RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Online Epitaph

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column describes the web site we have created to honor my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, and in doing so post an online epitaph.

In the piazza, Morruzze.

April 17, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA) -- One year ago I joined my father, my brothers and their families, as well as a few other friends and relatives, at my mother's grave in Santa Monica, Calif.

It was close to the first anniversary of Mom's death, and we gathered with a rabbi for a ceremony to unveil her headstone.

Mom is buried in a municipal cemetery shaded by palm trees. Like most of the other grave markers there, a simple, flat plaque rather than a standing tombstone denotes her resting place.

All that is written about her is her name and the years of her birth and death. And there's a menorah, following the tradition of marking Jewish women's graves with depictions of candlesticks.

But there is no epitaph. Nothing that tells about who she was, where she came from, how she lived or the way she was regarded.

The fifth commandment enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers.

This year, as the second anniversary of Mom's death approached, my brothers and I joined the growing ranks of children who now choose to honor their parents online, creating a Web site to celebrate our mother's life and commemorate her. Also, since my mother was an artist, we wanted to share images and information about her work.

Essentially what we did with the Web site was to etch an epitaph for Mom in cyberspace, picking up on an age-old tradition of personifying the deceased through words chiseled into solid stone.

My brothers and I all collected material and supplied content, but I was the one who designed the site, sticking to several basic priorities.

For one, the software had to be easy to use. We had to be able to post both text and photos. Since we wanted to encourage response and interaction, we also needed a format that combined a Web site with a blog.

The Web sites built by friends of mine for their parents run the gamut from simple memorials aimed primarily at family and close friends to elaborate multimedia constructions or sites aimed at placing a personal life story into the context of broader history.

The Web site for Lore Rasmussen, who died in January, details her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who went on to become an American civil rights activist and educator. The site that artist Josh Gosfield put up to honor his father, Gene, includes animation and a jivey rap poem.

"In the two minutes that it takes from beginning to end, I recall his life -- that which I know only through stories, that which I experienced firsthand, and that which I imagined," Josh told me.

I considered various formats, but in the end I chose a simple wordpress.com blog template. It's not overly ambitious, but it's straightforward -- as was my mother -- and so far it seems to fit the bill.

People already have begun to find it.

"I was so happy to come across this website. Your parents were very important to me when I was a young child," reads our first post, a moving tribute from a woman who knew my folks 25 years ago.

"I am so glad that you started this website," she added, "if only for the opportunity that it gave me to reflect on what your mother and father meant to me."

In my work over the past two decades, I've visited hundreds of Jewish cemeteries where lives and life stories endure in sculpted form, sometimes for centuries.

Some epitaphs use stock phrases and pious platitudes. But some tombstones bear elaborate carvings, with symbols denoting the name, heritage, attributes or profession of the deceased. Others feature epitaphs that read like full-blown CVs -- birth place, death place, education, professional positions, honors, titles, family.

Sometimes I get a chill when I read these persisting evocations of rich and complex lives.

Because of the Holocaust, most of the the people buried in Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe have left no direct descendants. The cemeteries themselves often are overgrown and abandoned. Still, here are the declarations of love and bereavement, of honor and respect.

For example, I never knew my great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber. She was the mother of my father's father, and I was given my middle name in her honor. Ettel died in Romania, well up in her 90s, in 1947, having survived the Holocaust.

Prewar pictures show her with a stern-looking visage. But her epitaph calls her "a positive and dedicated woman, fair and kind in all her doing; (she) offered hospitality and charity to the poor and set a full table for the Tzaddikim."

Cyberspace is not stone, and I have no idea how long the online epitaphs we are creating with our Web sites will endure.

I do know, however, that if you Google my mother's name, you'll find her. And if you follow the link, you'll get to know something about who she was and why we still care so much about her.

The Web site for my mother, Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, is at shirleymoskowitz.wordpress.com.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber's books include "National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe," "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)," and "Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe." She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com.)

My Article on European Bluegrass, in the IHT/New York Times

Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, CZ, 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my article Bluegrass Thrives, Far from Home, which appeared in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune and the online edition of the New York Times.

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Published: April 9, 2009

PRAGUE — A recent concert in Prague demonstrated the far-flung reach of an infectious musical genre that spells “Americana” from the first ringing twang of a finger-picked string.

It was a concert of bluegrass music — but the event was a far cry from the high lonesome hills of Appalachia.

