Bill Benson

December 23, 2020

The Kolyma Highway begins at the port of Magadan on Russia’s Pacific Ocean, heads north some distance, but then veers to the west, and ends at Yakutsk, a city of 311,000 people, deep in a Siberian wilderness called the taiga. Travelers see only spruce and fir trees in every direction.

All together, this highway of gravel, mud, ice, and pavement that cuts through the endless forest extends across 2012 kilometers, or 1260 miles, of the Russian landscape.

Early in the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, decided to build the Kolyma Highway with conscripted slave labor, prisoners convicted back east on trumped-up charges. Each received years-long sentences, and each were transported by railroad or ship to Magadan.

Stalin sent both men and women to the prison camps that dotted the full length of the highway. His stated purpose for the highway was to extract gold, tin, and uranium from the mines, but his actual purpose was to bully, intimidate, and terrify the Soviet Union’s people into submission.

The Kolyma Highway was a make-work project, “Stalin’s citadel of repression.”

Andrew Higgins, a reporter at The New York Times, wrote a recent article on the Kolyma Highway, that appeared in the Sunday, Nov. 22 edition. Higgins quotes from Varlam Shalamov’s short story collection, “Kolyma Tales.”

“There are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather.”

Historians estimate about one million men and women worked on that highway throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and that tens of thousands of men and women died there. Either guards shot them, other prisoners murdered them, the cold froze them, or the relentless work killed them off.

A survivor named Antonina Novosad recalls “how a fellow prisoner was shot and killed by a guard for wandering off to pick berries just beyond the barbed wire. Prisoners buried her there. This is how we worked. A camp is a camp.” Russians now call the Kolyma Highway “the road of bones.”

In the 1960s, Stalin’s replacement, Nikita Krushchev, dismantled the prison camps, but the highway remains. Traffic is sparse. People have deserted the towns. “Hundreds of miles separate the road’s few inhabitants.” The mines are shuttered. The factories are crumbling. Memories are fading.

Evidence of the mighty struggle prisoners endured when they built the highway have vanished.

Some distance off the highway, but near its midpoint, is the town of Oymyakon, “the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world. Called the Pole of Cold, its inhabitants suffer from an average January temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Although officials set the workday at ten hours, guards often worked the prisoners a full 12 hours, even on Christmas Day, considered “just another workday.” When Soviet officials in Moscow first came to power, they outlawed all religious celebrations, including Christmas.

In the winter of 2018, a young Moscow blogger named Yuri Dud traveled the 2012 kilometers of the Kolyma Highway in a van, and along the way he heard people’s stories. He decided upon this adventure, because, he said, “nearly half of young Russians had never heard of Stalin-era repression.”

Early in his two-hour video, entitled, “The Birthplace of Our Fears,” he comes across a wooden star, no bigger than three feet across, wired with colored electric light bulbs. A Kolyma Highway historian named Rostislav Kuntsevich explained to Yuri.

“They usually put stars like this one atop factory roofs. The star was wrapped in red fabric. If the prisoners met the quota on time, the star lit up with a red light in the evening.

“When they did not meet the quota, additional work hours were ordered, and the star wouldn’t light up. So prisoners knew they had hours of work ahead of them.”

Imagine the hopelessness that the people dispatched to the Kolyma Highway must have felt their first day on the job. Cold, work, beatings, and hunger stretched far ahead of them into a bleak future.

Imagine the sheer agony they felt on Christmas Day. No family gathering. No turkey or ham meal. No respite from the work. No presents. No smiles of joy. No phone calls with loved ones. No mercy.

Joseph Stalin’s most famous quote, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

In the New Testament, shepherds reported that they heard angels sing the words, “Peace on earth. Goodwill to all men.” A message of hope, of a better life, of rest and comfort, of joy to the world.

Yet, in Stalin’s Siberia, Christmas surrendered to hopelessness.

To my faithful readers, at this season, I wish each of you a Merry Christmas.

Bill Benson

December 11, 2020

An interesting anecdote appears in Barack Obama’s recently-published memoir, “A Promised Hope.”

He recalls the day, a Friday, Oct. 9, 2009, when he was stunned to learn that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s members, meeting in Oslo, Norway, announced that they had selected him.

When told of the honor, Obama was incredulous. “For what?” he asked.

The committee’s members explained that they had selected him, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people, and for his promotion of nuclear nonproliferation.”

They were most impressed that he kept a campaign promise “to give a major address to Muslims from a Muslim capital during his first few months as president.” On June 4, 2009, he had stood in the Major Reception Room at Cairo University, in Cairo, Egypt, and gave his “New Beginning Speech.”

In it, he talked about “nuclear weapons, the Israeli / Palestinian dispute, democracy, religious freedom, economic development, and rights of women.”

Critics of the Nobel Committee’s choice, pointed out that Obama had occupied the White House for just eight and a half months, and had produced “no significant foreign policy achievement.” Certain critics went so far as to demand that the committee retract the selection.

