Poetry Revisited: Soliloquy by a Parachute Jumper by Mary E. Bulkley

Soliloquy by a Parachute Jumper

(from Poetry Magazine, June 1942)

We do not know how tall was Newton’s tree
From which fell Newton’s apple,
Whence he drew laws to work infallibly.

Now, I’m that apple, falling full miles five
Instead of full five feet.
Was Newton’s aplle picked up whole, alive?

If “square of time” measured his apple’s race
(Whole ages gone, I left my stemless tree)
I must be dropping at a pretty pace.

But I’ve a leaf hisapple could not match,
For mine, I hope, is full of magic power.
My leaf can swell and swell (unless it catch).

Will it grow big now that I’ve pulled its strings?
Thank God, it jerks.
My dash has changed to gentle flutterings,

Not with the ghastly crash his law put there;
My leaf has saved its apple
And it makes vod the las “sixteen t square.”

Mary Ezit Bulkley (1856-1947)
American writer and poet

Poetry Revisited: Raiders’ Dawn by Alun Lewis

Raiders’ Dawn

(from Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems: 1942)

Softly the civilized
Centuries fall,
Paper on paper,
Peter on Paul.

And lovers walking
From the night—
Eternity’s masters,
Slaves of Time—
Recognize only
The drifting white
Fall of small faces
In pits of lime.

Blue necklace left
On a charred chair
Tells that Beauty
Was startled there.

Alun Lewis (1915-1944)
Welsh poet

Poetry Revisited: The Click of the Garden Gate by May Hill

The Click of the Garden Gate

(from The Casualties Were Small. Wartime Poetry and Diaries
of a Lincolnshire Seaside Villager: 2009)

I hear the click of the garden gate
But it is not he
He comes no more either early or late
To his dinner or tea
He is far away in an Air Force Camp
Learning to fight
(I wonder if his blankets are damp
And if he sleeps well at night)

Not twenty years when went away
Just a boy
He may never again come back to stay
To delight and annoy
Will what he has gained balance what he has lost?
He will change
Will his growth to manhood improve him most?
Or make him change?

I open the casement into his room
So tidy and neat
And the sun shines in and chases the gloom
And the wind blows sweet
Ready for him when, early or late
He comes back home to the sea
I hear the click of the garden gate
But it is not he.
(Perhaps it is Rene coming to tea!)

December 1940

May Hill (1891-1944)
English diarist and poet

Poetry Revisited: The Unborn by Edward Dyson

The Unborn

(from Hello, Soldier! Khaki Verse: 1919)

I see grim War, a bestial thing,
with swinish tusks to tear;
Upon his back the vampires cling,
Thin vipers twine among his hair,
The tiger's greed is in his jowl,
His eye is red with bloody tears,
And every obscene beast and fowl
From out his leprous visage leers.
In glowing pride fell fiends arise,
And, trampled, God the Father lies.

Not God alone the Demon slays;
The hills that swell to Heaven drip
With ooze of murdered men; for days
The dead drift with the drifting ship,
And far as eye may see the plain
Is cumbered deep with slaughtered ones,
Contorted to the shape of pain,
Dissolving 'neath the callous suns,
And driven in his foetid breath
Still ply the harvesters of Death.

He sits astride an engine dread,
And at his touch the awful ball
Across the quaking world is sped,
I see a million creatures fall.
Beyond the soldiers on the hill,
The mother by her bassinet.
The bolt its mission must fulfill,
And in the years that are not yet
Creation by the blow is shorn
Of dimpled hosts of babes unborn!

Edward Dyson (1865-1931)
Australian journalist, poet, playwright and short story writer

Book Review: Crabwalk by Günter Grass

As time passes, ideas may go out of fashion or even become kind of taboo, but once in the world they never disappear completely. These days, fascist ideas including national socialist ones see an alarming revival all around the world thanks to – for the moment still – democratic movements that prudently deny their roots. Such pretended nationalistic and patriotic, but actually racist ideologies make believe that they can put the unfathomable chaos of the modern world in a clear order and especially the young are easy prey for the populist demagogues who cunningly preach them taking advantage of the growing discontent in the population over living conditions and cultural diversity. In the novel Crabwalk by en-NOBEL-ed German writer Günter Grass a journalist from Berlin retraces his own and his mother’s lives to understand how their history encouraged his son to write a Nazi blog and to kill his pretended Jewish counterpart.

