conuly

Has LiveJournal changed the way it deals with too-long entries, and nobody told me? Because I delete my bookmarks as I post them, and now I can't recover all the links I put in my entry which, um, aren't there....

On Turkey and Armenia

Courting Europe, Turkey Tries Some Soul-Cleansing
By STEPHEN KINZER

VAN, Turkey

THE 10th-century Akhtamar Church, its stone facade alive with vivid images of birds, animals, saints and warriors, dominates a small island just off the southern shore of Lake Van. For nearly a millennium, this spectacular Armenian monument was a seat of great religious and political power.

Then the Ottoman Empire expelled and wiped away the Armenian population here in the massacres of 1915, and the church fell into near ruin. Its condition symbolized the abysmal relations between many Armenians, who believe their ancestors were victims of genocide in 1915, and the Turkish Republic, which rejects that claim.

This fall, at Turkish government expense, restoration workers began repairing the church. They have cleaned the exterior and replaced the collapsed roof, and plan to return next summer to work on the interior.

Although this is an act of historical preservation and tourism promotion, it also reflects something much larger. To the horror of conservative nationalists, there is a new sense of freedom taking hold in Turkey. The government is promoting democratic reforms that will one day, it hopes, allow Turkey to join the European Union. In the process, old taboos, like admitting the possibility that the Christian Armenians were the victims of genocide, are falling.

Whether steps like restoring the Akhtamar church will ease Turkey's entry in the European Union, however, is far from certain.

In Europe, resistance to Turkish membership has in fact been growing. It was one reason that voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the union's draft constitution last spring. A magazine poll a year ago found that French opposition to Turkey's entry had risen to 72 percent, from 58 percent two years earlier. More recent polls suggest that Europe's resistance has not abated. French officials have promised a referendum on any plan to approve Turkish entry into the European Union.

Here in Turkey, even as the church reconstruction was under way, a court was giving Hrant Dink, editor of a newspaper for Istanbul's Armenian community, a suspended prison term for making comments "disrespectful to our Turkish ancestors." A prosecutor has indicted Turkey's leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk, on similar charges, and several other such cases are pending.

To outsiders, it sometimes seems that Turks cannot decide whether they want to embrace the standards of human rights and free speech that the European Union demands of its members.

In fact, however, many Turks say they fervently want their country to meet those standards. So, on most days, does the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But defenders of the old order, including prosecutors, judges and officials with influence in the army and bureaucracy, fear that steps to open Turkish society will weaken national unity, and are trying to suppress them.

Nationalists have prevented the government from reopening Turkey's land border with Armenia, and have tried to prevent serious investigations into incidents like a recent bombing in the southeastern province of Hakkari, which was made to look like the work of Kurdish terrorists but turned out to have been carried out by police agents.

Tension within Turkey's political class is intensifying as citizens begin voicing opinions that have long been anathema.

In September, for example, a group of historians and other academics, most of them Turkish, met in Istanbul to challenge the taboo on suggesting that the Ottoman regime committed brutal crimes, perhaps even genocide, in 1915. It turned out to be a historic conference on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians.

The event had been postponed twice, once after Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said it would constitute a "stab in the back" to Turkey and again after a judge banned two universities from playing host to it. It was finally held at a third university.

Participants had to walk through a gantlet of angry protesters, but once they found their seats, and began to speak, they observed no limits to their debate. Their papers had titles like "What the World Knows but Turkey Does Not" and "The Roots of a Taboo: The Historical-Psychological Suffocation of Turkish Public Opinion on the Armenian Problem."

The conference produced an avalanche of news coverage and led to weeks of analysis. Some columnists and opinion-makers objected to parts of what they heard, but nearly all welcomed the breakthrough to open debate on this painful topic.

"I was there, and it felt like we were making history, like something incredible had suddenly happened," said Yavuz Baydar, a columnist for the mass-market daily Sabah. "Everyone was conscious of it. This is not a taboo anymore."

The response to the conference suggests that other longstanding taboos may also be ripe for challenge. If people here can now argue freely that the Ottomans were guilty of genocide in 1915, it may not be long before they promote other long-suppressed ideas like Kurdish nationalism, with which some Europeans sympathize, or political Islam, which nearly all of them detest.

The recent rioting in France in alienated Algerian immigrant communities, however, raises new questions about Europe's willingness to accept Turkey's application in any event. The anti-immigrant French leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, was quick to use the riots as a further argument for not admitting "another 75 million Muslims" into Europe.

It could easily be 10 years or longer before Turkey is ready to join the European Union, and this fall's riots may well be forgotten by then. Omer Taspinar, director of the Turkey program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said he was not worried by the impact of unrest like this.

