Honoring JUNETEENTH

What you lose and gain by Passing, a phenomenon of racism (Tobacco country, North Carolina 1934 – 1955; LA, California 2017, 2018): What does it mean to “pretend to be White”? “What is being White as opposed to being Black”?

Elise St. John, a light-skinned black movie star up for an Academy Award for Best Actress, asked these questions to her soon no-longer manager and chilly relationship with her childhood best friend Rebecca, who’s not pleased with her only client’s social media platform supporting the Black Lives Movement. 

Crystal Smith Paul bursts onto the literary stage with a captivating, penetrating, provocative historical novel about running away from, or embracing, black racial identity. Did You Hear about Kitty Karr? delves into the racial phenomenon of Passing, inventing another fair-skinned black Hollywood actress, this one legendary, who turned her racial deception into a full-blown, “crossing over” never-to-return to her Southern black roots. Was it “easier when she never had to see her own kind”? “Pretend that they didn’t exist, that she wasn’t missing anything”?

Beneath the façade, Kitty Karr, born Mary Magdalene, missed a lot.

This is both a story of what Kitty Karr outwardly gained – opportunity, fame, fortune – and a psychological dive into what she missed on the inside. What happens to her soul? is the existential question. The mental anguish, loneliness, feelings of isolation and shame no one sees. The longing for kinship, belonging, black culture causing: “An insecurity in her that became the undercurrent of her soul.”

This is a novel with a soul. The conflicted soul of a black woman. There’s a great line in the novel – one of many – justifying Passing as long as you don’t believe Whites are better. A central question for us is: Can we justify what Kitty Karr has done? Will the soul of Black America and its sorrowful history of systemic racism traced nearly a century, artfully folded into plotlines and mysteries, help make up our minds?

Soulful music drifts through the 400 pages, by casting Elise St. John’s father as a soul musician/music producer. Barry White’s “Just the Way You Are” cited, touching the soul with beautiful lyrics and profoundness, much like the novel’s potent message: the color of your skin is NOT who you are. 

Mary/Kitty Karr’s emotional story is told through the voices of two pale-skinned black female actresses – one who Passes forever, the other doesn’t – enabling us to bear witness to a story of racism through much of the 20^th century alongside Elise’s day-by-day, morning and afternoon, month-long 2017 voice (with an epilogue of sorts in 2018) that shows the reckoning with racial discrimination broadly and up-close.

Mary’s story starts off staying fairly close to childhood months and years, but when she takes her first leap into Passing (on a cross-country train trip that lands her in Hollywood in 1955) her story starts skipping years, so we have a wider picture of how she evolved into a Hollywood icon. We first hear her voice in 1946, but her racial identity begins in 1934 with an ancestral lens into the violence, brutality, terror of what the lack of freedom and oppression wrought. Mary’s ancestors were slaves; her grandmother and mother as a young girl sharecroppers, “a form of slavery” (see video below) after the Civil War; and Mary grew up under Jim Crow laws.

The author, biracial, thanks her parents in her Acknowledgements “for the freedom to be me.” Did Kitty Karr find Freedom by Passing? According to Stanford University Professor and Director of African and African American Studies Allyson Hobbs in her 2014 book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life: “To write a history of passing is to write a history of loss.” Paul, though, shows us there’s more than one side to this complex issue.

DNA studies confirm what we already know. Trauma is genetically passed down through generations. To what extent hereditary makeup influences the experience of racism parallels the Nature vs. Nurture question. Racial trauma is not disputed. It’s the gray-sided fallout of Passing/Crossing that’s explored.

Setting a chunk of the novel in one of the most exclusive, residential enclaves of gated mansions tucked into the hills of the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Los Angeles – Bel Air – speaks to the grandiosity of the private lives of Kitty Karr and the St. Johns. Next-door neighbors, in fact. “La La Land” was also a place Mary dreamed of in the movie theaters with another light-skinned black friend, sister-like Emma, escaping the South’s sizzling heat. Sizzling one way to describe the heat of this novel.

