Monthly Archives: June 2012

“Rainbow Nation” by Stephen Poellot CC ’05

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*green*

I volunteered during my six months in Cape Town, because that’s what American students do. Taught township kids about the critical importance of the environment. Our final meeting was supposed to be an outing to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. I didn’t go, but I can imagine how it was. Table Mountain as the backdrop, lush flowers of every color, and rolling green hills. Green is the color of money back in the States, but in South Africa the Rand is printed in every color. We said it looked like Monopoly money. We could spend it like Monopoly money too, even after the dollar depreciated. Our money goes far here, much farther because it’s green. Green symbolizes growth. Money grows well here, as long as you bring the right cards to the table. One night at Grand West Casino, Jimmy, my roommate from USC, tripled his money. He told me, ‘Put me anywhere on God’s green earth and I’ll triple my worth.’ The anthropologists at the University of Cape Town taught me about this. It’s called Millennial Capitalism. It means that money grows irrationally, exponentially, through gambling and stock markets; the old rules of capital and production don’t apply in the New South Africa. It means that Jared’s family, South African ex-patriots living in Texas, bought a beach house for three million Rand and plan on selling it in six years, just in time for the World Cup. They’ll make a killing, because that’s how money grows, at least when your money is green.

You have to use American dollars when you visit Victoria Falls; they only accept dollars there. What else can they do when the inflation rate is 10,000 percent, 10,000 percent in less than a year? The view of the falls is best from the Zimbabwe side, but it’s not safe. The political situation went haywire when the government redistributed white-owned farms to landless blacks. It threw the currency markets into a tailspin–rampant inflation and suddenly Zimbwawe’s money was worthless. Greenbacks don’t do that; they’re strong, reliable. The Apartheid government had a reliable way of keeping the blacks out of white suburbs: they built rolling green fairways between the neighborhoods. Golf courses, coal-burning power plants (you can guess which way the wind blows), and airports are great ways to separate people. As I learned in the township, the environment is critical.

*red*

They don’t have dead presidents on the currency here; what kind of portrait do you put on a currency in a country where every leader for the last fifty years was considered an oppressor or a terrorist? When I got to Cape Town there were political signs hanging from every lamppost; just a face, a name, and a party logo. The ANC is green-yellow-black, the NNP blue and green, and the DP yellow and blue. No major political party is red. Red comes with a lot of baggage. Red is communism. America openly supported the Apartheid regime for thirty years, and then covertly for another ten. Why? Cold War, fear of communism: Mandela wasn’t just part of a plot to overthrow Apartheid, it was a communist plot. Of course that’s all over now, but red still comes with a lot of baggage.

Red is blood, and HIV mixes with blood, but blood and HIV don’t mix well with politics. I saw Valimer Moosa, an ANC Cabinet member, speak at the University for forty-five minutes, never once mentioning HIV. When a member of the Treatment Action Council questioned Moosa, his face was red, deeply perturbed. He challenged her, “Do you think that I could sleep at night knowing the government isn’t doing everything in its power to fight AIDS?” Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population here is infected with HIV. The AIDS Ribbon is red, there’s a giant one hanging in front of University Hall. There’s also a mural a block from my house, with a spray-painted condom and the government-certified ABC’s: Abstain, Be safe, and Condomize. The anthropologists at the University taught me about this too. It’s called the didactic method of education. Give people information: just the facts, words and numbers. And it works, sort of. Buhlelo, one of the township kids I work with, could whip out what HIV and AIDS stood for faster than I could. Said he was taught about AIDS a few times every year. Does he know anyone with AIDS? Nope. President Mbeki went on television last year and said he didn’t know anyone who died from AIDS either.

*colored*

I learned that colored is a color in South Africa. A mix of black and white, not gray, kind of light-brownish, probably of Cape Malay origin. If being white was not an option, it was preferable to be colored rather than black under Apartheid. I went on a homestay in a colored township called Ocean View. There was no ocean view, only ocean winds. I found out from Sina, a mother who volunteered as a police officer, that it is no longer preferable to be colored. Nowadays, she told me, the blacks control the government, the whites control the money, and the coloreds are left behind. Shades of color are crucial. In rural sections of Kwa-Zulu Natal, it’s the shade of pink in the vagina that determines whether or not a girl is a virgin. It’s a traditional practice that’s been reinvented to cope with the AIDS epidemic. Virginity testing makes a lot of people uncomfortable. The anthropologists say that the problem is trying to reconcile ‘rights talk,’ like the human rights of girls not to have their vaginas inspected in a public performance, with ‘culture talk,’ the rights of groups to conduct cultural practices without interference. It’s not a problem with a black or white answer, probably one of the shades in between.

