How I Write

 

Back in the fall of 1984, when writing was still an evolving process for me, I took a course in New York University’s School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) called Practicum: Teaching Expository Writing.  The class—a ‘practicum’ is a course designed for the preparation of teachers in a particular field that involves the practical application of theory—was taught by Gordon Pradl (1943-2020), a longtime professor of English education at NYU’s ed school.     

I was a new Ph.D. student in the Department of Performance Studies at the time (1983-86) and I was offered a position as a preceptor in the undergrad Expository Writing Program.  (‘Preceptor’ is what the EWP called its teaching assistants.)  The Writing Practicum was a required class for all preceptors who were teaching the mandatory, two-semester Writing Workshop.  Performance Studies grad students were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.

(Expository writing, in the way NYU used the term, is writing that conveys factual information, as opposed to creative writing, such as fiction.  The purpose of expository writing is to explain, inform, describe, or analyze something.  While most expository writing appears in the form of an essay, it’s also the type of writing used in personal and business letters; memos; recipes; reports; news articles; press releases; term papers, theses, and dissertations; textbooks; encyclopedia entries; and almost any other kind of non-fiction written work one can imagine.)

One of the assignments for Dr. Pradl’s Writing Practicum was to describe our “writing process”—in other words, to articulate how each of us went about putting words and ideas on paper “from assignment to conclusion.” 

Because of scheduling, I didn’t take the Practicum until the start of my second year at NYU.  I’d had a year of teaching in the EWP and a year of working under the Performance Studies emphasis on writing.  All the DPS faculty specifically stressed in their classes that all our written work was expected to be of publishable quality, whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal. 

(My first published essay, “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson,” written in May 1984 for a DPS course, was published in the winter 1984 issue of The Drama Review.  I went on to publish in various journals, a number of other essays that were or started as class assignments.  Two were even exam papers!)

Nevertheless, when Dr. Pradl asked that question, I was still going through a serious reevaluation of what I did when I wrote.  Not only had I simply never come to grips with the process as a process, I couldn’t be absolutely sure—or even reasonably sure—that what I thought I did is really what I was doing.  Certainly, it wasn’t likely to remain what I did for very long—I was still leaning. 

Part of the reason for this uncertainty was undoubtedly that I’d never had any instruction in writing prior to NYU.  Like my peers in the ’50s, I learned grammar and vocabulary in primary and middle school, of course, but in high school and college lit classes, we studied writers, not writing.  Composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum.

Writing in high school and undergraduate school wasn’t very demanding with respect to style or presentation; it was all about content: as long as the facts were reasonably correct, the paper was acceptable.  After college, the only writing I did that wasn’t personal, were army reports (military intelligence, the field I was in, demanded a lot of various kinds of reports!), the rhetorical standards for which weren’t very high. 

The first writing I did that made me aware of my prose was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977.  The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work, the performance of my “thesis role” was (my MFA is in acting), but I was constrained to write a readable document, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best thesis the department had seen. 

I used to describe my own college writing style as “pedantic,” but now I wanted to write “trippingly on the tongue.”  The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing that.  I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to.  I had to learn for myself how to do it.

A subliminal writing influence “to acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” might have come from the periodicals I was reading at the time, such as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine.  They’re less formal than the kind of academic reading a student usually encounters, and they’re easy to read. 

Some of the writers I admired at that time were Times columnists Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen and essayists S. J. Perelman, E. B. White, and James Thurber.  I didn’t imitate the style of those writers, but they all wrote in a conversational tone.  (Notice how many of those writers are humorists.)  

I still hadn’t developed a “writing process,” however.  I don’t know exactly what I did while I was writing; it was all just dumb luck—or osmosis—that I got anything on paper at all.

The next step in my development of a writing process was returning to school for a doctorate.  I started at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in the fall of 1983 and a required class was Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance.  The course, taught then by Kate Davy (now provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn), essentially covered just what the title indicates but it was also partly a writing class for DPS grad students. 

One of the texts for Resources was William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d characterize as the writers’ equivalent of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting: fundamental, practical, commonsensical, and excellent (see my profile, “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” posted on Rick On Theater on 28 July 2015).

The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty, including Davy, couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.  My principal instructors were Michael Kirby (1931-97), Brooks McNamara (see “Remembering Brooks McNamara (1937-2009),” 3 June 2009), and Richard Schechner, who all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, a premier theater journal published in the department. 

Alongside TDR, another publication, Women & Performance, founded in 1983, is also published by DPS.  With two scholarly journals as part of the environment of my department when I was first learning to think like a writer, the Resources and Methods course, the urgings of my professors, trying to teach the skill to others in the Expository Writing Program, and, later, taking Dr. Pradl’s Practicum, I began to conceive a process of composition.

In addition to Zinsser, by far my strongest influence in this reeducation endeavor, I read other writers on writing: Peter Elbow and William Safire (who wrote not so much about writing as language) and the old standbys Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. 

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that I ended up following a pretty standard procedure for putting ideas and words on paper: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading.  Of course, that’s a simplistic description, and even at that, the details have changed over time.  Still, tried and true works, so why not?

One thing whose effect became really clear immediately was technical.  Just before I started the Practicum, I bought myself a computer-word processor.  That first word processor changed my writing fundamentally even as I was just learning how to do it.   

The impetus for getting the computer was eminently practical.  In the fall of 1983, I wrote a column for the departmental newsletter; the subject’s irrelevant, but it was a voluntary project, not an assignment.  It was all of three pages, and I wrote it by hand, then typed the draft. 

I cut-and-pasted the first draft, re-edited it, typed it again, re-edited it again, and retyped it again.  Three drafts of a three-page piece of writing that I didn’t even have to do!  That was a lot of work for a freebie.

I was very aware that my Qualifying Exams, the DPS equivalent of “comps,” were coming up in a year.  The Performance Studies Qualifying Exams were three 10-page essays of publishable quality which we had to write in ten days.  I’m not even a touch-typist—there was no way I could research, draft, and edit three acceptable essays in 10 days if I had to get it to a typist in time to get them photocopied—I had to provide a copy for each member of the DPS faculty—and turn them in.

After that, there would be the doctoral dissertation.  My MFA thesis, for which I hired a typist, was only 44 pages long, but the Ph.D. dissertation was a whole different beast.  The only way I could see to succeed at these two vital tasks was this new technology, the word processor.  Of course, I’d need time to learn how to use it, so now was the time to get one. 

In December 1985, I got the exam essays done on time and one of my teachers told me later that though the department didn’t distinguish between levels of success, if it did, I’d have passed with distinction.  The computer allowed me to do that.

As soon as I got the word processor, I found that I wrote more avidly, and sometimes more words as well, because it was fun.  I would often find that I’d worked for hours without stopping because there wasn’t any effort required to type the words onto the screen.  I’d been using an IBM Selectric, but even the best electric machine required effort and my fingers and hands got tired.

I didn’t count drafts anymore because it all became one, flexible draft that reformed itself every time I made a change—until I decided it was finished, and sent it to the printer.  Since there was no retyping every time I wanted to edit a draft, I did far more editing and revising.  Where I’d used to give up on a change because it was too tedious to make—say, changing a small word or reversing the order of two sentences—I now pushed a couple of keys, and I’d have exactly what I wanted, instead of what I’d settle for. 

I won’t even get into the changes in doing footnotes, numbering lists, alphabetizing, keeping margins straight, and not ruining a page by typing too close to the bottom.  It wasn’t as easy then as it is now, but I could change font sizes, even typefaces, without even changing typing elements; a standard electric typewriter couldn’t even do that, of course.

So, just as I was piecing together a workable process for writing, it was changing.  I was convinced it was for the better—and I think it has proved to be. 

Actually, I don’t think the basic process changed so much as it got streamlined and condensed.  The drafting-and-revising stage is the clearest example.  Cutting-and-pasting became an electronic operation instead of a messy, time-consuming, actual scissors-and-tape job.

Another advantage the word processor provided me was the facility to start my writing wherever I wanted—where I felt most confident.  Since I could insert paragraphs wherever I needed, I could start in the middle of the piece and go back later and add a beginning.

Beginnings, it would turn out, were one of my problem areas.  I would eventually develop strategies for dealing with this problem, but back at the start of my transformation into a writer, I didn’t have any—at least not consciously.

When I started writing my master’s thesis, I was terribly blocked at first—I didn’t know how to start.  I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin.  I would simply start putting words on paper as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they were grammatical and made sense. 

I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was freewriting about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called focused freewriting.  It’s a prewriting tactic that I still use today.  Soon, the ideas all just began to gush out. 

Here was another benefit I derived from working with a word processor.  I used to agonize over each word, each sentence, each paragraph, and I couldn’t move on until I was reasonably satisfied with the result.  I’d scribble a draft, rewrite it on the blank line above the first attempt, maybe cut-and-paste, reread it—sometimes aloud—and cross out more and rewrite again. 

With the computer, first of all, I no longer even needed to be concerned if the first version wasn’t right yet because I could go back later and revise it or even cut it—no harm, no foul.  Second, if I had an idea while I was working, I could go right back and rewrite the sentence or ’graph and go right back to work where I’d left off. 

This development went a long way to helping me resolve another writing problem I had.  You see, like a lot of people, my mind works faster than my fingers, even on a computer keyboard, let alone a typewriter.  While I was struggling over words and sentences I’d already composed, I would sometimes forget what I was thinking of saying next.  Moving along without the obsessive rewriting prevented me from forgetting many of the ideas I had.

I still have the problem, not only when I stop to revise in mid-write—which I no longer do as a rule—but whenever I stop, say for an errand or a meal or sleep, or even when I’m working on one idea and the idea for the next section just evaporates before I can get to it.  Sometimes I can retrieve the thought, but sometimes it’s just gone.

Since I know I have this tendency, now I occasionally make a note about an idea I want to get to next.  I used to write it on a slip of paper, sometimes on a Post-it which I’d stick on the draft.  Now, with the computer, I just type the note to myself in the spot where I want to add the thought. 

The basic process through which I work when I write an essay of any length developed over a couple of years, principally the years I was in residence at NYU.  (We did a lot of writing in Performance Studies; every course had at least one paper, and most had two or three short ones and one term project.) 

I continued to follow the process after I left school and wrote mainly for publication, but I condensed it a little over time.  (As I noted, the computer also streamlined the working method, but that happened organically and quickly.)  Still, the basic steps remained, just not always discretely.

prewriting.  As soon as a writer, including a student writer, decides to write, whether it’s an assigned task or something she or he’s inspired to write, prewriting begins.  This covers anything a writer does before putting words in sentences on paper or screen.

Fundamentally, prewriting starts me thinking and planning for my writing.  I start to explore my ideas about my topic and gather additional information.  I begin to organize my material.  It’s important to note, though, that all this is tentative and flexible: I can change any of it as I progress and discover or encounter new thoughts.

Prewriting might include making an outline, doing research, reading or watching related material, and making notes.  It might also involve determining what has already been published on the subject, a procedure that’s often required for proposals for theses and dissertations as well as articles submitted for publication.

I accomplish some of these prewriting tasks not only before writing begins but also as it’s beginning.  Reading pertinent material is often on-going, particularly when one piece of literature leads me to another I hadn’t known about earlier.  On big projects, I have also continued to do research while I’m writing.

One prewriting task that almost has to occur before any writing happens is idea generation.  Clearly, if I know from the outset what I want to write about, this step is less imperative, but for assigned writing, that may not always be the case. 

When I set out to write my MFA thesis, I knew my subject intimately, but I still didn’t know how to write about it.  I didn’t know about any of these procedures yet, but I instinctively applied a form of idea generation, and even hit upon a known technique for getting started.

There are many techniques for engendering ideas: freewriting, focused freewriting, brainstorming and list-making, subject-mapping.  I’m not going to discuss all of these (mostly because I don’t use them, but they’re common writing terms and readers can look them up in writing texts and on line).  I do use the first two tactics on the list.

Freewriting, unlike other prewriting techniques, is writing in sentences and even paragraphs (brainstorming results in lists of words and phrases; subject-mapping uses diagrams and lines).  I write for at least 10 minutes about whatever comes to my mind without stopping.  I try not to change anything I’ve written, though the temptation to edit is hard for me to resist.  I try not to be concerned about grammar, punctuation, or spelling.

I actually don’t use plain freewriting much, since I usually have a subject in mind.  What I did to break the writer’s block I experienced at the start of my thesis was focused freewriting, which is the tactic I use mostly to get started.  It’s a way to find out what’s generally known about the subject, what I know about it before I do any reading or research.

Concentrating only on my topic, I write down what I know, making free associations as I go along.  Ideally, I don’t censor my thoughts.  I write for about 10 minutes, then stop and underline one sentence.  For the next 10 minutes of freewriting, I focus on that idea.  I repeat this process as often as I need to until I feel I have something concrete enough to build on.

Counterintuitively, this exercise often actually generates useable writing.  It may not be the start of the essay or article, but it frequently ends up somewhere in the composition—cleaned up grammatically and rhetorically, but the ideas remain.  Not always, though.

drafting.  Using the ideas and plans he or she developed during the prewriting phase, the writer begins composing.  He or she refines the organization first devised in the outline, if the writer made one.  In the drafting phase of the composing process, the writer should consider only the content and ignore grammar, punctuation, and spelling to create a first draft of the composition.

This step is an exercise in discovery.  Writing the first draft of the composition is when the writer assembles most of the information he or she will use in the finished piece.  This is an exploration.

This is the step in which I get the ideas on paper or screen, composed in sentences and paragraphs.  I organize the ideas into coherent groups.  Inevitably, I pay attention to style while I’m writing the first draft, even though I know I shouldn’t, but the real concentration on this comes as I’m revising.  I’m mostly concerned that what I say can be read and understood by anyone with a general familiarity of the topic. 

As I noted, I try to consider only the content of my work at this stage, not the grammar, punctuation, or spelling—though both the word processor’s review applications and my own proclivity make it problematical that I’ll completely ignore mechanics.

I also try to keep pressing ahead and not stall over vocabulary or mechanics (my old habit) so I can focus on getting the ideas down.  As I write, I allow new ideas to develop and, if they’re pertinent to the section on which I’m currently working, I insert them as they occur.  If they apply to earlier or later sections of the paper, I make a note in my outline (or even right on the draft, since I can delete it later when I’ve taken care of the addition).  

The first draft is a “discovery draft” in which I find out not only new ideas about the topic of which I hadn’t thought at the start, but also how I feel about the subject and new ways of looking at it.  In my play reports on Rick On Theater, I frequently comment that I don’t know exactly how I feel about the play or the performance I saw, but that in writing about it, I figure that out.

While I’m working on the draft, I refine my organization occasionally for unity (keeping related ideas and points together) and coherence (keeping the writing logical and rhetorically consistent).

revising.  After completing the draft, the writer reads it over and decides what ideas need to be improved, expanded, or eliminated.  Many writers feel that this is the step in the writing process when they truly learn to write. 

It’s often a good idea to read the draft aloud to get a sense of how the prose flows (or doesn’t).  Readers read with their ears as well as their eyes and brain; they hear what’s been written, like reading poetry or song lyrics.

After reading through the draft, the writer adds new points and more specific details.  Specifics make the writing concrete rather than vague and airy.  Some ideas must be dropped either because they don’t really fit the point or the argument, or they don’t advance the thesis, the essay’s main idea about which the writer’s trying to inform the reader.

The writer then reorganizes the material for a better, more logical arrangement.  The criteria are still unity and coherence.

At this point, the writer creates a second draft—and revises that.  This time, she or he revises for style: better diction (choice of words); smoother, more flowing phrasing; eliminating clichés and redundancies (saying the same thing over and over again); adding detail and specifics; correcting the grammar; straightening out the sentence structure; and so on.

Depending on how long or complex the essay is, the writer will create further drafts and revise them as well.  There’s no limit to the number of drafts and revisions the writer will make before she or he’s satisfied.

When I revise, I focus first on content and organization.  Does each paragraph contain a single, clear thought?  Have I focused on a single main idea?  Do I have an effective opening or “lead” (sometimes spelled lede in journalistic jargon)?

Are there specific facts, examples, incidents, definitions, and other details?  Have I cut out material that is not on the topic or that repeats points I’ve already made?  Have I arranged the material in a logical order?  Have I ended with an effective conclusion?

I’ve acknowledged that leads, that is, getting started, are one of my most pervasive difficulties.  I’ve gotten better at it over time, but it can still hang me up.  One piece of advice that Kate Davy passed along in Resources and Methods has helped immensely: “Leads are more a ‘manipulation’ than an introduction.”  The opening gambit is meant to “hook” the readers, get them interested in what you’re going to say.

She provided some suggestions that have worked quite well for me, among them: relate an anecdote, present a provocative (and relevant) quotation, and issue a challenge.

My second most difficult writing problem, though, is endings or conclusions.  Even now, some of my pieces don’t actually end at all.  They just stop.  Again, Davy came to the rescue, explaining, “A conclusion is not a summary.”

(Does anybody remember the recommended essay structure from high school and maybe also college: “Tell the readers what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you said”?  Wrong!)

A conclusion “should have a feeling of winding down.”  Davy again gave us some practical suggestions: a quotation (but this one shouldn’t lead on to anything), a rhetorical question, a speculation. 

Next, I concentrate on style: Have I used necessary transitions and connections?  Have I used key words to help create unity?  Have I avoided short, choppy sentences?  Or (more likely in my case), long, windy ones?  Have I avoided unnecessarily repeating words or phrases?  Have I used clichés and hackneyed or over-used expressions?

I look carefully for words I can cut out (clutter) and language I can make less stiff and simpler.  Have I avoided informal language, slang, and jargon?  (When writing for ROT, though, I use more informal diction, including slang, than I would for an academic paper or an article for publication.  I want the posts to sound more conversational.)

Finally, I look for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—including typos (because I’m still not a touch typist!).  Now, in the era of spell- and grammar-checkers, I take special care to spot errors where I type actual words, but the wrong ones—I’m always typing but for by and and for an—because spell-checkers won’t flag those (though grammar-checkers will sometimes).

Have I eliminated sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and comma splices?  (These aren’t errors I often make—though I will occasionally write fragments deliberately.)  Do the verbs agree with their subjects?  Have I used the correct pronouns?  Have I used capital letters correctly?

As I’ve said, this is the step in my writing method that was most affected by my switch from handwriting and typing to the computer.  Though I noted above that drafting and revising is a repeated process—remember my little three-page newsletter article that took three full drafts?—once I started using a word processor, drafting and revising, rather than being a series of repeated but separate steps, became one process that just went on as long as I needed it to.

editing.  In this penultimate step in the writing process, the writer checks over his or her grammar, punctuation, and spelling thoroughly one more time. 

Even with the grammar and spelling guides embedded in all word processors now, it’s still useful to keep a grammar reference and dictionary handy.  The reason is that computer spell-checkers, as I pointed out, can’t distinguish between homonyms or words that are anagrams for one another (lemon and melon; listen and silent).

Grammar guides with the word processor follow a set of rules that don’t vary from instance to instance.  Grammar isn’t a matter of inflexible rules or laws; it’s based on convention, the way which things are usually done by common agreement.  The writer may have good reason to ignore convention and disregard the grammar-checker’s advice or “correction.” 

The computer guidance can also be plain wrong because the machine can’t analyze the syntax in its programming and a similar syntax the writer intended; it will flag correct punctuation or word form simply because it doesn’t understand.

When I do my final edit, I read through the essay for readability.  I may read it aloud because if I trip over my own prose, a reader certainly will, too.  (If I have time, I put the paper aside for a few days so I can reread with fresh eyes.) 

I put myself in the place of a reader, reading my composition objectively, as though I hadn’t written the paper.  I try to read as though I’d never seen the paper before.  I ask myself questions I imagine the reader will ask; if the answers aren’t in the paper, I look for places to put them in. 

I pay attention to whether my writing reads smoothly and proceeds from one point to the next logically and fluently.  Have I made the point that I wanted to make?  Is the essay going to be comprehendible for its likely audience?

Beginnings and, to a lesser degree, endings, which I’ve identified as problem areas for me, often have to be worked on, smoothed out and polished, but my most consistent problem is writing too much—I tend to run off at the mouth—so cutting during the editing step has become the most important revising technique in my process. 

In the final stage of editing, I give my grammar a last look for correctness.  I’m pretty good with grammar, but there are always questionable instances that need reconsideration—not to forget those pesky typos.

I’m less confident in my spelling, though I’ve gotten better over the years.  (I have certain spelling problems about which I’ve long known—ie/ei words and -ede/-eed words, for example—and I always check those specifically.) 

I also always check and recheck the spelling of personal names (Richard Rodgers has a d in his last name; Eugene O’Neill has two l’s in his; Barbra Streisand had only two a’s in her first name, not three); titles of books, movies, and plays; the names of companies and businesses (especially theaters and theater companies—which ones use theatre in their names, like most Broadway houses, and which ones use theater, as New York City’s Public Theater does).

I check the paper to be sure I’ve correctly used all punctuation marks.  I especially check quotation marks and parentheses to be sure I included the closing marks (because I still sometimes forget).  I also check that I’ve used capital letters correctly, as well as italics, abbreviations, and numerals. 

If I’ve used quotations, I double-check them to be sure I’ve transcribed them right.  If I’ve edited the quotation, I make sure I’ve marked those changes properly (brackets for insertions, ellipses for deletions).  If the paper uses source-documentation notes, I check that mine are accurate and correctly formatted for the publication or the professor.

proofreading.  This is the last step in the writing process, and the writer rereads her or his last draft to be sure there are no errors remaining—particularly those resistant typos.  (There’s a psychological phenomenon known as “closure” that causes us to read what we think should be on the paper, but isn’t.  It makes us insert missing words or correct misspellings in our minds, and we can read the same sentence over and over and not see the mistake unless we focus very closely.)

Proofing is reading strictly for errors, and it’s a good idea for the writer to reread several times, once for each kind if writing problem: once just for spelling and typos, say, once for punctuation problems, once for subject-verb agreement or verb-tense consistency, and so on, as necessary.

After working on several papers, the developing writer should begin to identify the kinds of mistakes that are habitual in her or his work.  Many, the writer will learn to avoid in the first draft stage, but others may persist, and proofreading specifically for those is wise.

I don’t proofread for content.  I will have taken care of those issues when I edited, if not while I was drafting and revising.  As I said above, I know certain words are hard for me, and I make some punctuation errors consistently as well.  I check for those first.

