Women's America: Refocusing the Past

The introduction to this book suggests that women’s history (and I mean in the USA) can be studied in stages, with each era of history bringing changes and progress. Take for instance Amelia Earhart, which the authors use as an example of courage. While she was definitely an innovator, as there were few women aviators at the time, she wasn’t the first woman in the USA to show courage. Half a century earlier, hadn’t thousands of women taken risks when their families moved into the Great Plains? Anyone who saw the recent remake of True Grit knows that the “pioneer woman” of the 1800’s had to have assumed great risk. It is for this reason, that the authors advise the following criteria when reading this book; identify the historical source, ask who created it, ask why, ask how the attitudes (or laws) of the time influenced the recording, and ask who it was meant for.

     An early chapter here covers the issue of women in early America, with special emphasis on those that were enslaved. The authors write about how rice harvesting was a back-breaking job, often done by the women. They cut through the Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima stereotypes, and show us how the reality was even worse. The women performed hard manual labor, and relatively few were tasked strictly with cooking, cleaning, and childcare.

   A more interesting piece is the issue of something called “Interspousal Tort Immunity.” Under English Common Law, the husband and wife were considered one person, so they could not sue each other. The wife could therefore not claim any damages of her husband beat her or stole from her. The chapter is comically titled “Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” in that the jewelry bestowed as an engagement gift was in fact a defense. A woman could sue a man for breaking an engagement, because it was considered a breach of contract. However, in the event of such a broken promise, she was expected to keep the jewelry, so she wouldn’t have to humiliate herself by going to court. As for a married woman, her jewelry was the last thing that creditors could seize if her husband defaulted his debts.

    As I mentioned before, women of the pioneer era are detailed, along with convents in the cities. The contribution of the nuns was covered in an earlier book titled Women of Faith, where the Chicago nuns were the founders of education for children in Chicago. In Women’s America, however, the New York nuns are said to have gotten some political clout (though not necessarily power) by establishing childcare and education institutions. It was the only situation where the male politicians would listen to the women, because without the nuns and their schools, the city would be caring for the poor on its own. In anti-tax USA, the last thing the politician wants to do is tax the men to pay for social services. As discussed in Women of Faith, the anti-Catholic sentiment of the time encouraged the establishment of the convent schools, as a way of alleviating (what was seen as) the Irish Catholic root of poverty.

   Further chapters discuss the change in rape prosecution, how the boredom of the post-war housewife led to Friedan’s feminist movement, and the changes with regard to education, health, technology, law, ad government. The authors do great justice to the history of American women with their unbiased research and writing. From the very beginning, they advise the scholar to examine the primary and secondary sources, so they can be aware of bias and undue favoritism. While this might seem new to some, keep in mind that bias is always evident in history. Remember the old adage, “history is written by the victors?” Now remember the other one, that “to the victors go the spoils of war?” By studying the sources carefully, you can get to the root of history, and cut through all the prejudices. That in itself is the basis for the study of any history.

Iranian Jews in Israel by Alessandra Cecolin

Alessandra Cecolin doesn’t take the most optimistic platform in this book. According to her, the Iranian Jews have, since 1948, made very attractive pawns for Zionism. She writes of how they were encouraged to emigrate to Israel by both the secular and religious parties, both of whom wanted to use their Iranian brethren for political gain. The secular Zionists wanted the Iranian Jews to give up many of their customs, while the religious Zionists favored Ashkenazi (German) customs. Before I go further, I want to state that this was common for all Jews in Muslim countries, be they from Iran, Yemen, Morocco, or Ethiopia. The Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews never had their customs respected.

