Oh, What a Lovely War (Not)...

Part I

This is my fifth war when I'm counting as an American. There was the Cold War; then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Those are just the sites where my country of origin was deeply involved, where the war was visible. I'm not counting covert operations in places like Chile, Mozambique, Chad, Ethiopia (very partial list). I'm talking about when the carnage was right there, in your face, sometimes with the image of a young girl in Vietnam running naked through the streets, another time with scenes of bombed out Mosul and devastation in Afghanistan.

The Cold War remains embedded in my mind's eye. I picture nuclear bombs about to hit my schoolyard, launched by Russian Communists intent on destroying The American Way of Life.

And now, more wars. But this time, I'm an elder. It's harder. It's anguishing to watch the patterns repeat themselves, as if no enmities had ever been resolved. Now I see through the lens of a Londoner, a grandparent, a woman of a certain age who will not witness the next period of relative stability. The world is in freefall. The historic moment I inhabit reverberates with chaos and rage. Russia is once again a threatening monster, and nuclear nightmares disturb my already age-troubled sleep. America has abandoned Afghanistan to its ghastly fate. Armed clashes in Iraq's north kill more civilians. A divided Korea lives on, and North Korea's masses die of Covid under the pitiless gaze of their god-like ruler. The US just sent ground forces to Somalia. The UK blusters and blunders on the world stage, creating conditions for conflict in northern Ireland.

So what? Why should I care about matters about which I can do little? Because I'm your classic bleeding heart liberal, someone for whom the horrors of the world are real even when I'm not directly impacted. And the powerlessness I feel engenders my old defence, rage. I'm one of those people whose feelings of being vulnerable are so scary, I use rage to mask my frightened self.

Sometimes the defence works well, and my strongly expressed feelings cut through English reserve to deeper connections than I might otherwise have. Sometimes the rage is just noises I make, flailing about in well-honed outrage. I screech about how unjust it all is, how horrible things are, how stupid people are ruining the world. In reality, I'm wallowing in feelings of anguish at how unimportant and powerless I am, how the world will go on without me once I'm back to being stardust. The novelist Nabokov reminds us 'our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.'How I hate today's current darkness, and how I dread the darkness yet to come.

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Closer to Home

Part II

The ongoing conflict in Palestine/Israel feels up close and personal. That’s because I’m a Jew. It’s a baseline identity, a reality both good and bad. I see the world through the lens of a New York Jew, whether I want to or not. It’s not a matter of choice; it’s ingrained. My life partner is not Jewish nor are my grandchildren. I don’t affiliate with any formal Jewish organisations. Intellectually I call myself a rootless cosmopolite. But in my heart of hearts, I’m a working class Jew who filters perceptions through that gaze.

Five and a half years ago, I moved to London from California. I deliberately turned away from Palestine/Israel. Realities there were too painful, and being in a new country preoccupied me with other concerns. But I keep being drawn back to events in that small patch of land on the Mediterranean. My pain and outrage around what Israel as a nation-state is doing to Palestinians won’t be stilled. So I'm presenting a three part Zoom series addressing some of the core issues.

The series will examine the histories of both Palestinians and Jews going back to their beginnings. We’ll look at how Christian Zionism influenced the Balfour Declaration and continues to exert enormous influence today. We’ll consider the role of key figures like Yassir Arafat and Theodore Herzel. And most difficult of all, we’ll have a look at the entanglement of antisemitism and antizionism.

This will be the most challenging issue. Antisemitism--real Jew hatred--is on the rise. It’s not a figment of the Right’s imagination. Opposing Israeli policies and demanding accountability for what Israel is doing to Palestinians can very easily slide into portraying Jews as all-powerful, moneyed, hook nosed, greedy creeps. It’s easy to ignore the reality that antisemitism has its roots in early Christian doctrine which insisted Jews were Christ killers. It’s hard to remember that for 800 years, Jews were forbidden to enter English towns. And there are those who still deny the reality of six million dead in the Holocaust.

The series will make room to discuss these issues, with the aim of shedding light and diminishing heat. It won’t be easy. But that’s what the series will be going for. Join us.

A Mother is a Sometime Thing

I have outlived my mother. Our February birthdays were two days apart. She died twenty minutes before another year would have begun. Every February, as our birthdays – along with her deathday – approached, my anxiety intensified. My fear was even greater last year. Nearing the age she was when everything stopped, I felt mortality creeping up on me. While its footsteps have receded, now I am well and truly an old woman. And I am trying to figure out what that means, how being an elder can be restorative as well as a reminder that my earthly time is shorter than ever.

