Four days ago, I wrote about Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, which I had begun reading. I didn’t happen to mention that I was considering putting it aside temporarily in order to read a new novel, Thad Ziolkowsi’s Wichita. I did so just after writing the post, and I’m now halfway through.

Why Wichita? More to the point, why Wichita when I was enjoying de Waal’s book, and when a long list of novels awaited me if it was fiction I hungered for?

I don’t have a good answer. I suppose it helps that Wichita is only about 250 pages long, in contrast to the undoubtedly richer Hilary Mantel historical novels that top my fiction list, Wolf Hall and the new Bring Up the Bodies. All I can say is, last Friday night I was previewing the Sunday NYT book review section online — a weekly habit — and Natalie Bakopoulus’s review drew me in. I downloaded the free Amazon sample right away, read the first few pages, and as I continued to enjoy The Hare with Amber Eyes over the weekend, I couldn’t get the idea of Wichita out of my head. On Sunday evening, I gave in.

I am invariably at a loss as to what to say about a novel without saying too much about the plot. For much the same reason, I didn’t read Bakopoulus’s review of Wichita all that closely. I just skipped around, alighting on a few passages, such as the review’s close:

“Wichita” is a novel about expectations and outcomes, about what is open and what is veiled. Its emotional terrain is touching and vast. Whereas you might begin the book drawn in by its sense of humor, its ending will unhinge you, as if a storm has ripped through you and, like the wind in Rilke’s poem, sucked “the world from your senses.”

“Through the empty branches the sky remains. / It is what you have.”

Part of what tempted me to read Wichita is the fact that some of the characters are academics. I suppose I won’t be revealing too much if I say that the book starts with the main character arriving at his mother’s home in Wichita upon graduating from Columbia, leaving his east-coast-based academic father and grandfather and uncle and aunt and cousins behind. At the book’s halfway point, he is only in his third day back at the house. I’m not unhinged yet.

Ziolkowski is himself an academic, a professor at Pratt. Wichita is his first novel. He is also a poet and the author of a memoir, On a Wave, about his surfing years. So I’ve learned. A week ago, I knew nothing about him. I’m looking forward to reading this interview once I finish the novel.

Whenever I read mainstream news sources (NYT, NPR) these days, I realize that my notion of reality has undergone a major shift in recent years. Either I’ve gone crazy or, after decades of complacency, the scales have fallen from my eyes. I think I know which, but perhaps I’m not in a position to judge.

Here’s the thing. I attended a presentation today about the future of museums, museum best practices, and such, and at one point I realized that I heard something the speaker said in a way that must be at odds with how everyone else in the room heard it. Are they all blind, or am I just mad?

The speaker was talking about the need for museums to engage their communities. Not just outreach, bringing the riches of the museum to the people, but engaging them more deeply. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without examples, and she offered a few, such as a program a small museum in a southern state ran that engaged inmates in painting, in parallel with an exhibition.

That’s roughly what the program did. The details don’t matter. What matters is that the speaker spoke about other work engaging museums and prisons, and mentioned how poorly we do in this country with our prison system. She passed over this lightly, not wanting to turn the conversation to the politics of prisons and our failed war on drugs, but she said enough to suggest that this is what she had in mind. First offenders locked away for years because of mandatory sentencing guidelines, drug offenders locked up for life rather than getting treatment and becoming productive contributors to society. States spending funds on ever-growing prison populations rather than on underlying social issues. That sort of thing.

The underlying message: our prisons are failing us. Our legal/justice structure is failing us. Well, yes. Then again, maybe it’s succeeding. This was what I thought, and what sent off the alarm that maybe I’m crazy.

What is the goal of the prison system anyway? Rehabilitation? If so, then yes, the system is a disaster. But we can make sense of it all if we simply re-state the mission of the system. It’s not rehabilitation. It’s increasing the profits of the corporations that build the prisons and, more and more often, run them. State after state is privatizing the prison system.

Let’s see. Oh, here. Here’s Adam Gopnik, reporting on prisons four months ago in The New Yorker:

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

Who said our prisons are failing?

Then there’s our war on terror. You can see where I’m heading. Failure? All these years and we still can’t shut al Qaeda down? Well, what’s our measure of failure? More money to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. More money for drones in countries with which we aren’t at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen.

Heck, what about our own country? We’re not at war with ourselves, are we? Yet, drones are our future, with local law enforcement agencies getting into the act. And all those full body scanners at the airports. Do they work? Do we need them? No matter. Companies are making big bucks off them. Michael Chertoff, Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, is a lobbyist now representing the companies that make the scanners. What’s good for our national security corporations is what’s good for the country.

