Prey

“Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.” —Salman Rushdie

I would be a fool to try to compare myself to Salman Rushdie, though he claims he’s a big Law & Order fan and I’d be up for a debate on Claire Kincaid versus Abbie Carmichael (full disclosure: Jill Hennessy’s son was once a classmate’s of my son’s, so I may be biased). My one claim to literary fame is as the author of InStyle Weddings, he’s won the Booker Prize; he was once married to Padma Lakshmi and the closest I’ve ever been to her was at a table near the stage at a James Beard event at which she was the guest of honor last year (she’s just as gorgeous in person, if perhaps a bit too in love with fillers).

And, of course, what he endured over 30 years for poking the zealot bear, ending in nearly being stabbed to death and losing an eye, makes what I’ve endured over four months for doing something vaguely similar look like nothing. Death threats from someone named Fuck you NAZI who was presumably posting from his mom’s basement in Jersey (the exact fuggy venue where Rushdie’s assassin prepared to kill him) are not an internationally enforced fatwa issued by a mufti, and I still have both eyes. (Something weird has happened to one ear, however—I hypothesize PTSD has caused me to grind my teeth in my sleep and that this somehow affects the pressure in the ear, leading to a sense that I’m constantly making my final descent. Perhaps I am. The membrane flexes.)

Nevertheless, I did find myself thinking recently about Rushdie and the crazed crusaders that have hunted both of us, prompting me to read Knife, his moving and reflective account of the attack and its aftermath (the most memorable line describes his eye post-stabbing, which, he writes, “hung down my face like a large soft-boiled egg”).  

City of Asylum

The last time I’d thought of Rushdie was when I flew to Pittsburgh with my two sisters to bury my parents’ ashes in October 2022. The trip was long overdue. My dad died of Alzheimer’s in 2008 and my mother died of being old the fall before the pandemic, lying on her bed in the nursing home, surrounded by the three of us, the blood slowly pooling in her shins until her heart ran dry.

We had chosen a green cemetery not far from the assisted living facility where they’d spent the last years of their lives and planned to tack on a few extra days in the city where we’d all spent our childhood and my father had taught music at the University of Pittsburgh for decades.

Rather than a hotel, we booked an exuberantly Tex-Mex-themed VRBO (plastic cacti, jack-a-lopes painted on tin) in the lively Mexican War District neighborhood, the long-time home of my friend John, a journalist and newspaper editor. He told us to be sure to check out the nearby City of Asylum bookstore owned by his friend Henry Reese. Reese was inspired by a talk by Rushdie to start a Pittsburgh branch of Rushdie’s International Cities of Refuge Network, which supports writers in exile in several European cities, and the bookstore helps with that effort. “We provide sanctuary to endangered literary writers, so that they can continue to write and their voices are not silenced,” states the organization’s website. Eighteen years later, Reese was the man who was onstage with Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institute when he was attacked while preparing to speak about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.

The bookstore was a delight, as was the adjoining restaurant, 40 North, all part of a building called Alphabet City, which includes spaces for performances, workshops and residencies. I ended up buying George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which I loved. I returned to the bookstore, owned by the man who was inspired by Rushdie to open it and who then nearly watched him die, when we held a memorial service for our parents the following summer. This time I wanted to buy How to Love Your Daughter, a book by Hila Blum, an Israeli author. The waitress at 40 North, where I was dining with my husband and my son, who accompanied me for this trip, kindly offered to open the register for us—the bookstore had closed for the night. I didn’t want to be a bother, so I told her I’d return later.

But the next day, I found that the bookstore was again closed, this time for a private event, and I was leaving the following day. I tried a third time to buy the book on the store’s website but never received it. I finally downloaded the Kindle version (like Rushdie, I do sometimes resort to Amazon for my reading material). I recommend it.

I tell this long story because the irony of how persistently I tried to buy an Israeli author’s book given what I had to endure six months later for expressing online my support for Palestine is as bitter as maror. Blum lives in Jerusalem, I bet not far from where many of my tormentors fired off their vicious threats to me four months ago and certainly not far from where my ancestor Gerson Stern wound up (more on him below). I now wish for my own asylum, a room on Pittsburgh’s Samsonia Street, where the writers sponsored by Henry Reese live, as I find myself one of them, running as fast as I can from those who seek to silence me.

