Africatown, Alabama

One benefit to being temporarily stuck Stateside is that I have had a chance to catch up a bit on my reading. Most of my reading has, naturally, centered on Russia. But I have also had the opportunity to read a couple of titles on one of my favorite topics, African-American slavery in the United States.

My most recent read in this vein is Sylvanie A. Diouf's Dreams of Africa in Alabama. Diouf, who currently serves as curator for New York's Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, takes as her topic the fate of the Africans who were spirited into the United States aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship ever brought to American shores. The Clotilda landed on the eve of the Civil War--in 1861.

Sadly, and shockingly, the transatlantic slave trade did not end when Congress ended the slave trade in 1808. Africans continued to be enslaved and brought through the harrowing Middle Passage to the Eastern United States under cover of darkness and sometimes with the complicity of the very officials who were supposed to suppress the trade. Moreover, if a slave ship made it across the Atlantic and was caught, the law did not require that the slaves be repatriated but rather that they be sold at auction, with half the proceeds going to the government and half to any informer involved in their discovery by the authorities.

The harrowing journey of the Clotilda Africans began as a wager. The owner of the ship, a callous and casual racist named Timothy Meaher, bet someone that he could bring in a ship full of African slaves without arousing the authorities' suspicions or incurring penalty of any kind. One has to wonder at the stupendous inhumanity of a man who would put human beings through the horrors of the Middle Passage just for the sake of a bet.

I had always thought the scenes aboard the Lord Ligonier in Roots were masterpieces of realism. But reading of conditions below ship on the Clotilda, I came to realize that even that depiction, hardly one apologetic for slavery, was largely a whitewash. The biggest piece of whitewashing in Roots is the simple fact that the slaves are always depicted clothed--the men in loincloths, the women in cloth-like clothing that fully covered their privates and their breasts. According to Diouf, slaves were routinely shipped across the Atlantic stark naked--partly because doing so made the work of cleaning up their stool and vomit easier for the ship's crew, but also because slavery's defenders created a myth of the naked African "savage". It was the enslavers, not the slave, responsible for Africans' arriving naked on American shores.

No sooner had they arrived in America than the Africans aboard the Clotilda were separated at the auction block. Nonetheless, a sizable group of them remained the property of Timothy Meaher, the Clotilda's owner. This group formed a tight-knit community that chose to remain together after the Civil War, purchasing land owned by Meaher and founding a community they ultimately named Africatown, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama.

There seems to be no way to overstate the tragedies experienced by the men and women of Africatown over the course of their long lives together. One man saw not one, but three, of his sons killed in preventable train wrecks for which the responsible railroads managed to weale out of having to pay any compensation. Another man, who joined the Union Army shortly after it reached Mobile, spent decades trying to get a veteran's pension and other services to which he was entitled by law. Nearly all of the Africans died close to penniless.

Nonetheless, the book is a powerful work of history examining how the Africans managed to preserve a culture to which surrounding whites and African-Americans were largely hostile. Africatown maintained a judicial system founded on a West African, not an American, model, and the community held on to African means of government by consensus.

That such a thing could happen in Jim Crow Alabama seems little short of a miracle.

This Blog Is Presented in Living Color on Blogspot.com

Do not realign the vertical and horizontal axes on your computer screen. Do not change your color settings. Do not go up to your rooftops to adjust your antenna. What you are seeing is the look of the future--or at least, the look of the future of the Far East Side Minyan.

Having opted not to change the blog name simply because I will now be reporting from Eastern Europe, not the Far East, I felt it was time to give the Far East Side Minyan a makeover. Oddly, I have wanted a red, white, and blue color scheme for some time; Taiwan's flag is red, white, and blue, as is America's, as is Russia's. The green template I had before I had chosen only because I saw it as vaguely "eastern". But as I will be in Europe, I felt it was time the blog had a more European feel to it. And yet, also a bit of an American flavor, since I am, after all, an American teaching American English.

Other features of the blog have changed as well. I have decided to have the archive set up in descending order by months, not ascending order by weeks. This is to make life easier for my mother, who periodically prints out my dispatches so that my computer-phobic grandmother can keep abreast of my adventures. Now my mother can more easily print out the blog and send it to my grandmother a month at a time, as is her wont.

I have also decided to change the fonts, in order to have a uniform Georgia font throughout. I wanted a classier, more consistent look for the blog, and I felt that having a single font would make The Far East Side Minyan easier to read and to print out.

