Category Archives: Reflections

Reflections

Three questions have fascinated me most in the years I’ve been exploring what happened in Amsterdam in 1940-45: what did people do at that time about the dilemmas they faced? what would I have done? and what does that mean I must do now? The Reflections here will be a place for me to wrestle with these questions, probably just by asking even more. According to Dutch writer Remco Campert, whose father wrote the iconic poem of the Dutch resistance, says, “Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins. And then ask that very question to someone else.”

Fortunately, “Reflections” is a broad enough title that it will give me a space to share anything else that I hope will be of interest to other readers and writers.

The Cut Out Girl: A Hidden Jewish Child and Her Rescuers

The ineptly titled “The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found” by Bart van Es is foremost the gripping and complex story of a Jewish girl hidden in plain sight in the bosom of the author’s grandparents’ family. Over her story is laid the equally complicated tale of this host family, and how little the author knows of what happened among them under the Nazi occupation. In the course of the book, the “cut out girl” Lien de Jong and the author Bart form a collaboration and friendship, and we see how the story is pieced together. Their conversations in her Amsterdam apartment interlace his journeys to her hiding places and various archives and experts. The two come to understand, at least to some extent, how the rift between Lien and the people who helped to save her could have happened in the 1980s.

Bart de Es does an admirable job of evoking moments, in a breathless, present tense style that shows how the potatoes are served at the family table, or how a ball rolls into the woods. He tells the reader that he has embellished the fragments Lien provides in their extended conversations, stirring in just enough egg to hold the dough of her memories together, and checking with her for accuracy. Although he left the Netherlands for England when he was only three years old, de Es spent many summers there and has a real feeling for the landscape, which he conveys in detail. However, he learns that it is actually full of hidden secrets which come closer and closer to his own people.

As background to the personal stories, de Es provides compact, well researched (although not footnoted) accounts of key events that will influence the fates of the characters: his speculation about why 75% of Dutch Jews were rounded up and murdered, the bombing of the countryside and the “bridge too far,” how the survivors were treated when they emerged from hiding or the camps, and more. Occasionally, the reader is in the same numbed and disoriented state Lien is experiencing, unsure what age she is, which village we are in, who that character is, and what’s happening in the bigger picture. But de Es usually gets the balance right, painting the background in with just enough strokes to make it visible. His lengthy descriptions of photographs sometimes feel excessive, but he nearly always points out details that all but the most studious reader would miss. Most are reproduced at such a small size that a glass would be needed to see what de Es has noticed.

Like any book on this theme, there are heart-wrenching moments, and they are never overplayed. I will never forget the letter Lien’s mother writes to the family who will hide her daughter. de Es gets it just right when he speaks of the tone of “measured sacrifice” as she expresses the wish that her hidden daughter think of her new family as her parents, and turn to them for comfort in “the moments of sadness that will come to her”. Although Lien’s mother closes with the wish that they will all be reunited one day, she is making other provisions.

Although skimpy in recounting his own emotional reactions – undoubtedly better than overdoing it as most American writers might have done – de Es deserves great credit for recounting Lien’s feelings in a way that seems accurate and honest to her. That shows particular bravery in the case of the sexual abuse she was subjected to, including inappropriate attention from the author’s grandmother. de Es finally is struck by the thunderbolt of connection between her life and his – not only the link with his grandparents who sheltered her, but between his biography and hers. Grappling with a rebellious teenaged daughter, he recognizes Lien’s “free fall” at the same age, and sees his strict grandmother in himself. He also discovers much more, which changes his view of his childhood and perhaps the Dutch identity: “My sense of the one village in the Netherlands that I thought I knew has changed.”

As someone who spent 13 years researching and writing about this place and time to produce An Address in Amsterdam, I empathized with de Es’s poignant question “What could I add?” as he scrutinized the piles of books about World War II. But add he has, at least in the English language. This book gives us an intricate picture of the “before, during and after” for a hidden child and those who both helped and hindered her. “The Cut Out Girl” records the profound damage to all the survivors (hidden, Jewish and others), and is a tribute to resilience and the ability to throw lines of connection across the wounds.

The Echoes of Kristallnacht

Synagogue in flames

Kristallnacht is significant because it was a moment of warning about what was to come. What appeared to be individual violence carried out by thugs was specifically sanctioned and incited by the state. What happened that night of November 9-10, 1938? As always, there was an excuse.

Thousands of Polish Jews had been expelled from Germany, and an enraged Jewish teenager shot a German diplomat as a result. The diplomat died about the same time as a big Nazi celebration, and Goebbels used the occasion to call for a rampage – but not officially. “The Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” This was both a call and a license to vandalize Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The word was passed down from party officials and the Security Police to their local outlets. Although the Nazis later tried to maintain the fiction that these events happened locally, it’s clear that they were orchestrated from Berlin.

The numbers tell one part of the story of the night of November 9-10: 91 people dead, 267 synagogues desecrated or destroyed, some of them burning through the night in full view of fire departments which were ordered to watch unless nearby buildings were threatened. More than 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted. But that’s only part of the story.

Kristallnacht was the moment when the German state first arrested people only because they were Jewish. They took 30,000 Jewish men, mostly young and vigorous per the orders from above, shipped them off to work and concentration camps. (The men below were marched through the streets and forced to watch as a synagogue burned.) Some died of the camp conditions, but many were released when they agreed to immigrate.

Men arrested during Kristallnacht

That’s where Kristallnacht and my own life’s work intersect. Kristallnacht sounded a warning that German Jews could not ignore. The Netherlands had been neutral in World War I, and there was a longstanding, well integrated Jewish community there. After Kristallnacht, it’s not surprising that more than 40,000 German Jews applied for a visa to enter the Netherlands, but only 7,000 got one, and even they were put in camps. In desperation, 2,000 more refugees snuck in, and at least the Dutch didn’t send them back, although they did incarcerate them. Is this an echo of the situation of refugees who try to enter the U.S. today? We’ll come back to that point.

