The Capture of Adolf Eichmann, a/k/a Ricardo Klement (20 cents)

On Thursday, I went to see Neal Bascomb talk about his new book, Hunting Eichmann, at the Spy Museum.  I had no thought of buying the book, but I thought the conversation would be interesting.  It was beyond interesting and, yes, I did put down my $27.50 and bought a copy of the book, which I have now read.  While I wouldn’t call Hunting Eichmann the best written book I have ever read, the subject matter was fascinating.

Eichmann, as you probably know, was in charge of “the Final Solution”, which extermination of the Jewish people during World War II.  But not many people knew this at the time, although in 1944 his role in Hungary became quite visible.  But as more was learned after the war ended, his pivotal role became obvious.  And there were those who wanted to find him and make him pay for his crimes.

Of course, there were others who felt differently.  Not only neo-Nazis, but those who felt that Germany had to move foward after the Nurnberg trials, and that further routing out of Nazis would be too disruptive and involve too many people.  Similarly, for a period of time, Israel had other problems to deal with.  And the United States, having just recruited German scientists to immigrate to the U.S., did not want to get too heavily involved either.

And, Eichmann had disappeared.  Living under an assumed name, he was living in Northern Germany taking menial jobs, and then, in the early 1950s, arranged an escape to Argentina.  All of this is detailed in the book, as is how his identity was first suspected (his son inadvertantly befriended a German Jewish girl, not knowing she was Jewish).

Eventually, a German jurist, Simon Wiesenthal, and David Ben-Gurion decided he should be captured, assuming his identity could be confirmed.  Israel took the lead (in fact, keeping the others out of the loop), mounting an extraordinarily complex operation to confirm that he is Eichmann, to capture him, to hold him in a safe house, and to secrete him out of Argentina to Israel.  And it worked, Eichmann being transferred to Israel, tried and executed.

The Eichmann capture was the biggest operation that Mossad had then ever attempted, and it went a long way to lead to the reputation of Israel’s external espionage agency.  As I am now reading the latest espionage thriller by Daniel Silva, Moscow Rules, the latest adventure of Mossad superstar Gabriel Allon, I realize how the mystique of the Mossad captures the imagination.

Accurate or not, I don’t know.  But the Mossad’s swagger colors a lot of thinking about Israel, inside the country and out, and it leads to a fair amount of arrogance which either serves, or misserves, the country, depending on your point of view.

If Only It Weren’t Free…..

I would not read The Washington Examiner at all, but it is free so it often becomes the newspaper of choice when you sit down over a cup of coffee in the morning at a cafe.

Putting aside its horrific right-wing editorial policy (and equally horrific right-wing columnists) for today, however, let’s take a look at some of the accomplishments of our fellow human beings:

1.  Waiters at Clyde’s of Gallery Place, M & S Grill, 701 Restaurant and several others have apparently been paid $20 for each credit card number that they gave to three individuals, who had used the credit cards to purchase $750,000 of goods and services.

2.  A Maryland suburbanite was sentenced for counterfeiting $50 bills.  His equipment was purchased with other counterfeit bills he had previously made.

3.  A New Jersey man pled guilty to illegal transporting to New York and New Jersey from Virginia 15,000,000 untaxed cigarettes.

4.  Two teenagers poured sulfuric acid on a playground slide; their parents’ homeowners’ policies had to pay extensive damages to the family of a young boy who was severely burned.

5.  At the Fuji Mountain restaurant in Temple Hills, on Thursday nights (but only from 8:30 to 9:30), ladies can get free drinks and free “wasabi peas”.  The FM ad makes it clear, though, that the free wasabi peas are only “while supplies last.”

6.  It strikes me odd (looking at another ad) that the Gilbert Small Arms Range would choose to be located on “Terminal Road”.

7.  And, then there is the Urban Country furniture ad, which says that its sale will onlly run another ten days and will end on May 31.  Today is May 28.

8.  A defense contractor in Iraq pled guilty to bidding an excessive amount, so that a competing bid would be selected, with the winning bidder paying the excessive bidder a commission for its services.

9.  In New Mexico, after an automobile accident in which her father was killed, a 7 year old drove the vehicle for help.

OK, so we can’t ignore the right wing slant completely.  Did you know that….

1.  The FCC is going to probe Arbitron ratings because the ratings favor right-wing talk shows?

2.  The media are supporting Obama’s policies because they know they will be destroyed by big government if they don’t?

3.  The Chrysler dealerships that are being closed are all owned by Republicans, and that is how they were chosen?

4.  Obama chose Tuesday as the day to announce his Supreme Court nominee only because he thought it would get North Korea off the front page?

5.  If Sotomayor were not Hispanic, she would not have been considered for the nomination?

6.  Women’s happiness appears to be in inverse relationship to the amount of equality they have with men?

7.  The appointment of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as State Department chief legal advisor means that we will be giving up our sovereignty in favor of international controls, and they we may wind up ratifying such awful treaties as the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Greene and Greene (11 cents)

Charles and Henry Greene were brothers, who designed homes and their furnishings and interiors in California in the earliest years of the 20th century.  Their style is called American Art and Craft style, and was heavily influenced by William Morris and John Ruskin, by Japanese design, by Stickley and his Mission Style, and I think also perhaps by Tiffany and by Europe’s art deco and art nouveau.  Their work is on display at the Renwick Museum.  The show has photographs of the houses, a large number of beautiful wood furniture pieces, a number of design details, and a video focusing on ten existing houses, with their heavy reliance on wood and other natural materials.

Below are images, not from the show, to give you an idea:

Witness to an Extraordinary Event

Tuesday, a little afternoon, I am crossing Lafayette Park on the diagonal.  It is chilly and drizzling, and the park is uncrowded.

A small girl, 5 or 6 years old, is chasing a dark brown squirrel.  She is holding a pink camera, probably a throw-away camera.  She wants to take the squirrels picture.

The squirrel runs away.  It probably was not running as fast as a squirrel can run, but she was only a little girl.  She seemed to be running almost as fast as the squirrel, calling to it as she went along.  The squirrel ran to and up a tree, stopping on a branch.  The squirrel looked at the girl; the girl looked at the squirrel.

The girl stood still.  The squirrel comes down the tree and walks out onto a root.  The squirrel is now about two feet from the girl.  The squirrel sits and stares as the girl.  The girl raises her camera and takes a picture.  I could tell, it was a perfect picture of the squirrel.  After the click of the camera, the squirrel slowly turned away and went back up the tree.  The girl ran towards her mother yelling “I got his picture.  I got his picture”.

The mother will not believe it when she sees itl.

Just a few things I had not reported on before (3 cents)

The Concert.  The Tuesday concert at the Church of the Epiphany, a piano recital by English pianist Anthony Adkins, his first American concert.  Ravel, Chopin, Alwynn and Faure.  Very enjoyable, particularly the Faure, which was the transposition of a piece originally written for the harp.  Many notes, and the piano was more harp-like than you could imagine.

The Peace Cafe.  A Sunday morning program at Busboys and Poets, one of a lengthy series bringing together different voices on the middle east, this time with Mohammed Sawalha, professor of linguistics at An-Naja University and founder of the Palestinian House of Friendship.  Committed to peace, yet his conversation is basically:  we want peace, but look at those Israelis.  If only they would leave us completely alone, we would all be friends.  There would be no problems.  A little simplistic, I thought.  But perhaps you cannot accept much more on either side.

Jewish Month at the Library of Congress.  I am not sure why May is Jewish month, but it is, and there have been a number of programs on Jewish topics.  I have attended three:  one on the history of Jews in Ethiopia by a former curator of the National Museum of Ethiopia, Yohannes Zeleke; one on Nazi Propoganda (art work, film, etc.); and one on the history of Jewish Washington and Jewish Alexandria during the civil war.  I found the third program to be the best.  The propoganda program was, I thought, designed for a much less knowledgable audience, and the Ethiopian program was too helter-skelter.

The Book.  The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli, a member of the Nicaraguan upper class, a poet, and an underground, and then exiled, and then public Sandanista.  Interesting viewpoint of the Sandanista defeat of the Samoza dictatorship, of the difficulty in determining what Sandanista governing policy should be, and of the eventual defeat of the movement.  Meetings with the Castro brothers, with other Latin American leaders, and leaders from the USSR and even Vietnam, all of interest.  But then there was Belli herself, someone I did not like at all, driven as much by her sexual urges as by her political considerations.  If you thought, like in the movies, that rebel movements were as much about sleeping around as anything else, this book will prove you right.  That she walked out on two husbands, after having been unfaithful to both.  That she went into exile, leaving her children behind and presumably giving them little thought.  She did marry a third time, this time to an American journalist, so that in the aftermath of the Sandanista years, she was able to live in California, and go back to Managua for visits.  Ugh.

Restaurants.  Nothing new.  Shanghai Garden and Indique.  Both good.

And.  A memorial day picnic, our Israeli houseguest, helping our neighbors plan a trip to Barcelona and our friends a trip to Turkey, taking the car to the body shop, watching “The Big Lebowski” on DVD, and trying to read the newspapers every day.  Oh, yes, and occasional work.

