Prague

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I'd like to open this entry with a response to an anonymous "Matt," who apparently failed to notice the sarcastic tone behind my "criticism" of Turks for not speaking English. "Matt" left me a really angry message saying I'm the uneducated one. While I am a product of the public school system, I would hope that is not the case. I appreciate the attempts to cleanse my blog of its customary ethnocentrism, but I would hope that anyone bright enough to be offended would also be able to pick up on the subtlety of sarcasm. The inability to communicate with anyone has really brought home how helpless someone is in a foreign country, and it has made me feel like a huge moron for a large portion of this trip. When the lady in front of you in line at the pharmacy goes nuts on the cashier and you cannot understand what is going on, you feel inept and useless. That has been the case many times on this trip, and it will continue until I finally reach the golden medina of London, where I hear the Queen's tongue is still spoken.

First, some thoughts on Budapest. Budapest is a fairly nice city, but my feelings towards it are completely colored by the unethical cabbie with a doctored meter who charged us 40 dollar for a 5 dollar cab ride. If he hadn't been twice the size of both of us put together, we could have made a better effort at indignation, but at the end of the day he drove off with 8 times what he was rightfully owed. I then went and asked another cabbie how much our fare should have been, and when I told him of the discrepency he laughed and said "Sometimes Hungary is like Turkey." It was bad enough getting Turkish hospitality from the Turks, I didn't need it from the Hungarians. Why don't these governments regulate their taxi industry? These Europeans need to stop ripping us off, and make their money honestly, like Americans do, by working 100 hours a week.

Budapest was a great city to experience, full of trendy resturants with English signs and menues and names like "passion" or "Incognito." We went to a shopping mall that would be a credit to any American city, and not only were McDonald's ubiqtious, but Burger King as well. I felt like a man at home as I walked past a T.G.I. Friday's to buy a fountain coke at the McDonald's next to Burger King across from KFC. The fall of communism has definently upgraded the menues of many eastern europeans. Unfortunetly, I'm travelling with Richard the 5 star King who hasn't found a bowl of goulash he didn't want to stir with his silver spoon, leaving me to find the least expensive non-Pork entree on the menu, which can be quite a challenge in a country whose national cuisine is "Bacon wrapped in a Knuckle of Pork," I kid you not. The best meal we have had was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Athens, which was great. They also have a weird custom of bringing you a "running receipt" as you eat your meal, which is terrible for those of us who would rather find out the damage AFTER desert, but non-threatening to people like Richard who barely look at the bill before they forward it to Visa.

Budapest had a beautiful castle, which I couldn't tell you much about because I wasn't willing to pay for a guided tour of a castle I had no interest in. I took lots of nice pictures of the outside, though, and I'm sure it was really important to someone at some point, if to no one else than the slaves who built it. It was really nice, and it had a convenient McDonald's close by that I am sure the Castle resident used often. We also went to Hero's Square, which had lots of statues of people who I also don't know the history of, since I also wasn't willing to pay for a guide to show me around a square. They had really nice statues though, so I am sure they were important people at one point.

