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Monday, August 28, 2006
The hour is early The whole world is quiet A beautiful morning's about to ignite I'm ready for danger I'm ready for fire I'm ready for something to lift me up higher Life's been good, I guess My ragged old heart's been blessed With so much more than meets the eye I've got a past I won't soon forget You ain't seen nothing yet I'm still learning how to fly... -- Rodney Crowell, "Fate's Right Hand"
The days pass on a cycle. Not the news cycle. Time is what it is. Ditto weather. After the initial collapse, the body and spirit heal. Ambition becomes proprtionate. Charity descends on the spirit. Well, maybe not. Maybe I mean clarity--purer anger, sharper focus. As follows...
Just like women who have a child, swear they'll never go through another delivery, and promptly get preggers again, we eagerly brought drinks and smokes to the couch last Friday night to watch the return of Bill Maher. We had forgotten: For all his talent, he is an unforgivably lazy host. And as an interviewer, worse than the wonderful Jon Stewart, whose single flaw is his weakness in five-minute give-and-take. Maher delivers a crisp opening monologue, snappy long-distance interviews, and closes with a tart segment called "New Rules." If only he'd do more in that vein. But the centerpiece of the show is a 35-minute panel, which invariably kicks around the Iraq War to absolutely no gain. Either no woman wants to be on this show or Maher has a terrible booker, for he launched the season with a three-man panel. Four man, really, for Christopher Hitchens has enough testosterone for two--he not only supports the war, he gives the finger to those who don't. Hitchens does not always seem sober on TV, but it makes little difference. He has that palmy Brit accent to give him gravitas, and he wears one of Graydon Carter's discarded cream suits for that suave look. In every other way, he's Ann Coulter--he makes it up as he goes along. He cites George Bush's State of the Union speech as if Bush's words meant anything. Ditto Colin Powell at the U.N. And Hitch seems to be the only one who knows that on 9/11 George Tenet said, "Gee, I hope those weren't the guys training at flight schools in the Midwest!"
Maher seems to think his job is to toss out a topic and watch until the panelists have eaten that bone clean. Or maybe he just doesn't know enough to jump in. In any event, HBO broadcast these lies and more--unchallenged. For Hitch, it was a four-star night. Or maybe not. Earlier in the show, Maher interviewed Spike Lee and asked him a question, prompted by a lazy reading of a Bob Herbert New York Times column, about black-on-black violence. Hitch went out of his way to commend Maher for asking this question. And then Hitch's expression soured, as if to suggest a dark view of dark Americans. Maybe of all people of color. No doubt, in the late '60s, Hitch would have creamed his jeans over the carpet bombing of Vietnam. This moment cried out for a wider audience. C'mon, YouTube, show us Hitch's expression as he talked about Spike. Let's see if that was a pro forma sneer or the rictus of racism. I'd put money on the latter. As for Maher, I can't imagine many viewers found this dead zone in the middle of his show easy to sit through. If he continues to set the bar this low, he could find himself off the air--again. And that would be a loss, because you can count TV hosts of courage on one hand.
This is an excerpt from "Strongest Dad in the World," a Sports Illustrated piece by Rick Reilly: Eighty-five times Dick Hoyt has pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.... And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. " 'He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life,' '' Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. " 'Put him in an institution.' " But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. " 'No way,' '' Dick says he was told. ‘There's nothing going on in his brain.' "
"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain... After a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick wanted to do that...How was Dick, a self-described "porker'' who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks.''
That day changed Rick's life. "Dad,'' he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!'' And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that....in 1993, they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"....
Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii....
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time....
And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago.''
Hildi Halley, a woman from Maine whose husband, an engineer, died under unclear circumstances in Afghanistan, recently met with President Bush. She got to say all the things Cindy Sheehan didn't. The best part: "We literally sat knee to knee...I looked deep into his eyes and talked to him about love and losing people and that he was responsible for this. I said, `I didn't vote for you, but you are my President. And you're not serving me.'
"I said I believed it was time to put an end to this. His job is to find solutions. I said, 'You yourself have said you had erroneous information going into this....As a Christian man, you realize that when you've made a mistake it's your responsiblity to end this. And it's time to end the bleeding and it's time to end the war.'
"I said, 'What would truly bring healing is to start working on changing your policy towards the Middle East...as President, you're here to serve the people. And the people are not being served with this war....It's time as a Christian to put our pride behind us."
