Flashback 1988: How parents fail in preparing kids for kindergarten

 

     My three grandchildren marinate in adult attention. Love, books, toys. I've watch all four parents in action, up close and over time, and have nothing but admiration. They rock.

      The only problem, as I see it, is that all children aren't given such a leg up in life. 

      Not close. Most stories vanish, but this one has sat in mind for nearly 40 years, and I thought I would post it now, to mark the end of my surgical recovery period and prepare for my first column being published tomorrow. 

      This is a story was written as part of a team producing a series, "The Critical Years." We developed a questionnaire, working with the Board of Education, the Erikson Institute, and Chapin Hall Center for Children at U of C (we did things up right, back in the day) and sent hundreds to Chicago Public School kindergarten teachers, following up with focus group interviews with teachers and parents — I remember sitting in a room at the Robert Taylor Homes, conducting an interview with half a dozen parents, thinking, "We're not in Berea anymore...."  

     As shocking as this story is, in my memory, the reality was worse. Children would show up to kindergarten not knowing their names — they'd know a nickname, "I'm Little T!"  They wouldn't know the primary colors.

    Whenever critics of Chicago Public Schools are slamming CPS for their results, I remember this story and want to pipe up, "But consider where students start at. A lot of these kids are royally screwed from Day One — with the best conceivable education, many would never catch up."

      The news today is hardly better. One in four adults in Cook County is functionally illiterate. The ham-handed slashers of the Trump administration have gutted Headstart and other programs designed to throw a lifeline to such kids. I'd be a little reluctant to share such an old story with you, were I not completely confident we could write the same thing today. Maybe we should. That said, it's quite long — feel free to skim.

    This story ran on the front page, bylined, "By Don Hayner and Neil Steinberg."

