be very hard for you, but I need you to shut up about how difficult I am making your life.  I would never betray you this way, so I’m asking you never to reveal anything personal that happens between us.”

I think of Zora Neale Hurston in this context.  She was up against the rules of a rigged game she had no hand in designing.   She was not consulted about the virulent, often violent racism of her home country, our country, an America where death by lynching was still imposed on Negroes who forgot their place.  Someone wrote of Zora that she refused to play by the rules of a game she’d never agreed to play.   Respectable position to take, I’d say, even heroic.  She got some fame, deservedly so, and fell hard, because, in the end, the game is designed that way. Agree to play or not, there it is.

I have my faults, but lying is not one of them.   To say to me “you’re lying” when you feel I’m in error about some small, easily verifiable fact, is not the same as saying “you’re wrong.”  But I’m not here to quibble, so don’t bother arguing that you never said it.  You said it, take that to the bank.

I’m here simply to state that as I’m being smothered by a toxic blanket, wielded by a drowning man, I’m not going to agree to sit quietly and keep trying to work things out nicely with the fucker who’s wrapping the stinking blanket around my face.  Fuck that.  If you are offended, here is some consolation:  you know now, full-stink, how it feels to have your feelings and wishes ignored.   Feels unfair, I know.

For someone who owes an apology he is incapable of giving to go on the offensive to try to save an old friendship… well, it’s nuts, fucked up, crazy, mad, foolish, doomed, counter-productive but also: unfair.   The big betrayal you apologized for, after we came as close as two people can to punching each other’s faces without actually exchanging blows, you still defend as right, in some twisted way.  “I saw you getting furious, OK, but I also seriously thought if I told you those two little things it would make a difference.   So, sorry you got so mad, but I was actually only trying to do the right thing.”  Insisting even now, that the thing you were forced to apologize for really was hardly blameworthy at all, oh my.  I guess winning really is the only thing, if your personality is hardwired that way.

I’m trying my best to get this whole unfair set-up out of my head.   I have other things I have to focus on, things that will take massive concentration to do properly.  That rule “no reference to how consistently antagonistic and morally tone deaf I am or how my slightly insane passive aggressive behavior toward you might irk you, I’d certainly never make such a reference to you, I’d never publicly betray you…”— nah, bunk dat, homey.   Fuck that.  Learn to do better or move the fuck on.

 

A Ticklish Personal Matter

When attacked we can fight, take flight or do any number of other things.  I have been trying in recent years to follow the principle of non-harm, Ahimsa, approaching others openly and directly, and without violence.    I don’t mean to whine, but this is sometimes a tricky road in a culture where every rugged manjack among us is expected to compete and a shove, a knee or sharp elbow is perfectly permissible in this contact sport not intended for sissies, weaklings or peaceniks.   It is a particularly hard road when, in a moment of misguided bonhomie or extreme peevishness, a friend feels free to get some blindside shots in.

In my hubris, holding my vow of peacefulness in absurdly high regard, I made a mistake, I realize to my great misery today, expecting that one kind of animal, given the chance to be heard, to listen, to reflect, could turn into another kind of animal, somehow.  I was hoping, in the face of escalating bad experiences with a troubled, reflexively defensive old friend (and we all have our troubles) that we could somehow work out the worst of our conflict and have a more honest, mutual relationship going forward.  I was actually hoping for a miracle, rare as those things are.  It was a foolish hope, no matter how laudable and high-minded the attempt to save a badly damaged old friendship might have seemed.

Writing is the only tool I’ve developed for thinking and working through this kind of painful situation — being hurt, receiving an extracted, pro forma apology  (my friend insisted there was an implied apology already given when he said, after my long explanation, that he now understood how I felt) and then having the ante immediately raised by more of the same mistreatment that was already apologized for, ad nauseam.  The hurtful behavior comes down to an uncontrollable reflex to ignore, disregard or minimize the feelings of others, seeing only your own feelings. The raw feelings in others often aroused by your own words and deeds, you truly feel have nothing to do with you or anything you might have done.

