Border Walls, Boundary Waters, Dumb and Dumber

Uh oh! Donald Trump may have to start talking about building another wall. This wall would be a lot longer than the wall between the United States and Mexico. This one would span the longest non-militarized border between any two countries—the United States and Canada. 

Canada and the 48 continental states share a 3,987 miles border. The border between Canada and Alaska adds another 1,538 miles. By comparison, the U.S.-Mexican border is 1,989 miles.

Why the sudden need to shore up defenses against a country that has been, for all intents and purposes, our soft sister for more than two centuries, even ceding us domination of its national sport, hockey? Islamophobia, of course. Specifically, the acceptance of Syrian refugees. http://nyti.ms/294mHw6

And we all know what comes next, warn the fear mongers, chief among them, The Donald. Terrorists will be embedded among the refugees and sooner, or maybe later, under cover of Canadian residency papers they will slip quietly, make that simply walk, through border passport control and start killing Americans. 

Trump can point to a 2015 U.S. Senate report, “The State of America’s Border Security,” for validation of a plan to wall off the country, top and bottom.

“Security observers have argued that Canada represents a substantial vulnerability, because it provides immigrant visas to individuals who pose a significant threat,” said the report. http://washex.am/1Nzujr8

He can also remind us of Ahmed Ressam who planned to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999. Ressam was an Algerian al-Qaeda member who had lived in Montreal. He was caught with a bomb in his car by Washington State border security. 

So get ready America for cement mixers and chain link fence planters to be working overtime should Trump get elected president. 

Boundary Waters: One of the joys of writing this blog is the opportunity it affords me to reminisce and reflect on current events associated with my past. Today, July 4, for example, is the 40th anniversary of the successful Israeli raid on Entebbe that freed 100 Jewish hostages from Palestinian and German hijackers and the clutches of Idi Amin, the madman leader of Uganda. 

By coincidence, Gilda and I were at Ben Gurion Airport that day, awaiting a flight to Rome as the triumphant Israelis and the freed captors returned to Israel to a celebration reserved for feats of heroic grandeur such as Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic, V-J Day at Times Square and the inauguration of our first Afro-American president.

Two days ago I was catapulted back 35 years by an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by former Vice President Walter F. Mondale and Theodore Roosevelt IV, the great grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. “Protect Minnesota’s Boundary Waters,” they wrote. They opined against a mining proposal that could imperil the region (http://nyti.ms/299T7pE).

I suspect most people seeing the term Boundary Waters had faint ideas about its meaning and the attachment Minnesotans have to it. I, too, would have been mostly ignorant to its meaning had it not been for an October 1981 cover story Chain Store Age did on Dayton’s Department Stores of Minneapolis and its new merchandising concept, Boundary Waters. 

“The Boundary Waters is an area of northern Minnesota along the Canadian border that is one of the few true wilderness regions remaining in the country,” Stephen E. Watson, then Dayton’s sr. vp and general merchandise manager for men’s and women’s apparel, explained (Watson would go on to become president of Dayton Hudson Corp., now known as Target Corp., before assuming executive roles at other retail companies). “The people in the community here see themselves as very outdoors-oriented, active and adventuresome. To them, Boundary Waters have real, as well as symbolic meaning.”

Dayton’s no longer exists, but a scion of the founding family, Mark Dayton, is now governor of Minnesota. He has come out against the mining project. 

Dumb and Dumber: For all his political skills, just how dumb is former President Bill Clinton? And is Attorney General Loretta Lynch dumber for agreeing to meet with him at the Phoenix airport as the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server while secretary of state is still ongoing?

Before he does something dumb again (he always seems to do something that ruffles his wife’s campaigns, as he did in South Carolina eight years ago), he should be confined to grandfather duty full time with only limited public exposure, such as at the Democratic convention. Hillary has more than enough surrogates to campaign for her. She doesn’t need her husband to give Trump any opportunity to ridicule him and her.

