Art is 80

Snow started falling in DC around midnight, and a combination of snow, sleet and freezing rain is to continue through the day, as a massive storm sweeps across much of the country. It does not look like snow depth will be the problem. We may have 4 or 5 inches of very wet snow on the ground now, and its wetness is obvious in that nothing stuck on the top of our backyard table.

The problems aren’t going to be with snow depth, but with the potential of ice bringing down power lines, and very cold temperatures for the next week, where the thermometer won’t exceed 25 degrees. According to the Washington Post, 500,000 customers across the country have already lost power, particularly in southern states.

In the now 56 years I have lived in Washington, I have seen heavy snowfalls probably about once every two or three years. The Snowmageddon, or whatever it was called, 16 years ago, pictured above, was the heaviest snowfall, where we got about two feet of snow throughout the area. But I have no real memories of what happened after the snow fell; I assume it disrupted things a few days, and that it began to melt fairly quickly. You would think I would remember more, but I don’t.

On the other hand, over my life, I do have some snow memories, and I thought this would be a good time to go through them. I am sure that, some time this afternoon, I will remember one or two instances that slip my mind right now, but don’t worry. I am not going to add to this post then.

My first big snow memory comes from when I was in the 6th grade, and a student at Ladue (now Reed) Elementary School in St. Louis County, about a mile and a half from our house. A lot of snow fell during the day, and the roads were obviously jammed. I actually don’t remember how I used to get home from school that year (did my mother pick me up? was I in a carpool? did I take the bus?), but however, I did it, I couldn’t do it that day. So, I think all by myself, I walked home, not dressed for snow, with the snow coming well above my ankles, my feet and pants getting very wet. By the time I walked home, I think that the sun had come out. I felt very grown up. I really liked the walk. I have no idea where my mother thought I was, or how she thought I would get home.

My next snow memory doesn’t come until law school. One winter break (I think) in what must have been 1965 or 1966, my classmate Fran Oates and I decided to drive to Quebec City and Montreal (don’t ask), so we did. I don’t remember the drive up until we got to Levis, Quebec and took the ferry across the St. Lawrence to Quebec City. The river was frozen over, and the ferry was also an ice breaker, which chopped the ice and created ice islands fit for polar bears as we crossed. Very exciting.

After realizing that snow didn’t stop the Quebecois from walking and playing around the city like it was July, we drove the Montreal and went to the old Montreal Forum (I think that is what it was called) to see the Canadiens play (again I think) Detroit. The Forum was full, the atmosphere beyond electric, the cheers all in French, and I don’t remember the score. But our plan, the plan of normal 23 year olds, was to get in our car (our car being my 1964 VW Beetle) and drive back through the night.

The Interstate had not been built yet, so the drive was on a two or four lane road that eventually followed the Hudson River going through one quaint town after another. The problem was that we started the drive with just a few flakes falling on Montreal, but eventually found ourselves in a heavy snow storm as we drove through the night. The good part of that was that there were very few cars on the road, so it was all quite beautiful.

The plan was to cut off where the New York Thruway extension leads into the Mass Pike, to take the Mass Pike through the Berkshires until there was a turn off to go south, or southeast, to New Haven. By the time we got to the entrance to the Mass Pike, the sun had come up and everything looked white. When we got to the toll plaza where you picked up the turnpike ticket (no automation then), it was empty, so we just drove on.

For the 50 (or is it 100) miles we were on the Mass Pike, the following was true. We saw absolutely no other cars, not one. The turnpike had not been plowed, and we had no idea where the road was or where the shoulders were at all. Our assumption was that the Mass Pike had been closed to traffic, and that everyone knew that but us. It was a frightening ride (how fast should you go? 60? 45? 25?) We were all by ourselves.

My next snow memory is one from some time, I would guess, in the 1980s, when the DC area was hit with a unusual Veterans Day snow, about 10 inches on Nov 11. I had been to some sort of meeting in Fairfax City VA, normally about 45 minutes or so from home. When I left the meeting in late afternoon, it had been snowing a bit, but it didn’t seem too daunting to drive. The way home that I chose including driving on Interstate 66. I remember going down the ramp onto the highway, and seeing that traffic was a bit slow, something that happens often on 66, so it didn’t really concern me. I didn’t stop to think that, in late afternoon, the backups on I-66 were not typically on the lanes leading to DC, but on the lanes leading from DC to the Virginia suburbs. I remember being on I-66 for more than 3 hours with no way to communicate to Edie, and with a fear of running out of gas, and of being stuck in non-moving traffic overnight.

The next memory is of a beautiful day, when perhaps in no more than a suit jacket, I got on an airplane to travel to Bluefield, West Virginia. I had never been to Bluefield before. My client was taking an old hotel and converting it to senior housing, and I was there to scope it out, meet the people involved, including city officials, and plan for a real estate closing in the near future. As I sat in an office that afternoon, I glanced out the window and saw that it was no longer a beautiful, sunny day, but that the clouds had taken over and snow began to fall. By the time the meeting was over, and I checked to make sure my plane was leaving on time, I was told that the flight had been canceled due to the weather, and the airport closed.

No problem, I said to myself, I will rent a car and drive home (I thought I could make it by midnight). But it turned out that the only car rental in Bluefield was Hertz, and that Hertz was at the airport, and that the airport, and therefore Hertz, was closed. I could not get a rental car.

So I checked into a motel as snow continued to fall. The motel was across the street from a diner that luckily stayed open, or I would have starved, and I stayed in Bluefield for two nights, as the airport and car rental remained closed. Luckily, it was during the winter Olympics, so I was entertained while I was there, speaking to no one, living in an otherwise empty motel, and eating at an otherwise empty diner.

On the third day with still no airport and no available car, I grew frustrated. I found out that I could take a cab to Roanoke for about $75, and its airport was open. So that’s what I did, and got a flight back. Pretty smart, you say? Not really, when I learned that the Roanoke Airport had never closed and I could have gone there and flown home the night the snow began to fall.

As I close out this post, I now remember a few other times. I remember that long weekend freshman year at college, when friend Larry Gillis suggested to a few of us that we take the weekend and go to his parents’ “cabin” in Derry, New Hampshire, which was beautiful in the snow. We went only to discover that the cabin was a summer cabin, not winterized, no heat, no water, no food, and in a neighborhood where there was nobody else, because every house was a non-winterized summer home. We lasted one night. Larry admitted that he hadn’t thought things out too well. That’s Harvard for you.

I remember the only time I have ever been in London during the winter, when I went about 15 or so years ago to an international meeting of various friends of Ben Gurion University organizations and London (and all of Britain) was hit by a large snow storm. I remember that London, like Quebec City, didn’t shut down during the snow, and people wandered around like it was summer time, and that the entire of England and Wales, as seen from the air, was white. I found that interesting.

I also remember a trip, again during college years, to New Hampshire to see a friend, where a very snowy day led me to think that I should cancel the trip. But I didn’t, and was glad that I didn’t because the next day, with maybe 8 inches of snow on the ground, the temperature soared to the 60s and the sky was as blue as can be. The mountains were just beautiful.

As I said, I know I will think of more snowventures (new word), but I will keep them to myself. As for today, we still stay put and just hope our power does not go out.

This is the second part of my description of items on a random shelf in my office. Yesterday, we saw D. Fisher’s bust of Moses draped in Mardi Gras beads. Today, before we get to some books, we show a hand carved gourd, by Peruvian artist Cesar Aquino Velli.

And then to the books, quite different from those shown yesterday.

The cover of this book is not in good shape, but the book, Edwards’s Great West…..History of St. Louis, is. It is a very detailed history of the City of St. Louis “to the present time”. The “present time” is 1860. St. Louis history starts in 1764. In 1860, it was already a major commercial center, and had a population of about 160,000. Ten years later, after the Civil War, its population had doubled to more than 300,000.

You may know that I have a fairly extensive collection of items related to the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair. For some reason, two World’s Fair-related books are on this shelf and not with the other 100+ items.

The book pictured above is by (and was signed by) David Francis (1850-1927). Francis occupied several positions over his life, including Mayor of St. Louis, Governor of Missouri, Secretary of the Interior, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia. He was also the head of the first American organizing committee for the Olympics, and the President of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the organization that supported the Fair.

The book pictured above, A Tour of Europe in Nineteen Days, is the story of Francis’ whirlwind trip to Europe to drum up support for the Fair, and to encourage European countries to put together exhibits. It was a very successful trip.

You can see that this copy was given to P. E. Northrup. As best I can tell, Northrup was a publisher of maps, the man who created and printed the official maps of the Fair site.

One of the countries exhibiting was the German Empire, and this elegantly designed book is a catalogue of its exhibit. This is not a brochure, but a hard cover book with over 500 pages of text and illustrations.

William Seward (1801-1872) was another man who held several offices. Governor of New York, Senator from New York, he hoped to be the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860, but was edged out by Abraham Lincoln. He became Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and was attacked and seriously injured the night Lincoln was assassinated. He remained Secretary of State under Andrew Johnson, negotiating in the purchase of Alaska (Seward’s Folly) in 1867 from the Russians. After his retirement from government, he went on an around-the-world trip, accompanied by his adopted daughter Olive. He wrote the story of his trip for the book pictured above, but he died before it was finished. Olive completed the book and saw to it that it was published.

Just short notes about the final two books on the shelf, pictured above. Alfred Rambaud (1842-1905) was a French historian who, for a time, lived in Russia, studying its language, culture and history, and writing a very detailed history of the country from medieval times onward. I have the two volume American edition (only one volume pictured), the first volume published in 1879 and the second in 1882.

The final book pictured (there are a few more on the shelf that I am not mentioning here) is a bound copy of the National Geographic Magazine from the first half of 1940 (with several large maps folded in a back pocket). Why I have this random volume is unclear, but, as usual, there is something special about it. On the front cover, there is the gold embossed name of the original owner of this bound volume. It was General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold (1886-1950), one of the founders and commanders of the United States Air Force, and later a founder of both Pan American World Airways and the think tank, the Rand Corporation. That must be why I have kept this volume.

It will be difficult, when the time comes, to know what to do with everything in my office. And I know I should be thinking about that now (no, not just thinking, but doing), but I seem unable to.

I have as much stuff as the average hoarder, but I don’t think I qualify as a hoarder, because virtually everything I have is, to me, of interest.

Take for example one shelf out of many in my office.

Yes, on the shelf you find a bust of a very worried Moses, given to me by my sister decades ago.

It is signed D. Fisher, but I am not sure who that is. It might be David Fisher, who died in 2013, but the signature is not his usual All-CAPS signature. Moses is wearing two Ben Gurion University of the Negev baseball caps, two sets of Mardi Gras beads, and a medal with my name on it demonstrating actual proof that indeed I was on the staff of The Harvard Crimson.

But, as usual, it is the books that interest me most. Not that they are all valuable, just interesting. Somebody would want them, I am sure.

The radical right wing has always been here, in the 1950s, as well as today. If you are near my age, you probably remember these. Ah, nostalgia. It isn’t what it used to be.

Rags to riches. “A Horatio Alger story” was the way many “only in America” stories were told.  Until I found these two books, I thought Horatio Alger was a character, not an author. Alger himself (1832-1899) was not a Horatio Alger story, but the son of a prominent Unitarian minister, and a graduate of Harvard, 110 years or so before me.

