Take a bow, David

New York Times' op-ed columnist, Bob Herbert, takes his turn in interpreting what's just happened here in today's piece, "Take a Bow, America." Among his other points, he writes, "Barack Obama won the state of North Carolina, for crying out loud." This is a very big deal.

Among the people whom Bob heard from after the election, he writes, is a friend of mine:

I got a call on Friday from David Goodman, whose brother Andrew was one of three civil rights workers slain in the searing racial heat of Mississippi in 1964.

“It’s shocking, isn’t it?” he said of the election.

I agreed.

“It’s wonderful,” he said.

I heard from David on election day myself. First came a video that was being distributed to the Jewish community, in which David had a cameo, explaining the connection between his brother's murder and Barack's election. It's a powerful piece and my only regret was not receiving it until 3 o'clock on election day.

Then as the returns became clear, we exchanged text messages. From David:

--Somebody in Heaven organized.

--Yes We Can.

--Xx me

Here, in honor of the Goodmans and their indomitable spirit, a picture of David and his son, Jacob, taken just a few weeks ago atop a 1000-foot sand dune in Mongolia.

Comments

[Cousin Alan Blank]

Cousin Jessica:
You know how my life has been occupied by "finding" cousins, right? My curiosity seemed to have piqued one spring day in the Krasnosielc section of Mt. Judah Cemetery in 1966,at age 11, at the "unveiling" of my zayde, Zelig Blank. My father took me to NYC from Syracuse, NY, where I couldn't have been raised farther from all the cousins even my father had never met, since his father moved them all to Petersburg, VA, in 1915.
As you know, Zelig's second wife, Tova Ruchel, my grandmother, was your grandfather, Charlie Lipnack's sister. (I'll never forget Charlie giving me $5 when I first met him in 1960, I think. How generous, especially compared to all my other known relatives!).
Back at the cemetery in 1966, in shock for seeing the density of headstones and gravesites compared to our upstate New York rambling hillside cemeteries, my father's cousin Rose Newman Schun stood with us as Zelig's headstone was unveiled. While we were standing there, she loudly, and with a voice I have just recently been reintroduced to, deeply and with announcement of fact, said, "Oh, there's the Goodman kid".
Goodman kid!? What is a kid doing in this bizarre cemetery. Old persons die, not kids.
I'm sure a few more comments were made, but I had not turned into the verbally curious man I am today.
Decades later, I learned what I had been sheltered from in 1964, the murders of Goodman, Shwerner, and Cheney in Philadelphia, Mississippi. At the same time, I always remembered the words, "Oh, there's the Goodman kid".
It must have been after watching a special on the murder of the three and about the program to register the Blacks to vote in 1964, a somewhat-militant and extremely honest Black woman from the program was interviewed about the murders. As I recall, she said that many Blacks could be killed in the South with almost no notice, but if a White kid from the North was killed, that would bring headlines. That, she stated, was the reason for inviting the unsuspecting White unsuspecting college students to the South that summer, she said. It was evident in her interview that no special protection or training of the dangers was given to these young adults and that the Civil Rights cause could not have been successful had it not been for the deaths of the Northern Whites. She justified her position by pointing out the obvious, the high-scale coverage of the missing Civil Rights workers and all that followed.
All the while, "Oh, there's the Goodman kid" stood out in my mind.
In my quest to find simple family links to others, and after seeing multiple televised "specials" on the murders, I was determined to find out if Andrew Goodman,z"l(of blessed memory), was a relative of ours and why he was buried in the Krasnosielc section along with others from that shtetl.
Before I could even understand the effect my call could make, I found Andrew's mother's phone number on one the many websites designed to infringe on citizens' privacy.
I naively called her with the determination of find more information about their family's link to our tiny shtetl in Poland.
Of course, she was surprised to get such a call at her home on the Upper East Side. I think she was pleased someone remembered her son, mentioned something about her husband's family being from the shtetl and insisting I donate to the Andrew Goodman Memorial Trust for a movie, I think, they were intending to make of his life.