A Quick Pennsylvania Jaunt (2 cents)

We left our home in Washington DC on Saturday at about 10 in the morning; we were home by 8 that evening.  We drove north through Frederick, into the Cataoctin Mountains, past Camp David and Thurmont, MD, into Emmitsburg, and then across the state line into Pennsylvania.  We toured a number of small towns, such as Waynesboro, Mercersburg, McConnellsburg, Greencastle and Chambersburg.  We crossed back in MD, had supper at the Shamrock in Thurmont (we have eaten there on other occasions) and drove back home.

Here are the highlights:

1.  There is some extraordinarily beautiful scenery, both in the Catoctin Mountains shortly after you cross into the state, and in the Appalachian Mountains that you cross (zigzagging up and down) to get into and out of McConnellsburg.

2.  There is at least one farm where they breed registered Texas Longhorn cattle – what a surprise to see them on the other side of the fence.

3.  On Memorial Day weekend, everyone is having a yard sale.  The surprising thing is how much junk people gather over time.

4.  There are many very, very fat people in this part of the world.  What a shame.

5.  There are still large used book stores in most of the more sizeable towns.  My guess is that the rent is dirt cheap, and most of the sales happen on-line and not from walk-ins or regular customers.

6.  While most towns seem to have downtown places to eat comfortably, Waynesboro is the exception.  We had a nice lunch at the Hoover, located in an old house, but out of the main business area.

7.  There are at least two chocolate candy factories in Waynesboro.  We bought some candy at Zoe’s, at their “outlet store”.

8.  We stopped at a farm where they had an extensive collection of antiques for sale outside – mainly old kitchen and farm implements.  But they only sell on Memorial Day weekend.  That’s it.  The sign, as you leave, says “see you next year”.

9.  There are Chinese and Mexican restaurants everywhere.  We saw few people who looked either Chinese or Mexican.

10.  These places have all seen better days.  Some towns today are in better apparent shape than others.  But the historical architecture is still there – if there were only the people to fix them up and support them.

All in One Night

Three dreams:

The Office.  I was in my office, but went out of the building to watch them pour a concrete floor for the building under construction next door.  The process was very interesting, but I needed to get back up work.  I went up the elevator, into the suite, and to my own office.  I looked in, but did not recognize the furniture or anything on the walls.  I looked at the surrounding offices.  One had two people in it whom I did not recognize; the other had its door closed, but I knew it was not mine.  I was both perplexed and worried.  I asked a (male) secretary where my office was.  I was very embarrassed.  He said:  I have a chart here; let me look.  He looked.  I was nowhere on the chart.

The Performance.  My wife and I had agreed to be in a short skit.  I think it was part of a show for charity.  There were a number of skits.  We arrived for the rehearsal, which was to be held just before the actual performance.  The building looked like an old, large parking garage, but I think I thought it was the back, working space of the theater.  There were handmade signs on the wall, pointing in the direction of the precise rehearsal space for the various skits.  Ours pointed up a steel vertical ladder which was affixed to a wall.  It was a very tall ladder, was obstructed at the base, and did not seem to have a door at the top.  To the right, maybe thirty feet away was a stairwell.  I thought maybe this would get us at least to the right level.  We went up the stairs and were in a cavernous room filled with actors (?) all dressed like they were members of the Washington Nationals.  As we walked across this space in the general direction of where I thought the ladder might end up, all of a sudden a strong shock went through me as I realized that I had never looked at the script and had no idea what my lines were.

The Accident.  I was driving with two friends.  The car had been rented by one of them, but I was doing the driving.  The car was stopped, facing a wall.  It was dark.  I said:  why are we just stopped like this?  We need to get back.  They agreed, I backed up the car, and went on my way.  Soon I saw we were driving next to a beautiful forest green Lamborghini.  But it was coming very close, almost sideswiping us, staying close even as we turned corners.  Then it hit us.

We were in the waiting room of the hospital, but not because we were hurt.  We were there to see someone.  I was reading a large pamphlet-like magazine.  It had a full page picture of a Congressman, and talked about how he had accused his wife of infidelity, and left her.  The woman from the Lamborghini appeared in the hospital waiting room.  She was tall, in her 40s, fairly attractive, dressed very expensively, including a forest green cloth hat.  She looked at me and said:  I am so depressed; I am sorry I hit you; I know it was all my fault.  A short young man got up to move her away into another room.  I knew he was concerned about her confession.  I also knew that she was the Congressman’s wife.  She kept talking and looked at me and said:  I know you are connected with the lawyer.  I thought that she had some relationship with my ex-brother in law, although he is not a lawyer.  She feinted.  A crowd gathered around her; no one knew what to do.  I said:  this is a hospital; there must be a doctor around.  Her friend said:  But she is not a patient.  A gray haired man in a doctor’s white coat said:  To us, everyone is a patient, and he went to treat her.  He smiled at me as he went out.  I looked at the wall.  There was a mural there advertising the hospital.  The man in the white coat was in the mural, smiling the same smile.

