Thrown Peas

An Israel-Iran War. One Extraordinarily Bad Idea.

2012-02-05T03:14:00.011-05:00

"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.

2012-01-22T20:08:00.032-05:00

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

2011-12-04T23:41:00.009-05:00

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

2011-11-04T00:00:00.009-04:00

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).

Lithuania Redux 3: The Saddest of All Beggars OR a Case for Saint Jude

2011-09-19T23:23:00.004-04:00

So what’s changed in Vilnius during the past two years? Well the best way I can describe it is that if Vilnius, and Lithuania as a whole were a person it’s kind of like someone hit her over the head with a baseball bat and didn’t let her clean herself up afterwards. This of course is true of the USA as well, but the global financial meltdown seems to have taken a particularly dramatic toll and you can see it on the faces of the people and you wonder at it as you realize that there are five times as many beggars in Vilnius than there were just two years ago. My second time in Lithuania there was a brutal raw desperation to some of the beggars that just wasn’t here two years ago, a type of desperation I had only ever seen before during one scary trip with my parents to the outskirts of Tijuana when I was nine or ten years old. It’s the type of desperation that stems only from being convinced that starvation is around the corner. Although there were several dozen sad cases worthy of Saint Jude, the saddest of them all was undoubtedly a man with an open infected wound on the top of his forearm that went down to the bone. The first time I encountered him just through the entrance of the gates of dawn he used his arm as a barrier to block further movement. He’d simply put up his arm and people in all directions would instinctively back away and the unlucky ones would end up pinned between the bone sticking out of his arm and a wall. There was something so disturbed, so unmistakably medieval about it that every time I approached him I had a guttural reaction to put as much space between him and myself as humanely possible.

Photo of the "Gates of Dawn" where this incident occurred. Credit Joe.Sau flickr.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no sissy. In fact I’m just the opposite. I’ve seen some really horrible stuff in person without turning away or flinching; from strokes, fatal heart attacks, to a waterlogged/bloated corpse to a mutilated (but not bloated) boy’s corpse and most relevant to this incident a really horrible compound fracture of a friend’s femur that took some of his thigh-muscle along for a ride. In all of the cases I got really upset an hour or two after the adrenaline wore off. Which is to say that I’m no fan of gore or suffering but it’s not like I haven’t seen some horrible things the average person in a first world country hasn’t. Because I have. That combined with unbelievably horrible things I’ve seen on film and in photos for Holocaust related research in archives (much worse than you’ve seen on TV or Youtube) means that this beggar was on the surface hardly the worst thing I had ever seen. But there was something so perverse about both the man’s arm and his situation that it has caused me to lose sleep ever since. It took me a while to figure out what it was that has stuck with me so much but ultimately I’ve come to realize that it was his calmness.

Let’s start clinically: he had an open infected wound that was about 3 inches long, with about 2 inches of bone fully exposed. The skin surrounding the bone was black, dead, and gangrenous, resembling more charcoal than skin. The visible bone itself was completely white, devoid of any surrounding blood or tissue (G-d forbid you ever see a compound fracture up close you’ll see that there’s lots of stuff that is fastened to the bone and as the bone breaks the skin tissue stays attached to it, in his case it looked as if bacteria had eaten away all of the skin and ligaments over a period of days). But the thing that was most upsetting about it was that the man seemed totally there mentally and he was extremely calm. After trapping people and exacting money he spoke to the people he had caught as I stood a short distance away. He was Polish; or at least an ethnic Pole and spoke to the crowds in Polish, Lithuanian or Russian and sometimes all three. It wasn’t until the third day that I heard him speaking to someone in German and therefore realized that I would be able to communicate with him myself. As you’d expect what he had to say was absolutely devastating.

He was in his sixties and recently a widower. He was sawing something when he cut his arm and although he went to the hospital an infection had set in, followed by gangrene. Unable to work he couldn’t pay his rent (he was already behind due to his wife’s funeral) and was evicted from his apartment. He had no relatives and the homeless shelters refused him because they (rightfully) felt that he was a health risk to everyone near him and that he ought to have been in a hospital. The hospitals for their part, for reasons I have either forgotten or never understood due to my poor German, wouldn’t take him and the man related to me that he “honestly feared” that he was going to die from the infection. Looking at it, and knowing that his bone had been exposed to the elements for weeks I was honestly surprised that he wasn’t far more ill than he appeared, let alone dead. And I told him my assessment. As we were having this conversation a horrified-looking German man in his late twenties asked him why he wasn’t in a hospital, about insurance, about how much a hospital stay would cost him etc. I started to leave and our hopeless case called out to me “sir, aren’t you going to give me any money?” “Money” I said “money! You don’t need money you need medicine and a hospital bed!” He looked at me sadly and said “what I need sir is Saint Jude but money won’t hurt!” I saw him the next day but not the day after that. By complete chance I ran into the German man in a bar and found out that he, along with colleagues on a business trip, had paid the equivalent of three hundred Euros to get the man into a health clinic. I gave him about fifty Euros to reimburse him for the part I felt I should have paid and bought him a beer. I never heard from the Polish beggar with gangrene after that.

Lithuania Redux 2: Or Jordan Tries To Pay More Attention To The Lithuanians The Second Time Around.

2011-09-15T23:35:00.005-04:00

I went to study Yiddish in Vilnius Lithuania in July/August of 2008. Being there was a lot more difficult for me emotionally than I had expected and partially as a result I spent much of the time behind the lens of my camera filming so that I wouldn’t have to process as much information or interact with people during tours. The good aspect of this is that I ended up with ten hours of tapes of tours of Jewish and Holocaust related sites in Lithuania which are now on Youtube in their entirety in Yiddish with English subtitles, leaving an invaluable (albeit poorly shot) record not just of my trip but of Lithuanian Jewish culture. The bad aspect of this is that I spent far more time on my first trip living in Vilna and not in Vilnius and as such missed a great deal of Lithuania itself. For what I mean by that last sentence, as well as some background information on this city, I’m going to turn this entry over for a bit to excerpts from a letter I wrote to my parents and a couple of friends the first time I went there:

In some ways right now I’m beginning to live and study in two places simultaneously: Vilnius in 2008, the fascinating Lithuanian capital and next year’s European Capital of Culture and Vilna, the once second city of Poland and sometimes Lithuanian capital and one of the cultural capitals of vanished (ahem, murdered) Yiddish speaking Europe. Although Vilnius and Vilna were located on the same ground and share many of the same buildings and streets, they are really different places in more ways than a name (Vilna is Yiddish, Wilno is Polish, Vilnius is Lithuanian). Vilnius/Vilna in all of its reincarnations was and still is located in Eastern Europe, in the area that is now called the Baltics. If you look at a map of the Baltic countries today (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania respectively from north to south), you’ll find that they are the three small countries to the south of Finland (across the Baltic Sea). They are to the northeast of the comparatively larger Poland, and to the west of Belarus and most of Russia. (Strangely enough, just to confuse us, there is a small piece of Russia that is squeezed onto the western half of Lithuania and eastern half of Northern Poland against the ocean that is detached by hundreds of miles from the rest of the country. Although Russia looms very large to the east of here, this detached chunk of Russia is the only part of it that actually borders Lithuania.)

The city of Vilnius, whatever it has been called and whoever has called it home, has existed since the 14^th century, if not earlier. The city has been shuttle-cocked alternately between Poland (or better yet several different kingdoms and republics of Polish speaking people), Russia, Lithuania (like Poland in several different reincarnations) and a Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth over the centuries. The city even managed to change hands seven times during the years of WW1. Throughout the past 500 years the city has been home to various combinations of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians, Jews and Roma. While the leadership and main ethnicities/languages of the city have varied, Yiddish speaking Jews were a constant presence for nearly five centuries until during the years of 1941-1944 when they were systematically murdered during the events that have come to be known as the Holocaust in English, H’shoah in Hebrew and Khurbn in Yiddish itself.

Yerushalim d’lite:

When Napoleon came to Vilnius, he was so impressed with the local Jewish community that he declared it the “Yerushalim d’lite” (French: Jerusalem of Lithuania). The name has stuck in Yiddish ever since. Vilna (the city is always called Vilna in Yiddish), was one of the great centers of Jewish civilization; both religious and secular, right alongside biblical Jerusalem, post-biblical Babylon, and Muslim Spain during the golden era. Yiddish Vilna was a center of religious scholarship and the center of a brilliant modern secular culture, and by the 1930s was arguably the most important Jewish city in the world (Warsaw and Thessalonica were the only rivals). In the 18^th century one of the Diaspora’s greatest minds, the Vilner Goan, held court and helped solidify the power of Misnagic Jewry in Lithuania. Interwar Vilna boasted a half dozen daily Yiddish papers, schools, universities, and criminal courts where Yiddish was the sole language of instruction/arbitration, not to mention some of the world’s most prestigious Yeshivas. Vilna was also home to the YIVO institute, which between the two world wars served as the address of scholarship on the history of Eastern European Jews, as well as the Académie française of the Yiddish language. Vilna, along with Warsaw and Lodz was also the home of much Yiddish political culture and the birthplace of the Bund. But all of that is gone. Today is a very different world. The Vilna described in thousands of Yiddish books is no more and will never again be…………

……..So, this society, which I call Yiddishland in English and “oyf der yidisher gas” (on the Jewish street) or “Yidishkayt” (Jewishness) in Yiddish, and not the Holocaust, is what I came here to learn about. In short I came to Vilnius to learn about the Jewish civilization that thrived here for centuries and to improve my knowledge of its language, not just because of an academic interest but because it is the culture whose remnants I grew up among. I grew up hearing Yiddish and singing songs that were written on the very streets that I am now exploring. I read some of the same books (albeit in English translation) that were written here and were bestsellers. I had neighbors, family friends and relatives who grew up in Yiddishland before the war (and I still know people who did) and learned Yiddish songs on their laps. So I decided to come here to learn about this stateless culture that thrived here and whose language I now consider my own from some of the people who grew up in it, in their own language, on the ground in which it thrived for centuries, before they are lost to time.

In addition to meeting with as many survivors as possible and hearing lectures and tours from them, I will be spending the vast majority of my time learning the Yiddish language at an advanced level and reading its literature not only in the original but also taught and explained in Yiddish. What I learn here, from the place, from the language, from the literature, and most importantly from the people, I am not just learning for academic development or “personal enrichment”. If I have my way it will be the language that my (future) children grow up speaking and it will be their culture too. I come here to learn what I can so I can pass it on to them.

