Carol Bergman

 

 

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.       

       

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

 

We're not going back.

 

-Vice President Kamala Harris

 

 

 

After I float out of the bardo and re-incarnate somewhere in Upstate NY deep in the majestic mountains, I'd like to return undercover as a man with a badge, a horse, wives and daughters to serve me, as needed, and entitlement up the kazoo. Let's flip The Handmaid's Tale, a fascist dystopia, which I am watching now for the first time—it's brilliant—and create a Handsome Man's Tale. Like June Osborne, Margaret Atwood's protagonist in the original novel, and again in the Hulu adaptation, I'm trying to keep my feminist shit together in the midst of virulent misogyny.

 

The charged, sexist language spewing out of the Trump campaign did not surface in a void; it is embedded in our culture, in our history, and in our literature. Trump is particularly adept at improvising tropes: a woman is nasty, or she is a bedbug, or not his type. In Richard Ford's masterful (note the male referent) 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, the protagonist Frank Bascombe, is lovable and clueless. He has no idea why he's not married any more even as he fantasizes a woman's "surrender." He feels so lonely late in the day after work that he drives up to the train station and watches the "Jewish lawyers" who work in DC debark.  Apart from their suits and briefcases, how did Ford's protagonist know they were lawyers, much less Jewish lawyers? "Jewish lawyers," is an antisemitic trope. Might as well throw in one of those, too, into this otherwise wonderful novel. And, yes, of course, Richard Ford's novels are still on my shelves, but only because I perform a sleight of hand and brain: This is the character's voice, not the author's. Or, Ford is a man of his time. He was born in Mississippi, after all. And so on.

 

Years after reading the Bascombe novels, I spotted Richard Ford in a restaurant and decided I'd ask him about the antisemitic trope. I tried to hold myself back from approaching him knowing I might not be able to speak up. I told myself that the famous author was enjoying his meal and his privacy. Nice try; I was enraged. I walked up to his table, and told him how much I enjoyed his books, which is also true. And that freeze, that holding back, was more than politeness; it was abnegation. The moment passed, he mumbled, "thank you," and I walked away, abject, a consequence of abnegation. Then I went home and wrote to his agent: "Is Mr. Ford aware of the antisemitic trope 'Jewish lawyer'?" No reply.

 

Sometimes it's easier—and safer—to stay silent, but surrender hurts, too; we have to resist.

 

Which is what I am doing today by writing this blog post.

 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts..

 

-Mark Twain

 

 

The van in the parking lot had Florida plates. It didn't look like any van I had ever seen. It was oversized, bulky and had a panel on the top that looked odd, like a tornado had dropped it there, which it might have done considering the tornado we had recently on the tail of Hurricane Debby. Compost dumped in the zero waste bin, and feeling righteous, I headed back to my car and spotted a woman surfacing from the side door. The van was mesmerizing and I kept on looking. The woman noticed my curiosity. "Want to have a look inside?" she asked. Then she slid the door completely open onto her living space, a miracle of engineering. It has everything—sleeping quarters, a cooking range, a compostable toilet, refrigerator, running water out of a tank—all of these accoutrements of living powered by the solar panels on the top. Solar panels! Even though the van uses gasoline to run @ 20 miles to the gallon, the solar panels power everything else. There are very few days that don't have enough sunshine to power-up apparently, Jan explained. That's good news for all of us in our climate-changed world, I thought. What a strange summer it has been—too much rain, not enough rain, early hurricanes, heat in June, too cool in August.

 

The woman was rosy-cheeked and and energetic for what turned out to be her 70 years, which she admitted to frankly in an unsolicited offering. I didn't share my age, never do, but she didn't seem to mind and kept on talking as she shook my hand and I shook hers. "Name's Jan Whitman," she said. "I travel up from Florida in the summer and visit friends and family all over the Hudson Valley." As the former Director of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley and the Founder and Former Board President of the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center in Kingston NY, Jan has many friends and former colleagues to see. And though she settled in Florida in retirement, the van keeps her moving, connecting and exploring in the spring and summer months. Though I have traveled a lot and lived on two continents, I was envious of the nomadic life, crossing state lines with ease, and attempting a regional dialect and outlook other than my own. How grand it would be for all of us to enlarge our worlds and learn more about our fascinating diverse country, not from an airplane, but from the ground. Our little corner of the earth would expand exponentially.

 

By definition, our homes and nation-states are circumscribed, our villages, and towns too insular and tribal these days. The village I live in, embedded in a town, was the site of Dutch, English and French Huguenot enslavers. It's still nearly all white. This was a shock when I first arrived here from the city in 2018. The signage in front of the historic houses didn't provide any clues. Much has changed recently, most notably the founding of the Margaret Wade Lewis Black Cultural Center. Slow but sure the board of the center presses onward with their programming and the renovation of a donated building.

 

I wondered if Jan was aware of the progress in New Paltz since she left for Florida. I didn't ask as I was already planning an article about her for the local paper. I knew they'd be interested in how she'd converted the van. "I had it done by a dedicated custom builder," she said. Sad to say, the last one in in my area, Vantastics, has gone out of business. But, for those interested, any local artisan who specializes in woodwork could do most of the interior work. Different contractors would be necessary to complete electrical wiring and  install the solar panels. Total cost: approximately $50,000. Considering the price tag on homes these days, conversion vans are a bargain. Many aficionados are doing the conversions themselves; there are several "how to" You Tube channels. And Facebook has numerous sites. "Van Life for Senior Women," for example, is replete with suggestions. It has 23k followers which leads to the conclusion that the itinerant life is more than a fad, it's a way of life, which is heartening indeed. Might local municipalities house their homeless in such vans, I wonder? Would that contribute to solving our affordable housing crisis?

