Happy Thursday, Dear Reader, and welcome back. Previously, I introduced you to the spark for this series and the questions it awoke. Now, in Part I, I take you to the magical place from which I weave my story and explain why it matters. You’ll notice I’ve chosen the third person, mainly to create space and perspective—for I, too, am an observer on a journey with you here.

If there was anything she had learned in her nearly sixty years, it was to begin from where one stood. In her case, that meant starting with this place: this 715-meter-long, 400-meter-wide, teardrop-shaped island, the stony, weather-worn tip of an ice-age mountain ridge. The question of why she was here on this remote heap of rock and sand in Stockholm’s vast and meandering inland lake system followed her as she went about her days.

Her husband’s family had been coming here during the summers for three generations, so it wasn’t as if there was no explanation. There was even symmetry in being here, as she had met him on another teardrop-shaped island called Sri Lanka, far, far away. But what she still couldn’t reconcile was the reason. For it was she who had chosen this life above all other possibilities; she who had argued that they should live here when their children were small. Now, after nearly two decades of living closer to the city, she and her husband had returned, chipper and able-bodied, and past middle age. The children visited and then left again, reminding her they were grown. She could tell herself there were risks or that living here wasn’t normal, but each time she tried to turn away, this place drew her back to itself.

Here, nature was close in, and there was a peace of sorts, though everything around her was always struggling. Some said it was a simpler life, but this was only a fallacy promoted by tourism marketing and the glossies, online or off—in truth, life and simplicity had nothing to do with one another. The word they were actually looking for was connectedness, which she knew she had found here from the very first night when, looking through the sleet-spattered window into absolute darkness, she’d heard it, shooting through the thick sheet of lake ice like a laser, deep below the surface, awakening her out of rootlessness as if it had only been a dream. Over the years, more such epiphanies would occur, but mostly the tendrils of this place slowly attached themselves to her, grounding her in the soil, immersing her in the water, and making her breath inseparable from its air. She became the seasons, and the seasons became her; and, about this, she wrote.

Above all, the island connected her to distant memory, paving the way for a revolution in her life. For a truly rootless person like her, the past could be a blur or even taboo. Most likely, this was, at least in part, a protective reflex to dull the pain of people and places left behind. She’d written so many impassioned letters to try to keep them present in her life, but the correspondence mostly faded with the passage of time or the lack thereof and the eventual disappearance of letters altogether. Some said the past was only a burden and best left alone. Memory wasn’t an easy path; navigating between the real and the imaginary was often treacherous, the intensity like infinity waiting to explode. Yet living without context left a void so troubling that it manifested in all manner of problems. Life without past and memory was hopelessly brittle, she discovered.

Here on the teardrop, in plain sight, was the ancient memory shared by all things of how no-life had given rise to its opposite: how, despite all the odds, or perhaps because of a mystery that transcended understanding, a carpet of evergreen lichen, a symbiosis of algae and fungus, had broken down the stone to form a thin layer of soil; how the moss moistened and held this precarious soil bed together until the first low plants, among them, the ferns, uncoiled and wove roots into it and gave it the fabric of land; how, as they withered and fed the awakening soil, the trees began to rise, offering shade and shelter and sustenance to creatures that left the waters, at first slithering, then creeping, galloping and even flying; how, when the trees cracked and fell in the storms, the armored woodlouse, nature’s undertakers, breathed through their gills to reach the darkest, most airless crevices, and, by ingesting the dead, released death’s life-giving powers. In the torn earth left by the foraging of greedy wild boars was also the ancient memory of all life’s condition: no living thing must hoard the land, the water or the sky, for that would be the beginning of its end. But fear of death and the desire to defy it were so overpowering that they usually led to a forgetting. Herein lay the seed of all tragedy.

Thus, the most powerful trace of this ancient memory lay in the unseen: in perception and the reaction to it, emotion, at the core of which was the never-ending struggle to accept that beauty and tragedy were inseparable. Like twins that had emerged from a single cell that had divided, their origins were the same, and one could not have been conceived without the other. This inseparability of experience was the crucible of love, which those who had come here before her must have experienced too, wandering this place just as she did, with a film of tears over her eyes, knowing amid the surviving that all was most beautiful as it was already dying.

Evidence of the others was everywhere underground or underwater, in the time capsules she discovered while tending her garden. There was the flint that had once been used to scrape the inner membrane from an animal’s skin so its fur could be worn during the punishing winters; then there were the long, thick, handmade rusted nails that haunted her with their suggestion of biblical crucifixions, though, in all likelihood, they had been used for constructive purposes; or the blunted rusty blade of an ice skate that had once transported someone across the lake, trusting it was not yet their time.

Much had been buried by the sand miners who had eked out a living by gouging sand and transporting it to the city, where it became cement for building Stockholm’s most elegant and prominent buildings. And, just under the surface of the murky bay was the iron barge, now a muddy ghost ship softened by algae, which they’d sunk when they’d finally left in the 1930s after a century of enduring with their families, sheltered through biting winters only by the four small rooms with wood-burning stoves that remained at the heart of the house.

The stone terraces that led down to the lake seemed too grand for the house until she discovered they had been built on the foundation of empty ”Bullen’s Pilsner-sausage” cans and tiny clear glass milk bottles, densely packed beneath the rocky ground. These were remnants from the 1950s, when her husband’s grandfather, the family’s patriarch, who had acquired this place in a clever trade with the local aristocracy, built the terraces, possibly lunching on local milk and guaranteed salmonella-free sausages to save his wife, an orphan and once his servant, who walked with a limp, from all-too-much work in a house that still lacked electricity and water. Instead, she sat on the warm sun terrace of the extra small cottage he’d built especially for her so she wouldn’t be cold, while he worked on his terraces, which may have been his saving grace from crippling depression.

Near the deserted northern tip of the teardrop, also disguised by softening flora but above-ground, was the stone cellar of an 18th-century seafarer’s inn once run by a commoner and a former lady-in-waiting at court who had left the hierarchical society that could not tolerate their union. All around it, the fruit trees had gone wild, the tiny crab apples providing sustenance for the many birds that flew from the trees whenever she approached. Public records showed the couple had given up their children for adoption, presumably because the conditions did not support feeding them.

Here, children had suffered, died, or been deserted, which, for a child, were the same thing; and yet, here, too, children had healed and thrived. During the years when he had lost all three of his siblings owing to their severe congenital handicaps, her husband spent his summers with his grandparents, in the bosom of nature. Under the gruff, aging patriarch's guidance, he experienced life’s vibrancy, which, in later years, he strove to pass on to their children.

By the sheer force of the past which this place brought to bear on her, the memories inside her began to stir and reveal the labyrinth of experiences within. She wrote and wrote, sensing all along that this process would eventually take her into forbidden pasts.

For six years, she journeyed back to a time not long before hers, a time of fear and terror in which her grandparents had lived. It shook her to her core, but it was also the kiln of her values and an expansion of her consciousness, which she would need in the disillusionment of the early twenty-first century. Still, she was a part of this new time and all that had contributed to it; no one, no event, and no place stood ‘outside.’ She began to consider this and embarked on a new journey to her own beginnings in a land far, far away.

Up next: We return to Brazil in 1967. P.S. Expect this series to appear in your inbox on a Thursday or a Sunday, as new parts of it become available.

Listen to “Teardrop,” a song that evokes the beauty, tragedy, and love in our common ancient memory. (For the magnificent lyrics, see here.)

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Greetings, dear reader. It has been a while, not out of neglect but to allow the ideas for the story I’d like to share in this special space between you and me to mature.

The spark for this series, which I’ll be sharing this late summer and autumn, flew from this spring’s reading. That would have been around mid-March, when the waterbirds brought life to the widening holes in the thinning ice sheet, which had begun to look like a decaying old man. Then, just as they were settling in, a great wind came and broke it all up, blowing the ice into our bay, where it clanked like church bells at a wedding. As John Steinbeck once wrote in his Journal of a Novel, we humans love our paradoxes—the birth of my story in a fine spring out of the closing reflections of another person’s life will have been no different.

In 1942, at the age of 60, as war and persecution raged in Europe, Austrian author, playwright, poet and pacifist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) sat at a desk in a rented house in the Valparaíso neighborhood of Petrópolis, a city nestled in the mountains 68 km (42 mi) north-northeast of Rio de Janeiro, and wrote about the world that had formed him. No doubt, the elevation, the European milieu, and even the remnants of an imperial past in a city founded by the Brazilian aristocracy for their summer retreats must have recalled his Austrian homeland. Likewise, the many steps to the house, built on a steep hill, must have been an uncanny reminder of the one hundred steps to the “romantic and impractical” home on the Zauberberg in Salzburg, which he had fled nine years before, when the persecution of Jews in Europe began.

No matter how painful these memories were, he wrote without tiresome nostalgia, which did not mean without passion. As if determinedly polishing a dusty window, he revealed an at once vibrant and ominous view of a world order that, at first gradually, then suddenly, came to an end. Maybe he wrote to reassure himself that it had existed; to come to terms with the loss. When he was done, he sent it to his publishers at Bermann-Fischer, who had taken refuge from Nazism in Stockholm, and, relinquishing the pen forever, crossed over into timelessness with his wife, Lotte.

In the late 20-teens, when I’d first read “The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, “ in a villa near Stockholm, where I was living at the time, these lines from the first page struck me with foreboding:

“If I try to find a handy formula for the time before the First World War in which I grew up, I hope to be most concise when I say: it was the golden age of security,” he wrote.

Even if absolute security is a delusion—the dinosaurs were secure until a comet hit them—Zweig’s words resonated with me, recalling a feeling I recognized by its ever more conspicuous absence. A question began to preoccupy me: Had I, too, been formed by and lived most of my life in a golden age of relative security that was ending or already over? If so, what was the substance of that age and the feeling of unassailability it had given rise to?

Share

The more I thought about it, the faster it ran through my fingers. After all, the retrogressive political disease spreading throughout the world hadn’t come from nowhere. The dangers posed by climate change and nuclear weapons, heightened by evolving technology, had been present throughout my life, and there had always been a handful of highly disturbed, power-hungry individuals who managed to dupe the many and wreak destruction. Maybe we were just learning how insecure we’d long been.

But there could also be personal explanations: maybe I was just more aware of the dangers of existence after the protective physical chemistry of younger years had worn off; maybe the death of a parent who had once represented all the security in the world was finally sinking in a decade after his passing; or maybe my choice of a high-risk vocation was catching up with me. So many maybes and yet all the signs were that these were breaking times.

The post-war world order presided over by the United States, my father’s country and thus also mine, seemed to be crumbling. At the same time, there was also the sense that America and the West could still pull back and restore things to “normal.” Even the resistance movement I joined to counter the new fascism often saw things this way. We acted in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who had resisted the forces of darkness during WWII, and, in the name of their bravery, we would preserve the international system that, however flawed, had kept the peace they had so valiantly fought for. In our minds, we knew that history flowed like a river, but in our hearts, we still hoped it had ended, because after so much horror and want, health and prosperity had reached more people than ever and would continue to do so if only we could hang onto what we’d had.

The second reading of “The World of Yesterday” this spring was different. The new century was a few more years along—each year a dizzying decade. The old order could not be preserved; it wasn’t even desirable. From all points of view, we had to let it go, take the best of it with us and build something better. Now Zweig’s words struck me with compassion in its truest sense: shared suffering over the loss of extraordinary times, people, and places, and the comforting illusions that had to be abandoned.

As I, too, approach 60, “The World of Yesterday” feels more personal. As it happens, I began life’s journey in Rio de Janeiro, 68 km south-southwest of where Zweig’s ended. Like him, although earlier in life, I had traversed the continents and retreated to a “romantic and impractical” place at once foreign and familiar; writing was my refuge. There were, of course, many differences; above all, that I still saw a future, even as I grappled daily with how to live in this old-new world.

So, during the coming days and weeks, out of this summer of fire as the first autumn winds begin to blow across my island, I’ll be sharing my world of yesterday or the world that formed me. Like the beautiful piano concerto, partly inspired by Zweig’s memoir and composed by Sir Stephen Hough during the pandemic, shared with this post, I hope to show how it was at once magical and tragic, fragile and majestic, and now seemingly distant but oh-so-present. Ultimately, the intention is to inspire reflection on how we are to live in this new century, because, despite the overwhelming nature of our challenges, we still have choices. This represents the continuation of the writing for Stefan, in gratitude; for me, as I approach what feels like a very special new age; and for you, dear reader, for reasons only you can know.

Credits: The flowing river sound in the intro/outro to the Audio version of this post is by Mixkit Sound.

Leave a comment

Share

Well, what do you know? I thought I wouldn’t see my second draft back for a while yet. But before I could dance a private little jig for having finished it, it was back on my desk from my husband, always my first reader, with glowing praise for certain chapters and troublesome question marks over others. So goes the craft, and thus I write to you with my nose back to the grindstone.

With that said, as I continue to contemplate my planned essay series about the world that formed me in the run-up to turning 60 to be published here on Substack (see my last post), I am re-reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, “The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European,” first published in 1942. It opens with some lines about Europe before 1914, the world that formed him, that cut straight to my nearly sixty-year-old heart:

“If I try to find a handy formula for the time before the First World War in which I grew up, I hope to be most concise when I say: it was the golden age of security” (Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, first ed. 1942). When he wrote these lines, he was, like me, 59, living in a war-torn world in which one could not trust the ground beneath one’s feet.

Alienated and displaced from his native Austria as World War II raged, Zweig, a leading Austrian writer and a Jew, submitted the manuscript to his publisher and, shortly thereafter, ended his own life together with his wife in a hotel on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in 1942 (where, coincidentally, I was born 25 years later). Despite the fate of its author, or perhaps because of the strength it must have taken to write so exquisitely under such pressures, books like this renew the human experience in language that reassures us, all is not lost.

Herewith a short poem that emerged after an early morning immersed in “The World of Yesterday” before another challenging day in the terrible beauty of the early 21st century. I’m tinkering with voice recordings of my work, so if you enjoy listening to poetry, you can listen to this imperfectly but most humanly recorded poem read by yours truly.

Morning Read



Waking with a stone

In the heart

Or the lungs,

The belly

Not sure where,

But there, where life force arises


Too early sunlight

Encrusts eyelids,

Presses temples—

How is a person

To be

On another day of killing?



There is another world

Right beside me

Still and clear

Familiar and tragic

Stretching itself wide

To hold us all


Summon the will

Open to the page

Sink deep

Let go

Feel, know

The stone dissipating.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Hello, dear friends! Just coming up for air from intensive manuscript editing in observance of International Women’s Day, which means so much more than itself these days. A little like the Pride flag, which now hangs outside my summer cottage in place of any national flag, this day is about the sanctity of the individual, the fundamental equality of all beings, and the right of each person to dream, aspire, and become.

