Author: NYRblog

Robert Gottlieb

President Franklin D. Roosevelt just after he was elected to a fourth term in office, November 10, 1944 (George Skadding/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

I was jolted the other day when The New York Times science section splashed three big close-up head-shots of FDR across the top of its front page. (The story: his death of a cerebral hemorrhage may have been linked to a melanoma.) Suddenly, unexpectedly, there was the face of my president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, at the height of the Depression, more or less a year after I was born, and by the time I became conscious of the great world out there, he had become the family hero: as resourceful as he was wise, as charming as he was brilliant. Everyone we knew loved his handsome, distinguished face, was moved by his beautiful voice—the famous fireside chats!—and, most important of all in those frightening times, took comfort from the confidence he radiated. We knew instinctively that with him leading us, all would be well.

Of course by the time we were in the war I was aware that there were people who hated him—that traitor to his class, that nigger-lover, that camouflaged Jew (Franklin Delano Rosenfeld); him and that virago wife of his, rushing around the world making trouble instead of staying home and looking after the children the way a decent woman would. But such people were beneath contempt. (Decades later, I was seated next to Sandra Day O’Connor at a formal dinner party in Washington, and we found ourselves talking about FDR—and amused at our wildly different experiences of him as kids: Where she grew up, in the ranching world of the southwest, his name was anathema!)

I remember in the fall of 1944 standing on Broadway and 73rd Street,
opposite the old newsreel theater, waiting with my mother for the president (our president) to pass by in his motorcade. It was only weeks before the election, and he was campaigning for his fourth term, in freezing weather. It was a long, cold wait. But eventually the cars came flashing by, and
there he was—leaning out toward the crowd, waving, smiling. A thrilling sight. You could see even in those few un-retouched seconds, though, that he was worn and tired; just possibly unwell.

Nonetheless, his death only a few months later—at the ridiculously young age of sixty-three—was not only unforeseen but cataclysmic, particularly so, perhaps, for people my age who had never known another president. I was not only in grief, I was scared; the bottom had fallen out of the world. With FDR in the White House you knew that your president was on the job taking care of you—like your parents, or the cop on the corner. The name “Harry Truman” meant nothing to you in 1945—he represented uncertainty, not security.

Have there been presidents since Roosevelt who’ve given American kids that sense of being guided and protected, of being in safe hands? Did Eisenhower? We didn’t need protecting during his reign; everything was stable and secure, or seemed to be—except when we practiced hiding under our desks to shield ourselves from A-bombs. Did Reagan? Perhaps to those who saw him as an amiable grandpa, but he didn’t project Roosevelt’s unshakable benign authority. Did Kennedy? Nixon? Carter? How about George W? And will Barack Obama ever come to stand as a symbolic bulwark between our threatening world and the anxieties of our children? We can only hope he will.

The night of that 1944 election I was so nervous I begged my parents to wake me up in the middle of the night when the voting was conclusive—but only if Roosevelt won. He did, and they did. I went right back to sleep, but I still remember how relieved I was on hearing the good news. With FDR in charge for what I thought would be another four years I had nothing to fear.

Haleh Esfandiari

Zahra Rahnavard waving to supporters during a campaign rally for her husband, Mir Hussein Moussavi, at Haydarniya Stadium, Tehran, June 9, 2009 (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

It is entirely appropriate that two women have become the iconic symbols of Iran’s protest movement. Thanks to cell phones and the Internet, millions of people around the world saw footage of the blood-soaked face of the young Neda Agha Soltan, as she lay dying on a Tehran street, shot by security forces during a peaceful demonstration. But even before last June’s rigged presidential election, Zahra Rahnavard, the wife of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, had gained international renown as the first woman in Iranian history to campaign alongside her husband—making speeches of her own and taking a strong stand on controversial social issues.

Ms. Rahnavard has caused a stir, but also set an example. An author and educator in her own right, she was the first female chancellor of any Iranian university—she directed Alzahra University in Tehran from 1998 until 2006—and has served as a political advisor to former president Mohammed Khatami. During the campaign, she was outspoken in calling for reform and also courageously endorsed the demands of the One Million Signatures campaign, a women’s rights movement whose leaders have been attacked and arrested by the Iranian authorities.

Following her example, the wives of the other candidates began to appear on the campaign trail as well. Women were active in the campaigns of the two leading opposition presidential candidates; and when hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets after Ahmadinejad was, improbably, declared the winner, women marched alongside the men, braving assaults and intimidation from the riot police, paramilitary forces, and knife-, club- and chain-wielding goons the government sent after the demonstrators. As an activist friend wryly told me, “They treated us equally. They beat, clubbed and arrested us just like the men.” (In a sign of the growing weight of the women’s vote, President Ahmadenijad—his legitimacy in serious doubt—sought to mollify this constituency by nominating three women to his cabinet, though parliament confirmed only one of them.)

Women have in fact been at the forefront of resistance to an intrusive state ever since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. In the early years of the revolution, they resisted the new regime’s attempt to force them out of the workplace and universities. They found subtle ways—such as showing a bit of hair and wearing shorter robes in pastel colors—of challenging the restrictive dress code the government imposed on them in the name of Islam. They refused to stay segregated, whether in the university classroom or in taxis. Today, more women than men win admission to universities in competitive state-wide examinations, and this trend has so alarmed some members of parliament in recent years that there has been talk of legislation to impose quotas: affirmative action in the interest of men!

In the mid-1990s, women flocked to support the reform-minded administration of President Mohammad Khatami, accounting for, in part, the large majorities by which he won his two terms in office. With the One Million Signatures campaign, launched in 2006 and aimed at collecting a million signatures for a petition protesting discriminatory legislation against women, the women’s movement entered a new phase, implicitly calling for a revision of laws rooted in the basic principles of Islam. Arrest, trial, heavy fines, and imprisonment have not deterred the leaders of this campaign, who come mostly from the broad middle class and have gone to small towns and villages as well as the large cities to collect signatures.

The participation by women in the latest series of protests marks another notable development. Women have shown themselves ready to do what had generally been regarded as ‘men’s work.” Despite the risk of beatings, injury, arrest, even death, they have continued to take a leading part in protests and demonstrations. The demonstrators’ chant, “we are men of war,” has changed to “we are men and women of war.”

When I was held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison in 2007, I was questioned at length about the women’s rights movement; my two interrogators seemed alarmed and befuddled by it. They certainly feared its potential: how else to explain the harsh way in which officials have dealt with the women collecting signatures for a simple petition? But my interrogators also told me they feared a backlash if they used excessive force to disperse female demonstrators.

That was three years ago. Now, the gloves are off. The sight of tens of thousands of women marching alongside men in demonstrations last June seems to have unnerved the authorities. Under the increasingly brutal regime of Ahmadinejad’s second term, Iranians have seen young and middle-aged women clubbed, dragged across pavements, and hustled into vans by police and official thugs in plain clothes. Rahnavard has steadfastly condemned the brutality of the security forces.

Only last week, mothers of young men and women who have disappeared in prisons or other government black holes, and who have been gathering every Saturday in a Tehran park to demand news of their loved ones, were beaten and arrested by security men. They have since been released but some may be asked to appear in court. Such scenes are now seared into the memories of Iranians; they will come back to haunt the regime for years to come.

Claire Messud

When I landed at boarding school in Boston in the fall of 1980—from a public school in Toronto, another world—I assumed the Iranian girls knew the ropes better than I did. Posh New England culture was utterly alien to me; but how much more so must it have been to my fellow boarders lately of Tehran? Aware of the recent revolution—even at fourteen, one couldn’t not be—I nevertheless was unable to relate the girl brushing her teeth beside me in the dorm bathroom to mass demonstrations or the then ongoing hostage crisis half a world away. I never asked the Iranians a single question about their histories: it was tacitly accepted that it was too delicate a subject and, by force of silence, too remote from our placid world of emerald lawns and peeling white columns. What, I now wonder, must the Iranian girls have thought?

As far as I know, they haven’t yet written the novels that might tell us. Others, though, have provided us with powerful reminiscences in the form of memoir: shortly after the turn of the new century, Marjane Satrapi gave us her family’s extraordinary stories of revolutionary times and after, and created, through her iconic graphics, a now-celebrated visual style with which to convey the travails of her native country.

In spite of Satrapi’s triumph and memoirs by other Iranians in exile, not much literary art from within contemporary Iran has yet reached mainstream audiences in the West. The novelist Farnoosh Moshiri’s fictions—including At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse—have afforded us harrowing accounts of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic regime; but she, older than Satrapi, has also not lived in Iran since the 1980s (she is based in Houston). As we watch Iran’s current political upheavals from afar and try to understand the minds of its citizens today, we might wish for greater literary access: little recent fiction published in Iran is available in translation. The avenues of cultural exchange are not broad.

Early in the last decade, Azar Nafisi’s immensely successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) provided a wide American audience with a picture of post-revolutionary Iranian life; but Nafisi’s book is not a novel. Through her account, you glimpse fascinating facets of quotidian life in Tehran over a decade ago, but she doesn’t presume to provide rounded psychological portraits of her students, nor does she alchemically transform her stories in such a way as to create a work of art. As a reader, you learn enthusiastically from, but do not fully inhabit, Nafisi’s world.

Fiction and poetry work differently from history or autobiography, opening to us the interior lives, the unrecorded ephemera and minutiae of people and their places. The Iranian-American writer Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz was published in 2007. Its story is fairly simple: Sofer recounts the incarceration in Evin Prison, not long after the revolution, of a Jewish Iranian paterfamilias, while his wife and young daughter struggle to find information about him and to continue their lives. Meanwhile, the couple’s older child, a son, faces his own challenges in New York City. The book is not elaborate in its telling; but Sofer’s eye for detail and her subtle understanding of character (how much more complicated is such a separation when husband and wife have been progressively more emotionally estranged beforehand?) ensure that the novel is both immediate and deeply affecting.

Painting by Riza Abbasi, c. 1625

Like Satrapi, Sofer left Iran as a child and has lived in exile for most of her life. Her novel, then, describes precisely the Iran from which my classmates had fled; and perhaps this is in part why I find it so moving. Others of the young generation have addressed the situation differently: Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) is the vital and engaging account of a family of Iranian-Americans following the September 11 attacks. Niloufar Talebi has translated and edited a volume of poetry entitled Belonging: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World, a book remarkable in its breadth and diversity, and in the power of its translations. From formalists to experimentalists, from the epic to the lyric, from the political to the erotic, Talebi’s collection offers us a rich sampling of contemporary Iranian poetry from the diaspora.

Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in the United States last year, differs in several ways from these works. For one thing, although Mandanipour has been living in the US since 2006, his literary career has been, until this latest novel, entirely Iranian: this is his first book to appear in English, and while his fiction remained unpublished in Iran for much of the 1990s on account of censorship, he is one of that country’s most celebrated and accomplished contemporary novelists. For another, born in 1957 (and thus a generation older than most of the others), he was an adult when the Islamic Republic was created. He remained in Iran for a quarter century thereafter, and has, consequently, a very different perspective from those who left as children, in the early 1980s.

Mandanipour’s novel is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran—it’s about a writer trying to write a love story that will satisfy the censors—it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter. He both tells us what it is like for his young would-be lovers in Tehran, and, by allusion, by direct conversation with the imagined censor, and by striking out lines and passages of his prose, reveals how much he cannot tell us:

“Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University. However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities…
…when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “…,” her mind grows very active and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be…Sara loves these three dots because they allow her to be a writer too…But she never borrows any contemporary literature from her college library or the central library of Tehran University. Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would find any books by writers such as me.
Ask me why, so that I can explain. [p. 14]

Playfully and yet with utter seriousness, Mandanipour exposes his constraints, and also the devices by which he might hope to convey his matter indirectly: traditional Iranian poetry; cinema. In so doing, Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture—not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it—through the warp and weft of the text itself. This novel doesn’t offer a conventionally realistic narrative, but to read it—and to appreciate that simply on account of its publication, Mandanipour is henceforth unable to return to Iran—is to understand, by inhabiting rather than by being told, what life there now, and the making of art, might actually be like.

Charles Rosen

Isaiah Berlin, Oxford, 1969; photograph by Dominique Nabokov

The hostile review of Isaiah Berlin’s correspondence by A.N. Wilson in the TLS—which has set off a heated controversy about Berlin and his reputation—exhibited a misunderstanding of university life as well as of the nature of Sir Isaiah’s career. Wilson was unappreciative of Berlin as a historian, comparing him unfavorably with his close contemporary, the Oxford historian A.L. Rowse. Neither were truly major historians but Berlin was not really a historian at all, in the full sense of that word, nor was he exactly a philosopher. His field, largely untrodden and little understood, was the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics and history: in this, his achievement was very great, above all in his profound elucidation of the way that ideas like freedom, enlightenment and nationalism could appear, develop and be challenged in the politics and art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He never aspired to be a historian of ideas in the grand general sense—that is, to give a complete intellectual image of any era, but only to reveal the contradictions and paradoxes in the historical development of ideas that we still grapple with today. Even though it is true that his conversation, at least in my own acquaintance with him, was even more brilliant than his writing, the essays on Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Joseph de Maistre, Alexander Herzen, and others will retain their interest and value for a long time to come.

Wilson’s main complaint about Berlin’s letters is the frequently malicious comments about life in Oxford. Not that malice is absent from Wilson’s review. In his case, however, it is often inexplicable. The review is entitled “The Dictaphone Don,” and this is surely intended to have a pejorative edge to it. But it is not clear to me why Berlin’s habit of speaking his letters into a dictaphone is more shameful than writing on a computer or with a goose-quill. On Berlin’s account of his meeting with Greta Garbo, Wilson complains “he has not spotted her lesbianism.” Should he have? Did she give herself away, dressing in men’s clothes like Queen Christine?

The petty aspects of Wilson’s review are overshadowed when Wilson is shocked that the letters “are peppered with malice about poor A. L. Rowse” while Berlin was personally cordial to him. The open cordiality to Rowse that Wilson characterizes as “treachery” is simply a frank letter of refusal to support Rowse’s failed campaign to be elected warden of All Souls College, a refusal couched in the kindest possible language. Wilson’s claim that Rowse was “ultimately more intellectually distinguished” than Berlin is simply ludicrous. The right description for Rowse’s historical work is well put a few sentences later by Wilson, “readable, well-researched volumes,” while most authorities consider that Rowse’s writing on Shakespeare, of which he was so vain, is simply risible.

When I was Eastman Professor at Oxford for one year a long time ago (an American is chosen annually), humorous stories about Rowse circulated frequently, as his pride in his humble Cornish origins and his subsequent intellectual renown were legendary. Both Berlin and Rowse were fellows at All Souls, a college where there are zero students (like the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study), and where the fellows are lodged and have breakfast and dinner together. In such a situation, a certain amount of malice behind the back of colleagues who are competent and useful but personally difficult to support is a necessary and legitimate safety valve: it is certainly a fact of life in every university where I have worked, however briefly.

One story often told about Rowse is that he came down one day to breakfast at All Souls, fulminating about a bad review in The Times of his latest book, and said, “You see the way the upper class resent that I have been able to rise into their midst entirely by my own merit.” John Sparrow, then the Warden of All Souls (he had been elected in 1952 over Rowse), looked up from his breakfast and said, “Rowse, whatever gives you the impression that only the rich detest you?” I would think that malice behind someone’s back is preferable to such a frontal attack, but the story reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s remark that British manners are sometimes so frightening to Americans that they would prefer no manners at all. What appalled Berlin was not only Rowse’s egoism, but his writing letters to The Times “to say that education is bad for the poor, since most of them are incurably barbarous & do badly on a little knowledge.”

In any case, malicious gossip, whether treachery or simply letting off steam, is not merely a luxury of academic life but a useful way of keeping the peace. Isaiah Berlin’s employment of it was always private and tactful, and mild compared to that of other Oxford dons like Trevor-Roper, and certainly less vicious than that exhibited a short time ago in the campaign for the election of the Professor of Poetry.

Among the most aggressive and significant pages of this volume of letters is the controversy between Berlin and T.S. Eliot on Eliot’s anti-Semitism—particularly his statement that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable”—which Eliot insisted was not racial or even religious but cultural. Their correspondence is distinguished by courteous expressions of mutual esteem from both parties. I should think that “free-thinking Jews” should feel flattered and even pleased that Eliot considered too many of us to be a danger to his dream of a right-wing Anglo-Catholic society.

A few years later, the courtesy attains comic intensity in a contest of gracious manners when Eliot sent Berlin a book, and Berlin thanked him by writing:

I feel quite sure that, for all your disclaimers, your erudition, as well as your wisdom, are far profounder than mine will ever be. Not that it would take much to be that; but it is all I can offer, sincerely, in return, and I do offer it to you in all humility and admiration.”

Not to be outdone, Eliot replied:

I was already convinced that you are my superior in learning, profundity and eloquence. I am now of the opinion that you far surpass me in the art of flattery.