Last but not least, I chose to reorganize the page layout in a way that uses more of the screen. I frankly never cared for the wide, unused verticle stripes in the old template. I hope that the new layout will make my dispatches easier to read, since less scrolling will be involved.

If anyone has any feedback or suggestions on the look of the blog, please let me know.

Leaving On a Jet Plane

Today at 10:30, the doorbell rang. My friendly neighborhood postal carrier needed my signature, in order to give me back a package I recognized at once as my visa and passport for Russia. I was so happy I could have kissed her, but thought the better of it, signed for my package, and went back to bed (ah, the wonders of temporary unemployment).

Today, I took my GRE, in order to be ready to put in graduate school applications over the coming months. I scored as well as I need to--a 700 verbal and 670 quantitative, which should be sufficient for any kind of program I would care to apply to.

My father picked me up from the GRE. I had intended to surprise him by showing him my passport with the visa attached, but he had already seen the Express Mail package I had left on the dining room table. Nonetheless, he too me out for a celebratory dinner and suggested we start looking for a flight on our return home.

I had expected booking a flight to be a difficult and time-consuming process, but we were able to find a reasonable flight from Kansas City to Moscow for a total of $650, including the cost of having the tickets FedExed to me via two-day delivery. So as of Wednesday, I should have my tickets in hand.

I am reasonably philosophical about the time I have spent Stateside. I've accomplished a lot: my application to American Jewish University is completed, save for the financial aid forms. I took me GRE today. I am looking into a variety of other graduate programs. And I managed to find this job in Russia a mere three weeks after returning home--certainly a far better experience than I have had with other job hunts. For the first time in a long time, I feel a sense of direction and purpose in my life that I know will ultimately bear fruit.

Next Monday evening, I leave on a jet plane, off to a new adventure. I am ready to go, and I will not hem and haw over what happens if I fail. One way or another, a bright future will open up for me in graduate school next fall. But in the meantime, I know I'll see and experience things I could never have seen and experienced any other way. And for this, I am eternally grateful.

Once Again, The L-rd Is On Time

Last summer, a couple of months before I entered the CELTA course, I bought Roots on DVD. I have been a big fan of Roots since I saw it on television when I was twelve or thirteen. The story of Kunta Kinte's efforts to be free, of Kizzy's attempt to build a happy life in spite of being owned by a man who raped her, of Chicken George's struggles against that same rapist, never gets old for me. But when I watched it on this DVD, I got to see some things I had not seen before.

Among the other special features was a special that had aired on ABC one year after the momentous original broadcasts of Roots, examining the cultural sensation that the book and miniseries had been. Alex Haley was interviewed for, and partially narrated, the special. And at the end of it, he said something I have been mulling over ever since:

"The L-rd," his grandmother used to say, "may not come when you want Him to, but He will always be on time."

I have thought about that sentiment a lot with respect to the tribulations I have had the past few months. Nothing has gone quite the way I thought it would--not in Taiwan, and not since coming home. I have had seemingly endless delays in getting myself into a good teaching position abroad, and that position abroad will itself be a delay in getting into the kind of graduate program I know I need to get into evetually--one leading to a clear career goal in the professions.

But nonetheless, things have come together. Not as fast as I might have wanted them to, but they have come together.

Friday, my passport and visa shoudl be sent back to my by the Russian Embassy in Washington. I will have them in my possession probably no later than next Monday or Tuesday, and will be able to book a flight for the following week. The journey to Moscow I have anticipated these three months will at last take place.

Looking back on the time I have spent at home, I have some cause for satisfaction. I managed to accept a new position a mere three weeks after leaving Taiwan, proving that there are jobs out there in ESL/EFL. I have managed to revive all of the Russian I knew at the end of a semester of Russian in college, langauge I had thought gone for good. I have read a few books on Russian culture, so that I will not be going into Moscow as ignorant of cultural niceties as I was in Taiwan. And I have gotten back on antidpressants, which should tremendously improve my chances of succeeding in Russia.

For the first time in my life, I feel as if I am making important life choices with my eyes wide open, not just grabbing onto the first thing I see. The experience of Taiwan and of the last three months has, I think, made more mature, made me like myself better. I am now considering a few different career paths--in the Jewish community, in teaching, in library science--that will be a better fit for me than what I was pursuing before I left New York.

My life, finally, is going somewhere.

And once again, the L-rd is on time.

An 8 in Democracy

When I first started to consider going to Russia, people started to ask me a lot of questions about human rights in the former land of tsars and comissars. I have done a fair amount of research on this--naturally, I would be curious to know what risks I would take in coming to Russia--and what I have found indicates to me that the situation is mixed and, well, complicated. I will address more on this in a later post (and, presumably, in posts from Russia). This post will deal only with ways degrees of democracy can be assessed.

I should point out, before I delve further into the topic, that I do not like the term "human rights". Not because I am opposed to the basic liberties that all human beings should enjoy, but because I feel the term is misleading and used for purposes I disapprove. Prior to the Second World War, the prevailing term for these rights and freedoms was not human rights, but natural rights, a term that came from Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The United Nations and other international organizations have popularized the former term because they felt natural rights was too linked to Enlightenment philosophical assumptions that people enjoy their rights as a result of nature.

Well, to me this assumption is inherently true and should be promoted unvarnished. Certain liberties and rights are sacred precisely because they are the products of nature and of nature's G_d. And this is not a fact the United Nations (or for that matter, organizations that actually promote human freedom instead of just talking about it in erroneous ways) should proclaim loudly and proudly. But I digress.

One source I looked into with respect to Russia's record of protecting the natural rights of its citizens are the various indices of democracy and freedom put out by various organizations. But what I have found shows to me that these indices suffer from various kinds of bias, perhaps inherent to creating quantifiable rating systems.

The one I find the most problematic is the Democracy Index put out by The Economist. This index ranks societies on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the most democratic. Countries rated 8 or above are considered "full democracies"; countries rated 6 to 7.9 are considered "flawed democracies"; countries rated 4 to 5.9 are "hybrid regimes"; and countries with a rating lower than 4 are considered "authoritarian." For the record, Sweden is considered the most democratic society, with a rating of 9.88; North Korea is the least, with a rating of 1.02. Russia rates a 5.02, classifying it as a "hybrid regime".

Now, I don't doubt that Sweden is a more democratic society than North Korea. Clearly some societies are more democratic than others. but within the ranking of the most democratic socities, I wonder what logic is being applied, as I fail to see what shades of democracy are being shown.

For instance, the United States ranks 8.22, 1.6 points below Sweden, and 17th out of 167 countries surveyed. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, as I have never felt unfree in my own country, and have no reason to believe I would feel more free in Sweden. And while I admit I have never actually met a Swedish person, I have also never heard anything to indicate that Swedish visitors to the United States feel less free here than they do at home.

According to Wikipedia, the Democracy Index considers four factors so important in makings its assessments that a low score automatically leads to a "penalty" in assessing how democractic a country is:

1) Whether national elections are free and fair (emphasis mine);

2) The security of voters

3) The influence of foreign powers on government

4) The capacity of civil servants to implement politics

Three of these criteria strike me as having fatal flaws. I can see no reason to assess national government more than state, provincial, or local governments in their degree of democracy. Some nations are more federal than others (I would argue that this is true of the United States compared to Sweden). One can envision a country with a less democratic government at the national level, but which gives most governmental powers to local governments which are more democratic.

The influence of foreign powers upon government strikes me as an issue that can cut both ways. Popular sovereignty can be undermined by interference of foreign powers, but it can also be enhanced. I would argue that, to the extent that democracy exists at all in lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority, it is only because of the interference of Israel and the United States. So I cannot see that interference inherently undermines democracy or human freedom.

I also fail to understand the logic of the fourth criterion, "the capacity of civil servants to implement politics." Or rather, I am confused by it, as I am unsure what it means. Certainly, there are countries in the world where civil servants are unable to maintain law and order, prerequisites for a functioning democracy. But I would also argue that there are societies where civil servant elites actively thwart the will of the people (one such society being the European Union, which maintains a ban on capital punishment contrary to the will and wishes of the vast majority of European citizens...but this is a topic for another post). Civil servants can be enemies of democracy as much as they can be its conduits.

In short, I question whether democracy can be accurately quantified. I can see no criteria for declaring Sweden more democratic than America that is not fraught with ideological biases. Americans, like Swedes, are secure in their voting rights, and I can see no evidence that the United States has less freedom of expression than has Sweden.

That Was the Week That Wasn't

Passover may not be my favorite Jewish holiday--that honor goes to Simchat Torah, when we dance around the Torah scrolls--but it certainly is the most meaningful. The story we tell each other around the seder table each year is the founding story of the Jewish people. This is not to denigrate the stories of the patriarchs in the Torah, only to note that the story of our liberation from Egypt is central to our narrative and consciousness in a way that, say, the binding of Isaac is not.

These days, the Jewish community boasts every type of seder you can think of. There are women's seders and men's seders, gay seders and interfaith seders, family seders and community seders. Since the Civil Rights Movement, we have even had "freedom seders"--a term I find incongruous since I can't imagine what kind of seder is not about freedom, though I support the concept of using the seder to promote support movements for freedom around the world. Over the years, I've experienced seders large and small, right-wing and left-wing, in communal halls and in tiny Upper West Side apartments.

But this year, I experienced no seder at all.

I tried too late to find a seder here in Kansas. The week before Passover, I called the local synagouge, which referred me to the local Federation. The Federation said it could send out an e-mail but wasn't hopeful, given how late I had asked And in the end, I never found a seder.

The rest of Passover has been essentially non-existent as well. I have no idea where to obtain matzah here in Kansas--in New York, you can find it in practically any grocery store--and so have made no effort to observe a Passover diet.

I imagine next year, Passover will be a bigger production. It's hard to imagine what a seder in Moscow might look like these days. So much of Russia's Jewish community has emigrated to Israel or America since the fall of the Soviet Union, and yet Jewish life in Russia is, by all accounts, reviving. The Russian government may be hostile to missionary efforts by Jehovah's Witnesses and other "new" religious groups, but it respects longstanding "historical" religious communities of Russia, Judaism included.

But I don't imagine I'll encounter the choices in seders I had in New York.

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Once I get to Russia, everyone tells me, I will have to get used to legendary Russian bureaucracy. But if my experience telephoning the Russian Consulate in Washington this morning is any indication, I won't have much to adjust to.

I called the consulate this morning to find out whether my visa application had been received. A very polite woman on the phone--to whom I managed to speak without going through a single voice-mail tree--told me not only that my application had been received, but that it has been approved, and that my passport and visa will be returned to me on the 25th, this coming Friday.

When I sent in the application last Wednesday, I knew that it would take six to ten business days. Given what I had heard about Russian bureaucrats, I had expected this really meant ten days at a minimum. But fortunately, I am getting it back in only six.

So now I get to start looking for an actual flight and getting my worldly belongings together. I will be going off again into the wild blue yonder, probably a bit sooner than I had expected, but ready to face whatever comes half a world away.

A Blog by Any Other Name

A couple of people have written, asking me what name this blog will have once I make it to Russia. nd so, in answer that question (drumroll please):

After careful consideration, I have decided not to change this blog's name. I will still be the Far East Side Minyan, even on the east side of Europe.

I have decided it would cause too much confusion to my regular readers, some of whom are not particularly computer savvy, to have to remember a new blog name and address. Moreover, I have come to rather liking the name I chose on a whim about six months ago, when I set out for Taiwan. I may no longer be in the Far East, but I like the humor of the name, and I can think of no better one for the regular dispatches I send out about my adventures overseas.

Speaking of which, your roving reporter is heading out for further adventures soon, G_d willing. I received my Letter of Invitation from Moscow today and sent my visa application to the Russian Embassy posthaste. This application should take no more than ten business days to process, so I expect it back by the 1st of May, after which I will finally be able to book a flight to Russia.

It's hard not to be afraid of somehow jinxing this. I have had such a long string of things almost come together and then fall apart over the last few years, that I hesitate to count any unhatched chickens. But there is little reason to suppose the Embassy will reject my application. I checked and double checked my paperwork before I sent it off, and so I have every reason for cheer. Whatever nagging thoughts I have in the back of my mind I will have to work to dismiss.

The Family Circus

It's hard to believe that I have only three or four weeks before I leave for Russia. According to what my school has told me, my new Letter of Invitation should be ready tomorrow, after which it will be sent to me and I will be able to reapply for my visa. All of this should take until the end of the month and, knock wood, I will be out of here in early May.

Quite a few things still need to be done before I can depart. One of the biggest is that I need to start digging through family photographs for good pictures of my nearest and dearest. One of the classic ESL/EFL lessons is to teach words for family members using the teacher's own family photos, on the theory that students are naturally interested in the teacher. So I need to be prepared for this exercise, as I expect I will have to go through it at one time or another.

