The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

After reading Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, I needed a page-turner in the worst way and by a stroke of good luck The Postmistress fell into my hands the day after I had finished all 754 pages of the story of Lincoln’s presidency (not including footnotes).  While The Postmistress definitely falls under the category of “chick lit”, it is a moving story that is well told and refreshingly free of the usual romantic silliness that characterizes the genre.  The basic premise of the story is that the lady postmaster in a small New England village decides not to deliver a letter.   As Postmaster, Iris James’ sworn duty is to deliver the mail no matter what it contains or whom it is for.  She knows full well what the letter in question contains and by withholding it lets one person’s story play out differently than it would have.  This novel could easily have been the victim of a trite plot line, however author Sarah Blake displayed her considerable talent as a researcher.  Ms. Blake succeeds in creating the main characters, Iris James and Frankie Bard, imagining small town America still reeling from World War I and in denial about the global threat posed by Germany under the Third Reich, and providing vivid descriptions of war-torn Europe.

The story takes place during the World War II German bombing of London, before the United States joined the fight against Adolf Hitler.  At that time, important news of the world arrived in newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts.  Edward R. Murrow was the first to bring the theater of war into Americans’ homes with his descriptive, daily broadcasts from London.  Murrow and his team of reporters dodged bombs and strafing runs in order to communicate to Americans how desperate and dangerous the situation in Europe was becoming.  Murrow’s gift was his narrative style with which he calmly and unemotionally described the unspeakable horrors of war. 

While not unheard of, women news reporters were extremely rare in Murrows’s day and Ms. Blake does a good job of making Frankie Bard believable in that role.  Frankie has a certain sang froid and toughness to her character which earns her the respect of her male peers, and eventually the fictionalized Murrow hires her to compile an on-air broadcast.  Nervous at first, Frankie soon develops her own voice and becomes a regular radio reporter from London.  Meanwhile, back in America people find themselves increasingly moved by some of her stories detailing the tragedies overseas.  A visionary few Americans who listened to the radio news broadcasts recognized the ease with which a German submarine could attack the homeland. 

Iris James, the postmaster of Franklin, Massachusetts, is 40 years old and unmarried; a kind-hearted busybody who prides herself on knowing everyone’s business but keeping it to herself.  She finds herself in a romance with the town mechanic at an age when many women were grandmothers.   Harry Vale -- who has tasked himself with watching the coastline for signs of German U-Boats, to the amusement of the postmistress -- makes Iris’ acquaintance when he asks her to lower the flag pole in front of the Post Office so as not to draw the Germans’ attention.  She refuses to comply, citing a lack of authority to do so, but then relents and writes a letter to the higher authorities in Washington when she realizes that she is in love with Harry.  (Janet Maslin, of the New York Times, tried unsuccessfully to make the flag pole into a phallic metaphor, in her review of the book, which makes no sense given that Iris is a willing virgin and Harry is feeling his manliness after a long period of celibacy.)  The Postmistress is written in a straight-ahead style without symbolic references, hidden meanings, or complex literary devices, which is why it is an easy and fast read.  This is not to say it is devoid of literary references:  at one point Frankie compares herself to Cassandra, the prophetic mad woman from Troy whom no one could understand.  It is an apt comparison.

Emma Fitch, the bride of the town’s young doctor, is the third heroine of this novel.  Dr. Fitch carries some baggage into the marriage which derails him when one of his patients dies in childbirth.  Unable to cope with his guilt over the woman’s death, the doctor hurries off to London to attend to war casualties.  While there he meets Frankie Ward in a bomb shelter and, as was frequently the case, the two become quite close for a brief, but pivotal moment.  In that brief time, Frankie comes to know Will Fitch better than his wife ever will and because of that meeting, the three women – Iris, Frankie, and Emma – become inextricably linked.

The Postmistress is at its best in the scenes of war-ravaged Europe.  Ms. Blake’s uncomplicated writing style brings an immediacy to her descriptions of physical and emotional wounds suffered on a massive scale.  In the end Frankie cannot tolerate the devastation she has dispassionately shared with her American audience, and neither can many of her male counterparts.  “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” had not yet been identified, but Frankie clearly suffered from it, as did Dr. Fitch, and thousands of others whose lives were shattered by the relentless bombing raids and the atrocities visited upon the Jewish people.  Frankie witnessed humans stripped of their humanity one time too often and the protective armor which enabled her to do her job fell away, leaving her smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable than she had understood her essential self to be.

The journalist’s code of ethics, briefly, is to seek truth, report it, and minimize harm.  A good journalist tells a story, without bias and as completely as possible, including only verifiable facts.  As fear-mongering in the United States creates widespread paranoia, Murrow sends Frankie, armed with a recording device (which the author acknowledges was not available when Frankie would have been reporting from Europe) to interview people on the refugee trains so that Americans can understand the whole story of the sudden influx of German speaking immigrants.  With her collection of recordings, Frankie holds onto tiny shreds of lives, which would otherwise have disappeared, and through these voices illustrates the evil of Hitler and the Nazis.  It is the voices that prove her undoing.  That and the death of a young American man who looks in the wrong direction before crossing a London street.

What stays with me after reading this book is the sense of helplessness that pervaded Europe even though the trains continued to run between countries -- right on schedule -- whether moving people to war, to safety, or to death camps.  With entire communities collapsing into rubble all across London, there was no more normal.  As a matter of national self-preservation, trainloads of children were removed to the countryside and taken in by strangers for the duration of the war.  It is easy to imagine postmasters and postmistresses all over England wishing they could let innocent children continue to believe that their parents would be waiting at home when the war was over.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander,all rights reserved

Unbroken

By Laura Hillenbrand

Louis Zamperini is, among other things, one of the toughest people to ever walk the earth.  He knows this and wrote about his travails in Devil at my Heels, published in 1953 and re-edited and re-published in 2003.  When contacted by Laura Hillenbrand who was seeking to write his biography, he felt like he had already told the story and didn’t think there was anything left to say.  Just the same, he graciously sat through more than 70 interviews while she patiently asked him questions, reviewed volumes of documents she had unearthed, and double-checked the veracity of witness accounts.   Unbroken:  A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a masterful piece of research; beautifully written and lovingly shared. 

In his 95-plus years in this life Zamperini has been a juvenile delinquent, vagabond, high school track star, Olympic athlete, World War II bombardier, castaway, prisoner of war, husband, and inspirational speaker.  It is difficult to read Hillenbrand’s book and not imagine some invisible hand at work, keeping him from the brink of ruin or disaster or death until he found God in the person of Billy Graham.  He was born with a nose for trouble and the winged feet of Hermes, both of which would serve him well throughout a life of pain and hardship.  Zamperini had another quality, hidden away inside himself, which inspired Hillenbrand to be his biographer:  he had endured the worst of man-made, soul- and body-killing hells but somehow managed to preserve the tiniest kernel of himself.  Long after the hell of war was over and Louis Zamperini was on the precipice of self-destruction, he rediscovered that essential piece of himself and nursed it back to life.

Hillenbrand is best known for her biography of Seabiscuit, the legendary thoroughbred racehorse of the Depression era.  Like Unbroken, Seabiscuit is meticulously researched and a wonderfully told tale.  Reading the notes on sources in the back of these two books reveals the depth to which the author goes to learn about her subjects.  She tracks down every witness, living or dead, and finds every document which references them. While the amount of work that Hillenbrand puts into her books is staggering, her true gift is in knitting everything together to create personal histories that take readers deep into the lives of her subjects.  In the case of Louis Zamperini, Hillenbrand found information about him that he never knew existed, including diaries of fellow prisoners-of-war, and which touched him deeply.  Typically, biographers and journalists spend days and weeks on the road searching out information and conducting interviews.  Hillenbrand was unable to do that.  She had to talk her sources into boxing up and shipping irreplaceable documents, photographs, artifacts, etc., to the prison that is her life.  Hillenbrand suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a mysterious illness for which there is no known cause nor cure, and rarely leaves her house, let alone her bed.

There really is no way to appreciate what it is like to live with CFS other than to imagine having advanced rheumatoid arthritis, the flu, and a killer hangover at the same time, for weeks and months on end.  On good days, Hillenbrand can take a shower standing up, ride in a car, or take a very short walk.  Sadly, the good days are few and far between.  Until she was diagnosed, several doctors dismissed her as being a hypochondriac, despite raging fevers, swollen lymph nodes, and strep throat that would not respond to antibiotics.  Before collapsing at 19 years of age, Hillenbrand was a hard working and athletic college student.  She had dreams of becoming a history professor, but her illness forced her to drop out of Kenyon College and retreat to her mother’s home in the Washington, DC, suburbs.  That could have been the end of her story, but she wasn’t willing to give up on living a useful life.

