Chronicles - Bob Dylan [9]
Being an heir of the ’40s and ’50s cultures, this kind of talk was fine with me. Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of an old folk song, too. Practically speaking, the ’50s culture was like a judge in his last days on the bench. It was about to go. Within ten years’ time, it would struggle to rise and then come crashing to the floor. With folk songs embedded in my mind like a religion, it wouldn’t matter. Folk songs transcended the immediate culture.
Before I moved into a place of my own, I’d stayed pretty much all over the Village. Sometimes for a night or two, sometimes for weeks or more. I stayed a lot at Van Ronk’s. I probably stayed at Vestry Street off and on longer than anywhere. I liked it at Ray and Chloe’s. I felt comfortable there. Ray had an elite background, even studied at Camden Military Academy in South Carolina, which he had left with “sincere and utter hatred.” He’d also been “expelled with gratitude” from Wake Forest Divinity School, a religious college. He had parts of Byron’s Don Juan memorized and could quote it — also some of the beautiful lines of “Evangeline,” the Longfellow poem. He was working in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, but before that had drifted around, had been employed at the Studebaker plant in South Bend and also at an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what that was like. “You ever heard of Auschwitz?” Sure I had, who hadn’t? It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed them, had been put on trial recently in Jerusalem. He’d escaped after the war and was captured by the Israelis at a bus stop in Argentina. His trial was a big deal. On the witness stand Eichmann declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish. Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided. There was a lot of talk about sparing his life, even sending him back to Argentina, but that would have been foolish. Even if he was set free he probably wouldn’t last an hour. The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution. The trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli state.
I was born in the spring of 1941. The Second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt — towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval — indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with — rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
My father was stricken with polio and it kept him out of the war, but my uncles had all gone and come back alive. Uncle Paul, Uncle Maurice, Jack, Max, Louis, Vernon and others had gone off to the Philippines, Anzio, Sicily, North Africa, France and Belgium. They brought back mementos and keep-sakes — a straw Japanese cigarette case, German bread bag, a British enameled mug, German dust