John Lichfield: Our Man In Paris – John Lichfield, Commentators – The Independent

The urban motorway which hugs the boundary of Paris proper is a sort of 10-lane medieval city wall. Inside the Périphérique is the beautiful city beloved of tourists and the home, for the most part, of the white and the well-off. Outside the Périphérique are the banlieues, a few of them leafy, wealthy and white; some of them poor and abandoned and dangerous; most of them a dynamic, incoherent, multiracial jumble.

President Nicolas Sarkozy took a bold, and somewhat puzzling, initiative last week. He selected 10 teams to think up visions for a “Greater Paris”. They will report back next year.

The idea is sensible and long overdue. But President Sarkozy’s initiative has, nonetheless, puzzled and alarmed many people. The Elysée Palace has jumped straight to the building stage. The Socialist leadership of the Paris town hall and the greater Paris area have been kept at arm’s length.

Critics fear that M. Sarkozy has no real interest in breaking down the invisible wall between Paris and its banlieues. Instead, they say, his plan is a smokescreen behind which property developers will be encouraged to create vast, new satellite cities of offices. Already, plans are going ahead for three new tower blocks.

Interesting report from the Paris known to us from La Haine and Caché.

The North Circular as sociologically significant boundary??

The cashier at the Regency Cafe is a small woman, but she has a powerful set of vocal chords. No doubt they’re kept in fine fettle by the intermittent calling – bellowing of orders ready for pick up.

Technorati Tags: “regency cafe”

The coldest day of the year so far – approximately -5c early in the morning.

An interesting NY Times article on the tightly knit Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. Among their number, Eddie Antar aka Crazy Eddie – the name familiar to me from trips to Wantagh, Long Island when his stores were advertised everywhere.

For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.

Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison.

The Crazy Eddie case became a cause célèbre, shattering longstanding community rules of silence and decorum. Eddie’s J-Dub wife, Debbie, caught him in flagrante delicto with his mistress, who also happened to be a J-Dub named Debbie, on the last day of December 1983 — a confrontation remembered among old-timers as the New Year’s Eve massacre. The massacre was a real bean-spiller, and it was followed by the testimony of Eddie’s first cousin (and partner and C.F.O.) Sam E. Antar on how the illegal schemes had been carried out. This gave the United States Attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Chertoff (now the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security), more than enough to work with. Eddie went away for six years.

The souk smart phrase above reminds me of 2 Danish guys I knew in Fort Lauderdale back in 1994/5. They both worked at Florida Swap Shop selling electronic goods. They were clean cut, nordic, young fellows and I remember them reporting that their Israeli boss had remarked:

‘If I looked like you, or you could sell like me, now that would be a winning combination!’.

An interesting blog post from Sam Antar – Eddie’s cousin and former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s. Something to read before going shopping on Tottenham Court Road – or 5th Ave.

work in progress………

“I looked around me and realised that if I didn’t do something, I would die here. I knew that I didn’t want that.”

Gitana was 38 when she left Lithuania, the only country she had never known, for a country she had never seen. The decision to move to London was made at a rock concert outside the capital city of Vilnius on a balmy summers day, which she had attended in order to keep a watchful eye over her then-teenage daughter and her friends.

Short, pretty and patient looking, she described the urgency of action once she had decided to move. Her husband was working with his brother in Spain at the time, and it transpires that she more or less made the decision to move unilaterally. Not as forthcoming about her husband by half as about her life here, (what does your husband do? Oh, nothing very interesting. Something quite boring, actually. Yes, but what? He’s a warehouse man.) I began to doubt the health of her life, and her choice. I probably never will resolve the doubt and realised that she herself probably doesn’t know if she in moving was escaping an old life or moving to a new one.

I would imagine that the motivation of the former leads to the manifestation of the latter. I asked her what made her want to move, and how Lithuania is different to England. You can imagine my surprise when she declared how warm and friendly Londoners are. “Here, they all smile at you!” She must have been smiling at them. Apparently the average Lithuanian is a very angry, bitter and jealous individual. I saw none of this in Gitana. I did see resilience and courage.

She came here alone, in 2002, before her country was adapted into the EU, not knowing a single Lithuanian soul, nor seeking one out. About this she was adamant; she wanted to build an integrated life as a Londoner. And life as a Londoner usually has quite an international flavour to it. She explained the Christmas tradition in Lithuania. As on the mainland continent, the festive meal is eaten on the 24^th December. Departing somewhat from better-known customs, the Lithuanian meal consists of 12 courses. Last year she and her husband had invited eleven of their friends over, and asked each to contribute a course. Twelve national cuisines were sampled that evening, though Gitana admitted coyly that she preferred her home fare.

Working as a confident and excellent court interpreter here ( that is how we met ) I wondered whether she had always worked with language. I must confess, the story of Marijana from Croatia in Coetzee’s SLOW MAN (and less so, the doctor in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS) was in my mind when I asked this. It is often that highly regarded professionals from abroad work as menial, manual workers in order to bridge the transition from immigrant to citizen. She had taught English for all of her working life (unlike here, school-leavers there do not yet have the luxury or the agony of choice. They make a decision and they are stuck with it.) but when she arrived here she found herself wandering up and down Croydon High Street enquiring in myriad shops and restaurants. After two weeks of relentless searching, she walked into a Chinese restaurant (“but owned by a Pakistani guy”, she adds, without pausing to register my surprise) and was told yes, they did have a vacancy for a waitress, and could she please go home, change and be back within the hour.

This she duly did, full of enthusiasm and not much else; she had never waited on anyone in her life. After a month she found a job working thirteen hours a day for six-and-a-half days a week at a hotel in Richmond. For the princely sum of £150 a week. No, she did not realise at the time that she was being grossly underpaid. This question of mine she answers without any bitterness or anger. I could see why on her account, she did not feel such kinship with her fellow Lithuanians. The exploitation, which lasted for over a year, she dismisses with a shrug of her shoulders and a smile, as if she should have known better.

Curiosity got the better of me and I enquired as to which creed of boss had so unfairly extracted her labour. A Pakistani owner of several hotels who clearly knew the system, for Gitana learned later that he had been paying an English girl almost double to do the same job. I wondered if the Pakistani had once worked as a manual labourer and whether immigrants conformed to the same cycle of ‘abuse’ which often perpetuates through generations. Which nationality of immigrant bring Gitana her food, and clean her hotel room, in years to come?

I was browsing through my RSS feeds and was struck by an 2 images of Fleet Street Holborn Circus – 1920 and 2003. Interesting.