“Beauty and talent” lighten the seriousness of racism, making the novel sparkle. Almost as if Paul deceives us by creating such an entertaining novel, while she deftly bores into America’s institutional racism.

Opening with Kitty Karr’s death, the biggest fictional mystery is why she willed her $600 million estate to the multi-millionaire St. Johns? Why direct Elise, much younger than her, to handle the dismantling of her entire estate and her memorial? Why not her mother, Sarah, also a famous actress closer to Kitty’s age than Elise’s? Who leaked this bombshell luring the media and paparazzo? Why is Sarah acting so anxious? 

Paul drops subtle clues, but you must keep your detective cap on to notice and connect the dots ratcheting up the intrigue.

Elise has two younger sisters. Giovanni is a TV star in Canada. The youngest, Noele, studying law, far away from the delusions of Hollywood at NYU, one of Paul’s alma maters where she earned an advanced degree in journalism. A graduate of the esteemed Spelman College in Atlanta, one of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Paul also attended UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television. Living in Los Angeles, she comes across as also schooled in the vibes of Hollywood. Paul draws well from the diversity of her experiences.

Black culture in literature and the arts provides another level of richness to fiction that feels so real because it tells truths. Too many to cite, but some highlights that echo throughout:

Martin Luther King’s celebrated words in his stirring 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech that people not be judged by their skin color but by the content of their character. America turned out in droves for the Civil Rights March in Washington, DC:

Nella Larsen’s 1929 literary classic Passing adapted into the 2021 Netflix movie Passing. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the story about two light-skinned women, one who passed and the other who didn’t. “All of us are passing for something or other,” says the black woman, shocked and then tantalized upon meeting her long-ago black friend now pretending to be white, either to justify her actions or express perceptiveness and cynicism about the human race.

W. E. B Dubois’ 1903 Souls of Black Folk concept of “two-ness” in navigating the White world by feeling black on the inside, acting white on the outside is the elusiveness of Kitty Karr. Will she show us she hasn’t lost sight of who she is?

Bathroom segregation by color is akin to today’s bathroom segregation efforts by sexual identity. A loss of “dignity and respect.”

Sidney Poitier was the first black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1964. Yet it wasn’t until 2002 that a black woman was celebrated the same. Halle Berry’s voice echoes too.

You will be affected by how Kitty Karr overcomes.

Lorraine

How the past stays with us (Vienna, Austria mid-to-late 1930s; Cork, Ireland 1980): “Art is flashes,” writes Billy O’ Callaghan, imagining what sports commentators might have said watching “maybe one of the greatest there’s ever been.” When “people came to see magic, and to have their breath taken away” by an Austrian superstar football player (America’s soccer). It’s impossible to separate O’Callaghan’s prose that takes our breath away from the legendary man who flew through the air “light as a breeze” – “The Paper Man.”

So why, O’Callaghan implies, don’t we know Matthias Sindelar (affectionately, Mutzl) the way we know of Brazil’s soccer legend Pelé? And, how come Ireland’s O’Callaghan isn’t as well-known to us as he should be, crafting such sadly beautiful prose? In 2022, I concluded his Life Sentences was an “awesome piece of literary craft.” The Paper Man is that too; this time expanding beyond Irish generational memories to Austria’s WWII history and a fictionalized love affair for the ages. Opening a month after the Nazis annexed Austria on a specific date April 3, 1938 – the Anschluss, which stood for Hitler’s grandiose unification plans. It was also the last time The Paper Man and his Austria Vienna team played for their country.

In O’Callaghan’s 2019 novel, My Coney Island Baby, he writes of dreamers and those “born to practicality.” In this dual timeframe story, 1930s Vienna is both the stuff of dreamers and then, catastrophically, collapses into the sheer practicality of survival.

First we’re treated to a man “so much more alive than anyone else,” who let others dream in those “genius at work” moments, ignoring the Fascist forces engulfing them. Early 30’s Vienna is likened to Paris in the 1920s when dreamers, intellectuals, and artists pulsated in a café society before Hitler destroyed dreams and lives. Dreaming and survival linked in the poignant Vienna storyline when thirty-something Sindelar falls soulfully in love with nineteen-year-old Rebekah, Jewish, a “girlishly pretty” café waitress. Yes, true love can happen “at first sight,” the name of the chapter. Until the Holocaust grotesquely twisted that love into survival mode.