And education. Yes, our public schools are a failure. We all know that. Everyone says so. The answer? Privatization, of course. We’re going to pay companies to make the schools better.

But perhaps school failure is a success, as it justifies handing public funds to a handful of for-profit companies that have convinced mayors, governors, presidents that they have the answer.

You see? Our prisons aren’t failing. Our national security system isn’t failing. Our schools aren’t failing. They are succeeding. They are ensuring that money flows where it’s meant to.

Crazy, huh?

Don’t agree just yet. I bring you Diane Ravitch, who has an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. I may be crazy, but she isn’t. She’s one of the most widely respected voices on public education in this country. Professor at NYU, Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board under Clinton and the second Bush.

In her NYR article, Ravitch reviews the recent Council on Foreign Relations report U.S. Education Reform and National Security: Independent Task Force Report, written by, among others, Joel Klein (former head of NYC city schools, now a Murdoch employee) and Condi Rice. The article is not behind the NYR paywall. You can read it without charge, and I urge you to do so. After reading it two nights ago, I was feeling a little more relaxed about my bout of madness.

The beauty of the report is its brilliant interweaving of two great failures: our schools and our national security system. The solution? Shovel money into the usual educational stoves.

I could quote many passages. This one will do:

Statistics are marshaled to prove that our schools are failing, our economy is at risk, our national security is compromised, and everything we prize is about to disappear because of our low-performing public schools. Make no mistake, the task force warns: “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”

Despite its alarmist rhetoric, the report is not a worthy successor to the long line of jeremiads that it joins. Unlike A Nation at Risk [published in 1983], which was widely quoted as a call to action, this report is a plodding exercise in groupthink among mostly like-minded task force members. Its leaden prose contains not a single sparkling phrase for the editorial writers. The only flashes of original thinking appear in the dissents to the report.

What marks this report as different from its predecessors, however, is its profound indifference to the role of public education in a democratic society, and its certainty that private organizations will succeed where the public schools have failed. Previous hand-wringing reports sought to improve public schooling; this one suggests that public schools themselves are the problem, and the sooner they are handed over to private operators, the sooner we will see widespread innovation and improved academic achievement.

Ravitch’s skewering of the report is worth reading in full.

With that, I rest my case. I’m not mad after all. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Let me out of here!

Mark Cavendish winning stage 13 of the Giro d’Italia

[From steephill.tv]

You probably know that the third and final week of the Giro d’Italia began today (a rest day). And you’re probably wondering why I’m not writing my usual paeans to Mark Cavendish, like I do during Tours de France. After all, he’s won three stages already — 2, 4, and 13 — and might have won a couple more if not for crashes. Plus, he’s comfortably ahead in the points classification, on his way to a likely red jersey.

And all this while riding for a new team, without the support of leadout rider extraordinaire and buddy Mark Renshaw. With HTC-Highroad bowing out of cycling, Cavendish signed with Team Sky while Renshaw joined Rabobank. The end of a great partnership. For the Giro, Cavendish has had the support of new teammate Geraint Thomas in the sprint finishes.

I’ve had trouble following the Giro though. I can’t seem to find it on Comcast. It’s broadcast in the US by Universal Sports, which used to be 115 in my cable package, but when I go to 115, I get something altogether different, and when I systematically search through all channels, I don’t find it. Thus, I’m reduced to following on the web.

Of course, I do have a job. Not starting each morning watching the Giro isn’t the worst thing in the world. And seeing the Italian video highlights has its charms. Like last Friday’s finish. Team Sky wasn’t properly organized at first, but just in time, they put Cavendish in position. He made his characteristic burst, crossing the line to the announcer’s shriek, “Cav-en-dish-a! Cav-en-dish-a! Cav-en-dish-a!”

For more on Cavendish’s stage win Friday, here is The Guardian’s James Callow reporting:

Mark Cavendish continued his dominance of a sport usually ruled by the finest of victory margins with his third stage win of the 2012 Giro d’Italia.

The Team Sky rider defeated Katusha’s Alexander Kristoff to take stage 13 by a bike length, with Mark Renshaw of Rabobank in third, but that hardly tells the story.

As the race’s fastest men strained for the finishing line over the final few hundred metres into the Piedmontese town of Cervere, Cavendish ceased pedalling, dropped behind the leading group and then easily outstripped them from a more open position.

It was the Manxman’s 10th career stage victory in the Giro and 33rd victory in all grand tours, taking him to within two wins of Freddy Maertens, who lies ninth in the all-time rankings. At 26 years old he may eye Eddy Merckx’s record of 64 stage wins with fascination, even if he knows he will struggle to beat it.

