Update 3-18-03


Hi,

Commentary of all kinds:

But first, an immediate reminder from Paul DeMartino:  Just to let you know that the next class get-together will be Sunday afternoon, March 23rd at Robin Feit Baker's house in Oceanside.  We expect a nice turnout, and everyone usually helps by contributing food, snacks, beverages, or dessert.  This, of course, is entirely separate from the gathering we're working towards on May 3rd.

Then, a belated birthday wish from Zelda White Nichols:  This is for Robin Feit -- Robin, we grew up together and were in the same class at Buck and South.  But you can't possibly be 55.  You will always remain 16 to me.

And the first answer to Ellen Epstein Silver, from Peggy Cooper Schwartz:  The Reunion Cruise idea sounds intriguing.  Les and I took a wonderful, seven-day cruise from New York City to Bermuda fifteen years ago, and I would certainly do this cruise again.  It's relatively economical, and all the New Yorkers in the class would not have to fly in.  Of course, being a Floridean, I wouldn't mind a Caribbean Cruise that leaves from Miami or Ft. Lauderdale.  Plus, Bermuda's a gorgeous, clean, and safe island, and the weather there is best from May to October.  

Assorted information from Barbara Blitfield Pech:  I look forward to sharing another wonderful mini-reunion weekend in New York on May 3rd.  All are welcome to join our camp out at Robin Feit's house.  Bring your own tent.
      Also, having a few minutes free to surf the net, I dropped Valley Stream into a search engine and found some of the following sites you might want to check:
      www.hnom.org                          Holy Name of Mary church
      www.mychurchandtown.com      Gibson and Green Acres/Millbrook
      www.valleystreamvillage.org       Village Green, mayor, Government Center
      www.memberstripod.com           Valley Stream schools reunion page
      www.emsc.nysed.gov                School Districts 24 and 30 news
      And a historic site for old Coney Island:
      http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/coneyisland/mapsdocs/map1949.htm
      Note:  These are not links.  You'll have to copy and paste them

A footnote in the search for Ed Bonlarron, from someone who prefers to remain anonymous:  You may have seen this as well, but I wanted to let you know that Frank Bonlarron has posted his name on Classmates.com.  If he doesn't know where his brother is, who will?

Next, the commentary, first from Mark Perlman:  I thought that I would share some of my feelings with the class.  I live in a suburb south of Colorado Springs.  There are a lot of folks living here who are stationed at, or working at, Fort Carson.  I work at Lowe's Home Improvement in the Springs with a lot of these same folks, and I see trains loaded with tanks, trucks, half-tracks, and other desert camouflage vehicles leaving the area every day.  Plus, I see troop and transport planes taking off, I hear of practice lockdowns at NORAD, and I see bombers making practice runs.  We also have Peterson Air Force Base and Schriever Base nearby, both on alert.
      If everything goes according to plan, our area will be reduced by three-quarters of the Army military personnel, about 11,000 people, by the end of next week.  At Lowe's, we've already had 8 reservists leave their jobs when they got deployed, and we have another 12 wondering when they'll have to go.  We also have 9 active military people, working here part-time, who are waiting for deployment.   
      I hope the President will realize his folly before we get committed to another Viet Nam.  This won't be a second Desert Storm; we're pretty well on our own in this one.  I hope and pray that Bush realizes that the "sins of the father" do not have to be repaired by the son.  Too many innocent citizens, on both sides, will be lost if this goes on.  Let us hope that it doesn't.

Then, Jerry Bittman:  Most of you are unaware that, on 9/14/01, I organized a candlelight vigil here in Nebraska for the victims of 9/11.  I am proud to say that today I have organized another, to be held tomorrow on 3/19.  I am tired of all this anti-American rhetoric.  Knowing that we will soon be at war, the vigil will honor our military men and women.  As with the last event, we are getting support from all facets of the media.  Families have been asked to bring pictures of their loved ones wearing their military uniforms.  Members of the clergy will lead us in prayer, hymns, and patriotic songs.  People will be allowed to speak into a microphone and voice their feelings.  Today, Police Chief Lynch showed me a picture of his son, who is in the military.  Chief Lynch guaranteed me that he and his wife will attend.  Again, the vigil is on Wednesday, 3/19, at 8:30 PM Central time.  If any of my fellow classmates wish to, please take a moment at that time and pray for our military.  And let us all hope that the coming casualties will be few.

