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You don’t have to be a demographer to know that more and more New Yorkers these days come from the Indian subcontinent. Just hail a taxi in midtown: chances are, you’ll find a man named Sarabjit, Uday, or Ali behind the wheel. The legions of South Asian taxi drivers are the most visible sign of an immigration that has been going on for more than three decades now. Today newcomers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are a vital component of New York’s mosaic: their vibrant communities enliven every corner of the city.

Begin in Manhattan, where Bangladeshis have settled into the old tenements of the Lower East Side and lined 6th Street in the East Village with their “Indian” restaurants. Then take the Number 7 subway across the East River to Long Island City, Queens, another Bangladeshi neighborhood, where new stores, auto workshops, and taxi garages are quickly supplanting abandoned factories and warehouses. If you continue on the Number 7—popularly known as the “Orient Express”—you’ll find that Jackson Heights now contains a teeming and prosperous Little India whose turbaned Sikhs and sari-clad women make the main strip feel like Delhi’s Chandni Chowk or one of Bombay’s upscale shopping districts. Finally, hop on the B train to Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush. There Pakistanis have revitalized block after block, festooning their new storefronts with Urdu script.

South Asians have sunk roots in New York neighborhoods from Gramercy Park, Astoria, and Flushing to Brighton Beach, Richmond Hills, and Jamaica. All told, the city’s population now includes some 500,000 souls—half of them Indian, the other half almost equal parts Pakistani and Bangladeshi—who come from the lands that formed the British Dominion of India until 1947.

But New York’s South Asians are not just another large and exotic addition to the city’s ethnic mix. They have prospered mightily in Gotham, as they have elsewhere in the United States. Their varied ranks include not only hardworking taxi drivers and shopkeepers but also thousands of accomplished engineers and entrepreneurs, physicians and academics. And their children excel in school, quickly entering the American mainstream.

What explains their success? South Asians have a double cultural advantage. They arrive not only with all the traditional immigrant virtues but also with an invaluable cultural and educational legacy from the days of British rule. That doesn’t make assimilation an easy, trouble-free process for them, of course. As with other immigrant groups, it takes a painful toll. But the astonishing rise of these newly made Americans shows how resilient the American Dream remains and how much the nation benefits from an influx of such energetic new residents.

 

In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration Reform Act, an effort in part to deal with labor shortages in certain technical fields. The new law opened the door to the subcontinent’s doctors, engineers, and pharmacists, accelerating a “brain drain” that began in 1947 and still afflicts the region. By the early 1970s, Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangla-deshis—most of them highly trained—had established a modest foothold in the U.S. of some 45,000 residents. A decade later the South Asian community was around 500,000 strong.

By then the professionals who had come to the U.S. with little more than their talents had prospered and become citizens, enabling them to take advantage of the family-reunification provisions of the 1965 act. Thus began the second wave of immigration from the subcontinent, a gathering surge of brothers and sisters, cousins and in-laws. The result: a combined South Asian population in the U.S. that today exceeds 2.5 million. Indians alone now constitute a bigger American minority than Koreans or Vietnamese, and in New York they outnumber Koreans by 20 percent.

If the typical first-wave immigrant was a much-sought-after pediatrician or chemical engineer, the second-wave immigrant is likely to be less educated and less proficient in English. But make no mistake: the second wave hardly represents the subcontinent’s poor, huddled masses. Almost all South Asian immigrants to the United States come from the region’s English-speaking middle classes, from families able to send at least one child to college (many of the cabbies really do have degrees). As Farooq Bhatti, founder of New York’s Pak Brothers Taxi Driver Union, explains, the rural poor of India and Pakistan are far too destitute to obtain a tourist visa and a plane ticket—or even a bus ticket from their villages to Bombay. Like the upper classes of these countries—who enjoy lives of extraordinary luxury and privilege—the very poor don’t emigrate.

The social gulf between the two generations of immigrants can be profound, deepened by the rapidity of the first wave’s success in “Amreeka.” Ram Iyer, an Indian-born social worker who deals with South Asian families in New York, talks about a “disowning factor.” As he explains: “People are embarrassed by their relative who works in a gas station.” But such embarrassment is far from universal. For instance, Rahaul Merchant—who came to the U.S. in 1979, got a degree in computer science and an MBA, and is now head of technology at Sanwa Financial Products on Wall Street—is proud of his brother, who owns a convenience store in Queens. Merchant was pleased to have his siblings (two sisters came over as well) stay with him until they found their feet. The family still invariably comes together every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, says Merchant, “we always talk on Divali,” the Hindu festival of lights.

South Asians of both waves have wasted no time in climbing the American ladder of success. The 1990 census reported a median family income for Indians living in the U.S. of $50,000, compared to $35,000 for native-born Americans. Sixty percent of them had at least a bachelor’s degree, and over a third had a graduate degree. Still more impressive, perhaps, this year the children of Indian immigrants won four of the ten prestigious Westinghouse prizes for high school scientists and placed second and third in the National Spelling Bee.

The cultural afterglow of the British Raj accounts for some of this rapid ascent. It is rare to find a South Asian immigrant who cannot speak at least some English—an enormous advantage. No less ingratiating in an America where language and manners seem to grow coarser by the day, most adult South Asians comport themselves with a certain old-world politesse, a courtesy redolent of Victorian tea parties. The consuming passion across the entire South Asian community for the game of cricket is emblematic: a slow, almost ritualistic sport of arcane rules, it typifies the immigrants’ devotion to order and fair play, civility and good form. Finally, of course, South Asian newcomers tend to adjust quickly to the American political and legal scene: most have had experience with democracy and the rule of law, however imperfectly the post-independence regimes of the subcontinent have realized such ideals.

It is also hard to dispute the claim, common among South Asians, that America has received the cream of the subcontinent’s migrants. Many of them have indeed demonstrated unusual initiative and perseverance to come here, and they have done so in order to build lives unimaginable back home. Thirty-five-year-old Joginder Singh, a Sikh taxi driver from the Punjab, has been in the U.S. for seven years and plans to stay. He started out making sandwiches at a Blimpie’s, drove a limo for a while, and now, like many Americans, dreams of moving to California. “There are more opportunities here,” he says. “It really pays you if you want to work.” The now-prosperous technologist Rahaul Merchant agrees: “I started from scratch. For the first few years I had nothing in my pocket. I could hardly afford French fries. But I made a go for myself. It’s the meritocracy that attracts people like me.”

The first decades of Indian independence were especially cruel to such strivers. The Congress Party subjected the new country to one socialist experiment after another, including nationalization. Protectionist policies and an obsessive fear of multinational corporations kept out capital, products, and ideas from abroad. And the so-called “licensing Raj” made setting up any kind of business a bureaucratic nightmare, made worse by endemic corruption and nepotism. By the mid-sixties, India couldn’t even keep pace with other developing nations like Turkey and Mexico. In the last several years the country’s political elite has begun to open up the economy, but India still has far to go if it is to hold on to its entrepreneurs. As the Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee says of one of her characters who emigrates to the U.S., “Success had meant to him escape from the constant plotting and bitterness that wore out India’s middle class.”

The Hindu caste system has done even more than socialism and bureaucracy to stifle Indian enterprise and social mobility—and to drive out the ambitious. A complicated form of hereditary ranking linked to occupation, caste effectively sets Hindu society in stone. As a guest at a Brahmin house in Rajasthan, I once watched in amazement as food spilled on the floor one hot afternoon remained there for hours: the servant whose role it was to clean up was out. Under this rigid system, any effort to improve your status is pointless—once a member of the floor-mopping class, always a member of the floor-mopping class. Such distinctions exact an enormous psychological toll on those of higher rank as well. The British author V. S. Naipaul, an Indian born in Trinidad, has noted that Indian scientists who win Nobel Prizes for work done abroad go home and produce little of value ever again; achievement ceases to have any bearing on their social standing.

The concept of caste is particularly hard for Americans to understand, the U.S. being in so many ways the antithesis of a caste culture. Indeed, caste identities tend to dissolve quickly once Indian immigrants arrive, in part because it becomes impractical to follow the system’s elaborate codes of purity. Traveling abroad was itself once considered a defiling experience. After decades of official disapproval, caste is finally losing its grip in India—but not fast enough for thousands of middle-class emigrants.

 

Physicians were among the first to flee the subcontinent and the earliest Indian immigrants to flourish in the U.S. Today the 32,000 Indian doctors practicing here are a formidable presence in the profession, especially among anesthesiologists, 10 percent of whom are Indian. With years of experience in the U.S. and plenty of money, they are an unrivaled organized influence in their community, acting through the powerful American Association of Physicians from India.

Dr. Mukhund Modi, an ethnic Gujarati from Bombay, has practiced pediatrics in the tough Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York for 25 years. Working in the borough was not his first choice, but he did his residency at King’s County Hospital there and decided to “hang around” while his wife, a pathologist, completed a fellowship at Columbia. “I went for the first five years thinking I would go back to India and live happily ever after,” he says. “I think that was true of most of my Indian colleagues too. But this country has given us a lot. Things changed—we had kids. It wasn’t a sudden decision. The opportunities we had here and the quality of life were very important to us.” His wife now works at University Hospital on Staten Island, where the Modis have lived for the past 19 years.

Modi has gradually come to identify with his new country. Though he remains the head of a New York organization that raises funds for the BJP—India’s Hindu nationalist party—he is also involved in local Republican politics, having long been good friends with his next-door neighbor, Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari. After many years Modi has finally decided to become an American citizen. “I didn’t apply before because of the dream of going back to India,” he says. “Now I feel that I’ll go back to visit but not to stay forever, so why should I lose the chance to vote in the U.S.?” Like many Indian professionals, he and his wife have settled comfortably into suburban life. They sent their daughters to local public schools—after a stint in Catholic primary schools—and then on to Amherst and Wesleyan. “Indians are typical middle-class people,” observes Modi. “We want a house, a good school, and a safe neighborhood. I’d call that the American Dream.”

Dr. Unni Moopan, a urologist and general surgeon who teaches at the Brookdale University Hospital in Brooklyn, remembers well the advertisements for doctors in the Indian press that drew him from the southwestern state of Kerala to America in 1976. Already a surgeon in India, he came for additional training and to do research. Five years later he had become a U.S. citizen. “The best part about New York is its mixture,” he says. “You don’t feel as though you are in a thoroughly foreign place suddenly. In New York everybody can feel at home. You are not the odd one, standing out in the crowd.” Moopan and his wife lived in Brooklyn and Queens before moving to Hewlett, Long Island, attracted by the public schools. The father of two children, he knew just what he was looking for when it came to their education: “The class size is small, and the rate of going to Ivy League schools is very high.”

Engineers formed a second large contingent in the professional exodus from the subcontinent. Today more than 20,000 Indian engineers work in the U.S., many of them graduates of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Unable to find work at home, these superbly trained technologists have made key contributions at such American high-tech giants as Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Bell Labs. The U.S. job market continues to place a premium on computer experts from South Asia, who now outstrip physicians among the professionals who choose to emigrate.

Kersh Birdie came to the U.S. in 1971, an early refugee from India’s high-tech sector. Formerly a partner at First Boston and head of technological development at Morgan Stanley, he took an MBA at night and now runs his own software and consulting company, Northstar Technologies, which employs 25 people in Manhattan. “Back in India they have tremendous computer-science education,” says Birdie. “They can compete with anybody. But in the Third World, opportunities were very limited in the technology business. Coming here was great—the market was wide open. I made up my mind to stay as soon as I got here, and I became an American as soon as I could.” Many others followed suit, Birdie notes, reeling off a list of senior Indian technologists at Wall Street firms like Fidelity, First Boston, and Bankers Trust.

 

South Asian immigrants who lack professional qualifications have gone into an array of traditional immigrant occupations. Crucially for the day-to-day life of New York City, they have nearly taken over the taxi industry: some 30,000 of the city’s 45,000 yellow-taxi drivers are now of South Asian descent. When a Pakistani “taxiwallah” was murdered in 1993, as many as 10,000 drivers protested outside City Hall. As for service, this takeover has made it almost universally possible once again for drivers to communicate with passengers in English.

Gaining entry into the taxi business is easy, but it’s a grueling way to make a living. After getting a New York hack license—a process that takes about six months—a new immigrant will lease a medallion taxi, keeping what he can, after expenses, from fares and tips. In a slow seven-day week, a cabbie can make as little as $300, which partly explains why so many of them compete recklessly for fares. “You must remember that we have the medallion owner on our back,” says a Bangladeshi driver named Imran. “I pay $112 per day for the cab, $3 for the union, $20 for gas, and $10 for food—plus taxes, TLC tickets, parking violations, and summonses. I’m driving 90 hours a week, and I cannot make $2,000 a month.”

It’s a physically and mentally exhausting job. Because the city has so few public restrooms, every cabdriver must carry a mental list of restaurants whose facilities he can use—without getting a parking ticket or a Taxi and Limousine Commission citation, which means at least a day of lost income. The rudeness of city officials, especially the police, baffles and pains the South Asian drivers. A Pakistani driver called Ahmed told me he was “stunned” the first time a cop told him to “move your fucking car.” The cabbies often find their passengers abrupt and unfriendly too, especially by South Asian standards. And because impatient passengers and their own financial interest push them to drive as fast as they can, they live in fear of tickets.

Taxi driving tends to be a bachelor’s profession, a fallback job for younger men in need of work. A Bangladeshi named Rahim came to New York to study aeronautics but had to drop out of school and start driving a cab. “I needed more money,” he tells me over a 2 AM dinner at the Kasturi restaurant on Lexington Avenue, a favorite hangout of Bangladeshi drivers. “My family back home is dependent on me.” Ponytailed, bespectacled, and sweatshirt-clad, he looks like a graduate student. Rahim lives with four Bangladeshi friends in a four-bedroom apartment in Astoria, where he pays $300 a month for his spartan quarters. He and a partner recently borrowed money to buy a medallion—no mean expense at the going rate of $200,000. It will take them 10 to 15 years to pay off the debt, but once they do, their incomes will shoot up. If Rahim can make enough money in the next couple of years, he would like to return to school part-time and find a wife to bring over from Bangladesh.

