A LETTER FROM CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Note: Several years ago, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko asked me to write a "letter from
New York" on the topic of the holiday season for the St. Petersburg newsweekly
Na Nevskom.
November 22, 2001
Dear Arkadii,
You ask me to give you a report on the holidays from New York. This is not an easy
topic for me as during these days I fall into a kind of haze, lost in my thought, trying to
lose my sense of where or when or what, at least momentarily.
You see, I've never liked holidays. The problem is not so much the false cheer; grimness
is not to be preferred. No, the holidays, the days off from work, always hold the hope of
catching up—with my sleep, my reading, my writing. But all that is absorbed in
compulsory socializing. Before you know it, you're further behind than when the holiday
began.
By this point, late in November, everyone is exhausted over the topic "9-11." Everything
is subject to the "9-11" test—how does this read/sound/play after September 11. One has
to fight ferociously with oneself to take the time from our 9-11 consciousness. But
without taking a break, there can't be any perspective.
Today my son Felix went to the annual Thanksgiving Day parade, presented by Macy's,
the big department store. Hundreds of drum majors and majorettes are flown from the
South and Midwest to pound out marching band tunes to an adoring, but apparently tone
deaf, crowd. Almost unknown celebrities from daytime TV wave expansively at the
cheering crowds, who turn to one another and say, "Who is that? . . . I've never heard of
him!" Huge balloons of popular movie and TV characters float above Central Park West,
a reminder that we inhabit a world of Disney Gods who live in a DVD Olympus. A large
native Hawaiian contingent does walking Hula dances in skimpy attire that is no match
for the New York's autumn chill; we all say, as in a round—"Do you see what they're
wearing? . . . They must be freezing!" Felix eagerly thrusts his hands out to all the passing
clowns and gets many big shakes. It is all exactly as always, exactly as I first saw this
parade almost fifty years ago. The same grand boulevard running along the park, the
same tunes piercing the crisp air. Life has not proceeded at all and I feel as if I must not
yet be born.
My brother teaches at an elementary school a few blocks from the World Trade Center
site. When the buildings got hit, the children had to be evacuated. The school has been
flooded with assigned condolence letters from children across America. "Now children, "
the teachers say, "let's send a letter to the downtrodden youngsters of SoHo." Bags of
letters on identical size cards with chocolate candy kisses arrive with such sprawled
greeting as, "My name is Billy. I am sorry your parents or close relative died. My
favorite sport is bungyball. What's yours?" Of course, such letters cannot be passed on to
the kids and besides no one in the school lost parents. The school is also being flooded
with gifts, even though these kids are quite well off; the gifts would be better directed to
the poorest schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx or uptown Manhattan. But holiday giving
is directed obsessively, almost manically, at the 9-11 victims. As a result, the homeless
and poor, a growing number these days, have even less help than usual.
November 22 is one of those days etched into the consciousness of many of my
generation, since on this day thirty eight years ago John F. Kennedy was shot. It's odd
perhaps that this year the anniversary falls on Thanksgiving, that quintessential American
holiday that recalls the pilgrims eating turkey their first few years after landing in a very harsh
New World. The New World has always been harsh, too harsh for too long for too many.
But it also offered not just the promise of something different but more important the
start of something different. Starts and stops, it's true; and no destination in sight. But we
continue anyway. We have no choice, there is no place to which to return.
Anyway, isn't this the time to say: We are all getting back to normal here in New York.
I am feeling absolutely normal. Totally and completely normal.
The problem is: I never felt normal before.
In a little more than a month, by my count, we will come to the end of the first year of
a new century. It seems like a very long time from now.
My love to you and Xena. We think of you both and of our happy days in Petersburg in
August, especially that day we drifted down the Neva.
Or did I just imagine it?
Charles
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