How much should we forgive a great artist?
Bookworm on Oct 26 2009 at 2:16 pm | Filed under: Hollywood
Hollywood is quite sure that Roman Polansky should be forgiven for raping a 13 year old because, considering his value to the artistic world, it wasn’t really rape. It was so long ago, he’s so talented, she’s so over it, whatever . . . . “All is forgiven, dear. Come home. I miss you terribly.” (And for those wondering, that’s the caption to a 1940s Esquire cartoon that shows a typically gorgeous Esquire woman, in a filthy kitchen, on the phone to her obviously henpecked husband.)
The reason I’m doing a sort of free-flowing rumination about this is because, on Pandora, I just heard a passage from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, one of my favorite operettas. Or at least it once was one of my favorite operettas. Now, I listen to it with my mind operating on two tracks. One glories in the gorgeous fin de siecle music that represents the last gasp of a more innocent time. The other track cannot forget that Lehar did nothing when his lyricist for so many successful operettas, the Jewish Fritz Löhner-Beda, was taken, first to Dachau, then to Buchenwald, and then to Auschwitz, where he was beaten to death.
Admittedly, doing something in the Reich of 1938-1942 (when Löhner-Beda met his brutal end) wasn’t necessarily easy or safe. But there is still something dreadfully wrong about the fact that Hitler’s favorite living composer, one who could have gotten favors, did nothing. It makes it awfully hard to listen to his music with the same pleasure I once enjoyed.
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16 Responses to “How much should we forgive a great artist?”
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I’m sure I’m just going to get in trouble, but wasn’t Whoopi saying that Polanski hadn’t pled to rape but to a lesser offense? Which was, therefore, “not rape-rape”?
Not defending Polanski, but rather Whoopi, as I listened to that show and it seemed to me she was being taken out of context.
So he bargained down to a lesser offense. How does that change the original act? Do you think she thought that the actual rape didn’t happen? or just that since the prosecution allowed him to bargain down the charge he shouldn’t be punished as much?
Whoopi isn’t the sharpest pin in the cushion.
Heh. First movie I saw her in was “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” – I thought it was a really enjoyable movie. Then I saw her in Sister Act. Had a bit of a problem with that one. Having lived in a convent boarding school for 5 years, her portrayal was so completely unlike the nuns I knew…
Still…I keep hearing the stories about people having been smacked by nuns in school… I spent 13 years total in Catholic schools taught entirely by nuns, and never once had a hand lifted against me, although my parents let me know without any equivocation that they had given the principal their permission to spank me as necessary.
I fail to see why they are putting so much effort into defending Polanski. He’s old, his best work if not all is behind him, throw him to the wolves. Of course, it could just be sympathetic fear that they to will one day be set adrift to account for their debauch behavior.
I was once slapped by a nun when I was 7. I was in Saturday catechism class preparing for my first communion. The nun, who was kind of a sourpuss, was making her way down a crowded aisle flanked by standing kids. I pushed a desk out of her way to give her more room to pass, but made a loud scraping noise as I did.
She thought I had done it deliberately and slapped me. The slap didn’t hurt as much as the injustice of it and her vast overreaction. But even at 7 I realized there are times when arguing won’t get you anywhere and that she’d made a mistake. I could live with it.
In short, I didn’t pull a Bill Ayers and become a sociopath because of the unfairness of it all.
My later extensive encounter with nuns was far happier. I was an altar boy at a Mexican church. The old lady in charge of the acolytes was the pastor’s housekeeper, a sourpussed old Mexican named Mary who was one of the most deeply ignorant, mean-spirited viejas I had ever met in my nine years of life. (Father Soriano agreed with me in his own cheerful way that Mary was a beyotch, but counseled me to remember that she was still a daughter of God and to respect her accordingly.)
Anyway, Father Soriano had somehow managed to recruit an order of Belgian nuns to come teach in his K-6 school. He lured them after he’d inveigled all of the Mexican dads in the neighborhood to put in thousands of man hours building both a school and a convent.
For some reason, Mary couldn’t stand the nuns. She kept warning us to stay away from them, although she never gave us clear reasons why. So, of course, we all managed to not avoid them at every opportunity.
They were the sweetest, happiest women I had ever met. The mother superior never walked. Instead, she glided across the pavement and up stairs, chirping and laughing, and invariably followed by a string of prancing kids. The other nuns were just like her. Once I realized what fine women they were, I understood Mary’s dark jealousy.
I also learned a lifelong lesson: Mary was so grumpy that I later realized she was my first close encounter with a liberal.
I like nuns although, having met only one in my life, my liking is somewhat abstract. I like the nuns because they sheltered my Jewish paternal grandmother in a Belgian convent throughout the duration of WWII. And I like the nuns because, when my Mom was in an Indonesian concentration camp, there were nuns there and my Mom remembers them with fondness to this day as invariably kind of cheerful, and that under the most dire circumstances. She also always appreciated the way they spread this kindness around to all, regardless of the recipient’s faith. So I like nuns.
Here’s my tie in with the UN
So he bargained down to a lesser offense.
Something that’s never happened before, of course.
How does that change the original act?
I dunno, how?
Do you think she thought that the actual rape didn’t happen?
if I did, I would have said so. That’s rather the point: that she was saying he hadn’t been charged with “rape rape”. Hell, he wasn’t even charged with statutory rape.
or just that since the prosecution allowed him to bargain down the charge he shouldn’t be punished as much?
You know, I’m not an attorney, but it has been my experience that yes, bargaining down a charge means you don’t get punished as much.
Book, I used to write for the Northern California Jewish Bulletin. Even though I was a goy, the editor let me handle non-religious stories because he liked me and knew his copyeditors would catch me if I ever walked into it too deep.
One story I remember vividly was covering the journey of a Jewish math teacher from Tamalpais High School who had gone back to Belgium to attend a reunion of classmates from a Catholic school whose headmasters had hidden him from the Nazis when he was a boy.
His mother had brought him to the school as the Germans were rampaging through Belgium, begging the headmistress, whom she knew to be a good woman, to take her son and shelter him. It was the last time he ever saw his mother. He learned years later that she had died in a concentration camp.
The headmistress, whose husband was a straitlaced old Belgian calvary officer, swore the boy to secrecy, telling him that he was now to pretend to be a Catholic and that he must never, under any circumstance, tell any of the other 80 students at the school that he was Jewish.
And so he did, living through the war as a lonely Jewish boy in a Catholic school, grateful for the protection the headmistress and her husband gave him, but regretful that he could never reveal himself.
So when he went back to Belgium 40 years later to honor the kindly people who had saved him, he resolved to tell his classmates who and what he really was.
At the reunion, as stories of the headmasters’ kindness spilled out from all the students who had gathered there, he experienced the most astonishing revelation of his life: None of the students he had lived beside for five years had been a Catholic. Every one of them had been a Jew, sworn to absolute secrecy and admonished to pretend to be Catholic while hiding their Jewish identities at all costs.
He recalled the shouts of amazement and then pure joy as the truth came out. The old man and woman confessed to their great deception and apologized for having to make all of their children lie. They were people of great honor who did not enjoy lying, but they also knew that the bold untruth they pulled off for so many months saved many lives.
There is a reason why Yad Vashem has the Avenue of the Righteous. Those nuns who hid your grandmother, like the couple who hid that boy, are among the reasons why I have not yet given up hope.
Book, time to turn Anglophile for your light opera and embrace Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert’s wit will never let you down. What, never? No, never. What, never? Hardly ever.
Charles: what a story. I wonder if the school neighbors figured out what was going on and maintained silence, or if they never caught on. Abraham Lincoln once said something to the effect that before Northerners condemn Southerners over slavery, they should ask themselves how they would have responded had THEY been born in the South. Similarly, we should ask ourselves how we would have responded had we been living in Europe during that era. Would we have stood up for righteousness? It is easy from the safety of our living rooms to condemn acts of generations gone by.
Several hundred years from now, how will they judge US?
You know, I’m not an attorney, but it has been my experience that yes, bargaining down a charge means you don’t get punished as much.
Since he skipped out on punishment entirely, your defense of Whoop goes down the drain.
The problem with straight answers is that they inevitably encroach upon regions people don’t like to get near. The fear of people knows no bounds.
GREAT story, Charles….
Forgive me, but inquiring minds need to know….how did 80 boys manage to get through five years of boarding school without EVER noticing that they were all circumcised? Or maybe Belgian Jewish folks weren’t practicing that part of the covenant in those days…..?
Help?
My guess is that the boys, recognizing the risks of their anatomy, practiced a great deal of privacy, no doubt encouraged by the school administration.
Could be…hard to imagine a boarding school with dorms, gym, etc. where it would be POSSIBLE for 80 guys to maintain their respective secrets from 79 other guys for five YEARS!
Even though European Christians didn’t routinely practice circumcision, there was a medical movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that counseled the procedure as a means of insuring hygiene and discouraging masturbation by lessening the voluptuous temptations posed by now excised nerve endings.
So circumcised Christian males among certain classes were not rarities.
At the same time, certain progressive Jews decided to do away with the practice, seeing it as a barbaric relic. So the presence of uncircumcised Jews would not have been surprising either—not that the boy would have remarked upon it however great his curisoity. The boys at that school had been told that they would invite death if any of their classmates learned about their Jewishness. The threat of being murdered by Nazis was enough to squelch any questions raised by the presence of unadorned schwanzes.
(I never did ask the teacher if he was circumcised—too nosy for a family newspaper—nor did I ask him what the bathing and gym arrangements were at the school.)