Appointment in Hackensack
No new podcast, because my father's dying.
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Step Into The Light, Poor Lazarus
My father is in the ICU; the doctors say he doesn’t have long to live. Hours, maybe another day or so. I wrote a little about his situation in Sunday’s newsletter. It’s been a brutal 5-6 days.
There’s a two-guest-at-a-time rule in ICU rooms, so while Dad’s wife and my brother are in there, I figured I’d keep myself occupied by writing this while I wait in the family lounge.
Now that I think about it, only way to honor Dad would be to break the rules, so.
Podcastery
No episode this week. Here’s what I wrote for last week’s show:
How did Russian Jews in the early 1900s wind up migrating to Galveston, Texas ?(!) How did the notion of America as melting pot come into existence? And how did a family memoir evolve into a forgotten history of Zionism? Find out this week in Episode 645 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. Rachel Cockerell and her amazing new book, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land (FSG)! We talk about the tightrope walk of composing a history solely out of primary sources and why she eschewed the author’s voice for this book, her grudging acceptance of Robert Caro’s maxim to Turn Every Page, and how her perspective on Jewishness changed over the course of writing the book. We get into the once-titanic literary figure of Israel Zangwill and how he gave it up to find a homeland for the world’s Jews, how Zangwill invented the notion of the melting pot and whether he truly believed in assimilationism, the inspiration of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo on Melting Point, and how Rachel got over the notion that the past was just a lead-up to now. We also discuss her next book on Halley’s Comet and whether she’ll stick with her primary sources-mode in future books, how her family reacted to seeing their stories (& contradictions) on the page, how a 90-year-old distant relative stole the show, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read MELTING POINT!
Recent episodes: Rachel Cockerell • Paul Karasik • Kate Maruyama • David Denby • Peter Stothard • Cecile Wajsbrot • Keiler Roberts
Instaxery
I took some Instax of my father on Saturday when he was in the regular ward and we kindasorta thought there was a chance he would survive this. I won’t take any more of him. Maybe I’ll share one of those with you later on.
Artistry
I sketched my father every day that I visited him here. Sketching like that reminded me of the drawings Lucian Freud made of his mother after she died.
Until Next Time
I don’t know if I’ll be back on Sunday with the links newsletter, nor about next Wednesday or a new show, but thank you all for reading/listening and supporting me & my family during this.
Tell me, what did the blackbird say to the crow? / Dry your eyes, don’t you cry, ain’t gonna rain no more / Men on the levee, dry wheat in the field / Pretty soon hear the tune of the threshing wheel,
So sorry you guys are going thru it thinking of you all during this most difficult time xox