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

Local photographer, international reputation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

copyright Mark Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The French, one big happy family?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering Schuylkill County by the sea...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in The Republican Herald September 29, 2013