not native fruit

sephardic tolerance

i've been writing so much about my mother and her family and very little about my father.  well, until recently, i thought i knew all there was to know about my father's family.  but now there's been yet another major familial wake-up call.  my father's family were 'danish jews.'  I put scare-marks around those words, because technically they were lutherans, however, not really.

let me try to explain.  my father told me, when i was quite young, that 'my family are the ones they call the portugese.'  as for most americans, that meant nothing to me.  at age 8, i replied to him, 'you mean you like people from portugal?'  we just looked at each other for a few minutes, aware that we were not really communicating.  but can you imagine that i remember this moment?  i think partly because i'd never seen my dad so agitated.  we had been in a roomful of men who were shouting and laughing and carrying on, and my dad suddenly took me outside and said, 'karen, there's something i really want you to understand about me.  i know you're a little young, but i want you to know that my people are the ones they call the portugese.'

okay, fast forward 50 years, and i'm reading on-line at jewishgenweb that the Danish Jews were called 'the Portugese.' 

Various other memories surface: 'our family wore yellow stars even though we didn't 'have' to' during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.  My father pointing to a picture of the Rothschilds' mansion in Denmark, saying 'they are one of our best families in Denmark.'  My mother insisted on naming me Katherine, and when my Dad pronounced it 'katrin' she changed it to Karen, assuming that it is a Danish name so it would be more suitable, etc.  He told me 'Karen is not one of our names.  Anna and Lilian, names like that are ours.'  There was all of this 'ours' and 'theirs' - not in any kind of passionate way, just quietly, matter-of-fact. 

His account of 'going to (the Lutheran) church' was that 'we' only went for things like 'the naming ceremony about a week after the baby is born,' weddings, funerals and at around age 14, 'when the boy becomes a man, we have a ceremony and the boy is given the scripture.'  He told me, 'they call it confirmation, but really it's just coming of age.'  'The scripture' was the Psalms only.  After that ceremony, my father went to sea, and began the career that would last for the rest of his life. 

Well, well.  Some of my American Jewish friends are very excited about this story, others tell me that he wasn't in any way, shape or form a Jew.  He had chosen to be 'nothing' because he wasn't really a Christian either.  But he always made it clear to me that he wasn't 'against' the Christian faith.  And, when you think about it, after all, Jesus was a Jew, so perhaps that helped at least a little when Jewish family took up a modified form of being Christian.  This kind of 'adopted' Christianity has been going on among the Sephardim since the 1300's at least. 

Apparently, from what I can glean, King Christian IV invited Sephardic Jews from Germany and the Netherlands to come to Denmark to help him modernize the country, especially in the shift to a money-based economy.  I guess it was probably fish-based before that (lol). Anyway, all of that was okay.  They also allowed a smaller number of Ashkenazi Jews to enter, especially in the area of Copenhagen.  The Sephardic population was found scattered throughout the rural districts, such as Ribe Amt where my father's families are from.  Well, in the early 1800's, social pressure was placed on these Sephardic families to convert to Lutheranism in the interest of a more uniform society (sounds like the wishes of Castilian Spain, but without the blood-purity cant.)  Most Danish Jews converted at that time.  The rest moved to either Copenhagen, or to Aalborg where there was a synogogue in Jutland. 

Well!  I have finally come across an article that talks about the high level of tolerance exhibited by the Sephardic Jews, their willingness to blend with their surrounding cultures through intermarriage, adoption of religious tenets, etc, in contra-distinction to Ashkenazi Jews who favored separation and a more highly defined identity. Not only that, but I recognize my dear father in these few pages.  He taught me always to respect the religions of others, because whatever I might think of the religion, it was very very important to the people who believed in it.  That was one of the most important, personal, private, highly-charged things my father ever said to me on one of our wonderful walks together.

Anyway, here's the link to the article on The Special Character of Sephardi Tolerance.

rilke/niels lyhne/danishness?

