{"id":2697,"date":"2009-12-25T10:22:39","date_gmt":"2009-12-25T14:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2009-12-25T10:22:39","modified_gmt":"2009-12-25T14:22:39","slug":"robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/robert-kelly-on-brooklyn-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Kelly on Brooklyn (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n
\"\"

Linden Boulevard in East New York, Brooklyn<\/p><\/div>\n

CITY AS PILGRIMAGE (continued…)<\/p>\n

<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/strong><\/h3>\n

East:\u00a0 Sunrise, the highway to the book<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I would set out, down the four steps cement steps of Mrs. Shevlin\u2019s house where we rented our apartment, cross the little cement patio, turn left. Pass the stoop where Loretta sometimes stood, the Polish girl next door, innocent slinky and pretty and sad with acne.\u00a0 Pass the ever-open Italian social and athletic club where old men, never young, sat with their black cigars all day long, outside on folding chairs in clement weather, smell of the black Parodi tobacco free for me passing.\u00a0 They sat inside at night in the smoky storefront, Italians don\u2019t stay outside at night no matter how hot, I learned that early.\u00a0 Pass the old drug store with the new facade,\u00a0 cross Crescent street catercorner to the vacant lot on the northeast corner,\u00a0 walk up to Pitkin Avenue, the big brick public elementary school I went to for a year or two, and where my mother taught for thirty years, always second and third grade, I was there for fourth and fifth.\u00a0 Its only distinguished graduate was the great comedian Danny Kaye,\u00a0 whose verbal antics and narcissist\u2019s face seemed the essence of growing up poor, you\u2019ve got to love yourself since nobody else will, you\u2019ve got to have a lot of words in your mouth, talk is free and it\u2019s the only tool you have.\u00a0 Words are the cheapest art material, cheapest weapons. I don\u2019t remember the inside of the school much, you got out as fast as you can, I remember the bulk of the building, the standard four-square architecture that the New York City Board of Education used all over the city, boxy, dull red, with Mannerist fiddlings round the windows and doors in pale cement.\u00a0 Danny\u2019s red crisp curly hair, red brick in autumn light, all right, I was on my way to the library.<\/p>\n

\n

This school was on Pitkin Avenue \u2013 if you went further out west along that avenue, and we will, you would come to the great cultural zone running for several miles through Brownsville into the center of the borough, but that comes later in this story.\u00a0 Right now I trudge north along Crescent Street.\u00a0 A long block to Glenmore, where Nisselson\u2019s pharmacy stands, my family trusts Mr Nisselson, because he\u2019s Jewish and gentle and old \u2013 we always go there, never to the brash nice Italian pharmacist practically next door to our house.\u00a0 Then a short block to the great diagon, Sunrise Highway, near its beginning here in Brooklyn, about to set out east on its endless journey through Queens and Nassau and beyond;\u00a0 in my childhood it was still the major artery of traffic from the city to the whole south shore of Long Island,\u00a0 though it had been dealt a mortal wound by the great Belt Parkway, the circumferential or ring road not quite finished just before the war.\u00a0 Cross Sunrise Highway \u2013 skill needed, traffic here came faster, and of course nobody, at least no child, no me, ever waited for the green light.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t see very well but I could hear like a dream, and I passed through traffic by sheer listening.<\/p>\n

\n

But there wasn\u2019t so much traffic then, fast as it moved when it did come.\u00a0 A huge intersection this was, always bleak and pale and gasping in the sun.\u00a0 It never rained on that corner.\u00a0 A huge stretch of empty roads crisscrossing.\u00a0 Years later I stood at daybreak once on the shores of the Persian Gulf,\u00a0 the horizon vague from the smoke of oil refineries, the heat already close to 100 degrees before the sun had fully risen.\u00a0 The emptiness of that sea, that desert shore, reminded me of something, and this intersection in old Brooklyn rose to mind \u2013 a bleakness that traffic makes, a peculiar uncomfortable but picturesque emptiness that speed makes all by itself, space left gasping in the airless aftermath of money passing.\u00a0 A hard street for a little kid to cross.<\/p>\n

\n

Then one block more, no building, just scrappy vacant lots, so many vacant lots in my childhood, tell about them later, you\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n

\n

A short block more to Liberty Avenue.\u00a0 The Law-Ran Diner on the SW corner, under the Fulton Street el station.\u00a0 Real diner \u2013 I sat at the counter, ate grilled cheese sandwiches;\u00a0 every Saturday the German cook made sauerbraten \u2013 my father\u2019s favorite meal of all the few he cared for, a simple man.\u00a0 I judged the sauerbratens of Brooklyn by the kartoffelkl\u00f6se, the big baseball-sized potato dumplings that had to be served \u00a0with the dish \u2013 did they have the crisp crouton buried at the very heart of the soft steamed dumpling?\u00a0 Had they put enough black pepper in the batter?\u00a0 Was the gravy vivid, as well as thick enough to coat every morsel the fork would wedge away from the ball?\u00a0 The Law-Ran did well on this, not the best, but good enough for a Saturday in November.<\/p>\n

\n

But here we are, I mean I was, under the Crescent Street station on the old elevated BMT.\u00a0 Here I turned right, east, and followed Liberty Avenue, past dirty windows with the scary pictures of psoriasis victims above dusty pots of ointments for sale to cure such conditions, maladies of the skin I had never (have never) seen on any living person.\u00a0 But the pictures taught me, beside the sphincter squeeze of horror as you gazed at the frightful images or turned away, taught me that if you look close enough at anything you will see the horror and the ugliness.\u00a0 Stare closely at your sweet skin with a magnifying glass and you\u2019ll see leprosy and fear.\u00a0 Melville said it long ago:\u00a0 This visible world seems formed in love, but secretly is formed in fright.<\/p>\n

\n

Onward.\u00a0 Many storefronts empty.\u00a0 This is not a prosperous time, my childhood, the war had unhinged more than values;\u00a0 nobody knew where to stand, or how to walk.\u00a0 I felt like a stranger on every street in my own neighborhood.\u00a0 And looking back, I think the people I took as natives, who were natives just like me, thought of themselves as strangers too.\u00a0 Onward, three more blocks and I pass the Earl movie theater, cheapest of the four movie houses in our district;\u00a0 here a child\u2019s admission in daytime (the afternoon, called the matinee to confuse us) was twelve cents\u00a0 (where the Gem was fourteen, and the upscale Embassy where the first run movies showed, a full quarter).\u00a0 Here I saw the revivals from the 30s and the scratched, last-ditch prints of current films.\u00a0 Here I saw with excitement the old chestnut The Sign of the Cross<\/em> with Frederic March and Claudette Colbert at about the same time our age\u2019s real signs were rising, smoke over Auschwitz, smoke over Nagasaki.<\/p>\n

\n

The movies drew me often.\u00a0 They changed their shows though (two features, newsreel, cartoon) only twice a week, so only two days brought me there.\u00a0 More often, I kept going.\u00a0 A few blocks onward I\u2019d come to Elderts Lane.\u00a0 This broad, emptyish street with a grassy meridian marked the actual border between Brooklyn and Queens.\u00a0 Right on the corner on our side was a fish market;\u00a0 every Friday huge cauldrons of oil were kept boiling;\u00a0 sweating men would slip in and skim out of them the fried seafood of the day or the season \u2013 fried flounder, fried sole all year round,\u00a0 fried cod roe that my mother loved, fried soft shell crabs in summer.\u00a0 We would walk up and carry home a big greasy bag of fried flounder, usually, sometimes with a newspaper stuffed with French fries.<\/p>\n

\n

But that was only Friday.\u00a0 If I were lucky, some summer night we\u2019d turn right and saunter a ways down Elderts Lane to where Simonetti\u2019s tavern and beer garden hummed in twilight, and where the best pizza I or anybody else \u2013 there were always dozens of big black cars parked nearby, from which stepped down the broad jacketed mysterious cognoscenti who ate quietly at tables apart \u2013\u00a0 can remember.<\/p>\n

\n

And that was even rarer than fish.\u00a0 What mostly happened at Elderts Lane is crossing it, and wandering on into the suddenly wider, fresher air of Queens.\u00a0 The el ended, the cavernous sun-striped darkness of Liberty Avenue gave way to sunlight.\u00a0 Where two streets converged, a small branch of the Bank of the Manhattan Company (oldest bank in New York, paid the lowest interest of all on savings) pointed its prow towards Brooklyn and approaching me.\u00a0 If I kept left, to its starboard side, I\u2019d pass the bank and come, next door, to the smallest, remotest branch of the Queensboro Public Library \u2013 some of its books were still stamped Queensborough \u2013 and this, most beloved place, was my library.\u00a0 Here everything began, and I dragged home big bags of books every week, from the era when I wanted to read Sherlock Holmes and Robert Hugh Benson (not that I\u2019ve forgotten them) on through the discovery of Proust and Mann and Joyce.\u00a0 But all I have to tell here is that I had found my way at last to the book.<\/p>\n

\n

West:\u00a0 Anokhi Yehudi<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

When I leave my house and turn left, past Loretta on her steps, pass the social club, and turn left again at the Italian drugstore my mother doesn\u2019t like, though the pharmacist is pleasant and I still wonder why, I\u2019m on Belmont Avenue, and stand in front of the Italian grocery where every day we buy our bread:\u00a0 Jewish sour rye with gleaming brown crust, short crisp bayonets of Italian bread.\u00a0 Cheese.\u00a0 In front of the store the B-14 bus idles.\u00a0 It is labeled Pitkin Avenue, \u00a0and here it starts its long run into the heart of Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

\n

This bus will take me.\u00a0 I wait near the grocery, still in Italy, still near the vacant lot, the bare fence through which I can see the yards, including the yard of the house I live in, the yards, long, scattered here and there with grape vines on rickety ramadas, or clumps of that sickly green that grows the ripe sweet tomatoes every Italian family plants behind the house.\u00a0 The bus comes and leaves every quarter hour or so. \u00a0\u00a0This is the end of the line.\u00a0 The end is the beginning.\u00a0 I live at the end of the line.\u00a0 I live at the beginning.<\/p>\n

\n

When the bus folds its doors closed and lurches into motion, it almost immediately turns right, down Crescent Street, and at once passes the social club, Loretta\u2019s house, my house.\u00a0 My parents are off at work, my mother at her school, my father at the bank on Madison Square from which he\u2019ll come home so tired every night at seven. No one will be at our windows.\u00a0 My little sister will be playing at my aunt\u2019s house two blocks away.\u00a0 The bus shudders past and I am gone from the home world into the world I want, the desire world waiting all along the line.\u00a0 One block and the bus turns right again, down Sutter Avenue, which it will follow deep into Brownsville several miles before turning right yet again,\u00a0 on Stone Avenue, and go one block north to Pitkin, where it finally makes a left turn onto the street that gives it its name, the high street of Brownsville.<\/p>\n

\n

Brownsville.\u00a0 There\u2019s one in Texas, on the Mexican border.\u00a0 But this one is not Mexican, not Spanish of any kind yet.\u00a0 Now, 1940, 1950, 1960, it is purely Jewish.\u00a0 Who was Brown?\u00a0 Who knows.\u00a0 But this is the Brooklyn ghetto, the money-poor and culture-rich ghetto I grew up on the doorstep of.\u00a0 This was my real home.<\/p>\n

\n

On Sutter Avenue, soon, after the last few Italian shops, the vacant lots interspersed with low houses, houses with porches where, in the autumn, here and there already you\u2019d see a sukkah built for the harvest festival, and know that the interdigitating of the Jews and the Italians had begun.\u00a0 At the corner of Fountain Avenue you\u2019d sometimes see a herd of cows shambling down the asphalt street, coming from the vacant lots and fields (this was after all the region called New Lots) where they grazed all day \u2013 right up into the 1960s.\u00a0 Cows who moved along among the dark cars and walked unguided, by habit, \u00a0into an ordinary storefront where, in the old garage, they had their barn.\u00a0 After the cows, after the occasional nanny goats some Italian family kept for milk, browsing on weeds and jetsam, the bus moved, all in a couple of blocks, into the Jewish neighborhood.\u00a0 Suddenly I felt excited and weirdly at home.\u00a0 Here on the first corner came the shabby dark blue offices and meeting room of the Arbeyter Ferayn, the left-wing worker\u2019s group, whose name, \u00a0part veiled from me in the Hebrew letters I would soon learn to spell out one by one, stood on a cardboard sign propped in the window. \u00a0This was the left wing of America now: \u00a0here\u2019s the territory of liberals and leftists, far from the America-Firsters of right-wing Woodhaven, the sentimental Mussolini admirers of the Old Mill \u2013 still only a few blocks behind me \u00a0on the sputtering smelly bus.\u00a0 This bus was carrying me on my pilgrimage into politics, into social awareness, into the shimmer of Marxism that made glorious all these ratty storefronts with their worker\u2019s circles and discussion groups and Hashomer Hatzair where all the cute girls were, cute, serious, dark-browed, even their bodies looked intelligent.<\/p>\n

\n

Now this Sutter Avenue the bus was smoking and grunting down, it was a narrowish east-west street, low class, though not as low as Blake Avenue one block south, which was the street market \u2013 the pushcarts, we called them, where everything from oranges to chinaware to cotton shirts for children to hot knishes were sold from laggard rickety carts on two big wheels that men pushed along the street and stopped to sell, or else moored a while on Sunday mornings and most afternoons and let the buyers come to them.<\/p>\n

\n

No, Sutter was a bit above that on the socio-economic scale, grim stores and storefront synagogues and meeting places, vegetable sellers and kosher butcher shops every few blocks, with not much hanging in the window, a scrawny chicken or two gibbeted for the crimes, featherless, yellow, or a lump of nameless holy meat on glazed white metal trays.\u00a0 Mostly I would study the language in the window, not the meat. \u00a0Sometimes the signs would be in English I could read, read but not understand, times and seasons, and specials for one or another festival \u2013 as if the people who bought the meat and cooked the ritual dishes were slowly losing touch with the Yiddish\u00a0 or sometimes Hebrew in which their minds were shaped, gradually learning from the street itself, the buses, the cigarette butts strewn along the gutter, their daughters sporting lewd blue jeans or peasant blouses that showed too much, somehow the look of those pants, the cars parked in between the pushcarts, the shiny Plymouths and Buicks men polished in the lonely afternoons, as if all these things were the words of the English language \u00a0on the march against them, so even in their own windows a sign would go up, chulent<\/em> it would say in American letters, or challah<\/em>.\u00a0 Where does language go?\u00a0 Even then I worried about it;\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to see English words \u2013 I was fleeing from my corner into all the streets, from my house into no houses, just people, the milling, moiling, tumult of ordinary other people.\u00a0 The foods of the other.\u00a0 The words of the other.\u00a0 Only those could nourish me.<\/p>\n

\n

On Sutter Avenue plenty of such nutrition was ready to be found:\u00a0 the noisy greasy corner printing shops, Drukerey<\/em> I could make out in the window, \u00a0working from the German I was beginning to know in school, \u2018printer,\u2019 where men in undervests read clean paper with their inky hands, men with hats on always, printing the curvy thick Jewish letters that seemed as rich as foods, as deeply familiar as the veins that twisted down my wrist.\u00a0 Hebrew letters:\u00a0 I was amazed that I couldn\u2019t read them, because they seemed to familiar, as if they were modeled on the inside of my own body, of every human body, organ and tube and channel and drop of seed.<\/p>\n

\n

They stood in doorways and looked at the sheets fresh-printed.\u00a0 Little boys with velvet yarmulkes and velvety eyes and dangling peyos would carry big loads of fresh print along the street to the binder, another shop not far away, and there\u2019d be the books and pamphlets piled high in the reading rooms, overflowing the doorways of what I took to be synagogues, what did I know, men in big black hats, and every now and then an elder great one wearing a big shtreiml<\/em>, a fur-trimmed hat and long black shiny coat and high white stockings.\u00a0 A stick he\u2019d carry, and walk like a man from our own history, as if Benjamin Franklin had come alive as a rabbi now, and all our American sagacity were just one gesture of the timeless wisdom of these strange Jews.<\/p>\n

\n

And the news stands full of papers and magazines, current, in Russian and Polish and even German, the Aufbau<\/em> I too was reading, the paper of the exiled German Jewish community, and there were papers in English, of course, and not just the leftwing press \u2013 Daily Worker<\/em>, PM<\/em>, The Compass<\/em>, The Post<\/em>, depending on the left-ness or the year, but all the presses, even the hated jingo red-baiting Hearst rags The Mirror,<\/em> and the Urinal American<\/em> as we learned to call it, though secretly I loved it for its comic strips, Jiggs and Maggie, Prince Valiant. Because these people read everything.\u00a0 That is the first thing I learned about the Jews:\u00a0 they read and read.\u00a0 On the bus I\u2019d often sit near clusters of yeshiva students who would be arguing over the bibles in their hands, pages ecstatic with commentaries in all sizes and styles of print, seas of text surrounding the great island of the Text itself, God\u2019s word \u2013 and all the words we could ever speak would only serve to comment on the least of it.\u00a0 Their pale fingers pointed to the text.\u00a0 These were my kin, my only brothers, even though I couldn\u2019t understand a word they said, or read.<\/p>\n

\n

Maybe that\u2019s why there were no bookstores I ever saw, I who lived for books.\u00a0 These people had a book.\u00a0 Libraries here and there, especially the Sterling branch at the end of the line, the real reason I\u2019m on this bus, that\u2019s the end and goal of the ride.\u00a0 No bookstores because all the urgent reading in the neighborhood was of the most current, the endless arguments of politics and what we used to call Current Events, current as in running, and we had to run to keep up with them, talking all the while in restaurants and bars and cafeterias and on park benches, \u00a0and jabbering on buses and schoolyards.\u00a0 That\u2019s what they read,\u00a0 that and the opposite, the Eternal Word that needed every man\u2019s devout and sustained attention, so that the old men, and men not so old too, would spend, I could see them there on summer days as I walked past their stifling hot storefronts, spend hours bent over the law and the commentaries, so that another name for the House of Prayer was the House of Study, and these men prayed with their eyes.<\/p>\n

\n

For Language itself was holy.\u00a0\u00a0 And into language I was trying to make my pilgrimage.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve grown older, I have come to understand that it is only into language that we travel, the names of the places into which we go, streets, cities, cathedrals, islands, Arabias, yes, but also into the using of language, the naming of things, and not just far things, but the things close at hand.\u00a0 And that is what a city is, a place where everything is at hand, and where a child can journey into language and discover the secret messages his own skin is getting from the world around him, the messages from breath and smell and moving particles of unknown matter, soft, pervasive, everlasting against his only skin:\u00a0 name these.<\/p>\n

\n

So it was into naming<\/em> the bus crawled down Sutter, holding me a rapt and virtuous prisoner of the way.<\/p>\n

\n

Presently the bus turned right, onto Stone Avenue, a wide, wide street and full of traffic, and wide sidewalks too, on which merchandise was often piled, heaped up for sale or just for storage in front of hardware stores that sold more china plates than hammers, in front of clothing stores, readymade uniforms and wedding gowns and religious raiment and other signs of service or servitude.\u00a0 Talliths in the window.\u00a0 Great purple velvet Torah scrolls displayed.\u00a0 And Stone was more upscale yet than Sutter, we were rising towards the high street, the main street of Brownsville, the celebrated Pitkin Avenue where the finest shops were open till nine every night \u2013 fine not by the standards of Manhattan of course, just fine enough to boast glitzy neon instead of the naked lightbulbs of the poor Blake and Sutter stores.<\/p>\n

\n

Here was Geyer the tobacconist, fascinating old man hunched over his showcase full of polished briars, pale beaky face living up to his name, geier means vulture, and from him I bought my first pipe, long stemmed straight briar, tall bowl lined with meerschaum, only a kid would buy a pipe like that, I still have it, its mouth piece long gone, the wooden shaft itself long enough to bite on if I still smoked.\u00a0\u00a0 And here, in contradiction, was Davega, the big sporting goods store, one of a small chain of them in those days.\u00a0 The double windows between which we filed to enter the recessed doorway,\u00a0 they were full of dazzling and often mysterious sporting things.\u00a0 Handballs bouncy pink (spaldeens) and hard black rubber, pink for the boxball every kid played, taking as our micro-tennis court the six-foot-squares marked out in every sidewalk, bounce on the crack to score, or lose, depending on the rules of the game, black for the wall ball, always called handball, slamming the dense hard ball against a tall concrete wall \u2013 the city park department built them here and there, schoolyards or tiny parks or as they called them playgrounds \u2013 a team game, for older, tougher, faster boys.\u00a0 It hurt the hand.\u00a0 The hurt, as in all sports, is part of the fun.\u00a0 And those curious ovate pigskin footballs, how strange to find a piggish thing here in so Jewish a place, didn\u2019t it defile the fingers?\u00a0 I never understood football, what kind of ball is it that you couldn\u2019t roll, couldn\u2019t bounce up and down, couldn\u2019t hit with a stick, what was the point of that?\u00a0 Yet that game won out in America, alas.<\/p>\n

\n

Oh the games were different in those days.\u00a0 Baseball was the king of games, so the window was full of official baseballs in their boxes, American League or National League, America is all about choice, \u00a0about buying a sense of identity from acts of choosing.\u00a0 Cheaper balls heaped up in pyramids big and little, and costly supple leather gloves to catch them and ashwood bats to hit them.\u00a0 And equivalent gear for playing baseball\u2019s awkward but simpler cousin softball.\u00a0 Basketballs were there, of course, but inoffensive, not much glamour in the game yet, it was just what kids played in high school, demotic, dumb.\u00a0 No squash, no nautilus machines, no jogging togs.\u00a0 Only criminals ran, and famous Finns in the Olympics, and portly gentlemen running for the bus, or kids running away from other gangs.\u00a0 Why else would a man run?\u00a0 No sense of body worship in those windows, in those days, \u00a0though tucked away at the back of the window might be a barbell and a stack of weights, and little dumbbells you could use to strengthen your pitching arm or make your swing more potent at the plate.\u00a0 And even a home plate would be there, leaning modestly against the rear wall, in case you wanted to set up a real baseball diamond in some vacant lot.<\/p>\n

\n

For there were vacant lots in those days:\u00a0 the city had not yet filled up every single space, or sometimes it had but then a building burned down or crumbled, or something was planned but never built.\u00a0 So there were lots, and we played in them.\u00a0 Parks as such were rare, but vacant lots were many.\u00a0 That\u2019s where kids sledded in the winter, played ball, shot arrows, beat one another up all summer long.\u00a0 The lots were full of weeds and dog shit, garbage, mosquitoes in all the greenery, lost things, old cardboard boxes that propped up made good targets for an arrow or crushed flat good bases for a game of stickball, poorest of all the baseball relatives:\u00a0 a broomstick to slap a pink spaldeen far \u2013 a ball could travel a full block if hit straight on, so the house walls on either side of the vacant lot would be bouncing surfaces for our evening game.<\/p>\n

\n

Past Davega\u2019s sporting goods the shops were adult, offered clothing and jewelry, the stuff I noticed as they say with half an eye, knowing it was not for me, and not being greedy enough yet for alternative identities to imagine putting those square squat diamond rings on my own ring finger like the tough old guys \u2013 Jewish and Italian both, curious\u2014in the neighborhood.\u00a0 No, \u00a0these stores were for grown-ups and their boring clothes, boring decorations, furniture:\u00a0 clothing is so silent<\/em>.\u00a0 It maddened me, the wordlessness of clothing stories, for all the practiced salesman patter that was scripted, not spoken. \u00a0How boring adults are.<\/p>\n

\n

Then after both the boring and exciting storefronts came\u00a0 the best thing of all:\u00a0 turn left at Hopkinson Avenue and there was the Hopkinson movie theater.\u00a0 This was the one place in Brooklyn where you could see what used to be called \u2018art films,\u2019\u00a0 by which people meant anything made in France or Italy or England.\u00a0 Or Russia.\u00a0 Russia, at a time when the very name was scary.\u00a0 But here I saw Eisenstein for the first time, the gorgeous tuneful patriotism of Alexander<\/em> Nevsky<\/em>, with that Prokofiev movie score I had an LP of and played a million times, dreaming of the Saxon knights swallowed up by the icefields,\u00a0 the pale beauty of the blonde American girl Hilary Brooke \u2013 who actually had once lived next door to us, years before, in another part of Brooklyn.\u00a0 So there it was, the girl next door in a movie made in the middle ages on a country further than the moon, by the greatest film maker of them all, the gay Jew who made all Russia beautiful. What else did I see here?\u00a0 Rules of the Game<\/em> and Grand Illusion<\/em>, the sublime and the frivolous, Lady<\/em> Paname<\/em> with the gorgeous long-forgotten Suzy Delair,\u00a0 Panic<\/em>, that paranoid masterpiece with Michel Simon, and Boudu sauv\u00e9 des eaux<\/em>.\u00a0 But it was the Russian movies that were so important \u2013 the current ones, preposterously blurry SovColor where true colors became pastel and vice versa, stilted, boring, but wonderfully strange.\u00a0 Anthology movies showing chunks of famous singers and instrumentalists, Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky, or that loveliest of all tenors, Ivan Kozlofsky, like a Ukrainian John Mac Cormack, breaking the heart with Lensky\u2019s aria \u2013 Kuda<\/em>, kuda<\/em>, that Nabokov made such mean fun of,\u00a0 Where, o where, have\u00a0 those years gone?<\/p>\n

(to be continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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