A Turkey from Russia with Love

I remember sitting in my Business English class at my German university, amused by the anecdote filled and relaxed teaching style our American professor used in order to keep our attention during the dissection of the even driest article in "The Economist".  He loved asking the "50,000 dollar question".  One of them challenging us to figure how many gallons of water are used to flush toilets during intermissions of live football games on Thanksgiving? This somewhat unusual connection to this important holiday depicted one fact very well, though:  it is the one day, where all Americans despite their religion and background come together over a more or less homogeneous meal and enjoy the company of family and/or friends.

Over the years I have learned to appreciate what Thanksgiving means to families in the U.S. (aside from all the accompanying stresses of course).  For my own American family, it was always a congregation of generations in my in-laws' house, children running around, my niece putting black olives on her fingers, women preparing food in the kitchen, men watching football and talking politics, until finally, everyone sat around the long table, said thanks and enjoyed a wonderfully delicious meal.

Living abroad brings many different challenges, which we try to soften by keeping family traditions alive, especially during holidays.  With food being such an essential part of these celebrations, it can become a major task to recreate holiday meals outside of one's home country. My husband missed the above described celebration with his family when he was an exchange student in Germany. As an attempt to accommodate the foreign students, his university prepared a Thanksgiving lunch for the few Americans that came to recreate their holiday in the cafeteria.  By no means the perfect substitute, but a taste of home as much as a gesture by the host country.

Later I would find out how much it means to preserve holiday traditions, and how far someone literally would go, in order to bring Thanksgiving dinner to a snowed in American expat community in Ukraine.  It was a cold winter in 1997, Kiev was covered in snow and permanent ice on sidewalks and store floors and the beginning of our Western holiday season was nearing.  Internet did not really exist, Amazon was just taking its first baby steps, and we could only receive care packets that would fit into the pouch, in general no bigger than a shoe box.  The local bazaars were empty, farmers waiting to grow their produce again in the spring - for now only being able to store and sell winter vegetables, such as beets, onions and potatoes.  Fish and chicken were available, displayed directly on the tables, no freezer needed in the subzero temperatures of the unheated bazaar halls.  The refuge to our Western comfy food became a shipping container in the backyard of the Embassy.  The container was half "commissary" and half video store, and housed a refrigerator sized freezer holding meats from a local German butcher who sold his wares out of the trunk of his old car.  The commissary half offered ant traps, batteries, very crumbled but delicious tortilla chips, some basic toiletries and some even more basic canned food staples.

With Thanksgiving and other holidays coming up, there was a need for special items.  A shopping list was distributed to all families, which listed the items available at the much better stocked commissary in Moscow.  Items such as marshmallows, cranberries, canned pumpkin and turkeys were just a pen stroke away.  The individual lists were combined into one enormous American expat holiday wish list, and a driver designated to drive with a van from Kiev to Moskow and back!  Our feast would be accomplished by driving 10 hours each way, more than 500 miles, in Russian winter conditions.  I am not sure if we all knew at that point, what a task this trip would be.  As the days went by and the weather changed for the worst, we had all succumbed to the fact, that Thanksgiving would not be happening or at least be delayed because the van could not make it through the snow back to Kiev. However, the driver, our hero, whose name I can't remember, made it back safely and on time.  I hope he knew what it meant to all of us, being able to have a real Thanksgiving turkey.

About a year later, we moved to Berlin, and my husband and I tried to figure out, how we can return the gift of an unexpected Thanksgiving dinner to someone.  We had gotten to know one of guards on our compound very well.  He was a young burly man from the Alabama, loved living in Berlin but missed his mother's homemade grits.  It turned out, the night of Thanksgiving, he was on duty, and so we decided we would bring him dinner to his small office in the basement, where he took breaks between rounds and watched TV.  He was visibly touched when we brought him Thanksgiving dinner, and I was hoping it would be a little taste of what he was missing from Alabama.  The next day I found out that this young man had two Thanksgiving meals right after one another, since our neighbor had the same intention we did.

This is what Thanksgiving should be about: sharing a meal with someone and reminding ourselves to be grateful every day for the people that have crossed our path and left a mark. Not the Black Friday deals, the Kmart store that keeps its doors open for 48 hours straight and not about the pushing shopping mob that runs over the employee who opened the gates to the consumers' paradise. Maybe by spending more quality time with the ones around us, by celebrating that less is indeed more, we can boycott the disappearance of this truly American holiday.

Wishing everyone near and far a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Cheers, Seinfeld and the Iceberg Theory

Crossing cultural barriers does not only mean to master a language and study a country's history and geography.  Although mastering a foreign language certainly is the bridge for cross cultural understanding, it is not sufficient to understand humor/jokes embedded in cultural values.