Most South Asian taxi drivers dream of being in business for themselves someday, whether with a medallion of their own or some other enterprise. Karnal Singh drove a cab for five years and then opened the Punjabi Palace restaurant on Houston Street, where he employs a brother, a nephew, and two cousins, as well as a Bangladeshi chef. Still only 25, he recently opened a second restaurant at Tenth Avenue and 27th Street. Though a Sikh, he retains only one visible sign of his faith: the steel bangle, or kara, on his wrist. His Pakistani friend and frequent customer Riaz Ahmad, who wears the traditional shalwar kameez pajama suit and a backward Yankees baseball cap, has a master’s degree in Islamic studies; he has been driving a taxi for five years. A restaurant is not in his future; he imagines instead going into “something like a car service—because I know this business.” Many drivers pool their resources to make the down payment and pay off the loans needed to start a business. “Four drivers making $30,000 a year will get together and buy a $100,000 workshop,” explains Farooq Bhatti, “and then they are on their way. In Pakistan we have become very good at repairing cars, because parts are so expensive.” In the westernmost avenues of Chelsea and the Garment District, Pakistanis and Indians now run dozens of small auto-shops-cum-taxi-garages.

South Asians have also turned New York’s newsstand business into a virtual ethnic monopoly. According to the Department of Consumer Affairs, they now operate an astonishing 300 of the city’s 330 street newsstands.

Eight years ago I found myself in Penn Station after midnight, waiting for a delayed Amtrak train. The main hall was a dirty, unwelcoming place, full of the homeless and prowled by other unsavory types. I noticed a new shop on the concourse, with a sign announcing: Hudson News. It was an oasis of cleanliness and light, with a handsome selection of magazines. Best of all, it contained several young Pakistani men in uniform, keeping a watchful eye on what was clearly a place of refuge for the respectable. Since then, Hudson News has gone on to revolutionize the terminal newsstand business, with a hundred stores in train stations and airports nationwide. Almost all of its employees are South Asian. The managers of the Penn Station, Grand Central, and Port Authority stores are “Joe” Khan, “Bob” Khan, and “Mo” Khan, respectively. Unrelated to one another, all are Pakistani immigrants and vice presidents of the company.

Joe DiDomizio, son of the chain’s founder and vice president of marketing and operations, is quick to give credit for the company’s expansion to its employees from the subcontinent. “They have a tremendous work ethic, they work very long hours, they are very dedicated, and they treat the business as if it were theirs,” he says. “We hire them at every level.”

The assistant manager of the Grand Central store is Waris Khan. A Pathan from Pakistan, where his people are famous for their martial qualities, he is a former high school math teacher. Today the mustachioed Khan stands a short distance from the store in his smart tie and navy blazer, keeping a fierce watch over the whole operation. He commutes each morning from Westchester Square in the Bronx, arriving in time to open the store at 5 am, and he doesn’t usually leave until early evening. “We are from the North-West Frontier, and we are very strong,” says Khan. “We don’t mind doing anything. I am 63 and still working.” Would-be robbers have tried to hold him up several times, but he so intimidated them that they left empty-handed. “You have to show that you are ready to fight,” he insists, mindful perhaps of the famous Pathan motto, “If someone gives you a pinch, respond with a blow.”

Sponsored by his four brothers—two of them lab technicians, one an accountant, and the fourth a supervisor at an Atlantic City casino—Khan came to New York in 1988, largely to get his two boys away from the guns and drugs endemic to his corner of Pakistan. The breaking point for him came when his 11-year-old returned from school one day talking about the Kalashnikov rifle that he and his friends had been playing with. Both of Khan’s sons now attend City College, and one of them recently applied to medical school.

South Asians man the ranks of many other businesses in New York. Many work behind the counter at neighborhood delis and grocery stores, and at chain stores like Duane Reade and National Wholesale Liquidators. The more entrepreneurial of them have bought into Blimpies, International House of Pancakes, and other restaurant franchises; Baskin-Robbins reports that some 250 of its operators nationwide are now South Asian. In the low-income neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, Pakistanis have made a specialty of under-a-dollar retailing, with successful stores like 99¢ Dream, 99¢ World, and 99¢ City. And should you venture into such porn emporia as remain in Times Square, you will find that a Sri Lankan runs almost every one of them.

Young South Asian men of the second wave have made a niche for themselves in several of the city’s more dangerous occupations. After taxi driving, the most common lines of work for Pakistani immigrants are construction and trucking. Sikhs have established an empire in the gas station business: the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs estimates that immigrants from India’s Punjab region—the great majority of them Sikhs—now own nearly half of New York’s gas stations.

 

Sikhs seem well qualified for such work, where the possibility of robbery is a constant. Observant male Sikhs take the surname Singh upon admission to a quasi-military order called the Khalsa, and they are famously macho: “We are kind of like the Klingons in Star Trek,” one young man told me. A fifteenth-century offshoot of Hinduism, the Sikh religion demands that observant males wear unshorn hair under a turban and, most important, carry a dagger. The Sikhs developed their proud military tradition through years of armed struggle—against India’s Moghul rulers, against the British, and then against the Empire’s enemies in India and abroad. Since independence, Sikh separatism at home has accelerated their emigration: many left amid the anti-Sikh sentiment that followed their bloody attempt to establish an independent state in 1984 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi shortly thereafter by one of her Sikh bodyguards. But even Sikhs have their limits. One told me that he started working at a gas station after two armed robberies in his cab, only to be robbed twice more “by black guys with guns.” He wants to move back to India.

South Asian community leaders are quick to liken themselves to the Jewish immigrants of yesteryear, and there are indeed some pronounced parallels. Like Jews, members of the Indian “diaspora”—especially Gujaratis and Sindhis—have played the role of middleman in international commerce, trading and settling throughout the world. Their economic success has often stirred resentment, giving rise to harassment and confiscations in the Caribbean, in Burma and Malaysia, and most notoriously, in Uganda and Kenya, which expelled South Asians by the tens of thousands in the 1970s. Having been driven now from several homes, many South Asian immigrants to the U.S. are multiple exiles. Here they rarely encounter serious discrimination or racial hostility (though this hasn’t prevented some South Asian campus activists from declaring that their communities share the victimhood of other “people of color”).

Like their Jewish predecessors, people from all three countries of the subcontinent have a special reverence for teachers, whom they often address as “masterji” (the suffix “ji” indicating great respect). Keshavan Narayan, a Tamil Brahmin who works as a journalist in New York, touches the feet of his former schoolteachers when he encounters them back home. Farwana, a 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl whose family moved to Long Island City a year ago and who attends the Newcomers’ School there, misses the respectful ways of her old classroom: students would stand up when the teacher entered and quiet down immediately when the teacher spoke. But she doesn’t miss the beatings that Bengali teachers sometimes give their students.

 

Such attitudes translate into sterling academic performance. As anyone who has spent time lately on the NYU or Columbia campus knows, South Asians make it into the top schools in disproportionately large numbers. Like youngsters from China, Korea, and Vietnam, they are more likely than other Americans to excel in the hard sciences and mathematics (though as native English speakers, they are more comfortable with liberal arts subjects than many other Asian children). Solid early schooling accounts for some of their success in these fields—primary and secondary education on the subcontinent is often superb—but so does parental pressure. Like generations of Jewish parents, South Asians strongly prefer their children to take courses that promise secure professional careers. Engineering, medicine, and business administration are clear favorites. The idea that a college student should study, say, theater arts because he or she finds it personally fulfilling is an utterly alien, American idea that causes considerable generational strife.

 

South Asians pursue many traditional Jewish trades. The Jains—members of an Indian religious sect famous for its ascetic vegetarianism, nonviolence, and business acumen—have become a powerful force in the diamond industry, as cutters, polishers, and importers. Their connections extend from Antwerp and Tel Aviv to the cutting workshops of India and Manhattan’s 47th Street, where they do business with Hasidic Jews. “Our philosophies are pretty close,” says Arun Kothari, a Jain in the gem business, of his Jewish associates. “We have been working with them for 25 years. We trust them implicitly, and they trust us implicitly. We know their families, and they know our families.” Punjabis in New York, like Jews before them, sell textiles and apparel in dozens of shops west of the Port Authority.

 

Natives of Gujarat, in northwestern India, have distinguished themselves as the premier shopkeepers and small-scale entrepreneurs of the South Asian diaspora. Wherever one finds immigrants from the subcontinent, a Patel—the most common Gujarati surname—is likely to run the neighborhood store. On the corner of 7th Street and First Avenue, one Mr. Patel has recently expanded the hardware store that he bought from a Russian Jewish family eight years ago. Both his sons and one of his daughters-in-law work in the store and have helped him open a second one in Gramercy Park. They presently employ workers from Mexico, Ecuador, Bangladesh, and Ukraine, and one can only listen with wonder as Mr. Patel’s son Muk yells down to the storeroom in a mixture of English, Gujarati, and Spanish. Though he sports a long gray beard, Mr. Patel still puts in a 12-hour day between his two stores.

 

Most South Asian immigrants come to this country with at least a vague idea of returning home once they have made their fortunes. Yet few go back, especially if their children have gone to American schools. They do visit, however—and that can be a traumatic experience. In Bombay I met an Indian-American businessman who had just come “home” from a successful career as a management consultant in Manhattan. After only three days he had decided to go back to New York: he could no longer handle what now struck him as unacceptable chaos, filth, and deprivation. Sunita Mukhi, a scholar at New York’s Asia Society, tells the story of an Indian businessman who went back for the funeral of his father. The sympathy of his relatives, many of whom he had never met, overwhelmed him. Mukhi asked him why he didn’t move back. “Are you crazy?” he replied. “I cannot breathe there. Too many people, too much corruption. Even the priests were asking for money to facilitate my father’s passage to the next life.”

 

Other Indian-Americans forget what made them migrate and romanticize the old country. Like tourists, they see only the colorful trappings and cultural confidence of the life they left behind. The result, very often, is a kind of pan-Indian identity that even the Indian state, for all its efforts since independence, has failed to generate. For the children of such immigrants in particular, what matters ethnically is that they are from the subcontinent—not that they are Keralites or Kashmiris. In an effort to recover their roots, many will take classes in Hindi—India’s official language—even though their parents speak, say, Tamil or Bengali. This softening of ethnic differences has carried over to the region’s most combustible conflicts. “We get on fine with each other all over the world,” a Pakistani taxi driver told me of his community’s relations with Indians. “It’s only on the border back home that we have a problem.” South Asians from all three countries often refer to themselves as the desi community or just as desis. The term means “countryman,” like the Yiddish landsman.

Like previous immigrant groups who have made a quick success of assimilation, South Asians struggle to hold on to their heritage. Pride drives much of this effort, but so too does a certain unease with their new home and its alluring but often destructive mass culture. As Theodore Dalrymple has written in these pages, “immigration across half the world is very stressful and disorienting, and old customs therefore become to some immigrants what soft toys are to children in the dark—a source of great comfort.”

South Asians rely heavily on religion to transmit traditional values to their children. Families worship together at their local temples and mosques (hundreds of which are scattered throughout the New York area), and parents often send their children for cultural instruction—weekend religious school for young Muslims and classical Indian dance for Hindu girls.

For Hindus, such training has met with mixed success. Anand Mohand—a professor of philosophy at Queens College who is a Purohit, or hereditary Brahmin priest—argues that a meaningful Hindu education requires a Hindu social setting: “In India we are raised by tradition. You don’t ask questions, and if you do, you are told `because it is so.’ Indians are Hindus more by osmosis than anything else. This means that immigrant parents are not equipped to answer the questions raised by their children. They spend millions of dollars building temples, but the youngsters are unwilling to sit through the ceremonies.” Journalist Keshavan Narayan, who has observed the community for two decades, believes that many of these young Indian-Americans eventually give tradition a second chance. “After college, when they are looking for relationships and establishing careers, they undergo a change in thinking,” he says. “They look at their roots and realize that their background gives them enormous strength in a society where family structure is falling apart.”

 

Growing up in New Jersey, Anu Anand, 25, went to some kind of Indian cultural event every weekend while attending Catholic school during the week. Her parents, worried by stories of South Asian students unable to deal with the newfound freedom of school away from home, insisted that she pick a local college. A recent graduate of Farleigh Dickinson University now bound for law school, Anu is fascinated by her roots. “I would like to have a traditional wedding ceremony if I marry another Hindu,” she says. And though she is not devout like her Brahmin parents, who pray every day, she studies Indian classical dance with her mother, Lakshmi, and insists, “I’m not an atheist, and I pray on my birthday.” Whatever the differences between herself and her parents, Anu generally approves of the traditional upbringing that Indian parents provide: “Overall, our parents did very well. We don’t have too many drug addicts, teen pregnancies, or alcoholics.”

Najma Sultana, a psychiatrist and a prominent member of the Indian Muslim community in the U.S., applies a practical test to her faith. Yes, South Asian families “lead a boring life,” she tells me as we sit in her living room in Jamaica, Queens, decorated with framed verses from the Koran, family pictures, and posters from the recent International Women’s Congress in Beijing, which she attended. But such a life “comes in handy: we hold on to our money, and we hold on to our families.” Islam helps them navigate American culture. “For us, religion is a positive force for dealing with all the temptations. We go to the mosque, we pray, we share—and half the battle is won.”

 

Nothing is so fraught with the tensions between the old life and the new as relations between the sexes. When an Indian couple come to New York and take an apartment, it is often the first time they have enjoyed any privacy; on the subcontinent, even the wealthy live with their extended families, a constant source of company and help. Life in the city thus brings on feelings of intense loneliness, straining many marriages. For men who come here alone and work until they can bring over their families, the solitude can be unbearable, as one after another told me. This is the flip side of the family-values coin—not having your family with you is extremely painful.

Yet for South Asian women, these new arrangements can also be profoundly liberating. “In India, whether you are married or not, there are too many people guarding you,” explains the novelist Susham Bedi. “And there are constant social and familial obligations, constant pressure from your parents, from your peers.” Most immigrant wives go out and work, a practice still relatively rare on the subcontinent—and a sore point with husbands whose ideas of family life took shape in very different circumstances. “We feel strong here,” continues Bedi. “Men, on the other hand, feel un-nourished. In India, even if his wife weren’t around, his mother and a sister would take care of him.” To appreciate just how revolutionary this change in family structure is, consider that in a Hindu marriage the wife promises to worship her husband “as a god.” “It’s tough for an Indian man,” says Sunita Mukhi. “He comes to this country, and it doesn’t fly anymore that he is a god, and the law doesn’t say that he is a god.”

The humiliations inherent in immigrant existence also bedevil South Asian men in their family lives. Not knowing how to do things—paying taxes, registering the kids for school—makes them feel unmanned in the eyes of their wives and children. Nor is it easy for someone with a college degree to find himself driving a cab year after year. Many weave lying stories of corporate advancement to pass along to family back home. Social worker Ram Iyer says that it is hardest for immigrant men in their forties or older, many of whom “have to come to terms with the fact that they are always going to be working at a newsstand or in a garage.” They transfer their ambitions to their children.

Unfortunately, such frustrations often contribute to domestic violence—a serious but largely unacknowledged problem in the South Asian community. According to Prema Vora, the program director of Sakhi, a Manhattan-based South Asian women’s group dedicated to combating such abuse, it is not uncommon to encounter battered South Asian wives whose husbands have deliberately refused to sponsor them, thus depriving them of legal-immigrant status. The women “are terrified to go to the police because they’re afraid they’ll be deported.” Domestic servants—many of them illiterate and brought over illegally—are vulnerable in the same way and often suffer under atrocious conditions.

Almost all South Asian parents would like their children to marry within the community. When pressed, they will admit that they would prefer them to marry within the same caste and ethnic group. This is true even of people like Susham Bedi, who comes from a generation of Indian intellectuals that pointedly rejected other forms of caste and religious prejudice. Among her friends, she says, “the hardest thing to accept is a black or a Muslim. A Christian or a Jew is okay.” According to Professor Mohand, marriages between young desis and Jews are especially common.

 

Most South Asian immigrants, even many of the second generation, continue to believe that you love the person you marry—you don’t marry the person you love. A modified version of arranged marriages thus remains the norm in their communities. Parents do not simply impose husbands on their daughters, of course. Rather, they introduce her to a man after they’ve checked his background and met his parents. The young people then decide whether to pursue the relationship.

 

The South Asian press in New York—Indians alone sustain seven English-language papers and a dozen more in Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, and Urdu—bristles with matrimonial ads. “Sikh parents request correspondence from handsome Sikh professionals (no Jats), for their daughter, 27, 5’9″, educated and family-oriented.” “Brother invites alliance from respected Sindhi families for sister, 28, 5’2″, attractive, highly educated, working in US. Prefer early marriage.” “Parents seek tall MD/MS/MBA match for beautiful, tall, slim, fair, Agarwal citizen girl, born/raised in India, 25/5’5″, BS, MBA (US) Senior Executive.” Sometimes parents describe their daughter as “homely”—meaning not that she is plain but that she would be content as a traditional homemaker. And having a “fair” or “wheaten” complexion is a definite advantage for a woman, especially among those northern Indians who consider their light skin and greater height a sign of racial superiority over southern Indians.

 

South Asians are quick to defend these old-fashioned alliances. “You have a 50 percent divorce rate in this country,” gloats a cabbie named Ali. “Our system is working much better.” It must be said, however, that the sexes divide in their support for traditional marriages. The South Asian press often notes the continuing preference of young Indo-American men for wives from the old country, women who have not been “spoiled” by Western ways. Prizing their newfound liberty, Indo-American women have begun to marry out of the community at a much higher rate.

Sexual liberation is a foreign and deeply disturbing notion for South Asian parents. Most do not allow their children to date, and many will not even allow their daughters to have male friends. Coming to terms with American sexual license is especially hard for those who are observant Muslims. As Farooq Bhatti puts it, sitting in his tiny, windowless office behind the Port Authority, “We don’t want to raise our daughters in all the vulgarity and nudity, the boyfriend/girlfriend concepts. It is hard to remain pure in this culture.” He remembers a friend who was so disturbed by the kissing that his seven-year-old boy and three-year-old girl had seen on television that he packed up and returned to Pakistan.

Most South Asian immigrants adjust more easily to life in the U.S., fending off the more pernicious elements in our culture while embracing the opportunities that attracted them in the first place. They have become model Americans in many ways. Well-educated and industrious, they contribute prodigiously to the wider economy and society while at the same time maintaining the vitality of their own communities.

Each year in mid-August, the Indian and Pakistani communities celebrate the independence of their home countries with parades down Madison Avenue to Union Square. Crowds picnic in the park. There are stalls all around, selling samosas and kebabs. Small children with American accents cling to their parents’ knees and wave little flags. Teenage boys in baggy jeans affect boredom, hoping to impress the girls. Many of the women wear brightly colored traditional dress, while older men look crisply Anglo-Indian in Nehru jackets or coat and tie. Modest by New York standards, the event has an authentic feeling that has long been missing from most of the city’s other ethnic parades.

No doubt the day will come when New York’s South Asians, like sundry Polish-, Greek-, and Irish-Americans, will parade down Fifth Avenue as thousands of their fellow citizens cheer them on. With the mayor on hand to praise their contributions to the community, the marchers will feel a certain self-consciousness as they display their distinctive costumes and food, dances and songs. They will have crossed the invisible cultural line that divides the immigrant from the hyphenated American. Such assimilation has always taken place with astonishing speed. It has its tragic side, to be sure, as traditions fall away. But it has an intensely American glory—well worth parading every year.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_bombay.html

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Innovative suggestions about fixing New York’s then-ragged quality of life that Nathan Glazer, George Kelling, Peter Salins, and other urban thinkers outlined in a special issue of City Journal six years ago influenced one of the great successes of Mayor Giuliani’s first term. City Journal’s authors argued that seemingly trivial irritations—from aggressive panhandling and lackadaisical garbage collection to public drinking, excessive noise, and de facto decriminalized drug selling—gave citizens the impression that things were falling apart and hinted, almost subliminally, that they were vulnerable to greater harms. “If the city doesn’t care about one aspect of its citizens’ lives,” former City Journal editor Roger Starr wrote, “it probably doesn’t care about others.” The inevitable result was soaring crime. The devil-may-care atmosphere emboldened wrongdoers, and a pervasive demoralization made ordinary New Yorkers anxious, pessimistic, alienated from civic life, slow to go out into the city for pleasure, and quick to leave town for good.

In response, Mayor Giuliani directed the police to enforce aggressively the laws against low-level crimes—so-called quality-of-life offenses or what used to be called “victimless” crimes. It turned out that there really was a victim: the social order. The most visible, dramatic consequence of the mayor’s new policy was the drop in crime to levels unknown since the early 1960s. Just as important, law-abiding New Yorkers began to feel that their city belonged to them once again. No longer did they have to watch thieves flaunting their invulnerability by selling their booty in full view of impotent passersby on Columbus Avenue or St. Mark’s Place; no longer did every subway ride make them cringe under the aggressive mockery of graffiti-scrawled trains, proclaiming that lawlessness ruled; no longer did every walk on the sidewalk involve facing a gauntlet of deranged or drugged beggars; no longer did motorists have to submit to extortion by squeegee at every intersection. Central Park, Tompkins Square Park, Bryant Park all became pleasant and safe. Trade picked up at the city’s restaurants and theaters. Hotels burst with tourists, formerly repelled by Gotham’s crime and grime but now drawn by its newly restored metropolitan glamour. New Yorkers no longer believed that their city was poised on the brink of anarchy; instead, it had a future.

What can a second Giuliani administration do to improve the city’s quality of life further? It can make New York a more civil place. Civility sounds old-fashioned, calling to mind Victorian gentlemen tipping their hats, and the word is alarming to those who believe bourgeois values are a prison from which we have recently, and thankfully, escaped. Indeed, for three decades a culture war has raged against bourgeois civility, under attack from moral relativism and multiculturalism, from the idea that people should be “authentic” rather than conventional, from the growing primacy of rights over duties, and from the fractiousness of identity politics. But civility is the preeminent urban virtue: both “civility” and “citizen” derive from the same Latin word for “city.” Civility means behaving in a non-aggressive, mutually forbearing way toward your fellow citizens. Since cities draw together large numbers of strangers in a small area, civility is the mutually respectful behavior required of all if urban life is not to become disordered and dangerous, as it did over the last three decades.

The mayor should focus on three main civility-enhancing strategies. First, two large classes of the public incivilities that infuriate New Yorkers—dangerously inconsiderate driving and excessive noise—are in fact illegal, and the mayor should push the police to enforce existing traffic and noise laws seriously. This is an extension of his first term’s quality-of-life strategy of enforcing already-existing but largely disused laws. Just as taking minor crimes seriously sent the message that the authorities really were in control, so too will increased police attention to cars with ear-pounding sound systems. Stopping motorists from skidding around corners and cutting off pedestrians in crosswalks will send an equally salutary message. Right now, the fact that you can get away with me-first, in-your-face behavior that isn’t just thuggish and inconsiderate but plainly illegal encourages people to let loose their thuggish but legal impulses, if only in retaliation. Enforcement would underline the principle that society has standards for your behavior toward fellow citizens.

 

Second, the mayor should demand civil behavior from all city employees, who should be models of right conduct for the public. If the representatives of public order show no respect, then why should anyone else? Third, schools should teach the rules of good behavior, as they did in the recent past. Contrary to the romantic ideology of the day, children are not born knowing all moral truths intuitively.

Now that New York has the lowest violent crime rate of any major American city, residents are less afraid of being mugged and more afraid that they or their children will get run down crossing the street. They feel under constant assault from motorists who run red lights, cut them off, or honk at them in crosswalks. They know that they have to walk defensively, because the near misses they experience every day sometimes turn into something really dangerous. Motor vehicles kill 250 pedestrians in New York annually and put a startling 13,500 more in the hospital. By comparison, Tokyo, with 12 million people, averages around 150 pedestrian deaths annually. London, with a population close to New York’s 7.5 million, experiences the same. Even Paris, noted for its crazy drivers, and with 2 million more people in its metropolitan area, has fewer than half New York’s pedestrian deaths. Gotham’s streets are the most dangerous for pedestrians in America, and lethal for children: every year, motor vehicles injure 3,500 kids between the ages of 5 and 14 in the city.

Enforcing the traffic laws would make New York’s streets a lot less anarchic—and a lot safer. Traffic engineers point out that a decrease in vehicle speed from 40 to 30 miles per hour—the speed limit on New York City streets, though few motorists know it and very few signs proclaim it—increases the chance a pedestrian will survive being hit from 40 to 70 percent, so just slowing speeders down will lead to fewer lost lives. A city with fewer speeders will be less scary, not only to the elderly, to parents, and to out-of-towners but to all New Yorkers.

Oddly, the New York Police Department does not see traffic enforcement as a priority, despite the pedestrian casualties. Police issued a mere 650 summonses for failure to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks in 1996—fewer than two a day—despite the 70 percent of traffic fatalities that occur there. Police should punish crosswalk violations ruthlessly. Despite the regular speeding on city streets of the city’s 2 million motorists—on Manhattan’s upper Broadway, the Department of Transportation alarmingly discovered, vehicles regularly zoomed by at 50 miles per hour—90 percent of the city’s 84,227 speeding tickets were for violations on the city’s limited-access expressways, not its pedestrian-heavy main streets, though more pedestrians than motorists die in city accidents. The NYPD hands out only 44 speeding tickets a day on the five boroughs’ local streets, and it should aggressively increase that number. As John Kaehny of Transportation Alternatives explains, “the police feel overwhelmed by the general lawlessness of the streets”—but their ticketing policy makes them complicit in the chaos.

New Yorkers must especially beware of the city’s buses and taxis, which frequently operate with little concern for the law. Buses, in particular, terrify motorists and pedestrians. Bullying juggernauts of the road, they pull out from the curb without regard for oncoming traffic, plow through red lights—causing gridlock along with endangering lives—and straddle lanes with impunity. Such reckless driving may well stem from a sense of legal invulnerability: police almost never ticket bus drivers, who share unionized civil servant status with them—albeit under state, not city, jurisdiction. And municipal bus drivers who have injured or killed people in multiple accidents still ride the streets, for civil service rules make dismissing them next to impossible. But when bus drivers, as civil servants, flout the rules of the road, it sends exactly the wrong message—that the official representatives of society have contempt for the law. More reason, then, for the mayor to direct the police to enforce moving violations against them vigorously.

By contrast, the police shower taxi drivers with tickets, but not for bad driving—though taxis often careen through the streets as if traffic laws didn’t exist, frightening pedestrians and passengers alike. Cabs killed 48 New Yorkers in 1994 and 1995, 70 percent of them pedestrians or bicyclists, and 5,000 taxi accidents occurred annually from 1988 through 1993. Yet most taxi citations are for ripped seats, parking illegally while the driver looks for a bathroom, or letting passengers get in at a bus stop. To take only one month as an example: of the 1,500 summonses police gave taxi drivers in April 1995, only 38 were for moving violations. If police would intensively penalize reckless taxi drivers now, they could ease up in the future, just as strict enforcement of the pooper-scooper law when it was introduced changed dog-owners’ behavior permanently, even though enforcement has now greatly relaxed. If word got out that police no longer tolerated irresponsible taxi driving, taxi drivers would drive lawfully and civilly—and other motorists would get the message too. Instead, the NYPD’s Traffic Control Division—which includes taxi enforcement—operates at half strength.

