Palko Karasz

“Itʼs not just a nice family gathering — itʼs a political act,” said de Waal in an interview the next day.

De Waal, a British ceramic artist and bestselling author, is the great-grandson of Viktor von Ephrussi, who thrived in Vienna as a banker before fleeing the city after Hitler’s 1938 incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich. On Tuesday, the country’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, welcomed the family to an exhibition opening nearby that tells their story.

“The Ephrussis: Travel in Time,” at the Jewish Museum Vienna through March 8, presents the family’s history through documents, photographs and souvenirs that de Waal donated to the museum last year. But the stars of the show are 157 netsuke (pronounced NET-ske), tiny Japanese carvings in wood and ivory, made famous by de Waal’s 2010 memoir, “The Hare With Amber Eyes.” The book, which takes its name from one of the figures, tells the story of the collection and the family, which survived World War II by spreading out into a worldwide diaspora.

De Waal has been a regular visitor to Vienna since the 1990s, when he received the netsuke as an inheritance from his great-uncle and started to research the collection, then numbering more than 250.

“Even though I love this collection, the story has more resonance here in Vienna,” de Waal said. The figures’ presence in the city, he added, would help tell the story “of not just anti-Semitism and racism, but polarization, and treatment of exiles, and migration.”

Austria has welcomed more than 1 million refugees and migrants who transited through the European Union’s unguarded borders, mostly fleeing conflict in the Middle East. Their arrival was followed by an acrimonious debate and loud protests from the far right. Austria’s government, led by conservatives, soon demanded the strengthening of Europe’s external borders.

De Waal is an outspoken supporter of open borders. Last November, he auctioned 79 of the netsuke to raise money for the Refugee Council, a British organization that supports refugees. And his family’s story, one of exile and integration, makes him sympathetic to the plight of migrants today.

Charles Ephrussi was an art collector in 19th-century Paris and patron of artists including Renoir, who featured the connoisseur in the back of his famous painting “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” The collector bought the netsuke in the 1870s, and sent them to Vienna as a wedding present to his cousin, de Waal’s great-grandfather.

“The Hare With Amber Eyes” tells how, in 1938, when the Nazis seized the Ephrussis’ art collection, a maid managed to hide the netsuke away, handful by handful, in her apron. They survived the war and were among the first items the Ephrussis managed to recover.

At the Jewish Museum, the netsuke are shown in glass cases throughout the exhibition, linking rooms organized along the Ephrussis’ journey from Odessa, in today’s Ukraine, where their ancestors made their fortune in the grain trade, to Vienna, Paris, London and beyond. The figures were intended to be handled, and each of them bears wear and tear from generations of admirers.

Also on show are artifacts, like the Renoir painting, that show how Jews rose in 19th-century Europe. Others, like a satirical newspaper illustration from the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France, record rising anti-Semitism on the Continent. The exhibition also tells how those who survived war and persecution remade their lives in the second half of the 20th century. (The line of inheritance brought the netsuke back to their native Japan, where de Waal’s great-uncle held them until his death in 1997, when they passed to de Waal in London.)

Danielle Spera, the director of the Jewish Museum, said the exhibition was a chance to reopen a chapter of history. “It’s really important to bring back into the minds of the Viennese and Austrian people what happened to this family,” she said in an interview. The mission of the museum, she added, was to raise awareness so that no one is persecuted like this again.

The Ephrussis’ story mirrors other tales of loss from other families who lived in the grand mansions on the elegant Ringstrasse, the boulevard that circles Vienna city center. But the display carefully avoids what de Waal in his book called “the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.”

“If you measure a story entirely through loss, what youʼre doing is youʼre not paying attention to the lived lives of the people in the story,” de Waal said. “Itʼs a much more interesting and complex story about how people remake their lives.”

Although “The Hare With Amber Eyes” reached a wider public than de Waal’s ceramic work, he is above all a visual artist. His delicate, minimalist porcelain vessels take the form everyday objects, like vases or teapots, and often include lines of poetry printed on the porcelain. An exhibition of de Waal’s vessels is on display at the Frick Collection in New York through Nov. 17.

In recent years, de Waal’s art and writing have taken on an increasingly political tone. In 2016, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, de Waal selected artwork around the theme of anxiety from the museum’s collections for an exhibition called “During the Night.” The result was a pitch-dark show that reflected his anxiety about political events in the year when Britain voted to leave the European Union and the bloc clamped down on migration. During this year’s Venice Biennale, de Waal showed a “Library of Exile,” made up of 2,000 books written by refugees and displaced people. The show will travel to Dresden, Germany, and London next year.