So that’s some of the background on how I ended up in Vilnius the first time around. I completed most of my goals; I met and got to talk to people who had grown up in the Jewish community before the Holocaust, I got to see many of the places I had heard about as a child, vastly improved my Yiddish and made a half dozen friends I’m still in touch with. So as Americans like to say “mission accomplished.” Been there done that right? Well, last summer Vilnius to me still wasn’t a matter of “been there, done that,” among many things I had left out some details in my films and needed to speak to a few people there and corroborate details. I also had other business to attend to on behalf of a friend that I’m not even going to begin to get into but could only be done in Lithuania, if at all. Plus, two Vilnius residents I knew had heard that I was in Spain and said that they had wanted to see me. So without enough forethought I decided to hop on a plane and go.

Traveling from Valencia to Vilnius is no easy trip. You have to first get to the Ryanair airport advertised as Barcelona which is really in Girona (six hours from Valencia by bus/train at best) and then fly to Kaunas and from Kaunas find a way to Vilnius and of course because this is Ryanair you have to leave Barcelona at 3am which means you need to leave Valencia the day before and have a hotel room in Barcelona that you only actually sleep in for a few hours. Still it’s certainly a much easier trip than making it from Philadelphia or anywhere else on the other side of the Atlantic for that matter. So in short, I had a few reasons to delay my return to the US and travel to Vilnius this past June (2010). But as it turned out two of the people who said they’d be in Lithuania were doing things abroad, one person I stupidly assumed would be there wasn’t and the “business” I alluded to completely fell through, leaving me with a lot more time to kill than I had planned for or knew what to do with. I soon decided to fill it by trying to spend my time in Vilnius and not Vilna the second time around, by “paying more attention to the Lithuanians the second time around” as I titled an email home. And in the end this was the only thing that went well during the course of my trip.

So what’s Vilnius itself like today? Well, the best description I can give comes again from that 6,000 word letter I wrote to my parents and friends in 2008. Here are some excerpts:

You asked me about Vilnius today. Well it’s not the city I grew up hearing about in old folksongs, in Chaim Grade’s novels or from survivors. As I mentioned yesterday Jewish Vilna and Lithuanian Vilnius are two different places located on the same ground. Despite that, (and not in any way holding that against it) Vilnius is a very interesting place. In fact, to be honest, Vilnius is far more interesting than I had expected.

Walking around Vilnius you can feel that it was built up in sections at different times by different people. A river separates the old city (with the University) from the new city. The new city is very Soviet in every sense of the word. There are more Soviet apartment blocks than residential neighborhoods, large patches of green earth are splotched along the ground between the buildings as if a dinosaur was allowed to run loose and leave footprints behind. The colors are dreary like they have been splashed on in titanium grays. Children play with balls between the big buildings, teenagers watch them and drink vodka out of large bottles. These are the outskirts of Vilnius. While in America the poor in cities are packed into neighborhoods of endless row homes that bake on summer nights close to the city centers, in Eastern Europe the poor live on the edges of the cities in a maze of giant soviet era apartment buildings with no neighborhood of which to speak. Because the buildings are self-contained units, there is little to no interaction at street level. The stores are far removed from where people live, more cars drive away than towards the buildings. The graffiti seems so permanent as to be part of the original building designs.

The second half of the “new city” on the opposite side of the river from the old city doesn’t feel particularly Soviet but more like an American east coast city’s downtime. There are a lot of high-rises and skyscrapers and long avenues with stores. Trackless trolleys and the occasional bus ferry people along in a spider web of routes. The buildings, at least at ground level, seem entirely commercial although some may double as apartment complexes, I can’t tell due to the language barrier. There a lot of trees placed around this part of the city, more than you’d see in a typical American city. But the key word is “placed”, they don’t seem to belong, they seem just as manmade and out of place (albeit much more organic) as the buildings themselves. This part of the city is known by the locals (and the guidebooks) to have different neighborhoods, types of stores and styles (unlike the more Soviet section which is much more uniform), although the differences are not perceivable to a foreigner on a short trolley ride.

The third section of the city is what the tourists, students, diplomats and wealthier Lithuanians are supposed to see. It’s known as the “old city” (what I’ll term “old city proper” is actually a much smaller subsection of the old city that I’ll talk about later) and as I’ve already mentioned it is separated by river from the “new city.” In a bizarre attempt to reduce the tension between the two sides of the river, the local authorities have painted giant words on both sides of the river. One set says “I love you” and the other says “I love you too.”

The old city is divided into several different residential and commercial districts. The University itself is on the edge of “old city proper”, a series of stunning centuries old buildings, all freshly painted, with a maze of alleyways and roads closed to traffic (or with limited traffic) where tourists congregate and stores and restaurants cater to them. Music from street musicians wafts through the air, polite multilingual beggars beg and sell trinkets and tchochkes, there are dozens of beautiful cafes that extend out along the main street. Most of the buildings double as both stores and high-end apartments. Many of the buildings seem built to look deceptively small from the outside, upon entering you discover that they seem to go on and on and on (they extend far further back than in the states). These are the most beautiful traditional European buildings I’ve ever seen in Europe except for perhaps in Prague and among the nicest to have survived the two World Wars. (The only thing I’ve ever seen like it outside of Europe is Quebec City, which having been undisturbed during WW2 is much more traditional architecturally than most of Europe).

(My photo 2010, part of “Old City Proper”)

In between “old city proper” and the more residential areas of the old city is downtown, filled with commercial districts and main avenues, it looks and feels like a nicer version of most American cities. The center of downtown features a large square that borders city hall. Bars and nightclubs comfortably share territory with banks, museums, hotels, bookstores, cafes and residential apartment buildings. On the edge of “old city proper” and downtown is the section of the university where the Yiddish Institute is housed. My classroom overlooks the presidential palace, where the president works (but does not live). Unlike the White House in America or the Prime Minister’s Residence on Downing Street in England, you can actually walk right up to the presidential palace, touch it and take a picture (in the US you’d have 50 bullets in you before you got within two or three blocks of the Whitehouse today). Walking to class across the steps of the presidential palace does not seem to raise the least bit of alarm. The palace, as the name implies, is actually a palace and not a house like its American or British counterpart. There is a guard unit but like the guards at Buckingham palace they seem to be there much more for the tourists’ cameras than for actual security. A block away is another large white stone building which is the defense ministry.

(My photo of the Cathedral, 2010).

(My photo of the Cathedral up close 2008).

Three blocks away, the boundary between “old city proper” and downtown is composed of the main cathedral and its adjoining square. The cathedral is a centuries old architectural marvel that is one of the most famous in Europe because of its architecture. The square, however, is more famous as the symbolic center of post independence Lithuania due to its role in the independence movement of the late 80s and early 90s and for it being often credited as the starting point of the international movement that brought down the Soviet Union. In the late 80s, the first Lithuanian human chain started on a single cement square outside of the cathedral and traveled up the country for hundreds of miles. After the event (and the enormous publicity it attracted), human chains were attempted throughout Eastern Europe. About (or perhaps exactly) a year later a single human chain that stretched the entire length of the Baltics again brought world attention to the plight of the local populace under Soviet rule. The small square yard sized chunk of stone where the last person in both lines stood is marked and is treated by both locals and tourists from throughout the world as holy ground, perhaps even more so than the famous Cathedral itself. There is a local superstition that if one walks around the marked stone three times, whatever they wish will come true. I did this and wished for world peace…. I’m not holding my breath.

(Part of Vilnius University, photo I took in 2008).

Lithuania Redux 1: The Little Spaniard

2011-09-13T00:21:00.010-04:00

In a way my trip to Lithuania began in the small Ryanair terminal in Girona. Ryanair, which is basically the Megabus of airlines, has its own peculiar super-informal culture that both the airline’s corporate structure and its loyal customers have created. As the tickets are often between 30 and 70 Euros for flights across the European continent the Irish budget carrier has become an essential part of both the tourist and ex-pat experiences. Since not many tourists go to Lithuania and few of those who do would take Ryanair from Spain in the middle of the night I found myself among a crowd of Lithuanian expats who lived in Spain and were going home to see family.

Expat communities are fascinating. Until recently expats formed their own cultures that bridged their “home” culture and the culture of their adopted country without realizing their own culture or outlook on life had been altered. Before the era of the internet and dirt-cheap travel expats were often stuck in a cultural vacuum, cut off from cultural changes in their homeland so that their “home” culture remained preserved like a fossilized specimen and combined with their new country’s culture. Now with instant communication and constant travel people remain abreast of changes in their homeland much more easily and as a result can maintain their home-culture alongside (and separate from) their adopted country’s culture in a way that was not possible for earlier generations of ex-pats.

All of this was on my mind as I waited at the Ryanair counter fretting over whether my backpack would be light enough so as not to incur an extra fee. Two of my Lithuanian friends are into studying expat-communities in general and the Lithuanian expat communities in particular. From them I learned that the vast majority of Lithuanian expats live in Britain but that there is a sizable community in Spain. I had already encountered several Lithuanians who spoke Spanish but no English in 2008 so I knew that it was always worthwhile to ask someone in Lithuania who didn’t speak English if they understood Spanish if I needed to communicate something to someone. But being in the airport and seeing 150 or so Lithuanians in one spot chatting away in their melodious language complete with their inscrutable and thoroughly un-Spanish mannerisms was stunning (and besides you can go months without running into someone who looks like they could be from the Baltics in Spain or at least that was the case where I lived in Valencia). The conversations and arguments over the overweight bag-charges in Spanish (and once even in Catalan, albeit with an adorable Lithuanian accent) were the only thing to remind me that I wasn’t in a shopping mall in Vilnius but was actually still in Spain.

Right as I got to the front of the line I heard a young boy with a working class Madrilenian accent arguing with an exasperated woman at bag-checking over an extra two kilos. He and his mother refused to let the airline officials put the extra-charge sticker on the bag and actually went so far as to roll/throw the bag back and forth between them so that the workers couldn’t get the sticker on. As I was on the scale next to them and the scale’s weight display was easily visible, the boy quickly realized that my bag was exactly two kilos underweight, ran behind me, opened my bag, put in some children’s books and an alarm clock and instructed me to put my bag back on my scale. I, his mother and the two women at the scales were all seemingly hypnotized by this strange act he was putting on and waited for his further instructions.

“Now, here’s how it’s gonna’ work” he said. “This Russian gentlemen here” (pointing to me) “has agreed to take my extra kilos in exchange for a story to be told on the plane. Now since both our bags are at the correct weight you can’t charge me.”

The two scale-operators looked at each other and burst out laughing. The boy thought he had won until one of them made a gesture to him that is usually reserved for a naughty dog and said “you can’t do that, that’s ridiculous.”

The boy’s mother looked at the woman and said: “Come on Ma’am, what’s the difference?”

The woman turned to me and said, “won’t you please hand this miscreant child back his books and his clock?”

