{"id":149189,"date":"2020-11-19T13:11:40","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T18:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149189"},"modified":"2020-11-19T14:03:55","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T19:03:55","slug":"long-live-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Live Work!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Dragi\u0161a Modrinjak. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Factories demand<\/em>
\nWorkers must command<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Primer<\/em>, 1957<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A Bulgarian grocery store opened for business in my Amsterdam neighborhood. On the inside of the plate-glass window they hung a Bulgarian flag, making the store highly visible from the outside, but dark inside. They sell overpriced Bulgarian groceries. And the same can be said of almost all the ethnic markets. First come the migrants, and after them\u2014the markets. After a time the ethnic food markets disappear, but the migrants? Do they stick around? The number of Bulgarians in the Netherlands is clearly on the rise; two Bulgarian markets have opened recently in my neighborhood alone. And as to those with a \u201cBalkan tooth,\u201d they have famously deep pockets as far as food is concerned; they\u2019ll happily shell out a euro or two extra to satisfy gourmandish nostalgia. The markets sell Bulgarian wine, frozen kebapcheta<\/em> and meat patties, cheese pastries (banitsas<\/em>), pickled peppers and cucumbers, kyopolou<\/em>, pindjur<\/em>, lyutenitsa<\/em>, and sweets that look as if they\u2019ve come from a package for aid to the malnourished: they are all beyond their shelf dates. The store is poorly tended and a mess, customers are always tripping over cardboard boxes. Next to the cash register sits a young man who doesn\u2019t budge, more dead than alive, it\u2019s as if he has sworn on his patron saint that nobody will ever extract a word from him. The young woman at the cash register is teen-magazine cute. She has a short skirt, long straight blond hair, a good tan. Her tan comes from her liquid foundation; her cunning radiates like the liquid powder. She files her nails, and next to her stands a small bottle of bright red nail polish. The scene fills me with joy. She grins slyly. I buy lyutenitsa<\/em>, Bulgarian (Turkish, Greek, Macedonian, Serbian) cheese, and three large-size Bulgarian tomatoes. Dovizhdane<\/em>. \u0414\u043e\u0432\u0438\u0436\u0434\u0430\u043d\u0435<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I know that every European right-wing heart warms to this description. True, the \u201cEasterners,\u201d the Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, not only steal, drink, and lie, but they bring with them their own pickles, their own<\/em> swill. They can hardly wait to milk our welfare system, move into our subsidized housing, which they then sublet to others while they go back to their houses and lounge and laze around with the money they\u2019ve ripped off from us taxpayers. Of course the Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles think the same of their<\/em> Roma; and until recently the Bulgarians thought likewise of their<\/em> Turks. Ever since educated Bulgarian women have been rushing off to Turkey in droves, however, to earn a little pocket money as housekeepers, the constellation of products and the erosion of stereotypes has shifted to the advantage of the Turks.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The division into those who work and those who do not\u2014the hardworking and the indolent, the diligent and the ne\u2019er-do-wells, the earnest and the couch potatoes\u2014is hardly new, but over the last few years it has become the basic media-ideological matrix around which revolve the freethinkers of the general public. Joining the category of the indolent, ne\u2019er-do-wells, and malingerers are the ranks of the jobless (for whom the employed claim they are simply incompetents and bumblers), along with the grumblers, indignants, and the groups defined by their country, geography, and ethnicity (Greeks, Spaniards, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians\u2014all shiftless riffraff!), anticapitalistic elements, hooligans, vandals, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists.<\/p>\n

In response to the question of how to become a multimillionaire, one of the wealthiest Russian oligarchs replied, \u201cDon\u2019t you forget, I work seventeen hours a day!\u201d The very same answer is given by criminals, thieves, politicians, porn stars, war profiteers, celebs, mass murderers, and other similar deplorables. They all say seventeen hours a day<\/em>, my career<\/em>, and my job<\/em> with such brash confidence, not a twitch to be seen. On Meet the Russians<\/em>, a TV show broadcast by Fox, young, prosperous Russians, many of them born, themselves, into money, fashion models, fashion and entertainment industry moguls, pop stars, club owners, and the like, all use the following phrases: I deserve this<\/em>; everything I have, I\u2019ve earned<\/em>; my time is money<\/em>; I work 24\/7<\/em>; I never give up<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The media (they, too, work 24\/7!) have managed to persuade the nonworking majority that this is so. And while the lazy <\/em>majority has no career, or profession, or first and last name, or even a face, the faces of the hardworking<\/em> minority are with us twenty-four hours a day. As far as women go, of course, the ass often replaces the face. The ass has its (ethnic) identity, and a first and last name (Guess whose gorgeous ass this is?