A Mother-to-Be Ponders Giving Birth Abroad

By Deborah Kolben

When I moved to Berlin last year, I settled into a Bohemian-chic neighborhood in what was formerly East Berlin. Despite Germany’s declining birth rate — the once decaying buildings here, where coal ovens and shared bathrooms have been replaced with stainless steel kitchens and cupboards filled with organic muesli — are packed with babies. It’s considered a German miracle. Coffee shops are more like nurseries. My block was home to three preschools, including one in my building. They say to be careful — there’s something in the water. And then, it happened to me.

One morning I noticed something was wrong. I went to the drug store and asked the clerk a question that must have sounded like: “Have you test me pregnant?” I took home three. My husband wasn’t convinced after the first test, and encouraged me to complete the trifecta.

A week later, after the news had sunken in, I set out to find a “women’s doctor” as they are called there. I stopped a seven-month pregnant woman on the street and forced her tell me the name of her doctor. As it turned out, this doctor had the main attributes we were looking for: She spoke English and she wasn’t, well, German.

My first appointment wasn’t entirely smooth. While the doctor spoke Spanish-accented English, one must converse with the nurses in German. During the intake we were able to get through the blood test, the family history, etc. But then she stumped me with a question; I just couldn’t figure out what she was asking. Finally, totally frustrated, the nurse put her hands between her legs and started saying in a raised voice, “Baby raus, baby raus?” “Abortion and miscarriage!” I shouted like a winning game show contestant. The gynecologist’s office, my mother later pointed out, is really no place for charades.

On my second visit, the doctor took a look at my medical records from America. She sat staring at one paper for a long time. “What is all this?” she asked pointing to the full set of genetics tests, including one for something called “Maple Syrup Urine Disease” that my doctor in New York had done before I got married.

I tried explaining that we were Jews and it was fairly standard to test for Tay-Sachs and other genetic diseases, thinking that I’d be teaching her something she didn’t know. But it turns out she’s actually the doctor for the local rabbi’s wife. She then asked if I wanted my husband to come in to the examination room because she learned from treating the rabbi’s wife that she shouldn’t shake his hand and that he certainly didn’t want to be in the room when the doctor pulled out the large plastic ultrasound probe.

A week later, I received the following message on my answering machine, “Hallo, this is Dr. R. Your iron is very low so now you eat blood sausage or liver two times a week. Ok, bye bye.”

I cannot lie. I ate my share of wurst in Germany. They come in all sorts of varieties and are a tasty snack. But forced blood sausage consumption when even potatoes made me queasy was out of the question.

Differences in ideas about meat consumption obviously weren’t my only concerns about having a baby in Germany.

On another visit to the doctor, she was doing a routine ultrasound, showing us the baby’s two hands, two feet, the parts of the brain, and then she paused. “What is that?” my husband asked excitedly as the doctor pointed to something on the screen that clearly indicated that the baby could be a boy.

A boy! Yes, that was wonderful news. But it brought with it other questions. I immediately went online and started Googling mohels in Germany, which elicited a few diatribes against the practice and no practical information. At Passover, I cornered a rabbinical student who said that there is one well-known mohel in Germany, but he’s 83 and maybe a bit shaky. He mentioned another local mohel, but noted that he’s been known to ask for upwards of 2,000 euros — because he can.

As the due date approached, it turned out that we were actually having a girl. And my husband and I continued to agonize over whether to stay in Germany or return to America to have the baby. There were practical questions about things like health insurance and being surrounded by family as opposed to the harsh sounds of this unfamiliar language. But maybe the strangest part about the prospect of having a baby there was that I was not automatically turned off by the idea of my child starting her life in Germany. It just didn’t feel as uncomfortable as I thought it would. I’m not sure if that marks some sort of historical progress.

Ultimately, we did come back to New York City and our baby’s geburtstermine, “birth appointment” is just a couple of weeks away. Still, I do sometimes wonder what my husband’s grandfather — a Holocaust survivor, born in Dresden, the son of a watchmaker — would have thought if we had stayed. Despite spending a year in Majdanek, he maintained a peculiar fondness for Germany. When he was dying, my husband came to the hospital and cheered him up by singing a German song he learned in school. He’d probably have mixed emotions about our child being born there. Then again, I’m told, the man was particularly fond of wurst.

