Different Slants

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 100^th birthday has just passed on May 29^th, 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.

(Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman, Copyright June 11, 2017:

This is a kind of a melancholy story, honestly, but not what you might be thinking.

What follows is a true but an unknown Bonnie/Joyce story, in which the villain, I truly regret…was me.

My beautiful older sister, Bonnie Sue, who, as she endlessly instructed me,was 2 years, 6 months and 8 days older than me, and who died today in 2010 at 62. Since she was born in the same year as Israel, when Bonnie turned 13, so did Israel-a unique country/human Bar Mitzvah–whose government issued a large special framed document to any boy or girl who requested it. Bonnie’s hung on the wall above her bed. It was in Hebrew, in full color and to those of us who understood the historical sequence of events, deeply moving. Even I at eleven years understood that.

Their lives shall not be forgotten while I still breathe. Their names kept alive. Bonnie and Joyce mattered to many people.

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Just found this old video made by my my son David to attempt to help me get established as a speaker. However, within it, there is a fleeting moment depicting my Joyce with such a big smile on her face, looking so happy that maybe something good is happening for me as a writer. I know she was pleased that David was involved.

There is also another time showing beautiful Rachel watching others reactions to what I’m reading.

(Read on …)