Los Angeles- August 2016

We are on a plane from Los Angeles to Washington, likely about to miss our connection to Pittsburgh tonight. We’ve seen lots of friends, eaten most of our meals at restaurants, gone hiking twice in Griffith Park, been to an evening of Israeli dancing, and worshipped at two nights of services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I met in 2005 and were married in 2008, now in a new building.

The people at the places I used to go are pretty much the same people who were there six years ago when we left, and mostly, they are doing the same things. Some people we wanted to see were on vacation, others, those who wanted their lives to be different, left town for better opportunities in the hinterlands between the Rockies and the Appalachians, much as Joe and I did. Other friends died in the years we’ve been gone, and I feel some guilt about not attending their funerals, not mourning them properly.

It took me a few days to get used to checking the traffic report, not the weather report, before going out. Every day we were there was warm and sunny, the temperature changing by what part of town we were in: cooler by the ocean, warmer in the valleys.

Maybe it is because we stayed near Beverly Hills that I noticed how many tourists were out and how few of them spoke English. Griffith Park, too, the province of gay men out looking for sex in the eighties, was now full of French, German, Chinese and Japanese tourists snapping pictures of the Hollywood sign. Years ago, the back roads in the park were closed to traffic, and there was a disastrous fire sometime between 2007 and 2009, years blending together in my mind. The only help to my memory is which of the eight apartments I lived  in when something happened during my twenty-five years in Los Angeles.

We had breakfast yesterday morning at Brooklyn Bagels, on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, then went shopping on that street for gifts for our catsitter in Morgantown and for Reva, my dance partner, who lent us a bedroom and bathroom for all but the first night of our stay. Beverly Hills is what I call “Mythological Los Angeles.” The people are all thin and beautiful, everyone drives a Porsche, Lamborghini or an exotic BMW you haven’t seen before. The women wear gorgeous clothes, jewelry and shoes, and the men are muscular with clear, unlined faces and perfect hair. Celebrities line the streets daring you to look at them, or smiling at you in the hope you will recognize them. We saw 82-year-old Larry King at Brooklyn Bagels and scores of glamorous people and cars.

All of our friends who own homes say they could not afford to buy their homes now. And those with jobs spoke of companies trimming their health-care benefits. These are problems across the country, but particularly in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Homeowners are secure. For renters, it’s more difficult, even though there is rent control in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

The more “real “ Los Angeles is the Spanish-speaking and African-American town, where people work in restaurants or at the airport, and kids go to public school. The people who teach in those schools also struggle to maintain some semblance of a middle-class life.

Our friends are outrageous by the standards of Middle America. One, from an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto, works hard, then goes out dancing every night of the week. Our gay friends from Great Outdoors, the hiking group, reminded us of how stiff and careful we’ve become in public.

Despite all these complaints, I am comfortable in Los Angeles. It seems  home-like to me. Being Jewish is certainly not an issue, slightly darker than Northern European is the norm, gay is not a big deal. And of course, our friends.  We have made friends in Morgantown, but they don’t go back decades.

I loved being out with my people, soaking up unhealthy amounts of sunshine, mingling with Orthodox Jews, spiritual and mostly more open gay people. We ate twice at The Farmers’ Market, a collection of restaurants outdoors in the Fairfax District. I used to eat lunch there every Tuesday when I lived nearby. Years later,t he same Armenian women work at Moishe’s, a stand with Lebanese- Armenian food, despite the Yiddish name. We also ate at the Brazilian barbecue, a place so good that I dream about the fried plantains. Speaking of dreams, I often spend my sleeping hours somewhere along Wilshire Boulevard, between downtown and the ocean, looking for my apartment and not remembering where it is. We drove much of Wilshire Boulevard last night, from Koreatown to Beverly Hills.

Maybe that is what Los Angeles is to me now, a dream. Hollywood and Beverly Hills are that to lots of people, but I’ve been there and done that. I don’t imagine us going back there to live, nor are we likely to live in that other dream city, San Francisco. I hope we can get back to California again. Until that time, we have remade our lives, like so many other refugees, in a new place, in our case, Morgantown.