This fighting spirit is what kept her college boyfriend of five months, Borden Flanagan, from leaving.  Not only did he remain committed during the months leading up to Hillenbrand’s diagnosis, he wanted to marry her and hoped one day to have children.  She, too, wished to marry but kept waiting for her illness to go into remission.  It never did; but no matter how sick she was, Hillenbrand found a way to keep working.  First it was writing for a horseracing magazine which never paid her what she was owed but did lead to better assignments, such as writing for Equus.  It was while reading about Seabiscuit for a piece for American Heritage that Hillenbrand became inspired to dig deeper into the story behind the legendary racehorse and the people who believed in him.   It took Hillenbrand ten years to write Seabiscuit as her disease ebbed and flowed, giving her brief periods of productivity in between relapses.  Even on her worst days, however, she tried to accomplish something.  When she submitted the manuscript for publication, she neglected to mention that she too sick to get out of bed most days.

After enduring years of condescension from the medical community, Hillenbrand eventually found a doctor who was able to help her manage her symptoms to a degree and this enabled her to continue striving.   In an essay she wrote for The New Yorker magazine, Hillenbrand describes how she was able to do the research and writing involved in Seabiscuit.  It was a matter of conserving and managing her strength and that required tremendous strategic thinking.  CFS limited the amount of energy Hillenbrand could expend on a given day, so she had to monitor herself carefully to assess what she could accomplish.  From her bedroom, she arranged for the Library of Congress to lend materials to her local public library.  When the materials arrived, she would go to the library and pore over them, taking detailed notes until the room began spinning.  Back in her room, if she couldn’t read, she would conduct interviews over the telephone, if she couldn’t talk, she would send emails.  Her research was so good and her questions so intriguing, that no one was put off by her reclusiveness.  Louis Zamperini did not find out that his biographer was bedridden until he read an article about her after Unbroken was published.  He sent her one of his Purple Hearts.

It was shortly after Seabiscuit was published that Flanagan confronted his feelings about spending his life with an invalid with whom he could never have children.  Hillenbrand’s success meant that she was no longer completely dependent on Flanagan, and the idea of being free tempted him.  When he finally worked up the courage to share his ambivalence with Hillenbrand, the two of them discovered strengths in each other that enabled them to forge a stronger and deeper relationship than either had thought possible.  He stayed and the two eventually married.

To Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers, Laura Hillenbrand is both hero and role model.  They write to her imploring her to do for CFS what she has done for Seabiscuit and Louis Zamperini.  What she has said is that she uses her subjects as a means of escaping the disease that changed her from being an active, vital person to a ghostly invalid.  It would take a biographer as skilled as Hillenbrand to bring her inner life to light and determine the degree to which fighting the disease makes her strong or her strength keeps the disease from winning.  Either way, Laura Hillenbrand is a champion.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Hungarian Rhapsody - Three Books

The Good Master, by Kate Seredy

World Wars I and II redrew world maps, broke apart empires, and wiped out tens of millions of people.   During the three decades spanning the assassination of Grand Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, by a Yugoslavian nationalist, to the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945 the human condition – for most Europeans, and Jews in particular – was about survival, one day at a time.  Many factors led to the conflicts which snowballed into the hellish battles that determined territorial boundaries, but  it was the collision of imperialistic empires vying for global domination that caused the chain reactions which devastated the entire world.  In all, 80 million human beings perished, roughly four per cent of the total population of 1945, some in conflict, some by hate, and others by chance.  The survivors suffered physical and emotional wounds, and many left behind ancestral homes and beloved traditions in order to escape death.

Hungary found herself in the middle of the World Wars by virtue of geography.  Long before artificial boundaries defined it as a separate country, nomadic “Magyar” people from the Ural Mountains began migrating eastward;  and around 865 AD a group under the leadership of the legendary Árpád split off and conquered the Carpathian Basin, north and east  of the Black Sea.  Over time, the Magyars developed a unique cultural identity which gave rise to a rich tradition of folklore, artistry, music, and horsemanship.  As western civilization arose with vast industrialized cities, territorial battles evolved into centuries of wars of aggression across much of Europe.  During all this turmoil, the Magyars held onto their way of life and Hungary retained its cultural identity. 