Berlin commented in a letter to a friend:

I have received a funny letter from T. S. Eliot, in which there is an ironical reference to me which he maintains … is a compliment. I do not know how to reply and therefore he wins.

Berlin’s courtesy and his malice were always civilized.

Jeremy Bernstein

Paul Samuelson at MIT, 1950 (Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Some time in the early 1950’s the late Paul Samuelson received a post card from L.J. “Jimmie” Savage, a noted mathematical statistician. It was one of several he had sent out at about the same time. Savage’s post card to Samuelson, and probably the others, said that it was essential that Samuelson read Théorie de la Spéculation, the Ph.D. thesis of the French mathematician Louis Jean Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier. Samuelson had never heard of Bachelier so he did not know that the thesis had first been published in 1900. Reading the thesis changed the course of Samuelson’s work. He improved Bachelier’s mathematics and used it to study the prices of warrants—options to buy, at a future date, stock issued by a company. These methods were passed on to his students. But for some of them, Bachelier’s ideas provided inspiration for a theory of financial engineering—the use of complex mathematical models to make risky investments that, taken to extremes (which Samuelson himself never did), nearly caused the collapse of our financial system in the fall of 2008.

Bachelier was born in Le Havre on the March 11, 1870. His father was a wine merchant and his mother was the daughter of a banker. Bachelier was surely headed for one of those careers in France that start with attending one of the grandes écoles—until both his parents died in 1889. Bachelier became the head of the family business but soon left to complete his compulsory military service. It was not until 1892 that he could begin his studies at the Sorbonne. One of the lecturers was Henri Poincaré, one of the greatest mathematicians of his time who later became Bachelier’s thesis advisor. Bachelier was not an outstanding student; he had had no practice taking examinations. He worked at the Paris Bourse, the stock exchange, during this time, which presumably gave him the idea for his thesis.

Among the commodities sold on the bourse were various government bonds called rentes. But one could also buy options on these rentes—a form of “derivative.” You bought the right to purchase such a bond at a later time at the price for which it sold at the time you bought the option. Until then you did not own the bond but just the option to buy it at a later time. If the price had gone up you would be in the money and if it went down you lost whatever it had cost you to buy the option. Unless you were a clairvoyant you would have to guess at the future price of the bond.

What Bachelier wanted to do was to replace clairvoyance by mathematics. To do this he needed to make some assumption of how stock prices evolve. He decided that at any given time it was as likely for a stock to go up as down. You might at first think that this means that a stock price would never get anywhere. But after a first up, say, the stock has a fifty-fifty chance of going up as down and thus moving further away from its starting point. In short the price of the stock, Bachelier decided, takes a “random walk.”

In his thesis Bachelier presents mathematics of this, along with examples. One of the things he shows is that the price evolves away from its initial price as the square root of the time elapsed (days, say)—not an obvious result. It is like the random walk of a drunk whose distance from his starting point increases with the square root of the time elapsed except here the object taking the random walk is the stock price.

What he did not know was that he had solved an outstanding physics problem. Early in the nineteenth century a Scottish botanist named Robert Brown had observed that microscopic particles suspended in liquids had a jiggling movement which we now call Brownian motion. It was Einstein in one of his great 1905 papers who presented the theory of this movement as a random walk induced by the bombardment of the suspended particles by the molecules of the liquid. The equations Einstein arrived at are identical to the ones in Bachelier’s thesis, which he had never heard of.

Only Poincaré, his thesis advisor, understood what Bachelier had done and was not put off by his humble educational background, although he graded the thesis as honorable rather than trés honorable. The only job that Bachelier could get was as an unpaid lecturer at the Sorbonne. He may have gone back to work at the bourse. He served in the French army from 1914 until 1918 and then got a few minor university positions. Poincaré died in 1912 so he could not help him. It was not until 1927 that Bachelier got a permanent position at the University of Besançon, where he remained until his retirement ten years later. He died on April 28, 1946. By this time the mathematical community understood the value of what he had done and his work was widely recognized by mathematicians. It was Samuelson who introduced it to economists.

Bachelier’s thesis had a profound influence on Samuelson’s work. The idea of using “stochastic” methods—of which the random walk is an example—to analyze things in economics like the movement of the stock market was novel.

Not only did this become part of his own work but he transmitted it to the brilliant young students and associates who had come to MIT to work with him. Among them were Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. Merton on his own and Scholes in collaboration with Fischer Black, who was working in Cambridge, extended Bachelier’s work on options to include “hedging.” You borrow just enough money to make your options investment less risky. Providing the foundations of modern financial engineering were the Black-Scholes and Merton equations, used by many hedge funds and investment houses to make the highly leveraged bets that precipitated the financial crisis.

Samuelson had a different background from these young people. He had been born in 1915 and attended the University of Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, the experience of which never left him. He became a convinced Keynesian and I think had a more detached view of the efficacy of mathematical models than his students. He understood that they were models and that things could go wrong. Keynes once noted that the market could remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. I never had a chance to meet Samuelson but in a way I almost felt that I had. In 1948 as a Harvard sophomore I decided to take the beginning course in economics. I have no idea why. Our text was Samuelson’s Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which had just been published. It is a marvelous book which in its many editions and forty translations has sold over four million copies. In 1970 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for economics. A number of his students and associates, such as Merton and Scholes, later won theirs. (Black had died by the time Scholes and Merton won, in 1997—a year before the spectacular collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, on whose board both men sat.) From time to time there were pictures of Samuelson in his eighties playing tennis and even in his nineties his interviews were always lucid and relevant. He had a full and long life. He died on December 13, 2009 at the age of ninety-four.

—To read about David Levine’s drawings, see the related post by Garry Wills. To view more images, please visit the gallery.

Garry Wills

It is a charming little dog, meticulously drawn, that faces us, all its curlicue hairs traced, its cantilevered thin legs ending in little paws (1971). Only on a second look do we see that the tiny face staring out at us from this fluff ball is that of Richard Nixon. Then, in a double-take (click!), we realize that this is Checkers, the dog Nixon used in his maudlin television address to stay on Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential ticket in 1952. A less adventurous artist might have done the obvious—made Nixon cower behind the dog he was using as protection. Levine did the unexpected. He made Nixon the dog. And as usual, there was a deeper purpose. He was saying that Nixon would not only do anything to get what he wanted, he would become anything. Later, when abortion was the issue, Nixon would become a fetus (1971). How does one give a fetus identity? With the nose, of course, the Nixon nose that Levine celebrated so relentlessly.

Having to puzzle out, however briefly, why the dog is Nixon was a typical reaction to Levine’s cartoons. They teased. Why is General Westmoreland’s neck so long and curving (1976)? A moment makes one realize it is an ostrich neck, the better for hiding one’s head from reality. Why does Linda Tripp’s head sit atop the body of a large bird (1998)? Oh, of course—a stool pigeon. A Levine work often needed deciphering. Sometimes this was because the attributes were so clever. Al Gore was drawn “straight” during his presidential campaign, but what are all the little clothes suspended around him (2000)? A closer look shows the tabs used to put different dresses on paper dolls, Levine’s comment on how Gore was changing personae.

But Levine did not need attributes to get his meaning across. He might have drawn Milton with a little devil beside him to show that the poet made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. Instead, Levine shows the man himself as diabolical (1978). He might have drawn John Wayne as the sunny cowboy others depicted. Instead, considering Wayne’s support of every kind of war, he drew him with the face of a fanatical killer (1997).

Levine often did the unexpected. After all, he had a huge range of subjects to cover when illustrating articles in The New York Review—classical figures (working from statues), Renaissance figures (relying on paintings), modern figures (from photos). What other American cartoonist was asked to draw, say, Jonathan Sumption (2000) or Fernando Pessoa (1972)? He even had to draw ideas—linguistics (1963), Mannerism (1965), finances (1964), the military industry (1964), art (1968), automation (1968).

In order to represent such a wide range of subjects, he needed a vast store of techniques. Obituaries reduced him to a few characteristics—heavy cross-hatching, big heads on small bodies, etc. Actually, he used large areas of pure black or pure white for many of his faces. Look, for instance, at Harold Lloyd hanging from a girder—his face is a white blank, except for the shade thrown by his straw hat (1984). John Quinn is all white, even his hair (1978). So, of all people, is Rubens, the master of chiaroscuro (1978).

And he was not trapped in the big head, small body format. He often did normal-size bodies—Elvis Presley(1981), John Pope-Hennessey (1991), Ford Madox Ford (1966), Twiggy (1968), Aldous Huxley (1977), Cesar Chavez(1975). He had to do Michael Jordan full length because he presented him as Leonardo’s universal man in the circle and the square—the image on the Italian one-euro coin (1999). What’s more, he often reversed “his” format and drew small heads on big bodies—Charles II (1979), Charles V(1977), Richard Ford (1987), Velázquez (1986), Paul Taylor (1987), Orson Welles (1972), John L. Sullivan (1988). He made each of Marilyn Monroe’s breasts bigger than her head (1973).

Levine had a larger field for originality because he realized that readers of The New York Review would get arcane references. When he had a tiny grotesque Nixon crouch on the fallen female body of Vietnam (1973), he knew the readers would see the reference to Fuseli’s incubus—only where Fuseli’s imp is instilling a nightmare in the woman, Nixon is delicately dropping a little bomb down her throat. When he drew the fictional character Zuleika Dobson (1966), his audience would know why he used Max Beerbohm’s style (with its mockery of Beardsley). When he drew the fictional Pamela, they would know why she covers her pudenda with a letter (1972). The picture of Nixon devouring himself (1974) would bring to mind Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

Levine was a man of high intelligence, wide reading, and solid artistic training. He composed, shaded, and drew with the eye of a practiced painter. But more than that, he had great psychological insight into his subjects. What he revealed could be scathing. The sadness of Richard Burton’s career is in the picture of his drink-raddled face and bleary eyes as he poses, in his Hamlet costume, tiptoe on the skull of Yorick (1989)—the real death’s head is his own.

Despite such dark visions, Levine had a kind of surreal imagination that took the next step, the way Mark Twain used to. It was not enough for Twain to say that a train was so slow it had no need of the cowcatcher; he added that the cowcatcher was needed in the rear of the train to keep cows from ambling aboard. In the same way, Levine began with a picture of Lyndon Johnson crying little crocodiles for tears (1965). But later on, he had to top that—he shows a crocodile shedding little tear-images of Lyndon Johnson (1966).

Given the run of his working years, his great subject had to be Richard Nixon. Herblock, too, was a great artistic foe of Nixon, but his Nixon is often a stick figure and Levine’s is a rounded tragic portrait. Consider the two men’s treatment of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes. Herblock shows a little Nixon doll dangling in the gap, holding on to the severed tapes on either side of him. Levine shows a seated and solemn Nixon, his hand over his heart in a pledge of truthfulness, but he had phlebitis at the time, and from his swollen left trouser leg some tape reels are spilling (1974). Levine brought us many aspects of the man—Nixon in sheep’s clothing (1970); Nixon asleep with a panda bear doll beside him on the pillow (1971); Nixon dangling from the last helicopter leaving Saigon (1971); Nixon crying dollars for tears in the ITT scandal (1975); Nixon as a rugby player, with the globe as the ball (1973); Nixon as Boss Tweed (1973), as Queeg (1974), as the Godfather (1972). The sixty Nixon drawings should be put in a book, to be called The Nixoniad.

The treasure house of Levine images—thousands of them—contains actors, athletes, musicians, scientists, philosophers, movie makers, pontiffs, all brought to life (sometimes brought back to life) by a magic pen and an incisive brain. What a loss that he is gone.

—A slide show of drawings by David Levine can be seen here.

Amy Knight

Nataliya Magnitskaya, the mother of Sergei Magnitsky, holding a portrait of him and letters he sent to her from jail, Moscow, November 30, 2009 (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Images)

The horrors of Soviet prisons and labor camps were described vividly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, and later, by the Soviet dissident and former political prisoner Anatoly Marchenko, in his 1969 memoir, My Testimony. To judge from a disturbing new report about the tragic death of 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in late November, Russia’s current penal system is almost as bad as it used to be.

As was the case under Stalin and his successors, the treatment of prisoners reflects the deeper problems of a politicized law enforcement system that routinely disregards human rights. Now, the Magnitsky case seems to have persuaded Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to begin to address these problems—though his powerful Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

On December 28, the nongovernmental Public Oversight Commission—a Moscow-based organization mandated by Russian law in 2008 to monitor human rights in prisons—issued a twenty-page report about the treatment of Magnitsky, a former auditor and lawyer for the Firestone Duncan legal and accounting firm, whose clients included the international investment fund Hermitage Capital Management. As has been revealed by Hermitage executives, Magnitsky discovered in 2008 that Russian authorities had been engaged in a huge tax fraud. Officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) raided Hermitage’s offices in 2007, robbing the fund of three subsidiaries for which they then claimed $230 million in tax refunds. In November, 2008, shortly after testifying about this fraud, Magnitsky himself was arrested by the MVD on bogus charges of tax evasion.

According to the Public Oversight Commission report, Magnitsky was in good health at the time of his arrest. But less than five months after his incarceration at Matrosskaya Tishina began, he fell ill and ended up in the prison hospital, where he was given an ultrasound and diagnosed with gallstones and pancreatitis. The doctor ordered a follow-up ultrasound and possible surgery within a month. Disregarding these orders, prison officials transferred him in July 2009 to a maximum security facility, Butyrka Prison, which has no equipment for ultrasound or surgery. Magnitsky’s symptoms worsened. He developed excruciating pain in his abdomen, but his repeated pleas for medical attention were ignored. Not until November 16, 2009 did prison officials finally call an ambulance to take Magnitsky back to Matrosskaya Tishina for surgery, which might have resolved the problem had they acted on it immediately. By the time he arrived at Matrosskaya Tishina and was put in a prison cell, Magnitsky was flailing in agony and screaming that the authorities were trying to kill him. Yet instead of operating on him, the prison doctors called in psychiatrists, who diagnosed “psychosis” and ordered Magnitsky handcuffed. Within a couple of hours he was dead.

Magnitsky’s death was not an isolated case. According to Yevgenia Albats, editor of the independent weekly The New Times and one of Russia’s most respected independent journalists, the numbers of prisoners who die each year while awaiting trial run into the thousands. But the criminal neglect of Magnitsky by prison officials and doctors is only a part of the story. The fraud that Magnitsky had uncovered while working for Hermitage Capital implicated high officials in the Russian government, and the denial of medical treatment appears to have been a way to pressure him to change his earlier testimony against the MVD. According to Magnitsky, in a petition he reportedly sent from prison to the MVD, “Every time, when I repeatedly rejected these propositions by the investigators pushing me to be dishonest, the conditions of my detention become worse and worse.”

Albats produced evidence that the organizers of the tax scam uncovered by Magnitsky were employees of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, which has close ties to Putin. The officials in question, according to Albats, worked in the FSB’s Department K, which is charged with monitoring Russia’s credit and financial system and is headed by Major General Viktor Voronin, a long-time Putin associate from the St. Petersburg KGB. As Albats reported in her investigation of Magnitsky’s death, prison officials and MVD officers, as well as judges and members of the prosecutor’s office who ignored Magnitsky’s numerous complaints about his medical care and the appalling prison conditions, were getting their marching orders from the all-powerful FSB.

In early December, amid growing public outcry over Magnitsky’s death, President Dmitry Medvedev fired twenty senior officials in the Federal Prison Service, including the chief of Butyrka prison and the Moscow prisons chief, and ordered the Ministry of Justice, which oversees prisons, to investigate the case. On December 29, a day after the Public Commission’s report came out, Medvedev went higher up the ladder, dismissing the deputy chief of the Federal Prison Service, Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Piskunov. Medvedev also made it illegal to hold persons accused of tax and other financial crimes in pre-trial detention. This was an important step because those who are wrongly charged with financial malfeasance—a common occurrence when powerful people want to get rid of enemies—can languish in prison for a year, or even longer, if the court consents, without a trial.

Medvedev also moved against the MVD. In mid-December he fired the head of the agency’s tax crimes unit, Anatoly Mikhalkin, who in 2007 had ordered a subordinate to gather confidential information about Hermitage Capital’s holding companies. On December 24, Medvedev signed a decree mandating a 20 percent cut in MVD staff by January 2012 and calling for a series of organizational reforms in the agency.

Unfortunately, the main culprit in the Magnitsky affair, the FSB, has until now remained unscathed. Despite the dismissal of Putin’s close ally, Nikolai Patrushev, from his post as FSB chief in 2008 (apparently as a result of internecine feuds), this agency is filled with Putin appointees and continues to wield tremendous influence over the other law enforcement agencies, including the MVD. Medvedev deserves credit for taking some first steps toward cracking down on the terrible human rights abuses in Russia’s criminal justice system. But he does not have the power to openly challenge Putin’s FSB stronghold, even if he wanted to—and his larger intentions remain a matter of much speculation.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow

Troy Erik Isaac, who was repeatedly raped by fellow inmates when he was imprisoned at age twelve. He spent the next two decades in and out of prison; he now works as a peer counselor and speaks to young people about his experience. (Photograph by James Stenson)

When Troy Erik Isaac was first imprisoned in California, his cellmate made the introductions for both of them. “He said to me, ‘Your name is gonna be Baby Romeo, and I’m Big Romeo.’ He was saying he would be my man.” Troy was twelve at the time. A skinny, terrified little kid, he accepted the prisoner’s bargain being imposed on him: protection for sex. He wasn’t protected, though. Soon he was attacked and raped at night by another cellmate, a sixteen-year-old. He told staff he was suicidal, hoping to be placed in solitary confinement, but they ignored him; the rapes continued.

In 2005, the Department of Justice investigated a juvenile facility in Plainfield, Indiana, where kids sexually abused one another so often and in such numbers that staff created flow charts to track the incidents. Investigators found “youths weighing under 70 pounds who engaged in sexual acts with youths who weighed as much as 100 pounds more than them.”

Reporters in Texas, in 2007, discovered that more than 750 juvenile detainees across the state had alleged sexual abuse by staff over the previous six years. That number, however, was generally thought to under-represent the true extent of such abuse, because most children were too afraid to report it: staff commonly instructed their favorite inmates to beat up kids who complained. Even when the kids did file complaints, they knew it wouldn’t do them much good. Staff covered for each other, grievance processes were sabotaged and evidence was frequently destroyed. Officials in Austin ignored what they heard, and in the very rare instances when staff were fired and their cases referred to local prosecutors, those prosecutors usually refused to act. Not one employee of the Texas Youth Commission during that six-year period was sent to prison for raping the children in his or her care.

Until now, when such stories have made it into the press, officials have been able to contend that they reflected anomalous failings of a particular facility or system. But a report released this morning by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) should change that. Mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), and easily the largest and most authoritative study of the problem ever conducted, it makes clear that sexual abuse in juvenile detention is a national crisis.

This is a difficult problem to measure, since some inmates make false claims, and some, fearing retaliation even when promised anonymity, choose not to report abuse. Overall, most experts believe that the numbers such studies produce are usually too low. But 12.1 percent of kids taking the BJS survey across the country said they’d been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year. That’s approximately 3,220 out of the 26,550 who were eligible to take it.

The survey, however, was given only at large facilities that held youth that have been tried for some offense for at least ninety days. That’s more restrictive than it may sound. In total, according to the most recent data, there are nearly 93,000 kids in juvenile detention on any given day. Although we can’t assume that 12.1 percent of the larger number were sexually abused—many kids not covered by the survey are held for short periods of time, or in small facilities where rates of abuse are somewhat lower—we can say confidently that the BJS’s 3,320 figure represents only a small fraction of the juveniles sexually abused in detention every year.

What sort of kids get locked up in the first place? Only 34 percent of those in juvenile detention are there for violent crimes. (More than 200,000 youth are also tried as adults in the U.S. every year, and on any given day approximately 8,500 kids under 18 are confined in adult prisons and jails. Although probably at greater risk of sexual abuse than any other detained population, they weren’t included in the BJS study.) According to a report by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which was itself created by PREA, more than 20 percent of those in juvenile detention were confined for technical offenses such as violating probation, or for “status offenses” like disobeying parental orders, missing curfews, truancy, or running away—often from violence and abuse at home. Many suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, and learning disabilities.

A full 80 percent of the abuse reported in the study was perpetrated not by other inmates but by staff. And shockingly, 95 percent of the youth making such allegations said they were victimized by female staff. 63 percent of them reported at least one incident of sexual contact with staff in which no force or explicit coercion was used; staff caught having sex with inmates often claim it’s consensual. But staff have enormous control over inmates’ lives. They can give them privileges, such as extra food or clothing or the opportunity to wash, and they can punish them: everything from beatings to solitary confinement to extended sentences. The notion of a truly consensual relationship in such circumstances is grotesque even when the inmate is not a child.

Nationally, however, fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished. Although it is a crime for staff to have sex with inmates in all 50 states, prosecutors rarely take on such cases. As children’s advocate Isela Gutierrez put it to The Texas Observer, “local prosecutors don’t consider these kids to be their constituents.” A quarter of all known staff predators in youth facilities are allowed to keep their positions.

The biggest risk factor found in the study was prior abuse. 65 percent of those who had previously been sexually assaulted at another correctional facility were also assaulted at their current one. In prison culture, even in juvenile detention, after an inmate is raped for the first time he is considered “turned out,” and fair game for further abuse. 81 percent of those sexually abused by other inmates were victimized more than once, and 32 percent more than ten times. 42 percent were assaulted by more than one perpetrator. Of those victimized by staff, 88 percent had been abused repeatedly, 27 percent more than ten times, and 33 percent by more than one facility employee. Those who took the survey had been in their facilities for an average of just half a year. In essence, the survey shows that thousands of children are raped and molested every year while in the government’s care—most often, by the very corrections officials charged with their rehabilitation and protection.

The necessary precautions to prevent this horrific treatment are clear (see the June
2009 National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, page 159). So far, however, reform has been slow. The Plainfield unit was converted to an adult facility after the Department of Justice investigation; nonetheless, two other juvenile facilities in Indiana were on the BJS report’s list of the thirteen worst nationally, as were two in Texas. In 2005, The Department of Justice investigated the L.E. Rader Center in Oklahoma. Although the state Attorney General’s office “refused to allow the United States the opportunity to tour the Rader facility,” investigators examining documents discovered, among other problems, rampant sexual abuse of the facility’s boys by female staff. It concluded that Oklahoma “fails to protect youth confined at Rader from harm due to constitutionally deficient practices.” But years later, Rader too is on the BJS’s list of worst facilities: 25 percent of its inmates still claim abuse by staff.

A recommendation by the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) in New York that judges avoid sentencing children to the state’s juvenile detention facilities unless they pose a significant risk to public safety has received a great deal of press lately, most recently on the editorial page of The New York Times. That recommendation followed multiple revelations of violent, neglectful, and abusive conditions—first in a Human Rights Watch report issued in 2006, then in a 2009 Department of Justice investigation, and finally in the report of a taskforce created by Governor Paterson. Most of the abuses described in these documents were not sexual. Now, though, we are told that the problems in New York are even worse than reported. New York juvenile facilities surveyed by the BJS did not in aggregate perform markedly better than the national average. It turns out that sexual abuse is yet another crisis in the state’s juvenile detention system, as it is across the country.

Unfortunately, such abuse also goes on at appalling rates in adult prisons and jails, as we’ll discuss in an essay we are now preparing for publication: in much higher numbers than have so far been reported in the press. There are effective ways to stop sexual abuse in detention, as we’ll explain. But despite the reports by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, some important corrections leaders are fighting the necessary reforms. We’ll discuss their influence in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, and why they are so resistant to change.

Sarah Kerr

Penelope Cruz as Lena in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces

In the summer of 1989, I spent several weeks in Madrid. It was my first time out of the United States, and I was overwhelmed by the shock of difference: the life-giving daily approach to time; the ghost dregs of imperial supremacy; the post-Franco traces of bleak limbo that were thankfully almost done eroding; the particular charisma, not quite the same as what I had absorbed from so far away, in books and movies, as “European charm.” There was a pop soundtrack to that summer, an album that that had come out months earlier but was still at its viral peak. One addictive song especially spilled out of windows onto plazas, with a stately beat and a girlish voice recalling (from the male point of view) an affair with a woman described as half-finished, with the body of a gypsy and “an eye here, a tooth there.”

Only recently did I realize that the video to this song, corny and glorious with late ’80s hair, helped launch a very young Penelope Cruz as a star. In America, several of Cruz’s films in the 1990s, such as Belle Epoque, did well on the art house circuit. But it was over the last decade that Cruz won more commanding stature as an international actress by working on stronger projects in Europe than she was being offered in the States, not infrequently with Spain’s leading director Pedro Almodóvar.

Cruz’s acting can be fierce, earthy, or kittenish as required. But in any of these modes, with her beauty she often seems in old-fashioned ways a bulls-eye for the audience’s gaze. A sequence in Almodóvar’s new film, Broken Embraces, makes explicit her link to arch-browed movie stars of the past. In the scene, she is preparing to shoot a movie, and her hair and makeup are done to look like familiar faces. Not only does she evoke Audrey Hepburn, she evokes Hepburn in two distinct phases—the short-banged gamine of the 1950s, and the wearier soul with the sleek updo from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Finally, Cruz tries out a loosely waved Marilyn Monroe wig. She easily pulls off the glamor. But Broken Embraces shows Almodóvar in a rather Hitchcockian mode of controlled play, opaque and melancholy psychological ripples, and intermittent threat. This is a world in which the warm spontaneity of a Marilyn Monroe would not have wide room to breathe.

Broken Embraces is a sometimes distant film that gains immediacy from Almodóvar’s supremely confident visual style and the rush of its stories inside stories. Especially in the first hour, his lifting of the lid off each new Petrushka doll gives palpable pleasure to the audience. The overarching tale concerns an unattached middle-aged film-director-turned screenwriter (Lluis Homar), whose fate interests us even as he seems too self-contained to manifest much personality. As we observe this man in his Madrid apartment in 2004, he hints in voiceover at mysteries we hope the film will further explain. How and why did he suddenly go blind? And why, when he became a screenwriter, did he change his symbolic enough given name, Mateo Blanco, to the noir pastiche “Harry Caine”?

Soon the film has jumped sideways and back in time to the story of Cruz’s character. When we first meet Lena, short for Magdalena, it is the early 1990s. She is working as secretary to a powerful Chilean businessman in Madrid, and she is consumed with worry for her father, who is in need of medical care. Her physically slight, older, imperious boss (neatly played by Jose Luis Gomez) is disturbing in his patriarchal grip on his surroundings, and both predatory and pathetic in his lust for Lena; for noir layering, we know from a glimpse of the 2004 newspaper that he will end up in jail for shady dealings, and later dead. In these early scenes, Lena seems many things at once. She is a loving and faithful innocent, a natural secret keeper, a capable vendor of her body, a survivor in a corrupt, unjust society.

A few years later, the stories have intersected. Lena, now the businessman’s bejeweled mistress, wants to become an actress. The businessman will finance the successful director Mateo Blanco’s anticipated new film if she stars. The director and his stunning if not overwhelmingly talented leading lady fall in love. To meet, though, they must evade detection by the businessman’s gay son, a soul diminished enough by the loathing of his homophobic father to carry out that father’s command to spy on the lovers in the guise of a behind-the scenes “Making of…” documentary about the film project.

Around halfway through the film, the themes of voyeurism and doomed love have lost some gut urgency and become stylish commentary on the methods and modes of cinema itself. The slate-colored beaches of Lanzarote have a sadness underlined by a scene from Rosselini’s Voyage in Italy, which they watch on TV; and there are more fleeting hints of Vertigo in Lena’s fractured self-presentations, and of Notorious in her entrapment in her lover’s house. And the movie Mateo Blanco was working on turns out to be a strange reimagining of Almodóvar’s own classic comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown—the once-zany beats fall off-kilter in the atmosphere of forboding. These references work quickly, almost like dream images, supporting the changing colors and the absorbing set, both domestic and archetypal, with which Almodóvar guides our eye and mood.

Like several of Almodóvar’s best-loved films—All About My Mother, for instance—Broken Embraces appears to move near its close toward a note of more embracing empathy. We start to see the bigger picture. Motives are sorted out, mostly. The fallout of betrayals is revealed, the hurt and yearning behind them aired and, when possible, forgiven. A feeling of severe loss but also possible consolation returns to the forefront. If Almodóvar is far too commanding an artist for any of this to feel exactly routine, there is a certain perfunctoriness to the film’s resolution. His command throughout this film does not quite feel the same as the rebellious necessity of some of his earlier triumphs. Broken Embraces moves us with flashes of real beauty. But somehow, instead of setting up house in our memory it departs quickly and lightly when it is done.

David Shulman

A demonstrator dressed as a clown being arrested by Israeli police during a protest against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, December 18, 2009. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The fact that Gaza is still under siege has hardly infiltrated Israeli awareness. The first anniversary of Israel’s military intervention in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, has of course been noted in the Israeli press. The predominant tone, even in Haaretz, supposedly the voice of the liberal left, is almost smug. The rain of Qassam missiles on Israeli cities and villages has more or less halted; in recent months housing prices in Sderot, which is less than a mile from Gaza, have soared, and demand for plots of land in the moshavim close to the Gaza border far outstrips supply. So for Israelis the campaign was clearly a success, despite the 1,400 Palestinian dead, the 3,540 houses destroyed in Gaza, the devastation of the civilian infrastructure there, and the international outcry about possible Israeli war crimes.

In general the Gaza story now fits the regnant Israeli paradigm: They attacked us, we patiently put up with it for a very long time, then we let them have it, and things have now been quiet for X months (until we have to do it again). Though nothing could be farther from the truth or more self-serving, most Israelis believe this. For the hard-core right, the paradigm is even simpler: We evacuated Gaza, removed settlements, and got Qassams in exchange. Ergo, all Israeli settlements on the West Bank must be maintained, indeed expanded, at any cost. Settlers I encounter on the West Bank think this syllogism is now part of the so-called “consensus,” and I’m beginning to think they may be right; it certainly informs government policy toward the Palestinians. You can also state the operative principle more bluntly: Fence them in.

Meanwhile, the picture emerging from Gaza is a more complex one. The volume of goods allowed in via the Israeli checkpoints is about 25 percent of what it was before the war. Flour, rice, and cooking oil are permitted, but the rules, which change all the time, are arbitrary to the point of perversity: recently tea, sugar, and preserves were banned (can one manufacture explosives from tea bags?), then reinstated. Pencils and notebooks are out. Only a trickle of construction materials, badly needed in the wake of the destruction wrought by the IDF offensive a year ago, has crossed the fence: a mere 41 truckloads over the last eleven months, compared to 3700 truckloads each month in 2007-2008. Ninety percent of available drinking water is not up to WHO standards.

According to the relief organizations, some seventy percent of the population survives on less than a dollar a day. Palestinian fishermen are hemmed in to ever smaller spaces: they used to be allowed to sail eight nautical miles from the coast; this dispensation was reduced first to six, then to the present three miles, and the Israeli navy regularly arrests them and sometimes impounds their boats (the shoals close to shore have been both polluted and largely exhausted; sardines are present six nautical miles from the coast).

At the same time, smuggling via tunnels from Egyptian territory is a thriving business, and you can’t blame everything on the siege; the Hamas government clearly benefits, in more ways than one, from its tight control over all goods coming into Gaza (a license per tunnel costs some 10,000 Israeli shekels) and may even prefer the present situation to the lifting of the blockade. Recent visitors to Gaza report that medicine and food, including luxury items, are available in plenty if one can pay for them. On January 1, Israeli planes bombed some of the tunnels, but the effectiveness of such attacks remains doubtful; despite extensive destruction a year ago, the tunnels (by now numbering in the hundreds) were rapidly rebuilt following the Israeli campaign. Egypt is said to be planning a steel barrier on the Gaza border which may slow down the tunnel traffic.

The apathy within Israel toward Gaza and its people is not absolute. The army, under fierce pressure because of the international outcry, says it is investigating 150 cases of possible criminal offenses by soldiers during last year’s campaign (so far, rather typically, only in one case are charges being pressed). There has been a chain of passionate, if not particularly effective, protests. On December 26 a thousand people demonstrated against the siege in a nocturnal protest march in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. In Beersheva riot police tried to shut down a lively protest on the streets, as they did during the war a year ago; this time they were less successful. There is even a Coalition Against the Siege that is organizing another march on Saturday night in downtown Tel Aviv.

On December 31 a Gaza Peace March took place both inside Gaza and on the Israeli side of the Erez border crossing, at the northern end of the strip. According to one report, on December 30, the Egyptian government allowed some 80 international peace activists—a small fraction of the more than one thousand that had gathered in Cairo—to cross into Gaza from the Rafah gate in the south; they marched through Gaza, and stopped about 500 meters short of the Erez crossing on the Gaza side, as close as they could get without risk of being fired on by the Israeli soldiers stationed there. Assembled on the Israeli side, meanwhile, were about a thousand Israelis, including several Arab members of the Knesset who, predictably, were furiously attacked by right-wing politicians for fraternizing with the enemy.

On December 27 I joined a march on the northern Gaza border organized by activists from Ta’ayush and other peace organizations. In theory, we were meant to be operating in tandem with what was supposed to be a much larger group of Palestinians marching inside Gaza but, given the tremendous difficulty in communications, this didn’t play out quite as planned. Unusually for us, we took pains to keep the plan secret—no emails, no cell phones, details passed only by word of mouth in safe places, only a few trusted journalists invited—in the hope that we would gain a little time on the beach and thus be able to unfurl our banners and cry out our message of hope.

Initially it worked: we had about seven heady minutes marching by the sea in sight of the Gaza tenements before the army zeroed in on us. Then the most remarkable configuration of forces descended upon us: a platoon of regular soldiers, the blue-uniformed police (some on horseback), Border Police, the notorious riot-control unit, amphibious craft closing in from the sea, and even an army helicopter hovering in the sky above us. There was one mock-heroic moment when two activists tried to get past the barrier by jumping into the sea and swimming frantically toward Gaza; the cavalry fished them out. The BBC turned up (a little late) and took some pictures; the Israeli media paid little attention. Sixteen activists were arrested and carted off to the police station in Sderot, where they were questioned and released some hours later. I can tell you the blockade works, and not only against tea bags.

It’s easy to be cynical about Gaza, cynical about whatever you choose to focus on: Israeli policy, the misery of Hamas rule, the fortunes acquired by the tunnel-smugglers, the suppression of dissent within Israel, the gratuitous cruelty of the ongoing siege. None of it makes sense unless you bring in the larger picture of the occupation and the steadfast reluctance of Israeli governments to make peace. Seen in isolation, Gaza is too riddled with ambiguity to galvanize what’s left of the Israeli peace camp into action. The real contrast is with the burgeoning protests in East Jerusalem, in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah where several Palestinian families have recently been evicted from their homes and Israeli settlers planted in their stead.

The legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is ambiguous: Israeli courts have recently ruled that Jewish claims to ownership of land and houses in the neighborhood, from long before 1948, are valid and constitute a basis for evicting the Palestinian residents, all of whom received these lands from the Jordanian government in the 1950s in exchange for their UNRWA cards (thus relinquishing their status as refugees). But the issue is not really a legal one. The government, the municipality, and the settlers want to take over yet another Palestinian neighborhood—another 26 homes are scheduled for eviction, in addition to the three that have already been evacuated—and, of course, to prevent any future compromise in Jerusalem.

As a result, hundreds of Israelis, many of them young people joining the struggle for the first time, take off Friday afternoons to march through town and then demonstrate, courting arrest and harassment, in Sheikh Jarrah; the clumsy attempts by the Jerusalem police to suppress the protest violently have only added to our numbers. The demonstrations have a festive character, with drummers, acrobats, and clowns (the police arrested the clowns). Rumors about the demise of the Israeli peace movement are, it seems, premature.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frank’s The Americans, the exhibition “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through January 3, 2010. Dominique Nabokov—whose own photographs appear regularly in The New York Review—saw the exhibition both in New York and in Washington, where it originated at the National Gallery of Art. Recently, she stopped by the office to talk about why Frank’s photographs are not only still relevant but also a “miraculous” body of work.

The catalog of the exhibition is edited by Sarah Greenough and published by the National Gallery and Steidl. In addition to the original photographs from The Americans, it contains many other photographs by Frank from the exhibition, reproductions of his contact sheets, and essays by Greenough and others, including frequent Review contributor Luc Sante on Jack Kerouac’s introduction to the first American edition of Frank’s book.

Tim Flannery

A word cloud of Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s remarks to the UN Climate Change Conference (Wordle/ecopolitology.org)

On April 5, 2009, Denmark got a new Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He was the third Danish Prime Minister in a row to bear that surname, replacing Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had been named the new Secretary-General of NATO. A capable local politician in his forties, Lars Rasmussen had, in contrast to his predecessor, almost no experience in international politics. His appointment received little media coverage outside Denmark. But just eight months later, with Denmark the host of the Copenhagen climate summit (officially the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP-15), Lars Rasmussen’s—and Denmark’s—lack of experience in international politics would have a global impact.

Following internal conflicts in the Danish cabinet, Rasmussen abruptly took over as chair of the conference two days before it ended, replacing Connie Hedegaard, the President of the COP (and previously his climate and energy minister) at a point when the negotiations had reached a critical juncture. As the host country, Denmark was expected to deliver for consideration that evening a draft statement on a final agreement. It did not arrive; nor was it produced the following morning. When it again failed to appear by lunchtime on December 17, a sense of crisis gripped the national delegations from 113 different countries. Numerous obstructions and demands by particular countries impeded a successful outcome. Leaders of some small countries were using the meeting to grandstand, while others were using it to push their own agendas. Many expressed astonishment when the representative from the Sudan likened a deal to cut carbon emissions to genocide, a comment that was perhaps prompted by Amnesty International’s call for the Danes to arrest Sudanese President Omar al Bashir if he attended the meeting. (He did not.) And by all accounts Rasmussen’s chairing of the final days of the meeting did not help in dealing with such unwelcome developments.

By the morning of Friday the 18th, the last formal day of the meeting, there was only one source of hope remaining—President Obama, who was scheduled to fly in that morning. Tellingly, upon arrival he did not, as diplomatic protocol dictates, meet with Rasmussen, but instead went directly into a meeting with about twenty world leaders, including Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Manmohan Singh, and then into an hour-long meeting with Wen Jiabao.

When he spoke afterward, President Obama was clearly both frustrated and surprised at the limited progress that had been made toward a resolution. Nor did things go terribly well after that. The key objective for Obama in his meeting with Premier Wen was to secure greater transparency on Chinese emissions targets, and Wen signaled his dissatisfaction by dispatching increasingly junior emissaries to meet with Obama.

Then, much to the annoyance of the Chinese delegation, Obama burst uninvited into a meeting between Wen, Manmohan Singh, Lula da Silva of Brazil, and South African President Jacob Zuma. It was at that meeting—in which no European leaders were present—that the final touches were put on the three-page document that would become known as the Copenhagen Accord. In this agreement, despite Chinese resistance, Obama could claim to have—in principle at least—achieved his key objective of obtaining greater international transparency and accountability for emissions reduction targets; and with the UNFCCC negotiations still in full swing, the US President flew home, citing deteriorating weather as the reason, leaving European representatives and those from the smaller developing countries alike surprised and chagrined.

When I awoke on Saturday, December 19th—the morning after what was to be the final day of the conference—I was concerned to discover that it had not ended and the wording of the final accord was still being discussed. As it was, the final negotiations ran until nearly 2:30 p.m. that afternoon, ultimately resulting in a resolution to “take note of the Copenhagen Accord of December 18, 2009,” as Rasmussen put it, before sharply banging down his gavel to close COP 15.

So just what has the world got out of this much-anticipated meeting? The Copenhagen Accord reaffirms the objective—first expressed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992—of keeping Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees. It affirms a commitment by developed countries to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change by creating a $100 billion fund for adaptation and mitigation by 2020. It commits the so-called Annex 1 countries (developed countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol) to announcing their emissions targets by January 31, 2010—within weeks—and it obliges “non-Annex 1 parties” to the Kyoto Protocol (developing countries such as China and India) to list national schedules of action to combat climate change.

While many of these commitments were expected, the pathway to agreement was a surprise. Indeed, as the meeting unfolded I got the feeling that I was watching the death of the old UN-sponsored process and the birth of something new. That’s not to say that COP 16 won’t occur in Mexico next year, as planned, but just that the really important work of abating climate change is likely to take place elsewhere.

The hopelessly confused arrangements for the Copenhagen conference will be cautionary. Meetings among powerful nations—such as the one Obama broke in on—don’t have to take place at COP. Just where the key negotiations on climate will occur in future is unclear, but it seems likely that the G20 will be an important venue, as may the G8. This will frustrate the smaller developing countries—such as Bolivia and Sudan—that have the most to lose from runaway climate change. How they will react to this shift away from COP, which amounts to their disempowerment, is yet to be seen.

The Copenhagen Accord left much hanging, including the question of precise commitments and how they can be enforced. Among the key questions it poses is whether the US is prepared to take concrete steps to reduce emissions, for since the US did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, it is not bound to announce its gas emissions target by January 31.

Much depends upon the fate of a cap-and-trade bill now before the US Senate. If such a bill passes, then the US will be able to commit, in a fully accountable way, to a national target of emissions reduction. If instead, the US is forced to rely upon regulations by the Environmental Protection Administration, including the imposition of fuel efficiency standards on coal-fired power plants, it will be much more difficult to commit to a precise reduction target, simply because it’s hard to be sure how much such measures will actually reduce emissions. And if that is the outcome, will the US seek to use a “national schedules” approach like China and India—according to which no hard target on national emissions reductions is mandated?

The Copenhagen Accord ends with two blank appendices, one for Annex 1, and another for non-Annex 1 countries. How they are filled in over 2010 will determine in large part the world’s success in averting dangerous climate change. Whatever the case, it is now clear that the focus in combating climate change will revert once again to the national level, which means that 2010 could be the definitive year in places such as the US and China, in the battle for climatic stability.

Hilton Als

Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois (Lisa Tomasetti/Brooklyn Academy of Music)

At one point during Blanche’s final mad scene in the Sydney Theater Company’s much discussed revival of Tennessee Williams’s modern-day masterwork, which just concluded its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a woman sitting across the row from me began to sob uncontrollably. Despite her obvious pain, she could not look away from the stage’s brightly lit scene of daytime disaster. One wondered about the source of that spectator’s tears. Was it the sight of Blanche being led to her dark future, her sister Stella’s flush cheeked confusion, or both?

You might recall the moment: Stella has just had a baby. Returning home from the hospital, she sets about restoring order to her home. First things first. She commits her older sister to a mental institution. Stella, it seems, cannot live with this truth: that Stanley, her husband, has raped Blanche. Stella prefers to treat Blanche’s report as further proof of her madness. The new mother loves her sister, but she loves her life more. If she believed any aspect of what Blanche had to say, she’d have to leave Stanley, and forego those aspects of her existence that Blanche envies — and has contempt for. Without a man, though, who would Stella be? Her marriage defines her. To divorce Stanley would mean she’d probably end up as her sister’s custodian, thereby becoming another member of the pitiful, powerless female world Blanche is a member of.

But as Williams makes clear about half way through his 1947 drama, Stella would never dream of leaving Stanley. His crude, working class demeanor degrades the memory of his wife’s genteel upbringing in Mississippi. (“I pulled you down off those columns.”) As a result, Stanley makes Stella feel alive, turned on, present. And in order not to forfeit that feeling, Stella is complicit in her own brutalization, and, ultimately, her sister’s. In fact, Blanche matters less to Stella than her future as a happily conventional woman, dutifully attending to her home, and honoring her husband.

Relatively few feminists have yet to articulate—sans ideology—the ways in which some women may find stereotypical male behavior necessary, if only to act out its supposed counterpart, “femininity.” Part of Williams’s genius, of course, was to recognize this dynamic, and to not overstate it. Still, the playwright’s sensitivity to character—and to female characters in particular—was little appreciated, if not misconstrued and ultimately dismissed altogether, when Mary McCarthy reviewed the show in 1948. In her piece, the writer more or less characterizes Williams as a mincing faggot, dramaturgically speaking, thus unqualified to write about heterosexual lives except as a kind of pornographer. But McCarthy doesn’t stop there; she goes on to equate Williams with his delusional heroine, saying that, as a writer, he seems “addicted to the embroidery lie.”

In the end, McCarthy’s distaste for Williams’s work is not unlike Stanley’s for Blanche’s dreams. Nevertheless, McCarthy was criticizing the play for what it isn’t, which is to say Ibsen-inspired realism; in fact, Blanche’s famous claim that “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” was a cry against the stodgy, realist, and I might add heterocentric theatrical style of the time. (The men in Arthur Miller’s post-war world, for instance, are never without long-suffering wives who put their husbands first.) But McCarthy doesn’t much like Blanche, either. The critic takes after her with the single-mindedness of a misogynistic homophobe. McCarthy writes: “The thin sleazy stuff,” of Blanche’s character “must be embellished by Mr. Williams with all sorts of arty decorations,” because, in McCarthy’s view, there’s so little to Blanche. She even finds Blanche’s backstory frustratingly contrived, saying: “It is not enough that [Blanche] should be a drunkard (this in itself is plausible); she must also be a notorious libertine who has been run out of a small town like a prostitute, a thing absolutely inconceivable for a woman to whom conventionality is the end of existence.”

But part of Blanche’s tragedy is that even though she tries on conventionality when she takes up with Mitch, it doesn’t fit: her intelligence and status as a defiant outsider keep getting in the way. (Stanley and Mitch’s horror and fascination with Blanche’s sexuality is a kind of trope; what really frightens and excites them is her very individual way of seeing things. Blanche can comment on her femininity even as she tries to exploit it. But she knows when she can’t turn the trick, either. Blanche to Stanley: “I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.”)

Perhaps McCarthy, like Stanley and Mitch, was ultimately too uncomfortable with Blanche’s queerness. She is unmarried, but she has loved. She has no money, no property, and no social equity, and yet her memories of the boys she took to her breast are a kind of sustenance, too. Williams lets us in on Blanche’s difference by degrees, and by having her speak a recognizably gay language. Queer talk from a queer artist about a queer woman. Blanche to Stella: “I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft.” Blanche to the Young Man she’d like to trick with: “I’m not a conventional person, and I’m so—restless today….” Blanche to Mitch about her dead gay husband: “There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there….He came to me for help. I didn’t know that I didn’t find out anything till after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of!” Blanche is the forerunner of certain other Williams characters in his gallery of difference.

There is some Blanche in Brinda, the black woman who must endure the crude advances of a white nurse who feels he can treat her badly because she’s black in Williams’s long 1964 story, “Mama’s Old Stucco House.” Blanche’s affectations are less modified in Candy Delaney, from the writer’s 1970 play, “And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens….” She is also part of the spirit Williams expresses through his verse in his 1966 play, “The Mutilated”: I THINK THE STRANGE, THE CRAZED, THE QUEER / WILL HAVE THEIR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR / AND FOR A WHILE, A LITTLE WHILE, THERE WILL BE PITY FOR THE WILD. A MIRACLE, A MIRACLE! A SANCTUARY FOR THE WILD.”

In “Streetcar,” Blanche is partly undone by the gossip Stanley spreads about her. He tells Mitch about all the men and boys his sister-in-law’s slept with in her hometown, and how she was suspended from her job teaching high school English. Mitch, feeling duped, goes over to the Kowalskis’ and confronts Blanche. He then tries to sleep with her. Why not? She’s cheap goods. To get rid of him, Blanche threatens to scream fire. Given that Mitch is her last hope of ever escaping Stanley and Stella’s home and living a “respectable” life, Blanche should be hysterical for the rest of the play. But under Liv Ullman’s direction, Cate Blanchett doesn’t vibrate with the kind of intensity and need for acceptance that one generally associates with an outsider. Instead, Blanchett’s Blanche tries to engage with, or defy, the male members of the Kowalski-centered community. Ullman and Blanchett’s Blanche is entirely too sturdy a woman. She’s an intellectually superior being who doesn’t so much engage with her sister as lecture her. Ullman uses her vulnerability to advance the plot; in the process, she doesn’t add anything especially insightful to our understanding of Blanche, and seems to find humor in her nearly indefatigable need to connect.

The actors traverse the large set with little ease, and certainly no understanding of the thick New Orleans atmosphere that Williams insinuates into the action of the play like a minor but important character. Under Ullman’s direction, the Kowalskis’ suffocating apartment is just one more prop, like one of Blanche’s summer furs; Ullman never infuses the rooms with a sense of foreboding, or dread. This is obvious from the moment Blanche arrives. Stella and Stanley aren’t there; their landlady and neighbor, Eunice, shows Blanche in. As Eunice chatters on, Blanche rudely cuts her off. But instead of exhibiting a mix of emotions—gratitude, her own wretchedness—she merely barks at the proprietress, like a drill sergeant. Left alone, the errant schoolteacher spies a bottle of liquor and takes a big, hearty gulp, again less out of a feeling of desperation than as a way of quenching her thirst.

Enter Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kolwalski. While Edgerton stresses—as he must—Kowalski’s physical appeal he, like the rest of the cast (Robin McLeavy’s Stella Kowalski is especially weak; her Stella sounds and acts like an emotionally underwhelmed schoolgirl) shrinks in relation to Blanchett’s star wattage, her air of unvanquished health. Still, Edgerton doesn’t act with any real sense of urgency; he keeps close to Williams’s text while trying not to mimic Marlon Brando, who still owns the part.

One requires a Brando-like intensity to play Blanche, but Blanchett doesn’t yet seem to possess the kind of imagination that understands degradation; she is too competitive a spirit to grovel where Blanche has groveled in order to stay alive. In fact, the moments leading up to Blanche’s rape—the cutting of the final chord of reality—rang especially false, because Blanchett plays it as though Blanche is drunk, confused, fitful, and not as a willing female victim to Stanley’s male need for control; she is ultimately relegated to the life of tragic mundanity she has tried so valiantly to escape, while Stella runs towards it.