Danny Fisher

White Sand – “Rachel” By Danny Fisher

My parents kept kosher and went to Shul on the high holy days. But while my father observed most of the customs, including fasting every Yom Kippur, he was quite open about his being fundamentally an atheist. God left him in a single moment; he was 17 years old and working as a tailor’s apprentice in Hungary when he received a postcard from his parents that had no return address. It read “We are being taken away by the Germans. We don’t know where. We don’t know if we will ever see you again.”

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(WIDK By DANNY FISHER) — I continue to make progress in my efforts to rebuild my life and career.  But as I think about what my parents went through, I feel that what I am rebuilding is nothing.

My mother, Esther

My parents truly rebuilt their lives after they and their families were devastated in the Holocaust. Click to read more…

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White Sand – “”On Lee Strasberg and Marcel Proust – including bonus feature of Proust’s longest sentence!” By Danny Fisher

I became interested in Marcel Proust, for whose monumental masterpiece my blog “In Search Of Lost Time” (http://www.insearchoflosttime.net) is named, when I worked as an assistant to director Nicholas Ray at his acting and directing workshops at the Lee Strasberg Institute. In addition to the dynamic workshops of Nick Ray, I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop given by the legendary Lee Strasberg, in which he chose a volunteer from the student audience and used the student to demonstrate the technique of emotional recall. That left an indelible impression on me, as the student was transported into another place, and all his senses were recreated – relived – to the most minute detail. The recollection of the student’s senses evoked the recall of the emotional state – as close as one could get to reliving the actual experience – it seemed a work of hypnotism on the part of Lee Strasberg.

Lee Strasberg

I had the further opportunity to personally experience such an intense emotional recall during Nick Ray’s workshops, using the techniques of Lee Strasberg combined with Nick Ray’s intensely personal directing style. I was able to relive a moment in my life, and felt that I was “there” for the period in which I was in the “spell.” Nick Ray and Lee Strasberg both had spoken about Proust in reference to the subject of the recollection of the senses and emotional recall, and about Proust’s famous madeleine and cup of tea, the taste of which unleashed memories in Proust resulting in several thousand pages and seven volumes which feature over 2,000 characters.

Marcel Proust

I was intrigued, and began reading “Remembrance of Things Past,” later retitled to the more literal translation “In Search of Lost Time.” I was tremendously captivated by the novel and read some of the volumes several times. It is my favorite book, the deepest and most profound book I have ever read – yet I am certain that I have not yet captured most of its meaning.

The book is not an easy read – it is admittedly tedious (but well worth it, at least it was for me) – and some of the sentences are so long that it is extremely hard to follow. I have been thinking for a while about a sentence I remember reading in “In Search of Lost Time” that was so incredibly long and I was eager for another read of it. I couldn’t possibly search for this sentence by perusing the seven volumes – that would likely take me years – but through the power of the internet, I tonight rediscovered Proust’s longest sentence – possibly the longest sentence in all of literature – and I am pleased to reprint this 958 word sentence in its entirety as a special bonus feature available exclusively (well, not really) here:

“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy–at times from the society–of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.” – Marcel Proust, “In Search of Lost Time”

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Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “In the Middle of the Night” By Danny Fisher

“In the middle of the night

In the middle of the night I call your name…”

I have spoken of my effort to rebuild my life and career.

I have spoken about Haiti and its suffering, of my mother surviving Auschwitz to rebuild a life she considered blessed until its end.

I have spoken about the poet Ezra Pound whose work inspires me even though he was a fascist and anti-Semite.

I have spoken about the hopes of my days and the torments of my nights.

“In the middle of the bath

In the middle of the bath I call your name…”

I continue to make great progress in rebuilding my career.

I am grateful to the many people who have expressed their support and encouragement.

I feel blessed to have the opportunity for a second chance.

I see many exciting things ahead.

I am thankful that my family and friends are well.

“In the middle of a shave

In the middle of a shave I call your name…”

I continue to face challenges.

I continue to be haunted by demons, imagined and real.

I struggle to get out of bed in the morning.

I will be haunted by demons until the end of my days.

I accept that life is a bumpy ride.

“In the middle of a dream

In the middle of a dream I call your name…”

I learn from a three foot tall man I met, Sean Stephenson, who says “Everything is always going your way, even when it doesn’t look like it – that’s actually the truth of life.”

Sean also says “No one can hurt you without your permission.”

I learn from T.S. Elliot, who says “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

I learn from Ezra Pound, who says “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.” And, “Pull down thy vanity!”

I learn from the great poet of my home town of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman– “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” and “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

I learn from my mentor Nicholas Ray, who said “Learn your limitations and take advantage of them” and “Do not care so much what other people think.”

“In the middle of a cloud

In the middle of a cloud I call your name

Oh Yoko,

Oh Yoko,

My love will turn you on…”

-   John Lennon, “Oh Yoko!” (Imagine album)

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “Lizzy” By Danny Fisher

I grew up with Lizzy – we went to Reynolds Junior High, Lincoln High and Binghamton University together. That was not planned, as we were not even friends. It was just coincidence. She was the most beautiful girl in each of those schools and I observed her from afar. She was a 10 and I figure I ranged from 4 up to maybe 7 when my hair grew long and I sported a John Lennon look in the early seventies. So she was untouchable – to me – just a straight on mismatch in the looks department. Her hair was long dark brown and her skin was soft and light. Her body was Jessica Alba. Her lips were Angelina Jolie and her eyes were as captivating as Claire Danes in Baz Lurhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

Claire Danes

At college I had begun to make films and also hung out with the legendary Hollywood director Nicholas Ray, who directed “Rebel Without A Cause” and so many other great movies. So what I lacked in looks I thought perhaps I made up in the “being cool” department. My confidence was also up, as I began an affair with the hippest girl on campus – a lesbian – or rather bisexual – fine arts major named Roz with a round face, slender body and long, natural bright blonde hair.   Roz and I were in the same sculpture class and I watched her as she sensually worked the wet red clay on the spinning potter’s wheel – I know you’re thinking “Ghost” and you’re not far off. I was struggling with carving white alabaster stone, and was working on a Brancusi-like depiction of a sleeping muse. I was passionate about Brancusi ever since the Guggenheim’s Brancusi retrospective in the early seventies. In my last year of high school, I went to the Museum of Modern Art nearly every afternoon to sit alone in its Brancusi room, where I would observe the elegant Bird in Space, the Sleeping Muse, various Torso’s and other works of pure solid beauty and perfection.

Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse

Roz and I were working late one day and were the only ones left in the art studio. She came up to me, her hands wet with red clay, and smiled at me. “I’m a lesbian, you know,” she said. I knew that. Then she proceeded to wipe the red clay from her hands and arms onto my shirt and blue jeans. I began to feel humiliated and resentful, but then gave in to her manipulation. “I’m really bi,” she continued, “and you know I think you’re cute and I wonder why you never look back at me in class.” Now I was truly mixed up. Was she playing with me or seducing me? So I asked her if she was fucking with me.

She then reached her wet red arms around me and gave me a deep and long kiss. Now I figured she wasn’t playing with me – although I was completely baffled that she would have any interest in me whatsoever. But it was ego inflation for me, as she was popular on campus and hung out with the coolest of the campus hipsters – punk poets, jazz musicians and a gay dancer who today is recognized as one of the world’s leading dancer-choreographers.

She drove me in her Volkswagen Bug to the cabin she lived in on Quaker Lake across the border in Pennsylvania, about half hour from the campus. She shared the cabin with the gay dancer and his partner, who tragically died of AIDS a number of years ago. She led me to her bedroom – we got undressed and climbed into bed.  I reached over to kiss her and she suddenly pushed me away with considerable force. Of course I was once again perplexed. We were naked and under the covers. “Don’t even think of touching me,” she commanded, as if doing so would be an act of the utmost indignity. I said, “Ok, that’s cool.  But what do you want to do?” “I just want to lie in bed and want to sleep,” she responded. “And you are invited to spend the night with me in my bed.” That felt better, it was alright with me to take it slow and I very much liked being wanted. “But, I swear,” she added, “if you so much as touch me, I will castrate you.”

I stayed up most of the night, but got some sleep. In the morning, the most beautiful sunrise shone through the picture window in Roz’s bedroom, infusing the room with a deep red glow. I sat up and looked out the window – the rosy sun was rising over the shimmering lake like an impressionist painting. I wanted to tap Roz to show her, but was too afraid to touch her. So I  looked at her sleeping for a long while, her long blonde curls comfortable on her pillow, and she reminded me of Brancusi’s sleeping muse, and my own inferior attempt to sculpt a sleeping muse of my own. She looked gentle and nonthreatening in her sleep. So I softly whispered to her that the sun was out and it was beautiful. She opened her eyes and looked deeply into mine. Then she smiled. In an act of brazenness, I reached over to kiss her very gently on the lips. She responded by kissing me strong and hard. She then climbed on top of me and we made love.

