Music by Ravel and Bach. “These flute classics speak of perseverance, stamina, and rigorous beauty. I would love to share them with you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of7_ZkS0ROc

Originally live streamed on March 19 on YouTube.

Louna Dekker-Vargas is a flutist, chamber musician, improviser and composer. Her open, curious ears have led her into adventures with classical, jazz and experimental music. She has traveled around the U.S. and Canada as a chamber musician, soloist and teaching artist.

Louna has served as a substitute flutist for the International Contemporary Ensemble, and is a regular substitute for the Broadway musical, Wicked. She also plays with NY jazz quintet Atlantic Extraction, led by bassist Nick Dunston. Her minimalist composition Ah was commissioned for chamber orchestra by Mind on Fire in September of 2018.

Her duo, The Witches, with Ledah Finck combines classical chamber artistry with inquisitive free improvisations and their own compositions for flute, violin and voice. The duo has performed in the Evolution Contemporary Music Series, Spectrum, the High Zero stage at Baltimore’s Artscape Festival, the Red Room, Rhizome, Andrea Clearfield’s Salon Series, The Union Square Chamber Music Series (Baltimore), and at the Baltimore Art Museum. Their album project Behind the Curtain: New Music on Women was the recipient of a Johns Hopkins Research Grant.

She is also a founding member of Trio Jinx- a flute, double bass and viola trio active from 2015-2018 performing residencies at the Sikta Chamber Music Festival, El Paso Pro Musica, the Mesa Performing Arts Center, and the Iowa Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival.

via the Comité Français pour Yad Vashem. The elderly Aristide Gasnier, mayor of Vibraye, with two US soldiers and some of the Jewish refugees he helped save during the Nazi occupation; Huguette stands directly in front of Gasnier; her older brother Maurice is the boy at the far right. Sarthe, France, 1944

Matt Seaton
New York Review of Books
March 12, 2020

Our friend Huguette Martel is an artist and French teacher. When she was younger, she drew cartoons for The New Yorker, and also gave language lessons to staff there. Not long ago, she moved into the same building in Manhattan where my wife and I live, and, seeing her more frequently than before, I learned more of her history—not something that she, a compulsively modest person, naturally presses upon one.

So it was that I heard the miraculous saga of how she, a child of French-Jewish refugees, had survived the Holocaust; and the Daily subsequently published her pictorial memoir, “Growing Up in Wartime France,” which relates the main elements of her story. But the tale turned out to have quite the dénouement, for that version—the only one she’d known for the first eight decades of her life—was significantly incomplete. The full history was even more remarkable.

Huguette was born in Paris in 1938, the second child of Mendel Fajwelewicz and his wife, Ryvka, immigrants from Lithuania. She also had a brother, Maurice, who was five years older, and together the family lived in the Marais district of central Paris, where Mendel was a wholesaler of workmen’s clothing. After the Germans invaded in 1940, the family fled to the countryside. They never made it to the “free zone” of Vichy France, but instead found shelter in a rural area under occupation called Sarthe, named for a tributary of the Loire. They settled in Vibraye, a village about a hundred miles southwest of Paris, not far from the city of Le Mans, famous for its motor-racing circuit.

Huguette was a two-year-old at the time, so the precise circumstances have always been murky to her, but somehow she and Maurice were placed with a peasant family, while their parents found similar refuge nearby. Her father paid the family for the children’s upkeep, but at a certain point he was running out of money. So, in July 1942, the Fajwelewiczes undertook the risky journey back to Paris, taking Huguette with them, so that Mendel could turn some of his stored drapery stock into cash.

It was a fateful venture—and very nearly fatal. They arrived back at their old apartment only hours before French police began the roundup of Parisian Jews that became notorious as the Rafle du Vel’ d’hiv, when more than 13,000 people, including some 4,000 children, were confined in a Paris velodrome before being transported to internment camps in Drancy, Compiègne, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, and thence to Auschwitz. The Fajwelewicz family escaped only because the concierge of their building, one Madame Mignon, tipped them off and helped them hide in the basement for two days and nights, until the coast was clear to flee again to the country.

Back in the village of Vibraye, the family succeeded in evading detection for another two years, until their part of western France was liberated by the Allies sometime in August 1944. Huguette recalls dancing in a field with Maurice, chanting “Nous sommes juifs! Nous sommes juifs!” (We’re Jews! We’re Jews!)—scarcely knowing what it meant, having lived most of the last four years in disguise in a Catholic household, but knowing that it was at last safe to say those words.

Read the complete article: New York Review of Books

Matt Seaton is a writer who lives at Westbeth.

photo: Village Sun

Westbeth feels like a ghost town
MARCH 14, 2020
BY KATE WALTER |

The community room is closed. The gallery is dark. The spring flea market has been postponed. The community room and the gallery are the heart and soul of Westbeth Artists Housing. Everyone looks forward to shopping at the busy flea market in the basement.

The main lobby, normally bustling with activity and conversation, is somber. Management recently issued a memo that residents should only use the lobby for essential activities — no hanging out. I really feel bad for the seniors with mobility issues who use the lobby as a place to sit on a bench and socialize. Thankfully, it will get warm soon and they will be able to go outside into the courtyard. Westbeth is a NORC, a naturally occurring retirement community, with many senior citizens in their 70s and 80s.

It’s hard to believe that only two weeks ago I gave a reading with three other writers in the community room. About 50 people were in attendance and later we talked about the work and drank champagne. I read the first chapter of a novel in progress and everyone told me they wanted to know what would happen next. The feedback was super-encouraging. Just what I needed. It was the kind of interaction that makes Westbeth a great place for artists to live.

I’ve been a resident here since 1997. One of the best things about this complex is all the free and inexpensive activities that take place in the community room — classes, readings, concerts, puppet shows for the kids, under the auspices of the Westbeth Artists Residents Council. I often write in my gratitude journal, “I’m grateful to live in Westbeth.”

Read the complete article at The Village Sun