In "Letters to the Poet As A Young Man" Rilke recommends that his student read the nineteenth-century Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen in order to meet the master of contemplative literature.  So, of course, I had to check Jacobsen out.  Our local library had in its possession his novel Niels Lyhne (pronounced Nils Lu-na), so I checked it out.  And as promised, it is one of the most precious, ruminative pieces of self-absorbed fiction anyone, even Marcel Proust, could ever desire.  It is absolutely beautiful, as well.  So attentive, so in tune with the silence of the contemplative life.  I've only just begun it, thumbed through and read a few paragraphs here and there, so I can't say much more about it just now.

I'm not sure if this is really something ethnically Danish, or if it's more symptomatic of the nineteenth century, generally.  The nature-writing is superb.  Not grandiose, as much American nature writing is, but homey.  Not ecstatic waterfalls, but cottage gardens. 

Sometimes I wonder if my contemporaries among the Danes 'rebelled' against this melodic sweetness and love of nature.  It still shows up in some of their films, like "Italian for Beginners," "Mifune," and others - urbane Danes rediscovering their rustic roots.  Maybe that phase of rebellion against the past is over, over there, because after all, over here there is a kind of revival of Bertram-style nature writing, for example, Thirteen Moons.  The pendulum appears to have swung yet again.  Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier is lyrical, descriptive, attentive, contemplative - all my favorite things, by the way. 

Sometimes I feel like my husband and I have not made such a great adjustment to 'modern times.'  We seem to be holdovers from the nineteenth century, and now we're living in the twenty-first.  Not sure if this 'backwardness' is related to being part native american and delaware moor, two cultures self-identified with the past, yet embedded in the present-day just like everyone else.  Sometimes we think it's the spot we live in, here in Berkeley, on the grounds of former native american settlements.

I've heard it said that many Danes are surprised and perhaps a bit discomfited that American Danes seem to be stuck in an image of 'danishness' that belongs to the nineteenth century.  That's when they left Denmark to emigrate to America, and Denmark has become 'frozen' for them as it was at that moment in the past.  Every year there are various festivals of Danishness that celebrate the 'Denmark that was.'  This disparity in self-image creates a rift with contemporary Danish Danes.  These are some of the strange facts of ethnicity.

For an example of sentimental, nature-loving, nineteenth-century Danish Lieder, try picking out the tune of "Vandring i Skoven" (music notated in a previous post, Wandering in the Forest.)

wandering in the forest

Vandring i Skoven, by H.C. Andersen (lyrics) and Henrik Rung (music)

Ionian

1             4        4  à                     1

0             0       2                             0

0   2       4  4    4         4-5   4 4      2   0-1    2    2     1   1     0

Min       sÆde Brud, min unge Viv, Min Kjaerlighed, mit Liv!

I           denne lyse, tause Nat, Hos Dig, min Verdens Skat,

Du        er saa frisk som BÆgens Hang, Som Nattergalens Sang,

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0             0       2                        0 -

0   2       4  4    4       4-5   4 4      2    0-1    2    2     1 1   0

Kom, Maanen skinner stor og klar, en stilhed Natten har,

Jeg er saa glad, saa salig glad, Duft, friske BÆgeblad!

Saa dyb som Nattens stille Ro, Her hvor Skov maerker gro,

4 à                               x      2   x      2       x        1

2                3       2          x      0  x      0        x        0

0-2  4  4   4      4 7  5    4         5       3  3      3        4        2

En Delighed, en Ensomhed, Min sÆde Brud, kom med!

Syng, Nattergal, lys maaneklar!  Jeg her al Rigdom har:

Hvor maleriske BÆge staa, og vi ved Maans’kin gaa:

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0   3                     2   2   0          0

0   5   5   5   5     4   x    0   0-1    2    2     1      1     0

I BÆgeskoven gaa vi to, der hvor Skovmaerker gro.

Min sÆde Brud, min unge Viv, min Kjaerlighed, mit Liv!

Min SÆde Brud, min unge Viv, Min Kjaerlighed, mit Liv!

My sweetest bride, my wife so young, my love, my life, come hither where the moonlight’s bright in the stillness of the night.  Oh, loveliness, Oh loveliness, my sweetest bride, do come!  In the beech wood we’ll walk, we two where woodruffs many grow. 

In this most bright and silent night, with you my dearest treasure, I am so glad, so full of bliss, do smell the leaves so fresh, sing nightingale, shine clearest moon!  All riches I do have: my sweetest bride, my wife so young, my love, my life.

Like the leafy beech you are so fresh, like the song of the nightingale, as deep and quiet as the night, where all the woodruffs grow; where beeches picturesque abound, we two in moonlight walk!  My sweetest bride, my wife so young, my love, my life.

nature and culture

I was perusing the obits, which I rarely do, and came across one for professor Doug Adams of the Pacific School of Religion at GTU.  His interest was the blending of theology and the arts.  One of his former students wrote: "'I probably would have been still stuck in a darkroom someplace doing documentary photography were it not for Doug Adams (who) taught (me) that a passion for the arts did not exclude (me) from a religious life.'  For his master's degree thesis, (the student) took a series of landscape photographs to examine the question that if the earth is God's body, how do different cultures treat God?  One of the pictures was of a strip mine."

We know which culture that was.

I've been reading about the Moorish culture, which was very much dedicated to horticulture: gardens and orchards, fountains and canals, and which brought agriculture to Spain in the eighth century C.E. So it would seem that older forms of Islamic culture had a loving, relational attitude towards nature, would 'cultivate' and 'care for' and 'husband' nature.

Orchards are important to many peoples.  It is said that abandoned Susquehanna Indian camps could always be identified by the old wild apple orchards in their vicinities in Pennsylvania, by the early explorers and settlers.  Also, my Danish relatives prized their gardens with fruit trees, where they would eat all their meals during the summer months.

I've visited India, where it would seem that the older versions of Hinduism still worship nature.  Rivers and trees, and sometimes even stones are seen as sacred at the least, and as embodiments of God at most.  Cows, too, are viewed as sacred, as are a wide variety of plants, including Bilwa and Tulsi.  They are adorned by flower garlands, daubed with sandal paste, and honored.

My whimsy tells me that the older forms of European Christianity 'sanctified' nature - as if she needed it - by dedicating the old sacred wells and fountains to various Christian saints. Kind of sweet, including nature in its otherworldly vision of salvation.   Fact tells us, however, that it also cut down the old sacred trees, which must have been very large and ancient.  Of course, by now they would have probably died of natural causes anyway, but it does seem sad to think of them being cut down because of raw ideology.

I think this photographer had a very good idea.  To judge a culture's view of God, by observing how it interacts with Nature.  Food for thought. 

the stork has landed

This just in from Denmark:

"The early arrival of the stork [from North Africa] carries with it the hope that chicks born on Danish soil could survive long enough to take wing for the first time in seven years.

"The first stork of the year has been spotted in Rudbøl in the marshes of western Jutland, the Danish Ornithological Society reports."

more dna ancestry: denmark and morocco

  I realize now that when I was a child my world-traveling, sea-faring Danish father thought I ought to know the truth about my ancestry, and he made various attempts to give me hints, kind of outside my mother's radar.  It was her decision not to tell me, and it was her ancestry that was 'the secret.'  He didn't want to go against her wishes, but I just know he thought it wasn't such a big deal, and he tried to give me some taste of what it was.

It's only through looking back that I can see it.  The way we used to sit for long periods of time - what's a long period of time to a child?  fifteen minutes?  it seemed longer - just looking at his pack of Camel cigarettes, first looking at the camel for a long time - he persuaded me to call it a dromedary - and at the pyramids (he told me he'd seen them), then turning the pack over and looking at the mosques, with their crescents and minarets and palm trees on the back.  Sometimes he'd ask me which side I liked better.  I loved the camel, but I often said I preferred the picture on the back.  Just basking in the sunshine of his gentle love and attention.  Enjoying ourselves together.

He also used to say he wanted to tell me a very special story about the stork.  He told me the stork was almost the national bird of Denmark, and every winter it would fly all the way to Africa and then in the Spring it would fly all the way back to Denmark, build its nest in unused farmhouse chimneys and bear its young.  I can still remember him saying to me, "It would fly aaaallllll they way to Africa, and then all the way back home to Denmark.  So you see, Africa and Denmark are connected."



