Where my family came from, I guess

 (Oxford University crest, England)

This we had in common with Sask, that we seemed to belong both to these poor reminders of forgotten glories, whose family roots get lost in time and who seem not to find an adequate place among people who usually do hardly remember their grandparents. Sask was very proud. So proud, that she did hardly talk, as if she esteemed it to lower herself to levels she did not merit. And though it was not exactly that: a banker does certainly have in mind (if he is serious) thousands and millions of informations he has to organize in very abstract blocks in order to deal correctly with heavy problems that do always appear whenever something is linked to money. Logically, Sask had been educated in an environment that was used to talk this kind of very synthetic language, without ever finding an appropriated place where to express herself, as her nearest environment was not adequate to her education. She looked quite snob, perhaps she wasn’t. In any case she kept those kind of singular atavisms that are common to empoverished families, as if the fact of keeping one or another very expensive object did lower the stress of finding oneself in a foreign environment. Thus, she had a certain number of quite expensive things around her, probably something like a pen, a French parfum, and some silk clothes, somewhere. What had really happened, I never learned about, because she was quite discreet about these subjects and although I managed to guess that there had been a crash between two banks with different views, her family had lost, I was not even extremely sure about the latter. In any case, she seemed to share my visceral hatred for the Rothschild family, abstract hatred linked to the financing ofNapoleon’s campaign to Russia by this family, that became very concrete the day I learned something more about Hannah’s death. (Sorry for the Rothschild’s: fame and money does attract enemies you have to deal with, if you can.) Why Sask did hate them, too, I don’t really know why.

Origins are as diffuse as vague references. Although we use to believe what we are told, there is no warrant that this be true, except for some details fixed in documents. In fact families do build up some kind of fairy tale about themselves, resuming the way of dealing with reality: things importance is given to, or taken away from, things that are said, others kept silent, borders and lines determining friends, enemies, allies through frozen silences or accidental references. There is thus a difference between what I’m said and what there really is, but both are relevant because if the one says facts ordering social belonging, the other does resume the families ideology.

What I know about my family is mostly a myth that I built up myself. My family was quite gripped what information was concerned, what always made me think they had many things to hide. Who knows. Something like the book ‘Panic’, Elizabeth was reading, where someone discovers finally that his family was completely different to what they pretended to be.

Facts are quite little: the German branch composed Kasten (grandfather) and von Speth Schülzburg (grandmother) lived somewhere in Mecklenburg, north from Prussia, next to the see, in a so called ‘gepachtet’ property.  

(Hans Erich Kasten, Elisabeth von Speth Schülzburg and their 5 children, Jochen, Arne, Peter, Fried and Ingrid in German property)

The Kasten were supposed to be very rich, and although most of the property got lost after the war (‘when the Russian came’, my aunt used to say), my grandfather’s brother Otto still managed to make of his business ‘Besucherring’ a national entreprise. Part of the family was linked to agriculture, but also quite interested in cultural aspects as theatre, opera and ballet. Actually, my uncle Peter got married to the first ballerina of the Dortmund ballet. (At that time, and it was not a happy marriage.) After war, the family moved to Lübeck. The family of my grandmother was one of the oldest aristocratic German families of the south, the von Speth. The genealogy goes back to the 12th Century, and they were ‘Freiherren’, title that was given directly by the emperor at that time and assured extreme autonomy in their own property. This title became later the lowest rank of aristocratic hierarchy, the barons. The Barons von Speth Schülzburg do still exist and have there property in Schwaben, I think, actual Bavaria. Their territory gave one of the most famous emperor’s families, whose name I may remember later. They were not very powerful in the XIXth and XXth (shifts of power to the north of Germany) and my grandfather (‘ausbezahlt’: in order not to loose the unity of territory, only the oldest son kept it, the others were given a part in money), went to Afrika (Ivory Coast) where he lost all his money in bad investments so that the daughters, almost without resources, had to favour mariage for money even if this implied the loss of the title. Southern Von Speth got thus married to northern Kasten.

The story though has quite a lot of gaps. It looks quite coherent, but it always seems as if there was too much of a silence concerning different points. Where did the Kasten come from? It is said, originally from Hamburg, and were clerks, low military and in general, low middle class (from the point of view of administration). Where did they get the money from and the political influence in order to be allowed to take ground through the modality of ‘Pachten’ (you pay a percentage of income to the state for a number of years until you have payed off a given price), which meant great investments in machinery and animals? My aunt said, the whole village was working for them, and in the not negligeable house (about 20 rooms) they still used to eat with Rosenthal dishes. How? On top of that, little is said about the Kasten family, as if the Baron von Speth had eliminated this ‘low class specimen’ from the familiar education.

What my particular hypothesis are concerning these contradictions I will talk about later, after having had a look at the Spanish side.

Here, the story is as full of gaps as the former. My grandmother born in Seville, became, as it is said, an orphan very young after her parents died in an accident. Nothing is mentioned about social situation, origins, anything of this common ‘Molina’ branch.  

(Joaquina Molina de Checa with Elisabeth von Speth Schülzburg during the marriage of my mother, Marina Checa y Molina)

My grandfather Checa, originally from a village of the province of Cuenca, came from a wealthy landowner family. Probable descendants of the most noble de Checa family, as the name is quite rare, they are supposed to have been visigoths asking for noble title in the 12th Century, too, and given title and the name of the village Checa at that time in the region of Aragon, where it still is. Conditions for nobility in Aragon where even worse than in Germany: the first son enherited property and title, the second was sent to the church and the others, as it is still commonly said ‘could become shepherds for the elder brother’, what is to say, they had nothing. Most of them did thus migrate to more favorable countries, which explains there appearance in Cuenca. My grandmother got to know my grandfather through a Spanish tradition that made that young unmarried women did knit sockets for young men doing their military service. They got married, moved to Madrid were they lived in the quite privileged barrio de Salamanca just in front of the place where general Carrero Blanco (who was supposed to succeed Franco) was blown up by ETA while going to the church in 1974. My grandmother became modist for the upper and aristocratic classes, while my grandfather made bad investments in textile in Barcelona and lost everything. (Men were no good business people in both families, as it seems.) Of their children, three got married to foreigners: Marisa to a French, Meyi to a Pakistani she knew while working in London, and my mother to a German. One of them got married to a soldier of career, Maribel. Women were not allowed to sudy at that time and both my uncles specialized in something more or less technological (computering and plane ingeneer).

My father left Germany when he was about to do his military service. Having been offered a post as English teacher he left for Spain about 1959. My mother, who had learned English during a one year au pair stay in Dublin, was teaching at the same school, called Briam (british/american). The director of this school was a former minister of propaganda of the Vichy government, François Gaucher, which linked the school to currents of the right to extreme right. They got married in 1963 and had five children: Karen, me, Arne, Ana and Jorge.

(Arne Kasten and Marina Checa de Kasten)

The strange thing concerning my mother’s family is the registration of her name. She does not appear in official papers as Checa Molina (father’s and mother’s name), but as Checa y Molina, the ‘y’ indicating something that needs further study as it is usually linked to aristocratic descendance.

From left to right: Arne, my mother, (behind) director of Castillo de la Mota where my mother did the ‘military service’, Jorge, (behind) myself, Ana and Karen

The hypothetical reconstruction I finish by making of my family is that the Checa are original slavs. This strange name, actually founding the Tschech Republic, is the same given to soviet prisons, called ‘tscheka’. The name does thus seem to be linked to populations related to the slavs (same root than Tschetsche -nian). That they are assimilated to visigoths is related to the fact that populations coming down from the north were usually called ‘goths’ and differences were not made whether they were slavs or other. Further, much more hypothetical constructions did lead me to the thought that it could be very old jewish populations having gone up to the north during or after the babylonian exile, making the link between northern commerce (mostly leather and similar as through the bridge-town at the macedonian river Strymon, Amfipolis). These populations, separated from original slavs, must have had proper territories with own national population, which would explain the appearance of both tschech and tschetschian, as atavism of older historical realities. I do presume they did often had the function of ‘messager, translator, link’, reason why they could have been sent with barbarian goth to see what was going on beyond the Pyrenees. At least, this is what I can generally conclude from basic principles in behavior of my mother and aunts. I realized much after that jew populations even integrated in other, would maintain a certain number of recognizable characteristics: families that were obviously of jewish origin in Greece (Abramoudis, Manafis) were extremely familiar to my own memories, and others I found the same familiarity with I suspected to be originally jews, such as Nicolas and Lassègue in France, and another one told me after 20 years, that his father was a jew (Robert Risch). As if jews had maintained their origin through distinctive signs even when integrated in another nation, so that they could recognize each other even hundreds of years later or with thousands of kilometers distance in between. Similarity in character will even determine likings: my mother liked Santa Teresa de Jesús very much and Fernando Rojas, both of jewish origins. She disliked the foundator of extreme nationalist movement and ideologist of the right (?), because she said: he was too agressive against jews and other populations. And even said this is the reason Franco put him to death (I could never verify the latter.)

What concerns my grandmother I always suspected she was a ‘bastard’ of a noble family member. Features do show extreme similarity with the ducs of Alba or related, and it is difficult to explain how a poor orphan of the south did have such an extraordinary social ascension in so little years. Her sister did even become the director of the women’s prison of Madrid and her son Jose made the military service together with the King of Spain (he was not yet.) All seems to indicate that some strong protecting lines were keeping the family in some kind of distant security.

Now, for what is of the German, except that they were obvious descendants of Goth (Gotha, the nobility book of Germany, is the record of the authentic descendants of the population that had invaded Germany around the third to the fourth Century) in what concerns my grandmother, and thus obviously hit by the ravages coming from blood mixture and other general misbehaviors, they seem to be attached to Judaism, too, in a way or another. The Kasten, rich and wealthy family, linked to arts and culture, could it really be descending from low middle class clerks? As jews were forbidden work in administration, many jews did convert in order to have acces to these posts in the XIXth Century, such as the family of poet Heinrich Heine from Hamburg. The nazi ideologist Rudolf Hess was of jewish origin, too. As administration was something forbidden to these people, it must have seemed something very desirable to them, and thus be proud of what a German would never have been proud of: low rank in Army or Administration. On the other hand, they would not give extreme importance to what they already had, wealth. This ambiguity seems to be an indication for the fact they could really have been jews. The name Kasten appears in the US as linked to Judaism.

There is nothing worse than a jew denying his origins, I always said: the Kasten family was certainly linked to extreme right activism before the second war, although my father never talked about it saying that … he wasn’t a soldier because he had some problem with his heart. Perhaps I’m wrong.

First dishes

Of course, Sask does not give any kind of importance to good food, and of all, she was the most surprised when the police of Jerusalem almost made an insurrection because they claimed that food (at least) be improved. You can’t really imagine what these poor police men and women are fed in Israel, and although it is true that someone should be happy with something that is graciously offered by the state, it is an evidence, on the other hand, that the stomach has limits of tolerance. (Of course, it is nothing that should further bother us, but it happens that, as said, Sask was always involved everywhere.)

This is probably the deepest point of disagreement between Sask and myself. It is true that my family did not give excessive importance to food, even if my mother cooked quite well. We were educated in some kind of stoic mood where we had to integrate as essential value that everything that is linked to the body should be neglected in order to make more deeper values appear in the right light. All these unconscious efforts of education got definitely lost when I went to study to France, as it is well known that of all, the French essence lays somewhere around their stomach. (Perhaps there has been a French virus irrupting among the ranks of Israeli police … who knows.)

From that time, I would cherish oisters and brie, French mustard and green pepper steacks, as well as other specialities of the ‘cuisine française’ that opened in me the desire of getting to know equivalent dishes in other countries. It is true that I always laughed with the French telling them, that they do prefer the rotten: be it strange that the foie gras is made of an ill liver and the corresponding wine, some white wine whose name I don’t remember (they should pay, on the other hand, if they want publicity), of a region near to Bordeaux (quite expensive by the way and agreably sweet), does take its sweetness from a special bacteria that does practically rotten the grape… Psst.  (Foie Gras and Sauternes)

Did you know that in some southern regions they do eat birds they have left hanging from the ceiling for as long as to assure that they are rotten enough, too? Either they wait for food to be rotten, either they eat it uncooked, like the oisters and the steack tartar. Strange?

But I adored the ‘crème de marron’, my grandmother had brought one day home, and which was neither rotten nor uncooked, but made of the left over of the marrons (do you say chataigne, in English?) cooked and sweetened for Christmas times. This is though the case only for the one of the Ardèche, all the others are bad copies. It’s true that French cheese is very good, although others prefer the Swiss. Quite Spanish I did always locate things specifically somewhere and did never enter in political games what food was concerned: Swiss chocolates are good and certainly better than the Belgian, (as well as watches although you can’t eat them), but French cheese is extraordinary whatever the German say about Swiss cheese. (I really did never understand how German could import horrible second class Greek  or Yugoslavian wine just for political reasons. They would never take Spanish Rioja or Jerez, not only because they were jealous of the quality but because they would never take any political advantage of the aquisition: it was so easy to get something out of Greek and Croatians just by telling them they had spent so many thousands in importing wine, while the knew the Spaniard would say: you got a good wine for a good price, what else do you want?) Spaniards do never make politics with food, and that is a great advantage because thus, you always know what is good for taste and health, while German do have to feed themselves with the most unbelievable rubbish just because it is of general convenience.

I thus have to admit that of all I had the greatest admiration for French food despite our deepest political disagreements. Not that I wouldn’t like a pizza (I remember to have eaten pizza in Naple in a lost bakery at three o’clock in the morning, I was said, as thet were originally) from time to time, or a German Schweinehacke with Sauerkraut, it is that the French have combined things so as to make eating always agreable, and not only one specific dish or another (to say the truth I detest ‘nouvelle cuisine’ precisely because it seemed to stay in contradiction with tradition French cooking).  

Of course I adored Spanish traditional food, and there are quite a lot of good dishes, such as the Cocido (you will almost not find this rarity nowadays because the obligations imposed by wild dieting do characterize it as too heavy),

 (Cocido madrileño, variante with beans)

an enormous plate composed of peas, potatous, different vegetables, hen, pig, chorizo, tocino and morcilla that are all cooked together and then sought out: my mother said, the soup was eaten the first day, the vegetables and the potatous the second, and the meat the third day, or even the saucisses (morcilla, chorizo, tocino) one day and the hen and pig’s meat another one. My mother’s memory seem to keep occasions where the cocido lasted for one whole week. (Lazy Spaniards, she said, cook one a week.) For me it was an evidence that the Spanish way of thinking worked as a Cocido: They put everything together however big the problem, and then try to separate the different aspects starting by the lightest. What problems are concerned they usually don’t pass the first dish … There must still be a traditional Cocido restaurant in Madrid near to el Rastro, in the Centre, if you are not afraid of fat …

I have always liked Chinese food. I remember the first time I went to a Chinese restaurant, in Madrid, being about 15, and I was fascinated by the difference in combination of elements. I would never stop eating Chinese and had even a Chinese restaurant chosen for my stays in Istanbul, or in Jerusalem, or in Paris. I even went to a chinese resataurant in Islamabad, but it was very different from what I used to know. I couldn’t do with the japanese food though, because I rarely like uncooked food. (I was always horrified when my sister ate uncooked eggs with her spaghetti.)

Greek food, widely shared with Turks and Balkans, I like in Greece or Turkey. Nothing but a good melitzanosalata or tzatziki or mousaka among many other extremely good dishes in Greece: whenever I have tried Greek food abroad it was almost not eatable. Reason unknown. Have you ever tried real feta made of sheep milk or authentic sheep milks yogurt? You should, its difficult to find, very expensive but extremely good. Its so much appreciated buy certain elites that you can even find it in the most aristocratic Parisian Fauchon. Don’t go if you don’t want to get ruined …

From the Russian I knew little. Bortsch was again no real reference and Russian restaurants not very good, at least in Paris. I have always thought that you get to know the Russian in Russia, like the Greek.

