Strike a Pose

I took this photo from a subsection of the photo gallery of the Houston Chronicle, entitled "Fashion We Don't Understand."

So true.

I was looking at a fashion magazine that came into the house today. It did nothing for me except made me roll my eyes.

What kind of bizarre designs are these haute couture designers coming up with? For whom are they meant? Aliens, no doubt. 'Cause not too many earthlings can be seen in some of the wilder designs that are strutted on the world's most renowned fashion runways.

I always wonder to myself: Who is going to wear this? Where are they going to wear this? And to top off some of the more elaborate and flamoyant looks are the hair and the makeup. Okay, I guess NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD makes for a eye-catching look, and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN tresses help birds find places to nest, if necessary.

From some of the major fashion houses, we are getting designs that must require detailed handbooks on how to wear these clothes and where to wear them. I don't call them clothes, I'm sorry. I think they are costumes and should be referred to as such.

The designers are actually costume makers, wardrobe men and women. Some of the looks are fitting for a futuristic movie made in 1952, or for the circus, or simply for the garbage.

I can't help that I appreciate a classic, lasting look in my clothes designs... And I can't help but think that most of the models out there on runways and in fashion spreads and fashion advertorials are actually ugly. Their inner beauty and external beauty is marred by hideous teased hair, charcoal-outlined eyes that make these women and young girls look like those famous clown pictures that were so popular in the late sixties and early seventies, and just plain ugly clothes.

My mother owns a Victor Skrebneski pictorial book; he is the photographer of the Estee Lauder print campaigns, or was (not sure if he's still alive and still doing them). He captured classic beauties adorned in classic wear. His photos made me smile. Many of today's photos of models and what they represent are not worth a second look, except if one wants to see how "freakish" ought to be defined.

I prefer that you give me a simple and practical clothing design. Give me a design within my budget. And give that design a model who can strike a STRIKING pose while wearing it.

That is fashion at its finest.

Ain't This Post the Cat's Meow?!

I've directed you before to Quinn Cummings's blog, The QC Report.

Quinn is funny, and as precocious an adult as she was a child actor. Her writing leaves you very amused, and wanting to read more about her and her world.

We now interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you this special post...written by Quinn, produced by Quinn.

Feel the burn.


When last we saw Lulabelle the cat, she was eating wet food and bringing sexy back with the external hard drive. I think even the most churlish among us would consider this a December well-spent, for a cat.

But, as many of us find out every year, winter calories don’t just go out with the molting brown Christmas tree sometime in January, to be picked up by the Fat Sanitation department, to be shredded into cellulite mulch which can be packed around Nicole Ritchie in order to keep her warm. No, winter fat is more like a gopher, wrecking the stability of your lawn of self-esteem, eating the tubers of your hope for wearing shorts this spring.

[Note to self: Read Sunset magazine only after writing blog.]

I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe Lulabelle noticed she was grooming a few more inches of stomach than she had been last summer. Maybe she saw a candid snapshot from Christmas and mistook herself for an ottoman. Possibly some kind neighborhood cat clued her in to how our new nickname for her, “La gata gorda grande” did not, in fact, translate as “Walks the runway for Oscar de la Renta”. Whatever did it, by the first week of January, Lulabelle was clearly on an exercise regimen. I respected her discipline and maturity. She didn’t strap on a pair of running shoes and try for five miles the first morning, only to turn her delicate ankle and head back to the loving embrace of the hard drive. No, Lulabelle works out in a smart and measured way for forty-five minutes to an hour every day.

Oh, did I say day? I meant night.

It goes like this. Night falls, the humans read and watch a little television. Eventually, we turn out the lights and, inexplicably, attempt to sleep. The cat, on the other hand, fresh as a cat food-scented daisy from an entire day of sleeping, views the bedroom light going as the cue to start stretching out her hamstrings. Within minutes, she’s doing time-trials through the house in pursuit of her prey. And what is her prey, you might ask? Is it one of the literally dozens of toys which have been bought for no other purpose than to cause her feline delight?

Have you ever met a cat?

Her great pleasure is throwing, stalking, pouncing on and then killing Daughter’s fuzzy ponytail holders. Having had a few weeks of late nights to contemplate this new avocation, I think I’ve discovered their appeal. They are little enough to be thrown and then carried around after you kill them. The fuzziness means they hang on to your claws, seemingly mocking you by refusing to die. Best of all, their very smallness means no matter how hard Quinn looks, no matter how certain she might be that she’s found every rogue ponytail holder in the house, Lulabelle can always find one more for the 3:45 am “Stretch and Tone” class she has devised for herself.

What I don’t understand is how a cat who, even Super-sized, still weighs less than twelve pounds, can make so much noise. Wouldn’t you think an animal genetically wired to be a killing machine would skulk? Every night is the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona here, only with trash-talking. Because when one catches her intended prey of North American Pink-Breasted Ponytail Holder, one wishes to let everyone know. Since I speak basic Cat, not idiomatic Cat, I can only guess, but the yowls and yodels could probably be safely translated as “…who’s your kitty-daddy, chump?”

This leads effortlessly into an aria I like to call “All hair-holders bow down before me”. This is usually around the time I come staggering into the living room. Lulabelle, understandably frightened by the homunculus with closed eyes lurching towards her, grabs her kill and takes off, leaping over the couch, sliding under the dining-room table, streaking through the bedrooms across people's heads. This is the circuit-training portion of her workout.God help me if I try to lock the Workout Queen out of the bedrooms. Unbeknownst to me, I am her exercise buddy, and Lulabelle will be damned if she’s going through all this by herself. She stands by the outside of the bedroom door.

LULABELLE: QUINN!

QUINN: Hush, Lu.

A second of silence, where we all contemplate what an incredibly stupid thing I said.

LULABELLE: QUINN, NOW!

QUINN: SHHHH!

A paw slides under the door, trying to wiggle the door open. Sensing this won’t work, the paw slides back. A moment later, there is the sound of a cat’s body throwing itself against the door.

LULABELLE: QUINN! WATCH ME DO CRUNCHES!

Over the sound of her hurling herself against the door, I can hear Daughter sleepily saying “…Mommy?” and feel Consort thrashing into wakefulness. I give up, leap from the bed, and open the door. The cat, mid door-hurl, skids into the room. We stare at each other in the half-light until the cat sees something under the bed. With a crow of triumph, she darts under the bed.

The amount of noise she generates would indicate she has either trapped a wolverine under there, or she found a ponytail holder. I slide under the bed and, in the dark, differentiate the precious toy from a rubber band and a dust bunny. I wriggle back out from under the bed, walk to the door, and throw it into the living room. The cat races after it, screaming in joy and blood-lust. I get back into bed and am just drifting off to sleep, so I don’t hear the sound of tiny well-exercised feet walking up to my side of the bed.

LULABELLE: THROW IT AGAIN! I’M FIRMING UP MY BUTT!

On the plus side, I think the shadows under my eyes make me look mysterious, and the cat’s wearing jeans she hasn’t worn in years.

Leitz, (Leica) Camera, Action

New life through a lens

By Mark Honigsbaum


For me, a lot of this goes back to being a teenager, dribbling over photography magazines and fantasising about being Henri Cartier-Bresson. And then, on top of that, there’s the Jewish bit.” Frank Dabba Smith, rabbi of the Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue in northwest London, is trying to explain what first drew him to photography.

It is a bright winter morning in Harrow on the Hill, but the curtains in Smith’s living room are drawn as he adjusts his slide projector. On one wall, a grainy shot of an ash-coated shop window near the World Trade Center site in New York, the dusty glass inscribed with the legend “Heros [sic] live forever”, jockeys for attention with portraits of Smith’s wife and his three children.

Finally, Smith is ready. He slots the first slide into place - a striking night-time image of a 1930s German factory complex, showing a series of linked blocks with the lights burning on every floor. On the main building, spelled out in giant neon capitals, is a sign that reads “ERNST LEITZ”.

“This is the factory in Wetzlar where Leitz manufactured the Leica camera and apprenticed young Jews who were victims of anti-Semitism,” explains Smith, an authority on the use of photography as a propaganda tool during the Holocaust. “Much of Wetzlar was destroyed by Allied bombing during the war, but somehow the factory survived.”

The next slide is from 1911. It shows Ernst Leitz II, then a vigorous 40-year-old, posing with his three children, Elsie, Ludwig and Ernst III, beneath a portrait of his father, Ernst I, the founder of the camera company.

But it is the following series of images that Smith, who has spent 15 years researching Leitz’s role in Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany, has brought me here to see. The first is a portrait of a local Wetzlar corn merchant, a Jew called Nathan Rosenthal. Dressed in a smart suit and waistcoat, he is seated beside his wife Else and their children Paul, then 14, and Gertrude. The year is 1929 and they look settled and contented, a picture of middle-class German respectability.

