As we flew from Shanghai to Tokyo on the way home, we passed Mt. Fuji. It looked very blue, as shown in the bottom photo. But when I ran the top photo through Photoshop, it took on an other-worldly quality.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Press tour to China and Japan: Fuji from the air
As we flew from Shanghai to Tokyo on the way home, we passed Mt. Fuji. It looked very blue, as shown in the bottom photo. But when I ran the top photo through Photoshop, it took on an other-worldly quality.
Press tour to China and Japan: From Mao to Yao
Portraits of Chairman Mao have been common in China for decades. Now there's a newly ubiquitous presence: Yao Ming. The Houston Rockets NBA star's image is everywhere endorsing the Olympics and China Unicom, the state-owned telecommunications utility. It was big news when he got married this summer in Shanghai.
Press tour to China and Japan: The travel story
August 26, 2007
Travel
China racing to rid its capital of gridlock and grime before Games
If you go for the Olympics, stay for the sights
By Lorne Mallin, Special to The Province
BEIJING – With the 2008 Summer Games less than a year away, China is running a marathon race to get ready for a tourist onslaught of Olympic proportions. A million visitors will descend from inside the world's most populous country with 500,000 more expected to land here from Canada and around the globe.
Will the capital city of 17 million be prepared? The Chinese sound certain as authorities spend billions of dollars to beautify and clean it up.
"I am confident that our government has the power to make sure it all happens," said the man in the next seat, a 30-year-old Shanghai banker, on a flight inside China last week.
The real answer seems to be up in the air -- literally. Beijing's air quality is atrocious. A World Health Organization expert has warned that Olympic spectators with asthma or heart problems could be harmed.
Three million cars and trucks clog Beijing's roads and an extra thousand more vehicles wedge into traffic every day. Just this past week, Beijing launched a four-day experiment aiming to take as many as 1.3 million vehicles off the streets each day and increase public transportation. While the penalty for ignoring the restrictions was only $14, traffic did flow somewhat more smoothly. And state media reported the test improved air quality, saying conditions were "fairly good" despite the grey haze.
Without some controls, Beijing's gridlock is extremely frustrating. I visited China and Japan this month on a press junket of Canadian reporters courtesy of those countries' national tourism offices to promote Asia travel during the Olympics. Some of the writers took a tour to the Great Wall. Generally 90 minutes away, the drive took about twice as long.
The part of the wall the reporters visited was far from where foreign activists, including two from Vancouver, earlier this month unfurled a banner calling for "Free Tibet 2008." I mention this to raise the ethical dilemma of having my cake and eating it, too: accepting a free trip to China while advising you might want to think twice about going to the Olympics in light of China's human-rights record.
China didn't make it easy to be enthusiastic. For a press trip designed to highlight tourism during the Games, we were given a briefing that revealed little about the preparations. We could see lovely scale models of the venues but none of the real ones from the inside. Only after persistent requests were we given any chance to photograph the two most striking structures -- Beijing National Stadium, known as the bird's nest, and the Water Cube aquatics centre -- from several hundred metres away.
On the other hand, Beijing itself is endlessly fascinating. We saw some of the standard sights, including massive Tiananmen Square, where students were massacred just months before I stood there in 1989 and where hawkers now sell $5 watches with Chairman Mao waving on the face. The adjacent Forbidden City is an extraordinary historical complex to explore. It now features some of the public toilets that officials have upgraded and awarded four-star status to respond to tourist complaints of foul facilities.
I also discovered that China has made great advances in its dentistry. I needed an emergency root canal in Beijing and got immediate and excellent service from Arrail Dental, with follow-up care in Shanghai.
In Beijing, we rode in pedicabs through one of the hutong, or alleyway, districts that are quickly disappearing as the city modernizes. Some of the hutong courtyards offer surprisingly cheap bed-and-breakfast alternatives ($17 a night at one place) to the expensive hotels popping up all over the city.
The most surprising sight in Beijing was the 798 Art Zone. An echo of Vancouver's Granville Island, it's a 23-hectare industrial area with more than 120 galleries. About 80 artists work in studios there, creating an oasis of freedom that you can feel in the air.
The air is radically different in Lijiang in southern Yunnan province, at the foot of the Himalayas 500 kilometres from the Tibet border. After sweating in Beijing, we relished the coolness. And the diversity. Twenty-five of China's 56 ethnic minorities have a presence in the area of about a million people.
That makes Lijiang culturally rich and a magnet for tourists. The focus is the 800-year-old ancient city, a 1.8-sq.-km. area of souvenir shops, cobbled streets and small inns that was largely destroyed in a 1996 earthquake and then rebuilt in the old style, with new ATMs for your shopping convenience. You can sample yak meat (a lot like beef). Or pose for pictures on one of the small but sure-footed horses that are used on the local snow-capped mountains.
The feel of the mountains is recreated in a spectacular outdoor show on the outskirts of Lijiang featuring 500 performers singing and dancing in ethnic dress. Impression Lijiang was created by a team including Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker (Raise the Red Lantern) who is also co-directing the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Games.
If the Olympics bring you to Asia, consider stopping in Japan on the way. With my daughter Lisa, who works in Chiba City outside of Tokyo, I took in a Japanese professional baseball game that featured what was described as "kegs on legs" -- young women with 10-to-13-kg mini-kegs strapped to their backs who run up and down the stands dispensing $4 cups of beer. With the press-tour group, I experienced a morning in a sumo stable where we watched the large but supple wrestlers go through their stretches and practice bouts. Afterwards, we were served chanko nabe, the rich stew that sumo wrestlers consume in great quantities to purposefully put on weight.
A couple hours north on the Shinkansen bullet train brought us to the picturesque Sendai area and the jewel of the trip for me. The nearby Akiu hot springs is home to Hotel Sakan, an exquisite spa that has been in the same family for 34 generations over 1,000 years. I could easily have stayed a week, soaking in the baths and absorbing the serenity. But then I would have missed China.
IF YOU GO
• The Games are Aug. 8-24, 2008. The China National Tourism Office website, www.cnto.org, is an excellent resource, with links to the Olympics. Their Toronto office is toll-free 1-866-599-6636 or e-mail toronto@cnta.gov.cn. Canadians need a visa.
• Explore Lijiang through its tourism bureau website: english.ljta.gov.cn/.
• China's domestic airlines offer the most convenient way of seeing the country. They have greatly improved their safety record but be prepared for inconveniences. One of our flights was delayed almost six hours and another was cancelled.
• The Japan National Tourism Organization's Canadian website is www.jnto.go.jp/canada/. Their Toronto office is 416-366-7140 and e-mail info@jntoyyz.com. Canadians do not need a visa.
• Get a taste of Hotel Sakan at www.sakan-net.co.jp/english_001/index.html.
• For more words and pictures on China and Japan, go to my blog at www.lornemallin.blogspot.com.
© The Vancouver Province 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sendai: Just a Shinkansen ride away
Canadian journalists Wes Lafortune and Carolyne Parent shoot the Shinkansen bullet train arriving in Tokyo Station to take our press tour north to Sendai.
Taiko group plays for the Natsu Matsuri (summer festival) at Akiu Onsen (hot springs) near Sendai.
Villagers and visitors join in on the Akiu Ondo folk dance.
My spacious and beautiful rooms at Hotel Sakan in Akiu Onsen.
The tokonoma (display area) in my rooms at Hotel Sakan.
Tsukiji: Gone fishin'
How about a little tuna sashimi at 6:30 a.m.?
Tokyo is the home of the largest fish market in the world.
There are many ways to slice into a frozen tuna. An axe and . . .
. . . and a band saw.
Shrimp, shrimp and more shrimp.
Wasabi in the raw. The bigger the more expensive.
Eggplant comes in all sizes in Japan.
Weird -- stuffed polar bear at a taxidermist's stall.Friday, August 10, 2007
Sumo in the summer
Impressive leg lifts during morning practice.These lifts are part of the ritual before each match at tournaments.
The flexibility of these big guys is astounding. This is called mata-wari (rip the groin).If they can't do it, some 350 lb. guy will sit on their back
or push down on their head until they can.
Junior wrestlers prepare chankonabe for us. It's a protein-rich stew that helps sustain the wrestlers. Washed down with beer and followed by a nap, this diet helps them put on weight — a major goal.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Gazing on the Ginza
I am amazed to find myself in Tokyo, courtesy of a press junket sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese national tourism offices. It just fell into my lap, thanks to Joe Kula, travel editor of The Province newspaper in Vancouver. I took early retirement from the paper at the end of the year to see what might open up for me as I turned 60. And here I am, wrapped in a yukata (light cotton summer kimono) and gazing out of my 25th-floor Imperial Hotel room on the Ginza shopping and entertainment district.
I arrived last Friday in time to celebrate Shabbat with my daughter Lisa, who is living and working in Chiba outside of Tokyo. She supplied the candles, and I brought a little bottle of red wine from the plane along with two mini challah from Sabra in Vancouver. I had feared it might be a year or more before I saw Lisa again after we said goodbye in Kiev in May at the end of our adventure on the Klezmer Heritage Cruise. (See my stories from that trip below and our pictures here.)
In the time we've had together this past week, we've marvelled at Chiba's annual fireworks display, enjoyed a symphony of eggplant dishes with Lisa's colleagues and families at a potluck, cheered at a Chiba Lotte Marines baseball game with its unique "kegs on legs" beer sellers, dined with Lisa's mother and old friends, sampled many treats from sashimi to okonomiyaki, and escaped the heat and humidity at an air-conditioned screening of Transformers, where we seemed to be the only ones getting many of the jokes.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Restoring a Jewish Presence in Ukraine
Published July 13, 2007
Streams of Judaism are competing for survival in Ukraine
This is the last in a three-part series on Jewish Ukraine.
By Lorne Mallin
Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny beamed from the bimah of the revived synagogue in the seaside Crimean town of Evpatoria as he looked out at pews full of local Jews and a boatload of foreigners from our Klezmer Heritage Cruise.
"Now we know that Jewish life is rebuilt here, and your trip here is another reassurance that synagogue buildings will never be closed again," said Dukhovny, who is Ukraine's chief rabbi of Progressive Judaism, a fledgling egalitarian movement in a country where Chabad-Lubavitch is by far the major player. Reform Jews in North America are part of the global Progressive Jewish movement.
The 97-year-old brick building is a symbol of the revival of Jewish life in Ukraine after the end of Soviet rule in 1991. Like hundreds of other synagogues, Ehiya Kapai Synagogue was closed decades ago by the Communist party. It functioned as a sunflower seed oil plant and was returned to the Jewish community in 1999. Local and foreign sponsors paid for the rebuilding and it was rededicated in 2005.
About 160 of us from the cruise ship Dnieper Princess, which was docked in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, came there for the dedication of an aron kodesh (the holy ark where the Torah is kept) that was financed by the Beth El Reform congregation in Virginia.
Arriving in four big buses, we caused quite a stir. Every police officer in Evpatoria was assigned to security for the biggest tour group ever to hit town. Even an ambulance was on standby outside the synagogue gates.
In an emotional ceremony, the head of the congregation, Raisa Shepavalova, carried a Torah scroll under a chuppah through the sanctuary as people reached out to touch it as she passed. After speeches, the community's lay leader, Evgeny Tzvi Perevozchykov, placed the Torah in the wooden ark.
"To see this tiny Jewish community ... continuing to fight to keep their identity, despite everything they must have gone through, was really an eye-opener," New York clarinetist David Krakauer later told me.
To celebrate, Krakauer and the rest of the professional musicians on the cruise played a concert, boogieing on the bimah in the synagogue and then leading everyone out into the courtyard, where we all danced.
Krakauer said it was the most moving concert of the cruise for him, and Dukhovny told the crowd it was a homecoming. "The music which your ancestors took from Ukraine to Canada or to the United States, this klezmer music, you are bringing back," the rabbi said.