I read slowly to take in each letter of each word and each punctuation mark.  I read line by line, sometimes using the cursor to guide my eye to individual words, syllables, or even letters.  If I have to, I’ll pronounce each word aloud.

I won’t try to proof more than a line at a time, often only a sentence or even a phrase, no more than my eye can take in at one glance.  I take in punctuation and grammar as I proofread, looking up anything of which I’m not certain.

When I’m finished proofing the piece, I’ll read it through once more, perhaps out loud again.  This is my last chance to make any changes or corrections before the final stage of the writing process: submitting or publishing.  Anyone who’s written an article for publication will know that once the publisher accepts the submission, the writer no longer owns the piece; the publisher does.  The writer can no longer make changes (unless the publisher or the editor requests them).  Until I send the paper off, it’s still mine.

In Poor Richard’s Almanac (1738), Benjamin Franklin wrote: “If you would not be forgotten . . . , either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”  Whether or not I’ve accomplished the latter achievement, I’m afraid, will be up to someone else.  I hope I’ve occasionally accomplished Franklin’s first criterion for a measure of repute.  If so, it’s largely down to the method I’ve tried to describe here.  I will add one other pertinent quotation, from 1682’s “Essay on Poetry” by poet and politician John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normandy:

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
  Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.

[I’ve published quite a few posts on writers and writing on Rick On Theater.  I won’t list them all, but I will reference the ones I wrote myself, especially the ones covering my own writing.  My profile of William Zinsser (28 July 2015) is already mentioned above; in addition to that, I wrote “Writing” (9 April 2010) and “Why Write” (4 March 2013).]

Gail Halvorsen, The 'Candy Bomber' (1920-2022)

 

[The man whose name appears in the title of this post, Gail Halvorsen, was a hero.  He was a veteran of World War II, but his moment in the spotlight of history came three years after VE Day and he became a hero to a generation of former enemies in that conflict who were children in the post-war years.  You’ll read that story below in Colonel Halvorsen’s—that’s the way I knew the man—obituary. 

[Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gail S. Halvorsen died at 101 years of age on Wednesday, 16 February, in Provo, Utah, his home after leaving the service, from complications of COVID-19.

[I knew Colonel Halvorsen when he was commander of the U.S. airbase at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin (16 February 1970-15 February 1974).  I was stationed in West Berlin from 29 July 1971 to 15 February 1974 as a U.S. Army intelligence officer.  I helped start an amateur theater troupe, the Tempelhof American Theatre, which met and performed at the airbase and Colonel Halvorsen’s daughter Denise was a member. 

[The Soviets controlled the airspace over their occupation zone of Germany (which became the German Democratic Republic, more familiar as East Germany, in October 1949) and restricted Allied flights to a very narrow corridor.  (What many people outside Germany often didn’t realize is that the divided city of Berlin wasn’t on the border between the two Germanys, but 110 miles inside the GDR.) 

[Furthermore, Tempelhof was actually in downtown Berlin and planes came in to land right over the rooves of apartment buildings until the aircraft actually dropped beneath the roof line while the airport and its landing strips were still in front of them.  (Tempelhof Air Force Base was decommissioned in 1994 and the civilian airport was closed in 2008.)

[For these reasons, only specially certified pilots were allowed to fly in and out of Berlin in my day.  One of them was Col. Gail Halvorsen. 

[In September 1973, I took a trip to Greece.  My folks were booked on an Aegean cruise, and we met in Athens a week earlier to tour the mainland.  I used an air force “hop” (catching a ride on an air force flight that was going in your direction anyway) out of Berlin—Athenai airport is also an airbase—and on the return flight, which included a leg from Ramstein to Berlin, Gail Halvorsen piloted the plane. 

[We were the only passengers on the flight and had been chatting in the waiting area, walked out to the plane together, boarded, sat down, and buckled ourselves in.  The plane took off, and then Colonel Halvorsen turned to me and said, “Excuse me.  I’m going to fly the plane now.”  I thought he was joking at first—till he got up and walked into the cockpit. 

[The Candy Bomber flew me into Berlin!  My little brush with actual history.

[(I’ve told that anecdote before on Rick On Theater: in “Berlin Memoir,” Parts 1 and 7, 16 December 2016 and 29 March 2017, and “The Big Lift,” 31 August 2017.  The Big Lift is a 1950 Twentieth Century-Fox film about the Berlin Airlift starring Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas.  It was shot on location in Berlin from July to October 1949, right after the Soviet blockade was lifted, and all the roles, except the two American NCO’s played by Clift and Douglas, were played by actual airmen or German actors. 

[(My post recounts some of the history of Operation Vittles, the official name of the airlift, and relates some personal responses I had to the film as it connected to my times living in Germany in the ’60s [see “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013] and Berlin in the ’70s [see “Berlin Memoir,” referenced above, and several other ROT posts].)

[Below, you’ll read the tale of how Gail Halvorsen got his nickname and, in 1948-49, then-Lieutenant Halvorsen became a hero to the children of Berlin (by the 1970s, the adults running the city).  The obituary I’m reposting is from the New York Times of 18 February 2022, sec. B (“Business”/”Sports”).]

“GAIL HALVORSEN, 101, ORIGINAL ‘CANDY BOMBER’ IN BERLIN AIRLIFT, DIES”
by Richard Goldstein

Lieutenant Halvorsen came up with the idea to drop candies, chocolate and chewing gum for the children of West Berlin during a tense Cold War standoff.

                                               

Gail Halvorsen in 2005 during a ceremony at Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, which the U.S. was giving back to Germany. In 1948, when he was a lieutenant in the Air Force, Mr. Halvorsen and his crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop candies, chocolate and chewing gum for the children of West Berlin during the Berlin airlift. Michael Probst/Associated Press

Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, an Air Force transport pilot, was on the grounds of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield on a mid-July day in 1948, taking part in a historic confrontation of the early Cold War years, when he spotted some 30 German children in ragged clothing outside a fence.

He reached into his back pocket, extracted a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint and handed out the last two sticks of gum in the pack.

“The look in their eyes, I could see their appreciation for something so small,” he recalled long afterward. “I wanted to do something more, so I told them to come back later.”

He promised to drop candy to the youngsters on his flight the next day from Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, carrying food and other vital supplies in a massive relief mission known as the Berlin airlift.

“They asked how they would know it was me,” he said. “I told them I’ll wiggle the wings.”

In the months to come, an act of kindness by this American airman — the boys and girls of West Berlin would come to call him Uncle Wiggly Wings — grew into a storied good-will operation within a Great Powers drama.

Lt. Gail Halvorsen, the “Candy Bomber,” greets children of isolated West Berlin sometime during 1948-49 after dropping candy bars from the air on tiny parachutes. USAF photo.

Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.

When Mr. Halvorsen died on Wednesday at 101, he was remembered as the original “Candy Bomber” of the airlift, a defiance of Soviet power by the United States, Britain and France that also symbolized reconciliation between the German people and the Allies in the wake of World War II. 

His death, in a hospital in Provo, Utah, was announced by the Gail S. Halvorsen Aviation Education Foundation.

The airlift began after the Soviet Union cut off the Allied powers’ land access to West Berlin, situated deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, in June 1948. The people of West Berlin were faced with near starvation and an impending winter without fuel.

The airlift, which continued for 15 months [26 June 1948-30 September 1949], claimed the lives of 31 American airmen and 39 British fliers in accidents, but it thwarted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s attempts to drive the West from the city. By the time it ended in September 1949 (the Soviet blockade had been lifted the previous May), Allied pilots had flown more than 277,000 missions, sometimes buzzed by Soviet fighters, to supply the city’s western sectors with 2.3 million tons of food, flour, coal, medicine and construction equipment.

Lieutenant Halvorsen, a native of Utah, flew 126 Berlin airlift missions, joined by his co-pilot, Capt. John Pickering, and his navigator, Sgt. Herschel Elkins.

When early press reports on the candy drops identified Lieutenant Halvorsen as the source of the sweets, he was summoned by Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, the airlift commander. He feared he would be court-martialed, since Air Force regulations prohibited any deviation from the airlift procedures.

But General Tunner was impressed by the good feelings Lieutenant Halvorsen had engendered for the United States only a few years after its bombers had left Germany in ruin. He encouraged the candy drops, from Douglas C-47s and later the more advanced C-54 transport planes, in what Lieutenant Halvorsen called Operation Little Vittles [the airlift was designated Operation Vittles by the U.S. forces; the British called it Operation Plainfare and the Australians, Operation Pelican].

In September 1948, the Air Force sent Lieutenant Halvorsen back to the United States to publicize his efforts, and he appeared on the CBS-TV program “We the People.” American candy manufacturers began donating sweets, and schoolchildren volunteered to wrap them in simulated parachutes, made from handkerchiefs and twine, for shipment to Allied-occupied West Germany.

At least two dozen pilots from Lieutenant Halverson’s squadron were among those who took part in the candy drops. They all became known as Candy Bombers.

Lieutenant Halvorsen received many letters from German children during the airlift.

A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. As recounted in Andrei Cherny’s book “The Candy Bombers” (2008), Peter sent another note reading: “No chocolate yet. . . . You’re a pilot. . . . I gave you a map. . . . How did you guys win the war anyway?”

Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail.

“Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,” recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. “It wasn’t the candy,” she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. “It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.”

Ms. Yunger had met Mr. Halvorsen for the first time at a reunion of airlift veterans in Tucson in September 2003. “I was just shaking,” she said. He hugged her and handed her a Hershey bar.

Gail Seymour Halvorsen was born on Oct. 10, 1920, in Salt Lake City, one of four children of Basil and Luella (Spencer) Halvorsen, who had a small farm in Rigby, Idaho, and later farmed sugar beets in Garland, Utah. He earned a private pilot’s license in 1941, briefly attended Utah State University, became an aviation cadet in the Army Air Forces and earned his wings in 1944.

He hoped to see combat in World War II, but he was assigned to ferry bombers and transport planes across the South Atlantic for the European and North African campaigns.

Remaining in military service after the war, he was stationed in Alabama when he was selected as a Berlin airlift pilot.

In the early 1950s, Mr. Halvorsen earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering from the University of Florida in a program devised by the Air Force Institute of Technology. He was later assigned to an Air Force command in California that pursued research and development for space projects.

He was commander of the Air Force base at Tempelhof from 1970 to 1974, when he retired as a colonel. He was later assistant dean of student life at Brigham Young University in Provo.

Mr. Halvorsen, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served with his first wife, Alta Jolley Halvorsen, on missions the church sponsored to England and Russia. She died in 1999.

His survivors include his second wife, Lorraine (Pace) Halvorsen; his sons Brad, Robert and Michael and his daughters Denise Williams and Marilyn Sorenson, all from his first marriage; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1980, Mr. Halvorsen helped inaugurate Airlift of Understanding, an exchange program involving high school students from Berlin and Utah, and he made some 35 good-will trips to Berlin over the years. He wrote of his experiences in a memoir, “The Berlin Candy Bomber.”

On the 50th anniversary of the airlift, Mr. Halvorsen flew to Berlin in a restored cargo plane that had been used in the mission and was introduced by President Bill Clinton at commemorative ceremonies. In May 2009, he was honored at the Pentagon when it unveiled a display telling of humanitarian efforts by the armed forces. He attended a ceremony in Frankfurt in 2013 marking the 65th anniversary of the Berlin airlift’s beginning, and he was also present that year for the naming of a school for him in Berlin.

In the summer of 2014, Air Force crews who dropped food and water to Iraqi civilians besieged by Islamic State militants reprised Mr. Halvorsen’s thoughtfulness of generations past by packing sweets they had received from home or had purchased to supplement the necessities of life.

“We are definitely not at the level of the Candy Bomber, but I’d give us an ‘almost’ for our modern version of it,” said Sgt. Emily Edmunds, loadmaster superintendent for the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron.

Mr. Halvorsen took part in candy airdrops around the United States into his 90s in connection with programs emphasizing a spirit of giving among young people. When he celebrated his 100th birthday at a party in Provo, outside the home of his daughter Denise, with whom he was living, a helicopter from the Halvorsen foundation dropped candy to the gathering. The president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, sent a message to Mr. Halvorsen stating that he had “built a bridge of humanity and compassion between Americans and Berliners.”  [The German word of ‘airlift’ is Luftbrücke, literally ‘air bridge.’]

“The airlift reminded me that the only way to fulfillment in life, real fulfillment, is to serve others,” Mr. Halvorsen told CNN on the Berlin airlift’s 40th anniversary. “I was taught that as a youth in my church, and I found when I flew day and night to serve a former enemy that my feelings of fulfillment and being worthwhile were the strongest that I’ve felt.”

[Alex Traub contributed reporting.]

Is 'Star Trek' Founded on Jewish Principles?

 

“JEWISH ROOTS OF ‘STAR TREK’ ARE EXPLORED BY EXHIBITION”
by Adam Nagourney 

[The following article appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 5 January 2022.  In it, Adam Nagourney explains how Sheri Bernstein, the director of the Skirball Cultural Center, an educational institution in Los Angeles, California, devoted to sustaining Jewish heritage and American democratic ideals, and Jessie Kornberg, the president of the center, justified hosting an exhibit of Star Trek memorabilia.

[I confess that, with one salient exception, I find the argument that Star Trek, of which I am a great fan (in college, I never missed an episode of the original series on the big color set at the frat house), is somehow infused with Jewish thought and wisdom hard to buy.

[Yes, the two stand-out leads in the show, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, were both Jewish, but how much sway would two actors have over the series’ content?  Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator and guiding influence, wasn’t Jewish.  If there’s any crossover, I’d think it was coincidental, or the consequence of the humanist values with which Roddenberry imbued the project that coincided with fundamental Jewish humanism.

[The one exception to which I alluded above is the hand gesture Nimoy invented for the Vulcan greeting.  That came directly and specifically from a symbolic religious gesture from a particular Jewish blessing.  It went viral even in the days long before social media and is almost universally recognized and even imitated.  But is that enough to assert that Star Trek has Jewish roots?

[Read Nagourney’s presentation of the Skirball’s exegesis and decide for yourself.]

This show, which has plenty of artifacts to delight Trekkies, notes the origins of the Vulcan salute.

LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy [1931-2015], who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.

But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center [Los Angeles], was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”

Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes [Season 2, Episode 15; 29 Dec. 1967], which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

[The Talmud, which translates as ‘instruction’ or ‘learning,’ is the collection of commentaries on biblical texts that forms, with the Torah, the foundation for the theology and religious law of Judaism.  It dates from between the 4th century to the 6th century CE.  The Torah is the law on which Judaism is founded (torah is Hebrew for ‘law’).  This law is contained in the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).]

That connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” [second series, 1987-94], and a display of tribbles.

To some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”

It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.

“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner [b. 1931], who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry [1921-91], who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.

Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.

Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October [7 Oct. 2021] and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk [“Arena,” Season 1, Episode 18; 19 Jan. 1967].

“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”

“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.

Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space [13 Oct. 2021 aboard a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule, built by Jeff Bazos], declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.

The Skirball Cultural Center is set on 15 acres, about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles [in the Sepulveda Pass].

The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s [8 Sept.] 1966 [U.S.] debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons [1966-69; now commonly known as Star Trek: The Original Series].) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.

The exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.

Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.

“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”

By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis [“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli; no dates announced], but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.

“There is no such thing as too much ‘Star Trek,’” Scott Mantz, a film critic, said as he began interviewing Adam Nimoy after a recent screening at the museum of “For the Love of Spock,” a 2016 documentary Nimoy had made about his father. A long burst of applause rose from his audience.

[Adam Nagourney covers West Coast cultural affairs for the New York Times.  He was previously the Los Angeles bureau chief and served eight years as the chief national political correspondent.  He is the co-author of Out for Good, a history of the modern gay rights movement.

[For the incipient Trekkie, there are five television series in the Star Trek franchise: Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69), ST: The Next Generation (1987-94), ST: Deep Space Nine (1993-99), ST: Voyager (1995-2001), and ST: Enterprise (2001-05).

[There are also streaming series: ST: Discovery (2017-present), ST: Picard (2020-present), and ST: Strange New Worlds (upcoming in May 2022).  There have also been animated series and 13 films released between 1979 and 2016, with several more in production.

[This tally doesn’t include the countless documentaries, books, comics, magazines, and items of merchandise, plus the parodies and fan products that pop up all the time.]

*  *  *  *
“THE JEWISH ROOTS OF LEONARD NIMOY AND ‘LIVE LONG AND PROSPER’”
by Abby Ohlheiser

[The following article is from a Weblog post of the Washington Post on 27 February 2015.  Abby Olheiser reports on an interview Leonard Nimoy did with a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language and the culture and history those books represent.  I’ve reposted it on Rick On Theater because the explanation provided in Adam Nagourney’s New York Times piece above concerning the invention by Leonard Nimoy of the Vulcan greeting gesture is incomplete and I wanted to fill it out.]

