Many of us immigrated to the U.S. as young children in the wave following World War II. Our parents had to find work, learn English, seek food and housing. Many were too tired or traumatized to sit back and tell tales about the homeland. In fact, they might have been abnormally silent. I’ve met many contemporaries who wish they knew what happened and sought to learn from others what happened.
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Now sixty-plus years later, more books are appearing to explain those times. The authors include scholars who’ve taken a long time to pull the research together and retirees who are using their leisure to fill in the history. Here are a few books that brought my mind some rest.
 
DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 by Mark Wyman. 1989 and 1998 editions.

Displaced persons, also known as refugees, are a constant in human history. As long as there is conflict and war, there are people who flee for safety and find it far away in a foreign country. In September 1945 there were 1.8 million displaced in Europe still waiting for a place to go. The politics of their resettlement continued for years after. Among them, 200,000 Baltic people knew that Russians had killed and deported about 130,000 of their kind in 1941 and would resume the persecution, so they refused to return. “Some 75 percent of the university, high school and grade school teachers had fled Lithuania,… as well as 80 percent of the doctors and … writers, painters, musicians, artists, etc.” (p. 119)

Wyman describes the “continent in ruins” right after the war, with up to twenty million bewildered people on the move. There were soldiers returning home; POWs, concentration and labor camp internees; civilians escaping intolerable places or expelled due to political antipathy. Most returned to their former homes. The Allied Forces were busy sorting them out and herding them into organized camps.
His riveting narrative describes the history around the DP camps in detail. Stories of individuals bring the experience to life. A chapter on repatriation explains the politics and logistics addressing stateless people who would not go home. He describes the special problems of orphaned children and surviving Jews. The camps became multi-lingual and -cultural communities, struggling to hang onto national identity, to school children, and to apply for asylum, in a limbo that lasted years after the war.
The hair-raising story must not be forgotten. In 2015, over a million refugees from the Middle East entered Europe, and there were 1.3 million active claims for asylum.
Those of us within a generation of the WWII DP experience know that security and prosperity was found by many DPs from this era. What we might not know is exactly how our parents coped at the time, and what lingered in their lives, good and bad.
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​Unravel the Secrets of Your Family

Nearly all families have some dysfunction. And SECRETS. Secrets are bonding. A family will unconsciously assign “roles” to different members to compensate for some of the imperfections in the group, or deep-seated wishes.  (E.g., “peace keeper,” “servant,” “provider,” “the sick/incompetent one”) If you want to break free and assign yourself roles that feel more AUTHENTIC, you need to look at the pacts that were created, first by your imperfect parents, and then joined by everyone, and then automatically reinforced in a thousand tiny interactions and words. How would someone outside the family, looking at the HEALTH of every person, see the games that you collectively allowed? Then practice HEALTH. On The Family, John Bradshaw.

You Are Allowed to Outgrow Your Parents’ Wishes For You

The “gifted child” is every child who is born and who uses his/her wiles to survive. It will accept nearly all treatments because it instinctively knows that the alternative is to be abandoned, punished, or die. That’s why abused children stay. Children’s brains grasp how they need to behave in order to survive. The trick is, when you CAN survive on your own, pull away from rotten “deals” with a parent. Say “no” to being put in the service of a parent’s dysfunctions--pleasing parents who really want to continue to own you, and maybe use you. You can love them, but when you grow up, try to rescue the SELF-WITHIN that compromised extremely, that “went along” with THEIR PERSONALITY more than it wanted to, deep-down. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller.

Your Life Matters, Own It, Don’t Waste It

Pelzer is a coach for people who need to grow up. He himself transcended a horrific, cruel childhood. He models what it means to BECOME HEALTHY. Stop blaming other people, hating based on stupid reasons, own your actions. The book is aimed at teens, but trust me, it’s a bath of wisdom. Help Yourself for Teens, Real-Life Advice for Real-Life Challenges, Dave Pelzer.

Stay on Top of Boundaries, Confusing Foibles

We all get into stupid pickles on a daily basis. “My mother-in-law smokes around my kids.” “My boyfriend won’t let me see my friends.” “My friend won’t speak to me since the wedding.” If you want excellent, routine coaching, covering the big and little foibles of life, subscribe to her feed or read her books. Carolyn Hax, https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/carolyn-hax/ or Tell Me About It.

​We all have voices in our head. Pithy messages from people who tell us good ways to think. Parents, therapists, friends. Self-help books.

Here are a few that reached into my confused, tormented, scrambled mind and heart at various points, and stuck, forever:

Recover Happiness

I was in deep despair about a romance, alone in a new city. I had experienced an obsessive, unrequited love for several continuous years in my early youth (e.g., “Maybe he’ll appear around the next corner? Please, please.”) This book told me how to BREAK THE HABIT OF SADNESS. Actions you can take every day, as if easing from an addiction. The Book of Hope, Helen A. DeRosis and Victoria Y. Pellegrino.

Choose a Good Love Partner

Almost forever, I mulled and mulled: What is a good love? How do you know you have a good love going? I knew that great chemistry is NOT the best clue.

Peck told me: With a good partner, you will GROW, spiritually, intellectually. They will provide a foundation and partnership for CHANGE, for GROWING UP. A bad partner will fear your change, your new ideas, your ventures even into new, petty daily habits. With a good partner, you can “be yourself” without a lot of censorship. You tolerate and adapt to each other. Want to learn guitar? Okay, go ahead. Want a new career? Okay, I’ll support you. Want to go vegan? Let’s plan a path that works for both of us. Neither person is PUT INTO SERVICE of the other so much that their soul feels crushed. The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck.

Be Creative, Explore

It is okay to be HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE and UNCONVENTIONAL. Society won’t break. (Anyway, you ARE society.) You don’t need to be destructive or angry about conventions you don’t like (e.g., girdles for women, neckties for men). Drop it, and see what happens. Create YOU and YOUR STYLE. Don’t live in fear of “what others think.” (They might be over-compromised, conforming in ways they don’t like.) Compromise when you need a trade-off, if you can tolerate it (dress for a job, clean up for a romance, show up for a community you want to join).  The Fan Man, William Kotzwinkle (a novel).

Treat Kids Like People

I grew up with authoritarian parents. Control and order were more important than fun, and warmth, and teaching to think. My automatic behavior with kids was to talk down to them, and guide them by being BOSSY PANTS. Here is a HANDBOOK for retraining yourself to be a kind and effective adult. There are exercises. Simulated conversations using cartoons. Examples of dialogs, responses. You will recognize your childhood in the examples of WHAT PEOPLE USUALLY SAY, and it’ll tell you to TRY THIS INSTEAD. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber and Elain Mazlish.

Feminism was STIGMATIZED over the last decades. It’s having a revival, however. People like Beyonce and Taylor Swift are able to use the word again. Some of their critics are boiling them in oil for using the word, or for being “the wrong kind of feminist.”

They were joined by about six million people during the Women’s Marches the day after Trump’s inauguration (January 2017), who defied the STIGMA of “feminism” to protest the sexism of the Trump campaign.

What’s a stigma? It’s a strong feeling of disapproval, a mark of disgrace or reproach, a set of negative and often unfair beliefs.

I think the stereotype of a feminist is someone who is angry, unhinged, and obsessively hates men. Someone “who doesn’t know how to be a woman and who doesn’t like being a woman.” (Note: And “a woman is… ?”)

This stereotype led to fierce rejection of the label by generations after 1975 or so: “I am NO feminist!” “Feminists are against Moms.” “We don’t want any feminists in our workplace.” “Feminists [like female graduate students] are ugly, angry spoilers. Undateable.”

Meanwhile, since the 1950’s and 1960’s when feminism rose up—Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer—many were proud to finally decipher and talk about what was wrong with the treatment of women in our time. There are explicitly “feminist” movements and organizations that never faded from the scene, in spite of decades of stigma: NOW, MS Magazine.

The rise of women’s studies (facilitated by The Feminist Press) means we are busy documenting the “missing stories” about women in history. (The first college course was in 1969.) Stories about women whose research was denied and stolen by Nobel Prize winners, whose mathematical skills were critical in national achievements (“Hidden Figures”), women who trained as astronauts and were denied their chance by men like John Glenn (who thought he deserved one more mission at 70-years, over any woman).

Even though we are half the population of the world, we need to list the leading lights just to remember they exist. See the “ten most famous” and even databases of names. As if, THERE ARE NOT MANY, my dear, who “make it.”

