CLAUDE-LEVI STRAUSS, FATHER OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY WHO ALTERED VIEWS OF THE ‘PRIMITIVE’
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s. More Photos »
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Pascal Pavani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100. More Photos >
His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss, in studying the mythologies of primitive tribes, transformed the way the 20th century came to understand civilization itself. Tribal mythologies, he argued, display remarkably subtle systems of logic, showing rational mental qualities as sophisticated as those of Western societies.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the common aspects of humanity’s attempts to understand the world. He became the premier representative of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations.
His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that the occasion was celebrated in at least 25 countries.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, he was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo, Brazil, and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
‘The Savage Mind’
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind,” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Lévi-Strauss at home in Paris on Nov. 28, 2008, his 100th birthday, being visited by President Nicolas Sarkozy. More Photos >
Slide Show In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism, and the cultural relativism that developed in later decades, was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of North and South American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West.
But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.” With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In his view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools. This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
Ideas That Shook His Field
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered, and he thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations With Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy, who were living in Belgium at the time. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he said in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny in Paris; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940. From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
A Taste for Adventure
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had his son Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as by Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of World War II, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941 Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas and the Russian-born linguist (and structuralist) Roman Jakobson.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” and the two regularly visited an antique shop in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest. The excursions left Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.”
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the school’s director of studies, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959 he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, myths speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.
Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.
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QIAN XUESEN, FATHER OF CHINA’S SPACE PROGRAM
Qian Xuesen in 1948
China’s state media reported the death. Mr. Qian had been frail and bedridden in recent years.
In China, Mr. Qian was celebrated as the father of Chinese rocketry, the leader of the research that produced the nation’s first ballistic missiles, its first satellite and the Silkworm anti-ship missile.
But in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, he was no less valuable, if not so publicly celebrated, as a pioneer in American jet and rocket technology.
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later as a scientist and teacher at the California Institute of Technology, Mr. Qian, also known as Tsien Hsue-shen, played a central role in early United States’ efforts to exploit jet and rocket propulsion.
As a graduate assistant at Caltech in the late 1930s, Mr. Qian helped conduct seminal research into rocket propulsion, and in the 1940s he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, now one of NASA’s premier space-exploration centers.
Mr. Qian served on the United States government’s Science Advisory Board during World War II. On the war front in Germany, he advised the Army on ballistic-missile guidance technology. At the war’s end, holding the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, he debriefed Nazi scientists, including Werner von Braun, and was sent to analyze Hitler’s V-2 rocket facilities.
In the 1940s his mentor and colleague, the Caltech physicist Theodore von Karman, called Mr. Qian “an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion.” In 1949, Mr. Qian wrote a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle.
But by 1950 his American career was over. Shortly after applying for permission to visit his parents in the newly Communist China, he was stripped of his security clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and accused of secretly being a Communist. The charge was based on a 1938 document of the Communist Party of the United States that showed he had attended a social gathering that the F.B.I. suspected was a meeting of the Pasadena Communist Party.
Mr. Qian denied the charges, his Caltech colleagues came to his defense, and the university hired a lawyer to assist him. Mr. Qian first sought to return to China but was placed under virtual house arrest by the government; later, he sought to stay and fight the accusations, but the government sought to deport him.
In 1955, Mr. Qian was sent back to China, where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put to work developing Chinese rocketry. By many accounts, he later became a committed Communist and served on the party’s ruling body, the Central Committee.
The loyalty allegations have never been fully resolved. Aviation Week, which named Mr. Qian its man of the year in 2007, quoted Dan Kimball, a former under secretary of the Navy, as calling Mr. Qian’s deportation “the stupidest thing this country ever did.” A 1999 United States Congress report on Chinese espionage called Mr. Qian a spy, but critics say the report provides no basis other than a claim that he passed to China the secrets of the American Titan missile program, which began years after he had been deported.
