A CALL TO SNUBBED AND UNDERVALUED INDEPENDENT WRITERS: "OCCUPY PUBLISHERS, BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES"

In one of the LinkedIn writers groups, a question was today raised about the Occupy Writers movement and a suggestion made that their goal is the same as that of self-published authors. I explained that no, these are already famous writers not concerned with the independents' plight. I suggested that what we need is to form an organization of independent self-published authors. I called it Occupy Publishers, Bookstores and Libraries, because this is where currently the barriers are erected against the independent writers. 

One of  our very well liked peers responded with outrage against such an Occupy movement, objecting to the term as signifying lazy people who want to enjoy the fruit of other people labors. I responded saying that, because our society is so polarized, Occupy has become a scarecrow, but it has its roots in the best American tradition of fair play and justice. 

I don't now, I said,  if you are familiar with N+, the literary publication which stepped behind that movement of young people who would like their country to be available to them. N+, to which I subscribed since its beginning several years before Occupy started, is a group of young aspiring writers, searching for their place under the sun and reminding me of the days of my literary youth. They believe theirs is not a political but ethical agenda, 

We should give them a listen, I pleaded, and you will see that demonizing them has no place in reality. Some of these young N+ people have already become best selling authors; all of them are idealists who think they can make a difference and make a positive contribution to their country. Just remember what the Boston tea party was about because new Tea Party came to deny the right of dissent from its views, declaring it un-American.

It is hard in our polarized society not to see any dissent in  a light other than that of an enemy. These children will be American leaders of tomorrow, guarding the rule of law and the freedoms and liberties of Americans.

In a wide sweep of history, they will be eventually considered the new American pioneers and not a rabble of anarchists as they are now painted to be. I think I will be proven right.

BOSNIA ON MY MIND

BOSNIA ON MY MIND

This is three stories in one, all of them centered on Bosnia, my birth land.  

First, the title. I started using it for Power Point presentations of my book,  Requiem for a Country:  A History Lesson,  ever since Angelina Jolie wrote and directed "In the Land of Blood and Honey," her own attempt to explain the causes of Bosnian genocides. I have tried to do that in The Last Exile in 2009 and again now in Requiem.

The second story actually started with Inga, a woman I had never met, and how she found me on the World Wide Web. She was born in Sarajevo, long after I had left it for the last time in 1946. She informed me she was a granddaughter of my paternal aunt, Erna, who had eloped with a Catholic man in 1938, a coincidence that played a role in her survival through World War II pogroms in the city.

It was the summer of 2010, and Inga had come upon my book, The Last Exile, on the Web. She sent me an email: Was I the son of a Mihael Levi, who had a sister Erna, her grandmother, in Sarajevo? We started exchanging pictures, memories and family history.  

From Inga, I learned how the breakup of Yugoslavia showed that Tito’s regime wasn’t what its detractors had made it out to be.  Bosnians, she reported, were not all that happy with the results of their “liberation” from the Federation he had built out of the ashes of the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Thievery was a sore point. Some people were getting filthy rich while the majority was falling into greater poverty. “We weren’t rich under Tito,” she said, “but everybody was pulling the cart in equal measure.”

The balkanization of Yugoslavia in the 1990s resulted in the independence of the former Yugoslav republics from each other, but also in a drastic lowering of the standard of living, accompanied by rampant corruption, in most of them. 

And this is the third part of the story:  A proof that this is not just a subjective, biased opinion from the rafters. It came in a book I came across, In a Bosnian Trench: A Wartime Memoir of a Muslim Bosnian Soldier, by Elvir Kulin, who wrote: 

After Tito's death, the economy in Bosnia worsened partly because of the corruption of political leaders and partly because of the cutback of social programs. Those cutbacks were demanded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which loaned Yugoslavia money. It was difficult to raise children and pay for food and school. You could feel the tension in the people. Unemployment was high. Nationalist politicians, who were replacing the Communist officials, blamed the poor economy on rival ethnic and religious groups.

These rival groups, taking their medieval revenge for fratricidal killings in the distant past, engaged in one of the worst genocides since the massacres of Armenians by the Turks after WWI and of Jews by the Germans during WWII.

To better illustrate my presentations about Bosnia, I asked Inga to send me some "before and after" photographs of Sarajevo, before and after Tito was gone, and before and after the internecine killings. Some of them were of the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics. The contrast was striking.

Inga wrote:

People lived well. Tito wasn't a dictator in the real meaning of the word. Yugoslavia had respect, and we who traveled abroad with the ‘scarlet passport’ saw it.

Then, we lived; today, we survive. There is no more that middle class. Today there are more mendicants and homeless (there were none then); many more bad things are happening.

Today, some curse him, say that one didn't live well then. I lived very well, was middle class, traveled through Europe, went every year to the sea ... not today.

I had broken ties with Yugoslavia before it broke itself apart, but I couldn’t remain uninvolved in the renewed carnage and destruction of my hometown. Thus: "Bosnia on My Mind" and my review of my Bosnian past.

I served Tito's Yugoslavia from its inception in 1944 until I left 12 years later. I observed it from afar as Tito ruled for another 24 years until his death. To this day, people ask me how is it that I don’t hate him as they think he deserves to be hated. It happens at private parties, as well as when I present my books to the public in schools and libraries.

Tito’s unfavorable reputation in America developed for many reasons, only one of them being his declared Communist background. Even when he stood up to Stalin in 1948 and his expulsion from Cominform marked the beginning of the end of the monolithic Soviet Empire, he remained sort of an anathema here. His attempts to find a middle ground between the western and eastern economic systems and to create a peaceful neutral corridor between the Eastern and Western Cold War blocks, deserved at least some praise for effort. He was a better asset to America than he was getting credit for.

The truth of the matter is that Tito’s enemies in America were wartime supporters of the enemies of the Allied forces in WWII, the Chetniks and the Ustashe.  These groups opposed Tito on ideological grounds even though he led the successful patriotic war against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia and effectively achieved unity and brotherhood of South Slavs.  After his death, that unity was broken by narrow and suspect interests along an artificial religious divide.

The animosity towards Tito helped many escaped war criminals avoid deportation back to and trial in Yugoslavia. Principal among them was Andrija Artuković, interior minister of the Ante Pavelić quisling regime in Zagreb, responsible for the unspeakably cruel extermination of Serbs, Jews and gypsies in concentration camps throughout Croatia between 1941 and 1945.  The outcry in the U.S. against Artuković's extradition from California, where he had been living, was based on his being an anti-Communist and a Roman Catholic at a time when Tito and the Vatican were at loggerheads over the wartime pro-Nazi activities of Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb. American schools were even named for the Croat prelate who had blessed troops on their way to serve Hitler on the Eastern Front.

At the time, no moral outrage could trump anticommunism in America. Former Nazis were welcome, not only as builders of rockets for NASA but also as dubious sources of information against the Russians, former US allies now enemies in the Cold War.  It wasn’t springtime in America then. Its moral leadership of the world had given way to a pragmatic "whatever works" in international as well as in domestic affairs. That is why this former foreigner maintains that this was the time when America’s beacon appeared to be dimming, as it began resorting to what was expedient rather than what was moral and ethical in international life. 

Several wars later, America is struggling to regain its old glow as the nation among the nations.  May it succeed. 

Front Page of i-Italy January 30, 2012

ON THE SURVIVAL OF JEWS IN ITALY 1941-1944


From the correspondence with Dr. Cappelli of the Calandra Institute prior to publication:

Due to constraints of space, which I exceeded by 10 words, I was unable to quote supporting sources, but they can be found in the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wiesenthal Center, www.HolocaustResearchProject.org and Renzo de Felice's The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, among many other scientific documents.

I am aware of the recent trend by some in academia, most of them part of the post-WWII generation, to interpret racial laws in Italy as more native than previously established. However, I must point out that most of these studies take their conclusions from subjective interpretations of official documents. I speak of factual survivals as an objective result of the sheltering which so many Italians provided to fleeing foreign Jews. It is a historical fact that Italians as a people hated the Germans; if they were saving Jews for that reason alone, it would not diminish the magnitude of the results.

I too have read every word Primo Levi wrote about his experiences, as well as words of lesser know Italians, such as a late friend of mine, Sergio Sarri, a non-Jew imprisoned in Germany, who wrote Bits of String about his capture as an Italian Partisan from Torino. I have had long discussions by email, letter and telephone with Ms. Indrimi [of the Primo Levi Institute in NY], before I gave up on trying to convince her that survival of any number of Jews is also a part of the story of the Holocaust. Every country seems proud that some of its citizens behaved admirably; why would Italy be different?

But  .... I refrained from .making my case ad hominem. All that the few of us remaining survivors are asking is that we not be denied now, as we surely will be denied once we all die away and make the point mute. It is my hope that the "reverse-denial" as I call it will not work in the end.

Once again, thank you for letting me set the record straight.

When I recently found on your digital pages a veiled attempt to deny the significance of the fact that many Italians helped foreign Jews survive the Holocaust, I asked to be given an opportunity for an opposing view. I thank you for allowing me to do express it.

 As an active Yugoslav Jewish antifascist in 1930s, I was too young to be accepted as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, but I got my chance to take action against Italian fascism in Split in 1941. There, I have earned my credentials against Mussolini and the black shirts on the streets of occupied Split in 1941. I have lived the whole of my 90 years opposing dictatorships and genocides, and what I have to say must be taken in that context.

I escaped my hometown from the Nazis because I was a Jew and my life was in danger. Had I stayed, I would have ended like more than 90% of Yugoslav Jews who perished for no other reason but for being Jewish. In Italian occupied Dalmatia, to where I fled, I was the enemy not for being a Jew but for being antifascist, a member of the underground. That was a fundamental distinction, which became even clearer in retrospect than it was at the time.

Territories occupied by fascist Italy were known to Jews from Salonica to Marseilles, everywhere in Europe, as the lesser evil; those Yugoslavs who did not perish in the Holocaust survived only because they escaped into Italian-held areas of Dalmatia and Montenegro.

 Uprooted and barely 19 at the time, I was taken as a civilian prisoner of war to an Italian hamlet in which the natives may have been circumspect about the foreigners, but not because we were Jewish. The churchgoing greengrocer’s wife asked us “sono veramente Ebrei”?, perhaps surprised that we didn’t look as sinister as the antisemitic propaganda was painting the Christ killers. She was the one who always gave us more than the prescribed rations of milk and bread “per gli bambini.”

I did not hate the fascists less because of that happenstance. But the Italians in Asolo did not behave as  one would have expected of members of a fascist nation.

When Mussolini fell in 1943 and we dispersed in various directions but all towards Rome, we were spared the fate of Italian Jews whose addresses were known to the new rulers - the Nazis and their Italian collaborators.  The refugees from Asolo, escaping with false documents given us personally by the highest government representative in the city, the Podesta, were not alone. Surviving with us were thousands of other foreign Jews from all over Italy, often thanks to active help from ordinary Italians.

This doesn’t by any means exonerate fascist Italy from being a participant in a bestial alliance with Hitler.

My political memoir, Requiem for a Country, juxtaposes our survival and the cruel fate suffered by Italian Jews deported in cattle cars from Milan, or burned in a crematorium in Trieste. The fleeing Jews were invisible to the authorities and that may have been the only reason they survived, but all along their route to salvation they found Italians who helped them hide, get food, move from one hideout to another.

I am to this day critical of the policies of Pius XII as being at best wishy-washy towards Hitler, but that doesn’t stop me from reporting that many a refugee, including myself, got assistance from at least some clergy in the Vatican. Was their number statistically significant? I don’t know. But I know the saying about the statistically tested parachute; I prefer that I had a good one at my side even if “scientifically” some may called it anecdotal. To the thousands of foreign Jewish survivors in Italy, escaping alive is a statistic, not an anecdote.

