Uncle Tom’s Cabbage

TUCSON — Tom Kulka was going to be 90 in July, and, for once, a big family blast in Akron would be all about him. All his life, he was the sweetly smiling uncle, brother or friend who stayed in the background, making sure everyone else was happy — and sated to the gills.

When Jeannette and I were married on a North Carolina beach in 1999, Tom and his two sisters spent most of the three-day party huddled in the kitchen of a rented house stuffing cabbages — their renowned beloved golumpkis. And, of course, pierogis.

The Kulka-Hermann clan offered a warm welcome when Jeannette first brought home to Ohio a Jewish guy from Paris. The men indulged dumb questions about the Cleveland Browns’ game blaring in the background. We bonded over Cuban cigars I’d smuggled in. Mostly, I hung out with Tom.

He wanted to talk about needless wars, famine, poverty and all the rest that few people in a rich country bothered to notice. By phone last month, the subject was Covid-19 that has raged on for so long, impacting everyone’s lives.

In his gentle voice, which no one recalls ever rising in anger, Tom wondered how so many Americans could have become so stupid and selfish. He had his shots and a booster, masked up and kept careful distances. But still. He felt sick last week. Within 48 hours, he was gone.

His grandniece, Emily Pataki, a nurse at Summa Hospital, stayed with him. “We had polkas playing into his room,” she said, recounting his last moments. “He even gave us a little shoulder-wiggle dance at ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’” 

Tom’s priest hurried over for last rites. He didn’t want life support, not even the cumbersome oxygen mask, the final step before a ventilator. “I’m ready to go be with the Lord,” he said at the end. “Now give me that Pepsi. I’m sorry but I have to go.” 

So much for “the common cold,” which many Americans now label Omicron in a pampered society shielded from the real world by two oceans and a thickening layer of ignorance. A sizable number believe they can escape a deadly pandemic by simply declaring, “We’re done.”

Mourning Tom, I remember his wistful plaint over the past five years. America was great because families from so many places shared basic principles and a sense of decency. They found common political ground until TFG, the former guy, whipped up fear and loathing.

How, he wondered, could people in a supposedly civilized country be so heartlessly heedless of others? And how could they accept that man as their face to the world?

Both our families found refuge in different yet remarkably parallel circumstances in the same part of Europe. Tom died just as war clouds gathered in Ukraine and yet more people seem destined to flee Eastern Europe with only what they can carry.

Tom’s mother, Catherine, made her way to Brooklyn where she met Stanley, happy-go-lucky Stash, who had also left Poland penniless. He worked on the Holland Tunnel. When flu savaged New York in 1918, he fell ill.  Everyone Catherine knew who went to a hospital died there, so she nursed him to health with whiskey at home.

The family settled in Akron. Tom’s sister, Helen, Jeannette’s mother, married Leroy Hermann, from the German side of Alsace-Lorraine. He fought the Nazis, first chasing Rommel in the North African desert, then storming Sicily. He was wounded in the first wave in Normandy.

My grandmother, Anna, joined revolutionaries in White Russia, now Belarus, next to Poland. Her husband, Albert, a doctor in the Red Army, died in unclear circumstances. Anna took her kids on a harrowing escape to Ellis Island in 1923. My other grandmother was born in Wisconsin to parents who fled Ukraine and stayed in Poland until sailing to America in 1906.

So now I’m a reporter in a place where bad actors can be held to account. I have written about The Former Guy off and on since I covered his tactics to dispossess poor families from their homes to build a gaudy casino, a temple to himself, in Atlantic City.

His plot against America was clear even before he took office. But his depraved indifference to lives he was sworn to protect stunned me when Covid-19 began to infect America.

In 1984, I visited Jonathan Mann at Mama Yemo Hospital in Kinshasa. He was researching a mysterious virus transmitted to humans by animals: AIDS. Since then, I kept close contact with epidemiologists, scientists and public health workers who tracked deadly new scourges.

Dr. Tony Fauci, a stalwart among global specialists, now travels with tight security because of death threats by cretins who have politicized a pathogen. One Republican slogan: “Fauci; he flips, he flops.” No, he follows the rapidly changing mutations of a coronavirus that world leaders have allowed to run wild. Especially TFG.

All anyone can do about a new killer virus is not catch it until scientists find a way to immunize and treat people it infects. That requires careful testing and tracing to isolate it.

Since the first cases inevitably reached America, TFG did the exact opposite of what was necessary for his own selfish purposes. I’ve written about this at length. In sum, I believe, on expert guidance, that he is directly responsible for at least a half-million needless deaths in America.

And more, his America-only policies did much to spread the pandemic around the world. Omicron quickly made its way from South Africa to America. As case numbers drop, people are deciding it is no longer much of a threat. Many refuse masks and vaccines. Republicans punish public officials for taking precautions and accuse Democrats of fearmongering.

Consider this:  Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, head of the Republican Conference, just declared with a straight face: “More people have died of Covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020.”

Tom died under Biden because of what Trump didn’t do, and what so many people still don’t do to protect others. The tallies are finally declining. But it is cold comfort that “only” 3,187 Covid-19 deaths were reported on Feb. 17 — or that they are mostly just old people.

As a Catholic, Tom lived according to a Bible with verses like the one about money changers in the temple: “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” For him, it came down to the golden rule common to most religions: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

That hardly squares with evangelicals and others in America who worship the Second Amendment but ignore the First Commandment. The meek are not inheriting the earth.

The Ohio gang traded Uncle Tom stories on a Zoom call the night he died. He was quirky, all right, but never cranky. Others always came first. If imperfect like all humans, he is a sure shot to be in exceedingly good standing with his Lord.

He was famously frugal, yet wildly generous with gifts. In the Army during the 1950s in Japan, he sent back a crate the size of small garage: whole sets of fine china, pearl necklaces, Japanese dolls, kimonos, silk pajamas. Something for everyone. The family still treasures that stuff.

“He always showed up when you didn’t expect him but really needed him,” his niece Janice Carlin said. Covid pneumonia, she added, has not ended that. “He is just one of those people who is always going to be there.”