Berkshire Eagle: Accents in the Berkshires

Comedian Patton Oswalt discusses his rescheduled Mahaiwe show (expect a night of pure escapism!), his approach to comedy amid turbulent times, influences like Jonathan Winters, voice acting, gothic horror in New England, and upcoming projects, including "The Sandman," Season 2.

Richard W. Painter is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and former chief White House ethics lawyer (2005-07) in the second Bush White House. A leading expert on government ethics, corporate law and securities litigation, Painter discusses the perils of President Trump's appointment of billionaire Elon Musk to head the shadowy Department of Government Accountability.

LENOX — Alexandra Tyer’s father did not like dictators. And so they did not like him.

Gustavo Avila got jailed by Cuba’s Fidel Castro when Alexandra was 7 years old. He was released several months later, on the condition that he take his family on the first flight out to Panama.

That country granted the Cuban family asylum because Alexandra’s mother, Alejandra, was Panamanian.

In Panama, Avila, a lawyer who published his anti-government views, ran afoul of Manuel Antonio Noriega. Another monthslong jail term was the result.

The United States invasion of Panama in December 1989 set him free.

“By then he was ready to move us to Venezuela,” his daughter says, laughing.

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GREAT BARRINGTON — Andres Huertas didn’t speak any English when his parents moved from Bogota, Colombia, to the Berkshires. It took a drawing of a soccer ball for him to realize that he might be able to communicate in his new country after all.

Another 10-year old boy at Undermountain School in Sheffield drew that picture and showed it to Andres as an invitation.

“I kind of understood what he was signaling,” Huertas recalls 17 years later, after his midnight shift as a police officer in Great Barrington. “That was one of my happiest memories as a child, because I was able to play soccer again. That’s how we were communicating, through pictures.”

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PITTSFIELD — Paulino Aguilar survived an encounter with El Salvador’s notorious death squads in the 1980’s. Aguilar taught high school students in gang-ridden San Salvador until he moved to Pittsfield in 2002. He lived on North Street and started work at 3 in the morning at the former Morningside Bakery on Tyler Street.

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Tanea Lavalle lives a long way from Moldova. But so do most of her former classmates and friends from this small Eastern European country, landlocked in between Romania and Ukraine.

Lavalle estimates “maybe 80 percent” of her classmates and friends have left this former Soviet republic. The ones left behind might just be biding their time until they can follow.

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NORTH ADAMS — Had Paul de Jong’s Holocaust surviving father decided to accept the job offer in New York, this immigrant’s tale would not have been told.

Vrin de Jong, a schoolmate of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, survived the murderous Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, where most Dutch Jews did not. On his first trip to the United States, by boat, in 1951, “He traveled to the promised land,” tells his son in the large North Adams house he and his wife, Carin, are renovating.

“I have the photobooks from my father and he had a fantastic time. He felt welcomed, he felt understood and unjudged as a Jew. As opposed to The Netherlands, where, when he came back from the war, people basically looked at him and said, ‘Well, we didn’t expect to see YOU again.’ ”

Finish the reading the story at: tinyurl.com/accentspodcast

Bintou Kanyi told her family in the West African country of The Gambia that she just had some errands to run at the village market. She did not tell them about the airplane ticket to New York.

“I ran away,” Kanyi says. “Because if I had told them that I was travelling, there were so many things they could do to stop me.”

Kanyi now works as a certified nursing assistant at Berkshire Medical Center. She also studies at Berkshire Community College and next semester will add classes at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts toward degrees in biotechnology and medical technology.

Read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast

PITTSFIELD — Veronica Torres Martin had an accent in her own country before she had one in the United States.

Torres Martin, now 44, is from Chile, but she was born in Germany and lived in Algeria before her parents felt safe enough to return to what was then Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. She was 7 years old.

“That’s when I got introduced to my own culture, and grandparents and cousins that I had never met,” she says in her office at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. She runs Berkshire Health Systems’ Language Services Department, dealing with hundreds of translation issues in dozens of foreign tongues each month.

Read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast

MONTEREY — Sandboarding down the dunes to the pristine beaches, then surfing the ocean waves or fishing or snorkeling in the azure blue waters. Living in Cabo Frio, Brazil, sounds like living in paradise."

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