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POETRY

BLOODLANDS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K views

‘In the very midst of civilised Europe…the existence

of an entire population is threatened.’ Anatole France et al, 1919


 

Ukraine, like all countries, is an invention;

an abstraction on a map; a conqueror’s

caprice; an accident of history;

an actual, continual pit of war,

occupation, partition, rebellion,

displacement, famine – and pogroms

under Chmielnicki’s Cossacks, the Tzar’s

Black Hundreds, the Soviets, the Nazis…

***

Until the Germans occupied Ukraine

my grandfather, a Tzarist refugee

in London, had had regular letters

in Yiddish from his parents and siblings

in Kyiv. After September ’41

no more arrived. Approximately

thirty four thousand Jewish men, women

and children – in two days – were shot to death

by the Germans and their collaborators,

the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.


Each fresh layer of bodies in Babyn Yar –

a ravine four miles from the city centre

and not far from the River Dnipro –

was covered by sand. As the Russians

advanced, re-occupying Ukraine,

the SS attempted to remove

the evidence by exhuming the corpses,

burning them, and scattering the ashes

on neighbouring farmland. Though the odd

piece of bone or necklace turned up, Stalin

ordered the massacre kept secret,

to pretend the retreat had never happened.


***


Before the latest invasion you could

book a tour of the Jewish sites of Kyiv –

the five synagogues, Golda Meir’s birthplace,

Babyn Yar – for less than £50 pounds

per person. Included would be a

selfie with the driver.

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POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

The war is two years over. The tide is out,

and the beach clear of detritus except

for part of an upended landing stage,

like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.

Beside it there are four small children,

who are playing the serious, absorbing games

the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.

The photographer, whose parents were murdered

by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire

near the Suez Canal. He photographed

Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso

with ‘Guernica’; covered the Spanish

Civil War, and the founding of Israel.

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POETRY

A VIEW FROM THE CASTLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

It is not the winter-grey Danube flowing –

hundreds of feet below – fast to Budapest,

nor the suspension bridge – with its high rise

circular restaurant – commemorating

the failed uprising against the Nazis,

nor the outline of the Vienna Alps

fifty miles away, nor the wind turbines

covering the plain between, but the concrete

Soviet era apartment blocks

now painted white and some in pastel shades

that first catch the eye from this stronghold

on a rocky hill far above the town

on the second day of 2018.

This must be Europe’s centre: liberated,

Catholic, polyglot; in Magyar,

German, Slovak; Pozsonyi Vár,

Pressburger Schloss, Bratislavsky Hrad.

 

As we descend the narrow, cobbled street

that turns with the hill’s contours, gusts of wind

whirl into the air small strips of gold paper,

detritus of New Year’s Eve celebrations,

and a party of Australian tourists

comes round the corner their resolute guide’s

tartan umbrella flapping unsafely.

 

*

 

The runway faces east so the plane

must bank westwards to fly by Vienna,

Prague, London to land at Manchester.

On the right are the Little Carpathians

with vineyards on the slopes and at their heart

wildernesses of beasts and plants still intact –

left, below, river, castle, tower blocks

reduced to perfection.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

‘Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!’
PEDAGOGICAL SKETCHBOOKS, Paul Klee, 1925

 

Cruising from Westminster to Greenwich, we passed
Tate Modern, the old Bankside power station –
art as regeneration. The current show
was ‘Paul Klee – Making Visible’. “Making
a fool of himself, more like!” called the captain
over the tannoy. There was much laughter
and some applause. The 02 Arena
and the Thames Barrier came into view –
two works of abstract art as engineering.
In the Royal Hospital’s Painted Hall
are Thornhill’s baroque maritime murals –
representational art as décor
and establishment propaganda.

On the return trip, a different captain
made the same remark – to the same effect.
Klee and his peers had been many decades
dead and were, seemingly, still a threat –
despite the sponsor, EY – Ernst & Young –
trusted global accountants and auditors!

Klee catalogued his work precisely.
‘Making Visible’ followed his schema.
In the ‘20s room, I studied his ‘Wohin?’ –
‘Where to?’ – oil on paper, A4 more or less –
a stylised landscape of seven trees –
straight trunks, leaves and branches circular,
six deep green, paint richly daubed, the seventh
a discreet orange – and varicoloured,
irregular fields, no lanes, paths – the title
painted in as part of the picture.

I had seen the work before: exhibited
in Chicago’s Art Institute, built
as part of the 1893 World Fair –
architectural art as marketing.
The exhibition was a reprise –
a sort of victory roll – of the Nazi’s
‘Entarte Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’,
mastered by Goebbels, opened by Hitler
in ’37 in Munich’s Chamber
of Visual Arts. In addition
to Klee’s, there were works by Chagall, Grosz,
Kandinsky, Kokoscha, Mondrian et al –
snatched from the public galleries of the Reich.
One might have expected the exhibition
to have been followed by the public
immolation of the works of art,
like the burning of books in ’33.
Some disappeared as Europe broke apart.
Many, like ‘Wohin?’, travelled safely
abroad. Money makes the art go round.

In ’33, vilified by the Nazis,
he left Germany and returned to Bern.
His was, as he put it, ‘a thinking eye’,
seeing truly the scope and the nature of things;
Picasso’s ‘master of colour’; versatile
in his use of materials; prolific.
In ’36, he was diagnosed
with scleroderma, an incurable
degenerative disease, that affects
motor skills. He died the month the Werhmacht
took Paris. He painted to the end.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LAST CALIPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.3K views

Ataturk dissolved seven centuries
of the Sultanate and the British
cloaked-and-daggered the aging Sultan
by sea to San Remo and exile.
Ataturk made the Sultan’s middle aged
cousin, Abdülmecid II, Caliph.
He seemed to carry his descent, as it were,
from the Prophet as lightly as a Pope
from the Saviour. He liked the pomp
and the public circumstance of the role
so much Ataturk sent him packing too.

Classical composer, husband of four wives,
painter, lepidopterist, gardener,
a Victor Hugo fan and of Montaigne’s
Essays – especially perhaps ‘By
Divers Means Men Come To A Like End’ –
he went into exile on The Orient
Express en famille and lived in Paris
and Nice. ‘He may be seen strolling with a mien
of great dignity along the beach,’
wrote a foreign correspondent, ‘attired
in swimming trunks only, carrying
a large parasol.’ He died in his bed
in his house on Boulevard Suchet
as Paris was freed from the Nazis –
his beard, of which he was proud, still resplendent.
He was buried in Medina – Madinat
Al-Nabi, City of the Prophet –
as, officially, the last of the line.
It could have been worse. His seems to have been
a charmed, perhaps even charming, life –
with an enviable retirement, due,
in large part, to Ataturk’s shrewdness.

What would either of them have made of
caliphate proclamations from the deserts
of Syria and Iraq; stage-managed
beheadings broadcast worldwide; Semtex strapped
to the gut and the heart?

 

 

 

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