2 | THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
page two
about it with the gourmet, the cat, the
family conflict and the tension.”
In the story, a restaurant called the
Amiable Fleas is situated not far from
the Place de la Concorde, a plaza along
the Seine. (The restaurant could be a
nod to Les Deux Magots, a cafe known
as a famous gathering place for writers
and artists that still exists.) It is run by a
chef named Mr. Amité, who has received
one Michelin star and is eager to earn
another.
“He’s very, very flustered about ev-
erything,” Mr. Gulli said. “He relies on
his cat to taste the food and nod his ap-
proval or disapproval. The cat is a very
magnificent cat named Apollo.”
If you intend to read the 1,500-word
story, the rest of this paragraph could
spoil your appetite: On the day the Mi-
chelin inspector is expected to dine,
there is a series of mishaps, and Mr.
Amité steps on Apollo’s tail. Then he
kicks the cat, which stalks off to an alley
in apparent anger. With Apollo gone, the
meal is a disaster. But then comes a plot
twist, a second chance and a revelation
about a secret ingredient.
“The Amiable Fleas” might seem like
light fare for a writer better known as a
chronicler of human suffering. But com-
edy was also important to Steinbeck,
said Susan Shillinglaw, an English pro-
fessor at San Jose State University, in
California, and a former director of itsMartha Heasley Cox Center for Stein-
beck Studies.
“He liked to spin up funny stories and
he had a great sense of humor,” she said.
“People might say this isn’t signature
Steinbeck. But it kind of is, because he
does have that range and that flexibil-
ity.”
Steinbeck’s novels of the 1930s, like
“Tortilla Flat,” “Of Mice and Men” and“The Grapes of Wrath,” which was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,
were largely rooted in the coastal region
of Central California — Steinbeck’s
birthplace — during the Depression.
But then came the ’40s, a time of tran-
sition. Steinbeck wrote a travelogue
with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts,
was a war correspondent and finished a
few more novels, including “Cannery
Row.” He had a difficult year in 1948,
when he split from his second wife and
Mr. Ricketts, a good friend, died unex-
pectedly.
The ’50s were perhaps a happier time
for Steinbeck. He remarried for the last
time in 1950, published “East of Eden” in
1952 and traveled frequently with his
wife, Elaine. Despite a lifetime of rest-
lessness, Steinbeck’s love for Paris was
evident, Prof. Shillinglaw said. At the
time he was writing for Le Figaro in
1954, she added, “he was probably a
happy man.”
In his first piece for the newspaper,
Mr. Steinbeck wrote that he thought it
might be presumptuous for him, a for-
eigner, to write about Paris. But he add-
ed that he changed his mind after con-
sidering the perspective that an out-
sider can bring.
“The uninstructed eye sees things the
expert does not notice,” Steinbeck wrote
in that first submission to Le Figaro.
“Mine is a completely naïve eye on Paris
— but it is an eye of delight.”Shortly thereafter came the story of
the nervous Mr. Amité and the imperi-
ous Apollo.
It is not only about a chef and his cat.
The piece begins more broadly, with a
defense of “little stories” and “soft veri-
ties,” which, the narrator argues, could
sustain people better than hard news
stories, or “the drums of daily doom.”
And it pokes fun at the intellectuals
who gather at the fictional restaurant,
describing a painter who worked in in-
visible ink, an architect who staked his
reputation on his hatred for flying but-
tresses and a poet “whose work was so
gloriously obscure that even he did not
understand it.”
Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature in 1962. During the ’60s, he once
again turned his focus to life in the
United States, examining it critically in
the memoir “Travels With Charley: In
Search of America,” about a road trip he
took with his poodle. He died of heart
failure in 1968, at 66.
Steinbeck was an old hand at gravitas,
Prof. Shillinglaw said, but he should also
be remembered for his modesty and en-
during appreciation for comedy, which
shone through in pieces like the ones he
wrote in Paris.
“What’s important about this is his
range — that he could write something
silly as well as be profound,” she added.
