Every Tuesday night, students from across campus head toward Raymond House, where Coffeehouse has become a staple of the student social diet.
Greeted by a warm atmosphere, comfortable furniture, and the choice of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, visitors settle down to enjoy a few hours of entertainment. Spotlights focus on a small stage, where the entertainment can range from professional bands to campus performers, such as the Dutch Pipers. And, on good nights, a hitherto undiscovered star will step onto the stage during an “open-mike” session.
The idea for Coffeehouse came in the fall of 1995, when Brian Goldberg '99 and several other freshmen began talking at a football game. “We started talking about the idea, 'What if we had our own house?' ” Goldberg says. “And we said, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a place where people could be social but it was also a showcase for artistic talent.' ”
Answering those questions led to the accumulation of new interested members, discussions with administrators, a proposal, and, in the fall of 1996, the opening of Coffeehouse.
The Coffeehouse stage has been the scene of stellar performances. “We wanted, essentially, to have a stage that gave people the opportunity to do something,” Goldberg says. “If there is some kid who sits up in his room and plays the guitar but he has no place on campus to play his first time, we wanted to give him a stage.”
That, they have. “At the end of the night someone sees the stage and it kind of beckons them and they step up, maybe with only a few people listening,” Goldberg says with a smile. “What's so wonderful is to see them a few months later and they're the ones stepping up when the crowd is still big.”
The group that runs Coffeehouse is called “The Society,” and members have worked to make Coffeehouse as accessible to the campus community as possible. They have implemented such programs as “Coffeehouse on the Road,” which brings the Coffeehouse experience to other spaces on campus such as Dutch Hollow and Old Chapel, and opened their doors to countless club meetings, poetry readings, and band rehearsals.
The true draw of The Society and its Coffeehouse is the freedom they represent. Whether it is the ability to get up in front of people and perform on a whim, or the opportunity to implement events, Coffeehouse is an opportunity for self-empowerment. Simply put, as Goldberg points out, “You come up with an idea, you can do it!”
Mikhail Iossel, writer-in- residence at the College, is the recent winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mikhail Iossel had a convoluted route to becoming the College's writer-in-residence
Engineer, writer, teacher, night watchman — Mikhail Iossel's resume reads like that of an eccentric character in a novel.
That's not surprising given that Iossel, the writer-in-residence at the College, writes fiction, and some of the best fiction-writers draw on their unique life experiences in their work. The recent winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Iossel is at work on his second book, comprising two linked novellas. His first book, Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life, a collection of stories, was published in 1991.
Iossel grew up in Leningrad, and his family's library was filled with the Russian classics (as well as Twain, Jack London, Faulkner, and Hemingway). He remembers always wanting to be a writer, and he began as a boy, winning several writing competitions. But that was not a simple path for a Jewish boy in St. Petersburg (as Leningrad was called until recently). “Jews could not be admitted to any college that had anything to do with humanities because that would be infringing upon the ideological sphere,” he says.
So, rather than enter the Soviet army, he chose to attend the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute, where he studied engineering, electromagnetic fields, mathematics, and physics. “It was not something that I could envision myself doing for my whole life because I knew that I wanted to write,” he says.
Nevertheless, he spent several years after graduation screening Soviet submarines and lowering their electromagnetic levels to the point where American submarines wouldn't detect them. Then, in the early 1980s, he became involved with an underground literary club, called “Club 81” for the year of its founding. He began to publish his work in “samizdat” (underground magazines) and meet frequently with foreign writers — even though such contact jeopardized his engineering work, which banned contact with foreigners.
He negotiated to leave his position at the research institution and went to work for a computer center, which required little secrecy. Shortly thereafter, like many underground writers and artists, he quit his day job and took a position as a night guard at the central park in St. Petersburg. His primary responsibility was watching over the roller coaster.
“I spent two-and-a-half years very happily that way,” he says. “I was writing and meeting people, publishing in the underground magazines, and co-editing a magazine of translations published by Club 81. By that time I had already made up my mind that I was going to leave the country.”
He applied for emigration to the United States several times, and was turned down repeatedly for a variety of reasons. He also started having “minor run-ins” with the KGB – due to his status as both a “refusenik” (someone who had been turned down for emigration from the Soviet Union) and as member of the underground. “Either you are an underground writer or you are trying to leave,” he says. “You don't want to be an underground writer trying to leave.”
Iossel was tracked by two departments of the KGB — one that watched his activities as a writer and one that watched refuseniks. “The counter propaganda were sophisticates, secret police who could discuss current trends in literature,” he says. “They just wanted to make sure that what you were writing would not find its way to the West.”
Those who tracked refuseniks were simply hoodlums. “They tried to make life uncomfortable for those who tried to appeal their situation,” he says. “Essentially, their job was to keep you as quiet as possible so that you would not attract international attention. If you started sending letters about your case, they would find a way to indicate that they didn't want you to do that, which was to bop you over the head, for instance.”
After five years of waiting to emigrate while the KGB made his life “uncomfortable,” Iossel was finally granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1986, when Gorbachev came to power and tensions eased.
Iossel settled in Boston, where he knew a few writers and poets whom he had met in Leningrad. He was also attracted to the large Russian immigrant community in Boston. “It gave you a certain degree of support,” he says. Working in bookstores for $5 an hour, Iossel continued to write. He resolved to write fiction only in English, which he had taught himself when he was still in middle school (he also took a series of courses on the theory of translation after earning his engineering degree and published Russian translations of contemporary American poetry in a literary magazine).
“I wanted to limit the scope of my self-expression,” he says. “Samuel Beckett said he began to write in French because he knew too many works in English. In Russian, I was too fluent, too many words, too much emotion. Writing English was an exercise of a mechanical nature, like a crossword puzzle. Forget untrammeled emotion.”
After working and writing in Boston for a year, he began to think about returning to engineering. “But I basically still wanted to write. Then someone told me about the notion of writing programs, so I applied,” he says. He entered a graduate writing program at the University of New Hampshire, eager to have blocks of time to write. He developed his own literary voice and style, which critics widely praised with the publication of his first book in 1991. He went from New Hampshire to Stanford, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction writing, and then taught at several other universities before coming to Union in 1995.
Iossel enjoys teaching writing because it allows him to talk about the things that he loves. And, of course, he has the chance to write, which he tries to do every day. For Iossel, the best thing about writing is the opportunity to “say whatever you want to say — about life, about yourself, about other people — and know that others will probably be able to relate to that.”
Iossel has returned to Russia several times. On his first trip in 1993, he was extremely apprehensive. “It is very difficult, but then, a couple of days into your stay, you realize that you actually have never left,” he says. “Russia, while changing, still remains the same. Though you can no longer belong there 100 percent because you have already severed your ties, there is a very strong pull because your first language is there, many of your friends are there, and it is the place of your youth, the landmarks of your life.”
Iossel has returned to St. Petersburg several times since that initial journey, sharing his enthusiasm for writing in a series of summer literary seminars, where American students study with well-known American and Russian writers.
Now in his mid-forties, Iossel lives in Schenectady with his wife, Victoria. Like Iossel, she was born in Leningrad, of a Russian mother and a Kenyan father. She grew up in Kenya speaking English, but she speaks fluent Russian and the couple speaks only Russian to their daughter, Yana, who is two years old. “We hope she will become bilingual,” Iossel says. Although he plans to take at least six months away from teaching to write thanks to the Guggenheim Fellowship, he has not yet solidified his plans. “Maybe I'll just throw a party at Geppetto's for 7,000 people and that will be the end of my Guggenheim,” he says with a laugh.
To Amber Johnston '99, whose senior thesis examined the impact of western medical methods on Fijian society, the following story is not unusual:
A Fiji woman suffering from schizophrenia goes to a psychiatric ward and receives sedatives, which do little to improve her condition. Worse, because she is using western medical treatments, she is an outcast in her community.
Finally she goes to a local healer, who “discovers” that the woman has been living on another person's land, and that the land's owners have placed a curse on her. She apologizes to the family that owns the land, moves to another house, and is cured.
Johnston, an interdepartmental anthropology and psychology major, studied in Fiji on a term abroad created by Steve Leavitt and Karen Brison, both associate professors of anthropology. Last summer Johnston returned to Fiji to conduct research for her thesis as one of nine students supported by a grant from the Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust (she also received an Internal Education Fund grant from the College).
During her term abroad, Johnston and two other students — Sarah Ahart '99 and Debbie Cederbaum '99 — lived in small villages and conducted anthropological field research on village life. Johnston became fascinated by the underlying emphasis on indigenous ancestral spirits in all of Fijian life.
“Fiji was missionized 200 years ago and outwardly appears to be a Christian society,” she explains. “But Fijians really do believe in their indigenous spirits. A lot of their indigenous culture is filtered through Christianity. Since the indigenous spirits play a direct role in almost every aspect of Fijian life, they are an integral component of traditional beliefs about mental illness.”
According to traditional Fijian culture, mental illness is caused by a curse put on an individual, either by another person or by a spirit. Fijian healers help find the curse that has caused the misery, and when the sufferers rectify the situation, the curse is lifted and the illness is cured. (Johnston says the system helps maintain the Fijian social order. “People behave in a certain way because they are afraid of having a curse put on them. This provides a socially-appropriate way to deal with problems in Fiji — all through the guise of mental and physical illness.”)
The people who do not get better are thought to have curses placed on them by the most powerful spirits. Although they don't improve, they are supported by their communities and families as they seek the curse that is causing their problems.
Not so for those who go to St. Giles, the westernized psychiatric hospital in Fiji. These people are treated differently from those pursuing traditional treatments, even though they may have the same symptoms. “Some of the patients at St. Giles are ostracized by their communities because they are labeled as mentally ill, something that is only associated with St. Giles,” she explains.
A good deal of the treatment at St. Giles involves trying to educate the local residents about their illnesses. But indigenous views die hard, and many patients don't regularly take their medication — a staple for western treatments.
Johnston concluded that the introduction of westernized treatment methods has done more harm than good in Fiji.
“These people have the choice of being admitted to St. Giles, taking medication for an indefinite amount of time, and being isolated from their villages — the most important part of their lives — or remaining in their villages, cared for and accepted by the community, and going to an indigenous healer who offers them a hope for 100 percent wellness. It is no surprise that many choose to go to a local healer.”
Johnston thinks we could learn from traditional Fijian treatments. “We take the mentally ill out of their communities, and the hospital becomes their families. In Fiji, they stay in their homes, within their support systems.” In addition, she stresses that there are few differences in the success rates for treatments. “We haven't found anything that amazingly cures people,” she says.
“Mental illness does have a social factor that you can't ignore,” she continues. “At Ellis Hospital, I work in the adolescent psychiatric unit, where ninety percent or more of the children have social problems — they were abused, they have no family, or suffer from other problems. I have to believe that their illnesses are not simply chemical. There is something else affecting these kids.”
Johnston traces her interest in mental illness to a volunteer program she completed at a local hospital near her hometown of Bradford, Vt., when she was in high school. She has worked in the recreational therapy department of the psychiatric ward at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady since her sophomore year at Union.
To any observer, they appear Catholic: they go to mass and confession, send their eldest sons to the priesthood, and celebrate Easter and Christmas.
But these “crypto-Jews” in the American southwest secretly practice the traditions of Judaism in the privacy of their own homes.
Daniel Pesikoff '99 discovered the crypto-Jews when writing a paper about his own ancestors, who settled in New Mexico in the 1800s. He returned to the topic for his senior thesis under the supervision of Teresa Meade, associate professor of history.
The crypto-Jews can trace their heritage to fourteenth-century Spain, when the Holy Office of the Inquisition demanded that all Jews in Spain either convert to Christianity or leave the country. “About half of the 300,000 Jews fled, and the other half remained in Spain and Portugal,” Pesikoff explains. “While some of them converted to Catholicism, others continued to practice Jewish traditions within their homes while openly practicing Catholicism.”
With the discovery of the New World, many of these Spanish Jews had new hopes of religious freedom in New Spain. “But the Church was no less stringent than it was in Spain and continued to try heretics in Mexico,” Pesikoff says.
Over time, the some Jews migrated northward into New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado, hoping to find greater religious freedom in less populated areas. But the grasp of the Catholic Church was still strong, and these crypto-Jews had to continue to practice their religion secretly.
Crypto-Jews still live in these areas, Pesikoff says. “In every type of public exposure, they appear to be Catholic,” Pesikoff says. “They go to mass. They go to confession. They are buried in Catholic cemeteries. But they also observe the Sabbath on Friday nights by lighting candles and by resting Saturday. They cover mirrors in their homes during time of mourning and celebrate the Festival of St. Esther. While their traditions are clearly nontraditional for a Christian society, neither are they the practices of mainstream Judaism.
“What has made them distinct is that their secrecy was initially required to hide their religion; presently, the secrecy is part of their religion,” he continues.
