To Announce That Question

Glad to find I’d misjudged the work I’d only just started yesterday: “Our Holocaust” by Amir Gutfreund turned out to be disarmingly inviting and this morning tempted, challenged, by the quote on the cover, I too read it straight through.  Children spend the first part of the book trying to pry stories about the Holocaust from their elders, their grandparents, the survivors there in the town of Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee.  Survivors are reticent about sharing much with small children, so we get glimpses that suggest horror or courage, or indignity.  Later, confronting mortality, the stories burst forth from characters like Grandpa Yosef.

These tales are difficult to put down.  Sunrise waxed into mid-morning without my even knowing it, touring through, camp to camp in the grim normalcy of Nazi occupied Poland.  One after another I looked up the litany of place names that were unfamiliar, each with its own terrible history, its own grim photos, its own Commandant, its own statistics:  Gross Rosen, Majdanek, Sobibor, Plaszow, Stuthoff.   I think I was brought back to Jonathan Littell and the expansive nightmare of “The Kindly Ones.”  Human evil, normalized, regimented, rationalized.  The vile part of you and me and him and her, held in check, barely by our beliefs, turned then upon its head.  Vile now proper.  Vile permissible, celebrated.  Vile, vile, it speaks to us, to shore up the flimsy protection we have from some contemporary return of pure evil, ascendant. 

I’ve only one more novel left from the purchases I made before this recent trip.  “Only Yesterday” by Israel’s Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon describing a period in Israel before the Shoah, looks to be a satisfying read.  At six hundred and fifty pages it won’t be anything I read in one-sitting . . . but who knows?  It is Sunday after all. 

The Mrs. and I went over to Stone Ridge last night.  Yes, I know the way.  No.  We don’t need the GPS.  A couple we’d met at my daughter’s school own a liquor store out there and my wife was keen to visit.  Up past Mohonk, along the rural isolation of Mohonk Road, into High Falls.  High Falls is an interesting settlement I’ve driven through a few times.  My wife, was considering it anew and we looked but didn’t agree on anywhere we might consider for a dinner.  By the time we found the liquor store it was getting dark and I suggested a drive through Stone Ridge, with its early eighteenth century buildings that somehow survive there, along the main drive.  One wonders what it was that anchored people here on this strip, two hundred years ago.  On our way back to the mini mall where the store was located, we spied a restaurant up upon a hill that looked promising.

The couple we knew weren’t in the liquor store.  We chatted with the well-informed young men who manned the shop.  Yes, they had local rye.  Sure, they stocked a few Gruner Ventliners.  And on the way out I waited for the woman in front of me to be done to ask the gent behind the counter about the restaurant we saw.  I had this inquiry elaborately planned out in my mind.  I’m not sure why I was being judicious.  I suppose I didn’t want to seem like I was from too far away.  But before I could ask, my wife came up and inquired audibly if I was going to ask the man about local restaurants.  And in my mind the who place stared at us.  He mentioned that the place next door, Butterfields, was part of the the Hasbrouck House, and was well regarded.  Another guy piped up and said he went frequently and recommended we try it. 

I nodded and thanked them and bought a bottle of Southern Ulster Rye and left.  My wife went off to have a look at Ming Moon, the Chinese take-out place in the mall.  Chinese immigrants, they didn’t want to talk to her in Chinese.  “I can't understand you.  We serve American Chinese take-out.”  She came back to the car annoyed.  And I suggested that I too was annoyed.  It wasn’t “cool” to announce that question so loudly, the way she did.  I then imitated her asking the question in voice much louder than what really happened.   This escalated into a good old-fashioned fight.  And though I admitted, upon not much reflection that indeed, it had been I, who’d lost my cool, and regardless of the countless times I’d had my Chinese tone corrected, in the parallel world, across the sea, none of it mattered.  We drove home, she sullen, me sheepish.  We’ll have to try Butterfields, some other time. 

Sunday, 2/16/20