HOW TO (properly) RAISE A CHILD, GIVING HIM CULTURE!
A plea from a mother whose parents and grandparents contributed NOTHING
 in the way of TRUTH, HISTORY, POLITICS, CONSPIRACY vs. ACTIVISIM.
WHAT WE SHOULD CALL Culture

Last night, I saw a travelogue on Cassis, a fishing village on the southern coast of Provence. I  watched, absorbed, wondering which of these little beachfront houses had been where my grandmother and grandfather hid from Adolph Hitler.

EARLY in the game, mid thirties, maybe, my grandparents sensed a disaster coming. They got outta Dodge. (Germany) Six million other Jews hung around but in 33 the burning of the books gave my gramps a "bee in his bonnet" reason to leave Germany quick! No matter the cash loss, (they walked away from their home.) Grampa Alfred planned the move to Paris. He left an enviable career as an orchestra conductor for a Berlin Opera house (he'd left an even better job at a Leipzig opera house, with longer tenure, as his podium joke pun to the orchestra was about Hitler running the national 'clitoral' party (the word 'socialist' sounds anatomical in German). He got his windows broken by a brick that very night. They had chosen exile first to PARIS then in 1940 when The Germans invaded, a quick trip under fire from German planes overhead... with millions of others getting shot at, an exodus to this remote little fishing village, Cassis, still known for its raisin flavored liqueur "CASSIS". 

But I never heard of raisin liqueurs or German planes overhead or Hitler or much of anything. Nobody told me ANYTHING about leaving areas where Killer Nazis were known to frequent. This I realized later --that bottom line, ---that one filthy wisecrack had saved their lives, for if they hadn't left Leipzig, their real home, (scared by that brick,) to try to live in BERLIN and there seen the unfolding panorama of the Third Reich, close up, they'd have ended up soap bars in a Leipzig supermarket. But having seen just the beginning and the book burning, (All my grandpa's titles were burned,) they took the big step of total exile from Germany.

I only learned this via a brief mention from my aunt who had been singing in an opera in Belgium when the Nazis came right into the dressing room with guns. They put Aunt Lilly, a fine soprano, had landed in a concentration camp in the Pyrennes. She, by some psychic feat, being a Sagittarian, (best sign for prophecy), had diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt and thusly  bribed a guard into finding her father who arrived with his Hungarian passport, which he'd always kept, even though he lived in Germany, and with it, got her freed. If she'd been a German they could have kept her. But Hungarians were off limits.

However,  none of this did I ever hear from my grandparents. The tail end of the story came recently from my Aunt's son, Steve, who had been in the house with Grandpa when he was a widower and alone with my aunt. Steve apparently HAD listened to adult conversation and asked Aunt Lilly for details. So he is the family historian.

I look back on our family's regular visits to our grandparents' house,( a mile from our own home). Twice a week my sister and I would find our ten year old spoiled selves stranded among this gaggle of adults who talked for hours and ate in the kitchen together. We never knew what they discussed nor did we know what they ate or care to join in. WE HAD CHILDREN's MINDS and tastes. We even refused even the Vienna Torte ! (as it wasn't chocolate and I knew that the second I bit into a piece). 

Grandma Eugenie had shown me how it was made from carob pods taken from the trees outside on Laurel avenue. She soaked the pods in water above the sink until they were soft and slimy which made me gag. The cake looked normal enough, airy light texture, its six layers frosted with pale bogus chocolate frosting, and a shiny, dark carob frosting on the outside but carob wasn't chocolate. I got that it was something you had to do during the war, but why would they continue the tradition? This was L.A. California in the fifties, damnit. No more prosperous place or time would ever exist.

So why my grandma even bothered putting all that work into a carob cake just never made sense to me. I mean, once, the first time only, I'd had a bite in my mouth and realized that where my mouth expected chocolate, there was this blank, vegetable shortening feel? Nahhh, I wasn't buying it and never got suckered into a second bite, ever!

Looking at the Cassis travelogue with regret I know that so much that happened during World War II never surfaced on the mental beaches of my childhood. No seashells of history, no detritus, no trace, no sign of that historical tsunmai washing thru all their lives and leaving Europe a wreck.

My childish ignorance, my not knowing what to ASK and not being any more interested in listening to their hours of blabber than I was in eating counterfeit chocolate cake --- has caused me loss. I have a hole in my existence.

My sister Sylvia and I wandered off at Grampa's house and played amongst the flowering forsythia bushes pretending  that we were surviving in a jungle. We peeled the skin off branches and sewed little jungle dweller clothing with leaves and twig needles and those memories are more vivid now than what I did this morning, sixty years later. We simply had no interest in their world. And more's the pity. Because brains that young can really grab stuff. Forsythia flowers? I can see them now.Hitler entering PARIS? Can't imagine it.

But as a child, I was taken to the library and the book nook at the thrift shop. My mother went every two weeks as that's how long the LIBRARY allowed you to have a stack.

CHILDREN READING
                      GREAT BOOKS

Today I read a LOT. One of my favorite authors is Isaac Bashevis Singer who recalls detailed scenes of his childhood in Warsaw Poland in the twenties. He was fully present as a child. Full brained, listening. You don't get to be an Issac Singer if you weren't. I feel the loss of the stories that my grandparents never told me and it prompts me to seek an alternate way to raise children.

