The dark underbelly of the “The Golden State” (Riverside, Southern California; present and past): “Valencias or oranges?” Only a citrus fruit-picker, or a writer was asks what seems like a simple question knows it’s loaded with history.

Perhaps only a writer like award-winning Susan Straight, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside, born in and still lives and works in Riverside, Southern California in the Coachella Valley south of San Bernardino, could write such a razor-sharp novel (her ninth), Mecca that beams a spotlight on the “invisible people,” marginalized multiracial and multiethnic people of color, whose centuries-old history reflects America’s agricultural economic engine more than any other state. Only someone who cares deeply about this richly diverse part of the country, also more than any other state, could write this hard-hitting novel about people who’ve largely been ignored others “wanted us to forget.” Straight doesn’t. “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past,” Straight wrote in her 2019 memoir, In the Country of Women.

Mecca is not, though, just about one place in America. Its targeted themes are universal: racism, hatred, violence, abuse, victimization, and oppression – economic, social, and cultural. Along with highlighting the critical importance of history, family, community, and connectedness.

Like the heat blazing in this mostly desert terrain, temperatures soaring 120 degrees for days, Straight’s characters “came from people who worked the fields” toiling, sweating. Mecca is aflame. Hot, angry, fierce like the Santa Anna winds that roar mightily across the desert and the Salton Sea, a toxic brew.

Much like Straight’s academic title that speaks to the scholarly esteem she holds, Mecca, deserves to be held in high esteem literary-wise. That doesn’t mean all the prose is enchanted. To be utterly authentic, many marginalized characters spew embitterment, resentful of their uphill plight in life, haunted and burdened by the racist treatment of their ancestors. Their words not nearly as cringe-worthy as the white contemptuous characters, who utter words that are loathsome, debasing, intensified by MAGA attitudes. An ambitious novel spanning time.

The darkness is starkly contrasted against the beauty of the landscape, its mountains, valleys, and canyons. Hope among the ruins.

The dedication stirs:

“Truly this book is in memory of my brother, Jeff. When confronted with hatred or violence, he used to say: I don’t get that station, man. His inner radio was all about oranges, dogs, and trucks. We always made up life on our own.”

“Inner radio.” What a gorgeous way to think about the voices of people who are not spouting this ugly stuff. Suffused in some of the characters’ rage and despair are do-gooders and elders who hang onto to a more spiritual place. Mecca is a real town, but it’s also a word that conveys a religious pilgrimage seeking awakening and peace.

The protagonist is a do-gooder of the highest sort: Johnny Frigas, a late thirties policeman with the California Highway Patrol. If only the worst racial slur he encounters is Fritos. Made more disturbing since he risks his life policing the congested highways and cliffhanging roads and his dignity every time he pulls over a white driver full of road rage and racial animus.

Johnny calls himself a “moreno,” referring to the dark color of his skin, his Mexican and Native American heritage. His grandmother was from one of the indigenous peoples in California, the Cahuilla Indians from the Torres Martinez reservation in Thermal. California is also the state with the greatest number of indigenous tribes, none likely familiar. Johnny and his father still believe they’re one of the “lucky” ones, still living in a row of “little wooden houses” that are more like “shacks” in the Anza hills on a ranch, where he was once an orange picker too (and cattle driver), while others like them live in worse conditions in migrant camps and trailers.

By Concerto [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

The author wants us to know that the earliest settlers to SoCal were these indigenous tribes and Mexicans, though not treated as if they belong. Mexican Americans first arrived when Mexico lost a significant portion of its land to the US during the Mexican-American war of 1946-1948. Hardships and sacrifices also toughened and strengthened.

Even when one of the characters is irate, she reminds herself: “It had to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. A gorgeous series of layers and colors – the base of golden sand and white dunes, the silver and green ghost trees and smoke trees floating like strange baby’s breath, the spears of white yucca, and the green creosote bushes.”

Mecca, then, is character-driven. In some ways, it reads like a novel in stories. Stories that may take a while, given the novel runs 370 pages, to recognize they’re tied to one another. Connected to three main characters: Johnny, Ximena, and Matelasse. Once you realize the stories of other characters and their big, extended families are related, the reading and messaging becomes clear.

The diversity of Mecca characters reflects Susan Straight’s diverse family. She too connected, so strongly it’s hard to imagine anyone else writing it as vividly, honestly, brutally, and passionately.