     A 5-year-old boy came to kindergarten at Drake Elementary School last year not knowing common words like "doll" and "cat."
     He didn't know how to look at a picture book, or how to do things most children learn "from just being alive," said Judith Bowden, his teacher at Drake, 2722 S. King.
     The boy's mother is illiterate and could not read to him, which Bowden said was a major cause of his school problems.
     More than six of 10 children in city public school kindergartens are not read to by parents, according to teachers responding to a Chicago Sun-Times survey.
     By comparison, nine of 10 kindergartners in Wilmette public schools are read to by their parents, as are 87 percent of middle-and upper-income children attending Chicago public schools. Yet experts say reading aloud to children is crucial to their educational development.
     "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. This is especially so during the preschool years," according to the landmark 1984 report Becoming a Nation of Readers by the Commission on Reading.
     One ongoing study by Linda Meyer, a senior scientist at the nationally recognized Center for the Study of Reading in Champaign, goes even further. Meyer's study suggests that parents reading to their children is not enough. There must be quality reading that involves an exchange of questions and insights between parents and children.
     Teachers surveyed said six of 10 children have parents who do not know how to prepare them educationally for kindergarten. Teachers in Wilmette said only one of 10 children has such parents and slightly more than two of 10 middle- and upper-income Chicago children have parents who don't know how to prepare them.
     Typical survey responses from kindergarten teachers:
     "The children are left to take care of themselves." "Parents don't talk to children or ask them questions." "Nobody worked with these children. Television is their baby-sitter."
     Many Chicago children are far behind when they start school. And while the study indicates parents want to help, it also shows they don't know how.
     Educators, who for a long time looked within the school system for the key to academic improvement, are increasingly looking to parents.
     "It is unlikely that we will be able to make a major difference for the child unless we place equal priority on education and academic remediation for the parent," warned a 1988 Ford Foundation study, Toward a More Perfect Union: Basic Skills, Poor Families and Our Economic Future.
     Once a young child falls behind, he may never catch up, said Burton L. White, director of the Center for Parent Education in Newton, Mass., and author of The First Three Years. He added:
     "The child who is delayed at age 3 when he enters Head Start invariably, with virtually no exceptions, is behind on language. And if he's nine months or more behind on language, the chances are very good he'll never be an average student. Ever. The probability that any Head Start program is going to make him even an average student is very, very low."
     Teachers said some parents don't even talk to their children.
     "Many young parents don't know, for example, that even though a child is not verbal, the mother or father being verbal helps language develop," said Laura Devon, spokeswoman for Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project assisting children at risk.
     Besides lacking basic parenting skills or information, parents have some ideas that are just plain wrong.
     "When you think you've heard the worst, something the next day always tops it," said Cheryl Stampley, a nurse working with new parents at the Robert Taylor Homes.
     Often, mothers feel that showing attention to newborns will "spoil" them. Some fathers feel that, until they are 6 months old, babies cannot see. Or hear. Or feel pain.
     A surprising number of parents will not put their children in a crib. They're afraid of crib death, although the crib itself, of course, has nothing to do with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
     A parent does not have to be poor to be overwhelmed with the responsibility of child rearing. Middle-class parents also frequently don't know what children need.
     "As bright as they are, they are totally unprepared (to be parents)," said Pat DeMar, director of a Family Focus drop-in center in Lincoln Park.
     While poor parents may lack knowledge, said DeMar, affluent parents, ironically, sometimes have too much.
     "They read numerous books, on child bearing, on child rearing, but they reach a point where they're so well-read they lack security in their own instincts," DeMar said. "I worked at Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor, and I saw better parenting because they felt their instincts were OK."
      Without adequate parental involvement, children can be so far behind when they enter school they have great difficulty catching up, even if the school does its job.
     At Terrell Elementary School, 5410 S. State, next to the Robert Taylor Homes, fourth-graders made a year's worth of progress in reading during 1987. Yet they still remained about 1 1/2 years behind the national norm.
     "We have to work twice as hard to get the children half as far," said Terrell Principal Reva Hairston.
     Parents often instill in their children a distaste for school that never goes away.
     One young mother, Kathy Jackson, sees her lack of participation as the cause of her son Robert, 11, having trouble in school.
      "He's not interested in school," said Jackson, "I didn't read to him, I didn't do anything with him. I believe that had a lot to do with it." She said she has begun to read to her younger son, Rodney, who is enrolled in the Dewey Child Parent Center, 638 W. 54th Pl., and that he seems to like school.
     It's futile telling some parents to read to their kids. "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Laura Devon of Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project aiding children at risk.
     Many parents are illiterate. One of every three to four adults in Chicago is functionally illiterate. From 650,000 to 1 million Chicagoans above the age of 16 read below the sixth-grade level. Only one-half of 1 percent of these adults are enrolled in literacy programs, according to the Chicago Literacy Coordinating Center.
     Illiteracy itself, though, needn't prevent a parent from enriching a child's early years and helping to foster a desire for learning.
      "Even if you can't read yourself, you can contribute by telling your child anything from fairy tales to stories of your childhood. You create a social event in which the child gets the idea of gaining meaning," said James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development.
     Many parents are themselves children. In 1986, 9,959 children were born to teenage parents in Chicago. If these children were entering Chicago public schools today, they would represent one-third of all kindergartners. Studies show teenage parents are more hostile and punitive to their children. They also don't talk or listen to them as much as older parents do.
     "I was 15 when I had my little girl," said Estasia, a mother in the Beethoven Project, which assists parents in caring for their children. "I had to give up cheerleading. I loved that uniform. She was my responsibility, from the moment I got home from school."
     "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Devon of Ounce of Prevention.
     "Often young parenting increases the incidence of child abuse and neglect. We've seen that in news accounts of the last couple months, where a mom left her baby in a cold garage. Many young moms might think it is OK to leave an infant in that situation for a couple hours."
     More than 10 percent of the babies born in Chicago are also dangerously underweight, according to the Public Health Department. Low birth weight - anything below 5 1/2 pounds - is caused by a range of prenatal factors, from drug abuse to poor nutrition to depression.
     Low birth weight is a factor in 70 percent of Chicago's infant mortalities, and surviving low-weight infants have a greater chance of suffering physical and mental handicaps.
     Most poor parents want the best for their children, according to the Sun-Times study. They just don't know how to get it.
     The survey shows that 65 percent of parents come to school to discuss their children's progress more often than the two times required to pick up report cards.
     "You don't discuss your child's progress unless there is interest," said Ted Sanders, Illinois education superintendent, commenting on that figure.
     And nearly six of 10 try to help their child with homework, according to the study.
     "I've never met a parent who didn't want her child to succeed, but some of them don't know what to do," said Reva Hairston, principal at Terrell for the last 12 years.
     "So much depends on the home life and how much parents do with their children as far as listening and talking to the child," one teacher wrote, echoing a sentiment of many of those surveyed.
     Although a distinct minority, some parents seem to have almost no involvement with their children's education after they start school.
     About 14 percent of children have parents who have never come to school, not even to pick up their children's report cards.
     "Many children raised themselves, and come to school when they feel it's time," said Pam Stevens, director of the Dewey Child Parent Center. "I went to a house on a home visit, and the door was open, the babies walking around, and the parents nowhere to be found."
     Almost one of 10 children is regularly more than 15 minutes late for school, and 15 percent of all children miss more than five days of school a month, according to the Sun-Times study.
      Bowden of the Drake school said she has one child who was absent 51 days and another who was absent 40 days this school year."I think some parents are so overwhelmed with their own problem they can't see, so their priority is self preservation," she said.
      Teachers say many parents don't like to visit schools because it reminds them of their own academic failure.
     "When they come to school, it's because their children are destructive," said Dr. Grace Dawson, principal of Beethoven School. "They come to school for negative, not for positive, reasons."
     While parental involvement will improve a child's chances of school success, increasing that involvement is not easy.
     "It would be nice if we said to parents that involvement is in your child's best interest, and they would do it," said Dewey director Pam Stevens. "But we have to use all kinds of bribes and incentives. We have to persuade. We have to be evangelical. There's a big gap between where we are and where we are supposed to be."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 29, 1988