Roz cooked me whole grain pancakes for breakfast, with fresh blueberries and herbal tea. Her dancer roommates joined us. They were very much in love, and I am saddened today to know that one of them is gone. Roz was in a friendly disposition and we hiked around the perimeter of Quaker Lake, which was at least three miles, and a neighbor’s  bright red Irish Setter followed us most of the way. We swam at mid-day, and at night went dancing at the local town bars. We went on for a couple of months. Roz was seeing other women at the same time, but I was her only guy – as far as I knew.

That made me confident enough to ask the true girl of my dreams, Lizzy, out on a date. She had surely seen me around campus with the hipsters and arm in arm with Roz, and now I was good enough for her, I thought. I asked her out for drinks at a large, local bar – and she accepted. We danced to a medley of Rolling Stones and then found a small table in a corner. I told Lizzy I was in love with her – was always in love with her, since Reynolds Junior High, Lincoln High and through college. She must have thought me strange but I was being truthful. “What about your girlfriend, Roz,” she asked. “Are you in love with her?” “No, it’s not like that – she’s alright,” I said, “but we just hang together, nothing serious.”

And then I asked Lizzy to marry me. While we had seen each other around for years, we never exchanged a single word, did not know each other at all, and we were both juniors at college. But I knew in my heart that she was the “one.”  She shrugged off my proposal, figuring I had one too many beers and that I couldn’t possibly be serious. But like Jean Marais’ elegant Beast in Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast,” I promised to ask her every night until she said “yes.”

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”

Lizzy and I dated on and off – mostly off – in college and for several years after college. I kept my promise and asked her to marry me every night, by phone, by letter, and on the very infrequent date, in person. I rather became a nuisance to Lizzy after a while, and she decided on a plan to free herself of what she felt was my obsession with her.  It was not an obsession to me but true love – but she wasn’t having it. Lizzy was now working as a paralegal in midtown Manhattan, and her co-worker, Dinah, was an attractive red headed paralegal who grew up in Scarsdale – her family was Wall Street rich. Lizzy hatched this idea to introduce me to Dinah – she thought Dinah and I would hit it off, that I would be happy, and that Lizzy would then be free to have what she wanted from me – to be my friend and nothing more.  It was a win-win idea – so it seemed to Lizzy.

We met for cocktails at a piano bar on the Upper East Side after Lizzy and Dinah finished work. It was a three way date, but the set up was very clear. We had a couple of drinks, and Dinah was eying me intently, smiling at me, and Lizzy seemed to be right – Dinah was right for me – or at least, I was right for Dinah. She liked me. I was fine with her – not the kind of sparks I felt for Lizzy, but maybe it could grow to something more if given the chance. At any rate, this was cocktails – not an arranged marriage.

After the third round of drinks, Dinah reached under the table with her foot and rubbed my ankle. I thought that was sweet. But Lizzy noticed and became visibly perturbed. Why? I don’t know, as the whole idea was for Lizzy to set me up with someone else in order to gain her freedom and provide me with happiness at the same time. Dinah was getting a little tipsy, so I asked her how she was feeling, and was there anything she would perhaps like to do?

Dinah looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “You really know what I feel like doing? I feel like a good fuck!”

I liked that – it was straightforward and I like that in people. Lizzy lost it, however, and knocked over two of the drinks,  which fell to the floor in a loud crash, disrupting the mellow jazz piano and prompting several waiters and busboys to come over – it became all a great big fuss. Lizzy announced that we’d all had too much to drink and it was time to go. I told Lizzy I was fine, the waiters will clean things up – not to worry. Lizzy now firmly grabbed my arm – hard – and said “let’s go!”

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space

Lizzy practically dragged me out of the bar. Dinah wrote her number on a matchbook and handed it to me with a wink and a smile. I thanked her and said I would call her. Lizzy hailed a cab and we were soon in my apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “What a fucking slut!” Lizzy exclaimed. I told Lizzy I thought Dinah was rather sweet and that I liked people who say what they mean and mean what they say. Lizzy asked me to take her to my bedroom.  I just looked at her.  She then said, “I’m horny.” I was like, “really?”

Afterward, we were getting dressed. Lizzy turned to me, kissed me passionately and said, “the answer is yes.” I said, “yes what?” She responded, assertively, “I accept your marriage proposal of six years ago.” I wanted to remind her that the last proposal was yesterday, since I had kept my promise, like Jean Marais’ Beast, to ask her every night for her hand. So that was 2,190 proposals, give or take. But I wanted to quit while I was ahead, and asked her if she meant it. She did. But she wanted a very small wedding – just the two of us at City Hall.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “Julia” By Danny Fisher

I have never won an Academy Award, but there were a couple of times that I had hopes of being nominated – and was seriously disappointed when I wasn’t. I was privileged to be a friend of the late Gregory Peck and his lovely wife Veronique, and the closest I came to Oscar was holding both of Greg’s Oscars – one in each hand – for “To Kill a Mockingbird” as well as his Lifetime Achievement Academy Award.

That was in Gregory’s study at his palatial home in Beverly Hills, and the stunningly beautiful Cecilia Peck, whom I had cast in my first movie, placed them in my hands – I was terrified that I would drop them. I came out of his study and Greg said to me in his deep, iconic voice: “You will win one yourself someday.” I protested his flattery, but he was sincere and I felt truly humbled.

Whenever I would think about the possibility of being nominated for an Oscar, I would inevitably think of my acceptance speech. And when I would think about standing at the podium wearing a stiff, uncomfortable tuxedo in front of hundreds of millions of viewers – trembling with regret that I didn’t consume at least two or three extra milligrams of Xanax – I would think of Julia. Winning an Academy Award was the only thing in the world I could think of that might impress the girl I was in love with when I was sixteen, and maybe fill her with regret.

All day, all night, in high school and at home, I thought about Julia. Her face was warm and round; her eyes were blue-green and inviting. Her dimples shone brightly when she smiled. Her light brown hair was cut in shaggy layers, a popular style in 1970. We were good friends, and I fell in love with her hair, her eyes, and those sugary dimples. She was not skinny, but that was ok, because then there was more of her. We were together in some after school clubs at Lincoln, and we became friends. I wanted more than a friendship, and I didn’t know if she did. But I was madly in love with her and I had to do something about it. I would ask her out on a date.

Julia liked me – I could tell. She liked my company, appreciated our talks together. I wanted to fall into her arms, caress her hair, kiss her lips, and more! But I could not just lunge at her in an after school club. I would have to date her. If I asked her out on a date, and she accepted, that would mean that she saw me as something more than a friend.

I agonized for weeks. At night I sat on my bed and stared at the black rotary dial desk telephone in my room. What if she said no? Could I live with the embarrassment and the humiliation? What if she said yes? Would I know what to do, where to take her? I would ask her to go out to a movie. Yes, I would be casual, and just ask her if she wanted to go see a movie with me. That way, it wouldn’t really be like asking her out on a date. It would be just asking for her company. It would be just like we were in school together – only it would be the weekend, and it would be night. I would be very matter of fact, so that it wouldn’t be obvious. Julia, I was thinking of going to the movies Saturday night. Would you like to come with me? That doesn’t sound like a date, does it? Well, maybe it does.

I dialed the phone. I stopped, out of breath, and put the phone down. My heart was racing. I took a deep breath. And another. I dialed again, with courage and determination. She answered the phone. She did not sound warm. Although I could not see her face I could tell that there were no dimples – her expression was undoubtedly frozen. I hesitated. I fumbled. I forced words into a question. “Julia… I was thinking of going to the movies on Saturday night, and… you know… I was wondering if you… basically… wanted to come with me.” Her response was quick, and was like a boxing blow to my head – like when my brother and I bought boxing gloves and tried them out on ourselves and he hit me real hard on my head and it pounded and throbbed and the world became dark – that was what it felt like.

“No, I’m busy,” she said frostily. “Oh, I said. All right.” Maybe she’s just not available that night, I thought, or pretended to think, even though my quivering, queasy stomach knew what she was really thinking. But I had to go the distance and make the rejection definitive. “How about the following weekend?” I asked, with a forced pretense of cool and casual hopefulness. “I don’t want to go out with you. I don’t think of you… that way.” There. She said it. Such finality! There was no ambivalence, no equivocation and no hope. She was not interested in me that way. I mumbled “Ok” and hung up the phone. She tore my heart in pieces. It is now four decades later and I am still not over it, but maybe writing this will help me get there.

After that, I saw her at school, and my longing did not decrease, but rather increased. I wanted more than ever what I now could not have, what had been unjustly denied me. I saw the rosy roundness of her face and the way her ample thighs filled her denim jeans. I could not accept this rejection by her. My relationship with Julia would now be confined to fantasy. And there was no end of fantasy.