THE NEW YORK TIMES—August 16, 2009

Looking for a doctor to deliver your baby when you’re 30 weeks pregnant isn’t exactly ideal. But when I moved back to Brooklyn earlier this month, after living in Europe for the past year, that’s exactly what I had to do.

In my perfect world I wanted to find a caring midwife who could deliver my baby in a non-hospital setting. After some extensive Google research, I found myself driving out one rainy morning to the Brooklyn Birthing Center, a small freestanding practice of midwives on an otherwise dim residential strip in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.

The practice had invited interested pregnant women and their partners to come tour their facility, which consists mainly of two bedrooms and a bathtub where women can labor and birth. I expected the assembled crowd to be other Park Slope women like myself who extol things like organic food and natural childbirth. But half of the women there that day were actually Orthodox Jews.

One man wore a yarmulke with the words “Long live the Rebbe King Moshiach Forever” written across the top. He and his wife and another Orthodox couple had traveled from Crown Heights. As it turns out, a good number of patients at this birthing center come from the Orthodox Jewish community. It was explained to me that many Orthodox Jewish women adamantly try to avoid C-sections.

According to Dr. Deena Zimmerman, a physician who also advises women on Jewish law, or halacha, the halachic issue associated with having a C-section is the possibility of taking a risk for an elective surgery. Many Orthodox women insist on consulting with their rabbis before undergoing elective procedures. “[I]f the surgery is really needed, it can of course be done, but religious women may be more inclined to check into the need before they agree to the surgery,” Zimmerman said.

But the desire for vaginal births can also be related to something more practical: large families.

“From a cultural point of view, religious women are, in general, more likely to want large families and are thus more likely to question the need for a C-section,” Zimmerman said, noting that once a woman has a C-section, it is more complicated to have a vaginal birth with the next child. And for safety reasons, some doctors will only perform a limited number of C-sections on a woman. So, if you want to have a large family, C-sections could get in the way.

I was told that was one of the reasons why Maimonides Medical Center, in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of Boro Park in Brooklyn, had one of the lowest C-section rates of any hospital in the city.

I also read online that more women in the Orthodox community are turning to homebirth. Has anybody else heard about this?

http://blogs.forward.com/the-sisterhood/112036/

Photographer Hans Robertson captured the expressionist dancers of Weimar Germany

By Deborah Kolben and Gal Beckerman

When Lotte Jacobi’s photos were exhibited together for the first time four years ago, reviewers were dazzled by how many of Weimar Germany’s glittering jewels—from Käthe Kollowitz to Martin Buber to the famously vampy Lotte Lenya—had been captured by her lens. She seemed to have single-handedly taken on the task of portraying the immense artistic, psychological, and political fervor of those tumultuous years, which seemed fragile even at the time—an ambitious task for any one photographer, even one as hungry as Jacobi. But her atelier was, in fact, one of 400 in Berlin, and she was just one of the many—mainly Jewish—photographers feverishly recording the dancers, writers, and actors that made this doomed moment in German history so extraordinary. Another photographer who clicked away at an incredible rate and with singular results was Hans Robertson.

To say that an artist has been forgotten is to imply that he was well known in his time. Robertson’s name—like that of Jacobi and most other commercial photographers—was not familiar outside the circle of performers who were his subjects and magazine editors who used his services. But from the evidence of only a fraction of his prolific output, discovered almost by accident and now on display at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, his work deserves attention.

Robertson’s specialty was expressionist dance. And expressionist dance was huge in 1920s Germany: the avant-garde innovations that had taken place at the turn of the century in everything from painting to fiction became popularized, and dance was transformed from an aesthetic exercise into an attempt to translate the inner life into movement. The gestures of this modern dance were primitive, dramatic, almost ritualistic, with a fetishistic focus on the human body. Mary Wigman, one of its main innovators, slid across the floor on her knees, eyes closed, fists clenched, performing her Witch Dance. Her school in Dresden became a center of this Ausdruckstanz, producing world-renowned modern dancers like Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi.

They all posed for Robertson. His studio on bustling Kurfürstendamm—a boulevard that was both the Fifth Avenue and the 42nd Street of Berlin—saw a steady stream of business in the late 1920s and early ’30s. But the commercial aspect of these photos, which were in demand by popular illustrated journals like the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, is less important than the artistic vision that guided their creation. Robertson was trying to use his camera in much the same way the dancers he photographed were using their bodies. From the creative way he manipulated light to his innovative use of multiple exposures, he wanted to capture more than just straightforward ornamental shots of the dancers. He was trying to convey their new art form on its own terms.

