Carol Bergman

 

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.

 

- Pankaj Mishra,  London Review of Books, 3/21/24, "The Shoah After Gaza"

 

 

Reading or listening to the news most mornings—national or international—is a Gothic experience, Gothic as in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, his eye the eye of a vulture, bodies falling upon dead bodies and pulling them to pieces. Except that the eyes in the 21st century are the eyes of weaponry, man-made, and lethal, from the sky or on the ground as screeching protestors flee live bullets.

 

I am writing on August 5th and tomorrow is the anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki on the 9th. As I have written before on this blog, I have a family connection to the after effects of these nuclear aerial bombardments. My husband's uncle, Norman Cousins, the founder and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature  brought 12 "Hiroshima Maidens" to New York for reconstructive surgery. He and his wife adopted one of them:

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/norman-cousins-peacemaker-atomic-age

 

As the American military brass descends on Israel, we await further escalations in the Middle East. Our beating hearts skip a beat. At least there's writing, a struggle for understanding, I tell myself. Writing as a form of activism. When we speak and when we speak out, when we speak civilly to one another, when we listen to suffering, our hearts settle, our pain eases.

 

Who among us has the best solution? I do not. Who can turn away from the atrocities in Gaza? No one. Too many. All of us. None of us. Some of us some of the time. Not turning away, even that could be the beginning of an awareness of our culpability, how we arrived at conflagrations and invasions in 2024. To have empathy for the injured on the ground, for the innocent children, for the search through the rubble of pulverized bombed out homes, whether it's Ukraine, Sudan or Gaza, or Israel, that is something, too. To donate to relief organizations, also worthy. But to ask the question what is wrong with us? And where do we go from here? And how can we heal from the atrocities and inequities we have inflicted upon ourselves and others ? And to remind one another that it is our taxes that pay for the military-industrial complex and a variety of despots in the world.

 

I have known soldiers, drone pilots and relief workers who have returned from wars. Many cannot sleep, they cannot eat, they cannot ever make love again, they drink too much. Once upon a time  they were babies mewling and puking in their mother's arms, and then, suddenly, they were trained to be killing machines or doctors pouring blood into veins after a battle. Brave soldiers, heroic soldiers, patriotic soldiers, home from the seemingly unending wars, and suffering.

 

Though it's Monday, I'm writing a sermon, it seems, albeit an areligious one. Does it fly? Make sense? Heal your broken heart, and mine?

 

 

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.

 

-Shirley Chisholm, 1972

 

After the euphoria about Kamala's nomination subsides, I told myself, I will upload all the American history on my Kindle to-be-read-stack and review and amplify, yet again, the history of this fascinating, fraught nation I call home. How did we get to where we are, fault lines and all? And what would I be teaching in a high school classroom come September, just weeks away from the election, if the righteous censors weren't sitting on my shoulder?

 

I minored in American history at UC Berkeley and entered a teacher training program after I graduated. During my second term of student teaching at Oakland Technical High School, I was assigned an English class and an American History class. The school had a large catchment area, but it was streamed, which meant that it was integrated in name only; within the school it was segregated. My history class was nearly all Black, young men and women from the ghetto, low achievers, truants, kids on parole, disaffected angry youth, my supervising teacher—a disaffected older white guy—explained to me, assuming I'd comply with his bigotry. Then he wished me luck. I needed it, but not because of my students, as it turned out.  True, it was a volatile, violent time—the Black Panthers were still ascendant in Oakland—and I was a young white teacher in a make-believe suit.

 

You're probably idealistic, my supervisor said, just be careful. I intend to teach, I told him. You are naïve, he said to me. Just keep control. The security guard will keep an eye on you, as will I.

 

Fair warning, but somehow, I wasn't afraid; I was determined. The Panthers were revolutionaries wielding huge weapons, there were shoot-outs with the police, but these same men and women were also opening schools and clinics. They cared about their children, students I was now facing in the classroom, shunted to the lowest "streams," in de facto segregated public schools, as many in our inner cities still are today.

 

I stood absolutely silent that first day as my students reluctantly entered the re-arranged, seminar-style room. The security guard lingered at the door waiting for his opportunity to rescue me. I have a mezzo voice, I am tall, and I was wearing a suit, my personal armor. I went up to tell him he wouldn't be needed, and invited him to sit down in the circle and join the proceedings. Back to basics, we were about to launch my own version of a Constitutional Convention, I told him. He didn't know what I was talking about, nor did my supervising teacher who was scrunched in the back taking notes.

 

Like all things political then and now, this plan of mine, hatched at 3 a.m. before my first day in this challenging classroom, was a performance. No clichés, euphemisms, platitudes or balloons allowed, however. Let's get started, I began. What's missing here? Who attended the Constitutional Convention and who didn't? Textbooks on every desk, I asked my rapt students to open to Howard Chandler Christy's painting. It depicts Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. There isn't a woman or Black person in sight.

 

And so began a very interesting semester. My students re-wrote the Constitution as though their enslaved ancestors had been attendance. It was, truly, an historical document.

 

But my supervising teacher wasn't happy. I had to explain why I veered away from the curriculum or he'd fail me. Worse, he promised I'd never get a job teaching in the Oakland School District, and might not even get my California State Teaching License. It was my second experience of threat to my livelihood, but it still perplexed me. I was too inexperienced to understand the political heft behind the intimidations; I had the insouciance and confidence of youth. Nice try, I told myself, and carried on. And, to my surprise, I did get my California State Teaching Certificate, issued "for life." I didn't even have to fight for it, or threaten my supervising teacher by reporting him, though I was prepared to do so. Maybe he knew this and backed off, like any bully. We know the type.

 

So here we are, umpteen years later, and Kamala, a California girl, is running for President of the United States. Of course, her backstory is nothing like the students I taught in Oakland; she was privileged. Still, she has felt discrimination and hatred in her life, plenty of it, and resisted it. I know and admire her type: fearless, determined, smart, competent, good-hearted. irreverent, hard-working, highly educated and ambitious. I could go on, but I'm over the moon.

 

 

 

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at the wrong done to him.  

 

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

 

 

Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us."

 

-George Saunders,  Lincoln in the Bardo

 

 

 

And he blusters and he bloviates upon the stage, about the imagined and/or exaggerated slights and grievances, for the sky is falling upon the heads of the righteous, in  particular The Great Leader's now second-in-command reading from a teleprompter. And next to him, dressed in the most expensive fashion of the day. is his helpmate, silent as the lambs in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, and even more obedient despite her elite education. For this is a gathering of the mighty, the beautiful, the elected and the selected, spinning fictions known as inspirational stories. And they will form a new congregation of the elected and selected and they will be fruitful and multiply for they will attempt a total abortion ban, and the Comstock restriction on birth control, catapulting all of us back to the mid-19th century, particularly women, the helpmates in this new Gilead.

 

So be it. A gathering of the righteous, a celebration of the backwardness and moral bankruptcy of what is still known as the "Republican Party." How Abe Lincoln must be curling in his grave. For, dear reader, it certainly feels as though we have been fighting a mostly bloodless civil war, which is to say, there has been plenty of violence and threat of violence, and rage and hatred, and now yet another assassination attempt in a county in a country saturated in the poison of gun culture. 

 

It has not yet happened to me, to us, as George Saunders wrote in his prize-winning book, Lincoln in the Bardo. Not yet. But everything has changed since Trump arrived, as those of us not of the congregation—or  "the movement," as he calls it—are mouthing platitudes about "democracy," or going on extended vacations from "the news."  There are echoes in our history, many of them, but never has such a fascist impulse been so close to realization as so many of us turn away in despair.

Are we too torn up, too paralyzed with fear to think straight? Are we so glued to the news cycle, our scrolling screens, and the safety of our homes to participate in voter registration  and/or protests?

 

About 158.4 million Americans voted in the 2020 election, according to the Pew Research Center, amounting to 62.8% of people of voting age. This may sound like a big-enough number, but it is not. The United States, a democracy, ranks 31st in voter turnout in the world. In the world, dear reader. And are we not, ostensibly, the designated and/or self-designated leaders of the free world? 

 

I record here, the one small action I performed last week after I read those pitiful statistics, for none of us alone can stop the juggernaut, but together, maybe there is hope. I got into my car and  picked up voter registration forms at the post office. There are a few 20-somethings in my orbit I talk with every day—at the gym, at the local café, in the health store. I put on my educator's hat and ask them about their issues—student loans, no medical insurance—acknowledging  their daily struggles as I struggle, patiently, to pierce their apathy and inertia with my heartfelt concern, and then ask if they intend to vote.

 

 

I challenge my readers to leave a comment here with their suggestions. Let us brainstorm together. I will give a prize to anyone who can identify the literary allusion in the title, though I am not sure what the prize will be.

