After my father died, I wondered where all that extraordinary "Chi", that brilliance, that force of intellect, that Energy....where did it go after the body that housed it went dark? I ask the same of Alan, whom I only knew as an old man, but so full of piss and vinegar, a know-it-all, passionate, compassionate outraged ranter and disturber of the peace and status quo. Then that disarming chuckle - and you knew he was enjoying every minute of it! He often told me that like him, I am a writer, and so I must write. But my writing would not do justice to Alan, and so I offer one of my favorites of his in his memory.
Manli *****************************************************
Sitting Shiva Among The Gentiles! ( The “Liberator”
and the “Survivor” visit Mercy High School ) ******************************************** Recently, my wife Lotte and myself yielded to an “ecumenical” impulse after Lotte got a call from a teacher at a plushCatholicBoarding Schoolfor High School girls inSouth San Francisco, who happened to hear about Lotte’s web-published Holocaust-related adventures from a friend and fellow teacher.
What Lotte and I experienced at Mercy High is partly something which perhaps might be subtitled: "Sitting Shiva for the Holocaust Among the Gentiles..." ( “Sitting Shiva” : a jewish group mourning ritual for the dead) . At one point, we all found ourselves reverently standing in the "Commemoration Room" (for the Holocaust) ---an elaborately decorated salon with (donated) survivor portraits of Holocaust Survivors -- or kids of Survivors, -- populated by invited overweight well-intentioned Jewish philanthropist-types , (many with multiple chins!,) bowing their heads to the earnest fervent remarks of Jim,, the teacher who founded the Holocaust Studies program at Mercy High ---incidentally, learning a lot of yiddish phrases along the way( i.e. "nash", "meshuganeh", "zoftig." )
Jim’s devotion to the memory of the Holocaust has produced an annual ceremony & colloquy , which draws scholars, witnesses, survivors, ecclesiastics , historians, free lance humanitarians, and many others equally dedicated, as he is, to the perpetuation of the Holocaust saga as both living monument, --and Cautionary Tale ---recalling yet again to those who may have forgotten what we as erstwhile inheritors of the Enlightenment and representatives of a technologically advanced age,-- nevertheless, --in the grip of our worst daemons, --- remain capable of. .
After Jim spoke, there was a chorus of "never agains!" by several octogenarian ex concentration camp inmates,. We were then requested to bow heads again to the prayers of a young (holocaust circuit-riding) reform Rabbi (wearing a high-style Macy's knitted yamulkeh!) who intoned an abbreviated version of the kaddish prayer for the dead beneath a large framed stone statuette of Mary Magdalene & baby Jesus nailed to a nearby wall. This statue he interpreted, as the unsurpassed symbol of "that mysterious eternal gift of mother love for which, let us now open our hearts together in prayer, -- ah-men." At which, one of the scheduled Main Speakers, -- a sly 79 yr old perky chipmunk of a Viennese jewish survivor, with a definite twinkle in his eye, (in current retirement from his previous 30 yr Professorship of French at UC Berkeley). gave me a mischievous wink. These days, he spends quite a bit of his time going around, making speeches about his own getaway from Vienna to Belgium, meanwhile peddling his own self-published memoir, "Breaking The Silence,"from out of the trunk of his car,--He finally couldn't help nudging me with a grin, surreptitiously nodding towards beatified Mary and Jesus on the wall while wearily shrugging his dissent from all the instant piety flooding the room, and simultaneously summing up the ironies he saw invoked in the Mother and Child statue by correctly identifying the two figures on the wall -- ---as “those two Jews”----(which they, inarguably, were !…)
It was the Main Event ,though, during which Lotte and I, were seated side by side on the stage in a huge auditorium, before a large audience of female teen-agers, all dressed in school uniforms,( plaid skirts and white blouses, their bursting bosoms barely contained by their prim outfits) many with pigtails saucily framing their open faces, ) which really got to me.
They sat, spellbound, whilst Lotte eloquently recited the poignant history of her own Getaway from Vienna to Shanghai, beginning with the goose-stepping entry of Nazi troops into her native city, Vienna in 1938, then going on to the trials of life under the Japanese Occupation in the international city of Shanghai, , and then, later, dodging bombs the Yanks began loosing on the city----a prelude to their own subsequent triumphal entry into Shanghai itself, after the Japanese surrendered to McArthur at the close of WW2. . And finally Lotte described the Wizard of Oz ( though temporary! )
Happy Ending to her saga, by bumping into me one day in the corridors of the Irving Thalberg bldng at MGM studios in Culver City, California, where she'd been hired as a german-speaking legal secretary (and where I --- -----in the guise of a neophyte screenwriter ----entertained myself with fantasies of blowing the whole place up ----including our loveable leader ---that famous human-orangutan ---- L.B. Mayer ------in a cloud of satisfying smithereens!..) ...