The dancer Harald Kreutzberg in Irre Gestalten, 1928

This is clear in the photographs. The series called “Leaps,” of Gret Palucca, a favorite muse of expressionist painters and the Bauhaus crowd, catches Palucca in mid-air, limbs splayed. Only part of her body is in focus—the ability to photograph sudden movement was itself a recent technological advancement. In one image her naked torso is twisted, in another her back arched. Then there are the soulful photos of Jo Mihaly, performing her one-woman piece, “Mütter.” She stands in front of a black screen wearing a black turtleneck, her pale, emotive face almost floating in the frame and illuminated from above by a single beam of light. On the more abstract end are Robertson’s photos of Harald Kreutzberg performing his “Lunatic Figures.” Robertson overlays three different exposures of the famously shaved headed dancer, capturing the various expressions of madness Kreutzberg is embodying. Even in Robertson’s more straightforward photo of Kreutzberg as a lunatic, holding a flower and posed loose as a marionette puppet, he captures the dancer as a depersonalized body, a trope of Expressionism that would later inspire, among other post-war dance forms, Japanese Butoh.

Of Robertson’s biography, says the curator of the Berlinische Gallerie show, Thomas Friedrich, “there are more questions then answers.” He was born in Hamburg in 1883. After studying engineering—a profession that inspired a few early photos of construction sites and workers—he changed course and headed to St. Mortiz where he apprenticed for the Swiss landscape photographer Albert Steiner. At 28, Robertson’s first photo spread—a pictorial tour through Holland—appeared in Photographische Rundschau. But his photo career would have to wait until 1918, when he arrived in Berlin. There he joined Lili Baruch—one of the disproportionately high number of Jewish women then making her living with a Leica—who set up the studio on Kurfürstendamm, specializing in dance photography, which Robertson took over in 1928.

To produce the thousands of photos he printed over the next five years, Robertson most likely worked long days and weekends. In addition to dance photography, he shot a wide range of portraits of many of the era’s personalities, from the famous—a nude profile of the boxer Max Schmelling—to the forgottn, such as a close up of the publisher Irmgard Klepenheuer, gazing intently at the camera, a cigarette between her fingers.

In 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses, Robertson had an inkling of what was to come. He handed over the studio to his apprentice, Siegfried Enkelmann. One of the few documents Friedrich, the curator, has been able to uncover is a contract signed by Robertson that makes the transfer final, and describes Enkelmann as “reliable.” And he was. The protégé survived the war and continued photographing dancers (including Mary Wigman) until his death in 1978.

Robertson and his coquettishly beautiful wife, the actress and dancer Inger Vera Kyserlinden (born Levin), escaped to her native Denmark. While the avant-garde movement had been taking place in Berlin, Paris, and Prague, most photographers in Copenhagen were stuck in the pictorial style of the 1910s. As a result, in 1963 Robertson established the first modern photography school in Denmark. But eight years later, just before Hitler began deporting Danish Jews, the Robertsons were forced into exile again, this time fleeing to Stockholm. They returned in May of 1945 and Robertson died just five years later at the age of 67. Thousands of his photographs were turned over to the Royal Library of Denmark following his wife’s death in 1969.

Over time, Robertson was reduced to little more than a footnote. And not just proverbially: It was literally in a footnote in 1992 that Friedrich—a charming, slightly disheveled curator who thrives on the detective work involved in resurrecting dead photos and their makers— discovered his name. He was intrigued, but it took another 14 years (after encountering Hans Robertson’s name in another context) for Friedrich to finally take a trip to Copenhagen to peruse the archive at the Royal Library. What he found there astounded him. Not only did Robertson’s photos offer the most comprehensive catalogue of Weimar dance, but his work was also that of an artist with a unique style and vision. Friedrich still marvels that Robertson’s photos manage to look so distinct from one another, even though they were all taken in the same studio.

The building that housed that studio, on Kurfürstendamm, no longer exists. Like it did in much of Berlin, new construction in the 1950s erased what was before. Now two pharmacies, a clothing store, and a nondescript café look out from the ground floor. There is no trace of the glamour and wild experimentation that was once captured there in pictures. But Hans Robertson himself might yet have an afterlife: Friedrich, it seems, is planning a large retrospective for 2011.