Sometimes, you have no choice but to judge books by their cover. Such as these books, written in a Spanish I cannot read. But often the covers get very high marks. And you don’t feel bad if you never get around to opening them up. Ibenez, who died in 1928, was anti-monarchist and wrote at least 40 books. That means, if I am to read them all, I had better get to work.

The Zigzag books were written for teenagers in the 1890s by a man with the unbeatable name of Hezekiah Butterworth. Schoolboy trips through Europe. Travelogues? Adventure stories? I don’t even know.

Maybe Donald Trump would like this one. William Faulkner’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Somewhere else in this room, I have Albert Camus’.

One more for today.

Yes, it is in Russian. This is the official transcript of the Russian trial of Francis Gary Powers, thevAmerican U-2 pilot shot down by the Soviets over Sverdlovsk, shortly after U. S. President Eisenhower assured the Russians that we had no spy planes flying over their country. The rest is history.

Part 2 tomorrow.

I have to praise Lawrence O’Donnell once again. I listen to his 10 p.m. program on MS NOW quite often. I do so in part because he is usually entertaining. And in part because I usually agree with what he is saying.

I don’t look at O’Donnell’s program as a news program. It is more like listening to an editorial page, or listening to a series of op-eds. I say this because O’Donnell does not portray himself as a neutral, as someone being fully objective and putting out both (or all) sides of a story. He is giving you his point of view. And he has very definite opinions on a variety of subjects.

One of those subjects that O’Donnell is passionate, and very opinionated, about is Donald Trump. O’Donnell (this is my interpretation) views Donald Trump as a powerful and dangerous clown, who just happens to be the president of the United States. Clowns, in general, often have two aspects: the comic, and the frightening. Donald Trump, as discussed by Lawrence O’Donnell clearly is comprised of both.

I am not saying this to, in any way, be critical of O’Donnell. Just the opposite. Because I find that Lawrence O’Donnell, in his descriptions of Donald Trump, tends to be quite accurate. He is accurate in reporting of instances from Trump’s history, in reporting the events of the day, and, most importantly perhaps, in reporting what is going to happen in the future.

Believe it or not, there is a Wikipedia entry called “Trump Always Chickens Out”. This first time I heard this phrase, I think, was on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, and I guessed that he probably coined the phrase. Apparently, not. Apparently, it was coined by Robert Armstrong, who writes for the Financial Times, on May 2, 2025, exactly one month after Trump’s self-declared Liberation Day, the day that Trump issued an executive order describing a large number of tariffs that the country would soon be imposing world-wide in order to counterbalance barriers to American exports. Within two days, the DOW index lost about 4,000 points, and Trump announced that the tariffs declared on April 2 would not be implemented. Trump’s abrupt about face led to the phrase “TACO Trump”, or “Trump Always Chickens Out”.

In late May, on one of his programs, Lawrence O’Donnell used the phrase after saying “Trump, the stupidest and most cowardly president in American history, backed down again”. Yes, O’Donnell does not hide his feelings, but he kept saying that, night after night and week after week, that the world should ignore various Trump threats, and various Trump promises, because he was never going to follow through with them. And, to my knowledge, each time that O’Donnell would make such a statement, he proved to be correct.

Most recently, O’Donnell used the TACO description to explain what was going to happen about Greenland. He told European leaders that they shouldn’t panic; they shouldn’t even be worried. When people talked about a possible military invasion, O’Donnell scoffed: “It is never going to happen”. When the question arose as to how Trump was going to work it that the United States wound up with the possession of Greenland, O’Donnell said not to concern yourself with it: “It is never going to happen”. When journalists from around the world began to alight in Greenland, he thought news outlets were wasting their resources: “It is never going to happen.” When Donald Trump issued his threats to Denmark and the EU and NATO about how determined the U.S. was to take Greenland, and how he would not take no for an answer, and how Greenland, as an island in the western hemisphere, should be off limits to Europeans, O’Donnell said: “It is never going to happen”.

Yesterday, Trump, speaking at Davos, gave his usual bombastic and threatening speech, warning the Europeans that he was going to acquire Greenland, and that in fact Greenland had already been taken by the United States during the second World War, and had been “foolishly” given back to Denmark by this country after the war ended. In this speech, Trump (perhaps surprisingly to most) took military invasion off his agenda (although, with Trump, things can change on a dime), but said that there were other ways to insure that Greenland became American, including of course (since Trump no longer does anything for the first time) a two stage imposition of tariffs, first on February 1 and then in June.

It was only about two or three hours later that Trump on Truth Social (no, I do not look at Truth Social) announced that he and Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of NATO, had come up with (something like) the framework of a concept of an outline of a possible, potential arrangement for Greenland, and that not only was a possible military intervention off the table, so were the proposed European tariffs.

It was a good, straight-man setup for Lawrence O’Donnell. Not only was he proven right that Trump was not going to launch a military attack on Greenland (and he ruthlessly criticized the rest of the media for paying any attention to the threat in the first place), but Trump was not going to impose the tariffs he declared were on their way (Trump Always Chickens Out), and he was doing this only with the framework of a concept of an outline of a possible, potential arrangement for Greenland, which – to O’Donnell – will never amount to anything significant.

Of course, it is easy (if you have the right staffs or search engines) to come up with instance after instance where Trump has said something like “and you will see what exactly we are proposing within two weeks” and nothing happens. The most obvious example would be in years of talking about a health care plan to succeed Obamacare. Last night, O’Donnell went back ten years, showing Trump on a dais talking about people who had suggested that Melania had come into the country illegally. Trump poo-pooed that suggestion and said, to counter it and put it to bed once and for all, Melania will within the next few days hold a news conference to explain exactly how she entered the country. O’Donnell says that it has been ten years since Trump promised that, and that he is still waiting.

Perhaps we will hear more about Greenland today. Whatever might be said about it, my guess is that tonight Lawrence O’Donnell’s reaction will be, “I told you so”.

Okay. Donald Quixote John Trump, President of the United States, spent a good part of his speech at Davos today tilting at windmills. Some of the windmills were actual windmills, as he made it clear that (1) all they do is kill birds and ruin the landscape, (2) no more will be allowed in the United States, (3) Europe’s energy production is being crippled by windmills and the New Green Scam, and (4) China makes all the world’s windmills but does not have any wind farms itself, other than some Potemkin wind farms that look like wind farms, but that do not farm the wind.

He claimed that American energy production would increase because of coal and Venezuelan oil, and maybe new nuclear plants. But he added another source of electric energy – excess electricity produced by data centers. That’s the first time I have heard that, rather than hearing that data centers are sucking up our energy and that will make electric and other energy more difficult to produce and more expensive for the consumer.

There was little that he said that he hadn’t said before – a lot of questionable (at best) statistics that he has used as recently as yesterday in the speech where he was praising himself for such a wonderful first year. But there were some things he said (or that I think I heard him say) that were interesting.

First, he said that there were no plans to use force to capture Greenland. Yesterday, when he was asked how far he would go to take Greenland for the United States, he said, basically and quite ominously, “wait and see”. So today, there was a bit of backtracking, but of course he could change his mind tomorrow.

Secondly, he said that the United States won World War II. Well, there is some truth to that, although the Russians would have a different opinion, at least as to the war in Europe. And he says that, in World War II, Greenland was not only protected and secured by the United States, but that at the end of the war, Greenland belonged to the United States, but that we “gave it back” to Denmark. Let me restate that: he said that after the war, we “stupidly gave it back” to Denmark.

This, I guess, is the newest fiction being used by Trump to legitimize his imperialistic tendencies. Remember that he said that the oil that we have seized from tankers leaving Venezuela, and the oil that remains under the ground in Venezuela, is actually American oil, and that Venezuela (presumably during its nationalization process) stole it from us, so we are only taking back what is ours.

Both of these claims (Venezuela’s oil belongs to us, and we stupidly gave Greenland back to Denmark) are fictions, of course, but his believers, members of what I have begun to call the Gullible Old Party (GOP) will treat them as gospel.

Besides insulting half of the room (the room being filled with people whom “he loves”, but can not help but insult), and talking about all of the great things happening in America (no crime in Washington, DC, and soon no crime in New Orleans, as well as what great things are now happening in Minneapolis), there were a few items he left out of the talk (at least I think he did).

For one thing, he did not mention his new Board of Peace, which originally was meant to stabilize Gaza (or turn it into a Mediterranean resort, but now seems to be an invite-only replacement for the United Nations. That surprised me.

In fact, he did not mention Gaza, or Gaza’s future in the speech, and that surprised me as well. He also did not mention drugs.

As I listened to Trump, I realized something else that is missing from all of his speeches. As we all know, the basic premise of everything he does, is concentrated on his own magnificent abilities, which he touts as being beyond the abilities of anyone else. You can not name one former president, for example, whom Trump praises. Each of them was stupid in the extreme.

Doesn’t this create a major problem? If every president prior to Trump was a dumb bell, what is to say that presidents who come after Trump won’t equally all be dumb bells? And if all future presidents are dumb bells, how would all the miracles that Trump is bringing to the world today be maintained after he is no longer president? You would think that this would be important to him, and that he would be talking about how to assure continuity, but this does not seem to be anywhere in his mind. Perhaps this is not surprising, and that Trump’s goal is not changing the world for a long period, but creating a legacy that will place Trump as the uniquely perfect president, who strengthened the United States during his terms of office in ways that no preceding and no succeeding president could hope to do.

It will of course be interesting to see what happens in Davos, and outside of Davos. What will the reactions of the Danes and other Europeans be to Trump’s demands? And if the Danes won’t agree to give up sovereignty over Greenland, and Trump will not use military means to take (or apparently in his mind, to take back) Greenland, what can we expect to happen? We see today that the European Union (I think that is the correct body) has suspended its trade agreement with the United States, and that a Danish pension fund has disposed of its US Treasuries. We see that Trump has set tariffs against European countries to rise on Feb 1, and again this summer, and that Europe can retaliate against American products either with comparative tariffs, or with what is being referred to as a trade bazooka, or something like that, which, as I understand it, is simply a prohibition on the export of European products to the United States.

D.Q.J. Trump will have a number of meetings in Davos yet today with European leaders, including President Zelensky, and we will see what comes of them. He talked in his speech about the number of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers being killed month by month, and how well he gets along with President Putin; he did not say that he gets along with Zelensky.

He did praise his relationship with some others. He said he “likes” French President Macron; he did not say that about Canadian Prime Minister Carney, who he thinks is ungrateful. He likes and respects President Xi of China (“everybody likes him”, I think he said). He really dislikes Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who “won’t be there very long”, or something like that, but he likes Gavin Newsom, with whom “he has always gotten along”. He loves the Danish people and the Danish leaders, but what kind of a country is it that allowed Germany to take over its land six hours after the start of an invasion, and how can they be expected to do anything?

The reaction to Trump’s speech at Davos was muted at best. It might be the first time that I ever heard a president give a speech at a world wide forum like that where there was not one instance of applause or laughter until the end, and where the ending applause was what you would describe only as “polite”. I can’t imagine anyone being pleased with the speech, and we will see what courage the various world leaders have in their public reactions to it.

When you have a bad head cold that hangs on for over a week, and you give up all non-essential ventures out of the house, you do have time to do some things that you otherwise might not get around to doing. For example, this week I read two books, and I spent time working on a family tree on the both very helpful and frustrating ancestry.com website.