Unfortunately, most of the German Jews who made it into the Netherlands were rounded up and murdered. Volumes have been written about how and why the Holocaust could have happened in as open and tolerant a society as the Netherlands. One factor was surely the superior systems the Dutch developed to identify who lived where, in an orderly population register which made it easy to check whether an identity card was genuine or not. It also greatly facilitated roundups by showing where the Jewish people were living. The Holocaust was also facilitated by the fact that the Dutch were and are traditionally a law-abiding people who basically trusted their government. There was no tradition of resistance there, as there was in countries like Belgium, France and Italy. Many other factors have been explored in response to the question, “How could the Holocaust happen in the Netherlands – and to such a devastating degree?”

Whatever scholars may differ about, the collusion of ordinary people was an absolutely key factor. Many minded their own business and tried to keep life going on as normally as they could, activities which would have been benign in a different time, but in this time made them colluders with the Nazis.

women in front of store with smashed windows Kristallnacht

Looking at the situation instead from the Dutch Jewish point of view, it seems strange that most of them simply did not believe that they would lose their homes, their businesses and professions, their freedom of movement and ultimately their lives. We cannot underestimate how safe they felt. Let’s hear from Dr. Jacob Presser on this point. Dr. Presser was a Jewish historian who himself survived the war by hiding, and he spent 12 years researching and writing the classic volume Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Here’s how he depicts the mood of his Jewish countrymen at the beginning of 1942:

“Many pinned their hopes on the likelihood of Germany eventually losing the war, and consoled themselves with the knowledge that, however bad their position, it could have been much worse. Moreover, few Jews believed that the Germans would carry their policy to the limit. True, there had been raids and hundreds had died, but, thank God, most Dutch Jews had been allowed to remain in their old homes. True also, the Germans had sounded the ugly word of ’emigration,’ but had they not prefixed the comforting adjective ‘voluntary’ – and was the measure not directed at foreign rather than Dutch Jews?” That gives us a sense of why only about one Jewish person in seven hid.

woman emerging from underground hiding place

We’ve all heard of the Dutch resistance and revered it. Having studied it for 13 years as I researched and wrote An Address in Amsterdam, I honor what those people did, in fear of their lives – especially those who had the double jeopardy of being Jewish. That’s why I chose to write about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance. But as much as we honor those resisters, we can never forget how few they were. Yes, historians say 24-25,000, and I think we can double that safely if we include people who only helped occasionally. But even so, we aren’t up to ONE PERCENT in a country of 8.7 million.

No one can review this history without a sense of apprehension. Yet there are so many differences between our situation now, and that in Germany or the Netherlands under the Nazis.

We live in a constitutional democracy
Our press is still speaking up to some extent
Violence against persecuted groups is still sporadic and occasional, and
We do have elections so we can correct the course.

And yet – who among us has not wondered

Are we sliding down the slope from civilization to barbarism? Because it is a slope, not a single moment of choice.
Is the American Jewish community not, like those in Germany and the Netherlands, deeply integrated into society at large? Yet the fact of assimilation did not protect them.

Kristallnacht broken windows

If we look back to the times that began with Kristallnacht for inspiration as well as horror, what can we find to guide us now? Kristallnacht was a time when many people woke up and realized that the Nazis were in earnest, that their hatred had turned to broken bones and windows, desecrated synagogues and 30,000 Jewish prisoners. Some of those people who woke up resisted, by fleeing or becoming active against the Nazis or both.

Can we make this anniversary of Kristallnacht our own moment of awakening?

When we hear code words for white nationalism and supremacy become acceptable in public discourse, can we speak up against them?

When we hear of hate crimes – whether they are in Charlottesville or Sacramento or Omaha – whether they are against peaceful protestors or African American men or someone who looked Muslim — can we respond with empathy and unity, as we did for Pittsburgh.

low candles lit

Can we say that whatever acts of hatred the U.S. government itself is committing must be stopped – and by us? To take a single example, think of children who are refugees and immigrants like my impoverished ancestors and perhaps yours. They are being stolen from their parents, just as they were at the gates of other camps. Can we claim those children, imprisoned in “tent cities,” that barbarous euphemism? Can we fight for them as strenuously as we would for our own children? Are they ours? If our tax dollars are paying for them to be kidnapped and imprisoned, are they not ours?

Let’s change gears and focus for a moment on the people who stayed home for Kristallnacht. They may have been quieter anti-Semites, or they may have been friendly to the Jewish people and disgusted by the violence in the streets. But they didn’t stop it. This is the story in the Netherlands, as well.

I wish I could offer you more words of comfort today. But all I can bring you is what your people have always done – to continue your hard work in the service of other persecuted people and yourselves. Work that everyone is morally and ethically required to do, whether or not we ever see the results. We are in a time when that spirit is more needed than ever.

Let’s not allow the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht and the murders in Pittsburgh to terrify and dishearten us. May they instead awaken us to be even more active on behalf of justice, and what used to be called “the human family.” As I need not remind you, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

Untitled, by Barbara Chen

This talk was part of the Shabbat service at the Israel Congregation of Manchester, Vermont, on Friday, November 9, 2018. Many thanks to them for inviting me.

My Hopes At Seventy

Mary as a baby with Dick and Becky

At seventy, I hope to go on being surprised by life. If another great calling comes to me, like the compulsion to write An Address in Amsterdam, I want to say yes. I hope to read and walk more, and drink more tea with my friends at odd hours. As the children in my life grow up, I always want to read them a book one more time. As long as my partner and I are still able, I want to stroll by the Lake with her, nag her to play the piano more often, and take her anywhere she wants to go. For my friends who are still in the more structured phase of life, I hope to provide respite, little islands of joy and peace. For those whose lives are less rigid — as I hope mine will be – I want to see art exhibits on weekdays, go to the movies in the afternoon, and cook food that takes too long to prepare in my old pressured life. In the community where I live, I hope to be someone others can rely on to be fully present when I’m here, using my skills to help everyone make good decisions we can all support.

