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Israel-Palestine
The Ashkenazi Zionist Eraser: Curricula in Israel on the History, Culture, and Identity of Mizrahi Jews by Sami Shalom Chetrit *** Lovingly dedicated to the late Dr. Yosef Halevi, who towards the end of his life completed his comprehensive and marvelous study of the forgotten writer, Shoshana Shababo, and implanted it in the collective Mizrahi consciousness. I consider this book a spiritual legacy. May Dr. Halevi’s memory be for a blessing. I will begin with a short story. A number of years ago my friend Professor Amiel Alcalay of New York was asked by Professor Gershon Shaked to edit a single issue of a literary journal published by the Foreign Ministry. Professor Alcalay, who in recent years has become one of the most important translators of Hebrew poetry into English, agreed, on condition that he would be granted complete freedom to select and edit. Alcalay went to work and prepared translations of several poems for inclusion in Professor Shaked's prestigious journal, and sent them to him. Some time passed, and Shaked wrote in response that some of the poems were written by unknown and certainly not important Israeli poets, and therefore his prestigious journal would be unable to publish them. "Who is Samir Chetrit?" Shaked asked, meaning me, Sami Chetrit. By that time, I had already published a book of poems entitled Opening, which had been awarded the Hari Harshon prize by Hebrew University -- the university where I had studied Hebrew literature with, among other professors, the gods of Hebrew literature, Gershon Shaked. Naturally, Alcalay withdrew from the project and relinquished this prestigious invitation. In fact, all the translations which Alcalay sent to Shaked were of works by contemporary Mizrahi poets. Shaked, needless to say, was shocked by the daring idea of the Mizrahi intellectual across the sea. I opened with this story in order to ask is the printed face of Hebrew literature in recent generations indeed presenting a representative selection of its many and varied creators? Who set up the display window of Hebrew creativity? How shall we relate to the following fact: the curriculum for literature in Israeli high schools includes 472 writers. Among them are 59 Mizrahi writers (Jews and non-Jews). 250 of the 472 are from the modern era and among these are only seven Mizrahi writers. Here I am using Gershon Shaked, who is essentially a literary historian, as a peg on which to hang the following question: who is to shape dominance of identity? Who is to mold the contours of Jewish history? Who is to decide what enters the historiographical ‘canon’ and what remains outside? And even more interesting, what are the considerations used by those historians? With this short list, I am attempting to narrow the big question to matter which are in the domain of state responsibility. In other words, the school curricula in the State of Israel. School curricula are that which mold identity and culture, and therefore we have to assume that a great deal of care and thought has gone into their design and selection, and are intended to serve important and lofty purposes. Here I will focus on the question of the place and image of Mizrahi-Jewish history and culture in school curricula which are mainly designed by Ashkenazi Jews (an examination of the names of coordinators and members of the curricular committees in the Ministry of Education indicates that 95% of them are Ashkenazi Jews). I will not deal here with the image and place of Arab/Palestinian history and identity in Ashkenazi Zionist historiography. Myriads of studies and books have been written about this by young Ashkenazi historians who call themselves "the new historians." Their silence with regard to Mizrahi issues has been attested too by many. It is clear to anyone who has read the various text-books on Jewish-Zionist historiography in the new modern era or the various literary anthologies, that the narrative is about the Jews of Europe (mainly Eastern Europe). And indeed, how could it be otherwise, seeing that these books tell only the story of the European Jewish Zionists. But the title should have fit the content, namely: the history of European Jewry and Zionism in the modern era. However, the Ashkenazi Zionist historian seeks to achieve a number of targets in one blow: to seize control of the overall Jewish narrative, to glorify and inflate the place of Eastern European Jews in the history of the Jewish people, and of course to utterly marginalize Jews of the Arab East and to establish a "historical" foundation for the myth of the rescue of the Mizrahi Jews by the Ashkenazi Zionist movement. This is reflected in the minuscule number of pages in these books which deal with Mizrahi Jews and especially in the content of these few pages. In Dr. Shimshom Kirshenbaum’s text-book, The History of the People of Israel in Recent Times, nine of 400 pages are devoted to Eastern Jews (see the photograph by Meir Gal, reproduced in NFW, July 1997, pp 30-33, in which he grasps in his hand the nine "Mizrahi" pages of Kirshenbaum's book, while the rest of the pages droop to the sides). The unfortunate content of these few pages represent Eastern Jews as helpless hostages in the hands of the Arab forces of darkness, and naturally, it was their beautiful and courageous white brothers who brought salvation. Also, in the text-book of Shlomo Horowitz A Short History of Israel in the New Era, only six out of 638 pages deal with Eastern Jews, and the content of these pages is pathetic. "At the same time as the Jews of Europe were undergoing a process of tempestuous revolutionary transformation in North America, to form a new and powerful Jewish center, Jewish communities emerged in the backward Islamic countries of Asia and Africa (which in the past had been the fortress of the Jewish culture), totaling about 800,000 persons -- and subject to the dual yoke of Oriental despotism and Moslem fanaticism. For the most part they lived enclosed in their own special neighborhoods, limited to earning their living in only a few professions (mostly artisans, carpenters and small traders). Their way of life was stagnant and sunk in spiritual sleep." This Ashkenazi historian adds: "The masses of the people lived in degenerated poverty and ignorance, spoke in the native language, and those who were located far from the mainstream of modern history (including those who in Kurdistan and the Persian mountains, as well as cave-dwellers in the Atlas mountains and desert oases on the edge of the Sahara desert) lived on an even lower level, and their way of life and level of culture was similar to that of their half-wild Moslem neighbors." And this fascinating story, told by an anthropologist-historian, continues: "The decisive majority of the [Eastern] Jewish population was ignorant and -- like their neighbors -- preoccupied with various, peculiar superstitions. Their public life was utterly stagnant and frozen: there was not even a trace of any social movements, nor a trace of ideological struggles or living aspirations, except for hidden yearnings for the coming of the Messiah" (Horowitz, vol. I, pp 169-170). This is the Zionist classic on which I grew up. Today, when I read these passages with a critical eye, I do not understand how I acquired the tremendous spiritual courage needed to free oneself from this racist poison, which led me and the members of my generation to feel deep hatred whenever the word "East" or "Arab" appeared. In other words, devastating self-hatred, self-abnegation, self-erasure and of course, imitating and attempting to acquire the identity of the superior white race, with the help of teachers like Horowitz. Of course, generations of Ashkenazim also grew up on this book and others like it, as they came to fill the roles -- through inheritance of the intellectual, media and educational elite in Israel. They really and truly believe that they hold their positions of power by virtue of their cultural and racial superiority. They are the ones who continue to mold, on this distorted basis, the Israeli identity and thus Mizrahi identity well. Not less deleterious than the creation of a negative self-image among the Mizrahim, was the creation of a superiority complex and an attitude of cultural condescension among the Ashkenazim. This is because imbedded in these books, like the texts with which we are dealing, is the apparently opposite thesis that the Jews of Europe and of Eastern Europe lived in the apex of human culture. As if their lives were not one long series of ignorance, pits, and darkness: the Crusades, the Inquisition, oppressive decrees and persecutions, expulsions, riots and pogroms, ghettoes, restrictions, racist laws and finally -- physical extermination at the hands of their good and progressive neighbors. If the Mizrahim were to study this history under the title "History of Ashkenazi Jewry," one can assume that it would be classified in their collective memory as the story of the Jewish Other, and the absence of the Mizrahi story would be visible to them, and perhaps one day they would be asked to be exempt from being tested on the subject of European-Ashkenazi history in their high school matriculation examinations. I believe that in the near future, there will be a sufficient basis and consciousness to justify such a demand. The situation of absence, then, is preferable to a situation of presence in such a negative and racist context. Such an absence is present in a relatively new book published by the Ministry of Education itself: The Zionist Idea and the Establishment of the State of Israel (Ministry of Education Curriculum, 1984). However, this book too falsely claims to recount the history of the Jewish people. The impudence and shamelessness of this book is seventy times worse. It ostensibly more progressive, and therefore it discards some of the customary racist, orientalist passages. But the book fails to declare its true name: The History of Ashkenazi Zionism. It invites Mizrahi students to adopt this foreign and alien history as their own, in a process of self-negation. Worse, it continues to hide from them the crimes committed by Ashkenazi Zionism against the Mizrahim in the process of the establishment of the State of Israel. Hence, this too is a bad book. In other words, it is an excellent book from the point of view of the aims of the Ashkenazi Zionist historians and teachers who have set for themselves to erase Mizrahi history and not to allow the crystallization of a Mizrahi identity in Israel. Of course, the Ashkenazi Zionist jargon has prettier names for this, such as "melting pot," "national unity," "one people," and similar cynical and evil slogans. The tremendous success achieved in enforcing these aims is attested to by the tens of thousands of Mizrahi high school graduates who are busy glorifying their Ashkenazi masters and lowering their own profiles to the point of erasing their own identities and selves. These young people utterly deny that Ashkenazi Zionism has been and is employing cultural and economic oppression against the Mizrahim. After all, in the entire reserve of knowledge which they acquired in high school and university (those who got there), there is no support whatsoever for such a view. Sad to say, I once had to teach The History of the People of Israel in Recent Times to a high school class composed almost entirely of Mizrahim as part of the preparation for the matriculation examinations. I must admit that this was a most frustrating assignment. The solutions that I came up with were far from perfect. In the first lesson, I divided the blackboard into two, and told the students that on one side we would study the "material for the examination, " and on the other side I would attempt to teach the history which the state refuses to teach. This was very difficult because the pressure to study for the lousy test was stronger than the desire to know the truth. One might say that my solution was almost a furitive one. Another experience I had involved teaching history to new immigrants. I was assigned to prepare an entire class composed of new immigrants for the high school matriculation examination, and to this end I was handed a new blue text-book decorated with a large Star of David, and upon which appeared the title: From Diaspora to State -- Chapters in the History of the People of Israel and the State of Israel, 1881-1951 (Ministry of Education Curriculum, 1992). This book attempted to explain, in 120 pages, and in simple Hebrew written in big letters for new immigrants, the history of the people of Israel and the State of Israel, no more no less! As I always do, I immediately opened the book and started to look for the pages on Eastern Jews, and wonder of wonders, discovered that there was one whole chapter devoted to the subject, of seven whole pages. The name of the chapter: The Mass Aliya [Immigration] After the Establishment of the State -- 1948-1951. Here are a few of the jewels offered to the young immigrants: "The wave of emigration of Arabs leaving the country and the wave of immigration of Jews making aliya [literally: 'ascending'] to Israel from Arab countries was similar to a population exchange procedure. Approximately 650,000 Arabs left the country and approximately 750,000 Jews from Arab countries immigrated to the country." Thus the darkest chapter in the Ashkenazi Zionist revolution becomes nothing but a vibration of waves of people who happen to be floating in the human sea. In a section describing the immigration of the 1950s, today's young immigrants are told: "Most of the immigration of the '50s was a rescue operation." And thus the Authoritative Narrator connects the fate of the survivors of the holocaust in Europe with the fate of the Jews of the Arab countries. So from what did Ashkenazi Zionism save the Jews of the Arab countries? "The immigration from the Arab countries involved large families, and the percentage of children among them was high. Most of them came from countries just beginning to undergo the process of modernization. Many of them experienced difficulties in adjusting to the new culture, which was European-Western. The absorption system [of the new state] expected the immigrants to fit into the conditions of the country and its way of life. Most of the immigrants from Islamic countries practiced the precepts of Judaism, and it was hard for them to get used to a secular Jewish society. This religious-cultural transition led to a crisis among these immigrants." One has to admit that this is a refined and soft, subtle style. This story of the "difficulties" in adjusting to the new "European-Western" culture always forces me to break out in bitter laughter. I do not know if I feel so bitter because I am laughing, or whether I am laughing because I feel so bitter. It reminds me of one of the first crises that my father underwent, when, in 1963, he returned one day from ulpan [Hebrew language classes for new immigrants] and announced to his elder brothers that he was fed up and that he was going to return with his family to Morocco. The story, at first glance, appears of little importance: my father was accustomed to go to ulpan dressed in his best suits, which he had brought from Morocco. One day an immigrant from Rumania approached him and asked to feel the jacket of my father's suit. The Rumanian caressed the material in wonderment, praised its quality and asked where in Israel my father acquired such a suit. My father replied that he had a closet full of suits that he had brought with him from Morocco. The Rumanian reacted with astonishment and puzzlement: that's from Morocco? They know how to stitch that way in Morocco? Afterwards he was surprised to learn that there was electricity and schools and trains and similar Rumanian-Western wonders in Morocco. My father often complained to his brothers about the "primitive Ashkenazim who