Can Ronen Barany Prevent the Future? Is He Even Trying? Or why an Israel-Iran War is Still An Extraordinarily Bad Idea

Last week I wrote a blog post explaining why Israel attacking Iran is a terrible idea.  I began the post with a seminal quote by Ray Bradbury in which when asked by a journalist how he went about predicting the future in his work Bradbury responded that his writing sought not to describe the future but rather to prevent it.  Although my motivation for writing the previous entry is the same as Bradbury’s motivation for writing, I’ll happily be the first to acknowledge that this little blog that very few people read on a regular basis will almost certainly not alter the course of human events, let alone prevent a war.  Still, my blog-post got more of a response than I had counted on.  As I wrote in the entry itself I had expected to get called a self-hating Jew, a Kapo, or a traitor.  What I hadn’t expected was for someone to threaten to decapitate me and my family.  Annoyed but not the least bit frightened, I decided to let the comment stand on my blog so that if nothing else it would serve as a testament down the road to just how unhinged and unwilling to have a sober discussion people are today.  And thinking semi-optimistically I wondered that if my purposefully civil blog-post could stir someone’s emotions enough to threaten to cut my head off, perhaps it would be able to convince someone else that this war is, as I wrote in an understatement of historic proportions, “an extraordinarily bad idea.”  And perhaps that person would be able to convince another person that it was a bad idea.  Hardly an earth-shattering goal but one which I hope is fairly realistic. 

In any case, I want to discuss one force which may have actually played a major role in preventing a nuclear war in the past.  And that force is art.  “Art?” you ask.  Yes, art.  In an earlier post (and the best one I’ve written yet) I described my trip to see Picasso’s Guernica, perhaps the single most famous painting of the 20^th century.  Picasso created the work to commemorate the first bombing of civilians by airplanes in an attempt to shock the world into preventing the Second World War.  Tragically, his masterpiece was not sufficient.  But two far more widely seen works of art may have actually prevented World War Three.  And although it is impossible to quantify, their influence over not only public opinion but actual US and Russian military policy makers is severely underestimated in contemporary accounts.  I’m referring to two films of the later days of the Cold War which were both made-for-TV movies.  Now, made-for-TV movies are usually subpar in quality (think Lifetime) but both of these films were well above average as works of art and one of the two is (in my humble opinion) one of the greatest films ever made.  The first (and more famous) was The Day After which aired on November, 20, 1983 and was seen by 100 million people, which puts it as the 19^th most viewed television broadcast in American history, something which is truly stunning considering that the US population was 2/3s of its current size.  For comparison, the 1983 Super Bowl, the second most viewed sporting event of all time, was only seen by five million more people.  46% of American households watched the broadcast of The Day After that night, constituting 68% of the people watching TV at that moment.  And the film was not only shown in the USA but was eventually seen by tens of millions in China and the USSR as well. 

What did The Day After portray?  It was the first film to attempt to realistically show an apocalyptic nuclear war on epic scale by showing the effects of multiple atomic explosions on Kansas City, Missouri. Simply put, although it’s been done many times since, nobody had seen anything like it before on screen. ABC cleared the film with the federal government in advance and in an effort to avoid public panic followed the advice of the Reagan administration to set up hotlines with psychological counselors on hand.  The phone-lines were overwhelmed with tens of thousands of distressed callers.  Even today watching the film, although clearly set in the 1980s and despite the fact that the special effects are now hardly state of the art, it’s still done well enough to disturb a contemporary viewer.  Here’s a scene from Youtube:

  

What was far more remarkable about The Day After was the effect that it had on policy makers.  Reagan noted several times over the years in his diary that his opinion on the efficacy of nuclear war was changed by the film.  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the very men who should have had the most insight into what three hundred nuclear missiles hitting the United States would have looked like, attended a special screening before the film aired on TV and were reportedly left deeply shaken.  Congress passed a resolution requesting that American diplomats try to convince the Soviet regime to show the film on state television (which they eventually did).  Reading about it it’s a stunning reminder to me of just how little imagination some people have.  I have a much better imagination than most people.  By imagination I don’t mean the ability to come up with outlandish ideas but rather the ability to visualize scenarios based on what I’ve read and experienced far better than the average person. I’ve read about the bombing of Hiroshima and have talked to a woman whose dress is permanently tattooed onto her body.  

And I can perfectly imagine (see, hear, smell) what a nuclear bombing would look like and I was able to long before I ever saw a fictional version on film.  It appears that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the very men who would have launched a nuclear war, however, did not fully understand the severity of the consequences of such a war until they saw a cinematic portrayal of it. And such is the power of art. Art; whether paintings, music or cinema, is successful when it causes people to think about things in ways they would not otherwise. And if you were to measure the success of a piece of art solely on its impact, The Day After would almost certainly be the most important piece of art of the entire 20^th century.  As the film ends (literally) in a pile of rubble with a man’s hair falling out due to radiation sickness, the filmmakers chose to break the fourth wall and flash the following words across the screen:

“The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.  It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day.” 

Devastating does not even begin to describe it, especially what it would have been like to see it when it aired for the first time when the cars and suits weren’t thirty years old. 

Even more devastating (although much less remembered), far scarier and a much better movie was the British answer to The Day After, 1984’s Threads.  Threads is, simply put, the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.  Like The Day After the film portrays nuclear destruction on a massive scale and its immediate aftermath but what distinguishes Threads is that it takes the story a generation further and provides one of the darkest (realistic) visions of mankind’s future ever committed to screen.  People continue living but nobody is entirely sure why they are bothering to go on.  While both films employ (then) state of the art special effects, Threads has an understated British sensibility in the film’s second (post nuclear-explosions) act that is far more devastating than its American counterpart.  Where The Day After would employ deafening screaming, Threads shows more realistic sobbing or a person too scared to produce a sound.  One of the most effecting scenes of the movie for me is when a group of city workers entombed in a poorly designed shelter are trying to have a meeting and a man says that he would really like to just be able to leave to get a beer in a pub.  His comrades think that it’s a bad attempt at humor until he keeps repeating his request and it soon becomes clear that he’s lost his mind altogether.  You can check out both films in their entirety on Youtube, both are more than worth the time. 

All of this brings us back to 2012 and the Israeli attack on Iran which as Salon covered brilliantly yesterday appears all but inevitable.  As discussed in the Salon article there has been shockingly little debate about this war considering the terrible consequences it could bring about.  This is especially true in Israel where a planned anti-war demonstration brought out a mere 25 people and in the rare moments when the war is actually discussed it is talked about with a stunning lack of agency on the part of those discussing it.  The general attitude seems to be that whatever happens shall happen and we’ll just have to deal with the consequences.  While some columnists like Larry Derfner have been sounding the alarm and are expressly trying to avoid a doomsday scenario (this is a fantastic column by the way which brings up some important points my post failed to address), they are lone voices in the wilderness and if there is going to be any serious discussion of this seemingly inevitable war it will not be spurred on by the journalistic sphere.  Rather, it will have to emerge from within the confines of art. 

Enter Ronen Barany.  Barany made a five minute film  that has been a Rorschach test of sorts for the Israeli public. The film realistically portrays an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel and is clearly designed to scare/upset anyone who sees it.  

What Mr. Barany’s intention may be beyond that, however, is completely ambiguous, as is evidenced by the fact that he was strongly attacked by people both on the right and the left.  Leftists felt that by showing the effects of a nuclear attack on Israel he was advocating for a preemptive strike on Iran.  Those on the right felt that by showing the devastating effects of a war Barany was naively arguing against having any war at all.  Either way, it’s quite clear that this short film The Last Day is supposed to provoke discussion.  And ultimately since hardly anyone is discussing this war outside of the elite liberal newspaper Haaretz and a lack of discussion makes the war all but inevitable, it doesn’t matter whether Barany’s film was expressly created like The Day After to prevent the future rather than to simply portray it because anything that increases discussion makes the war less likely to occur.  Although it’s a nice scary piece of work and has already gone viral having already been watched 100,000 times, it does not seem like it is having much of an impact.  Sure, it’s had a lot more impact than my lowly blog-post but if Barany’s intention was to prevent the future it’s unlikely that he will succeed.  We can only hope that if this war does come to pass that it won’t look anything like Barany’s vision of it.   

An Israel-Iran War. One Extraordinarily Bad Idea.

"I don't want to describe the future, I want to prevent it." Ray Bradbury.  

Like many of my classmates in eighth grade I was strongly opposed to the then inevitable War in Iraq. Unlike nearly everyone I knew then, however, including even some of the war’s fiercest critics, I knew that this war would not last weeks or months as promised but would disintegrate into a conflict that could easily last five years or more and costs hundreds of thousands of lives. As it turned out, the American misadventure in Iraq lasted more than seven years and resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million people depending on whom you chose to believe. How did I know this would happen at the age of 13 when even the US military was unprepared for the country's descent into civil war? At the time I was deluded enough to think that it was because I was paying more attention than the people pulling the strings because clearly I thought if they had the same information I had they wouldn't be stupid enough to get involved in such a conflict. Now I understand that, tragically, they had all the same information I had had and more but ended up ignoring it, some in order to make money, some because they had delusions of grandeur, and others because they had the mad desire to prove themselves not to be cowards. And finally in the case of some cowards among them they did not put on the brakes because they simply were afraid to say no to their bosses. It's not that I was any smarter than the analysts on TV either. Some of them inevitably knew the history of the region as well and could have foreseen Saddam's fall unleashing a many-sided civil war in which the only common enemy was the U.S. occupation force. But for some reason this prediction, which I shouted at my war-hawk of an 8th grade history teacher repeatedly in front of bewildered classmates, rarely if ever made it onto TV before the war began and the completely inevitable civil-war is now often described in recent documentaries as having come as a surprise.

Ten years later I'm feeling a bit of deja vu, albeit with two different countries and a potentially more dangerous situation. These two countries are, of course, Israel and Iran and the Israeli Prime Minister, his Defense Minister and much of the American Jewish establishment have decided that attacking Iran is not only a sane course of action but the only feasible one. Like the Iraq war ten years ago I see a (metaphorical) limo being driven by a lunatic taking swigs of whisky out of a flask going the wrong way down a highway straight into the path of a gas truck as his motley crew partying behind him eggs him on. This is, however, a terrible metaphor because in my metaphor the people at fault would be the ones to suffer the consequences and in modern warfare it's almost always people who have no control over the political decisions who end up being shot and blown apart. But you get the picture. I'm going to get chewed out for posting this as I do for any post critical of the current Israeli government and that's why I know it's important that I write this post. Although I doubt anything I write on this blog will have any influence other than upsetting some people and getting me nasty emails calling me a Kapo, I still feel obligated to write this post on the off-chance that it does change someone's opinion and that person can change another's opinion. So here it is: Israel attacking Iran is an extraordinarily stupid idea. Here's why:

1. Why worry about a nuclear bomb down the road when there are thousands of very deadly but non-nuclear ballistic missiles the Iranians may use if attacked that can hit Israel?

2. Iran has massive capabilities for launching terrorist attacks that would target not just Israel but American and Jewish sites worldwide.

3. Unlike the US with the Iraq War, Israel would be fully exposed to military retaliation and the Israeli home-front is woefully unprepared for a major war. Remember the Carmel Fire and the Israeli army needing aid from every country in the Mediterranean to get it out? Imagine 500 fires like that at once. Three former heads of Mossad, have come out against the plan, citing the inability to put out fires and a shortage of gas-masks.

4. Iran has 75 million people and most of them hate their government. It's nearly been brought down twice in the past four years. Attacking it would cause tens of millions of people who hate it to rally behind it and would get the country's Arab enemies to rally behind it, effectively turning a weak government into an indestructible one. It would also strengthen Assad in Syria and Islamists in Iraq. Unlike secular Iraq under Saddam which is now installing an Islamist regime (countries after dictatorships usually choosing whatever is the opposite of the disposed ruler), Iran currently has an Islamist government so when it falls a much more religiously liberal government more friendly to Israel is likely to take its place. Attacking it will destroy any chance of this happening.

5. If the US gets dragged into it, either by delivering military aid or being attacked by Iranian terrorists, it will foment anti-Semitism in the USA unlike anything in American history.

6. The Iranian government may massacre Iran's Jewish and Christian populations as retaliation.

7. Pakistan, which does have nuclear weapons as well as all sorts of internal security problems, would be severely destabilized, leaving open the possibility for loose nukes being funneled to third parties which could use them against Israel, defeating the whole purpose of starting a war to prevent a nuclear bombing in the first place.

8. Not that anyone cares apparently but tens of thousands of people will die if the Iranians retaliate and Israel and Iran start exchanging volleys of missiles.

So with so much common sense saying that this is an incredibly stupid and dangerous idea and with both current and former Mossad heads breaking ranks to oppose it, why is Netanyahu so determined to start a war? My own sense is that Netanyahu has a bit of a Messiah complex. For years he has been touring the world telling everyone and anyone that Israel (again despite the current Mossad chief's assurances to the contrary) is in mortal danger, that the year is 1939 and that everyone must step in line behind him to save the Jewish people from imminent destruction. Like a mother suffering from Munchausen by Proxy who is beginning to fear that everyone is catching on that her child is not really sick, Netanyahu feels the need to prove himself right to a disbelieving world. And the only way to do that is to sicken the child so to speak, i.e. to start a war with Iran to "prove" just how dangerous the Iranians would have been had the war not been waged. What Netanyahu and his enablers are too deluded by their quest to be heros to see is that the war they are seeking to start to prove their point will be far more devastating than the consequences of not taking action at all. Why, it should be asked, does Iran want a nuclear bomb? If you believe Netanyahu the Iranian government is on a messianic quest to commit a second Holocaust. But you must keep in mind that no country with one or two nuclear bombs is going to nuke a country with hundreds of nuclear bombs. It would be suicide. Iran wants a bomb to hold the rest of the world hostage so as to avoid being attacked conventionally during disputes and perhaps to use as leverage in trade deals. A bomb would also shield it from economic sanctions to some extent as well as be a source of pride. None of this is good, of course, but none of it is worth risking Israel starting a war with a major regional power. The US is able to deal with a nuclear North Korea that made a nuclear weapon against the wishes of the international community. The US and the USSR managed to survive with nuclear warheads aimed at each other for four decades without a single one being set off. Certainly Israel is capable of dealing with a nuclear Iran.

As it stands even the most optimistic of intelligence estimates say that Israeli strikes will not be able to delay the Iranian nuclear program from developing a bomb by more than two years. So an Iranian nuclear bomb is all but inevitable anyway. What isn't inevitable is a destructive war killing thousands of people launched in a mad-bid to prove just how dangerous the situation really is. So please, if you have a way to influence someone to stop this war, do so. And if G-d forbid you're sitting around five or ten years from now wondering how something so terrible was allowed to occur and why you weren't warned of the consequences in advance, don't say Jordan didn't try to warn you.

Lithuania Redux 6: Jordan Gets Attacked by Romanian Thugs or...... Why the Insane Asylum was Insane.

I traveled to Lithuania in June of 2010 for a one week trip. At the time I had just completed six months of study in a Spanish University. It was my second trip to Lithuania and when I got back to the USA I began composing long blog entries combining my recollections of my last trip to Lithuania with emails I wrote home to family and friends from when I studied Yiddish there for a month in 2008. This is the sixth of nine entries. (Entry one is here), (entry two is here), (entry three is here), (entry four is here) , (entry five is here). I hope to post a new entry every week.  So far I've failed at that goal.  

