"It's a Small World After All, It's a Small World After All, It's a Small World After All, It's a Small, Small World " Vanessa L. Ochs Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia It was at least a year before 1964 and I lived in Long Island, no more than half an hour from what would eventually become the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadow. Regularly we passed by the site being constructed en route to my grandparents' house in Paterson, New Jersey. We also drove by just for fun, as gas hadn't yet became precious, and no one seemed to have noticed we were living in an environment that needed protection. A Sunday drive for us was a treat, even novel, much like those rides we would soon take into the future as if we were the Jetson family, courtesy of the Ford Motor's people, when the World's Fair came alive. Month by month, I witnessed the World's Fair being created: there were trucks, scaffolding, ribbons of highway looping over and under, then the Unisphere. I pitied children not graced to live on Long Island. I knew I was blessed to have a ringside seat at the creation of this new world. My reviews were always affirmative: It was good, it was neat, it was right-on, it was groovy. Just as I had witnessed signs of my sister's growing in my mother's stomach, and felt already acquainted and even possessive of her as my baby even before she was born, I felt that witnessing the gestation of the World's Fair gave me an edge, making this my World's Fair when it finally opened. We went often as a family, but we also went on class trips, like when the P.S.#5 Elementary School chorus sang "Edelweiss" (I had a solo) and other hits from The Sound of Music at the New York Pavilion. We were instructed to dress like little Swiss girls, with colorful dirndls, ruffled white blouses, our hair braided and coiled. (Lacking a dirndl, I was told by my mother that I would look as Swiss as the next person in my plaid, pleated Sabbath skirt with a petticoat underneath.) The boys, wearing their gym-day shorts with crepe paper streamer suspenders pinned on and wearing their sisters' Bonnie Doon knee socks, became little Swiss boys in lederhosen. In those days, we believed we could save the world by going "trick or treating" for Unicef , by adopting a foster child in some miserable country as a student council project, and by sending a CARE package dropped out of a helicopter in to the hands of hungry people. (In fact, saving the world seemed easier than saving Plaid Stamps, as you didn't need to lick many stamps or go to a redemption center.) In those days, you could go to the Japan pavilion at the World's Fair and not have to bother going to Japan. You could do a report on Russia, and knock it off in four pages provided you had paragraphs for "geography," "natural resources," "history," "most famous products," and "people. " Consequently, we believed it was easy to think about and characterize foreign people; as easy as it was to pretend to be one; as easy as it was for us, smart, lucky and resourceful Americans, to save foreigners-that is, the rest of the world-- with our gestures, so small they were mindless. For just a few cents, or so our Unicef containers advertised, you could feed a village for a day, a family for a week, a child for a year. I knew a good deal about foreign people because I was an avid reader (actually, a looker at pictures) of National Geographic. My Uncle Ephraim had gotten me a subscription and, when my certificate of membership arrived, he explained that it was no small thing to be nominated as a member of the National Geographic Society. I assumed it was something like being elected president, and never understood why no others framed and posted their certificates. I also knew about foreign people from what I might now call "proto-field work." When we weren't visiting my grandparents, my family would dress up and spend Sunday afternoons at Idewild Airport. There we stood on the balcony overlooking International Arrivals and gave ourselves points each time we spotted a foreign person in native dress. "Look, Look! There's an Indian in a sari! One point!" " Look, a kimono, a turban! Two more points!" We hit the jackpot if we spotted a foreign person in native dress who got caught by the customs inspectors for bringing in something undeclared. "Oy vey iz mir! What were they thinking?" my parents would exclaim as the customs inspector went through everything in the foreign person's suitcase, even underwear. Sometimes my Uncle Ephraim came along, though it never dawned on us that we could win points by looking at him and exclaiming, "Look! A yarmulke!" From school, my magazine and airport excursions, I knew this: Foreign people wore their native dress instead of real clothes, sang native songs instead of normal music, and ate native dishes instead of regular food. They performed native dances and ceremonies in celebration of things we regular people took for granted (like the coming of spring) or ignored (like the harvest). Foreign people made sacrifices of flowers, incense and animals to appease their various gods: we, being brighter, knew there was only one God, and our sensible God-whether he and his long white beard existed or not--accepted only prayer, checks and apparently, Israel Bonds. Foreign people couldn't do things as we did just because we wanted to. They had customs, both quaint and weird, which governed what to do, how to do it, what to say, and when and where. Whereas I had my Barbie dolls and took them out of their case whenever and wherever I wanted and could choose to pretend they were getting oral polio vaccines at the doctor or dating and then getting engaged to Ken, every Japanese girl, governed by customs, celebrated "Girls' Day" by arranging her precious dolls in a multi-tiered display and by holding court, introducing her doll collection to visitors coming to pay their respects. My knowledge of foreign people and their ways-- quaint, deliberate, sometimes plain stupid, but always colorful and jolly-as-a-Mexican-hat-dance was also derived from my collection of dolls of foreign countries. Unlike my Barbies who got stuffed in their box like socks in a sock drawers and got poured out like Cheerios, my dolls of foreign countries were arranged with care and placed on a shelf, hardly ever to be played with. They were fragile and precious, and were, like the foreigners we spied on at the airport, the real thing, coming from real foreign countries. (That's how I understood their banishment to high display shelves. Ultimately, I would learn they were quarantined. We could admire the novelty of foreigners in magazines and airports, but the foreign dolls, like real foreigners, might have the real germs of foreigners that could give us malaria or the plague. This may explain why some of the dolls always remained in their see-through plastic containers.) The dolls were brought back by relatives who had "gone abroad," and wanted to "broaden my horizons" with their educational gifts. Why would I doubt the correspondence between these foreign dolls and their real, foreign counterparts? My first foreign doll, a French doll passed down to me by my aunt who had outgrown her, wore a pink puffy satin dress and black leathery boots. She was, from her flexible legs, a can-can dancer, and the fact that she came without underpants or lost them en route, confirmed a jumping rope ditty we sang about all the girls in France losing their underpants. Many of my girlfriends had similar collections; some even had geisha girls in glass boxes displayed on top of their family's living room curio cabinet. Thirty years later, scholar Susan Stewart gave perspective to our collections of foreign dolls: "The exotic object represents distance appropriated: it is symptomatic of the more general cultural imperialism that is tourism's stock in trade. To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy... (Stewart 1996, 147) I always noted the "in miniature" quality of all these dolls from foreign countries, even in the geisha girl dolls, which were larger than any dolls I had ever seen (excepting that life-size giant, Patty Play Pal.) It never dawned on me that people traveling to America might bring home a doll representing us, or that we could be miniaturized, commodified, domesticated. We wore regular clothing and not native dress; and because we ate Wonder Bread, which made us grow huge, and wore Keds, which made us run faster and jump taller, we Americans resisted representation in any static form. Defying reduction, defying collection, defying description by a certain limited set of observable traits, we were real. This was our privilege, unstated but deeply felt: to be the subject who observes, and not the object who is contemplated, put into its place. It was no surprise to me that when the World's Fair decided to feature a pavilion about the peoples of the world, it would look much like the "hands-off" foreign doll collection of an American girl. Soon, I learned it was not the "they" of the World's Fair that made this decision. Rather, it was the Pepsi-Cola Company that selected and sponsored this "salute to the children of the world," which was, according to the 1964-65 Official World's Fair Guide, A series of ingenious Walt Disney animations...a nine-minute boat ride takes visitors through miniature settings from many countries, where Disney-made figures of children sing and dance...The boat ride, called "It's a Small World-a Salute to Unicef," carries spectators past such familiar scenes as France's Eiffel Tower, a Dutch windmill and India's Taj Mahal. The animated figures dance, cavort with droll animals, and in their various languages sing a song called, "It's a Small World," composed especially for the exhibit. In the adjoining pavilion of the U.S. Committee for Unicef...are pictures of children from countries around the world, indicating the needs served by the United Nations... Though I went to the World's Fair many times, I never got