want to humiliate the Moroccans." Today this story strikes me as funny. At the time it was a source of unconscious anxiety for a new immigrant child. In 1980, a group of Mizrahi intellectuals, including Dr. Vikki Shiran and Professor Shimon Shetrit, submitted a petition to the Supreme Court asking that it halt the broadcast on Israel Television of a documentary serial known as The Pillar of Fire [on the history of Zionism], because it marginalized the Mizrahim, who hardly appeared in this narrative at all. I have to admit that for me at that time a young man of 20, it provided a good shot in the arm of consciousness. I was proud of them. Today it is clear to me that this struggle was pathetic. Today neither I nor a good part of my generation wants any "credit" for the Mizrahi role in the Zionist revolution. For the very simple reason that we indeed had no role in it. The ideology of political Zionism is Ashkenazi, and the Ashkenazim have full patent rights on it. This is because the mother which gave birth to political Zionism -- Christian anti-Semitism -- was born and lived in Europe, not in Morocco and not in Iraq! -- from the expulsion from Spain through the most terrible holocaust to today's neo-Nazi movements. Therefore my interest and that of my pedagogical colleagues in Kedma is not to prove that we were the most Zionist of all, but to tell our own story ourselves. To write our own history ourselves and to bequeath it to future generations, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim alike. Today, I refuse to study or teach Ashkenazi Zionist history under the guise of Jewish history. I am willing to teach it under its proper rubric as well as to place it in its proper context. I refuse to hear my story when it is told in a misleading, distorted and destructive way , the way the Ashkenazi Zionists tell it to me. For they had, and have, but one purpose -- to justify all the oppressive deeds of Ashkenazi Zionism against the Mizrahim, from the moment it was decided to bring them here by emotional and political manipulations, through their economic dispossession, up to their cultural dispossession and the eradication of their identity. Ever since my son began to study in elementary school, I have been troubled by the damage that these curricular materials are liable to inflict on him; therefore, together with him I flip through his history, ('Homeland') and literature text-books. In fourth grade, my son got a new history book: Journey in the First Colonies (Ministry of Education Curriculum, 1992). (This text-book was introduced in elementary schools during the tenure of Amnon Rubinstein, Meretz, as Education Minister). My son and I opened the book with great excitement, and we started to leaf through and examine it. As usual, I looked for the Mizrahim. Along the way I encountered, of course, Arabs -- in this book called The Arabs, without a name or any story of their own. Just a gang of especially "bad Arabs" who harassed the good Jews who came from Russia and Hungary. And lo and behold, after we had leafed through almost the entire book, and not found any mention of the Persian Jews who settled in the Galilee in 1815 whose numbers equaled that of the Biluim, nor of the Mani and Yehuda families who settled in Hebron in 1856, nor of the Shlush, Amzallag and Moyal families from Algeria and Morocco who settled in Jaffa and established in 1869 the first neighborhood outside of Jaffa in 1840, nor of the Mahane Yisrael neighborhood which was established in 1868 by Jews from Morocco and Algeria, nor of the Bukkharan Quarter which was established in 1869 in Jerusalem by immigrants from Bukkharia, Samarkand and Tashkent, nor of the Georgian Jews who came in 1863. And lo and behold, we had almost given up in despair when we found something. And not just anything, but one whole chapter on the Yemenites who came in 1882. The Ashkenazi Zionists always loved the Yemenites, especially their children, and so this book also devotes a chapter to them: The Little Yemenite. Naturally the chapter includes color pictures of Yemenite embroidery, and the cooking of jahnun and mallawe. But what attracted us were the words, actually. The story is told by "Mirale," a nine-and-a-half year old girl from a Hungarian family: "One day a little boy appeared in our alley-way. He was darker and thinner than any child I had ever seen before [...] The boy was walking through our alley-way, going from house to house and yelling 'Jibneh! Jibneh!' ['cheese' in Arabic] in a strange accent, part Arabic, part Hebrew, something mixed-up. Everybody in the neighborhood shut their doors in his face [...] My mother shot me a sharp glance, and said that this child came to Jerusalem just a few days ago with a group of 200 people. Everyone who came with him was just as dark as he was, and just as thin. These people say they were Jews who have came to this country from a distant land, from the land of Yemen. But nobody in Jerusalem believed them. "And why don't they believe them?' I asked. My mother lost her patience and scolded me: "Tell me Mira, since when are their dark Jews? [...] When he left, there was a tumult in our alley-way. Everybody spoke against him. They said he was an Arab, they said he was an impostor, they said all sorts of other things which I don't remember anymore. The rumors were so panicky and terrible that the same night my mother double-locked the doors, just to be on the safe side." The ending is a happy one, of course, like in all good Zionist stories: "Good news! -- our neighbor announced, and began to breathe easier -- you know Mira, these Yemenites are Jews. Our Rabbis invited them to an investigation. They tested them on the laws of kashrut [Jewish dietary laws], asked them to put on tefillin [phylacteries], to read from the Talmud and to say the Sh'ma [a main part of the daily prayer service] -- and the investigation proved that these people really are Jews, Jews who came from Yemen." How moving. Imagine what goes through the head of a dark-skinned pupil in the fourth grade who reads and internalizes these sentences? --When he looks in the mirror every day of his life? Or when he looks at his parents, who are the most legitimate people in the whole world for him. What must pass through the head of a light-skinned pupil when he looks in the mirror, or at his parents, or at light-skinned television personality, or at a blonde model in an advertisement? What happens to him when he looks at a boy that is darker than he is. Like Mira, the best he might feel is pity. Pity is a poor basis on which to build friendship and fraternity. In the high school curriculum on The History of the People of Israel in Recent Generations, Eastern Jews appear in only two chapters: Zionist activity in Islamic countries, and the Aliya movement and in The mass aliya and the liquidation of the Exile in the Islamic countries (Ministry of Education History Curriculum). As I noted above, Eastern Jews do not appear at all in the history of the Jewish people in recent times, and rightly so, but they do nevertheless appear when the matter is somehow connected to Ashkenazi Zionism. In other words, the Mizrahi story appears only when it serves the Zionist interest, as if Eastern Jews had no historical standing of their own. And we have already seen that in these passages (in the text-books), the Eastern Jews appear in a negative context, as if they spent hundreds of years living in suffering, awaiting redemption ... by the Jews of Europe. The use of the expression "the liquidation of the Exile" is of course positive here, ostensibly. The Ashkenazi Zionist historian wishes to say that it was actually good that the Mizrahi communities were liquidated, because their existence was so miserable. This is an insulting and contemptuous message with regard to glorious communities of hundreds and thousands years standing who strengthened and beautified Hebrew-Jewish culture from the day it was born on the East. It should be clear to any reasonable person that this situation needs to undergo a fundamental and comprehensive transformation. However, that's not what those who established the Ministry of Education’s Center for the Integration of the Heritage of Eastern Jews thought. It would not occur to anybody that the minority should do a favor and integrate the majority into the national narrative. And once again, this term "heritage" -- not history or culture. Many good Mizrahim worked in the Center, and saw it as a good opportunity to expand Mizrahi Studies in the schools; but in all innocence, they served the opposite purpose: the marginalization and inferiorization of the culture and history of Eastern Jews. One of the interesting products supported by the Center was in 1984 in an anthology of articles on Eastern Jews edited for high school students by the anthropologists Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shaked (both professors at Tel Aviv University). All the writers in the anthology, which was titled (how could it not be?) Eastern Jews, were Israeli anthropologists, who serve the function that they usually do, i.e., bestowing their support and "scientific" certificate of approval to the orientalist superiority-complex of Europeans towards those who belong to non-European cultures. In their introduction to the anthology, the editors discuss their motivations in compiling this collection: "The period in which we were involved in the preparation of this book was one of intense inter-ethnic tension, of a type we had not seen for years. We think that repairing the situation requires, among other things, more study and mutual recognition of the culture and heritage between each ethnic community in Israel." They elaborate on this topic in a later part of the introduction, and warn of the danger of an exclusive emphasis on the folklore and ‘exotic’ aspects of Eastern Jews, such as "cuisine and exotic details of costume and folk-dances." According to them, "the results would only be the deepening of the negative self-image of the students of Mizrahi origin and a deepening of the contempt felt by students of European origin towards them" (Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shaked, Eastern Jews, Schocken, 1984). However, when one reads the book, one discovers no surprises. The Mizrahim, of course, come from pre-modern, under-developed societies, and in Israel they are called "ethnic groups," although they have almost always constituted the majority of the (Jewish) population. In the entire collection, there is not even one study of the Mizrahi situation from the Mizrahi perspective. The book employs the manipulative, orientalist