Features
Return to Ukraine: searching out the Rosner family past
Introduction: Not too long ago we were contacted by former CBC Manitoba managing editor Cecil Rosner, who asked us whether we’d be interested in publishing a story about a trip he took in 2012 to visit the area in Ukraine where both his parents were born. Although it’s been 10 years since Cecil visited Ukraine, given the current situation in that country we thought it timely to get a sense of what life was like in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion.
By CECIL ROSNER ““Oi — look at the way the schlemiel drives.”
We are bouncing along the potholed roads of Western Ukraine, heading from Lviv to my mother’s hometown of Buczacz. Our driver and guide isn’t Jewish, but that doesn’t stop him from endlessly whistling Fiddler on the Roof tunes and inserting Yiddishisms into every second phrase.
“These guys are all ganefs (thieves),” he says of the policemen we pass, as he forms his thumb and forefinger into a pistol and slowly pulls the trigger. Alex doesn’t like the speed traps the highway patrols set up, and he appreciates oncoming drivers signalling him to beware of cops just beyond the next hill. It’s an important issue for our driver, who crisscrosses Ukraine’s roads all year-long, ferrying tourists to distant towns and villages in search of their Jewish ancestors.
For Alex, who holds a history degree and is an expert at tracing genealogical roots, it’s an occupation he never dreamed he would have. But in the chaos of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when jobs were evaporating and everyone was trying to reimagine their lives, it seemed like a useful niche to pursue – especially as foreigners were finally trying to discover exactly what had happened to their relatives during the Second World War.
That’s why I’m here too, along with my wife and a cousin. Both of my parents were born in the region, and both were here when the Nazis occupied the area in 1941. In different improbable and miraculous ways, they both survived the war and emigrated to Canada. But every single other family member was shot, gassed, beaten or starved to death by the Nazis and their collaborators. We came here to see what traces of their lives remained.
It seemed logical to make our first stop the local museum, right across from the old city hall. Buczacz is little more than a village, with about 13,000 people. In the early part of the 19th century, Jews made up two-thirds of the population. While that number ebbed and flowed over the years, Jews were still in the majority when the Nazi occupation began. But that would have been difficult to discern in the museum.
In all the display cases, and in the colourful photo album that the town produces, there is no specific mention of a Jewish population. There is scarcely any reference to the Second World War, except for a notation that the town “was released from German invaders and captured by the Soviet Union.” Wouldn’t a town’s museum want to address what became of the majority of the population? What happened to thousands of farmers, shop owners, tailors, tinsmiths, doctors, lawyers and politicians? Doesn’t the mass roundup and extermination of most people in town even rate a mention?
The only hint of any Jewish presence came in the form of artifacts from the life of Shmuel Agnon, a Jewish writer born in Buczacz who won the Nobel Prize for literature. But the entire fate of the people Agnon wrote about had been erased.
Alex had little luck getting the museum’s employee to throw any light on what the town was like in the immediate pre-war period. She genuinely seemed not to know. But there were a few things I already knew.
My mother, Mina, had been born here in 1913, and her family owned a wholesale distribution company. They carbonated water and stored it in big, forty-litre copper cylinders, shipping them along with ice to shops throughout the area. When she was 25, she married my father, Michael Rosner, who came from nearby Kolomaya. In 1939, they opened a small retail store on the main town square, probably within metres of the present-day museum.
When the war broke out in September 1939, there was a reprieve. The region came under the control of the Soviets, and Jews were under no immediate threat. All that changed when Hitler marched eastward in 1941. My father was conscripted by the retreating Soviets, and my mother was trapped behind Nazi lines for the remainder of the war.
For the next three years, every member of my mother’s family – her parents, five brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins – were dragged from their hiding places, bludgeoned or shot, or sent off to be executed. They were all dumped into unmarked graves. My parents’ first-born child – my brother – also fell victim, dying at the age of three in 1942.
My mother’s survival defied any normal odds. She fled from one hiding place to another, escaping just in time to avoid capture. She spent 11 months in the attic of a Polish family along with five other Jews. She took an assumed name and boldly convinced the Nazis she was Christian. Finally, after Buczacz was liberated, she re-united with my father and they came to Canada to start anew in 1948.
