No Bad Lands or Dogs

Returning home from our road trip to Alaska in 2022, it occurred to me that there were just two of the United States that I had not visited. I had never so much as set foot in either North Dakota or South Dakota. It may not be surprising that I had missed these. They are far from population centers and don’t host as many national conferences and meetings as Florida, California, or Illinois. Barbara had visited South Dakota but not North so when we found ourselves with a window of opportunity between the High Holidays and the onset of serious winter, we decided a quick road trip of 5,000 kilometers was in order.

With our window limited to just three weeks and much distance to cover, we made a beeline for Fargo without much faffing about. Just four days after pulling out of our driveway, we arrived in Fargo ND having camped our way through the intermediary states. Neither Fargo nor Bismark a few hours further down the road had a lot to capture our attention but another day found us in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

I can’t say enough about the quiet beauty of this park which receives a fraction of the visitors of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. And in late October, the number of guests drops to a trickle. With water and other services already shut off for the winter, we had our pick of campsites inside the park. Just $5 per night with a Golden Age Park Pass. ($10 for youngsters).

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, N.D. Vastness and solitude.

The park has a northern and a southern unit. The northern is even less visited then the southern. There were greeted with dark skies filled with stars, a waxing moon, and even a comet! The temperatures in the Northern Unit dipped to near freezing at night but we were cozy and warm in VanGo! under a thick down comforter. A warm hat and wool socks helped keep the extremities warm as well.

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS as captured by iPhone from Theodore Roosevelt National Park

One of the main attractions of these parks are the large number of bison that roam ad libitum throughout the park. These massive creatures are mostly quiet and chill but visitors are warned to stay at least several bus lengths away from them. They can get ornery if they feel you are in their personal space. On a day hike we encountered one just a few feet from the trail and had to stray deep into the brush to give him a wide swath. He took little interest in us.

The parks other attraction is its stunning geology including giant egg-shaped formations called concretions. These formed underground and were exposed when the sedimentary rock around them eroded. Even geologists are not sure exactly how they formed.

Where Mother Earth lays an egg. 

Feeling there was still more to see, the pressure of time pushed us south into the other Dakota. This was my last state. I celebrated with a photo at the Geological Center of the United States and used the rest room at the visitor’s center there.

In South Dakota we visited Custer State Park, Badlands National Park, the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, and the Crazy Horse Memorial, which was begun in 1948 and is still being sculpted out of a mountain face today with at least another 50 years of work left to go. When complete, it will be many times the size of Mount Rushmore. Fun fact: Crazy Horse’s visage is the work of the imagination of the sculptor. No known photograph of Crazy Horse exists.

I got mine back but quickly misplaced it again. 

Our son and his space dog Laika met us for the weekend in Custer and we splurged on an AirBnB for the four of us. Asher wanted to see Mount Rushmore, where we had gone a few days earlier. Unfortunately (for Laika) dogs are not permitted on the viewing plaza. I waited with her outside, while Barbara and our son visited the monument. People love a dog! I was approached dozens of times by men, women, and children who wanted to say hello to Laika! People also wanted to know what kind of dog she was. I replied that she was of the breed canus nonspecificus, which seemed to satisfy the curiosity. Laika enjoyed the attention, which perhaps compensated for her missing the stone visages of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the pince nez’d Theodore. She didn’t say one way or another.

Boy love him some dog. 

All too soon, it was time for Laika and his boy to head back west and for us to begin the long journey home. As we headed back east, we stopped in Chamberlain, S.D. home to the Dignity of Earth and Sky sculpture and the South Dakota Hall of Fame. There I was surprised to see L. Frank Baum claimed by South Dakota as their own. I knew that he had lived in New York State and in California but hadn’t realized he had lived in S.D. as well. The Hall of Fame honored him for his role in the women’s suffrage movement of which I had also been largely unaware. I should have known: His Dorothy and Ozma didn’t tolerate any mansplaining from the know-it-all and decidedly male Wogglebug. (Incidentally, Ozma may have been the first trans kid in children’s lit transitioning from male to female in The Land of Oz (1904), the sequel to The Wizard of Oz.)

