saved me. Now, my inner life makes me interpret a simple mistake, a
misunderstanding, as catastrophe. Nothing in the present is really
wrong, nothing that can’t be easily ĕxed. A man is angry and
frustrated because he has misunderstood me, because I can’t
understand him. ere is shouting and conĘict. But my life is not in
danger. And yet, that is how I read the present situation. Danger,
danger, death.
“Pay or get off! Pay or get off!” the driver shouts. He stands up from
his seat. He is coming toward me. I fall to the ground, I cover my face.
He is above me now, grabbing my arm, trying to yank me to my feet. I
huddle on the Ęoor of the bus, crying, shaking. A fellow passenger
takes pity on me. She is an immigrant like me. She asks me ĕrst in
Yiddish, then in German, if I have money, she counts the coins in my
sweaty palm, she helps me back into my seat and sits with me until I’m
breathing again. The bus pulls out onto the street.
“Stupid greener,” someone says under her breath as she walks up
the aisle to her seat.
* * *When I tell Magda about the incident in a letter, I turn it into a joke—
an episode of immigrant—“greener”—slapstick. But something
changed in me that day. It will be more than twenty years before I will
have the language and psychological training to understand that I was
having a Ęashback, that the unnerving physical sensations—racing
heart, sweaty palms, narrowing vision—I experienced that day (and
that I will continue to experience many times in my life, even now, in
my late eighties) are automatic responses to trauma. is is why I now
object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s
not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one.
But on that November morning in Baltimore I didn’t know what was
happening to me; I assumed that my collapse meant that I was deeply