Continuing The Walk

“The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street,” James Jones

So here I am in my literary overcoat standing just inside the doors of the New York Jewish Herald whispering to the unwary reader as they pass by:  “Look at me!” And what will you see each month as you pause to gawk, snicker, praise (I can dream, can’t I) scold, take to heart, or ponder? Well, aside from the obvious – six foot two, blonde haired, blue eyed Greek God type, did I mention that my specialty is fiction? – you’ll find an intellectually honest, spiritually curious, politically doubtful, anti-authority figure, American Jewish suburban raised/inner city craving, sports and Shakespeare loving writer. 

That’s who I am, not what I do.

I’m a writer, proud to count my membership among a fairly elite group of writers (as opposed to creative typists) that includes the likes of Bram Stoker, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Mel Brooks, Amanda McBroom, Curt Siodmak, Janet Berliner, Stephen Schwartz, William Shakespeare, Carl Sandburg, and Cathy Ladman.  By trade, I’m a fictioneer; prowling the high seas of doubt and apostasy to afflict the pain-bringers, and comfort the disemboweled. 

By choice, I’m a novelist – The Gemini Man, Nobody’s Safe, The Four Phase Man – much preferring 500 pages to express myself rather than the 20 or so of a short story.  On occasion, I’m a columnist (and I deeply thank NYJH’s Maximillien de Lafayette for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful endeavor) who dares to think that his opinion might have some worth and interest to people who’ve never read my books or other works, and certainly never met me.

But at my heart’s core, I’m taking a walk . . . one that began over a century ago.

108 years back, two brothers – both recently married – were thinking about their future.  In a nameless shtetl in Central Russia, the oppressiveness of their lives – never before considered – began to bear in on them.  With a child on the way for one, hopes for a child in the other’s heart, they decided that they owed it to their future children to give them the chances that their fathers had never been allowed. Jews in Tsarist Russia were non-citizens – taxed, but not represented; attacked with no reason and no possible redress; free to be arrested without warrant, jailed without trial, executed without charges – and with no hint of change in the wind, their collective lot could only worsen.  But there was something else in the wind in that Spring of 1898:

America

America was a dream with a core of reality.  A place where you could go as far as hard honest work and good spirit could bring you.  A place where you were judged by your actions not your religion.  A place that didn’t promise success, but promised the unfettered opportunity to pursue success. So they packed up their families, their few belongings, and began to walk. Through Latvia and Lithuania they all walked.  Six months on found them in Poland . . . were the quota for emigration to America had been closed.  So they continued forward; always forward.

Czechoslovakia . . . Austria . . . Germany . . . Belgium. And each time they either arrived too late to make that year’s quota, or couldn’t afford passage, or illness prevented their moving on just then.  But the dream of America, the possibilities of America energized their spirits, and propelled them forward. In Valognes, France – two years after they’d started, they paused for six months.  One child had been born and another (my grandfather) was on the way.  The brothers worked every job they could find; their wives did laundry and sewing, and finally in the Fall of 1900 enough money was raised to take the next step:

Passage to England.

In England, there was an open emigration quota and transient jobs were plentiful; so it was from there they hoped to take their final steps into the dream of America. And the walk continued . . . this time from their port of debarkation (Plymouth) to the small but vital Jewish community in Leeds, some 250 miles away.  There, they paused again; until enough money was raised to send the older brother on to America. 

Everyone in the family worked hard at as many jobs as they could get (on both sides of the Atlantic) to earn the money to bring the rest of the family across the ocean.  And some two years later, both families (alive, well, intact, and grown to include three children) that had left a land where they were despised or invisible, stood looking at the Statue of Liberty; prepared to begin their lives with the finest, most precious gift possible – one they had earned in their seemingly endless walk across a continent and an ocean – the gift of freedom and possibilities. The scope of that walk, the bravery of that walk astounds me.  Today, we complain about having to walk to the corner to get a paper.  We get in our cars or hail a cab to go to the theater five blocks away.  These two men, their wives, and eventually their three babies walked some two thousand plus miles with no money, no guarantees, and no assurance that it would ever lead them to what they wanted.  Through storms and heat, facing innumerable dangers and despairs, they continued on for just a mere whisper in the wind:  that in America, there would be possibilities.

Not streets paved with gold, not gifts and entitlements, not anything beyond one magical incantation:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

I live in a world of forms and computers, with tomorrow a looming threat. But there is at least one thing I do share with David and Philip; perhaps a result of genetic memory or shared cellular heritage. I continue to walk toward the future. I may do it on one foot – having stupidly lost my right one last year – and I may do it with more overt doubts than they had, but I still put one foot in front of my prosthesis and continue on. So I ask you all to pause on your own journeys for a time each month and walk beside me.  I can’t promise you’ll always agree with me, or even like what it is I have to say.  But I can promise you that the things we’ll see together, the things we’ll do together, the things we’ll be together, will open your eyes, stress your doubts and relax your sureties.  Maybe show you a new color in an old black & white picture, or give sudden clarity to a kaleidoscopic puzzle in the world.