I didn’t like her tone so I looked at her with as much seriousness and gravity as I could muster and said “the only alarm-clock I have on me is my own and I packed those children’s books yesterday.” The woman looked like she was about to either explode or turn into a shrew and turned to her colleague who was desperately trying to swallow her laughter.

“Get these ignoramuses to put their items in the correct bags or I’ll fine them both.”

“I don’t see nothin’ wrong.” Her coworker responded.

“Ah hell, didn’t you just see this boy open this man’s bag and stick in his clock and those books?”

“No,” the second baggage handler answered coolly, “I didn’t see nothin’ like that.”

The first baggage handler looked at us with this weird face that was trying to smile but was being ordered not to so that it appeared that she was choking on a fur ball and said “oh, hell, just go before I change my mind.” And so before I knew it we were both on our plane without having paid the extra fee for our bags. And that’s how I met the Little Spaniard.

Sure enough as promised, as soon as the three of us sat down on the plane the boy began his “payment” in the form of a story. He began talking in a hilarious monologue about his whole life story starting with his immigration to Spain at four and ending with his tenth birthday and a pantomime imitation of drunken goats. His monologue went on for a good twenty minutes during which time his mother occasionally peered over his head and shot me a quintessentially Lithuanian gesture that seemed to say “do you still want to listen to this? You don’t have to you know?”

The boy’s life story wasn’t particularly interesting or surprising but his enthusiasm for telling it was absolutely enthralling. After moving to Madrid he recalled refusing to speak or even try to understand Spanish which got him put in a special class for what he termed “mutes.” He didn’t like the class so he just ignored everyone and everything. This went on for several months. Then one day he got into a fight with someone during recess and when the teachers demanded an explanation and threatened to discipline him, before he even realized what he was doing he broke his silence to explain how the boys on the playground kept calling him “blondie” (rubito) and “mute buffoon” (payaso mudo) until they finally surrounded him from all sides and demanded that he speak. Then a large Arab boy decked him and the little Spaniard kicked him back. As he told the story the large Arab boy was watching him snitch on him and he expected retribution from him the next day on the playground. Instead when the boy saw him again he said “so you can finally speak?” and the two became best friends.

“And now,” he told me, “Ahmed is like my brother. Here” he said, handing me a photograph of himself a year or two younger together alongside his mother and with his arm around the shoulders of a boy standing in front of a woman wearing a burqa and a tall man smoking a cigar. “But he’s an immigrant like me so we both get to travel to our parents’ countries during the summer.”

“Lithuania isn’t your country too?” I asked.

“No,” he said “Spain, is my country, I was just born in Lithuania.”

His mother chimed in: “My mother calls him ‘the Little Spaniard’ ‘cause he’s always telling her about Spain and trying to teach her Spanish.”

“So you can speak Lithuanian?” I said addressing the boy.

“Of course, my Mom only talks to me in Lithuanian unless other people are visiting our house. So I speak it well but I say things wrong sometimes.”

“Do you know anything about linguistics?” His mother asked me, staring over her son.

“Well, actually I’m kind of a linguist” I said.

“Vale, he sometimes calques (literally translates) Spanish phrases when he speaks Lithuanian and I don’t correct him enough because I can figure out what he’s getting at so when he speaks to my parents he doesn’t even realize he’s saying a purely Spanish phrase with Lithuanian words. But he understands everything and has no problem being understood if he rephrases things.”

“Did you study linguistics?” I asked.

“Just a survey course in college.”

“What do you do now for work if you don’t mind me asking?”

“She’s a nurse.” The Little Spaniard answered for her.

“At first I worked as a maid in a hotel but I had studied nursing in Lithuania so once my Spanish improved I finished my education. I worked in a nursing home, now I work with dialysis patients.”

At this point the Little Spaniard put his hand over his nose mockingly and his mother grabbed his hand telling him something in Lithuanian. He began speaking in Spanish, all the while looking at me “so what if they can’t help it, they still smell.”

“Sometimes,” his mother said “when I have to work late and there’s no one to watch him he entertains the dialysis patients, he can be very charming so he keeps the old ladies entertained. We had a blind lady, a Lithuanian who didn’t speak Spanish. Her kids worked nights and she would have had nobody to talk to for hours if he didn’t keep her company.”

“Well,” began the Little Spaniard. “Other than the smell it’s alright, especially when Ahmed comes along to talk to the old ladies in Arabic.”

“How come he comes too?” I asked.

“Because of his religion he has to help people and do charity.” The Little Spaniard said. “His parents make him volunteer with people. They would too but they work too much.”

“He says he wants to be a doctor too so it’s a good fit” his mother added. “And because it’s a clinic there isn’t always a translator around so it’s good to have him around, especially for the blind people because with them we can’t just write something into a computer and translate it so they’ll understand.”

“Diabetes?” I asked.

“Severe diabetes cases, exactly” she said.

“But the kids are so young for this?”

“Yeah, it’s unusual but the patients like it and my boss prefers him to a dog which is what some of the clinics and hospitals are doing now to keep people happy.”

Somehow shortly after this point the conversation turned to my life and my reasons for traveling to Lithuania. To be honest I had been hoping to avoid the whole thing, in part to avoid having to explain the Holocaust to the boy on the chance that he wasn’t familiar with it and in part because it was a long story and in any case I wasn’t even exactly sure why I was on a plane to Lithuania at that particular moment myself. Still, I ended up explaining that I was Jewish, that my great-grandfather was from Vilnius, that I had been there two years earlier to improve my Yiddish and interview Jews who had grown up before WW2 and I was returning to double-check information with one of my interview subjects and visit a friend. Of the perhaps five minutes or so that it took me to explain all of this the only part that the Little Spaniard seemed particularly impressed by was my mentioning of Yiddish.

“I knew there were Jews in Lithuania,” he began excitedly “especially in the cities and that they were killed in the war but I didn’t know they had their own language.”

“Yeah,” I said “and newspapers, movies and even their own schools. Just like there’s a Polish paper and Polish schools in Lithuania today you had Yiddish too.”

“And this is different than what they speak today in the Middle East?”

“Yes, Yiddish is like German while Hebrew….”

“Is like Arabic..I’ve heard it before on TV. So what you’re saying is that there’s a whole lost world written in those newspapers in a language nobody speaks anymore?”

“Basically, yes. But some people speak Yiddish still, just not that many, not like it was.”

“Have the newspapers been archived?” His mother asked.

“Yes, thankfully.” I said. “You can read them in America and Israel and some in Lithuania too but they’re hidden away in archives on microfilm.”

“What does the writing look like?” she asked. Do they use the same alphabet as Hebrew?”

“Yes, give me a second.” I said. I looked through my bag, pulled out the Little Spaniard’s books and alarm clock and found the book I was looking for underneath; my Yiddish translation of The Little Prince I had brought with me to donate to the Jewish school in Vilnius. The copy I had was printed in both the Hebrew and Latin alphabets so it worked perfectly as an example to show them what the language and the script were like.

As I showed them The Little Prince the boy called out, almost screaming “hey, that’s my favorite book, look” as he showed me one of the books which had caused the great tumult at the weighing station, one of the same books I had just handed back to him without looking at. And in his hand was a torn ragged copy of the Little Prince in Spanish which had been read and reread to smithereens. And as he began flipping through the illustrations in the Yiddish Little Prince he began reciting entire passages of the book in Spanish for my benefit.

“You’ve memorized the whole book?”

“Yes,” said his mother “strangely enough he has.”

“The order gets jumbled though so I need to use the pictures but I have each page of my copy memorized. I often skip exactly a page.”

I was stunned. Now The Little Prince is not that long of a book, perhaps 25,000 words if that and if a ten year old in Pakistan can memorize the Quran in a language he doesn’t even speak than certainly a ten year old Spaniard could memorize a text a fraction the length of the Muslim holy book in a tongue he understands. Still, who runs into someone who has done such a thing? And how does someone go about doing such a thing?

“Why did you memorize it?” I asked.

“Because it changed my life. It’s the reason that I want to be a historian.”

“A historian?” I said, not seeing any reason why The Little Prince would lead anyone into that particular field and wondering if I had ever meet someone so young who had wanted to be a historian.

“You wouldn’t rather be an accountant?” I asked. The Little Spaniard didn’t get my reference or else simply ignored my joke.

“Of course a historian, that’s what The Little Prince is. He’s the only one there to tell his history and he does it so beautifully. I’d love to be able to explain to someone why something is so important to me as his rose was important to him. And since there is no one else to tell his story, he has to be the historian. And that’s why I’ll be a historian, to tell things nobody has bothered to remember. That’s why I was so enthused with the Jewish newspapers. Who knows what may be written there that’s been forgotten and needs retelling.”

“Here,” I said handing him a third copy I had, “have you ever read this version?”

“No, I can’t read Lithuanian. I’ve never seen this before, when and why was it translated?”

I almost got sidetracked into an explanation of how The Little Prince became the third most translated book in human history (more than 200 translations, some in languages far more obscure than Yiddish) but I caught myself in the middle of the digression and returned to the more pressing matter.

“Sure you can read it. Look, you know the alphabet already and you speak the language. And I know it’s a pretty easy language to pronounce because it’s written as it’s spoken see.” And to try to prove it to him I pulled out my Lithuanian phrasebook and read a few phrases for him aloud. By his expression, however, I saw that my butchering of Lithuanian wasn’t changing his opinion.

“Look, this is what I do” I said. “I give every one of my good friends from school who grew up speaking an immigrant language in America a copy of this book in their mother tongue so that they’ll learn to read. And when I visit friends in other countries I give them copies of the book in their own language or in a language they’re studying. I’ve brought the Yiddish for the Jewish school so that maybe they’ll see it and want to learn their own language which they no longer speak. And I brought the Lithuanian one for a good friend who I gave a copy to in Hebrew when she was learning that language. But she can already read Lithuanian well, in fact she’s writes for a Lithuanian newspaper so how about I give you the book instead but you have to promise me that you’ll read it.”

And so I gave away my Lithuanian copy of The Little Prince to the Little Spaniard, in the hope that in his quest to become a historian and tell forgotten stories he would eventually see the value of becoming literate in his mother tongue in order to tell his own. Shortly thereafter the boy, whom I noticed for the first time oddly resembled the young prince of the story in Saint-Exupéry’s drawings, began reciting a page in Spanish to himself and piecing together the Lithuanian words until his murmuring in both languages seemed to combine. Shortly thereafter he fell into a deep sleep. We soon landed in Kaunas.

Brother can you spare a dime?

