Category Archives: memoirs

Why I Left the Amish, by Saloma Miller Furlong ****

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why i left the amishThis is not just a curiosity piece, like Wagler’s Growing Up Amish. This woman can really write, and piece by piece, she puts together a very hard look at the way Amish treat the disabled, deal with issues of domestic abuse and incest, and the way that intellectualism is stamped out hard, the way you would a dish towel that lands flaming on the kitchen floor.

Before reading this book, I felt a certain…is sympathy too strong a word? Maybe it is…for the Amish. I had read in various places that more and more of their youth were leaving, and I had the impression that one more esoteric group that had struggled to maintain a cultural identity, was being left behind in the relentless march of history. Not so, and now I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if it were true.

Furlong writes really well. She tells us at the outset that she is the one person to receive a free ride at Smith College that year, and that this fulfills a lifelong dream she has had to continue her education. The Amish require their children to leave school after grade 8 in order to work, and the work done by the teenagers is all given (or supposed to be given) to the household fund. Furlong recalls her own longing, as she segues neatly from present to past and back again, as she watched her younger brothers and sisters leave for the school house she had loved, and how completely delighted her overworked, ill-tempered mother had been to have her there for domestic chores.

In the beginning, as I saw the Miller family’s role as an outcast, or nearly outcast, member of their Amish community, I wondered whether Furlong might have remained,as she says most Amish youth do, as a church member of her Amish community, if her family had been a functional one. “If only I didn’t have to live in this family situation, I could be as good an Amish person as anyone”. A friendly member of the community who has a good heart for children, Olin Clara, becomes a mentor and rescuer of sorts, occasionally bringing her over under the guise of needing “help with the little ones”, but when adolescent Saloma arrives, she is greeted by the smell of fresh-baked cookies, and Clara talks to her about her life. Finally it dawns upon Saloma that the real reason Clara has invited her over, again and again, is to show her how a normal Amish household is supposed to function. for awhile, she harbors the hope that Clara will take her in and rescue her from the cruelty visited upon her by the men in the family, and by her mother’s complicity by blaming the victim when she complains.

Saloma’s father was mentally ill and barely bright enough to maintain a home at all, and most of what is done is done by her mother, who is forced to do the backbreaking work of an Amish housewife, as well as the farm chores that are traditionally male. Ultimately, the mother makes a Mestophilian bargain of sorts: her eldest son is permitted to perform monstrous acts of cruelty upon the girls in the family, and the animals (not an easy read, and don’t hand this to your kiddies). In return, he takes on the role of the head of household in all but the most basic decisions, and exercises horrible power over all of them until,to Furlong’s immense relief, he marries and moves to a home of his own.

Here come some spoilers, so if you want to read this and be surprised, stop right here.

Still with me? Okay. Furlong is a thinker (even as a child). She has many questions about the Amish faith and the practices that are largely hinged upon those beliefs. She is not sure she wants to join the church formally, because once she does, she will be an outcast, shunned, and damned to flames of hell should she leave. However, as she passes the traditional age to join, too many questions are asked. She realizes a year later that if she doesn’t join, she will be an outcast anyway, because people really don’t just stick around at that age and NOT join.

She wants to ask questions to help her decide whether to leave or join. “I wanted to walk a spiritual path” that would permit her to ask “fundamental questions”. Since those who join always have a period when they leave the room with the Bishop and other church leaders during the Sunday service, it occurs to her that only by agreeing to join, will she get to go to those sessions and ask her questions. However, it doesn’t turn out that way. The church elders just preach at the upcoming members. “There wasn’t going to be any question and answer session”, she realizes. And this is the real beginning of the end. Every time Saloma persistently inquires about some aspect of faith, she is shushed, as though she has committed a breach of manners. The message is that she should just shut up and DO it, and the metaphor of a grain of wheat being crushed in order to make it part of the flour that can make a loaf of bread–the Amish community–weighs heavily on her. She sees herself as a grain that has escaped the pestle and remained whole, and unwilling to be crushed.

The end left me with some real questions. We are told how she makes her escape, yet 27 years pass that are all but left out. We know that she marries someone who is involved with the place that takes her in, but she has a teenage son as she writes, and yet is staying in a dormitory at Smith, hoping not to become one of the many she has heard of whose marriage dissolves because she can’t bear to leave the college when she is done.

Furlong correctly keeps her story true to the title, and the point of the book is to tell us about her path that lead to her leaving the Amish. She also gives the reader much more information about Amish life in general (including a really interesting system of dating!) than Wagler, who appears self-absorbed as he writes and tells only of his own experiences in a less detailed way, than Furlong, but the ending feels a bit abrupt. I read my copy on an e-reader, which to my frustration cuts off the author page; maybe I would have found some more scraps of how her story turns out there, or maybe she is still at Smith, hanging onto a tenuous marriage, and doesn’t know yet how things will work out.

In any case, if you have any curiosity about the Amish, there is far more in her book than I have written here. I wanted to cheer for her, and for the few who assisted her in her courageous journey. I highly recommend this book (and if you have read my other reviews, you know that I am very stingy with that fifth star).

