Kicks are for trids

Chaim Gildiner - 1917-2007

GILDINER, Harold (Chaim) Peacefully, after a brief illness on Saturday, November 3, 2007 at Humber River Regional Hospital. Chaim Gildiner beloved husband of Ida. Loving father and father-in-law of Michael and Catherine, Karl and Haviva, Alina and Michael McMahon. Dear brother of the late Beryl, and Clara Hilf. Devoted grandfather of Jamie, David, Sam, Aryeh, Sam, and Laura. He will be sadly missed by his family and friends. Services were held at Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel on Sunday, November 4, 2007. Interment Temple Sinai section of Pardes Shalom Cemetery. Memorial donations may be made to Soldiers Of Israel, 416-783-3053.

And this update, originally posted on Facebook:

The passing of a generation

My Uncle Chaim Gildiner had these amazing, suitcase-sized hands. For most of his life, he used them for good. There may have been a time when he used them for evil - although that was certainly not the way he would have told the story.

He was a tool and dye maker, the only blue collar member of my entire extended family. He came by his trade honestly - as a young man, and indeed throughout his life, he had been an active member of first, the Polish underground that fought the Nazis in Europe; then, later, the Soviet Communist party. And he was never afraid to wear his politics on his sleeve. He believed to his dying day - November 3, 2007 - that Russia and its antecedents helped to keep the world safe from Yankee imperialism.

He was not afraid to call himself a revolutionary, either, or to espouse revolutionary ideals. Once, early in my working life, when I was having a problem with a boss, and talking about maybe upsetting the apple cart just a little, Uncle Chaim sat me down on a couch. He told me, in his best Polish brogue (because there was no other way to describe it), "Larry, we lost the revolution."

This man of simple means - who came from nothing, as he was proud to say - and his wife of 67 years raised three incredibly successful children. Each of them has had multiple professional careers, and in turn brought more sage intelligence and wisdom into the world.

When Chaim turned 90 earlier this year, his family held a huge birthday party for him. My wife and kids and I arrived to find him out on the front porch, with his eldest son, smoking a cigarette. He was a man of stoutly held views, and a world view shaped by all the major events of the 20th century. He was even born the year World War I ended.

He and my seven-year-old daughter formed this incredible bond at that party, despite the nearly century-long gap in their ages. She waited on him hand and foot, and insisted on going back to visit the mourners not once but twice after the funeral.

I admired him, and loved him, and will miss him very much. He was the last surviving member of his generation in my family. But more than that, he was a man who clung to his beliefs, even when they weren't popular. He believed that even though they had "lost the revolution," his beloved socialists had left the world a better place.

Much like he did.

Camp connection

My daughter leaves for overnight camp in a few hours. She will be gone for a month. She's 9. And she's ready for it.

I'm not sure I am. But not for the reasons you might expect.

She'll be attending a camp that my wife, many of her friends and family members and my own sister attended themselves for many years. It's a good, professionally-run camp where I know my daughter will be well cared for, that she'll have a great time, and that the experience will be one she will treasure for years to come.

So why am I concerned?

This is why. Although her camp is in Northern Ontario, not Northern Israel, it is a Zionist camp. And I'm concerned that she will go for a summer experience, and come home with her head filled with rot.

I, too, am a Zionist. I believe in the State of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people. At the same time, I am a progressive, justice-loving left liberal who despises the blinkered view that holds that Israel is a poor, helpless victim that can do no wrong - and is surrounded by enemies who can do no right.

Utter, contemptible and rank bullshit. In the same way that the right wing has co-opted Christianity in the U.S. (and in Canada, perhaps to a lesser extent), mainstream North American Jews largely see Israel - and all mid-East politics - through a distorted, narrow and bigoted lens. And they blithely dismiss the notion - much less the reality - that anyone could disagree with them and still be a "good Jew" who supports Israel.

I am concerned that my daughter - surrounded by these voices, especially while Israel is at war with Hizbollah - may lack the judgment to understand that there are other ways of looking at the world.

My wife and I sat her down the night before her departure and explained our own views. We talked to her about why it's dangerous to generalize, and how no one can always be right or wrong. And we talked about the good, decent Muslim people in her own life who put a human face on a culture that many have sought, since before 9/11 but much more diligently after, to demonize.

We talked about how war is like bullying between countries (she's had first-hand experience with bullying in the schoolyard, as have too many kids her age). And she knows that violence is not an acceptable response to anything.

Still I wonder - and can't help but worry. She's young, she's naïve, and she's susceptible to peer pressure.

I'm her father. I'm supposed to protect her. So when does protection become obstruction?

A very wise man of my acquaintance - someone a few years older than I, and who had children a few years earlier - once gave me a very sage bit of advice. Child rearing, he said, is like a never-ending process of separation. From the day you bring your child home from the hospital, he or she is pulling away - becoming more independent and more self-actualized.

That's a good thing. It's what you want. (Although, as another friend so astutely observed, when you teach your kids to be independent, what you get is independent kids - which means you can't control their behaviour or their decisions.)

That first bit of wisdom has really given me comfort over the years. So to answer my own question: I think that protection becomes obstruction, for my daughter, this summer.

She'll need to learn to use her own judgment. To evaluate situations in an unfamiliar environment where her usual supports are absent. To stand on her own two feet, and be her own person.

Can she do it? She's bright, and I believe in my heart that she can.

I hope I'm ready to let her.

The cruelest month

Thank dawg, it's over.

My February was wretched. My wife and I attended two funerals in two weeks - this one, plus the not-unexpected but still devastating loss of her uncle Ed. But they were only part of the story.

In addition to the usual seasonal tragedies - mine and others' - there was one more this year, this one particularly dramatic.

A February 26 fire destroyed the home of my sister-in-law's brother, his wife and their six-year-old son. They watched it burn - three weeks after they moved in. The hydrants didn't work. They lost everything - or, as I heard it so aptly put, "Everything they own now fits into a plastic shopping bag."

I don't know whether there's any formal evidence to support it, but it just seems to me that a disproportionate number of such things happen in February.

Forget about keepsakes and mememtoes. We can all relate to the pain of losing something precious.

What I found myself wondering about, in the aftermath of this fire, was the more ordinary concerns: How do you decide which daily necessities you need first?

The husband in this situation had to get out so quickly that he only had time to throw on a pair of track pants. No underwear. His sister - my sister-in-law - bought him more underwear.

Ok, so where do you go from there? Do you start by replacing your plates and cutlery, or your clothing, or looking for a new house?

On a much smaller scale, I had a similar experience of my own about a year and a half ago. My brother and I took a day trip to New York City for a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman. On the way back to the airport, I accidentally left my wallet in a cab.

In it were all evidence of my existence, at least within my possession.

A helpful transit cop took my report and escorted me through US customs and onto my flight. But he warned me that he wouldn't be able to help at the other end - if I couldn't convince Canadian customs to let me in, he said, they'd send me back to New York to spend the night in jail, since as far as they knew, that was the last place I was from.

My story ended happily. Canadian customs was reasonable, and - believe it or not - the cabbie found my wallet and tracked me down through a business card inside. He called me, and I arranged to have it shipped home. To express my thanks, I let him keep the cash in the wallet (which was still in there, along with my credit cards and identification - miraculously, this being NYC, after all).

This particular family - the one that lost the house, along with everything else - has actually been quite lucky, as odd as it sounds.

First, they all escaped injury.

But second, and perhaps almost as important, friends, neighbours and complete strangers have come forward with offers of tangible help and support. One neighbour - whom they had never met - offered them the use of her house, which was sitting empty pending renovation.

This family has resources at its disposal - money, loved ones and a strong support network. Does that make it easier? No, it does not. A loss is a loss.

My month from hell may be over. Their journey is just beginning.

Update: March 5 - My brother told me about this site, which proves that the Internet really has a place for everything.

White man's burden in a yellow hat

My daughters have vaginas.

They don't have "woodgies" or "girl business" or "private parts" (although we do reinforce the notion of privacy quite ardently).

They know that boys have penises. And that when people die, that's the end of their lives. They don't "go to sleep," or "go away for a long, long time."

They get very sick, or very old, or sometimes both, and then - they die.

I have to confess, this commitment to plain talk did not come naturally to me. I grew up in a house where - despite their best intentions - adults tried to protect kids from the truth. The result, for me, is that coming around to teaching my kids the correct names for anatomical parts was learned behaviour.

And now, I endorse it. Wholeheartedly. In fact, my wife and I extend this commitment to "real words" to teaching our kids about some of the nastier parts of life - and death. For example, we took our elder daughter to a funeral in 2001, when she was five. She asked good questions. We answered them.

This posed a significant challenge, in our multiculti world, when - just a few months after the aforementioned funeral - 9/11 happened. We did not want to tell our daughter that it was bad people who had caused this unfathomable horror. Her public school had students who looked like those "bad people," and we were not prepared to lay the blame for a small band of murderous lunatics at the feet of an entire religion.

So how does this relate to the picture of Curious George?

The Globe and Mail ran an article in its February 12 edition, questioning the need to sanitize kids' films. A quote:

"There's a tendency toward extreme caution in children's book publishing now, and I'm sure it carries over to the movie world as well," says Leonard Marcus, a children's book historian and critic who interviewed Margret Rey shortly before her death in 1996.

Anyone who has read the original Curious George books will recognize them for what they are - parables for slavery. White Man's Burden in a yellow hat.

So the makers of this otherwise enjoyable film adapted it for modern sensibilities. No longer is wee George snatched out of his natural home, stuffed in the belly of a steam ship and forced across the ocean against his will - only to be beaten for "misbehaving."

BFD.

I applaud the filmmakers for recognizing that civilization has advanced, and become more enlightened, in the past half-century.

Ironically, this film - modest though it is - actually works on a number of levels. Not the least of them is the old-school, handpainted cell animation (computer enhanced in spots, but never computer dominated). The effect of this tip of the hat to the salad days of Disney is twofold: One, it gives the animation a warmth lacking in most Pixar productions; and two, it shows that the filmmakers are not afraid to revisit the past when it is appropriate to do so.

How it would have made the movie better, or enhanced children's enjoyment of it, to see old, dangerous stereotypes reinforced is a total mystery to me. Although I do grant that just how dead and just how buried those stereotypes are remains a point of contention.

On friendship

(notice originally published in The Toronto Star)

KIRSH, Cynthia Deborah (Cindy) - Beloved wife, mother and grandmother left us peacefully on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006.

Devoted daughter of the late Sam and Ann Kirsh. Cindy will be desperately missed by her adoring husband, Stevie and her children, Karynn (Andrew), Leon (Aly), Ali (Michael), Drew, Joy (Cesare) and Dawn. She was the best grandma in the world to Jake, Annie, Ezra, Michael, Lucas and Neah. Everyone whose lives she touched knows how very special she was. Funeral service will be held on Friday, February 3rd at 10 a.m. at Steeles Memorial Chapel (350 Steeles Avenue West, between Yonge and Bathurst Sts.). Interment will follow at the Ivansker Section at Bathurst Lawn Cemetery. Shiva will be observed. If desired, memorial donations can be made in Cindy's name to the Canadian Cancer Society, 888-939-3333. 

____________________________

It's said that a friend is someone who knows everything there is to know about you, and likes you anyway.

The death of this dear, sweet, giving woman - a lifelong, childhood friend of my mother's - has really got me thinking about the nature of friendship.

As children, we make friends easily. Although the friendships we form at a young age can be quite volatile (and short-lived), they serve an essential purpose. They are part of our development, our maturation into thinking, feeling human beings.

In school, we tend to form relationships of expediency - who can get us what we need? Even if we don't know what we need, or it proves to be ephemeral, these relationships  also become part of who we are. In fact, it often turns out that these friendships formed during our years in school have the greatest duration of all.

Later, in adulthood, it's easier to reject friends than to make them.

This one's too needy. That one's too demanding, or bossy, or tempermental. We're past the stage of life when we latch onto people and follow them around like lost puppies. Our expectations change, and along with them, our needs of our friends.

What we need from our friends in our child-bearing and rearing years (or the years when we focus on our careers, if that's the decision, or both) is a certain familiarity - a sense that these people know us, share our values and our general view of the world, and want basically the same things out of life.

At almost 44, I can't say what I'll need from my friends in the latter half (!) of my life. But I can see it coming - a change as sure and inevitable as the dawn.

Rare indeed is the friend who can transcend these phases of life. Cindy was such a friend to my mother.

They met in public school, and remained absolutely in lockstep throughout life. There was a period - during Cindy's troubled first marriage - when other pressures intervened.

But they never lost touch. Cindy's kids told stories at her shiva about how eagerly she'd await her husband's departure on a business trip, or to tend to other commitments that presented her with the opportunity to call my mother and arrange to steal a few, precious moments.

Cindy had the soul of an artist - but not the temperment. She used her hands to express the beauty she held inside, through jewellery, painting and her magnificent, robust, Rodinesque sculpture.

To her last days, she rejected the idea that anyone should do anything for her - or should want to. All her life, she'd wanted to learn how to tap dance. Toward the end of her life, my mother bought her a pair of tap shoes. "Take them back," Cindy said. "I've had my fun with them, and I don't want to see them go to waste."

Men - and boys - never share the same kind of emotional connection with their friends that women do. This is tragic. Making oneself vulnerable - opening up to another human being - is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

My mother is fortunate - blessed, she would say - to have had Cindy in her life. We are fortunate to have had her in our family. Our world is diminished, and darkened, by her passing.

At the funeral, at the request of Cindy's daughter, my sister - who is a rabbi and was asked to lead the service - read a passage from Robert Munsch's Love You Forever.

Quite apart from the emotional impact of the text - no parent can read this book without weeping - the title exudes precisely the sentiment that bound Cindy and my mother throughout life.

This - loving someone forever - is the nature of true friendship.