Hope and resilience

I’ve found that often stories in this paper tend to emphasize some theme.

Some of them are obvious — the holidays, elections, September 11, October 7. Some of them just seem felicitous. It’s just, maybe, something in the air.

A few weeks, ago, we had two first-person stories by writers remembering their fathers, and the week before that, we ran another, similar essay. All of the wariters — Deb Breslow, Merrill Silver, and Lenny Mandel — contribute to this paper often. Each of the three pieces was different, but all were sensitive, loving, and touching.

Why did that happen? Father’s Day is not only Hallmark-y but also months away. Something in the zeitgeist?

This week, heading into winter, with daylight saving time gone (although EST is much better for those of us who are early-morning dog walkers, and I love it) and the world going dark in midafternoon, earlier every single day, is not exactly the time to expect hope. Hope and resilience.

But — look at our stories.

To be clear, this isn’t straightforward hope. It’s not hopium. It is not unicorns and puppies.

The first hopeful story doesn’t present as hopeful in the beginning. It’s about the Israeli journalist Gil Hoffman, here for some local meetings. He’s talking about his new book, “The Blood Libel Machine,” which details the ways that Hamas and other terrorists and their supporters have created and weaponized hatred. But he ends with hope, which comes from the extraordinary courage, goodness, and kindness that come from regular people.

Ben Pinczewski is the son of parents who endured and survived horrors during the war; his mother started to hope again the day Bergen Belsen, the place where she almost died, was liberated. She took that resilience and hope with her and dragged her husband toward it as well. Her son does civil rights work now because he learned of his parents. That work takes hope — if you don’t think a better world is possible, why would you bother trying?

And then there’s Grossinger’s. It’s the story of the family, starting in poverty, building an empire that was also a haven for people who weren’t welcome in other places, Jews and African Americans. Families went there to be pampered, to be served, to not have to cook and still get to eat a lot, to not have to change their kitchens on Pesach, to be in a place where they didn’t have to pretend to be people they were not.

Love, community, safety, and hope. That’s a good thing to take into the winter.

—JP

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