Some of my readers who are also friends and relatives know that, on my father’s side, I am related to Al Jolson, considered by many to be America’s best entertainer until his death in 1950. Jolson was my father’s first cousin. My grandfather, Abraham Hessel, was the youngest brother of Jolson’s father, Moshe Ruben Yoelson, a rabbi/cantor who started his career in a small village on the Nieman River in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire) and ended it in Washington DC. He led the old orthodox Talmud Torah Congregation in Southwest DC until it was torn down via urban renewal, and became one of the two synagogues forming today’s Ohev Shalom synagogue on upper 16th Street in Northwest DC.

I was seven when Jolson died, and never met him. I was, I think, two when his father died. In fact, the only Jolson I knew was Al’s younger half brother, George, who was a DC commercial real estate broker, and one of the world’s most affable people. George lived not far from us on Nebraska Ave, and died in 1994. His widow, Adeline, lived to be 100, and I would see her now and then in the neighborhood.

Al Jolson had an older brother, three years older, named Harry, who was also an entertainer, mainly in vaudeville, and who outlived his brother by a few years. He, like Al, lived in Los Angeles, and in 1951 published a book, Mistah Jolson, which was a memoir, and in which Al played a very prominent role. I have had a copy of this book for decades, but I think this is the first time I read it cover to cover.

My father’s and the Jolson brothers’ grandfather was named Meir Hesselson, and he lived (and they were raised) in northern Lithuania, near the Latvian border. The obvious questions are: if Meir was a Hesselson, how did two of his sons become Hessel and Yoelson. And, then, how did a Yoelson have two sons who became Jolsons.

Whether you care about the answer, I don’t know, but some of you do, and others may find it moderately interesting, so here goes:

In the late 19th century in the Russian Empire, all young men were subject to the draft, except for oldest sons. (Now, I am probably oversimplifying, but this is good enough for our purposes.) So my grandfather’s oldest brother, Barnard, could remain a Hesselson, and did, even after moving to America and settling in Elmira, NY. The Hesselson store is still there, although under non-family ownership. But the other four Hesselson boys needed to create fake identities to avoid the draft.

Now, how this was done, I am not really sure, but it must have been sort of an industry, with one branch creating fake identification papers, and another branch knowing what officials to bribe (again, I am sure I am oversimplifying, but who cares?). And it seems that once a young man was set with his new identity, the next thing for him to do was to skip town. And that is what each of Meir Hesselson’s five sons did. And they all eventually made it to America.

So, in this process, Moshe Reuben Hesselson became Moshe Reuben Yoelson, and he became a rabbi in the old country, with a small congregation in the village of Srednik, west of Kovno, in central Lithuania. He had six children in Lithuania and, when Al and Harry were about 6 and 9, he left for America, bringing the rest of the family to join him in Washington DC about three years later. It’s an interesting story and Harry lays it out nicely.

But how to get from Yoelson to Jolson? It was a two step process, both by happenstance, not planning. When Al and Harry started school in southwest DC, not yet knowing much English, they were asked what their name was. They responded “Yoelson”. The teacher nodded and wrote down “Joelson”, and that was that. Yoelson, for the kids, became Joelson; for their parents, it remained Yoelson.

For the second step, you have to move forward about 10 years. Al and Harry, much to their father’s displeasure (to put it mildly) had become obsessed with theater and entertaining, starting by busking on downtown DC street corner. At 15, Harry ran away from home (he had finally found himself with some money, as a prominent man he knew from hotel busking got sick after he came out of a brothel, and Harry helped him get a cab to go home; he gave Harry a $10 gold piece to thank him and to ensure he kept quiet about the affair, and this gave Harry sufficient funds to run away) and went to New York. Al followed not long thereafter (this is another story for another time).

In their early 20s, the two Joelson brothers formed a vaudeville act with a third man, named Joe Palmer. Palmer was an older actor who had become wheelchair bound, and the act was based on three characters, one a patient, one a doctor, and one sort of a go-fer. Yes, tastes were different in those days. One day, at a new venue, the theater operator was preparing the marquee for the front of the building and told them that Joelson-Parker-Joelson had two too many letters for his sign. So, the boys told him just to drop the “e”s in their name, which he did. And from then on, they were each known as Jolson. As simple as that.

The book itself tells not only of the adventures of the Jolson boys, but also the American entertainment scene at the time. This was, of course, before motion pictures, and before the development of musical shows with plots. All entertainment was in the form of revues, with singers, dancers, comedians, one act following another. Jobs were tough, pay was very low and often not available. A hard life.

For a long time, the Jolson brothers shared relatively the same level of fame, although their personalities were obviously different from the start, with Harry being much more settled, and Al being a nervous wreck who was only able to control himself on a stage. Al’s confidence and ambition were also at different levels and soon he outshone is younger brother in fame, so much so that people began to confuse the two, to the detriment of Harry. There were a number of examples where someone would come up to Harry, introduce themselves and tell them that they once performed on stage with Al. They would explain when that was, and Harry would say “No, that was me, not Al”, and they wouldn’t believe him. As Harry says in the book, it turned out that there were two Jolson brothers, and both of them were Al.

It’s an entertaining book, I think, although maybe today for a specialized audience. Harry continued his vaudeville career, both in the U.S. and in the UK, where the music hall tradition remained strong, while Al wound up in the first talkie picture, The Jazz Singer, which kept his career alive. In the late 1930s, though, Al’s career began to wane, and was “saved” by the entry of the United States into World War II, when Al became the first, and probably most active, entertainer to join the USO and perform for American troops around with world tirelessly. After the war, he became the subject of a pseudo-biographic film, The Jolson Story, which became an enormous hit. As Harry (who was left out of the film) said, it was a biographical film for anyone who didn’t know the story of Al’s life. It was more fiction than fact, but was advertised as fact.

When the Korean War began, Al went on the road again, in spite of doctors’ warnings that his health would not permit it. Coming back from a trip, playing cards with friends, Al Jolson had a heart attack and died. He was 64. He left behind his young widow (third wife), and two young adopted children. He never had children of his own. Nor did Harry, whose 40 year marriage ended with his wife’s death in 1947. He married again, a year later, to a woman who had two young teenage children. I assume (I don’t know) that he adopted them, because they both took the Jolson names. I know a little about what happened to them, but not enough to say. I am somewhat curious, of course, but their fate for some reason is just not at the top of my list(s). Some pictures follow:

These are two portaits by Rembrandt, both in the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg. The one on top is known as “Portrait of an old Jew”. The second one is known as “Portrait of an Old Man in Red”. I find them both extraordinary, but that is unimportant because I don’t have any ability to judge art work, and experts can perhaps show me where I am wrong. But I can say that I really like both of them and no one, absolutely no one, can tell me I am wrong.

But this is not my point. My point is that I turned on a short video yesterday on YouTube called something like “Treasures from the Hermitage”, and there was this young, guide-looking Russian woman, pointing out a dozen or so of her Hermitage favorites.

One of the items she had selected was Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Jew, the top painting above. But….she identified it as Rembrandt’s famous Portrait of an Old Man in Red.

Two questions arise. First, why did she do this? An honest mistake? Or is there a back story? And if there is a back story, what is it? Something nefarious, or something innocent? Or actually something to with Rembrandt scholarship, with questions about how various of his paintings are, or should be, identified? I have no idea.

The second question is, how did I learn this? No, I did not know (or remember) anything about either of these paintings before yesterday. And I only saw the top one on the video.

The answer is that I was really intrigued by the subject of the painting. I wondered who he was. And perhaps I had this interest because the more I looked at the painting, the more I thought the sitter must be Jewish. And I said this, even though there is nothing Jewish about the painting itself. No six pointed stars, no menorahs, not even a kippah.

I went to my computer and Googled “Rembrandt painting old man red Hermitage” and I got multiple copies of the lower picture, not the upper one. I then Googled “Rembrandt Jew Hermitage” and got the upper one.

Forgetting the question about how the portrait was identified on the video, my question is: how can some one in 21st century America look at a portrait from 17th century Amsterdam and recognize the unidentified subject of the portrait as Jewish.

By the way, in neither painting can the sitter by individually identified.

I got diverted yesterday into a dive into Rembrandt, the Hermitage, and the Old Jew, as you will see if you scroll down a tad to the next post. But I did not want to ignore Rev. King, so I asked CHATGPT to honor him as Rembrandt might have:

Even if Trump’s term in office ends without drama in 2028, the country will face a major dilemma in dealing with all of the government criminality that will have taken place over the past four years.

For one thing, Trump may decide to use his pardon power to pardon his political appointees and his buddies for all crimes they may have committed and for all crimes for which they may be charged not only during his administration, but at any time thereafter. His power to do this would obviously be tested in the courts, and the Supreme Court will remain at least 6-3 Trumpian, so who knows how that will work out. But if the Court upholds the power of a president to pardon individuals for unindicted crimes, future crimes, and indefinite crimes, the Court would create a caste of people who are indeed above the law, so that may give it pause.

But in addition, the new president will be taking over a very divided and polarized country and will have its reunification as an important task. Every indictment of a presumed Trumpian criminal will be a strike against reconciliation, so a balanced approach will be required. It will not be easy.

I am not expert enough to say how much of the activity of ICE is illegal. I can tell you how much I think should be illegal, and how much I think is immoral, but I can’t go beyond that. Or maybe I can, by adding one more category. I can tell you how much I think is just plain unneccessary.

The answer is: most of it. From what I have read again and again, both Eisenhower and Obama led movements to deport people who came into this country illegally in greater numbers than Trump has accomplished. When Eisenhower did this, it was easier for the government to work outside of the public eye, of course, but this was not the case during the Obama years. Yet Obama’s administration was able to deport over 3 million individuals (that is the number I have seen) without anything like this amount of conflict or protest.

What does this mean? Of course, it might mean that the folks running Homeland Security and ICE are, compared to Obama’s crew, incompetent. My guess is that this is the case (based on general observation of virtually everyone Trump has appointed to any position anywhere: competence competes with loyalty, and loyalty is favored), but also that it is a secondary reason for all the turmoil. The primary reason is that turmoil is exactly what Trump wants.

After all, much of his campaign was based on Biden’s immigration failures, so it becomes important not only to correct those failures, but to demonstrate beyond a doubt that those failures are being addressed. The way you do this is by transforming a relatively routine policing activity into something that will grab the media’s attention (collateral damage, be damned) and allow you do say “Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden”.

I am not a fan of how Biden ran the southern border. If you look at early issues of this blog, you will see that, starting in 2022 or 2023, I said that the situation at the southern border was going to lose the 2024 election for the Democrats. And indeed it did. But we are where we are.

Trump has “closed” the southern border. I am not sure exactly what is happening on the Mexican border. I don’t know if anyone is getting in legally, or by sneaking in. But obviously things have changed there, no one is complaining about that as far as I can see, and certainly the media is paying no attention to this. As far as I can tell, this is a Trump success. At least for the time being, until we (the country, we) figure out what our immigration policy is (now, we have none, of course, and that is another big problem).

We have all sorts of immigrants in our country. Most of them are not “illegals”, although that is how Trump describes them and has done so consistently enough that not only MAGA but the media in general seems to fall in line. But the only “illegals” are those who came across the border illegally. (I know this is not fully the case; we have a large number of people who came into the country legally, but have overstayed their visas; this group has only been sporadically targeted by Trump.)

