Dirty War and Broken Families

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The white handkerchief of the Plaza de Mayo

Like Christopher and 20 million other waterlogged Northeasterners, I am a bit nonplussed by the Biblical rains of late. Forget an ark–I just want shoes that don’t leak.

Instead of going for Christopher’s donut fix, however, I am trying to use a little historical perspective to remind me that rain or no rain, offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf or not, life is good here.

And for that, I need little more than to remember my trip last week to Argentina, where last Wednesday was National Day of Memory (El Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia, for those of you keeping score at home). As with so many Memorial Days, the implied memory was not of that one really great summer day back in 1992 where they got high for the first time and kissed that cute girl from homeroom. No, rather, Memorial Days are somber days, and in Argentina, they are memories of things that happened not very long ago and are still not nearly over.

I had the privilege of spending much of the Day of Memory with Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, who had a somewhat terrifying front-row seat (as a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald) on the Dirty War, in which the Argentine government killed tens of thousands (20,000? 30,000?) of its enemies (students, leftists, Jews, psychiatrists, and anyone else deemed oppositional) from 1976 to 1983.

I’m not the person, and this is not the place, for a primer on the Dirty War. For that, there’s Wikipedia. Or, if you read Spanish, check out Uki’s book on the young naval officer who betrayed a group of grieving mothers and had many of them killed (or his more recent bestseller in English about the plot that brought Nazis to Argentina after the war).

As a parent, though, I find that the most fascinating thing about the Dirty War, and the efforts to memorialize it, is how traumatic it was for families. The enduring symbols of the victims are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who would gather in the square across from the interior ministry while waiting for their case numbers to be called so they could ask what had happened to their young children who had been “disappeared.” Since any type of public assemblage was outlawed, they wore white handkerchiefs to identify themselves to each other.

Though its founders were murdered, the group reformed and still marches today, still looking for answers they’ll likely never get. Unfortunately, they are represented these days by the shrill Hebe de Bonafini, who, like some of the 9/11 widows, wades too far into the politics of the day.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, though, had a different mission: They were the parents of women who were pregnant when they were taken prisoner. Being good Catholics, the military junta would not kill a fetus, so they allowed the children to be born before killing the mothers. The orphaned babies were then adopted by junta sympathizers and military families who wanted babies of their own.

Such a perverse scenario, and one which still raises discomfiting questions of identity and parenting today. To whit: the grandmothers’ group pushed for–and won–a law that forces adopted children (who would be about my age now) to give DNA samples so it can become clear whether they were the children of prisoners or not.

But would you want to know? If you had been raised by a family for 30 years–your whole life–would you want to find out that the people you call your parents had actually just harvested you from your birth parents before they were murdered by the government?

The DNA law is thought to specifically be targeting the adult children, adopted in 1976, of media titan Ernestina Herrera de Noble. But her children don’t want to know if they were actually born to the disappeared. I don’t know that they should be forced to find out. Regardless of your sympathies in the war, it seems unfair to upend the lives of people who were at the time just innocents, just babies.

So there it is: your daily dose of horrifying moral choices that you will likely never have to face, as child or parent. I’m gonna go enjoy the rain some more.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=459524

God Bless the Donut Pub

donut pubSpend ten minutes around me, and you will learn that I am not a man who wants any part of rural life. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and I’ve pretty much had my fill of car culture and hanging out at the mall on weekends.  I conform to, have even cultivated, the worst Woody Allenish clichés about New York City existence. I have to be coaxed into leaving the island of Manhattan, and get fidgety when I do. When confronted with greenery, I start to sneeze. I was once caused to go camping, by a long-ago girlfriend, and spent the entire four days sitting around glumly waiting for it to end. (Mostly because it rained the entire time. I took that as a hint from Mother Nature.) Unlike Nate, who is pleasingly and sanely conflicted on these matters, I am a provincial, parochial, ridiculous chauvinist. I will do everything I can to live the rest of my life on this particular hunk of schist. Frank O’Hara put it nicely: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” Solidarity, daddy-o. I’m even lucky enough to have married a city girl who more or less agrees with me.

And yet, as I trudged twenty blocks downtown to daycare in the rain this morning, for the second day in a row… pushing a baby in a stroller covered with one of those horrible oxygen-tent rain guards … holding a cheapo umbrella that blew out several times and lost most of its structural integrity halfway through the trip … I had a moment. It involved, just for a second, a big minivan with a sliding door and a carseat, and a commute that involved nothing wet except a travel mug of coffee. Just for a moment, I had a vision of my alternate life, and it seemed ever so much easier.

Fortunately, I have recourse at moments like this. It involves a stop at a place called the Donut Pub–a local institution that’s been on 14th Street since 1964. It has a spotless marble countertop, swiveling diner-style stools, and old Greek guys dispensing crullers. The donuts are several orders of magnitude better than Dunkin’; the coffee is as hot as fresh lava; and they’ll let you read the paper at the counter for as long as you want while your soaking-wet pants drip dry. On a morning when you’re feeling a little fragile, it takes the sting right out of everyday life.

Globalizing Children’s Literature

photo (13)So it might have been rough on the kids (and my wife) that I was away last week in Buenos Aires. Knowing that I was out having a great time in the land of empanadas and Quilmes beer probably didn’t help much.

So I shopped well for everyone to let them know that I was, um, thinking of them. That included, as it always does on my trips overseas, a visit to local bookstores to look for good children’s books to bring back home.

This time I went to Yenny bookstore in the Alto Palermo shopping mall (I know, before you Buenos Aires snobs write in, that the Ateneo bookstore is much cooler). But see, Yenny had a big kid’s book section, and plenty of great titles to choose from. The only thing is that they were, by and large, the exact same books I’ve found in bookstores in Berlin, Madrid, Istanbul–you name it, you’ll always have your Sendaks, your Carles, your Boyntons, and the rest of the small elite of American and European authors whose works you’ll find on every continent.

I don’t mind that great books are translated and sent around the world. And there’s something a little dizzying, in a good way, about the idea of the book I photographed up top (which I found in Yenny but didn’t buy): a Russian Tolstoy story illustrated and adapted for children by a couple of Koreans, on sale in Spanish in Buenos Aires. It’s the perfect example of what Jorge Drexler was singing about in his sparkly remake of “Disneylandia”.

My problem is that I travel quickly but want to remember deeply. I want something that is actually produced in the country I’m visiting, and, god forbid, that might actually say something about that country. That’s where the global kidlit industry can be a little depressing.cuero negro, vaca blanca_Page_01

I did finally find, hidden in a corner, the book Cuero Negro, Vaca Blanca (Black Leather, White Cow), written by Pablo Bernasconi. I know, he’s got an Italian last name, but so does everyone in Argentina. The fact is that he is an Argentinian children’s book author who does very cool stories with great pastiche illustrations, and I found his book in Buenos Aires. Sure, I read later on his blog that the book had actually been published by Random House and translated into English and Korean a half-decade before it was released in Argentina. But still, it’s about cows, which are a national Argentine obsession (my other pickup was called Opuestoros, which has been translated as Oppbullsits, and may or may not be Argentinian, but should be just because it’s also cute and bovine). My four-year-old daughter is seriously into this book already, and I’m happier for it.

I know that Maurice Sendak is a world heritage and whatnot, but I do feel for lesser-known authors around the world who would like to be able to make a living writing books for the kids of their countries. Books that can smartly reflect their national obsessions and values. It just seems more difficult than ever to actually pull that off.