Lotte's escape

A tale from the clinic. Plus Cheerful Chickadees, Linda Okazaki's dreamscapes, and an acrobatic alphabet for children.

BIRDS

Chickadee Nirvana, 2022. We have two types here in the PNW, the Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees. You can guess the identity of this one.

The sound of dees

THIS MORNING, I noticed a flock of birds hopping around one of the still-leafless trees in our neighborhood, their chatter recognizably Chickadee. During our Pacific Northwest winters, a few Chickadees often hang around, and lately I’ve seen a couple at our feeder, which is ordinarily dominated by juncos. Seeing a whole group of them leaping branch to branch was cheerful. I allowed myself to imagine they were an early harbinger of spring. Goldfinches have also recently returned to the seed feeder.

A couple years ago, I read one of my favorite entries in the cool-things-you-should-know-about-birds category. Chickadees are named for their call—chica-dee-dee-dee. The number of dees, I learned, represents the degree of alarm. When a Cooper’s Hawk visits our little pond, the dees go off the charts. One day, I decided to see how these little birds perceived me so I sat on the porch and listened. The first time, I got four or five dees—not a lot, though they were concerned about my presence. After a few more sits, it calmed down to three dees. This has generally been my experience with birds. If you are patient and stick around, especially near a spot where they feed, they often conclude that you’re not a threat. Best not to make any sudden moves, though.

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TALES FROM THE CLINIC

Roman Vishniac, Girl in Plaid Dress, circa 1935. Vishniac documented Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the wars. His work has been collected by ICP.

Liebchen

By Barbara Ramsey

DURING MY LAST MONTH as an intern, Paul, one of the other doctors in the clinic, pulled me over and told me he wanted to introduce me to a patient. Paul was in his final year and planned to leave Seattle after graduation. Most of the people he’d been caring for during his three years of training would be automatically assigned to other doctors. But Paul arranged personal transfers for a few patients. He wanted to place someone special in my care.

I was slightly alarmed. “Special” patients often had major psychiatric diagnoses or difficult personality quirks. Paul reassured me. “She’s complicated and she’s wonderful,” he said. “I think you’ll like her.”

Walking into the exam room, I saw a tiny, bent woman who appeared to be in her seventies. She had a severe spinal deformity, and a tube ran from her nose to an oxygen tank. “This is Lotte,” Paul said. “Lotte, this is Dr. Ramsey. She’ll be your new doctor starting next month.”

Lotte lifted her head. “So happy to meet you!” she said. “Dr. Paul has told me that you’re a wonderful doctor.” She spoke with a heavy accent, perhaps eastern European, but her voice was clear.

“Happy to meet you, too”, I replied. “I look forward to being your doctor.” The warmth in her smile made this feel true. After we left, Paul gave me a quick summary of her medical problems. She had severe osteoporosis, accounting for her bent spine, and end-stage lung disease. These two problems are a dangerous combination. Lotte’s kyphosis— the curving in her upper spine—was so extreme that it compressed her chest cavity, making it difficult to breathe. Her lung disease diminished her ability to oxygenate blood. And her fierce and frequent coughing sometimes broke fragile vertebrae.

Lotte and I saw each other frequently over the next two years. She was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia. She often had medication changes that necessitated close follow-up in the clinic. But her mood was always cheerful.

“You’re too thin!” she’d say to me. “Here, I brought you some cookies—eat, eat!” Rather than talking about her symptoms, she wanted to hear about me. “How is it going? Are you working too hard? Are you getting enough sleep?” I had to struggle to get her to tell me about her breathing, her back pain, her appetite, her sleep. As I was leaving, she’d say, “Ach, you haven’t eaten enough cookies yet. Let me put some into your pocket for later.”

Every once in a while, I convinced her to tell me about her life. She’d been born around 1910 in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family that spoke Czech and German at home. Her grandfather was a decorated officer of the Hapsburg Empire who served with valor in World War I. Her father became a merchant in the thriving world of post-war Prague commerce. As a teenager, she’d survived tuberculosis despite developing an often-fatal complication, tubercular peritonitis.

