CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Laika in a mock cockpit – Public Domain

I arrived by boat and there she was AMERICA (big and fat and beautiful like a cow)…what the fuck am I doing here with my beat-up suitcase at my feet with my stuff spilling out of it like a pile of dirty laundry on the platform (and AMERICA in front of me nervous excited ready) and I suddenly feeling like jerking off! —Raymond Federman, Take It Or Leave It

I arrived by boat and there she was AMERICA (big and fat and beautiful like a cow)…what the fuck am I doing here with my beat-up suitcase at my feet with my stuff spilling out of it like a pile of dirty laundry on the platform (and AMERICA in front of me nervous excited ready) and I suddenly feeling like jerking off!

—Raymond Federman, Take It Or Leave It

My old pal, the novelist and Beckett scholar Raymond Federman, had an experience when he was young that became the central meaning of his life. He was born to a Jewish family in 1928 in Montrouge, a Paris suburb. His father was a tailor. During the German occupation, his family was taken by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz where they all died. Federman survived because his mother hid him in an upstairs closet, instructing him not to make a sound, no matter what he heard. He spent the rest of the war hiding among farm families. And yet, he would say wonderingly, for him personally the war was a good thing because in 1947 he moved to the United States where he became a jazz musician, a university professor, and a literary provocateur, a “surfictionist.”

He once said to me, “Curteess, I became a professor and a writer, and now I have a pension, I live in San Diego, and I can play golf every day. I have a million dollars. Without the War, I would have been a tailor in a little shop in a dirty corner of Paris. How can I not be grateful for that? I don’t understand my life.”    

At the time, I didn’t see anything of my own experience in what Ray told me. But now I think something similar about not only my experience but the experience of millions of others of the New Deal generation. Had it not been for the War and the Cold War that followed, there would have been little need to educate the children of the American working class, thus opening, for those who chose, a new world of possibility.

We like to say that there are special moments in life—events, decisions—because of which “my whole life changed.” In this case, not only my life but the destiny of my generation changed when a stuffed dog appeared in my........

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