DANCING IN THE STREETS: A History of Collective Joy

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company. $26.

Reviewed by C.  Bertelsen

“Dancing in the Streets” is, frankly, a brilliant book. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of “Nickel and Dimed,” “Blood Rites,” and other journalistic commentaries on human society, is not an academic, although she documents everything as would an academic. Nevertheless, some readers might quibble over this omission or that in this highly readable and multilayered book. But the truth is that Ehrenreich probes a hollow place in contemporary society and comes up with some intriguing explanations about why we are who we are today. By synthesizing a large number of seemingly disparate ideas and sources, she speaks with authority about the increasing absence of collective joy in Western society, tracing the loss of what appears to be a basic human need.

Using a chronological framework, Ehrenreich moves through western history, beginning with the prehistoric roots of archaic ecstasy, passing through the Middle Ages, the Age of Reason, Puritanism and its associated military reform, colonialism, fascism, the rock rebellion of the 1960s, and ending with the modern-day frenzy surrounding sports. Along the way, she touches on the oppression of women and ancient female-generated dance and worship.

Ehrenreich starts by examining the ecstatic ritual surrounding the worship of the Greek god, Dionysius, and the impact of that ritual on the everyday lives of the ancient Greeks. Hinting that early Christian rites bore no resemblance to today’s staid “sit-down” Christian worship services and that dancing played a role in those rituals, similar to Greek and Jewish practice, she proposes a number of credible reasons for the gradual decline of communal joy and festivities in the West and in areas colonized by Westerners.

One of the paramount reasons for this decline lies with the early Roman Catholic Church cracking down on sacred dance, which likely took place within the worship space. Dancing and festivals thus moved from the worship space to the streets. In the beginning, both noble elites and their vassals and peasants all celebrated feasts days and other events communally. But as time went on, the elite and the powerful found the raucous behavior associated with the festivals, particularly in the Lord of Misrule traditions and the antagonistic jokes made by the peasants about the nobility, to be disturbing enough to begin withdrawing from the public celebrations. More and more, the nobility and powerful Church authorities attempted to control these festivals that occurred with regularity through the year—one out of every four days during the Middle Ages was an official religious feast day or holiday of some sort. Carnival became a primary target for such control.

In another fascinating discussion, Ehrenreich shows how Puritanism helped to squelch the Carnivalesque behavior of the common soldier. Prior to the introduction of Calvinism, soldiers spent a lot of time sitting around, drinking and carousing. The seventeenth-century English soldier and politician, Oliver Cromwell, changed all that by demanding constant drilling and other tasks that left soldiers little time for anything untoward and undisciplined. The military of today reflects those changes.

Calvinism affected society in other ways as well. The number of suicides in the Swiss canton of Zurich increased sharply in the sixteenth century, just as Calvinism took hold. Prior to the sixteenth century, few remarks about depression turned up in historical records. Claiming that suicide is a sure marker for depression, the author documents these conclusions well and suggests that communal ecstatic ritual and festivities may well have acted as a cure for depression over the ages.

The signs of yearning for collective joy appear everywhere in our modern, individualistic society, but manifest themselves most vividly with the extreme preoccupation with sports. College football fans in particular represent a concrete example of Ehrenreich’s basic theory. With body painting, chants and songs, outlandish costumes and masks, and even just T-shirts in school colors, any American college town in autumn revels in a spectacle that could very well have transpired during Carnival week in the Middle Ages. And that’s the thing—society today is a “society of the spectacle,” of passive observance of organized activity.

If the book sports any defect, it lies with sporadic ponderous wordspeak and occasional convoluted sentence structure.

“Dancing in the Streets” is brilliant, profound, disturbing, exhilarating, and revolutionary. If nothing else, it will cause you to look differently at the sports fans in your life.

© 2008, originalyl published in The Roanoke Times.

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CLEOPATRA: Last Queen of Egypt

By Joyce Tyldesley
Basic Books. 304 pages. $27.50.
Reviewed by C. Bertelsen

Shakespeare immortalized the notorious Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII, in his play (circa 1607), “Antony & Cleopatra.” Through the centuries, other writers and artists took up similar themes in numerous works of literature and art, including film director Joseph L. Mankiewicz who directed the 1963 film, “Cleopatra.” People today might be forgiven if Elizabeth Taylor comes to mind when they think of Cleopatra. Long considered the immoral and blood-thirsty Egyptian paramour of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, the legendary Cleopatra gets a new public relations agent, as it were, in British Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley’s “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.”

With the goal of putting “Cleopatra back into her own, predominantly Egyptian context,” Tyldesley traces Cleopatra’s Ptolemy family tree and the convoluted relationships therein. She confirms Cleopatra’s romantic liaisons with Roman rulers and conquerors, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, who appear in the book in detail. In Egyptian culture of the time, Cleopatra may well have thought she was married to these two men, a lawful wife. Archaeological and documentary evidence portray an entirely different Cleopatra from the one vilified in propaganda spewed by her contemporary Octavian and other powerful Romans. “The Romans, who looked long and hard at Cleopatra, never saw a wife. They saw an unnatural, immodest woman who preyed on other women’s husbands.” Unlike Greek and Roman women of the time, many Egyptian women lived free, intellectual lives. In this fact perhaps lay the seed of the rumors and back-stabbing behind Cleopatra’s legacy centuries after her suicide.

Tyldesley provides many scholarly tools for readers to use as she excavates Cleopatra’s life story from the many layers of Roman innuendo. Family trees, photographs of archaeological finds and statues, and maps help to make sense of the political intrigue characterizing Cleopatra’s times. Quotations from Plutarch round out details of Cleopatra’s palace life: “Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that … having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded … to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. … [He] saw … eight wild boars a-roasting,” for only twelve diners.

A solid piece of scholarship, Tyldesley’s revisionist “Cleopatra” examines the whole arc of Cleopatra’s life and her cultural milieu. The power struggles between Rome and Egypt predominate. And the city of Alexandria merits its own chapter, as it was an important center for the Ptolemies, their seat of intellectual and political power.

Tyldesley rebukes many academic accounts of Cleopatra’s life, a number of which “have been unable to cast aside Shakespeare’s vision and have been seduced into quoting Shakespeare as if he were a primary historical source.” Ironically, Arab historians, with access to Egypt’s oral history, preserved much of Cleopatra’s real story.

© 2008 C. Bertelsen. Published in The Roanoke Times, Sunday, November 2, 2008.

MY FATHER’S PARADISE: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

By Ariel Sabar
Algonquin Books. 352 pages. $25.95.

Reviewed by Cynthia D. Bertelsen
Cynthia D. Bertelsen is a writer living in Blacksburg.

Be forewarned: you will lose sleep over this book.

Journalist Ariel Sabar’s story about his father, Yona Beh Sabagha (later Sabar), an Iraqi Jew who grew up speaking Jesus’s lingua franca-Aramaic, mesmerizes from the very first sentences: “I am the keeper of my family’s stories. I am the guardian of its honor. I am the defender of its traditions. As the first-born son of a Kurdish father, these, they tell me, are my duties.”

But Sabar wasn’t always the good son, the keeper of stories and honor and tradition. He grew up rebellious, born in the la-la land of make-believe, Los Angeles, California. “Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A.” When Sabar experienced the birth of his own son, suddenly he needed to know his father’s story.  He quit his job at a well-respected newspaper and started researching and writing My Father’s Paradise. It took him three years, and included two trips to war-torn Iraq.

In the tradition of the famed storytellers of Zakho, his ancestral village, Sabar narrates a saga so touching, so amazing, so miraculous that the reader will feel awe for the resiliency of the human spirit. And also awareness of what immigrants to strange lands sacrifice in their exile, whether exile is self-imposed or forced upon them.

Beginning with the mud hut where his father was born to illiterate parents, Ariel Sabar recaptures the sense of Iraqi Jewish life in the shadows of looming mountains close to the Turkish border. From there the action moves to Israel, where phenomenal challenges faced his young father, one of the 120,000 Iraqi Jews airlifted out of Iraq to Israel in 1950. That little-known diaspora brought them to the Promised Land, but the bigotry and intolerance of European-born Jews toward the Kurds soured their experience. By the quirkiest of fates, young Yona earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and became one of the world’s most renowned and respected linguists of Aramaic at UCLA. In the end, the action moves back to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, where Sabar and his father searched for Yona’s older sister Rifqa, kidnapped by a wet nurse hired in the 1930s when Ariel’s grandmother couldn’t feed her.

Juxtaposed with Yona’s story are vignettes and informational passages about Kurdistan, Muslims, Jews, Christians, language, women, love, marriage, and history. Sabar also reveals the poignant story of how he came to understand and appreciate his strange immigrant father, a man who wore plaid suits better suited to 1960s golf courses than 1980s Los Angeles-“he was a bad dresser in a fashionable city.”

All this is the stuff of both Hollywoodish high drama and profound lessons about life. Unlike many memoirs flooding the book market these days, My Father’s Paradise is both unique and universal. Unique because of the isolation of the Zakho Kurds and the archaic language they spoke. And universal because it’s not just Yona Sabar’s story-it’s everyone’s. My Father’s Paradise is ultimately about the struggle to find a place in the world to call home.

C. Bertelsen’s review of Ariel Sabar’s new book, MY FATHER’S PARADISE: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, appeared in The Roanoke Times, Sunday, September 21, 2008. Read it here.