Another chat with a foreigner

As you know, I collect foreigners. I enjoy being one in other countries, and I enjoy encountering them here. Encountering foreigners IN other countries where they TOO are foreigners - whoa.

This guy was a Turk, the chef in a restaurant called Pera Downtown that has evidently just opened in SoHo. I knew Pera UPTOWN (around the corner from Grand Central) but it's too pricey for me. Goes for the one on Sullivan Street, too. For inexpensive and delicious Turkish food, I go to Balkanika on Ninth Avenue or ... now what's it called? The place on Second Avenue and 49th?

Or I go to Turkey, but I've only done that once.

He was standing outside the restaurant about 9p.m. smoking, off work, heading home. His English was pretty good. I told him I'd loved visiting Turkey, asked him where in the country he was from. Antalya. "I hear that's lovely," I said. "No - Istanbul. That's the beautiful one. You did right." "But there's so much to see all over that country - " "Yeah, but it's crazy now. They've all gone crazy. They're killing the country."

I'd heard Turkey's was one of the world's few thriving economies, but now he got into it. "Erdogan?" he said when I asked. "He's killing people. Nobody has money any more - just the very, very rich. Nobody else. Turkey used to be a poor country, but we could go out and buy a drink. Now? I put three hundred dollars in my pocket, when I come back it's gone, I don't know where it's gone. I visited my family for three weeks - thirty thousand dollars! I don't know where it's gone. I own three houses there - it's for my kids - when they want to come here to school, I'll sell the houses. But I work hard as I can and I can't pay for them now. It's terrible there now."

"Well, I was just in Greece - "

"Greece? You know who's saving Greece? We're buying up things in Greece. We're saving them. But they hate us. It's because they just don't want to work. They sit at home and wait for a check in the mail. And then they come to America - I got Greek friends here - they work like animals here! If they worked like that at home, Greece would be Number One. But they don't want to work at home - they want to work here."

"That's sort of true of Americans, too - "

But clearly I was missing his point, whatever it was.

He had more to say, about history. "They got this movie now - 1453. Have you seen it? It's at AMC on Broadway." I haven't seen it and it's not mentioned on line. "About the fall of Constantinople?" I said. "Everything. It's about everything about that. But I'm very disappointed. Three and a half hours, and it's just fighting. You know what? I wish they'd made that film in Hollywood." I said: "Fifty years ago, maybe. Today, they'd ruin it." "Maybe."

"They're doing that all over," I marveled. "Making movies about their history in sort of a Hollywood style. Thailand. China - "

"But it's lies," he said. "China. They didn't make a movie about the Great Wall." "Yes they did! I saw it! The Last Emperor. I even saw an opera made out of it!" "Yeah, but they didn't show the real story. You know why they built the Great Wall?" "To keep the Mongols out?" I replied, weakly. "Not the Mongols! The Turks!" He was bursting with pride. (History is a trick we play on the dead.)

It is true eastern China is mostly inhabited by Uighurs, folk of Turkic stock, and so is most of Central Asia for the matter of that.

"Sure!" cried the chef! "Turkmenistan - Kirghizstan - Vietnam -"

"Uh. Not Vietnam. But Uzbekistan - Kazakhstan - Azerbaijan - "

"Right, Uzbekistan," he said. "You know, if they got all those twelve countries or so together, there'd be a new Ottoman Empire!"

I wondered what it was about the Ottoman Empire he longed to restore. The idea of Turks as terrors of the seas? (Barbarossa, the Turkish corsair hero, was born a Greek Christian on Lesbos, but never mind.) The Janissary Corps? The Sultan-Caliph, commander of the faithful? The subjection of the Arabs and Greeks and Slavs? Minarets and Iznik tiles? (I'm all for Iznik tiles and minarets.)

The Mongols of course were also of Turkic stock.

"But we're not good at politics," said the chef. Many Turks insist to me that they're not good at business, finance, politics, all sorts of modern skills that, in fact, they are perfectly good at. They still like to think of themselves as unsophisticated ghazi warriors. It soothes their crestfallen vanity, at not being among the world's top nations, though in fact they are up there, with an enormous army and a thundering economy, not to mention a hugely influential TV industry that blankets the Middle East in soap operas, as Egypt and Lebanon do in Arab music videos.

"We're not good at politics, and people don't want us to unite. The Kurds. The Greeks. All those people." The various Turkic peoples would tear each others' heads off given the chance - they'd certainly be a lot less powerful united than they are separate.

But this is the current myth, or one current myth. And I do love to track the rise and fall of myth, which every people, every nation, every culture gives rise to, lives by, survives on in preference to variously unpalatable truths.

Having got the rant out of his system, he wished me good night with a most amiable smile.

The Messiah's brother-in-law

His name was "Adil" or something like that; his skin was swarthy but not black.
I guessed "Egypt."
He laughed. "No! But you are close!"
I guessed "Jordan," and all the other countries close to Egypt. None of them.
As you know, I only get a Point if I am right on the first guess.
"Mauretania," he said at last.
That was a first: a cabdriver from Mauretania!
"That's not close to Egypt!" I protested. "That's the other side of Africa!"
"Some of us look like Arabs, from the north; others are darker, from the south," he explained.

The south of Mauretania is very close to Senegal, and there are lots of cabbies from Senegal these days.
They are mostly from Africa now, have you noticed? Fewer and fewer subcontinentals. They used all to be from the subcontinent; now I guess they've gone into IT. Or gone home. And of course my podiatrist - or, rather, her parents - was subcontinental. (She, however, was born in New Jersey, and she's not going back to India except to visit relatives and spend some beach time.)

"How long have you been here?" I asked the Mauretanian. What is the capital? Nouakchott? I'm not even sure.
"A year and a half," he told me. "New York is the greatest city in the world!"
I basked in that - but how many other cities had he seen? To what were we being compared? Nouakchott?
"Don't you think so?" he prodded me.
"Well - I was born here - I don't have to find it so impressive."
But of course I do.
Still - the greatest? Hmmm.
"How long do you think it will last?" Now that was an interesting question. I don't know if a cabbie ever asked me that one before. That it even occurs to someone is - a change.
"It will all go to pieces the day after I am dead," I told him, airily.
That made him laugh. "Are you the Messiah?"
"I? No. He married my sister. We don't get along. In-laws. You know."
"I think from this you don't believe anything," he said, slyly.
"I wouldn't say that..."
"I was raised Muslim," he sighed, "but since I've been here - I've begun to have doubts - about all that."
"Doubts are good."
I don't even have a sister.

The next cabdriver was from Côte d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, not Abidjan (site of its recent civil war) but a small town outside it. I didn't get that point either. I think I guessed Ghana. There have been several from Ghana, the second-largest country in West Africa after Nigeria and a former British colony. None from Nigeria. Nigerians don't come here much. The last one from Ghana was named Kwame; that's how I guessed it: I remember Kwame Nkrumah from my little-kid-reading-the-papers days.
I got this cab at JFK, right after Ghana beat the pants off us in the World Cup. Mentioning futbol is usually a good way to make friends with foreign guys.
"You sure killed us last week at the Cup." He chuckled. "We played well," I continued (meaning nothing much). "You played better. I'll be rooting for you against Uruguay." And so I did, but Uruguay cheated and won. Another good game. The Ghanaians are exciting players - unlike the Italians or Dutch, who make me want to slap them.

But I'm very proud of getting my point for Mali. His first name was Oussan, which implied something in northern, Muslim Africa, and he was slim, sort of caramel-colored. "What do you know about Mali?" he cried, amazed.
"Timbuktoo," I said, though that's not even the capital.
"No one in America has ever heard of my country!"
That made me very proud.
Anyway, I got the point.

I'm delighted when they say, "What do you know about my country? Americans never know anything about my country. Where are you from? You can't be American!"
I don't want to be a typical know-nothing American. But is that typical of New Yorkers? Don't think so.

Sometimes they won't tell me where they're from. Then the game goes into penalty kicks.

Lineage of a Cab Driver

As you may know, I always look at the cab driver's name (and photo) on their license and guess where they're from. If I get it right in one guess, I get a point. Otherwise - no point. This is only possible in New York - no other city I know of has a visible license with a name and picture on it - I have to ask where they're from, and where's the fun in that?

(My friend Suzanne, from Milwaukee, asks New York cabbies where they were on 9/11; that always gets her a good story.)

This guy's name was "Luis Seixas," pronounced "Seyshas." The "x" puzzled me. I thought, it might be Basque - someone with a Basque surname might be from anywhere in the New World. However, "X" also exists in Brazilian Portuguese, and "Luis" is the same in Portuguese as in Spanish (as I knew because Portugal had a king named Luis in the 19th century - 1855-1889, or something like that).

So my guess was "Brazil," and I was wrong. (No point.)

But the guy's story was very interesting. He was born here, father from Ecuador, mother from Puerto Rico, but the family name fascinated him, so he researched it - very few cab drivers (or anyone else) do that! He was especially intrigued because Sephardic Jews kept telling him the name was Sephardic. It is!

His father had gone to Ecuador from the Dominican Republic. His father's father had gone to the DR from St. Thomas. And at some point an ancestor had come to St. Thomas from Curacao. Turns out (I didn't know this) both islands have very old Sephardic communities, going back to when Portugal re-took northern Brazil (Bahia, Recife, etc. 1647-54) from the Dutch, who had possessed it for some decades. (That's when Jan Mauritz of Orange-Nassau, who was the Dutch governor, made enough money from sugar planting and export to build the Mauritshuis in Den Haag and fill it full of gorgeous paintings.) The Jews had lived quite happily in Bahia when the Dutch ruled it (Recife was called "the Jerusalem of the New World"), but when the Portuguese got it back as part of the peace settlement, they imposed the Inquisition (having acquired that bad habit during Spain's 60-year rule of Portugal), and the Jews mostly fled - though some converted, and Seixas continues to be a popular surname in Brazil, where those who hold it are mostly unaware their families were once Jewish.

The Jews of Recife scattered widely, especially to former Dutch colonies (where they were safer), among them New Amsterdam (the first Jewish presence on future U.S. soil), Curacao and (I didn't know this before) the then-Danish colony of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. And there was lots of communication and business and marriage between the different Sephardic settlements, as there always was. One of the Seixas became an important leader of the New York Sephardic colony in the 18th century - "Abraham Seixas," said Luis. "You know the little Sephardic cemetery below Chinatown?" "Sure." "Well, the big stone in that one is him. And his brother went to St. Thomas, and I'm descended from the brother.... My father sort of knew about it, it had been handed down in the family that we were Sephardic once, but no one knew any details, and we've been Catholic for centuries. You have to go look it up, and I did. But I did because when I came to New York and began driving a cab, all these Sephardic guys asked me if I was Jewish, and if I was related to Abraham Seixas - of course I'd never heard of him then."

So I didn't get the point, but it was one of my most interesting cabdriver ancestry stories.

Current reading includes a biography of Proust's mother, née Jeanne Weil, daughter of a very well-to-do Jewish family that had come to Paris from Alsace two generations earlier (after the National Assembly liberated religious minorities) and were in the process of assimilating/not assimilating - terribly involved in French culture and ever more distant from religious Judaism, culminating in a great deal of intermarriage, such as Jeanne's to Adrien Proust. But questions, every step of the way, of what neighborhood to live in, of what professions to pursue, of whom to associate with, of whom to think of marrying. And then Dreyfus hit, and everyone had to rethink things. Which is excellent background for reading Proust, hein? Who was passionately devoted to his mother and grandmother, and thought about all these matters a great deal.

Proust's grandmother and Karl Marx were fourth cousins! And his greatuncle, Adolphe Crémieux, was a lawyer who led the fight to persuade the various French governments to discard the remaining disabilities placed on Jewish citizenship and full participation in the life of the nation.

The hot spot on the melting pot expands

In today's NYTimes, there's an article on Europeans making themselves at home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This underscores my belief that while home prices may plunge everywhere else on earth, they will remain stable in New York because everyone on earth with a little cash wants at least a pied-a-terre in the Apple. But the article tells other tales as well, the tale of the expansion of (shall we say) the griddle under the perennial fondue pot of New York. (Also: the kind of cheese that gets melted in it: the couple at the article's heart are named Patel, him English, her Swedish - unmentioned, the fact that "Patel" is an Indian name, that his family can't have been in Blighty all that long, that perhaps they came there not from India but from East Africa ... Obama says we're all mutts; I prefer to say "mongrels.")