As the cruel trick of fate would have it, Julia went to the same college I went to in upstate New York. We were no longer friends and traveled in different circles. Every once in a while, I would see her at my college, and the painful feeling of regret and emptiness for a romance never begun would fill my heart. There was a very popular professor at my college, an internationally famous British playwright, in his forties, who taught writing and acting for the theater. The students in his classes were swept away by the professor’s charismatic, sexually charged intensity. I rather thought he was pompous and pretentious, but all the girls talked about him, and rumor was he slept with many of his female students, especially those in their first year. I saw Julia walking on campus with him, and it scalded my soul to see them, knowing they would soon be together in bed.

Near the end of my first semester, I learned that this British theater darling died of a heart attack while having sex with one of his students. Serves him right, I thought, having no sympathy, as I saw memorial leaflets posted all over the campus. Just then I spotted Julia walking by herself on the lawn of the campus, her eyes sunken and looking like a ghost. I suddenly realized: she was with the playwright the night he died!

The thought that Julia fucked her professor to death will hound me to the end of my days.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “Summer Camp Night” By Danny Fisher

At Camp Vacamas one night, the boys in my cabin discovered that the girls’ shower shed had a small hole in the outside of its wooden wall. My cabin mates and I made an excursion at night, flashlights in hand, to get a peek at the girls’ shower. We were exhilarated and nervously excited – and the girls screamed when they found out we were peeping – but I really didn’t see anything but a blur.

When we got back to the cabin, our counselor, a tall, heavy set guy named Jack, was infuriated with us and felt we should experience the shame and humiliation he believed the girls experienced. He decided he was going to use me to make an example for the cabin and indeed for the entire camp. Why did he choose me? I will never know.

Jack said he was going to make me walk outside to the girls’ shower shed – which was about 100 yards from our cabin – completely naked. He said this would teach me and everyone else what it meant to be humiliated.

He directed me to take off my clothes. I stripped to my underwear. He said take everything off but my sandals. I removed my T shirt. He told me to remove my underwear bottoms. I hesitated and began to cry of fear, shame and shocking embarrassment. I looked around my cabin – everyone was sitting on their bed, and no one was laughing. In fact, everyone’s expression was stark. Jack shouted “let’s go!” I dropped my underwear bottoms to the floor and now I was as naked as a newborn baby. That I wore sandals made me feel even more naked. Words cannot describe my humiliation – and remorse. I was not angry with Jack, as I believed he was meting out punishment that I deserved.

Jack said he was going to have me practice to prepare for my excursion out in the woods in front of the entire camp completely naked. I was 11. He instructed me to walk up to each of the eight bunks in the cabin and circle each bunk before moving on to the next one. I did so, and completed a naked walk through my cabin, going from bunk to bunk, seeing each of my fellow campers wince at my indignity.

After I completed my round, Jack asked me if I was ready to step outside for the long walk to the girls’ shower shed, a walk of naked shame that would be observed by the entire camp – boys and girls. I just could not imagine going through with it. He opened the door and motioned me to step outside. I walked through the creaky door and out onto the cabin deck. I heard nothing but crickets and I could feel the cool night air on my exposed skin. I noticed nothing but the blackness of night. I stood motionless, staring into the blackness. Jack now called to me, “Had enough? Do you think you now know what it’s like to be seen naked?” I nodded yes. “Come on back inside, then.”

I was grateful for this reprieve. For many years I loathed myself for what I felt I had done. When I was in therapy in my mid twenties, we were discussing my inhibitions and I recalled this event to my therapist. He was mortified and expressed his view that I had been seriously abused. I was puzzled, as for fifteen years I felt that I was the abuser and was receiving just punishment.

When my mother was in Auschwitz, she was forced to strip completely naked each and every day and stand in the yard with hundreds of other naked women and men. And each day she was examined by Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death himself, who tapped my mother’s naked body with his wand as he inspected her and would make the selection that very moment as to whether she was going to live or die. This occurred each day of the several months my mother was in Auschwitz.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “Caroline” By Danny Fisher

My mother took me to an office of the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side.  I was looking forward to having a knish at Katz’s delicatessen afterward.  My mother spoke with an administrator, who was typing information on a form – how much my father made, that kind of stuff.  We were applying to summer camp – this would be my third and final year.  I had plenty of trepidation about returning that summer.  I was afraid that Caroline would be back, and I would be so terribly embarrassed to see her again.  I hoped she wasn’t coming back.

