"High tech" then and now: Julia Margaret Cameron and the art of photography

Christmas is over, the gifts have been opened, the wrapping paper thrown in the trash. I’m ready to bet that some readers got a new tablet or pad, a new smartphone or some other electronic device. If Santa was feeling less generous, or if you were not so very good, you may have only received a selfie stick or a case for your cell phone.

For those readers who spent Christmas day surrounded by grandchildren, I invite you to think back to Christmas fifty years ago. That year too, there was a “high-tech” gift on many wish lists. We were hoping for a Polaroid Swinger, an instant camera that squeezed out, in a minute flat, the photo we just snapped.

I was one of the lucky ones, I found a Swinger under the Christmas tree that year, and my sisters and I spent our Christmas day snapping our recently acquired poodle, the first dog we’d ever had.

The photos were small, bad and fascinating. Sometimes they were streaky, sometimes sprinkled with white spots, or only partially developed, leaving half the photo blank, looking as if it had been ripped in two. Also, there was that distinctive chemical smell and often, if we were too hasty in handling our photo, we left the smudge of our fingertips.

My father had a small motion-picture camera, we also had a Kodak Brownie, but the camera my sisters and I loved best was the Swinger because using it, we felt in control and got instant results.

As I write, if I turn my head, I see a group of adolescents in the street below. They’re taking group selfies. No sooner is the photo snapped, they crowd together to see the result. I’m not sure they’d have the patience to wait the minute it used to take for the Swinger to place a finished photo in our hands.

Fifty years ago, we “met” the Swinger (some of you may remember the ad with Ali McGraw and the $19.95 price tag). If we go back one hundred years more, we arrive at a period when photography was an extremely demanding craft and an emerging art form.

In early December, while in England to visit a friend, this was brought home to me in an “electrifying and delightful way” (to use the words of the photographer whose work I went to see) at an exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the British museum of art and design. The photographer is Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the 19th century’s greatest and among the first to understand that photography is art.

Julia Margaret Cameron, who was born in Calcutta, was introduced to the very new process of photography in 1842 by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel when they met in South Africa, where Herschel was surveying the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Cameron became interested in the process and followed its developments, but it was not until 1863 that she received her first camera.

Two years later, this extraordinary woman, whose enthusiasm for photography was equaled only by the confidence she placed in herself and her art, had her first “one-woman” show in the South Kensington Museum, later renamed the Victoria & Albert. In 1868, the museum’s director assigned her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, making her the museum’s first “artist-in-residence.”

Cameron photographed many of the greats of her day, her friend the astronomer Herschel, Charles Darwin, and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbor on the Isle of Wight, where she and her husband settled upon their return from India.

On that island off the south coast of England, Cameron began her first experiments, taking pictures of her famous neighbor, but also of island children, her family and her maids.

From the start, Cameron conceived of her work as art and sought to “combine the real and the Ideal.” She did not document events, as did her American contemporary Mathew Brady. On the other side of the Atlantic, he was revolutionizing photography in his way as he created the profession of photojournalist through his documentation of the bloody reality of the Civil War.

Cameron preferred historical, allegorical or biblical scenes. She composed her photographs as if they were paintings. In fact, her series of portraits of Virgin and Child are inspired by the Renaissance masterpieces of Raphael. Her photographs also illustrated some of Tennyson’s narrative poems, such as his retelling of the tale of King Arthur.

Yet, Cameron’s particular genius does not concern what she chose to photograph. Her innovations were technical and in her day, she was criticized for her unconventional techniques. In one article, I could never do them justice nor would I know how to explain them well. However, to give readers an idea of what it meant to take a photo in those days, I include this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eastman/sfeature/wetplate_step1.html

On this PBS site, you can learn the eight steps of the collodion process of photography that used wet glass plates the same size as the final print. Cameron’s photographs are quite large, meaning she used fragile glass plates of the same size, coating them with several substances before finally producing a photograph. To arrive at a final print, patience, knowledge of chemistry, and some luck were involved.

Often, the final result contained “flaws.” Cameron’s genius was to recognize them as art. The substances coating the plate often turned into swirls or smears in the print. Scratches might also appear; there could even be the smudge of a fingertip. For Cameron, they were part of the process and an ingredient of her art.

In the end, each of her photos was a “hand-made” object, a print containing the imprint of the artist’s unique personality.

Pottsville photographer George Bretz used the same process as Cameron when in 1884, he was hired by the Smithsonian Institute to document the Kohinoor Mine at the Shenandoah Colliery. His were the first photo shoots underground and his photos, the first of the underground workings of a mine, opening a new era in mine photography.

How many of us today would have the patience to work like Cameron or Bretz? Their techniques belong to the past; their patience may as well—something to think about in 2016.

On that note, I wish all my readers a happy, healthy new year. I look forward to “meeting” you again in 2016 for our seventh year together.

Being thankful at Thanksgiving

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday but one I have not celebrated for years. That day, I got up, got dressed, and went out. I went down into the metro, changed trains twice, and rode to the last stop of line 13, Saint-Denis Université.

The trains were crowded, as usual, especially on the line 13, where we travelled cheek-to-cheek. I looked around me, sizing up the other passengers, and noticed they were doing the same.

Since November 13th, we’re on edge when we’re trapped underground in trains or crowded corridors. Nearly every day, sometimes more than once a day, there are announcements on the information panels in every metro station: colis suspect, suspicious package, traffic slowed or stopped on one of the system’s 16 lines or on one of the several train routes that link the suburbs to the capital. So far, so good, no “suspicious package” has been anything more than that.