2010-11-25T02:37:00.001-05:00

Americans enjoy their high standard of living by waiting in a bread line (mid 1930s)

There’s an old depression era song that Al Jolson sang called “Brother can you spare a dime?” When Jolson sang the song in the 1930s a dime was worth a lot more than it’s worth today, about $1.30 in today’s money. Needless to say, today, during the great recession as the talking heads who make more money in a year than most of the people they’re talking to make in a decade are calling it, giving someone an actual dime won’t do them a bit of good. Nothing is actually sold for a dime anymore. When I was a kid the Chinese stores* would sell a single Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup for a dime. Now they’re worth 35 cents or so and get sold for 50. Even dollar stores rarely sell anything for less than a dollar anymore.

So when I was waiting for a train in New Brunswick and a young guy with a thick Brooklyn accent stuck his face up to mine and said “boss, can you give me a dime, my financial situation is real (expletive) up right now and supper* is waiting for me” I felt like I was in some kind of retro time-warp. Since I knew he couldn’t have been referencing the old depression-era song because odds are better than fifty fifty that he had never heard it, I figured he was asking me for ten bucks.*

On the surface he was making this request like he was asking his baby sister to pass him a box of cereal, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. But a look into his eyes and past his Brooklyn-street posturing revealed that he was truly desperate. So I asked him how much a dime meant to him, figuring that he didn’t really have the chutzpah (and I mean it in the real Yiddish sense of shocking gall) to ask me, a fellow university student, for ten dollars just before he planned on boarding a train he had no money to pay for.

He looked at me like he’d call me a moron or worse if he weren’t asking me for money.

“A dime’s ten boss” he half snarled half sung at me.

“Ten dollars?” I said, surprised by the incredulousness in my own voice.

He then looked at me like he’d deck me if he weren’t asking for money. So I told him that I’d see how much I had and opened my wallet (understand that I was in no way planning on actually giving him five dollars, let alone ten). And of course, as per the unbreakable axiom of Murphy’s Law, there was one bill in my wallet and it was a “dime.”

I felt some unexplainable shift of power occur in the universe and before I fully realized what I was doing the bill was in his hand and he was ten feet away barrelling towards the stairs out of the train station.

“What the –expletive—is you doin’” a black woman yelled at me, chomping on a cigarette that suddenly went out and fell to the ground.

“Well,” I said, “maybe now someone will give me ten bucks if I need it for a train.”

“Shit don’t work that way,” she said. “It should but it don’t.”

She pulled out and light another cigarette, all the while looking at me and said “he should’a come up to me, I would’a axed him where he was gonn’a get d’udder 9.90. And if he would’a thought from me, he would’a found hisself smashed up against dat train.”

We both laughed and she told me about her various woes, beginning with her being thrown out of the VA* hospital where she was visiting her husband. She had bags of food prepared for him that she learned that he wouldn’t be able to eat when she walked into his room and saw that he had tubes down his throat. In short she had come sixty miles by train to bring him a home-cooked meal just to find out he was too sick to eat it. She didn’t look too good herself; morbidly obese, unable to keep cigarettes in her mouth due to an incessant hacking cough that was interrupted by occasional wheezing. But boy was she full of life!

We talked for about ten minutes and despite describing herself as a “tough Trenton ghetto girl” seemed very sweet. As it turned out her husband’s health was just the beginning of an endless series of personal crises which she spent the whole time telling me about. I listened politely, half laughing and half crying along with her as the stories got sadder and somehow inevitably funnier due to her manner of relating them. And soon enough I realized that I had given the wrong person the “dime.” But the people who most need help are usually the last to ask for it and this tough “girl” would be about the last person to ever ask a stranger for a handout. Our conversation ended when her daughter called and soon enough I spotted our train in the distance.

And as I boarded that train I heard a young man singing “brother can you spare a dime” and could barely recognize my own voice in the cold night air.

*What the corner stores in some parts of Philly are called. The one in my neighborhood was run by Koreans. There is nothing Chinese (or Korean) about the stores except the people who own them.

*Only New Yorkers say supper to refer to the evening meal in the US. New Yorkers and especially working class whites from the Bronx and Brooklyn are also the only people I’ve ever encountered who will greet a stranger with “boss” but this may be used elsewhere. Supper though is a famous Newyorkism.

*In drug-slang a “dime” is ten, hence a “dime-bag” is ten dollars worth of a drug sold as a package.

*Veterans Administration. The VA runs hospitals that only serve army veterans. She was in her early fifties, about the right age to be married to someone who served in the later years of the Vietnam War.

World English vs American dialects: or how European intellectuals are making us all sound the same.

2010-11-14T04:05:00.005-05:00

Although I spend most of my time as an amateur linguist and as a translator working with Spanish and Yiddish, I’ve never lost my love of my native tongue; English. Since English is the world’s strongest and most prominent language as well as the international lingua-franca of both the business world and academics, many people lose sight of the fact that English is still an ethnic mother-tongue of the English in Britain as well as the first language of hundreds of millions of others around the world. And like almost all languages (but not Israeli Hebrew), English regional variations enable her speakers to pin down where someone is from. English speakers can also often determine a speaker’s social class (in Britain) and (in the USA) their race from their accent.

Hundreds of millions of people speak English as a second, third or fourth language around the world but most who’ve never lived in an English speaking country speak a fairly artificial academic form of the language that is from nowhere and yet can be understood anywhere. Obviously such people speak English with accents so upon meeting them you can tell quite clearly that they’re foreigners anyway. But even when they write you often realize that the person is not a native speaker because their grammar is too perfect, “with whom am I texting?”!!! or they use a combination of British and American vocabulary “I had spilled some fizzy-drink in my trunk” (which would sound bizarre to both a Brit and an American). There’s nothing wrong with this of course. They’re just missing the experience of speaking an authentic local English that is actually from somewhere.

The phenomenon of “world English” is societal and generational as much as it is linguistic. I’m always amazed to meet people from one European country who have a close friend from a second European country with whom they can only communicate in English despite it being neither of their native languages. Communication in English is the norm even with college educated people of my generation from different Eastern European countries. A generation ago such friendships, business contacts and romances would have occurred in Russian. An even more stunning example of the strength of English is the fact that it is becoming normal in Europe for two people from different countries upon meeting to defer to English, even when one of them speaks the others non-English mother tongue.

With the strength of “world English” and the development of several competing standard Englishes, native regional and dialectal variations of the language are in a precipitous decline. Regional accents are not as strong as they used to be. Grammatical quirks are being leveled out by exposure to mass media and strangely enough, by exposure to non-native English speakers who possess knowledge of a much more normative form of the language. While the average American two generations ago would have known only his own local dialect, today an educated person needs to possess a knowledge of the standard language and knowledge of a local dialect is considered superfluous at best. Although the differences between varieties of English in America are slight compared to variations found within other languages (with the exception of Ebonics/African American Vernacular English which is quite distinct), I still feel that something is being lost with the decline of regional accents. So to highlight some of these accents, especially for speakers of “World English” who use English on a daily basis but mostly communicate with fellow non-native speakers, I’ve found some audio-clips of many varieties of American English. Although Southern American English is mocked both in the US and in Europe (especially because of its association with George Bush), some varieties of these dialects are my favorites and I chose these clips with the additional goal of highlighting the linguistic diversity of the southern states. So without further ado here are some great examples of American accents.

Arkansas accent.

North Carolina accent.

Atlanta Georgia accent

Philadelphia accent. As I mentioned in a previous post, different neighborhoods in Philadelphia have their own accents (just like NYC and Boston). This is especially true among older lifelong residents. This accent could be Kensington, or Fishtown or (a long shot) South Philly. My own accent is closer to a North-East Philly accent with some interference from having lived in New Jersey for four years now. Nonetheless, few if any people from outside the city could distinguish my Philly accent from a South Philly or Kensington accent.

West Virginia accent. (Speaker is black.)

Tennessee

The famous Brooklyn accent.

Boston

Canadian accent: Americans and Canadians can generally tell each other apart but some Americans from the northern Midwestern states speak dialects that sound like regular Canadian English, with the only difference being a few hundred telltale Canadianisms. The stereotypical difference is that Canadians pronounce about like “a-boot.” In reality they say “a-boat”, instead of the American “a-bout.” Canadians also pronounce several dozen words like British English. Among them are progress (pro-gress), controversy (con-trev-esy), schedule (shed-ul, not American skedule), and lever (leave-her). Canadian spelling btw is nearly halfway between British and American.

For a bonus here’s a real Lithuanian Yiddish accent in English. In New York you hear Hasidic Jews who speak English with pronounced Hungarian Yiddish accents but it’s becoming rarer and rarer to hear English with the telltale Litvak lilt. This was an accent I grew up hearing all the time.

For those of you interested in learning more about English in the United States, the following are some links from a website about a great PBS series on the topic:

Here is a quiz from PBS with which you can test how well you can locate American accents

Information on Ebonics/African American Vernacular English.

Good News in the Yiddish World: Part 1

2010-10-26T03:47:00.012-04:00

I’m ashamed to have to admit that I failed at my seemingly simple goal of writing a new blog entry at least once a week. And seeing as I haven’t written anything here in more than a month, one could say that I’ve failed four times over. Considering that I’ve failed to write for more than a month twice now, one could even say that I’ve failed eight times over. All the same. It’s not like anyone’s actually paying that much attention, right?

The good news is that I’ve kept up with my most important goal which has been to write well thought out non-schoolwork related pieces consistently on a weekly basis. So where is everything that I’ve written? Well, it turns out that I’ve been on a bit of a hot streak as of late and everything I’ve written and/or outlined in the past month has been of high enough quality that I’ve felt it deserving of being worked into a full length article. So now instead of eight blog posts I have four articles on Yiddish culture written and ready to be submitted for publication, along with twelve articles on a variety of other topics outlined. Since material put on a blog cannot be republished in a “real” magazine or website, none of this stuff will see the light of day until someone decides to publish it. And that could, scratch that, will be a while.

In any case, I want to keep up with the blog and I will begin by going over some “good news in the Yiddish world.” When I began this blog I decided not to write about Yiddish projects I was working on and that such material would be more appropriate elsewhere. Because I’m on the board of Yugntruf I also won’t talk too much about what that organization is doing either other than occasionally post event notices. This leaves good news coming from the work of everyone in the Yiddish world not involved with Yugntruf. And in recent months there has been plenty of it. Here are (a lot) of highlights:

1. When I went to Israel in April this year one of the main things I did was go on a tour of the Yiddish institutions. As usually happens with me in the small Yiddish world, I was warmly welcomed by many of the leading figures and other fellow travelers and learned a lot about the community(ies). Much is happening with Yiddish in Israel. While the Yiddish circle around Yugntruf is stoking the flames of a (very) small language revival (in that families that weren’t Yiddish speaking for generations speak the language at home with their kids again), what is happening in Israel could better be termed a cultural renaissance, in that people are returning to the language as a part of their Jewish culture and identity but for the most part not attempting to speak it as a vernacular in the home. (This is of course excepting some beautifully stubborn Haredi communities in Meah Shearim and Bnei-Barak, with whom I had a couple fascinating encounters and was also received warmly). The fantastically talented composer Daniel Galay, a longtime Facebook friend and the chairman of the association of Yiddish writers and journalists in Israel Leyvik-hoyz, ended up sitting next to me at the same theater featured in this report (Yidishshpiel). Strangely enough we didn’t recognize each other and he was surprised to find a young man who didn’t understand Hebrew (there are supertitles like an opera for the majority of the audience which doesn't understand Yiddish) and said in Yiddish “maybe you understand Yiddish?” Then we both figured out who the other was.