The bagel lot

    Tuesday morning found me plunging backward, into the past, looking for the first use of the word "bagel" in the Chicago Record, a short-lived paper of the 1890s, and the Chicago Daily News. 
    The results were not what I expected.
    "Bagel" first shows up as a name, such as a certain Conrad Bagel, waylaid and robbed by five masked men in front of his State Street saloon in 1893. For 40 years it is only a name, plus misreadings of other names like Paget (the tendency of microfilm is for letters to puff up and degrade; optical scanners can have trouble reading them).
     The foodstuff shows up in the 1930s. In 1936, columnist Clark Rodenbach makes a colorful visit to Gold's, a restaurant at 810 W. Roosevelt since 1902. He notes that Sears executive Julius Rosenwald was a patron, Illinois' first Jewish governor, Henry Horner, "drops in when gubernatorial duties permit," as do Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and Groucho Marx.
    Being a journalist, Rodenbach must count as a near-celebrity, because he can't leave without a gift.
    "Before you go," says Moe Rafison, the third generation to run the place, "let me give you a bagel or two."
   Rodenbach feels obligated to explain what he's talking about. "They are roughly of donut form; and, like the rye bread, crispy on the outside and tender within. A great breakfast favorite with show-people after the last show."
     It was interesting to follow the bagel into more general acceptance — though even in the late 1950s, bagels were still being explained (including humorously, such as "a donut made of concrete") not only in a daily newspaper, but apparently among Jews themselves. 
    "Are Lox and Bagel (salmon and rolls) essential to Jewish Survival?" is the topic of a humorous debate held at the K.A.M. synagogue in Hyde Park in 1956, though I hold out hope that the explanation was inserted into the topic for the benefit of the general public.
     What really intrigued me was the use of "bagel" in the classified ads in the 1960s and 1970s.  