Halley said that the President appeared moved by what she'd said, but that she doubted it would bring about any real change. "He cried with me," she recounted. "I feel he responded to me emotionally. I don't know if that's going to change policy. It probably won't. But I hope it makes him think a little bit further."
Larry Magid--who knows as much about kids and Internet safety as anyone on the planet--sent me a copy of MySpace Unraveled": What it is and how to use it safely, the just-published “social networking” guide for parents that he co-authored with Anne Collier. It comes at a good time: MySpace, the king of “social networking” sites, gained its 100 millionth member this month. That's huge. No, it's crazy big. Like a monster, eating everything in its path. When Rupert Murdoch paid $585 million to buy MySpace, that seemed--to me, anyway--like an idiotic purchase, and for a very obvious reason: More than 20 percent of MySpace's members are under 18. As we know, kids are notoriously disloyal consumers and can always be expected to move on to the next cool thing before the year is out. If history is any judge, MySpace should be a ghost town by Spring 2007. And yet Google just agreed to pay News Corp's Fox Interactive Media--that is, Murdoch--at least $900 million over the next 45 months for the right to sell ads on MySpace and some other Fox sites. Which puts Murdoch $315 million ahead already. Clearly, some very smart people think that MySpace is here to stay. Go figger.
There is an argument that MySpace fills an important need, especially for teens. Kids are scheduled like little executives, running from one activity to another until they rush home, do their schoolwork and collapse. They need time to hang out, relax, gab with friends. MySpace looks like an ideal solution. Not only can you blog and communicate, you can do that on a site whose very name suggests that the members own it, that it's a club.
If hanging out with friends from school and the 'hood were the sole--or even main--function of MySpace, I'd cheer. But there is also the matter of accumulating friends, of piling up the numbers. How do you do that? By becoming a “friend” of a rock band. The more cool bands you orbit, the more “friends” you have.
This is a time-consuming activity. At the suggestion of Atoosa Rubenstein, the relentlessly plugged-in editor of Seventeen Magazine, I joined MySpace. The idea was that I'd share some cultural opinions, which would then attract new visitors to my web site, from HeadButler.com. But for weeks, I had only one “friend”--the founder of MySpace, who is everybody's “friend.” Then someone explained MySpace to me. You gotta work it. Two, three, four hours a day. (The “average” MySpace member spends between one and two hours on the site a day.) Hey, who ever said “friendship” is easy? Like marriage, it takes commitment and effort. Just keep loving those unknown bands… Of course, there is an easier way to be popular: flaunt your sexuality. Pictures preferred, especially of teen girls. Accounts of debauchery will also work. MySpace says it patrols its screens, but really--how do you patrol 100 million profiles? Well, someone does: college admissions officers, who visit MySpace to compare the Goody Two Shoes of the application essay to the drunk girl who portrays herself as a 'ho. And, of course, weirdos.
Pervs and predators have been making a lot of parents nuts about this site, thanks to stories like these: a 14-year-old girl strangled, reportedly by someone she met on MySpace; a 13-year-old girl stopped by her grandfather on her way to a train station to meet a 38-year-old man she met through My-Space; a 15-year-old charged with harassment when police found what read like a "hit list" on her MySpace page.
These headlines make it seem that MySpace is a perv's paradise. In fact, most kids know better than to consort with adults. And, as Magid and Collier note, the kids who do agree to meet adults--and go on to have sex with them--are, more often than not, willing co-conspirators. Which leads Magid and Collier to conclude that MySpace is a safe space: “the new burger joint.”
I think not. I see something fundamentally fraudulent about the phenomenon of “social networking.” These sites are not services; they are businesses. Helping kids grow, communicate, expand their worlds--that sounds nice, but it's bullshit. As a critic has written, “We keep touting MySpace as 'Do It Yourself' media for the masses when it's basically just an ad-revenue generator built on the backs of its membership.”
Think not? Already movie stars and famed musicians can be your “friends” on MySpace. They'll be happy to take your money. Will they bring you chicken soup if you're sick? Of course not.
The exploitation of kids on MySpace is, mostly, exploitation by MySpace. Back in the day--warning: here comes the Old Fart Rant--kids had real experiences and made real mistakes, played real games and got real injuries. MySpace takes kids who need fresh air and real friends and addicts them to their computer screens. Pump them up with snacks and soft drinks, and they're just like their parents--only “interactive.” Whatever that means.