Of course I was horrified with hebrew food, and even if a working mate coming from Australia tried to seduce me to like some peculiar Falaffel you could still find in the Jewish quarter in Paris, I could simply not submit the taste to any concept whatsoever so that I simply wouldn’t insist. It is true that every time I go to Israel I flee to Chinese or French restaurants (there is quite a good one near King David) or even to the palestinian quarters. To my understanding they had driven ascetism far too far.

Of course I like hamburgers and other deviations of common sense, and took even part in the opposition between Burger King and Mc Donald’s by taking decidedly the side of Burger King

.

It is true, that whenever I get in touch with aspects of American culture, I take decidedly the side of something: Marlboro versus Winston, for Marlboro, Coca Cola versus Pepsi, for Coca Cola, and Burguer Kind as said. It is funny that I don’t care whether the French mustard is Maille or another although I like their publicity very much (Il n’y a que Maille qui m’aille), as long as it comes from Dijon. There must be something inherent to American presentation of things that makes you take decidedly the side of something, and if you are eating a hamburger, why not play their game??

And many other things I will talk about slowly, as I habe to leave for … supper now, hoping Sask will positively solve the problem of the police by improving the food considerably (were it augmenting the taxes of reluctant populations, what she can use the well fed police for). And I have to remeber to write Maya an e-mail in order to correct the http’s adress, as I sent her a wrong one. Everything in its time.

 

(Polvorones de la Estepa)

Who is Sask?

Sask was born in my imagination about 1999/2000. At that time, for different reasons, soldiers were very important for my imagination. It is true that I liked her uniform very much, Myself said, but this was not the only reason. Soldiers represented some kind of order through their very appearance and in the very disordered northern Greece where I was living, the very fact of having , were it just as representation, the image of order in a uniformed someone who may still believe in rules and organization, was of extreme help. (Consider that in the village whereI was living, there was only one of the four cafeterias  having legal authorization to works as such, and the only one who had belonged to a … Bulgarian.) Order was thus  generally represented by my beloved character Sask, a lieutenant general (at that time still a captain, but who ascended through a heroic intervention in 2003 nobody knows about) of the Israeli Army. It was the Israeli Army because Isareli are the only people I know who still mention their army rank in their CV, so that my concept of order was embedded in a somewhat friendly atmosphere: in France my lieutenant general would certainly have died of dispair, and this was certainly to be avoided.

The lieutenant general had studied psychology and had some kind of related job in the army, in this was because I did know very little about armies and was more interested by psychological questions, so that I attached this professional activity to her in order to have something to talk about. In fact, the lieutenant general was a reference pole of disagreement between generally accepted theories and my own points of view, reason why she was always involved in the most absurd stories concerning the extravagancy resulting of the possible realization of modern theory. This gambling with the absurd arrived to its peak with a hilarious story I never wrote, where, times changing, homosexuals were put into some kind of program in order to convert them to the naturally correct. A poor lonesome cowboy, thus, heavily suspected of homosexuality, is put into the program, with the bad luck, that the combination of two opposite currents of methodology does always drive him mad: Natasha’s program, conveying the question of which would be the perfect wife, and Sask’s, conveying the problematic of the male man, fall into a mind that does not differentiate the ‘would’ of the ‘is’, so that he spends his time figuring out a perfect woman and an ideal man, until he is cut into two pieces.

Sask is exactly the type who does drive hypothesis down to its final consequences, at least in thought. She’s further involved in the killing of the dragon (Manual of a soldier), in the independence of Macedonia (Eldorado) and many, many other stories. She became so sympathetic to me, that she finished by populating most of my hypothetical constructions, together with Natasha, the Russian spy.