There are a diminishing number of us who still bear witness that in the barbaric times of WWII many Italians behaved better than most Europeans with the exception of the Danes. In my own country, we witnessed cruelties against Jews which made even the supervising SS cringe.

The modest joy at finding survivors in that corner of Europe only amplified the horror of the death of millions of others , including Italians, who perished in the Holocaust simply for being Jewish.

Honoring the good Italians does not dishonor the memory of the eight thousand murdered Italian Jews. It serves the historic truth.

DO PUBLISHERS SEE THE WRITING ON THEIR WALL?

It is interesting that the Digital Book World Conference & Expo (January 23-25, 2012) has on its agenda a forum named “Changing Author Publisher Relationship” with six speakers representing big name publishers, but no authors.

I have tried to draw this obvious deficiency to the conference organizers, but the only addresses one can reach are for registration. I have paid $25 for the exhibit day, but I do not have the hundreds of dollars I would need to attend (Individual Full Conference - $1,495.00).

So let me give a piece of my mind to the conference here on our website:

My take is that the publishers are feeling the competiton coming from people to whom they have been giving short shrift: the self published authors. We are already circumventing the barriers publisherdom has been setting in front of independent authors by uploading our stuff ourselves onto Kindle, Nook and other media, and printing our books as our own publishers. We pay the costs connected with making our works public, we promote ourselves at our own expense, and we wear out our own shoes peddling our books to bookstores and libraries.

No wonder there is writing on mainstream publishers’ walls.

If they want to prevent the approaching collective bankruptcy of their industry, they had better start talking to their bread and butter, which includes us, the “self-publishers,” aka independent authors,

Our organization is ready to start exploratory talks, and you, our members, can help by rounding up many more to give us clout as strong in numbers as it is in the principles we espouse.

I have published this blog also on the website www.indiePENdents.org -- the home of self-published and independent authors and their supporters. Join them

Digital Book World C

INDEPENDENT AUTHORS AS LEGITIMATE PUBLISHERS

It is time for independent writers to change the vocabulary of publishing.

The truth is that everyone who writes and self-publishes is also publisher of her and his own works: All others provide the services that we need to see our books in print and in digital form.

An independent writer is his or her own publisher even though he or she gets books to market through services calling themselves "publishers."  CreateSpace, LuLu (and many of the unfortunately less ethical businesses) provide editorial, formatting, printing and/or uploading.SERVICES for which they get PAID.  They have or hire the presses which print our works for distribution on demand.  Their PR efforts on our behalf, if we choose to use them, are essentially mass mailings to lists of addresses, another service for which we pay.

That is not publishing.

When an author isn't under contract with someone else, isnʼt paid for his or her manuscript and isnʼt promoted by a publisher, THE AUTHOR IS THE PUBLISHER.  My latest book reflects that fact by carrying my own imprint: Editions JML HIBOU (French for owl, as in wise, a joke I am entitled to at my age).

I chose my own editor (a great one - I was lucky to find her), who also formatted the book for printing and uploading to various e-formats including Kindle and Nook. Had I used the editorial services of one of these firms, it would not mean that they are my publishers.

The cover was my design executed by a local artist. If I paid one of the services for it, that would not warrant calling them my publisher.

I am by necessity both the publicist and the marketer of my books until someone else buys them from me and makes a contract with me on their printing and distribution.

When I started writing Requiem for a Country, I had secured my own ISBN number, only to find that each printing press I chose insisted on issuing their own, thus curtailing my own freedom on the market. I paid LuLu to be listed (in their own sweet time) by Ingram, which will supposedly get me into the Books in Print. But this will not  get my book into the bookstores: I will have to buy and provide quantities and guarantee, at my own expense, their return if not sold.

If I have to do that, I am not only the author but the publisher, a businessman and a gambler. Try getting a bank to underwrite that!

