Bill Benson

October 29, 2020

Forty years ago, in 1980, Aaron Lansky was a 23-year old student, of Jewish heritage, living in Massachusetts, when he stumbled upon his life’s work and ambition, rescue all the books he could find, printed years before in Europe, but written in an almost forgotten language, Yiddish.

At that time, experts believed that only 70,000 Yiddish volumes remained in the world. “Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of Jewish immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children—only to be thrown away or destroyed.”

Jewish people who had lived for centuries along the Rhine River had spoken a jargon called Yiddish that combined Hebrew and Aramaic of the Old Testament with High German.

Lansky went to work, gathering a box or two of Yiddish books at a time. “He issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish books, and the response overwhelmed him.” He would receive each book, catalog it, place it on a shelf, and then when requested, ship it to a college, library, or private collector.

In 2004, Lansky published his book, “Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books.” He stated he had salvaged 1.5 million books, an incredible feat.

We turn now to another effort to salvage and preserve abandoned books.

In May of 1948, Israel declared itself a new country. Out of the despair of the Holocaust, the Jewish Zionists were determined to establish their presence upon their ancient land of millennium before.

War broke out that year. Fourteen months later, in July of 1949, the Israeli’s and the Arab countries signed an armistice that gave Israel all of the land promised to them in the British mandate, plus half of the land that the Mandate had allocated to the Palestinians.

In 1948, the year that Palestinians have since called Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” between 670,000 and 760,000 Palestinians were either expelled, or fled their homes during the chaos of war. With them, they carried their keys, hoping to return someday soon, and open the door to their home.

For most families that day never came. Israeli forces either refused to grant them permission to return, or if a fortunate few did return, they found their home and village bulldozed into rubble.

To this day a key and a keyhole symbolize a Palestinian Arab families’ loss.

One thing that most families had to leave behind was their collection of books.

The Israeli government, plus the staff of the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University, plus Israeli army soldiers together laid their hands on some “30,000 books, manuscripts, and newspapers that the Palestinian residents of western Jerusalem left behind.”

“They also gathered another 40,000 to 50,000 books from the cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Nazareth, and other places.”

From the perspective of the Israelis, these dutiful clerks were fulfilling a good deed, preserving the Palestinians Arabs’ abandoned property, safekeeping the books from looters and thieves, with the intention of giving them back to the rightful Arab owners when identified, a complicated task.

The Palestinian Arabs see it different; the Israeli authorities confiscated their books, stole their culture’s base, and pushed aside their right to own and retain their property, their books.

In 2010, Gish Amit, an Israeli scholar, published a well-researched article in the “Jerusalem Quarterly,” Ownerless Objects? The Story of the Books the Palestinians left behind in 1948.

Amit writes, “as the project was underway, I imagine the first seeds of hesitation, pangs of conscience and misgivings began to sprout: are the books ours? What should we do with them?

“Are we looting the books or only keeping them safe? If we return the books to their rightful owners, how much should we charge for our efforts?”

Unbiased observers believe that if not for the Israeli’s efforts, the books would have perished.

Most of the books reside still in an Israeli library, awaiting a fair and equitable solution.

Gish writes, “Israel’s collection of Palestinians’ books marks the transformation of a lively and dynamic Palestinian culture into museum artifacts. The Palestinians’ books were placed within the shrine of Israeli libraries, fossilized on the shelves – accessible and at the same time lifeless.”

Aaron Lansky saved 1.5 million Yiddish books, but he passed them on to whoever requested them. The Israeli’s saved tens of thousands of the Palestinians’ books, but they remain in an Israeli library, standing on a bookshelf.

Bill Benson

October 2, 2020

Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the right word and the wrong word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Some writers choose big words to fill up a typewritten page. For example, William F. Buckley, Jr. built an extensive vocabulary and pulled it out often to impress his readers. He once wrote, “I react against declamatory rudeness that is coercive in intent.” Now what did he mean?

I think he meant to say that when he hears another person using rude words, or trying to bully someone else, he reacts, but how he reacts, he does not say. Does he get mad or stubborn or dismissive? His big words leave the reader wondering.

Other writers choose small words, single syllable words to great affect. For example, Amy Tan in her 1989 novel, “The Good Luck Club,” wrote, “The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish!whish!whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.”

The writing coach Roy Peter Clark, in his book, “Writing Tools,” said that Tan used in that passage, “Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word, “accepted,” of three syllables. Even the book title works this way.”

Imagine, if you can, a story of one syllable words. “The cat ran at the dog. The dog scratched at the door. The man let the dog in. The cat hissed at the door.” Interesting, but it sounds child-like.