to see "It's a Small World" at the Pepsi-Cola pavilion. This made me incredibly sad, incredibly jealous of everyone who had been there. On days I went to the World's Fair with school, the lines at "It's a Small world" were always too long. On days I went with the family, it was either the long lines or my mother's animosity toward the UN and disdain of Unicef that prohibited our going in, a maternal ban which seemed linked to her bothersome prohibition on buying things, particularly Volkswagens, made in Germany (because they were bad to the Jews) and anything made in Japan (either because they were still our enemies and we didn't forgive or trust them yet, or because cheap labor meant cheap work). How I yearned to see this wondrous pavilion! I imagined: large dolls that moved without wires, without puppeteers! A foreign doll collection that came alive, singing and dancing, like the toys that awaked at night in The Velveteen Rabbit. My mother tried to console me with realism: Hadn't I seen "It's a Small World" on special programs "closer than you ever could in real life" in the comfort of my grandparent's living room on their TV, the only TV in our extended family that came with "living color?" Uncomforted, I felt distinctly deprived of all that wonder that should have so easily been mine. Thus, I was in my mid-thirties before I ever saw "It's a Small World" at Disney World. According to Walt Disney himself, my advanced age would not detract from my belated encounter: "Fantasy," Walt had said, "if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time...nothing corrodes or gets run down...And nobody gets any older." I think Walt was right, at least about me then. Standing outside "It's a Small World" in Disney World's Magic Kingdom with my husband, my little girls, and my in-laws (the conceivers and subsidizers of this trip), I was as excited as the eleven-year-old I once was at the World's Fair. In fact, I became eleven years old again, and I was getting this second chance to recover what I had been denied. Finally, I got to see the foreign dolls come magically alive. I could relive the unspoken sixties fantasy: that foreigners were as we imagined them, willing to sing our song in their languages, happy to become dazed as our motors spun them round and round. Quite simply, the ride was pure splendor, everything I had imagined, and I wanted to go back again and again, to spend the whole day (maybe my whole life) there. "Look," my family exclaimed, "Mommy is in heaven. All the dollies. This is her dream come true." A decade later, I was about to visit "It's a Small World" once again, this time with only my younger daughter, now a teenager. I was here to observe "It's a Small World" from the perspective of an anthropologist of religion, which I had become, and to discover how this particular ride might be like a sacred journey, a secular pilgrimage. I didn't imagine I would bring new insights that might alter my experience. Even though I had been trained to attend to the "silencing of the Other" and to the impossibility of "crossing the border" and "knowing the Other," I was convinced I would feel the same wonder I felt before. Jeepers, this was Disney World, not the work of Ruth Behar, Karen McCarthy Brown or Nancy Scheper-Hughes come to life. As we waited in line, I felt distressed when I read Frommer's most recent guide, which I held in my hand. It was so emphatically cynical in tone, even though it was not written for an audience of critical anthropologists. You know the song, and if you don't, you will. It plays continually as you sail 'around the world' through vast rooms designed to represent different countries. They're inhabited by appropriately costumed AudioAnimatronic dolls and animals-all singing It's a small world after all... in tiny doll-like voices. This cast of thousands includes Chinese acrobats, Russian kazatski dancers, Indian snake charmers...French cancan dancers, Irish leprechauns...Arabs on magic carpets...African drummers and lunging hyenas in the jungle...Cute. Very cute. (Frommer: 124-125) No matter, thought I, irrelevant. I am not a jaded person. Even after my children matured, I still collected stuffed animals and gave them names. Only half-fooling, I played peek-a-boo with interest. I knew I would regress to eleven immediately. I counted on a replay so much that I didn't even consider the possibility that new perspectives-mine or some zeitgeist-could change everything. But my return voyage was most curious, even before we reached the ride. To get to the entrance of "It's a Small World" we went by a Bavarian-type restaurant: not really German, but the Germany of Pinocchio and oom-pah-pah. Maybe it was this fuzzy idea of Germany that had just been planted in my mind that primed me for my response as my daughter and I walked down the cement slope to "It's a Small World," got divided into groups, and then were squeezed between rows of metal rods towards our waiting boats. I felt like an unthoughtful cow, allowing myself to enter the chute into the slaughterhouse. Though I had willingly bought our costly admission tickets, chosen to go on this very ride, even skipped across Cinderella's castle to get there, I felt coerced, passive, without agency. And on the brink of disaster, ethnic cleansing, maybe extermination. "I cannot be separated from my daughter," I thought as blond woman dressed as an Italian gondolier shooed us both into our little boat. Why had I felt so much safer last time, so safe that I registered no risk at all? It may have been the presence of my father-in-law, of blessed memory, a man as big, strong, certain and capable as Mister Clean; a Jewish man who built his house with his own two hands. Perhaps it was the power of our full clan, journeying together through space, oblivious to all but our laughter, our joy. When had the myth of the invulnerable American so fully collapsed? I don't know what the last straw was-maybe the bombing of the Twin Towers-but I felt it in my bones: Americans were at risk, like everyone else, and all I could do in response to our endangerment was to cling to my daughter and to look for other versions of ourselves, as if familiar community might save us, as if our own might take us in and provide sanctuary. Around the curve, we were already sailing under a sign reading "The happiest cruise that ever sailed." Says who? Shame, shame, I thought, pulling out my imaginary editor's pen. This was not just a weak, passive sentence that obscured the doer and the "doee," denying an agent, denying agency altogether. This was not even a proper sentence. If the cruise were so happy, wouldn't it go without saying? Such a sign suggested ambivalence, not certainty. The words reminded me of Da lifnai mi atah omed, the Hebrew words that appeared over the ark in my childhood shul, "Know before whom you stand." If I didn't know before whom we stood, would we be in shul in the first place? Enough obsessing about the sign-I could now see the singing, gently moving dollies! I was all geared up, knowing that in "It's a Small World' it's important to identify the country or tribe as fast as possible before the boat sails on. But in my frightened state, my task changed-I needed to recognize our saviors. The first dollies I encountered were a trio holding songbooks wide open at their chests. They reminded me of Christmas carol singers, or robed singers in a church choir. To my surprise, I said "goyim," to myself. "Goyim?" It is not a word I'd ever used; it was my mother's word. Granted, it was not as bad as the word my father used, "schwartzse," as we drove across 125th Street in Harlem and he made us press our carlock buttons down. Still, goyim did not belong to the language of happy ecumenicism spoken in departments of religious studies and in community inter-faith groups. "Die Anderen" I heard myself saying, the other ones, my grandmother's word for all others, even less familiar and potentially more frightening than the garden-variety goyim. This was not my small world. It dawned on me that it was possible that I would find never find anyone like myself here, even if I sailed around all day. My small world was navigated under the stars of Jewish geography: They fled from Odessa, escaped to Shanghai, then the lower Eastside, Brooklyn, the Five Towns, or to Watertown, Rochester. "Oh, I grew up there; oh, I still have cousins there, where'd you go? Temple Beth El, Rabbi Sandrow. My God, me too! How do you like that, what do you know? It's a small world." The happiest cruise that has ever sailed had hardly even begun, when someplace between the can-can girls who equaled France and the bongo drummers who equaled Africa, and sometime before I completely gave up trying to locate myself in this small world, I got the kind of monster headache I've gotten those nights before the first day of school or the first day of a new job, anytime I feel my life is about to change in some way I can't control. The darkness obscured the tears pouring out of my left eye, the one that seems in charge of registering stress. I said nothing about this to my daughter, who was the only member of my family willing to accompany me on this return voyage. Side-coaching myself, I applied pressure on what I pretended to be acupressure points: magic, fun, no cares, akuna matata, have no worries. Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar me'od, v'haikar lo lefached clal. All the world is a narrow bridge, but the main thing is this: not to fear at all. Perhaps I could distract myself from my throbbing skull and could fend off this aching sense of loneliness by intensifying rather than abandoning the search for myself among the singing, dancing dollies. But what signs was I to look for? A 1960s kibbutznik in a kova tembel, a Russian Jew who now skates for Israel in the Olympics dressed in a costume that looks like a polyester tallis? An American Jew from Roslyn vacationing in Eilat wearing a Gottex bathing suit and Teva sandals and swearing that this sure beats the Bahamas? The prophetess Miriam, Barbara Streisand, Dr. Ruth buckling up in the backseat of a New York City cab, the rabbinical women of the Conservative movement, lined up for Frederick Brenner's photograph, wrapped up like a giant Christmas gift in their tefillin? Everywhere I looked, to the eastern shore and to the west, and up above us in hot air balloons, I saw only this: more dollies with their Psalters singing the little tune, but really meaning Halleluya, Ave Maria. And even though the first sign I saw when the cruise was over--Barukh Hashem-Thank God!