Manny Bloch’s cross-examination of David Greenglass, Ethel’s younger brother (bear in mind Bloch’s experience in court was settling small bakery contract disputes, and he was up against a very wily and very slippery Roy Cohn, David’s lawyer)
Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, pp. 141 – 142
“You realize the possible death penalty in the event that Ethel is convicted by this jury, do you not?”
Repeating the question, Bloch asked: “And you bear affection for her?”
If you’ve never heard of The Squares Challenge, you are missing something! The Challenge is hosted by Becky at Life of B, and the theme for this month is Past Squares.
Past Squares can be either your selection from a past round of squares, or something old, historical, etc
For the month, self decided she would focus on the “historical.” In the immortal words of William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
For today’s Past Squares post, self is going back. WAAAAAY back. Back to the time when she and Dear Departed Sister were four and five-and-a-half years old, respectively (She and her sister were only 18 months apart).
Dearest Mum dressed us alike, all the time. We had the same haircuts, the same dresses, the same shoes. Everything the same. Except for our personalities. When self frowned, her sister smiled. When her sister frowned, self smiled. This was some weird form of sibling rivalry. Nevertheless.
In one picture, self and her sister are sitting in front of a memorial to her grandfather. (Yes, there are colonnades, yes there was a bust of her grandfather. We were in the family resort, in an island in the central Philippines)
The second picture, self and her sister are with her parents. In the exact center of the picture is her grandmother, her mother’s mother. She was a force! A piano teacher from Jaro, Iloilo, her grandmother propelled Dearest Mum all the way to Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher. Self has no recordings of those days, since Dearest Mum stubbornly refused to have ANY recordings made of her music. Self doesn’t even have the countless magazine covers that her mother appeared in.
This is only self’s third round of participation in Life of B’s Squares Challenge, so instead of choosing favorites from her previous rounds, in April and July 2021, she’ll focus on past trips. She used to be quite the traveler! Everything came to a screeching halt in 2020.
May 2019: Self’s niece was going to Prague and asked if she wanted to come along. Self had never been to Prague. Of course she wanted to come along!
Dinner the first night was in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. All the surrounding buildings were lit. The view was stunning! The next day, at Prague Castle, we stumbled on a wedding photo shoot. Self was able to squeeze off a quick candid photo.
I’ve been taking more pics with my cell these days. The last pic I took with my Nikon coolpix on September 23, 2021:
“Pink Over Red”: Mark Rothko, American, born Latvia (1903 – 1970), Stanford’s Anderson Collection
Stanford’s Anderson Collection had re-opened to the public, the day before. It so happened that Sept. 22 was also Dear Departed Mum’s birthday; she would have been 86. So, I was full of FEELZ when I stumbled across this Rothko.
How do the pensioners in The Thursday Murder Club know about the Dark Web when self only heard about it a month ago?
She’s on p. 181.
Also, it turns out, the DCI likes Oasis. OASIS.
Normally, she would just barrel through to the end (especially as it’s getting pretty exciting), but today has had all sorts of appointments, and she’s meeting someone for dinner — DINNER! — at the Beach Chalet. Her cousin from Manila, who’s only here for a few days.
Stay cool (it’s hard, that sun’s like a laser), dear blog readers. Stay cool.
Self feels more engaged by Fault Lines than she was about Rules of Engagement. Karl Pillemer’s methods are research-based. He used “snowball sampling” techniques: “a large group of people are contacted and then asked to contact others in turn to help find interviewees.” His aim was to find subjects who had “reconciled,” who had moved “from anger and despair to acceptance . . . This book is built on their experiences, stories, and advice.”
He is not prescriptive: His aim is to present readers “with a range of ideas that they can apply to their own situations.” He followed up with “some of the estranged respondents over time to determine whether their own situations had changed and interviewing more than one person in a number of families.” Estrangement, Pillemer writes, “can be best understood as a form of chronic stress.” But he is quick to say he doesn’t intend to offer “clinical or psychological advice”: “I am a research sociologist and have no clinical credentials of any kind.”
He is quiet about whether he himself has any experience of estrangement, but of course he does. He just doesn’t share it, but he does. No one decides to write a book like this without that experience.
Self cannot believe she found this book as a result of an article in The Economist — which, as some readers might know, is not into New Age Psychology or anything so CALIFORNIA.
The author, Joshua Coleman (Ph.D. is after his name, so there’s that), is a psychologist with a private practice in Oakland, California.
p. 13:
My mission is to help you find healthy ways to reconcile. In general — and there are exceptions — I believe reconciliation is better than staying apart. Better for you and better for our society. And if a reconciliation isn’t possible, I want to help you have a happy, healthy life with or without your kid in it.
Read about the Life in Colour Photo Challenge, here.
This month’s color is PURPLE.
Purple is “a secondary colour made from red and blue, though you can find many different shades of purple. Stay clear of violet though as that will be making its own appearance. Although found in nature in shades of crocuses, lilacs, and irises, look for the bruised colours in a sunrise or sunset, an indigo sea, a full moon in an inky sky.”
Here are a gallery of self’s purples:
1. harvest from cousin’s organic farm on Negros Occidental, Philippines 2. rice and yam sweet from Silay, Negros Occidental 3. fountain in front of Oxford’s Christ Church 4. card from Dublin-based artist Jacinta O’Reilly 5. morning glories on porch
Some may be questionably purple, lol. Nevertheless.
Travel with Intent hosts the One Word Sunday Challenge. The current theme is TOUCH.
Self’s gallery:
Elevator attendant, Manuel Benavides Library, University of Santo Tomas, Manila
Jollibee attendant, Manila – Self asked the driver to stop by Jollibee on her way home from the airport. First stop! It was in the pre-dawn hours. Manila is a city that never sleeps.
Self, Andrew, and nephew Chris Blackett in the very long ago, at an amusement park in California
Self with an umbrella in Tokyo, also in the very long ago
Over the 2019 holidays, self joined son and daughter-in-law in New Mexico. She’d only been once before, for son’s wedding. Oh what fun. For the first time in a decade, self was together with son for Christmas and New Year’s.
In Albuquerque, we stayed with his in-laws, and they took us all over the city. One of the stops was at this small place that sold super-duper tamales and enchiladas. This young woman was so sweet.