We can display to the world our mastery of the English language by choosing a big, obscure word, or we can display our humility by selecting a small well-known word.

William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, in their classic book, “The Elements of Style,” listed a series of rules for better writing. Number fourteen is “Avoid fancy words,” a rule that Mr. Buckley ignored.

A writer though who mixes in big and little words, long and short sentences, gives her writing variety, that dash of spice that readers crave.

Also, most writing teachers, including Strunk and White, encourage their students to avoid the passive voice when constructing a sentence, but even the best writers fall into the passive voice trap.

For example, Horace Coon, in his book, “Speak Better, Write Better English,” wrote, “Good writing is frequently a matter of rewriting,” I would transform Coon’s sentence into, “The more you polish your sentences and words, the better you will write.” “She reworks her stories often; her writing sparkles.

Good writers rework their sentences often, and they work hard to expand their vocabularies.

The dictionary publishing company Merriam-Webster publishes wall calendars, a word a day for each day of the year. The seven words for this week include: Dead hand, the oppressive influence of the past; scape goat, one that bears the blame for others; elysian, delightful; junket, a trip made by an official at public expense; enmity, a mutual hatred or ill will; vaudeville, stage entertainment; and lackadaisical, lacking life, spirit or zest.

Just for fun, a writer could try to work those seven words into a single sentence, although five syllables reside inside “lackadaisical.”

The better writers enjoy phrase and sentence construction. For example, Mark Twain would match two words, first an adverb and then an adjective, and both words would begin with the same letter.

He would describe a trivial idea as “stupefyingly simple,” or a human calamity as “pathetically pitiable,” or a rebellious adolescent as “blissfully belligerent,” or a gem as “delightfully divine.”

Roy Peter Clark had this to say about good writing.

“Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the product of imagination and craft, a created effect. Remember that clear prose is not just sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose, a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of critical thinking.”

In other words, a writer can mix up big and small words, long and short sentences, avoid the passive voice, write in the active voice, and still lead readers down the wrong path. What she or he misses is that critical thinking part.

The literary agent A. O. Scott wrote, “The real culture war or revolution is between the human intellect, and its human enemies: sloth, cliché, and pretension.” Sloth refers to laziness, cliché is passing around stock phrases, and pretension is an artful form of lying or deception.

If you co-join all three words into a single idea, you will find yourself in a world where unthinking people repeat a series of conventional, trite, or unconsidered opinions or sentiments.

We need good writers who display the courage and talent to punch holes in this world’s series of half-baked, even outrageous ideas, using an expanded vocabulary, and an active voice.

by William H. Benson

October 15, 2020

In June of 1967, Israel’s army captured the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanians. Although Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, after brokering a deal with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, “its occupation of the rest of the territory seized in 1967 is ongoing.”

The West Bank is a landlocked strip of land, 2,263 square miles, sandwiched between Jordan to the east, and Israel to the north, west, and south. It is the geographic center of a fierce struggle that pits Jew against Muslim, Israeli against Palestinian, Hebrew against Arabic, and western against eastern.

Until the Jewish people, mainly Zionists from Europe, showed up out of nowhere early in the 20th century to claim the Palestinians’ land as their own, the Palestinians lived as they had for centuries, even millennium, back to the first century.

Often, they lived in stone huts. They farmed citrus trees, tended goats and sheep, rode mules on paths and trails, and built terraces on the steep hillsides, where they planted their now ancient olive trees. In a village, there was a small aristocracy: large landowners, lawyers, doctors, and shop-owners.

Palestinian society was agricultural, rural, and pastoral. The people loved to hike their hills, tend their trees that bore fruit each year, January through April, and watch over their flocks. In May 1967, 1 million Palestinians lived in West Bank villages; today there are 3 million.

Imagine the Palestinians’ shock when the powerful Israelis took control of the entire West Bank. The Palestinians now say that their land is “occupied.” It is, and they have no voice in its government.

In May 1967, no Israelis lived in the West Bank; today 430,000 Israelis live in 238 towns and villages, called “settlements,” scattered across the West Bank. A better word though is “subdivision,” an area of homes similar to those you see outside of Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas.

The Israelis select a site for a subdivision, and bring in bull-dozers to knock off the hills’ tops and flatten them into a level plain with a gorgeous view some distance away, of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, or the Mediterranean. In their rush, they crush the crude stone huts, and uproot the olive and fruit trees.

They then construct cookie-cutter homes, each with a red-clay tile roof, white walls, a garage, perhaps a swimming pool in the back yard, green grass and palm trees in the front, and paved streets. They construct a three-meter high wall around the subdivision.

