Christmas far from home

“Home for the holidays”: these are sweet words for those who can celebrate with their families, bittersweet for those far from home or homeland, separated from the ones they love. In Schuylkill County, some families have members serving in the US Armed Forces in places as far away as Iraq or Afghanistan. During this holiday season, their sons, daughters or spouses must be wishing for “home sweet home.”

Here in France, in the Paris region, there is a large Christian community celebrating Christmas far from home, longing for the country of their ancestors and for the churches where they celebrated mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus most likely spoke. They are the Christians of Iraq and there are about sixty thousand living in and around Paris.

Two of them, German Odeesho Banyameen and Stevani Odesho, are my students and they kindly took the time to tell me how they are celebrating Christmas this year. But, to begin, they told me something about themselves.

German and Stevani, who also happen to be cousins, arrived in France in 2008. The two previous years had been difficult for all Iraqis, but this was also a time when attacks on Christians were on the rise. Young Christian women were being kidnapped for ransom; terrorist bombs were exploding near schools and in busy shopping districts. German remembers the day all the windows shattered in her classroom when a bomb went off nearby.

Reluctantly, for reasons of security, both families decided to emigrate. They did not want to leave their country or their city, Baghdad, where they lived peaceably with their Muslim neighbors. But threats to the Christian community were increasing and, to protect her from danger, Stevani’s family had already sent their daughter to the family village in northern Iraq. The next step was for each family to leave the country for Damascus, Syria, where, as political refugees, they waited for an opportunity to immigrate to a country in the West.

In 2008, France opened its doors to Iraqi Christians. Without knowing a word of French, knowing little about the country, the two families settled in the Paris region. Today, German and Stevani, who now speak French well, are preparing a degree in English at the University of Paris 8. At home they speak Aramaic. While in Iraq, they went to public school, where all teaching was in Arabic.

Both young women and their families are members of the Assyrian Church of the East, one of the two main churches of Iraq, whose seat today is in Chicago, Illinois. This is an independent church, whereas the Chaldean Church of Iraq is affiliated with Rome. The two churches, whose history begins in the first years of the Christian era, were once one, but they separated in the 16th century. Only since 2001 do members of the two churches officially celebrate Holy Communion together.

Recently, I joined with Assyrian and Chaldean Christians to celebrate mass at Notre Dame de Chaldée, presided by Father Petrus Yousif, rector of the Chaldean Mission in France. In a modern chapel in northern Paris, Father Yousif celebrates mass in Aramaic, Arabic and French, in an effort to include everyone. The mass itself follows an order that would be familiar to Catholics the world over, but there are also prayers and blessings particular to the Chaldean Church.

While waiting for mass to begin, I listened to the young choir practicing, singing melodies that had an “eastern flavor” to my ear. During mass, readers chant passages from the Bible and prayers are sung by choir and congregation. Listening to these beautiful chants, often in a minor key, I was filled with a sense of another place and time, of music resonating with strong faith kept alive across the centuries.

As soon as mass is over, everyone heads downstairs for tea. As 2014 draws to a close, a new flow of Christian refugees, victims of the violence of ISIS, is arriving in France. These Iraqi Christians from Kurdistan, where their community has been present for thousands of years, have turned to the Chaldean Mission for help, and some are present at mass. For these new refugees, this is their first Christmas far from home and I hope they are able to celebrate in the traditional way.

For German and Stevani, this means a special Christmas breakfast of kadeh and kolache, served with hot tea and milk. Kadeh, sweetened raised bread, is a specialty of the Assyrian community whereas kolache are filled pastries common to many Middle Eastern countries and considered the “national cookie” of Iraq. In the Odeesho family, the pastries are filled with dates, walnuts or coconut. Family members may also eat eggs and cheese, breakfast staples in Iraq.

Once breakfast is over, it’s almost time to move on to Christmas dinner, where a variety of dishes make up the traditional fare. There may be a choice between harissa, an Assyrian “chicken porridge,” a thick soup in a yogurt base, containing chicken, saffron and finely ground wheat, or pacha, a soup made of boiled lamb’s feet and tongue, considered a great delicacy.

To accompany the soups, the table is covered with side dishes, some common to the Middle East, others Indian in origin. There are stuffed grape and cabbage leaves and many of the appetizers the Lebanese call mezze, as well as kubba, ground meat cooked in bulgur wheat. Rice mixed with meat, vegetables and spices is called biryani, as in India, and chicken curry is another favorite dish.

Throughout the meal Iraqi Christians drink wine—they consider it good for the digestion. For dessert, there will be more kolache, Iraqi “cookies,” served with tea.

Then Christmas day is over, but Santa Claus has yet not arrived. Don’t worry, he will. In Iraqi Christian homes, he comes the night of December 31st, hiding gifts under children’s beds instead of under the Christmas tree. He also visits Muslim homes in Iraq and in neighboring Iran, where Muslims too like to decorate a Christmas tree.

German and Stevani are looking forward to the holidays but, they both admit, they miss Christmas “back home,” a feeling anyone far from home or country on Christmas can understand. They will, however, do their best to keep their traditions alive and they wish you all “Aethokh Breekhta,” which means “Blessèd Holidays” in Aramaic, one of the most ancient languages of the world.

Searching for autumn in the city

Autumn came late to Paris this year. After a summer of rain and cold, September and October were two months of warm, sunny days. On November 1st, All Saints Day, a holiday in France, families picnicked outside and sunbathers peeled off jackets to bask in the light of a generous mid-autumn sun. Leaves on the trees remained mostly green, with here and there a splash of pale yellow. Autumn, the season of crisp air, crisp Macintosh apples, and hillsides aflame with color (my memories of the season in Schuylkill County), was nowhere in sight.

By mid-November things had changed. Temperatures dropped, gray skies returned, and rain washed away the dusty remains of summer so that autumn could finally settle in. Keeping up a family tradition—in the fall, with my mother and aunt, I often took a Sunday afternoon walk along the western slope of Sharp Mountain or in the woods behind our home—I set out to search for autumn in what I consider my “backyard,” the neighborhood where I live.

In Schuylkill County, autumn is easy to find. Most towns are nestled in valleys or gaps between the ridges of the Blue Mountain chain of the Appalachians. Lifting their eyes to the hills, residents can take in a riot of fall color. In the surrounding countryside, dry corn stalks rattle in the wind, and backyards are carpeted with fallen leaves that need to be raked.

In Paris, I lift my eyes to a gray sky and lower them (remember, I’m on the sixth floor) to macadam and gray façades, cars and busses. Craning my neck, further up the street, I can see a few chestnut trees whose leaves turn from green to brown and then fall. The next step is for municipal workers to blast them off sidewalks with leaf blowers while blasting the ears of anyone within a 100-foot radius.

The view from my living room window is not promising, but my “backyard” is full of surprises, proof that autumn in the city has splendors all its own. For example, in Belleville Park, at La Maison de l’air, “the House of Air,” a modern structure with a glass façade, where visitors can learn about atmospheric conditions in Paris, I meet Agnès Joly, an agricultural engineer. To explain her work to us, she takes time off from tending her aquaponic garden, a long row of above-ground edible plants fertilized by dozens of gold fish swimming in a pool at the garden’s base.

Founder of Joly Mer (mer=sea), Agnès has been chosen by the city of Paris to develop aquaponic gardening as part of a plan to promote urban farming and innovative green spaces. In her above-ground garden, Agnès is tending three separate plant beds, each devoted to a different form or urban gardening, all thriving without soil. In a modular unit holding several small pots, kale, chives and basil take root among clay pebbles receiving a balanced flow of oxygen, nutrients and water. In one unit, plants receive mineral fertilizers (hydroponics), in another, organic (bioponics), and in the third (aquaponics), the fish provide the nourishment the plants need.

Using less water than traditional agriculture, with no need of soil, above-ground gardens of this type can be installed almost anywhere, even in a city apartment, and the ultimate goal, as in traditional truck gardens, is to give city dwellers access to fresh, locally grown produce. And that is Agnès Joly’s plan: to sell her fresh greens and herbs to Parisian restaurants, proving that aquaponics is a viable economic and ecological model of urban farming.

On a crisp autumn day, against a changing Parisian sky, Agnès tends her garden, one moment awash in sunlight, the next, darkened by threatening black clouds. A few steps away, in the same hillside park, the leaves turn red and orange on the vines of one of the city’s oldest vineyards, still producing Chardonnay grapes. Centuries ago, these vineyards belonged to one of the abbeys that farmed the hills above Paris, irrigating their crops with the water of nearby springs.

Wandering through my neighborhood, I come across vestiges of that long-ago time in street names: rue des Cascades (waterfalls), rue de la Mare (pond), or rue Savies, named after an underground spring first mentioned in a document dating back to the 11th century. It is one of many still surging from sources beneath the hill where I live. With fields and vineyards located far from the Seine, the monks understood the value of these springs and watched over them as carefully as they did their crops, building springhouses and stone trenches with descending steps to control the water’s flow.

They called each springhouse a “regard” because it was the place where monks could not only observe the workings of the source but also care for it. In rue des Cascades, a fine specimen still remains, a small building made from cut stone, with a sloped stone roof. Built in the early 17th century, known as “le regard Saint Martin,” it protects Savies spring, which flowed naturally from its source until 1986, when the construction of an apartment building got in the way.

On a recent walk I found the door open and got to step inside. A local historian, holding a gas lantern, showed us the steps along which the spring flows, thick with lime deposits. This is very hard water, neither good for boiling or working up a sudsy lather. For centuries, however, it served agriculture and industry in the section of Paris known as Belleville.

Leaving the “regard” behind, we climb stone steps, crossing a small wood. Somewhere among the trees another springhouse is hidden. In the woods, leaves are falling, some orange, some bright yellow. Not yet five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and already dusk is closing in…

In Paris too, autumn has finally arrived. This is the urban version, where we can come across a micro-farm or a springhouse hundreds of years old. With luck, we may see some bursts of fall color and, above our heads, the expanse of a magnificent autumn sky.

Hunting season underway in PA and in France

Throughout October, the Republican Herald has regularly printed articles about hunting and now that antlerless deer season is underway and turkey season about to begin, this seems the right moment for me to add one more, a look at hunting in France.

I'm a city-dweller and I've never hunted, though nothing says I might not like to give it a try. Last Sunday, throughout all of France, the National Federation of Hunters was looking for people like me. In Fontainebleau Forest, once the hunting ground of French kings, only forty miles from Paris, in the Jura Mountain and the Alps that form the border with Switzerland, along Atlantic and Mediterranean shores, members of local chapters welcomed all those wishing to learn more about what it means to be a hunter in France today.

In the Jura Mountains, among forests, mountains and fields that remind me of those of Schuylkill County, hunters welcomed non-hunters in a typically French way: the day began with coffee and croissants. Then, after having donned a blaze orange vest, participants were assigned a mentor, an experienced hunter, who, along with his dogs, accompanied them for a morning hike.

In a region where deer, roe deer, and wild boar are the favored game, hunters explained how they track their prey, using dogs to flush the animals while they wait, poised to shoot, posted in strategic spots.

After a morning spent outdoors, where participants also learned about small game, waterfowl and game birds, they finally got to sit down to a meal of local game and wines, offered by the hunters, a perfect finishing touch.

Last Sunday, all over France, many people had their first contact with hunting. Some will surely take the next step: they'll begin preparing for the national exam required to obtain a French hunting license, which to the eyes of a non-hunter like me, seems no easy task.

