When childhood dreams come true…

Once in a lifetime it happens: you receive a gift you’ve been waiting for almost all your life and, holding it in your hands, reality outstrips the dream.

My waiting started fifty years ago at the Pottsville Free Public Library, downstairs in the Children’s Reading Room, a perfect place for dreams to take seed. Back in those days, Mrs. Hass was the children’s librarian (I may be spelling her name wrong. Was it “Haas”? Perhaps some readers would remember). When we arrived, she was usually seated at her desk, child-sized, in that we did not have to stand on tiptoe or raise or heads to talk to her across its surface. She, however, had to lean forward as she kindly welcomed us to that underground treasure trove.

Mrs. Hass was always well-dressed. She wore belted suits, soft in color, feminine in cut, and her light brown hair was swept back from her face and twisted into a loose bun. Details like that were important to me when I was a child. Without being able to express it, I somehow counted on her elegance, her charm, and her voice—I detected a slight accent suggesting she was born on another continent, to transport me far away from my daily life to new places, places I would not know how to imagine without the magic of books.

Naturally, I loved mysteries because mystery was what the library was all about and, very systematically, I carried those mysteries home. I must have read hundreds, but today, more than titles, I remember the experience. Having removed those books from their underground lair, I felt it only appropriate I read them underground as well. That’s why I carried them down into our basement and read by the electric light of a Christmas candle (no playing with matches!), thrilled as much by the darkness pressing in on me as by the words on the page.

One title, however, stuck. The Mystery of the Golden Horn. The story took place in Istanbul and, after reading it, that is where I wanted to go. If my memory serves me well (since then, I have never reread the book though this mystery by Phyllis Whitney, first published in 1962, is still in print), the Golden Horn was both a place and a sparkling brooch studded with precious stones. In my mind, the place and the jewels melded into one.

In the book, the brooch disappeared. The mystery was all about finding it. And the scene of the crime was the teeming banks of the Golden Horn, an estuary at the heart of Istanbul and an inlet of the Bosporus, the narrow strait joining the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean.

The title stuck. So did the place. I had to get there. How and when became my own personal mystery, a problem to solve and an enigma because, as an adult, despite the intensity of my desire, I just couldn’t find my way to Istanbul.

For my 50th birthday, forty years after having read the book, with my childhood dream still intact, I finally made it to the city and crossed the bridge joining the two banks of the Golden Horn. I was not disappointed and my heart throbbed to the beat of the city, vibrating to the beat of a disco hit playing everywhere. Like the city of Istanbul itself, part European, part Asian, the song joined East and West, creating the perfect bridge between two continents.

For one week, I crisscrossed Istanbul, a city of 14 million inhabitants, in search of that sparkling image born of childhood. I discovered wonders: Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque, the Spice Bazaar, so much more! But something was missing. I had not found what I had come looking for, the lost jewel which alone had the power to make my childhood dream come true.

I left the city, not disappointed but resigned to being an adult (finally, at 50!), free of the burden of dreams never meant to come true.

Ten years later, the miracle happened. I found it, the jewel. I did not hold it in my hand—it was too big, but I did touch it, smell it and drink it in with my eyes.

What happened? In October 2013, I received the gift of a lifetime, a cruise on the Black Sea that provided me with the key to the mystery.

It all began with a train ride from Paris to London, then a flight to Istanbul. There we boarded our ship and “set sail,” joining a line of tankers headed east on the Bosporus, one of the busiest and narrowest commercial waterways in the world. There was a storm. Everyone, including me, was seasick. It was not an auspicious start.

That first night in our cabin was more a nightmare than a dream as waves crashed against the portals and the ship rocked back and forth, turning our berths into lurching cradles and us into helpless babes. The ancient Greeks called the Black Sea “the inhospitable sea,” the Arabs, “the severe sea,” and the Persians, “the dark sea.” So far, it was living up to its name.

The next morning, the ship’s cafeteria was almost empty as most passengers never made it out of bed. Those of us who did were witness to the miracle: the swell of an emerald-green sea, its lacy foam like silver filigree, while high-rising waves, shot through with sunlight, sparkled sapphire-blue as their crests arched and fell.

Eureka! I had found it! The missing jewel, the missing link between dream and reality: the Black Sea. Like a peacock's tail, sparkling, jewel-studded, it fans out from Istanbul, inseparable from the city’s heart, the Golden Horn, irrigated by its waters, which carry the city’s splendors north and east to the Black Sea’s most distant shores.

As we circled the Black Sea, I threaded together the signs: in Yalta, houses with enclosed wooden balconies like those of old Istanbul, in Sevastopol, a mosque in the Turkish style, in the mountains above Sochi, villages with Turkish names, and in every market, just like in Istanbul, the same stands selling fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice and honey made from acacia blossoms, the tree and fragrance that unite all Black Sea ports.

So, in the end my waiting paid off. I guess we shouldn’t give up on dreams after all, and, to all my readers, I would like to wish a New Year where childhood dreams come true. I would also like to thank all of you who have followed Mademoiselle Remix. Tomorrow, in the novel’s last episode, Constance says good-bye.

As for me, I’ll be back next year…

Printed in The Republican Herald December 29, 2013

Local photographer, international reputation

Photographer Mark Cohen at a book signing at Le Bal in Paris

When I was a kid living on Greenwood Hill in Pottsville, we staged a Tom Thumb wedding at the local playground. Everyone got involved, even the bullies, decked out in their Sunday best. We girls wore frilly dresses and plastic hair bands with veils attached. In the empty lot that was our playground, we lined up for photographs and a few days later, there we were, on display in The Pottsville Republican.

I still have that photo, I can still name the kids huddled around the bride, and, what strikes me is how dusty we were. Despite our finery, despite our efforts to look our best, our patent leather Mary Janes had lost their sheen and the boys’ oxfords looked shabby and gray. It wasn’t our fault. We had done our best, but the playground was no more than coal dirt and every step we took stirred up a cloud of dust.

Playing baseball, when we slid into base, we blackened our pants and sneakers. Wearing shorts, we darkened our bare knees. Blackened sneakers, dark knees, the stuff of summers spent on coal banks and coal dirt lots.

“Dark Knees,” I’ve just been to a photography exhibit in Paris bearing that name. The photographer, a pioneer of street photography with an international reputation, is from Wilkes Barre, PA. His name is Mark Cohen and for over fifty years, night after night, after days spent in a commercial photography studio, he has tracked pictures, an affair of choice and chance, in the streets of Wilkes Barre, Scranton and towns in between.

I did not know Mark Cohen’s work and I discovered him and it listening to the radio, listening to an announcer struggle in French with the pronunciation of “Wilkes Barre,” as I asked myself if he was really talking about the Wilkes Barre that I know. Listening more closely, I learned that a photographer from that town was showing his work at “Le Bal,” an exhibition space in Paris devoted to photography. Checking out the information on the web, I promptly got on the metro and went to see the show.

There, against blood-red walls, I discovered a continuous line of 16 by 20 photographs, mostly black-and-white, travelling across the four walls of a large underground exhibition space. I did not discover Wilkes Barre or the coal region: no breakers, no strip mines, no deserted downtown that had once seen better days. There was nothing that deliberately drew attention to a specific time or place. There weren’t even people, at least not people posing, composed faces, bodies shot from head to toe.

Instead, there are fragments: a coat collar, a pearled eyeglass chain, a chin, a brooch; two calves wrapped in rayon knee socks, two feet wearing leather buckle shoes. Sometimes there is only a forehead, a hairline; bodies without head or feet; hands folded in the lap of a girl wearing cut-off jeans; a bare bony torso; dark knees against a background of vacant lots and clapboard houses, with a stairway leading to paradise…

There are also still lifes: the tops of unlaced boots, a string of outdoor lights, tomatoes ripening on an old wooden table in somebody’s backyard.

copyright Mark Cohen

These fragments, these photos, often beautiful and shot through with a disturbing grace, are not restful. Mark Cohen’s exhibition is not restful. Truncated bodies, defiant or frightened eyes, a fist slammed against a car window with the photographer inside, connote aggression and this notion is inherent to Cohen’s technique and work.

Mark Cohen has defined himself as a “trigger-happy gunslinger” and he has called his way of taking photos “grab shots.” Working for 35 years as a commercial photographer, when he closed shop each day, he began a second life, becoming a different person from the man “doing” weddings or annual reports. At nightfall, he set out, a stalker of sorts, with three rolls of film, a lightweight camera and a flash, entering a world filled with pictures, out there waiting for him. What was necessary, as much as style and technique, was the courage to make the “grab.”

Walking through the streets of Wilkes Barre, Cohen, like a gunslinger, shot from the hip, camera in one hand, flash in the other. Constantly on the move but using a wide-angle lens, he had to get close to people, dangerously close at times, confronting raised fists, threats, insults, and run-ins with the police. Approaching his subjects, according himself “artistic licence” to burst into their lives, Cohen “flashed” them, grabbing the picture and then, just as quickly, merging back into the flow of street life.

Returning to his studio after having shot more than 100 photos, he might make no more than eight prints. In many of the shots, choice and accident did not mesh—or the picture he envisioned did not take off once he captured it within the rectangle that is his signature format, one he never crops.

The next night, he was back in the street, following instinct, believing chance, luck, fate, call it what you will, would deliver new treasures, fragments of himself as much as of the place where he anchored his work. Night after night, Mark Cohen forayed into the streets of Wilkes Barre, fueled by a shot of adrenaline and the desire to delve deeper into himself.

Recognition and critical acclaim came early and in 1973, at age 30, the photographer had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Had he settled in the city, he might have become a star of the New York photography world. Instead, after a quick visit, Mark Cohen got back in his car and drove home to Wilkes Barre because he “felt like he wasn’t done there.”

Forty years later, the photographer moved to Philadelphia. It took a long time to wrap things up.

Mark Cohen claims he could have just as well taken his photos in Elmira, NY, as in Wilkes Barre, PA. I’m not so sure. Too much coal dust, too much darkness, too much grace born of a violent, mystical marriage between a man and a place: the coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, an intrinsic part of that self he mined for nearly fifty years.

Some readers may already know Mark Cohen’s work. Some may have seen his 2010 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There is also a book, Grim Streets, published in 2005. But, except for a college show in the early sixties, there has never been an exhibit of his work on his home turf. Too close for comfort? I wish we could have a chance to tell.

The French, one big happy family?

What would I do without the metro? Despite the crowds, the smells, the sticky heat, it remains a constant source of wonder and discovery for me. Just last week, sitting in a crowded train, my head bowed, my attention focused on the screen of my cell phone, like almost everybody else around me, I was wrenched from a virtual world back into the real by a woman’s cry.

Rising above the whoosh and thud of the closing of the safety gate on the platform and the doors of the car where we sat, I could detect fear, panic, desperation in that voice. Then, as the train pulled out of the station, beyond a wall of standing commuters who, less fortunate than me, had not found a seat, there was commotion, as if a scuffle had broken out. I craned my neck to get a better look and discovered, not a fight, but a scene of wonder of almost biblical proportions!

There, in our midst (and soon everybody was talking, concerned, amazed, perplexed), sat an infant in its stroller, unruffled and alone. His mother, still back on the platform of the last station, had pushed the carriage into the metro car, but the doors closed before she made it inside herself.

Suddenly, all of us, indifferent strangers only a few instants before, were connected, transformed into a makeshift family, responsible for the little boy literally thrust into our care. We consulted, decisions were made, and finally it was decided that the man who initially grabbed the carriage, saving the child from being crushed in the closing doors, would get off at the next station, to deliver the child into the hands of the transportation authorities. He was wearing a suit and tie, as were the two friends who accompanied him, respectable-looking types, “family men.”

As they got off, we waved good-bye to the still serene toddler and his rescuers and went on discussing this exceptional happening. The presence of the child, our sense of concern for his well-being, had somehow united us.

Mulling over this experience, I’ve come to see it as a means for me to wrap my mind around one aspect of French society that, despite my 25 years in this country, has always remained foreign to me. I am talking about French “family policy,” light-years away in its conception and practice from what Americans would call “child welfare.”

For a few minutes in a crowded metro car, a group of commuters, perfect strangers, became a family, responsible for a child too young, perhaps too scared, to tell us his name. On a permanent basis, year-in, year-out, this is what French family policy asks of French society: those of us who work and pay taxes constitute one big family, responsible for every child in France, where “family welfare,” not child welfare, is at the system’s heart.

It has been this way since 1932. At that time, based on a philosophy that made society responsible for the well-being of all its families, family welfare benefits, regardless of income or family situation, were first put in place.

And since then, this philosophy has stuck. The family welfare benefit known as the “allocations familiales” is not need-based, meaning a family with three children earning, let’s say, $20,000 a year receives the same family allowance as one earning $85,000—or more. In concrete terms, in 2013, this means each family would receive about $380 in family welfare benefits each month. I suspect this idea is a bit unsettling to many Americans’ minds, as it is to mine.

Since 1946, when French family welfare took an aggressively pro-birth turn, the more the merrier. For example, today, a family with six children receives about one thousand dollars a month in aid, more than double the benefits of a family with three. This may in part explain why, within the European Union, only the Republic of Ireland has a higher birth-rate than France.

Besides generous family welfare, France also offers an extensive network of municipal day-care centers. In my neighborhood alone, there are more than thirty, though that’s not enough to keep up with the demand of young parents “contributing” to France’s current baby boom. In the street, in busses, in the metro, there are children and strollers everywhere. City playgrounds are packed; so are the elementary schools, where children can enter full-day kindergarten when they are 3 years old.

