A Real Heroine

(GERMANY OUT) German Democratic Republic – nudist beach and camping groung at Motzener Lake – 10.07.1989 (Photo by Klöppel/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Today I want to tell you about a heroine. Not of the kind who, in the movies, on TV, and in countless computer games keeps slaughtering hundreds of wicked males each and every one of whom is considerably bigger and has far more muscle than she does. And not of the kind who raids tombs, dives to the bottom of the ocean, explores far-away galaxies, and does any number of things men, often many men, have started doing long before. But of a real heroine of an entirely different kind.

 

Let us call her Ms. X. She is an Israeli and in her forties. She has black hair, likes to put on makeup, and wears high-heeled shoes. The reason why I heard of her was because she was teaching my sixteen-year old grandson, Orr, literature. Not that she could not make her living in any other way, as is often the case with teachers. But because she loved the written word and wanted to share her love with her students. To do so she left her job as a chief nurse, took a B.A, and spent another year earning her teaching license.

 

Those who had the privilege of working with her could see how seriously she took her job. Carefully studying every poem and every poet on the curriculum. Proceeding slowly and methodically, with the result that she often fell behind the schedule dictated by the Authorities. Rarely did she miss a class; nor did she neglect to read the students’ papers and exams even when she was ill. The kind of teacher every principal would like to have in his or her school and every student should welcome.

 

One day the class was discussing a poem. It had been written by an elderly Yekkeh, which in Hebrew means an immigrant from Germany. In it, the poet expressed his longing for the days, long ago, when he and his mother used to go swimming in one of that country’s countless beautiful lakes. Just as their creator had made them, without any clothes on. And without any fear of not keeping their distance or touching each other in a way that was either affectionate or playful. For X, following the instructions she had been given by her superiors, this was an opportunity to speak about mother-son relationships and all kinds of Freudian complexes. And sex, of course. Bad sex. Incestuous sex. Sex of the sort that had sent those wicked Germans on their way to perpetrating the Holocaust.

 

Now it so happens that Orr has been visiting Germany practically every year since he was one and a half years old. Each time he did we, his grandparents, took him to swim in the lakes. Just as we happened to feel like, either with or without bathing suits. He and we oldies must have done it hundreds of times. As did countless others, male and female, big and small, at whom we occasionally took a peek and who occasionally took a peek at us in return. As a result, Orr was in a position to correct his teacher. In Germany, he told the class politely but firmly, bathing (and taking a mixed sauna) in the buff was a perfectly normal thing to do. There was nothing sexual about it at all.

And the worst happens i.e. cheating in the relationship as the partner is forced to look for physical satisfaction outside the sildenafil bulk marriage. First, to determine the prevalence of headaches in people deeprootsmag.org buying sildenafil online with cervical radiculopathy (shooting pain in the arm) and myleopathy (spinal cord dysfunction), and second, to determine the effectiveness’ of anterior cervical surgery (surgery from the front of the room. Premature check out that drugstore tadalafil 20mg cipla ejaculation affect the younger population equally and if you are leading an unhealthy lifestyle are prone to erectile dysfunction. viagra generic sildenafil It also promotes hair growth on bald area.  

For those of my readers who are not familiar with German culture and history, let me explain. Nudism is a German/Scandinavian invention dating back to the 1890s. The objective was to escape the overcrowded, often polluted, rapidly expanding, cities, by returning to nature. From this point on nudism, known in Germany as Frei Korper Kultur (free-body culture), went on to develop a long history the details of which I’ll spare you here. Suffice it to say that, far from being sexual, a deliberate effort is made to keep sex out of it—or else the outcome would be a mass orgy, which it is not.

 

Some governments, e.g that of the Christian Democrats in the 1950s, tried to suppress nudism. Others tolerated it or even welcomed it. Some sent in the goons to beat up all the nudes they could find. Both the Nazis and the East German Communists initially adopted this strategy. Only to conclude that, since they could not lick the movement, they’d better join it instead. The Nazis because they glorified the nude Arian body, that of little nude Arian girls specifically included. The East Germans Communists, because going nude was one of the few pleasures people could be allowed to enjoy without endangering the regime.

 

To return to X, she listened patiently to what Orr had to say. That in itself is not something every teacher does. When the class was over she went to the principal and told her what she had learnt. To wit, that everything she had been teaching her students over many years was, not to put it too politely, bull. The kind of bull critics love to invent and educators, to feed their hapless victims with. The matter reached the Ministry of Education. X insisted that she be allowed to tell her students the truth: namely, that the poem was not about the mother’s sexy body but the pleasure of stripping naked and swimming in a lake in the midst of nature.

 

She told the geniuses at the Ministry that she wanted to teach the poem the way its author had intended. They refused. Whereupon she resigned.

 

End of the story.