To start with, as in Pennsylvania, there's an application to fill out, followed by written notification of an exam date at an exam center in the region where the candidate resides. On the day of the exam, he or she will be tested on practice and theory, with emphasis placed on safety, physical ability and good common sense.

For example, candidates must climb over a fence or a ditch while carrying their (unloaded) arm. While in a simulated hunting situation, they must avoid shooting in the direction of hedges, which may hide homes, or in that of a human decoy dummy representing other hunters or hikers who share the same terrain.

In France, when transporting a firearm, it must be stored, unloaded, in a special case and the prospective hunter must show he has installed one in his vehicle. Most importantly, he must demonstrate he can shoot. Hunting rifle in hand, he has six chances to test his skills, as six clay disks are projected into the sky, with the added challenge that in one or two cases, he must also prove he knows when not to fire: at a red clay disk, representing a bird belonging to an endangered species, or at a disk flying into the air at the same moment a human decoy suddenly springs up. In either case, a shot means an immediate fail.

If he makes it through the skeet shoot, the candidate can move on to aim and fire at a moving ground target. Then, after having taken his rifle apart, unloading it and loading it again, he’ll sit down for the theoretical test, ten questions chosen from a list of 414 based on hunting safety, wild game and animal habitat.

To give an example, candidates are asked if a deer loses its antlers once a year, once every three years or never. I'm sure I don't have to tell Schuylkill County hunters the answer to that one. They may be shown the photo of the wing of a game bird, such as the partridge, and asked if it belongs to the hen or the cock. There are also questions that lead to an immediate fail, even if the candidate has already passed the practical exam, such as this true/false example: “It is legal to hunt with a compressed air rifle.” If the candidate answers 'true', it is an automatic out.

It seems to me this test requires a lot of preparation, a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge (I've read over all 414 questions!). I'm not sure how it compares to the one Pennsylvania hunters have to take, but I'm convinced safe hunting requires great skill and great respect for nature and for one's fellow hunter.

In fact, the National Federation of Hunters of France chooses to call hunting an "art," and in its charter, it lays out the values its members share: active participation in the conservation of nature; a willingness to interact with all those who enjoy contact with nature, including those who do not hunt; and an ongoing commitment to improving safety for hunters and non-hunters alike.

In the United States, the rules and regulations of hunting are established at state level, by state game commissions. In France, there is a national office of hunting and wild game (ONCFS). As on the site of the PA Game Commission, the French site provides practical information as well as access to the most recent legislation concerning hunting. There is also a link to each "département" in France, an administrative unit somewhere between a county and a state, where hunters can find the dates for hunting seasons in their region. They can also find accident reports for the last three years.

France has long been a country of hunters and many men and women continue to share that passion today. They have also kept alive traditions going back to the Middle Ages, such as hawking and "par force" hunting, where, before the kill, the prey is exhausted by a relay of dogs. Though painstakingly difficult to train, falcons and sparrowhawks are still used to hunt rabbits and small game birds.

In France, "par force" hunting can takes two forms: there is the fox hunt on horseback, much as it is practiced in England. There is also a literal "running with the hounds," where unarmed hunters run or ride mountain bikes, following a team of dogs. In this kind of hunting, where the goal is not to capture or kill, hunters, lead by first-class hunting dogs, are in it for the chase, which is only one letter away for the French word for hunting: la chasse.

And to all of you hunters or chasseurs, in Schuylkill County or in France, I wish happy hunting during the 2014-2015 season.

History of French village still speaks to us today

In September, I’ve had the chance to make the very best kind of Pottsville-Paris connection. I paid a visit to my sister Jane Graup who, for a month, has left Schuylkill County to take up residence in southwest France. She is living in Sorèze, a village located between the cities of Toulouse and Albi, in a region rich in wine, good food, beauty and history.

Sorèze sits at the foot of Montagne noire, Black Mountain, whose crest and slopes were inhabited from prehistoric times until the 13th century. The Romans, who settled in the region, recognized the strategic importance of the mountain and established on its crest an oppidum, an enclosed mountaintop fortress offering protection and a 360° view over the surrounding countryside. Early in the 13th century, the fortress was destroyed and the remaining population moved to the foot of the mountain, to the small village of Sorèze, clustered around a Benedictine Abbey founded in the 8th century.

All that happened long ago. Today Sorèze is a sleepy place where shutters are closed at dusk and the village streets, turned over to a pack of wild cats that insolently stare down the rare passer-by from atop municipal garbage cans. The village also has an elegant hotel with a vast park, housed in what was once a royal military academy. There is an elementary school, a pharmacy, three doctors, a very well-stocked supermarket, restaurants, cafés and, of course, bakeries where crusty baguettes are baked daily for the village’s 2,700 inhabitants.

On the whole, Sorèze seems a very pleasant place to live if you like to turn in early and rise at dawn, which, based on street noises, is what most people do. Early in the morning, they hurry alongside the imposing stone buildings of the royal academy and past the half-timbered façades of houses lining the narrow streets, stone and wood invested with hundreds of years of history.

Tourists with time to linger can stop to read commemorative plaques dedicated to village notables, a quaint version of local history. Or they can climb to the top of Black Mountain, where events eight centuries old still resonate today.

There they’ll find the ruins of the oppidum, destroyed at the beginning of the 13th century. At that time, southwest France was in turmoil, the explosive mix of religion and politics having led to war. Divided in two, France had a king in the north and, in the south, in a region known as Languedoc, many powerful and independent lords ruling over wealthy city-states. In the north, the king managed to subdue his vassals; in Languedoc, the aristocracy escaped his control. Embracing heretical beliefs, they also escaped the control of the Catholic Church.

One of those lords, the Count of Toulouse, refused to obey an emissary of the Pope sent to demand obedience to the Church’s teachings. The count was excommunicated. The papal emissary was murdered. In 1208, in response, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against this new kind of “infidel,” men and women who claimed to be Christian but who rejected the sacraments and the pomp of the Catholic Church. Once they became victims of persecution, residents of the rich cities of the South sought refuge in a string of mountain fortresses stretching across Languedoc, from the Rhone River west to the Pyrenees Mountains.

The crusaders sent to fight them received the same favors from the pope as those who had fought in the Holy Land. This time, they did not cross the sea to Jerusalem but set about destroying the mountain citadels, joining forces with powerful local bishops and archbishops, more warrior than priest.

In that way, the mountaintop fortress above Sorèze was reduced to rubble. With its high walls and its panoramic view, it had the potential to become a refuge for heretics seeking to flee the marauding crusaders, mostly barons from northern France.

While travelling with my sister, I was constantly reminded of this long ago conflict between the Catholic Church and a group of heretics desirous to return to a purer form of Christianity. Though today they are known as “Cathars,” a term derived from the Greek word for purity, they called themselves “good men” and “good women,” sometimes they simply called themselves “friends.” They had no churches or sacraments outside of the laying on of hands. And as they considered dying a liberation from the evils of this world, they resisted, literally, to the death.

Many Cathars were members of the aristocracy, many were protected by powerful lords and though the pretext for fighting was religion, politics played an equally important role. In 1226 the French King Louis VIII undertook a second crusade against the seemingly unconquerable heretics, meeting with partial success: the powerful cities of Languedoc fell under royal control.

In the end Church and King were victorious and this is still reflected in architecture and in the lay of the land. The city of Albi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, became a stronghold of an aggressive and triumphant Church. Both its massive archbishop’s palace and its cathedral, more fortress than church, attest to this. Nearby in the Pyrenees Mountains, many rocky peaks are crowned by the ruins of a fortress, once home to defiant heretics.

One of the last to fall was Montségur. In 1244, after a ten-month siege, 10,000 royal troops could finally claim victory against the 100 warriors and several hundred heretics who inhabited the citadel. Those who renounced their faith were spared. The more than 200 who did not were burned to death. Legend has it they willingly mounted their funeral pyre.

A century later, another crusade traversed France. This one, known as “the Shepherd’s Crusade,” was led by shepherds and vagrants who, in the name of their god, went on a rampage, killing Jews and destroying more than 100 Jewish communities in the South of France. Religious turmoil also marked the second half of the 16th century, when bloody conflicts divided French Catholics and Protestants during a series of eight religious wars.

While with my sister, checking the news, I read about modern warriors killing and destroying in the name of yet another god. Now as then, religion and politics do not mix. History has shown us, over and over again, what lethal partners they make. Meanwhile, I have the joy of my sister’s company as we eat, drink, and be merry, for we never know what tomorrow may hold…

'Highway 61 Revisted'

I’ve done a lot of driving on PA Route 61 in the past few weeks and I’ve probably had some experiences readers can identify with. I drove into a wrong lane, alive to tell the tale because there was no oncoming traffic, I missed the exits for some of the new jug handles and had to turn around in parking lots. I’ve had trucks from construction sites cross my path as if I weren’t even there, and of course, I’ve learned to slalom through the narrow corridors, some enclosed, some not, that make up the transition road between ‘old 61’ and the new improved highway everyone is hoping for.

I’m on vacation, visiting family and friends and probably, hopefully, in a year from now, the next time I visit, the new highway will be done. In the meanwhile, just like everybody else, I sit, motor idling, stuck in a traffic jam.

In some ways, believe it or not, I like it. Car-life, as I call it, is a novelty for me. In France I don’t own a car (though as readers know, I have a hard-earned driver’s licence). I take the crowded, smelly metro to work and instead of loading groceries into the trunk, I fill a personal shopping cart, a ‘caddie,’ that I wheel along the sidewalks between the supermarket and my home. Then I sling the handle of the caddie onto one shoulder and lug the thing up seven flights of stairs… Yes, car-life has definite appeal.

I’m someone who has had what you might call a chequered driving history. I didn’t get my first licence till I was 21, the age at which I also had my first accident, in the Penn State Schuylkill parking lot. Moving around, living in cities, I let my licence expire and had to take the test again in 1987, before I moved to France, where I found out my US licence was not valid. I did not get my French licence till 2011 and now I proudly possess two because, since 1987, I’ve kept my Pennsylvania licence up to date.

This summer, I’m getting used to driving. Perhaps it is my rental car, a black Impala, sporty and speedy, that has made me feel more confident. Perhaps it is the life I am living, the discoveries I am making, thanks to the freedom of being able to take to the road. In fact, not only am I revisiting ‘Highway 61’ (I thank Bob Dylan for the title), I’m getting to know Schuylkill County in an entirely different way.

I’ve gone south. I’ve moved to southern Schuylkill. I am living in the shadow of Hawk Mountain, not far from the banks of the Little Schuylkill and I feel like I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I have my own ‘little place’ (it’s bigger than my Paris apartment), I’m the summer resident of Summer Valley Guest House, operated by Carolyn and Gene Bonkoski, and I couldn’t ask for better hosts. Outside my bedroom window, I see green fields and trees and most days, I also see Charlie and Rio, the Bonkoski’s horses, who enjoy carrots, apples and watermelon rind as treats.

From the living room, I see the sun rise over Hawk Mountain and, thanks to my black Impala, I often go there to walk the mountain trails and sit at North Lookout, scanning the sky for hawks and eagles, catching glimpses of beautiful song birds as well. There, my sister and I spotted a scarlet tanager; along the Little Schuylkill, I’ve seen indigo buntings, gold finches, tufted titmice and catbirds.

Most of the year, I live in Paris. When I tell people, they exclaim at my good luck: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, all that beauty, all that culture at your disposal every day. They forget I also take the metro, go to work and carry my groceries up all those stairs: metro, boulot, dodo, as the French say: metro, work, and straight to bed. I wish I could take advantage of more of that beauty and culture. Just as I wish I could have more green…

In southern Schuylkill it surrounds me and I feel better, breathe better, even look better living in the midst of it. But as I write, rain is falling and outside, green leaves are shivering on the trees. Already there’s a hint of autumn in the air. The leaves will change color, they will fall, and inevitably winter will come. Perhaps I’d change my tune about my southern Schuylkill experience if I had to weather a Pennsylvania winter or two.

For the moment, I’m entranced. Travelling just a few miles to the other side of Route 61, I park my car at the new boat launch in Auburn and set out on the bike trail to its end, where I take a gravel road to the railroad tracks. I cross a bridge over the Schuylkill and then head down a path into the woods. Above my head, there is an abandoned railroad trestle. I walk beneath it. On the other side, there is a steep path that cuts up to a section of the Bartram Trail, that one day soon will continue from Pottsville all the way to Philadelphia.

I follow it for a stretch, stopping at a pond where I disturb a blue heron. It gracefully takes to the air, its image reflected, along with the surrounding pines, in the perfect stillness of the pool.

Soon I return to France, after a golden summer, one of the best and the calmest I’ve had in years. For that, I’ve also my two yoga teachers to thank, Beth Shields of Pottsville, and Pamela Gyory of Kempton. I discovered Pamela, her yoga classes, and her beautiful 'Forget-me-not' bed and breakfast, thanks again to my black Impala, that has carried me up and over Hawk Mountain, one of the most beautiful summertime drives around.

I used to live in the South of France, on the Riviera, to be exact, and in the summer, the coast highway, the final stretch of France’s legendary Nationale 7—the American equivalent would be Route 66—was one long string of cars crawling between Cannes and the Italian border. When it rained, the highway would flood in spots, as would the campgrounds located so close to the road that the drone of cicadas was drowned out by traffic noise.

The South of France or southern Schuylkill? For my summer vacation, I’ve made my choice…

George Catlin, coal-region painter, inventor of 'Indian Gallery' he took to Paris...

When I was a child, a favorite family excursion was a visit to the Reading Museum and its surrounding park, where my sisters and I liked to feed the ducks, throwing stale bread from the foot bridges into pretty shaded streams. We also wandered in the museum, in those days an old-fashioned kind of place, with yellowed walls and dimly lit displays.

Upstairs there was an art gallery, where I saw my first painting by the French painter Corot, a bank of willows dipping their branches into the River Seine, a small painting but powerful enough to awaken in me an early fascination with all things French.

Downstairs, behind glass, in display cases that filled the center of the gallery, sat or stood American Indians, as we called them in those days, life-sized mannequins in native dress, surrounded by the artefacts that were the tools of their daily life. Along the walls, there were displays of arrowheads, beads, pottery, coins, too many objects, all too small, to hold the interest of a child like me.

The museum was never crowded and this gallery was a quiet place, where the mannequins, frozen in time, indifferent to the faces pressed close to the glass, mournfully tended fires or raised an arrow in the direction of an invisible prey.

I haven’t visited the Reading Museum in many years and I do not know if those Indian mannequins still haunt the first-floor gallery, silent reminders of a way of life destroyed. Enclosed in glass, unreachable, untouchable, they are reminders of a time when such exhibits represented a kind of Noah’s ark, keeping alive the last vestiges of a dying civilization in the face of Manifest Destiny.

One man responsible for such exhibits was George Catlin, Wilkes Barre native, painter of native American life, explorer, ethnographer, entrepreneur and showman, originator of the type of display I saw at the Reading Museum as a child.

Born in 1796, raised in what was still the wilderness of the Wyoming Valley, where only twenty years earlier, a bloody battle had taken place between the Oneidas and American soldiers, George Catlin was raised on tales about the Indians that had once inhabited his family’s land. An avid hunter even as a child, he roamed fields and woods with his single-barrel shotgun, shooting at small game, hoping to one day bring down his first deer.

On one such outing, aiming at the coveted deer, the boy heard a shot before he had the time to fire and saw the deer fall to the ground. From the brush emerged an Indian who tied its feet together and threw it on his back, smiling at young Catlin before he disappeared among the trees.

The man, an Oneida who was camping near the Catlin farm, had walked all the way from Lake Cayuga, in New York state, to visit the ground where his ancestors had fallen in battle. After smoking a peace pipe with George’s father, he shared his venison with the family, congratulating young Catlin on his hunting skills.

Was it that incident, recorded by Catlin in his memoirs, that planted the seed, that gave him the fever, to go West, to live among the Indians, especially the Iowas and the Ojibwas, to record in vivid detail every aspect of their way of life? Destined by family tradition to be a lawyer, a gentleman farmer, a pillar of the community, responsible for the welfare of the growing city of Wilkes Barre, he gave it all up to study painting. Then, rather than paint the popular society portraits of his day, he devoted brush and palette to the feathers and war paint of the great warriors of the American plains.

When he was 32-years-old, in 1828, Catlin began defining the project that would become his “Indian Gallery,” a testimony to the native Americans among whom he lived while recording their lives. At that time, the idea of collecting Indian artefacts was not new. In fact, the US Department of Indian Affairs had an extensive collection and even invited Indians to Washington to perform native dances and display their skills.

Yet, the West remained a land of conquest and when Andrew Jackson entered the White House in 1828, collecting took a backseat to an upsurge in warfare. For Catlin, this became an opportunity to pursue a passion, born in childhood, that would continue to the end of his life. Through painting and collecting, he hoped to salvage the remnants of a slowing dying part of humanity.

A year later, he headed West, where he painted, collected, and befriended his subjects. After creating a substantial body of work, he returned East, joined by some of his Indian friends, hoping to solicit public interest in his living and artistic testimony, but the interest was just not there. At a time of aggressive westward expansion, Indians were the enemy and few Americans wanted to pay to see Catlin’s museum, the Indian Gallery.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, in London and Paris, Catlin found his public. In 1841, speaking in front of the Royal Institution in London, he proclaimed his desire to create a “museum of humanity,” devoted to all human races and animal species in decline. At Egyptian Hall, an immense exhibition space, he displayed his painting and his collections, while live Indians formed “frozen theatrical groups,” holding the same pose for hours.

Loading his collections, living and inanimate, on a boat, moving on to Paris, he took that city by storm, attracting the artistic and intellectual elite, impatient to rub elbows with the “savages,” hoping to catch a glimmer of the purity of primitive life.

Between 1839 and 1850, Catlin successfully travelled Europe with his “museum of humanity,” but then he went bust. When he had set out on his expedition, the word “museum” was still a kind of “catch-all” term, that took in circus sideshows, wax museums, exhibits of “living specimens,” as well as the serious art collections that were beginning to take form at the British Museum in London or at the Louvre. By the end of the decade, “serious” museums had won out and the European public had grown tired of Catlin’s travelling show, preferring universal expositions, like the World’s Fair that took place in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.

Catlin died penniless in 1872, still sketching Indian life, devoted to his Indian Gallery to the end. In 1879, his collections were saved from destruction by the Smithsonian Institute. Not until 2002, in Washington D.C., was there an exhibit worthy of Catlin’s work and of his mission to preserve the last vestiges of the cultures of the native American peoples he loved.

In France, everybody loves a cowboy…

My downstairs neighbor Thierry, who also happens to be my friend, is on the lookout for a Colt, a very specific Colt: he’s searching for “the Gun that won the West,” a Colt .45, the 4 ¾ single action model, with an ejector rod as long as the barrel. He has briefed me well on the subject, showing me photo after photo in a book he treasures, Colt, An American Legend, by R. L. Wilson, a coffee table book that has been translated into French.

As I write, I have in mind a model Thierry particularly admires, a gun that belonged to General George S. Patton. It’s a handsome piece of work with a finely engraved barrel and an ivory handle displaying a small medallion of a bucking colt, the sign that it’s the genuine article.

Thierry would settle for a wooden handle and he doesn’t need the engraving, but the day he holds an 1873 Colt in his hands, he’ll know he can die happy, having realized the dream of a lifetime. In fact, if he gets his hands on that Colt, he plans to carry it with him to the grave.

Thierry is a trained marksman and member of a gun club. He also served three years in the French Marines as a member of an artillery regiment. In the early 1980’s, he saw action in Chad during a civil war in that landlocked African country and, for his service, he received a medal for bravery. While in the Marines, he trained on 105mm howitzers abandoned by the Americans during the 1944 allied invasion of Normandy. In other words, he has experience with firearms and takes them seriously.

Sometimes Thierry invites me down for tea. During one of those visits, he showed me his .22 rifle and the medal he won using it in a 50-meter prone marksmanship competition. That was also the first time he showed me his book about Colts. I’ll admit that till that time, I’d never given much thought to firearms, and when I did, I thought about them as lethal weapons, associated with atrocities such as Columbine or Virginia Tech.

Listening to Thierry, looking at the photos, I recognized the Colt for what it is, a work of very fine craftsmanship and an artefact that played an important role in American history. For Thierry and for many Frenchmen, it is also the ultimate symbol of the American West.

Raised on westerns he watched on French TV, Thierry confided to me how much he regrets not having lived in the days of “How the West was won.” He would have loved to cross those wide-open spaces on horseback, his Colt pistol in its tooled leather holster, his Colt rifle attached to the saddle of his mustang. He and millions of other Frenchmen feel that way…

That’s why they flock to Disneyland Paris, where, months in advance, they reserve their seats for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” with Mickey and his friends. There, after drinks at Doc Cody’s Saloon, visitors to the park settle down for a real Texan meal of spareribs and baked potatoes served up in a cast-iron frying pan.

And once they’ve put on their souvenir cowboy hats, the show can begin: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, the Rough Riders, Sitting Bull, with Mickey, Minnie and Goofy (called “Dingo” in French), thrown in for the Disney touch. For nearly two hours, they shoot, ride, hunt, and dance around the campfire, recreating the Far West for an audience of Europeans hungry for the wilderness the way Americans might feel hungry for medieval castles or ancient Roman ruins.

Just one week ago, I had the opportunity to observe that hunger myself, standing in a long line at Quai Branly Museum, the museum of indigenous cultures and civilizations, to see an exhibit devoted to the Indians of the Great Plains. The show was packed and entire families crowded around displays of feathered war bonnets, beaded baby carriers, hide shirts and jackets, tomahawks and peace pipes.

There was even an extravagantly beaded hide jacked worn by Buffalo Bill himself, an iconic name to the French, the man who brought the American frontier home to them. In 1889, he was in Paris with his Wild West Show for the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower and the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He returned again in 1905 for a two-month run in Paris, followed by a six-month tour of the rest of France. Back again in 1906, France was the first stop on his final European tour that took him all the way to Ukraine.

Yet, Buffalo Bill was not the first American to tantalize Europeans with the call of the Far West. The very first American to bring his “Indian Gallery” to Europe was a man who hailed, not from the Black Hills of South Dakota, but from the black hills of anthracite. Born in 1796 in Wilkes Barre, raised on a farm in the Wyoming Valley, George Catlin grew up to become one of America’s greatest observers and recorders of Native American life. A true child of the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, he is also responsible for one of the most fascinating Paris-Pennsylvania connections ever made.