Yes, France takes care of its children and since 1981, the year Socialist François Mitterrand was elected President, more need-based aids have been put into place. Besides the back-to-school allowance, created in 1974 to help low- and middle-income parents pay for the school supplies of children between the ages of 6 and 18 (about $450 per child in 2013), there are aids to help finance at-home day-care, a family rent or mortgage allowance, as well as supplementary monthly benefits for low-income parents with young children.

Finally, once their birth is registered, all children are immediately covered by the national insurance plan of their parents.

In the past twenty years, on both sides of the political divide, there have been protests that France’s generous family policy is more than the country can afford. Most recently, in May of this year, François Hollande’s socialist government proposed adjusting family welfare benefits to family income. In other words, the rich would receive less, and perhaps the poor more, but, despite surveys showing 68% of the French in favor of such a measure, the government backed off, fearful of negative reactions at the polls.

Instead, tax laws have been changed so that, as of 2014, families earning over $50,000 a year, will be paying more income tax than in the past, putting an end to a system of deductions largely favorable to well-off families.

In France, only one household in two pays any income tax at all. As a single, working woman, I pay a lot and sometimes it irks me to think I am contributing to the “welfare” of the wealthiest families of France. On the whole, however, I am glad to pay and to participate in the creation of a safety net that benefits us all. And as my recent experience in the metro brought home to me, we are indeed all members of one big family known as humankind.

Discovering Schuylkill County by the sea...

Imagine a beautiful early autumn day in Paris. The wind is coming from the west, rolling in across the plains and low hills that separate the city from the sea. The day is crisp yet moist with a breath of salt air. Gulls and pigeons fly overhead.

On the ground, on the crowded esplanade of Chaillot Palace, perched on the Right Bank of the Seine, tourists jostle one another to get a glimpse of the very best view of the Eiffel Tower the city has to offer. They take pictures, buy souvenirs, eat ice cream and crêpes, happily milling in the crowd as they take in Paris at its best.

I’m there too, making my way towards one of two identical palaces built for the 1937 World’s Fair, that flank the esplanade. I push open a heavy glass door and enter a deserted vestibule. The walls are bottle green, the lighting dim, but up ahead I can make out a security guard. I advance towards him and he shines a flashlight in my purse before he lets me pass.

It is nearly five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. In two hours, the exhibit I have come to see at the Musée nationale de la Marine (National Naval Museum) will close its doors for good. I can’t incite readers to go see it—it’s too late. But I hope I can communicate my enthusiasm for the artist I discovered while sharing some connections between his work and Pennsylvania that may surprise you as much as they surprised me.

As for those of you who someday find yourselves on the Chaillot esplanade, I’d recommend you step inside the naval museum for an unforgettable voyage across the seven seas. Its collections of model boats, wooden figureheads and maritime paintings are among the best in the world.

To reach my destination, I wandered through them, a fitting preparation for the “plunge” I was about to take into the world of Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958), a complete artist, in that he painted, drew, sculpted, illustrated, and made ceramics and tapestries, whose work is inseparable from his lifelong love of the sea.

Mathurin Méheut was born in Lamballe, a town in Brittany, about ten miles from the sea. His father was a carpenter. The son left school before he was fourteen and worked for him until he was apprenticed to a house painter. Then he somehow convinced his father to send him to art school in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, where he studied applied arts before moving on to the School of Decorative Arts of Paris. Settling there, he worked in the fields of illustration and interior decorating until a return trip to his native Brittany changed his life.

In 1912 Méheut received a commission from a center of marine biology in Roscoff, a windswept port on the northern Breton coast. There he developed a passion for the fauna and flora of the sea, documenting in bold and colorful illustrations the life of the deep. These scientific drawings would later become an important source of inspiration for decorative motifs the artist used in murals and ceramic design.

Yet it was life on the shore, on boats and in the coastal villages that became the focal point of Méheut’s work. Across his lifetime until his death in 1958, he returned not only to Brittany, but also to Normandy and to the Mediterranean shore, to capture with great empathy the people whose lives were inseparable from the sea.

Sketching almost ceaselessly, producing thousands of drawings, he participated through his art in the life of the communities where he lived. He is on the beach in a storm as men and women, broad-shouldered, indifferent to rain and cold, drag from the water a capsized fishing boat, hoping there may still be lives on board to save. He climbs among the mounds of goémon, a Breton word, red and brown sea algae, as men and women load it onto wagons before carting it to fields where it will be used as fertilizer. He stands next to women, their heads wrapped in white veils, who rake the salt flats.

He also joins them in their cafés, where in Brittany, men and women, clasping each other around the waist, rock from side to side to the wheezing music of bagpipes. In Marseilles, he records listless dancing in a bordello. In the nearby resort of Cassis, he captures the life of those who go to the seaside to sun and relax.

During the 1920’s and 30’s, Méheut’s fame grows and ocean liners hire him to decorate their ballrooms and dining rooms. He also puts to use his expertise in marine biology to create deep-sea motifs to decorate the dinner services used in the first-class dining rooms of these ships and in famous Parisian restaurants (the seafood restaurant Prunier still uses those dishes today). His illustrations grace dinner menus and he creates posters vaunting exotic destinations during the heyday of luxury sea travel.

In 1930, he travels all the way to Pittsburgh, commissioned by H. J. Heinz to participate in the decoration of the Hall of Nations in the company’s service building. Méheut paints “the discovery of the New World.”

Working in different media, creating high art and low, all his life, Méheut remains faithful to the sea and its people, and his best work is devoted to them. Like his subjects, his palette is simple and direct, translucent blues and grays, strong yellows and ruddy red, much like rusty iron, often supported by a powerful black line.

Admiring his drawings, feeling their force, I am reminded of a contemporary of his, the American painter George Luks, born in Williamsport in 1867. In his watercolors of coal towns, I find the same translucent blues, the same ruddy red, the same empathy with people who engage in a daily struggle with Nature to earn their livelihood.

In Luks’s case, the depths of the sea are replaced by those of the coal mine, yet the resemblances are striking between his and Méheut’s work. Take for example Luks’s 1927 painting of Necho Allen discovering coal, on view in the library of the Penn State Schuylkill campus. The glow of the fire, the ruddy earth reflect the palette of Méheut’s painting of “the Big Fishing Nets” or his sketches of red-sailed fishing boats as they put out to sea.

In other words, discovering Méheut, I somehow discover home.

Published in The Republican Herald September 29, 2013

Mademoiselle Remix, Shirley Temple, Nancy Drew and me

Appeared in Republican Herald August 25, 2013

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Shirley Temple and always looked forward to watching her movies on TV. I'm sure lots of readers, young and old, have heard her singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop" or seen her hoofing with Bill "Bojangles," one of the greatest tap dancers of all times. Shirley Temple made so many great movies and everybody has a favorite or two.

Mine is the 1939 film The Little Princess, where Temple proves that besides knowing how to sing and dance, she can be a great dramatic actress as well. In this movie, she plays a little rich girl, living at Miss Minchin's exclusive boarding school in Victorian London. Everyone adores her and the head mistress coddles her until she learns that her richest student's father, off searching for diamonds in Africa, has disappeared, leaving his motherless daughter alone and penniless.

Overnight the "little princess" is demoted from star pupil to scullery maid, transferred from a toasty, luxurious suite to an unheated garret room. Of course, in the end, resilient and ebullient Shirley comes out on top, finding her lost father and even meeting Queen Victoria, but in between times life gets pretty rough.

I have probably seen this movie dozens of times. I have also read and reread the story on which it is based, the 1905 novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who also wrote the children's classics A Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. In my Paris apartment, I have a first-edition copy of A Little Princess. It belonged to my great-aunt Annette Hartstein, who for many years was the principal of Jalapa School in Pottsville.

I treasure this book and like to page through it to admire the beautiful illustrations made by an artist more familiar with firelight than with electricity. The drawings are dark yet they glow like burning embers, projecting a warm and wavering light.

When I was fourteen years old, my father died. I wonder if that is why I have always been attracted to stories where daughters lose and sometimes find their fathers. In these stories, mothers are strangely absent, often never mentioned, as if little girls were delivered to delighted, devoted dads by an attentive stork.

Even before I lost my father, I devoured Nancy Drew mystery novels, reading several in the space of a weekend. Other fans of the intrepid Nancy might remember she lived with her dad and Mrs. Gruen, the housekeeper, with no mother anywhere in sight.

Nancy also had a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, but he definitely stayed in the background. Mostly Nancy "tooled around in her roadster," to use the language of the early novels, with her girlfriends Beth and George. Together, they solved crimes without ever requesting the help of a man, be it Nancy's lawyer father or a member of the local police force.

I wanted to grow up to be like Nancy Drew and, sharing her first name, it seemed I might have a chance.

In my apartment in Paris, I also have some 1930 editions of Nancy Drew mysteries. Heading towards retirement age, I don't think there's much chance I'll ever become a "sleuth" like Nancy, but she remains a source of inspiration to me.

In fact, she and Sarah Crewe, the name of the "little princess" Shirely Temple portrayed, are the inspiration behind a serialized novel I've written and will soon be sharing with Republican Herald readers.

Beginning Monday, September 2, 2013, you'll find a link to it on the homepage of the electronic edition of the paper. The novel is Mademoiselle Remix and twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, she'll be writing to you...

To give you a taste of what it's all about, Mademoiselle Remix's story is that of a modern-day princess who falls out of a fairy tale into the real world.

Like Nancy Drew or Sarah Crewe, she is a girl raised by her father, a millionaire recluse, who has built himself a castle high in the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania. There he raises his daughter alone, with the help of a housekeeper and a governess, the same woman who schooled him when he was a boy (the character is a cross between Miss Patterson, a former head of the Pottsville Free Public Library, and Miss Schartel, once the Latin teacher at PAHS).

Then her father loses his fortune and commits suicide. Overnight, Constance, sixteen years old, finds herself alone, with no family, no home—or so she believes.

Her father had always told her her mother was dead. It was just the two of them against the world, but she soon learns her mother is alive, though not well, living with her son, Constance's half-brother, in the suburbs of Paris. And that's where Constance is headed, to one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of all of France—whether she likes it or not.

Constance speaks perfect school-girl French—her governess saw to that. She can adapt to the language, but can this innocent girl, who was never allowed to have friends, adapt to a mother she believed dead, a half-brother named Karim, a high school fraught with racial and ethnic tensions, a distressed and violent neighborhood nextdoor to one of the most brilliant cities in the world?

To find out, you'll have to read Constance's twice-weekly "letters to the World." In them, she tells her own story in her own words, those of a sheltered young woman suddenly and brutally confronted with 21st century reality. Beginning in September and across four months, you'll participate in the "remix" as Constance is reborn.

Mademoiselle Remix is Constance's autobiography, her reaching out to the World. It is also the story of a part of France that few tourists, let alone Frenchmen, know. For over twenty years, I have lived and worked there, in the "dangerous suburbs" north of Paris and I believe that's where the future of France, perhaps of the world, is being written now.

When I was seven years old, I already knew I wanted to learn French and go to France someday. Who knows what mysterious influences put such ideas in a young girl's head. And I have always loved telling stories that make people laugh or cry.

I'm hoping that's what Mademoiselle Remix will do, just as I hope you'll reach out to Constance, as Constance reaches out to you...

A vacation for the price of a metro ride

Appeared in The Republican Herald July 28, 2013

It’s official, in all the national papers and on the evening news. This year, four in six Frenchmen will be staying home instead of going on vacation. Those lucky enough to get away will be spending less and staying closer to home. Above all—and this represents a big change for the French, they’ll be cutting down on vacation time, going away for a week or two instead of a full month. It’s “la crise,” France is in crisis, as anchormen tell us almost every evening on the national news.

There was a time, not so long ago, when month-long paid vacations were the norm in France. The French language even created special words for the phenomenon. Those who set off for the month of July were the “Juilletistes” (based on “juillet,” July). Returning from vacation a month later, participating in a monstrous traffic jam extending from the Mediterranean all the way to the North Sea shores, they got a good look at the Aoûtiens (based on août, August), stalled in traffic, with motors overheating, just setting off when the Juilletistes were already heading home.

Some vacationers took off for more exotic destinations: a month on the beaches of Phuket in Thailand, an ascent into the mountains of Nepal, or a trip to the United States, a crossing of a continent in a Greyhound bus, with stopovers in places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, Rabbit-Hash, Kentucky, Tightwad, Missouri, or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Those were the days. Now many who can get away visit friends or family. Those who can’t, in small Parisian apartments or small towns which don’t offer much in the way of recreation, sit at home, dreading the return of their neighbors who, once they’re back, will lavish them with stories and photos of “les vacances.”

For those of us in Paris and the Paris region, however, there is another option. Between July 13th and August 18th, using our monthly or yearly metro pass, called a “carte Navigo,” we can travel hundreds of miles throughout the region, to the borders of Normandy and Champagne, all the way north to Picardy, and all for free. Last Sunday, with my friend Karima, I tested this offer and we both returned to Paris more then satisfied. In fact, we were delighted after having spent a bright and sunny day crossing wheat fields, wandering along the banks of the Oise River, walking in the footsteps of Vincent Van Gogh.

Our destination was the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, about twenty miles from Paris and we left from the Gare du Nord, the city’s train station to all points north. There, we crossed paths with security guards, crowds heading in all directions, travellers dragging suitcases, soldiers with machine-guns, protecting us from a terrorist threat but unable to keep away pickpockets, riding up and down the escalators, hopping on and off trains, eyes peeled for wallets and purses to snatch.

After having swiped our metro card and boarded a suburban train, we were off, leaving behind that urban hive. Ten minutes later, just like in the famous painting by Monet, we were riding through wheat fields dotted with poppies, a rich tapestry of red and gold. Along the banks of the Oise River, we spotted fishermen, busy “at work,” sitting in the shade of birch trees and willows, lounging on folding chairs, their fishing rods fastened to the bank or resting lightly in their hands. Then our train pulled into a small, white station basking in the sun.

Everybody off, end of the line! We had arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise.

With no special itinerary in mind, Karima and I crossed the street in front of the station and headed up a hill, along a winding, cobble-stoned street lined with small stone homes. Some had front doors opening directly onto the street; others were enclosed behind stone walls covered with honey suckle or hawthorn. Beyond others, we could glimpse cherry trees, heavy with fruit gleaming red in the sun.

An hour before, we had been in the biggest train station in Europe. We had to blink, rub our eyes and noses (we were simply not used to air smelling so good). We were in another world, one we had not imagined so close to our front door.

But there was more, so much more! Leaving behind the narrow street, we arrived at the town’s Romanesque church, dating back to the 11th century—and we immediately recognized it. Van Gogh painted it in 1890, during his short stay in the town.

In fact, in two months, he completed seventy paintings of the church, the fields of wheat we would soon be crossing, the city hall, the banks of the Oise, and the people he came to know. One of them was Doctor Gachet. While he was under his care, Van Gogh painted incessantly. Only a short time before, he had been in an asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France. His stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, so productive, ended in suicide.

Climbing up a hill from the church, we were soon surrounded by fields of wheat, swaying in the breeze. In their midst, behind a gray stone wall, in the town’s cemetery, Van Gogh is buried, next to his younger brother Theo, who cared for him much of his adult life.

During the two months he spent in Auvers-sur-Oise, Van Gogh lived in an attic room in the Auberge Ravoux, an inn that still stands today, looking much as it did in the painter’s time. The building still serves as a restaurant; it is also a historic monument and houses “The Van Gogh Institute,” which organizes exhibits devoted to the artist’s life and work.

Karima and I picnicked on the banks of the Oise, where Van Gogh often painted, we walked through fields where he had walked himself, we wandered through the streets and took in scenes that figure in his paintings. All the while, we felt one thousand miles from home.

At the end of the day, we hopped on a train back to Paris, refreshed and renewed, after our fine “vacation,” for the price of a metro ride.

I have to admit, though, that I’m one of the lucky ones. Readers, I’ll be in Schuylkill County when you read this, visiting family and friends. If you recognize me in the street, I hope you’ll stop to say hello.

A Paris attraction not for the faint-hearted!

My fifth-grade teacher at Jackson Street School, Ms. Cleona Picus, had some very good ideas about how to get students working together. I remember how, in teams of three or four, we built replicas of Native American villages—my group was in charge of constructing a Pueblo village from salt-flour clay. We also created our own marbled paper, turning our big, high-ceilinged classroom into an artist’s workshop. We also sang. Above all, we danced.

We danced to Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” and, on our knees, our heads and chests thrown back, tried our best to become “limbo stars” as we jerked to his “Limbo Rock.”

As part of music appreciation, we also did what you might call “interpretive dancing.” Ms. Picus put a record on the phonograph (yes, that was the word in those days for the heavy, cloth-covered contraptions that were standard in schools) and told us to spread out across the classroom. Once she lowered the needle onto the spinning vinyl disc, we began by listening, tuning in to the beat and the tone of the music. Then, once we were ready, we started to move, any way we wished, following no special pattern or steps.

That was the kind of dancing I preferred and, losing all inhibitions, I swooped around the room, waving my arms in all directions, transported by the music, transported by one particular piece of music, that still haunts me to this day:

For Halloween 1963, Ms. Picus played for us “Danse macabre” by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). It was a dance of death, our teacher told us, the dance of the dead who, one night a year, return to haunt the earth.

I listened to the music, I imagined ghosts and goblins buffeted by autumn winds, swirling among the treetops, pressing distorted faces against the windows of what were once their homes. Whirling around the classroom, abandoning myself completely to the music, I set in motion the creation of a very personal and romantic image of death.

One week ago, that image was shattered and, since then, the word “macabre” has taken on a different meaning for me. Looking in my Webster’s dictionary, I read that the word can apply to a personalized representation of death. It can also mean “gruesome” or “ghastly.” Those terms, much better than the swelling, swirling music of Saint-Saëns, describe what “macabre” means to me today.

One week ago, I visited the Paris Catacombs, the biggest underground cemetery in the world, home to seven million souls. It is a major tourist attraction and people from every corner of the globe come especially to see it, waiting in line, rain or shine, for a minimum of two hours. Once inside, they descend 130 steps and walk through a mile-long labyrinth of dank corridors. These are some of the abandoned tunnels of underground quarries, from which the limestone that built Paris was cut.

I have lived in Paris for over twenty years and, until one week ago, I had never visited the Catacombs. After having made the visit, I think I understand why:

Imagine a winding gangway in a coal mine, with, off to each side, hollowed-out breasts or chambers at regular intervals. Imagine dripping water, sweating walls, darkness broken here and there by flickering light. Once you have that in mind, fill up each chamber with thousands and thousands of bones, and you’ll have an idea of what the Catacombs are like…, but only an idea.

The horror of being there is something else.

In fact, the Paris Catacombs are not a cemetery. There are no marked graves, no headstones, not a single one of the dead is identified by name. In reality, it is an ossuary, a depository for the bones of the dead. Above the underground entrance, inscribed in stone, are the words, “Take pause: here begins the Kingdom of the Dead.”

Once over the threshold, the visitor walks between walls of bones, arranged so that the heads of femurs compose what might first be taken for a pebbly surface, broken at two levels by a long row of shiny marble spheres, that turn out to be skulls. Those walls are like dikes, holding back an avalanche of bones, deposited pell-mell in the abandoned quarry chambers. Here and there, the walls have given out. Those sections, visible to the public from behind iron bars, reduce death to a heap of rubble, forgotten, belonging to no one, hardly human at all.

When I came across a museum guard (for the Catacombs qualify as a museum), I asked if the exit was far away. Not too far, she told me. I almost ran to escape, climbing up a winding staircase, afraid to raise my head, afraid to see more stairs when I was so yearning for the light of day.

The Catacombs, I’d warn readers, are not for everyone, not for “the sensitive,” as I read in the museum brochure. I guess I belong to that category because they weren’t really for me, but now I’ve seen them, a once-in-a-lifetime experience I will never forget. Nor will I forget the intriguing history of the place, an underground Parisian cemetery created by King Louis XVI at the end of the 18th century, because, at ground-level, cemeteries were overflowing, pushing corpses to the earth’s surface or into the cellars of people’s homes.

In 1785, once the decision was made to move the dead to the abandoned quarries, for two years solid, day and night, processions lead by priests transported millions of bones across the city, depositing them in the underground chambers, consecrated by the Catholic Church.

Today, the cool, dank Paris Catacombs are one of the city’s “hottest” tourist attractions. Macabre, if you ask me, and I can’t figure out why each year 300,000 people make the trip to this particular “Kingdom of the Dead.” Maybe I’m just too “sensitive,” maybe I prefer to hear and imagine, rather than see, certain images of death. But, dear Readers, aware of the Catacombs’ popularity, I went there for you, and I’ll let you judge if, someday, you’d like to discover them yourselves.

Coal making a comeback in much of Europe, but not in France

In the European Union, coal is making a comeback, from Spain to Poland, home to one of the biggest strip mines in the world. Spain has become a leader in the storage of carbon dioxide emissions from coal. In the Asturias region, located in the northern part of the country, researchers are attempting to inject CO² back into coal and then extract or eject it as usable methane gas. The Germans, while investing heavily in renewable energy sources, are depending more and more on coal for the production of electricity, 42% of the country’s needs, at a time when nuclear power plants are being phased out.

All in all, coal-powered generators produce 25% of electricity in the European Union, that figure rising to 87% in Poland. The Poles, with coal resources to see them through the next half-century, prefer their energy independence to buying cleaner natural gas from Russia. With memories still fresh of Soviet domination, they are ready and willing to put up with the pollution from their giant open-air mine in Bełchatów, in south-central Poland, and its adjoining power station, which produces 40 million tons of greenhouse gasses per year.



The French, on the other hand, have largely rejected coal and its by-products. Coal-powered generators produce a mere 4% of the country’s electricity, and, for the moment, fracking is not authorized. In northern France, in the Nord-Pas de Calais region, once the heart of the country’s mining industry, there is, however, some interest in extracting coal bed methane as a replacement for conventional natural gas, despite local protests that the reserves are too small and the price of drilling too high.

In this region, one of the poorest of France, where unemployment hovers around 14%, mayors would like to see the money invested to improve housing and attract “clean” industries. They also fear that methane extraction could very well be a first step towards the legalization of fracking, and consider the non-conventional drilling of coal bed methane a threat to local water supplies because of the wastewater it produces.

Though suspicious of coal today, the French have carefully and lovingly preserved their mining past. In 2012, the Nord-Pas de Calais coal mining region, located in the far north-eastern corner of France, was chosen to be part of the World Heritage List of Unesco for its “remarkable cultural landscape, the result of almost three hundred years of coal mining and the technological and urban developments associated with the mining industry.” In an area stretching across about 75 miles, in a “living” museum, implanted in a landscape where people work and have their homes, former mines have been turned into theaters, eco-museums and art galleries—and culm banks (called “terrils” in French), some rising to an elevation of over 700 feet, can be explored along graded hiking paths.



At the heart of the region, in the city of Lens, on the site of a former mine, the Louvre, one of the world’s great museums, inaugurated a new extension in December 2012. There, for free, visitors can view a rotating collection of art from the Louvre in Paris, including a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci (though not the Mona Lisa—she never moves!), monumental Greek statues, and pottery and porcelain from Turkey and Iran. Imagine such treasures, exhibited for free and on a daily basis in Pottsville or Hazleton and you’ll have an idea of what this museum means to the city of Lens and to inhabitants of the region.



The nearby town of Lewarde is home to France’s biggest museum of mining, Centre historique minier du Nord-Pas de Calais, which, until June 2nd, will be hosting a special exhibit devoted to “men and machines,” tracing almost three hundred years of mining technology. The site of the museum is that of a former mine, the Delloye “fosse” or “pit,” and visitors, much like at The Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, can explore its underground tunnels. They can also visit the building where coal was sorted by “galibots,” the French word for “breaker boys,” and by women, who also worked in the mines.

The extensive complex of redbrick buildings and underground installations that is home to the museum includes several permanent exhibits: one documents the formation of coal over millions of years; another is devoted to daily life in the mines and includes visits to shower and dressing rooms as well as to the room where mining lamps were stored; another tells the story of the role of horses in the mines; still another explores energy resources past, present and future. An important place is also reserved for the testimonies of those who worked in the mines. From them, visitors can learn about the first day on the job, the dangers miners encountered underground, and their life at home and at the local bar or “estaminet,” where, at the end of the day, they shared a drink with their buddies.



Throughout the region, just like in Schuylkill County, there are company towns (known as “corons”), still inhabited today. The houses that compose them are built in all shapes and sizes, though nearly all are made of brick. These homes, inhabited by miners or their children, are also a part of the “living museum” of Nord-Pas de Calais, where the French have built an impressive and moving monument to the heritage of coal.



As for coal’s future, though it plays only a minor role in France’s energy production today, there are stirrings here and there that seem to indicate things may soon change. In February of this year, Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industry, made a plea for “le gaz made in France,” referring to the potential for extracting France’s resources in coal bed methane.

Along with other Europeans, the French also look on with wonder and envy when they hear reports that the United States, thanks in part to shale, may begin exporting oil and gas by 2025 and possibly achieve energy independence by 2030. Considering those predictions, even the most hardcore opponents to fracking and fossil fuels might begin to have second thoughts.

Yet, predictions remain just that, predictions, not facts. And the “Halliburton loophole” of the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempts fracking from certain requirements of the “Safe Drinking Water Act,” may already be depriving future generations of safe water to drink, which, if proven true, would raise the cost of energy independence beyond what anyone can afford to pay.

Love (and marriage?) in the Parisian metro

Spring has finally come to Paris after the longest winter I’ve ever known since my arrival in the city over twenty years ago. Temperatures, the weathermen and women promise, will soon rise to 70° and tomorrow we’re going to see the sun! Yes, this winter has been bleak, cold and dark, relentlessly so, day after day, and Parisians have behaved accordingly. Already famous (or infamous) for their unfriendliness towards each other and towards strangers, they have outdone themselves this past winter, freezing facial muscles into a permanent frown.

Luckily, to ward off the cold and escape the blues, we can always head underground. There, riding the more than 130 miles of the Parisian metro system, travelling between its more than 300 different stops, we can benefit from sauna-like conditions year-round, while participating in a form of urban theater, complete with surprises, laughter and tears.

For example, about two weeks ago, when temperatures were still hovering around freezing and we were all wrapped up in winter coats, a young man in shirt sleeves stepped into the car and launched into a speech, beginning with the customary “Mesdames, messieurs.” Shuffling our feet, turning away from him, we all closed in upon ourselves, prepared to listen to yet another appeal to our hearts and to our wallets, stiffening up in anticipation of him rattling a cup filled with coins in our face.

