(no subject)
Yesterday, my boss came up to my cubicle with a graying, kipa-clad man in tow and said, "This is Mr. N, our building manager. His mother was in Auschwitz. I was telling him about your trip. You should talk." And left. Turns out the guy's mother lost eight siblings and her parents in the war, survived until liberation with one brother and that was it. She helped commit sabotage during a stint in a munitions factory at one point and was one of Mengele's "patients" because she had blue eyes, and she died while Mr. N. was young-but not so young that he hadn't learned her story from her. (That seemed unusual; you hear a lot about how survivors didn't talk to the first generation, and it's been the second generation who open dialogues about their experiences in the camps.) He talked about how his mother wanted him to know everything, and how he'd gotten stuck in Hungary (where his family was from; and how strange was that, to meet someone born to one of the hundreds of thousands of Jews famously shipped in to the freshly constructed Birkenau camp) as a Refusenik after the war when the Russians moved in, and how he came from the generation who never knew what it was like to have grandparents, so he's borrowing from what he knows of other people's now that he's a grandparent himself.
I'll say one thing about the March of the Living trip: It's certainly done its job in starting conversations.
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Tomorrow I'll be turning 26 on the 26th (is there a name for that kind of birthday?). I wanted to write a story for the occasion, but I only managed a few hundred words of House-Wilson in what was basically a free day today. Nothing's biting. I'm considering being introspective and possibly angsty about where my desire to write fiction has gone and how it relates to things like performing for a community and getting bogged down in plot and characterization when it comes to sex stories instead of writing what I want without self-consciousness, but I think that belongs in a spiral notebook and not here.
On the plus side, there will be good food and Star Trek DVDs this weekend.
I'll say one thing about the March of the Living trip: It's certainly done its job in starting conversations.
.
Tomorrow I'll be turning 26 on the 26th (is there a name for that kind of birthday?). I wanted to write a story for the occasion, but I only managed a few hundred words of House-Wilson in what was basically a free day today. Nothing's biting. I'm considering being introspective and possibly angsty about where my desire to write fiction has gone and how it relates to things like performing for a community and getting bogged down in plot and characterization when it comes to sex stories instead of writing what I want without self-consciousness, but I think that belongs in a spiral notebook and not here.
On the plus side, there will be good food and Star Trek DVDs this weekend.