July 29, 2008
Everyone's Got a Story
About twice a week I get e-mails from aspiring screenwriters that go something like this:
Dear Mr. Avrech:
I have a great idea for a movie, can I tell it to you? I just need someone to write it down for me. Are you available? Maybe we can collaborate and then split the profits.
Here's my response:
Dear Aspiring Writer:
No. No. And no.
Sometimes I just write a single “no.” Less is more, you know what I mean?
Okay, this response might appear a bit blunt, maybe even cruel, but that's how I roll because I'm your basic anti-social writer happiest when chained to my desk and laptop, spinning my Hollywood yarns.
And gee willikers, would an aspiring surgeon write to a physician claiming to have a great idea for surgery and generously offer to split the profits?
I don't think so.
Now, when I get these cyber proposals I have formulated a new response:
Dear Aspiring Writer:
Contact Mrs. Ruchama K. Feuerman.
Everyone's Got a Story is Mrs. Feuerman's collection of 41 short stories from Jewish writers.
Ruchama K. Feuerman, author of that fine novel Seven Blessings, has been conducting writing workshops for fifteen years, and this volume is, in itself, a kind of advanced workshop for writers. At the start of each section Mrs. Feuerman offers tips and exercises on how to unleash the inner writer.
Just one excellent sample:
When creating characters, it's vital to know what your main character wants—really, really wants—and what's his secret flaw.
This is basic stuff, for novelists, short story writers, and screenwriters, but believe me, I have slugged my way through too many books, and too many scripts where this basic dramatic law is ignored.
This volume is a goldmine of tips for writers—all are clearly stated and free of grad school jargon. Not once does Mrs. Feuerman refer to “deconstructing the narrative.”
Thank G-d.
Hey, even I was taking notes.
Interpolation
The other day I was talking to my agent and he was telling me how much he likes my latest script. I go: “You know what, I think I'm finally getting the hang of this screenwriting gig.”
And I wasn't being my usual snarky self, I really meant it.
I confess: yours truly is always learning how to be a better writer.
End Interpolation
Anyhoo.
These short stories are remarkable; the volume is chock full of tales that are, for the most part, ignored by mainstream secular publishers, stories that are intensely Jewish, stories that explore with elegance and depth, hidden corners of the Jewish world.
Here are a few characters we meet:
In The Interview by Pia Wolcowitz, a member of the Bobover Chasidic community, the daughter of survivors learns a valuable lesson as her parents are taped by a coolly efficient Holocaust videographer. A fine and subtle meditation on survival.
A young man's journey to observant Judaism begins with speeding cars in Tara Eliwatt's unexpected Racing for My Father.
Crafted like a mystical mini-thriller, Gila Arnold's The Star and the Crescent details the journey of a seminary girl in Jerusalem whose devotion to prayer eventually brings her face to face with the ultimate challenge—a homicide bomber.
Bitter Harvest reveals the torment and helplessness as a loving father witnesses the unimaginable: his son passes away before is eyes. This story, a wrenching memoir, was authored by Alan D. Busch, long time Seraphic Secret reader and commenter.
There are so many fine stories in this collection that I feel guilty in singling out so few for praise. In truth, every story is a gem and Mrs. Feuerman has done a brilliant job of collecting such high quality work. Everyone's Got A Story offers good reading, and a guide to better writing—all in one handsome volume. Highly recommended.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:23 AM | Comments (38)
April 29, 2008
Israel-Arab Reader
Seraphic Secret recommends this fine volume. We received it a few days before Pesach and during the holiday read close to half the book. The original documents are real eye openers. If you care about Israel, if you care about history and truth, well, this book is essential reading.
Seraphic Secret often links to Professor Rubin's articulate articles. We have an ongoing correspondence with the good professor about Israel, terrorism, strategy and yes, even movies and old time Hollywood. Thus, it's a distinct honor and pleasure to bring this excellent book to our reader's attention.
“THE ISRAEL-ARAB READER”
Seventh edition
Edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin
Now available from Penguin publishers is this new edition of one of the most highly respected, widely used reference books on the Middle East, documenting the Arab-Israel conflict and peace process from its inception to the present day.
The book provides almost 300 primary texts covering more than a century of history. It documents the British mandate and early attempts to handle the conflict; Israel's independence and the outbreak of wars; international diplomatic efforts to make peace including the 1990s’ peace process and its breakdown. Materials are presented reflecting the positions of Arab leaders and states, Europeans, Israel, Palestinians, the USSR, and the United States. The texts of international resolutions and agreements, as well as accords made during the peace process, are also provided.
The result is a comprehensive work suitable for reading, reference, and teaching.
To order click here: Buy Now!
For detailed information on this book, follow this link: GLORIA Publication Catalog
Hedy Lamarr strongly urges you to purchase The Israel-Arab Reader. Scan courtesy Dr. Macro.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:20 AM | Comments (9)
September 18, 2007
Jihadists Endorse Hillary and Barak
My favorite bit of comedy from the Democrats is that support for Israel is a bi-partisan issue.
This is a Big Lie.
True, there are Democrats who support Israel. But the party as a whole, has made a landslide plunge to the left, has swallowed the poison pills of multi-culturalism, and moral equivalence. In this toxic brew Jew/Israel-hatred has infiltrated the Democratic party like a virus. Just scan the threads of the Daily Kos to get a sense of this wretched all-consuming medieval mindset.
But the proof that the Democrats are not good for Israel, not good for America and are favored by jihadists everywhere is readily available.
It's so naked that the Democrats, many of them Jews—what a shock—are in total denial.
Ask the jihadists.
This from the Cinnamon Stillwell, one of 27 Conservatives in San Francisco.
Last week, I was lucky enough to receive an advance reading copy of WorldNetDaily.com Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein's soon to be released book, Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans—to a Jew!
While I haven't yet read the entire book, one particular chapter caught my eye. Noting how closely America's foes follow U.S. domestic politics, Klein interviewed a number of Palestinian and other assorted terrorists about their views on the 2008 presidential election. And guess who the terrorists endorse, above all others, for president? That's right. Hillary Clinton.
The chapter in question is titled, "Terrorists Go Ga-Ga Over Hillary Clinton," and indeed they do. They base their support on the belief that Hillary will pick up where her husband, former President Bill Clinton, left off, in regards to the failed Oslo Accords, thereby assisting them in their goal of annihilating Israel. They also base it on the understandable assumption that Hillary will effect a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which, they note, would be seen as an American defeat. In the process, the jihadists make a very strong case (at least for those are aren't on their side) for not following their advice.
Taking it a step further, the jihadists also endorse fellow presidential hopeful Barack Obama and heap praise upon the Democratic Party, and the left in general, for its, shall we say, rather weak-kneed approach to fighting terrorism. For Republicans, they have nothing but contempt. A badge of honor, if there ever was one.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, Jeremayakova
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:51 AM | Comments (14)
August 07, 2007
Celebrating the Warrior
I don't often do this but I'm reprinting an entire article from The New York Times. I'm surprised that they published this piece but I get the impression that Edward M. Rothstein has a great deal of editorial freedom.
In any case, the book he reviews and ponders The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West sounds fascinating and I've already ordered it. Rothstein muses on the necessity for the West to make ruthless war on the jihadists in order to triumph — an argument Seraphic Secret has made time and again. We urge all our readers to read this essay and we look forward to devouring the book that triggered such common sense thinking.
I have highlighted the passages in bold-type for they strike me as particularly powerful and relevant.
Reconsidering the Role of the Warrior in Our Post-Enlightenment World
by Edward M. Rothstein
August 6, 2007
In one of the final events of the recent Lincoln Center Festival, a lone Mongolian bard named Burenbayar came onstage and chanted The Secret History of the Mongols. He had memorized the 13th-century text during long hours grazing animals on the steppes of Central Asia. And as is true of many ancient sagas, he sang of arms and the man — that is, of warfare and heroism.
His subject was Genghis Khan, a conqueror of many peoples who was both barbarically ruthless and soulfully sentimental, reveling in revenge by tearing out an enemy’s heart and liver with his bare hands while also forgiving, again and again, the bloody treachery of an envious childhood friend. He was at all times a warrior whose goal was conquest and whose demands could not be assuaged, except by victory.
Almost every culture has such figures in their past, men like Odysseus, King David, Muhammad and Aeneas, whose triumphs were often attained through extreme, horrific battle. Such founding figures often also display powerful streaks of sensitivity and elevated vision along with prophetic abilities; on their broad chests and battle-readiness rest the later triumphs of their civilizations. But warriors don’t have to display such qualifying attributes; throughout history they are revered.
Except for now, it seems, and particularly in the West. Today we are so wary of the warrior that we would find it unthinkable to celebrate him with elaborate descriptions of the beheading or disemboweling of his enemies. Instead we think of the warrior as a fanatic, an extremist with a streak of the berserk.
In The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (Basic Books), a new book in which the idea of the fanatic warrior plays a central role, Lee Harris points out that the word berserk comes from Icelandic accounts of Norse warriors of the 12th century who were so fierce in battle they fought without armor and raged like wolves. They were called “berserksgangr.” These days we tend to think of all warriors as berserk.
It isn’t that we don’t recognize, at some level, a need for warriors. At least in our cinematic fantasies warrior heroes abound. But they are kept on a short leash; they need a license to kill. Though they keep testing constraints on acceptable behavior, when they violate them, people around them tend, as the films put it, to “die hard”; freelance warriors like those played by Bruce Willis pay a steep personal price.
It is a measure of how distant we are from the ancient Greeks, Mongols and Romans that the most complete contemporary incarnations of the warrior are supervillains. Such evildoers display, as their ancient models do, a fierce tribal loyalty; a scorn for any life that stands in their way; a blood lust that megalomaniacally affirms human expendability. “Do you expect me to talk?” James Bond asks Auric Goldfinger, who has strapped Bond to a table where a knifelike laser beam gradually approaches his crotch. The villain laughs in amazement and says: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”
We watch these figures or read about their exploits with a certain sense of superiority. We like to think we have transcended this kind of ruthlessness; we are no longer tribally bound, but universally concerned; we don’t imagine eliminating our enemies in battle, we imagine driving them to the bargaining table. The West, riven by tribal and religious wars for centuries, imagines that humanity is capable of overcoming that past. Genghis Khan has been superseded by Jimmy Carter. The world’s remaining barbarians, even those in our midst, will eventually come to learn the virtues of the Enlightenment, the powers of reason and the prospects of a democratic future.
On the other hand Mr. Harris’s arguments should give us pause. And his book demands close attention even by those who would mistakenly consider him another form of berserk. By taking a long view of history Mr. Harris argues that the modern view of how to vanquish enemies is based on false ideas: first, that history progresses; second, that it progresses toward greater influence of reason; and finally, that reason, through its powers, can overcome all opposition. Our smug disdain for the warrior, he suggests, is based on a mistaken view of the powers of modernity and the Enlightenment.
In Mr. Harris’s view these errors are affecting the crucial confrontations now taking place between jihadists and Western liberal culture. We keep straining, he says, to see terrorists as if they were just slightly more extreme versions of ourselves, reflecting our own convictions, as if the jihadist were advocating destruction in the name of a version of liberalism.
A Palestinian blows himself up in a pizza parlor, a Shiite drives a car bomb into a crowded plaza of Sunnis (or vice versa), videotapes display beheadings and Internet sites herald massacres. Such horrific deeds are taken almost as proof of suffering, poverty, frustration. The surest cure for terrorism, the argument goes, would be to ameliorate injustice; in the meantime violence can be curbed with well-considered policing.
But Mr. Harris suggests that the jihadist is more accurately thought of as a fanatic, a warrior of the old school, whose technique has been remarkably successful over the centuries. Such warfare accepts no rules other than fealty to the tribe and accepts no compromise other than victory. Islam, he points out, has made “permanent conquests in every part of the world into which it has expanded with only three exceptions: Spain, Sicily, and certain parts of the Balkans”: three areas where Islamic fanaticism was confronted with opposing fanaticism.
Mr. Harris argues that by failing to characterize Islamist warfare accurately, the West deludes itself, even employing another Enlightenment idea — tolerance — to grant harbor to those who seek to destroy it. And the West implicitly affirms that, in the end, reason will triumph.
But why? The Enlightenment had inordinate faith in itself and the evolutionary progress of history. But look closely at the few places in the world where these ideas have triumphed, Mr. Harris writes: their success is more fluke than destiny. Democracy and reason displaced warfare and fanaticism not because of their superior powers, but because of rare historical circumstances difficult to replicate (including, he argues, in Iraq). Their survival, far from being inevitable, is always tenuous; liberal societies will always need to live with war.
So Mr. Harris mounts a challenge, and even if we harbor less apocalyptic visions, that challenge is considerable. If we believe, as Mr. Harris affirms, that the societies that have arisen out of Enlightenment ideas, whatever their flaws, really are morally superior to others, if we are convinced that the values of the West are rare and crucial and fragile, then to what extent are we willing to make a stand on their behalf?
In the most extreme case, how does a liberal society embrace the practices of the warrior, which are inimical to its most fervent beliefs? Wouldn’t this destroy precisely what’s being defended? Mr. Harris can’t fully imagine the ways in which liberal society will evolve under such circumstances, but he believes we will soon need to find out. And one way or another somebody like Genghis Khan will be involved.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:45 AM | Comments (12)
July 29, 2007
Images Before the Shoah
The pictures, in black and white, are softly focused, but the images are sharp and striking.
These are our ancestors in Poland before the Holocaust. They are ordinary workers, scholars and doe-eyed schoolchildren; there are graves of holy Rabbis, the miraculous grave of a Polish nobleman who converted to Judaism, there's a yeshiva for young girls — I marvel at their fashionable haircuts. The photos of Polish synagogues are a revelation, each is a gem, a vernacular masterpiece — all destroyed by the Germans. These well educated Teutonic barbarians were not content to destroy Jewish lives, they were determined to stamp out every trace of authentic Jewish life. The Germans understood that Torah was and always will be the life-blood of the Jewish people.
The Jews of Poland were, for the most part, poor in material possessions, but their spiritual life was rich beyond imagination.
You gaze at these pictures and with each click of the cursor you want to reach through time and space and cry out a warning: “Jews, flee before it is too late; it is coming, a whirlwind of such terrible immensity that you and your entire world will be reduced to ashes.”
But of course, there is no rescue for this Jewish world — lovely faces, ordinary scenes, sublime architecture — frozen in grainy black and white.
It will all be wiped away: six million times.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, Mordechai Schiller
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:51 AM | Comments (13)
July 20, 2007
Wild Boys Into Men
Seraphic Friend Tony Woodlief has written a great pamphlet. I've read it—twice—and encourage all my readers to order this fine work, and support the The New Pamphleteer. This is a cutting-edge conservative enterprise whose work echoes the early political pamphlets circulated by Tom Paine and other great American figures.
How does a hapless 21st century dad raise three young sons to manhood without taming their natural wildness? Modern society seems more interested in turning wild boys into mild boys, rather than harnessing their natural aggressiveness in traditional male virtues like protecting the innocent and seeking justice. Author Tony Woodlief describes his near-obsessive quest to find books, toys, movies, and other resources that teach boys to develop their character without losing what he calls “The Cowboy Gene.” In the course of that struggle, he finds out the true meaning of fatherhood.
To read an excerpt and order this wonderful pamphlet, go to The New Pamphleteer, here.
Oh, and Tony recommends my novel The Hebrew Kid and the Apache Maiden as a book that should be read by boys — for it will help teach them how to be men.
Karen and I wish you all a lovely and meaningful Shabbos.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:41 PM | Comments (4)
Jane Can't Get Published
Observing the decline of Britain is a sad, infuriating spectacle. The great people who stood alone and fought so heroically when the rest of Europe was being swallowed by the Nazi conflagration is but a pale shadow of its former self.
Yes, now we have an island seething with intellectual Jew-haters who disguise their medieval venom under academic credentials by labeling it anti-Zionism.
This same mind-set has now seen fit to remove Winston Churchill from the grade school syllabus, and replace his towering political and moral genius with politically correct sludge.
The British government now in power, with Orwellian mastery, refuses to use the phrase "war on terror"—as do the Democrats in America—and to further enable the aggressive jihadists down the street, the words "Islamic terror" are officially banned from all official government communiques. As do the Democrats in America—unofficially.
Indeed, the first casualty in war is the truth.
If all that wasn't bad enough, we now learn that the British, whom we thought were at least well-read Jew-haters and appeasers, are also, sigh, illiterate.
Jane Austen, weep for your not so great Britain.
She might have sold millions of books in the past 200 years, but a daring experiment has found Jane Austen would struggle to secure a book deal today.
David Lassman, a frustrated author and director of the Jane Austen Festival in the English town of Bath, sent off manuscripts featuring several chapters of Austen's most famous work to 18 publishers and agents, claiming it was all his work.
To his amazement all publishers rejected the manuscripts, and most failed to spot that he had ripped off opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
“I was staggered,” Mr Lassman told The Guardian newspaper.
“Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the English canon and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen's work.”
Mr Lassman decided to send off the manuscripts, which contained only slight alterations to Austen's words, in frustration at having his own original thriller rejected.
“I know it isn't a masterpiece but I think it is publishable,” he said.
“Yet nobody wanted it. I was talking with some friends and we wondered if Jane would find a publisher or agent if she were around today.”
The original article can be found here.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, David Paulin.
Seraphic Friend Dr. Carol has just sent us this disturbing article about the rising tide of Jew-hatred in Britain.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 06:01 AM | Comments (13)
May 30, 2007
The Zogerke, the Liver & Yom Kippur
In the 1840's there were among the simple folk many women [in Europe] who did not know how to pray in Hebrew. Still, they felt a great need to pray on the Sabbath, and especially on the High Holy Days. And there were literate women who made a business of their learning, praying aloud for the others for a small fee. Such a woman was called a zogerke (literally, a reciter). In the smaller Jewish towns there might not be such a woman, and then a man (a zoger) had to crawl into a barrel that was put right in the middle of the women's section [of the synagogue]. From the midst of this fortress, surrounded by women, he read out the prayers. As may be imagined, this custom often resulted in comical incidents. That barrel was an inexhaustible source of new jokes.
On Yom Kippur the zogerke was supposed to recite the prayers in a tearful voice, so as to bring the women's gallery to weeping and remorse. Now in our community there was a woman, the wife of the butcher, who was hard of hearing. She begged the zogerke to pray a little louder; she'd give her an extra large liver from the shop if she would do it for her. The zogerke answered in her weeping prayer voice, weaving her reply into the recitation:
“The same with the liver, the same without the liver.”
A moment later the men were startled to hear the entire women's gallery sob aloud in full voice:
“The same with the liver, the same without the liver.”
A little while later one of the women was on her way home and met another woman just arriving at the synagogue.
“Where are they? What prayer are they up to?”
“Nu, the prayer about the liver.”
“Liver? Last year we didn't say anything like that!”
“Today, efsher (maybe), because it's a leap year.”
Rememberings: The World of a Russian Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century, by Pauline Wengeroff
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:11 AM | Comments (12)
April 08, 2007
Hollywood Vanity
In her fine book, Film Journal, the great photographer Eve Arnold records a photo session she had with Marlene Dietrich in the mid-sixties. Dietrich was no longer a young woman, but still a lovely and vigorous star.
Arnold, a thorough professional, snapped dozens of still photographs of the great actress.
When Arnold developed the prints, she knew in her gut that Dietrich would not be happy. Dietrich was acutely aware of her image; she knew lighting and angles better than most professional camermen.
In fact, Dietrich would probably be furious.
Arnold sealed the photos and negatives, and sent word to Dietrich that she, Arnold, had botched the job and the pictures were no good.
Arnold left the envelope at Magum studios in Paris with instructions that the pictures be locked away and no one allowed acess.
Well, Marlene Dietrich was a movie star and naturally had to have a look at the photos. She made her way to Magnum, charmed or intimidated everyone in sight, and managed to scrutinize the images.
She was imperious and pitying: "Sad," she said, "but poor Eve has really lost her touch."
I want to thank Seraphic friend Toronto Pearl for giving me Eve Arnold's book, Film Journal, as a gift. I will always cherish it. This fine volume focuses a unique lens on a specific corner of Hollywood life. Highly recommended.
For the last two days of Passover, Seraphic Secret will be off-line. Thus, we will not be writing until Wednesday. We wish all our readers a lovely and meaningful Pesach.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 05:23 PM | Comments (2)
March 25, 2007
Quick Cuts
Here are some books I've read in the past few days that I'd like to recommend. As you can see, they run the gamut:
Wisdom from the Batcave: How to Live a Super, Heroic Life by Cary A. Friedman. This is Batman as mussar, ethics. A slim and lovely volume that goes to the core of why we love this crime-fighter. Rabbi Friedman does a superb job of teasing moral lessons from the darkly lit Batcave.
The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, Edited, Translated and Introduced by Ben Zion Bokser. This fine book consists of letters, aphorisms and excerpts from larger essays and other writings selected to provide a wide-ranging introduction to the thought and writings of Rav Kook, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the Twentieth Century.
The Golden West, by Daniel Fuchs. This might be one of the best books ever written about Hollywood by a working screenwriter. Fuchs wrote three well-received novels. They did not sell. He was brought out to Hollywood in 1939, and he stayed. He was not bitter. He was not angry. He was grateful for the sunshine, for the opportunity to make a good living. Fuchs understood the business and he also understood that the men and women who made the movies were a special breed inventing a new kind of culture. If you care about the real Hollywood, do not miss this book. There's also a fine introduction by John Updike.
On the Reliability of the Old Testament by K.A Kitchen Hey kids, guess what, the Torah is, uh, reliable. Actually, this is an extremely serious and scholarly refutation of the "minimalist school" by a Professor of Archeology, Classics, and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England. My father has another name for the minimalists: Jew-haters.
A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson. How Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea. It's all here: tactics, torture, targeted assasinations, terrorism. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Every page drips with lessons for our war on terror. Hanson is our Clausewitz, our greatest philosopher on war.
I'm Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown. Okay, I've finally learned how to crack an egg without getting eggshell in my omelette. Alton Brown is the Clausewitz of the kitchen; a warrior with a spatula.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 03:14 PM | Comments (10)
March 19, 2007
Jane Austen Quiz: The Answers
Last week we posted this:
Here's a little Pride and Prejudice quiz from So You Think You Know Jane Austen?
1. What first begins to attract Darcy to Elizabeth?
2. What bond forges an immediate friendship between the aristocratic Darcy and the mercantile Mr. Gardiner?
3. What are the implications of Darcy's remark "I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these"?
4. Why does Mr. Bennet tease and tantalize his wife so?
As promised, here are the answers:
1. Her fine dark eyes and her brilliant complexion (usually a primary attraction in Jane Austen heroine's).
2. Angling. There are trout in the stream that runs through the Pemberley grounds. Mr. Gardiner, presumably, fishes along the Thames. Darcy offers to supply him with some tackle.
3. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, tourism to the Continent was curtailed. A gentleman turned to his books.
4. Because, in his way, he is a domestic tyrant. Teasing also seems the means by which he controls his irritation at her stupidity (and his own stupidity for having married her).
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2007
The Annotated Jane
Well, it looks like I'm going to have to buy another edition of Pride and Prejudice.
According to an article in today's NY Times by William Grimes, The Annotated Pride & Prejudice is quite a source book for Jane Austen fans.
Mr. Shapard explains absolutely everything. He restores the proper contemporary meanings to word like "condescending" (polite to inferiors) and "vicious" (inclined to vice). "Fun," it turns out, was a vogue word, the "awesome" of its day, which is why the flighty Lydia Bennet—the foolish sister who runs away with the despicable George Wickham—uses it a lot. Mr. Shapard sorts out the differences among a phaeton, a gig, a chaise and a curricle, distinctions as clear to Austen readers as the difference between a Volvo and a Porche is to us.
All the details of day-to-day English life around 1796 come under inspection: currency, card games, fashions, dance steps, etiquette, mealtimes, and the subtle gradations of social class.
Here are some other interesting Jane Austen books mentioned in the same article:
Jane Austen: The World of her Novels
So You Think You Know Jane Austen?
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
And here's a little Pride and Prejudice quiz from So You Think You Know Jane Austen?
1. What first begins to attract Darcy to Elizabeth?
2. What bond forges an immediate friendship between the aristocratic Darcy and the mercantile Mr. Gardiner?
3. What are the implications of Darcy's remark "I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these"?
4. Why does Mr. Bennet tease and tantalize his wife so?
Answers after Shabbos.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:57 AM | Comments (6)
December 26, 2006
Tanakh Companion: "Book of Samuel"
I happen to love learning the Ne'veim, the Prophets. Always have. It's the story-teller in me. The Ne'veim are filled with great characters, epic narratives, and let's face it, blood and guts and battles galore.
A new series has just been published by the Ben Yehuda Press, The Tanakh Companion to The Book of Samuel. There's a fine introduction by Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot in which he explains the methodology used by the various scholars in the book:
"... the methodology shared by most of the authors (and the one that dominates most sophisticated Modern Orthodox study both here and in Israel) has been appropriately termed by my esteemed teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Carmy, "the literary-theological method to the study of the Bible."
"This approach makes systematic use of all the literary tools and methods that have come to the fore in the last hundred years while maintaining a firm control of all the classical exegetical literature. This study not only builds upon the insights of Midrash and classsical exegesis, but strives to engage the text directly as well, in order to tease out the profound religious meaning of the text."
The text from the Book of Samuel is presented in English and in Hebrew. This is an invaluable and thoughtful graphic design too often overlooked by some of our, ahem, more religious publishers, guaranteeing a wider readership for this worthy volume.
This is a book of essays, lectures really, by such fine scholars as Avraham Weiss on "Avigayil: Savior of David." David Silber on "The Birth of Samuel and the Birth of Kingship." Joshua Berman on "David's Request to Build the Temple."
Every single one of the thirteen essays in this book is a finely-cut gem.
Ben Yehuda Press has as its motto: Bible study in the spirit of modern and open Orthodox Judaism. This is a fine new Jewish publisher and I highly recommend this volume as a valuable addition to your Torah library.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 11:09 AM | Comments (10)
December 18, 2006
New Counterinsurgency Manual Released
The Pentagon has released a new counterinsurgency manual, jointly produced by the Army and Marine Corps. As the Foreward notes, "It has been 20 years since the Army published a field manual devoted exclusively to counterinsurgency operations. For the Marine Corps it has been 25 years. With our Soldiers and Marines fighting insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is essential that we give them a manual that provides principles and guidelines for counterinsurgency operations. Such guidance must be grounded in historical studies. However, it also must be informed by contemporary experiences." Experience, indeed. Steven Aftergood's "Secrecy News" blog of the Federation of American Scientists has the entire manual, and I will save it in the CT Library on this site.
To read the rest of this CounterTerrorism article, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2006
Rachel Corrie: Usable Goods
"Rachel Corrie's death is neither piteous nor pointless: it is pure bonanza. A predatory organization that callously endangers its human shields by placing them before the hideouts of war, it purports to preach non-violence -- except on its website, where it openly defends "armed struggle." Arafat, the warlord and terror chieftain who launched the intifada that was the ultimate ground of Rachel Corrie's death, lauded her as a "martyr"; for Arafat too, in the enduring propaganda blitz against the life of the Jewish state, she was usable goods. Media-savvy herself, she understood, as we have seen, the notion of a usable death: "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen."
You must read Cynthia Ozick's review of My Name is Rachel Corrie.
And of course you must read Yehudit's face to face with Rachel Corrie's American Gothic parents at the always invaluable blog, Kesher.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:10 PM | Comments (7)
November 29, 2006
The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature
Okaaaay! Any chance to mention our favorite writer, Jane Austen -- we'll take it.
Sure the Iranians are calling for the death of Israel and every Jew on the face of the earth, the North Koreans are scary as heck, the PA and their seventeen "security services" are hoping to be the new Einsatzgruppen, and Olmert and Co. are about as dumb a ruling party as the Jewish state has ever had--but hey, what else is new?
We've always got Jane, and honestly, this book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, sounds like a wonderful antidote to the childish, self-indulgent academic leftists who, for too long, have poisoned the groves of academia.
FP: What are some of your favorite works of English literature and what do they mean to you?
Kantor: Jane Austen’s novels are right up there. The conventional wisdom now is that Austen was a really very “subversive” author—that her books are full of secret rage against “the patriarchy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As I argue (with lots of examples from Austen’s side-splittingly funny novels) in The Politically Incorrect Guide, Austen is an astute observer of human nature who was well aware that most men would be immensely improved if they were a little more patriarchal than they are. Austen’s novels may be the most fun books in the English language. And they’re also a boost to your moral intelligence. They really inspire you to aim for personal integrity.
"...English Professors are a threat to our civilization"
To read the entire interview at Front Page Magazine, please click here.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, Jeremiah
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:23 AM | Comments (5)
October 20, 2006
Seraphic Book Review -- Plus Deleted Scenes
From today's Los Angeles Jewish Journal, here's my review of Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom's Between The Lines of the Bible: A Study From the New School of Orthodox Torah Commentary, Published by Yashar Books, Inc. Brooklyn NY.
The original title of my review was: "The Unbearbale Pleasure of Torah Between the Lines."
I wrote a sidebar that was meant to achieve a few simple things:
1. To disclose that I daven with Rabbi Etshalom in the Young Israel of Century City Early Minyan.
2. To reveal that Rabbi Etshalom is a sophisticated and fun man, not an ivory tower scholar.
3. To infuse a little fun into an otherwise straightforward review.
4. And, let's face it, I can never pass up the opportunity to recommend a few great American, Japanese and Chinese films.
Anyway, the Journal cut the sidebar because they did not have the space.
But I do. And here it is.
Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Young Israel of Century City where I attend the early minyan. Guess who’s the Rabbi of the early minyan? Yup. Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom. Okay, you’re thinking I have to give this book a good review. Well, truth is, I didn’t have to review the book at all. I did it because I admired and learned a great deal from this fine volume. Besides, Rabbi Etshalom and I have a pretty proscribed relationship. After services, the minyan gathers in back and everyone positively dives for the cholent. Here’s an example of what Rabbi Etshalom and I talk about. As you’ll see, we Orthodox are involved in, um, truly profound Torah conversations.
Rabbi Etshalom: So Robert, what’s the best Civil War movie ever made?
Me: Ride with the Devil, 1999, starring Tobey Maguire, written by James Schamus and directed by Ang Lee. A neglected masterpiece.
Rabbi Etshalom: Okaaay. Never heard of it. I’ll Netflix it. Have you seen any really good martial arts movies lately?
Me: Hero, starring Jet Li and the stunning Ziyi Zhang. Look for the battle scene at the calligraphy school. Poetry in motion.
Rabbi Etshalom: Netflix again. I happen to love Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Me: The sword fight in the trees, a true b’racha.
Rabbi Etshalom: Can you recommend any great Japanese movies?
Me: Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. The greatest movie ever made.
Rabbi Etshalom: Oh, I’ve seen it, of course.
Me: Rashomon.
Rabbi Etshalom: Are you kidding, a classic.
Me: Ugetsu.
Rabbi Etshalom: Noooooo, never even heard of it.
Me: Unbelievable film. It was produced in 1953, directed by the great Kenji Mizoguchi, and stars Machiko Kyo, absolutely the most talented and beautiful actress ever to appear in the movies. Mystical and terribly tragic. It’s like the most Jewish of Japanese movies.
Rabbi Etshalom: Great, this calls for more cholent.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:52 AM | Comments (17)
October 16, 2006
Woe to Live On
Recently, I called The Moonflower Vine, one of the finest American novels I had ever read.
This obscure book, the one and only novel ever written by the mysterious Jetta Carleton, appears to be autobiographical. But make no mistake about it, this is a supremely crafted work of fiction that is deeply imagined, vividly evoked in all its parts; a story that instantly grabs you, draws you into the lives and, yes, the passionate loves of five members of the Soames family: Matthew and Callie, the husband and wife, and their daughters, Jessica, Leonie, Mathy and Mary Jo the generous narrator.
The prose is light as air and yet at the same time dense and precise. Yes, Carleton's able to carry off these two seemingly contradictory techniques at the same time. Carleton slips into the minds of each character so effortlessly that we are never aware of her supreme craft. This, to me, signifies greatness in a writer: the ability to hide method. I have never cared for writers who make make their craft part of the story. This is material for grad students who have way too much time on their hands; grim and joyless professors who have forgotten the core love of stories, literary elites who no longer read yarns but, goodness gracious, get paid to "deconstruct texts."
INTERPOLATION #1
This is all just code for Marxist theory which the academics are currently relabeling. Afterall, their precious but murderous ideology sort of got a bad rap after word got out that their demigod Mao murdered some 60 million of his own people in the name of the, ahem, people's revolution. And the fall of the equally murderous and utterly corrupt Soviet Union was, er, not so good for the cause either. All those nasty gulags. But hey, that never seems to deter the true believers. They simply tell us and each other--endlessly, ponderously, insulting the facts and our intelligence--that that wasn't real communism.
Sound familiar?
Yup, just like the apologists for the jihadist throat-slitters, the fine folks who never tire of tellings us that that isn't real Islam.
Uh-huh.
END INTERPOLATION #1
Awareness of the author's craft has always sealed off a select group of great authors for me and made them, well, not-so-great. In fact, if not for some college lit courses, I would never crack the bindings of these author's books--for their works are boring, unpleasant, unreadable, in truth, unbearable. Here's a short list: everything Samuel Beckett ever wrote , the James Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, whole chunks of Faulkner, and the "mature" Henry James novels, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove are a true misery. Did you know that James referred to himself as The Master? I suppose he had to--his book sales were dismal.
Anyway, I've received over a dozen private e-mails thanking me for recommending The Moonflower Vine. So far not a single Seraphic friend has scolded me for making them waste their money on purchasing the book, no one has told me that I've stolen hours from their lives. In fact, each and every Seraphic friend has so adored Moonflower that they have demanded that I recommend another obscure and great novel.
Not so easy.
The pressure is on.
I take my blogging responsibilities seriously. Ask Karen, at four in the morning when I should be sleeping I toss and I turn and feel guilty that I have yet to come up with just that right combination of greatness and obscurity.
It would be easy to reach into the back of my bookshelf...
I'm doing it riiiiight now, and pluck out--
--here we go, that fabulous but now obscure (Nobel Prize-winner, 1928) Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undsted and tell you to read her magnificent three-volume work Kristin Lavransdatter. Undsted's portrait of a single woman's life, and of course Norwegian society, in the 14th century is a true epic and at the same time an intimate portrait of a single soul.
But I'm not recommending this great trilogy. That's too easy. Besides, it's not in the American grain.
Okay, go ahead and read it if you want to. It's stupendous. And besides, how many Norwegian novels are you ever going to read?
Answer: Very few.
Do you remember Yom Kippur? My list of the Ten Top Civil War Movies, except there are only eight movies on the list because there aren't ten great Civil War movies.
Anywhooo.
Of that list, my highest recommendation went to Ride with the Devil. It is Ang Lee's best film. James Schamus wrote the script and in the comments section I pointed out, twice, I think, that there is a classic piece of dialogue. Here's the set-up.
Jake, Tobey Maguire, a Missouri bushwacker, has just married Sue Lee, played by country Western singer Jewel. On their wedding night, Sue Lee, a widow, senses Jake's sexual innocence.
Sue Lee: Are you a virgin?
Jake: Girl, I've killed fifteen men.
Afterwards, I wondered, was this brilliant exchange original dialogue or skillfully lifted from the the novel from which it was adapted?
Over Shabbos, I sat down and read Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell from which Ride with the Devil is based.
Read it straight through in three hours.
(And yes, that dazzling bit of dialogue is straight from the novel.)
I am here to say that Woe to Live On, a novel of the Civil War is:
1. Obscure
2. Great.
3. American.
4. Poetic.
5. Timeless.
6. Savage.
7. Lush.
8. Disciplined.
9. Understated.
10. True
Caution: Whereas The Moonflower Vine can be comfortably read by either male or female readers, I should point out that Woe to Live On is a classic "man's" novel. It has scenes of violence that are stomach churning--not in detail but because they are so very casual, as is violence in war.
The time is 1860, the place, the border states of Kansas and Missouri--
Interesting, The Moonflower Vine also takes place in Missouri.
Hmmmm.... Does anyone see a pattern emerging?
--While the regular armies clash in the east in the great battles of the Civil War, Jayhawkers and southern Bushwackers turn the border states into a wasteland, savaging all in their wake. They call themselves irregulars but they were American terrorists.
INTERPOLATION #2
Both the Northern and Confederate Armies treated these "irregulars" with the exact same measure of justice that men who did not wear uniforms deserved. When captured there were no long drawn-out trials, no prison terms , certainly no habeas corpus.
The irregulars were hung from the nearest tree. No precious lead was wasted on these spoilers of the rules of war.
North and South understood that a man without a uniform is an argument for chaos. As different as their ideologies the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia agreed that a man under a black flag deserved nothing but contempt — and swift justice.
Alas, such moral clarity has been lost, hence we are a weaker and more vulnerable civilization.
We see ourselves as principled and compassionate, thus stronger. But our enemies see not justice and compassion but weakness and decadence.
Their perception is correct.
Our vision is dim and delusional
END INTERPOLATION #2
Woe to Live On is the story of sixteen-year old Jake Roedel, it is a unique and terrifying coming-of-age story. It's the story of love and war and we at Seraphic Secret consider this brief but powerful novel to be a uniquely great American work.
Read it and let us know what you think, for we are always anxious to hear from our wise readers.
Oh, and Virtual Jerusalem is running what has to be the most humilaiting dating experience ever in the How I Married Karen series.
This is the chapter that, I imagine, my offspring read, cringe, and publicly deny that I am their father.
Who can blame them?
To share in the humiliation, click here for Chapter 18, Flushing in Brooklyn.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 01:01 PM | Comments (15)
October 05, 2006
The Lover and the Beloved
If you want to understand what's happening in the world right now, just read William Manchester's Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion Alone, 1932-1940.
This superb volume book chronicles Churchill's courageous and lonely battle against pacifism, disarmament and appeasement. Churchill was politically isolated in Parliament, often jeered and scorned when he warned of the growing Nazi threat.
He fought men who had stooped to the acme of gullibility and self-delusion.
And it's happening once again as Islamic imperialism darkly threatens western civilization.
But I want to veer away from politics for a moment.
I want to ask a question -- about love.
Early in the book, Manchester writes about Clementine Churchill, Winston's loving and mostly loyal wife, and her brief three-month affair with a wealthy art dealer, Terence Philip.
Manchester quotes La Rochefoucauld: In any affair one partner is the lover and the other the beloved.
Long afterward Clementine conceded that the initiative had been hers.
Clementine said: "He made me love him."
Thus Philip, seven years younger, was the beloved.
The question I pose to my wise readers is: In marriage does this maxim also hold true?
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 03:41 PM | Comments (20)
July 21, 2006
Jane Austen & The War of Tammuz
The War of Tammuz, Hizbullah, Katyusha rockets, IDF casualties, kidnapped soldiers, UN barbarians; my every waking hour is preoccupied with Israel and her fate and how most of the world and the frenzied left in America have lined up against Israel, against Jews.
I wake in the middle of the night with lower back pain, a swamp of agony like you wouldn't believe.
Psychosomatic?
I crawl out of bed, grab the closest Jane Austen novel, Pride & Prejudice, and try to control the intensity of the pain by concentrating on Jane's impeccable prose, on her astonishing characters, on the perfection of her structure.
It works, to a degree.
This morning, comes the e-mail below from an old Seraphic Friend.
And so I feel justified in suspending my obsessive coverage and comments of the war zone, of the moral idiots who do not or cannot recognize evil because they live lives that are too leisured, too disconnected from any physical threats. Indeed, the most pivotal moment in their lives is whether to get a double or triple latte. To them, Hizbullah are interesting for the fashion potential of the turban Shiek Nasrallah wraps round his head, not that he might be storing chemical and biological weapons courtesy of Iran via Syria.
Seraphic Secret interrupts The War of Tammuz for Jane Austen and things about Jane Austen always matter.
Karen and I wish you all a lovely and meaningful Shabbos.
Dear Robert:
Since you are at fault for getting me so involved in "Pride and Prejudice," I had to write to you and give you my review of the book and the recent film adaptation starring Keira Knightley.
It is already a cliche to say that movies based on books are poor adaptations. There are also always the purists who complain of this or that change of detail. I have subscribed to this cliche on many an occasion. However, when it comes to the recent adaptation starring Keira Knightley, I was shocked to discover how thrilled to tears I was to discover how much I enjoyed the film and how pleased I was to discover its faithfulness to the Austen's novel. Often I judged its faithfulness by emotions engendered by certain scenes that were identical in every way to the emotions created by those passages in the book, only more so.
Some thoughts:
1) One remarkable achievement of the novel was its portrayal of the love and affection Elizabeth and Jane bore for one another. I have noticed the tendency all novels have to put the main protagonist on a pedestal that leaves every single other character in the story, save the love interest or on occasion the extraordinarily wise sagacious character, seem faulty or stupid or weak by comparison. Jane and Elizabeth's relationship break that rule. Keira Knightley and Rosamund Pike both do such an astounding job of portraying that sisterly closeness that I was in tears at certain parts of the film. Knightley's stunning smile that just breaks out like the sun suddenly coming above the horizon whenever Jane is happy does a much better job of demonstrating the love than my imagination could.
2) Matthew MacFadyen's Darcy was believable in all respects, cold and tender. Our first sight of his ability to smile splendidly, when Georgiana sees him for the first time, doesn't seem to contradict his previous behaviour.
3) The Bingley siblings were a delight to behold. I did not perceive the book's Caroline to be as haughty as the movie's Caroline.
4) I hated the movie's Lydia as much as the book's Lydia. Slutty and stupid.
5) Dame Dench's Lady De Burgh could not have been done better. The movie's Mr. Collins evoked more sympathy than the book's version. But both do a splendid job of portraying the clueless buffoon he is.
6) A few changes I noticed: The movie gave the Lizzie-Darcy relationship a "love at first sight" quality I did not at all perceive in the book. Perhaps I missed it when I read it...
7) Keira's acting when she tells Darcy off at the first ball, speaking of dancing even with people you don't find tolerable merits her an Oscar even without the rest of the movie. The movie Lizzie's feelings are tangibly hurt far more than the novel Lizzie.
8) The statement made in the film by one of the younger daughters about being embarrassed by Mrs. Bennet, while the latter was in the room, made me feel for her in a way I never did when reading the book. Mrs. Bennet's comment to Lizzie about coming back to her when she has five daughters she needs to marry was poignant and added a new dimension to understanding her, as well as making me think worse of Mr. Bennet, who in comparison doesn't seem concerned about his daughters' futures.
9) One glaring error in the movie that deserves mention is the director's decision to put the Pemberly maid's comments, about how wonderful Darcy is, in the background noise of the scene, as if it didn't really matter. I only knew to listen because I was expecting it. Someone who had not read the book would think Lizzie's impression of Darcy was improved by the Greek statues!
10) The character of Charlotte was very ably represented. A far stronger character than the book's.
If you have any thoughts you have time to share, I would be appreciative.
Have a good Shabbos.
Eli
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 04:05 PM | Comments (7)
April 11, 2006
The Duel
"On July 16, 1940 George Orwell noted that many intellectuals of the London Left were completely defeatist, ready to give up, while the middle-class people were not."
This quote is from page 172 of John Lukacs's The Duel, an utterly absorbing study of the titanic eighty-day struggle between Churchill and Hitler, 10 May - 31 July 1940.
Hitler's powerful army had invaded and now occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, and France.
And now Germany was poised to invade England.
Chamberlain and Halifax, appeasers, stepped aside and Winston Churchill, an outsider, mocked as a "mongrel" by the British upper classes because of his American mother, formed a government and became a bulwark against the Nazi tide.
If not for Winston Churchill, Western Civilization as we know it today would probably not exist.
Reading this fine book is at times depressing for people do not change. The appeasers of the left are still with us. The ways in which Winston Churchill were mocked are achingly familiar.
True, George Bush does not have the oratory skills of Churchill, but he does recognize evil and he understands that the barbaric mindset, and the rising tide of terrorism and state sponsored terrorism of the Arab world can no longer be tolerated.
To most of the western world in the late 30's it was easier to believe that Herr Hitler could be dealt with, could be negotiated with. There were peace parties all over Britian, especially in the churches, well meaning dolts who made sure that Britian was not prepared for war. And as a result millions died, deaths that could easily have been avoided. These peace parties, ultimately, are mass murderers.
And they are still with us. A branch of the Presbyterian Church just met with Hamas in Beirut about divesting from Israel. These Church people are collaborating with mass murderers, collaborating with a government whose covenant calls for the destruction of Israel.
To me what's most interesting about this book is that Churchill always understood Hitler whereas Hitler never really understood Winston Churchill; no Hitler spent much more time simply hating Churchill.
And Hitler absolutely never understood the first thing about America. Which ultimately crushed him.
I look at the Arab world and I pretty much see the same scenario playing itself out in the long run. Political Islam has a only a surface understanding of America and Americans. Their contempt for America, and especially for American women and their freedoms, trumps all.
For if they were to truly get to know us, truly understand us, they would instantly become one of us; and so they keep their distance with a blinding hatred that in the end will lead to their demise.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:10 AM | Comments (25)
April 07, 2006
Red Zone
Today, April 7, is Iraq Liberation Day. Three years ago, Iraq was liberated from the iron fist of one of the most repressive regimes this world has ever seen.
To honor this liberation I'd like to recommend the finest book written about post Saddam Iraq: Into the Red Zone by Steven Vincent.
Vincent was a critic for glossy art magazines when the twin towers came crashing down. So deeply was he effected by the atrocity, that he moved heaven and earth to get to Iraq so he could understand and report on what he saw.
Vincent is a rarity from the NY art world. He recognizes evil when he sees it.
Vincent is also particularly sensitive to the nuances of the battle of words that define how wars are fought. He scolds the mainstream media for labeling the murderers in Iraq as "insurgents." Call them what they are: "fascists" or "paramilitaries." Calling them insurgents, he notes, gives them a romantic air, and gives them a legitimacy they do not deserve.
Vincent reserves his most scalding criticism for the so-called "peace activists" who flood Iraq with their "fact finding" missions.
"Really, was Saddam that bad?" says one of these clueless anti-American leftists.
For the truth about these Canadian/Mennonite/Christian/Communist/Lenninist "peace" groups is that they only appear to bash America and Israel, but never true tyrannies.
And of course, not one of these peace groups raised a voice when Steven Vincent, this good and supremely talented man, was kidnapped and murdered by fascist thugs.
May his memory be a blessing.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:24 AM | Comments (18)
March 28, 2006
Another World
It's funny, I love novels, I love movies, and yet, perhaps my favorite book of all time is a non-fiction work that I've read maybe six or seven times. Perhaps I like it so much because the world it presents is so utterly foreign that it reads and feels like fiction.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman sits on a corner of my desk. It is a well thumbed paperback, spine cracked, pages spilling out. I think this is the third copy I've owned. Every once in a while I pick it up, open it at random, just read, and I am absolutely transported to a different world. The medieval world of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, but truly a time of chaos, where war and passions and assassinations ruled state craft. This is the only book I've ever read where I've actually felt as if the medieval mind I'm meeting is an alien thing.
The men who ruled their states seemed to have little impulse control, and committed terrible murders with little thought for long term consequences. Suffering was great and the serfs were expected to do most of it; whereas the nobles took it as their birthright to, well, enjoy themselves at everyone else's expense. The clergy were almost entirely corrupt and debauched, and naturally everyone hated the Jews.
Decency, or what we think of as goodness, was in short supply.
Heaven, hell and demons, were as real, as physically present as the most ordinary objects of every day life.
Women were, of course, treated like objects of commerce. It was no fun being a woman in the 14th century. If you were a noblewoman you were sold into marriage or you were thrust into some cold convent. If you were a female serf, you were lucky if your husband did not beat you to a pulp.
This is a great book and though we in the west have changed, human nature has not. The 14th century lives on in many parts of the mideast and Africa.
I recognize it in the sectarian slaughter in Iraq, in the killing fields of Rwanda, in the so-called honor killings all over the Arab world, in the homicide bombings in Israel, in the Janjaweed terrorists of Darfur.
Gosh, my fingers are actually getting numb just thinking of all the 14th century type states that still pockmark our globe.
Read this fine work. It is at once foreign and tragically, totally recognizable.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:29 AM | Comments (43)
March 27, 2006
The Best Plot Device... Ever
Last week, in the comments section, in an almost throw-a-way line, I said that it seemed to me that the most common literary device in the European novel revolved around the question of: "What do we do with our unmarried women?"
I received several private e-mails asking me if I was serious about this observation and if so, could I supply some more examples.
Well, I am serious.
The more novels I read, the more obvious it becomes that the standard plot device, and I have used it myself, see my movie, A Stranger Among Us is, The Umarried Woman Question.
Let us proceed.
Roxana by Daniel Defoe, 1724. This is an amazing novel about a beautiful woman who manipulates the social system and the accidents of her life to survive. This novel is dark. There is great psychological, sociological and economic insight. Roxana and Defoe have not progressed where the main character can lead an independent life, but all the right questions are posed.
Pamela by Samuel Richardson , 1740. A fifteen-year-old waiting maid's employer dies. She is pursued and preyed upon by the son. Pamela preserves her virtue even after he abducts and imprisons her and attemps to bribe her! Not one to give up, he even attacks her in her bed while a housekeeper holds Pamela's hands. Pamela goes nuts. The son falls into remorse and the rest of the novel is about his reformation. This novel is about education, about models of good behaviour, but the main theme of abduction and attempted rape of the virginal girl just keeps us turning the pages. We just have to find out what will happen to the unmarried young woman. It's in our DNA.
Persuasion by Jane Austen, 1818. I've written about Pride & Prejudice many times. Persuasion is also a very great book. Anne Elliot is 27-years-old. She's on the verge of becoming a spinster. Her family have lost their money and now live in reduced circumstances. Anne remeets her old suitor, a career naval officer whom she hasn't seen in eight years since his marriage proposal was turned down as not prestigious enough. Captain Wentworth, however, is now rich and respected, and is looking for a wife.
Jane Austen was the most important writer in the English language of her time. Her importance is hidden by her clever style and rapier like wit. She focuses on the emotional lives of women at a time when women, especially virginal women, were not allowed to have emotional lives. Austen pays close attention to what her women want. Most novelists, even into the Victorian era, required that women be ignorant of love and choice until they were properly solicited with an offer of money and marriage. Austen's women are also ferociously intelligent and ambitious without impugning their virtue.
Persuasion is not as lighhearted as Pride and Prejudice nor as forgiving as Emma. But it is her most passionate and her most haunting book.
In brief, a few more great novels that address the question of What to do with our girls/women? And now, you will notice that some of the novels move off into a new territory which I call: Once we've married them off, oy-vey.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, 1847. Actually, this novel wants to know, "What do women want?"
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 1847. A wild story about intransient passion, male and female. Truly, one of the most surrealistic novels ever penned.
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. Becky Sharpe. No one has ever known what the heck to do with this little minx.
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1857. This is The Elvis, The King, of the I'm Married, oy-vey, What do I do now? novels.
Therese Raquin, by Emile Zola, 1867. This one ends with a Japanese like double suicide. One of the most depressing novels ever written.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:55 AM | Comments (38)
March 23, 2006
Detour
Novels were invented to be read by the common man and woman; they were written to be accessible; no specialized knowledge is needed to enjoy the pleasures of a good story.
As a child I would curl up in a corner of my bed, open a book and dive into the words. I particularly enjoyed the Tom Swift series, or The Hardy Boys. I loved the drawings at the beginning of each chapter and I would often read a chapter then go back and compare the drawing to the words.
When Karen and I founded Seraphic Press and published The Hebrew Kid and The Apache Maiden, we took great care to supply beautiful drawings for each chapter. I wanted to give readers that same special feeling I had as a child, a feeling I have seen eroded over the years, of a fine book, carefully made and lovingly published.
As I grew older and my tastes in stories matured. Among others, I discovered Jane Austen. Pride & Prejudice has always been a fine guide to personal integrity. Anthony Trollope knows exactly how marriage works--and does not work. I understand more about the French Revolution by reading Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, than by plowing through a dozen dry histories. And when I read that there has been a typhoon in Japan I remember The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki.
It's odd, college literature courses took the pleasure of reading right out of me. The heavy theories. The turf battles fought by various mean-spirited professors. I didn't do well in these courses. I didn't get the narrow theories. The love of the words and stories was lost under an avalanche of "discourse."
It took years for me to get back to the love of reading after graduating from college. But once there, I was more certain of my love of words and stories than ever.
Sometimes, you have to take a short detour to get where you belong.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:03 AM | Comments (83)
March 08, 2006
Learning Patience IV
For our final look at Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace, an encyclopediac study of The Battle of Algiers, we turn our gaze upon the Jews of Algeria for they were truly stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The Jews in Algeria comprised about one fifth of the non Muslim population. Tragically, they were trapped between the European colonists and the native Muslim people.
Many Jews could trace their ancestry back to the expulsions from 16th century Spain; some even claimed to pre-date the invaders who surged out of the Arabian peninsula in the 11th Century. No matter the exact dates, the Jews of Algeria were an old and established community with deep roots and an abiding love of the land.
By the 1830's the Jews of Algeria had become an underprivileged community, fallen into poverty, and it was with the advent of the French colonists that their opportunity arose to improve their status. By the 1870's more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria began to arrive and the quality of the lives of the native Algerian Jews improved considerably.
In the Second World War, Petain's antisemitic regime repealed decrees of Jewish Rights, The Cremieux Decrees, and Jewish teachers and school children were expelled from all European schools in Algeria.
The whole community was threatened with mass deporation to Nazi death camps--which thank G-d, never took place.
By the 1950's the Algerian Jews were tugged in several directions. The poorest tended to identify with the Muslims rather than the French colonials, and many were members of the Communist Party. The wealthiest Jews identified strongly with the Parisian life style and scorned the local Muslims.
By 1954 a majority of the Jewish intellectuals and professionals sided with the Algerian insurgents. In August 1956 a group of Constantine Jews wrote a public letter declaring that:
"One of the most pernicious manoeuvers of colonialism in Algeria was, and remains, the division between Jews and Muslims... the Jew has been in Algeria foe over 2,000 years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people."
Frantz Fanon wrote: "The Jews were to provide invaluable services as the eyes and ears of the revolution, often acting as double agents against the French."
This was not enough for the FLN. By 1960, they tightened the screws on the Jewish population, demanding that the Jews en masse, declare itself publicly for the FLN.
By now, the Jews were "uncommitted." There was never such a thing as a united front among the Jews of Algeria. Besides, there had been too much indiscriminate terror, too much throat slitting, too much rape; the Jews were not fools, they knew that such revolutions eat their young.
The Jews of Algeria found themselves subjected to the cruel logic of terrorism. Typical was this letter to a Jewish shopkeeper:
"Sir, if on Wednesday you do not hand us a sum of two million francs, your daughter will be abducted and will serve as a mattress for the army of liberation... If you do not follow our instructions, your shop will be blown up and we shall have your skins, yours and your wife's."
In the spring of 1960, a terrorist grenade was tossed in the Jewish ghetto. In March the following year Jacob Chekroun, the Rabbi of Medea was murdered on the steps of his synagogue. The following month an FLN boycott was imposed on Jewish shops.