I had been to Buczacz once before, with my mother, in 1990. We came with a documentary crew to record her first visit back home since the war. It was an emotional trip and a difficult one for both of us. But we learned very little of the actual events that had transpired in the town, or the exact locations where they happened. That’s why, nearly 15 years after my mother’s death, I was returning for a second time.
I convinced Alex that our best strategy on this trip would be to find older people and ask them what they knew about the 30s and 40s. Alex seemed skeptical. For one thing, the war had begun more than 70 years ago, so it was unlikely there would be any useful first-hand witnesses at hand. And there was also the collective amnesia that pertained to inconvenient truths.
After all, a segment of the population had actively collaborated with Hitler. They were instrumental in helping identify and round up the Jews, the Communists, and all the other elements the Nazis wanted to destroy. Some might still be living in Buczacz and surrounding areas. Their children and grandchildren almost certainly are here.
The museum’s employee finally gives us a sliver of hope. There is someone in town we should visit – someone who knows the history and might be able to help us. His name is Mykola.
We drive for a few minutes and stop at Mykola’s house. I am expecting to find an elderly man who may have been a teenager during the war. Instead, we come upon a 40-something man in sweatpants and a Maple Leafs T-shirt. He is clutching a handful of papers and photographs. One of them shows a photo of Buczacz’s surviving Jews standing beside a memorial gravestone in 1944. Out of the original population of 10,000, no more than 100 survived. One of the people in the photo is my mother.
Mykola has taken an interest in wartime history, and now helps visiting tourists locate family remnants. He has a variety of interesting documents, including a map of pre-war street names, and a mid-19th century register of townsfolk. It turns out that he knows about some of the Jewish families that lived in Buczacz during the war – a handful of them have returned over the years, and he has helped them find their old homes and landmarks.
We ask Mykola if he could help solve a puzzle my mother and I couldn’t figure out on our previous trip. Her family had lived on a street called Zeblickevicie, which had changed names several times after the war. From her description, though, we knew it was beside a stream that ran into the Strypa River, a subsidiary of the Dniester.
We pile into the car along with Mykola and he directs us to the location. The stream had been covered over, except at the point where it emptied into the Strypa. Though the original home was no longer there, he shows us the exact location where my mother’s family had lived. I saw the idyllic surroundings, the lush vegetation around the quiet river, and for the first time I had an inkling of the peaceful life my mother experienced before the war changed everything.
While we were all walking along the old Zeblickevicie street, Mykola bumps into a friend and exchanges a few words with him. As we walk on, the friend stops my wife, Harriet, and our cousin Nina and says: “Mina Rosner – I am a Witness.” That is the name of my mother’s book. Alex is impatient. He had rich experience of locals trying to pester visitors, and he was eager to move us all along. But Harriet and Nina persist. It turns out the man on our chance encounter knows all about my mother’s story, and offers to take us on a tour of where she lived, where she went to school, where she hid during the war, and where her family members were killed.
Over the next 24 hours, Alex grudgingly admits he was wrong. Our serendipitous encounter has linked us up with Jura, a 60-year-old retired computer technician, astrologist and local historian. He knows my mother’s exact birthdate, and, it appears, everyone else’s in town. He has a photocopied version of my mother’s book, and he has pieced together her recollections with precise locations of many of the events she describes. If photographic memories actually exist, we figure he has one. He is a visiting tourist’s dream come true, and Alex has to take a back seat while Jura takes us on a remarkable tour of my mother’s life.
The first stop is just around the corner, on a street that used to be called Chechego Maya. I remember it from my mother’s stories, but we could never pinpoint it on our previous trip. Jura shows us the building where my mother’s sister and her husband ran a hardware shop. He knows the address because it’s listed in trade publications of the era. Though my mother’s original house and her parents’ store no longer existed, I finally had an authentic touchstone of some of her family’s life at the time.
Jura takes us to the pre-war building on Kolejowa Street that served as the cheder, the religious school, where Jewish kids studied. We visit the girls’ school and middle school where my mother was a student, and walk into Buczacz’s Sokol theatre, where she watched dramatic performances and movies as a teenager. A group of children is rehearsing a musical concert on stage, and I can imagine my mother sitting in the auditorium with her brothers and sisters and friends.
Just down the road, near an orchard, Jura shows us the garden of a long-ago demolished home where my mother hid during one of the Nazi aktions, or periodic killing sprees. A bunker had been constructed in the cellar, and this helped shield her and other Jews from capture. The Nazis conducted four major aktions during their occupation of Buczacz before declaring the town Judenrein, or completely free of Jews. But the declaration turned out to be false. My mother, along with dozens of others, managed to survive with the aid of courageous gentile families who risked their safety to shelter them.
In the middle of our travels, Jura pulls out a sheet of typewritten names – people who had served as policemen, gendarmes and SS officers during the war. I recognize some of the names. Some of the Nazi war criminals and their collaborators have been brought to justice, but the vast majority remain undetected and untried for their crimes.
We go to the Jewish cemetery, where many of the town’s Jews – including my mother’s parents – were taken to be executed. The place is untended and overgrown, a jumble of brush and junk, with headstones in various states of disrepair. We find my great-grandmother’s grave. It’s significant, because two plots over my mother buried her first-born child, Isaac, in an unmarked plot. I clear away the branches and debris from the group of headstones in the area to get a better view. I bend down and touch the ground where the brother I never met is buried. Exactly 70 years later, someone has come back to this place to remember.
Jura takes me down a path through brambles to a spot where survivors had erected a memorial to the war’s victims. The place is overgrown with trees and bushes now, but he says there was nothing here before the war. The marker no longer survives, and even if it did, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to find it without an expert guide.
Our next stop is Fedor Hill, another killing ground where thousands perished. It’s difficult to see traces of anything here, but Jura once again guides us to a marker commemorating the killing of 450 people during the early days of slaughter in 1941. It had been erected by a survivor’s family well after the war.
A far more prominent memorial on Fedor Hill is dedicated to the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the military wing of a movement that initially collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of winning an independent homeland. In fact, throughout our travels in Western Ukraine, there were numerous new memorials to Ukrainian nationalist fighters in places where it might have been logical to place markers noting the victims of the Nazi era. We saw this on the side of a synagogue in Ivano-Frankivsk, near the Jewish ghetto entrance in Lvov, and many other places. In my father’s hometown of Kolomyia, it was a similar story — no mention of Jews or Nazi victims in the local museum, no remnants of the huge Jewish population, and a patriotic memorial to Ukrainian nationalist figures on the site of a former synagogue. In the re-written history of today, the UPA and its related Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists are presented as groups that fought both Soviets and Nazis; no mention is made of the collaboration in 1941 that led to so much destruction during the war.
Throughout our trip to Ukraine, we were reminded of the upcoming election campaign and the ever-present imagery of Ukrainian nationalism, especially in the Western part of the country. In a land that was exercising its brand of democratic activity, we had to wonder how thoroughly the country had come to grips with its recent history. Many countries are wrestling with related questions, trying to reconcile horrendous events of the past with a way forward. But as in any process or truth and reconciliation, there needs to be an initial recognition of what took place. Erasing and denying the past is rarely the path to building a healthy future.
At the end of our tour in Buczacz, Jura wanted to know the exact date of my mother’s death. He also was interested in our birthdates and any other information he could glean from us. In a country that chooses to forget so much, he was something of an anomaly.
Features
Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
A police report obtained by the Forward sheds light on the removal of a Chabad rabbi from the campus of Oberlin College last week, after the school administration became aware of a police report that alleged he engaged in sexually explicit conversations online concerning minors.
Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, former co-director of Oberlin Chabad, allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos and videos through the messaging app Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12 and 13, according to the report.
In December 2025 messages to an adult on the platform, Elkan allegedly responded to photos of someone giving a child a bath. The person he chatted with alluded to touching the child’s genitals and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap, the report stated.
According to the Oberlin Police Department report, Elkin shared photos of girls as part of the chat. The department closed the case after a 20-day investigation, with no charges filed.
In a phone interview with the Forward, Elkan said he regretted his participation in the chat, but that his messages were not based on real events. He did not address the photos.