The 1980 chapters are set in Cork, where O’Callaghan grew up and lives. A place “born of practicality,” especially seen through the fictional protagonist Jack Shine – Rebekah’s son. Compelled to separate from the love of her life, O’Callaghan lets us imagine how much more of a blow it must have been when his mother discovers she was pregnant. Had it not been for Sindelar’s connections, a fearful, circuitous route out of Austria, she probably would not have made it. Not to her parents’ village in Kaumberg but someplace safer, to her Uncle Joe and his wife Ruth’s Cork home. They accepted and loved her like their own, into their home in a small Jewish neighborhood of historical significance.

Jewtown originated in the late 1800s when Lithuanian Jews fled here escaping Russian persecution. O’Callaghan wants us to remember this mostly vanished community of “Hibernian Buildings,” that’s “tucked in behind the city’s docks.” When he says it was a place that “feels like the edge of the world . . . with no place left to run,” he wants us to remember Jews have a long history of persecution.

The Paper Man is a novel about remembering. Rebekah died when Jack was eleven; he’s forty-one in 1980. Though the “shadow of loss never completely fades,” the family that took in his pregnant mother became his parents, their two children his siblings, when Rebekah died some thirty years ago. Nurturing a “particularly precious sense of love and belonging,” the edginess of a gritty place softens. His biological dad may have been a man “who lived enough to fill a dozen lives” but Jack never got to glimpse even one. Had he not stumbled on a box of intimate love letters sent to his mother from a mystery man, he still wouldn’t. No one asked, no one knows. The discovery ignites an “intangible intensity” of needing to know. To remember. Turning The Paper Man into an immersive historical and fictionalized, unresolved mystery.

At thirty-five, Sindelar’s “firework” of a life was snuffed out, suspiciously and “terribly difficult to accept,” when he was found dead in his apartment. The cause of death declared carbon monoxide poisoning seeping into faulty ventilation. Some speculated if the cause was suicide, but that doesn’t seem to fit the man courageous enough to speak out against Hitler. Feeling on top of the world and Catholic, Sindelar played on a national team with Jewish players the Nazis contemptuously called Judenklub. Having never read a WWII story involving sports, Jew Club is a new word in the canon of anti-Semitism.

Since the letters were written in Old German, his father-in-law translated them for him, revealed a little at a time. He’s dear to Jack, where we see the same understanding, love, and support of his wife. (He’s blessed with a little girl too.) The letters stir both men deeply as it becomes clear Rebekah was once happy, not the suffering person remembered most dying from a disease associated with poverty. A few photographs were also found of the man who gave his team the glorious name Wunderteam.

Sindelar’s 1938 soccer performance was “an exercise in grand humiliation.” Could the Nazis have murdered him? Assumptions aren’t good enough for Jack, whose contented life has now come apart. And so the novel also becomes a tenacious, searching tale.

Sindelar possessed an “elegance of pose” likened to “watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality.” Captured by a writer of elegant, powerful prose that has a musical and poetic rhythm, crafting words that echo his forgotten hero: “Every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” Words that are an exhibition on literary prose.

Prose that swells like the rising tides of the author’s homeland in close proximity to the sea and the dockyards – a “swelling boom.” O’Callaghan’s long, sweeping sentences, some a full-page paragraph, come in swells, creating an intensity matching the depth of emotions unearthed.

For all the complexities of delving into truths that are hard to put together when you’re “dealing with fragments,” and survivors who may not be alive anymore or their memories foggy and full of anxieties, the chapters hit on simple titles that capture their essence and trajectory. “Anschluss,” “Jewtown,” “At First Sight,” and “The Letters” are followed by “Falling,” “The Marina,” “Separating,” “Revelation,” “Arriving,” “Expecting,” “Searching,” “Dying,” and “An Ending” – which never really ends. Cork “a place of long memory,” and O’Callaghan a passionate writer who has pieced together fictionalized history that feels as real and alive as past memories can be.

