Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Fifty years ago this Aug. 11, my brother Harold Rosenthal was late for a plane out of Istanbul bound for Jerusalem. He was always late \u2014 school, appointments, parties, or late finishing dinner at Horn & Hardart\u2019s, the only restaurant working-class families patronized in Philly then. <\/p>\n
While my younger brother Norman and I agonized on the sidewalk, Harold would take bites of food in between whatever book he was reading, a passion cultivated when he was a student at Central High in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n
On this August day his tardiness put him near the back of the line at the gate for El Al Airlines. At the time, Harold was working as a senior aide to Republican New York Sen. Jacob K. Javits<\/a>. He was heading to Israel as part of an assignment for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had sent him on a tour of American embassies in the Mediterranean, ending with a seminar at Jerusalem\u2019s Van Leer Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n Four gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine<\/a> stormed the gate in an attempt to hijack the plane. When guards blocked them, they opened fire and then threw a grenade. Four people were killed, including Harold<\/a>. He was only 29.<\/p>\n Fifty years on, I\u2019m certain Harold\u2019s improbable rise was built in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n We grew up in a rowhouse on Tulpehocken Street in West Oak Lane<\/a>, the kind of block where everyone knew everyone and you learned early which streets were yours to walk down and which weren\u2019t. <\/p>\n Our parents worked hard but nearly lost that house to foreclosure twice. No kids had cars back then, which was fine. You walked to Pennypacker Elementary and then, to get to Wagner Junior High, Central High, and Temple University<\/a>, you learned the buses, trolleys, and subways. <\/p>\n Out of this modest life, Harold built a career in a world that seemed unknowable to the rest of us \u2014 all on his own. We didn\u2019t have a word yet for \u201cnepo baby\u201d because no one we knew had money or connections. But Harold was audacious about wanting more. That audacity carried him to a scholarship in France, then Cambridge University in England, and finally Harvard.<\/p>\n I was awed by his fearlessness. At Cambridge, seated at the back of a church for an Advent Carol service, he watched choristers slip through a side door and, deciding his seat wasn\u2019t good enough, followed them. His friends \u2014 the ones who\u2019d never dare follow \u2014 watched an hour later as he processed down the aisle in white robes, candle flame dancing, past Prince Charles, biting back a laugh.<\/p>\n That was Harold in full: certain that any door marked not for you was the one worth opening.<\/p>\n After Harvard, his climb was stunning. Legislative assistant to New York Rep. Hugh Carey<\/a>, then for Sen. Walter Mondale<\/a> of Minnesota, a stint at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and finally a senior adviser to Javits. <\/p>\n Sen. Mondale had already told him that if Jimmy Carter won the White House in November, there\u2019d be a staff position for Harold in the West Wing or as part of an undersecretary\u2019s desk at the State Department. A public school kid from a Philly rowhouse, one election away from the top of the government. <\/p>\n That August I took a position as a teaching assistant at the University of the Pacific in California, more hiding from adulthood than pursuing a doctorate. Our younger brother, Norman, was already on his way to an influential career as an endocrinologist. <\/p>\n If my future was uncertain, Harold was rewarding my overworked parents with the gift of an insider\u2019s view of his rise. He always shared his itinerary, printed on Senate stationery, with my mother, who tracked this Mediterranean tour almost hourly. He was only passing through Istanbul.<\/p>\n I was at a going-away dinner near Penn when I called home and heard the fear in my mother\u2019s voice \u2014 something about an attack on an El Al flight. There was no cable news then, no way to know. I quickly said my goodbyes and drove to Roxborough<\/a>. <\/p>\n I opened the door to find my mother collapsed on the floor and my father \u2014 who\u2019d flown with the Flying Tigers in China during World War II<\/a>, and who\u2019d lost his own cousin on D-Day \u2014 slamming his head against the wall. A stranger from the State Department had called and quickly said, \u201cWe regret to inform you that your son is dead. Someone will contact you soon.\u201d That\u2019s all.<\/p>\n I\u2019m certain Harold\u2019s improbable rise was built in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n It took time to bring Harold\u2019s body home. Turkish law required an autopsy first, and a friend of Harold\u2019s quietly warned me it would leave him unrecognizable. Waiting for Harold, my father consoled himself with the fact he\u2019d be able to see his son one last time. In the back of a limo to Roosevelt Cemetery, Norman and I had to tell our father the casket would be closed \u2014 one of the hardest sentences I\u2019ve ever spoken. <\/p>\n Sens. Mondale and Javits both eulogized Harold at the funeral on Broad Street. Weeks later, after a memorial at the Capitol, I sat with my parents outside, silently, in the brutal heat and viscous humidity waiting for a valet to find their car, which had been misplaced. Watching people coming and going up and down the marble steps, I realized this world wouldn\u2019t stop for Harold. It doesn\u2019t pause for anyone. It was already looking for his replacement.<\/p>\n Years later, because of a new thing called the \u201cinternet,\u201d we were handed a second wound. Just a year after the attack, a Christian-supremacist cult leader had fabricated a grotesque \u201cRosenthal Interview,\u201d inventing a confession in which Harold revealed how Jews secretly run the government. So witless \u2014 it was dated a year after Harold died. It was too absurd to survive anywhere but in fringe pamphlets \u2014 that is, until the internet gave it a permanence no pamphlet ever could. <\/p>\n What outlasted the hoax is the Harold Wallace Rosenthal Fellowship in International Relations, founded by his friends in 1977. Fifty years and over 300 fellows later, it\u2019s still helping ordinary students from ordinary families into congressional offices and embassies \u2014 through the same door Harold forced open with nothing but nerve.<\/p>\n The night Harold\u2019s shiva ended, sitting in my parents\u2019 now quiet apartment, I demanded of myself to learn something from Harold\u2019s death. Two things happened. First, I admitted the only thing I actually cared about was movies, not academics, and after my doctorate was done, I packed my car, which had been Harold\u2019s car, and drove to Los Angeles to figure out a way into the movie business. <\/p>\n Second, I swore never to hear news the same way again. We measure disasters in body counts \u2014 just two, just eight \u2014 a statistic filed away and forgotten by people with their own lives to return to. I promised myself I\u2019d stop, every time, and imagine the families behind each number. <\/p>\n In floods in Texas. In Gaza. In Kyiv. The dead are aggregated. Grief is always singular. Every one of those numbers is somebody\u2019s brother, somebody\u2019s family.<\/p>\n Mark David Rosenthal is a writer and producer of film and television. He is a member of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America, West. He was nominated for an Emmy for the 2016 miniseries, “Roots<\/a>,” and his WGA credits include \u201cMona Lisa Smile<\/a>,\u201d Tim Burton\u2019s \u201cPlanet of the Apes,\u201d and \u201cThe Jewel of the Nile<\/a>,\u201d among many others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min Fifty years ago this Aug. 11, my brother Harold Rosenthal was late for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[109451,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-257630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-harold-wallace-rosenthal-fellowships-international-relations-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}