(July 29, 2010) A personality attached to a cause can, obviously, galvanize awareness: No one was paying much attention to primate poaching in Africa before Jane Goodall emerged as an attention-gathering focal point; college kids in the ’80s might not have known much about apartheid beyond the name of Nelson Mandela, but they still rallied en masse for divestment, and many in the West probably can’t think of poverty in India without thinking of Mother Teresa.
“This Is a Soul”
Marilyn Berger
William Morrow, $25.99
So it’s perhaps not surprising that for Americans this summer, the one person who might be able to draw our attention away from the new season of “Mad Men” and direct our eyes toward the millions of people who go without basic medical care in Africa every day — the literally millions who live with hideously painful and crippling ailments that could be eased or cured if only we could muster a bit more will to help — is a slight, rasta-striped-kipa-wearing, Jewish fella from Syosset named Rick Hodes. Mr. Hodes is a doctor who has been practicing for more than two decades in Ethiopia. According to Marilyn Berger’s moving book, some people even call him Father Teresa.
Marilyn Berger is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a onetime correspondent for The Washington Post. Her book, “This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes,” is a hybrid, a biography-cum-memoir about both the doctor and how her life momentously intersected with his. Ms. Berger, who has a house in Bridgehampton, is the widow of Don Hewitt, of “Sixty Minutes” fame; he died last year, while she was completing the project.
In April, television audiences across the country were introduced to the hard-driving but rather unprepossessing Dr. Hodes when he was named the ABC World News “person of the week,” and when he appeared on “Good Morning America” beside Ms. Berger. They were an odd pair: he, pale and a bit worn out, delivering his message with unembellished simplicity, she a society-thin, Upper West Side-er with House of Kenneth hair and a gorgeously toothy broadcast smile that no doubt came in handy during the years when she reported from the White House for NBC News.
The irresistible hook of “This Is a Soul” is the impressive nugget that Ms. Berger, at the age of 73, became the mother of a 6 or 7-year-old boy from Ethiopia, whom she met when he was begging on the streets of Addis Ababa, his back deformed by spinal tuberculosis, and she was in town to write about Dr. Hodes. The resulting book was published in April with bookend chapters on how she found her son, whose name is Danny; brought Dr. Hodes to his rescue; went to Danny’s bedside in Ghana, when his back deformity was corrected by an operation performed by highly skilled volunteer surgeons from the States, and over the past 18 months brought him to live with her in a milieu where the housekeeper calls his new mom “Madame,” and Candace Bergen comes to dinner.
Sandwiched between this short but fascinating personal narrative, Ms. Berger details the incredible work that Dr. Hodes has been doing for the destitute of Ethiopia. With funding from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and armed usually with little but a stethoscope, he works out of two spare rooms adjacent to the Addis Ababa mission of (yup) Mother Teresa’s Catholic charity. He is known best for helping children like Danny who have terrible spinal deformities as a result of untreated tuberculosis, but he also recruits patients with heart problems, cancer, and deforming tumors.
Inspired by his Orthodox Jewish faith, Dr. Hodes is quoted quoting the Talmud. But he is not an orthodox, storybook hero: He emerges in “This Is a Soul” as a unique, sweet, alternately charming and quarrelsome personality, a rather shambolic bachelor and even loner who, surprisingly, ended up adopting five of his patients, impoverished boys who’d been living on the streets, and offering a home to more than a dozen other kids. The household, as described by Ms. Berger, is hardly conventional, and it’s probably not terribly comfortable by Western standards, but everyone seems to have a jolly time, wearing zany hats for Sabbath dinners and watching MTV behind Dad’s back. Mr. Hodes keeps the kids in line with good humor, replying to teenage requests for newly discovered American consumer goods (an iPod, etc.) with his favorite Hodes-ism: “Keep dreaming.”
We are reminded by “This Is a Soul” that it often takes a misfit to muster the independence and creative vision to break away from the expected path (the comforts and wealth of a medical career on Long Island, for instance) and instead do something crazy like live in Africa and work among the untouchables for a salary of beans.
This is the kind of book you don’t want to pick apart too critically. You don’t want to say anything very negative about it, because when reading it you immediately feel the paucity of your own compassion, the lameness of your own actions, when held up to the mirror of Dr. Hodes’s magnificent selflessness. You want others to read it, too.
This isn’t a work of investigative journalism. It’s a book of inspiration. Like one of the “Lives of the Saints,” it is filled not exactly with praise, but with anecdotes that speak louder than praise. If the awestruck reader reviews on Amazon.com are any guide, people love it. And after reading it, they want to do something.
Sometimes, of course, you might wonder what lies deeper beneath the somewhat enigmatic public image of the extremely good doctor. You might wonder about the ethical complexities surrounding some of the young patients’ having, seemingly, been summarily displaced from their living families. (This might especially pique the interest of readers, like this reviewer, who have adopted children from Ethiopia and are constantly therefore engulfed in debates about the balance of power between rich and poor nations, and the risk of exploitation that gapes in that radical gulf.)
But let’s leave the investigation and the revisionist viewing for another book, another year. Soon, we hope, Rick Hodes will have become a household name. And once he has entered the pantheon, there will be plenty of time and room on the bookshelf for a more cold-eyed reflection on his life.