ECHOES 4.2.21

We’ll begin with an old soviet Jewish joke at the expense of the powerful. Every morning, Levi comes to the newspaper shop, asks to see that day’s paper, looks at the front page, then returns the paper without buying. Eventually, the man at the shop gets curious. “Comrade Levi, what do you look for everyday?” “Oh,” says Levi, “Just an obituary.” “But comrade, the obituaries are on the eighth page! You only ever look at the first!” Levi sighs. “The obituary I’m looking for will be on the first page.”

I read newspaper obituaries, looking for history. I am not interested in the largest names on the page. The most recent celebrity death has already reached me by social media, the latest tragic or peaceful end of a tastemaker has already been mourned by my friends. I am looking for the life that was just large enough; lives that had their moment on the stage of the world, and then, when the spotlight was gone, had the audacity to keep living, keep going.

Take Alan Canfora, for instance, who died on December 20th of 2020. A pulmonary embolism finished the killing work of that dreadful year. Canfora made national headlines in 1970, for waving an anti-war flag at some National Guardsmen at his college, Kent State University in Ohio. A few moments after an iconic picture of Canfora and his flag was taken for Life magazine, the Guardsmen opened fire. They killed four protesting students that day. Alan Canfora got hit in the wrist, making him one of nine wounded.

The Kent State shooting became a deadly and galvanizing message to the American Left. They will kill you if you ask for peace; do it anyway. Canfora dedicated his life to that message. He spent years organizing the survivors of the Kent State shooting, investigating what had happened that day both in his camp of anti-war protesters and among the Guardsmen, becoming an expert in the moments that led up to the shooting. He marched, educated, demanded memorialization. When he found what he believed to be proof that the Guardsmen were ordered to fire, contrary to the official story that they had spontaneously panicked, Canfora demanded an investigation by the Justice department. He was denied.

Alan Canfora is why I read the obituaries. As far as his obituary is concerned, this man led a simple, angry life. He was outraged that his country went to war for no reason, he was outraged that the government called the National Guard on his friends, and he was outraged that the Guard opened fire on them. That rage carried him into a life of archival research and memorialization. A worthy weapon for the forgotten and ignored.

Is that the whole truth of Alan Canfora’s life? We will never know. The New York Times found only his anger and memory remarkable. Not his love, not his care, not even the desire for peace that set him against the national guard on May 4th, 1970. He has been transfigured by the historical record, and by my reading of it. In an interview Canfora gave to Smithsonian magazine, towards the end of his life, he remarked on Kent State University’s increasing willingness to talk about the history of the shooting. “The dust of history is settling.”

May it settle over him.