Cork is where “men and women roll up their sleeves to work and who keep their horizons close and their ambitions small.” By giving Jack the backbreaking work of a “docker” (or longshoreman, stevedore) toiling in drenching rain and frigid, windy conditions, O’Callaghan also wants us to remember those vanishing workers once so vital to Ireland’s shipping industry.

The layered depth of emotions, humanity, and tenderness Jack brings to dark and troubled times is a reminder that “everyone carries their problems with them.” Yet Jack is wise. Our literary hero since he also recognizes that “what he has in his life is more than he ever wants to risk.”

Lorraine

Why one woman’s selfhood journey resonates (New York City and Long Island, New York & rural northeastern Pennsylvania; 2001 to present day): Searing and soaring, Kelly McMasters’ memoir-in-essays that span and shift over twenty years emotionally affects us differently than traditional memoirs.

“A truly successful essay collection can reveal the author processing experiences at many different points in time and through many different lenses . . . the distance afforded by some multivalent lenses can allow an author to regard one’s younger self as a different character, a different persona. This can create an unease or uncertainly that is exciting, and also very relatable to the reader.”

Elizabeth Kadetsky, “The Memoir in Essays: A Reading List,” Lit Hub, April 29, 2020

Nineteen essays, each stunning, building on each other. Personal, with an honesty that must have been emotionally exhausting to dredge up and make sense of. Influenced by historical events, cultural discord, and a philosophy of appreciating the good not solely the bad. More of a coming-to-terms with the way things must be, but not until tirelessly trying to change the trajectory. The tone is melancholy, sorrowful, poignant, nostalgic, at times wondrous, but not bitterness. “There’s romance inherent in loss and nostalgia,” McMasters graciously says.

Calling The Leaving Season a memoir-in-essays versus a memoir magnifies the push-and-pull tension of a contemplative journey of self-discovery, even if aspects are unlike ours. Navigating different stages of life – coming-of-age, career, motherhood, divorce, single parenting – resonate. When to make a life-changing decision to leave a place, job, city, marriage? What’s gained and lost? Reflections that give voice to the choices, juggling, and struggles women face, exploring what it means to be a woman true to herself, needs, family?

The opening line of, “Home Fires,” the first essay, sets the stage with one of McMasters’ two sons asking: “WHAT SHOULD WE SAVE, MAMA?” The profound question isn’t just what would you take if you had to flee a fire, but an existential one. What should you pay close attention to that matters most to you?

The prose is emblematic of someone who’s dwelled in the world of books and words. As an only child, McMasters found solace and pleasure in the library near her Long Island home. Contributor to a delightful, eclectic array of magazines – literary, tech-related, pop culture, children’s – she’s been teaching words as an English professor at Columbia University and elsewhere; today at Hofstra University, circling back to her home roots.

Home as a physical place, geographical/environmental landscape, and deeper psychologically isn’t something just thought about in these essays. In 2017, the author co-edited the essay collection, “This is the Place: women writing about home.” She’s also written the 2008 award-winning, “Welcome to Shirley: a memoir from an atomic town,” about her hometown near Brookhaven National Labs, adapted into a documentary.

The Leaving Season is predicated on a dream that may not have “ever truly existed in the first place.” We sense the handwriting on the wall before McMasters, perceiving leaving as failure, tugging at our heartstrings because she tried so very hard to make the dream of a place and a marriage work out.

Opening in Manhattan 2001 when McMasters found herself standing outside the World Trade Center watching the twin towers burst into flames, staring in disbelief at people jumping out of the windows of burning skyscrapers. “Home Fires” summons up a “spectacularly dramatic catastrophe” and then, in the next breath, linked to the emotional catastrophe of a ten-year relationship, six married, with a “moody” artist anonymously named R. ending in divorce. “Marriage, after all, is just one long exercise in controlled burning,” she concludes.

McMasters didn’t leave New York City after 9/11. She did after 2006, when the USS Intrepid got stuck in the Hudson River leaving for its new home and identity: the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Metaphorically, that’s when it hits her that the “girl I once was still stuck.” She’s twenty-five. In “Intrepid,” the second essay, she assesses: “Sometimes, staying docked seems the safer option. But everything in New York moves on eventually.”

