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.