Once more with feeling...perhaps is a good way to describe my second reading of The Last Farmer: An american Memoir, Howard Kohn, published in 1988. It's been so many years since I first read this book that I remembered only the broad outlines. Ah, the blessings of a short memory...I can re-read and enjoy a book as much as the first time because so much is forgotten.
Howard Kohn, former senior editor of Rolling Stone and the author of Who Killed Karen Silkwood writes this reflection on his farmer father and his relationship with him. Fredrick Kohn was a 3rd generation German American farmer in Michigan.
"My father loved his farm, but her understood better than I the ironies implicit in passing on a farm in your own image. The lands mocks the farmer by outlasting him and outlasting his family, no matter the number of successive generations. The one thing of permanence that a father can bequeath---a life of respect and respectful virtues---will be rendered ironic and pathetic if he begins to act as if he is entitled to a bailout, whether from the government or from his children. My father had to work at understanding this. It was not given. It was an achievement, like any work. I had thought of (Great-Grandfather) Heinrich as a pioneer, going off to a new land, and I had thought of my father as a stand-pat guy. But I was my father who geared himself up for the bold stroke, who saw that the farm did not old us together, as I had thought, but stood between him and his children. So he sold it and brought us back together, or rather had gone off to find us, all of us in our own places."
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