Yes, trains remain crowded because most of us have no choice. We cannot do without the metro to get to work. Yet there is definitely more traffic above ground. When I stand at the bus stop near my home, I watch the cars go by and, in many, notice a woman at the wheel, alone. On the Monday following the Friday the 13th attack, there were record traffic jams in and around Paris.

I’ve talked with my students about the “event” that has changed our lives, especially as the university where we work and study, Université Paris 8, is located in Saint-Denis, the town where the police tracked and killed three terrorists involved in the November 13th attacks. On November 18th, the day of the police raid on the terrorist hideout, the university was closed. The next day, we were all back at work.

As for my students, I am impressed by their courage and their ability to “be themselves.” In class, we talked and laughed. Some students spoke of their experiences. A young man was in attendance at the soccer match between the national teams of France and Germany on November 13th. He heard the explosions but, with all the other spectators, stayed till the end of the match. This same student had been at a concert at the Bataclan Theater the night before the attacks. Students emphasized this is a place where they like to go, underlining that, this time, terrorists targeted the young.

A young woman told us she went shopping in Paris the day the university was closed. While in a woman’s clothing boutique, she saw the police arrive and they told everyone to stay inside: another “colis suspect,” this one in the street outside the shop. True to the calm fortitude of all my students, she kept her cool and comforted others, more surprised than anything else by the reactions of the women around her: they cried, sobbed and made desperate phone calls to their families.

This young woman, French with family roots in Algeria, told us another story. During Algeria’s civil war in the 1990’s, with its official death toll of 150,000, civilians for the most part, her uncle set out to pay a visit to friends. When he knocked on their door, no one answered. He was expected, so he turned the knob and stepped inside to discover the entire family, husband, wife and children, dead in a pool of blood.

There are other stories like that in Yasmine’s family, which may help explain why she remained calm and provided comfort to others during the brief half-hour she spent as a prisoner of a clothing boutique.

If my students remain strong in the face of the great uncertainty facing us here in Paris (will there be another attack, where, when, who will be the victims?), it may be that they feel thankful to be alive, capable of enjoying life, simply getting on with it. As I look out at my class, I see young French men and women; at the same time I see the world.

I have students whose parents were born in Mali or Senegal, the Republic of the Congo or Cameroon, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Thailand or China; within Europe, in Croatia, Serbia or Macedonia, Portugal or Spain. Many are Muslim, a few are Jewish, there are evangelical Christians and Catholics, and also atheists and agnostics, of which there are many in France.

In recent weeks, US presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for closing down mosques and for creating national identity cards indicating a citizen’s religious affiliation (we all know who is being targeted here). Based on my students’ family names, I would say many of them are probably Muslim, but the students themselves are typical French young people, eager to learn and live life to the fullest.

Should they—or their American counterparts—be stigmatized for their religion? It is neither the French nor the American way.

Since November 13, 2015, France’s “Black Friday” (I’ll admit, I’ve always hated the name of that buying frenzy that immediately follows America’s only official holiday that resists being commercialized), France has been controlling its borders and encouraging other European countries to put in place stricter controls by the end of the year.

Some, such as Serbia and Macedonia, have taken the lead. As refugees continue to flow into Europe, those two countries are allowing only Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians to pass.

These past few days, I’ve been asking myself, “what about us?”—what about us Parisians? Who would take us in if we had to flee?

Perhaps we could turn to Lebanon. This multi-confessional country, where Christians, Muslims and some Jews live together, all be it with some difficulty, will have taken in almost 2 million Syrian refugees by the end of 2015, a third of its total population. For France, this would be the equivalent of 22 million, for the US, over 100 million!

This small country houses its refugees and does its best to place all refugee children in schools, where they share classrooms with Lebanese children. The generosity of its citizens, of all confessions, has been exemplary and we could all learn a lot from them.

For me, this year on Thanksgiving, there was no turkey, no stuffing, no pumpkin pie, but I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the religious freedom that exists in the France and the US. I’m thankful for the delicious fresh food and bread I eat every day. Mostly, I’m thankful to be alive.

Marc Chagall - The Triumph of Music "burns like the sun"

Winter has descended early on Paris, a leaden sky blocking out the sun, enclosing us in a world of damp and cold. A fine drizzle hangs in the air, sidewalks are gritty with rain and soot. This morning at my neighborhood outdoor market, the butcher told me he could smell snow in the air.

To escape the six months of cold and damp that have settled in, we Parisians have different options: a privileged few can head south to the Mediterranean; the rest of us root out winter coats and woolen scarves.

In my case, last Friday, dressed in a down jacket, umbrella in hand, I stepped outside, headed down a steep hill and walked to the eastern limit of my neighborhood, home to the new Paris Philharmonic, inaugurated in January 2015.

At first glance, this imposing structure hardly resembles a source of relief from gloom. Seen from afar, it looks like a giant, molten German steel helmet fallen from the sky. Up close, well, it still looks like a German steel helmet, but flocks of birds, some plunging, some swooping upwards, emerge from the façade. They are there, obviously, to symbolize music, but they remind me a bit of Hitchcock’s film “The Birds.”

Happily, hidden beneath this mass of metal, beneath the lip of an immense balcony at the level of the concert hall, there is an exhibition space and within that space, there is light, color, music, love and joy. In a word, there is Chagall.

From October 13 until January 31st, 2016, the Paris Philharmonic is presenting the exhibit “Marc Chagall, The Triumph of Music.”

Chagall, who lived to be 98, dying at the end of a normal workday spent in his studio, experienced the major upheavals and horrors of the 20th century. Born in 1887 in Vitebsk, a city in today’s Belarus and at that time a part of the Russian Empire, Chagall, raised in a family of Hassidic Jews, went on to become a citizen of the world.

He studied painting in Saint Petersburg, painted in Paris, Berlin, Mexico and New York, where he fled to escape Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and finally returned to Europe. In the South of France, he captured that region’s vibrant, radiant color in all his works: paintings, drawings, collages, book illustrations, costumes, stage settings, a painting for the foyer of the Frankfurt Opera, the ceiling of Opera Garnier in Paris, monumental panels for the Met in New York.

At the Philharmonic exhibit, the place of honor is given to Chagall’s work for the theater, beginning with the monumental ceiling he was commissioned to paint for the Paris Opera in 1963. This 220 m² circular work, which it took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete, is a celebration of operatic music, where figures of opera and ballet circle high above theater-goers’ heads.

At the exhibit, these figures are brought “down to our level” thanks to a projection created by the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. We can see the details of Chagall’s depiction of Carmen, the ballerinas of Swan Lake, or the painter himself, palette in hand, the maestro of this vast scenic opera.

Impressive as this projection may be, with its musical accompaniment corresponding to the details of the 14 operas and ballets Chagall represented, it is not nearly as interesting as the preparatory work on view.

In drawings, paintings and collages, we discover how Chagall worked: how he began with swatches of bright color, how figures and themes emerged, how affinities were created, and finally, how all the details of his composition resonate together. Through the shock of color and visual rhythm, this painter-composer builds a bridge between music, color and form.

We can also see Chagall at work, thank to Izis, a Franco-Lithuanian photographer who followed the unfolding of his work for the Paris and New York Operas. Crouched on his knees, brush in hand, how small the artist looks, yet at no time do we lose sight of the enormous creative vitality that inhabited Marc Chagall all his life.

The exhibit follows a reverse chronological order, beginning with the decors for the Paris and New York operas in the 1960’s, ending with the artist’s work for the Moscow State Jewish Theater soon after its creation in 1919. After discovering the monumental decors, we participate in the creation of the costumes and stage sets Chagall created for operas and ballets.

For a 1967 production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Met, the costumes are wonderfully inventive, each one a work of art in itself, an integral part of the characters’ story, a complement to their voice and song. And once again, we get to see preparatory sketches to better understand how Chagall’s work emerged.

We can also view black-and-white videos of the 1967 production. In this case, the absence of color brought home to me the artist’s brilliant capacity to merge with Mozart’s music and totally inhabit the theater with his work.

From the start, in all media, music triumphs in Marc Chagall’s creations. We see this in his settings and costumes for Stravinsky’s “Firebird” at the Met in 1945 or for the ballet “Aleko,” based on the music of Tchaikovsky, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942. Of the stage settings for this production, Chagall’s wife Bella wrote, “Chagall’s decors burn like the sun in the heavens.”

In the panels he painted in 1920 for the Moscow State Jewish Theater, Chagall melds tradition and the avant-garde, celebrating the joy of the Hassidic music and dance of his youth while using cubist forms and experimenting with color.

I first discovered Chagall’s work as an adolescent, in all places, on the street where I lived. Our neighbor was Mr. Sol Wolf, an avid collector of modern Jewish art, with a fine collection in his home. Mr. Wolf and his wife Dorothy took me to art exhibits, lent me art books and introduced me to the enormous pleasure of enjoying art at home. They also introduced me to Chagall.

At the Philharmonic, I discovered him as never before, an artist full of life, love and joy, whose work blazes even on the darkest of Parisian days.

Migration and Immigration, US and Europe, then and now

When I was a child, my mother took my two sisters and me to Sunday School every Sunday at the United Church of Christ in Pottsville. We all sang in the children’s choir and we loved our choir director, Mrs. Dorothy Loy.

Not only did we sing each week during the Sunday School service and once a month in the main sanctuary, we put on a yearly extravaganza, a performance somewhere between a Broadway show and a sing-along around the campfire. We sold tickets to the show and played to a packed house, using the proceeds to pay for choir outings to Washington, D.C. or, most memorably, the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

I remember singing “Umiak Kayak, Mukluk, Tupik,” a song of “Eskimo words,” and “Second-hand Rose,” a 1921 Ziegfeld Follies hit popularized by Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl.”

We also sang Irving Berlin’s musical rendition of “The New Colossus,” the 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

As children, we were very moved by that song. It swells like a wave, constantly gaining in force, but then, almost miraculously, breaks gently on a welcoming shore. Lady Liberty gathers in her children and protects them from the storm.

Emma Lazarus’s poem was engraved on the statue’s base in 1903. One year earlier, during “the Great Strike of 1902” that lasted 163 days and affected the entire anthracite region, newly arrived immigrants were transported directly from Ellis Island to the mines. Escorted by the Coal and Iron Police, these men who spoke no English went to work as “scabs,” which earned them the lasting hatred of their new neighbors, striking miners fighting for a better life.

A few years earlier, on September 10, 1897, in Lattimer, PA, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian immigrants organized a protest against unfair working conditions in mines near Hazleton. By the end of that day, nineteen of them were dead, shot by members of the Pennsylvania State Militia.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, thus went the life of immigrants. And for many, Lady Liberty’s promise went unfulfilled.

In 1924, President Coolidge signed the National Origins Act, the United States’ first comprehensive immigration law whose goal was the preservation of “national homogeneity.” Already in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese immigration, but the new law of 1924 created numerical limitations for all countries and set up a racial and national hierarchy. In other words, severe limitations were placed on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Africa. Asians and Arabs were denied citizenship.

