Kaboom

Spring sprung at Füvészkert (Botanical Gardens) in the VIII District last Saturday.

'One or two secret policemen along the way'

There is a line in Anne Applebaum's review of Masha Gessen's new book about Putin that that is so inaccurate and mendacious I can't believe it appeared in print, let alone in the New York Review of Books. Describing Yuri Andropov's response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when he was the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, she writes,

He had been shocked when young Hungarians first called for democracy, then protested against the Communist establishment, and then took up arms against the regime, even lynching one or two secret policemen along the way. 

First a factual note about those "one or two secret policemen along the way." On Oct. 30, 1956, a mob lynched at least 24 AVH conscripts at Köztársaság Square. A photographer for Life magazine was at the scene, and it's tough viewing if you agree with me that murder is murder, no matter who does what to whom. 

But just as bad is her glib effort to make 1956 fit her world view. The uprising was remarkable for the breadth of its support -- young and old -- led first and foremost by left-wing, Marxist intellectuals and students who wanted a better form of socialism. They were joined a huge outpouring of support, including from many veterans of the extreme right. One eyewitness recalled that the uprising included the first reappearance of open anti-Semitism in Budapest since the Holocaust. 

By clumsily tromping outside her area of "expertise," she's let her stereotypes and assumptions show, and provide an insight into the Russophobic recesses of the neoconservative soul. This mix of provincial arrogance and willful ignorance is tragedy when we stumble into avoidable wars and prop up dictators, comedy when George W. Bush gets shoes instead of flowers thrown at him, and irrelevant when authentic people-led movements for social change -- in Serbia in 2000, across the Arab world last year, and in Russia right now. 

There's something pathetic about this unending desire to keep fighting the Cold War. Applebaum has plenty of places that will pay her for these thoughts, which she has honed as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and which have been feted by the most dishonest intellectual engineering project in Europe. So how she became NYRB's designated Russia expert is a mystery.

Giorgio Perlasca and the banality of decency

Among the things we need to remember about the Holocaust is the role of redemption. It is something I think about whenever I look out our window, which faces an apartment building that had been one of the city's safe-houses for Jews set up by Giorgio Perlasca. Like Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz, he used diplomatic cover to help save thousands of Budapest's Jews. Unlike them, he doesn't get nearly as much recognition. I've wondered if part of the reason is that he was a fascist.

There are no simple stories, and every one is bent to make some sort of argument. You'll hear a lot about Wallenberg this year, and rightly so. This Swedish diplomat saved many, at great personal risk, and as long as there are people around we should remember that we are capable of such bravery. But there is another dimension to his legacy. His mysterious disappearance — at the hands of the invading Soviets — creates a neat narrative that right-wingers and neo-cons cherish: a direct connection between the evil of fascism with the evil of communism. And it is a convenient way to downplay the fact that Nazism was defeated only by the incredible sacrifice of the Red Army, and little else.

Perlasca's story is complicated. He was a full-throated fascist, although of the more melodramatic Italian model. He willingly fought in Mussolini's absurd neo-colonial adventures in Africa, and went as a volunteer to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He later said that he became disillusioned in the late 1930s, when Mussolini adopted Germany's anti-Semitic tones.

During the war, Perlasca was in Budapest working as a supplier for the Italian military, and was here when Italy collapsed and dropped out of the war. The avoid going home, he took up an offer of Spanish citizenship for his service during the civil war.

The Holocaust came to Hungary soon after. The events here have a particular horror, because the Horthy regime, an eager ally of the axis powers, was certainly anti-Semitic but not quite exterminationist. They dragged their feet for years, but by 1944, as the war grew more and more desperate, pressure grew, and through the summer and fall deportations began. Eventually, Horthy was ousted in favor of Hungary's own homegrown fascist goons, who took the savagery to a new level.

It was those very dark years when people like Wallenburg, and Lutz, and Perlasca realized what was happening and could not stand aside. Perlasca, with the Spanish consul Angel Sanz Briz, began arranging dubious protection papers for Jewish families. When Sanz was sent to Switzerland, Perlasca stayed behind and cunningly pretended to represent the Spanish government in Sanz's absence. All told, over 5,000 Jews were protected. 