Three books – The Good Master, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Invisible Bridge  –  taken together, describe Hungary’s cultural , geographic, human, and political losses during the World Wars.  The Good Master,  by Kate Seredy, was a Newbury Honor Book in 1936.  In it, the author tells the story of her childhood when her father sent her to live with his brother’s family out in the vast Hungarian plains in the early 20^th century.  My fifth grade teacher read this book out loud to our class and to me it was magical in a way that Harry Potter can never be.  Kate was a skinny, spoiled little girl whose widowed father couldn’t handle by himself, so he sent her to the country hoping she might stay out of trouble.  From the moment of her arrival, announced by her “tin whistle scream”, she created a stir wherever she went.  Her Uncle Martón, the “Good Master”, being an expert horse trainer, knew exactly how to bring out the best in young Kate.  This book is a love story about him as well as her aunt and cousin plus the people and traditions unique to Magyar culture.  Kate Seredy immigrated to the United States in 1922, and eventually became a prize-winning illustrator and author of children’s books. 

During the World Wars Hungary was caught in the middle of the European power struggles.  Under the terms of Treaty of Trianon, at the end of World War I, Hungary gained sovereign status, at the price of 72 per cent of its historical territory.  The treaty gave vast tracts of land to Romania and the newly formed Czechoslovakia, as well as the combined kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia.  Three point five million ethnic Hungarians thus found themselves living in exile even though they hadn’t moved an inch. 

During the interwar period, Hungarian right-wing nationalists fought with those wishing to revert to the aristocracy over who should be king.  While the nation struggled to form a new government, interim regent Miklós Horthy appointed Count István Bethlen Prime Minister.  Bethlen proved to be a master politician who succeeded in bringing order to the country by engineering a series of compromises and payoffs to calm the anti-Semitic and right-wing radicals.  Under Bethlen’s leadership, Hungary joined the League of Nations and signed a peace treaty with Italy.  The Great Depression exacerbated Bethlen’s economic policy weaknesses, leading to devastating shortages and unemployment; anti-Semitism and fascism once again became popular movements.  Being tribal people, the Magyars had no love for the tribe of Israel;  even so, Hungary resisted Hitler’s policy of annihilation.  In the wake of economic devastation, Horthy replaced Prime Minister Bethlen with Gyula Gömbös, a right-wing nationalist who aligned himself with Hitler’s Germany, gambling that Hitler would prevail in any future conflict between nations.  Thus, anti-Semitism became the law of the land and Hungarian Jews suddenly found themselves stripped of their civil rights.

Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, is based on a diary he kept as he traveled on foot, and the occasional bummed ride, from “the hook of Holland to Constantinople” – at the age of 18 – shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany.  This book begins where his first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, leaves off:  at the Danube River as he crosses the Mária Valéria bridge from Slovakia to Hungary.  With the eyes, mind, and heart of a young man, Fermor recorded the details of every person, place, and thing he encountered on his trek.  While in Hungary, he traveled with Magyars and Gypsies on a borrowed horse and, like Kate Seredy, recognized the intrinsic value of these cultures as something precious and irreplaceable.  During his travels Fermor misplaced his diary which contained rich and detailed descriptions of a world that was on the brink of vanishing, although he didn’t know it at the time.  Decades later, workers in a Romanian monastery found the diary and tracked down its author. 

During World War II, Fermor worked undercover for the Grecian Nazi resistance movement.  His war experience coupled with his knowledge of classical cultures, gave him great insight and perspective about human history.  Many years later, when he read his own journal about traveling through Europe when the “old world” still existed, he decided to reinterpret it through the lens of a seasoned war veteran and scholar.  Between the Woods and the Water paints a poignant portrait of the aristocracy, city dwellers, peasantry, and gypsies whose ways of life were sacrificed along with millions of Jews in service to Hitler’s ugly hatred and megalomania, and then later to Josef Stalin’s Soviet style Communism. 

