When I first met author, artist, and ecofeminist Aviva Rahmani, I knew this would be a tough but fascinating developmental editing assignment. Very few people can successfully combine quantum physics, copyright law, and performance art and put it all together in a compelling memoir format. I was glad to help make that happen. The result was an incredible book called Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea (June 2022, New Village Press).
The Blued Trees Symphony.
I was a science writer and editor for about a decade, so I understood the terminology. The trick was to explain just enough of the science for it to make sense to a lay reader, but not too much since that would leave many readers behind. In addition, this is the story of Aviva Rahmani’s life, so I coached her on how to combine her disparate stories into a cohesive narrative. It’s a story that takes us from the art scenes in New York and California to her ecological awakening in Maine, and around the world to the Golan Heights on the eve of war. Think of her life as one big performance-art project—with its share of darkness and light.
Her life’s work involved two major projects: Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands; and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use. The theme running through it all is a concept she calls “Trigger Point Theory.” Any rare or surprising event is called a “black swan.” In physics, she says, black swans, or anomalies, can dramatically change the trajectory of events. She applies the same standard to art. When “solutions seemed to emerge” through her projects, that can trigger big change. “I would call this trigger point theory, an idea that was a corollary to butterfly theory but took it an inconceivable step further, that a deliberately chosen small point of disruption, intended as art, could affect much larger systems,” she writes.
My contribution: I helped Aviva coalesce these disparate elements into a story. Here’s what Aviva Rahmani had to say about my role in Divining Chaos.
Writing a book is very different than writing a short work. Working with Howard as my developmental editor helped me understand how to carry themes across almost 300 pages. My book is a memoir about ideas. At the time, I was still a recovering PhD, stuck in dissertation-land. My text was dense with complex ideas, multi-syllabic words and citations. My book’s style is conceptually free-range and some of the science ideas are quite complex. It took a lot of rewriting to make them digestible for someone, for example, who might not be fluent in thermodynamics.
Howard was quite gentle, encouraging, and patient with me until the pages came alive with the threads of my personal narrative. Our back and forth exchanges forced me to rethink and relive many crucial anecdotes in the personal parts of my narrative. I had been writing reductively about personal material: ‘this happened and then this and then that.’ Howard counseled me to put in the sensory details.
For example, I had a passage describing an afternoon at the Golan Heights in Israel hours before war broke out. He pressed me to recall the scents, sounds, and other sensations I felt as I stood there with a sense of mortal premonition. Howard stayed with me as we passed excerpts back and forth for comment until I could make each passage and the transitions between chapters and themes feel like they could be relevant to my readers’ lives. It was in that process that I found my voice on the page.
It was a challenge and a pleasure to work with Aviva on her book. It deserves a wide audience.
The college antisemitism I faced at Wayne State University in Detroit in the ’80s was of a similar character to kind endured by Jewish college kids today. The only difference is that I had no online network to which I could turn for solidarity or comfort. I faced it alone. I told my story to the Detroit Jewish News, which was then picked up by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (where I was once managing editor) and by other newspapers, including The Jerusalem Post.
I don’t want anybody to think that my college experience was all negative, though. In fact, I loved my time at Wayne State. This story is one of a few that really molded me into the kind of journalist, and Jew, I am today. That’s why I’m also going to file this post under “memoir,” too, because it is part of a continuing story of my life and the evolution of my relationship with Judaism. Here’s how this story begins:
In 1985, I stood in the corner of a crowded meeting room at the Wayne State University Student Center, stone-faced, while people I did not know lined up at a microphone to denounce me before the Student Newspaper Publications Board.
“I don’t think Howard Lovy should be editor of The South End because he is biased toward Israel,” said one, referring to the student newspaper, where I was up for the editor’s position.
The board would decide if I should take the top job. By virtue of my role at the paper, I was in position to assume the top editor slot.
“Howard is a Zionist,” said another critic, “so he should be disqualified from this important job as editor of The South End.”
