On the Missing, the Dead, My Dad and Bari Weiss

What are our responsibilities to the terrible stories? I can tell you what they're not

Home from Israel, piles of notes on my desk, some of which will be turned into proper writing, some of which already have. “Dispatch From Israel: A Soldier Dies, Strangers Gather To Mourn,” published yesterday over on Reason. The opening:

Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" plays as you drive south out of Tel Aviv in a heavy rain. It's incongruous with what you are driving toward, a visit with the family of Ahmad Abu Latif, the Bedouin soldier killed, along with 20 other members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), when the buildings on the Gaza border his company was preparing for controlled demolition were hit by RPG missiles.

Some Israelis have criticized the IDF for putting so many soldiers in one small location, essentially making them sitting ducks. You do not think any possible strategic failure behind Ahmad's death, at age 26, will matter to his mother. You also have no idea what gift to bring her.

"How should I know?" asks the young salesman at the counter of the roadside shop in Rahav. Then: "Maybe dates."

You carry the 5-kilo pack of dates, as big as an overnight case, past a dozen men smoking in an outdoor tent by an open brazier. That way, one indicates, pointing toward an open door. Inside, a woman is looking at you. She is wedged into the far edge of a couch, in order, you will realize during your visit, that the people who file in and out might sit beside her, as they take her hand, as they tell her, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, that they are so sorry.

Read the whole thing here. Or don’t. The world is massive and sometimes harrowed with sadness. There is a vast pool of writers and others offering views as to what’s going on. Some will be to your taste and some will not be. We do our best in tough situations.

I have very few skills. One is to sit with people during terrifying times and try to tell their stories. Some might call this parasitic, and I myself have written about the hazards of inserting oneself into the tragedies of others. So I can understand when people offer criticism of covering stories in ways they find not hard-news enough, or in a style that feels too intimate; stick to the facts, lady!

What I do not understand is learning about the death of someone you perceive to be on the other “side” and discounting it, or saying things like - and I wish this were not true - ‘fuck him, what about all the other dead people on the side I like?’ It’s as though learning, in this case, about the dead man’s 11-month-old daughter, they felt a bit of glee rise up, a confirmation that the justice they want to see in the world has come a little closer.

It hasn’t. Nor does it come closer when you watch someone - in this case, Bari Weiss - hide in a concrete culvert when the air raid sirens went off in Tel Aviv on Monday. (I had flown out an hour before, inspiring my friend Yael’s dad to text, '“Nancy is missing out!!”)

God help me I know Bari makes people deranged, that she has for some people became a symbol for anything they want to hate. People don’t aim their rage and frustration at, say, the neighborhood dry cleaner; they stare at their screens and look for big targets at which to launch their pellets of disgust, hoping for… what? Does it bring satisfaction? Whom do they think they are helping? You don’t like what Bari does or what I write? That’s fine! But a suggestion: Go sit with a family whose son has been killed. They will tell you: I am broken now, do not let my loved one be forgotten. If you can meet these people and still have your takeaway be (exact quote) “This sucks lol. Guy blew himself up committing a war crime,” let us relieve you of doing this again. We will take it from here.

Speaking of dry cleaners, when I grew up there was a One-Hour Martinizing on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was run by a European (I don’t know what country, maybe Germany) named Murray, always dapper, in a collar-shirt and a rose clipped his shirt pocket. (The store’s motto was, “Fresh as a flower in just one hour.”) My father brought his suits to be cleaned there. Murray must have had his sleeves rolled up one day, because I recall, at age 8 or so, my father coming home ashen.

“Murray has numbers on his arm,” he said, meaning the tattoo given to inmates at concentration camps. My father sat at the dining table, alone, and said this several more times. I could see it rocked him in a way I had not seen before. My dad grew up a Catholic kid in Greenwich Village in the 1930s and 1940s. He hated the krauts (though his late father had been German-Czech) and the Japs (when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, my dad thought it was the best 10th birthday present ever) and he carried the loose prejudices of his place and time, things we argued about as I became a teenager, things he would change his mind about, including gay marriage. But he never reveled in the suffering of others.

After he died, in 2020, I learned from more than a dozen people the kindnesses he’d done to them, particularly teenage boys who didn’t have a dad around, as my father had not, his own father having killed himself when my dad was three. He volunteer-coached the boys’ basketball team at the local Catholic school, and if you needed money, or a ride, or someone to call for help in the middle the night, he was your guy. He had faults, a lot of them, but the idea that a person could celebrate the suffering of another person, he would’ve knocked that person’s block off, and, afterwards, taken those who suffered (and also some pretty girls!) for steak at Peter Luger’s.

Several more Israel stories on the way; people will get something out of them - and I received a sweet fan note while writing this, so, it all balances out - or, if they are true to form, accuse me caring only about the deaths of some and not of others, a thing it seems to me they know something about.