I miss my parents lately, particularly now that I’ve read The Orientalist, Tom Reiss’ biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a tortured intellectual and prolific writer who lived while the great empires—the Ottoman, the Hapsburg, the Russian—died and totalitarianism took over. Nussimbaum was also known as Essad Bey and Kurban Said; he was a Jewish Orientalist whose greatest talent was self-invention.

Nussimbaum was born five months after my mother, in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city where there were oil fires above ground when he was a child. Baku, in Reiss’ telling, sounds like it came from The Arabian Nights.

My mother, who was quite a party girl, might have known Lev in the ‘20s when both were living in Berlin, a city Reiss captures with extraordinary vividness. Berlin in the Weimar period must have been a delight. If time travel were possible, I’d be there.

Nussimbaum’s is a story of displacement and exile. The book unearths history I had never imagined and helps explain why my parents, like the fascism-prone, Bolshevik-hating Nussimbaum, fled Germany for Italy in the early ‘30s (Italy wasn’t officially anti-Semitic until 1938, the year of the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria and Hitler and Mussolini formalized their alliance).

One of the most original works of history I’ve ever read, Reiss’ book—which he developed because he’s the “child of German-speaking Jews trapped in Nazi Europe” (I’m the son of German Jews who got out just in time)—documents a fantastic man negotiating perilous, challenging times. We live in interesting times now, with the world collapsing economically, forcing political accommodations that will be strenuous indeed. But Nussimbaum’s short career—he died, gangrenous and in great pain, in 1942—celebrates a degree of ingenuity and inventiveness rarely called for these days.

It also makes me very happy my parents made it to America, where you can breathe relatively freely. I wish I’d recorded more of their stories.

Also, visit Tom Reiss’s website.

Antonio Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is Catholicism on LSD.

I’m with friends on a hotel trip that’s deeply wearing but stimulating, on a continent that seems to be imploding but is still vital, authoritative and elegant. Here, trains are high-speed, cars are efficient, you can walk the cities, health care isn’t a fight. Shows you the U.S. has a long way to go.

A week later, however, Europe’s troubles are dragging down the world, stymieing what looks like an embryonic U.S. recovery. I don’t understand how a continent so apparently progressive can be in imminent danger of collapse. Too much community, it seems. It’s great to be all for one and one for all when the economy is on the way up, but one drags down all when it’s tanking.

But I ramble. The trip went from April 22 to May 1. We visited Belgium (Brussels was much more attractive than I expected), France (a day in Paris was expectedly delightful and Provence was ravishing), Spain, and Munich, Germany. I spent less than two hours at Dachau Concentration Camp, just long enough to chill at the recognition that it’s not just the evil the Nazis did, it’s how systematic and efficient that was.

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, a model for all the others.

I hope I go back. Each major city I visited—Brussels, Paris, Marseille, Barcelona and Munich—is a world of its own. I’m a Europhile.

It’s still cold but it’s bright, the snow crunching less than it did even a week ago. It’s been a chilly winter, though the sun the past few days has been delightful if a bit illusory. Around this time of year in Cleveland, the mind turns to getting far, far away and warm, warm and sunny.

Karen and Katy are traveling to Colorado next week to look at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Lylah just turned 15 and got a Nikon for that milestone (you’ve seen some of her pix; you’ll see more). And I’ll be traveling to Europe in about six weeks on a hotel trip arranged by my good friend and highly prized professional colleague, Rich Roberts.

So the thaw seems real, there’s motion in the works, the freeze is breaking. Other signs: those wily socialist Democrats who want to plunder the country for their own takeover will pass health care reform, flawed though it may be; the economy is sputtering with a little promise; reason seems to be clawing its way back into public discourse.

Ask me for citations and I’d be hard-pressed, but that’s my feeling.

We saw a cop ticketing my car. I yelled there was time left. He said I’d parked more than two feet from the curb. “Downright Christmasy,” I told him. I also told him I couldn’t believe him and said he’d had a choice: to ticket me or leave it be.

What’s your name? I asked. It’s on the ticket, he said. My $25 ticket from The Parking Violations Bureau of the city of Cleveland identifies him as “Cintron.” I told him the city does anything for money. I was furious. I took out my bile on Lylah on our way back east. That was unfair.

She wondered whether he’d had a yardstick to measure that legal 24 inches. I wish I’d had one with me and had the presence of mind to measure the distance myself. Didn’t look like two feet to me, so it’ll be my word against Cintron’s when I go for my hearing. I don’t intend to pay this fine.

