Relationships Defined: A Reflection Closer to Reality
by Robert M. Katzman © New Year’s Eve, 2017
1) Friend: One of one, or one of many, a preferred person to call, go places with, share experiences, be with when sad or drunk, to defend or be defended by when threatened by words or worse and who when you ask for help, absolutely, positively, shows up.
Teaching Jericho About Fire on Thanksgiving Day
by Robert M. Katzman Thanksgiving Day, 2017
We’re walking on the beach collecting wood
Thanksgiving Day
Pieces of our family are gathering
First time without Grandma in his short life
And my long one
Her shadow follows us
He’s six and doing his best
I’m sixty-seven and want him to know
To know about wood and fire and so much more
I think about Time and that it’s flowing too quickly
Bob in Israel: Crusader Castles and Caraway Seeds (part 2)
By Robert m. Katzman © October 27, 2017
 I thought the problem was Caraway seeds. I mean finding them in the Promised Land because since I’m cooking eggs in my obscure rented space far from English-speaking people in order to spend as little as possible on food, salt and pepper just didn’t cut it this morning. I decided to find a real, or at least larger grocery store where a range of spices might be available.
About Caraway seeds, in case this sounds odd to you or in case everything I write about seems odd to you, when I was a child on the South Side of Chicago there was a Jewish place on 71st Street and Jeffery Avenue, near Woolworths and I think north of the train. I was five then, in 1955, and I couldn’t drive yet, so my memories of where things were at that time might be influenced from my being three feet tall.
Robert M. Katzman © October 26, 2017
My plan to skillfully and thoughtfully distribute my wife Joy’s ashes where it would mean the most to both of us was going well. Our tall handsome blonde, brown-eyed son David made all the arrangements and connections on the Internet and eased my way, accept for the last one. What was I expecting?
Landing in Tel Aviv, Israel at 4:30 PM and leaving on the morning of Wednesday, October 25, 2017 from Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy awaking at 6 am, and flying east at noon on El Al, it was the last leg of my trip where Joy’s ashes will be sent into the wind from the top of Masada. Never heard of it? It’s usually incorrectly referred to as the Jewish Alamo, but since it happened 2,000 years earlier, the Alamo should really be called the American Masada. Just my opinion. Two Jews died in the Alamo with the other 180 men, not that it makes them any more special. (Read on …)
by Robert M. Katzman © August 25, 2017
 The problem with deciding to never write fiction is that I have to always be aware of when a really good story comes along. Well, here’s one and it involves my old car, two decent tire changers, a generous and pretty tavern operator and this wonderful little Kenosha, Wisconsin restaurant run by two gentle Mexican immigrants who deserve some real success. I want to help them. So read this unexpected chain of events which happened to me–one after the other–in a single intersection at 3200 60th Street on a warm clear day on Wednesday, August 21, 2017.  You may be very surprised.
Early that morning I dropped off my youngest daughter, Sarah Hannah, at the Metra Station at 5400 Sheridan Road because she was going to Downtown Chicago to be interviewed for her first possible intern position while she was a student at Columbia College. Smart, pretty, filled with ambition and almost 21, she was very hopeful.
Copyright June 20, 2017 by Robert M. Katzman
A short modern Passover story about the incredible courage of a small Danish fishing village whose residents did what they could to save their Jews from the exterminating Nazis. Heroes don’t always need guns to prove what they believe is the right thing to do. The Nazi are the only plague in this tale.
Although history swiftly evaporates as first the witnesses to an event occur grow old and die and then their children die, to some people history matters very much.
Current national events in politics in the United States are riveting the attention of millions of the world’s people right now for the cartoon-like of behavior of some in this country’s government whose names need not be typed. People want to know every scrap, every detail of “who did what, when, where, why and how”, as my high school journalism teacher wayne brasler used to say to our small class.\
But only for so long.
President John F. Kennedy is in the news right now because his 100th birthday has just passed on May 29th, 2017. He was elected in November 1960 when I was ten and died by assassination when I was thirteen on November 22, 1963.
Today I’m sixty-seven and while the second incident remains vivid to me, the first one does not. The youngest person to be able to vote for JFK, as he was affectionately referred to in 1960, would have had to be twenty-one and born in 1939.
The point is even great fame doesn’t keep a name alive in popular imaginations for very long, and no fame at all means virtually instant indifference.
This short story is about a great many very brave and resolute people living in eastern Demark, a tiny country just north of Germany and west of Sweden, during World War Two.