"Vishniac."

This is a reference to Roman Vichniac, whose collection of pictures of Jews in pre-War Poland were published as "A Vanished World." Some of those photographs were put up at this website� last Sunday, just after a bit of "Yidl Mitn Fidl."

Vishniac lost 70,000 prints in Europe, destroyed by the Nazis. But what he did manage to get back to America with is the best record one has of those who were farming (miserably), studying in cheders (intensely), selling (five potatoes, a handful of onions, papirosen, whatever there was), or talking together, on Nalewki Street, or in some shtetl of Belz. And that means that Roman Vishniac, who did not escape endless personal tragedies, even in the United States (his son, Wolf, was a scientist at Yale who died in a freak accident in Antarctica, and one of Wolf's two sons also died, both of them predeceasing the father of one and grandfather of the other, that wonderful man, Roman Vishniac).

It's all become quite the fashion, hasn't it? That float in Brazil. That window-dislay in Tokyo, as described above. And surely there is a link between this use of the German murders and the easy invocation of "the Holocaust" and of course, those visiting dignitaries who on state trips to Israel visit Yad Vashem, then come out, their faces suitably grim and ashen ("tvoj vzor unyl i strashen"), and they utter their "never-again" speech, and then go home, and at the U.N. they never get around to instructing their country's representatives not to vote as the Arabs and Muslims want them to, in the Great Gang-Up at the Kangaroo Court on the East River.

Yes, it all meant so much to them. They might as well join those would-be cariocan merry-makers, or the vetriniste in Tokyo, given what that event too easily called the "Holocaust" apparently means to them.

Best wishes

Vivek Iyer Vivek Iyer

Actually, as I learnt from Google, his family were from Europe and had suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis. In this context, his savage indignation at what appears to be the dissolving of the basic moral fabric of society has taken a by no means eccentric - though still self contradictory-route.

I have to admit I don't see things his way. But then I'm a kind of declasse, downwardly mobile, middle aged darkie whose sense of well-being is predicated on what appears to me the rising level of education and moral values amongst poorer young people in inner Cities in the West.

Furthermore, the steady erosion of the replacement ratio (welfare benefits to wage)which by a bureaucratic error re. indexing tended to reach a peak in the late '70's in advanced countries, has had a positive impact on softening the mores of traditionally macho working cultures against the backdrop of deindustrialization.

Incidentally, now that I'm disabused about the author's Japanese origin, I've got to say the Macro-econ rants are probably shoddy rather than eccentric.

Still, this guy sure can write!