As December ended, I tried to finish as many books as I could before New Year's:
Ken Krimstein's graphic novel about The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, for example. It instilled an appetite for Weimar Republic-era philosophy that I haven't yet followed up on. It had a few moments of the perfervid enthusiasm of a Dead Poets' Society, but either way it is very well done.
My uncle also gave me Berenberg's German-English edition of Eliot Weinberger's poem Die Sterne. Interspersed with Franziska Neubert's illustrations of starry patterns, which nod I think to Weinberger's cross-cultural approach to star lore and remind me of Islamic art (at least, modern Islamic art) that eschews depicting people, it is a soothing read.
It's also happily tying in with a hardcover edition, with picturesque gilt-edged leaves, of Jean Menzies's collection of English retellings of ancient Greek myth: Greek Myths: Gods and Goddesses. Which was a present, too, from a British former teammate.
Chekhov's Lady with a Lapdog and Other Stories are proving harder to read, just because they aren't very cheerful. But it is impressive again to consider how a man who didn't see his 50th birthday was able to write with so much observation, at such a stylistically sophisticated level, about such a large range of characters.
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Aside from that, I read The Light of Days by Judy Batalion in a young readers' edition.
It extols young Polish Jewish women who fought Nazis as well as the Jewish police in the cities, towns and villages in the early 1940s. Incredibly grim as the events are, I was impressed the author pulled through the writing and research.
It's also a more morally ambiguous book than I think the author realizes. She cheerfully describes the deaths of Nazis, or (in some cases) the attacks on Jewish police who have been detailed at the coercion of German authorities to round up fellow Jews, as if she were a World War I-era Briton talking about 'potting the Huns.'
Whereas at other times, Nazis, Germans who aren't Nazis, Polish people, and Jewish police help Jewish civilians to escape, even at great personal risk.
Did grenades, bullets, lightbulbs filled with acid, etc., always hit the oppressor instead of the helper?
I think it was more complex for the Jewish fighters to kill others than the book relates. Likely Batalion's research would have dug up evidence, if there had been any, of PTSD or feelings of guilt related specifically to guerrilla warfare. But I'm not sure if all Holocaust survivors would have been open about having these feelings.
I grew up around my grandparents' deep, war-related queasiness around weaponry. None of them, of course, were Holocaust survivors. Still, their attitude reinforced for me that people who knew best knew guns and their use, saw these as a serious, grim thing. In a limited context, guns can determine who dies and survives; as a broader response to violence, I am not sure they resolve anything as intended.
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The next book once The Light of Days was finished: We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, a book on First Nations, Native Americans, and stand-up comedy by the Canadian author Kliph Nesteroff.