In the world, I hope to go on being the elder: transmitting what I’ve learned in my own life, and what my 13 years of research about Nazi occupied Amsterdam taught me. We must act when we see the danger signs that are rife today. Everyone can find a way to resist, and that includes not allowing the evildoers to kill our joy in life.

Thus far, I’ve spent most of my time in service to my adult wants and duties and aspirations. In this decade, I hope to pay more attention to the child in me, to her wonder and openness to whatever is to come.

Mary at Age 3

So many of my dreams have come true: a great love, circles of friends who became my family, children I helped bring up, a vocation as a consultant, a calling as a writer, extensive travel, and participation in the vast causes of my time. Along the way, I achieved financial stability even as a single person, which was important to me as someone who grew up scraping by.

In the coming decade of my life, I hope to put my physical and legal affairs in order so that I and my beloveds are ready for my death in that sense. I also want to pull together my legacy of writing, my understanding of my life and what it has taught me, and portraits of the significant people in my life and how they have influenced me.

Joanna and Mary in orchard Frelighsburg

Even though I hope for many more years in good health with Joanna, in many ways my life feels complete. I could “rise like a queen from the table, with no further wants.” My relationship with Joanna is the great accomplishment of my life, as we honor each other’s beauties and endure our irritating habits, as we create new possibilities for each other and our friends in our home and embrace. I’ve told everyone I love how important they are to me, more than once. I fulfilled my duties to my own elders with love and grace, and brought flowers and stories and auntie indulgence into the lives of “my” children. I look back with pride on my years improving women’s work at the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing mentoring programs to women across government, and helping Vermont nonprofits make a better world right here, right now. I gave my whole heart to the task that was given to me in Amsterdam – not just writing An Address in Amsterdam to honor a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance, but giving talks far and wide to show how vital the book’s messages are in our own time. In a few words, “Do not stand idly by.”

I hope always to be as thankful as I am now.

Mary with Japanese Maple – Version 2

The Nurse with Many Homes

A Praise Song for Karen Tishuk

Karen and Mary, December 2017

Even in her last shortened months of life, Karen Tishuk began many sentences with “I’m a nurse, so I noticed . . .” She was observant, she listened, and when times were tough she knew what to do – even when she was diagnosed just shy of 70 with cancer and a lousy prognosis. By the time she died just nine months later, she’d used everything she learned as a hospice nurse and more. She gathered a bouquet of friends from an extraordinary and geographically scattered life to support her all the way to the end.

Karen had a conventional upbringing in Wisconsin in a big Catholic family, but she didn’t fulfill her destiny as a Midwestern housewife. From the beginning, she was an odd duck in her family despite mutual affection. She loved the lake she lived by, and made an early connection with nature and the earth that lasted until the day she died. Everything in her life flowed from this central, most crucial relationship.

Karen chose to be a professional woman, a nurse. She moved politically far to the left of her family of origin, taking action on multiple issues of justice. Just as profoundly, Karen felt a call to several Native traditions, which validated her longstanding attunement to the earth. Her days always began with meditation and alignment with the larger forces embracing the human world. Karen had to spend time outside, regardless of weather or inconvenience or busy-ness. She brought friends and patients the assurance and calm that stemmed from those hours of meditation, prayer and being in nature. Over time, Karen developed her own gifts to do readings and numerological analyses for others. When she discovered that the focus of her life was women, she came out as a lesbian and feminist.

Unlike anyone else in her family, Karen chose a nomad’s life. She spent a year or two or three in a place, working as a nurse (often in hospices), getting to know the land, and making close relationships that often lasted. A person of remarkable adaptability, she lived to my knowledge in Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Vermont – and I’m sure I’m missing some. Karen made herself at home wherever she went, and could always return to open arms. We met during the Vermont chapter from 2011-15, at the end of her career as a nurse.

Lake Champlain, Vermont

Karen and I laughed a lot about our differences. She was far more “woo-woo” than I, and yet I observed that her intuitions about people and situations were often uncannily right. Although my path has been guided more by my brain and heart than dreams or visions, I respected Karen as someone who took risks that most of us avoid. How many of us really let inner guidance determine our paths? Karen lived by the Taoist maxim, “She who obtains has little. She who scatters has much.” In contrast, I am a nester and even a hoarder of sentimental artifacts (Karen only had a few, but how she loved them!). For all our differences, our common politics and our joy in being out in nature brought us together again and again. We walked and talked for miles: in our urbanized neighborhood of old farmhouses, in a nearby graveyard with tall cypresses and marble monuments, along footpaths in hushed Vermont forests or beside the vastness of Lake Champlain.

Both of us were also outsiders in another sense, grappling with our place in the world and how to live with our wanderlust. As Karen aged, how would she accommodate that desire to “hit the road again”? What if her body said no at some point? But it hadn’t yet. She was as healthy as a farmer’s strongest horse. We also ranted about politics, and remembered better times, i.e. the sixties, when there was a real Movement. But we also noticed innumerable petite wildflowers and flashes of songbirds along the way. We wandered across the Canadian border to Montreal and Frelighsburg, savoring food seasoned with the “je ne sais quoi” of French ancestral knowledge, and drinking in the art. Karen relished both art museums and seeing her friends’ treasures.

Whenever there was a project at hand, Karen pitched in. Her sturdy body, descended from women who took pickaxes to the prairies, was almost as strong as her will. Her lively, broad face accented by her pixie-cut light brown hair always showed determination, no matter what she was undertaking. To be enfolded in her embrace meant a full body experience, and she tackled any task with that wholeheartedness and physical competence. When she held a baby, it wriggled happily and settled right down in response to her animated face and assured gestures.

Karen on right at Mary and Joanna’s wedding, July 14, 2013

My partner Joanna and I will always enjoy the cherry tree Karen planted for us, and the memories of her role in our wedding, just a few weeks after the Supreme Court decision creating equal marriage in the U.S. It meant so much to Karen that it was possible for us to be married, and as always Karen bustled about to make sure everything went smoothly. No celebration was complete without her, birthday or otherwise. In the co-housing community where we all lived, Karen was constantly on call for residents with health issues, especially two who were fighting terminal cancer.

Like me, Karen was a reader of both prose and poetry, and we spent many hours talking about books. I took daily comfort in glancing across the broad lawn that separated my study and her bedroom (both on the second floor). As I worked, I could see Karen in her rocking chair with a book. Even though she wasn’t paying attention to me, I felt her presence. I knew that she had regular phone calls with her faraway friends, and I hoped I might be among them when she moved away one day. Karen didn’t love Vermont; she’d come here because of a vision, but she longed for the big vistas of the west, to gaze on the great mountains and deserts that were her spiritual home. Her face glowed whenever she said “When I lived in Santa Fe. . .” or “While I was a nurse in Sedona. . .”

To say that Karen lived simply is an understatement. She never had more “stuff” than would fit in her car, and she got rid of many items along the way so she could travel light. When Karen drove from Vermont to Oregon, I don’t think she had to ship anything. Almost everything she had was beautiful to her, often carrying a story with it. In her last home, she walked me from object to object. They were suffused with the story of her whole life, an index of her important relationships. She might not have had enough pots and pans (in my view), but she had a magnificent multi-colored statue of Green Tara sitting on real silk for her altar. Although Karen had had more prosperous times, in the period when I knew her money was always an issue. She had lost her savings in the crash in 2009, and was working less than she wanted to in Vermont, as an overqualified professional near retirement age.

After Karen left New England – called back to the west, first to Eugene and then to southern Oregon – we stayed in touch, always at birthdays and anniversaries. Nobody found more apt cards than Karen, and her messages were heartfelt, fulsome reflections on what she loved and admired about us. Never trite, always specific, she touched on the essence. In our phone conversations, she tracked our lives with detailed memory, never forgetting an important person or event. It was humbling. Sadly, in January 2017, Karen fell and hurt her leg badly, and I stayed in closer touch after that time. It slowed her making friends in her new Southern Oregon location, as well as limiting her ability to be in the wild open spaces she loved.

It must be repression that I cannot remember how I learned, in late November 2017, that Karen had been diagnosed with serous uterine cancer metastasized to the cervix. I do remember, in Karen’s own voice, her account of the moment the nurse examining her let out a soft “uh-oh” when she felt the cervix. Further testing confirmed her instincts, and a hysterectomy was scheduled on December 14. In typical Karen “superwoman” fashion, her plan was to drive 3 hours to Eugene, do the pre-operative preparations, stay overnight in a hotel, have the surgery, and drive back that night – or maybe one more night in the hotel if she was feeling a bit under the weather. I asked if anyone out there could accompany and support her for those days. She said no, and I went.

When Karen met me at the hotel she’d reserved for us, she was agitated and exhausted from all the preparations, but happy to see me. I suggested a walk, since she’d thoughtfully put us right by a silvery river and a city park that was still green despite the onset of winter. Walking had always helped us before. We meandered alongside the water, watching the ducks and their antics, and admiring the lean beauty of the deciduous trees. We had a delectable local meal that night, something Karen had always enjoyed, and the next day another walk in an extensive park with huge conifers and a former filbert orchard. At times she was preoccupied, but we had many joyous moments as we wandered. “I see why you insisted that we get here in time to enjoy ourselves,” Karen admitted before we went to the hospital for pre-op. I had been through cancer with a friend before, and I knew we might never have fun again in the same way, and that she might never or almost never feel as well as she did at that moment. But I didn’t say that, of course.

If ever someone had already paid their karmic debt in helping others, it was Karen. She did years of hospice work as well as helping informally, as she did at cohousing, with the many crises that happen on the cancer path. I thought of all that as I waited for the surgeon to come and talk to me after Karen’s operation (I had medical power of attorney at that time). When he finally appeared, he said she’d done well in surgery, and would start chemo as soon as possible for six months, then a course of radiation. I asked about prognosis. “She’s got a fighting chance, about fifty-fifty – well, no, let’s say 40%. Maybe 35%. But she’s a fighter.”

To my huge relief, he decided to keep her overnight in the hospital, and we spent one more night at the hotel before I drove her home through the mountains. It took us much of the day with all the stops we needed to make. Throughout the medical saga, and even as we traveled home, I watched Karen learn the name of almost every single person she encountered. And she asked questions, learned something about everyone she met, even if it was just superficially. Did any of the surgeon’s other patients know he was about to adopt a foster child? She connected with the clerk in the hokey “family restaurant” where we stopped for lunch on the way home, with the inept nurse who wasn’t changing a tube right in the hospital, with the kid who helped her with a parking sticker. That was how she operated – and even a pit stop was the occasion to admire the views into the distant mountains.

