What I Read in May 2013

Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows. The author of Life and Fate surveys the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. He finds a long history of cruelty and slavery, but also a never-dying aspiration for freedom.

Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine. What makes the central figure of a woman-centered novel a heroine? Is she better than the rest of us, or just typical? Why do we care about her — and has she changed over the years? Brownstein explores these issues in classic text like Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Villette, Daniel Deronda. Portrait of a Lady and Mrs. Dalloway.

Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun. It took a lot of people — many of them named Duff — to build the massive Fort Peck Dam on the upper Missouri River in Montana. This Depression era project is at the center of the novel, the people named Duff are mostly there to build it.

! I can’t remember a month when I have finished so few books. I am immersed in three long ones:

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding,

The Debacle by Emile Zola,

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

I have posted once about Tom Jones and will have more to say when I have finished it. I expect to have comments on the others too. See you here next month.

Marketing Oneida Silver

Marketing Oneida Silver is now available here and as an email attachment. Both versions are free.

The heirs of the Oneida Community made beautiful, high-quality silver. They also promoted it in a competitive market using a innovative techniques. This booklet has been adapted from a chapter of The Community Table (now out of print), to which I have added more images, many in color.

The booklet History of Oneida Community and Its Silver is also available.

You can download these booklets to read on screen or print out. A color printer is recommended. Please share the information with others, but do not sell it or use it for commercial purposes. For a full listing of all booklets available and planned, click on American Silver Booklets.

To be kept informed, click here to fill out the request form.

History of Oneida Community and Its Silver

My former page The Oneida Community was based on information contained in my book The Community Table. That book is going out of print, but I would like to keep the information available for collectors — without the need to print and mail copies. I am breaking it up into booklets and adding more pictures and more color. Click on Oneida History to see the result.

You may save it to your hard disk, read it on screen, or print it out. A color printer is recommended. Please share the information with others, but you are not free to sell it or use it for commercial purposes.

I will be adding more booklets. To be kept informed, click here to fill out the American Silver Booklets form.

Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances Trollope, painted by Auguste Hervieu

In 1827 Frances Trollope — the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope — brought three of her children to the young United States. She stayed for four years, spending much of the time in the frontier city of Cincinnati. Then she went home and wrote a book about it: Domestic Manners of the Americans. It was a best seller in England, but the Americans hated it.

I have prepared a slide-show presentation about Francis Trollope and her book — and very opinionated she was. I have also put in a little bit about Charles Dickens and his American Notes , written just 10 years later.

Click here for the slide show.

Jewish Cemeteries

The Jewish cemetery I know best is the one near Vineland, New Jersey, where my husband Julius’ father is buried. Whenever we visited Jolan, his widowed stepmother, in Vineland we took her there. The three of us would stand about, reading the stones. Jolan would then stroll slowly, placing pebbles on headstones to show that somebody came, somebody remembered. On one visit, shortly after Memorial Day, American flags decorated many of the graves, including that of Julius’ father. When I questioned this, his stepmother said that the flags were for veterans and that Hugo had been a veteran. True enough. He was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Now he lies among his former enemies in a quiet place with mild South Jersey air.

Reading W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants has reminded me of other Jewish cemeteries, also quiet but in a more disturbing way. On a visit to Kissingen in Germany, where there are no living Jews, Sebald’s narrator seeks out the cemetery where Max Ferber’s parents would have been buried, had they not been deported.

 What I saw had little to do with cemeteries as one thinks of them; instead, before me lay a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movement of the air. Here and there a stone placed on the top of a grave witnessed that somewhat must have visited one of the dead – who could say how long ago.

We saw cemeteries like that on our road trip in the summer of 1989. Just months before the Berlin Wall came down, Julius and I, accompanied by three American-born cousins, started in Prague, drove in a great arc through the then-single country of Czechoslovakia into eastern Hungary and west again to Budapest. In Prague, all the tourists go to the Old Jewish Cemetery. They are always impressed by the tall and tilting stones, the ground so compressed beneath the visiting feet.

The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague

Those Jews were buried centuries ago, and their resting place is well maintained. We also visited the “New” Jewish Cemetery in Prague. Its most famous inhabitant is Franz Kafka, and they are still burying Jews there. We visited the grave of Aunt Rozicka who had died the year before. She is buried in the new section of this new cemetery. The older parts are more interesting, with stones engraved in Hebrew, in German, and in Czech. The trees growing up among the graves are well established now and no one comes to cut them down. On the wall, near the entrance are memorial plaques for those who, like Max Ferber’s parents, left no bodies to be interred.