“I’m really, really happy and it’s nice to finally get another win,” Cavendish said. “The guys just rode their hearts out again today and I’m so, so proud. After they did that I had to win, I had to find some gap to get through.

“It was just a question of waiting for that moment and then taking my chance. It was a headwind finish which probably played into my hands a little bit after leaving it late.”

[snip]

If Cavendish’s finish bore the mark of a rider at his improvisational best, his Sky team-mates had delivered him into a position where a rider of his talent would have been unfortunate not to win.

And memories of the pain from his high-speed crash in the third stage, when he was brought down by Roberto Ferrari, are finally receding. “It’s taken me a week to recover from the crash that I had but every day I’m feeling better and better,” said Cavendish.

The wonders of the internet! A week ago, I wrote about the book I was reading, Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. My plan was to turn to the latest installment of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, when I finished it. But instead I’m now a fourth of the way through Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. Why that? Because of the kind suggestion of someone who took the time to write a comment in response to my Odessa post. A complete stranger. I rarely get comments to my posts. Which is fine. I don’t expect any. But I’m grateful that I got this one. I remembered reading about de Waal’s book when it came out. Perhaps I read Walter Kaiser’s review two Octobers ago in the New York Review of Books. But I had since forgotten about it.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

In the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi assembled a collection of 360 Japanese ivory carvings known as netsuke, some comical and some erotic, none of them larger than a matchbox. The scion of a rich, respected banking family that “burned like a comet” in Parisian and Viennese society, Ephrussi was an early supporter of the impressionists; Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used him as the model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

The Holocaust swept Ephrussi and his glorious, cosmopolitan family into oblivion, and almost the only thing that would remain of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of their Vienna palace (now occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question”) in the pocket of a loyal maid, Anna—one carving a day for a year.

In this grand story, the renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal, the fifth generation to inherit the collection, traces the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. At once sweeping and intimate, A Hare with Amber Eyes is a deeply personal meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.

And the conclusion to Kaiser’s review:

Only someone for whom objects are as meaningful as they are for Edmund de Waal could have performed his quest. Only someone with his intelligence and sensitivity could have written such a fascinating account of his journey. The reader—and, indeed, the author—of this book will probably never fully understand the compulsion that drove him to undertake that journey, and his account inevitably leaves us with unanswered questions. Just why and how did a collection of netsuke impose, as he claims, a responsibility on him to explore his family’s history? Wasn’t it, rather, an opportunity that he may, consciously or unconsciously, have been seeking? But even if it was, how then did these Japanese artifacts allow him to open the doors of his family’s European past? Hasn’t his netsuke collection come to have greater significance for him than it did for any of its previous owners? Why did he feel compelled personally to revisit the rooms in Paris, Vienna, and Tokyo where the netsuke had resided? In short, how has a collection of tiny carvings exerted such irresistible exactions and provided such poignant ancestral awareness?

At the very end of the book, when his quest has taken him geographically and historically as far as Odessa and his family’s origins, he suddenly wonders what sort of book he is writing: “I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.” The answer, of course, is that it is about all of those things, but most of all it is the evocative account of a gifted, interesting, inquiring man in search of his historic identity.

None of this explains why I chose to read de Waal rather than the LBJ biography. All I can say is that I’m having difficulty finding the ship to board that will take me away from the borderlands of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century’s Russian and Soviet empires and on to the new world. The trouble began with Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which led to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Orlando Figes The Crimean War: A History, Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road, Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus, Charles King’s Odessa, and now The Hare with Amber Eyes. I need to find an LBJ ancestor who emigrated from the Black or Baltic Sea to Texas and get on board with him or her.

In any case, the current book is a natural successor to the Odessa book. Early on, we learn about the origin of Edmund de Waal’s ancestral wealth, in a paragraph that could have come straight from King’s book.

Odessa was a city within the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western borders of imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to live. It was famous for its rabbinical schools and synagogues, rich in literature and music, a magnet for the impoverished Jewish shtetls of Galicia. It was also a city that doubled its population of Jews and Greeks and Russians every decade, a polyglot city full of speculation and traders, the docks full of intrigues and spies, a city on the make. Charles Joachim Ephrussi [the author's great-great-great grandfather] had transformed a small grain-trading business into a huge enterprise by cornering the market in buying wheat. He bought the grain from the middlemen who transported it on carts along the heavily rutted roads from the rich black soil of the Ukrainian wheat fields, the greatest wheat fields in the world, into the port of Odessa. Here the grain was stored in his warehouses before being exported across the Black Sea, up the Danube, across the Mediterranean.

By 1860, the family had become the greatest grain exporters in the world.