Next up is Ximena. She also has a job no one wants: cleaning up after rich, white women who elect to have facial surgery at a fancy medical “spa,” where they toss around their unpleasant messes and leave something behind that has long-term consequences for her, like Johnny’s newbie days fresh out of the police academy also stumbling upon something that changed his life. We meet up with her again, different job but no less subservient. Fidelia, often by her side, is one of her cousins, struggling too, she bringing out an immigrant’s determination to learn English while speaking Spanish and Mixtec, a language of the “Middle American Indian from northern Mexico to Nicaragua.”

Johnny and Matelasse are single for different reasons. He from a traumatic incident introduced early on that unfolds so we see its impact. Unlike his tight group of friends, all married, some with children, whose stories are also told. Matelasse, part French as her grandmother was a slave in Louisiana, her mother still picking oranges, is a single mother left to count the plastic baggies for the lunches of her boys while working as an ICU nurse when we meet her.

These characters often come to us in chapters or bylines named for real towns, roads, and locations – Fuego Canyon, Bee Canyon, Coachella, Anza Crossing, Route 66 and Cajon Pass. As a literary technique, they serve to help us imagine Johnny riding his Harley on those highways and byways he knows so well, presumably like the author. They also contribute to the sense of connectedness rooted to a place and communities who do NOT turn their backs on each other.

The sizzling heat, not just in the vitriol and abuse, is thirst-wise, echoing the severe drought and climate change out West. Some stories cleverly bring out the need for ice to cool people down as well as ICE illegal immigrants are hiding from. ICE agents are so ferociously blinded in one story they dare to cross into a “sovereign nation.” Most, though, are characters born in America, citizens who deserve the same human rights but don’t get them.

In her memoir, Susan Straight tells us James Baldwin was her “teacher and mentor.” If only he could read the powerful ending, he’d be cheering along with us for those who refused to give in.

Lorraine

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Why a scandalous early-20th century British family spawned a cottage industry still thriving (Cotswolds, England, Paris, and Spain; 1920s to 1939): I’m a latecomer to the “Mitford Industry.” A pet phrase coined by one of the six Mitford sisters, Jessica nicknamed Decca, fifth youngest. A “defiantly radical author and journalist,” says British literary biographer Selina Hastings in her introduction to Hons and Rebels, which reflects how Jessica Mitford’s breakout rebellious autobiography reads. 

Originally published in 1960, reproduced in this handsome, limited edition by Slightly Foxed, a London bookshop and publisher I had the pleasure of stumbling upon during pandemic armchair browsing.

Decca intended the epithet to be disdainful of her landed gentry “eccentric” family, headed by 2nd Baron and Lady Redesdale, dubbed Farve and Muv. Nicknames and capitalizing phrases with a mocking tone abound. Sometimes playful, witty, though mostly in the early sections growing up in an “old and quaint” small village, Swinbrook, in “Cotswold country,” in the British countryside outside of London. A large family, including a brother Tom nicknamed Tuddemy, and those who served the “Ruling Class,” governesses who didn’t last long and a long-time Nanny, all living in a Downton-esque estate, Asthall Manor in the county of Oxfordshire, minus the charm.

Asthall Manor House
By Vieve Forward [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

The creamy-yellow stone that makes the Cotswolds a tourist destination is not the cozy image of the homes in the area nor in Jessica’s eyes. “It has the “look of frankly institutional architecture,” she says of the manor, resembling a “private lunatic asylum.” For many of the real characters who dwell inside – the Mitford parents and four of the sisters depicted, it’s a rather “eccentric” place.

Starting with rigid rules and boundaries. All the sisters were kept cloistered as they weren’t allowed to attend school outside the manor, only adored Tom was. (He boarded at Eton and then fought in WWII in Burma, so he’s mostly out of the picture. He died young, after the book ends). They weren’t allowed to have friends, only within their own kind – cousins, aunts, and uncles. Jessica the most distressed about missing the intellectual stimulation of teachers and yearning for friends and people from different walks of life. Isolation seems a root cause for why most of the sisters’ ideologies ran wild.

Which is to say I came to this autobiography without any knowledge of many of the family’s far-right extremist political ideologies ripe for an historic time. Unity and Deborah were Nazi supporters; Unity, the more viscerally disturbing of the two, had a close relationship with Hitler. Nor did I know that Diana was married to Sir Oswald Mosley, a staunch anti-Semite who led a British Fascist movement of “blackshirts” sounding similar to Hitler’s brownshirts. A Fascist too, along with both parents. Nor did I know Jessica was a Communist. Only two sisters come off as you might assume, loving the life of the British countryside: Pamela and Deborah/Debo, the youngest, who became the Duchess of Devonshire.