Et in Arcadia Ego (6 cents)

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia has been held over at the Folger until late June; if possible, go see it.  But if you see it, read it first.

There are some plays where you don’t want to know what happens until you are surprised in the last act.  There are others,  which tend to be the better ones, where knowing the play not only fails to detract from your enjoyment, but actually adds to it.  Arcadia is this type of play.

It takes place in one room in an English country house.  But while the location stays the same, the time varies, from the early 19th century, to the late 20th.  In the late 20th century, a duo of duelling academics are trying to understand what happened at the house 150 years earlier.  Like all good historians, they do their research, the pose questions to themselves which they answer to their satisfaction, all the pieces fit, and they are 100% wrong.  But we are the only ones who know that, as we were there in 1809.

And, we also know that, in 1809, a 13 year old girl was making extraordinary mathematics discoveries, discoveries that may lead to a complete mathematical model for the universe.  But they were too sophisticated for her time; they could only be verified and made useful through modern computer technology, obviously unavailable at the time.  At the same time, at the house of her parents, poetry was in the air – her tutor, a house guest/poet, and even Lord Byron.

Arcadia is an extraordinary play.  Profound thoughts.  Complex interconnections.  Time.  Continuity.  The repitition of history.  The invention of history.  The extraordinary capacity of the human mind.  The extraordinary limitations of the human mind.  And, at the same time, drama, mystery, sex, and comedy worthy of Oscar Wilde and the best of French farces.

“Et in Arcadia Ego” – paintings by Poussin, the basis of alternative history books, such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail.  A phrase on a tomb:  “And I too lived in Arcadia”.  Don’t discount what I have been, because I am now buried in this tomb.

A great play; a classic of the future.  A great production, with a very strong cast.

Courtyards, Hidden Away

The Roma restaurant of Cleveland Park has probably been closed for 30 years.  Located on the block across from the Uptown Theater, it served Italian food and had a garden in back for outdoor summer eating.  I always wondered what happened to the garden, thinking it long destroyed.

This morning, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a “Morning Glory” muffin at Firehooks Bakery in Cleveland Park, a place I frequent infrequently.  As I was paying, I noticed there was a back door, and it looked like a table outside.  I asked if there was a place to eat in back, and was told there was.  Exiting the bakery, I was astonished, because I was back in the Roma and it hadn’t changed a bit.  This fenced garden is not small; it is quite a large space.  The tables and outdoor wooden booths were all still there.  The fountain was still there.  The trellises and grape vines were all there.  Even the mural on the wall of the adjoining building and the four letters, ROMA, were there.  Who knew?

Later, I found myself in Georgetown.  At about 12:30, I decided to get a light lunch, and saw a small carry-out cafe called Bean Counter, very unpretentious, the kind of a place you probably wouldn’t walk into unless you were really looking for a simple, unpretentious lunch.  It looked more like a carryout than anything else; I only say two tables.  I asked for a turkey sandwich and some water.  As I was paying, I saw out the back door. It looked like another outdoor eating space.  I asked how you got there; the back door was behind the counter.  You would have to walk through the kitchen, which was none too big to begin with.  I was told you go out the front door, and there was small alley (yes, Georgetown small, probably less than three feet wide, that takes you to the back of the building.  Only four or five tables.  Somewhat rickety.  A big friendly dog, tied up.  But pleasant and quiet.  The owners appear to be Turkish.  The man at the table next to me came to this country to work at the Turkish embassy; he was from near Izmir, and is planning on returning next year.  We had a brief, but interesting conversation in this small, but pleasant (and unpretentious) courtyard.  Again, who knew?

The Washington Nationals – a Unique Team for a Unique City

The Nationals are fast losing their fan base, which spells disaster not only for their lackluster owners, but for the city’s finances. They are in last place, as everyone knows, with the worst record in the majors, and a pitching staff that couldn’t support an average minor league team.

But look at the hitting statistics. Of the 16 teams in the National League, the Nats are 2nd in slugging, and 3rd in batting average, on base percentage, number of hits, number of runs scored, number of runs batted in, number of walks. They are 5th of 16 in home runs.

So, the combination of terrific offense, horrific pitching and, yes, sub-par fielding makes for very interesting baseball. The fans would be beating down the gates if only winning was not important. Is it?