Sunday, October 23, 2011

Saying Goodbye To A Most Incredibly Independent Babi

When I was younger - maybe 7 or 8 - and first got into some mischief for being a 'wise guy' in class, I assumed I had naturally inherited such behavior from my father, who had gotten into similar trouble at that age. As I got a bit older, I realized my Babi - my mother's mother - who was then a spry 73 or so, deserved at least as much credit for my rebellious streak.

Considering many of the trials, tribulations and tragedies she had to endure in her lifetime, her fierce independence to the very end - her utter refusal to let life kick her when she was down - is probably the thing that most fascinates and amazes me about her to this day. It's what I'll miss the most about her. I figured I'd reflect on it since she passed away a few weeks before her 97th birthday this past Friday.

My Babi was a Holocaust survivor but her independent streak seems to have existed long before the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, when she was almost 30, and newly wed (getting married in your late 20s in that time period was alone a statement of her independance). In fact, it's likely the reason she survived an ordeal that saw so many of her family members perish.

Growing up in the town of Sátoraljaújhely in Northeast Hungary, Babi didn't see her father from 1914, the outbreak of WWI, when she was just an infant, until 1919, when the war ended. Her family was religiously defined as 'Status quo' which was some Hungarian Jewish equivalent of modern orthodox in America today. In a surviving picture we have that was taken in 1928 or 1929, her father is wearing a simple hat and her two older brothers and dapperly dressed, with their heads uncovered. She attended 'Gymnasia', the local non-sectarian Jewish school, through just 4th grade, as was standard for girls at that time.

Her first husband, who died in Budapest in late 1944 and is buried in a mass grave in the Dohein temple, wasn't a particularly religious man. He certainly didn't put on tefillin (phylacteries) on a regular basis - an act which is considered a daily staple of an orthodox Jewish lifestyle. If not for the war, she never would have ended up with my zeidy (grandfather in yiddish), who was from a hasidic family (he stopped wearing hasidic garb after the war but remained deeply religious). Though they grew up in the same small town in Hungary, their paths most certainly would have never crossed.

Babi's father passed away of natural causes in March 1944. She travelled from Budapest, where she lived with her husband, whom she had been married to for a couple of years at most, to sit shiva in Sátoraljaújhely at her parents house. In the middle of the shiva, her husband called her and told her to leave at once as word had spread that the Nazis had invaded Hungary. So she attempted to board the next train to Budapest. As she arrived at the train station in Sátoraljaújhely, the local anti-semitic authorities were separating out the Jewish passengers, forcing them to remain in the town until they could be deported to Auschwitz. Babi was unaware of this but saw a long line by the main entrance to the station and in her typical independent mindset, snuck in through a back entrance to the station and onto the train out of the city. When she returned to her neighborhood in Budapest later that day, her friends couldn't believe she had made it back from the countryside unscathed.

Babi didn't much like discussing most of her war experiences - she believed in living in the present and harping on it could send her into a deep depression (my mom says Babi once stayed in bed for 3 days straight after she brought her to see a play her class was doing about the Eichman trial). The stories she did have were mostly disjointed - a snippet here, and anecdote there. We know Raul Wallenberg pulled her off a transit at some point and saved her, as he did for many of Budapest's Jews. Above all, Babi would not be defined as a victim despite her harrowing war stories. We never thought of her as a victim - someone that strong never could be one.

Even in her later years when she had Alzheimer's and rarely recognized her grandchildren, she was always quick with a joke or a sly remark. On my last visit to her in May, she quipped to Simone that she was very chinosh (skinny in Hungarian). Then she turned her glance to me and a quipped, "him not so much."

One other story I'm reminded of is from when I was 14. I decided to stay in camp for a 2nd month and skip my family's vacation so my friend Jonah Lowenfeld joined in my place. Babi felt this young man was very rude - at one point she slapped him after he tried to pour wine for my father without 'permission'. That was my Babi though; if she thought you were wrong, she said so. There was no pretense with her.

