OFF THE WALL HISTORY LESSON IN LOS ANGELES - Text & Photographs: Lydia Aisenberg (April 2014)

In many conversations with people who have been tourists in the somewhat sprawling bumper-to-bumper city of Los Angeles, I have yet to find visitors who had a totally off the wall history lesson about California during early morning walks in the neighborhood of Valley Glen as I.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural is just that – a seemingly never-ending history lesson of vivid, vibrant, joyous events but also hauntingly disturbing panels of wars, slaughter, slavery and deathly economic distress. The mural, one of the longest in the world, is spread over almost half a mile of a portion 3 meter high concrete retaining wall of the San Fernando Valley Tujunga Flood Control Channel. The wide, unattractive to say the least, concrete laid sides and bottom channel passes through the area where I was staying, a school, park and sport complex on one side, a busy road and private houses on the other. A sizeable population of American Jews and Israelis live in the area, a fact realized when taking an early Shabbat walk and finding myself going with the flow of Jewish folk on their way to a number of small synagogues in the area.

The mural depicts California from thousands of years B.C. to 1984. In a series of huge panels, quite a number of which focusing on Jews in America, art from the heart linked to the past deals with many different periods. Massive immigration and settlement in America and the important contribution of those penniless and often sickly people from different continents who played a major role in physically building the country through manual labor in construction and agriculture, participated and succeeded in the struggle for civil liberties, worker’s rights and an emphasis with some panels on the Jewish contribution to the world of entertainment, whether it be Hollywood films, the world of music, media, poetry, literature and more.

A number of panels focusing on ‘Jewish Arts & Sciences’ feature the controversial Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg and The Beat generation of the 1950s and the German-born American citizen and Nobel Prize recipient Professor Albert Einstein. A rather attractive panel concentrates on the 1950s birth of rock ‘n roll – with a young guitar-playing Elvis Presley singing and swinging to a few dozen wide-winged and colorful Cadillac cars. An unabashed Elvis fan even after all these years, this writer thought how poignant the one and only Elvis, whose maternal grandmother apparently was Jewish, had been named Elvis Aron. The latter name was later decided by various pundits to have been a misspelling of Aaron, the brother of Moses. Either way, both Elvis and Moses were great movers with an enormous following!

Panels depicting an American Jewish family hunched around the radio and listening to devastating news about the German advances in the Second World War from the comfort and security of their living room in the USA, a red, white and blue banner

passing through the radio itself, shows a demonized Adolf Hitler lurking over their heads, arms outstretched as if to snatch them up off the couch at any moment.

Another panel shows a sallow faced Jewish refugee pulling on the anchor chain of the ill-fated ocean liner St. Louis packed with Jews on a last ditch effort to get out of Germany and head for freedom in Cuba. This panel is close to another showing hollow faced, emaciated Jews sprawled on wooden bunks in the Nazi death camps and then nearby the celebration of the American liberation of the concentration camps and focus on survivors who then emigrated to America, the land of the free.

A panel dealing with McCarthyism is an instant reminder of the Hollywood Ten and the large number of Jews who were caught up in the ‘Red Scare’ of the early 1950’s. A figure drawn at the bottom of the panel and dwarfed by a portrait of Senator Joseph McCarthy - the Hollywood sign in the background and a large group of people spilling out of his clenched fist - points an accusing finger at those in McCarthy’s grip, a chilling sight even on a pleasant summer California morn.

During the whole of my stay there was never more than a film of stagnant water lacing the bottom of the extremely bleak concrete channel and far too murky to reflect the hardships and sufferings of those enslaved, physically and mentally abused by others nor reflect the bottomless pit of resolve and tenacity of those who took upon themselves leadership roles to fight for the rights of their fellow human beings, portrayed in this amazing effort on a wall to tell it all. But to achieve just that would take at least another half a dozen miles in addition to this already impressive history of California, a project begun in 1976 and visitors informed by a sign that the Great Wall of LA is a work in progress, a monument to inter-racial harmony created between over 400 youth and their families from diverse cultural, social and economic backgrounds who participated in the project together with a large number of artists, oral historians, ethnologists and scholars. Although it would seem no additions have been made in recent years – but there is an intention to continue once funds are raised - it is obvious that the mural has been lovingly renovated of late, the colors extremely bright, glistening almost blinding one in sun’s reflection.

It was during the walks passing the mural that I began to realize there was a great deal I didn’t know about American history, or rather how little I knew and much of what I did know had been via Hollywood films the likes of ‘Gone With The Wind,’ and other great celluloid epics.

Native Indians, Mexicans, African slaves, immigrants pouring in from all over the globe, Japanese being rounded up and put in internment camps during the Second World War, Vietnam and so much more I did know, but when one sees history laid out in such powerful artistic sequence that is the phenomenal LA wall, the impact is deep, unforgettable and in my case, to read more. Truly a great success story crammed into half a mile - but still many an extra mile to go in order to redraw the lines of acceptable norms of behavior in present day American society strife with poverty, violence and inequality.

PAUL ROBSON, GWENDOLINE BROOKS, MARTIN LUTHER KING, ROSA PARKS and RALPH BUNCHE ride the same bus on the Great LA Wall

Taking a back seat to activist, singer, actor Paul Robeson; Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in 1955; Gwendoline Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950) and leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, is Dr.

Ralph Bunch, who successfully mediated the 1949 Armistice Agreement in Rhodes.

Hanging on to a roof-strap toward the back of the bus in a panel entitled ‘Forebears of Civil Rights’ – presumably meant to be ‘Forebearers of Civil Rights’ – is Dr. Ralph Bunche, chief aide to UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte who was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of the underground Jewish Lehi group. Following the assassination Ralph Bunche was appointed to take over the 1949 Armistice Agreement brokered on the island of Rhodes. A descendant of African slaves in America, Bunche was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his brilliant negotiating skills, the first African-American to receive the prestigious award.

In his memoirs the leader of the Israeli delegation, Moshe Dayan, wrote that a good deal of the more than sensitive negotiations with Mr. Bunche were conducted over a billiard table whilst the soldier and the diplomat tried to outdo each other shooting pool.

Before the discussions got underway, Ralph Bunch decided to have a local artisan create unique ceramic memorial name plates inscribed with the name of every member of the delegations at Rhodes. With the successful signing of the agreement, Bunche presented each one with the somewhat delicate souvenir of their success. At a later stage Dayan approached Bunche and asked him what he would have done with the nameplates had there not been an agreement.

“I would have broken the plates over your damn heads,” was the answer he received from the future Nobel Prize winner.