Looking for an independent film maker

Visit www.hu.mtu.edu/~hlsachs and check out "Betrayal" for which Patzi Gil has done the film script. Shopping film scripts is not my area of expertise, but as an oft published author I have a long track record,a freelance since 1957. My books are listed at Amazon.com. What I'm looking for is anyone interested in the film script for "Betrayal." I'm in Portland at 503 299 4328. --Harley L. Sachs

My latest op ed

Are illegal immigrants the new Jews?

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Once you get over the weasel words used in the descriptions, you will see disturbing similarities between the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany and illegal immigrants (a.k.a. undocumented workers) in the United States today. It was a revelation to learn, from a public broadcasting program, that there are now 250 internment camps (concentration camps? Resettlement camps?) for illegal immigrants pending their deportation. These camps are operated not by the government but by private contractors just as many of our prisons are operated today by corporations.

Not all of the illegals interned in the camps were originally smuggled across the border from Mexico by “coyotes,” nor are they all Mexicans. Some are from Haiti, Cuba, Honduras, and other countries. Some came into the country on visitors visas and did not leave when the visas expired. Some have been in this country for years. Others were brought in as small children or infants and know no language but English. Yet they all fall into a single category and are subject to deportation.

The definition of who is a Jew has also been complicated. When I was growing up and had to fill in an occasional form, the category “nationality” might include Jewish. So were Jews a nation, as defined by the Soviet Union, a religion, or, as defined by Martin Luther, as a race? Even among Jews there is perpetual disagreement of who is “Jewish” enough to count.

In Catholic Spain during the 500 year Inquisition Jews had three options: convert to Christianity, be deported, or pretend to be Christian and risk death for Judaising. In Nazi Germany Jews were first encouraged to emigrate, but later were deprived of all civil rights, sent to relocation camps, then to death camps in the program to make the world Judenrein,  cleansed of Jews.

In this country there is now a program to make the USA cleansed of illegal immigrants. Internment camps and deportation are the program. At least we have not resorted to death damps, at least not yet.

 Our own history is similarly tainted. The New World was to be colonized in a program of Christian imperialism. In the early days of this country, some of the native peoples. a.k.a. Indians, were hunted as savages and exterminated. The survivors were deported from their ancestral lands and moved to “reservations.” Their children were forbidden to practice their traditional religion, speak their own language, or eat their ethnic foods. They were to be “saved,” converted to Christianity. Until the 1950’s the Native Americans were not even .U.S. citizens.

There is a parallel in the treatment of Jews in Europe. I once met a Holocaust survivor from Hungary. When he was born, Jews could not be citizens, but before his sisters were born, the law was changed. His sisters were officially Hungarian. As a stateless citizen, he was able to leave Hungary and go to Sweden. His sisters could not get exit visas and were trapped in Hungary under German occupation. While his father pleaded with Swedish authorities for visas for his sisters, they hid in various places to avoid a transport to the death camps. Only at the last moment, when already on the train of death, did the Red Cross get them off and on the way to freedom in Scandinavia.

Unlike the Jews the illegals here do not want to leave, they want to stay. If stopped for a minor traffic infraction, if a search of immigration records shows they are “undocumented” they are whisked off to an internment camp pending deportation.

On the base of the Statue of Liberty is the famous poem by the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, “Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry masses yearning to be free.” Before the gates of immigration were closed in the 1920’s almost anyone of good health could come to this golden shore, except, of course, if you were Chinese.

Emma Lazarus’s poetry not withstanding, the United States has a history of racism and intolerance, whether it be against blacks, Indians, Irish, Jews, or currently illegal immigrants of any race or religion. Maybe it’s time to have a new litmus test for who can stay: if you’ve worked here for two years and have no criminal record we need your talent and your labor. Welcome to America.

"Retribution" completed!

Hey, it's completred! That's not the same as finished, of course, for copy editing remains to be done and touch-ups as needed, but the sequel to "Betrayal" is complete. When it's actually done I'll set it up at lulu for paperbacks and at lulu, kindle, and nook for downloads. Since "Retribution" is a short novel at 52,000 words I can combine it later with the 70k word "Betrayal" and make it into one blockbuster novel.

I return to Michigan next Sunday (May 1) for a summer of work to get the house ready to sell. Will give away some of the libfrary. Anybody want a book?

wHO WE ARE AND WHY

Jews have a myriad of ways to find out just who is also a Jew. One is to ask “MOT?” as in “Member of the Tribe?” Other means of recognition are typically Jewish names beginning with K or C, as in  Kahn or Cohen, indicating that the person is a kohane, a member of the priestly caste. The Napoleonic rule that everyone had to have a surname gave Austrians an excuse to give the Jews insulting names, like Tannenbaum (Christmas Tree), and names related to the Jewelry business like Diamond, or Glass are also clues. And of course, dropping a Yiddishism can be a clue, though lots of Yiddish words have come into the mainstream of American English. Klutz, kibbitz, and so on.

All those help us identify with our tribal group. Though many Jews are assimilated, may not be religious, or are Jewish only through the choice of ethnic foods, we are all members of a tribe. This is a powerful identification.

Though a secular Jew myself, I was brought back into the fold, so to speak, on a visit to Leningrad’s synagogue. There, though I knew no Russian and little Hebrew, I felt a deep kinship with my co-religionists, my fellow tribal members. The Leningrad Jews lived under the scrutiny of the Secret Police. Here in free America we still have hate groups that wish us all dead. In spite of our differences, there is a deep cultural connection.

Whether we were at a death camp or not, we are all Holocaust survivors. Most of us had relatives who were murdered in the Shoah. We remember the Crusades, the expulsions, the pogroms, and the 500 year Inquisition.  We have a strong group identity as an oppressed people.

At times the hatred directed at us is bewildering. We do not force our religion or culture on anyone else. We are not missionaries. We mind our own business. As members of the tribe, we need to realize that the problem lies not within us, but in the minds of the oppressors. Why else would it take until this year for the Pope to declare that the Jews did not kill Jesus? No wonder we have to stick together.

We Jews are all survivors of a great calamity, bound not only by our religion but by our shared history. It is a long one, a great culture, a powerful religion. Awesome.

Getting into my right brain

MS# 1619brain/about 893 words

March. 24, 2011

Reply to:

Harley L. Sachs

Apt. 222

2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd.

Portland, OR 97201

503 299 4222

Serving the Right-Brained Students

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Being in your right brain isn’t the same as being in your right mind The left brain is supposed to be the part that deals with logic and language while the right brain deals with relationships, shapes, music, and intuition. To use an analogy, the left brain is the digital side, the right brain the analog.

As it happens, some people are mostly left brain, and a few others are right brain. What’s happening with public education today is that the right brain folks are being short changed. I’m referring to the wholesale cancellation of classes in art and music. This is a real travesty committed in the name of saving money.

With Michigan’s budget on the skids, threats against unions and tenure, cutbacks in state support for local schools, the first things cut are the analog right brain courses, the ones that nurture creativity and imagination.

To short change the right brained students is akin to not permitting Afghan girls to go to school.

What we should be cutting instead are expensive sports like football or swimming. We spent a million dollars to build a swimming pool for our Houghton High School when the swim team consists of only about twenty students. When my daughter was on the team they practiced at 8 AM at the university pool. It was a tough commute in the UP winter, but it worked. Recently the school had to build an equal access gymnasium for girls’ sports. Where is the academic achievement in that?

As for football, our school superintendent says that if it weren’t for school sports, lots of kids would simply drop out. Not that any of them could make careers in sports after graduation—if they graduated at all. If you must have a school sport, pick something cheap like soccer. All you need is a ball. No helmets, padding, or fancy uniforms. No swimming pool, either. That may be why soccer, known as football in the rest of the world, is played in the poorest countries.

This is not vocational training. We need plumbers and electricians more than football players. The odds of becoming a sports pro are about like the chances of winning the Powerball lottery. Not only are the numbers of sports professionals few, but those that play bone crushing sports like football die early deaths. Nobody ever died from music unless they swallowed a clarinet reed.

A quick check on Internet sources will bring on a discussion of the flaw in our public education. It favors left brain people with math, science, and language, the sort of courses that are the core of a college education. That curriculum should be no surprise since almost all public school teachers are college educated. They went through a left brain curriculum and think that’s the route to take.

That’s not fair to right brain people, and some of those students have a very difficult time in school. What’s a greater threat to those right brain kids is the tendency of school boards caught in a budget crunch to do away with music and art.

Those of us stuck in left brain activity are missing out.

Though few of us are exclusively locked into one side of the brain or the other, I realize that as an author and student of foreign languages I reside mostly in my left brain. Not entirely, though, for I don’t do sudoko or whatever that Japanese number puzzle is called, nor do I do crossword puzzles, having an inferiority complex because I don’t know many three letter words, horizontal or across other than “the” and “asp.”.

Though I sometimes doodle, my right brain was undernourished until I was faced with the challenge of illustrating one of my own books. The original illustrator was dead. I enrolled in an art class to switch on my right brain.

I wondered, “How the heck you switch on your right brain?”

The art teacher took an upside down line drawing and blocked off all but a small strip. All I got to see were a bunch of meaningless lines. The exercise was to copy that portion. By degrees, we progressed to more and more of the picture until it was clear what we were copying. The idea was to forget about what the picture was, but to concentrate on the shapes and the lines, right brain activity.

I was reminded that forgers are known to forge names by writing them upside down. That way they concentrate on the lines, not on the names.

Like a truck with a balky transmission, my brain clunked from left to right in very low gear. After two hours of this I was in a fog-like trance. It was a strange feeling, like being groggy after a heavy sleep, or recovering from an anesthetic after an endoscopic exam. Where was I?

The single lesson worked. Turns out I was never an exclusively left brain person after all. I often think in analogies, the comparisons similes and metaphors are made of. To be a whole brained-person you need to utilize both your left and right brain.

We need the creative abilities and imagination of right-brained students. If your school board is thinking of cutting art and music to save money, tell them to drop football instead. It costs many dollars per hour to maintain a swimming pool. Pencils, paper, paints and brushes are cheaper than helmets and padding, and though drawing shifted me into a temporary fog of right brain activity, it didn’t wreck my knees or cause a concussion.

Film script ready!

Amazing! Patzi Gil has done a screen play adaptation of my novel "Betrayal." Now we have to flog the script to Hollywood. The book is available as a custom printed paperback from lulu.com and an ebook download frfom lulu, kindle, and nook lists.

President Palin

When Palin is President you won't have to worry about death panels, but about death squads.