Bikes join the motorized forms of transportation in terrorizing pedestrians, even more so since a Chirping Chicken bicycle deliveryman recently killed an elderly man on the West Side. The NYPD has cracked down on bicycle road-crime, issuing around 10,000 summonses to cyclists for running red lights, driving on sidewalks, and other infractions in 1997—an almost 50 percent increase over 1996. Of the 100,000 bicyclists on the city’s streets on any given day, the messengers and deliverymen, rather than the amateur riders, scare pedestrians the most, as they whiz the wrong way down a one-way street or plow onto the sidewalk with somebody’s Chinese dinner. Not surprisingly, they cause most of the city’s bike accidents, according to Transportation Alternatives. Commercial bikes should prominently display the employer’s name, and new laws should hold companies liable for the reckless driving of their cyclists, who work under heavy pressure to be speedy. Police should register all bikes ridden on city streets.

More than half the callers to the police department’s recently established, though under-publicized, quality-of-life hot line (888-677-LIFE) complained about excessive noise. Some of the noise is designed to be uncivil: boom-box cars, for example, or motorcycles and “muscle cars” with engines altered to make them sound as loud and raucous as possible. Mayor Giuliani moved in the right direction when he signed into law a noise pollution bill last November. The new law trebles the penalties for excessive noise, with a maximum individual fine reaching $2,100 for a third offense. Police can now slap a riotous nightclub with a $24,000 penalty. But police need to take excessive noise more seriously: early in 1997, only five of Queens’s and Brooklyn’s 39 precincts had meters to measure whether a noise was louder than the 80 decibels within 50 feet established by city ordinance as legal.

One major noise problem needs a new law to rein it in. The piercing wails of car alarms serve no purpose in most of the city. As much as graffiti or squeegee men, they send the message that no one is in charge: burglar alarms wail constantly, yet no one comes, as in some dystopian science-fiction movie. The chronic false alarms proclaim the intensely uncivil message several times a day (and night) that the peace and quiet of an entire neighborhood weighs as nothing compared to the anxieties of individuals about their property. Though in 1992 the City Council passed a law requiring car alarms to shut themselves off automatically after three minutes, it should go further and forbid entirely the use of car alarms within city limits and permit police to tow offending vehicles.

The city needs to look at its sirens, too, and ensure that they are the least bothersome possible and that they wail only during real emergencies. This holds true of the private ambulance services, whose noise-making remains unregulated. The mayor should also push to curtail street fairs sharply. They have turned into honky-tonk franchises. The mayor can also send a message that the city will no longer tolerate stores that blast music out front, except during Christmas and with a special permit.

 

If New York’s 200,000 public employees were to behave more civilly, it would soften some of the harshness of city life and set an appropriate example to citizens. Of course, the incivility of public servants is often systemic and impersonal. I once tried to report a broken fire hydrant and called the Brooklyn telephone number suggested by my local police precinct, but no one ever picked up. The fire department gave me another number in the same area code. It too rang unanswered in some dusty Brooklyn office. My experience was not out of the ordinary. One survey found that the city Finance Department put callers on hold for 27 minutes on average, and a 1996 City Council survey found that, out of 173 complaint and question letters sent to 21 different city agencies, only 31 percent had received the courtesy of an answer within six weeks. Of 16 letters sent to 16 agencies offering to donate books and other items, none received a response.

Sadly, if Mayor Giuliani tried to emulate his predecessor, Mayor La Guardia, and fire uncivil civil servants, he’d have a tough time. La Guardia, the well-known anecdote runs, once dropped by incognito on a Lower East Side relief station, where insolent officials ignored him. Eventually, one of the city workers went up to the angry La Guardia, who shouted, “Take off your hat when you speak to a citizen!” striking the hat from the bureaucrat’s head. La Guardia fired the civil servant on the spot. These days, regulations make it hard even to reprimand civil servants, much less fire them. Yet regulations do not tie the mayor’s hands completely. Managers can fire city officials “for cause,” though the process is arduous. The mayor could make it a potentially terminal offense for a civil servant to be rude to the public. Symbolically, such a gesture would show what city government expects when its employees deal with citizens. Nor are all city workers civil servants: some work part time or on contracts, so civil service regulations don’t shield them from public dissatisfaction.

The city’s managers can work at creating a culture of civility within their agencies. They should criticize boorish employees and lavish praise on those who treat the public as valued customers. Former Transportation Commissioner Ross Sandler recalls a senior transit executive who, whenever he rode the subway and heard a particularly friendly announcement, rewarded the driver with a star to wear on his uniform. The executive’s gesture might seem corny today, but it expresses Management 101 common sense about human motivation. Wherever civil service rules permit, positive reinforcement could also take the more material form of promotions and pay increases.

Private businesses spent the last decade figuring out how to “meet and exceed customer expectations,” as the management mantra has it, and businessmen have much to teach bureaucrats about how to be polite to taxpayers. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles engaged Eastman Kodak to train DMV employees to see license applicants as customers rather than as irritating distractions. Kodak’s program transformed DMV employee attitudes, with a happy result: the opening of the efficient, friendly, License X-press office on Manhattan’s 34th Street. In 1993 the average waiting time in a DMV office was one hour. In 1996, after Kodak’s creation of a new corporate culture in the department, the average wait shrank to only 11 minutes. Service companies offer other lessons from the private sphere that city agencies might borrow as well, including comment cards, 800 numbers, and monitored phone calls, to ensure satisfied customers.

 

The NYPD has already developed a civility program called “CPR”—”Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect”—which, properly instituted, could be a model for city government. But CPR has yet to permeate the entire police department, and it currently expresses more of a hope than a reality. Police, because they are the literal embodiment of the civil order, need to exemplify civility more than any other city employees. As the community’s monopolists of lawful force, they must hold themselves—and be held—to the highest standard. They must strike a delicate balance, making law-abiding citizens feel that the authority of society is on their side, while inspiring fear in criminals—all while the policeman is himself apprehensive. Cops must be civil even as they inspire respect, and sometimes fear—like FBI agents, for example, who address adult members of the public as “sir” or “ma’am,” even when they are about to arrest them, without in the least compromising their reputation: their very self-restraint is intimidating. The police force must not appear to be the meanest, best-armed gang in town, but something higher than that. Sure, this is New York, not never-never land, but when cops are rude or vulgar or dismissive to law-abiding citizens, whether rich or poor, it’s as if society has surrendered to thuggishness.

Under Mayor Giuliani, the Taxi and Limousine Commission has also launched a commendable quality-of-life campaign to improve cab drivers’ civility. The TLC banned burning incense in cabs and posted in all of them a “Passenger’s Bill of Rights,” which grants, among other things, a right to a quiet, radio-free ride. The city’s yellow cab drivers now attend a mandatory four-hour course in customer relations at La Guardia Community College. The campaign has been a success, according to TLC Assistant Commissioner Allan Fromberg. Serious complaints are down by 20 percent. “We are getting more praise and pleased phone calls,” Fromberg reports. “The business is getting more professionalized.”

Any city effort to foster civility should have a public school component. Resistance would be fierce: New Yorkers who believe that school uniforms are fascistic doubtless will object that teaching children to give up their seats to elderly people or pregnant women on the bus embodies unacceptable cultural bias. Already, though, public school teachers instruct their charges about the wrongs of racism, pollution, and cruelty to animals. Surely, civility is somewhere on the modern moral continuum, even if up-to-date teachers do not avow it. Some schools teach “conflict resolution” to prevent fights—a last-ditch course in civility. Any civility course would in fact convey a basic principle essential to coexistence in the city: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Even teenagers in chaotic schools can understand that if everybody littered, held open subway doors or sprawled across two subway seats, talked in movie theaters, and blasted music, cities wouldn’t work. Where schools have abandoned civics, as have all elementary schools in the New York system, the mayor should push them to reinstate it.

Teachers should teach civility as early as possible. With an increasing proportion of New York’s school children arriving here from abroad, the need for such education grows more urgent, though many immigrant children come from societies that are far more civil than our own. Immigration’s past success resulted in part from the schools’ effectiveness in instructing newly arrived children in the norms of democratic urban life. New York will have fewer inflamed and resentful egos if all its citizens share a common ideal of civility.

Each of these initiatives is in the mayor’s power to begin right away. Since he knows from the experience of his first term what valuable consequences flow from an enhanced quality of urban life, he would be well advised to set them going now.

 

http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_a5.html

 

 

 

Roll out the red carpet for Hollywood’s take on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hollywood, in its collective wisdom, has decided that now is a good time to make a handful of movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They are antiwar movies, of course. Rest assured that they won’t exclusively depict G.I.s and Marines as bestial rapists, murderers, and torturers oppressing populations that were happy and prosperous under Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

They will also depict good American soldiers, like those refuse to fight in an unjust, imperialist racist war against the Vietnamese — I mean — Iraqi people. Inevitably there will also be tales of veterans driven mad by Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or tormented by guilt. And, there will be portraits of whistleblowers putting their lives on the line to expose all those atrocities so regularly committed by America’s callous, cruel G.I.s and Marines.

Such types exist, and the real-life whistleblowers are worthy of praise. But the ordinary, quiet heroism of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be portrayed at all, let alone celebrated: The antiwar discourse imagines American soldiers only as monsters or victims. So don’t expect to see any movies portraying America’s soldiers building schools, protecting civilians, fighting side-by-side with Iraqi security forces, or giving medical aid.

(If you go to Iraq it’s hard to avoid such sights. But few Hollywood political types had the courage to go to Iraq even when it was relatively safe to visit Baghdad. The newspapers they read are ignorant of and hostile to the military)

For that matter don’t expect to see an on-screen army that remotely resembles the real thing, with its astonishing Benetton-ad ethnic diversity and quiet professionalism — not when there are all those post-Vietnam movie clichés to reheat: drugs, racism, murderous psychopaths, “fragging,” etc. What Hollywood, along with much of liberal America ‘knows’ about the post-cold war military is based on Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Casualties of War.

And as for the amazingly brave Iraqis of all ethnic groups who have risked everything to build democracy in their own country — they won’t be vying for your admiration on the big screen any time soon.

I suppose, in the end, we should be grateful that Hollywood’s war heroes won’t be Taliban murderers of female teachers, or Iraqi insurgents blowing up market places full of civilians… and that Susan Sarandon hasn’t flown to Riyadh, Tehran, or Peshawar to pose — appropriately covered — with suicide-belt wearing jihadis.

Of all of the Iraq films coming down the Tinseltown Pike, the one I most dread is the adaptation by Paul Greengrass of the bestseller Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Paul “Crash” Haggis’s Valley of Elah about a murdered veteran (killed because he knew too much) may make a stir. But Emerald City is the film that is likely to be taken the most seriously, and to establish a conventional and erroneous view of the war for years to come. Greengrass is the talented director of the last two Bourne Identity action flicks, as well as United 93. But he’s also the director of Bloody Sunday, a powerful but grotesquely biased account of a 1972 incident, in which British paratroops opened fire on a crowd in Northern Ireland. You can expect his version of the Iraq war to be similarly steeped in fanciful conspiracy theory. Especially as the source material is a tendentious book by one of the most egregious mainstream media journalists to have reported from Iraq, the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Even more than his Post colleague Anthony Shadid, Chandrasekaran’s reporting breathes hostility to the entire Coalition Project and objective sympathy for the various insurgents, militiamen and freelance murderers who have opposed it.

One important thing to remember when reading his book or watching the film: Chandrasekaran was a key figure in the Baghdad press corps before the invasion. More than any other Western journalist — except perhaps the BBC correspondent Rageh Omar, he was in tight with the flacks/secret policemen at Saddam’s Ministry of Information. Indeed Chandrasekaran was so careful to avoid unduly offending his hosts by criticizing the regime, that many journalists understandably assumed — without proof it should be said — that he was the un-named U.S. journalist, referred to by the New York Times John Burns, who purportedly courted regime favor by selling out his more honest competitors to the ministry’s spooks.

Chandrasekaran’s apparent regret at the overthrow of Saddam’s tyranny was not hard to detect. In the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s fall, he chose to interview a professor of politics at Baghdad University named Saad Jawad on the supposed destruction of the country’s infrastructure by U.S. bombing. It was a remarkable feat of dishonesty by omission. Though he disingenuously failed to mention the significance of Jawad’s position, Chandrasekaran must have known that to be a professor of politics under Saddam in 2003 you would have to demonstrate solid loyalty to the regime (it was a position analogous to being a professor of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow under Stalin). Moreover, he himself must have known that the claim of infrastructure destruction was nonsense: all he had to do was leave his hotel room to see that the city’s bridges, power stations, highways were all intact and un-bombed.

Since 2003 his coverage has been equally distorted. Much has been made of his criticism in Emerald City of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the lack of qualifications of some of its staffers. I am the last person to defend the CPA or its hiring practices, which often smacked of the cronyism that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration. But Chandrasekaran’s critique was crude and dishonest (he was ably taken to task by Dan Senor, Michael Rubin, and others). Moreover, it’s all too typical of Chandarasekaran’s approach that he went out of his way to smear people like Simone Ledeen, the daughter of commentator Michael Ledeen, in spite of the fact that she was one of the few young CPA officials who regularly left the Green Zone and came under hostile fire (she took similar risks in Afghanistan).

Obviously it would be mad to hope that Hollywood might make a pro-Coalition, or even an agnostic film about the Iraq war. But is it too much to dream of a film with some understanding of the real war and its complexities? There are better books that could be adapted for the screen. Rory Stewart’s fine Prince of the Marshes would make a particularly good candidate.

One real life story from the Iraq war that could make a superb film is that of Steven Vincent, the art critic turned war correspondent (and NRO contributor), who was murdered in Basra after exposing corruption and militia infiltration in the British-trained police force. He was a genuine hero, and his death was a genuine tragedy — one that exemplified the complexity and contradictions of Iraq after its liberation.

 

– Jonathan Foreman, a former film critic for the New York Post, was an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq in 2003 and 2005.

 

 

HOLLYWOOD HAS NEVER BEEN WORSE. HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG

Every summer since “Jaws,” which inaugurated the era of the event movie, people who love films have complained about the awfulness of Hollywood’s latest efforts.

But this summer the movies were worse than ever by a huge margin – so much so that it’s hard not to wonder if the decline might not be terminal for the form.

After all, this wasn’t just the summer of “Pearl Harbor.” It was the summer in which one of the best American films was “American Pie 2.”

How did this happen?

To some extent, almost everyone involved with movies is to blame.

We have a debased young audience that will go and see anything that is marketed cleverly enough. We have a movie industry that no longer seems to work along the principles of profit and loss and is dominated by studio bosses who began their careers as agents or bankers and do not actually love movies, unlike the Sam Goldwyns and Darryl Zanucks of the past.

Most significant, we have a corps of screenwriters who are drastically less educated and less skilled in the craft of the storytelling than their predecessors. Unlike even the worst hacks of earlier eras, these scribes grew up never having read Dickens or Dumas.

Other culprits include greedy superstars with too much power and the distant corporations that now own the studios. There are also the spendthrift directors who nearly bankrupted the studios into their present state of funk.

Film journalists and critics may have much to answer for as well.

Whit Stillman, writer-director of “Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco,” cites a critical tendency toward “deprecation or undervaluing of almost anything ‘high’ – in intent, aspiration, content and form – while so much that’s correspondingly ‘low’ is given the benefit of all doubt and imbued with imaginary excellencies.”

But attributing blame for the decline of Hollywood movies involves weighing a lot of factors, some old, some new, plus some choosing between chickens and eggs.

AUDIENCES

The box office failures of movies like “Out of Sight” and “Three Kings” suggest that no audience exists for good, smart, mass-market movies featuring convincing characters, strong narratives and powerful themes. Ordinary American moviegoers once loved such fare.

Sure, Gen-Y includes some cinephiles, but you have to wonder if young audiences today would even be able to sit through classics like “Casablanca” or “Citizen Kane.”

Baby Boomers and older Americans largely stopped going to the movies back in the late 1970s, when cinemas fell into disgraceful disrepair and VCRs became available en masse.

When new, comfortable cinemas were built, many of them went into shopping malls and cineplexes – the haunts of young people. So older viewers continued to stay away, at least as a matter of habit.

MOGULS

All the great American movies until the 1970s were made by people who experienced war or the Depression. Today, movie makers are largely children of the upper middle class who have never known hardship.

If they don’t come from Southern California, they’ve been seduced by its hedonistic culture, so isolated from the rest of the United States and the world.

The industry is dominated by ignorant hustlers and techno nerds, who aren’t even good businessmen. They are responsible for the grotesque waste that makes a big Hollywood film such an astonishingly expensive product.

Unlike the moguls who preceded them, today’s bosses have never been involved in the nitty-gritty of movie making. They have only a vague idea of how much things should really cost.

ECONOMICS

One of the bizarre things about the industry today is that no one appears to be interested in profits per se. Instead, people are obsessed with big numbers. Amazingly, it is far better for an executive to make $150 million on a movie that cost $140 million than $40 million on one that cost $20 million.

As writer-director James Toback puts it: “The only thing is to be in the top 10 of the year’s grossers if you want to keep your job. No one will pat you on the back for making a $12 million profit.”

Of course, companies that own the studios don’t expect their movie divisions to turn a profit. The real money is made on video and cable sales, merchandising and theme parks.

WRITERS

With the advent of cable, TV has become the preferred medium for screenwriters with talent.

TV offers less interference from nervous executives and a greater chance for glory. One leading TV writer, in the midst of penning a feature screenplay, told me his studio bosses told him that they didn’t actually like dialogue at all.

“Dialogue means you need better actors,” he said. “They want action because action’s controllable. It isn’t in the hands of a director.”

GROSSES

“The first weekend’s grosses have become much more important than the real bottom line number,” one retired distributor told me recently. So distributors and marketers no longer bother to nurture a film that might take a few weeks to catch on.

Either they spend a fortune on national advertising to “win” a first weekend, or almost nothing at all. There’s little interest in “platforming,” supporting a film as it’s gradually rolled out across the country. That requires an unacceptable amount of effort and thought.

FUTURE

If things continue to get worse, movies as we know them will be over. Most people will see features on a small screen with big pay-per-view premieres. An audience of 400 sharing emotions in the dark will become an extreme rarity. The cinema will go the way of the theater as a means of mass entertainment.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t hope. Perhaps the horrors of last week and the struggle to come will work a sea-change in Hollywood.

 

September 23, 2001

 

 

 

 

WE history buffs are grateful when Hollywood makes movies set in the past. We hope they’ll be decently entertaining, and pray they don’t contain massive, ridiculous inaccuracies or errors.

The good thing about “Pearl Harbor” – and it may be the only good thing you can say about the movie – is that it includes no elephantine Hollywood anachronisms that jerk you out of the story and spoil your enjoyment.

No one uses weapons or flies planes from a different era. There’s no invented massacre like the egregious church burning in “The Patriot” or appropriation of an another nation’s heroics as in “U-571”

Even more important it doesn’t peddle any of those JFK-style conspiracy theories about President Roosevelt or Winston Churchill deliberately making the U.S. vulnerable to attack in order get America into the war.

There really was a black sailor who grabbed a machine gun and fired on the Japanese torpedo bombers, though, in real life he didn’t get any kills, and unlike Cuba Gooding’s character, he would have known the Navy was a deeply racist, severely segregated institution before he joined.

Two American pilots really did get aloft and shoot down six or seven Japanese planes. Japanese aircraft were lost to small arms fire, and there really were men trapped in sunken ships who tapped on the hull for days until they died.

The haircuts and uniforms and music are all pretty accurate even if many of the scenes are shot like an ad for an insurance company.

Most of the mistakes that “Pearl Harbor” does make are either pretty minor or are necessary to serve the purposes of the ludicrous plot.

For instance, in real life, there were no fighter pilots in the B-25 bombers that took part in the heroic Doolittle raid on Tokyo .

Still, screenwriter Randall Wallace (whose “Braveheart” contained worse errors) wanted his two fighter heroes to fly against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and on the raid, and just made it happen. Nor, for all its daring, was it a suicide mission – 71 out of 80 airmen returned. Actually, three aircrew were captured, tortured and murdered by the Japanese in an incident omitted by filmmakers.

It’s not easy to picture Franklin Delano Roosevelt using a word like “bulls – – -” in a Cabinet meeting, but in one absurd moment, the script has the paralyzed president actually standing up out of his wheelchair to pep up the Cabinet!

But there’s something that “Pearl Harbor” gets wrong that goes way beyond any such anachronism or technical inaccuracy. And that is its sheer cluelessness as to why the attack was so important. Everything that’s instructive or morally dramatic about Pearl Harbor is absent.

It was Pearl Harbor that destroyed American isolationism and reshaped Americans’ attitude to what was already a world war. It also produced a wave of anti-Japanese hatred: one that makes the film’s careful excision of any racial epithets so common at the time seem even more ridiculous and politically correct.

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/harboring_history_6L49vqcUmMCO753M4KJIeJ

 

 

Hollywood does justice to Patrick O’Brian’s naval saga

DEVOTEES OF PATRICK O’BRIAN’S celebrated series of historical novels are likely to be not just relieved but delighted by Peter Weir’s beautiful film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”

They had reason to be worried at the prospect of a Hollywood version of the beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels. The twenty-volume series, set during the Napoleonic wars, mostly aboard British naval vessels on the high seas, is too literary and language driven, its humor too subtle and dry, to be promising movie material (although you can just about imagine a “Masterpiece Theater”-style miniseries). Worse, the stories form a fairly tight chronological sequence, and the title of Weir’s film combines the titles of O’Brian’s first and tenth books in a worrisome way.

All of which means that Weir’s “Master and Commander” is a small miracle: a genuine achievement in literary adaptation. For all its beauty and excitement, there isn’t a movie-ish moment in the movie. Every scene demonstrates a restraint and intelligence that accord with the spirit of O’Brian’s work.

Perhaps the most important thing to point out to non-initiates is the Aubrey-Maturin books are not precisely “genre fiction,” the pejorative term of literary snobbery used to damn even the best detective, science-fiction, western, and romance novels. They are not maritime adventures (in England there are whole sections of bookshops devoted to the genre) like the Hornblower stories of C.S. Forester (although these are underrated and inspired a very good British television series), Dudley Pope, and Alexander Kent. Rather, as Richard Snow wrote in the New York Times essay that introduced O’Brian to a wider public, these novels are arguably “the best historical fiction ever written.”

The maritime setting is extremely important, and the books are full of authentic technical detail comprehensible only to the most educated sailor (O’Brian was steeped in eighteenth-century maritime lore and literature). But they are also works of brilliant imagination. (O’Brian’s imagination was so rich, it flowed into his accounts of his own life.) The books are really about the unlikely friendship of two men: a bluff English sea captain named Jack Aubrey, and Dr. Stephen Maturin, a half-Irish, half-Catalan ship’s surgeon who is also a brilliant naturalist, a laudanum addict, and a secret agent for the British admiralty. Three things unite this pair: a love of music, a devotion to the war against Bonaparte, and a mutual admiration. The books are considerably less accessible and more learned than most historical fiction. But soon after Norton reissued the series in 1990–to be championed by such writers as Snow, Mark Horowitz, and John Bayley–they began to win a remarkably large audience.

O’Brian writes in an invented language that sounds like eighteenth-century English–although, as you can tell if you compare it with the language of Smollet and Fielding, it’s really a brilliant pastiche composed of slightly archaic vocabulary and syntax interspersed with genuine expressions of the era. One of O’Brian’s signature techniques is his eccentric, elastic sense of time, accelerating and slowing down in sometimes unpredictable ways. A teasing charm of the books is the way O’Brian takes the reader in great detail to the beginning of a battle–and then cuts to its aftermath, so that you discover how it all worked out in casual remarks at a gunroom dinner.

Perhaps of necessity, this style of storytelling is not mirrored by the film. Nevertheless, that a major movie studio–one every bit as guilty of crassness, greed, and cynicism as its brethren–would risk more than a hundred million dollars on a film like this, with little concession to mass taste or political correctness, is astonishing. Hollywood hasn’t seen as high-minded a gamble in thirty years.

 

THE SUCCESS OF PETER WEIR’S ADAPTATION (he cowrote the screenplay with John Collee) is all the more remarkable given that it is built on enormous excisions, not the least its marvelous dry humor and love of language. Huge aspects of the Aubrey-Maturin series are missing. The Maturin character in particular is simplified and shrunk by the movie: He occupies much less screen time than Aubrey and he is made to seem almost a quasi-pacifist as well as a landsman troubled by the harshness of naval discipline. As a skeptical man of the Enlightenment, the literary Maturin is supposed to represent modern sensibility in the novels, but there are important ways in which O’Brian intends him as very much a man of his time. What modern physician would admit that he cannot wait to feel bone under his saw or has taken part in some thirty duels? (British actor Paul Bettany, the real casting gamble in the movie, turns out to make a surprisingly fine Dr. Maturin–although he is certainly not “small, dark, and ill-favored,” and the film makes him a secondary character rather than co-equal of Jack.)

It’s also a shame that there are no women in the movie. O’Brian’s favorite author was Jane Austen (the second novel in the series, “Post Captain,” includes some brilliant Austen pastiche), and he was much interested in matters of sex, love, jealousy, and marriage. The Diana Villiers character in the novels, a divorced woman who becomes Jack’s lover and at one point Stephen’s wife, is a fascinating creation: Thackeray’s Becky Sharp wandered into a Jane Austen world.

Of course, if you haven’t read the books, you won’t notice her omission. Perhaps a more important flaw in the film is the inadequate and sometimes confusing way it depicts the technical challenges of naval warfare in this period. A sequence that involves disguising Aubrey’s HMS Surprise as a civilian vessel confused even a naval historian in the screening I attended. And it was obvious that non-nautical members of the audience didn’t entirely understand what was going on in one scene when the ship’s boats had to tow it out of danger, or in another why a sailor clinging to wreckage being dragged along behind the ship had to be abandoned to his death.

EVEN MORE IMPORTANT, the film fails to explain effectively the basics of naval gunnery: aiming when the hull is up on a wave or down in a trough or the difference between independent firing and broadsides. Still, Weir’s “Master and Commander” captures the terrifying nature of this period’s naval warfare with more realism than any of the swashbuckling movies of the past. And it does this without compromising the romance of tall ships. Indeed it’s a film of remarkable visual beauty that gives a real sense of the amazing elegant intricacy of square-rigged ships–for centuries the most complicated machines in the world–and their fragility.

Both the largeness of the sea (and its perils, especially in the sequence set near Cape Horn) and the smallness of the wooden world are made to feel wonderfully real. O’Brian was rigorous in his recreation of the social world of the early-nineteenth-century Royal Navy.

This, by the way, was an era when it was still very much a meritocratic service, with seamen rising “through the hawse hole” to become officers, and men of talent but little “interest” in the sense of social rank or political connection rising high based on ability and achievement. In the royal navy, unlike the British army, you could not purchase a commission–perhaps because the navy was so much more important to national security.

And unlike so many of its Hollywood predecessors, “Master and Commander” cuts almost no corners when it comes to period authenticity. It is filled with the kind of period detail and atmosphere that O’Brian reveled in: the songs sung at boozy dinners at the captain’s table, and the jigs danced in the crowded decks below, and the grisly surgeries practiced after battle.

Nor do you ever forget that the sailors in Jack Aubrey’s claustrophobic little ship are constantly at war with nature in the form of storms, calms, and disease, even when they are not engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with axes and cutlasses or enduring the horrors of a broadside.

This helps explain why the mariners live under such harsh discipline–the redcoated marines were on board as much to maintain the captain’s law as to snipe at the enemy. And to its credit the film has a sense of something that O’Brian makes much of: that there was more give and take in the relationship of captain and crew than maritime law would suggest. An unhappy crew had various ways of making its displeasure known short of the capital crime of mutiny, including the communicative practice of rolling shot: letting loose cannon balls roll thunderously and dangerously around on the deck while the officers took their supper below.

Weir has run with O’Brian’s particular interest in leadership and the moral courage required by command. The film begins with two young midshipmen keeping watch in the fog. One of them, the officer of the watch, thinks he sees the shape of a ship in the distance but hesitates when it comes to sounding the alarm. This young man’s lack of natural leadership becomes more and more of an issue until it begins to undermine morale. After it has a fatal result, Weir’s Aubrey makes a wonderful, moving, newly invented speech remarking that “we do not all become the men we hoped to be.”

This brings us to the film’s central performance by Russell Crowe, an actor whose reputation for boorish behavior in his private life has distracted people from his spectacular talents. Aubrey isn’t perhaps a role as complex as his marvelous work in “A Beautiful Mind,” “L.A. Confidential,” or “The Insider,” but Crowe’s performance is again wonderfully quiet and unshowy. He almost effortlessly conveys both Aubrey’s talent for leadership and his very eighteenth-century physical vigor (despite being physically less imposing than his literary model).

O’BRIAN’S AUBREY is very much a “Jack ashore”–clueless about human motivation and generally feckless when not at sea. In his own element on the other hand, he is a supremely competent predator, extremely aggressive in the way of his hero, Nelson, and his model Lord Cochrane. He’s also a Tory Englishman of the ebullient pre-Victorian type with large appetites for food, liquor, women, money–this was both an honor culture and a thoroughly commercial one–and, of course, battle. Though not particularly well educated or literary (his favorite line of verse is penned by one of his sailors: the impervious horror of a leeward shore), by the end of the series he’s revealed to be an accomplished astronomer and mathematician.

It hardly needs to be said that there really were men like Aubrey in those extraordinary days, and they accomplished a great deal, especially when they worked in conjunction with men as clever and curious as Stephen Maturin. And so did the royal navy. Although there are moments in the film when you could be watching almost any submarine movie–or science-fiction spaceship analogue–it’s interesting to remember that it was this form of military community that shaped an empire remarkably compatible with liberty. It’s significant that it was square-rigged ships that gave the Christian West a major advantage over its Ottoman and other Eastern rivals–for while you can win an empire with a navy, you cannot crush your own peasants with one.

THERE ARE OTHER FINE PERFORMANCES in Weir’s “Master and Commander.” Max Pirkis, who plays a midshipman, was apparently eleven years old when the film was shot, although he appears to be a year or two older. Eleven-year-olds really did serve as midshipmen (essentially apprentice officers) and under some conditions took on great responsibility. Pirkis arguably steals the movie, and does so with a character faithful to O’Brian’s vision of a lost but magnificent moral and social world. It’s a world that O’Brian did more to retrieve and reanimate than a host of academic historians.

O’Brian knew that while some of us do not become the men we hoped to be, others do, and in the royal navy of the Napoleonic wars, some did even at the age of eleven. To adapt an immortal phrase of Captain Mahan’s, those men and boys filled the ships on which Napoleon’s Grand Army never looked, but which forever stood between them and the mastery of the world. Because Patrick O’Brian wrote, those men and boys are still not dead history. And because Peter Weir has made his film, they have a chance at living for many more people.

 

 

 

Scorsese’s film portrays racist mass murderers as victims

Martin Scorsese is rightly the most lauded living American film-maker – a beacon of integrity as well as a brilliant talent. But his bloody, visually gorgeous new epic, Gangs of New York, set in Civil War-era Manhattan, distorts history at least as egregiously as The Patriot, Braveheart or the recent remake of The Four Feathers. In its confused way, it puts even the revisionism of Oliver Stone to shame.

The film works so hard to make mid-19th-century Irish-American street gang members into politically correct modern heroes (and to fit them into Scorsese’s view of American history as one long ethnic rumble) that it radically distorts a great and terrible historical episode.

It treats the founding Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of America with an ignorant contempt – where it doesn’t cleanse it from history altogether. Generally speaking, Hollywood sees that culture not as the root of treasured democratic freedoms, but as a fount of snobbery and dreary conformism. The paradoxical result of this Hollywood faux-Leftism is that the movie ends up casually glossing over the suffering of black Americans.

Gangs begins with a brutal battle in 1846 between two armies – “natives” (presumably Protestant) and immigrant Irish Catholics – for the control of the lawless Five Points area of Lower Manhattan. The leader of the Irish (Liam Neeson) is slain before the eyes of his five-year-old son, by the Natives’ leader, “Bill the Butcher” (a superb Daniel Day-Lewis). The son grows up to be Leonardo DiCaprio, a tough youth who comes back to the neighbourhood 16 years later determined to avenge his father’s death.

By 1862, Bill the Butcher has now incorporated many of the Irish thugs – including DiCaprio – into his own criminal organisation. Eventually he comes to see the boy almost as the son he never had. When the time comes for the two of them to square off, with DiCaprio in charge of the reborn “Dead Rabbits” gang, the Civil War is casting its shadow over the city with the 1863 Draft Riots.

These began with assaults on police by Irish immigrants enraged by Lincoln’s conscription order on July 11, 1863. Very quickly, they turned into a monstrous pogrom, with a 50,000-strong mob murdering and mutilating every black they could find.

The Coloured Orphans’ Asylum was set on fire, followed by several black churches and the Anglican mission in Five Points. The city’s small German Jewish population was also attacked. Panicked blacks fled to the safety of British and French vessels at anchor in the East and Hudson rivers. Many drowned. Those who were caught were often tortured and castrated before they were killed.

In the film, you don’t see any of this. Instead, a voice-over quoting from telegraph reports briefly mentions some of the mob’s racist violence. What you do see is the suppression of the riot: blue-clad troops massacring crudely armed civilians of all ages and both sexes. The rioters stand almost impassive, and are cut down by gunfire and mortar shells lobbed from warships in the harbour (a bombardment wholly invented by the film-makers).

The film’s narrator claims – and it’s a flat-out lie – that the mob was a multi-ethnic uprising of the city’s poor, that Germans and Poles joined with the Irish immigrants against New York’s epicene patricians and an unjust conscription policy that allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of military service for $300. In fact the city’s 120,000 German immigrants, many of them Catholics, took no part in the riots, there were almost no Poles living in the city and the rioters were almost entirely Irish.

They were furious with the city’s blacks because the city’s free negroes were often skilled artisans, economically and socially a rung or two above the newly arrived Irish, many of whom didn’t speak English.

Yet the film consistently portrays the “nativist” Yankees, led by Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher, as racists and the Irish underclass criminals, led by Leonardo DiCaprio, as multiculturalists avant la lettre.

The film’s misrepresentation of the “natives” begins early on. While the film’s Irish Catholics have a vibrant, energetic culture, the “native” Americans merely have prejudice. And you would never know that New York’s population included substantial numbers of Orange Ulstermen – a hundred people were killed in New York Orange-Green rioting as late as the riot of July 12, 1871.

Nor would you know from Scorsese’s depiction that Yankees – Northern Americans of English, Scottish, Welsh and Dutch extraction – increasingly thought that they were fighting the Civil War to abolish slavery. In the words of their favourite battle hymn, Jesus died to make men holy, and they would die to make men free.

The ending of slavery isn’t on Scorsese’s map, because its inclusion would be too difficult: it would require honesty and courage to reveal that his heroes – the Celtic predecessors of today’s beloved mafia – were on the wrong side of the most significant moral and political struggle in America’s history.

Nor would you know that many Irish volunteers fought with spectacular bravery on behalf of the union. Instead, everyone villainous in Gangs of New York is either a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant or an Irish Catholic who has sold out to WASPs.

There’s something bizarre about glorifying a subculture that fought to undermine Lincoln’s war to preserve the union and end slavery. Scorsese is treating racist mass murderers as heroes and victims. Yes, the Irish were cruelly abused in their adopted country. But it’s a strange modern fetish that assumes that victims cannot also be victimisers.

If, as the ad copy goes, “America was born in the streets”, it was not in the squalid, savage turf struggles of the Five Points, but in the streets of Boston and Lexington in 1776 – where the people traduced here as having no identity or qualities outside their xenophobia, fought for the liberties that all modern Americans take for granted.

Jonathan Foreman is film critic of the New York Post

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586345/Scorseses-film-portrays-racist-mass-murderers-as-victims.html

Victorian virtues, Hollywood vices.

BOTH THE NEW MOVIE “The Four Feathers” and the reaction to it exemplify contemporary attitudes to Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the Victorians who practiced it. The film itself–the sixth cinematic version of the A.E.W. Mason novel first published in 1902–is a failure as motion-picture entertainment: visually stunning but dramatically weak and thematically confused. Its failure suggests that the British imperial epic is one genre that cannot be successfully resuscitated as “Gladiator” did the sword-and-sandal flick. Anti-imperialism seems now to be too deeply embedded in our culture, and the Victorians seem at least as foreign to us (especially in their concern with things like honor and the judgments of Society) as the fierce non-Western peoples they fought.

Both the best and the worst things about this remake of “The Four Feathers” have much to do with its director, Shekhar Kapur–an Indian whose last film, the enjoyably lurid “Elizabeth,” displayed a sense of dynasty and of the importance of religious difference that is hard to imagine in an American director. His beautifully shot battle scenes in “The Four Feathers,” however, impose a kind of Leninist gloss on the Sudanese wars, with a cunning guerrilla peasantry teaching a terrible lesson to arrogant imperialist regulars, whose prized notions of masculine self-control and patriotism are revealed by defeat to be a great lie.

This is absurd historically–and, far worse, it wrecks the story.

The British fought two wars in the Sudan, from 1884 to 1885 and from 1897 to 1898. This film seems at least at times to be set during the first one, although the novel and all the previous movie versions were set during the second war, in which the Sudan was conquered by an Anglo-Egyptian army led by General Horatio Herbert Kitchener.

The Sudan was not considered a part of the British Empire in 1884. It was a rebellious province of Egypt, itself a nominal department of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, but in fact a state that had fallen under informal British control. Neither a colony nor an official protectorate, it continued to be nominally ruled by a khedive until after the Second World War.

Under the influence of the British, the Egyptian government had attempted to suppress the slave trade in the Sudan. This, in 1881, fueled a fundamentalist rebellion led by a messianic holy man who styled himself the Mahdi. After the Mahdi smashed an Egyptian army commanded by a Colonel Hicks in 1883 (capturing, among other things, its modern Remington rifles), the British decided that further attempts to contain the Mahdist revolt would be a waste of men and money. They ordered the evacuation of all Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan.

THIS WAS OVERSEEN by General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the British general appointed governor general of the Sudan by the Khedive despite London’s objections. Gordon, who was devoted to the Sudanese and the anti-slavery cause, wanted British intervention in the Sudan and he refused to abandon Khartoum, which was then besieged by the Mahdi. Reluctantly, and after much delay, the British prime minister Gladstone sent an expedition to relieve Gordon, who was protected only by an unreliable Sudanese and Egyptian garrison.

Though the film presents this expedition as an exercise intended “to restore the dignity of our empire,” its aims were much more limited. And although the film shows the resulting war as a military catastrophe, the facts are otherwise. The combined Anglo-Egyptian relief force fought several fierce battles with the “dervish” enemy, before arriving at Khartoum just too late to rescue Gordon.

Gordon’s death damaged Gladstone’s government and the careers of the soldiers who took too long to reach Khartoum. But calls for vengeance soon dissipated. And it wasn’t until a decade had passed, and the Mahdi had died and been succeeded by a new despot, the Khalifa, that anyone seriously considered undertaking another expedition.

 

SHEKHAR KAPUR’S movie begins marvelously with a vigorously filmed, rather brutal game of rugby. Here are young men being prepared for war through sport. Not cricket, mind you, with its chivalrous rules and rituals so redolent of a settled, leisured society–but rugby: a thuggish game invented by and for gentlemen who will one day face the challenge of ruling an unruly world. In the novel one of the characters refers ruefully to female admiration for “brute courage” in men, and Kapur has the women watching from the side display an almost visceral pleasure in the sight of their menfolk struggling in the mud.

It is a sequence that suggests that an ideology fetishizing physical toughness, teamwork, camaraderie, and courage really did play an important role in the ability of a small island people to conquer so much of the globe. It is also the last accurate, insightful, or, more important, honest sequence in the movie.

Worse, the film treks to extreme dullness. It’s some achievement to take the excitement and emotion out of a story that has delighted readers and movie audiences so often and for so long. Especially when you have going for you spectacular Moroccan locations (far more dramatic than the genuine Sudanese locations used in the 1939 version) and Shekhar Kapur’s amazing eye for landscape and color.

The filmmakers’ final product says little of the human drama of the novel, a work primarily interested in fathers and sons and blindness, both physical and emotional. It is also too ambivalent about courage, honor, and the spectacle of Europeans’ defeating people of color to take pleasure in high adventure.

It doesn’t help that the strain of speaking in English accents seems to drain stars Heath Ledger and Wes Bentley of their acting abilities. Still, it may not be the actors’ fault that all the male British characters speak and move with a robotic stiffness (as if the filmmakers drew their sense of Victorian England from Monty Python skits). The same characters in the 1939 version–a film made by people who had known real Victorians–are full of life and emotion by comparison.

You might expect modern filmmakers to be uncomfortable with honor and duty, but these modern filmmakers seem just as uneasy with love and loyalty and romantic rivalry. They don’t know how to deal with the act that precipitates the action in “The Four Feathers”: the resignation of Harry Faversham from the army on the eve of its departure to war in the Sudan. It’s this that prompts three of his best friends and his fiancée to hand him white feathers–symbols of cowardice–and provokes him to go to the Sudan, disguise himself as an Arab, and redeem himself with acts of heroism.

In the trailers for Kapur’s version there’s a line about his not wanting to take part in an immoral war. This has been excised from the final cut, apparently because the producers were afraid the public would draw some kind of upsetting parallel with the contemporary preparations for a war in Iraq. In the book and the previous movie versions, Harry resigns out of real fear: not fear of death or injury, but fear of being afraid. The clever, sensitive son of a bullying, unimaginative general, Harry has been the target of too many admonitory stories about men who went yellow under fire. And he is convinced he would do the same and therefore bring disgrace upon his family, his fiancée, his friends, and his regiment.

Interestingly, in the 1939 version–usually accused of being the most hopelessly propagandistic about the empire–Harry expresses strong doubts about the war: “the futility of this idiotic Egyptian adventure, the madness of it all.” And there were indeed lots of people in the 1880s and 1890s who felt the same way, the Victorian political class being rather less conformist than Kapur and his colleagues seem to imagine. But now Harry’s motivation for resignation remains a mystery, perhaps because the real goal of the film is to “deconstruct” the myths that informed its predecessors. In a confused, halfhearted way, it’s an anti-imperialist imperial epic.

 

IRONICALLY, this has been missed by most critics. Several have complained that the film isn’t anti-imperialist enough. Thus, the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote, “Go get skewered in the midday sun so Queen Vicky can add a few more quid to her Barclays account? [Faversham] would prefer not to.” The sub-Marxist idea that the Sudanese wars were part of some squalid grab for exploitable natural resources is laughable. The Sudan in the late nineteenth century had no resources for the taking–except the black slaves being traded by the very people the British were fighting. Roger Ebert felt the same way, saying that the movie was more enjoyable the less you knew about the real British Empire (he’s right, but for the wrong reasons).

Yet for all their apparent dislike of imperial culture, Kapur and his team are far too intelligent to make the ignorant assumptions that crept into so many reviews. Instead, in an effort to make the Sudanese into standard-issue victims of bad white folk, the film suppresses the race war that was already under way in the Sudan before intervention by Anglo-Egyptian forces. In the 1880s and 1890s–as today–Muslim Arab tribes in the north were brutalizing Christian and animist black tribes in the south. It also chooses to forget the fact that the Mahdi’s and then the Khalifa’s Sudanese were rebelling against Egyptian overlordship that long predated Britain’s very recent dominion over Egypt.

 

THE BRITISH-LED effort to halt the Sudanese slave trade, like the suppression of suttee (widow burning) and thuggee (the ritual murder of travelers) in India, may have been culturally insensitive. But such things were an inevitable result of the moral enthusiasms that played such an important role in British imperialism (though not Belgian, Spanish, French, Dutch, or German imperialisms). It was the desire to end the depredations of slavers that sent sailors of the Royal Navy to die of malaria in the Bight of Benin, and Gordon to die in Khartoum.

The sad thing is that the kind of dishonesty that removes issues of slavery and indigenous racial conflict also covers up a historical reality that is far more interesting than the one depicted in “The Four Feathers.” Sudanese black troops, anxious to avenge their enslaved brethren, were among the most effective troops marshaled by the British, certainly superior to the Egyptians who formed the vast majority of a force that included large numbers of Indian soldiers, volunteers from Australia, Canadian voyageurs (who manned whale boats used to bring troops up the Nile cataracts), and even some Americans.

Yet there are times when Kapur seems to be undercutting his own instinct to make this a revisionist retelling. For instance, there is a scene in which a shocked Faversham stops a French whoremaster from brutalizing a beautiful slave girl. Later, when Faversham behaves like a broken man, pathetically begging his jailer for food, it’s implied that he’s only doing so to save the life of a desperate comrade.

Kapur also seems to be seduced by the pageantry of the Victorian British army. His camera adores the gorgeous scarlet uniforms (though in real life khaki was generally worn in the Sudan campaigns), the rituals of the ballroom and regimental dining hall, and the camaraderie as much as it does the barren beauty of the desert locations.

Presumably it is this visual fascination that so enrages those who see the film as excessively apologist about the British Empire. In the production notes for the film, screenwriter Hossein Amini, whose script for “The Wings of the Dove” would make you expect better, is quoted as saying: “Imperial England was confronting a world and society about which it knew very little. These young men went from fantastic country mansions into the middle of the desert, and in the end their overconfidence and belief in their superiority led to mistakes and ultimately to disaster.”

EVERYTHING about this is wrong. The British didn’t suffer any military disasters in the Sudan. They won–and with so few casualties on their side, and with so many on the other, that it actually sickened the more sensitive among them. There’s something mad about the notion that late-Victorian British officers were braying, ignorant naifs whose illusions about warfare and their capacity for self-command would be smashed by war in a distant desert. These people had fought fierce tribespeople in mountains, deserts, and jungles all over the world for more than a hundred years. Yet Kapur takes a delight in showing the disintegration of British soldiery under the shock of combat–leaving unanswered the question of how small handfuls of these men managed to conquer so much of the globe. While you can lay many charges at their feet, cowardice or a lack of sang-froid was not one of them.

Kapur also has dervishes popping out of holes in the ground like enraged, sword-waving ground squirrels. In another sequence the dervishes put on the uniforms of killed or captured British soldiers, deceive their enemy, and therefore wipe out a British square. It’s a fantasy of the Sudanese as the Vietnamese on their best day. In truth, the main trick to defeating Sudanese rebels was to bring enough water. Some of the battles fought on the way to relieve Gordon were ferocious. In two of them British squares were briefly broken, giving inspiration to some of the best known imperial poetry and prompting the British to accord the Sudanese dervishes great respect–even though in both cases, Tamai and Abu Klea, the squares were reformed, the enemy who’d broken into them dispatched, and the attacks on them repulsed.

In the film, on the other hand, one of the officers panics and calls a retreat (though in a surrounded square there is nowhere to retreat to) and the square is completely wiped out. It’s interesting that the much less impressive real-life achievement by the dervishes seems to have made an enormous impression on the British.

See for example Kipling’s “Fuzzy Wuzzy” (referring to the Haddendawa tribe that fought at Tamai): “We sloshed you with Martinis, an it wasn’t ‘ardly fair; / But for all the odds agin you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square . . . / So ‘eres to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan; / You’re a poor benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man.”

Since the British meted out preferential treatment to the “martial peoples” of the empire (most of them Muslim), this really counted. The same battles were also the inspiration for the most famous piece of Victorian doggerel, Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitae Lampada”:

 

The sand of the desert is sodden red,–

Red with the wreck of a square that broke;–

The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his banks,

And England’s far, and Honor a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,

“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

Even this reveals a sense of war more realistic than the one Kapur allows his callow subalterns (though it shows how smart Kapur was to start the film off on the playing field). It is ironic that Victorians like Kipling could also be rather better at demystifying the imperial military mystique than contemporary anti-imperialists like Kapur himself seem to be: “A scrimmage in a Border Station / A clatter down a steep defile / Two thousand pounds of education / Drop to a ten-rupee jezail.”

Of course, the Victorians were much more complicated and interesting people than they are given credit for being. And though capable of great self-deception especially on matters of race, they often had an accurate sense of their own qualities and limitations, especially those that seem so alien today. They prized self-command because they knew the extraordinary things it made possible.

In 1852, a British troopship, the paddlewheeled Birkenhead, hit a rock off Capetown. There wasn’t time to evacuate everyone onto the lifeboats. So as the women and children were lowered to safety, the troops and their officers stood, mustered on the deck. Not a single man broke ranks. And they were still standing as the ship broke and sank.

As Kipling wrote, “To stand and be still / To the Birkenhead drill / Is a damn’ tough bullet to chew.”

What made such deeds possible was the combination of a sense of duty and a rigid social hierarchy (at least by American standards). What the Victorians had and we can hardly imagine are the resulting pressures of society. They lived in a world in which mere physical cowardice, let alone exposure as a liar or fraudster, could earn a man permanent expulsion from desirable social circles.

It is a sad irony of history that the Victorian “Romanitas”–the sense of duty and hierarchy, the discipline and paternalism that formed the backbone of the British military culture–ensured the doctrinal rigidity that cost so many British lives in both world wars. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to look at the Victorian men fictionalized in “The Four Feathers” through the Edwardian lens of Bloomsbury and Lytton Strachey’s mockery.

High Victorian culture could be rigid in its obsession with self-control and even cruel. But its optimism, discipline, and sense of duty made it very good at certain things. And their own pre-industrial code of a gentleman’s honor gave Victorians an advantage when it came to dealing with other honor cultures–honor cultures similar to those that inform Osama bin Laden and other Arab enemies of the West. If America is to take up an imperial role in the world today, we have only the Victorian British from whom to learn how to do it.

Jonathan Foreman is a film critic, op-ed columnist, and an editorial board member of the New York Post.

 

The savage soldiers in “The Patriot” act more like the Waffen SS than actual British troops. Does this movie have an ulterior motive?

The week before “The Patriot” opened in the United States, the British press lit up with furious headlines. “Truth is first casualty in Hollywood’s War,” read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson’s character was titled, “The Secret Shame of Mel’s New Hero.” The accompanying articles complained that the new Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as “bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers” and “bloodthirsty child-killers.”

The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film “racist” in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like “Titanic,” “Michael Collins” and “The Jungle Book” remake that have depicted the British as “treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic.” Roberts had a theory: “With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.”

I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street’s pundits will be after they have actually seen the movie. “The Patriot” will not open in England until August, but when it does, Brits will see a supposedly authentic historical epic that radically rewrites the known history of the Revolutionary War. It does so by casting George III’s redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil who commit one monstrous — but wholly invented — atrocity after another. In one scene, the most harrowing of the film, redcoats round up a village of screaming women and children and old men, lock them in a church and set the whole chapel on fire. If you didn’t know anything about the Revolution, you might actually believe the British army in North America was made up of astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do this kind of thing — as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the Nazi SS. Yet no action of the sort ever happened during the war for independence, but an eerily identical war crime — one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II — was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944.

As a film critic for the New York Post, I found “The Patriot” well made and often exciting. But I also found it disturbing in a way that many weaker, dumber films are not. It’s not just that it willfully distorts history in a manner that goes way beyond the traditional poetic license employed by Hollywood, it’s the strange, primitive politics that seem to underlie that distortion.

“The Patriot” is a movie that doesn’t “get” patriotism — in either a modern or the 18th century sense of the word. The only memorable, explicit political sentiment voiced comes when Gibson’s character makes the rather Tory comment that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away. The deliberate lacuna demonstrates a total lack of understanding of, or even a kind of hostility to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding fathers.

You could actually argue without too much exaggeration that “The Patriot” is as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym for “bad”) as anything made in decades. It’s even more fascist than “Fight Club,” that ode to violence, barely repressed homoeroticism and the rejection of consumer capitalism.

“The Patriot” presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts unusually Aryan-looking heroes and avoids any democratic or political context in its portrayal of the Revolutionary War. Instead of such context, it offers a story in which the desire for blood vengeance — for a son shot by a British officer — turns Gibson’s character into a “patriot.” Meanwhile, the imagery piles up:

In one scene towheaded preteens are armed by their father and turned into the equivalent of the Werwolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was thought to have recruited from the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla attacks against the invading Allies.

In the film’s most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the foreigner into becoming one of those bloodied, ax-wielding forest supermen so beloved in Nazi folk-iconography: an 18-century equivalent of the Goth leader Arminius (aka Hermann the German) who annihilated two Roman Legions in the Teutoburger Forest.

The black population of South Carolina — where the film is set — is basically depicted as happy loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely) freedmen.

But the most disturbing thing about “The Patriot” is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of the jingoistic “Independence Day”) and his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding British and other Allied soldiers from his script for “Saving Private Ryan”) depict British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops — particularly the SS in World War II. It’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda.

The British writer Howard Jacobson was so astonished when his latest novel The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize—the most prestigious award for fiction in the English language—that he asked the BBC interviewer who introduced her segment on the award if she could please repeat her opening phrase, “Howard Jacobson has won the Man Booker Prize.”

Jacobson is, in his public persona at least, one of Britain’s most likable literary and media figures. It is a testament to his popular success as a genial but demanding presenter of TV arts programs that the reaction to his literary triumph has been so overwhelmingly positive. For as amiable as he might be, Jacobson fearlessly broke with the politics of the literary and arts world by decrying the ascent of acceptable anti-Semitism in Britain and, even more bravely, made it clear that fashionable anti- Zionism is just a gussied-up version of the older hatred. Indeed, these themes are at the center of The Finkler Question, which is why his victory was so unexpected, not only to him but to everyone else as well. The fact that he was given the Booker the same month that Nobel judges in Sweden named Mario Vargas Llosa the literature laureate and Nobel judges in Norway gave the Chinese dissident Liu Xiabao the Peace Prize makes you wonder if Northern Europe has somehow slipped out of joint—and high above London, Stockholm, and Oslo, swallows are now dining on eagles.

After all, Jacobson was up against formidable competition—including the anti-monarchist Australian two-time winner Peter Carey, the conceptual artist Tom McCarthy, and especially the Anglo-Caribbean Andrea Levy. Her latest book, The Long Song, tells the story of a slave girl born on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation—a subject that could hardly be bettered as Man Booker Prize bait.