"The Turks responded to those riots in a very interesting way, saying that they show how urgent it is to give Muslims in Europe a sense of belonging, and that admitting Turkey to the E.U. would be a way to do that," he said. "Plenty of politicians in Europe, like Tony Blair, are saying the same thing."

"I do have another worry, though," Mr. Taspinar said, "and that is terrorism." If there is another attack in Europe that is linked to Al Qaeda, he said, "then I think the balance of opinion could turn against Turkey. Europeans might conclude that they don't want the E.U. to have a border with Iran, Iraq and Syria, which is what admitting Turkey would mean. In that scenario, even if the Turks do everything right, developments over which they have no control could prevent them from joining."

"The New Berlin Wall

The New Berlin Wall
By PETER SCHNEIDER

On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body, fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before, she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help. According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders - or to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother who had escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It's still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, "The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering." By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two elder brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister.


There is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall you have to go to the city's central and northern districts - to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the majority of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these, by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about "our Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived decades after the Turks and often illegally.

But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two rockets here, three rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the first time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla Kelek ("The Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your Daughters, Not Your Honor"). About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But they each had to risk much for their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu's fate. Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet when she refused to greet him in a respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to kill herself to escape her first forced marriage; later she was taken to Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two children from this marriage and took refuge in a women's shelter to escape her father's violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.

Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years ago. Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m. to pick up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn't like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening posture, either, but I was a long way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter told me that one or another girl in her class was not taking biology or physical education and no longer going on field trips.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg.

But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn't care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.

Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to fulfill the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws. One side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the families' revenge.

Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Necla Kelek's research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been bought - often for a handsome payment - in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are then flown to Germany, and "with every new imported bride," Kelek says, "the parallel society grows." Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, "Turkish men who wish to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin than in Istanbul."

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female victims, during the past nine years - 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the "miscellaneous" column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it's possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in keeping with the religious regulations." Volker Steffens, the school's director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students' open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.


During 50 years of continuing immigration, the Germans, most of the time under conservative governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not a country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied. Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans began to investigate the parallel society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German host society. The recent riots in France have increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and experts lined up in the news media to point out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in Germany (although up to 50 percent of them are unemployed) had full access to the German welfare state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris. True, there were some cars set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were interpreted as purely imitation crimes, nothing to be taken seriously. Yet in all these official declarations you sensed an undertone of panic. Germans' confidence that their nation can continue as it had been - integrating immigrants without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German identity, preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing modernism - is on the line. It turns out that in the heart of German cities a society is growing up that turns modernity on its head.

How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren, who has been living in Berlin for 40 years, once told me about one of his first plane trips from Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer from Anatolia, who had evidently never been in an airplane before. The man had no idea what to make of the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray table - nor did he understand his neighbors' explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there, in his sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer beads between his thick fingers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow countryman was enclosed in an invisible time capsule he wasn't going to leave even after he landed in Germany. It made no difference whether the man was traveling to Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had never seen a city; he was living in the 18th or 19th century and would carry the customs and rites of his homeland with him to his living room in Berlin. And he would cling to them doggedly if the Western democracy where he was living and working did not make a determined effort to acquaint him with its rules and laws. For decades, Oren has been preaching that it has never been so much a question of multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants into city dwellers.

After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the 1950's, was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation on the part of the host and the proviso, often repeated, that Germany was not really a country of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no accident that the foreign workers were called gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to leave after a while.

The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves as their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as much of their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive back to their villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a house.

Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max Frisch recognized the contradiction early on: "Workers were called," he wrote, "and human beings came." These were people who wanted their families to join them, people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with an education and a better future in that country. Germany did not give guest workers passports or the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them into the social system and giving them the opportunity for social advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class - relatively broad in comparison with those in France or in England - contributing around 39 billion euros annually to the gross national product and billions to the national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end, the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. And these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration, Turkish women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and the family members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts gradually became more and more like those back home as well. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla Kelek sums it up this way in "The Foreign Bride": "The guest workers turned into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims."

Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard - especially the youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma. "Seventy percent of the newcomers," according to Otto Schily, a former minister of the interior, referring to the period since 2002, "land on welfare the day of their arrival." Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of extended families living on the dole.

Necla Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had been living in Germany for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? "But how can you stand living here?" Necla Kelek went on. "You don't have anything to do with this country, you despise its culture and the way people live here." But we have everything we need here, was the answer; we don't need the Germans.

Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside their apartments, women resumed their traditional ways - apart from the "unclean" who ate pork, drank beer and let their daughters go unchallenged to parties and discos. Amid the German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, a rural culture was celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was spoken, where people ate, prayed, fasted and celebrated according to custom, and where the surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the unclean was looked down upon. The riddle of the time capsule brought up by Aras Oren came to an unexpected solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim immigrants were able to take up, in Germany, the life of their ancestors in Anatolia. Indeed, maybe life in Anatolia was meanwhile more modern and secular than in the Muslim districts of Berlin.


Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to the discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of immigrants - high unemployment, high dropout or failure rates in public schools. But this explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It turns out that the Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend. Rental agencies that procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings and circumcisions are among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln.

Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to the European Parliament, tells two different stories concerning ritual circumcision. He himself grew up in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three decades ago was an absolute nightmare. It took place in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4 and 9 years old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed by the local Turkish doctor, who took his instruments out of the tool case he'd brought along and started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on Ozdemir and sewed up the wound after the local anesthetic had worn off. To drown the child's deafening cries, a Turkish band started up with traditional music, and relatives danced in honor of the circumcised.

More recently - in other words, some 30 years later - Ozdemir took part in another, more modern type of circumcision, this time as a godfather. The parents had the operation performed by a doctor in a hospital. There was no ritual, and the patient went home the same day. Some days later, when the boy was fully recovered, the parents gave a party that, as Ozdemir explains, "really was for the circumcised, and not for the relatives." All the participants, the boy included, enjoyed themselves.

For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories showed that Muslim immigrants can hold onto their rituals by transforming and modernizing them. But there is a third story unfolding today in the rented halls of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, a story that emphasizes separateness and a communal rejection of compromise. The technical standard of the circumcision might be of the highest order, but it will have to happen in the presence of family and friends. The father of the circumcised might carry a German passport and run a successful company; but he will also worry about how his son's circumcision is judged by his friends and neighbors.


This conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide the next generation. For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren't in a position to control Islamic religious instruction. Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson plan that was submitted in German. Citing the linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often behind closed doors.

Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings.

There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent. Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page - until a recent revision - praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. "And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom."

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Seyran Ates complains.

It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says, "were in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians - will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened.


It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of Germany are forcefully calling on Germans to defend our democratic achievements against Muslim traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of democracy under the banner of respect for cultural difference. "What I am asking of the Germans," Necla Kelek says, "is nothing more and nothing less than equal treatment. I'm entitled to the same rights as any German woman."

Merely citing "lessons from the German past," as Germans tend to do, does not guarantee that these lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out of respect for the "otherness" of a different culture, Germans stand aside and accept the fact that Muslim women in Germany are being subjected to an archaic code of honor that flouts the fundamental human rights to dignity and individual freedom. This has nothing to do with Germany or the "guiding German culture" that German conservatives want to put through; it has simply to do with humanity, with the protection of basic human and civil rights for all citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.

Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are right in pointing out that there are many varieties of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not be confused, that there is no line in the Koran that would justify murder. But the assertion that radical Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have nothing to do with each other is like asserting that there was no link between Stalinism and Communism. The fact is that disregard for women's rights - especially the right to sexual self-determination - is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. "We Western Muslim women," Seyran Ates says, "will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims."

On the Park Street Tree Lighting

A Tree-Lighting Tinged With Sadder Ceremony
By GLENN COLLINS

They will light the lights on Park Avenue tomorrow evening, in the familiar, cheery annual public ceremony that has been a staple of the holiday season for 60 years. The children's choir will be 40 voices strong. Some 5,000 onlookers are expected, and carols will be sung.

But not a bulb will be lighted until a lone bugler has played taps. That is because this tree lighting tradition is not an ersatz celebration of shopping opportunities but a memorial for the dead. The Park Avenue tree lighting - one of scores of holiday rituals around the city - began in 1945 as a gesture by the greatest generation to those who were lost.

As it was then, it will be this weekend: the lights will glow again as a memorial to those who died in all the nation's wars.

Approaching the holidays, "this is a time of great poignancy, since people are dying again in war," said Margaret Ternes, who organizes the annual lighting of the Park Avenue Memorial Trees, a private effort that annually leads to the apparition of 2.5 miles of light bulbs - more than 2 million of them - on the avenue's traffic islands from East 46th Street to 96th Street.

"The lights were an important statement after World War II, and they are an important statement now," she added.

The original tree-lighting on Dec. 17, 1945, realized the wish of Susan Vanderpoel Clark - the wife of Stephen Carlton Clark, a philanthropist who was heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art - who "wanted a way to honor the servicemen from World War II," said Edward W. Stack, the retired president of the Clark Estates, which manages the family's charitable foundations.

"The trees gave a tremendous lift to Park Avenue - not only the people who lived there, but hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who visited even then," Mr. Stack said.

In the early years, Mrs. Ternes said, Mrs. Clark's personal electrician, Kimball Electric, did the wiring, and Boy Scouts manually turned on the lights. Mrs. Clark underwrote a large part of the cost until her death in the mid-1960's, Mr. Stack said.

