Skeptic in residence
I was born a skeptic, or that just the way it seems. It’s hard to be from cauldron of Polish-Jewish “Bloodlands” of World War II without some inner defense that keeps me and my ilk from embracing the latest ism that promises to be the answer to our latest angst – so no ism’s for me except one – skepticism about every other ism. Put an ism at the end of anything and I know it’s just foolishness – conservatism, communism, fascism, zionism, Catholicism, socialism, existentialism, Freudianism, Judaism – you name them and they are not for me. When Camus said that the sole possibility for surviving with honor is a life without illusions and lies – he hit my spot. I have tried to be true to that ever since. A quick look at all the lies I experienced tells the tale.
I was conceived at the end of January or early February of 1944 in Lorraine. After loosing it In 1871 to Germany, Lorraine, predominantly linguistically French reverted to France in 1918 only to be lost again in the spring of 1940. After 1871 hundred thousands of Polish miners were imported to Lorraine from Polish part of the German empire and they stayed there. In the second period of German control, Germany tried to turn Lorraine to be more like Alsace. French speaking farmers were dispossessed and Germans brought in – first the veterans of the first war and then the detritus of German diaspora in eastern Europe (there were 12 to 13 million Germans living to the east of Germany proper) and Hitler wanted to bring as many of them as he could, closer to the center. He tried to do the same thing in Western Poland, a lot more brutally.
My mother, a daughter of two Jewish dentists, from what became the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto (Pawia Street), arrived in this Lorraine wonderland in January of 1943, having escaped from said Ghetto with her sister, before final solution caught up with them – her escape story, life in Lorraine and my birth are covered in “Not all was lost – a young woman’s memoir 1939-1946” can be had via irenebessette.com or Amazon. She was fifteen when the first German bombs fell on Warsaw and 19 when I was conceived.
The Germans needed workers for their newly acquired farms and that need in Lorraine was again met by Poles, now captured at random or even hungry volunteers – my father was such a “volunteer” and my mother and later her sister, managed to exchange places with other female volunteers who did not want to continue to stay in Lorraine. The German farmers, always short of needed labor, did not complain. The other workers were Serbian prisoners of war. The workers were classified as slaves..
I beat the American army to the town of my birth, Morhange, by about 2 weeks. It was almost unheard of for the slaves to have children and it was illegal for them to marry. My father was of Polish catholic origin and from a very poor family in Warsaw. According to my mother, they did not discuss her real identity. I was baptized John Richard – John after my grandfather and Richard after my father’s brother who was shot dead in the street by a German soldier for no apparent reason. When It turned out that my maternal grandparents survived the holocaust – I became Richard.
It was hard for my father to work in liberated France and he soon joined the Polish Army in England and was shipped to Scotland for training. My mother, received his army stipend and also got a job from the new Lublin Polish government teaching Polish to the children of the Polish miners in Lorraine.
In the late summer of 1945 while my father was waiting with other Polish soldiers in Liverpool to be shipped to Japan to fight that ancient enemy of Poland – a haberdasher from Independence, Mo. – a city where I first got married – saved him. Together with about 50% of the Polish soldiers in the west, my father chose to return to Poland in 1946 as did my mother. They met again in 1946 in Poland and immediately divorced. My mother wanted education and to start the life she dreamed of when she was 15 and she did no cherish the idea of being married to a laborer who could provide her with more children but not resources. She was totally, as a middle class and somewhat sheltered Jewish young woman, unprepared to handle such a life. Her few months in Poland exposed her again to the idiocies of Polish antisemitism and she couldn’t stand it. Since her right to return to France was about to expire, she took first available transport with Jewish and Polish students and left, leaving me with her parents in Warsaw in 1946. They said they would follow her soon, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Apparently not everyone knows or tells the truth.
So it came to be that the memory of my mother became obliterated from my consciousness. When I came to, my grandparents were now my parents, my mother and her sister became my sisters and I had no idea what a Jew was. This was all covered “legally” by what my grandparents learned during the war – forged papers. I did not meet my father until 1984, in Warsaw, by then he had a stroke and could not talk. I am in touch with my two half sisters from his second marriage.
In the meantime my other sister Carolina, married a nice American man who was in charge of “JOINT” operations in Poland (Jewish relief agency)and in 1949, after Carolina completed her medical studies, she and uncle “Bill” went to Morocco to continue his work for JOINT.
Between 1946 to 1949 my mother desperately tried to make ends meet in Paris – eventually getting two licenses from Sorbonne but she was not allowed to work in France, only study. That did not apply in French colonies, like Morocco, where her sister now was. In Morocco, she started working for a bank, but quickly ended up in law school – University of Bordeaux ran a program in Casablanca. Thus she became a lawyer and teamed up with a Corsican who did criminal defense while my mother worked on his client’s civil needs.
In the meantime Carolina and Bill left for New York and in 1955 Morocco became independent and felt no need for Ashkenazy lawyers. My mother was in a quandary – return to Poland and reclaim her lost son or join her sister in NY. My grandparents assured her that they would be able to leave Poland within a year and it was thus that on December 1st, 1956 my grandmother and I landed at Orly and I was introduced to mom. It was on the way to the airport that I was told that Irene was my mother and not my sister and that we were Jewish, whatever that meant. Someplace over Brussels I threw up.
While waiting for our papers to come to America I went to a residential school in Brunoy run by JOINT. Since there was no French as a second language choice, I was put in first grade. It worked like a charm – if you put a 12 year old in the first grade, he or she will do anything to advance – thus by June of 1957 I was eyeing fourth grade. In June of 1957 JOINT put us on an El Al flight to New York and I was dizzy with excitement.
That summer my aunt divorced uncle bill – in NY hew was not the big man he appeared in Warsaw of Casablanca. My mother was completing her Master’s in Library Science at Columbia and we were subletting an apartment on 116th Street across from the law school. I spoke no English, went to a day camp and took the subway everyday with my cohorts to Coney Island where I first learned that in America you swim in trunks and not in your underwear. I watched a lot of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry in late afternoons – I had an English tutor couple days a week.
My mother graduated that summer and became a law librarian at Rutgers law school in Newark, NJ. We rented an apartment in East Orange – I was put in seventh grade. Since I knew enough so that I could no longer be Catholic. I was not yet ready to be Jewish – I joined the nearest church to our apartment and became a Congregationalist, on a theory that Americans treated church more socially than seriously and so it did not matter – except that it did. By the time I became president of my Pilgrim Fellowship at 17, I was an atheist and a full time skeptic. A frame of mind better suited to Jews I came to know and like. Was it all the lies and deceptions
Being a “Frenchy” in a Junior High with no applicable sports skills – Americans did not discover soccer until 30 years later – proved to be too much of a challenge. Calling a bulky black kid sitting in front of me an idiot turned out to be a wrong choice of words. When my fever subsided I was going to a private prep school in Newark – Newark Academy – from whence I and 33 others graduated in 1963. In 1962, together with my mother, we became citizens. It was then that I shed my father’s name “Borys” which supplanted my grandfather’s fake Polish name “Bakowski” and I became “Forester” after a novel by Maria Kuncewiczowa by that name. It was a multi-ethnic Polish love story about a guy who just didn’t fit, except back in his forest home.
I started NYU in the fall – my mother by then was a law librarian there and I had free tuition. She was also going to law school at night to get her second law degree. I ended up going to school in the summer and got my BA in the summer of 1966. I flirted with Phd’s in Clinical Psychology and Political Science, exigencies of draft bearing down upon me. In June I took my LSAT’s and when the results came in, I applied to a few law schools – and went to Fordham – that education was good for four straight bar exams – NY, Missouri, Mass and Oregon.
While I was in law school my mother – now a member of New York Bar, received an offer she could not refuse from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario where her bi-lingual skills and two law degrees propelled her to be the first female professor and law librarian at that school. While in Kingston, the law of propinquity led her to a professor of French and Quebec literature next door and soon enough my mother became Irene Bessette, the wife of a respected Quebec novelist, still in print, Gerard Bessette. I never lived in Canada.
In the meantime there was a war going on, which I always thought was a ridiculous overreach by the military wing of our republic, the South or Scott-Irish, who got us into every war we have been in since the war of 1812. Having received my law degree in 1969 and having taken the NY Bar – in order to avoid the draft I joined the other war invented by LBJ – the war on Poverty – which essentially ended with Reagan in 1980. I joined VISTA. VISTA sent me to Kansas City just in time to take another Bar Exam and file a few law suits. My last year in NY I met a lovely1/4 Jewish California girl – Diana – who became my first wife and the mother of my only two children – Aaron and Anna. We married in Independence, Missouri.
