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Earlier this summer I gave a wide-ranging interview with the Czech literary magazine HOST on my books on the history of Prague. Here is the published Czech text. The original English version from which the Czech text was edited follows (below).

Derek Sayer

H > Články > Praha, hlavní město 20. století

Aktuální číslo

07/26

PRAHA, HLAVNÍ MĚSTO 20. STOLETÍ

V létě v Praze proběhl velký kongres zahraničních bohemistů. K rozhovorům, které jsme přinesli v předstihu, přidáváme nyní ten závěrečný, a sice s britsko-kanadským sociologem Derekem Sayerem, známým svými interdisciplinárními přesahy a trilogií o české kultuře.

V posledních několika desetiletích jste se věnoval české kulturní historii, dokončil jste svou pražskou trilogii a nabídl nový pohled na modernitu. Existuje v Praze nějaká budova, dílo nebo památka, která pro vás tuto modernitu vystihuje?

Nenapadá mě sice konkrétní místo, které by představovalo modernitu v koncentrované podobě, ale Veletržní palác se tomu velmi blíží. Byl obdivován La Corbusierem a svého času platil za jeden z nejrozsáhlejších funkcionalistických objektů v Evropě. Nejen Teigem byl právem oslavován jako ikona progresivního modernismu. Jenže stavba zároveň vznikla jako ústřední bod „veletržního“ města, jinými slovy, byla navržena, aby prezentovala český průmysl. Otevření paláce neprovázela avantgardní výstava, ale uvedení vysoce nacionalistické Slovanské epopeje Alfonse Muchy, cyklu, který většina moderních umělců a kritiků té doby považovala za zpátečnický a reakcionářský.

Působil jste na univerzitách v Anglii i Kanadě a sám sebe popisujete jako Angličana místem narození a Kanaďana volbou, můžete k tomu říct víc?

Narodil jsem se v Londýně a v Británii jsem žil do svých pětatřiceti. V roce 1986 jsem se přestěhoval do Kanady, abych nastoupil na Univerzitu v Albertě, kde jsem dvacet let učil a zastával jednu z prvních Canada Research Chairs (prestižní výzkumný titul v rámci národního programu). Do Británie jsem se z rodinných důvodů vrátil v roce 2006, ale po odchodu z Lancaster University v roce 2016 jsem do Kanady odjel na důchod. Mám dvojí občanství.

Národnost není něco, co si vyberete, vybral jsem si tedy emigraci. Část mě zůstane Britem, ale poté, co jsem polovinu dospělého života prožil v Kanadě, je jiná část mě zase Kanaďanem. Stýská se mi po rozlehlých pláních, širé prérijní obloze a jasném slunečním svitu při dvaceti stupních pod nulou. Nebo po úžasně různorodé kuchyni, kterou si užívám v Calgary — mimochodem ve městě, kde se třetina obyvatel narodila v zahraničí a přes čtyřicet procent patří k etnickým menšinám. Toto by bezpochyby pobouřilo mnoho Čechů, tedy alespoň ty, kteří volili Zemana a Babiše a jsou k přistěhovalcům nepřátelští. Já se ale cítím nejvíc doma právě v místě plném mně podobných vykořeněných kosmopolitů.

Jak do toho zapadá Česko?

To je vlastně náhoda. Nemám formální vzdělání ve slavistice nebo bohemistice, bakalářský i doktorský titul jsem získal v sociologii. Má první žena, Alena, byla Češka, možná bych měl říct Moravanka, pocházela z Ostravy. Seznámili jsme se jako bakalářští studenti na Essex University v roce 1970. Československo opustila ke konci roku 1967, tedy ještě před pražským jarem, aby strávila rok v zahraničí jako au pair před tím, než začne studovat anglistiku na Univerzitě Karlově. Získat výjezdní víza tehdy ještě nebylo snadné, ale její otec měl i jako nekomunista dobré kontakty na ministerstvu zahraničí, navázal je při svém pobytu v Sachsenhausenu během války. Byl jedním z dvanácti set českých studentů zatčených 17. listopadu 1939 při „dni studenstva“. Týden před tím, než se Alena měla vracet domů, ale začala okupace a ona zůstala v Británii. Vrátila se až po revoluci.

To znamenalo, že ještě než jsem poprvé vkročil na českou půdu, udržoval jsem s Českem téměř dvacet let v moha ohledech intimní, jakkoli zprostředkované pouto. Podivná situace, když se nad tím zamyslíte, ale v rodinách emigrantů a uprchlíků po celém světě naprosto běžná.

Kdy jste se poprvé do Česka či Československa podíval?

Na jaře roku 1990, v období mezi revolucí a volbami. Většinu času jsme trávili s rodinou v Ostravě, ale povedlo se nám na pár dní zavítat do Prahy. Právě tehdy, na Smetanově nábřeží, mě napadlo využít zkušeností z novodobé historie pro konceptualizaci Prahy jako vyhlídky na modernitu a vytvořit tak alternativu k místům tradičně západním, jako je Paříž, Londýn, New York. V Praze jsem následně žil od prosince 1991 do léta 1993 a snažil jsem se co nejlépe naučit česky, zatímco jsem pracoval na prvním díle mé pražské trilogie, The Coasts of Bohemia.

Zmínil jste, že myšlenka uchopit Prahu jako nový úhel pohledu na modernitu vás napadla na Smetanově nábřeží. Byla to náhoda, nebo inspirace tím místem?

Když jsem se na jaře roku 1990 procházel po Smetanově nábřeží v Praze, napadlo mě, že by mohlo být plodné přistoupit k evropské historii vyprávěné ze západního pohledu kopernikánsky. Místo, kde mě to napadlo, nebylo bez významu: v průběhu 20. století bylo nábřeží postupně pojmenováno po císaři Františkovi I., prvním prezidentovi Československa Tomášovi Masarykovi, nacistickém říšském protektorovi Reinhardu Heydrichovi. A protože komunisté považovali vzpomínku na Masaryka za nepřijatelnou, nakonec i po českém „národním skladateli“ devatenáctého století, Bedřichu Smetanovi.

Tehdy jsem samozřejmě neznal tolik souvislostí. Muselo tedy jít víc o tušení než o cokoli jiného. Spíš než na jednom konkrétním nábřeží bylo pravděpodobně založené na té neskutečné architektonické koláži, kterou Praha nabízí — je v ní všechno od středověku a baroka až po nejrůznější podoby moderny, často promíchané.

Jedno místo na Smetanově nábřeží je pro mě však obzvlášť dojemné, socha Františka I. Když jsem ji poprvé viděl a také po celou dobu, co jsem v Praze žil, byl podstavec prázdný, protože socha byla po vyhlášení nezávislosti v roce 1919 přesunuta do lapidária Národního muzea. Vzhledem k honosnému rámování památníku působilo toto prázdné místo až surrealisticky. František byl na svoje právoplatné místo nakonec v tichosti vrácen v roce 2003.

Otisklo se vaše někdejší pozorování přímo i do knihy The Coasts of Bohemia, na které jste další rok začal pracovat?

Ano, celá ta procházka po Smetanově nábřeží. A pak ta socha: pro mě ztělesňuje ústřední téma mé práce o Praze, dialektiku paměti a zapomínání a její projevy ve veřejném prostoru — názvy ulic, sochy, památníky, pamětní desky, nástěnné malby a fresky, fasádu i vnitřní výzdobu budov. Z různých důvodů mi připadá dojemné také Smetanovo muzeum spojené se Zdeňkem Nejedlým, který se zasadil o jeho založení v roce 1926. Souvislosti mezi diskurzy národního obrození a KSČ po roce 1945 jsou důležitými tématy mých knih, ačkoli se jedná o něco, co Češi obecně neslyší rádi.

Vzpomínáte si na nějaký konkrétní okamžik také z pobytu v Ostravě, když jste poprvé přijel do Československa?

Z mé první cesty mi v paměti nejvíc utkvěla událost v tehdejším Divadle Zdeňka Nejedlého, kterou jsem později popsal ve své knize [Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, 2004]:

Nabucco, Verdiho první velký hit, má premiéru v La Scale 9. března 1842. Třetí dějství. Poprvé zaznívá velký vlastenecký sbor „Va, pensiero“. Publikum vybuchne a požaduje přídavek za přídavkem. Po skončení představení propuknou nepokoje. Rakouské úřady od té chvíle zakazují operním domům hrát přídavky.

Před svou smrtí zanechává Giuseppe Verdi přísné pokyny vyžadující, aby na jeho pohřbu nehrála žádná hudba. Staré novinové fotografie ukazují Piazza del Duomo až po okraj zaplněné lidmi, čtvrt milionu, půl milionu, milion lidí, kdo ví? Když se smuteční průvod pomalu prodírá obrovským davem, někdo začne zpívat, přidá se další a další, slova napsaná před šedesáti lety na jiném místě pro jinou dobu, slova, která přesto všichni znají nazpaměť:

Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,

va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

ove olezzano tepide e molli

l’aure dolci del suolo natal!

Překlopí se století.

Staré severomoravské město založené na uhlí a oceli, počátek roku 1990, to nejisté období mezi sametovou revolucí a prvními svobodnými volbami po dvaačtyřiceti letech. Jednoho volného večera jsem se rozhodl zajít do místního operního domu, kde zrovna hráli Nabucca. Před začátkem představení vystoupí zpoza opony na jeviště nějaký muž. Očekávám, že se dozvím, že jeden z hlavních představitelů je indisponován. Namísto toho však jménem svých kolegů umělců vášnivě vyzývá publikum, aby hlasovalo pro Občanské fórum. Napětí je hmatatelné, svírá hrdlo a štípe jako kyselý déšť, který visí ve vzduchu nad Ostravou.

„Va, pensiero“ zazní do absolutního ticha — jev, který jsem nezažil při žádném operním vystoupení jinde na světě. Žádné pokašlávání, popotahování nebo šuškání. Nevzpomínám si ani, že bych kdy předtím nebo potom slyšel žádat diváky o přídavek sboru. Až když dozní ozvěna posledního tónu, ani o vteřinu dřív, divadlo vybuchne. Lidé vyskočí na nohy a volají po přídavku. Té noci zaznělo „Va, pensiero ještě třikrát“, než mohla opera pokračovat. Později jsem se doslechl, že k témuž došlo v Národním divadle v Praze po sovětské invazi v roce 1968, což vedlo k zákazu Nabucca na českých jevištích na následujících dvacet let.

Vaše knihy se soustředí na individuální příběhy. Zaujalo mě, že téměř čtvrtina té poslední, Pohlednice z Absurdistánu, je vyprávěna skrz život Mileny Jesenské. Té je sice věnována stále větší pozornost, ale zároveň se málokomu podařilo přenést její dílo do širších souvislostí. Čím myslíte, že to je?

Milena Jesenská byla nepochybně významnou osobností své doby, což se po její smrti z různých důvodů opomíjelo. Odborná edice její žurnalistické práce vyšla až v roce 2016. Kvůli svým politickým názorům zůstávala po většinu komunistického období persona non grata — z KSČ vystoupila po moskevských procesech a ve svých článcích otevřeně odsoudila stalinismus. Jako žena Jaromíra Krejcara byla prominentní osobností meziválečné avantgardy, k níž byla KSČ nepřátelská od roku 1948 do počátku 60. let (jak popisuji v Pohlednicích) a znovu potom od roku 1969 do konce 80. let. Navíc byla spřátelená s Židy (za což jí Yad Vashem udělil vzácné ocenění „Spravedlivá mezi národy“), přičemž poválečná KSČ příliš neskrývala antisemitismus.

Na Západě, a zvláště pak v anglofonním světě, se její odkaz potýká s jiným problémem. Jesenská je známá především — dle mého názoru nepřesně — jako „múza“ Franze Kafky. Zčásti je to tím, že první text, který o ní na Západě vyšel, byla kniha Milena, Kafkas Freundin od Margarete Buber Neumann. Většina západní literatury o Kafkovi nepracuje s českými zdroji, Milena proto bývá nahlížena výhradně německou optikou, která ji obvykle exotizuje. Hlavní anglicky psanou výjimkou je Kafka, Love and Courage od Mary Hockaday. Kniha z roku 1997 se navzdory svému názvu zaměřuje na Milenin život jako celek, nikoli pouze na její vztah k Frankovi, jak Milena Kafkovi říkala. Pokud vím, jediným anglickým překladem Jesenské článků je kniha Kathleen Hayese The Journalism of Milena Jesenská, vydaná v roce 2003.

Může mít na její omezené zobrazování vliv také gender? Byla historie psána příliš „mužsky“?

Udělejme si myšlenkový experiment. Řekněme, že by Milena byla talentovaným novinářem, třeba jako Egon Erwin Kisch. Představme si, že by takový muž vedl vášnivou milostnou korespondenci s mezinárodně proslulou modernistickou spisovatelkou a poté psal nejen informativní články o avantgardě, architektonické a módní scéně, ale i ty nejpronikavější novinářské texty své doby o aktuální politice — od Stalinových gulagů přes anšlus po nacistickou okupaci Čech a Moravy. A navíc by se během okupace stal členem odboje, pomáhal Židům uprchnout ze země, byl zatčen a nakonec zemřel v koncentračním táboře. — Byla by jako takový muž známější? Ta otázka si odpovídá sama. Ve skutečnosti je těžké najít mužský protějšek.

Čím život a dílo Mileny Jesenské zaujaly vás?

Hlavním důvodem mého zájmu o Milenu Jesenskou je právě pozoruhodný život, jaký vedla. Je to ale také dáno mou metodikou. Rozhodl jsem se psát historii jako mozaiku poskládanou z fragmentů, čerpal jsem z životů jednotlivců spíše než z velkolepých abstrakcí. Pozornost, kterou jsem věnoval Jesenské, mi otevřela dveře do mnoha různých, vzájemně se prolínajících světů, které dohromady tvoří ústřední téma nejen zmíněné knihy, ale celé mé trilogie. Patří sem žurnalistika, avantgarda, modernistická architektura, komunismus, válka, uprchlíci, okupace, holokaust, tábory. Milena Jesenská mě také přivedla k dalším lidem, jejichž životy se staly leitmotivy knihy, zejména ke Kafkovi, Adolfu Hoffmeisterovi nebo k druhému manželovi Jesenské, architektu Jaromíru Krejcarovi, a pozoruhodné i tragické postavě její dcery Jany, zvané Honza Krejcarová/Černá, kterou Bohumil Hrabal nazval „perlou na dně propasti“. Skrz Janu jsem se potom seznámil s Vladimírem Boudníkem, Egonem Bondym, Mikulášem Medkem a dalšími „pražskými beatníky“, kteří se v 50. letech scházeli s Hrabalem v Libni. Bondy mě později spojil s Ivanem Martinem Jirousem, skupinou Plastic People of the Universe a pražským undergroundem po roce 1968 a tak dále. Pohlednice jsou plné takových souvislostí.