Next comes a shot of one of Leitz’s young Jewish apprentices, Kurt Rosenberg, beavering away at his workbench. This is followed by a slide showing Rosenberg’s original apprenticeship contract and a certificate with the date he completed his training and left Germany. The documents clearly show that Rosenberg was apprenticed at Wetzlar from 1933 to 1937, and emigrated on January 28 1938, setting sail for New York on a Hamburg-America Line steamer.

“Rosenberg’s is the strongest case of all because there’s a paper trail,” explains Smith. “Not only can we show that he was a Leitz apprentice, but we have proof that Leitz paid his passage to New York and later gave him a job in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue.”

According to Smith, both Rosenberg and Rosenthal’s son, Paul, were beneficiaries of a remarkable series of transports designed to spirit German Jews to freedom out of Nazi Germany. Now these convoys and the man who masterminded them are to finally get the recognition they deserve. This week, on February 9, the Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit group devoted to battling anti-Semitism, will present Ernst II’s granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn-Leitz, with the Courage to Care Award, in recognition of Leitz’s role in helping at least 41 Jews to flee Germany during the Nazi persecution of the 1930s. In addition, Leitz is being credited with helping a further 23 people to circumvent Nazi laws aimed at punishing Jews and Germans related to Jews by marriage.

Past recipients of the ADL’s award include Jan and Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank and her family, and Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten German industrialist who is estimated to have saved more than 1,200 Polish Jews from death in the Krakow ghetto. On the evidence available, the number of people Leitz helped was far smaller, but according to Smith, who has painstakingly pieced together the story of the Leica refugees, the risks the Wetzlar entrepreneur took were just as high.

Leitz’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Wetzlar’s Jews began within days of Hitler’s rise to power in March 1933 and continued through Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Jewish businesses and synagogues were systematically looted. Leitz’s secret campaign only ended in 1939, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland resulted in the closure of Germany’s borders.

Typically, young Jewish men like Rosenberg would be offered apprenticeships at Wetzlar. Then, after varying periods of training, they would be transferred to New York and put to work in the Fifth Avenue showroom or associated dealerships across the US. Leitz paid all the bills for their travel, and his executives furnished the refugees with letters of introduction and helped them obtain visas.

Incredibly, it is only now that the full story of the Leica escape routes is emerging. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that Leitz, a modest and close-lipped Protestant businessman, never spoke about the Nazi period in public, and even kept his good works secret from his family.

“One of the marks of the true altruist is that they don’t parade their works, they just get on with it,” says Smith. “From Ernst Leitz’s point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.”

It is hard to think of an invention that had a greater influence on the photographic record of the 20th century than the Leica. Launched at the 1925 Leipzig spring fair, Leica was one of the first cameras to combine high-quality lenses with a compact portable body. The brainchild of Oskar Barnack, a brilliant young mechanic whom Leitz had poached from rival company Carl Zeiss, this quintessentially German product revolutionised 35mm photography; by the 1930s, pictures taken on Leicas filled the pages of magazines such as Life and Picture Post.

But while leftist photographers like Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa were using Leicas to capture documentary-style images, the Nazis were using them for more sinister purposes. In August 1937, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, instructed news photographers that the “use and promotion of small modern cameras constitute[s] a duty inherent to their mission”. Two years later, he dispatched propaganda squads equipped with Leicas to the Warsaw ghetto to record the “degenerate” habits of the city’s Jews.

Leicas became a preferred vehicle for projecting idealised Nazi images of the “master race” - a trend particularly apparent in the consumer advertising from the period produced by the Leitz company itself, in which Aryan women balance on the end of diving boards as their blond infants frolic at the pool side. Indeed, on the face of it Leitz ran a model Nazi corporation, supplying Leicas to the Army and the Luftwaffe, and manufacturing the navigation gear for the V-2 rocket. Not only that, but in 1942 the Nazis forcibly conscripted hundreds of women slave labourers from the Ukraine to bolster military production at Wetzlar, a fact that prompted Holocaust survivors to file a class-action suit in 1998 against Leica and other leading German manufacturers such as Siemens and Daimler-Benz, accusing them of illegally profiting from Jewish and eastern-European slave labour. (In Leica’s case, the allegations were never proven. Nevertheless, in 1999 the German government and more than 100 German companies, including Leica, agreed to a compensation fund totalling $7.5bn.)

Was it really credible, wondered Smith, that at the same time as Leitz was supplying parts to the Nazis, he was rescuing Wetzlar’s Jews? And if so, how did he and his executives keep their activities hidden from the Gestapo?

Then there was the question of motive. Although Leitz had been a prominent member of the German Democratic Party before the war, in 1942 he joined the Nazis. Was Leitz, like Schindler, whose Krakow enamelware factory depended on Jewish slave labour and who many historians of the Holocaust argue was initially motivated by self-interest, a bit of an opportunist? Or was his Nazi-party membership a tactic, a way of allaying the Gestapo’s suspicions so that he could continue protecting his employees?

Smith makes an unlikely sleuth. A softly spoken Californian with receding, light-brown hair and Woody Allen-esque glasses, he has lived in London since the late 1980s and has a bookish innocence. He first began taking photographs as a schoolboy growing up in San Diego, and at 15 blew all his bar mitzvah money on his first Leica. His love affair hasn’t abated since. As a semi-professional photographer - he’s had more than 150 photographs published in The Economist - he favours the Leica MP and M6 rangefinder cameras and the latest Leica aspherical lenses.

Smith first heard about Leitz’s role in Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany when he was a student at Berkeley and came across a passing reference to the Leica apprentices in an article about Norman Lipton, the managing editor of Popular Photography magazine. As a 25-year-old, Lipton had worked in the advertising department at Leica’s offices on Fifth Avenue. From May 1938 to August 1940, he says he witnessed the arrival of scores of German Jewish refugees from the Wetzlar factory. According to Lipton, the refugees were processed by Alfred Boch, the company’s general manager and vice-president.

As Lipton was to recall in a subsequent magazine article: “I would see between 20 and 30 weary men and women lined up along the side wall of our large open ‘bullpen’ office. All carried luggage and a Leica camera around their necks. The line moved slowly in and out of Boch’s private office at the front of the room. The process was repeated every few weeks, following the alternate arrivals of the SS Bremen and SS Europa at the nearby Hudson River piers.”

Lipton claimed the refugees were then escorted to the nearby Great Northern hotel on West 57th street (now demolished) where they were housed and fed until jobs could be found for them at Leica and other camera businesses. “Day after day, Boch would be on the telephone trying to match their skills and training to job openings - at Kodak, Wollensack, Ilex, Univis and other upstate New York optical firms, as well as at camera stores, photofinishing laboratories, factories and business offices where their skills could be put to use.”

In 1967, Lipton set about tracing and interviewing his Jewish former co-workers with a view to publishing the tale in Reader’s Digest. But when he approached Gunther Leitz, the youngest of Leitz’s three sons (born after the 1911 photo), he received a surprising response. Over dinner at Haus Friedwart, the sumptuous mansion overlooking Wetzlar that Leitz had built in 1917, Gunther made it clear he didn’t want the story published in his lifetime. “My father did what he could because he felt responsible for his employees and their families and also for our neighbours,” he told Lipton. “He was able to act because the government needed our factory’s output. No one can ever know what other Germans had done for the persecuted within the limits of their ability to act.”

Lipton reluctantly agreed to Gunther’s request (indeed, his story in Photo International, from which the above details have been taken, did not appear until 1999, 30 years after Gunther’s death). Were it not for Smith, that might have been the end of the matter.

In 1991 Smith visited Wetzlar and toured the Leica factory. But it wasn’t until he stumbled on another reference to the Leica story - this time in an encyclopedia of Jewish photography - during a visit to New York in 1997 that he decided to contact Lipton. By now the editor was in his 80s and retired, although he was still living in New York and doing the occasional freelance job for photographic companies.

One of the first documents Lipton showed him was a letter from Nathan Rosenthal, the Wetzlar corn merchant, sent to Leitz from New York in February 1947. Rosenthal begins by recalling how the “Nazi criminals” forced him to flee to America in 1938. However, it was the next paragraph that caught Smith’s eye: “I shall always be grateful that when I pleaded my plight to you 14 days after Hitler’s rise to power, when my son Paul, who was in the upper fifth of the high school and who could no longer shield himself from the anti-Semitism of his teacher, you immediately accepted him into your firm without taking into account the political [consequences]. His training with you and later employment in your firm here [in New York] made a way for us to emigrate which would otherwise have been completely impossible.”

