CLASS DISTINCTIONS

Listing the names of my relatives who died in Auschwitz brought home to me [thanks to Jerry Fresia’s perceptive comment] the importance of acknowledging people by their names.  Here is another tiny example.  I am undergoing a year-long course of treatment with a drug called Prednisone for an ailment called Polymyalgia Rheumatica that I thought was obscure until I started mentioning that I had it and discovered all sorts of people who also suffer from it [including my own sister!]  Once I began the medication, all pain disappeared, but I must reduce the dosage monthly by very small increments until I am down to one milligram a day.  Last Thursday, I saw my rheumatologist specialist for a routine follow-up [her first name, I kid you not, is Reummy!].  When I checked in at the front desk I was handed several sheets of boilerplate information they are required to give me, both about the clinic and about me.  I read them idly while I waited to be called, and noticed a curious fact.  In the literature, all the doctors are listed by both first and last name, but everyone else – the Physician’s Assistants, Nurses, front desk secretaries, etc. – are listed only by their first names.  I checked, and that is the way their name tags are printed as well.

This is a clear, and I suspect more or less universal, marker of class distinction.  Needless to say, the nurses and physician’s assistants often know more about the diseases being treated at the clinic than newly minted Doctors who get to be known on their first day by both their first and last names.  To be known by your first and last names is in America today a marker of respect and importance, a fact that is of course quite apparent in the Academy. 

I am old fashioned enough not to be comfortable with being known solely by my first name, but I am also rebellious enough to insist that everyone else should receive the same courtesy.  When I got home, I found an email message from the clinic asking me to rate the service I had received.  I gave everyone and everything a top ranking [I mean, so far as I can tell, they are taking good care of me], but at the end of the questionnaire, in the space for “comments,” I recommended that all the people working at the clinic should wear name tags giving their first and last names.

I put down my email address again, but I have not heard from them.

A LITTLE FAMILY HISTORY

Jerry Fresia asks whether I knew personally any of my relatives who died in the Death Camps.  Since they died when I was nine, the answer is of course, No, but there is a good deal more to the story than that.  This has nothing at all to do with current political or other events, but I am feeling unnaturally fragile these days, as a consequence of the disasters we face, and telling family stories, even such as these, is a relief from the constant arguing and anguishing that will be our fate for years to come.

I have told elsewhere the story of my father’s father coming to Castle Garden [the predecessor of Ellis Island] as a babe in arms in 1880, and of the way in which the family name of Zarembovitch was changed by an immigration official to Wolff.  Growing up, that was the only story I ever heard about the Old Country, that and the fact that my great-grandfather had come with his family from Paris.  The ancestral name led me to believe, mistakenly as it turned out, that our roots were in Russia, and at one point I made a fruitless effort to find a town named “Zarem,” assuming that “Zarembovitch” means “from the town of Zarem” [it doesn’t.]

During the Second World War and afterwards, there was never the slightest discussion in my family even of the possibility that there were relatives who had died in the Death Camps – not one word, which, when you think about it, is very odd for a New York Jewish family, even one that was utterly non-religious.  After my mother passed away in 1975, my father made a trip to Paris, and while there he found two Zarembowitch’s in the phone book, though he was too timid to contact them.  Years later, after Susie and I had bought a Paris apartment, I actually did write a letter to André Zarembowich, the only remaining person of that name in the phone book.  We met him and his wife, Jacqueline, the two of them retired science professors our age, and established the connection.  It seems that André’s grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers [despite the fact that we are the same age.]   We are now good friends, and get together when Susie and I are in Paris.

André brought with him to our first meeting an extraordinary document, a full-scale genealogy of the Zarembowich family that had been painstakingly assembled by Micheline Gutmann-Marcus, one of his relatives [and mine too, of course.]  After we had rather gingerly established that we were all “on the left,” André explained that they did not see Mme. Gutmann-Marcus very often because she was a Sarkosy supporter [he had been rather worried that this new-found American relative would be a Republican!].

As I looked through the document, which runs 129 pages, I was searching for evidence of my grandfather, and sure enough, there was his Parisian birth certificate!  It turns out that my roots are not in Russia but in Poland, specifically in a small town in the northwest corner of Poland called Suwalki.  The Zarembovitch family had emigrated more or less en masse to Paris in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, driven by economic hard times and hunger.  Why Paris?  I have never found out.  The immigrants settled in the Jewish quarter, which is in the 4^th arrondissement, centering on the area between rue des Franc-Bourgeois and rue des Rosiers.

Once having located evidence of my grandfather’s lineage [this is the grandfather who devoted his entire life to the Socialist Party of New York], I flipped idly through the pages.  Mme. Gutmann-Marcus had included not only the usual genealogical charts, looking like inverted trees with the branching lines of descent.  She had also tracked down, for each branch of the family, the year and place of birth and the year and place of death for each member of the very large extended family.  As I ran my eye down the columns, I came upon people whose place of death was listed as Auschwitz.

