Joe Cillo

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Josh Kornbluth is best described as the Woody Allen of the West.

Presently Josh is performing at the Ashby Stage a.k.a. the Shotgun Players.

Most of his previous work consisted of monologues delivered below street level (The Hungry Id (sic) in San Francisco and La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley).

Now, merely twenty years into the business, Josh no longer descends below the sidewalk to get to the stage to perform in the case of SEA OF REEDS.

The fulcrum of SEA OF REEDS is his dilatory Bar Mitzvah at the sagely post-adolescent age of 52, four times the Hebrew National average for such ceremonies.

Josh explains, that as the son of communist parents, he spent his early years being a non-Jewish Jew and it wasn’t until he became a father that he became a humanist Jew believing that the collective imagination of man was actually God.

Assuming Josh is correct, God’s primary residence in Silicon Valley.

As prescribed by tradition, Josh is directed by his presiding rabbi to read a passage from the biblical prophets called the Haftorah.

Because Josh’s ceremony is in July, his reading assignment is from the Book of Numbers, Chapter 25 to be exact.

While most of Israel is hot during July, Josh holds his Bar Mitzvah in the Negev where one can bake matzo on the sidewalk.

In the passage Josh reads, the peripatetic Nation of Israel is temporarily abiding in Shittim; no scatological overtones intended.

Shittim was crawling with Moabite Shiksas and soon some wayward Israelites were dating—to use a PG-13 euphemism—the locals i.e. the Daughters of Moab.

As usual, one thing inevitably leads to the next; it’s a slippery slope: first it’s sidelong glances, then holding hands and in no time, these randy exogamous Israelites were kowtowing to the Pagan Goddess Baal Peor.

Baal Peor, is most politely translated, is the Cleft Deity; some theologians attribute modern pole dancing to her.

This Pagan Fertility Goddess demands rigorous obeisance and specific forms of surrender from her acolytes and votaries; none of which are PG-13 in priggish or civil societies.

As describe in Numbers 25, Baal Peor revelry eventually spills into public view.

Zimri, the son of Salu, and his Midianitish consort Cozbi, the daughter of Zur make a public spectacle of themselves.

Phinehas, Zealous the Grandson of Aaron, is appalled by their exhibitionism.

Phinehas takes a javelin in hand and skewers both Zimri and Cozbi—the woman symbolically through her belly.

Thanks to Phinehas’ moral vigilantism it was believed that a plague was stayed from the children of Israel thereby saving thousands of lives: A seemingly happy ending.

Josh thinks he is expected to reconcile himself to this bit of tabloid zealotry.

Instead, his response is an elegant exhortation for tolerance and it is possibly the core message of the play.

If you go to the play, you owe it to yourself to stopping texting at this point and listen carefully to his Bar Mitzvah address.

One bay area critic has mistaken Josh’s earnestness and sincerity for didacticism—which is apparently a misdemeanor in theater.

The play is filling with amusing boyhood reminiscences of being raised peripherally Jewish without becoming Jewish.

It is filled with intelligent humor without falling back on the usual shticks like sex or politics.

Rather than going solo, this time Josh has Amy Resnick (who starred in Haiku Tunnel with him) to prod him along.

Amy is part director and part surrogate Jewish mother.

A quartet provides musical support as Josh plays the reeds of his oboe.

The play, while not elitist, is sophisticated humor; it prioritizes artistic success well ahead of popular success.

David Dower directs this delightfully entertaining piece.

For tickets call 510-841-6500 or go to shotgunplayer.org.

 

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, LIKE IT OR NOT

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
― Sophia Loren

First, it was horsemeat.  We thought we were eating succulent bits of beef but to our horror, we discovered we were shoving Dobbin into our lasagna.  Worse, we have been devouring him topped with cheese, tomato and soupçon of lettuce in our burgers.  We were horrified.  Tesco, a major seller of deceptive equine products ran full page ads apologizing for misleading their customers, insisting they had no idea that they were mislabeling their products.

The rest of the world scoffs at English fastidiousness. “So what?” they say in at least 358 different languages.   The French adore horsemeat…in fact they hint that is why they are so romantic in bed, in contrast to the British who apologize before they even mange to get started.  The Irish add a wine sauce to anything and once tasted don’t give a damn.

But horsemeat in our dinners is not the worst of it.  Oh, no.

Now that we have managed to come to terms with the brutal fact that the glorious winner of Epsom Downs faces a future in our goulash, we have another gastronomic hurdle to cross.  Sixty percent of the tuna we buy to fill our children’s lunch boxes and add flavor to our casseroles is not tuna at all.  It is escolar, an oily fish that causes diarrhea.  That is why so many of us have that irresistible urge to relieve ourselves after indulging in those cute canapés topped with a pimento.  And you thought it was the conversation.

The fact is that most restaurants serve escolar and tell us it is albacore tuna. No wonder we cannot figure out why that delicious Salad Niçoise sent us to the loo within moments of savoring it flavor. It wasn’t that drink you had to wash it down.  It was tacky escolar putting on airs.

Everyone knows that we are what we eat.  It is now apparent that when we feed our children stew, they could easily be neighing for their supper in a matter of weeks.  What is far more frightening, that tuna fish sandwich that every child cannot resist could very well send him swimming in the Atlantic never to return.  It has already happened in my family.

My Aunt Gert swears that the reason her daughter Penny became an Olympic swimmer was that she ate nothing but tuna fish for SEVEN years.  She stopped eating it that unforgettable day when she cramped up just as she was approaching the finish line in Rome in 1960.  She blamed her loss on nerves, but we know better.  It wasn’t the pasta either.

My mother’s staple casserole was tuna fish mixed with cream of mushroom soup topped with crumbled crisps. She served it at every party.  We never understood why everyone who ate it got the “flu” the next day.  We thought it was Ohio weather.

The moral of this shocking tale is that if you want to win the big fight, eat a bull and if you think you are gay, eat fruit.

WHISTLE POWER

Whistle and dance the shimmy
You will find your audience.
Anonymous

Robert Smith has been arrested several times for whistling on the streets of Portland Oregon. Residents said he was disturbing their peace.  The court listened to shop owners, pedestrians and outraged mothers’ complaints and last February, decided that Smith was free to whistle as long as he didn’t stand still.  Now, Robert Smith walks throughout downtown Portland, whistling a penetrating, tuneless melody so loud you can hear him blocks away.   “I get more self-worth out of whistling. I do it every day — weather permitting,” he said. “I’m not out here to be the best whistler in the world. I’m just trying to make people smile.”

I think that is a lovely attitude, one that all of us should think about adopting.  Whistling is a delightful way to spread joy, catch someone’s attention and call the dog.  My sister could whistle before she could say a sentence.  She, like Robert Smith, used to love to whistle while she walked.  The difference is that my sister was a fat, adorable three year old who toddled happily in the neighborhood; Smith is a grown man; a construction worker, who should have better things to do with his time.

However, the end results for both of them are the same.  When neighbors saw my sister wandering through Birkhead Place, they would call my mother and say, ”Ida, your kid ran away again.”

That served to alert my mother and give my sister the attention she wanted. She too had no intentions of being the best whistler in Toledo, Ohio.  She wanted her mother.  My sister’s whistling often took her out of our gated community and into the main thoroughfare.

One summer day, in 1944, my sister wandered out of the house whistling and attracted a mangy dog who fell madly in love with her unique melody.  The dog followed her down the street, past manicured lawns and budding maple trees, across busy intersections and crowded parking lots until at last, a policeman noticed the tiny, dimpled whistler followed by a large, flea infested hound.

He stopped my sister and said, as kind policemen did in the days before they carried guns and a chip on their shoulder, ”Darling where are you going?”

My sister, who had not mastered speech as well as she had her tuneful art, said, ”Dog!” and she smiled at the policeman expecting him to tell her she was a brilliant child because she said a complete word.  At this very moment, my mother dashed into the street her apron strings flying behind her yelling, ”Marsha Dee!!! STOP!!!”

The policeman stopped.  Pedestrians stopped   My sister kept walking and whistling her way past the drugstore toward the bakery.  She pointed to the dog.  “We hunnry.” she announced.

The policeman went into the bakery, bought a bag of cookies: He gave one to my sister and one to the dog.  “Say thank you,” my mother said to my sister.  The dog barked, my mother popped a tranquilizer and the policeman continued his beat.

The moral of this story is: There was a time when a whistle got you a cookie, but now-a-days, all you get is a citation.”

 

 

 

BETRAYAL

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Harold Pinter’s BETRAYAL is presently being performed by the Off Broadway West Theatre Company.

At the onset, this complex play appears to be aiming at a precise definition of a seemingly simple word like betrayal; in the end it seems to have diffused the word into a vaporous hollow abstraction.

Jerry betrays his best friend and publishing associate, Robert, by snaking Robert’s wife Emma.