Glitter and Glue, by Kelly Corrigan*****

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GLITTERANDGLUE

Whoops, nearly forgot! Thank you, thank you to Ballantine Books and the First Reads program at Goodreads for permitting me to read this book free and in advance!

This isn’t Corrigan’s first book, and it shows. At first it appears to be light, fluffy material, a beach read. The confidential one-gal-to-another tone may create the illusion that we’re going to sit down over a cup of coffee and have a little chat, just us, and the book.

It goes deeper than this, though. The complexity of relationship between mother and daughter is not a new topic, but Corrigan is a strong writer, and she makes it feel new. She recounts how she had saved her money so that she could leave home to find out who she was, following college graduation. She needed to go out into the world to do that, she explained to her mother, who thought she should do something more practical with her nest egg.

In Australia, Corrigan runs low on money, and she finds herself signing on as a temporary nanny. The dad has just been widowed, and his 5 and 7 year old children are smarting from the loss. Reminders of “Mum” and mortality seem to be everywhere. And Corrigan, who is for better or worse playing the role of surrogate mother, finds herself channeling her mother. Everywhere she goes, her mother is still in her head. I recognize some of the truisms and turns of phrase from my own mother, though I am about a decade older than Corrigan. And gradually, Corrigan comes to realize that what her mother had said before was true: her father, who always praised her and was always positive, but didn’t deal with any of the details of raising her or disciplining her, was the glitter. Her mother was the glue.

Later she comes to realize that there is not one woman inside each woman, but dozens of them: the mother who has always seemed a trifle harsh, undemonstrative, curt, and (my word) anal at home is “a hoot” at the office. Everyone finds her hilarious there. She isn’t trying to be anyone’s role model, so she cuts loose. What a revelation!

Two favorite moments: toward the beginning when she is a “classic” snoop while babysitting. Whoa, I totally did that, and my friends did too! We used the house phone where we were babysitting to call each other up and announce our findings! Funny. Another favorite was toward the end, when the author, fuming a bit at home in San Francisco because she has been back home to her folks many times, but her mother hasn’t visited her, is told by a friend that she needs to invite her mother. “Maybe she thinks you don’t care.” Again, hell yes! My own mother instilled in me the notion that once your kids are grown, you don’t push yourself at them, sure as hell don’t drop in on them. I have been inside my own son’s house just once, and last summer he made an ironic remark about it. Hey, I was waiting for the invitation! Last thing any mom wants is for her kid to pull back the curtains and hiss to whoever is present, “Oh crap. It’s my mom.” *cringe!*

Ultimately, Corrigan experiences the role reversal that inevitably must come, and she becomes her mother’s glue when she falls ill. Her father is still the glitter.

I end a lot of reviews by saying that the reader shouldn’t pay full cover price, but consider reading it if your library or used book store has it. Not so this time. If you love an accessible yet intelligently written memoir as much as I do, cut loose and buy this when it’s released. If not for yourself, read it for your family. You’re bound closer than you may think.

Good Morning, Mr. Mandela! by Zelda la Grange *****

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Good Morning Mr MandelaZelda la Grange, an Africaner, grew up in South Africa under apartheid. Her family was steadfastly right-wing, and she was brought up to believe that Africaners were fighting against the “black communists”. She had been taught to fear them. The family servant, Jogabeth, was black, but she fell into a slightly different category, since she had a large role in raising la Grange while her parents, who were low income and struggled financially despite their white privilege, were working. But Jogabeth was not permitted to touch Zelda’s skin. When Zelda needed carrying, she climbed on the woman’s back, but already knew not to touch her hair, her hands.

It might rub off. It might soil her.
When she was finished with school, she got a secretarial position in the government, and it was there that she found herself working for a new president after the death of apartheid. She worked for Nelson Mandela’s personal assistant. White South Africa was in turmoil; some Africaners were progressive and welcomed the change, but her own family was outraged and frightened. La Grange needed her job and assured herself that because she was fairly far down the food chain, she would likely never actually see President Mandela.
And the very thought of running into Black people in positions of authority terrified her. How much must they hate her and all of the Africaners who had kept them down for so long? Would they hurt her? And when the day finally came that she saw the president, she kept on moving, eyes averted, but he asked one of his staff to bring her in for a conversation.