Qian Xuesen was born in 1911, as the Chinese imperial government was collapsing, in Hangzhou, in eastern China. He earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1934 in Shanghai. At the age of 23 he went to the United States on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at M.I.T. Later, at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, Mr. Qian met Mr. von Karman, who recommended him for the Science Advisory Board and gave him the lead role in research that developed the first American solid-fuel rocket to be successfully launched.
After his deportation, Mr. Qian wrote a position paper for Chinese leaders on aviation and defense, according to the state-run news service Xinhua.
Under his leadership, China developed its first generation of “Long March” missiles and, in 1970, launched its first satellite. Most of China’s recent space achievements, like its manned space program, began long after Mr. Qian’s retirement.
Mr. Qian never returned to the United States. In a 2002 published reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed that Mr. Qian had “lost faith in the American government” but that he had “always had very warm feelings for the American people.”
Caltech gave Mr. Qian its distinguished alumni award in 2001.
Xiyun contributed research.
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TROY SMITH, FOUNDER OF SONIC
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Sonic
Troy N. Smith Sr., in 2001.
His death was announced by the Sonic Corporation, the nationwide chain of drive-in restaurants he founded in 1959.
As a young man fresh out of the United States military, Mr. Smith turned somebody else’s trifle of an idea into an enterprise. One day, while driving along the Texas-Louisiana border, he grew giddy at the sight of a fast-food joint with a car-to-kitchen intercom. He asked the owners for a replica of the audio system, and he soon made it the centerpiece of his root beer stand in Shawnee, Okla.
Families, delighted by both the efficiency and absurdity of using a tiny microphone to command milkshakes to the driver’s seat, flocked to the Sonic drive-ins. By the late 1970s, Mr. Smith was operating one of the most successful fast-food chains in the United States; from 1977 to 1978, he broke ground on an average of one location a day, mostly concentrated in the South. Today, the company operates nearly 3,600 locations in 42 states. Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society and the author of “Sonic: The History of America’s Drive-in” (Cottonwood Publications, 2009), said Mr. Smith’s business model flourished because it came just as Americans began to embrace car culture and recreational eating.
“He came up with a formula that restaurants are a people business,” Mr. Blackburn said. “He defined what it means to be an entrepreneur.”
Troy Nuel Smith Sr. was born in Seminole, Okla., on May 26, 1922. He grew up in the oil patches of east central Oklahoma and in 1943 joined the Army Air Forces. When the war ended, he began work as a milk truck driver.
Mr. Smith found that he did not like to be ordered around, and he decided to leave trucking to become his own boss. He turned his entrepreneurial spirit toward food, opening several restaurants in Shawnee, including a diner called the Cottage Café and an upscale steak house known as the Log House Restaurant.
But it was the Top Hat, a root beer stand that he opened in 1953, that became Mr. Smith’s most lucrative endeavor, consistently yielding a 20 percent profit. He abandoned the other businesses, hoping to capitalize on the growing popularity of drive-in restaurants.
In the 1950s, drive-ins were already a staple of the American fast-food scene. Mr. Smith sought to reinvent them. He added an intercom system that made it possible to deliver food within three minutes; wired each restaurant with speakers to pipe in radio hits; added angular parking to increase privacy; and maintained a fleet of roller-skating carhops, even as other restaurants were cutting back. He came up with a slogan — “Service with the Speed of Sound” — and trademarked the Sonic name in 1959.
Mr. Smith used the franchise model to attract young talent and develop workers into managers. In the early 1980s, however, the bleak economy and concerns about quality forced him to close 300 of his 1,300 restaurants.
Mr. Smith stayed involved in Sonic for most of his life, even though he retired from managing day-to-day operations in 1983; he kept a seat on the board.
Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Dollie; a daughter, Leslie Baugh; a son, Troy Smith Jr., known as Butch; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
In his business interactions, he was known for chuckling in the face of bad news and greeting colleagues with effusive praise. In September, when he could not appear at a company convention because of his health, he taped a message for company employees, apologizing for not thanking them enough over the years.
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GEORGE NA’OPE, MASTER OF SACRED HULA
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George Na’ope
The cause was lung disease, said Iwalani Kalima, his student and caretaker for more than 40 years.
