David Prashker's Book Of Days

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The Argaman Press

October 18

1862

The whole world knows about Émile Zola's open letter in defence of Alfred Dreyfus (see July 12), or perhaps I should say in opposition to anti-Semitism and injustice, the one that begins with the words "J'Accuse"; it was published on the front page of the newspaper "L'Aurore" on January 13th 1898, and led to Zola's trial, conviction, and flight into exile from France; eventually his assassination (read the detail here).

On the other hand, very few people seem even to be aware of the letter that Victor Hugo wrote, to a Monsieur Daelli, the Milanese publisher of the Italian translation of "Les Miserables", from Hauteville House, the home on the isle of Guernsey where he lived out the long years of his forced exile from France (1856 to 1870). That letter is dated October 18th, 1862:

"You are right, sir, when you tell me that 'Les Miserables' is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of 'Les Miserables' knocks at the door and says: 'Open to me, I come for you.'

"At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

"Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavoured to fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.

"Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavour of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

"Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges?

"Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? Military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honour of Italy?

"Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heart-rending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinise your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.

"From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

"I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book, — I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

"As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

"This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

"Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

"In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they call 'French taste'; I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

"In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: 'Help me!'

"This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write: —

"'There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: This book, Les Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'

"Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

"If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.

VICTOR HUGO."

Nothing that anyone can really add to that, is there? Except to say, to those who haven't, or who think that seeing the musical is sufficient - go read the book.

Amber pages

Henri-Louis Bergson, French philosopher, born today in 1859

Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau (that’s Trudeau senior), former Canadian Prime Minister, and father of the current Canadian Prime Minister, born today in 1919

Chuck Berry, or rather more boringly Charles Edward Anderson, born today in 1926

Lee Harvey Oswald, presidential assassin, born today in 1939

Wynton Learson Marsalis, jazz and classical trumpeter, born today in 1961

Alaska transferred from Russia to the United States, today in 1867

The Tribunal that established the Nuremburg trials and passed judgement on the senior German leadership, convened in Berlin, today in 1945 - click here for the full archival document; the minutes of this first gathering, chaired by the Tribunal's President General Major General I. T. Nikitchenko, are on page 24. The first formal session would begin, in Nuremburg, on November 14th, and they continued until October 1st, 1946.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

December 23

1805, 1850

Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Darlus, 1720-1805, remembered by her married name as Marie-Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville, but usually with the Marie dropped; she was a French chemist who specialised in putrefaction, an obsession resulting from a particularly bad outbreak of smallpox that left her so badly scarred she withdrew from society and focused entirely on her studies, ordering books from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and setting up a laboratory in her home.

She is described by one website as “a key figure in a community of elite scientists in early modern Paris”, and that word “community” is central here, so let me quote the next part of the same paragraph:

This community was composed of anatomists, physicians, botanists, chemists, and pharmacists, and included Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718–1784), Bernard de Jussieu (1699–1777), Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–1794), Antoine François de Fourcroy (1755–1809), Bernard-Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François Poulletier de la Salle (1719–1788), François-Guillaume Rouelle (1703–1770), and Jean-Baptiste Sénac (1693–1770). As the historian Roger Hahn states: “These men composed what was commonly known in the eighteenth century as the ‘Republic of Science’, referring to the loosely knit community of scientists, most of whom were members of the French Academy of Sciences in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

“These men...” but where is Marie-Geneviève? Not listed. And why not? The next sentence of the same piece answers that:

That Academy refused membership to women; women therefore had to develop alternate ways to contribute to scientific conversation and advancement. They networked in private salons in their homes and conducted experiments in private laboratories, often also in their homes.

Or moved to England, like Marie-Marguerite Bihéron, who is listed on the same Ancien Régime page of "Woman-Blindness", and can be found with her teacher Madeleine Françoise Basseporte on April 28 of this blog.

The website I am quoting tells d'Arconville's tale in great detail, so I am not going to do so: simply click here for the full piece. And as to my mention of Bihéron: like Bihéron, like Madeleine Basseporte, d'Arconville learned everything she knew at the Jardin du Roi, whose story is also told in full at the link; we will see its importance yet again when we come to Madame de Genlis on the Napoleonic Age page of "Woman-Blindness".

Among her many activities she published - anonymously of course, because who was going to take a woman scientist seriously, outside the "community"? - a number of works, including “Moral Thoughts and Reflections on Diverse Subjects” in 1760, and “On Passions” in 1764; but most importantly her "Essay on the History of Putrefaction" in 1766, the result of ten years of laboratory study of the transformation of matter, carrying out and recording the results of more than three hundred experiments that involved rotting food under various conditions, to see how, and even if, putrefaction could be delayed. It could: by protecting matter from air and exposing it to copper, camphor and cinchona, rotting could be delayed. The start of the modern food industry, which is all about preserving food!

She also translated numerous books into French, including Peter Shaw's "Chemical Lectures", Alexander Monro's "Treatise on Osteology", and the "Advice From a Father to his Daughter" by George Savile, the 1st Marquess of Halifax; always adding commentary where she felt it necessary to explain more coherently, or even to correct.

Given that putrefaction was the outcome of her smallpox, I would have liked to place this short essay on the date on which it broke out, but any documents that ever existed to record that appear to have biodegraded long ago. So I am placing her on today’s page, the one on which the remains of her body were placed in that ultimate laboratory of putrefaction, the grave.

1850

Another of the vagaries of time that fascinates me is the things that one knows, or encounters, that may be mildly interesting, or even completely uninteresting, at the time, but which acquire an enormous significance later on, especially when history becomes personal. This is not simply the obvious fact that days which become historic started out as days like any other (9-11 for example, only became significant when the first plane struck the first building, at 8:45am), but the way in which future events render past events historic, even though they were not so at the time.

So, hunting for something else in an old diary more than a decade after the event, I came upon this entry from December 23rd 2001, written because it was a Sunday and I wanted to write, but it was the school holidays, and almost Christmas, and the kids wanted to go out and do something, and my wife was encouraging me to cook the full roast for lunch; but I wanted a quiet hour of writing first, and knew that an hour was insufficient for focused attention on the novel I was writing at the time; and so I surfed around an on-line almanac to see what might turn up, and it was this:

The Other Straus Family

Nathan, Oscar and Isidor Straus

Minus the second of that double S with which no German Jewish family could ever spell their name, and entirely free of either the schmaltz of the waltz brothers or the Nazi ambivalence of Richard "Zarathustra" Strauss, the "other" Straus family were American Jews of the sort of level of personal achievement to which Jewish culture expects all of its sons and daughters to aspire, but which leads non-Jews by way of jealousy into anti-Semitism.

Three brothers, of whom Isidor was born first, in 1845, Nathan second in 1848, and Oscar last, today, December 23 1850, all three in Otterberg, in Germany. The parents were Lazarus and Sara, and there was a sister too, Hermine, born in 1846. They left Germany for America in 1854, settling in Talbotton in Georgia for a while, where Lazarus established a company importing crockery, china and glassware, and manufacturing lamps, in the basement of a small store owned by a man named Rowland Hussey Macy.

Macy had opened four dry goods stores between 1843 and 1855, the original in downtown Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1851, to serve the employees of the mill industry in the area. All four failed. In 1858, at the suggestion of Lazarus Straus, and with his expertise to back him, he established a new store named "R.H. Macy Dry Goods", located at the junction of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street in New York. Lazarus made the move to New York at the same time, advising and financially supporting Macy, but also establishing L Straus and Sons at 44 Warren Street, the sole agent and distributor in the U.S. for Baccarat, Edward Webb, Minton and Wedgwood. By 1885 the company had branch offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Yokohama, Japan.

Isidor and Nathan worked in the family business, growing it until, in 1887, they became sole owners of what was now Macy’s department store in New York, maintaining their family's business as well, but pouring the bulk of their efforts into Macy's because, to be absolutely frank (with a lower case f on this occasion), even without that second S, Straus was too Jewish, and too many people thought that they were making denim jeans.

Isidor became a Congressman and was active in Jewish affairs until his death, on board the Titanic, on April 14 1912 – his death, and the refusal of Ida, his wife, to be separated from him when the lifeboats were launched, became one of the great sentimental scenes in the 1953 movie “Titanic”, as well as “A Night To Remember” in 1958 and the 1997 remake of “Titanic”. The couple are remembered in Straus Park, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, at the intersection of Broadway, West End Avenue, and 106th Street (click here and see the illustration at the top of the page).

Nathan served as New York Park Commissioner from 1889 to 1893, and gave two-thirds of his fortune away to projects in what was then Ottoman Falastina, particularly for the building of hospitals. His son, Americanly named Nathan Junior, was assistant editor at "The Globe", then editor of "Puck", which he published himself, and headed the U.S. Housing Authority from 1937 to 1942. And speaking of publishing, his involvement in the publication of the Anne Frank Diary (that's Frank with an upper case F) can be found on June 12. Nathan senior is also officially remembered in New York, at Straus Square on the Lower East Side (click here), and perhaps more significantly in the Israeli town of Netanya, which was named for him (click here).

Oscar, the third brother, trained as a jurist, was Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce and Labour - the first Jew to gain Cabinet rank in the U.S. - and his country’s envoy to Turkey (a key post in those days of the Ottoman Empire) three times: 1887-9, 1898-1900 and 1909-1910. He was also appointed five times to the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, founded the American Jewish Committee, and was the first President of the Jewish Historical Society. Oscar's involvement with Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and priest of religious tolerance, can be found on Oct 13.

Nor was the family a one-generation wonder; we have already met Nathan Junior; Isidor’s son Jesse was the one who built Macy’s into the world’s largest department store, before leaving to become U.S Ambassador to France from 1933 to 1936.

Oscar’s son Roger was a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. General Assembly in 1954, and founder of the National Conference of Christians and Jews; his son, Roger Junior, founded Farrar-Straus, the publishing house (now Farrar, Straus and Giroux), in 1946 in partnership with John C. Farrar. At the fourth generation Peter Straus, son of Nathan Junior, founded the Straus Broadcasting Group of radio stations, worked for the International Labour Organisation in Geneva as its executive assistant director, and then in the same capacity ran the U.S. aid programme to Africa in the 1960s.

8 years and a month after I learned these facts, but did no more with them than write them in my diary as something that might perhaps lead somewhere literary some day, eight years and a month later, divorced and living in Miami, I met a woman on J-Date, who five years later became my fiancée - a great achiever in her own right, as an architect who counts prisons, courts and city halls across America amongst her accomplishments. Nina's great-great-grandparents were Isidor and Ida Straus.

More on the Straus family at http://www.brilliantglass.com/cutting_houses/Carlson_3x.html; and even more at http://www.straushistoricalsociety.org/

Nina, abandoned, incomplete, 2017

Amber pages

Jean-François Champollion, the man who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, born today in 1790

Harriet Monroe, founder of "Poetry" magazine, born today in 1860

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sicilian Leopard, born today in 1896

And today was the day, in 1888, when that sad failed priest turned unwanted artist Vincent Van Gogh, failed even in the act of suicide, because there are no significant veins or arteries behind the ear

Joni Mitchell as Vincent, the cover of "Turbulent Indigo"

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

January 14

2015 (1989) [1791] {1875}

Following the Paris terrorist attacks, what else can possibly appear under this date, but this:

Good on you, Charlie!

Well, sadly, one thing - this:

January 2015: "Paris attacks: Pope Francis says freedom of speech has limits" (click here to read it, assuming the article hasn't been condemned and placed in the Index of Prohibited Literature in the meanwhile)

Because, yes, His Holiness the Pope, guardian of that great tradition of free speech which has been the hallmark of Catholicism since... since never. To which the only plausible response is a cartoon:-

And since I have now used up my quota of freedom of speech to post the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and my criticism of the Pope, let me follow Kierkegaard's great maxim that:

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid using"

... and then use my freedom of thought to invite you to click here, and read Charlie Winter’s translation of the Islamic State women's movement's - the al Khanssaa Brigade's - manifesto "Women of the Islamic State", which might well be sub-titled "I'm not Islamophobic, just very scared."

1989

And then... because we are honouring the great tradition of satire today, that weapon of human wit that is so much sharper than the axe of ideology or the scimitar of despotism... let me also note, because sports commentators do so love their off-the-wall statistics (this, for instance, is the first time that anyone has written this precise statement, in a silver journal, in blue ink, in Miami, on this date, while wearing a green T-shirt with black chinos, right-handed - ever: which makes it a record someone, somewhere, someday, has to beat - unless it gets disqualified because I have done it while using those performance enhancing drugs caffeine and chocolate); but in the wacky world of meaningless superstitions and fatuous data, few can beat this one, noted in a variety of otherwise intelligent newspapers of international renown, on this day in 1989:

that

"Ronald Reagan becomes the first U.S. President elected in a '0' year since 1840 to leave office alive"

and anyway, given the condition of his mental faculties, even this may not be certain...

I would also like to note that, on this day in 1791, Calvin Phillips "became the world's shortest man, at 61 cms, 2' 2”" - only, how do you become the world's shortest man? Did he suddenly shrink? Was he not previously even shorter, when a baby, or a boy? And was this the day on which he stopped growing? And how do they know?

And: how do they know? A quick Google-search reveals that a Taiwanese man named Lin Yih-Chih is actually shorter than Phillips by 2 cms, which is a lot at that height; and there is a South African woman named Madge Bester who comes up at 67.5 cms; or maybe it's the other way around and she's the shorter, he's the taller - is somebody trying to cheat by switching out of feet and inches into millimeters? And why are they in the newspapers for it anyway - some sort of freak show? And can we presume that, if they made an actual competition out of this, there would have to be laws about the use of performance diminishing drugs so that people don't get shorter by cheating?

Both, I also presume, are suffering from some form of bone disease or growth impediment; I wonder if Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer ever came upon the condition during his many years in Africa, and if he did was he able to respond medically? I ask only because today was his birthday, in 1875.

Oh, and one amberthought, which alas he is for most book-readers, even American book-readers, John Roderigo Dos Passos, transferred to Manhattan today in 1896. Does anyone know who did the portrait?

Luis Quintanilla is the answer to that closing question; a full catalogue of his works, with background info by his son, can be found here. The piece is called “John Dos Passos as a Sunday Painter”; oil on canvas c. 1943

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/