Some of them said something about the racist rabbi, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Another said something about the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon three years previously by an Israel-allied militia group and with the knowledge of the Israeli army. Apparently I was responsible for all these things and people. I should not have been surprised.
To truly show how far you have come in recovery, it is necessary to describe yourself at your lowest. One day, Dr. Remy was, in all outward appearances, a family man and successful Emergency Room physician. In one day, he lost it all—his family, his job … everything. He was wheeled, as a patient, into the emergency room where he was once in charge.
To get his life back, Dr. Remy had to not only recover from alcohol addiction, but also from his own ego, narcissism, and sense of entitlement. In this book, we experience, through his own eyes, what it is like to lose it all and then, slowly, climb your way back.
(Howard Lovy) pushed me to dig deep to rework passages and improve my prose. He responded to my emails quickly, and was even available after the work was completed for some mop-up issues. I applaud Mr. Lovy for his hard work on my behalf and highly recommend him as a developmental editor.” — Dr. J. D. Remy
I recommend this book for anybody who has faced life-changing challenges, or those who want to know, firsthand, how one person can fight back from devastating addiction and loss. Also, find out how he ended up on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight.
Many authors who have gone through traumatic experiences have trusted me with their memoirs. It may be because I’ve gone through my share of trauma, too, and I approach this work without judgment and with lots of empathy. So, I seem to specialize in memoirs about people who have hit rock bottom through addiction, bad luck, or bad health, and have an important message for others. I’m proud to help my clients find their voice through all this turbulence.
Dr. Remy was also kind enough to write a testimonial about the work we did together on his manuscript:
“Howard served as the developmental editor for my memoir Ballad of a Sober Man: An ER Doctor’s Journey of Recovery. He began work on it in February of 2020 and had completed the edit by the end of March—no easy feat for a 105,000-word book. We remained in close contact the entire time, and I found him to be thorough and responsive. He met my imposed deadline of March 31st. He pushed me to dig deep to rework passages and improve my prose. He responded to my emails quickly, and was even available after the work was completed for some mop-up issues. I applaud Mr. Lovy for his hard work on my behalf and highly recommend him as a developmental editor.”
Dr. Remy is also a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, where I host author-interview podcasts. I talked to Dr. Remy to get his story. Click on the arrow below to listen.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, here is my family’s Holocaust story. This story is based on memories passed on to me by my grandfather and by my great-uncle Charles, who went back to Hungary after the war, but changed his name to Lukacs, which sounded less Jewish. Charles became a journalist in postwar Hungary, and many relatives said that I take after him. My grandfather helped Charles get out in 1956 during the Soviet invasion, and he Americanized his name to Lucas. I spent a lot of time with my great-uncle Charles before he passed away in his 90s. It’s where I get a lot of my firsthand information about the Holocaust.
It was in 1939 that Charles put a four-year-old Andrew Lovy—my father—on a train heading west out of Budapest. He was accompanied by my grandmother Elza. They both later joined my grandfather, who had gone on ahead to America to establish a life there. My grandparents didn’t have to see the crematoria to know that they were waiting for them. I owe my existence to the far-sightedness of my Grandpa Joe, who got out in time. But, his is a different story to tell. Here is where it begins.
Hungarian Jews sat out most of the war in relative peace, although with increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws passed. Hungarian ruler Admiral Horthy was allied with the Germans, but would not do the Nazis’ bidding when it came to the Jews. At least, not yet.
But toward the end of the war—when Horthy knew it was lost—he tried to make a separate peace with the Russians, who were already on Hungary’s doorstep. So, on October 15, 1944, the day Horthy was to announce his surrender to the Russians, the Germans stepped in and installed a Nazi puppet regime run by the viciously anti-Semitic Arrow Cross. Yes, this is the same Arrow Cross that Donald Trump adviser Seb Gorka idolizes. They has been my family’s tormentors since before the war.
Then the familiar pattern began. First, influential Jews were stripped of their government and teaching positions. Next, Jewish businesses were smashed, looted, burned, or confiscated. Then Jews were stripped of all their possessions, rounded up and, starving, forced into cramped and disease-ridden ghettos. Entire villages in the Hungarian countryside were drained of their Jews, who were transported to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Mauthausen.
Already, most of European Jewry had been murdered. The world knew that Hungary was next—including Franklin Roosevelt. There were formal protests, and attempts to make secret deals to save the lives of a few Jews here and there, but the Allies—by then firmly superior in the air and on the ground—did nothing to save the Hungarian Jews.
The world watched.
Death-camp deportations and mass executions of Hungarian Jews were recorded matter-of-factly on the inside pages of the New York Times.
Sometime in the summer of 1944, my great-grandmother—a deeply religious woman who came from a long line of rabbis and Jewish scholars—was placed in a cattle car, taken to Auschwitz, and murdered in a gas chamber.
In Czechoslovakia, the word came out that it was now safe for the surviving Jews to come out of hiding. My great-aunt Hedwig, her husband, and two children believed it. They, too, were handed over to the Germans and murdered.
They were taken to the border of Austria and made to dig anti-tank trenches to try and slow the Russian army. The conditions were appalling, as sadistic German guards murdered Jews at random and threw their bodies in the trenches dug by the victims.
My uncles Andor and Charles were able-bodied men, so they were used as slave labor. By the end of 1944, they were marched from one camp to another, just a few steps ahead of the advancing Allies. They were taken to the border of Austria and made to dig anti-tank trenches to try and slow the Russian army. The conditions were appalling, as sadistic German guards murdered Jews at random and threw their bodies in the trenches dug by the victims.
It was by chance that Andor, in a separate death march, met up with his brother Charles. They marched together for a while. But soldiers of the nearly defeated German army were firing random machine-gun volleys into the marchers. My uncles decided it would be best if they split apart, so one of them would have a better chance of surviving until liberation.
They were right. Andor fell when one of his German guards opened fire. He would have been killed, but the Germans were in a hurry at this point. He heard one of the say, “Don’t waste a bullet on him. He’s dead already.”
Charles found Andor critically wounded, but alive, among a heap of bullet-ridden bodies. Charles picked his brother up and helped him continue to the march to the Mauthausen concentration camp. There, despite horrible deprivations and abuse, he was able to nurse Andor back to health and wait it out until Americans came six months later.
After the war, Andor testified against one of his Mauthausen guards, who was hanged for his crimes.
A few relatives survived Auschwitz and were sent to displaced persons camps. Many immigrated to Israel, but the trauma continued. An uncle could not cope with the memories of Auschwitz and committed suicide. My brother is named for him.
The Holocaust story involving my family is both unusual in its cruelty, but not so unusual in the context of the Holocaust. Many families suffered worse. Life-and-death decisions that would impact the existence of future generations were made in split seconds. There is more to my family’s story, and it is very much intertwined with my own.
The Jewish Daily Forward asked me to write a commentary on Trump’s executive order designed to combat college anti-Semitism. My piece was not so much about the (as it turned out, misreported by the NYT) proposal that Jews be defined as a nationality rather than religion. It has more to do with why, exactly, Trump is so nice to Israel. It has nothing to do with such an insignificant voting block as Jews, who don’t support him, anyway. You can read all about it in my Forward Op-Ed here.
But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post. I want to include below one reason why I am paying close attention to the issue of campus anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. I experienced it myself in college. The paragraphs below are the parts that were cut from my original too-long draft of my Forward commentary. I’m not complaining. It was beside the point and the editor was right to cut it. But here’s the personal part of the story:
At the risk of revealing how ancient I am, let me tell a brief story about what happened to me in 1985. When I applied for editor of my student newspaper, The South End, at Wayne State University in Detroit, hundreds of Arab students turned out at a hearing to denounce me … one by one … because of my commentaries about Israel. I stood there, stone-faced, while I was denounced for not being “objective” about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for the simple reason that I was Jewish and did not call for the destruction of Israel.
