Seventeen years ago, I began a search for Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets misplaced or forgotten in Utah “basements.” Progress was slow. But in May 1995, after twelve years of patience, the first collection was located in dusty storage in the Utah Museum of Natural History. A second collection (including cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, and two inscribed bricks) surfaced at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Peoples and Cultures in December 1996. These were found following a lead picked up at a social gathering. Someone casually mentioned seeing a “beer tablet” at BYU many years ago.
         Two more years passed. Then, in April 1998, The World & I published my article on the origin of writing. The essay included an account of my discovery of the first “forgotten” collection and my ongoing research into the life and work of Edgar James Banks, the archaeologist who brought the collection to the United States.
        This article triggered so much interest–including fairly extensive TV and press coverage–that my turtle-speed research accelerated with the speed of light. Subsequently, I have been informed of several collections in both private hands and public institutions including Utah State University at Logan, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Museum of History in Salt Lake City, and Arizona State Museum in Tucson. Then, in July, I was granted a “dream break,” sent to me no doubt by all the ancient deities of Mesopotamia.
        I received a phone call from one quite mortal American, Stedman Pool. His first words were intriguing: “Dr. Wasilewska, please write down my phone number and my name since you don’t want to lose me.” What followed was far more exciting.
        Pool referred to an article about my research that also mentioned Professor Banks. Banks sold the first “rediscovered” collection of cuneiform tablets in Utah in 1914, and I’d been trying to unfold his life story–with only modest success–since 1995. In fact, I was getting quite frustrated with this research. Suddenly here was Pool, a friend of Banks’ family. He told me that the archaeologist’s daughter, Daphne Banks McLachlan, was alive and well in Florida.
        It was one of the few times in my life when I became absolutely speechless. In 1996 I had tried to contact McLachlan, but my letters had been returned by the post office. One even carried a note stating that she had passed away. To my delight, I now learned that this was not the case.

        A few days later I called McLachlan. I was eager to “jump on the first flight” to Florida. Not having had the greatest experience with scholars in the past, she only hesitantly agreed to see me. Later I learned that she did not believe I would actually come. But how could I not? After so many years of chasing the ghosts of the past, I finally had a chance to connect them with reality. But anxious as I was, I couldn’t fly to Florida immediately. Prof. David Owen of Cornell University was coming to Utah to work with me on the collection of cuneiform tablets that had triggered my interest in Banks in the first place. But the day after he left, I was aboard a red-eye flight to Orlando.
        My first stop was the Historical Museum at Eustis. The curator, Louise Carter, and Walter Simms, a volunteer, guided me through their collections. Banks had lived in Eustis for many years. We frantically copied documents, and I photographed everything in the museum even vaguely associated with Banks and his family. Then, after a few hours, McLachlan herself came to collect me. I was to be her guest in her beautiful home at Umatilla. She was everything I expected and more. This attractive woman was full of energy, as could only be expected from the daughter of one of the most remarkable, though currently neglected, American explorers.
        For the next four days, we “dug” through old papers, letters, books, and pictures. Each had a fascinating story to tell. I believe it will take me years to explore them all in depth and build a credible account of all Banks’ remarkable accomplishments. One happy discovery was that McLachlan’s mother, Minja Banks, had written synopses of many of Banks’ exploits and stories. Together we uncovered many possible avenues for future research.

Edgar James Banks

anks (1866–1945) was a dedicated explorer of the Middle East and devoted student of its past. In hope of gaining access to archaeological sites, he secured a position in Baghdad in 1898 as an American consul to the Ottoman Empire. This did not last long. Money was scarce, and local authorities hindered his archaeological ambitions. But before leaving Baghdad, Banks became a dealer in antiquities, purchasing cuneiform tablets for a song from Arabs digging at Telloh and other sites. Years later, he received tablets and other artifacts from a fellow dealer in Constantinople (Istanbul) called “David.” Banks imported at least 11,000 such relics to the United States, and some estimates suggest the number may have been as many as 175,000 pieces. Examining the documents in McLachlan’s possession and papers she donated to the University Museum at Chicago in 1997 might help clarify the number and present location of these objects.
        In 1900, Banks was in Constantinople as leader of a proposed archaeological expedition to Ur

 (where the famous royal tombs of the third millennium b.c. were discovered years later by Sir Leonard Woolley). The venture was sponsored by the University of Chicago and financed by John D. Rockefeller. Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute, organized a memorable Babylonian dinner for the friends of the expedition before Banks left the United States for Turkey. Place cards were written in cuneiform, bread was shaped like Babylonian bricks, and the ice cream served was “the color of the desert sand.” A cake in the shape of the Tower of Babel was presented. “About it,” Banks would note, “wandered miniature Arabs with miniature picks, and concealed within its several stages was an art treasure for each of the guests.” He had the honor of cutting the cake and disposing of its treasures among the invited guests.
        It took Banks three years to obtain the Ottoman sultan’s permission to begin his dig. Even then, he could not excavate Ur. Nor could he choose Babylon or Tell Ibrahim, other prominent sites. His excavations were to be at Bismya, the site of ancient Adab, in Iraq. (I visited this site in 1999, and a partial account of my journey appeared in the April 2000 issue of The World & I.)
        Uncomfortable using Rockefeller’s money during the three-year wait, Banks supported himself by becoming acting professor of ancient history at Robert College (now known as Bosporus University in Istanbul). He also acted as assistant to the American ambassador, John Leishman, with whom he became firm friends. Never one to waste time, Banks visited various sites in Turkey, including Troy. This famous site will always, of course, be associated with Homer. But in the annals of archaeology it is also connected with the rich entrepreneur-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann’s excavations in the 1870s produced the celebrated “treasures of King Priam” that are now exhibited in Moscow.
        Schliemann took full credit for locating Troy, but reality was somewhat different. Frank Calvert, a Briton, owned the land on which the Homeric Troy was partially located. Calvert first located the site and introduced Schliemann to it. (Indeed, Calvert introduced him to archaeology in general.) Calvert had none of Schliemann’s arrogance or drive for fame. Unfortunately, his name has almost disappeared from archaeological annals. But Calvert knew the story of Troy and Schliemann’s excavations better than anyone. Banks met Calvert. His recollection of Calvert’s account is recorded in Minja Banks’ notes. As my own research is still in progress, I cannot detail the revelations found in Banks’ narrative. Suffice to say that it provides yet more evidence that Schliemann stopped at nothing to advance himself and experienced extreme difficulties with truth.
        Many of Schliemann’s lies have already been exposed by authors such as William Calder III and David Traill. Minja Banks’ notes may provide the definitive corroborating evidence to convince doubters that Schliemann was not only a compulsive liar about his private life but also his activities as an archaeologist.
        Banks’ own luck changed on August 27, 1903. Leishman received a cipher telegram from Consul Ravndal of Beirut with the following message: “Vice-consul Magelssen [sic] shot; assassinated in carriage Sunday night” (Banks, 1912). This cipher was also forwarded to President Roosevelt’s administration in Washington and the media. In response, the U.S. European Squadron was ordered to Beirut on August 28. That same day Leishman received new information: “Vice-consul not assassinated; shot at, ball passing close.” A drunk had haphazardly fired a revolver at the vice-consul as he returned home from some engagement.
        But the matter was not closed. On August 31, Admiral Cotton informed Leishman that three U.S. ships, led by the flagship Brooklyn, were on their way to Beirut to exact punitive revenge for the “assassination.” These confusing events almost led to war between America and the Ottoman Empire. Both governments were caused great embarrassment. Only diplomatic negotiation at its best prevented further escalation of the mistake. In the meantime, Magelsson was apparently busy collecting his obituaries and thoroughly enjoying his celebrated “death.”

        As part of the diplomatic settlement, Banks received his long-awaited permit on October 3, 1903. The story of Banks’ excavations at Bismya and the many problems he encountered is narrated in his book Bismya, or the Lost City of Adab (G.P. Putnam Sons, Knickerbocker Press, New York, 1912) and numerous articles. I would like to stress the importance of his work. He was the first American archaeologist to join the ranks of the great discoverers of the ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. Sadly, controversy marred his reputation. Among his many discoveries was a statue of a Sumerian king named Esar. Banks knew of Esar, but for reasons I am unclear of, the find was heralded at the time as being the oldest statue of King David. The statue then disappeared, and Banks was falsely accused of having something to do with it. Needless to say, he was innocent. The statue was found and is now believed to be in a collection in either Istanbul or, more probably, Baghdad. The scandal meant, however, that Banks was forced out of any further excavations.
        What surprises me is that such a remarkable explorer has been largely forgotten. Most educated Americans know of Lawrence of Arabia, but nobody recognizes the name Edgar James Banks, though he was involved in the international politics of the Middle East well before Lawrence (twenty-two years his junior) even visited the region. Banks was also the first American to climb Mount Ararat (in search of Noah’s Ark in 1912) and crossed all the deserts from Turkey to Aden (Yemen) the same year. Such accomplishments should not be overlooked. Moreover, Banks was not particularly healthy at the time of his adventures. At present only scattered information about his activities–such as the agonizing time he was abandoned in the desert by his guides–is known, but in the near future I hope to fully document the eventful career of this real-life “Indiana Jones” for the reader.

Collaboration with DeMille

eturning to the United States, Banks wrote a number of articles and books and embarked on several lecture tours during which he sold hundreds if not thousands of cuneiform tablets. On August 19, 1914, Banks married his second wife, Minja (daughter of Marko Miksic and Emilija Bistoniya of Croatia), and the couple would have two children, Bobbie and Daphne. To support his family, Banks became involved in real estate, but his love for adventure and the Middle East did not disappear. In time he embarked on a new career–this time in the field of motion pictures.
        Until August 1998 the only information I had about his involvement in the movie industry were the names of two companies, The Sacred Films Inc. and Seminole Inc., and an article by Banks concerning the first of them (with a few photos from the movies he claimed to have made). Since neither company was registered, the film specialists I contacted suggested that if any movies were made, they must have been low-budget, limited-market, religious productions. I suspected there was much more to the story. Indeed, some mystery seemed to be involved. Banks himself wrote that Sacred Films was producing its biblical movies in secret and was employing quite famous actors and actresses. Nevertheless, can you imagine my astonishment when McLachlan informed me that it was Cecil B. DeMille who, in 1921, invited Banks to become a consultant on movies that concerned biblical stories?
        DeMille directed two versions of The Ten Commandments (a silent version in 1923 and the 1956 spectacular). Banks is not credited with any involvement in the earlier film. But learning that Banks may have been involved in other productions (possibly for a private collection) created by this movie legend was extraordinary. I thought that I had solved at least one mystery of Banks’ life, especially because McLachlan has almost two hundred 8 by 10 stills from these old films. I believed I would be able to prove that Banks’ movies really existed and that I could identify them through his connection with DeMille. How wrong I was!

        The plot only thickened. Instead of solving one small mystery, I encountered a much bigger one. I have no doubt that Banks worked with DeMille in California between 1921 and 1923. But none of the official sources on the director, including his autobiography, refer to any movies produced or informed by such a collaboration. It is an extraordinary omission, a silence that speaks volumes.
        Based on McLachlan’s stills, I have been able to identify almost all the episodes or stories that were developed. DeMille and Banks’ projects began with the story of Adam and Eve and proceeded, in chronological order, through the events described in Genesis. After Banks left California, possibly at the request of Minja, who was sick in 1923, he settled in Eustis, Florida. DeMille meanwhile produced the next biblical chapter in line, the Ten Commandments, released in December 1923. Today the set built for that movie is considered to be Hollywood’s first grand-scale historical set, and in 1998 plans were made to excavate it. But Banks’ stills indicate clearly that the sets built for the earlier biblical stories–such as, for example, the city and ziggurat of Ur, or for the story of Noah’s Ark and the Flood–were equally impressive
        There is no doubt in my mind that Banks’ movies were a high-budget Hollywood production. Since he did not have the money to even contemplate starting such an undertaking, DeMille’s central involvement is almost certain. My hope in learning more about these lost, forgotten, or secret movies is not only to verify the documentation mentioned above. I also hope to identify the actors and actresses who were involved. According to Banks’ daughter, her father talked about directing Gloria Swanson, and her mother recalled that Banks also advised Douglas Fairbanks before that actor made the movie Robin Hood. But who was directly involved in DeMille’s mysterious and ambitious biblical project? I believe that I can recognize a few performers from the stills I have studied, but I am no specialist. Consequently, I must keep these guesses to myself.
        More intriguing is the question of what happened with these movies. And why did DeMille keep silent about their production? These are questions that I hope to answer. I do not yet know what happened to the movies produced by the secret company called Sacred Films. But the mystery of Seminole Inc. movies is solved. This was Banks’ private company and operated at Eustis. The old studio was recently renovated. It is located across the street from Banks’ first house in the town.
        Seminole focused on stories related to the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Eventually the company went bankrupt. McLachlan remembers her father packing his movies up in tin cans and burying them somewhere on their property, apparently for fear that they were a fire hazard. She recalls what the pit looked like but does not remember the location. Looking for them would likely be an exercise in futility. Banks’ property included more than 350 acres of orange groves, and the movies could hardly be expected to survive years of exposure to the humid Florida climate.
        Banks spent the rest of his life at his property at Lake Dalhousi, where he built a fabulous mansion of his own design. He seldom left his house for any activities other than growing oranges, and rarely talked of his adventures and achievements. He died a very modest man on May 5, 1945. At the time, few of his neighbors in Eustis had any concept of his extraordinary claims to greatness.n

Ewa Wasilewska is adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. She welcomes correspondence on this essay and can be reached through E-mail at Mruczekf Creation Stories of the Middle East, to be published by Jessica Kingston Press in September. The book is based on her four-part series on the same topic published in the February through May 1994 issues of The World & I. She is currently completing a book on Edgar James Banks titled The Forgotten American Indiana Jones.

Acknowledgments

        Although my research and book are not finished, I decided to release this limited (and copyrighted) account because the success of my work depends on assistance from others.
        I wish to express my gratitude to Mike Leavitt, governor of Utah, for his interest in my ventures. The governor opened the first public presentation of my discoveries on September 24, 1998, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
        I also wish to thank the editors of The World & I, particularly Dr. Morton Kaplan and Stephen Osmond, for supporting my research and providing the forum for periodic publication of its results.
        This research could not have advanced without the trust and assistance of Daphne Banks McLachlan, who loaned family documents and stills to my care. She has my deepest gratitude. I feel privileged to have met her and, through her stories, to relive the life of her father.
        Thanks should also be directed to my colleague Prof. David Owen, to Stedman Pool, Louise Carter, Walter Simms, the Utah Humanities Council, PhotoTech of Utah, and the Utah Museum of Natural History. I must also thank Richard Trevithick, Gloria and Ed Skurzynski, and Prof. James Kelly for their financial support and all curators who provided access to their collections. Also, numerous friends and students have given invaluable assistance, notably Adrienne Roberts, who located the Arizona collection of artifacts.
        I hope that this research restores Professor Banks’ legend and the respect he deserves for his numerous contributions to diplomacy, archaeology, film, and other fields.
        —-E.W.

Of the thousands of wooden castles that stood guard over medieval japan, three of the dozen that remain helped shape the modern cities that grew up around them.