Lilly of the West, a bluegrass band from Bulgaria, was joined by Czech musicians for a performance hosted by the Bulgarian Culture Institute at its premises in the heart of the capital.

“The music is very sincere, it’s about the lyrics, about the songs; every song tells a story,” said Lilly Drumeva, the singer who founded the band more than a dozen years ago. She had first heard bluegrass in Vienna, she said, when she studied there in the early 1990s.

Famed for its close harmony singing and lightning-fast fingerwork on the banjo, mandolin and fiddle, bluegrass music has an international following among a passionate niche of devotees.

In Europe, dozens of bluegrass concerts, festivals, workshops and jam sessions take place throughout the year. Homegrown bands take center stage, but American musicians also often tour. And local bluegrass associations, Web sites, blogs and publications promote the music and chronicle events. Scotland, the Czech Republic, Norway and other locations have even had bluegrass programs in public schools.

The scene is small but intensely active, said Dennis Schut, a Dutch musician who has been involved in bluegrass since the 1970s.

“I see it as a sort of religion or something,” he said. “You get addicted to bluegrass. The first time you hear it, you’re hooked.”

Mr. Schut’s 26-year-old son, Ralph, is a case in point. He moved to the Czech Republic — home to the liveliest bluegrass scene in Europe — for the music and now plays in a number of bands, including Roll’s Boys and G-runs ’n Roses.

Bluegrass in Czech lands grew out of a long, widespread acoustic music tradition. In 1964, concerts in Prague and Brno by Pete Seeger galvanized fans, who made their own five-string banjos based on photographs of Seeger performing.

Today, devotees claim that there are more bluegrass bands per capita in the Czech Republic than in any other country in the world.

By now, the music practically forms a local idiom — so much so that it was the country’s premier bluegrass band, Druha Trava, that was chosen to perform at Prague Castle before U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech there last Sunday.

Hard-core bluegrass fans, said Dennis Schut, do “everything they can to get people to play, hear and enjoy the music.”

In February, these aims underscored a meeting in Germany sponsored by the European Bluegrass Music Association, a coordinating group founded in 2001 and modeled on the Nashville-based International Bluegrass Music Association.

Billed as the first European Bluegrass Summit, it grouped about 30 people from a dozen countries, including concert and festival organizers, representatives of national bluegrass associations, music writers and even a few musicians.

“To present music, to make it grow, to further musical structures there has to be an organization of some sort,” said Olaf Glaesman, one of the participants, who organizes a bluegrass festival in Germany.

One major annual initiative comes each May — the whole month is designated by the Nashville association as Worldwide Bluegrass Music Month, and this year more than 145 events, ranging from big festivals to one-off concerts, are planned in Europe. (See the full schedule at www.ebma.org/101.0.html)

The highlight is the annual European World of Bluegrass Festival in Voorthuizen in the Netherlands. It will take place this year from May 21 to 23, and combines concerts with workshops, a band competition and a trade show with instrument makers, artists and others. This year’s line-up features more than three dozen bands.

Other major festivals during May include:

May 1-2. The Bluegrass Festival in Bühl, Germany. The lineup includes the American bluegrass artists Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen, Wayne Henderson and Helen White, plus the Austrian group Nugget, among other bands from the United States and Germany.

May 9. The Spring Bluegrass Festival in Willisau, Switzerland. In addition to Bulgaria’s Lilly of the West and bands from Northern Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, the lineup features American groups including Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen.

May 29-30. The Strakonice Jamboree, Strakonice, Czech Republic. The festival highlights more than two dozen top Czech groups as well as acts from Sweden and Austria.

May 30-31. The GrevenGrass Festival in Greven, Germany. Concerts and jam sessions feature groups from the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain and the United States.

Bluegrass Month in May, however, only begins the summer season of bluegrass festivals and tours. Top dates include:

June 19-20. Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, Czech Republic. Founded in 1973, the Banjo Jamboree is the oldest bluegrass festival in Europe. It features mainly Czech artists — but Czech bands rank among the top bluegrass performers in Europe. Most fans camp out, and there are jam sessions round the clock.

July 29-Aug. 2. La Roche International Bluegrass Festival, La Roche-sur-Foron, France (near Geneva). Entrance is free to this five-day festival of non-stop music by some 30 bands. The biggest bluegrass event in France, last year’s edition drew 12,000 fans.

Sept. 4-6. Didmarton Bluegrass Festival, Kemble Air Field, Gloucestershire, England. One of the biggest festivals, Didmarton features international bands, jam sessions and more.

My latest Moked.it comment (in Italian) from LA

My latest photo/comment on moked.it is from Los Angeles, where I spent Passover last year and went shopping with my father and my brother Frank in the kosher stores on Pico near Robertson:

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Benvenuti all'Elat Market, una specie di "hard discount" kasher a Los Angeles, dove con mio padre e mio fratello ci siamo trovati fra la gente - molti di loro dalla comunità persiana - che freneticamente acquistava una galassia dei prodotti rigorosamente Kasher per Pesach. Lì e in altri negozi della zona abbiamo comprato anche noi matzot, cetriolini, rafano, un pollo per la minestra, e pesce macinato (per il babbo, cui piace preparare un gefillte fish vero e proprio). Mia nonna, la mamma del babbo, che era nata vicino Cernowitz, nel vecchio impero dell'Austria Ungheria, era immigrata in America da bambina, prima della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Aveva vissuto a lungo prima della sua morte a Los Angeles, e adesso diversi altri miei parenti vivono attorno alla metropoli californiana. Ogni volta che ci vado, mi rendo conto - con un po' di stupore - che nell'area di Los Angeles si trovano più ebrei di quelli che si trovano in tutta la Francia. Più o meno venti volte il numero degli ebrei che vivono oggi in Italia.

Ukraine -- On the Road and Off the Beaten Track

My latest travel column for centropa.org deals with traveling to Jewish heritage sites in western Ukraine, including finding the tomb of the 18th century wine merchant Ber of Bolechow (with the aid of a cellphone).

by Ruth Ellen Gruber

On an overcast afternoon not long ago, two friends and I found ourselves plodding to and fro amid a forest of crooked gravestones in the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Bolekhiv, a small town in western Ukraine south of L'viv.We were on a sort of pilgrimage, methodically pushing through weeds and peering closely at eroding epitaphs, trying to find the tomb of a man we knew had been buried there more than 200 years earlier.Dov Ber Birkenthal, an intrepid wine merchant and Jewish community leader, had been born in Bolekhiv -- known in Polish as Bolechow -- in 1723 and died there in 1805.His tombstone, I knew, bore an epitaph that paid tribute to a long, busy and eventful life -- it summed him up as "the learned, the renowned leader, the open-handed, the aged."

Birkenthal, generally referred to as Ber of Bolechow, has been one of my heroes since I was introduced to him through his remarkable autobiography more than 15 years ago. Ber is believed to have written his memoirs in 1799 or 1800, five years or so before his death. He described everything from local political and religious intrigue to how he drove hard business deals and suffered on the road during arduous wine-buying journeys to Hungary. He wrote of customs duties, currency fraud, and drunken wagon drivers; of icy rivers, double-dealing business partners, flea-ridden inns, and occasional attacks by roving bandits. One long, dramatic passage describes how bandits attacked Bolechow itself in 1759, robbing and looting, killing several people, and setting homes on fire. Some local residents gave as good as they got -- the town's wealthiest Jew, a man called Nachman, held off the attackers with a blazing firearm in each fist. Business was Ber's primary concern. But he also touched on his failed first marriage and the love he found with his second wife, Leah; the pride he felt in his children; his friendships with other Jews and non-Jews; and his passion for books and prowess in half a dozen languages. Ber, "was a remarkable man," wrote Daniel Mendelsohn in his best-selling 2006 book The Lost: a Search for Six of the Six Million, which describes Mendelsohn's quest to learn the fate of his own relatives from Bolekhiv who were killed in the Holocaust. "Ber was the son of a forward-thinking, broad-minded wine merchant who encouraged his son's precocious intellectual appetites from his earliest childhood -- even allowing the boy to study Greek and Latin with the local Catholic priests, an unheard of thing," he wrote. The precocious boy, Mendelsohn went on, "grew up to be a precocious man: a successful wine merchant but also a scholar of enormous breadth and depth, a man who could read easily in Polish and German and Italian, as well as in Hebrew and Greek and Latin." He was, he concluded, "a man who exemplified the liberal, worldly energies that helped to create the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment movement." I had been to Bolekhiv once before, in 2006, when I was researching the latest edition of my book, National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe.

On that visit, too, I had prowled through the cemetery trying to find Ber's grave. "Dov" (in Hebrew) and "Ber" (in Yiddish) both mean "Bear," and I did indeed discover a tombstone of someone named Dov Ber that was decorated with a particularly vivid carving of a bear and bunches of grapes, indicating involvement of the deceased in the wine trade.

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RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Jewish Heritage

Samorin synagogue, At H0me Gallery, 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is from the milestone Bratislava seminar on the care, conservation and maintenance of historic Jewish property.

March 26, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (JTA) – The restitution of Jewish communal property in Central and Eastern Europe has been a hot-button issue since the Iron Curtain fell nearly 20 years ago.

But often forgotten amid the slow and painful legal battles to get back historic Jewish properties that were seized by the Nazis or nationalized by postwar Communist regimes is the practical and urgent need to care for, conserve and maintain the properties once they’ve been recovered.

For two decades and more, I've documented, written about and photographed these sites, which include many yeshivas and synagogues.

Many are huge. Many are dilapidated. Some are recognized as historic monuments. Most stand in towns where few, if any, Jews now live. Even basic maintenance can stretch already strapped communal resources.

In March, I joined Jewish community representatives from 15 countries who gathered to address these concerns at a seminar held in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.

The aim of the meeting was to foster networking and cross-border consultation and spark creative strategic thinking. Many participants had never met before and had little awareness of how colleagues in other countries were confronting similar challenges. Some knew little about the variety of Jewish heritage sites in other countries.

The meeting dealt with issues ranging from fundraising to roof repair to what Jewish law says about synagogue re-use.

During the seminar, which was organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the International Survey of Jewish Monuments and the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center, we visited several sites in the Bratislava area to see how some best-practice solutions had been implemented.

One was the former synagogue in Samorin, a small town southeast of Bratislava, built in 1912.

Back in the early 1990s, it was a derelict shell standing silent and empty on the outskirts of the shabby city center. Its lonely position and crumbling façade underscored its poignancy as a surviving relic of the devastated past.

Since then, it has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Owned by the Union of Slovak Jewish Communities, it is now held on a long-term lease by a couple who took over the building in 1995, restored it and transformed it into the At Home Gallery, a center for contemporary art.

The synagogue is used for cultural purposes aimed at the public at large. It even once hosted the Dalai Lama.

It also now forms part of a new tourism and educational trail called the Slovak Route of Jewish Heritage, which links about 20 historic Jewish sites around the country.

In restoring the building, Csaba Kiss and his Canadian-born wife, Suzanne, deliberately chose to retain evidence that the interior had been desecrated. The walls still bear painted decoration, but the paintings are faded and patchy; they have not been retouched or prettied up.

"Our idea was not to touch the walls," Kiss once told me. "They have memories; we can see them. It's special."

At the seminar's conclusion, participants agreed on a set of pragmatic guidelines with best-practice principles and procedures for the Jewish properties.

Jewish heritage, the guidelines state, "is the legacy of all aspects of Jewish history – religious and secular." At the same time, "Jewish history and art are part of every nation’s history and art. Jewish heritage is part of national heritage, too."

These assertions may appear to state the obvious, but given contentious internal Jewish politics and the taboos and prejudice that historically applied to Jewish culture in Europe, they actually articulate crucial basic concepts. And the guidelines as a whole, while non-binding, represent a milestone when it comes to restituted Jewish properties.

Addressing a frequently heard criticism of Jewish communal management style, the guidelines state, "Honesty and transparency are Jewish values and should be especially apparent in the handling of all matters concerning Jewish property." The guidelines urge detailed documentation of Jewish communal properties and heritage sites and underscore the need for openness and collaboration among Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

Will these guidelines be followed? Probably not to the letter. Financial considerations, legal obstacles, local conditions and human nature, among other things, prevent adherence to ideals.

Still, they form a framework that can influence practice and, perhaps, finally bring these sites the maintenance and preservation they – and the Jewish people – need.

My new column -- in Italian

Monument to the Holocaust, Buehl. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've started writing a brief commentary/column for the web site of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities -- moked.it.

The editor asked me to "read" or "read into" one of my photographs -- or another image -- each week.

I started with a picture I took last month in Buehl, Germany (when I was there for a conference on Bluegrass Music) of the monument marking the spot where the synagogue stood before it was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Today, an Italian ice cream parlor stands there. I used the picture as a peg to discuss (very briefly) German commemoration of the Shoah.