My mother’s name was Florence. Calling her only ‘my mother’ is to reduce her to the status of existing only in relation to me. In truth, I still view her that way, longing for our mother-daughter bond to have been happier than it was. Florence was not nurturing. Her way of dealing with the inquisitive, intense child who was her eldest of two (me) was to shut me down. ‘Don’t ask me that.’ ‘Do you want to be like your father and visit the mental hospital?’ ‘Why aren’t you doing your homework more quickly?’ etc. She had neither the temperament nor the opportunity to be maternal. Her energies went to more basic things like making sure her earnings as a bookkeeper were enough to augment my father’s miserly labourer’s wages. I still see the paper on which she kept small business accounts, little checked spaces where additions and subtractions were toted up.

In my mind’s eye, until relatively recently, my mother and our small house was ever present. It was a touchstone, the person and place against which I measured what I was doing and how I was living my life. Particularly my emotional life. I longed to be different from Florence, to be a loving person with an even-tempered, calm manner. I vowed never to yell, never to let my anxiety push me into raising my voice. I strove to be pretty, to be more physically attractive than Florence allowed herself to be. I traveled forth to see the world, making certain I did not inhabit a place so small as the house I grew up in on 160th Terrace. It was a house which Florence never left.

Needless to say, I’ve failed as much as I’ve succeeded. I look at my face in the mirror and see Florence’s outlines. I hear her tones when I’m upset with my partner and screaming in frustration. I retrace the trappings of our south Florida lower middle class house, remembering the time I cut myself on the jalousie window, and bled until Mrs. Bolt, our Hungarian neighbour, put sulfur powder in the wound. I recall the humid days when I had to water the grass, the Reader's Digest Book of the Month selections on the shelf, the frazzled meals of frozen peas and overcooked meat, my sister and I chastised when we made fun of the victuals. Most of all, I recall my mother’s weary anger as she tried to keep things from going under.

After two generations, all of us are forgotten. This truth torments me, one of those realities that cannot be transformed into a softer promise. I wonder who will remember me. And I recognize that when I am dead, Florence will be truly gone from this earth. I ask myself how I can honour her memory, a memory I don’t really cherish. I only fear that if I erase her, so will I vanish. I was not a loving daughter, and I did not ease my mother’s way. I longed only to get away – from her, from the unhappy house, from my impaired father. And get away I did. My life is rich. I have made of myself a worldly, educated, involved person. I have made a difference in the lives of a number of people. Though I have no biological children, I have mothered and I have sistered. I have a kind, loving, tolerant partner and share the joy of grandparenting his daughter’s children. And still, the shadow of my life as a daughter haunts me. So it is, so it must be. I live with the curse and the blessing of a mind full of memories.

Mother I never knew you...

Forgive me, my mother, for not being able to love you. As I must forgive you for being unable to soothe my childhood fears. After the death of my father, your husband, you had nine fulfilling years as a teacher’s assistant. This photo is you being honoured at the primary school two days before you died. I was there, though I did not recognize the woman being lauded and loved. Who was this person for whom many felt such fondness? Ah, it was Florence, not just my mother but a person all her own. Thank you – Florence, mother, individual – for giving me a shot at life.

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On Lamentation and on My Father

by Rose Levinson

Photo by Julia Yee

From William Carlos Williams

Tract

“I will teach you my townspeople

How to perform a funeral.

Or do you think you can shut grief in?

From us, we who have nothing to lose? "

Grieving is a lifelong process. The early death of my first husband, half a lifetime ago, is always with me. Steve’s loss is a quiet absence, one I come upon as to an old friend. Although in truth, sometimes it’s the events surrounding his illness and death I remember, rather than the person. Steve died at thirty and I was twenty-nine. I don’t have enough memories stored. But I do the best I can to keep him alive.

On the other hand, it was a surprise to find myself mourning my father. This parent has been a continuous absence, starting when I was young. His serious depression carried him far away. I’m not certain what led to writing about him on my visit to Ireland’s Inis Mor. Perhaps it’s sadness about how the world feels right now. I return to that original sorrow, the early loss of my male parent.

Here are two reflections on my own grieving. And because I was mourning my father, this issue of Emerging Voices is late. I needed time to go further inward.

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ON RITUAL

Are we ready, we dwellers on this suffering planet, to mourn what we’ve lost? Can we prepare for deaths to come, acknowledge deaths we’ve caused? Shall we begin a search for rituals to honor the world we’ve desecrated?

I ask these questions on a remote Irish island, Inis Mor. Odd that the urbanite I am should find myself in such a place, soothing in its calm and empty space. This morning, I walked beside the Atlantic, that sea which flung millions to the far corners of the earth. I embraced a sacred Celtic standing stone and tied a ribbon of desire to a hawthorn tree. I stood beside a well where countless islanders have placed stones of longing. I added my pebbles to theirs, watched them sink into the water. I asked our guide to bless me, and was comforted by his Celtic bestowal.

