A LETTER TO HARVEY MILK
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Seventy-seven-year-old Harry Weinberg, a San Francisco widower, takes a creative writing course for the elderly (“to pass the time”) and finds himself confronting, in unexpected places, the past that he is so keen to bury. Given the assignment to write a letter to someone from his past, he rejects the notion of writing to loved ones who died in the camps or even to his wife and instead writes to Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor slain in 1978. “You had to go get yourself killed for being a feygele?” Harry writes in his journal, mourning for the mensch who used to visit his kosher butcher store regularly.
It’s always dangerous to draw parallels between the suffering of one persecuted faction of humanity and another. How can suffering be measured or qualified? Luckily, this story does not attempt to make comparisons. It simply finds a common ground where the two cultures of Judaism and homosexuality can meet and recognize each other. Barbara, the writing instructor with whom Harry strikes up a rapport, is Jewish and a lesbian and determined to reconcile these two things. Although her family rejects her for being gay, she is anxious to explore the past of her people. Harry discourages her. “In the old country,” he says, “I saw things you shouldn’t know from.” From his lips it is both a benediction and a warning.