Although it is not unheard of for the Booker to go to a genuinely deserving work, it often seems as if the primary concern of Booker jurors is to choose a book that will make them look good according to the prejudices of their peers. Hence the urge to give the prize to exotics from outposts of the former empire, authors of victim narratives, and/or persons of color. Every few years, however, the Booker goes to some older white guy from the British Isles, as if to prove that the process is not totalitarian in its political correctness. The last of these, John Banville, won it for The Sea in 2005 at the age of 60. At 68, Jacobson is the second oldest.

Jacobson claimed his prize as a victory for comic writing. Indeed the Guardian newspaper stated that The Finkler Question was “the first unashamedly comic novel” to win the prize—a somewhat bizarre claim given the previous victories of Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and several others, including Paul Scott’s Staying On.

In any case, Jacobson and the Guardian are both wrong in their characterization of The Finkler Question. Like Jacobson’s masterpiece Kalooki Nights, first published in 2006, the new novel is far too dark and serious in intent to be called an “unashamedly comic novel.”

The book tells the story of three London men who have been friends since two of them were schoolboys and the third was their history teacher. Samuel Finkler is a TV intellectual who writes philosophically inspired self-help books of the Alain de Botton sort, with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen”. His Gentile school chum and rival, Julian Treslove, spent most of his career at the BBC, an institution he loathes, and now ekes out a living as a celebrity look-alike. Both were taught at school by Libor, a Jewish Czech émigré who has remained their friend for more than two decades.

Finkler is clever, driven, selfish, greedy, cynical, ruthless, and obsessed with worldly success—exactly the sort of person who thrives in TV and a rather dismaying model of a certain kind of secular Jew. The fact that Treslove calls Jews “Finklers”—and assumes that his friend’s personality quirks are “Finklerish”—is disturbing, though Treslove also sees Libor’s Mittel-European cultivated gracefulness and emotional intensity as typically “Finklerish.”

The incident that ignites the pilot is the peculiar mugging from behind of Treslove by a woman who says something in his ear that sounds like “You Jew.” Though he also wonders if his attacker could have been an ex-lover whispering “You, Jules” or have simply said “your jewels,” this fundamentally humiliating experience makes him suddenly aware of anti-Semitism and prompts him to delve deeper into the mysteries of Jewish identity and culture. Soon he is exploring salt beef sandwiches, klezmer music, Maimonidean musings on the effects of circumcision on sexual performance, and begins to date the founder of a new Jewish museum.

When he talks to Finkler about all this, he is patronized. Treslove recounts a long list of (real) violent anti-Semitic incidents in Europe and elsewhere, and Finkler responds, “I’m not saying it makes pleasant listening, but it’s not exactly Kristallnacht is it?”

Finkler has long been hostile to Israel; he has declared on the radio that he is ashamed of his co- religionists there and joined a group of prominent creative folk called ASHamed Jews that supports the creative and fiscal boycott of the Jewish state. This action repels Finkler’s dying wife: “I’m ashamed of your public display of shame and I’m not even Jewish.” She knows that his motivation is self-serving: not only does Finkler enjoy “the warm glow of self righteousness” that comes from saying the word “justice”; he thinks that joining the group is good for his career.

Only when, during the 2009 Gaza campaign, the press starts talking hyperbolically about “massacre” and “slaughter” does the philosopher in Finkler begin to have doubts about the group and its cause. Even as he does so, his comrades—several of whom seem based on real-life Jewish figures in the London media and academic scene—become even more hysterical in their denunciations of Israel.

Throughout the book there are discussions, arguments, and jokes—some of them daring to the point of offensiveness, others very bleak indeed—about Jewishness and Jewish identity. Finkler’s wife asks the increasingly obsessive Treslove if he doesn’t wish that Jews would just “shut up about themselves….Endlessly falling out in public about how Jewish to be, whether they are or they aren’t, whether they’re practicing or they’re not, whether to wear fringes or eat bacon, whether they feel safe here or precarious, whether the world hates them or it doesn’t, the fucking Holocaust, fucking Palestine?”

Treslove answers no. But then he fits in all too well with one of Finkler’s definitions of Jewishness—he is someone who is always “talking feverishly about being Jewish.”

Though Jacobson cracks wise throughout the book, “comic” really isn’t the correct descriptive for The Finkler Question, especially given its sense of approaching darkness. This makes all the more strange how readily he and others think it is. But then the response to Jacobson’s fiction has always been strange. Jacobson started publishing fiction at the relatively late age of 40. Born in a working-class Jewish area of Manchester in 1942, he was educated at Cambridge at the feet of the critic F.R. Leavis and then embarked on a career as a literature professor with positions at Cambridge and Sydney University in Australia before settling at the equivalent of a community college in the grim midlands town of Wolverhampton. It was the latter experience that inspired his first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), after which he began writing full time. He turned two widely praised works of nonfiction—Roots Shmoots: Journeys Among Jews and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime—into successful television series.

Jacobson’s novels come in two types: erudite autobiographical works that draw on his childhood in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Manchester and erudite autobiographical works about middle-aged sex and adultery among the academic and literary upper middle class.

The first set depict a pinched, insular community psychologically deformed by the shtetl life from which its residents emerged and then re-created in English cities. Living in perpetual, irrational fear that the “yocks”—a British-Jewish slang term for Gentile far nastier than “goy”—might one day form a drunken mob and attack the neighborhood, its inhabitants tend to turn to Orthodoxy or quasi-religious leftist politics. The hothouse intensity of their family life breeds misery. Theirs is such a depressingly graceless, incurious, and cramped existence that any reader could be forgiven for feeling the stirrings of an aesthetic anti-Semitism within his breast.

The books set in modern upper-middle-class London tend to be more lightweight. They include Act of Love (about an antiquarian bookseller who becomes obsessed with the idea of watching his wife betray him) and No More Mr. Nice Guy (about a TV writer who is kicked out by his porn-author wife and then masochistically revisits the sexual milestones of his life). All Jacobson novels share an obsession with sex—which helps explain the common likening of his work to that of Philip Roth, with whom some might argue he shares a certain puerility on such matters.

In the books that draw on his childhood, the sexual material can verge on the creepy. It is not just a matter of the usual Oedipal impulses. The protagonist in The Mighty Walzer—arguably his least entertaining book, about a teenage ping-pong champion—spends hours in the bathroom masturbating to sepia pictures of his long dead great aunts and cousins. But the ping-pong player’s obsessions are relatively bland compared with those of Maxie Glickman, the protagonist of Jacobson’s dark masterpiece Kalooki Nights. As a teenager, Maxie pleasures himself to a book called The Scourge of the Swastika—specifically, to photographs of naked Jewish women being inspected in a concentration camp. He is also erotically obsessed with Ilse Koch, the notorious SS wife who came to be known as “the bitch of Buchenwald.” Portnoy seems a paragon of psychosexual health by comparison.

Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, is about a small, sweaty, hairy, neurotically lustful English literature professor called Sefton Goldberg whose overheated erotic yearnings at a miserable provincial college get him into comic scrapes. Like so many small, sweaty, hairy, neurotically lustful Jacobson alter egos, Goldberg is unathletic, unmoved by nature, argumentative, masochistic, and self-obsessed. Again and again in the book, Jacobson explains these and other quirks with the phrase “because he was Jewish,” as if he assumes that none of his readers will have seen a Woody Allen movie and as if he himself believes that Jewish stereotypes of Jews are inherently cute and funny.

In Britain, Jacobson’s fiction is always said to be “underrated” and “hilarious.” Paperback editions of works like The Mighty Walzer are garnished with blurbs by famous writers proclaiming the sidesplitting nature of the contents within. But there are more laughs in any single book by, say, Tom Sharpe—a popular comic novelist without literary pretensions—than in all of Jacobson’s oeuvre put together. And it is hard to see how Jacobson is underrated. If anything, his early books are radically overrated.

Indeed, one sometimes feels that the critics who make such a point of laughing at Jacobson’s capering, neurotic, lust-tormented, uncomfortable Jewish characters are doing so because they are enjoying how ungenerous he is with his creations. Jacobson’s stand-in protagonists are hyper-aware of stereotyping and hypersensitive to it; they agonize about the meaning of Jewishness and the competing contradictory currents of secular Jewish identity. But these clever, libidinous, disputatious men are not always as sympathetic as they are intended to be, and their dexterous anatomization of lower-middle-class Jewish life as it was might make it seem uglier and more graceless than it could possibly have been.

Jacobson’s observations about his Jews don’t always ring true to American ears, as when the narrator of Kalooki Nights announces that “most ethnic troubles in most schools originate in geography or PE. They do for Jews, anyway, who can neither draw a map nor hang upside down from a wall bar. The two deficiencies are not entirely unrelated. Jews cannot draw a map nor negotiate a wall bar because they have seldom had any use for either.” The gym joke is old and the map joke is off; given how often and how far the Jews have traveled after various expulsions, it’s hard to believe they traditionally have little geographical sense. For Jacobson, “Jews” really means the shtetl Jews of Russia and Poland and their immediate descendants in England, and not much else. This fact, and the clichés that emanate from it, may explain why until now his books have failed to make a good impression across the Atlantic.

Another reason is that America is perhaps too philo-Semitic to be intrigued or amused by the kind of parochial British Jewishness that Jacobson celebrates and laments. As he himself notes, America is much more Jewish than Britain is. African-Americans, Hispanics, and WASPs alike unselfconsciously use “tush” and “shmuck” in conversation. Moreover, American Jewry has arguably become much more variegated than its much smaller British equivalent (the community is only 260,000 strong). America has Hells Angels Jews, tall Jews, surfing Jews, right-wing Jews, preppy Jews, baseball-playing Jews, country and western Jews, Green Beret Medal of Honor Jews, as well as more familiar shnooky, nerdy, Jappy, fearful, materialistic, klutzy, brainy, urban, funny, lawyerly types of Jew.

Jacobson’s books are aimed at and grow out of a society that never produced or embraced a Mel Brooks or a Lenny Bruce. As Jacobson’s alter ego Max says in Kalooki Nights, “somehow English Jews have had all the rudery squeezed out of them.” It is one of the paradoxes of the comparative history of Jews in Britain and the United States that British Jewry tends to be less assertive. There is nothing like an AIPAC or an Anti-Defamation League in the UK; their pallid equivalents are small, underfunded, and have little influence.

_____________

For these reasons, it might be difficult for American readers to appreciate just how courageous Jacobson has been as an opponent of the vicious anti-Israel discourse now so common in the United Kingdom. He has done so not only in The Finkler Question but in his role as a weekly columnist for the Independent, the most ferociously anti-Israel (and anti-American) of all Britain’s mainstream papers. It frequently devotes its front page to the bigoted rantings of the veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk. One of its star columnists is an exceptionally nasty and dishonest youth called Johann Hari who, commenting on Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008, wrote that whenever he tried to write positive or reassuring words about that country, “a remembered smell fills my nostrils, the smell of shit.” Hari’s article went on to accuse Israel of deliberately poisoning Palestinian land and drinking water with untreated sewage. That same year Hari, who specializes in smearing his targets as “racists” and who claims that his own critics are part of a McCarthyite conspiracy “sent” to “intimidate and silence” anti-zionists like himself, won a prestigious prize for political journalism named after George Orwell, a travesty that is almost comic in a dark Howard Jacobsonesque way.

Jacobson took his most widely noted and controversial stand during the Gaza campaign of 2009, when, in the course of a brilliant Independent piece on the vicious dishonesty of likening the Gaza assault to the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, he also denounced the anti-Semitism of a play by the long-fashionable playwright Caryl Churchill.

Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children—not Seven Israeli Children, as Jacobson noted—culminates in an Israeli character’s racist monologue rejoicing in the slaughter of Palestinian children: “they’re animals…I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out…we’re chosen people.” An appalled Jacobson wrote: “Once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple.”

He further noted that the Guardian’s theater critic Michael Billington had praised the play for showing “how Jewish children are bred to believe in the ‘otherness’ of Palestinians.” The use of the eugenic word “bred” led Jacobson to observe “how easily language can sleepwalk us into bigotry.”

In this column and in countless others, Jacobson has proved a uniquely calm and effective voice when it comes to exposing the assumptions, prejudices, and lies embedded in the rhetoric of people like Churchill and her supporters. He understands the culture of the liberal metropolitan media elite because he is a part of it. Not for him the tired old defenses of Israel that take no note of the unyielding moral universe of its Western foes. The battle and others like it are brilliantly evoked by The Finkler Question, which dissects the motivations of the London Jews who have joined or taken leading roles in the British movement to delegitimize Israel. Jacobson’s ASHamed Jews are not consumed by self-hatred but self-congratulation. Some have found a new form of religion and identity in their association with the BBC or other institutions of Britain’s media elite. Others are proving their assimilation. Still others are trying to destroy “the thing they loved for fear of its falling into the enemy’s hands” or merely engaging in traditional Jewish inter-tribal warfare.

The force of Jacobson’s column mirrors the growth of his work as a novelist. It is only in the past five years that Jacobson has produced fiction truly commensurate with his talent and ambition. The Finkler Question and Kalooki Nights are so superior to anything Jacobson has written before—richer, deeper, more important—that it is almost as if he has been awakened creatively by the threat posed to both Israel and the Jews by the efforts to delegitimize both. His arrival as a genuinely great British novelist is perhaps the only good thing to have come from the eruption of anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom. Surely one of Jacobson’s own rueful and neurotic narrators would have to acknowledge that it would have been better for Britain and the world if circumstances had allowed Howard Jacobson to remain just a relatively minor literary navel-gazer rather than a fearless speaker of truth on behalf of a people under a systematic cultural assault.

 

About the Author

Jonathan Foreman, a writer living in London, was formerly the movie critic and a war correspondent for the New York Post. He last wrote for us about the Mumbai terrorist attacks (“India’s Time of Reckoning,” February 2009)