I realized after the call, how unimportant my question was compared to the enormity of her pain and finally understood the reason I was calling, I think.
I had recently seen movies of Andrews parents televised during the search for Andrew and the others in Mississippi and their shock and hyteria of the situation, but I was not "afraid" to call her to ask my questions.
I think I was doing the right thing by not just watching recordings of history, but talking about it (as I very often do) and the murders, bringing up the subject as often as it is appropriate.
"There's the Goodman kid", must have either changed my life or been part of what is my best attribute: sharing (important) stories of our past, so not to forget those who have died before ourselves.
A story of the caretaker of the Goodmans' summer home in the Andironack Mountains, I found in a national newspaper online, tells of memories of Andrew and his siblings playing in the woods around their property and enjoying summers to their fullest, more reason to see Andrew not just as a victim, but as a typical teen enjoying life.
Not only did Rose put things in perspective by just uttering a few words, she put the curiosity of the subject in my head in 1966.
Not until 1977 did I see her again at my uncle's "unveiling", the same raspy,deep voice recognized after 11 long years, the same blonde hairdo accompanying her, but after insisting in 2005 on visiting her in Florida with my father, who hadn't seen her in decades, I found that she had dictated our family tree to her daughter who, in turn, self-published information I barely knew and which lead me to find zayde Zelig's father's second family and the a lone survivor of the Holocaust, who was my father's and Rose's half-second-cousin, and who did not know there was family in the US.
After sending an email to someone whom I thought I may know of any other family members of this family, a virtual "needle in a World Haystack" proposition, I received a reply from an Avishay Blankitny from, no less than, Shanghai! Avishay's father told him his entire family died in the Shoah and that there were no Survivors, no other family. He did not know there were relatives in the US and a single person, Rose Schun, who kept the memories of stories told to her in the early decades of the 1900's about a family trapped in Poland, not even knowing names of the children.
The Yad Vashem Memorial Holocaust website allowed me to piece our history together. I searched for any Victim whose father was my greatgrandfather Nussan Hirsch Blankitny. I found two names whose dates of births coincided with the dates of my own greatgrandmother's
death. Just after she died, other children were born, a year or so later. Not only was my own great uncle Abraham, here were Isaac and Jacob (in Yiddish-named form). I recognized one other family name and sent an email to that person who sent my email to Avishay in Shanghai, an Israeli who move to China a decade before for business reasons.
Avishay (and his sister) became and still are thrilled that I not only found them, my second cousins, but that someone from the family took the time and effort to do just that. They thought they were alone in the world and here were relatives who existed and even wanted to meet them.
Avishay and his wife visited my brother in Boston soon after that and eventually came to the West Coast and stayed with my wife and myself for a week. He calls me his cousin/brother/friend. He even brought his daughter, who lives in Colorado, to stay with us during his visit.
Oddly, Avishay and I are exactly the same age, and, of course, have the same initials, but with his daughter being Hila and mine, Hillary, we knew there was some "cosmic" connection as well.
If it wasn't for Rose Schun and her outgoing personality, her quest to share information, I would never have known of our tiny connection to Andrew Goodman or have ever found my cousins, and has taught me that the simple sharing of stories are not just for the benefit of the storyteller, but also for the (unseen) benefit of the listener and that may be the clue, to be a listener, and do good with what you hear, and while I am writing this, I remember I must call Rose, now my favorite cousin, and someone who talks with her only surviving first cousin, my dad, Jules, very often due to my insistence of visiting her just an hour away in Boca Raton, and who says to me what I told her my wife asks me, Rose and my private joke, "Alan, don't you have enough cousins?", not to mention Rose's own, "Alan, don't you work?"

[jessica lipnack]

Thanks, Alan. We're not related to the Goodmans except by love. Carolyn Goodman, who died last year, lived on the Upper West Side, proudly, I might add, and contributed much to that community as she did to the world. And, yes, Andy is buried in Queens.