Leonard Nimoy first saw what became the famous Vulcan salute, “live long and prosper,” as a child, long before “Star Trek” even existed. The placement of the hands comes from a childhood memory, of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service in Boston.

The man who would play Spock saw the gesture as part of a blessing, and it never left him. “Something really got hold of me,” Nimoy said in a 2013 interview with the National Yiddish Book Center.

Nimoy, who died on Friday [27 February 2015 at 83], spoke about the Jewish roots of the famous gesture for an oral history project documenting the lives of Yiddish speakers, of which Nimoy is one.

At the beginning of the interview, Nimoy talked about his childhood in Yiddish. He was born in Boston, but his parents came from a village in what is now Ukraine [Iziaslav], where his father worked as a barber. “My first language was English,” Nimoy told the interviewer in Yiddish, “but I needed to speak Yiddish with my grandparents.”

A disclosure: Years ago, as a college student, I worked part-time at the National Yiddish Book Center, which is located on my alma mater’s campus [Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts].

Although Nimoy never hid his upbringing from the world, my short experience there is why Nimoy’s work to preserve the language of his childhood came to mind today. I reached out to the Center, which explained that Nimoy started recording Jewish short stories, from Eastern Europe, in 1995, for a radio show hosted by the Center. He funded another project to record Yiddish stories and distribute them to children.

“Toward the end of his life, he called for increased efforts to teach Yiddish to a new generation,” Aaron Lansky, the center’s president, added in an email. “I’m not sure any Vulcan ever spoke a more geshmak (flavorful) Yiddish. He will be missed.” [The German word for ‘taste’ is Geschmack; the adjective ‘tasty’ or ‘flavorful’ is geschmackvoll or geschmacklich.]

Nimoy’s incorporation of the blessing speaks particularly poignantly about the permeable boundaries between Spock and Nimoy himself.

“This is the shape of the letter shin [ש],” Nimoy said in the 2013 interview, making the famous “V” gesture. The Hebrew letter shin, he noted, is the first letter in several Hebrew words, including Shaddai (a name for God), Shalom (the word for hello, goodbye and peace) and Shekhinah, which he defined as “the feminine aspect of God who supposedly was created to live among humans.”

The Shekhinah, Nimoy has said, was also the name of the prayer he participated in as a boy that inspired the salute. The prayer, meant to bless the congregation, is named after the feminine aspect of God, Nimoy explained in a 2012 post on the “Star Trek” site. “The light from this Deity could be very damaging. So we are told to protect ourselves by closing our eyes,” he wrote in the blog.

“They get their tallits over their heads [tallit (plural in Hebrew and Yiddish is tallot) is a fringed prayer shawl worn by religious Jews], and they start this chanting,” Nimoy says in the 2013 interview, “And my father said to me, ‘don’t look’.” At first he obliged, but what he could hear intrigued him. “I thought, ‘something major is happening here.’ So I peeked. And I saw them with their hands stuck out from beneath the tallit like this,” Nimoy said, showing the “V” with both his hands. “I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

After witnessing the ritual all those years ago, Nimoy practiced making the “V” with his fingers as a child. He “never dreamed” he would one day make the gesture so publicly and repeatedly as an adult.

That was, he said, until a “Star Trek” script required his character Spock to go home to Vulcan [“Amok Time,” Season 2, Episode 1; 15 Sept. 1967]. “It was the first time we’d seen other Vulcans, other people of my race, so I was hoping to find some touching that could help develop the Vulcan sociology,” Nimoy said.

“I think we should have some special greeting that Vulcans do,” Nimoy recalled saying. He suggested the prayer gesture from his childhood.

“Boy,” he said, “that just took off. It just touched a magic chord.

He noted that “most people to this day still don’t know” the history of the greeting, although he repeatedly and enthusiastically shared its origin.

Laughing, Nimoy revealed the best part of it all: “People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this!”

[Abby Ohlheiser covered digital culture for the Washington Post.  She left the Post in March 2020.

[A few comments on the WaPo article and the interview with Nimoy:

[Like Nimoy, my father (1918-96) was the son of a Ukrainian immigrant.  My paternal grandfather, Jacob, was born in the small city of Uman in 1890 (d. 1963) and came to the U.S. as a child with his parents and grandparents in 1900.  (My dad’s mother was born in Latvia in 1896.)

[In Dad’s family, the language of his grandparents’ household was German, not Yiddish—though they undoubtedly spoke Yiddish as well as Russian and Ukrainian, and probably also Polish.  My dad learned German as a child because, his father being a pharmacist who was at work when school let out, Dad spent his afternoons with his grandmother—who never learned English.

[The blessing of which Nimoy spoke above is called the Birkat Kohanim (“priestly blessing”) or Nesiat Kapayim (“lifting of the hands”).  The text, from Numbers 6:23-7, is: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; / The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; / The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”  (English versions of the blessing differ depending on the translation used.  Particularly in Reform or Liberal synagogues, most prayers are spoken today in English or other modern tongue.

[The blessing is traditionally chanted by the kohanim, the priests of ancient Judaism who are members of the tribe of Kohan (or Cohan), the descendants of Aaron, the bother of Moses.  In modern Judaism, especially among Reform or Liberal Jews, the concept of priesthood has been abandoned and the blessing is spoken by the cantor or rabbi (who isn’t traditionally a priest but a teacher).

[The Birkat Kohanim is meant to bless the congregation in the name of God and keep them safe from evil.  Today it’s usually given as a benediction at the end of the worship service before the congregants leave the sanctuary.

[The hand sign accompanying the blessing, which evolved into the Vulcan greeting, is formed with both hands, the two thumbs touching each other to form the symbolic representation of the letter shin (ש).  Nimoy adjusted the gesture for Star Trek to make it a one-hand sign.]