September in Maryland

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

From Winslow, a work in progress:

Antietam National Battlefield

Joshua Winslow
New York 24th
Hagerstown, Maryland
September 11, 1862

Miss Sarah Davison
Winslow, New York

My Dearest Sarah,

After a hard march of five days, we have stopped, at least momentarily. We are near Hagerstown, Maryland. I’m not sure when I will be able to post this letter. We have been moving quickly of late.

We have been ordered to rest for at least this day and maybe the next. I am writing this letter as the sun is setting over a tent-covered ridge to the west. No fires are permitted after dark, lest the glow of them alert the rebel forces of our position.

The place where we are was once a farm, or more accurately several farms covering hundreds of acres of fertile ground blanketing graceful and gentle hills. If there were a place to rival the beauty of our home in New York, this would be it. What few buildings stand here, barns and farmhouses, have been occupied by the officers as temporary command posts.

I can now barely imagine what this place looked like before the Union Army arrived. It was a quiet place and gentle in its stillness. Now, in any direction I look I see an ocean of men and tents, all moving in small waves. It’s as if a large living organism has engulfed this place and forever destroyed its tranquility. When we arrived here yesterday we thought that we were the last, but more men kept arriving through the night. There must be over ten thousand men here by now and still more come every hour. They have come from all over the Union, from Maine and Vermont, from a place called Deer Island, from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, from Illinois and Michigan and Ohio.

And also from New York. My sweet, beloved New York. I remember this time of year up in Winslow as my favorite. The stifling heat of August has broken but the days are still warm and golden, perfect for a picnic near a lake with my love. When the sun goes down, the evenings are cool again. Down here, the heat has not broken and that five-day march was brutal. Several men in our unit collapsed with heat exhaustion and had to be left behind. Many of the men arriving in camp are on stretchers. The drummer boys formed bucket brigades to distribute water from the stream flowing through the middle of the camp.

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The Oral Tradition

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Last week, I traveled up to Massachusetts to attend the memorial service for my uncle, John Juergen  Bubbers, who died in May after a long illness.  I was reunited with my cousins most of whom I’ve not seen in many years.  Sadly, it has been funerals, first of our grandparents and now parents that have given us the occasion to gather together again.  It’s probably typical that at these events that bring together extended families, we all observe our cousins and the grandchildren and look for our genetic connections.  This person looks like Oma, that person has Opa’s mouth, and so on.  In fairness, we also acknowledge who resembles a spouse who married into our family.

I took particular notice of one of my cousins.  When we were younger we were very similar looking, both of us blond haired and blue eyed and bearing some resemblance to our grandfather.  Now, not so much.  He was always taller and skinnier than me, and now it seems even more so, especially on the skinnier part.  That’s right, Fred. He got skinnier. What struck me was how much he reminded me of his father.  In his physical manner, speech patterns, even the way he carried himself was eerily evocative of my Uncle John.  It’s been decades since he lived in his father’s household, so how strong could his father’s influence be by this time?  When I remarked on this to my sister, she said, “Well, Freddie, I hate to break this to you, but everybody’s been telling me how much you remind them of Daddy.”

“I try not to,” I said.

“There, the way you said ‘I try not to.’  You sound just like him.”

I guess there’s no escape from Gregor Mendel and his stupid wrinkled peas.

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The Art of the Novella: The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer was first published in two parts in The New Yorker in 1979.  Later that year it was published in book form by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  It was the first book of his Zuckerman Bound Trilogy, which he completed in 1985.  The Ghost Writer first introduced us to Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, as a twenty-three year old writer at the start of his career.  Nathan has had four short stories published and has been profiled in a magazine as an up-and-coming writer.  He claims to be embarrassed by the profile and the accompanying picture of him with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, but his claim seems to be based on what he thinks is expected of him.

Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

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Racing to the Bottom

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Christmas Day, 1965.

The night before, when my family opened our presents, I had been given by Santa Claus, a small drum set, a GI Joe, and a little plastic guitar with the faces of John, Paul, George, and Ringo on the fret board.  A good haul for a five year-old, but I wasn’t going to get to play with my new toys until New Year’s Day.  I didn’t mind, though, for although it was Christmas Day, my sisters and I were dressed like it was Easter Sunday because we were headed to Kennedy Airport to fly to Miami Beach.  I can still remember how wondrous it all was to be living in the capital of the world.  We had a World’s Fair, Bernstein was with the Philharmonic (a hero in my family, likely because both the maestro and my father were born in Lawrence, Massachusetts), the United Nations was in Manhattan and our country’s membership was still something to be valued.

We lived in Queens, a borough of what was then “Fun City.”  My father was the sole owner of a drug store and worked long hours, but he made the most of the little time he had to spend with us.  On Sunday afternoons, when we weren’t at the World’s Fair, we might be bicycle riding in Central Park.  On a rare evening when he was able to close early or he was able to get someone to fill in for him in his store, he’d come upstairs and say, “Hey kids, let’s go for a ride,”  and we’d pile into his ‘63 Skylark and head off somewhere.  Where we were going would always be a surprise.  Sometimes my mother would come along, but more often she wouldn’t.  Being a parent, I now understand that these impromptu outings that took the three kids out of the house for a few hours were as much about parental bonding as they were about my father giving our mother a break.

Lincoln Center, New York. Sometimes we went into Manhattan in the early evening and just walk around Lincoln Center, dazzled by the lights and the architecture, the chicly attired concertgoers at the Metropolitan Opera House and Philharmonic Hall.  In my memory, all the women are wearing Oleg Cassini and look like Jackie Kennedy.  There were television sets in the lobbies, so you see and hear a bit of what was going on in the concert halls and the theaters, but the main attraction was the Zero-Mostel-Gene Wilder-The-Producers fountain.  Not to fear, sometimes we did actually get tickets and see an actual performance of a ballet or a symphony.

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