Teaching words for members of the family, as I know from experience, can be quite challenging for an ESL/EFL teacher. Many cultures do not conceive of family relationships in exactly the way we do. My faithful correspondent Leah Silberman Jenner remarked in a comment to my last blog post that Yiddish has words for your children's in-laws. When I took my CELTA course in New York, I witnessed a lesson by another trainee about the family. One very vocal student from Turkey could not believe that English, unlike Turkish, does not have single words to distinguish aunts and uncles on your mother's side from aunts and uncles on your father's side. It took several trys for this trainee to pacify his disgust over the issue.

I do not yet know how Russian treats in-laws, stepfamilies, or cousin relationships, which I gather are the areas where languages tend to differ the most (even within English, there are differences; in some places, people will refer to almost all relatives beyond their immediate family as their cousins). I have gotten only as far as the words for father, mother, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather, and so far, Russian conceives of these relationships in the same way that English does. About the only pecularity so far is that some of the Russian words for male relatives have feminine endings in the nominative singular but are nonetheless declined as masculine nouns.

Going Bananas

To me, verbs are the coolest cats in all of language; verbs have verve. G_d Himself is a verb (at least according to certain kabbalistic understandings of Him). And some linguists suggest that all of language may have evolved out of only two kinds of words: demonstrative pronouns (word meaning this and that) and a few basic verbs.

Yet at the moment, verbs are starting to be a headache. Or at least, one verb in particular, the verb to go.

You would think a word like to go would be common to all languages. And until I started tackling Russian, I found this to be so. In French, it's aller; in Hebrew, lelechet. In English, the verb to go is so much a part of the language that it lends itself to grammatical structures (I'm going to visit my aunt tomorrow) and idioms (think of go south, go sour, and go bananas). It's impossible to imagine English without this simple, two-letter verb.

But Russian is idiosyncratic in this as, I am told, in many other respects. A Russian cannot go anywhere. He can walk, he can run, he can travel in trains, planes, and automobiles. He can go somewhere once or repeatedly, but he cannot simply go. There is not means of saying that someone goes somewhere without specifying by what means he goes, how often he goes, and whether he set out intending to return.

Not one verb for which English might simply use to go is interchangeable with any other; so to discuss simple motion in Russian, one must learn a whole host of verbs.

Flash Cards and Fiddly Endings

I don't sit down with my Russian materials with as much frequency or consistency as I should. Part of the reason for this is that I am more than a little skeptical of self-studying languages. As a certified and slightly experienced ESL/EFL teacher, I know that learning any language involves developing the four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Self-study of a language does little to develop speaking skills because it provides no real opportunity for error correction. I can listen to a CD and repeat, but I don't really get to know if I'm pronouncing anything right. And the CD doesn't provide pronunciation even of all the words used in the book.

Another cause of my lack of discipline has been that, until recently, I felt as if I were going over old ground rather than breaking new ground. Most of what I have done has had the effect of reviving what I knew at the end of a semester of college Russian, not of teaching me any truly new material. Going over old ground can often feel dispiriting.

But I'm trying some new techniques for getting up a bit more steam on my Russian. One is making myself flash cards of vocabulary and going over it a few times until I really know the words. I've made quite a few flash cards out of vocabulary in my Teach Yourself Russian book, as well as verbs I found on a website listing the most frequently used words in Russian.

I am determined, from now on, to learn at least 10 new verbs a day. I think I can handle that for as long as I remain Stateside. I may not know the verbs as well as I should--some of them I am certain are irregular, but I can find no conjugations for them, nor can I determine for all of them whether they are perfective or imperfective aspect--but at least I will have recognition value when I start taking Russian lessons in Moscow.

The other big challenge for me right now is to get to a point where I know all of the Russian noun case endings. Having learned forms in Latin and Greek in high school, this should not be a challenge and mostly just requires practice. But it's awfully dull practice, just sitting and writing out noun declensions, and since I also have a limited vocabulary at present, I cannot always easily call to mind another word that fits the declension I need to practice.

Hopefully that will change once my Thousand Words in Russian book comes. I finally ordered the picture book. I hope it will at least get me through a lot of practical, real-life vocabulary so that, reasonably soon after arriving in Moscow, I can ask for boots and bananas without constantly consulting a phrasebook.