When Donald Trump met Xi Jinping, it was raining in Ronca Sopra Ascona, Switzerland. In my friend’s Swiss apartment on the Italian border, we baked bread for the Sabbath and watched Latin American TV. I wanted to see how the high-power meeting was playing out in one part of the world where the two superpowers compete, invading, sanctioning, waging war, making peace, building bridges, cutting off oil supplies, installing solar panels, and—mostly—extracting resources.
The Latin American commentators took the meeting seriously, but they also noted its theatrical aspects. China greeted Trump and his billionaire entourage with government officials and children, but no Xi. Elon Musk rolled his eyes and cocked his head like a bird. Trump slept with his head leaning toward Xi’s shoulder.
The Xi /Trump handshake was positively Marx Brothers-esque. After seeing that wrist-pumping power play a few times, I switched from watching noticias to rewatching the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s anti-fascist masterpiece, The Great Dictator, where the two dictators meet and do a similar routine.
The rain stopped for a little while, and we went for a walk in the local cemetery, where we encountered ghosts that spoke. Among the rocks and flowers was a gravestone for—Paulette Goddard—leading actress in The Great Dictator.
Paulette was married to Charlie Chaplin for a while, and also starred in Modern Times, the classic anti-capitalist movie of the mid-20th century, in which she played a breadline waif to Charlie’s cog in a factory wheel.
Paulette’s gravestone is next to a larger one for her third husband, Erich Maria Remarque, author of the anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Erich first came to Ronca Sopra Ascona when he was kicked out of Germany by the Nazis for his anti-war, anti-nationalist masterpiece based on his own experience as a German soldier in World War I. I noticed that he was born and died in the same years as my grandmother: 1898-1970. She was also a young WWI veteran on the German side. She served as a nurse. It was her Jewishness, not her politics, that caused her to flee the Nazis. Switzerland did not harbor my family like it did Remarque.
May 15, 2026, I was also thinking about the beginning of the ongoing Nakba, the catastrophe of violent displacement by Israelis of Palestinians. Remarque’s Western Front is a book that reaches across the decades, ever relevant to the current genocide, in its rejection of any nationalism that justifies the dehumanization of others to the point where you feel righteous killing them.
This day, when dictators strutted on the world stage, and bombs continued to fall to make the rich richer, we encountered the gravestones of a writer and an actor whose 20th-century anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-nationalist, pro-human messages spoke truths to our fragile 21st-century moment.