Before the moving, leaving, a few essays are interjected about her backstory with R. Unsure of herself, she was drawn to his “certainty” and differentness. “Invigorating, or terrifying,” but emotionally draining more than anything else. Pained when the impressionistic portrait painter refuses to paint her picture, and yet, fantasizing of not only having a room of one’s own but a home, alone, like Georgia O’Keefe. (Marriage wasn’t in her plans, nor motherhood.) Later in the “Stone Boat,” R.’s artistry is characterized as “exaggerated expressionism” with an “obsession with color and pattern.”

R. had been successful in the avant-garde center of the art world, but a rude awakening awaits when the couple move from Brooklyn to an isolated (on ten acres) “1860s eyebrow colonial farmhouse” in a rural “area with more cows than people.” Three hours from Manhattan, yet worlds away. “Part of the allure is to be a different person yourself.” But how far are you willing to go?

This was a place of “savagery and beauty,” where the “normal rules of society did not apply.” Driven by hunting seasons, broken men “powerless became the powerful.” For a while, McMasters gets lost in sharing the “wonders” of Nature, harkening Rachel Carlson, with her two young boys. When she looks back now she sees herself “separate from the person I know myself to be out in the rest of the world.” 

Playing psychologist, we see a marriage likely doomed from the start due to a string of bad luck compounding on itself. R. had his first heart attack at thirty-nine right before they married; his second right before they moved into the farmhouse. Was he suffering from clinical depression gone untreated? How much of his disinterest was affected by his medical condition? Anger ignored before they left New York City? How much was he affected by the “feral quality” of a place not even on a map that unfolds in the essays, “The Cow,” “The Ghosts in the Hills,” and “Lessons from a Starry Night”?

How much pain could have been prevented had they focused on thoroughly vetting the stone farmhouse in need of tremendous repair and renovation, R. could no longer do? McMasters assumed, no griping, all the mounting bills, balancing several literary jobs at time including commuting to Manhattan. Mounting too was her anguish of a father disengaged in co-parenting, fatherhood. Intensified in the essay that gives the collection its name, “The Leaving Season.” But, she persists. For the sake of her children, not for herself.

It’s not until the gorgeous essay, “Bookshop: A Love Story,” that McMasters does something for herself and her dream comes closest to reality. Bursting with joy, hope, and a bit of “much-needed magic,” she and R. opened a joint bookshop and art studio on the closest Main Street to where they lived in Honesdale:

“Ultimately, it’s this love of books that buoys me,” she wrote in a column she pitched for The Paris Review, “Notes from a Bookshop.” This is when she realizes how much of herself she’s lost. Sadly, the dream lasted only a year.

“Our Castle Year,” “Suspended Animation,” “Finding Home,” and “End Papers” amplify the leaving, progressing to a heartfelt belief “family doesn’t have just one meaning.”

The Leaving Season shows us there’s dignity and grace when your dreams don’t come true. “By taking away, I could be creating room for more.”

Lorraine

Painting a literary portrait of a 19^th century female trailblazer on a larger canvas than the art she left behind (Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts, and world travels; 1861—1924): Do you ever feel you were “born at the wrong time”? Isabella Stewart Gardner did.

“Is there anything more exciting than being understood?” she’s imagined asking. Is there anything more exciting than reading a novel by an author who shows us how deeply she understands her subject?

Boston’s Emily Franklin, a “lifelong visitor” of the Isabella Garner Museum in Boston’s Fenway area, seems ideal to capture the evolving “selves” of a woman who believed we’re “always finding our next selves.” Franklin’s literary selves include poetry; over twenty novels for adults and young adults; memoirist; and editor of short story collections. Still, a high-flying act to singularly compose an historical novel about someone whose husband “wanted to make me happy” but “did not always understand what might make me so.”

The Lioness of Boston – even the lions have multiple meanings – is an outstanding read about a woman before her time. The prose is exquisite – elegant rising to poetic, evoking Isabella’s artful soul.

