Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Death and the Virus

           
            All politics is local, and so at heart is most journalism.  I once read an anecdote concerning the reporting by a regional paper in New York State of Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight in 1927.  Its headline was “Lindbergh Flies Over Poughkeepsie on Way to Paris”.  Ever since I can remember I have been struck by a kind of morbid parochialism in the way our papers treat disasters: “Four Americans Die in Crash of Pan-Am Flight.”  When you read the story, you learn that there were thirty-six others who lost their lives as well.  The daily pandemic statistics of recent months have also tended slightly in this direction.  American leadership in coronaviral morbidity may be humiliating, but it is also fascinating, and certainly fully reported.  Beyond that I have wanted to know what has been happening specifically in New Jersey.  How about in my immediate community?  In both instances the answer has not been good.  But our own most distressing experiences have not been local.

            Our second coronavirus fatality—I’ll come to the first in a moment—occurred during the past week.  The man’s name was Eric Dean, a South Carolinian, and he was an uncle of one of our daughters-in-law, Melanie.  I did not know Mr. Dean personally.  From all testimony I have heard he was a lovely fellow.  I perhaps met him at the wedding, but if so I have no clear memory of doing so.  There is a lot I don’t recall these days.  Yet despite the lack of any actual relationship with this man, news of his death has brought vivid grief to our house.  Friendship and kinship are broad channels of vicarious experience and sympathy.  Melanie’s distress, amplified by that of her father, who had been very close to his brother, radiates out into our home and no doubt many others as though conducted by shiny copper wires.  To say that our nation has suffered a hundred and thirty thousand coronavirus deaths is a somber but somewhat abstract statistical statement until you think of the intricate emotional networks and sympathetic grids through which each individual loss crashes down on half a dozen, or twenty, or a hundred concerned neighbors, friends, and family relations.  From this perspective the statement that “the nation is grieving” or even “the world is grieving” moves from metaphor to simple fact.

            What I now regard as “my” first coronavirus death was of a different sort, beginning with the fact that, so far as I know, the cause of death was not coronavirus.  It happened on April 10 in New York, though I did not learn about it until mid-June and then only fortuitously.  All this requires some explanation.

            I shall identify him only by his first name, Eli.  I know little about his background, but I suppose he was of that second-, possibly even first-generation of American-born offspring of the large Eastern European Jewish immigrantion so important to the cultural history of the country, and to New York City in particular, the subject of Irving Howe’s memorable book The World of Our Fathers (1976).  Eli and I met while serving together on the board of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.  His graduate degree had been in Politics.  Only our American educational meritocracy, imperfect as it is, could have brought people of our very different backgrounds together—or put us on the board of anything.  I mention this sociological detail as it is relevant to the larger anecdote.  Eli and I became “periodical” friends, getting together at widely distanced board meetings.  He got interested in my blog and, especially in my work on The Anti-Communist Manifestos, which he proofread for me in galleys.  His interest stemmed from the fact that he was a 1959 graduate of Hunter College, one of the oldest components of the City University of New York, a conglomerate of institutions significant in the history of American Communism, with a radical political tradition from the 1930s not yet entirely dead in his own day.  Hunter was long an all -female institution; Eli became the first male president of its alumni association.  He was a great cataloguer, and he played a prominent role in the herculean task of organizing Hunter’s alumni records. 

            Time passed.  We rotated off the board.  Illness prevented me from attending some meetings at which we might have met.  In short, we fell out of touch for a few years.  Then, in the initial stages of soon aborted research into decipherers of mystery languages, I came upon a letter (published below in an appendix) written by a grateful student to her old teacher at Brooklyn College, Dr. Alice Kober.  Both Professor Kober and her admiring correspondent Mrs. Green (née Popper) were typical products of the magnificent free New York City university system, which had taken as its explicit mission the advancement through education of the city’s large population of youth of modest means, most of them the offspring of immigrants.  As you can see from the letter, however, this was not exactly what we usually regard as vocational training.  Kober was a great classical scholar, long under-sung, who did important work on cracking the ancient Minoan script called “Linear B.”  There’s an excellent popular book dealing with this adventure, but I wanted to know more.  Alice Kober was a Hunter alumna, and I personally knew the world-class expert on Hunter alumni.  So about the beginning of June I wrote a “catch up” letter to my friend Eli, its centerpiece being an inquiry about Kober.   One of his eccentricities was that he did not use email.

