Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  I continued to examine all those smiling faces. Smart kids, yes. And naive, for sure. It was easy to tell that we wore our hearts on our sleeves then, that we still had not assumed a defensive stance when it came to our feelings. You could see our good conduct medals neatly pinned to our Eisenhower jackets, so that everybody would notice. In our bright and confident eyes there was also the gleam of adolescent fervor. (The Army understood that fervor and used it; all armies do, they depend on it.) All of this was clear evidence to me, if I needed it that afternoon, that none of us, without exception, could believe then, at the moment those photos were taken, in the idea of his own death.

  Anyway, by then it was late afternoon in New Jersey, near dusk. Bern’s children and grandchildren were beginning to arrive for dinner, gathering in the living room and making a lot of good-natured noise while Bern made the introductions. As I said, they were full of Bern’s wit. In fact, they outshone him. Nevertheless, brilliant as they were, they were almost totally unaware of what their grandfather had survived, or how—exactly like my own two sons. Or even of the possibility that they themselves had escaped with their own lives through his survival, exactly like my two sons had through mine.

  A moment later, we were laughing again in Bern’s living room, as his grandchildren began to show us how smart they really were. I liked the sound of that laughter—Bern’s and mine. I carried it with me when I left. It was better than sentiment, better than the sound of trumpets and drums. Maybe it meant a kind of closure—a definitive end to the accumulated weight of sadness and nostalgia that Bern and I had both carried under the pressure of a half-century of memories. So much for so long.

  I would be ready to settle for that.

  A Note About the Author

  Robert Kotlowitz was raised and educated in Baltimore. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music, he went on to become a book and magazine editor in New York, where he served as Managing Editor of Harper’s Magazine. His first novel, Somewhere Else, published in 1972, won the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award for fiction. His subsequent novels were The Boardwalk (1977), Sea Changes (1986), and His Master’s Voice (1992).

  Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Kotlowitz joined WNET/Channel Thirteen in New York and became Senior Vice President and Director of Programming and Broadcasting; upon retirement in 1990, he was named Chairman of the Editorial Council and Editorial Advisor to the station. He is the father of two sons, and lives in New York City.