Your political witticism of the day, courtesy of whowhatwhy.org:

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” —Joseph Stalin

Memories From the Mail

Oliver Munday had no way of knowing, no way of knowing his illustration accompanying a NY Times Op-Ed piece Tuesday on the meaning behind Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would evoke memories of the Nazi extermination of my father’s family in the shtetl of Ottynia, a small town in what is now the Ukraine, but back during World War II was part of occupied Poland.

Munday’s illustration portrays air mail delivery of a letter. It depicts a bird with outstretched wings, wings made to look like jail cell doors, a letter carried in its bill (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/opinion/dr-kings-righteous-fury.html?ref=opinion&_r=0). Among the treasures my father left are four postcards from his family that trace Ottynia’s fate during the war. The first three bear stamps from CCCP, the Soviet Union. The intertwined sickle and hammer symbol of the proletariat  is at the top left corner of each postcard. At the start of the war, Ottynia fell into Stalin’s hands as part of his Polish partition pact with Hitler. 

Soviet stamps and symbol are on the fourth and final postcard. Though the black ink is fading, the postmark is from September 21, 1941. In red ink, just below the middle of the front of the postcard, is the imprint of another official insignia, a bird with outstretched wings, a swastika inside a circle in its talons. Fourteen days later, perhaps even before the postcard arrived at my father’s residence at 148 Van Sicklen Street in Brooklyn, the Nazis killed most of the Jews who lived in Ottynia, trucking them to a mass grave before shooting them. Only his brother, Willy, survived from his immediate family. Their parents, their sisters and brother, and Willy’s first wife and son were killed. The Jewish presence in Ottynia, initially recorded in 1635 but perhaps from many years earlier, ended after more than three centuries.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16 to live and work in Danzig (now Gdansk). He emigrated to the United States in January 1939. As many from his village who came before (and after) him did, he joined the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association, eventually becoming its president for many years. Two Sundays ago, the association held its 113th annual gathering. About 30 of us met in Mendy’s delicatessen in Manhattan for a luncheon, less than one-twentieth the number that assembled in the Hotel Commodore in 1950 for the jubilee celebration of the society. 

My father and Uncle Willy (who came to the States after the war) rarely talked about Ottynia. Indeed, nostalgia for Ottynia was not an emotion I would associate with any of the men and women I knew growing up who came from the town. That’s not to say they didn’t have memories of life there. It’s just that, like my father, they preferred to look forward, not backward. They lived in the company of their surviving friends, not the ghosts of the departed.

In Ottynia, my father said he ate potatoes every day. He became so fed up with eating spuds that upon arriving in Danzig he vowed never to eat a potato again. He kept that promise to himself for about a decade until one day a waitress coaxed him into trying some potatoes with his meal. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. He was a meat and potatoes man for the rest of his life. He rarely ate any other vegetable. Just potatoes. Hardly anything green ever graced our dinette table in Brooklyn. 

Though he would return now and then to Ottynia—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the fender of a large car in Ottynia—he'd always go back to the city life of Danzig. 

In my father’s house in the 1950s and early 1960s, the telephone was a necessary evil not to be used for prolonged conversation unless it was being used to communicate with his society brethren.

Ottynia had a very personal meaning to my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me. It meant a tight knit group of eight couples that formed monthly floating poker games, men in one room, women in another. Nickel, dime, quarter stakes. I learned how to mix highballs for them. When I was around ten, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously.  The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. For all its simple peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that served them well throughout the four corners of the earth. What my father learned in cheder (Hebrew school) and in the public school he attended through sixth grade in Ottynia laid the foundation for a successful business and personal life that has extended into his children and grandchildren and hopefully will continue for generations.

  

Can Evil Be Contained?

Can you stop a lone gunman? Can you stop a sole terrorist? After evil has been released, can you put it back into Pandora’s box?

