Bookends and Other Endings

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I wrote a book the other day. Well, I exaggerate; it actually took me a couple of days. And though I did some original writing for the book, I didn’t really write it as much as I compiled it by using excerpts from some of my previous books, articles I had written, a few of my blogs, etc. I wrote it for my kids (I have three) who are now all middle-aged, but to a father like me, they are still my kids.

I didn’t really expect to write any more books. I had to give up writing the last of my books several years ago. After that, I’ve turned to the blogging life and over the last five years, I’ve cranked out more than a hundred blogs. So, what made me to decide to write this book? Thanks for asking. I will tell you.  

I was led to do so as a result of reading another book, as I describe in the brief preface of my new book, a portion of which I will quote here:

The genesis of this book came about adventitiously as a result of my coming across a very curious book about the beginnings of Zionism. Of course, that is a well-known development that is familiar to most people, but what made this book so arresting and riveting to me was the way this history was narrated. The book entitled Melting Point by an English author named Rachel Cockerell consists entirely of quotes from the dramatis personae from this period – excerpts from diaries, letters, speeches, newspapers, etc. There is no interpretative commentary at all. This gives the book an immediacy, you-are-there quality as you witness history unfolding as it happens.

The story takes us from the beginning of Theodor Herzl’s first Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 to the creation of the state of Israel exactly fifty years later. 

But, it turns out, that’s not the real story of this book. Instead, it is one that has been virtually forgotten so that few people alive today are aware of it. But did you know that long before Jews were able to come to live in Israel, quite a few of them, indeed many thousands, mainly Russian Jews, were able to form a colony of Jews in – of all places – Galveston, Texas! Some remained there, some eventually moved on to and settled in other parts of America.

The man mainly responsible for creating this haven for Jewish refugees was during this period the most famous Jew in the world. But today, like the Galveston migration itself, he is completely forgotten. His name was Israel Zangwill, an author who at the time was hailed as the Jewish Dickens. In 1908, as a celebrity in New York, he wrote a play called "The Melting Pot," which was a huge hit and thrilled then President Teddy Roosevelt who was there on opening night.

But the man who was really responsible for the Galveston caper was a close colleague of Zangwill by the name of David Jochelmann, who turns out to be Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, something she only learned in the course of her research for the book. The author is the one who brought this whole forgotten episode in the history of the Jews to light as well as her great-grandfather’s pivotal role in rescuing these Jews from the pogroms of early twentieth century Czarist Russia.

There is much more in this book than what I have delineated here. We meet other people from Cockerell’s family who settled in New York during the jazz age, and later in London, all of which I found engrossing. Really, it is one helluva story, as the reviews of the book I’ve read make clear.

Anyway, musing about this book and what I had learned about the lives of all these Jews, it occurred to me that I might try, however belatedly, to educate my own children, now all middle-aged adults and no longer kids (except to their father), about what Jews had contributed to the world as well as telling them more about their father’s own journey as a Jew that led, in the end, to his forsaking his own sense of Jewish identity.

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I gave my book a somewhat whimsical title: Pastrami on Rye: A Potpourri of Pieces from the Life of a Jewish Apostate. But the book isn’t really humorous. I wrote it not just to entertain my kids (and whoever else might read it) but to tell them about my own Jewish past as well as what Jews had contributed culturally to our world. 

Now I know that very few of you are Jewish or care about such things, but since, as I will explain below, this will be my last blog, I will beg your indulgence for a few more minutes.

As I explain at the beginning of my book, it is the story of how I grew up Jewish and how I grew old only to forfeit my sense of Jewish identity. And what happened in between my youth and old age to bring about this radical change.   

The book has three main sections: (1) My life as a Jew; (2) Jewish contributions to the world of music and entertainment; (3) Israel. I will say more about the last section of the book here. 

The road that led to my apostasy, that is, to my abandonment of the religion into which I was born, even if I had never practiced it, led me to pick up a book entitled Dark Hope. I was in my early seventies then and had recently ended my career as an NDE researcher. Dark Hope had been written by an Israeli scholar – actually, as I was soon to learn, he had been a recipient of a MacArthur award and was a distinguished Indologist. But as you will learn from the chapters in this section, David Shulman was also an Israeli peace activist and had spent years trying, mostly in vain, to protect Palestinians from the violent depredations of Israeli settlers who felt that Palestinians had no right to occupy and work on the land where they and their ancestors had lived for generations.

 

Reading the book was not only deeply disturbing to me, but was a really a revelation. I had been only vaguely aware of the chronic and seemingly unending strife between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, but Shulman’s book shocked me into appreciating for the first time the full extent to which the Palestinians were brutally treated by the Jews while Israeli soldiers stood by and did nothing to intervene in the mayhem, much less arrest the Jews who were able to attack the Palestinians with impunity. [Palestinians aren’t permitted to carry arms, so they are left to only throw rocks.]

 

Reading Shulman’s book, as you will see when you read the chapters in this section, had opened a crack, a fissure, in my up-to-then Jewish soul, and, in the end, it could not be closed or mended. It ultimately led to my undertaking a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see things for myself. And once I did, I realized that my identity as a Jew could not only not be sustained; it was indefensible.

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I had planned to publish the book, but I changed my mind, knowing that very few people, including almost all of you, no doubt, would be interested to read such a book, so I just had my webmaster, Kevin Williams, create it as a PDF file. If by chance, any of you would be interested to read this book, just click on this link to view and/or download the PDF file.

Now on to other matters.

As I’ve mentioned, this will be my last blog. Yes, I know I’ve said that before. Last year, I actually announced my retirement from blogging, but eventually finding my hands at a loss what to do with themselves, auto-eroticism no longer being an option, I returned to blogging for a while and wrote another dozen or so blogs. But now I’ve really reached the end of the blogging line. My health issues, and especially my increasingly deteriorating vision, just compel me to call it quits. "To everything there is a season," and all that. [Of course, I might decide to change my mind again. What is that old cliché? Never say never….]

I refuse to spend more time talking about my afflictions. If I can’t joke or kvetch about them, why bother? No one is interested to read about the troubles of an old man, and even I find the subject tiresome and pointless. Besides, many people my age have it worse.

I will just make one general comment, though I have the feeling I have written about this before.

Some years ago, I wrote a book about various classical composers. One of them was the English composer, Edward Elgar. After the death in 1920 of his diminutive wife Alice, who was a large and vital presence in Elgar’s life, he entered into a final, fallow period I called a long diminuendo.

I’ve been in one of my own for the last seven or so years. I’m just marking time until the end.

Still, I’m grateful not only for the life I have had, but even for the life I have now. There are still things I enjoy, such as tennis. I lived during the golden age of the sport when the three greatest players of their time played:  Roger Federer, whom I worshipped; Rafael Nadal, whom I admired; and Novak Djokovic, whom I detest. And now new stellar players like Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, have come to dominate the sport and given me many thrills. And I can still read interesting books, even if I can no longer write about them in my blogs. Finally, but not least, I still enjoy the company of my longtime girlfriend, Lauren, who takes very good care of me. And picks me up when I fall, as I did last week.

Here we are when I was still semi-vertical in a recent photo taken in my living room.

By the time you read this, Lauren and I will have celebrated my half-birthday on Friday, June 13th, when I turned the corner heading toward 90. No male member of my family has even come close to living to that age. Will I make it until then? Do I want to? Guess.

I will just leave you with a slight alteration of the lyrics of an old Woody Guthrie song (of course all of his songs, like me, are old now):

"So long, it’s been good to know ya. It’s a long time since I’ve been home."

I am looking forward to going home – someday – just not yet.  I still want to be here for Wimbledon this summer….