Sons Are Liars Poem by gershon hepner

However ugly life appears
to be it’s good: so wrote Isaiah
Berlin to mollify the fears
of his dear mother. Sons are liars.


Timothy Garton Ash reviews Letters,1928-1946, by Isaiah Berlin (CUP) , edited by Henry Hardy (“A Genius for Friendship, ” New York Review, September 23,2004) . Like Clive James, he is puzzled the way that Berlin had so little to say about the events of the 1930’s and the Holocaust that followed but this poem was inspired by something completely different:

There is a moving early letter from the nineteen-year-old Shaya, as he was then known, to his spirited, musical, romantically aspiring mother, Marie, consoling her (“I know that your position is not sweet”) for the frustrations of living with the pedestrian caution of his merchant father, Mendel Berlin. “Remember, life is Good; and always will be Good however ugly it looks….” Somehow that remained Isaiah’s belief through all the horrors of the twentieth century, and this fundamentally optimistic, life-affirming attitude is one of the qualities that made him such a stimulating person.


9/15/04