“I think that sort of effortless charm is
characteristic Steinbeck.”John Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, in 1954, the year that he wrote a series of 17 short pieces, mostly nonfiction, that ran in Le Figaro, a French newspaper.BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGESThe lighter side of Steinbeck
STEINBECK,FROM PAGEThe illustration accompanying Stein-
beck’s short story “The Amiable Fleas” in
The Strand Magazine.JEFFREY MCKEEVER VIA THE STRAND MAGAZINEYao Li, a celebrated singer in Shanghai
in the midst of war in the 1930s and ’40s,
whose music remained popular after
she moved to Hong Kong when China
turned Communist, died on July 19. She
was 96.
The death was reported by the news-
papers Ming Pao in Hong Kong and The
Malay Mail in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
No other details were given.
Ms. Yao was called “the silver voice”
in Shanghai, her music influenced by
jazz and Chinese folk. She was not fa-
mous beyond Asia, but at least two of
her songs made an impact in the United
States. An English-language version of
one of her hits, “Rose, Rose, I Love You”
(1940), was recorded by the American
singer Frankie Laine in 1951 and rose to
No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
And last year, “Ren Sheng Jiu Shi Xi”
(or “Life Is Just a Play”), which she re-
leased in Hong Kong in 1959, was used
on the soundtrack of Jon M. Chu’s ro-
mantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians,” a
movie released last year about a New
Yorker who travels to Singapore to meet
her boyfriend’s wealthy family.With her soft, high voice, Ms. Yao was
long referred to as one of the seven great
singing stars of Shanghai, along with
her idol, Zhou Xuan, who was known as
“the olden voice.” The music of Shang-
hai bore not only the rhythms of jazz, but
also global sounds like Cuban rumba
and the Hawaiian steel guitar.
Ms. Yao thrived in that milieu, work-
ing at times with her brother, Yao Min, a
leading songwriter with whom she also
sang duets.
“They created a modern Chinese pop-
ular music that moved elegantly be-
tween swing, the blues, Hollywood
standards and Chinese folk,” Andrew F.
Jones, who teaches modern Chinese lit-
erature and media culture at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, wrote in an
email, “while incorporating traces of
many other styles and sounds from the
multinational soundscape of colonial-
era Shanghai.”
She continued to record after the out-
break of the Second Sino-Japanese War
in 1937 and during Japan’s occupation of
Chinese cities through 1945. One num-
ber, “Congratulations” (1946), sung by
Ms. Yao and her brother, became a famil-
iar song to celebrate the Chinese New
Year. But it was also a commentary on
the defeat of Japan in World War II, Pro-
fessor Jones said.
“The song’s rather melancholy tone,”
he wrote, “reflects both the exhaustion
and misery wrought by eight years of
Japanese occupation” and the distress
that ensued over the social unrest and
civil war that engulfed China in the wake
of the Allied victory.
Ms. Yao (whose name was sometimes
spelled Yao Lee) was born on Sept. 3,
1922, and raised in Shanghai. As a girl in
the early 1930s, she listened to Zhou on
the radio but was too poor to buy herrecords. Ms. Yao began singing on the
radio at 13 — at least once on a program
with Zhou — and signed her first con-
tract, with Pathé Records, a part of EMI,
three years later. She became a popular
nightclub attraction.
“Big movie stars like Li Lihua would
come every Sunday to watch me per-
form and request specific songs,” she re-
called in an interview in 2013 with The
Glass, a cultural magazine.
She married Huang Baoluo in the late
1940s.
She did not stay in Shanghai much
longer. The Communist Party took
power in 1949 and, fearing that she
might have to endure re-education by
the new regime, she fled to Hong Kong
with her husband the next year.
“I was so scared and very sad,” she
told The Glass. “I thought my life, and
career, were finished.”They were not. The musical world of
Shanghai was largely recreated in Hong
Kong, which was then a British colony.
EMI opened offices there and invited
her and other Pathé artists to record.