But no, he began by assuring us, our loose change did not interest him. His was a different mission. He was asking us to listen, appealing to our hearts, but his message was unique and he soon managed to put a smile on our faces and even got us talking, perfect strangers in the metro carrying on a friendly exchange.

He had entered our car with something to offer, not to sell, he told us, and it was up to us to choose if we were interested or not. He was offering, in fact, himself, which he did in about two minutes, the time it took to travel between two stations before he stepped off at the third.

He told us his age, 28, and his profession—he was trained as an engineer. And I can attest he was a nice-looking, clean-cut young man. Though he did not tell us his nationality, I would say he was from what the French call the Maghreb, Tunisia, Algeria or Morocco, all countries where French is a second language spoken by almost everyone. He spoke it extremely well and quickly got his message across.

He was single, serious and available and what he was looking for was a potential bride, a woman standing or sitting in that stuffy car of the metro interested, like him, in tying the knot. He wanted a wife, a home, a family, and there he was in the flesh, not like on those on-line dating sites, where you never know if what you see is what you get.

All the while he spoke, he smiled, and soon we were all smiling too. And talking. The woman standing next to me expressed her surprise. I commented he looked like a nice young man. Both of us, hitting sixty, were spectators. He was not addressing himself to us, but to some young woman sharing his desires. All she had to do was follow him onto the platform when the train came to its next stop.

And when it did, the doors opened and the young man got off, alone. No woman followed him off the train. No bites, at least not on that ride.

He did, however, brighten our day and lighten our hearts. He surprised us, in the best sense of the term, shaking us out of our commuter lethargy at the end of a long, hard day.

Strangely enough, the very next day, as I was walking down the street where I live, I was attracted to a sign posted on a phone booth (they still exist in Paris, though rarely do I see anyone inside making a call. Most often, phone booths serve as shelters for the homeless, offering protection from rain but not from the cold). Printed in bold letters on the sign were the words CHERCHE FEMME, in other words, “WOMAN WANTED.”

Was this an ad offering work to a cleaning woman, a babysitter, a companion to accompany an elderly person to the market? I was curious so I approached to read the fine print and discovered the ad offered none of the above. It was another offer of marriage, direct and to the point: 42-year-old Czech psychotherapist would like to meet a woman for marriage. Serious offer, children welcome. At the bottom, there was a cell phone number to call.

A few days later, another man stepped on the metro, begging not for money, but for a bride. This time I was less surprised by his plea than by the fact that it was happening again, three times in the same week, three unconventional offers of marriage. I said to myself, this qualifies as an urban trend and on-line dating services should take note. The search for love may be moving away from phone and computer screens and back into the real world.

Now it has been about two weeks since my last spotting, but I am still on the lookout, hoping to further document this trend, which, if sincere, surprises both by its directness and its old-fashioned appeal.

But springtime has arrived and it is natural that “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” above ground and below. There is even a Facebook page called “Spotted”: dans le métro parisien (in the Parisian metro), with over 20,000 fans. There you can leave a message for that intriguing person you spotted during your commute to work, with hopes of receiving an answer and meeting him or her again.

All in all, Parisians spend a lot of time underground, at this time of year, cut off from the sounds, sights and smells of spring. Luckily for us, everyday we descend into an urban theater, where we can find the best and worst of life, spectators and actors despite ourselves.

For those of you back in Schuylkill County who climb into your car, turn the key, turn up the music and drive, keep your eyes open, don’t shut out the spring. And at stop signs, look carefully in all directions. You never know whose eyes you’re going to meet.

Appeared in The Republican Herald, April 28, 2013

France’s Gothic cathedrals, rooted in a far distant past

Published in The Republican Herald, March 31, 2013

This year, Notre Dame de Paris is celebrating its 850th birthday and millions of visitors are expected to drop by to pay their respects, though there is nothing unusual about that. Every year the cathedral receives more than 14 million visitors, making it one of the most visited monuments in the world. Also, though France is a country where many Catholics have deserted the Church, you would never know it at Notre Dame. When it’s time for mass, whether it be on Sundays or weekdays, the rows and rows of straw-seated chairs are always filled with worshippers.

Other churches in France, though equally beautiful, are not so lucky. Many are deserted, some open for the occasional mass, others are being destroyed. Still others, though their doors are always open, attract few visitors inside.

In the town where I work, there is such a church. Its façade is a bit shabby and its sanctuary is often deserted. That may be why, after teaching, I like to go there to sit, resting my mind, restoring my soul. Contemplating the play of colored light against stone, I’m convinced I am sitting in one of the most beautiful churches of France (the photo following the title illustrates the church's interior).

The church is the basilica of Saint-Denis, named after the patron saint of the French monarchy. He also gave his name to the town and his story is inseparable from its origins.

In the third century A.D., Saint Denis was named the first bishop of Paris. At that time, the city was still a Roman colony, with public baths and an arena, a miniature version of the Coliseum in Rome. The Romans also imposed their gods on their subjects and forbade the worship of the Christian god. Saint Denis, whose true identity remains a mystery, brought many to the Christian faith and for this, on the Mount of Martyrs, also known as Montmartre, he had his head chopped off.

That might be the end of his story, but it is not. After his beheading, he simply bent down, picked up his head and, holding it firmly in his hands, began walking north. After travelling about two miles, he collapsed, died and was buried in a small settlement that became the town of Saint-Denis.



Two hundred years later, a chapel was erected on the spot. Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, wished to honor the martyr who had saved so many souls in the city she saved from physical destruction. In 451, joined by other women who rallied to her call, she stopped the advance of Attila the Hun, not with weapons, but with prayer.

Today, in 2013, the chapel she ordered built is the core and the heart of the basilica of Saint-Denis. It is located beneath the present-day altar, enclosed within not one, but four different churches. Archaeologists have excavated the foundations of that first church and there they discovered the bones of a man who was indeed beheaded. No one can ascertain that these bones belong to Saint Denis. But there is no doubt that, at one time, an axe came down on the neck of the person buried there.

In those early days of Christian France, it was an honor to be buried near a saint and soon the chapel became too small for the kings and queens who desired to rest near Saint Denis. In the sixth century and then again in the eighth, the church was enlarged. Today, the painted walls of the eighth-century basilica surround the altar and tombs of the earlier chapels.

I often visit that basilica with my students. They find it strange and mysterious to stand within that church within a church, with its thick walls and its tiny windows, both considered architectural marvels at the time it was built. The Emperor Charlemagne visited that church and walked on its stone and marble floor, decorated with porphyry, brought all the way from Egypt.

