Volume 53 - Issue 3

The New Journal Volume 53, No. 3

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

Nov.ember 2020

Cover art by

Cindy Ren

Editors-In-Chief Helena Lyng-Olsen Candice Wang Executive Editor Elena DeBre Managing Editor Hailey Andrews

Copy Editors Nicole Dirks Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

Creative Director Meher Hans

Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

Design Editors Brian Chang Natasha Gaither Rebecca Goldberg Annli Nakayama

Associate Editors Jack Delaney Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Madison Hahamy Illustrators Meera Rothman Cindy Ren Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Sydney Zoehrer Magdits Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Eli Mennerick Elliot Wailoo

Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, What a year it has been. Now that classes have spun to a close, Yale has sent us away from those we know, back to childhood desks or warmly lit kitchens. We once again find ourselves in cocoons of at-home isolation, this time with the hope of normalcy on the horizon. But for now, while we wait out what we hope will be one last winter of solitude, there is no choice but to reflect on this past, strange year.

That’s what our writers have done. This issue of The New Journal includes more poetry, creative essays, and fiction than we’ve ever featured before. Each piece is intimate—when our writers tell their stories, you’ll get to know a bit about them, too.

We hope that reading through this magazine will give you a little reprieve from the world.

Yours, Helena & Candice

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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The New Journal November 2020 FEATURE Talia Soglin

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WHAT’S IN A NAME? Uncovering a history through tracing a name.

STANDARDS Zachary Groz

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snapshot: LOOKING AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

Alex

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personal essay: STRAWBERRY FIELDS, FOREVER?

SungMi Johnson

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photography: UNTITLED

Caroleine James

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personal essay: MEMOIRS OF A FUTURE WORLD-FAMOUS FEMALE JAZZ SAXOPHONIST

Alice Yan

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personal essay: ON BEAUTY

Sarah Pillard

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creative: CALLIOPE

Alice Yan

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point of departure: TEACHING UNDER TRIAGE

Alexandra Galloway

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creative: GIVE AND TAKE

Sophie Kyle Collins

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verse: POEM, 12.1.20 (DEADLINE BLUES)

Lucy Zhu

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verse: FIRST DATE

Nimran Shergill

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verse: DRIFTING DOWN THE STREAM

Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

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verse: SESTINA

Joji Baratelli

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photography: ERZURUM (TURKEY), NEBRASKA, JERUSALEM, ASHWAN (EGYPT)

Phoebe Liu

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endnote: ASYNCHRONY

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Lighthouse Point, New Haven, 1931.

Looking at the Lighthouse A writer contemplates the mystery of lighthouses. _______________________________

By Zachary Groz

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n mid-November, I started reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and, like James Ramsay, one of the novel’s main characters, I developed something of an idée fixe about visiting one. Lighthouses embody a contradiction I wanted to understand––they are, in Woolf’s words, “endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.” The timing seemed right to reconcile the two: I had recently recovered from COVID-19 and finished a lonely quarantine. So on a wind-bitten day before Thanksgiving, I trekked out to Five Mile Point lighthouse, which sits on a promontory at the lip of New Haven Harbor. I was hoping for illumination–– what else would a lighthouse provide?––to see whether visiting the place, as if consulting an oracle, might resolve the antithesis Woolf identified.

On the beach, Five Mile Point lighthouse is massive and deceptively everywhere. Swivel your head in any direction and it will eventually show itself. I climbed the staircase leading to the optic section at the top of the lighthouse––a 74-step spiral that narrows like the chamber of a seashell––with the sound of shards of stone crunching under foot caroming off the walls.

Late in the day, the glass enclosure, seventy feet in the air, no more than six feet in diameter and eight in height, fills with sunlight but does not glow. The scene expands but the room constricts.

From this vantage, at the tower’s crown, New Haven’s skyline looks small and secret, like it was never supposed to be seen from this side, denuded of smokestacks and golden when the sun is low. The view is about the boldest illustration of New Haven’s conquest of the coast. Looking out, I could see all of the city from City Point to the East Shore and, on the horizon, oil tankers and oyster fishers navigating the waters, a marriage of the new and old New Worlds. New Haven follows a rule about coastal cities: their progress depends on their mastery of the sea. Mastery of the sea was impossible without a lighthouse.

For thirty years, Five Mile Point did what it could to guide seafarers into port, but because it was situated too far inland, its light was dim to the point of invisibility in thick fog and ships kept running their keels over the rocks in the harbor. In 1877, the lighthouse was decommissioned, stripped of its fog bell and 4,000pound lens. On the inside, all that’s left is the view out. At the top of Five Mile Point I realized, as James Ramsay eventually does, that the allure of lighthouses is in the distance from them—that I was only in “a stark tower on a bare rock.”

Across the water, I could faintly make out New Haven’s other lighthouse, the active one, Southwest Ledge Light. And though I had just come to understand what reaching a lighthouse does to its allure, what is lost in the summit, I wanted to get closer. *** I couldn’t. Southwest Ledge Light is privately owned but under the Coast Guard’s jurisdiction. Hoping to catch a ride out to the island on one of the Coast Guard’s regular maintenance visits, I called the New Haven station so many times that the officers started to recognize my voice (“ayyy, it’s you again!”). They told me it would be months before conditions would be right for a trip out and even then nothing was guaranteed. In the meantime, photographs of the lighthouse would have to suffice.

The photographs seemed to capture what the early American daguerreotypist Albert Southword said the medium can: the “soul of the subject itself.” Because they have the features of a body––neck, face, and complexion––and suggest an inner life with cycles of ruin and grace, lighthouses have been ripe for anthropomorphizing. A picture taken by the Coast Guard in 1903 shows Southwest Ledge Light pallid and forgotten––the soul of a different American Gothic. The lighthouse stands on less than an acre of breakwater, an

artificial landing made from the rubble of underwater rock, or “riprap.” Its footprint extends no longer than a brontosaurus from tail to jaw and the boulders that jut toward the mainland, shrinking as the water deepens, resemble vertebrae. The smallness of the island is apparent and the water in the foreground twists like in a Munch painting. The lighthouse’s Second Empire exterior and mansard roof were meant to make it look homey, but to today’s eyes the structure looks haunted, as if a turret of a Victorian mansion had harpooned its way through the rock, leaving the rest of the house submerged.

Given the building’s eeriness, I wondered whether it had been the scene of something brutal. Journal entries from the winter of 1907-8 confirmed my suspicion, prefiguring the plot of Robert Eggers’ 2019 period horror film The Lighthouse: an assistant tried to kill the head keeper twice, the first time with a fire axe, the second with a butcher’s knife. Failing, he rowed to shore and committed suicide. Lighthouse folklore is replete with other accounts of madness: the first two keepers at the Phare de Tévennec, a lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, were driven insane by what they believed were the voices of ghosts; Theed “Crazy” Judson, a keeper at Stratford Point Light in Connecticut, claimed to have seen sea serpents and mermaids rising from the water.

The trope of the deranged lighthouse keeper is easy to rationalize. The labor and repetition were relentless: every night polishing the lens of the lamp, stoking the fire within it with explosive whale oil, cranking the light nonstop during storms, and enduring the blow of the foghorn every fifteen seconds, like a clockwork song of the sirens, sometimes for weeks

_______________________________ Late in the day, the glass enclosure, seventy feet in the air, no more than six feet in diameter and eight in height, fills with sunlight but does not glow. The scene expands but the room constricts. _______________________________ Design by Natasha Gaither

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lighthouse to use a Fresnel lens, the invention said to have “saved a million ships.” A Fresnel lens looks like a twelve-foot-tall Fabergé egg made of glass with concentric rings etched on the surface in the shape of rippling water. It aligns an array of prisms on incrementally more dramatic angles to collimate, or make parallel, the rays of light from an oil lamp, concentrating them into a single intense beam. By the mid-19th century, most lighthouses had one. Fresnel lenses were also used in early car headlamps, movie projectors, cameras, and aircraft carrier landing strips.

Many modern conveniences still Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse, 2019. have a little lighthouse in them.

Most lighthouses today don’t use a Fresnel lens. Blinking LEDs have on end. A keeper’s day might leave too little room for quiet contemplation, or too much. “The trouble with replaced them and GPS, VHF radio, and other comour life here,” said Milton Herbert Reamy, a Massachu- puter electronics have reduced them to failsafes. All but setts keeper, “is that we have too much time to think.” a few have been automated. There are still a few dozen What’s more, some scholars speculate, in bathing their civilian keepers, but the last generation of keepers in lenses in liquid mercury to reduce the friction of the the Coast Guard has dwindled to one: Sally Snowman, bearings beneath the lamp, keepers inadvertently poi- who has been tending the light in Boston Harbor for soned themselves and triggered a kind of psychosis, the past 17 years. Snowman’s post is mandated by an more commonly known as mad hatter syndrome. Bore- act of Congress, which made Boston Light, the oldest dom, hard labor, and chemical exposure were a perfect lighthouse in the country, a kind of antiquarian simulation of what it once was. storm many keepers could not weather.

Boston Light’s old Fresnel lens shines a warm beam *** But the job was done nonetheless, and done for mil- for 20 miles more than is needed to bring ships into lennia, all the way back to the Phoenicians, who built port, but, according to Snowman, its intensity feeds a a network of navigational aids throughout the Mediter- longing in the psyche, its sweeping rays coming down ranean––temples with eternal flames that priests lit at “like a shield to the horizon.” The light “means many night. The Greeks did the same with their city-states. things to people on metaphysical and spiritual levels,” The Romans built towers at Ostia, Ravenna, Pozzuoli, she told me, “and they don’t want to see that go.” For Messina, Dover, and Boulogne, each integral to the an opening bid of 10,000 clams, they don’t have to. settlement of port cities and the empire’s expansion. The National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act Controlling light made longer voyages possible and of 2000 set off a surge in the buying of derelict lightwith them a larger geography of exchange and war, houses: Southwest Ledge Light was auctioned off, in connecting mariners to the land and civilizations with 2016, to Beacon Preservation, which owns lighthouses one another. Centuries later, lighthouses became some up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the Werth of the world’s first non-military public works, adding Family Foundation; earlier this year, Chesapeake Bay nuance to the role of the state and laying the founda- Lighthouse, offshore in Baltimore, was sold to a private buyer for upwards of $60,000; and there are now five tion for its infrastructure.

Every empire learned pharology, the science of light- lighthouses on the Great Lakes alone up for auction. house construction, named after the island of Pharos, Some bid for their beauty, others for what they hope where the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria was built. they might reveal. *** Long after the Lighthouse of Alexandria became a ruin Tonight in New Haven Harbor, having slept through and Rome an idea, the modern empires of France, Britain, and America advanced the art. The Tour de the day, Southwest Ledge Light’s lamp will spin.

