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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

July 6, 2000

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Leave a Comment / California, Community /

Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, interim leader of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, had a few words to say about his ex-colleague: “The man is courageous with respect to what he believes in.” That man is Rabbi Abner Weiss, who for 15 years has served as spiritual leader for the largest Orthodox synagogue west of the Mississippi, the Beverly Hills-based Beth Jacob Congregation at Olympic and Doheny. Weiss has decided to abandon his prominent position in L.A.’s Jewish community to lend his expertise and experience to England’s budding Modern Orthodox community. Weiss will serve as academic head of Jewish studies and dean of the rabbinic seminary of Jews’ College at the University of London and will lead a congregation with a membership of 900 families.

Two weeks ago, the 61-year-old South African-raised spiritual leader was the subject of a going-away party, presided over by emcee Goldmark, at the Board of Rabbis’ Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles headquarters. In attendance were spiritual leaders and Board of Rabbis colleagues of every denomination, hailing from Etz Jacob Congregation, B’nai David-Judea, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Valley Beth Israel, Temple Beth Zion and the Jewish Home for the Aging, among other institutions. They used the deli-catered sendoff as an opportunity to salute Weiss and extend their admiration and good tidings for the longtime board member and past president (1994-96). Also present at the informal luncheon, organized by Michele Kirsch, was Bay Area spiritual leader Rabbi Mark Diamond, who will become the Board of Rabbis’ new president as of August.

The luncheon itself was definitely a lighthearted, amiable affair given for an erudite, outspoken and well-respected pillar of the Jewish community. Rabbi Yisroel Kelemer presided over motzi with some jocular opening remarks. Also providing some comic relief was Rabbi Jacob Pressman, rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Am, who read a humorous poem dedicated to his Board of Rabbis peer. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Rabbi Levi Meier lauded his friend as a man who “struggles authentically with life and spirituality” and assigned him the loftiest title he could summon, yedid nefesh (soul friend). Shalhevet High School founder Jerry Friedman praised Weiss as not only the rabbi he bonded with when Weiss served as Shalhevet’s halachic advisor, but as his staunchest supporter when many in the observant sector of the community were opposing the very creation of the coed school.

Rabbi Allen Freehling of University Synagogue described Weiss as a rabbi’s rabbi, one from whom other rabbis could seek counsel from. And Rabbi Mel Gottlieb of Temple Ner Shalom described his dual relationship with Weiss, as a fellow clergy member and as a Beth Jacob congregant, giving a very personal appraisal of Weiss as part of “a broad progressive modern Orthodoxy that’s rare today. …[His departure] is a very serious loss.” Gottlieb continued, “He admires the complexity of human beings and understands how to articulate it. As a rabbi watching another rabbi, I watch in admiration all that he achieves.”

Gottlieb also praised Weiss’s open-mindedness: “He’s one of the few rabbis that will allow and be proud of having a Happy Minyan in his shul.”

Joshua Berkowitz, who worked as an associate rabbi under Weiss, said he “never treated me with anything less than respect and dignity,” adding that Weiss never made him do anything he didn’t want to do.

Berkowitz praised Weiss as a man who courageously stood up to apartheid following the murder of a professor. And when they traveled to Bonn, Frankfurt, and Berlin at the invitation of the German government, Berkowitz said “he could have worn a cap or a hat but always wore his kippah.”

“You had everything going for you here,” Berkowitz kidded about Weiss’s decision to leave Los Angeles.
“It must be self-masochism on your part!”

Succinctly summing up Weiss’s L.A. legacy, Federation President John Fishel told the several dozen attendees at the gathering that Weiss brought to the Board of Rabbis “a vision that was progressive” and a “commitment to the welfare of a broader Jewish community.”

“This is kind of surrealistic,” said Weiss when he got up to the dais. “I’m listening to all these eulogies, and I’m thinking, who is this guy they’re talking about?”

Weiss, who half-jokingly pegged himself as “Jewishly rightist and politically leftist,” recounted some of his “very scary” political battles with the forces of apartheid in South Africa, enduring phone taps and seeing others detained. He also shared his joy over a meeting last year with Nelson Mandela, who acknowledged his awareness of the efforts of Weiss and other Jews involved in fighting for his release.

“I’ve never apologized for having strong opinions,” Weiss told his audience of friends and colleagues. “I’m not a pluralist, but I am absolutely tolerant of people’s right to believe differently.”

Weiss also described his experience leading Beth Jacob as the defining years of his career. “Real relationships were founded,” he said. “What has surprised me and delighted me more than any rabbinical experience is that my colleagues, especially the non-Orthodox colleagues, have shared their insecurities and vulnerabilities with me. This is something I’ve never had.”

Weiss said he felt that here in Los Angeles, unlike a community such as New York, he could feel the impact made by his efforts and that living in California allowed him to be progressive and explore con-cepts he could not in New York, such as kabbalah and public meditation.

“I don’t think it could’ve happened anywhere else but California, and not because California is crazy,” said Weiss. “It’s the right place at the right time.”

Regarding his support of Friedman’s formation of Shalhevet, Weiss responded, “Why I stuck my neck out was because there were so many kids who needed the education and were being stopped from doing it on political grounds.”

“It was very encouraging. I’ve just come to really respect him and love him,” Rabbi Michael Beals of Congregation B’nai Tikvah, a Conservative synagogue in Westchester, told the Journal after the lunchtime program ended.

Later, Rabbi Weiss spoke to the Journal at length about his big move and the emotions his decision stirred in him.”When the opportunity arose, the challenge was so great. I entertained it at once,” said Weiss, “and then the wrestling and the doubts came afterward.”

Weiss, who has a five-year contract with London University to teach graduate courses and help set up model programs for Orthodox life, says, “It’s the challenge. I have an image of what a modern Orthodox community should be.”

Weiss hopes that his work in England will have positive repercussions throughout the European Jewish community. He sees the work to be done there as important for the future of Judaism; important enough for him to put aside his personal plans.

“I was really wanting to let go and make aliyah, but it’s good to feel the juices going again,” said Weiss.Yet as he prepares to trade smog for fog, Weiss evinces that even rabbis have their qualms about leaping into the unknown.