In our first upbeat encounter, ---- (I should mention that in those days Lotte used to wear pigtails nearly down to her waist )---- I noticed a radiant dirndl-wearing young woman lighting up the grayish corridors of the Thalberg building at MGM with her unnerving 1000 watt smile, itself often punctuated by frequent exclamations of happy surprise & wonderment at so much American peace & plenty all around her. --- Imagine : toilet paper available in seven different shades !, Nineteen different offerings of breakfast cereal for sale at the corner store ! And how about the festivity of the good humor man’s regular appearance , --his hurdy-gurdy daily playing from atop his white ice cream truck parked just outside the gates , summoning enthusiastic executive- types from their top floor offices , streams of actors, many still in makeup and costume, and flocks of female clerical workers --bursting from their secretarial cubicles –all joining in our spontaneous national ice-cream eating pastime, hollering their favorite flavors to Pedro, the wise-cracking vendor standing on the truck; s flatbed, who used to brandish sugar cones as if they were bandilleros
Everything seemed so wonderful to Lotte in those days, so marvelous, so fairy tale like, almost too miraculous to last. -.
Which, alas, turned out to be true. ! For , as she memorably recounted to the students, , -after 18 months or so, her Shangri La existence in LA abruptly collapsed; she began to suffer scarifying flashbacks , trembling suddenly at sudden noises, became unnerved at bright lights or unexpected movement,;, The sound of German spoken anywhere in her vicinity made her want to throw up, Worse, she started to dream of images she’d had --ostensbily ---long since put behind her… --Her ex-Viennese childhood chum & playmate. from Vienna, for instance --Maxerl, --returned, in dreams, as the ghostly goose-stepping Nazi he over night had turned into in 1938., bristling with polished boots & swastikas, shiny pistol in hand, proudly brandishing his brand new Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) badge! The hospital bed in which her dear father-- dying of cancer---lay, listening to a small bedside table radio, in dreams, kept inching closer & closer to the radio to which his ear was permanently glued, as it kept relaying exuberant bulletins of successive US military victories & advances against the Nazis .And eventually, ----(though by this time her father had died) ----it reported American bombs were falling nearer & nearer to Shanghai itself. Then the contorted swollen face of a 26 yr old Japanese army Sergeant named Khano Goya kept re-appearing. Sgt Goya had been appointed “official” Overseer of the improvised ghetto for “Stateless Refugees” which the Japanese had instigated, and into which Lotte and her family had been herded. The Sergeant like to call himself “King of the Jews” And in Lotte’s dreams, he began to loom more and more balefully, --- castigating Lotte for this or that (imaginary) infringement of Ghetto rules, & slapping her face in public (as had happened once in life ) only this time the face slapping kept repeating itself, , over and over again…It was as if a ferocious, (though soundless) hurricane ,-- a miniature invisible earthquake, -- had seized her -& wouldn’t let go –She felt herself assaulted night after night -- pulled & buffeted and tossed around like pieces of debris from a wrecked ship & wondering, ---through chattering lips and light-blinded eyes, ---when –if ever – these malevolent apparitions from the past , (which I tried to exorcise as best I could by holding her in my arms,) would, please God, finally stop and go away for good, once and for all !… ….
Well, stop they did! . In two years time , as she recounted to her Mercy High listeners, ,most of her worst symptoms ---legacy of her previously suppressed charades of terror & fear, --, the trembling , the stop-and-go shivers, the drum rolls of chattering teeth, --- -- began draining away as mysteriously as they’d begun. AFter the birth of our first child--- by which time we’d moved to Carmel , California, a paradisiacal village above the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles from LA ----Lotte was well on the way to recovery, putting down roots, in our new community , which today –after 50 odd years ---numbers her among its most distinguished Senior Citizens.. Yet the experience left deep fissures., From time to time, they can still occasionally, trigger a minor relapse. At Heathrow airport one time in England, for instance, just after we’d flown in from the States, she sat down and adamantly refused to join the long queue of international arrivals, being processed before a row of uniformed custom agents seated at their Union-Jack bedecked tables; perhaps it was the sudden crowding and chaos . Or the jumble & clash of foreign tongues. Or the felt presence of an arbitrary authority ----But it all seemed to produce an involuntary recoil in Lotte, , --a temporary paralysis of terror and fear . Indeed, it was only after I sat down and gently began pointing out to her that this time , in fact, she, had all the necessary attributes and bonafides,–---i.e. she had 1) a stamped & validated US passport; 2) ,a pocket full of US travelers checks;, 3), an international driving license . Gradually, after a few minutes, the black cloud enshrouding her began to lift; within a few more minutes she was able to pick up her bags, square her shoulders and follow me calmly through the vaudevillian maze of the usual customs folderol, , enduring the airport pandemonium roaring around us with determined calm. . .