Caroline was my first girlfriend.  I had been eleven the last summer – she was twelve.  When we sat on a big boulder outside the dining hall in the afternoon, Caroline moved my arm around her shoulder.  She was my girlfriend, so I guessed that was ok.  But then she took my hand, and moved it down so that my fingers lay over her breast.  I wasn’t sure if that was accidental or deliberate.  I gently moved my hand back up.  But she pulled it back again so that it brushed lightly against her breast.  I could feel her nipple through her blouse, and it was a strange thing to touch.  I felt awkward and embarrassed.  I wished she wouldn’t do that.  I hoped no one else saw.

We walked hand in hand down the dirt road from the dining hall, back to the cabins. Behind us, some girls were laughing, and one girl asked Caroline where she got her dress.  Caroline seemed indignant, and told me to ignore the stupid girls.  The girls kept teasing and taunting.  “Why don’t you wear one of your own dresses, Caroline?”  I didn’t know what they were talking about.  Caroline seemed embarrassed by the girls’ remarks.  I didn’t know what the big deal was about her dress.

Caroline and I turned into a narrow dirt side road and waited while the other girls walked past us.  They continued to jeer at Caroline as they walked by.  “Whose underwear you wearing, Caroline?” asked a plump black girl.  Caroline ignored the comment.  I wondered what they were talking about.  When the girls were gone and we were alone, Caroline took me in her arms, and kissed me.  She tried to slip her tongue between my lips, and I resisted.  I thought it was a strange thing to do.  The tip of her tongue sharply pierced my tightly pressed lips; it stung.  I would have been content with just a regular kiss.  Later on, boys told me about tongue kissing – but that was later on.  Although I didn’t understand Caroline’s way of kissing, and didn’t particularly care for it, I felt that this made her my girlfriend, that she was mine, and I was hers.  She had had a previous boyfriend, a tall, skinny Irish kid with reddish-blonde hair and freckles.  I was her new boyfriend.

The night of the social, the lights in the lodge were turned low.  Caroline and I were grinding to the slow music.  We were holding each other as tight as we could, and I could hear her breathing, and feel the beating of both of our hearts, and we were both very warm against each other, and I didn’t know how to dance, but all I had to do was just squeeze her tight and move our pressed bodies ever so slowly to the music, while shuffling my feet awkwardly against the pine wood floor.  “What’s it all about – ” the dance lasted an entire lifetime – “Alfie…” The song ended, and Caroline separated from me with a slight smile.  Out of nowhere, the skinny Irish kid with the blondish-red hair appeared and asked Caroline for the next dance.  She said sure.  I was flustered and hurt.  She was mine, and the Irish kid was her past.  They danced intimately, the way Caroline and I had just danced.  I was left to watch, awkwardly.  Now I thought she played a great big trick on me.  She wasn’t mine anymore, and was going back to him!

I left the lodge, and climbed up a thickly wooded hill that overlooked the lodge.  I climbed higher and farther until the lodge was distant and small, glowing amber in the blue-black night.  I was alone in the woods, and I dropped down on my knees, and cried to the forest, where no one heard me but the crickets, but I could hear myself.  I had lost Caroline.

The social was over, and I walked back to the lodge, where boys and girls were milling around outside.  Caroline was alone, and she walked up to me, asking where I had been.  I asked her where the Irish kid was, and she was puzzled.  “Aren’t you back with him?”  “Nonsense,” she replied.  “We just danced together, that’s all, silly!”  She took my hand, and then we walked down the dirt road, arm in arm.

At the end of that summer, I overheard some girls from Caroline’s cabin talking about her.  I walked closer to the group of girls to listen, and they spotted me.  “You ought to know about your Caroline,” one girl said.  “She’s so poor she’s got nothing to wear.  Whatever you’ve seen her wear doesn’t belong to her.  She’s borrowed clothes from every one of us – even from the counselor.  She doesn’t even own her own underwear.  Dirt poor, and she won’t admit it, either.  She hasn’t told you nothing, right?”  I shook my head.  “White trash,” the girl muttered, in explanation.

Caroline had given me her phone number, but I never called her; I wanted to forget about her.  I hoped I didn’t run into her at The New York World’s Fair, which was in Queens, where I knew she lived.  Now it was time for another summer season at Camp Vacamas, and I hoped to God Caroline would not return.  I sat on an old, worn couch in the office of the Educational Alliance as my mother answered the questions of the administrator, who continued to clack away loudly at her typewriter.  I glanced at the table in front of me, and picked up a brochure for the camp.  The cover read, “Camp Vacamas – A Summer Experience for Disadvantaged Youth.”  I was mortified.  Disadvantaged?  Is that what I was?  I was less than other kids?  Then I thought about Caroline and how she couldn’t even afford to wear her own underwear, and wouldn’t come out and talk about it, either.  I could wear my own clothes, at least.  But I didn’t want to see Caroline, and I didn’t want to go to some camp for unfortunate, lesser, miserable kids.  I tugged at my mother’s sleeve and told her I didn’t want to go back to camp.  She said I didn’t have to, as the administrator pulled the completed application out of the typewriter.

My mother and I ate knishes at Katz’s delicatessen on East Houston Street.  I ended up going back to camp that summer, after my mother promised to buy me a leather baseball glove and a real baseball.  Caroline didn’t return that summer, and I never saw her again.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “Carla” By Danny Fisher

It was the day after the Vietnam Moratorium. I was on the steering committee that organized the march from Lincoln High School to the Brooklyn College campus for the anti-war rally. Marty, lanky with long, frizzy blonde hair, was the head of the steering committee, and he urged us to cooperate with the police. “They’re not pigs, man!” he told us.

Carla was a dark skinned girl with long, dark brown hair, and was on the steering committee, too, but we didn’t really talk with each other much. Eddie, a tall, thin, light-skinned black student with a large Afro who lived in the affluent community of Manhattan Beach approached me at the end of the school day. “Hey, you know that Carla’s got a crush on you, don’t you.” I was fairly mesmerized. “Carla? A crush on me? You’re joking, right?” “No, man,” Eddie replied. “Haven’t you noticed the way she looks at you?” I hadn’t noticed at all, in fact. “She really likes you.”

I walked home from school, the blood rushing to my head in a dizzying whirl. My normally deflated ego was pumped so high that I burst with excitement at the sudden joy of life. Carla, so dark skinned, and pretty – I never would have figured her as my girlfriend. I lay in bed at night, dreaming of being with her. I imagined walking her home to her glorious house in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn’s most exclusive neighborhood, where one could hear the waves crash against the large rocks on the shore and the concrete chunks of the broken esplanade.

I saw Carla at school the next day, and she was warm and receptive to my company and conversation. I didn’t feel like I was asking her out on a date, but somehow we soon had plans to go to the movies at the Avenue U theater to see “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” It felt very natural, and I was not awkward. That’s because Eddie told me she liked me, and he was right – I could tell that she did. It is a nice feeling to be liked by a girl when you are in the eleventh grade.

There was a long line at the Avenue U movie theater. I guess that’s because they started a new policy of charging only one dollar. After waiting a long time, the movie was sold out and we were turned away. Carla suggested we go to Manhattan Beach – she had a joint on her. I said that was cool. I was smoking pot fairly regularly in 11th grade, as was everyone else – but unlike the rest of my friends, I haven’t smoked since that time so long ago. We walked along the ruined esplanade, and the waves crashed thunderously against the jagged rocks along the shore. We found some comfortable rocks to sit down on from where we could watch the crashing of the waves, and the nearly full moon illuminating the clouds in the night sky, and the reflection of the moon on the glittering horizon. Carla reached into her jeans pocket and took out the joint. She lit up and took a deep drag. She handed it to me, and it was flavorful and moist from being in her mouth, and the smoke was delicious and the coarse burning sensation deep inside my throat was exhilarating. The moon and the water and the surf became an impressionist painting. Soon we were kissing, with deep feeling, and our arms wrapped warmly around each other, sheltering us from the ocean breeze and the ocassional light sea spray. I looked into Carla’s dark brown eyes, and I could see in them the bouncing reflections of the moonlit ocean. We kissed again. The night was warm and magnificent.

The next time I saw Carla was at a party she had at her house. I was not all that comfortable being in her house with a crowd of people, and I hit the hash pipe right off. The hash must have been opiated, as I don’t know how else to explain the complete delirium it produced in me. The night raced by in a flash, and I remember only fleeting images. I remember crawling on the carpet in a stupor. I remember the blurred look on the faces of the other kids, some amused, some annoyed, and some concerned. I remember hearing the voices of a couple of kids arranging for me to be taken home in a car. I remember being lifted and carried out the door. Most of all, I remember looking helplessly at Carla as I was being carried away from her house. Her face took on the expression of cold stone, and the angry and embarrassed look in her eyes stirred my heart out of its oblivion. Her face receded into the distance and disappeared as I was carried away, conscious enough only to recognize that Carla would never speak to me again. I landed in the seat of someone’s car with a heavy thud like a discarded object, and fell into a dark and painful sleep.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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White Sand – “In The Beginning” By Danny Fisher

I sat on a record, and it broke. Everyone in the room laughed and I felt humiliated. That is my earliest memory. In Haifa, Israel, where I was born. I was three.