She also started working in the film in-
dustry, providing vocals that were lip-
synced by the actress Chung Ching in a
series of pictures, including “Songs of
the Peach Blossom River” (1956).
By then Ms. Yao had begun to emulate
the pop and country singer Patti Page
by deepening her voice. She continued
to sing into the mid-1960s. After her
brother’s death, in 1967, she took an ex-
ecutive job at EMI.
Information about her survivors was
not available.
Ms. Yao stopped making records, she
said, because of the encroachment of
modern studio technology.
Today, she said, “the singer needs
only to sing to prerecorded music, and
she can do as many takes as she wishes,”
she lamented in an interview with The
Straits Times, a newspaper in Singa-
pore, in 1992.
“For me,” she added, “I could never do
without a live band. Pretaped music kills
all the spontaneity and feelings in me.”YAO LI
1 922-BY RICHARD SANDOMIRAn undated picture of Yao Li, whose
singing career continued in Hong Kong,
where she lived after the Communists
gained power in mainland China.PICTURES FROM HISTORY AND GRANGER, NEW YORK‘Silver voice’ singer
of wartime Shanghai
Yao Li and her brother “created a
modern Chinese popular music
that moved elegantly between
swing, the blues, Hollywood
standards and Chinese folk.”Agnes Heller, a prominent Hungarian
philosopher and dissident who repeat-
edly found herself unwelcome in her
own country, died on July 19 while vaca-
tioning on Lake Balaton in western Hun-
gary. She was 90.
Her son, Gyorgy Feher, said Ms.
Heller had gone for a swim, a favorite
activity, before her body was found float-
ing in the lake. She had been staying at
the summer resort of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences in the town of Bal-
atonalmadi.
The cause of death was not immedi-
ately clear. The police, Mr. Feher said,
saw no sign of a heart attack or aneu-
rysm. “So what can one say?” he said by
email.
The police ruled out the possibility of a
crime, according to the Hungarian news
site Hungary Today.
Ms. Heller, a prolific, wide-ranging
writer in multiple languages, explored
Marxism, ethics and modernity as well
as everyday life. Her eventful life includ-
ed losing her father in the Holocaust,
falling into official disfavor after the
Hungarian uprising of 1956 and, most
recently, speaking out against Viktor
Orban, Hungary's right-wing prime
minister.
“A story is always a story of choices,”
she wrote in one of her final essays, pub-
lished in the journal Social Research last
spring. “It was not written in the stars
that Hungary would fare worst among
all post-Soviet states or that it would be
the most radical in its elimination of
freedom of the press or balance of powerin government and wind up with a sys-
tem I call tyranny.”
“Tyrannies always collapse,” she con-
tinued, “but whether Hungarians will
escape with their sanity and sufficient
clarity for a new start remains to be
seen.”
Ms. Heller’s strong criticism of the
current Hungarian government left
some friends and colleagues skeptical
about the circumstances of her death.
“She was a strong and avid swimmer,”
Judith Friedlander, a former dean of the
New School for Social Research in New
York, where Ms. Heller taught for more
than 20 years, wrote in a tribute to her.
“Yet somehow on Friday, she went into
the water and did not come out.”
Ms. Friedlander called Ms. Heller
“one of Europe’s most revered philoso-
phers and outspoken dissidents, both
during Communist times and again
more recently.”
She noted that Ms. Heller had gone to
the science academy’s resort every
year.
“The Orban government had recently
passed a new law that was going to dis-
mantle the academy, and Agnes was still
trying to fight that decision,” she wrote.
“Full of energy and terribly concerned
about the plight of Hungary and other
countries in Europe, she was not about
to give up.”
Agnes Heller was born on May 12,
1929, to a middle-class Jewish family in
Budapest.
Her father, Pal Heller, was a lawyer
and writer who had been helping people
escape Hungary and the Nazi sphere
when he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944;
he died there. She remained in Budapest
with her mother, Angela Ligeti, expect-
ing to be executed.
