Shlomo Gronich and Fats Waller

Israel is blessed with many talented popular musicians, among them is Shlomo Gronich, multi-talented and highly accomplished. He's a paradoxical figure for me, because I appreciate his music, I acknowledge his skill, admire his commitment to peace and understanding -- but something about his personality bugs me.
Listen to this whole clip of Gronich playing with Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson, the flutist who heads Jethro Tull, prances around and shows off, which I guess is what this kind of a musician is expected to do, and you can see Gronich doing much of the same in this clip of one of his best songs, "Yesh Li Simpatia." But Anderson still plays musically, and Gronich plays with aggressive tension -- possibly because he's on the stage with such a famous group, and he has to prove himself.
As a pianist, he can play very fast, but compare his playing to Fats Waller playing "Handful of Keys." Waller is also clearly pushing himself to play fast and showing off, but underneath the speed, somehow he's also relaxed, enjoying himself, and conveying his enjoyment to the listener.
Or listen to the double-time break in the clip of "Ain't Misbehavin'." The music just comes out, and it's part of a joke, African-American musicians laughing with themselves in a safe place. But at the same time playing on the highest level. And then there's the relaxed swing of "I'm Gonna to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter." I can't imagine Gronich playing with such ease.
Okay, you can't hold it against Gronich that he's not Fats Waller, but if you want to get a sense of what I find lacking in him as a performing musician, there it is.
Obviously I'm never going to be an African-American musician, at least not in this incarnation, but maybe, just maybe, I can learn to play with the kind of relaxation that makes it possible to play musically.

Post-Colonial Jew

Like most people in the First World, I live at many removes from the world in which my grandparents were born. They were born in the 1870s in Lithuania. I was born in 1944 in the United States. We were both members of a minority. They and their parents were Yiddish-speaking Jews in an autocratic, hostile empire. My parents and I were English-speaking Jews in a prosperous, democratic, tolerant society. I imagine that the provincial towns in which they were born were like Third World cities today: full of mud and garbage, dark, insalubrious, and dangerous.

My grandparents, until they emigrated to the United States, were entirely Jewish in culture, language, and ethnic identity, deeply and conspicuously different from the people around them. I was (and partially remain, though I have lived in Israel for more than forty years) deeply American in culture and language, not outwardly different from other Americans in an immediately recognizable way, but Jewish in ethnic identity. My parents and then I assimilated without repudiating Judaism, whereas my grandparents could only have assimilated into the dominant Russian culture by converting to Christianity. Our assimilation was quite easy, and I never thought very much about what we lost by it until I was a young adult, which was when I decided to live in Israel.

My grandparents weren't explicitly offered a Faustian bargain when they moved to the United States as very young adults. No one said to them, “Give up your Jewishness, and you can have all the benefits of American openness and progress.” In fact, they never did give up their Jewishness. They spoke with Yiddish accents until the end of their lives, though they came to know English well. But, without intending it, they enabled their children to set aside their Jewishness. My parents and their siblings children grew up as Americans in a society that by and large accepted them.

My parents and their siblings gained enormously by accepting the tacit bargain: give up your parochial Jewishness and reap the fruit of American prosperity and freedom. So why did I have a sense of loss, even though, paradoxically, I had never known what I felt I had lost? Somehow, I felt that my American identity was an ill-fitting garment.

Although we Jews like to think of ourselves as unique, our displacement is part of an enormous historical process affecting hundreds of millions of people. The leap into modernity from traditional societies has been a universal cause of anguish and confusion in the past two centuries or so. Rural populations became urban factory workers in their own countries, and many others left Italy, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Ireland, China, and other poor lands and migrated to the United States and other places where they could make a better living and escape oppression – frequently at urban factory workers. At the same time, in Asia and Africa European colonial regimes created and trained local elites, removing them from their traditional societies, teaching them new languages, and expecting them to behave like Europeans (while looking down on them for not being European). All of us, the descendants of these displaced people, lost a major part of our connection to our ancestors' past.

* * *

Like countless viewers all over the world, I watched The Sopranos with pleasure and curiosity, heightened by familiarity with the setting. I grew up in Greenwich Village, on Manhattan, which bordered on Little Italy. When I was a boy, my parents took me to small, family owned Italian restaurants. My mother bought almond biscotti from Italian bakeries, and, as I walked down Macdougal Street to my school on Bleecker Street, I passed Italian grocery stores and other small businesses with Italian names in gold letters on the plate glass storefronts. There was an Italian funeral parlor across the street from my school. Every year there was a street fair for Saint Anthony of Padua. When I saw Cinema Paradiso, the people's faces looked just like the people I used to see around me as a child. Not only that, lots of my relatives lived in suburban New Jersey, Tony Soprano's stomping ground.

I was fascinated by the characters in The Sopranos, because they are Italian in almost exactly the way that American Jewish people of the parallel generation – my generation – are Jewish. They have the food, the religion (which they don't necessarily take very seriously), and the family connections, but they have lost the language and the culture in which their grandparents were rooted. Like other assimilated ethnic groups, in return for their family's traditional culture, Italian Americans have gained the chance to excel in America, not – despite the stereotype – as criminals, but as doctors, lawyers, business people, entertainment professionals (like David Chase, the main writer of the series, and the excellent actors), and academics. Nevertheless, as The Sopranos makes clear, by sending Tony to Italy, by having him fantasize about an Italian girl, and by bringing an Italian mafioso to New Jersey, these people are not entirely comfortable in America. (Perhaps, as the 2016 presidential election results show, nobody is truly comfortable there – but to consider that possibility would be too much of a digression.)

My decision to move to Israel was an effort to alleviate this discomfort and restore my connection with the Jewish past. As I should have known, this effort was doomed to frustration and failure from the start, because Israel itself was founded on rejection of the Jewish past and the aspiration to produce a new kind of Jew, and, of course, the Holocaust obliterated what was left of traditional Jewish society in Europe. I couldn't go back to Vilna to learn Yiddish, but I learned something very important about the immigrant experience undergone by my grandparents by reiterating it, although far more comfortably, in Israel. An immigrant generation is a confused generation. Understanding a new and foreign society is daunting. My grandparents arrived in the United States with no financial resources to speak of, without knowing English, without a modern education, and in a highly individualistic environment, where people were expected to fend for themselves. Like the millions of other immigrants who arrived in America at that time, they had no knowledge of American culture and society, few tools to understand their new environment, and no letup in the constant pressure to make a living, so they could never step back and figure things out.

Not only were they disoriented, with no useful conventional wisdom to guide them in their new country, they also were unable to explain how things worked to their children, the second generation. So the children often had to lead the way. For example, my wife's aunt, who was born and raised in Chelsea, Massachusetts, once spoke to me about the flood of 1909, when she was a schoolgirl. She and her sisters had to be the family spokespeople when they went looking for shelter in homes on high ground, because their parents didn't know English. When our own children were in elementary school in Israel, my wife and I often had to ask them to translate notes from their teachers for us.

 Being a well-educated, affluent, English-speaking immigrant in Israel is much easier than being an indigent Yiddish speaker with no relevant formal education, but I can't exactly say that I've assimilated into Israeli society, even after more than forty years of residence here, military service, and acquisition of the Hebrew language – which I still speak with an accent. Moreover, I'm not sure that my non-assimilated Israeli-American-Jewish identity suits me any better than the assimilated American identity that I discarded.

I am Frightened

You can deny fear, face it courageously, or succumb to it. You can be blithe, defensive, or paranoiac.
I was never a very fearful person, though I was also somewhat risk-averse, and I occasionally avoided situations and refrained from certain endeavors for fear of failure and rejection.
I am not referring to abstract fears, however. I am referring to fear of events that will almost certainly happen. At my present age, an age that many people never reach, an age when one's contemporaries sicken and die, it would be stupid for me not to be afraid for myself, for my wife, and for my relatives and friends. I can distract myself from this fear, but I cannot deny the reality of impending loss. My only strategy for dealing with this condition is to keep myself busy and enjoy what I can.
Most people, if they thought about things objectively, would be fearful about the future, even if they live in a comfortable, secure, and stable corner of the world.
Recently I saw an interesting, if slow-moving, Romanian movie called Bacalaureat (Graduation), in which we see a man's life fall to pieces all at once. The film begins when a rock is thrown through the hero's living room window, either a case of random vandalism or a hostile act directed against him - we never know. The smashing of the window symbolizes and initiates a concatenation of events in which everything goes wrong. At the beginning of the film he is a respected physician. At the end he is being investigated by the police for corruption.
Dramatic and precipitous downfalls are more common than we like to think. I have met people whose life savings were wiped out by Ponzi schemes. One thinks one is financially secure, and then everything collapses. Being Jewish, I constantly think of the Holocaust. Even the survivors are people whose entire world was destroyed in a few short years. Security is illusory.
Aside from my age, I have other good reasons to fear. I live in Jerusalem, a city that has known destructive earthquakes. I live in Israel, a country prone to terrorist attacks as well as military threats, but such threats are hardly unique to Israel. No one knows whether an enraged gunman will open fire on the mall where one shops, the restaurant where one is eating, or the school where one's children study, whether North Korea will fire a nuclear missile at the United States, or Russia will invade Western Europe.
We all live under the threat of environmental disaster, and, now that Donald Trump has been elected, the whole world faces political instability. Can anyone say with confidence that in 2020, when the next US presidential elections are held, the world will be a better, safer place?
A psychologist whom I know once said, ironically, that people in clinical depression are more realistic than healthy people.

1001 Irish Dance Tunes

In 1907 two Irish-American policemen in Chicago, Captain Francis O'Neill and Sergeant James O'Neill, published The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, and you can either buy a reissue of it from Walton's, or download it from the web (it's not copyrighted) and print it out and bind it yourself, which is what I did.

Every day I play a two page spread of them, eleven or twelve, occasionally putting a mark in the table of contents if I like one of them especially well. So far I've played 767 of them now on the flute. Just 234 to go. I'll probably start over again at the beginning, unless I'm totally bored with Irish music by then.

Each of the tunes is short and simple, but they're astonishingly varied and creative, and each of them has a suggestive name, like "The Straw Seat," or "Condon's Frolics," in English and Irish. Here's a link to two reels. There are obviously hours and hours of traditional Irish music on Youtube!

I'm using the tunes as reading and fingering exercises. A lot of them fall exactly in the range of fingerings that I find a bit awkward on the flute, so I'm learning to overcome that awkwardness. I can't play them quite as quickly as they're supposed to be played, but they have charm even when played too slowly.

In general I shy away from exercises. I think it's better to play real music, that was meant to be music, and practice the hard as if they were exercises. That's why the Irish dance tunes are so useful, and fun to play, unlike most exercises. I try to imagine people dancing as I play. Music is for the whole body, not just the ears.

An Unexpected Parrot

From about fifty meters away, it looked very much as if a man was pushing a toddler swing with a parrot perched on the bar. As I gazed incredulously, a tall thin jogger slowed down to ask, in American English, “Is that a parrot?” “Seems to be,” I answered.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. The winter sky was clouded over, and the light didn't appear to be coming from any particular direction. I was walking our dog, a fairly large, brown mongrel, before showering and changing clothes for the Sabbath.

The dog and I slowly approached the swings to get a better look. I said hello. The man returned my greeting. The parrot's tail was bright orange-red. Its plumage was healthy-looking, mainly gray with some black stripes. I didn't want to get too close, because I thought the dog might scare the parrot. The man gently pushing the swing was above middle height, thin, in his fifties, dressed in a greenish, military-style jacket, wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a ceramic cup, presumably of coffee.

The swings, which my grandchildren love, stand on a grassy area in the midst of carob trees, planted in regular rows at a regular distance from each other – clearly a relic of the time when my Jerusalem neighborhood was the sparsely populated edge of an Arab village.

“Why doesn't he fly away?” I asked the man in Hebrew.

“Because I clipped his wings,” he answered in an accent I couldn't place right away.

The parrot ignored the dog, and the dog ignored the parrot. The man and I began a conversation.

“He likes to swing, doesn't he?”

“He's usually in a small cage,” the man explained, “and I have to take him out every once in a while to make him happy. He gets edgy when he can't move around.”

From there we went through the obvious questions and answers, though I didn't ask him why he didn't buy a bigger cage for his pet. How old was the parrot? (Young, just a year and a half). They live a long time, don't they? (Fifty years or more, as long as a person). Did he let him loose in his house? (No, because the parrot left droppings all over the place, but they didn't small as bad as human feces). Did it talk? (A little). And so on.

As the man talked, it became clear to me that he was an Arab.

The conversation drifted onto the subject of animal intelligence. The parrot's owner thought that even the smartest animal was no smarter than a four-year-old child, because no animal could find its way home from a strange place. Though I know that isn't true, I wasn't going to express a difference of opinion. Maybe the parrot wouldn't be able to find its way home.

I wanted to ask the man about his family, where he lived, and what he did. I thought he might know who the carob tree plantation once belonged to, but he wasn't interested in that. Instead, he told me that all we ever possess is the meter and a half of ground we're buried in. The earth and the sky belong to God. Then he began to talk about fate – whether we live or die is in God's hands. He pointed up to the gray sky.

What can you do when someone talks to you like that? Just nod in agreement.

After the theological discussion was over, I told the man I hadn't wanted to get too close to the parrot, because I thought it might be afraid of the dog. No problem, said the man. He finished his coffee, discarded his cigarette butt, put the parrot on his shoulder, and approached us. The parrot, clearly fond of its owner, had no interest in the dog, and the dog didn't notice the parrot. He sniffed at the man's jeans. I was afraid he might pee on him. He's done that once or twice. The man leaned over to pat the dog: Arabs usually don't like dogs, but this man was atypical. The dog enjoyed the man's patting.

I told the man I had to get going. He wished me a good Sabbath, got into his car, an old tan Opel, and drove off with the parrot on his shoulder.

Impersonation

Because of a favorable and intriguing review in the New Yorker. "Try to Remember: Tana French's off, intimate crime fiction" by Laura Miller (October 3, 2016), and because we had recently been in Ireland, where French's books are set, I bought and read the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods (Miller was reviewing the sixth, but I decided it was best to start at the beginning). I enjoyed reading that long, intense book and ordered the second one, The Likeness, which I have just finished reading. I intend to go on and read the rest, but not immediately. Hers are books that are hard to put down, and one doesn't always want to be swept away by that kind of energy.
The Likeness is narrated by Cassie Maddox, a detective who was a major character in In the Woods. The premise of the book is entirely unlikely, but, because French is a convincing writer, I ignored the impossibility of the initial situation and plunged right in. But I can imagine a reader thinking, "Oh, go on," and setting the book aside.
This is how the plot is set in motion: a young woman is found stabbed to death in a rural area about an hour away from Dublin, and she looks so much like Cassie, that her boyfriend, a murder detective who has been called in to begin the investigation, is afraid that it's her. Strangely, though she is obviously not the victim, the young woman's name is Lexie Madison, which was the name Cassie had assumed when she was working undercover to catch drug dealers, in other words, not the name of a real person (though, if you do a web search for Lexie Madison, you will find that there actually are women with that name). And, coincidentally (obviously not coincidentally, since Tana French put in in the book), Cassie had been stabbed while working undercover.
Because there is almost no evidence, Cassie is sent undercover again, to impersonate the victim (the police pretend that she hadn't died, which they can do handily, because in any event they can't locate the victim's next of kin) and live with her housemates under a false identity, in hopes of discovering who stabbed "Lexie." At the same time, the police are trying to find out who the victim really was.
So, for nearly a month, Cassie is living with four young adults who knew Lexie intimately, trying to pass herself off as that person, whom she herself had never known. French presents her preparations for taking on the role very interestingly.
With the passage of time undercover, Cassie becomes obsessed with Lexie and envious of her freedom and courage: she dropped her entire life several times, moved from place to place, repeatedly took on new names and identities, and so attained freedom, which Cassie envies. This fluidity of identity suited "Lexie" perfectly to fit in with the four graduate students in English Literature at Trinity College, who are living together in a mansion inherited by one of them, and restoring the house bit by bit. They, too, on principle, refuse to bring up the past, the time in their lives before they met each other and banded together.
A lot of the novel's plot is not really a plot. It's about Cassie's state of mind and her relations with the two detectives who are in charge of the investigation, and in a sense the novel is about how easy and how hard it is to be someone else (and, by extension, to be oneself). Also, like any good mystery novel, French keeps us guessing about who the murderer actually was.
In the Woods, the first novel in what has turned out to be a series, was narrated by Rob Ryan, a detective who was Cassie's partner in the murder squad, and Tana French managed to project his voice successfully. Now Cassie is the narrator, and, again, Tana French has gotten deep into her invented character's soul. So, like an Elizabethan play within a play, we have impersonations within impersonations: someone (we only find out who at the end of the book) was impersonating Lexie Madison, whom Cassie once impersonated, then Cassie impersonates Lexie, and, of course, Tana French is impersonating an invented character (just as Lexie was invented).
French is very good at describing places and things, quite imaginative, and highly intelligent. Lexie's four room-mates are quirky, original characters, and French manages to make us believe in them (at least while we're reading the book). They have created a closed milieu for themselves, aloof from the other students at Trinity, distant from the villagers around the house where they live, and cut off from their families. Strikingly, the police department, as French depicts it, is a mirror image of this little group. Detectives, even in relatively peaceful Ireland, can't live normal lives because of their work: both the intense demands of solving crimes and the stress of dealing with crimes all the time. Like the student characters in The Likeness, the detectives live beyond the realm of ordinary civic life. Perhaps that's why Tana French chose to invent and explore their world.
As I said, I'm planning to read the rest of the books in the series, but I need some time to recover from this one. I just downloaded Barchester Towers.

The Great America Some Voters Yearn For

Because I read RoddyDoyle's novel, “The Dead Republic,” in which John Ford appears as a significant, fictionalized character, I became more interested in John Ford than in Doyle's novel (a disappointment). I watched“Directed by John Ford,” a tribute to him by Peter Bogdanovich, made in 1971, which explains why other important movie directors admired Ford so much. My curiosity was aroused even further, so I decided to download one of his movies and see why people like Scorcese and Spielberg thought so highly of him.

I chose “The ManWho Shot Liberty Valence” mainly because I have always liked Jimmy Stewart (a fellow graduate of Princeton, after all) as much as I have disliked John Wayne.

Some movies made in 1962 (when I graduated high school) are extremely dated, and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is a prime example. The characters lack depth. The plot is stupid. The moral issues are clichés. The scenery and the sets are patently artificial. But I watched it to the end and enjoyed it – possibly because it made me realize how much things have changed in the ensuing years. I also wanted to see how ridiculous John Wayne and Any Devine could get, as well as the exaggerated drunks – funny alcoholics.

John Wayne plays a soft-hearted tough guy, and Jimmy Stewart plays a brave wimp, whose successful political career is based on his fame as the man who killed Liberty Valence, Lee Marvin. The bad guy is a mild villain compared to sadists I have seen on the screen in the past decades. But you can tell that Marvin was having fun playing him, whereas Jimmy Stewart seemed mildly embarrassed throughout film, and John Wayne didn't even try to act. The female lead, Vera Miles, was told twice by John Wayne that she looked pretty when she was mad, and she didn't even shoot him.

The explicit political message is democratic: people are created equal (even John Wayne's loyal, black hired man), and citizens can successfully mobilize, vote, and defeat powerful and unscrupulous special interests (farmers against cattle ranchers). Nor is the West lily-white. In a brief, unbelievable schoolroom scene, the brightest pupil is a Mexican-American girl, and, later, John Wayne almost forces the bartender to serve his African-American sidekick (played by Woody Strode).

However, if I got it right, the implicit political message verges on fascistic: you'd better have a gun, a real man risks his life (Jimmy Stewart confronts Lee Marvin, who is a far superior gunman), and political success is based on a lie (John Wayne really killed Lee Marvin). The West is where men can (and have to) be men.

If you missed “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” back in 1962, don't bother watching it now. However, I did see why directors admire Ford's directing, the way he used scenery, the way he managed crowd scenes, and the way he got actors to seem natural even in preposterous situations. He clearly had a deep grasp of what the cinema is and can be. He also had a naïve idea about American greatness that leads only to the political nightmare we are living in now.