From what I could gather, she lived at home in her twenties and had many suitors. She led a refined life in one of the major capitals of Europe—the cultured, tolerant Prague of Kafka and Dvorak. But then, Hitler.

Germany annexed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland—the German-speaking regions— in 1938. Lotte’s family followed the news carefully, but like both the British and French governments, they thought Hitler might settle for the Sudetenland alone. Six months later, Hitler invaded Prague. Because Lotte’s grandfather had fought with the Germans in World War I, her patriotic German-speaking Czech family was slow to anticipate the coming darkness. Still, they must have devised an escape plan because two days later they fled the city.

THE FAMILY TRAVELED east to Hungary and then Romania. From Bucharest, it’s not far to the Black Sea, where they boarded a boat to the Mediterranean and sailed to the Greek coast. They needed to change boats, but Greece was in chaos. Refugees were flooding in. Boats were impossible to find and harder to buy. Finally, Lotte’s family, her fiancé, friends, and others they’d collected along the way, found someone willing to sell a large raft. With it, they headed toward British-controlled Palestine. While her family had never been Zionists, their destination was now Haifa.

Growing up, I’d read books about the war and the Holocaust. I was a fan of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote about Jewish life in Europe and New York. Lotte made me realize my understanding of the past had been anemic. She was the past incarnate. And how she pronounced “Haifa”! She did something to the letter “H” that made Haifa sound desirable yet distant.

When she first told me about this, all she said was “Then we went to Israel” and I accepted the simple version. Later, I visited her at her house, where she introduced me to her kitchen, her daughter, and her plants—and I got the rest of the story.

“The raft was too small for all of us. We didn’t have enough food or water, so we rationed everything. The weather wasn’t too bad, so we were lucky,” she said.

As the raft approached Haifa, they used a maritime signal asking for permission to land, which was denied. The British weren’t yet formally at war with Germany and didn’t want homeless people fleeing Hitler to land in a port under their control. But the few dozen desperate refugees on the raft didn’t back down. Facing down the British empire, they continued toward the coast. British guns fired on them.

“Some people died,” said Lotte. “Others were wounded. It was dreadful.” Fortunately, the raft stayed afloat and they still had a few rations of food and water. They shrouded the dead but agreed not to dump their bodies overboard.

A diplomatic uproar broke the stalemate. By Lotte’s account, somebody, perhaps the French or the Americans, pressured the Brits to allow the raft to land. The dead were buried, the wounded were tended, and Lotte started a new life in Haifa. She married her fiancé.

Her sister also survived and their families started a bakery, where Lotte learned to make her delicious cookies. She had trouble getting pregnant, though. The doctors surmised that the long-ago peritonitis had invaded her fallopian tubes, making her infertile. Her sister, who’d had several children, was skeptical of the doctors. “Liebchen, you just need a vacation. You’re working too hard in the bakery,” she said. “You and your husband need to go to the beach for a week of you-know-what.” They did, and nine months later their daughter was born.

After more than ten years in their new homeland, Lotte and her family elected to move again. “Those people,” she said of the Israelis, “Too religious for me!” They packed up and left for America, where they ultimately ended up in Seattle.

There, she and her husband started a new bakery and raised their daughter. Years later when her husband died, Lotte closed it down. In retirement, her lifetime of smoking started to have its inexorable effect. The TB and times of poor nutrition had leached her bones and the osteoporosis became apparent. Still, she baked cookies for overwrought young doctors and tended her houseplants.

As her breathing grew more labored, her dependence on the oxygen tank became absolute. After an especially difficult hospitalization, she’d had enough. “Just let me go,” she said.

I hoped her final breath would come in her sleep at home, but that wasn’t to be. She was brought to the hospital one last time in respiratory failure. Fortunately, her daughter got there shortly after her admission and insisted that her mother did not want to be put on artificial respiration. They removed the breathing tube and Lotte died with her daughter holding her hand.