The largest group was admitted into the country on a temporary basis while their applications for asylum, or refugee status, or whatever, are being processed. Of course, we don’t have a sufficient infrastructure to process these applications on anything like a timely basis, and never have had. So, letting them in as Biden did was based on a sort of fiction, but nevertheless, the country did admit them, and, as long as their cases are still pending, they are not “illegal”, although they are now typically referred to as such.

And then there are others: individuals given temporary protection because they are from certain chaotic countries (such temporary protection often is not very temporary, understandably), or green card holders, or others legitimately admitted on various other bases.

As is often said, the vast majority of all of these groups become “good” residents, working (even where legally not permitted to), paying taxes, raising families, etc., and the number of criminals are much lower than the number of criminals in the larger American population. Of course, this means nothing to Trump, who makes it appear that virtually all immigrants are murderers, rapists, or drug dealers.

Trump started by saying that the “criminals” would be kicked out of the country. But that soon became a meaningless category, because suddenly anyone who came into the country during the Biden years was denoted as a “criminal”.

What would make the most sense of course would be to go after the criminals, and perhaps after those who swam across the border illegally and were never processed and are thus not “in the system”, and to do this as much as possible out of the public eye. But this is of course not what Trump is doing. He is doing the opposite.

By having masked, undisciplined ICE officers roam the streets, stopping people at will, asking for identification that they are not required to carry, beating people, handcuffing them, capturing them in schools, churches, and even at government hearings they are required to attend,  taking them away to detention centers without notifying family members or giving them a chance to contact anyone, and so forth, Trump is embarking on a campaign to firm up his base (I guess) and further divide the country, both for political purposes (enabling him to attack Democratic mayors and governors for allowing violence in the streets) or to divert from his other crimes and follies.

Unless the Supreme Court stops it (which it will not), all of this will continue and deepen during the next three years. We have not hit bottom yet. And it will be up to the next president to end it.

I hope that the Democrats can figure out how to respond to this correctly. I hope that they don’t adopt the mantra “ABOLISH ICE”, because this is just what Trump wants them to do. He wants to make ICE so disruptive that the Democrats will call for the abolition of the agency and Trump and the Republicans can then argue that the Democrats want to go back to the Biden era, open the southern border and let everyone in.

The Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2028 will need to establish a firm immigration/deportation policy that will not cater to extremes on either side. It must be inclusive in that it deals with all aspects of immigration, it must be fair to those who came into the country legally, it must be practical, it must be humane. I hope someone is developing this policy as we speak; it is not something that can be accomplished in a week or two.

In the meantime, the Democrats must realize (a) they committed big mistakes during the Biden years and they should admit to them, (b) how important immigration is to the country, (c) how people in the country should be treated fairly and their situations adjudicated fairly, (d) and how criminal activity on part of people in the immigration system will not be tolerated, and (e) how ICE will be reformed to carry out its purposes within the limits of law, and not undertake activities which go beyond those purposes. They should understand that Trump will try to force them into extremist positions for his own political sake, and that they must not swallow that bait.

Once upon a time……..when was the “once upon a time” time? Maybe last September. That’s about as far back as I can remember. And what do I remember? I remember that we were knocking small boats out of the water in the south Caribbean in order to stop Venezuela from sending drugs to the United States.

Of course, a lot of comments can be made about that escapade, but this morning, I am going to stick to only one. Venezuela was not sending drugs to the United States. Period. No argument here from anyone.

To the extent that Venezuela was moving drugs through the Caribbean, they were apparently headed to close-by locations where they would be processed and packed and, for the most part, then sent to Europe. They were going to Suriname, or to Trinidad. They were never headed to the United States. Clearly, his often repeated commeny that each boat sunk meant 25,000 American lives saved could only have been directed to the deplorables (oops, I mean the gullible)

But that made no difference. We were still sinking boats (and killing over 100 defenseless people) that left Venezuelan ports because they were sending drugs to the United States. Reality, as to the reason, was irrelevant.

The real, then not said, reason, we now know, was that Donald Trump wanted to steal Venezuela’s oil, and he needed a better excuse than “I want to steal Venezuela’s oil”.

Well, Donald Trump is Donald Trump and, like a leopard, he does not change his spots.

Let’s move to Greenland. For months now, we have been hearing that the United States needs to take Greenland away from its own people and from Denmark (forget the morality of this, for a second) because it is needed for American security. He says this by simply saying that, if America does not capture Greenland, Russia will. Or maybe China.

Well, that sure sounds serious. Until you think about it and realize that (a) neither Russia nor China has given any indication that they are going to try to capture Greenland, (b) that the United States not only has military bases and defense facilities on Greenland but is party to an agreement that says we can expand and increase those facilities to the extent that we want, and (c) Denmark, and therefore Greenland, is a member of NATO and, through Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the United States is already bound to defend Greenland from attack. There is absolutely no need for America to take over Greenland, either to defend it from enemies, or to use it as an outpost for our security forces.

Then, why is Trump so anxious to take over Greenland? To answer this question, remember what I said before: “Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and like a leopard, he does not change his spots”.

I quote Google’s AI: “Greenland holds significant potential for various minerals, most notably rare earth elements (REEs) vital for modern technology, alongside substantial deposits of zinc, copper, gold, iron ore, graphite, nickel, tungsten, and even oil, though much remains unexplored beneath its vast ice sheet.”

Donald Trump simply wants to steal Greenland’s mineral wealth. Nothing more complicated than that. America’s security interest is, like America’s need to stop Venezuelan drugs, is irrelevant.

Now, why does Trump want to do this? Does he want to do this in order to make his rich friends richer, or because, if he can make his rich friends richer, he is certain that they will all make him richer? Or does he want to do this because, he knows that control of the Venezuelan oil and Greenland’s minerals will make America itself richer and less dependent on foreign governments in the future for items that he believes (perhaps correctly) that this country will need or need to control?

I don’t know the answer to this, or whether it’s a combination of both. But I do think that what Trump is doing is rational.

It is also outrageous, and goes against everything that we have ever been taught about America, America’s difference, and American ethics. If we are simply to become a rich, powerful gangster state, we will wind up a rich, powerful gangster state. But we won’t be America.

I have some quick thoughts.

First, I understand that Donald Trump is the Acting President of Venezuela. I understand therefore the Donald Trump is the president of a socialist country. Therefore, as I understand it, the president of the United States is the president of a socialist country.

Second, I understand that Donald Trump is in possession of the Nobel Peace Prize. I also understand that Donald Trump has never been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore, I conclude that you don’t need to win the Nobel Peace Prize in order to get it. And that anyone, not just the Nobel Prize committee, can give someone a Nobel Prize.

Third, I understand that Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020, but that he knows that he won it. I understand that Donald Trump lost the State of Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024, but that he is certain that he won that state all three times. Therefore, I understand that the results as certified by election officials should not be controlling if Donald Trump decides otherwise. At least, this appears to be what a large segment of the American population believes.

Fourth, I used to think that Venezuela had a lot of oil. But now I understand that there is a lot of oil in Venezuela, but that all of this oil belongs to Donald Trump, who is able to sell it to American oil companies in return for sharing their profits with him to help pay for his favorite big toys. Maybe this is true of other resources, as well.

Fifth, I used to think that money supply was controlled by the Fed. But now I understand that Donald Trump also controls money supply by creating his own cryptocurrency. I also know  that he thinks that he should be in control of the Fed as well, thus controlling all U.S. money supply.

Sixth, I have understood that Greenland is an autonomous part of the Danish kingdom. But I also understand that Donald Trump thinks that Greenland would become part of the United States the second that Donald Trump declares it so. If Greenland can become part of the United States in this manner, any other foreign land could. I also understand that I could have used Gaza, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, or Canada instead of Greenland in this section.

Seventh, I understood that boats were safe from American attack while in international waters. But now I understand that boats can be sunk by American forces while in international waters in order to keep those boats from bringing illegal drugs into the United States, and that boats do not have to be bringing illegal drugs into this country in order to be put into this category. So, I conclude that any boat anywhere in the world carrying any cargo, or no cargo, can be sunk by the US for bringing illegal drugs into this country if Donald Trump wants them sunk.

Eigthly, I understand that obstruction of justice can be a crime, and that obstruction of ICE fits into this category, and that any obstruction of ICE is not only a crime, but a capital crime. And that no trial or investigation is needed, and presumption of innocence does not pertain, before the punishment can be implemented.

Finally, I understand that American military members are not supposed to follow illegal orders. But I understand that if you are a Democrat and you say this, you are to be punished, but if you are a Republican, it is okay to say this. Thus, I conclude that all people are treated equally under the law, except for Republicans, who can do anything they want.

I guess I finally understand it all.

Well, I have had this “head cold” for over a week now. No worse, not much better. Appointment tomorrow for my annual physical. We will see if my doctor has any bright thoughts.

In the meantime, I go through the days alright, just with less exercise and reduced activity generally. I generally write a blog post before going to bed and tear it up in the morning and start over. And my sleep is fitful, at best.

In fact, the only reason I know I sleep at all is when I know I am dreaming.

1. Like last night, I assume I was asleep when I was arrested. I was just walking down the street with a friend. For absolutely no reason, we were arrested and sent to join a large group of others, also seemingly arrested arbitrarily. We were all told we could not speak with each other and that we were to follow those ahead of us as we were marched for a long way down the center of street after street.

What city was I in? Not Washington for sure. I thought it might be Moscow, but had no reason to think that. Language did not seem to be a problem. The city itself was a mess. On the left, for a long while, were building after building, five or six floors, adjoining each other with no space in between. No cross streets. I couldn’t tell if these buildings were under construction or falling apart. On the right were small, unpainted one story concrete blocks, with doors but no windows, clearly abandoned, with litter strewn across their small, uneven lawns. Building that should never have been built.

Eventually, we got to a large flat, warehouse looking structure. We were told this would be our home. We would be given two meals a day. Otherwise, we were on our own. We were told this was not a work camp. But we were told we would be under constant observation, and the lights would always be on.

2. Also last night, I assume I was asleep when five women in my office were going to lunch and asked if I wanted to join them. I said “no”, knowing that I would be uncomfortable listening to them talk about “girl things”. Another woman suggested that she and I just go to the office cafeteria, and I said “yes”. I don’t know who she was. She looked like a school teacher in a classic western. Much taller than me. Gray hair pulled into a bun. Severe face. Plain, old fashion dress.

It turns out, it was Meatless Monday in the cafeteria, and all they had was cole slaw. I told her I needed more, and left. I went out the door and on to the roof. The weather was beyond perfect. My view was of other roofs and tall, older buildings. I decided to walk to the river. I knew where it was, but I did not know what city I was in, or what the river was called.

3. I must have been asleep when I went to give my speech at the indoor protest rally. The auditorium was filled. There were a number of people giving speeches. Soon, my name was called. I took off my long, heavy, black overcoat. I was wearing a suit and tie.

I had no idea what was being protested, or what I was going to say. I told them the speech would be short because, although I had a lot to say, I was not allowed to say it, and they were not allowed to hear it. They asked me where I worked. I told them I was with the government. They asked what I did. I told them I was in charge of government transparency.

That was my night. Now, on to my day.

How is that possible, you say? Well, here is brief explanation.

I had four grandparents (duh!), three of whom were born in Europe, and one of whom was born in the U.S. Of the three from Europe, one was from today’s Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), and two from today’s Ukraine (one from part then in the Russian Empire, and the other from part the in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire). My American grandmother’s parents were also from what was then part of Austria-Hungary.