(This is one heck of a stork's nest pictured here on an old ksar fortress in Morocco.)

baltic writer on writing

More from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, on writing:

"I begin each morning by practising yoga.  And after that - fasting on a lemon - I set about writing, which is only another form of yoga.  Writing is an excellent ritual for training the concentration, memory and observation.  It is an exercise of the capacity to dream and associate, and not least a training in truthfulness.  For I agree with Saul Bellow, that one knows immediately if a sentence has come from the right layer of one's consciousness.  If it has, it straight away begins to breed and flourish on the paper, in that it gives birth to and attracts to it a whole mass of other sentences.  If it is a lie, or you write from a shallow place in your consciousness, then sooner or later you go stale and can write no further.  Sometimes this morning ritual is a catharsis of tears and laughter.  In any case it is an extra dream dimension to everyday life, which allows a person the rare privilege of bathing twice in the same river.  Still I wouldn't attribute to 'writing' any greater importance than to baking bread, knitting a shawl, planting asparagus, or playing the piano."

I'd like to let this paragraph just stand here by itself, because it certainly warrants a singular attention, but I just have to mention what happened on Sunday evening, after I took that solitary contemplative walk through the neighborhood and then returned home.  When I turned back onto my street, I saw the emergency vehicle coming around the corner.  I'm sorry to say it was coming for my neighbor, G., who is only 54 years old.  Apparently he'd had a heart attack and they could not revive him.  I watched his wife cover her face with her hands, I watched them fruitlessly pounding on his chest when adrenaline and electric shock were not enough.  It was such an ordinary night.  A gentle, quiet Sunday evening.

It reminds me of the words of a Spanish-language poet, whose name I don't recall, who was read in translation at "Freight and Salvage," a local folk-music spot in Berkeley, on Saturday night.  I may be paraphrasing, but here is how I remember the lines:  "And those are the good men, the ones who love, and work, and who, on an ordinary day, lay themselves down under the ground."

from baltic shores

At the Berkeley Public Library Central collection, while searching for an Alan Furst novel for my husband, by chance I came across a book of short stories titled "From Baltic Shores" .  Now, as you may know, I've been exploring my baltic heritage, and this felt like a very serendipitous find.  I'm trying to find out something about my cultural roots from the british isles and the baltic region.  I can sprinkle my speech with Jewish idioms and Italian phrases, thanks to my upbringing, but I know nothing about what it means to be danish!  So, here are some excerpts from my explorations:

"In the summer, I have several guests in my garden.  Sometimes I have the feeling it's like Epicurus' garden, where one 'laughs and philosophizes.'  'Bene vixit bene latuit' - he who lives in obscurity lives well - said the same Epicurus.

"My garden is surrounded by a hawthorn hedge and high trees and runs down a slope covered in violets to where the fields of barley, rye or wheat begin.  Cows also graze there, and I think it gives a quite special sense of luxury when you go for a walk and twenty cows come running delightedly toward you.  I well understand the psalmist Kingo, who lived in the Løve district and wrote an ode to a cow.  That cannot be done too often.

"Apart from lilacs, wisteria, laburnam, jasmine, apple and plum trees, I have a big copper beech in my garden, to the right of the two rockeries.  There are usually two nests here.  Uppermost is a hawk's and below it a little wood-pigeon's nest.  You could say: Uppermost is the Pentagon or the Kremlim, a nest of stones, gravel and concrete, and below it, the dove of peace in its thin little nest of straw, grass and leaves.  No sooner has she hatched eggs than the hawk swoops out of the air and snatches them all.  All the same she stays there, year after year building her nest under that of the bird of prey.  So if the garden reminds you of life and death, you also come to think of futility.  A bird of prey and a dove in the same tree; it can never turn out well.  But it keeps on going."

This is from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, whose short story "I Live as I Write and I Write as I Live" is the first in the collection.  I enjoy the understated sense of humor, the country-wisdom, the appreciation of simplicity and of nature, the sense of relatedness to the Greeks, the love of obscurity and 'humility.'   She makes a point to let us know her garden is only 100 km from Copenhagen.  I feel exactly the same way she does about the dove of peace and the bird of prey.

hairdressing, or how the greeks saved western civilization

This story is a little vague  in details, and I apologize for that.  A friend of mine was telling me about an article she read by...was it Orianna Falacci?...about a friend of hers (Orianna's) who went home to...Iran?...during a particularly repressive period, for a family event.  While there, she had been unable to wash her hair for some reason - my friend couldn't remember exactly - at any rate, this person was apparently desperate to get something done with her hair, and sought out a former hairdresser she knew and begged him to act as a hairdresser again.  He did, and the man was subsequently imprisoned for doing so!  When I heard this story, retold already a few times distant from the original source, I thought to myself, 'no way, no one would be sent to prison for hairdressing!' 

Then I read this in the Mary Magdalene book, by Bruce Chilton, who speculates on whether Mary Magdalene might have been the woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears and dried them with her hair: "She (an unnamed woman) is simply called 'sinful,' without explanation.  Given the elegant gesture with her hair, it is more likely she pursued the profession of a hairdresser, which many rabbis saw as bordering on prostitution, since touching in private or semi-private was involved.  After all, although the (host) objects to her touching Jesus, she is not barred from his house, as a truly notorious sinner might have been." (p.58)

As I read this, it suddenly occurred to me that hairdressing might be a 'Greek' activity, and apparently Greek and Roman influences were both pervasive and resisted in ancient Israel at the time of Christ.  Perhaps this woman was a strictly Jewish hairdresser, but it is more likely that her clients were romans or romanized jews, I would think.  So I checked on-line and found this on the Encyclopedia Britannica site, under hairdressing, ancient Greece:

"History > Ancient Greece

Barber shops first came into vogue in the Greek period. Political, sports, and social news and gossip were exchanged by philosophers, writers, poets, and politicians while they were shaved, curled, manicured, pedicured, and massaged. Rituals of hairdressing are mentioned in the writings of Homer (Iliad), Aristophanes, and others. Some barbers were skilled artists and…"

horned owl

What a fearful bassoon!
As I child I heard it
from the ruins of Bugge's castle.
The words went thus:
'This truly spectral music
was made by the great hero himself
in the ancient hall, where he moans
over the castle's fall,
where his knightly blood
was fatefully poured out
by an assasin.'
When I became a soldier I said,
'That was the sound of that wild hunter.'
Every night he must repair
to his profligate ways, therefore
it was a happy time when
in peace and tranquility
I could believe in fairy tales and fables.
Was there anyone who could strike such terror,
Was there any other who could occupy my thoughts
and fill my young breast with such anxieties?
Himself both the Terror and Joy -
yes, your beak can do all this, you, Wild Hunter,
with the cry of your hunting horn!
But, away the ancient horror!
With the Magic of the young Day -
full again with my old fantasies!
And if, as a man, I've learned the whole story,
let me, nevertheless, as a poet
be like a child!

This is the fourth bird in Steen Steensen Blicher's 'Traekfulgere' / Birds of Passage, about the birds that transited through his native Jutland in the nineteenth century. He reflects, at the end of his life, on what these birds, and his associations with them as a poet, have meant to him. By the way, Niels Bugge was a famous hero in Danish lore.  My father was very proud to bear the name of Niels after him.

I find that Americans, and most Europeans, associate the owl with death, even though in Greek mythology, it is associated with wisdom.  Maybe it's because it is commonly held that the awareness of death brings wisdom, but it is easier to fear death than to accept its gift of wisdom.

Our spiritual teacher, Amma, will be arriving on our shores in just two short weeks, to bring solace and transformation to many.  When she holds temple programs in her native India there is a kind of eagle that circles above the temples and sometimes lands on its pinnacle while Amma is there.  It happens all over India, wherever she goes.  We also have a temple in San Ramon where Amma holds her programs, and there is a very large owl, it must be a barn owl, that flies out of the surrounding trees from somewhere and alights on the pinnacle of the temple at night.  I've seen this large owl, sitting up there, several times myself.  You might think it would be afraid of the crowds, or want to keep away.  It is not hanging around where the food is being served, which is about a quarter of a mile away.  No, it just likes to sit up there on the rooftop when Amma is in the hall.