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Spine Trouble from page 57
— Danny Raskin
the ethnic cleansing campaign he'd
witnessed at 12. He took a picture of
the concentration camp his brother
and dad survived, stood on the grave
of the karate coach who betrayed
his family and then confronted the
neighbor, Petra, who'd stolen from
his mother.
No wonder he was reticent. He'd
survived a holocaust. In 1992. He
was like the male, Muslim Anne
Frank — who lived to tell the story.
"Secret humiliation here." He
pointed to his line about wanting to
barge into Petra's home to reclaim
his mom's belongings then drag
Petra out by her hair to throw her on
a meat truck as Christian Serbs had
done to his people.
I starred specific details, corrected
spelling and tenses, scrawled "flesh
out" in the margins.
"Why you draw pictures on my
page?" He squinted to decipher my
edits. "You don't like?"
"Blows my socks off," I said.
"No good?" He frowned.
"It's great." Indeed, after several
more revisions together, it ran in
the New York Times. I framed it for
him. He started emailing me new
pages hourly, obsessively. I'd turned
my mellow Muslim physical thera-
pist into a neurotic Jewish freelance
writer.
Finding Commonalities
At home, I found a piece I'd pub-
lished in Newsday in 1993 on a
Bosnian benefit where Joseph
Brodsky, Wendy Wasserstein and
Susan Sontag raged against the
Balkan genocide, comparing Serbian
Milosevic to Hitler. It ran the month
Kenan immigrated to Connecticut.
When I showed him, he was awed by
the coincidence.
Kenan's mother hoped to chronicle
their escape, he said, but couldn't
learn English as she'd battled cancer.
Her photo showed a pretty redhead
who resembled my mom. She'd
warned "never go to someone's home
empty-handed," like my mother,
who'd grown up a poor orphan sent
home from school for speaking only
Yiddish.
Kenan's hard-working dad advised,
"Whatever your job, do your best,"
like my father.
I was from conservative American
Jewish suburbia. He grew up Islamic
in Eastern Europe. Yet in some ways,
it seemed we were from the same
close-knit, no-nonsense family.
When I questioned why his par-
ents didn't ask about his pent-up
feelings during the occupation, he
said, "They were too busy telling me
to duck:'
Israel sympathized with the
Bosniaks, Kenan recalled. They'd air-
lifted supplies and took in refugees.
His favorite American politician
was Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who'd
fought to break the unfair U.N. arms
embargo on Bosnia during the war.
I felt outraged for Kenan's Muslim
family, too. It turned out we were on
the same side, against violence and
terrorism — toward any innocent
civilians.
Twice weekly for a year, Kenan put
heat or ice to my back while I edited
his pages. After work, he'd sneak to
my classes and seminars, where he
met a literary agent who sparked to
his story. Kenan proposed we co-
author his memoir. I was reluctant.
Though I noticed Kenan's grammar
was improving as my pain subsided.
My sessions stretched to two hours.
He'd walk me home, continuing the
harrowing war saga he'd witnessed at
12 that he now couldn't stop spilling.
Had I become his Jewish mother or
personal femme Freud?
Healing Together
"Some annular tears never heal:' said
the orthopedic surgeon Kenan rec-
ommended I see at the Spine Center
down the hall from where we did
physical therapy. "No surgery could
help. You might hurt like this the
rest of your life."
I panicked, tears blurring the
insurance forms I filled out in the
waiting room. Kenan, suddenly
beside me, handed me a Kleenex. "I
come check on you," he said.
"My back may never get better:'
"You will heal," he said. "Some
tears do not mend, but function
improves. Strengthening core, stabi-
lize vertebrae ..."
I felt comforted by the anatomy
jargon in his broken English. I
thought of the line from a Bosnian
poem: "Wounded I am more awake,"
which a Jewish author friend had
used for the title of a book she'd
co-authored with another Muslim
Bosnian war survivor.
Coincidence? Her book was third-
person reporting from an older
female journalist's point of view. I
wanted to help Kenan tell his story
in his young male voice.
My next session, as I lay on ice,
Kenan gave me a gift: a gold Mars
astronaut pen. He put a piece of
paper on a clipboard to show me I
could write lying down without los-
ing ink. "So I can edit your pages flat
on my back?" I laughed.
"In vacuum, upside down without
gravity, under water, in boiling heat
Spine Trouble on page 62
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