In the Labyrinth

Mythic Moments: The Arrival of the SS Excambion at New York Harbor, January, 1941

This is an older post, but one that I love to revisit as a way to memorialize my father Emile's life and the journey he took to arrive in the United States as a Jewish teenager fleeing Nazi-occupied France. In this time of trial in our nation, where politicians seek to use their positions to engage in mutual venial squabbling and punishing of "enemies" in Congress and the administration, I return instead to the purity of the moment my father found true freedom at last in the US.

But I am also delighted to write that I discovered an attractive website called Critical Past, which captures random films from historical events. In my case, Critical Past had a movie of my father turning around and smiling. I started crying instantly. I knew this was when his life would change, from his past life as a dancer in the Paris Ballet opera house to something entirely different and new. He would become an essential professor of African Languages and Literature. He would publish volumes of poetry in French and English, marry twice, travel to Africa,13 countries along the coast, meet with many emerging African writers, and be an influential force through the journal he co-founded, Présence Africaine.  

Can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? That moment when everything changes, and you know that you will be profoundly changed in the future, that your life as you once knew it would be over. My father, Emile, was born in Paris. His father is an American ex-patriot, and his mother is a beautiful young Jewish woman anxious to leave her working-class origins behind. They lived in a fashionable area of Paris, and my father and his sister Rosine studied ballet at the Paris Ballet Opera House. By the time he was a teenager, my father was on his way to becoming a principal dancer.

Then WWII happened, and the Occupation of France in collaboration with the Vichy Government happened, and my father's life as a dancer was shattered. They were Jews and no longer welcomed at the Opera House. For the last six months of his life in Paris, not one friend would speak to him -- they would cross the street to avoid him for fear of his pariah status rubbing off on them. My father rose early in the morning before curfew and slipped through streets unseen to be first in the bread lines.

My Grandfather had been out of the country on business when the Germans invaded and could not return to France. However, he was able to provide the children with American passports through the embassy. My grandmother and the children traveled to Portugal, where they were promised passage on a cargo ship, the SS Excambion, that was carrying several dignitaries (Madame Curie's daughter on her way to try and convince the US to enter the war on behalf of the Jews, and Isaiah Berlin and his future wife) and many Jewish children traveling alone to relatives in the US.

The photo above is a still from a short film of the refugees arriving in NYC in January 1941. Someone sent me the link to the film, knowing my father's history, and asked, "See anyone you know?" In the opening shot, two young teens turn to face the camera, and there they are -- my father, fifteen years old, and his 14-year-old sister. Later in the film, there is a close-up of the two of them leaning out to take in the sight of NYC and the Statue of Liberty. (If you click the link, you will see the short film.)

This moment was critical to my father; he spoke of it often and included it in his poetry. So how amazing is it that some 80 years later and 29 years after his death, this film surfaces, and I can see him again as a young man leaning into the sun, into his future? Yeah, you know I cried when I saw it.

Putting Together My Father's Research With The Photos: West Africa 1963-64

 

Balafon performance in the streets of Conakry, Guinea. ©1963 Emile Snyder

 

Among the unique documents that have floated my way over the years was a manilla folder full of gorgeous black and white photographs my father took in the Ivory Coast, which was developed there, and some of them might have also been taken in Senegal, Mali, or Guinea. Among my mother's papers that I received after her death was a carefully cached collection of letters that my parents had written to each other from the fall of 1963 to the spring of 1964 when they were both abroad on Ford and Fulbright grants-- my father to numerous countries in West Africa and my mother to India, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

The letters are fascinating and cringe-worthy in places. One third love letters (with some surprising revelations about their sex life I could have survived never knowing about), one-third about money (there was never enough, and often arriving late, allowing for some desperate nail-biting), and one-third talking about the research and the separate lives they were having on their different continents.

As I read through the research parts of my Dad's letters, I learned a lot about these photographs--especially that he had done many field recordings of musicians, griots, and small village brass bands. He had made friends with prominent African writers at the very start of their careers as authors in 1963, such as Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal, and other writers and poets turned diplomats -- who also gave him music tapes and recordings (especially to the radio stations eager to get their music out to the West as well as Africa.). He sent around 25 videos back to the States with his friend Robert Garfias, an ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias, who then returned them to the Ethnomusicology Archives at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

I went looking for the tapes in the archives -- as this was the first I knew they had been adequately given to someone. I was so excited to find them listed here and here. So I will send scans of all the photos (plus more of the notes I discovered in his letters) to the archive there -- delighted that future students will have a chance to see these images and connect them to the music on the tapes. In many ways, the best part of finding all these papers is sharing the great features of their careers with others- to share those moments in history when they saw something, heard something, or wrote something that still matters.