In Knife, Rushdie writes of an imaginary conversation with his attacker. I have this fantasy, too. I want to know why my attackers, who wield virtual vitriol rather than actual weapons, at least for now, chose to go after me of all the thousands of people posting the same opinions or worse online and if they do, in fact, want to kill me or if it is all bluster. I want them to see me. To tell me to my face how much they hate me, a descendant of German Jews killed in the Holocaust, whose ancestor Gerson Stern wrote what was a touchstone of the Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany, a best-selling historical novel about the expulsion of the Jews from Prague in the 18th century called Der Weg ohne Ende (The Path Without End) which “helped the Jews to stand firm in their fight against Nazi brutality,” according to one review.

I want them to call me a Nazi and a Jew hater to my face. I want them to tell me why they included my family in their threats, why they so obsessively hunted me on every single platform I’d ever posted on and what their faith has to say about all of that.

Chautauqua

I once went as a young teen to the Chautauqua Institute, site of Rushdie’s near-death experience, with my father, who lectured there for a summer or two. Founded in 1874 as a Bible study camp on the lake of the same name, it grew to become an educational and cultural mecca, inspiring a nationwide movement. I’m not sure why we went together—father-daughter trips weren’t a thing for us. Perhaps it was some awkward attempt at bonding, our relationship during those years having been rather awful. I don’t recall. I only remember getting my period for the first time while on the trip and being too mortified to tell my father, silently bleeding on the bedsheets that night before furtively trying to find a drugstore the next morning that sold sanitary napkins.

That person, the knob-kneed teenager spending a rare few days alone with her father, vaguely miserable, as most 14-year-old girls are ,and forced to find a drugstore in a quaint resort town, could not have imagined her future self, a marketer at a bank who would one day be crucified for her political views.

I was quite good at what I did at the bank that helped crucify me. A fucking wizard. And now I’m not doing it. Which I guess is a good thing, because I’m doing this, which, admittedly, is somewhat more fulfilling than writing about the firm’s new Fed sentiment tool. But Christ on a tent revival camp handout was the accompanying torment torturous, thanks to the bounty hunters in their moms’ basements in Jersey, training their scopes on me.

Fear

Death is not typically something you think about until you are confronting it. My husband had to confront it when he was diagnosed with cancer, and he made the usual bargains with God and did the usual checking on life insurance payouts. Confronting a cancer diagnosis is very different from confronting a homicidal religious zealot masquerading as a social justice warrior, though. Both are threats but who will even try to save you from the latter? Not the NYPD, as I found out.

I’d like to ask Rushdie who saved him when he was traveling through life as Joseph Anton other than the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. Not his wives, who until now have mostly had the half-life of a sea monkey. His friends, I suppose—Amis and Auster and Hitch. I’d like to ask him how he would describe the shade of yellow of the exterior of the Athenaeum Hotel on Lake Chautauqua and if he ever had to find a drugstore nearby that sold sanitary napkins. I’d like to tell him that we both left bloodstains there (he writes he was mortified to do so just as I was, bleeding through his Ralph Lauren suit that had been cut apart by people trying to save him to reveal his underthings) and that while I obviously recovered from my incidental incident of filial shame much more easily than he did his near-fatal assassination attempt, I have now tasted a tiny crumb of what he was force fed.

In Knife, Rushdie writes this of his ordeal following the publication of The Satanic Verses: “The danger was real; the widespread hostility was almost worse than that.” Again, I have tasted a like-flavored crumb of that zealot-fueled hostility. “Widespread” in my case meant smears posted to Twitter and Instagram thumbs-upped by more than 5,000 people, smears that will forever follow me online, along with the perhaps irrational fear that one of the zealots will pop back up with more than mere threats, but the trauma was nevertheless brutal in its own way.

Rushdie also writes that once he had recovered, against all odds, from the eventual, horrific culmination of that hostility: “I had no way of being certain that there was nothing to be afraid of. I had only my instincts, and they said, Live. Live.” Me too, Salman. Me, too.

Last Thoughts

I will make one more pathetic attempt to link myself somehow to Rushdie and then I’ll stop. I lied about my sole claim to literary fame. I also hold the distinction of being the person who coined the word “staycation.” I know that sounds highly dubious. But I swear it’s true. Long, long ago, when I was a semi-big-deal magazine editor, I dreamt it up to use in a story or two, and then a friend who was a writer for a big-deal magazine said, “Love that! Can I use it?” Me: “Of course!” Next thing you know, we were all taking staycations.

So imagine how tickled I was to see Rushdie using my neologism in Knife to refer to a time he and his wife booked themselves into a Manhattan hotel to quietly escape from it all after he returned from rehab. Here’s to staycations, spiritual and otherwise, and to words, invented and shared and joined together one after the other after the other as a way to slowly and humbly and hopefully build a path forward.