Some people seem wired to be incapable of not doubling down when they feel they’ve lost a poker hand.  Admitting fault, apologizing, being humble, really listening to another person’s point of view — all losing hands in the eyes of the winners of our culture.   Being on the other end of things, a loser, I need to finish rinsing the fecal matter out of the Hawaiian shirt I was wearing yesterday (bad accidental spraying of projectile diarrhea) and try to get on with my regularly scheduled unpaid work, progressing well, in spite of the odds.    (here)

“I apologized to you, but that apparently wasn’t enough for you” he said chidingly to begin our reconciliation talks.   He appeared sincerely irked that his apology, sincere as he could make it, did not seem to have been enough for his unreasonably demanding old friend.   All he’d really done was accuse me of malice or extreme stupidity and hold me personally responsible for a catastrophe in his life (he later allowed that he’d been wrong to do that, but I have to understand the stress he was under at the time), put me in an unfair situation no friend should ever put another person in, and vent angrily at me after I’d done my best to be a supportive friend. He seemed genuinely aggrieved that his apology had seemingly made no difference to me at all.  Not the  conversational opening, or attitude, I’d hoped for, but I’d try to make the best of it, somehow.   

I pointed out quietly that after that apology the same hurtful behavior has been repeated in each of our recent exchanges.  I told him it appeared he was unable to stop doubling down, seemed poised to keep his streak of controversy going.   I said we should refocus our chat, talk about  the changes that would be needed going forward, in light of the multiple times recently my feelings—

“You want to talk about feelings?  I feel disrespected, traffic jam or no traffic jam, after being very easygoing about our meeting time, you have to admit, I was extremely laid back about our changed meeting time, which you’ll recall was originally 2:00, and which you later agreed would be three pm, and then we didn’t get together until 3:34 pm.   That’s very disrespectful, that long a delay is simply disrespectful on its face, especially on a day when we’re supposed to be having this important conversation you requested.  Of course, things happen, none of us can control a traffic jam, but it was very disrespectful nonetheless.”

Ten minutes later, the same feeling of being disrespected about our delayed meeting time, explained and expressed again, this time half a mile from where we started our walk.  My disrespect of him was becoming a leitmotif.   Shortly after that, maybe a block and a half later, he expressed his feeling of being disrespected again.   The boy can’t help it.   The third time was the charm.    I snarled that he was perfectly right to feel disrespected, I don’t fucking respect him.  I recited the top five reasons why.  Starting with his unfathomable difficulty understanding the emotions raised in others by his need to argue every point, the smaller the better; his indefensible, dependable tone-deafness to the feelings of others.  

A very nervous fellow (he insisted his baseline nervousness is no more than a three, four at most, on a scale of one to ten), he was remarkably calm yesterday, as he pressed on, constantly turning the conversation toward minute, arguably disputable details and away from the larger point:  his reflex to provoke and then wildly defend himself, a tic that needs to be controlled if he expects us, against all odds, to remain friends.  

He was calm and collected and I was on the verge of exploding in anger as he calmly explained, for example, why he is more of an expert on depression and anxiety than I can ever be (and by the way, he definitely does not suffer from anxiety disorder, he told me that categorically)  he had been trying to spare me this.  You see, as an undergraduate forty years ago he worked in a mental hospital, for a year and a half, and had regular briefings from a famous doctor, and therefore, sorry old bean, I didn’t want to pull rank on you and rub your nose in it, but since you brought it up… 

It went on this way for almost an hour.   Note for note, tit for tat, making an equivalence at every turn, true or false as needed, distinguishing, reframing, focusing on a tiny, irrelevant detail at great length, contradicting, insisting, qualifying, comparing, rephrasing, using the passive voice, digressing slightly, sticking a few convoluted points that would have impressed a professional contortionist.  At one point he told me, point blank, when we disagreed about the timing of an unfortunately dashed off email he’d sent — “you’re lying”.   On that issue it turned out, looking at the gmail time stamps later, I was approximately as close to a true recollection as he was.    When I could bear no more of this ceaseless counterproductive cavil I snapped, pointed in the direction of his car and told him to take a walk, get in his fucking car and go home.  We were done, I told him, I was done.  Direct and nonviolent, but direct, and done.  I truly had nothing else to say.   I’d started with nothing to say and now had less than nothing to say.

