Category: migration

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Adolf Hoffmeister on terrace of Les deux magots café, Paris, 1969. Photo by Václav Chochola, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have recently published a short essay on the eventful life of the “Czech writer, publicist, dramatist, painter, illustrator, scenographer, caricaturist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, professor, and traveler” (as he is described in the Czech Wikipedia; French Wikipedia adds “and radio commentator”) Adolf Hoffmeister (1902–1973), known to his friends as Ada.

A central character in my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, Hoffmeister wrote the libretto for Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, which was staged 55 times in the notorious Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto during 1943-4 before the composer, the set designer František Zelenka, and most of the children in the cast were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

I end the essay:

Hoffmeister died of a heart attack on July 24, 1973. His life was extraordinary, and yet it was thoroughly representative of Czechoslovakia’s twentieth century. Like countless other men and women—writers and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—his story shows why Czech dissidents sardonically baptized their country Absurdistan. Biographies like Ada’s are why Prague provides a more revealing vantage point on the modern condition than the western capitals from which we are accustomed to look out, naively equating history with progress. Things look different when viewed from Central Europe. Prague’s modernity undermines easy distinctions between east and west, good and evil, right and wrong. Here, all choices come with costs, and the lines dividing collaboration and resistance, consent and dissent, dissolve into a blur of moral uncertainties. This is a landscape painted in infinite shades of gray. When authoritarianism is in the ascendant and democracy under global assault, we cannot afford to dismiss twentieth-century Czechoslovakia as a faraway country. Prague’s modern history should sound a warning to us all.

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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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Is there some law that says the worse it gets in the world out there, the better it gets in the arts?  It was an outstanding year for music.  Highlights for me were discovering the incredible jazz+++ scene in diasporic London, as eloquent a fuck you to the white Anglo mean-mindedness of Brexit as I can imagine, and slowly excavating the assembled talents of the West Coast Get Down—which turns out to be much more than just (the phenomenal) Kamasi Washington.  It has also been a spectacular year for that peculiar category comprising stuff recorded way back when but only released for the first time this year, meaning it is not a reissue.  Most years I combine both in my top 10, but this year was so rich overall that I’ve made separate lists.

#1 Record of the Year

Janelle Monáe  Dirty Computer

The range of her imagination on this record is astonishing.  Not a weak track over 4 sides.  My favorite LP side of the year (A 2) has three very different varieties of joy: “Screwed” (featuring Zoë Kravitz), “Django Jane” (just Janelle, laying down the most kickass rap I’ve heard in 2018), “Pink” (featuring Grimes).  Warning: the download that comes with the LP beeps out all the fuck words.

The rest of the Top Ten (in alphabetical order)

Ambrose Akinmusire     Origami Harvest

The record company blurb sums it up nicely: “a surprisingly fluid study in contrasts that pits contemporary classical wilding against deconstructed hip-hop, with bursts of left-field jazz, funk, spoken word, and soul with help from the Mivos Quartet and art-rap expatriate Kool A.D. (Das Racist), along with pianist Sam Harris, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and saxophonist Walter Smith III.”  No, really, it’s a stunner.  Reminds me of the best of Uri Caine (like his Mahler recordings), which is high praise indeed.

Moses Boyd Exodus  Displaced Diaspora

Recorded in 2015, i.e., just before the contemporary London jazz scene exploded internationally, featuring Theon Cross (tuba), Nubya Garcia (bass clarinet), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), and Zara McFarlane (vocals) in addition to Moses Boyd on drums.  The Bandcamp website tags it under experimental hip hop beats jazz space music London, which seems about right.

Brandi Carlile  The Joke 

The songwriting is uniformly strong (try “The Mother”) but it’s that huge, soaring, effortless voice.  You can get lost in it.  Usually only operatic sopranos thrill me like that.

Alejandro Escovedo  The Crossing

I don’t usually go for concept albums, because usually the concept overwhelms the album.  This one is an exception.  The concept is the immigrant experience.  Escovedo seems hardly known outside Texas, where he is somewhere between a legend and a god.  A pity.  This album has huge musical variety and great emotional depth.

Nubya Garcia  When We Are (EP)

We first heard Nubya on We Out Here (see below) where she plays on five tracks, and were lucky enough to see her with her own band (Nubya on tenor sax, Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards, Daniel Casimir on double bass, Femi Coleoso on drums) at Ronnie Scott’s in London (where we also saw Ambrose Akinmusire).  She can honk squeak with the best of them, but its the unfailing warmth and luminosity of her tone that always gets to me.

Pistol Annies   Interstate Gospel

A top ten albums from me without a country offering is unthinkable but it was getting to look that way (see disappointments of the year, below) until this arrived through the mail this week.  Thank you Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angeleena Presley.

Ryan Porter  The Optimist

Recorded in Kamasi Washington’s parents’ basement in 2008-9, this triple album brings together West Coast Get Down veterans Ryan Porter (trombone), Kamasi Washington (tenor saxophone), Miles Mosley (upright bass), Cameron Graves (piano, fender rhodes), Tony Austin (drums), Jumaane Smith (trumpet), and more.  What Kamasi was before he Busby Berkeleyed it with cinematic strings and those god-awful choirs.  Great jazz.

Sons of Kemet  Your Queen Is a Reptile

Best of British for an era when the geriatric white majority is settling for blue passports to nowhere.  An angry album, and rightly so (read the sleeve notes).  Shabaka Hutchins (tenor sax), Theon Cross (tuba), and Tom Skinner + Seb Rochfort or Eddie Hicks + Moses Boyd on drums depending on the track.  Nubya Garcia on tenor sax and Congo Natty and Joshua Idehen (rap) guest.  Heady, polyrhythmic, driving stuff.  Saw them at Vancouver Jazz Festival, a riveting performance.  Luci hates it.

Various artists  We Out Here

The Brownswood compilation double-album that introduced me to the London jazz+++ scene.   If it wasn’t for Janelle Monáe this would be my undisputed #1.  These are the tracks:

A1. Maisha – Inside The Acorn
A2. Ezra Collective – Pure Shade
B1. Moses Boyd – The Balance
B2. Theon Cross – Brockley
C1. Nubya Garcia – Once
C2. Shabaka Hutchings – Black Skin, Black Masks
C3. Triforce – Walls
D1. Joe Armon-Jones – Go See
D2. Kokoroko – Abusey Junction

Nuff said.  Here is the Brownswood documentary that went with it.

Best five older recordings first issued in 2018 

#1  Miles Davis and John Coltrane  The Final Tour (The Bootleg Series, vol. 6)

Trane is incandescent, especially on CD 4.  Luci would like everyone to know that this is her favorite album of 2018 and that most of that London jazz+++ stuff is *very difficult* to doze off to.

and the rest—

Bob Dylan  More Blood, More Tracks

Charles Mingus  Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden

Thelonius Monk  Mønk

John Coltrane  Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

2018 Honorable Mentions

In most other years any of these would make it into my top ten list, but it’s 2018 so they didn’t.

Boygenius (Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus)  Boygenius (EP)

Lucy Dacus  Historian

Charles Lloyd and the Marvels + Lucinda Williams  Vanished Gardens

Maisha  There Is a Place

Mitski  Be the Cowboy

Most Played Album This Year

Nubya Garcia Nubya’s 5.  Recorded in 2017, second vinyl pressing 2018.  Her first album as leader, backed by Joe Armon-Jones / Piano, Moses Boyd / Drums, Daniel Casimir / Bass, Femi Koloeso / Drums, Sheila Maurice-Grey / Trumpet, Theon Cross / Tuba

Disappointment of the Year

A close-run thing between Kacey Musgraves Golden Hour (very clever but left me cold), Joe Armon-Jones Starting Today (love his work but somehow this offering never gelled as an album), and Kamasi Washington Heaven and Earth (too much concept, way too much choir—though as ever with him some great blowing).

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“Years ago we saw No-Man’s-Land, in a film, and because the film took place in 1918, we thought, fools that we were, that it was past history.  We went home from the cinema with a feeling of pride in the free radiant future toward which the people of today walk hand in hand.  At that time we had not yet experienced the strange twists and turns, the detours, dead ends, blind alleys, that history creates” (Milena Jesenská, “In No-Man’s-Land,” Přítomnost [The Present], 29 December 1938; translated by A. G. Brain, in Jana Černá, Kafka’s Milena, Northwestern University Press, 1993, p. 201).

Three months later Czechoslovakia was dismembered and Bohemia and Moravia invaded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and turned into a Protectorate of the Third Reich.  Milena Jesenská was arrested in November 1939.  She died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1943.

Today, almost 100 years after Czechoslovakia declared independence from Austria-Hungary and 28 years after the Velvet Revolution, Czech history veers off down another inimitably Czech country lane.

Miloš Zeman, who has warned that if the Czech Republic accepts more refugees from Syria (currently it has admitted a grand total of 12) “unfaithful women will be stoned, thieves will have their hands cut off and we will be deprived of the beauty of women, since they will be veiled” was re-elected as President of the Czech Republic.  At least the margin of victory was narrow (51.36% to Jiří Drahoš’s 48.63%) and the major cities of Prague, Brno and Plzen turned out in force for Drahoš.

Moral: history is never past.  Good thing Václav Havel appreciated the absurd.

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I’m sorry I have been off here for a year.  I have been retiring (from full-time employment at a university), traveling, writing, and moving continents (from UK to Canada, where I am reacquainting myself with real winter in Calgary, Alberta).

If there is anybody still reading this blog, I’ve just posted a piece on academia.edu (whose final version will be published next month in the Journal of Historical Sociology) on Brexit and Trump.  Please publicize if you like it.

Here is the abstract:

Following the victories of the “Brexit” camp in the UK’s 2016 referendum and Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, a new explanatory narrative rapidly established itself. According to this view, which has been widely accepted on both the political left and right, we are witnessing a popular revolt against “elites” spearheaded by white working-class “victims of globalization.” Drawing on extensive polling and census data, this paper debunks this new consensus as an artifact of post-factual politics driven by feeling rather than evidence. These were not instances of a “misshapen class struggle” that sometimes assumed racist or xenophobic forms, but centrally a race war on the non-native Other that has successfully managed to pass itself off as a revolt of the (white) deprived and dispossessed.

Here is the link:

https://www.academia.edu/31635901/White_Riot_Brexit_Trump_and_Post-Factual_Politics

 

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This is an Op-Ed piece I wrote for CEE New Perspectives, the companion blog of the academic journal New Perspectives which is published by the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague.  I reproduce it here with permission.

http://ceenewperspectives.iir.cz/2016/01/08/prejudice-hysteria-and-a-failure-of-political-leadership-of-refugees-and-november-17-in-prague/