Known as Uncle George to thousands of fans, the diminutive Mr. Na’ope (he stood barely five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds) was considered a hula lo’ea, or hula master, according to Maile Loo, executive director of the Hula Preservation Society in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
“We view him as the last of the great masters who spent their life training and teaching hula,” Ms. Loo said in an interview on Tuesday. “His reach around the world is unmatched.”
For more than 60 years Mr. Na’ope (pronounced na-OH-peh) taught hula and chanting in Europe, South America, Australia, Japan and in the continental United States. Although he had a long career performing the more modern mode of the dance, even comic versions, his greater role was in inspiring native Hawaiians to revive their sacred dance.
In 1964 Mr. Na’ope was a founder of the Merrie Monarch Festival, a weeklong event held each spring in Hilo celebrating traditional Hawaiian art, crafts, music and dance. The festival has achieved worldwide recognition for its contributions to history and culture. A highlight of the week is a three-day hula competition. Mr. Na’ope would often appear in a broad-brimmed hat adorned with long feathers and silk tropical foliage, gold medallions around his neck and oversized rings on each of his fingers.
Unlike some Polynesian dances, the hula began as a form of worship, evolving into a form of entertainment only in the 20th century. Every body movement or hand gesture had a specific meaning. A movement might represent a particular plant or animal, symbolize war or peace. In imitating a shark or waving palm tree, the true hula dancer believed that he or she had become the shark or palm.
“The old style is accompanied by a chant, our version of a song that tells a story,” Ms. Loo said. “Because we had no written language, everything was preserved through the chants: our history, our values, the stories of our leaders; thousands of lines of poetry.”
Modern hula — often accompanied by ukulele, steel guitars or piano — usually does not involve chanting. “In sacred hula you use hollowed gourds, drums made from trunks of coconut trees with a shark skin over the top; water-worn pebbles that are clicked together,” Ms. Loo said.
Through his workshops, concerts and the festival, Mr. Na’ope sought to revive tradition.
“By the end of the 1950s there were only about five people who had the upbringing that Mr. Na’ope had in what we call hula kapu, or sacred hula,” said Nalani Kanakaole, a professor of Hawaiian studies at Hawaii Community College in Hilo. “They started what we call the Hawaiian renaissance, and because of Uncle George and those other people, ancient hula has been redeemed from that Hollywood-type image.”
For George Lanakilakeikiahiali’i Na’ope, it began in childhood.
Born in Kalihi, a poor neighborhood of Honolulu, on Feb. 25, 1928, he was one of six children of Harry Jr. and Mariah Ka’alepo Na’ope. When he was 3 a neighbor began teaching him hula chanting. The family moved to Hilo when George was 13. Soon after, he was teaching hula for 50 cents a lesson. In his sophomore year, a friend who was auditioning as a dancer for Ray Kinney, a renowned Hawaiian bandleader, asked George to accompany him with chanting.
Mr. Kinney hired George, and for several years the young man traveled the world with the band: singing, dancing, playing ukulele and chanting. He performed at hotels in Waikiki; opened a hula school and recorded albums of modern songs. But he remained rooted in sacred hula.
Mr. Na’ope and several other devotees started the Merrie Monarch Festival, dedicating it to King David Kalakaua, who ruled Hawaii in the late 19th century. The festival is now attended by about 20,000 people each year.
“I felt the hula was becoming too modern and that we have to preserve it,” Mr. Na’ope said in 2006 when he received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the country’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. “I decided to honor Kalakaua and have a festival with just hula. I didn’t realize that it was going to turn out to be one of the biggest things in our state.”
Mr. Na’ope is survived by a brother, Francis; three sisters, Eileen Crum, Bernie Konanni and Emma Werley; and an unofficially adopted son, Beyers Hoatili Na’ope.
Uncle George remained a revered presence at the festival, usually perched on a huge peacock-style chair. In April he was there in a wheelchair. But in previous years cheering crowds gave him standing ovations when he performed a hula for the festival’s finale.
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GEORGE ZORITCH, DANCER IN BALLET RUSSE COMPANIES
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George Zoritch in the 1930s.
His death was confirmed by a friend, the choreologist Richard Holden, who said Mr. Zoritch had been hospitalized after a fall at home.
The acclaimed 2005 documentary “Ballets Russes” recently offered filmgoers here and abroad a taste of Mr. Zoritch’s vivid personality. At one point in the film he and the ballerina Nathalie Krassovska, both in their 80s, relived their past partnership in a segment from “Giselle,” punctuating their mime with spicy comments.
In his memoir, “Ballet Mystique” (2000), Mr. Zoritch readily recognized that he was not a bravura technician. He felt that artistry was more important than technique for dancers like him, who joined the Russian émigré troupes that succeeded Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1930s. Often they used variations on that company’s name.
“What made the Ballet Russe so successful was that it was composed of half-starved ballet-craving dancers who gave everything from their inner souls,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2007.
Mr. Zoritch opened a ballet school in West Hollywood in 1964, two years after the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in which he was the mainstay, was dissolved. He taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1973 to 1987 and more recently served on the jury at the Perm ballet competitions in Russia.
Born in Moscow on June 6, 1917, he moved after the Russian revolution with his mother and brother to Kovno, Lithuania, where he first studied ballet. Mr. Zoritch, who leaves no immediate survivors, then settled in Paris at 14 and studied with the Maryinsky ballerina Olga Preobrajenska, who also trained the “baby ballerinas” promoted by George Balanchine.
Mr. Zoritch’s career took a peripatetic path through the companies led by other Russian émigrés. After dancing with Ida Rubinstein’s troupe in 1933, he performed with the Russian Classical Ballet, organized by Anna Pavlova’s widower, Victor Dandré, then joined Bronislava Nijinska’s Ballets Russes de Paris in 1935.
His declared mentor was the choreographer Léonide Massine. Mr. Zoritch starred in Massine’s works with both Col. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes, which he joined in 1936, and the rival Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which he joined in 1938. He remained with that troupe until 1962, one of its last veterans. He had also been a principal in the 1940s and 1950s with the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. Along the way he appeared in Broadway musicals and a few Hollywood films, like “Samson and Delilah” (1949).
With his good looks, elegant line and charismatic projection in title roles in “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Le Spectre de la Rose,” he never went unnoticed. In a typical comment in the 1950s, the French critic Irène Lidova compared him to the “Greek youths sculpted by Praxiteles.”
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ART D’LUGOFF, VILLAGE GATE IMPRESARIO
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Fred Conrad/The New York Times
Art D’Lugoff, who ran the Village Gate nightclub, in 1993.
The cause has not been determined, said Mr. D’Lugoff’s brother, Burt, a medical doctor and frequent silent partner in his joyously noisy endeavors. Mr. D’Lugoff died at the Allen Hospital of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been taken on Wednesday after experiencing shortness of breath.
Opened in 1958, the Village Gate was on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets. The cavernous basement space it occupied — the building’s upper floors were then a flophouse — had once been a laundry.
Mr. D’Lugoff later expanded to the upper floors, and in its heyday the Gate comprised the basement space, used primarily for live music of all kinds; a street-level terrace for jazz; and the Top of the Gate, an upper-story performance space.
The club closed its doors in 1994, amid rising rents, a changing market for live music and the aftermath of some unsuccessful investments by Mr. D’Lugoff. It briefly reappeared on West 52nd Street in 1996 but sputtered out after less than a year.
Mr. D’Lugoff was also a producer of Off Broadway shows — most at the Gate — and helped conceive the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.
The Gate may have lacked the cachet of the Village Vanguard, a more intimate West Village club, but it was a bright star in the city’s cultural firmament for decades. A young Woody Allen did stand-up comedy there. The playwright-to-be Sam Shepard bused tables there. A waiter named Dustin Hoffman was fired there for being so engrossed in the performances that he neglected his customers, though service was by all accounts never the club’s strength. Dozens of albums were recorded there, by musicians like Pete Seeger and Nina Simone and by comics like Dick Gregory.
Though most often thought of as a jazz space — among the eminences heard there over the years were John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk — the Gate offered nearly every type of performance imaginable. There were blues artists like B. B. King; soul singers like Aretha Franklin; rockers like Jimi Hendrix; comics like Mort Sahl and Richard Pryor; and Beat poets. There was the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler; the odd classical recital (the composer Edgard Varèse gave the American premiere of his “Poème Électronique” there); and a duck, Hermione, who performed in the musical “Scrambled Feet,” which opened there in 1979.
Over the years the club also earned a reputation as an important Off Broadway theater space, presenting shows like “MacBird!” (1967), the Vietnam-era political satire; the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” which had its premiere there in 1968; and “One Mo’ Time,” the musical about black vaudeville that opened in 1979.
For many patrons, as for Mr. D’Lugoff himself, the Gate’s eclecticism was at the heart of its charm. One of his most celebrated offerings was Salsa Meets Jazz, a regular series in the 1970s that paired great Latin artists like Machito and Tito Puente with jazz titans like Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie.
But sometimes the fare grew too varied even for Mr. D’Lugoff, as he told The New York Times in 1988. “I used to put together a lot of unlikely combinations to appeal to a bigger audience,” he said. “Once we had Nina Simone, Dick Gregory and Larry Adler all on the same bill and had so much trouble deciding who would open that I went across the street and hired a guitarist.”
Arthur Joshua Dlugoff was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924, the son of Raphael Dlugoff, who ran a vacuum-cleaner and sewing-machine repair shop, and the former Rachel Mandelbaum. (Art later added an apostrophe to his surname as a pronunciation aid.)
Reared in Brooklyn, Mr. D’Lugoff served with the Army Air Forces in China in World War II. He later earned a bachelor’s in literature and economics from New York University and attended law school there for one year.
For the next few years Mr. D’Lugoff enjoyed a career as eclectic as any of his concert bills, working as an encyclopedia salesman, a waiter in borscht belt hotels, a cab driver in Los Angeles, a tree surgeon’s assistant in upstate New York and a union organizer in Massachusetts and Kentucky. Returning to New York, he embarked on a career as a concert promoter, presenting calypso, folk and jazz artists around the city.
He soon wanted his own space, and the Village Gate was born. (The name stemmed from the fact that early on, patrons entered through a metal gate on Thompson Street to avoid the flophouse traffic on Bleecker.)
Besides his brother, Burt, of Baltimore, Mr. D’Lugoff is survived by his wife, the former Avital Achai; a son, Raphael; three daughters, Sharon D’Lugoff Blythe, Dahlia D’Lugoff and Rashi D’Lugoff; and five grandchildren.
One secret of the Gate’s success was Mr. D’Lugoff’s eye for what the public wished to see. This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in “Let My People Come,” which opened there in 1974. Subtitled “A Sexual Musical,” it was all singing, all dancing and almost all naked, male and female, from top to toe.
The State Liquor Authority would have none of this. Where spirit was on offer, it decreed, the flesh should not be. In a protracted battle that engendered much coverage in the news media, it lifted the Gate’s liquor license.Mr. D’Lugoff went to court, the license was reinstated and the show ran for two and a half years.
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ESTHER HAUTZIG, AUTHOR OF WARTIME SURVIVAL TALE
Esther Hautzig
Her death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by congestive heart failure and complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter, Deborah Hautzig, said.
Mrs. Hautzig was moved to write about her family’s war ordeal after reading articles in the 1950s by Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful presidential candidate, about his visit to Rubtsovsk, the city in south-central Siberia where Mrs. Hautzig, her parents and a grandmother spent the war. She wrote to Stevenson, and in his reply he urged her to turn her impressions into a book.
The book, “The Endless Steppe,” tells of the charmed, prosperous life of Esther Rudomin, a young girl living in her native Vilna, then part of Poland and now in Lithuania — “a city of lovely old houses hugging the hills and each other,” Mrs. Hautzig writes — until German bombs rained down, spelling “the end of my lovely world.”
As part of a pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Red Army occupied Vilna, now Vilnius. Mrs. Hautzig describes how in June 1941 Soviet soldiers stormed into her home and humiliated her parents.
“Within a single morning, on a perfect June day, my young father had become an old man,” Mrs. Hautzig writes.
The soldiers arrested the Rudomins, telling them, “You are capitalists and therefore enemies of the people.” The Rudomins and Esther’s maternal grandparents were deported by cattle car to the “endless steppe” of Siberia.
Mrs. Hautzig’s father was soon drafted into the Soviet Army, and her grandfather died in Siberia. But Esther, her mother and grandmother spent the next five years in forced-labor camps, working in gypsum mines and at construction sites in the bitter cold with barely enough food and clothing. Infusing her work with a child’s sense of wonder, she described the delight of washing herself with a rare cake of soap and the deep pleasure she took in a simple drink of cool water.
Mrs. Hautzig’s daughter said that her mother had had a knack for turning the squalid into the bearable.
“In Siberia she wanted to make curtains for the unheated, filthy hut she was living in,” Deborah Hautzig said, “so she got gauze from a friend whose father worked in the hospital and dyed the gauze yellow by boiling onion peel.”
The Soviet occupation of Vilna, seen at the time as a calamity, may have saved her entire family from death. After the arrests, the Nazis invaded Lithuania and slaughtered 190,000 of that country’s Jews, or about 90 percent of a Lithuanian-Jewish community known for its learning and culture. Among the dead were many of Mrs. Hautzig’s aunts, uncles and cousins.
After the war Mrs. Hautzig, who was born on Oct. 18, 1930, returned to Poland with her parents and grandmother, spent several months as a refugee in Sweden and then came over alone to New York on a student visa in 1947. Aboard the ocean liner Drottningholm she met the Vienna-born pianist Walter Hautzig, who was returning from a concert tour. They married in 1950.
Mr. Hautzig survives her. Besides their daughter, Deborah, Mrs. Hautzig is also survived by a son, David, and three grandchildren.
Mrs. Hautzig attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn and enrolled in Hunter College, though she never finished because a professor there told her that her accent would disqualify her from becoming a teacher. Instead, she took a job as a secretary at the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons and later promoted children’s books.
Her first books were for children: “Let’s Cook Without Cooking” (1955), which offered recipes to help latchkey children prepare meals without an oven, and “Let’s Make Presents” (1962), offering tips for making inexpensive gifts like paper flowers. Both books were laced with the skills she learned by trying to brighten her life in Siberia.
Encouraged by Stevenson’s letter, she had begun setting down memories of her turbulent childhood. In 1968 “The Endless Steppe” was published by what is now HarperCollins. It was a finalist for a National Book Award in children’s literature. Soon it found a place on school and library lists of recommended books for teenagers. The Washington Post said it affirmed “the resilience of the human spirit.”
Mrs. Hautzig went on to write several others books — some based on her childhood in Vilna — including “A Gift for Mama” (1987); “Remember Who You Are: Stories About Being Jewish” (1990); “Riches” (1992), a Jewish folk tale; “A Picture of Grandmother” (2002); and about a dozen others. She also translated stories by the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz.
Mrs. Hautzig returned to Vilna in 1993 to visit the university where an uncle, Ela-Chaim Cunzer, died in 1944, his grave unknown. With the help of a student at the Vilnius University, Mrs. Hautzig unearthed not only her uncle’s college application with his photograph but also the masterwork of his short life, his handwritten 49-page master’s thesis on mathematics. She persuaded the University of Chicago to accept it for its library and Web site.
“At least here is proof, some more proof of how people lived and what they did, not that they died,” she told The New York Times in 1996. “He really was a student. He really worked hard. He really wrote this dissertation. And it resulted in something which is still here.”