This building, on the north end of
Szent Istvan Park, was
one of Perlasca's houses

There was something desperate about their work, especially as all they could do was buy time. There was one famous anecdote about when Perlasca personally took two Jewish children off a deportation train, sparking a confrontation with an armed SS officer. According to the story, Adolph Eichmann himself, who was overseeing the work, appeared and let him go, advising the SS man that "we'll get them eventually." Only the capture of the city by the Soviets in January 1945 stopped the horror.

Perlasca (and especially Sanz, who had a long diplomatic career for Franco after the war) would not speak about what they did, and remained completely unacknowledged for forty years. It wasn't a simple story, and the only true thing, perhaps is the title of the 1993 book about Perlasca written by Enrico Deaglio, entitled, The Banality of Good.

Whittling down in Florence

I realized early in our planning about Italy that we would face a welcome problem: too much. In our travels these recent years, we've spent a long time in places (Russia, Hungary), and had plenty of time to get to know them. Or we've been to places, like Croatia or Montenegro, where choosing what to do was a process of searching out and adding up. Italy, on the other hand, is a merciless process of whittling down. This is how we managed to leave town without seeing Michelangelo's "David" at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze.

We weren't there nearly long enough. The first things that struck me, walking away from the train station to find our hotel as it began to get dark, was that Florence has a much more pronounced bustle. If Venice is about elegant decay, Florence seems to be about chaotic improvisation. There were more crowds — helped by the seriously narrow streets — more filth, more noise, more smells. There was traffic everywhere crawling along, and a jumble of languages in the streets.

It seemed that every second building held a hotel of one sort or another. The abundance of lower-end options is staggering. Our hotel, I imagine, wasn't much different than many. It was owned by a very friendly fellow, who had the charming quirk of not letting his poor English get in the way of an earnest effort to conduct a meaningful and helpful conversation. Our room was absurd enough to be charming. For many years, a key part of the American in Europe experience was enduring strange hotel rooms, with their weird bathroom fixtures and aggressively lived-in vibe. So our place was positively retro. The furniture was mismatched, the bathroom was so small I couldn't fit into it if I squared my shoulders, and it had a small balcony that faced onto the courtyard of an Asian restaurant, so the smell of cooking oil would frequently waft up whenever we opened the door. Perhaps the strangest furnishing was an enormous, brand new, LCD screen television which took up one of the walls. I had no idea how to turn it on, and when I asked the owner, neither did he. There was a constant sound of running water, and our fellow guests were a rotating cast of working-class Germans, backpacking Scandos, and for a few days, a ton of Asian tourists. But the place was affordable, right in the heart of the San Marco neighborhood, and nothing I've said should be construed as complaining.

The first morning we began with that orientation shot, and walked down Via San Gallo to the Duomo. Nothing really prepares you for the size of this thing — you just never see an edifice like that, anywhere, let alone with the explosion of colors that you can know about but can't anticipate. Though the inside is somewhat overwhelming, we spent a good long time just walking around it. I think it must be clear by now that in Italy, I did a lot of staring.

Most of our days were a blur of holy spaces, as we spent a long time at San Marco, and Santa Croce, and Santa Maria Novella. We took the bus up to Piazzale Michelangelo and watched a sunset, we took pictures from the Ponte Vecchio, we spent a full day at the Uffizi (after having to buy scalped tickets because I didn't have the forethought to order ahead).

Our five-year old daughter kept her spirits up well, thanks in large part to a treasure-hunt style activity book my wife had the genius to buy right off the bat. I often wonder what is going through her mind when we take her places — in moments of frustration I'll point out to her that I didn't even have a passport until I graduated from college, but that's lost on her. We faced a few foreseeable problems — magnificent Renaissance churches are only so exciting — and some unforeseen. On our first morning, she lost a little plastic dog toy when she dropped it down into the grate of the Baptistery. Even though she only got it the night before at McDonalds, she was inconsolable for a few minutes. The pain vanished later on when we bought her a Pinnochio puppet, which was our constant companion for the rest of the trip.

