Diminishing Observance

   When I was a kid in Heidelberg we walked across the Neckar to Sabbath services because it was forbidden to ride on Sabbath. While I’m not very knowledgeable about my mother’s kitchen, I do know that she treated meat to what I take to be the prescribed three-hour bath in salt water. We also had separate dishes for Passover. We didn’t count ourselves among orthodox Jews (nor would they have included us), but in our practices we were not all that far from what today is called modern orthodox.

   During my teens, I was a faithful member of the synagogue choir, if not very aware of the institutional implications of that. My interest was mainly musical, but the context was entirely religious. My father would have loved me to become a rabbi, though there never was a chance of that.

   When I married Fannia—100% Jewish, but brought up ignorant of Jewish traditions—that made me take a lead, primarily during major holidays.

   While I had intellectual interests in Judaism from my late teens on my Jewish identification became primarily what a friend sensibly called tribal and above all political. I note when someone I read about is Jewish and never miss checking on that topic when reading—faithfully—NYTimes obituaries. I “give credit” to Hitler for that insistence to always identify myself as Jewish.

   But as for recent practice, it has waned away. Still, my two grandchildren, Max and Eva, were Bar and Bat Mitzvah. When in a recent phone call with Eva I said that there are plenty of non-observant Jews, just don’t forget that you are Jewish, she laughed and said she understood.

   And I have arranged to be buried with Fannia in a grave we bought in a Jewish cemetery—which probably contains more relatives of mine than any other on the globe. That should make up for neglect in prior years.

Jamie Bernstein

Jamie Bernstein, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir  of Growing Up Bernstein

   I finished reading this memoir by Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. It is a most interesting book—and well-written to boot—and by no means limited to that “Famous Father.” Indeed, in the latter half of the book the canvas becomes very broad and had me continuing to read without skimming. I can certainly recommend this volume, though I won’t prod my reader further by actually writing a review.

   I want to make one observation that I find pretty unusual. Before the book’s index is a section entitled “Acknowledgements.” What’s unusual about so normal a suffix is that it thanks by name 162 persons (if I counted correctly), most of them identified by descriptive phrases. I’m a lot older than Jamie Bernstein, but I couldn’t remotely match that feat.

August 12

Today am exactly ninety-one and a half years old--ignoring geography and time differences around the globe.

Got Away

  The point I want to make now is really stated, if implicitly, in preceding posts. My life spans a good part of the 20^th century. That was hardly a peaceful period. Yet I seem mostly to have been fortunate in escaping from or avoiding its negative depths. Timing (by whom?), luck (how come?).

I hope that my children and grandchildren will be as fortunate.

Germany in World War II

Ordinary German Lives During World War II

   When I returned to Heidelberg after graduating from college I had a brief conversation with a fairly young man staying in the same hotel. When he found out that I had left Germany early in 1939, he said that I was lucky not to have been in Germany during the subsequent period of war. I said nothing but thought it was nervy of him to make that comment, since it was German anti-Semitism that had us emigrate.

   I still think that, but what I have been reading makes it utterly clear that we were lucky to have been out of Germany during that war. The book is Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch. While it went well for a period, the war subsequently imposed a great deal of suffering on those ordinary Germans. Not surprising, given a long stretch of time that Germany continued the war after it was assured that they would lose it.

Avoiding War

   My recent reading about Germany during the two world wars made me conscious of the fact that during a century of many years of war, neither my father nor I was ever involved in fighting, though both of us spent time in uniform. Sheer luck.

   My father was born in Germany in 1896, old enough to be a soldier in World War I and indeed was drafted into the German army. Instead of being involved in fighting, however, the only “action” he saw was a stint in the German occupation of Russia after the war had ended on this German Eastern front. I have a picture of my father and a group of German enlisted men playing chess in a tent in Russia.

   In 1939, I emigrated with my family to the United States, arriving in March, before the start of World War II with the German invasion of Poland. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, my father was 45 years  old, beyond drafting age.

   Born in 1927, I was then14 years old, not yet subject to the draft. And when that time came—in February 1945—I was deferred  for the few months I needed to graduate from high school. But that July, 1945, I joined the US Navy. (How I thus avoided the more usual stint in the army is another story.)

   The war was then still on. In Europe it had ended on May 8, 1945, after Hiroshima, the war in the Pacific concluded on August 15.

   With the war over, the terms of those of us who had been drafted changed (I forget the details) and while much propaganda was lavished on us to sign up to continue to do battle in the Korean War, it was possible to get out. Which I did.     

Obama's White House

The World as It Is: a Memoir of the Obama White House

   I’m done with Ben Rhodes’s book, more correctly entitled than as a narrative solely about Obama. Rhodes was himself an actor during a period lasting nearly a decade, as advisor and, above all, speech writer. But Obama does sit at the center  of the account and if I had to choose one word to characterize him, I would pick thoughtful.

   That term is prompted particularly to distinguish Obama from his very unthoughtful and improbable successor as US president, Donald Trump. While Rhodes makes only infrequent statements of evaluation, he depicts a person of high ability and character, as one who is likely to be picked by future historian as one of America’s best presidents. While I don’t do book reviews. I recommend the Rhodes book to anyone interested in the subject.

Obama and Trump

   Having done with my reading about Hitler and, for that matter, about Germany, at least for the time being, I’m back in the US and in the middle of Ben Rhodes’s book on the Obama White House. It is interesting, if not transcendently so, for two reasons. The subjective one: little is truly new to me if in no way as clear and detailed in my mind as on those pages. Call the second “objective,” because the events recounted are coherent, sensible, logical—some version of “rational.”

   Coherent (or whatever) in contrast to Washington during the presidency of Donald Trump. Does that matter? Alas, it does. If Trump’s words and deeds were genial, one might follow his jumps, in awe because surprising or in awe because truly smart. But they tend to be neither; call it muddled mediocrity. Again, alas.

Hitler

   I just finished reading Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss by Laurence Rees. The fact that some of the account was familiar didn’t reduce its novelty, since the story is told with the focus on Germany. It’s a good book and convincing.

   For most of his career, Hitler’s power is effectively unlimited. Some years ago I was asked to name the most influential 20^thcentury personages. Einstein was easy, but Hitler who was the second, was not. But there is no question about his remarkable effectiveness. I think that Rees makes it easy for himself by trotting out “charisma” periodically. Does that really explain much of anything? More analysis of the German response is called for—probably to be found in dozens of books I won’t read

   I saw Hitler once, riding in an open car on the highway that went through Heidelberg—at a moderate speed, not racing. That was not all that long before we left Germany in early 1939.

Bad News

I follow the news and I don’t like it. The next years don’t at all look good. Then I ask, “Does it matter for me?” And conclude that it probably does not for me and most of my family, who are in positions not likely—but not surely—to be affected by these goings-on. Except Mark who has the misfortune of living in the real world. I greatly hope he escapes from the effects of reality.   

Born and Living in Germany until the Age of Twelve: a Brief Account

    I am now reading Laurence Rees’s recent book, Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss. While much of the account is familiar from prior reading, there is also a good deal that is new to me, especially details—people, specific events. It’s a well-crafted book, even if the author reminds us more often than needed that such and such a whatever is a function of Hitler’s charisma. That doesn’t explain as much as Mr. Rees believes. But reading that book has reminded me of my own life in Germany and is now prompting me to set down, in brief, what I remember of those years.

   I was born in Heidelberg in 1927 and my guess is that relevant recollections of mine start when I was about six years old. While that was the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, I was of course not aware of that. I do remember my first-grade teacher, Fräulein Sonnenschein, whom I probably also had in second grade, if I’m right in recalling Herr Müller as my teacher in the third. During the earliest of these years I also played with kids in our neighborhood, though that recollection is very fuzzy.