This time of year is auspicious for me personally and for my ethnic group. I’m a Jew, one moved by the rituals developed by my tribe over centuries. The Celts were in Ireland from around 500 BCE. Historically, the Hebrew year count starts in 3761 BCE. This is 5782 in the Hebrew calendar. Both communal identities predate the Christian era. Celtic rituals are alive in a place like Inis Mor. They speak in this place and beyond. They spoke to me. Embracing the stone, tying the ribbon, placing my pebbles, I murmured Hebrew words, I recited ancient Jewish prayers, I fused my intimate rituals with those of an unknown culture, enmeshed and comforted by both of them.

The power of ritual to shape experience, to order and contain it, is profound. Over the centuries, we humans have devised countless ways of marking our short journey from birth to death. Ritual is the heart of all religious practices. Of the twelve prevailing world religions, the Abrahamic trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are prominent, along with Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism. Alongside these, Baha’i, Confucianism, Jainism, Shinto, Taoism and Zoroastrianism add their unique responses to human finitude, along with nativist religions. All have devised actions, objects, calendars, movements, music to ritualize what is called belief.

As important are the uncountable rituals we individual humans make up, uttering our own unique pleas in the middle of innumerable troubled nights. Rituals help us express mourning. Without lamentation, there is no consolation. Ritual can make grief manageable.

On September 8, more than half a lifetime ago, my first husband died. The date is seared into my being. I’m remembering Steve now, and the final time I saw him, in his hospital bed in Dayton, Ohio. He was comfortable when last I was with him. And then, at around 6 a.m., I got the call that he was dead. They didn’t allow me to spend time with his uninhabited body, hustling me out of the room where he lay. I regret this, still sorry I didn’t challenge the medical staff who rushed me away. They did not permit me to sit with Steve and take in the awesome fact he was dead. They did not grant me time to invoke a ritual, to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

The absence of sitting in mourning has marked me forever, an opportunity lost. Buried sorrow sometimes comes to me in the form of unbearable anxiety. I didn’t know enough then about the need for ritual, the need to enact a way to face that which is ultimately triumphant: death. I know now there are ways we can grieve, both individually and communally. We must find them or we must create them. It’s what we humans can do in the face of an overwhelmingly confused world and the ongoing loss around us.

For those who lost loved ones to Covid, unable to be present at their dying time, the anguish is magnified. The loss of intimacy and parting ritual is another devastation of this plague. A daughter, Maria, who lost her mother to the virus, sobbed as she described lighting two candles every night, saying her mother’s name in front of the small flames. ‘It brings me some relief, even though I know it’s just candles in my living room.’

Which brings me to the overall theme of this Emerging Voices: Lamentations, cries of anguish for that which is lost and will never be again. Lamentation is a cry of anguish, savage in its purity. Grief inhabits a space of purity unmoored from constraints of reason or restraint. To lament is to let the profundities of loss penetrate the soul. Ritual is often the surest anchor to re-bind us to life.

For My Father

Max. Often called Mac. My father and the parent of my sister. Husband to my mother, Florence. Son of my Polish grandfather, Sam, a mean old man. He’d broken his back when a building block fell on him. Sam walked with a stick, but that didn’t stop him being overbearing and dismissive. When I visited him, at my Aunt Ro’s house where he lived, he’d be at a card table, playing pinochle with a bunch of men and sipping schav, a sorrel leaf and sour cream soup. When his grandchildren walked in, a nod, in his shrunken Polish Jewish world, was a huge greeting. My grandfather did not go in for nurturing. And he was hard on my father, who was not the kind of son someone like him should have had.

Max was the middle child. His sister Edith was the eldest, and Rose, called Ro, the youngest. Both of these women were stronger than my father. Edith was generous, loud, mother of four from three different fathers. First born Harry’s father was unknown, Edith not having bothered with a convention like marriage when she had him at nineteen. Her husband was Uncle Mel, who paid the bills by filing civil suits whenever the occasion arose and slipping on people’s front porches so he could sue for damages. Of their four children, Bea was the only girl. She and I became friends when she lived in Los Angeles, and I was a comforter as she lay dying. Having married two African-American men, and fathered a child with one of them, Bea had been excised from the family. It always surprised me that Edith, who was open in so many ways, should prove to be poisoned when it came to race.

Aunt Ro and Uncle Harvey were the glamorous couple. I remember them leaving their house to go to dances sponsored by the American Legion. Ro’s clothing and make-up made her look like the movie stars I saw in the glossy magazines she bought, her perfume trailing behind as she walked to the door. Uncle Harvey’s suit and tie were stylish, his hair slicked back and shiny with pomade. But Uncle Harvey was a gambler. He ended up driving a taxi, losing his house and wife, hanging out with shady characters in downtown Miami, and dying in a seedy hotel. Aunt Ro remarried, having a good life and ending up, as did so many northeastern Jews, living under the palms of Los Angeles.

