An Excerpt: Sam Hall Kaplan’s Urban Odyssey

Introduction

As a critic unbound, the search for a sense of place has been for me a compelling, fragmented urban odyssey. Recalled in memory and measured in experience, the odyssey cannot be summed up in a simple narrative of engrossing events and observations, deftly woven together.

Alife as an odyssey is not really like that—certainly mine hasn’t been. I view it as a puzzle of peopled events and deeply felt emotions, in a disturbing chaotic and cruel political climate and an alarming, threatened environment, scattered with embers of glittering hope. In retrospect, it is to me, personally, both rational and absurd, a contradiction, yet absorbing, a life in bits and pieces, fits and starts, to be recorded, candidly.

Though I occasionally had written personal reflections, my founding had been in pragmatic journalism, to report impartially, without fear or favor, and even in my years as a critic and commentator, to be sure when offering an opinion, at least trying to be dispassionate and fair. These were the posts that I grabbed onto and that guided me as I jumped from assignment to assignment, rock to rock, in the swift stream of writing.

Having authored several books, with some critical success and financial reward, I was encouraged by family and friends to write yet another, though this time a more personal chronicle. But I had deferred for various reasons, among them, frankly, not getting any foundation grants to subsidize my writing or any reasonable advance on royalties, both of which I received when younger, credentialed as I was by the New York Times and later the Los Angeles Times, and enjoying the exposure of radio and television, and an evolving social media.

To be sure, intellectual properties are problematical. And publishing has been sadly on the wane, in the rising competition for the disposable dollar in the vast bubbling multimedia and entertainment cauldron. There is also my age to consider, at this writing eight-seven, and that I’m comfortably retired, still scribbling to be sure, but at leisure—an occasional book review and commentaries on the internet’s social media where I have had a responsive following. And while reveling in reciting some of my varied adventures to family and friends, the thought of another book was off-putting. Writing is enjoyable, though also work. 

But no surprise, I also have an ego, and I weakened when two of my children, one a recognized poet and the other an accomplished scholar, joined together on Father’s Day, 2022, in a touching e-mail and addressed the issue of my writing a memoir of sorts, declaring that doing so would “be a beautiful way to preserve the power of your voice and the unique shape and content of your life for posterity, so your kids, grandkids, great grandkids (at some point) will have a window into your life and mind.” My other two learned children, a professor and a lawyer, echoed the appeal, and so did my wife, Peggy.

Touched, I of course accepted the challenge, and began culling my scattered clippings selectively saved in portfolios, in books reviewed and authored and in a few magazines and newsletters collecting dust on shelves. And thank heaven for Wikipedia. All I had needed to get me started, really, was the heartfelt assignment, especially from my family, to whom I have dedicated this book. Without their prodding, I wouldn’t have initiated this writing.

To be sure, in my years as a writer for print or broadcast, be it a newspaper, periodical, or book, a radio or television script, daily news or short- or long-form documentaries, a speech or a lecture, I also rarely turned down an assignment. My dictum had been to most always say yes, and then worry about doing it; for if I said no, that would be final, and then I wouldn’t even have a chance to attempt it and might never be called again. I especially liked assignments with deadlines, leaving no time for dreaded writer’s block, which I never have suffered, but still fear, especially in my older years.

In retrospect, I had been hardwired to be a deadline-driven writer, from my very beginnings as a journeyman journalist. Indeed, my first paid assignment, in 1952, fifteen dollars a submission, was compiling the Queens Teen column for the Sunday Long Island Daily Press, and getting it to its office in by 5:00 p.m. on Thursdays, on 168th Street, south of Jamaica Avenue, rain or shine. Then there was being news writer and editor of WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times, where I had to produce a five-minute pithy script “every hour, on the hour.” The job also included writing on occasion the news crawl of flashing honed headlines encircling the Forty-Second Street Times Square Tower, to be updated hourly.

Among my memories is writing “HAPPY NEW YEAR, 1960,” and then having to elbow my way through milling crowds to the tower and up three flights to where the sign’s typist perched, handing my script into eager hands, then going out into a teeming Times Square crowd, elbowing my way to Broadway and Forty-Third Street, and in the crush of cheering multitudes, glimpse the flashing bulletins and my words. Fleet- ing but satisfying.

Quickening the pace and pulse a few years later were the deadlines of night rewrite at the Times, with an editor hovering over me, and the rumble of the presses below as I banged away two and three fingered on a typewriter, to update for the next edition a breaking story, be it an earthquake (Alaska), a five- alarm fire (New York City), an election (wherever of import), the Academy Awards (Hollywood), or a political assassination and bloody coup (then Vietnam).

There also was no time for a coffee break, having to type three editorials to fill the news hole on the opinion page of the New York Post on days when its editorial editor would pass out drunk at his typewriter, impossible to wake as the deadline loomed. Or worse, he did wake, albeit wasted, to tap out an incomprehensible column, which had to be fact-checked and re-written by me, while witnessing a once honored editor stumble through the tragic third act of his demise, while on deadline.

At the more tranquil Los Angeles Times, deadlines were problematical, depending on the story, and the writing more relaxed. If there was pressure, it was self-generated, for there was no want of planning and design issues in what I described as an adolescent city in the throes of a growth spurt. I enjoyed the time it tendered, writing a book, compiling another, and in the world beyond, being a husband and parent.

Then later into my sixties more demanding were the sporadic deadlines of television, whether the scheduled nightly broadcast or breaking news, a camera in the studio or in the field, be it in front of an angry mob, a raging firestorm, or an in-house director, its uncovered lens focused on me, up tight, a red light flashing above, the operator pointing a finger at me, telling me that I was “live,” and to start reporting, and let’s not have any dead air, please—never. But it was for me only a three-days-a-week job, leaving more time for freelancing and the family.

My book reviews and essays at the time sharply focused on the drift planning, design, and development, which had been stirring up a personal following, and I began assembling them as the grist for another book. Tentatively entitled “Searching for the Soul of Cities,” it attracted interest, and despite my age, then seventy-five, I was primed to proceed, but then was stricken with cancer, and had to drop the project and put aside my notes. Thanks to UCLA Medical’s oncology department and experimental treatments, the cancer was conquered, but left me weak.

The thought of a book lingered, less journalistic and more biographical, to document my critical writings and adventures in planning, design, and development. Then there was my family’s history, which had roused my interest when researching a review in 2007 for the Jewish Journal on the planned National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia.

Aside from the architecture, the museum’s programming interested me, that the planned featured exhibition would “seek to tell the dynamic story” of Jewish migration and adaptation to America. Resonating with me was the theme “It’s Going to Be Your Story,” for I had been trying for some time to get my mother, Sadie, who lived alone in an apartment in Rockaway, Queens, to talk about the roots of our large, loquacious family.

Though 104 years old in 2007, her memory was as sharp as ever, which not coincidentally had made her the subject of a longevity study of 150 or so select Jewish seniors being conducted by the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. She apparently was blessed, and possibly her children, myself included, with something that has been labeled the “Ashkenazi gene” (a designated protein CETPVVW) that may aid mental function and extend life.

But my mother preferred not to recall the stories she had once regaled me with, now dismissing them as bubbemeises, grandmother tales, that long ago crossed over the line from fact to fiction, and back again.

Was my great-great paternal grandfather really a sergeant in the French army, who when left behind as Napoleon retreated from Moscow, in 1812, deserted south into Ukraine, married a Jewess, and spent the rest of his life under the whip of the czar? My cousin Alan Cheuse, then the NPR book critic, believed it, and so included the item in his book Fall Out of Heaven (Peregrine Smith, 1987), a loose biography of his father, my Uncle Fishel, my father’s younger brother. He had been a captain in the Soviet air force during the 1930s, who my father in time sponsored to come to the United States.

Or is this a story my father invented to ingratiate himself when he lived in Paris in the 1920s? He had gone to France as a coal miner after he spurned joining the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, and that after having been forced to serve in World War I and the Russian Revolution. In his later years he spoke French better than English, and would not speak Russian, except when spitting on the floor at the mention of the czar, Stalin, or Hitler. Yiddish was reserved for my mother and his surviving siblings.

And what about my mother’s blood relatives who, after booking passage to America with their last penny at the turn of the nineteenth century, were instead dropped off ailing at a dock in Cork, Ireland? Some eventually made it to America, some didn’t. One of my sons, Josef, a poet who spent a year at Trinity College in Dublin, has embraced this, as has my part Irish, Oregon-rooted wife, Margaret Mary.

It should be added that Josef was named after my father, who we believed was a “Joseph.” But a few years after his passing, we were told by my mother that my father actually had been anointed that at Rikers Island by an immigration inspector who thought the name Joseph would serve him better as an “American” than his birth name, Shiah, in Yiddish meaning a girl or boy with the promise of perseverance and curiosity.

Who on my mother’s side also were the ones left behind, to be driven down to the blue Danube by Hungarian fascists at the end of World War II, shot and thrown into the river that turned red with their blood; or who on my father’s side were herded out of Kyiv by the occupying Nazis in 1941 to be slaughtered at Babyn Yar? Kyiv also was where an uncle reportedly had been put to death during the purges of 1938 by order of Stalin. Could it be that he complained too loudly about the famine that devastated Ukraine, or was linked some how to Fanny Kaplan, who had shot Lenin?

We do know from my father that he was drafted into the czar’s army at fourteen and fought in World War I. He claimed to have deserted three times and been caught twice, once being dragged out of his house and lined up to be shot. Except the execution was stopped by a priest, allowing my father time to slip away, kiss my grandmother goodbye, jump out a rear window, and run, literally for his life. Or at least so goes the story. “Thank God the window was facing west,” he told me.

The stories continue about how he walked from town to town, picking up odd jobs, eventually signing up in Poland to be a coal miner in France, and put on a train going west. But instead of getting off the train as directed in the Saar mining district, he bribed the conductor and stayed on until Paris. There, with the help in that city’s small Jewish community, he became a tailor and supposedly romanced countless French women widowed by the Great War. He talked fondly of this time when I taped him shortly before his death in 1980. My mother would not comment.

Was it Uncle Zalman, no longer fighting for the communists in Ukraine but a bartender in south Philly, who wrote him to come to the “Goldene Medina,” the golden land, of America? He eventually did, on a purloined passport, to settle in Brooklyn. There he became a peddler in the era of tough Jews, shtarkers, then knowing how to sew, an upholsterer, and, finally, an interior decorator, furnishing the model apartments on Coney Island for, among others, developer Fred Trump, the father of the Donald. I did have some contact with that schmuck years later when he was hustling real estate in New York City, but it came to nothing.

So why was first cousin Alan a Cheuse, while me and most of my extended family are Kaplans? In his book, Alan writes that his father, Fishel, changed his name to Phil and the family name to Cheuse, which had been my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. He apparently did so to throw off the KGB, which he thought was hunting him down after his plane crashed in the Sea of Japan and he deserted the Soviet air force, to later end up in Shanghai and fly airmail for the Chinese nationalists. It is hard to make up these stories.

Or was it because Uncle Fishel hated his father, my paternal grandfather, for going to America after some pogrom or other and leaving behind the family in Ukraine, including my father, never to send for them as promised? Abandoning them. While they eventually made it to America, others did not, to die in World War II or to continue as what was described to me as the living dead in the ruins of Mother Russia.

“What is there to believe?” I asked my mother.

“You believe what you want to believe,” she replied. “Some may be true, some may not. What difference does it make? You are who you are. Be happy.” Then she added her daily counsel, and “be good, do good.”

With these thoughts echoing, I soon was back writing, a gift of sorts to my large and loving family, friends and acquaintances, and whomever will find engaging the bits and pieces of my life, remembered, the fragments persisting and pertinent. Enjoy it.