RUTHFULLY YOURS

Readers who remember Mel Brooks‘ hilarious routines as the Two Thousand Year Old Man — the quintessential old Jewish codger who has seen it all, knows it all, and is going to tell you all about it — will have no trouble enjoying “People!,” veteran journalist Sol Sanders‘ rambling, far-reaching and often moving memoir. While not two thousand years old, Mr. Sanders is pushing 90 … and has he got a tale to tell.

Although it ranges around the globe, his story is a uniquely American one, and of a special kind: that of small-town Southern Jewry. As a Jewish friend of mine from New York once remarked, “What you’ve got to understand about Southern Jews is that they’re very Jewish, but they’re also very Southern.” Such is Sol. Raised by immigrant parents in a small community in rural North Carolina where his parents, the only Jews in town, ran a successful variety store, young Sol’s love of woods, streams, farm animals and local characters was sometimes overshadowed by a sense of otherness, of apartness from his surroundings and those populating it. This gives his early reminiscences both an authentic feel and a critical objectivity that might otherwise have been lacking. Perhaps it is this same ability to absorb and appreciate the world around him while viewing it with an outsider’s eye that made Sol Sanders a born journalist long before he knew anything about the profession. It is also possible that his homosexuality, which he discusses candidly but, mercifully, not at excessive length or in morbid detail, enabled him to understand and empathize with people, places and situations very different from himself over a long, globe-trotting career in Europe, Asia and Latin America for major publications including the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and The Washington Times, among others.

I attended a showing of a documentary on November 9,1988 hosted by Ronald Lauder, who announced that Cardinal O’Connor could not attend because he was ill with high fever. Immediately after the screening, a frail and febrile Cardinal O’Connor surprised everyone and walked to the lectern. Holding a Torah to his breast, in a slightly tremulous voice he said a prayer for the souls of the victims ending with the words “never again.” rsk
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/07/nyregion/interfaith-events-marking-kristallnacht.html

A week of solemn events commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht got under way yesterday with John Cardinal O’Connor announcing that all 410 churches in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York would ring their bells Wednesday night to mark the event, the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust.

Speaking at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to 4,000 people, including a delegation of Jewish leaders, the Cardinal also said he would light a memorial candle in the window of his residence on Madison Avenue that night. He urged New Yorkers of all faiths to do the same.

”The horribly destructive flames of Kristallnacht can, by the grace of God, be converted into flames of worship, reverence and prayer for the human spirit,” he said. Hebrew Bible Displayed
Cardinal O’Connor delivered his homily holding a Hebrew Bible, which he called ”the Torah, the law written by the finger of God.” It was this book that the Nazis wanted to destroy, he said, ”so that with diabolical ingenuity, they could replace it with their own laws and thus replace God.”

As he spoke, the Cardinal, his voice breaking with emotion, clutched the Hebrew Bible to his chest and sometimes waved it in the air.

In his homily and in a column this week in Catholic New York, the Cardinal said he ”had no patience” with those who ask, ”Why do the Jews keep remembering the Holocaust?”
”To say to the Jews, ‘Forget the Holocaust,’ ” he wrote in his column, ”is to say to Christians, ‘Forget the Crucifixion.’ There is a sacramentality about the Holocaust for Jews all around the world. It constitutes a mystery, by definition beyond their understanding – and ours.”