After its run in Vienna, the Ephrussi exhibition will move on to the Jewish Museum in New York, and then to San Francisco. Bringing the netsuke and his family story back to Vienna, was important, de Waal said, but did it not, and would not, bring his family closure.

“What you have to do is to give people back their story,” de Waal added. “And that’s pretty much the only thing you can do.”

This article originally appeared in

VIENNA — Last Monday in the imposing Ephrussi Palace, Edmund de Waal presided over a family reunion. For the first time since World War II, 41 relatives from around Europe, the United States and Mexico toured the neo-Renaissance building that had been home to the Ephrussi family, European Jews whose wealth once rivaled that of the Rothschilds.

'The Hare With Amber Eyes' Comes Home

According to the Hungarian news website Index, which said it has seen a copy of the letter, the singers were asked to sign a declaration stating that “African-American origins and spirit form an inseparable part” of their identity. At least half the group signed, according to Index.

The letter was from the Hungarian State Opera’s general director, Szilveszter Okovacs, who last year defended the company’s decision to perform the work with white singers against the wishes of the Gershwin estate.

“Porgy and Bess,” which premiered in the United States in 1935, tells the story of an African-American community’s struggles with violence and racism. George Gershwin famously turned down companies that wanted to perform the opera in blackface, and his estate stipulates that the work should be performed by an all-black cast.

The letters seemed to be part of a defiant publicity stunt by Okovacs, who spoke cryptically and evasively with reporters. In an interview with the Hungarian news network ATV on Monday, Okovacs said that “Hungary does not keep records of skin color,” and therefore he could not “tell whether the cast suits that requirement.”

Speaking to another TV network, Euronews, Okovacs acknowledged the oddity of his request to the singers. “If we have to play on absurd grounds,” he said of the Gershwin estate’s requirements for the performance, “we can’t do anything but join the field in absurd outfits.”

Okovacs added that he was opposed to allowing “the presence of people in a production to be determined by skin color or ethnicity.”

A spokesman for the Hungarian State Opera declined to comment.

Sargent Aborn, the chief executive of Tams-Witmark, the New York-based agents of the Gershwin estate, said in an email on Tuesday that the Hungarian State Opera production was taking place without a license. Hungarian news media reported that the cast had prepared the current performances with photocopied musical scores.

Okovacs told The New York Times last year that the company had signed a contract with Tams-Witmark that didn’t contain specifics about the singers’ ethnicity. Still, when the production premiered, playbills and posters carried a note stating that the production was taking place without authorization and “contrary to the requirements for the presentation of the work.”

But Tuesday, Aborn of Tams-Witmark contested that version of events. He said that after the Hungarian State Opera confirmed “in writing that they understood the need to cast black singers to present the work dramatically, a license was issued for the 2018 production.” That license has since expired.

“It subsequently came to our attention that the production was in clear breach,” he said, adding that Tams-Witmark and the Gershwins were examining legal options.

Tams-Witmark did not disclose the exact wording of the license agreement. But the founder of the Grange Park Opera in England, Wasfi Kani, spoke to The Times of London about the license her company had obtained for a production there this summer.

“It does not say the singers have to be black but in effect you cannot have white people playing the main roles or the chorus,” Kani said in January. “It is the only work in the canon where you have to sign up for this. We are fishing in a very small pool because there are not that many black opera singers.”

Okovacs’ programing has previously attracted controversy both at home and abroad. His decision last year to stage “Porgy and Bess” with a white cast received international attention. And in June, the Hungarian State Opera canceled some performances of the musical “Billy Elliot” after a government-friendly newspaper columnist called it “gay propaganda.”

But Okovacs has led the company through an ambitious program of expansion in recent years, under the patronage of Viktor Orban’s far-right government. On Monday he announced its 2019-2020 season would be on the theme of Christianity. In an article on the pro-government news website Origo, Okovacs wrote that he had chosen to explore this topic because Christian traditions were at the core of European culture. “In Europe, even atheists are Christian,” he wrote, a phrase that Orban has also used.

The company’s new season features 21 new productions, six of which are world premieres. Among them will be a work reflecting on the sacrament of marriage, written by Pope John Paul II when he was a bishop in Poland; a new staging of Handel’s “Messiah”; and an evening of works inspired by gospel music.

When Index, the news website, posed questions to Okovacs about his letters to the cast of “Porgy and Bess,” rather than answering them, he came back with 22 questions of his own.

These included “What color is black (all black cast) on the Pantone scale?” and “Could 14 nonwhite artists, who are professionally suitable for the opera stage, live in Hungary today?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/hungary-opera-porgy-and-bess.html" id="38fac9dc-b970-3044-a8b1-483c5759648e">The New York Times</a>.

When the Hungarian State Opera’s white cast of singers came together in Budapest earlier this month to revive a production of George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” they received letters carrying an unusual request: to declare themselves African-American.

