Director Ethan Bensinger’s Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home appeared in 2012. The next three years saw this 60-minute documentary on Holocaust survivors amassing one award after another. In April 2014, it was showcased on public television stations across the United States marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Deutsche Welle has profiled a number of their websites dealing with German-Jewish émigrés around the world.
I had the honor of viewing this five-year project of labor and love at a film screening, commemorating the 20-year anniversary of the partnership between sister cities Chicago and Hamburg in the Hanseatic city’s town hall this past December. And somehow I have the feeling that even after three years the film’s journey is far from over.
Categories
Mother Love
Bijan woke to the voice of the muezzin calling people to prayers, fell asleep again, and then woke to his mother’s quiet voice in the living room. So often he had heard her in his dreams. But this was real. He was in Tehran, in his mother’s house, with her just a room away. It had taken so many years and so much searching to track down his mother whom he had not seen since he was eight years old.
The Window as Mirror
Look through a window and we see the world outside. Change of focus, and we can see ourselves reflected in that same window.
As an American writer living in Europe, I feel like an astronaut on Apollo 17. While that mission ostensibly was to explore the moon, ironically the greatest benefit gained may have been the famous “Blue Marble” photograph looking back at Earth. For the first time in the long-short arc of human history, we were able to see ourselves in a wider, deeper context. Eensy-weensy we.
Keep your nose touched to the paint and you can’t see what the painting is about. Microscope and telescope for the bigger picture.
Enough metaphors.
Going Green in the U.S.? Yes!
General perception has it that Americans do not care about the environment. But did you know that according to the Gallup Poll in March 2014, 80% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 favor alternative energy production over fossil fuels? And it might surprise you even more to find out that according to the same poll, over 60% of Americans prefer proposals that would regulate or limit fossil fuel emissions, including those setting higher pollution standards for business and industry.
Between September and December 2014, about 1,000 students and teachers from all over Germany took part in the Going Green Project, a blended-learning project for high school students. They explored green activities in the USA, mainly on the state level, and were surprised to find out how much Americans care about the environment.
God at the Bank
We were the only two waiting in the New Accounts section in the bank. For us gregarious Americans, this is a slightly awkward situation. In most waiting rooms, we would start a conversation. We start conversations with total strangers in doctors’ waiting rooms, in the halls of court houses, during intermission at the theater, and in any slow-moving line.
Banks present a special situation. They are quiet, but people are working all around, often in the same room. The standard opening question, “What brings you here?” may be embarrassing. Strangely, this doesn’t bother us in the doctors’ office. We’d rather tell a stranger that we have a sexually transmitted disease than that we need to refinance a loan.
“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested” — A Meditation on International Women’s Day
“Mommy, mommy. The other mothers are all unemployed,” were the first words out of my son’s mouth as he darted toward our car. Not exactly the kind of statement someone might expect from a 6‑year-old during his first week of school. Beaming from ear to ear, I immediately cleared up the little misunderstanding, but I realized that for him it was completely normal to have a working mother. Normal. His words were music to my ears and played over and over in my head. I imagined what a good husband, colleague, and boss he might become knowing that simple truth. However, being a full-time working mother has not always been normal, not even in the 21st century.