Deborah Kolben and Gal Beckerman are freelance writers living in Berlin.

This Must Be the Place
By Anna Winger
Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $24.95.

Days after moving to Berlin from Brooklyn this summer, I fell into a deep funk. It was the kind of can’t-get-out-of-bed depression where at 5 p.m. you realize that you haven’t left the apartment all day — except once, and that was to get a donner kebab, the pervasive Turkish street food and Berlin’s answer to the New York slice. I knew that outside, out in Berlin, there were galleries to see and cafés to idyll in, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. It all just seemed so gray, vast and empty. I was realizing that Berlin, with all its heavy history, could do this to a person.

It probably wasn’t the best idea, then, to start reading Anna Winger’s debut novel, “This Must Be the Place.” When the book opens, Winger’s protagonist, Hope, a third grade schoolteacher from New York, has also just arrived in Berlin, and fares even worse than I have. Drawn to Europe by a husband who spends his weeks in Poland — leaving in his stead a stack of books for his non-Jewish wife, with titles that invariably contain the words “Holocaust” or “antisemitism” — Hope hides out.

She uses “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” to prop open the bathroom door while she soaks all day in the tub. Besides, she has her own problems without the Jews to worry about. Just months earlier, she miscarried a baby she desperately wanted. Then she lived through the attacks of September 11. It’s with this burden that she arrives in Germany.

While Hope’s economist husband is off working in Poland, reveling in the idea that “the very people who had once driven out his grandparents now needed his help,” Hope is left alone in their vast, empty apartment in Charlottenburg, an upscale, if now slightly boring, section of former West Berlin. Before arriving, she had imagined a city that resembled Paris and where the women all looked like Marlene Dietrich. Instead, she’s been exiled to a city she compares to Newark: a bit bombed out, not so booming and a little bleak.

Not until she meets her upstairs neighbor, Walter Baum — who, pushing 40, is also stuck — does she feel ready to venture out. It’s their friendship that will form the center of the book and pull Hope out of the bathtub and allow her to see the city, with all its complexities, that she now inhabits.

When we meet him, Walter, once the star of a popular German television series in which he played Hans, a young buck often shown shirtless and brushing horses in a small Bavarian town, is fat and balding. Since 1986 he’s been the German voice of Tom Cruise, dubbing 14 of Cruise’s movies into German.

Walter’s girlfriend, who is too young and too pretty, has just left him, and he drives a convertible that makes no sense in a city where it’s always rainy and cold. He lives in constant fear of appearing in the pages of Leute von Gestern, People of Yesterday, a popular newspaper column where readers experience “a daily dose of thrilling Schadenfreude at the miserable afterlife of someone who once had it all.” And he is slightly miserable.

That is, until he meets his attractive American downstairs neighbor, Hope.

Walter sees Hope as some sort of salvation. He believes in her the same way he believes in Tom Cruise. And Hope, following the advice of her mother, just wants a friend — especially one that doesn’t know about her miscarriage.

Berlin, of course, is the perfect backdrop for two people unable to face their past. It’s a city where you literally trip over history every time you pass a “stumbling block,” the plaques placed on the ground outside the homes of people who died in the Holocaust.

It’s a city that is still busy making itself whole, unifying East and West, and figuring out what it wants to be.

“It’s amazing how you live with history here,” Hope tells Walter during their first conversation. “In New York, people only think about what’s going to happen next.”

Winger didn’t randomly choose to set her first novel in Berlin; the Massachusetts native lives here with her family. But Berlin is a city that lends itself to stories about how the past can often weigh down the present. The city — destroyed in war, divided for almost 50 years and now whole again — is itself a metaphor for renewal and overcoming fraught history.

At times, the power of Berlin as a metaphor becomes an easy a crutch for Winger. Walter struggles to make whole again a torn map of Berlin that he finds on the ground. Realizing that her bland white walls are actually layers of wallpaper, Hope tears away at them, revealing plastered newspaper from the Nazi years and then, at the bottom, a beautiful mural of fairytales.

(And as long as I’m at it, there’s that whole naming-the-protagonist “Hope” thing. We get it! We get it!)

But there is much that is fresh here, and it’s a pleasure to read a story about finding oneself again not though romance but through friendship.

