Fwd: A Complicated Optimist, Mark Bittman, NYTimes, 9/10/2014

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Thought you might have missed this Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Jane Swensen <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: September 16, 2014 at 7:30:00 AM GMT+10 To: Tony Podesta <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: A Complicated Optimist, Mark Bittman, NYTimes, 9/10/2014 The Opinion Pages | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER A Complicated Optimist SEPT. 9, 2014 My father, who died last week at 91, had a complex life that typified that of Jewish men of his generation. But of course when you know someone well, you see just how unusual that life is. Or was. Murray was born in the Bronx to immigrants from Austria and Romania. (The borders have since shifted — several times.) The family was poor and became more so during the Depression. (“We were happy with a boiled potato and some sour cream,” he’d yell at me when I’d refuse to clean my plate.) He enlisted in the Army when he turned 18, and was recommended for Officer Candidate School; his raw intelligence was instantly obvious to everyone who met him. He was denied admission, which he suspected was a result of anti-Semitism. And he was probably right. He’d never sit down and talk about his war years in detail. I asked his mother about them, and mine too, but he’d told no one much of anything. But 10 years ago I sat and listened while a friend of mine — a near-stranger to him — teased out the story. (I’m not a bad reporter. But he was my father and not easy to approach.) He landed in France sometime after D-Day, trudged into Belgium and finally Germany where, in 1945, as part of a nearly helpless squadron of G.I.s, he stumbled across a “small” concentration camp with “a couple of thousand inmates,” abandoned by fleeing Germans and all starving to death. I’ll spare you the grim details he told us (and they’re plenty gruesome), but the troops baby-sat for these former prisoners, sharing what little food they could spare with the few who were most likely to survive, until more Americans arrived and rescued them all. By then there was little to distinguish the liberators from the captives. And so it took me nearly 50 years to get the answer to “what did you do in the war, Daddy?” Murray weathered the Depression, the war, and missed opportunities: He was too impatient to take advantage of the G.I. bill, and went straight to work as a “jobber” in the fur industry, a position he stayed in for 40-odd years, always employed within the blocks bordered by 28th and 30th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues. (These blocks were once excellent places for kosher vegetarian food — “dairy” restaurants — and real frankfurters; no longer.) He married a talented woman who ultimately developed a career of her own as an administrator in an insurance company; she became my mom, and she’s sleeping in her bedroom as I write this in her den. Something made Murray more or less permanently angry, always on the edge of rage; he’d never say what. He was dogmatic and unyielding, and would say of our family, “This isn’t a democracy; it’s a dictatorship.” He acted as if he really believed that. (That was not popular, nor was it intended to be.) He could be unsympathetic to people who were treated as badly as or even worse than Jews, whose suffering he saw as unparalleled. And so, starting around 1964 — I was 14 then — we disagreed about and fought over just about everything. There was another side though. Murray combined thrift, discipline, fierce loyalty and generosity in unexpected ways. He’d put money in the hands of homeless people who weren’t asking for it. He bragged that he loved paying taxes. (“If I’m paying more taxes, it’s because I’m making more money.”) He supported his two younger brothers on and off and ultimately he could not deny his children much of anything, at least financially. He retired 25 years ago, managed his money well, took good care of himself and my mother, and never looked back. That was my dad. He was stubborn, not necessarily a bad thing. When his oldest and then youngest brother died before each was 50, of heart disease most likely brought on by smoking and obesity (they were men of impressive girth), he became determined to beat the odds. He gave up smoking and began to lose weight. (As any ex-smoker can tell you, this is a very tough combination.) He began a program of daily vigorous walking long before it was in fashion. And so he lived long enough to give doctors the tools they needed to keep his most likely killer, heart disease, at bay (he had triple bypass surgery 15 years ago), and kept his Type 2 diabetes in check with insulin and diet. He ultimately succumbed, I believe, to complications of Parkinson’s. We all believed he’d bought himself 10 or 20 years of life with that stubbornness, and that’s an incredible thing. I’m proud of that. To the end, there was nothing dishonest about Murray, and though he could be withdrawn, for the most part almost everything was on the surface: love, hatred, joy, anger, humor, wisdom, generosity and a seemingly boundless capacity for optimism. That was the quality I treasure the most. He could never, not for one second, believe that things were going to get worse; he was always certain they’d get better. It wasn’t long ago, years after he stopped being able to walk unaided, that he announced that he and a physical therapist were working on “getting me to walk again.” His muscles wracked by Parkinson’s, just a few weeks ago he told me he was going to work on “at least” standing again. And this man was not demented. He was just a cockeyed optimist, as the song has it. Though I’m happy I seem to have inherited some of that, I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t know his parents well — his father died when I was 3, and to say that his mother, my grandma Sarah, was not the most communicative woman in the world would be an understatement — but to me that optimism was the most powerful, memorable and positive thing about my dad. The funny thing is that he was almost always right: for him, compared to most humans, things really did work out well. How great is that? Jane Swensen | Associate Podesta Group | 1001 G Street, NW Suite 1000 West, Washington, DC 20001 202.879.9366 (d) | 202.830.8302 (c) | [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | www.podestagroup.com<http://www.podestagroup.com> The information contained in this transmission is attorney privileged and/or confidential information intended for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited