Trial by fire: Smart, The Commandant’s Shadow, and Mark Carney

I’ve been reminded what a bitter wind feels like. It’s sunny out, so, riding my bike to and from the theatre this afternoon, I wasn’t prepared for the wind. Bitter. It hurt.

But the show I saw was a triumphant tour de force — Nicky Guadagni in Smart, a one-woman show about Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept fame. I wrote to Nicky before I went that I’ve been unable to read the book, finding Smart’s emotional excesses … excessive. One reviewer wrote that it’s “a howl of a book, shot through with vivid imagery and ecstatic language, alternately exasperating and invigorating.”

Definitely not my thing. So despite the rave reviews, I was dubious about the show.

Well, here’s another rave. Betty Smart was a difficult and, yes, excessive woman; she had four children by her inamorato, the British poet George Barker who never lived with or supported her and eventually had 15 children by 4 women. She lived in poverty and obscurity in England and Ireland, her book unknown for two decades — her snobbish mother in Ottawa arranged for all local copies to be burned — until it was reissued in the mid-sixties, and Smart became something of a feminist icon. She was an alcoholic, hungry for attention, whose youngest child died of heroin addiction. And yet, in Nicky’s brave and brilliant portrayal, she’s also magnificent, a free spirit who lived on the edge of madness, who loved nature and babies and words, as well as an utterly unworthy man.

We need more stories about wild and crazy Canadian artists. May this show go on to the brave and brilliant future it deserves.

 By chance last night, I turned on a documentary called The Commandant’s Shadow, guessing, given the title, about its subject. I missed the beginning and hope to catch it again. Because, although I do my best to avoid films about the Holocaust — just don’t want to put myself through it — this is a profoundly moving film. It brings to light the actual people behind the film Zone of Interest, which depicts the happy family life of Rudolf Höss, the architect of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, who lived just over the wall from the slaughter. Höss was hanged in 1947 for crimes against humanity.

Höss’s son Hans Jürgen has struggled all his life to remain ignorant about what happened, but his own son Kai, a pastor, forces him to see the truth. As Kai says, “My grandfather was the greatest mass murderer in human history.” Yet Hans recalls his “idyllic childhood” and his father’s loving, tender last words in a letter before he was executed. The banality of evil.

An extraordinary Jewish woman illuminates the film — Anita Lasker-Wallfisch survived Auschwitz because she was recruited to play the cello in a band that made music as Jews were marched to their deaths. Now 98 and as sharp as a teenager, she chain-smokes as she remarks caustically on the world. Her daughter connects with the Hösses, taking them for the first time to Auschwitz, and then to London to visit her mother. The encounter of the Holocaust survivor and the son and grandson of the mass murderer is breathtaking. There is forgiveness, as much as there can be. There is humanity. They eat a torte together. These people are innocent of any wrongdoing, but the shadow of a hideous past has shrouded their lives.

Anita is asked if the Holocaust could happen again. She replies, “Look at the world,” and speaks about the rise in anti-Semitism.

Indeed, look at the world. Today’s paper reports that Israel has bombed the only cancer hospital left in Gaza. Over 600 people, mostly women and children, slaughtered just in this last round of bombing. Netanyahu and his far-right team are single-handedly bringing back a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Not that this ancient hatred needs their help.

Pundits like Bill Maher, who condemns the campus anti-Israel protestors as misguided pro-Hamas terrorist-lovers, seem incapable of understanding that you can be ferociously against what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and also anti-terrorist and anti-Hamas.

The conflation of loathing Netanyahu and his gang, and being anti-Semitic — that is, hating all Jews for the unforgivable sins of the heedless, corrupt, far right Israeli government — is wrong, although increasingly, sadly, more and more ubiquitous.

And finally, our brand new prime minister has begun his own trial by fire, submitting to stupid, hostile questions from a hostile and often stupid press. They’re all waiting for him to explode; apparently he has a famous temper. A vicious far right “journalist” posted gleefully about one of Carney’s children, who’s trans. Right after being sworn in, Carney flew to Paris and London to cement relationships with Canada’s allies, a perfect move, and at a press conference afterward was asked by a hostile “journalist” if he was going “to repay the taxpayers of Canada the cost of the trip.”

 I’d have told the “journalist” to fuck off, but Carney answered at length, with patience and clarity, about the necessity of shoring up allegiances.

A grownup. Very few around these horrifying days. Godspeed, Mark. This will be a rough ride for you, a dignified man surely used to being treated with respect.

Get through, please. Hang in there and save us.

Tiggy know where her food is kept, though out of reach. But she checks anyway. Hope springs eternal. For cats and for we human beings. Hope.

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