Going on Hiatus
This abbreviated issue of TLBR will be, I’m sad to announce, the closing issue for the year 2023. Over the next few weeks, my wife and I will be completing a too-long-delayed downsizing out of our home of 24 years, a house in suburban Westchester, New York, in which we raised our twin son and daughter (who are now nearly thirty, each of them living with their respective partners in different areas of Pennsylvania), and into an apartment on the upper east side of New York City. By the time we expect to be mostly settled in there, Thanksgiving will be upon us, and then very quickly the Christmas and New Year’s holidays will follow.
So for these next two months, instead of trying (and most likely failing) to find sufficient time to keep up with my reading and writing, it seems that the more prudent course of action for me is to suspend publication of TLBR until the new year.
Please look for the next issue sometime in January 2024!
Eva
Back in January, in TLBR’s opening issue of 2023, I had the unhappy occasion to write a tribute to my friend Naomi Replansky, who had recently died at the magnificent age of 104. Now, in this closing issue of TLBR for 2023, a second unhappy task falls my way, as I write this tribute to another dear friend (and Naomi’s spouse), the author and teacher Eva Kollisch, who died a few weeks ago at the equally magnificent age of 98.
I met Eva at the same time, and in the same circumstances, as I met Naomi, so let me carry over this one paragraph from my earlier essay about Naomi …
“I met [them] nearly ten years ago, shortly after becoming a regular attendee at the Sunday morning meditation sessions held by The Community Meditation Center on Manhattan’s upper west side. Naomi, then in her mid-nineties, and her spouse Eva Kollisch, then in her mid-eighties, had their ‘reserved seats’ in the front row which was traditionally held vacant for the older members of the community, to facilitate both their ease of finding a seat in the crowded room and their ability to hear the dharma talk with their increasingly diminished hearing. At the end of every session, no matter where I had been sitting in the room, I could easily determine whether Naomi and Eva had been in attendance that morning - I simply had to look over to the front row, and the crowd of well-wishers standing around the two of them was the only evidence needed for me to know that yes, they were indeed both there.”
I was introduced to these two wonderful women by Eva’s brother Peter Kollisch, whom I had befriended a few months earlier at the CMC annual holiday party, after which the two of us sought each other out every Sunday so we could sit together, usually in one of the back rows. Peter, while only a year or two younger than his sister, refused to sit in the front row with the other elderly meditators. But he always kept a careful lookout for Eva, who usually arrived with Naomi after he and I had already taken our seats. He would unfailingly tap my shoulder the minute he spotted her, saying “There she is! There she is!”
Peter soon lent me his copy of Eva’s first memoir, The Ground Under My Feet, a searing and unsparing account of her childhood and early adolescent years in 1930s Vienna, as Nazi Germany’s takeover of Austria loomed darkly on the horizon. Having so recently met Eva in person as the not very tall, and not very talkative, woman that she was in her 80s, I was astonished by the towering and very vocal teen-age Eva whom I met on the printed page. Thanks in no small part to her prescience and her persistence, Eva’s parents enrolled her and her two brothers in the Kindertransport program through which the three of them were transported to safety and placed in private homes across in the United Kingdom, where they stayed until their parents managed to flee Austria as well, and reunite the family in the United States.
After reading about the dramatic events of her early life, and the incredible influence she brought to bear on those events, it came as no surprise to learn that Eva went on to live an extraordinary life as a labor activist, a women’s rights advocate, and a professor of literature at a liberal arts college in Westchester, NY. You can read more about Eva’s life and her accomplishments in this New York Times obituary.
What you won’t read there, however, and what you can only know if, like me, you were privileged to meet Eva in her later years, is what a kind, gentle, and loving person she was. Despite all the evil that she witnessed and fled from in her youth, and in the face of all the many forms of social injustice that she encountered and struggled against throughout her adulthood, Eva possessed the sunniest disposition and the warmest smile of anyone I’ve ever met.
She was an exemplar of the Buddhist virtues of compassion, lovingkindness, and most especially, wisdom. And, together with her life partner and spouse Naomi, the two of them modeled to perfection exactly what it means to be in a caring and committed relationship. Eva and Naomi were so deeply devoted to each other that it was all but impossible to imagine either one of them without the other. And so, not long after Naomi’s death this past January, Eva, already in failing health, slipped into a peaceful and mostly inactive existence. She spent the final months of her long and fruitful life at home, sleeping through most of the day, cared for by her loving family and her dedicated health aides. And then, finally, a few weeks ago, she simply slipped away from this life, surrounded by her son, daughter-in-law, and her longest serving and most devoted aide.
So, sadly, Naomi’s and Eva’s deaths form a sort of bookends to this year’s issues of TLBR, with Naomi gracing the first issue of the year, and Eva gracing this one, the last issue of the year. This image, of a pair of bookends, could not be more fitting. They were the perfect pair, the perfect couple, the perfect partners. They belonged together in every way possible, and to all who had the great good fortune to know the both of them, they perfectly manifested exactly what kindness, friendship, and love truly look like.
Interesting reading from the past few weeks
This insightful essay, written by The Atlantic’s staff writer Anne Applebaum in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians (and thus before the start of Israel’s retaliatory bombings in Gaza) and entitled simply “There Are No Rules” (from which I’ve extracted the title for this issue of TLBR), provides an unsettling context from which to consider both the unspeakable acts committed by Hamas on the day of October 7th and the genocidal actions of Putin against Ukraine since March of last year. She provides no pat answers, but rather poses the kinds of questions we will need to be pondering for, I fear, a very long time to come … “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of [a] rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Please look for the next one in January 2024.
Wishing you and your wife excitement and ease on your move to the city! Such transitions can be filled with so many moments of remembering and challenging decisions regarding the objects of our lives. I look forward to your post transition newsletter in the new year.