newyorker--2020-01-06--Mary-Louise Parker Plays Professor

Mary-Louise Parker Plays Professor

When six Columbia University graduate students arrived at their creative-writing seminar one recent Tuesday , they encountered an unlikely classmate .
The actress Mary-Louise Parker , who is starring in Adam Rapp ’ s Broadway play “ The Sound Inside , ” had been invited to sit in by their professor , the writer Leslie Jamison .
The women met four years ago , when Jamison interviewed Parker at Symphony Space about her memoir , “ Dear Mr. You , ” a series of epistolary vignettes dedicated to the men in her life .
The two became friends , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to receive a galley of Jamison ’ s 2018 book , “ The Recovering , ” a literary history of sobriety .
She read it twice .
“ I was obsessed with it .
I am obsessed with it , ” Parker said .
Parker would like to write another book , but she ’ s been blocked .
“ And I ’ ve been craning away from the personal , ” she explained to Jamison , “ because I felt that everything I wrote was seen through the lens of ‘ actress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these days Parker stands onstage eight times a week and delivers a monologue about writing .
In “ The Sound Inside , ” she plays a character named Bella Lee Baird , who sounds a lot like Jamison—a middle-aged creative-writing professor at an Ivy League college .
( “ In my mind , I ’ m actually Leslie Jamison , ” Parker said . )
In the play , Baird discovers that she has terminal stomach cancer .
As she grapples with the diagnosis , she fixates on a student named Christopher Dunn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will one day write as well as Dostoyevsky .
The students in Jamison ’ s workshop were huddled at a rectangular wooden table in Dodge Hall .
The seminar had the dozy air common to classes that take place right after lunch—the fluorescent lights buzzing , the smell of burned coffee and wintergreen gum .
Parker sat at one end , wearing a black sweater and tortoiseshell glasses .
On her right sat Jamison in a maroon polka-dot dress .
Parker tried to put the students at ease .
“ Acting is so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she said .
“ I don ’ t know if I ’ m the greatest actress or anything , but I ’ m a really good dramaturge .
I can tell a structure , and I can tell where there ’ s a flaw.
” Jamison asked the students to discuss their thesis projects .
Yoshiko Iwai explained that she got into writing through modern dance .
She was working on some essays about “ death rituals ” and was interested in “ the way we write the body.
” She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her M.F.A .
“ You ’ re going to go to med school ?
” Parker asked , her eyes wide .
Next up was David Garczynski , who had bushy eyebrows and slight stubble .
“ Yeah , so , um , Yoshiko ’ s a tough act to follow , ” he said .
He told Parker that he was writing essays about climate change on the part of Long Island where he is from .
“ I wanted to talk about this idea of home as a place I never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never want to return ?
” Parker asked .
“ And yet your writing is all centered around it.
” “ I ’ m not that exciting , ” Garczynski said .
Parker shot him a look .
“ Don ’ t give me that face , ” he scoffed .
The students seemed to hold their breath , until Parker shot back , “ But , seriously , who is interesting ?
” Jamison cut in .
“ I was encouraging David to bring in more of the personal narrative.
” Garczynski @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fascinated now , ” Parker said .
“ Like , you went red hot.
” Maria Allocco , who was drinking kombucha , continued the introductions .
“ My father was an Italian Catholic priest when he fell in love with my mother in South Korea , ” she said briskly .
“ They eloped and were disowned by their families .
I write mixed-genre pieces on mixed-race experience .
And I write through lenses of feminism , and also about fluidity and allyship.
” She said her writing was informed by silent-meditation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them .
At the end of class , Parker told the students that she wished she could audit the course .
“ I ’ m a crazy nerd , ” she said .
“ I memorize poems .
In my dressing room backstage are all these poems .
Just this morning , I left a haiku on my son ’ s bed to remind him to clean the panini maker.
” The class laughed , so Parker decided to share her work .
With a small smirk , she recited :

Mary-Louise Parker and Leslie Jamison Illustration by João Fazenda
When six Columbia University graduate students arrived at their creative-writing seminar one recent Tuesday, they encountered an unlikely classmate. The actress Mary-Louise Parker, who is starring in Adam Rapp’s Broadway play “The Sound Inside,” had been invited to sit in by their professor, the writer Leslie Jamison. The women met four years ago, when Jamison interviewed Parker at Symphony Space about her memoir, “Dear Mr. You,” a series of epistolary vignettes dedicated to the men in her life. The two became friends, and Parker was one of the first people to receive a galley of Jamison’s 2018 book, “The Recovering,” a literary history of sobriety. She read it twice. “I was obsessed with it. I am obsessed with it,” Parker said.
Parker would like to write another book, but she’s been blocked. “And I’ve been craning away from the personal,” she explained to Jamison, “because I felt that everything I wrote was seen through the lens of ‘actress writing.’ ”
Instead of writing, these days Parker stands onstage eight times a week and delivers a monologue about writing. In “The Sound Inside,” she plays a character named Bella Lee Baird, who sounds a lot like Jamison—a middle-aged creative-writing professor at an Ivy League college. (“In my mind, I’m actually Leslie Jamison,” Parker said.) In the play, Baird discovers that she has terminal stomach cancer. As she grapples with the diagnosis, she fixates on a student named Christopher Dunn, who boasts in class that he will one day write as well as Dostoyevsky.
The students in Jamison’s workshop were huddled at a rectangular wooden table in Dodge Hall. The seminar had the dozy air common to classes that take place right after lunch—the fluorescent lights buzzing, the smell of burned coffee and wintergreen gum. Parker sat at one end, wearing a black sweater and tortoiseshell glasses. On her right sat Jamison in a maroon polka-dot dress.
Parker tried to put the students at ease. “Acting is so similar to writing in so many ways,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m the greatest actress or anything, but I’m a really good dramaturge. I can tell a structure, and I can tell where there’s a flaw.”
Jamison asked the students to discuss their thesis projects. Yoshiko Iwai explained that she got into writing through modern dance. She was working on some essays about “death rituals” and was interested in “the way we write the body.” She wants to get an M.D. after her M.F.A.
“You’re going to go to med school?” Parker asked, her eyes wide.
Next up was David Garczynski, who had bushy eyebrows and slight stubble. “Yeah, so, um, Yoshiko’s a tough act to follow,” he said. He told Parker that he was writing essays about climate change on the part of Long Island where he is from. “I wanted to talk about this idea of home as a place I never want to return to.”
“You never want to return?” Parker asked. “And yet your writing is all centered around it.”
“I’m not that exciting,” Garczynski said. Parker shot him a look.
“Don’t give me that face,” he scoffed.
The students seemed to hold their breath, until Parker shot back, “But, seriously, who is interesting?”
Jamison cut in. “I was encouraging David to bring in more of the personal narrative.” Garczynski nodded.
“I’m totally fascinated now,” Parker said. “Like, you went red hot.”
Maria Allocco, who was drinking kombucha, continued the introductions. “My father was an Italian Catholic priest when he fell in love with my mother in South Korea,” she said briskly. “They eloped and were disowned by their families. I write mixed-genre pieces on mixed-race experience. And I write through lenses of feminism, and also about fluidity and allyship.” She said her writing was informed by silent-meditation retreats; she has attended seven of them.
At the end of class, Parker told the students that she wished she could audit the course. “I’m a crazy nerd,” she said. “I memorize poems. In my dressing room backstage are all these poems. Just this morning, I left a haiku on my son’s bed to remind him to clean the panini maker.”
The class laughed, so Parker decided to share her work. With a small smirk, she recited:


newyorker--2020-01-06--Who Is Jared Kushner?

Who Is Jared Kushner?

On December 13 , 2016 , Donald J. Trump ’ s son-in-law , Jared Kushner , attended a meeting in a building not far from Trump Tower , in the Madison Avenue offices of Colony Capital .
One month after Trump ’ s surprise win in the Presidential election , Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov , the head of Vnesheconombank , or VEB , a Russian state-owned development bank .
Kushner , in later congressional testimony , said that his goals in the meeting were purely diplomatic .
The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. had told him that Gorkov had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new Administration and best ways to work together.
” That month , Vladimir Putin arranged an “ ‘ all-hands ’ oligarch meeting ” —as one of the oligarchs in attendance , Petr Aven , described it to the special counsel Robert Mueller ’ s investigators—to discuss U.S.-Russia relations .
At least three of Russia ’ s most prominent oligarchs subsequently tried to solidify ties with a man who seemed their perfect counterpart : a young American oligarch whose family had grown wealthy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President-elect ’ s son-in-law , Jared Kushner .
Through the Russian Ambassador ’ s persistence , Gorkov got the meeting .
According to Kushner , the two discussed U.S.-Russia relations—business was not on the agenda .
But a VEB spokesperson told the Washington Post something altogether different .
As described by the Post , “ The bank maintained .
.
.
that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family ’ s real estate business.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Trump Presidency would bring , the Russians accurately predicted that Kushner would be an immensely powerful figure in the incoming Administration , and that talking business could be a route to political influence .
When questioned by Mueller ’ s investigators , Kushner went out of his way to convey the idea that he thought little of the meeting with Gorkov—seemingly in an effort to bolster his argument that he in no way conspired with Russian state actors during the 2016 Presidential election .
According to the Mueller report , “ Kushner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not engage in any preparation for the meeting and that no one on the Transition Team even did a Google search for Gorkov ’ s name.
” But Gorkov had prepared .
He carried with him two gifts that showed he ’ d conducted a careful and deliberate investigation into the young man he was meeting .
As Kushner explained in a July , 2017 , statement to congressional investigators , one was a piece of art from Novogrudok , “ the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that same village.
” The selection of a bag of dirt as a gift was particularly resonant : Jared ’ s grandmother , Rae Kushner , was one of a few hundred survivors of the Nazis in the Novogrudok ghetto , in what is now Belarus but was then northeastern Poland .
Thousands of Jews from the area had been murdered , shot as they stood on the edges of giant trenches , so that they would fall directly into their own mass graves .
The survivors were imprisoned in a ghetto , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To escape , the residents smuggled bits of wood , spoons , and any other implements they could find past Nazi guards and used them to dig a tunnel that extended beyond the searchlights and barbed wire .
They put the dirt they dug up into bags and hid the bags in the walls of the ghetto , so that the Nazis wouldn ’ t discover their plan .
Mueller found that , during the Presidential campaign , dirt on Hillary Clinton was the currency the Russians had tried to trade with Kushner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russians were giving Kushner a literal bag of dirt , the symbol of the Kushner family ’ s miraculous survival story—a story that includes undeniable courage , irrefutable ingenuity , and lying about family relationships to enter the United States .
After the Second World War , anti-Semitic immigration laws sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the United States .
In 1949 , in order to increase his chances of obtaining an American visa , Rae ’ s husband and Jared ’ s grandfather , Yossel Berkowitz , posed as his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as his name on U.S. immigration paperwork , and renaming himself Joseph Kushner .
As a result , his son Charles was called Charles Kushner , not Charles Berkowitz , and his grandson was Jared Kushner , not Jared Berkowitz .
Jared ’ s wife ’ s married name would be Ivanka Kushner , not Ivanka Berkowitz .
In the nineteen-thirties , a few years before half of the family was murdered , the Kushners , as they usually did , took a summer vacation in the tiny town of Novoyel ’ nya @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sharp scents of pine and spruce and fresh lake water , the Kushner children played in the forest .
On Friday evenings , as the late-setting sun angled through the woods , the family gathered for Shabbat dinner .
Parents , grandparents , children , grandchildren , aunts , uncles , cousins sat in front of tall white candles to eat chicken soup , sweet kugel , the ever-present braided challah bread .
“ Summer camp ” was how the surviving Kushners would later describe these trips .
“ Camping ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their fondest memories .
There ’ s a photograph that endures from one of these summers .
The lower left corner is burnt , or chemically degraded , but the image in the center is clear : four children arrayed on a hammock around their father , tall trees standing like sentries in the background .
There ’ s Esther , in her late teens , on the far left , wearing a short-sleeved , close-fitting white button-down shirt , parted sharply by a dark tie .
On the right , with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s back and resting on her father ’ s shoulder , is the teen-age Reichal ( Rae ) Kushner .
Her thick black hair is cut in a bob , and she is smiling .
Her face , like everyone else ’ s in the family , is unworried , unlined .
Her dark-brown eyes gaze forthrightly into the camera , yet to witness horrors .
Half a decade after the photograph was taken , three of six members of the Kushner family would be dead .
Of hundreds of cousins , grandparents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aunts , only a handful , including Lisa , Rae , and their father , Naum , made it through : through the destruction of their home and the confiscation of their business ; through family separations and multiple mass executions ; through starvation , lice , beatings , forced labor , German dogs , and Nazi bullets ; through barbed wire and months of hiding in the forest during the Polish winter , a trek across international borders , and years in a displaced-persons camp .
The Kushners lost everything .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ghetto and that winter in the forest—during which they lived in ziemiankas , holes in the ground covered by trees—some twelve hundred Jewish partisans made their way back home to Novogrudok after the Germans retreated from the town .
“ You can not imagine—I fainted twice , ” Rae said , in later testimony , of the first time she witnessed the wasteland her home town had become .
“ We all wanted to run away from our town .
We wanted to run any place—but , like , Russia took us in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We couldn ’ t move .
You needed a passport .
You needed papers .
It ’ s not so easy.
” They asked themselves , “ Where should we run ?
Nobody wants to take us in.
” Under postwar Soviet rule , a Jewish underground emerged in the area , which helped survivors plot their escape .
About nine months after their return to Novogrudok , Rae , her sister , and her father told Russian soldiers that they were Greeks and boarded a train to Czechoslovakia , and then made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ met up with Yossel .
In a synagogue in Budapest , alongside some twenty other couples , Rae and Yossel were married by a rabbi .
There is a record of this moment , a ketubah , or Jewish wedding contract .
Normally a ketubah is a carefully prepared document , but this one was scrawled out hastily , on yellow paper with different pens , just before the couple fled again .
According to “ The Miracle of Life , ” a book compiled by Rae ’ s children for her seventy-fifth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crossed the Alps and several borders by foot , train and any other available mode of transportation.
” They ended up in a displaced-persons camp near Rome .
For the next four years , they were stuck in Italy , refugees waiting for a nation to welcome them .
“ We would go anywhere where we could live in freedom , but nobody wanted us , ” Rae later recalled .
“ Nobody opened their doors to us .
Nobody wanted to take us in.
” A picture from those years shows Rae @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , her shoulder-length hair still lush and brown , brushed up and back , and her once forthright gaze marred with worry and pain .
To make money while they were living in the refugee camp , Yossel sold tobacco and other goods on the black market .
At one point , he was arrested and sent to jail ; Rae , nine months pregnant with their daughter Linda , bribed a guard to get him out .
It was not long afterward that the Kushners lied on immigration paperwork and Yossel Berkowitz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , becoming Joseph Kushner , or Josef Kushnier , as his name was spelled then .
“ The Miracle of Life ” explains , “ Because sons and fathers were given priority to get visas , Yossel assumed his wife ’ s maiden name being that he travelled with his father in law.
” The newly renamed Kushner family was helped by an American nonprofit group that fully embraced immigration and helped tens of thousands of Jews escape from Europe—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society , or HIAS .
The organization booked their passage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with immigration forms .
HIAS accumulated a twenty-three-page case file on the Kushners , containing a list of family members , interview notes , and a record of their progress from Italy to New York .
The file was buried in HIAS records for seventy years and hasn ’ t previously been reported .
One form prepared for the Kushner family by aid workers listed “ Naum , 51 , ” as the family patriarch , with “ Josef , 26 , ” as his son .
“ Raja , ” also twenty-six @ @ @ @ @ @ @ daughter-in-law .
Raja ’ s—Rae ’ s— “ maiden name ” was given as “ Sloninski , ” a version of Joseph ’ s maternal grandfather ’ s surname .
Their country of origin was recorded as “ Germany , ” a more favorable country of origin for immigration purposes than their real home country , Poland .
The Kushners had listed a sponsor in the U.S. , but , before they landed , the sponsor disavowed any knowledge of them , according to a note made by an aid worker in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars to their name when they arrived in New York , in March , 1949 .
For three months , HIAS sheltered them and gave them a food allowance , with extra for Passover , which was just weeks after their arrival .
The group even helped the family find jobs .
Joe began work as a carpenter , in New Jersey .
Carpenters were in high demand in the postwar years ; in New Jersey , a thousand homes were built a week , for a thousand straight weeks .
Soldiers returning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ growing families , needed homes , and builders received a huge boost from U.S. government programs .
The G.I .
Bill provided low down payments and long loan terms .
The mortgage income-tax deduction helped middle-class families buy homes and build wealth , with government backing .
The Federal-Aid Highway Act , a twenty-five-billion-dollar program , passed in 1956 , stimulated home construction in the suburbs by making commutes to factories and offices faster .
This act , which established the biggest federal infrastructure program in U.S. history , fuelled the economy and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the time of his death , in 1985 , Joe had built four thousand homes—all of them above ground , unlike the pit he inhabited in Poland during the war—and he had accumulated tens of millions of dollars .
Four of those homes were mansions for his children , which he built in the New Jersey suburbs of West Orange and Livingston—areas that were newly opening to Jews .
By the time Joe built homes for his sons Murray and Charlie , Livingston had become a town of conspicuous consumption .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ else with what they had .
They had to have the best , ” one former town official told me .
The median income was well above the national average , and housing prices were increasing at more than two times the rate of inflation .
Joe built Charlie a large house on a large lot .
Down the hill , in a small home on a small lot , lived the captain of the high-school baseball team , who , even then , was getting involved in politics : Chris Christie .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Companies , with the idea of going into business with his father .
But Joe died soon after , and Charlie , bereft and left to lead the company alone , expanded his father ’ s business model from primarily focussing on development to dealing with acquisition , management , and debt as well .
The Kushners were part of a wealthy , aggressive , and fiercely private coterie of developers in New Jersey known as the “ Holocaust builders.
” Charlie , though , was a public guy .
He was written @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attention-getting donations to philanthropic causes and to politicians , most of them Democrats .
President Bill Clinton , Vice-President Al Gore , and the New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani came to his offices , in Florham Park .
Hillary Clinton visited the Kushners ’ beach home , in Long Branch , for a Shabbos dinner , during her Senate campaign in 2000 .
But Charles Kushner ’ s biggest donations by far were to support a candidate for governor in New Jersey .
Kushner and his associates gave one and a half @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of more than three million in donations that he made to Democrats , making him the biggest Democratic donor in the state by the end of the last century .
During that time , Charlie became known for his generous gestures—showing up at shivas , sending flowers and letters , appearing at hospital bedsides when associates ’ children became ill .
He lived in an expansive house , on Fawn Drive , in Livingston , with a large atrium and a floor-to-ceiling fireplace , and his home became the family gathering spot .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and outgoing .
At these conclaves , the boys played basketball and baseball in the backyard .
The girls played in the basement .
On Shabbat , Charlie ’ s home was the hub .
Rae brought over matzo-ball soup ; she had a special recipe , with tomato in it .
Every year , for Passover , Rae took the whole family to the Fontainebleau hotel , in Miami Beach—a high-rise arc of white concrete surrounded by myriad pools and decks and palm trees .
Rae would pay for the whole family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adjacent rooms .
The cousins—Rae had more than a dozen grandchildren—would run from room to room , bouncing on beds and hanging out on balconies , clutching the twenty-dollar bills that Rae gave each of them for the arcade .
Joe had been a strict parent , and Charlie was more so .
His family ’ s behavior was circumscribed ; his children weren ’ t even allowed to wear jeans—dungarees , he called them .
Joe ’ s grandchildren attended a Yeshiva that Charlie and his brother Murray had endowed : the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jerseys said “ Kushner ” on the front and “ Kushner ” on the back .
Charlie ’ s eldest son , Jared , was universally described as a polite boy , particularly deferential to his parents .
In one family photo , all the cousins are wearing sweaters—except for Jared , who is dressed in a button-down shirt and a tie .
By the time of Jared ’ s bar mitzvah , both he and Charlie had become increasingly focussed on the bright lights of Manhattan .
The bar mitzvah was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hotel .
Hundreds of people attended , including members of the New York Giants football team .
A central part of the bar-mitzvah ceremony is the reading of a story from the Torah .
Jared read Beshalach , the part of the Exodus story in which God parts the Red Sea for the Israelites and then allows the waters to flood the pursuing Egyptian army .
“ Jared is my favorite grandchild , ” Rae said .
A week later , Charlie ’ s sister held a bar mitzvah for her son Jacob @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jersey and without N.F.L .
players in attendance .
“ Jacob is my favorite grandchild , ” Rae said .
A photograph of the Kushner family , from the nineteen-thirties ; Rae , Jared Kushner ’ s grandmother , is at the far right .
Half a decade after the picture was taken , half of the family would be dead .
In the late nineteen-nineties , Charlie Kushner started pushing limits .
He began drinking more , and , when he did , he could become verbally abusive , including at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ donations in the names of his family members and business partners , without their knowledge , in violation of campaign-finance law .
He used corporate funds for personal expenses : landscaping , “ holiday alcohol , ” New Jersey Nets tickets , paying a consulting firm to assess the comeback prospects of Benjamin Netanyahu , then between stints as the Prime Minister of Israel .
In 2002 , Charlie ’ s brother Murray—who had his own business but whose ties to his brother ’ s business were cemented by a series of interlocking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taxes—sued Charlie for misusing corporate funds .
In legal filings , Charlie ’ s attorneys argued that he ’ d done nothing wrong and that his donations enhanced the prestige and power of the family real-estate business .
“ Charles Kushner ’ s activity , both charitable and political , has raised his name and reputation in the broader real estate community as a prominent real estate developer and an individual who dedicates his success to the well-being of his community , ” the lawyers wrote in a filing with the Federal Election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s and the charitable and political contributions made by the various Partnerships have been beneficial to each of the partnerships.
” His brother Murray ’ s civil lawsuit caught the attention of the new , politically ambitious United States Attorney for New Jersey , Chris Christie , who had been appointed by President George W. Bush , in 2001 .
Christie ’ s investigators began the arduous task of tracing interlocking limited-liability companies—L.L.C.s—through corporate ledgers .
Charlie fought back , hiring the kind of white-collar lawyers who can frequently make cases like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So Charlie took things into his own hands .
He had become convinced , erroneously , that his brother Murray and his sister Esther—named for Rae ’ s older sister , who was murdered by the Nazis—had secretly been working with Christie , from the beginning , to bring him down .
Charlie called Jimmy O ’ Toole , an East Orange police captain on the verge of retirement , who was also Charlie ’ s running buddy , and offered him a lucrative gig .
Sitting at his desk , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ Toole an accordion file stuffed with twenty thousand dollars in cash and asked him to hire a prostitute to seduce and entrap Esther ’ s husband , Billy Schulder .
For months , the scheme stalled .
O ’ Toole , raised as an altar boy , was consumed by guilt .
One day , O ’ Toole took the file of cash back to Charlie ’ s office , but Charlie wouldn ’ t take no for an answer .
He handed O ’ Toole a phone number .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say you ’ re a friend of John ’ s , ” Charlie told him .
It was a phone number for a Manhattan prostitute named Susanna , “ a high-priced , European-born call girl on Manhattan ’ s Upper East Side , ” as Christie described her in his book “ Let Me Finish.
” Finally , O ’ Toole called Susanna .
On a snowy day in December , 2003 , O ’ Toole ’ s brother Tommy , a private investigator , recorded a video tape of the encounter between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ O ’ Tooles to make copies of the video and to print eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch still photographs , with the woman ’ s face pixelated out .
For months , Charlie did nothing .
In March , Rae passed away .
In May , Christie began sending out target letters , a sign that his investigation was intensifying .
Two days after they were received , Charlie called O ’ Toole and asked him to have Tommy send the video and the stills to Esther on the eve of her son Jacob ’ s engagement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a week after Jared , and the two boys had grown up like brothers .
Charlie wanted to send the package to Jacob , too , and to Jacob ’ s two sisters .
Jimmy O ’ Toole talked him out of it .
Upon receiving the video , Esther recoiled in shock .
She called her lawyer , who brought it to the attention of Christie , who soon thereafter indicted Charlie on charges of witness tampering , tax fraud , and campaign-finance violations .
“ When people under investigation decide to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to obstruct justice , to attempt to impede the rule of law , ” Christie said at a press conference , “ it is our obligation to act swiftly and surely to end the obstruction.
” Charles Kushner pleaded not guilty , and his lawyers predicted that he would be exonerated .
But , in the next month , Christie showed that he had more cards to play .
It wasn ’ t a coincidence that Charlie had told Jimmy O ’ Toole to call Susanna and tell her he was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prosecutors learned that , for years , Charlie had been living a double life , using the pseudonym John Hess to travel to Manhattan and avail himself of Susanna ’ s services , seven people with knowledge of Charlie ’ s activities told me .
To gain a conviction at trial on witness-tampering charges , prosecutors would have needed Susanna ’ s testimony and that of a second woman , who had tried and failed to catch Charlie ’ s former accountant , Bob Yontef , in a similar plot .
Christie ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ women on the stand , to let the world know about John Hess .
In his book , Christie alludes to his own knowledge about the details of the case .
He writes that he later told Jared Kushner , during the Trump campaign , “ I ’ m burdened with facts about your father that even you don ’ t know , that I can never tell you , because if I did I would break the law.
” Charlie Kushner ’ s criminal attorney , Ben Brafman , disputes this version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ team conducted its own investigation and found “ zero evidence ” to support the findings about Charlie ’ s double life as John Hess , but Charlie opted to avoid the embarrassment of a trial .
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison .
He was sent to the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery , Alabama , where he remained behind bars for about a year .
Following his release , Charles Kushner was interviewed by The Real Deal , a New York-based real-estate magazine , in which he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Holocaust .
Charlie explained that his Hebrew name was Chanon and that he was named after his mother ’ s brother .
Charlie ’ s namesake had been a leader of the group that dug the tunnel out of Novogrudok before being shot by the Nazis .
As the group prepared to escape , they had strangled to death a Jewish teen they feared might collaborate with the guards .
The Nazis offered Jews small perks to inform on their fellow ghetto residents , as a means of control , Rae once explained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not take the risk .
For Charlie Kushner , nothing was worse than what he saw as collaboration .
The Real Deal interviewer asked Charlie if he had reached any resolution with his sister and her husband .
Charlie called his actions a “ family tragedy ” and expressed little remorse .
“ I believe that God and my parents in heaven forgive me for what I did , which was wrong .
I don ’ t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy , hatred and spite , ” he said .
“ On my worst day in prison , I wouldn ’ t trade places with my brother and sister , and yet I know what I did was wrong.
” When Charlie was arrested , Jared was studying business and law at New York University and working as an intern in the office of the Manhattan District Attorney , Robert Morgenthau .
He ’ d planned to work in a nonprofit for a while after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself in the family real-estate business , flying to Alabama almost every week to visit his father .
During those trips , Charlie inculcated a family narrative of resentment in Jared .
“ His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office , and they took it to the government , ” Jared later told New York magazine .
“ Siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing .
He gave them interests in the business for nothing .
All he did was put the tape together and send it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
At the end of the day , it was a function of saying ‘ You ’ re trying to make my life miserable ?
Well , I ’ m doing the same.
’ ” As the years went on , Jared ’ s sense of victimization solidified .
Christie “ tried to destroy my father , ” Jared later said , as described by Christie in “ Let Me Finish.
” “ There was a dispute inside the family , ” Christie quotes Jared as saying .
“ My father made those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Jared said .
“ They just benefited from my father ’ s hard work .
And those are the people who turned him in .
It wasn ’ t fair.
” And then , “ This was a family matter , a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis ” —not by prosecutors .
After Charlie ’ s imprisonment , Kushner Companies sold off most of its suburban empire , and Jared Kushner bought an aluminum-clad tower in midtown Manhattan—the “ Mad Men ” -era 666 Fifth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars , using a risky structure of debt to make the purchase .
Around the same time , he bought a newspaper , the New York Observer , a salmon-colored newsweekly known for aggressively getting “ up in the pipes ” of New York ’ s key industries : finance , real estate , advertising , entertainment , media .
( I worked at the Observer for eight years , and left three years before Jared Kushner bought the paper . )
Almost immediately after Jared purchased it , the paper changed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kaplan , complained that Jared pushed him to assign a story that would be a “ hit job ” on Chris Christie—whose star had risen since he sent Jared ’ s father to jail .
Kaplan refused .
Jared denied targeting Christie , but former employees recalled him boasting about upcoming “ hit jobs ” in the paper .
According to former Kushner employees , when the paper published one of these “ hit jobs , ” Kushner would point to the story , as if to suggest : This could be you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kushner married Ivanka Trump , and soon their businesses were working together .
Both prolific political donors from families of prolific political donors , Jared and Ivanka ’ s attention was a coveted object among New York ’ s political class .
Part of what was sought after was Jared ’ s influence , as a newspaper publisher of the élite .
Over time , a pattern emerged in the Observer ’ s journalism—it was transactional .
The paper published a glowing piece about the Kushner family ’ s private banker .
Jared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an attack piece about a fellow real-estate mogul , Richard Mack , who was an executive at an investment fund that owned some of the Kushner ’ s debt and had warned Jared not to raise rent for one of the biggest tenants at 666 Fifth Avenue , because it would drive them away .
( After multiple writers couldn ’ t find any evidence of wrongdoing on Mack ’ s part , no story was written . )
The Observer had to approach three different reporters to find one to write a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Schneiderman , who had recently filed suit against Jared Kushner ’ s father-in-law , over Trump University .
Before that piece ran , Trump tweeted that the piece would “ get even ” for another magazine story , one that accurately portrayed the fraudulent dealings at Trump University .
Kushner Companies was—dozens of employees and associates and partners who worked with the Kushners told me—a tightly knit family business , where no one with the last name Kushner could be at fault for anything , and no one else was safe .
Jared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and attentive .
When an employee ’ s relatives were sick or dying , the Kushners could be generous to a fault .
But the constant threat of their mercurial tempers created a deep sense of unease .
Jared “ was lovely until he was not , ” a leader of one of New York ’ s largest real-estate companies told me in an interview .
“ Until you had a falling out and were dead to him and he was out to get you.
” In November , 2015 , Jared Kushner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d gone to prison for , among other things , making illegal donations to Democrats , flew with his father-in-law to a campaign rally in Springfield , Illinois .
“ We don ’ t have victories anymore , ” Trump said at that rally .
“ We ’ re stupid .
We have stupid people leading us.
” That night in Illinois was an awakening , Kushner told Forbes in a rare post-election interview , “ People really saw hope in his message.
” Kushner said that he realized “ they wanted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world , the Upper East Side , or at Robin Hood [ Foundation ] dinners.
” Jared saw himself as a disrupter , people who worked with him told me .
His grandparents had , improbably , survived Nazi-occupied Poland , escaped , and immigrated to America , against all odds .
His father , in contrast to the other “ Holocaust builders , ” had aggressively raised his profile and his family fortune .
And Jared had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as impossible , foolhardy risks : becoming , in his mid-twenties , the publisher of a weekly newspaper in an era when newspapers were cratering , purchasing 666 Fifth Avenue on the eve of the Great Recession .
The building had nearly failed when the Kushners managed , barely , to refinance it .
The lesson he took from this , according to someone familiar with the deal , “ was not ‘ holy shit , I almost lost everything , ’ it was ‘ I should take on as much risk as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself into his father-in-law ’ s campaign .
It was a business model he was exceedingly familiar with—a family business .
As Trump ’ s lead grew over the months , Kushner expanded his role in Trump ’ s foreign policy .
As Trump closed in on the nomination , complaints emerged regarding his heated rhetoric .
A fringe of the U.S. body politic that had largely lived below the surface poked its head up : white supremacists and neo-Nazis .
In December , 2015 , Trump called for a “ total and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States ” after a gunman killed fourteen people in San Bernardino , California .
In the summer of 2016 , Trump retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton and a six-sided star , both superimposed on piles of cash .
An entertainment writer at the Observer , Dana Schwartz , published an article in which she asked Kushner how he could countenance such behavior .
“ You went to Harvard , and hold two graduate degrees , ” Schwartz wrote .
“ I ’ m asking you , not as a ‘ gotcha ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a human being : how do you allow this ?
” Kushner penned his own response .
“ This is not idle philosophy to me .
I am the grandson of holocaust survivors , ” Jared wrote , describing the multiple horrors his grandparents had experienced .
“ I go into these details , which I have never discussed , because it ’ s important to me that people understand where I ’ m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual , dangerous intolerance versus these labels that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ score political points .
The difference between me and the journalists and Twitter throngs who find it so convenient to dismiss my father-in-law is simple .
I know him and they don ’ t. ” By the time of this exchange , unbeknownst to almost everyone , Jared had attended a now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower , with Donald Trump , Jr. , Paul Manafort , and emissaries of a Russian oligarch the Trumps had once worked with , to discuss “ some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ member of the group wrote in an e-mail to Donald Trump , Jr. No one seemed to question the seamless pivot from business to politics to discussing “ Russia and its government ’ s support for Mr. Trump ” and dirt on Hillary Clinton , which , by this time , the Russian government did indeed have .
After Trump ’ s surprise victory , the Russians were back again , seeking strengthened ties with Trump and Kushner .
The meeting with Gorkov was just a part of this strategy .
At the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not much of a vetting apparatus inside the transition team .
By federal law , because transitions are vulnerable times , all campaigns , including Trump ’ s , had to name a transition chief months in advance , for national-security reasons .
Trump hired Chris Christie , who scrutinized applicants for Administration positions and , with his aides , put together some thirty binders of information .
A few weeks later , Jared saw to it that Christie was fired .
The thirty binders were tossed into the dumpsters behind Trump Tower @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in a periodic update of a running tally it keeps , found that President Trump had made 15,413 false or misleading statements since taking office .
As impeachment proceedings have continued , his rate of false claims has increased , reaching an average of thirty-two per day last fall .
In 1967 , in an essay called “ Truth and Politics , ” which was published in The New Yorker , Hannah Arendt warned where mendacity can lead .
“ The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now be accepted as truth , and the truth be defamed as lies , but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
” Truth has been replaced by a new currency : dirt .
That is what Donald Trump was seeking in Ukraine .
That is what Russia was offering in 2016 .
Rae Kushner , who died in 2004 , pushed for remembering , for the past serving as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an edifice of fact and truth that would stand as a levee against the rising tide of relativism that was , for her , the vanguard of a murderous regime .
“ People should know what happened to us , ” Rae said in 1982 , in testimony she gave at Kean College .
“ If we are not going to tell now , in twenty years , I don ’ t know who ’ s going to be to tell .
And now we have still the strength and the power to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rest of the world to be careful : Who is coming up on top of your government ?
” Fifteen years after his grandmother ’ s death , Jared Kushner defends his father-in-law ’ s contention that refugees are a danger to the United States .
Indeed , he has been tasked with overseeing the construction of a wall at the southern border and has been a prime advocate of installing a “ wall cam ” to record the building of the wall in real time .
In a June , 2019 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Jonathan Swan asked Kushner how he justified Trump ’ s drastic cuts in the number of refugees allowed in the United States , given his own grandparents ’ experience .
“ It doesn ’ t make a difference one way or the other , ” Kushner replied .
“ In the scheme of the magnitude of the problem we have , I think that we ’ re doing our best to try to make as much impact to allow refugees to be able to go back to their places.
” A divide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though , regarding Rae ’ s legacy and how to honor it .
“ I have a different take away from my Grandparents ’ experience in the war , ” Jared ’ s first cousin Marc Kushner , Murray ’ s son , wrote on Facebook , in 2016 , after Jared invoked their grandparents while defending Trump against charges of racism and anti-Semitism .
“ It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate .
Anti-Semitism or otherwise.
” Marc ’ s sister Melissa posted a similar message @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Life massacre , in Pittsburgh , which coincided with the birth of Marc ’ s daughter .
“ I will not allow hate to beget hate , but rather use hate to embolden kindness and love , ” Melissa wrote .
Jared Kushner continues to defend his father-in-law .
In his “ Axios ” interview , Swan asked Kushner if Trump has ever done anything that he would “ describe as racist or bigoted.
” Kushner responded , “ Absolutely not.
” Swan then asked Kushner about Trump ’ s 2015 proposal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Would you describe that as religiously bigoted ?
” Swan asked .
Kushner deflected .
“ Look , I think that the President did his campaign the way he did his campaign , ” Kushner said .
Swan asked again , “ But do you wish he didn ’ t , do you wish he didn ’ t make that speech ?
” Kushner responded , “ I think he ’ s here today and I think he ’ s doing a lot of great things for the country , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proud of.
” This piece was drawn from “ American Oligarchs : The Kushners , The Trumps , and the Marriage of Money and Power , ” by Andrea Bernstein , forthcoming from Norton .

On December 13, 2016, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attended a meeting in a building not far from Trump Tower, in the Madison Avenue offices of Colony Capital. One month after Trump’s surprise win in the Presidential election, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or VEB, a Russian state-owned development bank. Kushner, in later congressional testimony, said that his goals in the meeting were purely diplomatic. The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. had told him that Gorkov had a “direct line to the Russian President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new Administration and best ways to work together.”
That month, Vladimir Putin arranged an “ ‘all-hands’ oligarch meeting”—as one of the oligarchs in attendance, Petr Aven, described it to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators—to discuss U.S.-Russia relations. At least three of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs subsequently tried to solidify ties with a man who seemed their perfect counterpart: a young American oligarch whose family had grown wealthy with a healthy assist from government programs—the President-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Through the Russian Ambassador’s persistence, Gorkov got the meeting. According to Kushner, the two discussed U.S.-Russia relations—business was not on the agenda. But a VEB spokesperson told the Washington Post something altogether different. As described by the Post, “The bank maintained . . . that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business.” As most Americans struggled to discern what a Trump Presidency would bring, the Russians accurately predicted that Kushner would be an immensely powerful figure in the incoming Administration, and that talking business could be a route to political influence.
When questioned by Mueller’s investigators, Kushner went out of his way to convey the idea that he thought little of the meeting with Gorkov—seemingly in an effort to bolster his argument that he in no way conspired with Russian state actors during the 2016 Presidential election. According to the Mueller report, “Kushner stated in an interview that he did not engage in any preparation for the meeting and that no one on the Transition Team even did a Google search for Gorkov’s name.” But Gorkov had prepared. He carried with him two gifts that showed he’d conducted a careful and deliberate investigation into the young man he was meeting. As Kushner explained in a July, 2017, statement to congressional investigators, one was a piece of art from Novogrudok, “the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus, and the other was a bag of dirt from that same village.”
The selection of a bag of dirt as a gift was particularly resonant: Jared’s grandmother, Rae Kushner, was one of a few hundred survivors of the Nazis in the Novogrudok ghetto, in what is now Belarus but was then northeastern Poland. Thousands of Jews from the area had been murdered, shot as they stood on the edges of giant trenches, so that they would fall directly into their own mass graves. The survivors were imprisoned in a ghetto, enslaved by the Nazi war machine. To escape, the residents smuggled bits of wood, spoons, and any other implements they could find past Nazi guards and used them to dig a tunnel that extended beyond the searchlights and barbed wire. They put the dirt they dug up into bags and hid the bags in the walls of the ghetto, so that the Nazis wouldn’t discover their plan.
Mueller found that, during the Presidential campaign, dirt on Hillary Clinton was the currency the Russians had tried to trade with Kushner and the Trump campaign. Now the Russians were giving Kushner a literal bag of dirt, the symbol of the Kushner family’s miraculous survival story—a story that includes undeniable courage, irrefutable ingenuity, and lying about family relationships to enter the United States.
After the Second World War, anti-Semitic immigration laws sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the United States. In 1949, in order to increase his chances of obtaining an American visa, Rae’s husband and Jared’s grandfather, Yossel Berkowitz, posed as his father-in-law’s son, listing Kushner as his name on U.S. immigration paperwork, and renaming himself Joseph Kushner. As a result, his son Charles was called Charles Kushner, not Charles Berkowitz, and his grandson was Jared Kushner, not Jared Berkowitz. Jared’s wife’s married name would be Ivanka Kushner, not Ivanka Berkowitz.
In the nineteen-thirties, a few years before half of the family was murdered, the Kushners, as they usually did, took a summer vacation in the tiny town of Novoyel’nya, then part of Poland. Amid the sharp scents of pine and spruce and fresh lake water, the Kushner children played in the forest. On Friday evenings, as the late-setting sun angled through the woods, the family gathered for Shabbat dinner. Parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins sat in front of tall white candles to eat chicken soup, sweet kugel, the ever-present braided challah bread. “Summer camp” was how the surviving Kushners would later describe these trips. “Camping” and “going to camp” were among their fondest memories.
There’s a photograph that endures from one of these summers. The lower left corner is burnt, or chemically degraded, but the image in the center is clear: four children arrayed on a hammock around their father, tall trees standing like sentries in the background. There’s Esther, in her late teens, on the far left, wearing a short-sleeved, close-fitting white button-down shirt, parted sharply by a dark tie. On the right, with a hand draped behind her brother Chanon’s back and resting on her father’s shoulder, is the teen-age Reichal (Rae) Kushner. Her thick black hair is cut in a bob, and she is smiling. Her face, like everyone else’s in the family, is unworried, unlined. Her dark-brown eyes gaze forthrightly into the camera, yet to witness horrors.
Half a decade after the photograph was taken, three of six members of the Kushner family would be dead. Of hundreds of cousins, grandparents, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, only a handful, including Lisa, Rae, and their father, Naum, made it through: through the destruction of their home and the confiscation of their business; through family separations and multiple mass executions; through starvation, lice, beatings, forced labor, German dogs, and Nazi bullets; through barbed wire and months of hiding in the forest during the Polish winter, a trek across international borders, and years in a displaced-persons camp. The Kushners lost everything. The photo survived.
After years in the ghetto and that winter in the forest—during which they lived in ziemiankas, holes in the ground covered by trees—some twelve hundred Jewish partisans made their way back home to Novogrudok after the Germans retreated from the town. “You cannot imagine—I fainted twice,” Rae said, in later testimony, of the first time she witnessed the wasteland her home town had become. “We all wanted to run away from our town. We wanted to run any place—but, like, Russia took us in. We were afraid to move. We couldn’t move. You needed a passport. You needed papers. It’s not so easy.” They asked themselves, “Where should we run? Nobody wants to take us in.”
Under postwar Soviet rule, a Jewish underground emerged in the area, which helped survivors plot their escape. About nine months after their return to Novogrudok, Rae, her sister, and her father told Russian soldiers that they were Greeks and boarded a train to Czechoslovakia, and then made their way to Hungary, where she met up with Yossel. In a synagogue in Budapest, alongside some twenty other couples, Rae and Yossel were married by a rabbi. There is a record of this moment, a ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract. Normally a ketubah is a carefully prepared document, but this one was scrawled out hastily, on yellow paper with different pens, just before the couple fled again. According to “The Miracle of Life,” a book compiled by Rae’s children for her seventy-fifth birthday, the couple then “illegally crossed the Alps and several borders by foot, train and any other available mode of transportation.” They ended up in a displaced-persons camp near Rome. For the next four years, they were stuck in Italy, refugees waiting for a nation to welcome them.
“We would go anywhere where we could live in freedom, but nobody wanted us,” Rae later recalled. “Nobody opened their doors to us. Nobody wanted to take us in.” A picture from those years shows Rae, her lipsticked mouth a perfect bow, her shoulder-length hair still lush and brown, brushed up and back, and her once forthright gaze marred with worry and pain. To make money while they were living in the refugee camp, Yossel sold tobacco and other goods on the black market. At one point, he was arrested and sent to jail; Rae, nine months pregnant with their daughter Linda, bribed a guard to get him out.
It was not long afterward that the Kushners lied on immigration paperwork and Yossel Berkowitz took his wife’s last name, becoming Joseph Kushner, or Josef Kushnier, as his name was spelled then. “The Miracle of Life” explains, “Because sons and fathers were given priority to get visas, Yossel assumed his wife’s maiden name being that he travelled with his father in law.” The newly renamed Kushner family was helped by an American nonprofit group that fully embraced immigration and helped tens of thousands of Jews escape from Europe—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS. The organization booked their passage on the S.S. Sobieski and helped them with immigration forms. HIAS accumulated a twenty-three-page case file on the Kushners, containing a list of family members, interview notes, and a record of their progress from Italy to New York. The file was buried in HIAS records for seventy years and hasn’t previously been reported.


newyorker--2020-01-06--Why a Champion of Reparative Justice Turned on the Cause

For much of November , 1975 , the American networks carried regular updates on a piece of not quite breaking news : General Francisco Franco , the Fascist dictator who had ruled Spain for thirty-six years , was still alive , if only just .
In late October , the eighty-two-year-old caudillo , a staunch U.S. ally in the battle against Communism , had fallen into a coma after a series of heart attacks .
His death seemed imminent , but Franco , who had survived multiple assassination plots , continued to thwart those eager to announce his demise .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ from broadcasting rolling reports on his non-demise : Franco was in critical condition , Franco was responding to treatment , Franco had taken a turn for the worse .
When at last he did expire , on November 20th , the new satirical sketch show “ Saturday Night Live ” saw an opening .
“ Our top story tonight , ” a young Chevy Chase proclaimed in the show ’ s Weekend Update segment a few weeks later , “ Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
” The writers reprised the gag for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been critically dead now for eleven weeks , ” Chase declared in January , “ and his doctors refuse to speculate on how long he can last in his present condition.
” In Spain , many wondered whether Franco had truly made his final exit ; the authoritarian system he ’ d bequeathed the country , with its torture chambers and secret police , looked as immovable as the Pyrenees .
“ Everything is tied up and well tied , ” Franco had said in a speech in 1969 , an assurance that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the status quo he ’ d inaugurated would remain .
And yet within a few years the Francoist establishment had been dismantled , and Spain had made a relatively bloodless transition to liberal democracy .
This was a remarkable turn of events , but , to see it through , the country incurred a moral debt that , four decades on , some feel it has yet to fully repay .
The cornerstone of the new order was a so-called pact of forgetting , whereby the Old Guard agreed to step aside in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left got almost everything it wanted ( free elections , a free press , the legalization of trade unions , and , in time , a generous welfare state ) except justice for Franco ’ s countless victims .
It seemed like a more than acceptable compromise .
To insist on settling scores , it was widely felt , would risk inciting further violence just when everything the Republican side had fought for , in the Civil War of 1936-1939 , finally appeared within reach .
Today , the means by which Franco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the subject of contention .
Around the turn of the millennium , the children and grandchildren of Franco ’ s “ disappeared ” —the tens of thousands of Republicans put to death during the Civil War and the dictatorship—started calling for the exhumation of mass graves and a reckoning with the past .
The “ historical memory ” movement , though largely spontaneous , was catalyzed by a few figures , chief among them the novelist Javier Cercas , one of contemporary Spain ’ s leading writers .
At the time , Cercas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ role of galvanizing truthteller .
His early work was heavily influenced by the postmodern gamesmanship of American writers such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme .
In his first book , “ The Motive , ” published in 1987 , when Cercas was in his mid-twenties , a blocked novelist in search of material manipulates his next-door neighbors into committing a crime : he thinks that all he ’ ll have to do is write it down .
It doesn ’ t quite come off , for either Cercas or his protagonist , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life was a theme from which he would later wring many fruitful variations .
The year that the book came out , he took a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , where his second novel , “ The Tenant ” ( 1989 ) , another overdetermined misfire , is set .
“ I wanted to be an American writer , but in America I found I was Spanish , ” Cercas has said .
It was a slow homecoming .
Not until “ Soldiers of Salamis , ” published @ @ @ @ @ @ @ history come into focus as Cercas ’ s primary subjects .
The book is what we would now call a work of autofiction .
A down-on-his-luck novelist named Javier Cercas tells us , “ Three things had just happened : first my father had died ; then my wife had left me ; finally , I ’ d given up my literary career.
” Seeking redemption , both personal and collective , he sets out to reconstruct a little-known episode from the Civil War .
In early 1939 , the writer Rafael Sánchez @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Fascist party , the Falange , faced a Republican firing squad alongside a number of other Nationalist prisoners in a village a hundred kilometres north of Barcelona .
Somehow the bullets only grazed Sánchez Mazas , who fled into the nearby woods .
Within a few minutes , a Republican soldier found him hiding in a ditch , but , for reasons lost to history , the man let him go , shouting to the other members of his search party that no one was there .
Cercas resolves to find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help from his friend the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño , he makes contact with a veteran of the Republican army , Antoni Miralles , now living in an old people ’ s home in Dijon .
Is Miralles—a bruiser with a burning social conscience who fled Franco ’ s Spain only to enlist in the French Foreign Legion and rejoin the fight against Fascism in the Second World War—the man Cercas is looking for ?
It ’ s never definitively established , but the suggestive uncertainty frees up Miralles for broader symbolic purposes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he has come to embody a history of Republican suffering and resistance that was actively suppressed under Franco and then pragmatically ignored .
“ Soldiers of Salamis ” was widely embraced as a timely moral intervention in Spanish public life , selling hundreds of thousands of copies and transforming its author from a semi-obscure littérateur into a prominent voice for the historical-memory movement .
“ Who in Spain had ever heard of historical memory when your novel was published ?
” an admirer asks Cercas in a later book , before going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they needed it , because the country needed it , they needed to remember its Republican past as though they were exhuming it.
” Some readers were so moved that they missed the subtle game that “ Soldiers of Salamis ” was playing with fact and fiction .
In reality , Cercas ’ s father hadn ’ t died , his wife hadn ’ t left him , and his literary career hadn ’ t collapsed ; more to the point , although a Republican veteran by the name of Antoni Miralles actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ working on the book , and almost nothing is known about him .
In contrast to Sánchez Mazas , an infamous figure in Spain whose life Cercas clearly took great pains to research , the Miralles of “ Soldiers ” is largely a product of the author ’ s imagination—an asymmetry that in itself speaks volumes about the country ’ s selective interest in its own past .
As Cercas—the real Cercas—later put it , “ My aspiration was to lie anecdotally , in the particulars , in order to tell an essential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response , Cercas might well have been tempted to go on producing work in the same moral key .
Instead , he has spent much of his post- “ Soldiers ” career arguing against the very tenets of historical memory : what started out as a legitimate campaign for reparative justice , Cercas feels , soon degenerated into a pageant of sanctimony and opportunism .
The country ’ s 2007 Law of Historical Memory provided some support—overdue , in his opinion—for those attempting to trace the remains of family members killed by Franco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he considered a government usurpation of free intellectual inquiry .
“ History is made by historians , not politicians , ” he wrote in El País at the time .
“ A law of this kind is embarrassingly evocative of the methods of totalitarian states , which know that the best way to control the present is to control the past.
” More broadly , he believed that the sudden vogue for stories of Republican heroics—or what he called “ toxic sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience ” —was giving rise to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been widespread .
As Cercas makes plain in his latest book , “ Lord of All the Dead ” ( Knopf ) , finely translated by Anne McLean , the truth is altogether less agreeable .
“ For most of the time Francoism lasted almost everyone was a Francoist , by commission or omission , ” the filmmaker David Trueba , a friend who adapted “ Soldiers of Salamis ” into a feature film in 2003 , says near the start .
Cercas ’ s family was no exception .
During the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the Falangist mayor of Ibahernando , the village in the western province of Extremadura where Cercas was born , in 1962 .
Although neither of his parents was particularly interested in politics , they were , up until the end , unabashed supporters of Franco ’ s regime .
Ibahernando was also the birthplace of his mother ’ s uncle , Manuel Mena , who , in 1937 , at the age of eighteen , volunteered for Franco ’ s rebel army and died in combat twelve months later , at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up hearing stories of Uncle Manuel ’ s self-sacrificing heroism , and even as a young man felt that he would one day have to write a book about him .
For years , a sense of shame about his family ’ s political commitments prevented him from doing so ; “ Lord of All the Dead ” is his attempt to come to grips , at last , with this uncomfortable legacy .
“ In ‘ Soldiers of Salamis ’ you invented a Republican hero to hide the fact that your family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Trueba says .
“ Now it ’ s time to face reality , no ?
That ’ s how you can close the circle .
And that ’ s how you can stop writing once and for all about the fucking war and Francoism and all the rest of that shit that tortures you so much.
” As this moral pep talk would suggest , “ Lord ” is as much the story of Mena ’ s would-be biographer as it is of Mena himself .
Unlike the narrator of “ Soldiers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encounter here is not a fictional character ( except in the sense that the “ I ” of any remotely interesting work of nonfiction is always the product of an author ’ s carefully calibrated choices ) , and though Mena seems to have left only the scantiest of paper trails , Cercas resists filling in the blanks with flights of imaginative fancy .
“ This is not fiction and I am no literato , so I must confine myself to the safety of facts , ” he remarks , and the line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the book .
Cercas , in other words , is no longer prepared to lie anecdotally in order to tell an essential truth ; instead , he will dig through archives , trudge around historic battlefields , and interview the few remaining people ( largely decrepit and unforthcoming ) who knew his great-uncle .
Most of what Cercas learns about Mena could be summarized in a page or two , but since value—or , in this case , narrative payoff—is a function of scarcity , each new scrap of information acquires the momentousness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came from a family of landowning peasants , who , in the years before the outbreak of civil war , had begun to feel a sense of allegiance to the local gentry , in contrast to the region ’ s many landless laborers .
Although he inherited the standard-issue piety and patriotism of his social milieu , Mena , an excellent student , seemed destined to become the first member of his family to attend university and escape the confines of village life .
That was before July 17 , 1936 , when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left-wing government—a precarious coalition of liberals , socialists , and anarchists—that had come to power in open elections earlier that year .
Cercas is a man of a decidedly progressive persuasion , but this doesn ’ t inhibit his capacity to understand why so many Spaniards , Mena included , regarded the government , with its ambitious plans for land reform and fanatical anticlericalism , as an existential threat to the country and Franco as a national savior .
“ Can you be noble and pure and at the same time fight for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trueba , his sounding board and sparring partner , halfway through the book .
You can , Trueba answers .
“ We don ’ t judge Achilles by the justice or injustice of the cause he died for , but for the nobility of his actions , by the decency and bravery and generosity with which he behaved.
” Cercas comes to realize that Mena ’ s story , like that of Achilles ( as narrated in the Iliad ) , gains power from what the ancient Greeks called kalos thanatos : a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sentence , Cercas writes , “ I thought my mother had spent her whole life telling me about Manuel Mena because for her there was no better or higher destiny than Manuel Mena ’ s , and I thought , in an instinctive or unconscious way , that I ’ d become a writer to rebel against her , to avoid the destiny she had wanted to confine me to.
” Yet Cercas ’ s sense of the matter begins to change when , during a research trip to the Catalan village where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ passage in the Odyssey ( he ’ s been rereading an old copy from his childhood home ) in which Odysseus encounters Achilles in the underworld and tells him how venerated he is aboveground .
Achilles bristles .
“ Don ’ t try to console me for my death , ” he says .
“ I would rather toil as the slave of a penniless , landless laborer , than reign here as lord of all the dead.
” The following day , as Cercas and his mother visit the place where Mena @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him how devastated she must have been , as a child , by her beloved uncle ’ s fate , and how completely he ’ s misconstrued her fixation on it ; what mattered was the cruelty of the loss , not the beauty of the death .
“ With Manuel Mena ’ s death , ” Cercas writes , “ she had understood to the point of running out of tears that it was a thousand times better to be Odysseus than to be Achilles , to live a long and mediocre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moment later that his efforts at self-definition have been in vain : he ’ s become the very person his mother had always willed him to become—ordinary Odysseus , not glorious Achilles .
Whether he ’ s managed to write “ the fucking war ” out of his system , as Trueba predicted , remains to be seen .
“ Lord of All the Dead ” is a powerful work of D.I.Y .
history .
It can also be frustratingly elliptical .
One understands Cercas ’ s decision to renounce the fictional resources @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soldiers of Salamis ” ( Mena , the actual Falangist hero , is being offered up as a counterweight to Miralles , the invented Republican one ) , but the experience of reading a book with so many narrative holes is a bit like visiting a museum where half the collection is out on loan .
“ I will not ask what Manuel Mena ’ s reaction was when he noticed a bullet had hit him , ” Cercas writes in the tantalizing description of his subject ’ s death .
“ Nor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lying there .
.
.
.
I will not ask these things because I can not answer them.
” The result of this self-restraint is a portrait in negative space ; if Mena remains little more than an outline , at least the social world through which he moved is painted with vivid and arresting specificity .
Perhaps the best way to understand “ Lord ” is to see it as the latest installment in a series of books about the distortions wrought by historical memory .
In 2009 , Cercas published “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an account of the attempted coup d ’ état , or golpe de estado , of February 23 , 1981 , when an armed group of far-right officers held the parliament in Madrid hostage for some eighteen hours .
The golpistas were furious about the transition to democracy , during which the military had been brought under civilian control and the Communist Party , its bête noire , granted legal status .
As the officers fired shots into the air and shouted for everyone to get down on the floor , Adolfo Suárez @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prime Minister in forty years and one of the chief architects of the transition , remained seated , an act of defiance that Cercas sees as the “ founding gesture ” of Spanish democracy .
The episode was broadcast live on radio , and the following day , after the coup had collapsed , it aired on television .
Cercas has not abandoned fiction altogether—since his breakthrough in 2001 , two of the six books he ’ s published , “ The Speed of Light ” ( 2005 ) and “ Outlaws ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his turn against historical memory has coincided with an increasing preference for narratives grounded in meticulously researched facts .
Initially , he ’ d tried to write a novel about February 23rd , but he came to feel that the events were so intricate and enthralling as to render novelization redundant .
“ History fabricates strange figures and does not reject the symmetries of fiction , ” he says in “ The Anatomy of a Moment , ” in a sentence reminiscent of Borges , one of his acknowledged masters .
Nonfiction also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cercas considers the falsehood , righteously repeated every year on the anniversary of the coup , that the Spanish people and their institutions stood firm against the enemies of democracy .
As he sardonically puts it , “ The whole country stayed at home and waited for the coup to fail .
Or to triumph.
” The hypocrisy surrounding February 23rd , Cercas thought , was symptomatic of a larger misconception .
With the rise of historical memory came the growing sense , especially on the left , that the pact of forgetting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transition it enabled little more than the perpetuation of Francoism by other means .
For Cercas , these are the forgeries of jealousy , the carping of a later generation that has come to take the liberties of modern Spain for granted .
Although he concedes that the transition was imperfect , he maintains that “ a democracy was constructed that would have been impossible to construct if the prime objective hadn ’ t been that of crafting a future but—Fiat justitia et pereat mundus—making amends for the past.
” During the transition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well as ordinary citizens , began to make themselves over as long-standing opponents of the regime , retouching their pasts to bring them into accord with the democratic present .
Few people , however , took things as far as Enric Marco , a Catalan mechanic who falsely claimed ( and was widely believed ) to have been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp after fleeing Spain at the end of the Civil War .
Marco , the subject of Cercas ’ s 2014 book , “ The Impostor , ” rose to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amical de Mauthausen , an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps , most of them Republican refugees living in France at the time of its occupation by Germany .
It was only in 2005 , after decades of deception , that he was exposed , thanks to the sleuthing of Benito Bermejo , a historian researching the Republican deportados .
Cercas did some sleuthing of his own , and “ The Impostor ” alternates between Marco ’ s version of his life ( not just survival in the camps but years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) and the life he actually led—one of run-of-the-mill conformity .
Cercas also conducted extensive interviews with Marco , whom he comes to see as a kind of secret sharer , or evil twin .
Both men made a name for themselves by exploiting the public appetite for historical catharsis that peaked in the early two-thousands .
“ I did exactly the same thing as you , ” Marco says in an imagined conversation between author and subject , in which Cercas dramatizes his sense of guilt and uncertainty over his own appropriation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I invented a guy like Miralles , ” Marco continues , “ except that this Miralles was alive and he visited schools and talked to children about the horrors of the Nazi camps and about Spanish inmates there , and about justice and freedom and solidarity.
” What Cercas understands , and Marco does not , is the difference between muddling fact and fiction in a work of art and muddling them in real life .
“ The novelist ’ s deception is consensual , ” Cercas says , although he also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for that “ toxic sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience ” willingly suspended its disbelief .
“ Lord of All the Dead ” is a different sort of story .
It will neither flatter liberal pieties nor assuage feelings of collective guilt .
It may help Spaniards , and people farther afield , to better understand the lure of Fascism , a pressing task in today ’ s world , as Cercas has said in recent interviews .
In 2018 , Spain ’ s Socialist Workers ’ Party , which had passed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to power after six and a half years of conservative rule , and set about completing unfinished business .
This past October , after much delay , the government finally exhumed Franco ’ s remains from the Valley of the Fallen , the monumental basilica outside Madrid where they ’ ve been buried since 1975 , and moved them to a less august location .
Not everyone approved of this symbolic demotion .
The following month , Pedro Sánchez , the Socialist Prime Minister , was narrowly reëlected after a snap vote , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the first of its kind to gain traction in Spain ’ s democratic era , was among the contest ’ s real winners , more than doubling its number of seats in the Spanish legislature .
For a long time , it was thought that the country ’ s experience of dictatorship had inoculated it against the revanchist nationalism sweeping Europe .
Franco is still dead , but the need to monitor his condition has never been more urgent .
♦

For much of November, 1975, the American networks carried regular updates on a piece of not quite breaking news: General Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator who had ruled Spain for thirty-six years, was still alive, if only just. In late October, the eighty-two-year-old caudillo, a staunch U.S. ally in the battle against Communism, had fallen into a coma after a series of heart attacks. His death seemed imminent, but Franco, who had survived multiple assassination plots, continued to thwart those eager to announce his demise. This didn’t stop the networks from broadcasting rolling reports on his non-demise: Franco was in critical condition, Franco was responding to treatment, Franco had taken a turn for the worse. When at last he did expire, on November 20th, the new satirical sketch show “Saturday Night Live” saw an opening. “Our top story tonight,” a young Chevy Chase proclaimed in the show’s Weekend Update segment a few weeks later, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” The writers reprised the gag for months. “Generalissimo Francisco Franco has been critically dead now for eleven weeks,” Chase declared in January, “and his doctors refuse to speculate on how long he can last in his present condition.”