She finally becomes a referential psychic type (fourth refracted in lines of understanding) and appears even in logical constructions. Hannah did give to this character an environment. She was married, had two children, was about 34 in 2003. Married when she was about 17, she was separated from her husband since. She belonged to an impoverished bankers family of ashkenaze origins. She lived somewhere undetermined, neither in town, neither in a kibbutz, a house with a garden and a dog, a Rothweiler, Hannah decided. Some stories said her older son was adopted, others that he had some problem with drugs or psychic stability. The son was about 17, the daughter 14 in 2003. Other stories make her have a third child about 2002/3, of unknown father, final reason of divorce. In a certain number of hypothesis her husband is a treacher to the nation and is finally shot. All these stories were in fact nothing but the development of the impact of a certain psychic type in a determined environment.

She was quite tall, about 1.70, almost blond, with the hair down to the shoulders, thin. Her movements had something very martial, though not tense or agressive. Just ordered. Very esthetical, Myself used to say.

Sask was everywhere. Whether it was in the hypothesis of Hannah’s murder, in the impact of observation on human behavior, in the transmission of information in Irak war. She became so familiar that I tended to consult my movements with my imaginary character as if I could be sure that they would not be that wrong if responding to her concept of reality.

When I went to Israel in 2003, I met someone who had exactly the same aspect than my imaginary character. I met thousands of strange people in Jerusalem, some of them I saw very often, some, just for seconds or minutes. I remember that I was sitting at my usual place at King David when Sask crossed the hall in her uniform, having another soldier to her right. She was laughing. It was only seconds that she crossed my vision field, enough though to leave a quite burning impression. Was Hannah right when she said that Sask did exist? How thus were all my stories and logical constructions linked to the image of someone who was exactly like my imagined creature? I wouldn’t react anymore. Of course I didn’t imagine myself running after her in order to ask her whether her name was Shoona, the oficial name of Sask, she didn’t like, reason why I had given her another name. Her last name seemed to be something like Gavilan (Spanish name for a bird of the family of eagles), as I wanted to verify whether it was a real Hebrew name, I never attached it in a convincing way to her character. Lately I discovered that there is a similar Hebrew name.

Her character was quite dry, even harsh. She covered an extreme sense of humor behind mostly indifferent expressions. Sometimes she would make very cutting comments, reason why people were mostly afraid of her. To give her an adventurous character, I made her jump of the helicopter on weekends. This gave place to a whole lot of funny hypothesis, when Myself said that to jump of a helicopter meant to get drunk in Hebrew, which made me laugh very much (the possibility of it being so), although I did never give credit to it.

Thus, Sask became a double: someone who seemed to correspond to the outer appearance of my novel character, and my novel character as such. In a funny hypothesis, linked to the fact that our generation would not believe that it was possible to find someone lost among millions, I ‘make up’ Sask for Douna. The question was to meet someone somewhere, quite difficult to find, and manage to find the person back through what we called the Greek ‘yanis’ system.

However this last hypothesis ends up, if I find Sask again or not, I had to admit that the encounter had quite shocked my psychic system. We do never like our fantasy getting in excessive touch with reality, at least in what I’m concerned. I thus let some months pass, and tried to organiz memory through a new principle. Was is possible that Sask was there before? Somehow? I ordered the past in Greece through two criteria: those linked to a disposition that did lead me to have an Amaretto in Alekos cafeteria, and those linked to the one that made me discover a Stolichnaya 10 among the thousands of bottles kept by the same Alekos in his cafeteria. By doing so, I discovered an obvious invasion of my psychic system by two opposite currents: one linked to Israel, one to Russia.

The differentiation of these characters do allow to build up a hypothetical image of both Sask and Natasha (who did also come to Jerusalem, though she stayed at King David two days,one night). The descriptions as appearing in Manual of a soldier, though touched by irony, do correspond to the reconstruction of these two characters based on my personal movements in reality as considered from this angle.

Logically, Sask has thousands of features that may correspond to hundreds of people. The question is not, I said to Shanee, whether the description corresponds exactly to facts and thus to these and those, but whether someone does identify himself with such a description. Of course, if she exists, I hope she doesn’t fall in love with Myself. In our times and her environment it is as difficult to fall in love with a schizoid fantasy than with the non corresponding physical appearance. She certainly wouldn’t, to the greatest disappointment of Myself.