Cordouan in France, completed in 1611, was the first Tomorrow night it will do the same. And seemingly for-

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ever in a convergence of systems: ancient and modern, utilitarian and romantic, rational and uncanny, the deep alone and the always together. In believing that I would find some meaning by making it to the lighthouse, I committed an error of reification, mistaking the concrete for its idea, the place for what it symbolizes. Southwest Ledge Light and its terrain are still a mystery to me and I’d like to keep it that way. Knowing its stairs are there, and that they lead somewhere, is enough.

--Zachary Groz is a Sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College and an Associate Editor.

Southwest Ledge Lighthouse, 1903.

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design by Brian Chang

Strawberry Fields StrawForever?

A personal essay

By Alex*

M

y father is awake before the sun rises. My mother, up before both of them, labors at the stove. Breakfast is a plate of chilaquiles, a cup of Nestlé, and half a concha—a breakfast proven to be great for the soul, albeit not so much for the stomach. On the TV, the Univision weatherman announces the possibility of rain in the afternoon.

It doesn’t come around often, but when it does, all the strawberry fields flood, making it impossible for agricultural laborers to work without getting—literally—stuck in the mud. My parents react quickly; they can get more hours in if they leave now.

As they drop their still-full plates in the sink, I drag myself out of bed for my first class, a 9:25 AM lecture that has, unfortunately, become a 6:25 AM lecture since I decided to enroll in my Yale courses remotely and ride out the pandemic at home. “Leaving already?” I ask them. One of the plus sides of living where we do—in an apartment complex that used to be a labor camp deep in the agricultural fields of Watsonville, California—is that my parents don’t need to drive very far to get to work, which allows our mornings to go by a little slower.

Today, though, it’s not the distance that they’re worried about, but the time. Because my parents get paid by the hour—$5.75 plus $1.50 per box of strawberries they fill—the rain is an unwelcome guest. True downpours can mean days before the ground beneath their feet is stable enough to sustain their work again. Perhaps selfishly, I ask it to come.

To pour hot and hard from the sky and drench the earth and stop it all in exchange for a few days of rest. But because I know that my parents’ hands have never been comfortable with idleness, this prayer is kept between myself and the skies, and to them I only say, “Okay. Cuídense. Remember to wear your masks.”

Take care. Over the years my parents’ bodies have accumulated trauma from spending their days upside down, bent over with their hands almost buried under the hot earth, laboring from sunrise to sunset in the unforgiving fields that we call home. Maybe due to pride, maybe denial, my parents aren’t the type to talk about where their bodies carry the strain. But I can’t look away. I see it in their calloused hands and feet. Bruised knees. Sunburnt necks and the tops of their hands. My father’s swollen ankles. The small of my mother’s tense back.

Everywhere I look I see evidence of bodies valued only for the labor that is slowly becoming their ruin.

So, I worry. I tell them to be careful because I know the world considers them disposable and because they are not. Sometimes I become frustrated at my parents’ optimism about their position because I know too much to be optimistic. I know that although Latinx people make up only about a third of Santa Cruz County’s population, they account for over half of our COVID-19 cases.

I know that although Watsonville residents are only twenty percent of the county’s population,

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they make up fifty percent of the county’s cases. I know that in July of this year, the California Institute for Rural Studies found that farmworkers in my county are three times as likely as other essential workers to test positive for COVID-19. I know that if my parents were to get sick they would be vulnerable because of the parts of their bodies already worn down by their labor, and I know that because undocumented workers are not eligible for stimulus checks, disability benefits, or health insurance, my parents will be forced to keep disregarding their bodies for as long as possible. I feel like my parents are being held hostage. This makes me want to cry and scream and break some shit in anger, but my parents don’t see it the way I do. To them, it’s just the way it’s always been.

In my earliest memory, I am four years old and running over white and green kitchen tiles, opening empty cupboards, and standing in the door frame of my childhood bedroom yelling, “I call this one!” It was the day that we moved into our current apartment, the first home of our own, and the world was brimming with possibility.

“I feel like my parents are being held hostage. This makes me want to cry and scream and break some shit in anger, but my parents don’t see it the way I do. To them, it’s just the way it’s always been.”

In the few months after we received confirmation that we had been approved to move into Jardines del Valle, the official name for the MidPen owned housing complex, my parents had crafted a perfect fantasy of our new home. A playground. A basketball court. A room of my own—not just one for the four of us. A soccer field. Lots of space to run and play. “Un sueño,” they called it. A dream.

At the time I didn’t know, of course, what was so miraculous about it. Later I learned that since MidPen Housing renovated the complex in 1996 specifically for low-income agricultural workers and their families, we were only able to afford it because the rent was partly subsidized. Known first as Murphy’s Camp, and later as El Campo del Hoyo, the place has endured for a hundred years as a permanent site of contradiction, a place for laborers where no labor occurs, an enclave for rest. Over the past few

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months, since the coronavirus pandemic forced me to come home from college, I’ve been trying to figure out my place here. I walk around my neighborhood looking for answers, or maybe ghosts, imagining the stories that have passed through here in the hopes that they’ll help me discover my own.

Fermin Tobera is the ghost I think about the most. In the late 1920s, when the camp was just a few rows of bunkhouses, Fermin Tobera slept and bathed here. He was twenty years old when he left his home country of the Philippines and made his way to Watsonville in the hopes of finding work in the fields and being able to send money home. His mother characterized him as “gentle” and “courteous to the old.” On January 23rd, 1930—a few months before his twenty-second birthday—Fermin Tobera was hiding in a closet when a shot was fired into his bunkhouse, striking him through his heart.

The days preceding his murder had seen some of the worst instances of anti-Filipino violence ever documented in the US. On the night of January 18th, 1930, about five hundred white men and boys brought clubs and weapons to a Filipino-owned dance club in the Palm Beach section of Watsonville and threatened to burn the place down. They had heard that there were nine white women living in the dance club, and they intended to ‘liberate’ them. Due to bias in immigration and hiring policies, only one in fourteen Filipino laborers doing seasonal farm work were women, and the men often sought the companionship of white women.

This incensed Watsonville’s white population.

Immigrants were not supposed to ‘take’ things— including women, who were seen as things. They were only supposed to give—to give their labor and their time and their bodies—and they were supposed to do so without laying down roots in this country or asking for anything in return.

In the mind of the mob, Filipinos had broken a silent contract, and it was time to pay. The owners threatened to shoot if the mob didn’t recede. It didn’t. The owners opened fire. What followed was a week of horrifying racial violence against Filipino laborers. At Riberal’s labor camp, carloads of white men pulled workers out of their homes and beat them in the streets. Rioters demolished a Chinese apple dryer that employed Filipinos. They threw people off the Pajaro Bridge. Fermin Tobera’s murder was the tragic culmination of it all.

I wonder how long his body sat in that closet before it was picked up and flown to Manila, where his home country sponsored a large funeral for him,

his image now a permanent symbol of tragedy and the harm hatred can cause. I wonder this because those particularities make me feel like I carry him somehow, like his body hasn’t been completely erased from this place. I wonder this because it feels important that his body was able to rest before it had to cross another border.

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, my mother caught me and my cousin smoking the world’s smallest joint in one of the empty tractors that sit in the fields behind our house. After dragging us back inside by our ears, she delivered an hour-long sermon about how drug use leads you on a rapid downward spiral towards degeneracy and homelessness, and also makes you stupid. My mother became convinced that I was going to drop out of school, run off with a drug dealer, and come back home with a baby. (My mother watches a lot of telenovelas). As punishment, she gave me two options: spend the summer at my grandmother’s house in Mexico without cell service and internet or go to work with her to see what my future would look like if I stayed on this ‘wrong path.’

The next morning, I wrapped a bandana around my face to protect me from the sun and headed out in Converse and Hollister jeans for my first day at work. I was annoyed, but not too worried; working in the fields didn’t seem that hard, and at least I wouldn’t be bored. When we got there, the sun was starting to rise, and a beautiful shade of orange reflected off the tarps covering unending miles of produce. The mayordomo divided us into sections, handed us our boxes, and told us to start working.

It took about an hour for me to realize that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. While the women around me were about a third of the way through their sections, working like machines as they crawled on their knees from row to row, I was embarrassingly slow and increasingly tired. I had no idea how to decide which berries were ready and was constantly drawn to the reddest, sweetest-looking strawberries on the vine. Rookie mistake. By the time they were packaged, shipped, and ready to eat, they would be speckled with mushy looking grooves and impossible to sell. Sometimes, when I pulled one of these out, the older señoras working next to me would pause their gossiping to say, “Not that one, mija.”

By the time the clock hit ten and the mayordomo released us for our first break, I was ready to collapse out of exhaustion. My hips were tight from

squatting, my eyes were itchy from the dust, bruises formed on my knees, and I was developing a headache from the constant movement. The sun, which had seemed so beautiful in the morning, was suddenly unforgiving. I felt the sun burning the back of my neck and wanted nothing more than to accept defeat and go home. But the day was only beginning, and rest came only in a fifteen-minute “sit under the shade, drink some water, pee if you need to, stuff half a granola bar into your mouth before the mayordomo is yelling ‘back to work’” interval.

The militaristic nature of el fil was a harsh reminder of my mother’s words, of all the sacrifices my parents had made for me, sacrifices which apparently I’d squandered by allowing myself to be a normal teenager. “This is where you’ll end up,” she told me, “If you don’t start taking your future more seriously.” I did start taking it more seriously, not because I particularly cared about where I ended up, but because I understood that my future was inextricably tied to my family’s, and I wanted their story to end somewhere other than those fields.

Almost a full five years later, I’m well on my way to receiving a degree from Yale, which should make me feel like I’ve made some progress toward improving my family’s position. But mostly it just makes me angry, because I also feel like I’m being held hostage. When I was in high school, teachers would tell me that because I was so “gifted,” I would surely be the one to make it out of the barrio and have the opportunity to go to college on a scholarship. When I received my acceptance letter, it felt like all the pieces were falling into place: an Ivyleague degree, a six-figure income, a future where I could give my parents a comfortable life and an opportunity to finally rest.

Instead, I got to Yale and came face to face with the reality of how institutional power permeates every facet of elite universities and makes it impossible for marginalized students to survive their four years unscathed. In my classes, I sat through hearing my exorbitantly wealthy peers think about poverty and racism for the first time while my lived experiences were pushed aside or tokenized.

During my first year, I learned how disposable students are to Yale when one of my best friends was forced to withdraw from school because she failed a class when her mother had cancer. The administration’s attitude of “business as usual” during this pandemic and during the 2020 election has proven that humanity is not one of their priori-

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ties. This immense pressure to perform under any circumstances makes it clear to me that Yale does not care about us—we are here to support the university’s brand of diversity and equity, and that is it.

