Saturday Updates

Greetings once more from the Stroock Northern Strategic Direction. The entire Fami de Stroock has removed here for the combined joint celebration of the aforementioned Hannah's birthday, Stroock the Elder's birthday and Father's Day.

Photo courtesy of Mrs. Stroock. On the right is the family motorboat, named Waterproof, after our crazy* paternal grandmother's home town of Waterproof, Louisiana. Go ahead and google it. We'll wait. Hannah Marx Stroock, unreconstructed southern lady that she was, would not be pleased.

On to business.

The Great Nuclear War of 1975 edit job is coming along. We can't help but feel something is missing. For example, a character will mention that a Federal Agriculture Task Force is coming and our thought is, 'They have those?...Oh...Ok....I guess.' More planning. Can we finish it this summer? Once Nederland* and the short story compilation are done it should be possible. We still have no idea how it wraps up or how far we go. 1976? 1980? In real life Rockefeller keeled over from a heart attack in 1979. Look that up! We do know the last scene though. We know that.

We have not yet sent Debbie the short story compilation. But we'll do it next week. Pinky swear.

We have begun the battle of the Roki Tunnel and it's coming on nicely. Very nicely. Bunch of cutthroat Georgian Afghan vets and some Muj they picked up along the way blowing the crap out of whatever comes through the south end. This would make a great  blockbuster opener if it didn't need set up. Hmmm....maybe we can do that and just have the next chapter begin, '24 hours earlier' or something?

We've gone through two chapters of Nederland and things look great, fantastic, terrific, outstanding, in other words, the exact opposite of where things stood with Battle of the Three Seas at this point.

*We prefer 'eccentric'. A women who married the first Yankee that came through Fort Polk in 1944, moved to New York City, and spent the rest of her life thinking she was living in enemy territory.

Southern Jews

Steve Sailer's article on the American South hyperlinks to an old article of his about the Jew's place in same:

Weren’t Jews in the South more victimized by all the bigoted Southern anti-Semites? No. Actually, the slaveholding states were far ahead of the northern states in electing Jews to high office, such as Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin. 

In general, Jews were more welcomed by Southern elites. Much as in medieval Poland, where the nobles invited in Jewish merchants to provide them the financial services that their own people were too innumerate to undertake, rich Southern Protestants generally saw themselves as an agrarian warrior class. So Jewish commercial facilitators, such as the slave-owning Lehman Brothers, who founded the future investment bank in Alabama in 1855, tended to be welcomed as complementary to the landowners.

We can attest to this in our own family. Our grandmother was born in Nachez (pronounced Naches) Mississippi and raised in Waterproof, Louisiana. Her father, William Eisman for whom we are named, settled there after leaving Germany in 1919. He married Rose Marx. Hannah Marx Eisman followed in 1926 (she would kill us for revealing her year of birth). William and Rose Eisman are buried in a cemetery overlooking the Mississippi called 'Jews Hill'. It was commonly understood that Jews or 'Hebrews' were 'people of the book' and to be respected as such. 

In 1944 Hannah Marx Eisman met a nice Yankee Sergeant who was stationed at Ft. Polk...

Our grandmother was very much a woman of the South in form and manner and possessed something of a smooth, molasses accent.

She was buried in 2003 with Louisiana soil.