Nancy, Diany, Unity, and Jessica Mitford; Pamela, Debo missing
From The Sketch magazine, 1932
Via Wikimedia Commons

Decca wasn’t the best known of the infamous Mitford sisters. That distinction goes to socialite and oldest sister Nancy. She even said that: “In England, the name Mitford is no doubt associated in most people’s minds with my sister Nancy’s novels and biographies.” (Her novels include Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.)

To get a sense for the Mitford industry thriving today, recent novels include The Mitford Murders series by Jessica Fellowes (2018 to 2023), comprising six mysteries, one for each sister in order of eldest; The Mayfair Bookshop: A Novel of Nancy Mitford and the Pursuit of Happiness by Eliza Knight (2022); and The Bookseller’s Secret: A Novel of Nancy Mitford and WWII by Michelle Gable (2021). There’s no shortage of non-fiction books about the Mitfords over the last twenty years either, such as a recent one published in 2017, The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters.

But it’s Hons and Rebels that’s written in the first person, in an astute literary voice. Often, Decca feels like an observer looking in rather than a participant, which seems to mirror how she was growing up in a crowd of older sisters. “It never occurred to me to be happy with my lot,” she confides. Perceptively, at least by the time she was thirteen, she understood that someday she’d need a “Running Away Account.” That day comes and is central to the rest of her memoir when she meets Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew, at nineteen, causing quite an uproar.

While the first part – what it was like to be one of the Mitford daughters of aristocratic, aloof parents so restricted and isolated – is essential to understanding the origin of Jessica’s “confrontational reputation” (Selina Hastings’ words), much of the rest revolves around her running-away-life with Esmond, known for his far-left working class political ideology, which matched hers. A risk taker, he was a Loyalist during the Spanish Civil War, which Jessica’s story takes us to.

Unlike some of her other sisters, Decca didn’t fit the mold of the exalted coming-out debutante season at seventeen, here too, revolting against the aristocratic class’s lifestyle and values. The coming-out tradition, the fashion and the glamour, was something her mother cared about.

Foolhardy in investments, the family was land rich and cash poor. Not interested in much, her father was a member of the Conservative Party and the House of Lords, though rarely went to London to participate. Her mother wasn’t much better, not too involved in child-caring other than issuing ultimatums and critiques of her children’s behavior but gets credit for being charity-minded – London’s poverty her cause. Jessica was deeply affected seeing the dire conditions of the poor and the working-class, which explains her early attraction to communist propaganda.

Esmond occupies Jessica’s heart and ideological soul. After their story ends in 1939 when the book ends, she comes to America and champions civil rights and the abuses of capitalism.

History is very much part of this picture, with a special disgust for former Prime Minister Chamberlain and his doomed appeasement policy towards Hitler. Winston Churchill succeeds him, one of a number of historic figures cited, such as JFK and the owners of the Washington Post Eugene/Agnes Myer and their daughter Katherine Graham.

The most poetic lines may be Jessica’s brutal assessment of her family. How they lacked the “qualities of patience, forbearance, and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life, the instinctive respect for the fundamental dignity of every human being.” You can’t help but admire her support for “humanity, peace and freedom.” 

Postscript: For the past seventy-five years, Slightly Foxed has published a delightful quarterly literary magazine that bears the bookshop’s name. The artful covers drew me in, each by a different artist. A Slightly Foxed Podcast series accompanies the magazine. Hons and Rebels is one of their publications from their Slightly Foxed Editions. Charming British racing green hardbacks, with gold lettering and numbering on the spine and a red-ribbon marker. (Their Plain Foxed Editions are a lovely shade of “duck-egg blue.”) I’d forgotten what it felt like to hold a book so comfortably in one hand. It lends to reading a classic like this eye-opening one.

Lorraine

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Humanity in storytelling (North Carolina, Iowa, Florida; 1970s to present day): “Literature represents my greatest hope for our species at its very best,” Allan Gurganus said when asked about his ideal reading experience. Based on his new collection of stories on the stuff of life and what makes us humans, there’s reason to feel hopeful about the future.

Gurganus is a keen and empathetic observer of people. Hailing from the South, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, many of his stories are set in his invented town of Falls, and yet he speaks to and for all of America.

You may know the author from his award-winning debut novel that brought him instant acclaim, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells Us, in 1989. His last work, Local Souls, was published in 2013, so these uncollected stories were anxiously awaited by the literary community. Also for good reason.

While the voice of some of the narrators in the nine stories conveys an old-timey style of storytelling, there’s nothing old-fashioned about the contemporary issues Gurganus tackles exquisitely – subtly, cynically, wittily, compassionately, open-mindedly, poignantly.

While this is the first time these stories have appeared in one collection, most have appeared in another publication at some earlier time, as noted in the Acknowledgements.

The opening story, for instance, The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor, first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in its May 4, 2020 issue. As you’ll see in all of the stories, the plot – in this case about collecting Americana – goes far deeper than that. It also sets a semi-autobiographical tone. Although it’s not set in North Carolina as others are, it takes place in eastern Iowa within striking distance of the University of Iowa where Gurganus taught creative writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. One of his students is one of my favorite writers and most everyone else’s, Ann Patchett, who wrote that Gurganus “was and is my most important teacher. He writes with a deep and joyful expansiveness that is completely his own. Every story comes with a novel’s worth of heft and insight.” Not to be overlooked is that both writers have a distinctly authentic way with words and remarkable compassion.

The narrator in the lead story is a graduate student scouting for art that’s “ethnographic” for a class assignment. On page one, we’re told he’s written his master’s thesis on Hand-Wrought Iowa-Illinois Farm Toys, 1880-1920, part of his “American Studies” program. What could be more American than folk art? When he stumbles into Theodosia’s Antiques, he’s met by an ornery, eccentric (“weighing under ninety pounds” wearing “a county’s worth of brooch timepieces”), and wise proprietor who has plenty to sell but isn’t welcoming. She’s had her share of thoughtless, condescending students who think her precious artifacts are “junk,” as they too have gone hunting for the same class. The unnamed narrator must prove his worth – it’s a dance. When he notices a framed portrait of the aforementioned good doctor on the floor he earns Theodosia’s graces, so she takes over the storytelling, spinning yarns. With wit and sarcasm, we gain a window into a small community’s culture appreciating their folk art that’s viewed by others as the lesser arts.

When the first story touches us in its unique storytelling and wisdom, we’re primed to love all the rest. And we do. You may be hard pressed to choose your favorite. The competition is tough.

The Mortician Confesses, story #2, was originally published in the literary magazine Granta. Narrated by a deputy sheriff, on the surface it’s ghastly: a shocking murder case like he’s never seen before. So flummoxed he repeatedly says: “Babies we all are, when it comes right down to it. We think we know decency, but we ain’t got the first idea of it, now, do we?” The crime itself is nasty, reflecting something much sadder and tragic about the rise in mental illness sweeping the country. This grim case involves the abuse of a woman with Down syndrome by someone mentally disturbed. It’s about human weakness, frailty, and loneliness, asking an existential question we struggle with: “What kind of God lets this stuff happen?”

He’s at the Office also tells a larger story echoing the heartbreak of six million Americans dealing with a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease. The grief a child feels when they watch their aging parent cognitively decline becoming a shell of who they once were. Told by the daughter of a loyal company man whose eighty-year-old dad has had to leave the job he structured his life around. Without the familiarity of his office surroundings and daily patterns, he’s more agitated and disoriented than he needs to be. An achingly beautiful tale of the lengths a family goes through to provide dignity, comfort, and peace for someone they love.

Less than twenty pages in, we realize we’re reading the story of America. Not just in the heartland and in small towns where everyone knows your business, but everywhere. About the impact of the loss of corporate loyalty to long-timers. How technology has dramatically changed lives. And what it means to reach retirement without the means for long-term care. Gurganus’ ability to wrap so much up in the telling is simply marvelous. This story, along with the final one, My Heart is a Snake Farm, also appeared in the New Yorker.

The wacky, tacky snake farm tourist attraction isn’t located in North Carolina but Florida. The snakes are actually alligators – too many to imagine – but it’s a vintage “roadside attraction.” So is the rambling motel across the road, acquired by a sixty-six-year-old librarian who moved to the state where a majority of American retirees move to if they go anywhere. The poignancy of her tale is how after six+ decades and even when her new home isn’t a dreamy situation, she feels appreciated for the first time in her life, making real friends through the kindness of strangers. Reflecting another phenomenon sweeping America: isolation and loneliness. It’s not the only story that will bring watery eyes, but it’s one of them.

The one that guarantees tears is perfectly titled Fetch, particularly if you’re one of 50 million American households who own a dog. The dog fetching is a “fat black” Lab. The narrator an observer whose voice tracks what happens when, “Something is thrown. We retrieve it, without quite knowing why.” The observer is our eyes, ears, and heart initially speculating on why the owners are walking along a rocky beach in Maine the day after a powerful “nor’easter” storm, and then making observations about how the couple is feeling watching their beloved dog who’s jumped into the wild and “frigid Atlantic as if bound for Ireland.” The observer captures the “panic” precisely the way we’d feel in the same situation.

If you’re counting, you know there’s four more stories: Unassisted Human Flight; Fool for Christmas; The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC) – Light Lunch Inclusive; and Fourteen Feet of Water in My House. They span miracles; truth in journalism; homesickness and homelessness; the golden era of shopping malls; racism, war, politics; and the “privilege of at least trying to rescue each other.”

What more could you ask of any collection? And one that’s under 240 pages?

Lorraine

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An unusual, elegant approach to understanding performance anxiety (present-day and past reflections, Boston and Denver): In this thought-provoking, fascinating, and melancholy memoir, Natalie Hodges, a classical violinist, takes us into the intellectual and emotional experiences she went through to make a brave, life-changing decision to give up her professional dreams of becoming a solo violinist.

In Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, she twists the title with her uncommon memoir, elevating her personal stumbling block to higher ground in the form of scientific and scholarly inquiries in chapters that feel more essayist than memoiristic.

Common measure is a musical term for the most common time signature in which the rhythm of the music beats 1, 2, 3, 4. (See Hodges explain this in an interview.) The concept of common time, she writes, meshes with “communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others.” Part of that idea is that music is a universal language, so when we sit in an auditorium or concert hall we feel in sync with the audience sharing the music’s emotions.

This interpretation relates to the fundamental issue she struggles with: not feeling at one with others she performs with and unable to lose herself in the music along with the audience. Instead, she cannot breakthrough her “self-absorbed, interior time” – her self-consciousness and anxiety that she’ll “mess up” so “nothing flows.”

Although she’s performed on stages in the US, Paris, and Italy attaining technical mastery as a classical violinist, this wasn’t enough to be a solo artist. When you’ve spent practically your whole life practicing and loving the violin and the music, her emotions and professional judgments are profound. Between the beauty of her prose and the beauty of her passion for the music, we feel for her because she’s amazingly disciplined and committed.

Uncommonly too, her purpose comes across as not trying to pull our heartstrings, seeking our sympathy. Rather, as a Harvard trained musicologist she seeks a deeper understanding how the brain connects to music, time, and flow to advance her insight into what keeps happening to her. By writing it down, she’s making sense of her performance anxiety for herself, and then for us to apply to any endeavor, musical or not, which demands intense focus. In the process, she’s also experimenting with her dual interest: a literary life. With this memoir, she’s established herself as an independent and creative thinker with a writing future. 

I don’t pretend to understand the science and theories – neuroscience, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics – nor, as a non-musician, the musicology. You don’t have to, and, interestingly, it contributes to why you’re drawn to the writing, marveling at the difficult path she took to try to “break out” of her self-fears and make an extremely difficult and honest decision after devoting twenty years to her artistry since she was a young girl practicing five, six hours a day, eight before a performance.

Hodges lets us into the mind of a perfectionist, intellectually and psychologically. We can’t help but be awed by her ability to play the most complex of musical compositions for the violin, to such a degree that she precisely knows when and where she’ll falter on stage. She’s her worst enemy. Her predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her acute self-awareness overwhelms her ability to rely on “muscle memory” to get into the flow. 

The concept of flow first came on the scene in 1990 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a word you hear in educational circles describing gifted kids who can focus intensely for hours on end. 

Hodges doesn’t cite the “Father of Flow.” Instead, she digs deeper and more specific, introducing us to another psychologist and neuroscientist at Tufts University who’s influenced her thinking, Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel. He uses the cognitive concept of “entrainment” to explain being in sync with music. Defined as “the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat” – not just that we “hear beats” but we “feel beats” – his research has turned “human entrainment into a theory of perception.” You can listen to a trailer to his 18-part lecture series, one of The Great Courses, here: Music and the Brain.