Another change in traditional New York is, however, demonstrated by this article:

I once unwarily boasted of New York as the mingler of nations; a guy at the next table in the (Polish) restaurant (himself of Italian deriv.) laughed in my face. "I live in Jackson Heights," he said. "There are 18 nationalities on my block. And none of them mingle. They won't even speak to each other. Different grocery stores, different restaurants, different social groups at the park." "But what happens to their children? They go to public schools together, right?" said I. "Oh, they grow up and mingle - after they move to Manhattan," he admitted.

A few years ago, it was fashionable to say the Great American Melting Pot did not actually melt, that immigrants remained in their separate enclaves. That's true - for a while. In my family (who arrived in the decades before 1900 from Russia and Austria-Hungary), everyone married, and before World War II, everyone married only other Jews, and Ashkenazic Jews at that. (Scandal in my grandmother's family when their Hungarian daughters married Russian Jewish men - but they all did anyway.) In the generation after World War II, the first marriages to gentiles, gradually reaching and passing fifty percent of the mizpochah. Not until the seventies and eighties were marriages interracial as well. (One marriage to an ethnic Chinese in the 1950s.) Now we're getting into interesting religions and far corners of the earth, never mind same-sex unions and unusual adoptions. And of course we live everywhere. But we're still Ashkenazim. I think.

Used to was, the New York melting pot was Manhattan, and only lower Manhattan at that (and only parts of lower Manhattan – my neighborhood, South Village-SoHo, used to be pure Italian). Everyone grew up in an ethnic enclave of one sort or another, then moved and married and joined the middle class, and sent kids to mixed schools, and - then the pot melted, Irish married German Catholics, their kids married Italians or (horror on both sides) Jews, their kids married WASPs or (horror on all sides) blacks or Puerto Ricans, their kids married Chinese or Koreans.

But now the region where the melting goes on is much much larger, and the enclaves are diluting and gentrifying and vanishing: no unmelted Jews on the Lower East Side or Italians around here or Irish in Hell’s Kitchen or Inwood (it’s all Dominicans now in Inwood) or even blacks in Harlem (gosh!); all those neighborhoods have melted and interconnected (and interfucked, a word of my own coining). And now (we learn from this and many articles) Williamsburg has ceased to be a Polish slum and is a major meltdown. (Nearby Greenpoint is still Polish, with Chinese fringes.) And Crown Heights is still Hasidic, but how much longer? (Another generation, I’d say.) And Astoria is still Greek, and Jackson Heights is Afghan-Greek-Indian-Turkish-Croatian-Pakistani-Bengali-Chinese-Hispanic, and FOR THE MOMENT 18 nationalities share a block without ever mingling or even speaking to each other - but their children will go to CUNY and melt and move to Manhattan.

So it melts, but not at once, but in New York (and other ancient towns) the hot surface expands, the fire burns, the cauldron bubbles.

Weird Coffee

Constant fantasy, takes the place of travel, much cheaper, easier on back and feet: daydream I am in a strange city in a strange country when in fact I am only in New York. (Only!)

Today, awoke groggy (two margaritas and a vodka-and-tonic), no coffee, no computer, no conversation, nothing but instinct in gear, took manuscript and pencils - not to the Vandam Diner (as usual, if I'm up for breakfast) but to Starbucks on Hudson as it is next to my bank. Stood on line, but barely time to decide: do I want coffee, ice coffee, americano? Chose coffee and marble cake, but the woman at the counter, though smiling at me, was not speaking to me; she was speaking to the woman behind her, patiently, merrily, directing her on the next chore to handle, and doing this constantly as I tried to marshal thoughts, words, concepts to her, feeling as if distracted, rejected by her smile at me off purpose with her continual words not at me, the line behind me goading me not to wait longer, tongue refusing to sync with concept, desire - finally I blurted, "Coffee, medium size, with music." "With music?" she finally addressed me. "I mean, with room for milk." "Hot or ice?" Was she speaking to me? As I said, "Hot," she chattered again, still smiling into my eyes, but to the woman behind her. Threw me again. "And a marble cake." Somehow I escaped.

Had she been speaking Turkish? Croatian? Italian? Dutch? French? Quebec French?

Is this the new conversational manner - speak as if on ear phones (but she wasn't even wearing ear phones) with no connection between face, smile, and words? Would I get this, not be thrown by it, if I were 22 or had a cell phone or a bluetooth or were happily traveling in a foreign country?

Somewhat rattled, sat do my copy editing for a chapter or two.