Summer Song

Where beauty is, you reside -
A gentle tug at the core of me.
Like a soft melody or a riffling river breeze
That impatient selfishness could deny.
Come lie with me at water's edge
And I will heal your valiant heart,
Mend the wound inflicted there
As the ripples lave the petrous shore.
I am as constant as the tides,
Well outside the tumult of your days and
Howling gales that punctuate your nights.
I will anchor you to shore
And be the quiescent port
Where you may lay down your head, for I -
I am home.

The Allegation

As long as I can remember, my father has told a story about me, of which I have not the faintest memory.  I was about three years old.  My dutiful father was taking me with him as he ran errands for my mother.  I was strapped safely into the back of his 1964 Nash Rambler Typhoon, his first new car.

My father had commenced to backing out of a blind driveway on Flatbush Avenue, a four-lane artery that bisects Brooklyn for several miles.  It is important to note that motorists treat – and have always treated – this thoroughfare with reckless abandon, careening across town like apes freed onto a banana plantation.  To combat the perils of this reverse maneuver, my father decided to ask me, his juvenile copilot, for assistance.

     “Are there any cars coming?” he asked, unable to see around the parked cars.

     I am said to have peered over the windowsills out onto the street, and said, “No.  No cars, Daddy.”  My father began to back out.  With superb dramatic timing, I finally continued, “Just a bus.”

     To which my father locked up the brakes and skidded sideways, just in time to avoid the B41 bus bearing down upon his beloved car. 

     Usually, anyone hearing the tale inquires about the practicality of asking a three-year-old for a traffic report.  If my mother is within earshot, she will undoubtedly shout above my father’s stuttered excuses, “That’s because he thinks you’re God!”

     Personally, I don’t believe a word of the story… 

The Erotic Holism of Audre Lorde: A Testament in Two Parts

I.

     The dictionary defines holism as “a theory that the universe and especially living nature is correctly seen in terms of interacting wholes that are more than the mere sum of elementary particles” (Merriam-Webster, 2003).    In reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, I am struck by her clearly holistic view of the erotic, and its function in women’s lives.  For Lorde, the erotic equals the “assertion of the life force of women” (Lorde, 1984), in its most comprehensive manifestation.  The erotic makes women whole.

     Without empty rhetoric or abstractions, Lorde makes quick work of explaining that, within “the context of male models of power” (Lorde, 1984), there can be no true feminine erotic reality.  Phallocentric discourse reduces the erotic to cheaply sexualized images.  Each woman is charged to look beyond the puritanical distortion that confines the erotic to the bedroom, where women can be “psychically milked” (Lorde, 1984) by men.  Freed from this confinement, women find the true depth and breadth of the erotic possible within themselves.  For Lorde, the erotic is not synonymous with its most predatory alteration in this society, pornography.  While the erotic is fulfillment, pornography is “the abuse of feeling” (Lorde, 1984).

      Erotic holism is a tall order to fill, a call to move “beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society” (Lorde, 1984).  This movement requires, before all else, we look within ourselves and to leave no stone unturned in discovering our passion.  In this pursuit, the aim is to find what makes one feel deeply about being, and the difference between one person’s passion for auto mechanics and another’s passion for poetry is not measured by quality.  They are both equal if within both the “erotic kernel” (Lorde, 1984) can be found.

This requires courage: the force of the erotic is daunting, especially in this society, where it has been fashioned into “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (Lorde, 1984).  Once our inner parameters have been explored, and we learn the height and scope of our own fervent possibility, our power is limitless.  Lorde asserts that once this fullness has been achieved, we can have a “celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors” (Lorde, 1984).

     Women thus empowered are truly free to connect with others and begin to regain the things that have been taken from them – “our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives” (Lorde, 1984).  There is a sharing with others on a more than casual level.  There is an opening up, a baring of the self, which is an existential holism.  The “dichotomy between the spiritual and the political” (Lorde, 1984), so villified by Lorde, can only be bridged when women who are self-aware and whole seek committee with one another, bearing their individual passions before them.

     In addition, Lorde has succeeded in reshaping a tired, overused feminist polemic: making the personal political.  She shuns an external locus of politics, preferring instead that “our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within” (Lorde, 1984).  Lorde nullifies political correctness.  There is no ideological, de facto imposition of “the truth”.  Instead, there is the idea that ethical guidance from the depth of one’s self motivates action - renewal of the self as well as a transformation of society.  Though the concept was developed by 1978, it foreshadows Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location”, creating a paradigm for modern feminism that suggests the meaning of women’s lives is rooted in the personal, as bounded and defined by cultural experience.