Great Outdoors, gay mens' hiking group, Griffith Park

To ask for an interpreter, you point at your language

Brazilian barbecue at the Farmers' Market with Larry Nathenson

At Israeli dancing with our host and my dance partner, Reva Sober

The new Broad Museum of Art, downtown Los Angeles

With Rabbi Dalia Samansky, a classmate of Joe, and her husband Jason, Woodland Hills

Gregory Miller, at home in Alhambra with St. Francis (Greg is Jewish)

Factor's Deli. Pico Boulevard, with husbands Stephen Klein and Thomas Moore

Michelle Huneven and Jim Potter, in their kitchen in Altadena, which they are about to rebuild

At Ta'eem (Tasty) a Kosher Israeli restaurant on Melrose Avenue

In Griffith PArk, past the Observatory to downtown Los Angeles

Left to right: Tracy Moore, me, Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Rabbi Joe Hample at Lisa and Tracy's Wilshire Center home

Touristy picture at dusk with Joe from Griffith Observatory parking lot to the Hollywood sign

Kabob and Chinese Food A kosher restaurant with signs in English, Hebrew and Farsi (Persian), Pico Blvd.

Update: We made it to the flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and arrived home, after an 80 mile drive from the airport, at 1:20 A.M. EDT.

Tisha B'Av 5776 The Refugee Problem

I am in Los Angeles as I write this, at the home of my former Israeli dance partner,  Reva Sober. Joe and I have been visiting friends in San Francisco and Los Angeles since July 31. Last night began the fast day of Tisha B'Av, a day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, and many other tragedies for the Jewish people, like the expulsion from Spain in August 1492, or the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during The Holocaust. Joe fasts; I don't.

We attended services last night at Beth Chayim Chadashim, a mile down Pico Boulevard from where we are staying, and the place where we met just eleven years ago. We were asked during the service to write about something that made us sad - perhaps a news article we had read, or something personal. A few people read these out loud. My friend Ilene Cohen said she was worried about refugees, people who can't stay where they are, but may not have a place to go. We were supposed to add something personal to that, and Ilene did. I had also written about refugees as something that made me sad. Not just sad, but frightened.

My ancestors left Czarist Russia between 1886 and 1906. My father's parents, second cousins, came from Belchatow, now in Poland. My mother's family lived in present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. There were pogroms at the times they came, where Jews were beaten and robbed, at least, often with the cooperation of the local police. Jews who stayed in Europe, including family members, were murdered by the Germans in the decade before I was born. I don't know of any relatives in Europe.

I lived here in Los Angeles between 1984 and 2010. Refugees from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua came into Los Angeles in droves. People came from The Philipines, Jews from Russia and Iran, Armenians, Chinese and Vietnamese. I knew illegal aliens, but they were middle- class Jewish people from Israel, South Africa and Argentina. There were backlashes against the poorer, darker refugees, and the border was shut, until employers complained that they couldn't find workers. What they meant, of course, was that they couldn't find workers to work for low wages..

I felt like I was seeing New York, where my ancestors arrived a hundred years earlier. People would complain about "short, dark people with eight children" crowding Los Angeles, and I wondered if people in New York a century earlier had talked about my great-grandmother, also short and dark and with eight children. I would see people lined up at Virgil Junior High to take English at night and remember that my mother's father's parents met in an English night school class.  I still hear people say "Why don't these people learn English?" and I remember that my mother told me that her grandmother lived here sixty years and never learned English. Bubbie Glekel was married at sixteen, had two boys, and at twenty-four took them (ages three and six) to the boat to America to meet her husband, who came here first. That great-grandmother died when I was five, and I have only dim memories of her.

I've been hearing for the last year about a backlash in America against refugees coming here, particularly from Syria. Congress won't pass a reform of immigration laws, and people can be sent back to dangerous places in Mexico and Central America, separating them from their families.
Imagine living in a country where ISIS, Al-Queda and your own corrupt government are fighting, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to exert control, as well as the United States and Russia. The cruelty of what goes on there is horrifying, and we in the United States have no power but to accept refugees from the war-torn Middle East.

Of course, we are not the only country that needs to be more compassionate. I am always loathe to criticize Israel, but there are African refugees locked up there, and foreigners, if they lose their jobs, can be deported. And I read this week about asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia, who are locked away in camps in Pacific Island nations.

This is our seventh day in Los Angeles on this trip. We are in a neighborhood where many Orthodox Jews live, American-born but also from Israel and Iran. We have eaten twice at my favorite venue in Los Angeles, The Farmers' Marrket in the Fairfax District. One hears Spanish and French, Chinese and Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian and Farsi there.

I know that Los Angeles is not necessarily an ideal society. In my years working in public schools here, there were often clashes between ethnic groups, and income inequality is possibly worse here than anywhere in the United States. Still, I believe this town is less racist, more accepting of differences, than other places I have lived in or visited.

We have a spacious country. We can help people who are desperate, and still work to bring about more just and stable societies, including our own.