The first foreigner to tour a Japanese castle was nearly as astonished as I was. In 1580, Luis Frois, a Jesuit priest, visited Azuchi Castle in the company of its lord. Afterward, Frois wrote in a letter: “As regards architecture, strength, wealth, and grandeur [it] may well be compared with the greatest buildings of Europe. … In the middle there is a sort of tower which they call tenshu and it indeed has a far more noble and splendid appearance than our towers. It consists of seven floors, all of which, both inside and out, have been fashioned to a wonderful architectural design. … In a word, the whole edifice is beautiful, excellent, and brilliant.”
        This “noble, splendid” castle, along with the thousands of others that stood guard over medieval Japan, was made entirely of wood. A dozen of them have endured into the twenty-first century, and last year my husband and I visited three of the most celebrated.
        Why build wooden castles? In a word: earthquakes. Tremors rock Japan virtually every day, some barely noticeable, others killing thousands, as in Kobe in 1995. A falling stone wall is lethal. For this reason, traditional Japanese architecture has always used light materials such as wood, paper, and plaster. This makes for easy rebuilding after disasters–and some very vulnerable castles.

White heron castle

After over a century of nonstop civil war, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s first shogun, finally succeeded in uniting the country in a.d. 1600. He immediately ordered his rivals’ castles demolished; more than four hundred were torn down within days. Ieyasu then began building his own fortresses, to impress lords and commoners alike with his might. The largest and most magnificent of all was Himeji Castle, fifty miles west of Osaka. It was there that we started our castle tour on a crisp fall day.
        As we approached on the shinkansen bullet train, it was easy to see why Himeji had received its Japanese nickname, Shirasagi-jo, or “white heron castle.” With its sprawling layout and dazzling white walls, it resembled a huge bird landing on a hilltop. A Japanese castle makes a totally different impression from its European counterpart. Instead of a hulking mass of stone, Himeji Castle is a confection of delicate roofs and gables.
        Of Japan’s dozen original castles, only Himeji has preserved its walls and turrets, its keeps and

courtyards. The town’s citizens are tremendously proud of their castle, considered a crowning achievement of Japanese architecture and proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. English-speaking volunteers wait at the ticket booth offering free tours to foreigners. Masahisa Yoshida generously gave us a minicourse in castle architecture as he showed us around.
        Every element of the castle, we learned, had a practical purpose, right down to its color. The white plaster was fireproof, and the wooden walls were so thoroughly coated that in the entire complex, only a single window frame was left uncovered. The tiniest construction detail was carefully planned. Wooden window bars were wrapped in metal sheets, to prevent ninja spies from sawing through them. Then, to confuse the ninja, the bars were disguised with plaster.
        Inside Himeji Castle’s ponderous main gate, the modern world vanishes. Leaf shadows tremble on old stone, a mason’s hammer rings on tile, and the wind rushes through ancient pines. I was rather startled, though, when a samurai warrior in full regalia ambled around the corner. It turned out that a Kyoto studio was filming a historical drama for TV. As the hero, splendid in green brocade, strutted down a gravel path, female fans cooed behind their digital cameras. Himeji Castle is a favorite with Japanese filmmakers, including Akira Kurosawa, who shot his masterpiece Ran there.
        The castle’s layout is a maze in stone and plaster. You turn right to go left, head down a steep flight of stairs to climb to the tower–which never seems to get any closer. Every time I thought we’d found the tower entrance, the gate led us into another obscure courtyard.
        Such labyrinthine design compensates for the frailty of a wooden castle. Enemies who managed to cross three moats and penetrate the outer gates would quickly get lost. The route to the main tower twists and doubles back, thoroughly disorienting invaders (and tourists). Gates open onto blank walls, forcing impossibly sharp turns. Buildings bristle with gun slots and chutes for dropping rocks and boiling oil, and intruders would soon find themselves corralled in a narrow courtyard, under fire from all four sides.
        The hodgepodge of stonework in the foundations shows how castle building strained the resources of the entire nation. Himeji’s inner moat alone required more than three miles of stone. When quarries were exhausted, builders confiscated every stone they found. Within the foundations, Yoshida pointed out temple lanterns, Buddhist sculptures, stone coffins from prehistoric burial mounds, and small millstones called ubagaishi, or “old-woman stones.” These foundations were laid without mortar, allowing them to flex during tremors, and their graceful, flaring curves add stability. Each wall was signed by those who built it, so they could be summoned quickly to make repairs.
        Entering the main tower, we traded our shoes for soft slippers, and the cold floor quickly numbed my feet. Overhead, the dark wooden chambers thundered with footsteps and echoed with little-boy yells of “Sugoi!” (wow!). Architects still study the tower’s ingenious design, which has kept it standing through four centuries of earthquakes. Two massive wooden pillars run from the stone foundation through seven stories to the roof, adding strength and flexibility to the structure. The east pillar, 250 feet tall and a yard thick at the bottom, was hewed from a single trunk of fir. Its deep, swirling grain looks like immense fingerprints.
        Every inch of the tower was designed with war in mind. Though it appears to be five stories tall from outside, two hidden floors could conceal more soldiers. Steep, treacherous staircases end in heavy defensive trapdoors. In the corners of each floor lurk hidden guardrooms. If the enemy penetrated this far, all was lost, but honor required samurai to fight to the death to gain their lord time for a proper suicide.
        Centuries later, Himeji Castle still guards its secrets, and Yoshida shared one with me. Behind an opened gate, he removed a loose foundation stone and pulled out a battered pair of straw sandals, trimmed with tatters of blue fabric. Some nameless worker, centuries ago, had hidden his shoes to save the trouble of carrying them home–then never returned. Suddenly, the castle around me was filled with ghosts.

Mountain stronghold

Our next stop was in the heart of the Japanese Alps, 220 miles northeast of Himeji. Here Matsumoto Castle stands in stark contrast to Himeji’s white elegance. It was built not as a symbol of power but as a functional war machine. Even on a brilliantly sunny day, the “Black Crow Castle” is stark and severe. A mass of black woodwork and sooty dark roof tiles, the tower sits perched on its stone foundations. As we entered its main gate, an elderly Japanese pilgrim gazed openmouthed, pausing from his round of temples.
        We were fortunate to meet another volunteer guide here, and Tsunaichi Sato filled us in on the castle’s history. Matsumoto

Castle, he explained, was never used for a residence; it was intended strictly as a military headquarters. Its complex pillar system left no space for accommodation. The lord made do with a screened-off room for his own use and a chamber on the fourth floor for his war council. Gun racks lined the walls, and hundreds of pegs once held leather pouches of gunpowder.
        Inside the tower, a fascinating display showed how the Japanese had developed firearms–and changed the course of their history. Guns were first brought to Japan in 1543 by the Portuguese, but gunsmithing remained a closely guarded secret. Over time, the lords worked out their own designs, displaying great variety and imagination. Some resemble European weapons, while others are barely recognizable as guns. Bullets were made at home by samurai women and children.
        Suits of samurai armor were also on display, clearly the inspiration for Darth Vader of Star Wars. Sato explained that each weighed more than sixty pounds and could only be worn on horseback. Low-ranking samurai had to fight on foot, without benefit of armor.
        The tower’s top floor served as an observation post, giving a commanding view of the valley and any enemies approaching from the surrounding mountains. I was surprised to see a tiny Shinto altar tucked high in the rafters, and Sato told us the legend behind it. In 1618, a mysterious shining woman appeared before a watchman, saying that if the castle made an annual offering of a thousand pounds of rice, it would be protected. The offering was made, and the castle remained safe. To this day, rice is offered every eight years.
        Though some Japanese castles were destroyed in battle, their main enemy was fire. The roof peaks of Matsumoto Castle, like many others, are ornamented with tile images called shachi, half fish and half tiger, which were believed to call down rain. Ironically, these protectors were actually a major cause of fire. Their fins were bound onto their bodies with broad iron bands, which attracted lightning during storms. The Japanese didn’t understand the connection.
        Three concentric stone moats once defended the castle. The first circle enclosed the tower itself, while the second circle protected palaces, a granary, and gunpowder storehouses. The wide area between the second and third moats was a residential quarter, filled with the homes of ninety high-ranking samurai families. Humbler families lived beyond the outer moat, alongside the fields.
        Matsumoto Castle survived into the new era of peace enforced by the shogun and later received a most unusual annex. Thirty-five years after the fortress was built, its lord ordered the addition of a “moon-viewing wing,” an attached pavilion where he and his friends could write poetry and sip sake by moonlight. It was airy and pleasant, with a high vaulted ceiling and a vermilion-laquered balcony out over the moat. The monstrous black carp circling below looked ancient enough to have eavesdropped on samurai parties.

Castle culture

Far to the north, near the snowy tip of Honshu, is one of Japan’s most atmospheric towns. The castle in Hirosaki was the smallest that we visited, but within the modern city, we could easily trace the outline of an old castle town.
        Of Hirosaki Castle’s original structures, only three minor towers and several gates remain. Its main tower was rebuilt in 1810 after a fire. Now, swans glide along the castle moat, and the park encircled in its sweep serves citizens as an outdoor living room. Every spring, five thousand cherry trees explode into bloom, and during our visit the autumn maple leaves were at their flaming peak. It was Culture Day, a minor national holiday, and kids pedaled tricycles through the gates, while their parents admired the winning blossoms in a chrysanthemum competition.
        North of the castle, a district called Naka-cho shows how samurai neighborhoods looked. The dense cypress hedges that lined the narrow streets were too thick to see through but loose enough for defenders to stab through.

Several samurai family homes have been restored and are open to visitors.
        Wandering through the Iwata House, I was struck by its elegant simplicity. Walls of old, brown wood rose to a high thatched roof. The interior was beautifully spare, its tatami-matted rooms centered on small open hearths and furnished with graceful wooden chests, but the ceiling was high and drafty, with no chimney. Life here must have been miserably cold, dark, and smoky.
        In feudal Japan, everything had its assigned place, including religion. Though the shogun’s lords were nominal Buddhists, they mistrusted the clergy as potential rivals for power, and all temples were forced to relocate in teramachi, or temple quarters, where the lord could keep a watchful eye on them. Hirosaki has two such districts, one for the austere Zen temples of the samurai, the other for the devotional sects of the commoners.
        Zenrin-gai, the Zen district, is solidly lined on both sides with a score of temples. But as we peered into one courtyard after another, all were deserted. The temples’ most prominent features were their cemeteries, forests of small black or gray marble columns. Only a little shrine to Jizo, the protector of children and travelers, showed any signs of worship: a peculiar collection of weathered dolls, ceramic figurines, and toys stood there as silent offerings.
        Isolated in the far north, Hirosaki developed many distinctive cultural traditions. The most dramatic is the Neputa Festival, in which glowing, thirty-foot-high lanterns of painted paper are paraded through the streets every August. An old painting in the town’s Neputa Village Museum shows how the lanterns were originally carried as standards in battle.
        Many traditional Hirosaki crafts have samurai roots. Despite their warlike mystique, samurai were basically civil servants, and the lowest ranks struggled to supplement their meager stipends. Some produced baka-nuri, or “fool’s lacquerware,” using an insanely complex technique with forty separate steps. After viewing samples of each stage, I still couldn’t fathom the process, but the result was lovely: a minute honeycomb of red, green, and gold. Other samurai painted paper kites in bright designs. These activities are still carried out, and at a craft center we watched a master kite painter at work, the colors swirling off his brush in quick, sure strokes.

Shaping modern japan

Despite their warlike appearance, few Japanese castles were ever attacked. Their formidable construction made the odds too overwhelming. After a century of civil war in the 1500s, Japan finally emerged into 250 years of peace under the uncontested power of the shogun, and the castles turned into administrative centers–and ever-present reminders of the shogun’s might. Castle towns grew up around their feet, some of them the largest cities in the world, then as now: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya.
        When feudalism finally collapsed in 1867, mobs destroyed scores of the shogun’s castles as hated symbols of oppression. One was even sold for fifty dollars and made into barrels. World War II incinerated six more. Though many concrete replicas have been built since 1947, the dozen remaining authentic castles are among the most evocative and elegant sights in Japan.
        In our travels, I discovered that looking out from the top floor of a castle invariably spoils its magic. Beyond the sculptured elegance of the roof tiles, Japanese cities sprawl out ugly and functional–a tight-packed jam of apartment blocks, office towers, and train stations, crawling with traffic, simmering in smog, and smug with prosperity. The tile monsters at the roof peaks seem to be snarling at the twenty-first century.
        But this is the world that the castles made. By finally damping down the threat of civil war, they permitted Japan to turn its formidable energy to more constructive purposes and become a powerful player on the world stage. These fragile wooden castles proved strong enough to shape the future of a nation. 

Kristin Johannsen is a freelance writer based in Berea, Kentucky. She writes frequently about Asian cultures and travel.

To date, 275,000 Cambodians have fled Vietnamese repression for refugee camps in bordering Thailand, and tens of thousands more have picked up weapons hoping to liberate their homeland from the occupying forces. A Cambodian refugee camp, Site 2, where 130,000 refugees now live, is the second-largest home for Cambodians after Phnom Penh. And not unlike the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia is evoking both global outrage and significant domestic rebellion.
       
        There are approximately 61,000 Cambodians presently under arms and actively engaged in combat against the occupying Vietnamese military, making this combined resistance movement the second largest in their history.

Gregory Speck is a freelance writer who has written for The News World, Interview magazine, the New York Tribune, and various other publications. He is currently based in New York City.

James Cagney will forever remain one of the immortals of the Hollywood pantheon. A veteran of nearly seventy films, many of them classics, he grinned, punched, danced, and sang his way from the lurid underworld of crime and corruption all the way to the summit of American showmanship and patriotism, bringing high energy, good humor, and cavalier grace along in a style that even today seems breathtakingly original.

Born in New York City at the close of the last century, Jimmy Cagney soon found himself on Broadway making his mark in vaudeville. Success and recognition on the fabled Great White Way led him in 1930 out West to the silver screen and stardom during the golden Age of Hollywood. With The Public Enemy (1931) he introduced a new persona to the world of cinema: the bad boy all America loved to hate, hated to love, and couldn’t get enough of–no matter what. He would go on to make many more unforgettable films during the Depression, such as Foot-light Parade (1933), Jimmy the Gent (1934), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). But it was his characterization of George M. Cohan in Yankee Dodle Dandy (1942), his masterpiece, that revealed him as the consummate talent whose bravura ability as actor, singer, and dancer was unrivaled in the business of show business.

In white Heat (1949), a classic study of derangement, he painted a psychological portrait of the human as a animal, while in Mister Roberts (1955) he showed once again his versatile nature and his gift for cynical comedy. Having worked under many of the greatest directors and in the company of many of the other top stars for three decades, he retired from filmmaking in 1961, only to return as a cult figure of monumental proportion twenty years later in Regtime (1981), having published his autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, several years earlier. Until his recent death an eldest statesman of the American screen, James Cagney is revered as a dashingly handsome leading man who never gave a damn what others thought of him, and who soon emerged as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.

I met with James Cagney in his Manhattan hotel suite during a visit to town, shortly before his death, and found him to be as modest a gentleman as he was accomplished as a performer. Reluctant to say anything unkind about even the most notoriously impossible of his colleague from the stage and screen, this legend guarded his memories as closely as his staff has guarded his privacy. To be granted the honor of an audience with this hero of the American dream was a rare privilege, and one which never will be granted again, for this was the last interview Jimmy Cagney gave before his death on march 30, 1986.

Gregory Speck: Growing up in the rough-and-tumble world of turn-of-the century New York City must have been colorful.

James Cagney: It was basically no different then than it is today. It was just everyday living. With me, it was fighting, more fighting, and more fighting. Life then was simply the way it was: ordinary, not bad, not good, just regular. No stress, no strain. Of course, no one had much of anything, but we didn’t know that we were poor.

We certainly didn’t feel poor. My family lived mostly in a variety of tenement apartments in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, which at that point still had a lot of ethnic flavor: Irish, German Zech, Hungarian, and so forth. On address I remember was 81^st Street and York Avenue, where my father had a saloon. Yes, it was rough, and it was tough, but since I was a fighter, and a good one at that, it was not really so hard. In fact, you could say that it was easy for me, for I guess I was a pretty tough little kid. For my brothers Harry and Eddie, though, who eventually became doctors, it was not so easy. They were athletic, but didn’t like to fight, so I had to stick up for them, which I was glad to do. My brother Bill, who became my Hollywood business manager, didn’t mind a fight either, so we made a pretty strong family. We stuck together; We had to, because it was a “knock’em down, drag’em out” kind of world. It built character and made us strong. I learned how to take care of myself by fighting in the streets, and it was all part of the game. It helped me later in Hollywood, too.

Speck: In pursuit of your lineage, have you traced your roots back to Ireland and Norway?

Cagney: My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking. They were great people. My mother’s father, my Grandpa Nelson, was a Norwegian sea captain, but when I tried to investigate those roots I didn’t get very far, for he had apparently changed his name to another one that made it impossible to identify him within the rest of the population. I never visited Norway.

Speck: Among you first jobs as a performer, you did female impersonations.

Cagney: Yes, I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn’t really approve of it, through. Of course, when you’re starting out, you do what you have to do to make a buck. It was basically just a job. You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.

Speck: By 1920 you had landed a chorus-boy part on Broadway in a show called Pitter Patter.

Cagney: Yes, and it was fun to be singing and dancing in the footlights, and getting paid for it. It was exciting and brand-new to me to be working in the Longacre Theater. It was also the beginning for me of dancing before an audience, which always made me terribly nervous. I used to get butterflies nervous. I used to get butterflies in my stomach, and often threw up. But the, when I got out onto the stage, everything calmed down and I felt at home. Of course, those early attempts at dancing on stage were immature, but the style of those early efforts became the pattern for the eccentric kind of dancing I did later on. I used it throughout my career, and in fact it became my trademark. Twenty years later I used it to some acclaim as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on. The 1920s were essentially the time when I learned the business of performing. It was my initiation into the world of show business. It was also during this period that I came into contact with Cary Grant. His real name was Archibald Leach, and the was part of a team called Parker, Rand, and Leach. He wanted out, so I replaced him, and we were known as Parker, Rand, and Cagney.

Speck: I How did you and your wife Frances meet?

Cagney: We met backstage during Pitter Patter. She had been part of a group known as Vernon and Nye, and so she could dance, but I could not. She was also cute. I said “Hello,” and she said “Hello,” and that was the beginning of a love relationship that spanned sixty-three years and still exists today. Because her first name is Willard, I call her Willie, or Bill, for short. So as not to confuse her with my brother Bill, she is “My Bill.” If you want to call it love at first sight, then I guess that’s what it was.

Speck: I believe that Al Jolson bought the rights to Penny Arcade and sold them to Warner Brothers, which led to your move to Hollywood to star in the film remake, entitled Sinners’ Holiday.

Cagney: It’s true that I went out West to Hollywood to act in the remake of the show, but not in any star capacity. I was just a guy doing a job, and Joan and I had only supporting roles. With the exception of the climate, Hollywood was really not much different from Broadway, for the hours were long, and though it may have looked glamorous from the outside, on the inside it was hard work. We still had work. We still had deadlines, and the same kind of script concerns, and we still were working with show-business people, who are a special breed.

Speck: In 1931 you created a sensation in The Public Enemy, directed by William Wellman.

Cagney: I don’t know about this sensation business, but The Public Enemy was the film that really launched my career. I played a mean, mixed-up hood, a tough kid who tried to throw his weight around and ended up dead. It was a good part. I don’t think I took anything away from it. It just kind of flowed along. As you may know, the first title was Beer and Blood. It was one of the first of many chances I had to portray that kind of person, the fist-swinging gangster who becomes ruthless in order to succeed. There were many tough guys to play in the scripts that Warner kept assigning me. Each of my subsequent roles in the hoodlum genre offered the opportunity to inject something new, which I always tired to do. One could be funny, and the next one flat. Some roles were mean, and others were meaner. A few roles among them were actually sympathetic and kind-hearted, and I preferred them, but generally did not get to do many of those parts until much later in my career, for the public seemed to prefer me as a bad guy. Since I was most frequently cast as a criminal, constantly on the prod, I rarely to do the comedy roles I really would have preferred. I am really not at all like the character I played in The Public Enemy. I’m chiefly pretty quiet and reserved and private. Nervertheless, I had lots of gangster roles then, and in The roaring Twenties and in White Heat,and too much of the same thing gets to be too much. I don’t understand why the public never tired of those awful hoodlums. William Wellman did a good job on The Public Enemy I thought, as he did on the earlier picture I did with him, Other Men’s Women , in which I played opposite Joan Blondell and Mary Astor. He let me go my way and develop my own interpretation whenever it was possible. With other members of the cast of The Public Enemy such as Jean Harlow and Joan, however, he was less understanding. Having this kind of discernment makes for a good director. It was he who suggested that I squash that half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in the famous scene, and it set a precedent in the abuse of women in films. In my next film, Smart Money, which starred Edward G. Robinson, I again had to hit a lady in the face.

Speck: How did the Depression affect your life in Hollywood as a contract player for Jack Warner, and eventually as his highest-paid star?

Cagney: The Depression really didn’t have any effect at all on my life, for I was under contract, and I had a job to do. For the first year I was making around $500 a week and turning out about five pictures a year. In 1931, after walking out on them after making Blonde Crazy with Joan Blondell and Ray Milland, I found myself overnight making about $1,000 a week. The, walking out again in 1932 after doing Winner Take All I moved up into the league of Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., making $3,000 a week. Later still, in 1935, I walked out on Warner for breach of contract, when I saw that they were advertising a film of mine and giving Pat O’Brien top billing. It was Ceiling Zero, the sixth Cagney picture released in 1935, but my contract stipulated that they could release only four per year, and that in all of them I was to receive top billing. It gave me the leverage I needed to fight the studio, which no one had ever done before. I sued and took off for Martha’s Vineyard for six months, which was the thing to do. when I won I could pretty much dictate the terms of my contract. That kind of defiance later led to the fights Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and Miriam Hopkins waged against Warner. The studios were so rich and powerful, and so accustomed to exploiting their players, that everyone was astonished when I walked out. But my pictures were their biggest moneymakers, taking in millions. After I won, Jack Warner cam courting me again, for his desire to make money was stronger than his pride. Finally, in 1938, Warner agreed to $150,000 per picture for me, plus a percentage of the profits. As for the Depression, we knew that it existed, but it has no effect on us personally, for we were insulated form its effects. Since we had a demanding job to do, it was secondary to the task at hand, and that was to learn my craft. We had to get to the studio early in the morning and make pictures all day long, seven days a week, twelve hours a day, often starting a new film the day after the previous one was finished, without any break at all. I did what had to be done–nothing more, nothing less. The old mogul system was not a good system, but it worked, and the so-called moguls weren’t good or bad, but they were doing their job, which was producing, just as I was, which was acting. We all had families to support. Back then it was much easier to make a movie, for there was much more room and much less publicity. There seems to be a lot more money available to day. People are paid $5 million to star in a piece of entertainment without much substance or character or message. The costs are unbelievable to me, but when you see forty people standing around doing nothing for hours on end on a set and getting paid union scale it’s no wonder that movies have gotten so expensive to make. That’s why we went to England to shoot Ragtime at the Shepperton Studios outside London.

Speck: You made a total of fine pictures with Lloyd Bacon, such as Picture snatcher and Footlight Parade both in 1933, and then The Irish in Us in 1935.

Cagney: Yes, Lloyd, was a “knock’em down, drag’em out” director who kept the pace tight and rapid. He allowed us to act as we liked, to ad-lib, and to have a good time. In Picture Snatcher I played an ex-con opposite my friend Ralph Bellamy, and did Footlight Parade with Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, whom I liked a lot, and lovely Ruby Keeler, whom I adored. That film was choreographed by the great Busby Berkeley, too. For The Irish in Us I got to work with Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh, my two best friends, and Olivia de Havilland, who was my favorite and most beautiful leading lady. Pat and Frank were my dear friends, and for nearly fifty years Pat was number one, right up until he died. He was kind and funny, and we complemented each other in our performances. I made nine pictures with Pat, and nine with Frank, and among those there are five that the three of us did together. In one of them, Boy Meets Girl in 1938, we three teamed with Ralph Bellamy, also a close friend, and Ronald Reagan, who I liked a great deal. What a nice man, and a good actor! I remember one night, at a Screen Actors Guild function, Ronnie made a speech, forty-five minutes long, and all of it was ad-libbed. Well, it was brilliant. I came home to my Bill afterwards and told her that that man was fated, and not as an actor. I was right, too, for he became president, and a great one. Because Pat, Frank, and I were Irish, and we stuck together, we became known as the “Irish Mafia.” We rejected that term, though, and then got to be called the “Boys’ Club.” Spencer Tracy was a member of our group, too, and what a talented man he was. He was an actor’s actor.

Speck: In 1934 you played Jimmy the Gent with Bette Davis under Michael Curtiz. That film revealed your gift for comedy.

Cagney: It is true that Jimmy the Gent was my first film with comedic overtones. Very few people know this, but roles of that type were my favorites, and I always wished that they would give me more like them.

Speck: For William Keighley in 1935 you made G-men and in 1939 Each Dawn I Die with George Raft.

Cagney: G-Men was the first of five films I made with Keighley. It was a straight part, as an FBI agent, and was without any opportunity to cut up, which I like to do. As you may know, Keighley assumed a sort of French affectation in his speech, which was kind of funny, since there was a large British film community in Hollywood at the time. After the war he and his wife left for France, and I never heard form them again. My costar in G-Men, Margaret Lindsay, pretended she was British, although she was from Iowa, and that annoyed me, too. As for Each Dawn I Die, I played a bad guy again, but it was a fairly straight part, and there wasn’t much to it. I don’t consider either of these films to have much durability. In my mind, they are more easily forgotten than remembered. George Raft, though, was a very pleasant fellow and a good actor. Of course, he was truly a very tough man, who must have had some sort of association with the underworld of the time, which the rest of us did not, even though we were always playing thugs and hoods.

I remember on incident in particular that happened on the set with Raft and Edward G. Robison. Robinson liked to give directions to everyone all the time and was something of a “know-it-all,” which made him difficult to take at times. Well, Robinson, was giving his usual dictatorial instructions to Raft and touched him on the arm to point him in a certain direction. Raft told him never to touch him again, but Robinson didn’t take heed to this warning. Shortly thereafter he was telling Raft again what to do, and so he walked over to Raft to grab him by the arm to usher him to where he wanted him to stand. Raft belted him, and down went Robinson, halfway across the room. That was the last he told Raft what to do. Very few people realize it, but George Raft was one of the finest dancers in Hollywood, too. I rank him up there with Fred Astaire, he was not good. On only a couple of occasions was he allowed to show what he could do, and it was remarkable. Once he even saved my life.

After I won the Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy I was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, during a time that accusations of leftist influence were being made about the film industry. The mob had targeted me for liquidation, and I was to have a klieg light dropped on my dead when I walked on to the set. Well, Raft heard about the hit contract, and made a call to the right man, demanding that the plan be stopped, or they would have to answer to him. It worked.

Speck: In 1935 you also made A Midsummer Night’s Dream under Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle.

Cagney: I played the role of Bottom in that one, alongside Mickey Rooney as Puck. Bottom was set apart from the other roles, and Shakespeare himself depicted Bottom as a ham. Bottom wanted to play all of the parts, so I played him as a ham, with that ass head on my head. The critics didn’t seem to like my portrayal, though. That film had a great cast, too, with Olivia de Havilland, Joe E. Brown, Dick Powell, and others.

Speck: Over the years you did a number of films with military subjects, such as Here Comes the Navy and Devil Dogs of the Air, both of which Lloyd Bacon directed, and in which you starred with both Pat O’Briedn and Frank McHugh. Did patriotism lead you to these projects?

Cagney: No, they were just jobs to be done–nothing more, nothing less, We did the first one in San Diego in 1934 aboard the battleship USS Arizona, which was later sunk in Pearl Harbor. The second one was filmed the next year and led to my being named one of the ten top moneymakers in Hollywood. The three of us teamed up again in 1940 with George Brent under William Keighley to make The Fighting 69^th, which was about an Irish regiment in World War I. In 1946 I made 13, Rue Madeleine, a World War II spy film in which I ended up in Gestapo headquarters, tortured and about to be executed, when we bomb the hell out of the Nazis, and I go out in blaze. My last military role was much later, in 1960, when I played Admiral Bull Halsey in The Gallant Hours. My friend Robert Montgomery talked me into doing that one, but I didn’t like the role, although I am very much a patriot.

Speck : Perhaps the ultimate patriot, as George M. Cohan, through whom you revealed numerous new dimensions to your character and talent.

Cagney: Well, I could dance, so I landed the part. It was my favorite role as the All-American Boy. Hal Wallis, the producer, accepted my request to have final approval, so we went to work on the script and got it into shape. Then we prepared to shoot the movie. Cohan and I were about the same height, weight, and build. Both of us had light hair, freckles, and blue eyes, too, so in appearance we shared an Irish look. Same facial structure and features. Actually, we rewrote and reworked the script throughout the production. They now say Yankee Doodle Dandy is a classic. It had everything in it, as well as a good story line and honest family relationships. Humor and some emotional impact were added along the way to round out the song-and-dance scenes. To arrive at the proper dance style, a friend was brought in to help. He was Johnny Boyle, who had worked on Cohan’s 1916 Broadway Revue, and also on my 1937 film something to Sing About. He knew the Cohan stiff-leg technique, and was able to teach it to me. All in all, it was a good movie, for not only was it well-written and well-acted, but most of all it had heart. As a matter of fact, I met Cohan once when I was still young. I was trying to get a larger part in a play of his, and he refused to advance me. In fact, he threw me out of the play altogether. But that didn’t bother me, for I know that he liked the film we made of his life. I made $ 850,000 doing Yankee Doodle Dandy, and it was the highlight of my career.

Speck: White Heat, made in 1949, was another of your most distinguished films. How did you develop the persona of the psychopath Cody Jarrett?

Cagney: Originally, Jarrett was to be portrayed as the standard gangster type. I decided to give Cody some flesh, and to develop the role as homicidal maniac. So, we made him nuts, with a mother fixation, occasional fits, and incapacitating headaches. It worked, and the movie was a success.

Speck: In 1957 you played Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces.

Cagney: It too, was just another movie to me. Of course, Chaney’s life was interesting, and my little sister Jeanne played his second wife. That role provided me with an opportunity to explore his different characterizations in the early monster films he made, such as Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Wolfman.

Speck: In 1961 you worked under Billy Wilder in One, Two, Three.

Cagney: That was the film that convinced me to retire from show business. We were making the picture in Berlin inside a dark studio. I walked outside into the beautiful sunshine, and decided then, that was it. The thought of stopping was wonderful, so I resolved that that was my last film. Of course, I went back to work later on. My last film was Terrible Joe Moran in which I played an irascible old codger who was straightforward and true to his nature, consistent in his ways. I guess I’m like that.

Speck: How did you participation in Ragtime come about?

Cagney: Well, I surprised everyone by agreeing to play a role in that film, which Milos Forman was directing, because I had already read E.L. Doctorow’s novel. There were only two roles I could have played, and the one I liked was the police commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo. At the turn of the century such a job commanded respect and prestige. It was a very high honor to be named commissioner of police, and so they though I could do it. I had had a stroke by that time, but the doctor said that work would be good for me, and that doing nothing would encourage my batteries to go down. Of course, I was still painting in my studio, but otherwise doing very little. So, I agreed to do it. It was my friend Carroll O’Connon who suggested that I get Forman to enlarge the role for me, and he was willing. The rest is history. Pat O’Brien was in the picture, too, and I was happy to be working with him again. Since the Morgan Library wouldn’t let us shoot the scene there we had to go to England. It was just as well, for I got to meet the Queen Mother at the London Palladium then.

Speck: Are there any people from your sixty-five years in and out of show business whom you particularly admired?

Cagney: Oh, my, yes, many. I told you about Pat and Frank and Ralph and Spencer. Well, I also liked Doris Day very much. She was a lovely girl and had a lot of talent. I made Love me Or Leave Me with her in 1955 and thought it was a shame that she went the route of Pillow Talk. Steve McQueen was another fine, fine actor, and a dear friend. What a shame that he died so young. You know, I knew many “stars,” but I also liked being around the regular people, the crews on the sets. With them I could be myself, for they were street people, easy to be with, easy to know, easy to say things to. You could be yourself with them.

Speck: What advice would you give someone just coming into the profession?

Cagney: Just walk in , plant your feet, look’em in the eye, and tell the truth. When you’re an actor, you go out on the stage, or the set, and you act. But if you’re a dancer, you’re everything, for you have to act and often sing as well when you’re dancing. I did all three. Luckily, I started to learn it at an early age, and I could make my body behave as I wanted it to. I heard everything I could when I was still young.

Speck: In addition to your work as an actor-singer-dancer you are also a poet, a painter, and a yachtsman, I believe.

Cagney: Well, I get seasick a lot, but I love sailing. Once in 1978 out on Martha’s Vineyard, where I used to keep a place, I decided to take some guests out on my forty-two-foot ketch. We drove down to the dock, but the captain wasn’t there, so I piloted the boat myself, and it was wonderful. It helped me to recover somewhat from my illness. As for painting, I am often asked to sell my paintings. I always refuse, even though they sometimes offer me $65,000. The reason is that I feel I would be depriving a struggling young artist of money he might be able to obtain for his work. I don’t regret not becoming a professional painter, though, for it all happened as it happened. I’ve always enjoyed painting, but the only way I part with paintings is to give them away to charities, so they can be sold to benefit a cause I support. I still write poems, too, but used to do much more-humorous limericks, love verse, and other things–back in the old days. I wrote a poem for Willie Nelson the other night, too, to help him with his aid to the American farmer. The way I see it, we’ve done a benefit for Africa, so what about one for America? I think that the farmers in this country have gotten a raw deal. Many of them are unable to make ends meet, even as they work day and night. I know what a hard life it is, because I operate a farm in upstate New York, where we keep about 175 head of cattle. If I had to make a living farming I’d be bankrupt.

Speck: I know that you were always very close with and devoted to your own family, your parents and brothers and sisters especially. Do you see the family institution collapsing today?

Cagney: What is happening is tragic, but I think that soon families will grow back together, for people need each other, and the family is meant to make its members stronger by being together. I was regarded as the tentpole of my family by some, but I wanted to help them with my good fortune in any way I could. If the American family has seemed in danger of disintegration, I believe and hope it will survive, and I think America will return to old values. That’s what Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid benefit and concern and movement are all about.

Speck: When are they going to do a film about your own life?

Cagney: Well, Misha Baryshnikov has been wanting to play me in a movie, but I told him that with that ancient he wouldn’t be too convincing. He’s a great dancer, no question about it. Actually Treat Williams wanted to portray me as well, but the part is going to Michael J. Fox, who is such a talented young man. We get along real well, and I hope the film can be started while I’m still around to help with it. Some producers were trying to get John Travolta to play me, but even Travolta to play me, but even Travolta, who’s quite a fine actor and dancer, said, “What? Are you nuts? He was the one who suggested Mike Fox, in fact. I keep my fingers crossed in the hope that it will all work out, because Mike is just about the first one who hasn’t been afraid to take my role. But if I had the gumption to play George M. Cohan, then why shouldn’t young Fox play Jimmy Cagney?

Speck: What makes the Irish so feisty?

Cagney: They aren’t feisty!! [He holds up a pair of clenched fists like a boxer ready to land a punch, his eyes twinkling with benevolent mischief, his famous grin flashing.] One thing that troubles me is that they say that my portrayals of gangsters and hoodlums led to a tolerance of the criminal element by society. Well, I certainly hope they didn’t, because I’m firmly opposed to crime. I won’t even tell a lie. I saw friends killed in violent fights during my childhood in Yorkville, so I always tired to avoid crime, even though many of my roles made it look as if I got a kick out of it. I was never arrested, although once a cop kicked me in the ass. [He winks.]

Speck: I often get the feeling that American doesn’t believe in herself any longer.

Cagney: When the chips are down, she believes. Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to have a bike. That hardship made people strong and resolute. The same thing has happened with the making of movies today: they’ve been spoiled by too much money. But I’m glad Ed Koch has done a lot to bring filmmaking back to New York. The current head of his office for film development, Patricia Scott, is an awfully nice gal, and she’s doing a great job. We met her when she came up to ask if I would throw the ball out to George Steinbrenner at the opening of one season. She had been married to George C. Scott, who had done me a favor when I was selling some of my Morgan horses. He bough two of them. Actually, I used to raise Morgans in California years ago, but I sold them. In fact, I kept what amounted to a small farm of twelve acres in the middle of coldwater Canyon near Baverly Hills. But I had to give all that up years ago. Now Marge and Don Zimmermann take care of me like I’m one of those Morgans.

In 1943-more than a decade before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and Rosa Parks began the Montgomery bus boycott-Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, embarked on an effort to recruit black ballplayers for his team, and in 1947, Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field in a Dodgers uniform. Integration in sports led the way to a wider acceptance of the need for racial equality.

We were told as children that World War II was a war fought against racism, against the idea that a whole class of people could be separated, subjugated, and even murdered because of their race and religion. But back home in the United States, while the war was being fought and in the years immediately following, racial separation and subjugation were entrenched by law in the Deep South and by custom nearly everywhere else. Even within America’s armed forces, ostensibly fighting for the principles of democracy, fairness, and equal opportunity, black Americans were segregated into separate units that weren’t allowed to fight alongside whites but instead were often relegated to building roads and digging latrines. Though military nurses were badly needed, the number of black nurses was kept small, and they were permitted to treat only black patients.
        This moral contradiction between what America said it stood for and the way it was actually organized was most clearly articulated at the time by the eminent sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma, published in 1944. The thesis of his book was that a terrible tension existed in American society between our professed ideals of equality and fairness based on individual merit and the reality of harsh, suffocating exclusion and oppression based on skin color.
        The evidence of that oppression was manifest, most clearly in the South. In those days, blacks and whites were kept apart by law and custom, in schools, buses, and theaters; at restaurants, hotels, and public toilets; at drinking fountains, swimming pools, parks, and baseball games; at the ballot box (where blacks were in various ways discouraged from voting and intimidated if they tried); in the jury box (where blacks were effectively excluded altogether); in the workplace (where blacks were pervasively denied fair opportunities); and in housing. Whereas such separation was enforced by law in the South, much the same separation was found in the North, effectively maintained by custom and tradition.
        Moreover, such separation was not benign; “separate but equal” was a lie. Indeed, the purpose of separation was to maintain subjugation and inequality. Inferiority and exclusion was enforced by the police power of the state and by traditions so strong they nearly had the force of law. If you were black, individual merit was irrelevant, even dangerous. As the writer James Baldwin told us, black parents, even in the North, often feared for children who showed ambition or revealed hope. Joe Black, a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early fifties, once said that when, as a boy, he expressed the hope of one day playing in the major leagues, he was admonished and told to give up his dream because it was not allowed. Oppression thus became internalized, the near-final solution of a racist society.
        The dissonance between the American ideal of equal opportunity based on individual merit and the reality of oppressive inequality based on skin color threatened, after World War II, to split America asunder. But there were those, including Myrdal, who saw hope in that dissonance, who believed that if we could somehow come to grips with it and make genuine efforts to conform reality to our ideals, it could be the source of our moral redemption.
        The story of that redemptive struggle is by now well known: how in 1954 a unanimous Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional; how nineteen months later, Rosa Parks sat down in a seat reserved for whites on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and how a then little-known 27-year-old black Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. stood up and aroused the conscience of a nation by organizing a bus boycott in her behalf. The modern civil rights movement was born and galvanized into action. Within a decade, it had succeeded in dismantling the legal infrastructure of Jim Crow segregation and secured the passage of federal laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment, public accommodations, voting, and housing.
        But before all that happened–more than two decades before the civil rights legislation of the sixties and more than ten years before the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision–a quiet drama was beginning in a small office in Brooklyn, New York, a drama that one observer later would call “perhaps the most visible single desegregation action ever taken.” According to one veteran of the civil rights movement, it “helped lay the predicate for the Supreme Court’s decision.”

Branch Rickey

he drama began in 1943–a year before Myrdal’s book was to appear and five years before President Truman desegregated the armed forces–with a visit Branch Rickey paid to George V. MacLaughlin. A flamboyant, cigar-smoking, Bible-quoting, 63-year-old midwesterner whose ordinary speech often resembled a sermon, Rickey was the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, one of the longest established major-league baseball teams. MacLaughlin was his banker, the president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which essentially held a mortgage on the team. Rickey made an astonishing proposal to MacLaughlin: he wanted to embark upon an effort to recruit black ballplayers for the Dodgers. This was astonishing, because there had been until that point an unwritten but absolutely unbreakable ban on black players, who had been relegated to segregated leagues called the Negro Leagues.
        MacLaughlin supported the idea, although not without some anxiety. He told Rickey that for this bold plan to work, he would have to find a black player who was better than the other players. Rickey next raised it with the team’s board of directors, who unanimously approved the plan and swore each other to secrecy, promising not even to tell 

their families. That’s how dangerous the idea of equal opportunity was in 1943! By 1945, Rickey had launched a widespread talent search for black players. He covered his true intentions by creating a new and bogus Negro League, called the United States League. Even the scouts he hired to look for the players thought they were recruiting for the new Negro League, as did the players recruited.
        Rickey’s motivations have been the subject of much debate. There were those who said he was merely trying to corner the market on the last unmined source of baseball talent. Even if true, such an explanation is insufficient: every baseball executive would have had the same self-interest, but none did what Rickey did. Moreover, most of the other team owners were unhappy with his actions when they found out what he was up to, and nearly all of them resisted him. One said that the fans would burn down the park if the Dodgers came in with a black player, and there was widespread fear that black players would attract black crowds that would drive whites away and reduce the value of their teams.
        Rickey himself followed a strategy of denying that he was trying to integrate baseball, much less make an impact on the broader society. He believed that making integration the issue would reduce the chances of success, so he continually claimed that “my selfish objective is to win baseball games.” But Rickey was a cunning strategist as well as a preachy moralist–part P.T. Barnum and part Billy Sunday, as one contemporary described him–and a full review of his life and actions reveals that there almost certainly was a strong moral component to what he did. Given how much opposition he engendered and how against the grain his decision was, it is difficult to conclude otherwise. In any event, regardless of his motives, what Rickey did had an enormous moral impact and not only on baseball.

An Educated Innovator

ickey was born in 1880, grew up on a farm in Ohio, and was raised in a pious Methodist home. As a young man, he played baseball for two undistinguished seasons in the major leagues, but he also went to law school, paying his way by coaching a college baseball team. For a baseball man at that time, he was unusually educated. He finished college in three years and graduated near the top of his law school class at the University of Michigan. Then he gravitated back to baseball in a managerial capacity, ending up as the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, where he remained for twenty-five years, until taking over the Dodgers in 1942.
        Throughout his baseball life, Rickey had a reputation for intelligent design. He devised new and effective ways to instruct players and sharpen their skills; invented training devices, like base-sliding pits and batting tees, that are commonplace today but were unheard of then; and pioneered the use of complex statistical measures to evaluate performance. He created what came to be known as the farm system, a network of minor-league teams under the control of the major-league team, where young players could be placed, taught, developed, and evaluated, eventually providing a “harvest” of fresh talent for the parent club. This system led to the dominance of the Cardinals, and later the Dodgers, and by the 1950s every team had a farm system. Whatever else he was, Rickey was baseball’s first scientist.
        He was also an extraordinary character. Rickey ostentatiously refused to attend games on the Sabbath, although he would listen to them on the radio and eagerly reap the receipts from Sunday games. He was an ardent supporter of Prohibition, who nonetheless was surrounded by and close friends with hard-drinking men throughout his baseball life. His pecuniary instincts were legendary: in Brooklyn, he would charge twice for the Memorial Day doubleheader and, in the days before players could market their services freely to other teams, he was notoriously tightfisted with players’ salaries. Once, while at Pittsburgh toward the end of his career, he refused to give a raise to the league’s leading home-run hitter, saying, “We finished last with you, and we can finish last without you.” One New York sportswriter dubbed him “El Cheapo.” Yet as the historian Jules Tygiel has pointed out in Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Rickey “inspired a fierce loyalty and a respect bordering on worship from his associates and players.”
        Tygiel also repeats a famous, and perhaps formative, experience Rickey had in 1904, while coaching baseball at Ohio Wesleyan:

        “Among his athletes was Charlie Thomas, a black first baseman, whose
        hitting, according to school archives, “was feared all over the state.”
        “From that first day at Ohio Wesleyan,” Thomas later recalled, “Branch
        Rickey took a special interest in my welfare.” In the spring of 1904 the
        Wesleyan squad traveled to South Bend, Indiana, to play Notre Dame. The
        hotel at which the team had reservations refused to allow Thomas to
        lodge there. Rickey convinced the management to place a cot in his room
        for Thomas to sleep on, as they would do for a black servant. That
        night Thomas wept and rubbed his hands as if trying to rub off the color.
        “Black skin! Black skin!” he said to Rickey. “If I could only make them
        white.””

        Rickey often told that story and said that it had haunted him for many years. He claimed to have “vowed that I would always do whatever I could to see that other Americans did not have to face the bitter humiliation that was heaped upon Charles Thomas.”

Jackie Robinson

he other star in the drama was Jackie Robinson, the player Rickey finally chose to break the color barrier. For those of us, young and old, who watched the drama unfold, Robinson was the major star, although he described himself as “only a principal actor” in Rickey’s play. Rachel Robinson, his widow, probably got it right when she described them as “collaborators.”
        He was born in Georgia in 1919, the youngest of five children. His father, a poor sharecropper in a deeply racist state where lynchings were not uncommon, abandoned the family when Jackie was an infant. His mother, Mallie, moved the family to Pasadena, California, where she thought they might have a better chance, when Jackie was barely more than a year old. She worked as a domestic, and there were days when meals were missed. Although it wasn’t the Deep South, Pasadena reflected the general racism of the time, compounding the pressures of poverty. When Mallie was able to buy a house in an otherwise white neighborhood, efforts were made to drive the family out.
        Jackie’s older brother Mack was an outstanding athlete, winning a silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by finishing second to the legendary Jesse Owens in the 200-meter sprint. Despite his fame and his college education, Mack could find nothing other than janitorial work, as blacks were excluded from competing for other, more attractive jobs. So, as he was growing up, Jackie Robinson was no stranger to racial subjugation.
        He, too, was a world-class college athlete, the first student at UCLA to win varsity letters in four sports: football, basketball, track, and baseball. One rival coach called Robinson “the best basketball player in the 

United States,” while another observer said he was the greatest ballcarrier in college football. He set records in track and field, won golf and swimming championships, reached the semifinals of the national Negro tennis tournament (another example of segregated life in America at the time), and, as a player with the Brooklyn Dodgers, often astonished the others with his skills at Ping-Pong. By the time he was drafted into the Army in 1942, few if any athletes had ever been so successful at so many sports. As one of his Dodgers teammates was later to observe, his combination of athletic skills and fiery competitiveness was astounding.
        In the Army, Robinson repeatedly confronted the pervasive racism of the military at the time. Despite his college education, he was initially denied admission to the Officers Candidate School at Fort Riley (Kansas), where he was based, gaining a spot only after Joe Louis intervened. Then he was banned from the Fort Riley baseball team, despite his obviously superior skills, and told he had to play “with the colored team.” But there was no colored team. This was what “separate but equal” meant back then. When, as an officer, he tried to obtain more equality, even within segregation, by requesting more seats for black soldiers at the base PX, he was asked, over the phone, by a superior officer who obviously did not know Robinson was black, “How would you like to have your wife sitting next to a nigger?”
        Soon after, Robinson was transferred to Fort Hood in Texas, where he was ordered by a military bus driver to “get to the back of the bus where the colored people belong.” Robinson, who knew that the military had recently desegregated its buses, refused. Nonetheless, his refusal led to his being court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted and in November 1944 received an honorable discharge.
        In 1945, Robinson played professional baseball with the Kansas City Monarchs, a stalwart team in the Negro Leagues. As a college-educated man at a time when few ballplayers were, and as a nonsmoker and nondrinker, Robinson did not fit in well with the rough-and-tumble barnstorming life. Nor was he as tolerant as others of the insults of segregation they regularly experienced as they traveled. Teammates remembered him as talented but certainly not the best player in the Negro Leagues. They also remembered Robinson’s fiery temper.

Rickey Settles On Robinson

y mid-1945, Rickey had narrowed his search and begun to focus on Robinson. He thought the young man was talented enough as an athlete and liked the fact that Robinson was educated and abstained from alcohol. Robinson’s temperament both attracted and worried Rickey. His refusal to buckle under to discrimination and strength of character were exactly what Rickey wanted. But Robinson’s explosive aggressiveness concerned Rickey: while it fueled his athletic performance, it also made him vulnerable to being provoked by the intense racism he was sure to experience as the first black to play in the major leagues. Rickey strongly believed that it would be necessary for Robinson to contain himself if the experiment was to succeed. More than a decade before Martin Luther King Jr. developed techniques of nonviolent protest as a weapon against the violence of southern racism, Rickey urged the same approach on Robinson, testing him in a now-famous exchange on August 28, 1945, at Dodgers headquarters at 215 Montague Place in Brooklyn. It was the first time they had met.
        Rickey talked for a while about his extensive search and his investigation of Robinson both as an athlete and a person. He then revealed the true purpose of his search: not to hire Robinson for a new Negro League team sponsored by the Dodgers but to hire him to play for the Dodgers. Robinson reportedly was both stunned and skeptical, and later said it had taken him a long time to convince himself that Rickey meant it. Tygiel describes what happened next:

        “For three hours, Rickey harangued Robinson … graphically illustrating
        the difficulties Robinson might face. He portrayed the hostile teammate,
        the abusive opponent, the insulting fan, the obstinate hotel clerk.
        Rickey challenged the black man with racial epithets and verbally
        transplanted him into ugly confrontations. “His acting was so convincing that I
        found myself chain-gripping my fingers behind my back,” wrote Robinson.”
        “In the face of this onslaught Robinson finally responded, “Mr. Rickey,
        do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?” [Rickey] had
        awaited this moment. “I want a player with guts enough not to fight back,”
        he roared.”

        “The purpose of Rickey’s theatrics grew apparent to Robinson. When the Dodgers president posed as a player who had just punched Robinson in the cheek, the man who had fought Jim Crow in the army replied, “I get it. What you want me to say is that I’ve got another cheek.”
        Rickey then gave Robinson a copy of Papini’s Life of Christ and asked him to read the sections on nonviolence (this was more than ten years before the Montgomery bus boycott). Until Robinson was established, Rickey told him, he would have to retreat from confrontations.
        According to the one witness to that meeting, Robinson did not answer for a long time. Then he said: “Mr. Rickey, I think I can play ball … in Brooklyn. … If you want to take this gamble, I will promise you there will be no incident.” And there wasn’t. Although once Robinson was established, his fiery temperament was very much in evidence on the field, during those first crucial years, and despite extraordinary provocation, Robinson remained contained and focused, at what cost to himself one can only guess.
        Before the meeting ended, Robinson signed a contract to play for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club. After a successful 1946 season with Montreal, Robinson was promoted to the Dodgers. On April 15, 1947, the opening day of the 1947 season, he stepped out onto the Ebbets Field diamond. Everyone knew it was a landmark event for baseball. Not many understood that it was also a landmark event for America.”

Rocky Start

s Rickey anticipated, the experiment did not go smoothly. In his first 37 games, Robinson was hit by pitches six times. (In the prior season, no player was hit more than six times in the entire 154-game schedule.) There were death threats in some cities where the Dodgers played, including threats to shoot Robinson from the stands if he took the field. On several occasions, the team as a team decided to take the field anyway, as a unit, and at one game, Pee Wee Reese, the team captain and a southerner from Louisville, Kentucky, walked up to Robinson on the field and put an arm around him while they talked. This gesture did not go unnoticed, and Reese and Robinson and their families became lifelong friends.
        Most of the other white players–a veritable melting pot of American ethnicity, with names like Snider, Shuba, Erskine, Hodges, Abrams, Reiser, and Furillo–came to admire Robinson; if they had racial demons, they exorcised them, and some would later describe the experience as transforming. There were attempts by a number of southern players to refuse to play with Robinson, and a petition was circulated, but both Rickey and the then field manager, Leo Durocher, responded swiftly and firmly. Their decision to do so, and the unwillingness of most of the players, including southerners like Reese, to support the petition, doomed it. In the end, a few of the most recalcitrant players were traded by Rickey to other teams, and additional black players were signed. Everyone in this drama was forced to confront what Myrdal had called the American dilemma. Most resolved the conflict in the direction of the ideals of fairness and individual merit.
        Other problems were external to the team. There was organized hostility from the other team owners. Although no record exists of this effort, and most of the owners at the time subsequently denied it, Happy Chandler, the commissioner of baseball at the time and a former governor of Kentucky, would later confirm that the owners had condemned Rickey by a 15–1 vote. There was skepticism from star players. Bob Feller, probably the leading pitcher of his time, said loudly that he thought 

Robinson would never be able to hit an inside pitch. “If he were a white man, I doubt that they would consider him big-league material,” said Feller. (Robinson hit plenty of inside pitches; he won the batting championship in 1949, and between 1949 and 1954 hit for an average of .327, batting over .300, the general standard of excellence, all six years. This feat was equaled by only two other players at the time, Ted Williams and Stan Musial, two of the greatest hitters of all time.) Finally, there was a lot of ugly and vicious race-baiting harassment from opposing players during the game, which only gained Robinson sympathy from his teammates, especially in light of his refusal to be provoked, as he had promised Rickey at the start.
        Throughout all this, Robinson quickly became one of the league’s star players, and in the end Rickey’s experiment proved to be a spectacular success. Robinson’s performance under unimaginable pressure was truly one of the greatest athletic triumphs, if not the greatest, in American history. But it was more than that, much more. Robinson’s struggle against the entrenched racism of the time, taking place as it did within the national pastime, in front of crowds numbering in the tens of thousands every day, and reported on a daily basis in the mass media, was a drama that involved millions in a way they could never otherwise have been involved. As one prominent black civil rights leader said some years ago, describing his childhood in South Carolina: “much of my whole sense of social justice can be traced to when Jackie Robinson came through Greenville and couldn’t get off the airplane to use the restroom at the airport.” What was true for black children in the South was also true for white children in the North.

A Boy’s Primer On Race

was nine years old at the time. I lived in Brooklyn and, although many black families also lived in Brooklyn, I never saw any as a child. Separation of the races was not legally imposed in New York, as it was in the South, but in some ways racial separation in the North was even more perfectly maintained. I went to a public school that was not required by law to exclude blacks; nonetheless, from kindergarten through the eighth grade, in three separate schools, I never saw a black child.
        When I went to the movies, there were no black people–not in the audience and only rarely on the screen. If a black person did appear on the screen, it was virtually always in a cartoonish, stereotyped role.
        When I accompanied my mother to the market, I saw no blacks. When I accompanied my parents to the voting booth, no blacks were in line to vote. I never saw a black elected official. When I went with my father, a construction worker, to the union hiring hall, there were no blacks there, either. And before 1947, when he took me to Ebbets Field to see my beloved Dodgers, the crowd in the stands as well as the players on the field were as white as the ball.
        None of this seemed startling, not to me and not to my friends on the street. Children growing up, even in a liberal New York family and neighborhood, became used to the racial exclusions, as if somehow that was the natural order of things. Among whites, it was the rare parent who said anything to small children about the massive immorality of racial discrimination, and it was quite impossible for white children on their own to break free from the pervasive images that surrounded them. Thus were the cultural habits of racial separation–and its close cousin, racial subjugation–maintained.
        It would be years before such separation and invidious discrimination became the subject of debate in Congress and still more years before such discrimination would be remedied by law. How the nation became ready for that 

debate, and why groundbreaking civil rights laws and court decisions happened when they did–essentially between 1954 and 1968–is a complicated question, admitting to no singular answer. But surely part of the reason can be traced to the breaking of the color line in baseball in 1947.
        Before 1947, most Americans, unless they were personally affected by racial separation and exclusion, were not engaged by what Myrdal called the American dilemma. Of necessity, that meant virtually all whites, most of whom benefited unjustly from racial exclusion, whether they knew it or not. For example, before 1947 there were only 400 major-league jobs in baseball, and all were held by whites. Some of those whites were not as good as some of the blacks playing in the Negro Leagues. Had competition been open, and decisions made on individual merit alone, some blacks would have replaced some whites. Those whites who were not good enough held their jobs only because blacks were prohibited from competing. They benefited unjustly from racial exclusion.
        The same thing was true in more ordinary employment. My father, who struggled to find employment as a construction worker toward the end of the Depression, was helped by the fact that blacks were excluded from labor unions; in a situation where jobs were scarce and limited, excluding a whole class of people arbitrarily benefits those not excluded. My father benefited from racial exclusion–whether he realized it or not, and whether he was responsible for it or not–and, as his son, so did I. Before 1947, few whites thought about such things or related them to the patterns of separation and exclusion that prevailed at the time.
        For young people, that was especially true. How many nine-year-olds, particularly white ones, followed the drama of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955? How many nine-year-olds outside the Deep South, where even small children could not escape the conflict, were moved by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954? And how many closely followed the debates in Congress during the sixties or identified with the struggles that led to those debates? How many nine-year-olds, especially white children, were reached by those events in a personal way, or came to understand viscerally what they meant? How many were transformed? Not many.
        But fully seven years before the Supreme Court’s decision and nearly nine before Rosa Parks sat down on that Alabama bus, ordinary people all over this country, including small children black and white, participated in and learned from Jackie Robinson’s struggle in a way that was direct, powerful, and enduring. In that sense, Robinson’s feat and Rickey’s leadership constituted the first great public civil rights event of the post–World War II era.
        It has been said that baseball is America’s secular religion, and it was certainly true back then when other major league sports such as football and basketball were in their infancy. Baseball was America’s public drama, its source of heroes, its passion play. It was broadcast daily on radio (television hardly existed in 1947), and in those days you could walk along the street and literally hear the game from radios played in stores. Baseball was so central to America in those years that when the idea of canceling the 1942 season arose after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said no, because baseball was too important to morale. Baseball was an icon, perhaps the leading icon, in popular American culture.
        Growing up on the streets in Brooklyn, my friends and I were passionately involved, in a way that seemed to us familial, with our teams. In Brooklyn, we felt a personal relationship with the Dodgers players. Into that relationship in 1947 came Jackie Robinson, who as a player was so exciting that he captured our hearts and shaped our aspirations. On a team filled with heroes and stars, he was the one we most adulated. We tried to incorporate everything about him into our own styles–his intense competitiveness and assertive play, his exquisite sense of timing and surprise, his slashing disruption of the opposing team’s poise, even his batting stance.
        None of this would be worth noting today, but it was 1947. Robinson was black, and we were white and living segregated lives. While we were rooting for him to steal home, beat out a bunt, or make a saving catch in the field, we were also participants, to a degree little understood at the time, in a major racial drama, engaged in a way none of us had expected. Before we had ever heard the phrase “Jim Crow” or knew what it meant, we knew that when the Dodgers went to St. Louis to play the Cardinals, Robinson (and, later, the other black players on the team) wasn’t allowed to stay in the hotels where the other Dodgers stayed, nor eat where they ate. That–not from a book, not in school, not from a congressional debate, and not from a court case–was how I learned about racial discrimination in public accommodations. And that is how I came to hate it. That was also what led to discussions at dinner that had never taken place before, and it is how many children first heard their parents address the issue and say, even if unenthusiastically, “That isn’t right.”
        We also knew about the death threats; about the resistance of some teammates and how Rickey and Reese and others responded; and about the race baiting from opposition dugouts. We learned most of this from Red Barber, the Dodgers broadcaster, himself from Mississippi, who after hearing that Robinson had been hired first decided to resign his coveted position and then found a way to rise above his own prejudices and report the drama fairly and accurately every day–and in a southern drawl!
        Most of all, we learned from Robinson himself, from his extraordinary performance under what certainly was, and remains, the most sustained pressure any athlete has ever endured. And we learned about family, about the incredible support of his wife, Rachel, and how crucial family can be. It is quite possible that for many of us, these were the first images of black humanity we as white children had ever been allowed to see.
        By watching Jackie Robinson and the players who followed him, we learned when we were very young and in a way deeply meaningful to us, that skin color had nothing to do with talent, ability, hard work, strength of character, or any other trait that mattered. Skin color, it seemed to us then, was like eye color or hair color. It told you nothing about a man’s character or his ability to hit a baseball. For many of us, from there it was not a hard jump to understanding that skin color also told you nothing about a person’s ability to play the violin, do mathematics, or help build a tall building in New York.
        In the years after 1947, we watched while some teams, still claiming they were not prejudiced, continued to refuse to hire black players. (The New York Yankees were all white until 1955, and the Red Sox were the last team to hire a black player, in 1959–twelve years after Robinson broke the line.) We knew that for many years afterward, black and white players were not allowed to room together on road trips, and that mediocre white players were still being hired while blacks had to be superstars to crack the lineup. We watched the long resistance to hiring black coaches, managers, and general managers, even though these jobs had largely been filled by former players. From all this we learned about the difference between token symbolic progress and real progress, the layers of resistance to ending racial discrimination, and how even the most dramatic single act of desegregation cannot without more remedy undo decades of institutionalized racial exclusion.
        Finally, there was the breaking of racial separation itself among the fans. Before 1947, the crowd at Ebbets Field was virtually all white, but after 1947, things began to change. By 1949, I sat in integrated bleachers, and it felt natural. We would scream, together, when Carl Furillo fired a strike to third to nail an opposing runner. We were ecstatic, together, when Robinson, with his feints from third, forced the opposing pitcher to balk home a run. We cheered, together, when Duke Snider hit one over the scoreboard, giving Big Don Newcombe a lead he would not relinquish.
        I remember Robinson winning one game with a dramatic, late-inning drive to left-center. I found myself, an eleven-year-old white boy, embracing a middle-aged black man in the next seat. There was a sense of community between black and white that day at Ebbets Field, a meeting ground in a society that had banished most other meeting grounds, a place where black and white made common cause, both on the field and in the bleachers. It is quite possible that in those early years, Ebbets Field was the only fully integrated public accommodation in America.
        It was also a unique experience at that time to see, in such a visible and public arena, black and white teammates, working together, partners in a joint venture, and doing so successfully (the Dodgers were by far the most successful team in the National League during the decade after Robinson broke in). In a land where such interracial ventures were discouraged, if not prohibited, and thought by almost all to be a practical impossibility, the performance of the Brooklyn Dodgers as a team between 1947 and 1956 was an extraordinary and unprecedented image.
        I do not mean to suggest that everyone loved each other at the ballpark, or on the field, and went home newly free of racial prejudices and determined to fight for racial justice. It is hard today to imagine what it meant then–in the late 1940s–for a young white boy to identify with the struggle of a proud, talented, and assertive black man in his fight against racism; to watch white men like Rickey and Reese stand alongside Robinson and exercise leadership; and to somehow ingest that struggle and consider it his own. How unusual and reformative it was at the time to experience, even sometimes, a sense of commonality between white and black.
        Many of us, perhaps most, were not even aware that we were learning these lessons. They were learned nonetheless, and they prepared us for the struggles that would come in the larger society a decade and more later. By the time of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the demonstration at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, those nine-year-olds were twenty-five. Standing there in that huge crowd, we felt we had bore witness to this before. In fact, the March on Washington took place on August 28, 1963, eighteen years to the day of that first meeting between Rickey and Robinson.
        “Luck is the residue of design,” Branch Rickey liked to say, and his design for baseball turned out to be a design for America. As for Robinson, if he were alive today, he would be reminding us–and not gently–that racial inequalities still limit the opportunities and stifle the dreams of too many black children, who have not been able to escape from the layers of racial exclusion laid down over so many decades. The laws we passed, as transforming as they were, have not proved to be enough. He would be talking to us, as he did in his last public appearance shortly before he died, about the unfinished struggle, both in and out of baseball. For many who remain in that struggle, Robinson remains among us, pushing us to go further, stutter-stepping off third base, eyes flashing, heading home. 

Ira Glasser was the national executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for nearly a quarter century until his retirement in 2001.

T.J. Binyon untangles the myth of poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and examines the real complexity of his character and work.

At a ball, on September 8, 1826, Czar Nicholas I remarked to his deputy minister of education, a certain Bludov, that he had had a conversation with the “cleverest man in Russia” that afternoon. His interlocutor was more than a little surprised to learn that the man in question was the poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837). He had good reason to be, insofar as Pushkin had just arrived from Mikhailovskoe, his estate, where he had been languishing under house arrest for various indiscretions, including personal associations with virtually all the central figures in the recent Decembrist uprising. Add to this the czar’s impression that the poet was at the moment suffering from a serious form of venereal disease and, again, the less than formal attire in which he presented himself to Nicholas, and Bludov ought to have been genuinely dumbfounded.

During the interview, Pushkin told Nicholas with naive frankness (and perhaps a touch of characteristic audacity) that he would have been on the square with the rebels nine months earlier had he been able, but that he would try to change his ways. T.J. Binyon, the author of Pushkin: A Biography, finds it most surprising that Nicholas refers to him as an intellectual and not a poet. Certainly, posterity has remembered him more as a poet, but one with an exceptionally profound understanding of his country, his compatriots, his language, and the nature of poetry and literature.

These, of course, are the things that make up the myth of Pushkin. All are somewhat grounded in his life and work but selectively fertilized and projected beyond their source, whether by Dostoevsky in the famous Pushkin address of 1880, which attributes near-miraculous powers to him, or at various times by Ivan Turgenev, Marina Tsvetayeva, or the organs of the Soviet cultural industry, to name but a few. Scant days after Pushkin’s death, Mikhail Lermontov, generally considered Russia’s second-greatest poet, had begun the process with the underground circulation of his homage to Pushkin, “The Death of a Poet”:
        “The Poet is dead: a slave of honor”
        “Felled, by slanderous rumor”
        “With a bullet in his breast, and by desire for revenge”
        “His proud head now hangs down.”
        “The Poet’s spirit could not endure “
        “The shame of trivial insults,”
        “He rose up against the opinions of the world”
        “Alone, as before, and killed.*”
        A scathing attack on the hypocrisy of Petersburg’s high society, which helped bring about the events that led to Pushkin’s death, this poem immediately ignited the mythmaking machine. Like Pushkin before him, Lermontov would be exiled, and four years later, at the age of twenty-seven, he would die, like Pushkin, in a duel. This is the stuff of legends and myth. That is likely why, although it is possibly the best-known posthumous event in the traditional mythology, Binyon does not mention it. Moreover, the myth of Pushkin did not really coalesce for another thirty-five or forty years.
        Immediately upon opening Pushkin, the reader is alerted that the myths are just that; this biography aims to discover and reveal the man who inspired them. Binyon succeeds to a truly remarkable degree. He presents us with a thoroughly demythologized Pushkin: “This ‘ugly descendant of negroes’ as he called himself, was small in stature–just under five foot six. He had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually dishevelled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails–often dirty–of which 

he was inordinately proud.” The reader often struggles not to be offended or repulsed by him. Binyon’s Pushkin may not have warts, but he has several cases of venereal disease (in which he almost takes pleasure); he is rude and abrasive; he is superstitious, blasphemous, and frequently base; he is almost always callous about and often toward women; he is morally and financially irresponsible toward himself, his family, his friends, and anyone with whom he interacts; he dissembles and fawns when necessary; and he writes great, truly great, works of literature.
        The incident with Nicholas I described above, full of contradictions, implications, and enormous consequences, provides a stellar example of the challenges facing those attempting to examine the real complexity of Pushkin’s character and work. From this point on, the freedom-loving Pushkin would be intimately involved in a complex relationship with the czar, one that would implicate all aspects of his life: literary, social, personal, and financial, to note but the most obvious. He could not have anticipated what this would entail. Looking back, he had not been on the square that fateful day in December 1825 because the organizers and leaders of the failed coup simply did not trust him. Though he was known widely for his belief in freedom from political and moral oppression, they all did not trust him because “he had a big mouth” and was known to be impulsive and egotistical.
        Many of these Decembrists were his friends and fellow writers; they had been classmates in a remarkable experiment, which brought together a group of the brightest young members of the nobility for a special education to prepare them for state service. For their participation in the revolt, they received sentences ranging from execution to Siberian exile to prison. While they achieved none of their aims, they changed the course of Russian history by their example and by the fear and anxiety they instilled in the authorities, which led first to retrenchment and much later to reform. It is easy to draw a straight line from them to the Bolsheviks. Binyon’s depiction and analysis of the Decembrist phenomenon are more detailed, accurate, and informative than those found in any standard history of Russia. Fullness and richness of detail and multileveled complexity are typical of practically all episodes in this biography.

More documentary than Hollywood story

he announcement of T.J. Binyon as the winner of the 2003 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction for the first new full biography of Pushkin in several decades was greeted with considerable surprise by critics and readers, but not because of anything about the work itself. Quite simply, Binyon is known more as a writer of thrillers than as a biographer or scholar, although he does lecture on Russian literature at Oxford. His Pushkin will ensure he is known henceforth as one of the truly great biographers. Less certain, however, is whether the English-speaking world will have the patience to get to know his subject better.
        This is a massive book, chock-full of detail, and written–as it should be–more like a documentary than a Hollywood story. While it reads like the very finest of documentaries, it will not appeal to consumers of Hollywood’s generic packaged narratives or their print equivalents. It is a hard but richly rewarding work. It might seem that Onegin, the 1999 film version of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, might have prepared the ground, but despite the excellent production values of the film, its high-profile actors and director, its popular success was quite limited. Its shortcoming was surely a function of the original on which it was based, in particular the transparent simplicity of its plot.
        That plot, of course, is not what makes Eugene Onegin great. It has compellingly drawn characters as its backbone, but, like so many of Pushkin’s works, its technical sophistication, rich allusions, remarkable digressions into autobiography, social commentary, cultural references, literary intertextuality, and brilliant combination of parody and irony are what render it unique and powerful. Martha Fiennes’ lush and sensual, almost tactile, transformation of it into celluloid was in many ways superb, but its limited box-office appeal is just another example of the elusiveness of Pushkin and his work.
        Eugene Onegin is generally acknowledged to be Russian literature’s first genuine novel, despite having been written in verse, and it may be the best-known of Pushkin’s works in English translation. He also wrote some of the greatest love poems in Russian or any language, mock-heroic epics, Anacreontic verse, a variety of bawdy and blasphemous poems, brilliant epigrams, historical narratives and poems, fairy tales, history, short stories and novellas, a great historical drama in a Shakespearean vein, and much more, although it all still results in a relatively slim oeuvre, if page count is a measure of anything.
        His influences, besides his Russian mentors Zhukovsky and Karamzin, include Tasso, Byron, Sterne, Horace, and Scott, to name a few. While it may sound facile to say it, his poetry, if not his prose, is nearly impossible to translate, more so than with many other poets; and that accounts to a great extent for his profile being so much lower abroad than it is in Russia. We know Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Babel, Solzhenitsyn, and Nabokov very well, but Russia loves her poets. In the West, Pasternak is the author of Doctor Zhivago, but in Russia he is a poet. Of all the great Russian poets, Pushkin defies the translator most of all.
        Perhaps this study will generate increased interest in Pushkin’s art. Like a tempter, Binyon dangles it in front of us, saying very little about it, only tersely punctuating the narrative with references to what Pushkin was writing, publishing, burning (to avoid political problems), or conceiving at various times. He utilizes passages (in his own, deliberately pedestrian, translations) as introductions to chapters and events, leaving aside all but the briefest critical or interpretative comments. What he does say, however, makes it clear that his appreciation of Pushkin the artist is profound, and he makes the reader anxious to know more. Still, he stays true to his commitment to eschew critical commentary, and perhaps that is just as well. There is a lot of fine critical work on Pushkin available, from Lotman to Tomashevsky, Lednicki to Nabokov. This biography, however, stands alone.

Between the myth and the man

inyon frequently uses specific works to bring out the tension between the poet and the scoundrel, the myth and the man. Among Pushkin’s most revered love lyrics is one of the greatest in the Russian language and perhaps in any language, “I Recollect a Wondrous Moment.” Written in 1825, it was dedicated and hand-delivered to Anna Kern, with whom he was passionately in love and who rejected his advances. The poem is written as a profound expression in pure and ethereal form of a deep, unrequited love, and for the purposes of textual literary criticism and for the myth of Pushkin, that seems to suffice. What followed three years later surely makes one tremble to think what would have happened if Petrarch and Laura had actually ever met. The

 crudeness and banality of Pushkin’s comments in a letter after his affections were finally reciprocated in the bedroom are startling when contrasted with the ostensive sentiments of the poem, even for a reader who is not totally naive. The great Russian scholar Roman Jakobson has already explored a similar phenomenon in the life and work of the Czech poet Macha (1810–36), but hardly anyone has heard of Macha, while this poem is considered an iconic expression of genuine affection. It may well have been that, to the extent that Pushkin the man was capable of it at that point in his life.
        For sure, Pushkin was crude, rude, impulsive, self-centered, and precocious. The comparisons with Mozart in his audacious baseness combined with exceptional genius are unavoidable. (Small wonder that Pushkin wrote one of his “little tragedies” on the subject of Mozart and Salieri.) Binyon exercises admirable restraint in suspending psychologisms that would attempt to supply motive or cause for his subject’s actions where they are not explicitly given. When it is justifiable, he identifies them. Pushkin frequently comments, for example, on the inadequacies of his looks and stature, or on his African physiognomy, all of which disturbed him, and Binyon brings this out, but only as far as Pushkin did. While he generously avoids the potential psychoanalytic cornucopia he is afforded when Pushkin equates the creative process with both sexual and excretive bodily functions, he lays it on the table for those who are inclined to pursue that line of inquiry on their own. For the rest of us, there is a wink and a chuckle, and a little more of the myth is taken away.
        Pushkin is written carefully and deliberately; it manifests in the best possible way the author’s background in writing thrillers. Binyon painstakingly builds up the story, weaving and unraveling historical detail, delineating characters with a skill and sensitivity that would make many a novelist envious. The book outlines potential developments and real conundrums in the poet’s life, gradually gaining pace and intensity as it moves toward its conclusion. It starts slowly, but Binyon wants readers to know as much as possible about everything going on around the poet: about his family, upbringing, social class, school and schooling; the literary and sexual politics of his time; how card games were played and how loan sharks operated; and many, many more crucial details of daily life. Those who’ve read of the decline of Russia’s gentry, whether in Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades,” Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, get a close-up and exquisitely elaborated exploration of its early stages from the end of the eighteenth century. The gambling, overspending, and profligate and seemingly pointless lifestyles of the wealthy, soon-to-be-poor are brilliantly animated and brought to life.
        Pushkin’s ancestry hardly made it apparent that he would eventually be considered Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of the Russian literary language. On his mother’s side Pushkin was a descendant of a slave of African, probably Cameroonian, origin who came to be known as Abram Petrov Hannibal (Gannibal in Russian) and had been presented to Peter the Great in 1704. Heretofore he was generally held to have been from Ethiopia and was occasionally referred to as Peter I’s Arab, but Binyon makes the case for the specific location he asserts, a good example of the thoroughness of his research. Hannibal eventually attained a very high rank in the military and was recognized and rewarded for it. On his father’s side Pushkin descended from the traditional Russian nobility, but both sides of his family had fallen on relatively hard times before his parents married.

Gambler and dueler

ushkin and his wife belonged to a part of the nobility that had known better times and could not keep up with the lifestyle their inclinations demanded. In many ways they were an allegory for the decline of the Russian nobility. Money is one of the dominant motifs of the book; Pushkin was plagued by money problems all his life. Some he caused himself, whether by gambling, which he did all his life and without thinking of the consequences, or through foolish business ventures or publishing contracts. Indeed, Pushkin was constantly in debt; he gambled more irresponsibly than Dostoevsky (who was pathologically compulsive in his addiction) and was not unlike the young Tolstoy. Unlike those two, he never quit and never recovered financially.
        Some of his financial problems were not entirely his fault. His wife, Natalya, had expensive tastes and little appreciation of the subtleties of cash flow problems; both his family and his in-laws had serious financial problems that implicated him whether through promised but unrealized inheritances or the assumption of their debts. The situation was unmanageable, and it appears that it was only his audacity that allowed Pushkin to get through it all. The stress was intense, and Binyon allows for the possibility that his final duel may have been partially a recognition that he needed a drastic way out of his situation.
        Besides money, we are constantly reminded of Pushkin’s penchant for dueling and the deficiencies of character that led to his participation in so many encounters. He was quick-tempered, vindictive, motivated by pride, and surprisingly courageous. While dueling was illegal, it was not uncommon (as we know from War and Peace, for example), and Pushkin was fond of it as a means of dispute resolution. Its significance is magnified by its presence in such works as Eugene Onegin and “The Shot,” and by the fact that he ultimately died in a duel, in a manner not unlike that described in his works. A trio of factors is formed by the addition of the element of sex. There was simply a lot of sex–including visits to brothels and adulterous and other extramarital affairs–in Pushkin’s life, and in the life of his peers.
        Constant gratuitous involvement with money, sex, and violence: The jaded views of Pushkin’s Byronic or Sternean characters are not entirely figments of the poet’s creative imagination. Occasionally some of these things would come together

 in comical juxtaposition. As a young man Pushkin often could not afford to dress in the prescribed manner, so he would dress outlandishly, presumably to dissemble an attitude of disregard. He once showed up at a dinner while he was on service exile in the south wearing transparent breeches with nothing under them. Binyon describes the scene with reserve, while allowing its implicit humor to assert itself in full view.
        There are so many fascinating characters in this book that it is hard to select any for special mention. The outstanding Polish poet Mickiewicz, Pushkin’s classmates and friends Kuchelbecker and Delvig, also both poets, and Natalya’s mother come to mind as highly memorable. Binyon has a unique ability to allow such figures to speak for themselves and does so convincingly and artistically, while retaining his scholarly objectivity. The elaborate scholarly apparatus in the form of copious endnotes and explanatory footnotes validates the accuracy of his work.
        Passionate attention is paid to Nicholas I, always destined to play the role of the villain of nineteenth-century Russia. In this book, however, he appears much more ambiguous and complex. He is a tyrant, to be sure, but he is also genuinely interested in understanding what is going on around him; he suffers fools poorly and has a sense of duty and morality that transcends the immediate. Binyon does not relate all the nastiness of his reign because that is not central to this book’s concern. Similarly, Vladimir Dahl (1801–72) and the poet Vasiliy Zhukovsky (1783–1852) are brought to life with great strokes of inspired prose. Zhukovsky, in particular, is shown as a complex figure who made a huge difference in Pushkin’s life.

The villains

here are two outright villains in this story, and Binyon does not disguise his disdain for them. They are Pushkin’s killer, Baron George D’Anthes, and his adoptive father, Baron von Heeckeren, whose role in the poet’s demise was less direct but still pivotal. Binyon spins out the details of the series of often sordid and tawdry events that led to the tragic duel. That he does not hide his dislike of them is obvious, but he is careful in examining the forensics of the situation, and Pushkin gets his fair share of blame.
        D’AnthŠs has frequently been seen as a victim of circumstance, but Binyon leaves no room for this option. He is at the very least a cad of the first order. Blame is not the only issue, however, for these two have no obvious redeeming qualities; they are simply despicable. D’Anthes, for example, proposed to and married Pushkin’s sister-in-law to demonstrate that he was not in love with Natalya; meanwhile he was still insinuating his feelings toward the latter with little subtlety–or success.
        The other notable character, of course, is Natalya (1812–63). Just as Binyon does not conceal his dislike of the two barons, he is obviously fond of Natalya, although it is not as easy to see why. Perhaps he just wants to clear her name of the tarnish it has acquired over time, part of both the mythologizing and demythologizing processes. The standard image of Natalya is that of a capricious coquette, with little real affection for her husband and no appreciation of his vocation. Binyon leaves unchallenged the matter of her flirtatiousness and even her superficiality. It would be tempting to count the number of times he repeats the word flirt or its derivatives from the point in the book where she and Pushkin are married. He uses it like a recurring motif in a musical composition, never allowing the reader to let it out of mind. Like the ominous tolling of a bell it signals what is to come, reminding us of how the practice has been viewed by most commentators.
        Binyon does not try to make Natalya better than she was, but he makes the case that she was better than we have come to know her. Arguing that she loved her husband and never betrayed him, he allows us to recognize that when Pushkin was her age, he was no more commendable in his behavior. Traditional accounts often present the possibility that she had been the czar’s mistress, but Binyon dispels that possibility as well.
        If anything is missing in all of this, it is a sense of Pushkin as father. We are told that he loved his four children, and there are indications of his concern for them. The only comment by him expresses affection; after all, he had become a paterfamilias and seemed to accept the responsibility, even if that did not mean always being at home.
        Binyon makes it clear from the outset that the book will look at everything there is to look at. He gives as much information as he possibly can; he does not glamorize or prettify and tries to let the facts speak for themselves. They do, but it takes a while to learn their language. It soon becomes clear, for example, that gambling, impulsiveness, whoring, and carousing are much more important to the story of this life in its early years than poetry is. Poetry is there, and the precocious emergence of Pushkin’s career is marked and noted, but it is overshadowed by the other things he is doing, many of which are simply adolescent, and certainly politically incorrect, in today’s parlance.
        At the end, we still are unsure how to connect the man and the myth. There are still huge questions about his politics, personal values, and the relationship of his art to his life. He is not fully there for us, but that is, I believe, what makes this such a great book: Binyon has told us all he could and will say no more. After that there is the literature, and it is surely as great as Russia believes it to be. The dynamic process of coming to know Pushkin’s writings will be informed and enhanced by familiarity with this biography, but it is also worth the effort for all the richness of its historical, social, and cultural observations. Pushkin is a superbly well-told story of a remarkable individual. 
*My “unpoetic” translation.

Allan Reid is professor of Russian and chair of the Department of Culture and Language Studies at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, as well as president of the Canadian Association of Slavists. He has written on Bakhtin, Lotman, Babel, Aksyonov, and Gorbanevskaia.

Critic Robert Hughes tackles the protean work and tumultuous times of eighteenth-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

In 1796, Francisco de Goya, in the midst of a successful career as a portraitist of royalty and, in his own way, chronicler of history, produced a series of eighty prints that he titled Los caprichos. The word capricho–in English, caprice–implies whimsicality, playfulness, fancy. But Goya’s prints were hardly that: as he himself explained them, their subject matter was selected from “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual. . . and which, at the same time, stimulate the artist’s imagination.”

Robert Hughes New York: Knopf, 2003 429 pp., $40.00″>

        Satirical, caustic, and disturbing, Los caprichos, Goya was quick to add, did not aim to mock anyone in particular–an offense, we learn, that would have cost him his career. In Goya, a new biography of the artist, critic Robert Hughes sees that the overall effect of Los caprichos was a merciless commentary on social, political, and religious hypocrisy. Marriage, as Goya depicted it, was a form of prostitution, and the Catholic Church was beset by greed. Priests extolled chastity and moderation but pursued boys and gorged themselves on meat and drink, while abstemious monks were as voracious as cannibals. Goya’s most ferocious criticism was directed at the Inquisition, ruthlessly satirized in many prints.
        Perhaps the most famous of Los caprichos is “El sueno de la razon produce monstruos”: the sleep of reason brings forth monsters. Here, Goya shows a man asleep, his head resting on his folded arms. Owls and bats fly menacingly around his head; at his feet, a lynx sits motionless, alert and staring. Bats, bloodsucking creatures of the night, evoked associations with the devil; owls, Hughes tells us, were at the time symbols of “mindless stupidities,” not, as we might suppose today, of wisdom. Yet there is an intimation of wisdom in this unsettling scene: the ability to see through darkness and perceive truth from error was the special talent of the lynx. The sleeper is none other than an artist himself, offered a piece of artist’s chalk by one of the owls. If this is a self-portrait, Goya, at fifty, is a man exhausted; beset by demons that haunt him, assault him, but might, after all, serve to inspire him; a man seeking wisdom, yet subject to a swirling maelstrom of stupidities and evils.
        Certainly this print encapsulates Hughes’ understanding of Goya: a genius whose mind was capable of producing monstrous doubts and anxieties; who was exhausted by a mysterious and horrifying illness; who responded viscerally and emotionally to his country’s continuing troubles, including poverty, barbaric oppression, and war. “El sueno de la razon produce monstruos” was the first print of Goya’s that Hughes ever owned, purchased when he was still a student. Though a second- 

rate copy, to be sure, it tantalized him. “I realized to my astonishment,” he says, “what extremity of the tragic sense the man could put onto little sheets of paper.”

Wild man

ragic, tormented, contradictory: Hughes’ Goya is not the romantic hero created by his nineteenth-century French biographers, who so admired him, Hughes believes, “that they felt obliged to make Goya … a revolutionary, an anti-monarchist, a turbulent and erotic figure with a wild youth behind him and a fiercely ingrained resistance to any sort of interference with his artistic autonomy.” The truth is more complicated: although Goya happily identified with a kind of street dandy called a majo, he also enjoyed patronage by a succession of Bourbon royalty and the aristocracy that surrounded them. For thirty-nine years, he was a court painter. He luxuriated in weekends at country estates, produced portraits for the rich, and bragged about his earnings to friends and family. He coveted recognition and acclaim.
        Born in 1746, Goya was brought up in Zaragoza, the provincial capital of Aragon, the fourth child of Jos‚ Goya, a gilder whose commissions included church sanctuaries and architectural decorations. Goya’s mother belonged to the lowest order of nobility–a title bought, not inherited; still, his family had a certain status in the town. Goya emerged from schooling literate but hardly educated and was apprenticed at age thirteen to a painter, a friend of his father. Following his apprenticeship, like many aspiring artists, he took a sojourn to Italy. By the early 1770s, he was back in Zaragoza, where he married and began his professional career, winning several church commissions. Success might lie before him, he hoped, but his future would not be played out in the provinces. In 1775, at the age of twenty-nine, he set out for Madrid, where his brother-in-law already was established as a court artist.
        Hughes, the author of Barcelona, The Shock of the New, and American Visions, creates here a sweeping and richly complex portrait of the social, political, and cultural context in which Goya lived and worked, evoking in gritty detail Spain’s “mean, dirty” capital city, home to nearly 150,000 people and the court of Goya’s first patron, Carlos III. A diligent, even obsessive, Catholic, Carlos, Hughes notes, was a man of unalterable habit and punctilious rigidity: “His favorite metaphor of political life was the clock, with its cogs and wheels tick-tocking along in a regulated, invariable pattern.” Evenings at the court, Hughes tells us, “were said to induce a profound torpidity.” The king’s passion was aroused only by the hunt, in which he engaged whenever he possibly could. Goya’s portrait of Carlos shows him decked out in a hunting costume, his favorite regalia. Within this world of intellectual provincialism, ardent Catholicism, and the Inquisition, Goya rose to prominence, awarded commissions to design tapestries, paint portraits, and adorn churches. “I am now Painter to the King with fifteen thousand reales,” he boasted to a friend. By 1786, a decade after he arrived in Madrid, he had become an artist of repute.

        Yet within a few years, Goya’s exultations dimmed. He bristled at working within the circumscribed expectations of the court, with artists who believed their task was to imitate classical forms rather than celebrate nature. “What a scandal,” he exclaimed, “to her nature deprecated in comparison to Greek statues … without acknowledging that the smallest part of Nature confounds and amazes those who know most! What statue or cast of it might there be that is not copied from divine nature?” In 1792, he suddenly left Madrid and traveled south, apparently to find new sources for his art and revitalize his imagination.
        Instead, he succumbed to an illness as devastating as it was mysterious. His symptoms were overwhelming: he heard a constant roaring and ringing in his head; he was dizzy and prone to fainting, nauseated, and, at times, nearly blind. Soon, he became totally deaf and remained so for the rest of his life. The symptoms, Hughes notes, have been attributed to M‚niŠre’s syndrome, botulism, polio, hepatitis, meningitis, and even syphilis–a diagnosis that Hughes rejects because Goya, later, showed none of the expected signs of syphilitic degeneration. In any case, Hughes is more interested in the effects of illness than in its unknown cause. Because Goya’s physicians could not explain his illness, nor offer any treatment, much less cure, Goya was beset with anxiety. How long, he worried, would the illness last? Would it become worse, ruin his career, separate him, forever, from social relationships; would he, in the end, become mad? Deafness was the worst affliction, condemning him to unremitting isolation.
        Many months passed before he could paint again, and when he did, his fear of isolation and degradation formed the theme of several works, notably the dark and disturbing “Interior of a Prison” and “Yard With Lunatics.” Even when his subjects seemed unrelated to his illness, Goya’s work of the 1790s shows recurring evidence of his depression. Goya, Hughes writes, “had just been stricken down into the depressive’s nightmare predicament: cut off from the world and from intimate contact with others … ; alienated; lost within himself; desperately anxious … to show that things were not as bad as they seemed, that nothing was deeply wrong, that he could still function as a man 

and an artist.” Paintings of bullfights, of strolling musicians, of street life were imbued with a sense of desperation and violent fears. Outstanding among these works were Los caprichos.

The first modernist

n the thirty years left of his career, however, Goya was fueled not only by his personal demons and monsters but by a conviction that he was forging new directions, both in technique and subject matter. In Los caprichos, he experimented with and furthered the technique of aquatint, which allowed him to create modulated, painterly tones–swathes of deep black, mysterious shadows–which were not possible merely through etching. “There are no rules in painting,” he announced. “The tyranny that obliges everyone, as if they were slaves, to study in the same way or to follow the same method is a great impediment to the young who practice this very difficult art.” Instead, he encouraged, and practiced, a spontaneity in technique and vision that made his work fresh, vibrant, and, in Hughes’ eyes, prescient of modernism. His drawings, Hughes says, “exalt the scribble, the puddle, the blot, the smear, the suggestive beauty of the unfinished–and, above all, the primal struggle of light and dark, that flux from which all consciousness of shape is born.”
        But Goya’s modernism, Hughes tells us, has less to do with technical innovation than “with a questioning, irreverent attitude to life; with a persistent skepticism that sees through the official structures of society and does not pay reflexive homage to authority, whether that of church, monarch, or aristocrat; that tends, above all, to take little for granted, and to seek a continuously realistic attitude towards its themes and subjects.” Goya struck out against convention to render the sensational and the shocking: robbery and murder, adultery and rape, cannibalism. Nowhere is his rebellion more striking than in his portrayal of war. In The Second of May, The Third of May, and The Disasters of War, Goya created not paeans to patriotism and heroism but revelations of savage brutality. War destroys: “This was the irreducible fact,” Hughes tells us, “that, in a time clogged and sugared with every kind of false promise about the chivalrous nobility of war, Goya brought back from the killing fields of Spain and put in the forefront of his work.”
        Those killing fields occurred between 1808 and 1814 when Napoleon’s hundreds and thousands of trained militia took on Spain’s bedraggled, underfunded, often starving soldiers and, more astonishing to the French, the guerillas–women among them–fighting for their country and their lives. Although Goya had voiced no protest when Joseph Bonaparte was proposed by his brother as Spain’s new regent (although as a Spaniard he well understood his compatriots’ celebration of their ser autentico, or true identity), he believed that war could have no victor, only degradation on all sides. Goya’s Spanish farmers and peasants eviscerate the French with as much barbarity as the French cut the throats of their Spanish prisoners.
        The eighty etchings comprised by Disasters of War are relentless in their depiction of violence, rotting cadavers, orphaned children, birds devouring bodies still half-alive: cruelty, pain, sorrow–and, Hughes writes, “a pessimism so vast and desolating that it can fairly be called Shakespearean.” One plate is titled, tellingly, Nada: nothing. “It has all been for nothing,” in Goya’s dark view: “the countless deaths, the misery, the rape, the pillaging, the dismemberment of Spain.” Nothing except the loss of identity when violence reduces humans to no more than beasts.

        Napoleon’s defeat and Spain’s restoration under Fernando VII confirmed Goya’s pessimism about his country’s future. Although again he rendered service as court portraitist, those paintings, Hughes says, reveal Goya’s distaste for the repressive monarch. Fernando’s paranoic vengeance against real and imagined enemies made Goya’s life intolerable. In 1824, he applied for permission to take the waters in the south of France and went into self-imposed exile in Bordeaux. Deaf, ill, knowing no French, still Goya envisioned a creative future: he took up lithography, returned to portraiture, and reprised some Spanish themes in his paintings. But his health undermined whatever enthusiasms had revived: in 1825, physicians discovered a large tumor; early the next year he suffered a stroke that paralyzed half his body; and on April 16, 1826, with only a few friends at his bedside, he died.
        Hughes brings to this biography more than his usual passion for art. Certainly, he says, no one writing about the visual arts, as he has done for more than four decades, can avoid considering Goya’s work and impact. But Goya had proved an intimidating, even intransigent, subject, pushing Hughes to a writing block that lasted for years. Only after a near-fatal automobile accident that resulted in five weeks in a coma, a dozen operations, six months of hospitalization, and more than three years of therapy could Hughes return to the project. During his recovery, he had dreams about Goya: dreams that he had met the artist, dreams that Goya was manipulating the contraptions that kept Hughes’ body rigid, and his bones healing. “One does not need to be Dr. Freud,” Hughes says, “to recognize the meaning of this bizarre and obsessive vision. I had hoped to ‘capture’ Goya in writing, and he instead imprisoned me.” Nevertheless, Hughes discovered that his suffering generated empathy for his subject, a visceral understanding, that had eluded him before. “It may be,” Hughes believes, “that the writer who does not know fear, despair, and pain cannot fully know Goya.” Despite the regrettable cause, he has succeeded in capturing his subject with the trenchancy and wit that characterize all of his writing. For Hughes, Goya is a man of ferocious spirit and energy, an artist of astounding originality, an eighteenth-century Spaniard at once isolated from and embroiled in his culture, inspired and repulsed by the terrifying temper of his times. 

Linda Simon is a professor of literature at Skidmore College and a frequent contributor to The World & I.

 
“Honor is everything,” says Ahmed, a 52-year-old Palestinian Muslim. “If a person loses his honor, he becomes like an animal.” The significance of honor among Muslims is complex, especially when compared to Western standards, but in the high-context, collectivist cultures of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the inappropriate behavior of relatives brings shame to everyone in the extended family.
      Palestinian communities are typically insular. Family members often remain in the same village or neighborhood for their entire lives. “Everyone knows each other,” says Muhib Nimrat, consul with the Embassy of Jordan in Washington, D.C. “When you mention someone’s family name, most people can tell you their history.” Wealthy or poor, the reputation and honor of a family are its most important attributes.
      Steeped in a collective sense of identity, families take pride in the accomplishments of individual members and feel shame if one of them does something dishonorable. “The family plays a role in every aspect of life in the Arab world,” says Nimrat. “Whatever you do, you have to consider the immediate family and extended family, even the neighbors. How will they react? What will they think?”
      Unlike Western countries, which champion individualism, Arabs focus on the group. The family is more important than the individual.
      In the feudal, patriarchal societies of the Middle East, honor is based on what men feel is important, and reputation is everything. Unfortunately, thousands of women have been killed in the name of honor because imagination and rumors are as important as actions and events. Most, but not all, of these killings involve Muslims. Some Jewish communities, from the ancient fortress of Masada to conservative Hasidic sects of today, have similar views of tradition and ritual law but refrain from killing women in the name of honor.

Murder by family

The murder of females in the Middle East is an ancient tradition. Prior to the arrival of Islam in AD 622, Arabs occasionally buried infant daughters to avoid the possibility that they would later bring shame to the family. This practice continued through the centuries. It may still occur today among Bedouins, who consider girls most likely to sully the family honor.
      Several thousand women a year are victims of honor killings. Numerous murders are ruled an accident, suicide, or family dispute, if they’re reported at all. Police and government officials are often bribed to ignore crimes and hinder investigations. A woman beaten, burned, strangled, shot, or stabbed to death is often ruled a suicide, even when there are multiple wounds.
      Many women are killed and buried in unmarked graves; their very existence is removed from community and clan records. The fact that so many murders go unreported is indicative of the status of women and the role of culture in fundamentalist Islamic countries. “It shows that women are still sometimes seen as commodities that are owned by men,” says Carolyn Hannan, director of the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women.

      In the Palestinian communities of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel, and Jordan, women are executed in their homes, in open fields, and occasionally in public, sometimes before crowds of cheering onlookers. Honor killings account for virtually all of the murders of Palestinian women in these areas.
      Honor killings occur for a variety of offenses, including allegations of premarital or extramarital sex, refusing an arranged marriage, attempting to obtain a divorce, or simply talking with a man. If a woman brings shame to the family, her male relatives are bound by duty and culture to kill her. “A woman shamed is like rotting flesh,” a Palestinian merchant tells me. “If it is not cut away, it will consume the body. What I mean is the whole family will be tainted if she is not killed.”
      Among Arabs, marriage is traditionally a family affair, not a personal choice. Girls are often pressured into arranged marriages, while boys are not. “I was forced to marry my cousin,” laments a young Palestinian woman. “I hated him. He beat me and humiliated me in front of his family and friends. But what could I do? If I had fled, I would have been killed.”
      Men hold all the power in the marriage. They are allowed up to four wives and may divorce a wife simply by saying “I divorce thee” three times before witnesses prior to registering the decree in court. The process for divorce is much more difficult for a woman and in some communities virtually impossible without her husband’s consent.
      A woman’s activities are closely monitored by her

HONOR KILLINGS AND ISLAM The Qur’an has been inaccurately used to sanction honor killings and a host of other practices.

family. Her virginity is considered their responsibility, and she is dominated by men her entire life–first her father, then her husband, and finally her sons. When a woman’s chastity is in question, her family feels the shame, even if she is raped or the rumors prove unsubstantiated. As a result of “her” shame, the extended family is compromised. It will be difficult to arrange marriages for her unwed sisters, and her male relatives will be scorned and ridiculed until they kill her.
      Women are killed by their fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, cousins, or sons. In communities where the crime is prosecuted, teenage brothers are encouraged to kill their sisters because the consequences will be less severe due to their age. Relatives of the victims, including mothers and sisters, often defend the killings and occasionally help set them up.
      Islam is inaccurately cited as justification for these crimes. In one case, a Palestinian boy admitted to reciting the Qur’an while strangling his sister for dishonoring her family. The girl was killed because her desire for independence became public knowledge.
      Most honor killings occur in poor, rural tribal areas or among uneducated urban dwellers. “The tribal influence is an important factor,” notes Nimrat. “Education is also important. Someone who is not well educated will immediately kill his sister or wife. If he has a higher level of education, there might be some understanding.”

Sanctioned to kill

Critics claim honor killings are sanctioned by the educated elite, who pass laws that enable murderers to get off with little or no punishment. “Many groups want harsher punishment for those who commit such acts,” continues Nimrat, “but the cultural dimension plays an important role. To eradicate this will take time.”
      Even when apprehended, murderers serve little or no jail time because honor killings are accorded special status in the courts. Men convicted of premeditated murder may be imprisoned for as little as three to six months. Upon their release, friends and relatives treat them like celebrities. Ahmed, a Palestinian boy who killed his teenage sister because she refused an arranged marriage, was commended upon his release from jail. Neighbors showered him with compliments, and his father called him a hero for restoring the family honor.
      The West Bank and Gaza Strip are governed by the Palestinian Authority under a combination of Jordanian, Egyptian, and tribal laws. Israel has no jurisdiction in these territories. There are at least twenty-five “official” honor killings a year among the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and thirty-five a year in Jordan. The actual number of deaths is much higher.

Honor Killings in Jordan In Jordan the family will generally impose self-administered justice and escape legal punishment.

      Hundreds of women have died from strange and unusual accidents or questionable suicides. Many more are buried in the desert, unreported and unaccounted for. The secret of their fate is entombed with them in the sand. The lack of reliable statistics has hindered women’s groups and human rights organizations in their campaign to eliminate honor killings.
      “Uncontrollable rage” at having lost their honor is another reason given to excuse perpetrators of these killings. It’s the American equivalent of innocent by reason of insanity.
      The brutality of the attacks is shocking. An eighteen-year-old Palestinian man stabbed his teenage sister forty times because of a rumor that she was involved in an extramarital affair. The family thanked God for her death. In an adjacent neighborhood, a sixteen-year-old boy killed his divorced mother, stabbing her repeatedly as he chased her into the street. The boy told authorities he was upset because neighbors were gossiping about her allegedly immoral behavior.
      Among Palestinians, all sexual encounters, including rape and incest, are blamed on the woman. Men are presumed innocent; the woman must have tempted him into raping her or enticed him into having an affair. A woman is expected to protect her honor, even at the cost of her own life. If she survives a violent rape, she is condemned for her “mistake” and may be killed by her family.
      “The issue of consent is irrelevant when it comes to honor killings,” says Marsha Freeman, director of the International Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW). “It has to do with the woman being defiled. It completely objectifies the woman as being about her sexuality and purity. It makes her not human.”
      For Palestinian women accused of sexual infidelity or disobeying their family, there is little recourse. Few are given the opportunity to refute the charges or prove their innocence.

       It’s difficult for women to flee the situation. Arab societies are close knit, and most women lack the resources to live alone. Palestinian newspapers include advertisements placed by families who are looking for female relatives accused of immoral behavior. “When they find her, they’ll kill her,” says Jameel, a Palestinian businessman, “because the whole family wants the girl dead.” The community is warned not to interfere, not to hide the woman.
      The Palestinian community has limited resources and shelters. Women accused of inappropriate behavior are frequently jailed to protect them from their families. At least fifty women a year are imprisoned in Jordan on honor-related cases. The number held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is unknown. The length of detention ranges from a few months to several years. Some of the female detainees expressed concern that they would never be able to leave jail because their families would kill them.
      Once imprisoned, women can be released only to a male relative, who must first agree not to execute them. Regardless of assurances, women are often murdered within hours of their discharge. Fayez Mohammed secured the release of his seventeen-year-old daughter, Lamis, from a Jordanian detention center where she was staying for her protection. He guaranteed her safety and then slit her throat. Fayez was sentenced to nine months in prison for the crime.

Victims of dishonor

In Palestinian communities, a woman’s purity reflects directly on a family’s reputation. If a woman is raped, missing, or even rumored to have engaged in premarital sexual relations, she is taken to a medical clinic for a hymen exam. This process can have fatal consequences. Over 75 percent of the Palestinian women in Jordan subjected to hymen exams were subsequently killed by family members, even when tests proved they were still virgins.
      Some women, including virgins, have operations to reattach their hymen prior to marriage, in part, to ensure that they bleed on their wedding night. This procedure, illegal in most Arab countries, can save a woman’s honor, and perhaps her life. Among Arabs, it is essential that the new bride be a virgin. If the bride’s hymen is not intact, or if she fails to bleed during initial penetration, the husband can declare the marriage void and return her to her family. Viewing her as damaged goods, her family may feel they have no alternative but to kill her, even if they believe she is innocent of any wrongdoing.
      From the tribal standpoint, the only way a family can regain its honor is to eliminate the women in question. “The law of the clan is sacred,” notes Jibril, a Palestinian merchant. “A man is entitled to kill for his honor.” Several Palestinians justified honor killings by equating a woman’s reputation to glass, porcelain, or other fragile objects, stating, “Once broken, it is ruined. It cannot be fixed or repaired.”

Coerced to Kill Some Palestinian women, facing a loss of honor and certain death, have been offered a chance “to die with dignity” by strapping on explosives and killing Israelis.

      In some areas, a Palestinian woman is required to have a male relative accompany her whenever she leaves the home. Unfortunately, her male “guardian”–father, brother, uncle, or cousin–may be a sexual predator who rapes her. Should she become pregnant, he will publicly condemn her for dishonoring the family after killing both her and their unborn child. Last year, seventeen-year-old Afaf Younes was killed by her father, who had allegedly been sexually molesting her. Afaf had tried to escape his sexual abuse by running away, but she was caught and returned to her father. He then shot her in the name of honor.
      A sixteen-year-old Palestinian girl became pregnant after being raped by her younger brother. Once her condition became known, her family encouraged her older brother to kill her to remove the blemish from their honor. Her brothers, the rapist and the murderer, were exonerated. The girl was blamed. “She made a mistake,” said one of her male cousins. “She had to pay for it.”

      Even more horrifically, a four-year-old Palestinian girl, raped by a man in his mid-twenties, was left by her family to bleed to death. They did this because they felt her misfortune would sully their honor.
      Women often accept their fate and expect to be executed, even in the case of incest and rape. “They have to kill us,” exclaims Ritza, a middle-aged Palestinian woman, “to keep others from doing wrong. It is the law of our society.” It is hard to grasp the logic.
      Girls, feeling they are ruined by scandal, go submissively to the slaughter. Such is the power of culture that has conditioned both victim and killer to accept their roles. “He had no choice but to kill her,” says Rateb, whose son killed his sixteen-year-old sister after she was raped. “He was tormented. The community was persecuting him because of what his sister did. Her death has helped to wash away his shame.”

James Emery is an anthropologist and journalist. Information for this article was obtained through interviews and research conducted in North America, West Asia, and the Middle East. The names of some of the Palestinians interviewed were changed to protect their identities.