Richard Jeffrey Newman

So this is kind of cool. I have been enter­ing my books into Sente, a really fine bib­li­og­ra­phy soft­ware pack­age if you’re on a Mac, and I came across these two books of poetry that I took from my grandmother’s library, Cups of Illu­sion and The Upward Pass, both by Henry Bel­la­mann, best known for the novel King’s Row, which he pub­lished in 1940 and which was made into a movie in 1942. Any­way, what drew my atten­tion was the fact that Bel­la­mann inscribed the books of poetry to my grand­mother, call­ing her his “dear lit­tle friend” in Cups of Illu­sion and “good friend” in The Upward Pass. My grand­mother once hinted to me that there was a story from the time she was a girl about her and a writer – though she never actu­ally told me the story; she tended to be very secre­tive about her past – and now, of course, I am won­der­ing what that story might be. In 1928, the year Bel­la­mann inscribed The Upward Pass, he also pub­lished Crescendo, about a man in love with two women. I some­how doubt that was the story my grand­mother never told me, that she was one of the women in the novel, but it is fun to think about.

Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illu­sion that I opened to at random:

August Gar­dens

Falling petals and dusty leaves
And droop­ing flower heads
Beneath unpity­ing skies
Unpromis­ing of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknow­ing courage
Meets each day’s mock­ing sun.

How you keep faith with wind and rain!

I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled ten­drils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.

Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?

And here is one from The Upward Pass:

The Gulf Stream

They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bear­ing the strangest things to north­ern lands:
Ver­mil­ion fish, like flow­ers, with sil­ver bands,
And bronze sea­weed from scar­let coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray mon­keys hang by cun­ning hands,
Fol­low the thin­ning blue to north­ern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.

The while this ardent cur­rent chills and fades,
Splen­dors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of bore­alic fire,
Each one a spec­tral ship with rain­bow sails,
Sink­ing and fad­ing as it nears the sun
In this relent­less river of desire.

The dis­cus­sion in this Nice Guy™ thread over at Alas reminded me of some­one I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman – I’ll call her Kim – with whom I was close friends in col­lege, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was con­vinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been class­mates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as Eng­lish majors dur­ing our sopho­more year in col­lege. I have no mem­ory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, even­tu­ally, I wanted very much to turn that friend­ship into some­thing more.

I don’t remem­ber if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remem­ber, how­ever, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from cam­pus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stom­ach. We started talk­ing, most prob­a­bly about some­thing we were read­ing for class, when sud­denly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remem­ber what, if any­thing, I said in response, though it was cer­tainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friend­ship was far more impor­tant to me than the pos­si­bil­ity of a sex­ual rela­tion­ship which might end up not work­ing out, so I swal­lowed my dis­ap­point­ment and accepted her, and loved her, as the inti­mate friend I assumed she was say­ing was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.

Before Kim met the man she mar­ried, she had one boyfriend that I remem­ber, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a cou­ple, not so much because he was arro­gant, though he was, but because he epit­o­mized that arro­gance, at least this is how I remem­ber feel­ing about it back then, by braid­ing and bead­ing his hair in imi­ta­tion of Bo Derek’s hair­style in the movie 10. The semes­ter Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across cam­pus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once – and this is what con­firmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true ass­hole – he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the cor­ner of my eye as I passed and fig­ured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a cou­ple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across cam­pus, he’d for­get about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hur­ried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.

I know she even­tu­ally broke up with that guy – it’s funny, I remem­ber his name, first and last – and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have mem­o­ries of going to at least one clas­si­cal music con­cert with her dur­ing our senior year (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, she played the vio­lin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sex­ual ten­sion between us, though noth­ing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even real­ize it might have been sex­ual ten­sion until the fol­low­ing day, and then it con­fused me because it was so at odds with the sub­stance of our friend­ship; and I remem­ber how ambi­tious she was as an aspir­ing jour­nal­ist and how much I respected the integrity of her pol­i­tics and her belief that she could make a real dif­fer­ence in the world. Mostly, though, I remem­ber how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was any­thing we could not talk about. Her friend­ship enriched my life, plain and sim­ple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grate­ful for that.

Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to cam­pus, a man who’d writ­ten a tremen­dously pop­u­lar book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school news­pa­per assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did – at least this is my mem­ory of the story she told me the next day – she asked him dur­ing the Q&A about some­thing that, if true, would call into ques­tion the valid­ity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d writ­ten and be taken seri­ously. His response, in front of the entire audi­ence, was to invite her out to din­ner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her ques­tion. At the din­ner, he offered to give her an exclu­sive, pri­vate inter­view back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remem­ber cor­rectly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was inter­ested in giv­ing her a good deal more than an inter­view and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up hav­ing sex with him that night.

When she told me this, I was, for obvi­ous rea­sons, hor­ri­fied, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said – because she didn’t – a man who behaved like that was not some­one she ought to trust; but she did not lis­ten to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty fre­quently, and then, after what seems in my rec­ol­lec­tion to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d pro­posed mar­riage and that she was think­ing of accept­ing. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very point­edly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friend­ship. I remem­ber try­ing to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not sur­prised not to be invited to the wed­ding. Sev­eral years after we grad­u­ated, I was talk­ing with some­one who had also been her friend when we were in col­lege, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life com­pletely any­one she’d known dur­ing her col­lege years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.

I googled Kim’s name today and was sur­prised to dis­cover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online pres­ence. There are a cou­ple of ref­er­ences to her and her hus­band, recent enough that I assume they are still mar­ried, and a cou­ple of scanned arti­cles she wrote for our col­lege news­pa­per back when we were under­grad­u­ates. I read them wist­fully, remem­ber­ing the strength of her voice and of her char­ac­ter. I hope – despite every­thing that what I have writ­ten here implies about the man she mar­ried, because I would wish her noth­ing less – that her mar­riage has been a good one, happy and chal­leng­ing in all the right ways, and most of all lov­ing; and I hope that she has found ways of mak­ing her life as mean­ing­ful as she once thought being a jour­nal­ist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say good­bye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the oppor­tu­nity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.

I just fin­ished read­ing The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exo­dus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Jour­nal whom we have invited to read as part of Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College’s Lit­er­a­ture, Live! read­ing series, spon­sored by The Cre­ative Writ­ing Project (CWP). A mem­oir that is at once a love let­ter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chron­i­cles the dif­fi­cul­ties Lagnado’s fam­ily faced as they nav­i­gated the often tor­tu­ous path they were forced to travel from the priv­i­leged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the dif­fi­cult and, espe­cially for her father, often humil­i­at­ing exis­tence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arro­gance with which Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Jews – as indi­vid­u­als and as work­ers in agen­cies that were sup­posed to help fam­i­lies such as Lagnado’s – treated their Mizrachi core­li­gion­ists, who fled or were forced to leave their home coun­tries in the years fol­low­ing Israel’s found­ing; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Asso­ci­a­tion for New Amer­i­cans (NYANA) case­worker assigned to the Lagnado fam­ily, and how Kirschner refused to find any com­pro­mise between her pro­gres­sive val­ues relat­ing to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patri­ar­chal old world val­ues, it is hard not to sym­pa­thize with Leon. Not because there is any­thing defen­si­ble in his desire com­pletely to rule the lives of the women in his fam­ily, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intol­er­ance only served to accel­er­ate the unrav­el­ing of the Lagnado fam­ily by encour­ag­ing the inde­pen­dence of Lagando’s older sis­ter Suzette. I’m not sug­gest­ing that Suzette should have allowed her­self to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patri­ar­chal thumb, but surely there were gen­tler ways of intro­duc­ing Leon and Suzette to the greater inde­pen­dence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dis­missal of and dis­re­spect for the val­ues Leon had brought with him from an older gen­er­a­tion in a far more tra­di­tional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this mem­oir that are wor­thy of note – the Ital­ian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a hous­ing dis­pute between their par­ents and the neighborhood’s anti­se­mitic response to that dis­pute; the con­trast Lagnado draws between her expe­ri­ence being treated for Hodgkin’s dis­ease by a pri­vate physi­cian in New York City and her father’s dis­mal treat­ment at the Jew­ish Home and Hos­pi­tal, and then at Mt. Sinai Hos­pi­tal, in the last years of his life (and each of these con­trasted with the med­ical treat­ment the fam­ily had been able to com­mand when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could sum­mon the best doc­tors in Cairo to look after him and his fam­ily); Lagnado’s meet­ing with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had nego­ti­ated the pur­chase of the Lagnado fam­ily home when Leon finally, reluc­tantly, real­ized he and his fam­ily could no longer remain in Egypt – but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s fam­ily was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s dis­cus­sion of that culture’s fam­ily tra­di­tions left me frus­trated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was ham­mered into us that kol yis­rael are­vim zeh lazeh, all Jews are respon­si­ble for each other. That lofty sen­ti­ment notwith­stand­ing, the cur­ricu­lum we were taught cer­tainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mat­tered, were those of Euro­pean, and espe­cially east­ern Euro­pean, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I cer­tainly can­not blame my con­tem­po­rary igno­rance on the faulty edu­ca­tion of my youth. After all, noth­ing has stopped me from edu­cat­ing myself other than the way I have set the pri­or­i­ties of my life (and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has cho­sen to invite her), but so much of my early Jew­ish edu­ca­tion was focused on Israel – the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the strug­gle to found Israel – that it’s sur­pris­ing I remem­ber no atten­tion being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s inde­pen­dence was declared in 1948, nearly a mil­lion Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their coun­tries or chose to leave because the con­di­tions there had become unten­able. Surely learn­ing about Israel ought to have meant learn­ing some­thing about the cul­ture of the mil­lions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to set­tle there. Equally sur­pris­ing to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s mem­oir is Israel men­tioned except as either a pri­mary cause of the prob­lems the Jews of Egypt were start­ing to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them with­out fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jew­ish home­land, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egypt­ian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as des­per­ate, not as one that might con­tain within it some small part of the hope with which the Euro­pean Zion­ists clearly embraced the idea of a Jew­ish home­land there.

The Man in the White Shark­skin Suit, how­ever, is a mem­oir, not a his­tory. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the found­ing of Israel as fer­vently and hope­fully as the Euro­pean Zion­ists did. More, I am sure that the feel­ing I had after read­ing Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far bet­ter off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the priv­i­leged life her fam­ily lived there than with the real­ity of the lives of all Egypt­ian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more com­plex than any­thing I could learn from read­ing Lagnado’s mem­oir; and yet read­ing the book, espe­cially the chap­ter called “The Last Days of Tar­boosh,” brought me back to a trans­la­tion con­fer­ence panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroc­can, if I remem­ber cor­rectly). Dur­ing his talk Chetrit spoke of how – and I am para­phras­ing here; I wish I could remem­ber his exact words – the Euro­pean Zion­ist Jews col­o­nized the Mizrachi Jews, replac­ing the Mizrachi nar­ra­tive with the Euro­pean Jew­ish nar­ra­tive, even to the point of usurp­ing the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speak­ing for cen­turies, if not mil­lenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a ref­er­ence to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jew­ish national lan­guage or to some other con­flict over lan­guage.) His state­ments sur­prised me in much the same way that read­ing Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obvi­ously has a per­spec­tive, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accu­racy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jew­ish edu­ca­tion worth its salt should have as one of its goals mak­ing its stu­dents that informed, or at least teach­ing them that they should feel respon­si­ble for inform­ing them­selves; and that most cer­tainly is not the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received. Indeed, the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received ren­dered both Chetrit’s per­spec­tive and Lagnado’s story entirely invis­i­ble, and it did so not only in the inter­est of mak­ing Israel cen­tral to Jewish-American iden­tity, but also to estab­lish­ing the Zion­ist nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel as the uni­ver­sal Jew­ish nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel. Sto­ries like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demon­strate that such uni­ver­sal­ity is a myth. Con­fronting that myth is impor­tant not because it calls into ques­tion Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because com­ing to terms with the full com­plex­ity of the nar­ra­tive of Israel’s found­ing is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew – and maybe this applies to con­cerned peo­ple who aren’t Jew­ish as well – can­not not take a posi­tion regard­ing Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state.

(I’ve writ­ten more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­semitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bot­tom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s read­ing at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege is sched­uled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the Cre­ative Writ­ing Project web­site.