Lipton also handed Smith a letter from Henry Enfield, a Miami Beach camera dealer, dating from 1961. It explained how, in 1935, Enfield, who was then living in Frankfurt, had sent his son to England for safety, and how, after the boy finished school, Leitz had helped him to obtain an apprenticeship at Wallace & Heating, a prominent photographic dealer on Bond Street. In August 1938, three months before Kristallnacht, Enfield had approached Leitz for advice about liquidating his assets and relocating to the US. With the help of senior Leica executives, he obtained a visa from the US embassy in Stuttgart. Like Kurt Rosenberg, Enfield was also furnished with a letter of introduction to Leica’s New York office signed by Alfred Turk, Leica’s sales director. That transfer cost Leitz dearly: following Enfield’s departure, a spy at the Wetzlar factory leaked Turk’s letter to the Gestapo, and Turk was thrown in jail, forcing Leitz to travel to Berlin to negotiate - successfully - his release.

Smith was eager to question Rosenthal and Enfield further but both were dead. Nor was Paul Rosenthal very forthcoming. Smith didn’t give up. Instead, he wrote directly to the Leitz family, and got an immediate response from Knut Kuhn-Leitz, son of Leitz’s daughter Elsie.

Knut was seven years old when his mother was arrested for her own attempt to help a Wetzlar Jew, and he had vivid memories of the Gestapo bursting into their house while he and his sister were in the bath. Knut had been very close to his grandfather, but while they had spent many happy afternoons discussing the family business, Leitz never once mentioned Wetzlar’s Jewish apprentices or their escape. Now, Knut was curious to learn more and agreed to help Smith search the Wetzlar archives.

A sprightly 70-year-old with watery blue eyes, Knut no longer resides at Haus Friedwart - “it is too big, too drafty”, he says - but he still keeps an office there and visits nearly every day. Designed by the German architect Bruno Paul, the white-stone mansion is an unusual blend of styles, boasting a grand colonnaded portico and loggia, as well as a reception room with a carved wooden staircase offset by a figure of Christ and busts of three generations of Leitz males. However, the house’s most striking feature is its location. Built on the slopes of a medieval fortification known as the Kalsmunt, it sits directly above and behind the old Leica factory, as if keeping watch on the goings on below.

The house’s grandeur notwithstanding, Knut says his grandfather was a man of simple tastes. “His own room was small and spartan. He had maybe two suits, and used to wear the same hat every day. He was very warm, very approachable. He hated to see people suffer. Mentally, he was my protector. I knew that if something was wrong or needed changing, I could go to my grandfather and he would do it immediately.”

In hindsight, Knut says it is not surprising that Gunther forbade Lipton to write about his father’s good works. “My grandfather never put it into so many words but the family credo was ‘do good, but do not speak about it.’ If he were here now he would hate all this talk.”

After the war, Germany was racked by soul-searching and recrimination. Who was a Nazi and who wasn’t? And could ordinary Germans have done more to stand up to Hitler and oppose anti-Semitism? Those tensions would have been especially acute in a small town like Wetzlar.

Then there was Leitz’s Nazi party membership. One of the first documents uncovered was a detailed statement prepared by Leitz for a denazification trial court in Wetzlar in 1947. Reading it, one is struck by how painful the process must have been for him. Leitz begins by pointing out that in 1933 he had stood as a candidate for the German State Party and had “violently” attacked the national socialists, describing Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung troops as “brown apes”. Leitz goes on to say that he never departed from a “fundamental democratic attitude”, employing Jews at his factory throughout the 1930s and helping them to escape abroad. These acts of defiance had provoked the suspicions of the Gestapo and made him an “object of indignation” in the Nazi party. It was only when the Nazis had threatened to sack his senior managers and take over his factory that Leitz reluctantly agreed to join the party in order to avoid, as he put it, “the most extreme scenario”.

With characteristic understatement he concludes: “I was not only a passive member but resisted actively against the Nazi tyranny as far as my means allowed.”

Perhaps part of what Gunther meant when he told Lipton that no one could know what Germans had done for the persecuted “within the limits of their ability” was that his father wasn’t all that proud of his record and didn’t think he was in a position, as Smith puts it, “to lord it over anyone”.

In the preface to his Booker-prize winning account of Schindler’s life, Schindler’s Ark, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally writes that it is easy to avoid bathos when describing evil, malice being a staple of fictional and historical narratives. By contrast, “it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue”.

Part of the problem is that acts of virtue - what today we would term altruism - are rarely as straightforward as they seem. Is it altruism that prompts mothers to make sacrifices on behalf of their children, or is their behaviour better explained by what evolutionary biologists would call the selfish furtherance of their genes? Similarly, when philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet donate billions to disease research, is it simply the poor of Africa they are hoping to make feel better or does it offer them some comfort, too?

We will never know what drove Leitz to take the risks he did - like Schindler he does not lend himself to what Keneally calls “easy character headings” - but we do not have to look far to see where he got his morality. Born in Baden in 1843 to a staunch Protestant family, Leitz’s father, Ernst I, had been groomed for a life of the cloth. In 1865, however, he decided to train as a mechanic, moving to Wetzlar to work at Carl Kellner’s Optical Institute. When Kellner died four years later, Ernst I took over the business, and quickly proved to be a progressive and enlightened employer, setting up one of Germany’s first company health insurance schemes.

In this respect, if not others, it seems that Ernst Leitz II, who joined the company in 1906, was very much his father’s son. Leitz made a point of learning the names of all Ernst I’s employees by heart. And when Ernst I died in 1920, and three years later hyperinflation threatened to erode employees’ earnings, Ernst II printed his own form of currency at Wetzlar and imported groceries from Denmark so that his workers wouldn’t go hungry.

The Leitz family’s reputation for humanitarianism might explain why, when Paul Rosenthal began to suffer anti-Semitism at school, Nathan appealed directly to Leitz, who enrolled Paul in a three-year sales training programme. And it also explains why, when the Nazis forced Paul’s father, Nathan, to close his corn business, Leitz rented warehouse space from him at a fair market price. The rental income eventually enabled the whole family to join Paul in New York.

Rosenthal concludes his 1947 letter by praising Leitz for the “sincerity” of his ideals, and tells him that his “exemplary works will exist for unlimited years to come”. He also wonders: “How many innumerable young Jewish people from Giessen, Frankfurt and Darmstadt did you train in your photo business during the Hitler period in order that they were able to earn a living on emigration without taking into account whether your assistance pleased the Nazis or not?”

It is a good question and one Smith has spent many hours puzzling. But in spite of publishing an article in the Leica Historical Society of America newsletter appealing for more apprentices and their families to come forward, Smith has so far been unable to substantiate Lipton’s claim to have witnessed as many as “20 to 30” refugees arriving at Leica New York “every few weeks”.

Smith’s conclusion is that Leitz did not set out to be a hero but simply responded “as and when something came up”. In other words, there was nothing calculating about his altruism.

But a wider question is why the Nazis tolerated Leitz’s activities at all. One answer is that in the 1930s, Hitler was desperate for hard currency, and Leica, with its lucrative overseas sales of microscopes and cameras, was an important source of foreign export earnings. This could also explain why, when Turk’s letter of recommendation to Enfield was intercepted by the Gestapo, Leitz was able to negotiate his release. (The Gestapo agreed, but only on condition that Turk resign from the company.) But Smith believes the main reason was that the Nazis feared that without Leitz at the helm, there was a danger production at the company would collapse, threatening their ability to source optics for the military.

“Ernst Leitz was utterly revered by his employees. The Nazis knew that without him, the whole sense of motivation, cohesiveness and precision at the factory would be gone,” Smith says. He has meanwhile discovered numerous other examples of Leitz’s good work, involving not only Jewish employees, but also Jewish members of the wider Wetzlar community as well as non-Jews related to Jews by marriage.

And just as Leitz was programmed to act in the way he did by his upbringing and the dictates of his conscience, so, it seems, was his daughter. In 1942, the first Ukrainian slave labourers began arriving at Wetzlar. Appalled by their living conditions, Elsie Leitz began visiting the camp and agitating for better food and clothing. Her visits irritated the Gestapo, and in May 1943, when the half-Jewish wife of a local optical-maker was caught attempting to flee across the German border into Switzerland, suspicion immediately fell on Elsie. Indeed, she had given the woman a map showing her the route across the border, as well as forbidden Swiss francs; Elsie was arrested and taken to Frankfurt. There is also evidence the Gestapo suspected Leitz of being in on the plot (the woman, Hedwig Palm, had hidden for several weeks at his sister’s house in Munich), but couldn’t prove it.

It took Leitz three months to secure Elsie’s release - a period that took its toll on both of them. Elsie was badly treated by the Gestapo while her father, by then in his 70s, suffered a stroke. Elsie spent the remainder of the war a virtual prisoner at Haus Friedwart. In a subsequent account of her arrest and imprisonment, she wrote that “it was the law of humanitarianism” that had provoked her into coming to the aid of her Jewish neighbour, and she “felt no reason for regret”.