Before I get into how I was attacked by a group of Romanian thugs I should probably remind you of the hotel in a converted townhouse where I was staying that I had termed the “mishegoyem-hoyz” (the insane-asylum). In the fourth installment of this unfortunately irregularly updated series, I mentioned in passing that in the course of one day (and my first day no less) at the hotel I had been kicked out by the owner so she could attend a fair with her kids, awoken to the same boys setting off Chinese firecrackers causing me to hide under my bed as I mistook the noise for gunfire and how seeking to relax from the stress of that incident I mistook gas-valves for the “bubble-bath” switch, which as the hotel’s owner put it to me in her broken English “Jew (you) d’nearly make da whole place go boom.” And after nearly blowing up the hotel and poisoning myself in the process she assured me that she wouldn’t “make (me) leave only ‘cause you’re a moron” because “we have not big guests’ number tonight.” So yeah, it’s fair to say that I wasn’t too impressed with the hotel’s customer service that first day and I was wondering what could possibly go wrong next. As it turned out, the competency of the hotel’s management never improved but I would become a lot more sympathetic towards them once I learned why things were so bonkers and especially after they saved me from what was shaping up to be a vicious beating.

The second day I was woken up by knocking on my door at 8AM. “Great,” I thought, “am I about to get kicked out again?” I hastily dressed, opened the door and was handed a croissant and a coke by a man who seemed completely bewildered to see me.

“You’re about twenty years younger than I’d imagined” he said, in impeccable English with an accent that was three-quarters Irish and a quarter Lithuanian.

“Why should I be twenty years older?” I said, staring at the food and wondering if it would be impolite to bite into it right in front of him.

“You’re the businessman who requested the wakeup-call right?”

“No,” I said “I’m the tourist who was hoping to sleep till ten.”

“Oh,” the man said and without a word he grabbed both the croissant and the coke bottle out of my hands and walked over to another door on which he began pounding. Now irrevocably awake and under the distinct impression that a croissant seemed like a great idea I headed out for the day. I never managed to find a croissant (I don’t recall ever seeing one in Lithuania and my attempt at ordering “crossanes” following the moronic Lithuania tourist trick of adding an es to any random word resulted in nothing but stares since no such word exists) but I did end up leading a tour of what was the Vilna ghetto and the Jewish quarter in a language I don’t actually speak, something I’ll get to in the next post. After yet another afternoon where I completely failed at my goal of visiting contemporary Lithuania and instead gave a tour in some warped parallel universe where the Holocaust had never ended, I ended up watching the World Cup with a group of German Erasmus students in Uzupis, a charming but whacky Bohemian district that declared its “independence” from Lithuania in 1997 on April fool’s day and where a giant Yiddish sign details its “constitution,” article 12 of which is “a dog has the right to be a dog.” (Don’t believe me? Well go and see for yourself!)

Around eight that night I ended up in a pub that could have easily been five hundred years old and was told by a drunken Spaniard to order “tarta americana.” I didn’t see anything on the menu that resembled “American pie” but I decided he had probably been recommending the apple pie. So I ordered the apple pie and as it turned out it would be the single best decision I made during my whole trip to Lithuania. I have absolutely no idea how or why the best apple pie I’ve ever had is served in a pub in Lithuania but just take my word for it that they’ve taken the most American of desserts and somehow improved upon it. As I was eating the strange angel-hair like cream off of my third slice of apple pie around ten at night I noticed two men in the corner of the pub staring at me and doing a pretty terrible job at trying to hide the fact that they were staring at me. It was so obvious that it seemed theatrical, like something that would happen in one of the Harry Potter movies right before the scar on Harry’s head begins to burn.

Due to my upbringing in one of America’s scariest cities I’m far more street-smart than the average American tourist and as it turns out street-smarts is one of the few things that are universally cross-cultural. If someone is sizing you up to mug you in Vilnius and is not good at hiding it, it will look no different than in Philadelphia or Timbuktu. Due to the two men staring incessantly at me I decided that the best course of action was to pay with my credit card so that they wouldn’t realize that I had a single 500 Lita bill in my pocket. (I had gotten it at a money-exchange kiosk.) Due to my terrible luck, however, the credit card machine was broken and the waitress, who either had the street-smarts of someone from the rural (American) Midwest or was just a complete moron, made a big show of handing a stunning number of 20 Lita bills back to me. Now 500 Litas is worth roughly 190 dollars so assuming the pie cost two dollars a slice I was effectively being handed 184 dollars in five dollar bills.

As I watched the two men salivating over my money while whispering excitedly I wondered why the waitress couldn’t have just given me two 200 Lita notes so it wouldn’t have been obvious that I was carrying such an obscene amount of money.

I headed out to city hall which would be well lit and reasonably full of people at that early hour figuring that I could avoid being attacked in a crowd. But I didn’t see any sign of the two men and based on how bad they were at scouting me I figured that they may very well have lost me. So I headed for the gates of dawn hoping to make it the two hundred yards past the gates to my hotel. Now being a tourist attraction the gates of dawn are fairly well lit at night and have restaurants and hotels inside of them. Outside of them (which is also right outside of the old town) the area becomes pitch black and with the exception of two or three unmarked hotels there is absolutely nothing there that suggests it’s a place that a tourist should be wandering around at night. In fact, it looks like just the place where a tourist ought not to step foot and the area’s close proximity to the central train station just adds to the lack of security.

About twenty feet outside of the gates of dawn the two men from the bar suddenly appeared about ten feet behind me. I immediately stopped walking to see if they were following me and sure enough they stopped and began conferring in Romanian. I tried to catch what they were saying, the language is related to Spanish after all and I can sometimes catch things but I realized that if I spent all my thoughts on trying to understand them I’d probably miss my opportunity to escape. I was so close to the gates that I could have probably dashed right past them, through the gates and put myself in too large of a crowd to be attacked. But I knew that if they did catch me it would probably have upset them and then they would have been all the more likely to have wanted to hurt me. I didn’t want to be robbed obviously, losing two hundred dollars, a camera and a passport in the middle of the night in a country where you don’t speak a word of the language is awful but it’s much preferable to ending up in the hospital after a severe beating in said foreign country. In short, dashing past them was out but I also wasn’t going to just turn myself over to be mugged. So I decided that my only chance of not being robbed was to pretend that I had no idea what they were up to and to seem vulnerable enough that they would feel no need to hurry up and get it over with. I hoped that that would give me enough time to sneak into my unmarked hotel right under their noses. This seemed like a very long shot, however, considering that the hotel was a solid three New York blocks from where I was. But as this was the only viable course of action I started moving again and went into acting mood; walking unusually slowly and singing out loud like I didn’t have a care in the world both to throw them off of the fact that I was on to them and to try to relax.

“oyfn veg shteyt a boym, shteyt er ayngeboygn”

Maybe I could summon some protection from the city’s Jewish ghosts by singing a famous Yiddish lullaby.

“ale feygl funem boym zenen zikh tsefloygn”

But what good would Jewish ghosts be in a city where nearly every Jew had been murdered?

“dray keyn mizrekh, dray keyn mayrev un der resht keyn dorem”

One of the men, now even with me on my left, began singing something, a sad tune without words.

“un der boym, gelozt aleyn, hefker farn shturem”

We passed a wooded area and the man standing behind me slightly to my right was speaking softly into a cell-phone and I became aware of a third figure moving through the woods about ten feet away.

“zog ikh tsu der mamen her, zolst mir nor nit shtern”

We were now even with the long row of European style town-homes, walking three wide with the figure coming out of the woods trailing five yards behind. The hotel was about one hundred yards ahead.

“vel ikh mame eyns un tsvey bald a foygl vern

ikh vel zitsn oyfn boym un vel im farvign

ibern vinter mit a treyst, mit a sheynem nign”

I’m not a fast runner so I figured they’d catch me if I made a dash for it. So I kept up the act and began walking even slower and just to throw them off asked the man to my right if he had a cigarette. To my surprise he pulled out a cigarette and a lighter, lit the cigarette, and handed it to me without slowing down. I kept the cigarette in my hand, hoping it would stay lit so that as a last ditch measure I could jab it into one of their eyes.

“Yum, biti biti biti biti biti bum”

“Yum, biti, biti, biti, biti, bum”

Roughly twenty yards to go. The entrance to the hotel was a nondescript door. You had to stand in front of a small camera for three seconds and the man at the desk, if he was there, would buzz you in. My only hope was to press the button that activated the camera without them noticing and to somehow get in the door without letting them in. The problem was that if I stood by the door it would be obvious what I was doing and they’d probably beat me. But if I didn’t stay by the door the man would not see me to buzz me in. Ten yards short of the door I put the cigarette, still lit, in my left hand and began dragging my right arm against the wall casually as if I were completely unaware that the three men now surrounding me close enough that I could feel their breath were no longer even trying to hide the fact they were about to attack me. Dragging my arm like that would render me unable to throw a punch but it would also make my reaching for the bell look totally random. The man who had been in the woods got in front of me, turned around and began walking backwards facing me, barely letting me continue. The other two cramped up against my left side. I was trapped with the wall blocking any foreseeable route of escape to my right. I suddenly felt the bell.

“zogt di mame, nite kind, un zi veynt mit trern

vest kholilye afn boym mir farfroyrn vern”

I didn’t have the faintest idea why I had suddenly begun singing again but when I pressed the bell I realized that my own voice covered over the mechanized buzz of the locking mechanism opening. I walked a full two yards past the door when without any proper formalities the man in front of me threw a punch. Being too short to get a good shot at my head he was aiming for my neck but as I had already been positioning myself to turn around to make a break for the door he ended up hitting my shoulder blade. And before I was even fully conscious of having run the distance I was on the other side of the door slamming it shut on one of the man’s thumbs.

The thumb, it turned out, was just enough to jam the door and prevent it from locking. I was stuck for nearly a full second, completely unsure about what to do. If I had continued forcing the door all the way shut I might have very well ripped off the man’s thumb but if I opened the door too much they’d pull me back outside. As if just to break the silence the man let out an incredible scream that gave the impression that far more than just a thumb was stuck in the door and I opened the door just a crack. I looked into the man’s sad eyes and as if some sort of gentlemen’s agreement had been reached he pulled out his thumb and just held his thumb in his other hand as I got the door closed. I could still hear him screaming even through the glass but the man backed away from the door. His two comrades, however, rushed the door and began banging so hard that I thought they’d surely break the window pane. I took three or four steps back, watched them from the edge of the staircase and without even realizing what I was doing gave them the middle finger. The man who had punched me kicked at the glass which visibly shook but did not give way. The four of us looked at each other stunned.

I ran up the flight of stairs to the concierge desk. It was pitch-black on the second floor and I ran right over a man who began screaming to someone else in Lithuanian. A light turned on and I found myself on the floor on top of the hotel manager who was holding a cell phone in one hand and a large metal mallet in the other. His son was about five feet away, wielding a nine-iron and looking like he was about to piss himself.

“Thank God it’s you” the manager said. “Did they get in?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Are, you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’m calling the police, one moment.” He began calming down his son who was still standing there ready to hit me over the head with the nine-iron despite looking like he was going to collapse from utter fright at any moment. The poor boy was so spooked that I don’t think he even recognized me as the idiot hotel guest he had managed to scare under a bed by setting off firecrackers the day before. I told the manager not to call the police.

“But we need to catch them” he answered. “We can’t just have thugs picking off tourists like that, someone will get hurt. And furthermore I won’t tolerate anyone trying to harm one of my guests. You were lucky but the next one won’t be and the cops can’t do anything without a complaint.”

Despite the manager’s protests I talked him out of calling the police. I had no desire to get involved with being interviewed by cops and since nothing had been taken and I had broken a man’s thumb (for which I still feel guilty mind you) I felt that things were more than even. Still, I didn’t like the idea that someone might get hurt because I didn’t want to go through the formalities of filing a police report so I told the manager everything I could remember about the men (their appearance, that they were speaking Romanian, their clothing) and he composed an email that he sent to a listserve for businesses in the area. The camera was not attached to a recording device so there was no picture to send along.

As it turned out the button I had pushed to get buzzed in activates not only the camera which the guest is to look into so that the manager can confirm his identity but also activates an additional camera that shows about ten feet of the sidewalk on either side of the door. The manager and his son saw what was happening and had grabbed improvised weapons in case I had managed to let any of the thugs in. Whether they would have come out and tried to fight off the men if I hadn’t gotten the door open is ambiguous to me but hopefully they wouldn’t have been stupid/brave enough to have tried that and would have just called the police.

The strange near-mugging seemed to remove a wall between myself and the family that was running the hotel and the man told me why things were so consistently bonkers. As you have probably divined from the previous entry, the man and his wife had absolutely no idea what they were doing when it came to running a hotel. As it turned out they weren’t hotel managers by trade but two teachers who had fallen on hard times, lost their home in a rural town in the country’s north and we’re put to work at the hotel by the woman’s cousin in exchange for having a place to live while they found somewhere else to go. The cousin, for her part, was in a small town near Kaunas tending to her dying mother-in-law. The two boys, having lost the only home they knew, not being enrolled in school because their parents were planning on moving elsewhere ASAP, and finding themselves in a big city that their rural upbringing made frightening, were completely nerve-wracked and bored. The fact that they had nowhere to go but the hotel’s courtyard certainly made the experience even worse. The family had been planning on leaving for Ireland, where the man had lived for several years a decade ago, but had to earn enough money first doing odd jobs and managing the hotel to be able to rent an apartment. (EU citizens can move around very easily, going from Lithuania to Ireland is not like going from Lithuania to the USA).

So in short they were in limbo and to make things worse they had inherited a business that was going bottom-up even before they took over because due to the recession there were few tourists coming to Lithuania who had enough money to avoid staying in a hostel but not enough to stay in a more expensive hotel within the old city. As it turned out I and the businessman were the only two people in the hotel (out of a dozen or so rooms) that whole week and I was the only guest the first day. And that was why the woman had been so forceful in getting me to leave for the fair because she was desperate to find something for her sons to do and me being the only guest once she got rid of me she was able to abandon her post to entertain her stir-crazed sons. It was far from professional but certainly understandable.

And so, a lot more understanding of the situation and being thankful for them having buzzed me in at exactly the right moment for me to avoid being savagely beaten, I was able to ignore the several other odd and degrading incidents that befell me during the rest of my week at the “mishegoyem-hoyz” and even left them a good review on several hotel search engines, which were, to be honest, completely undeserved. But hey, I made it out alive. And I only nearly “made d’whole place go boom.”

Lithuania Redux 5: Don’t Be a white trainer in a nightclub in Kaunas

I traveled to Lithuania in June of 2010 for a one week trip. At the time I had just completed six months of study in a Spanish University. It was my second trip to Lithuania and when I got back to the USA I began composing long blog entries combining my recollections of my last trip to Lithuania with emails I wrote home to family and friends from when I studied Yiddish there for a month in 2008. This is the fifth of nine entries. (Entry one is here), (entry two is here), (entry three is here), (entry four is here) I hope to post a new entry every week.  So far I've failed at that goal.  

I actually wrote this entry in September but delayed posting it because I wanted the posts to go in chronological order.  Unfortunately, I've managed to write what would be posts seven, eight, and nine if I were going chronologically and have been unable to complete posts five and six.  For that reason this post, post five in order of appearance, is actually post eight chronologically.  The only thing you need to know to follow it in terms of background is that I traveled from Vilnius to Kaunas and met the same friend I tried to meet in post four there.  This is a misadventure we had together with another friend.  

I hate nightclubs more than almost anything else that doesn’t involve violence, racism or Brussel-sprouts.  First off, I don’t drink.  Second, I don’t like loud noise.  Third, I would rather talk to someone than dance and fourth, I am particularly bad at hearing in loud places so I can converse/understand far less than the average person in a nightclub.  Finally, because I had a really bad concussion as a teenager I become disoriented in loud or crowded spaces.  Combine that with the fact that nightclubs are as quintessentially Spanish as hookah bars are quintessentially Israeli or baseball is quintessentially American and the fact that my general approach to life in Spain was “do as the Romans do”, after six months there I was completely nightclubbed out for life.  This was, of course, despite the fact that I had only gone to nightclubs three or four times in Spain because I hate nightclubs so much.  I spent most of my time in Spanish nightclubs making sure creepy Armenian men who may or may not have been gangsters (apparently friends of the owner) didn’t make unwanted advances to deliriously drunk girls from my dorm.  When I didn’t have that distraction I spent most of my time trying to avoid colliding into people who thought they were dancing but were actually kind of just walking in circles complaining about how loud the music was.  And when I wasn’t trying to avoid people I was trying to convince someone, anyone, to split a cab with me so I could go back to the dorm, which usually got the response “dude, it’s not even dawn yet!”  So yeah, I hate nightclubs.  In fact, thinking of it perhaps I’d rather the Brussel-sprouts.  

As it turned out though, my friend in Kaunas and her friend from Israel really had their hearts set on going to a nightclub.  Having not gone to a nightclub in her hometown in a while she turned to her brother for advice. Her brother, knowing the clubbing scene, told her the clubs that were bad ideas for various reasons (I remember distinctly that one club was designated for getting into fights and was to be avoided by womenfolk and foreigners alike).  So with a recommendation from her brother we had a destination picked out and I was perfectly resigned to being miserable for a few hours so that they could get their clubbing experience in.  As fate would have it though, I ended up inadvertently preventing us from getting into the club at all.  

I got the feeling that part of my friend’s motivation for bringing us to a nightclub was to show that Kaunas was youthful and hip and could compete with Vilnius.  Vilnius of course, for all its charms, is a small city when compared to the major metropolitan centers that most tourists who end up there are already familiar with.  For comparison’s sake it is roughly 1/3 the size of Philadelphia and Kaunas is roughly 1/3 the size of Vilnius in area so when it comes to Kaunas you end up with a city about 1/9^th the size of Philadelphia with few attractions. And that’s not much at all considering that on an international scale Philadelphia is not a major metropolis by any stretch of the imagination.  In short, Kaunas is very much off the beaten path and although it has some small-town charm to it in the downtown area, there’s really no reason to go there unless there’s something or (more likely) someone specific you want to see.  Anyway...the entrance to the nightclub was down a flight of stairs.  My companions vanished through a doorway and I would have followed them in but a stream of angry Lithuanian words blocked my progress and I ended up with what appeared to be three large men trying to point to the top of my head (but missing the mark) from a dozen stairs above.  One came down and began yelling at me so I told him (in very broken Lithuanian) that I didn’t understand him, and that I spoke Anglų kalba and he started shrieking “trainers. No damn trainers. White, no!”  I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about.  So I told him that I was not a trainer and that even if I were why should my skin color be an issue in a country where nearly everyone is white? At that moment he looked like he was deciding exactly how to rip my head off and it was clear that if he understood that there was a miscommunication he didn’t find it amusing.  In any case, even had he chosen not to render me headless, I might still be there wondering what sport I was not supposed to be coaching if my friend hadn’t arrived and began arguing with the bouncers in Lithuanian, which promptly got all three of us, well, bounced.  Swallowing both my sense of embarrassment mixed with utter confusion and the feeling that I had narrowly avoided several hours of misery, I asked my furious friend what had happened.  

“I forgot to tell you Jordan that you can’t wear white sneakers in a club.”  

“Huh?”  

“I tried to reason with him that you were a foreigner and ignorant but he wouldn’t listen and give permission.” 

 

“Why white?  Too unstylish?”  

“No, it’s that gangs and subcultures that like to fight used to wear white so they feel it’s a security risk to let people in wearing white sneakers.”  

The idea of me being a security risk in Kaunas of all places was just too ridiculous for me not to burst out laughing.  In my mind Kaunas is a city permanently linked with unspeakable violence and cruelty during the Holocaust (see the history of the train station) and the city’s Jewish community, including some of my family, was exterminated with the enthusiastic help and scythes of many of the locals (and perhaps even the grandparents of the bouncers for all I know), so the idea of me being threatening to anyone due to the color of my sneakers seemed ludicrous beyond belief.  I muttered something to that effect under my breath in Yiddish and immediately felt bad for again judging 21^st century Lithuania and her idiot bouncer-thug types by the memory of 1940s Lithuanian fascist partisans who scythed Jews to death even before the Nazis arrived.* 

In the end, we had a perfectly nice evening eating at an outdoor restaurant watching Spain win a match in the world cup. 

*In fairness to myself you have to admit that the most stereotypical profession for the grandchild of a fascist goon would be someone whose job it is to kick people out of nightclubs because they have the wrong kind of footwear.  In actuality, however, it’s just as likely that his grandparents had been bartenders or social-workers or anything else for that matter and in defense of bouncers being a jerk is part of the job and they may very well be sweet people when they aren’t working. Unfortunately those same fascist Lithuanian partisans who made a sport out of killing Jewish civilians were on my mind so often during the trip because the Lithuanian government was considering honoring them with parades at the time.  In any case, it was after this incident that I realized that I’ll never be able to separate contemporary Lithuania in my mind from the Holocaust and that perhaps this is something unavoidable that shouldn’t be dreaded.     

Lithuania Redux 4: A Rainy Day and Night of Culture.... Or Jordan gets kicked out a hotel and called a moron

I traveled to Lithuania in June of 2010 for a one week trip. At the time I had just completed six months of study in a Spanish University. It was my second trip to Lithuania and when I got back to the USA I began composing long blog entries combining my recollections of my last trip to Lithuania with emails I wrote home to family and friends from when I studied Yiddish there for a month in 2008. This is the fourth, of nine entries. (Entry one is here), (entry two is here), (entry three is here). I hope to post a new entry every week.  So far I've failed at that goal.  

