Great story by Shani Boianjiu: “Means of Suppressing Demonstrations”
Shani Boianjiu: “Means of Suppressing Demonstrations” : The New Yorker.
Out of the Ashes, Onto the Runway
Holocaust Survivors Take the Runway
via Holocaust Survivors’ Pageant Taps Into a Conflict in Israel – NYTimes.com.
A beauty pageant in Haifa, Israel, for holocaust survivors. It’s perfect. Poetry. Just what the world needs. A light unto the nations. I can see it. A trend. Next year, perhaps a Miss Darfur, or Little Ms. Rwanda. Competitors matching stories of rape, beatings, witnessed horrors, as well as tales of survival and the transcendent success that culminates in their very presence at the marvelous pageant. And poise. Let’s not forget poise. Poise counts.
This will make great TV. The next step in reality programming: Hard reality. There’s a world of possibilities. Perhaps a Devastated and Deracinated Olympics. Remnants of native populations vying for belt or crown in Indian Arm Wrestling, backgammon, and aboriginal dreaming. Maybe “Survivors Got Talent.” Skeletal folk dancers of all stripes. I can see it. Dance-beat didgeridoo solos and sex-trafficked beauty queens in bathing suits. Who wouldn’t tune in for that? Triumphs of the spirit, don’t you know? Extravaganzas!
Think of the revenue.
Sometimes I dream in Yiddish
Sometimes I dream in Yiddish. It’s so long since I lived in a house where it was spoken. When my grandparents died–and they went young–it stopped. I never speak it now. I couldn’t. I can just barely understand it. But when I hear it, I feel oddly at home in the sound of it in […]
