Anne Frank's Diary

    This year my assignment at the charter school has been reading with six 6th grade advanced students.  After we finished Romeo and Juliet we began Anne Frank's Diary.  We are almost finished with it,  The the students, five of whom are Hmong and one Vietnamese, will do a project comparing the plight of the Jews in Europe during WW II with what their people experienced in Laos and Vietnam after the Communist take over.

This is from The Writer's Almanac, March 29, 2016

It was on this day in 1944 that Anne Frank made the decision torewrite her diary as an autobiography. Almost two years earlier, in June of 1942, Anne's parents had given her a red-and-white-checkered diary as a 13th birthday present. A few weeks later, Anne's sister, Margot, received a notice to report for a forced labor camp. The next day, the family went into hiding, moving into rooms above the business office of Otto Frank, Anne's father. Otto's business partner came too, along with his wife and son, as did a dentist. From the beginning, Anne recorded her daily thoughts and feelings in her diary, which she nicknamed "Kitty." Once she filled the original checkered Kitty, she wrote in a black-covered exercise book, given to her by the non-Jewish friends who also took food and supplies to the families in hiding.

On March 28, 1944, the group who lived in hiding together gathered around a contraband radio to hear the news broadcast from London by the Dutch Government in Exile. The Education Minister, Gerrit Bolkestein, encouraged ordinary Dutch citizens living under the Nazi occupation to preserve documents for future generations. He said: "If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents - a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or priest. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory."

The next day, Anne wrote in her diary, describing Bolkestein's speech. She wrote: "Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the 'Secret Annex,' the title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if people were told how we Jews lived and what we ate and talked about here."

Frank went back through two years of entries and painstakingly rewrote them. She assigned pseudonyms to her family and the other members of the Secret Annex, and she edited for clarity, character development, and background. She decided that after the war, she would write a memoir called Het Achterhuis,which translates as "the house behind," or "the annex." She would use the diary as its basis. She wrote: "I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the 'Secret Annex' are humorous, there's a lot in my diary that speaks, but whether I have real talent remains to be seen." She wrote again and again about her desire to become a published writer - a journalist or novelist - and questioned whether she would succeed. At one point she wrote: "Everything here is so mixed up, nothing's connected any more, and sometimes I very much doubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh. 'The unbosomings of an ugly duckling' will be the title of all this nonsense."

Even while she rewrote her original diary, Anne continued to add to it, now with an audience in mind. In the spring and summer of 1944, she filled more than 300 pages of loose paper with this revised work. She was still working on it when the Nazis raided the secret annex in August of 1944, acting on an anonymous tip, and sent all of the inhabitants to concentration camps. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945; of the eight members of the secret annex, only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived.

Miep Gies was one of the Franks' friends who had helped them during their years of hiding - she and her husband were active in the Dutch resistance. After the annex was raided, Gies found Anne's writing and kept it in her desk, hoping to return it to Anne herself. When she learned that Anne had died, she passed it on to Otto, who edited and eventually published his daughter's story.

