spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.
Oh sure, love. I think so, too, sometimes, said Ruth, willing to hear Faith out since she had been watching the kissers, too, but I’m really not so sure. Nowadays it seems like pride, I mean overweening pride, when you look at the children and think we don’t have time to do much (by time, Ruth meant both her personal time and the planet’s time). When I read the papers and hear all this boom-boom bellicosity, the guys outdaring each other, I see we have to change it all—the world—without killing it absolutely—without killing it, that’ll be the trick the kids’ll have to figure out. Until that begins, I don’t understand happiness—what you mean by it.
Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all. So for all these conscientious and technical reasons, Faith was ashamed. It was clear that happiness could not be worthwhile, with so much conversation and so little revolutionary change. Of course, Faith said, I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.
* * *
One of the things I did want to talk about is the moment at which in one’s youth, or one’s childhood even, one develops a kind of fidelity, or one is so struck by some event that one is changed by it. I think of this particularly when we talk of the Holocaust and its meaning to us all.
We seem to forget that our people really lived before the Holocaust and that they were also in a lot of hot water even before that. And I understood this first in a way that has never left me. This happened when I was about—well, what I remember is the size of the kitchen table. The table was just below eye level for me at the time. My mother was reading the newspaper, and she turned to my father—my father’s name was Zenya (my parents were Russian Jews, like a lot of people)—she turned to my father and said, “Zenya, it’s coming again.”
Now, they had come to America in about 1905, and she said, “It’s coming again.” That’s all I remember her saying. But I must have heard lots of other conversations. Because that was in the very beginning of the thirties, maybe earlier, and what she was talking about, of course, was the coming of Hitler. And she said, “It’s coming again. ”
I think Marge Piercy has a poem about sleeping with your shoes under your pillow. Well, from that time on, in the middle of an extraordinarily happy childhood in a perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood with thousands of children and a first-class family quite friendly to my interests, and despite all the goodness, that incident at the kitchen table was so powerful that when I began to write, I thought, Should I really write in English? But since I didn’t know any other language, there really was no choice.
The general feeling I had was that I might be forced to live somewhere else; and as a matter of fact, when my parents came to the United States, a lot of my mother’s friends went to Argentina, and to Palestine, and to Brazil. So they had become Spanish or Portuguese speakers and writers. It didn’t seem strange to me that I might live out my life in another country, and I think a lot of us must feel that way sometimes.
That moment at the kitchen table was one of the most striking events in my life. And who knows how I might have felt about things if that hadn’t happened, because actually my family was a rather typical Socialist Jewish family. My father refused to
Oh sure, love. I think so, too, sometimes, said Ruth, willing to hear Faith out since she had been watching the kissers, too, but I’m really not so sure. Nowadays it seems like pride, I mean overweening pride, when you look at the children and think we don’t have time to do much (by time, Ruth meant both her personal time and the planet’s time). When I read the papers and hear all this boom-boom bellicosity, the guys outdaring each other, I see we have to change it all—the world—without killing it absolutely—without killing it, that’ll be the trick the kids’ll have to figure out. Until that begins, I don’t understand happiness—what you mean by it.
Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all. So for all these conscientious and technical reasons, Faith was ashamed. It was clear that happiness could not be worthwhile, with so much conversation and so little revolutionary change. Of course, Faith said, I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.
* * *
One of the things I did want to talk about is the moment at which in one’s youth, or one’s childhood even, one develops a kind of fidelity, or one is so struck by some event that one is changed by it. I think of this particularly when we talk of the Holocaust and its meaning to us all.
We seem to forget that our people really lived before the Holocaust and that they were also in a lot of hot water even before that. And I understood this first in a way that has never left me. This happened when I was about—well, what I remember is the size of the kitchen table. The table was just below eye level for me at the time. My mother was reading the newspaper, and she turned to my father—my father’s name was Zenya (my parents were Russian Jews, like a lot of people)—she turned to my father and said, “Zenya, it’s coming again.”
Now, they had come to America in about 1905, and she said, “It’s coming again.” That’s all I remember her saying. But I must have heard lots of other conversations. Because that was in the very beginning of the thirties, maybe earlier, and what she was talking about, of course, was the coming of Hitler. And she said, “It’s coming again. ”
I think Marge Piercy has a poem about sleeping with your shoes under your pillow. Well, from that time on, in the middle of an extraordinarily happy childhood in a perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood with thousands of children and a first-class family quite friendly to my interests, and despite all the goodness, that incident at the kitchen table was so powerful that when I began to write, I thought, Should I really write in English? But since I didn’t know any other language, there really was no choice.
The general feeling I had was that I might be forced to live somewhere else; and as a matter of fact, when my parents came to the United States, a lot of my mother’s friends went to Argentina, and to Palestine, and to Brazil. So they had become Spanish or Portuguese speakers and writers. It didn’t seem strange to me that I might live out my life in another country, and I think a lot of us must feel that way sometimes.
That moment at the kitchen table was one of the most striking events in my life. And who knows how I might have felt about things if that hadn’t happened, because actually my family was a rather typical Socialist Jewish family. My father refused to
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