Hello. I am winding down my internship at the Institute, and feeling slightly worn down with the Dixie Jewry. I just wrote 15 pages about the history of Montgomery Jews, and am currently working on Birmingham. Some interesting things: Montgomery's first white settler was named Abraham Mordecai he was a fur trader convinced that the local Indian Tribes were a lost band of Israelites. Also, he got his ear cut off. Birmingham, on the other hand, was home to the most famous Jewish poet... in Japan.
I've been in the media lately...check it out:
1) This was my second column in the Summer Daily...Howard Dean came to Jackson, and I had thoughts about the gaping chasms of regional political alliances.... Catfish Kveth#2: Red Mississippi Blues.
2) My third column of the summer came out this week, and delves into the complex and altogether, deceivingly pleasant ethos of the American county fair in Catfish Kveth#3: All's Fair
3) I produced another piece for WLEZ's Radio Fondren. It's a bit of an audio tour of Jackson art galleries. I think I should get a stipend from the Jackson Tourism bureau. When its up on Radio Fondren's website this will be a link. Click on the big headphones, or scroll down until you see the link for August 8th...
I hope you are all well.
-DJH
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Turns out that the Deep South has independent music labels and kids in tight jeans too.
So, I've made friends with a Jackson local who has his own show on the community radio station here (WLEZ, 103.7fm). He' involved with a small, though growing arts scene in the city. I'm going to produce some radio piece for him. In fact, I already have. I went to a concert at this new venue in Jackson called 121 Millsaps. It's a sort of art collective, studio space, performance venue, old warehouse. The link below goes to his site, click on the big head phones to hear the most recent show featuring my piece about 30 minutes in.
Go, go Jackson, go.
Go, go Jackson, go.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Oh Moon of Alabama
I write to you now from room 123 in a Day's Inn in Montgomery, Alabama. I'm here on a research trip with my boss Staurt and the other two history interns. We're road tripping around the Heart of Dixie synagogue-hopping and small-town library-scouring for info on the Jews. This process continues to be bizarre. We spent about an hour in the incredible 95 degree humidity writing down all the names of the Jewish section at the Live Oaks cemetery in Selma. My favorite: Stonewall Jackson Lilienthal. I'm not kidding. Then we crossed the bridge over the Alabama river that Martin Luther King once walked over in the Freedom March for Voting Rights in 1965. Tomorrow, it's all day in the state archives at the Montgomery City Library.
I won't write any more, because I have to save material for a column I'm writing for the summer Stanford Daily. I think there should be one every other Thursday. I'll post a link when they're up.
HERE IT IS, the first installment of Catfish Kvetch. Enjoy.
I won't write any more, because I have to save material for a column I'm writing for the summer Stanford Daily. I think there should be one every other Thursday. I'll post a link when they're up.
HERE IT IS, the first installment of Catfish Kvetch. Enjoy.
Monday, June 23, 2008
वेयर? वहत?
After driving for 11 hours from Chapel Hill North Carolina , hopped up on stale gas station coffee, NPR podcasts, and the concrete of highway moving 85mph below my feet, I opened the door to the sanctuary of Beth Israel of Jackson Mississippi to see a room full of elderly Southern Jews watching an Israeli youth group performing a high energy Grease medley loaded with Hebrew harmonizing, snapping, clapping, hip swiveling, white polka-dotted overalls and neckerchiefs. And I thought: Holy God, what have I gotten myself into?
Only days before I was sitting comfortably in my parents living room in Massachusetts watching HBO documentaries on demand and munching homemade biscotti. It’s been a strange couple of days. Monday was Massachusetts to Washington D.C. Besides taking a wrong turn somewhere around Cheesequake, New Jersey and the monsoon that hit the D.C. area as soon as I got off the highway, it was a pretty smooth day. Met with my friend Jenni in Cleveland Park (Though, when I stepped through the door her family was in the midst of a bit of crisis involving pyschotic break or two) But we had a very nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant regardless. I then made my way over to Bethesda, Maryland to meet my friend Mike whose summer program put him up in a altogether sterile, ritzy, and corporate high rise suite. (The kind of place you might take a congressional intern to booze up and off) Woke up in a white anonymous room and headed to Arlington to meet my friend James for lunch, then I hit the room stuffed with coffee and some pretzerellas (think mozarella stick lined with pretzel).