Yet I continue to study for the same reason that my parents continue to work, because I am fulfilling a promise, and also because there is no other option.

On the day I went to work with my mother, we got home at about 4:30 in the afternoon and my exhausted body demanded rest from me for several hours. I slept through dinner and didn’t wake up until about 9 p.m.; when I did wake up, there was a heating pad thrown over my back and two tablets of Advil on my bedside table. My parents didn’t wake me up for work the next day even though the terms of my punishment were that I would continue for the rest of the summer. Every time I think about how my parents didn’t want me to put my body through for even one more day what they have theirs for decades, I start to cry. I don’t know how I’m supposed to allow myself to rest. I haven’t earned it.

When I wander around my neighborhood, I picture how many generations of farmworkers have lived and died here, how many bodies have decayed and resisted here, and I allow myself to feel a little hope. I remind myself that the problem didn’t start with me and that it probably won’t end with me, but that that’s okay. Although to others we may be disposable, we are not to each other. That is enough to guarantee that the struggle for a better world will not end with me, and that someday it won’t be this way anymore.

--Alex is a student at Yale University.

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Untitled, by Sungmi Johnson

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Memoirs of a Future

World-Famous

Female Jazz Saxophonist W

hen I was in middle school, back in Salt Lake City, my saxophone teacher used to recline in his ergonomic wheelie chair, rest his interlocked fingers on his gut, and tell me I was special. Sometimes, he would spend the entirety of our allotted hour telling me so. Caroleine, you’ve got a gift. Caroleine, you’ve got style. Caroleine, your tone is exceptional. This pedagogical approach irritated me, not because it was unhelpful, but because it was redundant. I already knew I was special. I was the most complex, interesting, talented, attractive person in my acquaintance, possibly the entire world. When Kate Moss was fourteen, she had bow-legs and crooked teeth. When Joseph Smith was fourteen, he couldn’t even spell “arithmetic.” At fourteen, I had clear skin, a 4.0 GPA, and the biggest boobs in my immediate family. I could (and often did) use “defenestrate” in a sentence. My theophany was just around the corner.

To pass the time until cosmic forces swept me into a new life, my teacher encouraged me to audition for Caleb Chapman’s Little Big Band. Caleb Chapman was Glenn Miller for Mormon kids. His twenty-twopiece youth swing band practiced forty-five minutes south of Salt Lake in a beige building wallpapered with awards, commemorative plaques, and gushy newspaper

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By Caroleine James Design by Natasha Gaither

articles. On the first day of rehearsal, Caleb told the rhythm section to give him a twelve-bar blues. Twelvebar blues is a basic chord progression that spits you out where you started. Jazzified John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. Caleb pointed at the kid next to me, the first chair alto saxophone. (I was sure this was a clerical error. He was in my seat.) I didn’t know it at the time, but his name was Evwan Hatch.* He was twelve years old with skinny calves, skinny ankles, skinny arms, and long, skinny fingers. Poor sacrificial lamb.

He stood up and took a deep breath.

Usually, young saxophonists sound strangled. Their facial muscles struggle to prevent their bottom teeth from gouging their lower lip. You can hear the struggle. You can hear the gurgle and buzz of excess saliva, the uncertain tongue, the lag time caused by groping

fingers and a groping brain. Their teeth put pressure on the reed. The reed squeaks. Their swing is “ricky-ticky:” an onomatopoeic term for stilted spaces between notes.

They’re in the dark, eyes closed, frantically stringing together one sound after another. Not all young saxophonists, however, are “usual.”

Evan’s tone was steady, full, and bright like a bell.

He flung glissandos into the air and they sounded celebratory. His notes came to a point, they rose, they fell, they obeyed the dictates of comic timing. Imagine a beloved yet assertive uncle telling you a story he’s told a million times before. A good saxophone solo is like speaking without words. Evan spoke.

After Evan sat down, Caleb pointed at me. The chk chk chk of the drums was deafening. I tried

Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer

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the rhythm section was “in pocket”1 and the horns “attacked together.” One afternoon, Caleb paused rehearsal to ask each student who their musical inspiration was. Michael Brecker, Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, Wycliffe Gordon, Freddie Hubbard. . . Sitting there, listening to the litany of unfamiliar names, I realized that I didn’t know beans about jazz. I could name one jazz song I enjoyed (“Minnie the Moocher”), and that was only because it included the word “hoochie-coocher.” Evan liked Kenny Garrett.

Evan Hatch, seventh-grader from American Fork, UT, actually listened to experimental 90’s post-bop with titles like “Sing a Song of A Song.”

On purpose.

Saxophone was my fourth favorite hobby. The coveted first place spot was reserved for standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror and pretending I was on Jimmy Fallon.

JIMMY: Caroleine, I absolutely adore your latest album, Special Girl. I hear the critics adore it too. Can you tell us a bit about your musical journey?

ME: Well, Mr. Fallon— JIMMY: Call me Jimmy.

Charlie Parker, Saxophonist known for pioneering the bebop style of jazz.

ME: Well, Jimmy, I may be a famous female saxophonist, but my road has not been an easy to recall some shred of wisdom from my teacher, but one. When I was fourteen, this kid named all I could come up with was, “Caroleine, you’ve got Evan Hatch punched me in the face and called me a gift.” To me, music was a piece of paper with notes a bitch and said I’d never amount to a thing. I wanted on it, handed down by a higher power and polished in to defenestrate him, but of course, my higher self preadvance through intensive practice. None of this off- vailed. Evan, if you’re watching this— the-cuff, stand-and-deliver nonsense. I sat out the jam session.

From that day onward, Evan Hatch ruled my mind.

He didn’t know it, but the two of us were locked in mortal combat: he, the cruel musical tyrant, I, the lovable and soon-to-be-triumphant underdog. I started practicing every day. I practiced in the basement and in my grandpa’s car. I ran scales like I was supposed to, worked my long tones, did that weird little waaaaahyayayayaya vibrato exercise. I practiced with a stack of Jamey Aebersold books. After Jamey’s monotone “Ah one. Ah two. Ah one. Two. Three. Four,” I would offer up a joyless rendition of “Song For My Father.” I didn’t know if I was getting better because I couldn’t hear myself. My deafening inner monologue drowned Evan Hatch was unaware of my underdog narraout the sound of the chord changes: what’s the third tive and selfishly refused to conform to it. First of all, in Eb7 wait don’t play the third that’s too obvious wait he was two years younger than me—a big difference you missed it now we’re in Db7 what’s the third in Db7 when you’re in middle school. Second of all, he was a wait. nice person, the kind of nice you have to be when you The band met every week. After a couple of months, have ten siblings. His laughter was high-pitched and

__________________________ From that day onward, Evan Hatch ruled my mind. He didn’t know it, but the two of us were locked in mortal combat: he, the cruel musical tyrant, I, the lovable and soon-to-be-triumphant underdog. __________________________

1 This is a very technical jazz term. It means grooving, vibing etc.

You know it when you hear it.

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frequent. He wore a uniform, cartoon-character style: thick-rim glasses, Brigham Young University t-shirt, tan cargo shorts, white tube socks pulled all the way up. He was sweet. And I hated him anyway.

The Little Big Band experience culminated in the Peaks Jazz Festival, an annual event that drew musicians from all over the country. Peaks was my last shot to turn my jazz career into an inspirational drama à la Chariots of Fire. Initially, I planned to play the most exquisite alto-sax solo ever to grace human ears, the kind of solo that would make Charlie Parker rise from his grave, hand me a Selmer Mark VI, and tell me, “You’ve got it, kid.” As Peaks approached, my standards dropped. A month away, I was willing to settle for making Caleb cry—still a difficult feat since big band solos are only twelve bars. A week away, I had pared down my

goal to “I will play a solo that doesn’t make the audience walk out en masse.” The night before the concert, I decided it would be better for everyone if I didn’t play a solo at all. I found myself back where I started: sitting meekly in second chair, listening as Evan caressed my cheek and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear.

Musically, of course. Music was the only sexy thing about him.

He was too squirrelly to oppress me, too comical to bully me, too talented to lose my imaginary competition.

Evan, if you’re reading this, no hard feelings, okay?

You can have jazz. It’s a dying art form anyway. Plus, I’m going to write the next great American novel.

So suck it.

Bitch.

--Caroleine James is a junior in Branford College.

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design by Annli Nakayama

ON BEAUTY A personal essay by Alice Yan

I

asked my mom one day how she chose my Chinese name, Aì Lì, or “love jasmine flower.” We were in the car driving back from New Haven for winter break.

She told me it was just a phonetic transcription of my English name, Alice, which she had decided on before my Chinese name. “Your name means beauty,” she said. “Don’t you want to be beautiful?”

I thought about all the times that I’d been called beautiful.

The time I was in China, and a stranger approached me on the street and complimented me on my “big eyes.” She said she’d always wanted double-folded eyelids like mine. I smiled a polite smile, trying to mask my discomfort, and mumbled a quick “thank you.” I didn’t know how she wanted me to react. I couldn’t think of a more meaningless thing to say to someone.

The time I was walking in front of Payne Whitney on my way back from class and a man came running toward me, waving his hands. He stopped in front of me and said that he’d just driven past me and made his friend stop the car so that he could get out and ask for my phone number. “Why don’t you put your number in my phone?” I said, but he was adamant and wouldn’t leave. He was already walking back to his car when he remembered to ask my name. He sent me a six-second voice memo later that night. “Is this the beautiful girl in the black dress?”

The time I stood across from Patagonia on York Street and listened to a boy tell me that, no, he wasn’t interested in hanging out with me if I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I wasn’t worth more than what my body could offer him. All I wanted was for someone to want to spend time with me regardless of what I looked like, but that seemed more and more unattainable.

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I thought about my grandmother, my laolao. She changed her name from “elegant and charming” to “always striving” when she was my age, because she thought her original name didn’t represent her ambition. She went to university when it wasn’t common for women in China and dedicated her career to teaching mining engineering to college students.

I thought about my mother. She came to the United States with nothing but a small, red suitcase and two hundred dollars to start a new life here as a PhD candidate in Wyoming. My mom raised my sister and me by herself while working long hours at a pharmaceutical company. She would come back home everyday, exhausted but nevertheless yelling, “Lì lì, I’m home!”

I want to be beautiful like leaving your friends and family for an unfamiliar place so that you could give your future children a better life. I want to be beautiful like persisting as the only woman in a department of men who thought they knew more than you. I want to be beautiful like staying up until two a.m. on FaceTime with your friend, doing nothing but savoring their company because you told them you were feeling lonely. I want to be beautiful like finding out someone remembered a small detail about you that you don’t even remember telling them. I want to be beautiful like slowly learning that your worth is not tied to what one imbecilic boy said to you sophomore year. That’s the kind of beautiful I want to be.

--Alice Yan is a senior in Morse College.