The American linguist, Noam Chomsky, said, “In defense of the committee, we might say that the achievement of doing nothing to advance peace places Obama on a considerably higher moral plane than some of the earlier recipients.”

Obama was the fourth U. S. President to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Others included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.

Barack Obama and his wife Michelle flew to Oslo, and there, on Dec. 10, 2009, he accepted the diploma, the medal, and the prize money, about $1,000,000, and he delivered his Nobel lecture. He later made good on his promise to give all the prize money to various charities.

Perhaps, the strangest Nobel Prize ever announced though occurred on Oct. 13, 2016, when the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature gave the award to Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

This was the first time that a musician and a songwriter had won this distinguished prize.

Critics pointed out the obvious, that although Dylan had written memorable songs—Blowin’ in the Wind, and Like a Rolling Stone—he could not approach the level of talented fiction and non-fiction writers, who have won the prize in past years.

That list includes Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison.

A critic said the committee would have made a better choice in the Beatles, and another quipped that “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs. Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars.”

For two weeks Dylan said nothing, even refused to take the Swedish Academy’s phone calls, but then he told a journalist that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was “amazing, incredible.”

In November, Dylan informed the Academy that he would not travel to Stockholm on Dec. 10, to receive the prize, because of “pre-existing commitments,” but that he would do so later.

On April 2, 2017, Bob Dylan did appear in Stockholm, met with the Swedish Academy in a private ceremony, and received his diploma and gold medal, stamped with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, “And they who bettered life on Earth by their newly found mastery.”

The Nobel Prize Committee though gave him six months after the Dec. 10 date to give his Nobel Lecture, a prerequisite for claiming the prize money, again about $1,000,000.

He recorded his speech in Los Angeles, California, on June 4, 2017, and sent it to the Committee, and in it, he mentioned three books: “Moby Dick,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and “The Odyssey.”

Toward the end of his speech, he asks, “So what does it all mean? If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs, and I’m not going to worry about it—what it all means.”

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. I hope some of you can listen to these lyrics.”

Barack Obama and Bob Dylan. Neither could quite believe that they had won a Nobel Prize.

Bill Benson

November 26, 2020

The first people to live in eastern Massachusetts were the Native Americans. A tribe called the Wampanoags lived on that rocky coast for perhaps 10,000 years.

The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620, and aboard that ship were about 35 people who belonged to a small but extreme religious faction called the Pilgrims.

These were Separatists, Englishmen and women who chose to illegally separate themselves from the Church of England. If not for the Wampanoags, more Pilgrims would have starved that first winter.

A third group arrived in eastern Massachusetts, in 1630. Called the Puritans and led by Jonathan Winthrop, this religious faction settled 40 miles north of Plymouth, at Boston. These Puritans chose to remain within the Church of England and purify it from within, rather than separate from it.

The Puritans wanted to remove all traces of the Catholic Church from England’s Anglican Church: services spoken in Latin, a priests’ vestments and fine clothing, and elaborate churches with shrines and statues. Instead, the Puritans believed in simplicity and plainness in their worship and churches.

Roger Williams and his wife Mary arrived in Boston on February 5, 1631, part of the Great Puritan Migration to what became a New England. Winthrop had known Williams back in old England and considered him a young Puritan minister, one of their own.

Winthrop and the other Puritans leaders offered Roger a prime position as Teacher in the Boston church. Imagine their shock when Roger turned them down. He said that first the Puritans had to renounce all association with the Anglican Church, and beg God for forgiveness forbeing Anglicans.

After quizzing Roger, the Puritans discovered he had converted to Separatism.

Roger though took the principle of Separatism to an extreme degree, far further than did the Pilgrims. He permitted people to worship as they please, the idea of liberty of conscience, but he did not want to join in worship, in the same room, with any others who did not believe as he believed.

He went so far as to refuse to pray—an act of worship—before his meals, with his wife Mary.

After months of debate, the Puritans banished this ultimate Separatist, Roger Williams, who fled to Narragansett Bay, where he established a new colony, Providence at Rhode Island.

This early colonial American history demonstrates how ideologies change over time. In America, the Native Americans’ religion yielded to England’s Christian faith. Out of the ancient Israelites’ Old Testament faith came the Christian faith that Europe adopted in the form of the Catholic church.

Reformers of the 16th century, like England’s King Henry VIII, split apart from the Catholic Church. Then, the Puritans sought to reform the Church of England from within, but the Separatists, like William Bradford and Roger Williams, wanted to institute a new and purer church.

Confusing it is, but most ideologies change over time. A challenge to the ideology arises, and the ideology can respond in one of three ways: 1) disapprove and avoid any change, 2) compromise with the change, or 3) separate from the change and begin a new thought, a new school of thinking.

Hegel, Engels, and Karl Marx, described a “dialectic method,” as a means to seek truth. First, present a thesis, then submit a contradictory thought called an antithesis, and then propose a synthesis.

Socrates pursued truth in like manner. “He states a proposition, finds a contradiction to it, and, correcting it in the light of this contradiction, finds a new contradiction. This continues indefinitely.”

