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But old colleagues said . . . the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart, . . . a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms
-for Leo Kanner, MD
Years before he became our first child
psychiatrist and penned his classic paper on autism,
Kanner was Chaskel Leib, an aspiring teenaged poet
rejected by the Yiddish publishers in Minsk.
Like generations of Jewish boys, he gave up
hope for a literary life and learned medicine,
studying in my great-great-great grandfather’s Berlin.
Then he fled to Yankton, South Dakota,
birthplace of my apple trees, changed
his name to Leo Kanner, and made his last
move to Johns Hopkins where, years later,
my wife sat on his old black leather couch
and learned child psychiatry. They say he loved
to settle on the supple skin, writing papers
with the fountain pen he had used for verse, lucky
to have been a failed poet instead of an artist
slaughtered in Terezin. And after re-reading
his autism paper this morning, I’m dazzled
by our parallels-my teenaged Jewish life saved
from Vietnam by a med school deferment,
my orchard from Yankton, connections
to Berlin, Hopkins and his couch, harmonies
between Chaskel, Leo and Richard that might
make a man believe in God. But old colleagues said
the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart,
a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms
at Shabbat dinner, eyes closed, as if the ancient rhyme
and meter were his own, as if God might be listening.