   Then things changed very radically, in conformity with the anti-Jewish legislation of 1935, the so-called Nürnberg Laws. The neighborhood kids no longer played with us and all Jewish kids were kicked out from German public schools. At first that lead to a segregated Jewish class within a public school building. I reached it by bicycle since it was on the other side of the Neckar from our house in Neuenheim. But soon that stage followed by the establishment of a small Jewish school, housed in a building on the Bunsenstraße belonging to a Jewish organization the name of which I can’t conjure up. Our main teacher was Herr Durlacher who had lost his job as a Jewish public school teacher, but we also had a couple of Jewish teachers who had been dismissed from Gymnasium jobs and didn’t quite what to do with little kids like us.

   During those same years we had religious instruction from Lehrer Jacob and quite faithfully observed Jewish holidays. While that didn’t go so far as to prohibit us from turning lights on and off on the Sabbath, it required us to walk to services at the synagogue in the Old City across the river, since riding was forbidden on Shabbat and some holidays.

   This all ended on November 9, Kristallnacht. My father had been advised to stay out of the house in the hope that things would soon return to normal. But he decided to stay in our apartment. They came for him early in the evening; “they” being very polite officers of the Heidelberg police. Their advice was to take a warm coat, since he was headed for Dachau, the concentration camp, much colder because more elevated.                                                                  

   He got out in January, haggard, but not physically injured. We had been fortunate to have a low number for appearing at the American consulate in Stuttgart and that’s where we went to get our visa to the US. For me, age 11, the most remarkable fact was seeing someone writing with his left hand.

   Back in Heidelberg, the furnishings that were going to New York were being loaded into “Lifts” (forerunners of containers), with each item that left the house being checked off as being on the permitted to-go list as it was leaving the house.

   My 12^th birthday was recognized if not exactly celebrated before we left for the train that would take us out of Germany. When the Rheingold got to the Dutch border, the passengers were ordered to get out on the platform to be checked. A dignified older gentleman in our car spoke up, “Aber nicht die Leute mit Kinder!” (But [surely] not the people with children), so we had our papers checked in the car. After a while the train took off and we were in Holland, out of Germany. 

      

_

The Effect of Trump

What’s Good About Trump

   In my view, Donald Trump is a vile person. I don’t know enough history to say that he is the worst president that has ever sat in the White House, but he is certainly at the very bottom—by far—of those who have held that office in my lifetime.

   If that is so, what’s so good? Not anything that he did or said. I remain puzzled about how Trump got elected. My grasp of the views and motives of my fellow citizens is insufficient for me to understand how they could vote for him. Had he run against another red-blooded American man he surely would not now sit in that White House. But there he is: I ask again, what’s good about that?  The answer: the reaction of the American public.

   To be sure, it helped a lot that Trump was made responsible for serious offenses to children. That my fellow citizens will not accept. So, it’s a mixed bag. That’s surely the best kind now available.

Who Trump Is

Trump’s Cruelty and the Crying Children of ICE Detainees

Donald Trump is not wrong or misguided (etc.); he is a vile person. Face it, we have a vile person as president.  I applaud when, as now, his behavior is offensive to a large number of Americans. The more that happens, the less he is looked upon as the president of the United States. The office will survive this decline; not, I hope, the current incumbent.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-cruelty-and-the-crying-children?mbid=nl_Daily%20061918&CNDID=40407924&spMailingID=13720689&spUserID=MTMzMTg0NzczMDY3S0&spJobID=1421733816&spReportId=MTQyMTczMzgxNgS2

Now Lincoln

   Herewith another brief report on my reading. I suspended my reading of Slezkine’s big Russian volume, as too detailed for the patience I could muster at this time and have now made a good start on a very different narrative, Dan Abrams’ Lincolns’ Last Trial. While Lincoln has been on the scene from the beginning, I have not yet reached the point where he moves to the center of the stage. The account from the start has been interesting. It’s about a murder and it’s made utterly clear as to who killed whom and why. So I much look forward to read of Lincoln’s role.

   The account is so interesting in good part because it is very detailed. Very. I have done no research on this event, but I do wonder how so amazingly much—and detailed—information was  actually passed on.

The Past Recedes

      It’s about six years that I’ve lived in Mexico, my third country of residence. To be sure, it’s very likely to be the shortest. Moreover, I am retired here and pretty removed from the hurly-burly of this capital city. My main people are my daughter, Ellie (whose main job is that of principal clarinet with the Sinfonica Nacional), Miguel, her husband (who is much in Queretaro where he is principal oboe in the orchestra) and their friends, quite a few of whom speak English. Max and Eva, the two grandchildren have been mostly away, with the former just graduated from RISD (and soon off for a job in the States); while Eva is very busy in her second year in the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. I see Max and Eva when they are home on vacation. Finally, there is Antonia, the young and very competent household assistant (for want of a better word) with whom I do not share a language.

   Now you know the people I’m with on a day to day basis, a most harmonious group. I’ve never been much of a phone person, so I add little traffic to that contraption. The main and only regular phone partner is my son Mark in Los Angeles.

   You have just gotten a picture of the people who make up my world, appropriately reduced commensurate to my age. What happens when I make an attempt to broaden this circle of contacts with acquaintances? Basically nothing: nada, niente, rien, garnichts.

   Granted my attempts were neither inventive nor vigorous. Emails sent off to past acquaintances were mostly not answered, though there were exceptions. I blame no one, since I have hardly been Mister Gregarious in my life  and now harvest what I have sown. I can’t say that if I could roll it over again, I’d want to change much of anything. Not having regrets about the past is a better sleeping potion than any drug.

Flops?

  I’ve never been good at abbreviations, puzzled when everybody else got it. Clearly MY problem, whatever its undiagnosed cause. But lately I’ve come across quite a few cases where expecting the general reader to get it is something of a stretch. Writers in the world of journalism have come to count on an “in” audience of which I am not a member.  I may be in a minority, but I am far from alone. Look at an example.

“Although impressive, Summit can be seen as a placeholder. Supercomputers that are five times faster — 1,000 petaflops, or an exaflop — are in the works, both abroad and in the United States.”

   Are we supposed to know what those “flops” are? From where? In the past, the world caught up with the experts. No doubt it will again; but it hasn’t yet.

Conducting

I just finished reading Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting by John Mauceri. Even though the author has had a long, varied, and distinguished career as a conductor and actor in the world of music, I must confess that I had never heard of him. My loss, no doubt, especially if his music-making is as competent as his writing. If you are interested in conducting, are coversant with “classical” music, though, like me, not an expert, this is a good book to pick up; a Kindel version is available from Amazon.

How Today’s Sex-Related Behavior is Distinguished from that of Other Times

   How sex is expressed or dealt with varies considerably from one time and place to another. I am sure that a huge number of books have been written on the subject—all unread by me. If some historian to more of them have already characterized and described that entire scene in contemporary U.S. I haven’t seen it, but I have read enough to have in idea as to some of the goings-on that will be among its ingredients. So herewith some traits that should appear in a characterization of the current scene. Call the forthcoming some remarks for an historian of current sex-related behavior.

     Perhaps the most notable trait is that women are speaking up. Not very long ago they suffered or gloated in silence, leaving it to a few mostly educated women to speak and write for a much larger number. What they are speaking about is what men do to them that is unwanted—from “mere”talk to rape. Men can no longer rely on a response that is limited to suffering in silence.

   In some ways the behavior of men is similar: they are speaking up; about their wrongful treatment of women in their  past. Nor are these reports limited to confessions; there seem to be plenty of third-person reports about male sexual transgressions.

   So far I have pointed to talk—talk you hear now of which you heard little until recently. But there are also actions. Organizations are getting rid of people with recently revealed dubious records. Levine is no longer at the Met: an amazing jump from Before to After. There’s much more to be said, but I leave that to you.

Language

Burgundy may be fucked. The northern Rhone Valley is partly fucked,

Though many of the great vineyards face away from the sun. The southern

 Rhone is completely fucked.

   The above is a quotation from an article about wine in a recent New Yorker. There are at least two comments to be made about the language used.

   First, that the word “fucked” is to be found in the New Yorker. This is year 2018; I would bet that that would not have been the case as recently as three years ago. The word would have been on a proscribed list, as it probably still is for many publications. Since the New Yorker is a style setter, its use of the word is, call it liberating.

   The meaning here of “fucked” is not what it was—for an eternity—before a fairly recent shift. I’m a member of that earlier cohort and don’t use the word—out of habit, not squeamishness. It then referred to sexual action. No more.

   “Fucked” now means “screwed up.” To be sure that formulation also needs an explanation.

   Next time---maybe.

Obama's Audacity of Hope

   I’m now well in Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. While it is personal, for want of a better term, it is not autobiographical, like his first. The first part is a good presentation by a professor of constitutional law, covering familiar and unfamiliar territory. What comes next is best called a discussion of politics, though not always of a day-to-day sort. It is interesting enough to hold my attention, though it doesn’t evoke comments. 

May 16, 2018

Today

is my parents' ninety-second wedding anniversary. 

Rudy

More Obama

   I’m done with Obama’s immensely interesting Dreams from my Father. I’m not surprised that it spent quite some time on the best sellers’ list. As usual, no review from me, just a comment. Many, many pages, after an account of the earliest years of his life, are incredibly detailed, with a huge cast of characters with accounts of what they did and said. Either the author has a phenomenal memory or he had taken notes about his life for many years. Impressive, in either case. I’ve now conjured his second book into my kindle, but am somewhat doubtful that it will be as interesting as the first. But as I said before: we will see.

Obama

Obama Bio

   I found a “sample” on my Kindle of Obama’s Dreams from My Father and, after starting to read it, promptly conjured the entire book into that for me indispensable device. I’m nowhere done (he’s still in his teens) but I’ve much enjoyed reading it and am learning a lot. Obama  has an unobtrusive style, but it is a style. He wrote the book when he was thirty-three years old and you are made aware that you are reading the  words of someone real, but of course not of a future president. But the combination: of teenage Obama and President Obama is certainly plausible.

On Bitcoin

  I’ve been catching up on NYReview articles, since the mail delivered several issues at once. That led me to “Bitcoin Mania” by Sue Halpern who is identified mostly by a forthcoming novel. It’s quite a long article and I read every bit of it. And while it makes use of a few unfamiliar Fachwörter, the piece is composed in perfectly readable English.

   But I hardly understood any bit of it.  (It’s actually quite a strange experience to read a quite long article in my own language without “getting” any of it.)

   Let me give you a sample which, I assure you, is representative:

Once the validating cryptograhic puzzle for the latest block before and after it by its unique hash, and                       the block and its hash are posted to all the other computers that were attempting to solve the puzzle.

   I have two questions. How many readers of this piece will actually get much beyond its opening? And, more puzzling, how did it get into the NYReview. I hope this is not a sign of things to come under the editorship of Mr. Buruma.

Serenade

   In the late 1950’s Fannia and I were living in New York and tended to go regularly to the ballet. I was not and have never become a true ballet fan (a balletomaniac), but we certainly became fans of Balanchine and went often to see his ballets.

   The subject comes up, because in a fairly recent issue of the NYReview appears a long article on his Serenade. I mostly don’t read about ballet, but I read this piece by Jennifer Homans from beginning to end, surprised all the way through, how her account evoked my recollections of the Tchaikovsky score.

Trump's Passivity

Trump’s (Yes) Passivity

   I’m puzzled about an aspect of President Trump’s behavior, while in another part of my mind I recognize that it is not at all problematic, but wholly in character. I explain.

   Every day, my news-reading fare includes a number of pieces that are either critical of Trump, are sarcastic about him, or otherwise make fun of him. His popularity with the press—at least the chunk that I read—is as the butt of accounts of great variety.

