Mahberet - The Mutual Notebook

By Mike Fink

It's been two years since my report from RISD for our shared scrapbook, the mutual sketchbook/notebook  "machberet"-- the summing up of the seasons of the Jewish,, moon calendar. 

 I lost my elder brother.  Of the three little Fink boys, only I remain alone in our shared local Academia.  The first-born, a Brown graduate of 1950, a chemistry teacher, a Korean conflict veteran, has a brick with his name inscribed upon it here at the sculpture of a combat soldier, on our campus in the vicinity of the recent memorial to the victims of the World War II Holocaust, where the obelisk to the War to End War keeps company with the Grecian Second World War arcade, with its Four Freedoms contemplative benches,  and the carved names of our Allied troops with nearby Rhode Island roots.

Both my siblings now lie in Swan Point cemetery.  I put a patriotic flag on my oldest brother's grave as a personal gesture of respect.  I observe the yahrzeit of my middle brother and RISD colleague, at minyan and at my home, and by staring at boyhood snapshots and at his architectural sketches, or pen or pencil still lifes which so often accompany my memoirs.

I am a nostalgic soul!   I cherish the transformation and transcendence of a box of undeveloped negatives into snapshots or pages of drawings or depictions of a lifetime of resolved or unresolved family issues.  

Another philosophical adventure is...to collaborate with students, alums, or coffeehouse companions in turning a photo into a painting.  I offer and present a few captions to explain/explicate such evidence of this effort to transmute what passes into what remains, altered perhaps, rather like the juice of grapes into a fine wine that elicits dreams.  

A professor must travel, to represent the school and to research the focal points of respectful and somehow poetic pilgrimages.  I frequent the Caribbean islands in quest of Sephardic synagogues or what may remain of them in haunting, noble ruins, and how, for example, "Statia", the Golden Rock of St. Eustatius, came to supply gunpowder to George Washington and to salute with cannon fire and boom, the birth of the United States with its Touro Synagogue launching the very, promising, concept of the freedom of the soul from governmental supervision and intrusion.  "To bigotry no sanction...to persecution no assistance."  And Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his Good Neighbor Policy right here upon this island which paid dearly for its assistance to our first founding father!  The British navy destroyed the island and exiled its inhabitants.

I also visited Stockholm, Sweden, to pay respect at the statue monument to Raoul Wallenberg, who left neutral Sweden for occupied Budapest, to confer Swedish citizenship upon the otherwise doomed Jewish citizens of Hungary, saving thousands from death and suffering himself the tragic fate and ultimately death within solitary confinement in a gulag of the Soviet Union, ironically and mysteriously. He exists only as an ideal and as a symbol of courage and of the aristocracy of heroic kindness!

I used a camera to take back a few memento images of this journey, including a visit to the mysterious grave of Greta Garbo:  she's also not there!  Her ashes were, at her request, anonymously scattered, except for this honorary inclusion with her signature in gold carved upon a handsome and glossy rock.  She had once planned to hide a gun in her bodice and to shoot to death Adolf Hitler, her admirer who had hoped she might abandon America and embrace Germany! Her discoverer/director, Maurice Stiller, lies in a nearby Jewish cemetery, with pebbles atop the marker. 

I gave the Garbo homage to an artist alum,  Wendy Ingram, who made a charming small oil painting from the quick glimpse my camera grabbed.  Finally, another RISD graduate from the class of 1965, Patricia Allen, interpreted in acrylic design  a candid of the three Fink lads playing in the front yard of a summer retreat in Oakland Beach during the late Depression probably about 1938, just before the Great Hurricane and all the events before us then and now quite bygone!