Friday, October 16, 2009
Not all grave news is bad news
Carved into bench at the Sex family plot.
All right, this was an outright manipulation, but it made you look, didn't it?
I got out to take a few pictures and visited a local cemetery which has an old Jewish section.
Until I started roaming Chicago with my camera, I'd never seen the old Jewish cemeteries with their tumbledown stones, Hebrew lettering and ceramic portraits. I find them very moving and thought provoking. Long forgotten family members with inscriptions stating they will never be forgotten, infants implying terrible sorrow, glimpses of history lost and unvalued, and ceramic images from the 1920's looking as good as new--all create an urge in me to honor and record those interred there, as if I alone can keep their memory alive.
Perhaps I should have been an historian and not a doctor. Of course, isn't psychiatry a kind of probing into history, only of the living and not the long dead?
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2 comments:
History is my first, and perhaps, one true love.
A couple of years ago I was in Krakow, Poland and visited the cemetery in the Jewish ghetto. Only so much space was allowed so after a while people had to be buried on top of other people. The stones, too were on top of one another. Much was painful there so near Treblinka, the cemetery was a part of the pain.
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