Because the Crimson Military swept into Ukraine within the late summer time of 1943, Vasily Grossman was overcome with each exhilaration and foreboding on re-entering his homeland. The novelist-turned-war-correspondent warmed to the “gentle breath of Ukraine” on his face once more and the evocative sight of tall poplars, white huts and wattle fences within the countryside. However after two years of Nazi occupation, he discovered his stunning mom nation scarred by “fireplace and tears” and consumed by “unhappiness and wrath”.
He was shocked to see the devastation as he handed via the cities he knew nicely from his prewar days (and whose names have develop into all too acquainted to us at this time throughout the newest battle in Ukraine): Donetsk (then named Stalino) the place Grossman had labored as a coal mining engineer; Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital with its golden cupolas, the place he had married his girlfriend Anna Petrovna Matsyuk; and Odesa, the culturally wealthy Black Sea port, the place a lot of his mom’s Jewish family had lived and later been massacred.
“Previous males, after they hear Russian phrases, run to satisfy the troops and weep silently, unable to utter a phrase. Previous peasant girls say with a quiet shock: ‘We thought we’d sing and snicker once we noticed our military, however there’s a lot grief in our hearts, that tears are falling’,” he wrote.
As a proud son of Ukraine, steeped in Russian tradition, Grossman was each a chronicler of the Soviet Union’s best victories and a clear-eyed investigator of its darkest crimes
The distinction between the Crimson Military’s victorious marketing campaign throughout Ukraine in 1943 and President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of 2022 couldn’t be starker. Reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s triumphs throughout the second world battle, the Russian president has performed up the fraternal ties between the 2 Slavic peoples and the historic symmetry of a Russian military “liberating” the Ukrainian folks from the supposed grip of neo-Nazis. As Putin wrote in an impassioned (and traditionally selective) essay on Ukraine, revealed final July, Russians and Ukrainians have been sure by centuries of frequent trials, achievements and victories. “Collectively we now have at all times been and will likely be many occasions stronger and extra profitable. For we’re one folks.”
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However, aside from a number of separatist pro-Moscow districts of jap Ukraine which have welcomed Putin’s intervention, the truth has been very completely different. Even earlier than the newest battle, a Ukrainian opinion ballot revealed final December confirmed that 72 per cent of respondents thought-about Russia a “hostile state”. The defiance, braveness and sense of nationhood proven by the Ukrainians within the face of the cruel onslaught has been extraordinary. The one brotherhood proven between the Russians and Ukrainians, in keeping with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, resembles that between Cain and Abel.
There are at all times many good causes for studying Grossman, however few occasions are as resonant as our personal. As a proud son of Ukraine, steeped in Russian tradition, Grossman was each a chronicler of the Soviet Union’s best victories and a clear-eyed investigator of a few of its darkest crimes. He would have understood higher than most the break up identities, divided loyalties and historic animosities that underlie the present battle. Certainly, he embodied a lot of them.
Born into the Jewish Ukrainian intelligentsia in Berdychiv in 1905, Grossman grew up in an period of murderous upheaval, residing via the Russian Revolution, the civil battle, the Terror Famine in Ukraine, the Stalinist purges, the second world battle and the Nazi Holocaust.
As a battle correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda (Crimson Star) military newspaper from 1941-1945, Grossman spent greater than 1,000 days reporting from the frontline. There, he reported the “ruthless fact of battle” with all its horror, heartbreak and heroism. His accounts of the epic siege at Stalingrad, the titanic tank conflict at Kursk and the ultimate savage battle for Berlin marches the reader straight into the frontline. Specifically, his reporting on the ferocious preventing at Stalingrad within the winter of 1942 give us a glimpse of what it should be like at this time to be in Kharkiv and Mariupol as these Ukrainian cities are pounded by Russian shell fireplace.
It was a horrible sight to see Stalingrad perishing amid “smoke, mud, fireplace”, Grossman wrote, nevertheless it was nonetheless extra horrible to see a six-year-old little one crushed by a fallen beam. “There may be energy, which may resurrect large cities from the ashes, however no energy on the earth is able to lifting the sunshine eyelashes over the eyes of a lifeless little one.”
As a novelist, Grossman reworked this encyclopedia of expertise into Life and Destiny, one of many best novels of the twentieth century, echoing Leo Tolstoy’s Conflict and Peace. Switching between the frontline drama and the shattered lives on the house entrance with Tolstoyan sweep, he describes the human face of battle as odd residents have been torn between the dual evils of Nazism and Stalinism, the focus camp and the Gulag.