Fortunately, Karen received a modest inheritance from her mother soon after she was diagnosed, just in time to cover the many expenses that insurance wouldn’t touch, including alternative therapies. Karen wasn’t a saint; she was furious that cancer intervened just at the moment when she was approaching her 70^th birthday and had a bit of spare cash to do some things she’d always wanted to do. Over the next nine months, she put together a small group of women from around the country who would sustain her. Robyn from Santa Cruz was her most frequent visitor and caller, a craniosacral therapist who became the first medical power of attorney with me as backup. Shari from Philadelphia has her own yoga studio and was constantly providing chants and prayers that Karen could join in. Shari’s sister Susan from Sedona stayed in constant touch, and sent Karen photos from her extensive hikes they used to take together. The other Mary from Wyoming was a sister nurse with whom she could discuss medical strategy and drug issues. My job was to provide poetry sometimes and love always, and to check out the doctors’ claims and prophecies against the actual research. I was the sometimes unwelcome voice of the future, trying to anticipate what Karen might need and stay one step ahead of it. Over time, our circle expanded – especially toward the end – to encompass others, including her marvelous hospice nurse friends from Seattle and elsewhere. Robyn set up a Caring Bridge site early on so that many people could be in contact, including Karen’s family, and she drew a lot of strength from that.

Joanna and I went out to visit Karen for a week in late February, while she was going through chemotherapy. Despite her weakness and digestive issues, we managed to travel to see the majesty of Mount Shashta, a looming presence encased in snow just across the California border. The three of us stood in awe on a bright winter day. Even 25 miles away, we felt the presence, and Karen was in her element. A few days later, she took us out for an extravagant and scrumptious dinner in an historic inn in nearby Jacksonville. We ate by firelight in a cozy room with rustic stone walls. Karen had even chosen the specific, secluded table. Although she threw up later, she thoroughly savored her lamb chops and potatoes Anna. Some pleasures are worth it. At her home, I cooked gallons of bland soup and bone broth and froze it, and Joanna hung curtains, fixed electrical issues and created calm.

Over the months that followed, Karen assembled a professional team which included both allopathic and more traditional healers, some of whom were “hands on” and others who worked energetically or even long distance. Toward the end, she found an Oriental medicine practice which provided a lot of relief and comfort. Karen’s spirits went up and down. She’d always had energy to burn, and suddenly she didn’t. She’d loved good food, and it didn’t always taste right. Even if it did, she couldn’t digest it. Her bowel problems increased, as well as the pain and inconvenience that accompanies those. When her oncologist told her chemo wasn’t working any more and proposed a different regimen, Karen first agreed, then declined based on research showing the odds just weren’t good enough to put up with still more side effects.

Mary and Karen at her apartment, February 2018

All along the way, Karen received a steady stream of calls, texts with quotations or news or (her favorite) photos or videos, e-mails, cards, and gifts of both sacred and profane items. She had to conserve her energy, so passive communication was often best – including Caring Bridge, which she checked every day that she wasn’t truly sick and sometimes when she was. The messages of caring and support meant so much to her, but she also had a strong appetite for distraction. Who wants to think about illness all the time, especially when they’re sick? Karen wisely decided to take Sundays off from all communication – no texts, no calls, no e-mail. Our communications sustained her, but her energy was often so low that they was simply too much.

Karen was always interested in the rest of us. She wanted to know who had a new grandchild, who had learned to speak French or play ping pong, who was working on the issues of the day and how. Unless she was in an absolute emergency herself, she always asked after me first, and she listened all the way to the end. On Caring Bridge, she asked people to send texts and photos and anecdotes and poems that were NOT about cancer, but about themselves and what mattered to them. She didn’t want to let the illness consume her attention altogether. Karen did the needful to prepare if she didn’t make it (living will, powers of attorney, hospice research etc.) – but she also maintained hope. “I believe in miracles. Why shouldn’t I be one of them?” she asked with a raised eyebrow and a smile.

Karen was still debating where to spend her last weeks until almost the very end, calling hospices in locations where she had close friends to compare possibilities. But in the end, she decided to stay put, and fortunately an excellent residential hospice, the Holmes Park House, was nearby in Medford, Oregon. After all of Karen’s voluntary simplicity, it amused her and everyone else that she was fated to die in a beautiful mansion! She did have the clichéd champagne tastes and beer pocketbook, as well as principles about “stuff.” Our last conversation before we were under the imminent shadow of death included strategizing about how to travel if you feel horrible and can’t control your bowels, since I knew all too much about it. Before the end, Karen did manage to squeeze in two wonderful trips: Robyn took her closer to her beloved Mount Shashta, the last mountain she ever saw, and Karen drove herself to visit her treasured friend Helen, who has dedicated her life to helping the dying and lives right by the ocean.

When she finally agreed to be admitted to hospice care (while still in her own apartment), Karen felt a huge burden lift. Her nurse became the coordinator and orchestrator that she’d been for herself all those months. She’d had so much support, research, and questions from our circle, which was a huge help but also overwhelmed her at times. Now one person was the key to her care, at least on the allopathic side. Karen still saw herself living into the fall, her favorite season other than winter, and I was trying to organize September/October visits from her close friends (including me). I’d hoped to meet her in Colorado or at least see her at home.

Sadly, her situation plummeted in mid-August. Karen went straight from an emergency room admission for severe abdominal pain to the residential hospice, where she was given one to three weeks to live. We were all shocked, including her, but her dear ones rallied round, and we were in constant contact by text and otherwise. Her hospice nurse friends came from afar, and blessed the place she had chosen. Karen was surrounded 24 hours a day at the end by people who cherished her, with Robyn in the lead. Those who couldn’t be there physically spoke with her in brief calls so she could hear our voices, even though she couldn’t respond. I read a poem about the beautiful approach of the angel of death. Joanna gave her a vision of birds taking flight.

Once Karen knew that her death was inevitable, she surrendered with grace and expediency. “I’m so glad,” she said, “that I lived long enough to know I was loved.”

Anne Frank’s Birthday: Fact and Fiction

Anne Frank 1940 school photo

No one knows exactly when Anne Frank died in 1945, but we do know she was born on June 12, 1929. Every year, I remember how close I felt to her as an eleven-year-old reading The Diary of a Young Girl in a small closet in North Carolina. Anne was an intimate friend at a time when I had very few. Like so many girls, I completely identified with her nascent romantic and sexual longings, her hatred of her mother, her deep humanitarian, and her aspirations as a writer.