And then there was their brother, my father, Max, the male child. He was unassuming, gentle, barely articulate. He was not masculine, if masculinity is defined as strong and decisive and able to cope with the world. Max never finished high school, his formal schooling ending at the end of year eight. When I was in my thirties, I learned he’d been married once before. So far as I’m aware, I was the first child born to him, but who knows.

Max was working as a waiter in the Poconos in upstate New York. In the nineteen forties, this was the resort of choice for Jews from New York and surrounding areas. The Poconos was where the working class went to eat lox and cream cheese, drink coffee and munch on rugalah, play bad tennis and lie around in the sun. A photo of my father shows a nice looking man, short but attractive, with a sweet small mustache. On his arm was a folded towel, the kind you use to clean a table.

In the Poconos, on vacation, my father’s parents met my mother’s parents. My father was twenty-four and my mother twenty-eight. Time for marriage. In Max’s case, a second one, in Florence’s case, a first. It was an arranged marriage of sorts, the parents pushing these two weak-willed people into a liaison. Their wedding picture is full of hope; later pictures show two people whose union did not bring happiness. Whatever joy there might have been was snuffed out by inadequate money, an overbearing mother-in-law living in the back of the house, a subservient daughter--my mother--who took out her rage at my father and her daughters through a continual stream of churlishness. And there was my father’s mental illness.

Looking at my mother now that I have lived beyond the age at which she died, I feel mainly understanding and sorrow. She must have felt trapped with two daughters to rear, a husband who earned little to no money, a mother who never let her feel adequate. Her parents lived with us until they died, and my grandmother ruled the house with constant instructions about how things were to be done. She sat sometimes on the front porch with our neighbour from across the street, Mrs. Bolt. I overheard her speaking contemptuously of my father, of how he wasn’t a good provider. It broke my heart, and I covered my ears to block out her invective.

Max worked as a labourer. Sometimes he was behind the deli counter at the supermarket, chopping cabbage to make coleslaw. Other times he unloaded goods for the Seven-Eleven grocery chain. Occasionally, he helped out when a caterer was preparing a meal. He worked silently, he spoke little, he suffered much.

At intervals, my father was put into the psychiatric ward of the nearby state hospital. The hospital was not a snake pit. It was a pleasant enough environment. When I visited my father, his white coated attendant was kind, and I often saw my dad outside in the exercise area. He was incarcerated to deal with depression, overwhelming seizures of sorrow which set him weeping and pacing. He was never violent or abusive, nor could he say what tormented him. The treatment of choice was electric shock therapy, administered to bring him out of whatever depths he was inhabiting. As my father was inarticulate, the ECT only increased his inability to put into words what was going on. Returning from a hospital session, he went back to whatever menial work was to be had. My mother, herself working as a bookkeeper, had some relief for a time, but the cycle repeated.

My father died at sixty-two. He was in the hospital at the time of his death, in restraints. It’s an image I can hardly bear to recall, his ending so constricted and so subdued. It wasn’t suicide, but surely he had decided deep inside it was all too much and time to go.

My father occupies a blank space in my interior self. I seldom think of him, and when I do, it’s with anxiety along with sadness. When I feel overwhelmed and sad, I worry I’ll go under as did he, unable to cope and crushed by the genes he passed on. I hardly know this man, though I lived with him until I went off to university at nineteen. When I was with him, he said little to me. I think having a daughter, let alone two, was too much for him. Not interfering with our lives was all he could manage. At least, he never abused us, and he worked hard at low level jobs to keep us fed and clothed. After his death, meeting with his psychiatrist and begging him to explain what was wrong with my late father, all he could say was, ‘We were never sure. But working was very important to him.’ Desperate to understand, this was all I was given.

It’s difficult to honor my father, to wish for any of his qualities. His truncated development made him almost non-human. When I try to figure out why he was so malformed, I can only guess it’s partly biological and possibly the result of a father who no doubt made him feel not only inadequate but totally defective as a man. But that’s my need to make sense of it, to have a coherent story. No doubt there are other contributing factors hidden away in his troubled journey.

Though I have no biological children (doing my mothering in a different way), my one sibling has two children. Throughout their youth, she worried they would show signs of mental instability. Widowed young, I missed the motherhood window. It is, thankfully, something for which I have no regrets. I would not have done well, continually on guard for signs of my father’s damaged self.

These few words are the closest I’ve come to focusing intently on my dad, on Max Levine, trying to honor the human who brought me into the world and enabled me to get to this time, to this place. He had a short, unhappy life. I wish it had been otherwise, both for him and therefore, for me. As we Jews say to honour our dead: may his memory be for a blessing.

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