The project was continued by other donors, including Mary Lasker, the philanthropist; for the last 25 years, it has been administered by the Fund for Park Avenue, of which Mrs. Ternes is the executive director.

Originally, there were 29 trees, from 32d Street to 96th Street; then the number of trees was increased to 84; more recently, there have been 110.

The annual installation is a logistical challenge. "We have to start working in September," said Bud Montana, president of the Manhattan-based Montana Electrical Decorating Corporation, which took over the project when it bought out Kimball Electric many years ago.

After installing cables and electrical timers, workers bedeck dozens of live cherry trees and hawthorns planted on the avenue. Then, 18-foot-tall firs from Nova Scotia are trucked in and installed by Van de Wetering Inc., a landscape contractor.

Only then can a crew of 15 electricians swath the firs with lights, an exacting process that continues "right up until the afternoon of the lighting ceremony," Mr. Montana said.

For decades, the "let there be light" invocation that signals the lighting has been the province of the pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, "with the exception of 2001, when Mayor Giuliani came and uttered the illuminatory words following 9/11," said Michael L. Lindvall, senior minister for the church. Those lost in the World Trade Center were also honored.

For many residents, the tree lighting is a multigenerational tradition. "I remember when there was snow, the lights would shine and you could hear the sound of the chains on the snowplows - it was a magical time," said Judith T. Steckler, president of the board of 863 Park Avenue at 77th Street, who attended the first illumination ceremony as a little girl. Eventually, she took her children to the event.

But New York is New York, and through the years, the annual rite has hardly escaped mishap. Mrs. Steckler recalled a time "when the lights were multicolored - red, white, green and blue - and drivers couldn't tell what was the stoplight, so there were auto accidents." These days, the lights are all white.

In the early 1980's, an entire Christmas tree was stolen - with the lights on it, Mrs. Ternes said. Not to mention another tree that was knocked over by a careering taxicab. (Yes, sports fans, no one was hurt.)

"And still there are those goofy people who think that these huge trees could fit in their living rooms, so they try to take them down," Mr. Montana said. "But they can't. They are cabled down now."

And Park Avenue is Park Avenue, so sometimes there is the demand from some residents for, well, a competitive edge. Mrs. Steckler gets complaints "that their tree is bigger than ours," she said, and sighed, "Life is too short for that."

Many call the lighting's effect powerful. "On Park Avenue, it is very cold, it is very dark, and then, suddenly, the lights are on," said Julia Winpenny, who has a tree view from 67th Street and Madison Avenue. "The lighting changes everything."

Since Mrs. Steckler's two children are grown, "I no longer put up a tree in my apartment," she said. "So those trees on Park Avenue are my trees."

The lighting costs $300,000 a year, most of which goes for electrifying the imported Douglas fir trees, all of it paid for by the Fund for Park Avenue. Contributions come from more than 2,500 residents, property owners, businesses, foundations and friends. After the dedication ceremony before the church at 91st Street tomorrow at 6:30 p.m., the lights will glow from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily until Jan. 31.

The holiday lighting "is a beautiful tradition, and I hope it never stops," Mrs. Steckler said. "To this day, I am so sad when they take down the lights. We are back to the doldrums of winter and there is a long way to go before the leaves are on the trees."

On the citification of India

All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India
By AMY WALDMAN

SURAT, India - This western city has at least 300 slum pockets, grimy industry, factory-fouled air and a spiraling crime rate. A 1994 epidemic - reported as pneumonic plague - that originated here caused national panic. It is the kind of place where the body of a woman killed by a passing truck is left in the street because no one knows her.

The city hardly seems like a beacon, yet for young men across India it shines like one.

In his central Indian village, B. P. Pandey heard that Surat was a "big industrial town" and made his way here to work. Rinku Gupta, 18, one of Mr. Pandey's five roommates, came from the north. Hundreds of thousands more have traveled from Orissa, in the east, and from Maharashtra, to the south.

In the rural mind, Surat, in Gujarat state, looms with outsized allure, and its girth is growing to match. In less than 15 years, its population has more than doubled, to an estimated 3.5 million, making it India's ninth largest city. A majority of Surat's residents are migrants, drawn by its two main industries, diamonds and textiles.

Surat's growth spurt is being replicated across India. At least 28 percent of its population now lives in cities and many more of its citizens move in and out of them for temporary work. In some southern states, nearly half the population is in cities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people. A decade later it had 35.

As the people shift, so does the very nature of India. This is a nation of 600,000 villages, each of them a unit that has ordered life for centuries, from the strata of caste to the cycles of harvest. In this century, cities' pull and influence - not only financial but also psychic - are remaking society. Less visible than the heated consumerism or western sexual habits changing India, this slow churning may be more profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues of village life, more wrenching.

"From all over India, they are coming," said Kailash Pandey, a milk seller, of the migrants pouring into Kanpur, one of the million-plus cities.

Kanpur, Surat and 17 of the other biggest cities sit along the so-called Golden Quadrilateral - 3,625 miles of national highways that circle the country and are being modernized in an epic infrastructure project. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and photographer drove that route, looping through India's megalopolises - New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai.

The highway brings in and out almost everything cities need, including much of the cheap labor that men like B. P. Pandey supply. So with the road's improvement, Surat and other cities are surging anew, spreading toward the highway as if toward their life source.

The redone highway is also shrinking the distance between villages and cities. In the countryside through which the route passed, the buzz was about places like Surat, and the sense of a nation on the move.

"This is rural India - people don't stay," said Anil Kumar, a shopkeeper in the village of Kaushambi. "The highway has made it easier."

Compared with China, whose rural population is also moving, India's urbanization has been a saunter, not a sprint - slower, looser and more haphazard. That is partly because some of India's economic policies have served to constrict its cities' possibilities. Decisions made during and even after four decades of quasi socialism have crimped the kind of manufacturing that has spurred China's urban growth.

Good jobs or not, India's migrants still come. Their presence is creating new challenges: battles for land, competition for jobs, strained resources and religious and political tensions. So diverse is Surat's population that the municipal corporation now runs schools in eight languages.

And when the migrants return home, they bring new views and aspirations with them. Their perspectives are combining with the improved highways to open up, and out, the closed worlds of India's villages.

Waiting for a bus at the station in Jaipur, Surender Yadav offered his own village as an example. Bypassed by development, it sat down a wretched road off the highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. There was no medical dispensary, and perhaps more galling to Mr. Yadav, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate in Hindi, no newspaper delivery.

But the highway's widening and resurfacing meant villagers were no longer waiting for development to come to them. Every morning, Mr. Yadav said, 20 or so people rode their motorbikes to the highway, parked and hopped on a bus. They went to New Delhi, two and a half hours away, or Gurgaon, even closer, and worked as police officers, low-level clerks or customer care representatives in call centers. India, ever absorptive, had absorbed the highway, and turned out something new: the commuter village.

The village is becoming less a way of life than a place to live, a stop on the journey to the metropolis.

Brighter Prospects

During religious holidays, 200 to 300 buses a day pull out of Surat and head north for 10 hours on the national highway. Their destination: the rural region of Saurashtra. Their cargo: diamond cutters and polishers visiting the drought-parched villages they left to work in the city.

By the hundreds of thousands, the young men of Saurashtra have found good livings in Surat, even though most lack good educations. They earn about $2,400 a year - nearly five times the average per capita income - in diamond work, and sometimes significantly more.

Rajesh Kumar Raghavji Santoki, 28, had tried farming for a year at home, and given up in the face of a water shortage. After just three years in Surat, he was earning in a month more than the $500 his farmer father earned in a year. He owned a house, a motorcycle and a van.

India found its niche in the cutting and polishing of low-cost diamonds for the global middle class, and today more than 7 of 10 diamonds in the world are polished in Surat. It has created close to 500,000 jobs here alone.

That is nearly half as many jobs as India's entire information technology industry. Bangalore, the symbol of India's knowledge economy, may be a global buzzword, but the fate of India's rural poor depends more on industrial cities like Surat.

Together, the cities' dominance means that India will never return to a farming-based economy. The urban portion of the gross domestic product is roughly double the urban population, a fact not lost on Mr. Santoki or his boss, Savji Dholakia.

Nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Dholakia was an impoverished farmer's son, who at age 14 came by bus down the highway from Saurashtra to Surat.

Today, he runs a family-owned diamond business, Hari Krishna Exports, that did $103 million in exports last year. He speeds back to his home village on the revamped highway in a silver Mercedes E220. His example spurs more young men to follow him back.

In a fine white shirt and gold chain, Mr. Dholakia sat in his round white office, its sterile modishness far from his dusty youth, and analyzed his ascent. In today's India, he said, migrating from country to city was the only way. He was rich enough now to buy his entire village many times over.

"If you want to play international cricket, you need a proper playground; you cannot play in a field," he said, with six television screens to monitor his workers before him. "If you want to grow internationally, you have to leave your place."

Dreams to Chase

In the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, B. P. Pandey intuited as much, although his dreams were more prosaic than a multi-continental business empire. He came to Surat, he said, "to earn and enjoy."

Rough nubs, not polished facets, had brought him from the rural hinterland. Surat, once famed for its silks and brocades, has become a synthetic textile hub. The clacking of 600,000 hidden power looms fills its streets. Its factories texturize yarn, produce embroidery thread, weave saris and ship all of it along the highways to Punjab, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.

Mr. Pandey had come to be a cog in this enterprise. Farming back home was dying, and his aspirations rising. He did not want to work in his home area, he said. He wanted what the city offered - energy, opportunity, the rewards of globalization.

Those rewards were not yet in reach. Mr. Pandey, 30, working in a yarn texturizing factory, earned only 2,100 rupees, or $46 a month. It was more than he could earn at home, but hardly enough to lift him from poverty. Yet he counted himself lucky to have a job.

India's relatively low exports and underdeveloped manufacturing sector - only 25 percent of its economy - meant the demand for factory jobs in the city far outstripped the supply. Many migrants eked out work as street vendors or day laborers.

The expanded highway was already giving Surat's textile industry a boost, cutting the time to move goods to ports, and to cities around the country. It had also cut the travel time to Mumbai, formerly Bombay: the 155 miles separating the two cities now could be driven in just over three hours, and Mumbaikars were coming to Surat to invest.

But fixing the roads would not be enough to make India competitive. Ports and airports also need work. Inflexible labor laws, excessive bureaucracy and indifference to quality by industries long sheltered from competition have undermined India's race for a larger piece of the global economy. Even Surat's two main industries were vulnerable to these handicaps, and China was hungrily eyeing them both.

Rigid and strike-happy labor unions, meanwhile, have cramped growth, and prompted industry to migrate toward cities without them. One result was that workers like Mr. Pandey had no union, and thus no benefits, no contract, no job security. He worked six and a half days a week, his only shift off stemming from a mandatory power cut, when he rested in his room. He lived in a barren tenement above the factory where he worked, in an overcrowded, underserviced industrial estate.

Mr. Pandey had come to enjoy, but the city had no real entertainment, and only 774 women for every 1,000 men. For many migrants, alcohol - brought down the highway like everything else here - filled the gaps.

Money and Motivation

If cities' conditions were grim, and the earnings meager, their fruits still tasted sweet in the village. To the rural poor in India's eastern and northern states, Surat and other cities to the south and west offered the best hope for a decent job.

The men in the state of Orissa, on India's eastern coast, had long ago concluded that literally crossing their country to work beat farming the fields next door. In Surat, they had cornered some of the more lucrative textile jobs, and shoehorned relatives and friends from Orissa into them as well.

The money-order economy they had created was reconfiguring life back home. Sushant Mohanti and two dozen other men from his village, which sat next to the highway in Orissa, regularly went to work in Surat's textile factories, about 870 miles away. He sent to his family at least one-third of the $150 or more he earned each month, as did the others.

For many rural families, having a member working in a city protected against vagaries of weather or crops. But it could also mean enough money for a substantially better life. Mr. Mohanti swept his hand grandly across the product of the migrants' labors: a row of solid, or "pukka," houses that had replaced the village's thatched huts.

But migrants were bringing home more than money.

Five hundred to 700 people from the village of Golantara in Orissa had gone to Surat to work, said Bibuti Jena, a former village head. They came back with new drive, haranguing less motivated peers who used caste barriers, unemployment or a lack of land to justify their inertia.

"I go out and work, why don't you?" the returnees said, and their words resonated.

"People are less lazy," Mr. Jena said of the village that spread behind him. "The work culture is changing."

So were desires. A bit north on the highway in Orissa, Nila Madhav, 21, stood on the median, next to fellow villagers selling watermelons to passing cars.

After four years of traveling to Bangalore to do embroidery work for $90 a month, he said, he could no longer see himself cultivating watermelon, or farming at all. It wasn't only the money: he had adapted to the city's ways, and south India's gentler climate, in the process rejecting the life of his parents.

"It's very hot here," he said of the spot his family had farmed for generations, "and I don't like to work in the heat."

Mr. Madhav had returned from the city with not only a new attitude, but also with a new language. His native language was Oriya, but he was holding forth on the median in Hindi. In cities like Bangalore and Surat, far from the Hindi-speaking north, Hindi had become the migrant lingua franca, the vernacular of a new pan-Indian culture.

Urban work was creating new identities. And in a country where caste has determined fates from birth, it also offered something subversive: freedom.

The Power of Labor

Given that they were sleeping at a highway crossroads in the city of Udaipur, 315 miles north of Surat, Shankar Lal Rawat and his fellow pavement dwellers did not look like liberated men. They had come from a village to the north, and were living day and night on their patch of cement, where they waited for contractors to hire them as porters or construction workers for less than $2 a day.

They were farmers, but the dynamics of their village had made farming unprofitable. As Adivasis, members of India's indigenous tribes, their status matched that of the lowest castes. The power in their village, much of the land, the money-lending monopoly and access to the water supply all belonged to a Rajput, or upper-caste, landlord named Jaswant Singh.

He paid just over a dollar a day for the men to labor in his fields. He charged prohibitive rates for the water they needed to work their own land, and for the loans they took to pay him for it. In their village, as in much of India, the caste system had conflated ritual status and economic power.