Four decades later, I had the joy of living in Amsterdam for six months, and discovered a distressing truth about that tolerant city: 80% of its Jewish people were rounded up and murdered. My child’s view that no one on earth could have suffered more than Anne was so wrong. She was much luckier than most. The Franks’ hiding place was ready in advance, they were all hidden together for 25 months, they had more room and comfort than most people (small as it was), and the quality of support from Miep Gies and others was extraordinary.

In 2002, while staying a few blocks from Anne Frank’s hiding place, I discovered that Jewish people had also been hidden in the attic above our apartment. When I learned that they were last seen fleeing over the rooftops as the Nazis shot at them, I had to learn more about the larger story of which Anne’s was only a part. I began imagining who those people were, and an historical novel began to take shape. For thirteen years, I read histories and memoirs; visited museums, archives, and libraries; listened to people who would talk with me; and wandered the canals looking for unmarked addresses where important events took place. That’s one of many reasons my book is called An Address in Amsterdam.

Resistance Courier at Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

Resistance Courier at Verzetsmuseum, Amsterdam

As much as I regarded Anne with a child’s adoring eyes, and admired her with an adult’s greater discernment, I also realized that she was confined by her parents’ choices as well as the Nazi Occupation. She was not quite 11 when the Germans invaded the neutral Netherlands. If Anne Frank had been a few years older, it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have found a way to help the resistance.

While I knew that my book would have a young Jewish woman as a heroine, I wanted to write about someone who was old enough to make her own decisions, but young enough that she would have to grow up fast in order to do so. How did an ordinary young woman decide to risk her life as a resister? What would she actually do, and how? As Rachel Klein, my heroine, formed in my imagination, I didn’t see her as an older Anne Frank, but as her own person, with different needs and ambitions than Anne. However, to be sure that I wasn’t unduly influenced, I avoided reading the Diary again until An Address in Amsterdam was done and in press.

As I re-read the Revised Critical Edition which compares all the versions of the Diary, I found my old friend Anne Frank still there – vulnerable, smart, fearful. Perhaps because the times had changed so much, I also heard more clearly than ever the warnings in her work, and her injunction to us now. Today, I’m not so much moved by the girl who wrote “I still believe that people are good at heart,” as the one who speaks to us now: “How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single moment before trying to improve the world.”

Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave and S.C. Indigenous Women

When the Indigenous Women’s Alliance of South Carolina representatives rose to speak to the S.C. Women’s March, they wore red: red for the one Native woman in ten who is murdered or missing. The two women, Kathleen Hays and Terrence Lilly Little Water, spoke first in their own languages, then in English. Kathleen reminded us that “My tribe, the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, as well as many other Indigenous peoples in North America, have a heritage distinct from our European neighbors in that women have traditionally carried the mantles of familial and societal leadership. But, as we all acknowledge by gathering here, our current environment doesn’t remember that particular tradition, a tradition rooted in this land and its varied peoples. The value of women’s involvement in public leadership has been questioned and resisted since this land was colonized and what we protest today ultimately is an attack on our worth.”

The women also brought us even more sobering news. According to the Indian Law Resource Center, “On some reservations, the murder rate for Native women is ten times the national average. Some 88% of these types of crimes are committed by non-Indians [since] 77% of the population residing on Indian lands and reservations is non-Indian.” Young Native women grow up expecting to be raped; more than half experience sexual violence.

“On some reservations, the murder rate for Native All this hit me particularly hard because I just finished reading Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave, the story of her life until she discovered poetry and came to dazzle a global audience. She writes in “Becoming Seventy”: “it was impossible to make it through the tragedy/ without poetry.” This book is an account of the tragedy, beginning with her mother’s horrifying marriage to a violent and abusive man who controls her almost completely. While the scene could be painted in many patriarchal cultures, it carries a particular sorrow in that it so clearly shows how Native men inflict on women what has been done to them. Victims persecute victims, who then generate more victims.

There’s nothing new about this, but seeing how it operates in an individual’s life is devastating – and seeing how Joy Harjo finds her way through it is nothing less than inspiring. Using the intuition she calls “the knowing,” she realizes that she must escape her stepfather’s house before he rapes and brutalizes her. The path to Haight Ashbury is the obvious one for an attractive Indian girl like her; in fact, someone tells her that he can hook her up with someone to help her prostitute herself on the streets. Wisely, she declines, and decides instead to try to go to an Indian school. Thanks to her talents, and with the help of a teacher who supports her, Harjo succeeds in being admitted to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

At last, she has a chance, and begins to blossom – but is also exposed to some destructive behavior among her peers. At times, we see her go down, and why and how it happens; while it’s heartbreaking, our hearts also have to expand to understand why the bottle is so appealing. Soon, Harjo is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, and provides a parable of how utterly and devastatingly that can change a young woman’s life. In the ensuing years, through several relationships, the threads of alcohol and violence are entwined. I never read a more persuasive account of domestic violence in general – why men perpetrate, why women stay – and the particular horror of such violence in the Native community. (Although recall that most assaults on Native women are committed by non-Natives.) Harjo does not name her abusers, but she does talk specifically about the contradictions in their and her behavior, and what it takes for her finally to break free.

How can I honor the gift Harjo has given us, the gift of her truth, and take it into my own life and being? Only by listening when those two women in red, Kathleen Hays and Terrence Lilly Little Water, speak, and supporting their work. By repeating the names of the First People of South Carolina, the Catawba, Cherokee, Chicora, Edisto, Pee Dee and Santee. By writing here, so that non-Native people like me can support our sisters at the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center Logo

When public officials make offensive statements, we can circulate the truth. The Center says “Pocahontas, of the Pamunkey Tribe in Virginia (which was just recently granted Federal Recognition status in 2016, after over 400 years of colonization), was kidnapped and subsequently raped by colonizers in her early teens. She was then brought to England, where she was shown off like a specimen to the English. At the age of 21, and before she could return to her People and her homelands, she died.”

Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave is the story of a woman who overcame. If we take her seriously, we have to find ways to stop the ongoing killing and assaulting of the women who didn’t get away. And the silencing of those who speak out on their behalf.

Librarians: My Favorite Tribe!

I’ve been in love with librarians ever since I could read. They always helped me find any book I wanted, and encouraged me to learn and read more. From grades 5-8, I spent every afternoon after school in the Women’s College Library at Duke University. I still feel more at home in a library than in any other public place. The smell of old books means more to me than the fragrance of almost any food.

When I learned that the New England Library Association meetings would happen just half a mile from my house this year, I was ecstatic for several reasons. My favorite tribe was coming right to my doorstep, and I’d be able to talk with them about my new book, An Address in Amsterdam. This historical novel of a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance was 13 years in the making, with many hours spent in museums, historic sites, archives and, of course, libraries from Amsterdam to Washington and Los Angeles.

Fortunately, my book was published by She Writes Press, an all women’s press which encourages us to help each other. So it was easy to ask who among the sisters wanted to share a table with me at NELA. By the time they came here to Burlington, Vermont, two were old buddies from the Brooklyn Book Festival: Jeanne Blasburg, author of Eden, a family saga set in a Rhode Island beach house; and Laurel Davis Huber, author of The Velveteen Daughter, the untold tale of the writer of the children’s classic and her daughter. Leah Chyten also happily joined us, with her story of the feminine divine in Judaism, Light Radiance Splendor.

For two long but delicious days, my sister authors and I stood and regaled any librarian who would listen with the stories of our books – what they were about, how we came to write them, what programs we offer, and why the books have done well with libraries and book groups. Twice a day, we did a raffle and saw the grins on the faces of the winners as they chose their free books. I distributed bibliographies on the Dutch resistance to the Nazi Occupation, post cards, and information about everything from my talk on “Resistance Then and Now: Learning from the Dutch” to “Anne Frank’s Neighbors: What Did They Do?”

Kata Welch from Cavendish, Vermont

Mostly, though, we chatted with the people who are on the front lines of defense of the written word. Of preventing any book from being banned. Of keeping both children and adults in touch with the freest information in our society. Yes, they also deal in audiobooks and computers and other media. But the foundation is books, and the love of books. It was a joy to reconnect with the librarians who had already invited me to come and talk with their patrons – to hear how people had responded, that they had to order a second copy of the book, that it was engaging younger readers. And I loved talking with the librarians whose devotion to their work goes so above and beyond what anyone will ever be paid for it. It’s a calling, not just a profession.

Cynthia Bermudez with prize books

So much loses its shine or becomes diminished as we learn more about the world and age. I admire librarians just as much as I did as a child, standing by the counter with a pile of books that I’d devour by nightfall. My hat is still off to them, especially now that they are dealing with an increasingly demanding audience, new technologies, homeless people with nowhere else to go, and much more. If anyone can save our country today and keep us all thinking critically, it’s the librarians and their books.

My best friend Eliane’s birthday

Today would have been my best friend’s 91^st birthday, and she would be mad at me for crying about it. But there’ll never be another Eliane Vogel Polsky, for me or anyone. I’ve even forgiven her for keeping a secret from me for 19 years.

I first admired Eliane as a professional mentor – a labor lawyer who devoted herself to the cause of women’s rights and won landmark cases in the EU, a distinguished law professor who oversaw all the EU-funded research to improve women’s employment in Europe. The first day we met in Brussels, I fell under her spell – an elegant, brilliant woman, not one to suffer fools gladly but with the warmth and generosity of a huge bonfire. There was no hint of what I would learn about her later.

An hour with Eliane was like a month with anyone else, so intense was her attention to any given moment. Taking a walk in Brussels, her home city, brought forth a stream of stories about the garret room her father reluctantly allowed her to rent so she could have some privacy before she married, about the cascades that used to rush from the fountains in the center of the city.

Over the years, we became ever closer – especially after Eliane retired, and was free to come to the U.S. every year. Our conversations had, I thought, covered everything. Then I spent a week with her before my first long stay in Amsterdam in 2001, and she told me something she had never revealed before. As a Jewish teenager, Eliane had been hidden in plain sight in a convent school in Liege. She took me to that classically beautiful city, a river town. This time, her stories seared rather than delighted me. We saw the train station where she was almost caught without her false papers. The bridge where the Nazis had made “une piege a soucieres – you know what it is? A mouse trap.” The convent itself.

If Eliane had told me that she’d been kidnapped by pirates, I couldn’t have been more astonished. I had simply never done the arithmetic to realize that of course she would have had to hide. For the first time, I felt the truncheon of Nazism crash down on my head. They would have killed my best friend, a woman of endless accomplishment and dearer to me than I can ever express.

So when I went to Amsterdam the next week for a long stay, I was open to learning about the Nazi occupation as never before. After discovering that we were living inside the Jewish Quarter, I began to research it in earnest. Over the coming 13 years as we came and went from Amsterdam, Eliane visited often from Brussels. Our 2002 flat was under an attic where Jewish people had been hidden. I was so haunted that I had to learn more about their world and write about it for others. Rachel Klein, the heroine of An Address in Amsterdam, and her parents began to appear to me, not in the supernatural sense but in some ethereal way that characters come to writers.