De Waal writes beautifully about objects and touch. For instance, in introducing us to the netsuke collection that his great-grandfather acquired in Paris, de Waal discusses the vitrines in which wealthy people of the era would display their findings.

A collector friend of Charles is described in the act of placing Japanese objects in a vitrine, “like a painter applying a stroke to his canvas. The harmony is complete and the refinement exquisite… “

The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalize through distance.

This is what I realise now I failed to understand about vitrines. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums. They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock. Vitrines were a sort of coffin: things need to be out and take their chances away from the protection of formal display, to be liberated. “Out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen!” I wrote in a sort of manifesto. There was too much in the way. There was trop de verre, too much glass, as a great architect commented on seeing a rival Modernist’s house of glass.

But the vitrine — as opposed to the museum’s case — is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.

One more quote, because the story is so charming.

Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lives, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: “This seems to have slipped from the bundle.”

Fellow fans of the NYT Vows column, be sure to read tomorrow’s celebration of its twentieth anniversary. Lois Smith Brady tracks down six of the first featured couples and updates us on their marriages, providing stories of happiness, divorce, and death. Good stories all.

The one weakness is Brady’s introduction, which in true Vows style is a bit overdone. For instance:

The way people look at marriage, and live it, has changed over the years. It’s like farming, once considered drudgery and hard work, but now seen as a soulful utopian adventure.

Young people are so beautifully ambitious about marriage these days. I recently interviewed a couple for a Vows column who said they wanted to spend their lives finding each other’s “inner voices.” Marriage may have changed, but love has not. It still makes people say crazy things. And it’s still a glue that no one has control of.

Has so much changed in twenty years? I think not.

But never mind. Read the stories, which Brady recounts well.

The front page feature article in today’s Wall Street Journal raises a provocative question: should the world record in paper airplane flight distance be held by the individual who can design, build, and throw a paper airplane the farthest, or should designer-thrower duos be eligible as well? This is not an abstract question. At the end of February, designer John Collins teamed with former Cal quarterback Joe Ayoob to build and sail a plane 226 feet and 10 inches, breaking the record of 207 feet, 4 inches set in 2003 by then-fifteen-year-old Stephen Krieger.

This would be a good time for me to note that I know Stephen. He is a recent graduate from the math department at the university. I never had him in a class, but a few summers ago he was one of the teaching assistant/counselors in the summer program I help run for talented high school students. At the opening orientation, as part of the counselor introductions, a surprising fact was revealed about each one. Stephen’s fact: he was the Guinness World Record holder for paper airplane flight.

Who knew there even was such a category? Though I suppose it’s natural enough. More to the point, given the hundreds of millions (billions?) of paper airplane throwers in the world, I couldn’t believe that the record holder was a colleague.

No more.

Stephen, ever the good sport, was on hand for the record-breaking throw. From the WSJ article:

Stephen Kreiger had lived through many attempts to overtake his world record for flight. But he watched with resignation in February as a challenger prepared to unseat him using an unorthodox strategy.

Mr. Kreiger had held since 2003 the Guinness World Record for throwing a paper airplane the farthest. He had won it at age 15, after a summer’s preparing by toning his throwing arm.

But here was 51-year-old John Collins at the end of the empty Air Force hangar in Sacramento, Calif., preparing for the flight of a newly folded plane he had designed, having not worked out at all.

And his plane was in the hands of a ringer: a large 27-year-old man with a buff arm.

The stand-in, Joe Ayoob, wound up and rifled the plane in a long, towering arch that came as little surprise: Mr. Ayoob, as a University of California-Berkeley quarterback, logged more than 1,700 passing yards in 2005.

“Competitive paper airplane flying had always been, in my mind, what can one person do with one piece of paper,” says Mr. Kreiger, a 23-year-old engineer. Using a ringer, he says, is problematic: “I don’t really think that’s the spirit of the competition.”

Guinness World Records NA Inc. thought otherwise. Mr. Ayoob’s throw, immortalized on YouTube, sailed 226 feet and 10 inches, breaking Mr. Kreiger’s record of 207 feet, 4 inches. Guinness in March named him and Mr. Collins the record holders.

A Guinness spokeswoman says there was no internal debate about giving Mr. Collins credit. But some paper-plane purists are still aflutter.

Paper-plane enthusiasts have traditionally seen theirs as an individual sport. The question now: Is Mr. Collins’s ringer a bad precedent, or has he ushered in a new era in which designers can focus on better paper folds instead of muscle tone?

It is serious business for paper-plane people, who compete with intensity in a discipline otherwise mostly seen as a hobby for kids or classroom slackers.