Later, she threw herself into good works, supporting Dr Albert Schweitzer’s healing of the sick in Africa and promoting Germany’s efforts at reconciliation. Leitz, meanwhile, got on with what he did best: making cameras.

I ask Smith to show me a picture of Leitz in later life, after his secret transports, after his daughter’s imprisonment, after US troops arrived in Wetzlar and liberated his factory. The Californian flicks through his slide carousel before alighting on a favourite. Taken on Leitz’s 80th birthday, it shows an elderly, frail man walking into the Wetzlar factory on the arm of Dr Theodor Heuss, president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Leitz’s face is in shadow, obscured by an oversized trilby hat. The year was 1951. Five years later he was dead.
Now that Smith knows the lengths that Leitz went to help Wetzlar’s Jews and what he and Elsie suffered, why does he think Leitz never mentioned his efforts to Knut?

Smith doesn’t reply immediately but walks over to the window and parts the curtains. From his living room you can see clear across northwest London. “Perhaps it’s like some survivors of the Shoah,” he says eventually. “They rarely discussed it with their children either for fear they would drown in it. When you’ve been through a trauma like that you just want to get on with living life.”


LEITZ, CAMERA, ACTION GETTING TO SAFETY IN THE US

At 5am on February 12 1938 Kurt Rosenberg rushed upstairs to the deck of the Hansa.
The Hamburg-America Line steamer was about to dock at the Hudson River pier, and Rosenberg, a 22-year-old camera mechanic from Wetzlar, was eager to capture the moment on his new Leica.

“The boat was sailing at half-power into the New York harbour,” he later wrote to his parents in Frankfurt. “Right and left, thousands of lights, and in front of us the skyscrapers of Manhattan.” Unfortunately it was too dark to take pictures and the moment went unrecorded. But Rosenberg was able to take numerous other photographs in the US, making his life the best documented of any Leitz refugee.

Rosenberg was brought to Wetzlar by his father Georg on April 25 1933, five weeks after Hitler’s rise to power. While there, he learned how to repair microscopes and cameras. At first, Georg, a Jewish banker and German war hero, refused to accept the need to emigrate. But in 1938, with the Nazi persecution of Jews intensifying, he relented.

Leitz immediately furnished Kurt Rosenberg with a letter of introduction to the New York office and a ticket for his passage. Like other Leitz refugees, Rosenberg also received a new Leica camera as security in case of financial difficulty - hard currency couldn’t be taken out of Germany, but Leicas, which were readily exchangeable for cash, could.

On arrival in New York, Rosenberg was taken to the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue, where he was put to work in the repair room. However, the following day Customs paid him a surprise visit - despite Rosenberg having the correct papers, there were evidently suspicions about him - and he was subsequently transferred to Leitz’s San Francisco office “since not only my fate but also that of the company was on the line”.

By now the situation in Germany was worsening, and Rosenberg began sending urgent telegrams and affidavits to his parents. On November 9 1938 - Kristallnacht - the Nazis looted Jewish business across Germany and Georg was thrown in Buchenwald. Although he was later released due to his age, in 1941 he was deported to the Lodz ghetto, where he died in 1942.

In 1943 Rosenberg volunteered for the US Army. His ambition was to be an air-reconnaissance photographer but, on April 20 1944 the troopship on which he was travelling was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, and he was killed along with 500 other US serviceman. He was just 28.

In all, Rosenberg left more than 1,000 photographs recording his journey from Wetzlar and his new life in the US - an invaluable archive now in the possession of his family.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Hey, Mel, Any Chance You're Out There Reading This?

"I have worked with some of the most talented producers, directors and actors in Hollywood. I would trade every one of them to work with Mel Brooks. Sigh."

-- Robert J. Avrech,

February 5, 2007

Mamale Cass

I was born in 1961, and from an early age, I was into music. It would be primarily the songs and singer of the late sixties that left early impressions. (okay, aside from "Hello, Dolly", which I loved and sang when I was about five years old)

Because my oldest son is into the classic rock of the sixties and seventies, and the music is heard throughout the house and car - "Put on Q107" is the oft-repeated request -- I often have flashbacks when I hear certain songs or hear the deejay make reference to songs and singers of that era.

Denny Doherty, from The Mamas and Papas, died in mid-January in a suburb just west of Toronto. I'd had no clue he lived in our vicinity, and had no clue he was Canadian-born (Halifax, Nova Scotia.) Of course, radio stations began to play the music of Denny's famous band, The Mamas and the Papas.

Around the time of Doherty's death, my son and I had to go to the library for a research book for an assignment of his. We were in the music section, and I found a "Jews in Music" book for him to sign out and peruse. But I found myself perusing the book, too.

The most common refrain from my mouth was "I didn't know ________ was/is Jewish!"

The most common refrain from my son's mouth was "__________ from ____________ is Jewish" and he proceeded to share some Jewish related tidbit of info given about the named performer.

On this musical journey through the book, I made a discovery that sort of blew my mind. Maybe you're all in the know already, and I'm just slow on the uptake, but I found out that Ellen Naomi Cohen was better known as Mama Cass Elliot. Is this news, or what?!

She stood out for me in my musical memories; this overly large woman who helped make mumus popular in the mid to late sixties, and helped make The Mamas and Papas popular, had always been a source of wonderment for me. And when she died, supposedly eating a ham sandwich while in London, I recalled that too.

Apparently, she didn't choke on a ham sandwich...and apparently Cass Elliot gave birth to a daughter in 1967, never revealing publically the name of the child's father.

There is a site that talks about Jews in music. It features a wonderful piece on Mama Cass Elliot, and Cass's daughter, Owen, maintains a website about her late mother. www.casselliot.com

Somewhere, no doubt, Mama Cass Elliot is belting out "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

I Could've Written This...

Several weeks ago my mother passed along an article that she'd cut out from a local, monthly Orthodox Jewish paper. She knew I would appreciate it. She knew that I could sort of relate to it. She knew that she sort of could too.

I'm typing it now for you, simply because... it is beautiful, even if sad.


DADDY, REMEMBER US? by Jodi Jakob

My dear father, incredibly bright, wise and understanding, is now struggling to recover from an operation just one week ago that removed a large, cancerous tumor from deep inside his brain. If only I had known that I would not be able to communicate with my father after the surgery, I certainly would have made sure to lengthen and deepen our prior phone conversations. Though I made every effort after Rosh Hashanah -- during my short visit to Los Angeles -- to savor the precious moments we shared together, these days it doesn't at all seem like I valued my father's companionship enough.

When we were finally allowed to enter the recovery room after the surgery -- which took almost a day to complete after many more days of preparation, with multiple doctors' appointments, testing of the brain and bodily functions -- my father ever so sweetly apologized to my siblings and me for not being able to remember our names. Though at that time he was still able to recognize us, his voice and behavior stung of change and more change to come. Little did I realize, though, that the loving caresses he gave me on my cheek after I kissed his hand that day would be the last interaction we would share that week. I have replayed that poignant moment countless times in my mind.

The brain, with its storage of memories, identifies our unique selves, our history and our world. When the tumor first made its ugly way into our lives, it gradually took over my father's short-term memory. But we were comforted, knowing that his long-term memory had not been damaged. But now it is different. We are just a bunch of strangers to my father. Even my mother, after 50 years of marriage is painfully unrecognized by her husband.

I cry to Hashem -- I want my father back! The doctors and nurses reassure us that some patients go through this stage after brain surgery, and that some do snap out of it. At least a few days ago we were able to say that my father's behavior was probably due to the medication or the swelling of the brain following surgery. But now that he is off those medications, we can only face the hard facts. We must turn to Hashem, and wait with humility for the outcome.

Let us look at the special people in our lives and appreciate the gift of their presence. It's a gift that comes with no guarantees, a gift which is both given and returned by the swift movement of a secret key, held only by the One Above.

I hope readers could kindly make time to help us shake the heavens, so that Hashem might return to my wonderful father his memory and his health. The name to daven for is Gavriel ben Vilca.

My Classic-Rock Kid...Revisited

I walked into my sons' bedroom to say good night just now. My oldest, who listens to his classic rock station while falling asleep, drew my attention to the song on the radio: "Girl, You Really Got Me Now."

He asked, ''Is that the newer version [by Van Halen] or the original one by...um...the KINKIES?"

Um, honey, that is just slightly off....but you certainly made me smile with it.

Happy (Early) Tu Bishvat

http://www.eyarok.org.il/tubishvat.html

Adolescent Angst (A Confession)

I'm guessing that most, if not all, of you, were pretty well-adjusted adolescents and teenagers. Sure, self-esteem could falter at times, but I figure that for the most part, you were happy in your skin, content with your many friends and social activities.