Driving through Virginia listening to a New Yorker fiction podcast about a woman having an emotional crisis in the Museum of Metropolitan Art and staring into the vast expanse of blank highway stretching out in front of me, I thought: Where am I? I’m nowhere. I’m anywhere. I’m in my car. I felt an urge to experience some local culture, to see some stuff. I saw a sign for the Peterson Historic Battlefield National Park. Americana, here I come! After driving around slightly lost in an economically depressed little rural town, with the GPS system chastising me all the while for getting off course, I finally found the park entrance and drove through the access road to view the various forts captured by the Union. At Battery Number 5, I came across a large group of people being given a tour by a park ranger. Naturally, I hopped on. In his thick Virginia accent, he told us about the banal details of the life of a Confederate or Union soldier. I looked around at the group and saw a preponderance of guys with buzz cuts. Then I saw many in the group were wearing military fatigues. I soon learned that I had joined a tour group of National Guardsmen on break learning about our nation’s history.... Rusty Watkins (the park ranger) took us to the spot in the old Peterson battlefield where coal miners from the Union ranks tunneled underneath the Confederate camp and dynamited the hell out of Johnny Reb. As he described the carnage of the Peterson siege I looked around at my beefy peers, actual soldiers listening about the atrocities of wars of yore. Uncomfortable and sweaty in the hot sun, I was relieved to get back into the air conditioned car and blast my New Yorker shit all the way to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
When I arrived in Chapel Hill I went to go stay with Ari, a UNC graduate student who I met on couchsurfing.com, a social networking website where people offer to put up travels on their couches. Surprisingly enough he did not try to steal my stuff nor make homoerotic advances. Instead, we went out to eat dinner at a local, organic market, walk around UNC campus, and play pub-trivia with his graduate student friends. I guess Blanche Dubois was right about the kindness of strangers and whatnot. I once again believe in the internet and that decent people exist. Chapel Hill felt weirdly like Amherst, Mass with its small, preppy, college town vibe. I told this to Ari, who himself is a Jew from Orange County, California, and he explained: “There is the South, and then there is the South.”
The next day, I woke up and had some coffee with Ari and got on the highway at around 9am EST. In one day, I drove over 700 miles, and through 5 states (and we’re not talking chintzy New England states), saw a giant peach in South Carolina, ate 18 inches of Subway sandwiches, listened to hours upon hours of podcast, crossed a time zone, ate two Slims Jims in Alabama, and pulled into the Beth Israel of Jackson to meet with the crew from the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Mississippi at 8:30 pm CST only to find Isreali teens wailing into cordless mics in front of a room full of dazed and slightly bemused American members of the Tribe.
These were the Tozim Isreali Friends Scouts. A youth group started sometime in the 1970s. They tour the United States every summer to share their songs and dancing and remind us how horrible Palestinians are. Kind of like a Zionist Mickey Mouse club. Except replace cute/irritating skits between musical numbers with fear mongering promotional videos that advocate the furtherance of the Israeli state and take away the Mousketeers signoff song with the Israeli national anthem and flag waving and you’ve pretty much got a good picture of what we’re dealing with. Loads of costume changes, jazz hands, and Star Search note belting... plus a little Hebrew and prayer. Welcome to the Southern Jewish experience, I thought.
After the show, I met some of my co-workers and headed off to the house of the person I’ll be staying with until my apartment opens up, dazed and confused, and already over-dosing on Jewish and thinking on repeat: What have I gotten myself into?
I’ve been here for a couple of days now, and the thoughts of “Where am I?” “Why am here?” don’t seem to quit. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m working for Jews. Jews. Jews.
Stay tuned, and you might just hear about Goldring Woldenberg Institute’s Southern Jewish Educators Conference that I had to work at this past weekend.
Shalom Y’all, until next time,
Turistamen Supremawitz en el Sur
Only days before I was sitting comfortably in my parents living room in Massachusetts watching HBO documentaries on demand and munching homemade biscotti. It’s been a strange couple of days. Monday was Massachusetts to Washington D.C. Besides taking a wrong turn somewhere around Cheesequake, New Jersey and the monsoon that hit the D.C. area as soon as I got off the highway, it was a pretty smooth day. Met with my friend Jenni in Cleveland Park (Though, when I stepped through the door her family was in the midst of a bit of crisis involving pyschotic break or two) But we had a very nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant regardless. I then made my way over to Bethesda, Maryland to meet my friend Mike whose summer program put him up in a altogether sterile, ritzy, and corporate high rise suite. (The kind of place you might take a congressional intern to booze up and off) Woke up in a white anonymous room and headed to Arlington to meet my friend James for lunch, then I hit the room stuffed with coffee and some pretzerellas (think mozarella stick lined with pretzel).
Driving through Virginia listening to a New Yorker fiction podcast about a woman having an emotional crisis in the Museum of Metropolitan Art and staring into the vast expanse of blank highway stretching out in front of me, I thought: Where am I? I’m nowhere. I’m anywhere. I’m in my car. I felt an urge to experience some local culture, to see some stuff. I saw a sign for the Peterson Historic Battlefield National Park. Americana, here I come! After driving around slightly lost in an economically depressed little rural town, with the GPS system chastising me all the while for getting off course, I finally found the park entrance and drove through the access road to view the various forts captured by the Union. At Battery Number 5, I came across a large group of people being given a tour by a park ranger. Naturally, I hopped on. In his thick Virginia accent, he told us about the banal details of the life of a Confederate or Union soldier. I looked around at the group and saw a preponderance of guys with buzz cuts. Then I saw many in the group were wearing military fatigues. I soon learned that I had joined a tour group of National Guardsmen on break learning about our nation’s history.... Rusty Watkins (the park ranger) took us to the spot in the old Peterson battlefield where coal miners from the Union ranks tunneled underneath the Confederate camp and dynamited the hell out of Johnny Reb. As he described the carnage of the Peterson siege I looked around at my beefy peers, actual soldiers listening about the atrocities of wars of yore. Uncomfortable and sweaty in the hot sun, I was relieved to get back into the air conditioned car and blast my New Yorker shit all the way to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
When I arrived in Chapel Hill I went to go stay with Ari, a UNC graduate student who I met on couchsurfing.com, a social networking website where people offer to put up travels on their couches. Surprisingly enough he did not try to steal my stuff nor make homoerotic advances. Instead, we went out to eat dinner at a local, organic market, walk around UNC campus, and play pub-trivia with his graduate student friends. I guess Blanche Dubois was right about the kindness of strangers and whatnot. I once again believe in the internet and that decent people exist. Chapel Hill felt weirdly like Amherst, Mass with its small, preppy, college town vibe. I told this to Ari, who himself is a Jew from Orange County, California, and he explained: “There is the South, and then there is the South.”
The next day, I woke up and had some coffee with Ari and got on the highway at around 9am EST. In one day, I drove over 700 miles, and through 5 states (and we’re not talking chintzy New England states), saw a giant peach in South Carolina, ate 18 inches of Subway sandwiches, listened to hours upon hours of podcast, crossed a time zone, ate two Slims Jims in Alabama, and pulled into the Beth Israel of Jackson to meet with the crew from the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Mississippi at 8:30 pm CST only to find Isreali teens wailing into cordless mics in front of a room full of dazed and slightly bemused American members of the Tribe.
These were the Tozim Isreali Friends Scouts. A youth group started sometime in the 1970s. They tour the United States every summer to share their songs and dancing and remind us how horrible Palestinians are. Kind of like a Zionist Mickey Mouse club. Except replace cute/irritating skits between musical numbers with fear mongering promotional videos that advocate the furtherance of the Israeli state and take away the Mousketeers signoff song with the Israeli national anthem and flag waving and you’ve pretty much got a good picture of what we’re dealing with. Loads of costume changes, jazz hands, and Star Search note belting... plus a little Hebrew and prayer. Welcome to the Southern Jewish experience, I thought.
After the show, I met some of my co-workers and headed off to the house of the person I’ll be staying with until my apartment opens up, dazed and confused, and already over-dosing on Jewish and thinking on repeat: What have I gotten myself into?
I’ve been here for a couple of days now, and the thoughts of “Where am I?” “Why am here?” don’t seem to quit. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m in Mississippi. I’m working for Jews. Jews. Jews.
Stay tuned, and you might just hear about Goldring Woldenberg Institute’s Southern Jewish Educators Conference that I had to work at this past weekend.
Shalom Y’all, until next time,
Turistamen Supremawitz en el Sur
Friday, December 14, 2007
El Fin...por ahora
I'm in the Stanford Center having just picked up my group photo and returned all my borrowed items, so I figured I would take advantage of the free internet one last time to write a final Santiago/travels in Latin America blog entry. So here's a few brief anecdotes that made me think about the world, my time in it, the prospects of returning home, etc...
- After handing in my final paper to Profe Micco about televison's role in contemporary Chilean politics (12 pages in Castellano, thank you very much) he took a few of us crazy American students out for some expensive Dutch Beer. And I thought to myself: how nice it is to make connections, to have ideas in a new part of the world, to not have internet in your host family's house so you can spend all day writing a paper sans distractions and actually feel good about it in the end and you wrote all in spanish, to challenge yourself by sitting down and thinking in a different language.
- While trying to find a card to give to my host family, I stumbled into a book store on Avenida Providencia and discovered there was a free concert inside. The placed was filled with young, hip , and cute chileans bobbing their heads to the sounds of two guys (one on drums with a full bushy chilean-jewfro hair the other on guitar in glasses, both wearing black ties and chuck taylors por supuesto) making the kind of electric, indie, alternative, folk rock that makes you feel instantly nostalgic and wistful and appreciative all at once. So of course I was hit with a wave a melancholy at the thought of leaving Santiago, a city bursting with undiscovered bookstores and possibilities.
- At the metro this morning, I looked into the mirrored wall of the station and accidently made eye contact with the reflection of a middle aged woman in the subway car next to mine. She smiled, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and they both waved. I waved back a we all giggled thinking about how silly it is that we can only connect with the people in opposite metro cars and even then only through their mirrored reflection, so busy moving around the planet at high speeds we forget to look around and see who' s right near us.
So those are some thoughts. I would share more, but before I leave Santiago I have museums to see, restaurants to eat at, hills to climb up.... Turista Suprema for life, baby. For those of you who have been following along (which by now, is probably just Eddie and Rachel) I hoped you thoroughly enjoyed the ride. I sure did. I'll keep posting to this blog with more stories and writing and less "this is what I'm doing now" so keep checking it out if that's something that interests you. But here ends this portion of blogging, but I hope el viaje nunca está terminado. ¿Cachai?
Que se vaya bien, besitos, vaya con dios, suerte, todo mi amor, y más,
Daniel Hiiiiiiirsch (por la ultima vez)
- After handing in my final paper to Profe Micco about televison's role in contemporary Chilean politics (12 pages in Castellano, thank you very much) he took a few of us crazy American students out for some expensive Dutch Beer. And I thought to myself: how nice it is to make connections, to have ideas in a new part of the world, to not have internet in your host family's house so you can spend all day writing a paper sans distractions and actually feel good about it in the end and you wrote all in spanish, to challenge yourself by sitting down and thinking in a different language.
- While trying to find a card to give to my host family, I stumbled into a book store on Avenida Providencia and discovered there was a free concert inside. The placed was filled with young, hip , and cute chileans bobbing their heads to the sounds of two guys (one on drums with a full bushy chilean-jewfro hair the other on guitar in glasses, both wearing black ties and chuck taylors por supuesto) making the kind of electric, indie, alternative, folk rock that makes you feel instantly nostalgic and wistful and appreciative all at once. So of course I was hit with a wave a melancholy at the thought of leaving Santiago, a city bursting with undiscovered bookstores and possibilities.
- At the metro this morning, I looked into the mirrored wall of the station and accidently made eye contact with the reflection of a middle aged woman in the subway car next to mine. She smiled, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and they both waved. I waved back a we all giggled thinking about how silly it is that we can only connect with the people in opposite metro cars and even then only through their mirrored reflection, so busy moving around the planet at high speeds we forget to look around and see who' s right near us.
So those are some thoughts. I would share more, but before I leave Santiago I have museums to see, restaurants to eat at, hills to climb up.... Turista Suprema for life, baby. For those of you who have been following along (which by now, is probably just Eddie and Rachel) I hoped you thoroughly enjoyed the ride. I sure did. I'll keep posting to this blog with more stories and writing and less "this is what I'm doing now" so keep checking it out if that's something that interests you. But here ends this portion of blogging, but I hope el viaje nunca está terminado. ¿Cachai?
Que se vaya bien, besitos, vaya con dios, suerte, todo mi amor, y más,
Daniel Hiiiiiiirsch (por la ultima vez)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Villa Grimaldi
Preface: Things are going well with me… finishing up exams and papers (writing one about the role of television in Chilean politics...muy interesante) and trying to enjoy my last little bits of Santiago before I head back to the States. But before I leave, I want to make sure I share with you something really valuable that happened to me-- I took a tour of Villa Grimaldi, a former detention and torture camp during the Pinochet regime. I’ve decided not to post it outright in my blog because something about talking about torture alongside a discussion of how much fun I had at the beach last weekend and a goofy picture of me wearing a funny hat I bought in Buenos Aires felt slightly inappropriate. Also, I thought it best to spare any squeamish readers casually perusing the blog, because it’s pretty heavy stuff. But I highly encourage you all to follow the link below. It’s an account of by far the most important thing I’ve done in my travels and I think it’s a worthwhile read for everyone.
(Also, editorial note: some of the numbers I mention might be slightly off due to a bad memory for numbers. Quoted text is also from memory and translated from Spanish. However, all anecdotes are true.)
Please Read This
Faces of los disaparecidos
(Also, editorial note: some of the numbers I mention might be slightly off due to a bad memory for numbers. Quoted text is also from memory and translated from Spanish. However, all anecdotes are true.)
Please Read This
Faces of los disaparecidos
Friday, December 7, 2007
I leave Sunday, December 16th, and I’m faced with the difficult task of summing up about two weeks sans blog entries as well as trying to get the most out of the two weeks I have left. So here are a few key moments from the last two weeks neglecting to mention a whole lot, in non-chronological order just to be slightly edgy:
--“¡Vamos, vamos chilenos, esta noche podemos ayudaaaaar…..!” kept running through my head as a made my way up the winding alleys and stairways of the hills of Valparaiso, stopping every minute to take another photo of the Chile’s main port city with its hills littered with colorful houses, incre
dibly vibrant graffiti and street murals, and huge cargo boats heading off into the distant, blue Pacific. “Let’s go Chileans, this night we can help,” is the one of the theme songs of Chile’s annual Teletón, in which every channel broadcasts a 27 hour telethon to raise money for physical therapy for children with physical disabilities. It’s full of enthusiastic television personalities, over the top musical numbers, ridiculous comedy acts, sexy dancing girls, and a whole lot of Chilean pride. When I looked out over singular Valparaiso from the top of Cerro Alegre, humming the Teletón jingle in my head, I too could feel the goofy exuberance of Chilean nationalism.
-- “Do I smell chocolate?” I asked Eva as I swirled my glass of deep purple Malbec and took one hearty sniff. “Yeah, there’s some of that,” she responded looking doubtful of my future as an enologist. Meanw
hile, our Italian-Argentine guide babbled on about los sabores viejos y maduros as he flipped his curly black pony-tail beside a huge oak barrel in the show room of his family’s traditional bodega. We were baked from the sun, and hopped up on riding bikes through tunnels of trees beside expansive vineyards, the Andes glittering in the distance. We might as well have been in Tuscany as we gorged ourselves on salami and bread earlier that day sitting in the shade giggling and flushed from the hearty Malbec of Mendoza, Argentina.
-- In the center of the former prison yard of the former prison that is now an cultural center with muraled walls and scattered barb wire sculptures on one of Valparaiso’s tall hills I entered the circus tent. Rueda is a performance piece with three actors that prominently features a tire swing. And it was awesome. Without words the actors communicate everything through their bodies, toes, fingers, hips. Swinging through the air, the lights of Valparaiso glittering around us, I too felt high on acrobatics and prisons cum art refuge.
-- To celebrate the first night of Hanukah I helped my host mother decorate their synthetic Christmas tree and ate fresh peaches, and reveled in the utter weirdness of celebrating Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Gloria hummed to herself while stringing up gold ribbons on the branches, and told me she would probably come back tomorrow and decide she didn’t like the way it looked and change everything. While placing a bushel of golden rubber grapes, I explained to her what us crazy Jews do for eight crazy nights, she made approving faces and responded with lots of “¡que divertido!” and “oh, interesante.”
--Tipsy on red wine and a sweet, highly alcoholic Brazilian drink that I can’t remember the name of eventhough the waiter told me three times, I looked around the room with jungle wallpaper and swirling colors at my Stanford cohorts laughing and chewing on savory meat that waiters serve them from big metal skewers. Thanking Helen and Peter Bing once again as I stuffed a tender cut into my gaping mouth and felt the oncoming thin gasp of queasiness.
-- A man in a green shirt raised his arms to a bronze statue of Jesus as my friend Shira and I passed on our way to Salvador Allende’s grave in the sprawling Cementario Nacional. We were slightly lost in this city of the dead with its wide avenues lined with trees shading the marble mansions of the affluent and dead, and pointing towards smaller side streets in their shadows. Even in death Santiago is a city divided by class, the poor resting eternally in project like stacked graves, their remains piled high in crumbling towering walls of cement boxes. In the hot afternoon sun, we walked to the outskirts of this necropolis to find a massive granite wall inscribed with the names of over four thousand people, los disaparecidos, those who went missing during the years of Pinochet. We made our exit as a stray cat crossed in front of us looking for refuge from the mid-day spring sun.
-- I sat in my professor’s office, Sergio Micco the former vice president of the Chile’s Christian Democrat party, as he madly searched for a book for me about television’s role in Chilean politics and muttered Chilean curses and laughed to himself. Meanwhile, I observed one shelf displaying tiny tin figures of twentieth century world leaders, Russian stacking dolls painted with the faces of Putin all the way down to Lenin, and The Little Black Book of Communism and The Little Black Book of Capitalism at opposite ends of the shelf.
-- I sipped a hearty mug of Escudo, Chile’s cheap national beer, and nibbled on my fried seafood empanadas and looked out at the Pacific Ocean, the faint sound of surf mixing with the soft bossa nova playing from within the restaurant. In the small town of Horcon, worn down boats and hippie craft stands line the shore and you have the faint feeling that you too could buy a little ocean side shack, sell macramé bracelets, and disappear forever.
As I come to the end of my time here, I feel all sorts of regrets…I wish I had tried harder to make Chilean friends, I wish my Spanish had improved just a little bit more, I wish I had spent less time at the Stanford center and with Stanford students, etc… But then when I collect these moments in my head, I can’t really feel that regretful and in weird ways I’ve learned all sorts of things.
I hope you all are well, and most likely I’ll see some of you soon.
Suerte.
Daniel Hiiiiiiiirsch
--“¡Vamos, vamos chilenos, esta noche podemos ayudaaaaar…..!” kept running through my head as a made my way up the winding alleys and stairways of the hills of Valparaiso, stopping every minute to take another photo of the Chile’s main port city with its hills littered with colorful houses, incre
dibly vibrant graffiti and street murals, and huge cargo boats heading off into the distant, blue Pacific. “Let’s go Chileans, this night we can help,” is the one of the theme songs of Chile’s annual Teletón, in which every channel broadcasts a 27 hour telethon to raise money for physical therapy for children with physical disabilities. It’s full of enthusiastic television personalities, over the top musical numbers, ridiculous comedy acts, sexy dancing girls, and a whole lot of Chilean pride. When I looked out over singular Valparaiso from the top of Cerro Alegre, humming the Teletón jingle in my head, I too could feel the goofy exuberance of Chilean nationalism.-- “Do I smell chocolate?” I asked Eva as I swirled my glass of deep purple Malbec and took one hearty sniff. “Yeah, there’s some of that,” she responded looking doubtful of my future as an enologist. Meanw
hile, our Italian-Argentine guide babbled on about los sabores viejos y maduros as he flipped his curly black pony-tail beside a huge oak barrel in the show room of his family’s traditional bodega. We were baked from the sun, and hopped up on riding bikes through tunnels of trees beside expansive vineyards, the Andes glittering in the distance. We might as well have been in Tuscany as we gorged ourselves on salami and bread earlier that day sitting in the shade giggling and flushed from the hearty Malbec of Mendoza, Argentina.-- In the center of the former prison yard of the former prison that is now an cultural center with muraled walls and scattered barb wire sculptures on one of Valparaiso’s tall hills I entered the circus tent. Rueda is a performance piece with three actors that prominently features a tire swing. And it was awesome. Without words the actors communicate everything through their bodies, toes, fingers, hips. Swinging through the air, the lights of Valparaiso glittering around us, I too felt high on acrobatics and prisons cum art refuge.
-- To celebrate the first night of Hanukah I helped my host mother decorate their synthetic Christmas tree and ate fresh peaches, and reveled in the utter weirdness of celebrating Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Gloria hummed to herself while stringing up gold ribbons on the branches, and told me she would probably come back tomorrow and decide she didn’t like the way it looked and change everything. While placing a bushel of golden rubber grapes, I explained to her what us crazy Jews do for eight crazy nights, she made approving faces and responded with lots of “¡que divertido!” and “oh, interesante.”
--Tipsy on red wine and a sweet, highly alcoholic Brazilian drink that I can’t remember the name of eventhough the waiter told me three times, I looked around the room with jungle wallpaper and swirling colors at my Stanford cohorts laughing and chewing on savory meat that waiters serve them from big metal skewers. Thanking Helen and Peter Bing once again as I stuffed a tender cut into my gaping mouth and felt the oncoming thin gasp of queasiness.
-- A man in a green shirt raised his arms to a bronze statue of Jesus as my friend Shira and I passed on our way to Salvador Allende’s grave in the sprawling Cementario Nacional. We were slightly lost in this city of the dead with its wide avenues lined with trees shading the marble mansions of the affluent and dead, and pointing towards smaller side streets in their shadows. Even in death Santiago is a city divided by class, the poor resting eternally in project like stacked graves, their remains piled high in crumbling towering walls of cement boxes. In the hot afternoon sun, we walked to the outskirts of this necropolis to find a massive granite wall inscribed with the names of over four thousand people, los disaparecidos, those who went missing during the years of Pinochet. We made our exit as a stray cat crossed in front of us looking for refuge from the mid-day spring sun.
-- I sat in my professor’s office, Sergio Micco the former vice president of the Chile’s Christian Democrat party, as he madly searched for a book for me about television’s role in Chilean politics and muttered Chilean curses and laughed to himself. Meanwhile, I observed one shelf displaying tiny tin figures of twentieth century world leaders, Russian stacking dolls painted with the faces of Putin all the way down to Lenin, and The Little Black Book of Communism and The Little Black Book of Capitalism at opposite ends of the shelf.
-- I sipped a hearty mug of Escudo, Chile’s cheap national beer, and nibbled on my fried seafood empanadas and looked out at the Pacific Ocean, the faint sound of surf mixing with the soft bossa nova playing from within the restaurant. In the small town of Horcon, worn down boats and hippie craft stands line the shore and you have the faint feeling that you too could buy a little ocean side shack, sell macramé bracelets, and disappear forever.
As I come to the end of my time here, I feel all sorts of regrets…I wish I had tried harder to make Chilean friends, I wish my Spanish had improved just a little bit more, I wish I had spent less time at the Stanford center and with Stanford students, etc… But then when I collect these moments in my head, I can’t really feel that regretful and in weird ways I’ve learned all sorts of things.
I hope you all are well, and most likely I’ll see some of you soon.
Suerte.
Daniel Hiiiiiiiirsch
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