Spain Archives - Andrew Kauffmann

From medieval times to the Modernists (The surprise stories of anti Jewish prejudice)

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

What can any of us do in response to the newer challenges – of anti-Semitism today? I would simply start by saying please open your heart or mind to what Jewish people themselves say needs to change. All too often in recent years, Jews warning journalists, politicians and others about anti Jewish prejudice have been accused of playing political games, of effectively ‘crying wolf’.

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The power of remembering (and not letting others distort our stories)

Leave a Comment / No Regrets, Reflect, Reset / Andrew Kaufman

Memoir can and must be written because each of us has our own created version of the past. We own it, no one else does, no matter how incoherent our history is.

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The silence of others

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

it is very difficult to be open and to protest loudly when living under the most intolerable and oppressive forms of government. I can’t criticise those who remained silent. What I can criticise is those who remain silent now, who still repeat when it’s put to them, ‘why not remember the victims of the past?’ – “these things are better left in the past”.

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Vignettes in what used to be Vichy France

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

The more I’ve read around the subject and listened to lectures, the more I understand there’s a Myth of the Resistance. Sure, millions did resist the Nazis, and there are many reasons French people can stand tall and celebrate this history of Resistance. But there’s something about the June 18th anniversary which doesn’t quite work when you read Charles de Gaulle was seen as rather an oddball himself.

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Looking back, looking forward

Leave a Comment / Reflect, Reset, Uncategorised / Andrew Kaufman

The words, the single units, are overpowering scents of cheese. To my ear, the sentences are most troubling. They’re occupied provincial markets. Other times, they consist of warring articles and prepositions, hooting at one another as if they’re busily competing to reach the coast.

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Good as Gold

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

He repeatedly gurgled, ‘Marieme, Marieme.’ And something about accara fritters and sosu kaani sauce.

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The tall avenues of nothing

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

I watch the scene at the top of the tall avenues: there’s nothing. Barcelona is a city of fiestas and insofar as it’s a city of siestas, the difference now is that the sleep people fall into is morose, immoderate.

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The purples of Ronda

Leave a Comment / Reflect, Reset / Andrew Kaufman

We discuss whether or not to distance ourselves from other tourists, without having the language to validate what in other times, would be labelled a prejudice.

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With a bit of perspective

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

Nothing seemed especially different that day, except perhaps the dissonance between the honeyed glow of the sun in people’s smiling faces and the intuition none of us could afford to be complacent.

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Fragments

Leave a Comment / Reflect / Andrew Kaufman

My cheeks are puffy; my eyes are the eyes of over-fed goldfish.

Fragments Read More »

Spain

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