And then there was me... I was somewhat shy, not too cool, a bright student, and definitely not too popular, except for many of the wrong reasons: a target for others. It was as if "Nice gals finished last." I didn't have many friends until I was about 17, and then slowly, slowly, I began to evolve and come out of my (oyster) shell.

The lack of ego, the insecurities that carried over from primary school, chased me to junior high and some high school even. I was always fearful of others -- what they MIGHT say, what they MIGHT do -- just because I'd experienced a lot of that stuff already. Not pleasant for a young person.

But I always say that those experiences made me a much stronger person, and a well-adjusted person. I have learned to forgive, even if I don't completely forget episodes, which is a step ahead of many people. I could well have turned into a bitter, reclusive, scared-of-the-world person, and surprisingly, I'm not. I'm happy, I love people, I am confident (90% of the time, anyway), and I'm aware of the many nuances that bullying can take and try to steer my children from them.

Sometimes in my "I must be the only person treated like this" mode, I used to wonder what it would be like in school if I suddenly disappeared. In grade 7, I recall being at my locker and wondering if I was just a "spirit" hovering in the hallways, what I might hear said about me, if I was gone. No, I was definitely not suicidal, not even truly depressed...but I always had a good imagination and just wondered: Would it make a difference to my peers if I was gone? Would they notice? Would they care? Would they then be sorry for the way they'd treated me?

I think that is what I truly wanted: for people to realize and recognize that I'd been emotionally hurt and that they should feel sorry for the way I'd been treated.

Perhaps that's why I'm so aware of others -- others' feelings, others' thoughts. Sensitivity about myself was always strong, yet it introduced a great sensitivity to others...which is a good thing.

I wonder if I'd been a different kind of kid, and my school experiences would have been different, if I'd become a different kind of adult. But as I'm definitely happy with who I am these days ( and all without therapy of any kind, only use of keeping my journals throughout the years), it all worked out for the best, didn't it????

A Classic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy5le7Vuax0

A Pearlie of Wisdom...from a Madam

"It's not the college degree that makes a writer. The great thing is to have a story to tell. "

-- Polly Adler

Polly Adler was born in a small town in Russia in 1900, and made her way to America at the age of 14, just before the outbreak of World War I. The war stopped her family from joining her.

Polly worked in clothing factories, sporadically attended school, and eventually began to keep company with theater people. At the age of twenty, Polly Adler opened her first bordello and became a madam. It is so difficult for me to fathom this former "shtetl maidel" becoming a madam...and a successful and rather well-known one.

She officially "retired" from prostitution in 1944.

At the age of fifty, she went to college, and shortly after, with the help of a ghost writer, wrote her memoirs, "A House Is Not A Home."

My mother owns a paperback version of this book and throughout my years of growing up, it always caught my eye because of its name. The title became a catch phrase in my family, and was an important value that was taught to us.

***************

Images:

#1: Polly Adler's business card

#2 Her famous autobiography, the book I remember from home

#3 Polly Adler -- has that seductive, sultry look with those dark glasses

#4 Polly Adler -- does this woman look like she ran a brothel? Not. At. All. She reminds me of Shirley Booth, who played Hazel.

****************

Some Trivia:

Polly Adler's real name was PEARL ADLER.

****************

Death notice in Time magazine June 22, 1962:

Died. Polly (real name: Pearl) Adler, 62, longtime (1920-45) Manhattan madam whose garish parlors were a house away from home for those who found the scarlet parrot on her business card an invitation to expensive pleasure; of cancer; in a Hollywood hospital. At Polly's midtown bordello, amid Louis XVI, Egyptian and Chinese furnishings, and a Gobelin tapestry of Vulcan and Venus "having a tender moment," Racketeer Dutch Schultz took his ease, barking orders to henchmen from under a silken canopy, while in nearby rooms Social Registered patrons reveled, and off-duty cops romped. In retirement, tiny (4 ft., 11 in.), dark-haired Polly wrote a bestselling memoir (A House Is Not a Home) that helped enrich the idiom ("There's no shaking off the press"), completed two years of college, where one of her professors coined a rich one of his own: "The problem is, Miss Adler knows nothing about syntax."

Lend This Guy An Ear

I received an email with a cute song, "Thank G-d I'm a Jewish Boy." So I went to search out the singer/songwriter. You should too. Listen to the clips...and you'll smile -- I promise. And if you're familiar with the stylings of the late, great, Allan Sherman, you might see some similarities.

I didn't listen to every selection, but did listen to and enjoyed BIG NOSES and MY FAVORITE THINGS.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/alieberman2

A Presence Is Indeed Often a Present

I've taken the time to now comment on the comments of my last few posts. In case you don't go back and read them, I'm copying one that addresses someone's presence alongside someone who is ill. I thought you ought to read it.

Thank you all for your comments.

Yes, someone's presence can in fact be a gift.

I have a cousin whose grandmother (my great-aunt) had been in a nursing home for a few years. Even though my great-aunt was often sleeping or simply "out of it", I would visit, just sit with her, hold her hand and say a few words...whether she heard them or not.

I asked that cousin one day: "Do you visit your grandmother? Do you take the kids to see their great-grandmother?"

I got a very flippant answer: "No...it wouldn't make a difference anyhow. She's so out of it, she wouldn't know who I am or who the kids are, and wouldn't know I'm there."

I never forgot -- nor, in a way, forgave -- that cousin for that shi**yattitude. If that attitude prevailed throughout this world, people who were sick would simply die earlier.

The truth is that one never knows when their presence can make a difference. And I can tell you another story about how one's presence had an impact...

IN 1981 after my dad was operated on for a brain tumor -- benign -- he was barely conscious for the first few days after. But I happened to be there one day and a nurse was asking my dad simple questions to test his cognition. She said, 'Mr. A, there is someone in the room with you. Do you know who it is?"

In barely a whisper, and with his eyes closed, he said, "My daughter...Pearl."

I was astounded; I might've said something to him when I walked in but thought due to the heavy painkillers, he couldn't hear me or sense I was there.

How wrong I was! And that memory has stuck with me, among several others from that time, for these past 25+ years.

So nobody should ever say "It doesn't matter if I'm there or not."IT DOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(phew, now that I got that out of my system, I can move on to something else)

Rethinking that Last Post of Mine

After I'd posted that news item and my own comment, I imagined a much different scenario...on El Al, or any other "Jewish" airline...

1. Parents board, a three year old and an infant in tow. As they try to store their hand luggage in the overhead carrier, the infant begins to wail. Mother hushes the baby, who doesn't cease wailing. Flight attendant approaches, a big smile on her face.

"Oy, what a bubelah. Looks just like my Meira at home in Tel Aviv. Let me hold her, while you finish packing away your stuff." Flight attendant rocks the baby, tickles her under her chin and receives a big, toothless grin for her effort, along with some drool on her collar. "Don't worry about that spot. I'll just use Tide, instant spot remover, when I'm back in the galley. Enjoy the flight, and if you need me to look after the baby, come and see me back there. I'm Dahlia."

2. A four-year-old is jumping up and down on his window seat when he excitedly sees another plane off on the horizon. This child, mind you, is quite the obese little boy, and his movement makes for some turbulence. Over the loudspeaker: "Please fasten your seatbelts. We have a first-time flier in seat 14D who is just a bit excited. As soon as he calms down, we'll fly just a bit smoother. Let the boy have his fun, okay?"

3. In the line to board Flight 224 to Miami Beach: a gaggle of children become unruly, pushing and anxious to be on the plane already. The airline clerk says over the loudspeaker, " Would those children wearing the Bais Avraham school shirts please sit down NOW!" Stunned into submission, the dozen children do as she instructs...and do so quietly. After a pause, the clerk can be heard again, chuckling over the loudspeaker: "I didn't say 'SIMON SAYS' !"

---
Halevai , if we could travel on airlines that imbue such warmth, such haimeshekeit, travelers might just very well be happier people.

Does This Apply...

...When Flying to Israel?


Child's tantrum gets family tossed off plane

ORLANDO - (AP) -- Flight attendants often deal with obnoxious passengers who won't listen to instructions by kicking them off the plane. But a Massachusetts couple think AirTran Airways went overboard by treating their crying 3-year-old daughter in much the same way.

Julie and Gerry Kulesza and daughter Elly were removed from the flight when the girl refused to take her seat before takeoff, airline officials said today. But her parents said they just needed a little more time to calm her down.

The Kuleszas planned to fly home to Boston on Jan. 14 from Fort Myers after a four-day visit with the girl's paternal grandparents. She was removed because ''she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat'' during boarding, AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.

AirTran officials say they were only following Federal Aviation Administration rules that children age 2 and above must have their own seat and be wearing a seatbelt upon takeoff.