I was thunderstruck.  In my entire life, which by then had lasted well over seventy years, it had simply never occurred to me that some of the six million European Jews killed in the camps might have been my relatives!  How could they not? you may ask.  How indeed.  And yet the thought had never crossed my mind.  The list of victims that I posted on this blog are the men, women, and children listed in Mme. Gutmann-Marcus’ document.  They all died in Auschwitz.

Is this all of my relatives who died in the Holocaust?  To a certainty, I can say they are not.  These, recall, are only my European relatives on my father’s father’s side.  My father’s mother came to the United States as a little girl from Vilna.  My mother’s father’s family came from Rumania, as did my mother’s mother’s family, I believe.  If I had a similar document for each of my four ancestral roots, I am certain it would contain scores more name of death camp victims.

My only link with this large European extended family is André and Jacqueline, and their son and daughter.  They are, of course, just names to me.  I have no personal connection with them, or indeed with Suwalki [which, by the way, is only 80 miles southeast of the old Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad.]  And yet, now that I know about those victims of the death camps, I feel an irrational bond with them, and a sense that the Holocaust robbed me personally, not just the world, of something valuable.

Well, that is my reply to Jerry Fresia.  Thank you for indulging me.

A PREDICTION

As the horrors of the next four years unfold, with Climate Change deniers, women's reproductive rights opponents, public school opponents,gun enthusiasts,  proponents of eliminating any minimum wage at all, those eager to up the rate of deportations, and war starters in control of the government, there are people on the left who will devote all their time and energy to condemning what they see as the inadequate ideological purity of others well to the left of the center of American politics.

I have seen this farce before.

A FIRST RESPONSE TO JERRY FRESIA

I begin the first of two posts responding to comments by Jerry Fresia.  This post is a response to the following lengthy comment from yesterday:

“But you said something Professor, in this post, that has been an issue for me for quite a long time: "find the place where you could most effectively strike a blow for freedom or for the international proletariat, regardless of where that might be." Great. I'm all in favor of solidarity especially when it has to do with the "proletariat." But here's the thing: what about my life? I'm a painter and spend a huge amount of time trying to get clear about and get my students to think of painting as an expressive activity, not a productive activity and further that an expressive activity affords one the opportunity to create one's life and become more of who one is most - as opposed to the artist-as-entrepreneur whose goals have to do with career and climbing the ladder. Here's my point: capitalism distorts my life and makes it difficult for me to be emancipated in the Marxian sense. Is this not the case with academics? Does academia somehow sit outside the range of corrupting power relationships? Perhaps I'm being defensive. I have been chided for not being "active," i.e. for not actively participating in some movement in which I am expressing solidarity. But my view is that I can most effectively help to create a better world if my activism is centered at the "point of production." So Professor, please tell me: have you felt (and Lord knows you have written about this elsewhere) that education in capitalist American has been corrupted in ways that you yourself have felt compromised? If not, I would be surprised. If so, why not urge that each of us strike blows where we work, blows at the university by professors for their own emancipation. This is a part of Marxism that appeals to me. Why is the revolution always over there?”

This is a very rich comment, about which much could be said.  In preparation, I searched my blog, seeming to recall something I had said earlier, and discovered that just three years ago, I responded to the very same question from Jerry with just the answer I wished here to give!  I am reminded of Socrates’ response to Callicles, who complains that Socrates is always talking about the same simple things [cobblers, fishermen, shepherds.]  “Yes, Callicles,” Socrates replies, “and in the same way.”  That is one of the most profound and beautiful lines in all of Philosophy.

Jerry asks two questions which, though linked, are distinct.  The first is, “How am I to justify a life devoted to art when the world cries out for justice?”  The second, put especially succinctly, is in the last line:  “Why is the revolution always over there?”

In discussing the first question, I shall allow myself to quote for the fourth time, the last as recently as thirteen months go, this passage from Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments:  "It is not given to everyone to have his private tasks of meditation and reflection so happily coincident with the public interest that it becomes difficult to judge how far he serves merely himself and how far the public good.  Consider the example of Archimedes, who sat unperturbed in the contemplation of his circles while Syracuse was being taken, and the beautiful words he spoke to the Roman soldier who slew him: nolite perturbare circulos meos.  [Do not disturb my circles -- ed.]"

Jerry, by working at your art, you are striking a blow for the revolution [whatever that may be] as powerful as if you stood on the front line of a protest confronting the police.  You are doing this in two ways.  The first way is that you are realizing the possibilities of the human spirit that, in the end, give value to life.  We shall all die, and while we live we shall all face sickness and tyranny and exploitation and injustice.  Beauty, like truth, confer dignity on what is, after all, inevitably a losing battle with fate.  The second way is that through art you are, as Marcuse shows us in One-Dimensional Man, keeping alive those infantile fantasies of omnipotence that serve as the erotic sources of revolutionary energy.  Men and women do not fight at the barricades merely for a raise in the minimum wage, even though that may be what they achieve by their sacrifice.  They fight for liberation, which is both impossible truly to achieve and the indispensable goal of all transformative action.

I shall begin my response to the second question by reproducing a story I told on this blog five years ago.  [Yes, even I have limits to my capacity for originality!  Like Socrates, I repeat myself.]  Here is what I wrote:

 Many years ago, I was invited to participate in a symposium at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, on the subject of the political responsibilities of intellectuals. This was part of a series of symposia open to the public, and we are asked to present talks that would be accessible and interesting to a non-academic audience. The other two participants were Martin Jay, a sociologist who had written a very valuable book on the Frankfurt School for Social Research, the famous pre-war gathering of left intellectuals that included Horkeimer, Adorno, Fromm, Benjamin, and Marcuse, and Sam Weber, a very well-known UMass Comparative Literature scholar, and myself.

I took the assignment seriously, and wrote a rather pedestrian, but earnest, talk on the responsibilities of progressive intellectuals. It was moderately well received, I guess, but at least it was entirely comprehensible. Martin Jay chose to speak on images of the mirror in nineteenth century French literature, a subject obscure even in the most recherché of circles, impenetrable to the good citizens of Lexington who had gathered for the event. Weber, not to be outdone, delivered a talk on Heidegger's essay on technology that I found completely incomprehensible, to put it as delicately as I can.

I was, I must confess, genuinely offended by the performance of my colleagues, so
when it came time for those of us on the dais to engage in edifying intellectual intercourse, before throwing things open to the audience for questions, I asked each of them where he stood on the subject of the unionization of professors. I should explain that the UMass faculty had recently been unionized, in an effort that I had very strongly supported. The two of them stumbled over one another fleeing from the question. It had obviously never occurred to either of them that the political obligations of ostensibly left-wing intellectuals had anything at all to do with unions, and most certainly not with the unionization of professors, which they clearly considered infra dignitate.

The answer to Jerry’s question is that the revolution is always over here, never merely over there.  Those of us blessed with comfortable guaranteed incomes may write about justice as John Rawls did, as though one were sitting on a cloud like the Greek Gods observing the amusing shenanigans of common folk below, but in doing so we deceive ourselves, until one fine day a corporate whiz is appointed to the Chair of the Board of Trustees and decides that too much money is being wasted on the Humanities.

In my opinion, the best way to form a political coalition with men and women in other lines of work is first to struggle for justice in one’s own neighborhood or workplace.  Then, reach out in solidarity to others and forge a coalition designed to strengthen both of you.  Progressive political action is not charity work.  In America today, if you think you have no personal need for the comradeship of others, then you are probably part of the problem.  When I became aware of the injustices in my workplace, which at the time was Columbia University, I stood with the students who were protesting their university’s involvement in the Viet Nam War and its plan to encroach on neighborhood parkland for a gymnasium that the residents of that neighborhood would be barred from using.  Three years later, I left for the University of Massachusetts [which, be it noted, despite not being an elite private school, was nevertheless very much in the “upper middle class,” so to speak, of tertiary American institutions.]  The limitations of my experience and vision are very much on view in my 1969 book, The Ideal of the University.  Each of us learns from where we are in the world.

HAND TO MOUTH

Ivanka Trump is offering a personal thirty to forty-tive minute meeting with the highest bidder, with $50,000 the suggested price.  This does not sound like a high-powered executive preparing to help run a multi-billion dollar enterprise.  It sounds like someone living hand to mouth and desperate for any cash available.  Very odd.

ENOUGH!

I have read with some bemusement the extended comments on this blog about the charges that Russia interfered with the American election.  At first I was put in mind of a fine old 1967 comedy, The President’s Analyst, starring James Coburn.  The plot is far too convoluted to summarize.  Suffice it to say that for most of the film, the story seems to be about a conflict between the FBI and the CIA.  The FBI agents are all identically dressed in dark suits, ties, and hats, are utterly humorless, and are all 4’11” tall.  The CIA agents are dressed in shaggy sweaters and tweed coats with elbow patches, and look like a gathering in a Senior Common Room of an elite private college.  In a brilliant dénoument, it is revealed that the real power behind the throne is neither the FBI nor the CIA but – wait for it – THE PHONE COMPANY.   I believe the whole thing is on YouTube.  It is lots of fun.

But then I thought, What am I supposed to make of these ever more convoluted speculations about false flag operations and political leanings of the FBI and the CIA, not to speak of the bizarre fantasy that Trump will achieve a rapprochement with the remnants of the old Soviet Union?  What do I know? 