Hodges calls her second chapter “Untrainment” reflecting how she’s not been able to get lost in those beats. In chapter three, she introduces us to a classical pianist from Venezuela who’s so in sync with the music she can improvise complicated compositions spontaneously without missing a beat, Gabriela Montero. In awe of her “sixth sense,” Montero calls this phenomenon the “dual implications of helplessness and power.” Power signifying what’s written down in the music for eternity versus the impassioned musician performing with so much spontaneity.

Time, as the title indicates, is examined from many angles starting with the “Prelude,” another clever play on the common term Prologue. “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”

It’s not until we reach Chapter four, page 79 (a slender memoir at under 200-pages, with another thirty interesting references), that the memoir and the prose becomes more self-focused, philosophical, and poetic as she looks back on her childhood filled with violin music her mother taught her how to play. 

“Uhmma” emigrated from Seoul, South Korea but PLEASE don’t think of the author as the victim of a harsh style of parenting Asian writer Amy Chua brought into modern language in her memoir Hymns to a Tiger Mother. Besides the dangers of labeling and contributing to rising anti-Asian sentiments, nothing could be further from the truth. Hodges loves her mother dearly and appreciates the gift she’s given her (all of her four children play a musical instrument). She reminds us that a characteristic of immigrant families who come to America is wanting “to give your children what you did not have yourself.”

Though she doesn’t dwell on her Texas father’s Asian stereotyping and awful abuse, having gone to South Korea to find himself a subservient wife to start a family in Denver, this is also a story about racism and abuse. How her mother sacrificed so much for her children, counterbalancing the darkness by making sure their home “was music, and music was color.” Music expanded and enriched Hodges’ world immeasurably. That’s not to imply she doesn’t briefly consider whether spending all those formative years practicing might have been wasted time. You can guess how she comes out on that question.

What also makes her memoir so unusual is that while her mother was being violently abused, in addition to the psychic abuse of racism, to the point that her father once hit Uhmma so hard her stitches from a Caesarean delivery “burst,” Hodges felt so much joy growing up in a house of music.

One reason, perhaps, Hodges’ journey doesn’t start off chronologically as commonly done. “Don’t write it like a sob story,” her mother advised. Through her uncommon approach, she hasn’t.

Lorraine

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Remembering millions through two different Holocaust survival journeys (Poland, early 1930s to after the end of WWII; Maryland and Connecticut, late 1940s to late 1990s, & afterwards): The world needs saints and miracles.

Here’s how Mother Teresa explained the psychology of numbers – how monumental catastrophes in the millions don’t affect us like individual ones:

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Is that why we’re in a golden era of memoirs? If we share our personal Herculean hardships, the world might be more compassionate?

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Anna Salton Eisen in her first-hand account of her parents, especially her father’s, Holocaust stories in Pillar of Salt, and Rebecca Frankel’s second-hand telling of the story of the Rabinowitz family’s Holocaust survival in Into the Forest want us to never forget what happened to six million Jewish people humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and murdered in the darkest of times.

You’ll feel emotionally pained by both, and praise both since greater awareness can lead to increased activism and public outcry. Unknowingly, they also intensify the world’s shared pain aghast at the emptiness of the “Never Again” chant watching in horror the atrocities perpetrated on the Ukrainian people by another brutal dictator. Putin chillingly seems hell-bent on doing what Hitler did to millions – wiping Jewish people “from the face of the earth.”

As we remember the millions of lives lost that we cannot fathom but do so through the lives of two Jewish families, Eisen wants us to also remember another five million more wiped out: non-Jewish people, including ethnic groups like the Romani and Slavic peoples; religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses; essentially anyone they deemed “socially aberrant”; and enemies of the State.

Poland is the country where the greatest number of Jewish people were erased: three million. Poland is also the Holocaust setting of both books. In two small villages and two ghettos near each, and concentration camps spread out.

One, Zhetel, was “once a very happy little Jewish town” in northeastern Poland where Miriam, Morris, and their daughters Rochelah/Rochel (Ruth in America) and Tania (Toby) happily lived (surrounded by their large extended families) until they were driven out to live under intolerable conditions at the Zhetel ghetto. The other, the Salton family (Eisen’s father George, brother Manek, and their parents) lived in southwestern Poland in Tyczyn, the region known as Galicia (which extends into western Ukraine including Lviv), until they were forced into the Rzeszów ghetto.