In most cultural arenas—in religion, politics, literature, science, music, etc.—there are schools of thought, then a contradictory school, and then either a melting together or a further splintering apart of the several schools. Branches can join together to form a single river, or they can split into streams.

For example, in music, there is classical, big band, hymns, rock, country, disco, rap, bebop, or a host of others. Sometimes one music style remains solitary, but at other times, it will borrow from another.

All of this change in ideology can confuse and disorient the wisest people. How to keep it all straight? What to believe? How to identify the truth? What school of thought creates the greater good?

In politics and religion, the sponsors of one school dislike those of another, and vice versa. Liberal vs. conservative. Fights commence, battles erupt, and wars drag out. When the smoke clears, one ideology will claim a win, but only temporary, until the next challenge.

No matter the ideology that our minds might subscribe to at a given point in time, our natural bodies still demand food at regular hours every day. It is then that we, like the Pilgrims, set aside the ideology and for a moment feel grateful and thankful.

Have a great Thanksgiving this week!

Bill Benson

November 12, 2020

Only Palestinians live inside the Gaza Strip, a skinny stretch of flat coastal plain on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, sandwiched between Egypt and Israel. Gaza is only 25 miles long, and an average of four miles wide. Yet, 1.85 million Palestinians call it home.

It is densely populated. It is impoverished. It suffers from 44% unemployment. Electrical power is now down to four hours per day. It is on, then it is off, a daily reminder that the Israeli’s control the flow of diesel fuel into Gaza that powers the often-bombed electrical power plants.

In 2005, the Israeli government dismantled their settlements inside the Strip, marched its military out, and then built a wall around the Gaza Strip’s perimeter. The Israeli Defense Force soldiers shoot at anyone who dares to step inside the buffer zone, or who sails their boats more than three nautical miles from shore.

If a Palestinian happens to escape Gaza, the Israeli government may not let him or her return.

For example, last summer, a Palestinian named Nidel sold his coffee shop in Berlin, Germany, because he wanted to visit his family in Gaza. When he arrived at the border at Erez, the Israeli authorities refused to assure him that he could leave once he crossed the border and entered into Gaza.

Nidel would not take the risk. He gave up trying to see his family, and returned to Europe.

Unlike the Palestinians on the West Bank, those inside Gaza see no Israeli settlements atop the hills, see no soldiers, experience no daily humiliations at numerous checkpoints, but one author, Mario Di Cintio, who visited the Gaza Strip, said, “Gaza is less under an occupation, than under a siege.”

In more blunt terms, the Palestinian people say, “We live in a prison.” Most cannot leave.

“Gaza is a place where people measure time in terms of wars rather than in years.” There was a First Intifada 35 years ago, a Second Intifada 20 years ago, and then, in 2007, two Palestinian political parties, Hamas and Fatah, clashed in a bloody war over who would control Gaza.

Once Hamas won the war, its leaders declared war on Israel. Again and again, they have launched rockets and flaming balloons over the wall, across the border, to inflict death and injury upon the Israeli’s. As a result, the Israeli Defense Forces have launched attacks upon Hamas, deep into Gaza.

There was Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in November of 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in July of 2014. In this latter Operation, Israeli forces crushed 20,000 houses, killing 500 children, caught in the crossfire or buried under concrete rubble.

And now coronavirus has gained a foothold among this most crowded people.

And yet, for all the horrible news, people are people. Children are children. They adapt.

Abdel-Rahman Al-Shantti sings rap songs in a rapid-fire, flawless American form of English that has gained worldwide attention online. He sings, “Some things will never change. Some things will stay the same, but when it’s said and done, Palestine will still remain.” He is 11 years old.

Gaza children participate in the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a non-profit organization that citizens began in 1989, during the First Intifada. Tamer sponsors literacy programs, writing workshops, public art projects, storytelling events, and an annual reading campaign each April.

Another Tamer program, called “Baba Read to Me,” encourages “parents, especially fathers, to read to their children.”

In addition, Tamer asks children and youth to knock on doors to collect used books from their neighbors. Marcello Di Cintio says, “It is a sort of literary Halloween.” Tamer then sends the books to poorer neighborhoods to begin or augment a library.

The children also ask their adult neighbors if they have ever visited Jerusalem. If they have, they ask them to tell of their memories of the city. Di Cintio says, “The children write the stories down, so they can have a record of the city they love, but might never reach.”

Tamer also sponsors the “My First Book” program. One child writes a story. Another illustrates it. From the hundreds of stories received each year, judges select the 15 or so best stories, and publish them in an annual edition of “My First Book.”

Di Cintio says, “Taken together, the books offer a sort of child’s history of Palestine, as seen through the eyes of children.” They write of dinosaurs, lions, crocodiles, turtles, and olive trees.

“Sharouq writes of the day the sky over his village rained red mulberries.”

Di Cintio expresses some hope for Gaza’s next generation. He says, “songs, stories, art, and poems will bring more change than bullets, bombs, or politics. A people who read their stories and poems, who sing and dance their songs, cannot be defeated. They write themselves a continued existence.”

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.