The Sunny Side of the Street

My father, Sidney Rosenberg, with mustache, on one knee in the front row. 
My mother, Henrietta, hands on knees in white shoes.

Out of the blur of my childhood, I see my fundamental relationship to the world coming into focus. My witness to the famines, the refugee camps - from the end of WWII to the present - has somehow not altered my essential optimism.
The American Journal of Epidemiology reports that this may be good for my health. I'm not sure about that. On the contrary, a tablespoon of harsh reality taken once a day might improve my vision. But, insofar as the Journal's prognosis is true, I owe my conviction of well-being to my father. Last week, I observed his yahrzeit. He died on December 14, 1978. Lighting the memorial candle, I remembered him a little more than usual on 14 Kislev, the anniversary of his death on the Hebrew calendar. This year, the Hebrew and secular dates coincided on the 14th which is unusual, but then these are unusual times.

My father was born in New York and raised in the Yorkville section of the city where German was the predominant language. Too young for WWI and too old for WWII, he came of age in the '20s with no memory of trench warfare and no capacity to imagine the coming horror. He was an antiques dealer by trade, a clever business person, but also a man with any eye for beautiful things. He bought and sold objects made in Europe that became signifiers of culture to Americans who admired the filigree and gilt, the expert craftsmanship. It was understood that the merchandise in his dusty shop, an allergist's paradise, could not be arranged neatly in shelving and bins like so much underwear at Macy's. The display had to be casually profligate, haphazard, a commotion of cups and saucers. The customer was invited to wade through the stacks of dinner plates and tureens, wandering up and down the aisles, past the Meissen figurines and the Dresden dessert dishes, without a care in the world, without a thought of the real and very recent history of those places. This was the '50s, after all. My mother stood behind the glass showcase gossiping with the customers. My father cruised West End Avenue doing his best to acquire, at the most advantageous prices, the cherished valuables of widows with goulashy Viennese accents before the wobbly old ladies decamped for Florida. Like a surgeon, he extracted the heirlooms, polishing each piece with care so the old world tarnish would be removed. Then he re-sold the porcelain and sterling to shiny Americans, willfully ignorant of history. My father was a gentle, unmarked man. For him, Majdanek was like Aleppo. Something observed from a safe distance. Something that happened to someone else.

In our house, we took a sanguine view of things. We voted for Stevenson. We believed our country would one day embrace the Puerto Rican children my father lovingly tutored in English after school and the black people we saw on the IRT local, even the woman who came down from Harlem to clean, hanging her coat on a hook in the back bathroom off the kitchen. We were well-intentioned and criminally naive.

In our house, we were convinced that America would win the Cold War. That in the end, no country with a vulgarian head of state who banged his shoe on a desk in the sacred confines of the U.N. could come out on top. Poignant, isn't it? 2017 is the centennial of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had disposed of the Russian bear, but here he is again sniffing around the remains of our picnic. We continue to forage for the lessons of the last century. My father is gone, but I am still processing my grandparents' immigration and assimilation stories, the long journey out of the old world and into the new. We all drag our family stories around with us wherever we go, rarely setting them down long enough to listen to all the other stories. Your ancestors were brought here from West Africa in chains? Generations of the men in your family got their paychecks and their emphysema in the coal mines? It would shock my father and other shopkeepers in New York and Cracow and Budapest, where his parents were born, to discover that things could go bad and from there to worse. He provided my mother, my sister and myself a down-market version of the life of the wealthy family in the 1970 Italian movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, all out on the court dressed in tennis whites when the SS came for them.  Like my father, most of us know what we know and not much else. I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted. Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe.

A good place to begin is this piece by Timothy Snyder, originally a Facebook post: http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/

 Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish.

The Great Awakening

Pottery by Ben Maisel

That was then, this is now. After the shock and awe of the initial assault on our sanity that occurred on election  day, we are now facing the daunting task of defending ourselves and holding our territory for the next four years. I try to avoid military metaphors, but there is a sense that we all feel embattled. We are partisans who will be fighting on multiple fronts, employing a wide range of skills and training. We cannot all be commandos.

Let's begin by laying a foundation of love in our own families and communities. You may have noticed that this is already happening. The energy of isolated iron filings magnetizing towards one another has been palpable from the onset. Love is strong. It empowers people to feel courageous and creative in the face of looming danger. It is the most potent antidote to despair. Love is a perennial weed. It blooms in unexpected places and defies all attempts to be tamed. Reach out to it and it will spread across backyards and fields where you live until you can no longer control it. Transplant it when you can and admire its beauty as you ponder how to contribute to the great awakening that needs to happen.

Fortified with a sense of connection to one another, to the Earth, we can begin to think deeply about how we came to be teetering on the edge of this particular precipice. Part of this process is the exercise of historical memory. I don't mean how the Clintons were tainted or how the press demonstrated its venality. I mean reaching back as far as we can to taste the rapaciousness of the western powers in the Middle East that flourished in the aftermath of World War I; the acquisition of vast resources for the purpose of lining the silk pockets of the already rich; the dominion of French, British and later American white men over millions and millions of brown people. Follow this juggernaut through a series of tyrannical regimes, the sputtering promise of Arab Spring, perpetual bombardment, the starvation of native populations, and the rise of ISIS. Congratulations, you have arrived at the refugee crisis. You are confronting a condition where virtually the whole of the western world is recoiling in horror as the people of color they have been only too happy to exploit arrive en masse at their doorstep seeking sanctuary. Enter Brexit, Le Pen, Putin and Donald Trump.

If you looked closely, you could see it coming and you could feel how this historical matrix would create a perfect storm of racism and xenophobia, set against a background of globalization-induced economic dislocation and environmental degradation. In our country, where the domestic presence of Muslims has up to now been less of a factor than it is in Europe, it's an easy sleight of hand to use the available raw materials to generate anti-Mexican or anti-Black rhetoric and violence, always bubbling just under the surface in the melting pot. The post-colonial tune is a theme with infinite variations.

Sitting with the weight of all this and being hammered day in and day out with the proposed appointments of savage ideologues, the presumed Health and Human Services secretary who doesn't believe in health or human services, the Education secretary who's never set foot in a public school, I feel on some days like I'm being force fed a banquet of barbarism and choking on it. On other days, I imagine a car that has stalled on the tracks. I'm in danger of being hit by an oncoming train. I can't go backward, I can't go forward. The only sane option is to get out of the car before it's too late, walk home and breathe deeply into the knowledge that I will only be able to exercise a narrow influence over events, but that when my influence is added to yours and yours and yours, the train will ultimately be stopped.

Some will march, petition, write to their congresspeople. Some will get involved with local efforts to sustain pluralism, resist growing income inequality, protect our land and water. Some will make art as Woody Guthrie did, as James Baldwin did, as Picasso did when he painted Guernica. And some will be charged with the task of holding the space so that there can be an ongoing conversation in the spirit of both/and. Both economic anxiety and racisim gave rise to Trump. Both understanding how the Democrats failed their natural constituency in the election and how in its aftermath we can and must resist the result. We are the only ones who can make change, inch by inch, row by row as we used to sing lovingly to our children. We are all at risk and we need each other desperately.

http://ncdd.org/22174  Check out the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation's program to "Bridge the Divides"

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish.