A Little Explanation

We had dinner at Penang in Bethesda, which has very good food, decent prices, a large contingent of Malaysian customers, and a unique, family style atmosphere.  And we found good parking.

We visited Dunbarton Oaks in Georgetown, which was a delight.  If you haven’t been there, I suggest you visit it.  Admission is free, and there are three things to see.  First, the Byzantine art, a nice selection of mosaics, fabrics, silver pieces, ivory pieces, ceramics, jewelry and more.  It reminded me of the wonderful exhibit that I recently saw at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and one of the docents pointed out that the missing exhibits at Dunbarton were now at the Royal Academy.  The second part of the museum is dedicated to pre-Columbian art works (the Olmec pieces dating back 3000 years or more) from Mexico, Central America and the Andes of Peru and north.   This portion of the museum is a circle of glass circular rooms overlooking the gardens designed by Philip Johnson almost 50 years ago (looks brand new).  The third part is the “music room” a very large and very elegant room which was the site of the conference in the mid-1940s which determined to create a “United Nations”.

Actually, there is a fourth part of the museum – the gardens, which we did not see but which can be a trip in itself.  And the selection of scholarly works in the gift shop on each of these topics is impressive.

“Disraeli” is a biography by Andre Maurois, written in 1927 and like his biography of Shelly, which I read last year, very enjoyable and easy to absorb.  I am sure that there are many more detailed and more researched life stories of both of these Englishmen, but I recommend Maurois for his style.  His Disraeli is an interesting character.  Baptised by his father, Jewish Benjamin Disraeli was in many ways a misfit in his youth, as much as he tried to be the perfect Englishman.  He was very very bright and equally ambitious and extraordinarily hard working and diligent.  He was also very handsome and had an easy way with the ladies, who responded to his clever conversation and his outrageously rakish way of dressing.  Feeling frustrated in his ambitions, he turned to writing and wrote several novels (with varying degrees of success), before finally finagling his way into the House of Commons.  But what happened then was fascinating.  He became a steady parliamentarian for thirty years, he married a woman 15 years his senior, he twice became Conservative prime minister, he became very close to Queen Victoria.  His policies were pro-empire.  He favored increasing the voting classes.  He did not believe that the government should over regulate religious observance.

Maylasian Food, Byzantine and Olmec Relics, a Very Nice Wedding with a Very Loud Band, a Visit from my Cousin before he deploys to Afghanistan, Cherry Blossoms and Benjamin Disraeli.

That about describes the weekend.

Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children”: My Small Addition to the Conversation

And what a conversation, it has become.  Caryl Churchill, famed English playwright and outspoken anti-Israeli activisit, has written a 7 part, 8 minute play, entitled “Seven Jewish Children: a Play for Gaza”.  If you have not read the script (now available on-line virtually everywhere), I will explain that in each of the seven scenes, a young girl is being discussed.  The question is what should she be told, and what should she not be told.  The goal is to protect the child, presumably.  The people involved in each scene have very different ideas on how to bring about this security.  Presumably, each scene takes place at a different time in modern Jewish history.  The last scene takes place during the Gaza operation, and ends with a relatively long and vicious statement by one of the adults, who no longer is speaking to the child, but to his own bitter feelings towards the Palestineans; he could care less if they live or die.  In fact, he may prefer their death.

The play was first performed in London at a function to raise funds for assistance to Gazans.  It quickly became a matter of great concern in much of the Jewish community.  This concern was magnified when Theater J (the DC Jewish Community Center theater) in conjunction with the Forum Theatre decided to do a series of staged readings of the play, with Theater J accompanying the reading with the performance of three equally short pieces written in response.

If you go to the Theater J blog (the link is on the right), you will see the controversy that has been stirred up.  It is extraordinary.  And, unlike many controversies, I believe it is very healthy.

The first reading (which I did not attend) was reviewed this morning by Peter Marks in the Washington Post.  It is not my intention to discuss Marks’ review at length, only to note that it was very complimentary of the production, very complimentary of the Theater J staff, and rather dismissive of the play itself, which he felt was clever agitprop, and (I think I am paraphrasing) an easy and cheap shot.  I don’t agree with his final conclusion; I think the play is profound (and I am not always a Churchill fan), but that is unimportant.

