Eid al-Adha
26 Oct
The above “carpet,” by Pakistani artist Rashid Rana, is made up of thousands…tens of thousand? hundreds?…of photographs taken of animals being slaughtered* in homes, streets and slaughterhouses all over Karachi. To be honest, I don’t know if all these photos were taken on Eid al-Adha or just over a period of time, but it seemed appropriate to the day. Eid al-Adha, known as Kurban Bayrami in Turkey and in the Balkans, Eid e Qorban in the Iranian world, commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son (Ismail, right? not Isaac…) according to God’s will. It also marks the end of the Hajj. Anyone who can afford to, sacrifices an animal and distributes part of the meat to neighbors, relatives and the poor. I think for many Muslims it’s the major holiday of the year. It’s always struck me as a feast that had some of the mixed solemnity-joy of Easter (aside from just the obvious element of the sacrifice of the Son), as opposed to the candied, Christmasy festivesness of Eid al Fitr.
(Kurban, which I assume is an Arabic word, is the source of the beautiful Farsi expression “Qorban-e-to” “your sacrifice” — meaning “you’re welcome” or “at your service” or “my pleasure” — I’m all yours; do with me as you wish…here’s my throat…)
Below is a detail of Rana’s piece:
I wish there were a more close-up shot of it available somewhere. It was beautiful.
It was shown here in 2010 at the Asia Society as part of an exhibit of contemporary Pakistani artists called Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, which was really fascinating (starting with the title).
Some of my other favorite pieces at this exhibit was the work of Imran Qureishi, who does Mughal-style, Shah Jahan period-type portraits (one of my great aesthetic weaknesses) with figures from contemporary Pakistani reality:
But perhaps the most interesting pieces for me were from Faiza Butt, an artist born in Lahore but now working in London. Her discussion of her work should be checked out:
“My choice of medium was a reactionary response to my years as a student at the Slade School of Art, where large, physical, muscular and “technologically advanced” work held more worth than contemplative intellectual responses. [my emphasis] I started to create ambitious, highly detailed drawings with ink pens that rival “spectacles” of work and focus on art historical and gender issues.”
At the the exhibit were displayed two collage pieces she did out of the famous Taliban photos discovered by German photographer Thomas Dworzak in photo studios in Kandahar in 2001. The photographers were happy to give them to him; ‘most of them are dead” one said. Butt called the pieces she made out of these photos: “Get out of my dreams – I and II”:
I still can’t figure out what she means. “Get out”? “Dreams”? I think there are stunning ideas behind these pieces and not the least stunning was the title. Is the strange eroticism of these men, with their khol-lined eyes out of a Perso-Indian opium dream, what draws and compels her? Or are they just Taliban monsters, whom she wants not out of her dreams, but out of her nightmares? I had seen the photographs before of course — American journalist Titan Jon Lee Anderson has compiled them into a beautiful edition (below) with an intro by Dworzak, after they first appeared in The New Yorker – but thanks to Butt, they got into my head in a new, strange and beautiful way.
A wildly divergent tangent from Eid al-Adha, eh? Or maybe not. Good feast to all.
Also the feast of St. Demetrius today, by the way, Dmitriy Solunskiy — my patron.
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*Sorry for the PETA girls — “slaughter” here has absolutely no moral or ethical connotations for me; it’s just how you kill animals. When applied to human beings, of course, it has a different meaning, though I know they’re both on the same ethical plane for you.
Nole takes Murray down — finally
14 Oct
“Vengeance – this is a breath of life one shares from the cradle with one’s fellow clansmen, in both good fortune and bad, vengeance from eternity. Vengeance was the debt we paid for the love and sacrifice our forebears and fellow clansmen bore for us. It was the defense of our honour and good name, and the guarantee of our maidens. It was our pride before others; our blood was not water that anyone could spill. It was, moreover, our pastures and springs – more beautiful than anyone else’s – our family feasts and births. It was the glow in our eyes, the flame in our cheeks, the pounding in our temples, the word that turned to stone in our throats on hearing that our blood had been shed. It was the sacred task transmitted in the hour of death to those who had just been conceived in our blood. It was centuries of manly pride and heroism, survival, a mother’s milk and a sister’s vow, bereaved parents and children in black, joy and songs turned into silence and wailing. It was all, all.”
Land Without Justice – Milovan Djilas
“Resilient Djokovic SLAMS Murray”
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Litvaks and Galizianers
12 OctBack in a previous post/response to “Jewish London‘s” comment on “Tishabuv” I made a reference to the difference or self-categorization among Eastern European Jews as “Litvaks” and “Galizianers.” Here’s a map of Europe in 1648. 
