The Lure of Old Suitcases

                                The Lure of Old Suitcases

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal,9/1/19

“Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote the Jewish King Solomon.  For a certain Jewish child’s curiosity about the contents of his father’s long forbidden suitcase, there was seemingly no cure.  Or so says my new friend Peter Bein, author of Maxwell’s Suitcase.  No cure, that is, except to open the suitcase after his father had died. 

            Author Peter Bein teaches English at Chattahoochee Technical College.  His professional career has been winding, though purposeful and interesting.  How many college English teachers first “had a math brain” as Bein puts it, studied mathematics in college, spent 25 years in the computer field, taught math, returned to college to get a Master’s degree in Professional Writing and then taught English?

            Maxwell’s Suitcase is what the publishing world is now calling a memoir, not a full scale researched biography but a remembrance or a focusing upon a period of time, a person, or as in Bein’s book, an object.

            Bein’s object is a suitcase of his father’s, hidden for forty years in a hall closet in the family’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York.  Bein’s father made his escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 on Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), or the Night of Broken Glass, November 9, when Nazi forces ransacked Jewish-owned homes, stores, hospitals, schools, and synagogues, leaving streets littered with shards of broken glass.

            Suitcase in hand, Max Bein fled Germany for the United States, leaving behind his mother and fiancée, Lola.  In the suitcase, son Peter Bein would learn, were pictures and stacks of letters bound in old shoelaces, which became the inspiration for his book.  The letters were to his father from Bein’s lost grandmother who had been killed in a Polish death camp at Belzec during World War II.

            It is one thing to read a history book about the Holocaust.  It is quite another to talk to a friend who is not yet even 70 and who has such close connection to one of the greatest evils of human history.  Bein’s connection to his past, particularly his grandmother’s death, is exquisitely described in his riveting book as is his childhood puzzlement over how his father could have fled Germany leaving his mother, Malka, behind. 

            When Bein was ten, his father said to him, “Come, I’ll show you my pictures from home.”  It was one of those rare occasions when Max would open up the suitcase and “invite me to the past,” Bein writes.  But not for long.  When Bein was shown a picture of his grandmother, he asked “Where is she?” only to elicit a quiet “She disappeared” from his father.

            The letters in the suitcase were written during WWII from Bein’s grandmother in Poland to his father in New York City.   In 1996, living in Columbus, Georgia Bein opened the suitcase after his father’s death.  “That suitcase was the keyhole to my past,” he writes.  Later, living in Atlanta, Bein secured the help of a friend who met him once a week at the Aurora Café in Atlanta’s Little Five Points and translated the letters aloud in English while Bein wrote feverishly.

            This enterprise compelled Bein to “make an appointment with his past” as he travelled to Poland and Germany in 2008, 2009, and 2010 to “find his way back home” and learn about the fate of his grandmother as well as the reason why his father was so protective of the suitcase.  The visit to Poland included finding and making a picture of the apartment where his grandmother had written the letters in the suitcase seventy years earlier.

            Any moviemaker seeking an interesting twist on Thomas Wolfe’s title, “You can’t go home again,” need look no further than Bein’s memoir.  Its conciseness makes it as script-ready as a book could be. Malka’s letters to her son Max are heart-rending, her last one ending with “From your mother who loves you and wishes you the best.”

            Today the Holocaust, like history in general, is being weaponized and trivialized.  Using history as a bludgeon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said the detention centers on our southern border ought to be called “concentration camps.”  Little must she know about what people such as Bein’s grandmother Malka endured. 

            Cicero wrote, “Who only knows his generation remains always a child.”  Author Peter Bein was not content to know only of his own era.  Hence a suitcase was his teacher and his motivation to discover who he was.  The suitcase, he writes, was his “museum in a box.”

            Readers can find Maxwell’s Suitcase on Amazon and at PeterBein.com.  From it they can learn to respect – and heed – history as Bein himself has done.

