Ulrich Boser

Ulrich Boser is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. He analyzes a variety of social policy topics and is particularly interested in education and criminal justice issues.

Prior to the Center, Boser was a contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report, special projects director for The Washington Post Express, and research director for Education Week. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and Smithsonian. He is also the founding editor of The Open Case, an online criminal justice magazine and currently serves as the research director of Leaders and Laggards, a project that evaluates state systems of education.

In February 2009, HarperCollins published his book The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft, and it received glowing reviews in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, and the Associated Press, among others. The book spent more than a month on the Boston Globe bestseller list and became a national bestseller.

Boser’s writing and research has received a variety of awards and citations, and Washingtonian magazine recently described him as “a writer to watch.” He has also served as a commentator for CNN, National Public Radio, and The New York Times.

Interviewed by Josh Korenblat

/One/: What piqued your original interest in investigating the theft of the paintings at the Gardner Museum?

Ulrich Boser: In December 2004, I began working on a story for US News & World Report about Harold Smith, one of the world’s most successful art detectives. He had recovered lost Renoirs, exposed forged Da Vincis, and cracked the country’s largest gold robbery. Smith worked the Gardner heist for years. But within weeks of our meeting, Smith died of skin cancer, and after his death, I decided to pick up where he left off and search for the lost paintings.

/One/: What are some of the themes of your book? You bring to vivid, trenchant life the theft of the paintings, down to the slice of the knife to wrest the Rembrandt canvas from its frame. There seems to be a tension between beauty and vulgarity in this theft; the love of art and the love of money; the timelessness of the museum and the fleeting nature of both life and theft. Can you articulate your thoughts regarding these polarities and how they might compel various forces in your book?

UB: I don’t know if I can identify the themes that run through the book. I think that’s for readers to decide. That said, I think the history of Boston, the history of the museum, the history of art theft, all have an upstairs/downstairs, high-society/low-society tension, and I wanted to highlight that—I think it’s a key part of the story. I also think that the Hollywoodization of museum crime prevents recoveries. People often glamorize art theft. They think that art thieves are sly and skillful, Pierce Brosnan types with a passion for Impressionist paintings. But the reality is far from it, and the people who steal art are largely run-of-the-mill crooks—aging drug dealers, out-of-work bank robbers, ex-cons looking to pay the rent. They want the cash. They steal art because it’s easy.

/One/: Did you see these themes at play in the art and artists themselves? You briefly mentioned Rembrandt’s moral failings despite the overwhelming moral pulse most can feel in his art, and Vermeer’s financial problems have been well documented—he died at age 40, destitute and reportedly a mere shadow of himself. Is the contrast between the impoverished, suffering artist and the timelessness of art part of the final painting’s appeal, both in your imagination and in the popular imagination?

UB: Yes and no. I think the tension is there. No doubt. You cited some good reasons. But I also think that these works stand on their own. They are masterpieces regardless of whether their creators were poor or rich or criminals or saints.

/One/: The twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin once feared the potential lost “aura” of original art in an age of mechanical reproduction. In the case of the Gardner paintings, which are truly lost and available only in mechanical reproduction, what do you think this aura means to art lovers? What is lost by getting to see only reproductions and not having access to the originals?

UB: Great question. And so, yeah, I think people often forget how important these paintings are. I mean, there are so many reproductions out there—it’s so easy to become numb to the magnitude of the heist. But these works are masterpieces because of the details, and the details are lost when you steal the original.

Here is what Gardner director Anne Hawley once told a reporter—and I think it’s a good summary of the magnitude of the loss: “For us, it’s like a death in the family,” she said. “Think of what it would mean to civilization if you could never hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony again. Think if you lost access to a crucial piece of literature like Plato’s Republic. Removing these works by Rembrandt and Vermeer is ripping something from the very fabric of civilization.”

/One/: In the book, you are clearly motivated to find the paintings in part because there is a hefty $5 million dollar reward for their return. And yet near the end of your book, you concede that your growing obsession with the case might have less to do with tangible results—that the mystery itself has lured you in with a pull that many artists must experience while creating their works, and that many can attest to while viewing a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. Can you explain this emotion that you felt and that you witnessed in others who were searching for the lost paintings?

UB: The Gardner case does have a lot of strange angles. I ended up chasing down all sorts of curious tips and angles. I interviewed all kinds of people. I hired private investigators. I visited prisons. I once flew to Ireland to see if Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger might have the art. It has been nearly 20 years—and the masterpieces are still missing. And I think that’s the rub. The case is a mystery, an unknown, and that means that almost anyone could be a suspect, from a retired guard to an ex-curator to a guy who lived near the museum for a few months in 1990 and seemed to come into some money a few years later. I think that’s what attracts so many people to the case. That and—of course—the $5 million reward.

/One/: Did the work become more meaningful to you by its absence? There is a long tradition in art of exploring this theme. Consider this poem by Emily Dickinson, which asks if yearning is better than having: “It might be easier/To fail with land in sight/That gain my blue peninsula/To perish of delight.” Did art itself become more meaningful to you during the course of your research for this book?

UB: Absolutely. I often had a John Steinbeck quote rattling around in my mind. I think it goes something like this: “Wanted loses value on being had.” That said, I want to see those paintings back at the museum. In this case, at least, yearning is not better than having.

/One/: How did you change over the course of the book?

UB: Hard question, as that is essentially the story of the book. I mean that’s the narrative arc.

/One/: Many art museums exhibit work taken during World War II, and of course famous pieces like the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Pantheon, are highly controversial in terms of their provenance, having been lifted in imperial times from the original locales. Do museums take into account the provenance of their works and how they are attained with more acuity these days?

UB: Yes, museums and galleries are working a lot on these issues. Yet, the art underworld remains huge—and the Art Loss Register’s database of stolen art has swelled over the years to include 609 Picassos, 181 Rembrandts, and Caravaggio’s priceless masterpiece Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. According to experts, the stolen art trade is one of the world’s largest black markets, a $4 to $6 billion illegal business.

Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Chai Vasarhelyi is a director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese, and Brazilian roots. She grew up between New York City and Rio de Janiero and graduated from Princeton University in 2000 with a B.A. in comparative literature. She made her film debut with A Normal Life, which she co-directed and cowrote with Hugo Berkeley – and this hour-long documentary about young Kosovars who came of age during the recent war won the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Documentary award. Chai has received grants from several foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the William and Mary Greve Foundation. Chai has worked with Emmy Award-winning teams documenting the 2007 Paris-Dakar Rally, girls’ soccer in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and a New Orleans high school basketball team that emerged from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to win the 2005 All-State Championship. She has received an Achievement Award from the Creative Visions Foundation. I Bring What I Love marks Chai’s first feature-length documentary film.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

/One/: How did you first learn of Youssou N’Dour?

Chai Vasarhelyi: I grew up with world music but it was mostly Brazilian; my father’s Hungarian and grew up in Brazil. I was interested in making an uplifting film in Africa, and a film called Amandla! had come out which looked at the events in South Africa through music.

Also, someone had given me a mix tape with a West African artist on it, so it made me like West African music. At the same time I had this premise of looking at Africa through music. Youssou is the most celebrated living contemporary musician today in Africa, and the first time I heard him perform at Carnegie Hall was kind of a life-affirming experience. I didn’t understand a word of what he was singing about, I didn’t understand the context, but there was something so emotionally honest about him and it really touched me. So I wanted to meet him and see if this was the right story.

/One/: Did you just approach him?

CV: Yes, how the film came to be has a lot to do with how I approached him. The first time was through a Senegalese friend of a friend who owned a bar in New York; he introduced me to Youssou briefly after that concert. I mentioned that I wanted to make a film, so we met the next day on the street for about 10 minutes, and then I met with his management and his record label, and at the end I heard that there is this other album, that it’s something very special. Youssou is very hard to pin down. I knew he was playing in Europe and I was working in London, so I went to Spain and literally snuck backstage at a concert. He looked at me like, “What are you doing here?” and invited me to eat with them. That’s when he gave me a burned copy of the Egypt album.

/One/: Was the album already out?