 

 

It's wanting to know that matters. Otherwise we are going out the way we came in…What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is short…

 

                                                         -from Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia

 

. . .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.

 

-Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

 

 

 

This morning, the morning after the umpteenth assassination and/or assassination attempt against a politician or activist in the United States in my lifetime alone, I decided to get out early to walk my compost down to the Huguenot Street community garden. I could not shut down the news, though I thought it would do me good. "Composting, at least, is something practical to sustain hope," I wrote on What's App to a friend in the UK, now celebrating its Labour Party victory. I finally shut the news down when a bystander on the Washington Post podcast I was listening to said, "We went home and listened to Fox News." Fists in the air, threats, revenge, retribution, grievance, Project 2025, none of this is good news.

 

I thought of Stoppard's play, Arcadia, kept it in mind as I continued my walk. Life has become "a Gothic novel expressed in landscape," Stoppard wrote, except that the landscape when contemplated in silence is also solace. Gardens, even indoor plants, become our Arcadias, utopian visions of unspoiled wilderness where we are able to rest and refresh our spirits, perhaps even begin again. Isn't this also what revolutions promise: beginning again?  Weren't our "founders" hopeful?  Has the American "experiment" utterly failed? Do we have time to steady the ship and move forward? Are these pointless rhetorical questions?

 

And then there is the extreme weather this summer which came upon us without warning, we thought. Well, not exactly; we had been amply warned. But the reality was bone thumping: an early hurricane, constant 90 degree days without much respite, and even the pool water will not cool. I lap swim and then stand under the outdoor cold shower near the changing rooms, sit on a bench, and catch my breath before heading home to AC. I still walk to the pool, water bottle in hand, doused with electrolytes. And every ten laps, I drink, but the water in the bottle has warmed to tea temperature and the post-swim alcohol drops for my ears are almost dangerously hot.

 

And so it goes these days, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. So it goes.

 

This post is dedicated to all the brave young Democrats running for office this year, many under siege on social media, and serious physical threat. May their courage inspire those of us who will vote for them and work to get out the vote. May our election poll workers remain steadfast and unafraid.

Autocrats invariably target not only human rights defenders and journalists but also writers and artists. They instinctively recognize the power of words and, by extension, free and creative expression to spark imagination, kindle hope, and allow people to imagine different and better worlds built on equality, freedom, and human rights. In the absence of free expression, other freedoms are quick to die, paving the way for autocrats to write their own rules…

 

-Marilynne Robinson, "Agreeing to Our Harm,"  NYRB, 7/18/24

 

 

On a hot Saturday morning in late June, I donated another cache of books to the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, NY, my new small hometown, a well-read town, which also boasts many visual artists and a state university. An "elite enclave," in other words, in the distorted vision of some. Elting Library will have their 67th  library fair at the end of September.  There will be books on tables in the parking lot of the library, music, and plants for sale, a festive occasion no matter the weather. Last year it was raining  that week, I recall, but no matter. Tents protected the paper books, sales were brisk--the fair yielded about $30,000 that day according to Crystal Middleton, the new director of the library-- and the post-Covid socializing among neighbors and visitors was intense.

 

Library fairs and book sales of donated books have been a fixture in many small towns across the United States since the 19th century. Volunteers gather to do the work of sorting, lifting, pricing and selling on the day of the event. It's labor intensive work, and some libraries have shifted to smaller events to supplement state and/or local government funding. At the Stoneridge Library, due west of New Paltz, the library fair has been abandoned, but there's a new bookshop which operates year round and raises about $10,000 per year, as compared to $14,000 from the past annual book fair, according to Jody Ford, the library's director. All the books in the shop are donated and the volunteers enjoy chatting to the shop's customers, members of their community, readers one and all. "It's a great success," Ford says.

 

Up in Woodstock, the barn behind the library is still taking donations for their 83rd library fair scheduled for July 22nd. Some libraries, such as the Gardiner Library have segued to book sales rather than Library Fairs eliminating anything other than the books themselves. It's still takes a lot of organizing, volunteerism, and muscle power, but is less complicated.

 

Will library fairs and book sales continue into the fast-paced digital world, or will they slowly disappear, becoming a quaint footnote in a town's history? It's hard to say from the vantage of 2024. A community's devotion to its residents' continuing education and sense of belonging is most important, especially in an over-sized disparate nation such as ours. And for those of us who celebrate knowledge and civil discourse, books—what they contain, what they inspire—are our mental furniture and cultural legacy. It is no wonder that so-called "controversial" books have been targeted by the radical right. Organizations such as Moms of Liberty are intimidating librarians, parents and, by extension, their own offspring, homogenizing their education and reading lists with their self-righteous censoring.

 

I am haunted by the dystopian vision of the abandoned, trashed Boston Globe newsroom in the episodic adaptation of Margaret Atwood's prescient Handmaid's Tale, the hallways reverberating with June Osborne's solitary daily run as she awaits her rescue.

 

 

According to the PEN America data base, "Writers at Risk," there were 339 writers from 33 countries jailed in 2023, an increase of 62 writers compared to 2022 and 101 more than in 2019. American writers, journalists and artists are not rounded up or incarcerated, but that does not mean that pressure is not applied, or that cancellations do not happen, early signs of a despotism our "founders" would have abhorred.

 

This post is dedicated to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter currently on trial in Russia for his reporting, Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things,  who has been charged by the Indian government under the new Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)  for comments made in 2010 about Kashmir, and to Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi whose jail sentence in Iran may be extended.

 

 

We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands.

 

-Marilynne Robinson, "Agreeing to Our Harm," New York Review of Books, 7/18/24

 

 

 

I was perusing a book of paintings and drawings by the neo-Impressionist painter, Paul Signac, to distract myself from The Great Debate, when I came across the drawing I have used to illustrate this blog post. The wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine grind on, others flare constantly. Signac's minimalist rendering of war zone desolation stirred me into thinking that it might be time for me to attempt a sequel to Another Day In Paradise, my book about—and with—international humanitarian relief workers. My thoughts at the moment coalesce around domestic first responders. To that end, I profiled a firefighter this week for the local paper. 

 

Here's the link. Click off on the X to defeat the firewall.

 

https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2024/06/24/the-heart-of-a-first-responder/

 

 

I have also been talking to former soldiers and relief workers again about their experience of war, and their recovery from war. I have an untested theory that one of the many causes of PTSD is our fundamental abhorrence of harm as codified in the commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Kill." As soldiers are taught to kill, and expected to be able to kill, I believe that the brain resists, and that the resistance settles in the soldier's psyche as PTSD. Some carry the wound of war to their grave.

 

Something similar may happen to humanitarian workers. They are exposed to killing machines and dead bodies as witnesses and healers, which is exposure enough. They may be unable to re-enter "normal" life, or self-medicate, or collapse. Or, they may have the tools and resources to keep going until they retire; it's variable.

 

When war, school shootings, insurrections, and corruption overshadow our lives, and an upcoming election, we must re-engage, re-imagine, and strengthen our fundamental human and humane values, be they religious, or secular.

 

This post is dedicated to all the civilians in war zones who have been killed, or are struggling to survive.

 

 

…man, as Thomas Mann says, is a confused creature. And he becomes even more confused, we may add, when he is subjected to extreme tensions…

 

 

-Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve

 

 

 

I never understood why my mother didn't want to own Chanel #5. It was a comme il faut scent for every woman of the haut bourgeoisie when I was growing up. I envied girl friends who ransacked their mothers' stash and wore Chanel #5 to parties. Comme il faut, I coveted a bottle of my own for my 16th birthday. But it was not to be. Like much else in my growing up years in a community of refugees, explanations were limited, or non-existent. After a while, I knew to leave my elders alone especially when the dismissive, "Why do you ask?" signaled an end to the conversation. Until my first year of college when I matured into defiance, I could not answer the—why do you ask?—show stopper.  Defiance was considered  disrespectful  in my family. The punishment was a pained silence, a silence that inflamed my curiosity and my imagination. Thus is a writer and reporter born, though that took many more years of education and experience.

 

My mother died before I could ask her about her boycott of Chanel # 5 and it was only recently when I watched  the Netflix biopic about Coco Chanel, Coco Avant Chanel, that I understood: Coco was a Nazi collaborator. Why my mother chose not to reveal her legitimate disdain for Coco Chanel I do not fully understand. Certainly she knew enough about her by the time I requested that lux bottle of perfume. So, I will hypothesize about my mother's silence on this particular boycott: Dynamic, fast-paced assimilation, similar to my parents' choice of the most American names possible for their children and the epidemic of nose jobs during my high school years suggested to me as I "came of age." I didn't succumb. My resemblance to the bas reliefs of Akhenaten gave me pleasure and intrigued me more recently when a cousin invested in DNA sampling and it came back "North African." 

