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 20th 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 20th 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.
He also said, "I just pray that they [immigrants in the US] might be treated with the same dignity and respect as those who arrived before and built this incredible nation of immigrants."
Quite a lot of people in Gringolandia as in Mexico noticed and commented. My favorite column is by Jorge Ramos writing in Reforma. Anderson Cooper is the US version of Jorge Ramos, but Jorge Ramos has Andersoon Cooper beat by a mile (or maybe 1.61 kilometers), although maybe because he has such varied places to express himself and those places don't mind references to writers like Octavio Paz..
Among other things, Ramos said,
'It is significant that a country as sad as ours has so many and such lively fiestas. For us, the fiesta is an explosion, an outburst ... There is nothing more lively than a Mexican fiesta.'"But, also, our fiestas are a form of protest. We take advantage of them to complain and let off steam. Once again Paz:
"In the swirl of the fiesta, we explode. More than opening up, we tear ourselves open."
'I just pray that they might be treated with the same dignity and respect," said Birdman's director, "as those who arrived before and built this incredible nation of immigrants.'
In at least two important areas Mexico has seemingly managed to put the kibosh on China's efforts here. The first was the cancellation of its winning bid to build high spped rail here.The second was shutting down the Dragon Mart development near Cancún because of serious environmental damage.
But China has many tentacles. Now China is overwhelming Mexico's artesanal production. With Chinese junk, of course. Today's La Jornada quotes Socorro Oropeza the director of the Unión Nacional de Productores Artesanales Coyolxauhqui which claims 15000 members as saying "We [artesans] are being extinguished" by the cheap Chinese imports. Although Mexican artesans have won international prizes, most live on the edge of poverty, without land. Rodrigo Gutiérrex from the indigenous community of El Rosario in Jalisco said that artesans had stopped making ceramics because of Chinese "junk". Instead, almost all the artesans in his area collect plastic bottles for which they get 12 pesos a kilo. (That would be empty plastic bottles.)
As far as I know, there is no official national government support for Mexican craftsmen. Here in our area, there is a government store, but I don't know about anything else. I do know we still buy lovely pots and casseroles and dishes from Puebla and our area. But tourists are the big market. Tell any you see to BUY MEXICAN.
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.
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, mazbook@yahoo.com
** Richard has an excellent blog at mexfiles.net. Definitely worth following.
The final curtain has fallen. Susan Trigg and Jim's photo exposition is over. I never quite managed to get there at the same time as my camera did (I don't have a smartphone) and so never got to take orderly pictures. But below are a few of Jim's shots seen through my camera as we were taking everything down, and also a few shots of Caftán Rojo, the exhibition space/art school where the show was held. Any fuzziness in the shots is my fault. Jim's photos were beautiful and sharp. The woman who printed them, Mariana del Campo, gave them rich, velvety color. Remember, if you click on them, you can get bigger (but not clearer) images.
A grasshopper hugging a blade of grass.
A mostly blue moth
A Giant Beetle
A ladybug
I hope I am not doing too much of an injustice to this photo by putting up my inadequate version. It was taken at the very top of Cofre de Perote with fog swirling around. The rails lead back to the ladder on which you go down the rocky outcropping which crowns the mountain.
Baby hummingbirds in their nest.
Covered patio at Caftán Rojo. Art students hang out during their break. One girl is an incredibly hoola-hooper. She seems to practice for hours.
The courtyard at Caftán Rojo.
Jim and Susan worked hard putting the exhibit together and hanging it. And they took it down so fast!
Detroit, which I'm sure most of you know, is facing bankruptcy, is having the great collection of art housed in the Detroit Institute of Art evaluated by Christies for possible sale to pay off debts. There's an article in the Art and Design section of the New York Times about this.
In the NY Times, Diego Rivera's name falls at the end of a very short list of great painters: Bruegel and Van Gogh and Diego Rivera. There are many more who could be included.
Today in La Jornada, you can find an article by Mexico's David Brooks about the Rivera piece, in fact a large mural painted in1932-1933 before the more-famous Rivera mural (famous because of its destruction) in Rockefeller Center. This PBS piece is a nice summary of that brouhaha.
The mural in Detroit is two stories high and called "Detroit's Industry". Not only does it portray workers and steel and machinery, it has tender side pieces as you can see here. Here is a link to a virtual tour of the mural.
As the mural in Rockefeller Center did a couple of years later, the one in Detroit provoked controversy. In Detroit it was religious as well as social and political. After all, Rivera was an avowed communist. Among other accusations, it was said the piece "fomented ´class warfare', that it made fun of Jesus, that it promoted racial equality and that it was Marxist propaganda." The principle daily newspaper of the time, The Detroit News, wanted it destroyed. Thankfully, that didn't happen.
Things have changed in Detroit. Today the majority of its citizens want the art kept. The state´s attorney general has said that it is a charitable trust and as such can't be sold to pay off the debts of the city. But it's still notclear that it will be preserved for the city. It is possible that the art will be put in opposition to the city workers' pensions: keep the art or pay the retired workers.
Brooks points to the dedication at the entrance of the DIA: Dedicated to the people of Detroit for the knowledge and enjoyment of art." That so many people in Detroit want the art to stay in the face of the obvious suffering of the city is remarkable. This is a debate worth having. Art held in the name of the people, for the people: does it help when people are poor?
ro
Our reading/writing group meets more or less every fourth Wednesday of the month. The next one is coming up on the 16th of October. We are a growing bunch of yes-we-are, would-be, have been and would-have-been writers of various ages and "ethnic backgrounds". We call it a readers' group because some (many) of us shy away from criticism and just want to enjoy each others' tales and because some of us haven't necessarily written anything new in a long time and don't feel like having the old stuff rehashed yet again. For some reason I am reminded of children's hour at the library where kids sit in a circle on little chairs around the friendly adult who reads a page and then holds the book up and shows the pictures. We each get a turn to be librarian, clearing our throats, looking around the circle of faces before we begin. We read bits of our memories, stories, poems, even a letter. We know each other outside of our little reading group. We can puzzle or say aha about the sides of each other we didn't know, the feelings revealed, the delicacy hidden behind a gruff voice.
We meet at Caftan Rojo which has within its walls and its courtyard an art school and various changing art exhibits as well as an English language book exchange and a Spanish book collection which you can borrow from. On the Jewish holidays, it has celebrations which the small Jewish community of Xalapa and Coatepec attends. We attended the memorial of a friend there a year or so ago. Sometimes someone from the area gives a presentation as was the case when a former professor from the US gave a talk on peak oil which he hoped would alarm us more than it did.
If you are in Coatepec, wander in, have a seat if you want to rest your feet. Look around. You can find current information at www.caftanrojo.org. Here are the phone number, address, etc:
Para más información puedes llamar al teléfono 01 o 52 (228) 816-3151 de lunes a sábado, de 9 de la mañana a 3 de la tarde, o visítarnos en la 3ª calle de Xicoténcatl nº 44, en Coatepec, Veracruz, México.
This is a link to a captivating post on a museum in the midst of what is now desert between Chihuahua City and Cuahtémoc in northwestern México. Linda, Eric and families in New Mexico, you really, really ought to go see it. It is MUCH closer to you than to us. I was surprised to read that the Mennonite farmers in the area (who are leaving now in sizeable numbers) are not organic or near-organic farmers and that they do not work to conserve water. As my brother-in-law Ivan says, when water-table water is gone, it's pretty much gone.
But, but...this is NOT a gloomy article: it is joyful. Enjoy it, the pictures, and Elizabeth and Eliseo, and celebrate two original and resilient human beings.
Jim had surgery for his glaucoma in Mexico City last week. It seems to have gone well and yes, it was reasonably priced even at a very fancy hospital. We had hoped Medicare would cover some of the cost since the hospital had said they could accept Medicare. But Medicare won't. This seems both foolish and unfair since excellent care is available at a MUCH lower cost here, and since Jim and I have paid into Medicare our whole working lives. Obamacare may change this, but according to Mexconnect, not in the near future since (groan) all the rules and regs have to be written, and they might never be. Mexconnect also has some good information on health care in Mexico and insurance companies that will cover us old folks, including IMSS. So we are going to look into the private insurance possibilities and are very glad we keep up our IMSS coverage. IMSS can be slow, but it is generally good, especially for (oddly) routine coverage and emergency coverage, although we do know of some notable exceptions. I do think it is worth thinking about these things!
Here are some photos from the Hotel Camino Real del Pedregal and the Hospital Angeles del Pedregal. the hotel is next to the hospital and is fancy but you can find Deals, especially close to check-in.
Hotel conceirge desk in the very high-ceilinged lobby.
Huge geometric sculpture suspended from ceiling of mezzanine level of hotel as seen from main floor
Dancer (sort of) sculpture in lobby.
Sculpture over reception desk (which is under overhang)
Traffic on Periférico Sur seen from top floor of hotel
Apartment building seen from top floor of hotel.
Reflection of Jim taking photo of sphere outside of side hotel entrance.
Hospital Angeles from top floor of hotel.
Lobby art in hospital
Hospital information desk with art composed of trees and abstract mural behind it.