Not So Bad Lands for Big Horned Sheep

Finally, we stopped in Mitchell, S.D. to visit the “World Famous” Corn Palace. The interior of the building is not very remarkable. Most of it is taken up with a basketball arena. But the exterior is a façade of images made of corn cobs and is changed every year.

The Castle Corn Made

Leaving there, we plowed into Iowa and sped toward home and obligations.

Friends upon hearing my new boast about having been to all 50 of these United States often ask if I have a favorite. I don’t. There is not a place in this country, indeed on this planet that doesn’t host its own special and unique sources of beauty and wonder. We found Dakotans to be warm and friendly, the culture interesting and engaging, and the natural beauty of those states breathtaking in its vastness and solitude. Like many spots I have visited, I left there with a sense that there was much still to explore yet all too aware of the strong likelihood I will never return.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.

Getting Used to Anything

This past July in the midst of a bunch of other stuff going on in my life (ask me about it sometime), I tripped and fell breaking the fifth metatarsal in my left foot. It was an uninteresting incident. I walked out onto the back porch to check the salmon I had on the grill and my foot caught on the one step down and I fell forward twisting and breaking my foot under me. It was the first time in my 62 years that I broken a bone.

I tried to pretend it was ok but by the next morning it was swollen and painful and clear that it needed attention. Barb drove me to the Urgent Care Clinic where, after making sure I had insurance, they x-rayed it and confirmed the break. They put me in a boot and told me to contact an orthopedist for further care.

I was near despair. I hate to sound like a baby but my primary exercise is walking. At the time, I was walking two hours a day. This break was really going to mess up my life. It was very painful to walk on even with the boot. I tried using crutches and not putting any weight on the foot but that is not easy to do, as you may or may not know.

A few days later, I saw the orthopedist. By then, I was hobbling around pretty well. The pain was mostly gone, and I was able to resume most activities around the house. Going downstairs to the basement was challenging but I was managing better than I had imagined I could just days earlier.

NP Lee looked at my x-ray and then turned to me. “I am sorry this happened, man,” he said. “How are you doing with this?” he asked with genuine concern pointing at the boot.

“It’s amazing what you can get used to,” I replied.

He paused in thought for a moment, looked deep into my eyes and said, “that’s true” in a way that made me believe that he had had to get used to a thing or two in his life.

The good news, he told me, is that I didn’t need a cast or surgery. The boot would do as long as I wore it all the time except when bathing or sleeping.

Over the next few weeks I adapted. I couldn’t drive our Civic, which has a clutch, but I could drive the minivan just fine. I could clomp around the grocery store and do the shopping. I could even go for shorter walks around the meadow right near home. In short, with a few exceptions, my life carried on fairly similarly to what it was before the break.

Six to eight weeks sounded like a long time, but it went by quickly and a day came in September that Mr. Lee told me that I didn’t have to wear the boot any longer. Complete healing would take a long time but as long as I was careful, I could go back to wearing a complete pair of shoes.

The first day or two without the boot were strange! Even though there was no pain, it felt weird to walk without it. I limped though there was no need to. I just felt odd to walk without the boot, I had gotten so used to it.

A few days later I was walking normally again.

Change comes when we least expect it. It is rarely welcome. It brings stress, challenge, even despair. But the human ability to adapt is our species’ superpower. It’s why we have managed to spread to and live in every climate our little planet has to offer from the frozen waste of Antarctica to the broiling deserts of Africa.

The universe, as I’ve constantly had to be reminded, doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what you do or don’t want. What you’d rather not deal with. How you wish it were different. As my college roommate used to infuriatingly tell me, “It’s part of the deal.”

Whatever happens, we adjust. We change as required. We rise to the moment. We go on.

Resilience? It’s just a fancy word for getting used to the things we’d rather not.

When life hands you lemons, you may not always be able to make lemonade. It turns out though, you can get used to eating lemons.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.

Noch Einmal (Once Again)

“There is only one journey – going inside yourself.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Last Friday I attended a reception in my (and 16 other new citizens) honor at the German Embassy in D.C. The Embassy’s Consul General, a warm, gracious, person you might expect would be a diplomat, moved about the room speaking with each of us in turn. “Was it a difficult decision to take German citizenship?” she asked me. “No,” I said without hesitation, and it was true. In that moment I had no reservations. But the journey to get there was a bit circuitous.

