Carol Bergman

The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

         

-James Baldwin

 

Above all things, I fear absurdity as time runs out. 

           

-Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

 

 

It was the third letter I received in a week complimenting me on my Nomads trilogy:

 

Dear Carol Bergman,

 

Your literary voice bridges journalism, memoir, and fiction in a way few writers achieve. Nomads is a striking collection of flash fiction, aphorisms, anecdotes, and mini-essays that reflect your range and mastery of storytelling. With humor, precision, and depth, the pieces speak to universal themes war and peace, love and loss, the ordinary and the profound. The variety of narrative personas you employ gives the collection a layered richness, reminiscent of Lydia Davis yet distinctly your own.

 

What makes Nomads stand out is how it defies easy classification while leaving a strong cumulative impact on the reader. Its brevity and wit make it highly accessible to modern audiences, while its subtlety rewards careful rereading. This balance of immediacy and depth makes it a work with both popular appeal and enduring literary merit.

 

I'd love to help position Nomads more prominently within the flash fiction and literary short-form community through curated Goodreads placement, visibility campaigns across literary platforms, and targeted outreach to readers who appreciate innovative narrative forms. With the right exposure, Nomads can connect with the audience it was meant for: readers who enjoy compact but resonant storytelling.

 

Warm regards,

 

The letters were well-crafted and nearly identical, though the senders all had different names. What writer doesn't enjoy appreciation? Then I checked on the bona fides of the senders. They did not exist.

 

I thought of a friend who had been seduced by emails from a "man" on a dating site, had even felt a surge of anticipatory hormones when he said he'd be coming through New York on his way back from a trip abroad. Similarly, I had nearly "fallen" for the sweet words in the letters I received. What writer doesn't enjoy appreciation? But I'd been paying attention to AI scams for a while, and this one was obvious. Too smooth, I thought. Smooth as butter. Still, I read it straight through and enjoyed myself.

 

Writing is a "murky business," Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell's Roses.  We can never be certain we've got it right or that we've connected with our imagined readers. The scammers know their target. Perhaps they had once attempted writing themselves and are creating AI masterpieces as missives to their lost selves.

 

Dear (         ),

 

Thank you for the well-crafted AI letter I have received about Nomads. Having searched your name, you probably do not exist. It is the 3rd  letter I have received from different "people." My agent is receiving them also and is blocking them. 

 

Clearly, you want to charge for non-existent services.

 

Writers appreciate compliments; they are seductive. We do not, however, appreciate AI generated letters, or scams.

 

Please note that if you do not present bona fides, I will block you, and report you to the Authors Guild lawyers.

 

Best regards,

Carol Bergman

 

Not surprisingly, there has been no reply.

 

End of story? Not quite. The episode unsettled me. How will the future unfold for aspiring writers? How will their work be received and evaluated? Who will sit with them and line edit their work? How will an inexperienced reader know the difference between a writer's hard-won accomplishment and an AI generated work? Will AI "enhancement," or "embellishment" matter in a few years' time? Will editors and publishers even notice, or care?

 

And a few final thoughts. My experienced eyes are a telephoto lens; what is near is far, what is far is near. I have stepped forward, taken risks, fallen into a crevice at times. I have been rescued or have rescued myself, a disciplined writer, a writer who continues to search for her subjects, and expand them.  Indeed, I would not be telling this story if I had been seduced by ease or luck.  I have blocked voices offering shortcuts, however tempting, and am grateful I am still able to distinguish between what is human-made and what is manufactured. If I could rewind, begin again, where would my writing life begin? Would I begin on top of the mountain relinquishing all struggle? 

       

They were in the garden having a Labor Day barbecue when the President stepped on the baby. He heard a cracking sound, looked down—he  was wearing his new boots—and  saw the baby's bloodied head under his right foot. The security detail rushed forward and hustled him away. Fortunately, there were no reporters present. An ambulance was called, however, so it was only a matter of minutes before the media, eavesdropping on the police radio channels, was alerted to an incident at the White House. Sirens wailed, satellite dishes hummed, a press conference was called.

 

          "Ladies and Gentlemen there is absolutely no truth to the allegation..."

         

And so on and so on.