Book Review: Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco

The horrors that alleged “enemies of the Third Reich”, most of all those with Jewish ancestors, had to endure under Nazi reign were so appalling that at the time many simply couldn’t believe rumours about them. When eye witnesses and hard facts of systematic atrocities turned up eventually – as they use to, in general –, the world was dumbfounded and reluctant to take them at face value. In a modern European country like Germany people couldn’t be so barbarous as that, could they? Therefore even when their countries were annexed or occupied, many Jews lulled themselves into a false sense of security until it was too late for escape. The narrator of Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco observes the growing concern of her apparently calm family, notably her parents, as race laws are gradually implemented in the German-occupied Netherlands and deportation to the Polish concentration camps becomes a daily threat.

Book Review: Cyclops by Ranko Marinković

Most legendary creatures are archetypical manifestations of certain aspects of human nature, good or evil, and the myths surrounding them represent a general idea of the world, i.e. of how it came into being and of how it works. Classical education made many of them household names and so, they found their way quite naturally into literature as allegorical figures or less easily explainable symbols. With World War II threatening to spread to Yugoslavia, the protagonist of Cyclops by Ranko Marinković sees himself doomed to end as helpless prey of the man-eating one-eyed giant Polyphemus from Greek mythology. Like other young men he must expect being called up any time, but although patriotic, the intellectual hopes to avoid national service systematically reducing his body to bones and skin. He wanders through Zagreb daydreaming and yearning for the woman he loves without hope or drinks heavily with friends.

Book Review: The Kappillan of Malta by Nicholas Monsarrat

However pleasant island life can be, it can also have serious disadvantages when it comes to assuring supply with all those things that nature can’t offer at all or not in sufficient quantities. In war times, for instance, the watery enclosure can turn into an almost unsolvable, even life-threatening problem, notably when the island is located in a strategically important place and becomes target of military action. In history, the latter has been more than once the fate of the small island of Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and North Africa as shows the historical novel The Kappillan of Malta by Nicholas Monsarrat. During World War II Father Salvatore takes it upon him to look after the bombed-out sheltering in catacombs and to improve their morale speaking to them about the many challenges that their forefathers faced and survived in more than two millennia.

Book Review: Roman Elegy by Sabine Gruber

The death of a person often unleashes a train of unexpected thoughts and memories, sometimes even events. Moreover, it can make us question our relations to other people, notably spouses and children, our meaning in life and our standpoints. Sometimes we gain new insights that make us change direction or take long overdue decisions. It’s a death in Rome that sets off the Roman Elegy by Sabine Gruber, an Italian writer in German language, and lays the seed for an unlikely romance. Through the typescript of a novel that the deceased wrote, she connects her youth friend not just with the widowed owner of a hotel in Rome where she worked for a short while in 1978, but also with the then young man who awakened her interest in the position of her boss in fascist and Nazi times. And in the background there’s always Stillbach, the Southern Tyrolean village where all three women grew up.

Book Review: The Greater Hope by Ilse Aichinger

There are heaps of fiction works dealing with World War Two and the holocaust, but most of them have been written long after the unspeakable horrors and by authors who could look at the period from a safe distance, be it geographically or historically. It’s little wonder that only few eye witnesses, notably survivors felt up to letting their own dreadful experience flow into their fiction. It would have been too painful and in addition it was unlikely to make a living of such books. The Greater Hope by Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger is one of a small number of postwar novels evoking the sufferings of the war years. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old Viennese girl whose Jewish mother emigrates to the USA to escape from the Nazi regime. Her Aryan father, an army officer, rejects her and so she has to face all the incomprehensible prohibitions and dangers of the time in the care of her persecuted grandmother.

Book Review: The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergović

Every end comprises everything that was before. This is especially true for us human beings because not just own experiences make us the people who we are but through socialisation we also carry on our shoulders the material and psychological burden of our ancestors, i.e. of entire history. Time heals the wounds or makes them fester beneath the surface. In The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergović the turbulent history of the Balkan countries that once formed Yugoslavia materialises in 97-year-old Regina Delavale who has seen it all and who finds her accidental end knocked out by tranquilisers in a hospital in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2002 after senile dementia has irrevocably turned her into a violent, abusive and wicked monster. Going backwards in time her daughter Dijana evokes the forming, if not traumatising events of her own and her mother’s life until her birth in 1905 and even a little beyond.

Book Review: Artemisia by Anna Banti

It isn’t easy to defy established role models or other unwritten rules of society to go your own way, to make a career that people say wasn’t meant for you because you were born this or that and to still find happiness. Only a strong personality can bear the constant fight and the isolation that a life beyond convention often implies and that may also lead into solitude, if not loneliness and resentment. But even with passion and determination to back you, there are moments of weakness and doubt. The much acclaimed Italian classic Artemisia by Anna Banti shows the struggles of the author rewriting her almost finished first draft of Artemisia Gentileschi’s biography that was destroyed in World War Two and those of the female painter from Renaissance Italy on her way from a raped fourteen-year-old unwilling to put up with her fate to an accepted artist of her own right at the courts of Naples and England.

Book Review: Angel of Oblvion by Maja Haderlap

To belong to a minority can be a hard lot, especially in times of economic crisis or in a period of political change. In Europe nationalist zeal ran high in the early twentieth century leading to the Great War of 1914-18 and destroying the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. In the plebiscite of 1920 the mixed Slovene and German-speaking population of the southern-most areas of Carinthia was called upon to decide whether it wished to stay with what remained of Austria or preferred to join the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). The majority voted for Austria, but from then on relations between the ethnic groups tensed. As shows Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap, during the Nazi regime the rift widened further because merely for their Slavic descent Slovene Carinthians were considered inferior and branded as natural traitors. And after the war pain, resentment and mistrust continued to fetter under the surface.

Book Review: Twenty-four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Every war necessarily leaves painful and indelible traces in society, but people’s souls are wounded not just during the war itself. Often the suffering begins already before it breaks out and lasts until long after its end because there’s always a more or less intricate history leading to open hostility and often unexpected aftermaths emerge long after the restoration of peace. World War II is no exception there. The holocaust, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bloody battles virtually all around the world are burnt into individual and collective memory forever. But also those who weren’t directly affected by such traumatising horrors suffered, though differently, less obviously. The pacifistic novel Twenty-four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae evokes the years before, during and after World War II as a primary school teacher and the twelve pupils in the first class that she ever taught experienced them in a small Japanese village.

Book Review: The Conductor by Sarah Quigley

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Undeniably, every war affects the civilian population in many ways and to varying degrees. It’s inevitable. And the closer people live to the front lines, the greater is the danger that they will find themselves run over by the enemy or even by their own troops. If there is time they will flee as far away from the fighting as they can, but if it’s a big city and if they live under a rigid regime like Stalin’s Soviet Union this option may be refused them. If they are lucky, it’s all soon over. If they aren’t, they have to struggle for survival under siege as was the case in Leningrad (today again: Saint Petersburg) during the winter of 1941/42. In The Conductor by Sarah Quigley the musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra who are caught in the city by advancing German troops strive for some kind of normality despite hunger and cold.

Book Review: The Train by Vera Panova

Click on the index card to enlarge it!

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It’s a matter of fact that wars aren’t only fought by soldiers on the battlefields, but that many others are involved in it, be they members of the army working at the rear, be they civilians assuring that there is no shortage of supply at the front nor at home (as there has been in every great war, though). Among the essential services that any army needs to provide is qualified medical care in field hospitals, sometimes rolling ones like in the rather forgotten World War II novel The Train by Vera Panova that won the renowned Stalin Prize 1947 and that appeared in English translation in 1948. The men and women packed together on the hospital train to take care of the wounded come from different backgrounds. Nonetheless, they have something very important in common: they are fervent patriots with a strong desire to help their heroic soldiers and their country to win against Nazi-Germany.

Book Review: If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Without doubt the holocaust is the darkest chapter of German history and it is inseparably linked to the horrors of World War II. Millions of Jews from all over Europe lost their lives not just in concentration camps, industrial plants and ghettos, but huge numbers of them were killed right away by members of the Waffen-SS and sometimes the Wehrmacht ploughing through the lands of the traditional Jewish shtetl on their way eastward. When Nazi troops crossed the Soviet borders on 22 June 1941, the fighting on the Eastern front began. Little noted at the time and hardly remembered today, both in the lines of Stalin’s Red Army and of the partisan bands that had formed on German-occupied territory fought Jews. The novel If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi tells the fictitious story of a dispersed Jewish artilleryman of the Red Army who joins the partisans because he has nothing left to lose except his life.

Soviet Citizens in World War II

Soviet partisans on the road in Belarus,
1944 counter-offensive
via Wikimedia Commons

Without doubt, World War II is one of the big recurring themes of modern literature and since I started book blogging, I’ve already reviewed several novels set against its backdrop. However, if you read my summaries of The Christmas Carp by Vicki Baum, The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, The Wedding in Auschwitz by Erich Hackl, The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski, and The Angry Hills by Leon Uris or A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute and even The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka, you’ll find that they all show events from a more or less western and/or Jewish perspective. 

But as from 22 June 1941 the Soviet Union too was at war with Nazi Germany – despite the deal that Stalin had made with Hitler in 1939. Fierce battles raged on her territory and apart from millions of soldiers also civilians, among them a considerable number of Russian Jews, lost their lives and suffered under German atrocities as well as partisan activities. And yet, we know little about how Soviet people experienced World War II although there are war novels written from this perspective, most of them less famous than their western counterparts, though. Starting on Friday I’m going to present three of them here on Edith’s Miscellany. 

The first will be If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi bringing attention to partisan life under German occupation with a Russian Jew who is also a dispersed Red Army man as protagonist. Then follows a little known though Stalin Prize-winning classic of Russian literature, The Train by Vera Panova, that will take us to the rear of the Red Army to a very mixed group of Soviet patriots travelling on a hospital train to take care of the wounded. And after a dystopian digression to Central Asia with an Austrian novel from the fin de siècle, we’ll go through the siege of Leningrad with the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and The Conductor by Sarah Quigley.

I hope that you’ll enjoy this change of perspective!

Book Review: The Angry Hills by Leon Uris

Espionage is a dangerous trade, especially in times of – hot or cold – war, but not everybody deliberately chooses to enter it. Sometimes, above all in novels, outsiders get mixed up in intelligence work more or less by accident like Graham Greene’s Jim Wormold, the Englishman living in Cuba before Fidel Castro, who is recruited as a spy against his will (»»» read my review of Our Man in Havana) or the middle-aged American protagonist of The Angry Hills by Leon Uris who at first doesn’t even know that Greek resistance against Nazi Germany and British Secret Service have chosen him as unsuspicious and ignorant courier. What starts for the “bread-and-butter” writer Mike Morrison as an innocent business trip to Greece to transfer family money to the USA just in time before war will prevent it turns into a flight from invading German troops and Nazi spies hunting after a sealed envelope containing secret information.

Book Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

There are books that everybody has at least heard of and that keep attracting readers throughout years, decades and in some cases even centuries, in short books that are timeless classics of literature. Undeniably, the slim volume that I picked for today’s review is such a classic or to be precise a modern classic since it first appeared only in 1958. I admit that Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote may owe part of its lasting notoriety and popularity to the fact that it was adapted for the screen as early as in 1961 starring Audrey Hepburn. For the rest, the novella is a brilliant portrait of a young woman who left behind a modest life somewhere at the back of beyond in order to enter well-to-do society of New York City and to get her share of glamour and happiness.