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Tattoo is a reminder of Jewish spirit
HE doesn't speak much. He's currently spending six weeks doing
nothing at all - not even eating. But no one could ignore
my extraordinary friend David Blaine.
He doesn't push himself forward. In a gaggle of celebrities,
he is the one who sidles away from the chatter and the laughter,
seeking a shaded spot for some quiet contemplation.
But he attracts more attention than the most swooning drama
queen. Cameras fix on him faster than on Jodie Marsh when
her boob tube accidentally slips off, again. David Blaine
has the gift that every celebrity would kill for, and he's
got more of it than any man I have ever known. Charisma.
His presence is magnetic, drawing every pair of eyes like
compass needles to him. Go down to the banks of the Thames
and look at the crowds that are growing daily around the transparent
cage, suspended from a crane, in which he has locked himself
with no nourishment other than a water drip.
The onlookers are fascinated. He waves a hand and people
shriek like teenyboppers at a mop-top concert. He sits up
and hundreds of people excitedly tell each other, ''He moved!
He's going to stand up now! Do you think he can see us? Oh
my God, I swear he's looking right at me''.
David Blaine's exercise in isolation and starvation has a
profoundly Jewish theme, of course. And, of course, this has
been ignored by most of the media. Loud Jews are only allowed
in very specific cases.
It's OK for Joan Rivers, for instance. Mel Brooks can get
away with it, Woody Allen when he's in a manic phase. But
a performer like David is expected to shut up about his Jewishness
when he does anything attention-grabbing.
I find this tunnel-vision among journalists incredible, because
on one level my friend is making a blatant statement of sympathy
with the hundreds of thousands of Jews who died of hunger
in the ghettos and the work camps of the SS.
He could not have made his allegiance more plain - he even
tattooed the number 174517, which Primo Levi bore from the
concentration camps, on his left upper arm.
''My biggest inspiration has been reading a lot of Primo
Levi, the Holocaust survivor who became a poet and writer,''
he told a reporter on his website. ''Those people went through
real trials.''
Whenever anyone asks about the number, he directs them to
Levi's book, Survival In Auschwitz. He has dozens of copies
in his apartment, so that he can give them out to journalists
and friends without worrying whether he'll be able to get
a replacement copy.
(That's the problem with lending books you love - you spend
so long trying to find them again.)
David has a great anecdote about getting the tattoo: he was
in Paris, and the tattooist spoke no English, and David could
not make himself understood - so he inked the numerals onto
the skin himself.
It's the kind of story that reporters on a 'cuttings job'
love - when they're trying to compile a long profile from
nothing but a stack of archived newspapers, quirky vignettes
like that are invaluable.
But this little tale has been completely ignored. If the
tattoo had been anything but an Auschwitz memento, I think
the story of the tattooist who spoke no English would be a
defining element in the Blaine legend.
You'd read it every time you saw his picture. But the outright
Jewishness of his act seems to stun most commentators.
''He did what? A tattoo? Primo Levi's number? From a concentration
camp? Eugghhh! We've got to pretend that never happened, OK?''
I fail to see how David could have announced a more Jewish
manifesto for his whole performance, called 'Above The Below'.
This is only one aspect of the performance of course, but
it's a powerful one.
Here is a Jewish man, surviving by will alone, without food,
in a hostile environment. The metaphor is lurid, and no one
has even glanced at it. Clearly the Holocaust is too raw a
crime still for Western Europe to contemplate, except in the
most mawkish and hand-wringing way.
Most journalists would only recognise a Jewish angle to the
show if David suddenly leapt up and yelled, ''Oy! Enough already!
I could murder a bagel''.
But others notice. I became aware in the most shocking way
possible that British neo-Nazis were watching David's performance
when two thugs approached the ring fence beneath his Plexiglass
cage, at Potters Bar Fields near Tower Bridge, one night last
week.
''Oi! Blaine!'' they yelled. ''Oi! Oi! Oi!'' At last, David
rolled his head their way. And their arms shot up, palms down,
in a gruesome salute. I yelled out something incoherent, and
a couple of security men started off towards the cowardly
yobs, but they were already running off, laughing and swearing.
The performance is attracting a lot of nuts, of course. A
man came down dressed as Saddam Hussein last week. I keep
seeing another guy who is festooned with Union flags. And
what can you say about the drunks and the sensation seekers
who are hurling food at the cage, and even lobbing golf balls
at it?
Or the boozed-up nightclub girls who pull up their tops and
flash their breasts at the figure curled up above them? Maybe
the neo-Nazis were just another pair of drunken idiots. Maybe
they didn't even know David is Jewish. Because, God knows,
the rest of the world doesn't seem to realise.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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