If It Can Happen to Leon Klinghoffer…

A meditation on art and death, opera and needlepoint

Last week, a friend took me to see The Death of Klinghoffer at the Metropolitan Opera, a production that received a respectful review in The New Yorker but has prompted more controversy than the grisly Salomé (set in an abattoir) that bloodied the Sydney boards two years ago, or the full-monty version of Moses und Aron that shocked Covent Garden (sort of) in 1965. The opera, conceived by Peter Sellars and composed by John Adams, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, gives dramatic, musical form to the incidents surrounding the murder of a wheelchair-bound New Yorker named Leon Klinghoffer, who was killed by Palestinian hijackers in October 1985 while holidaying with his wife near Alexandria, Egypt, on a cruise liner called the Achille Lauro.

Let me be clear, as President Obama would say: I recognize the tragedy of this event and am mindful of the grief of the relatives of the victim of this despicable act. Furthermore, because I write, often, in the performing arts library that abuts the Met, I have witnessed the angry crowds of protestors that have gathered on the plaza facing the theater (resembling a full-company scene from Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children), have read their signs, and heard their shouts of outrage. They regard the decision to convert Klinghoffer’s fate into an art form, and the librettist’s treatment of that fate, as an affront and insult. I get that. (A letter from Mr. Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, denouncing the project, appears in the opera program.)

That is why I have been reluctant, for some time, to write about a curious relic that came into my possession 19 years ago, whose resonance lately has been troubling me.

It is a pillow that my mother embroidered for me, weeks after Klinghoffer’s death, which instantly became my most cherished family memento. Up top, you see a picture of it, as it looks today, after three decades of being paw-handled by cats and having paint and schmutz land on it.

This bit of handicraft arrived, unheralded, at Yale Station in November 1985, in a drab cardboard box and came, the return address noted, from Oklahoma, from my parents’ house. At the time, I was surprised to find a “care package” awaiting me at the campus post office. Over the years, my roommates and friends sporadically received boxes of goodies from home — gingerbread, brownies, candy, chocolate, and so on. I never did and never expected to (I was always dieting, anyway). Also, my mother’s mordant and mischievous sensibility had made me uninterested in being babied. My idea of a care package was talking to her on the phone every week and getting her lively news from Oklahoma, where she and my dad were overworked college professors and my younger brothers were busy kicking field goals and winning spelling bees. I did not yearn for her to dispatch me batches of Rice Krispie treats as proof of TLC. Tuition was proof enough.

So when this box arrived, about the size of a bundt cake, my best guess was that my mother had baked one more poppyseed cake than necessary for some campus Russian Club function and had sent it on to me because it was hardy enough to survive the mails. In my dorm room, I opened the box and found amid the shreds of excelsior not a cake, but a throw pillow — bordered in an upbeat, insipid calico (with yellow piping) — that bore the embroidered message, in tall, curlicuing red, green and blue letters: “‘If it can happen to Leon Klinghoffer, it can happen to anybody.’ — Memento Mori, Tom Brokaw, NBC News, Oct. 9, 1985.’”

I burst out laughing. What had induced my mother — with her staggering teaching load — to convert this tragicomic pronouncement (the death tragic, the phrasing pure Marx Brothers) into a knick-knack? And when had she found the time? The lettering was beautiful—the fanciful script reminded me of John R. Neill’s illustrations in the Oz books. And a pillow was definitely a novel means of transmitting headline news.

I had read about the Achille Lauro incident in the rumpled New York Times that circulated in the college dining hall, but the pathos of the event (which I feel strongly today — particularly with Marilyn Klinghoffer’s poignant solo from Friday night’s performance echoing in my memory) had not struck me at the time. In college in the ’80s, before the internet, before 24/7 headline chasing, and without easy access to TVs, students paid more attention to their classes and social lives than to the news of the day. What we all cared most about then, anyway, was making Yale divest from companies that did business with South Africa (which was still Apartheid-riven, then).

For me, the main news value of the pillow was not so much the quotation as its author credit, Tom Brokaw — which my mother had embroidered in red, in a serifless font (if “serif” and “font” can even be used when speaking of thread letters). We adored Tom Brokaw in my family: I had grown up watching him every day on the kitchen television, at breakfast and dinner, first on the Today Show, then on the NBC Nightly News. I could not separate the stitched sentence from his voice. I could hear him intoning those grave syllables, could picture his concerned head-shake, his immobile upper lip, the grimace of regret that must have preceded his eulogistic summation, his fatherly South Dakotan good looks softening the blow of the bad tidings.

The Klinghoffer pillow soon became legendary in my social circle. People who visited our dorm would inevitably make a beeline for it and inspect it with relish. When I graduated, it traveled with me to Queens, then to Brooklyn, and finally to my Manhattan apartment, where it currently resides.

Legions of catsitters have photographed the pillow during their stays in my apartment; I suspect recent sitters Instagrammed it, but I have a BlackBerry, not an iPhone, so I can’t be sure.

Friends who’ve never met my mother look at that pillow and feel they know her to the core. But for me, until recently, it was simply an objet de décor, not a cause. In the early 1990s, when I heard that Peter Sellars was putting together an opera about Klinghoffer, the news interested me, but I made no attempt to see it. The pillow was homage enough.

But in 2012, in the long lead-up to the Klinghoffer apotheosis currently unfolding at Lincoln Center (the opera’s final performance is November 5), my parents visited me in Manhattan, bringing my six-year-old nephew with them, to induct him into love of New York and its cultural attractions (Mary Poppins, ping-pong at SPiN!, the Union Square Market, the American Museum of Natural History). During that visit, my mother was touched to see the ancient Klinghoffer pillow perched prominently on a loveseat in my living room but was dismayed to see how battered, stained, and faded it had grown (I think she felt its poor condition reflected badly on her artistry). I told her I wished she could embroider me an exact replica (I am too impatient to embroider), but knew she couldn’t, given her health. In 2007, my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and as the disease has advanced, it has made intricate handwork hard for her. She still defiantly keeps up her hobbies, quavering hands notwithstanding — painting basset hounds, rolling out pie crusts, sewing dresses for my niece at the machine. But deploying needle and thread, minuscule square by minuscule square, thousands of times over, is a step too far.

Nonetheless, last spring, in Virginia, at Easter, my mother surprised me with another unexpected care package. Opening it, I found a freshly embroidered version of the old Klinghoffer pillow.

Upon her return home from New York, my mother had gone online to Etsy and found a craftswoman who could do what she no longer could, and resurrect her gift. The needlewoman did not replicate the elaborate, whimsical letter shapes my mother had chosen in 1985, but she made the words vivid again, and visible. (She got the date wrong, but embroiderers don’t have fact checkers.) Here is the updated pillow:

These days, both pillows sit in my living room, the new and the old; they are my bookended, homespun Ozymandias samplers. Once again, a fleeting glance at my sofa reminds me, or anyone who happens to be in the living room, of the fickleness of human fortunes: “If it can happen to Leon Klinghoffer, it can happen to anybody.”

Last Friday, at the Met, I heard that message in a new form. Both of these tributes to Klinghoffer, so differently conceived, seem to me sincere and significant. They are reminders of the imprint one person can leave upon the world — an imprint that can only live on as long as there are others who record it, who refresh it, who reflect.