Joel Schalit

Designing Disenchantment

“I’m so over Italy,” said an American relative who spent many years working in the country. “It’s just too frustrating these days.” Indeed, if one were to read British news periodicals, after Israel, the Italians have the second worst reputation. Based on the behavior of Italy’s political leadership during the year that we lived in Milan, it’s not difficult to understand why.

The hardest part in explaining why isn’t in criticizing Berlusconi, or any of the boorish, racist behavior of his cabinet members. They’re too easy to disassemble, since they are already such grotesquely exaggerated caricatures in their own right. The challenge is to provide the kinds of examples of their misrule, that would lead others, outside of Italy, to actually care.

For me, that means finding ways to narratively represent how utterly depressing it was, for example, to be invited to a sumptuous dinner at a Mediaset journalist’s home, and told how strongly she backed a government proposal to impose quotas on immigrants in public schools. “How can we tolerate a situation where we Italians are a minority in our own classrooms?” she asked.

I can cite so many instances like these, some far worse even, mixed up with far more mundane everyday events, all of which communicate the same thing. That’s the advantage, I think, one gets, living in a particular place for any length of time. If you pay proper attention to what’s going on around you, all the elements are there to mount the most effective kinds of criticism.

A disenchanted Italian is responsible for the poster. Pasted to a lamp post, in Navigli, some time in January.

Levantine Continuum

You don’t see Arab grocery stores around here like we did in Milan. However, the number of Middle Eastern restaurants and fast food places in this part of Berlin would be enough to make any Italian conservative’s head spin. In Boxhagenerplatz, the square in which we’re temporary ensconced, there are no less than four falafel places, and one doner shop.

The difference, between Friedrichshain and Piazzale Loreto, is an absence of Arabs. The pedestrians are largely European, speaking any number of languages. Though I have heard a higher incidence of Israeli-accented Hebrew, the emphasis is on German and English. One has to go next door, to Kreuzberg, to approximate the oriental vibe of our former home.

Being able to discover a Levantine continuum, this far into eastern Europe, and live within it, definitely has its advantages.

Kibbutz Pasolini

Discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Italy is highly unique. It’s complicated, on the one hand by Italy’s own recent colonial history in the Middle East (Libya), and its burgeoning Arab population on the other.

I’m working on a series of essays trying to tackle the subject, in non-traditional ways. One avenue I’m working on is film. This is a screen shot from Pasolini’s brilliant Sopralluoghi in Palestina, shot in Israel in the early 1960s.

About half way through the documentary, the legendary director says something to the effect of “It’s not Biblical enough here.”

The Virtue of Flexibility

My review of Shlomo Sand’s controversial The Invention of the Jewish People is finally out. Check it out, in this week’s Forward.

Flesh for Fantasy

I’m used to seeing recyclers sort through all manner of rubbish. Standing behind a Milanese refuse truck hauling large quantities of discarded meat products is a completely different story. Via Padova, sometime in February.

Declining Exchange Rate

One of the best places to gauge Italy’s changing demographics are the open air markets held throughout Milan each week. Our neighborhood affair takes place on Tuesday and Saturday. Hosted in a square bordering Via Vitruvio, its a great place to buy everything from olive oil and parakeets, to Italian translations of the Koran, and cheap pantyhose.

For the last month, I’ve forced myself to go down to the market, and record the different languages I encounter as I walk from one end to the other.  French, Arabic, Spanish, Tamil, together with several different Italian dialects, are the primary languages spoken. Often I have found myself recording one language on my left, another on my right, simultaneously.

Focused on making audio recordings, I almost always left my camera behind on these trips. Last week, however, I made an exception. An Egyptian merchant had been selling Obama-themed grocery bags for the previous couple of weeks. I didn’t want to buy one. However, I didn’t want to leave Milan without having taken a picture of one of them either.

Inoculated City

I couldn’t think of a better expression of Italy’s anxiety about its increasingly multicultural character than this bus advert for designer jeans. Shot in front of our apartment building in Milan last week, it’s also featured as the main photo on Zeek‘s landing page today. I wanted an image that would speak to Wednesday’s feature, Mya Guarnieri’s  We’re Not White Trash. We’re Jews.

The same logic applies to this picture, which we ran on Monday. Published in conjunction with Bruce Wilson’s Their Religion is Hatred, I was hoping the photo would help capture, however indirectly, the stress felt by Arab migrants, like this woman, standing in front of Lega Nord campaign posters, already condemned by an elections campaign monitor. (See “Manifesto Abusivo.”)

Though this photo has already expired (replaced today by the bus advert photo), its caption read “War in the ghetto,” since the shot was taken on Via Padova, the symbolic heart of Milan’s immigrant community. The bus picture, similarly, bears the caption “Dreaming of Multiculturalism,” as a means of explaining what it reflects, rather than what it intends to express. Everything is documentary.

Clampdown

On Friday night, Jennifer and I went out for dinner. Our destination was an Arab-run Tex Mex place on the other side of Piazzale Loreto, a block from the Egyptian consulate. In the year that we’ve been living here, it has definitely become one of our favorite restaurants, even though its not exactly orthodox in its take on the cuisine. Nevertheless, its offered us welcome relief from pasta.

On our walk to the restaurant, we noticed a significant amount of police and military vehicles in the square. Large Carabinieri-marked vans with anti-riot mesh attached to the windows, and oversized, camouflage troop transports repeatedly whizzed by us. Their destination: Via Padova, the site of fierce street battles between Latinos and North Africans two weeks before.

Unnerved by all the activity, following dinner, we took a shortcut home through the Loreto tube station, which you can walk from one side of the square to the other. Its normally bustling passages were empty. Gone were the usual south Asian street vendors hawking keffiyehs and Obama-branded beanies. A trail of blood extended down the floor, stopping, suddenly, fifty or so feet later.

A couple of hours later, I took Pixel out for his last walk. Security personnel continued to drive around the square, periodically turning off onto Via Padova, sometimes onto Corso Buenos Aires, where an ambulance stood parked, lights flashing. From what I could see, the police vans were full. It was difficult to see  through the plastic windows of the army vehicles.

The Carabinieri van, above, was positioned at the entrance to Via Padova.