Category Archives: personal

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Remembering A Remarkable Soul

The first two lines of a greatly appreciated personal email today, from a man whose mother died a few nights ago:

My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish,  a royal death.

She would have been 98 in a matter of weeks, and it was only recently that I heard her voice tiredness for the first time.  

I knew her for more than 40 years, making her around my age now when I met her, a small coincidence that just occurred to me.   If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 that remained to her, I would be very blessed.  

The only memory of her that is not pure sunshine is recalling how demanding a mother she sometimes seemed to be.  All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers.  Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.  As her oldest son noted, over the years we became buddies.

“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often.  If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grown up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often.  What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be.   Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.

She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time.  My parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring.  The graduation was in Newark, New Jersey.  Sophie emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and her husband in their nearby home.  The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.

She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and her husband to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort.  “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal.  The two couples became friends at once.

Her husband died, and, not long afterwards, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live.  Sophie was then close to ninety and had stopped driving on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye.  She took local streets, a trip that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.  I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died.  It was like the sun.  She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could.  She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.   She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.

A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B.  Sophie and my mother were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.   I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”.  My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up.  This cracked Sophie up.

“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!”  She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.

Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full.  My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die.  “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath.   I’d talk soothingly to her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.

Sophie walked slowly and deliberately at 92.  She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace.  She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.

One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die.  Sophie kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went.  She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example.  I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.

 

 

CV (revised)

I was self-employed as an attorney, never part of the corporate world.  I taught in the public schools for five or six years (teaching mainly third grade) before attending law school.  I have an MA in Creative Writing, my BA was in history and philosophy. 
 
I found I lacked real enthusiasm for the law and had philosophical as well as financial reasons for deciding to leave that adversarial world.   I set out several years ago on a path to help in the ways I am best equipped to help, doing work I can wholeheartedly believe in.
 
I envisioned a non-hierarchic, creative program where children could work together to make their voices heard.  I imagined the children in the Harlem schools where I taught having a place where their ideas would be listened to and supported as they demonstrate the depth of their imagination and desire to learn.   Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of stop motion animation in a way elementary school-aged kids could teach each other to do.  I invented a portable animation stand that fits in a backpack and sets up in five minutes.  The next two years I facilitated approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.   It is very gratifying to see how it works immediately, exactly as designed, everywhere I set it up.  Within minutes the room is a buzzing beehive of purposeful activity.
 
What I need now is help pitching, publicizing and selling the program.   I’m looking forward to hearing your advice and ideas about the steps I need to take to find the people I need to help move this from great working idea to  sustainable program.

Metaphor for a life

A human life is a universe.  It is (re)written:  she who saves one life saves the world.  The death toll numbers you see on corporate TV are from Stalin’s calculus– a million ended lives are an abstraction.  For every American journalist with a name whose face we see on video before a psychopath cuts his head off, thousands of nameless, faceless children and old people are killed in the name of fighting beheading psychopaths.   These kids and their grandparents have names, faces, universes, of course, but it is much more comfortable to think of them as collateral damage, necessary deaths to, theoretically, prevent our own murder, you dig?  Better not to dwell on what the nation does in our names, you say?  OK.  

So lie back on the couch and tell me the metaphor that best describes your life at the moment.  

“Waiting for a cat to shit to determine whether I’ll be able to go home today or continue waiting here for the cat to shit, possibly take him back to the vet tomorrow.”  

What?  

“He had diarrhea for a few days, I took him to the vet Saturday.  He took a loose crap Saturday night and then– nothing.   He’s regular as an atomic clock with that short digestive tract and his habit of waiting til Sekhnet gets back before hunching to uncork his turds into the sand, kicking the sand a bit until Sekhnet diligently scoops the shit away.  She calls herself the Elephant Sweeper, the one who follows the elephants in the circus parade with a shovel and bucket.   She got home yesterday, nothing.  Overnight and so far today, and it’s going on dinner time 48 hours later, nada.”

So a cat doesn’t have his daily bowel movement and you are stuck in place?

“Afraid so.  The vet’s girl said to call tomorrow mid-day if the cat hasn’t gone by then.  Trouble is, nobody will be here until late tomorrow night.  The cat could have real problems by then.”

So you are acting out of concern for another living creature you are attached to rather than in your own, strict self-interest?  

“Afraid so. The phrase is really apt, I am afraid.  Afraid of this metaphor that so accurately captures what my life has reduced itself to, with the help of an unrealistic goal of being the director of my own destiny.  Today my destiny is to wait until a cat takes a crap.  Not the destiny I had in mind for myself when I went to bed last night.”  

Not entirely fair, this waiting for the cat to pass some turds, while on the surface not a bad metaphor for your slow-motion, extreme close-up life at the moment, is not expressed in the way most fair to you.  Be fair.  

“This act of kindness to an animal who cannot help himself, while seemingly sentimental to some, is also an act of kindness to Sekhnet, worried sick about the handsome little animal she affectionately serves.  There is nothing I can do at my place that I can’t do here, or little, anyway.  I like the waiting for a cat to shit metaphor, though, it fits so perfectly.”  

Fits your self-mocking foolery, maybe, but not the larger purpose of supporting your powerful but delicate dreams and putting them out into the world.  

“True, my powerful but delicate dreams do not appear in the flattering chiaroscuro light they deserve when the metaphor is expressed this way.  I am clearly more than a man waiting for a cat to shit, although I am also, clearly, a man waiting for a cat to shit.”

Just so. 

 

CV

“Might you send a resume so that I can get to know you a little better before we meet on-line to work on your business idea?”

Might if I had one, dollface.   Will whip one up for you now.

58 years old.

BA (history and philosophy) and MA (creative writing) from CCNY.   JD from Rutgers Law School-Newark.   Member of NYS and Federal Bars.  Quit drinking 2005.  Don’t hang out in bars or with members of bars, though I pay my membership dues.

Driven since childhood to create things that connect to other humans.  Guitar at 14, added piano, bass, ukulele.  Writing continually, rarely fiction.  Drawing and painting since age three or so.   Common denominator– having skills in these areas is nice, but not very nice, or even understandable to society at large, unless monetized.  Years spent ignoring this brutally obvious fact.  

Taught public school, mostly third grade, for about five years, the average attrition time for NYC public school teachers at the time (it is two years now, I hear).  Loved the work, got on well with students, colleagues and parents, couldn’t survive the bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy felt the same about me.    Odd jobs, including tutor to a couple of teenaged R & B stars, a challenging, interesting gig while it lasted.

Common denominator:  bringing out the hidden potential of students by engaging their creativity and giving them leave to run with it.    

Law school and a reluctant career in law, mainly in NYC Housing Court, considered by many to be the most contentious court in the country.   Found myself there by default, mostly standing in the shoes of tenants the court deemed unable to adequately represent themselves.  Low pay and high stress, the stakes were often homelessness.  Lack of entrepreneurial zeal needed to make more than a subsistence living as a self-employed attorney led me to find a path to helping in the way I am best equipped to help.  

Envisioned a non-hierarchic program, imagining the children in Harlem schools where I worked, where the students would be listened to and supported as they worked together to demonstrate the depth of their imaginations and desire to learn.  Spent one year figuring out how to do all facets of simple stop motion animation, inventing portable animati0n rig that fits in a backpack and duffel bag, sets up in five minutes.  Next two years spent doing approximately one hundred workshops, the bulk of them in NYC public schools.  

Gratified that it works immediately, as designed, wherever I set it up.  Discouraged by the lack of general excitement I’ve been able to generate about an engaging educational program that children love.  The workshop in action is a self-propelled, humming beehive where children invent and cooperate freely.  Without an effective sales pitch for recruitment, sites and funding, the program, no matter how excellent in the many tests, cannot survive and grow.  I have just about every skill and potential needed to advance this program, but for expertise as a salesman.

 

Now, of course, I need to edit this so as not to hear the shriek, the virtual leap out of the virtual skin and the frenzied clip clop of the skeleton carrying off the terrified skin as it was animated in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  

The facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.  Varnish those facts with a thin veneer of pleasantly scented bullshit and then we can talk.

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

Graveside Service

Today is the 59th birthday of an old friend who died last January 2.  A few days later I joined an amazingly large group of people who went out to the necropolis, snow-covered that day but generally looking like a golf course with a few trees, to help bury a very likable man.

Tomorrow, if the determined widow’s July 21 email requesting a favor and mentioning the date is still accurate, is the unveiling– the Jewish custom of returning to the grave about a year after the funeral and pulling a veil off the engraving that memorializes the departed’s life.  In this case, because of this particular burial ground, it will not be a tombstone unveiled, there are no raised markers there.  A plaque at the head or foot of Steve’s grave will be revealed, and his oldest friend, a rabbi and wonderful speaker, one of the best, will read the inscription and say a few words.  As our friend speaks the large crowd will nod, and sigh, and smile, and cry, and laugh, and they will go somewhere to eat and catch up and then, in their comfortable cars afterwards, life will continue on.

I didn’t agonize long before deciding I won’t be making the trip to the unveiling, outside Boston.  There are a variety of reasons, I suppose.  For one thing, nobody reached out to invite me, outside of the demanding widow’s slightly unreasonable July email requesting that I write, within the next few days, not about any specific memories from the time her husband and I actually spent a lot of time together, but about our conversations in the months before he died, after not seeing each other for decades.  At a loss, and unable to pull something together in the sudden and arbitrary four day window I was given, I didn’t write back and haven’t heard a peep since.

I think of their wedding, and how my friend stood next to his bride and sobbed as the rabbi performed the wedding ceremony, and I remember mumbling to a friend “it is the right of every man to choose the noose into which he slips his head.”  As far as I can tell Steve’s thirty year marriage to this demanding woman was a very happy one.  Though both were amputees from their respective cancers, they continued to have sex right up to the end.  I think that detail I’m probably not supposed to mention speaks remarkably of their love and devotion to each other. 

None of our small circle of old friends has contacted me about the unveiling, on the theory, I suppose, that I could just as easily contact them.  Fair enough.

An objective case could me made that it is difficult for people to reach out to me these days, as most people are reticent in the face of tragedy.   Steve and I once talked briefly about how many people were unable to call him during his decline, or, if they did call, talked of everything but his cancer, although he remained consistently upbeat and much more cheerful than anyone could have expected through the long crucifixion that was his cancer death.  I suspect something similar operates with me, though I feel like I’m as personable as I ever was.  Lurking, behind my deft evasions about how I’m doing, is the unmistakable and terrible tragedy of someone doomed to not truly live in the same world as everyone else, despite having all the tools to flourish in that world.  Like a dying man, the things I am wrestling with are not the carefree playful ones a hard-working, productive person likes to be surrounded with on a day off.

So, happy birthday, Melz.  You were a good man and I salute your success, your many talents, your loving wife and your two beautiful, talented daughters.  In other circumstances, I’d pay a call tomorrow.  But you, as well as anyone and better than most, know the deal, old friend.

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”

   
 

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.

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.