You Think You've Got Regulatory Problems!

[Duncan Frissell]

For a brilliant illustration of how to avoid official regulatory regimes read:

On Burning Ground
by Michael Skakun

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031220566X

This is the story of the author's father, Joseph Skakun, a rabbinical 
student who lived in a small Polish village at the time of the Nazi invasion.

He was faced with certain legal and practical difficulties that he had to 
overcome.

He was fluent only in Yiddish, he was circumcised, his experience was 
limited to Yeshiva and shetel life.

By the end of the war, he was an SS recruit living in Germany officially 
designated as a Lithuanian (and thus almost an Aryan in the Nazi racial 
classification scheme).

His main survival technique (which all of us can use) was to analyze a 
harsh regulatory regime, find a category uncovered by the harshness, and 
include yourself in that category.

The one survival technique he possessed was knowledge.

Just to give you a flavor...  He dealt with his circumcision "problem" not 
by sleeping with hooks and weights (as some other Jews did), but simply by 
knowing that several small communities of Tartars lived in Poland.  These 
residual invaders from the past were Muslims and thus circumcised.  He 
merely declared himself a Tartar.

Author Michael Skakun was lucky in his choice of parents.  His next book is 
going to be about his mother who was a member of a community of Jews 
exported to Siberia to save them from the Nazis.  She then walked to Tehran 
and the Brits shipped her to Palestine (by ship) in the middle of the war.

DCF