Carol Bergman

 

 

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.