I've never been one to plagiarize and certainly not from bands that reek of faded glory. But indeed, Bananarama said it best back in 1983: It's been a cruel, cruel summer.
America's lingering racial tension cast its ugly head once more with the Sonia Sotomayor hearings and the inane "birthers" controversy. Poor Farrah Fawcett got her thunder stolen by Michael Jackson just hours after passing. And somehow the suits at every major news network decided a thorough discussion on the meaning of President Barack Obama's choice of a Bud Light for the "beer summit" was more important than a substantive analysis of the healthcare reform plan.
And that's just the global stuff. It hasn't been the kindest summer at home, either.
In 1989, just a few months after I was born, my mother got a late-night phone call from Uncle Benjamin. In Yiddish, you'd call him a landsmann, that invented word for a friend so close he has become family.
"Your cousins are here!" he said frantically.
My mother was understandably confused. All the cousins in Europe were lost to the Holocaust or scattered pogroms, and those who had come to the United States had slowly died off in the 30-odd years since they had immigrated.
"Uncle Benjamin, I don't have cousins," she reminded, not allowing her voice to betray her new hope.
But she did. Vladimir and Dina and eight-year-old Phillip were waiting at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, having just flown in from the Ukraine. They soon found an apartment in Brooklyn's heavily Russian Brighton Beach neighborhood and settled into their lives, and ours.
Two years later, another late-night phone call from Uncle Benjamin -- the rest of the family had arrived. Rita was Dina's sister, a librarian and teacher in a small town near Lvov, Ukraine, and Khana was the family's matriarch, still making her own cheese as she neared 80.
You'd be surprised at how quickly you latch on to first cousins, twice-removed when everyone else is dead. "The Russians," as we call them -- knowing full well that they're Ukrainian -- were absorbed seamlessly into our lives, and they've been part of every major life event we've had for the last 20 years. We're immensely lucky to have them.
But July was a cruel month for the Russians. Two hospitals in one month is two too many.
Just around Independence Day, Rita's esophagus was perforated during what should have been a simple endoscopy. She was in Manhattan's St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital for almost a month before being transferred to a Brooklyn rehab facility. None of Khana's homemade pastries for her right now -- she's sticking to food with the consistency of apple sauce, not apple cake.
But then again, Khana -- now 90 -- won't be doing any baking for a while anyway. On July 25, she fell while cleaning Rita's bedroom and fractured her hip. Though surgery last week to repair it went as planned, it'll take weeks of physical therapy before she can think of walking on her own again.
It's been a horrible month of cruel juxtapositions. I visited Rita in the hospital before going to a concert with friends a few blocks away. When my family stopped in Brooklyn last weekend to tend to Khana, it was en route home from a Long Island vacation. The summer was never supposed to look like this.
This whole situation has prompted me to return to my childhood habit of saying prayers before bed, something I haven't done since I graduated from Hebrew school at the end of eighth grade.
But if this cruel summer has taught me anything, it's that there is value in the simple virtue of stability. Just like every supposition of racial profiling doesn't call for a beer summit, not every whispered prayer needs to call for momentous change. When it comes to the Russians, I would be indescribably grateful for mere stability.
Each night before I go to sleep, I say the Sh'ma Yisrael, Judaism's most quintessential and all-purpose benediction and wish so hard I can almost physically feel it that if God cannot move things along for the better, that at the very least She can keep them the same.
In 1941, a 17-year-old Khana had her own cruel summer. Two of her first cousins -- my maternal grandfather Sam with cholera and my great-uncle Chaim with typhus -- were stationed in two hospitals 15 miles away from each other. As she walked them meals each day for three months, with burlap sacks for shoes, I'm sure her prayers were for nothing more ambitious than for things not to get worse. Just having Sam and Chaim alive was probably more important to her than hopes of happier days to come.
Sometimes the plain fact of daily survival can be the greatest success.