I did attend the 10 p.m. reading at Theater J last night.  My guess is that there were more than 150 people there.  The JCC community center room (as opposed to the theater) was SRO.  The readings were moving, and the discussion moderated by artistic director Ari Roth equally so.  As Peter Marks’ said, the audience and the discussion became a part of the theatrical evening.  Not the usual post-production tag-on, but a theatrical experience in and of itself.

Churchill is obviously (maybe not so obviously) not Jewish, but each of her adult voices is.  I have heard them all.  (Of course, the voices on the Palestinian side are, I am sure, equally confused and diverse, and we all know the vituperative nature of most Palestinian public pronouncements.)

So, what can I add?

A couple of things, perhaps.

First, less than a year ago, I was sitting in on a forum held in Beer Sheva, in the Negev, where the topic of discussion was Sderot.  This was before the Gaza incursion, but during the time that Sderot was beset daily with Kassam rockets being launced from Gaza.  Casualties were few for a variety of reasons, but fear and life-disruption was endemic.  Schools were closed, sirens blared seconds before rockets fell, the town’s economy was shattered.  The discussion participants included a social worker and a Ben Gurion University instructor, both of whom lived in Sderot, and many others whose lived touched on Sderot in a number of ways.  The question was: what should the Israeli government do to stop rockets being launched across the border?  And the opinions varied, just like the opinions in the Churchill play vary.

But I remember a man sitting in the back row of the discussion room.  In his 40s, I would guess, he was a large, muscular looking individual, with a close cut, military hair cut.  He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt; he face was angular and determined looking.  He introduced himself as a member of the IDF reserves, who was (or had been, I am not sure which) high in the ranks of the IDF southern command.  He stated his opinion forcefully.  The government was putting the residents of Sderot in a danger which could be avoided.  Again paraphrasing, he said:  “They should let us go in.  They should turn us loose.  We could resolve this problem.  It would be done quickly.  We know what weapons there are (and they have more than just Kassams) and we know where they are.  If they let us loose, we would destroy the weapons; the problem would be behind us.  They are simply cowards.”

I am sure he believed everything he said.  Eventually, the government did turn the IDF loose.  At the time, I believed it was not the wrong thing to do.  I never anticipated attacking Gaza City (bombs had not come from there), or a large ground assault.  I don’t know whether the man in the back row anticipated this or not.  But once again, the Israelis proved that they can start a war easier than they can end a war.  How much has been accomplished?  And at what costs.

My second contribution comes from friends in Israel, and particular our friends’ two oldest sons, now I think 15 and 13.  They were against the war.  Their family members are all what are considered “Lefties” in Israeli terms (another “L” word).  I read their Facebook reports of their experiences as the fighting continued.  In their public schools in Modiin, a new community between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (on the site of the town where the Maccabees lived), they told of the difficulties that they had in school as “lefties”.  Their 13 and 15 year old classmates were by and large speaking exactly as Caryl Churchill’s last character spoke.  And, from what I have read elsewhere, this is not atypical for Israeli schoolchildren today.

Thirdly, I would like to address the one Palestinian-American in the audience last night.  He spoke in a not unfriendly tone, but wanted the audience to be aware that it was not only Gaza that caused the problem, but also the West Bank and Lebanon, and on and on.  I agree with that.

But there is another side to this, as well.  There were armed attacks in 1948 and 1967 and 1973 and on and on.  There are suicide bombers.  There are the Kassams.  There is the extraordinarily vile language spoken too often not only by the Arab man in the street in the Middle East, but by governmental officials and by government supported press, and taught in government/religious schools.

I thought that the Churchill play was in fact rather sympathetic to the Jewish adults trying to figure out what to tell to the unseen daughter(s).  And, as I said, I think it fairly accurate.  I wonder if an equally accurate play depicting Palestinian adults deciding what to tell their children would not sound even more horrific.

Before the reading of “Seven Jewish Children”, there was a full performance of Motti Lerner’s play, “Benedictus”, a 70 minute one-act drama, about an impending United States attack on Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons, in order to avoid Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, and the reactions of three individuals, an Israeli arms dealer born in Tehran, a powerful but currently out office Iranian politician who was a boyhood friend and co-revolutionary with the arms dealer, and an American ambassador.  They are each trying to avert the war (or are they?), and developing ways to do this (or are they developing ways to make sure that they will fail to avert the war?).  Somewhat (but only somewhat) farfetched, to be sure, but with extraordinary dialogue.  Every position that is stated is turned on its head by the listener, over and over again.  There is no trust, or rather each thinks that they can understand when and how to read the positions of the others and turn it to their advantage.  They fail abysmally.

But they aren’t major players.  They may be trying to avert the war, they may be simply playing out their own issues (they each have grievences against each other from years gone by), who knows.  But they aren’t going to stop the war, even assuming that it is the one thing that they want to do.

So it is with the characters in “Seven Jewish Children”.  They can’t stop a war, either.  All they can do is get angry, and bitter, and sad, and frustrated, and confused.  And that is what happens.

Opening Night at the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival: “Gyumri” (4 cents)

This is a film festival sponsored by People in Need, a Czech NGO, and held under the auspices of Vaclav Havel.  A major festival each year in Prague, it also travels the world and is this week in Washington.  Last night we went to opening night to see a new documentary titled “Gyumri”.

In fact, we did not know we were going to a film festival; we thought we were just going to a movie.  But a representative of the Czech Embassy and one of the leaders of People in Need spoke, as did the director of the film.

People in Need was formed in 1988, when three young friends, drinking beer, heard about the earthquake in Armenia and the international response, and decided that Czechoslovakia should participate.  They petitioned the still Communist government, which contacted the still Soviet government, and started a campaign to collect clothes, blankets and so forth.  Thinking it was a one-shot affair, they little knew that twenty years late, People in Need would have  a staff of about 250, and be involved in social service activities in over 40 different countries.

Gyumri is the second largest city in the Republic of Armenia, and was one of those hit hardest by the 1988 earthquake.  All in all, 25,000 Armenians died, apparently almost 1/3 of them children, often caught in school which, like the Chinese school that collapsed last year, were very poorly constructed.  The focus of the movie was on families who lost children in the earthquake, and the children they had post-quake, whom they often gave the same names as their no longer living children had.

The film runs for a little more than an hour.  It was completed last year, after four years of interviews and filming, and contains some earthquake destruction scenes, as well as the contemporary ones.  It is a very unpleasant film to sit through, but pleasantries are not its goal, and I think it succeeds very well in telling a story.

I realize that there are things that I just don’t think about after a major catastrophe like this.  I don’t think about how the parents of killed children cope in the years and decades ahead.  How they are so often scarred for life, living in the past, dreaming about what could have been.  I certainly never think about the children who were born after the quake, who know about their dead siblings, who feel compared to them, who feel connected to them, who live with a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt, even though they were not even there at the time to become survivors.  It is the agony of the survivors, and the confusion of their children that will stick with me from this film.  And because you can look at so many analogous situations:  war, famine, tsunami, Holocaust, and so on, I think it is an important, and too often unconsidered, aspect of the tragedy.

There are six more films to be shown over the next three days.  We will be unable to attend any of them because of usual schedule crowding.  But I am sure that those who do will be well rewarded.

The Holocaust in Greece

Greece lost the vast majority of its 75,000 Jews in the Holocaust.  The largest segment of the Jewish population (between 40,000 and 50,000) lived in Salonika, a coastal city in northeast Greece, which had been home to the largest single population of Sephardic Jews in the world, Ladino speaking Jews who were welcomed to this city by the Turkish Sultan, and who enjoyed a cultural flowering under Turkish and then Greek rule.

During the early years of World War II, most of Greece was occupied by Italy, but this northern segment of Greek Macedonia was German occupied, with a significant amount of Greek collaboration.  Scholar Andrew Apostolou spoke on “The Holocaust in Salonika” last night at the Magen David Sephardic Synagogue in Rockville before an audience of perhaps 200.  An Oxford scholar, Apostolou gave a very informative and intelligible presentation, saying that while the Greeks like to speak of the horrible occupation (which it was) and how the Christians tried to help the Jews, that research on what happened in Salonika does not bear this out for the most part.  There were many Greek collaborators (in fact it could almost be said that the Salonikans invited the Germans in); there was much Christian indifference; and there were some instances of Christian aid to the many Jews of the city.  Further, he pointed out, that Christian aid to the Jews was not without great risk.  In addition to the 45,000 Jews who were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 (after several years of increasingly severe restrictions), there were 15,000 non-Jewish Greeks who were killed as “reprisals” during the German occupation of Salonika.  To be sure, most of these were not killed because they helped Jews, but any sort of protest could turn deadly.  Nevertheless, he said, there were some protests; he cited university protests against decreasing student aid as an example.

Contrasted with the Jewish experience in Salonika, was the experience of the 275 Jews on the island of Zakynthos, a small island off the larger island of Corfu.  These were not Sephardic Jews of Spanish origina, but were Romaniot Jews, who had been in Greece probably since Greco-Roman times.  They were Greek speakers, not Ladino, and therefore impossible to distinguish from the remaining inhabitants.  The island population saved all 275 Jews; they simply refused to turn them over, they refused to give their names to the German occupiers (eventually, the Italian occupation was replaced by a harsh German occupation); they hid them for years in farm houses scattered about the island.

The story was a fascinating one.  The mayor and the bishop, when required to give names to the Germans, submitted a list of two names, their own.  When told by the Germans that the Jews were dangerous and were potential perpetrators of sabotage, they demurred and said that the Germans should worry about the Greeks, not the Jews.  And not one Greek on the island turned in one Jew during the entire time of the occupation.

After the war, most of the Jews (who were by and large impoverished at that time), left the island to go to Athens or to Palestine, and the remainder were scattered after an enormous earthquake in the early 1950s destroyed the main city, but they remain close to the island today, visiting back and forth.  The mayor and the bishop meanwhile have been honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

The Zakynthos story was told in a new documentary film, “Song of Life”, which tells the story, and interviews the survivors.  It has some beautiful moments, although the film itself could, I think, have been edited one more time.

Last year at the Jewish Film Festival of Washington, another documentary was shown, this one a Swiss made film called simply “Salonica”, which showed how little of Jewish Salonika remains, and what it had been like.

Quite a contrast between the two.  And it shows what, perhaps, could have been done differently to avoid the calamity that occurred.  Or perhaps that is just wistful thinking.  Perhaps everything was inevitable, and always will be.

An Overdue Reprise of the Week that Was

1.   The Cat.  On Wednesday, we noticed that Windie was walking very strangely, his back legs dragging along, and that he had become very lethargic.  Thursday evening was spent at the vet, and Windie checked in for an overnight stay, having his matted hair shaved down, and being diagnosed with an overactive thyroid.  The prescription:  medicine by bill or liquid injection twice a day.  He doesn’t seem to understand the routine (or rather I should say he doesn’t seem to appreciate the routine).  But it gives us bookend for our days, something to do morning and night.

2.  The restaurants.  After shying away from restaurant eating for a while, I had dinner out three times last week.  First, at Cafe Deluxe in Bethesda, which was very very good, and quite crowded to my surprise.  The four of us had scallops, ahi tuna, roasted chicken, and a vegetarian plate of sides.  Second, at Saigon Bistro on P Street, a new inexpensive restaurant which has received good reviews.  I found it disappointing.  Or perhaps fried rice was not the thing to order in what is primarily a pho house.  Saturday, Grenville Moore’s on H Street, which was, as always, excellent.  Mussels, fries and Belgian beer.

3.  The theater.  “Marisol” by Jose Rivera, at the Forum Theatre.  A play of the Apocalypse.  God is old and senile, and can’t keep anything in control, and apparently has lost interest.  The angels plan a revolt.  The times will be chaotic.  Cities will fall.  Economies will tumble.  Illness and poverty will be rampant.  Poor Marisol, fighting her way up from the Bronx with a professional job, finds herself abandoned by her guardian angel (who is off to fight) and left on her own amidst the chaos.  The play was apparently written with the new millenium in mind, in 1999 or so, but is just as appropriate (or more so) today, when things really do seem to be barely holding on.  It is a weird play (obviously), and to me not particularly satisfying.  I kept reflecting on Thornton Wilder’s apocalyptic “The Skin of Our Teeth”, which I think handles the end of civilization much more deftly.  That said, Vernonica del Cerro and Patrick Bussink gave first class performances, which is not to be taken for granted in a play where the Marisol character faces so many different challenges, and Bussink plays so many different characters.  Glad I went?  Sure.  See it again?  Nah.

4.  The Lectures.  A good deal of the weekend was taken up with three lectures by Professor/Rabbi Max Ticktin as scholar in residence at Adas Israel.  The first lecture, on Hebrew poetry, concentrated on Yehuda Amachai more than anyone else.  Ticktin, who is always so engaging, talked about the fragmentation of Israeli society, and how it seems to be held together by language more than anything else, and how poetry is the expression of that language.  He said that, in the 1950s, when Israel was more homogeneous and settled, its poetry seemed to reflect society.  Today, there are so many societies that such can no longer be the case.  The Saturday lecture was on Hebrew literature, which I thought was the least successful of the three.  Hebrew prose did not really exist, he said, prior to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, and he divided the literature of the country into two phases, first through 1977, and secondly, until the present.  He talked about the centrality of the Bible to much Hebrew literature, even when the writer is secular, and not religious.  Sunday morning, the topic was Yiddish literature, and Ticktin gave an interesting picture of Warsaw between the two world wars, when the city had over 300,000 Jews of every stripe, and Yiddish prose, poetry and cinema were so abundant.  He concentrated on the poetry of Isaac Manger, who wrote in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s, before leaving Poland, dispirited by the turn of events, to settle in London, New York and Israel before dying at a relatively young age.

5.  The books.  A confusing book week.  I am trying to read the next volume of the diaries of Viktor Klemperer, surviving in Dresden in 1942-1945, but am having trouble because the print is so small.  Really small.  Like every page should be two pages.  Which means that the 600 pages should be 1200.  I will tough it out, but it will take time.  So, in the meantime, I have diverted myself to a number of other things, like the first chapters of the memoirs of diplomat George Ball (which is very well written), a story by friend Michael Greenberg published in a book entitled “Tel Aviv Stories”, Andre Maurois’ biography of Benjamin Disraeli, and a number of magazines.  I tried to read Defiance, by Nechama Tec, the book about the Bielski resistance that was the basis of the movie, but for some reason, could not continue; the book (at least at first) was a bit too stiff.

6.  The cousins.  We had pizza (Pete’s Pizza in Columbia Heights; I had hoped for better) and more Belgian beer with my newly found second cousin, and discussed family trees and the St. Louis that was.  Nice time.

The upcoming week has restaurants, theater, movies, book sales, lectures, different cousins and more.  Bet you can’t wait.

Putting Retention Bonuses in Perspective (one cent)

Retention bonuses do have their place, you know.  Particularly for businesses in trouble, even businesses in bankruptcy.  A simple example:  a business is being liquidated in bankruptcy.  The task is to maximize the amount of funds available for creditos.  This means collecting from customers who owe money.  The business has an employee who has an excellent relationship with the customers and a good track record collecting receivables.  But this employee needs to find another job, with a company not in liquidation.  The trustee in bankruptcy approaches the employee with an offer:  stay with us for the next six months and, if you do, in addition to your regular salary, we will give you 10% of what you collect, or we will give you an additional $25,000.  Something like that.  It happens all the time, and not only is there nothing wrong with it, it has only positive aspects.

So, if the task of AIG is to wind down certain entanglements created by its hedge fund operation, and if this requires time and expertise, and if the individuals at the company have not been personally involved in illegal activities, there is nothing wrong with saying:  stay for the next six months (or longer if it takes longer) and wind down this business for us and if you succeed (presumably within certain parameters), you will get a retention bonus of $XXXX.   There is nothing wrong with that, either.

