Boston December Approach

Boston December Approach

A pale three-quarter moon beyond the wing banking to starboard
The gray crenulated clouds below
Above the city where snow transformed commuters’ lights to phantasms of late fall.

Selma and Bob

Selma and Bob

Selma hated Bob with a vehemence that would have led a casual observer to conclude that they had no business being together. The fact that over thirty-five years had passed since their wedding, following a brief relationship precipitated by the introduction of Selma to Bob by Bob’s parents, made it all the more amazing that these two misfits of matrimony would have survived literally eons of marital abrasiveness.

Both Selma and Bob appeared to be older than they looked at sixty-one and sixty-five respectively. Despite the fact that Selma searched out and attended the myriad opportunities for “personal growth” when they summered in the Berkshires, she vehemently refused to take one iota of information she had gleaned from these workshops and actually translate them into making either of their lives more rewarding or comfortable. Even when she saw the results a workshop on diet had had on their Berkshire neighbors Allen and Eileen, which she had attended along with Eileen in the nearby community of Lenox, she steadfastly refused to use either the book she had bought at the meeting, or use any of the common sense recipes introduced there for improving her health. In fact, although she had installed an expensive gas range in her vacation home in Massachusetts, she had failed to turn it on in over two years of living in that house and needed the prodding of Eileen to finally use it to heat up some biscuits meant as a farewell gift to her and Bob at the end of a summer season.

The most “humorous” workshop she had proposed to her friends was one dealing with Individual Psychology, a branch of psychology in which family relationships are at the core of treatment. What could be more ironic than a person who hates her spouse seeking out an expensive conference on how to deal with matters of interpersonal interaction? But, this was the reason d’etre for how Selma spent time during the summer months. She sought out these conferences as the moral majority searched for weaknesses in the human soul to exploit for political reasons!

Why Selma hated Bob was not clear. What was transparent however, was the fact that Bob had learned over the course of his torturous marriage to internalize the torment that Selma meted out and actually blamed himself for her reprehensible behavior. During the season just past in the Berkshires, Selma had left Bob for five weeks as a pay back for his deviating from the route they had chosen to travel to their summer home. Despite having traveled alone on many occasions in the past, Selma flipped out when Bob sought an alternate, and more picturesque route on his motorcycle, trailing Selma in their car, during the final thirty-five miles of their trip. She steamed with discontent at his departure when relaying the incident to Eileen and Allen on borrowing a flashlight from them in order to more effectively empty the contents of the car into their vacation home.

Even Selma and Bob’s dog had become extremely neurotic from being exposed to their constant bickering, as evidenced in his agitation while he urinated on Allen and Eileen’s plantings at the front of their house as an enraged Selma asked to borrow the flashlight.

Days later, when Bob sat holding his head over Selma’s sudden departure from the Berkshires because of the motorcycle incident, he attempted to tie her sudden and impetuous departure to her enmity toward him over writing a college girlfriend a short note several years ago. How Bob could combine these two disjointed elements in his mind was not unusual, as his ability in mathematics and his work in a government agency dealing with science belied even a scintilla of ability to understand or solve even the most basic practical aspects of living on a daily basis. Indeed, he had recently visited his friend’s house after being encouraged to buy some fresh corn at the local fool co-op because he could not figure out what to do with the corn in the husk or how to go about cooking it! Here was a man who had worked to unlock major secrets of the universe, but did not know that corn had to be submersed in boiling water in order to make it edible.

During Selma’s absence Bob could not stay away from Eileen and Bob’s house. He became a major unmitigated nuisance to them. One late afternoon, as the sun played off the deep green of a nearby mountain, Bob lamented that he would rather die than get legal advice in the event that Selma tried to evict him from their Berkshire home. In yet another faux pas of their married life, Selma was the sole signatory and owner listed on the deed to their summer home. Unbelievably Bob related near tears that “I would rather die than get legal advice if Selma takes action to evict me from the house.” He had come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing in his life mattered and that even his penchant for, and ability for scientific matters, had been “child’s play.” Never had Allen and Eileen seen someone so ready to devalue his entire existence! Allen’s intervention, recommending family counseling for both Selma and Bob, if she returned to the Berkshires, fell on deaf ears.


Eileen and Allen had been in Florida for about two months when Allen’s cell phone rang in January on their way home from the beach at Juno, where they would usually picnic or take long walks along the beach. They had owned a winter home in Florida for two years. The voice Allen heard was unmistakingly Selma’s voice, generally jovial when speaking to her friends, a decided change in tone and volume for the high-pitched, staccato attacks reserved for Bob. Allen and Eileen decided that they would first visit their friends at the home Selma and Bob shared with Bob’s two brothers in Boynton Beach, a house left to him by his father who had died only two years before. Thinking that perhaps the Florida sun and warmth would soften the hostility between Selma and Bob, their friends looked forward to the visit in just a few days. How wrong they would prove to be!

First, an initial volley was fired by Bob who wanted to travel to Miami Beach as the two couples had originally planned, but was short circuited by Allen who knew that they had already spent too much time sitting and chatting at Selma and Bob’s home to make the multi-hour trip worthwhile on this particular Sunday. As a compromise the two couples decided they’d walk along Atlantic Avenue, in Delray Beach, a tourist trap and one of the communities in South Florida with the oldest average age, a distinction which made trips to Delray eventually depressing and almost always universally boring.

On the way back from Delray, with Bob still complaining about the jettisoned trip to Miami, Bob suddenly swerved into the far right lane of travel, prompting Selma to grab the wheel from his hands and begin a verbal attack that thus far had been uncharacteristically absent from the day’s journey. “What’s the matter with you, you fool? If you’re going to drive, then drive. You’re going to kill us all with your stupidity!” Now, Selma was pretty much on track regarding Bob’s lack of driving expertise, but the vehemence of her broadside was what unnerved both Eileen and Allen who sat in the back seat of the convertible, gasping from the close call that has just passed. Sadly, all that Bob could conjure up as a response was a lame, “Don’t grab the wheel from me while I’m driving,” delivered in a voice that reflected his subservience and tacit acknowledgement that he had indeed nearly smashed the right side of the car against another car overtaking him wrongly in the far right lane.

Two weeks later the couples walked through one of the myriad and mindless shopping malls that had sprouted up during the most recent building boom in South Florida after eating at a nondescript restaurant within its staid confines. The Super Bowl would be played the next day which prompted a request from Bob that Allen travel down to Boynton Beach to watch this annual fest of legalized and widely accepted viciousness.

“Why don’t you come up here so that we can watch the game at this sports bar?” Allen asked as they walked past a line of televisions suspended from the ceiling at the outdoor portion of a bar they passed on their stroll through the mall. “I don’t think I’ll be able to find my way here without Selma in the car,” Bob whined, looking for assistance that Eileen and Allen knew would not come from Selma, who was completely disinterested in traveling anywhere on the so-called Super Bowl Sunday. “Go yourself,” was issued in a low growl from Selma, who did not know or care whether it was the Giants, Packers, Red Sox or Yankees who were playing in the scheduled game.

Now, it wasn’t so much that Bob had problems with memory, which however were substantial in his case and further infuriated Selma; but rather the fact that he was still able to propose and explain detailed and scientifically complex projects that interested him, but was totally unable to get on and off of I95 without substantial assistance, with the ramp only a few miles from the house he occupied in Boynton Beach.

This simple interaction precipitated a fusillade of jibes between the two. “Come along with me, tomorrow,” Bob both pleaded and whined, coupled with, “Why don’t you come down to Boynton?” he added looking longingly toward Allen as a way out of the morass and attack he knew would come. “I don’t want to go to your stupid game,” Selma shot back without hesitation. “But I won’t go without you,” he continued, as if looking to be repeatedly rebuked. “You can do something with Eileen,” he countered. “I don’t want to travel tomorrow for an idiotic game!” she now shouted, drawing the attention of passersby.

It was no so much that Selma was indeed right about the stupidity of football, as it was her taking each and every opportunity to use any interaction with Bob as a means of furthering her quest to drive him and his self-concept into the ground, and all this from a person who prided herself on seeking out and attending the most up-to-date conferences, in the long past wake of what was the age of personal development, as a means of bettering interpersonal relations in a society that had long since devalued the same.

One conversation in particular, as they walked to town in the Berkshires, between Bob and Allen upset Allen immensely. Allen had already turned down Bob several times when Bob suggested that he let Allen teach him the nuances of trading in what the stock market called margins. Allen wanted nothing whatsoever to do with anything that was even remotely tied to investments, and especially putting money into companies that produced military goods and “services.” He suspected that Bob’s penchant for investments must have had something to do with the military contractors, and he recoiled at the thought since he had been a war resister during the Vietnam War and opposed any such outlays. “It’s easy,” Bob relayed. “I can teach you how to make a bundle through this process.” Allen changed the subject, having lost complete interest and tolerance for the topic.

While they walked, Allen brought up the topic of service in the military, since both he and Bob were only separated by five years of age. “It’s kind of funny,” Bob began. “When I graduated from college I was placed on the payroll of a corporation that supplied the government and I was classified as unavailable for military service since the company was considered a significant part of the national defense.” Allen didn’t think it was funny at all, and remained silent.

While Eileen and Allen generally avoided both Selma and Bob after their major blowout of the summer and Selma’s five-week absence, they were moved when both Selma and Bob came over one evening after Eileen and Allen’s Yorkshire Terrier died, to whom they had been very attached, and they both placed stones on the grave that had been made for the pup in part of a flower garden beside their Berkshire summer home. Despite all of their contradictions and flaws, to which we are all subject, here was the dynamic duo of bickering and marital rancor, suddenly possessed by the most basic of human kindnesses.

Howard Zinn: Bomb After Bomb

Howard Zinn: Bomb After Bomb

An Article Worth Reading

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/headlines/ci_6746734

Absent for a while...Notes on Notes

While working on my memoirs, Notes Of A Military Resister, I need to limit the number of posts I work on. Notes will not be available on this site, as I plan to publish the work through a traditional publisher.

A Great Soul In The Universe

A Great Soul In The Universe

My beloved Yoda died…
As a billowing white cumulous cloud
Drifted lazily south to north in a summer sky
Touching the Berkshire Hills
Where he once ran as if driven by celestial fire.
That evening a new moon
Would appear low in the west
And I would remain heartbroken forever.

Don't Keep Students From The Help They Need

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2007/05/20/a1e_Lisnoff_commentary_0520.html

The Treatment of Mental Illness

The Treatment of Mental Illness

A recent discussion on the killings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 by Seung-Hui Cho, a student, raised the topic of the treatment of mental illness in the United States.

Cho was not unknown to the mental health or justice system in Virginia. He had been referred for mental health services and to campus security for a host of aberrant behaviors including harassing women on campus and extremely bizarre writings and actions in literature classes. He frightened both former students and professors to the degree that referrals were made and acted upon.

The problem is that the mental health system failed. Despite being diagnosed as a danger, Cho was allowed to remain at the university without ongoing treatment and bought weapons and ammunition both on the Web and at a Virginia gun shop because of a loophole in Virginia law. While that loophole has now been closed, someone with serious and debilitating mental illness can still buy guns at gun shows in Virginia. He also bought additional ammunition at two well-know retail outlets.

But the issue of the access to guns in Virginia and in the larger United States does not begin to address the issue of why Cho’s mental illness was not treated properly.

The treatment of mental illness in the U.S. remains poor. One-to-one and group counseling and therapy are often not available, and if they are many insurance plans limit the amount of time a person can continue to receive treatment. While drugs can assist with the treatment of mental illness, often they are administered without ongoing counseling or therapy.

Dealing with the mentally ill in the U.S. continues to be problematic. Many families cannot cope with a family member who has mental illness. Communities are so dispersed that people with mental illness who may have been accepted to a degree in the past no longer find the cohesive setting in which others care for them and interact with them. Large mental institutions were largely closed during the decade of the 1980s, and the numbers of people living in their alternative, community homes, is infinitesimally small.

One mental health writer, a psychiatrist, held that the most beneficial kind of interaction for people suffering with mental illnesses was interpersonal communication from custodial staff in a hospital that treated these diseases. The latter is a profound observation on the care that the mentally ill receive in this society. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994) is in its fourth edition, with some categories of mental illness broken down into several subsets, yet the tragedy of Virginia Tech has many precursors.

The great tragedy of Virginia Tech will not soon recede in public memory. The poor quality of mental health services will continue.

School Violence

School Violence

You remember where you were and what you were doing when major events take place in your life: the Kennedy and King assassinations, 9/11. So it was with the murders at Virginia Tech.

That horrific scene brought the events of eight years ago to a level of consciousness that made it difficult not to move back in time. I served as a high-school counselor in a small town. Columbine High in Colorado was fresh in the minds of many who dealt with adolescents.

I received a call from a counselor at a nearby religiously affiliated school as I was preparing final schedules for students. In a matter-of-fact tone the counselor from that school reported that my school was about to receive a student who had left his school on the recommendation of that school’s staff. The counselor mentioned that student had had many, many unpleasant verbal confrontations with faculty, administration and fellow students. While private schools are afforded the luxury of jettisoning students who don’t fit in, public schools cannot discriminate.

I filed all of this information in my mind as a footnote to the upcoming school year after speaking with teachers in the school who would have the student in their classes. While my actions may have been prejudicial, Columbine has forced imparting this information as necessary.

At my first meeting with Tim at the beginning of the school year the only remarkable item in our discussion of his assigned courses was the fact that he showed little emotion. The school year moved on and the events of those days became remote. So far back in my memory had the warnings about Tim receded, that when my phone rang late one night, and a detective from the community where I worked spoke, I had trouble naming a student in my caseload who would have been capable of threatening an act of violence against fellow students. When the police detective mentioned Tim’s name in conjunction to a threat made that day in the school cafeteria, all of the events connected with him from the previous summer came cascading into place. The detective asked me to report to police headquarters the next morning.

I spent over an hour with the police being questioned about whether or not I felt that Tim was capable of carrying out an act of violence in the school. In a separate room somewhere in police headquarters Tim was also being interviewed.

Leaving the police department, I walked directly across the street and met with the coordinator of special services to request that Tim be evaluated. The administrator stated that it was too early to begin an evaluation and suggested I fill out the detailed referral form that was used in cases requiring an evaluation. Tim’s mother refused to give her authorization for the administering of the recommended educational and psychological tests.

Within weeks of the threat, one of Tim’s teachers began regularly visiting my office. She reported menacing behavior on his part in her classroom. Days later a parent I had known for many years in the community came into my office in tears and said that her daughter felt threatened by Tim in yet another classroom.

With no period of calm between these incidents, I was shocked when a teacher sent Tim to my office. He wore a T-shirt that had strips of masking tape affixed to both the front and back reading, “I Hate You!” I asked him to remove the tape. Glaring at me menacingly, he violently ripped the tape off the shirt and left leaving a trail of verbal threats.

I scheduled a meeting with Tim’s mother following this incident, but again she refused to sign the referral for an evaluation. The school’s principal finally prevailed upon her to grant consent for testing.

Confidentiality requires that the results of the evaluation remain undisclosed. However, at the conclusion of a meeting in my office, the psychologist who conducted the evaluation stated that he could not definitively assess Tim’s future propensity for violence.

In an act of bizarre “solidarity” with Tim, three students leave black trench coats in their lockers, a frightening symbol of the group that had formed around the gunmen at Columbine. Near the end of the school year Tim is discovered in a stairwell uttering incoherent statements. The school year ended and I breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that the heat of the summer might cool the situation that had developed over the course of the academic year.

The next school year began in the bluster of activity that all years do. In the middle of the fall semester one of Tim’s teachers came down to my office accompanied by her department chairperson. There was a look of fear in her eyes as she handed me the journal that contained a free writing exercise by Tim. The selection contained well-written graphic descriptions of violence and alienation.

I met with the principal, social worker, and psychologist. We agreed that the contents of the journal were indeed violent and the principal decided that she would order Tim to remain home until further testing could be arranged.

Weeks passed and the school department was informed that it was now the subject of a lawsuit filed on Tim’s behalf contending that the school department had violated his rights by punishing him for a free-writing exercise. The judge would ultimately find that the staff should be admonished for not calling Tim in to discuss his writing. He also determined that we had violated Tim’s right to free expression. When the legal representatives from both sides met in the superintendent’s office to discuss these findings, I was told that I would be immediately removed from Tim’s case and he would be reassigned to a different school counselor. The school principal was also admonished by the court for not affording the student due process. Adding to the weight of the case, the judge ordered that the school department pay for Tim’s legal fees.

