Sacramento Bee, CA
Jan 31 2007

Two funerals, many lessons
By Paul Greenberg –
Published 12:00 am PST Wednesday, January 31, 2007

A Russian once told me that the great thing about getting drunk in
the morning was that it cleared your whole day.

How Russian.

That was back when there was still a Soviet Union of unlamented
memory – a regime capable of driving anyone to drink and worse. The
Russian wrote for Novosti, Pravda or some such "news" agency. No
wonder he drank. Poor fellow, he was what we soon learned to call a
Sovjournalist – as opposed to a real one.

There is no more Soviet Union, but one suspects things haven’t
changed all that much under the newest tsar. The suspicion is
confirmed every time a real journalist is killed in Russia.

The great challenge, there and here, remains just to reflect the
ordinary, everyday truths of life. And not let our own journalism
block the view.

In a free country, readers provide a healthy corrective, which is
what letters to the editor are for. In countries not as free, the
criticism takes the form of censorship. Or an assassin’s bullet. Some
killers act under cover of law, others are moved by their own
fanaticism.

In any society riven by hatreds or suppressed by iron rule – the two
tend to go together, like some kind of fatal syndrome – a rare writer
may come along who lets the reader see the ordinary truths of life
through prose as clear as plate glass. And the sight is enough to
enrage those who want him silenced.

Such a writer is living on borrowed time. See the murder of the
Armenian/Turkish/just human Hrant Dink in Istanbul. He knew it would
happen one day or another.

"I feel like a pigeon," he wrote in what would be his last article.
"Like a pigeon I wander uneasily amidst this city, watching my back
constantly, so timid and yet so free."

Fresh flowers now mark the spot on the busy street where he was shot
down. His funeral goes on every day.

If you want to really clear up your day so you really see it, rather
than just go through it in a fog, start it with a funeral. It puts
things in perspective. It carves the rest of the day in bas-relief.
The trivial is gently blown away, no longer worth bothering with. The
vital leaps out: friends, family and those ordinary courtesies and
delights of life that are anything but ordinary, such as the presence
of love. All are heightened after a funeral. How could we ever have
overlooked them, lived without them? At 11 o’clock the other morning,
I was hurrying into Temple B’nai Israel here in Little Rock for the
funeral of a great lady who had no great airs. Yes, there are still
such; just look around. This lady’s name was Beatrice Brint Marks,
and I thought of her as the last Yiddish speaker in Arkansas.

Whenever I saw her, I would try to refresh my poor, neglected,
faded-beyond-hope childhood Yiddish. She was patient but exact. She
expected you to do your part.

Yet the most eloquent thing about Bea was her silent glance, which
took you in at once. If you pleased her, it was apparent, and you
were rewarded by just being able to stand next to such as she, and
share the same wordless bond. If not, poor posturing thing, you could
tell she hoped you would do better in the future.

It was the final tribute to Bea’s presence that the crowded
glass-walled main sanctuary of the temple, which was made to worship
the Lord of Hosts on high holidays with blasts on a ram’s horn and
sonorous injunctions, had the air the other morning of a quiet
conversation around the kitchen table. How very much like Yiddish,
that most diminutive of languages, that kitchen language.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize for his writings
in Yiddish, said it was the only language on Earth he knew about that
was never spoken by people in power. Naturally most of its speakers,
millions of them, were murdered. There’s a lesson in that: It is a
terrible thing to be powerless. I hope my pacifist friends are
listening.

It is the simple, ordinary human truths that most provoke the
violent, and most alarm the empty, abstract, secretly insecure thing
called The State.

They are also the truths that most affect us, and that we most need
to hear.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of
the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His column appears routinely in The
Bee on Wednesdays and occasionally on other days. His e-mail address
is paul_greenberg@adg.ardemgaz.com.