“I’m terrified,” admitted Weiss with a nervous laugh.
Goldmark believes that Weiss will do just fine in England, even though he realizes the Board of Rabbis – and L.A.’s Jewish community as a whole – will lose a very respected voice and Orthodox leader. He illustrates his point with an anecdote of a time a while back when the Board of Rabbis was considering a female executive director candidate. Following a meeting on the subject, Goldmark phoned Weiss.”I called him and said, ‘Abner, what do you feel about a woman serving as executive director?’ Goldmark recalled, “and he said, ‘If a woman can be a member of the Board of Rabbis, why can’t she become an executive director of the Board of Rabbis?'”

Goldmark then telephoned some of the other representatives of the Orthodox community sitting on the Board of Rabbis to ask how they felt about the nomination. Says Goldmark, smiling, “They asked, ‘What did Rabbi Weiss say?'”

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow Read More »

Growing or Shrinking?

Leave a Comment / Community /

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin can’t stop laughing.
No really, I tell him, according to the numbers, the Orthodox community is shrinking.
He takes a deep breath.
“I’m trying not to get upset here,” says Cunin, sovereign of West Coast Chabad for the past 36 years. “But you have to be blind to say that.
“Have you counted the kosher restaurants? The schools? And the mikvahs – just look at the mikvahs!”

Actually, I have counted, and the numbers are pretty impressive. About 130 kosher restaurants, bakeries and markets, 5,200 kids in Orthodox day schools and about 80 shuls, from Chasidic to liberal Orthodox. And that’s stretching from the Beverly-La Brea community all the way out to the Ventura County line in Conejo, and down through Irvine and Long Beach.

I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s in Los Angeles, and I remember the days of Nosh N’Rye and Kosher Nostra – and that was it. And that’s not even going back as far as Hartman’s, the only kosher restaurant in town till the early ’70s. There were three day schools, North Hollywood was the only Valley outpost, there were a dozen or so Orthodox shuls, and when you saw a shtreimel or even a black hat walking down the street on Shabbos, it was odd enough to make you stop and point.

And you’re telling me – and the rest of this flourishing and vibrant Orthodox community – that our numbers have shrunk since the late ’70s?
Yes, says Pini Herman, principal investigator of the 1997 Los Angeles Jewish Population Survey, presented by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Close your collective jaws and look at the evidence. In a 1979 survey, those defining themselves as Orthodox constituted 5 percent of the Los Angeles Jewish population, at 11,400 households.

Today, Orthodox households number 10,600, making up just 4 percent of the population of 248,000 Jewish households in Los Angeles, the Valley and South Bay. Compare those numbers with about 18,000 Orthodox households, out of 104,000 Jewish, in 1953.
Huh?
“I can’t understand what they mean. It defies reason,” says Rabbi Gershon Bess, a leader in the Beverly-La Brea area. “On just one street, on Detroit Street, we counted, Baruch Hashem [thank God], over 200 children.”

Exactly the point, says Herman. It’s a classic case of ecological fallacy – when you are part of a community, you assume everyone is like you. “When you live in Chinatown, you think everyone is Chinese,” he says. Outsiders might also tend to overestimate the number of Orthodox Jews because they are more visible. For example, says Bruce Phillips, a sociologist who also researched the study, Americans estimate that 20 to 25 percent of the population is Jewish, when it is in fact 2 percent.

The rightward shift of Orthodoxy could explain some of the perception that more people are Orthodox – more people dress the part, and as such stand out. Still, even if the perceptions are inflated, how do you explain the number of institutions? Let’s just look at kosher restaurants.
“When I was dating in the ’60s, we had Hartman’s on Fairfax and Sixth. That was where you had business meetings, dates – that was it,” says Michelle Harlow, whose parents, Anne and the late William Bernstein, were pioneers of the Los Angeles Jewish community.

Today, there is a menu for every taste and occasion, in about six distinct geographic areas. “That just shows that the leisure activity has changed. That shows socioeconomically what the Orthodox community can afford,” counters Herman, which also might explain why attendance at Orthodox day schools has more than doubled in the last 20 years.

And, he adds, clusters of Orthodox establishments – shuls, restaurants or bookstores – can just signify a geographic shift rather than actual growth. A new mikvah in the Pico area might mean the death of one in Fairfax.

Miriam Prum Hess, director of planning and allocations at the Federation, adds another explanation for the restaurant phenomenon. Not everyone who utilizes an Orthodox establishment, whether it be a pizza shop, a mikvah or a day school, is necessarily Orthodox.

“I think we’re seeing more observance in the Conservative community, as well as the observant ethnic community of Persian Jews,” she says.
Certainly, the conservatively estimated 30,000 Persian Jews in L.A. add an interesting factor to the analysis.
Like Sephardic Jews, Persians don’t define themselves within the standard American slots of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist.
“Back home we had one monolithic community in terms of worship and belief, so we didn’t have these names,” says Rabbi David Shofet, leader of Nessah Israel Congregation, a 700-family cultural and educational center in Santa Monica. That pattern persists here, where even if observance levels differ, no one labels anyone else.

Today, many of the kosher establishments, especially on Pico, are owned by Persian Jews. “We needed the special spices and greenery, and we couldn’t get them here. That was the kernel for the huge markets like Pico Glatt and Eilat Market,” Shofet says. Persian-owned establishments have effectively changed the face of kosher cuisine in L.A. Cunin takes issue with these labels altogether. “Calling myself Orthodox doesn’t mean I am any holier and calling myself Reform doesn’t release me of the responsibility I have to God, the Torah and the Holy Land of Israel,” Cunin says. Rather, Judaism is Judaism, Torah is Torah, and people’s observance is a personal matter of where they are in their journey.

“If you approach a Chabadnik on the street and say ‘Are you Orthodox?’ they would laugh in your face,” he says. “If you asked one of the Russian immigrants who come to our schools, they would just walk away.”

My unresearched intuition is that the 1953 survey, which found about 18,000 Orthodox households in L.A., included a good number of first-generation Americans who knew only Orthodoxy from back home, who attended an Orthodox synagogue two or three times a year, who sent their kids to the only day schools around. They were more Orthodox by default than by conviction.

That might explain why the 1997 survey also found that three out of four people who say their parents were Orthodox are not now Orthodox. Perhaps it was not a meaningful Orthodox upbringing they left. Perhaps those same families who called themselves Orthodox in 1953 would call themselves Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist today.

So if the rosters have shrunk, maybe it is because they are no longer padded with people who never enjoyed a fulfilling Orthodox life. And if that is true, maybe the converse is as well. Those who define themselves as Orthodox today do so with pride and conviction, with a dedication to creating a rich, meaningful life for themselves and their children.

That is certainly true of the ba’alei teshuvah, the 30 percent of the Orthodox community who grew up outside of Orthodoxy.

A qualitatively stronger, if quantitatively smaller, community could also explain the boom in schools, eateries and shuls.

The boom goes well beyond the basics: Los Angeles is now home to an active bikur cholim society, which tends to the needs of the ill and their families; adult education for men and women at all levels; women’s tefillah groups; kollels, where the community supports men who study Torah all day long. None of these institutions is absolutely necessary.

Rather, they indicate that the community has matured beyond subsistence and is flourishing. So in the end, is their any harm in overestimating our size?

Phillips, who with Herman now runs Phillips and Herman Demographic Research, says there is grave danger.
“If they believe their own propaganda, they are going to make communal and financial decisions that endanger existing Orthodox institutions,” he says. “That means creating an overly ambitious building plan, that means you hire teachers you can’t pay. A distorted image stretches resources too thin.” And he says that can hurt not just the Orthodox but the wider commun
ity that uses the valuable services the Orthodox provide.

Meanwhile, on Pico alone, the Orthodox Union just opened a new building, YULA and Aish HaTorah are under construction and Chabad just purchased another couple of sites on Pico adjacent to its existing preschool-through-high-school buildings.

As for Rabbi Cunin; “It all depends on what kind of glasses you are wearing, what type of outcome you intended before you started,” he says. “Shrinking?” He laughs. And laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

Growing or Shrinking? Read More »

Of One Mind

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film /

Joel and Ethan Coen, the quirky auteurs of “Fargo,” “Raising Arizona” and “The Big Lebowski,” are groaning.

They are recalling a recent viewing of their first feature film, “Blood Simple” (1984), a stylish, noirish tale of murder in Texas, which is being reissued in theaters today. “We cringed through the whole movie,” admits Joel, the elder brother, who is tall and thin, with tousled long hair and a scraggly goatee.”It was a bizarre and interesting exercise,” adds Ethan, who has freckles, round spectacles and a closely clipped red beard.

When an impending DVD release led to the restored director’s cut of “Blood Simple” not long ago, the unconventional Coens did exactly the opposite of what one might expect: They made the movie a bit shorter. “We cut out all the boring parts,” they say, in stereo, with twin shrugs. They also did some re-editing, remixed the sound and added some music they couldn’t afford when they were just a couple of tenacious Jewish kids from Minneapolis shlepping their first film around to festivals in order to find a distributor.

“Blood Simple” put the brothers on the map (Ethan quit his job as a statistical typist at Macy’s), and the Coens went on to write, produce and direct a series of off-center, ironic, unsettling fables peopled with vividly drawn cartoon characters.

Though Joel is credited as director and Ethan as producer, their work is so enmeshed that even the actors can’t say who does what. It’s been said that a typical exchange after a take involves Ethan saying, “Joel,” to which his brother replies, “Yeah, Ethan, I know. I’ll tell them.”

Their odd, distanced, outsiders’ view apparently comes from growing up Jewish, with Orthodox grandparents, in the icy American heartland, which is depicted in the Oscar-winning “Fargo” as a flat, frozen wasteland, occasionally broken by a tacky pancake house or a motel.

Everything about life in the suburbs outside Minneapolis was banal, they insist; the brothers, whose parents were university professors, amused themselves by making Super-8 films or watching kitschy programs on TV. While their sister went off to become a physician in Israel, they escaped to New York, where they worked odd jobs, bummed money from friends and scraped together the funds to complete “Blood Simple.”

The irreverent Coens are notorious among journalists for refusing to answer questions, but they perked up during a Journal interview when asked about the preponderance of unusual Jewish characters in their films. There is Bernie (John Turturro), the gay Jewish con man from “Miller’s Crossing”; the Clifford Odets-like playwright (also Turturro) afflicted with writer’s block in “Barton Fink”; and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), the crazed Vietnam veteran of “The Big Lebowski,” who insists he cannot do this or that because he is shomer Shabbes.

Joel says the idea for Sobchak began as he was thinking about his Orthodox maternal grandparents and about an observant actress who once asked him if she would find work in the theater if she could not perform on Friday nights. “We wanted to explore the idea of someone in modern society who cleaves to all those rules,” Joel says. “The whole idea of this loose-cannon, gasbag Vietnam vet” proclaiming himself religious was rather funny and ironic, Ethan suggests.

As for “Barton Fink,” the brothers began the script as an antidote to their own writer’s block. While penning “Miller’s Crossing” in 1990, they could not finish the script. Instead, they paced, chain-smoked, telephoned friends, but nothing seemed to help. So they simply started another screenplay. “[It] washed out our brain, and we were able to go back and finish ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ ” Joel told The New York Times.

Of One Mind Read More »

Choosing Celibacy

Leave a Comment / Community, United States /

At 16, Carl Birman started secretly to date men. At 21, he came out and plunged into a gay world of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He joined a group called the Radical Fairies that promoted promiscuity and paganism. As for the ages between 5 and 10, he tried to bury them in the past. He did not succeed.At 39, Carl davens daily, observes the Sabbath and meditates on the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. In his struggle to reconcile the sexual abuse he says he endured during childhood with his adult quest for meaning, he has been celibate for eight years. “Given all my previous shenanigans, sins if you will, this was the only way I could move forward,” he says. “But I don’t think celibacy is the solution, unless you’re Gandhi.”

With his shaved head, thin frame and large eyes, Carl bears some resemblance to a wandering ascetic, though he works as an attorney for a nonprofit organization in Flatbush, Brooklyn. While he displays occasional flashes of wry humor, he’s a serious guy, and for good reason. He would like to meet the right man one day. For now, he’s trying to put the past to rest and advocates celibacy as a way “to help people figure out their direction in life. It’s a way to come to terms with feelings without acting on them,” he says.

Carl can divide his life in three phases.

Phase One: growing up in an upper-middle-class Reform Jewish household in Westchester, where a male member of the family stole his innocence. He told no one of the abuse. “I dissociated, though I never blocked it out completely. I became obsessed with men and interpreted that I must be gay,” he says. “I didn’t link the abuse with being gay until much later.”

Phase Two: rebelling against “warm, fuzzy, liberal Judaism” and becoming a neo-pagan. “I took paganism seriously,” he says and describes his days with the Radical Fairies as “taking gay liberation to the extreme. We were all searching for meaning and found it dancing around a fire performing pagan rituals.”For about 10 years Carl lived this way. He smoked enough marijuana to become an addict. He had relationships that turned sour. He had nightmares about his childhood and one too many moments in which he felt completely powerless over his own life. By his early 30’s, he knew he needed to leave the pagan world, where he heard plenty of anti-Semitic comments, and saw the Torah as an escape route. He gravitated toward the stories of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which illustrated how pagan desires can be sublimated. “My yearning to understand God was paramount,” he recalls. “I became attracted to Orthodoxy.”

Phase Three: purifying his soul and acknowledging there’s no quick fix for the dilemmas of his life. Though Carl has “drifted from a world where, if you’re not having sex, then you’re not gay,” he does not feel so comfortable in Orthodox Jewish settings. Once, he attended a panel at an Orthodox synagogue on sexual abuse and “found it appalling” when a speaker pointed a finger at the “evils” of feminism. Essentially, “it’s all been independent study,” he says of his Torah learning. “I can’t imagine sitting down with an Orthodox rabbi but I’d like to find one. I’d like to observe all 613 commandments because I feel that’s the most authentic way to be Jewish.”

Carl has a difficult time understanding some of the gay Orthodox Jews he’s met. “They have that American mentality that you can have everything, that you can be both Orthodox and gay and that it’s fabulous,” he says. “But it’s not so easy for me. That’s why I’ve chosen celibacy.”

Celibacy, however, does not belong in Phase Four, which has yet to take shape. Carl admits to “middle-class aspirations” of 2.5 kids, a house in the suburbs and a religious context for living life.He toys with moving to Israel one day, but “it’s all meaningless unless I have someone to share it with,” he says, emphasizing that this someone would also have to renounce the sexual behavior between men that Leviticus calls an abomination. “But there are other sexual practices that the Torah doesn’t mention. There are ways to work this out.”

Carl used to dream that he would meet his beloved at the Western Wall. But when he took that trip to Jerusalem, he did not find him. Carl takes that as a sign that he still has work to do. “I’m not looking for a quick fix; I’m still confused,” he admits. “But I’m trying to live a decent, honorable life. I want to help people and get the message out that abuse is rampant and can happen to anyone.”

Carl still has nightmares. Only now he wakes up, opens his siddur and recites morning prayers. “The healing process, it takes so long,” he says quietly. “But it’s imperative that I work this all out. … God will show me the way.”

Choosing Celibacy Read More »

Return of a Classic

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film /

For the first time since 1987, and for the first time ever in the original French, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophüls’ seminal documentary about France under Nazi occupation, comes to the U.S., including Los Angeles, this week.

Since the film’s 1971 release, there have been hundreds of Holocaust-themed feature films and documentaries, but Ophüls’ 4 1/2-hour epic about ordinary people making extraordinary choices remains classic. And through “Schindler’s List” has proven that such films may find a vast commercial audience, those who brought “The Sorrow and the Pity” back to the screen insist they did it for love.The impetus for the reissue began a couple of years ago with the Los Angeles visit of another great, if controversial, documentarian: Leni Riefenstahl.

Hitler’s old filmmaker was receiving the lifetime achievement award from Cinecon, a festival presented by the Society for Cinephiles, which sparked an outcry within the society. One member who irately left the organization in the wake of the well-publicized fray was Dennis Doros of Milestone Films.

The art-film distributor thought about all the German filmmakers who, unlike Riefenstahl, had chosen to leave Nazi Germany. He thought about “The Sorrow and the Pity,” the film about personal choice that had changed his life when he first viewed it in college. A reissue seemed more pertinent than ever, he theorized.Easier said than done. Doros had already tried, for a decade, to obtain the rights, which had been tied up with owners who had gone bankrupt. Even after he finally secured permission last year, he had another problem: Getting the word out beyond the foreign-film-art-house crowd. A sudden idea helped him gain publicity.

Doros remembered that Woody Allen, a longtime fan and supporter of Ophüls, had paid tribute to the film in “Annie Hall.” In one scene, Allen’s character, Alvy, drags Annie to see the movie, despite her complaint that she is “not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis.” At the end of “Annie Hall,” Annie drags her new boyfriend to see the film, which Alvy considers a personal triumph.

So it was not surprising that Allen promptly agreed, after a call from Doros, to sign on as a presenter of the rerelease. “The Sorrow and the Pity” “was such non-junk in a sea of mediocrity,” he told The New York Times. “It’s to the documentary what tragedy is to drama.”

The film opens July 7 at Regent Showcase Theatre, 614 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood, (323) 934-2944.

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New Film Packs Heat

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film /

Two memories prompted James D. Stern’s debut feature film, “It’s the Rage,” a parable about gun violence starring Gary Sinise, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, Anna Paquin and David Schwimmer.The first involved a bullied 6-year-old who snapped and ran amuck with a butcher knife at Stern’s school in the upscale Jewish suburb of Glencoe, Ill. The boy didn’t manage to stab anyone, “but he would have hurt a hell of a lot of children if he had had a gun,” the director says.

The second memory was of the telephone call Stern received late one night in 1983 informing him that his old college roommate had been murdered. A teenaged assailant had shot Toby, a Columbia University graduate student, over $1 as he walked his fiancée home. At the funeral, the distraught Stern, then an employee of the Manhattan Theatre Club, helped to carry the casket, to recite the “Kaddish” and to shovel earth on the grave.

“It was a huge wake-up call for me,” admits the veteran Broadway and off-Broadway producer of shows such as “Stomp” and “The Diary of Anne Frank,” starring Natali Portman. “Gun violence became more of a focal point in my political consciousness. … And I vowed one day I would dedicate something meaningful to Toby.”

Stern, 40, a part-owner of the Chicago Bulls, got his chance after breaking into the movie business with “Michael Jordan: To the Max,” a successful large-format documentary film about the athlete’s final days in pro basketball. He quietly secured the rights to Keith Reddin’s play, “It’s the Rage,” which is now a film dedicated to Toby.

The black comedy is a cautionary tale about what happens when a group of people, some ordinary, some unhinged, pack guns; apparently it was Reddin’s screenplay, revised by Stern, that prompted the stellar cast to sign on with a virtually unknown director.

The topic didn’t hurt either. The story strikes a chord in the post-Columbine era, Stern suggests. “There are lots of guns in movies,” he says. “But the reality of how everyday people react when they have a gun has rarely been explored.”

“It’s the Rage” opens today in Los Angeles.

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Making a Difference

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Kids & Teens /

There was a time, I realize now, when I doubted that one individual could make a difference; that is, a real difference in the lives of others. It was the system, the institutions, the economy, I told myself and others; it was social forces, wars, history itself that affected our lives. Not one person. Not you or me. But all that was before I met Debrah Constance.

Constance is the director of A Place Called Home (APCH), a community center and safe house for inner-city kids in South Central. Inner-city, of course, is the euphemism we use to describe Blacks and Latinos, whether we see them as helpless victims of a careless and indifferent society or as irresponsible, rotten kids who make wrong choices which land them in trouble and lead them eventually to a fate they probably deserve. In either case, they are at the center of Constance’s world today – and have been for seven years now.

It was seven years ago that this committed Jewish woman, then 46, started APCH in a church’s basement rooms. She had an enrollment of 12. Today, the center serves over 300 children daily, ages 9 to 20, with a total membership of 3,500. And it has made a difference in many of their lives, and in hers as well.I am seated with Constance in her office, a tiny trailer with a sewing machine. Constance, dressed in a white T-shirt, red slacks and wearing glasses, is attractive, spirited and natural. All the while that we are conversing, she is knitting. Her eyes move from my face to the quick turn of the knitting needles back to my face, almost in one fluid motion.

She looks toward the door, but continues knitting as Alex H., 20, enters the room. Alex is a former gang member whose troubles are far from over. He has just been released from jail after serving 35 days for a probation violation. He had phoned from jail an hour ago and, as promised, came directly back to APCH.Alex has a shaved head and a piercing under his lip. He looks, well, like someone who might just have been released from jail for violating his probation. But he has shed his old gang outfit of baggy pants and jacket for khakis and a red checkered shirt. He looks fresh and resolute. And I am more than a little surprised.Constance stands and embraces him. Tells him how good it is to have him back. Her feelings are palpable in the room. And Alex recognizes all this in an instant. He hugs her back. If he had any doubts before, they have been erased. He knows that there is no question: She will take him back. He will resume his job at APCH as activities assistant and will be able to finish school.

He starts to tell her about his time in jail. “It’s a war zone in there,” he begins. “People are killing each other. The cops, they instigate the fights between the Blacks and the Mexicans. I thought I was gonna get cut. There were guys stabbing other inmates, and innocent guys would get blamed for it. I got sent to the hole for 10 days because our dorm was one of the ones that started it. I wasn’t even involved.” He shook his head. “And Debrah, I saw a lot of the guys who were members here: Paul, Jose, Darryl. My friends. They’re doing life,” he said, despair in his voice.

Constance listens as though it’s her life on the line, not his. And then she tells him what he needs to hear: that he is going to work hard at APCH and that “you’re never going to see them again, Alex.”She knows Alex’s history. That he is one of the young people, not too dissimilar from the kids playing out their lives in prison. His family history is bleak, though familiar. His little sister was killed in front of his eyes as part of a drive-by shooting in his front yard on Halloween eve in l997. His older brother was also killed; two other brothers are in prison.

Constance knows all this, but she believes that if there is a small window of opportunity, young people like Alex can be reached. She tries to keep that window open, sometimes barely a crack and only for a moment, but she seizes every chance. She makes sure that everything is free at APCH; that the children are guaranteed a free education, tutoring, a chance to attend college free; and she offers help, real help, in finding work for them. And, not incidentally, she provides three meals a day.

In l988, as community affairs director for Jon Douglas Realtors, Constance read an article about a dedicated teacher at Jefferson High School in South Central and offered him financial help. Roland Ganges, the teacher, said “I don’t want your money; I want your time.” She tells me with a grin, “I thought, oh great, I’m dealing with a real nut.”

But she came down to South Central and worked with the teachers at Jefferson High and with the kids. “I saw the children didn’t have a safe place to go after school, that there was this tremendous need. But I had no idea what to do about it.”

Then she had an interview at KCET and they asked her, “What do you really want to do with your life?”And to her astonishment she replied, “All I want to do is open a safe house for the children of Jefferson High School in South Central.”

She rented a big house there, gave up her six-figure salary and started APCH. Today she oversees 44 paid employees (many of them youngsters she has nurtured) and an annual operating budget of $l.6 million, all from private donations.

To those who know her, it was not surprising that Constance gave up her handsome income and her secure business niche for a life helping others, for a chance to help repair even a small part of the world. For of course, she had herself once touched bottom, had needed someone to help her get straight.

She had grown up in Great Neck, Long Island, the oldest of three daughters of an advertising executive father and a mother who had been a Broadway actress. As a teenager, she herself had dropped out of high school and fought through alcoholism and drug addiction.

“I had problems growing up,” she told me. “My two sisters were Bat Mitzvahed, but I wasn’t.” Couldn’t, she implied. “It was a troubled home,” she said.

Constance has memories of sitting alone and terrified in closets and hiding naked in the snow. As a child she lived in fear of her father and felt she would never fit in. She created her own world in her bedroom closet, where she would sit for hours with her dolls, her only friends except for her younger sister, Victoria.At 17 she dropped out of school and ran off with her boyfriend to be married. It was a brutal and terrifying relationship. She ran off to Los Angeles at age 20 to live with her grandparents and enter therapy. She was married again at 25 (in 1972) and had a son, Gideon Irving Haimovitz.

That marriage ended seven years later. There were bouts of drinking, an invasive cancer and, finally, the recognition that she was an alcoholic and needed help. Then the long, painful climb up from the bottom.Touring the bustling, vividly colored headquarters of APCH, here’s what you encounter on a random day: You see the children intensely engaged in doing their homework while sprawled on cozy couches, playing video games, pecking away at computer keyboards, fashioning dolls out of yarn and socks, playing pool, eating, playing basketball or studying dance or music. There’s a music studio, a computer lab, a gym, a dance studio, classrooms, a playground and a library. The sounds are happy, bustling ones. It is possible to think of this place as a kind of little Israel flowering in the desert, for there is nothing outside except violence, desolation and hopelessness, and rejection based on notions of what children in South Central are like. And in fact, Constance told me: “My whole dream always has been to start a kibbutz. I’d always dreamed of living on one. Right here. Six blocks north, south, east and west.”

General Colin Powell, in an interview with Larry King, recently stated that if there was an APCH in every inner city, many of the seemingly intractable problems of our children would be solved. Film director and APCH secretary Robert Greenwald recalls how he got involved: “First I read an article that said it was a
safe place for kids who were in this war zone to come and do their homework. It seemed just such a pure and simple idea.”

Accredited by the Los Angeles School District, APCH offers young people not in school a chance to earn high school diplomas or GEDs. It offers programs in recreation, job training, sports, mentoring, gang prevention, intervention, and counseling. It has instruction in the visual and performing arts. This is not charity, and it is not blind forgiveness. If the children are on the premises, they have to go to school, belong to A.A., and accept the professional counseling APCH offers. The library reminds the children that it does not lend them books; it gives them away. Books may not be returned.

Among those who have found their redemption at APCH is Alex H.’s friend, Miguel Herrara, 20. Miguel was shot five times in a drive-by just outside the building that houses APCH. He had been skeptical of the place, but after being shot he decided to take a closer look. Today he is the leader of both the center’s A.A. program and its gang rehabilitation program. His father went to prison for drug smuggling when Miguel was 8 years old. “I was on the streets since I was 10,” he says. Miguel first went to jail at 13 for stealing cars. Out in six months, he became “addicted to gangbanging.” When he was 17, his daughter was born.He recalls seeing Constance for the first time while APCH was being built. “I used to see this white lady all the time, coming up, checking on stuff. Like, what was she doing? At first I thought she was a narc. She invited us to hang out at her place, attend school there, become something in life. Then I thought she was saying this stuff so we don’t raid her building. She was telling me about the games they’d have. She was telling me all these fun things and I got very excited. I never really had a childhood. She said she was building a wall for me, ’cause I liked to play handball, and there was no place to play but the alley. And then I saw the wall actually going up like she said.”

After Miguel got out of the hospital and while he was still on crutches, he ran into Constance again. “She was real worried,” he recalls, “and came over to me and asked what happened. She kept talking to me. And little by little by her talking to me, I started believing in myself. Then I decided I’m not gonna end up like my father and let my own daughter become fatherless. One day I was humbled and I came to Constance. I asked her for a job. She hired me on the spot.”

Of Miguel, Constance says, “Miguel represents what my life is about. If this center was open for only one reason, and that was to help that kid change his life around, that’s enough reason for it to be open.”So I think they’re really learning. It takes a long time. They’ve only known one kind of life. Their parents are in prison, their grandparents were gang members. So they’re just following history.”So Constance waits. And waits. “I never talk to them at first. I don’t even try to. I wait for them to look comfortable before I even say hi to them. It can take months.”

I wonder what the success of this burgeoning project tells us about the redeemability of human nature and the problems of our educational system. In all probability, the answer is both encouraging and ambiguous. One person can make an enormous difference in the lives of those she touches. But without that person, that spark and catalyst, that pure spirit free of motives of greed or power, projects like this might be frail reeds in the wind.

Constance saved herself by saving these children. Sister Patricia Connor, co-program director of APCH and a member of The Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, says: “Debrah believes that all that she’s experienced has helped her to understand these children, because she can tell each one: ‘There’s nothing you have gone through I haven’t gone through. I know addiction. I know abuse.'”

Constance had a pure and simple idea, and as long as she is here, it will grow, absorbing the buildings across the street, neighboring parking lots and abandoned factories and crack houses. After she is gone, it will take the magical presence of another person who loves the children of South Central as her own.A Place Called Home’s Web site can be found at www.apch.org

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7 Days in the Arts

Leave a Comment / Calendar, Entertainment, Picks and Clicks, What's Happening /

8Saturday

The film is a cult classic. The theatrical adaptation has inspired audiences for more than two decades. “Harold and Maude,” the offbeat comedic tale of a death-obsessed young man and the free-spirited 80-year-old woman who teaches him about life, opens today at The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum. Theatricum’s artistic director Ellen Geer appeared in the 1971 film and plays the role of Maude in this production. Saturdays at 8 p.m. through July 22; Sundays 7:30 p.m. through Sept. 24; Saturdays 4 p.m. Sept. 9-30. $20/$13 (general admission); $14/11 (students, seniors and Equity members). 1419 North Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. (310) 455-3723.

9Sunday

Rich European folk traditions come alive today with performances from two exciting groups. Limpopo brings out their blend of Russian folk music, dance and costumes for a children’s concert that includes a take-home art project, at Skirball Cultural Center. Don’t stop dancing yet, because Yiddishkayt Los Angeles presents the infectious klezmer revival sounds of The Klezmatics in a concert of new and old Yiddish songs at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater. Limpopo, 11 a.m., $5. 2701 North Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. Reservations, (323) 655-8587. The Klezmatics family show, 11 a.m., $7; concert 7 p.m., $30/$20. 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. (323) 461-3673.

10Monday

Lavish decorative gold jewelry, plaques and other objects from the ancient Ukranian culture of the Scythians are on display at LACMA West. The museum addition at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax houses over 170 precious works of art that tell the story of a once-feared warrior culture which prospered through control of Greek trade routes along the Black Sea. The wealth amassed by the Scythians is evidenced in the rich treasures now on display. “Gold of the Nomads: Scythian Treasures from Ancient Ukraine” is on display through Sept. 24. Mon., Tues., Thurs., 12 p.m.-8 p.m.; Fri. 12 p.m.-9 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Adults $7; Seniors and students, $5. 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 857-6000.

11Tuesday

“Paragraph 175” is a documentary film about the Holocaust, but even among the recent wave of such films, this one has a different story to tell. The title refers to the Nazi sodomy law, under which tens of thousands of homosexuals were arrested, forced to wear pink triangles on armbands, and sent to concentration camps. Through interviews with survivors and historical footage, the film traces the effects of the Paragraph 175 law, which remained on the books in West Germany until 1969. The screening is presented as part of the OUTFEST film festival. 2 p.m. The Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 North McCadden Pl., Los Angeles. (323) 960-2394.

12Wednesday

Great (fake) moments in film, television and theater that never quite made it into the show have surfaced on a local stage.“The Cutting Room Floor” features Dorothy Gale, Romeo and Juliet, Jan and Marcia Brady, and many others in a unique evening of one-acts and sketch comedy. Wednesdays at 8 p.m. through Aug. 16. $10, cash only. The Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. For information and reservations, call (323) 243-4488.

13Thursday

A traveling exhibition of rare books, manuscripts and artifacts from the Library of Congress makes its first stop at the Huntington Library. Now on view, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic” is composed of approximately 200 items arranged in seven sections, and includes original documents like George Washington’s 1790 letter to Touro Synagogue where he testifies his support of religious liberty. Tues.-Sun., 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., through Sept. 3. $8.50 (general admission); $8 (seniors); $6 (students); free (members and children under 12). 1151 Oxford Rd., San Marino. For more information, call (626) 405-2141, or visit www.huntington.org

14Friday

In French, with subtitles: If those words excite the cinephile in you, Raul Ruiz’s “Time Regained”, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s epic “In Search of Lost Time,” has what you need. The film opens in 1922 with Proust on his deathbed, reflecting on his life. His real memories are gradually overwhelmed by the stories and characters he has created. “Time Regained” received rave reviews at the Cannes and New York Film Festivals, no surprise considering the cast: Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, John Malkovich and others of the most respected actors around. Times vary. General Admission, $8.50; students $6.50 and seniors $5.50. Laemmle’s Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. For program information, call (310) 477-5581.

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The Senator and the Author

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment /

Two giants of the American Jewish community, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and author Herman Wouk, got together last month in Washington, D.C., to discuss their new books and other topics in front of a gathering of more than 200 people.

Wouk, who has written such works as “The Winds of War,” “Marjorie Morningstar” and “This Is My God,” said he wrote his new book for young Jewish adults who are asking themselves who they are and for new parents who look at their children and wonder who they are going to be.

He said the meat of the book, “A Will to Live On: This Is Our Heritage,” is a review of the 3,000-year history of the Jewish community, the heritage that he believes is threatened and in great peril. Lieberman asked why Wouk, in his book, was more optimistic about Israel’s future than he was about Diaspora Jewry. Wouk said that while he was excited by the growth of Kesher Israel, Orthodoxy was still only 10 percent of the American Jewish community.

“We must have the heritage,” said Wouk, apparently referring to the other 90 percent of American Jews, many without a strong Jewish education. “If we don’t have it, the melting pot goes to work not by being threatening, but like a glass of hot tea in which the sugar gradually dissolves without even being aware that it’s happening.”

On the other hand, Wouk said that even though Israel also has a minority of Orthodox Jews, it does not matter because, as one secular Jew said to him, “I’m here, I’m home, I’m a Jew, I speak Hebrew, I’m 100 percent Jewish.”

While Wouk noted that the will to live on is a plain fact of Jewish character, he said he is worried about the depth and strength of the American Jewish community, especially now that Israel is solid and stable.”In the second half of the 20th century, what the American Jewish community did [to support Israel] was one of the great feats of any community ever, to pour energy in to make something happen across the seas,” he said.

Wouk praised Lieberman’s book, “In Praise of Public Life,” as a work that would inspire young people to go into politics.

Lieberman did not talk much about that book, but rather discussed some of the themes Wouk wrote about, as well as his recent trip to Israel.Lieberman agreed with Wouk that education is a key component of Jewish survival.

“The Talmud says that in the world to come we are asked three questions: Did you negotiate in good faith, did you try to raise a family and do you have a set time for Torah learning?” he said. He noted it does not mention, for instance, keeping kosher or davening three times a day.

“They were delving to the bare rock of Jewish survival, right conduct, children and learning, and that’s what Herman appeals to us to do,” he said. “Maybe we cannot daven together [because] there are different ways we draw the mechitzah, but we can all learn together.”

As for the Middle East, Lieberman believes Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has a very hardheaded vision, not an idealistic or romantic vision, but reflects the majority of Israeli opinion which wants peace with security.

Lieberman sees the political situation in Israel as similar to the current predicament of the United States, which has an electorate that is primarily moderate but a Congress polarized by extremes.It may be easier for Barak to win a referendum [on a peace treaty] than to hold the government together, he said, because the Knesset is also dominated by extremists on both sides.

After meeting with Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Egyptians on his recent mideast trip, Lieberman said he sees a yearning for peace in all quarters but doesn’t see a sincere commitment to peace from some of Israel’s partners.

Lieberman also said that all sides he met with told him that they trusted President Clinton and believe he understands the needs of their people. Lieberman said he was not sure whether that was a good sign.

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Visiting Vietnam

Leave a Comment / Travel, Worldwide /

The 25th anniversary of Saigon’s fall has unleashed a flood of existential questions for Vietnamese and Americans. The roads taken, alternatives ignored and current choices compete for attention.Surprises and paradoxes littered the cityscapes of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi during my two-week April trip to Vietnam. First, Vietnam has become a safe, cheap and fascinating travel destination for American tourists. Schoolchildren, for instance, walk out of their way to greet you with a “hello” at museums and in parks. I’m sure a certain and unavoidable amount of anti-U.S military sentiment exists, yet almost everyone I met seemed very friendly, eager to talk and curious about the United States.

It’s impossible, even for people who have suffered in Bangkok’s traffic jams, to imagine the chaos on Saigon’s streets. Visualize the worst traffic jam you ever sat through on the 405. Now replace each car with five motorcycles, three overloaded bicycles, and a cyclo. Shrink the freeway by two thirds. Add humidity. Subtract traffic rules like lanes, direction and seat belts. That’s traffic in the new Vietnam.

The English language has also made an impressive comeback on the streets. A huge banner, for example, hanging on the recently completed Hanoi Towers proclaims in English: “Office Space Available for Lease.” Of course, Hanoi’s largest banner wraps around the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. It measures at least 20 feet high and 100 yards long and proclaims in Vietnamese, “Vietnam belongs to the people of Vietnam.”These contradicting banners lead to another perception. Traditional communist symbols currently co-exist in an odd symmetry with new corporate logos. The unofficial motto, acceptable to both older communists and younger capitalists, seems to be “money makes the world go ’round.” The attitude, at least in Saigon’s crowded markets and narrow street stalls, feels like “We won the war, you lost. Now won’t you please buy something?”

The intense energy, chaotic streets and constant bargaining for consumer goods in Saigon and Hanoi highlight the government’s dilemma. The country remains extremely poor by almost all standards, including the average number of calories consumed daily. Countryside residents average just over $150 per year, Hanoi residents top $300 per year, and Saigon residents live it up on $600 per year. Women merchants still carry produce using don garh, the two baskets suspended from either end of a pole and carried on their shoulders.

The continual presence of young children peddling postcards, especially in Saigon’s District One and central Hanoi, where tourists visit and shop, can be disconcerting, even overwhelming. I became essentially a walking ATM, purchasing numerous postcard collections, Xeroxed copies of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” “The Sorrow Of War” by Bao Ninh and “Lonely Planet’s Vietnamese Phrasebook.” Visitors might want to have a “giving” philosophy worked out in advance. After a few days, I was giving away the duplicate postcard collections to other aggressive postcard vendors. (I still brought back over 200 postcards!)

My most memorable mornings involved hiring a cyclo driver, riding around wide boulevards, and taking pictures of Saigon coming to life from 5 to 7 a.m. You can watch hundreds of Vietnamese residents exercise in the streets and parks starting at 5 a.m. Senior citizens stretch their bodies; children play soccer in the streets; a few women begin to set up on the sidewalks to sell vegetables, bread and fish. I also enjoyed very early walks along Hanoi’s beautiful Hoan Kiem Lake as hundreds of people exercised. Vietnam’s two state television channels have also created a distinct electronic culture. The channels often show close up images of butterflies, rice fields, and the day’s newspaper – with little or no camera movement. An off-screen narrator presumably provides commentary. Vietnamese television seems the total visual antithesis of MTV’s fast edits, music and seductive commercials.

Another indigenous form of Vietnamese entertainment, water puppet theater, provides an intriguing glimpse into peasant culture. Hanoi’s Water Puppet Theater, a popular attraction, depicts Vietnamese folktales in short symbolic vignettes as four musicians perform a 45-minute concert of traditional music. This peculiar evening of pre-electronic entertainment, celebrating the lives of rice farmers and national mythology, features colorful puppets moving in a languid pool. Designed for 11th century peasants and marketed to 21st century tourists, the Hanoi Water Puppet theater costs less than $3 and includes a free audiocassette. A bargain or a bore.

A far safer bet for sophisticated visitors remains Ha Long Bay, with its spectacular island peaks. Ha Long Bay, selected as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994 and featured in the film “Indochine,” awes one with its natural beauty. Boat cruises are available taking visitors to hundreds of small, uninhabited, oddly shaped limestone islands for a few hours. It’s a stunning and magnificent place in the Gulf of Tonkin that gives the distinct impression of being unearthly. Tourists usually take a one- or two-day organized excursion trip from Hanoi. During the bus trip to Ha Long Bay, one can glimpse Vietnam’s endless rice fields, water buffaloes, and women in their non (conical hats) working in the fields.

Visiting Vietnam, like visiting Israel, means running into old ghosts from painful historical periods. In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, American tourists can spend several full days just visiting museums and monuments about “the American War.” A strong nationalism and third-world revolutionary rhetoric continue to burn inside Vietnam’s museums, even while local merchants and their consumers dream of a first-world economy.

The national slogan, printed on all government forms, reads: Independence – Freedom – Happiness. Cynics and refugees joke that the dashes stand for minus signs. Ho Chi Minh’s multidecade crusade for national independence from the Japanese, French and Americans was successful. The Vietnamese paid a heavy price for victory and unifying their country – approximately 3 million people died in the war with the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies alone. Given Vietnam’s 20th-century wartime experiences with foreign powers, a certain level of classical nationalism and xenophobia seems understandable.

The War Remnants Museum, called the American War Crimes Museum until a few years ago, crams many disturbing pictures and articles documenting wartime atrocities. A surprisingly large percentage comes from Western media sources, including large color photographs of the My Lai massacre, prisoner executions, and physical torture. According to the guides, the War Remnants Museum is the most popular Saigon museum for Western tourists.

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi remains the country’s central shrine for remembering that long 20th century civil war. Thousands of children, peasants, and tourists walk two by two past stone-faced soldiers. Visitors encounter the legendary state founder in somber silence as people view the well preserved corpse of Vietnam’s George Washington. I couldn’t help wonder how history would have been different if the American government had recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence – which began by quoting our own Declaration of Independence – in 1946 instead of supporting France’s efforts to regain her former colonies.

Yet Ho Chi Minh’s formula for independence, freedom and happiness – built on the Soviet economic model, national pride, and decades of rebellion – has brought more poverty than prosperity. Reunification led to a forced exodus of at least a million ethnic Chinese, soon known as boat people, rather than some socialist promised land. New wars soon followed with Cambodia and China. I felt sad leaving Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. The cult of Ho Chi Minh, for worse or better, continues.

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