My Tante Chaika (Aunt Clara) was the only one of my father’s four siblings to make it out of Russia with him and move to the U.S., with her hubby my Uncle Calman (Carl). Chaika was a bulldozer of a woman. In her later years she survived so many strokes and other physical setbacks that my mother, who was not very fond of her, once famously said “They’re going to have to shoot her.” She finally passed away, in her late 80s.
She made knishes. The potato knishes and the kasha knishes were among my favorite foods when I was a little boy. One time we were over at Chaika’s for dinner and she served me a liver knish. I must have been around eight. I looked at it, pushed it around a little with my fork, and said “I don’t like it.” She said, “First take a taste — then tell me you don’t like it.” And I thought, what’s the point? I won that battle and the dreaded item was removed.
Decades later, my family and I were dining at a deli in NY and I noticed liver knishes on the menu. I ordered one for us to share. It was delicious. I’m sorry, Tante Chaika — I wish I had tried yours.
At 22D in the puzzle today: “Potato turnover in a Jewish deli.” Answer: KNISH. What a surprise to open that little door today and find Chaika there!
We’re going to take a brief break from our usual nonsense (very brief, I promise) to honor the life and memory of Norman Miller, who passed away at the age of 99 in Manhattan on February 24th. Norman caught a big fish a long time ago, and he wasn’t even fishing.
He was born Norbert Müller on June 2, 1924, in Tann in der Rhön, Germany, and moved with his family to Nuremberg in 1930. On Kristallnacht in November 1938, Nazis entered the family’s apartment and used axes to smash furniture, featherbeds, a cupboard with jars filled with jams and pickles, and musical instruments, including a piano and cello.
They knew they had to get out of Germany, but they could only get papers for Norman — through the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to safety. This was in late August 1939. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, and the rest of the family never obtained visas to get out. Norman was 15.
They were able to keep in touch through letters for two years. At one point, they sent him a family photo — they inserted Norman between his mom and sister so it looked like they were all together. He never saw them alive again.
In 1944, when he was 20, he joined the British Army and changed his name to Norman Albert Miller. He was assigned to intelligence because he was fluent in German. On May 7, 1945, the day Germany surrendered to end the war in Europe, Norman was part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment guarding a checkpoint in Hamburg. A brown Opel containing four men was stopped. They presented papers they claimed they were delivering to Field Marshall Montgomery. One of the fusiliers was a little suspicious so he brought the paperwork to Norman to assess. Norman realized “we have a big Nazi fish here.”
It was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who, as the Reich commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, was responsible for deporting thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps, and performed similar functions in Poland. Seyss-Inquart was arrested, tried in Nuremburg for war crimes, and executed on Oct. 16, 1946. The arrest brought Norman no satisfaction, he later said. “It didn’t bring my family back.”
Shortly after the war ended he learned that his parents, sister, and maternal grandmother were taken to the Jungfernhof concentration camp in Riga, Latvia in late 1941. In March 1942, they were taken to a forest on the outskirts of Riga, shot to death, and buried in a mass grave.
Norman and his son Steven traveled to Riga in 2013, and went to the forest where they filled three vials with soil from the killing fields: one for Norman and the others for his sons.
At Norman’s burial in Paramus, N.J., the soil from his vial was poured onto the coffin after it was lowered into the grave. In his eulogy, Norman’s son said the purpose of sprinkling the coffin with the Riga soil was “so that they, who were torn from him and never had a proper burial of their own, can finally be prayed over and reunited and laid to rest with their son.”
Norman is survived by his sons Steven and Michael, and two grandchildren, one of whom is named Suzanna, for his sister.
Rest in peace, Fusilier Miller.
“Don’t stare directly into it, but, right behind me, is that . . . ?”
Remember that great song, TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART? It set the tone for today’s eclipse-themed puzzle. It was by Bonnie Tyler. The puzzle also featured MOONSHADOW by Cat Stevens, INTO THE NIGHT by Santana, and STARING AT THE SUN, by U2.
Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I’m only falling apart.
Nothing I can say.
A total eclipse of the heart.
Are you repenting, readers? Here’s egs on today’s theme:
“It doesn’t seem right to have a TOTALECLIPSE-themed puzzle with no Marjorie Taylor Greene reference. In case you’ve just awoken from a week-long coma, she said, ‘God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.’ On second thought, an entire MTG tribute puzzle could be real popular: earthquake, eclipse, Jewish space laser, Sandy Hook hoax. The themers just about write themselves.”
But here’s what I wanna know — if I haven’t pented once, how can I re-pent? And before I pent, do I have to pre-pent? If I regret it, can I de-pent?
Where is Marjorie when I need her?
This poem is from today’s Writer’s Almanac. It’s called “Threepenny Opera” and it’s by George Bilgere.
The elderly modern dance instructor
And his elderly wife are dancing
In top hats and tails, doing a Kurt Weill
Number as old as their marriage.
They’ve reached that age when the body
Is starting to wonder how it got here,
When it has become strange, even to itself,
And moves around uncertainly
As if looking for a lost pair of glasses.
They do not mean for what they’re doing
To be a parody, but, of course, it is;
The word means something like
“To sing alongside,” and it’s just
Possible to see the lithe dark lovers
They used to be, singing just beyond
The penumbra of the spotlight.
When they tap dance and set
Their old skeletons clattering
Across the stage, the teenage boy
In front of me smiles and nudges his girlfriend
Who has reached the moment
Of her beauty that will keep everyone
On the edge of their seats
For the next two or three years.
I posted my Knish story, above, as a comment on Rex’s blog and got this nice response from veteran Rex-ist Nancy:
Liveprof — I enjoyed your liver knish story. It reminds me of what my father once said to me when I was very, very young and a picky eater. “Nancy, you are fully entitled to dislike any food you dislike. But you are not allowed to dislike it without tasting it first.”
Dad was a real gourmet and eager to turn me into one too. At four or five, I looked like an exceedingly poor candidate. By age seven, I was well on my way. And my parents loved to tell the story of how, when I was 11, we were on a trip to Washington D.C with their closest friends and their friend’s 11-year-old daughter Kathy and how in a restaurant, when Kathy ordered just about the only thing she would eat back then, which was spaghetti and meatballs, I ordered shad roe.
As Ogden Nash might have said:
Liver knishes
Are delicious.
I thanked her and noted that that poem was by Ogden Knash.
The answer at 1A today was HAIKU (“17-syllable Japanese poem”).
There is a funny book by David Bader called “Haikus for Jews.” (According to my good friend Miriam Webster, the plural of haiku can be either haiku or haikus. I bet Bader chose the latter because it rhymes with Jews.)
Here are some samples from it:
Beyond Valium,
the peace of knowing one’s child
is an internist.
Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I’ve done?
Yom Kippur: Forgive
me, God, for the Mercedes
and all the lobsters.
Congrats to a very nice (and very smart) young man: Paolo Pasco, winner of this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held in Stamford CT over the weekend.
Remember The Analogues? They’re going to send us off tonight with a special “eclipse” song. Just for you, little darlin’.
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 