“To be clear, what had happened was an online chat with an anonymous adult on purely fictional, you know, fantastical things that’s not rooted in any kind of reality whatsoever,” Elkan said. “And I entered that, and I should not have, and I take responsibility for that.”
Elkan added that he has been engaged in “professional care and spiritual counseling to deal with all of the stresses and all of the factors that led me to engaging in an unhealthy behavior.”
According to the report, in an interview with police, Elkan confirmed the Kik account belonged to him and said the chats were “escapism” from the stress of his everyday life. He denied ever viewing or possessing child pornography.
Elkan told the Forward that “oftentimes people think of rabbis as godlike and infallible,” and he “made a mistake in one of the weakest few moments of my life.”
“There was no crime. Nothing illegal. Poor judgment, yes,” Elkan said. “And there’s not a victim. The victims here are the Jewish community and my family.”
The fallout on campus
Oberlin president Carmen Twillie Ambar wrote an email last week alerting students and staff of the news that Elkan, who had worked at Oberlin Chabad since 2010, had been banned from campus — without sharing specifics.
“In the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life — including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior,” Ambar wrote. “This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community.”
Elkan criticized how Oberlin handled the situation, saying the email that the college sent to the community about his departure was vague and allowed speculation to spread. He also said the email was made public during the meeting in which campus officials informed him that he had been banned.
“That’s where my hurt, and I think so much of the hurt of the community lies. Because every time we stuck our neck out for the college, and every time we work for the best interest of them and the community, what feels like the very first opportunity they had to show us that same support, they chose a very different route,” Elkan said. “So I take responsibility for my actions, and I hold the college incredibly responsible for how this has played out.”
Andrea Simakis, a spokesperson for Oberlin, said in a statement that representatives of the college met with Elkan via Zoom just prior to releasing the campus message “to let him know we were going to send it, why we were sending it, and that we were banning him from campus.”
Simakis added that the language in the campuswide email “reflects the information in the police report, which we obtained through a public records request.”
Along with serving as a Chabad rabbi, Elkan also certified Oberlin’s kosher kitchen and sometimes led Passover services and other religious celebrations on campus, according to Ambar’s email.
Chabad rabbis are not typically employed by universities, instead operating independently through the Chabad umbrella, with Chabad functioning as recognized campus religious organizations.
Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, a Chabad spokesperson told the Forward. Chabad did not provide further comment.
In the email to the community, Ambar said Oberlin had not previously received reports concerning Elkan’s behavior and was now asking a third party to investigate whether members of the campus community had been affected.
Ambar added that the news would be especially difficult for “those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan,” but “the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action.” Rabbi Allison Vann, who had led High Holy Day services on campus with Cleveland Hillel, will work with students for the remainder of the semester.
The post Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats appeared first on The Forward.
This story originally said that Elkan posted images of children in a bath. He was a recipient.Features
A Christian Debate About Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIKThe Western neo-Marxist attacks on Israel, in league with Islamism, are of course a grave political and military danger, but their ideology can be rebuked by anyone with the slightest knowledge of actual history. “Jesus was a Palestinian”? “Israelis are white settler-colonialists”? These are almost jokes.
Such people don’t even know that the Zionist movement in fact rejected what was called “territorialism,” the project to build a Jewish homeland anywhere – in Argentina, western Australia, and elsewhere in the world. This included the so-called “Uganda Proposal” in east Africa, which was voted down at a World Zionist Congress in 1905.
Another territorialist plan, pushed by Communists in the 1920s, was for a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union known as Birobidzhan. This came to fruition but ended up a complete failure. Jews were not interested in places outside their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.
Antisemitic rhetoric today appears on the progressive left in rhetoric that casts Zionism as malevolence, but also on the populist right in conspiratorial language about hidden power and divided loyalty, some harkening back to religious language we though was long gone.
The left’s arguments are shallow and, while extremely concerning, are fallacious. But the theological debates on the right are more alarming, because they will affect America’s relations with Israel. They go right back to genuine issues regarding the place of Jews and Christians in their respective religious worldviews and interactions. They are at the heart of “everything” in western history.