Not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, did most measures of the 1924 law become obsolete.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new and powerful symbol of America’s relationship to the “huddled masses” entered into competition with the legendary image of Lady Liberty lifting her lamp. The United States-Mexico border wall has cast a shadow on this monument to freedom and a welcoming democracy.

The European Union has also been busy putting up walls and the most recent began to rise in July 2015 when Hungary undertook the construction of a fence along its border with Serbia. So far, it has not stopped the flow of refugees from Syria, Eritrea, Iraq or Afghanistan, but this wall has become a symbol of the deep divisions among the 28 members of the European Union during what is the world’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

To summarize some of the important events of the past month, on September 7th, Germany pledged over 6 billion dollars for the cost and care of the 800,000 refugees the country expects to receive by the end of 2015; yet on September 14th, it reinstated border controls, abolished within the EU by the Schengen Agreement of 1995. Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands soon followed suit.

Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia have voiced a preference for Christian refugees, whereas Hungary has begun denying all asylum requests.

France has pledged to accept 24,000 refugees this year, but this quota is not being filled. Refugees prefer Germany or Sweden to France, “the country of human rights,” which inscribed the right to asylum in its Constitution of 1793.

Rumors travel fast in today’s world, even among refugees. France has become identified with dirty and dangerous refugee camps, too much unemployment, too much bureaucracy, and a nationalist far-right party, the National Front, whose power and influence is on the rise.

As for how France sees itself, I’d say the nation is anxious and doubtful about its identity and place in the world.

Many of the French fear their country cannot afford to welcome thousands of refugees. With the largest Muslim population of all of Europe, estimated at around 6 million, they also fear that more Muslims would pose a permanent threat to French identity. And with a large population of citizens and legal residents who are unemployed, some who are homeless or living in substandard housing, voices are being raised to ask why the country is not taking care of its own first.

Putting into practice what some EU nations have stated as a preference, the mayors of the French cities of Belfort and Roanne have publicly announced their intention to accept only Christian refugees.

As the migration crisis is taking on the tone of a religious conflict, I’d like to conclude with the thoughts of some experts in the field:

Pope Francis has chosen as his mission to build bridges where there are walls. World leaders, please take note.

Former Pope Benedict XVI provides a clear definition of refugees: “All migrants are human beings who possess fundamental and inalienable rights that must be respected by all and at all times.”

He also reminds us that Islamism is not Islam: “Religion is disfigured when put in the service of ignorance, prejudice, violence, scorn and abuse. In such cases, we observe not only a perversion of religion, but corruption of human freedom, a narrowing and blinding of the spirit,” adding that “such an outcome can be prevented.”

As for Jesus, he would feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and invite the stranger into his home.

It has never been easy to be a migrant. Nor is it easy to welcome the stranger with open arms: a difficult challenge and food for thought in these challenging times.

“Days Gone By” in Sicily

I started reading The Republican Herald soon after I learned to read. Back in those days, it was still The Pottsville Republican and it arrived in the late afternoon, just in time for a quick read before the evening meal. “The Republican” was part of our family and in my mother’s 91 years of life, there was hardly a day she did not hold “the paper” in her hands.

As a young reader, I skipped the long articles on the front page. Instead, I immediately turned to the editorial page, where I found “this day in history,” which provided me with my first lessons in historical chronology.

Next I turned to my favorite column, “Days Gone By,” events that, for the most part, took place in the region 100, 75, 50 or 25 years ago. I was a little girl, not yet ten years old, and I had to make a considerable mental leap to travel so far back in time.

Even 25 years required effort. The entries were about soldiers coming and going from a terrible war, followed by the war’s end and the soldiers’ return home. 1970 marked the 25th anniversary of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. My father was in a boat off the coast of Japan when the first atomic bomb dropped, but that event seemed as distant to me as Noah and the Flood.

Travelling 100 years back in time was harder still. I had to cross from one century to another, to another war, one that took place close to home. My father, a Civil War buff, took us to Gettysburg and Antietam, where I learned the blood flowed ankle-deep.

At Gettysburg, we climbed Little Round Top. I even have a vague memory of laying eyes on the last Civil War veteran alive, a decrepit old man shrunken to the size of a boy, dressed in an over-sized Union uniform, slumped in a wheelchair.

Over fifty thousand soldiers died at the Battle of Gettysburg, yet there was only one civilian death. We visited the modest house where it took place. Reaching out a hand, touching the table where Jennie Wade was kneading bread when a stray bullet found its way to her heart, I could feel her presence and no Civil War death seemed as real to me as hers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, battles and vestiges of the past ever since I returned from a week in Sicily, a trip I took with my nephew Louis Graup of Auburn, about to enter his senior year as a math major at Temple University. We travelled all over the western part of the island, documenting our movements in photos: “We saw you at” Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, among the temples and ruins of cities built over 2,500 years ago.

As when I was a child reading “Days Gone By,” I had to let go of my narrow notions of time to plunge into the past. At Selinunte, in southwestern Sicily, I crossed a vast plateau overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, walking streets first laid out in the 7th century BCE. To the north stretch olive groves and dry fields where sheep graze. To the south, about 220 miles across the sea, lies the city of Tunis in Africa.

About 2,500 years ago, Selinunte was a thriving city with 30,000 Greek citizens and probably just as many slaves. On one plateau lay the market place and the acropolis, the city’s center of power; on another, across a river flowing into the sea, the Greeks built their temples, monumental structures in the Doric style made of the local golden stone.

Starting in the 8th century BCE, the Greeks arrived to colonize Sicily, at the same time as the Phoenicians who set sail from Carthage, near to present-day Tunis.

At Selinunte Greeks and Carthaginians clashed more than once. In 409 BCE, invading troops from Carthage killed over 16,000 inhabitants and conquered the city. It was also a battleground of the First Punic War, which ended in 241 BCE. Towards the war’s end, the Carthaginians, who retained control of Selinunte, destroyed the city when they could no longer defend it.

Louis and I visited the remains of other Greek cities, some more magnificent than Selinunte, but nowhere else did I feel so strongly the destructive forces of man and time. Massive columns, broken or leaning to one side, some still standing tall, rise to the sky, the last defenders of past glory. Everywhere there is rubble, a mixture of stone and terra cotta, fragments of the homes where people once lived and of the utensils they once used.

Time and nature have done their work at Selinunte but there is also the violence of man leaving his destructive mark on history.

Protected from the beating sun by a parasol, Louis and I could contemplate this destruction from our lounge chairs on the beach at Marinella di Selinunte, a small resort a few steps from the ruins. Walking along the shoreline, we could see the remains of Selinunte’s largest temple dedicated to the goddess Hera.

After sunset, we forgot the past for a while. Along the main street of Marinella, a few bars blasted Italian pop music. In the relative cool of the evening, families, couples and groups of young people came out to stroll. Restaurants were crowded and Louis and I enjoyed a delicious pizza on the terrace of our hotel. For dessert, we had juicy slices of “anguria,” watermelon.

Everywhere we travelled in Sicily, we had to juggle with time, bounding back and forth between millenniums, constantly confronted with what happened, 2,500, 2,000, 1,000 or 500 years ago. We also encountered the influence of early Christians from Constantinople, of Iraqi Muslims who arrived via Tunis in the 9th century, of the French, the Spanish and the Germans, and finally of a united Italy, thanks to Garibaldi, the great unifier of the Italian people, who arrived on the island in 1860.

During our trip to Sicily, my childhood practice of time-travel, picked up while reading “The Republican,” was an indispensable skill. Yet, I’ll admit, at times Sicily was too much for me.

We spent our last days in Palermo. This city is at once majestic, breathtakingly beautiful, decadent, dirty and at times downright ugly. Hot, humid, crowded, and enveloped in tantalizing mystery, it is the fitting symbol of an island that, despite thousands of years of outside influences, remains a world, and a law, onto itself.

Hot summer in the city brings back Schuylkill memories

It’s been a hot summer in Paris, too hot for me and too hot for the city itself. There have been breakdowns in the metro, and above ground and below, in a city where air conditioning is the exception, not the rule, the dehydrated and those suffering from heatstroke have been dropping like flies.

It’s been noisy too. Windows are open, an invitation to the slightest breeze to come inside, whereas it’s most often noise that rushes in: sirens blaring, as the Parisian SAMU, the city’s emergency medical squad, rushes to the most urgent “hot spots;” jackhammers hammering (summer is the time for repairing pipelines and laying cable, which means reducing sidewalks to rubble and stirring up lots of dust); garbage trucks grinding as they pick up and compact waste. As I write, a motorized street-cleaner sounds like it’s tearing up the street, not washing it.

Lots of people noise too, and human contact, more than most of us want. In the metro, it’s impossible to avoid the moist touch of other bodies; packed metro cars feel like a sauna tainted with the faint odor of disinfectant. Above ground, there are just too many of us, in the streets, in city parks, or along the banks of the Seine.

We Parisians are grouchy. Tourists are turning “the number one tourist destination in the world” into a giant amusement park. If we didn’t need them so much, well, we’d tell them to all go home. That would bring the city’s population down by a million at least and surely, after such a mass exodus, temperatures would drop at bit.

Yet, there are strange compensations for those of us weathering the city heat. I’ve been seeking relief in art museums, where masterpieces require cool, dry air. In that way, I’ve been to see some of the biggest shows of the season, such as the first French retrospective of the Spanish painter Velazquez. In the spring, crowds stood in line for hours. A few days before the show’s closing, I strolled in and admired the paintings among a sparse, cool crowd.

Movie theaters could be another option. They too are air-conditioned, but in the newsletter put out by the city hall of the 19th arrondissement where I live, I learned that bedbugs are on the rampage and those upholstered seats in not-so-clean theaters seem like the perfect place for a surprise attack.

Yes, it’s a hot time, this summer in the city, and constantly that 1966 hit by the Lovin’ Spoonful has been running through my head: “Hot time, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty… All around people looking half-dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.” As for how I’m feeling about summer in the city this year, those lyrics sum it up.

They also bring back a lot of memories of summers not spent in the city, of Schuylkill County in the summertime, and I’m at the point now in life where my memories go way back. To escape the city heat, I slip into an imaginary world of moist heat, bright green, the “different world” of summer nights, and swimming pools.

I grew up on Greenwood Hill and back in those days, we children walked everywhere. Nobody talked about carpooling, there was little or no supervision. Screen doors opened, children ran outside, and they returned home when they were thirsty (our favorite drink, sugary Kool-Aid), hungry or tired.

With my best friends Donna and David Newton, I walked almost every day to the East Side Pool. We avoided main streets and sidewalks, preferring alley ways. Walking to the pool, we took our time, stopping to pop tar bubbles with our bare feet or to suck the nectar from flowers growing on honey suckle vines.

I remember the East Side Pool before it had a filtration system. Water from the dam at Agricultural Park rushed down a chute into the pool, which was actually more like a pond whose waters were constantly refreshed from the dam above. Sometimes the pool was drained, cleaned and refilled. In times of drought, it had to be closed. I remember green algae forming on the surface, but that did not stop me from jumping in.