The next day I was off first thing in the morning to the Tel Nordau elementary public school where his daughter in law Hannah Polin Galay teaches Yiddish to elementary school students. I served as a foreign Yiddish speaking guest for the students who were both amazed and motivated by encountering a young person who spoke fluent Yiddish but no Hebrew (they realized very early on that my inability to understand them in anything but Yiddish wasn’t an act). I was particularly interested in learning about Hannah’s pedagogical methods because I had never seen Yiddish (or any language for that matter) taught to young kids. And her short class was truly fascinating. One important thing to note is that just like Israel and especially Tel Aviv Hannah’s students represented a melting pot. Some of the kids were clearly not of Ashkenazi descent. Many were of mixed heritage. Some were from the former USSR and had Russian accents; some stemmed from families who been in Israel for generations. A few were the children of Americans and four or five were not Jewish at all but Filipino. One Filipino girl who knew some English made the amazingly astute observation that the words feder (feather, pen) and feather were cognates! All the kids in the classes I visited learned Yiddish just like they learned English, math, Hebrew literature/reading skills or anything else for that matter. While Yiddish was mandatory for some of the lower grades, many older kids (those featured in this CNN report) attend optional classes in the afternoon. Interestingly enough many of these students are also not of Ashkenazi descent.

2. I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Aviv Luban at one of Yugntruf’s Yiddish Breaks at Brandeis a while back. He and I think similarly about a couple of key issues relating to Yiddish culture and Jewish identity more broadly. In January I wrote an article. After putting it aside for a few days I decided that it was too emotional and didn’t hold together well and went on to other things. Then, in April, Aviv published a much better but nearly identically argued article in the Jerusalem Post as an opinion piece. I’ll let Aviv’s wonderful article stand on its own merits without further comment.

3. Here is an update in the form of a short video report from Emory University about their Yiddish program.

4. Yiddish power ballads? My reaction when I first heard that one was “that’s going to be ridiculous.” And it kind of is. But a few of the songs recorded by the group Yiddish Princess work shockingly well, especially Avrum Sutzkever’s poem “ver vet blaybn” (who will remain), the lead song on their Myspace page. The group is first rate musically; no surprise considering the musicians who compose its members (Sarah Gordon, the daughter of Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper, Avi Fox Rosen, and Michael Winongrad among others). You can hear about the evolution of the group in this interview.

5. When I started my Youtube account two years ago, it was the only Youtube channel with original content in Yiddish with English subtitles. Thankfully, higher quality channels have joined it, among them the official channel of the venerable Yiddish language Forward newspaper. The Forward has been releasing a half dozen different eight to twelve minute shows in biweekly series. Among them are Ross (Shmuel) Perlin’s reports from China, “a New York Jew in China.” I first met Ross in Vilnius in 2008 and we share a passion for endangered languages. Ross is a bit braver than I am, so while I’m living comfortably in the states he’s over in a rural village in southwestern China (days away from paved roads!) doing a groundbreaking detailed grammatical survey of the Trung language (a distant cousin of Tibetan). Here’s a report on his work in Yiddish with English subtitles.

6. Many people, especially Hasidic Jews who grew up speaking Yiddish but have no exposure to its non-religious scholarly culture, have asked me what an academic lecture (referat) in Yiddish is like. Well here’s a great one. Even better, a full English translation is given for those of you who don’t understand the language or know Yiddish but can’t make heads or tails of Yiddish literary terms. The speaker is the incomparable Argentinean born French Yiddish linguist and teacher Yitskhok Niborski. The lecture was delivered at Stamford’s Hillel as a program of the National Yiddish Book Center. The subject of the lecture is the poet Avrum Sutzkever (1913-2010). One thing that caught my attention watching this were the many unexpected similarities in culture, diction, and word choice between this style of high level Yiddish academic lecture and the traditional religious lessons delivered in Yiddish known as Shiurim.

7. “A pop-culture introduction to the Mama-Loshn.” When I got that in my inbox I thought “this one is going to be really painful!” Instead, I stumbled upon what are probably the cleverest (and least conventional) Yiddish lessons ever. A “Yidisher Pop” is done as an online gossip column that teaches Yiddish. It even has spray-painted celebrity photos af idish! like a certain gossip columnist I won't degrade myself by mentioning. Designed by Adina Cimet and Alyssa Quint, these unique lessons in both the Hebrew alphabet and transliteration teach basic vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. See for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW6FhYtUp98&feature=related

8. The president of the US and much of Congress were treated to a wonderful rendition of the Partisan Song at the US capitol rotunda as part of the Holocaust Museum’s days of remembrance.

9. The second Yiddish-Japanese Japanese Yiddish dictionary was recently published in Japan. The book was actually advertised in newspapers and is being sold for a whopping 700 dollars. In addition to the two dictionaries there are also Yiddish textbooks in Japanese.

10. There are several Yiddish metal bands but the one that’s caught my attention the most recently has been the group Dibbukim out of Sweden. Although not native speakers, you can hear that the two singers know the language fluently unlike singers in the other metal bands. The music itself is also very interesting and clever. Here’s an interview with singer Niklas Olniansky from the Polish Yiddish language radio show “naye khavlyes”, as well as their first music video.

Need more good news from the Yiddish world? I'll be writing the second half of this post in the coming weeks and I'll write a similar post in Yiddish highlighting stories and resources about current events in the Yiddish world that are only accessible to Yiddish speakers.

Migration within the EU and the Roma in France/Italy: These aren’t the migrants we signed up for.

2010-09-05T01:44:00.008-04:00

Roma family in France after being sent to a new temporary camp.

Immigration: US vs. Europe

The United States is a country which, despite its rhetoric, is not very open to immigrants or even visitors. Americans themselves are generally good to immigrants (despite recent flair-ups with Latin American immigrants, especially in the southwest) and immigration is a huge part of American identity, especially in terms of its own mythology. Despite this, it’s basically impossible for most people who’d want a green-card (permission to reside here permanently) to get one and for residents of most countries even visiting here involves a downright insulting process of advance security clearance and visa-applications, even for vacations. Many countries have taken to punishing the US by making Americans jump through exactly the same hurdles their own citizens must go through entering the US when entering into their own territory.

Requirements for immigrating to the US vary tremendously from country to country and are largely based on a quota system. The quota system works this way: if too many people have already come from one place (sometimes a country, sometimes a region), then no more are accepted the following year from that place. This process of course ignores the fact that a lot more people will want to come to the US from poorer countries than from say, Scandinavia. The only ways around this system are winning a “green card lottery” in which the green card is given out randomly to a few lucky people or by marrying an American or another green card holder. A few exceptions have been made in the past for people facing particular difficulties, for instance Jews from the former USSR and Vietnamese whose families aided the US during the war. Depending on the country involved, green card processes take 5 to 10 years for the first applicant, with additional years needed to bring across the applicant’s family. And this “time served” does not get factored into the seven years needed to acquire American citizenship. So in short, if you want to come here, you’re going to have to wait a very long time.

Compared to the US, EU immigration law can seem like a joke. While non-EU citizens who want to live in Europe face many of the same obstacles that they would have if they had wanted to immigrate to the US, citizens of EU countries are allowed to live and work in any EU nation they please. This rule came into effect in 1994 as one of the perks of the then recently established European citizenship and needless to say, many of the people from poorer European countries who would have tried to immigrate to North America are now choosing Western European nations like France and Italy. Among the 11 million migrants with EU citizenship living in EU countries where they don’t hold citizenship is an unknown number of Eastern European Roma.

Estimating Roma populations is extremely difficult. The number of Roma in Europe is variously estimated at anywhere between 6 and 14 million and estimates of the number of Roma in a particular nation are equally varied. When I lived in Spain I heard estimates as high as 1,000,000 and as low as 100,000. Since most Roma live pretty much “off the grid”, don’t send their children to schools, don’t participate in censuses, and often live in unregistered self-constructed settlements, estimating their number can seem like a fool’s errand to all but the most dedicated. The fact that no government can claim to know exactly how many Roma live within their territory or even exactly where they live plays into the fear-mongering of right wing politicians throughout Europe.

In the last couple of years, Italy, followed even more virulently by France have sought to dismantle Roma camps, and deport immigrant Roma populations back to their home countries. In France, many social ills from crime to unemployment are being blamed on Roma populations. Around 300 Roma camps (often in effect small towns on the edges of cities) are set to be destroyed with their occupants given the choice between unequal housing (say a bed in a gym for a month), life on the street or life in another illegal camp. The political will for such evictions, which the majority of the French public supports, is drummed up through scare-tactics highlighting the presence of foreign, mostly Romanian and Bulgarian Roma. Like right wing American politicians who make a big tumult over illegal immigration, in a sense making the issue seem like a sudden emergency every ten years or so when it has been an ongoing phenomenon for decades, French politicians have long used the “Gypsy problem” to win votes before elections. What is forgotten by the French and Italian public is that most of the Roma who are being evicted from their camps have lived in France or Italy for generations and in some cases have even lived in the same camps for generations. As for the “foreign” Roma, as citizens of EU nations they should be entitled to live and work anywhere within the European Union. The French government claims, essentially, that the Roma are not pulling their own weight and don’t find jobs quickly enough and therefore ought to be deported. The issue becomes even more complicated because several EU countries, including France, only approved Romania’s entrance into the EU on the condition that Romanian nationals would only gain the right to live in France in stages. In 2014 Romanians are slated to gain full residency rights and Sarkozy’s government is looking for ways to get rid of their “foreign Roma” before then and make sure they never come back. Roma families are being offered 300 Euros a person (100 a child) and free airfare to return to Romania. At the same time France and Italy are trying to initiate an EU wide Roma policy which would exempt Roma from enjoying the same right to live/work in any European country that they are entitled to as EU citizens. This plan has caused a great deal of controversy among EU politicians and several countries invited to a conference dedicated to the “Gypsy problem”, most notably Germany, have refused to attend. Romania which wanted to attend wasn’t even invited.