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Between the beginning of the Crusades and the end of the religious wars in the German states in around 1648, a giant wave of the majority of the world’s Jews moved eastwards from German-speaking lands to Eastern Europe, preserving their form of late medieval German (Yiddish, which just means “Jewish”) in their new countries, like Spanish Jewry preserved late medieval Castillian (Ladino, but which Sephardim themselves usually refer to as “Kastelyano”) throughout the Ottoman sphere and general Mediterranean area after being expelled from Spain in 1492. What I’d like to illustrate with the maps above and below is that no Jew ever actually migrated and settled in Russia. The vast majority of Central European Jewry moved to the united Kingdom-Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, because Poland was perhaps the most progressive and open and tolerant state in Europe at the time and welcomed them gladly. Jews later ended up in Russia and Austria when Poland was finally partitioned between those two empires and Prussia in the eighteenth century. Otherwise, what Jew in his right mind would have gone to live in Russia?
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The term “Litvak” refers to those Jews who lived in those territories of northeastern Poland centered around Vilna, Minsk, Bialystok and eventually Warsaw — regions more advanced or somehow “modern” than the rest of the Polish kingdom. “Galizianer” refers to those Jews who lived in the southeastern areas of Poland — and after Partition — Austria and Russian Ukraine.
“Litvak” refers to Lithuania obviously, but mostly derived its prestige as an appellation from the central role of Vilna* in rabbinical and Jewish scholarship; as a reverse honour-indication of that role, Salonika was known as the Sephardic Vilna. Galicia, what’s now southeastern Poland and Western Ukraine, roughly round the twin urban poles of Cracow and Lwow became, and remained into the twentieth century, one of the most overpopulated and impoverished parts of Europe — so much for enlightened Austrian rule.
One can take it from there in obvious ways: Litvak was more modern and sophisticated; Galizianer was more backwards and isolated; Litvak was more open to the modernizing influences of the German Jewish Enlightenment; the Galiizianer was more closed and isolated in his shtetl life; the tragically aborted explosion of Yiddish-language literature and theater and cinema in the early twentieth century was Litvak — with its center now moved to Warsaw; many of its themes, however, were the tales and mysticism and Hasidic other-worldliness of the Galizian south. Opposites but complimentary. Sholem Aleichem was a Litvak who wrote about Galizianer themes. Renaissance and Enlightenment Jewish scholarship was Litvak; klezmer and Der Dybuk and Fiddler on the Roof are Galizia. Helen, the receptionist for take-out orders at my dad’s coffee shop in the 70′s used to say she wouldn’t eat the store’s pastrami and corned beef because they were delivered by a “dirty Galizianer,” but she and an insurance salesman who used to have lunch there — and kinda used to hit on her — used to kid about he would never trust a “sneaky Litvak” like her; by that time, both of them were joking.
The differences mean even less today, except for that, due to New York Hasidim, Galizianer Yiddish is the most alive form of the language. But even young New York Jewish kids know what the two words imply. For what that was worth…
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*Lithuanians — yes, I get hits from Lithuania — please do not write me and tell me the name of the city is Vilnius. For Jewish purposes it’s Vilna; for Polish, Wilno. See: “Names: Istanbul (not Constantinople)“
Note: Roumanian Jews and “Bessarabtsy” (Moldavian) Jews were kind of a separate category, though I suspect that linguistically and culturally they were pretty similar to Galizianers, aside from a reputation for being especially humourous and quick-witted and high-livers and partiers, and for introducing pastrami to New York, a linguistic and culinary kin to pastirma, one of the many ways that Roumania has always been a bridge between Ottoman and Eastern-European-Russian worlds.
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Yom Kippur, Kol Nidre, Moishe Oysher and the First Roumanian (a little late…sorry)
10 OctYom Kippur (pronounced “Yum Kip-per” or “Yun Kip-peh” and not “Yom Kip-pur”) is the holiest day of the Jewish year; just thought I should explain, I don’t want to under or overestimate my readers’ knowledge. It’s the Day of Atonement, which closes the ten beautifully named Days of Awe that begin with the Jewish New Year (“Happy New Year to Everyone“). Jews fast and atone for their – “sins” is too Catholic – for their moral failures, let’s say.