Today's Writer's Almanac

Saint Patrick died on this date in around 460 A.D. Though he's associated with Ireland, he was born in Roman Britain. His father, Calpurnius, was a deacon, but he probably took the post for political reasons. The family was not particularly religious, nor were they very keen on educating their children. Young Patrick - whose name at that time was Maewyn Succat - was kidnapped by Irish pirates when he was about 16; they took him back to Ireland and sold him into slavery to a Druid high priest. The priest put him to work as a shepherd, so he spent a lot of the next six years outdoors and alone, praying. He later saw it as a test of his faith. One night, he had a dream that a voice spoke to him and told him it was time to leave Ireland, so he escaped. But once he got back to Britain, he had another dream or vision that showed him his mission: return to Ireland and convert the pagans to Christianity. He pursued a religious education in France, which took several years. There were already Christians in Ireland by this time, so he was sent by the Church to minister to them. He already understood Irish language and culture, and wisely chose to incorporate traditional Irish practices into Christian observances, rather than outlawing them. He was very careful to deal fairly with all of the Irish people, Christian and non-Christian alike. By the time he died, he had established schools, monasteries, and churches all over Ireland. Patrick wrote two books, both relatively short. One is his spiritual autobiography, the Confessio. The other is his Letter to Coroticus, which condemned the British mistreatment of Irish Christians. Over the centuries, many legends have grown up around Saint Patrick. One of the most famous is that he drove the snakes out of Ireland; the snakes in the legend are probably a metaphor for the Druids. Another well-known story is that he explained the Holy Trinity - three persons in one God - to Irish pagans using the three lobes of the shamrock leaf. And he's credited with the design of the Celtic cross: the ring around the cross is said to be Patrick's attempt to incorporate the Irish sun god into the Christian symbol. Saint Patrick's Day has been a religious celebration in Ireland for more than a thousand years. People were given the day off work, so that they could attend church in the morning and then celebrate with a family meal of Irish bacon and cabbage. Even though it falls in the middle of the Christian season of Lent, during which meat is prohibited, the church relaxed this rule for the celebration of Saint Patrick's feast day. The pubs were closed for the day. Compared to what we've become used to in America, it was a fairly somber holiday. Here, it's become a holiday of boisterous excess, and a celebration of Irish culture by people of all ethnic backgrounds - especially in recent decades, when many holidays have become more commercialized. American celebrants feast on corned beef and cabbage, toss back record amounts of Guinness stout and Jameson whiskey, and drape themselves in green and orange, the colors of the Irish flag. Green in particular has become the traditional St. Patrick's Day color, even though blue is the color most commonly associated with the saint himself: bars and pubs all over America serve green-tinted beer, and Chicago even dyes its river green for the day. It's also become a holiday known for its parades, which first cropped up in American cities that had a large population of Irish immigrants. Irish Americans in Boston organized the first Saint Patrick's Day parade in 1737, in part to call attention to the mistreatment of Irish immigrant workers. New York City threw its first Saint Patrick's Day parade a few years later, and it is now the largest in the world. In recent years, Ireland has made an attempt to match America's exuberance. Dublin's officials realized it might be a good way to boost tourism, so they held their first Saint Patrick's Day parade in 1995. Since then, the parade has grown into a full-fledged, five-day festival that attracts people from all over the world.

Significant History from the Writer's Almanac 3/10/16

A woman known as "Moses" died on this day in 1913. Harriet (Ross) Tubman was born to slave parents Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green, in Dorchester County, Maryland. The exact year of her birth is uncertain, but it was probably around 1820. She was christened Araminta by her parents, and soon became known as "Minty," though she eventually renamed herself Harriet after her mother. When she was about five or six, the slave-owner hired her out as a child-minder. She was whipped if the baby cried and woke its mother, and one day she received five whippings before breakfast. When the 15-year-old Harriet refused one day to help an overseer restrain a runaway slave, she was hit in the head with a two-pound weight and was left unconscious without medical care for two days. Although she recovered, she began suffering from seizures, and narcolepsy, and also began to have visions and prophetic dreams. Deeply religious, she viewed these as messages from God. She married a free man, John Tubman, around 1844, though she was still a slave. When the plantation owner died in 1849, Harriet escaped, with two of her brothers. John Tubman stayed behind and eventually remarried. Using the Underground Railroad and the aid of Quakers, traveling by night to avoid the slave-catchers, navigating by the North Star, she made it to Philadelphia and enjoyed a brief period as a free woman, until passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made her a runaway slave once again. The thought of her family left behind in Maryland haunted her, and she worked odd jobs and saved her money, so that a year later, she might return to help her niece's family escape. Over 10 years and at least 13 trips, Harriet Tubman is believed to have led some 300 souls out of slavery into freedom in Canada. On one of her last trips, she brought out her parents, who were by that time around 70 years old. She used ingenious diversions to avoid being caught, like carrying two live chickens with her so that she appeared to be going on an errand. She worked coded messages into spirituals and hymns, and the singing of them spread her instructions from slave to slave. Once she evaded capture by simply pretending to read a newspaper - since it was well known that Harriet Tubman was illiterate. She traveled in winter, when folks who had homes were usually inclined to stay in them, and she scheduled departures for Friday nights because "escaped slave" notices couldn't be published until the following Monday. At one point, the price on her head was as high as $40,000, but she was never betrayed. She was never captured and neither were the slaves she led. Years later, she told an audience, "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say - I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger." She also served as a cook, a nurse, a scout, and a Union spy during the Civil War, and though she received commendation for her service, she was never paid. She described one battle she witnessed: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." After the Civil War, she began taking in orphans, the elderly, and the infirm. In 1903, she bought land adjacent to her home in Auburn, New York, and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent, and then transferred the mortgage to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Though this was her final major humanitarian project, she continued to travel and speak at suffrage conventions into the early 1900s. She and Frederick Douglass had great respect for each other. He wrote to her in 1868: "Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day - you in the night. ... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.

Recommended Reading

      Some have said "The best novel I've ever read."  The New Your Times Book Review 2014 called it one of the 10 best books.  It was a 'National Book Award' finalist.  Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See is certainly a fine book with a great plot and superb writing.
    Most of the action takes place in WWII but part of it's genius is following some characters until 2014.  By extending the time that long after the war it provokes reflection on the lingering effects of the war on those who live through it.
   Quite a long book, at 530 pages, it felt like a quick read for two reasons.  The first reason is that the story is compelling and the second is that the prose rolls easily along with great images and reflections.
   A friend who read it via audio books found that the author's technique of non-linear time sequences made it a bit difficult to follow.  She found it necessary to concentrate on the dates given at the beginning of the chapters.  In fact the book opens 7 August 1944  but a few pages later is 1934 and this juxtaposition of dates/times continues throughout the book.
   This is a book that, after resting on the shelf for sometime, could profitably be reread.

Let's Hear it for Women's Lib!

WRITER'S ALMANAC 3/4/16

Frances Perkins took her post as U.S. Secretary of Labor on this date in 1933. She was the first woman to serve on an American president's cabinet. She had become involved in politics after witnessing the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911. It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history: nearly 150 garment workers died. Perkins made workplace safety her first political cause, and helped draft many fire regulations that are still followed today. Franklin Roosevelt, who at that time was serving as governor of New York, named her to his Industrial Commission, and he relied heavily on her advice throughout his career. Before he began his first term as president, he offered her the cabinet post; she told him she would accept if he would agree to let her address several labor problems that she felt needed fixing. Roosevelt agreed.

Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of The Nation, praised FDR for his choice, predicting that Perkins would prove to be "an angel at the Cabinet in contrast with the sordidness and inhumanity of her predecessors." But many people, including labor union bosses, opposed the nomination of a woman to the post. Perkins believed men were more amenable to women who reminded them of their mothers, so she dressed modestly and rarely wore makeup. She kept quiet in meetings. She later recalled: "I tried to have as much of a mask as possible. I wanted to give the impression of being a quiet, orderly woman who didn't buzz-buzz all the time. [...] I knew that a lady interposing an idea into men's conversation is very unwelcome. I just proceeded on the theory that this was a gentleman's conversation on the porch of a golf club perhaps. You didn't butt in with bright ideas."

Her policies did away with child labor in the United States. They also led the way to the 40-hour workweek, the Federal Labor Standards Act, and Social Security - and they formed a large part of the New Deal.

MN History from 'The Writer's Almanac' 3/3/2016

The Territory of Minnesota was formed on this date in 1849. It was made up of all of what's now the state of Minnesota, plus that part of the Dakotas that lies east of the Missouri River. The southern and eastern boundaries of the Territory of Minnesota had recently been determined by the establishment of Iowa and Wisconsin as states, in 1846 and 1848, respectively. The northern boundary was much older: that was drawn when it was determined that the 49th Parallel would form the boundary between the United States and Canada in 1818. French and British fur traders had been doing business with Native American residents of the area since the 1600s, but the trade had really picked up after the turn of the 19th century. At the time the territory was formed, there were several large and thriving Ojibwe and Dakota Sioux settlements, and only three substantial white settlements: Saint Paul, Saint Anthony, and Stillwater. Each city received its own institution: Saint Paul was named the territorial (and later, state) capital; Saint Anthony - which would soon be absorbed by the new city of Minneapolis - was the proposed site for the University of Minnesota; and Stillwater became home to the territorial prison. Once the territory was formed, large numbers of American settlers began moving into the area. Many of them came from the northeastern United States-so many that Minnesota was known as "the New England of the West" for a while. White settlements cropped up all over the territory, and the European American population grew from fewer than 10,000 settlers to more than 150,000 in the 1850s alone. Native Americans' territory and influence waned as their land was taken over in a series of government treaties. The territorial era came to an end when Minnesota became the 32nd state in 1858.