Simone Plastrik: 1919 - 1999
Morton, Brian
SIMONE PLASTRIK was listed on Dissent's masthead as its business manager, but she was much more than that. Irving Howe used to say that Simone was the one person who might be truly...
...She made a strong impression, even on people who barely knew her...
...I'm too old...
...When I came to work at Dissent, in 1983, the first thing that struck me about her was her insistence on getting things done without delay...
...In recent years she sometimes grumbled that Dissent had become "too social democratic—too shvach...
...she preferred to tell a different kind 'of story...
...That was just like Simone...
...We were lucky enough to know her only because of an accident...
...Her liveliness, her loyalty, her cheerfulness in the face of physical suffering, her distaste for pretentiousness, her fearlessness, her amazing modesty—knowing Simone, you wanted to try to be as good as she was...
...I want to know how much time I have left—six months, two months, one month—so I can know how to organize myself...
...She talked about him as if he'd just left the room...
...I met her two years after Stanley died...
...When she was a girl, growing up in Poland, she was a tomboy...
...I want to make sure that everything at Dissent goes smoothly when I'm gone...
...SIMONE PLASTRIK was listed on Dissent's masthead as its business manager, but she was much more than that...
...She had a gift for friendship...
...I was at her house once when she started to feel a terrible mounting pain in her side, from what turned out to be a blood clot on her lung...
...Normal for you, Simone...
...I think she was still married to Stanley...
...The first time she went out in her disguise, an old friend who didn't know she was underground came up to her, smiling brightly...
...Her highest compliment was to call someone a worker—by which she meant someone who was willing to lick envelopes...
...he called out...
...But no one who knew her will be surprised to learn that she was thinking about Dissent, worrying about Dissent, to the last...
...I've never known anyone else who endured pain with such grace...
...I didn't bother to correct him about what she was to me...
...Once when I saw her in the hospital last May, she said she was planning to have a talk with her doctor...
...About once a week I would feel her hovering at my shoulder...
...After the EMS workers took her out on a gurney, one of the cops came up to me...
...She'd mention her discomfort, but matter-offactly...
...answering the phone message on the same day you received it—she believed in the absolute importance of taking care of the small things...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 • 95 SIMONE PLASTRIK She liked to talk about how Stanley and Trotsky—"the Old Man"—had engaged in a polemic in the 1930s, and how Trotsky had referred to Stanley as "the petit bourgeois from Brooklyn...
...It's normal...
...During the war, in Vichy France, Simone was in the Resistance...
...At lunch one day, just to joke around, I said, "Simone, I don't know what makes you tick...
...I asked her if she ever thought about finding a new man...
...She paused and said, "What do you think...
...About five years ago, we were gossiping about one of her friends, also a widow, who had a new man in her life...
...She joined the socialist movement at about the age of fifteen, as a member of the Red Falcons in Paris during the 1930s...
...96 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...These small things—the minor details that weren't minor at all—Simone called schmates...
...The most withering epithet in her vocabulary was "prima donna...
...After a few minutes, two emergency medical service workers and two police officers arrived...
...She would talk, for example, about how she'd painstakingly transformed her appearance in order to evade the police...
...During the last three years, after she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she spent almost as much time in the hospital as she spent at home...
...I typed the letter and put it in an envelope...
...she used to push the boys off benches...
...She never told us much about the risks she took...
...She looked up at me, surprised...
...but I couldn't say no to Simone...
...Simone said she needed me to come up and take care of some urgent business...
...Irving Howe used to say that Simone was the one person who might be truly indispensable to the magazine...
...to use the word she would have chosen, she kept us mobilized...
...Really, though, I don't think that was the reason...
...Of course it could have waited, but that wasn't Simone's way...
...They were with her in her bedroom for a while, checking her out...
...It's not extraordinary," she said...
...The extended family— all of them—died in the camps...
...Her arthritis was so crippling that she had to retire early from her job teaching French at the High School of Music and Art—a job she loved—and she was often in such physical agony that she couldn't sleep at night...
...There was a small army of people who loved her—people who ranged in age from their twenties to their nineties...
...But I hardly ever heard her complain...
...She kept the rest of us moving...
...I'd have nothing to give him but my arthritis...
...Your mother," he said, "is one tough lady...
...How could you not be good to Simone...
...It was late...
...She waved me away impatiently...
...BRIAN MORTON is the author of Starting Out in the Evening...
...One day when she was climbing a tree, she fell to the ground and broke her leg...
...I was tired...
...Politically, she never lost her fire...
...The fracture was so complicated that it couldn't be treated properly in Poland, and her father took her to a specialist in France...
...Three weeks before she died, after she'd been confined to her bed, she told us that she'd had a dream that Dissent had received a hundred dollars from Vanessa Redgrave, who wanted to get involved with the magazine, and that Paul Berman had been dispatched to England to meet her and find out whether she'd matured enough politically to work with us...
...I was in the other room...
...She calmly called 911, packed a bag, and put some make-up on while she waited for the ambulance...
...Bonjour, Simone...
...A few years ago, when she was very sick and thought she didn't have much time, she called up some of her friends to thank them and tell them she loved them...
...she dyed her hair, wore dark glasses, and hid under an enormous hat...
...Every time she opened the mail, it seemed, there was some present or card from someone who'd been thinking of her...
...Her father liked it there and brought the rest of the immediate family...
...Why should I?" she said...
...She had no patience for leftists who wanted to be generals...
...Writing to the subscriber immediately...
...Simone had fought back from illnesses so many times that it was easy to think she'd keep fighting back forever...
...He shook his head with something like amazement...
...I didn't want to...
...I came to the office, and it turned out that she needed me to write a letter of apology to a subscriber whose issue had gone astray in the mail...
...I don't know why they're so good to me," she would say...
...Once when I was on jury duty I called the office at the end of the day to check in...
...through her stories about him I felt as if I came to know him...
...I'm so relieved," Simone said...
...To be insulted by Trotsky was a high honor...
...I just told him that I knew, I knew what he meant...
...Brian, have you taken care of all your schmates...
...I said, "I think you're extraordinary...
...She didn't want to leave anything undone...
...Schmates," she said...
...I'm a woman of action," she used to say...
...There was a moral element in her attention to the small things...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