 

That night the president lay in bed with his Brazilian masseuse. The woman, who was about twenty-five years old at the time, had chocolat au lait skin and amber eyes. She had smuggled herself into the country in a basket filled with non- poisonous tropical snakes and had required plastic surgery to remove the scars. The woman, a refugee from poverty and travail, had been rescued from incarceration at the detention center by the President himself in a public relations display.

 

"The president has rescued ...  "    

         

And so on and so on.

         

The president had paid for the surgery out of his private account. During her recuperation, the Brazilian masseuse was given a room with bath at the White House and she was still there many months later. Every morning at breakfast, the president's wife ignored her husband. Her manner was haughty and she hardly opened her mouth when she spoke. A conversation through clenched teeth, shall we say. She was studying Buddhism and practicing compassion. This was her mantra: "I am not angry. I understand your needs." She articulated this subliminally, but sometimes it burst forth unwittingly into the chasm between them.

 

The president laughed. He had always found his wife amusing.

         

The First Lady suppressed a scream. She had no privacy, there were eyes and ears in every crevice of the newly gilded edifice, the center of American government and the Western Industrialized World, and if she hollered everyone would hear her, record her remarks, the inflection of her voice, the scowl on her face, and these would all be reported assiduously within hours.

 

"The president's wife is sidelined,"  began every report since she had entered the hallowed portal. This was a reference to her marital status and also to her life thus far.

 

Of late, she had found aroma therapy helpful, an antidote to the Brazilian masseuse. The scent of the candles, bath oils, and creamy potions obscured the odor of sex from the other end of the hall.

 

She had been at the barbecue the afternoon of what came to be known as "the incident," but was in the far west corner conversing with the Ambassador of Koomar and his elegant wife.  They were discussing the latest fashion, well above the knee according to the current Vogue, when the First Lady heard the cracking sound. She thought, as did everyone else, that someone had snapped the bone of a chicken. Perhaps someone was eating in proximity to the small stage that had been set up for the over amplified country western band. They had not yet started to sing and the stage was empty, though the mikes were operative and had been fully tested.

 

But it was not a bone, it was a baby. The First Lady witnessed the kerfuffle as the security detail whisked her husband away, and then the paramedics arriving, and the mother of the child, one of the housekeepers who had brought her small son to work that day due to a baby sitter problem, crudely and forcefully shoved herself into the ambulance as the wind swept up her skirt and revealed her tattered undergarments.

         

"There is no truth to the allegation..."

         

 The next morning, in a scheduled breakfast audience, the president's press envoy repeated this assertion to the assembled reporters. And in the afternoon, the First Lady perused the headlines with alarm:

 

BABY KILLED AT WHITE HOUSE BARBECUE  (The Examiner)

 

UNEXPLAINED DEATH OF BABY AT WHITE HOUSE BARBECUE (The Post)

 

BABY DEAD IN WHITE HOUSE  GARDEN (The Gazette)

 

PRESIDENT IMPLICATED IN BABY'S DEATH ( The Star)

     

          Another press conference was called:

         

          Reporter: Is there any truth to the allegation about the baby?

         

          Another reporter (interrupting): We have heard that the Brazilian masseuse...

         

          "There is absolutely no truth to these allegations..."

 

And so on and so on.

       

BRAZILIAN MASSEUSE HAS BABY IN WHITE HOUSE (The Star)

 

THE FIRST LADY IS CRUSHED (The Post)

 

 One week later, as the President was hosting a foreign dignitary in the Green Room, the First Lady went out into the garden with a magnifying glass. It was already crisp autumn and a skim of vibrant leaves covered the hardened ground.  Still supple in middle age, the First Lady lowered her body to the ground in one graceless movement, sat back on her haunches like a peasant in India had once shown her long ago, and sighed. It was true, she discovered, that the position was comfortable and she could rest for several hours and search the ground for clues with her magnifying glass. It was an illusion that she was alone, of course; she was never alone. The security camera followed her into the garden and within minutes an officer was at her side helping her to her feet. But she already had the evidence in her pocket. She returned to her quarters and placed it under the potpourri on her dressing table. Then she called the detective in charge of the investigation. "The President killed the baby," she told him.

         

When the detective arrived, she handed him the plastic bag with the evidence. This consisted of a clump of mulched dirt from the garden, a few strands of long reddish brown hair, one or two hydrangea petals, a bright red leaf, and a small tab-like label from the back of the President's boot.

 

         

The next day, with great fanfare, the President of the United States was arrested and released on bail.

 

          "He is not a threat to the nation,"  the judge said.

        

That night there was a contretemps in the private quarters of the White House which has, unfortunately, not been recorded for posterity. By all accounts, the President had a towel around his neck when he emerged from his bedroom, stomped to the other side of the hallway, and pounded on the First Lady's door. She emerged, laughed at the President as he had laughed at her, and retreated to her chambers. On his way back to his apartment, he took the towel and flicked the security cameras off their metal brackets.

 

At breakfast the next morning, the First Lady and  the President did not speak. She was reading The Post, he was reading The Gazette. Both headlines were the same:

         

LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, THE PRESIDENT HAS STEPPED ON THE BABY

 

 

This post is dedicated to the White House Press Corps.  To be absolutely clear, it is a figment of the author's imagination.

 

 

 

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

 

-Charles Dickens, Hard Times

 

I had finished my lap swim and was sitting on a bench in the shade facing the outdoor shower, a metal post with four hard-to-turn spigots. The water runs hot for an instant and then turns cold. I have a routine: I shower the chlorine off my skin, and then sit for a while to dry off and get myself together for the short walk home. It's a relief to day dream under blue skies after too many days of wildfire smoke from Canada, watch the kids romp, and listen to their screams of summer delight. My reverie on this particular day was broken by a stranger leaning his cane and a plastic bag filled to overflowing against the bench.

 

He was an old cadaverous guy, naked to the waist. I had noticed him in my peripheral vision entering the pool enclosure via the exit, far away from the check-in station, and then returned to my email. I looked up from my phone when he asked how to turn on the shower. His voice was soft, the request polite. He seemed sober, coherent, but his body was famine thin, his ribs were visible, he was barefoot, and his white hair was all akimbo. Pieces of twine or grass were tied decoratively around his ankles.  He whispered  thanks as I demonstrated how the odd-shaped spigots turned on and off, and then smiled a sweet smile. He had no teeth.

 

I returned to the bench and watched him revel in the water. He was no longer a stranger, he was a visitor, a guest.  I wondered where he lay his body down at night, if he had shelter, or food, or if the safety net he was dependent on had been terminated, but I did not ask. Why not?  Because he had interrupted my reverie? Destroyed my sense of well-being? Because I needed a break from mayhem and trouble? Then I worried that someone official might notice his presence and ask him to leave. He looked different, he was so very thin, famine thin. Images of the starving in Gaza surfaced. Here, at least there is fresh water, I thought, and it has washed away the dust and flattened his hair. And how would anyone know that he had wandered into this privileged enclave and didn't belong unless he'd been spotted, or I said something, which I had no intention of doing. And what is the meaning of the word belonging anyway? 

 

 

As veterans return from foreign wars, they find a nation that uncomfortably mirrors the conflict zones they left behind: communities fractured and exploited by extreme voices.

 

-Jake Harriman,  Marine Corps, co-founder of +More Perfect Union, in Stars & Stripes 1/27/25

      

 

If it is true—according  to climatologists— that every forest fire in the world is everyone's forest fire, that there is only one planetary forest fire, then  it follows that every war in the world also has no boundary, that every war is my war, and your war. Images of a flattened Gaza are reminiscent of Tokyo after the American bombing on March 9, 1945,  and images of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, destroyed by Russian forces on May 26, 1995, are reminiscent of Gaza and Gaza is reminiscent of Tokyo and Grozny. Choose images of any war—even London during the Blitz—and you will find survivors digging through rubble, searching for remnants of their lives, for the bodies of their neighbors and relatives,  for beloved family pets, for food and clean water.

 

Images transfix but they also anesthetize, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  We gaze at suffering on oversized screens from the comfort of our living rooms. We get up to make some tea, but even before this impulse, the still image or the eerie drone images have vanished from the screen. The war is here, and then it is gone; it has become ephemera.

 

If we are able for a moment, or a day, to contemplate our one precious life on earth interlocked with other precious lives on earth, the image of children walking over the rubble searching for bodies, or food, or water may say to us: "pause."  In this contemplation, every avaricious war is a crime, and every arms dealer—individual, corporate, or nation state—is a war criminal.

