Papa, the troubled

In 1952, Alfred Eisenstaedt visited Ernest Hemingway in Cuba to photograph him for the September issue of LIVE magazine. Sadly, the prominent photographer found a thoroughly disagreeable, troubled and paranoid writer, whom he could barely take any good photos of, in the very few occasions Hemingway even let him try.

A contact sheet of Eisenstaedt’s photographs of Hemingway in Cuba, August 1952

Years later, in an interview Eisenstaedt, who has photographed presidents, emperors, awkward scientists, egomaniac actors and Joseph Goebbels, noted that the author of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, and ‘The Sun Also Rises‘ was:

“the most difficult person I ever photographed.”

When great men fall, they don’t just descend, they go very, very far, indeed.

Eisenstaedt recalled Hemingway drinking from the moment he woke up until the time he went to bed, often going into violent rages over minor slights, and rarely saying a sentence without offending.

Hemingway chats with friends at a favorite cafe in Cuba

Words that emerged in Eisenstaedt’s  memories of the 52-year-old writer, shortly thereafter awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,  included “crazy,” “berserk,” “wild,” “insulting,” “drunk,” and “blue in the face.” Every attempt to photograph  him, the photographer described as a stressful and frightening misadventure.

“Crazy,” “berserk,” and “wild” is how Eisenstaedt described Hemingway

Despite the difficulties,  Eisenstaedt continued referring to Hemingway by his famous nickname “Papa,” as an obvious expression of his fondness to the writer.

“I found some old pine stick,” Eisenstaedt recounted of this scene, I said, ‘Papa, take this, it looks very rugged, very rustic, and come up the hill.'”

Eisenstaedt’s photographs are a reminiscence of the troubled Hemingway, but also of the haunting truth that the artists’ worst demons are often their biggest blessing in terms of talent. Seemed to realise and accepted this worrisome fact, in his speech for the Noble Prize in Literature in 1954, Hemingway said:

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

Cover of the LIVE magazine, September 1952 – one of the few successful Hemingway’s photographs Eisenstaedt managed to take

photo credit

Bosnia: individualism suspended

Aleksandar Hemon has contributed to the Writers Bloc Event, a pioneering project for writers to explore education and literacy around the world, with the essay ‘National Subjects’, which looks at the use of the education for ethnic identity training in Bosnia.

The Bosnian war crushed common life, a result still obvious now twenty years later. Today, the curriculum for the compulsory classes, a.k.a national subjects, in Bosnia varies depending on the children’s ethnicity. Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs are taught three different, mutually exclusive, histories of their same homeland. Hemon tells a story of seventeen classes of Bosnian children sharing nine classrooms when there is plenty of space in the Croatian side of the school, and further observes:

A system of education is a system of expectations. All you need to know about the ways in which a polity imagines and defines its members could be found in its education. The tragedy of education in Bosnia and Herzegovina is that the designs behind the education system—however fractured and anarchic—are easy to see, yet there is hardly a political force on the state level that could stop the brainwashing, let alone dismantle its structure.

Hemon’s essay reminded me of Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicles – a story about the Bosniaks and the Serbs told by a French and an Austrian consuls living in the Serbian town of Travnik in the early years of the 19th century.

When, on the threshold of a new war, the authorities turned a deaf ear to the French consul’s request for recalling, a Serbian peasant, he hardly even knew, helped him and explained his reason to do it thus:

Veziries come and go… and each of them takes something with him, that’s true. They go away and forget what they have done and how they have treated us; and then a new one arrives and it’s the same thing all over again. But we remain, we remember, we keep a tally of all we have been through, of how we have defended and preserved ourselves, and we pass on these dearly bought experiences from father to son. And so our cashboxes have two bottoms. One is just deep enough for the Vezier and scoop clean, but underneath a little something always remains for us and our children, for the salvation of our soul, for helping ourselves and our friends, when they are in need. […]

..our masters are fine and mighty gentlemen, they’re like dragons, our masters are, but they have to have their wars and fights and expenses. You know we have a saying: Big lords are like big winds; they blow, they break things, they blow themselves out. And we lie low and keep on working and put something away for a rainy day. That’s how we last longer and always have something.

If caused by ‘lords’, either veziries or politicians, segregation could be overcome, as ‘big lords are like big winds’, they ‘come and go,’ but this to happen Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs have to reach out to ‘the cashboxes,’ left by their ancestors, and mull over the damages caused by the Bosbnian war. If unwilling to do so, they risk becoming a nation of ethnic groups not citizens, and a society for which the origin is superior to the individual itself.

Photo ‘Bosnian schoolchildren’ by Velibor Bozovic

A full list of the essays in the Writers Bloc series:
Aleksandar Hemon on Bosnia
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Nigeria
Rachel Holmes on Palestine
Kamila Shamsie on Pakistan
Zukiswa Wanner on South Africa
Tahmima Anam on Bangladesh
Nick Laird on Nepal
Nathalie Handal on Haiti
Hardeep Singh Kohli on India
Petina Gappah on Zimbabwe

P.S. This blogpost was originally posted here.

The father’s advice

In 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and think about.

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

(source: Lists of Note; published in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters)

*

Parents are blessed with their children just as children are with their parents.

P.S. This blogpost was originally posted here.

‘No one is bigger than bread’

I’ve just finished ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’, a hilarious, witty and moving novel with something for everyone – the eastern Europeans could recognize themselves in the characters, while the Westerners – get a grasp of the expression ‘the deep Slavic soul’.

‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’ is, however, not tragic in the way most books on Eastern Europe tend to be. The bitterly painful reflections on Stalinism, communism, dissident camps and broken dreams are tangled in a comic feast, full of eccentric rather than depressed types.

Writer Marina Lewycka, Ukrainian descent, was born in a refugee camp in Germany, at the end of World War II, and raised in England. Apparently both, her ‘parallel’ lives between Eastern and Western Europe and my eastern European background helped for the strong impact which the book had on me.

Some parts of it I reread. Some parts reminded me of my childhood, others – of stories my grandparents have told me from the time they’d been young. Some parts saddened me, others – made me burst into laughter. Overall, it was painfully close and nostalgic at the same time.

Most touching were a few paragraphs on how eastern Europeans value food and food storage. They brought memories of a manufacture, taking place in our house every summer, as well as in every house in our neighborhood, and in every neighborhood in the country, and probably in the neighboring countries too.

*Because the eastern Europeans feel strongly about their food and its preservation.*

Westerners regard food as a means for physical sustenance and as something that helps them stay healthy and enjoy life. Preserving is hardly known, and making and baking are mostly associated with the Saturday and Sunday markets for home-grown and home-made food. Food in Eastern Europe is, however, another story. A lot different! Accumulating and storing (almost in commercial quantities) are needed for the family’s physical survival. A matter of life and death!

Let me give you an example with this emblematic household appliance ‘the freezer’.  Western Europeans buy their freezers based on functionality and practicality reasons, eastern Europeans – on volume capacity. Bigger freezer = less for storing in jars, paper, plastic bags, crates, etc. (the imagination should play here). Also, the amount of food stored never seems to be enough. As a popular saying in Eastern Europe goes:  ‘food will only be enough, if it remains’, meaning that the preservation should exceed the needs.

Buying second-hand jars, which to stuff with more winter suppliers, is always an option. Also, be aware that producing  jar lids is probably one of the most stable businesses in Eastern Europe. (The economic slowdown and the recession help it too).

An excerpt:

My mother had a pantry under the stairs stocked from floor to ceiling with tins of fish, meat, tomatoes, fruit, vegetables and puddings, packets of sugar (granulated, caster, icing and Demerara), flour (plain, self-raising and wholemeal), rice (pudding and long-grain), pasta (macaroni, twirls and vermicelli), lentils, buckwheat, split peas, oatmeal, bottles of oil (vegetable, sunflower and olive), pickles (tomato, cucumber, beetroot), boxes of cereals (mainly Shredded Wheat), packets of biscuits (mainly chocolate digestives) and slabs of chocolate. On the floor, in bottles and demi-johns, were gallons of a thick, mauve liquor made from plums, brown sugar and cloves, a glass of which was guaranteed to render even the most hardened alcoholic (and there were plenty of those in the Ukrainian community) comatose for up to three hours.

Upstairs under the beds in sliding boxes were kept preserves (mainly plum) and jars of home-made jam (plum, strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant and quince in all combinations). In the potting-sheds and garage, cardboard fruit-boxes were stacked with the latest crop of apples, Bramleys, Beauty of Bath and Grieves, all separately wrapped in newspaper, exuding their fruity perfume. By next spring, their skins would be waxy, and the fruit inside shrivelled, but they were still good for Apfelstrudel and Blini. (The windfalls and damaged fruit had been picked out, cut up, and stewed as they fell.) Nets of carrots and potatoes, still preserved in their coat of clayey soil, bundles of onions and garlic, hung in the cool dark of the outhouse.

When my parents bought a freezer, in 1979, the peas, beans, asparagus and soft fruits soon piled up in plastic ice-cream tubs, each one labelled, dated and rotated. Even dill and parsley were rolled in little plastic bundles and stored away for use, so that there was no longer any season of the year when there was scarcity.

When I teased her about these supplies, enough to feed an army, she would wag her finger at me and say, “It’s in case your Tony Benn ever comes to power.”

My mother had known ideology, and she had known hunger. When she was twenty-one, Stalin had discovered he could use famine as a political weapon against the Ukrainian kulaks. She knew-and this knowledge never left her throughout her fifty years of life in England, and then seeped from her into the hearts of her children-she knew for certain that behind the piled-high shelves and abundantly stocked counters of Tesco and the Co-op, hunger still prowls with his skeletal frame and gaping eyes, waiting to grab you the moment you are off your guard. Waiting to grab you and shove you on a train, or on to a cart, or into that crowd of running fleeing people, and send you off on another journey where the destination is always death.

The only way to outwit hunger is to save and accumulate, so that there is always something tucked away, a little something to buy him off with. 

There is a popular belief in Eastern Europe that throwing bread (even being moldy) is a sin. According to a proverb: ‘No one is bigger than bread’. Meanwhile the Westerners say: ‘The bread of life’, meaning that what is needed for a full life is spiritual food.

**

Although I tend not to blame the past for all  strange eastern Europeans’ affinities,  when it comes to food, I’m willing to do so. Or at least partly.

Not enough time has passed yet for Eastern Europeans to forget hunger, food stores with only basic products on the shelves, the empty shops in the 90s and the two-mile queues for bread in the mornings.

As much as ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’ is concerned, it is not a clash between Eastern and Western Europe. I understood it as a comical, but truthful picture of the eastern Europeans and their mentality. A mentality, which is sometimes a result of circumstances, not choices.

**

P.S. This blogpost was originally posted here.