“A trauma cannot be forgotten,” Ms.Heller said in a talk in 2014, when she
was awarded the Wallenberg Medal by
the University of Michigan, given in
memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the
Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of
thousands of Hungarian Jews during
World War II. “You will not forget it even
if you want to forget it. The more you
want to forget it, the less you can forget
it.”
Other family members also died in the
concentration camps, and one theme of
her later explorations in philosophy was
set.
“I promised myself to solve the dirty
secret of the twentieth century,” she
wrote in “A Short History of My Philoso-phy” (2010), “the secret of the unheard
of mass murders, of several million
corpses ‘produced’ by genocides, by the
Holocaust, and all of them in times of
modern humanism and enlighten-
ment!”
Much of her writing looked at issues
of ethics and morality and pondered the
relationships between the self and the
human institutions into which a person
is born.
Her earliest influence was the philos-
opher Gyorgy Lukacs, whom she en-
countered somewhat by accident when
enrolled at the University of Budapest
after the war.
She was studying to be a scientist, buta boyfriend asked her to accompany him
to a philosophy lecture.
“I sat there listening to Lukacs and I
understood hardly a single sentence,”
she told the journal Radical Philosophy
in 1999. “But I did understand one thing:
that this was the most important thing I
had ever heard in my life, and so I must
understand it.”
She fell into Lukacs’s intellectual cir-
cle and later, in the 1960s, became a prin-
cipal member of what was known as the
Budapest School, philosophers whose
common link was Lukacs. They initially
focused on applications of Marxism,
though most later distanced themselves
from it.
Ms. Heller also became politically ac-
tive, joining the Communist Party in- It was the beginning of a turbulent
relationship with the authorities.
After the Hungarian uprising of 1956
was snuffed out by the Soviet Union,
Lukacs was temporarily deported and
fell into official disfavor, as did his fol-
lowers. Ms. Heller lost her position as a
philosophy professor at the University
of Budapest. She felt ostracized. People
she had considered friends turned away
from her on the street to avoid having to
greet her.
Her relationship to official powers in
Hungary continued to be strained, and
in 1977 she emigrated to Australia to
teach at La Trobe University in Mel-
bourne. She joined the New School in
“Heller was eventually faced with the
task of reconstructing her life and ca-
reer in another country and language,”
John Grumley wrote of this period in the
biography “Agnes Heller: A Moralist in
the Vortex of History” (2005). “This is
an obstacle that has destroyed many in-
tellectuals. Yet Heller’s emigration to
Australia in 1977 was followed by an
enormous burst of theoretical produc-
tivity. Writing in another language and
re-establishing her credentials in novel
surroundings was just the challenge
that she needed.”
She published at least 20 books after
leaving Hungary, including “A Theory of
History” (1982) and “Can Modernity
Survive?” (1990). She retired from the
New School in 2009. At her death, her
son said, she had been living primarily
in Budapest.Ms. Heller’s first marriage, to the phi-
losopher Istvan Hermann in 1949, ended
in divorce in 1962. Her second husband,
Ferenc Feher, another member of the
Budapest School, died in 1994. In addi-
tion to her son, she is survived by a
daughter from her first marriage,
Zsuzsa Hermann.
In recent years Ms. Heller lectured
and taught all over the world and spoke
out often about the political situation in
Hungary.
In a memorial that Professor Grum-
ley said he would include in a forthcom-
ing book of her lectures that he is edit-
ing, he wrote that “the European public
sphere will miss her” because of her
stand “against xenophobic populism.”
“Hungary will miss her even more,”
he added. She was a “a fearless critic of
Viktor Orban’s nationalist right-wing
authoritarian and anti-Semitic govern-
ment at a time it really needs a robust
opposition.”Hungarian philosopher was an outspoken dissident
AGNES HELLER
1 929-BY NEIL GENZLINGERAgnes Heller in 1981. A prolific writer, she was also a critic of the Communist regime
after 1956 and Hungary’s current prime minister, the right-wing Viktor Orban.ANGELO PALMA/A3/CONTRASTO/REDUXAgnes Heller was “full of energy
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