As a sufferer, as a lot as a witness, of historical past, Grossman’s writings additionally inform us a lot concerning the tragic destiny of Ukraine and its Jewish group, particularly. His final (unfinished) novel Every little thing Flows comprises graphic recollections of the Terror Famine that was inflicted on Ukraine within the early Thirties. Stalin’s pressured collectivisation of agriculture and his brutal marketing campaign in opposition to the richer peasantry, generally known as the kulaks, prompted the deaths of just about 4mn Ukrainians, and has come to be generally known as the Holodomor (combining the phrases for holod, starvation, and mor, extermination).
Grossman didn’t write about his mom’s demise in any of his newspaper reviews. However on the ninth and twentieth anniversaries of her homicide, he did write two heart-rending letters to her as if she have been alive. Within the second, found after his personal demise, he wrote that he had devoted Life and Destiny to her reminiscence. “I don’t worry something as a result of your love is with me, and since my love is with you perpetually,” he ended with a defiant coda. In some of the shifting chapters in Life and Destiny that echoes this imaginary correspondence, the partly autobiographical character of Viktor Shtrum receives a farewell letter from his mom declaring that “nobody has the power to destroy” her love.
It’s estimated that 6mn-8mn Ukrainians have been killed within the battle, about one-fifth of the prewar inhabitants, together with 600,000 Jews. Grossman was one of many first reporters to know the sheer enormity and evil of the Nazi Holocaust. His article “The Hell of Treblinka” was cited in proof on the Nuremberg trials.
It’s as an insistent, truth-telling humanist that Grossman might have left his most lasting legacy. As a author in Soviet occasions, he was severely constrained in what he may publish however he was nonetheless decided to make his personal fact recognized. In that sense, he personifies the ceaseless battle between two ideas of fact in Russian tradition: between that of pravda (temporising human fact) and istina (God’s everlasting fact).
Like all different revealed writers of his time, Grossman was pressured to adapt to the dictates of socialist realism. However, in contrast to many different writers, he additionally espoused a type of humanist realism, in keeping with Julia Volokhova, a Moscow-based literary scholar. “His legacy aroused, and continues to arouse, heated disputes amongst readers and critics. Assessments of his persona and inventive achievements are virtually polar opposites,” she says.
Usually considered via a chilly battle prism, Grossman was accused of slandering the Soviet regime, or collaborating with it. Some admired his Tolstoyan fashion, others accused him of extreme pathos and an inclination to moralise. However Volokhova says Grossman refused to affiliate himself with any literary motion or political group and could be thought-about as a “realist author.” “That’s the reason he’s a ‘very uncomfortable’ author,” she says.
The bitter irony is that Grossman obtained a lot acclaim and bought greater than 7mn books whereas writing throughout the confines of Soviet propaganda. However he died in desolation after the Soviet authorities banned his masterpiece Life and Destiny, into which he had poured his true emotions. “There are bitter and tragic pages in my e-book,” Grossman acknowledged in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, the then Soviet chief. “Maybe it’s exhausting to learn them. Imagine me, it was no much less exhausting to jot down them. However I merely needed to write them.”
In a futile try to free his “arrested” e-book, Grossman met Mikhail Suslov, the Communist Occasion’s chief ideologue. Grossman’s account of their assembly in 1962 encapsulates the conflict between differing understandings of fact. “Our Soviet writers should solely produce what is required and helpful for society,” Suslov mentioned. “Why ought to we add your e-book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are making ready to launch in opposition to us?”
Two years later, Grossman died from abdomen most cancers on the age of 58. It was solely 24 years later that Life and Destiny was finally revealed, within the dying days of the Soviet Union.
As Putinism more and more vibrates with the drumbeat of Stalinism, Grossman has once more fallen out of favour with the Kremlin. “There are millions of methods by which Grossman doesn’t match with Putin’s Russia,” says Robert Chandler, who has translated a lot of his writing into English.
But different, uncounted readers are nonetheless quietly impressed by Grossman as a flag-bearer for a extra peaceable, liberal and outward-looking Russia. Chandler recollects a dialog he as soon as had with Arseny Roginsky, one of many founders of Russia’s human rights organisation Memorial (now banned), which painstakingly tried to report the main points of each sufferer of Stalinism. After Chandler launched himself because the English translator of Grossman, Roginsky beamed and easily mentioned: “He’s our author.”
In Vasily Grossman and The Soviet Century, the biographer Alexandra Popoff wrote that the novelist had lived throughout the worst attainable time to be a humanist, pacifist and internationalist, making his writings all of the extra exceptional. “The concept that humanity and compassion would prevail over violence and tyranny was on the coronary heart of Grossman’s beliefs,” Popoff wrote.
The Russian theatre director Lev Dodin staged a powerful theatrical adaptation of Life and Destiny on the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg, warning concerning the “failure of human reminiscence.” “Grossman’s story shouldn’t be solely about fascism or communism or anti-Semitism,” Dodin informed the FT in 2018 earlier than the play transferred to London. “It’s about any sort of totalitarianism.
“The precise horror differs on this or that nation, or this and that continent, however I feel all of it may lead us into one huge tragedy,” he warned.
There was no time crueller than ours, but we didn’t enable what’s human in man to perish
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Previously few years, nevertheless, Grossman’s voice has pale as Stalin has been steadily rehabilitated as an excellent battle chief by the Putin regime. Final July, Putin accepted a regulation making it unlawful to equate the “goals and selections” of the Soviet and Nazi leaderships throughout the battle and to disclaim “the Soviet Union’s humanitarian mission in liberating the nations of Europe.” Chandler laments: “Grossman shouldn’t be a lot valued or learn in Russia itself lately.”
Throughout my six years of reporting for the FT from Moscow within the Nineties, nevertheless, I might usually catch echoes of Grossman’s humanism. And even at this time, as we watch one other brutal battle ravaging the long-suffering folks of Ukraine, it’s placing how his spirit endures. A violinist in a Kyiv basement is filmed taking part in a mournful tune that’s then taken up by 93 different musicians world wide. Moms within the Polish metropolis of Przemysl go away pushchairs on the station platform and prolong a heat welcome to tons of of hundreds of arriving Ukrainian refugees. A solitary lady within the Russian metropolis of Nizhny Novgorod is detained for holding up a clean sheet of paper in symbolic protest in opposition to the battle. Grossman would certainly have nodded in recognition, and appreciation, of those small acts of fellow feeling and kindness.
Through the second world battle, Grossman wrote that he had seen a lot struggling that he didn’t know the way it may all be stuffed inside him. “It’s the author’s obligation to inform the horrible fact, and it’s the reader’s civic obligation to be taught this fact,” Grossman wrote. “To show away, to shut one’s eyes and stroll previous is to insult the reminiscence of those that have perished.”
Despite all of the darkish occasions in his life, Grossman retained an innate optimism and an intensely cussed perception within the important goodness of individuals. “There was no time crueller than ours, but we didn’t enable what’s human in man to perish,” he wrote. We are able to solely pray that we will match Grossman’s instance at this time.
John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor and a former Moscow correspondent
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On the day after Doug Burgum became governor of North Dakota in 2016, he addressed questions about what he would do about all of his wealthy investments.
They included extensive real estate developments benefiting from state programs that he was suddenly in a position to oversee. His answer was that he would “manage” his conflicts of interest, but he would not divest from his holdings in the state.
“The issue here is to make sure that I have no conflict of interest relative to many state programs and decisions,” he said at the time in an interview with a local newspaper.
Since then, however, his range of holdings, which include extensive urban real estate development in the state, tens of millions in technology investments as well as oil and gas leases, intersected with his policy decisions as governor, a New York Times review has found.
That is particularly true for extensive development efforts in downtown Fargo that have been the beneficiaries of targeted state and federal tax benefits. But at the time, he did not disclose the specifics of any potential conflicts or how he managed them.
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Now, as Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, Mr. Burgum could face questions about how he plans to avoid conflicts in leading an agency with vast influence over the use of public lands in ways that reverberate for landholders, energy producers and others.
Rob Lockwood, a spokesman for Mr. Burgum, said in an email to The New York Times: “Everyone who knows Doug Burgum knows that he is a man of outstanding character and ethics who complied with all guidelines as governor.”
Mr. Burgum, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday, said in an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics that he would divest from a few holdings that include oil and gas and mineral leases that could pose conflicts.
But he also said he would hold on to other investments that he had been advised might be financially affected by particular matters that could come before the interior secretary. These investments include a range of venture capital funds and some of his Fargo real estate developments, though he will resign from managerial duties in his companies. In those cases, he said, the ethics office had determined that he would be able to recuse himself from decisions that had an impact on those entities or get a waiver.