Our individual experiences , of course, inevitably shape our response to whatever befalls us. . Perhaps that’s why, over the years, Lotte--and myself, too, as an ex-member of the U.S. military--engaged in the victorious tide-turning struggle against Hitler in 1944-45 ---have turned into steadfast backers of justice-mongering causes; we ran a Settlement house in Salinas, CA,, for instance, aimed at trying to secure–among other things--- better working conditions for farm workers; we lobbied for more equitable --& affordable -- health care for Seniors, we publicly decried our Government’s seeming affection , (to us, incomprehensible!) for foreign dictators, & we demonstrated against environmental degradation, while, at the same time, emphasizing the vital ( and statistically indisputable) link between economic –and political---democracy And Lotte remembered to remind her well-meaning (and plainly well fed!) students, that -even as she spoke ---- that very minute! ------hundreds of thousands of desperate fugitives were in flight all over the world;--- running from hunger, from exploitation, from peonage , from atrocious abuses of one kind or another etc. She pointed to the current crop of the expelled, the visa-less , the “ethnically cleansed”, ---daily expanding numbers of would-be escapees drawn from the widening ranks of political, ethnic, and economic “undesirables.” They were crowding into overloaded fishing boats, trudging through tropical forests, climbing icy mountain passes, braving attack dogs , brutal border guards, wayward brigands and cynical bounty hunters, --all in order to reach some tantalizing , idealized, desperately clung to dream of political and economic “ sanctuary”, where, , finally,( if they were lucky,) they might be able to feel safe enough to think of themselves as “free.”.
Notwithstanding this melancholy litany of flight and pursuit, Lotte managed to finish her contribution on an upbeat refrain. She sounded a “despite everything” note by quoting from “Anthem,” a haunting hymn-like song by the distinguished Canadian poet , singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen, which even though its main stanzas indict widespread deceit , fraud & cruelty in the world , nevertheless manages to tease a sort of saving grace out of the two line choruses –or “mantras” –Cohen has slyly inserted between the main stanzas , which hint of redemption & possibility,--- something Lotte’s own long life experience has eloquently confirmed in spades, (and which makes her own appearance at Mercy High , together with other Holocaust survivors, such a truly celebratory event.. )
(Lines from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen)
“The birds they sing
At break of day
Start again
I hear them say
Don’t dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what has yet to be… Chorus:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect off-ering
there is a crack –a crack, --in everything…
That’s how the light comes in
That’s how the light comes in…..”
******************************************************************************
After Lotte finished speaking , she handed me the microphone. I stood , speechless, for a few seconds. ( According to the “official” brochure, I wasn’t even scheduled to be on the program!.) They’d seated me next to Lotte, I’d been told, - -- so that the impressionable audience of young girls ---already primed with more than their share of Holocaust horror tales ----would be able to see, with their own eyes, what an authentic American “liberator” (me!) looks like.
Not having prepared remarks , I decided ,first , to try to downplay the too easily invoked ( though duly enshrined in many countries ----–and richly endowed -- - -- globally thriving Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Biz… Its automatic Golden Oldie mantra, , “Never Again ! -- ( though mocked, and profaned every time a new slaughter-of-innocents tale pops up somewhere in the press !)) ) is regularly repeated ---and earnestly prayed for (in the direction of heaven, let’s hope !) ,year after year after year.
I then went on to describe how one day , in April, `1945, near the war’s end, , I came upon a heart-stopping scene: wraithlike beings, skeletal, some scarcely breathing, cavernous of eye and bearing their death-sentence tattoos like lepers stigmata; they were jammed into bunks blanketed by what seemed cast-off rags or scraps of paper, listlessly bunched in sardine like clusters, oblivious to the stench around them (plus an occasional rotting corpse or two,) and by this time seemingly indifferent to the advanced decay of their coffinlike barracks as well –What I was looking at were the pajama-clad remnants of the walking dead at Buchenwald Concentration Camp!. .