All of these years later I sat at a table in a learning lab at the community college where I now work with the images passing by me that the media had now emblazoned on our collective consciences from Blacksburg, Virginia. All of the mayhem; the grief and loss; the faces never to be seen again, and I reflect on the days in my office as a counselor and how those events unfolded and were dealt with, and try to comprehend the incomprehensible in the present! When will we as a society honestly discuss the issues of gun proliferation, violence in schools and the treatment of mental illness?

Howard Lisnoff is an educator and freelance writer.

The Vote: An End to Jim Crow Laws

This letter appeared in the Palm Beach Post 4-16-07

Felons can right Bush administration's wrongs

The administration of Gov. Charlie Crist is to be highly lauded for making the large majority of felons who have served their sentences eligible to vote in Florida ("Felons regain civil rights," April 6).

That action may in some ways undo the wrongs that have been unleashed on the United States and the world by the questionable victory of George W. Bush in 2000. A war with no end in sight in Iraq, poor care for wounded veterans, attacks on civil liberties, ignoring the reality of environmental destruction and an inadequate plan in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are only some of the consequences of that election. Those denied the vote must register and turn the tide of these disasters.

HOWARD LISNOFF

The True Meaning of Life

The True Meaning of Life

Passersby stopped and genuflected at the shrine of the holy incarnation of exotic sports cars. Cordoned off at the mall, beneath the warm Florida sun, one aficionado pointed out the nuances of body design to his family that seemed to be enthralled with such meaningless revelations of consumerism.

All The News Unfit To Print--Rejected by the NYT

April 4, 2007

To the Editor:
Re “My Life In The Army,” (Op-Ed, April 3): Robert Wright states, “I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn’t where the most consequential disrespect has come from.”

When I entered basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia in the fall of 1969, drill sergeants routinely referred to the Vietnamese as “gooks.” During one field training exercise one sergeant, who led the training exercise, cynically referred to serious shrapnel wounds displaying what appeared to be “joke shop” body parts he said could be surgically reattached to a wounded soldier. These issues of life and death could hardly afford laughable and cynical treatment from this NCO.

Wright also observes that, “People think of the Army as hierarchical, but compared with the private sector it’s a bastion of egalitarianism.” Compare the latter with an attack by some enlisted men and draftees against National Guardsmen and Reservists in the training cycle I was part of. Combat boots and uniforms were left slashed as a result of that foray.

It was Kent State in May 1970, however, that forever soured my view of the military. Consider also the massacres at My Lai and those carried out by a unit known as Tiger Force in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during a seven-month period in 1967.

Abu Ghraib and Haditha are now places that can be counted as tales of carnage and dehuminization of both prisoners and civilians. How does any of this do honor to those who serve faithfully, who have been wounded and who have died? And where is the anemic peace movement supporting vigouously those who oppose militarism from within the service?
Sincerely,
Howard Lisnoff

Censored by The Jewish Voice and Herald--Rhode Island

March 13, 2007
Dear Editor:
Re “Refresher on Israeli history for President Carter,” and “Carter, history and the Jew,” (Opinion and Editorial, February 2), both critiques of former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid. Yehuda Lev states, “Israel has committed its share of errors in this conflict and also has much to answer for. He continues, “Israelis learned a bitter lesson in Gaza, when after evacuating all Jewish settlements in the Strip, they discovered that it led only to intensified shelling of Jewish communities in Israel proper.”

The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own human rights organization B’Tselem have all commented about Israel’s behavior in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. B’Tselem observed, as reported in Norman G. Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005) that, “What renders Israel’s abuses unique throughout the world is the relentless efforts to justify what cannot be justified.” Finkelstein goes on to quote former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, reflecting on his observations from the Gaza Strip that, “I had seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered…but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.” Also quoted in Beyond Chutzpah is Amnesty International’s report that states since the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel “routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects.”

These actions on the part of the Israeli government are not “errors,” but rather the well-documented dehumanization of Palestinians that have continued since the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank began in 1967. The abuses have included the bulldozing of homes in the West Bank and Gaza, denial of access to water, lack of medical facilities for Palestinians, greatly diminished opportunities for Palestinians to work in Israel proper, the establishment of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, and the construction of a wall that cuts through territory occupied by Palestinians in the West Bank. While Israel has suffered the horrific actions of suicide bombers, the death toll of the second Intifada has been one Israeli killed for every three Palestinians who have met the same fate. These topics are hotly argued in Israel, as part of democratic discourse, however, the Israel lobby in the U.S. has bristled at any rational discussion of Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people and the vicious reaction at the publication of Jimmy Carter’s new book was hardly unexpected. There is an obvious disconnect in the U.S. within some segments of the Jewish community in being able to reasonably discuss Israeli democracy on the one hand, and the taboo of discussing Israel’s very different and unacceptable treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In Shein’s opinion piece, he concludes, “Few in Jewish history have stood with us when we—alone—faced a world arrayed against us, lusting for our downfall or even death.” Thankfully, anti-Semitism is generally a relic of the past in the U.S., and collectively we make up the religious group with the highest income in this country, and usually live lives free of fear. While there exist pockets of
anti-Semitism in the larger world, Jews worldwide have generally been able to live lives free of the horrors of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. This writer wonders how much contemporary anti-Semitism is fueled by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Anti-Semitism is wrong anywhere, just as is discrimination against Palestinians!

In Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip it is long, long past due for a reasonable approach to the settlement of this seemingly endless dispute. All parties need to renounce violence against one another and stop the heinous dehumanization that is so antithetical to the Jewish tradition of peace and rational discourse. Painting Jimmy Carter, a fine president and tireless worker for peace, in libelous and slanderous terms will do nothing to bring about peace in the Middle East! Accusing American Jews who criticize Israel as being self-hating, disloyal and anti-Semitic does nothing but diminish Judaism in perhaps irrevocable ways.
Sincerely,
Howard Lisnoff

A Writer Confronts Censorship

There are two types of censorship. For anyone who writes there is the kind imposed by others such as editors. The latter is quite common, especially in traditional media. Another more subtle form of censorship is self-censorship that the writer imposes on himself or herself in order to make written expression acceptable to a particular public. Both forms of censorship are injurious to the search for truth through the written word. They harm both reader and writer.

Congress must take action to diminish access to guns

Once again the censors strike! Compare the link to The Palm Beach Post and the original letter below!

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2007/02/16/a23a_lettersfile0216.html


Dear Editor:
Re “ Get the killer guns…” (Editorial, February 4). You write,"There’s profound disagreement about whether to enact new gun laws,” in reference to possible legislative action to regulate assault weapons that are usually cited as the cause of multiple deaths such as drive-by shootings in Florida.

The gun debate needs to be fought at both the state and national levels. Your editorial correctly states that the debate over gun control has long since been “hijacked” by the National Rifle Association, and that Congress needs to take immediate action to dramatically reduce access to guns in the U.S., especially among criminals.

In Florida the debate over the Second Amendment right to bear arms became nearly a lost cause twenty years ago when guns and gun licenses proliferated when citizens were given the right to carry concealed weapons. A recent editorial in The New York Times, “A Day Without Guns” (January 30), points out that licenses to carry guns in Florida skyrocketed from 25,000 to 410,000 during that twenty-year period. To add insult to lethal injury, a majority of legislators in Tallahassee saw fit to enact a law that allows for guns to be used for self-defense through deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary.”

The result of the combination of illegal and legal arms flooding the streets of Florida, along with the free ride that Congress and the state have given to the NRA, has led to documented instances of felons being granted the right to carry concealed weapons. Acts of violence have been committed on the thinnest of pretexts by those legally carrying weapons, while street violence continues to soar.