Let me throw in a wild thought: should we gang together, could we use indiePENdents to negotiate with POD presses and dictate the terms of publishing? Probably unlikely, because our organization would have to become a kind of business that we have no inclination to be. As individuals in this group of independents, we should, however, collectively pursue imagining ways to promote our cause.

We should not be inhibited by having silly dreams: Bring on your ideas and I am sure some of them will become THE SOLUTION.

This blog appeared first on the www.indiependents.org website.

AN INTERFAITH FOUNDATION 

HONORING THE ITALIAN PEOPLE 

Italian Goodness co-existed with Italian Tragedy because the fascist rule did not succeed in snuffing out the Italian soul. That is why so many individual Italians share the honors among the righteous listed in Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, located in Jerusalem, Israel. And this is why I am proposing the establishment of foundation which -- as part and parcel of the homage to those who perished at the hands of the fascists -- will make sure that the collective example of the good people of Italy during WWII becomes known and not forgotten. 

I would like to live and see such a non-profit foundation pay homage to and promote the truth of the humanity the Italian people showed to Jews during World War II. While the fascist government in Rome was an ally of Nazi Germany, and as such introduced racial laws imitating Hitler's, the people of Italy by and 149 

large resisted racism. While millions perished in Europe, thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust owe their lives to the fact that the majority of Italians never lost their human soul to the hatreds of the time. On the contrary, ordinary people of Italy — and even some of their lower rank clergy — played pivotal role in helping, hiding and protecting Jews against the Nazis and Mussolini‘s Salò Republic. The number of those deported would have been more tragic but for the active resistance of Italians to the raids and deportations. 

In the absence of general knowledge about this truth, and indeed against an unexpected resistance to it, it is my wish that the foundation should provide a balance by publicizing testimonies of survivors, spread documents on the righteousness of Italians in the face of grave danger to themselves, and promote the knowledge about the humane role of the Italians -- in the media, on campuses, in schools and universities, as well as in Holocaust Museums worldwide. 

Bosnia on my mind

. . . it never could be the same again, this shattered marble mosaic, now missing so many of its colorful Jewish chips. Out of 75,000 Yugoslav Jews, fewer than 5,000 found their way home, less than 1,000 to Sarajevo—a skeletal remnant of a once whole native people. I realize now, fifty years later, it was too late to return to the old coexistence, to dream of brotherhood, with an integral part of the community already wiped out. But for a time we continued to dream of co-existence, purposefully oblivious to the face of reality.

The gruesome slaughter of Sarajevo Jews had mostly been carried out by locals. In concentration camps in Croatia, for example in Jasenovac, the native koljači (throat-cutters) went about the killing in such a barbaric way that it shocked even the Germans. So many bodies were thrown into the Sava river that the downstream current ran red with blood all the way to Belgrade. 

Also there in search of the old hometown was my cousin Izzi, the nemesis of my youth, whom I’d last seen at the liberation of Rome on June 14^th, 1944, as we welcomed the triumphant army of General Mark Clark. He was now a man of responsibility, father to Daniela, whom Flora had delivered just days before a most difficult exodus from Asolo to Rome. Our world was now at peace as Izzi and I walked these streets again, slowly taking in the familiar sights.  

I noticed a couple of field wagons, each pulled by two big Bavarian draft horses, the kind used to transport heavy loads of beer barrels. But they weren’t loaded with beer barrels.  They were piled high with some very familiar furniture.

“Hey,” I told Izzi, “that’s our stuff there!”

Our family’s furniture was easy to recognize, as it was all hand made to order. The kilim-covered divans from our Turkish Room; my parents’ pale beige-green bird’s-eye maple bedroom furniture; Art Nouveau, matte finish, black wood upholstered round armchairs. The shining grand piano had to be ours as well. I stopped the caravan, left Izzi to stand guard, and headed for the nearby police station. We confiscated the contraband, but I refused to press charges. I didn’t know these people, and I didn’t want to know who was behind all this wartime robbery. I set it aside, blocked it out, did my best to forget about it. 

I was twenty-four, ready to start life in the society of my dreams.

(From The Last Exile)