A hundred million people can't be wrong? Nonsense. A hundred million people are almost always wrong. Or to put it lest kindly, most of that hundred million are so unaware of the real transaction that they don't even sense they're being exploited. There's a word for people like that--losers.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Living on the edge of the city limit line This is where the boundary finally ends And I swear that we're the last living souls in a populated ghost town All the billboards are our best friends Which way did our last chance go and can we get out if we go right now? It seems that with the malls and the mega-church stadiums We would get out if we knew just how With the radio on -- John Ritter, “Golden Age of Radio”
Nantucket—We’ve just arrived for a tradition-in-the-making: our second annual retreat. The ferry takes 2+ hours, and that trip through open water under a darkening sky is sufficient to bring on the first layer of chill. A day spent reading in the garden and walking the beach deepens the calm. The seals swim right to the edge of the beach—never saw that before. By the end of two weeks, I might not recognize myself. On the other hand, Katrina struck Louisiana while we were here last year. We were sharing a house with another writer. So when we weren’t in sweet, gentle water, we were watching CNN and writing and, mostly, wringing our hands. So as much as I’m peaceful, I’m also wary—evil lurks. Certainly, lying does. And that’s the topic of my sermon today: the prevalence of untruth. Lie #1: the British-hatched terror plot that might have taken down as many as 11 passenger jets. We learned immediately that after a year of planning, these “terrorists” had bought no plane tickets. Several of them lacked passports. Now it appears that their terrifying technology was as improbable as their plot. An English IT journal—what? You expected cable news to blow the whistle?—called The Register tells you what you’ll need to pull off a mission of this sophistication: Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them. It's best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate—especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation—to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie. Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide/acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else. After a few hours—assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities—you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two. The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible. So what was that week of fear about? Politics. Bush up to his usual tricks, still looking for a lie so terrifying he’ll never need to tell another. Still, who would have thought that Tony Blair was so desperate he’d play along with this farce? Today, the Brits indicted eight of the 11 suspects on “conspiracy to commit murder” and “preparing acts of terrorism.” It is hard to imagine weaker charges. But it is not at all difficult to understand why we have gutted our economy, chucked our rights, mortgaged our future, destroyed our status in the world and Lord knows what else because 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11. It’s terrorism. 24/7 Arabs. Men who enjoy cutting throats. The fact is, those were precious lives lost on 9/11—I can personally attest to that—but many fewer lives than are lost to handguns or drunk drivers each year. Indeed, we lose more children to diseases that could have been prevented. And who knows how many uninsured Americans die unnecessarily? It’s heresy to say it, but terrorism just isn’t the threat it’s been cracked up to be. Oh, it’s terrible when it happens, but in context, it just isn’t the big deal that Bush & Company want you to believe. But then, when have they told you the truth about anything? Truly. Name one. Lie #2. Every word our government tells us about our troops. Like: we’ll soon bring some home. Like: they are well-equipped. And, most of all: that they are gung-ho for “the mission.” Cut to the 172nd Stryker Combat Brigade. Thirty-eight hundred men and women had done a year in Iraq. They were coming home. Three hundred-eighty were already in Alaska. Three hundred were waiting for planes in Kuwait. Now 300 of those in Alaska and all the soldiers in Kuwait are on their way back to Iraq, Destination: Baghdad. Mission: keep Iraq from falling into the Civil War it’s been in for months. Are those soldiers jiggy with the mission? Here’s a website for their families. And here’s a wife, raging: “My world came crashing down. I sat down and cried, I didn't know what else to do. How was I going to keep going by myself. I had already spent a year away from my best friend, my husband, and now they want to keep him longer. My family is all the way on the other side of the country. I am alone. All I have is my kids. Ohhh, how am I going to tell my kids? "President Bush said the soldiers have to stay in Iraq, but he didn't have to feel my heart breaking. He didn't have to look into my kids’ eyes and tell them that there daddy isn't coming home. He doesn't have to live on edge constantly and fear every time the phone rings. He is not loosing hair, having anxiety attacks, constant diarrhea, and sick to his stomach every minute of everyday. I try to act happy and 'normal' for my kids’ sake, but it’s all fake. Inside I feel like I am dying. I love my husband and I am proud of the work he does. However I feel he has done his job over there and now it is time for him to come home to his family. Please, I beg for your help to get our loved ones home.” Click on the link for more heartbreaking stories. Happily for me, my world is smaller than larger than the news. Large, in that I can think as big as the sky allows here. Small, in that the leading actors are my nearest and dearest. We have the first two years of “Entourage” on DVD, and the Yankees are winning and winning and winning. We have food and water and cozy shelter. Lucky? Believe it. Not a politician in sight—I missed the Clintons last night—so the lies are at distance. My prayer for you: that your cable news channels don’t work, that you spend these last weeks of summer reading good books and listening to great music and watching fine movies. And that nothing “newsworthy” happens, so you don’t have to be offended by lies.