Organizations who don’t use “the word” are busy challenging laws, practices, concepts: National Women’s Law Center, AAUW, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and Women’s National History Museum campaign, for example.

Here’s my point: it is really about respect and dignity for women, and opportunity. We can call it a wish for “equal rights.” It’s a protest against stereotypes, behavior, laws, and social conventions that limit women and push them into lesser-paid, subordinate roles. That insult them and exclude them from power and achievement. Steer them only to the roles of the nurturing servant and the sex-mate.

Our wish for respect is NOT inconsistent with the wish for nurturing, motherhood, femininity, or LOVING MEN. It means: just like men, women want to live free of harassment, free of being reduced to being a sex servant, free from being pressured to be a near SLAVE in a highly restricted role in society. We want choice in procreation, in managing the marvelous role of motherhood. And we have brains just like men who want power and complexity at work.

What the anti-feminists want, is to make this wish AWFUL. They say, Girls: Stop protesting, stop complaining about the insults, the lower pay, the lack of advancement at work, the stupid pressure to be a man’s wet dream. It’s unpleasant. It interferes with the power and PLEASURE men have in feeling that they own women. It tarnishes the treasured image of the selfless, loving mother who wants nothing more, the giving lover who needs nothing for herself. JUST SHUT UP. Stay in the little box we’ve made for you.
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I think we need to reframe the “dialog.” Just like the politicians we know do. Talk about a “new normal” when a girl can grow up as free as a boy, and a woman can live like a man. (Without some of the garbage that goes with that…). Talk about respect, dignity, freedom of choice in life, and fair pay. Don’t use “the word” because there’s an automatic stupid response to it.

​A recent episode of “This is Us” on NBC (“Memphis”) shows an Afro-American man taking his biological father to Memphis. Randall was adopted and raised by a white couple. They enter a bar, and Randall meets, for the first time, people who are actual relatives of his besides his father. He’s drunk, and he exclaims to his wife on the phone: “Cousins! Cousins! I have cousins! First and second and other cousins!”

Randall grew up surrounded by love. Why is he ecstatic to find total strangers who are “distant cousins,” and blood kin?

Wasn’t the love of his adoptive parents enough? Why do adoptees crave a real blood relative?

Refugees are sometimes like adoptees—uprooted, often cut off from familiar people and immediate family, their “tribe.” They are scattered across the world, reduced to seek physical survival. Having a cozy home is moot, cousins are moot.

If you read about refugees in France who are unaccompanied minors—their parents sent these teenagers across thousands of miles of danger, so SOMEONE in the family might survive.

I have a lot of “virtual family”—people to whom I feel so spiritually connected that they feel like kin, as if I’ve known them all my life. Does it matter if we share DNA?

I think the shared DNA—“cousins, cousins”—is a primal identity. “Where you came from” and “who you are.”
But sometimes an adoptee or a love child reconnects with a biological parent and finds them alien, repulsive, or destructive to them. Unattractive.

Sometimes there are people in our family tree who seem to us awful, undesirable even as friends, immoral, toxic, unpleasant or just plain boring.

Does DNA trump everything? The assumption that “we are family” may not hold, emotionally and/or intellectually. It’s ONLY DNA, in some of those cases. We have nothing in common and we reject the assumption of likeness. “That’s not who I am or who I want to be.”

Many of my friends and I have gone into the search for ancestors. It is amazing and wonderful to find resonance, inspiration, and intrigue. People a century old who indeed look like us. People who did things that we do, who had habits we have, lived like we do, and even thought like we do. Similar struggles. It’s GREAT to call those people “family.” Those are welcome roots.

I asked myself, what are you looking for, in this roots searching? My answer: the feeling of belonging. Deep belonging. Likeness. Resonance.
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Instead of picturing family TREES we should picture biological ties as ROOT SYSTEMS. Some plants can have root systems covering hundreds of miles.  Millions of branch roots and billions of root hairs. That’s the genetic pool we’re in. They are the SAME PLANT. The parts that show above the ground—the expression—will vary depending on conditions. The “green shoots” are bound together underground. They might look alike. They can look different too. It feels good to be in it together, though.

Assessment

• Why do you want to downsize your stuff?
• How do you feel about doing it?
• Who else cares about it? How will they help or hinder you?
• What impact will it have on your life?
• What is your timeframe?
• How much do you want to reduce overall, ballpark?  (e.g., 10%, 50%, 25%)
• On a table, list the biggest types of stuff that are a problem.
  • Books
  • Papers & records
  • Furniture
  • Family toys and memorabilia
  • Clothes
  • Shopping stuff – extra towels, appliances, knicknacks
  • Kitchen things
  • Dishes and glasses
  • Tools
  • Food storage
  • Wall hangings, pictures
• Put a number (1 to 3) or draw a circle next to it for the SIZE relative to all your things. Which stuff is the biggest problem in terms of needing to downsize?  (1 = small, 3=large)
• Put one to three checks beside each circle for how easy it would be to part with some of the things in this group. (1=hard, 3=easy)
• Put a percentage next to the bubble for how much of this stuff you really should downsize, e.g., 10%, 25%.
• Draw a smiley face or a frown face for which type of stuff/bubble would get the most reward from someone else or the most resistance from someone else. E.g., “my spouse will never let me get rid of the furniture we inherited from his/her parent.”
• Now prioritize which type of stuff has THE BIGGEST PAYOFF and the EASIEST PATH for you. For example: “Reducing my books by 50% would allow me to free up living space and my spouse would be thrilled.”  Or, “My clothes take over 4 closets and I would have room for my new hobby if I reduced by 50%.”  Or, “Getting rid of all my tools is necessary for us to move from a house to an apartment.”
• Starting with the top priority, on a separate piece of paper, put a heading for the type of stuff (books, clothes, collectibles, etc.)  Underneath, identify options for disposal:  sell, donate, give away, throw away as trash, give to family, etc.  Put a star or two beside those that are really promising. Do this for anything that is a big part of your belongings and/or poses a problem.
•  Now under each priority group, estimate how much time you have to devote TO THIS GROUP of stuff, and how long it would take you without help.  E.g., two months, two weeks, a few days.  Identify any sources of help (my son/daughter would gladly help me sort through photos, my sister wants dishes and would help, I can hire a student to sort my books or papers, I can hire an organizer).  (Look at taskrabbit.com as a possible source of help with limited tasks.)
• Now look at all your priority groups, and identify: which ones are a HIGH PRIORITY, have various promising routes for disposal, and can be done quickly. RANK all your priority groups by these criteria.
• You now have an ACTION PLAN.  You can see how long it will take to tackle your problem of stuff. You can see how much it will cost you in time and/or money and/or help.

Action Plan

• Get a calendar.  Make a timeline starting now. Enter each group of stuff as a header.  Under each header, identify the options for disposal that you identified before (sell, donate, etc.).
• For each group, draw a line or fill in cells for weeks/months for the amount of time you estimated it would take to tackle the group. After you’ve finished one group, put the next group on the calendar.
• Communicate your Action Plan with others who care about you and your stuff to enlist their support. Ask them to commit to supporting you, morally or really, in keeping on target.

​GET GOING!

• Mark off progress on the timeline.  E.g., Books donated to library.

​We are indeed blessed and having a charmed life if we are physically and emotionally comfortable, have access to education and jobs, and are safe from discrimination and oppression.

How many people is that?

On the news last night, a UN official said that 1% of the world’s population was in “refugee status.” I thought, “how close to home is this experience?”

I’m foreign-born, an immigrant. In the USA, 13% of the population is like me. That’s more than one in ten.
Other countries have more foreign-born immigrants: Australia has 27% of population, Canada 20%. Europe is at 7%.

That’s a lot of “displaced people.” Some fled certain death, economic disaster, hardship, oppression.

How many of us are familiar with the “immigrant experience?” A majority of the population identifies as within three generations of an immigrant. Those within three generations may be actually as high as 75% of the population.

You’ll be encouraged that second-generation Americans do very well, almost catching up with “natives” in many respects.  That’s almost miraculous—and explains why a LOT of people want to come to the USA.

Remember “foreign-born” can mean: I don’t know the language, I have no house, I have no job or financial security, I don’t know how to get food-housing-jobs-healthcare-schooling. A huge learning curve in a foreign language. The days and months go by as you try to get out of poverty, send the kids to school, provide for the family.

Even so, for the second generation, median income and home ownership are CAUGHT UP with “natives.” And the percentage of college graduates EXCEEDS the rate for “natives.” Immigrants must be desperate for security and basic needs.

My parents were part of the 12 million people wandering around Europe right after World War II around 1945. I won’t repeat all the groups behind the numbers. They were all in misery over some reason they could not “go home” anymore.

There are other miseries besides being “displaced.” We could have the legacies of slavery and racism in our family experience. Native American mistreatments. Or, losing jobs and dropping into poverty, having to move and start over, for reasons other than national politics. “Food insecurity” which means you don’t have enough to eat, even though you may be born here.

There are about 1.5 million people seeking asylum in Europe now.
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The numbers seem to say: Don’t be cold-hearted about immigrants. In America, there is probably one in your family tree within three generations.

There is a movie genre I would call “the spouse gets alzheimers and dies.”  Or very close to it. My favorites:

Amour (2012)

Still Alice (2014)

Away from Her (2006)

Iris (2001)

Cherry Blossoms (2008)

They say that Hollywood is ageist and doesn’t think there is an audience for movies about older people.

(Pause for laughter and snide comments.)

Here are my current favorites for old farts and crones having a good and meaningful time. I don’t give you descriptions because you can find everything online, including movie trailers, if you google the title of the movie.
 
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

Ladies in Lavender (2004)

Land Ho! (2014)

Frankie and Grace (2015, Amazon Prime)

Elsa and Fred (2015)

I’ll See You In My Dreams (2015)

Whales of August (1987)

The Bucket List (2007)
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Quartet (2012)

Jeff’s grandchildren brought masks to our Seder, representing the ten plagues of Egypt. There was a set of finger puppets too.

According to the Book of Exodus, there were ten calamities threatened or inflicted by the God of Israel on the Egyptian Pharaoh, to persuade him to release the Israelites from slavery. It worked. The Pharaoh let these people go, and their exodus began.

Whether you think they are figurative or actual, the story is great. They are mostly “natural” disasters:

• water is turned into blood,
• hordes of frogs are unleashed,
• all the dust in the air becomes lice,
• swarms of flies attack people and livestock,
• horses, donkeys, camels, cattle, sheep goats, and even cats belonging to Egyptians are diseased,
• Egyptian men and their animals are covered with boils,
• there is a thunderstorm of hail and fire,
• a swarm of locusts consumes all the farm plants,
• the sky goes dark for three days shutting everything down,
• and the firstborn of the Egyptians are going to die.

I thought the masks were hilarious. I’m not Jewish and did not grow up with an annual recitation of the plagues. The stories are High Drama. Magnificent, Unimaginable Curses.

Of course the calamities are commensurate with the suffering of the Israelites, the slaves.

The pageant of this brings to mind Chinese New Year’s dragons and Tibetan demons: personifications of evil that become fodder for colorful festivals. Yes, the root story is frightful, sad, devastating. But the memorial can be fun.

Meanwhile, I thought: what are the plagues of our age? More precisely, what plagues has MANKIND WROUGHT on this Earth?

• Pollution (rivers, oceans, our garbage)
• Over-killing of edible animal life (fish)
• De-forestation and destruction of eco-systems needed by other species (reindeer, extinct species)
• Long-term poison in the form of pesticides and radioactive waste
• Hunting giant, noble animals so we can harvest one tiny piece of them (ivory, horns, shark fins)
• Subjecting sentient animals to experiments for their entire lives, for our cosmetics!
• Keeping sentient animals in captivity and confinement for our amusement or as slaves (zoos, circus)

I’ll call these the SEVEN HUMAN PLAGUES. If Mother Nature could speak: Stop destroying me and mine.

My wish: this becomes a theme for murals all over the world. Somebody holds a contest and comes up with a colorful template that children can execute on any sizeable wall.
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Also, somebody hold a contest for a set of masks and a set of costumes that can be hauled out for festivals (Earth Day?), to raise awareness of our need to STOP IT.

Update: The fundraising has begun, in order to organize a contest. PLEASE DONATE, so we can hold the contest. See https://www.generosity.com/community-fundraising/the-7-plagues-mural-contest