I also wanted to give you a heads up about new directions The Tendril will be climbing in. When I turned 59 this January, it suddenly struck me that next year is the big 60. Whatever happens from then (from now!) has to count, no more rehearsals for life, as the indomitable Jane Fonda recently reminded me. In a series of short personal essays, I’ll be reflecting on a bygone era—I think we can call it that now—that shaped my formative years and most of my life until the past decade or so. It was an extraordinary time, the first in which something like a global consciousness emerged, which also challenged our sense of belonging and had serious consequences for the health of our planet.

There are other surprises afoot: a little new media, including conversations and recordings, so that you can rest your weary eyes, sit back, and just listen.

For now, while the manuscript is still being polished, here is a poem I wrote as what I hope will be the last spring snow this year, fell. Maybe it represents the first intimations of a new book—an image, a sentiment, a memory, a season, the whisper of the wind through the reeds that says: there is something here to pursue in your last act, the next thirty years (hopefully).

Happy International Women’s Day!

Woman’s Boudoir on a Snowy Morning

I’d seen myself sitting there before

In that woman’s alcove

At the dresser

With the mirror and the hairbrushes

Looking out the window

At the things you once said, falling on me

Like snowflakes on too-willing leaves

Someday it would come to this,

The birds looking out for Spring

From the branches below,

Like eager children

Waiting for parents to shine on them,

And I’d wonder: were you right

Or, as the heart grew, did it really matter?

On the things a parent once said and how we spend much of life coming to terms with them, until, after many seasons, the growing heart reframes our struggles. On a woman in her boudoir. On the coming of spring.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I’m writing to you from Skanör on the Falsterbo peninsula, on the southern coast of Sweden, facing Denmark, where I’ll be giving a talk tonight in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s especially poignant to be here in a hotel room looking out upon this wintry sound, as the conversation I write about below was with a friend whose grandmother once endured a treacherous journey across it in no more than a small fishing boat to escape the Nazis. Many tried to escape this way. Not all survived. Smuggled from a Danish farming family to a Swedish fishing family, my friend’s grandmother was saved—the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust--by the goodness and solidarity of ordinary people. She went on to create a new family in the United States. Today, her granddaughter retells her story in a United States which, in a sinister twist of history, has itself taken a turn toward fascism.

Last week, a dear friend, a comrade-in-arms, if you like, left a voice message at 6 a.m. EST, my time, 12 p.m. CET, the next day. The voice was hushed, yet as crystal clear as a newly polished window, and as calm as the pastoral scene I imagined it was beckoning me to look at. Her baby gurgled in the background. All the sounds of her home were as crisp as an Ingmar Bergman film or a Bach prelude. “Tell me a story, Mommy,” the child murmured, even before it was old enough to speak or to understand the words. I settled in for a tale. My friend laughed at the weirdness, the trippy-ness, the bizarreness of what she had to say, a little like I did when, many years ago, I read the Harry Potter series to my children. But the stillness in her voice seemed ominous, like being in the eye of a storm. Already, I felt as though falling down a rabbit hole with Alice into Wonderland, although the world I was about to land in is very real.

“ICE is in my neighborhood, in my street; they took somebody from my quarter the other day,” my friend said, her voice even and close. As I listened, I found myself on the grounds of the Queen of Hearts’ croquet match, where the characters live in constant fear of having their heads cut off. Crucially, the difference was that, in my friend’s story, fear had birthed courage. “Yesterday was the strangest day,” she continued. “I am so amazed by all the people who are stepping up in the neighborhood. Everyone wants to be signed up,” she explained, describing the elaborate system that had emerged in no time to counter ICE’s violence. “It doesn’t change the government hunting us down,” she cautioned. “You get the worst of people and the best of people. It’s wild.”

I unpacked her words: THE GOVERNMENT, meaning the federal government of the United States of America, of which both she and I are citizens, is hunting down its own as well as other innocent civilians, with the enthusiasm of a pack of ill-tempered teenagers playing an online war game. The moment we’d both, sometimes together, been warning others about for so long had arrived. Suddenly, the meaning of resistance broke out of the amorphous past we’d both devoted our lives and professions to trying to understand, taking form like a mountain range emerging in a seismic shift. Now we knew that it was all that stood between us and the abyss. And suddenly, I also understood that what she and I had been doing all these years was not preventing such a moment from emerging, because we could not—the worst in people will always try to destroy us—but that we had persisted to nurture the best in us, because only that could eventually save us. My friend’s grandmother survived the Holocaust because of the humanity, courage, and resilience of many ordinary people. It is a lesson she has been sharing widely for many years.

Subscribe now

I listened to the message once more and sat with it and Alice in Wonderland for a while in my study. The Cheshire Cat’s grin seemed everywhere, but no one believed it, just like the aged reality TV star’s capped teeth. The characters beholden to the Wonderland regime asked ridiculous questions for which there could only be ridiculous answers. Somehow, it was always six o’clock. Alice grew very tall or very small, depending on what potion she drank. “Who am I?” she wondered as her world became ever more absurd. There was only one thing that protected Alice from losing her bearings: to call things for what they were. “They’re only a pack of cards,” she says of the Queen’s soldiers.

At the outset of 2026, calling things for what they are may be the only thing preventing all of us everywhere from losing our bearings. So, let us say it: ICE, and by association, the U.S. federal government, has murdered innocent civilians, its own citizens, in cold blood in the cold light of day. This was no mistake; it was part of an organized campaign of terror. The names of the two citizens murdered this January are Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Let’s repeat them in our hearts as often as we can. My friend’s voice message exemplifies the naming of realities that must be repeated over and over until the lies drown. Where fiction meets reality is that tyrannical regimes are, by their nature, a pack of cards, or, more aptly, a house of cards. They fall as soon as enough of us remember to breathe and to tell our stories with calm and resolute clarity. As I head off to deliver an address for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the local church, facing the sound between Sweden and Denmark, where my friend’s grandmother was once ferried away from the Nazi terror in a small fishing boat, I keep this in mind.

“On Bondi Beach“ is a poem I wrote after hearing of the tragedy that occurred there on 14 December 2025. Bondi Beach was once my childhood playground.

“Alice in Wonderland on the Way to Auschwitz” is a poem dedicated to my friend, Adéle Schreiber, who took her copy of “Alice in Wonderland” with her when she was deported to Auschwitz. She passed away in 2022, just shy of one hundred years old, from complications due to COVID.

A discussion that took place at Davos this year, which I hope you’ll take the time to watch. While one can debate how dangerous or beneficial AI will be to humans in the future, democracy is the best tool we have for changing our direction when things go wrong. Let’s all work to strengthen and improve it!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

This autumn, I’ve leaned into the last chapters of an extraordinary story that, years ago, fell into my lap, so to speak and that, during the two years I have been working on it, has felt like a radical undoing (thanks for that term goes to poet David Whyte, whose Substack I encourage you to join), requiring me to question my basic assumptions. While it may be true that the writing of all good stories requires, at some level, a willingness to be changed, the intensity of this one was unexpected.

What follows, below, should not be regarded as a preview of the book; it isn’t. (Please check the end of this posting for links to other postings where I have provided glimpses.) Rather, it is a reflection on faith at the end of two years of writing and discovering that it is at the heart of the work.

So, what is faith, and why do we humans need it?

When I was a young child, living with my parents and younger sister in far-flung parts of the world, we sometimes paid short visits to my father’s mother and sister, who lived in Queens, Long Island. I felt an immediate and strong connection to my Scottish grandmother, a deeply religious Catholic immigrant from poverty-stricken Paisley. During our short visits, when we all crammed into the welcoming but somewhat crowded house, I slept with her in her bedroom, where her rosary hung near the glass of clear solution in which she immersed her dentures at night.

Having folded back the bedcover she had masterfully crocheted, we’d sit on the edge of the bed, and she’d lead the bedtime prayer with a mouth that somehow managed to look as sure as it was sunken. I mumbled after her, my mouth full of gaps where my milk teeth had fallen out. Prayer was a novelty for me, since both of my parents, for their own reasons, seemed to have shunned religion. After that, we’d climb in between the sheets, and I’d nestle under her downy chin and fall asleep in the confidence that, like one of those crocheted patches she had sewn together with other equally-sized patches to make her masterful bedcovers, I belonged with this woman who made me a part of something greater than myself (an epiphany for a young child) and who, though she was my biological grandmother and we shared the same initials, J.C., was a stranger in all other respects.

Thus, my first taste of religious faith suggested that it had something to do with trusting that, while we may all be strangers, we are not alone. But then came the necessary breaking away to become a self-sufficient individual, along with the skepticism that education brings. At school and university, I excelled in history, which seemed to me, to a great extent, to be about the abuse of faith—the hijacking of religion by the power-hungry and the bloodthirsty, or the substitution of religion by ideological-nihilistic cults, resulting in, for example, the worst crimes of the twentieth century (not to mention the early 21^st).

Whenever I saw the crucifix, especially with the blood-drained innocent young Jesus with those horrific wounds nailed to it, I could feel angry to the point of disdain. How could people hang this instrument of torture on their walls or, even worse, around their necks? Worst of all, religion seemed to me to be a cop-out wrapped in a false sense of superiority: once, when I asked a relative how he had found a certain, very desirable off-the-beaten-path destination, he replied, “Well, duh, I followed Jesus!?” So, maps were useless trinkets, things happened to us, and, aside from being damned if we didn’t accept this, we were downright misguided to harbor any sense of our own agency, except for following a dead man, of course. Faith, at least in the form of religion, seemed hopeless and alienating.

In the summer of 2009, life hurled me a knockout punch. Without saying who delivered it, I can tell you that it took me months to find my bearings again. When I did, I began what, unbeknownst to me then, would become a years-long process of exposing a forbidden family past (that phrase became the subtitle of the book I subsequently wrote). If I could find one word to define that period, it was doubt, an a-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea kind of doubt. Daily, I asked myself deeply disturbing questions, such as, why dig up the past, especially against most of the family’s will, and complicate my life? As an emotionally scarred family member, was I equipped, despite my training as a historian, to play the role of impartial observer when faced with documents and eyewitnesses? Above all, was it morally wrong to judge those who came before you and lived in times you could barely imagine?

Subscribe now

In hindsight, however, there was another word for an idea that also defined that period: doubt’s shining twin, faith. If prayer with my Scottish grandmother had suggested that we strangers were not alone, then this grueling process in which strangers magically appeared to assist me when I needed them most, fostered the belief that we had been called upon to acknowledge something larger that could shine brighter than any one of us on our own. The catch was that we’d never catch a glimpse of it, if we ever did, without effort; in fact, it could demand falling apart and painstakingly putting oneself together again in a different composition, as I eventually wrote in the afterword to my book about this journey. Above all, after wading through shocking primary documents in archives and listening to the heart-wrenching stories of eyewitnesses in the killing fields of WWII Poland, it demanded accepting that the bad and the ugly co-existed with the good in me, too. To turn the ship of humanity toward a better future, we had to learn to recognize it and do what we could to emphasize the latter. In this way, I learned that true faith was not for the faint-hearted; rather, it demanded Herculean strength.

During my travels in Latin America, to which my grandparents fled during the resumption of war crimes trials in West Germany and Israel, I stumbled upon an uncle whom, throughout life, I had been made to understand was dead. The manner of his apparently gory death had even been described to me by relatives. Traveling all the way to Paraguay to meet him, his wife, and my two cousins, I learned the true meaning of a leap of faith. I could give in to all the little demons stoking fires in my head—family prejudices and my own—or I could believe that there was meaning in this unbelievable coincidence. As it happened, it had great meaning, and continues to do so, not only to me. My uncle died last week at the ripe old age of ninety in the care of his loving family, who I am so glad to call my own, too. Knowing them helps me to understand myself better.

Since then, I’ve devoted a great deal of time to art in the form of writing. As in religion, in art, there are no certainties. It means that you enter into a pact between yourself and something out there—call it God or the muse—without knowing what the result will be or whether there will be any result at all. The protagonist of my new manuscript saw all his writing, his novels and poems that became popular psalms, as a process of naming; that is to say, putting words to this divine, unquantifiable, uncontainable force. It seems an impossibility, it is an impossibility, and that is the beauty, the wonder, and inherent tragedy of art and faith in art.

As 2025 comes to an end, I am holding out hope that humans will make the 21^st century better than the 20^th. I must—I am a mother. However, I have to concede that the gremlins of doubt are making serious inroads. This is where the story I have just finished writing helps me, because it is about what we are to do, how we are to be, when the light of humanity dims, and fear spreads its insidious reign, wrecking our bridges to hope. This is where faith, whether through religion, art, or other means, comes in: it keeps a candle burning, insisting that we are not alone when we feel small and atomized. It is where leaps of faith come in, because they’re needed when those bridges have been destroyed.

More than half a century later, I can still hear my Scottish grandmother’s quiet prayer, and it strengthens me: “Lift your sights, stranger-sister,” it says, “there is an ocean in you, the one that is in me and all around us.”

Leave a comment

Share

Previous Postings providing glimpses into my new work:

It’s a Wonderful Life

The Land Inside

A Writer at War

The Eternal House

Postcard to the Future

Afterthoughts:

Events

For anyone in the Malmö, Sweden area on the evening of 27 January, I’ll be giving a talk at the Swedish Church in Höllviken on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Two opera singers will be performing psalms by the author and poet Jochen Klepper, the subject of my new book.

Poetry

Enjoy Window to the Moon, a poem I wrote this November in the mountains about a meeting between old strangers.

Music

If there is a piece of music that embodies a leap of faith, it must be Keith Jarrett’s Cologne Concert. Starting at 11.30 pm on January 24^th, 1975, at the Cologne Concert House, the only time slot available after another performance that evening, Jarrett played to a full house on a piano that had been in disrepair only hours before. The album became the best-selling solo jazz album of all time.

An eleven-year-old boy receives a postcard dated 8 December 1942, from a well-known German author and poet, a close friend of his parents living in Berlin. Just three years before, the boy and his family fled Germany for neutral Sweden because of his mother’s Jewish heritage and his father’s work as a pastor, both reasons for persecution under the Nazis. The author and his family are unable to leave because the German authorities have so far refused to issue the necessary permits.

He feels a special closeness to the author, not only because their families were persecuted for the same combination of reasons, but also because they have a common artistic calling. “When I was your age, I also wrote plays for my puppet theater; I’d very much like to read your play sometime,” the postcard says unassumingly, free of any reference to the author’s desperate situation. By the time the boy receives it, the author and his family are already dead because the alternative would have been separation and deportation of his daughter and maybe even his wife, who are Jewish.

The boy never forgets that postcard or the fate of the family. In fact, those few precious words—mustered in unimaginable conditions, when the author and his wife had already set in motion plans to end their lives—strengthen the boy’s determination to pursue his unusual passion. At first, like his author friend, he’d wanted to become a novelist, but the postcard is a calling to heed his own inner calling. It is a personal message but also the author’s signum: through his novels and poems, he has helped so many to defy outer pressures and heed their inner voices.