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calliope A short story by Sarah Pillard

I

n 9th grade, I briefly thought I was in love. He was charming and handsome, and, better yet, he was entirely infatuated with me. We used to sneak away from our classes to see each other in the single stall bathroom, or under the staircase in the east wing. After school, we went to Giant supermarket across the street and he would kiss me in the dry goods section at the back of the store. And I loved it. But then, at the end of sophomore year, as we sat naked and sweaty in the backseat of his car, he asked me to be his girlfriend. I practically leapt out into the street, pulling on my inside out t-shirt and sticky shorts, and said I would call him later that night. I didn’t call him. Instead, I spent the night at my friend Annie’s house. We lay in bed together eating salt and vinegar chips and tapioca pudding until we fell asleep on our bloated stomachs.

Twenty years removed from grocery store kissing and the sad pock-marked faces of fourteen-yearolds, now in the back seat of an Uber, I suddenly am reminded of Jeremy, that almost-boyfriend, by the way the driver hums to the tunes on the radio. Equal parts annoying and endearing. I get out of the car in front of Tastee Diner, the sight of which also catapults me back: this time to that high school exhilaration and anxiety of late nights and sneaking out, the once in a while successful escape from parental surveillance. Its smell brings back even more visceral memories of late drunken nights. I am going to throw up. Annie is sitting at one of the booths towards the back and I manage a feeble wave before rushing into the bathroom to kneel over the toilet. The dampness of the cold floor seeps through the knees of my pants.

Design by Annli Nakayama

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I threw up in this same bathroom after my senior prom. I emptied out everything that I had consumed that night, mostly liquid, and then wiped my nose, washed my face, and chewed some gum before going back out to sit across from my date. I had ordered French fries and when I finished eating them, I licked the salt off of each finger. I thought I looked sort of sexy until I felt an escaping string of spit making its way down my chin.

This time, after turning my insides out into a toilet bowl that smells distinctly of grease and shit, just like it did when I was sixteen, I exit the bathroom to Annie. We hug, and I breathe her in, revelling in her smell. She, too, has the same scent as always; a mixture of sweat and talcum powder that gives me a particular sense of comfort that I realize I haven’t felt in the five years since we’ve last seen each other.

“You don’t know how good it is to have you here, Mel. I’m glad you could make it,” she says.

“Of course.” I don’t know what else to say, so I slide into the booth and stare down at the lard and syrup-slicked menu, not interested in opening it because that would involve touching the dirty plastic. I don’t think I could stomach the feeling of that peculiar mix of slime and stickiness on my fingertips.

“Anyone else coming from high school?”

Annie shifts in her seat at my question and gives me a tight-lipped smile before answering.

“Actually, it’s going to be pretty small. Mostly family. A few of her friends.”

“Of course,” I say, “Seems like what she would have wanted.”

At this, she grimaces a bit and lets out a sound from the back of her throat that is closer to a bark than a laugh.

“I’m not sure about that, but it’s what’s easiest for us, and I suppose that counts for something,” she says.

“Aw Annie, I’m sorry. I’m fucking this all up, aren’t I? I want to say the right thing. But… well, I’ve never had a friend lose a parent. This feels weird. I’m sorry– –” “It’s okay. It’s really okay.”

She takes my hands in hers and her palms are damp. She squeezes my fingers and they burn under her clammy grasp. “Why don’t you tell me about you?

We can talk about my mom later, but, honestly, I’m already feeling funeral fatigue and the damn thing hasn’t even happened yet. What I really want is to hear about you.”

Her bony fingers still grip mine and I wonder if my hands are fatter. I wonder if she can tell that I’ve gained weight, not just in my belly, but all over, a little bit of extra padding for my sharp edges. My body is baby proofing itself, taking a lead from what I’ve read in countless parenting prep books: cover the furniture corners, the electrical sockets, anything that might hurt a blundering and curious child. The extra fat around my bones preemptively protects what is growing inside of me.

When I returned home from my first semester at college, I drove Annie to the Planned Parenthood clinic forty-five minutes from where we lived.

Unplanned pregnancy was scary, but not unheard of in our town. Annie left the clinic emptied of what

had been there when we arrived, but with a comprehensive plan for more reliable birth control.

That weekend, Annie’s mom was away working as a flight attendant for an international trip, so we had the house to ourselves. We spent both days sprawled on her bed watching reality T.V. about young, hot people somehow finding love through a series of inane challenges––obstacle courses, trivia, all sorts of multi-round games. We painted our nails hot pink and green, and made lumpy face masks from a recipe we found in a two-year-old copy of Teen Vogue. For dinner, we ordered pizza and even indulged in extra garlic sauce, sopping it up with the crusts until they were soggy. At night, with our limbs nestled against each other, Annie kicked me in her sleep. When we woke up, the blanket that we had both fallen asleep under covered only me.

Annie’s mom came home Sunday night and roused us from the near-catatonic state that had gripped us both all weekend. I had spent many high school nights at Annie’s and when her mom was home, she would turn on the radio, and sing and dance around the kitchen while she cooked. When I stayed late and ate dinner with them, the three of us sat crosslegged on the couch and slurped soup or rice and curry or spaghetti from purple plastic bowls. This time, though, she came home and slammed the door so hard that the house shuddered.

“Annie––did you start boiling some water like I asked?”

Annie had not, she had not even seen the text from her mother. Her mom came into Annie’s bedroom

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and sent me out with a stare. I scurried away and sat in the living room, knowing that I should leave but not wanting to be rude and go without saying goodbye. I could hear them in the room directly above me. The entire house shook with their anger. When the light fixture above me shattered and its pieces fell to the floor, I swept the glass into the trash and walked home. On my way, I thought about Annie’s boyfriend whom she had gushed about on the phone.

I was equal parts angry at him for managing to skip the whole ordeal and grateful that when it came down to it, it was me she wanted with her and not him.

She married that college boyfriend five years later.

I was a five-hour plane ride away when she went into labor for the first time, so I video-called in to see the newborn, Callie, named for Annie’s mother, whose full name was Calliope. A beautiful name, though I was tempted to ask how much say Annie had really had in the decision. But I could hear her mother, newly a grandmother, in the background of the call, so I held my tongue. Their second child, Adam, was three weeks premature and was in and out of the hospital for months after the birth. I checked in most days, however briefly, and I swore that I would make the trip out to see their rapidly growing family sooner rather than later. But then my parents retired and moved to the West coast. I suddenly had even less reason to make the trip all the way home, which is how it came to be that Annie had two kids that I had never met, and a dead mother who I didn’t get to see for the last time, and colder, bonier hands than she had ever had before.

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At the diner, Annie orders a coffee; I ask for plain oatmeal and a cup of orange juice. It’s a far cry from our high school orders of mozzarella sticks and onion rings that left grease stains on our sweatshirts, or milkshakes and sundaes with chocolate syrup dripping down mounds of ice cream. Over the meal, if it can be called that, our catch-up is perfunctory. We pay the check and for a moment, sit in silence.

“How about we walk down to the cove? We can talk a bit more on the way,” I say, suddenly desperate to get outside.

The day after our high school graduation, Annie and I ate shrooms smushed into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and spent the whole day at the cove––really a sewage pipe that runs into a pond in the woods across from our high school. There’s a path that goes around the pond and we walked along it in our bare feet, luxuriating in the moss and mud between our toes. At some point during the day, we laid down in a patch of grass; I felt both nauseated and exhilarated by the psychedelics working their way through my system. I basked in my sweat and in Annie’s company and cried at the beauty of an unleashed Australian shepherd that bounded towards us on the path.

It was hot that day, almost 100 degrees, and the east coast humidity bogged our bodies down, but we wore shorts and tank tops and tied our hair up. Today, I am wearing jeans, because it has always seemed to me like adult women who work don’t wear shorts–– we are allowed dresses or slacks, jeans for our casual outings. The walk from the diner to the cove is only

about 15 minutes and on the way I tell her about the kids in my 7th grade class and about my parents’ new retiree hobbies. When we get to the path, we sit at a bench that has been here for longer than either of us have.

“Annie.”

She waits.

“I’m pregnant,” I say without looking at her. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that while she was saying goodbye to her own mother, I was in those first giddy stages of becoming one. The day she called to tell me her mom was dead, I was on my way to my first ultrasound.

“I’m raising it, him or her, by myself and it’s exactly what I want. I’m really very happy,” I continue. I am met with silence and when I finally look over, Annie is crying.

“I’m so happy for you,” she finally says. “I’m so happy for you.”

The last time we were here together, seventeen years ago, we sat on this same bench. At the time, I was exhausted. The salt from my tears had dried into a barely perceptible crust around my eyes. After hours of sharing our every thought and marveling at the sights around us, Annie and I had fallen silent.

For a moment, I had thought that maybe she was asleep, but then I felt her head come to my shoulder and her arm slink around my waist.

This time, I snake my arm behind her back and squeeze her torso. My neck doesn’t nestle into her shoulder quite as well as hers did mine when we were

teenagers, but the heat from her body lets me know that this is still Annie.

--Sarah Pillard is a senior in Silliman College.

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Teaching Under Triage

By ALICE YAN

T

eaching, in certain ways, is a performance art. The teacher, lecturing before a hall brimming with students, is the prima ballerina in a Tchaikovsky ballet or Lin Manuel Miranda in Hamilton. And, according to Shelly Kagan, “performing to an empty theater is just completely different from performing to a live audience where you’re getting their presence.”

Shelly Kagan’s face fills my computer screen as I’m listening to his analogy. He’s in his home office with bookcases filled with leather-bound spines behind him.

The more I talk to him, the more I begin to understand why he’s one of Yale’s most popular lecturers. His class on “Death” has been so well-received that Yale turned it into an Open Yale Course, allowing the public to experience Kagan and his philosophical teachings. His stage presence is captivating, and his passion for whatever subject he’s talking about never gets lost, even through a computer screen. When he speaks, he leans into the camera, close enough that I can see my own reflection in his glasses, making it feel like he’s divulging a secret rather than speaking about Zoom’s shortcomings.

Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy, is teaching a

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Normative Ethics seminar and a lecture titled “Life” this semester, but hasn’t been on campus since March. He is not the only professor who hasn’t stepped foot on campus since the start of the pandemic.

As Yale wraps up its first-ever completely online semester, I sat down virtually with five tenured Yale faculty members, most of whom have been teaching for several decades, to see how they’ve been handling online teaching while simultaneously coping with the pandemic. While some professors found the transition to virtual teaching smooth, others found it frustrating and laborious. Some have found more free time for various recreational pursuits, while others feel drained after a long day of shouting into a microphone the size of a large water bottle (more on that later).

