Essay Writing 101

Sometimes the ways of the US Postal Service are strange to behold, beyond human comprehension. If things work as they should you’ll receive this on Friday September 30 just in time for an après Rosh Hashanah lunch sit down in your favorite easy chair. But as we know Saturday or next Wednesday is as likely a delivery date as any.

So, I ask you, what is this essay about? Will it rail against the inefficiencies of a privatized government bureau? Is it about Rosh Hashanah, perhaps lunch? Or easy chairs? Answer: None of the above. Instead it’s time for a redaction of the Essay Writing 101 a course I never took in college.

In the last issue I took a swipe at a letter writer who asked in what I thought was a patronizing and disingenuous fashion why Jews continue to vote for very liberal politicians when you would think that our values would be more in line with more conservative candidates. I found this patronizing because it suggested that Jews should be more like the author, like the majority of Americans, and, let’s face it, (and this is the disingenuous part) why aren’t we Christian. It would be to our advantage and like being a conservative would only require us to give up the past several centuries of our development to join the greater community. So I wrote a strong rejoinder but wanted to temper it a bit. So I added what I thought was a dollop of humor by teasing my editor (who nevertheless I described as “terrific”) for publishing what seemed to me a letter verging on the anti-Semitic.

It’s called “misdirection” in the essay writing business, sometimes it’s described in dance terms as a “lateral Arabesque” the starting with one thing you don’t intend to pursue but which sets up what your real target is, and then concludes with the initial misdirection either for emphasis or humor. It’s a technique used since at least the time of Homer’s Iliad.

So what was the reaction to the piece? Did I hit too hard, below the belt, score a knockout? None of the above. You shouldn’t have attacked Nancy (the editor) is all I heard. But I didn’t attack Nancy, I used Nancy’s publishing the letter as a springboard to dive into my real subject, the letter, I responded. You shouldn’t have attacked Nancy, is the response. Well, I give up. Nancy knows I didn’t attack her. In fact the original column concluded with a deliberate non-sequitur that I thought pretty clever, but she didn’t so out it went. Her only objection to my using her as a foil was that I referred to her as the paper’s editrix. She said it sounded too much like dominatrix but I said I had Amelia Earhart in mind who is always referred to as an aviatrix, but again the change was made. Never did she suggest that I was being unfair to her or complaining in a more than friendly tease.

So, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

(One person who wrote to me asked why I seemed not to know that most American Jews vote for very liberal candidates and chides that I should have known from the New York Times on September 23 that Jews have long proved a solid voting block for the Democratic Party. But my column was published in the September 16 edition of the Voice & Herald and submitted a week before that. I appreciate my correspondent’s belief in my prescience but if I knew what the Times was going to print two weeks before publication I’d be a very much richer man than I am.)

As this is designed to reach you on Rosh Hashanah and is the edition of the paper that precedes Yom Kippur, please let me take the opportunity to thank those of you who have made reading this column a regular part of your bi-weekly activities and to ask sincerely that if I’ve offended with anything I’ve written to forgive as my object may have been to provoke, but never to offend. Shana Tova, everyone; may 5772 bring us all the blessing of lives filled with love and joy, peace and prosperity, good health and the wonder of discovery. And may the US Postal Service get this to you in time for your après déjeuner period of overstuffed relaxation in an overstuffed chair. Amen

Jews as Liberals

Sometimes the ways of editors are strange to behold, beyond human comprehension. At the Voice & Herald we have a terrific editrix but why she chose to print a patronizing letter to the editor from a self-proclaimed practicing Catholic who asks “Why do most American Jews still support and vote for very liberal politicians when you would think that their values would be more in line with more conservative candidates?” is beyond me. You’ve got to wonder how desperate she is to have a letter to the editor.

Dear self-proclaimed practicing Catholic: I don’t know if most American Jews vote for very liberal candidates for office. Hopefully we do, but I cannot testify to that as I’ve not taken a poll. In fact I know several Jews who would take offense at your generalization pointing to themselves as George W. Bush conservatives. But if it’s true that we vote liberal it’s because of our history and our values. We have been at the noose end of the rope, the saber’s edge of the Cossack, the victims of the triangle shirtwaist fire, the inhalers of Zyklon B. What? Do you think that because many of us are now prosperous we should forget where we came from, forget that others are not yet prosperous and, in fact, are sliding into the morass of poverty as the wealthiest become wealthier? Should we ignore their plight which used to be ours? Should we forget that Jews marched in Selma, rode on Freedom busses, were slaughtered by conservative red-necks for daring to help African Americans register to vote? Should we forget the dogs that bit us, the tears we shed when we watched the news on TV and saw the atrocities of the south, the new heartland of the conservative Republican Party? Am I living in the past? Well, if so, I guess I’m a conservative after all. I’ll go to my local gun show and buy me an unregistered Glock. After all, I wouldn’t want no gov’ment revenu’ers interfering with my Second Amendment rights to pack a rod.

That’s the history we bring to the table, those of us who have not become conservatives. As to our values they go back to the bible. We were slaves in Egypt and I’ve lost count of the number of times we’re reminded of that fact in the bible and told, don’t treat your workers as you were treated in Egypt. Our prophets trump our desire for profits. They were advocates of social justice. Those of us who go to shul read them every week. Those who don’t attend regularly probably go on Yom Kippur where we always read, “This is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, clothe him, and not ignore your own kin.” Well, thanks to Reaganism there are now too many homeless for us to take care of ourselves, so we depend on government to do the job for us and pay our taxes so that it can be done. We pay our taxes so that government can build high-speed trains and repair roads. Oh, wait, I forgot, as a conservative I don’t want to pay taxes; after all, it’s my money; why should I share it with some vagrant, why should I want it spent on trains when I own a car?

As long as I’m quoting bible, here’s a question for our purported practicing Catholic: What would be the political philosophy of someone who said that it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? Just wondering.

And finally, why was this question addressed to Jews in the first place? I know for a fact that many mainstream Protestants are more liberal than I am, and many Roman Catholics who are also. OK, Protestants, raise your hands if you are a liberal. I see, one, two, three, a million, ten-million. Now Roman Catholics, are any of your liberal? I see, one, two, three, a million, ten-million.

Please, Madame Editrix, enough. As to the rest of you, write a letter to the editor for her; she obviously is very lonely. Praise this column or attack it—or better yet, praise this column and attack Rosenberg’s.

A New Hero

I have many heroes, but today I add a new one to the list. In literature my hero is Hector of the Shining Helmet, defender of idyllic Troy from the barbarians at the gate. The Bible has a slew of heroes to choose from but I’ll stick with Joshua bin Nun, for obvious reasons. In science Galileo, who refused to back down from his researches even knowing the fate of those who preceded him tops the list, though modest Isaac Newton is close behind. Of American presidents I’ll stick with Kennedy, hero of my youth. In sports Gil Hodges wins the prize. His denied entrance to the Hall of Fame is a modern day equivalent of Hector being defeated outside the walls of Troy by the Achilles and Athena.

Except for Joshua, none of these fellows was actually Jewish, except in my mind. But the new guy is. One rainy day we drove to the Clark Museum in Williamstown to see the special exhibition called “Pissarro’s People”. (It’s there for another month if you have the inclination to make the drive.) I didn’t know much about Camille (since he’s my new hero we are now on a first name basis) other than vaguely that he was an early exemplar of the Impressionist School of French painting. What I didn’t know was that he was a Sephardic Jew. In fact, that morsel might be a clue to his personality and world outlook. Now, the world outlook of which I speak is not exclusively Jewish (it was shared by his exact contemporary Leo Tolstoy—1828-1910)—but Jews of his time, 1830-1903 and later, or some Jews, hold a similar perspective.

Pissarro is sometimes called the “Dean of Impressionism” or its “father”. He was an older member of that group that included Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, etc. which broke with the sanctified traditions of Beaux-Arts formalism to create the more fluid art that gave the idea of passing reality rather than perfected views of the past. So why is a guy who painted fuzzy a hero? Not because of his skill (which is indisputable) nor because of his courage in defying the establishment (also indisputable) but because of how he lived and painted. His real rebellion was against the self-satisfied bourgeoisie to whom material possessions were the be all and end all, who treated laborers as if they were replaceable cogs. He married Julie Vellay (1838-1926) one of his mother’s maids, a woman he loved for who, not what, she was, and to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life. That he would see in the maid servant virtue was reflected in his paintings of peasants who worked his rural lands. They are shown during hard work and deserved leisure. They are respected, not revolutionary as suggested in Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners”. To Pissarro the peasants he painted from the mid-1870s on were interesting people living interesting lives best shown in their collective markets, kind of like what is now springing up as nostalgic throwbacks such as the Saturday morning and Wednesday afternoon Blackstone Blvd. farmers’ markets, a place to see and be seen, to meet and to gossip, to buy (Blackstone Blvd farmers’ market prices are not for peasants) and to sell, a place other than the church to congregate. It’s a romantic image ignoring the smells and feel of cow dung and the backbreaking labor of sowing and reaping, but to Pissarro (and to Tolstoy, both of whom worked side by side—at least on occasion—with their peasants) it was the forecast of what was to come, a time when labor, peasant labor in this case, would own the land and determine what was to be bought and sold and for how much, the profits distributed according to effort and need. Think kibbutz.

In the end, Camille realized that this edenic vision was not to be and he drew a series of sketches called Turpitudes Sociales (Social Disgraces), Hogarthian depictions of life in the industrialized cities with a prediction of the uprising of the workers against those who exploited their labor. (You can find the complete set at http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/pissarro/content/slideshow-turpitudes-sociales.cfm)

So, my new hero in art is the Jew, Camille Pissarro—not because he’s Jewish but because his Jewishness colors his work in a way I’d never realized until I saw his people at the Clark.