So they had chosen to travel down the new highway to the city and its thriving construction industry. The men's migration had deprived Jaswant Singh of his labor supply - a problem emerging for upper-caste landlords across India as lower castes leave - and asserted their financial independence.

Gandhi idealized villages as the way to return Indians to their precolonial state. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit, or untouchable, leader who helped write India's Constitution, saw it differently: he called villages a cesspool, "a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism," and urged untouchables to flee them for urban anonymity.

In a modernizing India, Ambedkar's words are being heeded as never before for economic, not social reasons. Over time, the results may be the same.

Mr. Rawat, 30, and the other laborers living by the highway had traded rural poverty for urban, and left their families behind. The city's daily wages amounted to only slightly more than they would have earned tilling Jaswant Singh's fields. But in the choice of where to struggle, or whom to owe, was power - hardly a revolution, but a start.

On that wall found in Lower Manhattan

Found: Old Wall in New York, and It's Blocking the Subway
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

Correction Appended

Three weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority started digging a subway tunnel under Battery Park, the project hit a wall. A really old wall. Possibly the oldest wall still standing in Manhattan.

It was a 45-foot-long section of a stone wall that archaeologists believe is a remnant of the original battery that protected the Colonial settlement at the southern tip of the island. Depending on which archaeologist you ask, it was built in the 1760's or as long ago as the late 17th century.

Either way, it would be the oldest piece of a fortification known to exist in Manhattan and the only one to survive the Revolutionary War period, said Joan H. Geismar, president of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City.

"To my knowledge, it's the only remain of its kind in Manhattan," Ms. Geismar said. "It's a surviving Colonial military structure. That's what makes it unique."

Among the items found around the wall are a well-preserved halfpenny coin dated 1744 and shards of smoking pipes and Delft pottery, said Amanda Sutphin, director of archaeology for the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission.

"It's one of the most important archaeological discoveries in several decades in New York City," said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. "Everybody knows that the Bronx is up and the Battery's down. But I don't think anybody anticipated that the Battery was 10 feet down."

Some city officials are excited about the discovery because of what it might teach historians and tourists about life in New York under British rule.

But its discovery has posed a problem for transit officials, who are in a hurry to replace the 100-year-old South Ferry station.

Ms. Geismar and other archaeologists said it was too soon to say exactly when the wall was built or by whom. Most likely, it is the base of a barrier at what was then the shoreline, built to protect soldiers as they fired guns and cannons at attacking ships, they said.

Several historians and archaeologists interviewed about the find said they did not have enough information to compare its significance with other discoveries in Lower Manhattan. In 1979, the walls of the Lovelace Tavern, which was built in 1670, were found during excavation for the building at 85 Broad Street that now serves as the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. And in 1991, digging for a federal building a block north of City Hall turned up the African Burial Ground that dates from the early 1700's. In both cases, at least some of the remains were preserved.

A battery wall appears on maps from the 1760's, but some archaeologists said they have a hunch that this wall may predate that one by as much as 60 years. Some say the discovery of the coin near the base dates it to at least the 1740's. There is no way to tell for sure exactly how old the wall is, but the archaeologists want to study the material in and around it.

What is clear about the battery wall, which sits on bedrock about nine feet below street level, is that it is in the way of the transportation authority's plan to build a section of tunnel for the No. 1 train that will connect to a new South Ferry station.

The authority planned to spend about $400 million on the project, which began in late 2004 and is scheduled to be completed in two years. The money came from the Federal Transit Administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

But the authority has not estimated how much the discovery will add to the cost of the project or to its duration, said Tom Kelly, an M.T.A. spokesman.

"It's premature to discuss this thing at all, other than to say that we have made this find and we are protecting it," Mr. Kelly said.

The authority's handling of the site has already rankled some preservationists.

When an excavation crew discovered the eight-foot-thick wall in early November, it was one continuous stretch of cut and mortared stones about 45 feet long, archaeologists familiar with the project said. But pictures and drawings produced by the authority's employees show that the wall is now in two smaller pieces about 10 feet apart. The gap, the archaeologists said, was created by the steel claw of a backhoe before they could halt work at the site.

For the past month, work on the tunnel there has been at a standstill while officials of the various city agencies involved have debated how to proceed with construction of the tunnel while preserving some or all of the wall.

The authority's contractor on the project, Schiavone Construction of Secaucus, N.J., was being paid extra to complete its work in Battery Park quickly so that the park could reopen by summer. In exchange for the right to tear up the park, the authority agreed to spend more than $10 million cleaning up the mess and helping to reconfigure the park as the Parks Department has envisioned. That redesign would include a new bicycle path to link the riverfront on the east and west sides.

