Carol Bergman

 

 

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.