Kafka and Me

by Regina Edelman

Summer 2009 the United States is in recession. My husband and I don’t have jobs. No company wants to employ us as if we’re infected and undeserving to continue living after our fifties. Money enough, we make our own world as we boldly head to the future. I believe my studies of man and nature will be helpful to the blind journey of humankind.

Wind rattles lanterns on the sun-roof and chops green water in the bay below. I pass delicate purple tulips trembling among blowing leaves and bikini girls sunbathing on long deck chairs and then sit under a maple facing west.

I have my books around my beach chair: Jung’s Synchronicity, Confessions of Saint Augustine, and Collected Stories of Franz Kafka.

I read a good part of Jung's Exposition and as I marked the page for tomorrow’s studying, I noticed a wasp carrying dry branchlets to an anchor embedded between bricks at the bottom of the wall. Why does it work so hard to do that? To secure its fertile eggs for the future?

I finished one more chapter of Saint Augustine. He confessed he stole pears as a kid, regretted sexual pleasures of his youth, and described how his stressed mother fond of wine wanted him to be a priest to satisfy her. There was nothing more glamorous than to have a son become a Catholic priest in the third century, and Augustine became an obstinate priest fond of wine too.

I picked up Kafka. The wasp brought another branchlet to knit inside the anchor. I waited for it to finish its labor and fly back to get more material for its home. The Stoker the story marked to study, I read:

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

A sword? No, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t raise a sword, but a torch, doesn’t it? To search the truth, I got up and looked to the statue in the bay. The sun illuminated a torch in her upraised right hand. The Staten Island Ferry’s foghorn lowed. Sluggish sailboats fled down the Hudson. There came the little wasp loaded with one more branchlet. Lanterns rattled. Happy girls turned their butts to the sun. Big white clouds slowly passed.

The wasps never went to Harvard to learn their precise navigation.

©2009 Regina Edelman

Ahmadinejad at Battery Park Ritz-Carlton

by Daryl and Regina Edelman

Ironically, at this moment, New York City police are on the roof of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, protecting Iranian tyrant and holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is staying across the street at the luxurious Battery Park Ritz-Carlton where he is enjoying a sweet view of the Statue of Liberty!

While the U. S. economy is in a tailspin, American taxpayers are shelling out their hard-earned bread to pay for a three block radius of FBI and police security for the Iranian strongman, including ambulances, firetrucks, police cruisers, German Shepherds, and mobile command centers to guard the madman from American citizens walking their dogs in the imperious dictator’s Battery Park compound. Trucks of special food are delived for his banquets there.

It’s not only us Americans who are outraged about Ahmadinejad’s sickening polices and presence. This afternoon, about a hundred peaceful Iranian protesters marched against him up and down Battery Place across the street from the Ritz shouting, “Freedom and Democracy for Iran!” They carried, as one protester explained, “the old Iranian flag, our rightful flag, not Ahmadinejad’s flag of tyranny.” It was a protest that would not be allowed in Iran under the tyrant’s power. With all our flaws, America is still a place where you can have your say, and the police left the protesters their's, though we were not free to walk the sidewalks we walk every morning because of a foriegn tyrant.

© 2009 Daryl and Regina Edelman