The Interior Department has long been susceptible to ethical concerns. It has influence over how vast tracts of mineral-rich federal land can be used. During Mr. Trump’s first term, the department became a center of allegations and investigations about conflicts of interest involving high-ranking officials, including the two men who served as its secretary.
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Federal law has much stricter disclosure and recusal standards than Mr. Burgum operated under as North Dakota’s governor. It also has criminal prohibitions against officials becoming involved in decisions that could personally benefit themselves or family members.
Mr. Burgum previously disclosed his detailed financial assets for the first time in 2023 as a presidential candidate. An updated version he submitted recently was released by the government ethics office on Wednesday ahead of his hearing, showing a range of assets that could puts his net worth well over $100 million.
While Mr. Burgum was governor, his policies included expanding a state tax program targeted narrowly at real estate development firms like his own that were seeking to revitalize aging downtowns.
His firm, called Kilbourne after his mother’s maiden name, was one of a handful of developers in the state relying in a significant way on such tax breaks and by far the largest in Fargo, according to local officials. He also gave final approval to the zones that benefited from a federal tax credit program, which included areas with his company’s projects in them.
Mr. Burgum was not paid a salary by Kilbourne and “had zero operational authority,” Mr. Lockwood said.
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Still, Mr. Burgum continued to have investments in the company’s projects and maintained formal positions in their entities, financial disclosure forms show.
While Mr. Burgum was in office, questions about other ethical choices emerged, including his use of a luxury box at the Super Bowl provided by a regional electricity utility.
After the tickets were reported by The Associated Press, Mr. Burgum said he accepted them to have “quality time” with company executives and he repaid the utility $37,000.
The controversy prompted the governor’s office to enact an ethics policy stating that office officials should “take great care to avoid conflicts of interest or even the perception of a conflict of interest,” including in cases of overseeing policies that involve personal business interests. But the guidelines did not state what actions should be taken when an appearance of a conflict arose.
More enforceable state ethics rules requiring disclosures of potential conflicts of interest did not go into effect until 2022, the result of a 2018 ballot initiative.
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Ethics experts in North Dakota and outside the state say that under generally understood norms, Mr. Burgum probably should have made more disclosures about potential conflicts and how he would mitigate them.
“Even a small appearance is enough to trigger an obligation to be open to the public,” said Kedric Payne, a government ethics expert with the Campaign Legal Center.
‘Nobody Really Cared’
In his first State of the State address, in 2017, Mr. Burgum laid out an unusual plan for a state that was one of the most sparsely populated in the country: Go urban.
“It takes safe, healthy cities with vibrant, walkable main streets and downtowns to attract and retain a skilled work force,” he said.
In Mr. Burgum’s vision — built upon his mother’s reverence for historic buildings — North Dakota towns would grow upward rather than outward.
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His dream also aligned with his business strategy.
For more than a decade, he had been focusing his development interests in downtown Fargo, eventually becoming one of the state’s biggest urban developers. He also became one of the most reliant on a government tax incentive program called Renaissance Zones.
The program gave state tax incentives for companies that invested in neglected neighborhoods. Mr. Burgum quickly made use of them as well as other similar tax break programs, through acquiring and renovating a turn-of-the-century manufacturing building that was scheduled for demolition, and then turning it over to the local university.
The program allows for state income tax exemption for five years, offering investors in big projects to save up tohundreds of thousands of dollars a year per project in property tax savings.
Twenty Kilbourne projects worth about $300 million have received the Renaissance designation, Jim Gilmour, the city’s director of strategic planning and research, said in an interview. Each of the Kilbourne Renaissance projects was approved individually by a number of city and county entities, with the state’s Commerce Department overseeing the program.
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As governor, Mr. Burgum eventually made an expansion of the program a plank in his economic agenda. In his State of the State speech in 2023, he proposed a “Renaissance Zone 2.0.” Among the changes, which were enacted by the Legislature and signed by Mr. Burgum, was a provision to allow for the tax benefits to last an extra three years.
(Kilbourne has not added any new Renaissance Zone projects since then, and Fargo’s county government so far has not agreed to adopt the expansion in benefits.)
Dustin Gawrylow, a longtime Republican critic of the program who unsuccessfully lobbied against the bill, said the perception of a conflict from Mr. Burgum’s status as a top Renaissance developer who could potentially benefit from the expansion was sometimes discussed behind closed doors around the State Capitol.
“It was brought up, but nobody really cared,” Mr. Gawrylow said.
Mr. Lockwood said that “local leaders, the media, and Fargoans are very aware of Doug’s decades-long efforts to revitalize the city.”
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Managing Conflicts
While Mr. Burgum was running for governor in 2016, a different state tax break program he used became a subject of discussion on the campaign trail.
Mr. Burgum had founded in 2008 a firm called Arthur Ventures with his nephew, James Burgum, that had invested about $65 million in technology startups up to that point. The firm had taken advantage of a state angel investment tax break program, which provided benefits for certain funds that put money into small startups.
Two funds managed by Arthur Ventures earned investors $800,000 in tax benefits. But the program came under fire from Republican lawmakers for sending a large portion of the investments into out of state startups.
In March 2016, while Mr. Burgum was campaigning, James Burgum testified before the Legislature to try to help save the program that was under attack. The campaign of Doug Burgum’s Republican opponent called him the “poster child” for the problems with the program.
Mr. Lockwood said in his statement to The Times that “job creators being attacked by career-politician opponents for using a law designed to encourage economic investment, innovation and entrepreneurship in North Dakota was a ‘water is wet’ moment.”
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Later in the campaign, after Mr. Burgum’s Democratic opponent raised concerns about his ability to manage conflicts of interest, Mr. Burgum said he would “take all the appropriate steps to assure North Dakotans that I’m fully focused on serving them with integrity and transparency.”
After taking office, he explained that meant that he gave up his day-to-day management positions while maintaining his investments under the leadership of others.
But the federal disclosure Mr. Burgum filed to run for president in 2023 revealed that he did not entirely step away. He was listed in various positions ranging from manager and president for various Kilbourne-affiliated limited liability companies and maintained investments of around $15 million to $60 million in several dozen Kilbourne-related entities and funds.
Kilbourne’s managers downplayed his role in the firm, even as they highlighted his affiliation as helping to attract other investors. In an interview with a local publication, Lauris Molbert, Kilbourne’s executive chairman of the board, said the governor’s hefty investments were an important signal to other investors to get on board.
“He personally put his balance sheet to work,” Mr. Molbert said.
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A Development Opportunity
In the spring of 2018, a state news release announced that Mr. Burgum had designated 25 neighborhoods in North Dakota to be opportunity zones.
Their designation was part of a new federal program similar to Renaissance Zones but devised to limit federal tax liability in order to help direct investment into struggling neighborhoods.
The idea, Mr. Burgum said, was to “help revitalize our low-income areas in North Dakota.”
Left unsaid, however, was that two of the neighborhoods chosen were ones where his firm owned properties it was hoping to develop. In the years that followed, Kilbourne developed five projects in those areas through two investment funds that offered the tax breaks, with Mr. Burgum’s stake valued between $2 million and $10 million, according to his 2023 financial disclosure.
The structure for the opportunity zones was enacted under the Trump administration, and governors were given leeway in selecting the zones as long as they met certain criteria.
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Under the system set up in North Dakota, the city and county of Fargo applied to the state’s Commerce Department for opportunity zone status for 11 areas, including the two containing the Kilbourne properties. Of those, Mr. Burgum designated the two with his properties and three others in the region.
Brett Theodos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has studied the federal opportunity zone program, said he had never heard of such a prominent official tasked with designating the areas having a stake in the zones selected.
“A lot of the country qualified, so there were a lot of options for governors to choose from,” he said. “The whole trust-us approach is problematic.”
Tim Mahoney, Fargo’s mayor, said in an interview that initially he had concerns about whether Kilbourne might get favored in its extensive dealings with the city, but he has concluded that the treatment was aboveboard.
The city relies extensively on the approval of state loans and other sources of funding that are under the governor’s purview.
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Mr. Mahoney said he had not spoken to Mr. Burgum directly about any of Kilbourne’s business. But, he said, the governor had met with the planning department and pressured him and other city officials repeatedly to make downtown development a major priority, arguing that added properties build a tax base that supports schools, water, the police and city streets.
That fits with Mr. Burgum’s general evangelism for urbanism — and with where he has invested his money.
“The governor was very clear on what his bias was,” Mr. Mahoney said. “His bias is downtown places will make more in taxes for everybody.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
BP is cutting 4,700 jobs, or just over 5 per cent of its workforce, as chief executive Murray Auchincloss tries to save costs and revive a share price that has lagged behind rivals over the past year.
The UK oil major is also reducing the number of contractors it uses by 3,000 this year, adding that 2,600 of those had already departed, according to a memo sent to staff on Thursday by Auchincloss.
In the memo, Auchincloss said BP was making “strong progress” in its attempt to be a “simpler, more focused, higher-value company”.
