The ones who succeed we call saints

Writer Robert Silverman on the evil eye, the Nova Knicks, and love as acts of faith.

There are ways to ward off the evil eye, my mother carefully explains. It’s a little after 5pm on October 5, 2024. We’re tucked into the back room of her office, where she, at age 86, still spends about 95 percent of her waking hours and puts in a solid 14 hours of work per day, as a psychologist and committed stock market trader. 

It had been nearly one year to the day since we found out she had been diagnosed with stage 4, i.e. metastatic, non-small cell lung cancer. 

No, it hasn’t altered her work schedule. 

On that morning in 2023, she’d just gone through a grueling 36 hours at Weill-Cornell. A hip replacement surgery led to serious bowel complications. Any surgery, she always reminds me, that requires anesthesia will cause the digestive system to shut down, and hers wasn’t functioning at peak capacity to begin with. Oh and she contracted a nasty campylobacter virus while she was laid up to boot. And it had been a little over two months since the other surgical procedure to deal with her peripheral artery disease, which is why the hip replacement was delayed, and on and on. 

I was the one who found out about the cancer first, scanning her Weill-Cornell health portal for the results of the CT scan before hauling ass over to the Upper East Side, hoping against hope the entire time, scrolling frantically through my phone trying to parse the doctor’s clinical scribblings. Like my mother, I delved straight into research mode. Nothing. No positive indicators to be found. Maybe mom would be able to dredge up more answers. Better answers. She was the family’s medical expert—entirely self-taught, of course. Maybe she’d say she’s had these kinds of nodules on her lungs pop up on a CT scan before and don’t worry about it. I didn’t wake my father or inform my sister and share the awful news, because why send them spiraling if I wasn’t 110 percent sure. 

That’s how mom handled every familial crisis: Deal with the task at hand first, collapse into a puddle of wailing and gnashed teeth later, if at all. Or keep plowing forward till you’ve forgotten what it was that made you so mad/sad/frustrated/exhausted/crushingly depressed in the first place. In this house, mom holds everything together. 

“I was hoping for a quick death,” she told me from her hospital bed matter-of-factly, right after I’d delivered the verdict. She meant a deadly stroke or heart attack. The cancer? She had six months, maybe nine, especially considering her age and her pre-existing comorbidities, which I’ll spare listing in full here. “You don’t get to choose the way you go. It seems like there would be so much to say but there’s nothing,” mom said. And yet she was still here, one year later.

But yes, the evil eye.  

As her ThinkOrSwim online trading platform kept whirring on her monitor behind her, spitting out data points, and showing exactly where she should have bailed on a stock position but didn’t—the Silverman family does not produce top-tier gamblers, myself very much included—we talked about the old ways, the downright ancient superstitions that had been drilled into her practically from birth. She never believed a word of it, to be clear. All throughout her childhood in one of the more impoverished parts of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a creaking one-bedroom tenement she shared with her soon-to-be diagnosed as schizophrenic older brother, mother, and polio-ridden father, she rebelled as best she could against the forces of irrationality and, as she’d put it, fucking medieval thinking. 

Daily stock market tracking chart by Claire Silverman, courtesy the author

You could get zapped by the evil eye at any moment, by normal people, who had no special affinity for wielding dark magicks. The way it works, you see, is that everyone you meet–friends, relatives, total strangers–represents a possible threat, just by thinking about you. If someone was jealous of you or wanted something awful to befall you? Evil eye. Even a positive thought like admiration from someone you care about could subject you to unexplained bad luck, heartbreak, financial ruin, chronic illness, things of that nature. How would you know if you’d been cursed? You didn’t. You couldn’t. But if out of the blue you were waylaid by a random illness or rumbly tummy, the evil eye might be to blame.  

Luckily, there were ways to remove the curse. For example, you repeat the following incantation three times. Three being a magic number and all. Knowing who exactly had damned you helped wasn’t de rigeur, but it couldn’t hurt. 

