VOTE in November. Help us live up to the ideals of America

Two performance events added immeasurably to my understanding of the events in my grandfather Salomon’s life . The first is a film, Memoir of a War, but more poignant is the title in French, La Doleur. Written by Marguerite Duras who also wrote The Lover,r it painfully shows how difficult it is for the ones who are waiting on word about the survival of loved ones during and after the war is over.
How my uncle Julius wrote letter after letter inquiring after the fate of his brother Wolf and his father!
How my parents waited for those thin blue envelopes to arrive from Switzerland with any news of the parents’.
Yesterday I was privileged to see Fidler Aufn Dach. Otherwise known as Fiddler on the Roof. Played and sung with full orchestral accompaniment in Yiddish language on the stage in the new home of the Folksbiene Players at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on the waterfront facing the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Super titles in Russian and in English assisted those with no Yiddish. The spellbound audience understood every word, song and nuance. The performance was sold out and the play will be held over for an extra month.
The poignancy of the story comes alive in Yiddish on the smaller stage in this acoustically amazing venue. How the lives of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century were as precarious as a fiddler playing his music on the roof! The familiar story of the changes Tevye experiences as the head of a family of five daughters has moments of mirth and joy while showing how quickly life was changing as his daughters were growing up. Economically times were tough. They sing that by twelve each boy had learned a trade. The need for these trades diminished as the sewing machine came into broad use. Motl is proud his shirts will be sewn by machine. So many tailors will be put out of business. The role of women was changing. The Torah was the backbone of their lives, but the role of the all knowing rabbi was decreasing in the wake of political
The pogroms which my grandparents and his family experienced were dramatically explained, as the local officers told the family in advance what was going to happen about which they had no control.
And then the people were forced to leave their small town and move wherever they would be accepted.
I do know my grandparents moved from their small town in Poland after one of these pogroms to the big city of a Frankfurt, Germany in 1919. Oy Gevalt! Give us strength.
Change is continual, progress often hurts the poor as their labor is being done by technology. How these populations are treated is our responsibility. New training and compassion are as sorely needed and missing now as they were one hundred thirty years ago.

Stalling

I have let everything get in my way to pursuing this new project. I went to the beach in New Jersey for a few days. I've met new friends with whom to have lunch or dinner or attend a play or a movie.
I've cleaned out my drawers and closet, getting ready for fall. I've gone shopping. I also have continued my volunteer projects and of course I go to the gym. Those activities will continue but why has this project stopped exciting me?

In every season I will have distractions and choices to make. My life is full. I have organizations to which I belong. Each one has meetings and meetings to prepare for meetings. When I wrote my previous two books I was confined to a space and a time where I had fewer distractions and a serious obligation, which was caring for my husband who had Alzheimer's disease. I was living in Mesa Arizona where the sheer number of distractions was greatly reduced.

But most of all, I believe, I was so dismayed and so full of despair about the world I live in today, that I felt, when I saw the 1938 Projekt  that here was something I could chew on, get lost in, and be distracted from the awful state of affairs I see in my country today. I have all of these letters, documenting more of the personal atrocities perpetrated on my own family that need to be addressed, remembered, memorialized. I now know that there is a memorial at the site where my grandfather was shot and I know he was murdered by the Ustasis, a fascist group who came into supreme power in 1941 when Croatia was formed from Yugoslavia.

I haven't stopped working entirely. I have found a translator for the letters which I have sent to her. She has returned three of them so far. Reading more carefully, I discovered I have a postcard written by my uncle, in french, from Paris to his sister in Basel, Switzerland.

This will get done, but first I have to work to get people to vote in the November elections. I have to sign petitions to save our children and our families from deportation that my family endured. I have to march to protest limitations on every woman's right to choose what happens to her body. I have to be vigilant and this week I have hope. The justice department and the courts of law in this country will prevail. We will not have our democracy derailed by a would be oligarch whose corrupt dealings are being exposed. I see that from the darkest of nights there comes a dawn. 

Organization Time

Learning for me has always been fun. I now know why my great grandparents lived where they did and why my grandparents left the community they had lived in all his life. I am studying and researching and living in my head, thinking about a small town in Poland and I have decided to divide the new work into three sections. before, during and after the war. I will work on the first two sections at the same time, using the Jewish Gen site for further information. Eventually I will find an archivist in Poland and in the Ukraine to obtain more information.

I have found a translator for the letters and post cards and in doing so, I had to look at them carefully. I have two post cards written in French by my uncle who had left home as a teenager to play the violin in a cabaret in Paris! He was rounded up by the Vichy government, sent to a camp, then transferred to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

I have post cards written from the concentration camp in Theresienstadt by relatives of my grandmother. What was their fate? Did they survive? Stay tuned.

So much to find out about. It really is exciting right now as the complexity of the story fills itself out.

HISTORY What do I intend to do?

The easy answer is to write another book. Since I have written two books already that should not be very difficult, right?

Why now?

This year the Leo Baeck Institutes are presenting a daily online chronicle of the events perpetrated on their Jewish population by the government of Germany in the year 1938. It is called The 1938 Projekt. There is also a physical exhibit of the project at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Since 1938 is my birth year and since my grandparents lived in Germany at that time, as well as my parents, aunts and uncles, I tuned in. Although I know this history, its relevance to the political events of this year are striking . Of utmost concern to me, is the complicity of the population and the lack of resistance to these anti-Jewish edicts.

The presentation is in the form of  original documents and letters written by the authorities to the Jewish doctors, lawyers, sportsmen, students, etc and by them to relatives and friends.

I realized I am in possession of some of the original documents written by my paternal grandfather, beginning in 1938 when he was imprisoned in Germany ostensibly for listening to foreign radio broadcasts.

I had always intended to donate these post cards and letters to the Leo Baeck Institute as Dr.Max Gruenwald, who was my rabbi in Millburn New Jersey where he taught the Hebrew High School courses and married me to my first husband, worked diligently with Leo Baeck when he began to collect the materials which form the archives that chronicle Jewish history from before during and after the war.

Now is the best time to donate these priceless letters. But first I will have them translated, I will find out more about his life and the lives of his parents, my grandmother, their siblings and  will once again trace the route my grandfather Salomon followed s he desperately tried to escape from the Nazi clutches.  

I Feel Free

Dear Diary,

It certainly feels as if I am writing in a diary, dear blog readers. This time it has been almost two years since my last blog entry. As we proceed together, you will see how I have spent my time. My followers know that my dear husband passed away three years ago. What you may not know is that I published a second book just before he died, which I have not launched, publicized or marketed.

The book is titled The Key, the Turtle and the Bottle of Schnapps and it is a tribute to my parents and grandparents who survived the Holocaust. It is a good book. It chronicles one way that ordinary middle aged people resisted and succeeded in escaping the Nazi terror and how my grandparents continued their positive, forward looking personalities in the twenty-two years we had them with us after the war.

But I wrote it to honor my wise, strong, courageous, resilient, persistent grandmother. I think of her still whenever I have a challenge to meet. My go to saying to myself is "If Oma could survive the challenges she faced, I can find my way forward, too."

My greatest challenge this past year was to jump over the hurdle of turning eighty. This is one challenge my grandmother did not meet. She died at seventy-five from the effects of emphysema, brought on by years of smoking cigarettes. I have been worried that my good health and my memory would not continue to serve me well. I have felt embarrassed by my worry. I "know better" than to be anxious about stuff that hasn't yet happened.

During this past year, I have met fifteen women who have or are about to turn eighty. They are vibrant, active, yoga, dance and exercise partners. They love to attend films and plays and are active politically to restore and maintain our civil rights, our environment and our sanity in these troubling times.

And, on July 9th, I celebrated my eightieth birthday!!!!