This was more than just a disagreement over Israeli policy. I felt a gut punch every time another speaker, who did not know me at all, denounced me. At the time, there was nobody I could turn to for support. I remember well the sense of isolation, this horrible feeling in my stomach that this had nothing whatsoever to do with Mideast politics. I was targeted because I was an outspoken Jew. I was more than qualified for the job. I had been writing for the paper, living and breathing for the paper, for the previous two years. But the Student Newspaper Publication Board decided I was “too controversial” after the protests. My application was rejected.
My coverage of these controversies in college, getting into the thick of the argument with Palestinians students, and forming friendships with some, taught me an important lesson about who I was as a Jew and who I wanted to be as a writer.
That was in the mid-’80s, and the problem has become exponentially worse. So, yes, I understand that Jewish students need to be protected from anti-Semitism. It seems that all you have to do is claim you’re anti-Israel at any university campus, and you can get away with targeted harassment, even violence, against Jewish students or visitors.
Believe it or not, Jewish students will survive college. The story ended well for me. One story the Arab student body complained about was my coverage of the Muslim Student Association’s sale, in the student center, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I suggested in my coverage that it was, in fact, an anti-Semitic forgery. Strangely, my coverage of the issue would earn me an internship at The Detroit Jewish News and my unexpected later career as a Jewish journalist. It would lead, eventually, to the managing editor’s office at JTA in the early 2000s, when I put into practice many of the lessons I learned in my mini-Mideast wars in college
My coverage of these controversies in college, getting into the thick of the argument with Palestinians students, and forming friendships with some, taught me an important lesson about who I was as a Jew and who I wanted to be as a writer.
The way to combat anti-Semitism on campus is to continue to host speakers of all points of view and change minds the old-fashioned way. Make sure students are safe, of course, but college is where you are allowed to be loudly, boldly wrong along the way toward adulthood.
I’m about to say something with which just about every other person in the publishing industry will disagree. In fact, most will strongly, passionately, with much snooty sarcasm, disagree with what I’m about to say. Everybody has a memoir in them. Not only that, but everybody should write a memoir. There, I said it.
Every life is unique, and everybody has a story that only they can tell. As a journalist, what I enjoy most is getting people’s stories in their own words. As a book editor, I can help them tell it in a way that brings out their own voice, that will invite others to relive their unique lives with them.
It’s not an easy thing to do, to write a memoir. I recently advised an editing client that he’d need to change his story’s focus if he wanted something more than just a family heirloom to give his children. For that, you have to make hard choices on what parts of the story to emphasize, what to leave out, and how you make your specific theme universal. Not all publishers have the patience for it, especially since memoirs are reaching saturation in the market now.
With the rise of self-publishing, authors don’t need to put up with rejection by acquiring editors who decide whether anybody cares about your story. Just write it. Oh, and hire a good editor to help you tell it. That’s all.
With that said, I’d like you to meet indie author Leila Summers of South Africa, who self-published a memoir called It Rains in February, about a very personal, painful topic, the suicide of her husband, that she made universal.
Click the button below to listen to our interview.
Me, in 1985, age 19, with more hair than I needed and wearing the keffiyeh given to me by my Palestinian friend.
In this scene of my memoir-in-progress, I learn an important lesson in college about perception and reality when it comes to Muslim-Jewish relations. And I’m introduced to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. More on that in a bit. The year is 1985, and, as I say in this excerpt, I think I know everything, when in fact I know very little. This is typical for a person who is only nineteen years old and being exposed to many things for the first time in life.
This is the story of the beginning of many things in my life: An understanding of Arab perceptions, an intense friendship I had with a Palestinian woman, my own journey through the way others perceive Judaism, and the accidental beginning of my career in Jewish journalism. The passage at the end will make sense in context, I hope. A recurring theme in my book is also my struggles with OCD and how the comfort of Jewish ritual gave it a home.
From time to time on this blog, I’ll post various excerpts as I get closer to completing my book about my grandfather’s life in pre-Holocaust Hungary, and my own personal journey through Judaism.
