THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

It has been 40 years since I graduated from A & S and the NROTC program. In those four decades, I had stopped in Louisville for only two brief visits, so the reunion was indeed a "homecoming."

During the reunion weekend, returning alumni were led on a campus tour. The campus has doubled in size since I was a student, so I did not recognize half of it. We stood next to Davidson Hall, trying to figure out where our first chapter house at 2020 South First Street had once stood. It was a similar experience at the kick-off gathering on Friday evening when some of us who had not seen each other for 40 years looked for some sign of recognition. I discovered that most of the brothers from my era had a hard time figuring out who I was. Of course, in 1957 I was sixty pounds lighter, didn’t wear glasses, had a crew cut and no white beard!

It took very little time to lay aside the superficial disguises. The joy of it was to discover recognition in the eyes, the voices, the laughs, and the sharing of mutual memories, along with the fun of laying all those years aside and just being together again...

None of this would have happened at all without two years of precise, persistent, and personable planning by the reunion organizer, Bill Brasch ’71S. His motivation for such a stupendously successful gathering was none other than his love for people and his understanding of how important our personal relationships as fraternity brothers were and are.

For those U of L alumni who, like me, have been away for a long time, I offer this thought: you too might want to consider rekindling those old friendships that have faded over the years. If you are "really smart," you do realize how important your personal relationships as classmates, roommates, teammates, fraternity brothers, and sorority sisters were and are. Hopefully you will take advantage of the nextreunion opportunity at U of L, as I did, to renew those old acquaintances.

It might be one of the most rewarding experiences you’ve had since college.

The Rev. Dr. Robert B. Shepard, Jr. ’57A
Senior Pastor, Anaheim United Methodist Church Anaheim, California

Trying to avoid the ‘Jew Hunts’ organized by Lithuanian collaborators, Kovner took refuge in a tiny hut at the very limit of the settlement. He thought he was alone. But he was wrong. There sat across the bare room an aged Vilna Jew, slowly turning the treadle of his hand-driven sewing machine. He had no bobbin or thread. But his needle incised a pattern of stitch-holes on a piece of stiff white paper.

"What are you doing here?" Kovner asked. "I am writing the Memor Buch, the history, of the annihilation of the Vilna Jews," the old man answered. Kovner thought the old man had been driven insane by the Hurban surrounding him. "You are writing the history of the ghetto on pattern paper, using a sewing machine without thread?" the young Kovner asked. "Yes," the sewing-machine historian said to Kovner. "When the war is over, there will be time enough to pull through the threads."

The sewing-machine historian did not survive. Nor has his paper stitchery survived among the thousands of Vilna documents in the YIVO archives now in New York. But his voice in Kovner’s tale is commanding. It tells us it is we who must work toward the human completion of the work of Creation: "What God created to be made." It is we who must pull through the threads.

Dr. Arthur J. Slavin
Recently retired Justis Bier Chair in Humanities and former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Editor’s Note:

The excerpt above is from a text delivered at the Naamani Memorial Lecture on April 7. The lecture commemorates the life of Israel Naamani, professor of political science, who died in 1979. Internationally respected as a Hebrew scholar, Naamani was a fellow of the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences and presided at the first plenary session of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in 1977. The lecture is funded by an endowment from Naamani’s family, friends, colleagues, and former students.