My display of anger, which I’d managed to resist for almost forty minutes, seemed to give him a lift, odd to say, maybe it was the small moral victory he’d been craving — he became as conciliatory as he knows how to be.  He was relieved to see that I was finally calming down.   He assured me that he was capable of change, was going to change himself, fully intending to, and soon, he was back in therapy again.  He told me he would try to do better at recognizing the signs that he was making me angry, and promised to try to back off when he saw me getting very upset.   I told him it was a bit late to consider a friend’s feelings at that point, once he was already provoking his friend to anger.   He was undaunted, optimistic. “People can change,” he assured me, after his tour de force of immutability and well-fortified neurotic constancy.  

He implied that I was being hard-hearted to insist that an apology must contain a promise about future actions.   There I cannot yield.   It is a crucial component of a healing apology, real ownership of the hurtful thing done, acknowledgement of how that hurtful thing feels, sealed with a credible assurance that the behavior will not be repeated.   He would stand by his apology, although he couldn’t guarantee all of that, since so much of his hostility, if any (he wasn’t going to fall into the trap of stipulating to that) is apparently unconscious and therefore beyond his control, nonetheless I should believe his promise that he is sincerely working on changing himself, to become a better listener, not always provoking, being much less provocative, not that he was admitting he did provoke anyone, it was surely something he was completely unaware of about himself, if I even was right about it, which he had his doubts about, but since I seemed to believe that he was…

We spent a few senseless hours after that, talking in a more or less relaxed manner about a number of more mundane things, and then, as it was close to his bed time, he headed off  shortly after the sun went down.   As we parted, he played the love card, going for a hug.  I gave him one arm and told him that love is more than a word or a feeling, it’s the way you actually treat the people you love.

I am done being a lawyer, and trying to be patient in the face of reflexively defensive, often inept would-be amateur lawyers who insist on their right to keep arguing no matter what.  At least lawyers with the training and experience know, most of the time, when to fucking shut up.

A prayer, then:

Strive to be humble, never haughty,
Seek understanding, not strife    
Attack not, nor shall you counterattack, except to save a life.

When in the wrong, be remorseful, not aggrieved
Be not proud, but meek
Modest, not brazen
seek insight, not vindication,
Listen with your heart, become wise.

talk to your rebbe
friend
he will tell you the same thing

(please rise) 

Betrayal of Confidence

Kind of hard to forgive, I think you’d agree, someone who’d deliberately betray a friend’s confidence in a public forum.  Two weeks ago I wrote, in the context of comparing depression and anxiety, a few sentences that were, unbeknownst to me, exactly this kind of unthinkable betrayal of trust.   My friend wrote:

One thing I would ask of you is to, in the future, keep our conversation to ourselves.   I would certainly never publicly write about you, or any of your troubles.

Today I learned that these are the words he complained of:   

One complaint I’ve long had about one old friend is an inability to remember many of the specific, specifically troubling, details of a difficult discussion we’ve had.  The troubling section of our conversation is erased, like an incriminating tape.   This constant partial erasure appears to be a mechanism of anxiety.

How awful I feel, and how petty.   I wonder if I’m being over-sensitive.

 

 

Searching for Ancestors

It is late at night, has been a long day, an emotionally challenging day, but I wanted to get back to my cousin in Israel, so I dropped him an email just now.   He has been searching for the traces of our family and recently found some real clues.   The hamlet our people came from, on a fork in a marsh south of the Pina River a short ferry ride from Pinsk, has been erased from history, wiped off the map–  the people who lived there and the name of the hamlet that all those who lived there called it by.  