Lorde’s work suggests you must know yourself before you can know the world.  This holistic self-knowing assures that real change can occur, and not just the “shifting of characters in the same weary drama” (Lorde, 1984).

           

II.

     So, what does this mean to me, and why did I, who has little or no acumen or interest in politics, choose to handle Audre Lorde?  Well, as it turns out, Audre Lorde and her essay are a part of my evolution, both literally and figuratively.

     In late 1984, I became a student at Hunter College, almost by accident.  Friends who were part of the Lesbians Rising student group there pushed me into a writing class I didn’t want to take.  The teacher, they said, was phenomenal, intense, passionate, incredible.  The teacher was Audre Lorde.  I didn’t know who she was.  I had no inkling of her status.  I was singularly nonplussed at her zeal.  But, on some level, I knew enough to pay attention.

     As a matter of habit, I sat to Lorde’s left, watching her stalk across the terrain of the classroom, always challenging someone, usually gesturing wildly, often laughing.  I would be lying if I said I did not sit through her classes like some slack-jawed yokel, in awe of her power.  I would be lying if I said that when I read Sister, Outsider that semester, I understood it.  And I would also be lying if I said Audre Lorde liked my poetry.

     It was clear that she liked me – we often walked to the subway together, and I drove her home to Staten Island a few times.  But it was also absolutely clear that she thought my poetry needed divine intervention.  She spent the entire semester tough-loving me into authenticity.  

     Lorde called me on every weak and superficial verse, every obnoxious and erudite turn of phrase, sometimes not sparing my work from scathing invectives despite polite company.  It was the first time I had ever simultaneously loathed and venerated a person.  I was completely infatuated.   And I finally did write one good poem.

SHE & me

Dandelion days, Bosco nights

and searching her purse to find the magic nutshells

that turned my stubby little fingers red.

I played hide and seek with the laughter

lurking in the folds of her dress

and paddycake with the workwise hands

of the maid/cook/babysitter/mommy.

“Anything for my pumpkin”!”

Until the almost-ever-present

knitted-brow smirk told me

I was breaking laws I never knew

blasting off to the planet Teenager.

 During my stay, I was beckoned by memories

of Pine Sol and Chanel No. 5

and a voice teddy bear soft

beyond the new schoolmarmish cold.

I closed stinging red eyes to the stranger

searching for Mommy like a prospector

wading in the muck to find ore.

When the nugget surfaced, starshine from

her liquid amber eyes warmed me.

We hugged, nose to nose,

heart to heart.

                       

Lorde wrote a single word across the bottom of the page – “Beautiful!”     

Being in Lorde’s presence was like participating in my own autopsy.  A dark reference, but I certainly don’t mean it to be so.  You see, there was something about her words that prompted me to leave my disinterested, disconnected self behind and come to a new consciousness.   Lorde did not seek to reform me, she was simply the archetypal reagent in my self-transformation.

    Knowing what I now know, I can say that my twenty-year-old self had a brush with the erotic. 

(References excluded.)

Hit Bononut: An Italian Childhood Among the Hasidim

“There were voices --
Thunder and lightning and a long blast of the shofar;
The mountain was covered in clouds and smoke.
On that day,
We saw the voices.

When you see voices
You never forget it as long as you live.”

from “Standing at Sinai”

 ____________________________________________

25 Tamuz 5732

     “Well he’s bad, bad Leroy Brown…baddest man in the whole damn town!”

     I’m bouncing a little pink Spalding ball (hereabouts known as a spaldeen) against the flaking grey steps of our row house, singing my nearly eight-year-old lungs out.  Sweat is running little rivers down my back, but it’s too early to go in the pool yet.  I wonder if I can invite someone in today.

     My mother comes out on the porch, and I begin to ask her if I can ask Honey to come in.  Honey Weiner, whose real name is Channi (converted for the convenience of the goyim who can’t pronounce the glottal ch), lives next door.  She is ten.  I know she probably can’t come in, because she isn’t allowed to wear a bathing suit in public.  I want to ask anyway.   Maybe she’ll still come over to play. 

     “What are you up to?” my mother asks.  Before I can answer, there is a sickening crash followed by a harrowing scream from next door.  Mrs. Weiner, Honey’s mother, flies out onto her balcony, dragging Eliezer, Channi’s brother, behind her.  They are both holding a bloody towel to his meaty mess of a hand.

