History, fate and the violins of a wounding autumn

In these sad and mournful days, I have been thinking about History and Fate. A small footnote to the tragedy in Pittsburgh was the catalyst; and, with letter bombs and gunshots as the violins of a wounding autumn week, my thoughts took flight.

At first, though, it was a simple twist of Fate that had me going. Judah Samet was four minutes late for services at the Tree of Life synagogue last Saturday – and that saved his 80-year-old life. His Sabbath routine, like all rituals, was normally set in stone: he’d arrive punctually at 9:45 am. Last Saturday morning, though, a chance conversation with his housekeeper delayed his drive to the synagogue, and that tilted the axis of his Fate. No sooner had he pulled into the Tree of Life parking lot – a full four momentous minutes later than usual – than there was a knock on his car window.

“There’s shooting inside your synagogue,” a man warned, according to Samet’s memory of the moment. And just like that, his destiny veered off from the ineluctable course that History seemingly had in store for him.

It was not the first time.  As a child – he was 6, maybe 7, the details grow murky with the passing of the decades – the Nazis shoved him into a train heading to Auschwitz, his life caught in the cruel grip of the times in which he lived. But, as he tells the story, just before his train was to head on to the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz, he was transferred to a train that took him to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Why? He’s uncertain. All Samet knows is that Auschwitz was a swift death warrant, while Bergen-Belsen offered the relative reprieve of a slow, agonized end in starvation. Thirty thousand Jews – including Anne Frank – died behind its high, barbed-wired fences. Judah Samet, however survived.

After the war, he made his way to an orphanage in Israel, and then, in time, on to a new life, another reinvention, another chance at a previously only imagined future, in Pittsburgh. Once again History, brandishing its grim malevolence, intervened.

“It never ends,” he said with apparent resignation. The story of the Jewish people is, woefully, a story held together in many fundamental ways by the sacrifices of its martyrs. {mosads}

I heard a similar wail of despair when I attended an inter-faith memorial service at my local suburban Connecticut temple last Monday evening. Our little town had gathered to commemorate those who had been murdered in Pittsburgh simply because they were born Jewish. The congregation’s former rabbi, full of grief, began by saying that he’d stood at this pulpit in the aftermath of September 11^th to speak about the unspeakable, and now, seventeen years later, he had returned to face a similar, daunting challenge.

That connection pushed my thoughts back to those awful days, too. Once again a very painful memory was clear in my mind: A father at my childrens’ school had taken the train into the city early that morning to play in a weekly basketball game at a downtown gym. When the game was over, he hurried over to his desk at his brokerage firm’s trading table in the World Trade Center – only to arrive in time for the first plane to smash into the building.

It is one more sad tale of History colliding with Fate. A man in a cave has some wildly atavistic and anachronistic vision of a return to the caliphate, and he sets in motion a scheme that reaches across oceans and continents to wreck the lives of a family – 4 young children! – in our bucolic suburb.

Here we’re enjoying the good life of shaved lawns and heated pools, 401Ks, SUVs, and SATs – and yet we, too, cannot escape the fierce History of the times in which we live. Or our Fates.

Or can we? After I had returned from the wrenching memorial service, I received a text from a friend in Florida. She was busily working away – ringing doorbells, raising money – for the Democratic campaigns of Bill Nelson for Senate and Andrew Gillum for governor. Both candidates, she was soaringly sanguine, had genuine chances to be elected; and with their victories, Democratic control of the Senate was a possibility, as well as an opportunity to change restrictive state voting laws that could make all the difference in the 2020 presidential election.

Rather than relying on quixotic Fate to intervene, she was pushing and shoving against the tide of History. The sermon she was implicitly preaching – although I doubt she’d have much sympathy for the comparison – was straight out of the Gospel according to Karl Marx. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,” he had written. And his point – although, I concede, my old professor Karl Popper argues strenuously against this interpretation – is that History is not Fate. There are no iron laws. The times in which we live can be rewritten.

And that is the lesson – a call to collective action as much as a personal realization – I take away from all the human and political dramas that have been swirling through my mind in these agitated times.

One cannot count on the vagaries of Fate to put you on one train or another, to delay a car ride, or to keep a basketball game running just a little longer. All that is beyond our control. But we can still shake things up. In fact, we have a responsibility, a civic and, in these unseemly times, a moral duty, to do what we can to halt the march of the forces that have given rise to our current virulent History, a bullying and victimizing politics that is determined to undermine the well-cherished ideals of justice, compassion, and fair play which are the benevolent cornerstones of our nation.

Election day is Tuesday, November 6.

History can be re-written; and as the page turns, so does our nation’s Fate.

Howard Blum is a writer and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former Village Voice and New York Times reporter, and the author of more than a dozen nonfiction books. His most recent, “In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies” (HarperCollins), was published in February.