My prayer for Tisha B'Av is that refugees throughout the world will find a place where they can live peacefully and prosper, as my ancestors were able to do in the United States. May it come to pass, speedily and in our time.

For my grandparents, Issachar Wenglinsky and Feigie Sadowsky (Sam and Anna Wendell) and Y'hoshua Poliakoff and Chaika Glekel (Samuel Joseph and Irma Polk). 10 Av 5776- 14 August 2016

San Francisco - July 31- August 8, 2016

People were asking if we were planning a party for Joe's sixtieth birthday at the end of August. I didn't want to do that, so I suggested to Joe that we return to our adult roots (Joe from twenty-four; I from thirty-four) in California. He readily agreed and here we are. Joe lived in San Francisco from 1984-2004, and then in Los Angeles from 2005 to 2010. I lived in Los Angeles from 1984 to 2010.

We thought we would be adults and stay in motels instead of crashing with friends, until we looked at the cost. Joe's friend Nathan offered to put us up in his flat in Haight-Ashbury. He is remarkably generous. Joe arranged lunch and dinner dates with a dozen friends; I contacted my friend Art, whose parents and mine were friends in Baltimore before we were born. We traveled in Europe together in the summer of 1971.

What I noticed in San Francisco is what tourists always see: it's cold in August. Most of the clothes I brought were not warm enough to handle the low temperatures in the fifties at night. I've always loved San Francisco, and I saw again how beautiful it is, with its greenery, its architecture, the vistas from the parks and hillsides.

There were plans for San Francisco in the 1970s. No new freeways (indeed, two were torn down and not replaced after the 1989 earthquake), no big parking lots, preservation of most of the old  city. The vision was of a city where people would bicycle or take transit to work, where the old neighborhoods would be restored to their former glory.

This has worked, to a large extent. The problem here, as in other beautiful cities, is that the cost of housing has skyrocketed, pushing out those of meager means who helped transform the city. The rise of Silicon Valley, not far south, and full of highly-paid, highly-educated young people, has made San Francisco a go-to place to live.

We heard from friends in rent-controlled apartments that they fear their landlords will try to displace them. People we know complained about how "arrogant" the young are, how out of touch with local values. Those who own houses talk of cashing out and moving to Palm Springs, or other less expensive cities.

One of Joe's friends, who has done well selling real estate, said "Change is inevitable." And that's what I most agree with. The young people do ride bicycles or take transit to work They have fixed up, or caused to be fixed up, blighted neighborhoods.

There is an element of subverting the new San Francisco. We rented a car at the airport, and often during our stay had to park a mile from Nathan's home to find a legal space. With the lack of parking, people now take Uber and Lyft to work, so people don't park (nearly impossible and expensive if you can find it) but cars still crowd the streets. The city streets where the freeways used to be are jammed.

There are still people sleeping on the streets in Haight-Ashbury, and our friends took us to both expensive and cheap restaurants in town, or cooked for us. The Castro neighborhood is still the gayest place in the United States, although while there I noticed the older men on the street were still twenty years younger than I.

And that is what made me saddest. San Francisco was an epicenter of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. We are survivors of that epidemic. Some of Joe's friends are HIV positive, but coping well. Still, I felt the presence of ghosts all around me saying "Don't forget us." And I won't.

I posted pictures on Facebook of our visits with friends, and two people said they had never seen me look so happy. One friend in Morgantown answered "He's home." Spiritually, yes. I huffed and puffed more than I used to walking up the hills, and I didn't rent a bike or see Radiohead in Golden Gate Park, which I would have liked. Joe would not have liked either of those, and we stayed busy anyway.

I loved seeing Joe's friends (one of his best friends was in Europe, so we missed him). They are quirky in that old San Francisco way, very openly gay in their lives, and free to live how they want. It was only after I first met them that I thought I could stay with Joe. Still, I agree that the city has been "taken over" by young people. That happened in 1967 also, as I remember. And will probably continue to happen as long as there is a city.

We left Monday for Los Angeles, where we are now.

On a street above The Castro

Looking east to downtown from Buena Vista Park

At The Embarcadero, with the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge behind Joe

With my friends Art Siegel and Carol Gould at their home. The Oriental rug was in Art's parents home when we lived on the same street in Baltimore

With Joe's friend Randy, out to dinner. They met at Harvard

An apartment window in The Castro

A mural in Haight-Ashbury

Weller Street house in Haight-Ashbury

Joe and our host, Nathan, in his new kitchen

Anarchist Bookstore, Haight Street