Nel cuore di Buehl, una piccola città tedesca non lontano da Baden-Baden, si gusta gelato italiano sul posto dove per più di 110 anni sorgeva la sinagoga. Fra i tavolini davanti al "Eis-cafe Italia", così come in tante altre città e cittadine tedesche, un monumento molto semplice fa parte ormai dell'arredo urbano, che segna e forma il tessuto vivente del luogo. Memoria quotidiana, dunque. Memoria di oggigiorno (come i monumenti ai caduti di guerra che sono disseminati in ogni cittadina italiana). Per i curiosi, per chi si ferma a leggere, il monumento informa che fino al 10 novembre 1938, la famigerata Notte dei Cristalli, si trovava lì una sinagoga costruita in 1823. Sul suo sito web, lo Yad Vashem ha un filmato che mostra la sua distruzione. Il filmato fu girato da un pompiere, un vigile del fuoco, un amatore che girava i film per hobby. Secondo lo Yad Vashem, voleva "catturare il lavoro dei suoi collegi", mostrali mentre controllavano il fuoco in modo che distruggesse soltanto la sinagoga e non gli altri palazzi intorno. Un anno fa, parlando i occasione del Giorno della Memoria in Germania, l'ex ambasciatore di Israele Avi Primor si è posto una domanda: "Dove nel mondo si è mai vista una nazione che costruisce monumenti alla sua propria vergogna?".

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Klezmer Music and the Ghost of Germany's past

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA -- about Punk Cabaret klezmer danse macabre in Germany... namely, a concert by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, which I heard in Freiburg at the height of the controversy over the pope's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop....It was a terrific concert, and the band's latest CD -- just released -- is also great. Partisans and Parasites.

Me and The Painted Bird in Freiburg.

Feb. 25, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.

The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.

Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.

I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.

Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.

Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."

For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.

The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."

Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.

The concert I attended was performed before a standing-room-only crowd in Freiburg, a university town in the southern part of the country.

Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience.

Most of the songs were from the band's new CD, "Partisans and Parasites," a collection of original pieces and reworked Yiddish songs that deftly juggles genres, styles, epochs and languages.

Kahn's song "Parasites" tells of species that live on others who then sometimes kill them. His "Khurbn Katrina" mourns the destruction of New Orleans with a soulful mix of Yiddish and Bourbon Street. A beautifully reworked version of the Yiddish classic "Borscht" employs English translation to reveal a rollicking love song.

About halfway through the show, the band launched into its most notorious number, a deliberately provocative tune about the power and folly of revenge.

Called "Six Million Germans/Nakam," it recounts how East European Jewish partisans formed a group called Nakam -- Revenge -- that sought to avenge the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by poisoning Germans’ bread and water.

The plot was foiled, and Nakam disbanded. Its leader, Abba Kovner, went on to become one of Israel's most noted poets.

"Six Million Germans! 6 Million Germans!" goes the chorus, chanted against the background of bouncy klezmer riffs combined with a spirited oompah march.

The audience seemed to love it.

"Ultimately, it's not about the absence of justice or victims," Kahn told me when we sat and talked after the show. "It's not about Jews and Germans; it's about revenge. It's about the sense of vengeance and whether or not that really has sense."

Kahn told me how history provided an inescapable background for his work.

"I think we're all doomed to repeat history whether we want to or not," Kahn said. "The question is, what part of history are we going to repeat? Even if you don't actively remember the past, the past is going to come and remind you of itself."

There was something "naively sort of quaint" about Holocaust denial, he added. But other forms of deliberate amnesia can also be destructive, Kahn said.

"It would be nice if we were the kind of animal that can't do these things to each other," he said. "But to deny that we did it then is to deny that we're doing it now. It's to deny a very real problem that humanity has to deal with, which is the problem of racism, fascism, dehumanization, collective punishment.

"We sing songs about this, about memory, about memory politics. But ultimately it's not only about do we remember or are we remembering or is there something to remember. It's what exactly are we supposed to not forget, what does 'never again' really mean.

"Is it 'never again' to us?" he asked. "Is it never forget this? We need to look again at what it is we're supposed to remember."

A few days before I saw The Painted Bird, the music critic of The Jewish Chronicle of London, Paul Lester, raised hackles in the Jewish music world by slamming what he called "the fake roots music of the klezmer brigade."

"The best Jewish music -- or rather, the best music by Jews -- reflects the moment and is somehow a response to the times in which it was made," Lester wrote. "And if there is a 'Jewish voice,' it is not to be heard in klezmer, maybe because it is being drowned out by all those clarinets, violins and accordions."

The "Jewish voice" he was seeking, Lester wrote, was "urbane, witty, sharp, smart, savvy, often satirical and thoroughly contemporary. It also has an American accent."

To my ears, that's a pretty good description of The Painted Bird.