            Should you be puzzled about the relevance of a seventy-five-year-old letter to coronavirus death, it is this: although a wild good chase never ends in bagging a goose, it sometimes stirs up other interesting game.  About ten days later I got a letter back from Eli’s sister, with whom he had lived in Woodside, Queens.  She told me that Eli had died two months earlier.  He had been overwhelmed by a sudden debility, gone into hospital and, after a few days, died.  She had been late in answering my letter because she, too, had been in hospital. This news was abrupt, brutal, and final.  I had heard nothing of it because the normal channels through which I might have were disrupted during the coronavirus crisis.  I tried to learn more from one of the deans at Hunter with whom Eli had worked.  He had not learned of the death either.  I scoured the Internet and eventually found a brief obituary in one of those sad little sites established by funeral homes for “memory books”.  The only memorial then registered was that of a hospital transport worker, limited in education perhaps but rich in human decency, relating his brief moments of friendly exchange with a dying patient.  “Rest in peace friend,” he wrote, “in your ‘Deluxe Apartment in the Sky’.”  Whatever actual ailment was fatal for Eli, this, too, is “coronavirus death”: abrupt, capriciously communicated, forbidden such public solace as customary obsequies foster, caught up in a vast and undiscriminating sadness, rushed over, passed by as we stumble on to the next stupefying statistical chart.



APPENDIX

Readers sometimes ask me, no doubt in puzzlement, where I get my topics for blog posts.  The answer is: mostly from my random reading.  The letter below, which is of a kind any old professor would practically die for, is available on-line in a scholarly archive at the University of Texas devoted to materials relating to archaeological discoveries in Crete  and elsewhere.  The archive was founded by the great American archaeologist Emmett Bennett and is now curated by another distinguished scholar, Thomas Palaima.  It has no relevance to Linear B or any other object of Kober’s scholarly research, but it is a delightful testimony to her accomplishments as a teacher.  My small effort to identify Fritzie Green was without success.  But her letter, written three weeks after D-Day, is replete with tidbits of social history.  If you do what I did—use the Google Maps function to check out the two addresses in the letter—you will see something of the “two Americas” that are troubling so many of us today.

 [Printed Letterhead]
Lawrence Green
3221 Gladstone
Detroit 6, Michigan


[The rest of the letter is in longhand]
Dr. Alice E. Kober
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn, N. Y.

Dear Miss Kober,

                                                                                                                                                Tuesday 6/27/44

                                 This letter has been so long in the process of being written and yet so very often thought about, that I find it at once difficult, yet easy to put it down on paper.

                                 I know that name and address on the top of the page mean nothing to you and even though I would amplify and write Mrs. Lawrence Green  neé Freida (Fritzie) Popper of 208 Avenue I Brooklyn, that too, would probably not strike a familiar chord.

                                 However, my identity is not really important.  I was just one of that group of Latin students who, during less troublesome times six or seven years ago, enjoyed Horace and Plautus and Terence under your capable guidance in the evening session at Brooklyn College.

                                 I want you to know how much it meant to me when you carried us through so that we had  [ p. 2] sufficient credit to consider Latin our major—despite the fact that you no longer wanted to teach at night.

                                 I hope this letter reaches you because I do want you to know, even at this late date, that I was one student who never believed or considered that Latin was “not practical” and that whatever love and understanding I have for the classics, I attribute for the most part to you.

                                 Thanks so much.

                                                                                          Sincerely,

                                                                                          Fritzie Popper Green




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