Sukka on Garfield

I was just reading about this on the Old First blog written by Daniel Meeter. I'm inspired. To celebrate Sukka in the street with members of Beth Elohim and the Old First congregation, in sympathy for all of our struggles for freedom and righteousness, and in support of the homeless, is something I couldn't miss.

On Sukkot, which was Tuesday, I picked up a book off the street on 8th Avenue, My Father's Rifle, a memoir by Hanir Saleem, a Kurd born in 1964. Too read it was an experiment which ran from sweet to a bitterness I'm still recovering from. It's the story of how his family's life and culture was gradually shut down by the Baath Party, who stripped away the Kurd's right to exist. What hooked me at the beginning was a description of the stunt his cousin's trained pigeon performed. He writes "The bird took flight, soared up into the blue sky, then plummeted like a dead weight in the void and began whirling about itself." Who knew? My immediate reaction was to chuck the Wii and learn to train pigeons. Another excellent vignette posited his mother, spraying pomegranate all over herself while making juice in her orchard. My immediate reaction was to spray pomegranate juice all over myself.

Reading the book helped me to understand more viscerally what it's been like for Kurds, Jews and many others throughout history who've had to survive at times by hiding their identity, who've had to leave hostile territory, at who knows what loss to soul, self, home and hope.

The part of the book I'm having the most trouble recovering from is the story of the writer's young niece, who was singled out in her Baathist school because she had sung a Kurdish anthem. When confronted about it by family, she was told never to sing it again, because by doing so she risked her father's life. Soon after her whole body became swollen and and she developed a fever. Her uncle took her to the Baathist hospital twice but the care they gave her was too little too late since they knew she was the child of a rebel. I have to comfort myself by thinking that she died by the strength of her soul, which refused to live in a world where expressing herself could endanger her father, where her grandparents and family were so dispirited that their gloom hung over their house is Aqra, where there was too much terror to allow any room for the music of her tiny lungs. Her name was Zilan.

I'm so glad to live in an age in which Jews and people of all religions are free to observe holidays openly in the street and be celebrated by neighboring cultures. Where I can express whatever I want without any fear of being drawn, quartered, burned stoned or flayed. Where no one can force me to persecute another. I have no idea what's happening in Kurdish regions now, I don't think I could handle knowing at the moment. It's enough to hear accounts of the Janjaweed in Sudan and houses burning in Georgia. I need to savor the freedom Brooklyn and America gives us, and every spot of earth blanketed by peace, and then get up my courage to look out.

Above, that's the pigeon guy at Washington Square Park, currently under renovation. What's his secret?