ALEX'S FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS -- ANNO 2005

ALEX'S FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS -- ANNO 2005
WITH A MERRY X-MAS TO ALL!

1.TROMSO, January
A fantastic place to open the festival year if you love snow and don't mind fifteen minutes of daylight, MAX ...in January. That was just a joke, folks -- by late January you get almost a whole hour of sunlight -- around eleven AM -- but really, who needs it? ...when fest topper, irrepressible Norskie-American MARTHA OTTE, is guaranteed to provide a slate of such interesting films that you'll spend the whole time in the dark anyway.
The trophy guest of the fest this year was the bearded English imp, Mike Leigh, here to present his multi-prize winning film "Vera Drake", a very good film indeed -- in fact, let's face it, one of the year's best. One of the best Norwegian films was "An Enemy of the People", directed by local boy Erik Skjoldberg, and based on the famous Ibsen play, but updated to the present and set in magnificent fjord scenery. There were several Xlnt Swedish entries, as well as a balanced selection of international fare and the general upbeat atmosphere which always prevails when you get this far north -- six degrees above the Arctic circle, to be exact!

2. BUDAPEST, Hungarian film week, early February.
-- NOTHING -- A bad year for Hungarian cinema and even veteran Lojas Koltai's breathlessly awaited "FATELESS", (Sorstalansag) based on Imre Kertesz's nobel prize winning concentration camp novel, was a big disappointment. The film immediately traveled to Berlin where the reception was also lukewarm.
(NOTE: It got a better reception later in New York)

3. BERLIN, second week of February. One of the best Berlin years in recent memory -- many many winners, among them a feature length documentary on Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, an eye-opening American documentary entitled "The Protocols of Zion", the Mitterand biopic "Le Promeneur du Champ de Mars" with a magnificent portrayal by Michel Bouquet, "Kinsey", starring a most convincing Liam Neeson in the title role, and the marvelous South African version of Carmen "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha", sung entirely in the Xhosa click language -- the film which most deservedly took the Golden Bear. One out-and-out piece of crap, however, needs to be mentioned, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", an incredibly stupid, unfunny comedy, starring Bill Murray and a bunch of other big name actors. How this one passed Berlin selection muster is beyond belief -- but then, no festival is perfect.

4. ROUEN Festival of Nordic Cinema, March.
Eric Clausen's remarkable new Danish psychological tragi-comedy "VILLA PARANOIA" turned out to be the discovery and the main event of the fest, and picked up a gaggle of prizes in Rouen and elsewhere within just a few days. Eric stars, directs and does just about everything else in a film which goes straight into my Best Ten of the year. But, chicken lovers beware -- (lottsa unkind to chickens footage). Strong performance also by mainstay Danish actress, Sonja Richter. A truly off-beat and exceptional film.
Several Belgian films were also impressive, as well as a number of old Scandy docs about Polar expeditions which put you right there. It's always an interesting selection in Rouen with discoveries every day of films you would never see anywhere else -- a favorite festival of mine for this very reason, but the main festival organizer, Norwegian-Francaise Isabelle Duault, is a kind of pouting, chain-smoking bitch, who acts like she's doing you the biggest favor in the world for letting you attend her festival, and who is best avoided during the fest itself. The Hotel Cardenal in the shadow of the Monet Cathedrale, is a winner -- especially my room right over the square with the tricolor draped over the balcony, and the Café PAUL below, with automatic player piano, is a classic straight out of a Too-Loose Low-Treck poster -- This time I also took in marvelous Art Museum at Le Havre and the Eric Satie museum in Honfleur across the Seine Estuary -- by car with eccentric locale cinephile Patric (Duchamp) Marchal -- Such a lovely city (think French Sausalito) -- it's worth any excuse to visit and hang out in for a week -- loaded with good used book stores, restaurants and coffee houses with bay views, and dont forget Marcel Duchamp ...

5. ISTANBUL, April.
The Hotel Buyuk Londra, the most amazing cheap hotel in the world, with an ancient lobby loaded with cackling parrots and a most interesting clientele from the Four Corners -- is in itself worth a visit to Istanbul. Then the nearby Fish Market will make your mouth and eyes water from stem to stern. The bustling walking street of Istiklal with an ancient trolley car right in the middle is one of the great walking streets of the world -- along with Stroget in Copenhagen and a few others -- and then there was Ivana, the young blond Croatian bombshell in a baseball cap from the Zagreb film festival, who is on a trip of her own and is a trip in herself -- The Bosphorus boat party with all the stars and VIPs and more food 'n you could shake a stick at -- which is where I met Ivana and the Irish director Jim Sheridan and his wife -- and the belly-dancing TV lady from last year in Bursa -- whatta trip she is! -- and Biggstar Harvey Keitel (his canned speech --"I'd like to have a drink with each and every one of you" -- went over big with the local fans) -- the main-event guests of the fest, were Harv, and Jane Campion, New Zealand director of "The Piano" --good lookin lady with solid underpinning -- She topped the jury, charmed everyone, and was very accessible at parties. But no films that really stand out -- maybe because I was having too much fun otherwise --I'll hafta check my files --
Also -- Two Operas in Turkey, Donizetti's rarely performed BELISSARIO in Istanbul -- and Don whutchamacallum -- (not Carlo, and not Giovanni) -- Ah -- Pasquale! -- in Ankara, a beautiful capitol city. Many NBA basketball games on TV at my hotel in Ankara while smoking the grass of Istanbul. Fun! Turkey shouldn't join the European Union --The European Union should join Turkey!

6. WARSAW JEWISH MOTIFS FESTIVAL, Early May.
Non-Jewish Armenian Serge Avdekian's amazing concentration camp Animation film, "Ligne de Vie" (The Line of Life) was technicaly striking and unforgettable in every way. A small gem with a heavy message. "Yadvebne" was a feature length documentary about a Polish Pogrom (unaided by any Germans) on the Jews in that city, a tale long swept under the rug in Poland. Extremely powerful. Margerete von Trotte's film, "Rosenstrasse" about the German women who saved their Jewish husbands in WW II Berlin played to a totally packed house and was one of the highlights of the fest. In general, festival organizer Miroslav Chojecki has, for the second straight year, come up with an original selection of films on the Jewish motif of a kind not to be seen elsewhere. The new venue, the venerable KINO MURANOW on the edge of the former Ghetto, is a big improvement over the House of Culture venue of the festival's first outing in 2004. Andrzej Wajda, the dean of living Polish film directors, is a big promoter of this festiva and was a constant presence. One evening I was lucky enough to have coffee with him and his wife in the cinema lobby.
The festival hotel on Plac Konstitucja was quite comfortable and well located. I think Warsaw is my favorite Euro City -- I just feel good there. Don't ast me why --I dunno ...maybe it's because I sense the Yiddish forever embedded in the sidewalks of Marszalkowska ... and know that back in 1921 my then eleven year old future mother walked those sidewalks with my Grandfather on the way to America --

7. KRAKOW Festival of shorts and documentaries, late May. Nothing stands out. The small downtown hotel provided was quite nice and user friendly. I didn't see very many films this year, but hung out at the hotel much of the time shmoozing with fest guest Al Maysles at the Kinoo Kijow balcony, and catching up on writing at the hotel, as the weather was shitty and the selection less compelling than in previous years. But the the overall scene was o-kay, as usual, with the now de rigeur closing party at the modernistic Japanese art museum, MANGHA, overlooking the river.

8. LOCARNO, August --
A comprehensive Orson Welles Retro, as director, actor, and object of studies by other directors, was the center-piece of the fest. The 1957 contemporary western drama, "Man in the Shadow", starring Jeff Chandler as an incorruptible sheriff up against a most evil rancher played by Orson Welles, was one of the best films of the fest -- the kind of film where you leave the theater saying "they just don't make 'em like that anymore". On the giant screen in the Piazza Grande a horrible retrospective of Terry Gillian bullshit unfolded nightly sending many viewers scurrying to the pizza stands. In my book, Gilliam is to be avoided like the Plague -- However, the gripping Indian film on opening night in the piazza was a definite winner -- basically a biopic of one of the first heroes who resisted the British occupation of India in the mid 1800s. Grand scale battle scenes and very good acting. Hope I have the name of that one written down somewhere. Food-wise, just about the only culinary bargain at the height of the summer season in this Alpine lakeside tourist trap is the great pizza at a very popular pizzeria just off the main square. After the nauseating pizza of Budapest, I found this place to be a rare treat and subsisted mainly on Pizza throughout the festival -- Pizza and Orson Welles.

As for accommodations and lodging ... After getting quite a run-around of one night stands, here at the height of the tourist season (one night I actually had to sleep on the beach) I finally scored a reasonably priced villa hotel at the top of the funicular cable car. Great views -- good food -- very comfortable bed, one drawback... The last cable car goes up the hill at 8 PM -- therefore I had to forego many late shows I would have liked to attend. At the closing party I met actress Alexandra Stewart who barely remembered that I had once done an interview with her (circa 1975) in California when she was the live-in consort of Louis Malle. Tant pis. She hasn't aged very well but still has that distinctive profile with the perfectly straight Roman nose. The weather was wonderful most of the time and the Italian grace of Locarna very captivating. I'll go back -- it was fun!

9. GDYNIA POLISH FILM WEEK, early September:
Nice room at the Dom Marynarza (Mariners' House) on the beach. Zanussi's latest, "PERSONA NON GRATA", handsomely filmed in Uruguay by ace cameraman Edward Klosinski, was the big number but I didn't care for it -- the press conference was better than the film. There wasn't as much social action this year as usual. The opening party on the hill with Jolanta Rayzacher of the Polish Film Promotion Agency, my oldest friend in Poland, was the only social event I attended, but it's always fun to knock the vodka back with her -- Whatta woman! -- Jacek Bromski's "Uzala" film set in the taiga on the Chinese border, was kind of a bore -- There was no one real standout, and several disappointments from touted directors, but I didn't see everything -- mighta missed some goodies -- The ladies on the bench by the sea on the last day were fun ... spent a whole afternoon with them -- Then caught a plane straight from Gdynia to Bilbao, via Frankfurt --and a bus from there to Donostia --back in Basque land and glad to be here -- the other place in Europe where I really feel at home --Ekarikkasco -- Thank-you -- after Warsaw ...

10. SAN SEBASTIAN. 2ND TIME -- AND LOVED IT! -- Good Festival, Good Hotel -- and a complete ROBERT WISE Retrospective -- Wise died on the 14th of September, literally on the eve of the festival, so he was obviously unable to attend, but the Wise retro was the best Package there,
I saw three Wises (shoulda seen more!) -- all winners --"Somebody up dere likes me" (1956)-- arguably the best thing Newman ever did, "The HINDENBURG" (1975) -- incredible early Nazi era reconstruction with Geo. C. Scott at the top of his game -- and "Run Silent Run Deep", (1958), a submarine drama in which "Gable and Lancaster make the seas boil". The last one I saw on getaway day was "Queen Christiana" (1933) the archetypal Garbo film, with the icy Swede at her best, altho I'm not a Garbo fan. There were several good competition films --"Drabet" from Denmark, and especially "SUMMER IN BERLIN" (Vor dem Balkon) with that incredible Nadia Uhl -- one of my Best Ten pix of the year --- and she, one of the best actresses. Altogether an XLNT five star festival. The image of Hitchcock on his hundreth birthday anniversary was everywhere to be seem, including on the official festival bag, which easily wins the Oscar for the Best Festival Bag of the Year! The winning film from Czech Republic was actually a loser -- and heavily pooh-poohed in the Spanish press -- but then, no festival is perfect, although, frankly Scarlett, San Sebastian comes pretty damn close!

11. FROM SAN SEBASTIAN STRAIGHT TO HAMBURG -- (VIA BILBAO and FRANKFURT) to meet Ben Geissler and consult with him on his Messina screenplay. Stayed at my usual, INSTANT SLEEP hostel in Schulterblatt -- Breakfasts at "Unter den Linden", one of the best terrasse cafes in Europe. A number of good films, but the standout was Ben Becker's one man show "Ein Ganz gewöhnlicher Jude" (A very ordinary Jew", 2005) -- about a Jewish German journalist who is asked to address a group of young German students on "what it means tio be a Jew in Germany today" and then agonizes over whether to accept the invitation or not. Amazing performance by Becker --spellbinding! This one I MUST RECOMMEND to Chojecki for the next Jewish Motifs fest in Warsaw. Another candidate for my Best Ten list, without a doubt. I also caught an unusual opera at the Hamburg Opera House, Hindemith's "MATHIS DER MALER" -- very good one in fact, (with SUSAN ANTHONY!) and I had an xlnt seat at this very modernized glitzy opera emporium. Hamburg is rapidly becoming one of my favorite cities. Good food, good bookstores, good lake views, good particle accelerators at DESY, good transportation system, good people, lotta ganja -- who could ask for anything more? (puff-puff)

12. VALLADOLID: In the brown Spainish heartland NW of Madrid --
This was an important new addition to my festival repertoire and I was very comfortable at the Hotel Roma -- smack in the center of town in the walking streets section, a block from Plaza Mayor and the Ayuntamiento. Five scattered film venues: I ended up spending most of my time at the one nearest my hotel, although I did catch a couple of events at the festival showcase, Teatro Calderon. But the opening film there, by Costa Gavras, was a loser -- about a kind of wimpish french serial killer. I flew in from Vienna via Barcelona and the flight itself was unusual over the brown plains of Northern Castilla y Leon to this remote outback airport. 99.4 % pure Spanish city --once the heartland of Franco Spain, but for fifty years the home of this very special International film festival --I'll givvit Four Stars **** and make it an every year visit from now on! Also met some interesting filmmakers --two guys from Australia, one, Mark Bliss, a Czech immigrant with a hair-raising story a mile long, the other one, Anthony, who is an extremely talented young cat (24) of Greek origin (kai milae poly kala ellinika!) and is definitely going places -- his short film about Afgan immigrnts to Australia was terrific --really good. Fest opened with a disappointing shot from Costa-Gavras (Le Couperet), but many good Spanish features -- especially the up-roarious, rip-roaring, side splitting screamer of a comedy, "EL CRIMEN FERPECTO" (The ferpect crime) by Alex Iglesias and starring one of the funniest guys I've ever seen -- Guillermo something. I'll get the names straight later, but this was simply the rib-ticklingest film I've seen in years -- Naturalmente, at the top of my Best Ten list of the year. Incidentally, Ang Lee's FUCKABEES MOUNTAIN was also there -- and was impressive in its own way -- especially the mountain scenery and the actor Heath Ledger -- but for some reason it struck me as just a twist too phoney and forced (wazato-rashii is the Japanese word that comes to mind) -- like too much message or emphasis on making a point -- that this is "just a love story" which it is not 'just' at fucking all! It's a fukkin story about two closet faggots, and Basta -- definitely a major picture, but I mighta liked it better if it hadn't arrive so hyped up in the media as some kind of super masterpiece -- which in my book it ain't -- in spite of all the Plittickly-kreck critics who have been eulogizing it to high heaven as if their lives or jobs depended on it -- One of the better films of the year, yes -- I won't say it isn't -- but it goes into my SECOND BEST ten, because I SAW TOO MANY OTHER GOOD MOVIES THIS YEAR -- so Angst Lee checks in on my Best TWENTY list somewhere in the Second Ten -- Sorry bout that, all you serious critters --er --critics out there... And, oh yes -- Carlos Saura's all Flamenco all-star musical sketches film "Iberia" based on the strring music of Albeniz - magnificent on every way.

AND FINALLY FOLKS: Numbuh thur-teen -- and Here we are in Freezing Fukkin Firenze still absorbing the fascinating gaggle of Indian and Hindooistic flicks which lit up the walls --i.e., the screen of SPAZIO UNO ...The Italian festival of Indian films, "Two Rivers", from the Ganges to the Arno -- at the strange little culture center where the fest took place. All kinds of mind-blowers with a taste of chutney, but for me the main event was the closing documentary on Ismail Merchant, of the Ivory-Merchant Combine -- masterpiece of a documentary about a masterpiece of a man, while the features which will most stick to my ribs are two more "First Tenners" of the year, the heart wrenching Drama "Murder Unveiled" and the Sexy Israeli rib-tickler "Turn Left At the End of the World", about an Indian Jewish family which comes to settle in a Hebrew desert colony at the end of the Israeli world, and runs into all kinds of assimilation problems with their French-speaking Morrocan Jewish neighbors. Selvaggia who runs the festival is a most interesting woman, and oddly enough, my festival hotel here -- as in Valladolid -- was the Hotel Roma -- Two Hotel Romas in two consecutive film festivals! -- This one was a pretty snazzy four star job right around the corner from the festival theater, and I also ate Tripa alla Fiorentina almost every day at the take-out rosticceria on the next side street after Spazio Uno. All in all Florence has been a trip in itself. I've been exploring it extensively ever since the festival ended in spite of the cold --brrr -- and I even managed to squueeze in an evening at the Uffizi among many other things.

Now at this youth hostel, 'The Golden Arches", not far from the Train Station I am still waiting to hear from the CAPRI film festival which straddles the new year from Dec, 27 to January 2nd, 2006. Indications are, however, less than positive, so, if no news breaks in the next 24 hours I may just put my tail between my legs, pack up my book bags, and return to Budapest where to spend the Remains of the Year weeping in my Goulash and pissing in the sink..

THE END -- Ahmet-Agajanian de Leon, Itinerant film critic and Oriental Rug salesman,
FLORENCE, ITALY

PS: Never heard jack-shit from Capri, so I did close out the year pissing in my goolyash at the Citadella high on Mount Gellert in Budapest overlooking the Danube on New Years Eve.

_________________________________________________________________

A Lifelong Attachment To Yiddish

or

“THE SHTETL WITHIN”

by Chaim Pevner

Considering that I had a most unfortunate childhood, which led to some terrible lifelong neuroses, stemming directly from the collective and individual neuroses endemic in the Jewish family which raised me -- it would not have been at all strange if I had totally rejected the language in which the basis of these neuroses was formed – Yiddish. There was, in fact, a period in my life when I very self-consciously attempted to reject everything Jewish – not only the religion, which had always seemed stupid to me – but every other aspect of being Jewish, even down to the use of the language. This was particularly true when I moved out to the West Coast in 1956 at the age of 24 to enroll at UCLA -- a period during which I gradually began to realize that a continued attachment to “Jewishness” had nothing to offer me … nothing to contribute to my further intellectual or moral development. Nevertheless, since I literally grew up with Yiddish and in Yiddish, it was so much a part of me that the language, at least, I could not slough off so easily. A native language is, after all, a basic part of any person’s makeup. In fact, even after I left the family circle in which Yiddish was the normal daily language of discourse, I still found that using Yiddish whenever I could, even 3000 miles away from home, always gave me a certain pleasure – even a certain kind of comfort and solace -- and provided me with an internal emotional refuge I could always “come home to” in moments of severe alienation. Therefore, even when far from my original Philadelphia “shtetl”, and having rejected all forms of “yiddishkeit” as a personal code of behavior, I still continued to seek out opportunities to speak Yiddish, which automatically implied seeking out older people -- usually people a whole generation or more older than myself – with whom I felt comfortable speaking Yiddish. I never felt comfortable speaking Yiddish with people who spoke half-assed, out-of-tune, or highly Americanized Yiddish, which was inevitably the case with the few American-born Yiddish speakers of my own generation. Moreover, whenever I would start speaking Yiddish with these older, old-country speakers of Yiddish, they would always marvel at the fact that I -- a non-religious American–born youngster -- spoke such an authentic Yiddish without the slightest trace of an American accent -- with, in fact, totally untainted Ukrainian shtetl cadences and the rich idiomatic vocabulary associated with that territory. The fact that I always got such positive feedback whenever I engaged in Yiddish conversations with these older speakers is undoubtedly one of the main reasons that I continued to make a point of using the language long after the rest of the “yiddishkeit” culture had rubbed off or otherwise outlived its usefulness for me.

During my California Yiddish years (roughly 1957 to 1969) – I was always the youngest person in my Yiddish speaking circle of friends in L. A. There were a few other fluent Yiddish speakers of my own generation around -- Henry Shlutzky, for example, but, since English was by far the dominant language of these younger people, I never spoke Yiddish with anybody my own age – only with older people, all of them, in fact, immigrants from Eastern Europe who still spoke English with a definite Yiddish accent even after years and years of residence in America, and many of whom still spoke other languages such as Russian, better than English. ( I am thinking here of people such as Ezra Stein, Manya Schrogin, Joe Schrogin, the Russian-Jewish singer Manya “di Tzigaynerte’ and many others, most of them now long gone – zoln zey ale hobn dem lekhtigen Geneydem”) .

As I started to say, due to certain circumstances which I will not go into here, and which were definitely far beyond my control – my childhood was attimes very traumatic – even nightmarish. It was not however all trauma and nightmare – there was a lot of fun and joy between the traumas.
Children have a remarkable ability to bounce back from pain and swing with the good things – to find something good in almost any pile of shit. This is why children can amuse themselves for hours in a back lot covered with trash that would only be disgusting to an adult. Even though, now, armed with the insights of sophisticated psychoanalytic reformulations, I can look back on my childhood and say – sure -- basically there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, Chaiml -- that it was the older people around me who were so mentally ill and so petty-minded – stupid, to put it bluntly -- that they could do no better than to push a lot of their own mental illness and neurotic behavior off onto me – nevertheless, and no matter how you choose to look at it -- the end result was that, as a child, I sustained deep emotional injuries which would dog me the rest of my life – and would at times drive me to the verge of suicide – yes, suicide -- -- and yet, there,was a lot of joy in my childhood – much of it, perhaps trash heap joy – but some of my most basic Yiddish memories are connected with the love and nurture that was also lavished upon me as a very small child – notably, by my grandparents and Aunt Jennie – and all of it couched in Yiddish.

“Treyst” (my consolation) – “main ziys kind” – (my dear sweet child) – and “mir zol zain far dir” -- (it should be happening to me, not to you) – were merely the tip of the iceberg of a whole stockpile of fervently uttered, loving Yiddish expressions which constantly came my way in early childhood. The “mir zol zain far dir” one is particularly interesting, in that it more or less sums up the whole syndrome of self-sacrificing maternal devotion lavished upon a young child in a Yiddish speaking family, in Five Little Words. I don’t know how many times I may have heard this last
expression in the first five or six years of my life, but I was a somewhat sickly child – not weak and sickly, but subject to all the childhood ailments that were so common in those days at frequent ntervals – scarlet fever, mumps, whooping cough, severely upset stomachs – God knows what else -- Sometimes when I got sick I would feel really terrible and would lay there in my bed moaning and crying and thinking I was going to die or something – and it was at these moments of critical agony that my grandmother or Aunt Jennie would cradle me protectively in their arms and would start intoning, in an almost liturgical sing-song, the magic words, “mir zol zain far dir, main kind – -- mir zol zain far dir” –
and these words always weathered the storm and got me through the crisis – obviously, or I wouldn’t be here now – writing the words on this page. The words were truly magic because what they actually meant was: “God – please take the pain and suffering out of this poor little child and give it to me – I can handle I – and I don’t care if I die as long as you let my little child stop suffering – just give me the suffering and spare this beautiful child” – Yes, that is exactly what the words meant and it always did make the suffering bearable – and then fade away – and any kid who ever heard those words could ever possibly doubt that the source from whence they emanated could be anything but a person who loved them totally and unconditionally! – With early inputs such as this, how could one not love the language in which they were said!

To summarize the “bad part” very briefly, without dwelling too much on the morbidly grim details:
Into a traditional immigrant shtetl family that had arrived from the Ukraine in 1921, only a mere 11 years prior to my birth, my mother brought me as a “pitzele kind” (teeny weeny baby) back home from New York City where she had had me, to Philadelphia. Slight problem – she was not married. Therefore I was an ‘out-of-wedlock’ child, and worse, she would not reveal the identity of my father. Further complication – it was rumored that my father was a “Spanish artist” – not Jewish! – Now, the third part of the triple whammy – when I was not quite one year old, Rifke – my mother, then barely 24 years old – suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital. There, in the snake-pit environment that was par for the course in mental hospitals of the early thirties, she contracted septocemia (“blood poisoning) and suddenly died. When, in a moment of lucidity moments before her most untimely death, her sister (my aunt Mollie) asked her to reveal the identity of my father -- Rifke’s infamous last words were, “I can not…” –As my aunt Mollie retold it several times in very much later years, the actual Yiddish dialogue went like this: Mollie, to dying sister: “Rifke, vezey kenste iberlozen a kind af der velt on a nomen? – Ver iz zain tate?” Lterally; “Rifke, how can you leave a child behind in this world without a name --- WHO IS HIS FATHER!” – to which Rifke, for whatever inscrutable private reasons of her own, replies with her last breath, “Ikh kenn nisht”. --

The entire family was traumatized by the sudden death of this very bright but highly wayward daughter who had joined the Communist Party, run off to New York to study Methods of Yiddish teaching in a Communist school, was rumored to have had an affair with her teacher, Moissaye Olgin, the writer, lecturer and leading Yiddish spokesman for Communism of the time – had become pregnant by a different man, also a Communist but probably not Jewish – and had then visited the ultimate indignity upon her religious parents by flipping out and dying in an insane asylum.
Of the three scandalous items – (almost unbearably scandalousin a very conservative, highly religious Yiddish immigrant community) – (1) being a child of unmarried parents, (2) having a father whose identity was unknown but suspected to have been non-Jewish, and (3) having a mother
diagnosed as medically insane (‘schizophrenic’ is the modern term) -- who then goes and dies in the nuthouse – the last of the three was probably the worst. The reason being, that -- particularly in those days – insanity in the family was looked upon as a permanent blight upon the entire family
blood line.

Since all this happened while I was still a barely babbling baby I was essentially unaware in any direct way of all this heavy baggage through out my pre-school years, which is to say, up until the age of six. I was taken in by my grandparents who spoke nothing but Yiddish to me and, to whom, everybody else in the family and immediate circle of friends, spoke nothing but Yiddish. I was the apple of their eye, like some kind of late child in a fairy tale, and, though I called them “baba” and “zayde”, I probably thought of them as my parents – because, in effect, that’s what they were. The circumstances surrounding my mother’s escapades were a taboo subject never to be mentioned in my presence, and so I had no concrete awareness of them in these relatively idyllic early years. Except for some fleetingly traumatic situations associated with my grandfather’s worsening physical condition due to encroaching pulmonary tuberculosis, (which would take his life when I was seven), these earliest years were for the most part normal and happy as childhoods go.
I had everything I wanted in terms of food, playthings and attention. Zayde would take me around with him on rides about the city to visit family members and ‘landslayte’ – people from the same shtetl in the old country -- and he would love to show me off to these people as some kind
of “child prodigy” of phenomenally perfect Yiddish speech. He was really proud of the way I spoke Yiddish even at this childish level, and other people also seemed to be duly impressed. For some reason, it seems, I spoke much better Yiddish than the other little kids my age – probably because of my total immersion in the language with hardly any English around me at all, and constant,
round-the-clock reinforcement.

At any rate, in these early years I received nothing but strong positive feedback and “kvelling” – which is to say, lavish, gushing praise -- for the simple fact that I spoke this family language properly and, I suppose, rather eloquently for my age. It is also quite likely that my Yiddish sounded “old” for my age, because I did not speak it with other little kids -- almost exclusively with adults – so that my Yiddish sort of quickly by-passed the infantile stage and directly reflected the vocabularyand usage of the Yiddish-speaking adults around me. That is probably the reason adults were so impressed with my use of Yiddish. I can’t think of any other reason, because, what’s the big deal about a kid who speaks the same language as his mother and grandparents? In any case these frequent expressions of open approval – I guess you could even say “admiration” -- that often greeted my use of Yiddish in childhood must have laid down a special pleasure association of deepest ego gratification in the deepest recesses of my little soul, regarding the use of this language. Whereas other children from Yiddish speaking homes started shying away from Yiddish as they grew up, especially once they started going to the all speaking school, this never happened to me. I simply never had the slightest social hang-up about speaking Yiddish, and it always seemed completely natural to me to speak it with anybody whom I sensed would be more at home in Yiddish than in English -- whether the butcher, the candy-store man, the old man on the corner or with my ‘bobba’ who, of course, spoke no English at all.

Moreover, since it really was my first language much of my casual everyday thinking – my normal interior dialogue – actually went on in Yiddish, even after I started school, and most of my basic emotions were completely wrapped up in Yiddish. To this very day, I think that Yiddish is a language which has more emotional content for me than English, at nearly every level of emotion -- except maybe in the realm of sex! Certainly, the verbal resources I have at my disposal for
wishing various kinds of evil upon people -- must be far richer in my Yiddish storehouse of curses than in my English one, which relies primarily on a very limited stock of standard obscenities tediously strung together with little variation or creativity; ‘sonovabitch’ – ‘motherfucker’ – ‘cocksucker’ – and Anot much more -- whereas by comparison, the Yiddish curses are endless – from the simple and totally untranslatable, “A za yor af ihm” – which literally means “such a year on him” –but loses everything in the translation – to far more graphic visions of hell, like’ “brenen zol af ihm di hoyt” (may his skin catch fire and burn right on his body ) or, “brekhn zol er mit gal” – ( may he vomit gall ) – “kakn zol er mit blit” – ( when he shits it should be with blood ) --- and so forth, ad infinitum
…
Regarding the untranslatability of the commonplace Yiddish expression “a za yor af ihm” -- (‘such a year on him’), the reason it defies translation is that what these words really imply is that “he” – (whoever the subject is) – should have nothing but misery for at least a year, if not for the rest of
his goddamn life -- whereas, oddly enough, with the incredibly convoluted logic of Yiddish – the very same expression, if applied to oneself – “A za yor af mir” – implies the very opposite -- “I should only be so lucky” -- , i.e., “I should only have such a good year” – sort of like Babe Ruth, who when queried about his thoughts on the fact that his salary was higher than the president’s, replied; “Well, I had a better year than he did” (sic) – which would come out in Yiddish something like, “Farvos nisht – Ikh hob gehat a beser yor vi er hot gehat!”—to which the president might well have replied, “a za yor af ihm!” – which, depending on the degree of smirk on face and emphasis with which each word is delivered, could have the emotional content of “Fuck him – that sonuvabitch -- he should only drop dead on the spot!”

Duvall, Washington; Sunday, February 11, 2001

Reformatted and printed out, mon. sept. 19, 2005 -- San Sebastian, Spain

BERSERKLY -- MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPED QUADROPHRENIA --

Dear Yebem,
Nice piece on Beserkely. Captures the true flavor of the place.
I appreciate your perserving my secret identity. Waclaw
Rubenstein, indeed. And the high-IQ psychotic. Marvelous accolade.
Vladimir H. Lukasiewicz

BERSERKLY -- MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPED QUADROPHRENIA --
[Revised Edition]
by ALEX DELEON

BERSERKELY, WRITTEN FEB 17, 2001
After dinner talk with Lee Scott in Duvall, Washington, about the old days in
Berkeley and San Francisco.

In my various nomadic moves about the globe, one of the few
places I once did feel myself very strongly attached to, for quite a number
years in fact, was BERKELEY, California -- especially with the University of
Calif. at Berkeley. In those days when you said “I’m going to Berkeley"
this automatically meant the College Community of that middle-sized
East Bay city, and nothing else. There was actually quite a bit more
to the city of Berkeley than just the College Community, but it was
essentially a college town, and the University was easily the largest single
employer in the City.

In those days the student enrollment was said to be around
25,000 and the rest of the campus community, faculty support staff and
peripheral workers was probably another ten or fifteen thousand, so that
something like half the city directly depended on the University for sustenance.
In addition there were literally scores, maybe hundreds of little business
establishments all around the campus -- restaurants, all kinds
of merchants, bookstores, movie theaters, etc., etc. which catered primarily
to students and campus employees, so that the campus community was really
a city within the city -- a city unto itself.

The campus itself occupied a gigantic wooded oblong plot of
ground several square miles in area set on rising ground sloping upward to
the cyclotron complex in the Berkeley hills, about a half a mile wide from
north to south and well over a mile east to west if one included all the
wooded hills behind the football stadium in Strawberry Canyon. From the
base of the Campanile in the center of the campus proper, or from the
outdoor terrace of the student union, one was already high enough to catch
glimpses of San Francisco Bay, and from the International House steps at the
top of Bancroft Way there was a spectacular view, especially picturesque at
sunset, of the Golden Gate Bridge many, many miles away on the horizon across
the bay.

The campus life in which I was involved, however, centered
mostly on a four block strip of Telegraph Avenue, the bustling business street
leading up to the campus, and on certain parts of the campus itself --
primarily the humanities complex around Dwinelle Hall and the Student Union,
which was kind of a sub-city within the sub-city of the campus --the
precursor architecturally of what today would be a shopping mall. These
were my main stomping grounds and sometimes an entire week would go by
without my ever having strayed much more than one or two blocks from this
intensely active strip of territory.
Shattuck Avenue, another major business artery parallel to
Telegraph, which catered more to the general shopping community, was only about
three blocks down, but already seemed to be beyond the pale ?Eif not on the
very edge of outer space. Whole areas of the campus that catered to
Engineers and business majors were also Terra Incognita. It was actually a
rather topologically constricted world, but there was so much going
on -- intellectually-wise, sex-wise, adventure-wise, fun-wise -- you
name it-wise -- that it felt like the center of the Cosmos so, why bother
going anywhere else?

My association with this community started in the fall of 1957
when I went up there from Los Angeles to visit Elmera Schrogin, a girl
friend from UCLA down south -- and was immediately enthralled with the place,
so much so, that I applied for an inter-campus transfer and enrolled at
UCB the very next semester, Spring 1958 -- and then the association with
Berkeley lasted -- on and off -- until 1977 when I moved to Japan.

In between, for nearly two decades it seemed that I was always
bouncing back and forth between L.A. and Berkeley, but there was a
particularly intense all-Berkeley period between 1961 and 1963 during which I
considered myself to be a committed Berkeleyite .
This was when I was finishing up a degree in Linguistics and
also a period during which it seemed that the main topic of social discourse
was Berkeley itself -- how great it was to be in Berkeley -- what an
exceptional place Berkeley was -- how anybody who chose to be there was, by
definition, exceptional, and how for some mystical reason Berkeley
attracted the absolutely best minds in the land, and the girls with the
loosest morals.

At a time when it was still considered to be somewhat taboo
for young couples to live together unless they were married, in Berkeley
unmarried boys and girls living together in “open sin" -- was the norm --
almost a social requirement. The proof that Berkeley was the intellectual
center of the univerese -- and forget about Harvard or Princeton -- was that
there were at the time EIGHT Nobel Prize winners in the physics department
alone, and god knows how many others in other departments -- There were
scads of world famous scholars in every field: such as Teller, the father of
the H-bomb, in Physics, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, also a Nobel prize
laureate, in literature, famous mathematicians, logicians (Alfred Tarski),
anthropologists, sociologists, Sanskrit scholars, writers like
Aldous Huxley -- on and on -- a truly high-powered faculty, but maybe the
biggest attraction for young people like myself was the highly
permissive sexual atmosphere, the free-wheeling party life, and the avant-garde
social aura.

There was also an incredibly in-bred aspect to this socially
free-wheeling community which gave it something of the feeling of Paris in
the twenties or maybe Rome in the days of Caligula. The kind of thing you
often heard over coffee at the “Med"-- ( an Italian coffee shop that served as
“Berkeley’s collective living room") -- might run something like this:
“So, I walk into this party and look around -- and suddenly I
realize that I’ve had sex with everybody in the room" --- or its variant,
that Everybody in the room had already had sex with everybody Else
in the room -- - While such claims may have been slightly exaggerated, they
definitely reflected the overall picture. Blase is the only word that
could describe the prevailing Berkeley attitude toward middle American
middle-class values --- and since I was at the time in the very midst of rejecting
my own set of middle-class Jewish values, I took to Berkeley like a fish to
water -- or maybe, more like a pig to shit!

Social life in Berkeley was so wild and wooly and there were
so many people on the verge of madness walking around -- everything from
harmless eccentrics to out-and-out high IQ psychotics -- (like Marty Horowitz, the
anarchist physicist who made home-made high explosive bombs in his
apartment) -- or Abdullah, the brilliant, fat mulatto Islamic studies scholar,
who one day walked into the library with a shotgun and started blasting
away in the name of Allah -- or the artist, Hernando Pevner, who used to stage
nude pot-parties for artists and models at the “Telegraph Hilton"
as he had named the squalid tenement he was manager of -- or of Waclaw
Rubenstein, the brilliant logician and Beethoven specialist, who used to
get his stooges to move his stolen grand piano through the streets to his next
abode whenever the collection agency gestapo would start breathing
too hotly down his neck -- so that, before long we started referring to our
beloved town as “Berserkly"--- which wasn't too far off the mark ...

TO BE CONTINUED in the Bulgarian Journal of Pedagogy and
Social Psychology

_

THE PRINCESS OF STRESS AND PERSONAL DELUSION

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