Most of the novel is set in Isabella’s grand, six-floor, townhouse-mansion on Beacon Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, once swamplands, where she lived when she married John Lowell Gardner – Jack – at twenty, moving there in 1861 during the Civil War. By the time the vision of a museum becomes a reality, Isabella’s collections outgrew their home. Located about fifteen minutes away, the museum sits on parkland designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, befitting Isabella’s love of walking through Boston’s Public Gardens, America’s first. Venturing out alone was scandalizing, one of many outrages that followed her through decades. Mostly structured chronologically, the novel lets you see her evolution.

Among the novel’s pleasures is tracing her early feminist thoughts and actions. Invigorated by more men than women who accepted her unorthodoxy as they were actually interested in what she thought, initially Harvard men of the arts and sciences. Drawn to progressive mindsets, proponents of aesthetics yearning to be “more than I was,” the novel reads like a Who’s Who of famous and lesser known painters, writers, suffragettes and activists of other social causes. The lioness was an outspoken free-thinker, romanticist, lover of beautiful things and landscapes. Above all, a fierce seeker of a purposeful life.

Franklin opens our eyes to a woman who left her mark on an aristocratic society, though she’s been more likely known more for the unsolved 1990 art museum crime of stealing thirteen paintings (a $10 million reward awaits) rather than for everything contained in her museum of memories: paintings, rare books, objects d’art, sculptures, antiques, and more, including its Italian architectural design because Venice stole her heart.

Divided into four Books subtly titled with ISG’s different names characterizing her unfolding selves – “Belle,” “Mrs. Jack,” “Isabella,” “Isabella Stewart Gardner” – Isabella comes alive using three literary approaches: chapter narratives; intimate Intermezzos that reveal her innermost thoughts, feelings, intentions; and an epistolary format reflecting the abundant letters she exchanged.

The letters, interspersed, begin early on with her sole two yet dear female friends, Julia and Harriet. (Julia from her early Paris boarding school days; both she and Harriet Jack’s sisters). Expanding to the blooming relationships she cultivated with men, along with growing friendships with other nontraditional women. Isabella had contempt for “intolerance” in all forms, championing injustices towards women and men, such as gender inequality, the right to vote, gender identity, slavery, and anti-Semitism. For that alone, she should be remembered.

One of her closest male friends was the painter John Singer Sargent, who wrote in a fictionalized letter he needed “to remind you always to shine within, no matter who the onlookers might be.” His artistic style of “bringing light into the darkness” matches Isabella’s yearning “to matter. Or have what I do matter.” Someone who wants to “help us find the courage to be ourselves.”

Literary Henry James and the Jewish painter Bernard Berenson exchanged voluminous letters with Isabella. Fascinating Franklin made them her own when the Museum houses cases of the originals.

“Belle” is the self who says: “Parts of me longs, truly longs, to belong. And still another part wonders at a greater land.” For painfully too long she fought to be accepted into the exclusive, Puritan, elite upper-crust Boston male world – the “Boston Brahmins.” Having come from New York City’s upper-class, she wasn’t prepared for the severity of being judged as so out-of-place. The difference between a predominately homogenous New England community to a more culturally and ethnically diverse metropolis a factor in the prevailing conventions she confronted that made her feel a “sad magic to being a female.” A “gnawing emptiness.” Isabella fought gallantly, except for an exceptionally fragile period of grief and despair when she suffered three tragedies. Hers is a story of how “strength is from suffering.”

Travel saved Isabella’s spirit and soul repeatedly thanks to Jack, a Boston Brahmin who nonetheless opened the “wideness of the world” for her traveling the globe together for months at a time.

The Who’s Who includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who saw himself as an “awakener” and Isabella “trying to be awakened.” Also, artists and writers James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin who dressed like a man since it was much easier to be one), Maud Ward Elliott; and activists Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe (Maud’s mother). The historical figures you’ll meet could easily make up an Appendix of Enlightenment and Insight. For instance, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first black woman in America to become a physician; Harvard’s first art professor Charles Eliot Norton, whose legacy lives on in the Norton Lectures; and painter Bernard Berenson who illuminates Jewish persecution in the 1800s.

What’s not to love about a woman who refused to “build a fortune or find meaning at the expense of others”? Who speaks about a “candied afternoon,” acutely aware of special, fleeting moments in her emotional roller-coaster life.

One of Isabella’s delightful awakenings happens with Jack when they traveled to Paris to the gallery of another female art pioneer: Berthe Moriset (see https://enchantedprose.com/pow-right-in-the-eye-thirty-years-behind-the-scenes-of-modern-french-painting/). The Berthe we’re treated to introduces Isabella to many struggling artists, such as Edouard Manet and his painting “Sunrise Over Water” with its “quality of realism infused with sadness” before the art movement became known as Impressionism.

“Art makes you desirous. What more could we want?” says Berthe, whose “grace and sadness and art and purpose, all sheathed in the act of not being sure what she was doing, only that she wanted to keep doing it” describe Isabella too. She may not have possessed the equilibrium of Julia and Harriet, who between them had seven children, all boys, but showed her grace in other ways. Motherhood consumes a big chunk of Belle’s early days, leaving a lifelong effect on her.

The Lioness of Boston is every bit a triumph as Franklin’s eventually triumphant subject. I closed its 369 pages the day Boston’s Harold Kushner, Rabbi Laureate and mega-bestselling self-help author passed away. One of his books, “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough: The Search for a Life that Matters,” sums up Isabella’s questing life.

A reviewer called Kushner’s first book “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” a “spiritual survival manual.” For anyone needing inspiration for a path forward to live their lives with existential purpose, The Lioness of Boston offers ways for healing and setting us free.

Lorraine

Standing up to Fascism (North Holland, mostly Amsterdam and Haarlem, the Netherlands; 1940 — 1945): They say people break. She never did.

“How does evil spread?” asked the literary voice narrating this forgotten story of a heroic non-Jewish Dutch Resistance fighter, ignited when the Nazis took over the Netherlands in 1940. She admired people “who stand up for their beliefs, because the world is currently drunk on war.”

She left so little documentation behind to protect those she loved, collaborated with, and for the mission. Award-winning historian Buzzy Jackson turned to historical fiction to dig up as much as she could and imagine the rest to craft the breathtaking To Die Beautiful. Had Jackson not visited Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum, historical fiction readers most likely would still not even know her name: Jannetje Johanna Schaft before the invasion, transformed into Hannie Schaft afterwards. Later becoming known as The Girl with Red Hair (the title of the UK edition).

Jackson makes the unbelievable believable. You’ll be caught up in a whirlwind of emotions, thoughts, and heart-stopping suspense reading this electrifying novel. Anne Frank, the “most famous victim of the Dutch Holocaust,” looms heavy. Her diary left an accounting. Hannie left no such thing.

You may be asking, like Jackson did, why one of the few female WWII Dutch resisters is unknown to most of us considering more Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust than in any other European country: 75%! Jackson notes and explains in her brief “Historical Notes,” suggestive of how deeply immersed she was in telling this story from the viewpoint of humanity. To Die Beautiful is historically based, but it’s an emotionally-driven powerhouse.

Capturing the segregation, fear, humiliation, rage, grief, loss, hunger, separations, and disappearances of those who were subjected to, witnessed, and lived through five traumatizing years of the Dutch Holocaust when Jews and their families were persecuted, rounded up, arrested, tortured, murdered, The Nazis adopted a scorched earth regime that also included non-Jews perceived as “Jew-lovers,” and ordinary Dutch citizens starved, looking as if they too had been forced into concentration camps most shockingly during the “Hunger Winter” (The Dutch Famine). Warning: the brief video below may be too disturbing to watch:

Jackson has put on a seasoned novelist’s hat, using charged prose grounded in historical realities: real people, places, events, timelines, atrocities, resistance operations. Glued to the 400+ pages, you’ll read at a faster clip than a novel half its size.

To Die Beautiful is a harrowing reminder of what tyranny looks like.