Painting of Catlin by William Fisk (1849)

At a time when his accomplishments as painter, ethnographer, and naturalist went unrecognized in the United States, Catlin was being celebrated throughout Europe and especially in France. In 1845, during a triumphant tour of his Indian Gallery, he was received by King Louis Philippe, who commissioned fourteen paintings of Indian life for the historical museum of Versailles. The painter Delacroix visited the Gallery to make sketches and the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud were inspired by his work.

White Cloud, head chief of the Iowa (1844-45)

Back home, the US Congress refused to invest in Catlin’s paintings or expeditions because the government considered him hostile to its Indian policy and too sympathetic to his Indian subjects and their way of life. Not all Americans, however, felt that way. In 1852, when Catlin set off to South America to paint, his expedition received the support of none other than Sam Colt himself…

Which brings me full circle to the point where this article began: Thierry and his Colt. In any readers have any ideas, suggestions, or 1873 Colts to sell, I’ll put you in touch with my downstairs neighbor. As for George Catlin, I’ll get back to him next month. This Pennsylvanian who joined East and West deserves an article all his own.

In Rome or in Pottsville, the past is all around us

My mother’s house in Pottsville sat atop the southern tip of the Mammoth Vein, one of the richest deposits of anthracite coal in the world, one of the most twisted and tortuous as well. As children, we played in the woods behind our home, scuffing our sneakers on outcrops of shiny black coal that we “mined” with sticks and stones. Coal was there for the taking, at the surface of the earth, and we played with it the way other children play with sand at the ocean’s edge.

The front windows of my mother’s home looked out on Sharp Mountain, where, in the mid-19th century, outcrops of coal lured ambitious entrepreneurs into believing that all they had to do was scratch the surface to tap into rich veins of anthracite. They tried it and soon came up against rock and shale.

When she sat in her bedroom at the back of the house, my mother could see all the way to the crest of Broad Mountain. Through the trees, she saw a row of houses in York Farm, once company housing for miners. Further north, she could make out the contours of a strip mine. On the clearest of days, the co-gens lining the crest of Broad Mountain sent up visible signals of smoke and ash.

My mother died when she was 91 years old. When she was younger, in the autumn, when Schuylkill County foliage was at its peak of beauty, she liked to hike to the water tanks on Sharp Mountain and look out over the Indian Run reservoir. In a little book I have in my apartment in Paris, The History of Schuylkill County, published in 1950 by the Pottsville School District, I read that Indian Run Valley was where “Indians sought shelter after carrying out attacks.”

Seated in her home, looking out its windows or walking nearby, my mother took in a limited territory, but in terms of time, her gaze could span millions of years. Beneath her house and on the slopes of Sharp Mountain exist visible, tangible signs of geographic activity that began over 300 million years ago, during the Pennsylvanian stage of the Carboniferous period, which marked the beginnings of the slow birth of anthracite.

In terms of time that our minds can grasp, Indian Run carries us back to the French and Indian War in the mid-18th century, when British troops, stationed at Fort Lebanon, pursued Native Americans to a stream in Indian Run Valley. Arriving too late, they found campfires still burning, but the warriors had eluded them.

Closer still to home in time and space, at the York Farm Colliery in 1892, a mine-gas explosion left fifteen miners dead. One of those killed was named Chris Honicker. I wonder if he is a distant relative of mine.

At this point readers may be asking themselves why, sitting in my Parisian apartment, I am busy digging up Schuylkill County’s past. The answer is that I’ve just been to Rome, where the past is everywhere, a part of everyday life, a part of the present, impossible to overlook or to forget.

Of course, there is all the resplendent glory of ancient Rome and of the Renaissance, coexisting in perfect harmony atop the Capitoline Hill at the city’s heart. There, Renaissance palaces flank a piazza designed by Michelangelo, and a 12th-century church supposedly marks the spot where a sibyl announced to Caesar Augustus the coming of Christ. Quite modest in size but enormously significant to the history of Rome, the Capitoline she-wolf, which may date back to the 5th century BC, looks down on the crowds as she suckles Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.

And that’s just one hill, one small hill in a city that includes seven, none remarkable in size, but each one a veritable Everest in terms of its multilayered history. Above the red-tiled rooftops of Rome, atop Vatican Hill, the dome of Saint Peter’s, another creation of Michelangelo, dominates the skyline and the history of the Catholic Church.

On the Palantine Hill are the ruins of the magnificent palaces of Augustus Caesar and his wife Livia, overlooking the Circus Maximus, where chariot races were once run. In her dowry, Livia brought to Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, a beautiful summer palace to the north of Rome. In the National Roman Museum, you can still visit one of its rooms, a painted garden, where frescoes more than 2,000-years old are as fresh and alive as if they were painted yesterday.

Roman hills also enclose underground treasures. On Celio Hill, across from the regal ruins of the Palantine, you can travel down a staircase to visit the homes of ordinary Romans alive in Caesar Augustus’ time. Above ground, not far from a major hospital and crowded city streets, chickens cluck and scratch the ground while sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order to which Mother Teresa belonged, tend their vegetable garden and prune fruit trees.

There are also less glorious hills, not counted among the traditional seven, such as Testaccio to the south of Rome. Its names refers to “testae,” which are shards of pottery, the material of which the hill is composed. Here is where ancient Romans tossed their unwanted earthenware jars. Later, it became the city’s meatpacking district and today the former slaughter houses have been turned into a museum of contemporary art.

Wandering through the streets of Rome, one day I almost literally tripped over a ruin, some ancient stone jutting out from the side of a building, and everywhere, even in the most modern neighborhoods, I came up against Roman columns, walls and statues that artfully blend in with the new.