After hours of conversations in front of grainy screens, I realized that, in a lot of ways, we may be more similar to our professors than I’d previously thought. Along with the technical challenges of teaching online, our professors are dealing with personal obstacles just like everyone else. What started out as conversations about Zoom quickly turned into ruminations on pandemic life, nos-

talgia for the past, and uncertainty about the future. *** Only a few classes, such as laboratory and art classes, met in-person this semester. Most other classes ran completely virtually, including Shelly Kagan’s two philosophy courses.

Kagan, a self-described Luddite, admits that he’s been struggling with Zoom and prefers to write on his chalkboard than on the program’s virtual whiteboard. He attributes his technological struggles to his age, before adding that he purchased his first smartphone only a year ago. Before that, he’d been using a hand-me-down flip phone.

“I’m an old man. I’m set in my ways. I do not like change,” he said.

Three of the professors I interviewed pointed out their age when describing their challenges adapting to virtual teaching. Joseph Altonji, Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics, said that he’s “too much of an old dog to learn the new tricks.”

Age was another important factor to consider when deciding whether or not to meet in person. Altonji considered having one introductory meeting in-person for his undergraduate labor economics seminar but ultimately decided against it, saying that he would have been “slightly uncomfortable,” even if they met outside.

Marcia Inhorn, William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, also felt uneasy with meeting in-person. “I would not consider meeting [in-person] in a seminar format because of age and COVID. I do not want to get COVID-19. I don’t want to spread it to my family.”

Most of the professors I spoke with are between fifty and sixty-four years old, an age group four times more likely to require hospitalization for COVID and thirty times more likely to die when compared to most undergraduates at Yale, according to the CDC. Teaching virtually has come at a cost for Kagan, beyond just having to deal with technological challenges. He laments that he can no longer receive the constant feedback from his environment that he usually gets from lecturing in-person. The rustling of bodies if he’s being boring, the subtle “huh”s as students are thinking about a question he just posed––all of it is lost on Zoom.

“I feel the difference. I feel stiffer lecturing. I feel less in the flow,” he added.

Some professors, unlike Kagan, feel too much in the flow. Altonji misses being interrupted by spontaneous questions from his students, saying that oftentimes this semester he would lecture for ten minutes without interruption. William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Eco-

nomics, has the same problem and reminds himself not to “go on and on and on.” Laughing, he says, “[Zoom] is not a very lively medium.”

As I talked to more professors, I found that the problems we students face with virtual classes are comparable, yet still vastly different from the ones our professors face. Sure, we might all experience the occasional bad WiFi connection, but if their Internet goes down, a class of one hundred students is left in silence. If ours goes down, we can get the notes from a friend or watch the lecture later on Canvas. Their problems seemed to be amplified versions of ours, because they have to manage a class on top of dealing with whatever obstacles may arise.

Beyond the classroom, professors had to confront their own personal challenges as well. One common theme links them all together—a longing for the past.

Nordhaus says that he’s been back to his office a few times to pick up books and “look nostalgically at all the things [he’s] missing.”

What Altonji misses deeply is regular social interaction with his colleagues and students. Along with his classes, all of his professional conferences have been moved online as well. “You can get a fair amount out of the presentations but you don’t have conversations with people about what they’re working on or even just how they’re doing,” he said.

Marcia Inhorn has been staying in her house with her husband and children as much as possible. She laments not being able to see her elderly parents, who live in another state.

Inhorn added, “It’s really been tough to be so separated from family that I would’ve certainly seen this year.”

Shelly Kagan and his family have also been minimizing the amount of time they spend outside of the house, resulting in his family’s use of Instacart for their groceries. The online orders sparked a philosophical debate in his household. “It means we don’t have to go into the grocery store, but we’re sending somebody else into the grocery store, so they’re at greater risk. Who is this person that’s being sent into the grocery store? This person will be either somebody who’s lost their job or needs the extra money. So basically I’m taking advantage of the fact that I’m comfortable financially to make somebody else take the risk for me. Is that morally legitimate?”

Even philosophizing has grown more difficult. He finds that, when staring into space — the main way he ponders philosophical questions — fewer thoughts are coming to his mind. He succumbs easily to distractions on his computer from the newest New York Times

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headlines about COVID or the election. He says, rather drily, that all of this falls under what he calls “pandemic-induced stupidity.”

I resonated with the relatability of his comment. I didn’t think I would have much in common with someone who had to use a slide rule in his math classes. I thought about my version of Kagan’s pandemic-induced stupidity. It’s having to read the same paragraph three times because I’m thinking about how I only walked 2,000 steps today. Or not realizing I’d missed a meeting with my dean because I was too busy reading COVID-related predictions in the Times.

With challenges, however, come solutions. After all,

“He finds that, when staring into space — the main way he ponders philosophical questions — fewer thoughts are coming to his mind.

He succumbs easily to distractions on his computer from the newest New York Times headlines about COVID or the election.

He says, rather drily, that all of this falls under what he calls “pandemic-induced stupidity.” the professors I spoke to didn’t get to where they are without adapting and overcoming obstacles.

In an effort to “simulate as close as possible the reallife experience,” Kagan asks his students in his seminar to keep their videos and microphones on at all times “so when they’re ready to jump in they don’t have to fumble around and unmute themselves.” Much to his delight, his students love to talk, so he hasn’t seen a drop in engagement in his seminar.

Although Altonji has noticed a dip in participation, he’s found that one-on-one interactions with students work great remotely. Because of the ability to share screens, he can easily review his students’ empirical projects with them. “The medium works very well for one-on-one advising,” he said. “I can just as easily meet with a student at eight at night as I can at nine in the morning.”

William Nordhaus also loves the flexibility and convenience of Zoom. He’s looking forward to not trekking a mile through the snow in the middle of winter to get to class. In terms of long distance travel, a few weeks ago, he gave a talk in Italy and didn’t have to board an airplane. The setup time for his Zoom classes is a lot less than for a normal in-person class, and he’s happy about

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the few hours a week saved just in terms of logistics.

Along with all the challenges, the pandemic has also brought small joys to the daily lives of some professors.

Smiling, Professor Inhorn tells me about how her millennial children have been home since the spring.

“We’re living together for the first time in years. Personally, as a mother, it’s been fantastic. It would’ve never happened otherwise.”

Professor Altonji has also been spending more time with his family, now that he doesn’t have to commute to New Haven from his home in Madison, Connecticut.

He speaks fondly of hiking, cycling, and playing tennis with his wife, all things he wouldn’t have done regularly had he been working from his office on Hillhouse Avenue. *** Moira Fradinger, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Comparative Literature, is the only professor I spoke with who has an in-person component to her course this semester. Her graduate class on key concepts in psychoanalysis meets in-person and is streamed via Zoom for those who cannot physically attend.

“After Trump’s administration decided to put a ban or to limit the access of foreigners to American universities if they did not have an in-person component, I volunteered in my department to offer a hybrid class… so that foreigners could apply for this as a credit.”

This semester has not been easy for Fradinger. The first room she was given in Old Campus had only two small windows offering poor ventilation and was not large enough to accommodate a seminar of fifteen socially distanced people. After three weeks in this room and a second attempt at finding a different one, Fradinger was given an appropriately sized room in Rosenfeld Hall. A permanent classroom found, she now had to determine how to have everyone’s voices be heard.

In each meeting, she couldn’t walk around but had to stay in the same place with a large microphone a few feet away from her, which was supposed to record in-person conversation so that the virtual participants would be able to listen and participate in the discussion. Even though the microphone was the size of one seltzer bottle (as she describes it), it was not sensitive enough. Because the students were spread six feet apart, it wouldn’t pick up their voices. To try to find a solution, Fradinger asked a theater student to teach everyone in the class how to properly project their voices without having to move closer to the microphone and risk breaking social distancing, and Classroom Technology & Media Specialists Tony Sudol and Paul Auringer was instrumental in providing the microphone and helping

her throughout the semester.

Issues with the microphone, coupled with connection issues from the streaming program, left Fradinger drained after each class. “I finished with such an exhaustion every Wednesday,” she said. …“my semester has been consumed by learning how to make it work. The technological preparation––being there half an hour before… staying afterwards to clean, my Wednesdays were completely useless because I was so exhausted.

My voice was hoarse and pretty much out because I was shouting for two to three hours.”

Through all of the difficulties, Professor Fradinger found some positives that came from teaching her hybrid course. The students grew attached to each other, which was one of the reasons that Professor Fradinger cites for keeping the in-person component, even though she had considered going fully virtual many times throughout the semester.

“I really found the group of students fantastic, and [we] managed to create an atmosphere in which we were all together in making an effort to cope with poor technology,” she added.

During my interview with Professor Fradinger, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car that was driving through rural Pennsylvania, so I inevitably lost signal a few times. Every time I reconnected, she always had a calm smile on her face, assuring me that everything was fine in response to my frantic apologies. I imagine this sort of patience was necessary to overcome all of the technological and organizational challenges she faced this semester. *** Marcia Inhonrn’s teaching isn’t the only aspect of her academic experience that’s changed. Her research has been completely reshaped by the onset of the pandemic.

She is currently working on a project on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies. Anthropologists of reproduction, like herself, are concerned about the ways that COVID has affected reproduction, including the shutting down of in-vitro fertilization centers around the world.

“It’s caused further delays for people who are feeling up against the biological clock, if you will. There’s been a lot of grief about that. What is it going to mean?

Is COVID going to be the reason that I never end up having children?”

I compared my own pandemic-related problems to those of Inhorn’s research subjects. All of a sudden, they didn’t seem that significant anymore, which isn’t to say that they aren’t still legitimate concerns. But, I’m fortunate, as I’m not up against the so-called biological clock, and the pandemic hasn’t severely disrupted my life and

family planning. The minimization, which is different from trivialization, of my own issues is comforting.

As I hit the “stop recording” button on my phone and thanked Professor Altonji for his time, he surprised me with a question. He asked me how I was doing. The last time I’d seen him was last May in an economics seminar I’d taken. I looked at his face on my computer screen for a minute. His hair had grown long, and he was wearing a casual fleece sweater instead of the button-downs I was used to seeing him wear. I thought about his question.

How was I doing?

I said I was doing well because I really was doing well. I told him about how much I was enjoying being home after a semester in New Haven. He told me about the trails and forest preserves he and his wife had been exploring. I couldn’t remember the last time someone asked me how I was. Talking to Professor Altonji about the small joys we were savoring in our lives was a nice escape from the pressures that this pandemic has brought. His simple question left me with a smile on my face long after our call ended.

-- Alice Yan is a senior in Morse College.

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Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer

GIVE AND TAKE In the city, even the sunsets are gray. Through the window of the apartment, the sun sinks into the sea. Its light ripples across the water, tinting the murky water golden before drowning under the waves. All the light in the apartment dies with it, leaving Michael alone in the shadows. The door opens, and Sarah walks in, startling to see him. She drops her purse, spilling its contents all over the floor. The stream of light from the door casts light on the Star Trek mug in his hand. Spock gazes back at her, disapproving and cold.

