Virgie Bell's View: MEDINATH YISRAEL

Our recollection of history is spotty at best. At least mine is. The book I am reading now titled" The Hope", by Herman Wouk was a little hard for me to understand until I looked up that period in some of my reference books. It turns out that there is a gap in my memory of when the Jew established their homeland. This was accomplished May 15, 1948. Thus I had my 12th birthday ten days before. I don't remember that birthday for Israel or my last year before I became a teenage girl.

I’m sure by this time we did have electricity and an inside bathroom, therefore we had a radio going each morning. I would have loved hearing A Slow Boat to China some time in the morning before school. My brothers and I would have walked a quarter of a mile to catch the school bus in order ride the two and a half miles to the small country school. I would have spent the entire summer hoeing my dad’s cotton. The hours were from daylight to near sundown with an hour off for lunch.

My birthday would have been a week-end celebration. Mama Curry and Papa Curry would have been there and we would have had a freezer full of ice cream to go with the traditional cake. The reason I don't remember is because we would have done so on many such week-ends. I’ve looked up movies and books of that year. I didn't read any of the books that were the best sellers for 1948. We possessed The Holy Bible, the works of Zane Gray, a World Atlas and a dictionary. My folks received the Lubbock paper in the mail around noon each day by a rural route deliverer. So Israel become a nation when I was the most cut off from anything having much of an impact on my world.

I went to the show with my best friend each Saturday. It was the highlight of my life. We bought cherry cokes and comic books and I always bought a little book with the lyrics of the top ten songs of the Hit Parade. At any rate, I wonder does everyone have this little gap in their memory. Is that the reason that we find reading books hard as a nation? I can understand how that could be. I felt sort of lost in the first of this novel. I have made up my mind to check out which books of fiction run through this period. I have on hand the historical account that takes in that period of time. I have a set of encyclopedias which I would not give up for any amount of money. When I discovered this strange case of temporary amnesia I am very thankful for my background with my family. Our little band of gypsies and the period of history in which we traveled with our little caravan; it was our little part of The Greatest Generation.

Before I was a hoe-hand, I lived right across the street from the ocean and fell asleep to the roar of the surf each night. My brothers and I found every kind of shell and every kind of fish and stood back and watched sharks thrash madly and insanely while caught on a pier. We lived at Hanford Nuclear Facility under the strictest security measures the United States of America ever put in place, because this was the Manhattan Project. My world was so entrenched in World War 2. I spent the entire time being raised on a base. My dad helped to weld those ships that fought for my country. I remember the jubilation when Roosevelt won his third term as president. I remember the Christmas lights up in downtown Los Angeles. The floats from the rose parade, blackouts air raid alerts, and then the all clear signal.

When Israel came into being I had learned to gather eggs, and watch pigs and cows and a horse all in my backyard. My closest neighbor was a quarter mile away yet I had lived in a city with a 3,000,000 population. For a twelve year old, I had just about experienced it all, so when I found myself lost in time I discovered something that I want to share with Gunz Up. I hope no one will depend on this internet for learning. It is such a poor substitute for studying done with books. I tried to find my way back over my life in order to find my bearings and couldn't do it properly on the internet. The greatest airlift in all of history was also going on, the devastation of the starving German people after being destroyed by allied bombs and our military victory. Their entire population was completely at our mercy.

This new country that called itself MEDINATH YISRAEL or State of Israel had escaped to become only a few hundred thousand survivors. They had been more than six million but had been exterminated to these few by the German Nazi Party at the bidding of the most evil man in the history of the world ... the mad man, Adolph Hitler. I determined to catch up on my memory for the Birth of a Nation. Mr. Wouk keeps me busy. He makes me study; he makes me stop and think. He helps me grow and he makes me glad that I love to read and so now I do remember 1948.

SUPPORT THE TROOPS!