Roger Hines

7/28/19

           

           

Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

                          A Brief History of a House Divided

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment / racism, racism, and now recession, recession.  

            Media assault didn’t start with our current president, though it did of course start with a Republican president.  Ronald Reagan was a cowboy from California whose ignorance of geo-politics and diplomacy would surely cause him to blow up the world.  And we dare not have a president saying, “Government is not the solution; government is the problem,” or – while still California’s governor –  “The college Vietnam protestors are screaming ‘Make love not war,’ but considering their appearance I doubt they could do either.”

            Just whom does such rhetoric sound like?  While its tenor may not be as acidic as Trump’s, its aim was just as sure.  And the head cheerleaders of the Reagan opposition were, yes, the three major pre-cable television networks.  If not as malicious as today’s cable networks, they were still definitely anti-Reagan.

            In spite of his supposed instability, Reagan was re-elected.  Sam Donaldson of ABC was to Reagan as Jim Acosta of CNN is to President Trump.  Both so-called reporters made themselves the story.

            In Reagan’s day cable television was in its infancy, CNN being launched in 1980, the year Reagan was elected.  The three major television networks were foot soldiers for the Democrat Party just as they and at least two cable networks are today.  Conservatives, having never enjoyed media support, edged bravely into the winds of bias and subjective journalism wherever and however they could.  Their primary conduit was radio.  Radio “spots” funded by Texas oil man H.L. Hunt kept the conservative faithful from despair.  The journalism and compelling voice of Paul Harvey, intertwined with American lore and values, kept them from sheer depression.

            Conservatives slightly cracked the media in 1966 in the person of William F. Buckley and his television program, “Firing Line.”  It was only a crack.  Rush Limbaugh would push the door further in 1988.  Only when cable television expanded was the door pushed open by Fox News in 1996.  Even so, there were two GOP presidents, Bush I and Bush II, who bore the brunt of the old networks’ bias.  Bush I was portrayed as “a wimp,” he who flew WWII combat missions and was shot down, only to fly again.  His son, like Reagan, was presented as something of a strutting, strident cowboy.  The Bushes weren’t Texans.  They were privileged whites from Connecticut merely using Republican Texas as their new base of power.  Or so the northeast media asserted.

            Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, were media darlings.  Clinton was the bright boy.  Obama was the future for sure.  He would put conservatives in their place.

            But it came to pass that, partly because of the IRS’s treatment of the Tea Party and globalism gone wild, the peasants came with their pitchforks.  From every crook and cranny they came, mostly from heartland America and small towns, though from large industrial cities as well.  We’re all familiar with “… and a little child shall lead them,” but nowhere in the annals of history do we find “…and a billionaire shall lead them.”  But a billionaire did lead ordinary folks to victory, vindicating Buckley who had said he’d rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty.

            Yes, the billionaire talks ugly.  He hits back.  His rhetoric falls far short of Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature.”  But the billionaire is listening to his peasants and they are influencing him for good, not on his hitting back which he needs to continue, but on his increasingly apparent love for ordinary folks and their values.  Who knew (the educated media elites should have) that globalism was understood by the non-elites at both the intellectual and pocketbook levels?  Who ever dreamed that the non-elites, so many of them people of faith, would support a thrice married playboy?

            It’s fortunate that ancient Jews didn’t reject the help of King Cyrus even though he was a pagan Persian.  Not a perfect vessel, that Cyrus.

            It would be nice if those who fault people of faith for supporting the president cared more about the abhorrent practice of abortion, the loss of manufacturing to other nations, and the illegal immigration crisis. It would be wise if free-marketers stopped taking social conservatives for granted.

            Those peasants are smart.  Guided by common sense, they know a smart, authentic dude when they see one.  Given that the face of the Democrat Party is now the anti-Semitic members of The Squad, it’s possible that the Jewish community will join the peasants in giving the playboy a rousing victory in 2020.

Roger Hines

8/21/19