IVAW Chapter profile: Chicago

IVAW: Chicago

IVAW chapter profile: Colorado Springs

IVAW Colorado Springs

Lily America (+ a recipe)

A few years ago, Margaret Randall solicited family stories about food with accompanying recipes for a book as a gift to an editor about to retire. As far as I know, the book never materialized, but this story did, so I offer it up here.
 

“Lefi Paretsky, 14,” reads the manifest of the Campania that sailed into New York harbor on July 9, 1904. “Last place of residence: Slonim.” “Ethnicity: Hebrew.” “Occupation: Servant.”

Long before I knew her as my grandmother, Lefi became Lily and no servant she. Ever. Also no longer Paretsky, nor Ratzkin, nor Rosenthal, not any of the names she adopted as she moved through her new life. But Lillian LaVine, wife of Samuel LaVine, a name also changed en route from Vilna to Golders Green to Ellis Island.

Not Ellis Island for Lily, though. For her, it was Boston harbor, and the ship she was supposed to be on was somewhere on the bottom of the sea. The rest of the family was busy mourning in New York when the telegram arrived, announcing, We’re here! Tanya, the oldest son, a businessman in Brooklyn, was dispatched to fetch them: Lefi; her younger sister Rochel (soon to be Rose); and their parents, Pesche and Jankel.

Jankel was 56 years old, too old, the authorities said, a burden on the state.

"He’s my father. "l’ll take care of him! " " replied Tanya, pulling himself up to his full five feet and change.

"You?" scoffed Mr. Authority, "You’re a cripple. What can you do? "

It was true. Tanya’s arm had been maimed in an accident at his window sash factory, but he wasn’t a greenhorn and he wasn’t intimidated. With his withered arm, he took the table where Mr. Authority sat and hoisted it above his head. "My father," he insisted. "I Will Take Care of Him."

Or so the story goes.

Deborah in free fall

Deborah Digges, a longtime colleague, killed herself by jumping from the top of a sports stadium in Amherst, Massachusetts on Friday, 10 April 2009. There is a category of friendly colleagues, people you know only through work and see seldom, but enjoy running into whenever you do. Deborah was in that category for me and it makes me sad that I won’t ever have that small pleasure again. My husband was the first at the university to learn about her death when her son, a former student, called on Saturday. The grim details came a day or two later. At a hastily organized memorial service, students and colleagues, stunned and sorrowful, read poems and talked of her warmth and talent and passion for language, and some cried as they described her teacherly embrace. Afterwards, everyone talked about how spectacularly she had died. I make no claims on knowing how or why she came to her resolve – I didn’t know her that well and it seems kind of prurient to speculate – nor do I know much about the physics of free fall. It occurred to me that if you really mean to end it, it’s a good idea to be sure you’ll be dead and not just badly messed up and alive to suffer. But more haunting is an image I’ve concocted of Deborah (who was a babe, though that’s not a thing obituaries mention) in mid-air, hair flying up like in a cartoon, arms stretched wide to the wind. And I keep wondering what was in her mind in the moments after she stepped off that edge and before she landed.

Beyond Bracelets: What Veterans Want

Unpublished op-ed by Liam Madden and Nan Levinson
29 September 2008

As both candidates demonstrated in last Friday’s debate, wearing a bracelet to commemorate a dead soldier is one way to show support for U.S. troops. Keeping promises to living soldiers and veterans would be a better one, especially if you intend to be president.

In August, 70 members of the nonpartisan Iraq Veterans Against the War marched to the Democratic and Republican national conventions to deliver letters and briefings to the campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.

In Denver, veterans in uniform led thousands of civilians on a four-mile march to the gates of the DNC, where IVAW petitioned the Democrats to discuss its main goals: immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq, full veterans benefits, and restored sovereignty and reparations for the Iraqi people. As hundreds of riot police faced off against them, the former soldiers and marines calmed the crowd by reaffirming their commitment to non-violence and their respect and sympathy for the police officers. Several police had tears streaming down their faces and one broke down, leaving his phalanx altogether.

The power in their pain

some cool veteran-artists

Subtitle: definition

Subtitle: The predictable and only intermitantly interesting story of how we’ve come to the point where every book must have a very long subtitle including the words, “why,” “how,” and “what you can do about it” and why suggesting to your publisher that maybe your book could do without a subtitle brings a gasp of disbelief followed by a pained disquisition about how bookstores wouldn’t know which shelf to bury it on, with a digression about why some marketing person somewhere decided that some novel needed to be subtitled “A Novel,” so that soon, what you can do about it is to subtitle every novel "A Novel,” just in case inattentive readers or, for that matter, bookstore shelvers, might mistake it for a manual on home birth or perhaps a duck and how (like) cute you can be in your subtitle and (like) still get away with it or (alter)na(t)ively why you can man(gle) words to (re)veal new meaning and when it’s appropriate to include the name/nickname of your pet or/or spouse in the subtitle and what difference it makes when you’ve read the most interesting parts of the book in the subtitle and, of course, what you can do about it (hint: not much)

My scoop on stop loss

Soldiers challenging 'stop loss' policy
Unfortunately, it went nowhere, as so many of the court challenges did. The lead John Doe dropped out of the lawsuit and returned to Iraq, and the Army continued to stop loss soldiers into 2009, though it announced that it was winding that involuntary retention down. As of September 2008, when I exchanged emails with Lt. Col. Anne Edgecomb, an Army PAO, a total of 120,300 soldiers in the regular Army, National Guard and Army Reserves had been stop-lossed between January 2002 and May 2008.

Antiwar soldiers? Say what?

All in the Family

when no one else was writing about disgrunted soldiers & editors kept saying, great story, let some else publish it....

Breaking the Code of Silence