In Rome there’s no tearing down the past. You simply build around it, which may be why it took sixteen years to construct one line of the Roman metro—new archaeological finds were always slowing down the works.

Rome is not an easy city. It is crowded and noisy, just like cities everywhere yet it is also different, perhaps because the present has not forgotten the past. It’s not like Paris, where the past has been turned into a monument, solemn and imposing, nor like many places in the United States, where too often it has simply been torn down.

In Rome, the past is a companion, a wise counsellor. It does not haunt its citizens, as a forgotten past often does. It inhabits them, enriching their lives, a friendly spirit that reminds them that the ground on which we walk, always and everywhere, resonates with history.

Easter 1914

I read it in The Republican Herald in the column “Days Gone By” : April 7, 1914, Herman Straub returned to Pottsville at the end of two years of working at “the greatest job the world has known,” the construction of the Panama Canal.

Herman made it home just in time for Easter, celebrated on April 12th that year. Perhaps on that day, he and his wife strolled along Centre Street, participating in the Easter Parade. If by chance they did, Madam was most likely wearing a “hobbie skirt,” wide at the hips and so narrow at the ankles she could only take mincing steps. Straw bonnets decorated with artificial flowers were popular that year. Perhaps she was wearing one of those too.

Across the ocean, in Paris, women hobbled along in high heels, wearing the same ankle-pinching skirts. On their heads, they sported extravagant creations, turbans topped with erect, high-reaching plumes, hats with wide triangular brims, cloches fitted with a “Turkish veil” that covered the chin, mouth and nose in order to set off a pair of enticing eyes.

Men’s fashions, on both sides of the Atlantic, remained conservative and dark. At a time when men were busy changing the world, they surely had little time to think about clothes. Some, like Mr. Straub, were off building the Panama Canal; in and around Paris, many were working in the automobile industry. At that time, Paris was the world’s “Motor City,” and in 1914, there were more than 600 car manufacturers in France.

One year earlier, a Frenchman driving a Peugeot had won the Indianapolis 500. Still in that year, a Frenchman was the first to fly from Europe to Africa across the Mediterranean Sea. Those triumphs were broadcast on radio beamed from the top of the Eiffel Tower or seen in newsreels projected on the silver screen of Gaumont Palace in Paris, the biggest movie theater in the world.

In 1914 change was everywhere and things were happening almost too fast, prompting the French poet Charles Péguy to write, “The world has changed more in the last 30 years than in all the time since Jesus Christ.” By the end of that year, at age 41, he was dead.

On August 15, 1914, the first cargo ship sailed through the Panama Canal. Two weeks earlier, on July 28th, the Great War began. Between then and November 11, 1918, it took the lives of 9 million soldiers. The poet Charles Péguy was among the first to fall, killed by a bullet at the Battle of Ourcq on September 5, 1914.

World War I is much on my mind these days as everywhere in France commemorations of the “Great War” are taking place. There are so many exhibits that it would take an entire year to visit them all (to get an idea of the wealth of events, consult http://centenaire.org/en). On TV, there are documentaries to watch, and once July roles around, there were be official ceremonies galore.

Of course, these events interest me but on April 11th, I had the unique experience of participating in one of these commemorations myself. I took part in an opera, a sound collage, a work of experimental music, based on what is called “verbal notation,” a musical score built of words and not of notes.

To participate, there is no need to play a musical instrument or to “read music” in the traditional sense. All you need to know is how to read—and to listen with heart and mind. If you possess those skills, then you can play a role.

This experimental work, “A Great War,” is composed of music, sounds, images and words all belonging to the period of World War I. Its composer, Joseph Kudirka, came from the US to France, where, as the guest of my university, he explained to us how to become a part of his work.

We—a professional pianist, two video artists, three professors from the English department, and three students from the music department, each a musician as well, listened and understood: we would be playing a creative role, improvising as we interacted with a “sound base,” the composer’s montage of songs, voices and gravelly silences all originating in the period of World War I.

Before our first meeting a week before the performance, we had all collected our materials. One of my colleagues chose advertisements: stimulants to keep soldiers healthy in the trenches, alcohol to keep them warm, and, as the war progresses, artificial limbs to replace those they’ve lost. Another chose American patents: a new and improved brassiere, a garbage disposal system, and (remember the Lusitania!) an idea for camouflaging ships at sea.

There were poems by the French poet Apollinaire and texts in Greek, Flemish and Russian I couldn’t tell you anything about. There was also a ukulele rendition of “When this lousy war is over.” I chose poems written in the trenches by the Italian poet Ungaretti and poems in German, wanting to “commemorate” those two languages of the war.

At rehearsals, we all sat down. Through the horns of two gramophones from the war period came a faraway, trembling voice singing “I’ll take you home again Kathleen,” a 1914 recording. We listened and then we spoke, reciting the words we had chosen, together, alone, in swells, accompanied at times by the piano, while behind us flashed images, not necessarily of the war, but of those times. Sometimes we sat in silence and the only sound was the hissing of white noise.

By the night of the performance, we had learned to listen to each other and to the sounds around us. And we had learned to pace ourselves to the composer’s composition of sounds. Then the lights went down and for one hour, we were in the spotlight, using sound, music, image and movement, to recreate “A Great War.”

And it worked. It brought home to us all, audience and performers alike, the density of time and the paradoxes of war. In 1914, during the long weeks of the First Battle of the Marne, Americans were crowding into movie theaters to watch Charlie Chaplin and the “Perils of Pauline.” They were listening to the first recordings of calypso music, and blues and jazz were outpacing ragtime. America was isolationist and little did Americans imagine that a few days before Easter 1917, they too would be entering that war.

Easter 1914. I wonder if elegant Parisians strolling along the Champs Elysées had an inkling that a long and bloody world war was just around the corner.