August 4th, 2010 §
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.
June 13th, 2010 §
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.
September 18th, 2009 §
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.