Different Slants

The 1917 Telegram: From Russia to Celia © August 26, 2020

From stories I was told as a child in the 1950’s. Even my cousins, the grandchildren of the four immigrants, are dying now, so it’s time to leave a record. Forgive any errors. I was so young:

My Grandmother, originally Celia Baumwohl, was born in 1901 in the tiny town of Dobra, in the southern Polish Galician region of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. The northern part of Poland was part of the German Empire. So for a while, Poland disappeared from the maps of Europe.

August 16, 2020 © by Robert M. Katzman

(Originally written 11/18, this revised story has new meaning to me with the possible election of a President with Irish ancestry and his VP with immigrant parents from East India, Jamaica and with a Jewish husband, to boot. Only in America could this happen, yet still, the hate persists. This true story relates how I handled hate when it came to visit me, 30 years ago. May healing and understanding occur in America if they are elected.)

You may not remember me since I have not posted here since December 2013. My name is Rick Munden. My wife Mary and I left the US in June 2010 to buy a sail boat in the Netherlands and explore Europe. We have been doing that for the past ten years during which time we have visited 25 countries spending six or more consecutive months in six of them.

We had already been in Lisbon, Portugal for eight months when the covid-19 pandemic broke out. I think it would be instructive for American readers to learn what that looked like from the perspective of someone in Portugal and to compare and contrast the American and Portuguese approaches to the crisis and their results. It should be noted that Portugal is a very small country with a population of about 10.5 million.