''The flight was already delayed 15 minutes and in fairness to the other 112 passengers on the plane, the crew made an operational decision to remove the family,'' Graham-Weaver said.

But Julie Kulesza said: ``We weren't given an opportunity to hold her, console her or anything.''

''Elly was sitting in front of our seat crying,'' she said in a phone interview. ``The attendant motioned to a seat and asked if we purchased it for her.''

They had paid for the seat. Gerry Kulesza said another attendant then approached the family and told him: ``You need to get her in control and in her seat.''

The couple told the attendants they were trying. Julie Kulesza said she asked the attendants if Elly could sit on her lap, but they said no.

The family flew home the next day.

The Orlando-based carrier reimbursed the family $595.80, the cost of the three tickets, and offered them three roundtrip tickets anywhere the airline flies, Graham-Weaver said.

But that's too little, too late for the Kuleszas. The father said they would never fly AirTran again.

****
The one time I traveled to Israel, I flew via KLM, and I don't remember crying/yelling children on board. But the stories I've heard re. El Al and other U.S. airlines flying to Israel...probably ought to get more than one family kicked off a plane -- and not necessarily reimbursed for their troubles, either!

"What Happened to Me?"

The title of this post is something that I heard my father say a few times this afternoon while I was visiting him in hospital.

Oftentimes, he lies in the bed, shaking his head from side to side, in a pose of disbelief...to what he's going through.

Today he was pseudo-sleeping when I came, so I sat and chatted with my mother. A short time later, someone walks in and introduces herself as an occupational therapist and she wanted to ask my father a few questions to assess him and his cognitive abilities.

She woke him, and even if it was just a light sleep, it was a sleep. To suddenly have to respond to questions would not be too good, I figured...and I was right.

There were basic questions that you and I would probably not have much difficulty with: What is your name? What city are we in? What province? What kind of building are we in? What season is it? What's the date? What floor are you on?

Even as she asked these questions, I knew that I had to hold back my retorts: my father has been lying in a hospital bed for over 4 weeks! How should he know the correct date? He'd been moved to several different floors over his stay! How could he know the floor?

I did ask her why she'd come now, especially after rousing him from sleep; he is rather clear-headed in the morning. She had gotten a requisition and was told to check up on him now, is what I was told.

My father, the former businessman, struggled with counting backwards from 100 by 7. He got to 93 and was stuck.

When asked to spell " world" and then spell it backwards, he couldn't spell it backwards.

He had to write a sentence for the therapist on a clipboard she provided. Even though he was lying in bed, and somewhat elevated, it wasn't a conducive situation for writing. I'm not quite certain what, if anything, he actually wrote on that paper. But when asked to read back what he'd written, he said, "You're a lovely lady."

He was asked to draw a clock face and provide the numbers. He couldn't do that.

------

When someone, G-d forbid, has dementia or Alzheimer's or even Parkinson's or suffers from a stroke, they might be so far advanced in the mental decline, and not realize that the answers they're giving are not correct, when administered tests such as this one today. The difference is that my father DOES recognize his inability to give the answers that, perhaps several hours earlier, might've been easy for him.

He recognizes these limitations. He told the OT that he used to do math so fast in his head. I grew up with math and spelling drills that my father gave me. This is how he taught us; this is how he taught himself. And suddenly the brain doesn't want to catch on anymore.

After the OT left, he was still hung up on that "subtract 7" question and pushed himself over and over to try and work through the sequence. I guess he was trying to prove to himself that perhaps he could do it, at least for himself, if not for the OT.

I saw the tears in my father's eyes when the OT left; I felt the heaviness of his emotional pain, and that of my mother who watched this too.

"What happened to me?... What will become of me?"

We tried to speak convincingly that after mental and physical rehab we hope to have him home again. As we do...and as he does.

As I've said, when the clarity comes, it is like a curtain is drawn open and the sun shines through. My father can talk about everything and anything. He can describe in detail episodes from 50 and 60 years ago. But when the daylight grows dimmer, the mind grows dimmer too.

The medication, the past seizures, the brain fluid, the lack of constant movement and being in a bed for so many weeks have taken their toll.

...But at what price?

Every Minute...

In the comments section of my last post, Marallyn ben Moshe wrote:

"EVERY MINUTE WE HAVE A PARENT IS A GIFT."

Kol ha-kavod to Marallyn for knowing that and "stating" it aloud. It is like poetry to my eyes and ears. For I have been gifted my entire life with these caring, loving, respectful parents of mine. I have always recognized that and feel sorry for those who aren't gifted with similar parents.

There are parents who cannot be considered a gift -- they are plain and simply HORRIBLE people, terrible role models, who treat their offspring like garbage. Oftentimes they do not deserve to have had the title "parent" bestowed upon them, and oftentimes the child is better off without such a parent in their life.

Thank G-d I do not personally know people in this predicament, but I know they exist. Family dynamics are often the result of the dynamics that came a generation before; people learn from example: whether how to improve, or whether to follow in negative footsteps and have family history repeat itself.

I hope that most, if not all of you, can appreciate your parents -- what they give/gave you to help you be the best person you can be...and the right tools for parenting.

Saying Thanks

Several of you have commented on my posts, saying although you're tuning in a bit late, you're still thinking of me...of my family...of my father, and davening for him.

Although I'm not commenting on the comments, you deserve a post specifically to say THANK YOU for your warm messages and your good thoughts.

It will be four weeks tomorrow evening that my father went into the Emergency department. He's been shuffled over those four weeks from different floors where beds were available. Apparently the hospital had its own outbreak of Norwalk Virus (upper respiratory disease that can kill...especially among the elderly) and beds were in great demand throughout the hospital. Wherever there's a bed, that's where they've sent my dad: Emergency,Cardiology, Rehab, General Medicine. It's been difficult to get used to a nursing staff, through several changing shifts, and then be transferred elsewhere and start all over again...repeating medical histories to nurses and hospital night sitters and roommates, etc.

In many ways, my father seemed better weeks ago, in the early part of his hospital stay. It has now been said that it may not be a short-term rehab after all, but rather a slow and lengthy rehab -- difficult to digest for all of us involved. But G-d willing, with rehab, my father might be able to go home again and resume his life in some semblance of normalcy.

As I've said before, the brain is a wondrous thing: the capacity for what it knows and what it can't discern. My father can have a 20 minute conversation in Russian with the relative of a roommate (Russian was spoken by him between 1940-45 when he spent the war years in Siberia. He has been told he speaks like a native, and with no accent.), giving all detailed information of when he was in Russia, where he was in Russia during the war, what he did, etc. But when asked when he came to Toronto, he couldn't remember that!

Night becomes day; day becomes night. Concern with "what time is it?" is at the forefront. With daytime, and especially morning, comes much more clarity of mind, and a sharp memory, but the later in the day it gets, weakness, inertia and confusion sink in.

I prefer to visit my dad in the late morning, and then if possible, again in the evening between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. -- when nighttime sets in and settles down...yet leaves my father somewhat unsettled.

Some people don't understand family bonds and concerns. Apparently a friend of mine checked in a couple of weeks ago with another friend of mine to hear how my dad is doing. The friend said that I'm visiting as much as I can -- even if just to be company for my mother -- and my dad is sleeping a lot. The friend who was checking up on me couldn't understand why someone would sit and bother to watch someone sleep.

And this comes from a person whose own father has had serious back surgery and a slow and difficult recovery!

I was aghast that someone could think like this. What if it wasn't pure drug-induced sleep, but a coma that my father was in? Isn't that a form of sleep? Am I expected to choose to not sit around "just because he's sleeping?"

People mean well, but sometimes just don't think, do they?

I know that several of you have had to know of unfortunate medical circumstances in your families, and we continue to hope and pray that good health will prevail.

Again, I thank you for your concern, and as my father continues to say: "Let's hope for the best..."

Alles Auf Zucker! (Go for Zucker!)

My husband and I don't always agree on films. We mostly go to family films with our kids, but I'm a lover of "chick flicks" and artsy films, and he likes action-gore films. So I go with the girls to some films and he goes with the guys to other films. The only movies we can more or less agree on seeing and enjoying are quirky films.

He chose this film from the video store, described the premise to me and I thought it sounded fun.

If you want offbeat & quirky... you've come to the right movie.

If you want dysfunctional family... you've come to the right movie.

If you want deceit... you've come to the right movie.

It helps that I understand a lot of German...but the subtitles helped.

There's a German line in the movie: "It's never too late to become Jewish." That should get you thinking...

Here are a couple of good movie links. The first is in German, but find the sidebar bit called KINO TRAILER, click on it, and you'll get a peek at the film.

Here's another, more detailed movie link.

If anyone has already seen this film, please let me know your thoughts. It wasn't full-blown funny as in guffaws, but it was filled with lots of chuckles and smiles.

