Helen Maryles Shankman's Blog, page 4

The Man in the Purple Speedo

In my little New Jersey town, there is a pool. On sweltering summer evenings, after the worst of the sun has passed, I stuff the kids into the minivan and instinctively head for water. While I park on the grass, the kids vault out of the car and head for the gate.

As my youngest performs a series of skin-blasting cannonballs off of the diving board, I locate a beach lounge under a tree, flop full length onto the vinyl webbing, slip off my shoes and smile at nothing at all. This is my Happy Place. And while the sun sinks towards the line of cottonwood trees into a warm sea of candy pink clouds, and small children in soggy swim diapers waddle past me on their way to the gate, The Diver appears.

Silently, he disrobes, leaving his street clothes on a lounge, and stalks over to the diving board. Patiently, he waits his turn, just another body in a long line of seven-year-olds. When he finally mounts the ladder, I can hear the noise level around the pool dip for a few moments.

All eyes, young and old, are riveted upon The Diver as he walks springily to the end of the board. Positions himself. Concentrates. And then, performs a heart-stoppingly perfect, splashless, back one-and-a-half somersault with a tuck at the end.

I don't know the Diver's name. I don't know where he lives, or what he does for a living, though I think I've seen him at my synagogue a couple of times. Perhaps in his forties, perhaps in his fifties, he is a tall spare man with graying curly hair and a generous bald spot.

Year after year, as older families age out and new families join, The Diver is a topic of conversation. It is almost a rite of passage to view his spectacular, gravity-defying feats, while asking the following questions: Who is he? Where did he learn how to dive like that? Was he in some past Olympics? And why does he wear that purple Speedo?

He's at the pool as often as I am, so he has to know what all the kids are wearing these days, baggy, knee-length trunks. I ponder possible explanations. Is it just comfortable? Does that skin-tight fabric help him cut through the air while he's making those amazing twists and turns? I'm a writer, so it is only a matter of time before I begin to invent reasons. It's his lucky swimsuit, the one that took him to the championship of some high-school dive meet in the dim and distant 1970's. Or this; in a fit of rebellious adolescent anger, he told his dive-loving father he would never swim again. After his father's untimely death, he regretted it, and now, too late, he is diving for his dad's love. This one is my current favorite; he was the champion diver of his public-school swim team. He never recovered from the disappointment he suffered when the last meet of his senior season was scheduled for Yom Kippur, which, as a practicing Jew, he couldn't attend. Now he is doomed to perform that champion dive over and over again, in his old team swimsuit, until the end of time.

Kids adore him, following his every move with worshipful, shining eyes. They don't care about bathing suit fashion. During this year's Olympics, he was a local star. Children followed him onto the board after every dive, trying to mold their chubby little bodies into an approximation of his moves.

So, now that I think of it, maybe the Speedo is his lucky swimsuit, after all. The Diver's grace has inspired generations of children to imitate him. The rest of us grownups just sit there and exercise our imaginations.

My 9/11

Two weeks ago, I took my children to visit the new 9/11 Memorial. With the unfinished buildings, and the noise and grit of construction going on all around us, I found no peace, just the trauma of memory. It is just as raw for me now as it was eleven years ago.

Tonight, as I stand outside my house holding onto the dog's leash, I can see a narrow beam of white light in the distance, piercing upwards through the veil of clouds into the heavens.

It's 9/11. That beam of light in the distance emanates from Ground Zero.

Nine years ago, we were recent transplants from New York City, where I had never needed a car, to the Garden State, where evidence was mounting every day that not knowing how to drive was a tremendous liability.

I was running late. Looking through the picture window, I could see that it was a warm, sunny day. Rosh Hashana was a week away, cars were parked up and down my street as men gathered to pray at the nearby synagogue. My daughter had just boarded the bus for her fourth morning in Kindergarten at a school five miles away, and I was struggling to buckle my two boys into a single stroller so that I could get to nursery school. Upon my return, dozens of moving boxes would demand my immediate attention, as would my youngest, who was exactly one year old.

In the midst of this morning madness, my sister-in-law calls. "Your city's on TV," she says. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

I am locked in mortal combat with the recalcitrant toddler, who deeply resents having to leave the magical world of Teletubbies. I imagine a small plane stuck in the side of a building, like the one that hit the Empire State Building in the 1930's. "Wow," I blurt. "I'll check it out when I get back. Right now, we've gotta get out of here. We're late."

