Harry Schwartz

Have you ever watched a beauty pageant and fallen more deeply in love with each successive candidate? Miss Haiti, she’s the woman of my dreams. No, wait, it’s Miss Denmark. Wait, wait, no, it’s Miss Greece. That’s kind of what it’s like to do a tour of independent bookstores. Each one is so utterly complex and enchanting that you are sure it’s the best one ever … until the next one comes along.


So, needless to say, I am now infatuated with Harry Schwartz in Milwaukee. Very good people at the store, notably Jay, the writer/event coordinator just returned from New York City (pictured alongside the Schwartz sandwich board. Great books. And a really animated audience. (Perhaps my appearance on the ‘Milwaukee Midweek’ radio program filled the seats with more attentive bums.)

What is also energizing is that because my book is about France and everyone is still buzzing about the burning car phenomenon, at Harry Schwartz I was asked questions about current affairs. This allowed me to jump up on my soapbox, which is really my favourite thing to do in life. My spiel? France has been pretty smug, using its honourable anti-war stance to blindly ridicule all things American, so it is something of a relief to see the country knocked into the mud. France is an utter failure at giving its immigrant and lower classes opportunities to climb the social and economic ladder. As an outsider, I’m not affected by this inherent class-ism, but for my French friends who weren’t lucky enough to be born into a middle or upper class family, there is nowhere near the same cultural openness or upward mobility that you find in Canada or the United States.

What France needs is a 20-year program that invests heavily in education, most importantly, an education relevant to its new population. My friend Nadia is a teacher at a lycee and she is continually horrified that the French culture that is taught is still the lily white, overly romanticized tradition of Voltaire and Balzac with nothing to represent the reality of the five million Magrebian immigrants or any other French subculture. The thing the government needs to do is take a long term perspective so that those born in the French ghettos in 2010 arrive at the age of 15 with hope and optimism, not utter despair and bitterness. As I said at Harry Schwartz, if I had been born in St. Denis and given no hope or help, I would have been setting cars on fire too.