I was across town in another hospital tending other patients. Someone managed to get hold of me and, as soon as I could, I went to Lotte’s bedside. There, her daughter and I sat together looking at Lotte and wishing we could keep her on the raft a little longer.

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ARTISTS

Linda Okazaki, Yellow Bird, Blue Table

The color of dreams

Note: Linda Okazaki is one of my favorite artists of the Pacific Northwest. Her brilliant retrospective has just concluded at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, but the associated book is available from their bookstore for $24. For the book I wrote this essay, which is reprinted with permission from Chief Curator Greg Robinson, who organized the exhibit.

IF YOU WERE encountering Linda Okazaki’s paintings for the first time, and knew little of her life, what might you see in them?

You might notice the water—streams, lakes, seas, and what look like enormous baths. “Water for me is like the sky for other painters,” she says, with shapes and colors that can be chosen to reflect a mood or complete a composition. Water is the ultimate shapeshifter, even morphing into human form over eons. For a painter of stories, that makes it the most fluid of metaphors, signifying everything from the womb that bears life to the river crossed to we know not where.

Okazaki’s color stands out, too, for its vividness and luminescence. Joyful colors play against sober themes while darker ones intensify the solemn notes. Okazaki is a lifelong student of color, particularly the myriad ways in which it conveys emotion. She wrote her master’s thesis on a 19th century theory of color that still informs her work.

Birds are prominent, especially crows and ravens. These, too, are metaphorically rich figures that appear in the oldest myths and stories, including among Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives. Other creatures turn up as well, such as fish, dogs (in one case, a specific dog), cats, and coyotes. They, too, are story carriers.

You might observe that many of her paintings depict a woman, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, who appears to be part of a larger story. She is swimming outdoors or reclining indoors or up in the sky and often accompanied by birds or other animals. Occasionally there are other people in the paintings, including a few historical artists with whom she imagines dialogues in her journal. The figures are drawn expertly but not realistically or proportionally, and usually in shallow perspective.

The water, the colors, the birds, and the woman—all are imbued with emotion. They comprise a story that is just beyond our grasp, like a dream. You might suppose, correctly, that many of the images come from dreams, and that the woman in the dreams, like most of us, is trying to work something out… Read and see more.

FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE

THIS POPULAR handbill from 1782, entitled The Comical Hotch Potch, or The Alphabet turn'd Posture-Master and sold by Carington Bowles, No 69 in St Paul's Church Yard, London, inspired a modern composer named Carl Schimmel to write a musical score. He composed it for Flexible Music, a group that includes a percussionist and marimbist named Haruka Fujii. She is part of the leadership team with Rhiannon Giddens for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble. (I’ve been a Rhiannon Giddens fanboy for years.)

A Hotch potch is a jumbled mixture of different things, derived from the French word hocher or “shake” and also the name of a Scottish stew made with mutton. On the handbill, the alphabet is spelled out by 18th century dance masters and intended as educational fun for children. According to one source, “Following the custom of the times, the print has only 24 letters. "J" and "U" are missing as many people continued to use "I" and "V" respectively.” All this is to say that a lover of alphabets travels many roads, some of them dead ends. Try as I might, I could not find the original illustrator.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

I CONFESS a weakness for graphic black-and-white street photography. Ovidiu Șelaru took this photograph, which reminds me of Paul Strand’s famous Wall Street picture or certain streetscapes by André Kertész. Șelaru, a Romanian based in London, works the genre as well as anyone I’ve seen recently.

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Snippets of the week

“I DON’T THINK the outside world knows that Indians are hilarious. Pretty much every tribally-connected Indian would kill at a comedy club open-mic night. Indian humor is so vital in Indian culture that I’m always suspicious of the unfunny Indians (and I’m actively scared of unfunny leftists in general).” —Sherman Alexie

“MANY ELITES today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to “stay together for the sake of the children,” even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they “talk left” but “walk right”—an unusual form of hypocrisy that, however well intended, contributes to American inequality. —Brad Wilcox in the Atlantic

“BECAUSE HALF-A-DOZEN grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.” ― Edmund Burke, quoted in Bastiat’s Window