When I arrived in Kaunas it was just after dawn and I was completely and utterly exhausted, the type of exhaustion which makes you unsteady on your feet without even realizing it.  Armed with gifts (the aforementioned Yiddish Little Prince, a tiny bottle of Valencian Sangria, and honey from Andalusia), a video-camera, three days worth of clothes and a phrasebook I figured that it would take me at least an hour to get through customs.  After all I was transporting alcohol and (perhaps worse) an agricultural product across an international border and I was half asleep which would presumably have made me look both suspicious and foolish.  Additionally my most recent experience going through security/customs had been leaving Israel where I was interrogated for nearly three hours, stripped searched and accused of unspeakable crimes on the basis of my knowledge of Yiddish, friendship with an Eastern European woman who lived in Tel Aviv and wasn’t Jewish and the over-imagination, paranoia and delusions of Israeli airport officials. After that Kafkaesque experience in which I was accused of things without being told what they were and was insulted for not choosing to live in Israel while simultaneously being accused of breaking its laws (i.e. how American Jews not on Birthright tours are sometimes treated leaving Israel), I certainly figured that Lithuania at least could muster a few rude questions, a frisk search and a perhaps a veiled anti-Semitic interrogation over whether I was seeking to see/retrieve property that had belonged to murdered relatives (this happened to someone I know who visited Poland).  But when I got to customs the man simply opened my bag, looked at the alcohol and said “looks like you’re going to have a good time, enjoy Lithuania” and indicated that I should go to the next hallway, I thought this was surely some kind of a trick.  Where was the woman who would come out of nowhere and ask for the names and addresses of people I knew in the country and then call them in front of me (as happened when I first went through security in Tel Aviv entering Israel)?  Where was the man who would keep asking me “are you not not afraid?” to which I’d respond “no” and he’d say “so you are afraid then?  Why are you afraid of me?” Passing through customs at that moment I realized that I was suffering from a bit of post-traumatic stress from my previous trip across borders and reminded myself that I was entering Lithuania where the most common national communal concern involves worrying about the country’s standing in Eurocup basketball rankings and not Israel where legitimate fears of terrorism have created a society that is afraid of its own shadow (like America was right after 9/11). And unlike exiting Israel where my Yiddish books were seen as a threat and resulted in interrogation, there was no notice of them entering Kaunas despite the fact that it’s a language many people in Lithuania see every day (albeit only on the memorial plaques for the murdered people who used to speak it there). So to make a long story short, being tired to the point of confusion and paranoid that someone was going to come up to me and force me into an interrogation room, I stumbled right out of the tiny airport and immediately realized I had no idea how I was supposed to get from Kaunas to Vilnius.  Luckily enough, about ten seconds later the Little Spaniard popped his head out of a fifteen passenger van and directed me into it.  I asked where they were going and as it turned out they were going straight to Vilnius so I handed the driver some money (he gave me almost all of it back because the taxi was 1/5^th the price I had imagined it would be) and I found myself on a Lithuanian version of what in Israel is called a (Monet) Sherut and according to Wikipedia is called a “share-taxi” in English. Basically it’s a fifteen passenger van that follows a set route but not a set schedule, leaving only when it’s full.  

The ride to Vilnius was uneventful albeit scary as all trips in motor vehicles in Lithuania inevitably are.  The countryside looked completely unchanged and I was able to contemplate it silently as nearly all of the passengers had nodded off even before we left the airport.  I thought I recognized the field where a famous Musar Yeshiva that Chaim Grade had attended once stood and reflected on the small towns and hamlets sprinkled throughout the country where the graves of my ancestors lie with no one to tend them.  I had come to Lithuania the second time in large part to spend more time learning about Lithuanian culture and not to focus on the mass-murder of my people but in the share-taxi there was no Lithuanian culture to be had and for me the landscape belongs solely to Yiddish literature.  Here were the trees whose bark was brewed into the greatest explosion of Jewish cultural creativity in history.  The Rom press printed what would become the standard Talmud (a then 1500 year old tractate on religious laws which they reformatted) as well as a large chunk of modern Yiddish literature and it was from these Lithuanian oak trees that it made the paper onto which five thousand years of Jewish experience was printed.  Those five thousand years of Jewish tradition were wiped off the face of the earth in Lithuania and survive almost solely in the books that were printed there and smuggled out of the country and perhaps in the trees themselves for many were planted to cover over the mass graves where entire towns of Jews were lined up and shot.  Each town in Lithuania which was once Jewish has a former synagogue (usually the post office now), a Jewish cemetery (usually destroyed) and a mass grave which the locals can always point out.  The collective knowledge contained in the books came from the trees and they returned back to the trees for after 1000 people were shot dead, nearly every day, day after day from June to November of 1941 trees were planted to cover the mass graves and as the corpses decomposed the words the people had read recomposed themselves back into the bark from which they had come.  Watching the endless forests go by I had the sudden urge to get out of the van when we stopped at a light and rip the bark off of a tree and carry it along with me as a talisman.  Since the Lithuanian wing of my family has no marked graves I figured that I’d bury it in Philadelphia and erect a small monument.  Thankfully, a near-collision with an 18-wheeler snapped me out of my depression and threw my mind back into the 21^st century and reminded me of my goal of learning more about Lithuanian culture.  Little did I know that I had picked the best day of the year to do so.  

We were dropped off at the central bus station in Vilnius and I quickly parted ways with the Little Spaniard and his mother as her father was waiting there to pick them up.  Walking around Vilnius I found to my complete surprise that I still remembered the city well enough to find my way around but even so I soon realized that I had no idea where my hotel was so I hopped into a taxi, showed the Russian driver the address and soon found myself in a strange hotel room straight out of the mid-19^th century (other than the TV and bathtub which would nearly kill me, more on that later).  I was about to conk out till evening when a woman entered my room (yes the door was closed) and told me very emphatically to leave because there was to be a “culture fire.”  “A culture fire” I thought, “what in the world?”  I let myself imagine culture being burned or perhaps more optimistically culture around a bonfire but listening to the woman’s emphatic descriptions in extremely choppy English it became clear that she had meant to say “culture fair.”  She then said something to the effect of “come on, this only happens once a year” but with about 25 words, a handclap someone would use to motivate a drunken chicken and a typically Lithuanian over-attempt at a smile.  “Well,” I thought “I came to see Lithuanian culture and it will be a much better story to tell if the hotel manager successfully kicks me out of my room at 11AM so I might as well go.”  So I nodded, thanked her, grabbed an umbrella and headed out the door toward the gates of dawn through which she had promised there would be the “culture fire.”  

As I was leaving I decided to pick up a sandwich at a store right inside of the gates of dawn and I exited the store just in time to see the hotel manager with two young boys walking by.  I ran up to her and she proceeded to purposefully look right past me and shuffle her boys ahead of her.  What in the world?  I decided to ignore them despite my annoyance with the situation and continued walking until I found myself face to face with a group of people in traditional costumes cooking a giant stew in a cauldron suspended from a tripod.  I had often wondered what exactly a cooking tripod looked like because they often appear in Yiddish literature and seeing one was an unexpected moment of clarity and I began chuckling under my breath. First off, I finally got to see what a cooking tripod actually looked like and secondly I suddenly understood the strong association between tripods, paganism and the western European conception of a witch because the three young women doing the cooking looked like a gaggle of witches making potions.  A few women who were well dressed in modern clothing looked suspiciously into the pots and talked with their counterparts in medieval clothing who were stirring.  Further down the main square a large group of teenagers were dancing in significantly less fancy traditional costumes with the girls wearing funny green hats.  A group of musicians played leers, trumpets and balalaikas as young boys sang in the medieval style imitating women’s voices. Larger crowds were gathered watching, some clutching small flags embroidered with coats of arms of medieval family crests and dutchesies which, for that day at least, were suddenly unforgotten. 

This is more or less what the tripod looked like although the pot was much bigger.

This is very similar to what the women cooking were wearing except their costumes came with hats that an American or Western European would think belonged solely to witches, i.e. long and pointed. 

This is the exact outfit the dancing teenagers were wearing. 

Further down in the square a small wooden house straight out of the 17^th century was being unloaded off of a giant flatbed truck.  I love old houses and even more outdoor museums built around displaying them (there’s a great one just outside of Cardiff btw) so I asked around to see if the house had come from a museum but nobody around me understood English.  I was able to communicate enough however to be given a camera to take pictures of a group of men in early medieval light-armor who wanted to pose in front of the house with swords raised as if they were ready to go pillaging.  Past the house and the dancers were three or four dozen food stands separated into a few groups.  The first group had people cooking in traditional costumes on small tripods or directly in crock pots on fires and amazingly they managed to keep up with the long lines of customers.  In the second group of food stands there were one or two people cooking using traditional methods for display purposes while people behind them cooked the same food on modern gas grills or in small stoves.  The third group were farmers in modern clothing who had come from the small towns around Vilnius with prepared food; especially bake-goods and sweets.  The contrast between the different vendors led to an interesting dynamic.  In Lithuania there is a huge urban/rural split between those that live in the big towns and cities and those who live in the villages and hamlets (yes it’s an old word that makes you think of Lord of the Rings but these settlements are far too small to be called villages, at least by an American like myself).  Although TV and radio have eliminated it somewhat, locals can instantly tell someone who grew up in a village or hamlet from someone who grew up in a larger city or town and with more rural people even a foreigner like myself can pick up on the difference without understanding a word of the language.  So even though many of the people cooking were wearing clothes straight out of the 17^th century and their farmer counterparts were dressed in modern clothing, the people in modern clothing still appeared more out of place to me than those who clothing-wise could have stepped out of the renaissance because they were clearly out of their element.  Although the rural/urban split is nowhere as great in America as in Lithuania (which has programs designed to help people from rural backgrounds like affirmative action for minorities in America and where politicians bemoan the plight of “wayward rural youth”), I had experienced the same phenomenon in America at the Pennsylvania state fair where I could spot the rural people not used to the hustle and bustle of a large crowd and fast transactions because the pace of things put them at ill ease. 

    

Since I was starving I looked around to buy some food.  There were lots of hot meals being cooked but I wasn’t entirely sure what everything was and after suffering from severe food poisoning the first time around in Vilnius in 2008 I was very wary of buying food prepared on the street using medieval cooking methods.  I bought something halfway between a calzone and a Welsh meat pie expecting it to have meat inside but I opened it up to find that it had nothing but eggplant.  As I’m allergic to eggplants (and nothing but eggplants for that matter) I tried to give it back to them since I hadn’t eaten it yet but that just kind of got me yelled at so I took the eggplant calzone/meat pie thing with me and headed over to see what the rural farmers were selling.  I was also motivated to put some space between myself and that section of the food area since nearly every person in the immediate vicinity was staring at me like I was a complete moron and an eyesore to boot.  I ended up going through the farmer’s stands and noticing that nearly every table was made up of things that weren’t a meal, at least not in the traditional sense.  There were lots of pickles, pickled onions, jams, marmalades, sauces, produce, a few decapitated birds on ice with their feathers intact and lots and lots of types of bread.  The basic Lithuanian bread is known as ruginė duona and is a variety of rye-bread made with sourdough.  There’s a variant of it that is made like a cake and which for reasons I don’t understand is more filling gram per gram than just about anything (it expands in your stomach like tamales).  

 Ruginė duona: Lithuanian rye-bread, half a loaf will keep you full for two days.

  

As I had been looking forward to this exact type of bread ever since I had decided on a whim to go to Lithuania again I decided to buy a roll.  As happened with the taxi I tried to pay with about five times as much money as was necessary.  After buying it and being charged the equivalent of eighty cents I came to the conclusion that food must be significantly more expensive in Vilnius than in the small towns surrounding it and that I was being charged the rural rate.  Sure enough, when I bought a comparable loaf of bread in a store in the old town of Vilnius three days later I was charged exactly three times as much.   

Since it was pouring and the wind was starting to blow the rain sideways into my shivering eyes I looked for a ledge to hide under where I could still listen to the music.  But I was just too cold and too tired to want to listen to traditional music so I went back to the hotel that I had been kicked out of only an hour earlier. When I got to the hotel I found that there was nobody there to buzz me in the front door and so shivering and cursing under my breath in three languages I went in search of an internet cafe which I remembered from my time studying at the Yiddish Institute.   After a 20 minute walk through Old Town Vilnius in which my umbrella blew away from me twice and my eyes wouldn’t stop shaking (do eyes shiver or shake?) I found my way to the internet café where I was greeted by a bilingual sign whose English portion read “closed for culture-fair.”  Now I rarely lose my patience, especially in situations where losing your patience will just get you into more trouble, but I had hit rock bottom and felt like whacking my umbrella against a tree and cursing the day I decided to come back to Lithuania.  Once I got over my anger (without letting on an outward sign of my frustration) and realized that damaging my umbrella was a bad idea since it was raining so hard I thought I might drown without it, I headed a block over to a bar where Vilnius’s youngest native Yiddish speaker used to work and the food was consistently decent.  There was no sign of the waiter a year or two younger than me who speaks Sabesdike Losn (a rare Yiddish dialect with no “sh” sound that was spoken in parts of Lithuania and Latvia) but as it was the touristy old town area the waiter who served me spoke English so I got to warm up and eat the Lithuanian equivalent of zeppelins.  The bartender also recommended another internet cafe to me.   

Lithuania is one of two countries in Europe where cell-phones by law have to be unlocked, meaning that you can buy a sim-card and pay by the minute.  Since my father had bought a phone in the Netherlands (the other country where cell-phones are unlocked) and given it to me I had a cell phone with me with no reception that needed a sim-card.  So I went to the internet café, emailed my Lithuanian friends and family and went in search of a sim-card.  Now Lithuania, telephones and I have a nasty history (in short, I once accidently bought a whole phone instead of just a phone-card at a cost of 120 dollars and the phone never worked) so I decided that even if I thought I knew what I was doing I wasn’t going to buy a sim-card from anyone unless their English was very good.  That way I’d be sure that they’d be selling me a sim-card that would work and not a cellphone that took sim-cards.  Unfortunately, the three or four places I found that sold sim-cards had workers who spoke little or no English and although one woman took my cellphone, put in the sim-card and starting clapping (again, what is with clapping in Lithuania?) I was too nervous to actually buy the sim-card since I didn’t know if it would work and no amount of miming could communicate that I wanted her to write down the price.  So I headed back to the internet café, saw an email from a friend to meet her at a “lindy hop demonstration” at the courtyard that used to belong to the Vilna Gaon’s Yeshiva at 8PM.  As I had no working cell phone I’d just have to find her. It was about 4PM. I walked the half hour back to the hotel (where one of the two boys from the “culture-fire” incident buzzed me in), got my key (they don’t hand out keys in much of Europe, you get them at the desk each time) and conked out, hoping to wake up before 7PM.  

I woke up to what I thought was the unmistakable crackling of high-caliber gunfire right outside my window and immediately did what any sane person would do and crawled under my bed and crawled into a ball.  After about two long minutes of what I still thought was steady gunfire without any screaming, sirens or sounds of movement I decided to peek out my window once the crackling ceased.  Dressing while carefully making sure none of my body was exposed to any possible shooters outside the window I stuck out a shaving mirror past the window so I could see what was happening in the courtyard below by its reflection (better to have an arm shot off than a head I figured, I got that idea from 24) and saw the two boys whose mother ran the hotel getting ready to light up a line of old-fashioned Chinese firecrackers.  I stuck my head outside, looked at them and was instructed by pantomime to cover my ears which were soon greeted again by the crackling of what sounded just like .48 handguns going off.  My Lord, I thought, I’ve checked into a lunatic asylum!  I checked the time (6:45, the kids at least did Chinese New Years at a convenient time for me) and decided to take a bath.  The bath nearly killed me (more on that in a later entry) and resulted in a large amount of gas filling the room, my having to breath into a paper bag for nearly 20 minutes and the hotel owner screaming at me in something that was attempting to be English but was nearly incomprehensible, except for the salient detail “Jew (you) d’nearly make da whole place go boom.”  And I had thought the gas-valves built into the bathtub were there to make bubbles in the water like in a hot tub!   Once the hotel-owner calmed down and assured me that she wouldn’t “make me leave only ‘cause you’re a moron” because “we have not big guests’ number tonight” (whether they would have kicked me out for being a moron if they could have gotten another patron remains a mystery) she handed me a brochure in English for a “Night of Culture.”  The “Night of Culture” was scheduled to last throughout the whole night and was supposed to have close to three hundred different events.  Unlike the morning’s events nearly all of the night’s events were to highlight contemporary culture and were to feature non-Lithuanian culture.  There were to be lots of German bands playing rock music in English (seriously like five), Lithuanian bands playing jazz, Lithuanians playing Greek music, Greeks playing Bavarian music, Bavarians singing in French, dancing demonstrations of everything but traditional Lithuanian dancing (the aforementioned Lindy-hopping, Swing, hip-hop, waltzes etc) and lots of museums and galleries open late into the night not charging the usual admittance.  It all seemed great but where was the contemporary Lithuanian culture?  There was none to be found.  While it seems that Lithuanians (or at least some Lithuanians) love to dress up in traditional folk-costumes, dance and cook using medieval technology and the government likes to show it off, there was shockingly little emphasis being placed on contemporary Lithuanian culture.  