 

I am a child of refugess from war and I am drawn to the heroism and right actions—in the Buddhist sense—of humanitarian workers who risk their lives to protect civilians, return them to health, or bring them to safety. They work in the interstices of conflict, in the afflicted neighborhoods of our cities, in the countryside, all over the world.

 

When Fascism came to Europe, citizens were unprepared for war as a consequence of Fascism. When Communism came to Russia, citizens were unprepared for the Gulag. When Project 2025 came to America, no one imagined a masked paramilitary army, or deportations, or children starving, or the capitulation of revered institutions, or students unable to attend colllege, or families unable to access medical care in what was once the "richest nation on earth."

 

There is always an earthquake preceding a tsunami. We must gather our energy, our wisdom, and our determination, to resist the rising tide of hatred and oppression.

 

 

 

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
     

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 

 

On a warm July Thursday, check-in day at Mohonk Mountain House, I sat with Sevan Melikyan away from the crowd in the cool Lake Lounge for an in-depth conversation. He is best known in the Hudson Valley as the founder and curator of the Wired Gallery in High Falls where he mounts shows of local artists. He also organizes pop-up art fêtes at Mohonk Mountain House, offers in-gallery art lectures, and conducts art tours abroad three times a year. He's headed to Istanbul at the end of September, and Sicily, Malta and Provence in 2026. His wife, Maria, a professor of arts management at SUNY Purchase, helps him with one tour a year. For the others, he hires an assistant.

 

Though New Paltz and environs is a small community with overlapping friendships and artistic circles, I had never met Sevan until a friend's recent photography show at the Wired Gallery. It's a small gallery with a beating heart, fully alive to artists and art-making. Sevan and Maria live upstairs, their kitchen the galley for refreshments during openings.

 

Sevan's journey to the mid-Hudson Valley was complicated. He was born in Istanbul to an Armenian family whose ancestors had survived the 1915-17 genocide without fleeing into a diaspora, but eventually migrated to Paris when Sevan was 9. His father was an engineer, his mother a homemaker. "They were the best parents anyone could have," Sevan says ruefully. And though they were strict when Sevan expressed a desire to study art—something practical, please—they also passed on the sustaining joys of culture, and the importance of learning the language where we live fluently. Sevan speaks four—Armenian, Turkish, French and English.

 

"I am thinking of myself as an immigrant again," Sevan reflects, "and how I was shocked by the feeling of being a foreigner in Paris. I never felt that way when I arrived in New York." How would Sevan feel if he arrived today, I wondered. How would my family have felt, and just about every family I know. Perhaps there's some solace in the reminder that unless we are indigenous, or descendants of slaves or indentured workers, everyone else in America is an immigrant, or a descendant of immigrants.

 

Sevan's eldest sister Sheyda had already arrived in New York and eased Sevan's transition to the New World. Before he left Paris, his father had told him he'd marry a green-eyed girl. A prophecy, or simply a heartfelt wish for his son? Sevan did not specify. Little did he know when he fell in love with the green-eyed Maria that she was a Smiley, a member of the abolitionist Quaker family that built Mohonk Mountain House in the late 19th century, and still own it. Sevan has keys to the mansion, literally and metaphorically. He took me on a guided tour through its history, into private locked rooms with solid old furniture and libraries of  leather-bound books. "Many are about gardens," he explains, "and there is an old bible on the top shelf." We were in a room on the ground floor that the family reserves for its gatherings and private conversations.

 

"Art offers hope in the darkest times," Sevan's Artblazing Tours website assures us. How interesting, I thought, as we meandered up the carpet-covered staircase to a closed-off sitting room on the second floor. The preserved Smiley history inspires this tall, lanky energetic man. He nourishes a dream of preserving art history in Ulster County. "I cannot believe how many talented artists there are here," he says. "I want to create an art museum as a permanent repository of this art for future generations." He's identified a property that is up for sale and hopes to develop his vision one day soon. "It will be hard work. How will I fit it in?" he asks rhetorically. It's not an unusual aspiration for a man whose family has survived war, massacre, displacement and flight. The work of unlocking and re-narrating history—all history—is both necessary and grounding. There is still so much we do not know about ourselves, and one another. What is essential in our pasts, and in our dreams, is often invisible, unless we bring it into the light.  