In Spain, many wondered whether Franco had truly made his final exit; the authoritarian system he’d bequeathed the country, with its torture chambers and secret police, looked as immovable as the Pyrenees. “Everything is tied up and well tied,” Franco had said in a speech in 1969, an assurance that, whatever might befall him personally, the status quo he’d inaugurated would remain. And yet within a few years the Francoist establishment had been dismantled, and Spain had made a relatively bloodless transition to liberal democracy. This was a remarkable turn of events, but, to see it through, the country incurred a moral debt that, four decades on, some feel it has yet to fully repay. The cornerstone of the new order was a so-called pact of forgetting, whereby the Old Guard agreed to step aside in return for de-facto political amnesty. The left got almost everything it wanted (free elections, a free press, the legalization of trade unions, and, in time, a generous welfare state) except justice for Franco’s countless victims. It seemed like a more than acceptable compromise. To insist on settling scores, it was widely felt, would risk inciting further violence just when everything the Republican side had fought for, in the Civil War of 1936-1939, finally appeared within reach.
Today, the means by which Franco’s legacy was buried has become the subject of contention. Around the turn of the millennium, the children and grandchildren of Franco’s “disappeared”—the tens of thousands of Republicans put to death during the Civil War and the dictatorship—started calling for the exhumation of mass graves and a reckoning with the past. The “historical memory” movement, though largely spontaneous, was catalyzed by a few figures, chief among them the novelist Javier Cercas, one of contemporary Spain’s leading writers.
At the time, Cercas was not an obvious candidate for the role of galvanizing truthteller. His early work was heavily influenced by the postmodern gamesmanship of American writers such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme. In his first book, “The Motive,” published in 1987, when Cercas was in his mid-twenties, a blocked novelist in search of material manipulates his next-door neighbors into committing a crime: he thinks that all he’ll have to do is write it down. It doesn’t quite come off, for either Cercas or his protagonist, but the synergy—or mutual parasitism—of art and life was a theme from which he would later wring many fruitful variations. The year that the book came out, he took a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his second novel, “The Tenant” (1989), another overdetermined misfire, is set. “I wanted to be an American writer, but in America I found I was Spanish,” Cercas has said.
It was a slow homecoming. Not until “Soldiers of Salamis,” published in 2001, did Spain and its history come into focus as Cercas’s primary subjects. The book is what we would now call a work of autofiction. A down-on-his-luck novelist named Javier Cercas tells us, “Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I’d given up my literary career.” Seeking redemption, both personal and collective, he sets out to reconstruct a little-known episode from the Civil War. In early 1939, the writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a founding member of Spain’s Fascist party, the Falange, faced a Republican firing squad alongside a number of other Nationalist prisoners in a village a hundred kilometres north of Barcelona. Somehow the bullets only grazed Sánchez Mazas, who fled into the nearby woods. Within a few minutes, a Republican soldier found him hiding in a ditch, but, for reasons lost to history, the man let him go, shouting to the other members of his search party that no one was there.
Cercas resolves to find the merciful soldier, and, with help from his friend the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, he makes contact with a veteran of the Republican army, Antoni Miralles, now living in an old people’s home in Dijon. Is Miralles—a bruiser with a burning social conscience who fled Franco’s Spain only to enlist in the French Foreign Legion and rejoin the fight against Fascism in the Second World War—the man Cercas is looking for? It’s never definitively established, but the suggestive uncertainty frees up Miralles for broader symbolic purposes. By the end of the book, he has come to embody a history of Republican suffering and resistance that was actively suppressed under Franco and then pragmatically ignored.
“Soldiers of Salamis” was widely embraced as a timely moral intervention in Spanish public life, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and transforming its author from a semi-obscure littérateur into a prominent voice for the historical-memory movement. “Who in Spain had ever heard of historical memory when your novel was published?” an admirer asks Cercas in a later book, before going on, “People read it because they needed it, because the country needed it, they needed to remember its Republican past as though they were exhuming it.” Some readers were so moved that they missed the subtle game that “Soldiers of Salamis” was playing with fact and fiction. In reality, Cercas’s father hadn’t died, his wife hadn’t left him, and his literary career hadn’t collapsed; more to the point, although a Republican veteran by the name of Antoni Miralles actually existed, he died before Cercas began working on the book, and almost nothing is known about him. In contrast to Sánchez Mazas, an infamous figure in Spain whose life Cercas clearly took great pains to research, the Miralles of “Soldiers” is largely a product of the author’s imagination—an asymmetry that in itself speaks volumes about the country’s selective interest in its own past. As Cercas—the real Cercas—later put it, “My aspiration was to lie anecdotally, in the particulars, in order to tell an essential truth.”
Having drawn such a resounding response, Cercas might well have been tempted to go on producing work in the same moral key. Instead, he has spent much of his post-“Soldiers” career arguing against the very tenets of historical memory: what started out as a legitimate campaign for reparative justice, Cercas feels, soon degenerated into a pageant of sanctimony and opportunism. The country’s 2007 Law of Historical Memory provided some support—overdue, in his opinion—for those attempting to trace the remains of family members killed by Franco. Yet Cercas was uneasy about what he considered a government usurpation of free intellectual inquiry. “History is made by historians, not politicians,” he wrote in El País at the time. “A law of this kind is embarrassingly evocative of the methods of totalitarian states, which know that the best way to control the present is to control the past.” More broadly, he believed that the sudden vogue for stories of Republican heroics—or what he called “toxic sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience”—was giving rise to the flattering fiction that opposition to Franco had been widespread.
As Cercas makes plain in his latest book, “Lord of All the Dead” (Knopf), finely translated by Anne McLean, the truth is altogether less agreeable. “For most of the time Francoism lasted almost everyone was a Francoist, by commission or omission,” the filmmaker David Trueba, a friend who adapted “Soldiers of Salamis” into a feature film in 2003, says near the start. Cercas’s family was no exception. During the Civil War, his paternal grandfather served as the Falangist mayor of Ibahernando, the village in the western province of Extremadura where Cercas was born, in 1962. Although neither of his parents was particularly interested in politics, they were, up until the end, unabashed supporters of Franco’s regime.
Ibahernando was also the birthplace of his mother’s uncle, Manuel Mena, who, in 1937, at the age of eighteen, volunteered for Franco’s rebel army and died in combat twelve months later, at the Battle of the Ebro. Cercas grew up hearing stories of Uncle Manuel’s self-sacrificing heroism, and even as a young man felt that he would one day have to write a book about him. For years, a sense of shame about his family’s political commitments prevented him from doing so; “Lord of All the Dead” is his attempt to come to grips, at last, with this uncomfortable legacy. “In ‘Soldiers of Salamis’ you invented a Republican hero to hide the fact that your family’s hero was a Francoist,” Trueba says. “Now it’s time to face reality, no? That’s how you can close the circle. And that’s how you can stop writing once and for all about the fucking war and Francoism and all the rest of that shit that tortures you so much.”
As this moral pep talk would suggest, “Lord” is as much the story of Mena’s would-be biographer as it is of Mena himself. Unlike the narrator of “Soldiers of Salamis,” the Cercas we encounter here is not a fictional character (except in the sense that the “I” of any remotely interesting work of nonfiction is always the product of an author’s carefully calibrated choices), and though Mena seems to have left only the scantiest of paper trails, Cercas resists filling in the blanks with flights of imaginative fancy. “This is not fiction and I am no literato, so I must confine myself to the safety of facts,” he remarks, and the line is repeated, with variations, throughout the book. Cercas, in other words, is no longer prepared to lie anecdotally in order to tell an essential truth; instead, he will dig through archives, trudge around historic battlefields, and interview the few remaining people (largely decrepit and unforthcoming) who knew his great-uncle. Most of what Cercas learns about Mena could be summarized in a page or two, but since value—or, in this case, narrative payoff—is a function of scarcity, each new scrap of information acquires the momentousness of a major life event.
Cartoon by P. S. Mueller Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Mena came from a family of landowning peasants, who, in the years before the outbreak of civil war, had begun to feel a sense of allegiance to the local gentry, in contrast to the region’s many landless laborers. Although he inherited the standard-issue piety and patriotism of his social milieu, Mena, an excellent student, seemed destined to become the first member of his family to attend university and escape the confines of village life. That was before July 17, 1936, when Franco launched his military uprising against the left-wing government—a precarious coalition of liberals, socialists, and anarchists—that had come to power in open elections earlier that year. Cercas is a man of a decidedly progressive persuasion, but this doesn’t inhibit his capacity to understand why so many Spaniards, Mena included, regarded the government, with its ambitious plans for land reform and fanatical anticlericalism, as an existential threat to the country and Franco as a national savior.


Cartoon Caption Contest

Each week , we provide a cartoon in need of a caption .
You , the reader , submit your @ @ @ @ @ three finalists , and you vote for your favorite .
Anyone age thirteen or older @ @ @ @ @ To read the complete rules , click here .

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption here, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
Mark Thompson Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop