Tag Archives: Anne Frank

To Kill A Mockingbird – Banned Again

Image

To Kill A Mockingbird – Banned Again

 “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” Atticus Finch, Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird  has a long history with censorship.  It is one of the most challenged books in American Literature – from strong language, sex and rape to it makes people uncomfortable and now it is racist. 

The plot and characters are loosely based on the author’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her Southern hometown in 1936 when she was 8 years old.

Atticus Finch functions as the moral backbone of the story, a person to whom others turn to in times of doubt and trouble. His daughter Scout is the narrator and the story is told through the eyes of an eight year old girl.  Unable to abide the town’s comfortable ingrained racial prejudice, Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man with trumped up charges against him. After losing the trial, Atticus practices empathy and understanding and teaches this to his children Scout and Jem. He never holds a grudge against the people of Maycomb. Atticus accepts all people because he is an expert at “climbing into other people’s skin and walking around. “ 

My son calls him the world’s greatest dad. To Kill A Mockingbird is a book I reread often when faced with a moral dilemma. It has always been a lesson in doing the right thing for no other reason then because it is the right thing to do even if you know the outcome.

The story reflects the time and language of the South during the depression. Yes, as a child It made me uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable for the black people in my class also. I was also uncomfortable reading Anne Frank. Why did people hate us so much? 

Literature is not history. There is this wonderful moment in reading a novel where you think “You feel that way too? I thought that I was the only one.” I relate to Atticus Finch’s moral dilemma, Anne Frank’s fear and resilience, Hamlet’s indecisiveness, Holden Caulfield’s bad atttiude, Celie’s rise from nothing, Florentina’s love (In the Time Of Cholera) and Don Quixote snd Sancho Panza’s friendship. The list goes on and on. 

Having students read about racism is not an act of promoting racism. While some aspects of history can be “uncomfortable” to read, they are also thought-provoking and encourage important discussions on race. it provides students the opportunity to read and analyze the characters on their own terms and develop their own sense of morality.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn and other novels are being considered to be banned in California.  The banning of books sparks serious debate over literary censorship in the classroom. If we continue to ostracize and disallow certain texts to young readers, we are limiting their access to ideas and opinions which vary from our own. If we begin to exclude anything that may “trigger” a specific group, we will be grossly limiting our children’s education.

My boyfriend is rereading Hemingway. He said that  Hemingway is casually antisemitic and racist. I have no idea what that means. Further along in the book, he said, “It’s not so casual anymore. He is antisemitic and racist”. Is Hemingway next?

Read safe,

JAZ

Fifty Favorite Books That I Have Read On Trips, On The Beach Or At Home

Image

Posted on

Fifty Favorite Books That I Have Read On Trips, On The Beach Or At Home

i thought i would reblog this one- since we suddenly have all this time now.

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” Lemony Snicket   

How does a book make the favorites list? I remember it. I have a really bad memory and  if it stays with me, it stays forever. I want a book to take me somewhere I haven’t been before, another time, another place, another pair of eyes.  There are  books that have taught me something and changed  how I see the world. Some  of them I have read more than once – under the covers with a flashlight.  I identify with certain characters.  There is this wonderful moment in reading where you think “You feel that way too? I thought that I was the only one.”

It was very hard to pick only fifty. My favorite books from many different stages of my life are here and in no particular order.  If you missed reading any…..they are good.

The Master And The Margarita   Mikhail Bulgakov  (Russian)

On The Road  Jack Kerouac (American)

Purge  Sofi Oksanen (Finnish)

The Chosen Chaim Potok  (American)

Love In the Time Of Cholera   Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian)

Gone With the Wind  Margaret Mitchell (American)

Swann’s Way  (In Search Of Lost Time)  Marcel Proust  (French)

To Kill A Mockingbird  Harper Lee (American)

One Hundred Years Of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (Colombian)

All Over But The Shoutin’  Rick Bragg (American)

Snow  Orhan Pamuk  (Turkish)

The Fountainhead  Ayn Rand (American)

The Prophet  Kahlil Gibran  (Lebanese American)

Atlas Shrugged  Ayn Rand (American)

Don Quixote  Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)

The Great Gatsby  F. Scott Fitzgerald  (American)

The Stranger  Albert Camus  (French)

The Giving Tree  Shel Silverstein (American)

Diary  Of A Young Girl  Anne Frank (Dutch)

The Old Man And The Sea  Ernest Hemingway (American)

The Kite Runner  Khalid Hosseini  (Afghan American)

For Whom The Bell Tolls  Ernest Hemingway (American)

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being  Milan Kundera  (Czech)

Middlesex  Jeffrey Eugenides  (American)

Siddhartha  Herman Hesse (German)

The Things They Carried  Tim O Brian (American)

Life Of Pi  Yann Martel (Canadian)

The Sun Also Rises  Ernest Hemingway (American)

Zorba The Greek  Nikos Kazantzakis  (Greek)

A Heart Breaking Work Of Staggering Genius  Dave Eggars (American)

The House of The Spirits  Isabel Allende  (Chilean)

Catcher In The Rye  J.D. Salinger  (American)

The Gulag Archipelago  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian)

Good Night Moon Margaret Wise Brown  (American)

Wild Swans  Jung Chang (Chinese)

Tuesdays With Morrie  Mitch Albom  (American)

The Painted Bird  Jerzy Kosinski (Polish American)

The Prince Of Tides  Pat Conroy (American)

Man’s Search For Meaning  Viktor Frankl  (Austrian)

Slaughterhouse Five  Kurt Vonnegut  (American)

War And Peace Leo Tolstoy  (Russian)

Metropolitan Life  Fran Liebowitz  (American)

Fly  safe,

JAZ

Nine Things That I Will Take To Auschwitz

Image

Nine Things That I Will Take To Auschwitz

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Primo Levi

I have studied about World War II in school, read a lot, saw the movies, documentaries and visited other concentration camps. I’ve obsessed over the Holocaust since I read Anne Frank when I was nine years old. I don’t really know how to  prepare for my trip to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Since opening to the public in 1947, it has become a world-known symbol of the atrocities that took place during WWII. Here is my list of things that I will take with me.