 

 

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

 

― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

 

 

How easily a hand becomes a fist, Margaret Atwood wrote in The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, which was prescient. How confident are any of us that when we are threatened with death, our basest, most animalistic impulses will not engage? Under siege, altruistic impulses and learned values thin and vanish. If our family needs water and food to survive, we push ahead of the line with our tin bowls.

 

But I am not writing about a war zone today. I am writing about my own, small town in upstate New York. On Thursday night we were instructed to begin boiling contaminated water for drinking, brushing our teeth, even washing and rinsing our dishes. The mad rush for bottled water began. And the hoarding. Remember the shortage of toilet paper during Covid? How many of us shared our bounty if we identified a stash? How did local, state and federal government manage the shortages? They didn't.*

 

I started boiling water to fill the Britas—they do not filter bacteria—and our water bottles immediately. I put a bowl of boiled water on the bathroom sink. I hadn't figured out dish washing and rinsing. Boiling water for daily use is arduous and it didn't take long for me to feel exhausted. Early Friday morning, I set out early in search of bottled water.  I bought a half-gallon at Stewart's and then headed for another small shop in my hood—My  Market—to buy some well-priced apples and red peppers, and to checkout their bottled water if we didn't get the all clear soon.  Shoving me aside were two women stacking at least five gallons of water on the counter. Their focus and aggression were startling. When I suggested that they halve their purchase so that neighbors might benefit, they brushed me off. "It's for two families," one of them said dismissively.

 

How spoiled we are, I thought, to have clean water in abundance at the flick of a tap, or to be able to access and pay for bottled water. 

 

"Don't you have the Ashokan nearby?" a city friend asked when I told him about my conservation-conscious town losing its bearings.

 

The Ashokan. Now that's an interesting piece of New York City and New York State early 20th century history. Eleven towns were obliterated to create the Ashokan; descendants of those families still remember becoming refugees. More than a billion gallons of water from the Ashokan and other Catskill reservoirs have  flowed into New York City every day since 1915.   

 

Water is a finite resource, temperatures are rising, rivers and reservoirs are running dry, climate change continues unabated. Flood, fire, drought, water borne disease. I am not an expert on reservoirs, aqueducts and viaducts, but it is obvious that they—and we—are interconnected and interdependent whether we want to be, or not.

 

*The laws regarding the obligations of government are entangled with politics and the privatization of essential resources. I will leave it to a legal commentator to disentangle local, state and federal legislation.

 

 

 

 

Can you feel me hugging you Bryan? I am always going to be hugging you.

 

-Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy; A Story of Justice and Redemption

 

 

 

A young woman wandered into the café. I was immersed in reading my notes,  a writer at work in the midst of a distracting buzz, my attention laser focused, the woman in my peripheral vision. I looked up and she was standing at my table, invading my personal space, and holding up her phone.

 

"Would you have a charger?" she asked.

 

I was disgruntled by the intrusion. It's never happened to me before in this small, quiet, homogeneous, gentrified town. I stood up and grabbed my small backpack off the chair. I'd had my phone stolen recently and I wasn't up for another theft. This young light-skinned Black woman looked like a waif.  She was wearing a low cut sleeveless summer dress down to her ankles, running shoes that looked too big for her feet, her hair tied up neatly with a ribbon. Within seconds we had profiled each other. She was hitting on me—sweet older woman with whitening hair—and I was reflexively protecting my possessions.

 

What was her story?  What was my story?

 

"Are you a student?" I asked. That was one of my more innocent assumptions.

 

"No. I've been out at Bethel but my friend let me down and I can't stay with her."

 

Bethel, the site of Woodstock. A lot of folks wander through New Paltz searching for Woodstock. She'd found the empty field where it all happened, way back when. Now she was here, the only Black person in this too-expensive café. Situated on the environmentally protected rail trail, it attracts a lot of tourists with fancy bikes and helmets.

 

"What were you doing there?" I asked the young waif.

 

"Trying to save our democracy," she said.

 

"Thank you," I said. I purposely didn't ask if she had a place to stay. It was obvious that the phone charger request was a gambit.  But the saving our democracy project, however real or imaginary, pleased me.  This young woman couldn't have been more than 20 and where had she come from and where was she going to sleep? And did she have a grandmother who would always hug her?

 

"Did you ask the baristas if they have a charger?" I asked resisting my inclination to ask her to sit down, listen to her story, and buy her a cold drink. I wasn't in the mood that day, my work had been interrupted, and for goodness sake isn't there anyplace safe where we can rest and recover from the woes of our beleaguered nation? Apparently not. 

 

If I wasn't going to invite the young woman to sit down, there was nothing more to say. I gathered my papers and slid out of the café into the sultry air.

 

 

We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but not commit it.

-

-Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza; A Reckoning

 

 

When James Baldwin was invited to visit Israel in 1961, he observed brutality at every checkpoint. I caught one of the filmed interviews he gave on an Instagram feed recently. "Wherever we go, there is always a border," he told reporters interested in him and his pilgrimage. He went on to say, "The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of 'divide and rule' and Europe's guilty conscience for more than thirty years."

 

The image of divide and rule—in  a stark physical sense—stayed with me. I am missing my Palestinian-American friends, friends I have not seen since the October 7 massacre and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Once in a while I write a text or email just to say: "Thinking of you, hope we can get together for a coffee and a hug soon." Once in a while, I receive a reply.

 

These friends, friends of many long years, know my backstory and my politics. They are educated and well-traveled yet, in this terrible historic moment, our friendship has been cast asunder. Though the rift feels biblical in its intensity, the antidote is obvious: build bridges and do not stop building bridges.

 

This week, I interviewed a new barber in town. His name is Mohammed Shadi Aldalaq, Mo for short, and his reputation for artistic haircuts is growing as fast as hair in summer. In the two days I hung out with him in his cozy, comfortable shop, there was a steady stream of customers. A mother with three kids in tow—all needing cuts—was  delighted by the reasonable prices; two balding men, including my husband, appreciated Mo's sensitivity; a young student with thick curly hair had specific instructions about the latest haircut fad.

 

Teachers and barbers often run in families. The tradition in Mo's family began with his refugee grandfather in the Zarqa City Refugee Camp in Jordan, one of the camps created in 1948 by the International Red Cross to accommodate the uprooted Palestinian families during the Arab-Israeli war. Palestinians consider the forced displacement and killings during that war their "Nakba," or catastrophe.

 

Mo's grandfather taught in the camp and also learned how to cut from an experienced barber. He passed the skill along to his son, who passed it along to Mo, who started cutting hair when he was 14.

 

"Do you like to draw?" I asked him.

"When I have time."

 

I wasn't surprised. He has the hands and eye of a sculptor.

 

A sign above the cash register in the shop reads: Work hard. Stay humble. It was a gift from his wife, Shadia, a finishing touch before the shop opened a year ago in August at the southern end of the New Paltz bus station.

 

On the second day of my visit, I met Shadia whose father, Radi Serdah, is well known for his entrepreneurial ventures. He owns New Paltz Taxi, the Trailways bus stations in New Paltz and Kingston, and Main Street Auto on North Chestnut. American born and educated, Shadia does some of the billing for her dad.

 

She fell for Mo in 2015 when she was visiting her mother's Lebanese-Palestinian family in Zarqa City, Jordan where Mo grew up and was still living with his parents. His mom was cooking that day and Shadia said, "She's a terrific cook. I want to marry someone in this family."

 

During our conversation, Mo was pulling up photos from his phone of his mom, and all his nieces and nephews; he has four sisters. Before the Nakba, the family owned orchards in Jaffa, he said. My heart sank. Jaffa is the Hebrew name the Rabbi gave me on my wedding day. It means beautiful, and I have cherished it quietly over the years. But it's also an ancient city on the Mediterranean, not far from Tel Aviv. An Arab majority city during the Ottoman era, it still has a large Arab population, and is now best known in the US for its oranges.

 

More of the family's story unfolded with another photo. Mo and Shadia are sitting on a balcony. They are engaged, they are in love, they are laughing. In the foreground, the remaining tents in the Zarqa Refugee Camp are visible; they abut what became a built town over the years. Beyond them a desert landscape, hills, some low slung houses, and Israel. Mo says, "And there, in the distance, is Palestine." The longing in his voice was like an ocean sounding, or the lament of a cello's basso notes.

 

I hadn't mentioned that I come from a Jewish Holocaust family. In the moment, it seemed irrelevant. I do not feel any longing for Israel and have never visited, though I have always been curious about its culture. I am grateful my parents chose the multi-ethnic United States as their safe haven from genocide. Praise be it remains a safe haven, I thought to myself, as Mo expressed two of his American dreams—to work hard, to own a house one day with Shadia.