Let's invent a new TORAH. One where grandchildren are forced to sit quietly, eyes held open by toothpicks but wide open --as their elders talk and remember. There's no getting out of the room cuz you're a wee one. If the babes want they can try a sour pickle, or ignore same if they wish. But they're bloody forced to sit down and have a plate of grown-up food put before them, like it or not -- cold cuts, knishes, olives, pickled herring, grown up foods, acquired tastes, maybe, but it's expected that they fiddle with the food and attempt to acquire the taste. Grownups must like it for a reason so kids gotta take it on faith. Same about the subjects of conversation. HAVE FAITH. You want to hear this, you don't know why but just listen.

AND in this Utopian universe, children will be forced to sit and listen to everything said. They must spot that there is caring in the adults, and hope in the adults that some shred or molecule of the evening's words will lodge in a spare brain cell and cause a mental picture to form. That picture is called either actual history or learned viewpoint. Or supreme Knowledge. Or in its lowest form, simple opinion, but it's better than playing jungle natives sewing kilts in the bushes.

Because it is those pictures that form us as a jewel of a bead properly placed on the string of time. Not just some random coconut rolling about the jungle floor. We will not revert to jungle play only because it is our infant predilection if we are forced to sit in the parlor and hear about the depression and Hitler and the war and Cassis. And respect carob cake as the only food available in wartime. And eat it and taste its deliciousness with respect for the fact that chocolate isn't always available. The full concept of the ups and downs of history.

 I will always feel un-formed --as for all the years of my childhood, neither grandparent ever directed a word to me. Neither parent, for that matter, ever required me or my sister to be in a room with them. We were spared their learned, cultured, interesting friends. We could play in the yard. Therefore, a big big gaping hole exists in my education. One I couldn't plug with paperback novels,  movies, friends, and weird-ass primitive careers like marriage to a Mexican, import/export, acting, screenwriting, astrology, raising four fatherless children, doing past life regressions, then dating a married screenwriter and all my other, similar, made-in-the jungle by primitive hands-dumbass professions.

But what can you expect? I am without a history. I am as uncultured as an alleycat. Or as an Amazonian Indian who prays to a Leopard and bangs on a drum.

Parents, never give a child any say in the matter. By rule of law, kiddies must attend. Do not give a gathering of any kind where kids aren't sitting right there, at the adult table, butts firmly applied to chairs. Chain the little rodents down. Don't let them con you that they don't understand, that they want to congregate in the kid group off by themselves in the bushes and skittle rocks over some river outside. THEY'LL UNDERSTAND well enough! Don't ever let a kid con you they gag on that weird ethnic food on the table and they want tv dinners specially prepared. They can damn well watch you eat stuffed cabbage and when they get hungry enough and smell the tomato sauced unique sulphurous green leaves of the cabbage wrapped around seasoned meat or the knishes or the pickled herring, they will take a mouthful and think, "interesting, heady, unique SENSORIAL INPUT. This is what they ate back in Germany, or in Budapest." And have a little respect.

WHEN I THINK of the Vienna torte and cheese blintzes with cherry jam which made me TURN UP MY NOSE as a kid I could hit myself in the forehead! And it was said of my grandma, making this apple pastry thing (STRUDEL) with the thin dough in paper thin layers that you could read a newspaper thru the dough, making this pastry was an art, but one you had to be born into it and it couldn't be taught --yet I rejected those lessons, I COULD SHOOT MYSELF  Load the gun and give it to me!

HANG WITH YOUR ELDERS kiddies. ABSORB, ask, listen. Eat blintzes, eat Vienna torte, learn to stretch strudel dough and learn about the Treaty of Versailles and pogroms and Ghettos! My grandparents on Daddy's side never went in a synagogue in their entire lives, nor did my father. And that would be the most interesting of all subjects of converse. Lapsed Jews. Reneggers. Turn Coats. Turning your back on it all as it was not safe or stylish. My Dad came to Hollywood in the 30s and never told anyone he was Jewish. IN 1945, with two daughters, my dad wanted to rent in the posh PARKLABREA apartment complex. The rental agent asked. "Are you JEWISH?" Dad said 'no. I am not.' He got the lease.

That Agent was not just an anti-semite, the BUILDING POLICY in Los Angeles in 1945 with Jews heading up every single film studio--- was no Jews. Some of these words may be unknown to the average child but they should not be. And the child should always be able to tap an adult on the elbow and ask what does 'anti-semite' mean or 'lapsed Jew' mean?? Or genocide or Dictator or Hitler.  Even if the adult says 'eat your cherries, kid, and don't ask about stupid stuff,' that child will get a powerful idea something is up. Something interesting.  More interesting than being  told 'eat your cherries.'

Culture isn't automatic. It isn't handed over in a single ceremony. It must be set before a child who is taken to the library and the thrift store where he can build his OWN library. Or it is CULTURAL OBSERVATION, fed to a child who accompanies you on your errands but done daily with parental awareness that without this exposure, the germ of culture won't take, the antibodies of reason will never develop. Jean Jacques Rousseau was wrong about divine primitives. Our native DNA isn't going to carry the next generation very far from the condition of a Neanderthal. Culture must intercede and it rides in sometimes on something as simple as recipe for Strudel.

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Our WEB POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Progressive Researcher, Writer, Mother of 4 and career Astrologer. Catch up with her websites  TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! & HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also HOW TO LIVE on A NICKLE, The FRUGAL PAGE. and 50 other themes that appeal like GETTING ON THE DOLE, HOW TO NEVER NEED A VET FOR YOUR PET .. HER MAIN PAGE WITH CLICKABLE PORTALS is THE ASTRAL WEBSITE! Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 35$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic!

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