intertwining of haphazard events. The trick is to seize the moment. Time recedes, never to be replenished. Life is an adventure. To revel in its actuality, to love it as we wince from the low blows it delivers along the way, is to exalt it.
For all its expectations, this narrative is little more than a sketch. Spanning seven decades, many of its basic pen strokes rely on memory -- dimmer as I rummage through the distant past, clearer as powers of recall increase with the vividness of more recent events. Likewise, long periods of self-inquiry have yielded a few mismatched but pertinent fragments. Some events, too faint to recollect with any certainty, may be inadvertently out of sequence; I strove toward spontaneity, not the rigors of linear history. Others, as relates to some aspects of my work, especially in Central America, were deliberately reversed or transposed to cover compromising tracks or protect valued sources. Lastly, too painful to relive, even vicariously, too personal for public consumption or too fragmentary, some details were synopsized or ultimately excised from an over-exuberant first draft. Whenever possible, I’ve endeavored to reconstruct events, recapture feelings and echo dialogues long since blunted by time. Legitimized by indelible recollections, notes, faded photographs, family anecdotes, yellowed documents and recorded history, this narrative also relies on insights and perspectives apprehended long after the fact. They are laid bare without pedantry or false modesty. I vouch for their candor. I offer no apology should they lack wisdom, civility or virtue.
THIS I BELIEVE
“Solitude knocks at the door only when invited,” my grandmother used to say. She suffered neither fool nor whiner gladly. My uncle, a hopeless romantic, asserted that “flirting is a science; loving is an art.” An aunt, a notorious adulteress, justified her innumerable trysts by pleading that “never to lie, never to deceive is a feat only an imbecile can perform.” My father, a country doctor who lacked a scintilla of entrepreneurial spirit, warned that “the transaction that brings the highest dividends is the one not yet concluded.” My maternal grandfather, an electrical engineer and amateur humorist, liked to say that “intelligence is a battery that can be recharged only when plugged into someone else’s intelligence.” And, shortly before she died, in a moment of agonizing self-awareness, his daughter -- my mother -- whispered, “To live with death in one’s soul is to die alive.”
For all their pithiness, poignancy or devilish wit, aphorisms evoke what is already there in the glaring light of day. It’s the hyperbolic nature of subjective truth that transforms perceived reality into a grotesque parody of itself. But the essential lessons they convey, even metaphorically, speak volumes about those who coined them, about their lives and times, about the hopes, joys and sorrows that inspired them. More profoundly, what emerges from their confluent parts is the culture of cynicism, circumspection and stoicism that favored their survival.
Crafted over the generations by members of my clan, countless aphorisms were already common currency when I was a boy. They may have influenced the man I would become:
Avoid the arbitration of those who call themselves “neutral.”
Man discards the debris of his subconscious by dreaming.
Society jettisons the detritus of its conscience by eliminating dreamers.
Only fools think they’re always right.
One tolerates more readily the meanness of an idiot
than the stupidity of a cruel man.
Society censures abortion not because it robs it of a genius or a virtuoso, but because it deprives the state of a taxpayer and the church of a hostage.
Money is like fire. It can warm your feet or burn your socks.
A political slogan is tripe in pill form that only imbeciles swallow whole.
Never honest with itself, history unfolds while historians deform it.
One starts out being a portrait; one ends up being a caricature.
Men are by nature ungovernable, which is why they clamor for laws they’re unfit to obey.
When politicians keep pointing fingers at each other, it’s the voters who eventually give them the finger.
The pernicious spirit of religion is that it considers temptation as much of a sin as the misdeed it invites.
To appreciate exile one must have endured the indignities of the regime that inflicted it.
Eat today if you hope to be hungry tomorrow.
Beware of those who haven’t yet betrayed you.
Always get even in advance.
If you can’t afford a hired killer, try blasphemy.
Words have the right to be, even if they sting.
To be credible, journalism can’t afford to be harmless.
PART ONE
THE SOURCE
The seminal years
FUTURE PERFECT
Proverbs and aphorisms and in-your-face wisecracks are the legacy of the Jewish people. We wouldn’t know how to ride the stormy swells of life or countenance calamity without invoking some quaint saying that warms the soul, or chases away the blues or restores faith in divine providence:
Life is the greatest of all bargains; we get it for nothing.
The clever repartee that lifts the spirit --
Live; you can always hang yourself later.
The age-old counsel that warns against rumor-mongering --
What your eyes don’t see, don’t invent with your mouth.
The sarcasm that demolishes absurd assumptions --
If my grandmother had testicles, she'd be my grandfather.
The sardonic rejoinder to airs of mawkish nostalgia --
If you want to talk about the good old days, wait a while.
The subversive one-liner that encapsulates and concretizes the Jewish ethos --
To be Jewish is not a circumstance; it’s a state of mind.
Jews are by nature restive, skeptical. Encrypted in the Jewish psyche, the greater truths and lesser lights our Biblical heroes bequeathed are course-plotting aids, not endpoints. We recognize their fallibility. Adrift on a sea of perplexity, we don’t follow them without engaging in endless soul-searching or endless debate. It’s our nature to spin then reject hermetic concepts. We are, therefore we doubt. Everything is relative, unfinished, highly debatable, often contentious. We owe this paradox both our longevity and our vulnerability. Reality is a many-sided gem. It’s impossible to glimpse all the facets without being blinded in the process. To see everything is to see nothing. So we improvise.
There’s a question to every answer.
The closer you get to the altar, the farther God retreats.
Sometimes, we switch from the declarative to the interrogative. When we respond to a question by asking another -- an acquired reflex -- what emerges is neither witticism nor affront, but the synthesis of a cardinal reality in which the sublime and the ridiculous come together and mate. It takes very little to create an alternate reality -- or to endow it