The director, Dani Levy, is from Basel, Switzerland, my mom's hometown. All I can say is that he has an interesting way of viewing the world...

Grab some popcorn, get comfy and hit the PLAY button on the remote.

A First

I was walking back to shul on Shabbos afternoon with my children for mincha/maariv. (women are invited to listen to the speaker at seudat shlishit) We passed a little dog, whom we'd first seen a week ago, also while walking to shul in the afternoon.

I've met countless dogs in the area, and often remember the names of most of them. I remembered this one was TIFFANY, a Maltese-Yorkie blend. I also noticed that Tiffany had gotten groomed since we met her; she was sporting a pink hairclip in her doggie locks, which wasn't too bad. But then my daughter and her friend pointed out that the dog was wearing pink nail polish! Sure enough, Tiffany was. A first for me to see. Can you believe it? Dog nail PAWlish (not original -- too bad.).

I asked the owner if Tiffany owns a coat -- nope, not a coat, but she does have boots...and a DRESS and other accoutrements. WOW...........

I should've asked if she also owns a Tiffany watch or a Tiffany-diamond-encrusted dog collar that she wears only on special occasions.

She's definitely not Max's type. He likes the females very natural-looking, those who don't put on any doggie airs. He's still in love with Phoebe, the dog a few houses away. Remember her? She's the one who never fails to wiggle her tush in his face every time she sees him. Guess that's the next best thing to a doggie lap dance, huh?

Sayings These Days

These days, my father is saying :

"Ich bin nisht mer kein mensch." I am no longer a man.

"Ich hab nisht mer kein koach." I no longer have any strength. (This has changed from the previous : "Ich hab nisht kein koach." I have no strength.)

This dear man, in spite of those horrible, and often panic-stricken moments of confusion (due to the anti-seizure medication, the great number of seizures he'd experienced, and thus the trauma on his body and brain, and the lying in bed for over three weeks) as to where he is and what he's doing there, and where has my mother/siblings/niece and nephews gone still has his moments of clarity.

And in that clarity he recognizes his great limitations....his need to depend on others for help -- to shave him, to help him complete basic everyday tasks, such as eating and going to the bathroom and moving in the bed and learning to walk all over again.

Human strength is a wondrous thing. Human frailty is not.

(Please continue to daven for Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka...to regain that wondrous mental and physical strength of his and let him go home again.)

My Classic Rock Kids aka The Kids Are Alright

One of the local shuls is hosting a concert next month, featuring "Uncle Moishy" , who grew up in Toronto, and lived down the street from where I grew up. I know who he is, but my kids certainly do not. As we passed the big banner in front of the shul, I heard at least two out of three voices pipe up from the back seat of the van: "WHO'S UNCLE MOISHY?"

What could I say but, "He's a Jewish musician, but we never listened to his kind of music."

I did not grow up with that kind of music -- yes, we had some Pirchei Choir records, just because my first cousin was in one of the NY-based choirs and thus, on the records -- and my kids have not grown up with that music. Although "yeshivish" music is rather nice, I'm mostly familiar with it from simcha dance classes and background music in some of the Kosher restaurants I've been to.

My kids, up until the past year or so, mostly grew up with the classical and jazz that I'd play for them, as well as easy-listening radio stations. But a year ago, something happened: they began to make their own choices in music. My oldest became an Elvis Presley fan, as well as Paul McCartney...from which evolved a fondness for Beatles music. My daughter, along with her girly-girlfriends, discovered the popular young singers, and began to choose her own radio stations to listen to, thus learning lyrics very quickly to "at the moment, popular songs." My youngest was able to distinguish between Neil Young's and Paul McCartney's voice.

These days, they are very much into music, downloading onto their little MP3 players...and knowing how exactly to do that.

My oldest is a fan of "classic rock" songs and singers from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Upon hearing two opening notes to a song, he can recognize the song and singer or band. He did ask the other day if Jim Morrison and Van Morrison were brothers, which struck me as an interesting question. Not too long ago, I explained what "Woodstock" had been, simply because he is an avid listener to music of that generation. This 11-year-old kid blows my mind with his musical savvy.

My youngest son isn't too far behind his older brother in his music appreciation. I was in the office reading blogs, and they were in their beds in the bedroom they share next door to the office. I heard them talking...and my six year old son says, " A., I know a good song you can download."

A. "Yeah? Which one?"

N. "Iron Butterfly."

A. "That's not the name of a song. That's the name of the band! And I don't like 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' "

Everything old becomes new again. Isn't that how the saying goes? Those same songs I was hearing for the first time when I was prepubescent are those songs that I'm hearing again, but that my kids are hearing for the first time and getting into.

Sorry, Uncle Moishy. For my kids, you just can't compete with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Stones, Paul McCartney and Wings...

Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose*

La traduction: The more things change, the more they stay the same

Time passes, people age, lifestyles change, families grow, storms are weathered...again...and again...and again.

That is how I view life in my family. We've encountered and dealt with major health shake-ups that may have affected one person, but in turn have always affected the family.

We've been handed another shake-up... My father is still in hospital, free of seizures, but so heavily medicated, he sleeps most of the time, and is only a shell of his former self. Because the meds are in his bloodstream, we don't know yet his full mental and physical capabilities and/or if they will be retrieved. Doctors ask about what kind of home my parents live in, if he could return home to the life they knew, if we would get medical care, if my mother could handle things.

So many questions... No real answers.

Medical care itself is a shell of its former self. Over the years that my father has been hospitalized for various ailments, we've seen the decline of the Canadian health service. It's sad -- new hospitals are being built, and yet, there are not enough doctors, nurses and staff to meet the needs of hospitals already in practice.

I gave birth to two of my children in the hospital where my father is right now. Even with the three year gap between those two kids, I could see the cutbacks that the hospital was experiencing during my stay.

It's sad. We worry about our loved ones. We worry that their needs are being met by hospital staff. And yet I feel sad for the staff themselves, who are so overworked in these demanding jobs.

My father is a model patient. He doesn't complain. He is so polite and friendly, when he's awake and less groggy. He addresses the doctors and nurses by name, through each shift. He makes small talk with the staff...in several languages. He is not needy.... YET WE NEED HIM. So I'm hoping that these doctors and nurses will set him on the road to a wonderful recovery...yet again. He's been on such a road many a time.

As Bob Dylan penned, "How many roads must a man walk down/before you call him a man?" My father had to become a man while he was still a little boy. I'm hoping he's still got a few good years left in him to be the wonderful man that he's known to be.

***************

This post is rather disjointed, isn't it? It's like my poetry -- I intend to carry my words one way, and they take a path all their own. Yes, this post was going to be about my father, but I was more inclined to write how I want people to ask about how he's feeling and progressing medically, yet I also almost resent having to repeat the same stories and explanations to people. It's sort of a push me-pull me tactic. It isn't that I'm lazy to tell the stories, but primarily it always come down to the same base idea: the truth hurts; hearing or seeing the truth hurts; vocalizing the truth hurts even more. I already felt this when he had a brain tumor 25 years ago and people would ask, and ask, and ask, and I'd have to answer, answer, answer. Yes, I appreciated the concern but sometimes just felt I wanted to shut my ears and eyes to it all.
I don't know if other people have encountered these feelings when in similar circumstances, whether family, health or job related issues come up and questions are continually asked. Maybe it's just my personal quirks...?

Thanks for "listening."

"How Is Your Dad?"

I thank you all for your concern, your well wishes and brachot for my father to have a swift and complete recovery. We're certainly not there yet, but thank G-d he's seemingly better than he was last week.

I wanted to give you kind people who have continued to ask, "How is your dad?" some feedback. The following is pulled from an email I wrote to Cruisin' Mom shortly after 3:00 a.m. today when I was awakened by some noise and couldn't go back to sleep for a couple of hours. What did I do? I turned to the computer, to blogging and emails, supposedly from which my "addiction" has waned. (sorry, Ezzie, I was awake just a bit earlier than you today; I headed back to sleep at 5 a.m.!)

"My father is stable but still in that hospital bed. He's in cardiac, and they took the halter monitor away from him a couple days ago. I believe he also hasn't had a seizure --grand mal or petit mal -- in two to three days, which is a good thing. Perhaps they've found the right dosage of anti-seizure meds to help control them. But it's very strong regardless, gives great memory loss and some confusion still. My dad looks better than he did early last week, but is SO WEAK. He keeps saying in Yiddish, "Ich hab nisht kein koach." I have no strength. We're hoping he'll be moved to neurology and get some rehab -- he only began sitting in a chair yesterday a couple of times, has to learn to walk again and do other things. --Physical therapy and rehabilitational therapy are both needed. My mom thinks he would need round-the-clock care should he come home. We're not yet at that stage, and I hope the hospital recognizes that fact and doesn't throw him out yet.

