Oliver Sacks, age 81, is dying, due, as he announced some months ago, to "multiple
metastases in the liver." But as he succumbs he becomes yet more
forthright about aspects of his life and character.
In his memoir "On the Move", which is to be
recommended for any number of other reasons, including the fact that it is
often laugh out loud funny, Sacks is direct and clear about the homosexuality he
had been unable/unwilling to live out openly for most of his adult life. (His
parents damned it and him when he announced to them his attraction to boys, his
mother suggesting it might be better if he had never been born.)
In a new piece for the NY Times he fills in the rich context
of being Jewish.
I include that piece here, though hope to be writing more
about Oliver Sacks, who is, I think, to our age, what Freud was to his, except
better:
NY Times 8/16/15
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/oliver-sacks-sabbath.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
Oliver Sacks: Sabbath
MY mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox
upbringing — all photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I
was told that he woke up if it fell off during the night. My father, too, came
from an Orthodox background. Both my parents were very conscious of the Fourth
Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and the Sabbath
(Shabbos, as we called it in our Litvak way) was entirely different from the
rest of the week. No work was allowed, no driving, no use of the telephone; it
was forbidden to switch on a light or a stove. Being physicians, my parents
made exceptions. They could not take the phone off the hook or completely avoid
driving; they had to be available, if necessary, to see patients, or operate,
or deliver babies.
We lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in
Cricklewood, in Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the
greengrocer, the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the
Shabbos, and did not open their shutters till Sunday morning. All of them, and
all our neighbors, we imagined, were celebrating Shabbos in much the same
fashion as we did.
Around midday on Friday, my mother doffed her surgical
identity and attire and devoted herself to making gefilte fish and other
delicacies for Shabbos. Just before evening fell, she would light the ritual
candles, cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. We would
all put on clean, fresh Shabbos clothes, and gather for the first meal of the
Sabbath, the evening meal. My father would lift his silver wine cup and chant
the blessings and the Kiddush, and after the meal, he would lead us all in
chanting the grace.
On Saturday mornings, my three brothers and I trailed our
parents to Cricklewood Synagogue on Walm Lane, a huge shul built in the 1930s
to accommodate part of the exodus of Jews from the East End to Cricklewood at
that time. The shul was always full during my boyhood, and we all had our
assigned seats, the men downstairs, the women — my mother, various aunts and
cousins — upstairs; as a little boy, I sometimes waved to them during the
service. Though I could not understand the Hebrew in the prayer book, I loved
its sound and especially hearing the old medieval prayers sung, led by our
wonderfully musical hazan.
All of us met and mingled outside the synagogue after the
service — and we would usually walk to the house of my Auntie Florrie and her
three children to say a Kiddush, accompanied by sweet red wine and honey cakes,
just enough to stimulate our appetites for lunch. After a cold lunch at home —
gefilte fish, poached salmon, beetroot jelly — Saturday afternoons, if not interrupted
by emergency medical calls for my parents, would be devoted to family visits.
Uncles and aunts and cousins would visit us for tea, or we them; we all lived
within walking distance of one another.
The Second World War decimated our Jewish community in
Cricklewood, and the Jewish community in England as a whole was to lose
thousands of people in the postwar years. Many Jews, including cousins of mine,
emigrated to Israel; others went to Australia, Canada or the States; my eldest
brother, Marcus, went to Australia in 1950. Many of those who stayed
assimilated and adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism. Our synagogue,
which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew emptier by the year.
I chanted my bar mitzvah portion in 1946 to a relatively
full synagogue, including several dozen of my relatives, but this, for me, was
the end of formal Jewish practice. I did not embrace the ritual duties of a
Jewish adult — praying every day, putting on tefillin before prayer each
weekday morning — and I gradually became more indifferent to the beliefs and
habits of my parents, though there was no particular point of rupture until I
was 18. It was then that my father, inquiring into my sexual feelings,
compelled me to admit that I liked boys.
“I haven’t done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling —
but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”
He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a
look of horror on her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish
you had never been born.” (She was no doubt thinking of the verse in Leviticus
that read, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of
them have committed an abomination: They shall surely be put to death; their
blood shall be upon them.”)
The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words
made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.
After I qualified as a doctor in 1960, I removed myself
abruptly from England and what family and community I had there, and went to
the New World, where I knew nobody. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found a sort
of community among the weight lifters on Muscle Beach, and with my fellow
neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but I craved some deeper connection —
“meaning” — in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that drew me
into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.
Recovery started, slowly, as I found meaningful work in New
York, in a chronic care hospital in the Bronx (the “Mount Carmel” I wrote about
in “Awakenings”). I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them deeply,
and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories of situations
virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to
many of my colleagues. I had discovered my vocation, and this I pursued
doggedly, single-mindedly, with little encouragement from my colleagues. Almost
unconsciously, I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was
almost extinct. This did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great
neurological case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by
the great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply
satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.
During the 1990s, I came to know a cousin and contemporary
of mine, Robert John Aumann, a man of remarkable appearance with his robust,
athletic build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an
ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power but also of great human
warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment — “commitment,” indeed, is
one of his favorite words. Although, in his work, he stands for rationality in
economics and human affairs, there is no conflict for him between reason and
faith.
He insisted I have a mezuza on my door, and brought me one
from Israel. “I know you don’t believe,” he said, “but you should have one
anyhow.” I didn’t argue.
In a remarkable 2004 interview, Robert John spoke of his
lifelong work in mathematics and game theory, but also of his family — how he
would go skiing and mountaineering with some of his nearly 30 children and
grandchildren (a kosher cook, carrying saucepans, would accompany them), and
the importance of the Sabbath to him.
“The observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he
said, “and is impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of
improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”
In December of 2005, Robert John received a Nobel Prize for
his 50 years of fundamental work in economics. He was not entirely an easy
guest for the Nobel Committee, for he went to Stockholm with his family,
including many of those children and grandchildren, and all had to have special
kosher plates, utensils and food, and special formal clothes, with no
biblically forbidden admixture of wool and linen.
THAT same month, I was found to have cancer in one eye, and
while I was in the hospital for treatment the following month, Robert John
visited. He was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the
ceremony in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled
to travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His
commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly
concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.
In 1955, as a 22-year-old, I went to Israel for several
months to work on a kibbutz, and though I enjoyed it, I decided not to go
again. Even though so many of my cousins had moved there, the politics of the
Middle East disturbed me, and I suspected I would be out of place in a deeply
religious society. But in the spring of 2014, hearing that my cousin Marjorie —
a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had worked in the field
of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I phoned her in Jerusalem
to say farewell. Her voice was unexpectedly strong and resonant, with an accent
very much like my mother’s. “I don’t intend to die now,” she said, “I will be
having my 100th birthday on June 18th. Will you come?”
I said, “Yes, of course!” When I hung up, I realized that in
a few seconds I had reversed a decision of almost 60 years. It was purely a
family visit. I celebrated Marjorie’s 100th with her and extended family. I saw
two other cousins dear to me in my London days, innumerable second and removed
cousins, and, of course, Robert John. I felt embraced by my family in a way I
had not known since childhood.
I had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with
my lover, Billy — my mother’s words still echoed in my mind — but Billy, too,
was warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the
Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to join
him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.
The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside
time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a
wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B
and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a
life might I have lived?
In December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and
gave the manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn
I had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine years
earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without knowing this, and
that I had been able, for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank
declaration of my sexuality, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets
locked up inside me.
In February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer
— and facing death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My
Own Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece for
the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and the elements
I loved, took on lives of their own.
And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted
away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or
spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life —
achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the
Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh
day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one
may, in good conscience, rest.
