A golden age

I watched last night, on my brother's recommendation, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It is a weird film. OK, learned critics loved it, it has nice if nostalgic and selected shots of Paris with everything modern and ugly excised, and charming actors impersonating famous people from the past, but the satire and the nostalgia for a golden age didn't work for me.  Hemingway, Faulkner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stern were in Paris in the 1920s because it was a cheap place to live in and you could get booze legally. Some of them were talented people, others fed of the talents of others. There was a temporary flowering of the arts, as there was in Vienna in the years immediately before the First World War, in Berlin during the Weimar Era, the Belle Epoque from 1871 in Paris, in New York in the 1960s, but I don't buy into such nostalgia. The period was overcast by the shadow of the war and the unsettled sense of injustice, resentment and disillusionment. The Belle Epoque followed the defeat of France in its war against Germany, and was marred by the ugly divisions that were manifested in the Dreyfus case. Golden ages are periods of history without major wars such as the present. There are and were bloody regional wars, Vietnam, the Balkans, Chechnya Iraq and Afghanistan, and numerous conflicts in Africa between countries and tribes many of us had never heard of and certainly had never given much thought to, but the conflicts on the scale of the two World Wars had been avoided. Compared with the history of past centuries, we live in a period of peace. Woody Allen can poke fun at Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and the rest of the notable characters of that period, and in particular, poke fun at the pompous academic know all, but spare me the nostalgia.

The transformation of America 

A few days ago I watched a documentary about Noam Chomsky, the possibly misguided guru of linguistic theory, but certainly a prominent spokesman for intellectuals who don't like what's going on in the America around them. There was little in what he said that I didn't know, but he had a way of putting things together, organizing his argument to make his points clear. He talked about 10 points that contributed to the transformation of America that essentially made the rich richer and the gap between rich and poor greater. America was a fairer society in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was the last President who believed in the ideals of the New Deal, a fair go for the common man. After Nixon, the rich elite took steps to enhance their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of the Americans. In the 1960s America was a manufacturing country. People made things, cars for example. Gradually with the transformation of economic theories, libertarianism, free market principles, manufacturing was transferred to lower wage economies, China, Mexico, India, wherever it was cheapest to make things. Those employed in America in making things were displaced by people in places where they were prepared to accept lower wages. In exchange for exporting manufactured good, America imported poverty. In the course of achieving such an outcome, America destroyed its infrastructure by underinvesting, destroyed its educational system by defunding, altered the political landscape by removing limits to politcal contribution and thus ppolitical influence, created a philosophical context in which such changes became not only acceptable, but desirable. The creation of wealth through manufacture was replaced by financial manipulation. Financial controls were removed, with the result that financial collapses occurred, something that never happened during times of stringent financial regulations. Financial collapse led to the impoverishment of the already poor and the middle class, while the wealth of the rich were protected through the principle of 'too large to fail' and large financial institutions were rescued by the state. Socialism for the rich, the poor subsidised the losses of the rich. Financial manipulation also enabled the creation of vast monopolies, which stifled innovation. The response of monopolies threatened by innovative start-ups is to buy them and stifle them. Monopolies are of their nature averse to risks. Trump and his large number of followers are the product of the sense of alienation and disengagement that is the result of this transformation of American economy. Chomsky may not always be entirely right, but he is worth listening to.

Too much music

Yesterday I went to a piano duet recital, by two talented Wellington musicians, Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton. For me, the highlight was Schubert's Grand rondeau, D951. I don't recall ever having heard this piece before. Schubert wrote it five weeks before he died. It is a rondo using a gentle, song like theme. The music just sprouted from the 29 year old Schubert. In the last year of his life he wrote his greatest instrumental works, the piano trios, his three great last sonatas, his cello quintet, and the song cycle Winterreisse, one of the most moving song cycles ever written. The slow movement of the A Major sonata and the slow movement of the Cello Quintet are some of the most melancholy pieces I can think of. Although suggesting that Schubert had his own forthcoming death in mind is romanticising these works, they have a gentle, sad, acceptance of fate  that can only be captured in music, or perhaps more accurately, only the young Schubert, on the brink of his own death could capture. Much of the rest of the music of his last years is sunny, cheerful, but there is always a tinge of sadness that creeps though. Music just poured out of him, even though he felt ill for much of the time. He gorged himself on music and wanted more. He wanted to learn counterpoint. He didn't think he was good enough. What a wonderfully humble little man he was. Since yesterday my mind is full of Schubert's late works. I have listened to the A Major Sonata, the Cello Quintet, the F minor Fantasie for Piano Duet. If there would be music at a Jewish funeral I would select my music from among these pieces, though would not want to rush their perforamnce. 

Israel and music

Inbal Megiddo, the wonderful cellist who teaches at the New Zealand School of Music, gave an interesting and thought provoking talk last night on the role of music in Judaism and Israel. She talked about music in ancient times in the Temple, but it is music in the emerging Israel and the role of music in nation building that was of special interest. The early generation of Jewish composers, the generation of Ernst Bloch drew inspiration from traditional Jewish liturgical and popular klezmer music. The following generation gathered the music of the various ethnic groups in Israel, as Bartok and Vaughan Williams did in their time in their lands. The younger generation are no longer self-conscious about writing Jewish music. They are just contemporary composers. If they draw on the wealth of different musical traditions around them these are building blocks of the language of their music. As important, however, as the works of Israeli composers, performers have a significant role to play in bringing the various people of the land of Israel together. Inbal, a former member of the Western- Eastern Divan Orchestra talked about the orchestra that brings together young musicians from the countries of the Middle East, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, to make music together, and incidentally, establish friendships. She talked about the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth that employs Russian Jewish musicians to supplement the Arab musicians playing traditional Arab musical instruments. The orchestra brings together Muslims, Christians and Jews. She mentioned the Polyphony Conservatory, based in Nazareth, with a branch in Jaffa. Most of its 130 students are Palestinian Israelis, but among the students there are  Israeli kibbutzniks who are brought together by their love of music. Perhaps it is in music that we can see the future of a peaceful Middle East. There may come a time when Arabs get sick of murdering Arabs, Palestinians stop murdering Israelis and Israelis murdering Palestinians. and the region will live in harmony and cooperation as they do when making music in their orchestras. 

The future as a guide to the present.

We were fortunate in Wellington to have a visit by Prof. Mark Steiner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He gave a short talk about one of his many areas of expertise, Rabbi Israel Salanter. One of the great things about knowing so little is that I can always learn a lot. Prof. Steiner talked about Salanter's view on the conundrum of why good people do bad things. (I hope that I got the drift of his talk right). He said that the reason for this is that people are disconnected from the future. He used the analogy of doctors smoking, even though they know its consequences. Why smoke if you know that it is going to kill you? Why do evil when you know its evil consequences? This is a question that is very relevant in considering the Holocaust. The perpetrators, or even the bystanders, were mostly ordinary human beings, who committed evil deeds or condoned them. The question that this raised in my mind is: if such disconnect with the future makes evil acts by good people possible, is there a similar impact on people by a disconnect with the past? We can't know the future, but we can know the past, though that is capable of various interpretations. Would a connection with the past lead to good actions?  And how can we connect with the past in a way that this forges universal connections? These are big unanswered questions. But even if we know the consequences of past actions we may not learn the appropriate lessons. The Americans thought that by changing the political regime they can achieve geopolitical aims, and got bogged down in the Vietnam War. Yet a generation later, wanting to impose 'democracy' a concept not known in the region, they got bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, You could argue that they got the Ayatollahs in Iran because they thwarted the democratic aspirations of the people a generation earlier. Look to the past and consider the future.

Leonard Cohen

Dear Leonard (or should I call you Len?)

Last night I watched a ten year old documentary about you. It touched me more than I would have imagined it would. You are eight days older than I am, like I, you are Jewish, and not only Jewish, but also a Cohen, though you come from a more distinguished learned Jewish family. My roots are pretty humble, a small time country cobbler on one side, a wine wholesaler on the other. No talmudic scholars in the family tree, though there are synagogue office holders. Our early lives were, however, very different. You grew up in peaceful Quebec, while my life was shaped by war-torn Hungary. In the New Zealand where I landed, I was always something of an outsider, tolerated, even respected, but never one of the in crowd. Like you, I had modest literary ambitions, wrote stories for the Teachers College Students/ magazine. I think I might have been its editor, so had the inside running, wrote poetry, a folder of which I gave to a fairly well-known poet for his opinion. He promptly lost it and I kept no copies. Perhaps no great loss, the poems were probably all rubbish, but posterity will never know. I came across you for the first time when my elderly colleague, John Elphick sold your early books of verse in the mid 1960s. John Elphick represented Jonathan Cape, the leading literary publishers. John, a very earnest patriotic Englishman, who was a dedicated fire watcher during the war, had little sympathy for some of the Jonathan Cape authors, Joseph Heller and his anti-war Catch 22, and your books. As everyone knew, books of poetry don't sell, poetry is hard to understand, it is acquired taste for long-haired intellectuals, obscure, like Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Spender, MacNeice. Yours were different, they were personal, easy to read, and unlike other books of poetry, they sold in large numbers much to the amazement of John Elphick. Somehow our interests, yours and mine, went their separate ways. In so far as I continued to take an interest in literature, I leaned towards the heavy end, while you wrote for the common man, and the young common man and woman for that matter, I was dismissive of writing, like that of he beat poets, and the whole bohemian counterculture, that shared personal angst with the rest of the world. And then you took up song writing and singing. When I was young, I frequented a student cafe where people played guitars and sang songs about the working man, or the war, and always the underdog, lovely gentle songs. Although I had a lot of time for the young people around me, tolerant, free thinking, who by and large shared my world view, I was never part of the crowd.

I took no interest in your kind of very personal music,that is easy to listen to. I was strictly classical, the highlight of my musical experiences were the late Beethoven quartets. As an old man now, I am learning from my children, and this is why I took the trouble to watch the programme about you. I have to admit that I was very taken with your music. You were fortunate with your arrangers and the young performers who sang your songs. I don't know whether your songs have deep meanings, in most cases I couldn't follow your words, but they were lovely gentle music. So Len, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

To forget or remember

Last week I had the privilege of talking to a group of visitors from Warkworth, North of Auckland, at the Holocaust Centre. They were older people from a retirement village and I had to think of something different to talk about from my talks to school students, which usually relate to specific topics within the curriculum areas. So I talked about why the Holocaust Centre came into being. For many years people didn't talk about the Holocaust. Survivors wanted to move on with their lives and didn't want to relive their horrendous experiences, people at large found the accounts of the Holocaust too troubling and disturbing and simply didn't want to be upset. Survivors didn't want to talk, but they also found that people didn't want to listen, didn't want to know inconvenient truths. A generation later, fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a younger generation became interested in the horrendous events that their parents tried to forget. So when we had a service in the synagogue commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the synagogues was almost full, but largely full of people I didn't know, people who were not part of the Jewish community. This event that brought home to me that the Holocaust touched a great many lives, not just Jewish lives, and that it was not a Jewish story, it was a universal, or at least a Western European story. The rest is history. I tapped on the shoulder some very able people, we formed a committee to establish a Holocaust Centre, which has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. Visitors, school groups come from all corners of the,  country, visitors from overseas compliment it on the way its small space is used to bring home the essential account of the Holocaust, and make this relevant to New Zealand here and now. But the question of remembering continues to be in the forefront of our thinking. The stories of survivors are important, but those killed must not be forgotten. 'Never again' is too simplistic a lesson. We need to talk about the nature of civilization, and in particular, about the disintegration of a liberal, enlightened culture that unravelled in the wake of the First World War and the events that preceded it. The ideals embodied in the French Revolution, 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality', which largely underpinned the consensus of European culture in the nineteenth century, were subverted. They were sacrificed to causes like Nationalism, Communism, Racial superiority, dreams of past glory, and to achieve the goals of these causes whatever means were needed were justified to attain the greater end. Talking to the present generation about the Holocaust we have to talk not only about the horrendous tragedy, but also question the values we hold, explore their relevance, and understand the underlying principles of Western civilization and its consensus about the ideals of European liberalism.