"Although he's more lucid, we've heard so many things come out of his mouth over these 12 days of hospitaliztion: life lessons, stories from the past, "instructions" to my mother should things not go right for him, "I love you" countless times to each of us...and among all that have been the confused moments with inappropriate questions or statements that come from nowhere, not inappropriate meaning anything lewd or crude, just lines that don't belong in a conversation at that time.

"Hard to see, as I'm sure you can understand. And his age has nothing to do with that. A well, able-minded and able-bodied man going in... suddenly changes overnight!"

And this is from a second email I wrote about an hour later to Cruisin' Mom.

"So imagine, I went to a friend's father's funeral on Wednesday, I went to another friend's father's funeral the following Tuesday...and between those two funerals, and beyond, my dad is in a hospital bed, also seriously ill.

"So honestly, it hasn't been a couple of good weeks...Guess you could figure that one out yourself."

I hope to be able to tell you about steady improvement, and that indeed my loving father, and yes, a very special person to all, will come home....soon enough.

"Stolen" from Stacey

Saw this over at Stacey's Shmata; I was reluctant to respond to it, but found it fun, and without boundaries, so I thought I'd repost it here. You may choose to respond, you may choose not to. I won't be offended if there are no comments.

What Do You Know About Me?

This is how it works: YOU leave a comment, copying the questions and filling in the blanks about ME even if you don't have any idea what the answers are. Be honest...or make something up....it's up to you and it's all fun :-)

My name:

Where did we meet:

Take a stab at my middle name:

How long have you known me:

When is the last time that we saw each other:

Do I smoke:

Do I drink:

When is my birthday:

What was your first impression of upon meeting me:

Do I have any siblings:

What’s one of my favorite things to do:

Am I funny:

What’s my favorite type of music:

What is the best feature about me:

Am I shy or outgoing:

Am I a rebel or do I follow the rules:

Do I have any special talents:

Would you consider me a friend/good friend:

Would you call me preppy, average, sporty, punk, hippie, glam, nerdy, snobby, or something else (what):

What is a memory we have once had:

Have you ever hugged me:

Do you miss me…do you think i miss you:

How well do u know me?

What is my favorite food:

Have you ever had a crush on me:

If there was one good nickname for me, what would it be:

What’s your favorite memory of me:

Who do I like right now:

What is my worst habit:

If you and I were stranded on a desert island, what one thing would I bring?

Who are my favorite sports teams?

What was the last thing I said to you?

Will you repost this so I can do it for you?

Keep on Writin'

I've noticed -- yet again -- that several of my favorite bloggers are calling it quits, if they haven't already. They feel their blogs have served them well for a course of time, and now they will just deal with their lives, and not share every aspect of their life with the general blogosphere.

Although my own blog posts don't always offer up the same caliber of writing as I'd hope they would, although I may not post as frequently as I might've been doing a year ago, I NEED my blog. I NEED this means of communication. I NEED this outlet for my creative writing.

As a result of my blog writing and blog reading, I've been inspired more often than not over the past two years to write poetry, poetry that has managed to get published.

I'm basically writing into thin air when I post something on Pearlies of Wisdom. Whatever I write is out there, perhaps being read, perhaps not. Nonetheless, I've come to accept that I need to write to this unseen public.

Of course my need to write isn't as strong as it once was; for too long a time, that need overtook me...to the point of a seeming addiction to write posts and to read others'. I'm so thankful that "addiction" has waned greatly -- yes, it did do damage in my life, I admit, and I'm not pleased about that.

Blogging has defnitely become one of my favorite pastimes. It has yielded friendships, a personal and general education about many topics and communities, learning tools for "netiquette" and an overall personal satisfaction.

I'm guessing that at some point in the future, I may not NEED to blog any longer...just like when I finished my longtime journaling on the night I became engaged, and said goodbye to that "hobby," feeling I no longer "needed" it.

For now though, rest assured, that I'm still gonna be here. Of course, I don't share everything -- aside from the anonymity factor, sometimes the truth hurts much too badly to capture on paper, or onscreen -- but if I do feel the need to get way below the surface in my writing, I know someone will be out there...just waiting to read my Pearlies of Wisdom.

A Look Back at (My) 2006...

January -- Acquired a new dog, Max.

February -- ?

March -- Youngest son turned 6.
My father was in serious condition in the hospital; as a result, I had to cancel a trip to California that I'd so looked forward to.
Published poetry in an American Jewish literary journal.

April -- I was "dismissed" from my job after being with the company for nearly 19 years.
My husband turned 46.

May --?

June -- My oldest son turned 11.
My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

July -- My father celebrated his 86th birthday.

August -- My daughter turned 9.

September -- I turned 45.

October -- ?

November -- Started a diet under a doctor's care.

December -- Published an article in the Canadian Jewish News.
My father is in hospital with serious medical problems.

As you can see, my year has centered around family -- both my parents, my husband and my children...and our dog. It has centered around my livelihood (or seemingly lack thereof) of copy editing and editing. It has centered around celebrations. It has centered around my creative writing. It has centered among health.

My life in 2006 has been busy; it has been rich; it has met with disappointments and with simple and great pleasures; my life has had to deal with harsh realities of home life and work life; and as been taught to me over the course of many years, my life has understood that good health is first and foremost to everyday living. Not even with all the money in the world, are you the richest person...but with good health, you are indeed!

Let us all hope and pray for good health for each one of us, for each day to be better than the day that preceeded it, and for 2007 to be a bright and happy year.

Cheers, everyone. L'chaim!

LIMBO

I like to do the limbo.

I don't like to be in limbo.

We are in limbo with/about my dear father.

Here is my father's head-related medical history. You will then understand what kind of head traumas he's had, and the long-lasting effects, and thus the seizures.

November 1981 -- brain tumor; benign. We discovered it as a result of a grand-mal seizure he had at night in bed. He went to bed with a severe headache that night. He had surgery to remove the tumor, was on anti-seizure medication for over a year, couldn't drive, but thank G-d made wonderful progress and a complete recovery.

January 2000 -- mild stroke; slight confusion and garbled speech.

April 2003 -- fell on my icy front steps; hit his head; suffered grand mal seizures; in intensive care during SARS crisis in Toronto; horrible time. Back on anti-seizure medication.

March 2006 -- suffered several grand mal seizures; rushed via ambulance to hospital emergency dept.; medical personnel thought he'd had a massive stroke; in hospital for 2 1/2 weeks; lots of confusion, some memory loss, weakness, but came back to us...walking out of the hospital, albeit now with a cane to help his balance.

December 2006 -- chest pains and general weakness; taken to emergency; chest fine; begins to have several seizures -- grand-mal and continual petit-mal seizures. HORRIBLE confusion, great weakness, sleeping constantly; severe memory loss. And in among all that, there is still the dear, sweet and gentle man who's concerned and worried about all those around him. With his many lucid comments shine his true personality, his base qualities!

Why is he still having seizures if medication is supposedly controlling them? Till they find the right dose, I suppose. Funnily enough, this is the same medication he first used 25 years ago after his brain tumor and the surgery to remove it.

But it is also anti-seizure medication, and at high doses, that lends itself to severe memory loss.

My father always says that he was reborn 25 years ago. He remembers the date of his surgery and thanks G-d every day and especially every anniversary of that date...as do we.

Last night I was with him until just before midnight; in between his sleeping and the few petit mal seizures I witnessed, he spoke both with lucidity and also with confusion. In one of his lucid conversations, he told me how important it is to be a good person, but how it sometimes backfires on you. He told a story, reverting back to his mother tongue, Yiddish, of how in the war, when he was in Russia, he was trying to come to the protection of someone and the person who'd been attacking that someone attacked my father, beating him over the head with a stick...that led to severe injury, probably a concussion and the need for stitches.

I said, "Dad, that beating might've been the start of all your head troubles."

Twenty five years ago the doctors indeed said that a head injury received earlier in his life might've led to the growth of the tumor.

In any case, over all these years, there has been a buildup of fluid around the brain. It is this fluid that presses against certain nerves, and thus causes seizures. But with his cocktail of numerous medications he must take for his several ailments, one never knows how other drugs impact everything, too.

He went in to Emergency a week ago today, not feeling good, but knowing everything, being able to do just about everything, and being very much his own person. A week later, he is a synthesis of fragmented memories, little physical mobility and great confusion.

Will keep you posted....

If you can, please daven for Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka.

B'sha'ah Tovah

Please visit my friend at http://tenlikoach.blogspot.com/. She has some wonderful news to share with all of you; I already knew for several weeks and am more than thrilled for her and her husband.

I wish them well, and G-d willing may they give birth to a healthy and happy child b'shaah tovah/at the right time.