    The myth of Muslim tolerance is shown in this book to be just that, a mere myth. The author includes many examples of Persian Muslims abusing their Jewish neighbors, through massacres, mass thefts, and forced conversions. The Jews of Mashad, for instance, converted to Islam en masse in the 1830’s, while practicing Judaism in secret, so they were relieved to be able to emigrate to Israel. Part of the reason behind the anti-Jewish activities, though not directly stated here, was the Iranian government’s weakness. Moving to a country like Israel, even at the cost of becoming a second class citizen, was a better alternative to a government that couldn’t protect you. A sizeable number of Jews went to Herat, Afghanistan, rather than say “Alla Hu Akbar,” so perhaps the emigration part wasn’t really new to them?

   Altogether, the image that Cecolin paints of Iran’s Jews comes off as bleak. However, this book is missing some essential documentation. There aren’t enough firsthand accounts of Iranian Jewish life in Israel, nor reprints of speeches or letters. It might also make sense to compare the situation of Israel’s Iranian Jews with that of other non-European Jews, like the Yemenite community. However, with Israel’s Mizrahi community becoming ever more powerful, whatever marginalization is probably waning fast. 

Paul Solberg: Ten Years in Pictures

Solberg is a photographer of many talents. In this book there’s a black and white photo titled “Son of  Farmer,” that I first mistook for something Dorothy Lange might have shot. Many of his black and white portraits evoke Lange’s Depression-era work, with the emphasis on the subject’s character. As for his black and white landscapes, they could pass for Ansel Adams. His male nudes and flower still life photographs bear a close resemblance to those of Robert Maplethorpe.

I’m not sure about the color landscapes, however. This book includes one from the Southwest USA, framed by an old metal sign, and I’m not sure how well it works. There’s something about his landscapes that look much better in black and white, unlike his portraits, which look great regardless. It probably has to do with his studies in anthropology, and according to this book, he studied at Cape Town. Now that is something I would like to see documented in his photos.

Never Built Los Angeles

Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell begin by treating LA as an architect’s paradise. For every decade, and innovative architect shows up, adds style to the city, and move on. Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Frank Gehry, they all made their mark on the city. The problem is, the greatest works of architecture were funded for private buildings, not public ones. There’s also the issue of what happens when the architects move on.

    Some of the designs in this collection are practical, like Richard Neutra’s “Rush City” from the 1920’s. The glass-box style seems less like fantasy nowadays, because more people are opting to live in small apartments near the place where they work. Others, like A.C. Martin’s Egyptian Swim Club, are beautiful, but costly. By the 1950’s, you had practical ideas for building, but the massive scale would hit road blocks. Take the Bunker Hill project, for instance; it was a sound plan, with regard to transportation and pedestrian safety, similar to London’s Barbican. Bunker Hill would have residential buildings surrounding parkland, and the roads would be tunnels underneath. The problem was, it would require demolition of whole residential blocks. You’re unlikely to get approval for that. It may have worked in New York City, with Lincoln Center and Stuyvesant Town, but not in Los Angeles. The city had no Robert Moses to bully politicians into bulldozing the neighborhoods.

   One of the most ironic projects in the book is the Dobbins Cycleway, built in 1900 and named after the mayor of Pasadena. It was a massive elevated roadway, made of wood from Oregon, and designed to connect residential and leisure areas. There was even a bike-sharing program, much like today’s Citibike, where you could rent a bike at one end and drop it off at another. The Dobbins Cycleway died after the automobile became available, along with electric streetcars. There are calls for efforts to bring it back, but with only $4 million a year to spend on cycle roads, the city can’t meet the massive cost. Building expenses are higher in 2016 than they were in 1900.

    The sad thing about this book is that almost all of the ideas were good. So many of them, even the ones from the 1920’s, promote apartment blocks with nearby rail service. If LA had pushed for light rail and electric streetcars at the time, then it wouldn’t have needed the massive expressways that slash the city and pollute it. Based on maps of LA, I suspect that a lot of it had to do with availability of land. LA is a coastal city, and to the East is just more land, so you can build right out into the hills and deserts. Remember the scene from E.T. where the boys race their bikes through the hills? They’re full of half-finished houses (big, I might add), and in the 33 years since, more neighborhoods like that have been built.

    After reading The Metropolitan Revolution, Walkable City, and other similar theses, I think that this will change in the next few years. The foreclosure crisis has shadowed the home-buying ideal all over the USA, and bigger isn’t better anymore. Maybe Los Angeles will see abandoned neighborhoods will be torn down and replaced with apartments, connected by light rail?

Graphic Cosmogony

    God (yes, the regular one) has a problem in Deity School; his boring life doesn’t involve throwing lightning bolts, making tidal waves, or flying around on winged feet. He doesn’t get any funky clothes like togas, horned helmets, or winged helmets. So what is he to do for his school project? He makes a beautiful diorama of his universe…considered weak in a class where the other deities juggle planets. This short comic is written and drawn by Andrew Rae, a frequent illustrator for the New York Times. He turns the Judeo-Christian deity into an out-of-place schoolboy, who can’t compete with exotic paganism. It makes you think about how pre-Judeo-Christian beliefs must’ve been a lot more fun, with all those marvels of ancient mythology.

    Graphic Cosmogony is a collection of creation stories, illustrated by well-known commercial artists. Most of the work is only semi-realistic, no Marvel Comics muscle or faces here, not even any Robert Crumb. Take Daniel Locke’s Moshiri Ikkewe Chep story, about the Ainu myth of creation. The work is reminiscent of woodblocks, with bulky shapes and only two colors-blue and black-to give it a dark, underwater feel.

    Most of the works in this book are ironic, as in the case of Jon McNaught’s Pilgrims. They pull up to a church in the middle of nowhere, tour the interior, take pictures, and then they leave the place the way they came. This holy site is really just a lonely place that only exists because people come to see it. Would these “deities” exist if nobody worshipped them? Maybe this book is a metaphor and parable on the lives of artists; would their work exist if nobody looked at it?

Once There Was a Village by Yuri Kapralov

Yuri’s neighbor, Jimmy, had a small part in the movie Superfly as a junkie (in his own apartment, because part of the movie was filmed at their East 11^th street building.) The piano sculpture on the wall is one of many that the author created, using the constant flow of junk from the constantly emptying apartments.  Today the author, and the neighborhood’s Slavic community, are mostly forgotten. This book is pretty much forgotten too, and I’m not even sure how I heard of it. It was written in 1974, reissued only once back in 1998, and my research shows that Kapralov died in 2005, a lifelong hard drinker. A true “starving artist,” he made his living tending bar and doing odd jobs. Well-known only in local circles, he had several marriages, a daughter who was murdered in San Francisco in the 1980’s, and wrote some forgotten novels and story collections. Other than that, not much remains.

   Now, a little about the book. Kapralov writes about all the poor, disgusting, and hopeless people that lived in the East Village of New York City from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. He captures the dirty, greasy, and grimy essence of the area which seems to change in stages. First comes the period up into the 1960’s, when the area was working class, and a multiracial one at that, lots of Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Eastern Europeans, and poor Jews. Next comes the mid 1960’s, when the hippies, whom he disliked immensely, descended on the area, along with heroin. Finally comes the 1970’s, when the building were abandoned and burned, the junkies had died, and just about everyone and everything else had died too.

    As for Yuri Kapralov, he was born in Russian Carpathia in the 1930’s, survived WWII, came to the USA as a “displaced person” in 1949, wandered the Northeast, ended up in the East Village in the 1950’s. The area had a large population of Slavs who came here after the war, and most of them had surrendered to the Americans to avoid being persecuted by the Soviets. They stayed in Manhattan until the late 60’s, by which time most of them went to Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, or to New Jersey. The book describes most of the neighborhood’s Slavic residents as being desperately poor, and the only ones who stayed were the ones who couldn’t escape no matter what. At least they had their own church, school, mutual support network, but Kapralov’s writing doesn’t make anything positive. The Poles and Ukrainians are all old, tired, sorry, defeated, and depleted. They drink too much, and while they don’t get into fights, their kids end up leaving or ending up on heroin.

    The author seems to accept the dirty aspects of the neighborhood, the junkies, the trash, and the crime. He disliked the hippies immensely, however, even more than the junkies, because he thought they were exploiting a poor enclave when they had the money to do better. As for the trash, he relishes it, because he got to make sculptures out of the old pianos that were thrown out. But he writes heavily on the summer riots, despising both the bottle throwing kids and the police, whom he considers bullies and cowards. “The garbage man can’t refuse to enter a bad neighborhood, nor can the fireman refuse to enter the burning building” he writes, “yet the police will call for backup rather than charge into danger.” You might say that these are all symptoms of the neighborhood’s hopelessness, where everyone involved is guilty in some way.

    I would not absolve Kapralov of wrongdoing, however, because he did manage to waste his money on alcohol, and he could’ve moved away if he’d tried. Maybe he liked having the freedom to lose? I doubt he made enough money to support his kids, and seeing as how this book is mostly forgotten, it wasn’t like his accomplishments had a lasting impact. I will, however, give merit to this book, because it tells me a lot about the East Village that I wasn’t aware of before. It dwells heavily on the history of the Slavic residents, few traces of them remaining other than a Ukrainian museum, a few Ukrainian restaurants, and a curio shop on 14^th street which has since closed.

Merchants in the Temple

In the 1500’s, Henry the VIII wanted to expropriate England’s monasteries, and figured he could legitimize it if he could prove the Abbots were corrupt. He sent his men out to question whether they followed Saint Benedict’s rules, or whether they were having too good a time. Was the food simple and plain? Did they live in dormitories and cells? Was a mattress, blanket, and pillow their only bedding? What they found was the opposite; the monasteries were luxurious, the food was lavish and plentiful, the monks were lazy and hired people to do the work around the property. As for the vow of chastity and celibacy, the monks often had wives and kids that they were supporting on the church’s dime. According to this book, the church in Rome is far worse.

    Author Giangluigi Nuzzi jumps in with both feet, and reprints a letter from an auditor so we can see some evidence. It details the lack of transparency in the Vatican’s finances; nobody’s held accountable; Cardinals are not questioned on how they spend; the Italian authorities torn a blind eye. Remember Jim Bakker of PTL, and how he was accused of financial monkey business with his church? Well his accusations of taking million dollar vacations are nothing compared to what goes on in Rome. You have too many institutions, too many people involved.

    A big part of the book has to do with Pope Francis. He disciplined a German Archbishop for spending church money on a huge home, and he’s spoken out publicly about the Vatican’s finances. As for the Pope’s use of the money, the newspapers have had a field day with his “austerity,” such as downgrading his personal quarters, eating lunch in the staff cafeteria. The last Popes had entourages, huge residences, personal cooks, and servants lined up 24 hours a day. All Pope Francis has is an apartment above the shop. However, the author isn’t 100% a supporter of Pope Francis, because first off, his “apartment” has the quality of a 5-star hotel, not a monk’s cell. Secondly, he places retired churchmen in lavish accommodations. As for the blame, the author places a lot of it on the Italian government. Unlike in the USA, Italian religious institutions have a lot of leeway as to how they keep the books. They can get away with improper spending, owning for-profit business and not paying taxes, and nobody questions them. In the USA, all non-profits have to be registered as such, and they have to report all financial activity to the IRS. Oversight keeps them honest.

Perhaps the financial crisis in the church has to do with the clergy getting too much respect, the way a rock star is over-adored by his fans? Maybe it’s simply an issue of being corrupted by too much power? Pope John, when faced with a complaint that a church usher made more than the Bishop, responded with this; “the usher has children to support, and you had better not!” I think it’s time for the church to expect that of the clergy. Religion shouldn’t be a business.