terminology of 'define and rule': "transformation and trends," "crisis and change," and the like. For the most part, the book looks at the Mizrahim here in Israel from an insulting and intrusive anthropological point of view. Two of the articles are devoted to violence and aggression amongst the Mizrahim, or more precisely, the Moroccans. For example, in his article Aggression and Social Relations, Shaked attempts to give a "scientific" explanation for the "violence of the Moroccans." Here is a small sample of the pearls of wisdom being offered to high school students: "One of the accepted scientific explanations for the ‘violence of the Moroccans’ sees it as an expression of the intensification of the crisis which erupted when family and communal ties began to break down. The crisis began in Morocco, with the migration of Jews from the villages to the coastal cities which developed along with the French penetration, several decades before the [mass] immigration to Israel. The crisis deepened after the immigration." And further: "Another accepted outlook sees Moroccan violence as the product of the conditions of insecurity and physical danger, which characterized large parts of Morocco for generations." In another place in the same article, the learned anthropologist defines a "violent incident": "A raising of the voice accompanied by expressions of anger, revealed in facial expressions and body movements, following upon personal accusations of inappropriate conduct which fails to meet mutual expectations or as a reaction to what one of the parties views as unjust demands." These words, like the article as a whole, contain much ‘hidden wisdom.’ First, they separate Moroccan Jews from all the rest, labels them ('scientifically') as especially violent, and thus bestows a higher rank on the rest of the Mizrahim. Second, they explain 'scientifically' why it is that the prisons are full of Moroccans. Third, they absolve Ashkenazi Zionism from any connection or responsibility for the situation of Moroccan Jews which could lead them to rebel against the oppressive forces, and instead they explicitly say that this is an old problem which they brought with them from Morocco. This is precisely where the malicious power of the article is embedded. The article speaks of the founding of Shas, after the establishment of Tami, after the upheaval of 1977, after the rebellion of the Tents Movement and the Black Panthers . The sociologist authors try to sum up a revelation rebellion and independence with the lying expression: "ethnic tensions." Another form of profit reaped by the holders of power is a patent on the right to define violence. Their definition does not include the brutal acts of violence committed by Ashkenazi Zionism against the Moroccans themselves, a violence which sought to disintegrate their power and to wipe their identity and spirits off the face of the earth: bringing them to Israel by fraud and deception, while dispossessing them of their property, housing them in inhuman and humiliating conditions; humiliating their parents and disorganizing their families; preventing their children from receiving a good education, while turning them into a cheap labor force for the developing Ashkenazi-controlled industrial sector; disconnecting them from their culture and from religion and injecting them with fierce self-hatred. And after all this, they want to accept us with love -- one by one, each soul wiped clean of identity and memory and no longer dangerous to the Ashkenazi cultural hegemony. Recommendations: By way of summary, it is fitting to offer some operative conclusions. I have two types of recommendations. One for Ashkenazim and one for Mizrahim. To the Ashkenazim I recommend: don't write about me, don't explain me, don't define me, don't teach me, and don't tell me who I am and where I came from. Continue to document your (so you claim) terrible holocaust and your kibbutz. Continue to discuss your intra-Ashkenazi tensions -- between religious and secular, liberals and socialists, seekers of peace and persecutors. Such discussions are very important for your own development, and if you are sufficiently busy with them, you might leave us alone so we can say something about ourselves. I have two recommendations for my Mizrahi brothers and sisters: you are permitted not to pay attention or heed, and not to study or teach, this violent curriculum designed to disintegrate and erase you. To reject it all with disgust and call things by their true name. My second recommendation is that throughout every minute of your entire lives you always ask about, investigate and document your personal and communal history, and to hold on to it proudly and stubbornly. Do not relate to yourselves only in the Ashkenazi Zionist context. People without memory and identity are simply wiped out of humanity. Memory and identity are the only forces which can return to us the possibility of awakening and shaking off the European mud and mire which almost choked us to death. Notes: ***Article reprinted with Author's permission. First appeared in "News From Within", Dec. 1997, published in Authorsden.com and reprinted here. About the Author(s): See under Our Contributors to find out about the Author(s) of this article. |
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