* * *

When I was a kid, I thought that when you grew up, you had to move to another country and learn another language. I wondered where I was going to go when I grew up, and what language I would learn, and why one couldn’t just stay in the country they were from. My parents, my relatives, and all of my parents’ friends were from someplace else.

When we arrived in the South Bronx in 1958, I was four years old. My brother Jack was six. There was a great snowstorm that year, and everyone in my family says, to this day, that when I saw snow for the first time, I cried out in Hebrew that white sand was falling from the sky. I don’t remember speaking Hebrew.

The South Bronx

* * *

My uncle bought me a Timex watch. It cost six dollars. I lost my watch soon enough. While walking in the park near our house, I was approached by two Puerto Rican kids. They asked me the time. I was scared. I said it was a quarter to three. One held my trembling arm, as the other stripped me of my watch.

***

My father was a tailor. When we lived in Israel, he made suits for Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan. In the Bronx, he made some of our own clothes. I wore a bathing suit made of thick wool at Orchard Beach that itched like hell.

David Ben Gurion, 1948

* * *

Food was different. I can no longer taste what I tasted then. At Orchard Beach in the summer, my mother would make sandwiches of buttered, freshly baked rye bread, with sliced fresh green peppers sprinkled with salt. We ate the sandwiches, along with hardboiled eggs. The salty ocean air mixed with the aroma of our picnic lunch. I have been unable to recapture this taste. At home in the Bronx , I ate from a bowl of sour cream, into which I crumbled pieces of bread – there was nothing more delicious in the whole world. My mother made a dish I loved that I haven’t eaten since – mashed potatoes, mixed with flaked pieces of fried chicken skin.

***

The Bronx was sloped, and that made for great sledding in the winter and roller-skating in the summer. Roller skates would fit onto the bottom of your sneaker, and you would tighten them with a key. It was important not to lose your key. We would roll fast down the steep hill of Topping Avenue. In the snow-covered winter, the sledding was exhilarating. We were disappointed when our sleds were stolen.

Some kids next door had a set of plastic army figures, which we would line up on the sidewalk into great armies that faced each other at battle in a great big war.

* * *

A cousin of mine once told me that everyone would, at one time in his life, experience a very bad event. That worried me for years – decades actually. Every time I slid down the sliding pond in the park, I wondered if I would fall off, and whether that would be my bad event. I feared it, yet, in some ways, I wanted to be over it so I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Some bad kids threw a rock at my brother Jack in the park, and it cut his ear badly. There was blood, and in the hospital, Jack had to have his ear stapled. I couldn’t imagine how you could have your ear stapled back on to your head, the way you would staple together two pieces of paper. I felt really bad for him. But I thought this might have counted as his bad event, and so, in a way, I also felt he was lucky to be over it. I imagined that my bad event would produce blood and that was scary.

* * *

One day a big box arrived at our apartment. It was our first television set, with a rounded black and white picture tube and rabbit ear antennas you adjusted to get good reception. Someone told me that there were little people inside the television that acted in the shows, and I used to try to look inside the television from the back to see if I could find them.

The first television show I remember watching as a family was the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was in a glass booth, and I didn’t understand anything about the trial. I just knew that it was very important. And that it somehow had something to do with my parents, but I didn’t really know what.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

* * *

It is amazing to me now how many years it was before I realized that I was a child of parents who survived Hitler’s concentration camps. It wasn’t as if I never knew about it. It’s just that I never consciously thought about it. It was after I graduated college, when I was about twenty-two, and I was experiencing bouts of anxiety that I decided to see a therapist. I had been in therapy for months, when one session the therapist asked me if there was anything about my upbringing that differentiated me from others. I thought and thought, but did not come up with anything. The therapist told me I was a child of concentration camp survivors. My first thought was, so, what the hell does that have to do with anything? And then it hit me hard, and very deep, and I thought for a long time, for every day and every year since, that this heritage was at the core of my being.

* * *

Excerpt from an autobiographical novel I have been writing called “White Sand Falling.”

Danny Fisher is the CEO of film distribution company Fisher Klingenstein Films and Editor of website WIDK (Wish I Didn’t Know).  He was also the founder and CEO of  former company City Lights Media.

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