Monday, August 14, 2006
What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information. We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants. -- Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
First I was afraid/I was petrified/Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side/But I spent so many nights/thinking how you did me wrong/I grew strong/I learned how to carry on... Ah, disco. The glory days, before AIDS. Funny how those lyrics came to mean something different. Funny how they grid neatly over the reality we face in Year 6 of George Bush's un-American America. Is there anyone out there who still doesn't get the drill? Who doesn't understand that the United States is--by choice--in a state of permanent war? The United States is at war not because we have enemies, but because the American people are the enemy. The people have power--we could vote this band of crooks out. So we must be convinced that the people who are oppressing us are the only people who can save us. We must, in short, be brainwashed, defeated or demoralized. It is axiomatic that such a brain-bending domestic campaign would produce external enemies. That's all to the good. It proves that Bush and Cheney and their team were right--the world is a dangerous place. Best to knock our foes down before they get the first punch in. Who are our foes? Cadres of revolutionaries. Not governments. But fighting cadres is to be engaged in asymmetric warfare--police actions, with unorthodox weaponry. That kind of warfare is cheap. And we have invested in expensive hardware. So we must go to war with governments, even if, in the process, we cause more cadres to form. We had bin Laden at Tora Bora. We let him go. A criminal offense, if your name is Bill Clinton. Another day at the beach if you're George Bush. Why did we let bin Laden escape? Because we need him alive. He's the bogeyman, and although Bush likes to say he's not important, he's totally the point. Bin Laden is 9/11. And as long as Bush can invoke 9/11, he's got 20-30% of the voters right there. But the other point of 9/11 is less convenient: The same 30% of Americans who think Bush is doing a good job think that bin Laden and Saddam were brothers in arms. The rest of us want to cut and run. But we can’t say that loud and clear, because our government has assured us that we can’t leave Iraq without making these freedom-haters want to take the fight to us in other places --- like our shopping malls and soccer fields. But there’s not much the government can do to juice a good headline out of Iraq. It’s in civil war mode. Our troops stand by most of the time, trying to avoid casualties. Meanwhile, the militias pretty much run the country. (In Fallujah, the police got messages: Quit or die. Overnight, that police force shrunk from 2,000 to a few hundred officers.) So we need a new war. Iran will do. We could have dealt with Iran diplomatically, just as we could have dealt with North Korea and Syria (and, for that matter, Iraq). But talk is for wimps. Besides, if you talk, you occasionally have to listen, and our government has no interest in hearing anyone say anything but "you bet" and "how high." And that is why the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers led to $10 billion in damage to Lebanon and to a quarter of the population suddenly homeless. We needed Israel to take care of Hezbollah so there were no distractions when we hit Iran. We don't want war on two fronts. Israel must be secure when our bombers and missiles do the death dance on Iran. It could get complicated here, but only if you’re thinking. Don’t think. Just know that Al Qaeda equals Iran equals Syria equals Hezbollah equals Palestine. They’re just one big group of freedom-hating scary Muslims who want to destroy the American way of life. The new fascists. The Israeli "defense" of its borders was such a done deal that Dick Cheney left for Wyoming on July 29 and has not been back since--he’s taking the vacation Bush can’t. And why? Because the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah was planned months ago. All Israel needed was the excuse. The kidnapping provided it. But what’s interesting is that Israel got routed. No one expected it. (Our government is always surprised when "terrorists" are disciplined and well-armed.) What a monkey wrench in the American juggernaut. I never thought I would see the day where I cheer Hezbollah. (And I’m not cheering now. To flip the paradigm, the Israelis who died matter just as much as the Lebanese children and farmers who got slaughtered.) But Hezbollah has given Bush and Cheney a slap across the face with its PR victory over Israel. It may have saved the Middle East from going down in flames. For the moment. But only for the moment. Come November, we have an election. And that means some bad guys have to die. (Remember: no thinking.) They can't be white. That leaves the Islamo-Fascists building atomic bombs (not!) in Iran. The liquid-bomb terrorists gave Bush no bounce. Everybody seems to have heard they had no real "go" date. No plane tickets. Most had no passports. (Know how hard it is to get an EU passport now if you're Muslim?) And the news brought a fresh bummer: Homeland Security was trying to dump its research into weapons like these. Yowsa! So hi ho hi ho, it’s off to war we go. We’re just weeks away. The cable news patriots can go nuts all over again. And we can hear how a vote for a Democrat is a vote for terrorism. And in November, we’ll find out if the American people still fall for this BS. And then, after the election, we’ll deal with the war we started. Are you afraid? I am. Mostly of my own government.