CV: He recorded it in 1999 and was going to release it in 2001, and then 9/11 happened. So he held the release. When I met him in late 2003/early 2004, he was thinking about finally releasing it. He burned me a few tracks from a laptop, and I followed the band in my car as they drove to Grenada for the next show. I’ll never forget driving into this city that symbolizes everything—the east and west and the religious persecution and the call of the Moors—and listening to Egypt. I just knew that I had to make this film, because I was flustered with the situation with America and here was someone actually standing up for something he believed in and presenting a tolerant face of Islam, which is not what we saw in the media.

/One/: How many years did it take to make the film?

CV: I filmed for two-and-a-half years and edited for about two years. Later in the editing I had to go back and do a few more things, so it was on and off for four years, and then a year to release.

/One/: This movie is a departure from your previous documentary.

CV: The team is consistent: I have the same editor and I would say the films are very close to each other although very different in subjects. My first film is called The Normal Life, and it’s about six friends after the war in Kosovo. We were all the same age when I began making my film. It’s a very sincere film, and part of my heart still lies in the ground in Pristina. Both films are very similar in terms of the heart that’s in them and both are stories that you would not necessarily have heard but that do pertain to our lives. They’re similar filmmaking style. The gaze is similar.

/One/: How do you find your subjects? Chance, or are you always looking?

CV: I think you know when you find them and as you get older, you tend to become more discerning. I really wasn’t sure about Youssou as a subject. I was very tentative and it was the Egypt album that just turned me. I knew at that moment this was the film I had to make. It’s a very idealistic way of looking at it, but it was that important to me. Similarly, with my first film, I knew there was a story there in Kosovo; I couldn’t understand how it was possible there was a war and ethnic repression going on in 1999. I thought we’d resolved this stuff and here it was happening in the middle of Europe. It was very idealistic to get on that plane. I was in college and I was like, “Let’s go to Kosovo.” I met the subjects of that film—all translators for places like The New York Times and Washington Post, who were exactly like me except where they were born. These individuals are extraordinary and grew up waiting for war. The understanding that so little, yet so much, separated us blew my mind. I didn’t know it would take four years to make the film and I didn’t know how hard it was. I’d never gone to film school. I’d directed plays, but that was very different.

/One/: Why film? You’re in college and you want to tell this story—why decide on film as a medium as opposed to, say, writing about it?

CV: Film relays the most amount of information in the least amount of time. Also, it brings to life emotions in a way that will allow people to identify with the subject.

/One/: Did you have a prior knowledge of the Griot tradition before meeting Youssou?

CV: I actually did. When I was growing up I’d learned about the Griot tradition from a book we had to read in a French class about West Africa. I wasn’t intimately acquainted with it, but I had since eighth grade discovered what Griot was. The Griot tradition is fascinating and relates to the idea of the epic tradition, and that was another connection between the Kosovar Albanians and the Senegalese. Albania is one of those places that the idea of epic poetry is still alive and that people recite their poems. There was something I found very compelling about that type of storytelling.

/One/: How does Youssou manage to keep true to the tradition and yet be so popular?

CV: I don’t think that popularity and the Griot tradition are in conflict with one another. The Griots were popular musicians; the Griot was for the people. As a pop musician it’s a different issue.

How does he stay true to it? I think it’s in his blood. It’s all he knows. What he actually sings in In Your Eyes is “If you want to educate your people, build a school.” His art has always been his activism. His activism has always been his art. He has devotionals and he does have some love songs. But even the songs that are about women are things such as “respect your aunt.” There’s a social message to everything he does but it doesn’t feel like medicine because of the Griot tradition. It is the role that he plays and there’s a place in that society for that type of music.

/One/: Youssou has been referred to as the Bono of Africa. Other than the activism apparent in his music, what other type of humanitarian work has he been involved in?

CV: Youssou has been a tireless humanitarian. He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1987. His first time going international was part of Amnesty International “Human Rights Now!” tour alongside Peter Gabriel. He’s very much into the rights of children, including education and health. Malaria is also something that’s very close to his heart. He’s even testified before Congress about the disease. What’s fascinated me is that he’s really asked to speak on behalf of a continent, and that’s a very strange thing. I mean, who are we to ask one guy because he happens to be from Africa to speak on behalf of a continent?

Youssou insists on living in Dakar. He says there’s an airport, and that he can fly anywhere. He insists on bringing a lot of these things that he sees abroad in his development at home and I think it’s got to do with his roots, it’s got to do with the Griot tradition and staying close to the issues that pertain to the lives of everyday Africans.

/One/: You are quoted as saying you are a “change the world” kind of person. What is your definition of “change the world,” and what do you think is the responsibility of individuals in communities to try to achieve that?

CV: I think Youssou is a really good example of what you can achieve. I don’t know if what I can do will have any effect on other people’s lives. For me, I saw a story I thought was very inspiring and maybe a film showed that story to more people and touched their lives. We all have a responsibility to stand up for what we believe. My mother is Chinese and fled oppression in China. My first film was set in Kosovo, where people didn’t have basic human rights. It’s very easy to say, Everyone stand up for what you believe in, but at the same time you also want to live to see the next day. It’s nuanced. At the time I made the film—after 9/11, war going on in Iraq—I felt helpless: Here I am going to Kosovo making movies, and does it mean anything?

/One/: Why did the Egypt album grab you so much?

CV: Here was an artist standing up and essentially celebrating a tolerant face of Islam, which was not at all the story we saw in the mainstream media, and I thought that was brave. Islam is a very diverse religion—why are we only hearing one version? Youssou’s Egypt project brings that to life: He was a black West African reaching out to North African Egyptians. They didn’t speak the same language but were celebrating a common tradition in a very old Arabic musical style about the Senegalese Sufi brotherhood. It just raises questions, and that’s what I was interested in. It wasn’t dogmatic, he wasn’t on a soapbox, he wasn’t preaching to anyone—he was truly just celebrating and telling the stories.

/One/: Were you and Youssou surprised at the negative reactions to Egypt given the fact that he was so popular?

CV: I think Youssou definitely pushed the envelope when he released an album during Ramadan. I think that no matter where you are that was definitely new.

/One/: Why did he do that?

CV: Essentially because he was implying that this is spiritual music, why can’t you listen to it during Ramadan? What happened was that it was misunderstood for many different reasons and the reaction was so extreme, so fast that there were debates on the radio, people were calling in raising objections, and the TV station pulled the ads off the air without letting them know. Overnight 20,000 cassettes were returned by street vendors.

/One/: If he had released it in another month, not Ramadan, do you think the reaction would have been as negative? Was that the reason for the negative reaction or was it him singing sacred verses?

CV: I think it was definitely a combination. I think in releasing it during Ramadan he was introducing it into the sacred space and that brought it to a head. Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection and Youssou was introducing this music as a way of spiritual reflection, and so it just illustrated his point in a particularly clear, black-and-white way. I think no matter when he released it, it would have raised eyebrows and been a topic of discussion, but doing it this way was very intentional.

/One/: Has his popularity been restored?

CV: It was such an extraordinary thing that happened around the album: the Grammy and the endorsement from religious singer Mustapha M’baye. What you see in the film when they go into that studio to sing about the Prophet Mohammad, it’s the first time that a religious singer was in a recording studio. You had music in the spiritual realm but it wasn’t recorded and it certainly wasn’t released. It was recorded in a tape recorder and when you walk the street you hear it but Mustapha, by crossing that line, lent his support to Youssou, which was a very big deal because he’s one of the most celebrated religious leaders in Senegal. And the Grammy was like winning a gold medal—that’s the only way to think about it. No one knew what a Grammy was. Kabou Gueye, the assistant composer turned to me once it happened and asked, “What’s a Grammy?” I said, “It’s a big international award.” It was the first time a Senegalese had ever won it. I think Senegal was such a tolerant society that allowed that reconciliation, when do you see the media admitting they’re wrong? No one does that. In Senegal they said, maybe we were wrong. Now, there’s a whole genre of sacred recorded music. There’s a woman who was one of Youssou’s backup singers that is now a famous Sufi recorded artist.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She studied Linguistics at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2006 and for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

Laila Lalami: I grew up speaking both Moroccan Arabic and French, but my earliest exposure to books came through French because I received a semi-colonial education that emphasized French more than Arabic. Nearly all of the children’s literature that I was exposed to as a child was in French, so when I started writing fiction, it was in that language. While I could read and write Arabic competently enough, I found it very hard to write fictional narrative in Arabic. My use of French in fiction isn’t at all that unusual for a Moroccan writer of my generation (witness, for instance, the work of Fouad Laroui, or Abdellah Taia, or Nadia Chafik, or Driss Ksikes).