The intent of the framers of the Constitution through the Second Amendment was to have a militia armed to protect against the meddling of foreign powers. Even if hunting is taken into account as a reasonable exception to gun control, what possible defense can a reasonable person offer when kids are killed on the streets by stray automatic rifle fire; police have to deal with guns being brandished during routine traffic stops, and the rest of us have to consider that even a minor disagreement in Florida can lead to gun violence that may be upheld by the courts?
Sincerely,
Howard Lisnoff

The Shul by Sylvia Lisnoff

The Shul

There are people who have passed it practically every day of their lives and haven't the vaguest notion of its purpose although it had stood there for a good part of the century on the town's main thoroughfare. It has a perfectly good name, Beth Sholom, but much of the mail is addressed to the "Jew Church." But whatever it has not meant to the gentiles, it was the hub around which radiated the lives of the Jewish townspeople.

It is a simple, attractive building in the neo-classical style, a large Star of David the only adornment on each of the stained-glass windows. Entrance is gained through heavy, double wooden doors over which is carved the Decologue. The inside with its warm mahogany woodwork and lofty arched ceiling, is pleasing to the eye though is eerily still, the cold pervasive. The heat has been turned off and pipes drained as an economy measure. The synagogue's only function now, is for the three days of high holidays, and it is doubtful that that will continue for much longer. It has become very difficult to get the required ten men for a minyan. If you stand very quietly, you can conjure up a million memories. They come flooding at you in torrents-the solemnity, the gaiety, the sorrows, the comedy …

There is Mrs. Goodman arriving for Kol Nidre, aided to her seat by her husband. Her whole life has radiated around her illnesses, imagined or real. She never learned that a whole world existed outside of her own body. Everyone knows what to expect of her but if she lives to be a hundred and twenty, she will never understand why people do not react more sympathetically to whatever happens to her and why they avoid her like a plague. If the truth were known, she is barely aware of how they feel. Her head is too full with herself. On this night she is already deathly pale. It will not be long-she has yet to disappoint us. Although it is only a couple of hours since everyone has started to fast, as soon as the rabbi finishes the opening prayer, she will slide to the floor in a dead faint. No one gets frightened-it has become a tradition. The smelling salts are ready and her husband is prepared to escort her home, only a few yards from the synagogue.

On the front bench sits Mrs. Berg, the congregation's matriarch, sobs emanating from the depth of her being. As she reads the Yom Kippur liturgy, she takes every sin listed as her very own-she implores the Almighty to protect everyone from the enumeration of the ghastly means of death that can be visited upon us, who are only flesh and blood. Her sobbing becomes more intense, her body racked by tremendous shuddering. She pleads for atonement for all of Israel.
It is Simchas Torah, the gayest of holidays. Ordinarily quiet, unassuming, introverted Shlomo, plied with drink by the congregants, dances and sings. Everyone is delighted. Who deserves more than he, this one night a year-barely able to eke out a living-a new mouth to feed every couple of years? Tonight belongs to Shlomo.

Little Meyer, so small for a Bar Mitzvah "borcher," stands on the platform ready to deliver the words prepared for him by his teacher. He is bravely holding back the tears of nervousness that threaten to flow any second. His mother, bursting with pride, looks at him with adoration. Her concern that he will be short like the men in her family is banished for this day. She needn't have worried-he will be a six footer at maturity.

For years and years the shul had never been blessed with a wedding. Actually, it was too small for the amount of people a family would invite for the nuptials. Another problem was that there were no accommodations to serve the wedding dinner. So the ceremony was usually performed in a rented hall where the dinner would also be served. Consequently, there was much excitement and joy among the townspeople when Linda announced, room or not, she was getting married in the shul. Despite the fact that the guests were packed in like sardines in a can, it looks like a scene from the Arabian Nights: gossamer wisps of material entwined with pastel shaded flowers bedeck the chupah and the shul. It indeed looks like the setting for a storybook princess.

It is the worst snowstorm of the century. On more man is needed to make up the minyan for Hershel's Bar Mitzvah. It seems that will be impossible. Suddenly, the door flies open and there stands Mr. Hertzberg, the storm whirling about him. He looks like a snowman, icicles hanging from his bushy eyebrows and mustache. He is in his seventies and has trudged, uphill, three miles through he blizzard. Only a man with his deep abiding faith could perform such a feat. A miracle has come to pass.

Itzie and Miriam stand on the "bimah" facing the rabbi. They are being united in holy matrimony. Itzie is already in his fifties. Although his mother has turned away many eligible women, she is getting old and worries that he will be left alone and unable to cope. It is a quickly arranged match, and although they are already standing under the canopy, the mother has misgivings and has instructed the little, wizened rabbi, called out of retirement to perform the ceremony, to make an addition to the traditional vows. The rabbi asks the bride, "Do you promise to be good to your in-laws?" If the truth be known, it helped "ve a taite banches"-like bleeding helps a corpse.

There is Berly tugging at the curtains hung to separate the women from the men as required in the Orthodox tradition. He peers over his dime store glasses, which sit on the bottom of his nose, and looks over the curtains. He likes to look at the women and they knowingly smile at him.

The children are seated around the oblong table, their seders and writing tablets opened before them. Mr. Gold, the teacher hired to instruct the children twice a week in Hebrew subjects, and prepare the boys for Bar Mitzvah, stands at the head of the table. He is pleasant and patient-not the prototype of the European rebbe who thought you could instill knowledge with the aid of a switch. Today the lesson is an explanation of the rules of Kashruth. He tells his pupils that any part of the pig is forbidden: ham, pork, bacon. As he mentions bacon, Ian, the class clown, makes smacking sounds and gleefully rubs his stomach. Mr. Gold gives him a long dark look. The students titter.

Terror overcomes the congregation when Mr. Goldberg, from a neighboring community, who asked if he could attend services, stands up during the solemn prayers of Yom Kippur and loudly proclaims he is taking his family and leaving. He tells those assembled that they are living in the dark ages and he will have no part of it. He considers himself enlightened and takes offense at the separation of the men from the women and the chanting of prayers in the traditional Hebrew. A pall settles over the congregation. …An empty building, inhabited by ghosts from the past.

In the beginning before there was a shul, services were held in the house of one of the members. As the Jewish population grew, a large barn-like structure was rented. When they started to prosper a search committee was formed to seek a suitable building to purchase. This was by no means a simple task. First there was a monetary limitation. There were those on the committee who thought in grandiose terms. Then there were those who looked at the situation more realistically and had to spend much of their time explaining that the whole affair had to be approached modestly. There was also the problem of location; each committee member desiring it to be in close proximity to his home. Finally a compromise was struck and moderation reigned: a building at a moderate price in a central location and to top it off, a mitzvah earned. The building purchased: a barroom!! What better deed than to turn a saloon into a house of worship, ranking only second to turning a church into a synagogue.

The preparation for the dedication of the shul was the most exciting event the Jewish community ever participated in. There was a committee for every eventuality: program, entertainment, refreshments, invited guests. The day of the happy event arrived; every member of every family was bedecked in his or her finest clothes. The weather matched everyone's mood: warm and bright. The line of the procession started at the home of the member who donated the Torah. He carried the Scrolls at the head of the line of march. With him, the invited rabbis and honored guests representing neighboring congregations and Jewish affiliated organizations. A band imported from Boston followed playing appropriate marshal music. Young Mutke carried a velvet pillow upon which was placed the key to the building. Then followed the rest of the congregation with their families and friends. Many gentile townspeople gathered on the sidewalks and watched the parade, wondering why there was no statue of the Virgin. Handbills were distributed inviting everyone to join the celebrants. The inducement of promised refreshments and entertainment enticed a few of the more daring of the onlookers to join the group.

It was a plain wooden building, indistinguishable from the others around it. The key was handed to the eldest of the visiting rabbis. He had the honor of officially opening the shul. Everyone crowded into the building-there was barely room to move. No one took notice that the Oran Kadesh, where the Scroll was placed, was on the north wall instead of the prescribed eastern wall. Who in the congregation knew north from east-they were men of business, not astronomers?

The shul Sylvia Lisnoff writes about is now only a memory.

Sammy's Story

Sammy’s Story

Nothing could have been more contradictory compared to the simplicity of Sammy’s life than the diamond and ruby earrings that the sales clerk held out to Sammy Heller’s nephew and his wife. “I knew one person from Jericho,” she said, taking the small retainers from the backs of blood red rubies set among a handful of the crystal clear stones and handing them across the divide of the glass jewelry case. “His name was Smiley Heller…what a personality…always with a smile no matter what.” Sammy’s nephew knew that smile well. On his study desk sat a black and white posed photograph of Sammy on his bar mitzvah day, smiling out at the world, his eyes turning to small slits with that smile framed by a thin face. His tall, thin frame would enhance the kindliness that that smile embodied.