The Invisible Bridge – a work of fiction by Julie Orringer – is set during the second World War in Budapest and Paris, and is loosely based on the story of author’s Hungarian Jewish grandparents who immigrated to New York at the end of World War II.  Andras is the second of three brothers whose ancestral home is in a rural village called Konyár.  Andras and Tibor, the eldest, are living in Budapest while waiting to emigrate for their college educations, Andras to architecture school in Paris and Tibor to medical school in Italy.  Their younger brother, Mátyás, is still in secondary school at the time.  On the eve of Andras’ departure for Paris, Elza Hász, an upper-class Jewish woman of his family’s acquaintance asks him to take a package to her son who is already living in Paris.  Andras agrees and while he is picking up the package, Elza’s mother slips him a letter in secret to be mailed once he reaches Paris. 

The mysterious letter eventually leads Andras into a new and exciting world full of romance and mystery, as well as jealousy and misunderstanding.  Meanwhile, the winds of war grow stronger, and life in Europe for educated Jews during World War II underwent a rapid sea change.  Almost everyone in Europe suffered food and fuel shortages, but Jews also suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of their former friends and neighbors.  Conditions in the Hungarian labor camps where Jewish men worked as de facto slaves were only somewhat less abusive than in Germany’s death camps.  Survivors returned home looking like skeletons and covered with lice, only to be recalled as soon as they were healthy again.  That anyone survived is a testament to the strength and durability of the human spirit.

Those Hungarians who opposed the Nazis suffered the loss of their communities in silence, because to voice opposition was suicide.  They watched the gradual fraying of their social fabric as did their counterparts in other countries which fell under Germany’s power.   Prime Minister Bethlen held Hitler at bay and promoted tolerance of Hungarian Jews, but his successor, Gyula Gömbös, aligned Hungary with Germany and pandered to Hitler in the hope of retaining some degree of autonomy when the wars ended.    

A common saying during times of war is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and in World War II the Allies needed socialist Russia in order to defeat Hitler.  The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin had entered into a mutual non-aggression pact with Germany, but Hitler reneged and this proved his undoing.  After Hitler’s defeat, Soviet troops maintained their occupation of much of eastern Europe including, Hungary.  The Warsaw Pact of 1955 codified the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe as a response to West Germany’s joining NATO.  Russia, having been invaded by Napolean and Hitler, viewed western Europe and the United States as a clear threat; an occupied eastern Europe provided a strategic buffer against any future invasion attempts.

While we cannot know what might have happened had Hungary continued to resist Hitler, by aligning herself with Nazi Germany  the nation was trapped in the Soviet bloc at the end of World War II.  Under Communism, tradition and religion had no place and so, what little remained of Hungary’s cultural heritage following the wars, went deep underground.  During the Communist Era (1947-1999) several hundred thousand Hungarian intellectuals and free-thinking individuals “disappeared”; and yet, some independent spirit remained and in 1990, the opposition was strong enough and organized enough to force the USSR to loosen its grip.  Today, Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO and enjoys hard won autonomy as a sovereign state.

As a metaphor, the “invisible bridge” works on many levels.  First it refers to the bombed out Chain Bridge in Budapest:  the pillars remained standing, but the spans and road bed were under water.  The metaphor also describes connections between people across time and distance.  Many such “invisible bridges” exist when worlds are torn apart by war and devastation.  These three books featuring Hungary paint a devastatingly beautiful portrait of a people and a place – a world – that has mostly disappeared, but can still be reached over the invisible bridges of memory, culture,  and history.  If The Good Master  and Between the Woods and the Water are what was, then  The Invisible Bridge takes us to what is:  a world shaped by triumph and tragedy, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, war and peace.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Dreamers of the Day

Dreamers of the Day
by Mary Doria Russell

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2010

According to “The Washington Post” the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is already five or six times larger than the Exxon Valdez catastrophe of 1989; and will continue to spew for at least two more months, or longer if the relief wells fail. We are starting to see the devastating and depressing pictures of fish, birds, and turtles coated with the sticky, slimy crude and could very well see entire ecosystems collapse. So who is to blame for this disaster?  BP?  The Minerals Management Service?  President Bush (2nd)?  Vice President Cheney?  President Obama?  To find the answer, we need to go back in time to the early years of the twentieth century, when the burgeoning automobile industry created a demand for petroleum that shows no signs of stopping. Today the United States is the third highest per capita consumer of oil, after Saudi Arabia and Canada. With China and India producing cars for their growing middle classes, competition for this dwindling resource could soon be as ugly as the Gulf oil spill.

Dreamers of the Day is not a great book. It is written well enough, but the story is a little silly as the narrator is speaking from beyond the grave. If you can tolerate a few clichéd plot devices, the reason to read this book is that the author, Mary Doria Rusell, provides a clear and succinct early history of the Middle Eastern oil industry as well as British efforts to retain control of Iraq and Jordan following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was this critical moment in history that set the stage for the world’s current addiction to oil and the consequences that continue to play out.

In the aftermath of World War I, western Europe, Specifically Britain and France, redrew the maps of eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East.  British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, called a meeting, in Cairo in 1921, with Middle East experts to decide how to re-organize newly liberated Mesopotamia and Transjordan. T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was one of the attendees, given his knowledge of the Arabic world, as was Gertrude Bell, a woman of great stature who was also an expert on the Middle East. Colonel Lawrence and Miss Bell both acted as mediators between the various Arabs and the British, carefully winning the respect and trust of the former and educating the latter. The result of this meeting was the installation of Faisal bin Hussein as Iraq’s first king. Faisal was given this honor out of gratitude for helping the British during the first world war by entering Damascus, Syria, at the height of the Arab Revolt against the Turkish Ottomans. Churchill, on the advice of Miss Bell and Colonel Lawrence, recommended Faisal because they believed he could gain the support of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. This was a cunning choice as Faisal was from a prominent Sunni family and was also a direct descendent of Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfather, Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf. The Cairo Conference had expected Faisal to be more of a puppet than he turned out to be; and Faisal, for his own part, discovered that bringing different religious and ethnic groups together into a single government is much harder than it sounds. Further complicating matters was the on-going rivalry between France and Britain over the entire region known as The Levant.

Meanwhile, demand for petroleum and its byproducts grew exponentially as industry and technology evolved in Europe and North America. Oil producing and exporting companies formed and used Basra, Iraq, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf as their main depot. Britain retained control of Iraq until 1932, granting it independence in exchange for land and natural resources, Royal Air Force bases, and a coordinating role in foreign policy for twenty-five years. During this period Iraq suffered a series of coups d’état and a British invasion; and perpetrated a pogrom against its Jewish citizens. The opportunistic oil companies continued their messy business by lining the pockets of whoever was in power.

Following the second World War, the United Nations annexed Palestine, dividing it into Arab and Jewish States in 1948. The creation of Israel – a homeland for the Jewish people – was unacceptable to the Arabs in the region, especially the displaced Palestinians even though the land in question was mostly unpopulated, barren desert. Israel quickly became the Arab world’s main enemy and has been in a state of preparedness for war ever since. While the creation of Israel had no direct bearing on the production and distribution of oil, the fact that the region became dangerously unstable meant that access to that oil was constantly at risk.

After World War II, the strategically located Suez Canal became critical to the shipping of oil to consuming countries such as the United States. Britain maintained a military presence of 80,000 troops at the Suez Canal in order to protect its access under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Across the next two decades, anti-British sentiments grew as Egypt struggled with inflation, unemployment, and an unstable economy. In October of 1951, Egypt decided to abandon the treaty and demanded Britain’s withdrawal from Suez. This led to increasing violence and rioting in Cairo and ultimately to a military coup d-état led by Muhammad Neguib and Gamal Abdul Nasser, who would one day be Egypt’s president. Before, during, and after this period, Egypt routinely intercepted cargo destined for Israel as it passed through the Suez Canal. In spite of harsh criticism from the United Nations Security Council, interference with Israel-bound ships increased steadily under Egypt’s new regime. During 1955 and 1956, Britain and Egypt engaged in a growing power struggle as Egypt sought total autonomy. In addition to direct conflict, Nasser engaged in negotiations with communist countries to obtain arms. Britain sought help from the United States but President Eisenhower decided to stay out so as not to offend Saudi Arabia, a key supplier of oil. In a series of chess-like moves, Egypt did the unthinkable and officially recognized the People’s Republic of China. This so angered the United States that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles revoked American financial support for the Aswan Dam project. With the United States out of the way, Nasser claimed that Suez belonged to Egypt and demanded that British forces withdraw.