The novel ends on a more optimistic note than that on which it began, which gives me, er… hope about my own year here in Berlin. There still might be something heavy about this city that makes you want to stay in bed, but perhaps once you get on the U-Bahn and start chipping away at all those layers — like the wallpaper in Hope’s apartment — the complexity of all that history has its own engaging beauty.

Deborah Kolben is an Arthur F. Burns fellow living in Berlin.

“They’re going to call Gowanus ‘West Park Slope’ or ‘East Carroll Gardens,’ ” a local potter said.

TEN years ago, when a Bay Ridge businessman named Emmanuel Maropakis bought a former metal fabrication factory on a desolate strip of Third Avenue at Sixth Street in Gowanus, he thought he could make a few dollars renting the place out for storage.

The immediate surroundings were not promising: Local commerce included the South Brooklyn Casket Company, a pasta factory and a fairly active drug trade.

“It was all empty, empty, empty, except for the prostitutes,” Mr. Maropakis recalled one day recently as he stood in his building and wiped his hands on his paint-spattered pants.

But when he heard last year that a luxury condominium and a boutique hotel were planned for this stretch of Third Avenue, he got a better idea.

Just before Christmas, he started transforming the old factory into a sprawling pizza and barbecue restaurant, with nearly 300 seats. Mr. Maropakis’s most recent addition is a brick oven he built, which can cook 1,000 pounds of meat at a time.

Not everyone in the neighborhood shares his enthusiasm. In fact, about a month ago, when Mr. Maropakis spray-painted the words “Brick oven bar-be-que” on the plywood covering one of the windows, some people who work in the area thought it was a joke.

“I can’t imagine what it’s doing here,” said Adrienne Yurick, a potter whose studio is half a block away.

In the last couple of years, the high-end boutiques, cafes and restaurants that transformed Fifth Avenue have been spilling onto Fourth Avenue. But few residents expected Third Avenue to start going upscale so quickly, and some are already fearful that Park Slope and Carroll Gardens will merge to form one big brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood.

“They’re going to call Gowanus ‘West Park Slope’ or ‘East Carroll Gardens,’ ” Ms. Yurick said with a grimace. “It’s a joke. This is a truck route.”

The first major sign of gentrification on Third Avenue arrived in the beginning of February, when Bar Tano, an Italian restaurant with large glass windows and a bar that serves 40 types of Scotch, opened at Ninth Street in an abandoned storefront opposite a tire repair shop. Entrees include braised short-rib sandwiches with caramelized onions and homemade potato chips for $15, not exactly the plate of chicken and rice on the menu for $4.50 at Sonia’s, a Latino restaurant across the street.

A few blocks down, an old bodega is being transformed into a nightclub by Turan Kiremitci, who owned the former after-hours spot Save the Robots in the East Village. On Seventh Street near Third Avenue, the owners of Union Hall, a bar near Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, are opening a bar and performance space in a former warehouse.

Flirt, a boutique that has branches in Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, started offering sewing classes seven months ago in a classroom on Third Avenue between Carroll and First Streets. And a coffee shop is under construction in what used to be a beloved old Italian grocery on Third Avenue at President Street.

The real transformation, people in the neighborhood suggest, will come when Whole Foods opens a 68,000-square-foot market on Third Street and Third Avenue. Environmental problems on the site have delayed the project, but Whole Foods is pressing ahead.

Tony Nunez, who works as a cook at Sonia’s, has already noticed changes on Third Avenue since the arrival of Bar Tano, among them a decline in the number of prostitutes on the street.

“Now, maybe there’s just one, and I haven’t seen her in a while,” Mr. Nunez said. “They’ve all gone over to Second Avenue.”

THE NEW YORK SUN — January 7, 2008

DALTON, Ga. — With a population only twice the number of people who work inside the Empire State Building, this self-proclaimed carpet capital of the world appears to have very little in common with the hustle and bustle of New York City.

Delfino Cruz, above, moved to Dalton, Ga., from Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 years ago and now works 70 hours a week for FieldTurf Tarkett, one of the largest turf manufacturers.

But Dalton, which is nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, has forged a most unusual connection to New York: It has, literally, become crucial to the ground on which many New Yorkers walk and play.

The town has carved out a niche for itself as the manufacturer of New York’s “grass” — the artificial turf that the city has been laying increasingly in parks and asphalt lots and, most recently, public housing projects.

Since 1997, when the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation began turning to turf, Dalton has knitted, tufted, and coated thousands of feet of it and loaded it onto trucks for the 800-mile journey to the five boroughs.

To date, the city has replaced 90 of its 800 grass or asphalt ball fields with artificial turf, and another 23 are scheduled for conversion.

“Anywhere you’re going to look, there’s a 100% chance that’s it going to come from Dalton,” the president of Elite Synthetic Surfaces, Mike Gismondi, said about turf around New York City.

Until a decade ago, Dalton was a sleepy, white town where residents and carpet barons piled into Baptist churches on Sunday mornings. But in the last 15 years it has become a magnet for Hispanic immigrants and, in turn, an even more important manufacturing community. At the same time, New York’s manufacturing industry has virtually disappeared.

With that in mind, the progression of Dalton from the “carpet capital of the world,” which claims to manufacture more than 75% of all American-made carpets, to New York’s artificial turf capital makes more sense.

The $14-billion American carpet business includes artificial turf, and its proud capital is a town where the main highway is lined with billboards advertising outlets such as Carpet Express, Carpet Barn, and Super Carpet.

Adding to Dalton’s ability to turn itself into New York’s main grass exporter is that its changing population has given it a strong manufacturing labor workforce.

Worshipers now pack the pews at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church for three Sunday Masses in Spanish. Two newspapers print weekly Spanish editions. Mexican bakeries, grocery stores, and taquerias line the east side of town.

In 1990, just 6% of the population of Dalton was Hispanic. That number ballooned to 40% according to the 2000 census, with the actual number estimated to hover closer to 50%. The incoming kindergarten class this year was 70% Hispanic.

Lured by good-paying jobs, Mexicans started making the 1,000-mile trek from the border about 15 years ago to work in the area’s 150 carpet mills. While the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has occasionally made well-publicized raids, immigrants still manage to find jobs.

Delfino Cruz, 39, moved here from Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 years ago after his brother made the journey. “It’s a good place for the work,” Mr. Cruz said while tufting yarn for a football field at FieldTurf Tarkett, one of the largest turf manufacturers.

He works 70 hours a week and makes about $800. In Mexico, he said he could make maybe $200 a week working in construction. “Before, there was nothing here,” he said, describing the town when he first arrived. “Now there’s a lot of businesses, a lot of fun.”

When asked what he thought about the grass being shipped to New York, he shrugged and simply said: “I have a cousin there.” (Artificial turf isn’t Dalton’s only connection to New York: The preppy killer, Robert Chambers, lived here for several months working in a dye factory after getting out of jail in 2003.)

New York has spent $150 million on artificial turf so far, and it is one of the biggest consumers of artificial turf in the country.

As the immigration debate has raged in recent months, both New York and Georgia have been on the national stage. In New York, Governor Spitzer’s failed proposal to give illegal immigrants drivers’ licenses found its way into a presidential debate. In Georgia, new legislation went into effect this summer making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to get access to health care, welfare, and Medicaid benefits, and requires local law enforcement to notify INS upon arresting anyone living in America illegally. Many illegal immigrants say they are afraid to drive to work for fear that they will be arrested for driving without a license and then be deported.

While the influx of immigrants has diversified this 33,000-person town in a very New York way, it has also sparked tensions. While manufacturers welcome the workers into their factories with open arms, the traditionally Appalachian workforce fears that they’re being replaced, and they often blame immigrants for bringing gangs and graffiti.

“Run like fire from Dalton Georgia,” one man recently posted on a local Web site. “The carpet barons have given it away to illegal aliens for the sake of cheap labor.”

Unlike other manufacturing that has moved overseas, the carpeting business has remained in America, attracting immigrants.

“Immigration saved this town, whether legal or illegal,” Darby McCamy, the vice president of marketing at Evergreen Synthetic Turf, which has installed several fields in New York, said. “Smaller textile industries have gone to China, but immigration has saved us from outsourcing to China or other places.”

Dalton started making carpets because, according to local folklore, a young woman revived the colonial art of “tufting” in the early 1900s. She made a tufted bedspread for her brother as a wedding gift, and it was so popular she started selling them. Later, the whole town started making these colorful bedspreads and sold them off porches along the highway, earning Dalton the nickname “Peacock Alley.”

