for Rudolf Wagner, in memoriam
There is a YouTube now making its way around the Internet of a blindfolded young Muslim fellow on a streetcorner in New York with a sign that says,
“I am Muslim. If you trust me, please give me a hug.”
He cannot see those who pass him by, nor those coming into his embrace who invariably walk away in tears.
I am thankful he is doing this.
Who am I, after all, and who was Herb but the offspring of desperate refugees escaping tyranny, half-mad with fear and rage? We were, both of us, new Americans, taking a chance at life and recombining our gene pools to give birth to the next generation of citizens. Ours have turned out to be three remarkable people whose intelligence and kindness have proved a blessing to us and our shared society, which is made up of fellow immigrants anyhow.
This is not a new story; we humans have had to run away and resettle elsewhere many times before. At its best, it makes for diversity; at its worst, for mayhem, hatred and violence. There must be a trick to mixing it all up without trying to kill one another in the process.
Not so easy, apparently.
This week, an opportunity to practice what I preach has walked right into my life, by an unexpected opportunity that caught me off guard.
I know a German man, Rudolf, who is married to a Chinese woman, Cathy, who I’ve known since she came to live on my street many years ago, after escaping from China during the Cultural Revolution with her mother and sister.
You following this…?
As it happens, her husband, Rudolf, teaches Chinese Studies at the same University that barred Herb’s mother, when she was a student there, after the Nazi’s took power and she was kicked out with other Jewish students.
She, Cathy, left China after her father died in prison during the Cultural Revolution, and came here, to where I live in California.
Now she and Rudolf live part-time in Heidelberg and part-time in Boston, where they both teach Chinese history. I rarely see them, except when they come to visit family for the holidays.
Rudolf has been ill, so Cathy wondered if I might be able to help him while they were here. We have long considered one another “family” so it was natural for her to ask, and for me to agree to it when we were all together for Thanksgiving break.
But picture this scene: the Russian-Jewish wife of a deceased German-Jewish refugee singing every day for 10 days in California to a German scholar who grew up in Nazi time not far from where her husband’s family had fled for their lives just one generation earlier.
Rudolf and I know each other via the Holocaust and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. How likely is that?
Even the timing is uncanny, as it is happening just before the one-year anniversary of Herb’s death, and each day I can track exactly what was happening on this day one year ago.
‘Yesterday’ we ‘sprang’ him out of the hospital; today, opening the window to fresh air gave him joy; tomorrow he ate fresh cranberries with relish.
Each morning Rudolf and I go deeper, agreeing to heal all the rifts we represent, sharing love and hope with all refugees everywhere, then reciprocally with all beings, then with the very waters and air of the world, then with the unseen sources of life itself, and then for all its dualities: sound and silence; Light and Dark; good and evil…
Through the window, as if floodlighting our intentions, at exactly the right moment the cloud cover parts and Rudolf is surrounded by a blaze of sudden light. An omen.
Each afternoon I organize Herb’s poetry, which I am making into a book to give to the family. This closet poet left his poems here there and everywhere, and it is like a treasure hunt to find them all. I search through notebooks and old letters, his computer files and my birthday cards.
For now, we are together again, laughing and crying, saying our next level of good-byes, and it is good.
Egyptian and Jew,
Old Gods and New.
Iraqi and American,
Allah and God.
Israeli and Palestinian,
Adonoi and Allah.
Iraqi and Iranian,
Allah and Allah.
Irish and English,
God and God.
The ancients – many gods,
Mimicking human folly.
Now, one God, many faces.
Which face
Will part the Red Sea?
hls 2003
