I spent a glorious late summer day in Ljubljana this week, having taken the overnight train that runs through Zagreb on the way to Venice. I haven't been to Ljubljana in over ten years - it used to be a grey, provincial ex-Yugo regional town but has bloomed into one of Europe's most beautiful and trendy urban centers. The transformation is amazing - even the dull panel housing projects have been spruced up and modernised and there seems to be a cafe on every street corner, so you'll never have to walk more then ten meters to find a coffee.
I stayed at the
Hostel Celica, which is located in a refurbished old prison, complete with bars on the windows. The rooms, however, have each been redesigned by different Slovenian artists, and as far as hostels go, it was definately the cleanest and most friendly I have ever stayed at. Nevertheless, I hate staying at hostels. I'm mean and crotchety, I don't want to meet lots of backpacking
wiggers from New Zealand or Wisconsin and share their impressions of east Europe ("they... like...
eat bacon every day!") and sleep next to a dozen pairs of sweaty socks in a room with no desk or chair to sit in. When traveling with Fumie we never stay at hostels, because a private room or cheap pension for two is generally the same price as two beds in a hostel, plus you don't have to share your room with a dozen aromatic Australians.
Up early and went straight down to the Ljubljana main market, located just outside of the old town along the river that runs through the center of town. It is mushroom season, and chanterelles are going for 16 Euro a kilo, while porcini are a whopping 38 Euro a kilo. That's a bit ridiculous - this has been a good porcini year in central Europe. I bought some fresh wild porcini at my local market in Budapest yesterday - they were a bargain at Ft 2000 a kilo (8 Euro.)
Slovenian cuisine reflects the fact that Slovenia is actually located in a cultural and climate hub of Europe: to the north you have the Hapsburgs and the Alpine influence (lots of filling dumpling dishes,) to the west the sea and the Italians (there is pizza and fried Kalamari everywhere) and east and south is the Balkans (meat grilled by people who like blood feuds.) Foodwise, that translates out to a choice between excellent Northern Italian style food and excellent Balkan fast food, usually fried up by emigrant Albanians and Bosnians. Burek, the meat strudel snack that is the world's best breakfast, was everywhere.
Cevapcici are my nemisis when traveling in the Balkans: given the chance, I'll usually stick to the
cevap and ignore everything else on a Balkan menu. Budapest is just slightly north of the
cevap frontier: you can find it on Serb influnced menus at the
Kafana, at the
Jelen Bisztro at Blaha Lujza, and at the
Castro, but
cevap is street corner food. In Balkan terms, a civilized place means you never have to walk more than a hundred paces to find a cheap, freshly grilled tube steak sandwich prepared by somebody who is quietly scheming to eliminate the members of a rival family over some minor breach of tribal etiquette.
Yummmm!
Apart from the food, Slovenia manages to include at least four different climate zones in the space of a country small enough to fit on your desk. You can go skiing in the high Julian Alps near Bovec, and in forty minutes be eating ocean fish beneath the palm trees along the Adraitic sea. I usually visit Slovenia for the
trout fishing. Although the season is still open, I didn't have the time on this trip to wet my line, but on the trip home the train line ran parallel to the Savinja River, which was like having trout pornography streamed into my brain all the way home.
Yes, I'll be back, possibly next May. The problem with fishing in streams that flow from Alpine mountains is that the snows melt in June or July (usually the best months for trout fishing) making the rivers flow deep and high, and wading is not only difficult, but dangerous, especially if you are fishing with Claude Cahn, whose fishing style combines the grace of fly fishing with the recklessness of base-jumping. The Slovenes deal with high water by tying huge weighted streamers and nymphs, things that seem like feathered matchbox cars just to get a few seconds of decent drift, and the whole sport gets reduced to a mechanical excercise in nymph fishing using barbless bricks. Of course, the fish are huge. My largest trout ever was a rainbow I caught in the
Sava Bohinjka with Claude a few years back, before the age of digital photography...
The small Slovene regional towns are worth a visit: any one of them would be a world heritage site if located in Austria or Germany, but in Slovenia cute, well preserved walled towns with a castle overlooking a bend in a river are a dime a dozen. My favorite, by far, is the aptly named Ptuj. Not, in fact, named after the English onomotopoetia for "
spitting", this is the oldest city in Slovenia, settled during the Iron age by Celts and known to the Roman as
Poetovio. I think this has got to be the most distinctive place name I've come across in Europe, rivaling such towns as
Bastardo, Italy, and
Fucking, Austria.
We are in Edinets, a town in the northern part of the Moldovan Reublic as a part of Alan Bern's The Other Europeans project, which we participated in during the summer in Weimar, Germany. Having met the wonderful Moldavian lautar violinist Marin Bunea -and his ethnomusicologist wife, Diana Bunea - we are now traveling around Moldova listening and learning from the Moldovan lautar tradition. It's a brass folk tradition that hasn't been heard much outside of Moldova, but is also probably one of the few living traditions that has very close roots to the origins of modern Klezmer music.
What is interesting here in the north of Moldova is that the Klezmer influence was so closely intertwined with local music that the local non-Jewish slang term for a musician is "klezmeras". We've been spending a couple of days trading licks and ideas with some great musicians.
This morning we visited the Jewish cemetery of Edinets with Zev Feldman. Zev - who was one of the founders of the klezmer revival in the 1970s - has family roots in Edinets, and so it was moving to visit the boneyard with him. That's Zev, dressed as an extra in the film Dr. Zhivago.
Took a stroll down Holocaust Street, which is a memorial located in the old Jewish street of Edinets. Edinets, everybody told us, only has about two Jews living here, which is interesting since we met about seven of them this morning, all speaking Yiddish. And now, two floors below me, I hear the band warming up, so I am off with my fiddle... I will go into more detail soon when I can type sitting at a regular desk...
A taste of what Mark Rubin is missing: north Moldavian brass lautar with cimbalom, heavy on the valve trombones.
Kádár gets crowded at lunch time, which is the point: it is only open for lunch. The food is fresh - prepared in the morning - shoots out of the kitchen, and then they close at 3 pm. The place is a treasure chest of odd peccadillos, such as the payment system: you finish your meal, and then go to the doorman and recite a litany of what you've eaten, including glasses of seltzer water and slices of bread, pay, and then slip your waitress a nice tip. But in terms of "old-fashioned" it doesn't get better. My Father was in the midst of dental restructuring, and so he was obviously pleased with good old Magyar meat soup, beef boiled to the point of agreeable gummability.
They even serve pink tall glasses of malna, the old rasberry syrup and soda soft drink that was the staple soft drink of pre Coca-Cola communist times (before the advent of traubisoda, even!) My Mom found the daily special was tőkfözelék - creamed squash mush with a slice of pork - which (without the pork slice) is what she had been feeding me and my siblings for decades in New York before we ever saw it on a restaurant menu. I used to eat this for breakfast when I was a kid. Mom loved it.
I went for the meat: below is the pork ribs and red cabbage lunch. Next to it is a plate of beet salad with fresh horseradish piled on top - strong enough to knock you to the floor and bring floods of tears to your eyes. Khreyn heaven...
A lot of customers come in to the Kádár and only order the filling, cheap soup and a dessert. It's an older way of dealing with lunch - soup and sweets. The desserts are an edible museum of old Magyar home style sweets, from back in the day when the dessert course was just as important as the main course in filling you up with cheap starch. Our choice was fánk, which is, essentially, donuts, except the Hungarian donut is a ball of sweet fried yeast dough dusted in sugar and the jam is spooned over it. Doh!
Other Kádár options might include várgabéles, sweet bread cubes swimming in vanilla sauce, or any of a load of grandma era afters like mákos tészta, poppy seed and sugar sprinkled on spaghetti, which is usually eaten as a main course (and was the source of Primo Levi's disdain when, after being released from Auschwitz, the pasta loving Italian Jewish writer was interned for a year in a transit camp with Hungarian Jewish cooks.) Or, you can stroll three blocks away down Dob utca for a visit to Frölich Cukrászda, the last of the old style kosher pastry and coffee shops in the Ghetto.
Frölich's is famous for flodni, the ultimate Budapest Jewish pastry: poppy seeds, apple, and nuts sandwiched in a pite pastry sandwich. This is the stuff that was the cause of the
This isn't the Jewish pastry that we know from growing up in Galicianer-influenced New York City, but I'll soon be on the road looking into the origins of some of that. I am heading out to the fabulous Republic of Moldova on friday... palm trees... tropical drinks... sandy beaches... Aloha Moldova! I'll be with a lot of the teaching staff from the Weimar Yiddish Culture weeks with whom I worked in the summer - Alan Bern, Zev Feldman, Kalman Balogh - visiting lautar musicians in Edinets and Chisinau, and basically spending a week in the poorest nation in Europe - the birthplace of my paternal grandparents, and hopefully, get a chance to visit the shtetls where they were born. More soon... gibt mir Bessarabia!
Bruce and I go wayyyyy back. We met at Boston University back in the pleistocene era, before the ice sheets separated us. With the end of the Ice Age, Bruce came to Hungary on a gig, and the Hungary Effect took hold, leaving him married, with two kids, a house, and no access to life-giving White Castle hamburgers. But we survive. With much less hair, I'll admit, but we survive. 
Bay State Road, Boston Mass. USA... 1977.
Solinski? As in Josef Solinski, the early 20th century 
Branding your enemy as a communist has a long history, but as somebody who actually lived for a while under the rule of a communist state and had my rather antic run-ins with a few of those last true believers in the late 1980s, it rings hollow to hear people who never met a communist in their life ranting against the specter of a Red Menace. As somebody who has watched Hungarian politics since the late 1980s, Commie-baiting is one of the trends that defines neo-con campaigning in the 21st century – in a society without any real commies. Why? Because middle aged geezers usually run election campaigns, and these guys are still responding to the great threat of their childhood nightmares: the Commies.
I was raised during the Cold War, and the Commies played as big a role in my early childhood nightmares as did Godzilla, the Crawling Eye, and Frankenstein. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis: my family packed the car to evacuate New York and all I could take was my toy Tonka dump truck. I remember watching the Barry Goldwater Republican campaign TV ad in 1964 in which atomic mushroom clouds greet a Democratic election victory. I visited Hungary as a kid in the 1960s. I remember the Russian tanks tooling around civilian roadways in Veszprém, the secret police following our family to dinner, and the twice weekly nighttime artillery practice bombardments the Russians used to exercise in the skies over Veszprém until well into the 1970s. On the other hand, I also remember the visits from the FBI agents to our home in the Bronx when my Aunt from Budapest came to see my Mom after twentyfive years of separation. And who would forget the Radio Free Europe TV ads showing a huge Red Army soldier crashing into people’s homes with an axe yelling “NYET!” to the huddled family listening to Elvis on the shortwave. Communists were scary.
But guess what? It is 2008, and the communists are gone. Sure, there is North Korea, and Cuba, and in some strange, perverted way we can include China as still having something vaguely resembling a communist system. Absolutely none of these societies would be familiar to Marx, Lenin, George Lukács, or even Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks. The generation born after 1975 grew up in a world that was seeped in anti-communist rhetoric, but lacked any commies to aim at. Communism was already a dead system by 1990. Yugoslavia proved it. China confirms it. Cuba is not a threat. Hugo Chavez – a parody of Latin American anti-imperialist bravado, but no, not a Communist. North Korea? Let’s not even go there.
The most dangerous ideological trends in the world today are not Communism but instead those that mix racist, negative nationalism with religious fervor in pursuit of a mythically determined future state populated by a mythically “pure” group: “real” Americans, “real” Serbs, “real” Magyars, “real” Jews, “real” anything. Anyone familiar with anthropology will tell you: there ain’t no real anything, anywhere. “Race” is not an accepted anthropological concept: it is a culturally and historically defined social construct. We are all mixed. We all in this soup together, bra. Nobody is pure anything. 
This is why the number 88 bothers me this week. What is really nasty is the rise of neo-Nazi ideology in the background of right wing radical groups in the world – in the US as in Hungary. Neo-Nazis are well organized, and have utilized the internet to attain an ideological unity that crossed national bounds. The growing 
And if you see an 88 spray painted on a wall, take note: these fracking bastids are in our area. Last week Hungary celebrated the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, an occasion that has become a annual street riot for radical Hungarian nationalists and neo-nazis in Budapest. This year the police managed to keep order, but at night on October 23, the cops took 
It is time for the courts in Hungary and the US and Europe and all over the world to define them as a terror threat and deal with them as such. We are about to see some real change in America: and the radical right seems to see things in the same way.
88. It means Neo-Nazis. They are a worldwide problem. As the New York subway signs say: If you see something, say something.
Pure Spanish jamon, a gift from our globe trotting friend Lisa. Fresh, salty, thick, and not very kosher. If this isn't a sin then I don't have a clue as to what a sin consists of. Adultery, coveting, sloth, greed... those are child's play compared to this. Many, if not most of my "transgressions" consist of eating things that do not conform to the Jewish dietary laws of kashrus. No, I am not a kosher Jew, not by any broad interpretation of the definition. Perhaps I am not alone in this, as evidenced by a particular rabbi's son with whom I spent time with in Weimar this summer.
Now, don't get me wrong. I spent approximately fifteen years of my life in righteous pork denial, to the level that I wouldn't allow pork to be present in my house and would often use the term "pork breath" as an insult. Not entirely kosher, mind you, but definately anti-pork. Maybe an occaisonal eel. An awful lot of clams, I'll admit, and crabs?... don't even start with crabs. I ate a bit of catfish, sturgeon on occaision, and Gawdalmighty cheeseburgers by the dozen, but no, never pork. A lot of stewed curried goat. But no pork, whatsoever. This state of mind mysteriously disappeared when I moved to Hungary.
There really wasn't any doubt that being kosher wasn't going to be an issue when I moved to Hungary. While we have an active kosher Orthodox community, and a lot of my buddies keep the pig at a distance, my years in the land of the Magyars have - shamefully, I admit - been one long swine-fest, a veritable roll in the sty of culinary life, and damn... whatever bonds I was bonded by sure taste good when I broke them.
Now, I don't eat pork out of any anti-religious attitude. I eat pork for protein, and because I like eating animals, particularly smart ones that rescue hillbillies from burning shacks in West Virginia on occasion. I also eat pork out of convenience. Train travel, for example. 
East Europe doesn't really do beef - it takes too much land to raise, and isn't cheap. Or tender. Or available much of the time. So, as in Poland, you eat the meat that you can raise in your backyard and sell to truckers along the highway in front of your house.
Actually, this year I can happily atone for the sins of my Father(s)... who took me out to an International House of Pancakes in Teaneck, New Jersey and personally oversaw my consumption of the all American I-Hop breakfast... thanks, Pop!
I can atone for the sins of eating other non-kosher forms of delicious food. Usually, traveling in Muslim territory means no pork. Fine. But that doesn't mean I can't transgress over a plate of succulent stuffed mussels as served in Istanbul... no scales at all... bottom fish as the working class of Philadelphia would call them....
All in all... a wonderful year to atone for!