The boy knows he is fortunate. As he gets older, thinking of what might have been sends chills down his spine. The school he attends in Viggbyholm, Sweden, is uncommon for its time: a place run by people concerned with human rights and the integrity of the individual, even before these ideas became an international standard under the United Nations. Apart from encouraging creativity, it also instills a keen awareness of ethics. But the postcard from the persecuted author is unlike any other catalyst. It is an arrow to the heart that cannot be removed, and out of the pain, the lifelong pursuit of his passion emerges.

Subscribe now

Over the years, the boy becomes one of the world’s leading marionettists, establishing a theater that travels the world performing pieces inspired by classical myths and legends. As if this weren’t enough, later, he establishes a museum for the many striking marionettes he and his colleagues have made, the faces of which have evoked humanity’s most enduring questions.

The author, with no future, helped a boy to grasp his bright dreams. The simple act of writing a postcard was an extraordinary act of overcoming, but it must have benefited him as well. Exhausted from years of fighting to provide for and protect his family in an increasingly hostile environment, he had lost the ability to write, save penning the necessary letters and keeping his diary. The postcard was a chance to recall a more innocent time, his own childhood days of unselfconscious creativity before the struggles and the self-doubt began.

Moreover, even if he did not intend it as an act of resistance, this was resistance at its most poignant. Handcuffed by the shackles of persecution, he wrote some of the most impactful words of his life. The words were so clear and simple that, like quiet spirits, they passed through the shouting, the lying, and the censors to reach someone who, with all his life’s might, would work for a different kind of society.

This true story, woven into the book I am currently writing, has a timeless quality: amid its tragic end, an earlier generation has the foresight to leave a calm note of faith for the new, encouraging one life, which will inspire many others and thereby build a better society.

The postcard was expressly written in 1942 to a boy, a person I have had the pleasure of meeting many years after his retirement from a long and most unusual career. Yet, when I read the words, they speak to me too. Pursue your creative calling, they say, not despite the adversity that anyone in the creative arts encounters, but because it means something to others and is the foundation of a free society. They also urge me to look beyond myself, between the cracks of the darkening clouds in our world, to ask what I can do and what I might leave behind that will inspire a new generation in a better world when I am gone.

What better gift, what better example, can there be for a young boy in 1942, for a writer in 2025, for all of us for all time?

Afterthoughts:

Kid is a poem I wrote this summer based on a different and, in some ways, more tragic story because, in it, the young have no future. I could not help but write it when my son, traveling in the mountains of South Korea, told me of his experience of keeping a young goat company during its excruciating week-long life. Writing it, I was reminded of the wars that continue to rage in our world, in which the youngest always suffer the most.

An old friend, with whom I have recently been debating, has publicly opened up the question of how we can create a world without war. He is engaging many people in the discussion, and all good thoughts are needed. You can hook up with him to join this urgent debate at LinkedIn (look for Sundeep Waslekar, President of the Strategic Foresight Group). I’ll provide a review of his book by the same title in a future posting.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

They’ve lined the house with flowers, vases everywhere, full of whatever is available from the garden, especially in summer, but even as autumn and winter, nature’s slumbering time and therefore his time for writing, approaches. Neither he nor his wife likes to make statements or protest loudly; they can’t afford to because it could endanger their daughter. However, under the circumstances, one could see this house, with its many flowers, as a protest. The soft petals in many colors counter the monolith of steely strength that the regime would like to portray itself and the nation it has hijacked as. It seems effortless—putting flowers in vases around the house—but in a world where unbearable dreams weigh down the days, it is a triumph.

Their routines, including an elegantly set table at mealtimes, no matter how sparse the offerings, their intensive letter-writing to friends, book and article writing, and the maintenance of this home and its garden, elude the regime’s goal of undermining the sanctity of the personal realm. Everywhere, there are the signs of an unquenchable thirst for spiritual nourishment—the Mannborg piano where composers have set his poems to song, the library full of new and old classics, and the antique Christian icons collected on travels through the years. The latter, especially the figures of Jesus, represent transcendence and the idea that no man is greater than God, which the regime attempts to quash with its leader cult. The house wears the Church year—Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost—like a colorful feather in a hat. The Party flag is notably absent. He calls the dining room a “refectory” after the dining hall in a monastery. In it, they break bread with the few visitors they try to help, even as they are persecuted themselves, a ritual that honors the bonds of charity and solidarity among friends.

However, in his diary, a work which will one day be considered by some as “an immense existential achievement,” he admits to the difficulty of making progress with his new book, “The Eternal House.” He seems to have lost his capacity to immerse himself in his work and write for hours, even during the indoor season. The figurative wolves are at the door, howling for his attention, threatening his family. It is any person’s nightmare, let alone a professional writer’s.

Perhaps this house will never be more than what both he and she call a “tragic idyll,” a small paradise destined, with its inhabitants, to succumb to what he senses are end times. Some say their refusal to let it go and to leave early enough doomed the family to take their own lives. And yet, reading of how they lived in it over the years, one cannot help but be moved by the immense existential achievement of the way they carried on, filling the vases, putting pen to paper, reading, playing and listening to music, setting the table, welcoming friends in need, breaking bread, celebrating the church year and their birthdays.

The regime ended, its leadership met a fittingly sordid end, but this story of a family in their cherished house amid the storm has an eternal quality about it; a lantern that stays lit through the tumult of all time, always so close to anyone who cherishes their life at home.

You can tell that I am back working on my manuscript about my discovery of the Kleppers and their experience of living in their beloved home in Berlin during the 1930s and early 40s until their deaths by suicide in December 1942. The more I delve into their story, the more multifaceted its relevance becomes to my own life (though hopefully I can avoid their end).

Recently, when trapped in a small one-room cottage at the water’s edge on my summer island in the worst gale in memory, too far away from the main house to leave, I thought of them and the meaning of house and home in a stormy world. So often, in my own rootlessness, I’ve struggled with the idea: for the longest time, forming attachments to places seemed to me at best irrelevant, at worst painful, because the moving boxes were always at the door. I’ll leave explaining why to future missives.

Yet, as those sharp, sometimes heavy, large objects hurtled past the window, I couldn’t but help be calmed by the warmth of my nine-month-old pup in my arms, the sturdiness of the wooden beams, the protection of the shingled roof, and the compartmentalization of the wild weather by the squares of the latticed windows. The intimacy of it was like an anaesthesia that stopped time.

The Kleppers were often criticized for endangering their daughter’s life by clinging to their treasured home in Nikolasee, Berlin, for too long. While the argument is simplistic, even if it were so, I sympathize deeply with them. Living in what feels ominously like an “end time,” Klepper’s words for describing the age in which he lived, makes having a place where we can hold one another, wrap ourselves in the security of our cherished routines and nourish our spirits with our books, music, and the symbols of our faiths and beliefs, like the transcendence of a collapsing old world.

The Eternal House was never written, except in fragments; however, perhaps each of us, with the privilege of inhabiting a protected space with our loved ones in good times and bad, is writing it all the time by living this most ageless of ideas.

Enjoy, Letting Go, a poem I wrote this Midsummer, realizing that I’d soon probably have to leave a home I’ve loved living in for many years.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

But it wasn’t just the story itself. Rather, it was the combination of an extraordinary tale with its teller, an octogenarian from conservative Catholic small-town Bavaria, a person from whom one might least expect openness to sharing complex private matters in public, let alone the capacity to reimagine life and her closest relationships. Maybe the latter is the very meaning of modernity, an invaluable quality currently drowning in a wave of regressive politics and culture.

While being preened by makeup artists and served refreshments by kind assistants in the waiting room behind the television studio with the other participants, I wondered who among us was the Holocaust survivor. So often, when I participate in public forums with my family story, the organizers invite someone, in the words of one media producer who will remain nameless, “from the other side.” I’ve spent many fruitful years working with Holocaust survivors and their descendants—most recently touring Sweden for two years in public dialogue with a dear friend of mine whose grandmother, chosen by her family in the ghetto to survive, was told by a Ukrainian who knew she was hiding in a barn as she fled that he could trade her with the Germans for a kilo of sugar.

It is precisely because I have heard this and other comparable survivor stories so many times that I know they can never be heard enough. They have truly added meaning and context to my own work. But to invite us to appear together to somehow have both “sides” of a historical conflict represented has always seemed to me to be wrong thinking. We all want the same thing: respect for the integrity of all people, the basis for peace. I’d go so far as to say that humans will not be able to shed warfare as long as this perception of “sides” inherited through generations endures.

So, when the very friendly, well-groomed older dame, accompanied by her energetic filmmaker daughter, arrived in the waiting room, I assumed they had been invited as a counterbalance to whatever I had to say. We chatted briefly, but aside from the psychologist invited to the program to provide professional commentary on our experiences for the public, none of us said a word about what we were about to share with tens of thousands of viewers.

Sometimes, perhaps even most times, having your assumptions blown to smithereens is a good thing. Guided by the seasoned moderator and surrounded by an eager audience seated at the gently lit tables that formed an aura of benevolence around us, Monika Decker did just that by sharing a most unexpected story.

In her early fifties, she finds a silk blouse left in the bathtub at home. She knows it isn’t hers, so she asks her daughters whether it belongs to one of them. Neither recognizes it, so her husband is the only person left to ask. They’ve been married for over thirty years. It is a good marriage, although, as in all families where people live with consequential secrets, tensions can sometimes feel unbearable.

When he admits the delicate blouse is his, she realizes there are essential things about him she doesn’t know, so they take time together, and she listens. After decades of trying to understand his ‘condition’ and through spiritual work in his church circle, he is ready to talk. Since age ten, he has had an inexplicable need to wear women’s clothes from time to time. During their marriage, he’s taken day-trips to nearby cities where he can wander the streets anonymously, away from their town, where everyone knows everyone.

Stashed in boxes are neatly filed articles he has collected over the years concerning his situation, and a diary documenting his secret life. Beyond his worries that he’ll alienate his family and his wife will divorce him, he bears the collective memory of what happened to people like him during the Nazi terror into which he was born. In the post-war years, he lived and worked as a teacher in this small, Catholic, conservative town. It isn’t a place he trusts will tolerate this other self.

But his wife decides this isn’t going to break them. He hasn’t, after all, done anything to hurt anyone. What is wrong with wanting to dress as a woman at times anyway? Don’t we all have female and male sides? “He was such a wonderful person, I never wanted to be without him,” she explains to the moderator. They visit the shops together, and she helps him choose women’s clothes that suit him. The acknowledgment and full acceptance of his secret by her and his willingness to share it usher in a phase of their marriage she remembers as its best.

Shortly before his retirement in his early sixties, he died from injuries sustained in a bicycle collision. She remembers the book they’ve both read about family secrets. It suggests that keeping such secrets can be harmful. For him, this explains the family that formed him during childhood. Monika thinks instead about their children and how keeping their father’s secret might impact them. At his deathbed, she takes a chance and shares the story with their two daughters, Cordula and Uli. The two women react differently, but Uli, who has sensed the distance from her father most acutely, sets to work making a film about him. It will take her six years, a process of reconciliation with the man she knew but didn’t, a posthumous effort to let him blossom fully.

Years later, the film, Anima - My Father’s Dresses, a title based on the Jungian term for the feminine part of our personalities, earns a standing ovation after its first showing in his hometown. It wins important prizes; Uli travels the world discussing it, working tirelessly for a world beyond tolerance in which our divergent selves are not simply to be borne in silence, but embraced and celebrated.

The morning after the show, just before I left for the airport to return to Stockholm, I walked along the Rhine River, which ran behind the hotel. It was a beautiful, thoroughly warm, sunny May morning, a contrast to the nippy air I have become accustomed to in a Swedish spring. A diminutive figure in a chocolate brown lace shift dress with a handbag strung over the wrist walked briskly in my direction. The face with crimson-red lips was downcast under a brown pillbox hat perched on a shoulder-length ebony wig. The feet in high heels moved at a pace that suggested the hope of outrunning attention. There seemed to me no question that this person felt shame, a kind of shabbiness about his-her ‘condition.’ But who creates that shabbiness? Is it the person who, despite all the judgments he-she knows are being passed from minute to minute, would rather dare than die in self-repression, or is it those of us who judge? The answer seems clear to me.

I can only recommend the film (see the possibilities below). Maybe it will refresh the meaning of your story, as it did mine.

* There is a well-made trailer with English subtitles at Uli Decker’s website. Please contact her about the possibilities for watching the film (with English subtitles). Rights are with The Goethe Institute, through which viewings can be organized.

* Link to the episode on Südwestrundfunk’s Nachtcafé (Germany only).

* In support of NPR and the fight to defend the Constitution and free speech in the United States today, I am also reminding you of the program they made with me some years ago entitled The Family Name, which became a Snap Classic, meaning that the program attracted significant attention and was regarded as important enough to be rebroadcasted over the years. On the subject of sides, I’d also like to mention Beyond Sides of History, an NPR multimedia program I participated in with my friend, Rachael Cerrotti, that went viral when it was released in 2017. Kudos to NPR for making these excellent programs. Rachael’s Substack is Along the Seam. See her remarkable work at We Share The Same Sky, the story of her grandmother’s survival as a refugee in Europe during WWII.

Leave a comment

Share

January 1941. Berlin. A writer has been drafted into the Wehrmacht. His shadowy eyes set in a porcelain-pale face reflect that he is a migraine sufferer. His shyness embarrasses him. Years of late nights at his desk have taken their toll on his vision. During the first month of training, he falls off the back of a horse so often that his wife has to send him deer tallow to nurse the wounds and bruises. His hands have known little more than the pen and the typewriter; at best, he’s managed the garden spade for a few minutes each day during the warmer months, part of a rigid schedule meant to keep him producing in turbulent times. He and his publisher have been dreading the draft, but now that he has been called in, he makes no effort to resist.

Although he does not support this regime, he cannot deny some sense of honor in being called to fight for his country. Over the last few years, his novel about the 18^th-century “soldier king,” Frederick William I, the founder of his country’s military, has gained fame. Even his family is proud to see him in uniform. But the main reason he doesn’t try to evade the draft is that his wife and her daughter from her first marriage are Jewish, or this is the way the society they live in perceives them—they are not practicing Jews, though they show strong solidarity with other Jews, helping them to escape the persecution when they can.

Since its 1937 publication, his hit novel has protected his family from the jaws of the state. This book is a strange phenomenon: he wrote it as critique of the regime rather than as the ringing endorsement that many Nazis who bought it would like to think it is. Recently, however, the book’s influence as regards his family has been waning. Strenuous efforts to arrange for his youngest daughter’s emigration have faltered. They’ve managed to get the older one out. His wife is still protected by their marriage, which he refuses to give up, unlike some others who divorce to further their careers. But their albeit reviled legal union doesn’t shield the young, tender one, whose future is being stolen by the day. Now that he is a soldier, they’ll leave his family alone, he thinks or hopes. He’ll have to take the risk of being killed, because, apart from soldiering, there is little else left he can do to shelter them.

July 1941. The Eastern front. Having travelled thousands of kilometers through Europe into Russia, he learns from a general that it would be best for his family if he stayed and didn’t seek a posting closer to home. There, he’ll only attract negative attention—he is already serving on borrowed time as others in “mixed marriages” have been dismissed from the Wehrmacht, which is aligning with the Party. He keeps pictures of his family close to his chest and doesn’t discuss them with his comrades, just as he doesn’t discuss Jewish matters with anyone.

His superiors cannot promote him, but respecting his special abilities as a writer of intense religious faith, they appoint him spiritual carer to the men. Though danger is ever-present, he never sees battle, only its aftermath. Whenever there is time in between listening to the men’s woes and taking up the spade again, this time to dig trenches or graves, he begins writing again on broken tables or munitions crates. It is a relief after a long period of paralysis caused by the hopeless struggle with the authorities at home. Writing is his craft, his bread and butter, but it is also a spiritual process—without it, he loses his bearings in the world. Apart from soldiering, it is the only other thing he can do to protect his family, he believes.

In his diary, short sketches, and poems, he brings all his considerable gifts to bear to portray what is, not what is expected of him or other writers of the time, namely, the glorification of an aggressive national muscular heroism and the ‘othering’ of the local Slav population.

Above all, he portrays war’s irreconcilability: the enduring beauty of the landscape and the cycles of nature set against the burnt and bloodied bodies of soldiers and horses, the “martyrdom of cars,” the destroyed and deserted towns. The magnificent blue birds fly from the shores of the Dnieper River against a crystal clear sun-drenched sky, while the burnt face of a dead Russian soldier follows him in the faces of all the other soldiers. Some post-war readers of his diary will call the juxtapositions in his portrayals grotesque, bordering on madness—the result of a nervous reaction, no doubt—but isn’t this the nature of war?

In his texts, the locals shout, laugh, and cry just like they do anywhere else, but their mourning rituals seem more open, more humane than anywhere else. Children lead funeral processions in between offering him cucumbers sprinkled with rare sugar. A beautiful young woman sits in a doorway playing the balalaika until an air attack splits her in two. Afterward, they place her feet next to her head as her mother approaches, stone-faced, tears running like cracks down her cheeks. Everything burnt and bloodied, broken and destroyed has the right to be recognized, to live, and to long—the ruins of churches still aspire to the heavens, just as they do at home.

Among the most striking portraits he creates at the front is that of the green mask he found dangling from the remaining stalk of a frozen potted plant, abandoned on the windowsill of a home along the Narew River. Emptiness baptizes emptiness through the holes that are the mask’s eyes. An unexpected stillness comes over him, and when a frightened artilleryman asks, “Aren’t you afraid?” he realizes that he feels no fear, perhaps because he has seen what is, God or the oneness in everything, not what the forces of division want him to see. He lets the trembling giant take his hand and place it on his heart to calm him.

He channels this newfound stillness back to his frightened family at home through a poem he writes one early morning. The Trostlied am Morgen (Morning Song of Comfort), in which peace can be found in the darkest hour, will console generations of churchgoers and others who will read, sing, or listen to it and feel its quiet power.

Jochen Klepper survived the war on the front but not the war at home. As I have mentioned in previous pieces that offer insight into my current manuscript (See “The Land Inside” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”), he took his own life with his family in their Berlin home in December 1942 when all efforts to save his daughter from deportation failed.

I’ve shared this insight perhaps because war once again rages and enrages in Europe, and countless men like Klepper are having to find a way to survive the madness of war and their fears; my way of managing the absurdity of living in relative peace when today’s most dangerous aggressor shares a sea border with the country I live in (Sweden) and many Ukrainians who have sought refuge here report on the unbearable conditions at home.

I’ve also shared it because the whole world seems to be at war with itself at present. Where will we find stillness, the perspectives and consciousness that lead to enduring peace, as we wage the necessary fight for justice and positive freedom?

Pope Francis, an extraordinary gentle warrior for the poor and the neglected, spoke out about deploying the weapons of peace. Perhaps this one writer did just that over eighty years ago, under the worst imaginable conditions. Now we, too, must find the courage.

Poetry is an invaluable weapon of peace because it transcends opposing sides. More than any other form of written expression, it points beyond words to something limitless that we can all feel and sense and know to be true without having to say so. So, herewith, I am deploying two new pieces, written during the weeks that I’ve spent at my mountain cabin in the ancient not-so-high Swedish mountains.

Mermaids – written for Evelyn, my sister, at 55

First Stream – written upon seeing a young pup taste the water from a fresh mountain stream for the first time.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

This March, a professor at Wesleyan University approached me about a twenty-minute video my website said I would make available to anyone using my book, The Pendulum, in the classroom. I created it when the book was first published in 2018 with the help and undying patience of a skilled British intern passionate about art and human rights. I had forgotten about it entirely, but the request prompted me to watch it again, and, when I did, I realized how appropriate it is to the moment we are living through.

So, for now, on this day of good trouble, necessary trouble in the U.S. and all around the world (see Hands Off), I’m dusting off this little treasure and sharing it with you, in faith that history, no matter how hard it is to penetrate or how painful it may be to know, grounds us and gives us wings.

I am stepping away from my study and my manuscript today to join others and make our collective voice heard. I hope you are too, even if it is not at a demonstration. Simply meeting friends or family and enjoying one another’s company is a meaningful contribution.

This March, I was invited to address a demonstration near the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, which had removed the Ukrainian flag that had hung from one of the facades of the Embassy complex since the 2022 Russian invasion. Here is the text of my talk which evokes history to inform the present moment.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

When Friday evening’s news resounded through the world with the ominousness of a cracking ice sheet, I was with my husband and two adult children watching a performance of La Bohème at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. Few places say as much about humanity as the opera—the extraordinary beauty of a soprano in a duet with a tenor that soars over ugliness and cruelty and leaves one shivering with the miracle of it; the deep truths of the baritone and the bass like the mystery at the bottom of the sea.´

During the first intermission, I glanced at the scene on my telephone and saw two lost and unconscious individuals bringing the world down, only for the chance to lap up a taste of raw power. In the same room sat the leader of the free world (message to the Europe: we don’t need to look for one, we already have one), a man who, instead of accepting the offer of a “free ride” when his country was attacked, requested assistance to defend his people, and thereby also the free world, from a cruel aggressor attempting to revive tawdry dreams of empire that belong in the past.

When I returned to my seat for the second act, I shifted my attention from the stage to the magnificent late-19^th century opera theater. The advantage of purchasing the cheapest seats is that you get to sit on the highest balcony with a bird’s eye view of the whole grand room. In the dim light that radiated from the stage, my eyes followed the elaborate gold-leaf encrusting the portal over the actors. It was a tribute to Gustav III of Sweden who founded the original opera house, demolished in 1892, only to meet a fate that is the quintessential stuff of opera: to be murdered at a masquerade ball in the very same house.

As I sat experiencing the vast space, many thoughts came and went. The sense of being outside of what is happening overtook me and I could simply watch my surroundings and the images of my mind unfolding. I saw my father's ghost sitting in the royal box in his polo-shirt, his hands clasped in gentlemanly restraint, watching the destitute artists in the story of La Bohème through his gold-rimmed glasses. When he was at home, opera played constantly in the household of my childhood, a memory of the evenings he’d spent as a youth in standing room at the Old Met when he’d laid down his last dollar to escape the poverty of his origins in Brooklyn. Throughout my life, he was a Republican who thought you should look after your own and forget the rest, whatever that meant. As the travails of the characters played out on the stage, I wondered whether he could really watch the heartbreak of the poverty-stricken Rudolfo, who could not provide for his tuberculosis-ridden love, Mimmi, and say it was all his fault, as some of today’s Republicans would claim.

Then, suddenly, I saw myself with my sister when we were very young. We watched with trepidation as a curious kitten squeezed its head through the space between the door and the wall. It looked around with its oversized watery eyes, until with horror we witnessed a cracking sound after which its head hung limp, its neck broken because one of the adults had opened the door. Although no one had intended it, I wondered whether the things my father, who still sat there watching the opera with a look I so desperately wanted to decipher, tried to teach me were true: did we really live in a world where it was inevitable that all things small, delicate and tender would be destroyed and the idea that it did not have to be so was simply delusional? My gaze ran over the heavy neo-Baroque chandelier that hung ominously over the audience, miniature figures that could easily be crushed. Normally, one could be a little jealous of them, sitting in the best seats in front of the orchestra pit and the stage. But tonight, their presence seemed a form of resistance to the notion that there could be no trust.

Subscribe now

On the way to the opera, my children, who are in their mid-twenties, told me about their plans. One is fulfilling his dream of working among monks at a meditation center in Asia and the other is bracing herself to give a talk to three thousand municipality officials on crisis-preparedness based on the Ukrainian experience. In Sweden, every household has been furnished with a handbook from the central government entitled, “If Crisis or War Comes.”

Soon I felt my children’s loving presence in the two seats on the next balcony up behind me. It was as though they were parenting me, dealing with this world, war and peace in ways I would never have imagined when I was younger. Undoubtedly, they have empowered me to do what I do these days: to bring the experiences of individuals who lived in a past that likened our time to life so that we may learn from them and, with respect, do things differently if we can.

The central figure of my new manuscript, an author living in 1930s Berlin, saved newspaper articles about the daily storm of events, the shrill dismantling of an old order, as difficult to digest then as our current storm and dismantling. He knew of people, especially Jews, who spoke to Hitler in their dreams. The feeling of being towed under by “big” men, as he put it, has become as familiar to me as it was to him. Yet, he wrote his novels and his poems that were put to music that would make him the 20th century’s most important Protestant hymn-writer. Bach was his inspiration, especially the complex dialogue of melodies in the master’s fugues.

On the opera stage, Mimmi was dying, her voice fading into infinite space. I saw a tear run down my father’s cheek and knew instantly that his heart struggled with what his head had learned early in life. I also knew that what I would always remember from this evening wasn’t foremost what I saw on my phone, rather it was the extraordinary music of ordinary people in La Bohème, a force that will always elude dictators.

Share

New Podcast: Recently, I did a very enjoyable interview with Julian Morgans of the Australian podcast “What It Was Like” to commemorate the eighty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Even if you know the story behind my memoir, The Pendulum, this one offers new perspectives as we reflect on the relevance of the Holocaust to all people today. The YouTube link is below, but you can also find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or where you prefer to listen to your podcasts.

Poetry to reflect upon: My grandfather was an SS man transfixed by the idea of “Lebensraum” in Ukraine. I've rededicated my poem, The Green Book, about him lamenting the failure to capture the black soil while in exile in Brazil to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

A man pours his heart into his diary, an intense private conversation with himself and his god recorded over ten years. 1932-42 in Berlin is a decade of such tumult, violence, tragedy, and, above all, state intrusion into the lives of ordinary people that most are too afraid to express themselves at all. During this time, he becomes an acclaimed novelist, but his diary, which he believes should vanish with him when he dies, will be his most extraordinary enduring work; that is, apart from his poems, which become church hymns sung by many who, in decades to come, will have little idea that he wrote them. Suicide has stalked him throughout life like the most familiar of strangers, and though his faith condemns it, it draws nearer with each passing year.

Like many diaries, this one records events in real-time in a family, a working life, a neighborhood, a country, and the world beyond. Yet this particular diary distinguishes itself by a gripping tension that reflects the author’s struggle with faith and the surprise of its infinite quality as his family’s crisis of survival amid brutality intensifies and their impending end approaches.

Each entry begins with a pericope taken from the Moravian Daily Texts, excerpts from the Old and the New Testaments extracted to offer a moment’s reflection on each day of the year. They are like markers that offer a much-needed pause amid the daily assault of news that otherwise leaves a person breathless. In this way, the diary becomes a deeply personal ritual, one man’s unswerving daily practice in an atmosphere of governance by chaos, a candle radiating into the darkness and the spiritual barrenness of the times. The same soft but intent light permeates his poems and novel, offering solace to many, including people who have been imprisoned and tortured.

In the decades after his death at home by suicide with his wife and younger stepdaughter (read more about her in my last posting, Its A Wonderful Life), this author comes under intense criticism for, among other things, his “inner emigration.” The diary, which survives him, is published without significant sections that illuminate his full attitude and efforts to protect his family. It becomes the source for those who ask why he didn’t do more to save his youngest daughter, a Jew threatened with deportation. Why did he instead flee inward to the diary and a useless, distracting struggle with faith rather than focus on physical emigration and saving lives? Wasn’t it all just a colossal exercise in self-obsession and cowardice?

The nature of the times we live in has significant consequences for our perspectives of how people behaved in the past. It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen to work on this story about the life and literature of Jochen Klepper. In many ways, we live in times similar to his when a polarized political climate and rabid, greedy, power-seeking forces overwhelmed many, making them feel trapped, gagged, and powerless.

In the post-war years of expanding democracy, growing prosperity, and a blossoming global community, this man’s situation became ever more distant, and it was easier to criticize him. Our breaking times make us more open to understanding how difficult it must have been to offer the comfort of creativity, beauty, and aesthetic nourishment through literature and music when forces intent on crushing those qualities were rampant. Once again, perhaps we can begin to understand the courage and energy required to keep a diary, especially one as spiritually rich as this one when the authorities were doing everything possible to hijack religion and replace it with a leader cult.

Speaking out and taking action when possible is essential, but cultivating one’s private space for creativity and spiritual nourishment is equally important. The land inside is that place where you can tap into the breath that paradoxically feels universal because it is so deeply personal. No wonder tyrants do all they can to invade and quash it.

Lately, I’ve noticed the obscene extent to which technology intrudes into this private sphere like never before. We’re seeing how tech giants side with politicians who mean to suppress our freedoms and damage our well-being because it increases their profit margins. Just the other day, the sudden appearance of a “co-pilot” pulsing like a noisy, unwelcome guest in my newly opened Word document underscored where things are headed unless we insist on taking another path.

As a writer, the blank page is sacred to me. It’s a highly private, personal place where I have the opportunity to choose my own muses and practice my craft, embroidering reflections and language. I don’t need company. In fact, company is detrimental to my art, sucking the air out of it and crowding the page before I’ve even started.

What kind of experience could the diary I have been reading have offered had there been a “co-pilot?” A non-human “co-steerer” would have interfered with the spontaneity, immediacy, and directness of the work and detracted from the unique and ever more important experience of learning about a real flesh-and-blood person’s life in a time that bears uncanny similarities to the one I am living through. Could any sentence really have been constructed better? Does a machine really have better words? These questions are absurd when it comes to such a work.

Being vigilant about the inner realm is an ever more urgent task. In this sense, “inner emigration” as criticism seems to me a troubled idea. After all, the land inside can be our deepest source of strength and solace, both for ourselves and others, in an age when the outside can so often be depleting.

Read Epiphany, a poem I wrote on my birthday this January that explores the inner question, “Who are you?” which seems ever more important to leave unanswered as the years go by.

