Alive beyond Alive
by Loyola Walter
My friend Loyola works at Mount Saint Joseph (she’s chair of the Art Department) and knew Pete Mosher. We reminisced last night and today before Pete’s funeral. Cab picked me up at Lo’s this morning and we went to Saint Clare’s Church on Cedar Avenue. Lo sent the following to me this afternoon as Cab, Jane, Allison Lind, and I were returning to Saint Louis.
I meet Cab
(when she comes to get Markie for the funeral)
and suddenly I become aware
of all the forms that Pete is taking.
There she is, a new person to me, in her dark blue dress coat and shoes,
thin delicate face with large eyes and a small serious smile “glad to meet you”
and in the muddy cold street, air silver with rain and the melting of snow
I see him, smiling,
see
All the forms he is now taking
All the beautiful, one-of-a-kind forms.
Alive beyond alive.
______________________
Taking a Stand
These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors.
I met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at Blackberry Café in Clayton. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will also give the commencement address.
Mr. Wiesel and Ms. Epstein have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by the Nazi genocide. He survived the Auschwitz death camp, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.
After the war he moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, and eventually became a journalist and novelist. After the war, she served as a research analyst for the U.S. government at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments; she then came to the United States.
In the 1990s I spent many hours reading Wiesel’s books and writing a study of his activism in light of his Holocaust experience. In the last decade I have spent many hours with Ms. Epstein: at peace vigils, meetings, demonstrations, and as part of the International Solidarity Movement in Israel’s occupied West Bank in 2003.
Wiesel is an internationally renowned icon, advisor to presidents (Carter, Reagan, and Clinton), guide to Oprah Winfrey at Auschwitz, and author of over forty books. Ms. Epstein has been known locally for decades as a speaker on the Holocaust and also as a grass-roots activist challenging U.S. militarism; more recently, she has become prominent nationally and internationally because of her work for Palestine.
Mr. Wiesel would agree with the working title of Ms. Epstein’s political memoir, Remembering Is Not Enough. And I think that Ms. Epstein would agree with Mr. Wiesel words from his Nobel lecture in 1986 in which he critiqued neutrality and urged people to take up the cause of those who are oppressed and marginalized.
Given what Martin Luther King, Jr. once called named the imperative of responding to what is going on in the present, the crucial moral task is to refuse abstraction and embody such maxims in our specific political, economic, and cultural context.
For example, in the second volume of his 1999 memoirs, Mr. Wiesel admitted he had not done enough regarding the Palestinians, even as he stated he had not taken a public position on the conflict. He had long held that since he lived outside of Israel, he didn’t have the right to be critical of the Jewish state.The Palestinians’ situation, he claimed, nevertheless touched him.
The fact that he did not live in the Soviet Union, Bosnia, or Iraq did not stop him from speaking out about those urgent situations (he was a strong supporter of Bush’s invasion/aggression in Iraq in 2003). There is also the fact that, for over four decades, Mr. Wiesel has made the strongest, most ardent “public stand” of support for Israel, from the 1967 war to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to its response to the intifada in the late 1980s. He forbade himself to criticize in public Israel but he certainly sang its praises and justified its actions.
Unlike the Nobel Peace laureate, Ms. Epstein has taken a public stand to oppose, not the “plight” of the Palestinians, but their oppression by Israel, steadfastly backed by the United States. Since 2003 she has made five trips to the West Bank to work with peace, women’s and solidarity groups opposed to the now almost 44year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In East Jerusalem, Mash’a, Al’ara, Hebron, Qalqilya, and Bil’in, she has joined the Palestinians, along with Israeli activists and other internationals, in nonviolent resistance to Israel’s intensive effort to ghettoize the Palestinians and to expropriate more of their land for Jewish settlers.
She has bore witness to Israel’s massive wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. She has received a very small but unforgettable taste of what the Palestinians experience every day, from being strip searched, water cannoned, tear gassed and sound bombed, as well as being declared a terrorist and security risk.
She stood face to face with the women, men and children of the West Bank and listened to their stories, memories, anguish, and hope.
In the last three years, she made four unsuccessful attempts to be one on the boats to break Israel’s devastating siege of Gaza. She is scheduled to join scores of other U.S. citizens on the U.S. boat to Gaza in late June as part of the International Freedom Flotilla II.
By her words, but much more powerfully by her actions, Ms. Epstein is saying to us, We must intervene, since neutrality only aids and abets the oppressor.
______________________
The Good News of a Reader’s Response
by Fred Zweig
Mark,
I finished reading your book yesterday. It has it all: a beautiful love story, heroic idealism, clarity. It is awesome in many respects. I am 93 years old and consider myself pretty tough-minded but it is the only book I remember reading that made me cry! Congratulations on your achievement.
With great appreciation,
Fred
______________________
Metta for a Psychiatrist
May you be filled with loving kindness
For the kids on the edge of urban doom
May you be well
Unfazed by the hourly bureaucratic hoops
May you be peaceful and at ease
Before the inferno of institutional inanity
May you be happy
For the benefit of each human-miracle-being you see
______________________
Interbeing
“Listen, listen
This wonderful sound
Brings me back to my true self.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
You say you wish you could hear my bell
You are 5633 miles away from me
I am 5633 miles away from you
I hear the bell in the emails you send me