-was a transliterated "shalom," I had experienced neither hello nor goodbye nor peace nor the wholeness of shleimut. I had seen the cinderblocks, the plasterboard painted sky blue behind the dollies; I had seen the metal runners that our boat did not float on, but ran on, like a train. I had seen a tired ride that needed upkeep, and an image of world peace as one happy shrunken family, and that was tired, too. We had been navigated through worlds of foreign-like children in parallel, and oh-so-separate play: their fun was fun only because they weren't killing each other, because the dollies were kept separate from each other in their own demilitarized zones. The Eskimos didn't raid the Taj Mahal, the British toy soldiers didn't step on the toes of the Mexican morocca players, the Africans stayed in Africa. The music stopped, the ride ended. Thank God, how glad I was to escape from our boat. I got off, as if at Ellis Island, as if at Ben Gurion Airport. I was ready to kiss the tarmac, ready to bentch gomel, to say the prayer one recites when, unexpectedly, one is blessed with a narrow escape. Outside, seeking some corner of the world where we could regain safety, I led us to the nearby Disney gift shop. There, finally, I spied a landsman, a compatriot. It was Barbie, brainchild of Ruth Handler, a Jewish mother, which made Barbie a nice Jewish girl; did it matter that she was blond and plastic? I got closer, hoping to find the Barbies I knew intimately, the ones I grew up with in Long Island: Barbie in her evening gown, Barbie in her blue and white striped bathing suit. Closer up, I saw the Barbies were in pink boxes, each announcing her country and her name, as if she were in the native dress competition the Miss Universe contest: Meet Polish Barbie; and this is Thai Barbie, and now we welcome Mexican Barbie. No, I decided, I would not permit these to be foreign Barbies! Safe on shore, away from the dangerous placelessness and peoplelessness I had suffered in "It's a small world," I would have to be among mishpoche, family. The Polish Barbie wasn't really Polish, not Thai, not Mexican. Even the manufacturing information on the pink packages made this clear: some parts of Barbie were from Malaysia, some costumes were from China and Indonesia-all places, I curiously recalled, that my mother permitted us to buy from. Here was the truth, I decided. I was now among Barbies who were getting dressed up for Purim, the holiday of masquerade recalling one Jewish woman who saved Jewish lives by dressing up as the Queen of Shushan. I was among Barbies who were Queen Esthers, all dressed like dolls from foreign lands, Barbies who could save their own people (and then maybe, if they had time, they could rescue others, because it was a mitzvah, a commandment of compassion.) Look! Here was Swiss Barbie (that is, dressed up in a dirndl to be Swiss), and I made believe she was like me, singing Edelweiss from The Sound of Music at the New York World's Fair. Come the month of Adar, and the day of Purim, Swiss Barbie would deliver mishloach manot, packages of caring, to the people she knows by name, the people in her shtetl, her ghetto, her UJA Federation region, her sisterhood, her Hadassah group, her havurah, her women's Rosh Chodesh group, her small, small world. In the company of this minyan of Barbies, I prayed: Oseh shalom bimromav May the One who makes conceptual peace, Peace as a remote idea, Hu ya'aseh shalom Make a peace you can feel and touch and eat. A peace you recognize when you see it, Like the nose on your face. Alainu v'al kol yoshvai taivail For me, my family, The old neighbors on Fairmount, The new neighbors on Saint Anne's, The UPS guy, and As long as you're at it and all goes well, Everyone else who lives here on the earth. The members of the Barbie minyan made little bows, as I do when I pray, in the direction of each corner of the earth. From the small space that is familiar and safe, we affirm our small world prayer with a small, small Amen. Fodor 1995 Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and Orlando. New York: Fodor's Travel Publications, Inc. Frommer 1996 Walt Disney World and Orlando. 1964 Official Guide of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair Stewart, Susan 1996 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London:Duke University Press. Watts, Steven 1997 The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.