February is a hard month to love. Say all you want about the plucky groundhog, and rhapsodize on the romance of Cupid; remember the Chinese New Year, American Presidents and throw in a good word for Leap Year but the truth doesn’t change: February in the Northern Hemisphere is a difficult month to love. The Holiday Season disappeared ages ago and the pastel head of Spring is nowhere near to being seen on the horizon. We may be looking at wind or rain next month but right now the weatherman’s two favorite words are “freezing” and “snow” and the outside world almost seems drained of color. In February, it’s hard to avoid getting depressed. To keep the wraiths of February Depression at bay, may I suggest picking up a few books? In their own ways, each of the following stories helps me through these days of relentless cold. I hope they can help you too. If the rest of the world had to describe Jamaica in three words or less, their list would be: Poverty, Music, and Hot. Politics, Drugs and Religion make the next list but they seem to have grown out of a civilization where life…
Google remembered the liberation of Auschwitz today. For those who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century, Auschwitz is the edge of a remembered nightmare, a disaster our parents and grandparents witnessed and passed in their memories to us. My mother saw the newsreels of the liberation as a child and the images haunted her forever but some of my friends were even closer to the tragedy. One college friend’s great-aunt was a survivor of the camps and when I met the lady, I marveled that this happy cookie-jar of a woman had faced such evil and still lived so joyfully, dancing with a tattooed number on her arm. Another friend was the child of camp survivors who married after the liberation and their tenacity and PTSD were visible in her character. Auschwitz left a lifetime of suffering and long memories in its wake and those of us not directly affected have been trying to grasp the motives and magnitude of the Holocaust ever since. This is the role more and more of the world has moved into over the last seventy years and it’s a role William Styron talked about in his novel, Sophie’s Choice. Styron…