Maybe It’s Really Just the Hole

Nina Mogilnik
4 min readNov 19, 2024

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My father, Z”l, used to sing a little Yiddish ditty about working all week and all you get is a bagel with a hole. It was a poignant reminder of how life can be so disappointing, how labor can be so under-rewarding, and how something hollow sits at the very center of our lives. Or maybe it was just a bit of nonsense to pass time in a shtetl, or in some far off land to which Jews migrated or fled. I guess I’ll never know.

But the bagel with the hole came to mind today. Oddly, it popped into my head after a long overdue catch up with an amazing woman who cheers me so by calling me her friend. She’s one of those people who honestly renews your faith in humanity. She’s such a do-er that I can only feel like a slug in her presence. But that’s on me. Each of us carries our stuff, and stuff on behalf of others — family, friends, friends who are like family. You get the idea. But she does so much outside the caretaking. She is a force, truly.

So why the bagel with the hole? I think it’s because, speaking only for myself here, the hole at the center of the bagel seems like a stand-in for so much. It’s a portal, literally, since you can look through it. The hole lightens the weight of the bagel, however slightly. And in its most obvious interpretation, perhaps, the hole is a gaping absence, an incompleteness. And I think it’s this last idea that grabbed hold of me today.

I have felt so many absences lately that the pile on has been a little harder than usual to bear. I miss my father, with whom I am utterly desperate to discuss the catastrophes of the recent year, including our recent U.S. election. I want his wisdom, his laughter, his letting me vent while he calmly takes it all in, knowing that I don’t know in my bones as he does how bad things can get, and knowing he can’t really protect me from any of it. But he can make me think he can. And that’s the only thing that really matters.

I think also of the hole through which I imagine my friendships — never large in number — have vanished. Or fled. I don’t really know. People are busy and all. Busier than I am, I always assume. But too busy always seems a bit of a stretch. So I have to chalk it up to I’m just outside the boundaries of whatever their friendship circles look like. Maybe they’re the bagel and I’m the hole, the thing others look through and past.

None of this is shared with despair. Instead, I’ve worked hard to cultivate a kind of dispassionate interest, almost a bystander’s curiosity about my own life. It’s not a terribly interesting life, and in some ways, there’s not much there to ponder. I call myself a writer, I suppose because I had to call myself something for a film project I accidentally landed in, and “just a human” didn’t seem to fit. But my writing literally takes minutes — however many minutes it takes me to type, really. So after 10, or 15, or even 30 minutes of writing, what then? Even a day started late and ended early has lots of hours in it.

I recently had a conversation with my eldest about supplementing what work doesn’t give him satisfaction-wise with something that might fill that particular hole. I was so thrilled that he — and his wife — were excited about his studying a new language. And I was honestly tickled that he landed on learning Swahili. I think he was sold after learning that 150 million people in the world speak it. And that if he and she travel to Africa one day, it might come in handy.

I wish I could come up with the thing for myself. I’ve latched onto and let go of a number of ideas, including learning Spanish, being a volunteer tutor, and/or joining volunteer projects in my community. For some reason(s), I just cannot bring myself to commit.

I’m not really a joiner, I’ve come to realize, mostly because past experience has not been a reinforcer. Too often in my adult life, groups have been frustrating, or clique-based, or both. It’s not that I move fast and break things. It’s that endless process for me is like watching paint dry. And I’d rather undergo root canal without novocaine than watch paint dry. So I’m no closer today to filling that hole than I was a month or a year or two years ago. Except for one thing. And that one thing saddens me, truly.

In the aftermath of the horrific Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas terrorists and their civilian collaborators on Israeli border communities, I got involved with putting up posters about the hostages taken (both dead and alive) to Gaza. That led to my becoming involved with a film about that chapter in the life of New York City. The film is still being screened, and I continue to participate in Q and A sessions about it. I am deeply grateful for having met the extraordinary human beings associated with this project, but I am despondent that such a tragedy has been my key link to anything outward looking and productive this past year. That is a failure to launch of some kind, a failure to fill the hole in that damn bagel with something that is not dependent — as my involvement with this film project has been — on the utter randomness of having been “discovered” by the director. He would have made an excellent film without me. It’s more about who and what I am without his film. Who will I be, and what will I be doing, once this chapter in my life is over, once everyone has moved on? Will I be stuck still, looking through that hole at a vast, gaping…what exactly? Tabula rasa? Dark tunnel? Bridge to somewhere new? I’m not posing these questions in an effort to be clever. I honestly want to know. Wouldn’t you?

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Nina Mogilnik
Nina Mogilnik

Written by Nina Mogilnik

Thinker, Writer, Advocate, Mom of Kids with special needs, Dog Lover, Wife, Partner, Orphan

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