When she arrived, she burst into tears of mortification and fear. He took her hand, ending her lifelong habit of never touching a black man before she even realized what she was doing, and he made a point of holding that hand until he was ready to give it back to her. And in his kindly, genial manner, he told her, as she stood sobbing in terror before him, that she was overreacting. It would not be the last time he would tell her this.
When I began reading la Grange’s memoir, I was initially disappointed. She spoke of her own life and told the reader that this was not Mandela’s memoir but her own. I didn’t want to read about the daily doings of some Africaner functionary. If I hadn’t received the book in exchange for a review, I’d have abandoned it, and it would have been my loss. Because soon after she found herself working for Madiba, her job became inextricably intertwined with his, and it continued through his retirement. Her life was, in many ways, his life. But because Mandela did not address his presidency when he wrote Long Walk to Freedom, and because he would never brag or dwell upon his own successes unless they were important historically, her story about life with him is different from his own. And because he would never name-drop, she does it for him.
I reflected upon his choice of la Grange when he chose the entourage with which he would travel. He made a point of having a multi-hued staff around him, blacks, browns, golden toned and Africaner. She and a professor were the two Africaners he chose. So initially, he had just wanted her to be the Africaner who would represent her own race and culture on the new presidential staff. And it was a smart move. A man in his position must watch constantly for security risks. When choosing an Africaner for the staff, he needed not only someone who was organized, hard working, and competent—which she was. He also needed the least likely individual to be an assassin! La Grange describes herself as very young (I think she was short of age 20), but also shy and much inclined to blushing. Duplicity was beyond her. She also says she was plain looking and overweight.
Madiba was a really smart guy. He understood that her youth made her more malleable than some, and that she was no part of anyone’s plan for a coup. In time she replaced his private secretary, and over the course of twenty remarkable years, she developed a steel spine as she became the gate-keeper to Mr. Mandela both during his presidency and after his retirement.
La Grange has a lot of stories to tell. She traveled with Madiba to many places, and tells of his friendships with other members of royal families abroad, with celebrities, and with ordinary people. She also speaks of his tireless effort, even after the age of 80, to raise funds for clinics (especially for AIDS patients) and schools in what was still an underdeveloped nation. There was (and probably still is) a tremendous amount of corruption in government, but Madiba was completely clean, as one might expect, and made a point to keep his charity funds separate from those of the government. His travel abroad and frequent appearances sometimes caused political friction with those who succeeded him, who felt he had no right to speak for South Africa anymore; Madiba insisted he spoke for himself alone. And la Grange points out that it was the ANC that chose to make him the icon of anti-apartheid struggle, and thus they had no business complaining when international figures asked for Madiba rather than Mbeki or others who currently held office.
There is a part I skipped through at the beginning that explains what apartheid was, and how it affected the lives of those who lived under it. I didn’t read it because there was nothing there I didn’t know; I was an anti-apartheid activist once myself. But for those who were too young to recall it or whose attention was elsewhere, it may help plug the gaps.
But the vast majority of her story is of her life with Nelson Mandela. For two decades she was on the go, 24/7, and served at such a frenetic pace that she often could not take 20 minutes for a meal. The phone often rang in the middle of the night, and sometimes she worked all night long as well. Her transformation and dedication were complete.
At the very end, a fracture within Mandela’s family formed, and a couple of his daughters decided that she could no longer see him, but she had been there for him right up until he was well into his decline. The memories she shares are ones you will find nowhere else; Madiba had attempted to write a second memoir, but was unable to complete it. And even had he done so, he would not have proudly told the world about the good that he did the way that la Grange does for him.
Highly recommended to everyone.

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich****

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Suspenseful and great fun; nonfiction. My son has a good friend who has been a professional gambler for years. He doesn’t do what these guys do, though, because it’s true, you do become unwelcome once you have won too many times, or if you come in as a team.(It seems credible, too, that it might be illegal to signal someone to come join a card game at the very moment you know the shoe is loaded with face cards and aces).

It’s an exciting book to read–and I’ve read it twice–simply because it is so daring, and Vegas seems like such a powerful entity to challenge. I am glad the writer did not include all the casino names and the minutiae that others seemed to crave. For one thing, the urban topography of Vegas changes constantly. The MGM burns to the ground, is rebuilt further up the street. A couple of casinos don’t do well and go under, but then Steve Winn throws up some brand new ones…I think if the writer had become too specific with each and every casino, color scheme, manager’s name, etc., it would have become irrelevant within a year, as employees change, walls are repainted, casinos are razed to put up mega-casinos.

For the rare few, like the fellow I know, who have such brilliant memories and math skill that they always remember what each player at a table has played and how many face cards and aces have shown out of a six-deck shoe (set of cards the casino uses for its patrons), the only way to win consistently, though of course not every time, since luck is a factor, is to go and play at tables with other players, never against the house. Our friend of the family also makes it a point to order one strong drink and nurse it steadily throughout the night, so everybody else is drunk and he is sober.

This reviewer, being a liberal arts type and no kind of math wizard, spent an entire week in Vegas once and did not gamble a single penny. Saw lots of great shows, watched other people bet astonishing amounts of money…and then went out to eat somewhere awesome. I spent a lot of money, but lost none of it. But teachers are generally sensible that way.

Obviously, this book was not published because of the writer’s skill with prose, but with such an interesting story to tell, I am glad it was published. I greatly enjoyed it, and passed my copy on to a couple of friends before I sent it to a charity used-book sale. This is light reading, but also a page-turner. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, read it. Just don’t regard it as an instructional manual that will lead to great riches, unless your skills are similar to those of the folks at MIT.

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, by Alison Arngrim *****

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confessionsofaprairiebitchThey say actors tend to have high IQs. This book is one more piece of evidence. Arngrim is super smart, and she can really write. And she is very, very funny.

