A Weekend in the Country

Or at least, a day.

I went up to Poughkeepsie again this weekend to see my folks. After a brief layover in NY to see my very pregnant best friend (who totally looks like one of those pregnant supermodels - there is the baby bulge, but not another extra pound on her) and then a quick drink with another friend, I met my brother and his girlfriend for the 11pm Metro North train upstate. We all caught up (as other Metro North riders harrumphed our chatting and tried to sleep for the hour and a half) and my brother managed to avoid paying for his train ticket. He's good like that.

The weekend (for me, just Saturday really) was pretty low key. We started the day in Kingston, NY, where we strolled along the Hudson River and then ate Puerto Rican food (plantains and yucca. mmmmmmmm.)

We then headed over to Woodstock. It's a strange place, that doesn't seem quite sure where it fits into this century. There are some vestiges of 1960's/early 70's hippie, community life - a few folks who are out every day in the town square, protesting, or singing, or teaching, or doing something (I couldn't quite tell which.)

One was a woman dressed in so many layers of clothes she couldn't put her arms down. She was doing weird sun salute type moves, and may in fact, just be homeless. Another guy has a bike completely wrapped in cloth and ribbons, that is plastered over with protest signs. None of these folks looked old enough to actually be holdovers from Woodstock-Woodstock.

I'm not sure where they come from then. You sort of get the sense that a lot of people head there looking for something they can't find elsewhere, and then staying whether they find it or not.

It was a beautiful day. Chilly. The leaves are starting to change up there.

We waited in line in the evening to see a film at the Woodstock Film Festival. The movies were all sold out (the venues were all pretty small) but you could wait and they would sell any empty seats due to no-shows.

I was out-voted in my movie picks (I dare say I was hoping for something that would make me smile) so we ended up seeing Fateless, a Hungarian holocaust epic.

So, I didn't smile much, but it was beautifully shot and very subtly acted (except for one strange overwrought scene with a young Hungarian girl).

More than anything, it made me want to read the book.

The story deals with a young Hungarian jew who is taken off a bus one day on his way to work and sent to the work camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It is unlike the stories of jews in other countries, like Germany or Romania, in that when he comes home when the war is over, there are some things that have hardly changed back in Budapest. Parts of the city have been destroyed, but the holy men who lived next door to him are still arguing about what it is to be a jew.

I think that the book must do a better job of raising these questions than the movie does -- the boy is a secular jew, a Hungarian, hardly considers himself a jew at all -- and must face up to these identity issues inside the camp. We see this, but we do not see or hear what he thinks about it all, until we get to the end and there is a kind of sum-everything-up type voiceover at the end. It felt a bit contrived. Or perhaps something was lost in the translation.

It was indeed an engaging two hours, and fun to see a film in this small town art house, with all the art-y yuppies who live along the Hudson River Valley.