The Russian Summer: A Reading in Retirement Blogpost

Summer 2018: I got myself into a Russian Roulette.

Earlier this year, I had read an outstanding review of Yuri Slezkine's  The House of Government.  It is a book about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, until about World War II.  But it is a history of how the Russian Revolution was experienced: how it "felt" to live in and through it.  The book is based, in  large part, on memoirs, interviews, literature.  It sounded fascinating, and I decided to read it.

Part of why I decided was that it reminded me of a book I had read before Tony and I went to St. Petersburg several years ago, Natasha's Dance, a cultural history of Russia from the  late 19th century to the mid twentieth, written by the historian Orlando Figes.  It was a wonderful book, one discovery after another--immediately readable and genuinely compelling.  The House of Government looked to be similar.

Before I tackled the Slezkine, though, I decided I would read Figes's more conventional history of the period, The People's Tragedy, a book that had been on my shelf for several years.  So I began my summer reading with it.

The People's Tragedy seemed to me to be a very good and very detailed history of the Russian Revolution.  I certainly learned A LOT by reading it.   Being so detailed, it is, not surprisingly, very long--almost 1000 pages.   It was not as immediately compelling as Natasha's Dance, so I read it alongside other books, mainly novels.  There were times when I asked myself, "why are you doing this?" but me,  being me, I continued.

After I finished The People's Tragedy, I started The House of Government.  It is also detailed (very) and long (very).  Right now, I am about half way through, so it will go home  to Louisville with me.  It definitely provides another way to think about the history of the  Revolution, as it also aims to describes experiences of individuals.  But it doesn't (and I'm sure didn't aim to) have the  narrative drive of Natasha's Dance.  Nevertheless, I persisted.

While reading these two mammoth histories, I managed to read two Russia-related novels.  One, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, is pretty well known, and has been a best seller for a while.  I found it quite enjoyable (particularly as relief from above) and was happy to find  its locale, the Hotel Metropole, described in The House of Government .  (It was,  in  fact, one of the first Houses of Government--that is buildings where party elites lived.)  The other was Mrs. Engels, a book I had bought a  year or so ago.  I found it on the long-list for the Booker Prize. (Looking at prize long lists is a good way to discover good new novels.) It is a fictional account of a woman named Lizzie Burns who lived with Frederick Engels, first in Manchester then London while he and Karl Marx were working together.  Burns was a worker in the Manchester cotton mills, functionally illiterate, but very intelligent.  Little is known of her or her sister Mary Burns, who was until her death Engel's lover.  They apparently helped him navigate Manchester slums, an experience that led to The Condition of the Working Class in England.   It was interesting (and about something of which I knew almost nothing) and the character of Lizzie was well imagined.

Of course, over the summer I read other things as well.  I read six novels for the Copper  Harbor Book Club, some of which I liked better than others.  I read Lisa Hallday's  Asymmetry, about which I blogged; Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language, about the "murder" of Roland Barthes and too cute by half; and Emily Friedlund's History of Wolves (short-listed for the Booker) very good, about a young girl in Minnesota who struggles with her past (actually too complicated to boil down to a phrase)

The preceding paragraph describes reading I might have done any summer,  but the rest of the blog gives a picture of a kind of reading I don't think I ever really did (unless I was preparing for a big trip) before I retired.  Finding a subject, going in for a deep focus, trying to learn something.  Retirement doesn't  just facilitate such reading for me--it really encourages it.  I have come to think of it as one of the ways I have replaced scholarship in my life.  (The other ways are the book I'm writing and when Tony and I or Susan and I tackle a book together (this summer The  Odyssey with Tony and Garden of the Finzi-Continis with Susan). Of course, it's  not scholarship of the kind I performed when I was employed.  But it parallels it in ways that work for me: discovering something I didn't know, testing that knowledge by reading around in it, going serendipitously from one discovery to another.

#ReadingInRetirement
#RussiaHistory
#Reading

The Best Books of 2017

In the order which I read them.

In the Darkroom.  Susan Faludi.
Susan Faludi's biography of her father, born Istvan Friedman, who became Stephanie Faludi.  Complex account of slippery notions of identity, especially as it involves gender, religion, and  nationality.  I wrote about it earlier  on the blog here and then some supplementary material here.  Faludi is a Pulitizer prize winning journalist and noted feminist writer.  A really interesting book.

Sarah Wildman.  Paper Love.
This year, I read a lot of books about people who found a  cache of letters or film or other materials left by family members connected to the Holocaust, and tried to reconstruct the story behind these artifacts.  My reading jag.  This is the first one I read.  Not all w ill make  this  list, but Wildman's story of her attempt  to identify the woman her grandfather left in Austria is compelling and very insightful about the nature of historical narrative and Holocaust victims.  I earlier wrote about it here. 

Ian McGuire.  The North Water.

A physician gets caught up in a whaling expedition and the Arctic.  This is an extraordinarily tense and well-written novel.  It's kind of a blend of Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy, and I don't say that lightly.  Like Melville and McCarthy, McGuire writes beautiful sentences that convey horror-filled events and feelings.  This is an aesthetic I really like, and I really liked this book.

Hideo Yokoyama.  Six Four.  

This is a long--and slow--police proecdural from a Japanese writer.  The story unwinds in a very unhurried way, but plot becomes  increasingly complex.  It's really interesting  if you like this sort of thing.  Also understanding police procedure in Japan is one  of the book's challenges.

Glen Kurtz.  Three Minutes  in  Poland.  

Another book from the archives to  the real story, but this time the artifact is a three minute film Kurtz's grandfather shot in Poland right before World War II changed his family's village in Poland irrecovcaably.  I wrote about it here

Alice Kaplan.  Looking for The Stranger.  

Alice Kaplan's fascinating narrative of the history of Albert Camus' first great novel, The Stranger (which in preparation for Kaplan, I also re-read.).  Kaplan traces the history of Camus, as well as the history of the French in Algeria (even locating  the original of the Algerian man whom the Stranger shot), the history of the book's publication  and subsequent success.  Very highly recommended.  I also read her first big book, The Collaborator:  The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach,  Still deep in  my World War II obsession.

 Daniel Mendelsohn.  The Lost:  A Search for Six of the Six Million.  The last (for now) of the personal quest from the archives books of the summer.  Because it was SO good.  A compulsively readable set of tales about the difficulties of retriving the past of individuals.  Probably the best book I read this year.I wrote about it here.

Jan T. Gross.  Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland.  

Anna Bikont.  The Crime and  the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne. Anthony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michelin eds.)  The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. 

At this point  I  turned to history and read a set of books  about the Holocaust massacre of all  the Jewish inhabitants of a  small town in then-eastern  Poland, Jedwabne.  The issues raised by these books were and  remain highly contentious among the Polish survivors of the massacre, as well as Polish citizens at large.  I wrote about these books here. 

Marcel Proust.  Swann's Way.  Translated Lydia Davis..

This was Tony's and my summer book.  Not completely sure it was a "best" but certainly a challenge and in many ways a reward.  Both of us have read about Proust all our adult lives.  This  year we decided to try it out.  I read the new Lydia Davis translation and Tony read the classic Scott Moncrieff.  Reading it confirmed much of what I thought I knew about Proust but also showed me much that I hadn't realized.  The gifts are the extraordinary interiority and the gorgeous descriptions of the natural world.  The challenges are the pace and length.  We are going to do the next book in the upcoming summer, The Guermantes Way, and  then see what we think. 

John Le Carre.  A Legacy of Spies.
Finally, back to normal reading.   I love John Le Carre and have read them all.  This might be the last.  Here he reconnects all the people from the Quest for Karla trilogy (Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable School Boy, and Smiley's People) to tie up the loose ends, but also to show us how very much has changed from the old cold war.  

George Saunders.  Lincoln in the Bardo. 
Although there were places where I thought it went on too long, in the end I think it is as good as its reviews.   Dazzling, techno-brilliant, dialogic and timely. 

Honorable mentions.  (Just to show that I did read novels this year.)
Hannah Tinti.  The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley.
Viet Than Nguyen.  The Sympathizer.
Francis Spufford.  Golden Hill.
Rachel Kadish.  The Weight of Ink.
Richard Stern.  Other Men's Daughters.
Gabriel Tallent.  My Absolute Darling.

Reading in Retirement

I have always read a lot.  My whole work career was built around reading (and writing), and I always read regularly during times I wasn't working.  So reading a lot in retirement isn't itself new.  However, the way I read has changed in some ways, though not in others.

What's different?  I no longer have to read for class or for research.  So I have a great deal of freedom in what I choose to read.  Also, because I don't have a job anymore, I have more time to myself and thus more time to read.  So more freedom and time are the main differences.

What is the same?  I read mostly novels but also (increasingly) non-fiction.  I read different kinds of novels, often having a couple going at the same time: one that may be more serious or longer or more difficult, and another (usually read on my Kindle in bed at night) less taxing, such as a detective novel.

How do these differences and similarities come together to shape my reading.  Here is what I have come up with so far.

1.  I read a lot more non-fiction.  I often go on "jags," getting interested in something and pushing ahead.  Some of my jags have included bog people the search for the Nile, polar exploration,  Recently I've been reading a lot of books about World War II, such as the two books I blogged about earlier where someone tried to find out the truth of family artifacts.  I then read The Collaborator by Alice Kaplan which is about her search of the archives to narrate the biography of Robert Brassillach who was executed for his writings (rather than actions) by the Provisional DeGaulle government after the fall of Vichy.  I am about to start  Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn, about his attempts to discover the truth of what happened to six members of his family who were killed in the Holocaust.  The link in this latest jag, I think, is archives, narratives that go back to fill in the past (a narrative shape that I have always found alluring), and World War II. I think my "jags" have to do with wanting to explore a topic (often one I found haphazardly) in more depth and also with the principle of  one-thing-leads-to-another.

2.  I read novels all the time.  Even while on my non-fiction "jags," I always have a novel going.  If my serious reading is non-fiction, then my novel is usually pretty easy. But more often than not it is the novel that requires serious attention.  I try to alternate long novels with short ones (just to vary the pace) and serious with fun.   But I say this in all seriousness (and some of you will know exactly what I mean):  I would be a nevous wreck (and no fun to be with) if I didn't have a novel close to hand.  My nightmare is to be stuck on a plane without something to read.

3.  I look for opportunities to read with others.  I belong to two book groups, one in Louisville and one in Copper Harbor.  Tony and I often read a book together: something big and ambitious, which we divide into sections and talk about at dinner over several weeks.  (Last year we did Little Dorritt; this year we are cautiously trying Proust.)

4.  I keep a list of the books I read, something I have done for over 20 years. (Otherwise I can forget what I have read.)  I sometimes look at the list to keep track of what I am doing

5.  I still (and will always I believe) have this feeling that reading is "work," as well as "pleasure."  Work in the good sense of using my brain and accomplishing something important; pleasure in the sense that it makes me happy and gives me the sense of a larger life.

This is a kind of meandering blog post.  I feel like I should be able to write something more coherent--something that really illuminates why I read and what it means to me, especially now when, except for a few instances, it not connected to anyone but my retired self.  Sometimes I feel like I am in Paradise, being able to wake up in the morning and read anything I want to.  Sometimes I feel like I should be doing something else--though I'm not sure why or what that would be.

My Life as a Reader.  That's probably the best I can do.

#ReadingInRetirement
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Glenn Kurtz. Three Minutes in Poland. More Trails to the Past.

Continuing my reading jag. . . .

This is a fascinating book.  In August 1938, Glenn Kurtz's grandparents went to Europe, visiting famous European cities, such as Paris and Brussels.  As part of their trip they also visited a small city in Poland named Nasielsk.  While there, his grandfather shot about three minutes of film, both in black and white and in color, of the people of this town. By the next year, all the Jews in this town will have been deported, first to the Warsaw ghetto and then to the camps.  Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, less than 100 survived World War II.

Kurts finds this film and recognizes its  potential interest.  He sends it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is able to salvage the film's images.  (Just in time, a few years later and it would have deteriorated beyond repair.)  Kurtz wonders who these people were.  The film is one of the very few home movies made of pre-WWII Poland, and one of the very few in color.

Kurtz wants to find out as much as he can about these people, but it isn't until someone sees the movie on the Holocaust Museum's website and sees her grandfather--whose face remains recognizable over 70 years later.  Once Kurtz meets the man in the movie, now the 80+ year old man named Maurice (Morrie) Chandler of Florida, Kurtz and Chandler try to name as many of the people in the film as they can.

Meeting Morrie, Kurtz begins to find connections and those connections spur further connections.  He travels to Canada, the UK, Israel and Poland.  He becomes, as he admits, obsessed with documenting as much as he can.  But as he eventually recognizes, each connection spins out and the connections almost become infinite.  

When I first viewed my grandfather's film, I imagined it might still be possible to identify a few of the individuals who appeared in the beautiful color images.  But my conversations with survivors quickly spilled over from the frame of the film, from individual identifications into much larger networks. . . .  Jewish Nasielsk  that exists in memory is the chance artifact of those who happened to live longest."

Kurtz recognizes how arbitrary it is that this remembered Nasielsk survived:  arbitrary that he found the film in time, arbitrary that someone happened to see it and recognize her father as a child.  But even more arbitrary, who survived, who lived long enough to tell the story.

Three Minutes in Poland is a glimpse into a lost world and a profound meditation on what makes "history,"  It is a narrative dream.

You can see the move here.

#ThreeMinutesinPoland

#GlennKurtz

#HistoricalNarrative

#PolandinWWII