Check out an interesting substack exploring the nexus between AI and Literature by friend and author Derek B. Miller.

Collage is a fascinating means of expressing the land inside. Enjoy this thought-provoking composition I recently purchased from artist and friend Chris Marcell Murchison, who displays his work on Instagram.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

A young woman drifts in her paddle boat on the Wannsee near Berlin. On this warm Sunday at the end of August 1940, the sky is hazy, as though it has tired of the summer’s heat. She turned eighteen in March, and all her life should be before her. But this day, this moment, drifting unhindered on the lake is, for her, all there is.

She cranes her neck backward to look at the sky, which mirrors the color of her crystal blue eyes. Being a part of this boundlessness is a miracle, though most others who live freer than she does don’t fully appreciate it. She shuts her eyes and opens them—no one can take that choice away from her. Reveling in the chance to choose and the spaciousness, she gazes down at the water to look at the sky’s reflection. Instead, she sees her tanned face framed by her sun-kissed rye-blonde hair. She looks like a poster pin-up girl for the times, but she is in a boat, not swimming in the water as she prefers, precisely as she cannot be that girl because of who they have decided she is. Jews are forbidden from swimming in this water or any of the other public pools in the area. When her stepfather, who is not Jewish, saw the sign, he bought her this paddle boat as a part of his ongoing effort to help her continue living as normally as possible. He is an avid swimmer and regards the right to experience the water as essential.

She tries not to think about things that can no longer be hers, including the feel of the water on her skin, the weightlessness, and the freedom of movement. For now, she is grateful for what she still has. What she cannot know is that in a year and a half, a conference will take place in a mansion on the periphery of this lake that will reach a decision resulting in everything being taken away from her, even her life. On Monday, she will report to the Employment Bureau, where she expects to be assigned to an arms production factory. She has no choice in the matter; it is forced labor, an order from the state.

She is afraid, but this isn’t her nature. Alone in this small paddle boat on this vast lake under the infinite sky, she finds her courage again to face another day.

Swimming is one of my great passions. My love of it from an early age has likely saved me from weak lungs. Each time I visit my local swimming pool, about three times a week, this loaded scene of the girl in her boat follows me. Here, I’ve embroidered it from a book I am writing about my discovery of the fate of the Stein-Klepper family, who lived in Berlin during a time of rapid change and great brutality not unlike our own. The young woman in the paddle boat is Reni, the stepdaughter of Jochen Klepper, an author who attempted to protect his Jewish wife and her two daughters from the Nazi terror in imaginative ways, including writing bestsellers. Who would touch the family of an “Aryan” who had written a novel that was a 1937 hit, especially with Wehrmacht officers?

In the swimming pool, I feel liberated from life’s burdens, both my own and the oppressive news of our age. Submerged in the clear water, the pressure of time and gravity dissolves, and I become the medium itself. There is no resistance because there is no separation. I understand Reni’s desire to be under the vast skies in her boat, as close to the water as possible, but our situations are quite different.

I’ve often thought the swimming center must be the most humane place I visit regularly. People of all stripes, shapes, and ages wander freely between the shallow and the deep pools, some providing the delight of gentle shoots and bubbles, some warm, some tepid, and some refreshingly cool. Exhausted young parents stretch their creativity to make the experience appealing to apprehensive or defiant children. “Let’s see who can get changed fastest!” exclaims one mother in the locker room to her sobbing child, who cannot be more than five years old. The child stops crying, looks wide-eyed at its mother, and soon starts tearing off its clothes enthusiastically. There is patience at the swimming pool in reams, just as there is concern for one another’s safety. A little girl jumps into a basin too deep for her, and her pregnant mother, who speaks another language, is terrified. I lift the girl out, look into her eyes, and smile to give her confidence. I don’t want her to be afraid of the water—I want her always to treasure the freedom it offers.

But the swimming center is only humane if we make it so. Reni lived in a society run by a regime that wanted people to lose touch with their humanity because it divided and weakened and thus served the power interests of a single political party and its elite. The exclusion of a minority from swimming—“Jews Unwanted” read the signs near all the bathing facilities— served this purpose. People adored Reni at her local swimming pool, but when the regime issued its cruel directives, most obeyed or, even worse, obeyed in advance. In the early days, few understood that in depriving her of this pleasure, they would also become complicit in depriving her of her life.

Whenever I visit the pool, I think about this and how essential it is that we insist on maintaining it as a place of humanity. One of the lessons of Reni’s time is that when the world’s compassion dims, as it does in certain periods, acts of kindness shine even brighter and matter more. Even in Reni’s time, some people took risks to maintain spaces of respect and communion.

During this holiday season, I watched what I thought would be an old clunker, a film dated by “Aw, shucks” and humor lacking irony. However, anyone who pays attention to “It’s a Wonderful Life” from 1946 starring Jimmie Stewart will quickly realize there is nothing old about it. In it, the protagonist, tired of what he sees as his own failed life, experiences what his community might have been like without him. Since he has devoted his life to making things better for others, the alternative version of his town is cruel, egotistical, materialistic, and unmoored from any sense of right and wrong. The film is about two types of America, the neighborly and the hostile place, but its themes transcend borders these days.

And so, I wanted to close out 2024 with the two images of Reni in her paddle boat on the Wannsee and me immersed in my pool with the young and the old, the healthy and the handicapped, those who speak my language and those who don’t, those who look similar to me and those who don’t. We are once again living in an era when it can seem as if “all humanity has been wiped out” (quoting Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, on a visit to Gaza this year), and, indeed, there are a growing number of such places. Therefore, in 2025, the task is to defend, expand, and increase the number of places where human integrity is respected without exception, even if it is only at your local swimming pool.

Sometimes, when we feel oppressed by events in our own lives and beyond, it feels difficult to bring spaciousness into our lives, let alone into the lives of others. Poetry, with all its immediacy and freedom from the need for explanations, can be helpful. Enjoy The Being of a Tulip in a Room, which I wrote on the First of Advent in such a moment.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

The following piece reflects my personal odyssey of being an American based on thoughts that have struck me on recent morning walks around a lake near my island west of Stockholm, Sweden. It is intended to contrast with the election news, another way to approach America and Americanness that can raise questions, not about one party or another, but about the whole. Hopefully, it can also provide perspective, comfort, and inspiration to those in despair.

I’ve included images of nature from my walk, which could be scenes from many places in America. We share so much in common and find ourselves through one another. Enjoy.

When I was a child growing up in many countries around the world due to my father’s job as an international banker, American elections and their meaning for the country and the world mostly passed me by.

Dad was an American, the first son of Scottish immigrants with limited means, who grew up in what he called “the unforgettable borough of Brooklyn” during the 1930s and ´40’s. This experience made him skeptical of human nature in general, and the institutions created to govern it in particular. How many times did he try to drill into me and my little sister that all politicians were crooks and that you shouldn’t trust your own mother? Naturally, he assumed I would not apply the latter to my own German mother. He told me not to bother too much with tax forms. “Just write 0 at the bottom of the form and sign it,” he said, which I did for years when I was younger until I discovered this was not the way to fill in your tax forms. He was not a tax evader himself, but he made his life choices based on an unswerving determination to pay as little as possible to the Internal Revenue Service.

You could say that, from the outset, my opportunities for developing a sense of civic responsibility and any substantive attachment to the United States were limited. Yet I was an American citizen, albeit born in Rio de Janeiro, and made to understand that the navy-blue passport with the spread eagle on it, rather than the green Brazilian one I received by right of birthplace, was what counted.

Early in life, my parents tried to keep my sister and me away from images of the Vietnam War still being waged while we were living in Asia in the early 1970s.  Instead, when we visited the Pacific rim of the United States on the island of Maui on holidays, my sister and I lay on our stomachs in front of the black-and-white television, binging on replays of “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island” while sinking our teeth into cushions of cavity-inducing Bubble-Yum. In this sugar-sweet comfort zone, the disturbing images that I had caught sight of anyway on the front page of my father’s morning newspaper or evenings on television seemed distant: soldiers jumping out of helicopters; coffins wrapped in the American flag; hippies in bell-bottoms protesting on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.; Asian people burning. My immediate experience of America was an instant feel-good, a place of limitless fun things that the places we lived in, with their comparatively meager wares and poor Western imitations, could not offer.

On occasions when we visited my father’s sister on Long Island, Dad looked tortured by the proximity to his origins. Every ten minutes, he left the big family meals that went on for hours to take a walk. On the occasions when I followed along with him, he was at a loss for words. There was something in his experience of America that was dark, dangerous, and depressing that he had sought to get away from throughout life. When I asked him what the matter was, he only shivered and held my hand. Spooked by this behavior, I was relieved to return to my aunt’s house, where I could play with the other children in a paradise of non-stop jelly beans, Kool-Aid, family baseball, Twister, and Barbie. Couldn’t Dad see how lucky my cousins were to live in this American spaciousness and plenty where people lived happily in an endless flow of entertaining stuff?

In an American school I attended in Hong Kong, I gained my first taste of the responsibilities that American life might incur. Each morning, with all the other students in what then seemed the biggest assembly hall on earth, I had to put my hand on my heart and recite a pledge of allegiance to the United States of America, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It was powerful to recite these words with so many others. My heart always beat faster, even if I couldn't say what being American meant beyond the consumer heaven I had encountered on our holidays.

Immediately after assembly, I returned to my classroom, where my teacher, Mr. Barnes, drilled us on the harder side of American civic responsibility: civil disobedience. With a Native American headband restraining his gigantic afro and a long beard that made him seem like the Almighty himself, he strummed on his guitar and led us in singing Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. I loved the tune, humming it through my days, as much as I felt awed by the glistening promise of the Pledge of Allegiance. But its questions and underlying anger were like a knife to my uncertain American heart. Among others, the lines: Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?... Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows that too many people have died? The juxtaposition of these words with the uplifting ones my young child’s lips had mastered while holding my hand on my heart in the assembly hall could not have been more bewildering.

Mr. Barnes’ way of being clashed with the carefree attitude of those television series, the sugar rush of Bubble-Yum, or the have-it-all land of Barbie. His science lesson about the sun burning out became the stuff of my nightmares in which there was nothing left to eat on earth, and we’d all freeze. We were undeniably headed toward Armageddon, and all there was to do was stroke the perpetually hungry class hamster, Bill, until it was all over. One day during recess, while offering Bill the last carrots and cabbage from our refrigerator, it occurred to me that Mr. Barnes’ dark view of the world had something to do with the burning Vietnamese mothers and children, or with the man with the big dimpled nose called Tricky Dick (Richard Nixon). After I’d caught glimpses of the mothers, the children, and Tricky Dick on our TV before my parents turned it off, I couldn’t get them out of my mind, especially the burning people.

In other schools, I sang other anthems (fun fact: I can sing the Philippine national anthem in Tagalog by heart) and pledged allegiance to my flag and to the country for which it stands. I supposed that, in my case, this was the American flag, though, after Mr. Barnes’ class and some experiences of American haughtiness and ignorance, I began to feel distinctly uneasy about it. Moreover, I sensed that being an American was not only about a lifestyle of cool stuff; it was also a troubled state of being with awesome responsibility and soul-crushing burdens.

In the early 1980s, the headmistress of my high school in Sydney, Australia, came up with the idea of “exploiting” my citizenship to expose Australian students to The Declaration of Independence. My assignment was to read it to the entire school at our morning assembly on the 4^th of July (in the Antipodes, the seasons are reversed, so school terms are different to those in the Northern Hemisphere and thus we were at school in those first days of July). Ours was a girls' school that was unforgiving in its pursuit of high achievement—my German teacher put me on detention for making just one mistake on my test. Having a German mother, I was expected to set the class standard with nothing less than an A+. You could say my task was daunting.

Proud but mostly terrified, I attended weekly meetings with Ms. McLaren, our Sturm-und-Drang music teacher, tasked with preparing me for the big day. Typically, she flew up and down the main aisle of our assembly hall, her long, loose red mane swirling, flame-like behind her, before choosing one poor student. Through huge eyeballs that popped out of their sockets under albino lashes, she’d demand better enunciation or greater diaphragmatic force from the shuddering girl. None of the teenagers in the hall wanted to become the subject of her undivided attention, which was exactly what I had become.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. As I read these words, agreed and declared unanimously in Congress by the thirteen states of the United States of America on July 4^th, 1776, a tidal wave of awe rose in me. This was a vastly more overwhelming feeling than the accelerated heartbeat I had felt when I had recited the Pledge of Allegiance in primary school. While I don’t want to dismiss the benefits that my delivery must have reaped from the hours I spent with the dedicated Ms. McLaren, the feeling that poured out of me as I read came from a deeper source, a sense of daring with immeasurable consequences. I felt as if I might spread my wings and fly over the assembled, even the headmistress and Ms. McLaren, scattering the magic dust of freedom over them. Afterward, my classmates acknowledged that I was the one most likely among us to become president of the United States. I savored this lozenge for weeks, if not months, by conveniently setting aside the facts: there were no other Americans in my school except my younger sister, Evelyn, and I was disqualified by virtue of having been born abroad.

In later years, that same feeling of awe overcame me when I first tuned into the inauguration of a new president. It was January 1989, and I was in my student apartment in Frankfurt, Germany, where I spent a year studying International Affairs as a Fulbright Scholar, when I listened to the swearing-in of the new president on the radio. George H.W. Bush spoke in an uninspiring nasal twang, so it wasn’t his delivery that caused my tears to well up. Neither did this wave of emotion have anything to do with his policies, which I was mostly unaware of unless they affected international affairs.

Ironically, at this point in my life, I felt less than more American after the three years I’d spent as an undergraduate at Wellesley College in Massachusetts (I spent one of my four undergraduate years studying English Literature at Oxford University). During those Wellesley years, I sat in my room, tuning in to the BBC World Service, which, to me, was a lifeline to the world I had lived in (ten countries across three continents—Latin America, Europe, and Oceania). I felt alienated by Americans’ apparent lack of interest in that world, which I saw reflected in my colleagues’ inexplicable passion for the superficiality and ham-fistedness of American television, above all, The David Letterman Show. My days of being satisfied by comforting replays of old American television shows were over.

Instead, the emotions I experienced in my apartment in West Germany while I listened to George H.W. as he held his hand over the Bible may have had something to do with studying the politics of medium-range cruise missiles, which is what one did as a student of international affairs living in a divided Germany during the Cold War. All that I had learned and the “frozen” context in which I lived in a Europe cleaved between totalitarianism and democracy made an act that signified the peaceful transfer of power seem an unlikely and extremely fragile miracle.

During my thirties, Dad and I worked hard to ensure that my children would become American citizens (alongside their Swedish citizenship, which they inherited from their father). No doubt, Dad’s crisp letter to the Embassy about serving as a naval officer in the North Atlantic and being shot at in Cuba helped. I was most grateful. The stories my German grandmother, who had endured two world wars, shared with me about fleeing the Russians suggested that it was good to have options.

But the truth was that on the many occasions when I visited the United States during my thirties and forties, it worried me. By then, I had worked as a consultant in the developing world for years, so I was used to seeing abject poverty and the woeful consequences of wealth concentrated among the very few, usually by corruption. What shocked me increasingly about America was the contrast between Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” and what I witnessed: the explosivity of garbage-laden poor communities juxtaposed with megamansions that might be occupied for a few days a year; persistent racial segregation, and the failure to fully acknowledge the legacy of slavery; people who could not afford to pay for treating life-threatening health conditions or to give their children a decent education; gas-guzzling cars, wastefulness and a general lack of concern about the finiteness of the earth’s resources; and a lack of interest in the rest of the world encouraged by the belief in American exceptionalism.

Ironically, by writing books and articles about living in Scandinavia, I got to know my country better, touring parts I had never visited before, including the Midwest and the West Coast. Irrespective of where I went during these years, I marveled at the vastness of the landscape and appreciated the friendliness of those I met, while feeling their tragedy. Visiting America was like lying on a water bed for a few minutes: it was fun until it made you queasy. Aside from the heart-wrenching experience of leaving loved ones and returning across the Atlantic, I was always relieved to go home to Sweden, where I had settled with a family of my own.

Dad was unhappy about my choice. He had swallowed Eisenhower’s and others’ politically convenient myths about Scandinavia (high suicide, loose sex, life-crushing taxes), deliberately intended to discredit these countries and their socialist path, which seemed all too close to communism. Despite his own discomfort with his origins, Dad always hoped and expected that I would choose to live in America, which had nevertheless offered him the opportunity of social mobility and, above all, low taxes.

But his own heavier feelings about his country had already backfired. If some of what I had seen on the road during my visits seemed to affirm them, my sister’s experience of being a working mother of young children (including twins—we both have them) in uber-expensive Connecticut, and the impact of the 2007-8 financial crisis in her life in a society without a public social welfare system convinced me that all was far from well in the land of the free. The reality was that a process of destroying Americans’ prospects for social mobility, initiated by Ronald Reagan, whom Dad had voted for, had already reached an advanced stage. At Wellesley, many students had been unhappy with Reagan—now I understood why. Another line from Blowin’ in the Wind, which, thanks to Mr. Barnes, I knew by heart, began to echo in my mind like a portent of things to come: And how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?

By mid-life, it was time for me to reconcile myself with being an American. I could always identify with one of my other passports—by now, I had added the U.K. and Sweden to my collection— but I had inherited my accent mostly from my father, which is like walking down the street with an American flag tattooed on your forehead. Noting this and the lack of women on his board, the then-president of the American Club of Sweden rang and asked whether I might consider joining the Club’s board. Though it consisted of Americans and Swedes and was intended as an intercultural endeavor, I seriously doubted my capacity to muster enough Americanness to be a successful contributor. After all, having a German mother, I rarely celebrated Thanksgiving and didn’t understand the Super Bowl. But Gary was most persuasive, and in the end, I agreed and served for a decade, three years as president. This entailed close collaboration with American institutions in Sweden and the U.S., including the U.S. Embassy. For a person who inwardly struggled to build a bridge to her American identity, the outward cultural bridge-building that my new role demanded was overdue therapy.

Little did I expect that my German background would play the invaluable role it did in helping me manage this role and deepen my identity as an American. By the time Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s nominee in 2016 and, eventually, President of the United States during the following year, I had spent six years researching my mother’s family’s past and the probable reasons for my birth in Brazil, which we had never honestly spoken of. Dark secrets can asphyxiate relationships, which was certainly the case in my old family, setting me off on a tortuous and morally hazardous journey I felt I had no other choice but to pursue (you can listen to podcasts about it broadcast by the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, and others at my website).

Traveling between Germany, Poland, Paraguay, and Brazil during those years, I discovered the hair-raising story of my grandparents’ engagement in the SS in occupied Eastern Europe. I worked through the shock of it in a book I titled The Pendulum and turned my attention to democracy and human rights activism in Sweden and elsewhere. With this experience behind me, I was dismayed to find that even some of my American friends who hadn’t voted for Donald Trump couldn’t grasp that he was an existential threat to the country, fully capable of putting the U.S. on a path similar to Germany’s during the 1930s. With a few others, I felt as though I was holding up a lone candle of truth about our situation: that America’s democracy was hanging by a thread. To be fair, the Club’s board unanimously rejected my resignation and accepted the one condition of my stay: that we create and publish a code of ethics to be observed by all members and guests at our gatherings. This code seems to have stood the Club in good stead and has guided its rebranding.

Out of the wound in my Americanness, the desire and the need to take civic responsibility and, at times, show civil disobedience grew. I reminded Americans overseas to vote and pay their taxes. I supported my board colleagues in running Thanksgiving dinners, where we shared food with the homeless. I collaborated with friends who felt as passionately about democracy as I had become, creating discussion forums where we rediscovered the eternal task of reinventing and strengthening the only system of just governance we know. I wanted to spread my wings and scatter that magic dust of freedom again, to remind everyone of what we had taken for granted and were in danger of losing. It never seemed enough, but in doing all this and sensing there was always more that I could contribute, I became an American.

In the U.S. today, which, as I write, may be on the brink of discovering the full horror of Trump’s “American carnage,” there is a desperate need for healing. As I have mentioned in previous postings, I am currently immersed in writing a book based on the diary of an author called Jochen Klepper, who lived and worked in Berlin during the 1930s and early ´40s. His wife and stepdaughters were Jewish, and the family, save one daughter who escaped to the U.K., committed suicide in their home in Berlin in 1942. His descriptions of the mood of Germans of his time illuminate the mood of Americans today. His fellow citizens were a tired people, he observed. Tired of wars, tired of figuring out how to make ends meet, tired of elites who thwarted their dreams, tired of being reviled by the world for its sins while having given so much. The exhaustion became so extreme that it led to cynicism, anger, fury, and eventually nihilism. The rest is history.

Many things need to be done to bring about this American healing, which is also about more fully realizing democracy globally. At the end of my presidency of the American Club, I wrote a short piece dedicated to the board that supported me in my role during one of the most turbulent periods in memory. Here is a quote from its most important passage:

I would like to put forward the thesis that many of us in this room and among the membership of our Club are here because we need to heal a cultural wound—that of separation, of not feeling at home where one is, and eventually of not feeling at home where one was. If you have not experienced any of those things, then I will bet my bottom dollar, whether you are Swedish or American or something else, that the global socio-political earthquake of the past few years has raised questions of identity for you. Today, we’re all asking ourselves who we are.

Foremost, I thanked my colleagues for helping me to build what I called the bridge inside. By this, I meant an inner path from frustration and sometimes even resentment and alienation at being an American to a passion and sense of responsibility for my country, which has meant and continues to mean so much to our world. Notably, my board colleagues were Europeans and Americans, all of them devoting their full energies to the idea that in knowing others, we also know ourselves. May most Americans vote in this spirit, and may we begin to heal by building the bridge inside.

For the best book I’ve read on American misconceptions of freedom and what freedom may mean as we head into the 21^st century, I strongly recommend Timothy Snyder’s new book, On Freedom. I also heartily recommend joining his Substack, Thinking About…

Leave a comment

Share

Prayer and poetry are “trending,” I’ve heard. I understand: the fulcrum of the book I am currently writing is the life of an author who lived in Berlin during the 1930s and early ’40s, for whom prayer and poetry became a means of emigrating when other paths led nowhere. In the post-war era, this “inner emigration” was sometimes criticized as inaction. But living in an age of renewed turbulence, dictatorship, and war, gives us appreciation for why some people were drawn to an inner world, a place of consolation where moral and aesthetic beauty is a necessary condition of being and where strength lies in the quiet arts. Who does not long for such a place these days?

For years, poetry has been a part of my weekly practice. It has reconciled where there is no reconciliation, provided a place for thoughts and images when they have nowhere else to go, and endured burdens that no soul can bear alone. It is a release from the prison of flawed logic and the inevitable contradictions of explanation, allowing transformations as improbable as a larvae becoming a butterfly.

While writing the book, I’ve written less new poetry and devoted a few minutes each day to reading, editing, and grouping with others of its kind, at least one poem I’ve penned during the past years. In this process, I discovered an unshared piece that stayed with me in the days after rereading it. Perhaps it is the glorious warm early September weather here on my island in Lake Mälaren outside Stockholm that makes the idea of a poem called “A Chair and a Table in the Sun” seem relatable. Or maybe it is this juxtaposed with the creeping suspicion that the lovely unseasonal weather comes at a high cost or the daily reminders of monstrous violence and want in the world that makes me keep circling back to it. You know a poem has succeeded at some level when this happens.

“A Chair and a Table in the Sun” is equally about the weight of existence—how much each person can carry and how that person carries it— as it is about the seemingly carefree act of sitting at a table in the sun in the foothills of the Pyrenees (as I was on the day when I wrote it). At its center is “the binding” to the world we cannot escape, which is also the birthing ground of all compassion, “the infinite yield of the binding.” The poem offers no way out—repetition seals the gaps between the lines, the stanzas, and the beginning and end of the poem. At the same time, it rejects all splintering, all attempts to divide. This is what this piece says to me. Maybe it says something else to you—it would be an even better poem if it did.

In everything that gets written and talked about this autumn, when the ability to focus will seem agonizingly elusive and the truth hazy and distant, perhaps this short poem can offer a place to go, a place to emigrate temporarily, to find the strength to return, engage and do your best.

A Chair and a Table in the Sun

A chair,

A chair and a table in the sun

In the sun

Where troubles evaporate

From the surface of my soul

From the surface of my soul

Where the rays bind me

To all the world

To all the world

Where the hungry

Are hungry no more

Hungry no more,

To be fed on the infinite yield

Of the binding

Of the binding

From a chair

A chair

And a table in the sun.

20 January 2024

On sitting on a chair at a table in the sun on a rooftop in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Leave a comment

Share

This Midsummer, I searched through my files for one special piece I needed for reasons you might find either macabre or endearing. Read more about that below. The piece was one of many columns I wrote for the Swedish-American newspaper “Nordstjernan” during 2006-2010. A selection was eventually published in a collection mainly intended for 14,000- 15,000 subscribers, for whom the column became a cherished friend.

When I asked the editor what I should write about, she merely replied: anything, as long as I was writing from the viewpoint of my life on this tiny pile of rock and sand in Lake Mälaren, where I had made my home. Very well.

Any of you old enough to remember Alaister Cooke’s brilliant BBC World Service series, “Letter from America,” in which an Englishman writes back to the Old Country from the New World, will begin to understand that I conceived “Letter from the Island” in the intercontinental spirit meant by this grand master of correspondences.

Little did I know then that we were on the cusp of an era when e-mail, social media, and messaging would relegate the rich and important art of letter-writing to history. We are the poorer for it, but at least some of it remains for us to remember and enjoy via digital files and even, if we are lucky enough to find them, on handwritten pages. Perhaps, in unexpected ways, such as at Substack, this vanished art can inspire us to seize the possibility of renewing it.

Below, by way of explaining the context in which I rediscovered it, I share the short little treasure, a letter from the Old World to the New, written many years ago, that became the eulogy at my dogs’ burial this Midsummer.

Share

It was at the end of a late lunch on Midsummer’s Eve when my husband and I sat on the dock on our minute island outside Stockholm, eating home-made strawberry cream tarts while we watched the boaters speed past us from their summer homes on the outlying islands to the celebrations on the mainland. We’ve danced around enough Midsummer poles with our children to last a lifetime. Now they are grown up, and until the grandchildren arrive, we prefer to let others pretend to be small hopping frogs (as one of the songs sung at the festival of Midsummer goes).

”I’m going to bury the dogs today,” I said, shocking even myself with the abruptness of it, though it had been on my conscience for some time. On my way out of the house with the imperfectly assembled cream cakes, I had caught sight of the paper bag containing the wooden urn that held the ashes of our beloved ebony collie-retriever, Ellie, whom we were forced to euthanize one year ago. She appeared to have enjoyed her life thoroughly until the last three days when the tumor made breathing painful. Next to the paper bag was a black box with an elegantly scripted golden “L” (for Lucy) on it, in which I had placed a lock of our previous dog’s white-buff colored tail fur bound in a baby-blue ribbon.

What was left of my dogs had ‘lived’ in my office on the shelf underneath the one where I keep the books I need for whatever manuscript I am working on. At least they were together there, near me, I thought. The worst thing you can do to a dog is to leave it alone.

My husband immediately said he’d help me, not mainly because of his feelings for the dogs’ remains—he is more rational about dead pets than I am—but because he didn’t want me to do this alone. There was something poetic about all of us, including the dogs who had always ensured no one in the family felt desolate, wanting to spare one another loneliness, especially in the face of death.

We chose a hill near the water’s edge where they’d have a perfect view of the lake through the reeds. Both dogs, in their separate lifetimes, loved sitting quietly at the shore, watching happenings on the water. While digging the two graves, my husband extracted more than one big stone and worked up such a sweat that I asked him whether he’d like to dip in the lake before the ceremony began. He smiled and said that gravediggers prefer a drink for their labors.

With me, in a basket, were the remains, two Midsummer wreaths I had made out of birch, daisies, and bluebells, and the ‘eulogy,’ the column I had written twelve years ago for Nordstjernan after Lucy died. It was the last one I wrote for them, as her passing also coincided with the end of full-time island life when our children started school closer to the city. I wasn’t sure my editor would publish it, though she had, so far, never rejected anything I submitted. It was just that this one was so deeply personal that it might alienate readers. In the end, it went to print (as was still the way of newspapers then) and became one of their readers’ favorites.

The afternoon of the burial was the loveliest Midsummer’s Eve in memory. The birch and the tall golden sheaths of grass gleamed in the gentle sun as they swayed gently over the open graves. I placed the containers with the remains that had spent so much time in my office, bidding a last farewell to each dog with a short kiss that seemed wholly inadequate compared to the incalculable service these loyal, affectionate, and playful creatures had provided to our family.

Before covering the graves with soil, the stones my husband had dug up, and the wreaths I had made, I read that last epistle to my dogs. Although it had been about Lucy who had died twelve years ago in January when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun only begins to rise from its lowest point, it was relevant to both of my beloved canines this Midsummer.

“Goodbye, my sweet girls,” I said afterward, tears streaming down my face and my husband’s arm over my shoulder, the smell of sweat from the digging a surprising comfort.

Then, something that perhaps can only happen when Midsummer casts its magical spell occurred: a pitch-black dog and a buff white one sat with ears pricked, looking at me momentarily from behind the graves. Their dark eyes, mirrors of our fascinating world, were wholly attentive, and their snouts twitched, waiting for me to throw a stick or offer them a snack. When nothing came, they raced off together to play, chasing one another across the grounds after the long wait in my office. Being the dog of a writer means a lot of waiting, but now that time is over, somehow, all three of us, though bound together forever, are free.

