Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America

Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America by Michael Dobbs and published in 2004, is an excellent account of the landing of eight German agents on America’s Eastern Coastline in 1942 with the intent to engage in acts of sabotage to weaken the war production industry in the United States. Two teams of saboteurs, four members each, were brought to our shores by U-boats. One team was dropped off on a beach in Long Island, the other off Jacksonville Beach in Florida.
Most of the eight saboteurs had once lived in the United States. The team leaders spoke good English and knew their way around the country. The youngest of the eight, Herbie Haupt, was born and raised in Chicago. Some in the group had strong ties to the German-American Bund, a fifth column working insidiously on behalf of the interests of the Nazi government in the States.
As it turned out, no sabotage was carried out. Two of men, one a group leader, with complex personalities and mixed loyalties, eventually ratted out their comrades to the American authorities, and all were soon apprehended.
President Roosevelt was shocked and embarrassed on how vulnerable the American coastline was to foreign penetration. He did not want this vulnerability to be exposed to our adversaries in a public trial. Roosevelt created a military commission to try the saboteurs behind closed doors. The last time a military commission had been convened was 1865, to try Mary Surratt for her role in conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Ralph Ellison

I just finished reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It was the only novel of Ellison’s that was published in his lifetime. He worked on the book for seven years, and it won the National Book Award in 1953, making Ellison the first African American author to win that distinguished literary prize.
In my opinion, Invisible Man is one of the great books of the 20th Century. Its first- person narration is brilliant. One sees the influence of both Faulkner and Joyce in the interior monologue of the unnamed narrator. From the beginning to the end, the novel grabs your complete attention with riveting episodes set in the Depression-era South and New York’s Harlem.
In an interview with the African American author, James Alan McPherson, Ellison discussed his writing. “Fiction,” he said, “became the agency of my efforts to answer the questions: Who am I, what am I, how did I come to be?…What does American society mean when regarded out of my own eyes, when informed by my own sense of the past and viewed by my own complex sense of the present.”
Ellison in that interview then goes on to make a statement that still resonates today in fierce controversy. “It is quite possible that much potential fiction by Negro Americans fails precisely at this point: through the writer’s refusal (often through provincialism or lack of courage or opportunism) to achieve a vision of life and a resourcefulness of craft commensurate with the complexity of their actual situation. Too often they fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race to take their chances in the world of art.”

My Summer Class on”A Crown of Feathers” will now be Online

Due to the pandemic, my upcoming class on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories” at Oakton Community College’s Emeritus Program is going virtual. Although this Emeritus class is geared toward an audience of seniors, anyone, anywhere, is welcome to join us.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, was one of the great storytellers of the twentieth century. The scope of his writing is wide, depicting the lost world of the vibrant Jewish community in Poland, as well as the difficulties of acculturation to America experienced by the Jewish refugees fleeing Europe both before and after World War Two.
“ A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories” consists of twenty-four stories, nicely balanced in settings between the Old and New Worlds. This powerful and poignant collection of stories was the winner of the National Book Award in 1974.
The class is being offered six consecutive Thursday mornings from June 18 through July 23. The time of the class is 10:00 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. Class and registration information for the Emeritus program can be found at http://www.oakton.edu/conted. Please feel free to share this with anyone who may have interest.

The Havarti Effect

My guest blogger today is Reverend Ken Frazier, a dear friend, who is the Senior Minister of the First Congregational Church of Waterbury, Connecticut.

The Havarti Effect, or How to Get to Heaven
(another short, short story for our time)

She’s been working for several years as a clerk in the deli department at one of the large grocery store chains in Connecticut, and now that many deli departments are partly closed, with none of the salads and pastas and prepared foods, she has moved to the cheese and salami section. She takes great pride in stocking and arranging the items, all neatly ordered, and she’s always been polite and helpful to the customers, and most of them were appreciative of her efforts until recently when things changed. Remember? Things changed? How shall I say this? Tempers flared. Patience wore thin. Restraint was in short order. Quantity restrictions were ignored, and in general, life in the “essential” grocery store segment of our current economy came to be more and more difficult.
But, she still took pride in her work and tried her best to be of service to all the customers. Like her grandparents, her mother and her sisters, she had been reared, you see, with an admirable work ethic. One could even say she had been imbued from her youth with a classic “Christian” work ethic, drawn in part from the writings of C. S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia, read to her as a child, and in the writings of the great Christian novelist, George MacDonald, who put it this way:
“It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.”
And, then one day the Havarti cheese incident occurred, and like so many of the changed things in our time, it was irrational. She was stocking the cheese department when a customer began to complain about the Havarti cheese…it wasn’t fresh enough, the packaging looked strange, the expiration date wasn’t right, how long had it been out, why is it from Denmark, and on and on. She attempted to be of service, to no avail, and finally the irate customer huffed and walked away grumbling, leaving the Havarti cheese in the display.
Another customer who witnessed the incident came up to her and said, “You did everything you could, and you will go to Heaven.”
The Havarti effect, then, is the effect of a life devoted to compassionate service, and that is what OUR TIME calls for. We are all feeling the strains of this “new normal.” (And we haven’t even figured out what that means, yet.) The answer to the strains is at the heart of our faith, namely the love of God that will not only carry us through, but will be our gift to the world. And put simply, for our time, “going to Heaven” means being in the place where God can be seen: in a deed of loving kindness, in patience and understanding, in knowing that the mask you wear is to protect others, that the masks you make may save the life of a frontline health care worker, that the 6’ spray-painted mark at the grocery store is a sign of indomitable hope, in just two short steps.
Be at peace,
Ken Frazier

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Anne Tyler is certainly one of the grand dames of the American literary scene at age 78. She has written 23 novels, three of which have been nominated for a National Book Award, one, “Breathing Lessons,” won a Pulitzer Prize, and one, “A Spool of Blue Thread,” received international acclamation by being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I have been an avid reader of hers for nearly forty years, having read 18 of her novels. Why do I keep coming back to her?
The answer is simply that she gives me pure reading pleasure. Her books, most of them set in Baltimore and its environs, always have an interesting plot, but the real strength of her writing is her marvelous protagonists, all variations of a quirky Everyman or Everywoman.
The Everyman in her last novel, “Redhead by the Side of the Road,” is Micah Mortimer, an IT repair guy who doubles up as a super for a small Baltimore apartment building. Like so many of Tyler’s main characters, Micah has made poor decisions regarding both love and career. We meet him in the novel where he has attained creature of habit status, a middle-aged man set in his ways.
In typical Tyler style, Micah’s daily routine is described humorously. “Monday was floor-mopping day—the kitchen floor and the bathroom . ‘Zee dreaded moppink,’ he said as he ran hot water into a bucket. He often talked to himself as he worked, using one or another foreign accent. Right now it was German, or maybe Russian. ‘Zee moppink of zee floors.’’’
The book is a delight and a great and fast read (only 178 pages) to divert your attention from our own routines that we now face each day in this new and scary Covid-19 world.