Some people ask, how could anyone kill innocent children? The truth is, such depraved behavior should not surprise us. Brutality, senseless and premeditated, is universal. It’s been with us since Biblical times (read the story of Dinah and the slaughter her brothers wrought on the helpless, infirm males of Sechem—Genesis 34). Or Pharaoh’s dictate to slay the first born of the Hebrews. Think we’re more humane in our “enlightened” age? Not if you’re familiar with our treatment of Native Americans. Or Africans brought here into slavery. Or if you’ve followed the individual and collective torments afflicted by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their legions, by Lon Pol, Slobodan Milošević, Yasser Arafat, by drug cartels, Muslim extremists, African warlords who, terrifyingly, arm children only slightly older than those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, to kill others. 

It’s not an exhaustive list, just an exhausting one as we contemplate how in the name of religion or nationalism or some –ism that is meaningless to most everyone else, carnage is condoned and, given technological advances, made more efficient with weaponry available to almost anyone, a “modern convenience” unimaginable just decades ago. 

Adam Lanza, by increasing accounts, was a troubled young man who should not have had access to guns, let alone the firepower his mother stored in their home. Adam was not able to conquer our most basic instinct to harm, to inflict superiority over another. Restrictive gun laws won’t prevent another tragedy, though the frequency of incidents might be diminished. They will happen. Too many guns already are out there. Too many unstable males (have you noticed these shootings are never perpetrated by females?) are not supervised and can easily get their hands on guns. It’s ironic that 17 years ago the State of Connecticut shut down a mental health facility, Fairfield Hills State Hospital, that might have housed Adam Lanza in the very community he has shaken to its core, Newtown. 

Israel has shown that while all terrorist action cannot be eradicated a pro-active approach to security can shield citizens from most danger in public places. Perhaps an answer for our school systems, at least for grades K-12, is to have single-entry facilities monitored by an armed guard. Yes, it would be costly (my guess is $50,000 per school building). But would it be more onerous than having to live through another massacre? Are we saying we are prepared to live by an actuary’s calculations that it’s more cost efficient to endure another mass murder than staff a security guard who most likely will never have to engage his protective skills?

The solution is not foolproof. Several times a week I walk into our local high school on my way to instruct students in the English as Second Language study hall. There’s a security desk outside the administrative offices. Once, maybe twice, I have been stopped by the guards. We’re just too trusting a society; 99.99% of the time, it makes no difference. But all it takes for disaster to strike is for the .01% to sneak through carrying a semi-automatic gun stocked with an oversized ammunition clip. 

The gun lobby believes armed deterrence is an answer. It believes all adults should carry weapons, even concealed guns, even on school grounds. I prefer letting trained professionals handle security. It should be a service we are all prepared to fund. 

Marking a Birthday

The yahrzeit memorial candle commemorating the 13th Jewish calendar anniversary of my father’s death burned longer than 24 hours. It flickered Wednesday night, the eve, by coincidence, of my father’s secular calendar birthday, January 5. He would have been 101 today. Or maybe 100. My brother, sister and I simply don’t know.

Several Polish documents—a “morality testimony” and a “certificate of belonging”— list his birthday in 1911. But he often said records were not very exact in Ottynia, the little town, a shtetl, in Galicia where he was born. He would say he was born in 1912. So that’s what we put on his tombstone.

Now part of Ukraine, Ottynia passed through many hands over the centuries. When my dad was born, Ottynia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I it reverted to Poland. During World War II, Ottynia fell under Soviet Union control as part of the partition of Poland pact Stalin forged with Hitler. Nazi Germany overwhelmed Ottynia after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. At the end of the war, Ottynia became a military-restricted area in Ukraine.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16, venturing first to the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea before coming to America via England in January 1939, months before the second world war broke out. All of his immediate family, except his younger brother, Willy, were killed. Though he would tell his children folklore stories, really parables, about life in the Old Country while we were growing up in Brooklyn, he rarely talked about conditions in Ottynia or Danzig.

Perhaps they were too painful to relate. Trying to raise funds to bring other members of his family here, he was powerless to relieve the pressure on their lives. Among his possessions when he died were three postcards from his parents we’d never previously seen. In painstakingly small Yiddish handwriting, they convey the sorrow of parents who haven’t seen their eldest child in two years, the agony of life in a weakened state. The first two were postmarked by Russian authorities. Stamped on the front of the third and final postcard, just under his name, is a symbol of the Nazi flying eagle holding a swastika.