Truvovich was the name, wiped from every map in existence, as far as my cousin, and I, and a friend who lives in Poland and is a pretty fair researcher himself (and who searched in Polish), have been able to ascertain.  Between us we turned up one map, with a Jewish star and the letter T at the place we suspect may have been that site where one of my grandmothers, and one of my cousin’s grandfathers, were born.  The link I sent my cousin to that map no longer exists, though we have my screen shot of the pertinent section of the map.  

Pinsk Street Map - circa 1925.png

This takes us into the realm of What the Fuck?   We know the Nazis were fucked up, that the einsatzgruppen, the special killing units that followed the Wermacht, the army, as the secret police state was imposed in one occupied territory after another, were merciless (until they started going mad, becoming alcoholics, became unable, most of them, to continue murdering unarmed civilians and their children, usually by shooting them into ditches).  

The Final Solution, with its mechanized extermination camps, was put in place partly because the number of Jews and others believed by those insane Nazi fucks to be genetic poison was too great to be wiped out by shooting alone, and partly because the killers they sent to massacre these folks just couldn’t keep doing it, psychologically.  Those rare sadists among them who loved to kill became another kind of problem.  Easier to just put them in charge of a crew in one of the death camps, where their perversion would be a virtue.

But I am getting ahead of the story.   At one time all of my family members were alive and supremely insecure in the impoverished little shit hole in the marsh where they lived.  Of two of them, Harry Aaron (who I always knew as Uncle Aren) and my grandmother, Chava, I know what can be known.  Aren fled the Russo-Japanese war, made a life for himself in America, had three children, all of whom I knew.   My cousin in Israel is the son of Aren’s daughter.  I remember Aren too, he lived until I was eleven.   Chava, Aren’s youngest sister, begat my father and my uncle and died in Peekskill a few years before I was born.  There was a cousin, Dintsche, who had two kids in America, both still around,

Beyond that, the fate of the rest of our family is a statistic.  The einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews of Pinsk, and the outlying areas, and wiped them out in two major aktions, a few months apart, in 1942.  The details are here.

It is late, and airless, the humidity is like a continual punch in the face.  Outside the sky is black.  I haven’t the strength at the moment to follow all the thoughts that led me to begin to write this.   Except to note the mystery, as we are alive here in this wink of an eye, and the need to know.   The desire, like a serious thirst, to find something out, to learn even a single detail.  It is too maddening to know nothing.  

Recently my cousin learned that one of his great-uncles, a man I’d heard of as Volbear, a man he names Wolf Bear on his family tree, is listed in Yad Vashem as killed in 1942.   This was big news, to see the testimony, our ancestor’s name in writing.  The testimony consisted of a few names: Wolf Bear’s (born 1888), his wife Tzirel’s (age unknown), their two children, Leah Reizel, 14, and Yisrael, 10, and the year they died in the slaughterhouse that was Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942.  This is far more detail than we have about the fate, and lives, of Aren and Chava’s other brother Yudle or their sister Chaska.

The other day my cousin sent me this photo, taken in 1938, found among his mother’s papers (she lived to 104!).  The niece and nephew of our common ancestor, named for the matriarch and patriarch as far back as our family tree goes (four generations).  Those ancient ancestors would be my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Leah and Azriel [1].  The nephew and niece in this photo are Azriel and Leah.  Look at them:

Azriel & Leah (Nephew & Niece) - 1938.jpg

1938, before Hitler’s war, the war the madman insisted the Jews made him start. Their photo, taken that year, came with a note, in Yiddish, which my cousin had translated into Hebrew.   My cousin wrote: they state that life is difficult and they are looking for help.  

 

[1]

Leah and Azriel Gleiberman.png