In September 1970 we moved to St.Louis so that my wife could go to graduate school at Washington University. My speciality was housing law and St.Louis was a disaster ever since Brown vs Board of Education made it more difficult to segregate schools. Huge swath’s of the northern half of St.Louis became abandoned, as owners burned their houses, block after gaslit red brick block. The large housing project was dynamited after Legal Aid assisted rent strike. We were in the thick of it.
Soon enough the Director of St.Louis Legal Aid who hired me, committed political suicide and was replaced by a cautious black man who did not want to make waves. I on the other hand became addicted to waves. So I made the first serious mistake of my non-career and opted for Mass Law Reform Project in Fall River. My Azorians clients, mostly from St. Michael’s, did present interesting cases, but as soon as they landed on my lap, the padrons who ran state and federal public housing in the city, satisfied whatever needs the client’s might have and I could not make any waves. For 15 months we hanged and in September of 1973 we packed up our WV bug and headed for Cuernavaca to be de-schooled by Ivan Illich. Ivan supported his center in Cuernavaca which was like an intellectual retreat for the catholic worker movement in Latin America by providing intensive Spanish classes at a lower level. This we did for three months and the rest of the time we travelled all over Mexico. The seminars topside were warning us about the “medical Nemesis”. in early spring of 1974, we landed in San Francisco in the apartment of a Long Island couple who successfully sued they Long Island school district to prohibit compulsory school prayer – did I mention they were Jewish?
Thus it was that in May of 1974, while beating the pavement of the Bay area, I was offered and took the job as deputy director of Portland Oregon Legal Aid. My wife being from California knew where it was – I looked at the map and noticed a lot of forests – clearly a good sign.
It was in Portland that my two blue-eyed children arrived. After two years, my director left and I became director of a program that had between 21 to 34 attorneys, depending on exigencies of funding and contracts. The end of the war on poverty and with it my interest in running just another service agency was deflated by the election of Ronald Reagan four years later. I left in March of 1980 to become chief of staff to a newly elected City Commissioner, Margaret Strachan.
Portland is one of the few remaining cities that still has a commission form of government – the commissioners were also the top administrators of the bureau’s assigned to them by the Mayor, also one of the five commissioners, and thus always in need of two extra votes to get anything done. In the end, we had in our administrative portfolio, planning, transportation, buildings, housing which became a foundation for my future livelihood.
In 1984 my acting out my mid-life crisis eventually ended my marriage. My wife and I separated in early 1985, got together at mid point and separated for good in September of that year. A painful process for both of us. In the meantime “the other woman” who had to have me, did not want me as soon as she got me. I did not want to go back to my old life anymore and in the meantime in 1986 my incumbent commissioner lost her re-election by a few hundred votes to a near-do-well police lieutenant, who lasted one term and whom no-one remembers. This too was a painful loss for all of us.
With the help of a very good therapist I dedicated myself to being available to both children as much as I could. Trying to keep it very simple at first. As my marriage crashed – I was determined not to do this again – and started psychoanalysis myself for four full years ( our days a week on the couch, until I got bored talking about myself). It was on January 1st, 1989 that I had my first dinner date with my current wife, Lois Gold, a therapist and a family law mediator. Her daughter Elana, same age as my son, died in a small plane crash, several years later.
In 1987 finding I ventured off on my own. First as a consultant relying on the knowledge from my City Hall portfolio, then as a combination of lawyer and consultant, dealing with transportation, land use permits and urban renewal issues. Later, after some training, I added mediation to my skills in those fields and finally in 1995 I became a Hearing Examiner for land use and code enforcement cases, principally across the Columbia River in Clark County, Washington and it’s many cities, then and for many years the fastest growing area in Washington State.
In 2011, with the housing market and construction in disarray, and my client bases decimated, I retired from that work and started spending more and more time in sunny Palm Springs, CA. Palm Springs attracted us at first with it’s International Film Festival and the 2013 season constitutes the first entries in this blog.
As of today, my children are both married working on or anticipating their first progeny. Aaron is a lawyer for FDIC in DC and my daughter workers for Kaiser as a medical nutritionist. My mother died on October 7, 2012 in Portland from complications of breast cancer – she was 88.