Images are ©1963 Emile Snyder -- please email me at the blog to request permission to use these photos.

Emile as a Young Sailor

 

I am a bit late in posting this, but I want to acknowledge my father's participation in WWII, which was considerable.

My Jewish father was 16 when he fled Nazi-Occupied France and arrived in the US. At 17, he enlisted in the Navy and served in almost every major Naval battlefield, including Normandy, where he fought to liberate France. His last engagement was in Okinawa, where a Kamikaze jet fighter bombed the destroyer and cast him and others into the sea. He floated, holding onto debris for close to 24 hours before being rescued. Like many men of WWII, he was modest and quiet about his service. He lost good friends and brought home to their families the last papers and items from their lives at sea.

 

 

 Much later, my son enlisted just after 9/11 and, much like his grandfather above, became a soldier, fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other dangerous places. He served for fifteen years until finally, he put down the sword and came home to a wife and new baby. The fox in his arms was a gift from a local man. And though my son accepted the gift (for not to do so would have insulted the man), he released the fox back into the wild, just beyond the wire where his anxious mother was calling for him. 

                                                  

                

 

The Mystery of Family Photos

This post is for my cousin François, who has been visiting the blog to see what photos of our families are appearing -- and happily identifying those I don't know. I love these three photos for how the people are grouped, smiling, and staring back at the photographer. I am not sure who everyone is, but I know I am related to them all, making them seem even more mysterious. I can't help but search their faces for a sign of myself, a gesture, a smile. So here is what I know of the photos, and I am hoping, François, that you can identify the others in the pictures.

 

 

The sepia photo above is of my grandfather Frederick Snyder, standing there rakishly among those women. I am unsure if any of them is my grandmother Madeleine -- their hats are pulled so low that it is hard to be sure. But if not her...then perhaps they are three of her six sisters? Maybe it is Madeleine who took the photo? And they look like they are having so much fun, leaning against Madeleine's big American boyfriend. I wonder if they knew that Madeleine was already pregnant by someone else when he married her. 

 

 

This is a later photograph -- Fredrick now poses like a doting father, with my father Emile and his sister Rosine perched on Frederick's knees. And the children behind? I love their postures --especially the oldest one, leaning against the wall with all the humor and panache of an adolescent.  I have some guesses...but I'll see if François can enlighten me.

 

Here is the last one, which is still later. Some of the adults here are the children from the photo above. For some reason, the image must have been taken before the war. People seem so relaxed and playful -- the younger one's mug in the back. (Even as I look at it now, the two young men holding up the girl are the identical two older boys from the photo above. And the women! How much like an older version of the two girls!) But judging from the clothes, it also seems late enough that the war is hovering not far away.

 

Orality and The Singer of Tales.

I am continuing with my notes on reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, with some sidesteps to look at authors, whose work Ong references: Milman Parry and Albert Lord whose Singer of Tales is a fascinating study not only of the structure of Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey but also the important use of mnemonic devices in works that are orally performed and transmitted. So here are the key interesting ideas for me: 

Milman Parry analyzing Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey discover that every distinctive feature of Homer's poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition. These were never performed the same, as poets in an oral culture do not "memorize" the text, but "stitched together prefabricated parts."  They recognized a collection of epithets (so many versions of "the wine-red sea") that had different meter lengths and could be used anywhere in the text as the poetry required. This certainly makes sense to me where both epics and tales were highly patterned -- usually the only consistent feature of different collected variants of the same epic or story. According to Harold Scheub's observations, even a child of five can be a reasonable good storyteller because she will have learned the patterning of the narrative, having it heard it repeated with every telling.  

Ong argues: "Homeric Greeks valued cliches because poets and the entire oral noetic world or thought-world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or would be lost." However, I would add that the repetition itself needed to be evocative and interesting, eliciting a variety of emotions out of the listener to engage them, and that is when repetition becomes art, rather than a list of items to be recalled. Ong expresses David Bynum's ideas (The Daemon in the Wood,1978) that "the clusters constitute the organizing principles of the formulas so that the essential idea is not subject to clear, straightforward formulation but is rather a kind of fictional complex held together largely in the unconscious." And so strong is the idea of the formulaic portions of storytelling that "they ride deep in the conscious and unconscious" and don't vanish the moment literacy is introduced, but often are reproduced even in early written form by those from the oral culture who have learned to write --mimicking at times the oral performance. (Amos Tutuola's brilliant The Palm Wine Drinkard is an excellent example of this -- although in Nigeria, he received criticism, mainly from educated Nigerians, because of what was perceived as low-class, uneducated English.)

I find this particularly interesting because when a fairy tale transforms from its oral version (ironically, we can only read in transcribed texts) into a literary tale, it risks losing its profound evocative nature. Repetition and patterning into forms organize the story's details, creating tension when the human and the fantastic interact -- emphasizing not just the surface movement of the tale but all the complicated feelings such arrangement of images brings forth to the listener. In some ways, it is closer to music (or indeed, singing the tale) -- we are aware of the patterning, the phrases, the way they move from introduction to increasingly complicated arrangements, and then a coda which feels like the beginning but isn't because of the experience of the journey to get to the end. For the analyst, the social message is: What is the story trying to tell us? I think it's more a case of how the story makes the audience experience, through its techniques, our lives as lived in that moment of the telling, and because our lives are always changing, it allows us to hear the same tale over and over, and find in it something new.

Photo: "Griot" © Emile Snyder, 1963, Tittia Frasciotti, Galekea Women, 1988.

Emily Dickinson: Poetry on the Back of a Coconut Cake

In addition to writing sublime poetry, Emily Dickinson was also an excellent cook and baker. She often baked sweets and cakes for her neighbors and the neighborhood children. But poetry was never far from her mind and she combined her cooking arts with her literary skills. On the back of her recipe for this coconut cake was penned this poem: "The Things that never can come back."

"The Things that never can come back, are several —
Childhood — some forms of Hope — the Dead —
Though Joys — like Men — may sometimes make a Journey —
And still abide —
We do not mourn for Traveler, or Sailor,
Their Routes are fair —
But think enlarged of all that they will tell us
Returning here —
"Here!" There are typic "Heres" —
Foretold Locations —
The Spirit does not stand —
Himself — at whatsoever Fathom
His Native Land —"

Nelly Lambert, a Dickinson scholar at Catholic University, discovered in Dickinson's letters her delight at cooking and how often she referenced it in her letters. Lambert shares her discovery in an article for NPR (which includes the recipe and cooking suggestions for the Coconut Cake and an image of her handwritten recipe):

Dickinson discussed baking in many of her letters — evincing both her trademark wit and a zest for life that belies the common image of her as a depressed figure. Note the animation in her letter to a friend about some burnt caramel rule: "I enclose Love's 'remainder biscuit,' somewhat scorched perhaps in baking, but 'Love's oven is warm.' Forgive the base proportions."

In my own life, I have experienced the poet-cook as my father Emile Snyder published numerous volumes of poetry and was well known among his family and friends as a committed gourmet cook. It is one of the things I miss most about his absence -- I have his poems, but oh how I would love to sit in his kitchen again and watch him prepare something extraordinary, steam rising from the pots with fragrant aromas, the crisp freshness of garlic, parsley, basil under the crush of his knife, the sizzle of olive oils, the hiss of the wine poured into a frying pan with shallots and the whoosh of flame stirred up to release the alcohol -- and me getting tipsy on all the vapors. More than ten years later I still have my father's hand written recipes, stained from laying too close to the cutting boards. And I am reminded of all that reading Dickinson's opening lines: "The Things that never can come back, are several —/Childhood — some forms of Hope —/the Dead —"

For more reading, I recommend the article  "Emily Dickinson and Cooking, from the Emily Dickinson Museum and  "In Praise of the Cook" I wrote for the Journal of Mythic Arts on the mythic powers of the cook in fairy tales and folklore.

Embroidered Postcards From Africa and Spain

In 1963 my parents simultaneously received Fulbright Awards to study abroad for the year. My mother went to India (and traveled through Nepal, Bhutan, and a forbidden sliver of Tibet on the border.) My father traveled to West Africa, where he made his way down the coast through 13 countries, meeting with emerging African authors and poets -- among them Chinua Achebe and Leopold Senghor. It was an interesting year for my brother and me -- since neither parent wanted to relinquish the award nor take us in tow on their travels. My brother was sent to a boarding school in France, and I remained at home with a newly married couple (she was Tibetan, and he was American). I was nine.

Over that year, I received a lot of mail from my parents -- my father was especially fond of sending postcards because the cards were visually wonderful, and he could write short, loving messages. (He also sent sea dolls from many countries too.) I have saved them all. And going through them for the first time in 100 years (ok, it feels like that!) I am delighted once more by his selection. These two cards he purchased in Casablanca at the start of his trip. They are embellished with embroidery. I wonder if they still make these?