That's when I hear her gasp, a sharp, shocked intake of breath. "Oh my God! A plane just hit the other building!"

Understanding comes to me slowly. "It must be terrorists," I say.

Still, pre-K. I've already paid for it, this is all happening miles away, we might as well go. In a changed world, I push my little one to his new school, then quickly return to the playroom. I switch on the TV. The images are famous now, the thick gray smoke streaming in the wind, the people hanging out of the windows, the gaping wounds in the building's sides.

In the absence of any real information, rumors circulate. We hear that jets are still in the air, headed for we-don't-know-where. We hear that the Pentagon has been struck. We hear that there's a plane somewhere over Pennsylvania. We hear that the George Washington Bridge has been wired with explosives. Fear claws at my heart as I realize what this means. America is under attack. The reporters look grim. We have yet to hear from our government. Are the planes on their way to Chicago? To the White House? What is going on?

My first instinct is to pick up my children from their various schools and flee, or at least, have them near me. I can't, of course. I don't have a car and I don't drive. My husband works in Brooklyn. He will have to drive through the City, across the many bridges and tunnels, to reach us. But Manhattan is closed. No one can get in or out. I am alone. I don't know when I'll see Jon again, and I can't get him on the phone.

That's when the phone rings, the sweetest sound in the world. My heart leaps; it's him, it's him, thank God it's him. "I'm standing at my window, watching the World Trade Center burning," he says.

I cling to the phone. I don't want him to hang up. "I don't care what anybody else is doing," I say. "Come home."

I return to the TV. The minutes crawl by. I am waiting for any kind of good news; the fire's out, everyone's safe, we caught the nasty buggers who did this. Without warning, the first building disappears in a puff of smoke, like a magic trick. At first, I am not sure what I am seeing. It's a grainy gray picture, and all I can be sure of is that there is smoke. But the smoke slowly clears off, and I realize that the building just isn't there anymore.

Tears spring to my eyes. It never occurred to me that the building might collapse. How could it? The World Trade Center is a massive monolith, holding dominion over the skyline. It was the first thing you looked for when you emerged from the subway, to orient yourself. How could one little airplane destroy such a giant?

Forty minutes later, the other building shifts a little. I watch with a hand pressed to my mouth as the antenna sinks out of sight, and then the whole edifice slides silently downward, and we are left with a pillar of smoke. When it dissipates, slinks away, the sky is empty, a raw, naked cerulean blue. It is 10:28.

This is when we lose our communications. The television stations, the radio stations, the telephones, all of them transmitted from that one pulverized antenna.

The buildings are gone, but I cannot tear myself from the TV. I don't know why; Perhaps I am waiting to find out that this has been a dream, or perhaps I keep waiting for someone to tell me what to do next. For the first time, I wonder if anyone was inside. I assure myself there was plenty of time for everyone to have been safely evacuated.

Unaccountably, the Verrazano bridge opens for a short while at 3:00. Since the phones aren't working, I wonder if Jon is on his way home. I am terrified; what booby traps are still ahead? What will explode next? I wonder if I should have told him to stay at work. But an hour later, I hear the front door open and close, and when he comes up the stairs to the playroom, looking haunted, I seize him and don't let go. He tells me it was like driving through a ghost town; there was no one else on the bridge, a busy New York artery usually clogged with cars. He describes for me the the cloud of smoke that hovers over lower Manhattan like a shroud, and will remain that way for weeks.

For the next few days, whenever I check into our community web ring, someone is frantically seeking any information about a man named Alan who worked in Tower 2. A week later, I scroll over the subdued announcement of his memorial service.

We begin to hear our friends' stories; I worked on the 82nd floor, I was saved because I was at morning prayers. I got to work, and when I saw the flames, I turned around and got right back on the ferry. September 11 was supposed to be the first day in our new office in Tower One. A guy on my floor is alive today because he was fired yesterday for sexual indiscretion.

And this one from my big brother, food buyer for a famous restaurant in midtown. The produce guy was late. When he called the company to ask where his delivery was, the man on the phone said incredulously, "Haven't you heard? The World Trade Center is on fire." My brother slammed the phone down and walked over to Fifth Avenue, where he witnessed the smoke, the flames, and the frightened citizens for himself. Then he walked back to the restaurant, picked up the phone and barked, "Okay, I saw it. Now, where are my vegetables?"

