Let's write about November 19th the year 1863 and the Gettysburg Address

 Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American in substack:  

President Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg, PA- For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address (1863)- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Let's write about inspired religious art- Fra Angelico (born1395- died 1455)

Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe? By Cody Delistraty

Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. Echo opinion art review published in The New York Times.

The Annunciation- Archangel Gabriel with the Virgin Mary by Fra Angelico

But, it wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for.✝️👼😇 👼🏽🙏Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.

“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” 

With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.

A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. 

Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.

So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.

Angelico began as an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and had sold a few paintings by the time he joined the convent of San Domenico near Florence, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. (He posthumously gained the “angelic” moniker.) He was a man of deep faith, said to have wept every time he painted Jesus on the cross.

The Dominican friars of Angelico’s order were a particularly disciplined breed, following a 13th-century credo that encouraged extreme austerity. There was no search for meaning in that convent; it was a given. When Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned him to paint many of the frescoes in Angelico’s new convent of San Marco, it’s very likely Angelico didn’t even consider what he was doing to be “art.” His painting was, more than anything, an act of devotion — “visions,” as the art critic John Ruskin would later write.

This fall, I visited a major exhibit — running through January — at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco (where Rothko visited) and the nearby Palazzo Strozzi that brings one into Angelico’s world and faith.

There, you’ll find Angelico’s most stunning work, “The Annunciation,” outside the friars’ cells, up the stairs in the convent, which became a museum in 1869. A large-scale fresco painted in the 1440s, it depicts Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Look first at Gabriel’s wings. Though the light and shadow of the scene are otherwise realistic, Angelico omits the shadows that would otherwise emanate from the angel’s wings, lending Gabriel an other worldliness.

Look next at both Gabriel and Mary’s eyes. Angelico has given the angel a feminized face — neat lashes, reddened cheeks, golden and curly hair. He looks ever so slightly upward at Mary. He is here to deliver impossible news. His eyes pretend toward authority, but mostly he appears puzzled. Mary meets his gaze with a look of her own weighted shock, her lips pursed, her neck arched downward so that she has quietly become the one in control of the conversation, as though, with the exchange of this revelation, she now embodies a divinity greater even than an angel.

Look then at the architecture around them. The ornate, Corinthian columns, the mathematically precise Roman arches. How classical and ordered. What a contrast these exacting, human creations are to the cosmic information being delivered and received by these startlingly modern, expressive faces. It is as though the word of the Virgin birth has slashed its way through art history itself, so that we can practically see the Classical giving way to the early Renaissance.

And though it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless.

“You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher, described Angelico’s key artistic invention as interiority: “that indwelling significance of human features.” Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling.

Consider, as Hegel does, an ancient Egyptian sculpture of Isis embracing her son, Horus. In this, there is no warmth, no “soul,” writes Hegel. The artist expects the viewer to know that there exists love between these two by the nature of their relationship. The viewer must generate within himself the associated feelings and apply it to the art.

Angelico, by contrast, elicits these emotions — through his depictions of eyes, hands, the use of light and so much else — so that upon looking at his art one is immediately struck by the love and intimacy flowing between his depictions of Virgin and Child or the awe and befuddlement between her and Gabriel in “The Annunciation.” 

Angelico broke through art history by subtracting a crucial step. One does not regard his art, then create feeling, then look again to see that feeling manifest; rather, the seeing and the feeling are simultaneous, as Rothko saw in Angelico’s work. The artwork has become the emotion.

Let's write about the history of the mariners' Underground Railroad to help free Southern slaves

 The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors by Eric Foner

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

Freedom Ship:  The Underground History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, author Marcus Rediker. A book review published in the New York Review of Books by Eric Foner*, Emeritus, Columbia.

Of the innumerable images published in American newspapers in the decades before the Civil War, few were as ubiquitous as those depicting a young Black man traveling on foot through a forest (represented by a single tree), his belongings wrapped in a sack attached to a pole slung over his shoulder. Instantly recognizable as a runaway slave, the image was usually accompanied by text providing a physical description of the fugitive, the offer of a reward for his capture, and a warning that anyone who assisted the runaway—or even refused to take part in his capture—risked serious legal consequences.

Thousands of these notices (including those for women
) appeared in print, testimony to American slaves’ intense desire for freedom and their willingness to risk their lives to obtain it. But this familiar depiction, argues the historian Marcus Rediker in his new book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, is misleading, encouraging historians to focus on overland flight, ignoring the fact that “a large proportion” of slaves escaped by boat. Moreover, these advertisements imply that most fugitive slaves were acting on their own, whereas many relied on assistance from sympathetic individuals or organizations such as the Vigilance Committees. Springing into existence in the 1830s, and 1840s, in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other northern cities, they sought to combat an epidemic of kidnapping of northern free Blacks for sale into slavery and to provide help to fugitives. Taken together, these local networks came to be known as the Underground Railroad.

Ironically, the rapid expansion of cotton production in the lower South beginning in the 1820s, not only enriched slave owners, merchants, and bankers, North and South, but also established a web of maritime trading routes that greatly increased fugitives’ opportunities for escape by sea. Hundreds of ships each year carried the South’s “white gold” to the port cities of the Atlantic coast and on to textile factories in New England and Europe. 

Rediker presents some startling statistics that illustrate the growth of seaborne commerce. By the middle of the nineteenth century nearly 200,000 seamen sailed out of the major ports each year, the largest number to and from New York City, which dominated the cotton trade. Some 20,000 of the sailors were African Americans. In 1855 American shipyards produced over two thousand new vessels. That explosion in maritime commerce, a result of slavery’s widening role in the American economy, created more occasions to steal away on ships and rendered obsolete the idea that those who fled the South did so unassisted.

Laws punishing attempted escapes by sea proved difficult to enforce. Captains were supposed to search their ships for runaway slaves, but as the coastal trade expanded this became prohibitively time consuming. The accelerating sectional conflict over the future of slavery, moreover, meant that a growing number of northerners proved willing to abet fugitives. This was especially true of members of the free Black communities that spread after northern states enacted laws for the gradual abolition of slavery. Black men were well positioned to help fugitives hiding on sailing vessels. As sailors, longshoremen, sailmakers, carpenters, and other maritime laborers, Black workers were omnipresent on the docks and aboard ships. Many kept a lookout for fugitives and directed them to people who could help. The presence of Black seamen was especially important for stowaways. Sailors were known to stack the heavy bales of cotton in a way that created spaces where slaves could fit and to provide them with food and water during the voyage.

To be sure, escape by ship carried its own risks. It was easier to hide in the woods than on a small packet boat. If a runaway was discovered, the captain and crew might turn him in for a reward. Nonetheless, Rediker argues, the chances of getting away on one of the innumerable vessels plying the Atlantic trading routes were considerably higher than those of reaching freedom on land. In 1856, Virginia established a Port Police to search all ships heading north from the state, but the officers had only six vessels for patrolling the vast waters of Chesapeake Bay. They were “overwhelmed,” Rediker writes.

Proximity to the sea was crucial for the most celebrated fugitive in American history, Frederick Douglass, whose journey from Maryland to New York in 1838 was immortalized in his three autobiographies. Douglass’s escape from bondage required him to travel by ferry and steamboat as well as by train—all modes of transport much faster than running away on foot. Instead of days or even weeks, it took him less than twenty-four hours to cover the two hundred miles to freedom.

Douglass, Rediker writes, was “a man of the waterfront.” As a youth he spent several years in Baltimore, one of the nation’s leading port cities and home to its largest free Black community. Along with two uncles and two friends, Douglass devised a plan to escape by canoe into Chesapeake Bay and make their way northward. But someone who learned of their intentions betrayed them. Douglass was sent to jail and then to Baltimore by his owner to learn the maritime skill of caulking.

In his second, successful effort at escape, Douglass, in his words “rigged out in sailor style,” was aided by Anna Murray, the free woman he was planning to marry, and by a retired Black sailor who gave him his own “sailor’s protection” identifying him as free. Soon after he reached New York, however, Douglass encountered Jake, a runaway slave he had known in Baltimore, who warned him that slave catchers prowled the city’s streets. A “generous” Black sailor then directed him to David Ruggles, head of the city’s recently established Vigilance Committee. Ruggles arranged for Douglass to travel to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the nation’s whaling capital, whose free Black community had long assisted fugitives—the city was known in antislavery circles as the Fugitive’s Gibraltar. Douglass’s experience drives home the point that escape was not a solo project and that assistance came from both organized networks and strokes of luck, such as Douglass’s encounter with Jake. Rediker also emphasizes the importance of Black (and not a few white) sailors who secretly distributed antislavery documents in southern ports, especially copies of Walker’s Appeal by David Walker, a free person of color from North Carolina who published his powerful condemnation of slavery and racism in 1829. 

Southern state governments outlawed its circulation and tried to restrict the presence of seamen who might distribute it, requiring Black sailors who arrived on ships from the North to be imprisoned while their vessels were in port.

Rediker is especially interested in multiethnic patterns of resistance uniting sailors and dockworkers, including the New York Conspiracy of 1741, which involved Irish, Hispanic, and African participants, and the Knowles Riot in Boston, in which free sailors and slaves fought the press-gangs rounding up seamen for the Royal Navy. The waterfront, he writes, may well have been the most racially and ethnically diverse workplace in the world. Many ships based in the British Isles and North America picked up sailors while in Europe, the Caribbean, and even the Pacific to replace men who had died, been disabled, or deserted.

Over the course of a long and influential scholarly career, Rediker has established himself as a pioneering chronicler of working-class life in the early modern Atlantic world, with an emphasis on those working at sea or on turbulent waterfronts. He has urged historians to include sailors in their accounts of the era’s labor history, rather than slighting them in favor of much-studied early factory workers. He knows the ships, maritime workers, and commercial routes intimately. Rediker brings to life the cacophonous soundscape of the waterfront, with merchants and captains crying out work orders as ships were loaded and unloaded and women, slave and free, loudly hawking baked goods, eggs, and other food to sailors and dockworkers. He identifies an ethos of solidarity among maritime workers, contrasting it with the dog-eat-dog outlook of emerging capitalism. He pays considerable attention to the importance of the suppression of piracy in the emergence of Britain’s seaborne empire and the imposition of discipline on an unruly working class. “Pirate ships,” he has written, were “democratic in an undemocratic age,” offering an example of multiracial accord that helps explain why many white sailors and waterfront workers were willing to assist fugitive slaves.

The titles of Rediker’s previous books suggest these historical preoccupations. They include Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Perhaps his most widely known work is The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, coauthored with the scholar of British working-class history Peter Linebaugh. The myth of the Hydra—each time Hercules lopped off one of its numerous heads, two new ones took its place—became a commonly employed metaphor for the difficulties authorities encountered in attempting to suppress a recalcitrant working class. Resistance somehow kept springing back to life.

Within this overarching story of capitalist development and working-class struggle, Rediker takes the reader on a tour of port cities in British North America, from Savannah to Boston. In each locale he surveys the activities of free Blacks, slaves, and white abolitionists in assisting fugitives and presents a compendium of dramatic escapes. Unavoidably the book’s structure produces repetition, but Rediker keeps his eye on the main subject—escapes by sea. A few chapters focus on well-known runaways, notably, in addition to Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a memoir that describes the sexual abuse to which she was subjected by her owner in North Carolina and her eventual escape to the North. Jacobs came from a seagoing family. Three of her uncles were sailors, two of whom escaped by sea. One uncle worked as a steward on a packet ship that sailed regularly between North Carolina and New York City. Jacobs managed to hide for seven years in a small crawl space in the house of her free grandmother. Her wait for a ship to transport her to freedom was excruciating, but many runaways had to remain in hiding before being able to depart on a coastal vessel. In June 1842, one of Jacobs’s uncles succeeded in locating what she calls a “friendly captain,” who transported her on the ten-day voyage to Philadelphia.

Unlike Douglass and Jacobs, most of the individuals whose experiences Rediker relates will be unfamiliar even to the most diligent historians. There’s George (surname unknown), for example, a youth owned by a New Orleans merchant. George must have set some kind of record by stowing away on a ship departing from Louisiana for Boston, a distance of two thousand miles by sea. George had heard people in the Crescent City talk about Boston as an antislavery stronghold, and in August 1846, when he saw the city’s name painted on a ship, he decided to hide on board amid the cargo. One week into the voyage the captain discovered him. It was too late to turn around, so the skipper continued to head for Boston. After the vessel reached the city he contacted his ship’s owner, who agreed to a plan to send George back to New Orleans. Abolitionists tried some innovative legal maneuvers in an effort to free him, some sailors ran interference as they could, and George temporarily slipped his captivity. But efforts to have the fugitive released via a writ of habeas corpus failed, and he was sent back to New Orleans. A subsequent attempt to persuade a grand jury to indict the captain for kidnapping on the grounds that he had unlawfully imprisoned George on his ship also foundered, and the captain was soon back at the helm.

No one knows exactly how many slaves managed to escape bondage. Rediker offers a “conservative estimate” of 15,000 to 20,000 arriving by sea in all ports during the thirty years preceding the Civil War, when the Underground Railroad and cotton shipping were both at their peak. Other historians have proposed figures for escapes of all kinds reaching up to 100,000. Some runaways were recaptured, but successful renditions were costly. Anthony Burns escaped from Virginia by boat in 1854 but was transported back to slavery on a ship from Boston Harbor. To get him there the local authorities required over one thousand armed militia, police, and infantry—hoping to prevent a repetition of events in 1851, when a large, mostly Black crowd rescued the escaped slave Shadrach Minkins from a Boston courthouse and spirited him off to Canada. Rediker devotes an entire chapter to William Powell, who with his wife ran the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House in New York City, a refuge for sailors who needed lodging until they found work at sea and where numerous fugitives were hidden. Rediker describes Powell as a “quintessential waterfront intellectual and activist.” He had sailed the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific and kept detailed records of the over six thousand boarders, including a number of white sailors, that he housed between 1839 and 1851. A prolific writer and speaker, he lectured alongside Douglass. Powell presided at a mass meeting organized by Black New Yorkers to protest the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which exposed free Black people to kidnapping or simply misidentification by courts. Powell himself, along with his wife and seven children, departed for Liverpool in 1851, fearing capture by the law even though none had ever been a slave. They returned to New York after a few years in Great Britain and resumed their work. Powell also became the city’s first Black notary, enabling him to produce “seamen’s protection certificates” like the one Douglass used on his escape.

States tried to impose their authority on the maritime working class but had little success. As noted above they jailed Black sailors who came into port on northern vessels. In 1859, the government of Charleston, fearing that northern sailors lacked sympathy for “our peculiar institutions,” resolved to train poor white youths to become “homegrown” mariners. Nothing came of this effort. Slave owners in Savannah formed the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association to stop fraternization onshore between Black and white maritime workers, who often bought and sold stolen goods.

Penalties for those who aided fugitives were not light. Sailors and captains who were caught were arrested and jailed. In Virginia Captain William Baylis was sentenced to forty years in prison and only freed when Union soldiers liberated Richmond at the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, by the 1850s captains were making what Rediker calls a “business of escape,” charging substantial fees for transporting runaways to the North. Among the most active members of this maritime underground was James Fountain, who had a secret compartment built on his ship, the Chas. T. Ford, where stowaways could hide. A Black ship carpenter worked with Fountain, alerting fugitives when he was sailing. Fountain charged as much as one hundred dollars per fugitive—a substantial sum in those days. He was not averse to carrying groups. On one occasion, in 1856, he transported twenty-one men, women, and children from Norfolk to the North—the largest group escape by sea of the pre-war period.

Freedom Ship joins a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the centrality of the fugitive slave issue in bringing on the Civil War and a smaller but growing literature on the maritime Underground Railroad, including Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander’s Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad and Timothy D. Walker’s edited volume Sailing to Freedom. As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, debates took place over the responsibility for apprehending runaway slaves. The Constitution required that they be returned to their owners, but exactly how remained unclear. A national law enacted during the presidency of George Washington authorized owners to track down and apprehend fugitives on their own (not always an easy thing to accomplish). Half a century later, efforts to implement the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which transferred responsibility for rendition to the federal government, inspired widespread resistance in the North. Some free states enacted “personal liberty” laws that sought to nullify the national statute by barring local officials from participating in the capture of runaways. These measures showed that the South’s ideology of states’ rights could be invoked to combat abusive national policies (a historical lesson especially relevant at the moment). None of this could have happened without the actions of slaves who sought to escape bondage and the people who helped them.

Given the evidence Rediker accumulates, it should not be surprising that the longest complaint against the North in South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession of 1860 was that the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause had been “render[ed] useless” by popular resistance in the free states. How appropriate that the Civil War began in Charleston Harbor, where the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery had long been fought on docks piled high with bales of cotton and on ships that daily sailed past the looming presence of Fort Sumter, some of them carrying hidden fugitives on their way to freedom.

*Eric Foner:  The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the 2011, Pulitzer Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. (October 2025)

Let's write about the upside of inevitable aging: For 80 year olds and counting optimists

New York Times essay on aging by Roger Rosenblatt

A famous Maurice Chevalier (b. 1888-d. 1972)

 quote on aging is, "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative". Another related quote is, "I prefer old age to the alternative"

I’d Like to Stay 85 Forever😀

Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think❓

To be sure, there are setbacks, such as the other day, when all at once I found myself on the floor. As I rose to leave the living room chair, it slid out from under me, leaving me astonished, my head banging against the piano keyboard nearby. So weak is my twice operated-upon back, so immobile my muscle-less legs, all I could do was sit there looking plaintively at my wife, Ginny, hoping for leverage, and recalling an ad on TV some years ago. A woman about my age now is on the floor, calling out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” — her cry as noble as Beowulf’s or any tragic hero.

For my part, I felt more foolish than tragic. The fall was a reminder of the liabilities of the 80s. Yet these are more than counterbalanced by the gifts this decade brings. I have a great deal of free time these days, which I’ve chosen to fill in several satisfying if idiosyncratic ways.

I recite lots of poetry, sometimes to Ginny, often to the window. Poetry that has hibernated in my head since my 20s when I used to teach English and American literature at a university. I memorized great swaths of poetry then because it allowed me to talk directly to the students, eye to eye, as if the poetry existed not in a book, but in the air. Right now, if you turned me upside down and shook me (it really isn’t necessary), I could give you several Shakespeare sonnets, a Dylan Thomas villanelle, “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” by Marianne Moore, the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and all of the introductory stanza to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” That may sound like bragging about my memory, but I share it because I think it says something about the lasting power of poetry. Also to brag.

These days, I play more of the piano on which I knocked my head. Playing by ear, too lazy to learn to read music as a kid, my range used to be very limited, especially the chords. With time on my hands I’m getting a little better. You would never mistake me for Bill Evans, or Nat King Cole before his singing days, but my touch is pretty good, and I can do a fair job with “My Romance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “What’ll I Do” and nearly everything by the Gershwin brothers, Fats Waller and Cole Porter. At my age it’s a triumph to get better at anything.

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family.

In the poem “October,” the sublime Louise Glück found that these years presented one’s life with a cold clarity, as “an allegory of waste.” Me? I see only harvest. I seem to have been partly responsible for creating a crop of six extraordinary grandchildren (add your own excessive compliments here). Before my October years, I would write the same breezy daily note to each of them: “Love you.” Now I have the time and freedom to putter around in their lives, asking this or that, making private jokes. The kids seem to take my attention gladly, or are too polite to tell me they don’t. Either way I have a flourishing garden of young people with whom I can banter to my heart’s content. So I do.

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring.

The other night Ginny and I watched the film “They Might Be Giants,” with George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and his psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, who actually is a Dr. Watson. I finally realized what it’s about. The film’s title refers to Don Quixote, for whom the windmills at which he tilted might have been giants, though they were not. But the fact that Don Quixote thought they might be giants meant that his capacity for dreams was greater than his fears.

I still have those. Dreams. Dreams for my country and for the world. And love. I have love intact. Ginny, for instance, the remarkable old woman who helped me to my feet when I parted ways with the chair.

My view of Ginny is one thing that October has not changed. I see her as a rescuer now, as I saw her when we married 62 years ago. Bright colors, cool winds, perfect weather.

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

Let's write about old fashioned censorship- Remember the Smother's Brothers?

 

Before Jimmy Kimmel, there weree the Smothers Brothers. In fact, 

President Richard Nixon got the brothers’ variety show cancelled after they wouldn’t let up on Vietnam. 

In the wake of the new late-night wars, Dick Smothers is having flashbacks.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine, by Bruce Handy.

An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

The letter was dated November 9, 1968, five days after Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, for the Presidency. Five months after that, with Nixon in the White House, CBS abruptly cancelled the Smothers brothers’ show. The network claimed that the series’ producers violated their contract by not providing finished episodes to its censors in a sufficiently timely manner (an assertion that would not pass muster in a subsequent civil-court case won by the brothers). Many, including the brothers themselves, felt that they were victims not only of skittish advertisers and conservative affiliates but also of the new Administration, which would prove unshy about targeting perceived foes in the media and elsewhere—though one might give that President a wee bit of credit for not going about it quite as nakedly as others.

Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day. “It sure didn’t start with us,” he insisted, when asked about politicians’ recurring habit of attempting to muzzle TV performers. “In my lifetime, it started with Edward R. Murrow, of course. But they didn’t fire him. They just switched him to a time slot not many people watched.”  This is true. In 1954, Murrow exposed many of Joseph P. McCarthy’s lies on his CBS news-magazine show, “See It Now,” a tipping point in the senator’s downfall. Just a year later, the series lost its sponsor, Alcoa, and was shunted from its Tuesday-night prime-time slot to random, irregular dead zones on the schedule.

Smothers was speaking on the phone from his home upstate, not far from Niagara Falls, in the village of Lewiston—“a booming economic juggernaut of a hundred and fifty years ago,” as he put it. (A native Californian, he moved there for love.) Tom, his older brother by two years, died in 2023. They first found acclaim, in the early nineteen-sixties, as comedic folksingers, playing night clubs and releasing popular LPs. A failed but apparently likable sitcom led to “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which débuted in February, 1967. It was a broad tent. Guests included Jack Benny, George Burns, Kate Smith, and Red Skelton. “We wanted the people we hung around the radio listening to when we were kids, people that meant something to us,” Smothers said. But the brothers also wanted the program to be “relevant. Not a silly show.” They assembled a legendary writers’ room, which included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Bob Einstein. But relevancy turned out to be a moving, even accelerating target. “The sixties hadn’t really got into top gear yet,” Smothers said. When they did, “it was like being at the scene of an accident.”

The brothers clashed with the network over silly things, like a “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch with George Segal that had naughty, homophonic fun with the word “frigate.” 

They also got in trouble for more serious efforts, like bringing on Pete Seeger, who was still blacklisted from the McCarthy era, to sing his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” But all in all, Smothers said, the show’s satire “was gentle. We didn’t do things that were right in your face, like the monologues today.” That wasn’t meant as criticism: he said that he’s a fan of Kimmel, Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart. “They’re brilliant. Brilliant,” he said. The times, in his view, demand in-your-faceness.

Back in the day, Dick was the duo’s straight man; Tom was the pretend naïf who got the best lines and, backstage, served as the act’s guiding hand. “My brother had a little bad-boy thing,” Smothers said. “But to the day he died he also had a strong moral compass.” To that end, he recalled, Tom wrote an earnest letter to L.B.J. which both brothers signed, “basically not apologizing for what we were doing, but saying that, if we were heavy-handed, we didn’t mean to be.” Johnson’s letter to the brothers was his reply. It concluded, “If ever an Emmy is awarded for graciousness, I will cast my vote for you.”

Needless to say, the current White House occupant, an actual member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (though Emmy-less himself), is offering no such absolution. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Muzzled.”

Let's write about history that must be told regardless of how painful it might be to read- Lithuanian Holocaust

A Daring Escape a book review published in the October, 2025 New York Review of Books, by Neal Ascherson

SS Nazi guards and Lithuanian collaborators forcing Jewish men into the Ponary forest, Lithuania, 1941

A painstaking investigation into twelve prisoners who tunneled to freedom from the Nazis in Lithuania reveals how much of their story remains unknowable.

Maine Writer- Reading and reporting about this book review added to the many other echoes I have published about the Holocaust helps me to realize how there is actually no end to the horror inflicted on the Jews during this dark time and the nightmare did not just begin and end. Rather unbelieveably, the Holocaust crimes built momentum over time.

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust.

This is a strange but grimly memorable book. What makes No Road Leading Back strange is that Chris Heath, an experienced English journalist, became gripped by a drive to find and check every detail of a single Lithuanian episode in the Holocaust. That drive—he calls it “relentless”—forced him on through months and years of journeying, questioning, and research. He needed to discover what happened to the survivors of that episode, at the time and in their postwar lives. What makes the book memorable and gives it such importance is that Heath finds himself not just telling a story but telling how he pursued the story. As historians have long recognized, what “actually happened” in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were “there”❓

The background to No Road Leading Back is the fate of Lithuania’s Jews under the German occupation between June 1941 and August 1944. The murder of almost the entire Jewish population—some 210,000 in 1941—began immediately after the Nazi invasion and was largely completed within a few months (before the Nazis had begun gassing Jews at Auschwitz and other extermination camps). The Lithuanian genocide was exceptional, even by the standards of the Holocaust, for two reasons. The first was its appalling efficiency. Between 90 and 96 percent of the resplendent community that had long made the capital, Vilnius, a center of Judaic wisdom and civilization perished—the highest proportion of any Nazi-occupied country with a significant Jewish population. The second exceptional feature was the widespread, sometimes enthusiastic collaboration of Lithuanians in rounding up and shooting Jews. Even in other occupied Eastern European countries where antisemitism was ingrained, the Nazis did not find such a high level of voluntary support.

The largest killing site was Ponary, a forest area a few miles southwest of Vilnius. The firing squads were usually Lithuanian, many of them teenagers recruited from a variety of patriotic militias. It’s estimated that they killed over 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children at Ponary, mostly from Vilnius. Some 30,000 Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others also died there. They were shot into large stone-lined pits constructed during a previous Soviet occupation to hold fuel tanks. Layer upon layer of bodies accumulated in the pits, each layer covered with a scattering of sand. Later, following their usual practice, the Nazis began a concealment operation. A team of some eighty men, mostly Jews but also a few Soviet prisoners, was ordered to exhume the dead and cremate them on huge timber pyres. The ashes were then mingled with the forest sand. The team members were housed in one special pit, accessible only by ladder, and well fed for their task. It was understood that they too would be shot when their work was completed.

But a group of them, initially about a dozen, formed an escape plan. With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some thirty meters long, hoping to reach the surface in a place that would be unobserved. The digging started in early February 1944; the breakout, according to most accounts, took place on the night of April 15. Almost all the eighty prisoners in the pit lined up to enter the tunnel, but only the front few—the diggers—made it to safety. Alarms and floodlights were triggered, and guards opened fire. The rest of the escapees died, killed in the open or trapped inside the tunnel. All but one of the survivors joined Soviet partisan units in the forest until Vilnius was liberated by the Red Army four months later.

Some of them soon told their stories, in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Hebrew. But the horror of what had been done at Ponary, and even the heroic tale of the tunnel, seem to have made little impression in Allied countries. The war in Europe was still going on in August 1944. Auschwitz had not yet been liberated, British troops had not entered Bergen-Belsen, and American soldiers did not come across the camp at Buchenwald until almost exactly a year after the Ponary escape. 

More broadly, the realization that the Third Reich had been engaged in a gigantic plan for the extermination of European Jewry was only beginning to dawn.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Soon, though, Heath was stumbling among contradictions. He faced contrasting and irreconcilable memories of events, vanished documents, and personalities who were either martyrs of Jewish self-defense or despicable collaborators with the Gestapo—or perhaps both. Simple facts split into divergent tendrils. Who first suggested a tunnel? Who crawled out of it first? Even the handful of survivors whose widows and descendants Heath was able to meet (mostly in Israel) had left narratives that often didn’t fit together. Their very names were hard to pin down. One stout-hearted old escapee known to Heath as Motke Zeidel had nineteen different versions of his name.

The slow acceptance that history can be dismayingly plural, that contradictory and even apparently untrue accounts all have a certain validity, is the most impressive element in this long book. “We must trust that [the tunnelers] all spoke their own truth,” Heath writes. He goes on to explain why he resisted the temptation to rely on only one voice in recounting the heroic episode of the Ponary tunnel:

We want to bind our empathy to one or more of these people whose actions will transcend adversity…. But to that end…I would have silenced the dissonant voices of those who were actually there whenever those voices proved inconvenient for the narrative. (hmmm....not sure I understand this❓😕)

About what was done at Ponary, however, there was less ambiguity. The first part of No Road Leading Back is, to put it mildly, a difficult read. It recounts in unsparing detail how, between July 1941, and August 1944, the population of the Vilnius ghetto and other settlements was murdered there. At first the Jews were marched several miles to the site; later they were brought by rail or road. On arrival they were stripped to their underwear, sometimes blindfolded, and then herded to the edges of the forest pits. There they were shot, each group falling onto the layer of fresh corpses in front of them. Nearby villagers patronized a lively market selling the heaps of clothing, shoes, and valuables the victims had left behind. Payment went either to the young Lithuanian executioners or to a Polish wholesaler. 😢😨

It was not until the winter of 1943, that the SS launched its routine cleanup operation, although executions were still taking place.

Weighed down with leg chains, savagely beaten, and urged to work faster, the exhumation squad was sent into action. Layer by layer, they dug up some 68,000 bodies rotting in the pits, extracted gold teeth or jewelry, then dragged them to the towering pyres that blazed and smoked day and night. Several of the men came across the bodies of their own families, although at the bottom of the pits the corpses were flattened beyond recognition. The overpowering stench penetrated the men’s clothing and skin. Months after their tunnel flight, Soviet partisans could not bear to stand near a Ponary escapee for long.

Immediately following the liberation of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944, many eyewitness accounts emerged, although not yet in English. A Soviet special commission arrived almost as the last German fled and produced a full, shattering report about Ponary, complete with forensic examination of corpses found in pits as yet unopened. There were lists of clothing recovered (“French gray plaid knitted blouse, crepe de chine dress”). A few years later, as Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia reached its peak, it became the rule to call the victims “Soviet citizens,” suppressing the fact that most of them were Jewish.

After these first revelations, interest in Ponary went quiet for decades. The atrocities were nevertheless on record in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. The special commission’s report had been followed by several publications, among them a book in Yiddish by the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the report Ponary: Baza (Ponary: Base of Operations) by the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz. 

By chance, Mackiewicz had been cycling past Ponary when a trainload of Jews was massacred as they tried to escape. Heath comments, “Between them, the bold and assertive writings of Sutzkever…and Mackiewicz about Ponar constituted a stirring, detailed, and authoritative first draft of this history.” And yet “those first voices turned out to be, for a long time to come, pretty much the only voices.”

For the world’s indifference, he offers a string of acid explanations. 

For example:

• These were “the wrong kind of deaths” (i.e., not in the gas chambers the public came to know about). 
• They happened “at the wrong time,” in the first months of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, before the world knew of the Holocaust. 
• They were “in the wrong place,” in obscure lands liberated by the Soviets rather than by the publicity-conscious Americans, British, or French. 

Heath could have added another factor: the cold war. In the West, stories from authorities behind the Iron Curtain were soon discounted as Communist propaganda. And for the few who understood anything about Lithuania, there was embarrassment. How could sympathy for a small nation imprisoned and brutalized within the USSR be reconciled with evidence of its widespread participation in Nazi crimes? By then many of the Lithuanian perpetrators had reinvented themselves as refugees from “Red tyranny” and settled in West Germany, Canada, or the United States.

Ponary was designated as a memorial. At times it was almost abandoned; at others it was radically “restored” in ways that bore little resemblance to the original ground plan. 

Meanwhile the myth of the “double genocide” took root in the country. Immediately after the war, the vengeful Soviet Union had deported to the gulag about 130,000 Lithuanians, the majority of them women and children—about 5 percent of the population. Nearly 30,000 of them died. This crime was held to “balance out” the murder of Lithuania’s Jews. (I remember vividly the bewilderment of Jonathan Miller, the opera and theater director, when he returned to London after visiting the land of his Jewish ancestors. In Vilnius he had gone to the museums, only to find that it was the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet rule that dominated displays of “genocide,” rather than the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.)

But by the 1980s, and especially after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, new generations were becoming aware of the real history of their country during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and some of them were determined to confront it. Honor had been paid, starting in Soviet times, to Lithuanians who had risked their own and their families’ lives by hiding Jews. But free Lithuania now also honored heroes of anti-Soviet resistance, some of whom, it was suggested by a few bold voices, had also supported the Nazis in their onslaught on “Jew-Bolsheviks.” Heath tells the story of the well-known writer Rūta Vanagaitė, who in 2016 published Mūsiškiai (Our People), an exposure of Lithuanians’ antisemitism and participation in the atrocities, which to her astonishment sold out in a day. Times had changed: now everyone wanted to read and argue about the book, even if they hated its content. But the next year, when she dared to hint (without much proof) that a certain anti-Soviet “hero” had another past, her books were pulled from stores.

Well before independence, Lithuanian academics had begun working diligently to draw up precise records of Ponary and other mass-murder sites—research that remained obscure to the media and most of the public. But the outside world, especially historians of the Jewish experience, was regaining interest in wartime Lithuania. In 2015 the ebullient Richard Freund, an ex-rabbi and professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford in Connecticut (known to local newspapers as “a real-life Indiana Jones”), became involved in excavating the ruins of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius. While there, he visited Ponary and became excited by the thought that the famous escape tunnel might still exist underground.

Freund assembled a team that included a retired expert on prison escape tunnels and several geophysicists with sophisticated equipment; Heath devotes many pages to explaining the ground-penetrating technology known as electrical resistance tomography (ERT) that they used. A film unit from NOVA, a scientific documentary series, recorded proceedings. World media, including (Fake❗) Fox News and The New York Times, were alerted to stand by for the big story when the tunnel was found.

In the end the results didn’t match the publicity. The ERT indicated plausible though not quite conclusive routes for the tunnel, but an excavation to reveal it was ruled out as impractical. American media proclaimed the “discovery” of a “forgotten” tunnel. In fact it had never been forgotten and had been “discovered” twelve years earlier. In 2004 the Lithuanian archaeologist Vytautas Urbanavičius had thoroughly excavated the vertical shaft and the first yards of the horizontal tunnel beyond it. (He also found a bucket in the entrance containing seven antitank grenades primed to be detonated by wire—one of the remaining mysteries of the story.)

The twelve men who escaped through the tunnel and what became of them are at the center of Heath’s book. After the war almost all of the handful of Jews still alive in Lithuania made their way to Palestine, and some later moved to America. (The small Jewish community in Lithuania today is, apparently, mainly composed of postwar immigrants from Russia.) Most of them had already given their testimony about Ponary: Shlomo Gol, for example, had been a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, where he described how he had found his brother among the corpses. Some fought in the 1948 war that established the State of Israel. Others arrived there and faced startling hostility. Motke Zeidel was asked by a panel of Tel Aviv historians, “How did you go like sheep to the slaughter?” Heath writes, “The way he told it afterward, first he slammed his fist down on the table, then shouted ‘shame on you!’ at the historians as he walked out.” Heath notes that the accusers were using words from a famous speech by Abba Kovner, a leader of Jewish resistance in the Vilnius ghetto.

Kovner’s name, in turn, opens into the story of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilnius Jewish council. In an excruciating tragedy repeated in other Nazi-organized ghettos, Gens had to choose between sending a regular quota of Jews to their doom at Ponary or facing the immediate murder of the entire population under his charge. In the end the Germans shot him, too. He left behind a speech: “In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths. And in order to ensure that you go with clean consciences I have to forget mine and wallow in filth.”

In late 2016, Gens’s formidable ninety-year-old daughter Ada and his granddaughter Irene agreed with Freund to search the area of a Vilnius prison for relics of him, using ground-penetrating radar. Nothing identifiable was found. But another agonizing dilemma of wartime collaboration surfaced when Irene denounced Kovner for organizing resistance and thereby provoking the liquidation of the ghetto. All over occupied Europe, and not only in ghettos, resistance movements were blamed for causing German retaliation: the killing of hostages or the burning and massacre of entire communities.

The Ponary tunnelers were at least clear of these moral pitfalls. Heath was fairly quickly able to identify eight of the twelve escapees and to speak with the relatives of all of them except one, Konstantin Potanin, a Russian soldier captured by the Germans (and wrongly designated as Jewish) who gave a Lithuanian newspaper an outstandingly eloquent interview about Ponary within weeks of the liberation. He was killed in a traffic accident a few months later. Heath was able to track seven others to Israel. They had since died, but with tact and patience he persuaded their families to repeat once more what they had been told, often unwillingly, about Ponary and the escape.

Heath learned that a few of the escapees had formed the custom of meeting on April 15, the date of their breakout in 1944. Their children remembered the reunions as occasions not of mourning but of cheerful memory-swapping at which drinking went on far into the night. It was cognac, one relative recalled. No, it was vodka, said another. But they agreed about the old men’s laughter. In old age, Motke Zeidel returned to Ponary with a film crew and entered the pit that had once held the escapees and those who didn’t escape. He ordered vodka, cured herring, and cucumber to be brought down to him, and in that place he ate and drank. That was his triumph and his revenge on those who had tried to kill him, and on death itself.

In their last years the survivors were constantly sought out for their memories. But their experience with Claude Lanzmann, the director of the towering, nine-and-a-half-hour Shoah (1985), was not happy. Two tunnelers, Yitzhak Dogin and Motke Zeidel, featured prominently in it. But, they soon came to realize that Lanzmann was interested in them only insofar as their recollections fit into his immense project, a film about the Holocaust “with no archival footage at all, just artfully juxtaposed testimony from those who were there.” Lanzmann wrote afterward, in his imperious, dramatic style, “It’s not a film about survival and survivors. It’s a film about death.” Shoah included terrible memories of the killing at Ponary, the exhumations, and the pyres, but nothing about the tunnel. When they saw it, Zeidel and Dogin felt hurt and manipulated. Angry on their behalf, Heath lists gross errors of fact in reviews of Shoah and in the published scripts.

