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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