At the Depot, a former railroad station turned restaurant in downtown Dalton, trains still rattle the windows about every half hour. Tom Peebles, whose family owns AstroTurf, said all workers are treated the same, but that he doesn’t want to see the “culture and language” of Dalton changed. “We pay them like any other Southern Baptist white boy,” Mr. Peebles said about the Hispanic workers. “But if I could wave a magic wand, I would make them learn the culture and the language so that ours doesn’t have to change.”

In addition to AstroTurf, Mr. Peebles’s family, which arrived in Dalton six generations ago, owns about a dozen other carpet-related companies (he carries eight different business cards in his wallet). Artificial fields have changed drastically since the invention of AstroTurf, a scratchy green rug that was first used in professional sports in 1966 when grass wouldn’t grow inside the Houston Astrodome. Companies now use new varieties that are more grass-like and easier to maintain, in addition to using antimicrobial protection and rubber infill.

While artificial turf is more expensive than ordinary sod, it saves money in the long run because it requires less upkeep and lasts for about 10 years, according to the deputy commissioner at New York’s parks department, Liam Kavanagh.

The parks department started turning to turf as New Yorkers began abandoning the traditional sports seasons and using playing fields for increasingly popular sports such as soccer all year long. Manufacturers claim it is environmentally friendly because it uses recycled materials and does not require chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

Critics worry that artificial turf is harmful to the environment, contributes to the urban heating problem, and gets too hot during the summer.

When New York City’s Parks Department announced several years ago that it would be replacing the grass lawns in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights with turf, the community formed a vocal opposition group and targeted the local City Council member, David Yassky. At a rally last year, more than 100 protesters gathered in the dusty park and chanted: “Hey Mr. Yassky, no fake grassky.”

The parks department installed the artificial turf last year, and in November it named Cadman Plaza the park of the month and crowned it the “jewel of downtown Brooklyn.”

]]> http://deborahkolben.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/the-little-georgia-town-that-covers-new-york-city-in-turf/feed/ 0 debbiekolben Delfino Cruz, above, moved to Dalton, Ga., from Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 years ago and now works 70 hours a week for FieldTurf Tarkett, one of the largest turf manufacturers. http://deborahkolben.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/the-matzo-show-on-rivington-street/ http://deborahkolben.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/the-matzo-show-on-rivington-street/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2008 12:48:21 +0000 debbiekolben http://deborahkolben.wordpress.com/?p=40 ]]> THE NEW YORK TIMES — January 6, 2008

Through the window of Streit’s matzo factory, some watch and others ask for free samples.

ALL day long, people ask Leonides Negron if he is Jewish.

Mr. Negron, a 46-year-old Puerto Rican, works at the venerable Streit’s matzo factory on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, handling the stacks of steaming flat breads as they emerge from the 900-degree, 72-foot-long oven. While bearded rabbis upstairs bless the dough, Mr. Negron stands near the first-floor window, listening to merengue on the radio and moving matzo from a conveyor belt onto wire cooling racks.

The bakery has operated in the same four red brick tenements since 1925, and because its oven is on the first floor, passers-by often gaze through the barred windows to watch the action inside. Some ask what is being made; others request a taste. A man who strolls by every morning asks for a piece of matzo for his dog.

Mr. Negron is happy to chat.

“I tell them it’s Jewish bread,” he said of the matzo in the familiar red and blue box. “But to Spanish people, we just tell them it’s crackers.”

Soon, however, the questions will come to an end. A month ago, the company’s owners put the building on the market for $25 million. They plan to move the business from Manhattan, probably to New Jersey.

Mr. Negron, who lives in Ridgewood, Queens, is nervous, about facing a longer commute and about losing his window. For two decades, he has stood in the flour-dusted factory watching the neighborhood turn from Latino to white. He has seen the closing of the bodega across the street, and the opening of Bondi Road, a sleek Australian surfer-themed restaurant, on the same site.

“All day long we stare out the window,” Mr. Negron said as he stacked matzo with two other workers, his back just inches from the window. “It feels like you’re working in the street.”

Some passers-by have long memories, among them a man named Aaron Schechter, who was outside the bakery the other day with his wife and grandson. Mr. Schechter, who is 81 and lives on the Upper East Side, proudly remembers having his bar mitzvah suit made by a tailor around the corner.