     “Vey is mire!  Oy vey!” she wailed.  Then she called out to my mother, “Margie!  Margie!”

     My mother runs down the porch steps, “What happened?  Oh my God!”           

“Mein gott, he fell through the window!  Please can you take us to the hospital?  My husband is not home…”

     “Okay, okay,” my mother runs back toward the house to get her keys.  “Come down.  I’ll take you.”

     We scramble into our olive-green 1972 Satellite Sebring.  The Weiners sit in the back.  Eliezer has not uttered a sound.   With his uninjured hand, he twirls his payos and looks fretfully out the back window.  Mrs. Weiner speaks to her son in Yiddish, and thanks my mother over and over at frequent intervals. 

     I am puzzled.  How does she know my mother’s name?  Do they ever talk?  What else do they know about us? 

Adult Hasidim, especially the men in their voluminous black coats and brimmed black hats, seem to look through me.  When I see them on the street, they don’t say hello, don’t make eye contact, just rush by. They look either sad or serious or angry (I can never tell).  But they know us!  Why do they not let us know them?

     Weeks after the incident, when Eliezer has recovered, Honey and her mother arrive at our doorstep with a token of thanks.  It is a dress and a doll for me.  I want to ask her if we can be friends.  I want to ask her about her school – I know it is Shulamith School for Girls because I read the words on the back of her jacket.   But I say nothing.

 

“Saying that one kind word will soften every

insult uttered on the face of the earth. Doing

that one good deed will nullify all the evil

in the universe. Because the world is one,

and you are the world.”

based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe,

 Menachem Mendel Schneerson

15 Tishrei 5735

     I hear the rhythm of reverent voices, low and sweet.  They echo in the stillness of the October night.  Flickering shadows creep along the corrugated plastic walls of the makeshift hut that take up the entire balcony outside the living room of Spitzers’ apartment.  I know the whole family is huddled in there, that they will finish singing their prayers and stay there all night.   I stand in the darkened street, and look up at the third floor, wondering.

     I know it is Shavuot (pronounced shavoowiss by the thick-tongued Italians in my neighborhood).  I want to know more.  I want to see what it feels like to know a kind, loving, and compassionate god who only demands of humans to be like him.  To spend hours performing mimes of ancestors’ actions, hands moving as theirs have moved,  thoughts flying as theirs have flown.  All the time sure that the delight of an awesome deity rests in your own capable hands.  All lessons lead to the moment of veneration, and those moments come often.  What parallel experience could my watered-down, ashes-and-palms Roman Catholicism possibly provide?  I know the answer before I can even articulate it: not a one.

While we are busy planning which houses we’ll egg and chalk at Halloween, the Hasidic families in our Brooklyn neighborhood are preparing to praise their God in thanks for the grain harvest.  I personally had never seen a grain harvest, except on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  But it is a living symbol to my Borough Park neighbors, who bear gratitude for the bounty of the Torah in their hearts.

Black-hatted men, cautiously-dressed women and hordes of children possess their shtetl - this neighborhood, eyes focused on something I can’t see, but want to.  There is something wise, something mysterious, something utterly other-worldly about these Lubavitch followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov.  It is in their midst I find the roots of my fascination with the divine and the mystical.  Their rituals, their gathering, their inviting the spirit of god daily into their midst impress the print of heaven on my soul.

“May songs of praise ever be upon your tongue
and your vision be on a straight path before you.
May your eyes shine with the light of holy words
and your face reflect the brightness of the heavens.
May your lips speak wisdom
and your fulfillment be in righteousness
even as you ever yearn to hear the words
of the Holy Ancient One of Old.”

from Talmud Berachot 17A

21 Iyyar 5738

      My face is buried in Thomas Tryon’s The Other.   I don’t so much read the words as devour them these days.  My mind is open and wants desperately to be filled with all the knowledge it can hold.  I have been sitting on the stoop since lunch, the warm spring sun on my face, reading. 

      My parents return from an afternoon function at church.  Uncle John and his friend, Jackie, are with them.  My parents head inside, and my uncle walks Jackie a few doors down the street to her apartment.    Once they have gone, the street becomes silent again.  I return to my reading.

Suddenly, I hear a single set of running feet, then a desperate voice shouts, “Gotteniu!  Help me!  Somebody!”  