My other brother is an emergency room doctor. He tells us how the ERs geared up for the masses of injured, and how nobody ever came. A few days later, he would volunteer at Ground Zero, treating firemen and construction workers among the blown out, deserted and dust-coated display windows. He describes the smell of burnt metal, the mud, and the Potato Chip, the surreal last remnant of the blasted Trade Center facade. He describes a storefront with the word "Morgue" spray-painted onto it.

I don't really have a 9/11 story, only this, everyday life. On September 9, 2001, we took the kids to the Liberty Science Center, directly across the Hudson River from downtown New York. As we left the parking lot, we saw a double rainbow cross the sky, right above the Twin Towers. We pointed it out to the kids; it was a glorious sight. Two days later, they were gone.

And that's all. I ask my children if they remember that day. They don't, but we watch the documentaries together every September 11th, gathered together in the family bed, so that they understand that this moment in history touched all of our lives. Look, Daddy works right there, look, Mommy used to live down that street. Last night, I took them outside to see the beam of light.

I want them to remember.

I'm published in Cream City Review!

Okay, this sounds weird, but I wanted to write a light-hearted story based in the Holocaust. After all, as Gunter Grass writes, "On sorrow floats laughter."

The new story is called, The Whore of Solna Street. It's 1942, deep inside German-occupied Poland. The matchmaker offers Erno Hammer, a poor tailor, the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. At first, he can't believe his luck. Dora is a wonderful cook and housekeeper, and a dynamo in bed. When he discovers that she's sleeping with every man in town, he considers divorcing her. But after a brutal Aktzia, the tailor and his wife escape to an underground bunker, which she pays for with the pleasures of her body.

Their hiding place is already occupied by forty-three other Jews, the wealthy members of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council. They ostracize the tailor and his wayward wife, but in the end, Dora's specialized set of skills save all their lives.

This time around, I based a narrative on one of my father's experiences.

I didn't think I was going to be able to use any of Dad's war stories. Mom's stories involve heroics on all sides, Jewish partisans, virtuous German officers, and courageous Polish farmers. And everyone in her family survived.

On my father's side, everyone died. There are tales of heart-stopping heroics...but the heroes in Dad's family gave up their lives.

Still, Dora. Here are the facts; in the town of Drohobych, where Bruno Schulz lived and died, my father, his brother, and their father entered an underground bunker, a bunker that housed the Judenrat. Two pretty girls took turns sleeping with Ivan, the Ukrainian who lived upstairs and brought them food.

Not content with what he was earning, Ivan came up with a plot to murder the poorer inmates of the bunker. The plan was to bring in new people, with new money. But his girlfriends overheard him talking with the doctor who was to commit the murders, and reported back to the people downstairs.

A family history like this is a gift to a writer. And so, The Whore of Solna Street was born.

Let me know what you think!

Looking for Selinger

The strangest thing happened. I went looking for Selinger--a high-placed Nazi who protected my family for a while during World War II--and found Falkenberg.

Bernhard Falkenberg was another German transplanted to Wlodawa, the chief engineer of an ambitious drainage project. Serendipitously, I've happened upon war-era photos of Mr. Falkenberg with his wife and young son, and more miraculously, of the enormous drainage canal he was constructing.

In a place where atrocities and war crimes were practiced on a daily basis, Mr. Falkenberg kept his humanity. He stubbornly protected his Jewish workers, writing phony work papers for many, warning others to hide before the increasing SS roundups. In 1942, he was arrested and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp.

In my Wordpress blog, I've detailed much of what I've done. Like contacting the War Crimes Archives, filling out a sheaf of intimidating legal forms in German, and translating the fifty-year-old typewritten documents with the sometimes astounding, sometimes amusing help of Google Translate.

But outside of my family's stories, Mr. Selinger has proved to be elusive; divorced, with no children, there are no photographs, no diary, no family to contact. Only some 55 pages of testimony gleaned from a vast, 2000 page cache of typewritten files on the town of Wlodawa. In those few pages, he describes the unimaginable horror of cleaning up after a German cavalry unit massacres his entire work force behind the stable of his glorious castle, pleads with unknown powers to prosecute the men who murdered his Polish farm manager, and protests that he had nothing to do with what happened to Falkenberg. After that, the trail goes cold. Mr. Selinger sinks quietly into history.

Still, over the past two years, comments trickled slowly into my "Looking for Selinger" blog posts. Men whose fathers were partisans in the forests around Wlodawa. A man who turned out to be a cousin. Last year, a journalist contacted me with interesting news. He is attempting to put together a documentary. It's not about Selinger, it's about Falkenberg. He is the Communist Schindler

This past weekend, with trembling hands, I clicked on an unfamiliar email address. Seventy years have passed since anyone showed any interest in his family's courageous acts, he writes, full of emotion. It's the boy in the picture.

In New Jersey, a woman writes a blog post. In Germany, a man reads it and writes back, holding the answers to seventy-year-old questions.

I'm spending way too much time on Pinterest!

Over the past few days, I've created four boards to act as visual companions to my manuscript, Underpainting. I've uploaded paintings that are mentioned in the story, gowns worn by Anastasia Bonheur, editor-in-chief of my fictional fashion magazine, and places and moody spaces that figure prominently in the plot. Does it make you want to read the book? Tell me what you think!

http://pinterest.com/hmshankman

The Damned Poem

I was standing in the library parking lot when I heard the news, that Gunter Grass had written a poem about Israel, a poem people were saying was anti-Semitic. It’s funny, because by coincidence, I was there to pick up a book to read over Passover, Crabwalk, by Gunter Grass. Without going into the library, I got back in the car and went back home.

Who am I? I’m nobody. Not an academic and not a politician, just a writer at the start of her career, a writer whose parents are Holocaust survivors, a writer who turns those stories into fiction, a writer who finds inspiration and solace in the work of the great Gunter Grass, and in knowing that some Germans were sorry, terribly sorry, for what they’d done to my family, or rather, to the tattered shreds of what was left of my family after the war.

The Tin Drum, Dog Years, and Cat and Mouse are among the most powerful books I’ve ever read. My copy of Peeling the Onion makes its home on top of a stack of my works-in-progress, on the cover a picture of Mr. Grass smiling craftily at me from behind a haze of cigarette smoke. As a tribute, I’ve even based a fictional character on him; in my story The Messiah, a young SS private, ordered to execute a group of Jewish children, drops his gun and runs away.

So, I read the poem.

Did he use the wrong words?
Oh, yes.
Did he choose incendiary images?
He certainly did.
Is he an anti-Semite?
Absolutely not.
Does any of this, in any way, alter the fact that The Tin Drum stands as one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time, with stirring, voluptuous verse that wantonly crosses the borders of poetry, cinema, history and myth, with savage humor, searing images and soaring prose?
Not at all.

So, to all of us out there in the world who are maybe a little heartsick over all this sturm und drang, here is my solution. Forget the poem. Pull The Tin Drum off of your bookshelf. Dust it off. And read it again.

The Golem of Zukow

Thrilling news! My short story, The Golem of Zukow, has been accepted for publication by Kenyon Review Online!

Rewrite Update

I just sat down to work on my Underpainting manuscript, and I got those oogly feelings you get deep down in your belly when the hottest guy at the party turns around to look at you. Oh, my. That's what writing's all about.

To Write is to Rewrite

Copy. Paste. Reread. Erase.

Stare blearily out the window. Get more coffee. Check my email. Read it over again.

That's what it means, rewriting. I am in the throes of changing Part 2 of my Great American Novel from a book-within-a-book to a dialogue between two characters, and right now, this is what my life consists of:

Copy. Paste. Reread. Erase.

Pick up kids at carpool. Buy some groceries. Make tuna casserole. Help with first grade homework. Feed rabbits. Fret about bills. Make breakfast. Make lunch. Make dinner. Sit down in front of the computer and read it again.

Only this time, I like it. I hesitate with my finger poised over the Delete button. It's good, I say to myself. I allow myself a smile. I save. And move on to the next section.

"They Were Like Family To Me," my Pushcart Prize-nominated short story, is online!

Okay, now for a little self-promotion. They Were Like Family To Me can be read in its entirety at the 2 Bridges Review website: My story begins on page 55. http://2bridgesreview.blogspot.com/