The nuances of satire and "reading between the lines" in shows such as Cheers or Seinfeld, was beyond my understanding, despite 13 years of formal English in school and university.  It took me about a year of living and working in the United States that I finally appreciated and learned to love that style of humor.  Now, 20 years later, I can relate everyday situations to particular episodes and play similar word games with my husband to evoke a chuckle.

So, how do we process humor, when we immerse ourselves in other cultures, and why is it so hard to get it? In order to answer that question, we need to look at cultures from a wider angle.  In 1976, Edward T. Hall coined the term "Iceberg Theory" to explain the visible and invisible elements of a culture. Through this analogy, the majority of a culture is unseen to us and therefore is harder to understand and share. Humor falls into the invisible category, since it is a conglomerate of values, norms, attitudes, beliefs and much more.

Learning another language (among the visible elements in the iceberg theory) is a long process of memorization, grammar crunching and eventually manipulating language in a fluent manner by using more and more synonyms.  At its best, it is firstly a linear path that we follow:  "this word in my mother tongue translates to that word in another language".  At a more advanced level, we start to branch out more in expressing ourselves in a foreign language, because we draw from a wider vocabulary base.  That is when we enjoy reading foreign books or watch foreign movies.  We are now able to follow a plot, but still stumble over humor other than slapstick.

Immersing oneself in another culture by living in it for a longer period of times, say at least 12 months, is what opens us up to the settle nuances of culture.  We start to understand how that culture evolved, what its values are and how it deals with social and political criticism.  

Although, universally, we all share a sense of humor, we react to different triggers.  The central topic of a joke or punch line is directly connected to cultural norms, deep embedded in us.  These norms are the yard stick for each culture's perception of a joke to be funny or not.  Without knowing the underlying (invisible) aspects of a culture, we are unable to share humor as I had experienced myself in my first year in the United States, trying to make sense of the humor acted out in Seinfeld and other shows.

Some forms of humor are straight forward, such as slapstick, therefore easier to understand across cultural norms since they speak to a more primitive sense of pleasure, whereas more advanced forms require detailed knowledge of political systems, news' flashes and social circumstances, becoming a part of freedom of expression.

Historically, humor served as an outlet to criticize political or social circumstances in many countries. Berlin became famous for its political cabaret clubs during the Weimarer Republic in the 1920s, a time of social liberalization in Germany. During the Nazi regime, this freedom of expression was heavily limited.  In the years after the division of Germany, the East as much as other countries of the Eastern block and the Soviet Union developed a very sharp version of political humor in the form of anecdotes, which were shared privately, among very close friends and family members, as a way to vent their political frustration and oppression.  These anecdotes almost resembled a code language for survival and could not be shared with just anyone. A deep sense of trust had to be established first before the humor could be "shared safely".

I first learned about these anecdotes when attending language studies in preparation for my family's move to Ukraine.  Months into full time language classes, one of our teachers presented us with a political anecdote.  We translated the short phrase perfectly, were able to understand each word, but could not understand the cultural context.  Our teacher desperately tried to explain to us, why this cartoon was so funny, but to no avert - it remained a simple translation to us. 

While humor serves entertaining purposes and embellishes political satire, it is also held up to cultural norms in ways that it becomes intolerant for others.  Holocaust jokes are strongly rejected by Germans, whereas in the United States I have oftentimes witnessed comedians incorporating it into their comic routines.  Monty Python has crossed all barriers in my opinion through its movies and the "Flying Circus" series, sometimes reaching my own personal limits for what I find to still be acceptable humor. The publication of 12 editorial cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005 about the Prophet Mohammad, evoked very strong reactions in Muslim countries around the world and killed hundreds of people in violent riots. The Chinese government was baffled by the "mysterious sense of Western satire", when the satirical "The Onion" newspaper claimed the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to be the sexiest man alive in 2012.  The state-run Chinese newspaper "People's Daily" reprinted passages of the Onion's article along with a series of photo the North Korean leader.  A perfect example for intercultural misunderstandings.

Where do we draw the line?  Are we allowed to mock another culture or religion for our own entertainment?  When does tolerance turn into intolerance and how do we preserve the freedom of speech?  The United Nations tried to address this human rights issue in a 2006  initiative called "Cartooning for Peace", which included a conference and culminated in an exhibit by the most popular international (political) cartoonists.  A sample of their work can be seen at http://www.cartooningforpeace.org/?lang=en.

Delving into the human rights area, gives us a new understanding of the power of humor, far greater than comic relief.  Its real powers are not in entertaining, but in political tolerance, freedom of expression and censorship.