I wasn’t in the mood to contemplate the socio-cultural implications of the evening’s programs however for I was still coughing from nearly “making the hotel go boom” and it was pouring again.  I made it over to where the Lindyhopping would begin and realized that in the cold rain and fog with little light that every fifth or sixth young Lithuanian woman looked like my friend and without a cellphone I’d probably never find her.  So as I waited for the Lindyhopping demonstration to start I stood in the middle of the main road that weaves through the Old Town (which had been shut for the festival) and walked up to any Lithuanian woman who vaguely resembled my friend from a distance and in the process creeped an unfortunately high number of them out.  At about 8:15 I decided to give up the search and went back to what had been the Vilna Gaon’s courtyard.  Instead of a group of Lithuanians Lindyhopping I saw a few people swing-dancing and about a dozen foreign tourists watching them while shivering in a huddled convulsing mass.  I saw one of the festival volunteers wearing a specially designated uniform with a patch that indicated that he spoke English and asked where the Lindyhopping was.  He told me that they were running late and had switched with the swing dancers who were supposed to do their “demonstration” at 10.  Since it was still pouring I went to the nearest event indoors which turned out to be a free night at the National Art Gallery and pushed my way into a large foyer where half of an orchestra was playing something as solemn as the weather.  The little National Gallery had several thousand people packed into it and we had to walk by too quickly to actually see much of the art but none of it was particularly impressive or interesting, leaving me with the sad impression that the Philadelphia Art Museum has more famous art on one floor than the entire Lithuanian National Gallery. 

While Lithuanians dress incredibly fancily by American standards, the rain had caused many of the outfits to fall apart and the more expensive the outfit looked the more it seemed to be falling apart.  This was especially true of some women who had made the unfortunate decision to wear those absurd British felt hats that have feathers coming out every which way and on a good day do nothing to keep out the sun or keep one warm.  On a bad day like that rainy evening however, the dye from the felts was running down the hat off the brim and onto their faces.  Together with the feathers it looked as if they had had a goose perched on their heads that had been blown apart by a shotgun blast, leaving just a few feathers and some tears of blood behind.  Even with how stupid the outfits made the women look (the men were just wearing soaked suits) I still felt miserably underdressed and considered fleeing until I entered another antechamber of a gallery and saw a large group of (working class?) teenagers.  They were clothed in a (poor) imitation of American hip hop attire and were posing in front of large paintings as a girl amongst their number took their picture on her cell phone while occasionally taking swigs from a large bottle of vodka and bursting into fits of hyena-like laughter. Before I could register what was going on I was handed a camera by the youngest boy in the group who was then lifted onto another’s shoulders and hoisted onto a chandelier from which he began swinging.  I must have said something in English for a girl barked at me in an unmistakable Cockney accent (yet another Lithuanian expat?) to “take a picture mate” and right as the camera flashed two security guards burst in and began shrieking in Lithuanian.  I threw the camera back to the girl as the entire crew (some dozen teenagers none older than 15) fled except for the poor young lad who remained suspended swinging from the chandelier.  

“Crap,” I thought “I’m going to get arrested for damaging the Lithuanian National Art Gallery.  I’ll be lucky if I don’t spend the night in jail.”  The two guards took the boy down from the chandelier and put the two of us together against a wall between two large oil paintings.  I heard myself muttering under my breath in broken Lithuanian that I didn’t understand what was being said and that I was an American tourist (so it probably came out as something like “I no understand, me tourist America”).  The bigger of the two guards looked at me, laughed and said in English “I haven’t said a word yet. Shut up!”  He then spent about five minutes talking to the kid who had been swinging from the chandelier and to my utter amazement let him go.  They then asked me what I had seen, believed me when I said that I had done nothing but taken a picture for the wayward youths and told me that the kid was lucky the chandelier had held his weight because if it had broken they would have needed to arrest him.  And then to make matters even weirder they thanked me for having visited Lithuania and asked me what I thought of the museum.  What in the world?  I told them that the boy swinging from the chandelier accompanied by drunken teenagers was a fine example of modern performance art and a profound social commentary on the effects of the economic crisis on Lithuania’s youth but the comment went way over their heads and they left me with polite handshakes and confused stares.  

Back outside the rain had finally let up and I found myself in the museum’s courtyard watching a slideshow of modern riffs on traditional Japanese art.  I got the vague feeling that the exhibit symbolized some aspect of the atomic bombings of WW2 but couldn’t quite put my finger on it and decided to see the Lindyhoping demonstration.  Where there had been maybe a dozen people in what was the Vilna Gaon’s square there were now nearly a hundred and I watched in amazement as they all learned Lindyhop dancing (some had clearly done it before) and danced as a group.  It was absurd and on some visceral level disturbing to me.  Here I came to Lithuania to learn something about Lithuanian culture and find the hip young Lithuanians reviving a jazz dance that has been completely abandoned and forgotten in America.  And on top of it they were Lindyhoping away where, unbeknownst to them, the most famous synagogue in all of Lithuania (in the wider Yiddish sense of “Lite” and not the modern country) stood.  Sure, Lithuanian Misnagdim never danced like Hasidim do but certainly anything that would have been going on in that courtyard before WW2 was a lot more culturally authentic to the area than a dance movement that started in Harlem.  Depressed with the whole thing, I looked at my schedule of hundreds of events and saw that at most three had anything to do with what could be termed “Lithuanian culture.”  The Lithuanian cultural events had all taken place during the day and had attracted a very different crowd than those who came out for the “Night of Culture.”  But more disheartening was the fact that not a single event out of hundreds had any connection to Jewish or Polish culture, the two ethnicities that dominated the city for the 19^th and first half of the 20^th centuries.  There were specifically Armenian, Turkish, Canadian, German and even Frisian “demonstrations” but no sign of anything local.  And in a way this just confirmed what I already knew, that doing (performing) culture today for most Europeans is a matter of exploring cultures besides one’s own in superficial ways to get a smorgasbord of different cultures into a short time frame, in this case a single rushed twelve hour night of culture.  But standing there trying to hear ghosts praying in Lithuanian Hebrew over the din of revival-swing music I felt that this wasn’t “culture” in any traditional sense but the creation of a new post-post modern way of superficial cultural tourism without any travel.  Or perhaps it was not the embracing of a culture but the creation of a new post-ethnic culture based on combining random elements of other cultures and brewing them into something new.  I didn’t have an answer and ultimately I didn’t care.  I was disappointed with the whole thing and the rain’s return was just the extra bit of convincing I needed to return to the hotel that in my head I had begun calling the “Mishegoyem hoyz” (the lunatic asylum).