       "AUTO sales mgr. 100 cars a mo. If you can run a Bagel Lot." reads one, in 1966. "Floor plan & financing available."
     "SALESMAN BAGEL LOT," reads another, in 1972. "MUST BE EXPERIENCED."
     It didn't seem a term used with the customers themselves, but part of the private lingo of the car lot. "AUTO SALESMAN" a 1976 ad explained, "Need 2 experienced salesmen for high volume 'Bagel Lot'"
     My Wentworth and Flexner "Dictionary of American Slang" had nothing, as did AI. I formed a theory that it would turn out to be the deepest discount cars, pivoting off the "Jews are cheap" calumny. 
     I wasn't far off. In Paul Dickson's "Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms" I found, "bagel: a poorly maintained car, to a person looking at it for trade-in."
     As to why a bagel was a poorly maintained car, for now we'll leave that to the imagination.
      If you are like me, you are wondering what happened to Gold's. At the crossroads of the Jewish ghetto in the 1930s, it was steamrolled along with much of the neighborhood by the University of Illinois campus in the early 1960s. Although as a reminder that being Jewish is to never be too far from calumny, I noticed a brief, laudatory 1931 Daily News description of Gold's uses the word "clean" four times. A moment's reflection and you'll realize why.
    

The crowded house

     There is an old Yiddish tale that goes like this:
     A village man comes to his rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I have a problem — my house is far too small for my growing family, but I can't afford a new one. What should I do?"
     The rabbi looks at the man.
     "Do you have a chicken?" he asks.
     The man is a little confused.
     "Yes," he slowly replies. "I have a chicken."
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Take the chicken into your house to live."
     The next day the man returns.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. Now I have the chicken flapping around, feathers flying, in addition to my children running, my wife scolding. It's even worse!"
     "I see," says the rabbi, stroking his beard. "Do you have a goat?"
     "Yes..." says the man, unhappy where this is going.
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Bring the goat into your house as well."
     The next day the man returns, eyes red.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. But this is even worse: madness — the goat braying all night, chasing the chicken, the children running, my wife complaining. It's a nightmare."
     "I see," says the rabbi. "Do you have a cow...?"
     You see where this is heading. The story can be continued with any number of livestock until the poor man is at his utter wit's end. Then the rabbi instructs him to remove all the animals from the house, and the man returns, grateful and amazed, at how his home situation has been improved.
    "Rabbi you are a true tzaddik, a sage!" he exudes. "There is so much room for everybody."
     The moral, I believe, is that we have it good, but we don't know it, until things go bad for a little while. I had it good, until I had my rotator cuff surgery when ... well, honestly, I still have it good. Yes, the thing hurt like the dickens for ... two days. But the drugs helped. ("So long as I'm in pain," I hissed to my wife, "it's not addiction.") As does physical therapy. And my wife has been a godsend, as always.
     Harder was wearing the sling for 24 hours a day. Not just any sling — with a pillow and its own red ball for me to squeeze — reminding me of the little shovel on my Ariens snowthrower. On my left hand — my dominant hand. For six weeks.
     I became quite good with my right hand. I wrote in my journal, slowly. And learned to dictate copy. Wednesday marked my third week in the sling. Three more to go. But it will come off, eventually, and I will be so happy for a time, joyously thinking of the tale above, along with the line from Psalms that came to mind when I first contemplated the vast amount of time to be spent in the sling: "A thousand years are but a day when it is past." (Checking, the actual quote draws God into the equation: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." I like my remembered version better.

Extra credit: I'm a huge Eugene O'Neill fan, and after I wrote the last paragraph above, I realized there is a slight echo of his greatest play. Any idea?

The final line of "Long Day's Journey into Night" — "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

Speaking of private ailments

       Lately, it seems the news has quieted down. The daily Trump disaster? Almost muted, a muffled din far away. The war in Iran, even more absentee than before. The economy, despite everything, chugging along uneventfully. The gathering global warming catastrophe? Routine now.

      Maybe because it is summer; the August slough.
      Then I began to suspect it wasn't the news, so much as me. I had this surgery and have been focused on recovery, sleeping, sort of, in a chair every night. Maybe I'm just not absorbing current events very well. The news is there, but since I'm not writing a column — back on Friday, in theory — I'm not processing it effectively.

Henry David Thoreau
(National Portrait Gallery)

    Which reminded me of my one of my favorite quotes, from Henry David Thoreau, one that I've posted here a couple times, but bears repeating, warning against all who "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere."
     Despite my frequent quoting — seven times, as recently as last year, quite a lot really — I don't recall the context. Had to be "Walden," right?
    Wrong. I plugged the quote into Google, and AI fell flat on its face, as AI will do:
   "AI Overview — Henry David Thoreau used this phrase in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, written on December 5, 1856." 
     Bold-face be damned, when I went to look at the citation itself, in his letters posted by Project Gutenberg, I got an Oct. 18, 1843 letter to his sister Helen. This is the germane passage, where he refers to his friend, Willam Ellery Channing — the poet who suggested he build a hut in the woods and go live in it:
     "You think that Channing's words would apply to me too, as living more in the natural than the moral world; but I think that you mean the world of men and women rather, and reformers generally. My objection to Channing and all that fraternity is that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company."
     In essence, reformers themselves need the help they deign to lavish on others.
     True enough. But this is the interesting part. As useful as that phrase is, and as much as I used it, when I plug the quote into Google, up pops six EGD and one Sun-Times reference. Nothing else, It doesn't quote any other work than mine. Which I find hard to believe. Maybe Google is now so self-referential that it sends me back to my own stuff, like a dog returning to its mess. Or could it be that I'm the only person ever to quote that particular line? That idea defies belief.

Flashback 1996: Immigrants turn up heat on the natives

     God, this is SO depressing...
     Are we doomed to chew over the same old bullshit FOREVER?
     I was up early Saturday — big day, had to head over to Bridgeport first thing in the morning. I figured, let's take care of EGD early. And I was in the Newsbank, and thought, "Wonder what I wrote this week 30 years ago?" My column began in 1996, and I can see what odd, antique, esoteric issues were captivating public attention then.
     Oh look. Immigration. Republicans fear-mongering over the prospect of swarthy people crossing the border. Everything old is new again.
     Sigh. I guess they keep doing it because it works. Donald Trump will serve eight democracy-shredding years as president of the United States because half of America is terrified they'll lose their job to a 22-year-old who just showed up in this country and barely speaks English. The hate runs deep. My column starts up again Friday, and I swear, I'm tempted to turn this in. It could be printed, word for word, as is and, except for the mass citizenship ceremony, be entirely accurate.