Then, a month later, ---as one of only three German speaking members of a Mil Gov team assigned to Erlbach, a medium sized town, in the state of Bavaria , I found myself charged with sorting out the "bad" nazis" from the "nominal" ones. We military linguists were supplied with dozens of boxes of printed questionnaires ( ‘ fragebogen” in German ) which had been professionally prepared, so we were told, by “experts” in the psychological warfare section of the US Dept of State . .
Employing these carefully prepared instruments, , -- which consisted of long lists of queries involving political affiliation, party membership , attendance at rallies , contributions to Nazi groups, ratings of the nations leaders , attitudes towards the War , etc..( demanding mostly simple yes or no answers)--- ---- we’d soon be able , we were told, to “accurately” distinguish "toxic" nazis from "not so toxic” ones , and "borderline” ones from “reclaimable” ones, etc, ----& thus be ready to place those being queried on a statistically determined Nazi “complicity” graph,” which would help us in administering whatever legally mandated punishment –as set down by Mil Gov regulations, ----might eventually be decreed. .
To me, the whole questionnaire project was a sample of pure think-tank malarkey, cooked up by well paid (and doubtless well tenured! ) refugees from academia ! ….It was based, of course, on our national fixation on measurement ----our confidence that anything and everybody is capable of being accurately summed up statistically --- and hence can thus be rewardingly sliced, diced, digitized, and “explained.” !.....
–Meanwhile, my own knowledge of German had already made me privy, to a great deal of local political and social gossip, as well as a fair amount of Erlbach’s more familial—or “tribal” -- history--- Which meant I had already been able to glean a general sense of what actually had been occurring in the territory under our control (a unit of local government called a landkreis , comprising an area about the size of RI.) That’s why I quickly managed to “lose” my latest batch of think-tank fragebogen , into the nearest waste paper basket !. Which left me, of course, with nothing to officially “orient” myself with --..-no uniform “criteria” -- by which to assess degrees of“political innocence or complicity, though that was ---supposedly --part of our mission --- in regard to potential war crimes proceedings which might be inaugurated later on. . .
But my 22 yr old “intuition” proved no match for the infinite variety—and ambiguity --of individual responses among the people I was dealing with. I soon found out they’d been compelled to live their lives under constant scrutiny –and intimidation --by the local branch of the Nazi terror machine, an often invisible , yet increasingly threatening presence, which kept swelling –or metastasizing—(like some faulty sci-fi laboratory experiment gone wrong !) -to Orwellian size by the time Hitller’s vaingloriously proclaimed “Thousand Year Reich” --- was forced to surrender -- a mere dozen years after it was founded --in 1945.
I related to the students, too, how one night, I found myself assigned ,-- to my distaste , --- to lead a group of fellow GI’s surreptitiously “shadowing” a sallow-faced teen-ager, . back to his home in the working class district of the city, (where, we suspected, he’d been stock-piling US cigarettes, chocolates, soap, cereal, and other difficult-to-get items, filched from our Mil Gov storehouse. .) As it happened, these suspicions, turned out to be true., But all at once, I found myself witnessing an appalling: scene: my dear army buddies seemed to have abruptly morphed into replicas of that publicly caricatured figure , the “Ugly American”, made so notoriously infamous in Vietnam. They were taking out all their pent up frustrations, fear, loneliness, homesickness (and God knows what else,! )--, ..on the quivering 14 yr old "perpetrator ,” hand-cuffed in front of them, while his terrified family, --a war-widowed mama and his two younger sisters ,-- stood helplessly by, shaking with fear;; in a few minutes they’d practically destroyed the first floor of this family’s bungalow --- smashing cupboards, kicking open glass doors, throwing all kinds of stuff ----food, toiletries, cosmetics, clothing etc ---helter skelter all over the floor in a spontaneous orgy of self-righteous ”evidence-seeking” zeal. Preposterously, I found myself having to pull rank on them -- even brandish my favorite battle-scarred tommy gun in their faces, --so as to get my avenging, freaked-out, fellow countrymen to cease & desist their violent, illegal,-- unauthorized, --rampage ….
That night, though, I couldn’t sleep. I began to realize that I’d been forced to face into something I’d been trying ---for weeks --- to AVOID facing into : i.e. the demoralizing fact that it was the Occupation itself that was probably responsible for the kind of freak-out I’d just been describing: for weeks we’d been on the receiving end of anonymous threats & rising hostility (due, I think, to the occasional arbitrary, or heavy-handed way somebody from our office would treat a local Erlbach-er or functionary.