Like a lot of comedians (which is what she did after being a child actor,at least for a time), her unerring comic instinct developed as a survival skill. Terrible families come in a wide range of dysfunction, but if domestic atrocities were a contest (and thank goodness they aren’t), Christina Crawford (Mommie Dearest) would be left eating Arngrim’s dust. The enormous temper tantrums and other vile forms of acting out inherent in the character she played were a recipe for mental health. How many other people get to go out and scream at other people for a living? And trust me, she needed all the help she could get. For the specifics, get this book and read it. It is worth the cover price.

Public reaction to Arngrim ranges from the hysterically funny to the almost unbelievable. She and her Prairie mom went to a fair as part of a publicity effort, to sign autographs etc, but they were attacked by an angry mob and had to slide out of there quietly. On a French television program, she was asked to explain her bad behavior, and she explained, as if she were her character, that she had been raised by a dreadful mother and was jealous of Laura. The studio audience and talk show hosts all understood entirely. It’s just too hilarious!

In real life, she has been close friends with Melissa Gilbert since their early days together on the set, and she spoke so well of Gilbert that I think I may read her memoir, too…and I was not even remotely interested in doing so before this! She also has some interesting things (I am dying to divulge, but won’t…READ THE BOOK!) about Michael Landon. Wowzers.

Not-so-funny is her experience losing a good friend to AIDS. I lost an old high school chum in the late 80’s, when a whole generation (or more) of gay men were unknowingly exposed to a deadly virus that at the time had no useful treatment. I applaud the years she has served as an advocate for HIV awareness and treatment. She has gone to bat for abused children, too. Again, you have to get the book! You just have to read it!

I always have 4-6 books on a string at a time, and I float more or less freely from one to the next. The only time I put this one down for another was at bedtime, because for awhile it was rollicking enough not only to keep me awake, but to keep me awake and laughing, or shaking the mattress with suppressed gales.

Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva, by Gerry Albarelli ****

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teacha!I came away from reading this novella-sized (just over 100 pp) nugget somewhat ambivalent. There were aspects of it that I enjoyed, but please note that I read it free, courtesy of Net Galley. If I had paid full hardcover price, I might well have felt cheated. A buck or two for my e-reader? Maybe.

Albarelli spent a year teaching afternoon classes in a yeshiva. I had seen the word used in text without a lot of explanation in other works, and had heard friends and colleagues refer casually to having sent their children to a “small, private Jewish school” when living in New York City. So I came into this—and volunteered the time to read and review it—because I had questions, as well as the slightly voyeuristic curiosity I always seem to experience when examining a culture that is very different from my own.

Several other reviewers on Goodreads.com expressed frustration. They expected Albarelli to come to some sort of conclusion. I felt the same way at first, but after some thought I realized that he had a conclusion. The problem with it is that it’s buried in the middle of what are separate, journal-like chapters, each of which depicts a particularly interesting (to the author, and often to me also) incident or important day at the yeshiva.

Did I get my questions answered? I think so. I did not understand that there are Jewish families living in present-day New York City who speak no English at all, only Yiddish. Chassidic Jews, ultra-conservative, keep themselves apart even by choosing not to learn the language of the dominant culture, but they see value in having their choldren learn it.

Our writer is one-year part time instructor among several who did not blend in culturally due to dress, their lack of facial hair, and the many singular details that demonstrate belonging to a carefully structured in-group. He and the other English language teachers weren’t Jewish, and the kids could tell.

In describing how this yeshiva ran, Albarelli painted a picture that I, as a retired public school teacher, found horrifying. (The rabbi who hired this guy said that public school teachers did not do well in his yeshiva; I can certainly see why.) A large room of 8 year old boys spent the entire morning unsupervised by even a single adult in the room with them. They had a pattern of behaviors that resembled The Lord of the Flies (my comparison, not the author’s), except less organized and more random. Furniture was broken and left in corners; garbage was not always cleaned up, but left on the floor. The students—all boys—disrespected teachers openly when they arrived or during assembly and class time,, spitting on them, throwing things at them, and worse. They did this in full view of other teachers and the head rabbi, none of whom corrected them in any way. If anything, the teacher must be to blame.

Some of the other reviewers took issue with Albarelli’s smug implication, unmistakable, that he was the most favored English teacher, abused least because he was so much better than any other English instructors, and that the other teachers all more or less had it coming. What a joy he must have been to have for a colleague! Don’t let the door hit you on your way out at the end of the school year.

But there were passages suffused with the joy of the teachable moment, when he was able to get some of his students to engage. At times, we are led to believe that every child in his over-sized class was longing to participate during the whole lesson. Given the other things he says, it strains credibility, and yet there can be no doubt that he enjoyed these sessions; they are his main motivation for writing this, at least to my eye.

The conclusion that is buried in the text is that this chaotic, at times bizarre system of education works for this set of children because it is consistent with the way things are done at home. He doesn’t back this theory up with anything factual like home visits; we are to take his word for it.

Because it gave me a glimpse inside a culture that I’d been curious about, I am rounding my 3.5 review up to a 4.0, albeit reluctantly. I would encourage the writer to be more clear about his objectives and organization.

To readers, I advise that if you’re interested, you might check your local library if you believe you’d like to read more, but don’t go out and pay a lot of money for this muddy though occasionally informative and entertaining bit of reminiscence.