Jednou z výhod pokusu psát historii z „hadrů a odpadu“, jimiž pohrdá většina konvenčních akademických narativů, je to, že se člověk může s čistým svědomím dívat jinam, než kam ukazuje převážně maskulinní mainstream. V mém případě se zdroje rozpínají od Domácí kuchařky Magdalény Dobromily Rettigové až po erotiku Toyen. Jde o různé přístupy k tomu, co Walter Benjamin nazýval snovými světy dané doby.

Takže přece jen máme především „mužské“ dějiny?

Myslím, že ano. Jedním z důvodů „maskulinismu“ tolika historiků je dle mého názoru nejen jejich (záměrný či nevědomý) sexismus, ale také zaujatost zdrojů, ze kterých čerpají. Po většinu období, kterým se zabývá moje trilogie, tj. přibližně od 80. let 18. století do 90. let 20. století, byli muži nejmocnějšími osobnostmi ve většině oblastí života, včetně politiky a umění, jejichž vztah byl jedním z mých hlavních zájmů. A o jejich činech potom psali většinou opět muži.

Zejména v Pohlednicích jsem vynaložil záměrné úsilí nepsat dějiny „mužsky“. Kromě Jesenské a její dcery figurují v knize další ženy, od jejichž životů se příběh odvíjí: spisovatelky Lenka Reinerová, Marie Majerová a Zdena Salivarová, tanečnice Mira Holzbachová, političky Marie Švermová a Milada Horáková, herečky Lída Baarová, Marie Burešová a Vlasta Chramostová, gymnastka Věra Čáslavská, režisérka Věra Chytilová a zpěvačka a disidentka Marta Kubišová — abychom jmenovali jen některé. Nemluvě o hrdinkách odboje z operace Anthropoid Marii Moravcové, Marii Kovárníkové, Ludmile Soukupové a Anně Malinové. Nebo Ince Bernáškové, dceři umělce Vojtěcha Preissiga, která po zatčení svého otce a zbytku skupiny po dobu deseti měsíců sama vydávala čísla odbojového časopisu „V boj!“. První česká žena popravená nacisty 26. srpna 1942.

Pokud jde o začlenění příběhů těchto žen do dějin, mluvíte o vědomé snaze čelit předsudkům. Musel jste se při zpracovávání české historie vyrovnat i s jinými — ať už osobními, nebo obecnými, řekněme západními — předsudky?

Předsudky nejsou to správné slovo, evokují spíše osobní rozměr než společensky zakořeněné perspektivy. Mluvil bych raději o konceptuálních geografiích, myšlenkových rámcích, uvnitř kterých jsme podmíněni vnímat svět pod určitým úhlem a do kterých zasazujeme psaní dějin.

Svou první knihu o Česku, Coasts of Bohemia, jsem zahájil úvodem s názvem „Orientace“. Chtěl jsem zde naznačit, že navzdory geografické poloze Prahy v centru evropského kontinentu a jejímu historickému umístění na rozhraní konfliktů, které formovaly moderní evropskou historii, Praha zaujímá v anglicky psaných historických narativech okrajovou pozici a zůstává neviditelná — jedině snad s výjimkou jednotlivých let 1620, 1938—1939 nebo 1968, kdy byly události v Praze uznány jako určující pro širší západní příběh.

Čím to bylo?

V té době bylo Česko ve Velké Británii pomyslně odsunuto do ghetta tzv. „regionálních studií“, kde působila jen hrstka obskurních odborníků a existovala pouze jedna vedoucí akademická pozice zaměřená na česká studia. Tu zastával Robert Pynsent, který mimo jiné považoval Karla Čapka za „spisovatele maloměšťáckých buržoustů“ a napsal do London Times protest proti udělení Nobelovy ceny Jaroslavu Seifertovi, protože byl „průměrným básníkem“. Tehdy i dnes je v anglicky mluvícím světě bohemistika či samostatná čeština vyučována pouze hrstkou univerzit. Zůstává vysoce specializovaným, menšinovým oborem, a to dává těm, kteří v oblasti pracují, neobvyklou autoritu jako jakýmsi strážcům brány.

Z historického i koncepčního hlediska byl obor formován dědictvím studené války. Výmluvná je i skutečnost, že hlavní mezinárodní odbornou asociací, k níž patří anglicky mluvící čeští vědci — kromě sdružení, která se zaměřují konkrétně na Česko a často i Slovensko — je Asociace pro slovanská, východoevropská a euroasijská studia (ASEEES). Ta byla založena v roce 1948 jako „přední mezinárodní organizace věnující se rozvoji poznání o Střední Asii, Kavkazu, Rusku a východní Evropě v regionálních a globálních souvislostech“. ASEEES udělila v roce 2013 mé knize Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století čestné uznání, za což jsem náležitě vděčný. Ale stále si kladu otázku, zda je to vhodný referenční rámec pro studium země, jejíž historie byla po tisíciletí historií zemí Svaté říše římské a která, navzdory panslavismu 19. století a meziválečným komunistickým sympatizantům, měla před rokem 1945 jen malý kulturní kontakt s Ruskem.

Máte doktorát v oboru sociologie, ovlivňuje to váš postoj k takovým společensky zakořeněným názorům?

V rámci studia jsem se zaměřoval zejména na historickou sociologii a Praha pro mě začala mít intelektuální význam především v souvislosti s ústředními tématy klasických sociologických teoretiků, jako byli Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim a Georg Simmel, ale i pozdějších autorů, jako Walter Benjamin. Témata, která bych mohl shrnout otázkou: Co je moderního na modernitě?

Domníval jsem se, že Praha nabízí k prozkoumání této otázky lepší výchozí bod než jakékoli západní město, a to díky šíři a rozmanitosti svých historických zkušeností v moderní éře. Například Londýn či New York nezažily ani fašismus, jak tomu bylo v Praze během šesti let německé okupace, ani komunismus. Paříž sice byla během druhé světové války také okupována nacisty, nikdy však nezažila komunistickou vládu. Berlín, který se mi jeví jako nejbližší Praze coby domnělému „hlavnímu městu dvacátého století“, zažil komunismus i fašismus, stejně jako liberální demokracii. Nenabízí ale nic srovnatelného s českým národním obrozením v 19. století jako procesem boje proti imperialismu. Berlín také nezažil etnické konflikty, které hrály tak významnou roli v životě Prahy od poloviny 19. století až do odsunů v poválečných letech 1945—1946, ani celou škálu forem komunistické vlády. Pražská kulturní a umělecká tvorba byla touto jedinečnou škálou moderních zkušeností formována a vyjadřuje je.

Jak vám tedy tato zkušenost pomáhá osvětlit modernu jako takovou?

Uvedu příklad. Václav Havel napsal Moc bezmocných jako úvahu o normalizaci. Má však také univerzální platnost, a to jako analýza toho, jak v moderním světě funguje moc díky aktivní spoluúčasti subjektů, jako je zmíněný pražský zelinář. Kanadský premiér Mark Carney ji citoval ve svém projevu v Davosu a pro mě je Havlova analýza stejně důležitá jako například myšlenky Michela Foucaulta. Hledáte dnes ve světě pražské zelináře? Podívejte se, jak se americké univerzity, včetně Kolumbijské a Harvardovy, poníženě přizpůsobují Trumpově administrativě.

Skutečnost, že jsem Prahu v tomto velmi specifickém smyslu označil za „hlavní město 20. století“, většinová akademická veřejnost přijala s pozitivním ohlasem, včetně mnohých odborníků v Česku — například renomovaná historička umění Lenka Bydžovská. Výjimkou bylo několik anglicky mluvících bohemistů, kteří můj názor zesměšňovali. Podle mého to poukazuje právě na limity jejich konceptuálních geografií.

V Pohlednicích se často opakuje výraz kafkárna, dal by se podle vás považovat za univerzální?

Ano, dokonce mám za to, že tento pojem by měl být považován za univerzální. Existuje snad přesnější popis modernity tak, jak jsem ji zachytil ve své pražské trilogii — zejména v Pohlednicích —, kde každý pokus o nastolení údajně racionálního řádu skončí jako kafkárna? Oproti tomu cynické chování Havlova pražského zelináře lze vnímat jako zcela racionální, byť nemorální a nedůstojný vzor toho, jak se jednotlivci mohou protloukat ve světě, který je kafkárnou. Je to svět, v němž se za život v pravdě platí vysoká cena a v němž bude takový postoj většina zcela logicky pokládat za šílenství.

V poslední době se na Substacku (česky v Britských listech) často věnujete globálním událostem. Které narativy považujete za nejproblematičtější?

Jak kanadský premiér Mark Carney zdůraznil ve svém projevu v Davosu, poválečný „řád založený na pravidlech“ umírá nebo již zemřel a je rychle nahrazován scénářem ve stylu Divokého západu. Podle tohoto scénáře několik velmocí bojuje o nadvládu — nebo si mezi sebou rozděluje svět —, aniž by je omezovalo mezinárodní právo či multilaterální instituce jako OSN. Poslední roky začínají stále více připomínat 30. léta 20. století: s nástupem neofašistických „populistických“ hnutí v celé Evropě, Velké Británii a Severní Americe, rostoucím autoritářstvím, omezováním občanských svobod a xenofobií i ze strany „centristických“ vlád a uchylováním se k ozbrojeným konfliktům (zejména, ale nejen na Blízkém východě) k řešení politických sporů.

V této souvislosti působí progresivní narativy o „konci dějin“ — v jakékoli variantě —, které jsem kritizoval v Pohlednicích, naivně. Můj důraz na složitost, nejednoznačnost, iracionalitu a „šedou zónu“, ve které se hranice mezi správným a špatným stírají, nabízí přesnější pohled na současnou politiku. Například zmíněný Carney: navzdory svému projevu v Davosu podpořil izraelsko-americký útok na Írán, ačkoli útok byl zjevným porušením mezinárodního práva a Charty OSN. Stejně tak učinili Ursula von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron a Merz, kteří dříve hlasitě odsoudili ta samá porušení mezinárodního práva, když na Ukrajinu vtrhl Vladimir Putin.

Jakou roli hraje Česko, nebo konkrétně Praha, ve vašem současném životě v Calgary? Na co se při plánované návštěvě nejvíc těšíte?

Neřekl bych, že Česko je součástí mého současného života v Calgary, až na to, že některá česká jídla patří k základům naší domácí kuchyně. Vařím fakt skvělý segedínský guláš.

V průběhu let jsem Česko navštěvoval často, ale už jsem tam nějakou dobu nebyl. Dálkové lety nejsou v mém věku zrovna snadné, a navíc jsou dost drahé při financování z důchodu.

Kdy jste Prahu navštívil naposledy?

V srpnu 2021, při první cestě mimo Kanadu po covidových omezeních. Bylo to poněkud tísnivé, tolik podniků zavřelo, obchody a restaurace měly stažené rolety, ulice byly prázdné. Ale v jistém smyslu mi to také připomnělo, jaká Praha bývala, když jsem tu žil a teprve se začala otevírat světu. „Zpátky do Evropy“ bylo tak trochu dvojsečné.

Kam se v Praze rád vracíte?

Kdysi jsem miloval Staré Město, ale dnes se cítím lépe v Holešovicích, Karlíně, Smíchově nebo Troji, kde jsem žil v letech 1991—1993. Nebo se vydávám ještě dál, třeba do Bohnic, kde mám přátele. Cestovní ruch sice přináší peníze, ale také velké problémy, stejně jako v Barceloně nebo Amsterdamu.

Těším se na obhlídnutí nových budov, jako je komplex od Zahy Hadid za Masarykovým nádražím nebo bytový dům Fragment v Karlíně „podpíraný“ Lilit od Davida Černého. Láká mě procházet knihkupectví a galerie, objevovat nové restaurace a vrátit se do těch starých osvědčených, znovu si pochutnat na chlebíčcích ve Zlatém kříži, vařeném hovězím krku s křenovou omáčkou v Lokálu a smaženém vepřovém řízku s bramborovým salátem v Café Savoy. A to vše zapít dobrým českým pivem.

17/09/2026

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rozhovor

Kristýna Pavlík Vaněčková

Derek Sayer (nar. 1950) je britskokanadský sociolog známý svým interdisciplinárním přesahem, emeritní profesor Univerzity v Albertě. Mimo Kanadu se proslavil zejména jako autor úspěšné trilogie o české kulturní historii, ve které upozorňuje na mozaikovitost příběhů a narušuje tak zavedené historické narativy — The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998), Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013), Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022). Za své knihy obdržel řadu cen, mimo jiné je jako jediný autor díla v cizím jazyce laureátem Ceny F. X. Šaldy (2014).

source: https://www.h7o.cz/clanky/14608-praha-hlavni-mesto-20-stoleti

English version 

You’ve spent the last few decades writing your Prague trilogy and focusing on offering a different view on “modernity”. Is there any building, work or monument in Prague that represents modernity in a condensed form? 

I can’t think of any single location that represents “condensed” modernity, but Veletržní palác [the Trade Fair Palace] goes a long way toward fitting that bill. Built in 1926-8, critically admired by Le Corbusier, and one of the largest functionalist buildings in Europe at that time, it has been hailed by Karel Teige and others as an icon of progressive modernism. But the building started life as the centerpiece of a “trade fair city” designed to showcase Czech industry. The palace opened not with some avant-garde exhibition but the first showing of Alfons Mucha’s highly nationalistic Slovanská epopej [Slav Epic], a cycle that was seen as backward and reactionary by most modern artists and critics at the time. During WW2 the Veletržní compound became the assembly-point for deportation of Jews to Terezín and other concentration camps from nearby Bubny station. Subsequently the building housed various state offices (including Tuzex and Strojimport) before it burned down in 1974. Subsequently it was reconstructed “like a phoenix” and now houses the National Gallery collections of 19th and 20th-century art and is a big tourist attraction. I’ve written about Veletržní palác at length in Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century.

You describe yourself as English by birth and Canadian by choice. How does Czechia fit into that?

I was born in London and lived in Britain until I was 35. I moved to Canada in 1986 to take up a position at the University of Alberta, where I taught for twenty years and held one of the first Canada Research Chairs. I returned to Britain for family reasons in 2006, but moved back to Canada in 2016 after I retired from Lancaster University. I have dual citizenship.

Nationality is not something you choose, whereas I chose to emigrate. Part of me will always remain British—but having lived half my adult life in Canada, another part of me is Canadian too, whether it’s missing the wide open spaces and big prairie skies and bright sunshine at 20 degrees below or the astonishing variety of cuisines I enjoy in Calgary, a city where a third of the population is foreign-born and over 40 percent belong to ethnic minorities. No doubt this would appal many Czechs, at least those that voted for Zeman and Babiš and are hostile to immigrants, but I feel most at home in a place full of rootless cosmopolitans like me.

