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.

PA Steel Town Subject of French Documentary

When I can’t sleep at night, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I fill up Pottsville storefronts with the shops I used to know as a child. Back then, around this time of year, my Aunt Mildred, a former principal of Yorkville school, would take me downtown for an Easter dress and shoes. Sometimes we went to Matt’s Kiddy Shop on East Norwegian, sometimes to Wolowitz’s on Centre Street, or to one of Pottsville’s two department stores, Pomeroy’s or S.S.Weiss. For shoes, there were Raring’s or Puddu’s, Triangle or Paramount.

My aunt, who was as generous as she was kind, would then take me out to lunch and on very special occasions, we’d dine at the Necho Allen, where we’d order a “Wimpy,” the hotel’s famous hamburger. If we were in a hurry, we’d stop by Green’s Five-and-ten and, seated at the counter looking out on Centre Street, order hotdogs and a Coke. Our last stop was at an iron railing overlooking the taxi dispatcher, who had his office beneath W. H. Mortimer Jewellers at Centre and East Norwegian Streets. He knew my aunt, who did not drive, and we’d have a taxi in no time.

Of course, I’ve only mentioned a few of the downtown stores. There were dozens, along with restaurants, diners, movie theatres, and bars where the local brews were served, a “Bavarian” from the Mount Carbon Brewery or a Yuengling on tap.

Those were the days…or were they?

By the 1950’s, coal employment in the anthracite region (Carbon, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northumberland and Schuylkill counties) was less than half of what it had been in 1917, when the number of workers peaked at 156,148. By 1960, those figures had dropped to 20,000. From then on, there was only sharp decline. In the year 2000, a workforce of 945 produced about 4 million tons of coal, as compared to over 100 million in 1920 (all statistics are from government tables reprinted in The Face of Decline, the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the 20th Century by Dublin and Licht, 2005).

Still, I grew up believing “Old King Coal” ruled in the kingdom of anthracite, home to that clean, slow-burning fuel that made America great. What would my country be without it, I asked myself, proud to be a coal miner’s granddaughter.

My father, also proud of his roots, drove us to the edge of the strip mines that were replacing underground mining in the 1960’s and together we looked on as giant shovels tore up the earth. In 1963, we went to Sheppton and, standing behind police lines, watched rescue teams at work after the collapse of a mine that left two miners dead.

Our family history and the history of coal were interlocked, tragic and glorious, unique. At least, that’s what I used to like to believe.

Now I know that anthracite’s history, very interesting and essential, is just one chapter in a long story of industrial decline and decay.

A recent French documentary brought that home to me. The film, “Braddock America,” directed by Jean-Loïc Portron and Gabriella Kessler, is about the western Pennsylvania town of that name. A borough of Pittsburgh located about seven miles from the city center, Braddock is home to The Edgar Thomson Steelworks, the first steel mill constructed by Andrew Carnegie in 1873. In 1901, Carnegie sold his mills to the group that became US Steel, the biggest steel producer in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the background, Edgar Thomson today

In 1974 steel production in the US reached a record high: 132.2 million tons. Less than a decade later, that figure dropped to 66 million and at Edgar Thomson, the massive layoffs began: 1,000 workers lost their jobs at the end of 1981. During the following three decades, as China climbed to the position of number one steel producer in the world, Braddock saw its population drop from about 6,000 to 2,000, at tenth of what it had been in 1920, the heyday of both steel and coal.

“Braddock America,” currently playing in movie theatres across France, gives a voice to those who chose to stay in what has come to be known as a “shrinking town,” as stores and services close (most recently the local hospital), and many move away, simply abandoning homes they cannot sell.

Standing in the middle of a street lined with homes and a couple of brick warehouses, a setting that could just as easily be found in Schuylkill County, a local history buff proudly proclaims that Braddock’s steel made America strong. Seated in his living room, a former steel worker recalls his pride and that of his father. They did a hard, dirty job that paid well. During WWII, the same man points out, the Pittsburgh mills produced two thirds of the steel for the Western European front.

The work was dangerous too. Accidents and death were common but the man who worked in the steel mill took care of his family, earning union wages, offering his children a better life. Many were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who became proud Americans while keeping their traditions alive.

All in all, it’s a story that sounds a lot like those told in Schuylkill County. Once you’ve substituted “coal mine” for “steel mill,” there’s little else that needs to be changed: the same pride in a hard job requiring skill and strength, a belief in the industry’s role in making America great, similar risks and dangers, labor strife and a long struggle for decent wages; and finally, dramatic and lasting decline.

In “Braddock America,” where film footage from Braddock’s past is artfully interwoven with shots of Braddock today, we see a booming town, a crowded, prosperous main street, payday at the mills—and then a long strip of boarded-up shops and empty lots. Braddock then, Braddock now: two different worlds.

Yet, there are a few dedicated community activists who hang on, organizing volunteer crews of street-cleaners, sprucing up the local ball field, participating in local government, fighting for a better future, the way their parents fought before.

Ultimately, “Braddock America” holds up a mirror reflecting an image I’d rather not see, one of a very wealthy nation that has let the “little guy” down. Americans should be grateful, then, for people like Mike Stout and his sister Nina, two dedicated activists from Braddock. They keep on fighting, losing battle after battle against the rich and powerful, but that’s doesn’t stop them. Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll win the war…

French “Cinderfella” gives a lesson in gender studies: Jacky au royaume des filles

Yesterday, I gave into a secret pleasure. On a blustery, brilliant Parisian afternoon, a true exception in a winter of relentless rain and gray, I slipped into the darkness of a movie theater to take in a matinee, a silly movie, a comedy, that turned out to be not so silly after all.

The title of the film, Jacky au royaume des filles, literally translates as “Jacky in the kingdom of girls,” but a much better title would be “Cinderfella,” because that’s who Jacky is, a masculine version of one of the most beloved fairy-tale princesses, Cinderella, who rose from raking ashes and scrubbing floors to sharing the throne with a prince whose ideal of the perfect bride was a woman with small feet.

Jacky lives in Bubunne, a kingdom where women rule and men obey, a desolate place with no gardens, parks or farms, no animals except for sacred ponies to whom boys pray, pleading to be turned into princes. While women patrol the streets, work in industry or govern—Bubunne is a military dictatorship, headed by a general about to step down in favor of her youngest daughter, “la Colonelle,” the men and boys stay home to cook and clean.

When they go out to shop or pray (sacred ponies don’t come inside), they always dress in “voileries,” a sack-like robe, something like a chador, that covers them from head to mid-calf, exposing their faces but covering the neck. Attached to the robe, just beneath the chin, hangs a silver ring. Upon marrying, wives can attach a leash to it to lead husbands through the streets.

The day the government announces “la Colonelle” will be giving a ball where she’ll choose her consort, the royal “couillon,” the number-one idiot of the land, all the boys go wild!

Of course, Jacky is already in love with “la Colonelle” (aren’t all the little boys?) and he dreams of going to the ball, but his mother dies and, taken in by a cruel aunt, with two husbands, by the way, he must stay home to cook and clean while his two cousins go instead.

By now, I’m sure readers have got the gist—in at least two ways. Jacky will marry “la Colonelle,” just like in the original. And this version of “Cinderella” is a fairy tale turned upside down, with all the roles reversed: women in charge, men scrubbing the floors; women wearing the pants, men covered by veils; women choosing (or, as is also the case in the film, harassing, even raping) and men patiently waiting to be the chosen ones.

Jacky au royaume des filles, directed by Riad Sattouf, is a good movie and it offers viewers a good time. In no way is it a feminist manifesto, but it just so happens that the film has been released at a moment when the word “gender,” as in gender studies, is making headlines in France.

In fact, on February 2nd, in Paris and Lyon, hundreds of thousands (according to organizers, far fewer, according to police) marched through the streets, waving pink and blue banners, protesting against a new program recently introduced in France’s public schools. Called the “ABCD of equality,” its goal is to undo stereotypes and promote equality between girls and boys from their earliest school days.

To give an example, in elementary schools, teachers work with images: a woman doing the shopping, a man repairing the kitchen sink, a couple cooking together, a little boy dressing up in a disguise. Students are asked to sort pictures according to whether they point to stereotypes or not. Disagreement can lead to heated discussion, even among the very young. When one boy suggests it’s OK for boys to cry, another protests: no! that means he’s a girl.

For this and for other ideas like it, such as using 19th-century paintings to discuss how women’s and children’s dress have changed or encouraging less violence on the playground, a part of France is up in arms—to the point that some parents, responding to rumors that the “ABCD of equality” is teaching their children to become homosexuals, intend to pull them out of school one day a month. Alerted by SMS’s that spread like wildfire, they are participating in a nation-wide boycott initiated by Farida Belghoul, a militant for family values, close to Dieudonné and Alain Soral, whom I wrote about last month.

Others are simply worried that schools are not doing their job, which is to teach children how to read, write and count. Still others feel public school is overstepping its bounds, making an unwarranted incursion into the private realm of family life.

In recent days, the whole affair reached proportions that forced the Minister of Education Vincent Peillon to reassure the nation that the “ABCD of equality” does not equal “gender studies,” a subject that will not be taught in French schools. In other words, though he is in favor of equality, far be it from him or the government to want to do away with one of France’s most beloved mottoes, “Vive la différence!”

But what’s wrong with gender studies, I’m tempted to ask. After all, its founder is the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one”—though you might say she was inspired by a man. In the 16th century, the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote pretty much the same thing, claiming we become human, we are not born that way. In both examples, in the best cases, culture and society improve upon nature to make us who we are.

Which brings me back to Jacky. In Bubunne, boys cannot go to school because the ruling regime does not want them to learn to read. Inside or outside, they must be covered by a veil, hiding themselves from the roving gaze of…females. And men and boys do all the dirty work, preparing the daily “bouillie” or slops, recycled human waste, the main, the only, dish in Bubunne.

Veils, slops and ignorance imposed on men, silly stuff, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem very natural, does it? We all know men are strong and intelligent, the ones who rule the world! And women, well, aren’t they the ones who do the dirty work? Ask yourself, who cleans the toilet at your house?

Nature or culture, which one determines the tasks that men and women assume in society? Jacky has taught me more about gender studies than the current debate stirring up French society.

Freedom of Expression: US-France, two different models

Thirty years ago I ate my first quenelle, a dumpling shaped like a sausage. The one I ate was the real thing, made of flour, butter, eggs, milk and ground pike. Swimming in a creamy fish sauce, the dumpling was mushy and a bit too fishy for my taste, but I savored the experience, eating a real quenelle in a French country inn, right next to the stream where the pike was caught.

That was thirty years ago. Quenelles are no longer such a popular dish in France. Few restaurants serve them and many young people wouldn’t even know what they are.

In fact, if you ask your typical young French person to define one, he doesn’t even think of food. Instead, he’ll tell you the “quenelle” is an anti-establishment salute, and, depending on who you’re talking to, an act of solidarity with the salute’s “creator,” the French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who first used it in a 2005 comedy routine. Dieudonné (“God-given”), as he is known to the French public, recently declared, “2014 will be the year of the quenelle”—and he was definitely not talking about dumplings!

So how has the name of a traditional French dish become the rallying point of a French comic and his thousands of followers?

It’s all about freedom of expression and how it is defined in France, a nation where it is extensive but not absolute. In 1972, a law was passed to make it a crime to incite racial hatred by speech, print or any others means. In 1990, it became an offense to deny crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Since 1992, heavier fines and longer prison sentences can be imposed on those found guilty of breaking either law. Dieudonné’s “quenelle” puts all these laws to the test, demonstrating that limiting freedom of expression can be a double-edged sword.

Dieudonné’s “quenelle” has been described as a reverse Nazi salute. The right arm stiffens and begins to rise, but, just as quickly, the left hand crosses the chest and holds it down. When I first saw a Dieudonné fan making a “quenelle,” I thought of Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove, the mad ex-Nazi scientist working for the US government. Still a Nazi at heart, he has a hard time controlling his right arm, conditioned to express its devotion to Hitler, so he must constantly use his left hand to keep it down.

This is the salute that has spread like wildfire across France. Though Dieudonné denies its relation to Nazism, claiming it’s an “up yours” kind of gesture (“quenelle” is also a nickname for suppositories), his fans have not understood it that way.

In early January, two 17-year-olds were expelled from their high school in Montgeron, a town south of Paris, because of a photo posted on-line. In it, one of the boys is shown making a “quenelle” while posing next to a pineapple, a reference to another Dieudonné standard, his song “Shoahnanas,” a blending of the words Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, and ananas, French for “pineapple.” The two boys admitted they were using these symbols to target their math teacher, who is Jewish.

In December 2013, Alain Soral, a controversial essayist known for his anti-Semitic views, was photographed making the same salute in front of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

Yet, Dieudonné still insists, the “quenelle” is not about anti-Semitism—and many might agree. His “quenelle” is a symbol, open to interpretation, and Dieudonné could always argue that those high school students and the anti-Semitic essayist were interpreting it the wrong way.

To accept that point of view, however, we’d have to overlook much about Dieudonné himself. For example, in an April 2010 interview on Iranian TV, he explains that Zionism (he never uses the word “Judaism”) is no more than lies and manipulation, and in the West, where freedom of conscience does not exist, Zionism has turned us all into slaves. Dieudonné, a self-proclaimed liberator, is using laughter to set us free.

We’d also have to overlook his recent remark about a French radio host who is Jewish and who refused to have him on his show: “Patrick Cohen…hmm…the gas chambers…what a shame.”

And there are many other examples, enough to have lead to seven condemnations for inciting racial hatred.

On January 9, 2014, this inglorious record prompted the top court in France, the Council of State, to reinstate a ban on Dieudonné’s show after a lower court had overturned it, placing in jeopardy the comic’s six-month tour of all the major cities of France. To justify its decision, the Council underlined the content of Dieudonné’s show and its attack on human dignity. It also claimed that allowing the show to go on posed a serious threat to public order.

In the days leading up to the Council’s decision, Dieudonné got top billing on the evening news—free publicity, in other words, for a mediocre comic who uses anti-Semitism and controversy to keep his career alive.

In 2008, during another tour, Dieudonné appeared on stage with Robert Faurisson, a “well-known” French Holocaust-denier. In the 1960’s, he was a literary scholar hungry for recognition. Not until he turned from literature to a full-time career as a Holocaust-denier, claiming the gas chambers at Auschwitz were for killing lice, did he achieve a nation-wide reputation—to the point that the 1990 French law against Holocaust-denial was passed in large part because of him.

Writing about Dieudonné and other French anti-Semites, my goal is not to convince readers that anti-Semitism is more rife in France than elsewhere. For proof of that, readers need only click on this link to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to find a Holocaust denial timeline: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008003. A majority of the Holocaust-deniers are Americans, but, as opposed to Dieudonné, they have not become household words.

And here I return to the double-edged nature of freedom of speech and its limits. In the USA, where it is guaranteed by the First Amendment, Dieudonné’s show would definitely go on. He could spread as much racial hatred as he wanted and, let’s hope, get the attention he deserved. In France, where he is constantly breaking the law, he keeps himself constantly in the spotlight, making opportunistic use of limits placed on freedom of expression.

When I was a chubby little girl, my mom told me to ignore people who called me names. And she was right—they soon gave up and went away.

Published in The Republican Herald of Pottsville, PA, January 26, 2014

When childhood dreams come true…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for me, I’ll be back next year…

Printed in The Republican Herald December 29, 2013