Further enlargements and additions came in the following centuries but in 1135, nearly thirty years before the first stone of Notre Dame was laid, construction began on a totally new church, built atop the others. The basilica was under the care of an adjoining Benedictine abbey and its abbot, a man named Suger, had some very big ideas about how he wanted to transform “his church.” His plan was to build the nave higher and open the basilica to light, making the “light of the world” visible through the use of stained glass.

Using intersecting arches and flying buttresses, he was able to elevate the ceiling of the church and open the walls of the sanctuary, creating space for immense stained-glass windows. For the western wall, Suger designed a rose window, the first in architectural history. He calculated that at sunset, the sun’s rays would flood the altar with the colors of the rainbow, renewing God’s covenant with the earth.



Suger’s church was one of the wonders of his age and he made sure he would be remembered for it. In a stained-glass window, today at the Louvre, we can see him, at the foot of the Virgin Mary in a scene of the Annunciation. He is also present in the Church’s main bronze door, where we find him kneeling among the disciples at Emmaus.

In his lifetime, Abbot Suger did everything he could to assure the glory of his church, but in 1789, with the French Revolution, the basilica of Saint Denis came upon very hard times. For centuries, it had been the official burial ground of the kings of France and for that reason, the tombs were sacked and the church vandalized. Legend has it that children in the town used the bones of kings to play jacks, called “osselets” in French, a word that has its root in “os,” bone.



Today a large part of the church is a national monument, a museum of funerary art, where visitors can admire the refurbished tombs of the French monarchy. That visit also includes the earlier churches hidden beneath the Gothic cathedral.



Certainly, Notre Dame de Paris is more imposing and its façade, far more beautiful, but on a sunny, spring-time afternoon, I’d rather be sitting in the basilica of Saint-Denis. There I watch the dance of colored light, the work of Abbot Suger, who, nine centuries ago, strove to abolish the boundaries between earth and sky.

US, France fight war against terror

War used to be different. It was neither more nor less tragic, but it was different from today, as the example of the Battle of Gettysburg shows. During the first three days of July, 1863, 51,000 soldiers died, nearly a third of the forces engaged. Around the little town of Gettysburg, the hills ran with blood, but in the town itself—and here’s the difference—only one civilian died.

When I was a child, we often visited the battlefields of Gettysburg and I remember visiting her home: Ginnie Wade, a 20-year-old woman, killed by a stray bullet, while she was in the kitchen kneading bread.

Since January 11, 2013, France has been involved in a military operation in Mali, a land-locked country of West Africa. On that day, the Ministry of Defense launched “Operation Serval” (the serval is a wildcat native to that region). In an official statement to the French people, the Defense Minister explained that the intervention was in response to a request from the government of Mali to help stop the advance of rebel and terrorists forces upon its capital, Bamako, and to aid the Malian army in re-establishing control over the entire national territory.

In a matter of days, French forces made it “all the way to Timbuktu,” the legendary Malian city whose name was once a synonym for the most distant place imaginable. At this time, after more than a month of operations, with about 4,000 French soldiers on the ground, only one of them has died in combat—which, of course, is one too many, but that figure attests to Operation Serval’s success so far.


The Gandamia Massif, northeast of Timbuktu

In mid-February, however, as French troops headed further north and east into the Sahara, the nature of this war began to change: landmines, suicide attacks, a sharp rise in civilian deaths. Back in Paris, the government reinforced homeland security, deploying more troops in airports, train stations and the metro, in response to a heightened risk of terrorist attacks.

Operation Serval, as the Minister of Defense Jean-Yves le Drian announced on Feburary 6, 2013, is a “real war” against “terrorists.” And, in “the war on terror,” as opposed to the Civil War, civilians are fair and often easy game.

Yet, in Paris, in the metro that I take almost every day, riding cheek to cheek with perfect strangers, we are all our usual, indifferent selves, more worried, at the peak of flu season, about germs from a neighbor’s sneeze or cough than the risk of a bomb going off in our midst. In general, I’d say, we’re indifferent to this war. I don’t hear many people talking about it nor do I see any outward signs that the French are supporting their troops—no banners, no flags, no ribbons, all signs of excessive American patriotism to French eyes.

This may be one of the reasons members of the French military are feeling discouraged, be they in the army, the air force or the navy. France has its “West Point,” a prestigious army academy called Saint-Cyr, founded in 1802. It also has its “Annapolis,” Ecole Navale, a naval academy founded in 1830. Its officers are among the best in the world. The military’s code of honor is strong and all its branches project an image of highly qualified professionals. The problem is, French society at large doesn’t seem to really care.

Blame it on former President Jacques Chirac, some would say. He’s the one who, in 1997, abolished the draft in favor of an all-volunteer army. He’s the one who put an end to what was once two years of compulsory service to the French nation (later reduced to 16 and then to 10 months), where young men of all backgrounds, races and classes came together in what many considered France’s “melting pot.” In a recent survey, 62% of the French regretted Chirac’s decision. This would appear to be an implicit wish for the draft’s return—though people may simply be feeling nostalgic about the “good old days” when a Frenchman knew what it meant to be French.


Recruitment poster for an all-volunteer army

In 2013, believing their glory days are behind them, feeling pessimistic about the future, the French are no longer so sure of who they are. Back in the days of the draft, when almost all young men served, the army was an essential component of French identity. Today, pushed to the periphery of society, the military, despite its annual budget of 43 billion dollars, placing it fifth in the world in terms of defense spending, is like a poor relation you’d rather forget about—and, in some important ways, the French have.

Last October, for example, French army wives began “battling bare,” inspired by Ashley Wise, the American who went to battle for her husband suffering from PTSD, spelling out her demands for better care on her bare back. These French women adopted her methods to bring national attention to the fact that their husbands, many on duty in Afghanistan, had not been paid for almost a year. They called themselves “un paquet de Gauloises en colère”—a angry pack of Gauloises, a reference to France’s best-known brand of cigarettes, but also, very literally, an angry pack of French women.



Their “bare-backed” methods worked. Just before Christmas 2012, emergency funds were unblocked so military wives could get creditors off their backs while, far away, their husbands served the nation.

Members of the French military are subjected to another strange injustice. Though medical care is excellent, if a soldier loses an arm or a leg in combat, he or she cannot be sure of who is going to pay for its replacement. Neither the health insurance nor the complementary insurance available to members of the military covers the costs. The national veteran’s association, as well as private charities, has stepped in to make up the difference, helping to pay for artificial limbs for those gravely injured in service to their country.

In early February, President Hollande, France’s Commander-in-Chief, paid a visit to Mali, where he was welcomed as a hero. In a speech, he proclaimed “terrorism has not been vanquished,” promising French troops would stay in Mali as long as necessary.

No one can tell how long this will be. That is another difference between the “war on terror” and past conflicts. As Americans know from their experience in Afghanistan, policing the world in the name of justice is an endless, often thankless task.