From Xico

Umm...Better late than never?

It sounds strange to say it, but Day of the Dead is a holiday that is really fun.  This is due in part today to the omnipresence of Catrinas, often life-sized dolls created by all kinds of people for display. The original Katrina was Jose Guadalupe Posada´s gift to Mexico. Posada (1852-1913) was a prolific cartoonist and illustrator who used
not just Catrina but skulls and skeletons of all sots and just about everything else  in his political cartoons.  Later nineteenth century Mexico, by the way, was home to quite a number of political cartoonists. Posada himself was a primary influence on Diego Rivera who hung around outside his studio in Mexico City to watch him work. Rivera included Catarina in his famous mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central.  

 In this section, you can see Diego, portraying himself as a boy, holding hands with Catrina and standing in front of Frida Kahlo.As were many of Posada´s cartoons, this mural is satirical, a lightish portrayal of social classes in Mexico.

Below are some Catrinas we snapped fotos of in Coatepec.

A voluptuous (in a manner of speaking) woman in  an athletic costume with pink sneakers.  I really like the sneakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in a  sparkly dress in a clothing letter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in an antique store, with a tricycle for some reason.

 

 A Catrina up on the 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

roof

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in a coffee shop.

 

 

 

 

 

Cut-outs in tissue paper hang all over, too:

Yitskhok (Isaac) Berliner Z'L as His Granddaughter Remembered Him

On September 20 I put up a post that I started out intending to be about Isaac Berliner, a Mexican Jew, who wrote poetry in Yiddish. Having been struck by a feeling of connection that surprised me, I´m afraid I got carried away and wrote MORE about my family than about Berliner and other Mexican Jews or Jews in Mexico. 

So now I offer more on Yitzkhok Berliner, here my translation of an homage in Diario Judio de México that his granddaughter Feige Efter Berliner wrote as part of a series on outstanding Jews in Mexico for Diario Judio de México.

To speak about my grandfather, a man of letters, and an upright man, is an honor for me.  A man who left a great literary legacy and a good name for his family and for everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.  Born in Lodz, Poland on September 27, 1899, he died in México City on January 27, 1957.

On arriving in Mexico in the year 1922, he worked, as did other immigrants, as a street vendor, carrying in his mind and heart the wish to write, which he did throughout his whole life. He was one of the first writers in Yiddish [in Mexico] and so he found a place at the magazine Der Veg (The Way) where he worked for many years.

Later, with the writers Jacobo Glantz and Moisés Glikovssky he wrote the book "Drai Vegn" (Tres caminos/Three Ways) which was the prelude to more of his writings. Its words spoke of his feelings across time. "Guezan Fun Mentsch" (Melodía del hombre/Song of Man), "Ad Matai" (Hasta cuándo/Until When), "Shtil ol ain" (Que se haya el silencio/That There be Silence), a fragment of which is written on his gravestone, and "Shtot Fun Palatzn" (Ciudad de los Palacios/City of Palaces).

Given that my grandfather walked on Mexican lands, although without knowing Spanish, he fell in love with its people, with its  freedom that had been longed for by those who arrived from a Europe at war, with its landscapes. But also he worried about the poverty which he saw ruled in our country. which penetrated deep in his life, in every corner. He wrote "Shtot Fun Palatzn", a book that spoke of Xochimilco, Popocatépetl, Tepito, and all that was emblematic of his beloved Mexico, but always taking into account the neediness of its people and its vices.  When my grandfather was working at "Der Veg", the great painter Diego River needed someone to write something in Yiddish on one of his murals, and thus began a close friendship between the two, to such an extent that the painter, at learning of the publication of the book, undertook to illustrate it.

The strong and solid foundation of his great caring and respect were what, from the beginning, he gave when he married a great woman, his Nejumele.  It was a love that began in Lodz (Poland) and that after many vicissitudes was consumated in Mexico.

Like a good poet, he saw to it that every day my grandmother received a rose and a poem. Thus the love for her family was converted into something vital for her life, since her health was fragile.  In spite of being very little, I remember that on many Sundays there were gatherings in their house with the presence of teachers and writers and as part of these unforgettable afternoons it was I who sang standing on one of the stairs of the big staircase.

I visited my grandparents on many days,  going outside to the garden filled with roses where my grandfather directed me to wander through them to appreciate their fragrance.