Looking at pictures on Saturday night with my Mom and brother Hillel, there Babi was at every one of our graduations, always smiling and just happy to be there to witness such a momentous occasion. She always mentioned with pride that my mother always brought home straight A's - this was still an incredible point of pride decades later. Our graduations were the perfect confluence of events as Babi truly valued family and education above all else precisely because of the personal independence those two things offer. With a strong education, she believed life's doors were opened up for you. With a strong family to support you through thick and thin, you could go out and be yourself to the world every day without worrying too much about being judged. In know Babi never did.

Pictures of Babi from this May



Thursday, June 16, 2011

Fascinated With Crustypunks

So I found this website - http://crustypunks.blogspot.com/ - online last night and I've spent hours reading it since then. It is a site started by an East Village photographer (I think) named Steven Hirsch to document the stories of the wandering groups of what have been labeled 'crustypunks' or gutter punks' by people around the country. These kids show up every summer in tomkins sq. Park in the east Village and set up there to panhandle in the days and 'party' at nights.

Most of their stories are quite similar. These kids basically run away from home in the teens after getting thrown out of their houses when their parents find them with hard drugs after years of fighting, or they come from really broken, messed up homes to begin with, where there is physical and/or sexual abuse. Some grew up in foster homes and never knew their parents or had any real family to speak of. They join these wandering bands of hobos, hop freight trains up north in summer and down south in winter and live a nomadic existence free of the cares that most of us with families and mortgages, jobs and deadlines.

They live really hard lives. Many are heroin addicts. The ones that don't do heroin are usually alcoholics. They get in lots of street fights - both with each-other and with locals. They get in trouble with the local police - tickets, arrests, constantly being hassled. They have few friends and many seem to be teetering on the edge of mental stability.

I love the fact that these sorts of subcultures seemingly spring up overnight in America. I love even more that amateur anthropologists like Steven Hirsch will see something interesting and new going on around them, camera in hand, and take it upon themselves to document it in a public fashion (damn I love the interwebs). It's a really well done site, because Hirsch captures the original voice of his subjects giving the reader a real sense of how a conversation (or rambling monologue) might go, while telling their life story, or recounting specific life events that have happened to these characters. And they are really are characters: each and every one could probably have a novel written about them or a movie made about them. The pictures the author takes are really good too - individual portraits that at a glance give you a real sense of who these kids are. As my friend Rena just put it, he does a very good job at presenting the good/idealistic vs. bad/realistic sides of these lives, and in a very short space.

I just remembered, when I was at my first Bonnaroo music festival in 2002 in the middle of tennessee, there was a crustypunk there who we saw wandering and we were making a huge bbq one afternoon and invited him over to dine with us. His name was Spider (they all have these sorts of street names given to them by fellow travelers) and he told us about his life. He wandered the country on freight trains - usually alone, occasionally with others. Everything he owned was in a single backpack and it wasn't even full. He spoke of the freedom he had from the materialism of America but also of being hungry a lot and never knowing where his next meal was coming from. Somethings basic things you can't break 'free' from I guess.

And here's an interview I just found with Steven Hirsch - Smart guy!

Anyway, fascinating stuff.


Thursday, June 2, 2011

Greatest Band Ever?

I'm talking about Phish of course! We had a rockin time as always Sunday night in Bethel Woods - site of the original Woodstock festival. A killer bbq (my sister Sara is a whiz at setting up complicated things like grill devices on the spot) and some delicious brews (thanks Bron!) set us on the right path. Our crew was augmented by Vinick, who finally popped his phish cherry in time for his 30th B-day (which he shares with Bob Dylan, who just turned 70 - we're seeing him in Tel Aviv in under 3 weeks!), Bron's awesome wife (Michal) and in our car, a cute-as-can-be 7-month pregnant Simone who was grooving hard with our unborn child, baby bump in tow, my brother (and the most serious musician in our crew) Mo, and my good, good friend Noam, who as usual showed up with no ticket and got into the show for $40 even (face was $45 for the lawn - no idea how he always pulls it off!). We also ran into tons on people we knew there, including Bars - been ages since we chilled at Phish together - and Howie F.! Also ran into Raffi G. - they were right near us on the lawn.