It was my father’s father, Abraham Hessel, who was from today’s Lithuania, so, although everyone we are talking about here was Jewish and therefore not ethnically Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Ukrainian or Lithuanian, when asked, I would say I am one quarter Lithuanian, with that definition meaning, both to me and my typical questioner, one quarter Lithuanian Jewish. And that has been part of the way I identify myself.

Now, however, that it is so easy to find your ancestors using the various computer tools available even on your smartphones, tools including Ancestry.com, as well as several highly detailed Jewish genealogy sites, I have learned much more about my ancestry than, say, my father knew, and am in the process of learning more than that. My father could have told you that his father was born in Lithuania (I think he could tell you that; I never asked him), but I don’t think he could have told you much about his grandfather (whom he never met), but I can.

I am still an amateur here, but can tell you that when you join Ancestry.com, and enter a name in their search engine, and say that you want to look for a particular individual in family trees that have been posted on the site for public viewing, you have a quick two step process to follow. The first is to make sure you are identifying, say, the correct Abraham Hessel and, once you do that, the sky is the limit…..if you are lucky.

I say “if you are lucky” because so far, for example, when I look up my father’s maternal grandparents, Leo and Toby Dicker who lived near Lvov (Lviv, Lemberg), I come up blank. I have read that my great grandfather Leo came from a wealthy family and was an educated engineer killed in his 30s in an industrial accident, but I haven’t located that family. And, as for my great grandmother, I don’t even know her maiden name. They had three children, obviously long gone. One lived in San Francisco and had no children. The other disappeared from my grandmother’s view when he was young and moved to study in Budapest; she never heard from him again. I don’t even know his first name, whether he married or had children, whether they left Europe, perished in the Holocaust, or if I still have relatives in Hungary. No clue.

(My grandmother, Helen Hessel, is listed as my grandfather’s wife, with “unknown” parents.)

But when you locate Abraham Hessel, the Abraham Hessel born in Zagare, Lithuania in 1869, and begin to look for published family trees that have his name, you strike pay dirt. And then, with every generation, you have choices to make. Do I trace his mother or his father? Then you choose one of four grandparents, wondering if you will ever have time to come back and trace the others (again, assuming they also can be traced).

You find that one of his parent was Meier Hesselson, who was born in the Lithuanian town of Anyksciai, near Kaunas (or Kovno). And you find that Meier’s father was another Abraham, but then you see something you weren’t expecting. You see that your great great grandfather Abraham Hesselson was not born in Lithuania at all, but in a Ukrainian town called Khmelnystskyi, near Lvov.

This gives you an idea.

How did your Lithuanian born grandfather meet and marry a young girl from the outsides of Lvov? Was it because his grandfather was also from outside Lvov, and there was some sort of connection? Perhaps.

At any rate, as you go back generation after generation, you see that your ancestors on this one “Lithuanian” line, were born in various places in Europe, not only in Lithuania. And you realize of course that you are only following one line of ancestors, and that there are many many, some of which you can find, and others of which there appear to be no trace.

But why is this particular Hesselson line available in such detail? You seem to ne following random people (you certainly don’t have time to try to research every generation) who were born in various parts of  what today are today’s Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Then for a few generations on this line, many of your ancestors seem to have from Prague, now in the Czech Republic.

But then, for more than 100 years, this line becomes Italian. We are, interestingly, talking about the time when Colombus was born in Genoa, that my great, great, great, great, great, great, great  great, great, great, great grandfather Abraham Mintz (himself born in today’s Germany, in Maintz – you see the progression of 15th century Ashkenazic Jews out of the Rhineland into other parts of Europe), moved to Padua, then part of the Serene Republic of Venice. There, he became the head of the major yeshiva in Padua.

Padua, by the way, at the time, was a Jewish education center, and Mintz a very well respected educator. You can Google him. He was first assisted by, and then replaced by, another German born man, my great great great great great great great great great great grandfather Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, born in the German principality of that name, and educated in Prague.

(You see two things from all of this. First, as today, Jews moved around, and second, as last names were not yet common, Jews were often referred to by their places of birth.)

Rabbi Meir married Abraham Mintz’ daughter, and, aa they say, the rest really is history.

Known as the Maharam of Padua, and also as the chief Rabbi of Venice, during much of the 16th century, and starting a continuing rabbinic legacy that is still alive today, the Katzenellenbogen family stayed in Padua a few generations before moving elsewhere. I think they were there long enough to make me Italian.

By the way, these were fascinating times for Jews in Venice. Strong scholarship, wealth and poverty, ghettos open in the day but locked at night, odd restrictions on what Jews could and could not do. Remember, too, that in 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain, with many Sephardic Jews winding up on the Italian peninsula, creating a mix of cultures within a mix of cultures.

Much more to be said about this…one day.

This will wrap up our 20 year ago road trip. We were driving across the northern border of Wisconsin. You know what the northern border of Wisconsin abuts? It’s the southern shore of Lake Superior, and the drive is beautiful. Beautiful, that is, until you get to the city of Superior, a city which in no way seems to live up to its name.

My first reaction driving through Superior was “well, this place sure has seen better days” and my second reaction was “well, maybe not”. I really don’t know.

You cross the St. Louis River at Superior and all of a sudden you are in Minnesota and Duluth.

Duluth seems totally different from inferior Superior.

It was peopled, where Superior looked empty. Lively, where Superior looked dead. Prosperous, where Superior looked like it needed welfare.

We didn’t stay in Duluth, but drove a couple of hours north (yes, north) to a Lake Superior resort, Bluefin Bay, where we stayed a few nights.

This picture (like the others, not mine) shows a type of light that we did see. Bright sun, enormous dark clouds, right next to each other.

Bluefin Bay will always be important to me, because it is where I ended my 15+ year period as a vegetarian and then pescatarian. For two nights in a row, I dined on venison.

After leaving Bluefin, we drove south back through Duluth and then back into Wisconsin, now going south. We were surprised that this part of Wisconsin looked so unattractive, since so much of the state is the opposite.

The Mississippi south of Minneapolis is the extraordinarily scenic, but on this trip, we skipped it, and drove through unappealing northwest Wisconsin, stopping for lunch in Eau Claire.

Eventually, we reached La Crosse, where we had cousins and which we had visited several times before. La Crosse, sitting on the Mississippi, is a very attractive, lively place, and we have always had a good time there. Sadly, my cousin Susan passed away several years ago, and her husband moved to Kansas City where their daughter lives, so we go to LaCrosse no more.

From La Crosse, we drove south along the Mississippi, through Fond du Lac WI then to Dubuque, adding Iowa to the states we passed through.

Our next leg was to go across northern Illinois to Chicago. We crossed the river at Galena, which I don’t know I had ever heard of, and was that a surprise!

Galena, once the home of U.S. Grant, is a tourist mecca. Who knew? (Answer: a lot of people. It was jammed)

In Chicago, we saw several of our cousins who live there, as well as friends and did it all in a day and a half. No sight seeing this time.

From Chicago, a two day drive home, stopping in Sandusky, on Lake Erie.

That was the trip. And in case it hasn’t occurred to you, we accomplished our goal, which I have failed to spell out. This was our Great Lakes road trip, and we hit all five lakes. It was a very beautiful drive and goes to prove the old maxim: no matter where you wander, there is no place like HOMES.

Day 5 of my cold. Cough. Cough.

Back to my diary and the trip. We learned on this trip, as we drove west from Ottawa to Sudbury that, at least in Ontario, the cities were terrific, but the rural areas looked pretty dull. It took a long time to get to Sudbury, a city of about 175,000 located several miles on top of Lake Huron. It wasn’t really a destination of the trip, but was en route between Ottawa and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We spent the night in Sudbury, had a nice dinner, but didn’t do it justice. Sudbury started as a nickel and copper mining center, but is now more diverse, the home to Laurentian University and, surprisingly, is about 1/3 French speaking. What we did do is go see the Big Nickel, the world’s largest coin, 40 feet high, on the campus of the regional science museum.

We the drove to American customs at Sault Ste. Marie, which we assumed would be a piece of cake. No, siree.

The border agent asked for our passports. Inside my passport was a small receipt from a recent trip to Israel, all in Hebrew. It didn’t have to be there, but it was, and he asked about it. I told him what it was and he asked why we had been in Israel. I thought nothing of the question, didn’t think he needed our itinerary, so told him simply “a vacation”.

He obviously didn’t like my answer. He sneered at me and said, “A vacation? That is a pretty odd place to go for a vacation, don’t you think?”  He then said ” Wait here!”

We waited. He took the passport into the customs building, and came out some time later, snarling, “You can go”, as if it must have just been our lucky day. Very weird.

We explored the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, which were worth exploring and drove through the forested Upper Peninsula until we got to the spot where we could take the ferry to Mackinac Island, which we did, and where we stayed a few nights.

If you haven’t been to Mackinac, it is well worth it. A prosperous tourist spot, very historic, and no cars on the island at all. We stayed at a very nice hotel, the Iroquois (today 4.8 on Yelp), visited the famous hotel, the Grand (now only 4.5), bicycled around the island and so forth. Here is the Iroquois:

We took the ferry back to the UP to get our car, and turned east a few miles to go to the important and world renowned town of Hessel, Michigan., where we bought t-shirts, and sweat shirts, and a painting, and all sorts of swag and, more importantly, attended the annual Hessel wooden boat show, which I found ultra-fascinating.

We visited the town book store with a great name, The Village Idiom, run by two retired school teachers, and no longer there.

By the way, after we got back on the road heading west across the Upper Peninsula, we came across another great name – UPChuck’s.

Yes, 20 years later, UPChuck’s is still there. It’s website says ” Don’t just read about us…..”.

In fact, we just drove on by. Not taking a chance. (There was some time ago a restsurant outside of St. Louis called Wild’s House of Poison. I don’t think many people at there, either. It quickly closed)

We stopped in Escanaba, an old lake port at the top of Lake Michigan, where iron used to be shipped south for smelting. Quiet now. And very pleasant.

We decided to stop and look at Marquette, the largest Upper Peninsula city, and home to Northern Michigan University. What an attractive place it is. Hills and water, and all set up for a long winter with book stores, craft stores and more.

But it was just a lunch stop for us. We needed to get into and across the top of Wisconsin and then to Duluth MN.

This old road trip is perfect material for me while I battle my cold. Hope it is okay for you. More tomorrow.

And by the way, none of these pictures are mine.

This is my 4th day with my cold. Yesterday evening, I thought I was heading toward the end, but I was overly optomistic, still coughing and still with a clogged nose. Sore throat long gone, never had fever, Covid test negative.

So I have been stuck in the house, with time on my hands, looking at things that have not been touched in a long time.

This innocent looking book is one of those things. It follows a road trip we took years ago. The trip started on July 31 and ended on August 18. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the year. But we visited someone who died in 2008, so that tells me something, and we had dinner with a couple a year after they married, so with a little initiative, I could figure it out.

The trip was also before I took pictures with my phone. It’s when I still used a camera, which means the trip pictures are somewhere here.

If I had the energy…….

So, we are talking about a trip that we took about 20 years ago. And don’t worry. I am only reporting highlights.

For some reason, we left home during evening rush hour and only drove to Harrisburg, and the next day to Syracuse.