So-called Christian Zionism, found particularly in Protestant theology, sees the creation of Israel as part of God’s plan to hasten the coming of Jesus as the messiah at end times. Obviously, this is not congruent with our understanding of the messianic age, but politically it has been largely beneficial to Israel.
There is a deeper theological divide separating Catholics and evangelicals, the latter among the Jewish state’s most fervent supporters. Evangelicals tend to see Israel as the fulfillment of God’s pledge to the Jewish people, and they view that fulfillment as intertwined with their own religious identity. In contrast, most Catholics do not believe they have a theological obligation to support Israel.
Classical Christian antisemitism (really, anti-Judaism) is rooted in two propositions: that Jews bear the guilt for Christ’s death, and that when the majority of Jews rejected Jesus (who was a Jew, as were all his early apostles), God replaced the covenant with the children of Abraham with a new covenant, with Christians. This idea of a new bond that excludes the Jewish people is called “supersessionism” or “replacement theology.”
It consists of the claim that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenanted, or chosen, people. According to supersessionism, Jesus inaugurated a new conception of “Israel,” one open to all, Gentile as well as Jew, because it was predicated on faith rather than the rejected markers of biological descent and observance of the law.
The Roman Catholic Church modified this stance with its historic document Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council. It expressed some recognition of the Jews’ special relationship with the God of Israel. Though the statement recounts the fact that most Jews did not “accept the Gospel,” it also declares that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers.”
This has been further elaborated. Pope John Paul II said that the Catholic Church has “a relationship” with Judaism “which we do not have with any other religion.” He also said that Judaism is “intrinsic” and not “extrinsic” to Christianity, and that Jews were Christians’ “elder brothers” in the faith.
Pope Benedict XVI explicitly rejected the idea that the Jewish people “ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God.” The Catholic Church states that “The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.”
But now we see some of those earlier positions re-emerging, and not just among antisemites like Tucker Carlson. This is troubling and should not be ignored. On Jan. 17, for example, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, an assembly of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders, released a statement referring to Christian Zionism as a “damaging” ideology.
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a Catholic commentator with more than two million YouTube subscribers, released a video in which he reiterated the older position on Israel: “I don’t think that the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, being Christian, I believe the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament; Christ is the new covenant.” Catholics are not supposed to believe that Jews have a divine right to the Holy Land because, Knowles stated, Jews do not enjoy God’s favour and are not in fact God’s people any longer.
As Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large for the website Tablet Magazine, cautions, in “Letter to a Catholic Friend,” published Feb. 16, “What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject” such comments? “What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream.” For Jews, for Israel, and for America, that would be an unmitigated disaster.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Jews & Jazz: Baroness Nica of New York City
By DAVID TOPPER This true story is a sequel to “Jews in Strange Places.”
In the summer of 1964, living in Pittsburgh, I attended the city’s first International Jazz Festival. I remember sitting alone, high in the Civic Arena, looking down on the concert below. I would need to go on-line to retrieve names of who the musicians were that I saw that night – save for one. Sometime in the middle of the show, the entire arena went dark, except for a single overhead beam of light shining down on a solo pianist directly below. It was Thelonious Monk.
To describe Monk’s music to a general audience, I need to speak of dissonance, angular melodic twists, hesitations, and even moments of silence. It was also fascinating to watch him play. With his hands splayed out flat (breaking all the rules of piano etiquette) he jabbed at the notes, as if he was seeing and discovering the keyboard for the first time.
One of the most interesting examples of appreciating Monk’s playing was demonstrated by the experience of a particular jazz critic (but I can’t recall who it was). Having at first only heard Monk’s music, he didn’t like it. But after he saw him playing, he began to understand and eventually to like it.
At that 1964 concert Monk played “Don’t Blame Me.” Not only is it the only thing I remember over the entire evening, but it is, I’m sure, the only piece that made me cry. Yes, I was that moved by his playing. It was a magical musical moment in my life that I’ll never forget.
I don’t know which came first: that concert or my buying the record album on which the tune appears. The record is CRISS-CROSS (Columbia, 1962), and it features Monk’s quartet at that time, with that song being the only solo track. From the liner notes we learn that when Monk left home for the studio, he was asked if he was going to play “Don’t Blame Me.” He said: “Maybe, it depends how I feel when I get there.” At the studio, he sat down at the piano, played a few dance tunes – and with the recording equipment still on – he went straight into that tune. Interestingly, in the liner notes, the writer calls Monk’s music “pure magic” – a phrase, I see, that I also used above.
The writer of these liner notes was Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, the focus of this story. Born in the UK in 1913, Kathleen Annie Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild, the youngest of four children, grew up in a quarantined life within manor estates. From an early age she showed talent in drawing and painting, later studying art history and branching off into photography (she became obsessed with the new Polaroid camera in the 1950s). It was her brother Victor who introduced her to jazz, particularly the work of Duke Ellington. This was probably in the late 1920s – and she was hooked.
Ever searching for excitement, Nica learned to fly an airplane. It was through flying that she met Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, ten years older and a widower, whom she married in 1935. They eventually settled into a 17th century chateau in north-west France. Over their years together they had five children.
Nica’s adult life is clearly divided into two parts. The second part, her role as the Jazz Baroness Nica in New York City (NYC), is the focus of this story. Nonetheless, some of the highlights of the first part provide some insight into the complexity of this fascinating woman.
Living in France in September of 1939, she experienced the start of World War II. Jules immediately joined the Free French Army as a lieutenant. Nica opened her doors to refugees and evacuees, until the Nazi army was advancing on Paris. Jules urged her to escape, and she did: with her children (she had the first two at this time) she got on the last train of refugees heading toward the English Channel. From the UK they went to the USA, settling in New York.
Jules was now in Africa. Nica (after leaving the children safely with friends in the Guggenheim family, on Long Island) joined him in January 1941 in equatorial Africa. She first worked as a decoder of intelligence, then a radio host, and finally an ambulance driver for the French Division in the North African Campaign. Having survived a bout of malaria in Africa, she was with the troops as they advanced on Rome. At the war’s end she was in Berlin and was decorated for her work.
If Nica hadn’t crossed the Channel in 1939, she may have suffered the fate of some of her family members who stayed in France, such as an 80-year-old aunt who was beaten to death in Buchenwald. Also, Jules had pleaded with his mother to get out, as Nica did, but she dismissed him. She died in Auschwitz, along with most of the rest of Jules’ extended family.
After the war, Nica and Jules were united with their children. Jules was then posted as a diplomat in French embassies – first in Norway and then in Mexico. During this time, their three other children were born. From Mexico City, Nica made occasional trips to NYC to listen to jazz, often alone. It seems that what became Nica’s obsession with the music was, concurrently, a major source of antagonism with Jules. He didn’t like jazz and said so. When they would fight, he would break her records. Inevitably, it led to their separation.
In 1953, Nica moved to NYC (taking along her oldest child, Janka, a teenager). After settling into a suite in the Stanhope Hotel in the Upper East Side, she bought a Rolls-Royce with which to jaunt around to the jazz clubs in the city; since she liked to drag race, she later traded it in for a faster Bentley. This was the era of the famous Five Spots Café, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, and other jazz joints. In a short time, with her upper-class British accent, she became known as the Jazz Baroness, having friendships with and being the patron of many jazz musicians.
Thus begins the second part of her life – and the reason for my story.
But before we venture there, we need to deal with drug addiction. Sadly, drugs played a major role in the lives of many jazz musicians in this era, and I need to discuss it, especially to put in the context of the endemic racism of the times. There were drug laws that the mainly white cops were ever anxious to enforce; and they didn’t hesitate to use their billy clubs to strike any black man’s head, if he resisted arrest. I am not exaggerating: several jazz musicians’ lives were shortened due to a severe beating by a cop. Moreover, the drug lords (some of whom owned the jazz clubs) were mainly from the Sicilian Mafia, who had access to an endless supply of heroin from Turkey, and they specifically targeted the black community. Blacks were easy targets, with their marginal existence within white society. Cramped in ghettos (such as Harlem) they could readily escape with drugs – and, sadly, too many of them did.
