Strephon Kaplan-Williams Books

Because of the holocaust which wiped out most of Jewish culture and its people in the space of two years in Poland and the Ukraine, almost nothing is known about Oscar's family in Russia. Yet through pictures and events of other Jews from his area of Staraya Sinyava in the Ukraine, we can get a view for what the Jews of that area and time went through.

Interestingly enough in my first dreamwork group as a dreamwork psychologist I had a Jewish woman psychologist who shared many dreams around a rape theme. One day I happened to mention that my father was from Staraya Sinyava. She perked up, eyes lit, not with happiness, but lit maybe with the ancient fire for a moment. "My father was from Staraya Sinyava also", she said. By an amazing coincidence we were now meeting for serious inner work the other side of the world in Berkeley, California. What if the old world from which we both came had remained the same? Would we have known each other, or some near combination of genes have produced different persons us? Still, some of the same genes must have flowed in our modern blood.

Here is a brief news history of the Jewish area Oscar Kaplan immigrated from when he was eight years old in 1907, brought over by his family. Had Oscar and his family stayed and not become a famous American poetry anthologist, this is what most likely would have happened to him.

This is a news timeline, based on the one day, Thursday June 9, about Staraya Sinyava and other areas taken from a news article by Claude Bensoussan for Guysen Israel News.
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1905: Jews are attacked and killed, their stores plundered and ransacked at the time of a pogrom to which Russian soldiers and cossacks devote themselves at Siedlce and Lodz (Poland).

1919: 12 Jews are massacred, several others seriously wounded and many Jewish women are raped during a pogrom carried out by bands commanded by Chepel and Lavorski from the Ukrainian National army of Simon Petlioura, in Staraya Sinyava (province of Podolie).

1920: 19 Jews have their throats cut. Many others are wounded and many Jewish women are raped in Berditchev (province of Volhynie) when the Ukrainian National army, reinforced by Polish quotas, besiege the city during four days.

1942: 1200 Jews of Ivienic (district of Novogrukok, R.S.S. from Bielorussia) are assassinated by the SS. Walter Rauff is the person in charge of the gas trucks and the staff of the Safety of the Reich (Reichssicherheithauptamt, Berlin). Rauff orders the first gassing in Riga (Latvia), using German and Austrian Jews stuffed in trucks with especially built pipelines to direct the exhausts into the sealed compartment.
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Oscar Kaplan left this area in 1907 when his father had finally earned enough money after two years to bring him, his mother, and the four other children to America. Here is a picture of what they must have looked like all crowded into the offices of the Rovno Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, trying to get visas to emigrate to America. This picture was taken in 1921. Imagine that most, if not all, these people have experienced the utter terror of hiding from people trying to rape and kill you, and you cannot understand why since you are not at war with anybody.

An essay on the web asks the question, why have the Jews been harassed and killed for so many centuries? No answers are satisfactory, not even the ones they gave. Why are the Jews killed when they are not stealing and killing their neighbors? Why did Jews mostly follow German orders in being rounded up and put in ghettos by the millions? Basically, they have not resisted evil, as that great Jew, Jesus of Galilee instructed the world, if these were really his words. In the Second World War only the Jews of Bulgaria in league with non-Jewish Bulgarians successfully resisted the Germans trying to round up the Jews. Denmark got their Jews out of the country and to Sweden in an underground 'railway'. This was covert resistance, unlike in Bulgaria.

This is what my father might have looked like had he not immigrated to America. I was born in 1934. This picture was taken in Cracow, Poland in 1932. Did any of these happy boys survive the war and concentration camps just ten years later? Little would they know that the games they played as boys would turn ultimately serious in just eight years. With these pictures of people from the old Jewish culture we are watching people who mostly did not survive.

Thus, with any neglect or meanness shown me by my relatively safe father in America, and the brutal schools I went to, this was terrible but nothing compared to what he had to escape from. Note that the news timeline above indicated the presence of a pogrom in Staraya Sinyava, Oscar's home town. I have the fantasy of having somehow known this fact and suddenly saying to my father when I still knew him alive at my age thirty, "Staraya Sinyava!" Would he look at me startled and get upset? For he was the man who hid his Jewish roots from his son and also his childhood as a Jew growing up in Russia and in the Brooklyn Jewish area. Could I have broken through his exterior and get him upset enough to share with me the truths he kept hidden from me all his life, not even letting me see him when he was dying in hospital?
to be continued.......

For me as Oscar's son it gives a good feeling to see him happy. The picture could be from forty-five years ago. Oscar died forty years ago in 1964 at age 64. But death is not nearly so important as life. What is great is to see my father happy. Oscar had the early childhood tragedy of being in the Russian Cossack pogroms against the Jews, leaving that when he was seven by being moved to America with his family. In America in the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn he was also attacked daily by gangs of Italian and Irish boys, and fought back. There was a block graveyard bordered on three sides by each of these immigrant minorities. The Irish and the Italians fought a lot and beat up their victims. The Jews were used to being victims. Oscar Williams fought back. He was known as the block bully. One time his sister found him lying in the street unconscious with a knife in his back. Oscar never told me this story and so I never got to ask to see his scars. Behind that warm smile of a man at last content with himself and his life is an earlier life not so easy on a boy becoming a man.

What is the message that a photograph conveys? The pre-Columbian native peoples of Mexico had a religious saying, "May my face reveal what my heart knows." Thus if you know your heart well and use it in life, then your face can become a magnificent realization of your true, realized nature.

Oscar has his usual trappings here besides his warm and wrinkled face. His standard white shirt and bow tie, signifying that he is both a respected editor and a literary poet. Note his well-brushed, full hair for a man of around sixty. It's still black and rich, and the hair-line has receded only a little. Of course almost everyone wants to live almost forever. Oscar did well to keep his hair as an example of his ongoing vitality. His secret was that he brushed it every day. This stimulated the hair follicles, he said.

Also in the background is a painting by his wife and my mother, Gene Derwood. These paintings probably do not exist anymore. I thought them weird and as a young man had no money nor any place to keep them, so I let them be donated to charity. I believe this painting is of a city after Atomic World War III. Oscar loved his wife and maintained a strong presence of her for the ten years after until his own death.

If I say anything more, it is this. During the shock of returning to New York City when my father died, on the day of his funeral I was alone with his body and have that image memory still of his face in death. It had just been revealed to me that Oscar Kaplan was born Jewish. Without any personality showing through now in death I thought I saw clearly his oriental features which I had never noticed in life. Yes, he seemed to be a Jew. I had prided myself in sensing among my friends who was Jewish or not, maybe because of my father's own secret identity hidden to me. I married a Jewish woman and we were close. Now here Oscar does not look Jewish. He looks too happy and warm, in contrast to most of the Jews I have known. Perhaps this means he had transcended his background and collective history by the time this picture was taken. It is a "strong presence" picture. I am happy to share it with you on this site. -Strephon-

Maybe this picture was taken in America in the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto somewhere. Oscar's father, Hyman Kaplan, I believe his name was, came over to America and worked at two jobs to earn enough money to pay for ship's passage for the rest of his family, two years later. About half the Jewish men who did this started new families and never brought over the old one, but Hyman did.
Thus, had my father stayed in the old country, along with his mother, brothers and sisters, they might have been wiped out by the Germans killing Jews in Russia in the Second World War. Of course he would never have met Gene, and I would never have met them both! But life is not lived on speculation. That which exists is the only life that exists and is real.

I met some of them at the funeral of my father. I never knew they existed. Oscar kept his Jewish origins hidden from me and his literary world. Oscar hated his father, according to my new relatives. He was having his wife, their mother, committed to a mental institution and she struggled with the men in white coats who came to get her, hit her head on the corner of a table and died.

The man lived to age 96. I met him once after the funeral. My uncle Abe spoke Yiddish to him and introduced me as Oscar's son. He went and gave me twenty dollars. Thus did I receive the blessing of the patriarch, traditional through the ages. I was thirty then. Hyman Kaplan read about his son's death in the Yiddish newspaper.

On our right is Oscar's sister, Hattie. She, being blond, had to open the door to the marauding Cossacks killing Jews in the pogroms of Russia, while the rest of the family hid under the bed. The father was in America earning money for their escape from Russia. Hattie was raped as a young woman by her employer and was heavily paranoid for the rest of her life working as a secretary in Washington, D.C.. The next to youngest boy next to her, stopped mentally growing at age 14 when his mother was killed. Oscar, the oldest, is next to Hattie and to his mother, whose name I do not know.

Abe is the smallest child with the sailor suit. He loved my father as a young man and became a millionaire who loved business but wanted to be a doctor. Sonya, Oscar's sister on our left, married, had two boys. Abe had two boys my age. My father and mother wanted Abe and his wife to take me in at age six but the wife thought I was too hyper. I had never played with children before. Yes, it's all so weird. But remember the harsh conditions people had to live through in those days. Being a Jew was like being constantly in a battle zone. One day they found Oscar with a knife in his back, lying unconscious. He was the block bully but still he could not protect himself. My cousins were attacked or threatened daily in going to school. I was in boarding school being threatened and beaten up, but at least they did not know I was half Jewish because I did not know I was half Jewish.

I don't understand any of it, but it all happened.

That's the family. The father went through three wives. At 96 he proudly stated to people that "the old tools don't work anymore." Well, that's life!

Kaplan is the Jewish name my father was born with. As the story goes, when he sent his first poetry out at age sixteen, it was all rejected under Oscar Kaplan. His sister, Sonya, suggested sending the poems out again under the name Oscar Williams. Williams was a movie star at the time around 1916. Half the poems were accepted in the same magazines and newspapers.

So Oscar adopted the name Williams, to get along in America. And he hid his Jewish identity from all except his Jewish relatives in Brooklyn, who respected his right to do so. Oscar would visit them in Brooklyn but not acknowledge any of them on the street in Manhattan where he worked with writers and publishers. This gave his brothers and sisters great pain.

What would make a man reject his own relatives, as if he was discriminating himself against Jews. All we can say is that as the oldest boy in the family when his father immigrated to America to earn the money to bring the family two years later, he was very afraid because of the Russian pogroms against the Jews. The Cossacks would break into the house, opened by his sister who had blond hair, while the mother and the children hid under the big bed.

Being Jewish was seen as dangerous for him, so as an adult he must have thought at least he could decide his identity in a free America. He changed Kaplan to Williams and became America's leading poetry anthologist. But he failed at being a well-recognized poet. His poems are full of mechanical imagery and negativity. If you don't accept yourself how can you come home to yourself as you are? Jews had to be careful then. Oscar paid a heavy price.

When I found out my identity after my father died I put in the Kaplan name with the Williams name to honor the Jewish half of my roots. A couple of German language publishers when they translated my books wanted me to be Strephon K. Williams. They said it would make the name shorter. One acceded to my wishes. The other did not.

My putting Kaplan back in the name as Kaplan-Williams is also my personal symbolic response to the holocaust. I will not let the Jewish part of me die the way my father let the Jewish part of him nearly die. But then again, outwardly his traumas were worse than mine. I suffered brutality and beatings at boarding school, but my life was not threatened directly as my father's was. He did not want to be discriminated against and terrorized as a Jew any longer. Who can blame him, except the rest of his Jewish family?