August 16, 2010

At The Express Tribune we’ve dispatched reporters from our small team to cover the floods that hit Pakistan about two weeks ago. And the strangest of stories are coming in. One that Fawad Ali Shah filed from Khairpur in upper Sindh was that young men were killing pigs.

Not cops. No that lingo doesn’t swing here. Actual pigs. Wild boar actually. The animals are a menace for villagers because they eat crops and destroy stored produce. Fawad, who went to Khairpur from Karachi, hopped a ride with a navy rescue team that went around in a boat. They found some young men who had stayed back in one abandoned village. The women and children and elderly had been sent to safer ground already, thankfully. These boys kept some rations and hung out in the half-submerged village because the flooding had brought the pigs out in the open. Fortunately the men had a place to stay because their houses were built on slightly elevated ground.

These men keep dogs specifically for protection against the pigs. Fawad saw them having a stroll with them on Monday and when he asked, they replied to his amazement that they had deliberately stayed back so that they could catch the pigs once and for all. That, I suppose is the sweetest revenge.

Another great story, from our Express News television channel came from reporter Rehan Hashmi who found an elderly woman who had arrived at one of the relief camps set up in Karachi. She had threatened her family that she would kill herself in Jacobabad. But get this, not because she had lost everything she owned in the flooding. Because she wanted her hookah.

The cameraman got a great shot of the woman with the hookah, which is perhaps better known as the nargile or water pipe, or if you’re an American college student, a huge bong. Yup. Many women in the countryside, small villages and towns are awfully fond of tobacco. In a way, as I’ve seen it, people sit around in the evenings passing around the hookah and chewing the fat.

We also got some terrible, terrible photographs from our guy Athar Khan. He went to one of the relief camps set up on the outskirts of Karachi and caught a woman and two kids fighting over a bag of flour. I cannot tell you just how many photographs of crying, fly-covered babies have flooded us in the newsroom. Some of my sister’s friends returned from distributing relief in Rahimyar Khan. One of them was a young man, who had four packets of biscuits left. He leaned out of the window of the truck to give it and saw one hundred hands outstretched. He was crying as he told the story.

I basically belong to Sukkur in Sindh but have very weak links to my ‘hometown’. When this flooding hit Sindh I told myself every five minutes that I should go there – not just to take medicines and food – but to write about it. Unfortunately, I need to do my duty at the newspaper. It’s my job to work with the reporters and photographers.

Pakistan is never really going to properly recover from this disaster of epic proportions. Our government is so corrupt that everyone is skeptical that the money for rehabilitation will be properly used. There is talk of the government falling. Someone told me that Chaudhry Nisar will be the new prime minister. Someone reminded me that the cyclone of 1971 had a similar effect.

We spoke to a schoolteacher in Sindh who said that because the schools have been turned into relief camps, kids are obviously not going to start the semester on time. He also said that the displaced people were ruining the schools. They were chopping up its furniture for fire.

Some good news trickled in. The Americans flew in two flights of tent material from the USAID warehouse in Italy. The plastic sheeting is the same kind that became popular with the people displaced by the earthquake in 2005. I remember, at that time, we thought it was the worst thing that could have ever happen to a country already at its knees. Not any more.

(For these stories please visit http://tribune.com.pk and go to the Sindh section)

In the new book, Furious Love, about the fervent, stormy romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that has been optioned for film, the lovers have a quarrel about Judaism.

In one scene, the joint biography by Sam Kashner, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and Nancy Schoenberger, an author, depicts Taylor and Burton having one of their usual, theatrical spats—over who was more “Jewish.”

The authors write:

Burton had referred to the Welsh as “the Jews of Britain”, a comment on their self-identity as the outsiders of the United Kingdom. [Note: Burton was Welsh]

“You’re not Jewish at all,” he told Elizabeth in one of their very public fights, “If there’s any Jew in this family, it’s me!”

“I am Jewish,” she answered, “and you can fuck off!”

Taylor, the irreverent and dazzling actress was raised a Christian scientist, but converted to Judaism at age 27. Though some say the decision was motivated by marriage to her third husband, Mike Todd—born Avrom Goldbogen, the grandson of a Polish rabbi, according to Time Magazine—Taylor famously denied it, insisting she had always been interested in Judaism. In her book, Elizabeth Takes Off, Taylor tried to set the record straight, and according to Wikipedia wrote: “[Conversion to Judaism] had absolutely nothing to do with my past marriage to Mike [Todd] or my upcoming marriage to Eddie Fisher, both of whom were Jewish. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time.”

Divas do things on their own terms. When she finally decided to convert, Taylor did so at Temple Israel of Hollywood, under the tutelage of then-rabbi Max Nussbaum. According to Time, who reported on Taylor’s conversion in April 1959, Rabbi Nussbaum developed a special curriculum for the actress that included: the Bible, and the books—A History of the Jews, by Abram Leon Sachar, What Is a Jew?, by Morris Kertzer, and Basic Judaism, by Milton Steinberg. Afterwards, “[T]hey discussed the ancient traditions and modern problems of the people of Israel,” Time reported.

At her conversion ceremony, Taylor was given the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel Taylor (Elisheba being the Hebrew version of Elizabeth and Rachel being the actress’s biblical heroine). Time described the ritual in detail:

[The] ceremony took place in the chapel of Temple Israel in the presence of Convert Taylor’s parents. Facing the open Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Scrolls, she answered the ritual questions put to her by Rabbi Nussbaum. Among them: “Do you promise to cast in your lot with the people of Israel amid all circumstances and conditions?” “Do you agree to rear your future children according to the Jewish faith?”

Then Elisheba Rachel Taylor repeated the pledge: “I, of my own free will, seek the fellowship of Israel . . . I believe that God is One, Almighty, All-Wise and Most Holy . . . I promise that I shall endeavor to live, as far as it is in my power, in accordance with the ideals of Jewish life . . . Most fervently, therefore, do I herewith pronounce the Jewish confession of faith: Shma yisroel adonoy elohenu adonoy echod [Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One]. Boruch shem kvod malchuso I’olom voed [Praised be his name whose glorious kingdom is for ever and ever].”

Taylor channeled her defiant Jewish spirit into almost everything – even her marriage. Director Mike Nichols is reportedly attached to direct Furious Love, the movie—which should be interesting since Nichols directed Taylor and Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, the 1966 film that the public came to view as a window into the couple’s real marriage. For those who haven’t seen the film—first of all, you should—but just in case, this line from the New York Times review of the book aptly sums up their relationship: “In their prime, the Burtons made ‘married love’ seem ‘glamorous and sexy,’ ‘even dangerous,’ the authors write. They also made it seem deranged and codependent,” Times writer Ada Calhoun notes. “There’s a lesson here for couples: marriage doesn’t have to be a partnership of equals. It can be a bodice-ripping, booze-soaked, jewel-bedecked brawl that survives even death.”

Imagine reading that on your ketubah.

Read more about Liz as a rabbi remembers her in Tales from the Jewish Crypt