I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary, by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak *****

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IkissyourhandsPoignant and painful; beautiful and wrenching…Szegedy-Maszak takes us through a time and place in a way nobody else could. If you are a serious historian, please consider this a must-read.

When I applied to receive this story as a Goodreads giveaway, I did so as an historian, conscious of a blind spot in my own education. I knew too little of Hungary and its past, apart from that it had become a part of the Soviet block at some point, and then became independent once more. I wanted to learn more about the country’s political and economic history, and if I had to read a love story to do that, then I would.

When the book arrived, I gasped as I pulled it from its envelope. Beautifully bound in hardcover with folio-cut pages and a pearlescent cover featuring the family about which she writes, I held it in my hands, showed it to my family, and then swore my head would not be turned by the beauty on the cover, and the painstakingly aesthetic manner in which the interior is designed. The family tree at the start of the book actually turns out to be essential, because many people are mentioned many times here, and to keep them straight, I would have to keep flipping back. But I didn’t know that yet. I saw the literary (and as it turns out, highly appropriate) quotes that adorn each chapter’s beginning, along with images from the past, snapshots of what is no more.

So…incredibly good taste, and no expense has been spared. But can she write? Oh yes! And by the time I was done, I had no fewer than fifty sticky-noted pages, and worse, every single one of them marks a passage that seems really important. Now I must pick and choose, which is a dreadful predicament.

Be aware that this is a hyper-literate read, not necessarily accessible to every reader. And to get to the good part, you’ll have to do a lot of work at first, plodding through the dull stuff at the start and trying to remember who everyone is.

Though it tells a good deal of what took place behind the scenes before, during, and after the second world war in Hungary (albeit from the very conservative perspective of considerable material interest and self-involvement), it is also a deeply personal story, told well by an already accomplished writer with a literary pedigree a mile long and granite solid. This is her first book, but Szegedy-Maszak is already a respected writer and journalist. Her love of family and the details that governed their lives in Hungary, Europe, and the USA are what makes this memoir compelling. For many, this will be a more palatable way to learn history as well.

Because of the role of extended family, which is inextricably intertwined with that of her parents, the reader must wade through lengthy genealogy in the beginning. I have read other reviews saying that the reviewer gave up on the book because of the initial level of detail, and indeed, at first it is tempting to wonder why anyone who is not related to the author would have an interest. Though the author has doubtless already hacked away at the introductory chapters and removed portions that it hurt her heart to pull and cut, a little more pruning at the start would make this book more readable. It’s a 4.5 on my very picky scale anyway, though, because what comes after its somewhat tedious beginning is remarkable and well told. It is a very scholarly yet heart-felt telling of how world events have impacted her family, and vice versa, and it is when she describes poignant experiences in a painterly, often painful way that her family’s story becomes most absorbing.

The writer grows up in a multigenerational household in which children are almost irrelevant, seated below the salt at the long formal dinner table. Everything the elders value and discuss has come and gone. Her mother descends from the Weiss and Kornfeld (later to become “de Kornfeld”) families, and her mother’s grandfather was once the most wealthy industrial and agricultural baron in all of Hungary. Now most of the empire is gone, and the family sighs wistfully and speaks about the past, when they were someone, when a mere phone call or visit from Weiss or Kornfeld could cause a policy change, or change someone’s life.

*consider everything after this to be a spoiler alert*

Her parents had been very different people. Her mother had grown up in a vacuum of sorts created by immense wealth and privilege. Even as the Nazis stormed across Europe, Hungary was, by the author’s telling, insulated for a long time, unlike their unlucky neighbors, the Poles. Hungary wanted the land that had been lost to Czechoslovakia in the Treaty of Trianon following the First World War, an immense piece of real estate inhabited primarily by Hungarians, and which had been taken from them. When Nazi tanks rolled into Austria and boundaries were redrawn, the Hungarians held their breath. They understood that with the USSR fighting as an Allied nation, they would see no restitution of land from the Allies. Thus, they became an Axis power, at first tentatively, with the hope that if enough munitions were produced by the Manfred Weiss Works, makers of tanks, munitions, and later in the war, airplanes, the Germans would see no need to invade and supervise Hungary. And this was the Hungarian argument against occupation: we can do so much for you independently, oh Germany. Don’t trouble yourselves coming here. It’s all good.

In the midst of all this, Hanna Kornfeld, the writer’s mother, meets a brooding intellectual and politician, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak. When he signs his letters to her—first formal, then impassioned, but with the restraint decorum required—he concludes with “I kiss your hand”, which is merely the equivalent of the Western “yours truly” (when we aren’t) or “sincerely” (even less so). It was a format, until it was more.

He is an intellectual, a scholar, and a very busy man. He is anti-fascist, and trying to somehow involve the Allied forces, so that Hungary can make its separate peace with Britain and the US, but Britain holds off, regarding Hungary as not of primary importance strategically (and in fact, they are surrounded by fascists, so it would be a stretch by the time Hungary makes its entreaty), and also, Hungary is regarded as opportunist.

Here the author bristles, and I think she doth protest too much.