In 1956, Britain, hiding behind Israel and aided by France, declared war against Egypt in a bid to regain control of Suez. Each of these nations had separate motives: Britain needed Suez to control its remaining colonies; France wanted to weaken Nasser so its North African colonies would not grow restless; and Israel wanted to use the canal for shipping. Britain calculated that Nasser’s alliance with communist countries would cause the United States to support the invasion once it began. In this, they were mistaken. Tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was growing and the threat of another global war, should the Soviets back Egypt, kept President Eisenhower from engaging militarily. In a surprise move, Nasser asked the United States for assistance in finding a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The United Nations then demanded an immediate cease-fire and the removal of the invading forces. Britain and France had no choice but to withdraw; and Israel had learned important lessons about waging offensive wars. In order to enforce the cease-fire, the United Nations stationed a peace-keeping force on the Sinai Peninsula.

This uneasy peace held for the next decade, but Egypt began a massive military build-up along its border with Israel and closed the Straits of Tiran to any ship flying the Israeli flag. With no access to the Indian Ocean, Israel began a parallel build-up of forces and arms. In spite of UN presence, Israel was continuously under attack by Syrian and Palestinian guerillas – or terrorists. Adding to the tension was the need for water for Israel’s growing population. The River Jordan delimits Israel’s eastern border with Jordan and Syria, and in 1964, Israel opened its National Water Carrier system to bring water to the arid central regions. This had the effect of reducing the water flow into Syria and Jordan. In retaliation, with financial support from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Syria and Jordan began construction of canals to divert the River Jordan’s headwaters from the Sea of Galilee. Beginning in April of 1965, Israel launched a series of air attacks to stop construction of the headwater diversion projects, because Israel’s water supply would have dropped significantly and the salinity of the Sea of Galilee would have increased as well. On May 30, 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria signed a treaty pledging mutual support should Israel attack again. President Nasser, who for years had tried to be a peace-maker in the region, said: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”

On June 5, 1967, feeling that an attack by Egypt and other Arab nations was imminent, Israel made a preemptive strike on Egyptian forces amassed on the Sinai Peninsula. Within three days, Israel had succeeded in capturing Sinai. Meanwhile, Jordan and Syria made a series of attacks from the West Bank region. Israel, however, was fighting for its life and quickly decided to take the Old City of Jerusalem as well as the Palestinian West Bank territory surrounding it. Syria, acting on false reports that Israel was losing the war, began cautiously conducting air raids across their shared northern border. The Syrians, however, were caught off guard by the vastly superior and fully deployed Israeli Air Force. In spite of a cease-fire being called by Syria and Jordan, the Israelis attacked Golan in retaliation for the years of attacks sponsored by Syria and also because this area was difficult to defend, given its geography. Six days later, the war was over and Israel was in control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. In addition to vastly increased territory, Israel also became home to approximately one million Arabs.

Israel’s military success only served to heighten the tension in the region and in October of 1973, members of the Organization of Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC), plus Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, declared an oil embargo against the United States for providing supplies to Israel’s military during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This caused gas prices to skyrocket and supplies to fall. Panic swept the United States and waiting in long gas lines became the national pastime. Bowing to pressure from the United States to negotiate with Syria, Israel agreed to give up the Golan heights. OPEC in turn lifted the embargo after a year but the threat remained.

President Jimmy Carter understood the long-term consequences of America’s dependence on foreign oil and put in place an energy policy designed to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and to increase our use of renewable resources such as solar power. He was, unfortunately, several decades ahead of his time and his immediate successor, Ronald Reagan undid every one of President Carter’s innovative energy incentives almost immediately upon taking office. Three decades later, the Gulf of Mexico is dying from our oil addiction. While it might feel good to place the blame on a single president, CEO, or corporation, in reality we are all guilty. We Americans have known for a long time that our wasteful consumption would have to end and yet we failed to demand more fuel efficient cars and freedom from our oil suppliers. Instead, we demanded gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles, high-performance sports cars, pick-up trucks, and Hummers.

At some point, the Gulf oil guyser will be plugged and the real work of cleaning up will begin. Will this catastrophe be the catalyst for our nation to break our oil dependence? Or, will we instead be like drug addicts who lie, steal, cheat, and kill in order to feed our disease until it kills us?

Copyright 2010 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved