Where Do We Stand?

 

(That sign needs refreshing and straightening up, doesn't it?)

Oh, where to begin? 

 

With the weather? Warmup and sunshine, then soaking rain, and now, coming up, back to snow. The sunny days were a pleasure, but it is March in Michigan, after all.

Omena Bay, Monday, March 3, 2025

With books? Recently I set aside, unfinished, yet another, this one a biography of a famous author, because after 180 pages read I could not stand to spend another minute in that man’s life. A biography of photographer Edward S. Curtis, by contrast, held me to the end, by which time I concluded that his life was as tragic as that of his subjects, except that he did manage to get his work done, and the tribes he photographed appreciated his work, and he had not succumbed to despair at the end but had in mind yet another project, though that late-life idea was destined not to be realized. Amazing perseverance! An interesting side note in Curtis’s was his correspondence with Belle da Costa Greene, the subject of a book of historical fiction I read very recently (The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray) and whose biography (An Illuminated Life, by Heidi Ardizzone), I now have in my to-read stack. Curtis and Greene were connected through J. P. Morgan, who employed Greene as his personal librarian and who finally underwrote Curtis’s expenses for his 20-volume work, although Curtis himself received no pay for all the years he put in.

 

With the dog? I can hardly “begin” with her now, my paragraph above on books having gone on as long as it did, but I know my readers enjoy having dog notes squeezed in among the books, so, first, here she is in black and white, looking more like our old Sarah than she generally appears to me. One morning I told her, “You are all my dogs,” meaning that she has inherited my love for them and that I see them all now in her. Isn’t that the way it is with dogs, when you come right down to it?

Sunny looking like Sarah --

We got to the dog park two days in a row, too, first with hard-packed ice underfoot and then with melting snow and the reappearance of mud. The dogs, of course, don’t care. They could not care less! (And isn’t it strange how easily Americans in general—I have to watch myself!—have slipped into saying, “I could care less,” when they mean exactly the opposite?) At home, we had not only morning Frisbee time but even the return of tennis ball play one sunny afternoon!

 

Meeting friends!

So there you have weather, books, and dogs, and now I’m going to dip into politics, so if you can’t stand the heat, you can exit the kitchen now. Fair warning!

Late winter thaw

The nation-wide economic boycott of online and big box giants set for Friday, February 28, was largely overshadowed by the shameful spectacle that took place at the White House. There was a pretty strong view, anyway, that a one-day boycott would have no effect whatsoever, either economically or politically, and yet, in solidarity with the idea, I finally made a plan to support it in my own way, because it felt good to be doing something at last. And then I realized, from all the feedback I received to my announcement, that other people felt the same way, that there is a great hunger for ways to take action, other than making repeated calls to our so-called Congressional “representatives” who could not care less than they do about our opinions or what we would like to see happening in Congress. (What we would like to see: evidence of backbone!)

 

So that felt good, but what next? The answer came when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with her to a public protest in Traverse City on March 4. We would be protesting not only the administration’s shameful treatment of the president of Ukraine but every other destructive and hateful thing he has done in the last – is it possible that it’s only been six weeks???!!!

 

The thing is, I have never before taken part in a public demonstration. Mind you, I was paying attention in the Sixties and arguing against the war in Vietnam, and I certainly supported civil rights in principle, but I never marched once. And I was young back then. Now? Well, I can do it for my great-grandchildren!

 

My friend and I were nervous before we went. We didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the only thing that would have made the experience more positive than it was would have been a larger crowd, but there had been at least two other protest gatherings earlier in the day, and some of the people standing with us on Bayshore Drive at the intersection with Union Street in Traverse City had been to all three demonstrations, and while the rain held off (thank heaven!) it was a gloomy, grey day, not to mention cold for a couple of aging “protest virgins” who had forgotten their gloves.

 

But what a wonderful experience it was! 

Wearing my knitted cap from 2016--do you remember?

The vast majority of motorists who passed our intersection honked car horns in solidarity, waved, gave us thumbs up, and even cheered. (In the half-hour we stood there with our signs, only half a dozen people at most were negative.) It felt good to be standing in public for our principles, and to be affirmed by people passing by was icing on the cake. At one point, I was near tears, I felt such love for my country and for my fellow brave Americans out there in the cold wind! It was a happy, joyful feeling!

 

Will public demonstrations make any difference at all? 

 

We know protests will not change the positions or alter the plans of the divider-in-chief in the Oval Office, but he is not our target audience. We want to motivate Democrats in office to unify and raise their voices, to motivate Republicans with eyes open to join in bilateral resistance, and to show any Americans still on the fence—or wavering in their support of the administration as they see the gutting of programs necessary to their livelihood or even to their lives—that they are welcome and that we can prevail if we join together. 

 

I did not (how could anyone think I would?) watch or even listen to Tuesday evening’s hour and a half rant. And on Wednesday morning, why would I “read the full transcript” or “watch highlights”? I know all too well the “state of the union”: It is in a perilous state, brought low by the divider-in-chief whose bloviating fantasies illuminate nothing, ever. What would that 90 minutes provide? Boasting and blaming, threats and lies and name-calling. Why would I subject myself to that yet again, even after the fact? 

 

First thing Wednesday morning, though, I did watch Senator Elissa Slotkin’s entire rebuttal (link in list below), and I was so proud that she is a Michigan senator! I am looking toward not the haters but the helpers, not the dividers but to those who would reunite us, those with a positive vision of an American future that is sometimes these days all too hard to see. 

 

As for those who disagree with me, I am through playing Whack-a-Mole. Put the pieces together—or don’t. Here are some places to start, if you care to see what I see. I have chosen a variety of sources and have made each choice for clarity and basis in fact.

 

Fact-checking the State of the Union address.

Senator Elissa Slotkin rebuts president.

War in Ukraine.

 

Full meeting with Zelensky in the White House.

 

Lech Walesa weighs in.

U.S.-Russia-Ukraine recent history

 

Current administration’s ties with Russia.

Russia and U.S. cybersecurity.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

 

What does Musk’s own chatbot say?

DOGE savings?

 

Cost of president’s trip to the Superbowl.

What tariffs could cost Americans (from Fox).

Ontario’s response to tariffs against Canada.

What constitutes an “illegal protest” in the U.S.?

 

Voter fraud, facts and myths.

Beautiful Michigan!

Beautiful Northport!

Of Little Girls and Cocktails, of Dogs and Hotels

June roadside, northern Michigan

With my first cup of Saturday morning coffee, I finished the last few chapters of A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, a runaway bestseller when it was published in 2016. I have yet to read the author’s first novel, another bestseller, Rules of Civility, so how the two may compare I will not be able to say. As for A Gentleman in Moscow, the impression I had early in my reading of the novel remained with me to the last page. It is this: that although Count Rostov carries out a complicated plan for the story’s dramatic finale (actually, two plans -- one for himself, another for Sofia), the real main character of the book is the hotel.

The Hotel Metropole, in the heart of Moscow, “was a residence hotel par excellence, an oasis for the worn and weary.” In June of 1922 [June – the very month in which I am reading the novel] Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who grew up on a country estate called Idlehour in Nizhny Novgorod and who has been residing at the Hotel Metropole for almost four years, is declared by the authorities to be a Former Person and sentenced to permanent house arrest at the hotel. If he is caught setting foot outside the door, he will be shot. The only reason he is allowed to live at all is because of a poem published under his name, a poem for which he is still regarded as a hero of the pre-revolutionary cause by certain high-ranking Party members. While under house arrest, Rostov, with an intrepid little girl in a yellow dress as his guide, manages to invade every nook and cranny, from cellar to attic, a Former Person spying on others much more than anyone ever spies on him, and as he explores the hotel the reader is introduced to it in loving detail.

That hotel! It is a whole world! Rooms, suites, restaurants, bar, ballroom, barbershop, florist. Rather than being obviously part of Moscow between the two world Wars, the Metropole seems to exist not in Russia at all, perhaps not even on earth, but in a land of fantasy, with its continuous, smooth-running operations, elaborate menu offerings, and seemingly inexhaustible cellar of fine wines. Another realm altogether!

In the novel the years 1929 and 1930 come and go without desperation or even any serious scarcity visiting the hotel, and from the beginning political horrors are so muted as to seem very distant and abstract. Intelligence, quick thinking, urbane wit, and instances of timely good luck dispel danger and conquer petty annoyances.

Apple tree, pruned and blooming

[It has been interesting to read this book in the time of coronavirus and protest demonstrations, while we are self-quarantining at home for 14 days after a harrowing five-day drive across the country. Self-quarantine is hardly equivalent to house arrest, but there are some similarities, the most obvious being the constraints on movement. But also, I must admit, a sense of safety and almost luxury in isolation, very like what the Count enjoyed at the Hotel Metropole. It is hardly prison, after all, being confined to one’s home with plenty to eat and, in our case, honeysuckle and apple trees in bloom.] 

How, though, I keep wondering, is the count paying for all those meals and all those bottles of wine? Surely he was not producing one gold coin after another from the hidden compartment sin the legs of his grandmother’s tea table! That would have brought the authorities down on him instantly to demand the source of the coins! So what is he doing for money? In real, historic Moscow, such a question would have to be asked and answered. In a fantasy hotel, it does not arise.

[The Artist and I, on the other hand, are very aware of financial resources, bills to be paid, provisions to be purchased, and limitations on what we can spend, with future income so uncertain.]

Nine-year-old Nina comes suddenly into the Count’s life.

“Where did they go?” she asked, without a word of introduction. 

“I beg your pardon. Where did who go?” 

She tilted her head to take a closer look at his face.  

“Why, your moustaches.”   

The Count had not much cause to interact with children, but he had been raised well enough to know that a child should not idly approach a stranger, should not interrupt him in the middle of a meal, and certainly should not ask him questions about his physical appearance. Was the minding of one’s own business no longer a subject taught in schools?

[At home, at the moment, I have both the burdens and the luxury of isolation. Luxury, because I was not ready on Monday morning, the first of June, to re-open my bookstore or to answer again and again the curious questions of friends and strangers. “Were you gone for the winter?” “Where did you go?” “How long were you gone?” “What do you do out there?” “How was the trip back?” “Are you glad to be home?” One person at a time I can handle. Thinking of more, I feel overwhelmed. Because ever since early March, when businesses closed across the country and shelter-in-place orders came down, we have all been living in some kind of alternate reality, riding an emotional rollercoaster in limbo, separated from one another by much more than 2,000 miles.] 

First comes Nina, a child. Then Anna, a beautiful woman. Later, Sofia, Nina’s child who gradually becomes his own. (And finally?) 

Besides these, the Count becomes a member of "the Triumvirate" when he joins the ranks of hotel employees as headwaiter, responsible for careful seating arrangements to ensure frictionless dining in the hotel’s premier restaurant. In a word, he has close friends and important relationships, although he can meet his friends only within the confines of the hotel.

[I have seen three friends since our return. With one the conversation was conducted with my car between us on the street. Another visit took place in my yard, with the friend in his car while I stood at a distance. A third visitor came onto our front porch, but we sat so far apart that we often had to repeat parts of the conversation that the other had missed hearing.]

And now, permit me to leave the more important aspects of the novel for a tangent. Willowy Anna, the actress, first appears at the Metropole with two borzois on leashes. The dogs do not play a large role in the story as it continues – theirs is but a cameo appearance – but these lines jumped out at me:

You may accuse a dog of eating without grace or of exhibiting a misplaced enthusiasm for the tossing of sticks, but you may never accuse one of giving up hope. 

The hope of the borzois in the passage quoted is that they may have a chance (they do not) of catching the one-eyed cat. 

Sarah, back in Michigan, in the front seat again

[Our dog, Sarah, was with us all winter and spring and traveled twice across the country in a very small space in the back seat of our small car, with never a complaint. When one motel clerk would have turned us away, saying they did not accept dogs, the Artist said simply, “We can’t live without her,” and she was allowed to share our room. She has impeccable motel manners, by the way: never a bark, never an accident. Sometimes we think about dogs that spend their days chained or fenced without companionship of any kind. How does a dog survive that kind of isolation? I contend that the dog’s undying hope is what gets it through each day, the possibility that at any moment life might change for the better. But how can a dog bring about change? Its repertoire and opportunities are dreadfully limited.] 

We human beings are more fortunate than dogs in the exercise of our free will and self-determination. What we imagine and desire we can often bring about.

And that’s where I want to leave you today, with a suggestion author Amor Towles gives us from the movie “Casablanca,” that 

… in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t [Rick] also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?

Radish sprouts, tiny but determined

Nothing Is What It Used To Be

remains of cherry tree

Up to the days of Indiana’s early statehood, probably as late as 1825, there stood, in what is now the beautiful little city of Vincennes on the Wabash, the decaying remnant of an old and curiously gnarled cherry tree, known as the Rousillon tree, le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, as the French inhabitants called it, which as long as it lived bore fruit remarkable for richness of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of color. The exact spot where this noble old seedling from la belle France flourished, declined, and died cannot be certainly pointed out; for in the rapid and happy growth of Vincennes many land-marks once notable, among them le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, have been destroyed and the spots where they stood, once familiar to every eye in old Vincennes, are now lost in the pleasant confusion of the new town.  - Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes

Thompson dedicated his historical novel to Dr. Placide Valcour, who inspired the book by providing the author with an “ancient and, alas! fragmentary epistle” from the year 1788, the mildewed remains of a letter written by none other than Gaspard Roussillon. The paragraph quoted above is the opening of the first chapter of the novel, a chapter called “Under the Cherry Tree,” and it struck me as appropriate not only to my theme today but also to the place from which it originates — Northport, Michigan, in the heart of northern Great Lakes cherry country. 

(J. Maurice Thompson, who died in 1901, is a well-known Indiana author. His best-known classic, The Witchery of Archery, is available again in reprint, but first editions from 1878 still command well over four hundred dollars.) 

Welcome to Northport

Recently a Northport local and born-and-bred native said to me sadly, “This isn’t the town I grew up in.” I can understand and sympathize, because even in the scant quarter-century that I’ve known Northport it has seen a lot of changes (I am grateful for some and sigh over others), but when I look past the confines of this little Michigan village I can’t find a single place that has not changed in the lifetimes of its residents. The South Dakota town where I was born, the northern Illinois town where I grew up — both are nearly unrecognizable when modern scenes are compared to old black-and-white family snapshots. What would I find if I searched out the dusty old Ohio road (probably paved now) where my grandparents raised fruit and vegetables and kept chickens for eggs to sell, where my grandmother milked a cow, and where the simple house had no indoor plumbing into the 1950s? That neighborhood today would not be the place where my mother grew up, I’m sure, just as, when I visit my mother these days in northern Illinois, my own sensibilities continue to be jarred by housing developments across the road where my girlhood self watched thunderstorms and sunsets over fields of corn and soybeans. Even the grade school my sisters and I attended (new when I entered third grade) has already been torn down to make room for yet more houses. Houses, houses everywhere! No more vacant lots where we kids could dig "forts" and climb wild trees.

Nothing is what it used to be. Anywhere.

The other side of the coin is demonstrated by towns that have vanished (or nearly so) rather than changing. Virginia Johnson, my August 2 TEA guest at Dog Ears Books, describes in her memoir, Ira’s Farm, a northern Michigan village called Harlan that no longer exists. Isadore in Leelanau County can still be found at the crossroads of Schomberg and Gatske Roads, and the Catholic church still stands, but all the “bustle” of the earlier Polish community moved down to Cedar a long time ago.

Nothing stays the same. 

Another fascinating book I’m reading right now is The Storks’ Nest [Life and Love in the Russian Countryside], by Laura Lynne Williams. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, the author moved to Moscow in 1993, where she met Igor Shpilenok and moved to work with him — eventually to live with and ultimately marry him and raise a family — in the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve. Williams describes their remote village, its population having declined from over 300 to a mere nineteen inhabitants:

…The villagers here have never had it easy. There were so many strikes against them: floods, famine, purges, collectivization, war, resettlement, and the absence of a road. Now the only people left in Chukrai are those who weren’t smart or lucky enough to leave. And then there are Igor and me, two naturalists who find solace in the village’s remoteness, in its total immersion in the wilderness of the Bryansk Forest, and in each other.

Williams tells her love story but does not romanticize the villagers’ lives. Alcoholism and poverty for some or, for others, endless, back-breaking physical work and poverty are their lot in life. 

When the grasses grow long and the sun shines, the villagers make hay. All day they swing their scythes, making nearly full arcs around their bodies. The grass falls in neat rows, and soon the open fields around the village are laid flat. The villagers stop only to sip kvas and eat salo and bread. The women wear white scarves tied tightly around their heads to divert the heat. One cow needs approximately three tons of hay to last the winter. One fit person could make this much hay in approximately twelve days. Hay is usually cut twice: first in July and again in August. About three days after the hay is down, if there is no rain, the villagers help each other stack the dry grasses and compress them into dense piles. The men toss the hay up on the stacks with their pitchforks, and the women trample it with their feet. 

The villagers cut hay all day, day after day, until the work is done, but Laura finds herself exhausted after a few hours, and this, mind you, is in the 1990s, not the 1890s. When one old woman in the village dies, by the time her body is discovered it has been ravaged (I won’t go into details) by rats and by her own cat. Her burial — there is no funeral service, but two other village women prepare her body and dress her for her coffin — turns out to be more an occasion for drinking and eating, especially drinking, than any memorial to the departed. Life has changed many times over in Chukrai. In the course of living residents' memories, people were executed or sent to prison or fled invaders, and houses slumped back into the earth. Has only hard work remained the same?

These days in Northport cherries are harvested with mechanical shakers rather than being picked by hand (but workers still get out on foot to prune the trees). No one grows large fields of potatoes or asparagus commercially here any more, as far as I know, and sure it is that school no longer closes in the fall for what used to be called “potato vacation” (i.e., so the kids could work the potato harvest). Housing prices have soared, making home purchase difficult for young families. Yes, much has changed, not only the new marina buildings, new sidewalks and streetlights on Nagonaba Street, new golf course, and new recycling station-in-progress north of town. Old tree giants that used to stand in front of what is now the Tribune and on both sides of the former Totem Shop (now Porcupine) are, like le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon in Vincennes, Indiana, long gone. 

Beautiful boat harbor

New recycling station will be here

No more trains

But just as the waters of the Wabash River still flow through Indiana, Northport still looks out on Grand Traverse Bay. Mountains, lakes, and rivers — they keep us oriented in place, through changes over time.

There have been days this summer when I’ve wished I could “freeze” Northport right where it is now. We’ve left behind the sad doldrums of a decade ago but aren’t insanely crazy-busy and crowded like Glen Arbor. Right now is not "the good old days" to some, not the "brighter future others" envision, but it seems good to me. I guess I just have to keep murmuring my mantra, reminding myself over and over, I’m here now, I’m here now.

If It Quacks Like a Duck, Who Is It?

Jingle-decorated safety pin from Romania

You know, I’m sure, the old saw that starts out, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...” Well, I want to tell you that that would not be your local philosopher-bookseller! You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you be able to tell the difference after over nine years of Books in Northport? If you’re a friend and/or a customer or even if we’ve never met but you follow Books in Northport from afar, don’t you recognize my voice in these lines? And if a strange voice were to break in and take over Books in Northport, wouldn’t you know something was wrong? Wouldn’t your suspicions be aroused?

What the -- ?! Why on earth do I pose these silly rhetorical questions? If curious, please read on.

Insisting on holiday cheer

As a general rule, I am not one for compulsively checking blog stats. While now and then a post getting more than the usual daily attention can boost my spirits, seeing low numbers on things written from my heart can be discouraging, so why give myself the grief? Instead, for the most part, I just say what I have to say, post a link on Facebook, and the pay is the same (zilch!), whether no one reads or hundreds do. Once in a while, though, I get curious. I was curious the other day, and what I found on the stats report was, as Lewis Carroll had Alice say, “curiouser and curiouser,” to say the least. While stats for individual posts were unsurprising – pretty much as usual – total number of blog views had spiked. The spike was sharp and not explainable by a large number of views of any particular post or posts. What was going on?

A look at ‘traffic sources’ did nothing to dispel the mystery, largest numbers of visitors coming from Google or Facebook, as is usually the case. ‘Audience,’ however, showed a different story. There on the world map, with shades of green showing where viewers are located when they visit, the darkest green covered the area of the former USSR. The rest of the world paled in comparison. 

I shared the surprising result with David, who asked why Russians would be reading my blog. Well, I don’t think they are. Ten times as many Russians as Americans? Why would Russians feel a sudden hunger for a northern Michigan bookseller’s take on Hermann Hesse or scenes of our village in winter? I doubt there is anything in my content or CV fascinating to these new “viewers,” but in light of current events their presence is alarming, even if, as seems likely, "they" are machines rather than people.

Think about it. Blogger is a big deal world-wide. As the anniversary of Tienanmen Square approached, the Chinese government blocked Blogger, making it inaccessible to Internet users in China unless they were able to cobble together a circuitous alternate route to the blogs, and the same was true of Google and Tumblr.

(Do a search and read about it if you don’t believe me, but bear in mind that searches are tailored to individual searchers, and your results would not necessarily match mine. In that way, creators of algorithms need to take their share of the blame for Americans reading only news sources with views matching those they already had.)

Moreover, with the new Google Plus service (which I do not use), blogs can be automatically connected to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Gmail, DO Note, Weebly and other sites and services. And now, think of all the bloggers who update using their mobile phones. “We’re all connected” means, among other more positive things, that we are all that much more vulnerable.

For over nine years, I have loved writing Books in Northport and connecting with people around the world -- those who actually connect, that is, not hostile, anonymous individuals, groups, or worms that only hover and stalk, with no interest in what I write, not even anything personal against me as a person or bookseller. Now I wonder how long I and other blogger friends will be able to maintain this precious outlet that has been for so long, for us and our readers, literary as well as social. I don’t know what might happen or when anything at all might come down on us.

“The personal is political.” Do you resist that idea? I’ll tell you, I’m really feeling it today.

Repressive governments are not interested in our fates as individuals, but they are very interested in restricting, in the most general, sweeping sense, our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas. It’s unlikely that darkness and silence will fall on us tomorrow – more likely we will be overwhelmed, day by day, by blinding metaphorical searchlights and fake news and enemies masquerading as friends.

If another voice breaks in here one day, though – or if your access is mysteriously denied – I'm telling you now, ahead of time, not to take it lying down. In fact, start now to do what you can. Think about it. What can you do? Now do it!

Flowers for freedom!

Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well. 

Book Review: A WORLD ELSEWHERE

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany, by Sigrid MacRae

NY: Viking, 2014

Someone at Viking made quite an understatement in writing the tip sheet accompanying the review copy of this book: “This shows the side of the [sic] WWII rarely seen.” A World Elsewhere is much more complicated than a story of “ordinary, decent people.” I was somewhat prepared for the author’s mother’s story, having hosted in 2006 another author whose family had survived repeated escapes in the same era--from Russia to Estonia to Poland to East Germany, West Germany, and finally to the United States.

Following the event with Sigrid von Bremen, I also heard another friend’s history of a complicated and harrowing World War II escape from the Germany of her birthplace, a third’s story of parents who survived both exile in Siberia and imprisonment in concentration camps, and a fourth’s telling me of many family members who died in those camps. But all of these were “decent, ordinary people.”

Sigrid MacRae’s parents’ story is unique in my own reading experience in two ways: first, that her mother was American (the other stories of fleeing Germany were all of Europeans), and second, that her father was a German officer.

In her prologue, MacRae tells of being given by her 85-year-old mother a box of her father’s letters, a box she was “reluctant” to open.

Opening the box—resurrecting him—would mean finding not only the man who became my father, but also the man responsible for the “Nazi!” a first-grade classmate had yelled at me as a six-year-old, newly arrived in the States from Germany. I didn’t know then what that was, but whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t good. The taunt stayed with me. It was thrown at me in many other guises, and eventually I blamed my father.

Eventually, after finally reading the letters, she undertakes extensive family and wartime research to be able to write her parents’ story. For the record, I'll note here that her father, while he   became an officer, was not a Nazi and not a member of the S.S. When he died, he was in the infantry, and most of his "action" consisted of marching through countries (France, Russia) Hitler hoped to conquer.

The book begins with the unlikely event of her parents’ first meeting and then, as MacRae tells of their getting to know one another, gives the very different backgrounds of her mother and father, Aimée and Heinrich. Aimée had lost her mother when only three years old; her father was cold and distant, her older brother anything but a protector. As if this weren’t enough, the girl spent years in a body cast to correct scoliosis. Thus Aimée’s girlhood and adolescence were spent in relative isolation, her education haphazard. Heinrich, by contrast, came from a large, close Baltic German family attached, before the Revolution, to the Russian court. He was confident, charming, and worldly in the best sense of the word. The two fell deeply in love, and when Aimée returned to Europe to marry him after a trip home, she expected to spend the rest of her life in Europe. When asked when she would be returning home, she replied confidently and emphatically, “Never!” For her, America was her father’s cold home, Europe her husband’s warm family.

A typical young married story begins: Heinrich immerses himself in studies, and Aimée begins having babies. They have the troubles and worries of any young couple trying to establish family and career but fewer financial worries than most, thanks to quarterly checks from Aimée’s trust fund in America.

But this is Germany between two world wars, and so along come unemployment, inflation, a weak government, and, eventually, the coming to power of Hitler. Heinrich’s family members and friends were not well disposed toward Hitler but did not imagine he would rise very high, be in power for long, or prove a great danger. That he was not a Communist something they saw in his favor.

At this point in the book a reader with historical hindsight begins to feel a chill.

Somehow the subtitle, An American Woman in Wartime Germany, did not prepare me to follow Aimée’s husband into occupied France as an infantry lieutenant. Imagining herself in her father’s shoes (helped by the letters he wrote to her mother during this time), MacRae paints a picture of French peasants clinging to their traditional hatred of the English and philosophically accepting the German invaders—until, too late, they realized that the Germans were making war not only against the English but also against the people of France. Eventually Heinrich, once a refugee himself when his family had to flee St. Petersburg for their estate in Baltic Germany, was put in charge of a POW camp and charged with helping refugees return home. He writes to his wife, “The misery in which these unhappy refugees live—here, there, wherever they find a place—is terrible.” Mostly, however, rather than dwelling on the ugliness of war, Heinrich writes home of the beauty of the French countryside and of his love for his family.

Almost all of my own European experience, as well as what foreign language competence I possess, relates to France, and the same was true for my father, a veteran of World War II—all the more reason I found myself in strange territory, accompanying, as it were, the German Army as it invaded France. It seems unlikely that the author’s father had any kind of vision of Germany taking over the world. Still, knowing what was to come in the Occupation, I could not take his letters at face value.

Then in June of 1941 came Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged German military push into Russia. Despite what had become of Napoleon and his army in 1812,

...Hitler was confident, claiming that he had only to “kick in the door” and the behemoth would crumble. Heinrich was with Army Group Center, the largest of the three prongs of the operation, meant to deliver a lightning strike and bring the quick victory Hitler predicted would be his before fall.