Next to the pool in a park shaded by pine trees, there was a small playground and a refreshment stand with a juke box. After swimming, before walking back home, we would sit on the swings and watch couples jitterbug. That was a long time ago and today health officials would close that pool down in no time flat.

In 1966, during the same summer the Lovin’ Spoonful were singing “Summer in the City,” the JFK Pool of Pottsville officially opened, a magnificent day for us all. The swimming pool was huge and beautiful! We were awed by the diving area, with low-dive, high-dive, and the daunting tower from which only the bravest dared to dive. I liked to jump off and once I decided to jump backwards, in the direction of the pool wall. When I came up, my body rubbed against it. A couple of inches more and I would have landed outside the pool, on the cement, and most likely died.

During those last summers of the 1960’s, we pretty much lived at the swimming pool. We dined on greasy pizza and fries and licked popsicles to quench our thirst. In the morning, there were swimming lessons and swim team, in the afternoon, fun with friends, and in the evenings, splash parties and water ballet, directed by Mrs. Willard whose husband was the manager of the pool for many years.

Those water ballets were impressive and we had some local rivals of Esther Williams. Two of them were my good friends. I remember a ballet on a Polynesian theme, where Patty Kenna, poised on the edge, arms spread wide, gracefully dove from the tower, hardly making a splash when she hit the water. Another talented water ballerina was Molly Gallagher. I was there as a spectator because I just couldn’t swim as well as my friends.

Writing about those long-ago summers, I’ve managed to cool down and forget the city heat. The back of my neck no longer feels dirty or gritty and another 1966 hit has eased its way into my brain. Now I’m “lazing on a sunny afternoon” with the Kinks, “in a summertime,” back in Schuylkill County, sitting at the edge of the pool, my feet in the water, an ice-cold Yuengling in my hand.

June: a month for commemoration and reflection

June is a month of commemorations in France. It began with D-Day ceremonies, re-enactments and parades on and near the Normandy beaches where the Allies made their first landings on June 6, 1944.

This year, June 18th marked the 75th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s call to the French nation. On that date in 1940, in a recording studio at the BBC in London, he dared predict a French victory over the Nazis only one day after Marshal Pétain, vice premier of France at the time, called for an armistice with Germany and accepted French defeat.

On that same date 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte lost the battle of Waterloo, an event that is commemorated, though certainly not celebrated, in France. Instead, it is the man himself who is everywhere in the news, celebrated as general, emperor, reformer, brilliant strategist, but also presented as a tyrant who terrorized Europe.

Those are the big events and there is probably not a Frenchman alive who has not heard of Napoleon or de Gaulle.

Few, however, remember the Tulle murders, 99 hangings that took place on the afternoon of June 9, 1944. I myself had never heard of this event until, as for the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp I wrote about last month, I saw a commemorative ceremony on the evening news.

On June 9th, President François Hollande went to Tulle to pay homage to the 99 men hanged because, on June 8, 1944, they briefly but successfully chased German occupation forces from their city. On the day following the attack, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich arrived on the scene to brutally retaliate.

Tulle is a small city located in southwest France. In 1944, its population was about 16,000. Today, it is closer to 12,000. The town sits in a valley surrounded by mountains, and through its center flows the Corrèze River. If the name is familiar to readers, it may be because of the lightweight netting used to produce bridal veils and ballerina’s tutus named after the town where it is still made.

In 1944, French resistance fighters affiliated with the French Communist Party were active in the city and the region. The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich had been sent there in part to regroup after heavy losses on the Eastern Front, in part to wipe out resistance fighters, known as “maquisards” in French because they are associated with the “maquis,” an isolated area thick with brush, difficult to penetrate.

As the Allies landed in Normandy, German forces in southwest France were busy perpetrating the same measures of terror they had used against local populations in the East. Their mission was to encircle and destroy resistance fighters, suspected sympathizers and any civilians who got in their way.

On June 10, 1944, one day after the hangings in Tulle, a detachment of the 2nd SS Panzer Division destroyed an entire village on the outskirts of Limoges, another city of southwest France. Throughout all the years of the war, inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had almost never come in contact with German soldiers and the village was not known for harboring resistance fighters. Yet all the men were gunned down, and the women and children were set on fire in the village church, 642 in all.

In Tulle, the Germans sought to destroy the Resistance. In the successful attack against occupation forces lead by the FTP (Franc Tireurs et Partisans, civilian soldiers and partisans), 40 German soldiers were killed.

The following day, posters put up throughout Tulle announced, “Forty German soldiers were abominably killed by members of a Communist group. For its members and those who helped them, there can only be one punishment: death by hanging. Forty German soldiers were killed; 120 fighters or their accomplices will be hanged and their bodies thrown into the river.”

On the day leading up to the hangings, thousands of men were assembled and a selection process began. Local French officials were later accused of turning over resistant fighters to the Germans, but the final selection was made by the Germans themselves.

At about four in the afternoon on June 9th the hangings began. The men were lead by groups of ten to a main street of Tulle, where a waiting noose was hanging from each tree, street lamp, and balcony. German soldiers volunteered to be the hangmen of the 99 men killed that afternoon. Other soldiers looked on, seated at the terrace of a café where they drank fine French wine and listened to music on a phonograph.

For some reason, at the end of the day of June 9, 1944, only 99 of the 120 men had been hanged. German soldiers boasted they were used to this kind of killing; they had hanged thousands in Russia. But in France, where the guillotine was used for the last time in 1977 and the death penalty abolished in 1981, hanging was not part of the justice system and its use inflicted on victims a symbolic exclusion from the community.