 

It is foolish and unhelpful to compare atrocities—the Holocaust, the Nakba, the October 7 terrorist massacre, the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Cause, effect, vengeance in a continuing bloody cycle. The history of the decimation of  Gaza and its people will be written by those who survive, or their descendants, not by me or anyone else discussing and arguing the unrelenting invasions, massacres, atrocities and bombings.

 

 

 

 

And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge…

 

-William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

 

 

Former New York State Governor Cuomo looked and sounded like an old dog throughout his resurgence into the limelight. But if Cuomo was an old dog wreaking vengeance without media savvy, Mamdani was a puppy with a blue sky smile. Are we kicking an old—"experienced" – dog  to the curb and elevating an–"inexperienced"—puppy  to higher office?   That's what many in the city fear, including many of my city friends. 

 

I had intended this post as comedy today. Reading the news every morning is hard enough, and the image of the old dog and the puppy amused me. Even though I moved out of the city in 2018, I still follow every electrifying, insane New York city election. But this one hurt and, in the end, was not amusing. It was amplified by hate, ageism, innuendo, tropes, and entitlement, an echo of the devolution of political discourse and language, especially on social media, but  not only on social media. Despite Elon Musk's getting-to-Mars fantasies, there is no Planet B, as yet. We have to settle down and try to make things work right here. I hope you will join me in an experiment to broaden and steady our frontal lobe thinking, as follows:

 

1.      Study in earnest-- and with as open a heart and mind as possible-- any issue which engages and challenges your life. Read  more, scroll less. Get more informed—more  educated—than you have ever been.  Read what you would not normally read in the mainstream media. Read and listen to media from other countries. Podcasts are available in abundance.

 

2.     Try not to assume that your point of view is the right one, or the only one. Consider-with an open heart and mind-other points of view. 

 

3.     Mentor anyone younger than you are. Showcase your experience, but allow new ideas to surface. 

 

4.     In general, listen more, talk less, as per my last blog post.

 

5.     Define and then re-define smear words, stereotypes, imprecise phrases. Study their historic source. Study propaganda. Take notes.

 

6.     Take a deep breath. Exhale.

 

I look forward to your findings and observations in this  utopian experiment.  We can reach for the stars, and one another, right here on earth.

 

 

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way… For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best."

 

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 

 

         

I have a new friend in town and we have so much to talk about that there is very little oxygen left in the café. We usually hang out for two hours or so, though I could listen to him and talk to him all day. I have no illusions that we'll agree on everything we discuss as we get to know one another, but it doesn't matter, the air is clear, the conversation is civil, there is no judgment at the table.

 

 It seems particularly important these difficult days to practice deep listening especially when we are just getting to know someone and their politics. What if our opinions are deeply held and divisive?  The tenor of conversation must remain respectful if we are to remain at peace with ourselves and one another.

 

Tea and empathy. Talk less, listen more. These are my mantras as I interview people, run a writing workshop, or cultivate a new friendship. Though we have no need of bomb shelters in upstate New York, and hopefully never will, we are enduring internecine warfare, gunshots ringing out across a peaceful suburb in the dead of night, hatreds old and new ascendant even among relatives, friends and colleagues. How easy it is for fury to turn violent, three-time poet laureate Joy Harjo reminds us in her poem, "Overwhelm." She warns that a country that "drinks from illusion," can "go down."

 

Listening to a Haaretz podcast this morning, I heard a still sane reporter gasp for breath as he used what Aldous Huxley called  "pleasant sounding vocabulary" to describe mass murder in Gaza and a missile attack on Haifa. After a while I did not hear this reporter's words, I felt his breath, escaping from his chest with a hiss, like steam. He was burning up inside.

 

Even in the safe enclave where I live, I encounter hatred daily. There is shouting and accusation, racialized slurs, and palpable fear. A man at a dinner party challenges what I have written and misunderstands my intention: to describe accurately, to report deeply, to understand a different point of view and analyze it with discipline and attention. I receive belligerent emails and delete them, turn my back on rage, move sideways out of range. Hatred is not sustainable. If it persists, we will annihilate each other.