My sense is that the time to contact the Allies was when Hitler invaded Poland. One doesn’t offer Hitler endless munitions, and then complain to the Allies when he sends his troops in to do exactly what they’ve done everywhere else in Europe.

Aladar, however, is not offering endless munitions; he is trying to persuade anyone who will listen to him that the fascists must be resisted at all costs. He is arrested for his anti-fascist activities and sent to Dachau. He survives , partly because he is treated as a political prisoner, which for some reason is considered a relatively (RELATIVELY!) privileged category, and also because the fascists don’t cast their eye toward Hungary until near the end of the war.

And when they come, they do it in the way only fascists can. The Danube runs red with blood. This is not allegory, but a literal reference. Despite every record that was burned, every photograph that was destroyed, there is still plenty of documentation, and the author provides it all, the child of the scholar become scholar herself. The bibliography at the book’s end, along with the notes for each chapter, is impressive.

Once Aladar is free, his experience leaves him brooding, nearly broken, and overcome with survivor’s guilt. It is with trepidation, then, that he contacts Hanna once more when the war has ended, because as he tells her, he is not the same man he was before the war; he has no money and no job; yet the one thing he knows is that he loves her and wants to marry her if she is still interested. He kisses her hands many, many times.

Interestingly, Hanna is fine. Her family has swung a deal. They will sign over all of the factories, the real estate, in fact the large majority of the family fortune, in exchange for their lives somewhere outside the Nazi realm. Let us go to a neutral country, and you can have it all.

The fascists want to hold a few of the family back as hostages. It is here that the writer’s aunt blanches and almost does not sign. Yet the family understands that there is really nothing to keep the Nazis from taking everything and having every last one of them killed. With the coolness that generally characterizes the ruling class, the family cuts its losses and runs. Who can blame them? Others would surely have done the same, given the chance. They go to Portugal initially; later some will try to rebuild a life in Budapest, others in Switzerland.

But it is Aladar whose political practices and courage open the door to the United States. It is remembered after the war that he has pleaded all along, from the very beginning, for Hungary to become a part of the Allied umbrella. He had met Hitler, and he had heard him speak. He knew the guy wasn’t someone you wanted to rule your people. He did everything he could to take Hungary into Allied hands, but it didn’t happen. He nearly died in the undertaking, and now, the US gazes at him with a bit more focus. He is a friendly face in war-torn Europe, and might make an excellent liaison with the new Hungarian government

When the war is over, is appointed minister to Hungary for the USA. With a moue of distaste at the notion of leaving Europe, and understandable grief at leaving her family at such a wrenching time, Hanna agrees to marry Alastar and move to the USA. Numerous family members will later follow.

But small countries all lose when enormously powerful countries sit down, victorious, to divide the post-war map, as if it were a smallish birthday cake where everyone at the table ought to get a little piece. Hungarians will not determine the fate of Hungarians. The USSR has paid dearly in human flesh and material loss, and now it will build itself a buffer zone to protect its turf against future incursion.

The Allied nations understand the nature of Stalinism (and this is my own historical interpretation; the writer embraces the Cold War era view of “totalitarianism” with regard to the now-moribund USSR). It is ultimately conservative; the USSR was not interested in expanding across the globe, only in holding onto its own power base. Just as France gained back land it had lost, and just as the US experienced unprecedented power and influence over the globe, so would Mother Russia see to it that her own needs were met. Hungary was diced up even finer, since a fair amount of anti-Stalinist sentiment prevailed there. When they were finished, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and other satellite states stood like sentries on the Soviet perimeter.

As for the heroic Aladar, he refuses to recognize the new Hungarian government. He welcomes the wife of the deposed head of state, one who was friendly toward a capitalist system. The Smallholder Party that Aladar favored has gone down, but he is not out of the fight yet. Soon, the newspapers in the Stalinist orbit will display a photograph of the Hungarian minister kissing the hand of this woman as she leaves the US, and he is branded a traitor.

His courage gets him nothing in the US except the opportunity to remain with his family as a US citizen (small potatoes for the writer’s family, yet something that is held dearly and hard to get these days!)
I was chagrined to see that he went to work for the right-wing (my characterization, not the author’s) Radio Free Europe. He had the integrity to resign when he learned this enterprise was CIA-run, but the Voice of America cannot be regarded by a Marxist (of the non-Stalinist variety) such as myself.

The writer is at her strongest when she injects the deeply personal moments into her narrative: a family member explains to her that when she views the photographs of bodies piled high at the death camps, she searches the faces of the corpses to “see if one knows anyone.” Suddenly the Holocaust becomes up close and personal in a way only trumped by Schindler’s List and Night. Family members have died there; this was not as clean an exit for her family as it is made out to be in the press.

Though despondent over the loss of his country’s autonomy; his own survivor’s guilt, including his inability to save the members of his family in Hungary who were killed or hurt by the Stalinists in retaliation against his activities abroad; and finally, the death of his and Hanna’s first-born and namesake, Alastar still travels to Hungary with the writer, his daughter, in the late 70’s, and he is still sharp enough mentally to shush her when she naively inquires about the number of police all over the airport. Marianne Szegedy-Maszak points out that he must have been clinically depressed, but not enough medical advances had been made for him to have anything to help him beyond Valium, a drug that’s great for anxiety, but doesn’t really do much for depression.

Though the writer seems perhaps most deeply attached to the female members of her family, I find myself more taken with her father, who despite his political leanings that are almost opposite to my own, was clearly a man of principle and integrity, and who knew how to roll up his sleeves and do what needed doing. In retirement, he finds that he needs to see things grow; he loses himself in the family garden, and visitors mistake him for the gardener.

There is so much more to see here, and this is clearly a work wrought from love of family and origin rather than something done primarily for fiscal gain. For those interested in the Holocaust; Hungarian history; or for women like Szegedy-Maszak (and me) who find that we understand our mothers so much better only after they grow old and die, this book should not be missed. The first few chapters are slow, but forge on, and you will be rewarded.

Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir, by Tony Hillerman *****

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seldomdisappointedHillerman was one of my favorite writers. I am so darned sorry he is gone. I read this partly because I enjoy autobiographies and memoirs (especially at bedtime; they are so linear that I can keep track while I am getting sleepy) and also because I had read all of his mysteries and had none of his novels left to read. But this one is an award-winner in its own right, which I did not know before diving in. It’s a real treasure.

Hillerman grew up in Oklahoma, and he grew up around American Indian kids. He learned a fair amount that way, but once he began writing about them, he felt he had not served them well enough, and so he wrote another novel with the same focus in an effort at getting it right. And so it went. He is the only Caucasian writer ever to have been named a Friend of the Navajo by that tribe, though I found this information on one of the fly-leafs of a novel, not in this book; he is humble and unassuming.

The name of the novel came from a saying of his mother’s: “Blessed are they that expect little, for they shall be seldom disappointed.”

Hillerman talks a lot about his experiences in World War II, and at first, one may think it is just an old man telling war stories. He tells his better than most, of course. But there’s more to it than that. He was badly injured in this war, and he considers himself fortunate to have been an artilleryman, since he says that riflemen got killed fastest; I always had heard that artillerymen got dead quicker than anyone, but that’s not what he says, and who knows whether this is just modesty or whether World War II was different from the general rule (or whether what I read that military historians recorded was wrong information, for that matter).

But Hillerman’s bent isn’t actually military history, it’s his own story, and this was a major part of it. He has a way of coming full circle with various points in his tale. Things that are mentioned at the beginning of the book show up at the end, changed yet the same. (Check the detail with which he describes a game of marbles during his childhood; it’s going to show up again.)

There are two things I really like besides the fact that the guy was really great with the written word. One is his working class trajectory. This comes out in his novels (and instead of mansions with tennis courts, his heroes live in thin-walled aluminum trailers or hogans with no running water), and his dedication to his wife. I have never seen a man wax so effusively over a woman he’s been married to for decades; it says a lot about his character.

I’ve read a lot of this genre, but this is one of the finest of its example I’ve read to date. Highly recommended (and never disappointed).

A Street Cat Named Bob, and How He Saved My Life, by James Bowen *****

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AstreetcatnamedbobHow does a young man from a middle income family end up sleeping on the streets in a cardboard box, addicted to heroin?

Answer: it happens all the time. It’s closer than you think.

James Bowen does a really fine job relating, in this lovely little memoir, how it happened to him, and the role Bob, a street cat who adopted him, had in pulling him off of Methodone and toward recovery and a life in mainstream Britain.

Here’s the disclosure: I won this book through the Goodreads.com giveaways. I say this on the fifth day of my new blog with a kind of nostalgia, since this was the first book I got free in exchange for a review; it’s been just over a year since then. The review to follow is the one I originally wrote for him back then.

James Bowen’s memoir smacked me upside the head by showing me a bias I did not know I had. First, I assumed this might be poorly written, and successful in England for the content and novelty of its subject matter rather than any attendant writing skill. When I saw the elegantly simple text, the well-crafted pacing, the deftness with which the writer weaves his life’s narrative in and out of the tale about himself and his cat, I started to look for a co-author or an “as told to”. In short, I did not really believe that someone who had (as he put it) “fallen between the cracks” of society would have the skill to write this book.

Slap my Marxist mouth! I am appalled by the social Darwinist that was lurking in the shadows of my own character, and I thank Bowen for casting that particular demon out by the dumpster, where it belongs.

Bowen has a few really brilliantly descriptive passages here, but he is not a master wordsmith. What works is the continuity of the story without any pauses for maudlin self pity. What amazes and strikes deeply, at least for me, is the way he continues for an astonishingly long period of time to assume that the cat will not want to stay with him. He has taken it in, but assumes that the streets will do better for this critter than he ever could. Time and again, he offers the cat the opportunity to run away and reject him, even after he has spent nearly all of his hard-earned money gained as a street musician on veterinary care, food, and wow, even a microchip (which my own little beagle does not have). Bob has the character to stick around, though, and eventually, in a truly marvelous moment, when a well-to-do woman offers Bowen a thousand pounds for his cat, he in turn asks her the price of her youngest child.

Sometimes people who have seen life’s dark underside commit terrible crimes and take a passive voice in discussing them later. They didn’t do something, but rather, it happened. A recent headline in my home city blared that a killer had apologized for his crimes, but when I read the article, the “apology” turned out to be, “I am so very sorry for the things that happened.” Though Bowen is surely no killer, I was watching for it. I’ve worked with youngsters who have been in and around the juvenile “justice” system here in the States. They get good at distancing themselves from their own wrongdoing, seeing it as tragic but inevitable, and adults do it too. But Bowen does not do that and does not go there. Anything he did, was something he did. If it was wrong, he owns that too. It gives his writing integrity that those who feel terribly sorry for themselves cannot impart.

So here it is. This book is terrific, and you should buy it and read it. When I entered the giveaway, I signed an agreement that this review could be used for marketing purposes by the author and his agents. I wasn’t required to write it, though, and if you’ve read my other reviews, you know I never pull punches. This one was well earned, by the way the man pulled himself out of the abyss, for himself and for his kitty, and for the way he tells the story.

Good job, Bowen.

The Lieutenant Don’t Know: One Marine’s Story of Warfare and Combat Logistics in Afghanistan, by Jeffrey Clement

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thelieutenantdontknowClement is a rough-and-ready type of guy. He comes from a military family, and grows up under the assumption that he will join the US Navy after he graduates. It is something of a shock to the family when he joins the Marines instead.

Most of the books I review are ones I receive free in exchange for a review, and my finger surprised me when it tapped the button requesting a copy of this title from Net Galley. See, I am a Marxist. I never support an imperialist war, which means every war the USA has been involved in since the end of the American Civil War, and for me, even the horror of 9/11 didn’t change that. So why did I want to read a soldier’s memoir of Afghanistan?

I hadn’t read far, once I received the book, when I realized that part of the hook for me was the journalistic black-out that has been imposed for many years, ever since the flag-draped coffins hit the front pages of local newspapers and everyone rose up for various reasons; some of them were against the war in general, and some were families of the deceased who felt it was disrespectful for their loved ones to be displayed this way. But one way or another, the Pentagon and those who stand behind it decided that this would not be another open-access war; there would be no more photographs of anything that took place in Iraq or Afghanistan in print from even the most mainstream media. It was a giant blow to the First Amendment. And now, though he was required to change a lot of details for security reasons, a Marine lieutenant has come forward to tell us about his experience there. It was as if the wizard had stepped out from behind the curtain; finally, someone was writing about the war.

Many people, especially those of us on the left, get the false notion that the US military wants to round up all of our young men and send them off to fight. It isn’t quite like that, at least in this man’s experience. From among those who sign up for ROTC, there are those who are culled. Some are tossed for academic reasons; some for physical weakness or unfitness; and others simply aren’t team players. And the amount of absolute obedience and conformity that the training requires leaves no room for the free thinker, that’s for sure. Either you do it, or you’re out!

I had never heard before of someone who genuinely loved every minute of his training experience. I think that part of that mindset has to be a really strong physical constitution; people who get sick easily just can’t do this. But a large part of it is also the culture, the stories that are handed down by the family, and the things he isn’t supposed to ask about. I have had friends from military families also, and I recognize common traits among them: they are reliable, punctual, and they don’t whine. Clements comes across readily as one of them. But he is a natural. He works hard, takes responsibility, and passes with flying colors, though the tale is told with a certain humility in which he owns his mistakes and laughs about some of them, lightening the overall tone.

When he is asked why he prefers to be a military engineer (in charge of logistics, so that he is out in the field with the men rather than driving a desk), he says that his skill set points toward engineering or teaching, and he does not want to teach. As a retired teacher, I could only grimly nod, and think, “So this is what it’s come to. Men would rather go out in the desert and get shot at than deal with the current climate in teaching.”

Long after bin Laden has been found and is dead, US forces continue to serve in the most maddening of conditions. Everything there seems to be in short supply. Nobody has a truck, and if they do, it runs badly; after all, trucks were designed for roads, not sand. Nobody can drive anywhere other than behind a minesweeper, because incendiary devices are planted anywhere and everywhere, or nearly so. Open desert is scary to cross because an attack could come from anywhere anytime, and just what will the convoy hide behind? But hills are worse, because gunners may hide behind them, and they too can conceal horizontal exploding devices. And while traveling in a large convoy, often speeds are limited to 3-5 miles per hour. Twilight is the Taliban’s favorite time to attack, but it is almost impossible to get anywhere at these speeds without having to travel during that time. If someone shoots at you, you aren’t allowed to shoot back unless you can see them; nothing creates an international incident faster than deaths due to friendly fire among allies. All you can do, when shots come out of nowhere, is run, and sometimes, that is at the speed of a walk.

But it has to be done. The village must be secured.

Clement has a gift for story, and the wisdom to let his experience gel to where he could write about what he did and saw with a measure of professional distance. He engages, but does not rant. It’s a good book, well paced and organized, with some (approved) photographs to further enlighten the reader.

What is it that “The Lieutenant Don’t Know”? The phrase is mentioned early in the text, but not fully explained till the end of the book, and it is done with the care and precision of an accomplished writer. You’d better order a copy right now, because not just anyone can explain it the way Clement can.