On the day of the hangings, except for the sound of a phonograph, all was silence. This atmosphere of terror and death made me think of other hangings, those that took place in the Schuylkill and Carbon County jails in 1877. I am referring to the Molly Maguires.

I had always imagined those executions taking place in winter beneath a cold, gray sky heavy with snow. When I opened The Kingdom of Coal by Dennis L. Miller and Richard E. Sharpless, one of my favorite books about the coal region, to search for the date, I discovered those ten men went to the gallows on the first day of summer, June 21, 1877.

In the year and a half that followed, ten more Irishmen were hanged. Though there are still debate and controversy about the activities and the goals of the Molly Maguires, few would dispute the unfairness of the trials that lead to these men’s deaths.

In June rosebushes are heavy with blooms and in Paris, the air has the delicious scent of linden flowers. It is a lovely time of year. Yet it is also a month where history calls us to vigilance as it recalls the destructive powers of hatred and war.

Anti-Semitism in France: past tragedy, present danger

On the last Sunday in April, a day set aside in France to honor the memory of victims of Nazi concentration camps, President François Hollande chose to address the nation from a site unique in France: the grounds of Konzentrazionslager Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi concentration camp located on French soil.

Until this visit, widely reported in French media, I had never heard of this place, a concentration camp complete with gas chamber, surrounded by seventy satellite work camps, most located in what is today Germany. Since 1960, the camp has been preserved as a memorial and includes a museum and the European Center of Resistance Deportees.

When the camp was first created in 1941 by order of Heinrich Himmler, the village of Struthof was located within the boundaries of the German Reich. This Alsatian village was part of France until the signing of the Franco-German Armistice in June 1940, when all of Alsace was annexed to the Reich. At that time, the French language was forbidden and soon Alsatian men were drafted into the Wehrmacht.

Until the Armistice, Strutfhof was a small ski resort with one hotel, where the inhabitants of Strasbourg, a French city on the banks of the Rhine, would go to ski on weekends. Once it became German, a colonel in the Waffen SS became interested in a vein of pink granite in the mountainside. The first deportees arrived to work in the quarries. The granite they extracted was used in some of the monuments built to honor the thousand-year Reich.

Life in the camp, as in all Nazi concentration camps, was deadly cruel. Subsisting on watery soup and a couple of crusts of bread a day, deportees rose at four, spent hours in extreme heat or cold waiting for daily roll call, and then began a twelve-hour shift of hard labor. Beatings were routine, disease rampant, death and hunger, daily companions. In all, 52,000 deportees passed through Natzweiler-Struthof between 1941 and 1945, when the last of the satellite camps were evacuated. Around 20,000 of them died.

Many of the first deportees to work and die at Natzweiler-Struthof were political prisoners or resistant fighters of over thirty different nationalities. There were also common criminals and homosexuals. In its early days, there were few gypsies or Jews.

In 1944, Jews from Hungary and Poland began filling the camp and at least 14,000 of them died. They were not, however, systematically gassed as at Auschwitz. Hard labor, malnutrition and forced marches, once the evacuation of the satellite camps began, were most often the cause of death.

Some also died as victims of scientific experimentation, and it is for that reason that the gas chamber at Struthof was built. German scientists working at the Reich University of Strasbourg used deportees in their experiments on combat gasses.

On November 23, 1944, US troops entered Natzweiler-Struthof, making it the first concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies. The satellite camps across the region continued working and killing almost till the end of the war.

In his speech at the camp, François Hollande reminded French citizens that racism and anti-Semitism are still very much with us and we have a duty to protect those who are its victims.

Today France has a Jewish population of 475,000, less than 1% of the total population, yet 51% of what the French call “racist acts,” some deadly, are directed against Jews. In March 2012, in the schoolyard of a Jewish school in Toulouse, a gunman shot and killed a rabbi, his two small sons and an 8-year-old-girl. In January 2015, during a three-day rampage of terror in Paris that left 17 dead, four shoppers were killed inside a kosher supermarket because they were Jews.

Since those attacks, the French government has put in place a program called “Sentinelle”: 10,000 soldiers joined by 5,000 police officers have been assigned to guarding “sensitive” spots in France. This includes embassies, the headquarters of news organizations, and synagogues.

In my neighborhood there are several synagogues. Since January, I have grown accustomed to seeing soldiers with machine guns in the streets.

All over Europe, anti-Semitism is on the rise. In France, Belgium and Denmark, terrorist attacks have targeted Jews and Jewish institutions. In France, anti-Semitism has also taken other forms which, while not deadly, are nonetheless violent. Jewish children are the victims of name-calling in schools; those wearing what the French call “conspicuous signs” of their religion are insulted in the streets. Within the Jewish community itself, there is a subtle pressure to camouflage one’s faith (an example would be covering a yarmulke with a baseball cap).

In November 2014, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls received the Lord Jakobovits Prize from the Conference of European Rabbis for his efforts to fight against anti-Semitism. Valls emphasizes that the enfranchisement of French Jews, who received citizenship in 1789, is one of the founding principles of the French Republic. He also warns against the danger of conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, turning criticism of Israel into attacks on the Jewish population of France.

The recent deadly attacks against Jews in France were perpetrated by young men claiming to act in the name of Islam. They were all French citizens, born in France, of parents from Algeria or Mali. They were not representative of France’s Muslim population, estimated to be around 4 million, of which 2 million regularly practice their religion (these approximate figures are based on surveys conducted by the French national institute of demographics; the government does not officially collect religious or ethnic data concerning citizens). Nor were they representative of young Muslims in France today.