   Well, he’s not the first in the negative eyesight of vox populi, but he may be among the rare who do not “fight back” in response of repeated “attacks.”  

   The question: is he silent because shielded by his staff from his treatment by the larger world—and hence ignorant of their reactions—or because he doesn’t give a damn. I’m no fan of Trump, but I still hope it’s the latter.   

Reading about Newton

Isaac Newton

   I’ve subscribed to the New York Review of Books since it came into existence during a New York Times strike many long years ago. I don’t think there were many issues that I read from cover to cover (I’ve long since stopped following fiction and poetry was never one of my arts), but I have read substantial chunks of most copies that came into my house.

   But recently I have become aware of a curious fact. While many an article has led me to books I then read, that was often not because the review itself, but rather because my attention was drawn to it by appearing in a NYReview article without there actually being much referred to. The NYReview article alerted me to the book’s existence, but frequently it took checking out a more conventional review to get me to read it. I wonder whether the editors of the NYReview are aware of this role they play.

  These long-winded reflections now led me to conjure into my Kindle a long and very scholarly-sounding book about Isaac Newton that should take me well beyond the foundations of modern science—if I find the determination to stick to it all the way through. Nous verrons

More on Age

Symptoms of Age, II

      A peculiar symptom of age—at least that’s what I think it is—is my sporadic thinking in German. This takes place mostly at night during fairly frequent period of lying awake. While I make up little speeches in my first language, I mostly recite—mentally, not out loud—the beginnings of a number of children’s songs. (The beginnings only because I don’t remember more lines than that, if I ever knew them.)

   I have not much used German in recent years and while it is completely fluent and unsullied by an English accent, it has the shrunken vocabulary of a teenager. Mind you, that’s not where my German got stuck. I wrote a doctoral dissertation—and my first book—based entirely on German sources; but that “learned” vocabulary did not enter into my daily (so to speak) use of German.

   By way of comment about the above, I think I may correctly call myself bilingual. But that does not mean—and probably seldom if ever does—that that “bi-“ means sameness of the two languages referred to.   

Needed: Historians

The Necessity of History, as Practiced by Historians

   During  the last few days I read Hillary Clinton’s latest book, What Happened. Then I turned to John Bridges’ Everybody Knows What Happened. The first is centered on Clinton’s account of her campaign for the presidency, while the Bridges book (he is Dr. Bridges on the title page) is a most critical account of that theme, betraying his support for Bernie Sanders. I could not have gotten through either book without generous (to me!) skipping.

   I am not noting these facts on my blog to give an account of either of these books; they are inexpensively available on Kindle.  I mention them as evidence for the title over these paragraphs. Bridges’ sources are mostly newspaper articles—giving away his orientation by the citing several times the Washington Times (look it up) and Ms. Clinton has both the advantage and handicap of speaking for herself. It’s all very provisional or, if you like, preliminary. Whoever lives long enough will begin to hear from historians.

Symptoms of Age

   A while back I casually mentioned to a friend that I feel like listing some of the symptoms of aging other than diseases or allergies acquired in old age. That is, not symptoms requiring a doctor to list and describe, but some that are aware of by the aged person.

   Well OK, but I’m not going to make this a project aiming at some sense of completeness—though I am sure that could be found on the internet, which I won’t bother to consult. So I’ll start with two.

   The first is obvious, that is noticeable by all: much increased wobbliness on my feet. Not very long ago I took long vigorous walks. Alas, that’s no longer the case. My leg muscles still seem in good shape and my brain seems to send out the signal: stride vigorously. No dice: vigorous it ain’t. Someone out there might have a more illuminating account, but I call it a symptom of relatively advanced age.

   The second age symptom with which I want to start this (possible) series pertains to hair—and I am thinking particularly of hair on the body—on the arms and legs and the bushier pubic growth. All that hair has gotten markedly finer than it had been. I attribute this—quite ignorantly, to be sure—to the fact that it has lost its original color—brown—and become call it transparent. Anyway, I take that fuzz to be a symptom of age.