Well, I do not know what the CIA wants [although I was once interviewed for a job by someone representing himself as a CIA recruiter.]  And I do not know what the FBI wants [although I have been interviewed twice by two somber men, claiming to be from the FBI, who were charged with determining whether I was sufficiently loyal to the United States to be trusted as a private in the United States Army.]

Did Russia attempt to interfere in the American election?  Of course it did.  How do I know?  Because it was in its interest to do so, and I assume it acts in its interest.

Where does this stop?  Did the Holocaust really happen?  Were six million Jews killed in the Death Camps?  I don’t know.  I wasn’t there.  Perhaps it is all a terrible slander on the noble German people.  I do know that twenty-one Jews were killed in the Death Camps.  How do I know?  Because they were my relatives.  Here are their names:

Bernard Zarembovitch

Marguarite Mendels

Juliette Zarembovitch

Lucienne Zarembovitch

Leontine Gutman

Leonie Zarembowitch

Salomon Zarembowitch

Hélène Zarembowitch

Isaac Gutman

Salomon Sidlovski

Isaac Waldmann

Rachel Sidlovski

Samuel Levy

Salomon Levy

Madeleine David

Henri Isaac Levy

Dora Levy

Rachel Weinstein

Fanny Ratzkovski

Leon Elkind

Sylvain Rochow

I suggest that we all stop this idle armchair quibbling and put our energies to trying in some way, any way, to make this a better world.  Which brings me to Jerry Fresia, but I am too angry to respond to his thoughtful and moving comment.  Sufficient unto the day …

ONE OF THE COUNTLESS WAYS IN WHICH I AM DIFFERENT FROM MARX

I have for some time been vaguely aware of a certain discord between myself and a number of commentators to this blog whose politics are very similar to my own, and their interesting comments on the reports of Russian meddling in the recent election have enabled me to clarify my understanding of this discord.  The purpose of this post is to articulate my developing understanding.

There are, I now see, two very different ways in which someone of my political leanings can define his or her relation to the country of residence.  For the sake of simplicity, I shall talk about my own relation to America, but what I say ought to apply equally to anyone reading this blog, regardless of where he or she lives.

The first way is for me to adopt toward America the attitude that Marx seems to have had toward the England in which he spent the last thirty-five or so years of his life.  Marx was, or so it seems to me, a citizen of the world.  He was born in Prussia, lived for a while in France, spent more than half his life in London, was fluent in German, French, and English, read Italian easily, was educated thoroughly in the Greek and Latin classic texts, and even taught himself Russian late in life after learning that he had disciples there.  I can see no evidence that he ever thought of himself as a Prussian, a Frenchman, or a British subject.  He did not identify with any of those nations, or with any other nation, for that matter, and judged the events of his day, with which he was intimately familiar, solely from the point of view of their relation to the prospects of the proletarian revolution for which he worked and which he awaited eagerly.

The second way would be for me to consider myself an American, for better or [as is so often the case] for worse, to take pride in what goes well here, to condemn and feel shame for what goes badly, to consider myself in some manner especially responsible for American injustices, cruelties, repressions, and exploitations, as opposed to those elsewhere in the world, even though as an unimportant and solitary person, I am by no discernible measure actually responsible for anything that goes on either here or abroad.

I do not think there is any doubt that I define myself in the second way, as an American, not in the first way, as a citizen of the world.  If a foreign country interferes in American elections, I feel it as a personal affront, even though I have spent quite literally the last fifty-five years protesting the ways in which the American government interferes in the internal political affairs of other nations.  If an appalling and dangerous buffoon is elected to the American presidency, I feel not merely disgust or fear but shame, even though I would never feel shame at the accession to power of dangerous buffoons in other countries.

In view of this fact, it is odd that the most consequential thing I have done in the public sphere in my life, aside from the pursuit of my profession, is to spend twenty-five years raising money to support young Black men and women at historically Black universities in a foreign country, South Africa.

When I think about myself in this fashion, it helps me to understand the sizable difference between the way in which I view the recent election and its aftermath and the way in which some of the most vocal commentators to this blog view those same events.  This is not something about which one can usefully argue.  If those commentators were to tell me that I ought to view myself as a citizen of the world, I could only reply, “But I don’t.”  Nor would it make any sense at all for me to urge those commentators to be more American!

If you see yourself as a citizen of the world who happens to be living in America, as Marx was a citizen of the world who happened to be living in London, and if you wish to be, as the French would say, engagé, then I suppose the sensible thing would be to look across the globe and find the place where you could most effectively strike a blow for freedom or for the international proletariat, regardless of where that might be.  But if, like me, you see yourself as an American, then it would make more sense to cast about for some way to advance your ideals here, in America.  That is what I hope I am doing in this blog.