From Michael Wolff, in New York magazine, March 10th:  I never know if I'll be thinking, as I read the Times at breakfast, that reasonable men have reasonable disagreements -- maybe it is a good thing to "free" Iraq -- or that all reason has discreetly departed.  Or, perhaps, that we have entered one of those surreal historical moments that reasonable men simply don't have the language for.
      The Times has assumed its most official kind of voice.  Its Pentagon reporters command the front page.  Other reporters are in war training.  The tone is sober, meticulous, striving to be nonjudgmental -- intent on ignoring all the various elephants in the room.
      When the Times has General Tommy Franks discussing the intricacies of mobilization, everything seems serious and competent.  But then as soon as you get to the numbers and the costs, everything becomes dreamlike and obtuse.  The New York Post business pages might be better at handling these numbers than the Times front page -- we need a War-Cost-o-Meter.
      And then we're paying Turkey $15 billion to be our ally?  Huh?  But the Times, more or less pointedly, hasn't used the almost unavoidable phrase checkbook diplomacy once.  (Has anyone thought to offer a similarly sized retirement package to Saddam?)

And The New York Times, March 13th:  Their friends are horrified.  Even they are surprised at themselves.  But as the nation stands on the brink of war, reluctant hawks are declining to join their usual soulmates in marching against war...  Those who have decided to shun the antiwar movement do not claim their positions without reservation -- particularly as the Bush administration remains at stark odds with its traditional European allies.  Some among them say they would prefer more diplomacy, more support from other nations, more time.  And their reasons for supporting military intervention vary: concerns about weapons of mass destruction that might be used against this country, or against Israel, a rethinking of America's role after September 11, or a general belief that intervention is the humanitarian response that will improve the lives of the Iraqi people.

Also, I keep wondering how my grandparents felt, in 1940.  They were about the same age we are now, and had come through the first World War, the 20's boom, the Depression, and were perched at the edge of another war, already started in Europe.  That war wasn't, of course, about religion, though it sometimes seems to have been.  When I say "my grandparents," I'm particularly thinking of my mother's parents, whose families came from Germany in the 1850s as reasonably well-off merchants.  They settled on the Upper West Side, lived in single-family brownstones, and had lots of kids.  My grandparents didn't have lots of kids.  They had one, my mother.  As Noel Coward says, there may have been a stillborn one after that.  But by 1940, my grandparents and my great-aunt were living in what I always thought was a good-sized apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street.  Though, as near as I can figure now, it was only 1000 square feet.  My grandfather was retired, possibly because of a heart condition, possibly because the family business had finally failed.  My great-aunt was divorced, after a short, late marriage to a friend's husband, when the friend died in her 40's.  They, and all their friends, had lost the family brownstones they'd grown up in, as their Upper West Side turned into Harlem after the first World War.  My mother was still living with my grandparents in 1940, though she was already engaged to my dad, who was finishing a Master's degree at NYU, on his way, possibly, toward med. or dental school.  With all that behind, or ahead, of them, at a time when the life span wasn't much older than 60, my grandparents were facing another war, one they knew could change the world, though they didn't know it could possibly end it.
      And maybe that's the final result of growing up as we did in the 50s, happy, innocent, protected, but always with the undertone that at any moment we could all be flashed into light, as were people in Hiroshima.  Maybe that's the threat of living with war now.  It's not the fear of hardship or change, but of the cartooned sign, The End Is Nigh.  I'm not afraid of change.  I actually like it, marvel at its permutations.  The more we change, the more we stay the same.  We can't go on.  We go on.  Yet I never stop thinking of the fall of Rome, Greece, the Aztecs, Incas.  The war we're currently skirting is supposedly a small war, but I think what we all fear is a chain reaction.  Iraq to Israel to North Korea to...  I doubt the world is going to end, even in nuclear or ecological disaster.  Something will go on.  So what I fear is too much change.  Right now, I'm very happy.  I got up too early this morning, but only because the dog wanted out.  Then I was rewarded with fresh-baked cookies.  Not my normal breakfast, but nice.  Still, how far is it from homemade cookies to death camps?  From having a home to seeing it blown to rubble?  Sarajevo was a sophisticated city less than twenty years ago, then it was ruins.  As I get older, I expect a gradual decline, a gentle simplification.  But not a full stop.  My grandparents outlived most of their friends.  They outlived my mother.  By the time my grandmother was ninety-four, she knew almost no one still alive, and hers was not the gentle death of my grandfather, who one afternoon simply went to sleep.  But that was 1961, 1974, and it's 1940 I keep coming back to.  What were my grandparents thinking?  What was it they felt?  And is there somehow, something, we should have learned?

Finally, on a lighter, almost totally different subject, from Corey Kilgannon in The New York Times, March 15th:  And so it came to pass that a talking carp, shouting in Hebrew, shattered the calm of the New Square Fish Market and created what many here are calling a miracle.  Others are calling it a Purim trick, a loopy tale worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or just a whopping fish story concocted by a couple of meshugenehs.
      The story goes that a 20-pound carp about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish began speaking in Hebrew, shouting apocalyptic warnings.  Many people here believe that it was God revealing himself that day to two fish cutters, Zalmen Rosen, a 57-year-old Hasid, and his co-worker Luis Nivelo, a 30-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant.  Some people say the story is as credible as the Bible's account of the burning bush, so the story rapidly spread, first through word of mouth, then through the Jewish press.  "Ah, enough already about the fish," Mr. Rosen said today at the shop his family owns.  "I wish I never said anything about it. I'm getting so many calls every day, I've stopped answering. Israel, London, Miami, Brooklyn."
      Here then is the story, according to the two men, the only witnesses.  On January 28th at 4 PM, they were carving up carp.  Mr. Nivelo, who is not Jewish, lifted a live carp out of a box of iced-down fish and was about to club it in the head.  But the fish began speaking in Hebrew.  Mr. Nivelo does not understand Hebrew, but the shock of a fish speaking any language forced him against the wall and down to the slimy wooden packing crates that cover the floor.  He looked around to see if the voice had come from the slop sink, the other room, or the shop's cat.  Then he ran into the front of the store screaming, "The fish is talking!" and pulled Mr. Rosen away from the phone.  I screamed, 'It's the devil! The devil is here!' " he recalled. "But Zalmen said to me, 'You crazy, you a meshugeneh.' "  Still, Mr. Rosen said that when he approached the fish, he heard it uttering warnings and commands in Hebrew.  "It said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah,' " he said, "which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near."
      The fish commanded Mr. Rosen to pray and to study the Torah and identified itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who died last year.  Mr. Rosen panicked and tried to kill the fish with a machete-size knife.  But the fish bucked so wildly that Mr. Rosen wound up cutting his own thumb and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.  The fish flopped off the counter and back into the carp box and was butchered by Mr. Nivelo and sold.
      The story has been told and retold, and many Jews believe that the talking fish was a rare shimmer of God's spirit.  Some call it a warning about the dangers of the impending war in Iraq.  "Two men do not dream the same dream," said Abraham Spitz, a New Square resident.  "It is very rare that God reminds people he exists in this modern world.  But when he does, you cannot ignore it."  Others consider it as fictional as Tony Soprano's talking-fish dream in an episode of The Sopranos.  "Listen to what I'm telling you," said Rabbi C. Meyer.  "Only children take this seriously.  This is like a UFO story."
      Whether hoax or historic event, it jibes with the belief of some Hasidic sects that righteous people can be reincarnated as fish.  Some community members have said that Mr. Nivelo may have been selected because he is not Jewish.  "If this was a story concocted by a bunch of Jewish guys, it might be suspect," said Matisyahu Wolfberg, a local lawyer.  "But Luis has no idea what this means.  If people say God talks to them, we recommend a psychiatrist.  But this is different."
      Mr. Nivelo, a practicing Christian, still believes the babbling carp was the devil. His wife told him he was crazy, and his 6-year-old daughter even laughs at him.  "I don't believe any of this Jewish stuff," he said. "But I heard that fish talk."
      Zev Brenner, who last week broadcast about the fish on his talk radio show on Jewish issues, said that the story has inspired a whole new genre for Jewish comedians.  "The station even had an advertiser, a gefilte fish manufacturer, who considered changing his slogan to 'Our fish speaks for itself.'  But he decided people would be offended."

The home page:   http://hometown.aol.com/falcons1965a


Rich