Whole families were riven by conflicting loyalties. The Levy family of Algiers is a particularly poignant and tragic tale. The father would be assasinated by the French as an FLN sympathiser while his son was murdered by the FLN on suspicion of being a French agent.
The end of the Algerian Jewish community finally came with France's withdrawal from Algeria and her independence in 1962. And as always, when the day of reckoning came, all the Jews were lumped together into the same boat--a boat that would sail away from Algeria, never to return.
Over 100,000 Algerian Jews, most of them poor, backward, and disease ridden, fled their homes, and poured into metropolitan France.
But in a sense they were more fortunate than the other loyal Muslims who fought for France and who were now abandoned to their fate to be massacred in the thousands by the vengeful FLN.
The Jews of Algeria were the historic canary in the mine. To judge the decency of any society, look at how the Jews are treated. The French treated the Jews wretchedly and so did the Muslims.
Now, the children and grandchildren of these Algerian Jews are once again witness to their homeland being devoured by Muslim terrorists. The French will do nothing; they know not what to defend for they believe in nothing.
In ten years, I guarantee, the last of the Algerian Jewish community will be forced to leave the shores of France -- for Israel, America and Canada.
Thus will end The Battle of Algiers--for the Jews.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:40 PM | Comments (30)
March 03, 2006
Learning Patience III
Who were these leaders of the Battle of Algiers, these men who were so willing, no anxious to spill boiling rivers of innocent blood. This is not an academic question, for as we shall see, the cast of characters is sickeningly familiar. We continue exploring Alistair Horne's, Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
Mohamedi Said: Born in 1912, he had grown up with early memories of a French officer slapping his grandparents. Fanatically religious, he worked during the Second World War with the Pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husaini, joining the Muslim S.S. legion formed by the Mufti. In 1943 he was parachuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr agent, was captured and sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled in 1952. Whether out of nostalgia for the good ol' days, or a whacky sense of fashion, he invariably appears in photos wearing a Wehrmacht steel helmet.
Ait Hamouda, AKA Amirouche: A skeletally tall montagnard with wide-set eyes and a thick moustache, he was also a deeply religious Muslim. Of remarkably quick and decisive intelligence, he assumed command of a small mobile unit, imposed iron discipline and made his men go on forced marches of seventy kilometers a day. Within six months he had over eight-hundred men under his command. Soon, he established a reign of terror in the Soummam region of Eastern Kabylia.
Ramdane Abane: Involved in a massacre that took place in 1945, he was jailed by the French. He studied Marx, Lenin and, surprise, Hitler's Mein Kampf. Released in 1955, he immediately made his mark as an outstanding political intellect. Something of an Algerian Robespierre, his sinister dictum was: "One corpse in a jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform." From the spring of 1955 Ramdane Abane's philosophy was central to the Battle of Algiers, both in its external and internal operations.
Abane would tolerate no "deviationist bodies."
Which means, anybody who disagreed with his group, the FLN, died--horribly.
You would think that Abane and his group would turn their attention immediately to their prime enemy, the French.
But no, Abane realized that he had to impose iron discipline on the Algerian population. And after Phillipville, Abane and the other leaders realized, with great satisfaction, that terror worked.
Abane had no interest in bringing the masses to the movement through propaganda. Pressure and blackmail on the average poverty stricken fellah, peasant, worked much more effectively. The terror cadres "with the knife literally under his [the fellahs] throat, make him hand over 50,000 francs."
"They never sought to attach the rural populations to their cause by promising them a better life, a happier and freer future; no, it was through terror that they submitted them to their tyranny."
In 1956, a visitor was shocked at the silence he found in the typical Algerian villages, each one of them of which would be held by a local FLN thug who was responsible simply for collecting "taxes" and "food supplies."
It was also a customary initiation ritual for a new recruit to be made to kill a designated "traitor", French officer, or colonialist in the company of a "shadow" who would dispatch the recruit himself and make sure the murder took place. It was a form of terror apprenticeship.
Yes, even after Philippeville, it was fellow Muslims who bore the brunt of FLN terror. Over the first two and a half years of the Battle of Algiers 6,352 Algerians were murdered by the terrorists as opposed to 1,035 Europeans.
The FLN announced that cigarettes and liquor were unIslamic and would no longer be tolerated. It was also a way of boycotting French products.
The punishment for any Algerian caught with liquor was having their lips severed. It was called, The Algerian Grin.
The punishment for smoking was the severing of the nose.
In the Casbah the Chardor was now mandatory on all women. The repression of women had begun.
Interpolation:
I guarantee that in the Palestinian Territories you will see the exact same pattern play itself out. Hamas is no charitable organization. Do not fool yourself. It is a ruthless terrorist group that sends out homicide bombers. They will not set up sanitation services. They will not organize medical services. They will not fix pot holes. They will not build any power grids. They have no idea how to build an infrastructure, for this is an organization whose roots are solidly embedded in savage clan and tribal rivalries.
Hamas will "collect taxes," they will "eliminate traitors," repress women, and steal every penny that comes their way. Oh and kill Jews. Here, read their covenant, it tells you what their plan is. I don't know about you, but when someone tells me that they're going to slaughter me, I tend to believe them. Especially when they have such a bloody track record already.
End Interpolation:
If we look at Iraq, this all makes perfect sense through the lens of the Battle of Algiers. The daily homicide bombers against civilians is how the terrorists control the population. It's how they tell the Iraqis that they must not cooperate with the Americans.
The terrorists cannot offer a better life, this everyone knows. They cannot offer medical services, dental services, freedom of speech, nor education. They cannot offer a society where banks and stock markets function properly, where contracts are honored, a society where you are are safe to walk the streets, a society where women are not treated like cattle.
No, all the jihadists offer is mutilation and death. And they count on this to frighten the homefront, and ultimately intimidate civilization into complete submission.
Second Interpolation:
It is interesting to note that every single country that has thrown off its colonial shackles is now in far worse condition than it was when the colonials were in charge. Congo, Mozambique, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Angola, Togo, Chad...
Sheesh, I'm getting tired, I just can't type all the countries that are on my list. My fingers are going numb. Okay, this is terribly un PC. But every single country in Africa that is now "free" is an economic basket case. Even South Africa, the last hope of Africa, hanging on by its fingernails, is drowning in AIDS. Algeria has just emerged from a twenty year civil war where over a million people had their throats slit.
The lesson? These violent Thirld World Revolutions invariably bring even worse goverments and even more terrible repression to their people.
End Second Interpolation:
Terror works.
But it doesn't always have to.
Not anymore.
We have learned too much about its corrupt innards. We, in the 21st Century have seen too much evil to tolerate this malignancy any longer. From the death camps of Eastern Europe to the genocidal covenant of Hamas, we can no longer allow these savages to nudge history backwards.
But we must stare terror in the eye and fight back in every way possible. That means we must fight militarily, and we must fight back softly, offering the best of what we have and who we are. And in the end, we will will prevail for we are not the French trying to colonize a foreign shore, but a free people offering other people the choice of freedom, and that is something every man and woman deserves.
***
Pearl, a good and loyal friend to Seraphic Secret since the very beginning, has just informed us that her father is gravely ill. She asks that everyone please daven, pray for "Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka."
In this community of fine and wonderful people. Pearl's goodness and generosity stands out. She made the long trip from Toronto to Los Angeles for the Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture.
Pearl's pain is our pain. We wish her father a speedy recovery.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:07 AM | Comments (28)
March 02, 2006
Learning Patience Part II
One could easily argue that Al Queda and the worldwide jihad pansurgency has its roots in the Algerian War. Alistair Hornes' magnificent book Savage War of Peace, Algeria 1954-1962 is a must read for a thorough understanding of what's going on in Iraq and in the Muslim world today.
The Algerian insurgents were, at the beginning, a mix of westernized intellectuals and Muslim fundamentalists, but soon enough the Muslim jihadists took over. Simply put, they were more brutal, willing to commit the kind of atrocities that would put them in the vanguard.
It is vital to understand that what's going on in Iraq today is part of an old and reliable guerilla playbook. If you don't understand the military and political stages, then you are fated to be crushed beneath the wheels of the jihadists. There is nothing improvised about the daily homicide bombing. It is a carefully thought out tactic that is part of a grand strategy that stabs at the soft heart of the western middle class.
And the Battle of Algiers is where the Muslim jihadists first perfected it.
The strategy for modern terrorism was well defined by the Brazilian guerrilla leader, Carlos Marighela, before he was hunted down and killed:
"It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things."
Marighela's philosophy is simple: using terrorism will inevitably provoke the forces of law and order to strike back with overwhelming force and repression, thereby alienating the hithero uncommited native population. The idea is to polarise the situation into two extreme camps and make impossible any dialogue of compromise by eradicating the "soft center."
Wrote Marighela: "The government can only intensify its repression thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever... The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation..."
It was along this line of thought that the Algerians started their war against civilains--without mercy, without quarter.
The opening attack came in a small hot place called Philippeville.
Seraphic Warning: The following contains a detailed description of a massacre. It is horrible and nauseating and if you have a weak stomach, read no further.
Philippeville was a small mining center of about 130 Europeans and about 2,000 Muslims, who for years had coexisted amicably. Apparently, labor relations were extremely good with a rare degree of equality between Muslim and European.
It appears that the whole Muslim community was aware of what was about to happen on August 20, 1955. A number of Muslim families even left town.
But no one warned the Europeans.
Shortly before noon, four groups of fifteen to twenty Muslim men attacked the village, taking it completely by surprise. They were led by Muslim mineworkers who knew each house and their neighbors. Intimately.
Telegraph lines were cut, the emergency radio transmitter was found to be "out of order" and the village constable who was equipped with warning rockets had "disappeared."
The Muslim attackers went from house to house, mercilessly slaughtering all the European occupants: men, women, children, infants. All the time egged on by Muslim women with their eerie ululations. From the Mosque exhortations to slit the throats of women and nurses in the cause of jihad.
It was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that a French Para unit managed to reach the town. An appalling sight greeted them. In houses literally washed with blood, European mothers were discovered with their throats slit and their bellies slashed open by bill-hooks. Children had suffered the same fate, and infants in arms had had their brains dashed against the wall. A mother disembowelled, her five-day old baby slashed to death and replaced in her open womb.
Four entire families had been wiped out to the last member; only six who had barricaded themselves in a house in the center of the village and had held out with sporting rifles and revolvers had survived.
Men returning from the mines had been ambushed in their cars and hacked to pieces. Altogether thirty-seven Europeans had died, including ten children under fifteen, and another thirteen had been left for dead.
The reaction of the French army was immediate. Out in the streets they found:
"...bodies literally strewed the town. The Arab children, wild with enthusiasm--to them it was a great holiday--rushed about yelling among the grown-ups. They finished off the dying. In one alley we found two of them kicking in an old woman's head. We had to kill them on the spot: they were crazed..."
The reprisals were severe. The Algerians claim that as many as 12,000 were killed by the French. The French cliam, 1,273. We will never know the truth.
But the Philippville Massacre had its intended impact. The polarizing effect that Marighela spoke of immediately took place. The Battle of Algiers went on for eight long bloody years, and the brutality on both sides was unspeakable -- for there was a burning river of blood between the French and the Algerians after Philippville.
In Iraq right now, the terrorists are working from the exact same playbook. They are murdering innocent civilians indiscriminantely. The hope is that the Americans will clamp down with even greater ferocity and the population will turn against the liberators. For make no mistake about it, the average Iraqi is relieved that Saddam and his gang of torturers, rapists and killers are gone.
So far, the Americans are playing it smart. They are reacting calmly and professionally. The terrorists are getting desperate, thus the attack on the Golden Mosque. An attempt to spark a civil war.
But on the homefront, the mainstrem media have not a clue as to the grand strategy the terrorists are using. They see car bombs, body parts, chaos and assume that all is lost. They do not understand warfare, worse, they do not understand evil.
In fact they enable evil with their foolish dispatches.
But there are some of us who understand jihad, some of us who understand evil, comprehend that this is a hundred years war that will be fought on a hundred far shores. We must be patient and yes, steadfast. It takes time and blood to defeat evil, but it can and must be done or we will be thrown back to the seventh century and its barbarian masters.
*****
Pearl, a good and loyal friend to Seraphic Secret since the very beginning, has just informed us that her father is gravely ill. She asks that everyone please daven, pray for "Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka."
In this community of fine and wonderful people. Pearl's goodness and generosity stands out. She made the long trip from Toronto to Los Angeles for the Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture.
Pearl's pain is our pain. We wish her father a speedy recovery.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:04 AM | Comments (49)
March 01, 2006
Learning From the Real The Battle of Algiers, Part I
The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontocervo, is considered a modern classic. Certainly the use of cinema verite is highly effective and the scenes of torture and terror bring chills to any civilized viewer.
But let's be clear, the film is a work of leftist propaganda, beautifully made, to be sure, but a film that seeks to excuse Islamic terror by theorizing that the French were so brutal that the Algerians had no choice but to resort to terrorism.
Sound familiar?
You better believe it.
When homicide terrorists first struck in Israel, the Arabs and their leftist enablers immediately claimed that the powerless Palestinians had no choice against the brutal and inhuman Israelis.
In short, the Israelis were blamed for Islamic atrocities.
Director Pontocervo was an assimilated Italian Jew from a wealthy family. But like so many secular Jews, he drifted into the fanatical religion of Marxism and The Battle of Algiers is his penultimate work of cinematic propaganda. It's right up there with Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which celebrated Hitler and Nazism.
But let's look at the real Battle of Algiers, free from the powerful, but deeply dishonest cinematic imagery of the film where the Islamic terrorists are accorded heroic status. In truth, they were a bunch of sharia-spouting thugs, virulent women and Jew haters—in general, genocidal maniacs.
The finest history of the Algerian conflict is Savage War of Peace, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne.
It is the definitive account of probably the dirtiest colonial war of the 20th century. We tend to think of the French as a bunch of pussies, but oh boy were they brutal. Once the Algerians revolted, the French followed a scorched earth policy.
"...the [French] army, incorporating Sengalese units legendary for their ferocity, subjected suspected Muslim villages to systematic ratissage—literally a 'raking over', a time-honored word for pacifying operations. This involved a number of summary executions. Of the less accessible mechtas, or Muslim villages, more than forty were bombed by Douglas dive-bombers..."
And this was just the opening salvo of the battle. It got worse. Much worse. The level of ferocity—on both sides—almost unimaginable.
The Palestinians are a lucky people in that their enemies are Jews. Any other enemy, especially Arab enemies, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago. And it still might happen. When Jordan faces Hamas and Hizbullah in Judea and Samaria, you can be sure the Palestinians will almost certainly try to undermine the Hashemite Kingdom; and then you better buckle up for some real old fashioned blood-letting. You can bet that King Hussein will not use targeted assassination—uh-uh—it'll be mountains of Palestinian corpses choking the Jordan River.
But I digress.
The leaders of the Algerian revolt kept telling one another and their cadres to have patience. Democracies, they told their followers, cannot stand long wars; democracies have a built-in weakness. Elections. And wars are bad for elections. Democracies demand immediate results.
"We can hang on forever," Ahmed Ben Bella explained to his men, "we can fight and fight, whereas democracies like France have to go to their citizens and explain why their men are dying. And sooner or later, they will grow sick of it. Democracies are inherently weak for they have no patience."
This theme rises again and again in this amazing book, and though the French fought in Algiers for eight long and bloody years, Ben Bella was right. In fact, the Battle of Algiers almost brought revolution to the streets of France, and a mutiny in the French army.
Now, let's be clear, the War in Iraq/Afghanistan are not colonial wars. The French had a million citizens in Algeria living as priviledged subjects. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan are wars of liberation against fanatical terrorists who are part of a world-wide pansurgency. The War in Iraq was a war to overthrow one of the worst dictators this planet has ever seen. Personally, I could care less about WMD's.
But the point about our lack of patience in democracies really hit home with me. Everywhere I go I hear people saying: "How long is this war going to take?" As if they are standing in line at MacDonalds.
Perhaps we are too used to instant solutions in our lives.
And the Islamic terrorists know it.
They count on it.
This is not The Battle of Algiers, and this is not Viet Nam. If we had pulled out of Iraq before the surge—opposed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden— well, no ally would trust us ever again, and the terrorists would have won an enormous victory.
And that would have been disastrous.
Truly, we need to learn patience.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:43 AM | Comments (68)
February 24, 2006
Fun with Fyodor - Screenwriter's Cut, Bonus Footage
I've been reading Fyodor D. and oh boy, what can I say, not fun.
Several of Seraphic Secret's more literate readers, yes we have quite a few, pointed out that perhaps the translations we were using were doing a disservice to the fine Russian language. Was it Ezra Pound who said that it's the poetry that gets lost in the translation? Anyway, others suggested that perhaps we were just a wee bit, um, insensitive.
Very possible.
In any case, I thought that today I'd do a little mea culpa, and stroll down memory lane and present a kind of:
This is Your Life: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.
Fasten your seatbelts for this is grim as, well, grim as a Russian novel.
1) FD (1821-1881) is born in Moscow into a scheming, dysfunctional family. This makes for unhappy kids, but often fashions great writers. Anyway, FD's childhood is so miserable that he never mentions Moscow in any of his books. Not once. Which creates some pretty strange ellipses, especially in The Idiot when Prince Myshkin leaves St. Petersburg for six months in you know where.
2) FD's father, a physician, is, surprise, remote and violent. A totally creepy man, he is murdered by his own serfs when Fyodor is 17 years old.
3) Seven years later, FD publishes his first novel to great literary acclaim. He is instantly popular and fashionable. A sort of Russian Brett Easton. At about the same time, FD becomes involved with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of revolutionary intellectuals who incite the serfs to rise up and murder, well, just about everyone--except the intellectuals. Duh.
4) 1849. FD is arrested and sentenced to death. He's subject to the famous "mock execution." Conspirators are blindfolded, and shoved up against the wall. The Commanding Officer calls out: "Ready, Aim..." The guns are primed. And then the Imperial Messenger comes galloping into the courtyard with a supposed "last minute reprieve from a merciful Tsar." Discerning readers will notice that this episode is used in The Idiot.
5) FD's sentence is commuted to a decade in sunny Siberia. Oh, forgot to mention that poor FD is epileptic. The condition worsens in exile.
6) 1859. FD returns to St. Petersburg. The literary world has, big shock, all but forgotten him. Like Hollywood, out of sight out of mind.
7) His wife, Marya Dmitrieyevna Isayeva, dies, slowly and horribly.
8) His brother, Mikhail, dies, slowly and horribly.
9) His epilepsy gets so bad FD's pretty certain that a) he's going insane or, b) he's dying, slowly and horribly.
10) Oh, also forgot to mention, FD's up to his neck in massive debt because he founded a slick magazine called Epoch, and gee, just what Mother Russia needs, another impenetrable literary/political/revolutionary journal that no one reads––except the government censors.
11) FD flees his numerous creditors, wanders through Europe: Paris, London, Vienna--which he claims to despise as "decadent." Though somehow young FD manages to consume barrels of decadent booze.
12) Oh, FD's also a compulsive gambler. Loses even more money that he does not have. Leaves IOU's in salons all over western Europe. Comments one irate casino owner: "Fyodor is a scoundrel! But his IOU's are just beautifully written!" FD also has a tendency to check out of hotels in the middle of the night, bills left, need we say it, unpaid.
13) 1867. FD marries his "stenographer," Anna Grigoryevna Snitkin, do you love that name, or what? Everywhere they go he introduces her as: "Staffmember, Stenographer and Soulmate, Snitkina." They have a beloved daughter, who dies almost immediately of pneumonia. FD crawls into bed for several weeks with a depression that only Snitkin can rescue him from.
14) FD writes constantly, though he's crushed almost hourly by Grand Mal seizures. FD is clinically depressed, and runs through manic binges of playing roulette, which he can ill afford.
15) Forced to enlist in the Tsar's army, FD's platoon is made up mostly of vicious ex-convicts, and others from the "lower classes." The only book he's allowed to read is The New Testament. He spends four long years in the army and this brutal experience changes the "structure of his soul."
Here's the thing I want to point out, and I'm certainly no expert. I don't even like FD's books on a word-by-word basis. However, on a conceptual level I get and admire him. Enormously. Ditto for Leo.
So: It seems to me that Fyodor's near-death experience takes a vain and self-important young writer and changes him into a person who now believes in moral and spiritual values. FD deeply believes that books, his novels, have to have a moral and spiritual center or they are just empty husks, depraved things--corrrupt and probably evil.
It also seems to this non-enthusiastic reader, that the unblinking emphasis on religion and values, these big ideas, are what make FD's novels... simply majestic**.
And conversely this is why so much contemporary literature is just plain bad; narcissistic, self-referential junk.*
Notice, if you will, that Mr. Tom Wolfe's last novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, is sneered at/dismissed/cold-shouldered by the NY literary elite. It's not hard to understand why. Mr. Wolfe writes in the grand, sweeping tradition of Fyodor and Leo.
Also, Mr. Wolfe's very great novel has, at it's core, the same big questions/ideas/themes that so preoccupied our Russians. Charlotte tortures herself with notions of good vs. evil, the religious life vs. secular society, and of course, the ever-present torment of carnal relations; when to give of the flesh, and to whom. And most vexing of all: the confounding relation between love and flesh, and flesh to love.
Mr. Wolfe treats these themes with the same unblinking earnestness as our Russians. Naturally, the chattering classes, far too sophisticated for such 19th century notions, are not even amused.
Quite simply, they yawn and ignore Mr. Wolfe's novel -- ignore America's greatest novelist.
**Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm lying to myself, morally speaking?
*See: Mailer, Roth, Updike. Granddads of the wretched movement.
**Notes From the Underground
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:30 AM | Comments (59)
February 23, 2006
Prince Myshkin, Flying at You - The Screenwriter's Cut
The KGB & Me
"We're going to smuggle siddurim, prayerbooks, into the Soviet Union and if we get arrested, good, they'll send us to Lubyanka Prison and we'll go on a hunger strike and die and then the world will know!"
I'm thinking to myself: What about my favorite pillow. Will the KGB let me bring my favorite pillow into prison with me?
I am in high school and I've decided to get involved in the SSSJ, The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. But I have to admit, most of the students, well, they really scare me, and I'm feeling vaguely ill at this, my very first meeting.
Eager and passionate, these Jewish kids fall into three distinct categories:
1) Hoods: These kids are so violent they've been kicked out of the JDL, The Jewish Defense League. If any of you remember the JDL, they were way extreme. These kids in the SSSJ are, let's face it, lunatics. They want to get arrested and horribly tortured by the KGB. Not only do they want to get thrown into Lubyanka prison, they yearn to get sent to Siberia!
2) Girl Hunters: There are a whole bunch of guys who have discovered that the SSSJ is a great way to meet girls. Look, when you're stuck in an **all boys Yeshiva seven days a week, from morning till night, well, I get it, I do, and --
**If I weren't so shy, so geeky, so hopelessly, helplessly in love with Karen Singer, a girl who has no idea I'm alive, I'd be chatting up the SSSJ girls too.
-- and the Girl Hunters can tell themselves that they are doing something for their oppressed Jewish bretheren. But really they're here for the smoldering Yeshiva girls.
3) Idealists: These guys and gals are like totally buttoned up. They're always making these long lists of things that have to be done immediately; they run the meetings with crisp, frightening authority. They are so focused that in a way I find them scarier than The Hoods--and The Hoods literally make me cower. The Idealists, to be fair, are the ones who get everything done, they actually travel to the Soviet Union and get the poor suffering Refuseniks out of their shackles. The Idealists give smooth, coherent interviews to The Daily News, The Post, The NY Times. In short, they are adults.
And then there's me. I'm with the SSSJ, sort of, kind of, because, and this is really embarrassing, because of a literary problem.
I'm trying to get educated.
My yeshiva high school, Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, no longer extant, comes up just a little short in literature. Actually, BTA comes up just a little short in everything, save basketball. But that's okay, we're basically all pretty smart, or so we tell ourselves, and we'll do fine in life, even if we're sent to a leper colony instead of to a high school. Come to think of it, all the other yeshivas actually do think of us as a leper colony.
And, deep nostalgic sigh, we take perverse pride in our outlaw status.
Leo and Fyodor
I hear, I don't remember where or how, that these Russian guys are really important writers and if you want to be considered an educated person, and I do, I really do, well, you have to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
I try, oh how I try, but well...
The prose and dialogue are stiff as my father's starched collars, it's mannered and, dare I say it, silly:
Here, just open War & Peace, any page:
"Is it much further? Is it much further? Oh, those insufferable streets, these shops and baker's signs, street lamps and sledges!" thought Rostov, when they presented their leave permits at the city gates and were driving into Moscow.
This from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, again, at random:
"Isn't your poor little heart quaking, perhaps, in terror of a rival?"
See what I mean, I don't know, maybe it's the translation, but this is awful stuff. It's stiff and dumb and makes me laugh. What am I missing? I have to know.
There's other stuff that's just driving me crazy. People in these Russian books are always "shaking their fists."
I have never seen anybody shake their fist. Not even my crazy uncles who, when we have our family circles, get absolutely wasted on Slivovitz. They argue in Yiddish, scream extremely loudly –– about what I haven't the vaguest notion; and then they fall asleep, snore like oboes, and drool. Yuck. But no shaking fists.
Also: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky characters are always calling each other "scoundrels."
Never in my life have I ever heard one person called a scoundrel. In fact, the first time I come across this word, I crack open a dictionary.
And then the crowning glory. And Fyodor is Elvis here, The King. People in his books are always "flying at each other."
Goodness gracious, whatever does this mean?
Mothra and Godzilla fly at each other, that's for darn sure. But in all my life I have never seen one human being "fly" at another human being. And Dostoyevsky does this in each of his books about a dozen times. Every single book without fail. And every time I come across this whacky phrase I just stop in mid-sentence and imagine people, yup, flying across rooms and wham! just slamming into each other. Which I know is not the intended image.
If it means to scream at somebody, why not say so, or at least translate it like that? If it means hit somebody, same objection, same remedy.
But fly?
There's also the business of Russian names. I am soooooo confused. Everybody's got really long and impossible-to-pronounce last name. Apparently they also have Christian names. And to make things even more confusing they've got a patronymic, and as if that were not enough, and believe me I'm tired just typing this, they've got a diminutive.
So I end up making lists of various character's different character's names.
You follow?
And sometimes I get so befuddled about who a character is that I'm not sure if the character is male or female--which presents huge problems of identity when two characters are kissing and I have not a clue as to who is male and who is female.
Don't even ask.
Even more bewildering are obscure military ranks, and civil service bureaucratic hierarchies that twist my brain into a pretzel.
Plus, really weird social ranks that make absolutely no sense, class distinctions that are so strange it's like reading science fiction.
I'm telling you, Russian society is so rigid and completely stuck in all these invisible class divisions that these people make the characters in Jane Austen novels look like relaxed free-love hippies.
Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, is a "former student" (what the heck is that?) who is "impoverished," and yet he employs--and how he does this I have no idea for he's committing a horrible murder because he has no money--a servant!
I'm thinking, just follow me here, okay? Raskolnikov, don't kill the old lady, just fire the servant, he can collect Unemployment, and you can save a few bucks on the payroll. Show a little fiscal responsibility for goodness sake.
And keep in mind, I'm a math disabled sixteen year old idiot!
I'm also thinking to myself: We're not impoverished in Brooklyn, how do I get one of these servants?
Anywhoooo.
The Plot Thickens
Back to the SSSJ. Why am I here? This is the plan: join the SSSJ, naturally help my Jewish Soviet bretheren, I'm not completely heartless, and I am not a complete opportunist (I so dearly hope) and maybe meet one of these Refuseniks and get to ask:
"Do you guys in Russia shake your fists at each other?"
And:
Do they call you a Jewish scoundrel?
And:
"Do you have a servant?"
And if so:
"Can I have/borrow/share him?"
And the really BIG question:
"Do people in Russian fly at each other?"
After a few really wretched months at SSSJ meetings--everybody's intensely, self-consciously dead-serious 24/7, so that this SSSJ chapter has morphed into a relentlessly grim, irony-free zone. Plus: so many arguments, so many bitter schisms, not to mention all the bad blood among guys and girls who have gone out, broken up disastrously in dramatic flames, and now other guys are going out with other girls and well--everybody just seems to hate everybody else. It's like Peyton Place, only here framed by a cacophony of grating Brooklyn accents, with yours truly absolutely at the top of the fractal sonic environment.
I usually leave the meetings in the middle of the vicious procedural arguments, go to a local revival movie theatre and catch some really great old film. Preferably Japanese.
And you better believe that absolutely no one at the SSSJ misses me.
Anyway, our chapter finally has a real live Refusenik who's going to speak to us.
I'm so up for this.
He's gaunt and hollow-eyed. He's named Yitzchak. He has grown a beard, wears a huge yarmulke, his tzitzis, fringes, are down to his knees. And he's got that authentic: I'm-tormented-but-totally-at-peace thing going, just perfectly. I would kill to be able to pull off that look.
The little room in the shul, synagogue, we're meeting in, is packed as Yitzchak narrates his years of struggle with the anti-Semitic Soviet authorities. Years without employment, years in, yes, Lubyanka prison where Yitzchak taught himself Hebrew, and learned the entire Torah by heart. He was in solitary confinement for six months! He "fed his mind" by dreaming of freedom and Eretz Yisroel, The Land of Israel. His wife, radiant and hugely pregnant, just sits by the edge of the stage, knitting, yes knitting little baby booties, and every once in a while she just looks up at Yitzchak with pure love and total admiration.
Every woman is crying. Every guy wants to be Yitzchak.
The Q & A is more of the same. Torture, commitment to Torah and Judaism. Freedom. More horrible torture.
Sucking Poison
I quietly make my escape. There is no way I'm going to ask this good and brave man about Prince Myshkin "flying at" someone.
I do what I always do. Go to the movies.
Red River is playing at a revival house a few blocks away. I have to tell you, this film just puts me on the floor.
Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru are trapped in a wagon train surrounded by warring, whooping Indians, er, Native Americans. He's shooting, she's loading his Winchester.
"Stay down," he orders.
Ziiiip.
He looks up, an arrow has pinned her shoulder to a wagon wheel.
Ouch!
"I told you to stay down," he growls.
"I must've forgot," she says, eyes hard as flint.
He pulls out a knife, cuts the arrow out of her shoulder--another big ouch--and then he sniffs the arrowhead. He shakes his head. Monty slits her dress open, then--and this just kills me--sucks the blood from her shoulder wound and spits it out.
"The arrow's poisoned" he explains.
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
"There's blood on your chin," she observes.
"You gonna faint?" he challenges.
"Not till I do what I've wanted to do since I met you," she says.
And she slaps him.
Hard.
Big music sting.
Then she faints.
Watching this I almost faint.
I gotta tell you, this is much, much better than Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. It's not even a close contest.
True Confessions I: I so so so so want to be Monty and so so so so want Joanne Dru to be Karen Singer. Boy oh boy do I ever want to suck poison out of K's shoulder.
True Confessions II: Still haven't sucked poison from my true love's shoulder. Got over that notion a looooong time ago. For this we can all be eternally grateful.
Anyway.
Never went to another SSSJ meeting. Have seen Red River another, ohhhh, fifty times. Know it by heart. Should know The Torah by heart, but there you go.
In college, never took a Russian Lit. Course. Asked a friend about the "flying" business. He explained that, "It's a metaphor for extreme emotional distress." Then added with a shrug: "It's a Russian thing."
Okey-dokey.
DVD BONUS ENDING: February 2006. I am thumbing through Joseph Franks' magisterial muti-volume study of Dostoevsky in my local library. All four volumes together weigh about a thousand lbs.
I just happen to open up to this little gem, it's by Dostoyevsky's long suffering wife, Anna Snitkin. Yup, honest to G-d her real-life name, not something from a Marx Brothers film. This is an excerpt from one of her journals:
"Poor Fyodor, he does suffer so much, and is always so irritable, and liable to fly at me about trifles..."
The nice librarian has to come (fly?) over to tell me that my laughter is disturbing the other patrons.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:31 AM | Comments (89)
February 17, 2006
No True Glory
This whole week, Seraphic Secret has been devoted to grand military theory.
And so, to continue the theme, I've just finished reading the best book about the war in Iraq that has yet been published: No True Glory, by Bing West. This is an eye witness account of the ferocious and bloody Battle for Fallujah by a former Assistant Secratary of Defense for International & Security Affairs under President Reagan, and more importantly a former Marine.
I'm excerpting an entire chapter because, quite frankly, I've never read anything that comes close to West's description of face-to-face urban combat, between well trained US forces and fanatical Islamic gunmen.
I read the book in two sittings. I would have read it in one, but I did have to get a night's sleep.
Buy this book. That's my review.
It is riveting.
Seraphic Alert: The following chapter contains language that is usually not found in Seraphic Secret. I could easily edit the languge of the Marines, but I will not. So, if you are offended by foul language. Stop right here.
Chapter 27: The House From Hell
On the morning of 13 November, Kilo Company set out to clear the dense blocks of houses stretching from Phase Line Henry west to the Euphrates. Captain Jent told 1/Lt Grapes that his platoon would take the lead and Grapes assigned a block to each squad. After the previous day's fight, the platoon was tired but excited, expecting immediate action, but the insurgents had retreated to the south and no contact was made in the first block.
The 3rd Squad began searching the second block by shooting and hammering at an unyielding lock on a courtyard gate. Admitting defeat, Corporal Ryan Weemer sat down to smoke a cigarette.
Screw this one, he thought, 2nd Squad has some C-4. They can clear it later.
Sergeant Christopher Pruitt, the Platoon Guide, ran across the street to pry open a side gate of the next house. Tough and muscular, Pruitt had a challenging nature and never relaxed.
”Hey, this gate's open," he yelled. "Let’s go!”
Weemer threw down his smoke and hustled over with Sergeant James Eldrige and Lance Corporals Cory Carlisle and James Prentice.
The five Marines slipped into the courtyard and Pruitt looked inside the outhouse. Fresh shit.
“They’re inside!" Pruitt whispered.
The cement house, with a dome-shaped roof and a small upper story, looked too small to hold more than a few enemy. So rather wait for a tank, the Marines decided to assault. Weemer, who had gone through the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) special training, posted Prentice as rear security and gestured to Carlisle and Pruitt to stack behind him. He slung his M16 and took out his pistol. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked down the door and charged across the room. He was “running the rabbit", a technique where the point man rushes across the room to distract the enemy while the second man in the stack does the shooting.
As Weemer sprinted across the entryway room, he glimpsed an insurgent with an AK hiding next to the door. As he ran by, Weemer fired three rounds into the man. Carlisle burst in after Weemer, almost bumped into the gunman and jumped back, spilling into Pruitt.
“Go!” Pruitt yelled, shoving him back into the room.
Carlisle stepped forward and fired a long burst into the insurgent, who sagged to the floor. Carlisle then fired another burst into the dead man.
“Stop shooting and get over here,” Weemer yelled.
Carlisle ran across the room and flattened himself against the wall next to Weemer.
"Ready to clear?" Weemer said, gesturing at the open doorway to his left that led to the main room.
With Carlisle on his hip, Weemer charged in and was blinded by the pulsing white flashes of an AK muzzle exploding in his face. Weemer thrust out his right arm and fired eight bullets into the insurgent. The two were standing five feet apart, looking into each other's eyes, firing furiously. Weemer could feel bullets whizzing by his face. Chips of brick and concrete were pelting him on the cheeks, his ears ringing.
Weemer was a qualified expert shot with a pistol. There was no way he had missed with a dozen bullets. He was close enough to slap the man. The man would not go down.
Weemer was running out of bullets. He shuffled towards the door, still firing, and pushed Carlisle back into the first room.
The AK rounds that missed Weemer as he made entry had passed through the door and struck Pruitt and Eldridge. Bones were shattered in the wrist of Pruitt’s firing hand and Eldridge was hit in the shoulder and chest. They staggered out of the house and Pruitt tripped and fell near the front gate. As he struggled to get up, an insurgent on the roof opened fire, the bullets kicking dirt into his face. He dove around the wall and joined Eldridge on the street.
Inside the house, Prentice, who had slid inside the doorway, saw a man wearing a green camouflage jacket and black pants rush out from a back room. Prentice fired a long burst from his SAW, hitting the man in the chest and head, killing him instantly.
Weemer turned back to Carlisle.
"Reload and we'll finish that other fucker."
Keeping his eyes on the doorway, Weemer patted his pistol leg-holster.
Where's my extra mag? he thought. Fuck.
He dropped his pistol and unhooked the M-16 from his back. He heard someone stumbling towards them and backed up as the insurgent hobbled out from the main room. Weemer shot him in the legs and, when he fell, shot him twice in the face. The man, wearing black body armor over a blue denim shirt, was light-skinned, with a red bandana tied around his curly hair.
Hearing the firing and seeing the wounded, other Marines were rushing to the house. Lance Corporal Samuel Severtsgard burst into the entry room. As he had done in yesterday's fight, Severtsgard was holding a grenade.
He nodded at Severtsgard, who pitched the grenade into the main room. Immediately after the explosion, Weemer and Carlisle rushed in. The air was filled with black smoke and the acrid smell of gunpowder. Weemer broke right and waited a moment for the dust to settle. He saw a stairwell against the left wall and quickly raised his M-16. Above him was a dome-shaped skylight and a circular catwalk with a solid, three-foot high cement guard railing. The stairs led to the catwalk.
As Weemer brought his rifle up, he saw an insurgent leaning over the cement railing, sighting in. The M-16 and the AK began firing at the same time, the sound deafening. Weemer felt his leg buckle. A hard blow rocked back his face.
To his left, Carlisle was struck down in a fusillade of bullets, the shooters taking dead aim from the catwalk overhead. Deafened by the din, Weemer hobbled back to the entryway. In the dust-filled room, he didn't see Carlisle lying with a shattered leg and he couldn't hear his screams.
His face numb and dripping blood, Weemer limped out to the courtyard. He had flashbacks of a jihadist his team had shot in the face a few days ago. He saw Prentice squatting next to the doorway covering the roof.
“What’s wrong with my face? How bad is it?”
Prentice barely glanced at him.
“You’re cut above the eyebrow. Its nothing.”
Weemer took off his Kevlar and found the spent bullet lodged in the webbing.
Carlisle was screaming in the main room, lying directly below the catwalk. The insurgents were using him as bait instead of killing him.
The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Jon Chandler, heard the screams and ran to the house, followed by Corporals Farmer and Sanchez. They huddled with Severtsgard.
" We’re gonna flood the room, OK? It’s the only way," Chandler said. "Everyone point their muzzles up high and blast away until we can pull Carlisle out. All right, lets go! Sanchez, you’re number one man, I’ll follow.”
Farmer thought it was a good plan." Let’s do it,” he said.
Sanchez thought, “Oh shit, here we go,” and his mind went blank—just doing, not thinking.
Severtsgard thought, Throw one grenade, then enter. He pulled a grenade from his deuce gear and thumbed the clip. Carlisle screamed again.
What am I thinking? thought Severtsgard, as he pictured Carlisle lying in the middle of the room. Hope nobody saw that.
He slipped the grenade back into its pouch.
Chandler kneed Sanchez in the buttocks to signal “GO!” and they flooded the room. Sanchez ran straight across the room. Chandler and Severtsgard broke right, aiming up at the catwalk. Farmer was the last one to the door, where he froze for a moment, trying to convince himself it wasn’t fear. A second later, a grenade landed in the middle of the room and exploded right where he would have been standing.
Farmer was blown off his feet back into the foyer. Severtsgard and Chandler disappeared in a huge swirl of dust and debris, as the deafening roar of AKs filled the main room. Chandler fell instantly, three bullets in his leg and both his shoulder and leg shredded by the grenade shrapnel. Severtsgard was also torn up, with shrapnel in his leg and foot. With one hand, he dragged Chandler from the kill zone into the kitchen.
Sanchez, who had raced across the main room, turned around and saw no one.
What the fuck? Where did they go? Sanchez thought.
In front of him was the door to a small room. Sure he was going to be shot, he kicked open the door and stepped in alone. The bedroom was empty. He propped his rifle against the wall and ran back into the main room. He grabbed Carlisle under his shoulders and pulled him into the shelter of the small back room.
Bullets were ricocheting off the walls and skipping across the floor. From behind the cement guard rail on the circular catwalk, the insurgents were darting back and forth. Their fires covered all angles of the main room below them.
In the kitchen, Chandler was howling in pain. Severtsgard had his rifle trained on the door so no one could enter and finish them off. After a minute or so, Chandler calmed down.
"Hey, man, the Corps will send us home now," Chandler said. "We're all messed up."
Severtsgard smiled and kept watch on the door.
Farmer was lying on his back in the foyer, his trigger finger and thumb badly shredded with shrapnel. He couldn’t hold his rifle. He leaned against the wall and let loose a barrage of profanity.
“Fuck! Those motherfuckers! I’ll kill’em. Those fucks!”
More Marines rushed to the house. Private Rene Rodriguez stood in the courtyard for a minute to sort things out. He had seen Sergeant Pruitt stagger down the street with a shattered hand. He had seen Weemer limp out yelling for reinforcements. The platoon’s corpsman, Doc Edora, was kneeling by the wall treating Eldridge for gunshot wounds in his chest. The word was the platoon sergeant and two or three more were down inside. And his fire team leader, Cpl. Sanchez, was in there somewhere, unaccounted for.
Rodriguez grabbed Lance Corporal Michael Vanhove and ran inside.
"Corporal Sanchez! Sanchez?" Rodriguez yelled.
"I got Carlisle," Sanchez yelled. "We're in the front room. Watch your ass. The center room's a kill zone!"
Rodriguez and Vanhove sprinted past Farmer, past the sprawled Iraqi bodies, the weapons, shell casings and blood. The insurgents above them opened up with a long burst of AK-47 fire. The rounds hit between the two Marines, forcing Vanhove to dive back into the foyer. Rodriguez plunged through the fire and into the bedroom with Sanchez and Carlisle.
“Take security on the door!” Sanchez said.
Sanchez had taken his pressure bandage from his shoulder pocket and was straightening Carlisle’s leg that had twisted backwards from the force of the bullets. As Carlisle screamed, Rodriguez’s stomach turned over. Sanchez spoke jokingly to Carlisle as he tried to staunch the flow of blood.
"Clean the wound, direct pressure, bandage, more pressure…just like in Doc’s classes.”
There was no back door, only a small window covered with sturdy metal bars. The insurgents were steadily shooting at the doorway.
A block away, Pruitt and Eldridge were wobbling up the street toward the medevac humvees. First Sergeant Brad Kasal from Weapons Company was walking forward next to a humvee. Kasal ran to Pruitt's side and pulled him to cover. Pruitt was close to passing out.
"Bad guys in that house," he mumbled. "We got people down inside."
Kasal grabbed the three nearest Marines and ran forward to the courtyard wall, where the squad leader, Cpl. John Mitchell, was crouching with five more Marines. Mitchell led them forward and they stacked along the wall outside the door. Mitchell was in charge. Kasal considered himself just another Marine pitching in. Taking no fire, they tumbled through the doorway.
It was a new house, with clean beige dry walls and a light, brown-speckled concrete floor covered with cement dust and swaths of bright red blood. Inside the doorway, Kasal saw two dead Iraqis. Sanchez and Rodriguez were yelling for a corpsman.
“Get Doc in here!” they yelled. "Carlisle's bleeding out!"
The insurgents knew the Marines had to move across the main room to get their casualties out, and from the catwalk they had an ideal field of fire. Joining Mitchell inside the house were First Sergeant Kasal, Private First Class Nicoll and Lance Corporal Morgan McCowan. For Kasal and Nicoll, this was their second day fighting side-by-side. After four years of service, Niccol was still a Private First Class, repeatedly busted by Kasal. In a battle of wills, Kasal had called PFC Niccol into his office nine times for fighting, drinking and tardiness.
Niccol's irreverence was legendary. On the eve of the battle for Fallujah, the battalion commander, LtCol Willie Buhl, gave him the microphone to motivate 900 Marines with his “I AM PFC NICOLL!” speech, a parody of Mel Gibson’s “I am William Wallace!” exhortation in the movie Braveheart.
"Niccol, you're with me," Kasal said. "Cover my back."
The firing had died down. Mitchell, a school-trained medic, decided not to hesitate.
“I’ll go across," he said. "You all cover me.”
Mitchell ran across the main room in a dead sprint to reach Sanchez, attracting only a few scattered shots. Kasal and Niccol stepped into the main room, staying close to the wall. Kasal looked at the stairs to his right leading to the second floor. Midway up, it looked like someone had chopped a peephole a foot wide out of the cement wall. He next noticed a small room the left of the room Mitchell had entered.
"Anyone been in that room to the left?" he shouted.
When no one answered, Kasal grabbed two Marines behind him.
"Cover that mouse hole and the ladder well," he said. "Niccol, we'll clear that room to the left."
Kasal kicked open the door and thrust the barrel of his rifle forward, sweeping or "pieing" the room from right to left, ending his two-second scan with his eyes locked on the muzzle of an AK pointed at his nose. The insurgent had been hiding inside the door next to the light switch.
Instead of shooting right away, he yelled in Arabic, then fired. In that instant, the shocked first sergeant had jumped a foot back and the AK rounds streaked by, hitting the wall. Kasal stuck his rifle barrel over the top the AK barrel and pulled the trigger, sending ten bullets into the man's chest. The thickset man, dressed in a khaki shirt with a black chest rig holding a row of AK magazines, slowly slumped to the floor. Kasal pushed back the insurgent's sand-colored helmet and, not wanting to be killed by a dying man, shot him twice more in the head.
Without looking behind him, Kasal shouted over his shoulder "Cover that ladder well!" and stepped forward to look around the small bathroom a second time. As he did so, bullets hit the wall around him and he felt like someone had hit his legs with a sledgehammer. He fell into the doorway and was hammered again. He started to crawl around the corner, then remembered Niccol was in the open behind him.
Lying on his side, Kasal looked back and saw Niccol propped against a wall. Niccol jerked and winced as the bullet s hit him, shoving his hand under his armored vest. When he pulled it out, it was covered with blood. Lying on his stomach, Kasal reached up and grabbed Niccol by the sleeve, pulling him down. As he did so, he felt a baseball bat hit him across the ass and he knew he had been shot again.
The insurgents had held their fire, then sprung their ambush. The firing went on and on, Kasal estimating it continued for thirty seconds. Why did those Marines take their eyes off that damn mouse hole, he wondered.
Kasal pulled Niccol to his left into the room. He propped Niccol's shattered left leg on his stomach, trying to tie a pressure bandage as a tourniquet. His hands were sticky with blood and he kept fumbling, worrying that Niccol was going to bleed to death due to his clumsiness. He heard a thump to his right and turned his head to see a pineapple grenade laying just out reach. He rolled left on top of Niccol and bear-hugged him as the explosion went off. He felt sharp pressure in his legs and buttocks and knew he had been hit again. When his head stopped ringing, he shoved his rifle out the door so the Marines would know which room they were in. He didn't want to be hit by friendly fire and he knew they would be coming for them.
Down the hall, Mitchell heard Nicoll yell, “I’m hit!” and First Sergeant Kasal yell, “Get that goddamn cocksucker!”
“Is Nicoll OK?" Mitchell shouted. "Is he going to die?”
Sanchez felt his stomach turn over again. Nicoll was one of his best friends. He couldn’t die. This was all wrong. They had to get them out of there.
Mitchell told Sanchez to take care of Carlisle. Without a word, he ran out of the room, hugging the wall as he sprinted for the bathroom. A grenade bounced and exploded behind him and several AKs started firing. One round hit Mitchell’s rifle in the chamber. Another ricocheted off of his weapon and tore into his thigh—his third Purple Heart.
He skidded into the bathroom. Kasal lay on his side to let Mitchell attend to Niccol in the cramped space. As the blood dripped from him, Kasal's blood pressure fell and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he jerked back, he yelled at Niccol to stay awake. Niccol was nodding off for minutes at a time, then muttering that he was OK.
"Get him out," Kasal said, "or he'll bleed to death."
Outside, Lieutenant Grapes ran up to the house as Pruitt, Eldridge, Weemer and Farmer were being helped into medevac humvees. Over a handheld radio, Grapes reached Mitchell.
"Find us another way out," Mtichell said, "or to kill those fucks so we can walk out!”
Corporal Wolf, who had bandaged Mitchell's arm in the fight the day before, pushed into the entryway next to Grapes and started shouting to Mitchell.
“I got to get over there man! You’re my boy! I’ve gotta come over there!”
Grapes and Wolf circled the house and found no other doors. The five windows had one-inch steel bars covering them.
“Where are they firing from?” Grapes asked Mitchell over the radio.
“There’s a ladderwell, and a skylight over the living room. At least one of them is on the roof!”
“All right,” Grapes told Wolf, “you get your team ready to pull them out. I'll put shooters on the roof across the street to suppress those guys. Once I give you the signal, get in there and pull them out.”
Wolf agreed. While Wolf put together his rescue team, Grapes led a heavily-armed squad onto the roof.
Sgt. Byron W. Norwood, who commanded a humvee with a .50 caliber, entered the foyer with Wolf to see how he could bring the heavy gun to bear. Formerly a crewmember on Colonel Toolan's humvee, Norwood came from a small town in Texas. His sharp wit had reminded Toolan of New York City-type humor. Norwood poked his head around the doorway just as an insurgent let loose a burst. Rodriguez, guarding the door to the bedroom, saw Norwood peek into the main room and watched as his eyes suddenly grew wide. The bullet hit Norwood in the forehead, killing him instantly. Wolf was hit in the chest by the same burst and fell back unharmed, a bullet lodged in his armor vest.
Seeing the expression on Norwood’s face terrified Rodriguez. I’m gonna be the next one shot, he thought. Rodriguez asked Sanchez to relieve him in the doorway.
The Quick Reaction Force, a squad from Lieutenant John Jacobs’ 2nd Platoon, arrived on the scene. Within seconds, Jacobs had his Marines maneuvering to bring fire on the insurgents.
On the nearby roof, the Marines with Grapes poured fire toward the skylight. They were at the same height, though, and the bullets were passing over the heads of the insurgents. With the wounded inside, throwing grenades or bringing heavy weapons into play was out of the question. Wolf couldn’t push across the main room without better suppression.
Chandler and Severtsgard, trapped in the kitchen, thought they could batter their way through a padlocked metal panel leading to the entryway. After shooting and hammering at the panel for several minutes, they pried it open and squeezed through. Wolf laid down suppressing fire and they staggered through the entryway and out into the courtyard.
Both were bleeding badly. Chandler was howling in pain, his leg twisted in a spiral fracture from hip to foot. Severtsgard slumped down against the courtyard wall, blood pouring from his fractured foot. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum came to his aid. Tatum, who had the thickest pair of glasses in Kilo Company, offered to remove Severtsgard’s torn boot.
“Go to hell you blind fuck! No way you are working on my foot!” Severtsgard yelled, getting to his feet and limping toward the nearest humvee.
Grapes and Jacobs knelt by the wall to plan what to do next. Five Marines were trapped inside. Rifle fire wasn't budging the insurgents hiding behind the cement wall on the catwalk above the main room and Mark 19 fire or hand grenades would injure the trapped Marines.
“Flashbangs! The insurgents will think they're grenades and duck,” Grapes said.
Jacobs led his men to the entryway, flipped in two flashbangs and rushed in firing. The insurgents immediately returned fire. Stalemate.
Back outside, Grapes, Crossan and Pvt Justin Boswood crept up to a bedroom window in the back of the house. Grapes and Boswood took turns on a sledge hammer, hammering at the steel bars. Grapes could hear his wounded Marines wailing in pain inside. He could hear Mitchell yelling, “Get us the fuck out of here!" After smashing and smashing, they pried two bars slightly apart. They stripped off their armor and gear and squeezed through. Marines handed their weapons to them.
Boswood pulled a dead insurgent’s body out of the doorway, the blood from his skull covering the floor. Grapes slid on his back into the main room, his sights fixed on the skylight above. Boswood knelt over Grapes chest, covering the stairs.
Grapes, Jacobs and Sanchez at last had the catwalk in a three-cornered crossfire.
"Ready?" Grapes yelled. "Fire!"
From three angles, the Marines fired up at the crosswalk, forcing the insurgents to duck behind the wall.
Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Jonathon Schaffer sprinted across the kill zone, grabbed Kasal and dragged him back to the entryway. Then they ran back and brought out Niccol. Then Mitchell.
That left Sanchez, Rodriguez and Carlisle in the back bedroom down the hall.
The Marines could either continue running the gauntlet across the main room or get through the bars over the bedroom window. Corporal Richard Gonzalez, a demolitions expert known as “the mad bomber,” suggested blowing the bars off the window.
“Are you fucking crazy?" Sergeant Jose Nazario yelled. "You’ll fucking kill them! Don’t blow it!”
Corporal Eric Jensen came running up with a long chain that was looped around the bars. Jensen hooked the chain to a Humvee and pulled out the bars. Sanchez and Rodriguez put Carlisle on a makeshift stretcher and passed out his limp body.
With all the wounded out of the house, Grapes linked up with Mitchell.
"Now we let Gonzalez do his work," Grapes said.
The Marines peppered the house with fire and hooted and hollered as if they were still inside while Gonzalez prepared a 20 pound satchel charge - sufficient to blow down two houses. Gonzalez crept inside the house and placed the satchel on top of a dead insurgent’s body. A few seconds later, he ran outside.
“15 Seconds!”
They ducked for cover. The house exploded in a huge flash of red, followed by chunks of concrete thudding down as a vast cloud of dust rose. A pink mist mixed with the dust and gunpowder in the air. Grapes was happy to see it.
The Marines waited several minutes, then moved forward into the dusty rubble. They saw two bodies lying among the slabs. As they drew closer, they noticed one of them move.
“They’re still alive!”
An arm flicked limply forward and a grenade tumbled toward the Marines. They turned and ran for cover. Sanchez saw Grapes and Crossan racing by him. I’m too slow! I’m fucked! he thought. The grenade went off, injuring no one.
Seven Marines climbed back up the rubble and fired two hundred rounds into the two insurgents. Among the detritus, Lt. Grapes found a woolen winter skullcap with bright colors, the kind worn by fighters in Chechnya. He kicked it into the dirt.
Bing West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in Marine infantry in Vietnam. His books have won the Marine Corps Heritage Prize, the Colby Award for Military History and appeared on the Commandant's Reading List. West appears regularly on The News Hour and Fox News. He is a member of St. Crispin's Order of the Infantry and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Newport, RI.
All original content is © 2005-2006
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 01:17 PM | Comments (29)
January 16, 2006
Africa
I have just finished reading one of the most important and depressing books I have ever read, The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. The subtitle of this superb volume is: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, A History of 50 Years of Independence.
The portrait of Africa that Meredith so meticulously draws makes Conrad's Heart of Darkness look like, well, an MGM musical
As the European Colonial powers withdrew from Africa, dozens of new states were born. There was much hope and celebration--and of course zillions of dollars in foreign aide was pumped into these fledging states.
Independence came in the midst of a massive economic boom. These lands were and are rich in natural resources--which is why the Europeans colonized Africa in the first place.
But one by one, each state devolved into vicious thugocracies. Nkrumah of Ghana, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Hastings Banda of Malawi, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Empire...
The rogues list is endless. These corrupt thugs all ran their countries as personal fiefdoms, looting and bankrupting the national treasuries, murdering all opposition, and setting up socialist governments that doomed their citizens to lives of wretched poverty and endless disease.
And which country do you think was propping up these vile regimes, America, Russia?
Nope.
France.
If you're looking for a truly evil colonial hand propping up one murderous regime after another, well it's those elegant, self-righteous Frenchman.
And you don't have to go back very far to find their bloody handprints. As recently as the genocide in Rwanda, the French are in the thick of it. The French army trained the Hutu genocidaires. In essence, the French helped the Hutu murder 800,000 Tutsi.
Hey, let's not forget that it was the French who rounded up the Jews in France without one Nazi taking part in the round-up. It was French policeman all the way on Black Saturday. Yup, the French have a talent for collaborating with facist regimes with genocidal plans. But then they crap all over America, get all uppity when we actually try to do some good in the world.
Finally, the genocide--it was not a civil war, but meticulously planned butchery--in Rwanda was too much of an embarrassment for the French and Mitterand tore himself away from his mistress for a few hours and sent in "peace keeping troops." It was called Operation Turquoise.
Meanwhile, the French were still delivering arms to the Hutu muderers.
Radio broadcasts in Rwanda told the Hutu women: "You Hutu girls wash yourselves and put on a good dress to welcome our French allies. The Tutsi girls are all dead..."
French troops on the ground, disgusted by the evidence of massacres they found felt betrayed. "We have been deceived," said a sergeant-major, staring at a group of wounded and starving Tutsi refugees. "This is not what we were led to believe. We were told the Tutsis were killing the Hutus. We thought the Hutus were the good guys and the victims."
"I've had enough of being cheered by murderers, " remarked another soldier.
A French officer broke down and cried, so appalled was he at the crimes committed by men he had trained.
Meredith does not take the easy way out. He does not lay blame at the legacy of colonialism. If anything, the colonial powers left these countries with strong infrastructures with which to build upon.
No, if there is any great blame it can be found in the tribal loyalties that subvert all other interests. The states that were carved out by the colonial powers were truly artificial. For Africans, it is always family, clan, and tribes that come first.
Ask most Africans about his or her nation and you will get a puzzled stare.
I cannot close without mentioning one of West Africa's most notorious warlords, Charles Taylor. After laying waste to Liberia using child soldiers, murdering, torturing, committing unspeakable atrocities, he set up "elections."
His 1977 campaign slogan was the truly catchy: He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.
He won.
Oh, and guess who gave his seal of approval to Taylor's election?
Former President Jimmy Carter. As always, utterly useless.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:18 PM | Comments (6)
December 30, 2005
Pioneer Jewish Photographers
The book was carelessly shtupped in the "just returned" shelf. I was browsing this shelf in my local library when the title caught my eye: Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel 1890-1933.
I checked it out, expecting the usual photos of Christian holy places, Arabs on camels--G-d I hate camels, they spit and bite and smell like you know what--and photos of dunes, lots of sand dunes.
Wrong.
This book and its contents are a complete knock-out. And for a Jew and a lover of Zion, well, a complete revelation.
To quote from the flap: Documentors of the Dream is the first comprehensive book to chart the origins and development of Eretz Israel as seen through the eyes of Jewish photographers and their images are largely unknown and unpublished in the world of photographic history. It is a curious fact that Israel, the embodiment of a culture, language, and history, a symbol of nationhood for Jews, almost never appears in photographs of the Holy Land. Most photographs of the period reflect a predominantly Christian world in a period of colonial expansion. Documentors of the Dream is a stunning and beautiful testament to an emerging art form and the emerging nation it captured.
After I inhaled the photographs in this book I gave it to Karen and begged her to look at it. Usually, Karen isn't all that interested in my art books. She's busy reading all these psychology papers that I find, frankly, incomprehensible. But she sensed that this time there was something different about the book I was offering and dutifully she set about going through it with her usual care and rigor. The next day Karen said to me: "The pictures in the book are just amazing. It's Israel before any sleaze set in."
You think you know what Israel looked like back before statehood? Look at the photo taken of Rav Kook with Rabbi Harlap in The Mercaz haRav Yeshiva, Jerusalem, in the 1930's, by the incomparable photographer Tzadok Bassan, pg.105.
Deeply touching are Avraham Soskin's intimate photos of British and Palestinian WWI servicemen. Note that the Palestinians in Palestine are always Jews. The Arabs are always called, well, Arabs, never Palestinians. It's a triumph of PR, actually a triumph of the big lie, that the Arabs have coopted the name Palestinians for they never referred to themselves as anything but Arabs until recently.
How did Israel let them get away with that?
Who said Jews are smart?
But I digress.
If you love somebody and you're looking for the perfect gift to give, well, this is it. A beautiful and illuminating art book that has amazing pictures you can look at again and again, and text that just never fails to astonish. This fine volume was published back in 1998, but you know what, it gets my nod for the best art book of 2005.
The other night, I dreamed of Ariel and woke drenched in a cold sweat. I got out of bed, went downstairs and made myself a cup of tea. In the living room, I sat in the Eames chair where Ariel spent most of the last year of his life learning, reading, talking to people. Making believe that Ariel was looking over my shoulder, I slowly leafed through the book, pausing at the photos of the Rebbeim and the Hasidim--the photos I knew Ariel would take particular pleasure in.
We spent the longest time on page 53 with Tzadok Basson's portrait of a Jerusalem Hasidic family: The noble and handsome patriarch Israel Shimon Schein Azulai with his two grandsons, Avrech Azulai and Chaim Yosef. Beautiful children with light--holy light--coming directly from their eyes.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:39 PM | Comments (11)
December 28, 2005
Dershowitz's Piece of Peace
The day this book arrived in my mail box a homicide bomber murdered five Jews in Hadera, Israel.
The day this book arrived in my mail box the President of Iran informed the world that the "Zionist entity" -- he does not say Israel -- should be wiped off the face of the earth.
The day this book arrived in my mail box I finished reading a detailed narrative of the great Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's March through Georgia.
Professor Dershowitz is an eloquent defender of Israel. In fact, this book should have been titled: The Case For Israel II, a sequel to his previous book The Case for Israel. I say this because the moment this book rolled off the presses -- it was irrelevent.
You see, Professor Dershowitz's thesis is that with the death of the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, the dynamics in the Middle East changed. "A season for peace may be on the horizon," says Dershowitz.
Dershowitz's plan for peace is, for the most part, Oslo redux.
With great elegance, and great naivete, Professor Dershowitz identifies twelve geopolitical barriers to peace, and he explains how to move around them and push the process forward.
Just like that.
As if terrorists were not in complete control of Palestinian society.
Dershowitz is fearfully logical. But his logic forces him to confront some pretty uncomfortable truths. For instance, he has a whole chapter titled: What if a Palestinian State Became a Launching Pad for Terrorism?
Guess how long the chapter is? A hundred pages? Fifty pages? Ten pages?
Sorry, it's three pages long, er, short.
Okay, so the very idea makes Professor Dershowitz, uh, lose sleep. It should. Palestinian society is basically a gruesome death cult. Their media is saturated in the most vile anti-Semitism you have ever seen. Local governments are nothing but self-serving thugocracies. Kidnapping and shakedowns are the only growth industries in Gaza. Imagine a state run by the Corleone family and you get a pretty good idea of Palestinian culture.
And don't fool yourself, the PA does not really exist. The PA at this point is merely a political illusion propped up by the western press.
The real power lies with the clans and the tribes. They are the ones who always run things in Arab society. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know the Arab world.
Which is why Israel is buiding the security fence. There is no partner for peace. At least Hamas is honest: they call for the complete destruction of Israel. Ditto for Hezbollah. Ditto for Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Ditto for Islamic Jihad. Ditto for Black September. Ditto for -- well you get the point.
Of course any Palestinian state that arises (Gosh, there's a depressing thought) will be a terrorist state; that's all they've ever planned for. That's all they know: to destroy, not to build. It's so much more fun to run around with a Kalachnikov and give interviews to Paris Match than to provide social services. I mean who wants to pick up the garbage?
So, how does Professor Dershowitz resolve this existential question of a possible, no probable terrorist state?
I quote: Until and unless that frightening scenario is addressed, with concrete guarantees from the international community, it is likely that distrust among moderate Israelis will persist... Only the United States, with the cooperation of European nations, could provide the needed guarantees."
Yup, you read correctly: international community.
Like whom, France, Germany? Hey, how about that other great European power...Belgium?
Professor Dershowitz's unfortunate refrain of "international guarantees" appears again and again in the pages of this book.
I know one person who probably really likes that whole notion: Kofi Annan.
It's really depressing.
At this point in the book, I badly wanted a drink, something really strong -- except I don't drink. Liquor gives me migraines. So I had a cup of coffee instead.
It's absolutely lunatic, if not downright suicidal. No nation is going to place her security in the arms of another country.
Let me say this: Dershowitz does a wonderful job of arguing Israel's case. No one does a better job. It's particularly gratifying to see him shredding the academic anti-Semites like Tony Judt of NYU and Noam Chomsky of MIT.
But, his arguments for peace are about as dead as Arafat.
Oh, Sherman's March through Georgia?
That was the nail in the coffin of the Confederacy. You see, the civilians who lived in the South did not suffer any real consequences for their deplorable life-style. Sure, they sent their sons and fathers off to war. They rationed food. Good coffee was hard to find. And their slaves were getting kind of surly. But all in all, life was, well, livable.
Until Sherman's well disciplined army came marching through. He burned their plantations. He ripped apart their corrupt society.
He made them understand that support for evil has a fearful price.
And guess what, the South capitulated once the civilian population got a taste of real suffering.
And then there was peace.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 03:55 PM | Comments (23)
December 21, 2005
Journalistic Grunt
Here's an interview with Robert Kaplan, author of the invaluable Imperial Grunts. Thanks so much to Steve Finefrock for sending it to me.
Kaplan is one of the few working journalists who actually bothers to live with our soldiers, and not in four star hotels. He knows them intimately. He loves them; hence he gets war right.
Kaplan understands journalistic elites, and geopolitics. Read this interview in its entirety. It is highly revealing.
Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan
Born in Brooklyn 53 years ago, Robert Kaplan was raised in a working-class section of Queens where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker. Recruited as a swimmer, he attended the University of Connecticut, where he took not a single history, economics, or political science course, but learned to write. He started in journalism at the Daily Herald of Rutland, Vermont, and commenced to energetically educate himself in world affairs.
A vagabond investigator of some of the world’s most troubled regions, he has written a host of books on places like the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. Reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s, he was one of the first journalists to profile contemporary Islamic radicals. His latest book, Imperial Grunts, is a ground-level portrait of American infantrymen serving around the globe.
Robert Kaplan was interviewed in Washington, D.C. by TAE’s editors.
TAE: Tell us how you got started writing about some of the world’s most benighted places.
Kaplan: Starting not long after college, I spent 16 straight years overseas living out of cheap hotels and youth hostels as a freelance reporter, sending in stories by mail and yellow telex tapes. I spent lots of time in North Africa and the Middle East, and two years embedded with the Israeli military. In 1988, I had my first book published. And then it just went from there.
Today, I live in western Massachusetts, mainly because of the solitude it provides. The more isolated a writer’s environment, the more powerful and honest the results—because writing, above all, is ferocious truth telling. And each year, I spend about six months overseas.
TAE: What draws you to the topics of war and ferment in which you’ve specialized?
Kaplan: I’m very curious. And travel is more than just going to different places. All too often, people who travel all over the world only socialize with elites like themselves. For me, that’s not travel. Travel requires getting to another socioeconomic class than the one you inhabit. And that means getting away from stable places with very affluent business communities and getting to war-torn places where you have to make a sociological and cultural adjustment.
I also find that places on the brink of collapse are intellectually fascinating because they’re like a real-life experiment with Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Ibn Khaldun. You can’t really understand Hobbes unless you’ve been to Sierra Leone when it’s cracking up. Hobbes once said that “life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And he’s exactly right, because freedom is nothing without authority. That concept has no real meaning in the classroom unless you’ve seen a place with no authority—where just walking down the street is absolutely terrifying. That’s why the most fundamental human right is personal security. That’s something that is very hard to communicate to people who’ve never been outside of an affluent, physically secure environment.
TAE: For all the talk of American imperialism, isn’t the main “foreign influence” in Iraq today—the main outside threat to Iraqi self-determination—the international jihadis who make up the al-Qaeda resistance?
Kaplan: Absolutely. One of the big myths of the Left is that we have troops around the world propping up dictatorships. This reflects a 1970s time-warp mentality. In every case I can name—from the Philippines to Georgia, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East—we’re stationed at the request of newly elected, internationally recognized, democratic governments. And this makes sense: You can’t have a stable democracy without a professional military.
If the United States were to pull out of Iraq you would have a real bloodbath, plus a reversal in a lot of the positive trends towards liberalization we’ve seen in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Dubai, and many others. I mention all these places individually because they’re not getting enough coverage in the media. Even Syria—despite all the trouble we’re having—is a much less autocratic place now than it was four years ago. None of this would have been possible if the United States had cut and run Mogadishu-style once things got rough in Iraq.
TAE: Is it plausible that the elections and constitutions and various liberalizations now taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan are inspiring a kind of “Arab Spring” in the places you just mentioned?
Kaplan: Yes. Three weeks after the first successful Iraqi election, Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt stunned the world by saying “this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.”
But because we’ve had such a surge of democratization in the Arab world in such a narrow frame of time, we’re going to have to stick it out in order for the progress to hold. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Lebanese democracy is just ephemeral; the Syrians will ultimately reconstitute Lebanon in their own totalitarian image. If we don’t stick it out in Iraq, Libya will go backward after going forward, and in Egypt Mubarak will be succeeded by another Brezhnev-type leader. And on and on.
TAE: What are the chances that the strong underground forces for freedom that are bubbling in Iran will push aside that nation’s theocracy in the next ten years?
Kaplan: I used to be optimistic. In the mid-1990s I saw an Iranian counterrevolution as the biggest coming surprise. But I was wrong. At this point, the theocracy is a system with divisions of power that are very well entrenched, and hard to overthrow.
And Iran is not Iraq—we couldn’t just go in there and topple it. There’ll be a slow evolution at some point, but I think the reality is that as long as we’re overextended in Iraq, we have to try to get as far as we can in Iran together with our allies. And only when the Iranian regime crosses a line in the sand with regard to their nuclear development should we—or will we—take any action.
TAE: Have you spent enough time with Iraqis recently to have drawn any conclusions on their current state of mind?
Kaplan: I think there’s a large, silent majority in Iraq whose worst nightmare is that we’ll leave abruptly. They don’t want us there with 140,000 troops, but they don’t want us to leave either. They essentially want what the Administration and responsible Democrats [?] want—a gradual takeover by their own forces over a few years.
TAE: If we gave you only two options, would you say that over the last three years in Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. has achieved more than we should have expected, or less than we should have expected?
Kaplan: In Afghanistan we’ve achieved more than we should have expected. You have to compare today’s Afghanistan to the high-water mark of its own governance in the 1950s and 1960s under King Zahir Shah. Even then, the government did not control the whole country and did not extend its writ into villages and towns. By that standard, we’ve achieved a lot more than anyone could have expected. And among the Afghan people, there’s relatively little anti-Americanism.
In Iraq, we’ve achieved a lot more than we have in Haiti or Kosovo—but still achieved less than we should have expected. My litmus test for Iraq is the flak jacket. As long as we still have to wear flak jackets all the time, then we’re not where we need to be.
TAE: How rapidly should U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq over the next few years, and what should the criteria be?
Kaplan: First of all, I don’t believe in a timetable. Troops should only be withdrawn as rapidly as the situation allows. And when we do pull down the number of troops—which we will—it’s important to get the political body language right. We cannot seem as if we’re cutting and running.
When Prime Minister Barak of Israel withdrew from Lebanon, for example, he got the political body language wrong. That resulted in the Palestinians misunderstanding his actions, and it became a significant cause of the first intifada. The Israeli prime minister was right to withdraw, but it wasn’t couched in the right phrases with the right context. So we have to be very careful about our withdrawal.
TAE: We hear much in the establishment media about morale problems in U.S. military ranks, and reporters often seek out disenchanted troops to put in front of microphones. Have you encountered widespread morale problems among American fighters in Iraq?
Kaplan: Absolutely not. I’ve only met two kinds of soldiers in the combat arms community: Those who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and those who are pulling every bureaucratic string to get deployed there.
I spent the summer of 2004 with a group of marines in Niger and sub-Saharan Africa, and every marine in that platoon was trying to get to Iraq. A few months later, one of them got lucky and ended up leading Iraqi forces into combat in the second battle of Fallujah. He was a sergeant from Georgia, and after the battle, he sent me a long e-mail flush with pride. And that’s not just a cutesy-pie story—that’s basically what I encounter all the time.
The only disenchantment is found in the Reserves and the National Guard, mainly because they signed up for a short time and end up serving many months. That’s a system that needs reform. But generally speaking, morale is better than it’s been in a very long time.
Keep in mind there is very little combat going on now. Most deployments feature more humanitarian missions than combat. Even in Iraq, the troops really have to search far and wide to find combat activities.
TAE: How do our soldiers understand for themselves, and explain to others, the value of the work they are doing in Iraq?
Kaplan: Soldiers are very aware of why they’re fighting—and that awareness stems from their own practical day-to-day experience, which is not killing people. By and large, they’re rebuilding, patrolling, and helping the Iraqi people.
Second, it’s important to realize that most soldiers don’t sit around discussing abstract questions like whether or not we should’ve intervened. They do, however, take policy and command directives, break them down, and then argue, complain, and fervently discuss them.
Since the dawn of time, the most popular hobby amongst soldiers has been complaining at night in the barracks. If you don’t hear complaints, then you know morale is bad—because that means people are silent. And I think that many journalists misconstrue this, because they don’t understand—and they haven’t read the history of—barracks life.
TAE: As in any institution with millions of members, there are rogue soldiers—and today we know their names and faces very well, as with Lynndie England. At times this has threatened to paralyze our war on terror. How common are rogue soldiers, compared to soldiers who do the right thing?
Kaplan: They’re statistically infinitesimal. This is the most disciplined, restrained military the U.S. has ever had, under more scrutiny than it’s ever had. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Nothing was a greater privilege in my professional life than being with 18- and 19-year-old marines as they turned into restrained adults the minute that combat commenced. To say that we shouldn’t give our soldiers authority is like saying we shouldn’t fly planes because they occasionally crash.
TAE: Have you talked to any of the troops about their feelings on Abu Ghraib?
Kaplan: Yes, and there are several levels to this. First and foremost, every soldier I’ve talked to has wanted to scream, “What were those idiots thinking? Who were their commanders? They should all be put in prison because they’ve besmirched our name! And even though 99 percent of what we do is good, nobody is writing about it because of these few idiots!”
That’s the first level. The other level is that after about six weeks of blanket coverage, they started disliking the media. They knew that the first few days of coverage were legitimate, because this was a terrible abuse. But after a few weeks, when the new revelations became smaller and smaller and less and less significant, the continuing blanket coverage obscured the great work that the U.S. Army was doing.
At that time, for example, they were involved in very restrained, close-quarters urban combat in Karbala, fighting that made Black Hawk Down look easy. Yet very little was written about it. And that’s when I heard soldiers start saying that the media was part of the problem.
TAE: You argue in your new book that evangelical Christianity has played an important role in making the U.S. military more moral, more disciplined, and more discerning. Explain that for our readers.
Kaplan: After Vietnam, one of the many motors that helped transform our military into a disciplined organization capable of complex exercises was the resurgence of religion. Perhaps most importantly, religious Christianity cut down on drinking and misbehavior. That in turn weakened the lure of the officers’ clubs, which narrowed the barrier between officers and enlisted and non-coms. I attended quite a number of religious services during my reporting for Imperial Grunts, and I never found them intimidating, proselytizing, or coercive. And the religion bucked up morale during difficult moments.
TAE: Is Islam a religion of peace, or is there is a bellicose spirit right at the heart of Islam?
Kaplan: Islam is a religion that’s willing to fight. It’s a great religion for poor, downtrodden people, and there are so many around the world. It’s direct. It’s stark. It’s in a specific language. The Koran has fewer ambiguities than other religious texts. In a way, it’s very populist. It actively proselytizes. And even though I wouldn’t call it a war-like religion, it can adjust itself to war more easily than others. But Old Testament-oriented Christianity can also do that. The Old Testament is all fire and brimstone, while the New Testament is more milk and honey. And evangelicals put a significant emphasis on the Old Testament.
TAE: Where are the moderate Muslims today? Why don’t we hear more from them after outrages are committed in the name of Islam?
Kaplan: I think they’ll be more outspoken if we can stick it out in Iraq. Look at the fact that some Sunnis were bombing mosques during Ramadan. How come nobody’s protesting in the Arab world? But once our success is assured, I think they’ll speak up.
Meanwhile, we do have Ayatollah Sistani. If Nobel Peace Prizes actually went to people who deserved them, it would have gone to him this year. Sistani exercised tremendous enlightened restraint in the face of so much violent provocation, and he really kept his community together. I do think we’ve gotten lucky with the Shiite leadership in southern Iraq.
TAE: You’ve argued that Democrats will not be trusted to wield the sword of U.S. national defense so long as a fierce U.S. combat soldier who draws inspiration from the Bible is something that makes them uncomfortable. Why are the Democrats seen as so weak on national security, and will that change?
Kaplan: Look at last year’s election, which, to a certain extent, was a referendum on the Iraq war. More than 70 percent of active-duty military personnel, Reserve, and Guard voted for the Republicans. And from my anecdotal experience—which was with the front line infantry and the Special Forces, who have always been more conservative—the Republicans probably received more than 90 percent of the vote.
With numbers like those, you have to ask yourself why. It wasn’t for policy reasons; a lot of people in the barracks will openly say that Bush and Rumsfeld made a number of mistakes. It was cultural. People in the military don’t feel like the Democrats are one of them. They feel as if the Democrats are from another America—from the same America as the elite media.
So the Democrats have a cultural hurdle to overcome, and it’s essential for the well-being of our democracy that they overcome it. A two-party democracy is only as strong as the opposition party, and if the opposition party simply can’t get elected, then the party in power starts performing worse and worse because it doesn’t feel the competition. It’s happened in other democracies, and I’m afraid of this happening in the U.S.
It’s also important that the military doesn’t become associated for too long with one political party. But for that to change, the Democrats must overcome their cultural problems. And generally speaking, that means changing their skewed ideas of what it means to be a Southerner or an evangelical in uniform.
TAE: Why do so many reporters, academics, and some everyday Americans think that people who go into the Army or Marines must be folks who didn’t have bright prospects in college or the civilian work force?
Kaplan: To be diplomatic, I think it’s class prejudice and snobbery. Because most of the people I meet in the lower ranks aren’t poor or from the ghetto—they’re the solid working class, which does still exist. They’re from non-trendy places in between the two coasts, or from working-class urban neighborhoods.
Look, for example, at one of the Special Forces teams I was with in Algeria. The executive officer, a graduate of The Citadel, was from a farming family in Indiana. The master sergeant was from a farming family in New Hampshire. The warrant officer grew up in an Italian section of Queens, New York. That’s America. Whites in the barracks get very insulted if you confuse them with so-called white trash, and African Americans in the barracks get tremendously insulted if you confuse them with people in the inner city. With both groups, some of them may have come from the underclass, but they’ve long since separated themselves from it. They have no class envy.
TAE: Most European democracies have completely lost their fighting spirit, and are thus left with unimpressive military forces. Why is the U.S. a comparative exception today among modern Western nations in the survival of a righteous martial spirit among its population?
Kaplan: I think Australia still has it, and Japan is regaining it. People are a little uncomfortable with that, given Japan’s military history, but their reconstituted spirit is understandable given their terrific fear of a reunited greater Korea. And even Singapore has a very feisty, strong military. So we’re not the only ones.
But in all these cases, I think it’s because there is a sense of specific nationhood, anchored to a specific geography, which gives it a moral accountability. Once you’re de-linked from geography and you only think in terms of universal values, you’re no longer motivated. That’s why Europe has a specific problem. The old nation exists less and less in Europe.
TAE: Much of the American elite has also lost its “martial spirit.” How has the American elite changed over the years, and why do you think they have?
Kaplan: In the early 1960s, I remember hearing my truck-driving father talk about the “Establishment”—people like Averil Harriman, John McCloy, Charles Bolin, George Tannin. Even though these people were very liberal, they saw themselves as Americans. Today’s similar figures wouldn’t see themselves in the same light, because they so often socialize and cross paths with people from other countries.
So the American elite exists less and less as an institution, while the global elite exists more and more. Today’s media elites, for example, care more about the thoughts and writings of their “esteemed” colleagues in Britain or France than their counterparts at the Chicago Tribune or the Omaha World Herald. That was not the case when I was growing up.
TAE: Do you think part of the problem that elites have with George Bush is the fact that he comes across as so American?
Kaplan: Definitely. The reality is that President Bush comes across as a kind of throwback, an archetypal figure from an earlier America. So no matter what he says, post-national elites in Washington and New York are going to feel culturally alienated by him. That’s something he just has to deal with.
TAE: Give us your overall view of journalists today.
Kaplan: We live in an increasingly large and complex society, and it’s becoming separated out into fragments. And each group—journalists, lawyers, soldiers—tend to socialize with each other, to date each other, to marry each other.
But journalists have a problem that other professional groups don’t have, because their job requires objectivity. As they become one social caste whose elite members tend to live in certain places, with similar zip codes, in similar high-income environments, that becomes very hard to get around.
Moreover, newspapers like the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Baltimore Sun used to be almost as significant as the New York Times. Those days are over. So the elite newspapers—which are only on the coasts, not in the heartland—now drive the debate. The result is that journalistic objectivity has become very problematic.
TAE: Give us some guesses as to what the world’s flashpoints and hotspots will be ten years from now, in 2016.
Kaplan: I think the focus of our military and security concerns is going to move to Asia, because the strength of the Chinese economy will have military consequences. They’re going to spend a lot of money on submarines—both diesel and nuclear—and develop an imperial navy. Over the next 50 years, the Pacific Ocean will no longer be the American lake that it’s been for the past 50. Unless we begin military cooperation with Indonesia, for instance, at some point the Indonesian military will be captured by the Chinese in some form.
We have to figure out how to manage the re-emergence of China as a military power. I also think that the Indonesian, Malaysian, and southern Philippine archipelago will grow in importance as possible venues for world terrorism. And I think that President Chavez of Venezuela is a potential Castro. Because he’s got a continental nation rather than an island, he could be more dangerous than Castro ever was. I think we need to develop a more realistic outlook on India. The future of the Middle East will be determined by Iran, and any major shift there will have consequences across the region. Even a subtle pivot by Iran toward greater cooperation with America would deal a serious blow to radicals through the region.
Published in Whatever Happened to Small Government? January/February 2006
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:24 AM | Comments (3)
December 06, 2005
Orthodox Mystery
My friend Rochelle Krich's latest Molly Blume novel, Now You See Me, has just gone into its seond printing. It's a fine book and if you're looking for a perfect Chanukah or Christmas gift well, your search has ended.
Publisher John Wiley has sent me Alan Dershowitz's latest book, The Case For Peace, asking me to review it on Seraphic Secret. I will read the book this Shabbos and post my thoughts sometime next week.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:50 AM | Comments (4)
December 02, 2005
Murderous Peaceniks
Among the mighty mountain of books on my night table, there's always a few volumes about war.
To any clear thinking person it should be obvious that war is the final arbiter of all great conflicts. Those who speak of negotiated peace speak of fiction.
The great World Wars have made this world what it is and there are numerous lessons to be learned militarily in terms of the present War on Terrorism. Thus I draw your attention to two very fine books.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, and A World at Arms by Gerhard L. Weinberg.
Tuchman's volume is about World War I, and Weinberg's about the World War II. Tuchman is a riveting historian who has the ability to tell a great story and make history come alive. Weinberg is more academic, there are thousands of footnotes. But he does detail, oh boy does he do detail.
An interesting theme crops up in both books, it's timely and intensely important.
Pacifists, Peace Movements, and their murderous aftermath.
Tuchman points out that the peace movements in France and England that preceeded WWI practically immobilized both countries' heavy industries to such an extent that when war finally did break out, France and England were at least sixteen months behind the Germans in heavy production. You see, the peace movements advocated a policy of--surprise--appeasement. Give the Germans what they want and they won't go to war.
As if.
Tuchman also points out that France and England were tragically behind Germany even in small manufacturing so that her soldiers marched to the front with not even proper winter uniforms. Her soldiers froze to death on the Western front.
Yes, it is true, millions of soldiers perished on the Western front from the new technology of machine guns, from Generals impaled on outmoded military doctrine.
But on a deeper level, millions were slaughtered because of the peace movements that self-righteously refused to recognise reality, that refused to confront evil.
By the way, one of the best films about WWI is King Vidor's The Big Parade, 1925. Also, not to be missed is Stanley Kubrik's Paths of Glory. The loooooooong tracking shots through the trenches were done before the Steadicam was invented and you can see Kubrik's obsession with long takes even at this stage in his career.
But I digress.
You would think that lessons would be learned from World War I. You would think that the pacifists and appeasers and so-called peace activists would have lost all credibility, but truth has a funny way of getting buried in the avalanche of big lies.
And, I suppose, the word "peace" has an almost narcotic effect on man. They hear the word often enough and they get, well, kind of stupid.
The peace movements that preceeded WWII were an almost carbon copy of the nonsense spewed before WWI -- except that communications had improved greatly. Newspapers like the NY Times wielded immense power. And of course, The NY Times, then as now, astonishingly dim, saw no reason to get involved in foreign conflicts. The peace movements in America, France and England were utterly penetrated by Hitler's and Stalin's ruthless agents. And Hitler in a replay of the Kaiser's attitude, well, Hitler absolutely adored the peace movements. He kept a close eye on them, and smiled the whole time. They were, he understood, his best allies. As long as these fools kept up their blather Hitler would be able to swallow whole countries.
Once again, the pacifists and peaceniks advocated appeacement. Just give Herr Hitler what he wants and surely he won't go to war.
Rule # 1 of Peace Movements: They cannot imagine nor confront evil.
Rule # 2 of Peace Movements: They do not care about history.
Rule # 3 of Peace Movements: They are always secretly financed and penetrated by the enemy.
Weinberg points out that by the time Great Britain declared war on Germany, England (and America) were two full years behind Germany in armament production. Once again, the peace camps made sure that the great Democracies were at their weakest at a time when they were literally fighting for their very existence.
Thus another world war dragged on for more years than should have been necessary and millions and millions of lives were lost when again, these lives could have been saved if evil had been confronted at an earlier stage.
It's not a great leap to the Viet Nam War. Because of the "peace movement" at home, we betrayed our allies and the North Vietnamese slaughtered hundreds of thousands of "political enemies."
After that, The Khmer Rouge were emboldened to commit genocide in Cambodia: a million men, women and children were murdered, mostly suffocated with plastic bags. These barbarians knew that America would not interfere, not after Viet Nam. Not after the Peace Movement.
And now the Peace Movement is on the march again.
About Iraq.
About the War on Terror.
God protect us.
And so, the next time you see a "peace demonstration," cloaked in all their moral vanity, keep in mind that these people will probably end up committing mass murder.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:04 AM | Comments (31)
November 22, 2005
Brooklyn Was Murder
Seraphic Secret friend, Neil Kleid is coming out with Brownsville, a powerful and original graphic novel. Neil has been working on this book for three years.
Here's some information from the publisher, NBM.
BROWNSVILLE HC
(Mature Themes)
HC,6x9, 200pgs, B&W
SRP: $18.95
Diamond Order Code: DEC053126
by Neil Kleid & Jake Allen
Written by Xeric Award winner Neil Kleid. In the 1930's, life in Brooklyn was murder. "Jewish gangster" isn't a term you hear much in post-Holocaust society ... but back when the Dodgers played in the East, and licorice cost a penny a bag, Brooklyn corners were lousy with semitic young toughs looking for adventure and excitement — none more so than in Brownsville. Follow the intertwined lives of Allie Tanennbaum, Abe Reles, and scores of hoods organized by Louis Lepke Buchalter into the deadliest hit operation in Mafia history, "Murder, Inc.", as they escape the mean streets and lonely tenements of East New York, and make themselves into the most dangerous men in America, only to eventually send their best friends and closest allies up the river.
Here's what people are saying about BROWNSVILLE:
"Jewish gangsters are almost unheard of these days. This taut and suspenseful drama takes people to an era that no longer exists. I'm not saying Jews are untainted by crime these days - but at least they're not out knockin' heads like they used to be!"
Harvey Pekar, writer, AMERICAN SPLENDOR
"Most of the material you'll find about the 'Jewish mafia' is garbage. This book examines a piece of the history of organized crime, and does so with grace, style and power. BROWNSVILLE carries history. Read it."
Carla Speed McNeil, creator, FINDER
Check out more about BROWNSVILLE at: rantcomics.
The full color cover is available for viewing here.
There's a hefty interview about BROWNSVILLE at Newsarama .
Neil sent me a PDF of the first few pages of the book and I was dazzled. I felt as if I was watching the Jewish version of The Godfather. Yes, it is that good.
Neil is writing and illustrating Migdal David for Seraphic Press. It won't be finished for another two years. But it will be worth the wait for Neil is a great talent.
The world of graphic novels is the richest literary vein in our culture. And within that world there is a tiny group of Jewish artists who are, with great courage and determination, creating graphic novels with authentic Jewish content.
I am in awe of their work.
Plunge into JT Waldman's version of Megillat Esther. Order Neil Kleid's compelling and painstainkingly researched Brownsville. For while the chattering classes are in their ivory echo chambers singing the praises of the tedious but oh-so-predictible works of the latest most fashionable but oh-so-forgettable novelist, it is Kleid and Waldman and a few others who are the true geniuses at work today.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 11:43 AM | Comments (6)
May 06, 2005
I am (Also) Charlotte Simmons
It's a real treat when you sit down to read a book and it absolutely rivets you, draws you into its world--and refuses to let you go. So much contemporary writing is positively anemic, devoid of plot, and contemtuous of drawing an accurate portrait of society. The writing workshops in our universities bear much of the blame for this. In my first creative writing workshop at Bard College, it quickly became apparent the kind of writing our Professor favored; anything else was considered "retro." I was given, subtle and not so subtle hints that I was not considered a "serious" writer; my interest in plot, character and good old fashioned story-telling was simply not acceptable. I got a C in the course and never took another creative writing workshop ever again. But, as far as I know, I'm the only student from that class who actually makes a living as a writer.
In any case, this brief and mildly bitter introduction brings me to Tom Wolfe, one of our great writers. Naturally, he is not beloved by the elite. His latest work, I am Charlotte Simmons has received less than glowing reviews. The reason? He is unabashedly honest about what goes on in our universities. The very places our cultural elite spring from. He is also an outspoken cultural conservative, and for the NY Times Book Review this is one rung above child molestation. I am about a hundred pages into the book and it is wonderful.
Charlotte Simmons, the main character, is a scholarship student from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her people are "mountain folk." They are pious, poor, and proud; yet they know who they are and take pride in "not doin' what others tell us t'do when it goes again' what we believe."
You can see how a character like Charlotte Simmons speaks right to my soul. I went from the confines of an all boys yeshiva to the Sodom and Gomorrah of Bard College.
Charlotte enters Dupont (modeled on Stanford, University of Michigan, and Chapel Hill) wide-eyed and innocent. She expects an enobling experience. Instead she gets an education in drunken frat boys, loutish athletes, the vast world of impersonal sex, AKA: hooking up -- and of course unisex bathrooms. What would the Ivy League be without this magnificent cultural achievement? Charlotte's first experience in the boy/girl bathroom is funny, painful, groteque, gross beyond imagining, and very true.
In Bard, a Wahhabist liberal college, I was, for one year, sentenced to a dorm where men and women shared bathroom and shower facilities. My solution was simple: I sprinted to the bathroom in the basement of one of the main buildings (not fun in the freezing winters of upper NY State) thereby assuring myself some privacy. I took showers at three or four in the morning. Why unisex bathrooms? I used to ask.
The answer was sheer gibberish: "tolerance," "comraderie," "equality," and as a way of preparing students for the "real world." I suggested that the only thing unisex bathrooms really prepares you for is a career in porn movies. Naturally, I was shouted down by these bratty, priveleged kids. I was labeled: a misogynist, a homophobe, uptight and, oh yes, a religious fanatic. Thus tolerance.
Tom Wolfe is our Charles Dickens. Let the NY Times gush over Jonathan Safran Foer and all his his dreary post-modern tricks. Give me Tom Wolfe any day. I can't wait for tonight: Shul, Shabbos dinner, conversation with Karen and then reading the rest of I am Charlotte Simmons. It's going to be a great Shabbos.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)
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