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carefree senior living in Novi.

ner, and I went to bed not under-
standing the day’s events any more
than I understood how the jelly gets
into the Chanukah jelly rolls. But
the next morning in our third-grade
homeroom at Theodore Roosevelt
Elementary School on Linwood
Avenue, we began four years of les-
sons about the “Yellow Menace.” And
about hate.
In the 1949 musical play South
Pacific, based on James Michener’s
1947 book Tales of the South Pacific,
a song says, “You’ve got to be care-
fully taught … to hate and fear.”
Along with dozens of other
11-year-olds, I was carefully taught.
By week’s end, posters were up
around the school. On one, two faces
side by side. “This man is Chinese.
He’s yellow but he’s our friend. This
man is Japanese. He’s yellow and he’s
our enemy. See the difference?”
I caught on. We hate Japanese
people. And we were at war with
them. There also was war in Europe,
the work of Adolph Hitler, pos-
sibly the inventor of hate and fear.
He was German, but I don’t recall
school posters teaching us to hate all
Germans.
Learning to hate Japanese people
was an ongoing course of study,
especially as the war with them grew
more vicious and spread across the
Pacific Ocean. This war, to even-

tually bomb Japan and drive the
Japanese people into submission,
was a war of strategies and tactics
based on the capacity of fuel tanks
in American warplanes and their
functional ranges. It became neces-
sary to capture a Pacific island, build
an airstrip and a fuel depot and then
repeat on the next captured island
in a connect-the-dots route to Japan.
Not so easily done by America and
her allies as the Japanese forces con-
tinuously intensified their responses.
At home, we went to the movies
and saw depictions of the brutaliza-
tion done to American and allied
fighters. Hate the Japanese? The
Japs? Movies showed us why and
how. So did the news reports. Bataan
Death March. Battle of the Coral Sea.
Kamikazes. We were carefully taught
to hate and fear.
Then the war ended — in violent
fires never before seen on Earth.
Tens of thousands of Japanese died
in the bombings of two of their cit-
ies. Has the Yellow Menace been
destroyed? Is it no longer necessary
to hate the Japanese? I was carefully
taught to hate and fear. To this day,
I continue to struggle to get past the
lessons. If only I’d done so well in
math.

*

Norman Prady, 82, is a journalist a nd author
living in Berkley.

Yiddish Limerick

TU B’AV

Call 1-800-917-8169 or visit
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(Beginning the evening
of Aug. 18)

Dos iz nisht* Valentine’s, Tu b’Av is
today.
Mir Yidn yetzt hobn* our own, we
can say.
Zog, “Ich hob dir azey lib”***
any way you can do.
With hugs un mit smooch-
es,**** a serenade or two.
Gib a kush***** don’t be shy, it’s undzer****** own lovers’ day.

* Dos iz nisht — this is not
** Mir Yidn yetzt hobn — We Jews now have
*** Zog, “Ich hob dir azey lib” — Say, “I love you so much”
**** un mit-smooches — and with kisses
***** Gib a kush — Give a kiss
****** undzer — our

Novi

EricksonLiving.com

— Rachel Kapen

11495988

2061780

8 August 18 • 2016

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