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