Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

The Sunday Before Thanksgiving…by Robert M. Katzman

By Robert M. Katzman Sunday, November 24, 2019

(Undated November 21, 2021)

About 35 years ago, when Joy and I were 36, Lisa was 10, David (now Konee) was 7 and Rachel was 5, a tradition was started within our little family. People don’t actually know when traditions start unless they linger through time like this one. This is that story: 

Once upon a time, in 1985 or so, I was on my second marriage with two young children. But when I was much younger and married to another very young and good person, we had a daughter, Lisa. After the 2nd marriage, on Thanksgiving Day, Lisa was home with her Mom and so she couldn’t be with her younger siblings or Joy and me, and it was sad for all of the five of us.

(Read on …)

Oslo, Norway, Yom Kippur and the Man of Mystery…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Bewilderment,Friendship & Compassion,Humor,Israel,Jewish Themes,My Own Personal Hell,Travel — Bob at 4:30 pm on Monday, May 6, 2019

Every so often, life throws me a curve. Sometimes so often, it feels like I’ve actually lived my life in orbit, and not on the land. This is a true story set in 1992, when on a trip to Frankfort, Germany to attend the world’s largest book fair, when I owned a world-travel foreign-language bookstore named Grand Tour, my wife Joyce and I decided to take a train north to Norway, from where some of her ancestors came a century before.

By chance, that year Judaism’s lunar calendar placed Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish world, the Day of Atonement, would also be in Norway the same time we were there. Our hopes of finding a Synagogue to observe that day, were dim. However, God must have a sense of humor, because this is what happened to us on the special day.

(Read on …)

America, Please, Don’t Do This!…by Robert M. Katzman

America, Please, Don’t Do this!

By Robert M. Katzman © July I, 2018 (Canada Day)

Eyes flicker open in the darkness. I hear the battery wall clock ticking, so I must still be living. Pale morning light is peeking past the loose drawn shades covering some of this small house’s dozen large windows. If this were a fort, no way to defend it. But on a sunny morning, cool wind outside, shades up and windows open a bit on four sides, I don’t need electricity to clear the stale air or illuminate my house.

Wearing my usual long black T-shirt with the screaming American Eagle on it, the one that stops near my knees so I always appear modestly dressed to a morning visitor, expected or not, except for the fact that its only about five ounces of opaque cotton, I decide to do my morning routine, parts of which I’m recording here for future anthropologists. Present day people may be less entranced.
(Read on …)

My Fierce Grandma Celia Warman, Her 1963 Thousand-Dollar Bar Mitzvah Gift to Me…by Robert M. Katzman © April 13, 2018

 by Robert M. Katzman © April 13, 2018

On April 13, 1963, near the top of Pill Hill on the South Side of Chicago at a very large, very square synagogue named Rodfei Sholem or Chodesh on 91st and Jeffery Avenue, I was still 12 years old and it was my Bar Mitzvah. But that Temple was so packed with members, that it had to schedule two Bar Mitzvahs at one time.

Many of the Hebrew School teachers were high-strung Israelis, only 15 years after the new country was formed, and they screamed at me all the time. This Bar Mitzvah, this singularly longed for day represented parole for me from my resented ethnic prison. I was free. I was done.

It took me four more years, on my own running a newsstand in Hyde Park by then, to figure out I really did completely accept my Jewish identity at 17, in 1967 and my personal life long self-education began that year and continues today, half a century later at almost 68.

99% of everyone who was at my Bar Mitzvah party are dead now. It is a lonely time to recall any of it, but I do remember the crowds. Now no one left to call and say: Do you remember…?

(Read on …)

Pleading with Fate in Jerusalem (part 12)…by Robert M. Katzman

Pleading with Fate in Jerusalem

by Robert M Katzman © December 4, 2017

I tilted my head to the Western Wall

Trying to summon the words

Conjuring up Fate to listen to me

Surrendering to that which can’t be seen

But nevertheless

Heard

Why do you keep doing this?

You keep taking so many away

No one left to call and say:

Do you remember this perilous time?

(Read on …)

Sleeping With the Bedouins… (part 11-a) by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Bewilderment,Friendship & Compassion,Israel,Jewish Themes,Travel — Bob at 9:33 am on Sunday, December 3, 2017

Sleeping With The Bedouins (part 11-a)

By Robert M. Katzman © December 1, 2017

Bedouins, originally badawi in Arabic, are nomadic borderless Arabs of the desert.

I had been to Jordan before, with Rick Munden, in May 2000, where he and I both had bad problems with our feet at the end of our nine days in Israel. We were on our way to Petra, also known at one time as the Rose City because of the color of the mountains, which is now a world famous destination of a Nabataean civilization buried under the red sand for about 2000 years.

Originally a bustling Arab community on the Silk Road to China located in a Roman province, it has incredible temples carved into the soft stone, Roman columns everywhere standing up and lying around like giant carved chips that fell off of a Las Vegas poker game table, a coliseum-like curved and stepped mass of seats facing whatever was entertaining them.

(Read on …)

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