Ghettoization was the first collective step towards dehumanizing the Jewish people. Many families crammed into the same tiny living spaces, never knowing when the Nazis would come and deport them to concentration camps: six extermination camps and over 1,000 labor camps. It’s from the ghettos that the Rabinowitz and Salton stories dramatically diverge.

The four Rabinowitzs run into the forest. George Salton’s parents are sent to the “death camps.” He also got separated from his brother, never seeing his family again. Being with your immediate family during horrific trauma and upheaval provides inner strength, but hiding out in a forest for several years and surviving is remarkable. Also stunning is that without any family George Salton endured TEN labor camps. (He hadn’t met Eisen’s mother Ruth until after the war; she was sent to Siberia.) Both family survival stories are mind-boggling.

The forest is the Białowieża Forest. “One of the earth’s last remaining primeval woodlands,” split between Poland and Belarus, today a UNESCO World Heritage site. They managed to survive in an “underground village” dug four feet into the ground called zemlyanki, a Russian word that means “dugout.” Morris Rabinowitz had been in the lumber business so he knew woods, so many people followed him there. Who, though, could prepare anyone for the massacres and living-on-the-edge with barely anything? Miriam was resourceful too, having owned a drugstore that carried a little of everything. Still, it’s a miracle their daughters sustained a “remarkable amount of childlike wonder in the brutal forest reality.”

As a whole, Holocaust survivors didn’t talk about what they went through. The Rabinowitzs also stand out because they “talked about it all the time,” whereas Salton Eisen lived in a silent home with “undercurrents of mourning” sensing her “gloomy heritage” but not being told. Until one day in her twenties, she cries out, “For G-d’s sake, Dad. What did they do to you?”

Which may help to explain why Eisen’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood come across as more psychologically devastating than daughters Ruth and Toby. By the time Eisen was about eight, she’d internalized the silence and pain she saw in her father’s eyes into nightmares, fears of “separation” and “abandonment,” and “isolation” as she didn’t know any family like hers. Although her father rose to a senior position at the Defense Department, and her homemaking mother was an extraordinary cook making sure her family was always well-fed and turning her skills into a catering business – fitting the sixties and suburban Maryland – when she discovers something of her father’s (no spoilers) in his nightstand she confirms his sinister wartime experiences. Instead of acting like a typical middle school kid, she delves into researching the Holocaust but tells no one. Her memoir tracks her awakening, deepening, and growing activism that continues today.

So much stuns in these memoirs, including discovering that Eisen is the founder of the synagogue in Texas (where she lives now) in the news a few months ago when an anti-Semitic terrorist held four members of the Congregation Beth Israel including the rabbi hostage.

We may want to look away from all of this, but how can we? Eisen points out these stories must be told “for the sake of history and the future of humanity.” Morally and existentially, she continues to say that “with freedom comes responsibility.” Her memoir may be spare on words (less than 200 pages), but she doesn’t spare the emotions. Frankel’s approach consumes more than twice as many pages (374, plus another seventy pages of detailed notes), describing relatively unknown history that also emotionally affects us.

Another difference between the two memoirs is that Frankel’s is a second-hand account told to her through daughters of Holocaust survivors who survived with them. How she connects with them is fascinating and miraculously coincidental, along with another amazing coincidence. Into the Forest, then, reads more story-like in the sense that there’s a Prologue, a before the war, a during the war, an after the war, and an Epilogue – the full arc of a novel in that respect. Frankel’s lyrical descriptions of the beauty of the forest are so discordant with what happened in the forest.

Eisen’s memoir of the during-the-war years would have been blank had her pleas to her father gone unanswered. He not only opens up but returns to Poland for the first time with his family. Her prose is more sorrowful in its rawness, less embellished although sometimes she expresses her profound emotions poetically. (Her Holocaust poems have been published.)

Into the Forest describes two relatively unknown underground resistance movements in the ghettos and after the war. Eisen makes reference to these but she concentrates on, “how it must feel to carry so much pain”? Today she’s a mental health therapist specializing in trauma. Her activism continues as her memoir is being adapted into a documentary planned for release this summer, In My Father’s Words. No doubt her father’s memoir, The 23rd Psalm, will also feed into it.

Both memoirs exemplify Eisen’s dedication. How vital for history and humanity is “the importance of memory.”

Lorraine

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