On the way, we visited a closed anthracite coal mine near Scranton, which was fascinating, as you actually go down into the mine.

I assume you can still take the mine tour. We didn’t look at Scranton this trip, but have been back. Joe Biden’s home town, of course, and the home of a very impressive railway museum.

Syracuse is where Edie got her first of several degrees, and where she still had friends. We visited one of her best college friends, Kate, and we visited Kate’s mother in the suburb of Pompey. Kate’s mother passed away in 2008. We stayed in Syracuse for a couple of nights before heading north. We, as always, were amazed at Kate’s garden, and had dinner with her, her boyfriend Alan (now her husband), her brother Bob, and her sister Jill and husband of one year, Ken. All interesting folks. Kate, like Edie, became a nurse after graduating in other fields, Bob was then managing the Syracuse airport, and Alan is a lawyer, whom I always enjoy talking with. He is a criminal defense attorney who has become a national authority on sentencing and related matters.

From Syracuse, we went north (yes, you can go north from Syracuse) to the Thousand Islands, a beautiful area on the St. Lawrence River, in the country of Canada, then a close ally of the U.S. Actually, there are 1800 islands in the Thousand Islands area, and we spent a night on a very picturesque one.

From there, we drove to Ottawa, where we had never been, and really liked the city. The Canadian Parliament Building, the American Embassy down the street, and the Moshe Safdie-designed National Gallery of art, lined up in a row. We walked, we shopped, we ate, and we stayed two nights in the beautiful Chateau Laurier Hotel, one of the country’s Canadian Pacific hotels, which has been operating since 1912.

We also went to the Museum of Canadian Culture, if that is what it is called. Very interesting. In fact, the only disappointment in Ottawa was, as we drove out of town, we saw the then new rink built for the Ottawa Senators, which they decided to put out in the suburbs, rather than the city. Opportunity missed, I thought.

Well, the trip did not end until August 18, and we are only on August 5, and this post is long enough. I guess I know what I will write about tomorrow (and maybe even Tuesday) unless Trump starts another war he can stop.

Time for another family tale. My father’s mother was born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the city of Lvov (then called Lemberg) in the year 1872. I always say that she lived to be 100, although she actually died a few weeks before her 100th birthday. She married my grandfather while still in Europe. He came to the United States in 1892 and died before I was born, in 1939. My grandmother, with their very young son, my Uncle Al, followed him to the United States the next year. They lived in Mobile, Alabama, in Galveston, Texas, in Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri, and in St. Louis, moving to St. Louis from Kansas City, in 1917, when my father was 14.

My grandmother was very selective in what she said about her past. Now and then, I would try to learn something, and ask her a question. She would have made a good politician, because she found it very easy to evade the question if she didn’t want to answer.

The best example of this perhaps was when I asked her how she met my grandfather, who was not from eastern Galicia, but from northern Lithuania, in the Russian Empire. Her answer to that straight forward question was “Oh, you know.”, and she clearly was not going to go beyond that.

But at one point, when my sister was in high school, they sat down and my grandmother told her much more than she ever had told me. Much of what I am going to say here came from my sister’s writing.

My great grandparents were Leo and Toby Dicker. Leo was from a wealthy family in Lvov, and was educated to be an engineer. Toby was from a poorer family and apparently was never fully accepted by Leo’s family. Unfortunately, Leo was killed when he was in only his mid-30s, in an accident that occurred during the construction of a railway line between Lvov and Russia, a cave-in of some sort. Leo’s family did not take Toby in, but forced her, with her three children, to open a small dairy farm on the outskirts of Lvov where, I think, Toby lived the rest of her life.

It was a small farm, and money was usually tight. It was also not in a Jewish area, but a primarily Catholic region, and Helen was sent to a Catholic convent school, where she learned Polish, German and French, and was taught a number of subjects commonly taught to girls, including sewing, embroidery and so forth, all of which would prove very helpful to her later in life.

I remember that, although she went to a Catholic school, she told me that she was always an outsider, and recounted to me the one time her mother decided to give her a birthday party and invited all of her schoolmates, none of whom came.

I think her education ended when she was 12. She had met a Polish opera singer, Paula Wolescak, and helped her by sewing dresses and costumes in return for piano lessons and the chance to learn a lot about music and theater. I don’t how long their relationship lasted, but at some point, Wolescak stopped performing (her husband insisted) and my grandmother met the man who would become my grandfather and married him. I assume it was some sort of arranged marriage, but don’t really know.

After being in America for a year or so, my grandfather had made enough money to provide my grandmother with a ticket to take a ship out of Hamburg to come to New York. Unfortunately, he did not send enough money to pay for 1 year old Uncle Al’s ticket, which my grandmother did not think was necessary. So the story is, that my grandmother, wearing a large shawl, wrapped her son in it, and sneaked him on board, bring him with her, without paying for his passage.

My grandfather was working as a peddler in Mobile, and my grandmother helped increase their income by taking on sewing jobs. She didn’t like Mobile, and after a few years they moved to Texas and then, for reasons I don’t know, to Kansas City. After years of financial struggle, they opened one store, and then a larger one. I think the stores were general merchandise stores, and my grandmother kept sewing and making blouses and other articles of clothing which were sold in the store, and were also sold wholesale. They were able to buy a fairly large house, for a growing family (eventually including 8 children who would grow to adulthood). As an aside, we knew the address of the Kansas City house and went to see it, only to find it an empty lot. But about half of the houses on the block are still standing, so you can get an idea of what the neighborhood must have looked like.

At about the same time, Helen became homesick for Europe and her mother, so she cashed in her husband’s life insurance policy, took the proceeds and with two of her daughters, her oldest and youngest daughters, my aunts Mary and Gertie, she went back to Galicia to see her mother, and stayed about three months.

At some point after that, my grandfather apparently was ill and needed surgery. The cost of the surgery and the recovery period took a toll on the family’s financial strength, and the entire family left Kansas City and moved to St. Louis where my Uncle Al was already living and had started his wholesale business.

I think my grandfather worked with Uncle Al, but I am not really sure about that. My grandfather (again, I never met him), along with his brothers, had had a strong religious education in Lithuania. At least two of his brothers became rabbis in the United States (one in Washington DC, and one a traveling rabbi in the North West), but my grandfather wanted nothing of a Jewish religious life. It seems to me he never really found himself, and never developed a real career in this country. I tried to find out more about him from my father and my aunts and uncles, but again seemed to face a wall. All my father ever said was “you would really have liked him” and all I heard from the others was what a great father he was. It seems to me that the Hessel house, financial problems and all, was quite a happy place.

My grandmother had nine children, of whom eight lived. For most of her life after my grandfather died, she lived, quite happily, alone. I never met anyone who was her “friend”; I don’t know if she had friends. She spent a lot of time with her children and their families, six of whom were in St. Louis, so she had a place to go to dinner almost every night of the week. I remember, when I was probably 7 or 8, she decided to visit her daughter in Anaheim, California. She went by train and, if I am correct, stayed about 2 years, then returning to St. Louis.

When she was about 80, she got sick for the only time in her life (that I know); she got a very severe case of shingles, and was hospitalized. We all thought this would be it, that she never would recover her energy. She came to live with us for a year or more, and then with her daughter, my Aunt Millie. But then one day she decided she was fine and wanted to live by herself. She took a small apartment in the Forest Park Hotel, in the city’s Central West End. The Forest Park was partly residential and partly transient, and housed a lot of professional actors and musicians as they were playing in St. Louis, making it a very interesting place. It had a first floor coffee shop, which was good and friendly and convenient. It had a swimming pool often filled with theater folks, and that was fun.

My grandmother was able to live by herself until she was well into her 90s when her body and mind began to fail her and she moved, or was moved, into the Delmar Gardens Nursing Home. She died three years after I had moved to Washington.

As to my grandmother’s seamstress abilities, in Kansas City she apparently worked for a theater making costumes. She made a lot of her own clothes, and a lot of knitwear for family members. I wore a sweater she made for years.

I don’t know if any of my aunts had the same talents, but my sister was a fashion major in college, and gor a while operated her own boutique in Clayton Mo. And my daughter Hannah, before kids took up so much of her time, did a lot of theater costume work. Will granddaughter Joan followvthe same path? I would not be surprised.

J.D. Vance gave a press conference yesterdaay where he claimed that everything was the fault of the Democrats, and while he doesn’t know about Renee Good herself, he is certain that the ICE protests in Minnesota were being organized by a terrorist, left-wing radical group and that the administration was going to investigate and get to the bottom of things. When asked if Good was part of this group, he intimated that she was, only qualifying what he said by admitting (alors!) that he was not certain if or not she got paid for putting her car where she did. When asked who was running the group, he said we had to find out.

I don’t want to repeat what everyone else is saying, but have a couple of random thoughts you might want to put into the mix.

1. Let’s take Iran. President Trump came out strong for the right of Iranians to protest actions of their government and said that if the Iranian government started to act wrongly towards the protestors, the U.S. would go into action. It appears that Trump might think that Iranians can protest government actions, but Americans can not. And, by the way, I am not saying that to be cute. I am saying that because that might be the way it is.
2. I am assuming that Renee Good did not hit the ICE officer with her car, although one of the videos makes it look like she may have grazed him, or he may have grazed the car. I have heard that part of the ICE training is to make it clear that an ICE agent (I assume this is true of all law enforcement training programs) should never go in front of an automobile; it is too dangerous. Now, you can say in this case: “Well, he didn’t position himself there, did he? Wasn’t he in front only because she abruptly turned the car?” I couldn’t tell the answer from watching the videos, BUT……do you know that the same officer was hit by another car that he recently walked in front of, needing over 30 stitches on his arm and hand?
3. Let’s even assume that Good was obstructing the work of ICE by placing her car where she did (although it appears that there was room for cars to continue driving around her). Is that a capital offense? Is every protest against government action a capital offense? (Here, I remind you again of the Iran comparison.)
4. I also understand that there are specific training points on firing guns at a moving vehicle, and that you can only shoot to kill if you think your life is in danger. As Good was beginning to drive away, there was no way the shooter could have thought his life was in danger, was there? It doesn’t look so from the videos.
5. It was lucky that, after she was shot, her car just slammed into another car and came to rest. What if it had run into a crowd (or an individual) on the street or sidewalk and caused more injury or death?
6. In response to a question as to whether it wasn’t the job of the government to calm things down, Vance’s response was basically that it was the job of the protestors to stop protesting.

I did just see some terrific interviews last night with a 72 year old couple who were pepper sprayed, and with a Minneapolis pastor who was handcuffed and arrested, presumably for nothing (I can explain), and was eventually let go with an agent saying: “You can go. You are White, and you wouldn’t be much fun, anyway.”

When the publicity about the major fraud problem in Minnesota was spread last week or so, I was afraid that Minnesota was going to go Republican. I am not afraid of this right now.

It was after I wrote everything that comes before that I heard that there was another shooting by federal officials in Portland OR, where two people were wounded. This too was a shooting into a car, and it was the driver and the passenger who were hurt, but were able to drive off. They were later picked up. I thought that there was some sort of proscription against shooting into a vehicle unless the shooter’s life was in danger. It seems that, in neither situation here was that the case.

