Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll

Around 7:30 a.m., the men gather in the chilling December air at the corner of South 5^th Street and Bedford Avenue, next to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass, as they do every morning.  There are about 30 of them, ranging in age from twentysomething to early fifties.  Some stand alone; others cluster in small groups, chatting, making jokes.  But everyone keeps an eye on the street, watching the cars, vans, and pickup trucks that pass by — and waiting for the occasional vehicle that slows down.

The men are part of a sad tradition in American labor — the shape-up crew.  For generations, the unemployed have clustered on particular street corners in American cities, hoping to get a day-labor job for a couple of hours or even better, several days.  Because most of them do not possess a special craft or skill, they are of little interest to unions or conventional employment agencies, and so are left to their own devices.

At the height of the Depression, most shape-up crews were made up of native-born Americans.  Today, the crews are almost entirely composed of immigrants, legal and otherwise.  Mexican-dominated crews have long been common to Southern California.  Here in Greenpoint, two of the men waiting by the bridge are African-American and several are Latino, but most have emigrated from Poland or the former Soviet Union.

Zygmunt “Zygi” Lemond, a stocky, friendly man of 43, came from Poland — he is vague about the exact year, but it was some time after the fall of the country’s Communist regime in 1989.  Drawn to Greenpoint by its large Polish community, Zygi has lived for almost a year in a homeless shelter on Bedford and Atlantic Avenues, about half a mile south.

Wearing a patterned jacket, hightop sneakers and a painter’s cap, he is dressed a bit more colorfully than the others.  (Even more bizarre is a younger man who looks like a college student, wearing a backpack, a Walkman — and rollerblades.)  Zygi’s background is also unconventional.  Trained as a musician, he left Poland when he realized that work would be harder to come by in a capitalist society — “How many dance bands do you need?” he asks rhetorically.

But Zygi felt that the American music business, while equally competitive, offered more opportunity.  And he does on occasion play bass guitar with a band, working New Jersey towns such as Linden, Garfield, or Passaic, which have large Polish neighborhoods.  He plays both nightclubs and social events — weddings, christenings, baby showers.

But it’s not enough to make a living.  So every morning, he is out on the corner, looking for construction or warehouse jobs or “painting, sometimes.”  The pay isn’t great, but it’s better than minimum-wage — at least $6 an hour, and as much as $10 for more strenuous construction or demolition work.

The real problem is the length and frequency of the jobs.  When asked if he gets much work, Zygi makes a face and says only, “It’s not regular.”  Some of his jobs have been as short as two to three hours, but none have been longer than two days.  “Yesterday,” he says, “I worked nine hours, in a warehouse.”  He usually stays on the corner until noon before giving up for the day.

At one point, a station wagon pulls up, with two men in the front seat.  Everyone clusters around, gesticulating, talking in two or three languages, as those with better English translate for their friends.  Zygi joins in for a few minutes, then walks away.  Eventually, no one else decides to get in the car, and the men drive off.

Zygi explains that the men offered to pay $6 an hour for extensive wiring and carpentry work on a building that they were renovating — but were honest enough to mention that the building was unheated.  “For a job like that,” he says, “it’s got to be at least $10.”

Not everyone can afford to be so choosy.  Down the block, on the other side of the overpass, another group of East Europeans have staked out their own patch of turf.  One of them, Sasha, a Ukrainian immigrant who has been in the U.S. for three months, says with a laugh that he does “everything.”  Another in the group, Tibor, who comes from Bulgaria, lists his skills as “welder, electrician… and I put down tiles.”  They are less easily discouraged than Zygi — they usually stay on the street until 2 or 3 p.m.

At his end of the block, Zygi sniffs that there are “too many Russians out here” — some days, in fact, they outnumber the Poles.  Is he voicing ancient resentments, given the history of relations between Russia and Poland?   More likely, it’s a matter of numbers.  The more men on the block competing for jobs, the less chance any of them has of getting one.

Occasionally, Zygi says, the competition gets ugly.  When an employer announces two openings and four (or more) men are gathered around his car, push can literally come to shove.  But the disputes are generally forgotten, or at least set aside, by the following day.  The men have to face each other every morning, and holding grudges is a waste of energy.

From time to time, two uniformed policemen in a squad car circle the block, keeping an eye on the group.  But the men are careful to stay on their best behavior.  Until several months ago, the group had been gathering a few blocks away, at the intersection of Wallabout Street and Kent Avenue; they were chased away by the police, after local residents complained that some of the men were drinking in public and throwing bottles and other garbage on the street.  Zygi confirms the charges, although he personally claims innocence.

Now another car pulls over.  Before Zygi takes three steps in his direction, the Latino driver picks the first three men who approach, and drives away.  Zygi shrugs, takes a cigarette from a Marlboro pack, and lights up.

Most of the employers, Zygi says, are Latinos or Orthodox or Hasidic Jews.  The latter, he says, are sometimes a problem because they prefer to pay him in cash, off the books, in order to avoid paying social security taxes.  He would rather get a check.  “If you’re paid cash,” he says, “it could be as low as $3 an hour.  A check, if it’s six, you still keep $3.75 after taxes and Social Security.”

Zygi is familiar with the current American political debate about welfare and unemployment.  He has heard the claims that there are plenty of available jobs for any able-bodied worker who is willing to look hard enough.  (In New York, Gov. George Pataki recently announced plans to cut state welfare rolls by 25 percent.)

But Zygi prefers not to take sides in this argument; he will only speak of his own feelings and experience.  Welfare, he says, is not for him, but he does not judge anyone who takes that route.

What Zygi really wants is the chance to leave the corner for good.  He says he knows of “some people in the summer who go to upstate New York.  They get regular factory jobs and they don’t come back.”  And Zygi himself has an application in at a factory on Java Street, a few blocks north.

For now, though, he remains under the bridge, waiting for another car to pull up to the curb.

“Every day,” he says, “it’s the same situation.”
 

Originally published in Brooklyn-Queens Waterfront Week weekly newspaper, 1995.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

Dr. Valentin Fuster’s workday begins at 5:00 am – but for the first fifteen minutes, he does absolutely nothing except think about the hours ahead of him. “Basically I program the day in terms of priorities,” he says, “to be sure that when I start, I know exactly where I am.”

For Dr. Fuster, the Director of Mount Sinai Heart, this approach makes perfect sense. The 67-year-old cardiologist has a load of responsibilities – as doctor, teacher, researcher, administrator and activist – that would tax the strength of many younger men. Yet he maintains his energy and his equilibrium through a mindset that is equal parts optimistic and pragmatic, detail-oriented and focused on the broader view. And despite a stunning record of achievements, honors and high-level positions, he is a modest, unpretentious man who considers himself “lucky.”

At Mount Sinai, Dr. Fuster presides over a dynamic program whose innovations in technology and research have placed it in the forefront of the cardiology field. At the same time, his interests and advocacy are global in scope. A former president of both the American Heart Association and the World Heart Federation, he is currently President for Science of the National Centre for Cardiovascular Research in his native Spain (where he spends part of each week), serves as Chair of the Committee on Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease for the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, and is in demand worldwide as a speaker and advisor on medical, cardiological and related issues.

“I just want to be on the frontline – this is where I am the best,” he says. “My affinity is for dealing with the issues very pragmatically, and getting results.”

Dr. Fuster spent twelve years at the Mayo Clinic before joining Mount Sinai in 1982 as chief of the cardiology division. After a four-year hiatus in the early 1990’s when he headed the cardiac unit at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, he returned to New York to be director of Mount Sinai’s Zena and Michael A. Wiener Cardiovascular Institute and later, director of the Marie-Josèe and Henry Kravis Center for Cardiovascular Health. In 2006, when the two entities were merged to form Mount Sinai Heart, Dr. Fuster was the logical choice to be its first leader.

When he talks about Mount Sinai Heart, Dr. Fuster emphasizes a number of aspects. The institute is noteworthy for integrating three disciplines – molecular cardiology, regenerative cardiology and cardiac imaging – but the doctor also praises “the integration of research, clinically applied research and clinical care.” Equally important, in his view, is that “this is a healthcare system, not a doctors’ system… we value tremendously nurses, nurse practitioners and technical people, who are very involved in what we do. We also include students who participate in projects – they are extremely helpful. And I think this is what makes this place very unique.”

He also speaks proudly of Mount Sinai’s openness to a diverse patient clientele. “This was controversial at the beginning, when we started,” he says, “but I don’t think it is anymore. I’ll never forget one day when [philanthropist] Laurance Rockefeller was sitting in the waiting area along with an ailing lady with a big hat from Harlem and he said, “I’ve never seen something more spectacular – this is absolutely fantastic what you have achieved here.”

“A Disease of Modern Times”

Dr. Fuster is serving at a critical juncture for the field of cardiology – a time, he says, when “there are so many advances, and at the same time, an epidemic.” The statistics are daunting: one in three American adults (80 million people) has one or more types of cardiovascular disease; it is the leading cause of death among women; 17 million people die from it each year around the world. And Dr. Fuster notes that it is a scourge of fairly recent origin – “Centuries ago, autopsies showed very little coronary disease. So it’s a disease of modern times.”

He is blunt in his assessment of how “modern times” have contributed to the problem:

“Of the six risk factors that lead to the disease, two we can call ‘mechanical.’ One of these is obesity, and the other is high blood pressure – a disease of the modern world, of tension, of stress – and obesity and blood pressure go together. There are two chemical problems, non-Type 1diabetes and high cholesterol, which have a lot to do with obesity. And two more factors are extremely modern: smoking and lack of exercise. All of this represents 95 percent of the epidemic.”

His studies and experience have made Dr. Fuster a passionate advocate for preventive medicine – and not just in regard to cardiovascular disease.

“I love this country,” he says, “but the concept of prevention is not part of the culture here – the feeling is, ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ So we have prolonged life two years per decade by treating disease – but we are not preventing it. As a result, people are dying later, but at the same time, the amount of disease is increasing. This is extremely costly. For example, the cost of treating cardiovascular disease in 2006 was over $300 billion; ten years before, it was one-third of that. If you understand that you’re spending three times the amount of money as ten years ago, you can trust that the health system will break. It will not be possible to continue like this.

“What we have to do,” he continues, “is understand that preventing disease will make a significant difference. Let’s say, for instance, that we’re treating two twin brothers – one at the time he develops an infarction and the other, preventing the risk factors that may lead to the infarction – for a period of ten years. The cost of treating the infarction is four times the cost of preventing the infarction. You cannot get away from the fact that quality of life, preventing events, is very important economically.”

Learning Globally, Acting Locally

To drive home this message, Mount Sinai Heart is conducting a number of research projects in the developing world. “We have to go to this part of the world as quickly as possible,” says Dr. Fuster, “in time to help prevent what we are experiencing in Western countries – but also because developing countries can actually help nations like the United States by teaching us a lot that we do not know.”

Indeed, Dr. Fuster becomes especially energized when talking about Mount Sinai Heart’s international projects, which include an initiative in Rwanda – in collaboration with world-renowned economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs – to help rural villagers combat cardiac disease by reducing their cholesterol and blood pressure, and a project involving 6,000 Colombian children aged three to seven, using the Spanish-language version of “Sesame Street” to teach them the importance of good health.

In another project, on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Dr. Fuster’s researchers are forming peer groups among local residents who smoke or suffer from hypertension or obesity to see whether group members can help each other develop healthier lifestyles. “The point we are trying to make,” says Dr. Fuster, “is that adults only change for two reasons: peer pressure, or the law. In Grenada, we are checking the peer pressure hypothesis.”

“The Principle of the Four T’s”

Dr. Fuster is proud of Mount Sinai Heart’s growing reputation – in U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Hospitals” survey in 2009, Mount Sinai was ranked 18^th in the category of Heart and Heart Surgery, up from 41^st the previous year. “This jump took place because we are doing things that are very advanced,” he says, “in terms of technology, in terms of what we do globally. And I can predict another jump next year.”

He also expects future breakthroughs from the institute in bioimaging – “You’ll be able to see physiological processes, not just anatomy and structure, how the body works, how the mind works” – and genetics.

For now, Dr. Fuster continues to juggle his myriad interests and involvements through what he calls “the principle of the four T’s – Time to reflect, discovering your Talents, Transmitting positive feelings, and Tutoring… I have two tutors, top people in the fields in which I’m interested, who can tell whether what I’m doing is right or wrong.”

And he is always finding ways to make a positive contribution to both his adopted country and his native land. He speaks with pride about bringing cardiology trainees to his wife’s home town in Spain each year, where he gives a lecture on the latest developments in the field “in the town’s movie theater – it’s like [the Italian film] Cinema Paradiso.”

“My life,” he says, “is really about giving back… because of how lucky I have been.”

Originally published in Mount Sinai Science & Medicine magazine, 2010. 

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By P.H.I.Berroll

Say you’re a New Yorker whose friends or relatives from outside the U.S. are planning to visit. You’d love to put them up in your Manhattan apartment, but unfortunately, like many Manhattanites you barely have enough space for your own family.

So you try to think of other options for your guests. A hotel?  Manhattan has some of the most expensive hotels in Western civilization, with nightly rates of four figures not uncommon.  Even cheaper hotel rooms (and “hotel” in this case could mean a converted town house or apartment building) can go for as much as $300/night. A motel? Those are often located near the city’s three airports – where the sounds of airline takeoffs and landings have disrupted many a traveler’s sleep – and in other less-than-desirable locations where getting to Manhattan involves  a lengthy and often crowded commute.

In the past few years, however, some innovative entrepreneurs – combining the DIY esthetic with the growing “frugal traveler” movement – have introduced new lodging options to put the traveler near the heart of the city without busting his budget.

The most well-established of these is San Francisco-based Airbnb, which enables “hosts” – apartment owners or renters – to offer their homes as low-cost tourist accommodations. Travelers can browse listings (which include photos as well as “reviews” from previous guests) in over 19,000 cities in 190 countries, and contact hosts with any questions before booking a space…   for as little as a day, or as much as a month. It’s a new twist on the bed-and-breakfast concept, though unlike traditional b&bs, the host may not be on the premises and guests often have to provide their own food. But on the upside, the traveler gets a clean, safe, conveniently located place to stay, at nightly rates ranging from the low $80’s to less than $150.

Airbnb is the brainchild of three young entrepreneurs, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia. Chesky and Gebbia, who met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design, were sharing an apartment in San Francisco in 2007 when they had their “aha” moment: Hearing that many attendees at an upcoming design conference had no place to stay – all the local hotels were completely booked – they offered their apartment as an informal bed-and-breakfast.

The experience worked out so well that after taking on Blecharczyk as a partner, they decided to expand their one-time act of kindness into an ongoing business operation – both to make money and in Chesky’s words, “to disrupt the [hospitality] industry” with their new approach. (Chesky, the CEO, is so dedicated to the concept that he gave up his apartment last year and has since been staying in renters’ homes “to grasp the full impact and experience of Airbnb.”)

Not surprisingly, the success of Airbnb has inspired several imitators, including iStopOver, which is based in Canada, and Italy-based Wimdu. There are also other sites offering different alternatives to traditional hotel booking: HostelWorld enables users to book stays at hostels in New York and 112 other U.S. cities as well as in 180 different countries, while CouchSurfing is a kind of exchange program where members can stay in the homes of locals in other countries and open their own homes to visitors from abroad.

But Airbnb has the greatest number of listings for New York City – more than 6,000 as of this writing – and Chesky professes to be unfazed by the competition: “They may borrow our concept or copy our designs, but the keystone of Airbnb is the community behind it – and the relationships our community fosters can’t be replicated.”

There is one drawback to the Airbnb system for New York City hosts:  officially, the business is operating in a legal limbo.

In 2010, the New York State Legislature passed a law (which went into effect in May of this year) entitled “Clarifies Provisions Relating to Occupancy of Class A Multiple Dwellings.” In plain English, the law makes it illegal for a paying guest to stay in another person’s apartment for less than 30 consecutive days if their host is not also living in the apartment. The law was passed in response to complaints from apartment dwellers and coop and condo boards about “absentee owners” who bought or rented multiple apartments not for their own use, but as tourist lodging – a violation of the rules in many NYC apartment buildings.

The problem is that there is no way for law enforcement to distinguish between those multiple-unit owners and the single-apartment hosts of Airbnb. Hosts who stay in an apartment at the same time as their guests are not affected, but those who take in guests while living elsewhere are at least technically breaking the law.

To date, however, there have been no arrests or prosecutions under the law, and local Airbnb hosts aren’t worried. As Rachel, a renter in Chelsea – for personal reasons she prefers not to use her last name – observes, “It’s not like the city or the state has the money to hire ‘real estate cops.’”

Airbnb has also had to deal with the fallout from an incident in June, in which a San Francisco host returned from an out-of-town trip to find that her guests had ransacked and looted her apartment. It was the first such occurrence in the company’s history, and while Airbnb worked with the police to catch the offenders, it was a wake-up call to Chesky and his partners. “For two million nights, we’d seen this as a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good,” says Chesky. “We were devastated.”

But the company took steps to tighten security, including designing enhanced tools to verify user profiles and creating an “education center” to provide hosts with safety tips. They also began offering a guarantee of $50,000 to reimburse hosts in cases of theft or vandalism.

According to Chesky, their business has not suffered – “In fact,” he says, “we have received thousands of e-mails from users who told me that they still believed in our service” – and he anticipates continued growth for Airbnb in the foreseeable future.

Indeed, Airbnb consistently gets high marks from users, not only for the low prices but also for something more intangible: the chance for visitors to immerse themselves in the life of the city. Airbnb guests often speak of how staying in an apartment enabled them to experience the “real” New York, as opposed to the isolation of a typical hotel. “I love being able to feel like I’m living in a neighborhood,” says Sara, a traveler from Vancouver, “rather than dropping into a tourist zone.”

It’s an experience that Airbnb hosts are happy to provide. “I don’t think we’re cutting into the large mass of people who want maid service every day and don’t care if they have a kitchen,” says Rachel. “But if you want a kitchen and don’t need a maid, then why would you reserve for $375 per night at the Times Square Residence Inn instead of $125 at my apartment?”

Here are the websites for the lodging services mentioned in this article:

Airbnb                                      www.airbnb.com

iStopOver                                 www.istopover.com

Wimdu                                      www.wimdu.com

HostelWorld                             www.hostelworld.com

CouchSurfing                           www.couchsurfing.org

Originally published in New York International magazine, 2011.

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An Obsession with Anne Frank:  Meyer Levin and the Diary

Lawrence Graver. University of California Press, 1995. 254 pp.

By P.H.I.Berroll

In his novel The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth observed that if the Jewish religion had saints, Anne Frank would have been canonized.  More than fifty years after she perished in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, the teenaged girl has taken on a symbolism beyond the facts of her short life and the diary of her two years in hiding.           

But has Anne’s basic humanity become distorted in the process?  Some critics found the recent Academy Award-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered “revelatory” because it depicted many mundane details of her life, both before and during the Holocaust.  This was confirmation of an indisputable fact: for many people, Anne has become – for better or worse – more of an icon than a flesh-and-blood human being.           

This phenomenon is at the heart of Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank:  Meyer Levin and the Diary. Graver, the author of critical studies of Beckett, Conrad and Carson McCullers and a faculty member at Williams College, here recounts the bitter dispute between a Jewish-American writer, who saw Anne as one kind of symbol, and his opponents, who saw her as quite another kind. On one level, it is a graphic, chilling account of one man’s descent into conspiracy-mongering paranoia. But it also raises issues about anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and the conflict between art and politics that persist to the present day.

At the center of the book is Meyer Levin (1902-1981) – novelist, journalist and essayist, a man who at the height of his career enjoyed both popular success and respect, if not adoration, from many serious critics. The fact that he is widely forgotten today is not simply due to changing literary tastes.

Graver begins his story in Paris in 1950, when Levin was given a copy of the French edition of the Diary by his wife. By then a writer of some repute, Levin had been profoundly affected by his experiences as a war correspondent in Europe, where he had witnessed the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps. Already insecure and conflicted about his place in the world (and America) as a Jew, Levin was provoked by these new horrors into a sense of mission: he was determined to bring the full story of the Holocaust to the widest possible audience, Jews and gentiles alike.

When Levin read the Diary, he knew he had found his instrument.  The book had been a critical and financial success in Holland and France, but Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had been unable to find an English-language publisher.  Levin offered his services to Frank, who accepted.           

Over the next two years, Levin tirelessly promoted the Diary in the U.S., acting as an informal agent for Frank. When the book was finally published by Doubleday in 1952, Levin praised it on the front page of The New York Times Book Review (without mentioning his personal involvement). Both Doubleday executives and other observers gave Levin much of the credit for the Diary‘s becoming a best seller in this country.

Meanwhile, Levin was also corresponding with several theatrical producers about adapting the Diary for the stage. The most prominent of these, Cheryl Crawford, agreed to give him the inside track on an adaptation, as did Otto Frank – despite Levin’s lack of playwriting experience.

It was at this point, as Graver recounts in painstaking detail, that things began to go badly. Levin gave the first draft of his adaptation to Crawford, who did not like it; she showed it to her colleague Kermit Bloomgarden, who was even more negative. Frank began to think about using another writer, though he still felt he had an obligation to at least consider Levin. At the same time, Levin insisted that he had “a right” to adapt the book – despite the fact that he and Frank had never signed a formal agreement.

Finally, Frank gave Bloomgarden the go-ahead to produce the play, and Bloomgarden hired a veteran husband-and-wife team of Hollywood scriptwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, to write it. For Levin, this was the ultimate insult.  Not only was he being deprived of an important creative (and financial) opportunity; even worse, that opportunity was being given to gentiles, whom he felt could not possibly convey the book’s essential message – that Anne and her family were persecuted, and eventually slaughtered, solely because they were Jews.           

When the play opened in October 1955, it confirmed Levin’s worst fears. “Most people,” Graver writes, “adored the Goodrich and Hackett Diary because they felt it transformed horror into something consolatory, inspirational, and even purgatorial… People came out of the theater thinking not of all the eradicated lives and the monstrous implications of the German attempt at genocide, but rather of a smiling young girl who affirmed that ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.'”

Levin sued Frank, Crawford, and Bloomgarden for fraud and breach of contract, and Goodrich and Hackett for plagiarism. He also mounted a campaign in the press in which he asserted that his play had been “suppressed” by the Broadway establishment for being “too Jewish.”  Increasingly paranoid, he claimed that Lillian Hellman, who had recommended the Hacketts to Bloomgarden, was a key figure in the conspiracy. He was convinced that Hellman – who as Graver notes was “an assimilated German-Jew [and] an anti-Zionist” – had determined that only a play reflecting her views would be produced.

The case became a cause célébre in both the Jewish and entertainment communities; at one point, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked by Levin to intervene (she begged off). The ugliest aspect was Levin’s treatment of Otto Frank, a decent man who only wanted to create something positive out of his life-shattering tragedy.  By any standard, Levin’s actions toward him were reprehensible – besides tying him up with litigation, Levin attacked Frank in the press, and wrote him insulting letters that accused him of betraying his daughter’s memory.

Levin’s behavior would normally preclude the reader from having any sympathy for him, and Graver hardly condones it. But the author repeatedly shows that Levin ultimately did more damage to himself than to Frank, or anyone else.  His marriage nearly collapsed; he became alienated from many of his friends (Martha Gellhorn told him bluntly that his adaptation “simply isn’t a very good play… not that the one shown on stage was very good either”); he wasted incalculable amounts of time, money, and energy. And while Levin wrote several best-selling books in the years that followed, his critical reputation was forever damaged by his conduct. (Indeed, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if this book inspired some readers to take a second look at Levin’s major works, such as Compulsion and The Old Bunch.)           

The court case was settled in 1959, with Levin being paid $15,000 by Frank in exchange for giving up any claim of “rights” to the Diary.But Levin could not let it go. For the rest of his life, he continued lambasting his enemies in print and pushing for a production of his “suppressed” play (which was finally produced in Israel in 1966, to generally good reviews). In his 1974 memoir The Obsession, Levin acknowledged, like a mental patient with periods of lucidity, the irrational nature of his decades-old battle and the crippling effect it had had on his life. Yet he was still unable or unwilling to give it up.

But did Levin in fact have a case?  As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies; and Graver makes it clear that for all the craziness of Levin’s behavior, his claims were not without merit. It seems likely that Bloomgarden et al. did indeed want a sanitized, de-Judified version of Anne’s story, because they believed such a treatment would appeal to the widest possible audience.  It makes one cringe to read of the play’s director, Garson Kanin, himself Jewish, telling the Hacketts, “The fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental.”

Yet in purely commercial terms, one can understand their thinking. Levin’s real problem was that he was battling more than a few individuals. As Graver points out, he was up against the mindset of American popular culture in the Fifties – moderately liberal, optimistic, looking to nudge rather than provoke its audience, preferring Rodgers and Hammerstein to Brecht and Weill.  By refusing to take the “majority” view of Anne’s suffering, he put himself outside the mainstream in that era. It is quite possible that even if his play had been staged on Broadway, it would have gotten bad reviews and a very short run. And then who would Levin have blamed?           

The larger issue remains:  since the Hacketts’ play has been translated into countless languages and performed around the world, has it not fulfilled Levin’s dream, even in a truncated fashion?  And could it have been realized in any other fashion?  Graver does not attempt to answer these questions; perhaps it is still too soon after the original events for anyone to do so.  But he has made an important contribution to the discussion, which makes his book well worth reading.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1996.

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By P.H.I.Berroll

It’s easy to feel a bit disoriented when entering Eataly for the first time. Not just because of the crowds, which are plentiful at most hours of the day, or the noise, which is on the level of a Times Square subway station at rush hour. It’s the fact that Eataly is not a place that can be easily categorized. Part market, part tourist attraction, part festival – it really doesn’t resemble any venue typically found in New York, or for that matter in the U.S.

And that, as it turns out, is part of the plan. Eataly’s creators are attempting nothing less than the establishment of a high-class Italian culinary emporium in the heart of New York City. Located in Manhattan’s Flatiron District at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23^rd Street, Eataly is based on another marketplace of the same name which entrepreneur Oscar Farinetti opened in the Italian city of Turin in 2007. For his New York venture, Farinetti took on a trio of culinary heavy hitters as partners: celebrated chefs and food-TV personalities Mario Batali and Lidia and Joe Bastianich. The group opened Eataly in August 2010, with the stated goal of making it “the ultimate culinary mecca for New Yorkers, visitors, gourmands and Italophiles alike.”

This explains why every aspect of Eataly is designed to appeal to three primary audiences: sophisticated Americans, Italians and people who wish they were Italian. Starting with the “Welcome/Benvenuto” banner that greets visitors at the entrance, all of Eataly’s signs are in both Italian and English – “We consider this to be a quintessential element of Eataly,” says managing partner Alex Saper. Helpful hints are posted for non-American customers (“In the U.S., leaving a tip is customary. Typically, 15 to 20 percent is sufficient”). Ask for “salami” and you’ll get a blank stare – what’s offered here is salumi. Walls are decorated with maps and other displays about the history and culture of Italy’s numerous regions.

But above all, there’s the food, a cornucopia of Italian national and regional specialties with an emphasis on artisanal (i.e. hand-made rather than mass-produced) products. Eataly includes seven full-service eateries, each specializing in a different food group: Le Verdure (vegetables), Il Manzo (meat), Il Pesce (fish), I Salumi e I Formaggi (salumi and cheese), Il Crudo (a raw bar), and of course, La Pizza and La Pasta.

Since no Italian meal would be complete without wine and dessert, there’s also Lavazza Café (named for Italy’s premier coffee company) and Eataly Wine. Lavazza offers gelato, pastries, chocolates and bite-sized dolci al cucchiaio (“spoon desserts”), along with espresso and cappuccino. At the wine shop, customers can choose from among nearly 1,000 bottles of vino from the major winemaking regions of Italy.

And for people who think “Italian beer” is an oxymoron, Eataly recently opened La Birreria, a 4,500 square-foot open-air rooftop beer garden, which offers a wide variety of both Italian and American craft beers.

Each section of Eataly has been staffed and stocked to appeal to consumers looking for something more than “typical” Italian fare. Le Verdure, for example, features a resident “vegetable butcher” who cleans, peels, chops and cuts the customer’s order – saving discarded peels and trimmings to be used as compost. Much of the pasta on sale is made fresh, by hand, every day. So is the mozzarella at the cheese department, charmingly named Il Laboratorio della Mozzarella.

Having a “laboratory” on the premises is in line with the overall mission of Eataly. Much of its agenda focuses on discovery, on education, on expanding the knowledge of the visitor. This is the idea behind Eataly’s on-premises scuola in which instructors – including Batali and the Bastianiches – offer regular classes in cooking and food and wine appreciation as well as nutritional, sociological and scientific topics relating to food.

Finally, there are the retail items – rows upon rows of shelves stocked with cured and fresh meats, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, fish, handmade pastas, desserts, baked and canned goods, sauces, olive oils, and coffees and teas, not to mention cooking utensils and cookbooks.  Customers can haul their bounty to the checkout line using lightweight shopping carts made from recycled plastic water bottles.

There’s no denying that the unique qualities of Eataly can be jarring to the uninitiated. It’s not the aforementioned crowds, which won’t shock anyone who has experienced lunch hour at Zabar’s or Whole Foods, or the prices (described as “fair” and “reasonable” by Eataly’s founders – which is another way of saying not cheap, but not excessively pricey by New York standards). It has more to do with the very nature of the Eataly experience.

Like most Americans, New Yorkers are used to buying pre-prepared food at salad or hot food bars and eating their meals at readily available restaurant tables. At Eataly, the first option doesn’t exist and the second only in truncated form. At each restaurant, it’s not uncommon for the customer to wait on line to order, wait again while the food is made, then wait again for one of the sparse number of tables to become available.  (There is the option of ordering to go, then finding a seat on a bench at nearby Madison Square Park.)  Nor is it easy to combine food categories; if you want a meat dish with your rigatoni, it will mean separate trips to Il Manzo and La Pasta. It’s appropriate that Eataly employs an international environmental organization called Slow Food as a consultant.

But customers who are willing to take a bit more time than usual will find the experience well worth the wait. (First-timers are advised to use Eataly’s main entrance on 23^rd Street, where an information booth is staffed by helpful employees who answer questions and hand out detailed floor plans.)

If Eataly proves to be a success, the partners are poised to expand into other major U.S. cities. “They have been scouting locations,” says Alex Saper. “Right now they’re considering L.A., San Francisco, D.C. or Boston.”

Though it’s too early to gauge how well Eataly has been received by the general public, it has made a positive impression on one particularly tough group of critics: the online “foodie” community. While describing Eataly’s layout as “daunting,” “a madhouse” and “a trip,” food bloggers have been nearly unanimous in praising the quality and variety of its offerings.

“I can’t say that it’s built for browsing, unless you come in right after it opens,” says Ann Newman, a New York food writer. “But the food is really high class, and a lot of it is different from the usual gourmet choices. That makes it a special place.”

Eataly is located at 200 Fifth Avenue, with entrances on both Fifth Avenue and 23 Street. It is open seven days a week from 9:00am to 11:00pm, though the hours of individual departments may vary.  For more information visit www.eataly.com or call 646-398-5100.

Originally published in NewYorkInternational magazine, 2011.

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