I decided to narrate this short chapter to see if I had the stamina to, eventually, record my own audiobook. Turns out, I’m not sure. I decided to take this seven-minute snippet and add some music to the background to make my voice perhaps sound more appealing. But, then, everybody is critical of their own voices.
You can read more excerpts from my work-in-progress on my Memoir page.
My Private Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
For those who’d rather not hear my voice, here is the raw, unedited version of this chapter.
“You don’t know everything, Howard,” Lamya told me, her eyes rolling slightly, revealing just a hint of humor, letting me know that she was both kidding and not kidding. It was 1985 and we were both working at my college newspaper at Wayne State University in Detroit. I did not know much about her, except I heard that she was Palestinian and had escaped from an abusive marriage.
“You think you know a lot, but you don’t know everything,” she said. Well, a more accurate statement might have been that I didn’t know anything. She was thirty years old and I was only nineteen. There were a great many things I did not know, but Lamya was specifically referring to my lack of knowledge about Arab culture and the way they think about historical and current grievances. I saw this in the angry letters to the editor I was receiving over my coverage of controversy over a book, a kind of silly-looking book. Turned out, the book was not a book at all, but really a fun-house mirror through which one could view many layers of distortions.
A few days earlier, Rabbi Oppenheimer of the campus Hillel approached me at the Student Center. I don’t know how the rabbi found me, or even how he knew who I was. I had never dropped by Hillel’s area of the Student Center. Somebody must have pointed me out to him as the guy who was writing pro-Israel commentaries in the student newspaper. He didn’t look like much of a rabbi to me. He wore a Greek fisherman’s cap. Tall, scruffy-bearded, he walked with a slouch that made it appear as if he was folded in half at the waist, but the crease stayed.
We had never spoken before, yet Oppenheimer approached me as if we had known each other for years and were continuing an earlier conversation. He tossed a book near my lunch tray, shaking the gravy well in my mashed potatoes, and then hovered above me and asked, “Guess what I found the Muslim Students Association selling at Manoogian Hall?”
It wasn’t really a book. It was more like a pamphlet. On the cover were a strange combination of words that actually struck me as funny.The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was an undertone of what I took to be Jewish sarcasm right there in the title. It seemed like it could be the script for a new Mel Brooks movie. You know, like Jews in Space. I looked up at the rabbi with a half-grin on my face, waiting for the punch line. Instead, there was silence. It took a couple of beats for me to realize that Oppenheimer was waiting for a reaction from me. I had nothing. He let out a tiny sigh and sat down next to me.
“Surely you’ve heard of the Protocols,” Oppenheimer said.
My blank stare was his answer.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Up until then, my knowledge of anti-Semitism was narrow, despite some experience with it during my early life in Georgia, and later in a suburb of Chicago (“Hey, Howard, aren’t you going to pick up that penny?”). But the serious, deadly kind of anti-Semitism was confined primarily to the Holocaust, fed mostly by my grandfather’s stories of Hungary. What happened before the life of my grandfather, or how it fit in with the larger narrative of my people, I was clueless. That’s what it is to be truly obsessive in the clinical sense. The information you obtain, obsessively, is narrow, focused, and often incomplete because it ignores the periphery and all that comes before and after. It was akin to extreme contemplation of the chalk outline of a corpse with no knowledge of the events that led to the murder. My obsession with the Holocaust was devoid of context except my own family’s.
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” I grinned slightly. The name still sounded funny to me.
“I’ll leave this here with you,” said the rabbi, who was not smiling at all. “Read it, and then come see me at Hillel and I’ll give you a statement for your story.”
