Word: ghettoes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...easy to guess whether the police would have so cavalierly destroyed the SLA's hideout had its members fled to a stucco mansion like the Hearsts' in Hillsborough rather than to the modest home of a black family living on the edges of a southeast Los Angeles ghetto. That the police should have appeared "the good guys" on television was ironic, all the more so because California authorities are using SLA activities as an excuse for rounding up dozens of Bay area radicals on unverified charges...
...alas, is quite a lot. Dybbuk, which was given its world premiere at Lincoln Center last week by the New York City Ballet, is a wan and murky evocation of the Hasidic legend that is all but drowned in a sea of pretentious metaphysical subfusc. The dybbuk story, a ghetto version of Romeo and Juliet given classic shape in Shloime Ansky's 1916 Yiddish play, involves the star-crossed lovers named Channon and Leah. Once their fathers had taken a vow that some day their children should wed. By the time boy meets girl, the vow has been forgotten...
...modern pastiche-a murmuring of Mahler here, a shriek of Stravinsky there, stray leitmotifs of Hasidic melody to suggest ethnicity. Robbins' choreography matches the music, sometimes cliché for cliché. When the orchestra explodes in a burst of Yiddish song, dancers sway sinuously, as if at a ghetto wedding. There are great yaps of brass at Big Moments of high stress; on stage, the performers thrust splayed hands to the skies or to the audience as if they had just discovered Martha Graham...
...fairy tale allied itself with other types of mass culture that saved it from cuteness and trite morality throughout the Victorian era. It never joined forces with another persistent and repressed literary genre, pornography--which this book terms "the ultimate cultural ghetto"--but it did identify with "vulgar" elements like spiritual mediums, Nursery nonsense and thrillers...
Nowhere was this reality more dramatically symbolized than during Brandt's visit to Warsaw in December 1970. There he paid his respects to the memory of the 500,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto who were killed by German soldiers during the war. At the simple granite memorial, Brandt fell to his knees in a heartfelt act of atonement and prayer. He often said: "No people can escape from their history...