The show was a great time as always with perfect weather, a great setlist and some sweet ass jams. So what's with the title of this post?

I just downloaded the entire show free on Phish's live download site - all I needed was the bar code on my ticket stub. And the just dropped prices on lawn tickets to $45 - and that includes a free high quality download of the show from the band! How many bands would do that for their fans?! Thanks again for the sweet memories - we'll see you next summer no doubt!

Here's a nice moment from Sunday night's show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGaHr3tVhLI

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

YMCA: Another Amazing Purim!

As I said on Monday night as it all wound down and I was having one last beer with Mike Berezin, this is the worst week of the year, because it's the furthest you can get from next Purim. Oh well - another amazing Purim is in the books. Party on people!




Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Physical Violence Therapy

We live in a world of laziness. Very few people I know even come close to reaching their full potential. Why is this?

Well, there's the usual litany of reasons. Various social and psychological disorders, substance abuse problems (generally alcohol or pot), chronic pain, lack of motivation.

Usually, people try half-baked methods to overcome their deficiencies - therapy, prescription drugs, God obsessions.

Well, I'm here to tell you of a new method I've come up with to reach your full potential. There's very little that motivates people like the threat of a good old fashioned ass whooping - or worse. You've heard of physical therapy, art therapy, music therapy... now there's Physical Violence Therapy.

Having trouble holding down a job simply because you just can't seem to find anything that truly fulfills you? My goons will threaten to break your legs beyond repair if you don't find a job... and keep it. It doesn't matter what at is - as long as your family no longer has to live beyond their means simply because you're too fucking lazy to hold a job for more than a week.

Can't seem to stop drinking or smoking pot when you should be helping around the house? What if one of our licensed therapists threaten to beat you senseless with a bag of brass doornobs? Will that help motivate you to not be such a lazy bastard?

Watch TV for hours when you should be at the gym trying to lose some weight? We've got brass knuckles and a beaker of skin melting acid with your name on them that say you'll be on your way to the gym in 60 seconds flat - or else...

You ever notice the way people spring into gear and do things they'd never do under normal circumstances like hand over their wallet and fancy jewelry to a perfect stranger when there's a gun being pointed at their head? Now you can use the powerful threat of Physical Violence Therapy to get your life back in order, maybe even overachieve for a change.

Physical Violence Therapy - because nothing motivates like a good ass whooping.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Playoff Football and Phish New Years

So, it's been awhile but I wanted to get back to writing a bit. Jason Rousman and I are tied for first place after the first week of the playoffs in our pick-em pool having erroneously picked NO to beat Seattle but getting the other three games right. After a far from good fantasy season, I hope we can at least take this title down. Here are our picks for this week's games:

BALT - 3 point underdogs? Best road team in NFL history? Even if they lose, they're covering
ATL - Everyone wants GB but not us. Atlanta had a great season, Matt Ryan is the most underrated QB in the NFL, and they were 7-1 at home this year. GB was 3-5 on the road and 1-2 indoors. ATL gets our respect and our pick
CHI - I know we got burned on Seattle last week but the bottom line is, they're really not that good. I expect Hassleback to come back down to earth this week resulting in a Chicago romp
NYJ - NE will win by a TD or less in a game that's close throughout

I'm especially psyched for the two AFC games - two bitter division rivals, they should both be tight and hard-fought.

In other news, check out this Phish Ghost from New Years: best jam I've heard in a long, long time. It's as transcendent as live improvisational music gets and I'm glad the boys can still throw down this well!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0Sf8lOdGRw

Also, the Meatstick meets It's a Small World dance number from New Years Eve is really cool - well done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H1sht6IDmQ&feature=related

Fast forward to the 4:30 mark to get to the good part.