In general, I think Mila enjoyed Italy because they truly love kids. In Eastern Europe, people in public have a fondness for children, but it comes with a hearty dose of contempt for their parents who are doing something wrong. Italians seem to take real, unabashed joy in children. I think every place we entered we were greeted with, "Ciao, bellissimma!" or "Ciao, Princessa!" Mila collected a number of freebies along the way — her favorite by far was when she insisted into going into a biker shop, and the scruffy, black leather-wearing shopkeeper gave her a Harley-Davidson keychain.

What to see in Venice

It's been several weeks since we returned from our too brief trip down to Italy, and it has taken me about that long to begin to sort out my thoughts on it. It is always terribly disorienting to actually do something that you always knew — at some level — you would do. And I've been dreaming about Italy since who knows when. 

I had a few days on my own in Venice, where since I was trying to do things on the cheap, I spent a lot of time walking around and getting as much out of a three-day vaporetto ticket as possible. It is the kind of place that makes you glad you have eyes -- so that was quite enough, to just see how the different parts add up to something fantastic. I spent a lot of time in the Cannaregio district -- a place that is somewhat off the well-beaten tourist track, where you are more likely to see boats toting things like kegs and mail than gondolas ferrying around other tourists. I had the strange sensation of stopping every now and then to look at a bridge, or a view down a canal, or a somewhat crumbling building. You stop, and then twenty minutes vanish. 

There were so many particular things that caught my eye:

— The floor of San Marco Basilica. Sure, the whole thing is a marvel, and you'll kink your neck for weeks from all the looking up, but don't forget to really look at the floor, the Escher-like patterns, and think about the long, deep roots of the Renaissance's revolution in pictorial perspective. 

— The color of the water. I took dozens of photos of the water, at different times of day, sometimes when it glowed gold reflecting the sun, or pink reflecting some fancy facade on the quay. Or sometimes when it was just its normal glow, from turquoise to slate blue. 




— As every responsible guidebook will tell you, getting lost is most of the fun. There is something delirious about stopping to check a map, getting your bearings, setting out, and instantly getting lost again. 




— I think my favorite thing to see, and I'm as surprised by this as anyone, was the roomful of Jackson Pollock's at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. There are four of them on display in one of the rooms facing the Grand Canal. On each wall is a different moment in Pollock's career, and each work is both perfectly representative of what he was doing but individually quirky (the colors seemed somehow more elemental and lively — reds, oranges, yellows). And in such a perfect setting, with the blue of the water, the bright white walls of the palazzo, the lingering sense that this may have been the very room where Peggy treated her famous guests for bellinis... it adds up. 


— Seeing things like this: when it was time to leave for Florence, I bought my ticket at Santa Lucia and went back out onto the steps to gaze at the Canal and the square for a few more minutes. Out walk two young American backpackers, who looked just like the nicest, friendliest two kids to step off the campus of Vassar. They step out, quite literally wide-eyed, and stop in their tracks. "Wow," the boy exclaims. "I can't believe we made it!" the girl says. They gaze joyfully into each other's eyes and kiss like they're in a goddamn movie. I was so surprised there is a place on earth where unself-conscious things like this happen that I couldn't even bother to roll my eyes. I was too drowned in self-pity because I was leaving. 

The city gives you a long time to think about decay and the long slow end of things. You know that the city is doomed. You've heard about the glory days, the Republic and the Doge's who ruled the Mediterranean like it was their backyard. You know about the end of the Republic, the long years as a tourist mecca. The fact that the floods are getting worse as sea levels rise, that the foundations and stones aren't getting any younger. That more and more people are moving out of the city (to be honest, I thought this process was much further along: I was astonished at the number young parents bringing kids to school in my sestiere, or little old ladies with carts to carry their shopping. I had expected it to be full-on Epcot by now). You know all these things.

There is a lesson in there. Riding along the Grand Canal, looking at all the grand old palaces that line the waterfront. Many of them are empty, I heard. The conservation restrictions are so stringent, the cost of repair and maintenance so high, the uselessness of your often-flooded ground floor. It is the most splendid facade on earth. And I thought to myself about that day maybe three hundred years from now, when groups of Chinese tourists are traveling through Times Square. Once, I can hear the guide saying, this was the center of the universe. All over the world people saw the plays and films imagined here, read the books written and published here, bent to the will of the financial geniuses who ruled the world from their offices not a mile from here. And the tourists will admire it all, and struggle to imagine what that lost world was like.