“They’re not Jewish,” Mr. Schechter’s wife said as a worker passed them a piece of hot matzo through the security bars. “Is that legal?”

It is. According to biblical law, only Sabbath-

observing Jews can touch the dough before it is cooked; a team of rabbis roaming the premises sees to that. Mr. Negron handles the matzo only after it is baked.

He also handles the inquiries from passers-by who want to know what kind of matzo he is baking that day: white, whole wheat and so on. In Mr. Negron’s expert opinion, “The egg-and-onion matzo tastes best.”

Sam Habib, a Muslim, and Cindy Gluck, who is Jewish, on the job.

ON the morning in August 2005 when Sam Habib and Cindy Gluck opened their first Dunkin’ Donuts, they awoke at dawn to make sure that the glazed fritters and French crullers were out on the counter. Then Mr. Habib sneaked off to the neighboring mosque to pray, and Ms. Gluck, panicky about the prospects of their new venture, went to the back of the store to cry.

Mr. Habib, a bearish 47-year-old with a warm smile, is a Muslim immigrant from Egypt, and Ms. Gluck, 34, is a slim, petite Orthodox Jew from Borough Park, Brooklyn. Both had sunk their entire savings into buying the franchise, on a busy stretch of Church Avenue at East 17th Street in Flatbush.

It was a terrifying gamble. The two had known each other only a few months when Mr. Habib, who says he dreamed for decades of running a Dunkin’ Donuts, asked Ms. Gluck, a real estate broker he had met while looking for a location, to join him in business. He knew she was an Orthodox Jew but said he didn’t care.

Technically, Ms. Gluck is a silent partner, owner of just 49 percent of the business, but as Mr. Habib is quick to point out, there is nothing silent about her.

“I let him make all the decisions,” Ms. Gluck said.

“Really?” Mr. Habib replied, with raised eyebrows.

Sam Habib, whose first name is short for Essam, arrived in New York in 1982 with only the change he had in his pocket. He sold his return ticket home to pay rent and went to work in the kitchens of Brooklyn restaurants.

Cindy Gluck (her real name is Hindy) grew up in Hasidic Williamsburg, in a family that she says were so poor, they often couldn’t afford to eat. At 20, she was married off to a man of her parents’ choosing; four children later, she went into real estate to try to make some money.

“I had never met a Muslim before,” Ms. Gluck said the other day, sitting with her partner in the small office at the back of the Church Avenue store, a space heavy with the aroma of baking croissants. “The first thing I wanted to know was: ‘What kind of Muslim are you?’”

Mr. Habib chimed in with a laugh: “All her friends told her that she should be careful that her crazy terrorist Arab partner doesn’t put bombs in her packages.”

Under the ground rules the pair worked out before making their partnership official, Ms. Gluck takes off Saturdays to celebrate the Sabbath, and Mr. Habib worships at the mosque every Friday. The doughnuts come from a kosher bakery in Borough Park. On Jewish holidays, Mr. Habib technically owns the entire business because Ms. Gluck is not allowed to earn money on those days.

And there is one edict they both obey. “Neither of us is allowed to enjoy the profits of the pork,” Ms. Gluck said. Any money the business makes on the sale of bacon, sausage or ham — foods that are forbidden in both their religions — is split and given away, hers to her synagogue and to Israel, his to the workers as bonuses.

The pair’s hard work has paid off; last year they opened a second franchise, on Flatbush and Sixth Avenues in Park Slope.

Both partners are married and have four children of exactly the same ages: 5, 8, 10 and 12. Mr. Habib has taught Ms. Gluck a few words of Arabic, and she has taught him how to say “good night” in Hebrew.

Mr. Habib often says a business partnership is like a marriage, and he acts accordingly; when he travels home to Egypt, he brings Ms. Gluck little gifts.

“You brought me that Muslim dress,” she recalled.

“It wasn’t a Muslim dress,” he replied with exasperation. “It was, I don’t know, a Nefertiti style or something. Ask my wife.”

Because of a contract dispute, Mr. Habib and Ms. Gluck are in the process of selling the stores back to Dunkin’ Donuts, but they will operate both for the next few months. And when their doughnut days are done, they plan to continue working together.

“She’s Jewish and I’m Muslim,” Mr. Habib said. “That doesn’t stop us from creating a business.”