Yesterday, on the day after the burial, I received an email that resembled the epistles I so often miss these days. It was from the husband of one of my mentors, one of my dearest and oldest friends. She passed away at the very hour on the very day that I had stood before my dogs’ open graves reading the eulogy below. I try not to be too superstitious, but there is something in me that cannot avoid believing the universe also had me reading those words for her as she passed into worlds we’ll never fathom while we are still alive. Rest in peace, Judith.

Wishing you a magical summer.

Share

Letter from the Island (01/2012)

In the Time of Faith, Hope & Love

I landed in 2012 like a colt that had just been born. During its early days, I struggled to stand up in this new year. Many feel this way in January, particularly in the cold North, where the Christmas break lures one into believing that, finally, we can go into hibernation. Somehow, we are supposed to restart at the same speed as we left off – behave as though we have been on a continuum. Yet, there has been an important break and New Year's resolutions promising a different sort of life, often including giving ourselves more time for family and other things in which we find meaning.

This year there was an added reason to feel that I'd been born into the new year with wobbly legs. My beloved golden retriever, Lucy, has had to leave us. For those of you who have been reading this column over the years, Lucy has been a constant companion. She has been there sniffing out the snowdrops when they emerge in the first rays of March; sitting like a mermaid at the front of my canoe as we made our way through the Mälar islands during the summer; digging to discover the mysteries that lie hidden under the leaves that I raked into piles in the fall; and rolling with the unbridled joy that all of us feel when the first snow comes.

By now, I've been provided with many thoughts about where Lucy is headed. Whether one believes in the afterlife or not, the beauty of these thoughts fills me with faith, hope, and love. These are the three thoughts expressed in that unforgettable passage from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians that has been read countless times, particularly when the beloved pass away. Although I have walked for weeks with the bloodshot eyes of a dog owner who is about to lose their most cherished walking companion, finding that one is left with faith, hope, and love when all else is stripped away is a wonderful discovery to make.

A tear rolls down my cheek, and I decide it must be faith. What would Lucy have done with any exciting discovery like this? She would have explored it. So, I go into the thought of faith. My memory takes me to the night off End Dock when a terrible storm raged, and my boat was like a cork in the ocean. Lucy and I jumped ship. She made it to the shore first, the champion swimmer that she was. I began to freeze in the cold waters and lose consciousness. At this moment, Lucy, the dog, began barking hysterically from the dock. Had it not been for this quick action, I am sure I would have passed out in the icy waters and drowned. She persisted with her barking, often with her head very low, leaning towards me as though to reach out, never giving up. As I dragged myself out of the waters, her tongue smothered me in warmth and in the faith that we would make it. It hadn't been our time yet, and Lucy knew it.

Another tear rolls down on the other cheek, and I find that it is hope. I see Lucy sitting at the end of the dock on our summer island, waiting for us to return from being away. She had enormous freedoms and could have gone anywhere she liked on the island during our brief absences, which never amounted to more than a few hours. Few modern dogs have this opportunity. Yet, Lucy knew freedom from the beginning and thus had no need to run away. Perhaps she wandered and sniffed here and there during our absences, but she never ventured far from the dock. One could see her, a white spot far in the distance, across the lake, sitting and waiting whenever we returned to drive our boat home. Just as she kept her hopes up that we would return to her, her eyes were always focused on the Christmas ham and the hope that a succulent piece would fall from my hands. She retained that hope until the very end of her days.

If there was a tear here and there for faith and hope, there was an ocean of tears for love. As I sat at my writing desk, absorbed in an activity she could never quite fathom, she often nudged my elbow to remind me that it was time to share my affection. There is always so much to be done, and it is false to believe there will be less to do once we have done all of it. Lucy knew that and forced me to make space in my daily life for expressing affection. She reminded all of us in the family constantly that there could never be enough sharing of love. In a time of abundance, the expression of true love is strangely one of those things that there can be a shortage of. There is such quantity of everything else that it gets lost, delicate and simple as it is. In the wagging of her sloped tail and in her dark, unflinching eyes, set determinedly between those pricked ears that reminded me of silk kerchiefs, she focused daily on dragging us out of our boxes and sharing. In this way, creatures like Lucy have a very important role in our society.

If there is anything I have learned from this beautiful animal, it is the considerable contribution that can be made by waking up and expressing joy. There is only one day of her decade-long life in which I can remember that Lucy did not do this. That was the day when she had to be emergency-operated for a very serious internal disorder that could have killed her within 24 hours. At some point, most of us forget how important it is to start the day with an expression of joy in those we have around us and in this short and curious thing that we call life. Lucy never forgot, except on that one day, which was entirely understandable.

I've been picking up the rest of the “Christmas cards” that have continued to stream into my post box in January. It is the first year I have noticed that even the most diehard of Christmas card writers just haven't found the time. I renew my resolve to greet all my friends in time each year. The underlying idea of the Christmas card will never be outdated, whether it is delivered on paper, electronically, or who-knows-how in the future. It is that time for stopping, reaching out, and re-establishing the bonds between one another that hold the earth together, just like the bonds that hold together elements in a compound. These bonds are essential for all life, as are faith, hope, and love. Godspeed, Lucy, the dog. You have brought so many so much happiness and meaning.

Enjoy a short radio play I wrote for the podcast The Europeans about Ellie the dog’s journey through Europe in November to December 2019. During the COVID pandemic, The podcast ran a series called “Summer of Solidarity” to unite Europeans in a time of social distancing.

Read Only a Moment, a new poem inspired by the year’s longest day.

Leave a comment

Share

Before the summer’s poetry starts, here are some reflections motivated by the spring’s activism and a new writing project.

This spring I began the all-absorbing work of starting a new manuscript that hinges on a lesser-known diary written from Berlin throughout the 1930s into the first two years of WWII. Without getting into the details, the experience immerses me ever more deeply in the question of what it means to live humanely in a brutal time, a theme I’ve explored in previous postings. It also presents the question of how we, living in the free world, still able to make choices about how we organize our society, can stop the deterioration of our world, and create the preconditions for emergence. For, there is no longer any question that the habitability of planet Earth now depends on us and, in turn, on our determination to preserve the right to govern ourselves based on the principles of equality, dignity, and the inviolable rights of all people.

Reading the near-daily entries by a fellow author attempting to survive both physically and spiritually under dictatorship prompted me to return to Tim Snyder’s eloquent and concise summary of how to behave in the face of tyranny, especially before it has taken hold of our societies, and attempting to stop it could cost us our lives. In this short handbook, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, published during the Trump administration, Snyder, one of the world’s most respected historians of 20th-century totalitarianism, elaborates twenty guidelines for disarming tyranny. I can only encourage you to keep it close and return to it when you feel torn about what to do.

As a result of my own democracy and human rights activism, I’ve come up with my own addition to Snyder’s excellent guidelines (if you read it, I suggest you do the same, it is a worthy challenge). It reads something like this: Actively pursue and cultivate possibilities for reconciliation and forgiveness.

An admission: I’ve long been skeptical of these words that have been abused and often emptied of meaning by power-seeking religious institutions and commerce (think Hallmark cards and social media advice). No doubt, my background as a member of a perpetrator family, which became indignant at the very suggestion of these ideas, didn’t help. Either they thought there was no point in trying because it would only result in failure and humiliation or, worse, existential death; or there was no need for them in the first place. A prose piece I wrote about a year ago expressed this state of mind in its opening lines:

I've looked askance at you with misgivings that I might turn into a pillar of salt that crumbled if I gave you my full attention. You might force me to become another uncharted soul rather than the one I know. You may be God's trap -- just another way to haul me to the cross, where my sins are on full display in those unsightly wounds.

However, a grassroots project I’ve been working on for the past five years has gradually helped me to untangle them from their associations with power-seeking institutions and commerce and to consider them more carefully. During these years, I’ve toured Sweden and held public conversations with my friend, journalist Helena Trus, who has written about her grandmother’s tortuous and painful experience of surviving the Holocaust. This April, a visit to a community college in Örebro, Sweden, broke new ground.

Imagine a room filled with people in their twenties, most of whom have fled war-torn countries with their families, having few or no opportunities to discuss the heavy inner wounds and burdens the experience has left them with. They have enrolled in a one-year course that examines reconciliation and forgiveness both conceptually and in their own lives. Helena and I sit at an angle to see one another and the surrounding audience. We have each spent more than a decade pursuing and discussing our family histories. Now, our task is to share those stories and engage others in a conversation about the meaning of reconciliation and forgiveness. Between us, we know we can manage, though we’ve never faced these particular topics head-on, and, to be honest, they are daunting challenges with unpredictable outcomes. We think more about the others in the room. Will they stay, or are their wounds too fresh for them to endure the emotional surgery that a session with us entails?

Here, again, is another excerpt from my short prose piece. Although I wrote it a year ago, after our first encounter with these topics at this community college, it mirrors my experience this spring.

In a room with others who are struggling, I say your names: "Reconciliation, Forgiveness," like two boulders that have been waiting patiently in my garden since the last ice age ended. The act of naming you is a start -- itself a reconciliation with you and a forgiveness of myself for not looking at your faces from the beginning. Even more, it is an exquisite taste of infinity. I look down the Yellow Brick Road (like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz) and begin wanting to understand.

Infinity is a very long road, the reason reconciliation and forgiveness require collective courage and determination (Note: Dorothy did not travel the Yellow Brick Road alone). These were present with such force in that room that I found my own relationship to these ideas transforming. Naming them in the presence of others was the first step, the opening to filling them with real meaning based on all the years of pursuing a path which, suddenly, I realized, was all about them:

More words fall from my lips without warning, but they embrace my fears like the gentlest mother. “Reconciliation is finding a way to meet one's past and the people who have played a role in it; a means of encountering one's shame and guilt with generosity and disarming them so they will never hurt anyone. Reconciliation births forgiveness, and more words fall: “Forgiveness transforms difficult, negative feelings about oneself and others into empathy, even love.”

Helena and I had been working together for years, but in all this time, I hadn’t found the courage to ask her a simple question. This room of wounded souls willing to walk the infinite path together summoned the strength in me to cross a new threshold: Helena, do I need to ask you for forgiveness? I asked, relying on the solid foundation of our partnership to bear any reply. I hadn’t directly committed any crimes against her family myself, but it had taken me decades to stand up to my nearest who had lied about very serious matters that had horrific consequences for her family—you might have called me a bystander.

I will keep Helena’s response private, but she was her usual gracious self, and, most importantly, it empowered those around us who were struggling with their own difficulties to surmount their fears and engage with a collective pain they saw and felt and understood needed to be healed. For unconsidered and neglected, reconciliation and forgiveness are like eternal wounds that hurt us repeatedly: either we hurt others or destroy ourselves or both.

When the session was done, there was a sense of relief that all of us were still intact but somehow changed:

Like Dorothy, who’d returned from the Land of Oz, I still possess my soul. What is more, I have determined to make peace with the Cross. I know where I have been and why I have been there. If only mirrors could whisper, they would say: "Carry on. Do not be afraid."

If I could make a wish for us troubled humans on this planet, it is that more could commit to engaging in processes of reconciliation and forgiveness. If history has any evolving relevance (my friend and colleague, Rachael Cerrotti, recently reminded me in her Substack, “Along the Seam,” that I once came up with the term), it is to point us toward these two ideas. Though they cannot be “achieved” and are a lifetime’s work, as soon as we take them on, the power of tyrants has no hold over us. In a storm, Dorothy’s house happened to crush the Wicked Witch of the East, but it was in her long journey with brave, kind, and sensible friends on the Yellow Brick Road that she eventually overcame the Wicked Witch of the West and thus the Land of Oz became free.

For a multi-award-winning program that National Public Radio (U.S.) made featuring my story intertwined with that of my friend and colleague, Rachael Cerrotti, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust as a refugee in Denmark and Sweden, please see:

https://www.wbur.org/kindworld/2017/12/31/beyond-sides-of-history

Yet in every escape, there is the inevitable encounter with reality—there is no utopia in utopia—which the idyllic town of Céret promptly reminded me of as the region in which it is located entered a third year of drought and bewilderment.

The most fleeting look at the nature of our problems, whether poverty, hunger, war, environmental destruction, the decline of democracy and human rights, and whatever else, reveals that the only source of meaningful change is that invisible but vast and powerful place that none other than each of us can access and affect: our humanity (Note: technology helps or hinders, depending on whether its development and use remain consistent with values associated with human dignity). While this may seem daunting, it also comes as a relief. The dissonance of business-as-usual as our world stumbles toward the brink can be deafening; the sense of helplessness disorienting and paralyzing.

In this long read, which includes thoughts from life in a French town and the journey North, I reflect on that vast and powerful place, which can be as robust as we choose to make it. I share my notes on a subject I’ve been thinking more about of late: What does it mean to live humanely in a brutal time?

Putting truth and the universal first

During the years that I pursued my grandparents’ story in archives and among eyewitnesses in Europe and Latin America, some well-meaning people warned me not to ‘get lost in it.’ They feared that if I continued, I could drown in the horrors of a past I could not change. I valued their concern and took it seriously. But neither they nor I could foresee the paradox that would emerge by forging on: as I went ever deeper into the abyss of my grandparents’ time, tiny lights switched on everywhere, illuminating my path and helping me to see increasing dimensions of the truth. These lights, which together formed an alternative universe to my dark discoveries, were the humanity of many individuals, then strangers, who shared my belief that we could only make things better by facing as much of the truth about the past as possible.

But why poke around in the past? Nothing can come of it! complained a familiar echo from an old universe, the frightened twin of the new one I had discovered. The reply was steady, gentle, and clear: by confronting the past, we become aware of our complexity and the conditions and choices that divide us and put us in danger of becoming unmoored from dignity. Moreover, there is a healing in the doing: In the moment that each one of those lights switched on, someone I had never met decided to put their humanity, a universal sense of belonging, above other belongings to illuminate what had gone wrong so we could find another way.

Showing courage by insisting on learning, innovation and humor

During the months that I lived in the haven of Céret, Russia’s dictatorship attempted to extinguish a light that illuminated important truths. When I heard the news of Alexei Navalny’s murder in an Arctic prison, I looked out the window of my workroom in despair. There, I saw the ‘dancing women,’ the 500-year-old trees that lined my street, which led to the Place de la Liberté, and towered over us with branches like rhythmically swaying arms, reminding me that, so far, no one has succeeded in destroying the idea of freedom.

Though Navalny’s early record is problematic—one can only hope that it was a reflection of the stifling political landscape from which he emerged rather than what he became—if there is anything he left us with, apart from his determination to expose the corruption of the Russian state, it was a masterclass in how to hold onto one’s humanity in the most brutal of conditions.

According to his wife, Yulia, his greatest gift was to innovate, which he did to the end, overcoming attempts to crush his spirit by nurturing his interest in literature, exchanging letters with their authors, and maintaining a sharp sense of humor, the most effective bearer of truth. Those who knew him attest to a man who never lost “the courage to be a friend to his friends and a father to his children” (See Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, Beware the Weak Man), frequent casualties in the lives of revolutionaries.