Heinrich can’t help thinking that a German victory in western Russia might enable him to return to his happy childhood place, the family estate in Ottenhof. Odds seemed to favor them in that the disparate peoples of Russia had never become unified under Soviet rule, and the “defenders of the Motherland were hungry and hollow-eyed,” often throwing down their weapons “in panic and exhaustion.”

Like his friend and fellow officer, Alexis von Roene, Heinrich had little sympathy with Hitler’s values and goals. But he was a Baltic German, with strong Russian roots.

The Russians had been set up on the bank of the Dnieper in 1812 just as they were now. If an awareness that this time Heinrich was in the role of invader, not defender, cast any shadow or brought a frisson of unease, it was quickly banished. He mentions no burned villages, no ruthless brutality. He was no alien invader; he was returning to land defended over the years by forefathers. This was a liberation, a return home.

He was killed at Mogilev on July 23, 1941. From that date forward his children, including the baby girl who never had a chance to know her father, had to depend on the resourcefulness and ingenuity of their American mother to preserve their lives and insure their future, and the remainder of the book is faithful to its subtitle.

From an isolated girlhood, interrupted by surgeries and immobilizations in a body cast and followed by an unhappy boarding school experience, the widow Aimée, American-born mother of six children born in Germany to a German father, finds within herself enormous reserves of strength because – she had no choice. Residents had been forbidden to leave East Prussia, but the roads were seething with fleeing refugees, Berlin was under siege, and if the family stayed put as ordered, Aimée’s oldest son, 16-year-old Friedrich, would be taken into a German army desperate for men.

She gave each child a small chamois bag with [her brother’s] Chicago address to hang around their necks. Putting any hope at all into such a fragile vessel seemed absurd, but she felt compelled to do it. They were headed into the unknown, and the thought of being separated in the maelstrom ahead was terrifying.

They had a wagon and a horse. They had, for a while, potatoes. At last they reach British lines, where Aimée persuades a British officer not to send them back into Russian-held territory.

After a series of refugee and displaced person camps, the family at last settles “permanently” in the traditional farming village of Grosseelheim, where the doctor friend who has attached herself to the family hopes to set up in practice, but the villagers and farmers are poor and cannot afford much doctoring. Then the doctor herself dies of cancer, and the family turns to relatives in America, hoping to emigrate.

Once safe in New England the family faces new struggles: an abandoned farmhouse that needs almost everything essential to it replaced; a deportation threat; the necessity of moving from a house they thought they would never leave when the property is condemned for expansion of a U.S. Navy airfield. But of course we know, from the beginning of the book, that mother and children flourish in America.

For me, it was not so much the story of  “an American woman in wartime Germany” that held me spellbound but the individual stories of young Aimée and Friedrich, their love story, and the unsettling view of the invasion of France through the eyes of a German officer, along with the grit and determination Aimée demonstrated in building a new life in America.

A World Elsewhere is beautifully but simply written. Much of the words on the page come directly from letters, the author allowing her parents to speak for themselves. The accumulated facts of the story are haunting, simply by being true. I doubt that very many postwar American women have ever imagined themselves wives of German officers. In hindsight and from an American perspective, such a vision is unthinkable. And yet, here were two young people, previously tossed about by life, who fell in love and did what lovers all over the world have always done--they married and began a family—little realizing the tossing about that lay ahead of them in the future.

The author writes in her epilogue that researching this book

...taught me that there is not one history, but many; that context is everything, and life is far more complex than we ever imagine, especially when history writ large intervenes. I found that despite the stiff-armed Nazi salutes and gutteral “Achtungs” that came my way, I was not the devil’s spawn after all, just the product of two people in a particular time and place, enmeshed in circumstance, their hopes upended.

MacRae’s parents’ story is not one familiar from hundreds of others from World War II, but the author conveys its truth and poignancy in such a way that the lives of Heinrich and Aimée will remain with readers long after the book has been closed.