The University overlooks all of Cape Town, an expansive view and a truly academic environment. You can find plenty to study here, especially from such a high vantage point. It’s a twenty-minute walk, door to class, up to what was once Cecil John Rhodes estate, what was once the all-white University of Cape Town. On a nice day there are hundreds of people of all shades out on the steps talking, not rights talk or culture talk, just talking. What the anthropologists didn’t mention, and what never occurred to me, was what my girlfriend noticed after visiting for only one day: on the steps there are many shades of people, all talking to the same shade. Not possible I told her, ‘I have black friends, colored friends, it’s the New South Africa, the rainbow nation, take a look around.’ And I did, and I noticed that she was right.

*gold*

All that glitters isn’t gold. In Gauteng Province, diamonds glitter as well, nestled in soft black rock called Kimberlite. Stars glitter and glimmer in the African sky, arranging themselves in constellations that I’ve never seen in the Northern Hemisphere. When I visited Cullinan Diamond Mine, there were no glimmering stars, only glittering diamonds: their five-star safety rating was recently stripped from them after two fatalities in mines during the last six months. Diamonds are forever, and the stars above have a lifespan of a couple million years, but the new South African government removes companies’ safety-stars after only a handful of ‘Lost Time Incidents.’ As if time was all that was lost, not limbs and lives; as if time was all that was to be gained, not diamonds and profit margins. A few miles outside of Johannesburg, I met an artist who bought an abandoned gold mine and began to research its history. He dug up all sorts of black and white pictures of black and white miners working by candlelight, sans shoes, pounding the rocks with raw muscle, as they did before the compressed air drill really made profits glitter. Of course, all that’s gold doesn’t glitter. As my artist cum tour guide explained to me, the streets of Johannesburg are actually paved with gold. Tremendous alabaster mountains found all over the city, leftovers from the gold-mining process, were once mixed with concrete and used to build highways. Only recently was it discovered that the old, inefficient method of extracting gold from rock wasted almost forty percent of the ore, leaving the rest lying there in the streets. Ironically enough, gold-mining companies now foresee the biggest profits in mining these alabaster mine dumps.

While I was in Johannesburg, the City of Gold, I stayed with a wealthy family, the Krugers. Nightlife was non-existent. After dark the gates were locked, security alarms turned on. The Krugers warned my friends and I not to explore downtown: it wasn’t safe, the city had taken a turn for the worse. They were so sure that they hadn’t ventured there themselves for almost fifteen years. They would drop us off downtown at the MuseumAfrika, but we mustn’t be lulled into a false sense of security. Stories, rumors, reinforced the atmosphere of insecurity. There was the break-in when five men with automatic weapons hopped over the back wall, tying up the Krugers around the dining room table. Or the friend of a friend whose car broke down outside of Soweto after dark; he was shot and killed. The fear is tangible, at least as tangible as the gold that paves the streets. Always present, but the problem remains one of extraction. No one’s been able to think of a way to get the gold from the roads without tearing the city apart, and they haven’t had much luck with the fear either.

*

white

/

black

 *

I always forget that white light is not the absence of color; it’s every color blended together. I guess that’s why so many people think God is white. God was white four hundred years ago, crossing the ocean when the Dutch Reformed Church first began mission operations under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company. Twenty years ago, God was briefly confused. Liberation theology claimed God for the black struggle and the Dutch Reformed Church claimed God for the ideology of Apartheid. In the New South Africa, God is white once again, played by James Cazaviel, and He crosses the ocean under the auspices of the Paramount Pictures Company. He shattered box office records in South Africa, beating out Titanic for the biggest opening weekend ever, before being nailed to the cross by the Jews. Like Mel Gibson, I’m Catholic. I also live on Church Street and walk along Chapel Road every day on the way to campus. I’ve found about seven Church Streets in Cape Town, but have not yet had a religious experience. I imagine that having one would be like seeing every color simultaneously, seeing only blinding, transcendental white. Maybe all this focus on whiteness is inappropriate when writing about South Africa? After all, it was not whiteness but, as Fanon put it, the Fact of Blackness that determined the fate of Africa. And I can still see black everywhere. At the pool hall down the road, the signs, sponsored by Black Label Beer, read “You haven’t won until you sink the Black.” Tee-shirts parody the beer’s insignia, reading “Black Labour,” helping to laugh off a legacy. Irony worn on the chest, covering the skin. I bought a Steve Biko shirt the other day. Not only because I admire the man who founded the Black Consciousness movement and was later beaten to death by security police; we also share the same first name. Funny, right? Of course, I can’t wear it until I get back to America, the fact of my whiteness would probably offend people here familiar with the other Steve’s history. It would, however, be misleading to conclude with the whiteness/blackness binary. I didn’t have a religious experience in South Africa because, like any good experience, six months didn’t confirm ideas, it conf

“Via Petroni Sette”[1] by Abby Rosebrock

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In January they told us Americans, indicating the girls with their eyes, that Bologna was a fairly quiet little city and in our search for apartments we would have only to avoid two particular spots: the area around the train station, predictably, and the Via Petroni. Of the eight apartments I surveyed I chose one in the latter zone, building number seven. The residents were the only ones who hadn’t offered me coffee during the interview, but I supposed they had been nice enough regardless, and there was their dog Brando to consider. Brando took a liking to me right off. He was knee-high and fox-shaped and the pale yellow color of dry sand. He was one of two dogs I fell in love with that year, and, unlike the other, Brando barked in plain English and loved me back.

I wondered what could be so bad about this Via Petroni, which in daylight looked no seedier to me than any of the other streets in the center of town. It was connected to a square called Piazza Verdi and for that reason associated in my mind with the opera, tamest and most charming and decrepit of all the fine arts. In fact I was to notice a few days later that bordering Piazza Verdi was Bologna’s very own opera house, stately yet somehow unassuming. I imagined strolling home through Piazza Verdi in the evenings with violins playing, among wholesome choristers and intellectuals, among suited middle-aged men walking arm-in-arm with their Sofia Loren-lookalike dates and whistling Rossini, sexual impulses appropriately in tact. I imagined that the people of Piazza Verdi would be dapper and inspiring and that I would enjoy walking among them after late-afternoon lectures at the University to my quaint bohemian household on the Via Petroni and to Brando, who loved me. At any rate I did not expect that by mid-February, once the semester was in full swing, the Piazza Verdi would be fixed in my mind as a living illustration of Dante’s hell; nor did I expect that this lot beside the opera house would acquire with the onset of springtime heat an impenetrable stench akin to that of taped-off, waste-ridden sections of zoological parks to which visitors are forbidden access.

I learned not long after moving in that neither the neighborhood nor the apartment would meet the standards I had set for them. Brando, for example, in spite of his charms, was little compensation for his owner and the padrone of Apartment Twenty-Two. Pippo was freakishly tall, approaching seven feet, with crooked front teeth, a face covered in coarse brown hair and a habit of changing his clothes about every fourteen days. He was the victim of a broken leg sustained during some mysterious bout of drunken debauchery in Ferrara not long after my arrival. At first I had thought the seven feet of him charming, the shoulder-length, matted hair and outspoken anarchism all signs of an admirably free spirit. There really was something of the lover in his manner of eating soup like a prehistoric ogre. He called it Zuppa di Bastardo, “fatta da bastardi e mangiata da bastardi,[2] a piccante slop of beans and potatoes he had invented in the mountains of Trentino years before moving to Bologna for classes at the art school he never attended.

The assistant chef was Duccio, Pippo’s long-time friend who had moved with him from Trentino to “study” in Bologna – not officially a roommate but an honorary bearer of the key he refused to renounce on moving out of Via Petroni the previous year to chase after some Ilaria in Florence. Whenever he needed a respite from amorous pursuits he returned to our place, often sleeping on our couch and (to his credit) paying a small share of the grocery bill. Duccio had beautiful, crystalline, cracked-out blue eyes.He was a bit thinner than Pippo and, though shorter, had more trouble carrying around his body, so that he was always hunched-over in a sinister-looking posture. Otherwise the two looked very much alike and were difficult to tell apart for the first couple of weeks. I liked to watch Pippo and Duccio stooping over their cracked earthenware bowls and licking them clean and collecting our bowls to lick after we had finished eating or appeared to have finished eating. I liked when the kitchen smelled more like Pippo and Duccio’s rosemary legume slop and less like cannabis. In fact there were aspects of Pippo that I liked very much, but his injury was a cross for us all to bear.

For months he lived on the couch in the kitchen by day and barked at us more loudly than Brando did. Gwladys Guez, the little French coquette from Brittany who shared my room, took to seducing her acquaintances just to get out of the house. Her most tenacious suitor was a man in his sixties who claimed to manage the jazz band we heard every weekend in the underground crypt and who stopped by occasionally to stock our pantry with champagne and coffee cake. Samir, a computer programmer and the flatmate whom Pippo called “Maghreb,” bought a Vespa and took a job delivering pizzas for peace of mind. Anna stopped frequenting her painting classes to take care of her wounded lover. In the mornings she drew up a stool next to Pippo’s sofa and didn’t budge for interminable shifts, taking breaks only to cook Pippo’s meals and brew him coffee. Together they played an American computer game on Samir’s old laptop, and Pippo thundered when the screen cut off every couple of minutes. After a month or so, he became maniacal and spoke to no one until he could conquer “Monkey Island,” with the s pronounced like a z, in the duration between system crashes. Anna continued to brew his coffee. I washed his dishes. Oli l’Olandese,[3] another former roommate in possession of a key, cleaned the apartment every week when she could carve out a break from writing her thesis. She studied anthropology and may very well have hung around the apartment out of an intellectual interest in our living habits. Oli and I took turns walking Brando in the early afternoons and – after he started sneaking in the kitchen every night to defecate on the small patch of floor space where Pippo was known to rest his beer can – in the evenings, too.

All this might have been fine, a tolerable discomfort, until the suspicion occurred to Gwladys Guez and me that Pippo may not have been so incapacitated after all, on the evidence of his nightly, sleep-depriving, earth-shattering sessions of faccendo l’amore[4] with Anna, more than two feet shorter than he and apparently not very difficult to please. Sometimes he played a recording of Jimi Hindrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” to obscure the noise, but an electric guitar was no match for their moaning and acrobatics. These incidences began in March, when the winter chill was dissipating and it became possible to sleep without several layers of clothing, the sheets of cellophane we had duck-taped to the walls in replacement of several broken windows being sufficient to shut out the mild frosts. Around the time the poplar trees began to bloom, Pippo and Anna started having the kind of sex that the poets associate with springtime. It was the kind of sex that made one on the outside feel destined to be alone for the rest of her life, and resentful of doing everybody’s dishes.

In fact it wasn’t terribly long before I gave up on the dishes, one afternoon when Pippo was dictating the recipe for stuffed peppers to Anna and lifting up the waist of Oli’s skirt to examine her backside as she knelt on the floor wiping up spilt red wine.

“You are getting tan,” he told her.

He had beaten Monkey Izland that morning and was feeling satisfied with himself, like some 19th-century mustached game-hunter who had set out in a colonized jungle and caught himself a real monkey.

Oli looked up at Pippo and at Duccio sitting next to him. Then she bent over again and continued scrubbing.

Duccio had explained to me a few nights before that things were strange between Oli and him since he had taken up sleeping with her and with the Florentine Ilaria at the same time. His Italian grammar was such that it remains ambiguous as to whether Duccio meant he was carrying on simultaneous, separate affairs with these women or habitually sleeping with them both at once, with three to a bed, in a jealousy-ridden ménage-a-trois. Regardless, he seemed rather proud of himself. Torn between his best friend and his faithful housekeeper, Pippo had not yet taken sides with either Duccio or Oli and had been deliberating for weeks.

“Oli is profoundly envious,” Duccio had confided me that evening as he helped me find a concert hall I should have looked for on my own. “She is in love, and a woman becomes irrational in such a condition. But she can be a very sympathetic person.”

All this I could read in Oli’s glance to the two men, to the 26-year-old jobless men who reeked of cigarettes and limoncello and made excellent soup and rarely bathed and had worn holes in the upholstery of our sofa. I dropped the encrusted plate I was working on into the sink and said to Pippo in my broken Italian, “It is not done that way. Do not do that. It is maleducato[5] and shows that you don’t respect anyone,” whereupon Pippo became enraged at me for the first and only time during my tenure at the Via Petroni, slammed down the screen of Samir’s laptop to better see my face and said, “Basta con questo moralismo sessuale.[6] Oli is my friend and she will tell me if she doesn’t like me looking at her culo. Until then I look at her culo[7] whenever I want. Mind your own business. Cazzi tuoi.[8]”

I stood silently for a moment and put down my dish with as little clatter as possible and went to my bedroom to start planning a trip to London for the next weekend. And I made a policy of letting the dishes pile up indefinitely.

But those versed in the politics of Bologna’s social scene would notice readily that my flatmates were not of the typical Via Petroni crowd we had been warned of, the punkabestia, dreadlocked self-proclaimed “beast-punks” in their twenties, dressed in gothic attire and fond of sitting under the porticos, or out in the open on Piazza Verdi, with their small-eyed, swollen-nippled or grossly-testicled, vicious-looking pitbulls and drinking themselves into a rambling stupor. They were generally harmless, aside from the occasional sexist remarks the more intoxicated male punkabestia would hurl at fair-complexioned, foreign-looking girls, and after a month in Italy we were deaf to such comments, anyways. Various creation myths circulated that explained the punkabestia’s origins. Some say there had been a law in Italy, inspired the culture of Catholic benevolence, that the sole owner of a domestic animal could not legally be sent to jail for any reason, and drug-dealers took to buying dogs as insurance against imprisonment. Others believe that at one time pet-owners were given small stipends by the government, making dogs a popular accessory among unemployed students. Whatever the reason, most locals agreed that about ten years before my arrival in Italy it became all the rage among Bologna’s youth to dress “alternatively” and roam the streets with snarling dogs on metal leashes. (“Bologna has a vibrant student community of cosmopolitan intellectuals,” I once wrote home to my father in South Carolina, paraphrasing a study abroad brochure I had read somewhere along the way.)

My roommates and I found prideful solidarity in our decidedly not being among the punkabestia ranks, and in our not taking them seriously. But their presence around the Via Petroni was enough, for a spell, to make me dread my evening walks home through the piazza that, like so much else in my life, I had romanticized prematurely based on its name, on the engraved marble sign at its entrance, on its title in the index of my map.

But not long ago, at the height of my disillusionment with the place (the kind I’m told everybody goes through for a couple of weeks upon moving overseas), just after I had stepped through a bevy of drunken twenty-somethings, sitting indian-style among broken bottles and puddles of urine and stinking up the Piazza Verdi with the dogs they had bred and cultivated to look as dumb and wretched as themselves, trashing the medieval architecture they felt it their political duty, as anarchists, to disrespect – it was just after I had picked my way through a crowd of these that I climbed up the slippery marble stairs of my apartment building and saw scotch-taped to the wall next to a neighbor’s door the following message in blue ink on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of white paper:

Ho trovato una maglia nella Via Petroni 7. È VERDE [in green marker] con maniche NERE [in black marker]. Era sporchissima ma l’ho lavata. È molto bella e fa ancora fresco fuori e voglio consegnarla alla person giusta. Se è tua, chiamami!!”[9]

There were a careful sketch of the sweatshirt and two exclamation marks after the text and the girl’s telephone number written large and boldly across the bottom of the sign. I thought for a moment of this neighbor of ours, a friend of the apartment who often showed up asking for cigarette rolling papers or sugar and was one of the few who could be counted on, my flatmates assured me, to return the favor. I thought of her, dreadlocked and foul-smelling, washing the lost sweatshirt, rummaging through her apartment for a blue pen and green and black markers and clean white computer paper and scotch tape and drawing up a plan for this magnificently thoughtful sign of hers. I stood there in the hallway caught up for a few irrational moments by a visceral love for Italy, for Italians, for the neighborhood, for the Via Petroni, punkabestia and all. I loved Pippo’s broken leg and Anna and Gwladys Guez and Samir and Oli and even Duccio and Brando’s diarrhea and the ubiquitous stench of alcohol. I loved the past few months and the next few months to come and I rushed into my apartment and forgot about the James Joyce novel in my purse.

Pippo and I were the only flatmates around that night; we spent the evening on the sofa eating tough-crusted Pugliese bread and olive oil with Brando. Pippo honored my request for his famous impression of the effeminate Frenchman who, years before, had refused him admission to a campsite because he had not pronounced bungalow to the Frenchman’s liking. He thanked me when I got up to fetch him a cigarette lighter. He told me affectionately that he was sure I had not voted for Regan. I ate my bread and drank our good wine and listened politely and contentedly to Pippo’s theories on sexual liberation and even agreed with a sentence or two.

——————————————————————————–

[1] 7 Petroni Street

[2] “made by bastards, eaten by bastards”

[3] Olandese: Dutch. Oli’s father was from the Netherlands.

[4] lovemaking

[5] rude, the result of poor upbringing

[6] “Enough with this sexual moralism.”

[7] ass

[8] Vulgar colloquialism for “Mind your own business.” Literally, “your dicks.”

[9] “I have found a sweatshirt in the Via Petroni 7. It’s GREEN with BLACK sleeves. It was extremely dirty but I washed it. It is very pretty and it’s still chilly outside and I want to give it back to the right person. If it’s yours, call me!!”

Listening to Lenka by Erica Wolff CC ’04

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She was not like the others, this Lenka. – not at all like the other Lenkas (the Lenkas are everywhere in Prague, as abundant and prized as the Pilsner beer). It is a testament to an undeclared adversity to diversity that nearly every female one encounters in Czech Republic answers to the name Lenka. Well, there are the Jitkas too – the Jitkas, the Janas and the Petras. But the Lenkas, they are the embodiment of Czech womanhood. They are usually blond (either natural or affected), tall and thin but undeniably sturdy- hard, angular features and old lady eyes set in otherwise youthful faces. They laugh occasionally, though humor and gaiety are not their nearest companions. They are haunted by a brutal past, hardened by a history so gripping that they cannot quite embrace the promising future that lies ahead. They are all short skirts and long necks – barely animated tree trunks trudging through the daily pain they call life.

But she was different, this Lenka – eyes so wide and shiny you could not help but stare. Smile so sincere and unusually permanent, you could not help but smile back.

“So you were here in the 80’s…I mean, you grew up under Communism, right?” I was thrilled that this new American visitor (this Josh from LA) had now replaced me as the most naïve young westerner in the group. It had taken me months to shed that air of skeptical “other.” Only recently had I been able to dull the obvious ignorance and awe that I used to display every time I met a Czech peer who (yes, of course!) had been taught to hate the ‘capitalist pigs’ while I had been buying up Boardwalk and Parkplace and contemplating the life lessons learned in a game like Monopoly.

“What?” Lenka asked with her usual well-meaning smile.

“You were here when the Communists were in power, huh? Wasn’t it…?” Josh could hardly find the word for what he thought “it” must have been like.

“Oh, yes, yes. I was here.” She paused for a moment. “But no, it wasn’t so bad, you know. I mean, it was nice then.”

“Nice?” I asked with obvious doubt and a not too well masked sense of disgust. I had never heard this type of response before.

“Jo,” she nodded. “You know, it was, well, easier sometimes. You know, now, you go the store and you want a pair of shoes. There are like, well, fifty different kinds and you have to choose from them. And back then, it was, well, here, these are shoes. Just one kind. And you wear them. And everybody wears them. They’re just shoes, you know – for your feet. So who really cares?”

None of us were quite ready to respond.

She went on, “And it wasn’t too bad, you know. Everything is simple and you go to school and you have your friends. And it was not like a prison. In the summer you go the cottage in the country. And there are mountains and there is sun- so, you know, this is our childhood.”

Not even prior exposure to Lenka’s unwavering optimism had prepared me for this response. After four months of studying Czech history and reading Czech literature I had yet to hear an account of life under Communism quite like this. I knew about the hardships, the loss of opportunities, the stifling of intellectual life; but the joys of simplicity? This was not a perspective I’d encountered before.

I found her acceptance of Communism unnerving. It seemed to affront every instinct of my democratic soul. She continued to speak about her childhood, laughing uncontrollably about some incident involving her sister and a lake. I stared at her wide, forgiving eyes, wondering why the bitterness was absent from her voice. And slowly, as the stories continued, I began to see the origin of her contentment. It was not so much that she liked living under Communism, but that she liked living as a child…and she just so happened to have been a child when the Communists were in power. Her positive perception of Communism was nothing more than a young adult’s nostalgia for the jollity of childhood.

“But some things were strange,” she finally admitted. “Like being Jewish, you know. We were Jewish but we didn’t really know it.”

“So your family hid it from you?” Josh asked. “They weren’t allowed to say they were Jewish?”

“Oh, no, no,” Lenka explained, “No, we knew we were Jewish, you know. Sometime, they told us, like, well, ‘we are Jewish.’ But really, I didn’t know what that means. Well, sometimes my grandmother did some prayers. But that was it. And no one taught us about it. So now, it is like, oh, this is what it is to be Jewish.”

She was referring “now” to our group – to the way we all met. We had come to know each other by going to the Chabad House here in Prague. These young people – Czechs, Americans, Israelis, whoever – we had all been going to the Shabbat services at this orthodox synagogue. Not one of us was orthodox (not even close). I suppose we all had our own reasons for going there – to connect to other Jews and to Judaism, to find something welcoming and comfortable when so far from home, to learn a bit more about our religion and our culture in a place where that tradition had deep historical roots.

I’d never gone to synagogue regularly when living in the U.S. I hadn’t seen the point. Well, I hadn’t exactly looked very hard for the point, either. But since I’d been living in Prague, I’d been going to Chabad nearly every week. It hadn’t changed my lifestyle tremendously. The rest of the week I was my old secular self. But come Friday evening, I gave myself a little reminder- you are Jewish. You are here in Europe, thousands of miles away from your Jewish home and your Jewish family, but you are still Jewish. Perhaps it was because those reinforcements were absent that I needed Chabad. I needed it to remind me I was Jewish and more so, to explain what Judaism was. Because I, like Lenka, had always known I was Jewish, but I (like Lenka) had not always known what that meant.

Listening to Lenka, I began to realize that oppression comes in many different forms. It is not only by the punitive hand of a totalitarian government that religion and personal expression are suppressed. Sometimes it is something as subtle as an attractive dominant culture that keeps us from practicing an inherited tradition or from understanding the origins of the self. I had been looking at these people with such assumed superiority. With my proud western perspective, I alone (among these Czech friends) knew the joys of liberality, the value of a democratic tradition. I, the veteran of a democratic state, looked with pity upon these virgin capitalists, these poor, struggling people trying desperately to shed the memory of oppression and rebuild their nation in the model of my western utopia.

And here was this Lenka, this child of an “underprivileged” nation, showing me, for the first time, that what she had suffered was perhaps not terribly different from what I myself had experienced. We had both known suppression in varying forms. We had simply been inhibited by different forces. And perhaps I had needed to come this land where religious expression was historically restricted in order to recognize how the freedoms of my homeland had somehow kept me from fully practicing my religion.

It was not so much that I was equating the horrors of the Communist regime with the smaller inadequacies of my own political system. But by understanding the limitations of my great American upbringing I was somehow able to conceptualize the realities of forty plus years of Communist rule. What was once, to me, merely an episode of historical trauma, a chapter in the history of a foreign peoples – distant and surreal – was now a sort of personal reality. People not only suffered through the Communist era, they actually lived through it. Someone my age had had a childhood under this a regime; and more than that – she had fond memories of her childhood under this regime. She, like I, had enjoyed her upbringing despite obvious challenges. And now, from our vastly divergent childhoods, we were together, as young adults, trying to recapture a tradition and a culture that, for varying reasons, had previously been denied.