The acorn does not fall far from the oak, they say. But Jean Laffite's father was a tanner. It is true that his brother Alexandre preceded him in the privateering profession. But was Alexandre a self-taught sailor -- a pioneer in this new trade? Hardly. Though their father was not a sailor, Alexandre, Pierre and Jean had family members who were ready to teach them the ropes. They were none other than their grandmother's three half-brothers, Reyne, Felix and Clemente,
Excerpt from t he Journal of Jean Laffite
"...under the orders of Uncle Reyne, Felix and Clemente who were the half-brothers of Grandmother"
Was Jean Laffite a self-made man? Yes and No. He was undoubtedly an individual who made much of the opportunities presented to him and who achieved a great deal on his own. But he was also part of a family, and he benefited from the supportive upbringing of his grandmother and the broad horizons offered by her kinsmen.
It takes many generations in a family before a spark of talent can flicker into a flame. Aaron Burr wanted to be a sailor, too. He ran away from home at age ten and signed on as a cabin boy. But his Uncle Timothy, unfortunately, was not a sailor himself, and he would not allow the orphaned boy under his charge to pursue a path that was not part of the family tradition. So Aaron was sent off to Princeton to study the classics, like his father and grandfather before him, And Aaron Burr, despite his adventurous streak, excelled in his studies, because he did indeed have the ability to parse classical languages programmed into his genes. At first Burr applied himself to his studies until he looked around and noticed that nobody else was doing half as well as he was, and then he relaxed and proceeded to enjoy the rest of his college years.
"You didn't build that." is a phrase that is bandied about by people who think it is unfair that we each have an inheritance and a family legacy and talents that are nurtured in us by relatives who appreciate what we can do, because they can do that themselves, too. But just because you have a foundation built by your parents, grandparents and countless generations before you, that does not mean you have built nothing yourself. Nor does it mean that you should be deprived of whatever advantages you were given at birth in an attempt to level the playing field for everybody else.
Everybody else also has parents, grandparents and nameless ancestors, too. We each come with something built in, and something to pass on to the generations to come.
One of the reasons that it is difficult for some people to accept the Journal of Jean Laffite as genuine has to do with Jean's grandmother, who is identified in the Journal as a Spanish woman of Israelite descent.
According to the dedication to one of the Laffite family Bibles, she is identified as a Spanish Jew -- Juive Espagnole -- which might be another way of saying that she was Sephardic.
The idea that Jean Laffite could have had a "Jewish" grandmother seems distasteful and also perhaps unlikely to many admirers of the privateer. By the same token, people who identify themselves as Jewish may have trouble claiming the privateer as related, because his actions in life do not fit a Jewish stereotype.
But part of the problem with all this is that public relations have painted all people descended from those banished from ancient Israel as Ashkenazi, Yiddish speaking ultra-conservative, religious fanatics or modern progressives with left-wing leanings. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are Jewish populations all over the world, including in Ethiopia and Yemen.
There is and was prejudice against non-Ashkenazi Jews in various Jewish subcommunities. Whether they are Sephardic, Yemenite or Beta Israel, they tend to be looked down on by Ashkenazi populations, for being too eastern, too dark or downright barbarians.
When I watched the video embedded below, about a young man named Yehye Nehari, born in Yemen to a mother of Israelite descent and kidnapped at age seven by ultra-orthodox Jews to live in New York where he was tortured for four years by being told he needed to speak Yiddish, because that is the language the Messiah speaks, I wondered about his mother. Nehari arrived in Israel at age eleven, alone, without family, and in the video we meet him at the end of his Israeli military service. His mother and sisters were flown in to see him. They had not seen each other for twelve years.
לא לפספס
Posted by שוקי שיינפלד on Monday, March 2, 2015
The mother is that rather young woman who is dressed colorfully in Yemenite clothing and is seen speaking into a cell phone in Arabic. She seems much less troubled or inhibited than her son. Notice how she doesn't let the Israeli men help her out of the van? See how confident and sure of herself she looks?
We think of women wearing eastern garb as being downtrodden or enslaved, but there is more than one side to that story.
The culture clash between the Ashkenazi progressive Zionists and the polygamous Yemenites they are trying to convert to Western ways is played to comic good effect in the movie Sallah Shabati.
In this movie, Topol plays the Oriental equivalent of the Ashkenazi character Tevye that he played in Fiddler on the Roof.
The Yemenite Jewish population still practiced polygamy when European Jewry had given it up in an attempt to fit in among their neighbors. While a European Jew had to give a dowry for a husband to provide for his daughter upon marriage, a Yemenite father expected to receive a bride price.
Communism, popular in Europe at the time of the return to Israel, was unheard of among the Yemenites. The problems of the liberated, progressive woman who is an adult, yet unmarried and works without pay in the dairy barn of her kibbutz seemed strange in comparison.
The diasporatic population of ancient Israel went in many different directions. Wherever they went, they ended up looking very similar to the local population and speaking the language of the land in which they lived. There are even some who emigrated to China and still can be identified there today.
In all probability, Zora Nadrimal did not resemble the stereotype of the Jewish grandmother that we tend to have today in America. She was not from the German speaking Ashkenazi populations. She did not know Yiddish. She was not part of a pacifist community that depended on an urban, industrialized society to exist. She did not teach Jean Laffite to turn the other cheek, and she was tough as nails when it came to seeing her grandchildren go off to war. Seafaring ran in her family.
But because of the current stereotypes, the stigma of the Jewish grandmother is one issue that prevents admirers of Jean Laffite from considering the authenticity of the Journal, whereas the non-Yiddish values of the grandmother turn off most American Jews, because they cannot identify.
This morning, it occurred to me that Aaron Burr and Jean Laffite had more in common as fathers than one might suppose: they were both brought up motherless, and they both became fathers to motherless children.
Aaron Burr remembered his mother to some extent, and what he did not remember was available for him to learn from the journal she left behind.
Jean Laffite did not remember his mother at all, according the Journal of Jean Laffite. But he was lucky that he had his grandmother to raise him in his mother's stead. Jean Laffite said that he owed all his ingenuity to his grandmother.
Inscription on one of Laffite family Bibles
p. 220 of Stanley Clisby Arthur's book, Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover
Although Jean Laffite and Aaron Burr had no mothers to raise them, they each came from strong families with a sense of duty and a desire to raise children. Neither of them was abandoned, and each received a good education, according to the means and the understanding of the family.
In those days, there were no debtors' prisons for fathers who failed to pay child support. There were only debtors' prisons for people who failed to pay the debts that they owed to others which they had promised to pay. If a man did not support his children or wanted nothing to do with them, he was free to abandon them. The loss, society felt, was his own.
As a result, fathers who took care of their children did so out of a strong internal urge to support their families and to nurture their children. Both Jean Laffite and Aaron Burr were absentee fathers, in the sense that their work kept them away from their children for many months and years. But they were both involved in their children's lives, supporting them financially and in more personal ways.
In my two Theodosia and the Pirates books, I focus on the parallel relationships between Aaron Burr and Theodosia and Jean Laffite and Denise. Both Theodosia and Denise grew up without a mother, and both had a close relationship with their famous father.
As the publication date for Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain approaches, I am having to find new ways to describe the book. Publicists and readers alike want to know: what is your book about? Why did you write it? What's in it for me?
There are many, many different ways to answer that question. Today, I want to give an answer that focuses on patriotism. And not just any kind of patriotism, but passionate, unrequited love of country.
When I set out to write Theodosia and the Pirates, I was a little tired of unrequited love. I had just finished writing the first half of Our Lady of Kaifeng, which is a story about a woman who travels halfway across the world in the hopes of having a conversation with someone she loves, but who does not love her.
It was quite a release to be able to write a joyous story of love that is reciprocated, and in part, that is what Theodosia and the Pirates represents for me. But as I was writing it, I became aware of a theme of rejection that ran just under the surface. And this rejection was not about the love between a man and a woman. It was about being rejected by your own country, or by a country you love and long to help.
How does this theme manifest itself? Here are a few instances:
Zora Nadrimal, Jean Laffite's grandmother, was a loyal Spaniard. And yet she and her husband were arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, and she was forced to flee the country after her husband's death, never to return. Spanish was still her native language. She raised her daughter speaking Spanish. She spoke Spanish to her grandchildren and educated them in the culture of Spain. But how did she really feel about her native country? What about her behavior inspires Jean to take up his "War Against Spain", an endless vendetta against the country that rejected his grandparents?
Theodosia Burr Alston was a loyal, patriotic American. Yet her father was accused of being a traitor, and even after he was acquitted of the charges, his name was dragged in the mud. If you open a history book today, Aaron Burr is known for two things: killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, and plotting to "separate the Western territories" from the United States. Burr went into exile for a time after his acquittal, but he returned to the United States and lived in poverty and obscurity for the rest of his life. How did Theodosia Burr really feel about the country that could do this to her father, after he had been a revolutionary war hero, had served as Vice President, and had always championed the freedoms of all Americans?
Jean Laffite, despite being a hunted man, gave the Americans information about their enemies the British that was designed to help them avoid being conquered. What did they do in response? They sent a raiding party against him. He ordered his men not to fight back against the looters, and even after his ships were stolen and storehouses looted, he contributed to the American cause by donating gunpowder and flint, artillery and trained cannoneers, and he fought for the US cause right alongside the men who looted him: Patterson and Ross. Yet when the conflict was over, he was never compensated for what was taken from him, and he was forced to find another place to continue his privateering business. Not content with driving him out of Barataria, the Americans required him to leave Galveston, too. And even when he was enlisted in the Columbian Navy, the Americans were still out to get him. What would you feel toward a country that did that to you? Paradoxically, Jean Laffite felt only love for the United States of America, despite the actions of its government.
Some people feel that everything in life is based on turn taking and reciprocity. It's all you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. But real love, whether it is for a person or a country, is not like that. True love transcends the need for reciprocation.
That's the big theme in Theodosia and the Pirates. It was present in the first book from the beginning, but it is given a final expression in The War Against Spain. Sometimes love of country is so strong, that it transcends borders and rulers. It is like a weed that flowers despite everything that is done to eradicate it. In this sense, the book is a tribute to the triumph of love over hatred.