We also went to the Great Synagogue of Budapest, which was incredible. It is the 2nd largest synagogue in the world (largest in terms of seating capacity, but a Manhattan mega-shul has more area) and it was absolutely gorgeous. It is one of the few buildings in Budapest to survive World War II, since it was in the middle of the Jewish ghetto, which meant the Allies wouldn't bomb it, and part of it was the headquarters of the SS, which meant that the Nazis didn't bomb it. Budapest was razed completely to the ground, which is stunning when you consider that Hungary had been an independent state aligned with the Axis until the Nazis occupied it for the sole purpose of killing the Jews who lived there, as the Hungarian government had proven unwilling to enforce Nazi racial laws. Hungary had been home to 800,000 Jews, 400,000 of whom were deported and killed, 200,000 of whom died either in the ghetto or at the hands of the local Hungarian fascist parties who aligned themselves with the Nazis. These local Hungarian fascists, of course, met a quick end when the Red Army rolled in seeking vengeance. The synagogue itself is absolutely stunning, and it looks like no synagogue you would ever see, because it is modelled on a church with elements of Moorish architecture reminiscent of a Mosque, which were the only examples of attractive places of worship for the architects who built the buildings. Judaism does not really have a tradition of building gorgeous buildings; the liberal movements in America today build attractive monstrosities, but the Orthodox often worship in unadorned rooms. This particular synagogue belongs to the Neolog movement in Hungarian Jewry, which the guide was unable to explain very well, but seems to involve Orthodox ritual with a Reform level of observance. There are still around 80,000 Jews living in Budapest, but most are old, and when people came back from the war they refused to live in the area of the ghetto, which had been the Jewish district of the past. Since Jews don't really live near the Great Synagogue anymore, it is a place of worship that still operates regularly, but has the smallest congregation in Budapest. There are 22 other synagogues in the area (mostly Neolog) that people prefer. The building had been destroyed, but not levelled, by World War II, and it was used as a place of worship without any serious repair, until the end of communism when it was restored with the sponsorship of the new Hungarian government that was eager to correct the mistakes of the past and distance itself from the positions of the past regime. It was the only synagogue I've ever seen that comes close to matching the beauty of the Blue Mosque or some of the great Churches I've seen here in Europe. It was built in 1859, and I'd bet it happened when the community came into a bit of money and decided they wanted a building just as nice as their neighbor's.

Someone asked the guide if there was still anti-Semitism in Hungary, and she said "Just the usual level, but it isn't official anymore." I asked what that meant and she shrugged her shoulders and said "Hungarians hate Jews, they always have. They still hate Jews in Poland and there are no Jews there anymore. At least the government tries to be impartial now." I asked her if they had a problem with assimilation, people leaving the community. She said "It used to be that we followed the halakah (Jewish Law) stating that a Jew is the child of a Jewish woman, but now we use the definition the Nazis used that anyone with a Jewish grandparent can be Jewish if he wants to." 50 years of communist oppression has left religious life a complete mess for all denominations in Eastern Europe, and Hungarian Jews are no exception.

We saw Green Day in Budapest that night, and they put on a great show. It is a bit surreal watching Hungarian teenagers and college students pumping their hands in the air when an American band is screaming "Screw George W. Bush!" but the music was excellent and Green Day has definently come up with enough good songs to fill a quality concert in the past 16 years. The venue was half-empty, with maybe 5,000 people there. How many of those Hungarian fans really understood Green Day's lyrics? Regardless of comprehension, they love American music in Europe. Mozart would be horrified if he wondered into modern day Istanbul and heard "50 Cent" from every car driving by at insanely high speeds with no regard for pedestrians.

We took the train from Budapest to Prague, which was an experience that reflects the work ethic of a European professional -- lazy, inefficient, and luxurious. It took 8 hours, and it was nice to have some downtime to relax, since we are usually running from place to place faster than a crooked Taxi's meter.

We made it to Prague late, and immediately went in search of a resturant (of course, Richard was looking for some awful place that served whatever variation of beef seasoning that serves as the local slop at the highest possible price). We ended up so lost that we wandered over to the bridge when we thought we were going to the city center. This city is confusing. Confusing but gorgeous. Prague is a small City, which I didn't realize, a city of only 1.1 million people. In honor of being here I picked up Franz Kafka's _Metamorphisis_ this morning, and I will let you know my thoughts on Prague's favorite son after I finish reading it.

We saw a replay of Game 1 of the Finals, which is my first Pistons playoff game since I watched part of the Pacers series at Hebrew U. It was at a lousy bar, but there were two other Michiganders there to listen to us complain about Ben's whining and Tayshaun's lack of fortitude in the face of physical play. What a terrible loss. The Pistons had better shape it up or they're headed home. BTW, when people talk about the NBA game being popular in Europe, they are complete liars. It is hard to find a TV with the game, let alone NBA fans. Have foreign NBA players accomplished nothing other than squeezing Americans out of jobs? Darko seems to have fewer fans here than he does at Larry Brown's house in West Bloomfield.

We paid for a tour of Terezin, which is an hour outside of town. The tour itself took 5 hours and required getting up at 8:30 (!) but was well worth it. Terezin was a concentration camp that was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Dachau or Trebelinka, it was an internment camp that was dressed up to be a "model" camp, used to show the world how well the Nazis were treating all the undesirables they were rounding up and deporting from the countries they conquered. They also sent all the musicians and famous actors here, which meant that this camp had a world-class symphony and opera scene with incredible artists producing all sorts of stuff. Everyone who died here did due to the overcrowding conditions and the 100 hours of manual work people performed a week in factories. Almost everyone who came ended up being deported to Auschwitz or Treblinka where they almost all died. It was weird to visit a concentration camp and hear some of the music they composed in the original musicals they performed and seeing the art the children painted (all heartbreakingly captioned "Sylvia Goldstein: 1936-1944, Auschwitz." Interestingly, under the agreement between Denmark and Germany, this was the only camp that Danish Jews were deported to, and they lived under a priviledged status which exempted them from deportation. We also saw the prison where they tortured political prisoners, including the cell where the guy who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand had been held after he was caught during World War I (back when there was a Czech Government, and they hadn't been sold down the river by the Brits and the French at Munich). The camp was in excellent condition (although it was scarred by the terrible flooding that occurred here several years ago), which is owed to the fact that the Red Army was advancing so quickly that the Nazi guards had to flee and didn't have time to liquidate the camp by killing all the prisoners and blowing up the structures. They were building a massive creek to drown all the prisoners in, but the Red Army moved too quickly and they feared Soviet detention too much to complete their task. Today it is a rural town of 1,000, as well as the home to a Museum. Our guide took us down to the Secret Synagogue, which was a hidden underground prayer room known only to a few members of the camp, beautifully ornamented with verses from the Amidah, one of the most important prayers in the Jewish service: "Return in Mercy to Jerusalem Your City, and dwell in it as You have Promised." It seems like the prisoners became Zionists in their misery. Make no mistake, this was the model concentration camp, but tens of thousands of people still died here and people understood that deportation meant death and they lived only a call away from annihilation.

The tour guide was excellent, and he said "You know, I don't like Germans, but I hate Russians." When the Czech government was under Russian influence, our guide was forced to spend 6 years in school trying to learn Russian (the Soviets understood that language is really the key to national identity, and that when you can make someone speak your language and name their children Sergey and Natasha, they lose their culture quickly thereafter) before the Velvet Revolution, when he didn't have to bother with it anymore. He told us that the Czech government, after losing the Sudetenland to the Germans under the Munich Pact, tried valiantly to build a system of bunkers in imitation of the French Maginot Line. The Germans conquered the rest of the country before they could make their bunkers operational, which probably isn't that much of a shame given how easily the Germans dealt with the actual Maginot line. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to be a Czech citizen in those months when you KNEW the Germans were coming and there was nothing your people could really do to resist. It was truly a dark time in history for everyone who lived in Europe, and it will be difficult to explain 500 years from now the madness and barbarism that drove the Nazis to destroy the entire continent. I trace the present decline of European (in terms of relative geopolitics) to the massive population loss that occured with the two world wars, holocaust and flu epidemic. You can't have that many people die without suffering structural damage, and the problems that European countries are having trying to assimilate immigrants from North Africa who came because of the present labor shortage can be traced to the catastrophic events of the first half of the 20th century (not to mention communism).

After Terezin, we did our laundry at a Laundromat / internet cafe. Thank you for those of you who made it this far, I have to cut this entry short (or long?) and check on my whites. Tomorrow we will take in the two big tourist sites of Prague: another big castle that I'll take pictures of but learn nothing about, and the old Jewish Quarter as we conclude our tour of the wreckage of European Jewish Life. After that is off to Rome and great food! Thanks for all the comments, my loyal readers!

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Comments

[anonymous]

Darko
>>Darko seems to have fewer fans here than he does at Larry Brown's house in West Bloomfield.<< That's a great line. Darko was complaining today that he's not getting enough playing time. Like saying now, a day before Game 2 of the NBA Finals, after you haven't played all year, that you aren't getting enough playing time is going to do any good whatsoever. Keep up the journals, much more entertaining than the casebooks I'm currently reading. -Scott - Scott