 

But what does any of this matter when the question "Are you Jewish?" is thrown at me unexpectedly. I know that the stranger who has dared to ask is thinking about the tragic war in the Middle East, as am I, every day. How will it end? When will it end? "Why do you ask if I am Jewish?" I might say if I have mustered enough courage, as I often am wary when someone asks. Has the stranger conflated Israeli with Jew, and Israeli with American secular Jew in particular? Is the stranger antisemitic, responding solely to my elongated North African face? Do they think I can solve the war? That I have taken a side? That I am a diplomat or a seer? To maintain my zone of safety, I answer the question about my identity, ethnicity or religion (take your pick) with the strange inversion of what my parents said to me: "Why do you ask?" Or, with emphasis, "Why do you ask?"

 

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering… Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

 

-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

 

…His thoughts were unjust and inhumanely cruel…and all the way home he despised them until his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.

 

-Anton Chekhov, Enemies

 

 

 

Over the weekend I read my students' manuscripts, walked and talked with good friends, began reading Beverly Gage's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J Edgar Hoover, Emma Goldman's autobiography, and Chekhov's short story, Enemies, cooked fresh vegetables into a stir fry, checked my email on my phone, skimmed the newspaper, and tried to stay off social media. I went out for a late lunch with my husband on Sunday and watched him feed the sparrows pieces of his bagel as gently as St. Augustine in that beautiful painting by Botticelli, though I might have made this up as I can't find the painting. No matter. What I want to convey here is the silence and peace that descended upon us as the sparrows flew away with their bounty, the air cooled, and the sun slipped over the Minnewaska Ridge.

 

Late, one of the weekend days, an offer came in from the New York Review of Books— $ 10 for 10 issues, print and digital—and  I could not resist. Before the weekend was over I  had read Jonathan Shulman's essay about what Israel must do to remain a viable, safe nation-state, and Aryeh Neir's essay about war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Neir is the internationally revered co-founder of Human Rights Watch and if he is contemplating changing his mind about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, so am I. He waited a long time before he used the word genocide to explain the Hamas instigated disaster, and the Israeli response. War crimes, certainly, even ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as the messianic settlers continue their nefarious actions. But this bombing of Gaza—hospitals, tent cities, schools, children—genocide loud and clear, Neir has decided. What made him change his mind was the refusal of the Israelis to permit humanitarian aid from entering the strip, famine weaponized, a breach of well-established international humanitarian law.

 

So, there it is: genocide. It's not easy for American descendants of pogroms and the Holocaust to acknowledge atrocities perpetrated by the Israelis. But they/we must.

 

If only I was a diplomat negotiating in a velvet curtained room, I might be able to remain calm and "objective."  But I cannot. I have Israeli family, Palestinian friends. I embrace them all.  I weep as I write, I work for peace.

 

 

For definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide:

 

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

 

 

 

 

To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune.

To elect him yourself was a disgrace.          

   -Samuel Adams

 

 The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution."   

― Benjamin Rush

 

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."

    ― Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

The man approached me while I was on the elliptical. We had talked once before, but I'd hesitated giving him my card. My intuition told me not to do that, something about the insinuation of his body between the machines as he approached me, though I'd asked him not to disturb me while I am working out. Now he was doing it again. Someone had told him I am a journalist, or maybe I had. And he had a question. "When I'm done with my workout," I said firmly.

 

It's a small gym in a small town and I carry my professional profile with care. I get occasional phone calls informing me of local government corruption, or a story about an undocumented worker who has been harassed. "Off or on the record what you say to me stays with me," I always say. Trust is important, not only to get the story, but because it is important to me personally as a reporter. I abide by the NY Times ethics rules, clearly stated below every reporter's bio.

 

The man was doing his weight work in another part of the gym. I could have left without seeking him out, but decided to keep my promise. We took off our headsets and he began to talk frantically. He is distressed by all he has been reading—the degradation of the environment, wars, the dysfunction in Washington. "And why aren't reporters reporting?" he asked. The question didn't make sense. Hadn't he just told me what he'd been reading about? Then I understood: he hadn't been reading, he'd been scrolling on social media, His "stories," were just sound-bite headlines. "That's not reading," I said.

 

Now I had a job to do, and it wasn't reporting: I took out a pen and paper from my backpack and created an instant reading list for him. He calmed down and thanked me.