     I happened to be driving past Soldier Field Tuesday when the ceremony let out.
     Eleven thousand or so Chicagoans, beginning the day as immigrants, had roasted in the sun for hours waiting for the federal government to hand over a piece of paper. Now they were transformed, finding their way home as new Americans.
     Traffic, already snarled by construction, snarled more. I'd like to say that everybody in the cars were honking and smiling and waving and giving thumbs up at this freshest batch of fellow citizens outside of a maternity ward, dressed proudly in their Sunday best.
     But we weren't. We just sort of sat there and gawked at them. I thought about honking, but I was in the left lane, stopped, and I figured the guy in front of me would get out of his car and shoot me.
     I couldn't help but imagine that many motorists in the traffic jam had their usual simmering outrage over immigration jacked up a few notches.
     I pictured them drumming their fingers on their steering wheels, eyeing the mustachioed men and dark-skinned women and thinking: "This, this is the peril! The waves of traffic-blocking, job-grabbing, foreign-tongue-jabbering humanity polluting our beloved American lifestyle and sapping our vital national essence!"
     Were not such thoughts common, how else could the Illinois Republican Party dare run that horrible television ad, the one with the grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of illegals scampering across the border? The implication is that we're being invaded; foreign people are pouring across our porous borders, the gates left open by bleeding-heart liberal Democrats.
     And then what? That's the part I never quite understood. What bad thing are all these immigrants supposed to be doing?
     Taking jobs, I guess. Though the argument has a basic flaw. If your job is such that a guy raised in a small village, a guy who doesn't speak much English, can wade across the Rio Grande and take it away from you, well then mister, maybe you should be thinking about personal career development, immigrants or no.
     Not to imply that the world doesn't send us its share of doctors and engineers and physicists. But the fact is that many recent arrivals tend to take the lowest jobs, at least until they acclimate themselves, which can take years.
     Many immigrant Ph.Ds are sweeping up after hours. It must gall them, along with all their fellows cleaning the toilets and tending mewling babies, to be treated as some sort of unwanted menace.
     Let's not be coy, either. "Immigration" is a code word for "immigration from Latin America." Those Republican fear ads didn't show a group of Colleens in knee socks dancing the Siege of Ennis, or a bunch of Gdansk shipworkers arriving at Terminal Four clutching cardboard suitcases.
     (Though it would be funny to imagine such ads: "There are a million grandmothers in Kiev who would rather be feeding the birds in Grant Park, and will, if you let them!" Maybe the Republicans are saving those for October.)
     I have a sneaking suspicion as to why so many native-born Americans are so worried about Latin American immigrants. Not that they would admit it, but I think that, in their hearts, they're afraid the immigrants are better people than we are. Harder working. More dedicated to their families. Less given to bellyaching and self-pity.
     They worry about how they'll be able to park the truck behind the worksite and catch the traditional midmorning nap and still keep their customers if some clutch of short, swarthy men with cowboy boots and big belt buckles, some plantain-eating recien llegados are going to work their tails off 12 hours a day?
     Not to worry. We're just as good, but maybe a little less motivated. The new immigrants, by setting a good example, will help us. Because the vast majority settling here will buoy us. They always do.
     And anyway, we'll get used to them. The irony of immigration is that while Average Joe American is always worked up about foreigners, in general, the specific groups keep changing. A hundred years ago it was the Irish who were viewed as bestial interlopers whose base origins and strange habits would prevent them from ever assimilating into our precious Way of Life.
     Guess what? They did, and the same thing will happen with Hispanics. Bet on it. All the haters and nativists who flinch whenever they see a sign pointing out a telefono, or clench their jaws in passing a frozen fruit bar vendor, those people will die off, to be replaced by people who grew up in a country where Latin American immigrants were just another part of the multitude who came here and found a home and prospered. Here, to this great country, which doesn't persecute people because they can read Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the original.
     Welcome to it. Sorry about the botched, over-long ceremony in the hot sun Tuesday. But that's how it goes over here. You'll get used to it.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 11, 1996

Cold ... colder ...

     Cold sinks. Heat rises. But why? A bright boy such as myself should know. It's because ... ah ... guessing ... with warm air, the molecules are busier, bouncing around, while with cold air they are slower, bunching together. Thus denser. Heavier.
     Am I right? Let's ask AI: why does warm air rise while cold air sinks?
     "Warm air rises and cold air sinks due to differences in density and the force of gravity," the AI overview begins. "When air is heated, its molecules speed up and spread apart, making the warm air less dense than the surrounding air. Earth's gravity pulls harder on the nearby cold, dense air, causing it to sink to the ground. As this cold air drops, it slides under the lighter, warm air and forces it upward."
     Sounds right to me. Meaning I was close enough. I'm glad being the son of a nuclear physicist had some advantage.
     This is significant because for the past two weeks I've been sleeping in a blue recliner in our TV room, on the ground floor of our house. It's colder there, I realized, because the warm air rises to fill the three levels above.
     So cold that, the other night, I actually adjusted the thermostat, which is an earthquake for me. I never adjust the thermostat. Not in winter. Not in summer. I always feel just fine. It's a gift.
     I didn't think about this until Friday afternoon, when my wife announced that she was too was cold, working in the living room, and would adjust the thermostat. She did so, fiddling with a dial located under an African doll in our front room. That wasn't the one I used.
     "I actually adjusted the thermostat the other day," I informed her. "But the one in the TV room. I was cold."
     She laughed.
    "That one doesn't do anything,*" she said.
    "It doesn't?" I replied. genuinely surprised. "Did not know that."
    "And how many years have we lived here?" she laughed.
     "Twenty-six years," I said, in a small voice.