Michael, what the hell do you think you’re doing?

I’m leaving.

Yeah, no.

What? You said I could have the Star Trek mug.

I don’t care about the mug. You can’t have him.

Are you shitting me, Sarah? We already talked about this.

Yeah, and I said no.

You told me to come pick up my stuff. That’s what I’m doing.

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A creative work by Alexandra Galloway

He’s not yours.

That’s bull, and you know it.

He’s staying right here.

You don’t even have a fucking backyard in this shitty apartment.

Tom walks him to the park.

Christ. You can’t be serious. Tom? He fucks my wife, and now he’s going to steal my dog?

Jesus, Michael.

You know what? He can have you. I don’t give a shit.

But that asshole can’t have my dog.

He’s not your dog. He’s never been your dog.

What? Just ‘cause he’s been staying here means he’s not my dog?

I’m the one that took him in.

We took him in. And I’m the one who actually watched him while you were off doing God knows what.

I was working, Mike. You know, when you were lying on

the couch all day. ’m a writer. I was at home writing.

Yeah, whatever you say.

Well, at least, I wasn’t off sleeping with the entire office.

You know that’s not fair.

Oh, sorry. At least I wasn’t off screwing my husband’s best friend.

Fuck you.

You know, I think I’ve already been fucked over enough.

How many times do I have to apologize?

Like, I’m sorry for falling in love with someone who isn’t a complete asshole.

Thanks for that. I could really feel the sincerity.

You complete and utter ass.

Honey, you’re making me blush.

You always pull this shit.

Knock it off. You know exactly what you’re doing.

This whole screwed-up comedy routine.

What?

Yeah, you don’t know a lot about me.

Well, I know you’re not keeping the damn dog.

I’m keeping the dog.

The kids miss him, you know.

You’re going to keep him from the kids?

You’re really going to hold them over me?

I hate you.

I should hate you. Fuck. I don’t know.

When did we get so fucked up?

Who knows?

Do the kids miss me?

They miss the dog.

Asshole.

We all miss you.

Huh. That’s all you’re going to say? ‘Huh’?

Uh-huh.

How did I ever love such a cold bitch?

You tell me.

Guess I thought you looked sad. Thought I could make you laugh.

Hm.

Didn’t know you felt that way about it.

When are you going to stop punishing me?

Do you hate me?

Yep.

Am I what?

Are you?

Sad?

Sometimes. You know, I guess, it doesn’t matter.

What doesn’t matter?

You can take the dog.

Yeah.

Seriously?

You’re just going to let me take the dog, the house, the kids, everything?

Whenever it stops making me feel better.

Yeah. Screw it. You’ll never get what you really want anyway.

Yeah, and what’s that?

I know.

Me. You can’t have me. And you’ll never get me back.

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Poem, 12.1.20 (Deadline Blues) Sophie Kyle Collins How badly I want to write you something new journal, But all year long it’s been the same Poems, over and over

— the stretch of silence, counting penalty Fastened tight, rocking slight, again — defer, defer blame, defer decision to infinity Breath, felt and held, again — withdrawal, a weapon, and softening, my currency

The pine branches look like thin ribs again the spruces in their robes that drape The pond like hammered silver, again flinging the light off tiny waves The hens move in one bob still again they gather at the fence in trailing shape

Will I at least get back my simple heat now that nobody’s juking me?

And will it always feel like the chilled spring, when they sent us packing?

As I was driving back on I-95, the raindrops huge slow and hard, I did see something new from my car a black knot of birds exploded right when one raindrop hit so loud I thought I could hear the flock breaking apart / How badly I want to write you something true journal, But if I didn’t live this out someone else would — Just pulling on a loose thread again, to fray a pattern or fix a stitch Time feels like a hem, again and pain is fabric caught in the clip, sew machine running up seams, again, bunching them up, hearing them split Will you always do them like you did me, setting up for tailored dread?

Well, I saw Bunny in the window And I tell you I almost called out lady, wearing his clothes won’t make you his baby You must dress yourself, can’t dress no one else, can’t dress for two, hung up like a coatroom But I know how it feels to look nice in costume / How badly I want to write you something rude journal, But if I start ragging on him Soft love tut-tuts me

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Around and inside me, again

Suppose it did come rather easy to breathe with Cas on a roof on Dwight swapping selves in broad daylight, And snowy Noah came soliciting, readily enough, bold joyful pressing, Oh, once I’d kissed Kathleen a sec for days I couldn’t get her waking up naked out of my head, Then this dream of you looking seedy sucking a cigarette, making me queasy / How badly I want to write, you something new journal, but I mirror a body of work been here twenty years My breasts in ellipse like bells again ringing when I sit up and settling apart, arranged on my chest, whole bells again competing with my shoulders for Most Graceful Rounded Part My mind is mirror-manifest again and when I move, it moves, and when I jump, it starts Will I get by looking like this won’t I ever have something to make?

Well, I tried whittling in the park The wood was lightweight from my yard I cut away a handle of three shapely knots When I got to the basin of my spoon the wood revealed its rot, and I can’t do much but strain soup Got a nice spoon that can’t serve or scoop. / How badly I want to write you something new journal But all year long it’s been the same Poems, over and over The pines the pond the farm the hens The seam the stitch the fraying ends The breath the dark the mouth the bed The breast the mind the heart the rest

First Date Lucy Zhu

It was a Tuesday unlike others I, dressed in charmeuse color my lips red I, another woman She’s brilliant, wise but dynamic she meets you on the corner brown eyes ecstatic The light turns green, and she starts walking have you ever seen a fat llama dancing?

You laugh she’s funny, but wait.

Scene one, take four I’m just reading lines it says to be funny.

Go, The next one is yours You’re from Missouri, youngest of five your father writes novels your mother loves art.

Illustration by Cindy Ren family and dreams But twenty-one years! what words do I use to share them with you?

Scene two, take one I beg her to speak, but only I, am left, alone on the stage.

A stream of words pour,

We pause for coffee on the side of the street specks of pastel fall from the trees

Slowly at first, but then racing, spilling, pushing you out—

It’s my turn to share she waves goodbye, you ask me questions–

Our final scene together, on a Tuesday like every other.

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Drifting Down the Stream Nimram Shergill

A pair of warm gloved hands sets a new toy boat drifting down the stream. Carried along by the current, gently it is rocked, back-and-forth and back-and-forth.

Its stream is but one of several streams with several boats.

Torrential eddies, smooth streamflows, directions shifted in the wake of other vessels––the naive toy boat may encounter these along the waves.

Sometimes the water is frigid though the sun radiates warmly against it.

Sometimes plants and pebbles and predators try to overwhelm the lone toy boat, turn its bow one way or another.

Sometimes the rain stings the deck, but remember the rain comes in a cycle: it will come and it will go.

Aging toy boat, try as its foes might, there is only one possible direction to go: forward.

There is a buoyant force lifting the hull when it threatens to go under.

The waning toy boat will keep on drifting.

The sun steals its color bit by bit. The water wears its edges. Eventually it will break, but ebbing toy boat, the journey was quite incredible, wasn’t it?

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Sestina Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

During what they might later call a diseased summer, or The Second Great Mortality, we had a house in a wooded area with a flat, dirty roof and a swimming pool so blue on the bottom that the water looked how it might in a line-drawing, the sun a lemon.

I didn’t remember inviting over strangers, and yet, the kitchen became full of strangers smelling like fish, or dust — their summer jobs. They hovered opposite the sink and peeled a lemon.

It was when I saw the twisted rind on the rim of a glass that I disowned the house— Not mine. A place replete with skinless fruit and little pools of water, alien spillage, even on the roof.

I feared someone would skitter off the roof.

They swayed with such abandon. I distracted myself with stranger thoughts, running the crusty dishes under water, realizing they might later call it a domestic summer: an experiment in the love between man or woman and house, testing how long the sheets can smell like lab-born lemon.

No one had more lives than the lemon.

We found it everywhere, the rug, the bed, the roof of the mouth. In hilarity, we scoured the house for other gifts, hunted for clandestine weapons, and donned the sweaters of a stranger.

I think it was an old man’s wardrobe for summer, with clothes for playing golf, and very little for the water.

In the morning, I woke early and reached for my water, padded through the rooms and peeled a dry lemon off the rug. It didn’t feel like summer.

It felt like the Middle Ages, the ‘danse macabre’ parading on the roof.

Morning made everything stranger, except the house.

It could be called biblical. The house, an ark against rising flood water.

The bible, after all, is always subsuming the stranger, such as we were. Estranged. Enclosed. Still drunk and dreading lemons.

Eschewing every sour fruit. Seeking something with which to roof, or line our stomachs. Seeking bread before leaving—leavened summer.

A stranger left her cardigan at the house, in the bathroom where, all summer, the shower head spewed cold water.

Remembering an adage about lemons, we drew the ladder away from the roof.

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F E AT U R E

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WHAT’S IN A NAME? Uncovering a history through tracing a name.

TALIA SOGLIN

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n the spring of 1979, Gary Mokotoff received an unsolicited letter from Israel. That is, the man who sent it was named Israel Cohen, and he lived in Bat Yam, a city on the Mediterranean just south of Tel Aviv. Israel had seen Gary and his wife Ruth’s names listed in the ’78-’79 registry for the high-IQ society Mensa, and he was intrigued by the couple’s surname. He’d noticed that there were very few people in Israel with the same name; in fact, he’d found only eleven Mokotoffs listed in the Tel Aviv telephone books.

Perhaps driven by the unrelenting commonness of his own last name, Israel Cohen enclosed in his letter to Gary the names and addresses of those Israeli Mokotoffs. Gary, then living in New Jersey, wrote a set of eleven letters back to them: “My name is Gary Mokotoff,” he remembers, paraphrasing. “My family came from Warsaw. Are we related?”

When Gary Mokotoff sent his eleven letters to Tel Aviv, he knew very little about his extended family and even less about his name. Over the years, acquaintances and business associates and even strangers had mentioned to him that they knew of Mokotoffs living in Buenos Aires and Australia and, yes, Israel. A door-to-door salesman had once told Gary’s mother that he’d had a piano teacher named Mokotoff in Berlin before the war. Gary didn’t know these people, and he certainly didn’t know if he was related to them.

Over the last four decades, he has found over 1,000 living members of the Mokotoff family, including relatives in Australia, Argentina, and England. He’s identified about 400 members of the family who died in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. And of the living Mokotoffs, he has yet to find one who is not related to him.

