featured essay:
An Atypical Rumination
There are those times, driving late at night, when your mind wanders into foreign territory. Minimal stimulation, maximal isolation and a curious weariness that seems to invite atypical ruminations. Everything and everyone around you seems to become a quiescent extension of your body and little more. You enter a zone. Your mind speed and ground speed diverge significantly.
In one particularly disquieting experience, my mind turned the taillights of a string of cars driving uphill, a half-mile ahead of me, into a fifty-foot tall truck. Without benefit of recreational drugs. Call it fatigue-induced sensitivity. On other, less colorful excursions, I’ve found the answers to work-related problems that had eluded me by day. My most memorable cerebral walkabout followed a family trip to Simmsbury, Connecticut, for an ice skating show. It wasn't a particularly long trip, about an hour and a half one way, but all the necessary triggers were in place by the evening’s end. It wasn’t a problem-solver.
The event was billed as a benefit for the victims of the 1986 reactor disaster in Chernobyl. At the time, Chernobyl was thought of as a Russian nightmare. Today, after the empire's dissolution, it's a Ukrainian nightmare. Olympic gold medalist Victor Petrenko, a Ukraine national, was the driving force behind the presentation, and arranged for the appearance of his gifted friends to draw the crowd. All of us were moved by the letters and poems that were read at the opening ceremonies. Then the skating began and held our complete attention.
My wife Diane, my daughter Karen and I have been fans of figure skating for years. We’re always captivated by the speed, grace and sheer artistry of the better performers. It’s a rare treat to see live performances, because television simply doesn’t do it justice. The two-hour event seemed very brief. After a slow exit from the crowded parking lot, we followed local roads until we hit I84. By then, Karen was sleeping and Diane was quietly relaxing at the end of a long week.
Left to my own devices, I drove on autopilot, freeing my mind for digressions. My first images, in a chain-reaction collection, were of the Russian pairs skaters. They always enchant me because, quite simply, they’re so much better than any others. I generally relate to them only as an appreciative audience. On rare nights, like that one, I contemplate our distant kinship. I'm half-Russian. Geographically, at any rate. Being ethnically Jewish keeps me from being lumped together with the gentiles that populate my father's homeland. In my own mind, as well as many others'. Anyone with any sense of twentieth-century history has some appreciation for the fact that Jews were not considered to be keepers, as neighbors go.
Whenever I asked my father why my grandfather Julius had left Russia in 1911, he shelved the topic with the phrase "political difficulties". I was later to learn, through my Uncle Leo, Julius’ youngest offspring, that grandpa was a bomb-throwing anarchist who was beginning to feel some heat. I'm no fan of terrorism, but it was an exciting addition to my family tree. Regardless of my grandfather's exploits, and those of the Jewish intellectuals that turned the Czarist state on its ear, the Jews in Russia generally were done unto.
The confluence of Russia and anti-Semitism could have led me down any number of paths. Attenuated by thoughts of the Ukraine, however, I landed near its capital city of Kiev. More specifically a nearby ravine called Babi Yar, an extraordinarily bleak bookmark in the Holocaust. In 1941, the occupying German forces decided to kill all of the Jews in Kiev, in reprisal for bombings later revealed to be the work of the NKVD, the Russian secret police. During an initial two-day period, at least 33,000 Jews were machine-gunned at Babi Yar. By the time the purge ended, 100,000 victims had been notched, most of them Jews.
The Germans were challenged by the lack of local gas chambers and crematoria and had to resort to heroic efforts to meet their quotas. Efforts that were equaled only by the exuberant complicity of the non-Jewish residents of Kiev. There were many cases during the Holocaust where locals hid Jews at their own peril. There were also many acts committed by populations sympathetic to the Nazis regarding the Jewish situation. By any standards, the locals' actions during the massacre outside Kiev were heinous.
Approximately forty-five years later and sixty miles north of Kiev, the reactor in Chernobyl exploded, unloosing an almost biblical pestilence. I'm not very religious, and only occasionally look at world events as if they might be deity-driven. I just can't see God as a micromanager, with his hand in everything, but occasionally I suspect that his fist has descended. Chalk it up to a quiet moment, during a moderately long drive home, late at night, at the end of a very long week, but the loop had closed rather uniquely. At the moment, it seemed like an epiphany.
Was Chernobyl a latter-day Sodom? The reactor accident divine payback for Babi Yar? On a cosmic scale, forty-five years and sixty miles is virtually dead on, isn't it? No, I don't think that the residents of Chernobyl, at the time their lives took a ghastly turn, were evil people. Yes, we expect God to be more surgical in his strikes than our armed forces. Yes, it seems somewhat arbitrary. Yes, there are good technical reasons why a bargain-basement reactor would trash a city. But it was so very Old Testament, that I couldn't let go.
We arrived home safely. I slept very well. In the morning it seemed more an anomaly than an epiphany. Chalk it up to the normalizing effect of daylight and the restorative powers of sleep. I’m more likely to blame the Chernobyl explosion on free-flowing vodka among the Russian engineers or too many budgetary dollars diverted from legitimate construction to the ruling elite’s lifestyles.
My only conclusions were ironic side-bars. Viktor Petrenko, a truly fine human being, shares his DNA with the old residents of Kiev. My nine-year-old daughter, now seventeen, inherited the genes of a Jewish terrorist from her father and her blonde hair and blue eyes from her mother’s Germanic forbears. I’ll need to have a chat with her some time. Particularly since she's now driving herself.
An Atypical Rumination
There are those times, driving late at night, when your mind wanders into foreign territory. Minimal stimulation, maximal isolation and a curious weariness that seems to invite atypical ruminations. Everything and everyone around you seems to become a quiescent extension of your body and little more. You enter a zone. Your mind speed and ground speed diverge significantly.
In one particularly disquieting experience, my mind turned the taillights of a string of cars driving uphill, a half-mile ahead of me, into a fifty-foot tall truck. Without benefit of recreational drugs. Call it fatigue-induced sensitivity. On other, less colorful excursions, I’ve found the answers to work-related problems that had eluded me by day. My most memorable cerebral walkabout followed a family trip to Simmsbury, Connecticut, for an ice skating show. It wasn't a particularly long trip, about an hour and a half one way, but all the necessary triggers were in place by the evening’s end. It wasn’t a problem-solver.
The event was billed as a benefit for the victims of the 1986 reactor disaster in Chernobyl. At the time, Chernobyl was thought of as a Russian nightmare. Today, after the empire's dissolution, it's a Ukrainian nightmare. Olympic gold medalist Victor Petrenko, a Ukraine national, was the driving force behind the presentation, and arranged for the appearance of his gifted friends to draw the crowd. All of us were moved by the letters and poems that were read at the opening ceremonies. Then the skating began and held our complete attention.
My wife Diane, my daughter Karen and I have been fans of figure skating for years. We’re always captivated by the speed, grace and sheer artistry of the better performers. It’s a rare treat to see live performances, because television simply doesn’t do it justice. The two-hour event seemed very brief. After a slow exit from the crowded parking lot, we followed local roads until we hit I84. By then, Karen was sleeping and Diane was quietly relaxing at the end of a long week.
Left to my own devices, I drove on autopilot, freeing my mind for digressions. My first images, in a chain-reaction collection, were of the Russian pairs skaters. They always enchant me because, quite simply, they’re so much better than any others. I generally relate to them only as an appreciative audience. On rare nights, like that one, I contemplate our distant kinship. I'm half-Russian. Geographically, at any rate. Being ethnically Jewish keeps me from being lumped together with the gentiles that populate my father's homeland. In my own mind, as well as many others'. Anyone with any sense of twentieth-century history has some appreciation for the fact that Jews were not considered to be keepers, as neighbors go.
Whenever I asked my father why my grandfather Julius had left Russia in 1911, he shelved the topic with the phrase "political difficulties". I was later to learn, through my Uncle Leo, Julius’ youngest offspring, that grandpa was a bomb-throwing anarchist who was beginning to feel some heat. I'm no fan of terrorism, but it was an exciting addition to my family tree. Regardless of my grandfather's exploits, and those of the Jewish intellectuals that turned the Czarist state on its ear, the Jews in Russia generally were done unto.
The confluence of Russia and anti-Semitism could have led me down any number of paths. Attenuated by thoughts of the Ukraine, however, I landed near its capital city of Kiev. More specifically a nearby ravine called Babi Yar, an extraordinarily bleak bookmark in the Holocaust. In 1941, the occupying German forces decided to kill all of the Jews in Kiev, in reprisal for bombings later revealed to be the work of the NKVD, the Russian secret police. During an initial two-day period, at least 33,000 Jews were machine-gunned at Babi Yar. By the time the purge ended, 100,000 victims had been notched, most of them Jews.
The Germans were challenged by the lack of local gas chambers and crematoria and had to resort to heroic efforts to meet their quotas. Efforts that were equaled only by the exuberant complicity of the non-Jewish residents of Kiev. There were many cases during the Holocaust where locals hid Jews at their own peril. There were also many acts committed by populations sympathetic to the Nazis regarding the Jewish situation. By any standards, the locals' actions during the massacre outside Kiev were heinous.
Approximately forty-five years later and sixty miles north of Kiev, the reactor in Chernobyl exploded, unloosing an almost biblical pestilence. I'm not very religious, and only occasionally look at world events as if they might be deity-driven. I just can't see God as a micromanager, with his hand in everything, but occasionally I suspect that his fist has descended. Chalk it up to a quiet moment, during a moderately long drive home, late at night, at the end of a very long week, but the loop had closed rather uniquely. At the moment, it seemed like an epiphany.
Was Chernobyl a latter-day Sodom? The reactor accident divine payback for Babi Yar? On a cosmic scale, forty-five years and sixty miles is virtually dead on, isn't it? No, I don't think that the residents of Chernobyl, at the time their lives took a ghastly turn, were evil people. Yes, we expect God to be more surgical in his strikes than our armed forces. Yes, it seems somewhat arbitrary. Yes, there are good technical reasons why a bargain-basement reactor would trash a city. But it was so very Old Testament, that I couldn't let go.
We arrived home safely. I slept very well. In the morning it seemed more an anomaly than an epiphany. Chalk it up to the normalizing effect of daylight and the restorative powers of sleep. I’m more likely to blame the Chernobyl explosion on free-flowing vodka among the Russian engineers or too many budgetary dollars diverted from legitimate construction to the ruling elite’s lifestyles.
My only conclusions were ironic side-bars. Viktor Petrenko, a truly fine human being, shares his DNA with the old residents of Kiev. My nine-year-old daughter, now seventeen, inherited the genes of a Jewish terrorist from her father and her blonde hair and blue eyes from her mother’s Germanic forbears. I’ll need to have a chat with her some time. Particularly since she's now driving herself.
your host:
Although enamored of all genres, Allan is predominantly focused on journalism, plays, and long fiction.
mini bio:
Growing up in a house run by the ultimate Jewish mother convinced Allan that the world was an asylum run by the inmates. His time in the corporate world strongly reinforced that belief.
Left to his own devices, his favorite target, after Jewish mothers and corporate mothers, is religion. Taking umbrage at the word sacrilegious, he describes himself as a creative believer, and insists that God gave us Darwin as an intelligence test.
current projects:
Life on the Left (article)
Necessary Evil (play)
Post Mortem (play)
A Bit Off the Top (play)