Three Silences

I.
My mother, Gela Baser, was born in 1924 in the Polish village of Raków, near Lodz. When the Nazis came, in September 1939, she was 15. After countless regulations and humiliations, all Jews were ordered to congregate in the town square. My mother’s family – mother, father and five children, relatives, friends -- instead escaped to the forest. They hid there for some time in a group of around 20.

Among the group hiding in the forest were a girl and her boyfriend. The girl became pregnant and, when it came time to give birth, she needed a warm, safe place, not the woods. A man from the town was found who had a room they could use – for a steep price. When the time came, the young woman and her boyfriend carefully went into town to the room where she would give birth. The man betrayed them. The girl was murdered. Her boyfriend was badly wounded, but he was able to eventually sneak away back to the woods.

As soon as he was better, my mother said, the young man went back into the town and managed to kill the man who betrayed them, knowing that he himself would immediately be killed, which he was.

Eventually, the entire group in the woods, except for my mother and one sister, was discovered by local louts who first robbed and then murdered their former neighbors. Neighbors. People they knew. After many months of hiding, my mother and her sister got fake papers and, managing to get recruited as Polish slave laborers, were shipped off to Germany.

The chance of their true identity being discovered in Germany was less than in Poland, where any slip of the tongue, or a familiar face, could give them away.

In Germany, my mother had to remember never to say her real name, or betray any sign that she was not a Polish Catholic. She learned not to speak at all, even in her sleep.

II.
After the war, she went to live in Brussels as a displaced person. She met and married my father, an American Jewish soldier, and came to live in Southern California. In the small town of Santa Barbara, where my father was born and where they settled, my mother carefully constructed a new identity. She was a quiet, sweet young woman who never, ever spoke about her past. She was shy about her accent and her difficulty in writing English.

In the beginning, when people asked what had happened during the war, she told them something of her experiences. But the response was invariably, “That can’t be true!” So she simply stopped talking. Because she never referenced her past and there were no other survivors in the town, she managed to suppress that part of herself for more than 20 years, until one day it finally had to come out.

Five years after the war, she gave birth to me in a clean and modern Southern California 1950s hospital. She was put to sleep for the birth. She was told not to breastfeed because her milk was “sour.” Or at least, that’s what she told me.

III.
Then, around 1995, she began to talk. She would tell me episodes, like the one about the pregnant girl and her boyfrind, endless terrible stories, as we took long walks together. She would suddenly turn to me and blurt out a terrifying story, and then get back to walking and admiring the scenery. She told her story, or stories, to Steven Spielberg’s documentation crew for many hours. A cousin recorded her on videotape. I made an installation that broke her into five images, talking about those years on five monitors. And she began to speak at a local college, although it was terribly painful for her. Her eloquence was unbelievable, especially for a woman who left school in the eighth grade. She wrote her story down, but never did anything with it.

And in 2008, my vibrant, healthy mother had a stroke that robbed her of her language and her balance. No matter how many hours she spends at her laptop, practicing on speech therapy software over and over again, her vocabulary is limited to a dozen words. She cannot speak or write. My peaceable father, who promised he would kill anyone who ever would harm her, to this day protects her, both of them halt and lame but with tremendous dignity intact.

As you can imagine, I wish I could hear my mother tell a story, even a horrific one with my ears and soul screaming for mercy. I wish she could tell me, but she can’t.

Killing the Messenger - Juliano Mer-Khamis and Mark Weil, z"l

In September 2007, Uzbeki theater director Mark Weil was murdered. Two days ago in Jenin, Israeli-Palestinean theater director and actor Juliano Mer-Khamis was murdered. Shockingly, theater is so important a political force that its creators must be murdered to stop their ideas from being seen.

Juliano Mer-Khamis, who described himself as "100% Jewish and 100% Palestinean," was the son of a Jewish Israeli mother and Palestinean Christian father. Both parents were radical activists. Juliano's 2004 documentary, "Arna's Children," which showed his mother's work with children in Jenin before the second intifada, won many international awards at film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival. His own Freedom Theater, created in 2006, drew threats for offering co-educational programming, among other innovations. Juliano was shot point blank by a group of armed men. He was 55 years old.

Weil, also 55 at the time of his death, was Jewish and Uzbeki. He founded his Ilikhom ("Inspiration") Theater in 1976, and its productions were seen around the world. Prior to his murder Mark Weil, like Juliano Mer-Khamis, had received threats about the content of plays. He was stabbed and beaten to death on the eve of a new theatre season. (For an interesting history of Weil's legacy, see http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004268079_ilkhom090.html)

We who live in freedom can barely imagine why anyone would murder, of all things, a theater director -- the theater being the poorest and least popular of popular entertainments. But if one thinks back to the heyday of the Bush administration -- when the media were agog with "Shock and Awe" and "embedded" reporters rode with American troops into Baghdad, when torture and corruption flourished and all protest went unreported -- one place you could go for a strong dose of the unvarnished truth was the theater.

Theater doesn't have to be broadcast, it doesn't require permission or publication, it doesn't need state support -- it can be a public voice for unpopular opinions.

Both Mer-Khamis and Weil flouted those who would control thought and speech in their communities. So far, the murderes and their motives remain unidentified, so we cannot know for sure why or by whom these artists' voices -- delicate, strong, humorous, creative, wise, honest and courageous -- were stilled.

Carmine to the Core

Sitting here, watching the cardinals come to feed, it amazes me that the male never appears unless preceded by his mate. If I see three females, with their bright orange beaks, I can be sure three brilliant scarlet males will soon appear. In fact, birds are the only animal group that raises its offspring in pairs. “Pairwise parenting is rare in mammals, insects, crustaceans, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, although it occurs sporadically in all of them... It is common only in birds," says Bernd Heinrich, author of "The Nesting Season," reviewed in Audobon magazine.

This brings to mind the Dalai Lama's talk at Radio City this past year, in which he spoke of compassion and unending love as a quality of mothers. (He also cited himself as being "the first feminist Dalai Lama," adding that the world would be a better place if women were its leaders.)

As an example of motherly compassion, he spoke about the golden geese he used to watch as a child at the Potala Palace. The goslings would fall from their nests high up in the palace walls (or perhaps they were pushed out of the nest by their mamas) and be set upon by raptors. He would gather up the fallen babies in a basket and take them to another monastery, some miles away, where they were safer. He said the mothers would always follow him, flying and waddling the whole, long way, while the fathers would drop in for a while and then scatter. All species have this one thing in common, he said: knowing a mother's love.

Recommended reading: Aside from all of Roberto Bolano (all Bolano, all the time) and of course Proust, a story in the Atlantic by T.C. Boyle, "The Silence," [theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/08/the-silence/8040/]  and an interview in the Paris Review with Michel Houellebecq  [theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq]. The exceptional and prickly Houellebecq (whom I haven't yet read) is himself an exception to the rule suggested above, of maternal love. Ahh, it doesn't pay to generalize.

Finding Time Again

My intrepid book club of four stalwart women has been reading Proust for over a year now. While our other members have fallen away for one reason or another (some aghast at what we've undertaken), the four of us have moved steadily through the volumes of "In Search of Lost Time," sometimes with difficulty, always with admiration for this incredible writer and his accomplishment.

After reading volume one, "Swann's Way," we decided to go on to volume two. And then we couldn't quit. We aren't all in the same place or even the same volume, but that's part of the beauty of the series: It repeats its themes over and over, so it doesn't really matter where you are.

When I went to purchase volume four, "Sodom and Gomorrah," the bookstore clerk congratulated me. Most people quit after the first or second volume, he said. Volumes five and six of the Penguin Classics series aren't even available in the US.

I'm now embarking on the final volume, "Finding Time Again" -- and "embark" does describe the lilting, meandering journey, as if over an ocean or a great body of water, that one takes with any one of the volumes.

In volume five's, "The Fugitive," Proust surprises readers with several surprising turns of event (which we didn't discuss in our group last month because some members were still reading "Sodom and Gomorrah"). In the beginning of volume six, Proust reflects on a journal by the Goncourts, pressed on him by a friend, that recounts a dinner at the Verdurin salon, a group "Marcel" has visited many times, and describes people Marcel has also socialized with and written about.

Proust/Marcel comments, wryly, that he doesn't have a good eye for detail, like the Goncourts. Ironic, because he notes in minute detail and at great length such dinner parties and the people who frequent them. Then he qualifies his statement: He isn't interested in exterior details; he's blind to such details. Instead, what he notes is the undercurrent that is particularly meaningful to his view of the world.

Which is why we love Proust. It isn't just the detail in his beautifully crafted and patiently spun out writing, but rather the reaching down to things beneath the surface, even things which, in their strangeness, we can't quite grasp (like his contrarian views on love).

Egging On the Writer

When critiquing a work in progress, it's important to heap on the praise, in addition to saying: 'I like this a lot; I like this less; this is confusing; good dialogue.' Because, while the writer will be grateful for your suggestions and honesty, most crucial is the unasked question: Is this a crock of baloney? To which the writer will usually reply ' yes' about his or her own work.

Then the writer will think: So and so gave me great suggestions but I've barely heard from him/her since. They must think my writing stinks, my play (novel, story, etc.) is so bad they've decided they can't bear to remain friends. They've seen who I really am: a fraud, a bad writer, a self-deluded, untalented, pathetic... And it's very hard to go back to the work without thinking: I haven't heard from so and so in a long time, in fact since they read my draft! Is it really so awful? Obviously, it is.

Whereas, critique plus praise (no matter how manufactured) helps the writer when s/he sits down to the unwieldy, awkward, horrible-seeming manuscript.

Praise is essential in all endeavors, unless one already possesses an incredibly resilient sense of confidence -- and these folks usually sing their own praises, and they usually aren't writers.