Dear Jochen:  Oops... I just sent the blank email by mistake.  Sorry.  

Jan and I were off traveling again for 10 days and just arrived back from Phoenix and Tucson where we able to relax by a hot spa pool, read a number of books, and visit with friends, who had relocated from Naperville where we live.  As you point out, it is always lovely to catch up with friends and reminisce, as well as converse on topics we exchange various views about. The weather in AZ was wonderful, with temperatures in the high 70's unlike the 30-40's here in Illinois. We remain here in IL for just 10 days and then, we are off to Florida to share warmer weather with our immediate family there.  We rented a large house starting on Christmas day in Cape Coral, FL which will house 15 of us (three of our kids and spouses, us, and seven grandchildren).  Again, the place has a swimming pool so it should be great fun to be with everyone, a first in several years, what with Covid restrictions and competing schedules. We return the second week in January. 

In rereading your exceptionally well written and deeply thoughtful expressions, I came away thinking that you are totally too hard on yourself.  Look at all you accomplished over your lifetime, i.e where you graduated from, how you achieved so much in your career field, the fact that you raised a family...all these being the most important results that one can attest to.  You ponder matters that few (largely myself included) either have the inclination to consider, have the intellect to think about, or take the time to adequately pursue. As you state, you are a writer (par excel-lance) and (from what Jan and I experienced), a wonderful listener and conversationalist as well. I find your written expressions and self-analysis in this regard quite interesting and revealing.  I wonder the extent to which you share such insights and revelations with others, including your son, friends, and other family members.  Hopefully, you do, but if not, that is a tragic and sad outcome. 

You ask if there are subjects that should be avoided between us; the answer is simply, “none”!  Do I have a topic that I feel would be a truly beneficial topic that we could spend more time on?  Yes, our shared ancestry and how our individual knowledge of such could expand our knowledge of our family ties.  I have knowledge of my mother’s family and you have first-hand and researched knowledge of your generational ancestry. The more that I find and learn about, the more impressed (and proud) I become with that history. I will wrap up now, but look forward to more communiques from you. Don

 On Dec 14, 2021, at 7:51 PM, dstrauss1899@yahoo.com wrote:


 Don

On Nov 16, 2021, at 5:35 PM, Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net wrote:

November 16, 2021

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter, and thank you for your generous estimate of my writing. I'm not sure it is deserved. As long as I can remember I've felt a desire, perhaps even a compulsion, to write. That need to write is at least partly a compensation for an often disappointed, and sometimes frustrated wish to talk. I interpret language as a social phenomenon. No child learns to speak in isolation, and what every child learns to speak is the language of its family. I hear in language an echo of the universal phenomenon of humans, living, working and dying together. And I see society not only among human beings. When I remember Aristotle's famous declaration that humans are in need of society, and only gods or animals can live in isolation, I see the array of geese flying overhead, the flock of sheep grazing on the hillside, the swarm of bees in the hive or the bevy of ants scurring through their ant hills, then I wonder whether I should ask for a refund of my tuition.

For me, expressing myself in words addressed, if necessary to an imaginary listener, has always seemed concomitant, if not prerequisite to all creative thinking. I remember, how as a student in college, I would practice my thoughts imagining I was addressing one of my fellow students or one of my teachers.  Later, when I was practicing medicine next door to Harvard Law School and only a few blocks from Harvard Yard, my conversations with patients seemed to me a reward much more valuable than the checks from the insurance companies.  I remember specifically visits from a professor of German literature, who came regularly and announced at the outset of one visit: "Doctor, I don't have time to talk to you today." I am appalled by the fact that most of my colleagues consider their time too valuable to listen and hire secretaries or assistants to obtain the histories of their patients' lives.

At the same time I was aware of the forcefulness with which language impinges on the emotional and intellectual ambience. In my medical practice, I listened without critical comment to everything that my patients had on their minds, and many of them entertained political notions and religious experiences very different from my own. I restrained myself from expressing any ideas which might make my patients uncomfortable. I wanted my consultation room to be a place of neutrality where all patients felt at home. Arguably I was (and am) a coward, or worse, I place a higher value on business than on Truth. Perhaps my belief that Truth cannot be adequately expressed in dogmatic formulas is evidence that I am a premeditating liar.

I raise these questions, because since on many issues to which you allude in your letters my responses would be unconventional and politically incorrect, I ask for your help in identifying the topics about which you wish, and the topics about which you do NOT wish to correspond, such as for example, my home-brewed Judaism, my analysis of anti-semitism, my interpretations of history as myth and of science as poetry, the cultures of perpetual economic growth and of advertising, my understanding or misunderstanding of the compelling social and political issues of the day, such as climate change, Roe v. Wade, up to - or down to, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile my warmest winter wishes to you and your family.