One thing that becomes immediately clear from the whole controversy is that some of the more established countries in the EU feel that they are getting more than they bargained for in terms of foreign immigration. Since many of their politicians are blaming the Roma for many social ills, their citizens are clamoring for the Roma to be dealt with and they feel that something must be done. At the same time, Western European nations without young populations need immigrants from the newer EU states and barring only one ethnic group is just not going to fly like it would in America. So in effect the French and Italian politicians are stuck with having to “deal” with their immigrant Roma populations, at the same time they can’t survive without the influx of workers that these same people are a part of. So they expel a small percentage of the foreign Roma (remember these people are allowed to return anyway) and tear down a whole bunch of Roma settlements for what basically amounts to a political spectacle. None of this will “solve” the Roma “crisis” and it will make life much more difficult for the Roma themselves. Instead of attempting to integrate the Roma into their countries in a manner in which they won’t lose their cultural traditions, the French government has basically opted to “pass the buck” and make them all move, often further away from towns and cities. In effect, the Roma are being shuffled around and temporarily hidden for short term political gain. A local townsperson may look around and not see “their Gypsies” but the unfortunate families have just been moved elsewhere nearby or if they were foreign shipped on a plane to Romania or Bulgaria.

What all of this is also doing is increasing the already extreme anti-Roma prejudices, which will just make it tougher for them to find legal work and will push more people into petty crime and keep more children out of schools. Many Roma advocates fear that this will lead to increased violence against Roma as well. On a continent where the Romani were enslaved well into the 1860s and where as many as 1.5 million (some 90%) were killed during the Holocaust (including literally the entire populations in Lithuania, Latvia, Holland and Croatia), anything heading down this path is particularly abhorrent.

The Roma Question: The USA vs. Europe

One thing that interests me with this issue is that the Roma do not face any of these kinds of prejudices against them in the US. The million or so American Roma, who mostly live in rural areas, are completely outside of the mainstream consciousness. Very few Americans are aware of how many there are living in their midst and they wouldn’t recognize them even if they interacted with them on a regular basis (say a frequent customer at a store). Other than fortune telling and in some circles musicians, no professions are associated with the American Roma and when Americans think of “Gypsy thieves” they think of Eastern Europeans, if they know that “Gypsies” are a real ethnic group at all. The racist phrase “to get gypped” (to be robbed/cheated) is widespread but the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to its origins and are surprised to learn the terms offensive origins. Nobody has worried about the Roma here since perhaps the 1870s, when they first began immigrating in mass, often brought over by circus promoters along with their trained bears.

The Roma, it should be noted, are neither a “nomadic” population nor a homogeneous one. Most Roma, whether in Romania, Afghanistan, Brazil or New York City live in the same place their entire lives. They sometimes switch between summer and winter residences but the vast majority of Roma are not nomadic by any means. They live where they find steady work, usually relying upon extended family networks for resources. The Roma are also a kaleidoscope of interrelated ethnic groups separated by languages and sub-dialects, kinship networks based on extended families, and professions that are common (and in some cases near universal) among specific subgroups (metalworking, music, circus performance, fortunetelling, carpentry, clothing production, landscaping etc). Much like Hasidic sects, Roma subgroups identify based on the geographic origin of their subgroup and on local traditions acquired there. The major group in the Philadelphia area is known as the “black Dutch” and not surprisingly originates from Holland. They are, however, nearly entirely English speaking. In fact, a majority of the world’s Roma no longer speak a variety of Romani. In Spain and England they speak mixed languages which incorporate Romani words and grammar into the local language. In New York and Northern New Jersey one hears Romani spoken, especially in Manhattan during the winter. I’ve been told that the sub-group that lives and works in the garment district has been in America for four or five generations but maintains their language and close contact with family overseas. Hundreds of thousands of Romani have also immigrated to America in the two decades since the fall of the USSR.

The real mystery, of course, is why the Roma encounter such prejudices in Europe and become headline news while in America they remain unnoticed. They don’t live within mainstream society on either continent. Their children generally don’t go to school, they often forgo normal housing. They often speak another language and make a living in uncommon trades. But yet on one continent they are the object of massive fear and derision and on the other most people aren’t even aware of their existence. Perhaps Americans have enough to fear and worry about already?

As far as the Roma in France, I don’t know too much about them. Whether the Romanian immigrants and the “indigenous” French Romani are from the same ethnic groups or interact with one another is unclear. I know that French Roma know French but whether they speak Romani among themselves is unclear. The Romanian immigrants have been interviewed in Romanian on the news reports I’ve seen but probably speak their own language(s) among themselves. If anyone could shed light on these particulars that would be great.

Class Warfare on New Jersey’s Rails

2010-09-01T01:38:00.005-04:00

I meet many more foreign visitors to the US and have more foreign friends than the vast majority of Americans. And one thing that is always mentioned when we discuss the US, or especially when I try to convince someone to visit me here is how “big” the US is. Size wise the US is obviously bigger than the vast majority of countries; it’s the third largest after all. But the States would seem bigger than all of Europe and Japan stuck together because of its “effective distance” (a term coined by a friend), i.e. the amount of time it takes to get around the country is significantly greater than in Western Europe or Japan. This is of course the result of America’s antiquated rail lines and lack of high speed trains, coupled with expensive airfare. While the US invested billions into creating the most sophisticated highways in the world, Europe and Japan spent decades laying the groundwork for rail systems which transport people more quickly, efficiently and cleanly than anything airplanes or cars could ever muster.

I knew all of this before I left for Spain but I never gave the matter much thought while I was there. I noticed that the AVE* trains went significantly faster than their American counterparts and were so quiet and smooth that I felt like I wasn’t really on a train but rather on some sort of hovercraft. I quickly learned that a trip from Valencia to Madrid would take about 3 hours and a trip from Barcelona to Madrid would take about 4.5. Nonetheless I didn’t put much thought into the distances involved nor did I compare them to more familiar US geography because after all I thought, America is big and Spain is small. I really didn’t have a sense of the magnitude of the differences and their impact on daily life until the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an excellent four part special on the topic around the same time that a serious illness in the family turned my life upside down.

After getting back from Spain in late June I began a night-class at Rutgers main campus (New Brunswick, NJ). I don’t drive. New Brunswick is only 53 miles from Philadelphia but to get there I had to take two very slow trains (the Pennsylvania based SEPTA’s R7 to Trenton NJ, then the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor Line to New Brunswick). On a good day this is a 2.5 hour trip one way. On a bad day it’s a four hour trip. On a really bad day (say when someone decides to kill him/herself on the tracks, something that happens some 20 times a year in NJ), the commute can take six hours. So in short I had to leave home at 3:30 for a 6:30 class and hope for the best. When a relative took ill in NYC and the situation required lots of attention from my family including overnight stays, I found myself effectively living in three cities at the same time. Within a span of a month I ended up spending more time on trains than I normally do in a whole year. The obscene amount of time spent bounding back and forth over NJ in slow trains gave me plenty of opportunities to ponder the differences between the Spanish and American train networks.

There are two different train companies that provide service between Philadelphia and New York. Between the two firms there are a meager five routes available, which run on one set of tracks (so they’re not really “routes” in the traditional sense but rather trains that make different combinations of stops). Both companies are owned and operated by government agencies. SEPTA is the public transportation agency for Southeastern Pennsylvania (most importantly covering the Philly metro area) and NJ Transit provides buses and trains within NJ and to some bordering areas of PA and NY (conveniently including routes ending in NYC). To get to NY by train from Philly the cheapest route is to take the same combination of trains I take to Rutgers but to continue on the NJ transit train until Manhattan. The NJ transit train from New Brunswick to NYC usually takes 90 minutes (occasionally there are express trains that take 45), so added on to the original time it takes to get to New Brunswick the full trip from Philly to NYC, a mere 86 miles, ends up being 3.5 to 4 hours. The price all together is $27 to $33 dollars. The other option is Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, which depending on the train selected makes only 1 to 3 stops and takes about 1.5 hours. These trains, run by a federal government agency, usually cost between $70 and $140 dollars. If the same routes were served on the Spanish AVE train, the trip would only take 37 minutes and would cost about 20 Euros, roughly 35 dollars. Since I cannot afford to take the AMTRAK, the difference would amount to me being able to get to NYC in 1/5 of the time. This would enable me to live in Philadelphia and work in Manhattan, or even to occasionally attend Yiddish events in the city without a four hour commute both ways (something I occasionally do as is). On the Spanish system my friends who live in Pittsburgh would be able to commute home in some 2.5 hours, rather than the current 9 to 10. The impact that this would have on daily life, as well as on towns lucky enough to get a stop along the high-speed route would be astounding. Considering the fact that many Philadelphians commute daily into Manhattan using Amtrak (1.5 hours, 70-140$ both ways), it’s not unrealistic to imagine that on a truly high speed network it would be possible for someone from DC to commute to NYC (or vice-versa) every day. But high-speed rail in the US remains a dream and a far off one at that. The current rail system is here to stay, along with its barely hidden class conflicts (un)neatly tucked away in the corner.

SEPTA/NJ Transit vs. Amtrak.

Officially, America has no social classes. Everyone from the janitor to the billionaire is addressed as “sir.” Working class people, especially blacks, often dress more elegantly for church on Sunday than their upper class counterparts. There are few institutions that reject members based on their ethnic or religious origins or how much money their family had five generations ago. American English does not have class based accents like British English (with the exception of one acquired upper class accent which is rare these days), and in theory all a person needs to enter what Americans would consider the “upper class” is money. So in the general American conception of class, money itself is class, not a family’s historical prominence nor what pastimes they’d chose to spend their money on (say, investing in racehorses/polo vs. season tickets for NASCAR) . Some of these class barriers that ostensibly don’t exist re-appear, however, when one compares Septa/NJ Transit with Amtrak.

Septa service itself is socially stratified. All routes either originate going downtown or leaving downtown. Every train passes through the same three downtown stations, no matter its final destination, making some of the routes considerably longer than they would be if they were designed to get people from point A to point B as quickly as possible. This feature was built into the lines to transport middle and upper-class Philadelphians with white-collar office jobs from the suburbs or outlying city neighborhoods to Center City (downtown) and West Philly (where the universities are congregated). Neighborhood to neighborhood transportation is mostly provided by Septa bus service, whose passengers are solidly working class. Some of the trains do attract a more working class clientele, especially the R7 to Trenton which is my first train to New Brunswick/NYC. This is because most of the businesspeople traveling to/through Trenton are going to NYC and hence using Amtrak. NJ transit trains have more business people but still have a predominantly working class ridership, especially during off-peak hours.