However, once I left Morocco to study abroad, I started to question the bilingualism with which I had grown up. In my country, French and Arabic did not always have a harmonious relationship; rather, they were often in competition in the public sphere. I started to feel really uncomfortable with the idea of writing fiction using the colonial tongue. At the same time, I had been working on my dissertation at USC, and I had to use English daily. That’s how the idea of writing fiction in English came about. Ideally, I would have written in my native language, but since I could not, it seemed that English was my only other option. And between writing in English and not writing at all, I made the choice of writing.

/One/: How does it benefit or detriment your readers, if at all?

LL: I would hope that good fiction, by which I mean fiction that tells us a truth about the human heart, is of great benefit to readers, no matter what language it is told in.

/One/: In many ways, you are acting as a translator before you even put words on the page—meaning you’re translating ideas in your native Moroccan culture into something we can understand. How important do you think this is in our understanding of other people/cultures?

LL: I don’t know if the role of the novelist is to translate a particular culture. It is enough that the novelist try to tell the most specific, the most complex, the most truthful story she can tell. And it is that specificity, that complexity, and that truth which eludes us so much in our perceptions of other people.

/One/: Do you consider yourself particularly inventive with your usage of English? How is it different from the typical translation where the original text, written in a native language, is translated by someone else?

LL: I do play with language in my work, but in ways that may be invisible to some readers because this playfulness is characterized by absences. For instance, I try to excise from my text any American idiomatic expressions because they are often culturally specific and my characters wouldn’t be using them. I also add in words from Moroccan Arabic that are hard to translate in simple ways. For example, it is easier to use “tagine” than to say “a stew of meat and vegetables cooked in a clay pot.” I don’t know whether my process is similar to or different than one involving a translation because I haven’t had experience with translation myself.

/One/: One’s nationality can certainly differ from how one identifies culturally. How do you identify—Moroccan, Moroccan-American, African, other?—and how does that affect your relationships and the communities in which you work and live in?

LL: I identify as all those things—and others besides: woman, Arab, Muslim, progressive, and so on. I think one’s identity is fluid, and different sides of it can be reinforced depending on the social, political, or cultural situation.

/One/: When you first started thinking about your new novel, Secret Son, were you intentionally trying to tell the story of the tension between classes in Morocco, or did you start with a character and the story took off from there?

LL: I remember clearly the moment, six years ago, when I started writing Secret Son. I had this image in my mind of a young man, walking back home in the rain to the shack he shares with his mother, having just watched a movie at a nearby theater. I followed that image for years, trying to figure out who this man was by putting him in increasingly intense dramatic conflicts with people around him. It turned out that the story was about Youssef, a young man from a slum near Casablanca. He has grown up all his life thinking he was the son of a respectable schoolteacher who died in a car accident, but at the beginning of the novel, he finds out that he is in fact the son of a wealthy businessman, so he decides to go find him. It’s this journey that frames the entire novel.

/One/: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you identify with the protagonist, Youssef El Mekki, a young man born into poverty, yet your own background isn’t similar to his. Whose story are you telling and why was it important to you to tell it?

LL: I am telling the story of my characters. Whether I have something in common with them is beside the point—the point is for the writer to use her imaginative empathy to create the most complex, most fully realized character she can.

/One/: In your opinion, does literature play an important role in promoting tolerance and awareness?

LL: Literature is the only art that allows us direct access to the minds, thoughts, and feelings of other people. So in that sense, yes.

/One/: Who were some of your influences? Can you recommend Moroccan writers or artists who have influenced you to /One/ readers? Who are some current writers that you admire?

LL: I think that perhaps it might be more appropriate for readers and critics to tell which influences are apparent in my work. All I can tell you is that everything I live, read, hear, and experience influences my work. I can of course recommend several Moroccan writers I admire: Driss Chraibi, Leila Abouzeid, Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Fatema Mernissi, and Abdellatif Laabi. Other contemporary writers I admire include J. M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Ahdaf Soueif, Margaret Atwood, and the late Tayeb Salih.