Blank Entry

[no entry today]

——————-

This is the first day without an entry in Papa’s diary. Perhaps is was just an ordinary day in which Papa visited his sisters on the way home from work and spent the evening by himself.

Temperatures in New York were in the low to mid 30’s most of the day with no precipitation. Time Magazine’s cover featured Eleutherios Venizelos, the outgoing Premier of Greece, though much of the issue focused on Woodrow Wilson’s funeral and legacy. The Teapot Dome Scandal shows up in Time and The New York Times, but is not yet in full flower. In sports, the Westminster Dog Show reintroduced the Best In Show award after the previous year’s elimination of it proved unpopular; a Sealyham Terrier took the big prize.

Papa must have been pleased to read an article in the Times about non-Zionist Jewish leaders agreeing to invest in Palestine, another sign of American Jewish sentiment shifting toward unified support of a Jewish homeland. Maybe he read about it before he went to bed, or maybe he spent the night talking about it with friends.

Empty

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Matt’s Notes

The words Papa chooses for his dismissive diary entries — whether he writes “dull” or “not important” or “unimportant” or “empty,” as he does today — always strike me as pointed and loaded with hidden emotion. To sit down, take pen in hand, and write “empty,” as opposed to one of a thousand other ways he could have described his nondescript day, recalls his earlier, anxious discussions of his life’s “emptiness” and the loneliness he’s struggled with all year.

Papa is idle, on a long, forced break from work. He lacks the money to do much more than ride out to Coney Island every day and wander, by himself, among the happy, thronging couples. He remains without romantic companionship. But perhaps his most difficult struggle is with a new form of homesickness grown thick and tangled since his father’s death. He no longer experiences ordinary longing for the old country, but instead faces the yawning absence of what he hoped to recapture one day with his family. He is awakened, after eleven years, from the sweet dream of safety and belonging and ease made possible by the prospect, however remote, that he might see them all in one place again.

For those of us following Papa’s diary, the word “empty” is anything but empty. It is a one-word poem written in longing for some relief. It is really true, can we really believe, that what came later would make him forget what it meant to him in 1924?

It seems that way. Papa, this is you:

[no entry]
—————

Matt’s Notes

As noted yesterday, Papa accidentally wrote his August 7th entry on his diary’s August 6th page, so that’s where you’ll find the latest.

Meanwhile, here are the New York Times headlines that might have caught Papa’s eye on the 7th:

GOMPERS DISPUTES DAVIS LABOR RECORD; Denies, in Reply to Wilson, That Nominee Appeared in Clayton Act Fight.

EXPERT SAYS LOEB ADMITTED HE WAS THE ACTUAL SLAYER; ” He Told Me He Struck the Blow” That Killed Boy, Dr. Glueck Testifies. [I happen to be reading a book about Leopold and Loeb while I’m on vacation in Mexico, where I’m posting from.]

Carnegie Gift to Jerusalem Library.

Candidates Must Be ‘Polite’ Over Radio in Massachusetts