In his essay, “Pilot Light” (Winter, 2013) Thomas J. Cottle tells of living with the “low murmur of fear” related to being Jewish. He calls this murmur, a pilot light, the small flame that burns continuously, and that at any moment can be used to ignite the full flame of terror. Cottle goes on to speak of the hundreds of things that today, keep the pilot light lit, even the small things like a colleague’s off-handed remark or a tasteless joke. As a child growing up with parents who well remember the Holocaust, Cottle recalls below, the time when, as an adolescent, he came face to face with betrayal and physical assault at the hands of someone he thought was a friend for no other reason than the fact that he was Jewish. He writes that “the words of philosopher Michael Oakeshott are relevant here: ‘We are what we have learned,’ Let us add, and what we continue to learn, and, for all I know, what our forbearers learned.”

On Brecht, French Horns, and Pilot Lights

Thomas J. Cottle

I remember the heat, the oppressive heat that one summer morning and I remember being cut by the bushes when Sam, a boy who lived in the neighborhood, and another boy, my French horn playing comrade, someone I thought of as my best-out-of-school friend, shoved me face first in to the corner of the garden behind Sam’s house. There was dirt in my mouth along with blood, and the two of them sat on me and pounded me and told me I was a dirty, filthy, Jew. They hated Jews, they said. “We hate Jews. And you’re a Jew. So we hate you!” And they pounded my arms and back. My crying only made them hit me harder and shove my face more forcefully into the dirt. “You’re a crying Jew girl. Sissy girl Jew. Sissy Jew.” To this day I feel so hurt by the one boy, I can neither mention his name nor employ a pseudonym for him in these musings. He shall remain the French horn player. He went away for high school and college and I never entered his home again. Years later I learned that he had died; I think he might have been no more than thirty. It was from an illness. I remember not knowing what to think, or what to feel; not a single emotion came forth. But by then the pilot light had been burning for years. Continue reading →