 

Am I any less fearful these days than this semi-literate man? Does my knowledge base protect me from feeling out of control and despairing? Absolutely. But the despair resides in me, and everyone I know, like an undertow. The only antidote for me is more reading, thinking, engaging in civil discourse, and writing.

 

Recently, I've returned to the colonial history I read at university as an American History minor, and to contemporary updates that realign the historical narrative to include the genocide of First Peoples and enslavement—egregious omissions in textbooks when I was young. This week I am reading a recent biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush by Stephen Fried. It has renewed my hope that the American "experiment" will continue apace. Raised Quaker in Philadelphia, Rush was an abolitionist, or became one as his education deepened, he traveled abroad to medical school, and  returned to America to participate in the declarations of independence and the revolutionary war.  Many of his student notebooks are available at the University of Pennsylvania library; some have been digitalized. Rush kept common books throughout his life which read more like reporters' journals, with doodles and sketches all over them. A constant student, eager and attentive, any educator would have enjoyed Rush's presence in a classroom. And if he were alive today and I could interview him, what would he say? Perhaps this:  It is not a time to relinquish hope or abstain from the struggle of an electoral emergency.

 

Doctors have always been considered non-combatants on the battlefield, tending to the wounded on both sides, as did Dr. Rush.  They step up when others opt out. They have courage, and we must have courage also. Our body politic, our citizens--all of us--are wounded. We must work to heal. Liberty lost is not easily retrieved.

 

 

Who can imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right?

 

         -George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

 

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it…

 

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

 

 

Sometimes a memoir writer can be a rascal or rapscallion, as the Brits would say, the prose pithy, the plot a romp like Catcher in the Rye,  the tone wry, until a moment arrives—and it is always unexpected—when the action stops and the reader has to either close the book to catch her breath, or return to the sentences that have made her lose her breath, sentences such as these from William Yukikazu Fellenberg's Sayonara Cowboy:

 

"Whether or not it is true is irrelevant. I accept it as part of my mother's world of the kami, the ancestor spirits who inform events that swirl into the future. She tilts my chin, so my face turns up to hers. The salt spray spumes to the heights of where we stand. Before pieces of the ocean land on your lips, you know it is delicious."

 

I met William Yukikazu (Bill) Fellenberg in a writing workshop at a local library soon after I arrived in the Mid-Hudson Valley. He read aloud from his memoir and I was intrigued. We then met for a coffee and chatted about writing and the writing life. It was obvious that Bill had been writing for a long time, had the drive to tell his unusual story, and the discipline to bring a book to completion. Nonetheless, it took him ten years to finish. Born in Yokohama, Japan during the American occupation, his mother, Sachiko, was a Japanese "shopgirl," his dad, William, a soldier in the occupation army. He brought them to America and Bill grew up in New Jersey, mostly with his paternal grandparents. He learned English quickly. "During our first spring and summer with my grandparents in Millington, my voice found words and arranged them in the American way, all by itself," he writes, understating his supple adaptation. He developed a likable, albeit mischievous persona, got into and out of trouble, loved his grandparents and was loved by them with a protective intensity, more so whenever his too young and inexperienced father wandered away, returned, and wandered away again. 

 

His mother never could adjust to life in America, and had a breakdown, it seems. Eventually, after much struggle and suffering, a decision was made: she must return to Japan. At just 8-years-old, but wise for his years, Bill was given the choice and decided to stay with his father. He felt guilt, the way a boy feels guilt, when he lied to his mother about his wish to return to Japan with her. The most heartrending passage in the book takes place on a ship in the New York harbor as Sachiko is about to sail away, leaving her husband and son behind forever.  The son writes: "Back then, I could not grasp why she left and why I stayed. Did she abandon me, or did I abandon her?" That was a child's thought. As an adult, in conversation, Bill uses the word "deserted" to describe his mother's departure.

 

"Have you ever been to Japan?" I asked him during a recent Zoom conversation.

 

"I have not and I have some regrets. I may do a pilgrimage with my son, who my wife and I adopted from Korea, and his wife, born in China."

 

At one point, a friend with Japanese connections offered to help Bill search for his mother, but to no avail. Despite this sadness and trauma--a disappearance without return--Bill retained his optimism and found  the courage to write about his complicated and challenging childhood with a strong and authentic voice. It's a book I could not put down and read in two sittings.

 

For more information visit

 

 

https://tinyurl.com/SayonaraCowboy