Wonder what else the uninviting city of Cleveland plans to do to me and others willing to brave it? Its officials wonder why people don’t want to go downtown. People like Cintron are one of the reasons. So is a law that’s more than open to interpretation—and that feels especially capricious in a city with no traffic to worry about because nobody wants to go there.

When my wife gave birth to our daughter, I realized no man ever works as hard as a woman. When, nearly 40 years ago, my then-wife-to-be (she became my first) and I decided to have an abortion instead of a child we weren’t ready to parent, we had to go to New York, where abortions were legal. It was a painful and difficult and intensely personal decision. It always is.

I just e-mailed Nelson nailing him for his arrogance, his presumption that in the name of morality he has the right to control a woman’s body. I can’t settle differences people have on abortion, but it’s a private affair, a highly personal situation. Don’t have one if you’re against it. But don’t prevent those who want or need one. If you don’t like the show, change the channel. But don’t put a chastity belt on the TV.

I’ll let you know if Nelson responds. At least someone other than a Nebraskan can contact him; Bart Stupak, the Michigan Neanderthal Democrat in the House who shares Nelson’s primitive approach, doesn’t accept e-mail from outside his own state.

Don’t even get me started on Joe Lieberman, an opportunist who gives chameleons a bad name.

If health care reform survives, let alone passes, it will be a miracle. I used to think it should, because at least, despite lack of public option and Medicare buy-in, it would be a start. I’m not so sure anymore given the way Nelson, Lieberman, Stupak and the perpetually negative Republicans have used morality to bludgeon it into impotence.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have come up with a screed, 10 principles to live by. These are retro in the name of conservatism. The party says it won’t fund any candidate unless he or she swears by at least eight of these. What next? Loyalty oaths?

Clinton intimated tears when a woman asked her how she bore up under the campaign strain. Pelosi quivered when she compared today’s heated rhetoric over health care reform and other Obama moves to late November 1978 in San Francisco, when Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay executive, were assassinated.

Clinton and Pelosi have reputations for being hard and unemotional. Many credited Clinton’s unexpected vulnerability for her primary win against Barack Obama. I wonder whether Pelosi’s show of vulnerability over the meanness in today’s charged political atmosphere will pay a parallel dividend. What that might be is being played out daily.

What’s happened to Obama, who as a campaigner was the best politician I’d ever seen? Apparently, he can’t lead, only synthesize, only accommodate. God knows I’m no fan of Republicans, but as Jon Stewart said, they had the discipline to sell the public on a disastrous war. Maybe Obama’s working health care reform like a wimp to appease the center right the polls say rule the country. Maybe he’s doing it because of a grander scheme he’ll unveil after midterm elections next year—if the Democratic majority holds, which it may not because of health care reform waffling.

I voted for Obama because I thought he was a liberal ready and canny enough to spearhead major social change, including health care reform that would result in a system similar to those in much of Europe and Canada. I’m not so sure anymore. I hope he pushes back Blue Dogs and ignores Republicans (except for those Maine ladies). I hope he has the spine to match his intellect and the will to move the country forward.

People complain he has bitten off more than he can chew. I hope Obama has the courage to bite down even harder.

Only this one puts vendors and beggars into competition—in China, they were somehow separate—so the main feeling a spoiled western tourist like me has is of being put upon, harassed. I don’t want to buy a Taj Mahal snowglobe or one of those thick red bullwhips vendors keep thrusting at me.

I’m heading across a short bridge and the tour bus is in sight when I see a man on all fours with a hand out toward me. He’s on all fours because that’s how he’s built. I can’t really see the man. All I see is the deformity.

I don’t speak his language, I don’t know what to do, even though I have some rupees on me. I feel ashamed, privileged beyond my right. I wonder how the man got this way and what could be done/what he could do to change a condition so extreme it seems no amount of money in the world could fix it. Helplessness and anger and shame roil me.

I ask our tour guide why that man was that way. There were others in the area like that, too; one wasn’t on all fours but had similar stick, scuttling legs. It was phantasmagorical.

The guide told me it was about education; those men didn’t know enough to go where help, available under India’s system of free medical care, was available.

No matter. I can’t get the image of the man on all fours out of my mind. Taking a picture of him would have been blasphemous.

Katy’s boyfriend Nick suggested I make a movie as a response to an Obama questionnaire regarding the future of the country under the president-elect. Here it is. It’s a prelude to my growing understanding of how to use the Internet to enhance the blog. Look for further/better changes in the near future, including real links, real pictures, more frequency.

I was at a local bar the night of Nov. 4 when CNN said Ohio had gone for Obama. That was when I knew he’d won the presidency, and I cheered as loud as anybody. The gang of Obama workers at the Purple Shamrock in South Euclid knew then that something huge was happening, and just how huge it was is beginning to settle in. It also made me feel better about living in Ohio, which has a tradition of voting for people who talk it right but do it wrong.

Weird to think that as of late next January, the president of the United States will be a hybrid man named Barack Hussein Obama. Not only did his solid election prove that a man of color can be president, it also proved that someone very different, not to mention very intellectual, can be. Some pundits call Obama’s election a vindication of civil rights, and indeed it is. My sense of politics began when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower. He was too much of an egghead and lost – twice. Now Obama, certainly as much of an egghead as Stevenson, has won. The difference is, Obama’s cool.

My friend Jack, who voted for McCain, told me an even bigger test will be when a Jew is elected president (that a woman will be seems more likely than that, actually). But for now, we should all rejoice in barriers being broken. Not to mention celebrate the best campaign I’ve ever had the pleasure of volunteering for.

If Obama runs the country half as well as he ran his campaign, the U.S. will be far more together. In the past eight years it’s been trashed, dumbed down, rode hard and put up wet, so we must keep a close eye on what President Bush does in his last 70-plus days. But for now, at least, a sense of hope and promise has returned to the electorate. Even those who didn’t vote for Obama give him the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, he’s also a consummate pol, and he’ll have to make peace with more traditional factions of the Democratic Party. He’ll also have to deal with the largely (and thankfully) defanged GOP. So he’ll compromise, moving to the center to govern, a center where it seems most people want him to be. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, because he was elected on the basis of a fairly progressive agenda. How he capitalizes on his victory before he takes office – whom he appoints, his interplay with world leaders – should be telling. If the next two months leave people feeling anything like Obama’s victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park made me feel, we all might be able to enjoy life in the USA again. 

I went to pick up my daughter at her friend Laura’s house and encountered a McCain-Palin sign on Laura’s parents’ front yard. I’ve talked politics to Laura’s mom, who’s said she leaned toward McCain. When I offered her Obama literature, she at least took it. When I picked up Lylah, Laura’s dad opened the door. I told him I was about to offer him Obama literature. He said no thanks. I said too bad. A fittingly scary conversation for Halloween night.

 Why do people vote for those who undermine them? I suspect a McCain administration wouldn’t better this family’s circumstances; surely, the Bush administration hasn’t. Okay, McCain’s familiar, and he and ueberfemme Sarah Palin may embody traditional values, or at least give lip service to them. Besides, they’re old-fashioned, though Palin’s pretty modern, at least in the chronological sense (she’s even younger than Obama, the most modern major politician on the set).

I’ve been canvassing for Obama for the past few weeks and am in the phase, a very late one, where I’m persuading people to commit to pulling the Obama lever or even vote early. It’s disheartening to encounter those on the other side of history, because history dictates an Obama win. His move – from out of nowhere, digitally empowered, original – seems inexorable to me. Not to mention his attributes.

Which brings me to Joe the Plumber, McCain’s latest substitute for an idea. Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher (thanks to Wikipedia, which also lists me, with qualifications) has come to embody Everyman and become McCain’s vehicle for middle-class identification. Joe has said he considers Obama a socialist, thinks an Obama election would signal the death of Israel (the racist subtexts here are manifold) and calls Social Security “a joke.” 

Because of the publicity, Joe’s flirting with a career as a country music singer, and a whack job Massachusetts-based Republican organization is pushing him to run for Congress in 2010. He’s clearly a flash in various jingoist pans, not to mention a faux celebrity McCain is using to pump up his own lackluster appearances.

Meanwhile, it looks like McCain has an uphill fight for the Presidency. Meanwhile, Obama appeals for money even though as of last report, he’d generated $650 million in Internet-based funds. And even in the last few days of this campaign, he’s soliciting small donations – and people like me are donating. He’s the equivalent of a fresh Macintosh, the latest Apple object of desire; you want it even if and when you don’t need it. (Not that we don’t need Obama.)

To me, Joe the Plumber is Joe the Hater, a way McCain can tar Obama late in the game. Let’s hope it’s too late and Joe the Plumber becomes a footnote, the political equivalent of Milli Vanilli. They’re equally authentic.