Simone Plastrik: 1919 - 1999
Walzer, Michael
ALL OF US who knew Simone knew for months that she was dying. But this was still very hard to believe or accept. I have never so successfully repressed what I knew. It was simply impossible...
...98 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...ALL OF US who knew Simone knew for months that she was dying...
...I thought of it as the higher bookkeeping...
...She was a militant who did not believe in gaudy gestures but in steady work...
...but with the strength that she gave us...
...She looked at the group of us who gathered in her home, and she decided that we could manage the work...
...She knew what she believed about all the larger issues, but she also knew that we can express and advance these beliefs only on a local scale, here and now...
...And she simply assumed that we would carry on...
...She was a woman of valor, eshet hayil...
...Maybe she marched with her fist in the air in Paris in the 1930s...
...And there was more work to do...
...Noone will doubt that, but what I especially loved about her was that she was a woman of valor who pinched pennies...
...a political magazine needs a political reason...
...That would be a signal to the others to move away, and then she would tell me what I had been doing wrong—mostly, what I hadn't been doing: the letters I hadn't written, the people I had neglected, the key moments, the opportunities when contributions could have been solicited, money asked for, that I had inexcusably missed...
...for although she enjoyed the relaxed conversation at the table, she never forgot that the hours were precious...
...and her here and now was Dissent...
...She was sure that we should carry on...
...some of them were actually being paid for...
...T T HE TWENTIETH century has been hard on political certainties, and to have sustained a life of conviction and engagement in this time is a rare achievement...
...She did the same, I think, for everyone in the office...
...she would not have wanted that...
...she approved of us...
...It was simply impossible to imagine Dissent without Simone, our small world without her at its center...
...And she signaled again when lunch was over, simply by getting up herself...
...Today that word conjures up pictures of people with their fists in the air—and that's not a picture of Simone...
...On the day each week when Mitchell and I came in, we would all eat together, the small group of us responsible for the day-to-day running of the magazine...
...Simone succeeded because she was so focused, on this magazine, on these people...
...I can't tell you what comfort it gave me to see her sitting there, steadfast through all the years of pain and illness, going through the mail, recording and acknowledging gifts to the magazine, writing checks, filling the large ledgers in which she inscribed our financial life—and always keeping track...
...She was a militant...
...I have never so successfully repressed what I knew...
...MICHAEL WALZER is the co-editor of Dissent...
...But this was still very hard to believe or accept...
...I think it's more likely that she organized the march and made sure that everyone got there on time and, afterward, collected some money for the movement...
...She kept track of us—not only of our books but also of our conduct...
...we could carry on...
...I come into New York only one day a week for Dissent, and it's not enough...
...It was, naturally, a brown-bag lunch, signaled by Simone, when she thought a good morning's work had been done: a table, she would say...
...And so we will...
...Every once in a while she would look at me and say, "I have to talk to you...
...but she watched out for our mistakes...
...She was one of us...
...I am not sure that she would have liked hearing this, but she was the near-perfect embodiment of both...
...Not for her sake...
...And so we did...
...It was that combination that kept Dissent alive for so long—far beyond the normal run of a leftist magazine...
...She understood that in the real world socialist commitment had to be seconded by bourgeois virtue...
...Her home and our office were the same place, for more than forty years...
...When Irving Howe died, there were moments when I thought that, well, magazines also have a life span, a time to flourish and a time to die, and maybe Dissent's flourishing was over...
...But Simone did not believe that...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