Word of this indiscretion would soon spread, stoking up the temperature of residual humiliation, still simmering among hard liners hunkered down behind their still- closed curtains and dead- bolted doors ; it was a humiliation worsened , too, by the bitterness of demobilized returning German war vets who would sit around, disconsolate , unable to find work to help feed their families… --- I’m talking here about the often unintentional blunders or psychological faux pas that we ourselves, at times, committed, contributing to a backlash among various segments in town . They sowed the seeds which often hardened attitudes on both sides. And --for our part,-- they threatened to endanger the stability ---or “mental health” –---of a number of our personnel, ----I’m referring here to decent, steadfast, veteran campaigners ,-- decoration-honored GI’s, with some of whom I’d been in various sticky situations from Normandy to the Rhineland. It wasn’t their fault, after all, that they’d ended up in Erlbach, forced to play roles they were wholly unequipped to play, --marooned in an obscure Bavarian township , unable to cope with contingencies and circumstances they’d had no training for & no context ,either, to help them evaluate, analyze or understand just what we –and they ----as Occupiers---might, sooner or later, be up against… …. … … ….
Next morning, to relieve my conscience , ,-- ---after the near impromptu mayhem I’d interrupted the night before, ---I trudged back to the working class part of town, lugging a few gifts , as penance –(or maybe as a kind of bribe for forgiveness from the widowed mother of the jailed teen-ager) -- offering my purchased and wrapped “apology” for the sudden brutality we’d inflicted on her 12 hours earlier ….
When the woman caught a glimpse of me, however, she turned & fled down a nearby street..., Who could blame her ? In her mind, I was no different than those who had trashed her home the night before,.. This was the exact moment , I think, that I decided, to hand in my resignation to Mil Gov & put in a request for demobilization , so I could reserve a seat as soon as possible on one of those military transport trains chugging North to the port of Brest in France from whence ships carrying GI's back home to the States were embarking daily .
I can remember, though, how astonished , --and moved ---I was at the agitation the recital of these just described events raised in many young listeners.. At one point, one of their teachers, --a young woman in her thirties, be-shawled, dark haired, & fierce- eyed, ---rose and began cross-examining me about torture. How harshly should we judge those who ordered torture to take place under Bush? -- How far up the chain of command should we go to pinpoint and hold accountable those who contrived to make such torture "legal?-“---,- How should one find one's way, -- one’s “ethical compass” -- in such seemingly out-of-control, heartless, jehad-threatening and increasingly violence-stricken times etc..? Excruciating questions, to which I admit I didn’t, ---and don’t---- have readily acceptable answers. (Who does ? )
Yet questions, somehow which forced me to acknowledge that our pilgrimage to Mercy High School ---- despite its accidental asides into humor (or “inter-faith-y” geniality )--- had inspired us to try to “transmogrify” Cohen’s mournful (musical) roll call of our collective and individual transgressions & betrayals i.e. exploitation, greed, deceit , war, mendacity, murder, self-aggrandizement , spiritual vainglory etc. into a kind of reverse spin communiqué, encoded with agendas of hope and healing ,(helped by clues hinted at –--between stanzas --by the poet himself! ) which reflects in some way our own lifelong attempts (however miniscule) to bind up wounds whenever & however we could. The song itself , in fact, amounts to a kind of instruction manual, suggesting implicit ways to smuggle a rehabilitative and restored humanity into the cracks and crevices of our common life, by summoning ---and embracing ----the genius of a rare human attribute,-- magnanimity,------something apt to be extolled say, by High School or College Graduation Day Speakers, but more likely to be lamented.--.within the handed-down treadmill routines of our (often unrecognized) uppmanship-paced days -- as largely quote Missing In Action end quote.!...Yet if one keeps looking long enough and hard enough ,---as Cohen himself has succeeded in doing ---- one may find it possible to locate unexpected opportunities for such rehabilitative break-throughs in familiar , though surprising , places ----- May this happen sooner rather than later----ojalla! ( And may it happen not very far from where you and I happen to be standing this very minute.!.)
As our Poet himself sings, in his hoarsely eloquent, ambiguous, & wise threnody of resignation & renewal.., “”
“ The wars, they will be fought again
The holy dove,
She will be
Bought again..
Bought and sold
And bought again..
Still, there’s a crack, --
a crack in everything””
that’s ’how the light comes in..
that’s how the light comes in
that’s how the light comes in….. (Amen!.)
--------------Alan M.