I feel very fortunate to have known my grandparents, to have received so much love and learning from them, with which they have given me these foundations that, in the company of my husband, I can transmit to my children and grandchildren.

They say that the greatest inheritance we can leave in this life is a good name and Isaac Berliner did this many times over.

Mexican Jews, Jewish Mexicans, Poetry and Yiddish, and Bronx and Brooklyn Jews

Recently I discovered a Jewish poet named Isaac Berliner who emigrated from Poland to Mexico in 1922.  He started out here in Mexico City as a street peddler selling (maybe ironically) saints’ images.  He loved Mexico City and the people he lived and worked among in the crowded streets.  I found Berliner in an article accompanied by some translations of his poems by Eli Rosenblatt in Tablet. Looking for some personal rather than academic insight into Jewish DF I discovered Ilan Stavans, a Mexican, now Mexican-American, Jew from DF who is a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts and an incredibly prolific cultural critic and novelist.  The book I chose to look at is Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks at his Roots.  This is an informal bit of autobiography (he has a more formal one called A Critic´s Journey).  Its charm lies in the myriad family and local pictures which he includes and comments on.  It seems to me that in the 20^th century, Jews in Mexico City particularly followed a trajectory not all that different from Jews in New York City.  My great grandfather who lived in Brooklyn in the first part of the 20^th century sold vegetables from a pushcart.  His son, my grandfather, was a printer (and a socialist), a skilled trade.  He and his family (my grandmother, my dad and two sisters) started out in an apartment on St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx and went sort of upscale to the Grand Concourse.  My grandparents lived there for the rest of their lives, and as they aged, so did their building so that it was a bit worn down and shabby even when I was a child.

My father and his sisters left the Grand Concourse though my father became a doctor with a practice in the Bronx and so took a while to move, with my mother and me, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  My aunt Addie  married a large, handsome man with black hair who could have been Mexican.  He headed a firm of "interior architects."  They did the big lobbies and courtyards of big businesses and big apartment stores. They moved to a fancy subdivision in West Hempstead, Long Island. My Aunt Phoebe married a dentist and moved all the way to Utica in New York State where she served for a time as mayor.

Jewish immigrants in Mexico also started as pushcart sorts of people and then became owners and managers of small businesses and factoriesand then moved to the suburbs.  Stavans’s parents, as of the writing of Return to Centro stayed in DF, where they had moved, too, to a bit more upscale neighborhood. But among his relatives were an actor: his father; and an orchestra conductor: an uncle.  His father did run a small factory to pay for his art. Apparently nowadays, many Jews live in the more prosperous suburbs of Mexico City which are in fact in the state of Mexico.

But I should return to Isaac Berliner.  He is seen as a transitional poet.  Stavans doesn’t think he is very important, but Rosenblatt has a greater appreciation, with which, based on my scant exposure, I would agree.  Rosenblatt says, “The language is marked by its subversive use of allusions to the Jewish past.” He also notes Berliner’s surprising imagery.  Rosenblatt says he is a “modernist Yiddish poet,” more stuff for me to look up. By the way, Berliner became good friends with Diego Rivera who illustrated his book of poems, City of Palaces.  

Berliner wrote in Yiddish.  I’m not at all sure how much Spanish he ever learned.  My grandparents came to the U.S. speaking Yiddish and reading in Yiddish.  They only learned English after they arrived.  A heavy Yiddish accent marked their speech all their lives, and it was easier for them to fall back into their mother tongue than to try to explain complicated things in English.  I sympathize! My grandmother wrote her first letter (or anything besides a shopping list) in English to me when I was in Uganda in the Peace Corps.

Here are some of Berliner´s poems as they appear in Rosenblatt´s translation:

Godl Treads a New Land

 

(Fragment From a Long Poem about Immigrant Life in Mexico)

 

The sea behind is already suspended in green jelly

having been cast by a front of waves checkered and fluttering

like Jonah’s whale-fish, the ship remains, still by the coastline.

Here he encounters here a sun glowing with dust and pollen

He raises his eyes up to the heavens and prayerfully deep-dreams.

His still lips manage—Praise God, may His name be sanctified!—

I have just crossed the sea and arrived here in one piece.

 

Foreign-tongued voices deafen like the beats

of drums.

Strange men hand off the suitcase he carries

pulling,

His valise between valises, lifted on a wagon

two dark bodies flank him like two reyshes, bent.

Two palms lift and push the wagon hard

and Godl is off through the sunburned streets and intersections

He looks around and gazes upon it all, naked children in sand

messing around.

 

Big houses. Small, low-slung shanties bending down in prayer.

He touches the pocket in his overcoat to check if his tefillin

are there—if he had left them on the ship—God forbid—Deprivation.

 

He arrives at a house. An inscription on a board: “Hotel Espana”

A man opens the door to a room for him, better to say merely, “lodgings”

He washes his hands in a basin and wastes no time.

He takes a look through the shaded window to the eastern heavens astride,

fastens his tefillin upon his forehead and wraps the straps on his left arm

Forget it! He’ll pray in solitude, because here the Jewish street does not exist.

 

***

 

Let Us Relate the Power

 

It burns in me—the evil sin of Adam and Eve.

My troubles are soaked through with boiling tears and blood

I have never praised the Creator, I have never prayed.

I have never allowed God one tear through my wails.

 

My dreams dangle bloody on every picket

of this bright prison-world—I will beg, moan

My God—I come to you now with a holy quaking and panic,

Girded with prayers, like a devout Jew on Rosh Hashanah.

 

Each adversarial hour is a stumbling block,

Every coming day is for me a cold cruelty

Every bloody spot is a letter of Unesanneh Tokef

The red, agonized earth—an open page in the prayer book.

 

There, put those letters in all the corners of the earth:

Who from hunger? – Who in winter? – Who by fire? – and Who by water?

and I will stay a fleck of dust between red flecks

until the end of generations I will scream scream scream.

 

***

 

The Punishment Should Come

 

It became black it is a sunburned face

a piece of black coal

the light cries with red tears

toward a desolate destiny and unto horror

The Image of God wails

What has the world deserted?

 

There is no synonym

for sorrow that bullies

It is every letter

of a poem

an open mouth

that screams

moans

punishment.

 

For all

for beginning and end

for mourning-rips in cloth

upon a world of compassion and good

for us who have been dealt what we’ve been dealt

here, besides a variety of folk

for every bloody hour.

 

It moans

punishment

my song

blood, for a Jew

bloody scream

from each punishment.

 

The heart of time

has opened up a black secret

heated up my calm mood

God does not scream

in my song’s chamber

the blood of the Jew, it screams

it screams, it screams out to

a variety of folk

and it moans my every sentence

Punishment!

Punishment!

 

and I

a child

from a folk among wandering folk

 

through generations eternally in sorrow

through distant paths

through plague

through temptation

through wind.

 

I wait

for the ascent of a new day.

 

***

 

Marijuana

 

The path so muddy

A man, on the earth on the mist

Moving along lazy-stepped

with feet, like heavy pendulums

eyes, alight like candlesticks

small flames aroused, fall upon

womanly flesh and hips,

on girlishly tender faces.

 

What a waste!

He can’t avert his gaze.

Why, if man could master himself

slake in his eyes

these erotic flames.

 

The man smokes marijuana

A narcotic.

 

The dream-effect places him in a harness

 

The earth is not muddy.

He lays upon divans

that caress his feet, treading:

 

He doesn’t hear the laments,

The begging

The children on grimy corners,

play quartets

Here, thousands of singers sing

 

A man collapses from hunger?

They extend their hands and wail?

Their skin dried out?

 

An Emperor

A Youth

Upon thrones

Of red and bloody luminations

Nirvana

 

It smokes a man, that marijuana.

Narcotic.

 

He’s harnessed to the divan.

upon the earth, which is filthy.

 

Jose Guadalupe Posada, artist and printmaker extraordinaire

 

November 2  was the official Day of the Dead here in Mexico.  For at least a week beforehand, people put up their altars and set out life-size Catrinas decked in fancy dress clothes.  There have been processions, too.  In our colonia also for celebrating a saint or two.  

La Calavera Catrina was a creation of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a printmaker who used her to satirize classist living in Mexico:  the rich clothes hang on the skeleton who spent her money on them and didn't have enough for food. Calavera actually means skull, but has come to mean the whole Day of the Dead ummm woman.  Posada himself was famous as a satirist of Mexican life as well as an illustrator and a major influence on the muralist Diego Rivera. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in Mexico there was in fact what I might call a movement of satirists and cartoonists who made fun of the government and society and everything related to them.  They were skillful artists, these cartoonists.  The tradition continues today, though I think in somewhat muted form.

Posada was not just a political cartoonist, however.  He made thousands and thousands of prints about all kinds of Mexican subjects.  He was enormously skillful.  He used a number of methods to make his prints including lithography, and to speed up his work, he developed a process of using a special ink directly on a metal plate.  His first pictures appeared when he was still a teenager in a journal in Aguascalientes, his hometown, called El jicote.

A self portrait.

And below a sampling of his work.

 

Posada and the catrina.

 

Revolución (Mexican, of course)

 

[I don't know the title of this one]

I don't know whether this was a cover of a book or what, but it sure wasn't pro-Spanish.

 

Some thoughts on this print can be found at this link.  If you are interested in Posada, this is a site worth visiting.

 

I'll conclude with this, the central panel of Diego Rivera's mural, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda (Park).  Catarina has one arm through Posada's arm and with her right hand, she is holding the child Diego's hand.  Behind Diegoyou can see Frida Kahlo.  

There are hundreds and hundreds of images of Posada's creations on Google.  Because he worked mostly in black and white, the computer screen is okay for looking at his pictures.

In the beginning....

I don't have a clue why it has taken me so long to do this.  Probably because I'm in some ways nuts.

t is a shame, shame, shame that US students don't learn more about Mexican history, and from my perspective, Mexican history in particular.  It is one of those clichés that has a lot of truth: at least the Americans I know who live in the US and haven't visited Mexico still form their images from headlines about narcos and have only a tiny bit of curiosity about anything else in here.  There's a kind of "what's to know?" condescension which infuriates me.  I suspect they don't know much real US history, either.

I am going to try to draw pictures of Diego Rivera and Henry Ford and place them in their environments separately, and then bring them together as they came together in 1932.  They didn't really have much to do with each other as individuals, although they did meet, but they really serve well as, what should I call them, embodiments of their cultures and their times.  In this way, I hope we can see how these two very different cultures, Mexico's  and the United States'  developed, clashed, and paralleled each other particularly in the first third of the twentieth century. Also, I want to show how their economies became woven together along the edges at least while especially the US developed little understanding and empathy and appreciation for Mexico's cultures and history, a deficit which has had grave consequences.

But I don't want to do this in an encyclopedic way.  I'd be dead before I even got started.  So that you can dig in more depth, I am going to recommend books as I go along.  Don't feel confined to them!  My choices are all in English, usually written by Gringos: Maybe you can consider them introductory, or beginner books (though they are not simple-minded), and develop a passion for more as I have. Maybe you'll even study Spanish, as I did, if you don't already know it. 

Most (maybe all) are available for Kindles, and if they are, I've provided a link.  In no way am I boosting Amazon as the best source to buy downed-tree versions.  It's just that my Kindle has kept me reading like a junky here in our corner of Mexico where specific books can be pretty hard to come by.

The very first book I'd suggest is Richard Grabman's Gods, Gachupines and Gringos.  *,**I tried to think of something more serious to say start with, but I keep coming back to the fact that it's fun to read.  It is densely packed with personalities, opinions, punny titles and well-told tales which bring it to life.  Grabman races through the first I don't know how many thousands of years at mach speed, slows down a bit for the period of Spanish domination and hits his best stride with Independence and especially the late 19th through the first third of the twentieth century, my favorite years.  

While you are learning about Mexico in Gods, Gachupines and Gringos, I will catch you up on some American history.  

* You can order the book direct from the publisher in Mexico.  Here is the contact information:

Editorial Mazatlán, Av. Camarón Sabado no 610, Plaza Galerías, Local no. 11, fracc. El Dorado CP 82110, Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico Tel 52 6699167899, [email protected]

** Richard has an excellent blog at mexfiles.net. Definitely worth following.

Detroit in the News Again and I Haven't Stopped Learning about Diego Rivera

 

Yesterday The NY Times had an impressive mosaic of houses in foreclosure or close to it in Detroit.  It was impressive because of the numbers and because of the stories behind some of them.  There have been other stories, too, not receiving such flashy placement and graphics including one I missed about some kind of commemorative of the Rivera murals in the Detroit Institute of Art.  All these months I have been reading about Rivera, the Fords, Detroit, Mexico City, art and revolutions of different sorts. I figure I'd better put fingers to keyboard and get started with something!  It´s on its way.  As they say here, proximo.