My head snaps up.  I see Mr. Tischman, the jeweler who lives four houses up grappling for his jewelry case with a strange man.  My uncle sees the commotion and darts past, hurling his skinny body on top of the two men.  They all fall to the pavement, limbs flailing.

I jump to my feet and shout, “Daddy!  Daddy!”   My father has already heard the fracas.  He flies to the aid of Mr.Tischman and my uncle.  He leaps into the fray, and holds the man down.  All of them are yelling.  I can’t understand a word. 

A sea of black coats descend upon the scene like Caesar’s troops embarking on the Gauls.  Voices are voluble, hands gesticulate wildly.  There are at least four dozen angry Hassids, - pallid, unarmed and singularly fearless - clamoring to tear the thief limb from limb.  My father and uncle are lost in the swarm.  I am afraid they’ll be crushed, or worse – mistaken for the perpetrator. 

     Later, my father tells me, “This guy was trying to get up, and I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d leave him there alone.  And then they would kill him.”

Police from the 66^th Precinct show up and the mob evaporates.  They will materialize later at the stationhouse, demanding justice.  For now, things are quiet.  My mind turns the event over and over.  I know these people would have died helping Mr. Tischman.  They never hesitated for a moment.  Some of them do not even know him.

    I wish for myself – for my family – that kind of unbridled loyalty.

“When asked why his experiences during

the war had not embittered him, one

survivor said, I learned about friendship in

Auschwitz.  When I was cold, strangers

shielded me with their bodies from the

blowing winds, for they had nothing else

to offer but themselves.”

                                                                                    Arnost Lustig

15 Nisan 5740

     “Tell me you don’t think they’re freakin’ beautiful.”

I am sitting on my stoop.  My bespectacled, nihilist friend, Jeanne, sits beside me, a The Anarchist Cookbook open in her lap.  Jeanne sighs, looks up from her tome, and regards me seriously. 

“Yeah, maybe,” she allows.  “Hot, but very repressed.”

     “You think?”

“I know.”

     I continue to watch a gaggle of Hasidic women chat happily in the street.  They gather, as if their odd habit, in the middle of the street as if it is the most natural thing in the world to deter traffic.  Indeed, whenever a car cruises down our street, they step slowly aside, as if some other impetus compels them to do so.  Whether the car has to wait six or sixty seconds has no bearing on them. Their conversation is never interrupted.

I am focused on a woman of about eighteen.  She is a rare, wondrous jewel – blushing with health, full of vigor and life.  Her hair, thick and shining, cascades down her back in ringlets and curls.  Her emerald eyes shine with enthusiasm.  I know she must be intelligent – I fantasize that she is.  Years later, I will remember her comprehensively when Yentl’s Amy Irving portrays the young maiden, Hadass.

I don’t know why, but I know her name – Tova.  She is dressed in fine linen, a subdued mid-calf dress the color of wheat.  Her creamy skin is covered past the elbows. 

           

“Kovod bas melech p’nima­” – the glory of the

king’s daughter is within, our sages tell us. Tznius

is regal.  Tznius …allows her to externalize

fashions that suit her soul.  The soul requires

majesty.”

                                                                        from Around Sarah’s Table

                 

      She is my standard for feminine beauty.  This concept of tznius – Jewish modesty – has rides in my back pocket throughout my life.  Women of modesty, of self-respect, of sedate and refined nature draw me to them as a moth to flame.  I find an image of myself most clear when it is reflected in their eyes. 

Whenever I reach for a pen, the ink that flows describes women of this ilk.  There is always something quiet, something reserved and enigmatic about the female love interest of my protagonist.  She is always a shadow of Tova, a manifestation of gentle beauty I covet.  I cannot – I do not wish to – exterminate her.

                       

“Therefore, engage her first in conversation

that puts her heart and mind at ease and gladdens

her…Speak words which arouse her to passion,

union, love, desire and eros….Win her over with

words of graciousness and seductiveness…Hurry

not to arouse passion until her mood is ready.”

                                    

from The Epistle of Holiness

by Rabbi Moses benNahman

17 Av 5742

      “Moishe!  Moishe!”  Karl, our frenetic, overstressed neighbor, sticks his head out the living room window, and is calls to the third (and cutest) of his five sons.  Eleven-year-old Moishe, meanwhile, is bent gamely over his aged bicycle, trying to repair the chain for the tenth time at least. 

      “Yes, Tatte?” the boy responds, without looking up.