<\/em>\u2014a regular headline in Croatian newspapers). And meanwhile the ne\u2019er-do-wells have become Earth\u2019s burden, they slow its rotation, nobody knows how to jettison them, and they\u2019d be best off taking matters into their own hands. This is why the movie Ilo Ilo<\/em>, directed by Anthony Chen, begins with the unambiguous fall of an anonymous body from the balcony of a Singapore apartment building. The movie speaks about the impact of the Asian financial crisis on the \u201cindolent\u201d: they turn to drink, plunge from their balconies, kill themselves.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Short news items, such as a report from Rexecode, the Parisian center for monitoring macroeconomic development, sometimes snatch a little column space in the media in places like Croatia and Serbia, tucked in between the bigger headlines such as: \u201cYou won\u2019t believe the gorgeous asses vacationing this summer on the Adriatic beaches.\u201d The results shown by the Rexecode research project on the hours people work in Europe show that the lazy<\/em> Romanians are the absolute record-holders in terms of the number of hours they spend on the job. The lazy<\/em> Greeks come in second, and the lazy<\/em> Bulgarians, third. After them come the Croats, Poles, Latvians, Slovaks, Estonians, and Cypriots. Working the least are the diligent<\/em> Finns, while the legendarily industrious<\/em> Germans are somewhere mid-scale. Such news flashes do little, regrettably, to uproot the deep-seated prejudices, in fact they reinforce them. The diligent<\/em> have won the day, not only in real terms, but symbolically as well. The indolents<\/em> are despised by all, and most of all by the indolents themselves. They themselves look up to, even deify, the hard-workers (meaning: the superrich). The news that there are no more than two hundred hard-workers<\/em> in little Croatia, while everybody else is indolent<\/em> (whether jobless or working, they are all equally hungry) has prompted Croatian legislators to propose a new labor law, with the blessings of the hard-workers<\/em>; the new law apparently strips the indolents<\/em> of all rights, except the right to the barest of existences.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The native armed with bow and arrow, railway line, village, town, may the country thrive and grow, long live, long live work<\/em>. These are the lyrics of a song that was sung during the Socialist period, when workers\u2019 rights were much greater than they are today. I confess I never made sense of these verses, perhaps because I didn\u2019t try. What possible connection could there be between a native armed with bow and arrow and railway lines, villages, and towns, unless the lyrics are an anticipatory tweet about the eons of history of the human race: in other words, thanks to the appeal of hard work, natives traded in their bows and arrows for railways, villages, and towns. Or, perhaps, it\u2019s the other way around: without the redeeming balm of work, those same natives would have to return to the age of bows and arrows, while weeds would engulf the railway lines, villages, and towns. Although the everyday life of socialism in ex-Yugoslavia was like a hedonistic parody of the everyday life in other communist countries, Yugoslavs shared with them a packet of the same values, a set of common symbols, and their imaginary. And at the center, at least as far as symbols and the imaginary go, was work. Work was what persuaded the native armed with bow and arrow to evolve from the ape, and the \u201cpeasant and worker\u201d and \u201chonest intellectuals\u201d evolved thereafter from the native. \u201cThe workers, peasants, and honest intellectuals\u201d were the pillars, in the socialist imaginary, of a robust socialist society and were cast in a powerful positive light, especially because the honest<\/em> intellectuals were separated from dishonest<\/em> intellectuals just as the wheat is winnowed from the chaff. The \u201cbureaucracy\u201d was the necessary evil, the \u201cbureaucracy\u201d flourished, while feeding, parasite-like, on the people. In any case, the word \u201cwork\u201d was heard everywhere: in the news shorts that played before films in Yugoslav movie theaters, in the images of eye-catching, sweaty, workers\u2019 muscles, in my elementary school primers where the occupations were unambiguous (male miners, female nurses, male blacksmiths, female backhoe-operators, male construction workers, female teachers, male engineers, female tram-drivers), in the movies, and in the First-of-May parades\u2014pagan-like rites, honoring the god of labor as tons of sacrificial steel, coal, wheat, books were rolled out. The heroes of the day were the record-breakers, the men and women who went above and beyond the norm. The heroes of today are pop stars, Marko Perkovi\u0107 Thompson and Severina, and the many clowns who surround them.