Like Israel Cohen, I’m drawn to unusual names. Growing up, my ears perked up at NPR host sign-offs: Renée Montagne, Korva Coleman, Ira Glass. When family friends got pregnant, I peppered them with baby name suggestions. I spent hours surfing the database on babynamewizard.com, which charts the popularity of given names from the 1880s to the pres-

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

ent. (My own doesn’t make a blip on the radar until the 1970s.) I can still remember the first time I met another Talia, at a children’s museum in Berkeley when I was about four. It felt like kind of a big deal for about half a minute, until I, most likely, slipped off to play.

Even though I thought a lot about names as a child, I never really thought about my surname, except that I always thought my mom’s, Pearlman, sounded nicer than my dad’s, Soglin. Mostly, I was opposed to the sog-based nicknames of my dad’s side: Soggy Waffles, Soggy Pancakes, Soggy Cheerios. As I got older, “Soglin” started to feel a bit amorphous. Sometimes people thought it was Italian. I always told anyone who asked—not all that many—that it was Russian, Russian Jewish.

The only people I ever met with the name Soglin were the ones who were related to me, but I never dwelled on it much. *** am sitting with Gary Mokotoff in the fluorescent-lit back office of a building he shares with a public relations firm, in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Westville, in New Haven, Connecticut. From this room, he publishes the quarterly Jewish genealogical journal AVOTAYNU; the International Review of Jewish Genealogy.

Avotaynu, Inc. is billed as the “leading publisher of products of interest to persons who are researching Jewish genealogy, Jewish family trees or Jewish roots.” In addition to distributing the journal four times a year to about 1,300 subscribers, Avotaynu publishes an assortment of genealogical books, from the very general (Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy, which Mokotoff wrote himself) to the more specific (“Naturalized Jews of the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1834 and 1835.”) Mokotoff’s wife Ruth copy edits the articles to the classical tunes of WMNR radio. The journal’s editor, Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus, cajoled Gary into the publisher’s job at a genealogy conference in 1984, and she wields the red pen from her home in New Hampshire.

A small wooden tree hangs above Mokotoff’s desk. Its body has been carved in the shape of five

I

names from his own extended family tree stacked atop each other: Mokotoff, Friedberg, Taratotsky, Wlodawer, Cemnic. Gary, who was 82 when I met him last year but as sturdy as a tree, wears a pen in his front shirt pocket and a chunky gold chai necklace—chai is the Hebrew word for life — that Ruth gave to him many years ago. Both his ring fingers bear gold rings: one is his wedding band, and the other, which sports the initials “J.M.,” belonged to his father Jack. One day, he will give it to his grandson Jackson. He sits with his legs crossed, reclining in his swivel chair. Sometimes when he talks about the Mokotoffs, he closes his eyes and lets his hands take over.

Gary Mokotoff tells me how he discovered he was the only Gary Mokotoff in the world. The child of first-generation American Jews, Gary grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Even during his youth, he knew his name was uncommon. “If you knew a Mokotoff, you knew a relative of mine,” he tells me. But he never thought very hard about it, even though he thought hard about plenty of other things. Mokotoff matriculated at the University of Chicago at sixteen, where he studied, amongst other subjects, Gregor Mendel’s papers on fruit fly genetics, and went on to pioneer computer software at IBM in 1959. This was the age of punch cards; his first job was to write a program that would print out the computer’s entire memory.

Mokotoff tells me that his interest in genealogy was sparked by “an act of God.” He was also interested by the release of the Roots miniseries in 1977, which piqued interest in ancestry-seeking nationwide. In any case, as he waited for the Israeli Mokotoffs to write back, he dove into the archives at the Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library and called foreign consulates, asking for their telephone books. He didn’t have much luck at first. But Mokotoff would in time become an adept archival researchist, gleaning many of his leads from the mid-19 th century Polish civil registration records kept on microfilm by the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Mormons believe that the souls of their ancestors can be saved after death, so they maintain extensive records to help members

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of the church find and baptize their relatives. The original records, which contain some two billion names, are stored in a massive granite vault in a mountain range in Utah. They are not without controversy, because they list not just actual ancestors of church members but countless other people—including Jews—just in case their descendants one day convert to Mormonism. But the archives proved invaluable to Mokotoff.

In his letters, Mokotoff had asked the Israeli Mokotoffs for details on their most immediate family members and ancestry, hoping to find a common connection. A few months later, when he started getting letters back, he noticed that in every family there was at least one man named Tuvia. Ashkenazi Jews name their children after deceased relatives, so this suggested that all the families were one family, linked together by a common ancestor. There was a catch, though: there had never been a Tuvia in Mokotoff’s own family. But—and Mokotoff says this is the key to most genealogical problems—it was all about knowing what questions to ask. He knew the Hebrew names of most of his family members. One day, speaking to a cousin of his father’s, he realized he didn’t know what his Uncle Joe’s Hebrew name had been, so he asked. His father’s cousin said, “‘Uncle Joe? Oh yeah, I remember. His name was Tuvia.’”

In the years that followed the discovery of his own Tuvia, Gary Mokotoff would go on to create the JewishGen Family Finder and the computer database for the National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, now housed at the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall.

He was the first person to receive a lifetime achievement award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. The Forward has called him an “all-around makher,” or mover and shaker, of Jewish genealogy. In 1993, Mokotoff retired from his software business and devoted himself to Avotaynu, which has always been self-sustaining but never exactly rolling in cash. When I ask him why he is so interested in names, in genealogy, he tells me that my question is a strange one. “It’s kind of like saying, what makes you interested in baseball?” *** hen I was ten or so, I spent so much time browsing the family tree my dad constructed on Geni. com that he gave me my own log-in. The scans of old photos and memorabilia he had uploaded onto the site enthralled me: the sepia-toned baby photos of relatives I had known only with gray hair; the death certificate of my grandfather’s sister, who died of scarlet fever as

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A Mokotoff family portrait captured at a bar mitzvah. Gary and his wife Ruth sit in the front center. (Credit: Gary Mokotoff)

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an infant; the black-and-white photograph of my greatgreat-grandmother Rose, or Risya, her hair wrapped, brows furrowed, eyes hardened into the camera. Most of all, I liked to look at the ship manifest, which listed the passengers on my great-grandfather Ari’s boat to New York.

When Ari left the Russian Empire in 1912, he traveled under the assumed name Yankel Kazof. According to family legend, he did so in order to escape the draft; families who had just one son could exempt that child, but Ari had a brother. In this telling, the Kazofs were either friends or neighbors without any sons to be drafted, or, alternatively, a family who had already lost a son to the military. In any case, it seems that Ari could not leave under his real name, which was Aaron Soglin, and the turn of the twentieth century was not a great time to be a soldier in the Russian Army or a Jew in Russia, for that matter. So there he was on the S.S. Patricia manifest out of Hamburg: 5 feet 6 inches, brown hair, grey eyes, in possession of at least fifty dollars. (At ten, I could have recited these attributes from memory.) Ari arrived at the Port of New York, from which he eventually made his way to Chicago. There, he married my great-grandmother Sarah, had three children, and shed the Kazof name. He went back to being Ari Soglin, who he was for a good four decades until he died of a heart attack in 1954.

When I was born almost half a century later, my parents picked my last name out of a hat. Actually, the person who did the picking was a midwife named Yael Silverberg. My parents hadn’t been able to decide whether I would get Soglin, my dad’s name, or Pearlman, my mom’s; each was too stubborn to acquiesce to the other. Yael Silverberg plucked Soglin from the depths of a green Gap baseball cap and left my mom with a feeling of betrayal that twenty-one years later, still lingers. *** ver the last three decades, American genealogy has undergone nothing short of an explosion. A lot of this has to do with the Internet. JewishGen was founded in 1987; by the late nineties and early 2000’s, it had been joined by the likes of Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, Geni, RootsWeb, and 23andMe, not to mention newly digitized databases like the Ellis Island Passenger Search. The advent of DNA testing has attracted even more ancestry-seekers, who are drawn in by the allure of shiny pie charts and percentages broken down to the tenth. Mokotoff has had his DNA tested by a number of companies, but he’s more interested in what the data can tell him about his living relatives than in determining his family’s ethnic origin.

(Ancestry told him he was 100% “European Jewish”;

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NOVEMBER 2020

The ship manifest of the S.S. Patricia, which began sailing from Hamburg to New York on November 8, 1912. It lists Ari Soglin under the assumed name Jankel Kazof.

23andMe said 99.3%.) When he scrolls through DNA matches on Ancestry.com, the site can tell him how much DNA he shares with a relative, if that relative has also been tested (“287 cM across 15 segments”), and it can estimate the relative’s relationship to Mokotoff (“Third or fourth cousin”). But as Mokotoff scrolls through his matches, he lists off details the database can’t: this one’s mother is his second cousin, that one has a deceased father with whom he used to exchange letters.

Most American Jews trying to document their ancestry hit an immutable brick wall sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century. That brick wall can usually be blamed on Eastern European Jewish last names, or, more specifically, the utter lack of them. The primary problem with Eastern European Jewish surnames is that they are entirely made up. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jews used a logical but rather slippery system of patronymic naming.

In other words, Moshe, whose father was Aaron, would be called Moshe ben Aaron —Moshe, son of Aaron. If Moshe had a son named David, David would be called David ben Moshe. Eventually, various European rulers noticed that it was rather difficult to keep track of large swathes of their populations if they changed their surnames every generation. So around the turn of the 19 th century, various European states began passing laws compelling Jews to take surnames. When Napoleon 37

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Moshe wasn’t even from Mokotów—he lived in a neighboring town called Warka—but family legend goes that he must’ve liked how the name sounded, which was not too far off from the Hebrew “ki tov,” meaning “for the good of God.” The name Tuvia Mokotoff, translated literally, means “God is good, for the good of God,” and it leads right up to Gary Mokotoff’s brick wall. Gary knows from a Warka death register that Tuvia’s father was known as Moshe Aronowicz, or Moshe, son of Aron.

He can thus deduce that his fifth-great-grandfather’s first name was Aron. Aron’s ancestors are untraceable.

A second major challenge of this entirely fabricated class of surnames are their spellings. Names which originated in Yiddish or Russian or Ukrainian had to be transliterated out of Hebrew or Cyrillic alphabets. This meant that names often went through the ringer once in ship manifests in Hamburg, the port at which many Jews departed from Europe, and then again, sometimes many times over, after those who bore them arrived in the States.

Ari Soglin (left) with brother-in-law Willie Marshak.

invaded Poland in 1807, for example, he demanded the keeping of meticulous civil registration records. “Thank God for Napoleon,” Mokotoff likes to say.

But Jews were not thrilled about the prospect of surnames, and this general lack of enthusiasm shone through in their rather haphazard approach to the process. Sack-Pikus, the AVOTAYNU editor, describes the Jewish surname as a “goyishe invention forced on you for nefarious reasons, like taking your boys away to the army or taxing you.” Even once they took surnames, Jews felt no particular attachment to them and changed them with frequency, at will. Some took surnames in patronymic or matronymic traditions. When the comedian Sarah Silverman joked about an old Jew named “Manischewitz Gooberman,” her hyperbole wasn’t too far off; the surname Manischewitz comes from the given name Menashe, the suffix “-witz” meaning “son of.” Other Jews chose occupational names. Goldstein was a goldsmith; Fleishman a butcher. Still others took the names of their hometowns. Mokotoff, Gary discovered, came from the name of a town near Warsaw called Mokotów. His great-great-great grandfather Tuvia ben 38

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It is at this point that amateur genealogists tend to fall back on one of the most persistent myths of American genealogy: they declare that their family’s name got changed at Ellis Island. There’s a somewhat romantic appeal to this narrative, but inspectors at Ellis Island did not even record the names of arriving passengers; they simply checked them against the names already listed on the ship manifests. Once they arrived in the Lower East Side, or Brooklyn, or wherever, immigrants were at complete liberty to change their names to whatever they liked, often with no legal intervention whatsoever. Jews occasionally lopped off errant ov’s and sky’s from their names in attempts at Americanization. Sometimes, though, they made more dramatic modifications.

My own maternal great-grandmother was born in New York City as Lilly Usilewski but enrolled in public school as a Solawisky. When her younger brother went to school, he was listed as Daniel Oslofsky, at which point their father, who’d been in the country for a decade or so, had apparently had enough. The judge he went before to change his name was called Judge Green, which evidently sounded nice enough to him.

Thereafter, the Usilewski/Solawisky/Oslofskys were known as the Greens. *** hen I ask Mokotoff about my name, he pulls out a big red Avotaynu-published book titled A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Russian Empire. Of the tens of thousands of names inside, mine is not one of them. Mokotoff, however, is unconcerned. After some flipping, there, between Tsofnos and Tsoir on page 591,

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

What Mokotoff can’t tell me is what my name means. I hardly even thought to ask the question, because it has been so unanswerable for so long.

NOVEMBER 2020

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is: Tsoglin (Gomel’, Chernigov gub.) K: see Segal (?).

When I see the entry for Tsoglin, I know it’s my family.

In the 1990s, my grandmother had gotten in touch with a family in Brooklyn. Their last name was Tsoglin, and they came from the Gomel region in what is now Belarus, too, though they’d stayed in the Soviet Union until only a few years before. Grandma and the Tsoglins realized that they possessed the same family photograph from the 1910s. The Tsoglins turned out to be Ari’s brother Abel’s descendants, making them my second cousins, once removed. So Tsoglin (Gomel’) doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already, technically, but I’m surprised by how weighty the moment feels. That is where I came from, and to see it in print is proof.

The only other time I had read a name so similar to mine was in high school. One day, as I skimmed an issue of Time magazine at my dining room table in California, my eyes were drawn to a byline at the bottom of a page. The name, in bold font, was Richard Zoglin.

I read that byline more than twice, just to make sure.

Then I told my dad what I’d read, wondering if I was on the edge of an exciting new genealogical discovery.

But he told me that he’d already exchanged emails with Mokotoff at the Arolsen Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, looking for Holocaust documents of the Mokotow family (Credit: Associated Press)

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the Zoglins. Richard Zoglin and his brother Paul had grandparents from Gomel, too, but they could never go back far enough to prove we were related.

It turns out that the Soglin-Tsoglin-Zoglin spellings constitute a classic conundrum of Jewish genealogy, the solution to which began in 1918, when a man named Robert Russell developed the first sound-matching system, which coded letters to numbers to allow names to be classified by sound rather than by spelling. In the mid-1980s, Mokotoff and his collaborator, Randy Daitch, realized that the Russell system didn’t do a good job of matching Slavic or Yiddish-German names, so they created their own. In the Daitch-Mokotoff system, which is now used in the Ellis Island database and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, letter combinations that make the same sounds are coded in the same way. The “Ts,” sound, for instance, has the same Daitch-Mokotoff number as “Tz,” “S,” and “Z.” Double letters with multiple sounds—“Ch,” for example — are coded differently for each.

What Mokotoff can’t tell me is what my name means.

I hardly even thought to ask the question, because it has been so unanswerable for so long. But Mokotoff tells me to call Alexander Beider, a Sorbonne-educated expert on Jewish names and author of our dictionary.

When I call Beider in Paris, I’m not sure exactly what I want to hear.

Alexander Beider tells me almost immediately that Soglin is an obviously monogenetic name, by which he means a name that only one family has ever taken.

More specifically, he means that it’s a name one person in a shtetl in western Russia chose sometime in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century. That’s what the root was.

The Zoglins, Tsoglins, and Soglins are all branches off the tree that grew from that root, but Beider doesn’t know what they mean. His best guess is that it’s a corrupted form of a Yiddish occupational name; the “-in” a Russian suffix appended onto whatever now-forgotten word some single distant ancestor of mine chose for forever. When I hang up the phone, I realize that if Beider doesn’t know what my name means, I probably never will. It might be a dead end, but it’s one that all of us share together.

On my last visit to Avotaynu, Mokotoff codes my name for me by hand. The Daitch-Mokotoff system boils names down to their consonants, then matches each sound to a number. Mokotoff sounds out each consonant. S-G-L-N, he says, is 4-5-8-6.

458600 Sagalin, Sakolin, Seglin, Shklyannoj,

Shkol’ne, Shkol’nyj, Skalin, Sogalin,

Sokolin, Sukhlin, Tsoglin, Zaglin,

Zaklin, Zhigalin, Ziglin The red hardcover is unwieldy, so Mokotoff holds one THE NEW JOUR NAL

Gary and Ruth Mokotoff. (Credit: Gary Mokotoff)

end and I hold the other, while I think about how easily I could have been a Zaglin or a Sogalin or a Zaklin. It isn’t until a few days later that I realize I could almost as easily have been a Green. If I were Talia Green, who would I be? *** votaynu means “our fathers” in Hebrew, though in time it has come to mean “our ancestors.” It’s one of the first words in the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish service, which praises God and the Biblical patriarchs.

Baruch atah Adonai, eloheniu ve-lo-hei avoteinu Blessed are you, Adonai, our God and God of our ancestors Elohei Avraham, elohei Yitzchak, vey-lo-he Ya’akov [elohei Sarah, elohei Rivkah, vei-lo-hei Rachel v’Leah] God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob [God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah] One day in the eighties, when he and Sack-Pikus were still searching for a name for their journal, Mokotoff heard the Amidah in synagogue. “Avotaynu,” he said to himself—“that’s it.”

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Mokotoff tells me that he thinks on a day not so far away, genealogy will be over. Brick walls are brick walls, so there will be no tracing back to Isaac or Jacob (or Sarah or Rebecca or Rachel or Leah). But there will come a day when an eager genealogist logs onto Ancestry or Geni and discovers that their family tree has already been completed. Mokotoff seems less bothered by this than I would have expected, but I think I hear a trace of emotion under the monotone.

One day back in 1982, Gary and Ruth Mokotoff stood outside a stranger’s apartment in Tel Aviv. Moshe Mokotow wasn’t exactly a stranger, of course, but Gary and Ruth had never met him. From the doorstep, the two Americans heard some jubilance upstairs, the result of the gathering in Moshe’s apartment of a couple dozen Israeli Mokotoffs. Gary, the “all around makher” who had brought them all together, waited outside the apartment, considering what he would say when he made it upstairs. Eventually, he and Ruth were retrieved from the doorstep by one relative or another and led into the fray. What he exclaimed when he walked into the room was this: “Shmi Mokotoff ”: My name is Mokotoff.

– Talia Soglin is a senior in Davenport College.

NOVEMBER 2020

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JERUSALEM

Joji Baratelli ERZURUM (TURKEY)

ASHWAN (EGYPT)

NEBRASKA

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ASYNCHRONY

by Phoebe Liu

Discovering a special type of relativity

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oncerts are my theory of relativity — they warp time and space.

Before the pandemic, I used to slip into the backs of concert halls, restaurants, and radio show basements to attend two to three shows a week. Now, I watch livestreams while sitting in bed, running outside or lying on the grass with headphones while looking at the clouds. I know it’s not the same as sharing a physical space, but virtual concerts close the distance, sometimes thousands of miles of distance, between the performers and me, so that we’re in the same virtual venue.

When I’m at a concert, virtual or otherwise, time always seems to bend. Some moments feel like eternities, in a good way — especially silent moments, where we feel like we are suspended in air, and everyone holds their breath. Other moments pass before I even notice, slipping away before I can fully grasp their presence.

When I’m watching and listening to musicians, I both ignore and am hyper aware of the intricacy of time and how it stretches and contracts, like somewhat-risen sourdough. I watch, listen, feel for hours without realizing that time has passed. I notice when an ensemble is in perfect synchrony, or when the tiniest rhythmic detail falls out of step. Performers communicate complex rhythms with little gestures. A slight eyebrow raise. Leaning ten degrees to the left. A barely-audible breath.

They seem to read each other’s minds, perceiving time together, as one. And they’ve invited me, an audience member, to do it with them.

There’s something magical about synchrony.

Bands, orchestras, choirs, dance groups, and actors — they all aim to coexist in time. I think back to a moment this summer when I video called a few fellow musicians. We’d been in a chamber ensemble together and had been sched-

uled (pre-pandemic) to perform Beethoven’s Op. 59 No. 1 quartet that evening. Instead of performing, I navigated to our favorite recording of the piece and clicked “share computer sound.” We listened, and we cried. I don’t remember much else about the call, except how it made us feel.

Grief, yearning, exuberance. Connectedness found through synchrony. A simple act of sharing something that’s in time. Sharing a moment in time. Sharing time.

Sometimes, though, despite the beauty we’ve found in synchrony, sharing time isn’t what we want or need, and learning to take things at our own pace doesn’t make us any less connected.

There’s a musical exercise I’ve often turned to since the pandemic’s onset, during virtual rehearsals. Zoom lag renders synchronous playing impossible. So we aim for asynchrony. We first agree on a word or short phrase that characterizes the passage. One of us gives a cue — an in-character breath to show that we’re starting. Then we play. We ignore that we’re not in sync. We don’t think about harmony, and we don’t think about lining up any rhythmic motifs. Using phrasing, physical gestures, and timbre, we instead focus on communicating a certain musical energy. An emotion. It doesn’t sound good. And that doesn’t matter.

So we take away the ticking milliseconds and obsession over synchrony that I once thought defined a performance’s identity. What’s left?

Grief, yearning, exuberance. The emotions that have been there all along, but stronger now, rawer. Music is our world — an imperfect sphere suspended in spacetime. We don’t need to understand how it’s all connected. We just need to know that it is.

-- Phoebe Liu is a junior in Trumbull College.

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