Music plays a central role in Dukhovny's own congregation, Hatikvah, in Kiev. One Friday night service I attended was largely led by a lay cantor, Mike Urisman, 27, who played guitar and guided the 25 or so people there in prayers with tunes composed by such Jewish songwriters as Debbie Friedman and some of his own. It was a thrill for me to lead a chant during the service.
The Ukrainian capital is Dukhovny's home turf. He was born there 57 years ago. His mother was the daughter of a Chassidic rabbi and she taught Dukhovny and his brother to keep Shabbat. At 44, Dukhovny switched from a career in the sciences to attend Leo Baeck College in London, the Progressive rabbinical school.
His offices and synagogue are in a rented space a few steps below ground level. Dukhovny said that, with the formerly Jewish buildings in Kiev all claimed by Chabad and other Chassidic groups, it's difficult to attract wealthy patrons to his synagogue and help it prosper. "Rich Jews don't want to pray in a semi-basement," he said.
"Saying to business people in Kiev that the Reform movement in North America is the strongest and widespread and that Chabad-Lubavitch is a small sect - they do not believe me, seeing the gold, silver and marble of the Chabad synagogues.
"The constant challenge for the movement is that many of our programs are under-budgeted," Dukhovny said. The movement can financially support only 16 of its 47 communities.
Still, Dukhovny emphasizes the positive. "The main success of the Progressive movement in Ukraine is that the movement was able to build a strong presence," he said. "[It] presents another way how to be Jewish, opposite to the ultra-Orthodox view that there is the only one way how to be Jewish."
He explained that the constitutions of the congregations, which are part of the Religious Union for Progressive Jewish Congregations of Ukraine, open their membership to people who identify as Jews and can document they have Jewish heritage somewhere in the last three generations.
With an intermarriage rate of about 80 per cent, Ukrainian Jews are highly assimilated. Estimates of the Jewish population range from a low of 94,000 to as many as 500,000. Thousands emigrate every year to Israel and the West.
Dukhovny, one of only two Progressive rabbis in the country, said his movement, which serves about 15,000 people, has trained lay leaders and para-rabbis, built Netzer youth groups, opened eight pre-schools and six Sunday schools and owns six synagogue buildings.
Among the 240 registered Jewish organizations in Ukraine, there is a minor Conservative and Modern Orthodox presence, but Chabad is the largest, with more than 100 communities. Chabad moved quickly to revive Judaism in Ukraine and has opened thriving day schools.
There are Jewish community centres, welfare services, Holocaust memorials, museums and summer camps in Ukraine, plus a Jewish university in Kiev. When our cruise group visited the five-year-old Jewish museum in Odessa, it made an impression on Ronnie Tessler, who was the first executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and was instrumental in developing the new Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.
"Visiting the museum was a very poignant experience," she said. "The sorry condition of the building the museum is housed in is disturbing. It is obvious from the size of the museum and the home-made appearance of the exhibits that their work is being accomplished on a very tight budget by a small staff."
Ukraine has a rich Jewish history, going back to the sixth century CE, when the Khazars ruled the region, with some evidence that predates the Christian era. The Polish-Lithuanian Empire governed from the 14th century until the expansion of the Russian Empire in the 17th century. To contain the Jews, Russia imposed a Pale of Settlement that included much of present-day Ukraine.
The rebirth of Jewish life has not been without tensions. There are rival Jewish umbrella organizations, even rival chief rabbis from Chabad, competition for Jewish facilities returned by the government, pressure from Messianic Jewish groups and rising levels of anti-Semitism, with increasing reports of violent attacks on Jews and damage to Jewish property.
Lorne Mallin is a Vancouver writer, editor, designer and Jewish chant leader. His website is lornemallin.com.
HOW TO HELP
• Odessa is one of Vancouver's sister cities and home to a struggling Progressive Jewish congregation, Emanu-El. Last year it received a Torah scroll from Chilean Jews, replacing a stolen scroll that had been donated by Temple Emanu-El of San Jose, Calif., with which it is twinned. There are almost 150 members and they need more help to secure a building and run programs. Contact spiritual leader Julia Grischenko at judith@mail.od.ua.
• Contact Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny at ravdukh@ukr.net.
• Learn about the Odessa Jewish Museum at english.migdal.ru.
The klezmer in the Klezmer Cruise
Published July 6, 2007
Rocking and rolling down the Dnieper River
This is the second in a three-part series on Jewish Ukraine.
By Lorne Mallin
Some of the world's finest Jewish musicians sailed on the first Klezmer Heritage Cruise this spring. The lounges of the Dnieper Princess and the concert halls of Ukraine rang with the sounds of such renowns as David Krakauer, Michael Alpert, Guy Schalom, Alex Kontorovich, Bob Cohen, Vanya Zhuk, Eric Stein and Josh Dolgin, also known as DJ Socalled.
But they all paid homage to a short, dapper 86-year-old singer with a shock of white hair and twinkling eyes, who came aboard when the boat docked in Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres downriver from Kiev.
Arkady Gendler was a hit from the moment he began entertaining us with his bottomless repertoire of Yiddish songs.
"He is a true treasure and I feel uniquely privileged to have had the opportunity to hang out and play with him during the cruise," said Stein, a bass and mandolin player who is also artistic director of Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival. Stein is bringing his great band Beyond the Pale to the Norman Rothstein Theatre for a concert on July 12.
The 10th child of his family, Gendler was born in 1921 in Soroca, then part of Romania, now part of Moldova on the border with Ukraine, in the area known as Bessarabia.
"As far as I can remember, my father, my mother, all my siblings, everyone sang Yiddish songs," he told us one afternoon. "So it seems I started singing before I started speaking."
Gendler fled to Russia to escape the Nazis, served with the Red Army, later became a plastics engineer, struggled to nurture Yiddish culture during the repressive Soviet era and now teaches Yiddish at the ORT School in Zaporozhye. He's never stopped singing and songwriting and has appeared at Jewish music festivals throughout Europe and in California. This summer, he's on faculty at the KlezKanada annual music camp Aug. 20 to 26 in the Quebec Laurentians.
On the cruise ship and on shore, Gendler brought his rich voice and engaging showmanship to such tunes as Mayn Ershter Vals (My First Waltz), Ele-Bele! (So There!), Kartoflyes (Potatoes) and his own take on Chiribim Chiribom.
All of us on the April 29 to May 11 cruise were spoiled with remarkable music. There were about 160 passengers, mainly from Canada, with many from the U.S. and a few from Israel and Europe.
Josh Dolgin, whose parents Marc and AC worked on the nuts and bolts of the trip, assembled the musicians from Canada, the U.S., England, Hungary and Russia. They played on the ship, in halls, synagogues, a Jewish community centre and a Jewish day school, where hundreds of kids danced with the passengers.
Dolgin plays accordion and piano, sings and mixes klezmer and hip hop. His new CD, Ghettoblaster, is just out. He was followed most everywhere by a film crew making a documentary on him for the National Film Board.
A lot of the music on board was just having fun. Eric Stein revelled in the "endless alcohol-fuelled jams and spontaneous partying. Memories that will last a lifetime."
Arrangements were made to connect with local musicians throughout the voyage, which began in Kiev and sailed down the Dnieper River to the Black Sea ports of Sevastopol and Odessa, where we were greeted by Konsonans Retro as the ship docked. The group brings together German clarinetist Christian Dawid and a Ukrainian brass band from the village of Kodyma. Drummer Guy Schalom from London has also played and recorded with them.
"Those guys kick ass," said Stein. "They are one of the freshest and funkiest things I've heard in a while." He's planning to bring them to Ashkenaz next year.
Alex Kontorovich, who plays superb clarinet and sax, said his most thrilling moment was with the same group after the final concert in Odessa.
"The brass band followed us to the ship for the post-party, which inevitably morphed into the kind of low-down, dirty, tune-trading jam only possible when a heap of trumpets, tubas, and clarinets find their way to inebriated mouths."
The two most well-known klezmer musicians on board were New Yorkers, the multi-linguist, multi-instrumentalist and singer Michael Alpert, and David Krakauer, an astounding clarinet player who took his instrument kicking and screaming into another dimension.
Krakauer, who teaches at the elite level, graciously took on coaching a group of amateur musicians, who included Vancouverites Elie Dolgin, Noam Dolgin, Avi Dolgin and Lisa Mallin.
"Being a clarinetist, I was pretty intimidated to have this virtuoso giving me pointers on simple things like fingering, but he was so lovely and patient and inspiring, and he really brought the fun back into the music," said Elie.
"Then sure enough our little ragtag group of musicians really started to come together. And, boy, what a joy it was to all be playing together, learning melodies, improvising a little bit and having a great time."
Josh Dolgin, directed a Yiddish choir of about 20 passengers, including Shanie Levin of Vancouver and me. He reinforced the sheet music by playing the parts on a melodion, a keyboard with a mouthpiece.
"I loved every minute of it, " Levin said. "I think that we formed a cohesive group very quickly and I felt closer to the choir members as a result of the work we did together than to others on the cruise. Everyone decided very quickly who they would sit beside and who would best help them to sing their part well."
As well as the spontaneous dancing that erupted just about everywhere music was played, there was a folk dancing group led by Hélène Domergue-Zilberberg.
Ruth Hess-Dolgin of Vancouver said she's not a musician but "dancing to the klezmer gave me a chance to enjoy the music and get some exercise at the same time. It was good for the body and the soul."
Lorne Mallin is a Vancouver writer, editor, graphic designer and Jewish chant leader. His website is lornemallin.com.
RESOURCES
• Two excellent blogs that include cruise music and video are nfb.ca/socalled and Bob Cohen's horinca.blogspot.com.
• Check out Arkady Gendler's album My Hometown Soroke at www.jewishmusicfestival.org/store/arkady-gendler-cd
Rocking and rolling down the Dnieper River
This is the second in a three-part series on Jewish Ukraine.
By Lorne Mallin
Some of the world's finest Jewish musicians sailed on the first Klezmer Heritage Cruise this spring. The lounges of the Dnieper Princess and the concert halls of Ukraine rang with the sounds of such renowns as David Krakauer, Michael Alpert, Guy Schalom, Alex Kontorovich, Bob Cohen, Vanya Zhuk, Eric Stein and Josh Dolgin, also known as DJ Socalled.
But they all paid homage to a short, dapper 86-year-old singer with a shock of white hair and twinkling eyes, who came aboard when the boat docked in Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres downriver from Kiev.
Arkady Gendler was a hit from the moment he began entertaining us with his bottomless repertoire of Yiddish songs.
"He is a true treasure and I feel uniquely privileged to have had the opportunity to hang out and play with him during the cruise," said Stein, a bass and mandolin player who is also artistic director of Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival. Stein is bringing his great band Beyond the Pale to the Norman Rothstein Theatre for a concert on July 12.
The 10th child of his family, Gendler was born in 1921 in Soroca, then part of Romania, now part of Moldova on the border with Ukraine, in the area known as Bessarabia.
"As far as I can remember, my father, my mother, all my siblings, everyone sang Yiddish songs," he told us one afternoon. "So it seems I started singing before I started speaking."
Gendler fled to Russia to escape the Nazis, served with the Red Army, later became a plastics engineer, struggled to nurture Yiddish culture during the repressive Soviet era and now teaches Yiddish at the ORT School in Zaporozhye. He's never stopped singing and songwriting and has appeared at Jewish music festivals throughout Europe and in California. This summer, he's on faculty at the KlezKanada annual music camp Aug. 20 to 26 in the Quebec Laurentians.
On the cruise ship and on shore, Gendler brought his rich voice and engaging showmanship to such tunes as Mayn Ershter Vals (My First Waltz), Ele-Bele! (So There!), Kartoflyes (Potatoes) and his own take on Chiribim Chiribom.
All of us on the April 29 to May 11 cruise were spoiled with remarkable music. There were about 160 passengers, mainly from Canada, with many from the U.S. and a few from Israel and Europe.
Josh Dolgin, whose parents Marc and AC worked on the nuts and bolts of the trip, assembled the musicians from Canada, the U.S., England, Hungary and Russia. They played on the ship, in halls, synagogues, a Jewish community centre and a Jewish day school, where hundreds of kids danced with the passengers.
Dolgin plays accordion and piano, sings and mixes klezmer and hip hop. His new CD, Ghettoblaster, is just out. He was followed most everywhere by a film crew making a documentary on him for the National Film Board.
A lot of the music on board was just having fun. Eric Stein revelled in the "endless alcohol-fuelled jams and spontaneous partying. Memories that will last a lifetime."
Arrangements were made to connect with local musicians throughout the voyage, which began in Kiev and sailed down the Dnieper River to the Black Sea ports of Sevastopol and Odessa, where we were greeted by Konsonans Retro as the ship docked. The group brings together German clarinetist Christian Dawid and a Ukrainian brass band from the village of Kodyma. Drummer Guy Schalom from London has also played and recorded with them.
"Those guys kick ass," said Stein. "They are one of the freshest and funkiest things I've heard in a while." He's planning to bring them to Ashkenaz next year.
Alex Kontorovich, who plays superb clarinet and sax, said his most thrilling moment was with the same group after the final concert in Odessa.
"The brass band followed us to the ship for the post-party, which inevitably morphed into the kind of low-down, dirty, tune-trading jam only possible when a heap of trumpets, tubas, and clarinets find their way to inebriated mouths."
The two most well-known klezmer musicians on board were New Yorkers, the multi-linguist, multi-instrumentalist and singer Michael Alpert, and David Krakauer, an astounding clarinet player who took his instrument kicking and screaming into another dimension.
Krakauer, who teaches at the elite level, graciously took on coaching a group of amateur musicians, who included Vancouverites Elie Dolgin, Noam Dolgin, Avi Dolgin and Lisa Mallin.
"Being a clarinetist, I was pretty intimidated to have this virtuoso giving me pointers on simple things like fingering, but he was so lovely and patient and inspiring, and he really brought the fun back into the music," said Elie.
"Then sure enough our little ragtag group of musicians really started to come together. And, boy, what a joy it was to all be playing together, learning melodies, improvising a little bit and having a great time."
Josh Dolgin, directed a Yiddish choir of about 20 passengers, including Shanie Levin of Vancouver and me. He reinforced the sheet music by playing the parts on a melodion, a keyboard with a mouthpiece.
"I loved every minute of it, " Levin said. "I think that we formed a cohesive group very quickly and I felt closer to the choir members as a result of the work we did together than to others on the cruise. Everyone decided very quickly who they would sit beside and who would best help them to sing their part well."
As well as the spontaneous dancing that erupted just about everywhere music was played, there was a folk dancing group led by Hélène Domergue-Zilberberg.
Ruth Hess-Dolgin of Vancouver said she's not a musician but "dancing to the klezmer gave me a chance to enjoy the music and get some exercise at the same time. It was good for the body and the soul."
Lorne Mallin is a Vancouver writer, editor, graphic designer and Jewish chant leader. His website is lornemallin.com.
RESOURCES
• Two excellent blogs that include cruise music and video are nfb.ca/socalled and Bob Cohen's horinca.blogspot.com.
• Check out Arkady Gendler's album My Hometown Soroke at www.jewishmusicfestival.org/store/arkady-gendler-cd
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Searching for family history in Ukraine
Published June 30, 2007
Tracing the ancestral villages of Canadians in Ukraine
This is the first in a three-part series on Jewish Ukraine.
By Lorne Mallin
For many of us on the thrilling, emotional Klezmer Heritage Cruise down the Dnieper River in Ukraine this past spring, the most exciting and moving moments were away from the tour – in private visits to ancestral villages.
At our slide-music-video show June 20 at Or Shalom Synagogue in Vancouver, Avi Dolgin choked up as he described being on Khortitsia, an island in the Dnieper, where his late father, Joseph, was born and which he left in 1914 for Winnipeg with his parents, Isaak and Esther. In a field, while a local family and their goats looked on, Dolgin and 13 other members of his family on the cruise stood on a wall of the ruins of a building that might once have been a synagogue.
"We said Kaddish for the memory of Isaak and Esther Dolginover, probably the first time Kaddish had been said for them in years," Dolgin recalled in an interview in his Vancouver kitchen. "And then also a thank you for them for having gotten the hell out of there."
Dolgin was in Ukraine with his wife, Ruth Hess-Dolgin, and their two sons, Noam, 30, and Elie, 25. Dolgin's Ottawa-area brother Marc, sister-in-law AC and nephew Josh, a Montreal klezmer musician also known as rapper SoCalled, dreamed up the Jewish cruise when they visited Khortitsia during a Mennonite Heritage Cruise they tagged along on two years ago.
At that time, archivists in the nearby industrial city of Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres southeast of Kiev, had discovered some Dolgin family records. They were asked to look for more. What the archivists found surprised the family when they returned en masse last month.
"I think probably the most exciting moment must have been in the archive," said Dolgin. Two archivists had spent two full days combing through 70 years of records for every mention of every variation on the Dolgin name and laid out the results for the family to examine.
"To see the documentation right there in front of me of the family which I knew – my father's birth and my uncle's birth – was exciting," he said. "And then to discover documentation of family I never knew existed."
Previous unknowns who came to light included his grandfather's brother, Pavel, and Pavel's son, Piotr, and the fact that the family had come to Khortitsia from Belorussia, another part of the Russian empire, now known as Belarus, north of present-day Ukraine, thereby adding another layer to the Dolgin history. The family felt "jaw-dropping amazement" and great appreciation for the work of the archivists, Dolgin said.
Later, when our ship, the Dnieper Princess, playfully called the Dnieper Shlepper by the 160 or so passengers, docked in Odessa on the Black Sea, Dolgin and his family explored the roots of his mother, Eva Blankstein, who was born in Winnipeg and died there last November, at 97.
On the same day the Dolgins gathered in Khortitsia, my daughter, Lisa, and I travelled to an ancestral village about 180 kilometres southeast of Zaporozhye with a driver and guide, who thankfully were nothing like the "blind" driver and English-challenged guide in the book and movie Everything is Illuminated.
It took more than two hours to reach Alexeyevka, where my zayde, my mother Molly's father, Abraham Shuer, was born in 1882. Zayde immigrated to Winnipeg and then settled in Ste. Rose du Lac, Man., where the family ran a general store. Post-Second World War, he lived in Vancouver and was head of Schara Tzedeck's Chevra Kadisha.
In Alexeyevka, dirt streets radiate from the paved road that runs through it. Ducks, goats and turkeys feed on the roadside grass. A single-storey house and fenced yard that a resident generously invited us to visit featured coal heat, a chicken coop, red tulips, a vegetable garden, an outhouse and a television satellite dish perched near the tin roof.
There are no Jews left in the village of about 150, but in the market of the neighboring village, Smirnove, we met a babushka, a scarfed 71-year-old woman who led us to the Jewish cemetery by the main road. There, we found three surviving headstones – one leaning over at a sharp angle and two flat in the grass. Two women in a nearby house said the cemetery had been damaged by road construction and grave robbers. And time.
We said Kaddish there, even though we didn't have a minyan of 10 Jews. And we did the same in Malin, a town of about 27,000 about 85 kilometres northwest of Kiev, which we visited just before the April 29-May 11 cruise got underway.
My father Hyman's father, Louis Mallin was a Malinsky – which means "from Malin" – when he and his new bride, Bessie, came in 1913 from England, bound for Winnipeg. We don't know for sure where Louis was born, so we can't be certain we came from Malin. But we've kind of adopted it as a heritage shtetl and felt more connection there than in Alexeyevka because of the people we met.
Our guide, Larissa Sviridova, had called ahead and arranged for us to meet a representative of the Malin Jewish community. We were warmly greeted by Eugenia Fetman, 61, whose maiden name we were surprised to learn was Malinskaya, the feminine form of Malinsky. And she invited over Lev Markovich, 81, whose wife's maiden name is also Malinskaya. They're from different Malinsky families and we have no idea whether we're related.
Together, Fetman and Markovich told us about Malin's Jewish history. It was about 70 per cent Jewish before the war and some, like Markovich, escaped the advancing German army in 1941 by walking to Russia. The Nazis murdered 1,300 Malin Jews at a ravine. Now, there are 25 to 30 Jews left, all aging. The young people have left for better opportunities.
Fetman and Markovich took us to two Jewish cemeteries. One, in sad shape, was closed 18 years ago. The inscriptions were fading, but we found one marker with a Malinsky name and left a small stone on it. We saw many more Malinsky graves in the newer, well-maintained cemetery, where the headstones are all Soviet style – written in the Cyrillic alphabet, with pictures of the deceased either etched or inset into the stone. We noticed that none of the Malinskys resembled our family.
We visited the town market, the former synagogue that is now a chick hatchery and made a stop to take pictures of the house at 21 Lenina St., where Vancouver realtor Joe Fayner had told me he used to spend summers visiting his grandmother, Yuditsky. And we ended up back at Fetman's tidy apartment, where she fed us a lunch of yummy salads and the best blinis (similar to blintzes) we'd ever had, washed down with homemade vodka. It was very hard to say goodbye. They might not have been family, but they felt like family.
"Visiting Malin was such a delight," said Lisa, 24, who works as co-ordinator of international relations in Chiba City, near Tokyo. "It helped me feel connected to my ancestors. It was simple: I'm Jewish, they were Jewish and the people we met in Malin were Jewish, too."
Lorne Mallin is a Vancouver writer, editor, designer and Jewish chant leader. His website is lornemallin.com.
RESOURCES
• View more of our photos at www.flickr.com/photos/malinsky/.
• See a map and more photos and information about the cruise at www.magma.ca/~klezmercruise
• Connect with the Jewish Genealogical Institute of B.C. at www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/4441 , phone 604-321-9870.
• Visit the new Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. at the JCC, 950 W. 41st Ave. Online at www.jewishmuseum.ca or call 604-257-5199.
• Explore your heritage at www.jewishgen.com.
Tracing the ancestral villages of Canadians in Ukraine
This is the first in a three-part series on Jewish Ukraine.
By Lorne Mallin
For many of us on the thrilling, emotional Klezmer Heritage Cruise down the Dnieper River in Ukraine this past spring, the most exciting and moving moments were away from the tour – in private visits to ancestral villages.
At our slide-music-video show June 20 at Or Shalom Synagogue in Vancouver, Avi Dolgin choked up as he described being on Khortitsia, an island in the Dnieper, where his late father, Joseph, was born and which he left in 1914 for Winnipeg with his parents, Isaak and Esther. In a field, while a local family and their goats looked on, Dolgin and 13 other members of his family on the cruise stood on a wall of the ruins of a building that might once have been a synagogue.
"We said Kaddish for the memory of Isaak and Esther Dolginover, probably the first time Kaddish had been said for them in years," Dolgin recalled in an interview in his Vancouver kitchen. "And then also a thank you for them for having gotten the hell out of there."
Dolgin was in Ukraine with his wife, Ruth Hess-Dolgin, and their two sons, Noam, 30, and Elie, 25. Dolgin's Ottawa-area brother Marc, sister-in-law AC and nephew Josh, a Montreal klezmer musician also known as rapper SoCalled, dreamed up the Jewish cruise when they visited Khortitsia during a Mennonite Heritage Cruise they tagged along on two years ago.
At that time, archivists in the nearby industrial city of Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres southeast of Kiev, had discovered some Dolgin family records. They were asked to look for more. What the archivists found surprised the family when they returned en masse last month.
"I think probably the most exciting moment must have been in the archive," said Dolgin. Two archivists had spent two full days combing through 70 years of records for every mention of every variation on the Dolgin name and laid out the results for the family to examine.
"To see the documentation right there in front of me of the family which I knew – my father's birth and my uncle's birth – was exciting," he said. "And then to discover documentation of family I never knew existed."
Previous unknowns who came to light included his grandfather's brother, Pavel, and Pavel's son, Piotr, and the fact that the family had come to Khortitsia from Belorussia, another part of the Russian empire, now known as Belarus, north of present-day Ukraine, thereby adding another layer to the Dolgin history. The family felt "jaw-dropping amazement" and great appreciation for the work of the archivists, Dolgin said.
Later, when our ship, the Dnieper Princess, playfully called the Dnieper Shlepper by the 160 or so passengers, docked in Odessa on the Black Sea, Dolgin and his family explored the roots of his mother, Eva Blankstein, who was born in Winnipeg and died there last November, at 97.
On the same day the Dolgins gathered in Khortitsia, my daughter, Lisa, and I travelled to an ancestral village about 180 kilometres southeast of Zaporozhye with a driver and guide, who thankfully were nothing like the "blind" driver and English-challenged guide in the book and movie Everything is Illuminated.
It took more than two hours to reach Alexeyevka, where my zayde, my mother Molly's father, Abraham Shuer, was born in 1882. Zayde immigrated to Winnipeg and then settled in Ste. Rose du Lac, Man., where the family ran a general store. Post-Second World War, he lived in Vancouver and was head of Schara Tzedeck's Chevra Kadisha.
In Alexeyevka, dirt streets radiate from the paved road that runs through it. Ducks, goats and turkeys feed on the roadside grass. A single-storey house and fenced yard that a resident generously invited us to visit featured coal heat, a chicken coop, red tulips, a vegetable garden, an outhouse and a television satellite dish perched near the tin roof.
There are no Jews left in the village of about 150, but in the market of the neighboring village, Smirnove, we met a babushka, a scarfed 71-year-old woman who led us to the Jewish cemetery by the main road. There, we found three surviving headstones – one leaning over at a sharp angle and two flat in the grass. Two women in a nearby house said the cemetery had been damaged by road construction and grave robbers. And time.
We said Kaddish there, even though we didn't have a minyan of 10 Jews. And we did the same in Malin, a town of about 27,000 about 85 kilometres northwest of Kiev, which we visited just before the April 29-May 11 cruise got underway.
My father Hyman's father, Louis Mallin was a Malinsky – which means "from Malin" – when he and his new bride, Bessie, came in 1913 from England, bound for Winnipeg. We don't know for sure where Louis was born, so we can't be certain we came from Malin. But we've kind of adopted it as a heritage shtetl and felt more connection there than in Alexeyevka because of the people we met.
Our guide, Larissa Sviridova, had called ahead and arranged for us to meet a representative of the Malin Jewish community. We were warmly greeted by Eugenia Fetman, 61, whose maiden name we were surprised to learn was Malinskaya, the feminine form of Malinsky. And she invited over Lev Markovich, 81, whose wife's maiden name is also Malinskaya. They're from different Malinsky families and we have no idea whether we're related.
Together, Fetman and Markovich told us about Malin's Jewish history. It was about 70 per cent Jewish before the war and some, like Markovich, escaped the advancing German army in 1941 by walking to Russia. The Nazis murdered 1,300 Malin Jews at a ravine. Now, there are 25 to 30 Jews left, all aging. The young people have left for better opportunities.
Fetman and Markovich took us to two Jewish cemeteries. One, in sad shape, was closed 18 years ago. The inscriptions were fading, but we found one marker with a Malinsky name and left a small stone on it. We saw many more Malinsky graves in the newer, well-maintained cemetery, where the headstones are all Soviet style – written in the Cyrillic alphabet, with pictures of the deceased either etched or inset into the stone. We noticed that none of the Malinskys resembled our family.
We visited the town market, the former synagogue that is now a chick hatchery and made a stop to take pictures of the house at 21 Lenina St., where Vancouver realtor Joe Fayner had told me he used to spend summers visiting his grandmother, Yuditsky. And we ended up back at Fetman's tidy apartment, where she fed us a lunch of yummy salads and the best blinis (similar to blintzes) we'd ever had, washed down with homemade vodka. It was very hard to say goodbye. They might not have been family, but they felt like family.
"Visiting Malin was such a delight," said Lisa, 24, who works as co-ordinator of international relations in Chiba City, near Tokyo. "It helped me feel connected to my ancestors. It was simple: I'm Jewish, they were Jewish and the people we met in Malin were Jewish, too."
Lorne Mallin is a Vancouver writer, editor, designer and Jewish chant leader. His website is lornemallin.com.
RESOURCES
• View more of our photos at www.flickr.com/photos/malinsky/.
• See a map and more photos and information about the cruise at www.magma.ca/~klezmercruise
• Connect with the Jewish Genealogical Institute of B.C. at www.geocities.com/Heartland
• Visit the new Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. at the JCC, 950 W. 41st Ave. Online at www.jewishmuseum.ca or call 604-257-5199.
• Explore your heritage at www.jewishgen.com.
Missed the boat? Crimea river
June 24, 2007
Travel
MISSED THE BOAT? CRIMEA RIVER!
UKRAINE: Think of Fiddler on the Roof with tour-group cast
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| Stone lion guards Crimea’s Vorontsov Palace, where British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stayed during the 1945 Yalta Conference. —LISA MALLIN |
By Lorne Mallin
Special to The Province
Sailing down the Dnieper River from the Ukrainian capital to the Black Sea was an extraordinary journey of discovery for passengers on the first Klezmer Heritage Cruise.
Klezmer is Eastern European Jewish music — think Fiddler on the Roof — and its melodies flowed through the 12-day voyage from the international band on board and the local musicians who played concerts with them at ports along the way.
On the cruise ship, we sang, danced, laughed and cried. On land, we explored ancient and modern Ukraine, whose 46.5 million people have yet to really experience mass tourism since it declared independence 16 years ago as the Soviet Union crumbled.
About the size of Alberta (home of almost 300,000 Ukrainian-Canadians), it’s vast in European terms, bordering on Belarus to the north, Russia to the north and east, with a host of countries on the west – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova, and Black Sea to the south.
Almost all of the 160 passengers were Jewish, with most from Canada, plus Americans and a few from Europe and Israel. Throughout Ukraine, we visited synagogues, Jewish day schools and other sites that have been revived since the end of the Soviet era.
The trip was the brainchild of Marc and AC Dolgin, of the Ottawa area, and their Montreal musician son Josh. Two years ago, they joined a Mennonite heritage cruise on the Dnieper and visited the birthplace of Marc’s father Joseph in Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres southeast of Kiev. Josh was inspired to propose a Jewish heritage cruise complete with klezmer music.
When the cruise was announced, my daughter Lisa, who works near Tokyo, and I were inspired to sign on, and also to book private excursions to explore our roots.
My grandfather Louis Mallin’s name was Malinsky — which means “from Malin” — before he arrived in Winnipeg in 1913 from England, but we’re not certain where he was born. In the town of Malin, about 85 km west of Kiev, we met and wonderfully connected with Jews from Malinsky families. On the other hand, 180 km southeast of Zaporozhye in the village of Alexeyevka, where we know my mother’s father, Abraham Shuer, was born, there are no more Jews and only three headstones survive in the vanishing Jewish cemetery.
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| Above is a typical house in Alexeyevka, a village in the southern Ukraine where the photographer's greatgrandfather, Abraham Shuer, was born. LISA MALLIN — FOR THE PROVINCE |
But you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy discovering Ukraine. I arrived in Kiev five days before the cruise began and settled into the apartment I’d rented over the Internet, a much better deal at $59 US a night than hotel rooms. It was an excellent base to explore the 1,400-year-old capital of 2.6 million. The beautiful European city is modernizing but I had little interest in its new shopping malls and office towers, except to check into an Internet cafe. Instead, I focused on its gold-domed churches and cathedrals — many of which have been gloriously restored in the last 16 years — other historical sites and people-watching.
The spiritual centre of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christianity is Pechersk Lavra, which began as a cave monastery in 1051. Below ground are narrow tunnels housing the mummified remains of monks and saints, as well as several chapels. Above ground are magnificent churches and museums.
In the historic riverfront Podol district, the Chernobyl Museum movingly documents the human cost of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — the 1986 reactor explosion at Chernobyl, 100 km north of Kiev.
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A Kiev busker plays his bandura, a traditional Ukrainian instrument. LORNE MALLIN — FOR THE PROVINCE
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I visited Independence Square on Kiev’s main downtown street, Kreshchatyk, where 2004’s Orange Revolution led to President Victor Yushchenko’s election and many unfulfilled expectations. While I was here, it was continually occupied by flag-waving political groups. A little farther down Kreshchatyk, Lisa and I saw disturbing anti-Semitic graffiti outside a McDonald’s.
With the cruise group, we spent solemn moments at the memorial at Babi Yar, the ravine in Kiev where more than 33,000 Jews were machine-gunned to death in two days by the invading Nazis in 1941.
As we sailed down the 2,290-km Dnieper, we were treated to absorbing historical backgrounders by Prof. Eugene Orenstein of McGill University. Most every night, movies about Ukraine were screened. Amateur musicians jammed, singers formed a Yiddish choir and Jewish folk dancing was taught.
The four-deck Dnieper Princess was our home — 423 feet long with small but efficient twin cabins. We were well-fed in the dining rooms and enjoyed many music-filled nights in the lounges. Out on the decks, landscapes of cities, factories, villages and green fields passed before us.
Every morning, we were greeted on the PA system by Vancouver’s Elie Dolgin, a grad student at Edinburgh University, who peppered his announcements with puns such as “Ukraine, you saw, you conquered,” “Cossack it to me” and “Crimea river.”
Most every day in port, we climbed on tour buses. Some highlights:
■ In our first port of call, Dnepropetrovsk, the Museum of History’s chilling exhibit on the abuses of the Stalin regime in the 1930s and 1940s.
■ The Cossack show with great horsemanship and fine bull-whip skills on Khortitsa Island off Zaporozhye.
■ In the Crimea on the Black Sea, the Livadia Palace where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met for the 1945 Yalta Conference to decide the fate of post-War Europe.
■Diverse Evpatoria, which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sufi dervishes and Karaites, an ethnic Turkic community whose religion is similar to Judaism.
■ The 18th-century palace of the last of the Tatar Khans, in Bakhchiserai. We also explored on our own.
My most telling moment was in Odessa, on May 9, Victory Day, marking Germany’s 1945 defeat ending the Great Patriotic War. I came upon a monument to the Soviets’ disastrous 1979- 1989 war in Afghanistan. People laid flowers at the feet of a statue of a soldier, his arms resting on his knees, his face sad and weary.
If you go
■ Canadians don’t need a visa.
■ Air Canada and partner Lufthansa fly through Toronto and Frankfurt to Kiev. Fares start around $1,500 return from Vancouver.
■ There are no plans for another Klezmer Heritage Cruise but there is an annual Mennonite Heritage Cruise (www.vision2000.ca) and many other cruises by the Dnieper Princess’s owners, Chervona Ruta (ruta-cruise.com/en/), from about $1,300.
■ Lonely Planet Ukraine and Ukraine: The Bradt Travel Guide are excellent resources.
■ Check the guide books for apartment rentals. I recommend Ukraine Apartments at www.uaapartments. com.
■ For Ukrainian food in Kiev, point at what you want at a branch of the inviting Puzata Khata cafeterias. I paid about $5 for a full-course meal.
■ Virtually all the signs in Ukraine are in the Cyrillic alphabet, which includes Latin, Greek and Hebrew-derived letters, and it’s not rocket science to learn.
■ The money is called hryvnias or UAH. About 4.75 UAH per $1 Cdn. You can use debit cards in ATMs.
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