The New Jewish Cemetery, Prague

To Prague a few Jews did return, some like Aunt Rozicka to grow old and die in hospital, and others only to set a plaque for those who did not return. In the Slovak village from which Cousin Henry’s parents emigrated we found no living Jews, little evidence of the dead ones, and certainly no plaques. Unlike the cemeteries in Kissingen and Prague, no wall protects the site. The ground is so lumpy with broken stones and clumps of grass that it is difficult to walk, impossible to identify any specific grave.

In Saraspatak in eastern Hungary, where Julius and Gabor, his Hungarian cousin, were born and lived until 1944, the cemetery is surrounded by a sturdy wall; the gate has a key. The grass is uncut and the graves are overgrown with weeds and invading field flowers, but the stones are mostly intact. We watched as Gabor cleared his parents’ grave. They knew too much, Gabor’s parents. When the gendarmes came to take them away they committed suicide. Gabor was bereft but, because his parents died before the deportation, he has a grave to tend. Julius can only visit the memorial inscription for his mother and brother, engraved on the back of Gabor’s parents’ stone.

Gabor clearing his parents’ grave in Saraspatak. The inscription memorializes Julius’ mother and brother.

Sebald’s narrator had a similar experience in the untended cemetery in Kissengen. He found evidence of those who had lived but not died there, also linked to the relative who chose to die at home.

 I stayed in the Jewish cemetery till the afternoon, walking up and down the rows of graves, reading the names of the dead, but it was only when I was about to leave that I discovered a more recent gravestone, not far from the locked gate, on which were the names of Lily and Lazarus Lanzburg, and of Fritz and Luisa Ferber. I assume Ferber’s Uncle Leo had had it erected there. The inscription says that Lazarus Lanzburg died in Theresienstadt in 1942, and that Fritz and Luisa were deported, their fate unknown, in November 1941. Only Lily, who took her own life, lies in that grave. I stood before it for some time, not knowing what I should think; but before I left I placed a stone on the grave, according to custom.

For more about Julius and his family, see Hungarian Memories.

Robert Graves, I Claudius

Most of us of a certain age have memories of the Masterpiece Theater production of I Claudius, based on the two novels by Robert Graves, I Claudius and Claudius the God.

I have just finished reading I Claudius the novel. Wow! Things were really bad in the time of the early Roman emperors. I remember the Julius Caesar of Shakespeare and Shaw. Julius was already dead by the time the future Emperor Claudius was born, and Augustus was reigning – reluctantly, he said – over the former Roman Republic. Augustus was followed by Tiberius (bad) and Caligula (worse, much worse). It’s a little like my first reading of The Iliad, with an overabundance of death, both for the deserving and the undeserving.

So why make a historical novel out of all this mayhem and misrule? Claudius, as Graves portrays him, is a very interesting character. Afflicted by illness in childhood, with a stammer and possible epilepsy, he is discounted as an idiot not eligible to be emperor. An old historian gives him life-saving advice:

“Then exaggerate your limp. Stammer deliberately, sham sickness frequently, let your wits wander, jerk your head and twitch with your hands on all public or semi-public occasions. If you could see as much as I can see, you would know that this was your only hope of safety and eventual glory.”

His disabilities keep him alive when his brother, his cousins and many more are slain. The principal agent behind these deaths is his grandmother Livia, wife of Augustus and mother of the future Emperor Tiberius, her son by her previous husband. It takes some deep plotting to clear Tiberias’ way, but she is capable of it.

Most women are inclined to set a modest limit to their ambitious; a few rare ones set a bold limit. But Livia was unique in setting no limit at all to hers, and yet remaining perfectly level-headed and cool in what would be judged in any other woman to be raving madness.

It is Claudius who is telling the story and so it is his opinion that Livia did it – or most of it – but he makes a good case.

The best tip I received before reading was to obtain a family tree of the Livia-Augustus connection. I had two of them and still had trouble keeping straight all the many people named Drusus and Drusilla and Julius and Julia and Agrippa and Agrippina. The charm is not in the genealogy, but in Claudius’ careful account of the conspiracies and the final surprising outcome.

I have gone back to view again the television series from the 1970s and find that it holds up well. It represents the book in spirit, although the writers and the screen play have simplified and condensed some of the many subplots. That series introduced me to Derek Jacoby and he is still Claudius for me. In the book, we hear from Claudius directly and although he says he has a stammer, we don’t experience it. Jacoby’s task as an actor is to stammer convincingly without making the viewer lose patience. The writers also made effective use of voice-over, as Claudius in old age recalls events. In his mind, of course, he speaks as clearly as he thinks.

Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia

The Fruitlands farmhouse as it looked when I visited. It has been spruced up and is now part of the Fruitlands Museum at Harvard, Mass.

Bronson Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. He was a man of ideas – of spirit, he would have said – and one of the sages of Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott’s friends included Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Charles Lane and other English followers.

Bronson Alcott was unable to work for a living for any length of time or to hold on to his money when he had some. His wife – Abba, the model for Marmee in Little Women – and the four Alcott daughters pitched in to keep the family going.

 “His unwillingness to be employed in the usual way produces great doubt in the minds of his friends as of the righteousness of his life,” [Abba] noted in her journal, “because he partakes of the wages of others occupied in this same way.”

Exactly. What he was too pure in spirit to do himself he permitted others to do on his behalf.

Emerson and Lane helped out financially also, and the most dramatic example was the Utopian experiment at Fruitlands in 1843. I have read about Fruitlands in Louisa May Alcott’s light-hearted account, Transcendental Wild Oats, as well as some pages from her journal of those years. John Mattson describes the adventure in Eden’s Outcasts, his joint biography of Bronson and Louisa. In that version of the story, when Fruitlands failed Bronson collapsed emotionally, and Abba took over management of the family finances.

What Richard Francis brings to us in Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia is a full account of how Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane joined to buy the farm which became Fruitlands, how they conceived its purpose, and why it lasted only a few months. Francis provides an absorbing account of the ideological and personal conflicts which doomed the experiment. He believes that Bronson willingly withdrew, hoping to try again, elsewhere. Even if a whole-hearted unity of purpose had prevailed, however, there was not sufficient food and fuel for several adults and five hungry children to spend a New England winter in a ramshackle farmhouse.

Besides the practical limitations of supporting the utopian group on a poorly-developed farm – despite its name, Fruitlands had only a few ancient apple trees – the experiment was doomed by the overabundance of ideas, many supplied by Alcott and even more by Lane. Emerson’s view of Lane was wary:

In his article Emerson surveyed the blizzard of material Alcott had sent him from Ham. “Here are Educational Circulars, and communist Apostles; Alists; plans for Syncretic Associations and Pestalozzian Societies, Self-Supporting Institutions, Experimental Normal schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health Unions and Phalanterian Gazettes, Paradises within the reach of all men, Appeals of Man to Women, and Necessities of Internal Marriage illustrated by Phrenological Diagrams.”

Francis’ book spells out in great detail the many goals of the utopians, so many that some were mutually exclusive. Must a new generation of men be created before we can “reproduce Perfect Men” or can we improve what we have now with the right education? What must we give up, for example, good things to eat, so that we can find true abundance is what is left? How can we live self sufficiently without money and still pay the mortgage? These issues were accompanied with certain obsessions like rejection of dung to improve the fertility of the land. They favored green manure, but I can say as one who has spent time on a farm that cow manure is every bit as natural as clover, all being part of the same cycle.

Francis tells an interesting story and brings us a full-range of believable characters. Despite the elements of farce, the story ends sadly.

The Fruitlands fiasco was the product of misunderstandings and mistakes on every level, practical, personal, philosophical.

I Will Bear Witness: 1943-1945

I will Bear Witness, subtitled A Diary of the Nazi Years, is the second volume of the daily journal kept by Victor Klemperer in Dresden during and after the Nazi years. Sometimes the volume is titled To the Bitter End. It was the end, the end of the regime which hounded and almost killed the Jewish Klemperer, and it was a bitter end.

In an earlier post I described Klemperer’s desire to record his experiences. He continued to look for evidence about the effects of years of anti-Jewish propaganda.

Yesterday evening in Wormser Strasse an older worker – as far as I could discern in the twilight – cycles right up to me from behind, and says in a kind, fatherly voice: “Things will turn out differently in the end, won’t they, comrade?… Let’s hope very soon” – at which he circles back and into a side street… The day before yesterday, on the other hand, a family comes toward me, father, mother, little boy, evidently the “better class of people.” The father says instructively (and loudly) to the little boy, presumably responding to his question: “So that you know what a Jew looks like!” Now what is the true vox populi?

The boy was undoubtedly asking about the yellow star which Jews must wear so that they can be identified on the street. Klemperer no longer expects to survive the repeated arrests and transports.

How often do I think of André Chénier’s verse about the animal for the slaughter, which is no longer counted as part of the herd. How many circulars, prohibitions and commandments there used to be! Only very rarely now – everything has already been prohibited, and there are hardly any Jews left here…. Every single thing again and again turns my mind to the endless length of our slavery, to the very long list of those who have disappeared, who are dead, who all hoped to survive. And again and again I tell myself, I too, shall not survive, deep down I, too, am apathetic, and quite without hope, can no longer imagine myself transformed back into a human being.

That was in July 1944. In February 1945 many of the few remaining ‘privileged’ Jews in Dresden were ordered to report for a transport. Klemperer expected to be on the next list. Before either list could be acted on, the allied forces fire-bombed Dresden. Perhaps 50,000 German civilians were killed in the raid. Those Jews who survived, including Klemperer, removed the yellow star which identified them from their clothes. The Klemperers became refugees from the destroyed city, concealing their identifies and sometimes giving false names. Several acquaintances helped them, but life was difficult for everyone. By the time the war ended in May of 1945 they were in the American zone in Bavaria, seeking only to return to Dresden and the suburban house from which they had been evicted in 1941. They did return, walking most of the way.

Finally we found the Glasers’ building, it was a little damaged inside, but on the whole wonderfully preserved, with nothing but ruins all around. This was where the day turned into a fairy tale. Frau Glaser welcomed us with tears and kisses, she had thought us dead. Glaser himself was somewhat decrepit and listless. We were fed, we were able to rest. In the late afternoon we walked up to Dolzchen.

As you read this painful account of the lives of real people during years of terrible circumstances, this is not a triumph. It is the justice of survival for Victor and Eva Klemperer, but it is accompanied by the injustice of destruction for all of those who did not make it through to the bitter end.

Attentat!

A drawing from Harper’s Weekly of Alexander Berkman attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

I have learned a new word: Attentat. While a dictionary definition might be “attack” or “attempt to attack”, Alexander Berkman used it to mean “propaganda by the deed”. When he both shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick in Pittsburgh in 1892 he saw it as a noble act, a blow for freedom.

 Berkman rationalized that the assassination of Frick was not “to be considered as the taking of a life. A Revolutionist,” he said, “would rather perish t thousand times than to be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder. In truth, murder and Attentat are to be opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.”

Sasha and Emma, Paul and Karen Avrich’s joint biography of Alexander “Sasha” Berkman and Emma Goldman is subtitled “An Anarchist Odyssey.” It certainly is. Both came from Russia as teen agers, met in the United States and devoted themselves to anarchist ideals. Not inclined to violence herself, Emma nevertheless supported Sasha before, during and after the deed: “I do not judge an act by its result but by its cause”. Frick survived the attentat and Sasha spent 14 years in prison; Emma would have been there too if the authorities could have established her complicity.

The strikers at Frick’s Homestead steel mill, although they had suffered greatly from Frick’s cruel tactics, reacted to Berkman with horror. Their plea for justice had relied for its power on their own non violence. Some of the other anarchists didn’t like it either. Benjamin Tucker commented,

 “As one member of the human race, I fully confess that I am more desirous of being saved from friends like Berkman, to whom my heart goes out, than from enemies like Frick, from whom my heart withdraws. The worst enemy of the human race is folly, and men like Berkman are its incarnation. It would be comparatively easy to dispose of the Fricks, if it were not for the Berkmans…. The hope of humanity lies in the avoidance of that revolution by force which the Berkmans are trying to precipitate.”

At the heart of anarchist philosophy was belief in freedom from authority, whether of the government or of the capitalist owners or of religious doctrine. Yet to strike a blow on behalf of others is to assert an authority, an authority based on purity of intent and correctness of opinion. The “propaganda by the deed” is meant to influence others, to assert control in the situation. Berkman never recognized this. He was the angry young man all his life, the pure thinker who knows that his actions are right. To act in violation of human law – for example, to plan to murder Henry Clay Frick and then attempt to do so – is to seek justice above the established law. This issue is faced by all of those who break the law out of conscience, including Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They set their judgment above the social judgment of their time. In their insistence on non-violence, however, they may have learned something from Sasha’s example.

I Will Bear Witness: 1942

In 1942, Victor Klemperer, a scholar and professor of Romance languages, is living is a “Jew’s house” in Dresden. He had been pushed out of his university post in 1935 and evicted from his house in a Dresden suburb in 1941. As a baptized Jew married to an Aryan, Klemperer is ‘privileged’ in Nazi terms. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 is the second of three volumes of diaries he kept between 1933 and 1959 and which were published after his death.

I read the first volume several years ago. I recall that it recorded a life increasingly restricted and full of worry. Unable to pursue his academic research or to publish, Klemperer decided to record his experiences, to bear witness.

 I have no other choice except to work as if I were completely certain of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And yet from day to day I am reckoning on some catastrophe – arrest, disappearance into a concentration camp, etc. – it has been impossible for me to continue writing…. So I shall study whatever I can get hold of.

The son of a rabbi Klemperer never denies his Jewish roots, but neither does he identify with the Jewish community in Germany. He is part of the larger culture. He now borrows books wherever he can find them and he is educating himself.

 What shakes me in Elbogen’s History of the Jews in Germany, which I have now plowed through to the end and will make notes on, is the precariousness of my position as a German. Equal rights for Jews not until 1848, restricted once again in the 1850s. Then in the 1870s anti-Semitism already stronger again and, in fact, all of Hitler’s theory already developed. I knew very little of all of that – and perhaps did not want to know anything of it. Nevertheless: I think German, I am German – I did not give it to myself, I cannot tear it out of myself.

He cannot resume a Jewish identify.

 The return of the assimilated generation – return to what? One cannot go back, one cannot go to Zion. Perhaps it is not at all up to us to go, but rather to wait: I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere.

Already in the spring of 1942, life is so difficult that, although he is convinced Germany will eventually lose the war, Klemperer and his wife do not think they can hold on for even six more months. They do not know that it will get worse, much worse, and they will have to endure three more years of the daily terror. One of the wonders of published diaries and letters is that each document is written on a day when the writer knows only what has happened up until that day. Klemperer says, “the choker is being pulled ever tighter,” and in June 1942 he gives a summary. It is both comprehensive and petty.

 All the things, great and small, that have accumulated in the last few years! And a pinprick is sometimes more agonizing than a blow with a club. I shall list the decrees once and for all: 1) To be home after eight or nine in the evening. Inspection! 2) Expelled from one’s own house. 3) Ban on radio, ban on telephone. 4) Ban on theaters, cinemas, concerts, museums. 5) Ban on subscribing to or purchasing periodicals. 6) Ban on using public transport: three phases: a) buses banned, only front platform of tram permitted, b) all use banned, except to work, c) to work on foot, unless one lives 2-1/2 miles away or is sick (but it is a hard fight to get a doctor’s certificate). Also ban on taxicabs, of course. 7) Ban on purchasing “goods in short supply”. 8) Ban on purchasing cigars or any kind of smoking materials. 9) Ban on purchasing flowers. 10) Withdrawal of milk ration card. 11) Ban on going to the barber. 12) Any kind of tradesman can be called only after application to the Community. 13) Compulsory surrender of typewriters, 14) of furs and woolen blankets, 15) of bicycles – it is permissible to cycle to work (Sunday outings and visits by bicycle are forbidden), 16) of deck chairs, 17) of dogs, cats, birds. 18) Ban on leaving the city of Dresden, 19) on entering the railway station, 20) on setting foot on the Ministry embankment, in parks, 21) on using the Burgerwiese and the roads bordering the Great Garden…. This most recent restriction since only yesterday. Also, since the day before yesterday, a ban on entering the market halls. 22) Since September 19 [last year] the Jew’s star. 23) Ban on having reserves of foodstuffs at home. (Gestapo also takes away what has been bought on food coupons.) 24) Ban on use of lending libraries…. [continues through to a total of 31]. I think these 31 points cover everything.

Once and for all. The 31 may have been complete in June, 1942, but more were added later, as Klemperer wearily acknowledges when the time comes. I hope you did not skip point 17, the ban on dogs, cats, birds. Pets could not be given away or entrusted to Aryan neighbors; they must be put down or turned in to the authorities. Eva Klemperer had a beloved cat which they had continued to feed through all these difficult years.

 We hesitated for days. Today news came that a handover order was on its way from the Community, after reception of which I would no longer have the right to dispose of the animal as I saw fit.… I left the decision to Eva. She took the animal away in the familiar cardboard cat box, she was present when he was put to sleep by an anesthetic that took effect very rapidly—the animal did not suffer. But she suffers.

The regime is determined to humiliate and dehumanize the Jews. They cannot keep pets. They cannot ride on bicycles. They cannot sit in deck chairs. In 1942 the final solution begins to be implemented. As the year goes on, more and more transports leave with less privileged Jews to Theresienstadt and to labor camps in the east.

Klemperer and his wife survive the war. He was reinstated to his university position in East Germany. His wife died in 1951 and he died in 1960. His second wife, now a widow, deposited the diaries in a State Archive, from which they were published. Like some mystery readers, I cheated and looked at the final pages. This volume ends with the return of the Klemperers to their confiscated house in June of 1945. I will go there with them, but I first need a few days respite after the stresses of 1942.