In the Holy Grail of original thinking…..where art thou gone? In the planet’s whirl of cyber space and optics, our mother from her base in Shangri-la, Santa Monica, California, adjacent to the apartment of William Holden’s “I wanted wings”, and Gloria Swanson’s “I’m ready for my next take, mister DeMille,”s“Sunset Boulevard”, starring said William Holden, she scribbled this foray……
II
“It seems to me you’re fusing your refinements with a tough sensitivity, the system’s impact is mellifluous and equal to the primary design. If I may Raymond Chandler once said
“That to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure, much more than an artistic success.
Shakespeare would have done well in any, in any generation and culture, because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over.
He would have hated refinement as such because it’s always a withdrawal and he was much too tough to shrink from anything.”
III
A scholarship student in Rhetoric at Hunter High School in the City that never sleeps. An immigrant herself, her mother, our grandmother of landed gentry ,born in Berderchev, Ukraine outside of Kiev, they flede the invading Cossacks to Odessa and a steerage “Anthony Adverse” to the New World , docking in Buffalo, New York.
Making their way to the Stature of Liberty and Ellis Island, theKaminskys found themselves in the Bronx…..a field today below the El, near the old Stadium that Ruth built, and graffiti scripted buildings of prayer
Here my aunts scripted their aggressions and power…..my mother attending Morris Evening High, General Powell’s Elementary school.
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IV
Esther became the Rhetoric scholar…Rhetoric being her gift…..languages w at the turn of the 20th century her forte. Theadministration offering her the school’s scholarship to Hunter High School in Manhattan. ……….a tribute to our celebrityglazed cyber space and instant horrors. But she persisted, if notprevailing, her old sister argued she should go on to higher education, being she was the oldest daughter.
At fourteen our gifted mother was sent out t5o work and findhersewlf, deprived o her recognized gifts and talent across the board, ,living to tell the tale in mastering pitman shorthand,becoming a steno in Jimmy Cagney’s vaudeville booker Black & Erlingerr (“Yankee Doodle Dandy”)
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