* To the air conditioner, she later elaborated. It controls our boiler; the house has radiator heat.

Books on the TV tray next to the reclining chair. And on the phone...

     An EGD reader asked me what books I've been reading during my convalescence. Good question. I'm working on my own book, about the benefits of Judaism, so for the past year have been trying to make a dent in modern Jewish literature, pressing forward on three fronts: audiobooks, physical books and, the first time and at my wife's urging, reading on my iPhone, since I can hold it easily in one hand.
     The first book I read on my phone was "The Chosen," by Chaim Potok. I read it 50 years ago, but only vaguely remembered something about a baseball game. It's an excellent novel, a crisply-written character study of the friendship between the protagonist, Reuven Malter and his friend Danny — slated at birth to become the next tzaddik, or leader of his particular sect  of orthodoxy. Plus their relationships with their demanding faith and strong-willed fathers. A reminder that, like all religions, Judaism is not a block of uniformity, but a spectrum; the various factions sometimes hate each other. The opening game is played between the Hasidim and a less rigorous sect. We might see them as both orthodox Jews, but the Hasids really despise their opponents, warning them that they're going to hell for being apostates.
      Right before the surgery, I read Harry Golden's surprisingly-useful
"Only in America." I googled "10 best contemporary Jewish novels" and one of them was Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" which I picked because it won the prestigious Man Booker award. The funny, thoughtful book was published in 2010 and is surprisingly current, with much of the plot pivoting on the Palestinian situation. One character joins a group he calls "Ashamed Jews" and they go around apologizing for the continued existence of the state founded in their name.

     The physical book I'm reading is James Loeffler's "Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America," published this month by Metropolitan Books. It's set in Chicago, beginning in 1949 with what is essentially an anti-Jewish pogrom in Englewood. One of the book's many shocks is realizing how American antisemitism cruised right through World War II, largely unaffected by the Holocaust, a term rarely used until 30 years later, after a TV series of the same name. Much real estate is given to Terminiello v. Chicago, a Supreme Court case that grew out of a anti-Semitic priest holding a hate rally on the West Side, and the question of whether groups can be protected from libel in the same way individuals are.
     The center section is about the legal ramifications of the 1977 attempt of Nazis to march in Skokie, while the last third brings us up-to-date to the present day I'm going to write a column about it so I don't wanna get too far into it, but it makes her gripping read with a caveat that the center section explores every legalistic posture, maneuver, and nuance in microscopic detail. 
     I'm also finishing Andre Aciman's sweet and melancholy "Out of Egypt" on Audible, which I read years ago and was really just fact checking one passage but ended up listening to the whole thing. It's a sentimental look at his family before they were kicked out in 1965 part of the Arab world's purge of Jews into Israel, where it turns out they don't belong either.  The book is billed as a memoir, though Aciman, who went on to write "Call Me by Your Name," recreates conversations and scenes from decades earlier that he couldn't possibly remember, and as a writer of memoirs myself, I wondered how much art embroiders the reality he is describing.

     What's next? Beyond the obvious Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. I think I'm going to polish off Elie Wiesel's "Night," which I managed to miss in high school, when everybody else read it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.