Different Slants

Comment by brad dechter

August 27, 2012 @ 1:48 pm

This is a sad commentary Bob- sorry you feel your life should be erased. How about your wife, your kids, your grandchildren- would you want their lives erased too?

Comment by Bob

August 30, 2012 @ 9:30 pm

B,
It’s complicated and irrational, but I was trying express the pain of this unending madness, which by the way, has continued one more time. Think of that.

Poetry is sometimes also called “a cry of the heart” and that’s what this is. Capturing emotion in words is an art, not a science and that’s what I wanted to do, find a way to stop the pain. Find a way to let others experience what can’t seem to stop.

I hope you don’t understand. Better for you not to be able to connect.

Some people scream their frustration in the darkness. I write.

Bob

Comment by Assata

August 31, 2012 @ 10:15 am

Great writing and feeling. You walked me through what I might say to a never to be known Grandfather that impregnated my grandmother, which born my father, whom she terribly abused including sexually, whom with so much damage in his soul married my mother who gave birth to us, 7 children, so when he abused my mother (who took off and never returned one day) he had no choice but to place us in the hands of his abuser mother to raise ‘oh my’ which resulted in the continuation of abuse he escaped from, only to be handed down to her fresh pack of grandchildren to do as she pleased.

Comment by Bob

August 31, 2012 @ 10:37 am

Assata,
Your terrible story, while great expanded and more horrific, somewhat mirrors my own. I was beaten and emotionally terrorized for 9 years, ending when I was 14 and left home in the middle of the night. I do not believe a person ever recovers from that kind of treatment. Not ever.

A question. Have we met? You have a very interesting name, but I meet a lot of people and don’t remember right now. I’d like to know. Becoming discovered as a serious non-fiction writer as late in life as it is for me, all I can hope for is to write stories and poetry that people can intimately connect with.

Bob

Comment by Assata

September 1, 2012 @ 1:20 pm

Hi Bob,

This is where you will remember me from Bob. I also spoke with you over the phone a few days ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/us/28bangor.html

Assata

Comment by S

September 11, 2012 @ 5:01 pm

Bob,

Recently, I was intuitively ‘pulled’ to take a looksee at your blog after a long while (it must have been the cries of my Polish ancestors that alerted me!) and was shocked– no, severey disappointed–to read your reference in the entry facing me wherein you use the term, ‘Polish poison’ (not once but twice!)–even amping up the charge with ‘murderous Polish poison’, then mixing it all up with ‘murderous mounted Cossack’, repeating Cossack sword two more times for emphasis. You really manage to muck up history don’t you?

Whether you care or not that it is also YOUR history (and that too, is pretty sad), I care that it is mine.

All poetry (and poetic license aside)– and I have no issue with your writing ability (except when you use it in this case, to cast aspersions). This is deeply offensive to me, a person of Polish heritage (and would think, you as a Jew, would know better; or feel better).

I may be a poet too, but do not see (let alone accept)writing this as the excuse of ‘poetic license’. Just go ahead, now Bob (and kind readers) and substitue ‘Jewish for Polish’ in this entry and you will feel, perhaps, a little bit of my outrage. You can play with the facts in poetic writing, and you can play with feelings, Bob. But, not wit MY feelings in this case!

Now, whether you wish the truth to surface of not, Bob, do want the rest of your readership to have a fighting chance at it, in knowing what really happened at that time (and yes, it was a terrible time, a dark time, a convuluted time). Your deceased relatives you refer to here and in memory, were Jewish, but they were ALSO born Poles in that land then (a land which harbored the largest group of Jews for the longest amount of time in history, I might remind everyone).

To accuse Poland–and cast aspersions on the Polish people in this way, is unconscienable, when, in truth there were so, so many factors (and other more direct factors) that caused your people– both as Jews and as your immediate family, to fall to such terror and ill fortune.

So, please– in the name of rectifying your ‘cursing all that is Polish’, let the following stand in this comments box (the curses you call down upon yourself and your now and future family, is up to you to rectify– and God, I hope you will before you die)!

We all know by now, Bob, the hard hardness of your history– culturally AND personally. But ‘cursing the darkness’ by cursing others in your writing(in this case another culture– is NOT kosher– and goes nowhere toward healing the black hole of your pain– which is something you would hopefully address without having to resort to ‘murdering’ those of us, the living via your ‘creative writing’, with such hurtful aspersions (and this is not even addressing your cursing of women in all this–I am not going to fully go into that, but want to say this about it: it might have been your grandmother’s experience, but it was not necessarily her ‘poison’ she created (in fact, she was the victim of violence– she had fathers, and uncles, and brothers far back to the beginning, and it wasn’t usually the women brandishing the swords anyway)! So why accuse all the women of passing this along? Anyway that is yet another unjust accusation….Let’s get back to your
‘Polish curse’–

This excerpt is taken from ‘Albert Einstein University’ (link to full entry follows):

^ John Klier writes that “To detemine what pogroms were, it is essential to consider what they were not. The following events have all been characterized as “pogroms” by historians: the Kiev “pogrom” of 1113, the Cossack uprising under Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648; the Koliivshchnyna of 1768; riotous attacks on Jews in Odessa in 1821, 1859 and 1871, and in Akkerman, Bessarabia province, in 1865; the waves of violence in 1881-2; the Kishinev and Gomel riots of 1903; the anti-Jewish violence during the revolutionary years 1905-6; the “military pogroms” in 1914-16; the attacks on Jews by military units and irregulars during the Russian Civil War of 1919-21; and attacks on Jews amidst the national struggles between Poles and Ukrainians in 1920. Virtually the only common feature of these events was that Jews were among the victims, although they were not always the primary target. To begin with the earliest events, Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath has advanced a strong argument against considering the Kiev riots of 1113 an anti-Jewish pogrom. During the Cossack Uprising of 1648 and the Koliivschyna of the following century, which loom so prominently in the Jewish collective memory, Jews were neither the initial nor the principal targets. Rather, they fell victim because of their economic links to the main target, the Polish feudal system, which created an antagonism exacerbated in 1768 by religious antipathy between Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians. The loyalist violence of 1905-6 occurred within the context of a much broader social and political movement, and featured attacks against other “revolutionary” elements, such as students and teachers, in addition to the Jews. Amidst the chaos of revolution, moreover, the presence of organized Jewish self-defense sponsored by revolutionary parties, complicated the picture, since some self-defense activities were intentionally provocative. The “military pogroms” of 1914-16″ have the dubious distinction of being the first events in which agents of the Russian state – in this case military commanders in the field who were unaccountable to the civilian government – designated the Jews as a target and directed violence against them. In 1919-21, the suffering of East European Jews occurred amidst a complete breakdown of public order. The widespread atrocities carried out by all combatants fell upon many different segments of the population.”

NOTE: above, John Klier discludes the ‘military pogrom’ of 1914-1916 as NOT being NOT a pogrom, let alone, Polish pogroms! (
Professor John Doyle Klier (1944-2007) was a pioneering historian of Russian Jewry.

Full Link re: Pogrom:
http://medbib.com/Pogrom

And then read this about what really constituted a Cossack, their origins, offshoots, etc (QUITE complicated):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks

History is mucked up enough without modern-day contributions from souls who should know better than to further falsify it.

Comment by Bob

September 11, 2012 @ 8:13 pm

Note to my readers:
A person I know and respect, who happens to be of Polish descent–just like me–pointed out to me the unfairness and unjustness of my poem’s use of the words: “Polish Poison” and other negative references to Poland as a country and its people.

I agree with that person, a wonderful person, and she motivated me to rewrite some select parts of my poem. I have done that. Though I hadn’t intended it, my unconscious and casual use of those offending words was as vivid a display of prejudice as what I was describing.

I appreciate her making me more aware of my insensitivity. Also, I am sorry if anyone of Polish descent read my words, and was hurt by them. My eyes are opened a little wider now.

I learn slowly, but I do learn.

Robert M. Katzman — 9/11/12

Comment by S.

September 12, 2012 @ 3:21 pm

Thank you, Bob, for rescinding what you did, your willingness to contemplate and rewrite your work, and proferring your comments (both publicly and privately).

All of it restored my faith and memory of a man of integrity, courage, talent, and yes…wisdom, that I met in Bob Katzman.