My story? I had never agreed to write a story on this. But, nevertheless, I flipped the book open and the more I read, the more curious I became. Mel Brooks indeed, It was filled with what I found to be laughable lines about One World Government under the control of International Jewry. It was obviously written by anti-Semites, but if you are a Jew who denies it was written by Jews, well, then that just proves that you are part of the plot. That’s the beauty of a conspiracy theory. The more you deny, the guiltier you seem. And, now, Arab students are using it as some kind of proof of Jewish intent in the Middle East.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Semite and Anti-Semite
“We are Semites ourselves,” said Mohammed, the association’s president, speaking to me in a cramped office at the Student Center. “How can we be anti-Semitic?” Mohammed seemed a bit old to be a student. He came to Detroit from Egypt, which led to the rumor that he was also with the Muslim Brotherhood. I had no idea if that was true, but he was to become my nemesis for the next three years.
“It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are fiction. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” said Mohammed, arms waving, gesturing, hovering over me as I remained seated. “But you cannot deny that many of the prophecies in this book have come true. Jews run the financial systems.”
“Prophecies,” I thought. “Prophecies.” It’s the language of religion used to describe an anti-Jewish invention from the czarist era. I cocked my head a bit like a dog. Mohammad picked up on it immediately. “Yes, prophecies.”
Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service. I hadn’t meant these things to happen.
But I was only in college, was learning as I went along, and had not yet had my full immersion into Arab culture with Lamya and her friends. That would come later, and through it an appreciation of how very alike Jews and Arabs were in many respects. At that moment, though, at the age of 19, I thought I knew what an anti-Semite was.
Accidental Jewish Journalism Career
I wrote the Protocols story, which led to my friendship with Lamya, who would change my life in many ways, aside from telling me that I did not know everything. Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service.
I hadn’t meant these things to happen. But I felt I was being dragged there by this state of Jewishness that I could not escape. It was a voice that was always there since as long as I had conscious thought. It was sometimes my grandfather’s voice, other times I interpreted it as God’s. It could not have been my own, since there were obviously forces outside myself at play. I was convinced of it.
This voice led to the illusion of conviction and confidence and how very convinced I was that I was right. It’s how I stoically endured, expressionless, when the entire Arab student body showed up to a public forum to denounce my application to be editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. It’s how I handled the humiliation when Abbie Hoffman, himself, denounced me at a campus rally as representative of all that was wrong with the youth of the 1980s.
The tics of my early childhood had morphed into rigid thought in college. Yet, the feelings of being out of sync with my peers, of having another being travel with me, forcing my muscles and my brain synapses into rigid rituals, were still there in more disturbing forms. The tics, the habits, even the waking sleep paralysis and night terrors I had mistaken for God much of my life. What else could they be? But by 1985 I knew that it was a flaw in me. The voice was more than an impulse. It was much more dark, persistent, life-swallowing than the narcissism of youth.
This is a kind of memory of a memory. It is my grandfather’s childhood accounts of a Hungarian pogrom and other anti-Jewish violence and blood libel. Longreads says this takes 17 minutes to read. For slow readers like me, longer. It took about 100 years to write, from the time my grandfather experienced it then told it to my brothers and me. It’s part of a memoir I’m writing about my grandfather, Judaism, and other ghosts.
By the way, I was looking for historical references to the Hungarian pogrom described by my grandfather. I found it in the American Jewish Year Book. These disturbing accounts were of anti-Jewish violence well before the Holocaust. These were post-WWI. Click for a closer look.
There is much to unpack in the excerpt, from Hungarian pogroms to my grandfather’s memory of family and the town in which he grew up, to an actual instance of blood libel. In future posts, I’ll explain more about what my grandfather witnessed.
Howard Lovy retells his grandfather’s childhood accounts of anti-Jewish violence and blood libel in pre-Holocaust Hungary.
On the banks of the Danube, there is a place where the great river takes two sharp 45-degree turns, making it difficult for ships to pass unseen. For centuries, this feature made the city, nestled within, a fortification against foreign attack. But from an enemy inside the city’s own boundaries, there was no natural protection. And for a 9-year-old boy, hiding as his neighbors ransacked his grandparents’ home, a wine barrel was the only shelter. There he hid, silent, while around him echoed the muffled, angry, anguished sounds of a pogrom.
