Publication Parties
I’m excited about the publication party for my new book, My Father’s ALS: A Son’s Healing Journey. The book publication date is August 19, 2024, the day before my eightieth birthday. It will be a combined publication and birthday party. I can’t imagine a cheerier combination than turning 80 and celebrating publication of a new book.
It will be difficult to top the publication party for my first book: Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical. That party was held in 1981 in my adopted hometown Berkeley, with its ghosts from the upheavals of the 1960s. The large old Berkeley house was filled with many generations on the left. And there was Joe, the old-time labor organizer who was the subject of the book, pensive with his studious glasses, dapper in his sports coat and western string tie, a self-taught worker intellectual, a farmer intellectual, a shtetl boy who embraced the modern world, with this autobiography as a megaphone for his ideas about the immigrant Jewish left in twentieth century America. At that party he delivered a speech on the social movements he had been part of and the challenges ahead to build socialism. With Joe, it always was a critical evaluation of the past with an optimistic gaze to the future.
I was beside Joe, hair frizzy and sideburns long, big grin all afternoon, with a talk on the importance of Joe’s experience for my younger baby boom generation on the left. I read a favorite passage from our book, a story from the 1936 knit goods workers general strike, the time of Joe’s greatest accomplishments as a labor organizer. This was a story about the struggle to organize a shop, the New York Knitting Mills, where Joe took a swing at a scab crossing a militant picket line, and, amidst chanting and yelling and falling glass, police and goons set on Joe:
The pickets came to my rescue, especially the girls. They dared more, expecting to be treated less rough than the men. One of my best friends on the organizational committee, a class conscious working girl, Irene Mason, started to pull me away by the tie! She almost choked me to death! I told her later, ‘If I have such friends, who needs the gangsters?’
We were arrested. The most militant--those who are in the forefront and give direction--were always arrested, and in the process we were not so gently handled. But from the picket line to the police station, we sang our militant songs. We had a spirit of courage, a feeling of victory, even though we had to go through the fight and arrest. We were out of jail the next morning and back on the picket line. And when the strike ended, the New York Knitting Mills settled with the union.
From public appearances to private toasts, Joe and I celebrated our collaborative book to tell the world his life saga. I’m confident we gave away more copies of the book than the publisher sold. The autobiography was widely read, at least among our friends in northern California, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, the circles we most cared about. It was well reviewed in California and in Jewish and academic newspapers, magazines, and journals.
Joe and I did many speaking presentations together in the Bay Area. Hanging above my desk today is a bold red poster advertising one of those events, at Joe’s own nearby Sonoma State University: “Oral History as Autobiography. Joe Rapoport and Kenneth Kann. The Narrator and His Oral Historian.”
I still look at that poster with pleasure. Yes, proudly, I was Joe’s historian.
Now, with a new book, I will have an opportunity to tell Joe’s story again, from a different perspective. This time it will be from my vantage point over 40 years after the publication of Joe’s and my book. In the new book, My Father’s ALS, I recount how Joe’s life figured into the story of my clashes with my own father, my Dad. I once told Dad the story of Joe’s bar mitzvah in 1913, when Joe did not learn his haftorah and embarrassed his father before their shtetl. Joe’s father charged that Joe would not say Kaddish for him when he died.
With my own father dying in 1980, I wanted to disavow Joe’s story and assure Dad I would say Kaddish for him. But, how to tell my father? And then, what to do after Dad died? Say Kaddish? That’s brings me to My Father’s ALS. Another story in another book for another publication party.