My connection with your country was serendipitous. I was not formally trained in Slavics or Czech studies—my BA and PhD were in sociology. My first wife, Alena, was Czech, or maybe I should say Moravian, from Ostrava. We met as undergraduate students at Essex University in 1970. She had left Czechoslovakia at the end of 1967—i.e., before the Prague Spring—to spend a year abroad as an au pair prior to starting a degree in English at Univerzita Karlova [Charles University]. Getting an exit visa was still not easy then, but her father, who was not a communist, had good contacts in the foreign ministry that he made in Sachsenhausen [concentration camp] during the war. He was one of the 1200 Czech students arrested on November 17, 1939, the “day of the students.” A week before Alena was due to return home the Russians invaded and she stayed in the UK. She didn’t return until after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989.

What this meant was that I had what was in many ways an intimate but completely vicarious relationship with Czechia for nearly 20 years before I ever set foot on Czech soil—a bizarre state of affairs, if you think about it, but one that is common in families of émigrés and refugees the world over. My first trip to Czechia was in March-April 1990, after the revolution but before the elections. We spent most of our time with family in Ostrava, but managed a few days in Prague. It was then, on the Smetana Embankment, that I got the idea of using Prague’s variety of modern historical experiences as a different vantage point on “modernity” than the conventional western ones—Paris, London, New York, etc.

I subsequently lived in Prague from December 1991 through June or July 1993, doing my best to learn the language while researching The Coasts of Bohemia, the first book in my Prague trilogy.

I believe that not entering Czech studies through the usual academic routes, and not being part of those “area studies” networks, has given me a significantly different orientation to that of most Anglophone scholars working in the field. Whether for good or ill, I leave to readers to judge.

You mentioned you got the idea of using Prague as a different vantage point on “modernity” on the Smetana Embankment. Was this accidental or inspired by the place?

I commented on the Smetana Embankment in the introduction to Coasts of Bohemia:

Walking along the Smetana Embankment in Prague in the spring of 1990, it occurred to me that a Copernican turn on this history [i.e., European history as narrated from the West] might be fruitful. The location is not irrelevant: suffice it to say, for the moment, that in the course of the twentieth century the Embankment has been successively named after Emperor Francis I of Austria, Czechoslovakia’s first president Tomáš Masaryk, Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and (the communists finding the memory of Masaryk unacceptable) the nineteenth-century Czech “national composer” Bedřich Smetana. (p. 13)

Of course I didn’t know this level of detail at the time; I learned it later. So it must have been a hunch, as much as anything else, likely based on the incredible architectural collage that Prague presents—everything from medieval and baroque to many varieties of modern, all as often as not jumbled together—rather than anything specific to the Smetana Embankment. But one location on that embankment is especially poignant for me: the statue of [Austrian Emperor] Francis I. When I first saw it and throughout the time I lived in Prague the plinth was empty because the statue had been removed to the lapidarium of the National Museum in 1919 following independence. The vacancy looked surreal, given the ornate housing of the monument. Francis was eventually quietly restored to his rightful place in 2003. For me this history epitomises the dialectic of memory and forgetting, as materialized in public spaces (streetnames, statues, memorials, plaques, murals and frescoes, the architecture and internal decor of buildings) that have been central concerns of my work on Prague. I also find the Smetana Museum poignant for different reasons—the association with Zdeněk Nejedlý, who was instrumental in founding the museum in 1926. The connections between the discourses of the národní obrození [national revival] and the KSČ [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] after 1945 have been important themes of my books, though this is not something that Czechs generally like to be reminded of. This might take us to Letohrádek Hvězda [Star Castle], the onetime Jirásek and Aleš Museum, which I have also written about at length in The Coasts of Bohemia.

Getting back to your first encounter with Czechoslovakia, it was not dominantly set in Prague. Do you recall any inspirative moment from your stay in Ostrava?

What probably sticks in my mind most from that first trip was an incident in what was then the Divadlo Zdenka Nejedlého [Zdeněk Nejedlý Theater] that I made use of in a later book:

Nabucco, or to give it its full title Nabuccodonzor, Verdi’s first big hit, premieres at La Scala on March 9, 1842. Act III. The great patriotic chorus Va, pensiero is heard for the first time. The audience erupts, demanding encore after encore. After the performance ends there is a riot. Henceforth, the Austrian authorities decree, no encores will be allowed in opera houses.

Before his death Giuseppe Verdi leaves strict instructions that no music is to be played at his funeral. Old newspaper photographs show the Piazza del Duomo packed to the walls with people, a quarter million, a half million, a million people, who will ever know? As the cortège slowly feels its way through the immense crowd somebody starts to sing, and then another, and another, and another, the words written sixty years before in another place for another time, words that they nevertheless all know by heart:

Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,

va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

ove olezzano tepide e molli

l’aure dolci del suolo natal!

A century turns.

An old coal and steel town in Northern Moravia, early in 1990, that uncertain time between the Velvet Revolution and the first free elections in forty-two years. At a loose end one evening I decide to take myself to the local opera house, where Nabuccohappens to be playing. Before the performance begins a man steps through the curtain to the front of the stage. I expect to learn that one of the principals is indisposed. Instead he makes a passionate plea on behalf of his fellow-artists for the audience to vote for Civic Forum, the opposition coalition formed in November 1989 around Václav Havel. The tension is palpable, catching in the throat, acrid as the acid rain that hangs in the Ostrava air.

Va, pensiero is heard in absolute silence — something I have never experienced at an operatic performance anywhere in the world. No coughing, no shuffling, no whispering. Nor, I think, have I ever before or since heard a demand for a chorus to be encored.

When the last echo of the last note dies, but not before, the theater explodes. People are on their feet, yelling for it to be played again. Va, pensiero was encored three times that night before the opera could go on. I was later told that the same thing had happened at the National Theater in Prague after the Soviet invasion of 1968, leading to Nabucco being banned from Czech stages for the next twenty years.

Your books pay close attention to individual destinies. I found it interesting that nearly a quarter of your last book, Postcards from Absurdistan, is narrated through the life of Milena Jesenská. Although she is receiving increasing attention, few have managed to place her work in a broader context. Why do you think this is?

Milena Jesenská was clearly a significant figure of her time, and one who was for various reasons neglected after her death. It took until 2016 before a proper scholarly edition of her journalism was published, Torst’s monumental Křižovatky. She remained persona non grata for much of the communist period due to her politics—a one-time KSČ member who left the party over the Moscow trials and denounced Stalinism in print. She was also a friend to Jews (awarded the rare honor of “righteous among the gentiles” by Yad Vashem) while the postwar KSČ was pretty openly antisemitic, and as Jaromír Krejcar’s wife she was a prominent associate of the interwar Prague avant-garde, to which the KSČ was hostile from 1948 until the early 60s (as I trace in Postcards) and again from 1969 to the late 1980s. Neither of these things favored her posthumous rehabilitation. Her daughter Jana Černá’s (née Krejcarová) memoir of her mother Adresát Milena Jesenská was scheduled to come out in 1969 but never reached the bookstores, a casualty of the 68 invasion and normalization. It was first published by Concordia in Prague in 1991, that is to say, ten year’s after Jana’s death. Jaroslava Vondráčková’s reminiscence Kolem Mileny Jesenské came out the same year. Alena Wagnerová’s Milena Jesenská, which I think was the first Czech biography, came out only in 1994.

In the West, and in particular the Anglophone world, the problem is a different one. Jesenská is known primarily (and in my view inaccurately, even during the brief time of their relationship) as Franz Kafka’s “muse.” This is partly because the first text published on her in the West was Margarete Buber-Neumann’s Milena, Kafka’s Freundin. More generally, a majority of western scholarship on Kafka does not avail itself of Czech-language sources: Milena is visible only through Germanic lenses (which typically exoticize her). The main exception in English, published in 1997, is Mary Hockaday’s Kafka, Love and Courage, which despite the title focuses on Milena’s life as a whole and not just in relation to Frank (as Milena called Kafka). So far as I know the only English translation of Jesenská’s articles—a relatively small selection, but including several of her most important 1937-9 articles for Přítomnost—was Kathleen Hayes’s The Journalism of Milena Jesenská, published in 2003. 

Could her gender also have an impact on the representation? Has history been written too “masculinely”?

Let’s try a thought experiment. If Milena had been a talented male journalist (like, say, Egon Erwin Kisch), who at one time (let us imagine) had a hot romantic correspondence with an internationally famous modernist female writer, then went on to write not only informative pieces on the avant-garde, architectural, and fashion scenes and some of the most incisive journalism of its time on the politics of the day—from Stalin’s gulag through the Anschluss to the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia—and who during the occupation became a resistance member who aided Jews to escape the country, was arrested, and finally died in a concentration camp, would she be better known? The question answers itself. In fact, it is hard to find a male counterpart.

The main reason for my interest in Milena Jesenská is this remarkable life she led. But it is also a result of my method. I set out to write history as a collage woven out of fragments, drawn from the lives of individuals, rather than in grand abstractions. Focusing on Jesenská gave me entry to many different overlapping worlds central to the book and, indeed, the trilogy—journalism; the avant-garde; modernist architecture; communism; war, refugees, occupation; the Holocaust; the camps, etc. etc. She also connected me with other people whose lives became leitmotifs of the book, notably Kafka, Adolf Hoffmeister, her second husband the architect Jaromír Krejcar, and her remarkable, if tragic, daughter Jana (”Honza”) Krejcarová/Černá, whom Bohumil Hrabal called “a pearl at the bottom of a chasm.” Jana in turn connected me to Vladimír Boudník, Egon Bondy, Mikuláš Medek and the other “Prague beatniks” who hung out with Hrabal in Libeň in the 1950s. Bondy connected later on to Ivan Martin Jirous, the Plastic People of the Universe, and the post-1968 Prague underground, and so on. Postcards is full of such filiations.

One of the reasons for so many historians’ “masculinism,” I think, lies in the biases in their sources as much as any (deliberate or unconscious) sexism on their parts. For much of the period dealt with in my trilogy, c. 1780s–1990s, the most powerful figures in most walks of life—including politics and the arts, whose relation has been one of my key concerns—have been men, and it is their actions that have been written about, mostly by other men. One of the benefits of trying to write history from the “rags and refuse” that is scorned by most conventional academic historical narratives is that one can with a clean conscience look elsewhere, ranging, in my case, from Magdaléna Dobromila Rettigová’s Home Cookery (Coasts, pp. 79-80) to Toyen’s erotica (Prague, pp. 214-16, 262-4) as different ways of accessing what Walter Benjamin called the dreamworlds of the age.

I have made a deliberate effort, especially in Postcards, not to be “masculinist.” Apart from Jesenská and her daughter, figures around whose lives the narrative is woven include the writers Lenka Reinerová, Marie Majerová, and Zdena Salivarová, the dancer Mira Holzbachová, the politicians Marie Švermová and Milada Horáková, the actresses Lída Baarová, Marie Burešová, and Vlasta Chromostová, the gymnast Věra Čáslavská, the film director Věra Chytilová, and the pop singer and prominent dissident Marta Kubišová (to name but a few)—not to mention the resistance heroines of Operation Anthropoid Marie Moravcová, Marie Kovárníková, Ludmila Soukupová, and Anna Malinová—or Inka Bernášková, daughter of the artist Vojtěch Preissig, who single-handedly produced issues of the resistance newspaper V boj! for ten months after her father and the rest of the group were arrested. She was the first Czech woman to be guillotined by the Nazis, on 26 August 1942.

You speak about the deliberate effort to face the bias you made through including many important women in your books. Were there any other biases or stereotypes – personal or generally Western – you faced while working on Czech history?

I’m not sure biases is the right word—it suggests personal prejudice rather than socially embedded viewpoints—so I would rather speak of conceptual geographies: frameworks of thought within which we are conditioned to see the world and frame the writing of histories.

I began Coasts of Bohemia with an introduction I titled “Bearings,” in which I suggested that despite Prague’s geographic location at the center of the European continent and its historical location on the faultlines of the conflicts that have shaped modern history from the religious wars of the 17th century, through the national revivals of the 19th century, to the struggles between communism, fascism, and democracy in the 20th century, it has occupied a marginal position in Anglophone historical narratives, remaining invisible except when (as in 1620, 1938-9, or 1968) events there were acknowledged as impinging on the wider western story.

Bohemia was relegated to an “area studies” ghetto staffed by a small number of esoteric Czech specialists: in the UK, at that time, there was just one Chair in Czech Studies, which was held by Robert Pynsent (who among other things considered Karel Čapek a “petty-bourgeois writer” and wrote to the London Times objecting to the award of the Nobel Prize to Jaroslav Seifert because he was a “mediocre poet”). Then and now, only a handful of universities in the English-speaking world offered degrees in Czech studies or a training in Czech language. It remains a specialized, minority field. This gives those who work in the area unusual authority as gatekeepers.

Historically and conceptually, this field has been shaped by the legacy of the Cold War. It says much, I think, that the major international professional association to which Anglophone Czech scholars belong, other than those that are focused specifically on Česko (and often Slovensko), is the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which was founded in 1948 as “the leading international organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Eastern Europe in regional and global contexts.” ASEEES gave Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century an honorable mention in their awards for 2013, for which I am duly grateful, but I still question whether this is an appropriate frame of reference in which to study a land whose history has been that of the lands of the Holy Roman Empire for a millennium and which—nineteenth-century pan-Slavism and interwar communist fellow-travelers notwithstanding—had little cultural involvement with Russia before 1945.

Similarly, Steven A. Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939, was justly hailed as a major work of historical revisionism, challenging western-centric canons and demanding a rethink of how we conceive modern art, when it was published in 1999. But it still treats Bohemia as part of a homogenous “region” stretching “from the Baltic to the Balkans,” ignoring the fact that Czech artists during the period it covers were part of networks that included Paris (where many of them, from Mucha and Kupka to Štyrský and Toyen spent years), Munich, Berlin, and—for the interwar avant-garde—Moscow, while they had relatively little to do with artists elsewhere in Mansbach’s “Eastern Europe.” Inspection of Prague’s exhibition history or artists’ periodicals makes this international orientation very clear.

You are a Doctor of Sociology, does that influence your position on such socially embedded viewpoints?

I was trained with a particular focus on historical sociology, and for me Prague first became intellectually significant in relation to the central concerns of classical sociological theorists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel as well as later writers like Walter Benjamin—concerns I might summarize in the question “what is ‘modern’ in ‘modernity?”

I believed Prague offered a superior vantage-point from which to investigate this question than any western city because of the range and variety of its historical experiences during the modern era. For instance, London and New York have experienced neither fascism, as Prague did during six years of German occupation, nor communism. Though Paris was also occupied by the Nazis during WW2 it has never experienced communist rule. Berlin (which for me comes closest to Prague as a putative “capital of the twentieth century”) has experienced communism and fascism as well as liberal democracy, but offers nothing comparable to the 19th-century Czech national revival as a process of anti-imperial struggle. Nor did Berlin experience the ethnic conflicts that played so large a part in Prague’s life from the mid-19th century until the odsun of 1945-6, or the full gamut of forms of communist rule, from the show trials of the 1950s to Dubček’s attempted “reform communism” of 1968 and the “normalization” that followed. Prague’s cultural and artistic products have been shaped by and articulate this singular range of modern experiences.

