Aleksandar Hemon On Chicago Places That Inspired Love and Obstacles

Note: I lived in Ukrainian Village from 1994-19961, and Rainbo Room was one of my hang-outs as well.


“Love and Obstacles” (Aleksandar Hemon)

Nelson Algren Avenue

Aleksandar Hemon was visiting a friend in the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago in 1992 when war broke out in his hometown of Sarajevo. He extended his visit, eventually settling into an apartment nearby. “The area was completely devoid of glamour, and that suited me at the time,” the 45-year-old author says. “There was a war going on at home and my life was as far from glamorous as can be.” It was in Chicago that Mr. Hemon learned how to write in English, and he still lives there (in the Edgewater area). His 2008 novel “The Lazarus Project” was nominated for a National Book Award. His new collection of short stories “Love and Obstacles” centers on an unnamed narrator who moved from Sarajevo to Chicago in 1992. Mr. Hemon annotated a map of key places in his adopted city that influenced or inspired his fiction.

4. Rainbo Club at Damen and Division

In “Szmura’s Room,” Szmura and Bogdan go for a drink to this cult bar, which is perpetually going in and out of hipness. In the early ’90s it was one of those cool semidumps, before the neighborhood was despoiled by sushi bars and boutiques where falsely damaged clothes are sold, before studied negligence became fashionable. Nelson Algren used to drink there and brought along Simone de Beauvoir with whom he was having a famous affair. The locals fondly remembered her as Simon the Beaver.

[Click to continue reading Aleksandar Hemon On Places That Inspired ‘Love and Obstacles’ – WSJ.com]

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Rainbo Club

The book looks like a worthy addition to one’s library:

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation— and his MacArthur “genius grant”—for his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in The New Yorker, and several of those have also been included in The Best American Short Stories. All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time.

What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man who—like Hemon himself—was raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complications—the obstacles—of growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because it’s Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction— achingly human, charming, and inviting.

Footnotes:
  1. give or take []

Demographic Inversion

Jason Kottke pointed out an intriguing analysis about the changing demographics of Chicago and similar cities, discovered in a periodical I usually avoid, The New Republic1.

Vulcan
[Vulcan, a steel-worker working on a building being constructed in The Loop]

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.

Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.

[From Trading Places]

We can see that in our own neighborhood (So-Fu). In the eight years (and counting) I’ve lived in the West Loop, there have been at least 12 new high-rise condominium developments just within visual range, dozens more nearby, and even more in the South Loop. Literally tens of thousands of new family units have moved downtown, and there’s space for many, many more. Not to mention places like Logan’s Square (mentioned in the above referenced article), Pilsen, Wicker Park, Uptown, yadda yadda. The prices are not astronomical compared to Manhattan prices, but certainly not cheap.

Construction Season Rag
[Construction Season Rag, West Loop]

If you feel that way, you might want to ride an elevated train going northwest, to the lesser-known Logan Square, a few miles beyond the Loop. Whatever Logan Square might be, it is not downtown chic. It is a moderately close-in nineteenth-century neighborhood with a history fairly typical for a city that A.J. Liebling once called “an endless succession of factory-town main streets.” Logan Square was developed primarily by Scandinavian manufacturers, who lived on the tree-lined boulevards while their workers, many of them Polish, rented the cottages on the side streets. By the 1970s, nearly all the Poles had decamped for suburbia, and they were replaced by an influx of Puerto Ricans. The area became a haven for gangs and gang violence, and most of the retail shopping that held the community together disappeared.

Logan Square is still not the safest neighborhood in Chicago. There are armed robberies and some killings on its western fringe, and, even on the quiet residential streets, mothers tell their children to be home before dark. But that hasn’t prevented Logan Square from changing dramatically again–not over the past generation, or the past decade, but in the past five years. The big stone houses built by the factory owners on Logan Boulevard are selling for nearly $1 million, despite the housing recession. The restaurant that sits on the square itself sells goat cheese quesadillas and fettuccine with octopus, and attracts long lines of customers who drive in from the suburbs on weekend evenings. To describe what has happened virtually overnight in Logan Square as gentrification is to miss the point. Chicago, like much of America, is rearranging itself, and the result is an entire metropolitan area that looks considerably different from what it looked like when this decade started.

Of course, demographic inversion cannot be a one-way street. If some people are coming inside, some people have to be going out. And so they are–in Chicago as in much of the rest of the country. During the past ten years, with relatively little fanfare and surprisingly little press attention, the great high-rise public housing projects that defined squalor in urban America for half a century have essentially disappeared. In Chicago, the infamous Robert Taylor Homes are gone, and the equally infamous Cabrini-Green is all but gone. This has meant the removal of tens of thousands of people, who have taken their Section 8 federal housing subsidies and moved to struggling African American neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. Some have moved to the city’s southern suburbs–small suburbs such as Dixmoor, Robbins, and Harvey, which have been among the poorest communities in metropolitan Chicago. At the same time, tens of thousands of immigrants are coming to Chicago every year, mostly from various parts of Latin America. Where are they settling? Not in University Village. Some in Logan Square, but fewer every year. They are living in suburban or exurban territory that, until a decade ago, was almost exclusively English-speaking, middle-class, and white.

What More Can I Say
[What More Can I Say – condo building, South Loop]

Footnotes:
  1. what a crappy sentence, and yet, here it remains because I’m too pressed for time to write a better, clearer sentence. Well, and I’m lazy []