But the contractor is already a few weeks behind schedule, and engineers are concerned about a prolonged delay. One idea the authority floated was to remove a three-foot-long section of the wall to be preserved elsewhere, then plow ahead with the excavation.

Mr. Benepe and Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said they had been assured that no decisions had been reached on the matter.

"I'll talk to Parks about that and look at the options and see how much could be and should be preserved," Mr. Tierney said.

The unease among the various officials was apparent yesterday when archaeologists from the preservation commission and representatives of the Parks Department arrived at the site, which has been cordoned off with a plywood fence. A group of officials from the transportation authority's Capital Corporation turned the visitors away, telling them that the wall had been hidden under wooden planks that could not easily be lifted.

That response came as a surprise to the Parks Department representatives who were preparing to hold a news conference there today with remarks provided by officials including Mr. Benepe and Katherine N. Lapp, the executive director of the transportation authority.

Late yesterday, the various agencies said two planks would be removed to provide a glimpse of the wall, and the news conference today would go on without Ms. Lapp.

The squabbling did not dampen the enthusiasm of the preservationists.

"This is thrilling," said Warrie Price, president of the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that supports revitalization of the Battery. Ms. Price added that she hoped the wall could be reconstructed, at least in part, above ground in the park.

"If these stones are able to be reused," she said, "it would be wonderful to be able to actually touch this history."

On the last Ziegfield girl.

Last Living Ziegfeld Girl Recalls Her Youth in Follies
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

The last of the Ziegfeld Girls is still dancing.

Doris Eaton Travis, Broadway's longest-running performer, is planning to waltz again at the New Amsterdam Theater for two nights in March. When the curtain rises again at her old stomping grounds, Mrs. Travis will be 102.

"The New Amsterdam is where I started," Mrs. Travis said recently from her ranch in Norman, Okla. "And that's where it looks like I'm going to finish."

Mrs. Travis, the honorary president of the National Ziegfeld Club in New York, which raises money for indigent women in show business, was 14 when she became a member of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1918, joining a legion of long-legged lovelies in a variety show created by the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Along with two sisters and two brothers who also appeared in the Follies - which featured singers and comics as dancers and ran from 1907 until 1931, the year before Mr. Ziegfeld's death - Mrs. Travis worked the stage alongside stars like Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers.

For the past eight years, she has returned to New York to help raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, dusting off old dance numbers like the swing trot and the black bottom before several thousand theatergoers who probably missed her opening act 87 years ago.

"Every year, she brings down the house," said Nils Hanson, administrator of the Ziegfeld Club. "She's the darling of Broadway, a New York treasure."

When Mrs. Travis first performed for Broadway Cares in 1998, she was joined by four other original Ziegfeld Girls, all of whom have since died.

Last month, when the former Ziegfeld dancer Dorothy Wegman Raphaelson died in Manhattan at 100, Mrs. Travis became the sole survivor of a bygone era of song and dance, when the Follies shared Broadway marquees with the likes of Fred and Adele Astaire and Bob Hope.

"It's a strange feeling to know that all of that is gone," she said. "It can get kind of lonely."

Mrs. Travis says that she is overcome by a sense of nostalgia whenever she steps onto her old stage. "I think back to all the beautiful people I danced with, all the beautiful numbers, hearing that wonderful applause," she said. "It was a beautiful era, and there hasn't been anything like it since."

Mrs. Travis remembers Mr. Ziegfeld as a man determined to "create an environment of beauty and grace," when putting together his Follies shows.

"He would always scrutinize our costumes," she said. "He always wanted to make sure that there was nothing vulgar about the way we dressed, and that we were all a picture of elegance out there on stage."

Mrs. Travis and her siblings grew up in Washington and began their careers as child actors with Poli's Theater there. By 1913, before Mrs. Travis turned 10, she was performing at Poli's in front of huge Friday night audiences, which sometimes included President Woodrow Wilson. "The president loved coming to our theater," Mrs. Travis recalled. "During curtain calls, we would wave to him, and he would wave back at us."

After leaving New York in 1938, Mrs. Travis opened the first Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Detroit, building a successful chain of 18 of those studios throughout Michigan, which she operated for 30 years. In 1970, she moved to Norman to live on an 880-acre ranch with her husband, Paul Travis, who died two years ago. She continues to keep her spirits and her rhythm alive by teaching country-western dancing at a small club near her home.

"Listen now, some days I get up and I don't feel like doing the Charleston," she said. "But I still feel pretty good, and I still love to dance."

In 1992, at the age of 88, Mrs. Travis became the oldest student to graduate from the University of Oklahoma, where she earned a degree in history.

Two years ago, she was the lead author of "Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family From Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray" (Marquand Books).

"It seems strange to me," she said, "that of everyone from that world, this old Follies Girl is the last one standing."

And the last one dancing.