Kol Nidre, the first few words of which are heard sung by Moishe Oysher in the clip from “Overture to Glory,” (see Kol Nidre) is sung on the eve of Yom Kippur. “All Vows” in Aramaic, the prayer, which in many ways has become the center of the day’s observance, asks God for release from any promise or oath that one will make in the coming year. Controversial even among Jews at certain periods in Jewish history, in the Gentile world the prayer has generated volumes of anti-Semitic garbage, along the lines that one can imagine: sneaky Jews starting their year off with a legal loophole, etc. What Kol Nidre asks of God is understanding for the many ethical obligations that an honest man knows he will not be able to completely live up to in the coming year; it’s not a request for a moral pass or a license to lie. It’s an expression of terrible honesty, in fact.
Moishe Oysher (click)
Moishe Oysher was a Moldavian-born star of Yiddish theater and cinema, first in Europe, then mostly in the Americas, who almost accidentally stumbled into the real-life role of cantor at the First Roumanian Shul* on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. His powerful voice, entertaining and dramatic style (disliked by many purists), and movie star looks made him, and the First Roumanian, a sensation in the 1930s and 40s when he sang there, apparently increasing the congregation’s size to overflowing. “Ooooh yeaaaah….” the ancient caretaker who showed me and a friend the decrepit interior the one time I was in there in the early 90s, “Moishe Oysher…they say he really packed in the gallery [where the women sat] in those days, he he…”
Unfortunately Oysher died young, at 51, and unfortunately the First Roumanian Shul (see below) was torn down or — like used to happen to “landmark” buildings in Greece — allowed to collapse in 2006. It wasn’t any stunner of a building, but it was a historic center of Jewish New York and it had some of the best acoustics of any interior space in the city. Its congregation was tiny at that point and only used the basement, even on Yom Kippur, but it could have easily been used as a concert hall or musical venue of sorts like so many houses of worship in the city whose demographic environment has changed. In fact, it was in the process of being designated a landmark when, under shady New York real estate circumstances that may have involved the leaders of the congregation itself, city money for repairs was delayed for so long that the roof collapsed, the building was declared irreparable and the shul was demolished a few months later.
Like so much of the neighborhood, once the site of terrible poverty and the greatest population density of any equivalent set of square miles of urban space in history, but the wellspring of so much of New York’s historical and cultural and political life, the shul’s space is now occupied by a condo, with the old yeshiva side-door set into the glass façade in one of those contrived architectural pastiches that only add insult to injury for me, and Rivington Street no longer echoes to the booming voices of cantors on the High Holy Days but the screeching of drunk white girls pouring out of its series of identical bars at closing time. At least Katz’s can still make a living.**
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*Shul: “school” literally, in Yiddish, is the traditional Ashkenazi term for “synagogue,” a Greek word which means roughly the same thing: a place to come together and pray and study (“train,” if you like, for those that recognize the second half of the word from “pedagogue” — or the movie 300… Venetian Jews called their synagogues “scuole.” Oddly enough, I don’t know what Sephardim call theirs.) I don’t know where American Reform and Conservative Jews got the, frankly, sacrilegious idea of calling a “synagogue” a “Temple.” There was only One Temple to the One God in the One City; you can’t rebuild one in Great Neck or Forest Hills. I cringe whenever I hear it.
**Katz’s is a delicatessen on the corner of Ludlow and Houston, literally around the block from where the First Roumanian used to be. Like most Jewish businesses on the Lower East Side by the 1980s, it was sliding downhill and hanging on by a thread, when the sudden explosion of the neighborhood (starting with, and especially, Ludlow) into the center of under 35 nightlife in the city gave it a new lease on life. It’s now on every New York tourist’s itinerary and is open twenty-four hours a day, packed when the bars close after 4:00 a.m. It has decent undistinguished pastrami, but nothing there is especially good. A better post-bar munchies choice is Bereket, down the street on the corner of Orchard, the Turkish place that has a variety of meat-kebab-doner choices and zeytinyagli-ladera-vegetable dishes, but you have to deal with vegans there.
There’s still excellent pastrami to be had in New York around the clock, but I’m not telling where.
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Back…
8 OctSorry for the absence. A couple of time-consuming life circumstances, a technical glitch with posting — and a light case of what in Spanish is known as “pereza” (see below) has kept me off the Jadde for a while. But I’m back and haven’t forgotten explanations or definitions I owe you. Also, in response to certain friends and readers who claim they’ve on occasions wanted to make comments but didn’t want to bother with WordPress registration, I’ve highlighted my email address on the blog’s intro and at the end of every post as well.
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