At least one of the escapees, Shlomo Gol, later moved to the United States. Heath spent much time—typical of his lust for verifiably accurate data—trying to reconcile Gol’s various dates of birth. With the same energy he dug through Yad Vashem and Lithuanian ghetto archives to establish whether David Kantorovich had an earlier family lost in the Ponary killings. Four of the twelve escapees seemed to have vanished altogether, but Heath, through incredible persistence, managed to unearth at least traces of all of them in Europe or America. The last to be glimpsed was Lejzer Owsiejczyk, once a butcher. Heath pursued his shadow through ships’ passenger lists and newspaper clippings until he stood at last before the gravestone of “Louis Offsay,” who had drowned in Lake Erie sixty-three years earlier. Beside the English inscription were three words in Hebrew: “Leyzer, son of Abraham.”

Heath’s almost obsessive drive to chase down and record details in long narrative sequences and footnotes would be dismaying if he were not such a gifted and imaginative writer, self-critical and alert to intelligent discussion of his doubts and methods:

There’s always more, if you keep looking. Even after this book was more or less completed, I kept trawling—whenever I landed on some remote museum website to check a fact, I’d invariably stay for a while, reflexively peppering its database with search terms, just in case.

But earlier in his book, Heath reflects memorably on what he failed to find out:

I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.

Neal Ascherson is an Honorary Fellow of University College London. (October 2025)

Let's write about engraving recipes on cemetery headstones? Who knew?

You can have this recipe over my dead body 😋😀😅❗

Rosie Grant has spent the past several years collecting, sharing, and cooking recipes engraved on headstones. Echo article published in the Boston Globe by Oliver Egger, an editor and writer based in New Haven, Connecticut. He received the 2025-26 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

Most of the more than 600,000 gravestones at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, look the same: name, dates, and maybe an epitaph, such as “loving mother” or “beloved son.” 

But beside the manicured gardens and crisscrossing pathways are some outliers: a miniature replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a metal bear perched on a gravestone, and an obelisk with a slot where visitors can deposit their secrets.

Compelling all, but for Rosie Grant, the most striking is a headstone with an open cookbook carved into the top. The book’s granite pages reveal a simple recipe for spritz cookies: “1 cup of butter or margarine, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 egg, 2 1/4 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt.” The recipe was a favorite of Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson, a lifelong Brooklynite, postal clerk, and mother who died at 87 in 2009. An avid baker, Miller-Dawson would make trays of light and buttery cookies every holiday season. In life she kept the recipe close to her chest, but in death, she shares it with the world.

Grant first became a taphophile*, or cemetery appreciator, during a summer internship at the Congressional Cemetery — officially the Washington Parish Burial Ground — in Washington, D.C., in 2021. She has since started a popular TikTok and Instagram, @ghostly.archive, to document the history of cemeteries and unique gravestones. She discovered Miller-Dawson’s headstone recipe during the pandemic, when she, like many of us, was baking frequently. She made the cookies and posted about the experience on TikTok. That post went viral. Messages poured in from people sharing stories of their own loss and grief — and family recipes. Making a dad’s barbecue sauce or a mom’s chocolate chip cookies “was able to bring that person a little bit closer,” Grant says.

Moved by the outpouring, Grant looked into whether the tombstone recipe was part of a larger phenomenon. The first-known headstone evoking matters culinary belongs to the Roman Eurysaces the Baker, circa 50 to 20 BC, and includes pictorial engravings showing how to bake bread. But Grant could find only 52 recipe gravestones from more recent times.

She set out to document many of them — from no-bake cookies in Nome, Alaska, to meatloaf in New Braunfels, Texas, to a cinnamon roll cake in Kibbutz Na’an in Israel. In all, Grant visited 39 gravestones and shared each recipe on social media. All of them are in her forthcoming cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the recipes are for comfort foods like cookies, brownies, and cakes.

Grant doesn’t just snap a picture of each gravestone recipe — she digs through obituaries and public records and connects with the families of the deceased. She cooks the recipe with them and learns the story of their departed loved one. Grant says this experience has prompted hours-long conversations. “I don’t know how to describe it any other way than it felt like the food brought them back with us,” Grant says.

The result, says Grant, has been “a big oral history of food and legacy, mostly of women, how they were community centers, where they did all their volunteer work, how they hosted every holiday, and how they made the lives of others special.”

There is Annabell Gunderson, who worked at a school in Northern California and is buried beneath her snickerdoodle cookies recipe, which she often made for volunteer firefighters battling forest fires.

There is Marjorie Dawn Guppy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, a restaurant owner and beloved matriarch, forever memorialized by the recipe for her chocolate cookies, which were favorites in her family and across her town.

There is Mary Ann Rapp, who lived in Bristol, Tennessee, and whose tombstone is engraved with her fruitcake recipe. Her favorite saying was “A real baker always has flour on their face.” Every Christmas, Mary would dust her children’s or grandchildren’s cheeks with flour as they baked fruitcakes together.

And there is my personal favorite: Roberta Jackson, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, and whose recipe for kasha varnishkes — a traditional Jewish dish of buckwheat grains, caramelized onions, and bowtie pasta — concludes with the line: “Does it taste like mine? It does? Good!”

Grant now has 413,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram combined, and she hears from many of them that they intend to put a recipe on their own headstone. For hers, Grant has chosen a recipe for clam linguine.

Beyond inspiring future culinary headstones, Grant hopes her recipe project breaks some of the Western stigma around talking about death and inspires people to document their families’ own food history — to save precious family recipes before it’s too late.

*(AI definition): A taphophile is a person with a strong interest in cemeteries, gravestones, and the history and art associated with them, rather than a morbid fascination with death. Derived from the Greek words "taphos" (tomb) and "philia" (love), a taphophile might visit cemeteries to appreciate their historical significance, document gravestone art, research genealogy, or simply enjoy the unique atmosphere and connection to nature