Agonizing to see what happens to Hannie, but we’re also in awe of what she does. Awe at how far someone is willing to go to protect two Jewish friends and save the lives of countless other Jews for the highest-minded of causes – to save humanity. Despite violent sabotage assignments to thwart the Nazi’s Operation Silver Fir that killed Dutch resistors and up-close Nazi assassinations that put the reader tensely into death-defying scenes, the Resistance’s refrain was: “Stay Human.” The novel a fierce reminder of what the bravest of souls can do with steely determination and still find a way to show their humanity when innocents came in harm’s way. A stark depiction of the lowest bar of humankind and the pinnacle of the highest.

Johanna Schaft wasn’t born with an “urge to resist.” Jackson shows us when that emotional force was kindled at age seven, with one of the many one-liners that grab our attention: “I wasn’t always an only child,” Hannie says on the opening line of Chapter 1. She became an only when her twelve-year-old sister Annie died thirteen years before the “sour tang of Nazism began to spread into every corner of daily life.” From the time she was a young girl to a twenty-year-old law student at the University of Amsterdam Johanna hits us again confiding she became “an expert at being nobody.”

Johanna kept to herself. Avoided being a trouble maker, she says was easy since she was “plain” and “shy.” (Not so plain with her “bright red hair”!) That all changed, she changed including her name, when she became best friends with two young Jewish women who were sister-like: Sonja and Philine. This came at a time when “nothing I was being taught about justice seemed to apply to the quickly changing world outside.” The evils of Nazism marked the birth of Hannie Schaft.

The novel calls up a stunning line in former Secretary of Defense Madeleine Albright’s book Fascism: A Warning: “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time people don’t notice it” — until the chicken is stripped bare and it has taken hold of a nation. What a crushing, demoralizing defeat for the Netherlands proud of its centuries-old history. “The very reason refugees from fascism were drawn to the Netherlands was because we were known as much for our religious tolerance as for our windmills and wooden clogs.” And yet, in a mere five days the Nazis clobbered any notion of toleration.

The Nazis also waged a psychological war. They did everything to “chip away at the resources and morale of the enemy.” So too did the Dutch when the absence of a Dutch “military front” meant the “minds of the people became the front.” The significance of uplifting and sustaining morale in the Ukraine War cannot be overstated.

Hannie’s story includes four other resistance fighters. Two experienced men who trained and worked with her: Hendrik Oostdijk and Jan Bonekamp. Both feel real. Jan was, “willing to do things others wouldn’t do.” Hendrik is one of the few fictional characters, symbolic of the “brave Dutch men” who fought to save their citizens. Hannie’s relationship with Jan is a tender thread, deepening, stirring, and consequential. From there, she joins forces with two teenage girls, notably sisters: Truus and Freddie Oversteegen. A formidable Resistance trio. Non-fiction books and films have memorialized their legacy, but again Jackson provides a unique historical fictional focus. 

So many Nazi acronyms will curdle your blood, the unleashing of their police, military, and intelligence arsenal. But the acronym to remember stands for the name of the Dutch Council of Resistance: RVV, for Raad Van Verzet.

The first one-liner that sticks with you and circles back is the opening sentence in the Prologue dated 1945 Amsterdam: “You can walk right past your fate your whole life without seeing it.” It does give a window to Hannie’s fate but not anywhere close to her destiny. 

Hannie’s parents rightfully remembered too as they hid Sonja and Philine in the attic of their home in Haarlem no questions asked. We must never forget those who stood up to Fascism, informing us of how to react to political events today.

Anne Frank was hidden in an attic for two years. She died at sixteen in an infamous German concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. The novel introduces a Dutch camp that began as a place for refugees, Westerbork, turned into a holding railway station for transporting Jews to concentration camps, far less familiar to us. It used to be the Dutch Theater. The Nazis desecrated it into a Holocaust site. Anne Frank went through there. “Not wanting to arouse the temper of the Dutch people,” Westerbork plucked this chicken slowly.

Orange is the color of the Netherlands. Its meaning dates back to the country’s 16^th century founder William I of Orange. The Dutch Resistance adopted it. Orange is the code for Courage.

Lorraine