Thomas Frank has an interesting piece in the May issue of Harper’s on soaring college tuition, the concomitant increase in student debt loads, and the money-making financial model of universities. The article is behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it, though a small excerpt from near the end is freely available.

Unfortunately, Frank doesn’t provide evidence to back up his repeated jabs at universities as profit centers. The article is more sketch than in-depth study. Here’s a representative passage, which follows his observation that universities rely on their status as charitable institutions to defend their behavior:

Charitable institutions do not exploit the labor of their charges, nor do they relentlessly bid down their wages, as universities do with grad students and new Ph.D.’s who take on much of the teaching. They don’t run their endowments as you would a hedge fund (or, as is often the case, invest them directly in such concerns). They don’t take kickbacks to steer kids into the toothy mouths of expensive private lenders. They don’t sell their souls for seats on corporate boards or research grants from tobacco companies or a Division I title. They don’t replace scholarly leaders with armies of professional managers who proceed to fiddle with the curriculum, funnel resources to business schools, and strive for supremacy as (in the winning words of one expert on the subject) “one among many industries that pursue intellectual properties.” These are the deeds of profit-maximizing entities. The fact that universities don’t have shareholders and don’t pay exorbitant bonuses to top officers is merely a matter of organizational detail.

Talk about painting with a broad brush! I’d say he overdoes it there. But universities, public as well as private, do need to be out there full time chasing the money, whether from federal agencies, foundations, or individuals. That’s what gets the buildings built, the research equipment bought, the famous faculty hired or retained, the new programs started.

I read somewhere years ago — I wish I remember where, and this was more in the context of the Harvards of the world than universities in general — that if one imagines universities raise money in order to educate students, than one has the model exactly backwards. No, they educate students in order to raise money. Some of those students, some day, will be the source of major gifts. Educate them and the money will come.

Here’s another passage, from the excerpt available on-line:

Massive indebtedness changes a person, maybe even more than a college education does, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the politicos who have allowed the tuition disaster to take its course know this. To saddle young people with enormous, inescapable debt—total student debt is now more than one trillion dollars—is ultimately to transform them into profit­-maximizing machines. I mean, working as a schoolteacher or an editorial assistant at a publishing house isn’t going to help you chip away at that forty grand you owe. You can’t get out of it by bankruptcy, either. And our political leaders, lost in a fantasy of punitive individualism, certainly won’t propose the bailout measures they could take to rescue the young from the crushing burden.

I like that “punitive individualism” phrase as a description of our Republican Party’s attitude toward the unemployed, those with underwater mortgages, the sick. Blame the victims.

The article ends with a remark by Nicholas Merzoeff, a professor at NYU: “I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.”

I don’t find myself feeling that way about my job, but maybe I’m naive, or perhaps the difference lies in the significantly lower (though sharply rising) tuition we charge at the University of Washington compared to NYU.

Nor do I share Frank’s level of outrage. But higher education is changing, at the least in the expectations set for it by students, parents, and legislators, and not for the better. What stands out is the growing emphasis on universities as job-training institutions. After paying all that tuition, students expect jobs, and we somehow must magically ensure it, a hopeless task in the current economic climate. That’s where the damage is really done — the combination of large debt and job scarcity.

As long as I’m on this theme, I’ve been intending to read Andrew Delbanco’s book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, which was published two months ago. He’s one of the finest writers on higher education that I know (and also a college classmate). I did read Anthony Grafton’s review of it in The New York Review of Books. Early on, Grafton sets out a fundamental paradox, with which I’ll conclude this post:

The belief that college matters deeply is both implicit and ubiquitous. It dominates upper-middle-class and upper-class family strategies, it wins buyers for magazines that offer pointless and inaccurate university ratings, it generates income for college counselors, and it sustains alumni loyalty (genetics is destiny, a fellow professor told me thirty years ago, as we thought about which colleges our children might attend and realized that we might have sealed their possibilities by our own choices). Most important, it impels tens of thousands of students and their families to spend vast amounts of money every year.

The belief that college matters very little is also ubiquitous: it echoes through the dingy mansions of American public discourse. We hear such a belief when Rick Santorum criticizes President Obama for trying to ensure that as many Americans as possible should attend college, and denounces universities as snobbish institutions, divorced from reality and focused on indoctrinating the young with left-wing dogmas; when the billionaire businessman Peter Thiel offers prizes for top-ranked students willing to drop out of college and try to succeed as entrepreneurs; when writers argue that the college premium in wages is overrated and the American concern with selective admissions rests on erroneous beliefs about the practical value of higher education. These people are all, in their various ways, arguing that higher education has become a strange ghost world, whose practices and beliefs are foreign to those of most ordinary Americans, and whose benefits, intellectual or practical, may be few.

Gheorghe Alexianu, Romanian governor of region including Odessa during World War II, at far right

[From Charles King's post at The Wilson Quarterly]

I wrote last Sunday about the book I was reading, Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. I finished it yesterday morning. Still awaiting me when I wrote the post were chapters on Odessan life in the final years under the tsar, during World War I and the revolution, the first two decades of the Soviet Union and Stalin, and the Romanian occupation from 1941 to 1944.

Once Germany broke the German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union, it invited Axis ally Romania to head into the regions to Romania’s northeast along the Black Sea. King’s chapter on the Romanian occupation, Romanian anti-Semitism, and the removal of Jews from Odessa is the climax of the book. A horrific tale, as one would imagine, but a fascinating one as well. Also of interest are subsequent chapters on Odessa in the postwar Soviet Union, Odessa as part of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the rich Odessan-infused community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

I had an unexpected sense of familiarity when I read a passage in the chapter on the Romanian years. King first explains that

Odessans began denouncing each other almost as soon as the Romanian cavalry trotted down a deserted and sandbagged Richilieu Street. … The demand to unmask hidden Bolsheviks before they could stage further terrorist attacks was greater than ever, and the supply of Odessans eager to avoid suspicion themselves probably spiked as well. After all, it was hard to have survived the 1930s without embracing to some degree the Soviet system, and in the topsy-turvy world of war and occupation, every virtue conjured from necessity was now a vice waiting to be revealed. It really was like stepping through the looking glass.

This leads into a story of two men’s dueling denunciations, after which we come upon the following passage:

For plenty of Odessans, the way to demonstrate a healthy sense of civic duty was by stepping up and being of use in the maintenance of law and order, the discovery of underground Soviet agents, and especially the exposure of hidden Jews.

Alexianu’s administration saw all Jewish Odessans, at least in theory, as Soviet agents. … the search for hidden Jews was not simply a matter of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. It was also, from the perspective of the occupier and many of the occupied, a matter of security.

By no means do I wish to compare early twenty-first century America to Odessa under the Romanians, but really, is this familiar or what? Just replace Jewish Odessans with Muslim Americans and Soviet agents with Al Qaeda agents. Yes, this is an enormous stretch, but still. What is one to make of our airport security theater apparatus? Of our data collection? And so on.

Just yesterday I read an article about the aldermen in Brookfield, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, approving construction of a mosque. I know I should focus on this positive news — it was approved — but I couldn’t get the following portion of the report out of my mind:

Brookfield resident Beverly Kuntzsch told aldermen she was concerned about public safety. She said the New York Police Department surveyed 100 mosques nationwide in 2007 and found substantial ties to terrorism and “Jihad.”

“How will you monitor the literature or the preaching/teaching of violence that’s going on in the mosques?” Kuntzsch asked.

We’re not wartime Odessa, or anything remotely like it. But the security apparatus grows. It’s big business, for one thing, with bipartisan government support.

Where are we headed?

———

By the way, Charles King’s post at The Wilson Quarterly a year ago, from which the photo at the top is taken, is short and provides a good overview of what his book is about. See also Timothy Snyder’s review, which King’s post links to, again at The Wilson Quarterly. (Snyder is the Yale historian whose book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin I read, and wrote about, a few months ago.)

On finishing Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus three days ago, I thought I was done with books on countries or wars or travel or history of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Before The Caucasus was Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War and Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road (see my posts here, here, and here, as well as here) Next on my reading list was Robert Caro’s latest LBJ tome The Passage of Power, just out.

But Caro’s book is so long. I wasn’t ready to immerse myself in it. Searching for an alternative, I found Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. I suppose I was destined to read about Odessa before leaving this part of the world. It is, after all, my ancestral homeland, the 1893 birthplace of my grandmother, and a city I know little about.

Here is an excerpt from the description of the book at the author’s website:

Italian merchants, Greek freedom fighters, and Turkish seamen; a Russian empress and her favorite soldier-bureaucrats; Jewish tavern keepers, traders, and journalists—these and many others seeking fortune and adventure rubbed shoulders in Odessa, the greatest port on the Black Sea.

Here a dream of freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Yet here too was death on a staggering scale: not only the insidious plagues common to seaports but also the mass murder of Jews carried out by Romanian occupation forces during the Second World War. Drawing on a wealth of original source material, Odessa is an elegy for a vibrant, multicultural city as well as a celebration of the survival of Odessa’s dream in a diaspora reaching all the way to Israel and the United States.

I’m a little more than a third of the way through so far. It’s not a long book, and therefore not all that detailed either, but informative nonetheless. An opening chapter surveys the history of the Black Sea region from ancient times to the 1780s. Each of the next few chapters is built around one or two people of note in Russian and Odessan history.

First we learn about Potemkin, his relationship with Catherine the Great, war with the Ottomans, the arrival of John Paul Jones to assist with naval warfare, his dismal performance, and the saving of the day by José Pascual Domingo de Ribas. Among other successes, de Ribas took the small Black Sea village of Khadjibey from the Ottomans, leading to its incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1792. Subsequently, he received Catherine’s approval to build a new city, Odessa, on the site.

De Ribas and Catherine would both die before much progress was made. In the next chapter, we move on to the early 1800s, during which Richilieu carried through on the project, creating Odessa. The plague intervened in 1812, almost killing Odessa before it could reach adolescence, but Richilieu saved it through quarantine and fire.

On we go to Mikhail Vorontsov, his marriage to Lise Branicka, his appointment as governor-general of New Russia, the arrival in Odessa of the young Alexander Pushkin, his famous affair with Lise, and Odessa’s growth as a major international city attracting Italians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, Armenians, and many more.

Odessa’s role as a progressive port city made it especially attractive to Jews, for whom it provided a two-fold freedom: freedom within the larger culture to work in a variety of professions and live where they pleased, plus freedom within Jewish culture from the more traditional practices of the Pale. The chapter I’m now reading focuses on this growing Jewish community. King writes:

Jews emerged as the critical middlemen in Odessa’s commerce, linking up with peasants, immigrant farmers, and herders in the interior and forming an essential bridge to the large export concerns in the port city. Through their energy and social networks, Odessa became something that none of its early founders, from Potemkin to Vorontsov, could have imagined: the preeminent port of the Yiddish-speaking world. As a frontier city in need of both people and income, Odessa became one of the major urban centers of the Pale system, a modern and dynamic city where Jews could find economic prosperity and a degree of freedom within an otherwise constraining system. While Jews were viewed as competitors to Christian businesses in other corners of the empire — one of the reasons for legal restrictions on Jewish economic activity — their business contacts were seen as a boon in the growing city.

That’s my family he’s describing, a family I know close to nothing about. Not even when they would have arrived in Odessa. What I know is my grandmother’s stories of her childhood, the pogroms, and the Cossacks. Not that I had any idea what pogroms or Cossacks were, but I knew they were bad. And I knew that because Cossacks were attacking Jews (no doubt the 1905 Odessa pogrom that I will soon learn more about in the book), my grandmother’s family had to stay indoors to avoid danger. But they had to eat, and it fell to my grandmother to go out to buy food for the family.

In retrospect, the point must have been that she was the child most able to pass for a non-Jew. The language spoken at home was Yiddish, but she spoke Russian at school. Indeed, she studied French and was probably fluent in all three. Given how good her English would become, with less of the classic Yiddish accent of so many of her generation who came to New York, I would bet her Russian was that of a native. Whatever the reason, she was the family food procurer.

Not long after the pogroms, the family made their way to New York. My great-grandparents never did learn English or fit in. My grandmother did so quickly. It’s stunning to realize that she was equally at home in the world I’m now reading about and in late twentieth-century New York. What a woman!

Happy Mother’s Day, grandma.

Loyola’s Eric Lusby scoring against Canisius

[Kenneth K. Lam, Baltimore Sun, May 12, 2012]

Every May, Ron’s View features an overview of the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship. It’s May. Hence, time for the overview.

Only by chance did I remember two days ago that this is opening weekend. I hadn’t yet read last weekend’s news on the tournament selections. Just like in basketball, the NCAA tournament features teams that automatically qualify by winning their league championship or tournament and additional at-large invitees. And just like in basketball, some of those automatic bids go to less-deserving teams, keeping a few top teams out of the tournament. This year, traditional lacrosse power Cornell, with a 9-4 record and regular season wins over Yale, Denver, and Syracuse (all tournament invitees) was left out. In contrast, Canisius, which also lost to Cornell, in a 19-4 rout, was invited as a conference champion, despite its 6-7 record.

But let’s back up. Here’s the deal. Sixteen teams are invited. Eight are seeded, 1 through 8. Each of the eight seeds hosts one of the unseeded teams in first round play, which we are in the middle of. Four games were played yesterday, four are being played today. If all goes to plan, the eight seeds win and regroup next weekend for the quarterfinals, with the traditional draw: 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7, etc. Two games are at one site, two at another. Then, on Memorial Day weekend, the semi-finals and finals are played at some major football stadium, rotating in recent years among Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston (Foxborough).

As I explain each year, there is a small handful of traditional powers, which not only have reserved the role of champion to themselves but also expect to populate most of the runner-up and semi-final slots. Until recently, the elite consisted of Syracuse, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. In the past decade, Duke has firmly established itself as an eighth member of the elite. They were runners-up in 2005 and 2007, semi-finalists in 2008 and 2009, champions in 2010, and semi-finalists in 2011. (What happened in 2006? Well, you know. There was that rape accusation business and prosecutorial misconduct, with the Duke president shutting the team down mid-season.)

Lacrosse is growing quickly across the country. No longer an eastern seaboard sport, with hotbeds in upstate New York, Long Island, New Jersey, and Maryland, it is widely played in several western states, including here in greater Seattle. Not too many western universities field NCAA teams. But two teams in states not touching the Atlantic have begun to make waves. Notre Dame has had regular appearances in the tournament since 1990, and performed among the elite for a decade. In 2010, when Duke finally broke through with a championship, Notre Dame was its victim. The game was a classic, a defensive battle ending in regulation at 5-5. Overtime ended quickly, with Duke’s CJ Costabile winning the opening face-off, running straight down the middle of the field to Notre Dame’s goal, and scoring the winning shot in just five seconds. The other new power is the University of Denver, which stunned the lacrosse world by hiring Princeton coaching great Bill Tierney away from Princeton in 2010. A year later, Denver made it to the semis, losing to ultimate champion Virginia.

One can pretty much fill in most of the NCAA bracket each year before the season starts. Just write down the elite eight and the new two. Except that that automatic league bid business is getting in the way. This year’s victim was Cornell, thanks in part to the rise of fellow Ivy Yale, which beat Cornell in the league semi-finals and Princeton in the finals. The other nine made it safely in.

Two surprises this season were Loyola and UMass. Both are squarely in lacrosse country and both have had some success over the years. But this year was different. Loyola was undefeated and ranked number one when it hosted and lost to its neighbor down the street, Hopkins, a couple of weeks ago, its only loss of the season. (The NYT wrote a big preview article about this matchup of unlikely equals.) And UMass went undefeated, finishing the season ranked in the top two with Loyola, the order depending on which poll one used.

That’s the background. Here are the eight seeded teams, in order: Loyola, Hopkins, Duke, Notre Dame, Virginia, UMass, Lehigh, North Carolina. The eight unseeded teams, ordered according to which seeded team they drew for the first round, are: Canisius, Stony Brook, Syracuse, Yale, Princeton, Colgate, Maryland, and Denver.

Yesterday, I watched part or all of four first-round games. The day began with Duke winning convincingly over Syracuse, 12-9. Then UMass, bitter over its lowly 6 seeding after its undefeated season, took it out on Colgate for a while, building a 7-2 lead and holding on at the half 7-5. Two quick goals to open the second half made it 9-5, with victory in sight. But Colgate came back taking a 12-11 lead midway through the fourth period and winning 13-11. Was UMass over-rated after all? No matter. They’re gone.

On to Loyola-Canisius, #1 versus a team with a losing record. Not surprisingly, Loyola went ahead 4-0 in the first period, but Canisius was tough. They held Loyola scoreless in the second, closing to a 4-3 halftime deficit. I turned my attention away for a while, and next thing I knew, it was 14-3 Loyola! Final score: 17-5. And to think, Cornell didn’t even get into the tournament. What a pity.

The night game was UNC versus Denver. I have an attachment to some of the elite teams, for no good reason that I can think of. Hopkins. Syracuse. But UNC I haven’t cared about. Until this year, of course, what with Joel living there. And Denver is my brother’s alma mater. Who to root for? Well, I didn’t really care. Nor did I see much of the game. I checked in on it from time to time. Denver took a 6-2 lead early in the second quarter. UNC came back on an 8-2 run to take a halftime lead of 10-8, pushing that up to a 13-10 lead before Denver stormed back to take a 15-13 lead. With 48 seconds left, UNC narrowed the gap to 15-14. Denver won the face-off, but turned it over with 20 seconds left. UNC pulled its goalie and had some final chances, only to give up the ball, with Denver moving it upfield and getting an empty net goal to close the game at 16-14.

Meanwhile, Virginia is hosting Princeton as I write this, having taken a 5-2 lead at the half. It being Mother’s Day and all, not to mention the closing day of the Players Championship on the PGA tour, I won’t be watching as much lacrosse today as yesterday. Perhaps I’ll catch some of the last game, Lehigh-Maryland, Lehigh being another of this season’s surprises. More in a week or two.