Monday, August 07, 2006
The strategy for the Middle East is to keep Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon fighting. Keep all attention on them. If they ever stop, then everybody would look at Americans dying [in Iraq]. -- Jimmy Breslin
It wasn't the booze. It wasn't the echo of his father's loony views. It's something much simpler: his accent. Take the shrimp off the barbie at I hate juice.
Here are some wise words from Bernard-Henri Levy, in The New York Times: "I’m not one to play the dirty little game of counting corpses. But why shouldn’t what is due to some also be due to others? How come we hear so little, at least in the European press, of those Jewish victims who have died since Israel pulled out of Gaza? I have spent my life fighting against the idea that there are good deaths and bad deaths, deserving victims and privileged bombs. I have always agitated for the Israeli state to leave the occupied territories and, in exchange, win security and peace. For me, then, there is a question here of integrity and fairness: devastation, death, life in bomb shelters, existences broken by the death of a child, these are also the lot of Israel." And here's a shocker for those who believe this Jew has gone over to the Arab camp. I agree with Levy. It's awful on both sides. But what still blows my mind is how Hezbollah--which puts civilians at risk in Lebanon--out-strategized the Israelis. It's really at the point now where a military solution can't work. The choice for Israel, at least in the short term, is how to engineer the smallest loss. But the real scorn has to be reserved for Rice and Bush. All those years of big talk and swagger --when it came to the crunch, they proved themselves to be wimps. Can you imagine what HenryKissinger would have done if the president of Lebanon had told him he wasn't welcome? "My plane will land at 8 o'clock," Kissinger would have said. "Be there to meet me, or I'll give a press conference on the runway like you wouldn't believe." And though he's a war criminal, I would have cheered. This time around, it seems, the negotiators are the French. The French! Too ironic!
E-mail from a friend: Is it just me or did I just see what I thought I saw? The United States just made a mass evacuation of Americans half way around the world, on foreign soil with cruise ships, helicopters, 747's, DC 10's and military soldiers ... and they did this while bombs were falling and the Americans were hiding. However, they couldn't evacuate Americans in New Orleans that were all sitting on the roof tops of buildings and sitting in an arena sweating to death!
You think the Middle East is a bummer. Consider this report on the Amazon rainforest: The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year. Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down. Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.
Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel's greatest writers, has had only a handful of his 40 books translated into English. It's too bad. Then again, it's too bad Appelfeld didn't write "Badenheim 1939" under the pen name "Albert Camus"--if he had, this 148-page novel would be taught alongside "The Stranger" and regarded, rightly, as a modern classic. Appelfeld is a very unlikely writer. But then, it's remarkable that he's alive. Born in Romania in 1932, he was a quiet boy, an only child. He was just 8 when the Nazis shot his mother and deported him and his father to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, at which point they were separated for 20 years. Aharon escaped to Russia, where he was a shepherd. In 1944, at 12, he joined the Russian Army. When the war ended, he made his way to Italy and, finally, to Palestine. He spoke so many languages he couldn't express himself in any. And he had only a year or two of schooling. But he managed to enroll in college in Jerusalem and, soon after, to begin writing stories in Hebrew. Appelfeld has one great subject: understanding what happened to his people. "I'm dealing with a civilization that has been killed," he has said. "How to represent it in the most honorable way--not to equalize it, not to exaggerate, but to find the right proportion to represent it, in human terms." What kept him from depression, bitterness, suicide? "I've never been an angry person. This is what saved me." "Badenheim 1939"--the first of Appelfeld's books to be translated from Hebrew to English--is a modest, precise, even-handed tale. As it should be; this is a simple story, of a single season in a resort town favored by Jews. As the novel begins, Spring has arrived. So have the musicians. And the first tourists. But this season is unlike all others. How different? Read on.
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