Yesterday, with the approach of the snowstorm, I made plans.  This included shopping, catching up on reading and some writing.  I bundled up and walked over to our convenient but overpriced (location is more important than cost when the temperature is 17F) Morton Williams supermarket on First Avenue to purchase the ingredients for the halloumi salad I discovered at the Aroma Café on the highway from Be’ersheva to Jerusalem (I had to get Jerusalem in somewhere, right?). The ChatGPT recipe isn’t entirely accurate but produces a close enough version. In my reading pile were the last three of issues of the New Yorker – my intention was to read them – or at least look at all of the cartoons. 

With no other plans I truly wanted to focus on writing. For the record I already have ten characters bouncing around twenty-five pages in Novel II.  I have no clue where I’m going but the characters will eventually tell me what they want to do. As Jules Feiffer wrote, “The one thing I don’t want to know is where I’m going before I get there. I follow the orders of the book.  The book tells me where it wants to go, and I write accordingly.”  

I arrived home, semi-frozen, and placed the groceries on the counter. In the background I heard the news in the background and Diane told me about the killing in Minnesota.  The day suddenly changed. We’re loosely connected to Minneapolis. We have friends and family there. When we lived in Omaha we visited regularly. It’s a great town. Since the ICE ramp up, we’ve been in contact with friends.  All have been impacted.  One friend was followed by ICE on the way home from synagogue a few Saturdays ago.

The rest of the day was spent watching the news. We learned of the victim. We heard what Federal officials said. And we watched the videos. From what we heard and what we saw there is a disconnect a mile wide. Today I made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows as acolytes of the President stammered and squirmed (I understand that yesterday the President’s priority was hosting a preview for the Melania flick – one can only assume those present were squirming too).

Though my plan was to work on fiction, I have been consumed with facts concerning two men: Alex Pretti and Stephen Miller.  Both are close in age. From what we have read Alex was a well-respected ICU nurse who cared about his community. He was committed to helping people as evidenced by his choice of career – and by his final actions shielding a woman being terrorized. In photographs he always had a smile. I’ve never seen a photograph of Stephen Miller with a smile. I don’t know much about him other than he is the architect of the administration’s immigration policy – one could say he’s the Heinrich Himmler of this administration.

Stephen’s great-grandparents and grandfather were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Like mine, and millions of other Jewish families they fled from persecution. How he turned out the way he did is bewildering and incomprehensible – I leave that discussion to professionals. I do know that if his family did not immigrate, chances are they would have perished in the Holocaust and Stephen would not have been born.

In 1955 the Museum of Modern Art had a landmark exhibition ‘The Family of Man,’ with over 500 photographs depicting our commonality and shared humanity. I have the catalog in our bookcase. I’m sure Stephen has never seen it. Though it’s a collector’s item, I’d be happy to share it with him, but I suspect he would never understand, though I want to believe the rest of us do.