Eliane played a crucial role in developing the book – not only because I was so disturbed by her own relatively narrow escape, but because she told me many more stories about that time. For example, she recounted the reluctance of her father, a decorated World War I veteran, to believe that their family could possibly be vulnerable; or how it felt to be a 15 year old keeping a huge, terrible secret from absolutely everyone except the Mother Superior in the convent school. Her sensibility, her sense of her predicament, her fear and courage are all woven into An Address. As I wrote, Eliane read my work to see whether it “rang true,” and read the revisions until they did. She accompanied me to exhibits and sites even though they disturbed her and gave her bad dreams.

In our very last conversation, she asked me about the book, and I promised that it was coming. It was, but she died a year before An Address in Amsterdam was published – the story of a young woman with Eliane’s spunk and love of life, who never lets fear stop her.

When Eliane died the death of the just, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, even I could accept that it was time. Most days, but not today.

The Merchant of Venice: A Play about Anti-Semitism

When I was in college, I learned that The Merchant of Venice was the anti-Semitic play where the avaricious Jew Shylock demands his pound of flesh from the worthy Christian merchant. Fortunately, the new production at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum offered a chillingly contemporary interpretation instead. It’s probably much closer to Shakespeare’s intention.

Before the play even begins, a gaggle of youths are already harassing Shylock. From then on, every time any Christian says the word “Jew,” he spits, emphasizing the basic hatred to which Jewish people are subjected. Shylock, played by the brilliant and nuanced actor Alan Blumenfeld, is so much more than than the usual villain. We see how much he is exactly what the Christians have made of him – a man who is earning his living the only way they permit, who must scramble for everything because he is allowed to have so little, who will of course take advantage of the incredibly few chances he gets to have even a moment of dignity, much less revenge. When the idiotically optimistic merchant Antonio seeks to borrow money against his fortunes at sea, why should Shylock not demand a pound of flesh from near his heart if he is not paid on time? Why should he not “have [his] bond” when Antonio does not pay him?

Even the characters I remembered as having some shred of nobility are hypocrites. Even Portia’s speech beginning “The quality of mercy is not strained” is rendered absurd by the context: she is impersonating a legal expert who doesn’t actually exist – and the whole play, especially as rendered in this production, shows the “Christians” behaving in the most unmerciful possible way. Forcing Shylock to appear to adopt their religion is the final blow – and completely contrary to what Jesus professed.

The play is unsettling not only because the “good” characters show their evil sides so baldly, but also because it portrays the impact of hatred on both the hated and the haters. Anti-Semitism parades across the stage in both its subtler and its more savage forms. Thankfully, the actors held a “talk back” after the play, and dozens of people stayed for the conversation about how troubled we were, and why. Mr. Blumenfeld stressed that the play is not anti-Semitic, but about anti-Semitism. Artistic Director Ellen Geer and the company wanted to perform it at this time because we are again in a time when anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred and hate crimes are on the rise.

Theatricum Botanicum

The Theatricum Botanicum has a history of taking on unpopular causes. In fact, it was founded by Will Geer (known to people my age as Grandpa Walton) when he was blacklisted in Hollywood in the McCarthy era. Other actors banned from working in the industry gathered, and slowly today’s splendid open theater was built. It’s a magical place in the woods, but only half an hour up a twisting road from Santa Monica. The sets integrate the trees around them, with several balconies that serve many purposes adding dimension to the large stage. Amphitheater seating means that everyone feels close to the actors. Throughout the year, students come to be introduced to Shakespeare and theater arts, and in the summer they can be involved in productions and classes which anyone would enjoy. Adults even have their own chance to learn in more depth.

If I lived in southern California, I’d go right back and see this revealing production again.

Anne Frank’s Birthday: What Do We Say?

The birthday of Anne Frank was June 12, 1929, which means she was just eleven years old when the Nazis invaded Amsterdam, the “safe” place to which she and her family had fled. Understandably, her parents made the decisions about when and how the family went into hiding. In contrast, when I began imagining the heroine of An Address in Amsterdam, I wanted her to be old enough to create her own life, even under the Nazis. At 18, she could make an independent choice to join the underground. During the 13 years it took me to research and write the book, I avoided re-reading Anne’s Diary because I didn’t want to be unduly influenced by it. But I remembered our first meeting vividly, even so.

Anne Frank smiling

When I was ten or eleven years old, I took The Diary of a Young Girl to my favorite place to read in our tiny duplex apartment in Durham, North Carolina. It was a hall closet which lost half its space to the hot water heater, but that meant it was always warm. I’d found a bathmat to put on the floor and brought an extra pillow with me. Although the light wasn’t excellent, it gave me solitude and an environment so neutral that I could journey deeply into my book.

Anne Frank gives little description of Amsterdam, and in any case I couldn’t have imagined a city with canals instead of streets, and the vocabulary of its rows of centuries-old, handcrafted houses was still unknown to me. But, as I burrowed into my closet, I entered every other aspect of her world: the hideous Mrs. van Dam, the wondrous beauty of Peter, the cruel shrew who was her mother, her kind and virtuous father. I recognized her parents particularly, bifurcated into the contemptible female and the saintly male, and my heart bled for her. To be confined that way! To have to tiptoe, not be able to flush the toilet during the day, to live with constant fear of discovery. Anne felt like prey. One day, I would understand that, too.

The more I read, the more I couldn’t bear to lose Anne. Her story couldn’t end badly, could it? Anne Frank was too bright, too witty, too good a writer, too wise beyond her years, to die. She’d escape out a back window with a handsome Gentile boy even nicer than Peter who’d always admired her, wouldn’t she? I was used to fiction, not history, and I probably didn’t know about the Holocaust until after I finished the Diary. When I got to the end and learned that Anne had died at Auschwitz, I was devastated. None of my peers in the human world meant nearly as much to me as she did. Anne was like me: she felt things deeply, she adored her father as much as she hated her mother, she was already passionately attached to Peter, and books and writing were her mainstays.

It was the first time I loved a ghost, but not the last.