To take just one example of how this experience for me illuminates “modernity” more generally, Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” was produced as a meditation on normalization. But as an analysis of how power works in the modern world through the active complicity of subjects—like the Prague greengrocer—it has universal relevance. Canadian PM Mark Carney cited it in his recent speech on Davos. For me, Havel’s analysis is as important as, say, Michel Foucault. If you want to find Prague greengrocers around the world today, look at how US universities—including Columbia and Harvard—are abjectly accommodating to the Trump administration.

My treating Prague as a “capital of the 20th century” in this very specific sense was widely welcomed, including by Czech scholars like the distinguished art historian Lenka Bydžovská. The exceptions were several (though by no means all) Anglophone Czech studies scholars, who ridiculed the claim. For me, this shows the limitations of their conceptual geographies.

In Postcards, the term kafkárna reoccurs often, could it be considered universal as well?

There is no single equivalent for the term kafkárna in English, which is why I retained the Czech throughout having explained what it meant. I quoted the following definition, from Naše řeč:

This word that is difficult to interpret, let alone translate, denotes an absurd feeling of hopelessness, disarray, and dislocation that is typical of Franz Kafka’s work … Most commonly, the word is used to describe a nonsensical, logically inexplicable, chaotic, ridiculous, or hopeless situation, state and feeling to which one gradually resigns oneself, although one does not identify with it and it escapes one’s conscious understanding … The word may also describe a place that is peculiar, strange, out of the ordinary in a negative sense, a place governed by absurd laws. (Postcards, p. 25)

Yes, I do think the term should be universalized—what more accurate description can you find of the modernity I mapped in my Prague trilogy (and especially Postcards), in which every attempt to impose what is claimed to be a rational order eventually collapses into a kafkárna? Conversely, the cynical behavior of Havel’s Prague greengrocer may be seen as a thoroughly rational, if immoral and undignified, template for how individuals can get by in a world that is a kafkárna. This is a world in which living in truth comes at a very high price, and will quite logically be regarded by most people as crazy.

Recently, you’ve been on your substack focusing more on global events (in Czech accessible in Bristké listy). Which narratives do you see as the most problematic, and could Central European experience be helpful in this regard?

As Canadian PM Mark Carney pointed out in his speech at Davos, the post-WW2 “rules-based order” is dying or dead, and is rapidly being replaced by a Wild West scenario in which a few great powers struggle for pre-eminence (or carve up the world between them), unrestrained by international law or multilateral institutions like the UN. The last few years are beginning to look increasingly like the 1930s, with the rise of neofascist so-called “populist” movements across Europe, the UK, and North America, increasing authoritarianism, crackdown on civil liberties, and xenopobia even on the part of “centrist” governments, and resorts to armed conflict—notably but not only in the Middle East—to resolve political disputes.

In this context the progressive “end of history” narratives—in whatever variant—I criticized in Postcards look pretty naive. My emphasis on complexities, ambiguities, irrationalities, the “grey zone” where rights and wrongs shade into one another, offers a more accurate handle on present-day politics. Thus, for instance, despite his Davos speech, Carney supported the Israeli-US attack on Iran even though the attack was manifestly in breach of international law and the UN Charter. So did Ursula von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron, and Merz, all of whom had noisily denounced exactly the same breaches of international law when it was Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.

Is Central European experience relevant in this context? I would say yes, obviously—providing it is read in all its complexity, rather than as simplified in Cold War and post-Cold War western narratives. And that is what I tried to do in my Prague trilogy.

How present is Česko, or specifically Prague, in your current life in Calgary? What are you looking forward to during your planned visit?

I wouldn’t say Česko is part of my current life in Calgary except that some Czech dishes are staples of our home cooking. I cook a kickass segedínský guláš.

I have visited Česko often over the years but haven’t been back for a while. Long-haul flights are not so easy at my age, and they are also expensive on a pension (I retired from teaching in 2016).

The last time I was in Prague was in August 2021, our first trip out of Canada after the Covid lockdowns. It was eerie—so many businesses closed down and shops and restautants shuttered, the streets empty—but also in some ways a reminder of what the city used to be like when I was living there and it was just beginning to open up. “Zpátky do Evropy” was a mixed blessing. I used to love the Old Town but nowadays I’m more at ease in Holešovice or Karlín or Smíchov or Troja, where I lived in 1991-3. Or venturing further out, like Bohnice, where I have friends, or Sapa, which I wrote about in my little 2017 guidebook-cum-potted history Prague, Crossroads of Europe. Tourism may bring in the dollars, but it has also brought major problems, just like in Barcelona or Amsterdam.

What am I looking forward to during my visit? Seeing new buildings, like the Zaha Hadid development behind Masarykovo nádraží or the Fragment apartment block “held up by” David Černý’s Lilit in Karlín, surfing the bookstores and art galleries, and discovering new restaurants and revisiting old favorites—reacquainting myself with chlebíčky at Zlatý kříž, vařený hovězí krk s křenovou omáčkou at Lokál, and smažený vepřový řízek s bramborovým salátem at Café Savoy, all washed down with good Czech beer.

By on

Published in Canadian Dimension, August 13, 2025 

An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, Gaza. Photo by Ashraf Amra/UNWRA.

Cometh the hour, cometh the politicians

Back in February, Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad published a book titled One Day, Everyone WIll Have Always Been Against This. “This” was Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That day seems to be getting closer by the minute.

While most have carefully avoided using the word genocide, the list of politicians who have been staunch defenders of Israel’s “right to defend itself” but are now condemning its actions in the strongest of words—but not doing very much more—is growing fast.

They include British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas; Canadian PM Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand; and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

Following the Israeli war cabinet’s decision on August 8 to launch a new offensive to recapture Gaza City—an action likely to cause thousands more deaths and certain to displace a million more starving Palestinians to the overcrowded “evacuation zones” in southern Gaza—Carney and Starmer condemned this “escalation.” But there is no sign of the “concrete actions” the UK, France, and Canada threatened on May 19 if Israel did not “cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.”

The foreign ministers of Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (later joined by Austria, Canada, France, Norway, and the EU commission) got together to rush out a statement on August 9 “strongly rejecting” the Israeli decision to expand the war and urging “the parties and the international community to make all efforts to finally bring this terrible conflict to an end now.”

This was followed on August 12 with a statement signed by no less than 25 foreign ministers and two high representatives of the EU, lamenting that “humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels.”

The ministers complained that:

due to restrictive new registration requirements, essential international NGOs may be forced to leave the OPTs [Occupied Palestinian Territories] imminently which would worsen the humanitarian situation still further. We call on the government of Israel to provide authorisation for all international NGO aid shipments and to unblock essential humanitarian actors from operating. Immediate, permanent and concrete steps must be taken to facilitate safe, large-scale access for the UN, international NGOs and humanitarian partners. All crossings and routes must be used to allow a flood of aid into Gaza, including food, nutrition supplies, shelter, fuel, clean water, medicine and medical equipment. Lethal force must not be used at distribution sites, and civilians, humanitarians and medical workers must be protected.


Neither of these statements threatened any sanctions if Israel chose not to comply.

Surprisingly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came closest to actually doing anything to restrain Israel when he announced that “Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.” Because of its past role in the Holocaust, Germany regards the security of Israel as a raison d’être of the German state (Staatsräson) and is Israel’s second-largest supplier of arms after the US.

Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, too, says it is contemplating sanctions on Israel “as a way to save its citizens from a government that has lost its reason and humanity.” “We are not facing a military operation with collateral damage,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview with La Stampapublished on August 11, “but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization.”

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has spearheaded a move to get Western powers to join the 147 countries (out of 193 UN member states) that already recognize the state of Palestine. Britain, Canada, and Australia have undertaken to do so in September at the UN, albeit with conditions. Whether or not such recognition happens, in the absence of stronger measures this too will remain little more than an empty symbolic gesture.

The Trump administration in the US has meantime doubled down on its support for Israel. But fractures are appearing in the Democratic Party, which provided the Israeli government with “ironclad” backing throughout the Biden-Harris administration.

Thirty Democratic members of Congress have signed onto Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act to block offensive weapons sales to Israel, while on July 31, in the words of Senator Bernie Sanders:

By a vote of 27-17, Senate Democrats voted to stop sending arms shipments to a Netanyahu government which has waged a horrific, immoral and illegal war against the Palestinian people. The tide is turning. Americans don’t want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.


Even Trump’s MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone on record saying “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that October 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

This is all way too little and way too late for the people of Gaza. Whether it is better than nothing at all remains to be seen. As of now, this performative Western outrage is little more than a sideshow that leaves the IDF free, as Donald Trump put it, to “finish the job.”

Seeing the light

Politicians are not the only ones claiming to have had their eyes recently opened to the full horror of Israel’s crimes. Many credit photos of famine victims for their conversion. We can now add the no less horrifying photographs and powerful video footage of the “wasteland of rubble, dust and graves” to which two years of Israeli bombardment have reduced Gaza, shot by journalists from Jordanian planes dropping aid packages.

It was with “immense pain and a broken heart,” Israel’s most celebrated living writer David Grossman told the Italian daily La Repubblica on August 1, that “For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide.’ But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it…” Quoting Grossman’s words later got left-wing lawmaker Ofer Cassif expelled from Israel’s Knesset chamber.

Grossman was one of over 2,300 cultural figures to sign two recent Israeli petitions denouncing the “killing of children and civilians, the starvation and displacement of the population, and the destruction of cities across the Gaza Strip” as “atrocities on a historic scale,” which are “currently taking place in our name against a population that is only several kilometers away, in an impossible reality and terrible suffering.”

Across the democratic world, hundreds of writers, artists, film makers and others in the cultural industries have signed petitions condemning Israel’s actions. In Canada, “500+ law professors, lawyers, academics, former ambassadors, and civil society, faith and labour leaders” sent Mark Carney an open letter prior to the June 15 Kananaskis G7 summit imploring him “to catalyze G7 action to end the genocide.” It has yet to receive an acknowledgment from the prime minister’s office, let alone an official response.

Something is clearly changing when Bob Geldof, of “Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed the World)” fame, breaks his silence to accuse Israel of “lying. Netanyahu lies, is a liar. The [Israeli forces] are lying.” He added:

It enrages me to a point beyond comprehension when I see the images published by Sky News and what [former Gaza-based British surgeon] Dr [Nick] Maynard has been reporting from inside Gaza. And at that point, I thought, the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, my own past and history with this—I thought I should say something now.


Now? Where have you been for the last two years, Bob? Remember five-year-old Hind Rajab? Seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, hanging dead from the wall of a bombed-out apartment building in Rafah, her legs shredded to ribbons of flesh in an Israeli air strike?

Remember Rafah, which Joe Biden once said was his “red line,” a city of 200,000 people that the IDF has now pulverized to unrecognizable ruins?

Purity and danger

In the US, Jewish Currents Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart has suggested that “a kind of dam has broken… in mainstream media discourse and public discourse more generally”:

people are much more willing to say things that they were reluctant to say in the past, that there is starvation in Gaza, that it is Israel’s fault, and that beyond that, that this slaughter and starvation, this assault on the people of Gaza, has to end, and that it’s immoral.


This applies even more in other Western countries, where popular support for Israel has never been as strong as in America and opinion polls indicate it is now in steep decline. Up to 300,000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge for Gaza on August 3, completely wrongfooting Australia’s government. These were not your usual suspects.

Nor were the 522 people arrested in Parliament Square in London on August 9 as they protested the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act. The signs they were carrying—for which they can now be sentenced to up to 14 years in prison—read “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” This was the most arrests the Metropolitan Police had made in a single operation in at least the last decade. Half of those detained were over 60, nearly 100 were in their 70s, and 15 were in their 80s.

While Beinart welcomes latecomers and converts to the cause, “even if they come painfully late, and much, much later than one would like,” and counsels that “to gain the power to change policy, [you] have to swell beyond the initial group of activists and bring in people who may not be as morally pure as those people,” he is equally insistent that:

it’s also really, really important to remember and… elevate the voices of people who were correct initially, who said things early on that I think have turned out to be factually and morally correct. Because the danger is, if you don’t do that, then you… end up, you just replicate, you don’t change the… structure of discourse.


Among those voices, he instances Rabbis for Ceasefire; the student protestors who “were greeted… for being prematurely correct… with being suspended and being expelled and by beaten up by the police who were called in”; and “the writers, the intellectuals who said things about Israel’s attack that have proven to be correct.”

He name-checks several Palestinian writers and activists, including Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by Congress in 2023 for “representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust… as justified ‘resistance’ to the ‘apartheid state.’”

The danger now is that in our outrage at the awful images that are overwhelming our newsrooms and the pious statements proliferating from our politicians we will forget Beinart’s “prematurely correct” voices and reproduce the same discursive tropes that have enabled, sustained, and gaslit the Gaza slaughter even as we criticize Israel.

We need to face up to the conditions that produced these horrors—and this requires us to jettison some widespread liberal illusions not only about Israel, but also about the part played in this human calamity by the free, democratic, civilized West.

An ancestral homeland?

The congressional motion censuring Rashida Tlaib in November 2023 began “Whereas Israel has existed on its lands for millennia and the United States played a critical role in returning Israel to those lands in 1948… in recognition of its right to exist…”

Western politicians habitually frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland” (I quote Justin Trudeau). But the modernconnection between the Jewish people and Israel is tenuous. It is the Palestinians who have existed on this land for millennia—who are its Indigenous inhabitants—and the Israelis who are immigrants. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that a majority of present-day Israeli Jews are in fact the descendants of converts.

Nobody disputes the existence of Jewish kingdoms in what is now Israel during the first millennium BCE. But Jews were never the only people living in the area—what was the Biblical Samson doing among the Philistines in Gaza? Many Jews were expelled by the Romans after defeat of rebellions in 70-71 and 132-36 CE. Most of those who remained converted to Christianity under the Byzantine Empire or Islam after the Muslim conquest in 635-7 CE, without the ethnic composition of the land being significantly altered.

Were we to apply the Zionists’ “ancestral homeland” logic and timeframe elsewhere in the modern world, we would have to return England to the Celts, kick the Hungarians and Slavs out of Central Europe, and expel everyone of European descent from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. It is a poor justification for a genocide.

Or a settler colony?

By any sane definition, present-day Israel is a settler colony, which was established and has since been maintained by often extreme violence against the indigenous population.

In 1878, according to Ottoman records, Palestine had 462,465 inhabitants, of whom 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians, and just 15,011 (three percent) were Jewish. Zionist-inspired Jewish immigration from Europe began in the 1890s, fuelled by pogroms in the Russian Empire. By the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, Palestine’s population was still 90 per cent Palestinian.

Encouraged by Britain, which governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922, Jewish immigration snowballed, particularly after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. By 1944 Jews made up 30 percent of Palestine’s population. Tensions between Palestinians and Jewish incomers peaked in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-9.

Jewish numbers grew by 100,000 (including 70,000 Holocaust survivors) immediately after World War II. Seeking to establish a Jewish state, the Irgun (led by future Israeli PM Menachem Begin), and Lehi (led by future Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir) militias used terrorist tactics against the British, including hanging captured British soldiers held as hostages and bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with the loss of 91 lives.

Things came to a head in 1947, when Britain informed the UN of its intention to leave Palestine. A UN plan to partition the territory into two states, which would have given the minority Jewish community 56 percent of the land, was rejected by the Palestinians.

Civil war between Jews and Palestinians broke out at the end of November 1947, in which both sides committed atrocities. During the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.

On the day British forces withdrew, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel.” Troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, later joined by units from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, poured across the borders. The Jewish militias were meanwhile absorbed into the newly-created IDF.

After ten months of fighting Israel not only held the land allotted to it by the UN partition plan but 60 percent of the land intended for the Arab state, as well as West Jerusalem.

Jaffa, Palestine, 1920.

The great replacement

The population of Gaza is largely made up descendants of at least 750,000 refugees driven out during the 1947-8 war in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), boosted by refugees from the 1967 Six Day War. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that:

In a matter of seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over a year. (Ten Myths About Israel, chapter 1)


The total population of Palestine fell from 1,970,000 in 1947 to 872,700 in 1948. In 1947, Jews made up 32 percent of that population; by 1948, 82.1 percent. If you want to know what a real demographic “great replacement” looks like, this is it.

Between 15 May 1948 and the end of 1951, more than 684,000 new Jewish immigrants—many, now, fleeing from Arab lands where they had lived for centuries—settled in Israel. According to the UN:

Of the 370 Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were established on land abandoned by the Palestinians. In 1954 more than one-third of Israel’s Jewish population, plus 250,000 new Jewish immigrants, settled in whole cities that had been completely deserted by the Palestinians as a result of the military operations of 1948.


The so-called Law of Return, granting every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950. More than 3.25 million Jews have availed themselves of this right since 1948.

In flagrant violation of international law, Palestinians driven out in the Nakba have no right of return to the lands they and their forbears had lived in and cultivated for millennia.

The “war” didn’t start on October 7

Israel’s supporters insist that the present “war” in Gaza “began”—to quote the stock phrasing that has been repeated in hundreds of news articles over the last two years—”when Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the October 7 attack and abducted 251 hostages.” Not only is this inaccurate as regards the actual events of October 7. More importantly, it totally ignores their immediate context.

Gaza is part of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) Israel seized from Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. After that war, the UN Security Council unanimously—that is, with American, British, and French support—adopted Resolution 242 mandating “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

Despite further UN resolutions, Israel has not only failed to comply with this demand for 58 years, but has established Jewish settlements in the OPT in defiance of international law. The rate of settlement has increased hugely in recent years, with a 40 percent rise in the West Bank since the formation of Netanyahu’s government at the end of 2022.

In March 2025 there were 737,332 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, spread across150 settlements and 128 outposts. Perhaps as many as 160,000 of these are American citizens, who have been at the “forefront of the rise of settler violence.” The IDF and settlers have killed at least 964 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023 and driven tens of thousands from their homes.

Within the OPT, the Palestinian population—numbering around 5.6 million, as compared with Israel’s population of 9.5 million—has been subjected to what among many others the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN human rights office (OHCHR), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel’s human rights organization B’Tselem all characterize (and comprehensively document) as an apartheid regime.

While this context cannot justify the war crimes and crimes against humanity that the ICC charged Hamas leaders with committing during the October 7 attack, it goes a long way toward explaining why Hamas launched such a desperate attack in the first place.

Hamas’s attack was not unprovoked

In a landmark ruling of July 19, 2024, the ICJ held not only that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” but also that Gaza remains part of the OPT because Israel:

continue[s] to exercise, certain key elements of authority… including control of the land, sea and air borders, restrictions on movement of people and goods, collection of import and export taxes, and military control over the buffer zone, despite the withdrawal of its military presence in 2005 […] This is even more so since October 7, 2023.


As B’Tselem summarized the situation in January 2021, “the military occupation has not ended: Palestinians in the West Bank remain its direct subjects, while in the Gaza Strip they live under its effective control, exerted from the outside.”

Hamas narrowly won elections in 2006 and expelled its rival Fatah, which nominally governs in the West Bank, from the Gaza Strip the following year. Israel responded by imposing a tight land, sea and air blockade in June 2007, turning the beleagured enclave into what Human Rights Watch has described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Conflict has flared intermittently ever since, with Hamas and other militias firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with periodic military operations the IDF derisively calls “mowing the lawn.”

This is not an equal contest. Between January 2008 and October 6, 2023, Israel killed 6,540 Palestinians (5,360 of them in Gaza). In the same period 309 Israelis were killed by Palestinian action—a fatality ratio of 21 to 1. The disproportion speaks for itself.

IDF snipers, firing through the perimeter fence, killed 266 people and injured 30,000 during the (peaceful) weekly Great March of Return demonstrations of 2018-19. In May 2022, Israeli forces shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh—one of many more such killings to come (the most recentbeing the assassination of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his crew in a targeted airstrike on their tent near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on August 10). Two days before Hamas’s October 7 attack, 832 Jewish settlers stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem—the third holiest site in Islam.

If these are not provocations, the word has lost all meaning.

Israel’s response was not self-defense

As the occupying power in the OPT—including Gaza—Israel’s responsibilities toward the Palestinians under international humanitarian law include:

the obligation to ensure humane treatment of the local population and to meet their needs, the respect of private properties, management of public properties, the functioning of educational establishments, ensuring the existence and functioning of medical services, allowing relief operations to take place as well as allowing impartial humanitarian organizations such as the ICRC [Red Cross] to carry out their activities.


Israel’s conduct toward Gaza’s civilian population since October 2023 flagrantly ignores any and all of these legal obligations.

Leaving aside for the moment Palestinian deaths and injuries, the IDF had damaged more than 190,000 buildings by early April 2025—roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s structures—of which 102,000 were destroyed. This translates to roughly 300,000 homes lost.

By August 6, 80 percent of Gaza’s commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, and 68 percent of road networks had been destroyed or significantly damaged, and only 50 percent of Gaza’s hospitals were even partly functioning. According to the latest UN data, Palestinians now have access to only 1.5 percent of cropland suitable for cultivation. The IDF demolished Gaza’s only functioning cancer hospital on March 21. The same fate was suffered by Al Israa University—the last remaining university in Gaza—in January 2024.

In an appendix to the ICJ July 19, 2024 judgment, Justice Hilary Charlesworth explained that:

the population in the occupied territory does not owe allegiance to the occupying Power, and … is not precluded from using force in accordance with international law to resist the occupation.


“On the assumption that Israel is the victim of an armed attack triggering the right to self-defence,” she goes on:

The use of force in self-defence … is directed at restoring the situation as it was prior to the armed attack. This purpose distinguishes lawful self-defence from measures that aim to punish the aggressor for the harm inflicted. The latter measures constitute armed reprisals, which are prohibited under international law.


“Whether the use of force employed by the victim of an armed attack serves the purpose of self-defence,” she concludes,” is determined by “standards of necessity and proportionality.”

An existential threat?

As of August 6 at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children, had been killed in Gaza a direct result of IDF military action; more than 111,588 people had been injured; and more than 14,222 are missing and presumed dead. These figures, which come from the Gazan health ministry, are widely believed to be a serious undercount. The IDF lost 454 soldiers in Gaza during the same period. This is disproportionate by any criteria.

But was this killing and destruction militarily necessary? In order to restore the status quo ante, which is all international law allows?

Or was it an armed reprisal—a collective punishment inflicted on Gaza’s civilians in order to demonstrate, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to Israelis at the outset of the present war, that “We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come”? A reprisal that also serves the Zionist longterm objective of ridding Eretz Israel, by one means or another, of its indigenous Palestinian population?

At the outset of hostilities the IDF estimated Hamas to have some 30,000 fighters. In contrast to Israel—a nuclear power with one of the strongest, most experienced, and technologically sophisticated militaries in the world—Hamas has no navy or air force, tanks or armoured vehicles. Its armoury is made up of light automatic weapons, grenades, mortars, explosives, improvised rockets, and anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. It is, we might say, a David to Israel’s Goliath.

“Brutal,” “savage,” and “barbaric” as Hamas’s October 7 attack may have been, it was in essence a DIY assault from paragliders, small boats, bulldozers, pickup trucks, and motorbikes. It revealed serious failures in Israel’s security (which Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to have investigated until after the “war” is over) but it hardly adds up to what Israel’s supporters have loudly proclaimed to be an existential threat.

Hamas is even less of a threat now, when Israel claims to have eliminated at least 20,000 of its fighters and destroyed its command structure. Much as it might wish to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and reestablish Islamic domination from the river to the sea, Hamas doesn’t remotely have the capacity to do so—either now, or in any foreseeable future.

At this point it must be asked—as it should have been long, long ago—if this has long ceased to be (and possibly never was) a war of self-defense, why is Israel still fighting?

It’s not a “humanitarian crisis,” it’s a genocide

For whatever reasons—geopolitics, economics, guilt at turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, Islamophobia, racism—for the last two years Western politicians, with the overwhelming support of the mainstream media, have supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and done their best to brand all opposition as “antisemitism.”

Not only have they provided Israel with arms and diplomatic cover at the UN and elsewhere, frustrating any coordinated international response to impose a ceasefire. They have repeatedly ignored orders from and sought to discredit the world’s two highest courts, the ICJ and the ICC. They have eroded their citizens’ civil liberties by criminalizing pro-Palestinian actions and vilifying pro-Palestinian speech.

They have gaslit their populations, requiring us to believe that when Israel destroys a hospital or a school in Gaza it is because Hamas has a tunnel underneath it; that the doctors, nurses, aid workers, and journalists it has killed, often with their whole families, are all Hamas operatives; and that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”

Perhaps most insidiously—and here Islamophobia and racism do work their evil—they have tried to convince us that when Hamas commits war crimes they are the result of primitive, barbaric, fanatical religious hatred, but when Israel commits the same crimes on a massively greater scale, it is defending not only itself but “Western civilization.”

I predict that in the coming days and weeks we will see plenty of blame for the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza being laid at the door of Benjamin Netanyahu, who will seemingly do anything to survive in office (and keep out of jail). But the problems go far deeper than Bibi appeasing his extremist right-wing ministers to keep his coalition intact and his government in power.

The West may now be finally waking up to the full enormity of the horrors Israel has inflicted in Gaza. It needs also to wake up to the evils it has nurtured not just for the last two years, but for over a century, under the banner of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” It is time we started listening to Palestinian voices, while there are still Palestinians left alive to speak truth to power.

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“To articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Theses on the Philosophy of History—Walter Benjamin’s last text

Hope Obscured. Photo taken at Tate Modern, London, December 2019. Copyright Derek Sayer 2023.

I was one of those writers who were honored at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards ceremony in Toronto last Sunday. What should have been a joyous celebratory occasion was inevitably overshadowed by the horrific events unleashed by Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli civilians on October 7—which, let me be clear, I utterly and unreservedly condemn. After much soul-searching the organizers decided the ceremony should go ahead, as a gesture of affirmation of faith in the redemptive power of culture. I think this decision was the correct one even if the audience was much smaller than usual and there was a heavy security presence at the door.

Among those I talked with, there was no politicking but just profound sorrow, grief, and apprehension—above all fear for the fate of civilians, especially the children, who were already paying the price of politicians’ belligerence and intransigence on both sides. Fear, also, for the future, both immediate and longterm.

The proceedings began with a recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. It put me in mind of two other recitations of the same prayer, which I had recounted in the book for which I received the award, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History.

The first recitation took place in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp following one of the most infamous Nazi reprisals of World War II. In retaliation for the Prague assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (and architect of the Final Solution), by Czechoslovak paratroopers based in Britain, on 10 June 1942 German security forces sealed off the little village of Lidice, where they shot 173 adult males and deported 205 women to concentration camps. Ninety-eight children were taken to be “appropriately raised,” of whom 81 were subsequently murdered in the gas vans at Chelmno. None of the victims had played any part whatsoever in Heydrich’s assassination, though some had relatives fighting for the Czechoslovak resistance abroad. It was a collective punishment, of the sort the 1949 Geneva Convention (4) specifically outlawed (article 33) in the hope of preventing such atrocities ever happening again.

Following the shootings,

The troops doused the buildings with gasoline and set them on fire. Thirty Jewish prisoners were trucked in from Terezín. When they arrived in the burning village at 4:00 in the afternoon they were given pickaxes, shovels, 350 grams of bread, and 30 grams of margarine; taken to the place where the men’s bodies were heaped up; and told to dig a mass grave twelve meters long, nine meters wide, and three meters deep by six the next morning “or else they can quietly lay down with the others.” One of them, the journalist and broadcaster František R. Kraus, wrote a powerful account of his experience soon after the war ended. It was a Czech Jew who sang a requiem over the bodies of Lidice’s Christian dead:

“Suddenly the church breaks apart: a new metallic thundering breaks up the walls, the ringing of the bells resounds clearly, there is a thumping in the tower, flames roar up again, then suddenly the ringing stops, torn away from the roof the bell hurtles down, breaks through the wooden floor and ends with huge clattering on the stone floor, white smoke rolls out of the fallen nave. . . . Next to me stands Karl Langendorf, young, beautiful, the composer, he stands there like a marble statue, his mouth wide open, he raises and lowers his fists. . . . Then low singing sounds from his lips, it is Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem . . . Requiem aeternam dona eis domine et lux perpetua luceat eis [Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them] . . . Dies irae, dies illa [Day of wrath, that day] . . . a windy morning rises from the blood-drenched east and Karl Langendorf sings Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus . . . Dominus Deus Sabaoth [Holy, holy, holy . . . Lord God of the Sabbath] . . . bricks drop onto the empty church benches, jump high again and dance to and fro as if it were a festive church holiday, then the beams clatter down and break the roof, walls and vaultings shake, pictures of saints in gold frames fall from the old walls, and thunder to the ground . . . mass is being celebrated for the last time here.”

The grave diggers arrived back in Terezín to find candles burning at the heads of their bunks, “just as at that time, when the first of our comrades were hanged. Comrades are singing the monotonous melody of the Kadish [sic], stop, smother their joy.” “I sink back. My eyes pass over the barred windows. Outside the night is of the deepest black. And beneath me, on the lower bunk, Karl Langendorf sings quietly: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. . . .’ Then he adds in a low voice: ‘But Lidice is in Europe!’ Kraus survived the war to write one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, titled Plyn, plyn . . . , pak oheň: vězeň č. B 11632 (Gas, gas . . . , then fire: Prisoner #B 11632), published in Havlíčkův Brod in 1945. Karel Langendorf, as he is named in Czech sources, was transported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. He did not survive.

Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 180–2

The second recitation of the Kaddish was by the great Prague Jewish reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, who spent most of World War II as a refugee in Mexico. It was in Mexico City that he learned of the murder of two of his brothers in the Holocaust.

“In Mexico Kisch suffered horribly from the fact that Prague was occupied,” Lenka [Reinerová, another Prague Jewish writer and Kisch’s fellow refugee in Mexico City] told a Czech TV interviewer in 2001. “When we were alone, Egon spoke in Czech with me in Mexico—out of nostalgia and homesickness.”

Nostalgia and homesickness did not blunt the raging reporter’s insatiable curiosity. Egon’s Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Discoveries in Mexico, 1945) contained twenty-four essays on a wide range of topics, including sports among the ancient Maya, how to make tortillas, the hallucinogenic properties of peyote, and the cultural history of the cactus. He attends a Sabbath service in the village of Venta Prieta, whose thirty-seven Jewish inhabitants, “in no way distinguishable from other Indians or Mestizos,” were descended from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition in the sixteenth century.

“My father and mother were born in Prague, lived there, and are buried there. It never could have occurred to them that one day one of their sons would be reciting the prayer for the dead for them amid a group of Indians, in the shadow of the silver-laden mountains of Pachuca. My parents, who lived their entire lives in the Bear House of Prague’s Old Town, never dreamt that their sons would sometime be driven out of the Bear House, one of them to Mexico, another to India, and the two who were unable to escape the Hitler terror, to unknown places of unimaginable horror. My thoughts roamed farther—to relatives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies, sacrifices of Hitler, all entitled to be remembered in the prayer for the dead.”

quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 279–80.

Here, for the record, is the speech I gave at the Canadian Jewish Awards ceremony on Sunday. I shortened it a little in the delivery—this is the fuller text I had prepared in advance. Its resonances will, I hope, be obvious.

I am greatly honored to receive the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship, and would like to thank all those involved—especially the jury, upon whom I inflicted a very much longer book than I sat down to write in the fall of 2018.  I am particularly gratified for my work to be recognized in this way when I am not Jewish and Postcards from Absurdistan does not pretend to be a work of Jewish history.  But one cannot write the history of Prague without foregrounding the part played by Jews in that history—for over a thousand years—and it means a lot to me that the jury thinks I have done them justice. 

Postcards from Absurdistan is the final volume in a trilogy of books which take Prague as an alternative vantage-point on modernity.  In his unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, the great German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin nominated Paris, the so-called “city of lights,” as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and set out to discover “the prehistory of modernity” in the “dreamworlds” incarnated in its material fabric and cultural products.  I thought Prague might be treated analogously, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the very much darker twentieth century.  

My subtitle  “Prague at the End of History“ is deliberately ironic, because history was declared at an end no fewer than three times during Bohemia’s turbulent twentieth century: by the Nazis, when they incorporated Prague into their ‘thousand-year Reich’ in March 1939; by the communists, who proclaimed socialism ‘achieved’ in 1960; and by many Western commentators, who were confident that the 1989 revolutions in Europe heralded (in Francis Fukuyama’s words) ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’  

Each was the illusion of its epoch. Each proved spectacularly wrong.  Prague is a place where modernist phantasmagoria of history-as-progress have repeatedly unraveled.  The period covered in Postcards, from the Munich Agreement to the fall of communism, were the years of peak unraveling.

At a time in which democracy is once again under global assault, the dark half-century of Prague’s modernity considered in Postcards holds up a disturbing mirror to our own historical crossroads.

Postcards from Absurdistan is not a conventional academic history book, but a tapestry woven out of a multitude of fragments—a “collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections,” as the jury generously describes them.  Like Benjamin, “I want to allow “the rags, the refuse” that gets lost in the grander narratives of modernity, to “come into their own.”   These fragments are intended to function as dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s term, in which “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”

As well as providing a model (The Arcades Project) and a method (literary montage), Walter Benjamin makes a brief appearance in the book.  This particular passage takes off from the First International Exhibition of Caricatures and Humor, a deliberate antifascist provocation that took place at the Prague gallery of the Mánes Artists’ Society in the spring of 1934,. The exhibition was organized by one of the main characters in my story, the cartoonist, writer, avant-garde artist, anti-fascist activist and sometime Czechoslovak ambassador to France, Adolf Hoffmeister.

At this point I read the following extract from Postcards from Absurdistan:

The exhibition drew protests from the German, Austrian, Italian, and Polish governments, not to mention that eternal censor of social morality the Vatican. The Czechoslovak government ordered several works to be removed; the ensuing brouhaha ensured that the show had sixty thousand visitors by the time it closed. All the leading Czech caricaturists of the time were represented. The most eminent foreign participants were George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Erich Godal. By then, Grosz was already in America, and Dix had been fired from his position at the Dresden Academy (he would later be forbidden to paint anything but landscapes). Heartfield, Heine, and Godal had arrived in Prague as refugees in 1933.

Heartfield and Heine moved on again in 1938—Heartfield to England (where he was soon interned on the Isle of Man) and Heine to Oslo and then (in 1942) Stockholm. Godal made it to the United States, where he became a political cartoonist for Ken magazine and the New York newspaper PM. His widowed mother Anna Marien-Goldbaum, whom Godal had been forced to leave behind, was less fortunate. Finally given an exit visa from Germany in 1939, she was one of more than nine hundred Jewish passengers on the MS St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg to Havana on 13 May. The ship was turned away from Cuba and was then refused permission to dock in the United States (by president Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Canada (by prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King). A US State Department telegram sent while the ship was close enough to the coast to see the lights of Miami stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”  The New York Daily Mirror published two letters “from an aged mother on the wandering steamship to her son, an artist, in New York” on 6 June 1939. “It is so strange how near, and yet how much cut off we really are,” Mrs. Goldbaum wrote. The St. Louis turned back to Europe the same day. Anna Goldbaum was marooned in Belgium. She was deported to the death camps within a year.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. As the Western world faced another “refugee crisis” in 2015, the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole remembered Walter Benjamin—“not so much Benjamin the scholar of surrealism as Benjamin the despairing refugee. The Benjamin who fled, like millions of others, for fear of his life”—who committed suicide in 1940 in the little town of Port Bou on the Franco-Spanish border rather than be sent back to occupied France. “The receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay . . . include[d] five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress.” “The itemization reminds me of two things,” writes Cole. “Less, of the usual little list of what I drank or ate (mineral water, Toblerone), what I spent, when I check out of these frequent hotels of my life. More, of the little plastic bags I saw at the public morgue in Tucson, containing the last few personal effects of unknown travelers recovered from the Sonora desert in Arizona. A few dollars, a few pesos, photograph of a family, a mother’s passport to remember her by.” These are the rags and the refuse, the dialectical images that condense the terrible recurrences of the past in the present, blowing Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria of history” to smithereens. 

“Every refugee is alike, but each generation fails refugees in its own special way,” explains Teju Cole.

Right now the world is drowning in ancient memories—pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, the Nakba—whose contemporary mobilization is fueling hatred on both sides. I do not suggest that we can or should forget—any of the injustices, on either side. Those who have committed atrocities should be brought to account. But the one thing that needs to be remembered amid the fog and fury of war, and not just in the Middle East, is our common humanity. Otherwise what hope is there for any of us?

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

from the Kaddish, as translated at myjewishlearning.com

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I am delighted, as well as greatly honored, to learn that my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History has won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship. The jury citation is as follows:

Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (Princeton University Press), by Derek Sayer, is a kaleidoscopic romp across five decades of intellectual, artistic, cultural, and political foment and creativity in Prague, from the Nazi Anschluss to the collapse of communism. Brilliant and addictively readable, Postcards from Absurdistan highlights the influences and contributions of Czech Jews on cultural and sociopolitical Prague. Franz Kafka, one of the best-known Jewish denizens of Prague, sets the tone through the often surreal world he depicts. The book offers a magnificent and expansive collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections on Prague’s cultural elites, even as the geographic boundaries of the city itself cannot contain them. The Jewishness of these currents is steadily woven and subtly explored throughout the book. Postcards from Absurdistan represents the crowning achievement of Professor Sayer’s prodigious scholarship on Czech modernity.

A press release containing more information about the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, detailing the composition of the jury and this year’s winners in other categories (which include the distinguished architect Moshe Safdie’s autobiography If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture), can be found here.

Aleš Veselý, Gate of the Hereafter (Brána nenávratna, literally Gate of No Return). Holocaust memorial outside Bubny Station, Prague, installed 2015. Photo Derek Sayer.

It was from Bubny station that 50,000 Czech Jews were transported to concentration camps during the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The memorial was intended “to remember not only the victims of deportation, but to also focus on the stigma of those who organized the Final Solution and to remember the role of the passive silent majority that did nothing to stop them” as well as to “call attention to the face of prejudice, xenophobia, racial emnity, and discrimination on the basis of ‘otherness’ in the world today” (Memorial of Silence website, as quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, p. 193).

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I was invited by the Shepherd website to provide a list of five favorite books in any category. I chose “imaginative histories,” a concept coined by the documentary filmmaker, founder of the pioneering social research outfit Mass–Observation, and leading member of the British surrealist group Humphrey Jennings. My five recommendations may be found here.

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I have recently published an article in Britské listy in a series in which historians reflect on the pros and cons of researching on the history of a country that is not their own. Its organizer Muriel Blaive described the aim of the series as follows:

In May 2021, Jill Massino and I organized a roundtable at the annual congress of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York. It was entitled The Benefits and Burdens of the “Invisible Suitcase”: Writing Contemporary History as an Outsider.

Some of the greatest historians of the contemporary period are “outsiders” to their country of study, for instance Robert Paxton and Christopher Browning in the case of France and Germany during the Second World War. Outsider perspectives enhance, complement, and complicate existing narratives, and, as such, help to produce a more nuanced and complex portrait of the past. Yet our collective experience is that Western historians of communism in Central Europe struggle to establish their legitimacy among societies that remain attached to an ethnonationalist definition of identity. Also, many people believe that only contemporary witnesses are entitled to speak about contemporary history. This roundtable offered the cumulated experience of four scholars: Marci Shore, Jill Massino, Jan Čulík, and Muriel Blaive. We reflected on the way in which our status has affected our research, our writing, and our reception. As a result, our roundtable also offered insight into the societies we are studying and into the stakes involved in the production of history.

Britské listy has kindly offered us to publish our texts, as well as a few others on the part of colleagues who attended the panel and participated in a very lively discussion. 

My contribution began with reflections on a conversation in a Prague pub with a Czech colleague thirty years ago on a 1949 set of Czechoslovak postage stamps that he found absolutely unremarkable and I found utterly surreal. I titled the article “The Density of Unexpected Encounters.”

English text here.

Czech text here.

Earlier contributions were Marci Shore’s “Ostranenie, or the Epistemological Advantages—and Disadvantages—of Marginality,” and Anna Müller and Jadwiga Biskupska’s “Objectivity and the Polish Question: Two Answers.”

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Christian Michelides, Stolperstein für Milena Jesenska, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Guardian did not think the following letter, responding to a column by the self-proclaimed feminist Zoe Williams, worth publishing. The “terrible gift” to which Williams refers was a book that she identifies as Kafka’s Milena: Life of Milena Jesenská. No such book exists: she might be referring to Jesenská’s daughter Jana Černá’s Kafka’s Milena (which has no subtitle) or Mary Hockaday’s biography Kafka, Love and Courage: The Life of Milena Jesenská. It probably doesn’t matter, since Williams considered her father’s gift an insult and didn’t bother to read the book.

19 December 2022

Dear Editor,

I take issue with Zoe Williams’s article “I unwrapped Dad’s terrible gift …” (December 19).  Humour is humour, but Milena Jesenská deserves better than to be ridiculed as “KAFKA’S FUCKING MUSE” (sic). Jesenská was a pioneering advocate of women’s emancipation, who as an independent journalist and translator practiced what she preached.

For the record: “Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, five years before Franz and Milena first corresponded in connection with her translating his work into Czech.  Their love affair was almost entirely epistolary, lasted less than a year, and was likely not consummated.  Jesenská was then in her early twenties.  She had a life before, after, and beyond Kafka. 

She went on to became one of Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished journalists, whose reportage on events in Central Europe in the 1930s (the rise of Nazism, the Vienna Anschluss, persecution of Jews, the Munich Agreement, the invasion of Czechoslovakia) is of lasting value to historians.  Her writings on refugees are especially moving and have lost none of their pertinence today.  

Milena was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities in November 1939 and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1944.  In 1995 the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem listed her as Righteous among the Nations—that is, “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

Perhaps Williams should open that “terrible gift.”  Better yet, she could dip into Kathleen Hayes’s excellent selections in The Journalism of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.  Zoe’s Dad was doing her a favour. What better role model could a young, female Guardian journalist ask for?

Sincerely,

Derek Sayer

Professor Emeritus

University of Alberta

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For Zeese

My partner Yoke-Sum challenged me to play the 10 X 10 Facebook game.  The idea is to post an album every day for ten successive days that had significance in your life, with or without a gloss explaining why.  Not at all the same thing at all as your top 10 albums, musically speaking.  As often happens with my writing, the posts took on a life of their own, gradually feeling their way into a connected if not always coherent narrative of love and loss.   My 10 X 10 is about music that has mattered to me, but—it turns out—it’s a lament for an America that mattered to me too.  

#1 of 10 X 10 Diana Ross and the Supremes: The No. 1s

My father could do without music. My mother, eleven years younger and married at 18, always had the radio on. The old man would always switch it off. Mum owned a small collection of LP records that included popular classics (I can still hear Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony and Romeo and Juliet) and big band jazz (Duke Ellington) as well as what would nowadays be called “easy listening”—Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Matt Monro’s Blue and Sentimental.

I must have been seven or eight when my Auntie Connie asked me if I liked Elvis and I had no idea who or what she was talking about.  I soon got a musical education.  I sang in Rochester Cathedral choir every day from the age of eight to thirteen.  I was better acquainted with Purcell, Tallis, Byrd, and Palestrina than Lonnie Donegan, Marty Wilde, and Tommy Steele.

The first rock album I can recall listening to in its entirety was With The Beatles.  My parents taped it for my 13th birthday present in the annus mirabilis 1963, the year, according to Philip Larkin, when sexual intercourse began.  A month earlier the Daily Mirror had proclaimed “BEATLEMANIA! It’s happening everywhere… even in sedate Cheltenham.”  I wasn’t overly thrilled with my present. Much as the 1980s would later, Beatlemania had passed me by.

It was the dying days of empire, and Two-Way Family Favourites, the immensely popular BBC Light Programme Sunday lunchtime show for British forces abroad (Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya) seemed to play nothing but All My Loving and PS I Love You.  The musicians’ union was powerful in those days and Family Favourites was one of the few shows that played records, as distinct from broadcasting live performances, at all.  Over the next few months I got hooked on the madness from the Mersey like everyone else but my liking for the Beatles didn’t last. They were always too cute, somehow.

My voice broke and my world broadened.  Back then there was no commercial radio in the UK and the BBC didn’t cater to teenage longings.  I started listening to Radio Luxemburg’s top thirty on my first transistor radio, under the sheets, the crackly signal fading in and out.  In March 1964 pirate Radio Caroline started broadcasting from a ship off the Essex coasts and I became an avid fan. Later there was Radio London and John Peel’s Perfumed Garden.

At thirteen albums were out of my price range.  The first single I bought with saved-up pocket money was The Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go? which reached #3 on the UK chart in June 1964.  My first EP, a couple months later, was the Rolling Stones’ Five by Five.  Their covers of Wilson Pickett’s “If You Need Me” and Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” were revelatory.  Like those other North Kent boys Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who came from Dartford, three stops down the line, I was falling in love with an America that was only partly imagined.

I bought the Supremes’ Twenty Golden Greats (1977) on a nostalgic whim sometime around 1980.  Thrown in the suitcase as an afterthought, the cassette accompanied me for the second of three annual three-month stints teaching at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, in 1982.  I listened to it incessantly instead of the tapes of favorite operatic arias I’d lovingly made in anticipation of solitary evenings by the Indian Ocean.

The No. 1s (2003) is an even better anthology of the procession of monumental chart-toppers that throbbed, cooed, and moaned their way through my small town English adolescence, because it has a sprinkling of Miss Ross’s later solo recordings like the incomparable Touch Me in the Morning and Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To?).

No I don’t and likely never did, but Motown, R & B, and that sweet soul music are as much a part of where I came from as Pete Docherty’s gin in teacups and leaves on the lawn.

#2 of 10 X 10 Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde

I loved the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in 1961, for both the accuracy and the affection with which it skewered the Greenwich Village folk scene.  It hit me in a tender place.

I knew most every word of every song, from Dave Van Ronk’s “traditional” Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song), Brendan Behan’s Auld Triangle, and Tom Paxton’s Last Thing on My Mind to Ewan MacColl’s (bonnie) Shoals of Herring.  T-Bone Burnett, who knows a thing or two about the history of music, American and otherwise, did the soundtrack.

In 1964 or 1965, in search of a room of her own, my mother started hanging out at the Medway Folk Club, which had weekly gigs on Wednesday nights in the upstairs room of a pub by Rochester Bridge.  She started taking me with her, I guess, when I was 14 or 15. The club was hosted by our local Peter Paul and Mary the Medway Folk Trio and the evening always warmed up with a few performances from the floor.  Hughie the docker was a favorite with his Irish rebel songs, though I did witness him once give a rousing rendition of the Ulster Loyalist anthem The Sash My Father Wore.

I got to see Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, Bert Jansch, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.  I watched Arlo Guthrie perform Alice’s Restaurant before it was released on his debut disk in 1967. Mum brought ramblin’ boy Tom Paxton and the English folkies’ darling Martin Carthy (another one-time chorister, at the Queen’s Chapel of The Savoy) home for drinks.  Dad didn’t approve.  By then they were well on their way to divorce but Mum stood by her man until her last child had left home.  Then she took off with her flying doctor lover to Australia.

I never saw Mr Dylan live until the 1969 Isle of Wight festival, his “comeback” show with the Band after his motorcycle accident.  But I sure knew his songs, every word of every album, back in the day.  Mum had Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are a-Changin’.  Her favorite songs were Corinna, Corinna and Boots of Spanish Leather.  I somehow acquired Another Side and Bringing It All Back Home.  Kids at school thought I was crazy.  Guy couldn’t sing.

Inside Llewyn Davis ends ominously, with Bob arriving in the Village and performing Farewell, a scarcely concealed and never acknowledged rip-off of the old British folk ballad The Leaving of Liverpool.  Love and theft.  Such is the “folk” process.  Within a few years Dylan had killed the thing he loved.  The coup de grâce, as Griel Marcus has written, was likely that opening snare drum shot on Like a Rolling Stone.

The first LP I paid for with money I earned was Blonde on Blonde.  It was the summer of 1966.  I was 15.  I bought the album the week it came out in the UK with half my first pay packet from a dirty summer job in a barge yard in Strood emptying bilges, cleaning off barnacles with pneumatic hammers, and painting hulls with a protective primer of red lead.  Back then the boys were paid half a man’s wage for the exact same work.

Mum didn’t much like Blonde on Blonde.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  It was not just the cascading poetry of Visions of Johanna (lights flicker from the opposite loft/in this room the heat pipes just cough/the country music station plays soft/but there’s nothing really nothing to turn off) or Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands (with your mercury mouth in the missionary times/and your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes/and your silver cross, and your voice like chimes/how do they think could bury you?)

It was that thin wild mercury sound.  The long loping guitar line on I Want You, the hard driving rock of Absolutely Sweet Marie and Memphis Blues Again.

Dylan had gone electric.

#3 of 10 X 10 Kronos Quartet: Released 1985-1995

The first thing wrong was the number of pickup trucks in the parkade, the second the oversized lava lamps lining the stage, the third the fact that there wasn’t an empty seat in the house. This was Edmonton, Alberta, and we were expecting the Kronos Quartet.  Out came Pablo with his guitar slung over his shoulder.  The audience went wild.  We slunk out after the first number, distinctly out of place.

I think this happened in February 2003 because Yoke-Sum photoshopped George W. Bush’s face on a Pablo poster for the Canada-wide protests against the US invasion of Iraq the following weekend.  We were among 8000 who marched in Edmonton.  It was the first demo I had been on since my student days.

When we finally saw Kronos they were incandescent—supremely hip, highly theatrical, and the antithesis of everything conjured up by the words chamber music and string quartet.  But why?  I remember the devastating use of string sections in some of my other favorite albums, like Alejandro Escovedo’s Bourbonitis Blues or Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, recorded live with bass, drums, and three manic fiddles in a small club in Melbourne, Australia in one November day in 2007.

The ages of 15 to 17 were a fluid time when things were not so much taking shape as constantly kaleidoscoping, falling in and out of place. Not unlike 48-52, the age I was when I saw Kronos.  My later teens were less a work in progress than an experiment in trying on selfs, aided and abetted by the Beats, the Penguin Modern European Poets (Seferis, Prévert, Apollinaire) and Albert Camus (The Fall) among many others. An imagined Paris joined my imagined America.  It was all so various, so beautiful, so new.

I couldn’t wait to leave home.  But for the time being I had to content myself with a small band of friends united by our disdain for the provincialism of the Medway Towns and the jockstrap-and-Sandhurst team spirit our minor public school was trying to beat into us.  (Lindsay Anderson’s film If needs to be seen as a masterful documentary.)  Later, there were girlfriends.  Marion, with whom I went steady for a year in the time of the folk club, was the daughter of a teacher at the local art school.  His abstract paintings filled their house.  She had a thing for Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Beethoven.

Music was a big part of the rebellion.  My closest friend Peter Brewis was always bottom of the class but made it to the Royal College of Music and never looked back.  (Check him out on Wikipedia.)  It was Pete who introduced me to surrealism, Bartok string quartets, and Cathy Barberian singing Luciano Berio’s mindblowing Sequenza III for female voice.

What is interesting about this period, in retrospect, is that our musical tastes were so much more catholic than those I encountered at university a couple years later.  All the cool Essex students had all the same albums—Songs of Leonard Cohen, Hendrix, the Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and if you were *really* cool The Velvet Underground and Nico or Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats.  Not to mention the inevitable Beatles, who had by now transformed themselves from family favorites into New Age gurus.

We now have at least a dozen Kronos albums on our shelves, but the one that introduced me to their astonishingly wide-ranging art was the sampler Released 1985-1995, which includes the haunting first movement of Steve Reich’s Different Trains and the pulsating third movement of Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5.  Yoke-Sum has told the story of our new red Audi A4 and our mad rush to see Philip live in Calgary in her own 10 X 10.

Every track points somewhere else.  But momentarily, everything comes together in the glorious discords of Kronos’s 1995 rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

Footnote.  Yoke-Sum tells me I’ve mixed up two events at the Winspear Centre.  The Pablo fiasco did happen, but it was not the Kronos Quartet we were expecting to see.  We saw Kronos earlier—possibly on February 8, 1999, when (a Google search reveals) they opened the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music.  She adds that the tickets cost us ten bucks each.  The ESO were selling them off cheap at the university because they didn’t want to be embarrassed by an empty house.

#4 of 10 X 10  Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

I first got into modern jazz (as it was then known) around age 15, when I struck up a brief friendship with Tilly Haines, a nerdish boy in the year above me who was a member of the school jazz club Emanon.  (Tilly was a nickname, I have no idea what his real name was.)  Emanon—No Name spelled backwards—was run by the young history master Mr Humphries, who was a very cool cat, at least in our eyes.  He had a pretty young wife and two long rows of jazz LPs in the stereo console underneath the turntable.

The name Emanon was a dig at the very select intellectual discussion group Eranos run by the prickly old English master Mr Newman, which took its moniker from the ancient Greek word for a pot-luck dinner (ἔρανος).  The German sociologist Max Weber belonged to a Heidelberg Eranos at the beginning of the last century.  Weber’s biographer Joakim Radkau tells us that “this private gathering of men often became really boisterous and ‘all too male.'”  The same might be said of my schooldays.

I felt honored when I was invited to join Emanon, a privilege normally reserved for sixth-formers.  Gatherings took place after school in the early evening in the living room of Mr and Mrs Humphries’s lodgings in School House (it was a boarding school, though I was a day-boy).  Mr Humphries instructed us in the distinctions between bop, post-bop and modal jazz.  Free jazz hadn’t yet crossed his radar.  Mrs Humphries served tea.

Mr Humphries never lent out his records but Tilly Haines did.  I guarded them with my life.  I felt so special catching the bus home from school clutching a Monk, or Mingus, or Miles LP under my arm.

Tilly lent me Birth of the Cool.  The album is a 1957 compilation of tracks recorded by the Miles Davis nonet during three sessions in 1949-50, after Miles split from Charlie Parker.   The nonet was a larger group than Miles would use for most of the fifties and sixties—comprising trumpet, two saxophones, trombone, tuba, and French horn in addition to the rhythm section—and the compositions, as many critics noted at the time, were often closer to Ravel and Debussy than to bebop.  This was the first of Miles’s collaborations with Gil Evans.  Later they would produce Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and the sublime Sketches of Spain.

I loved the rich colors of the horns.  I loved the mysterious track titles: Jeru, Venus de Milo, Moon Dreams, Rouge.  But most of all, I suspect, I was in love with the idea of the cool.

The first jazz record I owned was Kind of Blue, picked up secondhand in a Maidstone flea market.  It has never been out of my collection since, though I must have gone through at least four copies in vinyl alone by now.  Miles was an essential part of my soundtrack to university (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Live at the Fillmore) whatever the other kids were listening to.

Still is.  As our standard poodle Luci slows into a comfortable old age she has developed this evening ritual.  She snoozes, waiting for us to finish eating dinner.  As the cutlery are put down on the plate she wakes, gets up from the floor, stretches.  I take her for her last walk of the day, just around the block.  On her return she sits down by the stereo, looking at me expectantly.  I put on a record.  She settles down on the sofa, puts her head between her paws and drifts off to sleep.

Occasionally I get to play something else, but nine times out of ten Luci’s lullaby is the sweet sounds of Miles.

#5 of 10 X 10  Begum Akhtar: Thumrees and Dadras

I recently received an invitation to a 50th anniversary reunion “for those who were at Essex University during the Academic Years 1967/8 and 1968/9 and who considered it to have been a positive experience worth celebrating.”  The website is full of posters of student protests, mostly against the Vietnam War.  I have a vivid memory of a long-haired American exchange student whose name I’ve forgotten excitedly exclaiming “It’s a call to arms!” as the Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man blared from the juke-box.

It was me who came up with the idea for the “Revolutionary Festival” that features in Jean-Luc Godard’s film British Sounds, aka See You at Mao, which (the website says) started “with car-burning in the square.”  It was a bitterly cold day and we had set up a welcoming desk for the comrades on top of the ice of the frozen fountain in Square 4.

I was 17 when I went to university, one of a handful of students who had our photos posted behind the bar because we were still too young to drink.  My first year was heavy on the drugs and rock and roll but light on the sex.  I’m not surprised the girls kept their distance.  I was arrogant, pugnacious, and hopelessly immature.  I scraped through my end-of-year exams and was persuaded to take a year out for my own good.

I spent the summer of 69 in a sublet slum on Kingsland Road in Dalston.  My favorite album of the time was Ornette Coleman’s New York Is Now!  It went supremely well with dope.  A brief and passionate affair with a visiting Indian girl I met in Westbourne Park led to a flight to Bombay in December and a two-day train ride to Delhi.  The relationship didn’t last, though we parted good friends.  But my four months in India and the long road back (Lahore, Peshawar, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mashhad, Tehran, Tabriz, Erzurum, Ankara, Istanbul) left a lasting imprint.

I tried to write about it in my book Going Down for Air, a text from another time when the pieces were kaleidoscoping and being rearranged.

At some time during those first weeks [in India] it hits me that nothing in my head has remotely equipped me to deal with the realities I am encountering.  Least of all anything I have learned in my first year at university.  My concepts are irrelevant, my images awry. Words lose their grip. The quartertones in an old woman’s voice, quavering to a harmonium in a language I don’t understand, move me inexpressibly.  A sitarist picks up the refrain of Colonel Bogey from a car horn in the street outside, weaves it into his raga, and my world—First World, Second World, Third World—unravels.

The old woman whom I was lucky enough to hear perform in Delhi (she died in 1974) was one of India’s most distinguished classical singers, Begum Akhtar.  Back in the UK I chanced upon one of her records.  I bought it but seldom listened to it.  It didn’t feel right.  The record finally perished in the summer of 1997 when the basement flooded on my acreage in Coronado, Alberta.  I haven’t tried to replace it.

Every now and again I hear that voice in my head, coming out of nowhere—a reminder that there are always more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.  You could call it my very own affective turn.

#6 of 10 X 10 Maggie Teyte: Mélodies Françaises/French Songs

The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street came out in May 1972, three months after I got married and a month before my final exams.  After that things could only go downhill.  The last decent Stones album was 1978’s Some Girls.  The next year Bob Dylan found Jesus.

Maybe it was the music.  Maybe it was me, settling into the comfortable ruts of marriage and career.  Either way I’m hard put to find many albums that really mattered to me in these years.  Bowie was clever but left me cold.  I had a guilty liking for Abba, which wasn’t just to do with Agnetha and Anni-Frid pirouetting in their miniskirts on an Australian stage.  Punk and reggae briefly excited me (White Man in Hammersmith Palais).  Born to Run flitted across my horizon, but it would be a long while before I properly appreciated Springsteen—or much else in popular music.  The train got diverted onto another track.

We moved to Glasgow in 1978 for my first academic job.  My wife got us a subscription to the Scottish Opera.  My first performance (Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra) had me hooked.   I saw most every production at the Theatre Royal over the next eight years, including their punk Rigoletto (Norma Burrowes sung a fabulous Gilda) and pathbreaking Janáček cycle with the Welsh National Opera.  Rigoletto was like Dylan’s 1966 English concerts.  Half the audience booed while the rest of us stood and cheered to the rafters.

I began to hunt down historic vocal recordings going back to the turn of the century.  Over the years I amassed a huge collection.  It, too, was destroyed in the great flood of 1997, but most of the dead sopranos—always my favorites—survived.  I kept them in the living room beside the stereo.  They are with me still.

John Steane asks whether we can ever get closer to the essential sound of the human voice than the acoustic inscriptions cut by a bobbing stylus on a revolving wax platter at the turn of the twentieth century.  I don’t know.  But straining to catch every note of Nellie Melba or Amelita Galli-Curci through the surface noise, I learned how to listen to music again with a focus I had not had since my teens.

I spent an awful lot of time with the divine Claudia Muzio, the tragic Meta Seinemeyer (she died of leukemia at 33), the ever-warm and eager Lotte Lehmann.  That was how I missed the eighties.

We (me, wife, baby daughter and the dead sopranos) emigrated to Canada in November 1986.  One Edmonton winter shivering at bus stops in minus 20 temperatures was enough.  When spring came I bought a Toyota Camry and learned to drive.  The next year I started teaching in the University of Alberta’s off-campus programs to earn extra money, mostly on native reserves.   It was a three-hour drive to Hinton, a pulp mill town on the edge of the Rockies with a Greek family restaurant and a motel that sported a stripper on Friday nights.

Mademoiselle Teyte was my preferred companion on the road, her voice soaring over the snow-bound prairies as I stepped on the gas and kept an eye out for the cops.  Born in 1888 in Wolverhampton in the Black Country, Maggie Tate (as she began life) first gained fame at the Opéra-Comique in Paris as Debussy’s hand-picked successor to Mary Garden as Mélisande, a role she reprised in London under Sir Thomas Beecham in 1910.  Her recordings of French song were all made in the 1940s, when she was in her fifties.

Reviens, reviens! Ma bien-aimée!

Comme une fleur loin du soleil

La fleur de ma vie est fermée

Loin de ton sourire vermeil.

#7 of 10 X 10 Tethered Moon: Chansons d’Édith Piaf

The year 1998 will always be associated in my mind with one of Bob Dylan’s greatest and darkest albums, Time Out of Mind.  That was when I rediscovered him.  It captured my mood, thirty miles out of town in cold irons bound.

Not dark yet, but it’s getting there.  Oh and yes, To Make You Feel My Love.

The storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain’t seen nothing like me yet

Only problem was, I was married to someone else.

My marriage ended that November.  In the next eighteen months I spent more time on my own than I had since my teens.  Following in Mum’s footsteps in more ways than one, I visited her in New Zealand (where she ended up after breaking up with her flying doctor and eventually remarrying) for ten weeks in the fall of 1999.  It seemed an appropriate time to touch base again.

After Christmas back in Canada with Yoke-Sum I left for Italy to teach the winter semester at the U of A’s school in Cortona.  My own company took some getting used to.  An old Italian hill town in January and February is a bleak place to be alone.

Yoke-Sum and I had recently discovered Winter and Winter CDs.  I played one disk constantly, Tethered Moon’s Chansons d’Édith Piaf. Tethered Moon is one of the many avatars of Paul Motian, who in an earlier incarnation was Bill Evans’s drummer on Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby.  It, too, crystalized my mood.

They return once in a way to the simplest possible statement of the melody. Masabumi Kikuchi plays such passages with infinite tenderness. Everything hangs on his phrasing, his timing, the unbroken line.  Gary Peacock plucks at the strings of the heart, his bass the very soul of Le Petit Monsieur Triste.  The little sparrow, her Paris—we need no more to beam us straight back. 

But the music takes us places Piaf would never have gone too.  Kikuchi turns her tunes inside out, probing, questing, trying on textures and colors and hues.  He stumbles, loses his way, finds unexpected routes home, hums, mumbles, snarls along with his piano.  Discords snag the flow, rhythms slide and shimmer between the instruments.  Holding it all together is the flawless delicacy of Paul Motian’s drumming.  He never seems to lay down a beat, nor does he ever miss one.

I quote myself in Going Down for Air, which I wrote in Edmonton, New Zealand, and Tuscany in 1999-2000 trying to come to terms with what often seemed an irreparably fractured life—even if I was in love.  I subtitled it A Memoir in Search of a Subject.

One other musical memory stands out sharp and clear from that time.  We’re in my little black Ford Ranger pickup truck driving back to Edmonton, on the stretch of Highway 1 between Banff and Calgary.  It’s a bright blue Alberta day, where the skies go on forever.

Lucinda Williams is on the stereo, the self-titled Rough Trade album.

The night’s too long; it just drags on and on
And then there’s never enough that’s when the sun starts coming up
Don’t let go of her hand; you just might be the right man
She loves the night; she loves the night

#8 of 10 X 10   Butch Hancock: The Wind’s Dominion

Lucinda kickstarted a whole new—or better, perhaps, an old-new—infatuation with Americana, and the continent yet again opened itself up to my imagination.  After Yoke-Sum and I moved to the UK in 2004 the music took on additional freight.

At first we were seduced by the English countryside.  But before long we found ourselves missing North American landscapes—the kind of landscapes that are caught in William Eggleston and Stephen Shore’s photographs.  It wasn’t England’s pornographic prettiness I wanted but faded strip malls and back lanes lined with electricity poles, the billboards on the empty highways, the vastness of the prairie skies.

I never fitted back in the UK.  Not enough space.  I was homesick for somewhere else.

It was our Texan friend Wesley who first introduced me to the Flatlanders, back in Edmonton.  More a Legend than a Band, the 1990 reissue of their only album was called, with justice.  The group was founded in 1972 by three high school friends from Buddy Holly’s hometown Lubbock and disbanded a year later.  (They got together again in 1998 and have performed and recorded intermittently ever since.)

Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night? asks Jimmie Dale Gilmore in that inimitable sweet high tenor of his.  No I didn’t.  Dixie hadn’t yet made my bucket list.  But Lucinda, Guy Clark, and Townes van Zandt were on my case.  So were Jimbo Mathus, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the Drive-By Truckers.  I was getting there.

When an unfortunate series of events involving an Icelandic volcano and a British Airways strike conspired to prevent me from attending a conference in Quito, Ecuador in 2010 I was stuck with a ticket to Houston for which I couldn’t get reimbursed.  We decided it was time to look up Wesley, who was by then working at Texas A & M University.

We took the long route from Houston to College Station via New Orleans, Bon Temps, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin.  Next year we returned and drove out west to Marfa.  We liked Texas so much we spent the 2013-14 academic year on sabbatical in Austin.  This time we flew from London Heathrow to Atlanta, Georgia, rented an SUV, and drove across country, following a musical trail through Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta, the best part of 1000 miles.  We took in Nashville on the way back.

Wesley visited us in Austin bearing a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon, most of which we downed during a long lazy sunny afternoon listening to the wailing sax of Ornette Coleman, a good ol’ Fort Worth boy.  I played him the late Geri Allen’s sublime piano rendition of Lonely Woman (on her 1997 album with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, Études), which he hadn’t heard before.  Lest we forget, Beyoncé comes from Texas too. My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma.  Roots music.

Butch Hancock sang The Wind’s Dominion at a celebration of Austin music hosted by Alejandro Escovedo at the Moody Theater and Jimmie Dale Gilmore did a set at Lucy’s Fried Chicken during South by South West.  The voice was limpid as ever.  We’d seen Joe Ely (along with Terry Allen and Ryan Bingham, billed as Texas Troubadors) at the City Winery in New York.  But we never did see the Flatlanders play together.

Later I found a secondhand vinyl of The Wind’s Dominion LP, recorded in Austin in 1979, at Reckless Records on Berwick Street in London.

Some call it the West Texas Blonde on Blonde.  The lyrics are surreal enough (try Mario y Maria, subtitled Cryin’ Statues/Spittin’ Images).  Only Born, which clocks in at just under ten minutes, is eerily Dylanesque in voice,  phrasing, and sentiment.  But it’s not that thin wild mercury sound.  Butch is backed by harmonica, a frenetic fiddle, banjo, accordion, autoharp, mandolin, upright bass, drums, piano, trombone and acoustic, electric, bass, pedal steel, and dobro guitars.  Sounds of the heartland.

And a reminder that there have always been other Americas.  You just need to listen.

#9 of 10 X 10  Nubya Garcia: When We Are

After twelve years in the UK Yoke-Sum and I called it quits and returned to North America for good, landing in Calgary on 21 June 2016.  Two days later the Brexit referendum confirmed that Britain was no longer the kind of country we wanted to live in.

We passed through London (which is not in the UK) this April for the first time since we left, visiting family.   We had booked tickets for two shows at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club.  Ambrose Akinmusire, whose 2017 album A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard, had been on repeat on our stereo for weeks, was all we expected and more.

But 26-year-old Nubya Garcia, who composes and plays tenor sax, was something else.  This was jazz via funk, soul, calypso, grime, hip-hop and Afrobeat—though passages from her piano player Joe Armon-Jones could have come straight out of Satie or Ravel.

Though Garcia lists “Coltrane, Sonny definitely … Also Miles, McCoy, Sarah Vaughan, Billie, Alice Coltrane” at the top of her listening pile, she cut her teeth playing in “grime and garage nights in north London, dub nights across the river in south London, and … the infamous Steez performance jams” at the Fox and Firkin in Lewisham.

Nubya is one of the children of the so-called Windrush generation whose mistreatment by British immigration officials forced the recent resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd.  The hostile environment policy toward immigrants, legal and otherwise, was the brainchild of her predecessor, home counties vicar’s daughter and now Prime Minister Theresa May.

The African diaspora is at the heart of young London’s current jazz explosion, with women (saxophonist Camilla George, trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, vocalist Zara McFarlane) to the fore.  As well as leading her own quartet Garcia plays in the all-female group Nérija with trombonist Rosie Turtonhe, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey and saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi (both of whom in turn also play in the Afrobeat band Kokoroko).  Garcia was named Breakthrough Act of the Year at the 2018 Jazz FM awards.  She is rapidly making her mark on the other side of the Atlantic too, having played to rave reviews this year in New York, New Orleans, and South by South West in Austin.

Nubya performs on no less than five tracks of the acclaimed We Out Here, a compilation recorded in three days in August 2017 and released by Brownswood Recordings earlier this year featuring Shabaka Hutchings, Theon Cross, Moses Boyd, Joe Armon-Jones, and Kokoroko among others.

The sleeve notes pull no punches:

Here in Britain, where we are exceptionally adept at cultural amnesia … music reminds us of Britain’s global past, and that London has never not known migration.  With the hideous proposition of the Brexit campaign, the racism and open anti-immigrant sentiment once again garnering national populism, the ongoing migrant crisis and nearly 100 years of racist immigration laws, We Out Here is timely code for we’ve been here, we are here, because you, dearest Blighty, were there. And we’re not bloody leaving.

Nubya Garcia’s latest EP When We Are is a great sample of her work.  The cheapest copy offered on Discogs sells at 70 Euro but it can be streamed and downloaded.  The cover artwork, by the way, is by her sister.  We were lucky enough to get one of the last ten vinyls ever (unless it is re-pressed, which it should be) at her Ronnie Scott’s show, which she signed for us afterward with a promise to come to Canada soon.

I shall treasure it—not only for the exhilarating music, but as a reminder that there are other Britains, too.   And that there is so much to be gained from listening to them.

#10 of 10 X 10  The Rolling Stones: Blue and Lonesome

Grant me an old man’s frenzy/Myself must I remake, wrote William Butler Yeats in his poem An Acre of Grass.

The Japanese artist Hokusai would have understood.  He once said that “my work until 70 was not worthy of attention.  At 73, I began to understand the shapes and structures of various creatures and plants.  When I become 86 my skill will become even finer, and at 90 I understand all its secrets. By 100 would my skill reach the realm of the divine?”

I have long toyed with the idea of writing a book about old-age creativity.  Works made by experienced, practiced artists who have seen it all and are no longer too concerned about what the world thinks about them—and who, in the best cases, throw out the rule book and take risks like there’s no tomorrow.

Think late Cézanne, inventing a whole new language of cylinders, spheres, and cones, think Verdi’s late late shows Otello and Falstaff.   All of Janáček’s major operas except for Jenůfa were written after he turned 65.

Think Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series.  Listen to his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ song Hurt on American IV.  In American V, recorded a few months before his death, the Man in Black used all his artistry and all the frailty in what was left of his voice to wrench every last ounce of regret out of Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind.

Bob Dylan accomplishes something similar in his recent trilogy of Frank Sinatra covers.  Not so much raging (he did that in 2012’s Tempest) as crooning against the dying of the light, his pitch is far from perfect and the misses can be excruciating.  But the stripped-down arrangements of his longtime backing band give him an intimate stage on which to sing and he conjures new meaning out of the old warhorses, remaking them into something inimitably his own.  Like Billie Holiday and Willie Nelson he is a master of phrasing, caressing every line and word.

Neither Bob nor Billie ever had much of a voice to speak of, but there is more to singing than just making mellifluous sounds.  I’d take Maria Callas, in spectacular vocal decline in her 1961 Arias from French Opera, the voice rasping and wobbling and at times nearly breaking in its search for dramatic truth, over the vanilla beauty of a Kiri Te Kanawa anytime.  Like John Coltrane, Callas tested her instrument to the limits of expression.

Lucinda Williams passed 65 this year.  The bright vocal clarity I loved in her Rough Trade album is no more.  Too much bourbon, heartache and tequila.  Too much death.  She slurs her words as she gets older, so you really have to listen to catch the lyrics.

But her recent albums Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and The Ghosts of Highway 20 are among her best work ever, and her vocal deficiencies—if that’s what they are—are an integral element in the bluesy, swampy, down-and-dirty Louisiana mix.  She sings of the crooked racist justice that is the way we do things in West Memphis, of the angelheaded prostitutes who teach their johns how to pleasure their wives, of the cruel Alzheimer’s that robbed her of the memory of her father as it took away his beautiful mind.

It is instructive to compare Lucinda’s 2017 re-recording of the 1992 album Sweet Old World with the original.  The worn and weary old voice reveals the depths in the songs, which she doesn’t so much sing as inhabit.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Blue and Lonesome, in which the greatest rock and roll band in the world cover twelve ancient Chicago blues numbers, most of them pretty obscure.  The Rolling Stones’ best album in 40 years is a loving, respectful return to their roots, where I first heard them back in 1964 when I was a thirteen-year-old boy and they weren’t too much older.

On the platform at Dartford Station, waiting for the train from Memphis to Chicago.

June 3-12, 2018