For five years Jerry and Emma conduct assignations in a cozy love flat not far from where they work … imagine eating a late afternoon lunch, with wine, perhaps a little dessert and then going home to their respective families … duplicitous almost to the point of schizoid.

When Robert married Emma, Jerry served as his best man.

Not long after the bouquet had withered and the garter had faded on the rear view mirror, Jerry ambushes Emma in her upstairs bathroom; he professes his adoration and adulterous love for her and plants the first kiss and the first brick in the road to infidelity.

After the affair begins to feel like a second year Birkenstock, the publishing business calls Jerry to New York leaving Emma alone with Robert.

In Jerry’s absence, Emma compromises her romantic integrity and makes love with her own husband; naturally she finds herself pregnant and has to explain to her returning Lothario that it’s okay; she was essentially faithful to him, after all, it was her own husband.

As C.S. Lewis once said, “Once you let go of reality, the possibilities are endless.”

Once the subterfuges, circumlocutions and prevarications get started, the three vertices of the love triangle are no longer communicating, they are collaborating on a script.

Jerry, as played to the Klieg lintels by Brian O’Connor, is an absolute rascal, a regular Paolo Malatesta; seducing with literary pretentions and pulp fiction in hand; you wouldn’t trust Jerry at a petting zoo let alone with your wife; what was Robert thinking?

Emma is an enigma: an attractive woman with options whose healthy sense of entitlement assures her that good wine, good food and frequent trips to Italy are just not sufficient.

Director Richard Harder perhaps does his best work with Emma, who is finely played by Sylvia Kratins.

Kratins’ Emma never sits still; her restless spirit keeps her head on a swivel, her eyes spinning like a rotifer and limbs in constant motion trying to get comfortable in the here in now while her mind is occupied elsewhere; is she Lady Macbeth or Madame Bovary?

Lighting is another creative strength of the show; low intensity illumination provides the audience with a keyhole feel: an intimate sense that we are eavesdropping on conversations; much in vogue these days given the liberties the NSA has taking with our liberties.

Keith Burkland as Robert is the axel about which the play revolves on.

Burkland’s Robert is opaque: a mystery shrouded in a reservation.

Is Robert mistakenly trusting Jerry and Emma or is he disinterested to the extent that he is willing to time share little Miss Francesca di Rimini?

Burkland is both an artist and a craftsman; polishing and burnishing his character until you can almost feel the tweed; acting is not what he does, it is who he is.

BETRAYAL is the best of Pinter and Richard Harder elevates it a step higher.

If you enjoy intimate theater where acting is an art, you don’t want to miss BETRAYAL at the Phoenix at Mason and Geary.

Call 1-800-838-3006 or www.offbroadwaywest.org.

The Haunted Valley

Short Story by Ambrose Bierce, Commentary

 

 

“The Haunted Valley” was Ambrose Bierce’s first published story.  It appeared in 1871 in the Overland Magazine.  It deals with gender ambiguity, same sex relationships, racial bigotry, and murder in the American West.  The story is divided into two parts.  In the first part, the narrator is traveling through a remote area, presumably in California, although it doesn’t say so specifically, where he encounters Jo. Dunfer, a rancher whose most salient personal qualities seem to be his bigotry against Chinese people and his penchant for whiskey.  Dunfer launches into a narrative about taking on a Chinese man, Ah Wee, as a cook and servant five years previous.  Ah Wee and a man named Gopher assist Dunfer in felling trees for a cabin he had wished to build on a remote part of the ranch.  Ah Wee is incompetent at felling trees and Jo Dunfer admits to killing him for this and other faults.  The narrative is disrupted at this point by a dramatic scream and Jo. Dunfer’s collapse.  Jo. Dunfer’s assistant [Gopher, although he is not named at this point] enters and the narrator briefly encounters him.  This incident is not explained in any great detail and the narrator leaves it in this ambiguous state.  He departs Jo. Dunfer’s residence in a disturbed state of mind and on his journey chances to come upon the grave of Ah Wee with this curious inscription.

AH WEE — CHINAMAN

Age unknown.  Worked for Jo. Dunfer.

This monument is erected by him to keep the Chink’s

memory green.  Likewise as a warning to Celestials

not to take on airs.  Devil take ’em!

She Was a Good Egg.

The choice of pronouns is an operative point.

The second part of the narrative takes place four years later when the protagonist returns to the same area.  This time he encounters Gopher, the other (white) assistant to Jo. Dunfer.  The narrator inquires about Jo. Dunfer and is informed that he is dead and in the grave beside Ah Wee.  Gopher accompanies the narrator to the grave and tells him that indeed Jo. Dunfer had killed Ah Wee, but not out of frustration with his abilities as a house servant, but out of jealousy over Ah Wee’s relationship with himself, Gopher.  One day Jo. Dunfer had caught Gopher and Ah Wee together and killed Ah Wee with an ax in a jealous rampage.  Dunfer buried Ah Wee in the grave and created the curious memorial marker.

Now comes the crucial turn on the very last page of the story which I will quote.

“When did Jo die?” I asked rather absently.  The answer took my breath:

“Pretty soon after I looked at him through that knot-hole, w’en you had put something in his w’isky, you derned Borgia!”  [referring to the narrator’s previous visit, four years prior]

Recovering somewhat from my surprise at this astounding charge, I was half-minded to throttle the audacious accuser, but was restrained by a sudden conviction that came to me in the light of a revelation.  I fixed a grave look upon him and asked, as calmly as I could:  “And when did you go luny?”

“Nine years ago!” he shrieked, throwing out his clenched hands — “nine years ago, w’en that big brute killed the woman who loved him better than she did me! — me who had followed ‘er from San Francisco, where ‘e won ‘er at draw poker! — me who had watched over ‘er for years w’en the scoundrel she belonged to was ashamed to acknowledge ‘er and treat ‘er white — me who for her sake kept ‘is cussed secret till it ate ‘im up! — me who w’en you poisoned the beast fulfilled ‘is last request to lay ‘im alongside ‘er and give ‘im a stone to the head of ‘im!  And I’ve never since seen ‘er grave till now, for I didn’t want to meet ‘im here.” (Bierce, p. 126)

I found three different commentaries on this story and I believe all three misunderstand it.  Bierce is admittedly not striving for clarity, but the story is clear if one is attuned to the possibilities of cross-gender identifications and same sex relationships.

Peter Boag (2012) in his study of cross-dressing in the American West states that “Ah’s sex is never entirely clear; feminine and masculine pronouns interchange readily right up to the story’s conclusion. . . Thus Ah Wee may have been a Chinese woman dressed as a man, or a (typically) feminized Chinese man” (p. 192)

William Wu (1982) read the story as Ah Wee being a girl whom Dunfer had won in a poker game.  Wu notes that the reader is misled through the whole story to think that Ah Wee is a man, but fails account for this misleading or to perceive the significance of the pronoun changes in the story.  Wu is focused on the racism in the story and thus misses the sexual implications that are really the crux of it, resulting in a misunderstanding of the murder and the sex triangle.  (Wu, 1982, p. 22)

Hellen Lee-Keller (2006) also tries to normalize the story in the same way as Wu.

As the tombstone indicated, Ah Wee was not, in fact, a he, but rather a she, and Dunfer killed Ah Wee in a fit of jealous rage thinking that Ah Wee and Gopher were involved in a sexual relationship.  Ultimately, Dunfer, who had fallen in love with Ah Wee over the years, fell into despair when he realized what he had done, started drinking heavily again, and grew even more anti-Chinese.

Lee-Keller follows Wu in seeing Ah Wee as female all the way through, but she doesn’t address Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as ‘he’ throughout, and seems to call into question that there was a sexual relationship between Gopher and Ah Wee.  In other words, she suggests that Dunfer killed Ah Wee out of misunderstanding and self-delusion.

The straightforward assumption that Ah Wee’s is a girl, won in a poker game, and subsequently killed in a sex triangle, does not make sense of the text, the shifting pronouns, and particularly the contrast between Dunfer’s and Gopher’s constructions of Ah Wee.  If you follow the shifting pronouns, there is a logic to their modulations.  They do not “interchange readily right up to the story’s conclusion,” as Boag reports.  Ah Wee is portrayed as a man by Jo. Dunfer through the whole story up until the very end of his narrative, with the exception of the curious epitaph on the tombstone.  Dunfer always referred to Ah Wee as ‘he.’  If Ah Wee were a girl, won in a poker game, why would there be any need for Jo. Dunfer to disguise her as a man, or for Ah Wee to adopt the identity of a man?  If that were the case, then it would mean that Jo. Dunfer imposed the male identity upon her out of his own psychological need for a male sexual partner.  But if that were true, why would he even take a girl home to his ranch, if what he really wanted was a boy all along?  The idea that Ah Wee was a girl straight up is untenable.  It fails to make sense of Jo. Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as ‘he’ throughout, and Gopher’s pronoun shift when he begins to talk about his own relationship with Ah Wee.  If you think Ah Wee was “really a she” as Lee-Keller thinks, then you have to explain why the whole story leads you to assume Ah Wee is male.   I don’t see any way to do that.  The story will simply not make sense if Ah Wee were really a female all the way through from the outset.

Alternatively, if Ah Wee were a female-to-male cross dresser, as one possibility suggested by Boag, it would mean she was presenting as a male throughout the story.  A full grown adult male would make an unlikely prize in a poker game and this raises a question mark over the whole tale about Ah Wee being a prize in a poker game.   This is Gopher’s version probably concocted to mask the fact that Ah Wee left him for Jo. Dunfer.   The poker game story is Gopher’s attempt at face saving.  Ah Wee was very likely Gopher’s lover before leaving him for Jo. Dunfer and moving to his ranch in rural California.  But was he/she male or female?

If she were a cross-dressed female-to-male, a la Alan Hart (see Boag, pp. 9-14), then you would have a female who gender identified as male becoming involved in “homosexual” relationships with two different males.  A rather convoluted  maneuver for a female to make.  This is not a realistic scenario.  I was not able to find any instance of a female who gender identified as male, who then went on to form sexual relationships with other men in her cross gender identity.  Somebody out there come forward if you have a counterexample.  There is no plausible interpretation of this story where Ah Wee is a natural female.

Gopher says that “the scoundrel she belonged to refused to acknowledge her and treat her white.”  This refusal to acknowledge her I think refers to Jo. Dunfer’s denoting Ah Wee as ‘he,’ that is, refusing to acknowledge his/her full identification as a female.  In other words, Jo. Dunfer insisted on Ah Wee’s biological gender as the proper identifier rather than accepting her psychological identification as a female.  This seemed improper and disrespectful to Gopher, and he attributed it to Dunfer’s shame and denial of his own relationship with Ah Wee, and consistent with his further maltreatment of her.  Gopher referred to Ah Wee as ‘she,’ when he was relating his own relationship to her, fully acknowledging Ah Wee’s psychological make-up.  This makes sense of the pronoun changes in the story and is consistent with the details in the narration.

The most likely scenario is that Ah Wee was a male-to-female cross-dresser, probably fully gender identified as female in the mode of Mrs. Nash recounted in Boag’s Re-dressing, Chapter 4.

Mrs. Nash was a Mexican male-to-female cross-dresser who successfully passed herself off as a woman among the U.S. Seventh Calvary in the 1870s and 80s for at least a ten year period during which she was married to three different soldiers in the Seventh.  Although it was widely known that she had a beard and shaved every day, she dressed and lived as a female, winning high praise as well as financial rewards for her skills in laundering, sewing, cooking, delivering babies, caring for infants, and witchcraft.  When she died of appendicitis it was discovered that “she had balls as big as a bull’s.  She’s a man!” (Boag, pp. 130-137)  The story became a national sensation.

I believe Ah Wee was a comparable figure to Mrs. Nash, a biological male who dressed and psychologically identified as a female.   Both Gopher and Dunfer knew Ah Wee’s “real” gender.  However, Jo. Dunfer did not recognize Ah Wee’s cross-gender identification, referring to him/her always as ‘he,’ whereas Gopher, loving Ah Wee in her cross-dressed identity, referred to her as ‘she,’ when he began talking about his own feelings for her.

The story told by Gopher of Ah Wee’s having been won in a poker game and his following her to Dunfer’s ranch suggests that the original attachment was between Ah Wee and Gopher.  Gopher was involved with Ah Wee as a cross-dresssed male-to-female.  Jo. Dunfer came between them by some means or other.   The poker winnings story seems unlikely to me.  If Gopher loved Ah Wee with the dedication that he seems to evince, why would he wager her in a poker game?  More likely is that Ah Wee fled with Dunfer to get away from Gopher.  But Gopher was a persistent, hopelessly attached lover who pursued Ah Wee to Dunfer’s ranch, got himself hired as a ranch hand by Dunfer, and continued his relationship with Ah Wee whenever possible.

Dunfer caught Ah Wee and Gopher together and killed Ah Wee in a jealous rampage.  Gopher suggests that the encounter in which they were caught was actually innocent in that he was reaching into Ah Wee’s clothing to remove a spider.  But this again sounds very self-serving on Gopher’s part.  Dunfer had almost certainly known of Gopher and Ah Wee’s prior relationship and very likely had an inkling that they were continuing on the sly behind his back.  The violent jealous rampage was probably the breaking of a dam of accumulated suspicion and resentment.  Dunfer confessed to killing Ah Wee before the authorities, recounting the version he had given the narrator and the case was judged a justifiable homicide.  He then erected the grave that Bierce describes with the curious epitaph, where he acknowledges, finally, her true (psychological) identity as a female.

In response to the narrator’s question about the time of Dunfer’s death, Gopher levels the accusation that he, the narrator, had been the one to poison Dunfer.  The “revelation” that comes over the narrator at that moment is that Gopher is making a confession.  Indeed it was Gopher who had killed Jo. Dunfer and buried him beside Ah Wee.  How does he know this?  Both he and Gopher know that he, the narrator, did not poison Dunfer.  So why would Gopher make such an accusation?  The accusation that the narrator had been the one to poison Dunfer is Gopher’s thin — or rather outrageous — cover story, and it brings up the suggestion that Jo. Dunfer did not die of natural causes.  Why would Gopher make such an accusation if he knew Jo. Dunfer had died a natural death?  In fact he knew perfectly well that Jo Dunfer did not die a natural death.  The narrator grasped all of this in an instant hearkening back to the moment in Jo. Dunfer’s house when he

saw that the knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye — a full, black eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of expression more awful than the most devilish glitter.  I think I must have covered my face with my hands to shut out the horrible illusion, if such it was, and Jo.’s little white man-of-all-work [Gopher] coming into the room broke the spell, and I walked out of the house with a sort of dazed fear that delirium tremens might be infectious.  (Bierce, p. 120)

The narrator’s visit to Dunfer’s ranch gave Gopher the opportunity he had probably been seeking for some time.  Gopher could claim that the narrator had poisoned Dunfer and thus cover his tracks as the murderer.  Gopher had plenty of motivation.  Gopher had loved Ah Wee, but Ah Wee preferred Dunfer to him — at least that is the way it seemed to Gopher.  Dunfer had taken Ah Wee away from Gopher — allegedly in a poker game, but most likely by other means. I think it probable that Ah Wee left with Dunfer willingly to escape Gopher’s clinging attachment.  Dunfer treated Ah Wee badly, according to Gopher — this is plausible — and eventually killed her in a jealous fit for continuing her relationship with Gopher.  It was Gopher who buried Dunfer beside Ah Wee.  It all fits.  Ah Wee is consistent with the type of male-to-female cross-dresser described earlier in the case of Mrs. Nash and the Seventh U.S. Calvary.  Jo. Dunfer’s referring to Ah Wee as male but then changing the pronoun on the tombstone:  “She was a Good Egg”  indicates that he had no illusions that Ah Wee had a dual gender identity.

I think Bierce understood what he was doing, and realized some people would be confused by the story.  He probably wanted it that way.  I suspect the story is based somehow on real events and that it is not simply a product of Bierce’s fantasy.  It was his first published story, and I think it is significant that he would choose this topic as the subject of his first public effort.

The story was written around 1870, shortly after the Civil War.  The frontier was still very much an unsettled place of adventure and opportunity.  It was rapidly changing, however, as were prevailing attitudes toward the many variants of sexual expression.  America was becoming more anxious even as it grew stronger, men were becoming less confident in themselves and in their place in the emerging industrial society, and people were becoming conscious and questioning of the sexual behavior of individuals.  These strains and anxieties are reflected in the intense racism in the story.  However, the racial bigotry, which is quite blatant, does not extend to the cross-dresser.  The cross-dresser is a curious anomaly, but is not yet pathologized per se.  Sexual and gender deviance are being associated with race, and it would not be long before the reflexive racial bigotry that was taken for granted and widely accepted would be extended to sexual minorities of every sort.  This story represents a transition stage between a time when sexuality was less of a public preoccupation to one where it became central to one’s position and acceptability in society.

The three published commentaries on this story that I was able to locate gloss over or miss the full import of the pronoun changes which are the heart of this sordid story of sex and murder.  The tendency is to normalize the story, to heterosexualize it first of all, and to completely ignore, or fail to perceive, the cross-gender identification that is central to the whole drama.  But Ah Wee’s male-to-female cross-gender identification is the only way to make full sense of the text.  If you pay attention to it, the text is clear.  It might have been clearer to Bierce’s audience in the late nineteenth century than it is to us.  Cross-dressing and cross-gender identifications were much less obtrusive and much more amenable to integration in society than they are today, as Boag’s excellent examination of the subject points out.  The bigotry against the male-to-female cross-dresser, was not as pervasive or even as widespread in the nineteenth century as it is today.  Racial bigotry was certainly intense and taken for granted.  This story illustrates how the country had not yet solidified what would later become rigid stereotypes and expectations for masculinity and male sexual behavior, but present day commentators tend to project back onto the story our own present-day biases and preconceptions which were still forming at the time the story was composed and were far from the fully entrenched cultural norms they later became.  This historical blindness not only simplifies the story and robs it of its psychological complexity, it also neutralizes the lessons it has to teach us in how our own culture has evolved in its notions of masculinity and proper male sexual behavior.

 

 

Notes

 

 

Bierce, Ambrose (1984)  The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce.  Edited by Ernest Hopkins.  Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Boag, Peter (2011) Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California Press.

Lee-Keller, Hellen (2006)  Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol 2, No. 1.  http://www.ambrosebierce.org/journal2lee-keller.html

Wu, William F. (1982)  The Yellow Peril:  Chinese Americans in American Fiction 1850-1940.  Hamden, CT:  Archon Books.

NEWS FROM THE BRIGHTON FRINGE

SHORT COMMENTARY ON WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POND

I had the unexpected pleasure of stumbling on BITCH BOXER  written and performed by Charlotte Josephine.  I am not a sports fan and I particularly abhor boxing, yet this play with its fast moving dialogue, exquisite direction by Bryony  Shanahan and truly brilliant lighting effects by Seth Rook Williams captivated me from the moment Josephine stepped on the stage and brought tears to my eyes as I relived a young girl’s torment,  torn by her own determination to validate herself in her fathers eyes.   This is a play that must be seen because words cannot cast its spell.  I takes place in 2012 when women entered  the Olympic boxing ring for the first time.  We see Chloe training to compete in the event even as she is torn by cosmic events in her own life.  Through it all, we see her hanging on to a tattered faith in herself and reaching for a star she knows belongs to her.  It is Josephine’s performance that makes this production stellar.  She is an artist in every sense of that word and beyond

BITCH BOXER returns to the Marlborough Theatre May 25,26,& 27 7:30 pm

www.brightonfringe.org; 01273 917272

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THE SPEIGEL TENT IS THE PLACE TO BE ……

LA CLIQUE  happens every night but MOnday at 9 pm and iach performance is unique.  You will see Scotty the Blue Bunny charming you with is wagging little tail and marvelous repartee;  Shay Horay amaze you with rubber bands, Lilikoi Kaos spinning hula hoops in ways you cannot imagine and the Wau Wau Sisters doing a trapeze act that defies gravity.  The show is spellbinding from start to finish and for me a huge highlight is Paul Zenon’s combination of magic and comedy.  This is an hour and a half of superb entertainment…fun, exhilarating and spirit lifting.

 

My favorite performers ever are and have always been MIKLEANGELO AND THE BLACK SEA GENTLEMEN.   They perform at 5 pm in the tent from the 13-19 and are an experience not to be missed “These are performers at the top of their game,” says The Scotsman;  The Sydney Morning Herald says “They are not so much a band as a dream you cannot wake from.”

 

The show combines musical theatre and black humor in unexpected ways.  You will never see its like anywhere in the world. Mikelangelo has composed and arranged songs that blend Balkan melodies and European Kabaret with comedy and farce.  The Gentlemen are superb musicians and each has his own comedic sense. Mikelangelo is brilliant on every level as their leader and your host in the production.  When they play AN A MINOR DAY you laugh and yet you know just what they mean…and I defy you not to nod your head at the black humor in A FORMIDABLE MARINADE.  You will chuckle; you will dance and you will love every minute you spend with MIKELANGELO AND THE BLACK SEA GENTLEMEN.  That is a promise.  Tickets 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

 

THE BIG BITE-SIZE BREAKFAST: Fresh Fruit *****

This is a series of award winning one-minute plays delightfully presented with coffee and a croissant included in the 12.50/9.50 ticket.  Fresh Fruit is a collection of 5 vignettes directed and produced by Nick Brice/Sam Holland and Sophia Wylie.  Each play in this series gives us a new take on what it is to be human, mixing pathos with humor.  Of special note is Tegen Hitchens whose monologue Thin Air  about a tight rope walker who learns what courage is all about is mesmerizing and unforgettable.  Do not miss this delightful mid day hour. Tickets 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

 

THE BIG BITE-SIZE BREAKFAST: Interpretations  *****

It is rare to see a show that has an almost universal appeal.  The audience for this “menu” ranged from a rapt 3 year old to a woman of 80 and everyone there was captivated by the selection of plays that combine comedy with a dose of unvarnished reality.  Of special note was Becky Norris’s monologue VALENTINE’S DAY about a woman who receives a valentine from a most unusual stranger.  Norris’s characterization is multi-faceted and believable, yet laced with dead-pan humor.  Kudos to Nick Brice, Sam Holland and Sophia Wylie for their programming and expert direction.  Once again they have given us a delightful and unforgettable morning. Tickets 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

ROAD Written by Jim Cartwright and directed by Julian Kerridge *****

This award winning play is as moving today as it was when it was written in 1986.  “Now, 24 years later, as the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider….once again it is the very poorest in society who suffer,” says director Julian Kerridge.  Theater is our best vehicle for social outrage and this gorgeous piece will make you cry, laugh and ponder at what is happening now in our world.  Perfectly paced, beautifully directed and acted by an all-star cast, it is the most important piece of theater I have seen in a very long time. Tickets 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

 

THE BIG BITE-SIZE BREAKFAST: Desires.  The Latest Music Bar May 19, 2013 *****

Once again, the audience is beautifully entertained with five ten-minute plays, all  unforgettable because each is a commentary on the human experience.  The  play selection for all three menus (at Theatre Royal and The Latest) is superb.  We are given literary quality, spot-on direction and amazing acting.  These talented performers must switch from one character to another in a repertory of fifteen plays (for all 3 shows) and not one of them loses the narrative flow.  Each menu is well worth seeing both for its social commentary, its quality, humor and pace. Tickets 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

 

THE TREASON SHOW *****

This special Festival show is at the Sabai Pavilion at 9pm Tuesday May 21 until Thursday May 25. The very talented cast present fast moving acerbic commentary on the news in song and satire that cannot help but appeal no matter what your level of political interest.  This venue is very large and lacks the intimacy that works so well for the production at The Latest Music Bar, but the skits still get  laughs and leave the audience with unforgettable memories that poke holes in the public image of our all too pompous public officials. Most memorable in this production was Daniel Beales’ impersonation of Angela Merkell singing a parody of My Way.  This show runs monthly. If you missed this one go to www.treasonshow.co.uk for the next edition.

 

BIG BOYS DON’T DANCE *****

This show is a must see for every age. The music is superb, the dancing is mind boggling and the talent of the two stars amazing.  There is a recognizable and believable story line running though the hour about two brothers about to split up because one is getting married.  However, the show is held together with almost magical rhythm, dialogue and dance. The hour passes in an instant, so memorable are the performances of these two South African actors with unequalled comedic timing and pace.   At The Warren until May 24 at 6 pm  Tickets www.otherplacebrighton.co.uk or 01273 917272  www.brightonfringe.com.

 

QUA, QUA, QUA !! *****
Prepare yourself for a delightful, interactive experience creating comedy in the Jacques Tati tradition.  This charming hour sweeps the audience into the Tati experience highlighting the tiny absurdities that are life itself.  Chris Cresswell has created this gem of a piece and it is his comedic genius that propels the action.  He is supported by a talented cast who pantomime his words. Marion Deprez is outstanding in her characterizations of the conductor on a train, a frustrated sunbather and just another woman in the rain.    Do not miss this tribute to a moviemaker who saw what being human means.  Cresswell’s presentation is sensitive to every nuance that makes life worthwhile.  Tickets: emporiumbrighton.com.  May 30-June 1 @ 7:30    13.50 pounds

 

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT *****
Paul Shaw is a consummate actor, a thrill to see on any stage.  His performance in this touching and very wise production is nothing short of stellar.  The story begins in 1958 when homosexuality was considered a mental disease.  A married couple meet for theater and ponder on their future and the baby soon to be born.  Shaw who plays all the characters in Neil Bartlett’s profound script has an understated delivery that makes the dramatization all the more powerful.  His series of characters explore the need to accept who we are and what we have become as a fact of our lives.  The music composed by Nicolas Bloomfield only enhances the poetic rhythms of the monologue.  The tragedy is that this show was only performed May 31 and June first at the Marlborough Theatre and more people lost the opportunity to experience it.

 

THE WEATHERMAN *****

 

Kiki Lovechild proves how unnecessary words can be in his charming pantomime of how to amuse yourself in purgatory. His show is beautifully paced and combines movement with sound and lighting that sweeps his audience into a world of fun and fantasy unlimited by earthly notions.  Anything can happen on his stage and does from umbrellas swirling to multicolored lights flashing and unexpected gifts shared by a captivated audience.  Nothing verbal can describe the magic of this production and why should it?  The show is an unforgettable hour that cannot fail to make you laugh and love being alive.  Seen at the Marlborough Theatre May 30-June 1.

JULIAN CADDY SPEAKS ON THE IMPACT OF THE 2013 BRIGHTON FRINGE

This is the second year that Julian Caddy has been at the helm of the Brighton Fringe.  In that time, the number and quality of shows have increased by 60% as have the number of attendees.  The Brighton Fringe is the second largest festival in the UK.  Caddy made these comments after a spectacular performance of THE BIG BITE SIZED BREAKFAST: INTERPRETATIONS (reviewed in this article).  The Big Bite Sized Breakfast series was a group of delightful and very meaningful 10-minute plays, each one giving the audience a new view of our own life experience.  Caddy spoke to us after the show.  “What Bite Sized is doing is basic to what we are about,” he said.  “Over 200,000 come to The Brighton Fringe.  And the shows that come here reflect the values of the society that hosts it.”

The majority of the patrons that attend shows for this festival are from Brighton as opposed to The Edinburgh Festival Fringe where the majority of punters are visitors. Each production lives or dies on what they produce and the audience’s reaction to their work.  “That is why we should make more of what we have here, now,” Caddy said.  “The Fringe should continue to support the arts by giving vibrant offerings throughout the year.  That is my ambition.”

Nick Brice produced the Bite Sized Breakfast show.  “Showing people the choices they have gives them the power to make change happen,” he said.

Brice pointed out the parallel between theatre and business.  He creates similar productions to businesses to help both employees and employers empathize with one another and learn how to actually understand what the other person is thinking.  His goal is to show people how to do business in a different way through theater. “Building a brand is making a piece of theatre,” he said.

Theater then is a reflection of life in all its many phases.  Perhaps, this is why experiencing a fringe festival anywhere is so very exhilarating.  Suddenly, the arts take precedence over profit…even over our daily routines.  Instead of going home, eating dinner and watching television, we take in a play, listen to music, laugh at a comedy and experience live entertainment with people of like interests.  All the shows that came to The Brighton Fringe this year were forms of communication and so was the act of attending them.  Theater, be it a play, a dance, a concert…  indeed, in all its forms…. gives us  invaluable tools to keep us human.

 

 

 

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Award Winning San Francisco Playhouse is presently performing the riotous ABIGAIL’S PARTY by Mike Leigh as directed by Amy Glazer.

Susi Damilano, rightfully the first lady of San Francisco stage comedy, marvelously plays Beverly: a diabolical, deranged hostess reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Mommie Dearest and Lindsay English.

Half hostess, half Nurse Ratchet, all evil; Beverly is the accidental devil herself; plying her guests, or captives, with alcohol as if it were mineral water, Beverly turns a perfectly wretched, boring party into a disaster and psycho-drama.

Even the audience is held captive because the play is gut-wrenchingly hilarious; insanely funny; but, you might catch yourself asking, “Should I be laughing at this?”

Neither a professional elevator operator, an evil spouse, nor a trained psychologist could ever push buttons as effectively as Beverly; tormenting her guests with gouging remarks which run the spectrum from careless, to tasteless, to tactless to ruthless.

Beverly shepherds her ovine victims into Dante’s stygian depths of tormented revelers.

Even a liter of gin won’t dull the mental anguish inflicted by Madame Beverly.

Ms. Damilano is the closest San Francisco is going to get to having its own Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett or Lily Tomlin; her comedy is nuanced to the rafters, her timing is to the nanosecond and her movements as salacious as they are comic.

Despite a supporting cast of four characters; this is nearly a one woman show; like a dominatrix, Beverly takes charge, rough riding her guests right into the fetid carpet stains.

A great set design by Bill English captures the very essence of chintzy kitsch, glitzy pretense and cheesy misguided intentions: superbly done; it induces a visual queasiness even before the house lights flicker.

If you are looking for a fun evening in San Francisco, then ABIGAIL’S PARTY is your ticket; this is art wrapped in bacon, wrapped in Velveeta, topped with Whip and Chill.

To reserve your night of laughter, surf over to SFPLAYHOUSE.ORG or call 415-677-9596.

The Dark Room, a novel

By Rachel Seiffert.  New York: Vintage International/Random House.  2001. pp. 278.

 

 

I used to be a darkroom photographer, and have spent many hours processing photographs with film and paper and chemicals struggling to get a print just exactly right in a darkroom under safe lights.  So I could relate very well to the opening vignette in this triptych novel set in Germany from the 1920s until the end of the twentieth century. 

The book is actually three independent novellas, the first of which, called Helmut,  is the story of a boy growing up in Berlin during the Nazi era.  It is the shortest of the three and my favorite.  The character, Helmut, is the most appealing person in the book and his observations of life in Berlin and his development as a photographer had special resonance for me.  The last novella, Micha, is the crux of the book and the motivation and impetus for writing it, I think.  However, I find this novella the least appealing, although it offers the most in substantive issues that will dominate the discussion presented here.

In each novella photography makes an appearance, and Seiffert seems to have intimate knowledge of photography and processing photos in a darkroom.  The title of the book, The Dark Room, ostensibly refers to Helmut’s use of the darkroom for processing his photographs.  Apart from that there is nothing else that relates to the title and by the end of the book, one is left wondering what the title of the book has to do with the content, because the darkroom is not central to the story line or to the larger issues raised by the book.

Reading Helmut, I could feel that the story was written by a woman.  Although the protagonist is a man, a handicapped man in fact, he has the sensibility and temperament of a woman.  He cries way too much for a man.  This is true of all the men throughout this book, with the exception of Kolesnik in the last segment, Micha.  They all seem like women in men’s bodies.  They are always crying over one thing or another, confused, and ambivalent, unsure of themselves, indecisive.  This is particularly so in the case of Micha.  He is the most feminine and most conflicted of all the male characters in the book, and I think the one closest to Seiffert’s own voice and perspective.  Helmut’s story is told in a tone of detachment, it has a surreal quality that makes it very interesting.  Helmut is absorbed within himself, seems almost oblivious to the political ferment going on around him.  He seems to go about his daily business unconscious of the momentous changes happening in German society under the Nazis.  For example, there is a description of his rising one morning and finding broken glass on the sidewalk.  There is no explanation or analysis of where the broken glass came from, but the implication is that it was the result of Nazi gangs smashing the windows of shopkeepers who were either Jewish or anti-Nazi.  Helmut simply sweeps it up apparently without reflection or reaction.

He has a preoccupation from childhood with watching the comings and goings of trains at the Berlin Bahnhof.  During the war years his observations reveal that Berlin is slowly being depopulated, and he carefully documents this development on a daily basis.  But he does not question it.  He does not ask himself why this is happening.  He does not seem to reflect on his acute observations.  He is observationally engaged, but emotionally detached.  He seems to have only minimal sexual interest for an adolescent boy.  Helmut finds some pictures of nude women in a stash of magazines kept hidden away by his employer, Gladigau.  “At night he conjures the images against his bedroom ceiling as the long, slow freight trains clatter below, a soothing rhythm of sleep.” (p.12)  That’s all the sex he gets in the first twenty-four years of his life.

The middle of the three segments centers around a young girl named Lore.  Her age is not given, but one surmises her approximate age must be twelve to fourteen at most.   She has a younger sister Liesel, who is probably eight to ten, two twin brothers who must be six or seven, and an infant brother, Peter, who is a babe in arms.  The story takes place at the end of the war and their mother, who appears to have been a Nazi operative of some sort, is being taken into detention by the invading Americans.  She instructs Lore to take the children on a trek from southern Germany to their grandmother’s residence in Hamburg far to the north, and gives her money and jewelry for the trip.  The mother then disappears and the story becomes the adventurous trek of this small troop of children making their way the length of Germany to Hamburg, largely on foot, during the chaos and uncertainty of the aftermath of the war.  A rather unlikely and unhopeful scenario, I think, but Sieffert’s sensitive writing style and attention to detail make one want to believe it.  Along the way they pick up an additional companion, an older boy named Tomas, who at first appears to be Jew who has been released from a concentration camp by the Americans.  Later it seems that he may have been a soldier or a prison guard who stole the identity of a dead Jew to escape detection by the Americans (pp. 150-52).  Tomas befriends the young group and proves himself vital to their success in completing the journey.

The story is a succession of perils and hardship which the children negotiate with a combination of resourcefulness and luck.  It gets a little repetitive after a while, but there is enough richness and variety to keep it from dragging.  Seiffert is a good story teller with a vivid imagination for detail that keeps her narrative alive and moving.

There is almost no mention of sex or sexual interest in this whole book, which is remarkable in a book featuring adolescents.  The only glimpse we have of any sexual experience in Lore is a negative one.

Lore is awakened by noises in the dark.  English male voices, whispering.  German female, coaxing.  Shifting rubble, no more talking, only breathing.

Lore knows Tomas is awake, too.  She is uncomfortable under the blankets, shifts back against the cold grit of the bricks behind her.  She doesn’t want to hear what they are doing under the ruined walls.  She counts the beams on the floor above her to block it out, but her mind keeps forming pictures.  Liesel turns over next to her.  Lore fights the urge to cover her sister’s ears.

There is whispering, and after that, walking.

Lore wakes again later to more noise: stifled breath and sobs.  She battles her straining ears, wills herself to sleep again.  The sounds are closer, muffled by blankets, not rubble walls.  Lore allows herself to listen to the dark around her.  Tomas cries with his jacket over his face, arms wrapped over the top to keep the sound inside.  He pulls in gasps of air, body a heaving shadow against the opposite wall.  Lore doesn’t want to see it or hear it.  She would cry, only his tears have taken over.  She lies, awake and furious, until daylight seeps through the cracks in the brickwork over her face. (p. 133-34)

What a prude she is!  This doesn’t sound like the sensibility of a very young, presumably inexperienced, girl.  I would expect more curiosity and receptiveness in a girl of that age.  To me this seems like the very unattractive attitude of an older woman, who has been conditioned to shut out and devalue sexual experience and react to it in a negative way.  It is rather un-German, I think.  That’s the juiciest part of this book.  A very negative, sanitized presentation of young people coming of age.

On the cover of the book an anonymous critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer is quoted who calls the book a novel about the German soul in the twentieth century.  I fear many people will be misled by this.  This novel doesn’t come anywhere close to being about the German soul.  It purports to be an exploration of the German soul, it tries to present itself in this way, but this is a novel about an English woman trying to come to terms with her own conflicted feelings about Germans and Germany.

The characters do not seem like Germans.  They have German names and they are set in Germany, but to me they don’t feel like German people.  The male characters do not feel like men, as I mentioned earlier.  In two of the three stories the protagonists are male and in the Lore episode there is a male character, Tomas, who plays a significant role.  The only male character who seems authentically male and authentically German is Kolesnik, in the final segment, Micha, and he is cast as Polish rather than German.

This is a woman writing about a subject and a domain that is quintessentially male, namely, warfare.  There is nothing wrong with a woman offering her perspective on warfare through the medium of a novel.  It can be a valuable and illuminating perspective.  But this novel is disingenuous in that it purports to represent male soul searching and conflict over the nature of war and wartime atrocities, when it is in fact a gently aggressive, judgmental, moralistic attack on the brutality and excess of warfare from a very female perspective of naive shock and outrage.  Seiffert’s position amounts to “How could you do such a thing, Grandpa?”  She finds it hard to grasp how men who can shoot young children in cold blood can still love their families and be good citizens.

Micha, more than any other character and more than the other two novellas, represents what Seiffert really wants to get at in this book.  Micha is a German man, probably in his 20s, who, as a hobby, takes up tracing his own family history.  The story is set in 1997, so he is looking back over a century of upheaval, warfare, and social disarray that his forebears had lived through.  This leads to an investigation of his deceased grandfather who was in the Waffen SS stationed in Belarus.

The Waffen SS in Belarus and Poland committed some of the most bestial atrocities of the war.  After the war the German government labeled it a criminal organization.  Their behavior was extreme even by SS standards.  In Poland they were so wantonly rampaging that Heinrich Himmler had to send a battalion of SS police to make sure they did not attack their own commanders and other German units in the vicinity.

Micha became obsessed to find out for sure if his grandfather had participated in any of that, or if he was the teddy bear that he always knew him to be.  After the war, the Russians had kept his grandfather in prison for nine years.  He did not rejoin his family in Germany until 1954.  That ought to serve as a clue.  Micha digs up where his grandfather had been stationed in Belarus and some of the atrocities that had gone on there.  He makes several journeys to Belarus to investigate and after a lengthy negotiation, interviews a Polish man named Kolesnik, who was there and saw what happened and was himself a participant.  Kolesnik essentially stands in for the deceased grandfather, and is the screen against which Seiffert projects the issues that are preoccupying her in the writing of this book.

After page 220, I became disgusted with it, and by page 250, I was raining down the full brunt of my wrath upon it.  It was when Micha was photographing Kolesnik and his wife (p. 254-55) that Seiffert tipped her hand and I saw her for what she is.  Elena (Kolesnik’s wife) wants to take a photograph of Kolesnik and Micha together, but Micha refuses to be photographed with Kolesnik.  Why did he refuse to be photographed with this man with whom he had established a relationship of trust and who had been sharing intimate confidences of an utmost personal nature over several months?  Why would he not want to participate in a permanent commemoration of the relationship?  The photograph would represent a personal bond and an acknowledgment of this personal quest that Micha had embarked upon.  The refusal indicates a rejection of Kolesnik by Micha as well as a hypocrisy in that he wishes to deny, both to himself and others, the personal connection he had forged with Kolesnik in order to induce him to talk.  This refusal shows that he is not reaching out to Kolesnik from the heart to create a personal bond of trust and mutual understanding, rather he is seducing Kolesnik in order to use him to satisfy his own personal need: when he is finished with him he will discard him.  It is dishonest and disgusting.  I think it is a crucial moment in the novel in that it is not just a further development of the character of Micha, but rather a revelation of Seiffert’s attitude and purpose in writing the story.

Seiffert is still fighting the war and still fighting within herself how to regard Germany and German people, particularly of the World War II generation.  She herself is not a wounded victim.  Her family did not suffer under the Nazis.  This grudge comes from an attitude of moral outrage over the atrocities committed in the war.  She is making it personal by setting it in the context of a family, a German family — at least a German family as she imagines them.  But I think it is a false picture, or at best very atypical.

What is offensive about this book is not so much its point of view, although I take strong exception to it, but that it purports to be something that it isn’t.  As such it will misguide and misinform English speaking readers about German people and German culture.  If even critics like the reviewers for New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer are befooled, then what of the general reader?

This book is a fraud, but I will tell you the truth.  I was in Berlin last fall and observed a vibrant, thriving, multicultural city growing rapidly and moving forward into the future with high energy and enthusiasm.  But it is also a city very conscious of its past, much more than any American city I have ever seen.  The contrast between past and present in Berlin is evident in nearly every block.  The weight of the past is visible in the architecture, old and new, the streets, the public art visible all over the city, and in the minds and conversations of the residents.  But it is nothing like the anguish and ambivalence that you see in Seiffert.

Today there is a community of approximately 12,000 Jews living in Berlin.  There are active synagogues, a large, very interesting Jewish Museum, opened in 2001, and a sizeable Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened May 2005, just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate.  I was told by a tour guide that it was built on the site of Josef Goebbels residence during the Nazi era, but I was not able to verify this.  This memorial is very controversial in many respects, but the fact that such a substantial memorial, extending over nearly five acres, exists in such a prominent place in the city is evidence of official repudiation of the Nazi policies and attitudes toward Jews and everyone.  That is a firm conviction literally set in stone.  The architect who designed it was an American Jew named Peter Eisenman.  In the following excerpt from an interview with Der Spiegel (May 9, 2005) he comments on the memorial and its psychological meaning and purpose.

Spiegel Online:  Who is the monument for?  Is it for the Jews?

Eisenman:  It’s for the German people.  I don’t think it was ever intended to be for the Jews.  It’s a wonderful expression of the German people to place something in the middle of their city that reminds them — could remind them — of the past.

Spiegel Online:  An expression of guilt, you mean?  Some have criticized the monument by saying it looks like a gigantic cemetery.

Eisenman:  No.  For me it wasn’t about guilt.  When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are guilty.  I have encountered anti-Semitism in the United States as well.  Clearly the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it is clearly a terribly moment in history.  But how long does one feel guilty?  Can we get over that?

I have always thought that this monument was about trying to get over this question of guilt.  Whenever I come here, I arrive feeling like an American.  But by the time I leave, I feel like a Jew.  And why is that?  Because Germans go out of their way — because I am a Jew — to make me feel good.  And that makes me feel worse.  I can’t deal with it.  Stop making me feel good.  If you are anti-Semitic, fine.  If you don’t like me personally, fine.  But deal with me as an individual, not as a Jew.  I would hope that this memorial, in its absence of guilt-making, is part of the process of getting over that guilt.  You cannot live with guilt.  If Germany did, then the whole country would have to go to an analyst.  I don’t know how else to say it.

The memorial and the behavior of the Germans toward the architect illustrate a decisive repudiation of Nazi-ism within the mainstream German culture.  There is no squeamishness about facing up to the past as represented in The Dark Room.  This memorial in the center of Berlin is vast.  It doesn’t show any indecisiveness or unwillingness to face up to the issue.  At the same time a controversy blew up during the construction of the memorial because of a coating on the stone slabs meant to inhibit the scrawling of graffiti  on them.  It happened that the company that manufactured this coating to preserve the Jewish Memorial from defacement was also the same company that manufactured the gas that was used to poison Jews in the concentration camps.

The product was to have been provided by Degussa, a big German chemical company.

Now it turns out that Degussa once owned Degesch, the firm that produced the Zyklon B used to gas Jews in concentration camps. At first, nobody noticed—or nobody wanted to notice. But then the press discovered the link, reportedly after being tipped off by a Swiss company that had hoped to win the contract until Degussa decided to donate half the material needed.

 After the story broke, the memorial’s board of trustees, after an apparently heated discussion, concluded that using the firm’s product, called Protectosil, would be “unacceptable given the specific nature of the Memorial project”. It advised the construction company to stop using the coating until another product could be found.

Degussa has not, in fact, been one of the companies that shies away from its past. It is an active member in the foundation created by German companies to compensate victims of forced labour. And it has commissioned researchers to look into its history, without having any say over what they publish.

This behavior is by no means exceptional these days. Since the mid-1990s, says Manfred Pohl, a historian and head of corporate cultural affairs at Deutsche Bank, most large German companies have reappraised their history. It is now time, he argues, to forgive them (not the same as forgetting). By excluding Degussa from the Holocaust memorial, an opportunity has been missed to do just that. One could also claim that it is unfair to penalise today’s shareholders or employees of Degussa for the actions of the company in the past.   (The Economist, October 30, 2003)

It is exactly the same issue in play in Seiffert’s novel.  But the Germans do not show the anxiety and confusion and paralysis before the issue that Micha shows.  He does not represent typical German attitudes or behavior.  Germans are quite good about facing up to the issue. They might come to differing conclusions, but they are almost always decisive and surefooted in whatever their direction.  Germans want to get on with it.  That doesn’t mean they want to forget.  They are not deniers.  But the kind of anxious preoccupation shown in Sieffert’s lead character is very un-German in my eyes.

When I was in graduate school, I took several seminars that fell under the umbrella description of “Ethics.”  We studied books by authors such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick.  I was shocked at how naive and simple-minded they were, and the crudeness of the methods whereon these intellectual edifices were constructed.  My professors took it all very seriously, but I had undisguised contempt for what I was being taught.  The professors and the authors of these books believe that there are timeless principles of ethical conduct that are independent of time and circumstance and culture, and that they can be discerned and refined by a process of concocting (usually) hypothetical situations and then testing various alternatives and outcomes against our “intuitions.”  In the case of Robert Nozick it was individual rights, in the case of John Rawls, it was principles of distributive justice.  My professors had great faith in this faculty of moral intuition which they thought was inherent in people and could lead in principle to universal agreement.  Absolute standards of Right and Wrong could be discerned and applied to people and events independent of cultural or historical frames of reference.

For example, Aristotle, and virtually everyone in the ancient world, took slavery for granted and never questioned its legitimacy as an institutionalized social practice.  My professors thought that today, from our vantage point of modern enlightenment, we can judge with finality that Aristotle was wrong and that those ancient societies were unjust with the same surety that we can judge that their calculation of the circumference of the earth was wrong as well as their conception of the causes of disease.  In other words, “ethics” can make “progress,” and our understanding of proper moral conduct can be “improved.”  In fact, human beings can themselves be made better in terms of their moral character should they apply these advances in ethical insight to their daily lives.  By implication, some people can be judged to be morally superior to others with absolute certitude and conviction.  One professor once asserted with fervent conviction the he was a better human being than Adolf Hitler.  I nearly laughed in his face.  This whole project of constructing these “ethical” systems by which human beings could be evaluated and compared seemed to me to be breathtakingly arrogant, naive, and stupid.  Unworthy of serious scholarly consideration.  I couldn’t believe they were teaching this in a university and that they expected me to read this stuff and take it seriously.  They judged me to be devoid of capacity for ethical thinking and unsuitable to even be in graduate school.  We didn’t like each other.

This approach and mindset behind all of these modern formulations of universal human rights and war crimes goes back to Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, who believed that moral principles must be understood a priori, that is independent of the contingencies of time, circumstance, and experience.  A categorical imperative is one whose validity and applicability is universal, that is, in all circumstances and it is justified as an end in itself — as opposed to being a means toward some greater good.  How one recognizes such imperatives and applies them to practical situations is not easy to grasp, but Kant had great faith in reason and he also believed that we had an innate sense of what was right that was not dependent on experience, that conscience tempered by reason could yield access to this inner light of moral right.  This was roughly the approach that my professors believed in and tried unsuccessfully to inculcate in me.

I think Rachel Seiffert believes something similar to what my ethics professors believed, although she doesn’t think in these grand philosophical superstructures, but I feel that same revulsion toward her and what she is doing that I felt toward them.  She thinks she can judge her Waffen SS grandfather with the same righteous certitude that my professor felt when he asserted his moral superiority to Adolf Hitler.  What is offensive about it is that Seiffert and the professor think they are delivering “objective” judgments that have universal validity rather than subjective reactions.  They want to claim a correctness that goes beyond themselves and their own subjectivity, the limitations and contingencies of their own personal point of view and position in the world.  This “correctness” can be imposed as “truth” on anyone.  It is not simply a point of view.  It is what everyone should think.  This is what is objectionable.

I probably would not like her son of a bitch Nazi grandfather either, and I’m sure I wouldn’t care much for Adolf Hitler.  But that is because of who I am, how I have been brought up, my values and goals and assumptions about life that have been shaped by long experience and the time in which I live.  I do not claim that they has any validity beyond myself.  I’m willing to concede that others with different experience in different times and circumstances may see things differently.  Seiffert and the philosophy professors are not.

I am squarely in the Nietzschean camp, who reject Kant and any attempt to formulate moral principles that are absolute and universal.  Moral sentiments have to be understood as arising not from abstract principles, reason, or some window of universal conscience, but in deep, visceral, emotional reactions.  When we see the piles of emaciated bodies in the concentration camps, our reaction of shock and horror is not a reasoned inference based on some universal principle.  It is a gut reaction of the most visceral emotion.  Our sense of morality, our understanding of Right and Wrong, begins in these primitive emotional responses.  Principles are abstractions that attempt to generalize from these primitive feelings to guide our future conduct and judge the conduct of others in situations that might have less immediate clarity.  But the fundamental basis for morality is our human emotional dispositions.  As such, moral preconceptions are highly variable and dependent on time, circumstance, culture, experience, and personal psychology.  They are inherently precluded from ever becoming anything like a universal imperative or a consensus across humanity.  Attempts to formulate a universal moral code or universal moral principles is an exercise in futility.  At best it is self-deception.  At worst it is hypocrisy and a legitimization of authoritarianism.

Rachel Seiffert, without being self-conscious about it, does have this predominant religio-Kantian context operating in the background and takes its presumptions for granted.  Her book can be seen as an illustration of how this absolutist attitude toward moral principles plays out in the interpersonal relations of a family and the estrangements and antagonisms that result.

The advantage of my point of view over Seiffert’s or the ethics professors’ is that it allows greater openness, greater flexibility, and greater tolerance.  The ethics professors who believe in absolute Rights and Wrongs are afraid to let anyone think differently from themselves.  They want to feel like their rightness is not limited to themselves and therefore they are justified in imposing their judgments of right and wrong on others and in requiring others to follow their mandates and conform to their standards.  It is the instinct of the religious priesthood in a different guise.  Instead of being the spokesmen for God, they claim to be speaking for “all humanity.”  We don’t need it, and its arrogance and blindness is a potentially dangerous, pathological force in society.

I can like people that I don’t like and the contradiction does not bother me.  Seiffert, believing as she does in absolute rights and wrongs, always has to be aligned with the side of right and never with the side of wrong.  She is convinced that there is a right and a wrong from which to orient oneself.  She can never allow herself to like someone who is evil.  Micha thinks he will never get used to it that Kolesnik likes him (p. 259).  I do not have these limitations.

As far as war crimes are concerned, you need to keep in mind that it is always the winners who try the losers.  The winners define what the crimes are, who the criminals are.  They appoint the judges, conduct the trials, pass sentences, and mete out punishments.  Victorious armies rarely try their own soldiers, commanders, or political leaders for war crimes.  The United States can point to a few well publicized exceptions, but these are always low level soldiers who are portrayed to be rogue.  The opportunity to discredit a few low level common soldiers for excess actually masks the larger, more systematic destructiveness being wreaked upon a country and its population that is sanctioned and promoted at much higher levels.

For example, today about 20% of the territory of Vietnam is uninhabitable because of unexploded American munitions.  On much of the landscape nothing will grow because of the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the war (Atlantic, June 2012).  Is this a war crime?  Is anybody being prosecuted for it?  Not even the Vietnamese are pursuing it as such.  They don’t see it in their political interest to continue the conflict with the Americans despite the lingering effects of the war upon their country.