 

Not long ago, I ran into a descendant of a Munsee-Esopus band of First Americans. He was driving a truck filled with farming gear and the paraphernalia of daily living, including a tent which he pitched in the fields of the farms where he had been hired to work. Not a migrant worker, an American, who continued to lead the nomadic life of his forbears, following the seasons or, in modern terms, seasonal work. His family was waiting for him back on the reservation. The dollars he accumulated through his labor would see them through the winter.

 

Enough counting.
You have no home
except this breeze.

 

-from "Breeze" by Najwan Darwish

Translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

 

You look at the tree which grows,
without stopping, in the warmth
of your gaze

 

-from  "Four Poems"  by Israel Eliraz

Translated from Hebrew by Liat Simon

 

 

 

The books in translation discussion group at the Gardiner Library was tackling Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul; Memories of a City when I realized that I could not completely visualize the geography of the city despite Pamuk's vivid descriptions, nor could I grasp the cultural references or the particular familial traditions on a first reading. It was like roaming through a fun house, the mirrors distorted and the entrances and exits hidden. By all accounts the book is well translated by Maureen Freely who spent some of her childhood in Istanbul, has worked closely with Orhan over the years, and was supportive of him when he was persecuted and then put on trial for daring to suggest that the Turks committed genocide in Armenia. He was acquitted, but the experience unmoored his emotional connection to Istanbul; all the photos in the book are in black and white, bleached of color. Indeed, many translators remind us that translation is not only a matter of words, or even sentences, but of understanding a whole culture—its politics and history—and  immersing the reader in that culture, thus enlarging the concentric circles of our identity and encouraging curiosity of a larger world.

 

I first learned the theory of concentric circles in college when I read Gordon Allport's classic study in social psychology, The Nature of Prejudice. The outermost rim of the circle is "mankind," the smallest dot in the center is our solipsistic world. Beyond the domain of that comforting, small self-contained world, everyone is a foreigner or stranger. The challenge of education, its moral imperative, is to enlarge the concentric circles of our students. With book bans disrupting libraries and schools, and angry school board meetings, this is a formidable challenge. So, too, the proliferation of social media, tropes and bullying of school-aged children and beyond. It is one thing to encounter a stereotype in a Wharton or a Hemingway novel—the authors long dead and from a less self-aware era—quite  another to see sometimes nuanced statements, or blatant stereotypes about Jews,  Blacks and LGBTQ people on Facebook in 2024, or to hear "From the River to the Sea," from  the Palestinians, the Israelis, the demonstrators—and  their supporters—who, I would posit, barely understand its underlying crass hostility and ultimate uselessness. This is a nuclear-armed world where we must all live together in peace or self-destruct. The same holds true for Palestinians and Israelis; they must find a way to survive and thrive side by side.

 

As an academic by inclination and training, my heart swells with anticipation at the beginning of every school year.  I am hopeful that the November 5th election will both energize and calm our college campuses, our schools, our boards of education, the wars overseas, and ourselves. But we must continue to speak out when it is appropriate, or necessary, and not fear ignorant defamatory smears, tropes, or threats of violence. 

 

This post is dedicated to the innocent citizens of Israel and Palestine who have worked hand-in-hand for peace over the years. May all those who have been killed in the October 7 massacre and the genocidal bombing in Gaza RIP, and the peacemakers continue their efforts with even deeper intention.

 

 

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.

 

- Pankaj Mishra,  London Review of Books, 3/21/24, "The Shoah After Gaza"

 

 

Reading or listening to the news most mornings—national or international—is a Gothic experience, Gothic as in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, his eye the eye of a vulture, bodies falling upon dead bodies and pulling them to pieces. Except that the eyes in the 21st century are the eyes of weaponry, man-made, and lethal, from the sky or on the ground as screeching protestors flee live bullets.

 

I am writing on August 5th and tomorrow is the anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki on the 9th. As I have written before on this blog, I have a family connection to the after effects of these nuclear aerial bombardments. My husband's uncle, Norman Cousins, the founder and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature  brought 12 "Hiroshima Maidens" to New York for reconstructive surgery. He and his wife adopted one of them:

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/norman-cousins-peacemaker-atomic-age

 

As the American military brass descends on Israel, we await further escalations in the Middle East. Our beating hearts skip a beat. At least there's writing, a struggle for understanding, I tell myself. Writing as a form of activism. When we speak and when we speak out, when we speak civilly to one another, when we listen to suffering, our hearts settle, our pain eases.

 

Who among us has the best solution? I do not. Who can turn away from the atrocities in Gaza? No one. Too many. All of us. None of us. Some of us some of the time. Not turning away, even that could be the beginning of an awareness of our culpability, how we arrived at conflagrations and invasions in 2024. To have empathy for the injured on the ground, for the innocent children, for the search through the rubble of pulverized bombed out homes, whether it's Ukraine, Sudan or Gaza, or Israel, that is something, too. To donate to relief organizations, also worthy. But to ask the question what is wrong with us? And where do we go from here? And how can we heal from the atrocities and inequities we have inflicted upon ourselves and others ? And to remind one another that it is our taxes that pay for the military-industrial complex and a variety of despots in the world.

 

I have known soldiers, drone pilots and relief workers who have returned from wars. Many cannot sleep, they cannot eat, they cannot ever make love again, they drink too much. Once upon a time  they were babies mewling and puking in their mother's arms, and then, suddenly, they were trained to be killing machines or doctors pouring blood into veins after a battle. Brave soldiers, heroic soldiers, patriotic soldiers, home from the seemingly unending wars, and suffering.

 

Though it's Monday, I'm writing a sermon, it seems, albeit an areligious one. Does it fly? Make sense? Heal your broken heart, and mine?