Septa trains are noisy, usually filthy, and have absolutely no amenities, not even bathrooms. Seats are not individual but rather double or triple. Eating is technically not permitted but people bring their lunches and dinners aboard all the time. Copies of the Daily News or the Metro are left behind on seats. NJ transit trains, by comparison, are much nicer. Passengers are generally quieter; the trains are cleaned more regularly. All of the trains have bathrooms. There are individual seats and even electric outlets to plug in computers or charge cell phones. Eating is strictly prohibited but drinking is permitted. Riders can often read left behind copies of the Metro, NY Post and Daily News as well as the more highbrow Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times. Unlike Septa passengers NJ transit riders are provided with designated waiting areas at the major train stations. But even with these extra comforts neither company comes anywhere near matching Amtrak, which compared to its competition is like a limousine being rated against a donkey cart. The guts of Amtrak trains are basically modeled after passenger planes. There are individual seats that recline, space for every passenger to plug in electronics, lots of clean bathrooms, and even a dining car! Most of the passengers are businesspeople whose trips are being written off as business expenses or are being paid for directly as part of their fee. There are few children and few people not in suits. Instead of CD players (remember those?) or I-Pods most of the riders have touch-screen computers on which they are editing work related documents. If they don’t have computers they are most likely reading a business related document or reading the Wall Street Journal. (Other than the aforementioned activities most people are sleeping which of course has nothing to do with social class). Upon arrival at the station(s) Amtrak passengers are segregated from NJ transit or Septa passengers. They get their own waiting areas which are separated from the rest of the station by walls and curtains. The “rich man’s waiting lounge” can only be entered after the appropriate ticket is checked by what basically amounts to a bouncer.

Class Warfare

As for the routes themselves, the Northeast Corridor lines only have two tracks dedicated to each direction. The faster traveling Amtrak usually takes the inner track seeing as it only stops two to five times. The slower Septa/NJ transit trains take the outer track which meets the platform at every station. Amtrak (and hence the federal government) actually own the track, which NJ Transit (and hence the state government) leases. When Amtrak trains take the outer track they always go ahead of the NJ transit trains so as to avoid the Amtrak train catching up with the NJ Transit train (which would delay the Amtrak train or cause a collision). This in effect delays the NJ transit train should it become necessary for an Amtrak train to travel on the outer tracks.

This parasitic relationship with the working class trains being subservient to their wealthier counterparts usually works well enough assuming nothing goes wrong. However, between the aforementioned frequent suicides and a summer full of terrible weather, much has been going wrong as of late. And the results amount to open class warfare that is blatant, obvious and at times Kafkaesque.

I got caught in the middle of one of these “battles” a few weeks back after a storm knocked down a tree, taking some of the track-signals with it. The signal problems stopped all traffic for a good hour and twenty minutes. I had just taken an exam the night before and as such had schlepped my ten pound dictionary and my laptop along with me. I planned to catch an early express train to NYC that would have gotten me there in roughly 45 minutes to visit my relative in the ICU. After that I would high-tail it back to Philly on a Megabus. I arrived at the New Brunswick train station around 10:30 to find about a hundred people waiting for the train. I was informed that not a single train had come or gone for an hour but no announcement was made and the two workers at the train station knew nothing. Among the people waiting for the various trains which had never come were conductors who were supposed to begin work on these very trains. Even they had not been informed of the signal problems.

At this point it was nearing 90 degrees but despite the heat people were in good spirits and finding humor in the situation. A half hour later an announcement over the crackly loud speaker informed us that no trains were running (duh!) and that train service for NJ transit would resume on the outer tracks in 20 minutes. As the first station is about 30 minutes from New Brunswick I decided to flee to the air-conditioning for the next fifty minutes. The station itself soon became hot, however, after another hundred or so people arrived and I decided to go back onto the platform, where about 150 people were now crowded. Babies cried, adults whined and everyone pushed and shoved in hopes of clearing a little personal space. I found a railing to lean my 20 pound backpack on. Three elegantly dressed white women, all wearing pearls, ended up next to me. One was in her late 20s and the other two were middle aged. The younger woman, clutching a purse which even empty was probably more valuable than my computer, looked at me nervously and said “we’ve never taken NJ Transit before, is it usually this crowded?” I could barely contain my laughter and explained the unfortunate predicament to them. “How long do you think it will be until the trains start running again?” chimed in her mother, pronouncing every syllable of every word in a way that revealed a boarding school upbringing (think Catcher and the Rye). I told them that I didn’t know but that we probably wouldn’t get on a train for another hour at least and it wouldn’t be an express like they had counted on. “But we have theater tickets!” they protested. “We didn’t drive only because we saw an advert(!) that said we could take this train specifically to get to the Broadway matinees.” I politely told them that there wasn’t a snowballs chance in hell that they’d get to NYC on time and that they should take up the issue with their State Senators. I went into my usual spiel about how the federal government paves highways, makes airports but does not support trains. They looked at me dumbfounded and asked if I knew where “management” was. Management. MANAGEMENT! This time I couldn’t control my laughter. I stopped laughing for a moment, choked out an apology and began laughing again. First off, I explained, the people who manage the trains aren’t in a station. And even if they were they certainly wouldn’t be in New Brunswick. Secondly, the sizable New Brunswick train station only has two employees at any given time because 80% of them were replaced with vending machines a few years ago that sell the tickets in their stead. The remaining two employees are there to sell ticket packages and to absorb the various complaints about the trains that should reach “the management” which runs the trains from some hidden place.

Still, despite my explanations and protestations, the women decided to complain at the ticket counter and dragged me along. The oldest of the three, twirling a bead of her pearl necklace and staring at the employee responded to his answers by saying “but couldn’t you do something, this is absolutely dreadful.” The ticket-man, a black kid my age with a rural southern accent said “I reckon t’at ‘bout describes it Mam.” I went back on the platform, right in time for the first of the Amtrak trains to whiz by.

Amtrak trains in New Brunswick can be downright scary. They go by on the inner tracks at about 130 mph and can be heard a mile away. The fast wind, dust, and wall of sound are disorienting no matter how many times you have experienced them. It can be downright terrifying to stand 20 feet away from anything going by at that speed but when you throw in its weight and mass a feeling of utter helplessness often sets in. The experience is made worse for me, however, because a friend of mine threw himself in front of one of these very trains my freshman year and every whizzing tornado of steel is a reminder of his senseless action.

“Trains are runnin’ again” someone said stating the obvious. More people crowded onto the platform and I occupied the time trying to estimate their number. I decided upon 350 persons. Then something downright terrifying happened. Without any warning an Amtrak train raced by us on the tracks closest to us at about 100 MPH, passing less than a foot from the people on the edge of the overcrowded platform. Lots of us screamed. People grabbed their children or their wives or held onto any available surface for dear life. Still, three or four dozen people were knocked over by the wind and a panic started. The train was gone nearly as soon as it had arrived, leaving behind a cloud of profanities and leaving the people closest to the edge to look over the gap to see if anyone had been struck by the train. To the surprise of many in the crowd, myself included, nobody had. If there had been but on person leaning an arm over the platform, or a skirt that extended an inch too far the person would have been torn to shreds without even noticing that something had happened.

The situation repeated itself another eight times over the next two hours that I was stuck there. (Obviously we all stayed far away from the edge of the platform.) While some New Jersey Transit passengers waited five hours to board a train (I waited four), the Amtrak trains were run with minimal interruption. A person arriving in Trenton or Philadelphia at 11 am for an Amtrak train wouldn’t have even noticed the delay because their train ran on schedule. But because of the extra trains sent to pick up the stranded Amtrak passengers, and the fact that Amtrak trains are never halted for NJ transit trains, Amtrak used all four tracks for its own trains for a full two hours. This left the poorer NJT riders stuck outside in 90 degree heat while Amtrak riders waited for their trains in air-conditioned private waiting rooms that only they were permitted to use. And as the (mostly) working class people baking in the sun looked at the trains whizzing by carrying the rich in a luxury we could not afford, I began to wonder what exactly was going through everyone’s minds. They knew, of course, that we were being delayed an additional two hours so that Amtrak passengers wouldn’t be inconvenienced. “Why don’t they split it up,” a kid asked his father in Spanish. “Why don’t they let one stop for us and then one fast train go by?” I looked at the two of them and said in Spanish “cariño (dear/little one), that would be taking turns. The rich don’t do that.”

A few minutes later the three rich ladies thanked me for talking to them (I have no idea why), and told me that they were going home. “Next time we’ll drive to Trenton and take the Amtrak train. Or maybe we’ll just bite the bullet and park in New York” one of them said. Then the one with the Holden Caulfield accent looked at me and said “I’d recommend you try Amtrak next time. Unfortunately most of the people here probably couldn’t afford it.” I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or punch her in the nose. Instead, I told her that I couldn’t afford it either and wished them well. I wondered if they had learned anything from temporarily finding themselves on the losing side in open class warfare.

1. AVE is an acronym for “High Speed Spanish.” It is also a pun because AVE in Spanish means “bird” (think “avian” in English.)
2. The word “advert” is archaic. The woman’s whole diction would have sounded educated forty years ago but now sounds quite unnatural. This was the stereotypical upper class WASP accent of a bygone era.

The Cleaning Ladies. Aka the Rudeness of The Spanish Middle Class

2010-08-08T21:45:00.013-04:00

Now that I am safely back in America I can write more honestly about my experiences in Spain, especially things about Spain and Spaniards that I was not impressed with. Growing up I often looked askance at many aspects of American life all the while assuming that Europeans were more sophisticated, intellectually curious and oriented towards social justice and social welfare than Americans. This may be true of some places in Europe (Norway/Sweden for instance) but it is certainly not the case in Spain, where from my own experiences I’d say that the average Spaniard is slightly more ignorant than the average American and is far less concerned about social welfare or treating people well than the average American. Spaniards, of course, think Americans are stupider than they are but it’s really hard for them to judge us when they don’t speak our language or understand the culture. Ignorance, however, doesn’t particularly upset me. It was trying at times when people asked me a question and then immediately got bored with the answer. For instance what follows is a typical conversation. I’d usually have one like this a week:

Guy down the hall: Where are you from?
Me: Philadelphia.
Where’s Philadelphia?
Near NYC, about two hours south…..
Oh, so you’re from New Jersey with the others.
Well, I go to college there but I’m from Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania.
Oh. (Feigning interest.) So that’s where the north lost the war?…
Which war?
Your civil war.
No, the north won, the north was the USA. The south split off and attacked us.
Oh, whatever, I mean that’s where the war was.
Not in Philadelphia, no.
But in New Jersey?
You mean Pennsylvania, yeah there were some battles there.
So that’s when Washington was the general?
No, you’re thinking of the War of Independence. That was 85 years earlier.
(Looking annoyed.) So are you going to see Manchester United here?

