A Long Story of Trauma, Good Luck and Suspense – education and deconstruction.com

Butterfly

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The Book of the Week is “Butterfly, From Refugee to Olympian– My Story of Rescue, Hope, and Triumph” by Yusra Mardini, published in 2018.

The author was born in March 1998 in a southern suburb of Damascus, Syria. Since her father was a swimming coach, she took up the sport with a passion.

In 2011, people expressed anti-government sentiments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in what became known as the Arab spring. During that year, Syria caught the bug. By summer 2012, armed soldiers and operators of heavy artillery and tanks, harassed protestors on the streets of the southern districts of Damascus.

By 2015, any Damascus residents who had yet to flee the violence, could die any day at any time from a fire, a bomb, shrapnel, a bullet, or a rocket-propelled grenade, aside from the more common ways life can end. Conscription into the Syrian military began at age eighteen, so early on, numerous teenage boys had already left for Lebanon, Turkey or European countries.

The author and her older sister finally decided to leave in 2015. Since they were from a middle-class family and they had been raised in a capitalist environment, they had resources that increased their likelihood of survival more than ever before in world history.

Western Union allowed them access to cash sent from their father (who had gotten a job in the country of Jordan). They had smartphones all during their journey. They and their traveling companions used the internet and its GPS feature to find hotels, eateries, train stations, and the precise dividing lines of countries’ borders. They heard cautionary tales that taught them what to do and what not to do, through not only face-to-face gossip, but also online information-sharing.

At one point, the evacuation process became like a game: “That night, we sit in Burger King [in Budapest] as the square grows dark, posting selfies on Instagram and chatting online with friends back home.”

Nevertheless, psychologists in the U.S. would probably diagnose the author with PTSD and survivor’s guilt, given what she wrote of how she behaved and what she was thinking. Her lifelong dream was to be an Olympian swimmer. But after resuming her athletic training, she felt helpless to solve the various life-and-death issues involving the war in Syria, and affect the fates of the flood of refugees in the world.

Read the book to learn numerous additional details of Mardini’s suspenseful story, and how she was able to make a difference, despite her doubts and individual powerlessness.

A Man of Two Superpowers

The Book of the Week is “A Man of Two Superpowers, From Russia With Hope” by Yakov Grinshpun, published in 2022. This short, sloppily edited volume explained how and why the author came to the United States, and how he adjusted to living here.

Grinshpun was born in January 1944 in a part of Ukraine that became Romanian territory during WWII. The Russians “liberated” his shtetl in March 1944. He was brainwashed from birth into the Russian Communist system, with its extreme nationalism, “meetings, salutes, slogans, parades and uniforms.” He was taught that the Americans were evil. Imperialism and capitalism became conflated in his mind.

Grinshpun was branded as having Jewish nationality due to his ancestry, even though he had been born in Ukraine– a territory claimed by the Russians. His birth certificate and passport both said as much. This made him the target of discrimination in most major aspects of his life in the then-Soviet Union.

In February 1962, at age eighteen, the author had finally become eligible to vote for his country’s leader. Actually, voting was legally required! Even so, there was only one name on the ballot: Khrushchev’s.

At university, as a Jew, he was barred from studying medicine or law. The few jobs open to him involved mathematics or engineering. However, Grinshpun did get free tuition in exchange for three years’ worth of working for the State in the job chosen for him– physics teacher.

Even into his forties, the author had such limited knowledge about the collective mood of the people in his homeland. He wrote, “The Soviet Union endured for about seventy years, and as far as I could tell in [summer] 1989 would for many more years with its draconian policies.”

Most of the world was gobsmacked by the events of the next few months. Grinshpun explained the reason for his ignorance: infantilism imposed on him by the Soviet government: “… we were never responsible for much. We had a secure job and a place to live– both all but for life.” In exchange for having no worries, the people were conditioned to be blindly obedient to authority, and to lack critical thinking.

Nonetheless, there were a few independent thinkers such as Ayn Rand, who knew years in advance that Communism in the Soviet Union would eventually collapse. Even now, there are very few people in the world who have Rand’s kind of insight.

Instantaneous, global communications is actually part of the problem. It provides too much noise. Grinshpun was provided with too few perspectives and resources to see the big picture, given his time and place. Acquiring the ability to zero in on the correct signals takes decades of life-experience, reading nonfiction books, and for the most part, ignoring the idiot box and the media’s pronouncements.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Grinshpun’s life experiences.

ENDNOTE: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“I told my husband if we have to go to the White House, okay, I will go, but I’m going as myself. It’s too late to change my pattern and if they don’t like it, then they’ll just have to throw me out.”

-Betty Ford on the TV show 60 Minutes, aired August 10, 1975– a year after Nixon’s resignation, and a year into Gerald Ford’s presidency.

Here’s a ditty on why things stay the same.

HISTORY REWRITER

sung to the tune of “Paperback Writer” with apologies to The Beatles and whomever else the rights may concern.

History rewriter.

Dear loyal voter,
Don’t you read Trump’s books.
They took decades to spin, full of gobbledygook.
They’re bragfests involving his ex-contacts.

He needs a job, so he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

It’s lots of dirty stories of a dirty man and his former wives didn’t understand.
His kids were sucked into his daily World.
They got steady jobs, but he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter.

History rewriter. Rewriter.

Yet there’re millions of pages in legal truth.
There’ll be millions more in a week or two.

He’s lasted longer because he’s mastered the style. He keeps changing it round.
And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.

History rewriter.

With free speech he owns the Right. But he needs the billionaires’ oversight.

You’ll want to LOOK at transcripts.
You can’t SEE them here.
But Trump needs a break. And he’s BEEN a history rewriter.
History rewriter. History rewriter.
Rewriter. Rewriter.

History rewriter. History rewriter…

My American Dream

The Book of the Week is “My American Dream, My True Story As An Undocumented Immigrant Who Became A Wall Street Executive” by Julissa Arce, published in 2016.

The author was born in 1983 in Taxco, Mexico. In 1994, she moved with her parents to San Antonio, Texas on a tourist visa. Because she was going to school (a private one) she was actually living in the U.S. illegally. Her parents (who were legal immigrants) didn’t understand the implications of such a situation. They simply wanted her to get a good education. Americans’ tax dollars weren’t even paying for it.

The upshot, though, was that Arce never got a Social Security Number, and couldn’t get any kinds of government or financial services: healthcare, a driver’s license, a bank account, or financial aid when she applied to go to college.

By living in the United States, Arce’s foreign status became her single biggest life-problem, especially when she was in her late teens. That problem led to others. If she moved back to Mexico, she most likely would be unable to return to the United States for at least ten years, unless laws changed.

Arce needed to earn “off the books” money to support her family, and pay her mother’s medical bills. On top of that, she had a drunk, abusive father. She was accepted to a college at the last minute, based on academic and student-participatory merit, and thanks to a new Texas state law. As is well known, many students are accepted to schools based on “legacy” or alumni-bribery practices, or on athletic rather than academic merits.

After many more hardships, the author got a job in the real world. She initially omitted the inconvenient fact that fake identity papers would allow her to work at the job only until she got caught for having a fraudulent Social Security Number. It appears that both her employer and the IRS turned a blind eye to her situation, as the former was able to pay her less than it would a non-foreign employee. BUT her employer was still withholding taxes from her paycheck. So why should her employer fire her? She was a model worker. She had to be– she was under the constant threat of deportation. She had to try harder than everyone else to please everyone.

Fortunately, several people in Arce’s life gave her good advice:

get the best education she could;
always strive do be the best at whatever she did– regardless of what it was;
be persistent;
associate with the appropriate people;
be professional at all times; and
continually socially network.

Arce was actually a shameless social climber, but she also showed she was a team player– unselfish with her time and talents. When the author achieved the pinnacle of what she perceived to be success, she wrote, “I felt normal– just another drunk Wall Street analyst on Stone Street on a Friday night.” And yet, she realized she still wasn’t truly happy.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Arce’s life experiences, and additional (true!!!) information (not emotionally-charged political propaganda) about immigrants in America.

The Night Trump WAS Defied – BONUS POST

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…And the exciting conclusion of the “Hush Money” Trial, produced by and starring Donald Trump, written by lawyers and decided by, THE JURY:

The Night Trump WAS Defied

sung to the tune of “The Night Chicago Died” with apologies to Paper Lace.

(Trump was STOPPED, in a court in New York City,
back in the USA, back in the Biden days.)

In the heat of a late spring night
where the land is a lawsuit mill.
The night Trump was defIED.
For him it was a bitter pill.

About-WITCH-hunts he’d bitch-and-moan.
But the GOP, he did OWN.
“It’s a disGRACE,” we-hear-him SAY,
while others FINally yell, “Hooray!”

I’d heard a MILlion lies.
I’d heard-the-crimes the night Trump WAS defied.
People, what a night the lawyers saw;
people, what a fight the lawyers saw.
Could it be?

And the propagandists sang, that a jury turned the tide,
but Trump’s current legal gang, could apPEAL and save-his-hide.
There was shouting and infinite TWEETS,
saying progress like this is SWEET.

But other people SAID, this is good for states of red.

I’d heard a MILlion lies.
I’d heard-the-crimes the night Trump WAS defied.
People, what a night the lawyers saw;
people, what a fight the lawyers saw.
Do my-eyes-deceive me?

And Trump still had the gall, to keep trashing one and all.
And the Right’s wallets opened wide,
and his slaves rushed to his side,
and they kissed his big, fat ass,
and they brushed his tears away.

The night Trump WAS defied.
hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah.
The night Trump WAS defied.
People, what a night the lawyers saw;
people, what a fight the lawyers saw.
Holy GOP!

The night Trump WAS defied.
hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah.
The night Trump WAS defied.
People, what a night the lawyers saw…

The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told

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The Book of the Week is “The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, A True Tale of three gamblers, the Kentucky Derby, and the Mexican Cartel” by Mark Paul, published in 2020.

Sidenote: Speaking of gambling, in May 1988, Paul Laxalt, a Republican from Nevada, and in June 1992, H. Ross Perot, an Independent from Texas: jumped into the race for president. The latter exceeded many people’s expectations.

Anyway, the author described the American horse-race gambling environment of the late 1980’s. At that time, off-track betting was putting smaller racetracks out of business, because gamblers could watch the races on which they bet, live– simulcast on video screens at racetracks and casinos; in other words, wherever gambling was legal. They did not need to be physically present at the racetrack.

Through the decades, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) got wise and cracked down on gamblers’ financial crimes such as tax evasion and money laundering. The author described one guy at the racetrack who illegally paid cash to winning bettors who wanted their money immediately, who were willing to pay a twenty percent fee to him rather than to the IRS.

The suspenseful part of the author’s story began when he and his best friend identified a talented filly– a female horse– that was running in major races. Practically all horse races had previously featured colts because on the whole, they were bigger and stronger and so more likely to win races, and were worth more money because they could be hired out to breed more race horses like themselves at a much higher volume than could females.

The author and his friend took what turned out to be a life-threatening risk by driving down from California to a casino in Tijuana, Mexico, to place a bet months in advance, on the said filly that was to run in the Kentucky Derby. He explained that by placing bets on events to take place far into in the future, gamblers get tremendously advantageous odds; for instance, 50 to 1 odds three months in advance, rather than, say, 2 to 1 odds on race day, on a horse to win– because that horse has become the favorite. However, if the horse doesn’t run in the race, regardless of the reason, the gamblers will lose all of the money they bet.

Read the book to learn of the gamblers’ activities before, during and after their fateful bet on their favorite horse in the Kentucky Derby.

On Both Sides of the Wall

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The Book of the Week is “On Both Sides of the Wall” by Vladka Meed, originally published in 1948. This book detailed the (Jewish) author’s and others’ wartime traumas of people inside and outside the Warsaw Ghetto (around which a wall was built by the German government) and the various groups who tried to minimize their death toll. The Jews were confined inside, and were required to wear white armbands (equivalent to yellow stars in other European locales). The Aryans outside were Polish people free to live their lives.

In July 1942, the Nazis began to deport the aforementioned Jews in vans that went to cattle cars that ended up at concentration camps. The local German authority, called the Judenrat, enlisted Jews– who became members of local law enforcement– to help them do so.

Bureaucratic rules dictated who got deported. Unemployed or sick Jews were the first to go to their deaths. The able-bodied were the last to be deported because they were needed for slave labor in munitions factories and workshops that made necessities (such as uniforms) for the war effort. Working Jews were issued employment cards. Of course, a black market sprung up in the cards, so the Nazis deemed the cards invalid in about a week.

Personal social ties with sympathetic non-Jews became priceless for Jews who went into hiding to escape deportation. Firstly, it was a death-defying feat to leave the ghetto; possibly by bribing guards at one of the wall’s transit-gates, or blending into a labor group leaving for work.

However, German officials inspected the identity papers of, and interrogated, every individual passing through. The officials arbitrarily engaged in beatings, atrocities and on-the-spot murders, or simply muggings or robberies (including of clothing!) of any Jew whose papers weren’t in order.

Further, there were Poles who walked the streets in groups looking for “Jews” (simply people whom they perceived to have Jewish facial features) to victimize and bully. And then there were Jews who joined the aforesaid local police force, who outed their fellow religionists so save their own skins.

The author was very fortunate that she had Aryan facial features. She took off her white armband and was able to get past the ghetto wall unharmed various times during the war years. But she constantly had to look for black-market housing and almost starved to death. Obviously, the fact that she lived to tell her story in this book spoke to her superior survival skills and great good luck. One way she significantly increased her chances of survival was that she joined the Resistance movement. Brilliant acting talent was the most crucial survival skill in that time and place.

In January 1943, a group of Jews finally (!) fought back against their deportations, via mostly hand-to-hand combat. The Jews by that time knew where the cattle cars were going. In April 1943, a Jewish group called the Fighting Organization and others began an offensive called the Warsaw Uprising. They fought against Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles who were gathered around the ghetto wall to carry out the last deportation roundup. At the time, the author happened to be among Aryans, outside the ghetto. But she possessed the experience to stay alive.

In August 1944, everyone in Warsaw— Poles, Jews, militias, etc.– cooperated in fighting against the Germans, in the Warsaw Rebellion. They were all sick of the years of oppression. Even so, the Poles committed evil acts against their fellow fighters who were Jews, and against the Jews forced out of hiding. The Germans ruthlessly destroyed Warsaw with weapons and arson, just to get back at their enemies.

Anyway, read the book to learn a lot more about the author’s trials and tribulations.

Moondrop to Gascony

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The Book of the Week is “Moondrop to Gascony” by Anne-Marie Walters, originally published in 1946.

The author was born around 1920 in England. Already fluent in French, in summer 1943, she received training in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in order to work for the French Resistance in southwestern France. She learned how to: decipher Morse code and ciphers, use firearms, pick locks, do parachute jumps, etc. Six months later, she, along with 22 men, jumped from a plane to go on their first mission. The ultimate goal of course, was to hinder the German war machine.

When the author’s unit left London, it was told it would get any resources it requested. That was a lie. Best laid plans usually went awry, as the group depended on supplies delivered via parachute to the French countryside. Problems arose with: the weather, plane shortages, or other Resistance cells in more dire need of food.

Everything had to be kept top secret, as German soldiers roamed around the railways and rural areas, demanding identity papers, harassing and shooting anyone perceived to be the enemy, on the spot. There were various times the author heard about the fates of her fellow cell members who had been tortured and then executed.

Certain peasant farmers collaborated with the Germans, and tattled on Resistance fighters. Some families allowed the fighters to sleep in the barn or shed or on their property, risking the wrath of the Nazis. One time, one such family agreed to help the Resistance but they chickened out. A family member failed to show up with lights to signal a parachuted-supplies drop, so the plane wasted a trip flying over the area and didn’t drop the sorely needed supplies.

In summer 1944, twelve hundred Germans killed every last one of eighty Resistance fighters. The former had some 13mm machine guns and mortars while the latter had a few Bren guns, and a cache full of ammunition which was hit by a mortar shell. About 4am, the few escapees, hiding in cornfields and vegetation, fought valiantly to the last man.

The Germans set fire to the fighters’ safe-houses in the region and used hand grenades to turn the burned-out structures to ashes. Six members of a peasant family who helped the enemy were also subjected to sadistic massacre and destruction of their home. All those war crimes took about four hours, after which, the Germans laughed about it.

In late summer 1944, the author was assigned to personally deliver a report to London. To get there, she crossed the Pyrenees on foot into Spain along with six other fighters. They were the lucky survivors who risked their lives amid deprivation and hardships. She wrote that they were gluttons for punishment because they formed intensely close bonds and took pride in sacrificing for their respective homelands.

Read the book to learn numerous other details of the anti-German underground’s adventures.

An Ocean to Cross

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The Book of the Week is “An Ocean to Cross, Daring the Atlantic, Claiming A New Life” by Liz Fordred with Susie Blackmun, published in 2001.

The author was born in 1953 in Southern Rhodesia. By the late 1970’s, she and her husband were both wheelchair-bound, due to a horseback-riding accident and an auto accident, respectively. Gluttons for punishment that they were, they decided to pursue the husband’s idea of building a boat with their personal hands, customized for them, and sailing it across the Atlantic Ocean. Many people who cast doubt on their dream had no clue how persistent, creative and resourceful this couple was.

The two were able to cut through some bureaucratic red tape in their home country because there were so few people of fair skin, including them and their then-leader, Ian Smith. But they encountered numerous delays for various reasons, including lack of money, lack of experience in boat-building and sailing, and government regulations. Their native Rhodesia was in the midst of political turmoil, and they needed sailing-practice in a challenging geographic location.

So they moved their craft to the South African coast, where they had to deal with South African customs, and submit a mountain of paperwork for various other reasons, including financing their boat-construction and supplies through: a bank loan, getting articles on their story published, and attracting sponsors. A series of guardian angels provided assistance through the whole laborious process.

Of course, they underestimated how much the entire project would cost and how long it would take; just one example– they allocated four days, with the help of family and friends, to drive their multiple vehicles to transport the boat (which was still a work in progress) to the Royal Cape Yacht Club in Cape Town South Africa, their launching place. Read the book to learn about: how long it really took, the details of their whole ordeal, and their learning-experiences and growth; from start to finish.

Haven

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The Book of the Week is “Haven, The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America” by Ruth Gruber, originally published in 1983.

As is well known, 1944 was a presidential election (or reelection) year. In June 1944, politician that he was– FDR announced that the United States would allow about a thousand (out of millions and millions of) European refugees from eighteen different nations to cross the Atlantic via ship (funded by relief agencies) and temporarily settle in a camp in Oswego in northern New York State, near the Canadian border. They had all happened to have fled to Italy. They weren’t counted in America’s then-quotas on immigrants coming from specific countries.

Gruber, who had friends in high places in the American government, got the coveted assignment to assist them. But first, she was vetted by the War Relocation Authority, the State Department, and the Public Health Service. Upon traveling to the transport ship in Naples, she received the U.S. Army title “general” so that she would be treated like a prisoner of war (pursuant to the Geneva Convention) if she was captured by the Axis Powers.

The refugees had suffered terrible hardships and traumas prior to their arrival in Oswego. However, they continued to live their lives as best they could while confined to the camp. The Jewish ones held a bar mitzvah, a wedding and a bris for the baby born there. The able-bodied were made to do various local jobs such as farm work or shoveling coal, for which they were paid eighty cents a day; insultingly enough– paid approximately the same as the Nazi POWs with whom they worked side by side.

When the end of the war was declared in spring 1945, the immigration status of the Oswego camp’s residents became a political football. In August 1945, about a twentieth of the refugees opted to return to their home countries. Thereafter, different stakeholders– government officials and political activists argued over whether to let the refugees stay in America, or go where they wanted, such as to Palestine.

Read the book to learn many additional details about the people involved, and their fates.

S.O.S.

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The Book of the Week is “S.O.S., Spirit of Survival, One Family’s Chilling Account of the Costa Concordia Disaster” by Dean, Georgia, Valerie, Debbie, and Cindy Ananias, published in 2013. This informative, suspenseful horror story is a must-read for all travelers who go on cruises.

“People were freaking out in various languages and everything was mass confusion.” Such was the situation on the Mediterranean cruise, Costa Concordia in mid-January 2012. The trip turned out to be not just a ruined vacation for the Ananias family– the parents and two of three grown daughters– but a series of life-threatening traumas and insult-to-injury indignities.

About four thousand people found themselves on a sinking cruise late at night. There were indications from the start of the trip, that the captain and crew of the ship were disorganized, negligent and sorely lacking in customer service training and emergency preparedness.

One circumstance (just one of many) that exacerbated the disaster, was that the ship was listing so precariously, lifeboats on one side of it were prevented from reaching the water by the laws of physics. After much exhausting effort, an attempt to lower the lifeboats failed, and hundreds of passengers already in them had to be lifted out of them only to fret about what to do next, how to get off the sinking ship.

In disasters such as this, life-threatening elements (such as which side of a listing ship will have operable lifeboats) are difficult to predict, but passengers can use ounces of prevention, and should, for the entire duration of the cruise.

The following are just some of the actions that can save lives in worst-case scenarios (if the parties involved are not too vain and don’t care how they look):

wearing one’s life jacket all the time (there weren’t enough life jackets for all the people on the Costa Concordia);
keeping tightly snug in one’s pockets– a packet in a waterproof holder containing: one’s travel documents, wallet-contents, contact info of one’s homeland’s embassy in all countries where the cruise might get shipwrecked, emergency-contact info of one’s family and friends, and (if one is American) contact info of major media outlets so that one can publicize one’s horror story while it is happening in order get maximum compensation from the cruise-line’s lawyers who are experts at defending against any and all legal challenges from anyone harmed by the cruise line’s activities;
keeping a flashlight tightly snug in one’s pocket all the time;
wearing sturdy, but lightweight and comfortably but snugly fitting shoes (not high heels) all the time;
carrying a sweatshirt tied around one’s neck or waist all the time– in case an evacuation takes hours in freezing weather; and
knowing how to swim before cruising.

Another step passengers can take to avoid losing valuable items, includes not bringing fancy jewelry or fancy clothing in the first place!

Read the book to learn: everything you ever wanted to know about what the authors went through during the cruise’s sinking, and their tips on how to avoid what they went through.