It was the bane of the otherwise flourishing development of modern jazz – as it evolved out of the bebop movement into cool jazz, then hot jazz, and on through hard bop and beyond. The names constitute a canon of innovative brilliance: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Kenny Clark, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Teddy Wilson, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, and more. Nica was at the center of all this in NYC – living among these major players all those years.
Nica too was hooked. But not on drugs. She was addicted to alcohol, which probably shortened her life: specifically, Chivas Regal, the exclusive aged scotch whiskey – a bottle of which she inexorably carried in her purse.
Her hotel suite became a place where musicians could get a restful retreat after a gig (sometimes sleeping overnight), a meal (courtesy of Room Service), money (to buy groceries or pay outstanding bills) – and, of course, a place to have after-hours jam sessions. Black musicians (which most of them were) could only avail of these amenities by using the Service Elevator. Dealing with the endemic racism within the social fabric of NYC became part of Nica’s daily life.
The most famous (or infamous) event in her NYC life involved the death of Charlie Parker, otherwise known as Bird. (The jazz club, Birdland, was named after him.) A genius who revolutionized the alto sax with his fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and far-reaching chord structures – he was a major visitor to Nica’s suite. Sadly he was heavily addicted to heroin and on March 15, 1955, he died at the early age of 34. It happened in Nica’s suite, and she had to call a doctor. Upon writing up his report, he estimated Parker’s age as 50 to 60 – that’s what the drugs did to his body. The headline announcing the death in the next day’s newspaper was: “Bird in the Baroness’s Boudoir.” Being a single woman with lots of money that she freely spent, Nica was a lighting-rod for salacious gossip such as this.
It also was the catalyst for Jules to file for divorce. Thus ended their marriage. Not surprisingly, she also was kicked out of her suite.
I recently did an inventory of my record collection and found that among all the jazz albums I have, the one musician for whom I have the most records is the pianist Hampton Hawes. I have 12 records, plus a cassette and a CD. I mention this because he is also one of the few musicians in this significant era of jazz who knew Nica and who wrote an autobiography: Raise Up Off Me (1974). I love this book. Written in Hawes’ black lingo, his account throws light upon Nica’s critical role in the jazz community, especially her friendship with Monk.
But first, a bit about Hawes’ own life. Born in 1928, growing up in Los Angeles (LA), Hawes was the son of a Presbyterian preacher. Self-taught at the piano, he had no familial encouragement to play jazz music. But listening to Bird, Monk, Bud, and others, he became good enough by the age of 18 to jam with some top musicians in LA. By around 1950 Hawes’ career took off with record contracts and (except for a two-year stint in the US Army, stationed in Japan) he continued to play and record – being voted “New Star of the Year” in Downbeat magazine in 1956.
It was around this time that he met Nica in NYC, during a gig at The Embers, a fancy nightclub, where he was well-paid. He also met Monk for the first time. Let me quote widely from his book.
Upon looking out across the tables in the nightclub, Hawes immediately recognised Monk. “Bamboo-rimmed shade, carrying a bamboo cane – he looked like … one of those African kings, strong but beautiful. … He was with a middle-aged woman who gave off a waft of perfume that smelled like it costs $600 an ounce, and when he introduced me – to Baroness Nica – I knew I’d guessed right about the price.” She left before he finished his set. But Monk stayed. “Monk drove me in his blue Buick to Nica’s hotel penthouse on Fifth Avenue. When she opened the door I could hear my album playing – the track, ’Round Midnight that Monk had written. He said to me, ‘I didn’t tell her to put that on.’ I walked into the room where Bird had died a little over a year ago. [That dates this as sometime in 1956.] A lot of paintings and funny drapes, a chandelier like in an old movie palace. Steinway concert grand in the corner. I thought: this is where you live if you own the Chase Manhattan Bank. … Her pad was a place to drop in and hang out, any time, for any reason. … She’d give money to anyone who was broke, bring bags of groceries to their families, help them get their cabaret cards, which you need to work in New York. … I suppose you would call Nica a patron of the arts, but she was more like a brother to the musicians who lived in New York or came through. There was no jive about her, and if you were for real you were accepted and were her friend.” … She gave Hawes a telephone number for a private cab. “If I was sick or fuc-ed up, I’d call the number and the cab would come and carry me directly to her pad.” According to Hawes, Nica picked up the colourful black lingo too.
As noted, many musicians’ lives were cut short due to drug addiction (and sometimes beatings by cops). Again, Nica came through – often paying for their funeral and even the plot, if the family could not afford to. She was there for them, literally, to the end.
Of all the jazz musicians who passed though Nica’s life, the one who had the most significant impact on her was Monk. Even among the wide range of idiosyncratic jazz musicians, Monk still stands out for his uniqueness. He was quirky in his talk, his behaviour, and his music as well. It’s clear that there was some mental illness involved, but it was never fully diagnosed. One doctor insisted that Monk was not manic-depressive nor had schizophrenia. Nonetheless, he had episodes where he was not living in this world. Nica’s gentle demeanour was perfect for Monk. She nurtured and fed him, especially when he became too much for his family.
Let’s bring Hawes’ autobiography back into this story. Once when Hawes was wasted on drugs and stretched out on a bench in Central Park: “a familiar Bentley rolls up to the curb. Nica behind the wheel and Monk saying, ‘Man, get in this car, a good musician ain’t supposed to be sittin’ on no bench lookin’ like you look’.”
Another time he’s in Nica’s penthouse looking for Monk. Hawes “peeks through a doorway at a body laid out on a gold bedspread, mudstained boots sticking out from under a ten-thousand-dollar mink coat and the body’s mouth wide open, sound pouring out of it, and Nica tiptoeing over, finger to her lips as if I’m about to wake a three-week-old baby from its afternoon nap. ‘Shhh. Thelonious is asleep’.”
One notable incident among many: in Delaware in 1958, she and Monk were caught by the police with a small quantity of his marijuana. She took the rap and spent a night or two in jail. She saved Monk’s head, possibly literally. It’s not surprising that the saxophonist Sonny Rollins called her “a heroic woman.”
The year 1958 was also significant in Hawes’ life, for he became the target of a federal undercover operation in LA. Caught with drugs, he was offered this: if he squealed on his drug supplier, he would go free. Hawes refused. Hence, on his 30th birthday, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. An emerging career was cut short; and it was the start of a decade to be wasted. Then in early 1961, watching the prison TV, Hawes heard John F. Kennedy deliver his inaugural speech. Hawes was impressed by the new president’s words. He writes: “I thought. That’s the right cat; looks like he got some soul and might listen.” And so Hawes spent the next few years putting together the documentation requesting a presidential pardon. It was not an easy task. The prison staff were not accommodating. But he persisted, and so, the document was sent off to the White House. I like Hawes’ comment about the very end of his appeal: “To round it off I added some heavy legal sh-t in Latin I’d dug up in the library.”
In August 1963, Hawes was informed that the appeal was granted. (In fact, it was the next-to-last clemency granted by Kennedy; in November he was assassinated.) It cut Hawes’ prison term almost in half. Thus after 4½ years wasted, he was able to re-launch his musical career. He continued to record and travel, but never kicked the heroin habit. In 1977 he died of a brain haemorrhage. At age 48, he left a legacy of so many wonderful jazz albums, including the 14 that I own.
For Nica, her problem was finding a place to live. As noted, she was kicked out of her suite when Bird died. So, she moved to Hotel Bolivar, across Central Park – only to be eventually let go too, due to drugs and noise. Next was the Algonquin in midtown. Shortly thereafter, she was asked to leave that too. In the end, she purchased a house on a cliff over the Hudson River in New Jersey, from which she had a spectacular view of the NYC skyline, and an easy drive to the city through the Lincoln Tunnel. Jazz musicians called it her Mad Pad.
By the 1970s, when Monk dropped out of the jazz scene, he moved in with her. Eventually, he also stopped talking; remaining sequestered in his room, where he died in 1982.
Eventually the heavy dosage of Chivas Regal caught up with Nica. She died of heart failure in 1988 at age 74.
There are numerous songs by jazz musicians in tribute to her; the two most famous are: “Pannonica” by Monk and “Nica’s Dream” by Horace Silver. As well, several nightclubs around the world are named: Pannonica.