With the exception of how much money $XXXX is.  If it is not $25,0000, or $50,000, but is instead $1 million, or $3 million, that seems outrageous.

Now it doesn’t bother me that the funds are coming from TARP or other federal funds.  Afterall, federal funds are used to pay salaries, among other things, and if a retention bonus is the equivalent of a salary (i.e., funds paid to someone for accomplishing a bank of work), that is OK.  But again when it gets to seven figures……..

Apparently, AIG management at the time saw nothing wrong with the arrangement, and even thought it beneficial.  Apparently, the FED and the Treasury Department agreed.

What is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong is not AIG, but the general compensation level of those involved in the investment banking and financial services businesses over the past decade or more.  Similar retention arrangements were made at other institutions, and would have been made presumably at many others, if they were in AIG’s position. For the recipients of the money, it seemed normal that they should earn this much.  For those who paid, or approved the payments, it seemed normal they should pay this much.

Top executive salaries, and the salaries of those who are not top executives, but who share in the responsibility for assuring that their business organizations made scads of money, have received their share of criticism, to be sure.  But no one did anything about it.

Now, perhaps someone will.   And not only with regard to AIG.  I do not believe anyone should be permitted to make this amount of money, as a retention bonus or otherwise.  The way to discourage that may simply be to put a confiscatory tax on earnings over, say, $1 million per year (subject to inflationary adjustments), or to preclude employers from deducting salaries paid above this level.  In addition, payments in stock or stock options would also have to be controlled.

The arguments against seem to be:  you don’t want to punish entrepreneurship (I don’t think this would discourage anyone, other than those whom we don’t want to encourage).  It is against the American way (balderdash!).  The government is incapable of regulation (this is not regulation; it is simply an income tax code adjustment.)

At any rate, this is my quick and dirty opinion.  (One day, I’ll also write about my support for earmarks.)

Help!! I Can’t Keep it All Straight.

My passwords and my userids for my office email account, my two gmail accounts, my yahoo account, my bank accounts, my two blog accounts, my facebook account, my twitter account, my Delicious account, my Ebay account, my Paypal account, my Smithsonian account, my Dinnerbroker account, my National Law Journal account, my Washington Post account, my New York Times account, my Ancestry account, my Flickr account, my Snapfish account, my NAHMA account, my NLHA account, my Pacer account, my Hilton account, my Mariott account, my American Airlines account, my Delta account, my Southwest account, my AARP account, my HDR account, my Postini account, my Kodak account, my Ritzpix account, my Best Western account, my Lexis account, my AllRegs account, my Orbitz account, my Expedia account, my Travelocity account, my Hotels.com account, my Hertz account, my Amtrak account, my NW Airlines account, my hotwire account, my Consumer Reports account, my Consumer checklist account, my Amazon account, my Borders account, as well as the many other accounts that I don’t even recall that I have.

“The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage”

The Flying Camel is not a very well known book, perhaps, but it is one that everyone should read.  It is a series of essays by 18 women, most of whom now live the United States, about the experiences of non-European Jewish women in their home countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco), in Israel, in France and in the United States.  Some of the essays are personal narratives, some sociological analyses, some a combination of the two.  After reading each essay, I wanted to sit down and talk to the author.  That is not my normal reaction.

The narratives can be hair raising (I would be perhaps a little suspicious if I was not familiar with a very analogous story of a friend whose family emigrated from Tunisia), not only as to how their families were treated in their home countries, but also in Israel, and to an extent in the United States.  In each location, these women and their families were treated as “outsiders”, outsiders to Moslem culture, and outsiders to European-centered culture in Israel and the United States.

I am not going to try to describe the contents of these short pieces (the entire book is 230 pages), only to say that they are important to read not only as a description of the family histories or life histories of the authors, but also as examples of the omnipresent, invidious and often subtle effects of prejudice, in its many varieties.

If you can find The Flying Camel, please pick it up (softcover, Seal Press, 2003).  It makes no difference if you are North African or Middle Eastern, if you are Jewish, or if you are a woman.

“The Civil War: A Musical Tribute”

This is the name of the show opening at Ford’s Theater next week. Am I the only one that thinks this name is both weird and offensive?