| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1 | ||||
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Because we've been traveling (as I mentioned in what I just posted), today feels like Saturday or Sunday to me. My hebdomadal clock is screwed up in that strange way one's inner chronometer goes awry when one travels from place to place and time zone to time zone.
And so I feel that, in posting the video above, I'm posting something Saturday- or Sundayish. If that makes any sense at all.
It's not something serious, I mean to say. Not in a serious weekday sort of way.
It's not something serious, I mean to say. Not in a serious weekday sort of way.
Except that it is serious. Earnestly so. It's a hilarious, moving segment in which Stephen Colbert interviews Maurice Sendak, who died today. Sendak comes across in this video as delightfully acerbic, iconoclastic, intelligent--all the things I would have imagined he'd be, from reading his work. And I have to confess I had no idea at all that he was gay.
Watching the video makes me think, interestingly enough--a totally off-the-wall comment coming here--of how proud my partner Steve is of his Jewish roots. Something I think of as I watch this video solely because I gather that Maurice Sendak was Jewish.
And Steve's Jewish roots are on my mind right now for the following reason: in the past week, when I got mind-numbingly tired of combing through footnotes in my manuscript, I wandered around the LDS library in Salt Lake City and happened on a dictionary of German Jewish surnames. And when I dipped into it to look for Steve's family-that-we-were-certain-is-Jewish, there was the name--Cahn/Cohn/Kahn--with one of the instances of the surname given from the very village in which Steve's Cahn family lived, the village of Stommeln just outside Köln.
On a trip there a number of years ago to do research about Steve's Schmitz ancestors, who moved from Stommeln to Wisconsin and then Minnesota in the 1850s, we had discovered that his two immigrant ancestors, Johannes Schmitz and Gertrude Ott, both had grandmothers named Cahn. And even though we had found this information in the church register of the Catholic parish, we had deduced that these Cahn forebears had very likely been Jewish, because the name was so clearly Jewish. And because we could find many instances of it in the history of the village's synagogue, which is one of the very few synagogues that survived Kristallnacht--and happens to have been built on land and with money provided by one Moses Cahn.
All of which means a great deal to Steve as someone who bears a certain burden of historic guilt due to his blood that is solely German and Austrian, with a tiny hint of Luxembourgish, Belgian, and Czech thrown into the mix. And who has spent years trying to understand what happened in the Holocaust and why it happened--and to come to terms with the fact that his own people managed to design and carry out that monstrous act of mass murder.
An impulse I understand very well--the need to know, to understand, and, yes, to atone--as someone descended from people who held other human beings in bondage up to the mid-19th century.
And watching Maurice Sendak, with his deep, engaging menshlikeit and sharp wit, somehow evokes these responses in me. And also reminds me that I had promised to blog about a book I read recently--Bob Smith's Remembrance of Things I Forgot.
About which I'll say only this, since I've now returned the book to the library and can't remember much of what I intended to tell you all about it: it's a wonderful, hilarious read. And it's worth reading for one section alone: when (through the magic of time travel, which plays a central role in the novel) old and evil Dick Cheney meets young, brash, evil-in-the-making Dick Cheney, and is double-crossed by his Machiavellian younger self . . . .
Whom he then coolly waterboards to teach the youngster a lesson. And to extort information he knows the cocky young twerp is daring to withhold from him.
And if that--and a plotline centering on a gay couple breaking up because one of the two decides to become a Republican--is not enough to make you run to a library or bookstore to get a copy of Remembrance of Things I Forgot, I don't know what would make you do so.
RIP, Maurice Sendak.
And Steve's Jewish roots are on my mind right now for the following reason: in the past week, when I got mind-numbingly tired of combing through footnotes in my manuscript, I wandered around the LDS library in Salt Lake City and happened on a dictionary of German Jewish surnames. And when I dipped into it to look for Steve's family-that-we-were-certain-is-Jewish, there was the name--Cahn/Cohn/Kahn--with one of the instances of the surname given from the very village in which Steve's Cahn family lived, the village of Stommeln just outside Köln.
On a trip there a number of years ago to do research about Steve's Schmitz ancestors, who moved from Stommeln to Wisconsin and then Minnesota in the 1850s, we had discovered that his two immigrant ancestors, Johannes Schmitz and Gertrude Ott, both had grandmothers named Cahn. And even though we had found this information in the church register of the Catholic parish, we had deduced that these Cahn forebears had very likely been Jewish, because the name was so clearly Jewish. And because we could find many instances of it in the history of the village's synagogue, which is one of the very few synagogues that survived Kristallnacht--and happens to have been built on land and with money provided by one Moses Cahn.
All of which means a great deal to Steve as someone who bears a certain burden of historic guilt due to his blood that is solely German and Austrian, with a tiny hint of Luxembourgish, Belgian, and Czech thrown into the mix. And who has spent years trying to understand what happened in the Holocaust and why it happened--and to come to terms with the fact that his own people managed to design and carry out that monstrous act of mass murder.
An impulse I understand very well--the need to know, to understand, and, yes, to atone--as someone descended from people who held other human beings in bondage up to the mid-19th century.
And watching Maurice Sendak, with his deep, engaging menshlikeit and sharp wit, somehow evokes these responses in me. And also reminds me that I had promised to blog about a book I read recently--Bob Smith's Remembrance of Things I Forgot.
About which I'll say only this, since I've now returned the book to the library and can't remember much of what I intended to tell you all about it: it's a wonderful, hilarious read. And it's worth reading for one section alone: when (through the magic of time travel, which plays a central role in the novel) old and evil Dick Cheney meets young, brash, evil-in-the-making Dick Cheney, and is double-crossed by his Machiavellian younger self . . . .
Whom he then coolly waterboards to teach the youngster a lesson. And to extort information he knows the cocky young twerp is daring to withhold from him.
And if that--and a plotline centering on a gay couple breaking up because one of the two decides to become a Republican--is not enough to make you run to a library or bookstore to get a copy of Remembrance of Things I Forgot, I don't know what would make you do so.
RIP, Maurice Sendak.
H/t to Sarah Seltzer at Alternet for the link to the Colbert video.
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