Yet France does indeed have a “Muslim problem,” another manifestation of French anti-Semitism if we extend this term to include descendents of Arab as well as of Hebrew peoples. Large segments of France’s Muslim population, in its majority of North African descent, have been relegated to the status of an underclass, bearing the heaviest burden of unemployment and underemployment. French Muslims are often victims of discrimination on the job market. Veiled women are victims of insults in the streets.

All over Europe, anti-Semitism and fear are on the rise. Our best bet is to learn to understand each other and to live together. Otherwise, we’ve got a lot to lose.

To learn more about Natzweiler-Struthof, readers can visit the camp’s site in English:
http://www.struthof.fr/en/home/

Live entertainment: past, present and the way of the future?

On a rainy April evening in Paris, I went to the theater. I had a free ticket that I’d picked up at work, at the ticket office at my university where students (and teachers) can get discounts and sometimes tickets for free. I didn’t know anything about the play I was going to see. I just felt like going to the theater so I walked in and took a seat.

The lights went down. A man sitting in the front row stood up and stepped onto the stage. He began by speaking in Italian. I felt an uncomfortable rustle around me. The play was called Nous n’irons pas ce soir au Paradis, “This evening we won’t go to Paradise.” So where were we going, we asked ourselves.

In the end, we went to Hell, and to Purgatory, a voyage that transported us outside of time to a place where minutes don’t count, where the worries of daily life fall away, where nothing matters as much what is happening this very instant on the stage:

In front of us stands a man in street clothes. There are no props, no stage décor. There’s simply one man, the actor Serge Maggiani, who speaks to us about another, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

Sounds like pretty highbrow stuff, doesn’t it? A narrative poem written in the early 14th century where all the characters, except the poet, are dead, some freezing in Hell (yes, the coldest parts are reserved for the worst sinners), others biding their time in Purgatory, and a happy few residing in Paradise (we won’t be going there, we’ve been forewarned).

But the evening is anything but that. Serge Maggiani, our guide, introduces us to Dante and points out that’s the poet’s first name. Right away we’re on a first-name basis with a man who, like us, has known suffering, disappointment and loss in love.

In fact, when Dante begins his journey, it sounds like he’s seriously depressed. He’s lost in a dark forest and with each step sinks deeper into the mire. In real life, he is an enemy of the powerful pope Boniface VIII and has been condemned to permanent exile from his beloved Florence. He has no income, no home, few friends.

He does have ink, pen and paper, however, and though he has been deprived of his birthplace, no one can take his native tongue away. Dante writes in the Italian of Tuscany at a time when no self-respecting writer would use anything but Latin. He lives in his language and makes it his home. Participating in the creation of the Italian language that will one day be spoken all over Italy, he also takes a writer’s sweet revenge when he condemns Pope Boniface to Hell before he’s even dead.

By the end of the evening, we may not have been to Paradise but we’ve met Dante, as real, as close to us as any man alive. We’ve also encountered the poet’s special genius and had a taste of eternity.

That rainy April evening, I experienced a moment of serendipity that no screen could ever give me. What I found with a group of strangers and a single actor on stage I could never find on my computer, my cell phone, my TV or even a giant movie screen. Live theater makes us more alive and this is something we all need.

In Pottsville, the people who have worked so hard to bring back the Majestic Theater understand this. They understand the importance of a community theater that makes live entertainment available at a reasonable price. Recently there have been Robert Thomas Hughes’s “A Miner’s Tale,” and “Triumph and Tragedy” to commemorate the end of the Civil War.

I remember the Majestic Theater when it was a farmer’s market. My mother remembered it from its early days as a movie theater though I don’t know if she ever knew it as a nickelodeon. That’s how the Majestic began when it first opened in 1910, four years before the great fire of 1914, which destroyed the city’s finest theater, the Academy of Music.

Rooting around in the past, I came up with the name of Robert B. Mantell, a well-known actor in his day. In New York and on the road, he played all the great Shakespearean roles and married four times, each of his brides a leading lady who played at his side. In September 1902 he was on stage at the Academy of Music in a popular play of the day, “The Cross and the Dagger.”

The following year, in the same theater, the Pottsville Musical Society put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” In 1913, the year before the Academy burnt down, the Honey Boy Minstrels were on the bill. Led by George Evans, co-author of “In the Good Old Summer Time,” they sang and performed vaudeville acts.

Once the Academy of Music was gone, other theaters took its place. The Hippodrome on E. Market Street brought in vaudeville acts and big bands. The Capitol on N. Centre Street was more palace than theater. It could seat over 2,700, had thirteen dressing rooms for vaudeville stars, and its interior décor was a cross between a Moorish castle and a very ornate Italian church.

Pottsville also had dance halls and in the days of prohibition, speakeasies galore. At the Holly Roof on the top floor of the Hollywood Theater, couples danced to the beat of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and the Dorsey Brothers of Shenandoah were regulars in town. There were also lots of clubs and bars on Minersville Street.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Pottsville had so much live entertainment that the city was off limits to soldiers from Indiantown Gap (though this was a rule hard to enforce). A trip to Pottsville was the equivalent of a descent into Dante’s Inferno. In just one visit, a young man could lose his soul, his health, and every penny in his pocket.

It would be easy to say “those were the good old days,” but they weren’t. There was the Great Depression and World War II. To make it through hard times, people got together to dance, sing, go to a show. They had fun and we could have more too if we put our screens aside and exchanged the virtual for the live.