Of course, most Americans only have a vague sense of Spanish history and I’ve even run into Americans who confuse the US civil war and what we call “the revolutionary war” (it’s “the war of American independence” in Spain and England.) But who’s keeping score? As I said, ignorance doesn’t particularly upset me. What did really upset me about Spaniards, especially the Spanish middle-class was their complete lack of concern with social-welfare. The most glaring issue that immediately comes to mind is Spain’s disgusting treatment of its Roma, who are literally treated worse than dogs. I had never experienced entrenched racism at all levels of a society until my time in Spain. To tell the truth I had never seen or experienced anything close. But much more revealing of the Spanish mentality is their treatment of fellow Spaniards from a lower social class, specifically the complete and utter lack of respect they show them. A very telling example I can give is how the cleaning ladies were treated in the dorm where I lived. I shared a suite with three Spaniards who had their own rooms and an American with whom I shared a larger room. This was in a fifteen story freshman dorm which had some 300 people living there. Unlike dorms in the US which are on campus and run by a single college/university, Spanish dorms are privately owned and house students from different universities. As the dorms are privately owned and essentially compete with each other for students, Spanish dorms are fancier than their American counterparts. This is most noticeable with the extremely high quality food which is served cafeteria style in the dorm itself. But this fanciness also extends to how the dorms are cleaned.

In the US student rooms are cleaned twice a year at most. Nobody makes your bed or cleans your shower or scrubs your floor for you. You clean your own room, dust your own shelves, and mop when necessary. In Spain, student rooms are treated just like hotel rooms and are cleaned/made up twice weekly. Some students also pay a little extra to have the maids do their laundry and sheets for them. While all of this was a bit shocking to me being an American, what really stunned me was finding out that few of the Spaniards even knew the names of the maids. One day the cleaning lady who did our floor came by and asked if she could come a few hours early. I said that I’d ask my suitemates and told them “(woman’s name) wants to know if she can come at 2.” “Who,” they asked. I repeated the name assuming that they had not heard me but they still remained confused. “(name),” I said “the woman who makes your bed every week!” They look at me dumbfounded and so “oh, the cleaning lady, yeah that’s cool.”

I thought we treated our cleaning ladies badly at Rutgers. Occasionally (let’s say every other week) a pizza would be left out on a table. Empty soda cans often wouldn’t quite make it into a trash can and would lie on the floor. On one occasion (and in two years I mean literally one) someone made a complete disgrace of a bathroom, tearing the whole place asunder with what basically amounted to a one man riot that was like a physical manifestation of a joke a five year old would get slapped for telling. People who vomited in the bathroom (and this happens weekly in American colleges) usually cleaned up their mess themselves or bullied someone else into doing it. In any case, it was rarely if ever left for the cleaning ladies. Everyone knew their first names and many of us knew how many kids they had, where they were from and what other jobs they worked and they learned our names and room numbers. That is just the kind of basic niceties that are expected in America. Overall, however, I thought that we were badly behaved. After all food sometimes got left out, occasionally toilet paper found its way into toilet balls and once someone decided it would be clever to, let’s just say, inappropriately use a shower. I wondered if the women would be treated this way if they weren’t immigrants but were, let’s say, poor native born Americans. In any case, I certainly thought the situation would be much better in “civilized” Europe. As we say in Yiddish “whose dream do you think you’ve woken up in?” or as they say in Philly “like hell.”

Not only did the Spaniards not know the names of the people being paid to do everything for them, they didn’t even acknowledge their presence when they walked in their rooms. No hello, no thank you, no goodbye, no “have a good Easter.” Nada. Far worse was the fact that the brats in the dorm where I lived purposefully trashed the place to an extent that would be simply unimaginable in the US. Students (18,19 year olds!) threw rotted food against walls, dropped watermelons down the staircase, lit firecrackers inside of cakes, broke ceilings and glass inside of elevators, spilled soda and vodka and left it spilled overnight, graffitied, tracked pizza and tomato sauce over several floors and left broken glass bottles on stairs and handrails. Most of these bromas, pranks as the students referred to them, were weekly occurrences. When I once dared to ask someone to consider the cleaning ladies as he took a bottle of ketchup and smashed it against a wall and smeared its contents all over, he looked at me and said “hombre, es que les pagamos a las mujeres” (dude, it's that we pay the women). “No”, I said, “your parents pay the owner to pay the women and they’re people just like your parents or Aunts.” He looked at me, shocked, and said “no, they’re ignorantas (ignorant/uneducated women) who are the children of peasants who mismanaged their land.” Well, what is there to say to such a thing?

In the US, on the east coast at least, the vast majority of cleaning ladies are foreign born. I thought that any disrespect they received originated in racial prejudice and/or was due to their being immigrants (I don’t give generalized ignorant/stupid behavior enough credit sometimes). In Spain, where such people are treated far worse than they are in America, they appear to be mistreated due to their social class. I don’t claim of course that what I was told by one prick is representative of middle class Spaniards or even semi-typical. But the complete and utter disrespect with which the dorm residents treated these women was near universal and never questioned. Whether this situation was unique to one university or a microcosm of typical Spanish middle class behavior is unclear but I’d venture to guess more towards the latter than the former. In a nation where children often live with their parents well into their 30s, where laziness is not only socially accepted but a time honored tradition, and where a stunning sense of entitlement prevails despite a 20% unemployment rate, rudeness is practically a patriotic value among the middle class. I have my own complicated theories about how this came to be that I will cover in further blog posts, but for the time being I’d like to hear from any Spaniards (in English or Spanish) who would like to refute, explain, or agree with anything I’ve said.

Summertime update: Time to reflect.

2010-07-26T01:46:00.005-04:00

I’m taking a class at Rutgers from 6-10 at night twice a week. It’s a tough semester-long class that I need to get a B+ in which Rutgers has condensed into eight weeks. The short time-span results in enough homework to make me feel like I’m taking a whole load of classes. I'm also stressing out about subjunctives, false-friends and pathetically enough, commas. I’m also busy as always helping to organize/promote Yiddish related events, especially on Facebook. This week that’s meant editing product descriptions on a Cafepress store, cataloguing hours-worth of Yiddish video/audio media and tracking down leads about a symposium that may or may not have happened fifteen years ago. I’m also editing the first draft of a third version of a document (manifesto/do it yourself guide) on plans/schemes to get Yiddish speakers to speak Yiddish more often and to get more people to learn it using minority language laws. Think language revitalization meets an Oprah style pep-talk meets community organizing, meets sociolinguistic models of language decline, write the thing IN Yiddish, keep it to less than 20,000 words and you’ll get a vague idea of what I’m putting together. I try not to focus on the fact that I started writing said document in 2008 and thought I’d been done in three months (my goal now is summer 2011!!!), but heck, I’m getting there. Slowly but surely. Maybe the English translation of said manifesto will be done before a friend of mine insists the world will end in December of 2012. Which reminds me. Wasn’t the world supposed to end in 2000 anyway?

Now some confessions/apologies intertwined with a few explanations and excuses: I’ve done exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t i.e. I’ve gone way too long without updating this blog. In truth, my primary goal in maintaining this blog has been to make sure I continue writing regularly, so that when I really need to write it will come to me naturally. And since I’ve been busy writing other things I don’t feel like I’ve particularly failed at this goal. I just haven’t been able to keep up with this blog as well as it deserved. In particular I regret not having written more short pieces about my time in Spain since that’s what the few people actually following this blog wanted to keep tabs on and it’s the topic that will most interest me thirty years down the road. (As a consolation there are some good long pieces about my time in Spain on this blog). It’s also been too long since my side-trips to Israel, England/Wales and Lithuania to recall exactly what I did in what order and to give my impressions thereof in the form of precise reportages. Still, with nearly four months behind me since my trip to the UK and about 2.5 since my trip to Israel, I can give a different type of reportage composed of the impressions which remain with me based on the salient details that have been successfully transferred from my short to long-term memory. And so many of my upcoming blog entries will be written about my six months abroad from the (relative) comfort of my normal American summer life, reaching backwards as it were through my imperfect memory to preserve an understanding of the recent past. Of course, my memory of my time abroad has been colored by recent events. This is especially true of my time in Israel where recent dark (and ridiculous) political upheavals have caused me to reinterpret much of what I saw in the holy-land. My memories of the somber-curmudgeony Spaniards have also been somewhat altered by their joyous celebrations during the World Cup. And the (semi)-revelation that all of the good British food I ate in Britain was Welsh and/or Cornish and not English, has again caused me to doubt that there is any good native English cuisine other than fish and chips.

From where I am now, I’ll take a little time to reflect.. Here goes nothing.

Most absurd Youtube films ever

2010-05-17T13:08:00.010-04:00

Youtube provides a (relatively) unfiltered look at a great diversity of human experience. Through Youtube you can hear opinions which could never be aired in a mainstream forum. Or you can relive all of the major events of the past sixty years through news-coverage or follow breaking news from around the world. Youtube is a great vehicle for discovering literature, learning a language, making new friends or documenting history. But if you don’t have the energy for anything serious like that, why don’t you watch these five videos which I’ve collected and which are, in my humble opinion, the most absurd videos on Youtube. Enjoy.

1. Aleksey Vayner’s video resume became so notorious on Youtube that he successfully sued the site to have it taken down. Meanwhile, after nearly all the claims in his film had been exposed as lies and the video was seen by tens of millions, video resumes have become about as common in America as the buffalo. By that I mean hunted to near extinction as nobody can see a video resume without thinking of this gem. Dozens of claims made by Vayner in other media, many of which led to his acceptance at Yale (starting charities, companies, publishing books, working for the CIA, having saved someone from drowning) have all been disproven. The guy is simply full of it. He also changed his name while at Yale to avoid some of the negative publicity his constant lying was bringing. Among the more interesting lies from this period was his production of a paper allegedly from the Dali Lami (whom he also claimed wrote him a recommendation letter) which confirmed him as a Buddhist God. Vayner (formerly Garber) also claimed during his time at Yale to have worked for the Russian Mafia, as a personal tennis coach to dozens of celebrities, to have started Napster and to have grown up on a Buddhist Temple complex in Uzbekistan where he would later return to be declared “the second best fighter in the world.” Most upsetting to me is that the man literally profited off the Holocaust, publishing a completely plagiarized and made up of book which was a “gendered perspective on the Holocaust.” Impossible really is nothing if all you can do is lie.

2/3. Some newscasts are unintentionally hilarious in ways that the journalists who produced them certainly never intended. Here are two famous examples from Youtube. Whistles and leprechauns. The leprechauns incident has even sparked a scholarly article or two.

4. Sometimes simple homemade videos get put on Youtube and are seen by 28 million people. Such is the case with this adorable video of two strangely humanlike cats.

5 Much original content on Youtube was made for Youtube. A lot of material on Youtube is like the two news clips above, professionally made but immediately put on Youtube shortly thereafter. But many of the great Youtube films are long forgotten gems from the past which would have never been rediscovered without Youtube. This is one of my favorites “blasts” from the past.