Smiles From the Kutno Ghetto

These pictures, featured on Jewpop, were taken by Hugo Jaeger, a famous German photographer in the 1930s and an early Nazi party member who took pictures of Hitler and his circle to immortalize the Fuhrer. He traveled to the gheto of Kutno, nearly Lodz, where he took the photographs in late 1939 and early 1940, not long after the Germans invaded Poland. There were about 8,000 Jews in the ghetto, which was created on the site of an old sugar factory and was liquidated in 1942. Most of the inhabitants were sent to Chelmno.

See all the photos here: http://www.jewpop.com/culture/des-photos-rares-dun-ghetto-en-pologne-sous-lobjectif-du-photographe-de-hitler/

So, why did Jaeger take these incredible photos of the Kutno Jews? According to the writer at JewPop, which compiles Jewish news in French and got the photos from Time/Life and other sources, Jaeger was sent to Poland in uniform as a war correspondent charged with getting propaganda images. And it's not clear why these photos, unlike others taken by Nazis, show the Jews in an almost empathetic way rather than as sub-humans under the degradation of German soldiers.

Knowing nothing else about this guy, I hazard a guess that the photographer in him was stronger than the Nazi in him. What strikes me is the smiles. It shows the power of a photographer asking a subject to smile for the camera. And they do, so discordantly with the background in most of the pictures and with what we know about the setting.

Central Banks vs. Uncertainty

"There continues to be what I'll call an 'uncertainty drag' on confidence and economic activity,"Dennis Lockart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said this week during a speech in Florida.

That's it exactly.

Uncertainty is a potent mix of emotion and unsettled cognition, breeding fear in the political arena and a sometimes toxic excess of caution in economies.

The slowdown in hiring the past few months, so alarmingly familiar in the three years since a recession officially ended but the jobs recession didn't, is all about uncertainty.

As winter ended, demand had been picking up, consumer and business sentiment had improved and the excess capacity of American industry had started to seriously ebb. But as anyone with even the slightest interest in politics or the economy knows, businesses have become reluctant to take on more workers.

The blockbuster pace of job creation early this year petered out in the spring, just as it did in 2010 and 2011. Last year's usual suspects were the earthquake/tsunami that slammed into Japan and throttled its economy, followed by a political trainwreck over taxes and budgets in Washington that damaged the once invulnerable U.S. government credit rating.

This year, too, some of the factors in the slowdown are obvious. Lockhart's list included: American households still trying to get out of recessionary debt; an anemic housing market; government cutbacks on the federal and local levels that produce tens of thousands of monthly layoffs; and the simmering risk of a financial meltdown in Europe that's already hurting U.S. exports. (I cribbed this list from what I wrote yesterday for the iPad publication The Daily.)

Anxiety over a U.S. election that will produce one of two radically different leaders further clouds the situation, as does a pending Supreme Court decision on health care reform that will resonate through workplaces and households, as does Congress's renewed inability to deal with the tax-and-budget issues that will take the country off the much-ballyhooed "fiscal cliff" at year's end if they're not resolved.

"It's clear that uncertainty is holding back hiring and capital expansion plans of U.S. businesses," Lockhart said.

And like San Francisco Fed President John Williams and Federal Reserve Board Vice Chair Janet Yellen, Lockhart suggested that if the employment situation worsens, the Fed could step in with a third round of massive bond purchases (QE3), a reshuffling of the bond maturities on its balance sheet or perhaps a hedged promise to keep the Fed's benchmark interests at historic lows beyond even the current 2014 horizon.

What these so-called doves didn't say, though, is how this would tackle the uncertainty.

Their more hawkish colleague, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, did. His answer: It wouldn't help at all.

At a UC San Diego conference today focused on China's currency, I asked Fisher if his view might evolve toward that of his colleagues, or even the publicly neutral stance of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who told members of Congress shortly before Fisher spoke that "at this point I really can't say anything is completely off the table."

And if not the central banks -- I asked with Bernanke's congressional interrogators in mind -- who's job is it to deal with the current economic troubles?

An annoyed Fisher -- who probably realized I wanted him to elaborate on his vague reference earlier this week to "mischief that has become synonymous with Washington" -- started off professorially: Monetary policy is all about increasing or decreasing fuel for economic growth

Right now, banks are parking a huge amount of excess reserves with the Fed or the regional Fed banks.  The largest U.S. corporations have roughly $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets. Several surveys of small businesses suggest they are not having trouble accessing capital (but that they are awfully worried by regulatory uncertainty).

Cash is available, and thanks to rock-bottom Fed policies, cash is cheap.

"We have extraordinarily low interest rates and we have liquidity sloshing around the system," Fisher said. "To me, the key issue is not whether the gas tank is full -- i believe it's overflowing … It's who will incent someone to step on the accelerator. That incentive can only come from the fiscal authorities."

Among central bankers, "fiscal" refers to the politicians who control taxes and spending.

"If you don't know what your taxes are going to be next year, and you have no idea because of the Supreme Court what the health care reform is going to mean for personnel, and you only know that spending will have to be redistributed and downsized, how can you plan your cost structure and how can you have confidence when you go to hire an employee what the cost of that employee will be," Fisher said. The turbulence in Europe and growth concerns in China just add to the anxiety.

"That's what's inhibiting employment growth, not monetary policy," Fisher concluded. "So in short, we're the good guys. The other guys? You can answer your own question."

The Night Max Wore His Wolf Suit

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another is surely one of the greatest and most influential nights of my life.

I started reading Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" to my own little Max when he was less than two weeks old.

And through Max's early childhood, as our repertoire expanded to include the likes of "Moo, Ba, La La La" and "Polar Bear, Polar Bear," "Ferdinand" and "Caps for Sale,""Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day" and "Make Way for Ducklings," Demi's gorgeously drawn and morally weighted tales and the D'Aulaires' spirited collections of Greek and Norse myths -- a perpetually burgeoning list pared each night to just five titles in the glider rocker -- "Where the Wild Things Are"was a nightly staple. Even when we got to "Charlotte's Web," "Wild Things" was never put away, and it played the same role for my son Oscar.

The magic of "Wild Things" didn't originate in parental nostalgia as it did with some other books and songs, though I remember so clearly my mother reading the book to me. And it didn't stem from Max's association with his namesake, though the first time he gleefully sounded out his name was with the letters printed on Sendak's "private boat for Max." (I must admit I didn't discourage the link, cobbling together a wolf suit for Max's first dress-up Halloween. And Oscar thought for years that "Wild Things" was about his big brother.)

The larger, warmer, scarier, wilder and ultimately more satisfying magic was all Sendak's.

To analyze the story and pictures risks losing site of that magic and the fun of a glowering, untamable Max who seems to giggle as his room becomes the jungle-like "world all around" and literally doesn't blink as he tames the snaggle-toothed wild things who "roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws." The three wordless, double-page illustrations in the middle of the book -- of newly crowned King Max dancing with the wild things under a full moon, swinging with them from tree to tree, and being feted by a wild thing parade -- are as pure as artistic renderings of childish fantasy get. As such they also give the readers and children a chance for their own enhancements: Max and I sang "Louie, Louie" during the moon dance, screamed like Tarzan in the tree scene and sang "Hail to the Max" for the parade.

But for an adult, especially one who has memorized the words and pictures through thousands of readings, it's impossible to miss how truly "Wild Things" captures childhood: the defiant boy whose untamed imagination shapes and masters the larger, monster-like adults in his life before, on his own terms and in his own good time, returning to the "night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him." Max and I always said together the book's next and last phrase, four words and a period that appear on an otherwise unillustrated page. "And it was still hot."

After Sendak's death this morning, I repeatedly heard and read commentators saying Sendak didn't shy away from the "dark" side of childhood. Fair enough. But he was also writing, as eloquently as authors who used hundreds of more pages, about the comfort and warmth children have -- or should have -- when the tantrums and wildness have burned out. The adult world is a scary one, and children can and do confront it with their own scary behavior and imaginings. But a child's life is also about that warmth, and how it helps children learn to tame their own wildness.

Mickey hears a racket in the night as Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen" opens, and instead of being frightened yells at the noisemaker, "Quiet Down There!" What follows is a Jewish Brooklyn boy's impressionistic fantasy in the warmest, best-smelling and most comforting place of many childhoods: the kitchen. And like the Max he resembles, Mickey finishes the adventure safe and warm in his bedroom.

Sendak's "Pierre," who would only say, "I don't care!" vexes his parents to the point of abandonment, and get's eaten by a lion for the stubborn arrogance that every parent comes to dread (and sometimes secretly admire). But the doctor manages to shake free Pierre, who "laughed because he wasn't dead." The Lion takes home Pierre and his parents and stays on as a weekend guest.

Childhood is, for the lucky or blessed, both a warm and scary place. So is parenthood. But it is hard to learn and retain that sense of balanced perspective, even if, I'll say again, we're lucky or blessed to get comfort with the fright. Rereading "Where the Wild Things Are" this morning, I realize Sendak was a source of both great stories and that perspective. And I'm sad that he's gone.