Category Archives: Current Events/Culture

Hot Time, Summer in the City

Something I’ve observed this summer, worse than ever before, is that tourists are invading every corner of the city, making demands, being cranky, expecting to find Valhalla and finding instead the tricked out, dark underbelly of Oz.  They have bought into the Disney image of New York that Mayor Bloomberg and his 1%-ers have hyped to the hilt, and they blame New Yorkers for the fact that in real life, this city is still a dirty, noisy, hot, muggy, polluted, poorly air-conditioned and ridiculously expensive cesspool.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love New York.  I have never wanted to live anywhere else.  But when I am solvent enough to leave the city every summer, I shall.  Where will I go?  Anywhere but here.

Summer temperatures top 1000 at least in heat index for much of the summer.  While weather idiots on the tube regularly crow about the gloriously hot summer temps, they are safely ensconced in studios with average temperatures of 700F or lower, knowing they are about to get into hyper-cooled town cars that will whisk them back to whatever well A/C’d suburban lushness they left this morning. The rest of us are pouring schvitz, and no building we find ourselves stuck in is adequately cooled.

For most of us in New York — both native and visitor — there is no place to go for real relief.  The tourist who paid exorbitant prices to get here is not going to leave the city for a weekend spent floating in a not-nearly-as-icy-as-it-used-to-be glacial lake in the Adirondacks, which might be the only place left in the Northeast that isn’t miserable.  That tourist is probably wishing s/he had considered Alaska for this summer vacation.  Whatever possessed her to come here?

New Yorkers — well, those of us stuck down her here on the ground for the summer; remember, the 1% are out of town or in their refrigerated towers where weather is irrelevant — take the blame.  The tourists scream at us, push us out of their way, scowl at us when we try to help them.  And the way they treat service industry workers is appalling.

Last week, in a moment of exaggerated irony, I heard a woman yell at her husband, “Stop that.  You sound like a New Yorker.”  He was in mid-rant, flinging filthy epithets at a tour guide whose bus was full and could not take the couple onto her bus.  I was standing close by, a witness to the whole episode.  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” the guide had said consolingly.  “I’ve called the dispatcher to send an empty bus. You are not alone — we have . . .”  “You f-ing liar,” growled the man as the guide ran back onto the bus, pleading for the driver to close the doors behind her because the man was clearly about to lunge.  “You’ve made me stand here for two f-ing hours, you stupid bitch.  You think I believe for one minute that you got off your fat ass to. . .” The tour guide said less than nothing; she did look like she was close to tears.  If this guy was any example of the kind of customers she’d been taking on all day, she was probably frazzled.  And broke because no one was tipping.

Most Americans  — and foreigners these days, for that matter — turn their noses up at tipping, and many foreigners simply don’t understand our system because where they come from, tips are included in the price they pay for everything; no one ever has to ask.  Most tourists view service industry people’s asking for tips as akin to panhandling.  Yet the tip seekers are hard working, critical members of the labor force.  Nothing would run without them.  Yet their greedy, megalomaniacal bosses don’t pay them what they are worth;  they expect you to do it for them.

Consider the same tour bus, for example.  You have paid what feels to you like a king’s ransom for the pleasure of sitting on a steaming solarium, getting stuck in traffic long enough to have your skin sun roasted to the color of polished pomegranate seeds.  But in truth, you have actually paid very little for the service you are receiving.  Think about it.  On every bus, there is a driver and a guide who will answer all your questions, take all your abuse.  At every stop there is a dispatcher who keeps the buses rolling and protects you from one another when you fight over who’s first in line.  In the offices there are accountants who count and account for the money and bosses who tell each of the underlings what to do at every moment.  You use this service as a taxi, and in a day’s time, your handful of money has paid for some 500 people to keep the rig running.

Do you honestly believe those 500 people are paid what they are worth?  How could the employers’ profits soar as they do — these are figures Mayor Bloomberg loves to crow over — if all those foot soldiers were substantially paid?

Out-of-towners look down on service industry workers, consider them beneath contempt. They are, after all, the working class and deserve to be underpaid, undervalued, overworked, and maltreated because they didn’t pay their dues, get a good education, work their way up the corporate ladder.  In this age of Romney-ite philosophy, if you’re not rich, you are a loser.

Boy are you in the wrong city for that attitude!  I’m sure it’s like this elsewhere, but in New York, a surprising  — no, an ASTOUNDING — percentage of those working blue collar jobs are well-educated, well-read millions who were traind for jobs in industries that have failed in the past two years . . . like publishing and its fellows.

And here’s another insight.  Maybe where you come from your bosses talk to you like you deserve to be treated like a human being.  But in New York, particularly in the tourism industry, thugs are in key management positions.  That same tour guide who was being upbraided mercilessly by the unhappy customer will go back to her post and take another verbal beating for some infraction she executed unawares, and when she gets her paycheck, chances are it will be short by at least five of her exhausting hours’ work.

So, what’s my point? 

I hope you do come to New York — come soon, and come often.  We need your dollars for sure.  But try to remember that you need the service industry workers at least as much as they need you.  They go out of their way to make sure you are having a great day; they answer your questions, make lists, point to landmarks to guide you on your way, recommend places to pee, protect you from as much of the unpleasantness as is humanly possible.  They bring you your food, valet your car, carry your over-stuffed suitcase, call your cabs, drive your transports, clean the washrooms (yes, they do — people are slobs, remember?), ensure that you get safely to whatever floor you seek and, well, there is little you don’t take for granted that doesn’t require your thanking a service person.

Treat all New Yorkers with kindness and respect.  But treat all your servers with some extra consideration.  Leave a tip.

And for goodness sake, try to have a great time.  That’s what you came here for.

Surviving Survival

After the end of the world
After death
I found myself in the midst of life
Creating myself
Building life

      Tadeuz Rozewicz, After the End of the World 

Surviving a tragedy only the beginning of a near-daunting struggle; in fact, the survival itself just may be the easiest part of the ordeal.

My mother, who survived the deaths of two siblings and a nephew, carried her burden to the grave, never really working through the emotions. She subjugated her feelings of inadequacy and guilt to the responsibilities of daughterhood, sisterhood and motherhood but remained ever damaged, always skittish.  The wounded look in her eyes shone brightly in her proudest, happiest moments.  I learned a lot about the process of perseverance and the danger of avoidance from her; I also learned to listen more acutely and to empathize. As a result, I was always attracted to survivors’ stories, compelled to explore and write about them.

 In 2003, my friend Belle married Maurice Cohen, a self-proclaimed Israeli spy and Mossad agent.  Maurice asked me to write his story, about his relationship to his brother Eli Cohen, Israel’s most famous spy, a Syrian Jew who had infiltrated the Syrian government and assumed the powerful position of Chief Advisor to the Minister of Defense, divining critical information and transmitting it to the Israeli government.

Credited with having gathered information that eventually saved Israel and facilitated the country’s victory in the 1967 War, Eli was, of course, caught. In May of 1965, he was hanged in Damascus in an execution that was televised all over the Middle East, leaving a devastated widow and three small children; Maurice was left holding a memory of concealment.  Before his brother was captured, Maurice had discerned the secret of his brother’s undercover identity but had told no one.  Maurice spent the rest of his life (he died in 2004) regretting his supposition that by failing to disclose what he knew he had somehow contributed to Eli’s death. (The article, published in Moment Magazine, is archived here on this blog.)

For years, Maurice carried what he believed to be his dirty little secret, the proof of what he perceived as his own cowardice.  When he and I began to write the story together he began to muster self-forgiveness, and as his burden lightened, he needed to tell more and more people.  When he died, we were about to embark on the writing of his book.

While Maurice and I collaborated long distance, I went to Cannes for Festival du Film, hoping to sell a screenplay.  While I was there, I became friends with Michel Shane, who had among his many credits that he was Executive Producer of the film version of Catch Me If You Can.  He and I talked about Maurice’s story often.  Like me, he came from a family that predisposed him to taking special interest in and a feeling deep empathy for survivors of cataclysmic events.  We could not have known then how his life would turn him into a survivor; he was a powerful cheerleader, a hearty advocate, and when Fencer Dan Alon was looking for a writer to chronicle his harrowing path to victory over despair, it was Michel who recommended me for the job.

Dan Alon was born in Israel in 1943, the son of survivors who had emigrated from Hungary and Austria to settle in Palestine.  His father had been a freedom fighter, and Israel’s partition in 1948 was as much a victory for the family as it was for the nation.  But in order to achieve that triumph, Dan’s father had had to forego his dreams of competing as a fencer in the Olympic Games.  The dream was passed on to Dan, along with the talent for swordplay.

In 1972, after years of preparation and sacrifice on his family’s part to get him there, Dan qualified for the Munich Games.  Alon, his coach and best friend Andrei Spitzer and one other fencer arrived in Munich a week before the games to spar with the German National team, an honor conferred on very few competitors.  When they checked in to the Olympic Village, Dan unwittingly saved his own life while Spitzer equally unwittingly sacrificed his by choosing their separate rooms.  When the Black September terrorists invaded the peace of the athletes’ compound, they overlooked the five men in the apartment Dan chose and went directly to the one Spitzer shared with the other coaches.

For thirty-four years, Dan was unable to talk about his experience.  He could not and would not quantify his pain.  He simply forged ahead, delving into the various activities that replaced fencing in his life.  Then, in 2004, chance and Stephen Spielberg took him to Oxford University, where, at a screening of Munich, Dan’s son had told the rabbi there that his father had survived the Massacre.  Like most people, the rabbi had not realized anyone had lived through it, and he immediately  invited Dan to Oxford to share his tale.  From that moment, Dan was encouraged to find a writer and record the journey for posterity, a process that has finally freed his soul and taught him how to breathe again. (http://munichmemoir.daptd.com/)

After a number of starts and stops, Dan and I finally published our book on May 24, 2012, and in the intervening years, Michel himself has become a survivor of the worst tragedy imaginable: the violent, sudden death of a child.

In April 2010, Michel’s youngest daughter Emily was blissfully returning home from school, when she was struck and killed by a suicidal driver.  The past two years have been hellish for Michel and his family, and some peace was finally affected in May of this year, when the driver was convicted of murder.  All along, Michel and his brave wife and two remaining daughters have carried on with grace.  They established the Emily Shane Foundation, which celebrates Emily’s optimism and commitment to kindness and joy (http://www.emilyshane.org/) by encouraging people, in Emily’s name, to make the world a better place one action at a time.  Emily’s loving, generous nature lives on on that website, dancing to the song that plays a hopefully plaintive tune, asking merely that we “do it with love.”

 Surviving is horrific; carrying on, actively and emphatically participating in life afterward is beyond courageous.  Committing to life even when it begs to be rejected . . . that’s inspirational.

Farewell to Great Gossip and a Fondness for Cigars

David Heymann died last week.  He was my friend, my colleague, my tireless cheerleader.

I was working as his editor on his last book, a tribute to the Joe DiMaggio/Marilyn Monroe love story, and he called me just minutes before he collapsed to talk about the book.  It was nearly finished; we had only the last chapter to fix, and he had all but “I dunno — maybe 15 or 16 pages” ready to roll.  His death was sudden, and when his friend Francesca called me to tell he he had died, all I could think was, “But he promised he’d call me tonight.”

I will ever hear the echo of that last conversation, will have in my ear the sound of his belabored breathing on the other side of the phone line, his gravely voice signing off with, “Okay.  I’ll talk to you later.  I’ll call you tonight. Is around 9 okay?  I just wanna get this thing done.”

It’s a good book, perhaps his best; he was so careful, meticulous about the details, wanting everything to be right so that the book honors the memory of two people for whom he had a clear admiration and, especially, the name of DiMaggio’s poor, lost son, who died the same year as his father.  He fussed over the three of them, worried about every little word he said of them; they were his children.

Working with/for David was an adventure, and being his friend was a daily revelation.  As his wife Bea once told me, “Life with David’s never boring!”  I wrote a farewell piece for my company DAPTD’s’s blog, and I’ll share it here.  http://daptd.com/home/2012/05/17/farewell-to-great-gossip-and-a-fondness-for-cigars/

DAPTD will miss you, David.  But I’ll miss you more!