Jochen


On 11/14/2021 06:35 PM, dstrauss1899@yahoo.com wrote:
Dear Jochen:  Thank you for your most interesting descriptions of your adventures, insights, and interpretations of what these events mean to you today.  Indeed, you are a most thoughtful and expressive writer.  I truly enjoy our exchanges and honestly, cannot write as imaginatively as you do.  Fortunately, we are still in reasonably good health so we try to be active every day. I meet with old business and university colleagues for coffee or breakfasts and try engaging with others on various volunteer agencies and Boards.  For example, I am active on the Board of the American Jewish Committee working on efforts against anti-semitism which regrettably continues in our society and on college campuses.  I also volunteer to escort folks into Planned Parenthood facilities, while being either yelled at by aggressive anti-abortionists or being prayed for by religious Christians so to pave my way to heaven as opposed to hell after I die.   I consider death as an end to all, (but perhaps there is a soul)?
We went to Houston last weekend for our niece’s wedding.  It was a traditional Jewish wedding with over 200 in attendance.  All had to first be documented that proving they had been fully vaccinated against Covid.  Yes…we flew there and risked our health, but luckily, all is well.  We are becoming more risk-takers as we are going out to restaurants and tonight will be attending a musical recital featuring an 85 year old good friend of ours who is the concert's star pianist. Just finished Chaim Potok’s book, _The Chosen,_ that I found fascinating as he describes the history of the Hasedim in Poland, leading to today’s very odd sect!
I always am in wonder every Fall at how quickly the day's of sunlight hours wane away.  Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I hope you attend your son, Klemen’s family gathering.  We will be with our daughter’s family and then plan to travel again the first week in December to a Phoenix resort and on to stay with friends in Tucson.  At least it will be warmer than here in Illinois. Stay healthy.  Looking forward to your reply.  Don
P.S.  Have you mentioned me to your son, Klemens?  Could I have his contact information for my future reference files?  Also, if you have contact information for Dr. Weinberg, who assisted Dr. Busch, that you can share, this information would be most appreciated too.
On Nov 1, 2021, at 10:43 PM, Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net <mailto:ernstmeyer@earthlink.netwrote:


Dear Donald,

Thank you for your e-mail.  I admire the equanimity with which you write about the medical problems that Jan and you have had in the course of the summer.  Sixty years of practicing medicine have taught me how important it is to bear the burdens of illness with patience.  I try to practice what I preach. My physical condition is little different from when you visited me earlier this year.

Your letter reached me during the six days when my son Klemens and I were visiting my parents' home in Konnarock, Virginia, a house with the maintenance of which I have been involved since 1952 when it was built. After my mother's death in January 1990, the house was occupied only occasionally during the summer by my sister, and in her absence, occasionally by my wife and myself.  The oil burner has not been used for 30 years. If I turned it on now, I can't say what would happen.  In one of the three bathrooms, the drain from the toilet and from the wash basin are badly occluded.  We were unable to open them with a metal "snake".  Sodium hydroxide drain opener helped only slightly, if at all.  On page 81 of the draft of my translation of the Rosenthal family history which I sent you, I described my efforts fifty-three years ago to prevent this home, the use of which had been promised my parents for the rest of their lives, from being sold out from them.

My increasing affection for this particular house, and for all the houses in which I have ever lived, - and for all the trails which I have ever hiked, - must have something to do with my aging memory.  The older I get the more irretrievably unreal the past seems to me, and the attempt to recapture the past in history seems nothing more than story telling, the invention and recitation of myths.  In German, as you may know, the word Geschichte has a double meaning.  Geschichte refers to what happened in times past, but it also refers to the stories that one tells to ones children, or to oneself. To revisit a house which stores so many memories, is in its own curious way, a recapitulation if not a rediscovery not of the past, but of the present, of life itself.

I had planned, while in Konnarock, to read in some of the books we brought over from Germany, many of them damaged from the water which drenched the container with our household belongings, (at the time referred to as a "lift-van") when the Nazis, as a farewell salute to the departing Jews, dipped it into New York harbor at its unloading. I thought I would take another look at the children's books which molded my childhood imagination, specifically one by a Danish writer, Karin Michaelis about the stationmaster's motherless daughter Bibi, which told of Bibi's reconciliation with her aristocratic grandparents, who had originally disowned their grandchild because of her mother's mesalliance with a commoner. All this from memory, because the three or four remaining Bibi volumes were stored on the lowest shelf of the glass-fronted bookcase which I understood my mother to have had custom made in Germany.  That bookcase was one of the few pieces of furniture which survived the immersion into New York Harbor. But now, with my hips almost immovable, I could not bend sufficiently to open the sliding glass door. To retrieve the books, I should have had to get down on hands and knees, and then to struggle back onto my feet. It didn't seem worth the effort.

Instead, I found food for my thoughts on the Internet, specifically in Wikipedia's accounts of the very smallest, the physics of subatomic particles, and of the very largest, the astrophysics of "the Universe" and its reported expansion from the time of its original explosion in "the big Bang" 13.8 billion years ago, enlarging with the speed of light to its present dimensions.  The approximate diameter (in meters) of the visible universe is 93 billion light years. https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/numbers.html Trying by a thought experiment to understand the meaning of such "astronomically" large numbers, I calculated how many millimeters were comprised in our recent trip of 790 miles to Virginia. 790 x 5280 x 12 x 2.54 x 10 equals 1,271,381,760.  or 1.27 billion. Presented with this number of millimeters,  I would have no intuitive idea about what it meant.  Then I contrast the unimaginable length of a light year with the the clearly visible extent of one millimeter, and find myself befuddled. I suppose that's to be expected when one gets to be 91 years and 4 months old.

My very best wishes to yourself and Jan.

Jochen

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