Since the crypto-Jews still maintain their secrecy, Pesikoff relied on interviews with people in areas where they are thought to live as well as transcripts of interviews with crypto-Jews who have decided to break their silence. The College's Internal Education Fund supported his trips to Mexico City, Tucson, and Denver, where he interviewed rabbis and historians, pored over documents in libraries, and scoured graveyards.
His thesis focuses not only on the history of the crypto-Jews but also on the circumstances that compel them to keep their religion a secret. “The crypto-Jews live in communities that are still very Catholic,” he says. “It would be scandalous for these people to reveal themselves as Jews. All of their neighbors think that they are Catholic.”
Pesikoff was particularly struck by a discovery he made during the recent spring break. While traveling in communities in New Mexico that were said to include crypto-Jews, he found Catholic cemeteries that also held the graves of crypto-Jews. “These are Catholic cemeteries, but if you look closely at some of the tombstones, you can see the Star of David or the Hebrew letter 'shesh,' which is the symbol for the 'Shema,' the holiest prayer in Judaism,” he explains. “I remember one tombstone included etchings of flowers. If you looked closely at the pistil of the flower, you could recognize the letter shesh. It made it all very real.”
With only thirty to forty crypto-Jewish families still remaining, Pesikoff predicts that the sect may disappear. In his thesis, he concludes:
“Crypto-Jews are in a difficult position and one that threatens the life of their tradition. They still live in fear of the Church, their communities, and now mainstream Judaism. However, with each generation, they are losing to acculturation. The children do not have the same sense of family tradition and, like many other American Jews, are not tied to the same beliefs. In crytpo-Judaism and normative Judaism, there are many intermarriages that endanger the traditions. It is difficult to determine how much longer crytpo-Judaism will remain. Since the age of Columbus, crypto-Judaism has survived out of necessity to protect Judaism. Today, secrecy may threaten the continuation of this practice.”
Irene Kan '99, a first-generation Chinese American, knew vaguely of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II, such as the Nanjing Massacre.
But when she read Iris Chang's 1998 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, she was horrified by the numbers: 300,000 people brutally killed, 20,000 women raped in just six weeks. And she was shocked that she hadn't heard of the massacre until her junior year at Union. Despite mass international publicity at the time, the event seemed to have slipped through the cracks of history until the publication of Chang's book.
Kan says that she wondered whether the details of the massacre were suppressed by the Chinese, American, and Japanese governments — and this question became the focus of her senior thesis. Working closely with her advisor, Assistant Professor of History Joyce A. Madancy, Kan conducted the bulk of her research last summer at the University of California at San Diego. Spending hours examining primary and secondary sources on the Nanjing Massacre and related events, she found that the governments of China, Japan, and the United States did, in fact, deliberately ensure the suppression of information about the massacre.
“After World War II, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was eager to form economic ties with Japan, and they were willing to disregard past atrocities in their own country,” she says. “While the victims of the massacre sought reparations, leaders of the CCP turned their backs on their own people since they did not want to tarnish their trading relationship with Japan or forgo Japan's economic assistance.”
China's post-World War II foreign policy goals were to obtain political recognition and international legitimacy from Japan through economic ties, she explains. Therefore, the Chinese government suppressed information about the massacre.
“I was shocked because the violent deaths of 300,000 Chinese citizens and the raping of 20,000 women is so atrocious that the least the Chinese government could have done is to commemorate it,” Kan says. “But it wasn't until four decades later that the Nanjing Memorial Massacre Museum, the first of its kind in China, was built.”
Kan discovered that the cover-up was even more elaborate in Japan. Information about the massacre was simply not disseminated to the Japanese people, she says, due to censorship of the press, including newspapers and history textbooks. In addition, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has publicly denied or failed to acknowledge Japanese atrocities during World War II, she says. Leaders of the LDP have continued to honor many of these war criminals by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which treats these men as worthy of worship as gods.
Similarly, the facts of the Nanjing Massacre were downplayed in the United States during the Cold War. “The massacre was very well publicized at the time that it occurred,” Kan says. “There were Western observers there who reported what they saw. But when the Cold War began, North Korea and China became America's newest enemies. The U.S. chose Japan to serve as a bastion against communism in Asia.” By rebuilding Japan, she says, the U.S. chose not to confront past Japanese aggression.
“The best part about this project was seeing how this event was suppressed by all three governments,” Kan says. “It's fascinating to find out about the cover-up because the Nanjing Massacre was such a huge event that even today it is called the 'forgotten Holocaust.' Until now, I didn't think that the government had that much control over history — or, shall I say, the history that we read in our history books.”