Via my mother, who has provided a translation from Yiddish to English, of the three women sitting at the end of the world:

Alleh drei vahba zenin gessesen uff ah shtein

(All three wives were sitting on a stone)

“Einah hutt gezuched, yor

(One had said yes)

“De ondereh hutt gezucht nicht”

(The other had said not)

“De dritter hutt gezucht,”

(The third one had said,)

“Frum vinit iss gekumen zoll iss gein” 

 (From where ever it has come, it should go)

“Avec in vassah ahrrhine”

(Away into the water)

The remainder of the weekend in October one year ago is mostly a blur. I barely processed the Hamas attack on Israel. Both mom and I knew in our bones that the Israeli response would be overwhelming. Images of throats slit, people lying in pools of blood on the street intermixed with mom’s terrible ordeal. Stabbing, unrelenting stomach cramps hour after hour. Frantic trips to the bathroom, if you could grab a nurse or orderly to help her get there before she vacated her bowels again. Nothing there, just water and mucus, running straight through her. Unable to move without stabbing pain, because she was still recovering from the hip surgery, which, between the constant diarrhea and the hip, she never got more than an hour or two of sleep a night. Oh did I mention that she couldn’t take any painkiller stronger than Tylenol, because it makes her blood pressure skyrocket? She raw dogged the entire goddamn recovery. I sat by her side for as long as the hospital would let me, and sometimes longer than that.

But I do remember tucking myself into a corner of her room late one evening while she went for more testing on Monday, October 9, logging into the weak hospital wifi signal to snatch a few minutes of action from the first Knicks preseason game, which they won. What else could I do?

---

You can’t interrogate why you fall in love with a team too deeply or else it all falls apart. The logic, if any is to be found, can’t sustain or encompass the totality and weight of your ardor. I’d been rooting for the Knicks since long before I was old enough to understand squat about basketball. In defiance of all the evidence, I hung around for eons’ worth of the terrible, star-chasing seasons, through all the failed saviors, and James Dolan-fueled follies. It’s how and why I started writing. Pouring out every ounce of bile that I had, for free, on an ESPN/TrueHoop blog that somehow still exists, even if blogging as a profession has gone the way of the dodo bird. I’d scarf down the games, yes, on illegal streams, because paying for cable wasn’t an option in the quasi-legal artist’s work/live space I was residing in. I’d rage and cackle, banging out entries and mashing the publish button often in the wee small hours. 

But I found it oddly difficult to put into words why last year’s Knicks model dug its talons in so deep. I didn’t want to get down and really delve into what made them tick or the specific ways that they pinged all my heartstrings, as if it would sully the experience. The theater director Anne Bogart describes this process as “the violence of articulation.” We create something, a first draft or a first stab at staging a play, and it’s a giant mess, mismatched parts clanging up next to one another and little darlings peeking out from behind curtains, begging for more exposure. 

To actually make art that’s, you know, good, means you slash and burn, and then trim and prune, trim and prune, murdering all manner of beloved sentences and theatrical flourishes alike in the process. It is by definition a cold, often painful, and always unsparing process. I wanted to live with this and keep these delicate, oh-so-fragile and kind of goofy feelings all to myself, untouched and certainly unedited. This too is a kind of comforting lie. All the good old websites where I might get some overstuffed, overly weepy bit of prose published don’t exist any more, so my preciousness about not blogging it was really another kind of self-flattery, but even so. 

Of course, the reason why I grabbed hold of this team and clutched them close to my heart was patently obvious. Or at least it would have been to anyone but me: They were a way to escape the present moment and let out primal yawps of joy or anguish or both in ways that I couldn’t or wouldn’t express about my present reality. They were a diversion in the best sense of the word. 

I moved back home after mom was released from the hospital. I did it because mom needed full-time care and there was no way in hell she’d allow any nurse or physical therapist to handle that job, even if the cost weren’t prohibitive. I’ve crammed mom’s swollen legs into compression socks in the morning, checking the box score to see if Julius Randle could pull out of a grim early season slump. When I stripped them off at night, I then ran to watch the taped (on actual cable tv, of all things) game. In between the endless drips of time waiting in doctors offices and hospitals, I wondered how Josh Hart mustered the endless reserve of energy needed to wreak pure havoc, often to his own detriment. While making mom’s meals, I fretted about Mitch Robinson’s latest in a never-ending series of lower body injuries. Did the latest symptom—light sensitivity, foot swelling, back pain, nausea, cramps, weight loss or weight gain, increased sodium levels, increased potassium levels, anemia, rapid heartbeat, heart murmurs, a near-constant runny nose, exhaustion, leg cramps that arrived like clockwork in the middle of the night, which have kept her from getting anything resembling a full night’s sleep—require a frantic series of calls to her doctor(s) and then waiting, endlessly, for said doctor(s) to return your call? (As a side note, do you ever wonder what concierge medical care pays for? It’s not necessarily a more skilled doctor; you’re paying for someone who will actually pick up the goddamn phone.) Well, some of that jangled, seething, and yet impotent rage can be mitigated by spending gobs of time studiously assessing the value of trading Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett for a true defensive stopper in OG Anunoby. 

But when it all came together? My god, the Knicks played not just with brute force and genuine menace, like the last legit Knicks contender 30 years ago. Instead, they learned how to dance, led by the balletic and yet relentless footwork of their pint-sized captain, Jalen Brunson. It was all so wonderfully and wondrously pretty, an adjective no one’s used to describe a New York basketball team since Clyde Frazier was still running around in extremely short shorts. This little squirt of a human being running literal circles around giants, carving out slivers of space where none seemed to exist, a craft borne by hours upon hours of unseen and sweat-soaked labor.

And more than anything, they just seemed to possess the will to do whatever was needed, long after bodies started dropping and every essential member rotation succumbed to injuries. Can I call it magic? Had they sloughed off the evil eye once and for all? I don’t believe in gods and monsters any more than my mother does. I’m not that person. I can’t be that person. But I can be exactly the kind of person who is stunned into beatific bliss when Hart and Brunson pummeled poor Tyrese Maxey with brickbats and then pried the rock loose before the ball finally made its way to Donte DiVincenzo who swished a wide open three to seal a game two playoff win. That me surely knows that supernatural forces would come to your aid in times of need, to provide you with bounteous riches and an endless fount of joy, even. 

It’s why I’m so distraught that that team doesn’t exist any more. There are five players left on the roster who were still here in October 2023. Miles McBride, who was drafted in 2022, is the second-longest tenured ‘Bocker. The hard-bore logic of why they shuffled Randle and DiVincenzo to Minnesota makes a ton of sense. I still hate it. Whatever they built last season, flawed though it may have been, built on something as unsustainable as college buddy-vibes, was mine, and I’m not ready to let go. But they’re gone. Ripped apart and remade as something new, into maybe something better, something contender-shaped. I don’t care. I wanted more. That’s not the way the world generally works. It is truly an act of grace, when life allows us the time and space to properly mourn something that’s been lost or taken far too soon. 

I sound like a child yelling about the unfairness of it all. Shallow. Selfish. Endlessly needy. And I know that all of what I described above can best be described as garden variety life shit. This is also something my mom has hammered home: Miserable people tend to be miserable, regardless of circumstances; happy people find a way to see the light even when buried under a cavalcade of predations and torments.  

The solution, then, is another cliche, one right up there with Tom Thibodeau’s most cherished mantra, “The magic is in the work.” No sorcery, just a ton of unseen sweat equity. It's one I’ve tried my level best to practice, if not believe: live in the moment, cherish each day as if it were a gift. Give thanks for these blessings, even and especially moments that feel like anything but a blessing. It makes me cringe to say it out loud, but if you probe it at all, like a lot of cliches, you’ll find some real sharp teeth. Keep going, like mom, who clawed her way out of a kind of hell and worked and worked and worked, and, well, is still working. With the right set of eyes, this too is a blessing. This year was a blessing. If I say it three times, maybe the incantation will stick. We all fail to achieve these lofty goals. I certainly do. The ones who succeed we call saints. The rest are cursed to keep going, to do our level best, all while failing and grasping. 

What is love but an act of faith, a religion, really, but one constructed around a knowingly fallible god?