New Music, New Albums Hungarian Opera Asks White Cast of 'Porgy and Bess' to Say They Are African-American

“As a convinced anti-fascist, I apologize to all those who may have been offended by what I said, which in no way intends to justify or play down an antidemocratic and totalitarian regime,” the president, Antonio Tajani, said in a statement.

His apology followed a radio interview on Wednesday in which he appeared to offer justifications of Mussolini’s dictatorship.

“I’m not a fascist, I was never a fascist, and I don’t share his political convictions,” Tajani told Radio 24, an Italian broadcaster. “But we have to be honest: Mussolini built roads, bridges, buildings, sports facilities; he has developed many parts of our Italy.”

“Until he declared war on the whole world by following Hitler, until he became a promoter of the racial laws, apart from the dramatic Matteotti case,” Tajani added, “he did positive things.”

Giacomo Matteotti was a socialist politician who was murdered by fascists in 1924 for denouncing electoral fraud and violence.

Tajani’s comments came after a year of heightened debate about Mussolini’s legacy, 80 years after the fascist leader’s regime introduced Nazi-like anti-Semitic laws.

Fascination with Mussolini’s rise and regime seems to persist. A book about the dictator, called “M,” by Antonio Scurati, found a huge audience after it was published last year. Critics said the book resurrected the cult of the leader.

And “I’m Back,” a feature-length comedy that imagined Mussolini’s modern-day return to become a TV and YouTube sensation, caused a stir last year. (It was an adaptation of a German film, “Look Who’s Back,” which was based on a satirical novel in which Hitler reappears.)

Mussolini’s memory has also been summoned in the political arena. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and the leader of the right-wing League party, sometimes quotes from the dictator. Neo-fascist groups regularly hold marches across the country.

Tajani’s comments drew immediate criticism from Italy and across Europe. “Unbelievable quotes from Tajani on Mussolini,” Udo Bullmann, the leader of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter. “How can a president of the European Parliament fail to acknowledge the nature of fascism?”

The National Association of Italian Partisans, an anti-fascist organization, issued a statement that drew attention to Mussolini’s crimes, for example in Ethiopia, “where entire innocent populations — children, women and men — were murdered with poison gas.”

The association said that Tajani’s original comments defending Mussolini’s legacy were “trite, superficial and typical of those who want to justify a regime like fascism” that propelled Italy into World War II “and caused millions of deaths.”

Tajani had initially defended his comments. “Shame on those who manipulate what I’ve allegedly said on fascism,” he said on Twitter on Wednesday, before changing course.

Tajani has made divisive comments about Italy’s wartime legacy before.

Last month, at a memorial service in Basovizza, Italy, he said “Long live Italian Istria and Italian Dalmatia.” Both of those regions have been territories of Italy at various times, including during World War II, but are today part of Croatia and Slovenia, where his comments prompted outrage and calls for Tajani to resign.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/world/europe/eu-mussolini-fascist-antonio-tajani.html" id="d4eba281-c397-32fb-a053-4429289e8550">The New York Times</a>.

The president of the European Parliament apologized Thursday after he said that Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist former leader, had done positive things despite leading his country into war and installing a totalitarian regime.

EU Leader Apologizes for Comments on Mussolini's Legacy

The County of Dorset coroner’s office said on Tuesday that she had died after a fall.

Wigginton had worked on the BBC’s flagship investigative program “Panorama” before she was hired, on a trial basis, to read evening news bulletins in the summer of 1960. At the time, women were largely held to be unsuited for the job.

As the BBC itself wrote in its online history, managers had thought women “were too frivolous to be the bearers of grave news.”

But BBC executives agreed to the experiment partly in response to the example set by the rival British commercial network ITV, which had made Barbara Mandell its first regular reader of television news in 1955.

Wigginton’s tenure at the public broadcaster was short-lived. Three months later, BBC managers decided to remove her. Research had found that viewers thought a woman reading the late news was “not acceptable,” according to the BBC.

The British news media had called her “Newsgirl Nan” and ran disparaging headlines.

“I read some articles from the time,” Fiona Bruce, a news anchor for the BBC, told The Times of London in 2004, “which said things like, ‘She hides much of her figure behind a desk. Pity, because she’s a stunning 36-25-37!’”

But to Bruce, Wigginton had “gate-crashed the news for a few brief but glorious months.”

BBC television news presenting began in 1954 with Richard Baker. Newsreaders, as he and a growing team came to be known, were not identified by name at first and did not even appear onscreen.

“It was feared we might sully the stream of truth with inappropriate facial expressions,” Baker, who became a popular television personality, was quoted as saying by the BBC in its obituary about him last November, when he died at 93.

Amid such conservatism, women for years faced an uphill battle against the prejudices of managers and viewers alike, particularly at the BBC. It was not until 1975 that Angela Rippon became its first woman to read the national news on a permanent basis.

After her short stint reading the news on the BBC, Wigginton moved to ITV and worked there as a television and radio reporter until her retirement. There was no immediate information on her survivors.

The challenges at the BBC have continued. Last year, the organization announced that it would cut the salaries of some of its male broadcast personalities after it emerged that there was a pay gap of millions of pounds between the highest-paid man and the women who presented some of the BBC’s leading programs.

Wigginton rarely gave interviews, but in 1964 she shared her feelings about her experience at the network, telling The Daily Mail that she had “suffered” and faced “prejudice and discrimination” there.

Adapting a line from Shakespeare, she said, “There were times when I was doing the announcing when I wanted to shout aloud like Shylock, ‘Hath not woman eyes, ears, senses?’”

This article originally appeared in <a id="661c3822-da34-35fc-a900-090deffdd815" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/obituaries/nan-winton-bbc-news-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Nancy Wigginton, first woman to read national news on BBC, dies at 93

LONDON — Nancy Wigginton, better known as Nan Winton, who was the first woman to read the national news on BBC television, died on May 11 in Dorset, England. She was 93.

“Say hello to the Bailey family,” the show’s producers said in an announcement Saturday. “A brand-new family moving to Weatherfield in June this year!” they added, referring to the fictional town based on Salford, an industrial city about 2 miles west of the center of Manchester.

The announcement did not address the family’s race or ethnicity, but the show’s network, ITV, said it was the series’ first black family.

To many observers, the addition, while welcome, came astonishingly late for a show, fondly known as “Corrie,” that debuted in December 1960 and that has been watched by up to a third of the British public — including, reports say, Queen Elizabeth II.

“How have the producers managed to get away with this for almost 60 years?” Matthew Xia, a theater director, told The Guardian, saying he was stunned it had taken so long for the show to reflect Manchester’s multicultural character.

“It’s about time, a street right in the heart of Manchester and they’ve never had a black family live there,” one Twitter user, Carly Purland-Goodey, wrote on Saturday.

For decades, the set where the show was produced was in central Manchester. In the 1970s and ’80s, the show was broadcast in the United States, first on public television to a lukewarm reception, and then on cable.

The show’s producer, Ian MacLeod, told ITV News that he did not know why the soap took so long to introduce a black family.

“Manchester has a large proportion of black residents, so it did feel sort of overdue we did this and represented modern Manchester a bit more accurately,” MacLeod said.

“Coronation Street” has had individual characters who are black or members of other racial and ethnic groups. In 2013, a character of Pakistani origin appeared, followed shortly by members of his family, the Nazirs. (In 2016, Marc Anwar, who portrayed the father, Sharif Nazir, was fired over anti-India posts on Twitter.)

The series, based on the residents of fictional Coronation Street, has been a British favorite for years alongside “EastEnders,” set in East London, and “Emmerdale,” set in Yorkshire. The story lines revolve around lives that viewers can easily identify with and have produced quotations and characters that are firmly engraved in British culture.

The shows have given rise to some of the most popular television celebrities in the country, including Pat Phoenix, who played the glamorous Elsie Tanner on “Coronation Street,” and Barbara Windsor, who appeared as Peggy Mitchell, the protective pub owner in “EastEnders.”

Both shows are so iconic that they appear in guides to British culture that applicants for British citizenship need to study for the test.

In recent years, soap operas have seen a decline in viewership, according to a report published by the Office of Communications, or Ofcom, Britain’s telecom regulator. In 2007, “EastEnders,” “Coronation Street” and “Emmerdale” averaged 8.7 million viewers each. By 2017, that figure had dropped to 6.9 million, the report said.

Even though the shows say they portray British society, they have been derided as mining one common theme, the poor and the jobless, and criticized for being nostalgic for a bygone era and tone-deaf to the changes in modern Britain.

The addition of the new family to “Coronation Street” appeared to be an attempt to address those issues, especially with the character of James Bailey, the 19-year-old younger son played by Nathan Graham. A talented soccer player, the character will face the challenges of coming out as gay to his family and teammates.

The rest of the family includes the father, Edison, a builder, played by Trevor Michael Georges; the mother, Aggie, a pharmacy assistant, played by Lorna Laidlaw; and the older son, Michael, played by Ryan Russell.

They will make their debut on the show in June.

'Coronation street,' beloved British soap, introduces its first black family

LONDON — “Coronation Street,” Britain’s (and the world’s) longest-running soap opera, which has chronicled working-class life near Manchester, England, since 1960, is introducing the first black family in the history of the series.

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