Some outside Russia criticized the attention given to the funeral of this controversial figure rather than to the Ukrainian children being murdered daily in Russia’s war. Still, there is no denying that the substance of Navalny’s light, when he chose to shine it, was the type of courage that challenges all of us not to be silent. It is the only worthy promise anyone can make to those children.

The irony of living in a free society rather than a dictatorship is that it is more difficult to distinguish what living humanely is—the contrast is (fortunately) less clear. Still, as free democracies become embattled islands in a rising sea of troubles, the need to consider what it means becomes more urgent. In this regard, events during my stay in Céret and my later journey home to Sweden through the heart of Europe offered food for thought.

Creating social trust

While in Céret, I gained insights into the mounting challenges to its sense of joie de vivre, which depends on a strong social fabric held together by the mayor’s office, the citizens, the weekly street market, and, not least, the canal system which distributes water for irrigation. Throughout most of my winter stay, Le Canigou, the sacred mountain that supplies Céret and the surrounding towns and farmland with fresh water from the winter’s snowfall, remained a shady peak that reminded me of a monk’s hood, with only a few rivulets of icy snow left over from previous winters.

After weeks of walking past empty canals and drying rivers and saving household wastewater for our host’s thirsty potted plants, my morning walks became a pilgrimage up the hill to plead with the mountain to take care of us. While I’ve never been drawn to religious mysticism, I began to feel an affinity with the farmers who, for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, had performed a ceremony in which they carried a statue of St. Gauderique into the receding waters of the River Tet.

When the rain didn’t come, the farmers became more agitated, blaming their equally water-deprived Spanish counterparts across the border for unfair competition. I watched from behind the wheel of my car as they burnt tires at traffic intersections, the black smoke drifting across a landscape where merely lighting a match could send us all up in flames. Though I sympathized with the farmers’ fears, their manner of protesting deepened my worries about what the lack of water would do to the social fabric.

As if to answer my question, the elaborate medieval fortresses punctuating the landscape came into view. Built at great cost in strategic locations to keep out the ‘other’ in a fruitless struggle for resources, they haunted me with their inherent paranoia and the evident wretchedness of life in them.

Waiting while the tires burned, my thoughts wandered to a past I am more familiar with through my family, in which people were motivated by similar fears. I recalled the lines of my grandfather’s denazification papers, which I found in the German Federal Archives, in which he wrote that he’d only been drawn to the Nazi Party as he believed Hitler could bring about better economic conditions. In other words, joining the Party had nothing to do with Nazism’s racist political agenda, which led to genocide. It was a common argument made by former Nazis, SS, and SA to wriggle out of all too severe punishment. However, if there was any truth to his claim, which I am sure there was (next to other truths), it is spine-chilling to know what fear of lack of resources can drive us to.

On the following day, the smoke of burnt rubber still stinging my nostrils, I walked down the hill from my morning of pleading with Le Canigou, a mountain I was beginning to find irritatingly stubborn, and encountered a tree on fire. Dry twigs and leaves had been stuffed into the hollow and blazed in hungry flames, which likely had been started using the lighter that lay on the ground nearby. In my mind’s eye, I could already see the houses and the bustling street market below reduced to ash and ruins.

A jogger called the police while I ran down the hill to warn residents of nearby homes and people in the market. A fire engine soon whisked past me in the opposite direction, and the crisis was over before most of the townspeople noticed the siren. The police opened an investigation, though I don’t know where it led.

Afterward, in a daze, I walked through the market, past its colorful fruits and vegetables amid the shouts of vendors selling their produce and the market-goers from near and far filling the town’s main artery with life, laughter, and multilingual chatter. I wanted to shout to everyone who went about their day as usual: Le Canigou can do nothing for us if we continue to set the planet on fire! But then, looking through tears at the many faces and knowing that each of us did this every day because the organization of our society still offers us too few good options, I modified my plea: Whatever lies ahead, we cannot allow ourselves to be divided.

Eventually, when I poured my story of the burning tree out to a vendor who had become a friend over the weeks I’d been visiting the market, he looked at me solemnly and replied with a heartfelt “Thank you.” Thinking I had saved them from the fire, his wife pressed a fistful of herbs into my hand. “You should try the ruccola too—it’s very good,” said the vendor, offering me a leaf and beginning to stuff a paper bag full of it for me to take along. He’d explained that he had begun working with local farmers experimenting with using a third of the water previously used to grow food crops. While he understood the tire-burners, it wasn’t the way forward.

It struck me that we could have wound conspiracy theories and stoked our anger about what had just happened on the hill. He might even have quietly begun to suspect that I, a careless foreigner, had sloppily cast a lit cigarette on the ground and caused the fire (Note: I don’t smoke). Instead, gratitude, kindness, and a recognition of realities that had awakened the will to change and innovate held the space between us. It was gratifying to learn that a marketplace need not be purely transactional and that it, too, can be part of that vast, verdant landscape of humanity where those who try to burn the trust between us can never ultimately succeed.

When we left, Le Canigou gleamed white with new snow. Had I been a mystic, I would have seen it as a reward for the handling of that day.

Tapping into the wisdom of diversity’s unity

On the way North, my husband and I took a route through Germany so that I could visit the German Literature Archive on the Schiller Heights in Marbach and, later, conduct research in Berlin. On the way, we stayed in Neckarsteinach, another idyllic town, this one on the Neckar River near Heidelberg, where the medieval timber-framed houses had been spared during the bombing of WWII.

The temptation to avoid confronting tourists with the history of the Third Reich must have been great in this pretty town, one of the origins of the Niebelungenlied, which offered river cruises and cafés serving towering cream cakes. And yet a plaque on a building around the corner from our rental apartment didn’t mince words: this building, now in private ownership, had been one of the few synagogues not burnt to the ground in Germany after the pogrom of 9 November 1938. Doing so would have meant burning down the town. Instead, it was ransacked, its contents thrown out the windows, and those that were not stolen eventually destroyed. Its members were humiliated and persecuted.

Depressed by the reminder of this history, which some in my family had refused to recognize fully, I cast my glance across the shelves of the well-organized library in our rental apartment. Many of the books seemed new, part of a deliberately curated collection placed behind a glass cabinet for guests to peruse. The instruction folder in our apartment welcomed readers to take any book from the private library they had not finished during their stay.

There I found a compendium of perspectives on human dignity reaching back to Classical Antiquity entitled Reading Between Years (Lektüre Zwischen Jahren, Insel Verlag, 1997, compiled by Hans Joachim Simm). It opened with these lines from Goethe:

“The highest culture… would prove to be that everything worthy, values that are actually human, should be able to exist side by side in different forms and that therefore different ways of thinking, without wanting to suppress each other, should be able to exist in one and the same region, walking quietly next to each other.”

Such a book, though short, could never be “finished,” and so I took it with me.

Embracing reconciliation and understanding

Over decades, the courage to behold different facets of the past at once and not to avert one’s gaze from “inconvenient” chapters has become a deeply humane German strength. This is no more evident than in Berlin and Potsdam, where I spent two days conducting book research.

Though my interest in memorials may seem obsessive, their presence and details often reflect how we see ourselves and the values we choose to emphasize. On an early morning walk in Gross Glienecke, Potsdam, I encountered a leafy alcove with what may be the most insightful and honest local memorial I have ever visited.

In the center was a column erected in 1926 to remember the town’s WWI “heroes;” to the left of this column was a boulder with a plaque commemorating the town’s WWII dead, and to the right, another plaque remembering “the victims of the violent dictatorship.”

A sign explaining the relationship between this trinity showed a spine-chilling timeline of German history up to the building of the Berlin Wall. It pointed out that those who wanted to see the original 1926 memorial in the spirit of reconciliation and understanding had been in the minority in the inter-war years. Instead, the majority chose to make it a gathering point for a cult of hero worship designed to justify ideological remilitarization during the Third Reich. A national day of mourning became a national day of heroism, recycling the violence.

“Pity the nation that needs a hero,” I thought, recalling the words of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann as I stood in this extraordinary alcove on a glistening spring morning when, in various parts of the world, demagogues and despots, including in Germany, were stoking new fascist-style cults of martyrdom (see, for example, Timothy Snyder's The Bloodbath Candidate).

Later, as I drove around Berlin listening to the growing popularity of the far right on the radio, I longed for the dancing women of Céret and their call to resilience, freedom, and responsibility.

At home, I keep the vision of them close to me in a 1913 rendering that hangs on my study wall (see below). Now and again, I reread the lines from Goethe’s great friend, Schiller, from the opening of my new compendium of human dignity:

The dignity of humanity

Is given into your hand,

Preserve her!

She sinks with you!

With you she will rise!

--Friedrich Schiller, Die Künstler

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

For those who would like to read Goethe’s and Schiller’s lines in the original German:

“Die höchste Kultur…erwiese sich wohl darin: dass alles Würdige, dem Menschen eigentlich Werte, in verschiedenen Formen neben einander müsste bestehen können und dass daher verschiedene Denkweisen, ohne sich verdrängen zu wollen,  in einer und derselben Region ruhig neben einander fortwandelten.” -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Vorbetrachtung

Der Menschheit Würde

Ist in eure Hand gegeben,

Bewahret sie!

Sie sinkt mit euch!

Mit euch wird sie sich heben!

--Friedrich Schiller, Die Künstler

For the closely related article I wrote from Céret for Holocaust Remembrance Day in January this year, please see:

In the Place de la Liberté, the square around the corner from the 200-year-old village house in the small French-Catalan town of Céret where I have been living since mid-December, there is a striking monument I pass by each day on my way up the hill to see whether any snow has fallen in the surrounding mountains that could help end the two-year drought that has plagued southwestern France.

Atop the monument is the statue of a mother in a flowing robe. She sits on a pedestal resting her head on the back side of her hand, her arm leaning on her knee, in mourning and remembrance. Underneath her, engraved in stone are the words, “The Town of Céret, To its children who died for France.” The names of those sons who made the ultimate sacrifice during 1914-18 follow. The list is so long that it takes up all four sides of the square column beneath her.  No one expected to have to screw plaques onto the base of the pedestal with the names of those who fell in a second world war etched into them. And yet, there they are declaring the terrible fate of another generation of sons and making a mockery of the idea of a war to end all wars.

One morning, a few days before Christmas, a crowd gathered outside the monument for a ceremony. In the front row were old men with medals pinned to their blazers and sashes hung diagonally over their shoulders, supported by their grey-haired children and grown grandchildren. Representatives from the military in tall hats stood opposite them and saluted while the mayor, a middle-aged woman, leafed through the pages of her speech at the podium, concerned to get everything right. A three-man band with shiny polished brass instruments waited for the signal to play.

I was an outsider, and yet somehow, I wasn’t. The world wars affected me and my family deeply. But I was from “the other side,” the granddaughter of an SS man, a descendant of the enemy. I stopped and stood on the fringes of the crowd, though it is hard to be inconspicuous when you are as tall as I am and have that self-conscious look of the foreigner about you. Some looked quietly over their shoulders and noticed me standing there between two parked cars but then quickly turned their attention back to greeting family and friends.

From where I stood, I could see the statue and its engraved pedestal straight through the open cast iron gate.  Today, it was flanked by two French flags. Seeing them dangling there made me feel desperate. In today’s volatile socio-political landscape, such ceremonies can so easily be perverted to feed the very same negative brand of nationalism that fueled the world wars.

And yet, all decency behooves us to remember these fallen sons, whose youth war so often stole. The question is, how can we do this without dismissing the complexities of history? For instance, the Vichy Regime, a puppet of the Third Reich, deported approximately 75000 Jews living in France between 1940-44. Though Céret was in free France, to which many fled during the German occupation, the monument itself, the military presence, the flags, and perhaps even the statue of the mother itself were evocative national symbols.

Wherever you live, if you are mindful, the world wars will, at the very least, face you with uncomfortable dualities.  If ceremonies of remembrance are to have any value for peace, they must be able to hold these many jarring realities all at the same time. People must be able to mourn their loss without traumatizing future generations and turning them into permanent victims, the stuff of aggressive nationalism and the seed of genocide.

Looking at the names etched into the monument, I asked myself how these men would have wanted us to remember their experience. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the author’s experience of the trenches during WWI, provides some answers. There is an abiding sense of meaninglessness in war which, to paraphrase Remarque, demands that young men who are just beginning to live and love the world are required to shoot it to pieces. But there is also something else, something we can build upon, and that is a sense of the universality of human experience that transcends flags. All men are made of the same flesh and blood, suffer the same, and most regret it when they do not help their fellow man, even if he or she is on the other side. Little wonder that the Nazis banned Remarque’s book. It is precisely this universality that remembrance must turn its attention to if it is to be of value for improving the human condition.

A memorable book I recently read, entitled A Reconciliation with Evil, an account of the life of my friend, Leon Weintraub, soon to be published in English (I’ll let you know when it’s available) and Swedish, alongside the existing Polish and German editions, points us squarely in this direction. Today, a spritely 98-year-old, Leon survived the poverty of his beginnings in Poland, several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and antisemitic persecution in his native Poland during the late 1960s. If there is anyone I know who has reasons to feel victimized and to become hardened in the shell of an identity, it is Leon. Yet, in his book, he dismisses these tendencies and says: “I just feel human.”

Maybe a professional life devoted to maternal health, for which he recently received the highest honor Germany can bestow upon a physician, made reaching such an enlightened conclusion more likely. People look all the same inside, Leon often says. Even when we have spoken of the most difficult things, as we once did in conversation on German public television, I am reminded of his long, warm embrace which places what is between us as humans above all else. It is a form of wisdom gained through the experience of what, for most of us, is unimaginable suffering and that we can only access through the act of remembrance. This means being mindful of the past, its devilish multifacetedness, and taking care never to lose sight of what binds us.

I do not know what was said during the small ceremony in the Place de la Liberté on that day. My French skills are too meager.  All one can hope for is that the mayor of Céret did justice to history and the sons of Céret, who are our sons too.

In closing, here is a short poem written out of the sense of unease from which this article emerged, but that also yearns for the universality in which it landed.

Hymn for Faded Flags

Flags billow and fade

Into one another,

Colors bleeding

In the winds of war.

In peacetime, they hang limp,

Separate,

The colors keeping to themselves

In the dense silence before a new fight.

A craggy, ancient language

Bursts from a man’s chest,

Haunting in its tenderness

From which the angry passion of belonging rises.

Mothers’ warm tears trickle through time

And the dank crevices of stone walls

Into the tranquil sea,

The final resting place of children.

Other thought-provoking pieces concerning the consequences of what and how we remember:

Letter to a Pig - A Short Film by Tal Kantor | Short of the Week

A presentation I did last year for Holocaust Remembrance Week at the Office of the EU Commission in Stockholm in conversation with U.N. whistle-blower, Inga-Britt Ahlenius:

Leave a comment

Share