Sammy was a second-generation American, the son of a textile factory superintendent from a well to do Russian-Jewish immigrant family and a mother with keenly intelligent sparkling eyes who had fallen in love with Sammy’s father for his flashing appearance as much as for his ancestry.

Sammy Heller also dealt in jewelry, but that will come later. On a morning late in December 1944, like many mornings since he and his bomber group had been assigned to an atoll in the Mariana Islands, Sammy boarded the huge B-29 and strapped himself into the seat of the forward gun turret housed in a bubble of glass on the belly of the flying behemoth, one among the other 11 other men who made up the crew. Within minutes the giant fortress would climb slowly above the verdant green of the island and rise far above the clouds where the endless Pacific below appeared to be a lake with strings of land-borne waves heading toward the few remaining islands that the Japanese still occupied. As the bomber reached cruising altitude the talk on Sammy’s headphones seemed routine by now. Occasionally he had to respond to one of the officer’s questions, but most discussion was within the bounds of the strong camaraderie as his fellow airmen called to Smiley. The war in the Pacific had already been technically won at this juncture and Sammy saw few of the Japanese fighter pilots that he had seen even a few short months earlier. Still, as he watched the bomb bay doors open and the huge weapons freefall to their island targets below he could not get rid of the fear that he would never see his parents or sister again nor would he get the chance to go to college to study business as he had intended at the outbreak of the war.

He wrote his sister Shana as he was on route back to the U.S., “I know there are people who believe that the atomic bombs should not have been dropped on Japan, but I cannot change the feeling in my heart that it was due to those bombings, however terrible, that I’m able to return home and resume a normal life.” Shana who would come to develop pacifist beliefs in the years to come said nothing to refute Sammy’s opinions about the bombings as she too was overjoyed that he would return home unharmed. Many in Jericho would not, and the small synagogue to which their family belonged would memorialize that fact with a plaque set before the women’s section of the temple that listed the four names of men who would never come home again to this small congregation.

Sammy returned home and enrolled at the state land grant university concentrating in business as he had planned to do. He graduated four years later and went to work in the burgeoning jewelry industry that was located in the city that was the state’s capital. Everything was going according to plan. Within a few years Sammy had moved up to a key position in the accounts department of his company, becoming a favorite when he traveled to meet customers in New York. How could anyone turn down an order with such an amiable young man who capped his intelligence with his ever-present ready disarming smile that greeted each customer’s representative regardless of the size of the account?

Sammy met Rebecca at the party of a friend soon after returning from the Pacific. Also easygoing and affable, they soon fell in love and were married the following summer. Though doing well financially, Sammy and Rebecca were not materialistic in the least and settled for a small apartment in an area of the city with many fellow Jewish veterans and their families who had settled in this modest neighborhood to be close to their jobs and raise families. Within three years Sammy and Rebecca were parents of two boys and decided to move out to the suburbs as so many others among them had done to seek just a little more space and a bit of privacy that was lacking in the tenements.

The 50s and 60s seemed to be passing as if by design. His marriage to Rebecca was rewarding, he maintained his status in the jewelry company for which he worked, his sons were growing up healthy, and he enjoyed the quiet and convenience of his neighborhood and he had even been elected as president of the synagogue at which he prayed, located within walking distance of his home. All that, however, was about to change in such radical ways that in just over a decade not a single dream that Sammy and Rebecca had was to be left unscathed. It was as if Eurystheus had reemerged from mythology to present Sammy with a contemporary version of Hercules’ Twelve Labors. While Sammy’s mettle had been tested in war, what he was to experience made that epoch seem puny in retrospect.

Sammy drove south from the city on less traveled roads, as was his habit, not liking the rush and traffic of the interstate. As he neared his home he noticed a headache that was unlike anything he had ever experienced. Arriving home, he took a few aspirins and the headache vanished, but over the next few weeks it was to return again and again. Although the aspirin remedy seemed to work, he thought he should check with his physician. A few days later his doctor pronounced him well with the observation, “It’s just part of living the lifestyles we do…just keep up with the aspirin and call me in a couple of weeks.”

Sammy let the weeks pass but his headaches didn’t disappear and it took more and more aspirin to get rid of them. Consulting his doctor again, he was sent to a neurologist who examined him and referred Sammy to a cardiac specialist when all the tests he ordered turned up nothing as far as his nervous system was concerned. Another several weeks passed before Sammy was able to see the third doctor in the sequence he had followed trying to solve the riddle of his ever-present headaches. Several days after seeing the cardiologist Sammy received a phone call at work from the doctor’s office. The doctor’s receptionist asked Sammy to come into the office the following day as the doctor had requested.

Sammy was ready to do whatever the doctor wanted to take care of the problem. Just as life had moved along in predictable ways for Sammy, technology and good professional care would remedy this situation. Sammy was ushered into the consultation room of the doctor’s office and sat across the huge oak desk with an inlaid ebony top in a professional office park only minutes from his office. Sammy looked around at the sterile, universal white broken only by the desk of the office thinking back to the emerald green and endless deep blue of the Pacific two decades earlier as the doctor entered the room. “Mr. Heller, I’m afraid we’re dealing with a serious problem with your vascular system. The tests that we’ve run so far show substantial blockage in the arteries of your neck. I’d like you to check into the hospital as soon as we can get a bed for you for some additional tests and we’ll see where we can go from there.” Sammy left the office dumbfounded. He knew the prognosis was serious, but the doctor withheld the worst of the diagnosis. He knew from the review of Sammy’s test results that he would need surgery almost immediately or he could suffer a fatal stroke. Even worse, the surgical procedure carried substantial risk, since transplanting arteries from one part of the body to another site could potentially induce a stroke through the surgery alone.

As he had faced the last great challenge of his life in the war, so would he handle this complication. His family would be a great solace to him and his faith in a just God would carry him through this great danger.

Sammy entered the hospital and underwent hour upon hour of the risky procedure performed by a vascular surgeon. Shortly after the operation his headaches disappeared. He needed a full month of recovery at home, which Rebecca provided faithfully for him, yet another dilemma arose upon his return to work. Sammy was asked to move into a smaller office than he had occupied before entering the hospital for the operation. Despite his years of productive work for his company he was given lesser sales responsibilities in a company where his boss and his boss’s family seemed like an extended family to Sammy. Soon, in addition to his job worries, his headaches returned and he was forced into the hospital for yet another risk-laden procedure. On his return to work after his second convalescence he was called into the president’s office. David Kramer sat across a huge mahogany desk that in some ways reminded Sammy of the surgeon’s office. “Sammy,” Kramer began, “You’ve been with us for a long time and you’ve worked well and loyally for us. You know from your trips that the jewelry business has been hurt by the recession. We’re going to have to let you go, but with your track record in sales and our references for you, we’re sure you’ll be able to find something with a local competitor in the field.”

Life was no longer on track for Sammy he thought as he drove south toward his home. Rebecca had returned to work in the state’s unemployment system after Sammy recovered from his first surgery, so at least they wouldn’t starve, and, as irony would have it, he would now begin to collect unemployment benefits.

Another jewelry firm in the city hired Sammy a half year later. He slowly but steadily built up account after account for his new firm. Within weeks of reaching parity in terms of accounts in his new job he was called into the president’s office for what he thought would be a discussion of a higher salary or perhaps a bonus given his unparalleled performance on the job. Defying the common wisdom that lightning can’t strike twice, Sammy was summarily dismissed from his job. During the endless days that followed his newest forced unemployment he learned from colleagues in the business that he had been used for his contacts in the jewelry industry and dumped when his usefulness was at an end. Worse yet, his original employers declared bankruptcy and Sammy’s retirement pension was lost amid the legal wrangling of the court proceedings. Sammy thought he had reached the absolute rock bottom of hard luck as he delivered circulars for the state’s only daily newspaper when he learned that Rebecca had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Things were not supposed to go this way…Sammy had paid his dues and only wanted to remain productive and useful to himself, his family and society. He arranged for a plaque to be erected at the synagogue where he had been president only a few years earlier in hopes that Rebecca and he would be spared further suffering, believing that he could rely on God when living had torn his core beliefs to their very roots. Fate however had a different plan in store for Sammy, and now for Rebecca also.

Sammy and Rebecca’s health seemed to collide on a downward spiral spinning out of control. Rebecca’s cancer thought to be in remission angrily returned to ply its ruthless toll. At about the same time Sammy’s vascular system in his neck finally appeared to be persevering in spite of the onslaught they had endured, his heart now showed signs of angina that had plagued his mother until her death. He entered the hospital for the last time twelve years after his first surgery.

Rebecca accompanied by Shana sat outside of the intensive care unit in the waiting room of the hospital where Sammy had first come for treatment. Sammy’s cardiologist entered the room on one of the brightest and most hopeful days at the end of April, the promise of late spring waiting in the perfume of deep blue hyacinths and lilacs amid the deep-green turf below a sky crystalline in its perfect blue just beyond the hospital’s windows. The doctor spoke the words of his prognosis simply and clearly with the clinical distance of a highly trained practitioner. “His heart and circulatory system are too weak to continue functioning. It’s a matter of hours…perhaps days until they fail. The only thing keeping him alive is his determination to live. He refuses to take anything to help him sleep because he knows that if he falls asleep his heart will stop beating.”

Sammy continued to live a week after the doctor delivered his opinion. Day after day, and into each night and again into the next morning he forced himself to stay awake and for his heart to continue to force his life’s blood through his faltering veins and arteries. He was as Homer’s ancient Odysseus fighting the good fight on his seemingly endless trek back to Ithaca. He fought with all his determination and fortitude to go on in the face of what he knew was his end. He thought of the war, his once successful life as a businessman, Rebecca who he loved dearly along with his two sons and his God who he wondered if he had been abandoned by. Why had so many things in life gone so wrong for him? He could not reach a conclusion as he hovered over the abyss that he feared was so close to him now.

Sammy died on the last day of April. As Jewish custom commanded he was buried the next day, the first day of May with the promise of summer close above the granite and marble and grass of the cemetery just off the highway that Sammy avoided for the less traveled road only minutes from the wrought iron gates beyond his opened grave. As if fate were making an exclamation point of both of their lives, Rebecca died in the cold, bleak days of early December of the same year. Following the cemetery service for Rebecca, Shana pulled the calendar from the wall in a rage and tore the leaves of the months into pieces that fell to the floor much like the first snow of winter.

Streets Of Gold

"Streets of Gold" originally appeared in ZNet Creative.

Streets of Gold

Willy Heller stood in the frozen dawn before his family’s clapboard home in Luenski. He held a simple brown valise at his side, tied with frayed tan rope, held tightly in his right hand as if in its holding he would both stop the story of his life and simultaneously begin a better life. The house stood at the end of the shtetl’s main unpaved street, among lesser houses that could be called hovels. It was the second year of the second decade of the 20th century, and Willy would leave with few regrets. His mother and father would remain behind, as would his younger sister. His younger brother tugged at his innermost sense of loss and sorrow, as he had been murdered years earlier in a Cossack raid on the shtetl. Both Willy and his sister Rebecca watched along with their mother as the younger Samuel was bound to a thick length of rope whose other end was tied to the saddle of a Cossack soldier’s horse. Minutes later Samuel was dropped unceremoniously in front of the house, bloodied and unrecognizable to his siblings and mother.

Willy’s family was well off by the standard of the time. His father owned a small fabric shop in a neighboring community and Willy’s older brother Nathan had left for the United States three years earlier with the money that had been scraped together over years and years to establish a small lace finishing company.

The town of Luenski had moved between possession of Russia and Poland so many times in the past several decades that the townspeople of the shtetl scarcely knew whether they were Polish or Russian nationals. What they did know, however, was that they were Jews, since the anti-Semitism present in all the dealings of their lives imprinted itself forever in their hearts and minds, and as in the case of Samuel, upon his headstone.

At the present time, as Willy turned from his home without looking back, memories enveloped him and followed him down the main street of the shtetl. Luenski had fallen into the hands of the Russian government and Willy faced the imminent prospect of being drafted into the Russian army, a fate he could not accept given what had happened to Samuel and the possibility that he would remain an indentured servant in the military because of his religious heritage.

At the Polish border Willy boarded a train that would cross the European continent in several days and embarked at the French port of Le Havre for the two-week journey across the Atlantic in steerage class.

Willy’s arrival in New York and his examination at Ellis Island were unremarkable. In perfect health, a good sum of money in his pocket, and under the sponsorship of his brother Nathan, his weeklong stay at a cousin’s tenement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan passed almost without notice. Willy knew better than to search for the rumored streets lined with gold in the Lower East Side and he knew his fate would be substantially better than the immigrants huddled nearby with his brother already established in business in the small New England town of Jericho. A half-day’s train ride brought him to Nathan, who stood looking longingly for his younger brother on the platform of the capital city only forty minutes by trolley from Jericho.

Willy and Nathan hugged one another on the platform repeatedly. “You’ve gotten so much older,” Nathan spoke first, his mastery of English nearly perfect after three years of personal and business dealings. Tears fell from Willy’s eyes. “I’m so happy to be here and back with you again,” he said, his English halting and with more than a trace of Russian and Yiddish sounds and intonations. “You’ll love Jericho, Willy, and with a position already waiting for you…”

Jericho was not the Promised Land, but it was so much of an improvement from the life of the shtetl. Jews in the small town of Jericho were segregated from the rest of the community in what could be called an American shtetl. While no Cossacks would come thundering into town, Jews kept to themselves in the one small block of neat three-story tenements a few miles from Nathan’s shop. “I think this freedom will take some getting used to,” Willy said on the way to the shop on his first morning of work in his new country, while he sipped the dark Russian black tea that had been so much a part of his morning routine in Russia.

Willy worked twelve-hour days at Nathan’s shop. He was quickly appointed to the position as floor manager as the business grew dramatically. Soon, the one floor of space that the lace finishing shop occupied was not enough to fill the steady stream of orders, and Nathan moved the business into several floors of a nearby brick mill that was located on the shore of the single river that served the needs of the many mills that dotted its shores. Within a year of arriving in America, Willy was named mill foreman as the business expanded to weaving lace. Nathan, not one to shirk from challenges in business matters, saw opportunity in expanding into other areas of textile production and soon opened another mill in a nearby community, leaving Willy as the sole manager of the lace works. While Nathan began to prosper in ways he could not have imagined just a year or two before, Willy began saving money in amounts that were never dreamed of in Russia. One dark cloud appeared on the horizon, however.

With the middle of the second decade of the century came mandatory draft registration for men who were in either late adolescence or young adults. As luck would have it, Willy now faced the jeopardy of military service for a second time in just a few short years. For months he was tortured with the prospect of being drafted along with the nightmare of his memories from Russia and the fate that had met his younger brother. He came to the conclusion, after agonizing turmoil, that he would postpone seeking full citizenship until after the threat of war passed. Tormented, between conscience and duty, he chose to passively wait until the fury was over. No one noticed as he led a respectable life and caused no trouble.

During the war years the Jewish community had prospered to a degree, through business ventures both on a grand scale, and as small as the corner mom and pop variety store, that a meeting was held at which time the assembled decided to build a small wood-framed synagogue in Jericho. Though anti-Semitism was prevalent in the U.S., the larger community, composed primarily of French Canadians, took little notice of the “Jewish church,” whose golden stained-glass windows—each decorated by a great Star of David in the upper half—glowed on Friday evenings and on major Jewish holidays. The community began to use the finished basement of the synagogue for both social functions and for the itinerant Hebrew teacher who met weekly with the growing number of children among the membership. It was at such a social gathering that Willy met Phyllis Shravitz.

Phyllis was also from the Ukraine at the border between Russia and Poland. Petite, intelligent, and pretty, she also had left her family in Russia and was living with cousins in Jericho’s shtetl. Willy and Phyllis began dating regularly. Of equal intellectual prowess, but of hugely disparate economic means, their attraction was nonetheless mutual. A picture of the two, enveloped within a heart in the photographic style of the early 1920s, shows Phyllis with smiling eyes and delicate features beneath a stylish curled coiffure. Willy is next to her, handsome with his piercing blue eyes, thick hair above a strong face; he wears a fine suit that was his usual dress as superintendent of the Jericho mill now one of the burgeoning chain of textile mills Nathan owned across New England. That picture was in stark contrast to one that stood near it that showed Willy in plain slacks and a band-collar shirt, flanking his mother who wore a babushka as was the style among Jews in Russia, while Rebecca stood grim-faced at her other side. One year later Phyllis and Willy would marry in the newly built synagogue.

Along with unimagined prosperity, Willy and Phyllis decided to raise a family. Shana was born two years later, and another two years would pass before Samuel was born, named after Willy’s brother—as is custom in Jewish tradition for the naming of a child—who had been killed in Russia by the Cossacks. Both Shana and Samuel were precocious and were raised amidst comforts that first-generation Jews could never have envisioned in Russia.

As the years passed, Willy developed a habit peculiar to societies that produce large amounts of disposable income among professionals. He began to spend occasional afternoons at one of the several horse and dog-racing tracks in the area. Leaving the office in the mid afternoon, he would arrive at his chosen destination still wearing his fine clothes from the factory. He cut a handsome figure and began smoking cigars to further enhance his image as he stood by the fence of a track on a fine New England spring day watching the horses and jockeys stampede past him, his betting receipts in hand.

Throughout the 1930s Willy began betting more and more. When Samuel’s bar mitzvah was celebrated at the synagogue in the mid 30s, the event was elaborate, and to an outside observer, nothing appeared wrong. Phyllis, however, who managed their accounts, knew that Willy’s gambling habit had kept the family from purchasing a house and they continued to live in a spacious apartment not far from the mill. Phyllis did not bring up the subject to Willy, as the rumors of what had begun to happen to European Jewry had reached the shores of the U.S., Phyllis worried about what would become of family that remained in Europe and Russia and had the additional worry that Samuel might come of age just as the ravages of war engulfed even the U.S.

The 40s brought U.S. entry into the world war and Sammy left for training in the Army Air Corps while Shana began attending college. Sammy was assigned to a bomber group in the South Pacific and served out the war as a gunner within a bubble on the underbelly of a B-29 high above the endless blue waters and tropical green islands of the sea below. Phyllis worried in silence about his safety and the fact that Willy had avoided military service was not lost on him as he wearily listened to news from Europe and the Pacific. To assuage his guilt Willy enthusiastically served on a committee of Jewish professionals and businessmen in Jericho who assisted resettled Jews from Europe and Russia find jobs and housing. His guilt was heightened by the fact that the quotas on immigration were so low that the number of fleeing Jews arriving in Jericho for help amounted to only a handful of souls.

Sammy returned from the war in 1945 and Shana married during the war, dropping out of college to begin a life with her new husband. Economic hardship lurked close by, however. Willy’s brother Nathan knew how to make money in America—that he had proved. Nathan sensed that the future of textiles existed not in the cold climes of the rust belt where the majority of his factories were located, but in the south where both heating costs and labor was substantially cheaper. This, however, bode poorly for his brother Willy. As the decade of the war came to a close, Willy worked in his office on a Friday afternoon, while the whir of the machines producing lace hummed in the background, the floors gently rumbling to the sound. Suddenly, Willy looked up as he noticed a change in the intensity of light entering his office. His brother Nathan, a stranger to this his first mill, stood in the open doorway.

Willy got up and walked around his desk while Nathan drew nearer to him. The two brothers hugged affectionately. “You didn’t say you were coming to town. What a surprise!” “ I thought it would be better to talk this way,” Nathan intoned, a worried, preoccupied look on his face. “Something wrong with our product…costs…trouble I don’t know about?” Willy asked. “Willy, I think we’re going to close up shop here at the end of the year.” “Close shop! But we’re a going concern…we’re making money for you and the company here and employing a lot of people.” “Willy, listen to reason. We can add significant profit to this operation by moving to the South.” “The South! I’m a Jew…what would I do in the South?” Willy asked, his face reddening. “How would my family live?” “Willy, look, think about it. If you decide against following the factory south, I’ll set you up in business right here.”

So, at year’s end, Willy opened up a huge fabric shop in the center of Jericho. The business made money, but not enough to supply Willy with the clothes and disposable income he was used to betting at racetracks. Soon, he was operating in the red, a fact that was not lost upon Nathan who had been generous in paying all of the costs to start the business. Less than five years after opening the business Willy was forced to shut its doors.

With little money in the bank, Willy was forced to turn to Nathan again. This time he backed him in purchasing a luncheonette a few blocks from where the fabric shop had been located. Again, the business made enough for Willy to support the family, but Phyllis began working several hours a day because of the long hours that the store had to remain open to make a decent profit. At about the same time she began to experience chest pains, and an examination by her family physician and a specialist revealed the ominous diagnosis of angina.

Willy began to feel guilt ridden. Phyllis, a woman he loved dearly, had raised two wonderful children who both now had children of their own, and he could not even afford a suitable home for her. Willy began to blame himself, justifiably so, for squandering huge sums of money at the racetrack while Phyllis had developed a potentially life-threatening disease.

Phyllis suffered three moderate heart attacks. One early morning as a new decade began Phyllis lay on the couch of their apartment having experienced chest pains throughout the night. When the doctor arrived, Willy left for the luncheonette to see whether his stand-in had opened it without problems in his absence. In the short time he was gone Phyllis uttered a loud sigh from the couch that the doctor heard where he sat with a cup of coffee down the hallway in the kitchen. He put down the cup and rushed into the living room, but it was too late. He attempted to resuscitate Phyllis, but his efforts were useless, as she had suffered a massive heart attack.

During the week of shiva after Phyllis’ funeral, Willy stayed with Shana and her family. Although there exists in Jewish tradition an admonition to stay away from the gravesite of a close relative for a year after the burial, Willy spent hours each day at Phyllis’ grave, hiring help to run the luncheonette. Shana would take calls from people who had seen Willy on the cemetery grounds at all hours of the day. To add to his grief, he ate almost nothing, and appeared listless and uncommunicative to others. Two months after the funeral Shana was called by the police to come to the scene of an accident that Willy had been involved in only blocks from her home.

Even though the accident was quite minor, Willy’s speech was slurred as Shana led him into the family room upon returning home. He appeared disoriented, and when their family doctor arrived, he ordered Willy to check into the hospital for tests. During the first night of his stay he suffered a major stroke and by morning he had lost most of his ability to speak and became paralyzed over the entire right side of his body. The paralysis was so severe that even his facial muscles were involved and his mouth turned down sharply at its right corner from which saliva flowed freely. When he attempted to speak, the sounds that were emitted were unintelligible, and his temper—which had always been one of his worst features—flared as if the person with whom he attempted to communicate was responsible for his suffering.

After a month’s stay in the hospital, Willy was released, having made no progress, and returned to Shana’s home where a hospital bed was set up in a spare room on the first floor. Shana soon found that she was ill equipped to care for her father. Willy now wore a huge stainless-steel brace fastened to the bottom of his shoe and rising to mid leg height that he dragged slowly as he walked. After a year of caring for Willy, Shana’s nerves and family relationships were frayed beyond repair. Willy’s temper was getting worse and worse, and he would rail at whomever didn’t understand his undecipherable commands. He would often emerge from the bathroom trailing a great, unrolled portion of toilet paper that clung to the bottom of his right shoe that grated as he dragged it along the floor. Finally, not able to continue any longer, Shana found a nursing home a few blocks away that agreed to take Willy on a temporary basis until more suitable arrangements could be made.

After several months Willy was admitted to the geriatric ward at the state hospital, and then to a Jewish home for the aged where treatment and care could be provided at a higher level than at any of his earlier placements. The home was only a few miles from the train platform where Nathan had first greeted Willy on his arrival from New York.

No one could have imagined or predicted that Willy’s symptoms would not improve as one year followed the next. Seasons paraded by Willy’s window on the fourth-floor of the modern facility. Visits from family members became fewer and fewer as Willy would call a visitor by the wrong name and fall into a massive rage when the person attempted to correct him. He called Shana by his sister’s name, Rebecca, and when Rebecca visited from New York, he called her Shana. He called Sammy by his father’s name, and continued the pattern until visits were so few that names and his temper meant little to others.

When one of Willy’s grandsons, Shana’s son, Hershel, was married in the early part of the decade of the 70s, his wife Ellen was shocked when she learned that Hershel had a single surviving grandparent and that he would not be invited to the wedding. Hershel saw Willy only infrequently and would routinely stop and buy him a cigar before visiting, as smoking a cigar seemed to give Willy pleasure and reminded Hershel of his grandfather of times past.

“I can’t believe how your grandfather has been relegated to almost nonexistence,” Ellen intoned in a manner that suggested disapproval. “Why doesn’t anyone in your family mention him…why wasn’t he at our wedding…I don’t care what physical condition he’s in; he’s still a human being.” Hershel explained that the last time Willy attended a family celebration was at Hershel’s sister’s wedding ten years earlier. He said that it seemed like Willy recognized no one at the synagogue where the wedding was held, and that he had attempted to leave the synagogue many times during the ceremony and the dinner that followed. Visits to the nursing home by family members became more infrequent and Willy had become a more and more distant memory for Hershel rather than a living member of the family.

One day Shana was called from the home and told that Willy had wandered off and was found walking the streets miles away. When workers at the home tried to get him into a van from the facility, he began yelling and waving his cane at them as if in macabre rendition of a swashbuckler. Other calls punctuated the years. Twice, Willy had to have growths removed: once from his vocal cords and again from a kidney.

Years turned into decades and Nathan’s family ignored requests that they help with the cost of keeping Willy at the home. Nathan had died a decade earlier and his family felt no sense of responsibility in sharing the wealth he had accumulated with his younger and ailing brother. They felt that Nathan had helped Willy enough when he was alive.

Willy did not realize that his son Sammy had died from the complications of circulatory problems in Willy’s twentieth year at the nursing home. Sammy had been the most assiduous member of Willy’s family in paying visits to his father.

Willy died twenty-two years after suffering the stroke, just eight months after Sammy had died. The ground was frozen with December and the earth from the grave lay in icy clumps at its side. As his wooden coffin was lowered into the ground beside his beloved Phyllis, one of his grandsons thought of the days when people found him at this place overcome by guilt that would separate him from consciousness through a stroke much as he had been separated from Phyllis by her death. Willy had come so far from his home in Russia…his refusal to fight in the wars of two separate and distant countries…his rise to a position of responsibility in his brother’s factory… his fall to ignominy—and to almost complete disappearance in the minds of his family, and finally to this lonely place beside the highway.

September 1965, Sand Hill Cove

September 1965, Sand Hill Cove

The surfer sat propped up against his yellowed pop-out Kahuna*, almost as a monument to the summer that would pass in a day. A near-silence shrouded the beach except for the whisper of the soft breeze passing through the slender dune grass, the sweet fragrance of seaweed carried in its gentle grasp. A few children played near their mothers below the almost crystalline blue sky dotted by occasional cirrus above a calm sea.

This is a poem I wrote about an idealized perfect day just before leaving for my freshman year of college. The recollection is both magical and ethereal, but based on the experiences of an actual day. The Kahuna I owned was manufactured and sold at a surf shop in Cranston, Rhode Island. It was my first board and actually did take on a yellow patina, its foam core having been processed with oil as opposed to alcohol, as much as I could understand the technical steps in producing a surfboard. Sand Hill Cove had waves that could be ridden only on days the surf was really up, its shores guarded by a breakwater. This is an excellent companion piece to the essay "Sand Hill Cove." The poem originally appeared in Z Net Creative. The world was new and the surf was up!

* A "Kahuna" was a surfboard named after the Hawaiian god of the surf.

Sand Hill Cove

This piece originally appeared in The Narragansett Times.

Sand Hill Cove

There is one place that I hold as the most beautiful place on earth in my mind. I went to visit there today, one last time for what might be months or years. I can’t say which it will be just yet.

Sand Hill Cove—now Roger Wheeler State Beach—showed itself at its best today, a humid day in late May. A huge trail of great nearly black cumulonimbus clouds filled the dome of the sky from west to east. Block Island was enveloped in a shroud of offshore fog, appearing almost dreamlike and surreal, as if suspended from the heavens in an ancient myth of heroes in some lost age. To the north a band of lighter cumulus framed the day of gentle winds and calm seas and warming temperatures. The dunes of the cove were already showing off their cover of ocean grasses and the great breakwater forming the Harbor of Refuge protected the few boats that could be seen.

My earliest memories of childhood and the summer sea were formed here. My family frequented the beach on weekends, and when we were lucky enough stayed for the traditional two-week vacation in a cozy cabin owned by friends on Ocean Road a mile away. As I grew older the memories of slightly sandy egg salad sandwiches eaten beneath skies of perfect azure blue were replaced with more frequent trips with friends as cars became more resilient and the relative affluence of the Sixties allowed for more leisure time.

While others went to the more popular Scarborough Beach and town beach at Narragansett, I was perennially drawn to return with friends to the dunes at the eastern edge of the beach which afforded privacy not readily available on any other beach I had known, and an absolutely perfect bird’s eye of the masses of beachgoers below and the inviting sea beyond (Today, the dunes are a protected area.) On the infrequent early evening in summer at sunset, if the conditions were right, the treat of full yellow moon rising at the eastern end of the beach is contrasted against the blazing orange-red of the setting sun. I have found such beauty nowhere else on earth.

Standing at the middle of the beach in front of the pavilion, the seasons and the past rush by in a kaleidoscope of images. My father rises from below the water in a rush of spray adorned with a Fu Manchu moustache of thick brown kelp. I chase a friend playfully across the sand on the first real day of spring in a time long since gone. While relaxing on a bench at the old pavilion, I meet a new friend in the magic of a late summer evening of youth. A friend, returning from a long absence and I stand on the dunes in August and watch the dazzling red of the sunset over Jerusalem. I carve a giant valentine in the October sand with the woman to whom I’m engaged. Our children learn to love the beach with its near perfect warm sand and gentle sea as much as we do.

Even with the beach abandoned for winter, the long lines of east to west redwood snow fences make an inviting welcome to beachcombers and cast long shadows in the late afternoon, while the beach grass, now brown, bends in supplication to the cold north and west winds.

Wherever I go, part of me will remain happily behind here, and a part of this timeless place will come along with me.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

Dictators We Have Known

Dictators We Have Known

There has been strong reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Many see his execution as just retribution for the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people and Iran. Aside from the issue of capital punishment, which is dealt with in another piece at this site, a substantial amount of reporting has been given over to the issue of how Hussein’s death was a just end to the life of a tyrant and dictator. Well, it’s always good to rid the world of any measure of evil, as there seems to be great quantities to go around, but the U.S. complicity in Hussein’s tenure as a tyrant raises many, many questions about the honesty of U.S. policy when the track record of our government and that of some of our allies is considered.

Here is a partial, very partial, list of dictators who the U.S. has openly supported along with the counties where they have plied their dirty work, usually involving the death and disappearance of thousands and often many more. There was Augosto Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Francisco Franco of Spain, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Carlos Armas of Guatemala, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlaui of Iran, and Manuel Noriega of Panama.

If the reader has any doubt about the crimes these criminals perpetrated then check a simple reference like Wikipedia. It will only take a moment and you can have the details of our allies’ wrongdoings confirmed. Feel free to add to the list and make up a list of your own, as there are plenty of tyrants to go around!

Saddam Hussein was an awful monster, but he was our ally up until 1990 when he made the mistake of countering the Bush I administration and went ahead and invaded Kuwait. When Hussein was gassing the Kurdish population of Iraq no one in Washington lifted a phone to complain. When he attacked Iran the U.S. even provided much of his weaponry and gave him strategic advice on that lethal campaign. There’s even a photograph of Donald Rumsfeld, yes Rumsfeld the architect along with Bush and Cheney of the current war in Iraq, shaking hands with Hussein in 1983 when he acted as Mr. Reagan’s special envoy. Now where was that photo in all of the coverage of Hussein’s hanging?

The point is, the U.S. has a policy of supporting tyrants in many cases, just as long as they don’t go too far astray and start acting on their own.

View From Overlook Mountain of Woodstock, New York

Howie Lisnoff On The Red One