December 24, 2023
In bed at 10, up at 3:30. Let Lilly out into the cloudy, damp 42° morning, high today is forecast as 47°, 13° above average, hazy conditions expected much of the afternoon, wind SE at 4 mph, 2-13/25. Sunrise at 7:21, sunset at 4:21, 8+59.
Treadmill; pain. No significant pain from 3:30 till noon. 30:12 &0.60, while watching Democracy Now on YouTube: an interview of Masha Gessen on the controversy surrounding her essay in The New Yorker "In the Shadow of the Holocaust," her receiving the Hannah Arendt Award from the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the withdrawal by the City of Bremen, Germany, and its university of site for the presentation of the award. Gessen's article described the similarities between what happened in Gaza before and after October 7th and the isolation and then liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.
I'm grateful for my wife, especially at Christmastime. I'm grateful that she reminds me so much of the other two women in my life who have meant so much to me, my mother and my sister. In my early morning, pre-dawn conversations with my sister, I would only half-jokingly refer to the two of them as Sts. Mary and Kitty of Emerald Avenue, or of Englewood. So now I live with St. Geri of Oak Park. Each of them was/is so incredibly strong, and so good, and their strength and goodness were especially visible at Christmastime.
I don't remember much of Christmases when I was a little boy. I was 10 days shy of my 4th birthday when Japan finally surrendered and WWII ended. Three months later, my father returned from the war, wrecked. I don't remember much of those Christmases in the late 40s and early 50s except that we always observed them. There was always a tree with presents under it on Christmas Eve when we opened them. What I do remember is that my father was an emotional and spiritual wreck during those years. He had survived the brutality of the Marine Corps and the carnage on Iwo Jima, but barely. He had no joy in living, even at, and perhaps especially at Christmas. After the war in which millions of humans had killed millions of humans, he knew better than to believe all that "Joy to the world" and "God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay' stuff. That my sister and I could still get excited every Christmas was attributable entirely to my mother who believed in the Christmas story, in the Church, and in God. Like a mother hen, she protected Kitty and me from the dark place where my father's spirit dwelled. We had no money during most of the time we lived in our 3-room basement apartment. My father couldn't hold onto a job and our only reliable income came from my mother's job as a waitress, relying mostly on tips. There was no bank account, checking or savings. We paid our bills with money orders bought at the neighborhood 'currency exchange' on Halsted Street. When I was old enough, my mother would give me the cash and I would purchase the money orders and bring them back to her. She bought our clothes through Dave Fein, a 'factor' or middleman, a door-to-door, human credit card. We sometimes didn't have enough cash for food, and I would be sent to Mr. Kelly's little grocery store on 73rd Street to get what we needed for lunch and dinner on credit. He 'kept a tab' for us and when money became available, we paid the tab. But there was always a tree and always presents on Christmas and somehow, in those very hard days, my mother managed to keep our spirits up, singing "Jingle Bells," "Santa Claus is coming to town," and our favorite "Silent Night." My Uncle Jim, God rest his soul, gave me my first bicycle one Christmas, a green J. C. Higgins, from Montgomery Ward But for my sister and me, it was our mother who was our hero, our guardian angel, our saint.
My sister Kitty followed in her footsteps. She too was a mother hen to her son and daughter. Thankfully their father was not the wreck our father had been but he admits to leaving all the child-rearing to Kitty. My mother worked as a waitress most of our childhood; Kitty worked as a cleaning lady for elderly clients in Phoenix's West Valley. Most of her elderly clients became her friends and came to rely on her for much more than cleaning services. She got to know some of her clients' children who resided in other states and became the person those children would call to check on their parents. She helped their parents as they dealt with cognitive decline and dementia. She belonged to St. Raphel Parish and for many years was a leader in the parish's St. Vincent de Paul program, distributing money and food to people in need. Her husband Jim would make the rounds with her, personally delivering bags of food. I 'made the rounds' with her at least once during a visit. As Christmas approached each year, Kitty managed an "Adopt a Family' program that matched families that needed help providing Christmas presents for their children with families that wanted to help. Each year, Kitty spent countless hours on the telephone with each of the families, obtaining lists of what the children wanted and what they needed, including exact sizes for clothing gifts, and passing the information on to the families who went out and purchased the gifts and wrapped them. Kitty and Jim delivered them and one year, during one of my visits, I helped with the deliveries. Every month, she traveled to downtown Phoenix to work in the kitchen at AndrƩ House, a ministry to the homeless, preparing and serving hot meals to hundreds of men and women living on the streets or in shelters. She was a wonderful human being, a Christian in the Matthew 25: 31-46 sense of the word, and like her mother, a hero and a saint.
Even with all her commitments as 'the cleaning lady,' as the linchpin of the Adopt a Family program, and as a leader in SVDP, she made a big deal of Christmas in her home, decorating the house and hosting a big family holiday meal. She had a large collection of Hummel Christmas tree ornaments that she had acquired over the years and, toward the end of her life, she was concerned about what would become of the little porcelains after she was gone. Neither of her children wanted them and she offered them to Sarah, her niece and goddaughter, and was thrilled when Sarah accepted them. Getting them to Germany turned out to be quite a project but the exchange was successful and the Hummels stayed in the family, as Kitty had hoped. Sarah kindly gave three of them to us.
My wife, too, is an inspiration to me, especially at Christmas. I admire her strength and her goodness. I omit listing most examples here out of respect for her sense of privacy and her modesty, but I can at least make mention that she shares the mother-hen qualities of my mother and sister. Her solicitude for her sons, her attention to their health and well-being and to their education as they were growing up has continued to the present day. Each of them loves her deeply and she deserves it. She has maintained many lifelong friendships, some going back 60 years, others 'merely' many decades. Her friends are scattered from Dublin, Ireland to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Illinois, but they keep in touch by telephone and some come to Wisconsin and stay in our home to be near her and share time with her. She often visits another friend in Milwaukee who is suffering from a serious illness and another recently widowed. When her brother was widowed and alone in a distant state and dealing with age-related challenges, she wrote him a long, detailed, heartfelt letter inviting him to come to live near us and when he did, she cared for him for almost 4 years until he moved to be closer to his daughter and son-in-law. In earlier years she volunteered at the Milwaukee Literacy Center, teaching others to read, and as a volunteer ombudsman at a nursing home. She spent years working as a mediator and investigator for the Family Court in Jefferson County, doing all that she could to ensure the welfare of children in divorce cases. She is a good and wise person and it is no surprise that her children, her friends, and I seek her counsel as we move through life. I omit much from this note only because of respect for her sense of privacy which is more refined than mine but I assert that she shares much of the strength and goodness that my mother and my sister had and that though I am unworthy of each and all of them, I am grateful.
Geri and I have shared 36 Christmases and for 35 of them, she has assembled her Little Village under our Christmas tree, a tiny but elaborate collection of miniature buildings and accessories spread out on a bed of cotton snow. Putting it all together is quite a construction project, accomplished by Geri lying on the floor and working under the tree. This year, as Geri has completed her recovery from a recent case of covid but now is enduring a nasty cold, there is no Little Village. I miss it but I'm glad Geri didn't jeopardize her health re-constructing it.
Tom Friedman on Gaza in this morning's NYT. Excerpts:
It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love/
It is time for the Biden administration to give Israel more than just gentle nudges about how it would be kind of, sort of nice if Israel could fight this war in Gaza without killing thousands of civilians.
It’s time for the U.S. to stop wasting time searching for the perfect U.N. cease-fire resolution on Gaza.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel that its war’s aim of wiping Hamas off the face of the earth is not going to be achieved — at least not at a cost that the U.S. or the world will tolerate, or that Israel should want.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel how to declare victory in Gaza and go home, because right now the Israeli prime minister is utterly useless as a leader: He is — unbelievably — prioritizing his own electoral needs over the interests of Israelis, not to mention the interests of Israel’s best friend, President Biden.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel to put the following offer on the table to Hamas: total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, in return for all the Israeli hostages and a permanent cease-fire under international supervision, including U.S., NATO and Arab observers. And no exchange of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
It sounds good to me though I doubt that there is anything that Israel and the U.S. can do to regain the respect of the civilized world. There is too much innocent blood on each nation's hands.
Masha Gessen: In the Shadow of the Holocaust in the New Yorker:
For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Ellis has a fever and pink eye and is contagious until tomorrow. Lyn will stay at home with her tonight, Maribeth canceled because Lyn won't be able to drive her home. Dinner tonight will be David, Sharon, Geri, and me. Correction! Sharon didn't want to leave Lyn alone on Christmas Eve so (1) she and David came over for hors d'oevres; (2) Sharon drove back to their house with containers of tenderloin, mashed potatoes, and asparagus for her and Lyn and then' (3) we all connected on Zoom to eat dinner together, just remotely, after which (4) we all watched Ellis leave her sick bed to open her Christmas presents from Nona after which (5) Sharon drove back to our house to pick up David and pieces of Geri's cherry pie and pumpkin pie to take back to their house to enjoy with Lyn. Life in the 2020s with modern technology.
