This is the Handscher family in Warsaw, Poland. My father's mother, Jenny, was born Jenny Handscher. These people are her brothers and sisters - and her parents, my great-grandparents. In the bottom row, from left to right, we have Schloime (who survived and later came to the U.S.); Eliezer (father of Menachem/Mike and Meyer who also survived); the parents, Menachem and Tova; the youngest of the children, Bezalel. In the back row, from left to right: the youngest daughter, whose name we don't know; Jenny (my grandmother); Minnie (who came to the U.S. with Jenny). Killed at Treblinka, so far as we know: Eliezer, Bezalel, the youngest daughter, and both parents. This photo was given to my father by my grandmother, and by my father to me. Just today I heard from Eliezer's grandson, Nachum Handscher, who lives in Israel. Nachum is the son of Mike/Menachem, one of Eliezer's sons. The story of the survival of Eliezer's sons, Mike and Meyer, is a long, complex and dramatic one - not for this entry, but later, someday.
Monday, March 15, 2010
bound for Treblinka
This is the Handscher family in Warsaw, Poland. My father's mother, Jenny, was born Jenny Handscher. These people are her brothers and sisters - and her parents, my great-grandparents. In the bottom row, from left to right, we have Schloime (who survived and later came to the U.S.); Eliezer (father of Menachem/Mike and Meyer who also survived); the parents, Menachem and Tova; the youngest of the children, Bezalel. In the back row, from left to right: the youngest daughter, whose name we don't know; Jenny (my grandmother); Minnie (who came to the U.S. with Jenny). Killed at Treblinka, so far as we know: Eliezer, Bezalel, the youngest daughter, and both parents. This photo was given to my father by my grandmother, and by my father to me. Just today I heard from Eliezer's grandson, Nachum Handscher, who lives in Israel. Nachum is the son of Mike/Menachem, one of Eliezer's sons. The story of the survival of Eliezer's sons, Mike and Meyer, is a long, complex and dramatic one - not for this entry, but later, someday.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