My grandfather Alfred Kohn left Germany and came to America in 1927, a year that fell exactly between the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and when Nazis finally seized power. His story was always that he left because he didn’t want to work in his father’s dry goods store in the tiny town of Königshofen in Bavaria where he grew up. But he later admitted to his son (my Uncle Steve) that he could see where things were going politically in Germany and thought it might be a good idea to get out. Besides, as a young man with his life ahead of him why not set out for the new world to seek what fortune might be found there?

It turned out that this “fortune” was mostly my grandma Paula (who also immigrated from Germany) whom he married on Christmas Day in 1931, and the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren he lived to see and delighted in. As for material fortune, he did fine for a man with just a high school degree. Not wealthy but able to afford what he referred to as his “comfort. In later years they enjoyed a level of earthly success that permitted the occasional trip abroad and a freezer that was always stocked with Häagan-Dazs ice cream.

My grandfather was a renaissance man interested in everything – a voracious reader and learner. In his 80s, he taught himself French by reading French newspapers, also baking, jewelry making, and painting. He completed the New York Times crossword every Sunday in ink. And for a man I never knew to take any exercise other than a walk he had incredible stamina. At 90 he was still running errands for the “seniors” who lived in their apartment building.

He had helped his parents leave Germany in 1939 (literally on the last boat as my mother says), but two of his uncles died in concentration camps. Moritz Kohn died in 1942 in Theresienstadt and Max Kohn in Rivesaltes in 1941. But he didn’t speak much about Germany, and about the Holocaust not at all.

As I grew up and learned about it my feelings about Germany became complicated. For my language requirement in Junior High, High School, and College I picked German (as had my parents in the 1950s). But I never practiced the language with my grandparents, whom I never heard speak anything but English.

During my freshman year of college, my buddy Steve, who lived in the dorm room next to mine, told me that he was going to Germany the next fall for a semester abroad. The trip was being led by his physics professor Rex Adelberger whom I knew and adored though I hadn’t taken a single physic class. When I expressed interest in going, Steve encouraged me to sign up and talked me through my trepidations.

The fall and winter of 1980 I spent in Munich was transformative. Steve and I had an apartment to ourselves. Our host couple was rarely at home, and we were on our own to shop, cook, and generally keep house. It was my first time living as an “adult.” I had to get myself up each morning, take the tram and the U-bahn (subway) to class, and generally look after myself. We often hung out with our German professors, meeting them after class to discussing politics, history, and philosophy. Copious quantities of coffee, beer, and tobacco were consumed at these gatherings though not necessarily all of them by every one of us.

The kindness, friendliness, and openness I experienced from everyone, some of whom knew that I was Jewish and some who did not, was astonishing. I also found a willingness on the part of the Germans I came to know to attempt to confront their history in a way that very few countries and peoples are willing to do. I loved everything about Germany and Europe. I felt that I belonged there and that I would love to have stayed if only it were possible. But there was college to finish and, of course one would need a job and for that one would need more than a tourist visa. I returned to the U.S. and had a life and a career here.

A decade or two ago, Spain passed a law which stated that anyone who could prove that they were descended from a Jew who was expelled in 1492, was eligible to apply for citizenship. Along with that would come citizenship in the European Union and the right to live and work anywhere in the EU. But I didn’t have any Spanish ancestry that I was aware of. (A later 23 & Me genetic analysis confirmed that I am 98.9% Ashkenaz.) I looked into German citizenship around that time but it seemed that I was not eligible because my grandparents left before 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The fact that my great grandparents had left on that last boat didn’t hold sway.

Then in January of 2022 Barbara and I connected with an old friend in Florida whose Jewish wife had applied for and received German citizenship. She told me that the laws had changed and that now anyone whose ancestors who’d had their citizenship revoked by the Nazis were now eligible to apply. Since the Nazis revoked the citizenship of basically all Jews living outside Germany in 1941, it appeared that I was now eligible, along with my children, my cousins, and their children.