Why has no one made a connection between the drone bombing of the fishing/drugs vessels and the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland? In all of these cases, there seems to be a total disregard of human life as goals are pursued. In the case of the two survivors of the boat bombed in September, and the case of the woman killed in Minneapolis, the possibility of provided attention to save their lives were ignored. In September, the survivors were hit by another drone. In Minneapolis, medical attention was obstructed; whether her life could be saved, I do not know, but there were people ready to try, and they were blocked from getting to her.

This morning, I hear we have taken another oil tanker. And I hear that Trump has decided that the “second wave of attacks” (who knew?) on Venezuela may not have to happen because the current government is being so cooperative. (On the other hand, he said that he would be very pleased if Nobel winner Machado decided to share her award with him. What does that even mean?)

On the other hand, Trump this morning addressed the Republicans at the Kennedy Center (not only the name of the Kennedy Center has been changed, but its use is no longer just as an arts center, but as a home for Republican political gatherings) and told them that we are probably through bombing fishing boats, but now we are going to attack cartels on land. What does that mean? That means Mexico will be a target of our military, and probably Colombia.

You know, I think it all started with the Gulf of America, and now has extended to the full Caribbean, which will soon be renamed as well. My guess is that Mexico won’t be very happy for the American military to move onto its territory, but that Trump will try to bully them as we attack cartels and cause a fair amount of collateral damage. Once we start that, I am not sure what the endgame will be in Mexico. In Venezuela, it is oil. And my guess is that soon, it will be real estate and tourism in Cuba.

We have three very rocky years ahead. I have said regarding Israel and Netanyahu and his gang that, if they are successful in pacifying the West Bank and Gaza (and building a tourism mecca in Gaza), in 50 years they will be praised, and any of the crimes they have committed along the way will be forgotten. I think the same of Trump.

In the meantime, we should scrap E Pluribus Unum, and move on to The End Justifies the Means.  Exitus Acta Probat. ( Thank you, Ovid)

Let me paraphrase Longfellow:

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Not the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

But what we saw in ’73,

Not knowing it would turn out to be

A taste of future history.”

What I am talking about is what we watched in 1973 when Woody Allen’s film “Sleeper” came out, and we learned what happened when a scientist played by Woody Allen is awakened after a 200 year cyrogenic sleep. I found this dialogue on a random web site; I am assuming it is accurate.

“Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk.”

“Dr. Aragon: Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

“Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or…..hot fudge?

“Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy…precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

“Dr. Melik: Incredible.”

While we were laughing, one audience member may not have been. Nineteen year old Robert Kennedy, Jr. undoubtedly saw this film, and just as undoubtedly, it must have given him an idea and a mission in life. And 53 years later, now that he is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, he is able to put Woody Allen’s parody (which he undoubtedly never knew was parody, but took to be gospel) into action.

Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy told Americans to eat more red meat and more cheese.

You can’t make this stuff up. Unless you are Woody Allen.

Or Cole Porter:

“The world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today, and day’s night today….”

Today, this is not major news. Health care is not major news. Even Venezuela is not major news (unless you are in Venezuela). Today’s major news is Minneapolis, where snow, but not ICE, is welcome this winter, where a 37 year old resident was shot by an ICE agent in her car, where ICE is having their largest operation yet because Trump doesn’t want Somalis in his country.

There is so much going on, but I seem to be in a poetic mood. That’s because I wound up last night with a sore throat which kept me up most of the night and is still with me. This is my first blog post written under the weather and I will make it short and quote something that Ogden Nash, the greatest poet of all times, did not write:

“Do I think I might have the flu?

I do.”

People seemed interested in my post about Uncle Al, so today I decided to move on to my Aunt Millie, one of my father’s sisters. Why choose Al and Millie, since this was a family of eight siblings (actually nine, but one died when she was eight or nine, or so)? It’s mainly because Al had no children, and Millie had only one son (now deceased) and no grandchildren with whom I have ever had any connection. I would be afraid to write about an aunt or uncle, and have a cousin (their child) tell me that I had insulted their parent. I once read something that Philip Roth wrote. This is certainly not a quote (and barely a paraphrase), but he said that if you don’t have the strength to write terrible things about your relatives for fear that your family will get mad at you…..you are not meant to be a writer.

I will start writing about Aunt Millie by writing about her only child, her son whose name, I am sure, was Robert, but who was always (as far as I know) called Bobby….Bobby Rich. Bobby was about ten years older than me, and we were certainly not ever close, although when I was with him he was always friendlier than friendly. I view him as a back-slapper sort of guy who forgets you the second he departs.

When I first was conscious of Bobby, he was already out of his parents’ house, and a member of the Coast Guard. Now, when Bobby was in the Coast Guard, I really had no idea what the Coast Guard was. I think I confused in my mind with the Merchant Marine. And I still don’t really understand what the Merchant Marine did. I had a more distant cousin on my mother’s side who lived in California but spent most of his time on Merchant Marine ships. I am sure it was an interesting life, but I have no clue as to what was in it.

So, Bobby was in the Coast Guard and he was stationed in Hawaii, I think for years, leaving Millie and her husband Jules alone with their dog Trumpet, a large boxer. I was a big fan of Trumpet, and I think Trumpet liked me, and when I was in the 6th grade, Trumpet had puppies. Well, Trumpet didn’t have puppies; Trumpet was male. But the puppies were apparently related to Trumpet, and we were given (or maybe we bought) one of them, whom I named Mugs, a name now that embarrasses me for its lack of glamour. I was so excited to have Mugs, but I think my mother hated Mugs, and didn’t want a dog at all. At any rate, after six months with us, Mugs got sick and died. Apparently, it was distemper, although he had had all of the normal shots (or so we were told). It was very sad, and it remained a mystery. Mugs was my last dog.

Aside: J. Fred Mugs was a chimpanzee who, at that time, was a regular co-host on NBC’s Today show, then in its first iteration under Dave Garroway. Dave Garroway had been a classmate and acquaintence of my mother at Washington U.  End of diversion.

Aunt Millie took me to my first baseball game. It was the Cardinals against the Cubs, I was already following both the Cardinals and the Browns, and I was very excited. Naturally, I brought my softball mitt, sure that I would catch a foul ball. I think I was six or seven years old. It was a very disappointing experience. The Cubs won, 6 to 1, but more than that, our seats were behind home plate, behind the net which assured me that no foul ball would come anywhere near me. My disappointment was increased because Bobby was at the game, too. He was with some friends, and they were sitting in the outfield bleacher seats, I think, and had wound up with a home run ball. Did Bobby offer it to me, his little cousin? Not on your life.

I don’t know how Millie spent her days. In my mind, she played cards and ate bon bons, but that may be all wrong. Uncle Jules was an on the road salesman, selling men’s suits. This seemed like a very boring way to spend your life, but it did mean that he always wore very handsome suits. I remember a shiny, gray suit that he told me was “shark skin”. Pretty ritzy, I thought. Jules seemed a nice enough guy. I know how he spent his time. He spent his time smoking cigars. The number of times I saw Jules without a cigar? I could count them on one hand.

Neither Jules (whose namecwas really Julius) nor Millie struck me as intellectual types. My guess is that is because they weren’t, but I can’t prove that one way or another.

One instance that I recall may help paint the picture. While my Uncle Al was a short, Mr. Magoo, Aunt Millie was of normal height, quite overweight (apparently she was very skinny as a young woman), bleached her hair a very light yellow (this is something that all the Hessel girls seemed to do, with the exception of my Aunt Irene, Jon Frey’s mother (you may know him….), who let her hair grow attractively gray). For some time, she drove a white Jaguar two seat sports car. You remember those? 90% hood? Whenever possible the top was down.

She drove one day to the Famous Barr department store in Clayton, but could not find a parking spot on the Famous lot. So when a nice young man offered to park her car for her as soon as a spot opened up, she was very appreciative and gave him both the keys and the car. I mean, she really gave him the keys and the car, because neither was anywhere to be seen when she left the store. Luckily, a few days later, the car was found abandoned not far away, I think undamaged.

Aunt Millie died young, in her 60s from cancer, leaving Jules alone for, I don’t know, maybe 20 or more years. We would see him, his nice suits, and his cigars rarely. He moved from their Richmond Heights duplex on Clayton Road, near Big Bend, to a new apartment development off Delmar west of McKnight, closer to our house, but I think he really ceased to be a family presence. I thought he must have been very lonely.

As to Bobby, he got married and divorced and married and divorced and I think married and divorced again. I only knew his first wife, Barbara, and not very well. A year or two ago, I tried to track her down, and discovered that she was living, with her husband, down the street from our friend Judy in Creve Coeur. But she was having serious health problems and I wasn’t able to see her. She and Bobby had two daughters. About them, I know little.

Bobby, I think, went through a number of jobs, winding up selling cars at Lou Fusz Chevrolet, a major St. Louis County dealer. When my father died, I called him up to tell him. He was very appreciative of my call, and told me he would see me at the funeral. He did not show up at the funeral, however, and never gave any sympathy to my mother, my sister, or me. In fact, we never heard from him again. Ever.

But in 1997, my sister passed away at age 49. She had become fairly prominent in the St. Louis business community (that is another story) and her death was well reported locally. Bobby again was MIA and may or may not have known. When we were at the St. Louis airport,  coming home after the funeral and shiva, I thought I saw Bobby at the airport. Looked just like him, although I hadn’t seen him in 20 years or so. I thought about approaching him, but did not. He, to me, was only part of history.

There is so much to think about on this, the fifth anniversary of the January 6 riots, the day after President Maduro pleaded not guilty in federal court, and a day after Robert Kennedy, Jr. decided that American kids don’t have to be that healthy, after all. We could talk about any or all of those things, or the other things floating around as we start our daily activities. But, for some reason, and maybe because we need distraction for a few minutes, I am going to talk about my Uncle Al, Isadore Albert Hessel.

Uncle Al (I don’t think I ever just called him Al) was born in 1893, and died in 1983. He was my father’s oldest brother, twelve years older. He was married to my Aunt Nell (Elinor) for 60 years or so. Through most of that time, they lived part time in New York City and the rest of the time in St. Louis. They had no children.

Al was the shortest of the three Hessel brothers, and I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t bald on top, with gray hair on the sides of his head. He had a myopic glance (and frankly, I don’t remember if he wore glasses or not), and reminded me, every time I saw him, of the cartoon character, Mr. Magoo. Picture Mr. Magoo, and you are picturing Al.

Aside: There are always questions that you wished that you had asked people who are no longer alive, and many I wish I had asked Uncle Al. One of those is: Do you know how much you look like Mr. Magoo, and how has that influenced your life? (Now, you may think that the obvious answers would be “yes” and “not at all”, but don’t be so sure about that last one.)

Uncle Al had a sense of humor, although I don’t remember him as a joke teller. I do remember one night at my parents’ house, when he was doubled over with laughter and said “You will never be old as long as you have a sense of humor.” At the time (I was young), I wondered if that was a great philosophical insight. Of course, now I know it just isn’t correct.

I remember something he said that I thought was funny, but he didn’t. When his mother, my grandmother, was in her mid-90s, she lived in the old Delmar Gardens Nursing Home in University City. One evening, 75 year old Al and 25 year old me turned up there to visit at the same time. It was dinner time, my grandmother was in the dining room, and we decided to wait in the corridor until she finished. Al looked at the residents eating, shook his head, and said to me, “I sure hope I don’t have to live here when I get old.” To me, Uncle Al had been old as long as I knew him. The Delmar Gardens residents were old, too, but he would have fit right in. And, for a year or so before he died, that is exactly where he did live, spending his silent days sitting in a chair next to his even older brother-in-law Joe.

One of the most memorable things about Uncle Al is that for the last 10 or so years of his life, he didn’t talk. Obviously, he was suffering from some sort of dementia, but you would never know it looking at him, because he looked fit as a fiddle. Not once in his life did he ever look otherwise.

One night, when he was in his mid-80s, he was obviously not feeling well and Aunt Nell was concerned. She called my parents and they all took him to the emergency room. The intake nurse tried to understand what was bothering him and kept asking him questions, to which of course, since he had stopped talking, he gave no answers. She kept trying, and finally did get a response. The question was, “Mr. Hessel, how old are you?”. The answer was, “I am 40”.

That was apparently one of only two times Uncle Al spoke during those final years. The other time came on the day of my father’s funeral, in 1979. After the funeral, family members came to our house and hung around most of that day. Whether Al knew what was going on, we don’t know. Disaster was avoided when someone saw Al dig his hands into a bowl of decorative marbles that for some reason my mother kept on a living room table, and stick a few of them into his mouth. Other than that, all was smooth.

As the day wore down, Aunt Nell said to her husband, “Al, it’s time to go home. We can’t stay here all night”, or something to that effect. Al paid no attention and Nell repeated herself, again getting no reaction and looking a bit frustrated. Finally, I intervened, and said something like, ” Uncle Al, Aunt Nell says it’s time to go home. Are you going with her, or should we just let her go alone?” Al, looking, as I said, fit as a fiddle, stood up straight, and with a strong booming voice spoke for the first time in several years and for the last time in his life, “LET HER GO!!!”

Uncle Al, not surprisingly, was a salesman. He was a distributor, again not surprisingly, of ladies’ undergarments, and even had his own line of underpants, called Fanny Pants. His St. Louis office was on the first floor of the Merchandise Mart on Washington Street, its windows displaying “I. A. Hessel & Co.” In big, gold letters. I have no idea where his New York office was. He did have his 15 minutes of fame in, I think, 1943, when the Post-Dispatch did a feature article on him. The premise of the article was how World War II was affecting life on the home front. The reporter went to Union Station to interview, I guess, traveling salesmen, and did “Pantyman Hessel” give him an earful about the difficulties of life without elastic!

One last thing. As the oldest of my father’s siblings, I always thought Al was born in Mobile, Alabama, my grandparents’ first home in America. Just after he died, I was with Aunt Nell as she talked to Rabbi Grollman about what he could put in a eulogy. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, but I heard her say, “He was born in Kansas City.”, which I knew was wrong. I asked her why she didn’t say that he was born in Alabama. Her response was harsh, “Shhh, I don’t want anyone to know he was a southerner.”

The joke, though, I guess was on both of us, as Al was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, probably in or near my great-grandmother’s house outside of Lvov (then Lemberg) after my grandfather had come to the U.S., but before my grandmother followed him. Is it possible that Nell did not know this, or was there sometthing else she wanted no one to know?

Thanks for reading to the end.

Thanks to friend Avi Sofer, I read an article this morning on the I-24 News website (I-24 is an Israeli media outlet) that quoted the Acting President of Venezuela, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, as saying yesterday that the American invasion of Venezuela and capture of President Maduro was carried out by the American military, to be sure, but was orchestrated by “the Zionists” and was the result of a “Zionist plot”.

Unfortunately, comments like this are frequently made by Venezuelan leadership, and have been since Hugo Chavez took control of the country in 1998. Now, I know virtually nothing about Venezuelan politics or history, but I do know that Chavez took control by winning an election, not by staging a revolution. Chavez led Venezuela until he died in 2013 (from cancer at 58) and Maduro, then vice-president, took over.

There has been a Jewish presence in present day Venezuela since the 17th century, but the community grew in numbers in the 19th and especially the 20th centuries, reaching about 50,000 when Chavez took power. There were some wealthy elements in the community, and it was identified by the Chavez regime as part of the country’s economic elite. The entire economic upper class became the “enemy of the people”, as businesses were taken over and nationalized, leading to the emigration of much of the country’s wealthier citizens, with most Venezuelan Jews moving over time to Israel or the United States. Today, only about 5,000 Jews remain in Venezuela.

In 2009, Chavez’ Venezuela broke off relations with Israel. Chavez at that time allied himself with Israel’s Arab neighbors, accusing Israel of perpetrating a second Holocaust in the Middle East.

From the beginning, the Chavez regime was proudly anti-American, and Chavez appears to have wanted to create a pan-Latin American anti-United States alliance. Chavez portrayed Israel as an enemy of such an alliance, accusing it of being not only a strong ally of the United Stares, but of performing America’s dirty work through the use of Mossad officers sent to Venezuela. Whether there ever was a Mossad presence in Venezuela and, if there was, what they were doing, I don’t know, but Chavez seemed to think that one of their goals was to assassinate him.

Any chance of a change of Venezuela’s anti-Israel policies under Maduro was lost when Israel refused to recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of the country.

Complicating all of this was a strong relationship that Chavez forged, and Maduro continued, with Iran. They worked together with a number of military and commercial agreements, bolstered by friendships between the leaders of both countries, and by common criticism of Israel. This alliance, along with some raids on Jewish institutions in Caracas have been cited as reasons so many Jews left the country, along with the nationalizations.

An aside: Then Iranian president Ahmadinijad got himself into trouble when, at Hugo Chavez’ funeral, he hugged Chavez’ widow, causing Iran’s religious leaders to go somewhat beserk, seeing a political leader touch a woman to whom he was not married.

Okay, now to Delcy Rodriguez, and what to expect. Assuming she continues in her Acting President role, and is not going to be a victim of another American attack, the United States may find the going a bit rough. President Trump’s initial comment that she was being cooperative seems not very accurate. A lawyer, the daughter of a Marxist revolutionary who “died” after being arrested by the pre-Chavez government, active in Venezuelan politics for over 20 years, she seems very competent,  very, very tough, and extremely anti-American. With her in control, the Trump idea of the U.S. taking control over Venezuela’s oil reserves seems far-fetched. We will see what transpires.

With all of the talk about Venezuela, the controversy over New York City Mayor Mamdani’s revocation of a number of his predecessor’s Executive Orders has been upstaged in the media. So let’s go back to them this morning.

As I understand it, Mamdani revoked about 15 Executive Orders that Mayor Adams had issued over the past year or so. They covered a variety of topics, but two of them (actually three of them) dealt with issues that impact New York City’s Jewish community. One of them, issued last June, adopted the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the other, issued just one month ago today, forbade certain city officials and appointees from divesting city funds from Israeli related investments or otherwise cooperating with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. The third Executive Order dealt with religious institutions in general and required police to investigate ways to create no-protest zones around them. The third one, for whatever reasons, seems to have not raised the objections that the other two have.

A number of Jewish organizations (I have not actually surveyed them) have spoken in blunt terms against these two actions by the Mamdani administration, saying that they portend problems in the future for the Jewish community and potentially for Israel. That is to be expected and I assume that the reasons given by each organization do vary a bit, and would have to be examined, or at least read, before meaningful comments could be given.

What I am more interested in the reaction of the State of Israel, which issued apoplectic statements, basically saying that this demonstrates that Mamdani is an antisemite who on Day 1 is showing his true colors. Those are the terms used.

I maintain that, in responding with this attack, Israel has made the mistake it always makes, and demonstrates one reason why so many Americans, including many American Jews, describe themselves as anti-Israel, or as opponents of Israel’s government.

New York City has more than 1 million Jews. Of those who voted in the mayoral election, about 1/3 voted for Mamdani. They provided a significant amount of his support, and his leadership team contains a significant number of Jewish appointees. They presumably largely approve of his revocation of the Adams orders.

Talking about this is complicated. I will try to simplify it.

1. Zohran Mamdani is ethnically Indian, born in Uganda, and is religiously Muslim. He identifies with Muslims and particularly with the Palestinian experience in the Middle East. I can’t tell you what his internal feelings about Israel are, but clearly he believes that Israel has engaged in genocidal activities in its treatment of its Muslim neighbors after the October 7, 2022 attack (which he has strongly condemned).
2. As opposed to the majority of Israelis, the majority of American Jews, while not identifying with the Palestinians as Mamdani does (of course, they would if they were Muslim and not Jewish), have also condemned much of what Israel has done, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
3. I myself do believe that the ultimate goal of Israel is to force many Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, and that Israel, and many (but not all, of course) Israelis feel that if this requires violence, so be it. Whether this constitutes acts of genocide is a legal question that, except in legal fora, may not be that important. But I do believe it is happening.
4. Israel (under its current government and perhaps under all of its governments) is a remarkable country with remarkable accomplishments. Some (but certainly not all and perhaps not even the majority) of these accomplishments have been achieved with the help of the United States, and with the help of Jews worldwide. Particularly because of the Holocaust, this is not surprising.–
5. But Israel wants to be treated as something special. It has declared itself a Jewish State in spite of the fact that 20% or more of its citizens are not Jewish, and it has “settled” about 600,000 of its Jewish citizens in the West Bank, on land occupied by Israel, but not a part of Israel. By doing these things, Israel has declared itself special in two ways: first, it wants to be known as the homeland of Jews, no matter where they live, and second, it clearly expresses the right to control lands that are outside of its territorial boundaries. Many Jews support these two positions, and the American government, while sometimes expressing opposition to the second, in fact has supported them as well.
6. In order to further its presumption of special status, Israel has supported the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitic sentiments. Under this definition (I am speaking broadly), opposition to Israel defines you as an antisemite. Of course, Jews who are against Israel’s current government or policies do not view themselves as antisemitic and oppose the IHRA definition. Because so many of these Jews are Mamdani supporters, the adoption of the IHRA definition by the City of New York is problematic, and the revocation of this Executive Order makes sense. And, again in my opinion, it does not make Mamdani an antisemite, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims that it does.
7. As to the Order involving the BDS movement, it is again important to know that has only been in effect for one month. So, it isn’t that Mamdani is overturning a long lasting New York City written policy. I have no idea why Adams thought this Executive Order was necessary less than a month before he was leaving office, except to create controversy for his successor. What its revocation connotes, I do not know. Does it mean that Mamdani is going to sign an Executive Order requiring City agencies to follow the BDS program? Highly doubtful, but we will see. If this does occur, anger is appropriate. And, if it seems like it might occur, the City Council could always pass a law containing the positions set forth in the Adams order.

To make a too long story shorter than if I went on and made it longer, Zohran Mamdani is, for personal and political reasons, separating his position on protecting Jews in the City and his position on whether Israel’s actions should be supported. As the mayor of New York City, his priority has to be protection (in a broad sense) of its residents. He has little to do with Israel in his mayoral capacity. He is entitled to whatever personal thoughts he has on the country and its leaders. As long as he does nothing to set the City of New York on an anti-Israel path, this is not a problem. If he does, it will be, but we have no reason to think that will be the case as of today.

A rational Israel would wish Mamdani luck in his new job, and would communicate and meet with him on a regular basis to attempt to blunt his current feelings towards their country. To simply call him an antisemite, and to say he is showing his true colors is 100% wrong. But it is in character, I am afraid to say, and sets a stage for an ongoing battle that neither side wants to lose, but that each side wants to win big. Winning big won’t happen, and controversy will be the order of the day. It is just too bad.