Author Archives: carlastockton

Lucky’s Not Good Enough

I wanted to love We Were the Lucky Ones, a Hulu original series.  After all, the story resonates with me.  Like my real-life Jewish family, the family in the show is dispersed by the Nazi invasion, set adrift in the world.  It’s a masterful series, well acted, realistically written, and beautifully shot.  Yet, after the second or third episode, I found myself feeling sick, resenting the artistry of it.  The why eluded me at first.

The drama is certainly harrowing.  An embattled family encounters every possible horror that the Holocaust meted. They witness, narrowly escape, suffer aftershocks, and move on. The music is Schindleresque sad, and the scenes of torture and cruelty are horrifying.  But that’s not it. Nothing in this show is any worse than what Keneally or Spielberg depicted or what Primo Levi described.  No loss is any more heartbreaking than those Daniel Mendelsohn memorialized.  There is nothing to see in this series that we haven’t seen in any one of the honorable Holocaust museums across the world.   So why does this show so offend me? 

Over my head, I hear the whirr of helicopters, and I run to the TV to check the local news. On the screen, hate-spewing,  pro-Palestinians rally on my Alma Mater campus, just up the street from my home.  An angry child-woman glares into the camera and shouts, “They are weaponizing the holocaust” while hundreds scream, “From the river to the sea.” 

At another gathering in midtown Manhattan, youngsters in checkered scarves and green, white, black, and red flags scream “Free Palestine.” A middle-aged man proudly waves a Hamas flag.  Online, a headline from the ADL: “Chicago Sees Rise in Antisemitism and Activism Amid Action by Anti-Israel Groups.”

There it is. Now I get it.

Our stories are betraying us.  It’s time to revise.

Real life has become scary, and those of us who inherited our parents’ PTSD, who were born with memories we cannot decipher, are reliving the dreams we cannot comprehend of the terror they fled.  The specters that used to visit only by night are fully animated by day.  Once upon a time, the anticipation of violence was easily quelled by stories that assured us that the world was sufficiently sorry; pogroms were a thing of the past. We believed our parents when they reminded us that this is America, after all, and we could feel safe.  No more.  Those night fears loom omnipresent over my home, my security, my grandchildren.  The stories no longer heal.

The haters are wrong.  It is not that we are weaponizing the Holocaust or antisemitism.  But we are hiding behind it.  We hold up our past like medals won in the Suffering Olympics that proclaim our capable willingness to suffer.  There is no more reassurance in the idea that it can’t happen here because clearly it can.  And it will if we let it. 

Those who wish for our annihilation are fueled by our pain.  Many display their own medals and say we have not suffered nearly enough.  Others are simply irritated by what they perceive as our whining insistence that enough is enough. 

We have to stop thinking that this approach will work. Many in the world deem it passive aggression.  We have to stop apologizing for our coreligionists who are fighting for the survival of Israel.  We have to stop disclaiming our right to fight back.  We have to take control of the rhetoric and paint ourselves as a far more positive, authoritatively powerful people. As Rabbi Diana Fersko recently wrote for Tablet magazine, “We have to stop running defense” (“American Jews Should Become a Little more Israeli” April 1024).  Just because millions of us were killed in the holocaust doesn’t mean we must beg for survival by reminding our foes we don’t deserve to be exterminated.  Would we be any less deserving if we had not suffered the mass murders? 

Art is a wonderful place to find relief and transformation.  Which is what so many writers and filmmakers, artists and curators have done by insisting on telling our truth.  But at this moment, the profusion of new Holocaust reenactments feels like a Hail Mary play that is doomed to failure.  We cannot think that because Hulu shows The Lucky Ones for ten weeks on their streaming app our detractors will suddenly see the folly of their ways and back off.  Will one Jewish family’s miraculous survival of that great apocalypse convince the world to watch any less dispassionately while the Ayatollah rattles Iran’s nuclear sword?   Not a chance.

We should have more films like Munich or Raid on Entebbe or even Exodus. We need to see heroes like Liev Schreiber’s character in “Defiance,” heroes who defied the stereotypes and showed our refusal to let the world beat us up.  There should be more series like Tehran that explore the ways in which Israel and world Jewry are endangered every minute of every day by adversaries who hate us for no reason but that they do. We should have filmmakers creating films like Watching the Moon at Night that expose Hamas leaders’ vitriolic calls for the extermination of all Jews everywhere. We need documentary footage of Jews standing up to the hate, holding their ground. . . winning.

We cannot expect the world to feel sorry for us just because we wear our thorny laurels in public.  People are not moved by pictures of dead Jews.  They take those images for granted.

Of Pasha And Pancakes

My father loved pancakes.  My mother made them often, but he especially loved the pancakes that the women of the United Methodist Church served every Easter morning after sunrise service. 

Perhaps the pancakes tasted sweeter when filled with the spirit of revelation.  Perhaps he just liked the way the pancakes were uniformly round, thin, and warm, so unlike the ones my mother made.  Hers were always misshapen, and by the time they got to his plate, they were routinely cold.  I suspect that in his mind, my mother had not mastered the gentle American art of making pancakes, as she had most assuredly not mastered the compleat art of Easter.

Oh, she got the gist. She understood that Easter was, like Passover, a celebration of renewal, of rebirth.  I was born in the wake of the Holocaust that drove her to the US, and though she never said as much, I know that the symbolism of Easter and Passover were reminders that she was fortunate to have a life that had transcended the ashes that consumed so many of her loved ones. She abjured the images she admitted to later, images of Easter pogroms in her father’s Polish shtetl. She embraced our celebratory rituals – coloring eggs, making paper flowers, painting murals for the dining room that exploded with the glory of springtime.  We lived in several places in the northeast, where winters then were long and bitterly cold.  The warmth of spring was a welcome reprieve.  But she never made Easter about Christ.

Nor did she make pancakes on Easter Sunday.  Easter Sunday was the one Sunday we broke with the weekly tradition of attending church together. 

On that morning, because I sang in the choir, Dad woke me early, and we went together to Sunrise Service, after which he stood in line, first for pancakes, then for seconds.  He chatted with the parishioners, schmoozed with the minister and the assistant minister, and then he drove back to the house to get the rest of the family. I would watch from the choir loft with a modicum of embarrassment as Dad, Mom, and my six siblings, all dressed in the new Easter finery that Mom herself had sewn, filed in.  They were, as always, about ten minutes late, and the congregation seemed amused as they filled a pew at the front of the nave. 

After the service, Dad was like a little boy.  He could not wait to get us home to our Easter baskets, which he had personally filled with candy and little toys.  Then we’d have brunch, which Mom would serve with pride. The other food varied with the years – when we were flush, we had meat and cheeses, and when we were not, we had whatever we could afford – but three critical items never changed.  At every Easter brunch, we ate the eggs we had colored the day before and the Passover matzahs she had hungrily opened that morning.  We always had chicken soup and matzah balls.  Dad made fun of Mom for the matzah.  She could have chosen toast, he would chide.  Or she could have made pancakes.  She would smile and say, “You already had your pancakes, and you don’t like mine nearly as much.” 

The year I was about 6, the toys in our basket included tiny taxidermized chicks.  My mother was appalled.  She said something I didn’t understand about carrying the imagery of Easter too far.  When I realized what I had in my hand, I shrieked and ran to the backyard, where I buried the weightless thing in Mom’s tomato garden. Years later, Dad remembered the day more vividly than I did, and I believe he blamed it for a cataclysmic change that came over me when I was twelve.

Until then, I never questioned our tradition of attending church together every Sunday. I was deeply committed to my father’s religion and, from the time I was 5, I sang in the choir, often emotion-laden solos with tears running down my face.  Easter was my teariest time –  tears of mourning for  the crucifixion and tears of joy for the resurrection.  My father was intensely proud. 

Then, in the middle of my final tween year, I experienced a reversal of faith.  I told my father that I respected Christianity deeply, that I believed in its tenets regarding love and forgiveness. But the basic mythology had lost its appeal. I could no longer believe in the stories; they did not ring true.  Dad and I fought bitterly over what he considered my blasphemy, but I was obdurate.  I would no longer participate in the rituals of the religion, and I would no longer attend church with him. He acquiesced.

My denunciation hurt him deeply.  I am not sure he ever truly understood what made me an apostate, but he never blamed me.  He never shunned me or made me feel awkward about it.  Our fight on the day I announced it to him was the last time he even addressed it. Until the year my first child was born.

Fifteen years after my lapse of faith, my husband and I moved to be near my parents’ home, where we reinstituted our family celebrations.  When Easter arrived, I was four months pregnant.  We spent the day with my parents, who had prepared Easter baskets for my teenage siblings still at home and another for my unborn child.  Mom was in the kitchen putting the last-minute touches on her Easter brunch, and I was pouring water into each of the glasses on the beautifully set table when my father asked me what religion we had chosen for the baby.

“Will you raise your kids as atheists?”  He asked. 

I laughed.  My husband had left Catholicism for many of the same reasons I abandoned Dad’s religion, and we had several times discussed our plan for our family’s religious education. Atheism had never been a consideration.

We wanted our children to have a solid background so that when they reached the age of renouncing traditions, they would have something to reject with authority.  No dropping out without a foundation for our offspring.  We decided on my mother’s religion, which seemed to us to be both logical and reasonable. 

“Besides,” I said to Dad.  “There’s no way around it.  Mom’s Jewish.  That means I am too.  And my children are as well.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s a sound choice.”  Then, with a twinkle in his eye that was tinged with just the slightest hint of accusation, he added,   “You do love those matzahs.  And with Passover, the only dead chickens will be in your soup.”

Maestro Moment

I opened Facebook the day after I watched Maestro and saw that a friend must have watched it the night before as well.  Her response surprised me.

“There is no soul,” she wrote. “No pulse to it. What woman in her right mind would concede her life to a gay man?”

I had to laugh. Besides the music, particularly the Mahler, what I loved most about Maestro was its deeply honest, layered look at a relationship I recognize from my own life. A relationship that saved me from self-loathing and taught me true love.

 Back in the olden days when I was young, misogyny was unguarded, and discrimination against women was prevalent – it was everywhere and out in the open. Straight men and women alike extincted the Ugly Girl, ignored the misfit, discarded the nonconforming woman. If we were not Helen Gurley Brown emaciated and/or Gymnastics Barbie adorable, we had difficulty making friends, attracting lovers, finding jobs.  Our fellow women could not afford to like those of us who were less than perfectly feminine, attractive to men, passive in accepting our rightful place.  Women were motivated by the need to bag their men; to be the friend of the Ugly Girl was to risk the stigma of association.  No woman wanted to be ignored by the men she sought to impress.

In that distant pre-Stonewall 60’s past, gay men, too, found themselves too often alone and friendless. Many sought beards, female partners who would protect them from the prying sensibilities of those who would out them. Being outed could put gay men in the same position as the non-standard issue female: at odds with the ability to find suitable jobs, housing, friends. Relationships with strong women – women who could stand beside them and anchor their respectability. – were a way to buffer the implied slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. They may not have offered sex to the women they courted, but they often gave more valuable gifts in abundance.  Gifts of attentiveness, admiration, validation, companionship. Many of us who were on the outside of social acceptability in the straight world found comfort and peace among the homosexual or bisexual men who needed us as much as we needed them.

As a naive As a naïve innocent from upstate New York, I arrived on the dating scene with at best a tentative self-image, and I soon saw that I had been identified as one who would do very nicely as a doting beard.  I was clever, nonjudgmental, erudite, and empathetic. I knew I was needy as hell, but I sublimated by giving until I was empty, and I was easily sated.  I got the affection I craved but never demanded, and my needs were met.

Maestro took me back to the year I was 17 and my very first real boyfriend Mark, a lovely gay Native American from outside Santa Fe. A boy who was, in every way that counted then, my perfect match.

We met in the scene shop at the University of New Mexico, where we both majored in drama. 

Stagecraft and scene design were required freshman classes, and on that first day, because I had never ever held any kind of a construction tool in my hands, and because I was without a single acquaintance in the class, I was feeling out of my depth and alone. Then a slightly chubby, deeply tanned young man asked me why I was wearing a key on a chain around my neck.  The nonsequitur startled me a bit but made me smile.

“I lose things,” I answered frankly.  “I’ll get locked out of the dorm if I can’t find my room key.”

The boy laughed and looked through me before he said, “You know, in Mexico, if you wear a key like that, you are letting the world know you are for sale.” He grinned.

I blushed.  “Oh. I guess that would assume anyone would be interested to buy this,” I indicated my bulky body and stifled a self-deprecating giggle.

Mark laughed. Then he aimed his dark brown cow eyes directly into my soul. “You would undoubtedly attract only the best of buyers,” he said.  “No sleazy airheads who are looking for a kewpie doll but anyone looking for a real woman.”

I was instantly smitten.  Remember, it was a different time!

For the next nearly two years, Mark and I were inseparable. Being with him made me infinitely happy.  Partly because of the superficial ways in which he satisfied my fantasies. Squiring me around in his fancy sports car – we even ran away together over spring break to escape the boredom and would have landed in NY if the car had not thrown a rod. Taking me to plays and films. Teaching me how to order alcohol. Introducing me to the kinds of excitement I could not have found in my insular hometown, like state fair rides and huevos ranchero and group peyote trips.  But it also made me happy that I made him just as happy as he made me.

Like the Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegro that Bradley Cooper and Carrie Mulligan portrayed, Mark and I finished one another’s sentences, guessed what each other was thinking, provided a blanket of support, love and acceptance neither of us had experienced before.

Even Mark’s mother adored me, invited me often to visit their large reservation home outside Santa Fe, where she was a tribal elder. She introduced me to Georgia O’Keefe.  Not O’Keefe’s work.  O’Keefe.  She would sit up with us late into the nights I was there, laughing at our stories, entertaining us with her own.  We were family.

Mark and I were melded.  We were the reconstructed humans in Plato’s Symposium, reconstituted as two halves of a single being. The fact that we didn’t have a lot of sexual intimacy was reassuring to both of us then.  I still believed that good girls didn’t, and he was grateful that I had no expectations. At the time, I was naïve enough to be unbothered when he took lovers and disappeared for days at a time.  He always returned to me. To our idyll. 

Knowing what I know now, I am sure I would have been jealous had Mark fallen in love with the men he bedded.  But I also know that I would have learned to live with the pain, would have found a way to sublimate my anxiety about it.  Our relationship was worth it to me.  If Mark had been bisexual, I might have proposed that we marry and start a family just like the idealized Lenny and Felicia.  He was not.  And in the end, his inability to commit for life was what ended our relationship.

In our second year together, Mark fell in love.  With a wonderful man. Our relationship would not fit in with the kind of arrangement they necessarily made with one another.  Mark never said as much, but I knew. I moved on.  We lost touch.

That was fifty+ years ago. . . .

I recently searched for Mark on Ancestry and found his obituary. I was overcome with a sadness I hardly expected.  And I realized that the fact that I searched for him at all was proof he still lives in the deepest corner of my heart, where I hold my parents and others I have lost.  He remains my first and deepest love. 

My Maestro.

Wishing for the Nightmare to End

The trauma is passed to us in our DNA. It has been etched by myriad attempts to obliterate us, forged by centuries of Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Cossacks, Jihadists, ad infinitum. . . an endless list of haters. Wherever we go, wherever we settle, we are never free of it.

I felt it in the earliest fog of my dawning awareness. In the safety of postwar America, it resonated in sounds and furies I couldn’t understand.   The wailing, the anger, the despair that accompanied the opening of an envelope.  The reluctance to go to the door when a telegram arrived.  The startle and the groan when the telephone rang. I felt the pain, intuited the anguish, but I was a baby, and I didn’t have words.  The frenzy was terrifying. 

As I acquired language, words seeped into my consciousness and insinuated themselves into my vocabulary.  Nazis, camps, exile, death, torture, hiding, hate. . . .

The images swarmed into my nightmares.  Dark images I could not name usurped my dreams.  By the time I was 3, the nightmare was a cinematic horror that repeated itself over and over. My cousins and I hide in my grandmother’s attic, a house in Queens full of shadowy corners, where evil easily lurked.  And always – though I do not know how or where I ever heard them – the soundtrack comes from the whine of European sirens and the thump of jackboots on concrete. 

I inevitably wake just as a helmeted monster finds me and proclaims, “So. . . you thought you could escape us. But there is nowhere to hide, Jew. . . .”

I was eleven before the full impact of my family’s flight became clear.  When I asked my mother why she never talked to me about it, she said, “I lived.  It wasn’t so interesting.”  She had not suffered as the beloved relatives suffered in the camps or as the cousins did when they were ripped from their parents’ arms and sent on Kindertransports or the way others did who watched their parents murdered and had to find their orphaned way to Australia or South America or . . . .Mom had no words and no sympathy for her own trauma –  being cast into exile, leaving everything she valued in a world gone mad.  She could not have explained it to me.

When I was an adult, I recognized some of her coping techniques.  She married my father, an all-American boy, whose family had come to North America by choice in the 1600s, Dutch and English protestants, fleeing nothing. They came in search of a New Life that was richer than the rich one they left behind.  Dad was a towheaded blonde, whose sky-blue eyes glistened with tears when he heard his favorite hymns.  He was Safety.  Mom buried herself in his identity and denied her own so that her children would never have to fear the monsters who robbed her of so much. 

I did not share her assurance.  I grew ever more afraid of the knock on the door, the intrusion of the evil interloper intent on taking our joy, our lives.  But I trusted that thanks to Israel, we would never again be an endangered species.  If the Nazis returned, we would have a place to go. The uncles and aunts and cousins who were denied entrance to alternate countries or who were caught because they knew of no place to go might have been saved had there been an Israel.  We the people without a country had one whose birth was within a year of my own, and we would never be flagless orphans again.

People ask me, “Why do you need Israel? You are American!”  My mother’s older sister, whose wisdom I found nonpareil, loved to say that in America we were safe.  “Don’t worry!” She would laugh. “The US is too diverse a community to hate one people with the kind of vehemence that European hegemony empowered.  We will never be hated like that here.”

I have wanted to believe her.  I have wanted to be grateful for this country that nurtured me, a country I deeply love.  Knowing that the Plot Against America of the 1930s and 40s was thwarted, I wanted to trust the country I have always believed is mine. 

Yet, even now we are reminded that even here we are interlopers.

A synagogue in Pittsburgh is attacked. Neo-nazis march in droves shouting “Jews will not replace us.”  Undereducated youngsters with no sense of history celebrate the murder of Israeli children and blame us for wanting to save Israel. They scream for its extinction.  Modern Judenratners, betray us at every turn.  We are no safer here than we are in any other gentile-dominated country of the world. 

We require the presence of a resolute, strong Israel to safeguard our future.

Israel must survive.   Or we will not.

Am Yisroel Chai!

Yom Kippur Confession — Goodby to King David

David, Age 4

I didn’t need a brother.  I certainly didn’t want one.  I liked being the center of my parents’ universe, the special doll of my much older half-sister.  Besides, I already had cousins who were like siblings when we were together, who were kind enough to leave me to return to my charmed realm. 

What egocentric three-year-old in her right mind would want the disruption of a younger sibling?

And yet I got one.

At first, he was little more than a nuisance. Smelly, wrinkly, ugly red but inevitable.  I accepted him.  And I accepted that I was responsible for him.  I even loved him. Before I was 4, I was happy to help with the laundry, comfort him when he cried, give him his bottles, sing him to sleep.

The second year was fraught.  He was ill most of the time.  Tracheal bronchitis, pneumonia, flu, ear infections.  He sucked up every ounce of attention my parents had to give, and I was their willing accomplice.  We coddled him, nurtured him, protected him. 

The day he began Kindergarten, his inability to hear enraged the principal, who thought he was simply ignoring her when she called us in from the playground.  I intervened, yelling at her, taking her hand off the ear by which she was about to lead him into school.  He was my responsibility.  I had to take care of him.

By the time I was in 5th grade, we had moved twice – once to a new state and then across town to our fourth new school in less than two years.  David had evolved into a magical boy.  People loved him.  He was powerful, smart, witty.  Everyone he met was his new best friend. He no longer needed me, and it was a good thing because the fact of five subsequent siblings, a veritable separate family, required that I no longer attend to him.

Yet David was still the victim of multiple ailments.  He was inevitably the first one to get sick and the last one to be well.  I remained healthy as the proverbial farm animal, the last to get sick and the quickest to recover. 

I was jealous, and that year I impulsively succumbed to my jealousy. It was the first and the last time I was ever jealous of David.  The experience chastised me.

The Asian flu arrived in our town sometime between my birthday in early October and Hallowe’en.  Fewer and fewer kids were coming to school.  David was felled in the first days of the epidemic.  Our siblings who were not yet in school had runny noses and low-grade fevers, but they were not terribly ill.  I had no symptoms. Whatsoever.

Which seemed like a terrible injustice.

Because I was the designated caregiver, I volunteered to look after David, who was quite ill.  I took him his meals and sat with him while he moaned himself to sleep. Then I lay down next to him and breathed as close to his mouth as I could before I licked the plate and utensils he had used as I carried them down to the kitchen for washing. I was determined to have a bit of this flu for myself.

I was so successful I nearly died.  For six days I ran a fever over 104, and at the end of the week, I had a three-day nosebleed. 

I have never been so sick before or since.  The experience was a powerful lesson.

What I learned was what a hero my brother actually was.  He so often survived battles with bugs like the one that struck me, and he paid a price.  Hearing loss, asthma, compromised immunity.  Eventually diabetes. 

Through it all, he was ever cheerful, ever willing to go out of his way to participate in athletics, at which he excelled, ever warm and supportive to his friends and neighbors. Everyone loved David.  And they loved him for a reason. 

They recognized his genuine lust for life and his commitment to having the best it could offer him, even if he had to pay a price for the privilege.

As a brother, he was certainly not perfect.  I was nowhere near a perfect sister.  Yet we were one another’s permanency.  So long as we were in the world together, we knew that we were grounded in some kind of family.  By 1999, both our parents were gone, but I was not an orphan until David left last February. 

I didn’t want a brother.  I thought I didn’t need one. But I did.

I needed David.