1.Courage. How will I stand in front of the gas chambers that killed one million people? Can I be brave and afraid at the same time?

2. Anti anxiety medication or at least some lavender oil. It will be hard to be in a place of so much darkness.

3. Mental toughness. How many stories of pain can I tolerate? How will I see and hear about the intolerable and insufferable acts  when I am actually there?

4.Camera and Notebook. I’m not sure if I will use them or if I will instead really be present and be an observer of what has happened.

5.Sadness. I know i will feel some deep, horrible sadness.

6.Memories of the people I knew who had those numbers on their arms; of the strangers that I saw with them and the people who died that I never knew but heard their stories. Memories outlast mortality.

7.Reason. It’s not possible to apply normal logic when trying to understand the Holocaust. How will I comprehend anything when I am actually there? In his will, Hitler blamed  WWII — including the Holocaust — on the Jews. On the people he was systematically exterminating. No, there is no logic there; no sense to be made of it. There was only madness and the people who followed it.

8.Anger at the current wave of antisemitism in Poland in response to the new Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, This law makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in crimes committed by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust.The law also bans the use of terms such as “Polish death camps” in relation to Auschwitz and other camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and carries a three-year prison sentence.

9. Faith that monsters do not last forever and eventually truth and hope prevails.

Fly safe,
JAZ

Anti – Semitism in Europe – Again?

Posted on by

Anti – Semitism in Europe – Again?

“At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?” William Styron

We are all born into some story, with its particular background scenery, that affects our emotional, social and spiritual growth.

My story was anti-Semitism. My grandparents were part of the well documented immigration of eastern European and Russian Jews at the end of the nineteenth century to America. Restrictions and barriers were placed on Jews that made it impossible to have a normal self-sustaining life in their countries.   In Russia and Poland, pogroms (physical attacks on the Jews and their villages) happened on a regular basis.

Both my parents were born here and had experienced anti-Semitism growing up. My father was a high-ranking officer in the army (not a job Jews could have at that time) and had fought in two wars. He experienced extreme prejudice during his twenty years in the army. My mother grew up on a farm where they were the only Jewish family in their town. She also had a lot of experience with bigotry and discrimination.

When they had children, they moved into the most Jewish neighborhood they could find so their children wouldn’t have the same experiences. Many holocaust survivors moved there as well. I grew up hearing all the stories.

I  was able to read at a very young age and for some reason read the story of Anne Frank when I was nine years old. I looked at the picture of Anne. She had brown hair and brown eyes. I thought that she looked like me and she was Jewish also.  I decided in my nine year old wisdom  that they  could come for me too. I quickly became friends with the only Christian I knew, Frankie, the son of the superintendent of our building. His family could hide me if it happened again.

Children don’t understand prejudice. The world is black and white to them. If someone is mean than you don’t like them. But for someone to not like you and want to kill you because you are Jewish, or Black, Gay or Muslim – that is a hard concept for kids. It has to be taught. As in – if your parents hate them or are afraid of them, then they must be bad. Being hated because I was born into a Jewish family that wasn’t even religious was hard for me as a child to comprehend.

I grew up on the beach and saw a lot of people with numbers on their arms. All the old people who I knew had heavy European accents. For a brief period I thought they counted the older people and when you became old you got an accent. Many of my friends were the children of holocaust survivors. Their lives were shrouded in mystery and darkness.

The holocaust changed so many lives by simply observing just how horrible certain humans can treat each other. It didn’t just scar the survivors but anyone who came in contact with their stories. I grew up in a frightened community. I have always felt how tenuous the world was and that things could end at any moment just as it had for Anne Frank.

As I got older, I became obsessed with reading everything I could about the holocaust. I saw every film and documentary. Someone asked me once “What job I was going to get as the leading authority on the holocaust?’ But I needed answers. How did it happen? Why did people hate us so much? How do people hate for no reason and of course – the nature of evil.

I learned that evil can happen when it is beyond the realm of civilized human consciousness – like planning to kill all the Jews in Europe by gassing and burning them in ovens, flying a plane into the World Trade Center, murdering all the intellectuals or killing  or kidnapping children for going to school.

I am watching that evil again. I recently  saw a map on CNN listing the number of Jews living in each country in Europe. Was that the same map that Hitler looked at? The last time I saw a map listing the number of Jews in each country in Europe it was in a holocaust book showing the number of dead Jews from each country.

So there are no lessons to be learned from the past. The people committing atrocities don’t think of themselves as evil. They commit these acts in the name of righteousness or religion. As someone who loves stories, I wanted restoration and redemption in my story. But instead the monsters of my childhood turn out to be human beings in the present.

Fly safe,

JAZ