      “Moishe, it’s almost sundown.  Come daven Mincha.”

      “Okay, Tatte.”  He goes back to his bike.  Karl disappears into the window, not unlike a cuckoo into a clock.

      Minutes pass.  Moishe is covered in grease.  His yarmulke is askew, his clothes disheveled.  His tallit hangs dangerously close to the mess. The sun dips behind the peak of the house across the street.  Moishe works on.

The front door of their house flies open.  Karl appears.  I notice that the veins on his neck are pulsing.  I can tell he is trying to control himself, and failing miserably.  He growls, “Moishe!”

Moishe looks up this time, “Yes, Tatte?”

“We’re going to daven Mincha.   Come in now.”

“Okay, Tatte.” 

Karl disappears.  Moishe goes back to his bike.  He works more feverishly now.  I fold my arms, and lean against the fender of my Chevette.  I need to go in and eat, but this is too good to miss.

 The street is now more shadow than light.  Moshe moves to the basement steps, and looks at the bike from beneath – perhaps a new perspective will help.  His brother, Shia, walks out onto the porch and looks around.  He doesn’t see Moishe, so he goes inside to report to Karl.

Karl flies out onto the porch himself, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Moishe!”

Startled, Moishe answers, “Yes, Tatte?”

“Moishe, let me ask you a question,” Karl says calmly.

“Yes, Tatte?”

“Are you Jewish?”

Moishe looks confused, but answers quickly, “Yes.”

“Then come DAVEN!”

This time, Moishe follows him into the house, no doubt wondering whether tardiness to daven Mincha could result in excommunication. 

“The Jew has made a marvelous fight in this

world, in all the ages; and has done it with his

hands tied behind him.”

                                   Mark Twain

     I am the storyteller.  I wear a cloak woven with threads of the Brooklyn neighborhood that begat me.  I am the child raised by a village.  I retrace my steps, find my center, and feel it as much Hasidic as Italian.

     From my progenitors - my beloved family – I am blessed with strength, depth, wit, ardor and an innumerable host of intangible essentials.    This is my bountiful birthright.  By this, I am humbled.

From the Hasidic neighbors whose lives ebbed and flowed concurrent with mine - my chosen, personal precursors - I learned resiliency, selflessness, and awe for the divine.  This is a gift I did not deserve.  For this, I am grateful.

North Randolph in the Rain

I look out onto the rainy street beyond the porch railing.  It is silent.  The Saturday morning ballet of nattering neighbors and carousing kids is delayed by the soft rain pattering to the pavement.  The air is a wet wool blanket clinging to my shoulders.  I sit, shift restlessly, fight the impulse to tread barefoot in the morning drizzle.

 I watch Doug step out his door, quiet as a cat burglar.  He reaches out, palm up, feeling for the exact cadence of the raindrops.  He frowns, mustache drooping like a dejected blonde caterpillar.  There will be no golf this morning.  He tiptoes back in.

The windchime is tangled.  I lean cautiously over the railing, stretching to unsnarl the delicate strands.  Meanwhile, giant drops of water divebomb from the gutter’s edge and plunk me on the head.  I persist, and soon the chime peals gratefully at me, a lullabye sound. 

The motion has made ancient injuries smart.  Both heels are sore, and my hamstring is cranky.  Humidity seeps into crevices and corners of my muscles like a spelunker. I smile, remembering the double plays and the Brooklyn-Queens championships that left me the legacy of a complaining physique.  The weather won’t let me forget.   

Water is running in rivers beside the curb.  It flows around clumps of cottonwood pods with artistic agility, feigning left, going right, and finally continuing its descent to the storm drains at the foot of Hooker Avenue.  The motion moves the air.  The sweet locust scent and the chalky essence of asphalt ride the breeze. 

I consider the swamp maples, the stalwart old ladies of the hill.  Sturdy and mossy, they soar over the houses reaching toward the sky.  Their branches lay open, welcoming the gentle shower from above. 

Birds flit from branch to branch, too busy to notice the rain.  They study the mulberries, like rabbinical students poring over Talmud. They converse in another tongue, chattering insistently, but still I understand. 

I am a foreigner among the native life.  Nature maintains its rhythms when I cannot manage mine.  I wrestle with doubts that descend on my life like sudden downpours.  I question and fret and wonder and despair as if tomorrow will never come. 

            The leaves don’t know how much growing they should do until the rain tells them.   I sit back, and listen harder.