The Palestinians resent how the Israelis took their land, homes, farms, and olive trees. What people would not feel outraged by this theft of land, and by its dramatic transformation?

The Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh wrote in his memoir, “Strangers in the House,” “My life then was shaped by the contrast between the meagerness of life in Ramallah and the opulence of life in the city across the hills. There were daily reminders of that cataclysmic fall from grace.”

The Israelis construct highways that allow West Bank settlers to commute back into Israel, to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, where they work in offices or in factories, but the Israeli authorities do not permit the Palestinians to drive on these same highways.

Instead, the Israelis have set up numerous check points, where the lines are long and the Palestinians are forced to wait for hours before gaining permission from the armed guards to continue their journey on side roads. As a result, the Palestinians have a difficult time moving about the West Bank.

Sewage from a subdivision atop a flattened hill can flow down into the wadi, the Arabic name for the deep gorge betwixt the hills. The waste kills the trees, and poisons the natural water wells.

Ariel is a typical subdivision, first established in 1978. It lies 20 kilometers into the West Bank and 34 kilometers west of the Jordan border. In the 1980s and 1990s, some 6,000 Soviet immigrants settled in Ariel, due to the cheap housing and Israeli government incentives to move there.

Today, Ariel claims 20,540 residents, several shopping centers, two industrial zones, a library, and a modern campus for Ariel University. It is the fourth largest subdivision in the West Bank, and is not going away anytime soon.

One writer wrote, “It is harder and harder to imagine that someday the Israeli government will evacuate these settlers.”

The subdivisions are controversial, because “they are Jewish communities on land that Palestinians want to become a part of a future Palestinian state,” but how?

Yes, other differences exist between Jew and Arab, between Israeli and Palestinian, between rich and poor, between powerful and powerless, between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, but it is the land grab and the discriminatory land policy that galls the Palestinian people even today.

Next time, in these pages, a further discussion on Palestinians and Israelis.

Bill Benson

September 17, 2020

Ian Fleming divided his 7th James Bond novel, “Goldfinger,” into three parts: “Happenstance,” “Coincidence,” and “Enemy Action.” Three times Bond intervened in Auric Goldfinger’s diabolical plans to enrich himself, and after the third time, Goldfinger had had enough. He seized 007.

“Mr. Bond,” Goldfinger said, “they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’”

Coincidences startle us. Two people discover that they have the same birthday, or they enjoy an unplanned meeting in a distant city, or they feel as if they have already experienced a present situation.

For example, in my ninth grade math class, our teacher asked each of us to say aloud the month and day of our birth. We discovered that I and another boy shared a day in September, two other boys shared a day in March, and our teacher and a girl shared a day. Three matches in a class of 30 students.

Julie Beck, in her article Coincidences and the Meaning of Life, dated Feb. 23, 2016, said, “The question is how many people need to be in a room before there’s a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer is 23.”

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both shared a death-day. Both died on July 4, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of their vote in Congress to approve Jefferson’s written Declaration of Independence.

A girl I know, and am most fond of, was born on Sept. 9, 1990, thirty years ago this month. When she turned 9, the day was 9-9-99.

Three, almost four, years ago, in Jan. of 2016, my wife and I were in Denver celebrating her birthday with our daughter and her boyfriend. We were riding a bus on the 16th Street Mall, when a random guy struck up a conversation with us.

Mr. Random looked at the boyfriend, and said, “I can guess the month and day of your birth.” “Oh!” Mr. Random first guessed November, and that was right. Then, he guessed the 17th, and again he was right. I am still wondering how Mr. Random performed that magic trick. Just two lucky guesses?

It is startling though when two people happen to meet each other in a distant city, without either knowing that the other would visit that city at that time, then.

Julie Beck says, “When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you’ll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point.”

For example, the last time I was walking around Disneyland, I happened to see a lady I know from Sidney, Nebraska. Of all the people milling around there, I saw her. Surprise!

Another example. Years ago, in December, my wife and I were enjoying the sights and sounds in a cold New York City. After a guided bicycle tour of Central Park, and to warm ourselves, we bought admission tickets to the Museum of Natural History, across the street from Central Park.

There, on the first floor, I looked across and through the mass of people and saw my wife’s cousin, Darrell, from Akron, Colorado, along with his wife and daughter. They looked at us. We looked at them. He said, “You’ve got to be kidding!” Each of us felt the jolt of surprise that connected us.

Harold Bloom, Yale’s onetime preeminent literary critic, now deceased, loved a quote from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” who said, “It is a good thing for a man to bear himself with equanimity, for one is constantly keeping appointments that one never made.”

Yes, we keep appointments, both kinds: those that we never made, and those that we have made.

School, in one style or another, has now resumed. A student can read and read and read, or not.

Those who are determined to prepare themselves today with a superior education are making an appointment with a better version of themselves, far into the future. They feel that jolt of surprise when they connect ideas, thoughts, words, writers, and characters, all through reading and listening.

Those who fail to prepare themselves for that appointment with their future self are making an appointment with disappointment and disillusion.

General Norman Schwarzkopf once said, “You can either exercise self-discipline now, or you can suffer regrets later.”

One last story. In early Sept. of 1972, I begged time off drilling wheat for a neighbor on the Saturday before Labor Day, in order to attend a church camp that weekend in the mountains. There, I met lots of young people, like myself, about to start college that fall.

Eleven years later, in 1983, I attended a singles club meeting, and there I met a girl who I learned had attended that same church camp 11 years before. Back then though, she was young, only 14, and was there to help the cook that weekend, washing dishes, wiping down tables. I remembered her.

In Sept. of 1986, I married her.

Bill Benson

September 8, 2020

On a calm summer day in 1823, in northwest South Dakota, a mountain man named Hugh Glass experienced absolute terror when he stumbled across a she-grizzly bear and her two cubs. He was alone. She stood on her hind legs, swatted his rifle away, then his pistol, but he held tight to his knife.

Few of us will ever experience first-hand a fright of this magnitude, a life-and-death wrestle with a hot, mad mother grizzly bear.

The author Federick Manfred described in his book “Lord Grizzly” how at that instant Hugh’s sense of time felt twisted, distorted. “Time stiffened, poured like cold molasses.” “Time poured slow–yet was fast.” “Time poured slow–yet space was quick.”

That may be true, but we will leave those thoughts to the physicists.

I know that when I was young, time moved slow. I was seven for a long, long time, then eight for a long time, then nine, and so on, but in my 30s, time gathered speed, ran ahead, and now it sprints and refuses to slow up. For human beings, time’s speed is relative to our age.

Yet, time slows down when confronted with a distasteful job. For some, work at a desk is a torture, for others work outside is painful. When we dislike work, the hours seem sluggish, stuck in low gear.

In recent days, a guy explained to me that he discovered at an early age he had little aptitude for work on his dad’s farm. He disliked the smell of grease, oil, diesel, gasoline. He groaned when he saw dust covering iron machinery, when he heard the tractor’s roar, when he felt the heat and wind.

Instead, he trained for work inside, at a desk, more his style, and has enjoyed a successful career.

Yet others would find that species of work misery-producing. A desk, a chair, a computer, pencil lead smudges, legal pads, eraser, files, spreadsheets, and a telephone would cause some to suffer an anxiety attack, a breakdown. They would run outside, flee the scene, break free.

The calendar says that Labor Day just recently passed. Our challenge as workforce employees is to find work that we enjoy, that we feel attracted to, that motivates us to strive with all of our strength, like wrestling with a grizzly bear. You and I feel better after we have worked hard.

When our skills, training, and inner desires match our work, time speeds up, shifts into high gear.

Shakespeare thought about this correlation between aptitude, work, and time. He wrote, “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.” “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.”

He also observed the regrets that men or women feel, after they have abused time. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” “We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.” “We have seen better days.” “O call back yesterday, bid time return.” We can ask, but we can never get back one yesterday.

Shakespeare noticed time’s connection to setting wrongs right. “And thus the whirligig of the time brings in his revenges.” “Time is the justice that examines all offenders.”

He also pointed out that time inflicts wounds on those who commit crimes. Macbeth murders the Scottish king Duncan to seize the throne for himself, but the guilt he feels racks his conscience. He loses his wife, Lady Macbeth, who pushed him into the crime, and now he mourns the mess he created.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death.”

Macbeth sees little hope when he peers forward into his future days, only a series of tomorrows that step forward, “in a petty pace.” It is no wonder that he laments that, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”

Time is the substance of life. We measure it out in minutes, hours, and days. Weekdays we give our eight, nine, or more hours to our employers, our bosses, and in return we receive back dollars that we exchange for food, clothing, and shelter for our families. It is life’s deal. We work, then we eat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson noticed that over time, as the present slips into the past, we collect things called memories that accumulate together into a body of thought called wisdom. He said, “The years teach much which the days never know.” In other words, he says, wisdom grows out of experience.

As for Hugh Glass, he stabbed that she-grizzly again and again until she dropped dead atop him. To survive, he crawled 160 miles, his arms pulling his body forward, his legs useless, back to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River, below Pierre. Hardest work ever. Time poured slow for poor Hugh Glass.

Hope you enjoyed your day off from work on Monday, Labor Day.