A Distant Heartbeat by Eunice Lipton

Author:Eunice Lipton [Lipton, Eunice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, History, Europe, Spain & Portugal
ISBN: 9780826356598
Google: TDJnCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2016-04-01T04:08:57+00:00

Whatever the reason, Dave chose Bill. On the boat, in Paris, then in the Sierra Pandols. He confided in him that he’d never slept with a woman. He gave him a letter high up in the barren mountains; the next day, he took it back and tore it up in front of his friend. When a bullet found him, he was talking to Bill. As the bullet’s force pushed him forward, he lurched toward Bill, a man as exotic as any a Lipton had ever seen.

Bill had grown up on a farm in Columbia County, New York. His mother, he told me, was born in a sod hut in Manhattan, Kansas. Her family had been on their way to California when they decided to stay in Kansas. Even Bill admits that he thinks the Communist Party sent him home to raise money for Spain because he looked American.

“As in, not Jewish or black?” I ask.

“I think so,” he replies.

“I am not proud of being an American,” Bill later reveals to me. “A book that had a great influence on me when I was a boy was Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley. It started with the Inquisition and the torture of Jews and continued to the conquest of the Americas and the Indians. It was then that I became an atheist. I was about fourteen when I read it. I hated what this country did to the Indians. And slavery. I hated it.”

It takes me aback to hear Bill talk about America in this way. I never felt American myself growing up, nor did anyone in my family. We were Jews, left-wingers, New Yorkers. There was always criticism of the United States, a litany about the degradation of workers, the too-high regard for men like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, the lack of respect for older people, the dirty streets and flavorless food, the racism. But there we were in America, enthralled by the skyscrapers and movie houses, the free schools and libraries, the ballparks and parade of shiny gadgets. And the steaks, the bacon, the hot dogs, the hamburgers, secretly scarfed down out of sight of our families. Not to mention the freedom to be Jewish, not to be religious but simply to be. The security to live that identity without fear. Still, it was normal in my progressive immigrant home to criticize America. Bill, on the other hand, struck me as such an American. I wasn’t prepared for this critique from him.

My father never said anything one way or the other about America. But I got the impression that it didn’t matter much to him. Where he was didn’t matter. In most cases, whom he was with didn’t either. You could say my father was excessive about independence. He once told me that you had to make sure the car you owned didn’t get the upper hand. “Don’t get too attached,” he’d say, “you know, cleaning it all the time, keeping it shiny. It has to know who’s boss.” He made the same point about the chocolates and pastries in his parents’ shop in Riga.

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