Charles Anthony Smith (2012) traces the beginnings of the concept of war crime to the trial of King Charles I of England by Oliver Cromwell.

This prosecution came about after the conclusion of a conflict for the nominal purpose of punishing the defeated leader for crimes such as the murder of civilians, torture of captives, and forced conscription.  The trial of Charles I was antecedent to modern war crimes trials.  (p. 21)

Once the Nazis were defeated and World War II came to a close, however, the Allies institutionalized the concept of war crimes tribunals through the Nuremberg Trials.  (p. 22)

The Nuremberg Trials have been judged a success and a role model for future proceedings of this type.  A similar series of trials in Tokyo at the end of World War II have not been so favorably judged.   The Nuremberg Trials

embraced concerns about substantive due process and procedural process as inherent to a just proceeding, the trials in Tokyo reverted to a show trial model with an almost complete disregard for the concepts of justice. (p. 80)

Smith goes on to present detailed analyses of subsequent war crimes trials in many modern contexts including Argentina, South Africa, the former Soviet States, the former Yugoslav States, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “War on Terror.”

The fundamental question considered here through the historical evolution and development of war crimes tribunals in their various forms is whether human rights tribunals, ad hoc or standing, promote and are the product of concerns about justice or are they more likely to be a manifestation of normal political processes and efforts to consolidate political power. (p. 270)

The cases examined here demonstrate that the purpose of the tribunals has been the consolidation of political power. (p. 271)

I concur with his analysis and evaluation of these processes and their underlying philosophical preconceptions.

Smith contrasts the character of the war crimes tribunals that are the consequence of peace through victory and the peace accord reached in Ireland in 1998, known as the Belfast Agreement, or the Good Friday Agreement.

One of the notable aspects of the case of Northern Ireland is the complete omission of any provision for war crimes trials or tribunals of any sort.  The long and violent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland includes multiple tragedies and the killing of non-combatants, indiscriminate bombings in civilian areas, the unlawful imprisonment of opponents, and a variety of other actions that, in other contexts, have led to prosecutions for gross violations of human rights. (p. 278)

Smith points out that this was not simply an omission on the part of the parties to the agreement, but a considered judgment.

The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering.  We must never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families.  But we can best honor them through a fresh start in which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all.  (Belfast Accord 3, quoted in Smith, p. 279)

One important factor influencing the character of this peace settlement was that no side in the conflict was able or likely to accomplish a sustainable military or political victory.  In other words, a draw on the battlefield means no war crimes trials will take place.  So much for absolute, indelible principles of Right and Wrong.

Micha is carrying out a war crimes tribunal on a personal level within his own family.  The story reveals how disingenuous, hypocritical, and destructive it is.  In the final pages the pent up rage and vengeance begins to pour forth.  Micha seems to care about nothing else but the crimes of his grandfather.  The desire for  punishment even extends to the grandfather’s wife.  He knows she covered it up, so she is also guilty.  He fights with his sister, is estranged from his wife, refuses to visit his grandmother, does not speak with his parents.  Every relationship he has is poisoned by his obsession with the facts of his grandfather’s Nazi past. (p.261)  This orgy of self-castigation is very un-German.  It appears to me to be Germans the way Seiffert would like to see them, what she hopes they might be.

At the very end of the book there is a perfunctory, supremely unconvincing gesture toward reconciliation as Micha brings his young daughter to visit her grandmother for the first time, apparently some years after the main subject matter of the story.  It doesn’t work as a repudiation of the thrust of the whole narrative, nor does it work as a logical outcome of character and events.  This flippant gesture feels like an afterthought, and a rather thoughtless one at that.  I think it reflects Seiffert’s utter confusion in the face of the issues she’s struggling with.

As Nietzsche pointed out, if God is dead, then there can be no absolute, timeless basis for moral imperatives.  Moral preconceptions and judgments become context dependent subject to variables of culture, social context, and personal psychology.  It does not mean, as Dostoevsky mistakenly thought, that all things become permissible.  Who grants permission?  It means that all moral judgments and all human conduct must be understood within the social, cultural, and psychological context in which they occur.  This is not a distressing situation as Jean Paul Sartre lamented in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946, p. 294).  It means we are in charge, and we are making the decisions.  And those decisions will be made according to the perceptions and values and norms of the times in which we live.  There is nothing wrong with this.  There never were any gods and there were never any priests speaking with God’s voice.  Everything is as it has always been.  A clearer understanding of the human condition removes the arrogance and grandiosity from our claims of moral certitude, and with that demise comes an opportunity for greater understanding of even the most evil people and the most despicable actions.  It doesn’t mean that we won’t kill them for it.  But we will do it on our own authority, not the authority of God or universal Right.

I can condemn the piles of bodies at Belsen and Buchenwald the same as Seiffert can.  I can feel the same horror and revulsion at the atrocities and brutality of the war.  But I know that my rejection and condemnation of these actions does not go beyond myself and there may be others who feel very differently.  I do not speak with the voice of God or for all humanity.  At the same time I have the capacity to relate with warmth and congeniality to the perpetrators of the most unspeakable crimes.  No matter how bad people are, not everything about them is bad.  There is always more to them than their worst manifestations.  Windows and bridges are always possible.  I believe it is a positive advantage in human relating that surpasses that offered by the perspective displayed in Seiffert’s book and by my ethics professors.

The Dark Room is a book about Rachel Seiffert.  It is not about Germans or Germany.  Keep that in mind if you decide to read it.

 

 

Notes

 

The BBC has a nice concise summary of the history of the concept of war crimes and their application.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/overview/crimes_1.shtml

Der Spiegel Online May 9, 2005

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-with-holocaust-monument-architect-peter-eisenman-how-long-does-one-feel-guilty-a-355252.html

The Economist, October 30, 2003.  http://www.economist.com/node/2179097

Kaplan, Robert D. (2012) The Vietnam Solution.  The Atlantic.  June 2012.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-vietnam-solution/308969/

Sartre, Jean Paul (1946)  Existentialism is a Humanism.  In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.  Edited by Walter Kaufmann.  Cleveland and New York:  World Publishing/Meridian.  pp. 287-311.

Smith, Charles Anthony (2012)  The Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials:  From Charles I to Bush II.  Cambridge, New York:  Cambridge University Press.  316 pp.

 

WHO SAID FIRST WAS BEST?

A first child is your own best foot forward,
And how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out.
Barbara Kingsolver

In all things in life, being first is considered the best.  You win the game, you get the scholarship, you pass the test. You are a winner, that is, everywhere but in your family.

I was my mother’s first born.  She had never HAD a baby before but she was pretty enthusiastic about motherhood until the last three months before I emerged.  She read books about how delightful little babies are with their cute, cuddly ways and she expected me to be a bundle of exquisite joy.  When, at last, I came crashing out of her uterus, I left the warm amniotic fluid that encased me and landed in a cold, hospital room. A bunch of strangers pummeled me to make me cry, cleaned me up and snipped my umbilical cord without so much as a kiss or a word of comfort.

I never got over it.  And neither did my mother.

It appears that all first-born children are emotionally and physically bruised just by being first.   My own mother never expected to have to deal with a crying, spitting, demanding sleepless infant.  She never forgave me for her stitches, the pain, the endless labor she endured for a very questionable reward.  “You almost killed me,” she said, every time she looked it me.

She may have been more verbal than most new mamas, but she was actually no different than every new parent when they have to deal with the unexpected rigor of that first baby.  The crying, the diapers, the pulling at your breast….  …not to mention the terrible guilt because they are not REALLY enjoying the process.

Everyone knows first-borns seem smarter, more aggressive and more successful than their siblings.  This is because they are constantly proving to their parents and themselves that they were worth the pain and suffering they caused. First-borns are usually taller than their siblings because they are the ones that have to reach up to get the dishes off the shelf to feed their little brothers and sisters. They are thinner too and that is probably because parents are always more careful to feed the first one proper food and teach them the good eating habits child care books tell them are best.  I had to eat my spinach or else while my sister dined on leftover pie and gallons of pudding.  The result was that she tips the scale at 400 pounds and I have yet to top 100.

All that stress and responsibly can kill a person and we now know that it actually does.  Researchers in New Zealand discovered that the oldest child from the most well-meaning families suffer more heart attacks, higher blood pressure and have a stubborn resistance to insulin that makes them susceptible to diabetes.  That means that the child born first will probably be the first one to go to the other side.

By the time the second kid comes along, the parents are more relaxed.  They don’t really notice the germs or the squealing and besides they have the older one to baby-sit.  It is the oldest child who ends up being a substitute parent to the others.  He is the one who establishes the family reputation in school for industry and intelligence. Band most unfair, when he kicks off, the younger ones get the inheritance.

It doesn’t seem right, does it?  That is why I now call on all older children to unite!!!!  When that new little nipper comes into the house, use those brains that made you the smart one and smother it with a pillow before it gets out of line.