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Auchincloss, who marks his first year as permanent chief executive on Friday, has come under mounting pressure from shareholders after several quarters of disappointing results.
Auchincloss, who was first took the top job on a temporary basis in September, 2023 following the departure of Bernard Looney, last year announced a two-year plan to save $2bn of costs.
In the memo, the 54-year-old Canadian said BP had “stopped or paused 30 projects since June” to streamline its focus, and also intended to expand its operations in lower-cost hubs such as India.
Last year the company opened a 400-person technical centre in Pune, near Mumbai, India, to provide engineering, data and subsurface services.
“We are uniquely positioned to grow value through the energy transition. But that doesn’t give us an automatic right to win. We have to keep improving our competitiveness and moving at the pace of our customers and society,” Auchincloss said.
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BP shares rose nearly 2 per cent following the news, but have fallen 5 per cent since Auchincloss took the reins of the company on a permanent basis. The share price has lagged behind that of rivals, including Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron.
BP’s workforce has swelled to roughly 90,000 people, with roughly 20,000 of those joining after it acquired the TravelCenters of America network of nearly 300 filling stations in 2023.
BP also bought out its joint venture partners in solar business Lightsource BP and Bunge Bioenergia last year, moves that added more staff.
This week BP postponed an event for investors in February so Auchincloss could recuperate from a “planned medical procedure”.
The company is due to report its fourth-quarter earnings on February 11.
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In recent weeks, analysts have cut their estimates for BP’s fourth-quarter profit after the company signalled trading in the period was weaker than it had expected.
Performers with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater gesture to the crowd of families at Vidiots, a historic theater in northeast Los Angeles, a few miles from where fires are still burning in the Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods.
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The carpeted floor of the main theater at Vidiots is drizzled with popcorn as dozens of children and their families crowd around a puppet show. Show tunes blast over the speaker as a puppet named Yellow Cat (who is, indeed, a yellow cat) prances and twirls across the floor.
Vidiots is a historic theater in northeast Los Angeles, a few miles from where fires are still burning in the Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods. Vidiots joined forces with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater nearby to give families and parents a way to take their minds off the devastation.
Diego Montoya shows off a marionette puppet.
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“The show was planned as a way to give families some relief, an opportunity to do something that’s fun and silly. To sit back and get away from the chaos of the world right now,” says Yellow Cat’s puppet master, Diego Montoya. Vidiots also screened movies and gave out pajamas and coloring books. Many of the families at the free event earlier this week are victims of the fire in one way or another — some have lost homes, others have children who have lost schools.
Three-year-old Leo Bane is one of the spectators of the puppet show. Part of his school burned down in the Eaton Fire, so this event is a welcome distraction for Leo and his mother, Tania Verafield.
“I think this is the only two hours I haven’t been constantly checking my phone and trying to get updates and I feel just some relief at watching my son giggle [as he watches] these amazing puppets,” says Verafield.
Iris Wong (left) sits with her mothe, Tina Yen, and Tania Verafield holds her son, Leo Bane, as they watch the show.
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Schools in the Pasadena and Altadena areas are largely closed as the fires continue to burn. The YMCA and local government are offering child care, but slots are filling up fast, and it’s falling on many families to look after their young ones. Many told me they’re relying on each other to get through this time.
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“People don’t know LA. It’s an amazing community,” says Ursula Knudsen. Both of her children lost their school campuses to the fire, and her younger daughter saw her school in flames as she evacuated with her father. Their home was also severely damaged.
“It’s not like Altadena needed a tragedy to come together as a community. That’s what’s wild. It’s only showing up 100 times more than it already was,” Knudsen says.
Buster Balloon shows off a puppet to children at the Vidiots theater.
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Coming to this free event with puppets, movies, and even a 6-foot-tall roving giraffe mascot has brought a moment of relief for Knudsen and her friend, Kate Mallor, whose children’s schools were also severely damaged by the fire. “It’s been so beautiful to see other moms here and to see our classmates and be able to hug,” says Mallor.
The puppet show in the main theater draws to a close with a grand finale. Yellow Cat is dancing to Barbra Streisand’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” and that’s no coincidence, says Montoya, the puppeteer.
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“It’s got a great message, you know, ‘Don’t rain on my parade, I’m going to have fun no matter what,’” Montoya says. “‘I’m going to do what brings me joy.’”
People walk by the exterior of Vidiots, which has a sign that says, “Here for you LA.”
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