An internet search revealed a few law firms that specialized in this sort of thing and after a few interviews I decided to go with a young American attorney based in Berlin. My sister, my mom, all my cousins on my mom’s side, and most of their children decided to apply as well — almost all of Alfred and Paula’s living descendants. There were 15 of us in all.

It took about six months to find all the needed documentation and complete the applications and then we waited for about a year for the German government to process our applications and render a decision. It still felt like a long shot to me.

Well, we were all approved, and by October of 2023 our citizenship documents had been sent to the German consulates closest to our homes. All each of us had to do was to go to the consulate and sign a paper accepting the citizenship.

Living in the D.C. metro area, my consulate was the German Embassy in Washington and I was invited to a special ceremony at which the citizenship would be conferred. My adult children who live in another state were assigned to different consulate, but I requested that they be allowed to join me for the ceremony in D.C. and this request was granted. My wife and my friend Steve, who convinced me to take the semester abroad and roomed with me in Germany more than 40 years ago, attended as well.

The program began with a lovely reception in the Embassy in a room that opened to a beautiful balcony. It just so happened that the day was a balmy 22 degrees Celsius, and the balcony was an inviting place to take photos. There was sparkling wine, soft drinks, and an assortment of cookies and sweets. Seventeen of us were receiving citizenship and we comprised four families each with multiple generations including young children.

The Consul General in her remarks spoke of how Germany was still coming to terms with what had happened. She expressed deep remorse and acknowledged that nothing could undo the past. Still, she hoped, this gesture of restoring our German citizenship, which had been taken from our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, might be a movement toward healing. She and her colleagues were thrilled to welcome us back as citizens and she noted that thus far Germany has restored citizenship to more than 200,000 decedents of German Jews.

When the time came to distribute the certificates, each of us was called up one at a time and presented with our Einbürgerungsurkunde (yes, that is a mouthful), our naturalization certificate, and also an NPR style canvas tote which contained: a book called Facts About Germany, a brochure titled Germany for Jewish Travelers, a wooden ball point pen, a notebook, a stationary pad, a coffee mug, and a medallion. The medallion displayed the German eagle emblem on one side and an image of Brandenburg Gate on the other. Around the circumference of the red and black painted coin the name of our new nation to which we belonged: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal Republic of Germany.

After the certificates were distributed, a self-deprecating young gentleman who worked at the embassy played several German folk songs on his guitar. He sang Die Gedanken Sind Frei (Thoughts Are Free) made popular in the U.S. by Pete Seeger in the 1960s. A fitting song, the theme of which is that even when the body is oppressed the mind can dream untethered.

When I first considered applying for German citizenship it was an extension of my youthful dream of living and working in Europe. And although I may no longer be adventurous enough to start again in a new country perhaps the younger generation of my family is. I might yet live the dream vicariously through one of my children or cousin’s children.

Then too, like most American Jews, I have been all too aware of the dramatic rise of Jew hatred in the U.S. since 2016 and which has exploded since the attacks on Israel last October 7. The thought that it might one day be advisable or necessary to escape has crossed my mind with increasing frequency. In 1939 a second passport could have meant the difference between life and death. If that day were to come again, EU citizenship offers a wealth of options. If things get bad in one place there are 26 other countries to try.

When I returned from my semester in Munich in 1980 my grandfather picked me up from JFK and brought me back to their apartment in Queens. He was eager to hear all about my sojourn. He tested my German and quizzed me on where I had gone, vocally disapproving if I had missed something he considered essential. He seemed genuinely pleased that I had chosen to have a relationship with the land of his birth.

Yet, I must acknowledge that I simply do not know how my grandfather would have reacted to my becoming a German. My grandfather loved the United States and was proud to be a U.S. citizen. I don’t think he felt that he had become an American under duress. But I also realize that it doesn’t matter now what he might have thought about it in the context of his time. The world is a different place than it was in 1933 or even 2001 when he died at the age of 96.

For me now, it is no longer about gaining the right to live and work in the EU, which I am unlikely to do. It is less about having an escape option should one be needed. After all the State of Israel has afforded me and every Jew in the world that security since 1948. Rather I have come to understand this gesture as a one of reconciliation.

At its heart, citizenship is a gift that was offered to me in the spirit of justice and reparation by the people of Germany and I have but one gift to offer in return. To accept it.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.