The Great Patriotic War

Here’s a short pop quiz: What was the turning point of World War II In Europe?

I’d wager many of you answered D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.

The more correct answer, according to most historians and to all Russians, would be the Battle of Stalingrad. Fought between July 17, 1942 and February 2, 1943, the battle for Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd, gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus region, was among the bloodiest ever fought. Close to two million casualties from both sides. Though they defeated Germany’s Sixth Army, the Russians paid a dear price—they claim losses of 478,741 dead Russian soldiers, 650,878 wounded. More than 40,000 civilians died. The city was left in ruins. The soil wouldn’t produce crops for three years.

To the northwest, the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) lasted for nearly 900 days. Some 1.5 million Russians died.

Overall, Russia says it lost 20 million soldiers during WWII, or what they call the Second Great Patriotic War (the first being the defense of the motherland from Napoleon’s invasion). Another eight million civilians died. Twenty-eight million out of a population of about 170 million. One out of every six citizens (16.5%). Hardly a family did not have a relative killed during the war.

By contrast, the U.S. lost 408,000 from a population of 131 million (0.3%). Aside from the attack on Pearl Harbor, random coastal shellings and combat on some islands of the archipelago of Alaska, American soil was not breached. No civilian population centers were terrorized or captured. Life went on, albeit under rationed goods. But vigilance on the home front couldn’t compare to the deprivations and brutality of living in conquered or embattled Russian territory.

Is it any wonder Stalin vehemently argued for the opening of a second front against Germany? He complained to FDR and Churchill the Soviet Union was bearing all the burden in fighting the Nazis, both in terms of the loss of life and the destruction of its territory.

I’m no expert on WWII, though I’ve seen my share of war movies, read some history and historic novels, so I have a pretty good idea what went on. A visit to Moscow’s Military Museum brings the conflict to life from a whole different perspective. I’d always thought America had supplied vast amounts of war materiel to Russia through the Lend Lease program beginning in the summer of 1941, before we entered the war but after Hitler tore up the non aggression pact and attacked Russia. To be sure, we did send in much needed supplies and equipment. But the Russians, themselves, produced the vast majority of their weaponry, developing numerous tank and airplane models. They developed the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher during the war. One of the best, if not the best, assault rifle, was also developed during WWII by Mikhail Kalashinkov.

Don’t take this commentary as any defense of Russia’s behavior before, during or after the war. But knowing what the Russians endured places their actions in context. Indeed, one of the major themes to emerge from Gilda’s and my two weeks in Russia was a greater appreciation of the hardships the people of this vast land have suffered through for centuries. Not decades. Centuries. They suffered through despots. The masses were slaves—serfs bound to their master’s land with no right to move—until 1861. Even their religion at times offered little comfort. In the Middle Ages, deadly violence rippled through the church’s competing factions. After the Bolsheviks took over, churches were closed, priests and nuns executed. The Soviet Union failed to provide a softer, more fulfilling life. After perestroika, their economy, meager as it was, collapsed.

The people, however, retained their sense of humor. They measured governments and leaders by the quality of the jokes about them. They revealed a resiliency forged through years of deprivation and suffering.

Russia is not a workers’ paradise. It is not a capitalist bastion. It’s a little like the Wild West. It’s not a full democracy, but is better than it ever was.


This concludes Russia Week at No Socks Needed Anymore. There’s much more I could tell, but I probably overtaxed your interest already, so I’ll go back to “normal” blogging next week.

The Double-Headed Eagle Has Landed

Perhaps you’ve noticed your faithful correspondent has been absent from your inbox lately. Well, the secret can now be told—even retirees go on vacation. Gilda and I just returned from two weeks in Russia, sailing on a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Discovery Channel has its Shark Week. Consider this your Russian Week. I won’t pontificate, not too much, I hope, on deep Russian themes. Rather, for the next several days I’ll provide some pointed observations and tidbits of information you might not have known about Russia:

Russia’s summer has been extraordinary, afflicted by intense heat and peat bog fires around Moscow that shrouded the capital in smog, making breathing for three hours outdoors the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes. Instead of normal temperatures in the 60s and 70s, during the weeks leading up to our trip St. Petersburg and Moscow experienced high 90s and even 100-plus days. We packed accordingly and even managed to bring with us a little Lady Luck, for the weather was just short of perfect for our fortnight in Mother Russia.

The symbol of the Russian empire was the two-headed eagle, facing east and west. Ever the cynics, Russians claimed it symbolized the country did not know which way to turn.

History, according to our guides, is the hardest subject to master in schools because textbooks are rewritten every two years. Russian history has an “unpredictable past,” said our guides. Reminded me of the Texas Board of Education and its respect for accepted knowledge.

Given a choice between order or democracy, between stability or freedom, the Russian people favor order and stability. Democracy is not a good word, a guide said, because “every time we have a weak ruler we have problems.” Putin is well regarded because he is decisive. Gorbachev is reviled because he presided over economic disaster. Yeltsin was considered a buffoon.

Despite the Soviet Union’s anti-religion manifesto, the Russian Orthodox Church has experienced a revival. About 65% of the population, it is estimated, affiliates with the Russian Orthodox Church, though they are not traditionally observant. That would require them to both fast and abstain from sex for more than 200 days a year. Attendance at services is on the rise (pun intended, as there are no seats in the churches. Congregants stand for the two to three hour services in buildings that usually do not have heat, though the Church of the Assumption in the heart of the Kremlin had hot water pipes installed under its cast iron flooring in the 18th century, a form of central heating gaining wider acceptance in the 21st century. By the way, a kremlin refers to any fortress built to protect a population center. Moscow’s Kremlin houses offices of the government and numerous churches where the Tsars were crowned, married, had their children baptized, and were eulogized).

Not so well known is that Stalin reversed his attitude toward the church after WWII, known in Russia as the Second Great Patriotic War (the first was the one against Napolean). Though Hitler promised religious freedom if it would support his attack, the church lined up behind Stalin and the Russian defense of the motherland. After the war Stalin eased up on restrictions and allowed more churches to open and operate.

Russian churches often have superb acoustics and boast exceptional male choirs, usually a quartet whose voices are transformed into resounding multi-layered harmonization. As I write this I’m listening to a CD of the White Lake Vocal Ensemble. Sung in Slavonic, an old, mostly lost language, the hymns are deeply spiritual.

After experimenting with a progressive income tax system, Russia has adopted a flat 13% tax rate on all income. Anyone who owes taxes, or excessive fines, for say, parking violations, cannot leave the country before paying off their debt.

Speaking of parking violations, before perestroika (which means reconstruction), there were about 200,000 cars in Moscow. Today there are close to four million. Understandably, traffic jams abound and there is not enough parking. Moscow installed parking meters, but the public rebelled, vandalizing many of them, forcing their removal. Cars are parked on sidewalks and other illegal places. Police tow trucks are called “black angels.” To relieve some of the parking space deficit, Russia is building vertical garages. Often they are co-op initiatives. People contribute to a building fund for a reserved spot and pay a monthly fee as well. The price of regular gas was around 26 rubles for one litre, equal to around $3.27 for one gallon.

To widen some of the roads in Moscow, buildings were elevated and moved backward several meters. Friday is the busiest traffic day as city dwellers drive to their suburban dachas. Most people have dachas. Under the Soviet Union land was distributed free of charge to all workers thereby inadvertently contributing to the peat bog fires that plagued Russia this summer and in years past. To have enough land to distribute, swampy peat bogs were drained. But without the dampness, peat bogs spontaneously combust in intense heat. It would be political suicide to try to wrest the dachas and land back from the populace to reflood the bogs. So Russia is living proof that no well-intentioned deed goes unpunished.