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Today the vistas I see are post-Yugoslav. Perhaps the view is better in the postcommunist countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary \u2026 I hope representatives of other postcommunist countries don\u2019t hold against me my geopolitically narrow focus. Everything I\u2019ve said refers only to little Croatia, little Serbia, little Bosnia, little Macedonia \u2026 And this crumb of badness in the sea of postcommunist goodness can easily be ignored, can it not? Although to be honest, research from 2007 shows that fewer than half of the Germans living in what used to be East Germany were pleased with the current market economy, and nearly half of them desired a return to socialism. As a return to the previous order is now unimaginable, the lethargic<\/em> East German grumblers have been given a consolation prize, a little nostalgic souvenir, a MasterCard and on it the face of Karl Marx, designed and issued by a bank in the city known today as Chemnitz, though earlier it was called Karl-Marx-Stadt.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Russian oligarch who said \u201cDon\u2019t forget, I work seventeen hours a day!\u201d seems to have forgotten a lesson he\u2019d imbibed in his earliest years. In Russian fairy tales, Ivan the Simple earns his happy ending and wins the kingdom and the queen. Does he do this by working seventeen hours a day? No he does not. He does this thanks to his cunning and his powerful helpers: a horse able to traverse miles and miles at lightning speed, a magic shirt that makes him invincible, a fish that grants his wishes, Baba Yaga who gives him sly advice, and powerful hawks and falcons for brothers-in-law. Even our hero\u2014Ivanushka, grimy, ugly, slobbering Ivanushka Zapechny, he who is the least acceptable, who lounges all the livelong day by the tile stove\u2014even he, such as he is, wins the kingdom and the princess without breaking a sweat. Our modern fairy tale about the seventeen-hour workday has been cooked up as consolation for the losers. Who are the majority, of course.<\/p>\n

The young woman at the cash register in the Bulgarian market knows all this; she files her nails and waits for one of the hard-workers<\/em> who will turn her from a frog into a princess. Her seventeen-hour workday at the cash register at a neglected ethnic grocery in Amsterdam will not deliver her the transformation she\u2019s hoping for.<\/p>\n

In the movie This Must Be the Place<\/em>, Sean Penn plays the role of a rich, aging rock star who says: \u201cHave you noticed how nobody works anymore and everybody does something artistic?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursa\u0107<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of seven works of fiction, including <\/em>The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and <\/em>Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with seven collections of essays, including <\/em>Thank You for Not Reading and <\/em>Karaoke Culture, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She has won, or been shortlisted for, more than a dozen prizes, including the NIN Award, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Heinrich Mann Prize, <\/em>Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Man Booker International Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the \u201cAmerican Nobel\u201d) for her body of work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ellen Elias-Bursa\u0107 has been translating fiction and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the eighties, including novels and short stories by David Albahari, Dubravka Ugresic, Da\u0161a Drndi\u0107, and Karim Zaimovi\u0107. She is the coauthor of a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander, and author of <\/em>Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, which was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Age of Skin<\/a>,<\/em> by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursa\u0107. Used with the permission of Open Letter Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dubravka Ugresic on the myth of hard work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-149189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLong Live Work! by Dubravka Ugresic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dubravka Ugresic on the myth of hard work.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Long Live Work! by Dubravka Ugresic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 19, 2020 \u2013 Dubravka Ugresic on the myth of hard work.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-11-19T18:11:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-11-19T19:03:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/work.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dubravka Ugresic\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dubravka Ugresic\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dubravka Ugresic\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/7c3c03dc2549084e4c822bbbdb2b2026\"},\"headline\":\"Long Live Work!\",\"datePublished\":\"2020-11-19T18:11:40+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-11-19T19:03:55+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\"},\"wordCount\":2185,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/work.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Featured\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Arts & Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/19\/long-live-work\/\",\"name\":\"Long Live Work! 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